In the late 1990s, my grandfather bought a mail-order bat box as a natural approach to mosquito management. The dark green plywood roost was mounted on tall wooden poles on a sunny patch in the yard and stabilized with tension wires. The catalog promised that the bats would raise their pups inside the box and feast on the mosquitoes that swarmed my grandparents' lakefront yard.
The bat box always seemed like an undisputed win for all parties (save the mosquitoes). But when I started researching a bat box for our mosquito-plagued property in North Carolina, I learned that some off-the-shelf boxes, like the kind my grandfather used, are essentially bat ovens. In hot months, artificial roosts that are poorly located, too small, darkly painted, or insufficiently ventilated can reach lethal temperatures, killing bat pups.
This knowledge rattled me, and I suspect it would have deeply upset my grandfather, who took great pride in his environmental stewardship. But this is how science is supposed to work—hypothesize, test, share, tweak, repeat. Sometimes it's a bummer, but how else can we know if our corrective measures do what we want?
In 2021, several experts debated in the pages of Conservation Science and Practice whether it helped bats to publicize the potential lethality of a bat box. "Telling people their well-intended conservation efforts are wrong is rarely productive," wrote Virgil Brack Jr. and Dale W. Sparks, principal scientists at Environmental Solutions & Innovations, Inc. The subjects of their critique, Reed D. Crawford and Joy M. O'Keefe of the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, replied that they would continue to raise awareness "that the cavalier use of unsuitable boxes could expose bats to deadly temperatures." Both parties agreed the design and deployment of artificial roosts could and should be improved. Once again, the reckoning is uncomfortable but necessary.
Amateur apiarists are rethinking a few things as well. Once considered the environmentalist equivalent of a victory garden, the European honeybee hives that were established in backyards and rooftops around the U.S. in the early 2010s following reports of "colony collapse" could "actually have a negative influence on native and wild bee populations through floral resource competition and pathogen transmission," according to research published in 2023 by conservationists at Concordia University and the University of Montreal.
"For people who say they want to save the bees and they have a honeybee hive, it's kind of like throwing Asian carp into the Great Lakes and saying you want to save the native fish," York University conservation professor Sheila Colla told The Washington Post in May 2023.
The undesirable effects of good intentions scale up pretty quickly when government policy drives environmental efforts. In August, Science reported that 2020 emissions regulations imposed by the United Nations' International Maritime Organization had the desired effect of reducing the amount of sulfur that ships released into the air, as well as the undesired effect of simultaneously reducing the volume of sulfur-based clouds, called "ship tracks," that form along shipping routes and reflect the sun away from the Earth.
"By dramatically reducing the number of ship tracks, the planet has warmed up faster," explained Science reporter Paul Voosen. "That trend is magnified in the Atlantic, where maritime traffic is particularly dense. In the shipping corridors, the increased light represents a 50% boost to the warming effect of human carbon emissions."
In China, ambitious government subsidies for green energy projects in the late 2010s spurred an explosion in electric vehicle (E.V.) development that is now readily apparent in the car graveyards around the country where obsolete E.V.s have been abandoned. "Not only are the sites an eyesore," reported Bloomberg News in 2023, but "getting rid of EVs so quickly reduces their climate benefit considering they're more emissions-intensive to build and only produce an advantage over combustion cars after a few years."
There are even policies where personal conservation and governmental environmental policy collide in a spectacularly horrifying fashion. In a September essay titled "We Thought We Were Saving the Planet, but We Were Planting a Time Bomb" in The New York Times, Canadian novelist and essayist Claire Cameron recounted her own personal reckoning with the time she spent planting trees on logging land in Ontario, only to learn years later that her efforts helped fuel forest fires.
"This was a common—if notoriously grueling—rite of passage for Canadian university students, since it allowed you to make good money while spending a few months outdoors with other like-minded young people. I was driven in part by the idealistic view that planting a tree was always going to be better than not planting one."
Except the trees they were planting were all the same species, water-thirsty and highly flammable, neatly spaced six feet apart. "Much later, I learned that the trees we were planting, black spruce, are so combustible that firefighters call them gas on a stick. The trees evolved to burn: They have flammable sap, and their resin-filled cones open up when heated to drop seeds into charred soil." To make matters more complicated still, the tree-planting program was managed by private timber companies but driven by government incentives.
For some, these unintended consequences will elicit schadenfreude; for others, despair. But there is a silver lining in these revelations, which is that we learn something new every day, month, and year about what kinds of eco-stewardship produce good results as well as what those results cost. While government bodies are not Bayesian actors, individuals and private firms can be. At the human scale, we can react and adapt to new knowledge, avoid or abandon well-meaning disasters, and make choices that have a positive impact on our local ecology.
In some cases, the best thing you can do for the environment is leave it well enough alone. Bats, it turns out, are naturally drawn to roosting in dead tree trunks. My property is full of them.
The post When Well-Intended Environmentalism Backfires appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Bizarro: The Surreal Saga of America's Secret War on Synthetic Drugs and the Florida Kingpins It Captured, by Jordan S. Rubin, University of California Press, 278 pages, $27.95
For the average American, the phrase "Florida drug kingpin" is more likely to evoke cocaine-slinging Cubans or meth-cooking bikers than a middle-aged science-fiction nerd who invited the police to inspect his facilities. Yet in the eyes of federal prosecutors, Charles Burton Ritchie was no less a kingpin—just smarter and less violent than the folks they were used to dealing with.
The story of Ritchie's rise and fall, as told by Jordan S. Rubin in Bizarro: The Surreal Saga of America's Secret War on Synthetic Drugs and the Florida Kingpins It Captured, is every bit as compelling as a more Scarfacian tale. Rubin, a former narcotics prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, has written a period-defining study of federal drug prosecutions at the beginning of the synthetics boom.
Our Dantes are Ritchie and his business partner Ben Galecki, who met as teenagers in the early 1990s while attending the same Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Pensacola, Florida, both under court order. Ritchie was a few years older and went on to found the Psychedelic Shack, a beach-adjacent shop that sold bongs, rolling papers, and alternative clothing. Galecki would later work at the Shack as a piercer.
Initially, the Shack made most of its money from cannabis paraphernalia. In keeping with head-shop practice, Ritchie forbade his employees from acknowledging what things like bongs were designed for and would not sell to customers who mentioned illegal drugs. Eventually, he got hip to a trendy head-shop product called spice, conveniently marketed by wholesalers as potpourri or incense, packaged by the gram, and featuring a label warning that it was "not for human consumption." Once on the Shack's shelves, it quickly became popular among the customers who bought "tobacco water pipes."
