Category: reason

Former Reason man Mike Riggs writes at The
Atlantic on some
interesting issues to watch for libertarians in local elections
happening today–vote early and often, if that’s the sort of thing
you enjoy.

After a bunch of stuff on mayoral races, he gets down to the
ballot initiatives where such Reason-y issue as pot, GMO
foods, the hapless aftermath of huge civic spending projects,
public pensions, the minimum wage, and development are being
subject to electoral whim hither and yon across this land of
ours:

Marijuana: Question 1 in Portland, Maine,
would remove all legal penalties for possession of marijuana so
long as the possessor is over 21 and has less than 2.5 ounces of
pot. Even if Question 1 passes, Portland law
enforcement can
still arrest people under state law if they so choose.
Proposition AA in Colorado asks voters to approve the official tax rates
and regulatory schemes for the state’s recreational
marijuana industry. 

Development: Propositions B and C in San
Francisco will determine whether
developers can build luxury condos along the water at 8
Washington Street. Proponents say developers will pay into San
Francisco’s affordable housing fund and develop open space;
opponents say the development will be worse than the Embarcadero
Freeway. 

GMO Labeling: Initiative 522 in Washington
state would require companies that use genetically modified
organisms in their products to say that on their labels. Most of
Washington’s newspapers oppose the measure, as do corporations like
Kraft and Monsanto. The American Association for the
Advancement of Science, the World Health Organization, and the
European Union all
agree that GMOs are safe. The response of I-522
proponents boils
down to: What’s the harm in a label? 

Minimum Wage: A question on today’s ballot
would allow New Jersey residents to raise the minimum wage from
$7.25 to $8.25 an hour, and enshrine annual cost of living
increases in the state constitution. While business owners have
said the measure’s passage might
force them to lay people off, the measure had quite
a bit of support earlier this year. 

Pensions: The passage of issue 4 would
result in a massive overhaul for Cincinnati’s public
pensions. According
to Governing magazine, Issue 4 “would affect
about 7,500 workers, retirees and their beneficiaries and would
close off the city’s defined benefits plan to new hires and enroll
them in a 401(k) style plan.”

The Astrodome: Years after it was
abandoned by the Astros, today Houstonians will
decide what
to do with Astrodome. The ballot measure would raise property
taxes by
a half-cent per $100 of home value; that money would then be
used to turn the Astrodome into a convention center.

Who can build what where on their property, who can smoke what
when, what mutually agreed deals you can make with your fellow
humans, how much you’ll be on the hook for deals government makes
with its workers, what to force other people to pay for for a
“convention center”–all these and more, decided by the whims of a
very few of the people around you. Look around you, America. Do you
trust them on this? Doesn’t matter!

The deadline for Reason magazine’s
Spring internship, which begins in January, is next week (November
13). Applications have been coming in already, but given that I am
expecting some applications to be sent in at the last possible
moment, I thought it would be worth highlighting some
words of wisdom from my former colleague Mike Riggs, who back
in March outlined five tips on how to land an internship. If you
don’t feel like reading Mike’s post in full (you really should),
here are the tips in brief:

• Follow instructions
• Write the hell out of your cover letter
• Show some familiarity with the publication
• Tell me what you can do for us, because we know what we can do
  for you
• Be Patient

I know it sounds easy, but otherwise good applicants have
jeopardized their chances of securing an internship here in the
past by not following these simple tips. Those lucky enough to get
an internship here have the chance to write for Reason
magazine and Reason.com, conduct research, and proofread. 

The instructions for how to apply for the internship are
here.
 

Check out the work done by our current interns Jess
Remington and Zenon Evans.

Good luck wannabe Reason interns. I look forward to
hearing from you soon. 

The final frontier is the harshest, most
hazardous and most unforgiving one humanity has confronted. Rand
Simberg explains that he looks forward to commercial space flight
in this dangerous environment, because the government prioritizes
excessive safety over actual development and exploration. Just hope
that private space enterprise isn’t smothered before it
launches.

View this article.

• President Obama has
  added a caveat to his pledge that you can keep your health care
  plan if you like it.
• 
  Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) wants Instagram to stop its users from
  selling guns.
• 
  Ebay is considering accepting bitcoins.
• Republican New Jersey Governor
  Chris Christie, who is expected to win re-election today, could
  use the victory to show the GOP that he is a strong 2016
  contender.
• Congolese officials say that the
  M23 rebels in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo have
  been defeated.
• 
  A gunman who opened fire at a New Jersey mall last night is
  dead after shooting himself in the head. No one other than the
  gunman, identified as Richard Shoop, was killed or injured.

Follow Reason and Reason 24/7 on
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The whole point of Obamacare—aka the Patient Protection and
Affordable Care Act—was to protect patients from greedy insurers
who lure them when they are healthy only to use some arcane fine
print to jack prices or dump them when they fall sick, notes Reason
Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia. But the administration has
engaged in similar subterfuge, showing that the profit motive is
not the only corrupter in human affairs.

View this article.

