Category: reason

Zero tolerance policies everywhere have lead to abuse by the authorities, leftwing or rightwing, blue or red, government or employers. Ronald Reagan’s zero tolerance for drugs led to mandatory minimum sentencing atrocities. Clinton’s zero tolerance for guns led to toddlers in schools being suspended for chewing a granola bar into the shape of a gun. And zero tolerance for sexual harassment on college campuses and employers has led to lives of men being ruined on flimsy grounds.

But all of this pales in comparison to the cruelty that is unfolding at the border now that Trump administration has deployed a zero-tolerance policy against the world’s most powerless people: fleeing migrants, notes Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia.

It’s decision to rip toddlers from parents to deter these parents, one conservative judge noted, has created hell on earth.

View this article.

In today’s episode of the Reason Podcast, Volokh Conspirator and UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh ponders the question: What is the difference between this month’s edition of Reason magazine and The Anarchist Cookbook?

He and I wade elbow-deep into some juicy questions about “crime-facilitating speech” (a term coined by Volokh in a 2005 paper), how it applies to Reason‘s Burn After Reading issue, and other questions of journalistic ethics. The podcast also digs into hypotheticals about source protection, white-hat hacking, national security, doxxing, and whether it’s legit to flash your headlights to warn fellow drivers about an upcoming speed trap.

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

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Photo credit: Amazon

Don’t miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)

Subscribe at iTunes.

Follow us at SoundCloud.

Subscribe at YouTube.

Like us on Facebook.

Follow us on Twitter.

In November, California voters will decide whether they still want to be California voters. Perhaps they’d prefer to be Southern California voters or Northern California voters?

One of the many, many efforts to break up the state of California into smaller, more governable chunks has made it onto the November ballot. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper proposes turning California into three states. A geographically small, but population dense strip of the central coast (including Los Angeles) would remain California. The northern part of the state (including San Francisco and current state capitol Sacramento) would become Northern California. The rest, including San Diego and the inland desert communities, would become Southern California.

Draper had previously proposed breaking California up into six states, only to see the effort fail because too many signatures for his ballot initiative were rejected. But on Tuesday, Draper’s new effort—called Cal 3—qualified for the November ballot.

Voters cannot simply decide to break up a state in a simple majority vote. The ballot initiative instructs the governor to seek approval by Congress under Article IV, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution to get permission to create these new states.

And that, of course, is where things would likely hit a snag. The very reasons Draper calls for the state’s fracturing—”vast parts of California are poorly served by a representative government dominated by a large number of elected representatives from a small part of our state, both geographically and economically”—benefit certain political interests who want to keep their power levels intact. By “certain political interests,” I mean the state’s Democratic Party, whose control over state-level political decisions is nearly (though not completely) absolute. As the Los Angeles Times notes, Democratic opposition to the initiative is already coming together:

A nascent opposition campaign already is sounding the more practical alarms about splitting California into three states. It could easily be bankrolled by some of the state’s most powerful forces, especially those aligned with Democratic leaders.

“This measure would cost taxpayers billions of dollars to pay for the massive transactional costs of breaking up the state, whether it be universities, parks or retirement systems,” said Steven Maviglio, a Democratic political strategist representing opponents to the effort. “California government can do a better job addressing the real issues facing the state, but this measure is a massive distraction that will cause political chaos and greater inequality.”

The fears of “greater inequality” are pretty rich, given the state’s propensity for mandating that the preferences of politically connected urbanites in population strongholds such as San Francisco and Los Angeles be spread all across the state, no matter how destructive they may be. It wasn’t the red parts of the state that have made it next to impossible to build more housing here, and it wasn’t the red parts of the state that pushed a massive minimum wage hike that’s going destroy employment opportunities in poor rural communities. And it certainly wasn’t the red parts of the state that continued an extremely wasteful, unneeded high-speed rail program that will milk the budget dry even though polls have shown most taxpayers really don’t want it anymore.