Spice, as many Americans now know, is not potpourri or incense. It's also not just "a" drug but an ever-changing number of synthetic cannabinoids sprayed onto generic plant matter to mimic the effect of cannabis.
The very first spice formulation to hit the American gray market was created by Clemson University chemist John W. Huffman in the 1980s using a federal grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Huffman would later say that actual cannabis was far safer than smoking the compounds Chinese chemists created based on his published research, which he likened to "playing Russian Roulette."
But Ritchie didn't tell his customers to smoke it. He told them it was incense and potpourri. "I'm a libertarian," he said during cross-examination at a 2017 criminal trial. "What people do with a legal product is their business."
This brings us to the recurring theme in Rubin's investigation: Ritchie's belief that he had sold a legal product. How does one ascertain that one's business is square with the law? You could consult the law—in this case, the Controlled Substances Act, which is periodically amended to include new compounds that the government wants to prohibit. You could contact an attorney. You could consult the local sheriff's department and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). You could have a lab test your product for banned compounds. Ritchie did all those things when he founded a spice manufacturing company called Zencense, and everyone—including the law—told him that the compounds he was buying from China, cutting with acetone, and spraying onto plant matter did not contain controlled substances.
But complying with the 1986 Federal Analogue Act is not quite that simple. The statute gives federal law enforcement license to go after people who deal in substances "substantially similar" in structure, effect, or advertised effect to prohibited ones.
In 1992, the first major case in which the law was applied went down in flames after two DEA chemists disagreed over whether an orphaned antidepressant compound called AET, which the defendants marketed as MDMA, was, in fact, substantially similar to any drug that was actually illegal. When the DEA analysts reached different conclusions in their respective testimonies, Judge Lewis Babcock, a Reagan appointee, concluded that the Analogue Act failed to inform citizens of what was actually illegal. If the DEA's chemists couldn't agree with each other about substantial similarity, what hope would a normal person have?
What does the phrase even mean? Alexander Shulgin, a Dow chemist turned psychedelic pioneer who reintroduced MDMA to the world after decades of inattention, succinctly summed up the problem with the Analogue Act in a 1987 lecture cited by Rubin: Is a Pontiac taillight "substantially similar" to a Chevy taillight? "In some ways yes and some ways no," Shulgin answered himself.
Rubin's history of the Justice Department's lobbying efforts over the Analogue Act suggests the agency was less concerned with epistemology than whether the concept would hold up in court. Eventually it would. All it took for the government to start winning was some messaging discipline within the DEA and enough trials to build a reservoir of favorable precedents.
As in 1992, that discipline was initially hard to come by when the DEA sought to prosecute spice manufacturers in the 2000s. Central to Rubin's book is a forensic chemist at the DEA who believed that Ritchie and Galecki, the latter a 20 percent owner of Zencense until the pair sold the company in 2012, were not manufacturing or selling a drug that was "substantially similar" to compounds that had been banned by a 2011 amendment to the Controlled Substances Act. The DEA fought fiercely to keep that chemist from testifying and found a friendly federal judge to agree in the first major trial against Ritchie and Galecki. During the second of what would be three trials, the DEA chemist was allowed to testify, but he had, by that point, resigned from the agency under a cloud related both to his work habits and to his unwise response to a Craigslist personal ad seemingly posted by a juvenile. In other words, he'd lost his punch as a witness.
Rubin's play-by-play of the legal battle that followed Ritchie and Galecki's indictment is meticulously annotated and chilling. One federal prosecutor said in open court that the government keeps a secret list of prohibited analogs that it will not share with the public because that would let the "bad guys" stay one step ahead of the law. A federal judge refused to let Ritchie tell a jury what steps he took to comply with federal drug laws.
Ritchie and Galecki are not perfectly sympathetic. They called their products potpourri and incense but gave them names like Bizarro and Orgazmo. They knew people were smoking and inhaling a chemical bouquet they mixed themselves in what can charitably be called rustic conditions.
But the feds come across here as more dangerous, mercurial, and unethical than their targets. Instead of presenting jurors with evidence of a crime and then proving the defendants committed that crime, the Analogue Act both allows and requires prosecutors to present legally vague behavior and then have jurors determine, based largely on competing testimonies on molecular chemistry, whether any crime was committed at all. In short, what Zencense did was not illegal until jurors said so, which they definitively did in September 2020.
The pair's ordeal is also vivid proof that bad laws have unintended consequences. It was the prohibition of cannabis, after all, that led to Huffman's research and the spice market. In a saner world, Ritchie and Galecki could've sold legal cannabis at the Psychedelic Shack. In this one, they saw a loophole the government created and took their shot. The government, unwilling to concede that it didn't have a pot to piss in, closed that loophole around their necks.
Ritchie, now 53, and Galecki, 49, are scheduled for release from federal prison in 2032. The Analogue Act is still the law of the land, even if nobody quite understands what that means.
The post How a Law No One Understands Brought Down Florida Drug 'Kingpins' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Since Albert Jones filed his U.S. patent for corrugated paper packing material in 1871, cardboard products have played the cart to globalization's horse. Cheaper and lighter than a crate and more protective than paper or straw, cardboard has made myriad goods affordable and deliverable to just about anywhere. From carrying glass vials of medicine at the turn of the 20th century to entire couches at the beginning of the 21st, cardboard is a linchpin of modern life.
So why do so many of us hate it so much? A few months back, I found myself losing sleep over the cardboard pile in our garage. It began with the disposable cocoons for a couch, bed frame, and mattress. As time schlepped on, the pile grew. Boxes for a dehumidifier (summer) and then a humidifier (winter) followed, along with various brown containers from Amazon and Walmart. I'd planned, as one does, to break them down as they arrived and put them in the recycling bin. But this only works if you do it, and I didn't.
When my wife and I realized getting rid of the pile would take months of filling the recycling bin with nothing but cardboard, we devised a new plan: drive the pile to a nearby county drop-off. Then the pile outgrew our cars.
Man plans; cardboard laughs. Man gives up.
How did we lose control? For one thing, household recycling bins have been no match for the massive amount of cardboard that accompanied the COVID-19 consumer spending binge. Sure, you can pile folded boxes on the curb and hope for the best, but drenched cardboard is less recyclable, and some jurisdictions charge penalties for material outside a bin—if they take it at all.
The one-size-fits-all approach to curbside recycling is a shame, as most recycled cardboard actually gets turned into other useful things, unlike a large portion of nominally recyclable plastics, which are sent to landfills or shipped overseas and burned. For me, the answer was not a bigger government bin or more government trucks but expanding my concept of cardboard's potential second life.