Our entire November
issue is now available online. Don’t miss: Jacob Sullum on what the
end of pot prohibition looks like in Colorado; Steven Greenhut,
Shikha Dalmia, Eric Boehm, Scott Shackford, and Ed Krayewski on how
to break an American city; an interview with neuroscientist Carl
Hart on the fundamental ignorance that shapes our national
conversation about drug policy; plus our complete Citings and
Briefly Noted sections, the Artifact, and much more.

Click here to
read Reason’s complete November 2013 issue.

Like
other third parties, Libertarians have never won much of anything
in American politics.  But as they have since the party was
founded in the 1970s, their candidates keep pressing on with a
message of limited government, lower taxation and limited
regulation. The Libertarian candidates in Tuesday’s gubernatorial
elections in New Jersey and Virginia represent the two sides of
third-party politics in America. On one hand, they are principled,
committed and willing to forge ahead despite virtually no chance of
success. On the other hand, write Eric Boehm and Kathryn Watson, in
a nation growing more dissatisfied with the two traditional
political parties, with Democratic promises that never seem to be
delivered and Republican ideals that seem rooted in the 20th
century, they represent a new way forward.

View this article.

Highland Park High School in
Illinois allows students to wear costumes to class on Halloween.
But when Mashon Sanders showed up as Jesus,
officials pulled him out of class and made him change. They said
some teachers found the costume offensive.

Central Connecticut State University declared a
state of emergency and ordered a
campus lockdown after reports of a possibly costumed armed man
on campus also carrying what looked like a sword. “Somebody was
seen either with a gun or was thought to have a gun,” a university
spokesperson told the press. The lockdown
ended after police took three people, including at least one
student, the primary suspect, into custody. They recovered no
weapons, and the Hartford Courant
reports that the campus police chief said there was never a
threat to anyone.  Nevertheless, even while acknowledging the
incident “possibly could have been a Halloween costume,” the campus
police chief insisted it “wasn’t a prank because there was concern,
there was alarm.”

The Courant has a
photo gallery illustrating the overwhelming police response,
which included cops from several local towns and state police
sending two SWAT teams to the school. The first photo, of a couple
embracing, is captioned “A man hugs his girlfriend as they reunite
on Manafort Street as students and faculty were finally released
Monday afternoon,” a caption worth a thousand words.

Police say charges are likely in the incident, according
to the Courant’s David Owens.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit comes out against
replacing the gas tax with a mileage-based levy, which would likely
be assessed via a GPS-style “black box” installed in cars. The
irony behind the reform idea? People are burning less gasoline,
which is one of the goals of transportation policy. But that means
government collects less money from the gax tax.

From Road & Track:

The response in many places — from Oregon to New
Jersey and points in between — has been to propose taxing
people based on the miles that they drive rather than on the gas
that they burn.  There are even test programs going on in
several states in which GPS trackers are being used to collect
drivers’ mileage.  Needless to say, this sort of thing has
people worried about privacy, especially in the wake of the recent
scandals involving government spying and abuse of data.  It
also raises the question of whether, by moving to a mileage tax,
we’re giving up on trying to get people to save gas….

After noting that tracking drivers in this way creeps out
privacy advocates, Reynolds further notes:

Simpler still, of course, would be an increase in the gas tax.
 Politicians don’t like that, because tax increases are never
popular, and gas is already expensive enough.  But, of
course, the mileage tax would be a tax increase
too, since the whole reason it’s being proposed is
because the highway administrators want more money than they’re
getting now.  If you’re going to pay more anyway, why give up
your privacy to boot, just so that politicians can pretend
something else is going on?  And the gas tax is still a pretty
good proxy for road use:  The heavier the vehicle and the more
it drives, the more gas it burns and the more tax its owner pays.
 Hybrids get better mileage (though often no better than
diesels) but that’s not enough to undermine this much, and
pure-electric cars are a tiny fraction of those on the road, and
that isn’t likely to change any time very soon.

Read the whole thing here.

The federal gas tax hasn’t increased in about 20 years and,
unlike most levies, is more clearly designed as a user fee – the
money collected is supposed to be used for highway and
infrastructure upkeep (though
it’s often diverted to other purposes). Note that Adrian
Moore of Reason Foundation favors trying out the black boxes. He
believes that privacy concerns can be addressed while getting more
accurate tallies. From an LA Times story:

Wonks call it a mileage-based user fee. It is no surprise that
the idea appeals to urban liberals, as the taxes could be rigged to
change driving patterns in ways that could help reduce congestion
and greenhouse gases, for example. California planners are looking
to the system as they devise strategies to meet the goals laid out
in the state’s ambitious global warming laws. But Rep. Bill Shuster
(R-Pa.), chairman of the House Transportation Committee, has said
he, too, sees it as the most viable long-term alternative. The free
marketeers at the Reason Foundation are also fond of having drivers
pay per mile.

“This is not just a tax going into a black hole,” said Adrian
Moore, vice president of policy at Reason. “People are paying more
directly into what they are getting.”

More here.