It’s nevertheless extremely clear that there’s going to be tremendous political opposition to any of this happening, regardless of how much California voters might want it. When Brexit happened, I argued that British citizens absolutely had a right to decide whether they wanted to remain part of the European Union, but I didn’t think much about how I might have voted if I had lived there.

California residents (not politicians) should have the exact same right to decide to break up the state into smaller chunks if they want to. As a California resident, I actually will get a vote on this option, even if nothing comes of it. Just the possibility that this could kill off the train boondoggle might be enough to get me to say yes.

People often ask who would build the roads in a libertarian society. This week brought a new answer: Domino’s.

On Monday, the pizza company unveiled its “Paving for Pizza” initiative, promising to partner with customer-nominated towns to fix up pot holes, repair road surfaces, and otherwise help provide a service many Americans think of as an exclusively public responsibility.

“Have you ever hit a pothole and instantly cringed? We know that feeling is heightened when you’re bringing home a carryout order from your local Domino’s store,” said company president Russell Wiener in a press release. “Domino’s cares too much about its customers and pizza to let that happen.”

So far, Domino has helped fix up roads in one town apiece in Texas, Georgia, Delaware, and California. The company has plans to partner with as many as 20, according to Domino’s Public Affairs Director Jenny Fouracre.

Each of those 20 cities is getting a $5,000 grant, so Domino’s is committing as much as $100,000 to its infrastructure initiative. That won’t buy you much blacktop, but some cities are still happy to have it.

“For us it really paid off and it’s been viewed as a positive in our community,” says Eric Norenberg, city manager of Milford, Delaware, whose town put their $5,000 grant toward fixing up 40 potholes.

Yearly road maintenance, says Norenberg, can take up about 10 percent of his city’s operating budget. The state covers just a little bit of that and the federal government none, so the corporate sponsorship is welcome.

“It’s not something we’ve done before. In a situation like this, if all other things were equal, we would try to something similar. I really hope this means that other companies will look to step up.”

Of course even this small private grant has been enough to stoke fears of an imminent corporate takeover of the nation’s roads.

“This feels like something from a William Gibson cyberpunk dystopia novel, where the government has become so weak and useless, private corporations have been taking over the basic upkeep of the nation,” writes Jason Torchinsky over at Jalopnik.

“What kind of state are we in as a society when Domino’s pizza takes a responsibility to fill potholes. Filling potholes is a function of government. Ultimately the goal for Domino’s is to sell more pizzas. That shouldn’t be the reason to fill potholes,” opined one Twitter user.

Yet this is exactly the reason the government fills pot holes. Well, one of the reasons at least.

Roads exist to service people’s transportation needs, whether that’s getting to and from work, schlepping freight between cities, or, yes, delivering freshly cooked pizza. Aligning the funding of roads with the purposes they’re used for would make infrastructure more responsive to the end user.

Moving to a more user-focused highway system could look like something radical, such as selling or leasing whole urban highways to private companies (as they’ve done in Santiago, Chile), or it could look a bit more mundane, such as spending people’s gas tax dollars on actually building and maintaining the roads they drive on.

Either option would be far different from how the public sector manages our roads in a lot of states, says Baruch Feigenbaum, a transportation expert with the Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this website).

“In some states the road conditions are terrible,” says Feigenbaum, speaking of interstate highway conditions. “There hasn’t been much of new capacity, and in terms of offering in terms of what we would call services” like towing, car repair, and food and drink options at rest stops. (Federal law prohibits the commercialization of interstate rest stops.)

These poor conditions often result from politicians siphoning money away from road infrastructure that people actually use to build out bike lanes and transit systems that politicians would prefer them to use.

Take California, which has some of the highest gas taxes in the country—and also some of the worst maintained highways. In 2017 state politicians upped their gas tax even more on the promise of fixing up its roads, then took $2.4 billion of that extra money and put it toward buying light rail vehicles and electric buses.