The first revelation was that it makes a fantastic soil supplement. Do you have a yard? A garden, perhaps? Buy a paper shredder that can handle 24 sheets and shred your cardboard. You can use those fragments as mulch in a vegetable or flower bed, or as the carbon element in a compost system. Large, heavy sheets of cardboard too tough to tear down or shred can be used as a weed mat and be covered in dirt or mulch (or shredded cardboard). Just make sure to peel the tape off before you return it to the earth.
City dwellers, you can also shred your cardboard and then put it in a recyclable bag (or right in the trash, if you care so little about the planet). No room for a shredder? Buy scissors made for cutting carpets; they cost roughly $20 on Amazon and make quick work of even the thickest cardboard. The goal is simply to reduce the cubic volume.
"Ah, but time is money," you say, and rightly so. Busy parents or moguls should direct their precious attention to a local freecycle group on Facebook or Nextdoor, where there is someone who will take anything provided it's free. Dead houseplants? This person wants them. A Ziploc bag full of mismatched screws from old Ikea furniture? Ditto. This person will also (probably) want your cardboard. Maybe he's moving, or maybe he's hoarding; it doesn't matter as long as he takes the pile.
You can also pay someone to take your overwhelming quantity of cardboard. Post a pic of your pile on Craigslist, offer $50 for pickup, and eager beavers will inundate your phone within the hour. Or try a service like TaskRabbit. The labor market may be hot, but it will never be too hot for odd-jobbers. (Just make sure to take your address off the boxes in case they end up illegally dumped in an alley or side street.) If you care deeply about cardboard recycling, a licensed junk hauler or moving company will take your pile to the right place for a thicker fee than the Craigslist merc.
Find a creative way to reuse or recycle your cardboard, and you can resume appreciating it. The alternative is to buy less, and where's the fun in that?
The post Control Your Cardboard, Control Your Life appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In The Big Break, Ben Terris delivers a book-length undressing of D.C. strivers of the Trump era.
The Washington Post reporter enters the social lives and salons of characters such as Leah Hunt-Hendrix, a former Occupy Wall Street protester and granddaughter of a Texas oil tycoon. She set up shop in D.C. to fight Trumpism, but we mostly see her bemoaning the choices of other Democrats. For instance, Sam Bankman-Fried, at that point still a crypto billionaire, and his brother Gabe show up with their own opinions about primary candidates—to Hunt-Hendrix's irritation.
We also spend time with Matt Schlapp, who helped transform the Conservative Political Action Conference into a carnival for opportunists in Donald Trump's orbit, and we meet the ambitious little people who get pulled under by these large personalities when they change course, or even get arrested, as Sam Bankman-Fried did. Terris treats all of them fairly, which, in D.C., means no one comes across well.
The post Review: <i>The Big Break</i> Documents Trump's Washington appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On May 18, 1980, paratroopers under the control of General Chun Doo-hwan tortured, beat, and killed hundreds of pro-democracy activists in Gwangju, South Korea. The activists were protesting Chun's coup and declaration of martial law, as well as nearly two decades of authoritarian rule by his predecessor. On May 18, 2023, 27-year-old Chun Woo-won, pictured bowing, met with survivors to apologize for his grandfather's initiation of the Gwangju Massacre.
The post A South Korean Apology appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When Miranda Dickson inherited her childhood home in the New Town section of Edinburgh, Scotland, she also inherited the curse of historical significance. After painting her front door pink in December 2021, Dickson was ordered by the City of Edinburgh Council to repaint her door a "dark and muted" color, in keeping with the character of the neighborhood, or face fines up to 20,000 pounds ($25,000). In April, after failing to overturn the order, Dickson waved the white flag with a government-approved green front door.
The post This Pink Door Wasn't Historical Enough for Edinburgh appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Los Angeles Press Club has announced the finalists for the 65th annual Southern California Journalism Awards, recognizing the best content published in or about Southern California during 2022. The press club received over 2,300 entries this year. Reason, published by the Los Angeles–based Reason Foundation, is a finalist in nine categories.
Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller is a finalist in the medical/health reporting category for his video on California's efforts to control what doctors tell their patients about COVID-19:
Senior Editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown is a finalist in the national political/government reporting category for "The New Campaign for a Sex-Free Internet," from the May 2022 Reason, in which she reports that
it's a financially precarious, and perhaps even dangerous, time to be in the business of online porn. And one of the biggest reasons why is that a constellation of activist groups, rooted in deeply conservative opposition to virtually any depiction of sexuality in the public sphere, have put considerable pressure on the middlemen who keep online porn in business. In some cases, that pressure has led to the creation of onerous new laws; in others, it has been aided by support from powerful figures in business and government. These groups have repeatedly sought to conflate the existence of consensual commercial sex and porn production with the prospect of forced sexual exploitation, often with lurid statistics about exploited minors that don't stand up to scrutiny.
Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward is a finalist for magazine columnist for three pieces: "Why Can't We Build Anything?" from the April 2022 issue, "You're Wrong About Disinformation" from the July 2022 issue, and "Who Controls What Books You Can Read?" from the August/September 2022 special issue on banned books, in which she noted that "there are always new fronts in the book wars" and that "kings, fascists, and communists alike have warmed their hands over literary bonfires."
Andrew Heaton, Director of Special Projects Meredith Bragg, and Senior Producer Austin Bragg are finalists for humor/satire writing for the video "Democratic Disney vs. Republican Disney":
Associate Editor Liz Wolfe is a finalist in the gender and society category for her video profile "Aella: Sex Worker, Data Scientist, Libertarian":
Producer John Osterhoudt and former Policy Analyst Daniel Raisbeck, now a Latin America policy analyst at the Cato Institute, are finalists for their video "Cuban Health Care Is a Catastrophe":
Former Assistant Producer Noor Greene, now director of strategy and operations at the Renew Democracy Initiative, is a finalist in sports coverage for "Enes Kanter Freedom: Exposing the NBA's relationship with China" and in immigration coverage for "The Air Force Veteran Fighting to Save Afghans From the Taliban":
Winners will be announced on June 25 at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
Don't want to wait for awards season to get the best of Reason? Make it a regular part of your media diet by subscribing to our email newsletters, magazine, Youtube channel, and podcasts.
The post <em>Reason</em> Is a Finalist in 9 Categories at the Southern California Journalism Awards appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>From his inauguration to March 24, 2023, President Joe Biden increased the regulatory paperwork obligation by 220 million hours, reports American Action Forum's Dan Goldbeck.
The regulatory paperwork burden under Biden "exceeds the combined total accumulated under Obama and Trump in their opening years," Goldbeck says. If that number seems incomprehensibly large, he notes that it equates to "roughly 25,000 years" of filling out forms and other compliance tasks.