Feigenbaum says it would be relatively easy—technically, if not politically—to sell or lease poorly maintained interstate highways to private entities, who would then be contractually obliged to maintain them in a certain condition, making back their investment with tolls.

This is, of course, pretty theoretical. As much as libertarians might wish for a Snow Crash–like future of private highways knitting together semi-sovereign suburbs, officials and voters and even corporations themselves are still skeptical of the idea.

Asked what Domino’s position on privatizing roads was, Fouracre said it had none.

Tuesday’s primary results were bad for Republicans in general, but even worse for those on the right who dare to criticize President Donald Trump. Rep. Mark Sanford (R–S.C.), a fiscal conservative whose libertarian leanings made him skeptical of Trump, lost his re-election bid to state Rep. Katie Arrington. (Arrington will face Democrat Joe Cunningham in November.) Sanford conceded late Tuesday night, admitting that “the numbers indicate I am not going to win this race.”

The fact that Trump issued a tweet Tuesday afternoon imploring primary voters to pick Arrington over the “very unhelpful” Sanford probably didn’t help his chances.

Mark Sanford has been very unhelpful to me in my campaign to MAGA. He is MIA and nothing but trouble. He is better off in Argentina. I fully endorse Katie Arrington for Congress in SC, a state I love. She is tough on crime and will continue our fight to lower taxes. VOTE Katie!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2018

The former governor is best known for disappearing for several days in 2009. It turned out he had flown to Argentina to spend time with his girlfriend, with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Trump’s tweet is a reference to the infamous episode, though the president is certainly in no position to criticize other married men for such mistakes.

Aside from the visit to Argentina, Sanford is remembered for vetoing pork-barrel spending and rejecting stimulus funds with the zeal of a Ron Paul groupee. And he’s been increasingly at odds with Trump as of late, frequently voting against the president.

Also in Virginia, Republican voters chose Corey Stewart to challenge Sen. Tim Kaine in November. You may or may not be surprised to learn that Kaine was Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential pick in the 2016 election. (Seriously, he’s quite forgettable.) You also may or may not be surprised to learn that the challenger, Stewart, was previously pals with some white nationalists and is a big defender of Confederate monuments.

Elsewhere, Democrats picked up a Wisconsin state senate seat in a district that Trump won by 16 points in 2016. All in all, it was a pretty good night for the Democrats, except in South Carolina’s 5th Congressional District, where admitted wife-beater Archie Parnell routed his primary opponents to clinch the Democratic nomination. He recently lost all support from the party, and his campaign staff, who resigned en masse.

FREE MINDS

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) finds that a majority of students support due process protections for those accused of underrage drinking, sexual misconduct, or otherwise breaking rules on campus. The poll, which was released this morning, was conducted by YouGov:

The survey reveals that many college and university policies do not reflect student attitudes toward due process on campus. American students think their classmates deserve many of the procedural protections outlined by FIRE in the 2017 Report. In fact, in all but one situation described in the survey, a majority of student respondents supported the ten fundamental elements of due process highlighted in the 2017 Report….Not only do the vast majority of students think their classmates should have due process rights, but they also feel that these rights are important: 98 percent of students think that it is very important or important that students have due process protections in college.

The key finding: “A majority of student respondents support nine of the ten fundamental elements of due process.” Respondents were less supportive of due process when it came to sexual misconduct cases, but solid majorities still backed fundamental fairness.

FREE MARKETS

The AT&T merger with Time Warner is happening—the Department of Justice lost its bid to block the sale on Tuesday. Reason‘s Scott Shackford describes the federal government’s attempt to stop the merger as “ill-advised” and notes that the outcome is undoubtedly good news:

AT&T is a service provider buying up a content producer, making a single, stronger company that’s better able to compete. This doesn’t produce less competition in the marketplace.