The figures in Goldbeck's charts compare the three presidencies at the same point in their third year and are derived from regulatory notices published by federal agencies in the Federal Register. Final rules have gone into effect after a period of public comment, while final rule costs capture the estimated economic impact of regulations over a multiyear period established by the regulating agencies.
The post Biden Has Added 220 Million Hours of Regulatory Paperwork Since His Inauguration appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A week after an alleged Chinese spy balloon first crossed into Alaska, an American F-22 used a Sidewinder missile to destroy the craft off the coast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on February 4. Just days later, a second floating object was shot down over the Yukon. On February 15, the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade announced that the second UFO was actually a harmless hobbyist pico balloon they sent up to circumnavigate the Earth.
The post It's a Bird! It's a Plane! Is It the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Affirmative: Jared Meyer
Walking through downtowns across the United States, one could be excused for becoming numb to outbursts from visibly disturbed and impaired individuals. Two decades ago, the idea that major American cities would condone (or in some cases, encourage) this situation was unthinkable. If a person was unable to take care of themselves, the options were moving to shelter or, if illness put themselves or others at risk, a clinical setting. Tent-filled homeless camps that stretch across city blocks or throughout public parks were simply not on the table.
A recent UCLA study confirmed the obvious: More than 75 percent of the unsheltered homeless surveyed have a substantial mental health problem, 75 percent have an alcohol or drug addiction, and the majority suffer from both. These afflictions, not a lack of housing, drive street homelessness in America. Choosing to live with the waste, disease, and violence that accompanies homeless camps is a clear sign that someone is not in control and needs an intervention. The only way to solve this problem is to force people off the streets and into safer settings that can treat the root causes of homelessness.
Imagine if you were suffering from untreated schizophrenia or an out-of-control addiction to opioids and found yourself living in a dangerous street camp. You distrust everyone in the system and perhaps do not even realize you are sick. Would you want your loved ones or the government to be able to get you help even if you did not want it? Many people of sound mind would, by force if necessary.
Moving homeless individuals off the streets works. After Los Angeles cleared its notorious Skid Row in 2006, the number of homeless deaths in the city dropped by half. A 2010 study showed that the successful campaign also led to a 40 percent reduction in violent crime, with no spillover effects into other communities.
It is also clear what happens when cities repeal or refuse to enforce their bans on homeless camping in public places. When Los Angeles began allowing the proliferation of street camps again in 2014, the city saw homeless deaths quadruple to five a day. This is a much higher death rate than U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan saw during the heights of the wars there. The Phoenix government does not enforce its camping ban, and more than 500 homeless people died on the city's streets in the first half of 2022. Most of these deaths were caused by drug use, but almost one in 10 were homicides.
After Austin repealed its ban in 2019, the city saw a 45 percent increase in unsheltered homelessness even as the number of people staying in shelters dropped. Deaths among Austin's homeless numbered 77 just a decade ago, but rose to 256 in 2020 after the camping ban ended (almost none of which were COVID-related). After 2019, Austin also endured double-digit increases in violent crimes involving the homeless. This is unsurprising, as neighborhoods next to street camps have higher levels of armed robbery, rape, and aggravated assault. The victims of these crimes are often other vulnerable homeless individuals.
Some homeless people need more than shelters and services to stabilize and get better. Unfortunately, mental health commitment laws, which states changed in response to past abuses and pressure from civil liberty groups, make it too difficult for those experiencing a major mental crisis to get help. According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, a national advocate for psychiatric treatment, four states require family or friends to refuse to help their loved ones for them to be eligible for some types of commitment. States often do not have "psychiatric deterioration" nor "grave disability" standards, which limits the services individuals can receive when they are clearly suffering from severe mental illness or addiction. Even when the standards for involuntary care are met, states' maximum inpatient hold and outpatient supervision times are often too short to lead to lasting change.
Those who oppose moving the homeless off the streets on individual liberty grounds often fail to distinguish between public and private property. (The United States finds itself in the odd position of overregulating private property while underregulating public property.) As much as some may hope otherwise, roads and most parks remain public property in cities. Government having and enforcing ordinances that regulate what is acceptable in these public places is necessary to protect public safety, personal property, and general order. The popularity of camping bans in referendums and opinion polls shows local residents know that in dense urban areas, allowing individuals to use public space however they choose is a recipe for disaster.
Solving unsheltered homelessness, along with the causal factors of mental illness and addiction, is difficult. But the current "solution" of choosing the streets over shelters and health care facilities is not working. All levels of government need to update their approaches and move individuals off the streets into safer alternatives—without their consent if necessary.
Negative: Mike Riggs
In 1963, nearly 600,000 Americans lived in state-run hospitals because medical authorities insisted they were mentally ill and couldn't live alone or with loved ones. In an address he gave that year to Congress, President John F. Kennedy described the facilities where these men and women were held, many against their will, as "unpleasant institutions from which death too often provided the only firm hope of release." The libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, in a 2000 interview with Reason's Jacob Sullum, called them "feudal slave estates."
When a midcentury progressive Democrat and a firebrand classical liberal conclude that a government policy stinks, it stinks.
Kennedy's alternative to mass institutionalization for both the mentally ill and the intellectually disabled (who accounted for an additional 200,000 victims of institutionalization in 1963) was to shift federal funding from state-run hospitals to community treatment centers that could help patients without pulling them from their neighborhoods, families, and homes. "When carried out, reliance on the cold mercy of custodial isolation will be supplanted by the open warmth of community concern and capability," Kennedy told Congress. "Emphasis on prevention, treatment and rehabilitation will be substituted for a desultory interest in confining patients in an institution to wither away."
Szasz, who spent his career arguing against the idea that mental illnesses are actual illnesses, wanted to simultaneously abolish all forms of involuntary psychiatric care and the insanity defense. He insisted that people who behaved violently should be incarcerated regardless of the psychological impetus for their behavior. People who merely acted weirdly or believed weird things, on the other hand, should be left to their own (nonviolent) devices. Szasz insisted that no one has the authority to stop an adult from hurting themselves. A homeless man who attacks a passerby should be tried and punished for assault and battery; a homeless man who claims to be Jesus and uses fentanyl in the open should not.
The Szaszian approach is too Manichean for criminal justice reformers and too soft for law-and-order types, but it at least has a limiting principle. Mentally ill people can be deprived of their liberty only as a form of punishment and only if they victimize someone; they cannot be deprived of their liberty to merely deliver them from temptation or risk.