The decision is also a blow to Trump, Berin Szoka tells Politico:

“Trump’s meddling in law enforcement actions, his attacks upon particular companies, and his utter unpredictability have created the kind of legal uncertainty common in ‘banana republics,'” said Berin Szóka, president the libertarian group TechFreedom. “At least in antitrust law, the courts, not Trump officials, will have the final say on what the law really is.”

QUICK HITS

• After maligning the women of the #MeToo movement, Turning Points USA’s Candace Owens is losing support. Her boss, Charlie Kirk, has apparently asked conservative activists not to criticize her publicly.
• Chip and Joanna Gaines, stars of the HGTV home improvement show Fixer Upper, have been ordered to pay $40,000 to the Environmental Protection Agency for failing to follow proper lead paint safety protocols. The government is also forcing them to discuss the issue on an upcoming episode.
• People really care about a raccoon stuck to the side of an office building in St. Paul, Minnesota.
• The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf eloquently answers a question posed by a feminist academic in The Washington Post: “Why can’t we hate men?”
• We can all hate Bill Clinton, though.

The headline is terrifying: “Mother gives warning after attempted abduction at rest stop.”

And yet the story is anything but. See if you feel the same.

“A woman is giving a stark warning after she says two women and three men attempted to abduct her daughter at a rest stop on Interstate 74 in Indiana,” reported 10TV.com in Columbus, Ohio.

Here’s the mom’s Facebook post:

PSA: so we are driving home from Cincinnati and got off at a rest stop for a quick bathroom break. Just my daughter and I went inside (i didn’t have my phone or purse on me). As we were walking in some lady who appeared to be on something, was trying to talk to my daughter, I held her hand the entire way in and walked swiftly ahead. As the lady was trying to talk to us she was also lighting a cigarette which she immediately extinguished upon us entering building. We went to far end handicap stall and went in together. I heard the lady enter and she was talking to another lady about us heard her say “the little girl”, I told my daughter we weren’t washing hands and I was going to carry her out. As we leave I passed both women and the one that I originally saw had changed clothes and started to leave after us leaving her bag on the floor of the stall she was in. The other lady with her was probably 6′. I then made a dead sprint to the car, threw my daughter in and locked doors. Once we were safely in car I noticed 3 men standing in front of a gold minivan with all the doors open…We called 911 and reported it and I have this terrible feeling that had I not been aware of my surroundings my daughter may have been taken from me. It is a terrifying world we are living in []. I wanted to share to try to remind everyone to be aware of your surroundings, hold on to your children and stay off your phones so you are not distracted!!!

She may have a “terrible feeling” that a kidnapping was about to take place, but stranger danger is so rare that even the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children—the folks who put missing kids pictures on the milk cartons and neglected to tell us most of them were run-aways or taken in custody disputes—has asked people to stop using the term. And David Finkelhor, head of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, told me he had heard of no children ever abducted from their parents in public for sex trafficking purposes, which seems to be the main fear these days.

A private citizen spreading fear on Facebook (perhaps innocently) is one thing. A media organization uncritically promoting this hysteria is quite another. This is reckless journalism. Nothing happened, and in all likelihood, nothing would have happened.

Vox recently invited Kate Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell University, to critique Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist whose meteoric rise to fame and unflinching criticism of political correctness has launched a thousand takes, at Reason and elsewhere.

Manne raises some interesting points. Unfortunately, she also commits a glaring error—one that is more obviously wrong than anything she identifies in Peterson’s work. Asked to identify the biggest mistake (“moral, philosophical, or otherwise”) in Peterson’s bestselling book 12 Rules for Life, Manne points to Peterson’s analysis of “mass shootings in general, and school shootings in particular,” which he says are caused by a kind of social angst, or “crisis of being.”