The Supreme Court contributed to deinstitutionalization when it ruled in O'Connor v. Donaldson (1975) that the state and its agents cannot confine people indefinitely simply because they have been diagnosed with a mental illness. Kenneth Donaldson, the plaintiff in that case, was involuntarily committed to a state-run psychiatric hospital in Florida in 1957 because his father said he experienced delusions. Donaldson spent the next 15 years in a crowded asylum, refused his freedom by J.B. O'Connor, the hospital superintendent, who testified that Donaldson was never violent, suicidal, or in need of therapy. He was simply a person with schizophrenia and thus belonged in the care of the state.
The old institutional model, which vacuumed up people like Donaldson and dismissed their indignation as a medical symptom, was itself a wide-reaching disease. At their peak, state mental hospitals contained three times as many people as are currently in federal prison—at a time when the U.S. population was roughly 60 percent of what it is now.
Scott Alexander, the pseudonymous blogger and San Francisco–based psychiatrist, supports a fusion of the Szaszian and community care approaches. "In my model," he wrote in 2016, "the overwhelming majority of mentally ill people can live okay lives outside of any institution, hopefully receiving community care if they want it. If they commit crimes they will go to prison just like anyone else."
Community care has never received the federal funding that Kennedy intended, but it does exist, even in places with large populations of mentally ill unhoused persons. But no policy model can eradicate homelessness. Not everyone on the street wants or can benefit from intervention. Involuntary commitment, even for the short, multiday periods currently allowed under most state laws, often exacerbates feelings of paranoia. Holding patients indefinitely turns them into prisoners. The only comprehensive solution—make homelessness illegal, and aggressively enforce that law—would be unconstitutional and barbaric.
But there is low-hanging fruit. Allow developers to build more housing to drive down prices. End the drug war so that opioid users know what they're putting into their bodies. Stand up to NIMBY ("not in my backyard") activists, who routinely insist on ghettoizing services for the poor and sabotaging the efforts of private actors like outdoor soup kitchens. And yes, those who are violent or destructive should have their liberties revoked in proportion.
There is no easy solution, but there is a very obvious bad one: locking away people for the grave sin of not having curtains to hide their faults.
Subscribers have access to Reason's whole May 2023 issue now. These debates and the rest of the issue will be released throughout the month for everyone else. Consider subscribing today!
The post Debate: Mentally Ill Homeless People Must Be Locked Up for Public Safety appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick dragged his landlord before the Cambridge Rent Control Board, Murray Rothbard, who also lived in a rent-controlled apartment and also did philosophy, argued that there is a moral difference between accepting a subsidy and agitating for one. "One is living your life within a State-created matrix, while trying to work against the system," Rothbard wrote in a 1987 issue of Liberty. "The other is actively using the State to benefit yourself and screw your fellow man, which means initiating and abetting aggression and theft."
Christians might call this being in the world but not of it. Rothbard called it "rationality and good sense" to take a handout you never asked for. In that spirit, I recently set out to learn what federal subsidies my wife and I might be able to collect under the High-Efficiency Electric Homes and Rebates Act, which was tucked into the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a 2022 law that I think is bad.
The short answer is "none." And while it might just be the sour grapes talking, my investigation left me wondering why so many other homeowners are eligible.
As it turns out, the IRA rebate for updating our main electrical panel, which we did in October for $2,500, is income-limited. Households that earn less than 80 percent of the area's median income are eligible for panel rebates up to $4,000; households between 80 and 150 percent of the area median income can receive a 50 percent discount. Due to our good fortune, the government won't pay for even half of our new circuit-breaker box.
"That's as it should be!" you might be thinking. But there is more to the story. According to Rewiring America, a clean energy advocacy group, we could have received up to $600 for the main panel job if we had an energy-efficient water heater installed in conjunction with it. We would have been eligible for a 30 percent main-panel credit if we also installed solar panels. The solar panels come with their own 30 percent tax credit.
That's where the math gets morally funky. "Even with the new federal tax credit—and other available incentives, including state tax incentives—home solar panels are expensive," the Pew Research Center noted in an October 2022 report. Pew found that the "average installation cost of a residential solar panel system so far this year can range from $16,870 to $23,170 after applying the federal solar tax credit."
Those figures made me wonder about the average solar adopter. "Median solar adopter income was about $110k/year in 2021, compared to a U.S. median of about $63k/year for all households," according to a November report from the Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Solar adopters tend to be middle-aged, non-Hispanic whites who primarily speak English and "work in business and finance-related occupations." Compared to the general population, they "have higher education levels" and "live in higher-value homes."
Some of my dearest friends are highly educated, upper-middle-class white people. They did not lobby for these subsidies, and I wouldn't begrudge their attempts to shrink their carbon footprints. But things like my new electrical panel (to say nothing of a five-figure solar panel array) make it cheaper to power a house and make that house more valuable. It seems perverse for the government to help well-off people pay for investments that make them richer.
The same goes for the subsidies that electric vehicle owners can receive for charging stations (for cash-strapped Tesla owners, one assumes) as well as the battery storage subsidy and the geothermal energy subsidy. These are upgrades for rich people. The financial returns they offer—to say nothing of the environmental benefits—surely should be incentive enough.
Or maybe I'm just salty about being too rich for one set of subsidies and too poor for the other.
The post The Morally Funky Math of Homeowner Handouts appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The House of Representatives Recording Studio allows news cameras to show only whichever member is speaking and wide shots of the House floor. But during the recent multiday battle over the next speaker of the House, media outlets were free to capture members negotiating, debating, and even losing their cool, as Rep. Mike Rogers (R–Ala.) did when Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.) refused to support Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) for speaker. C-SPAN has asked McCarthy to continue allowing candid cameras going forward.
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]]>The Department of Energy announced in December that researchers at the National Ignition Facility had, for the first time ever, achieved "ignition" in a fusion reaction, meaning researchers created a fusion reaction that releases more energy than it consumes. Physicist Tom Hartsfield wrote in Big Think that the laser-powered reaction "would not quite power one 40-watt refrigerator light bulb for a day" and that commercial opportunities remain decades away, at best.
Meanwhile, the two fission reactor units at the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant in Rhea County, Tennessee, power roughly 1.3 million homes. Including new plants expected to come online later this year in Georgia, the U.S. has completed construction on three fission units in the 21st century while retiring over a dozen with no plans to replace them.
The post Fusion Future, Fission Present appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Argentina is no stranger to economic turmoil, having defaulted on its national debt three times since 2001. Now the country is facing another bout of brutal inflation, with an annual inflation rate of 88 percent reported in October, up from 50 percent in January 2022.
Argentine photographer Irina Werning captured the frustration working Argentines feel in a photo series. "Inflation destroys savings, impedes planning, and discourages investment," she wrote in her introduction.
In August, when the reported inflation rate hit 78.5 percent, Argentine workers held a mock funeral procession, complete with casket, to mourn the "death of wages."
The post Argentina's Inflation Crisis appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The police department in Hinton, West Virginia, is falling into the Earth after water from Hurricane Nicole caused a nearby sinkhole to rapidly expand underneath the station. The sinkhole first appeared on Route 20 in June 2021. According to local station WBOY-TV, Hinton officials did not meet with state highway officials to discuss repairing the sinkhole until July 2022.
The post Do Sinkholes Hate Cops? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When our water was turned off one morning last January, we assumed it was due to the sinkhole slowly expanding across the width of our single-lane street in South Philadelphia. But we could only guess, as no one answered the phone at the Philadelphia Water Department, and the first city employee didn't show up on our street until four hours after the taps died. When one of my elderly neighbors asked how long it would take to restore service, the city guy said his crews were swamped. It took 27 hours.
With spotlights shining into the house and construction equipment rattling our walls, my wife and I spent most of that night wondering where we could go for a reprieve with a 2-month-old in below-freezing weather. North Carolina was an obvious place.
We moved there for my wife's new job, which she took so we could raise our son near family. Never again having to navigate the Philly Water Department's automated hotline was a bonus. Then we fell in love with a 1960s ranch house in an unincorporated township north of Durham, and I started to dream a little bigger: Better government is nice, but isn't less government even better? As of September, I no longer have to deal with any city's water department, because we have a well and a septic tank, as do lots of folks out in the county.
Like publicly maintained water systems in big cities, however, wells break. Ours pumped a hearty eight gallons a minute, but the water contained coliform bacteria, a well camera found cracks and gaps in the casing, and the pressure tank in the garage was rusted to hell. I soon wondered if we'd actually traded up. Then a real person answered the phone at the well company that our real estate agent recommended, and the employee who came to our house the next day called me en route to let me know his ETA. The inconvenience may have been lateral, but the customer service was several tiers above.
Moving from the city to the county also means I no longer have to deal with Philly's trash collectors, who routinely ripped bags and left their contents strewn the length of our block. My trash, like my water, is now my problem. Since there are many people out in the county, there are also many private companies picking up trash. We went with a company in Efland, which sold us a nice big can and weekly roadside pickup for $30 a month.
Like the well, this arrangement has tradeoffs: The private company collects only what's in the can, and we only get one, while Philly's trash trucks would take the contents of your house if you wrapped the mattresses in plastic. That said, it's a big can, and our new trash collectors manage to get all of our trash in their truck. They also text us a reminder every Wednesday night.
Living without government services isn't necessarily cheaper or easier than putting up with municipal bureaucracies. Our monthly water bill in Philly averaged $50, which means we spent roughly eight years' worth of water payments to upgrade our well. When we have trash that won't fit in the bin, we'll have to pay a junk hauler (or rent a truck). In a year or two, we'll need to have the septic tank pumped. Eventually, it may need to be replaced.
But even if we can only hope to one day break even on cost, the satisfaction I get from being treated like a customer has its own value. Back in January, the Philly water employee told one of my irate neighbors that his department was funded exclusively by service fees. "We work for you!" is a nice thing to say, but it is irritating to hear when you can't get a human on the phone or take your business elsewhere. If the trash company were to take us for granted, we'd find another one; they know that, which is why they send us a pickup reminder every week.
"Get a well!" is not an answer for the people who want to stay in Philly or any other city plagued by sclerotic decline. But it is an option for individuals with the means and disposition to reclaim some responsibility.
The post One Foot off the Grid, Where We Don't Have To Deal With the City Water Department appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>With each new season, the baking tent that hosts The Great British Baking Show contains a broader array of the peoples that make up modern Great Britain. For the first time, the reality show's three best bakers are immigrants to the U.K.: Janusz Domagala (from Poland), Maxy Maligisa (Sweden), and Syabira Yusoff (Malaysia).
Domagala's pistachio and cherry vodka wuzetka made him "star baker" in the premiere, and odes to his new home—a full English breakfast pizza and a "fish and chip shop" smörgåstårta—landed him the coveted title again during Bread Week. Maligisa's eye for detail has also seen her named star baker twice.
But while Domagala and Maligisa are technically skilled (and, like all bakers on the show, appear to be wonderful people), my money is on Yusoff. Her red velvet cake in the opener was, according to judge Paul Hollywood, "perfect," and her Malay-inspired nasi lemak smörgåstårta was a genius bit of fusion.
Season 13 of The Great British Baking Show flipped some sensitive wigs in October with its Mexican Week episode, featuring tacos dressed in refried beans and numerous mispronunciations of pico de gallo, but don't let the "cultural appropriation" scolds put you off: The show remains an uplifting celebration of culinary collaboration.
The post Review: In Defense of Cultural Appropriation on <em>The Great British Baking Show</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In place of life insurance, the astronauts who landed on the moon left behind autographed envelope covers that their loved ones could sell if they died in space. Half a century later, the so-called Apollo insurance covers produced for missions 11 through 16 are coveted collector's items, and actual liability insurance for space travel is a product slowly coming into its own.
Insuring space technology is now close to standard. In 2019, The Aerospace Corporation researchers Lindsay Chaney and Nicholas Hirano noted that in the prior year "roughly two-thirds of launched satellites globally carried some form of insurance." But insuring private space travelers is as new as, well, private space travel.
The American travel insurance company Battleface began offering space travel insurance underwritten by Lloyd's of London in 2021. Some of the policy criteria described by Battleface co-founder and CEO Sasha Gainullin, such as age and health status, are insurance boilerplate. Others are far more specific: "distance into space, the duration of the flight, and what type of space craft will be used."
In some ways, buying insurance for space travel is no different from buying a specific policy for other high-risk activities. You pay more because you're risking more. But as Gainullin notes, "Earth-based adventure activities have a known risk frequency, amassed by the millions of thrill seekers who have taken part and the small percentage who have, unfortunately, been injured or worse. Those statistics are not yet available for such a new risk."
Space travel insurance premiums will eventually reflect the success rate of launches and landings. Assuming a workable space tourism model emerges, the need for insurance will go up as ticket prices come down—especially if carriers are able to avoid taking on liability. A working parent headed to space for leisure will want a policy for death or disability, Gainullin notes, since "most insurances will void coverage if you are undertaking a more hazardous activity than that contemplated and declared on the application."
While pricey and hard to come by now, "there hasn't been a situation where insurance markets haven't stepped up," Neil Stevens, a vice president in charge of space products at the insurance broker Marsh, told The New York Times in 2021.