I don’t find Peterson’s explanation particularly convincing, though existential angst is a broad enough diagnosis that I suppose it could be correct in some fairly useless and non-falsifiable sense. But while Peterson might be wrong about what causes mass shootings, Manne is certainly mistaken about who commits them. By blaming this angst, she writes, Peterson “takes on a huge burden of explaining why white women, people of color, nonbinary folks, and so on, almost never act on our existential angst and despair in this way. Because, as you know, the vast majority of school shooters have been white men.”

Yes, most mass killers are white—but white people represent three-quarters of the U.S. population. If anything, mass killers are disproportionately non-white. According to Slate‘s Daniel Engber, who parsed Mother Jones‘s mass shooting database earlier this year, about 56 percent of mass shooters are white:

Judging by those newer numbers, and the most current census estimate that 76.9 percent of Americans are white, the whites-are-overrepresented-among-mass-shooters meme appears even less accurate. Perpetrators that Mother Jones classifies as Asian make up 7.4 percent of the data set, versus an estimated 5.7 percent of the population, while those MoJo identifies as black represent 17.0 percent of the mass shooters in the database versus an estimated 13.3 percent of the population. According to this data set, then, Asians and black Americans are overrepresented among mass shooters by about the same proportion (a bit more than one-fourth) that whites are underrepresented.

That database covers mass shootings in general (and is flawed in that it probably undercounts mass shootings that happened further back in time). It might be more accurate to say that Columbine-style mass shootings specifically committed in schools are disproportionately perpetrated by white people, but there have only been 8 of those kinds of attacks—shootings in which at least four people were shot to death in a school—since 1996. Schools are actually so safe that it’s pretty useless to make statistically sound racial generalizations about the kinds of mass murders committed there.

Manne claimed that “white women, people of color, nonbinary folks, and so on, almost never act on our existential despair this way.” (If she had stopped at women, she would have been on much firmer ground.) But the truth is that all sorts of people—usually men, yes—of all different colors and creeds are capable of horrible things. Whether or not curing our existential dread is the solution, there is no evidence that whiteness itself is the problem, despite what so many pundits would have us believe.

If you want to serve on a criminal jury, the most important rule is this: Say as little as possible, with your words, your body language, and your appearance.

But why would you want to sit on a jury in the first place? Because in a criminal trial, if you can read and reason and resist being swayed by emotion, you will make a better juror than most of your fellow members of the community. A jury is the entity that acts as the voice of the community, and serving as a juror allows you to contribute to that voice.

You may also believe that the law under which the defendant is being prosecuted is an illegitimate use of state power. In that case, acting as a juror gives you the opportunity to exercise the power of jury nullification—finding the defendant “not guilty” regardless of whether the state has proven the accusation beyond a reasonable doubt, writes Mark Bennett.

View this article.

While it may be months or years before the results of Donald Trump’s summit with Kim Jong-un are clear, his meeting with the other Kim was an unqualified success. Last week, thanks to the reality TV star Kim Kardashian West’s intercession on her behalf, Alice Marie Johnson, a great-grandmother serving a life sentence for nonviolent drug offenses, walked free from a federal prison in Alabama after spending almost 22 years behind bars.

Critics of our excessively punitive criminal justice system, while pleasantly surprised by Trump’s commutation of Johnson’s sentence, do not hold out much hope that it marks a shift in attitude for a president who was elected on a “law and order” platform modeled after Richard Nixon’s. But Jacob Sullum thinks there may be a way, short of finding a celebrity to adopt every federal prisoner who deserves similar relief, to encourage the president to use his clemency powers for good: by emphasizing how much it would upset Jeff Sessions.

View this article

“Shame on you! Shame on you!” chanted protestors after psychology professor Jordan Peterson said he’d refuse to obey a law that would require everyone to call people by the pronoun they prefer—pronouns like “ze” instead of “he” or “she.”

It wasn’t just radical college kids protesting. Hundreds of Peterson’s academic colleagues signed a petition demanding that the University of Toronto fire him.

The totalitarian left doesn’t just demand that their own point of view be heard, writes John Stossel. They want resisters like Peterson never to be heard.

View this article.