That's a bold claim, but it is backed by history. "During the constantly recurring epidemic visitations of the middle ages, anything depending upon the duration of human life could but be a lottery," the English actuary Cornelius Walford wrote in 1884. "Life insurance, except as a bet or hazard between two or more individuals, was therefore impossible. And yet it was practised to an extent of which we can only judge by collateral circumstances—one of these being the existence of forms of contract exactly adapted to the nature of the business."
The post As Private Space Travel Grows, so Will the Insurance Market appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration, by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees, Harvard University Press, 192 pages, $25.95
If the vast potential of outer space excites you but the cost of exploring it does not, The End of Astronauts is for you. The book imagines a future where frugal humans can have their cosmic cake and eat it too—as long as they don't mind robot bakers.
Notwithstanding their provocative title, science writer Donald Goldsmith and astronomer Martin Rees are not pessimistic about or opposed to space exploration. They just think robots should do most of the work, because robots are less needy than people, gentler on extraterrestrial ecosystems, and cheaper.
In keeping with their preference for cold machines, the authors are unmoved by the tautological romanticism that says we should go to space in order to go to space. They wave off President John F. Kennedy's famous 1962 declaration that we "choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
Goldsmith and Rees are likewise unconvinced by the argument that human beings are hard-wired for space exploration. And they wonder why, if a multiplanetary existence is humanity's "destiny," we must rush to accomplish that goal now.
Stern actuaries, Goldsmith and Rees bring up such irritating considerations as cost. They note that the Hubble Space Telescope, which has captured pictures of a supernova 650 light years from Earth, could have been replaced seven times for the same amount of money that America and Europe spent on five manned repair missions. Choosing manned missions over satellite launches, they say, "reminds us that our 'sunk costs' prejudice would prevent us from choosing the replacement option so long as the repair option, even if somewhat more expensive, remained viable." As they note elsewhere in the book, such cost comparisons seldom include a ledger entry for the dollar value of an astronaut's life.
The authors are equally unsparing in discussing the International Space Station, "probably the single most expensive artifact humans have ever made." Yes, they say, it has produced "scientific and technical results," but "its return on investment has been far less than the payoff from robotic missions." The space station has been orbiting the Earth for 30 years and is now old hat, which is why it captures headlines "only from a malfunctioning space toilet in 2019 or from stunts such as the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield's rendition of a David Bowie song with guitar accompaniment in 2020."
If they have it in for the space station and for dear old Hubble, you can imagine how Rees and Goldsmith feel about sending people to Mars or back to the moon. They go long on these topics, lazing in minutiae about exit velocities and gravity wells. If you're a fan of manned space missions, these sections may feel like someone is waving a decadent dish under your nose. The moon, they inform us, is an ideal launchpad for Mars missions as well as a potential source of helium-3 and water. And the fossil and soil records on Mars could be the key to understanding how planets die—if, that is, they don't contain microscopic life.
But none of that, the authors remind us, must be done by human beings. Robots can drive around Mars and pick up dirt. John Deere has them doing that right now in Iowa.
What robots won't do is get cabin fever, develop cancer from cosmic radiation, lose bone mineral density in zero gravity, miss their families, or go insane. A robot might die on a global broadcast, but no one would care very much.
Robot and artificial-intelligence skeptics may snort at this line of reasoning, which is the book's backbone. But a pretty smart robot named Perseverance is on Mars right now, which is how we know the planet is a pocked and pimpled plane of freezing red nothingness. Do we need to spend several hundred billion dollars to have humans confirm in person that Mars looks just like it does on TV?
But we'd do more than just that! Would we? Creating a second habitable planet would be a multistep process in the way that creating a natural diamond is a multistep process for prehistoric coal. First, Goldsmith and Rees write, we'd have to give the planet a thicker atmosphere by "vaporizing the small amounts of water and much larger amounts of carbon dioxide that currently lie frozen within the polar caps." That would allow for the resurrection of the lakes and streams that once existed on Mars and, eventually, the creation of an environment that could sustain plants, which, "after five hundred or a thousand years, could make the Martian atmosphere," currently 95 percent carbon dioxide, "rich in oxygen."
The book's case against human space exploration also touches on the epistemic dangers of "contaminating" the Martian ecosystem, which could lead to an astronaut's accidental collection of his own DNA. This, in turn, might leave Earth's best and brightest unable to conclusively rule out that some kind of human had already lived on or visited Mars. That argument is not the book's strongest moment. Neither is a brief section comparing the European colonization of Asia, Africa, and the Americas with a handful of humans colonizing a desolate planet (possibly) inhabited by microscopic lifeforms trapped in layers of rock.
Despite these weak points, the book's main argument is convincing. Robots offer more bang for the buck, not just because they cost less but also because they can do a lot. If, eventually, robots are able to do nearly everything astronauts currently can, sending people into space may well become pure vanity.
Several times while reading The End of Astronauts, I recalled "American Spaceman, Body and Soul," a 2021 essay by Mike Solana, a vice president at the venture capital firm Founders Fund. "Their problem is the vision itself of an expanding, growing, heroic human civilization," Solana wrote. Solana was referring to progressives like Sens. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who have argued that businessmen like SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos should be spending their fortunes on terrestrial problems rather than exploring space. "In order to justify our present stagnation, and the committed failure of almost every person in a position of influence and authority," Solana wrote, "it must be argued there are no good men doing hard good things."
Solana, Bezos, and Musk, like many Reason readers, are space romantics, and one thing space romantics can offer that space pragmatists often don't is a spirited rebuttal to the kind of declinist thinking that says no one can dream big until America has cured its most intractable social ills. Were that argument to prevail, there would be little money (public or private) for astronauts or robots. But if we are to extend ourselves further into space, we cannot ignore what the pragmatists say. And the most pragmatic path may be both private and robotic.
The post <em>The End of Astronauts</em>: Should We Send Robots to Space Instead? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In July, NASA released the first trove of deep space images from the James Webb Space Telescope, including this infrared photo from the Southern Ring planetary nebula featuring a dying star and a young star orbiting each other within a plume of burning dust and gas.
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]]>In truth, Dippin' Dots are neither space-age (they were invented in 1988) nor space-safe (click here for the skinny on what kind of ice cream astronauts actually eat). But many Americans nonetheless associate the "ice cream of the future" with Apollo-era optimism about the life-changing potential of new technology. Though they never caught on in the mass market, there is one way Dippin' Dots have delivered on their futuristic promise: The company's innovation of ultra-low-temperature freezers for transporting its ice cream pellets enabled it to consult with Pfizer on how to keep COVID-19 vaccines stable during transit.
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]]>The Rosenberg Space Habitat, or Rosie, is a 3D-printed, two-person pressurized living space designed to fit inside a SpaceX Starship for quick construction on the moon's surface. Designed by space architecture firm SAGA, the 23-foot-tall polymer structure uses a single ladder to connect a ground-level workshop, a second level with foldable desks and control panels for the habitat, and a third level for sleeping. Rosie also features SAGA's "most sophisticated version of our circadian lights to date."
The post Rosie the Space Habitat Is a 3D-Printed Living Space appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On August 24, President Joe Biden announced that the Education Department would forgive between $10,000 and $20,000 in federal student loans for individuals making less than $125,000 a year and couples making less than $250,000. His plan also extends the student loan repayment moratorium to December 31, 2022, and lowers the minimum monthly payment for "income-driven repayment" (IDR) plans, and allows single borrowers making under 225 percent of the poverty line to owe no monthly minimum payment.
While this plan is far less generous than the universal forgiveness backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), it will still be costly to the public fisc in a way that we won't know for years. Why? Because the Department of Education has no idea how to project the costs of its own programs.
According to a July 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—before Biden announced his policy—the Education Department is projected to lose $197 billion on the direct loans it issued from 1997 to 2021. These loans, which have interest rates ranging from 2.75 percent (for undergraduate Stafford loans issued in 2020) to 8.5 percent (for some PLUS loans issued in the 2000s), were initially projected to generate roughly $114 billion in income for the federal government.
How did the Education Department become the worst bank in modern history? The CARES Act, which froze repayment, interest accrual, and delinquency collections on all federal student loans in response to COVID-19, accounts for $24.6 billion in Education Department costs incurred from March 13, 2020, to September 30, 2020. Then-President Donald Trump authorized two extensions of that moratorium, while Biden had extended it four times as of mid-August, and has now extended it for a fifth time.
Halting repayment on $1.6 trillion in debt for several years adds up, and those presidential "pauses" cost an additional $77.8 billion. But the cost of the extended pause beginning on May 2, 2022, and which will now end on December 31 rather than having ended in August, was not included in the GAO's estimate. We can tack on substantially more billions in cost for what we can only call the latest extension, not necessarily the last one.
The GAO found that the losses the Education Department is now facing date further back, to the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations. In 2008, Bush signed into law IDR plans, which pegged monthly loan payments for participating borrowers to 15 percent of their adjusted gross income and forgave the remaining balance of those loans after 25 years. In 2015, Obama shortened those numbers to 10 percent and 20 years for many borrowers. Now Biden is planning to shorten those criteria to 5 percent for all borrowers on IDR and 10 years for loans with initial balances under $12,000. Some borrowers will receive credit for a payment they never made due to making less than approximately $15 an hour.
The policy giveaways don't end there. Bush also signed into law "public service loan forgiveness," which requires the Education Department to forgive the balance of loans owed by government and nonprofit employees (including firefighters and teachers, but also physicians and attorneys) after 10 years or 120 months of qualifying IDR payments. Obama's Education Department created the "borrower defense to repayment" regulations that have allowed Biden to forgive billions in federal loans owed by former students of for-profit colleges.
All of these policies have costs that eclipsed the Education Department's projections, and that is because the Education Department sucks at projecting costs. Its cohort model makes behavior assumptions about future borrowers based on the behavior of cohorts already in repayment. But the economy changes every few years, just like student loan policy. While the GAO says the Education Department "is in the process of replacing its cohort-based student loan model with a borrower-based microsimulation model," the new model won't be in use until 2026, and there's no reason to think that accurately predicting the enormous costs of federal student loan policies will keep people like Biden from incurring them (on your behalf).
Even if you believe that policy makers junked up the federal student loan system with the best of intentions, the GAO report provides strong evidence that the federal government writing student loans that can be discharged by executive authority poses a massive moral hazard.
The post Biden Is Writing Student Loans in Red Ink appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Communist Party of China has punished 27 people involved in producing state-approved math textbooks that featured "subversive" images of children, including drawings of a child sticking his tongue out and making a peace sign, male children grabbing female children, and a girl in a bunny outfit. The Global Times, a state-controlled newspaper, reported in August that the head of the People's Education Press was given demerits and the editor in chief was fired. Illustrators who worked on the book, according to The Guardian's translation of the Ministry of Education's announcement, were "dealt with accordingly."
The post Chinese Censors Target a Textbook appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In June, a regional Transportation Security Administration spokesperson shared a photo on Twitter of a display of liquid items confiscated over three days by agents at Syracuse Hancock International Airport. Each item in the massive haul, including bottles of water, shampoo, and booze, a jar of peanut butter, and several snow globes, was confiscated for violating the 3.4-ounce liquid limit for carry-ons.
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]]>In February, the software engineer and blogger Dmitri Brereton wrote an essay titled "Google Search Is Dying" for his personal website. His two main arguments are that Google's advertising is messy and dominates the results page, while the actual search results are mostly junk sites that have been reverse-engineered to rank highly.
If you have never searched for something on Google and felt deeply dissatisfied by what it showed you, Brereton essentially argues, you are living in the Matrix. "What you don't realize is that you've been self-censoring yourself from searching most of the things you would have wanted to search," he writes. "You already know subconsciously that Google isn't going to return a good result."
I was living in the Matrix. Then, two days into my 5-month-old's ear infection, I got search-pilled.
We had taken him to a doctor, but no one told us what we should do if our baby's ears hurt so badly that he wouldn't eat. When we called the pediatrician's office following a daylong hunger strike, the nurse told us that if we couldn't get him to feed, he'd have to go to the emergency room.
Naturally, we turned to Google for a second opinion.
My first search query was "baby with ear infection won't eat," all in quotation marks. Google returned zero links to actual web pages, along with three ads, one of which invited me to "Browse Baby Ear Infection Pictures."
Without the quotation marks, the same search query returned what looked like the full buffet: a better class of ads up top, followed by links to pediatric and general health websites. But on closer examination, the results did not feel like what Brereton described to The New Yorker as "the authentic Web." Every link took me to a nearly identical hospital website or healthy living site, and they all said pretty much the same thing: "These are the symptoms of an ear infection. If you think your child has one, call a doctor."
Per Brereton's essay, there is a third and correct way to find answers for very specific questions: add the word Reddit to the end of your Google query. When I finally did that, just minutes before we were set to pack our screaming baby into a car seat and head for the hospital, the very first search result, from r/beyondthebump, was: "Tip for when baby has infection and won't eat or drink!" The second link took me to a post titled "2 yr old has stopped eating after starting antibiotics for an ear infection," from r/Parenting. These were not ads or reverse-engineered copypasta, but real humans sharing information with other real humans about my exact problem.
It took us only a few minutes to find the advice that unlocked our son's appetite. A Reddit user in England shared a tip from a nurse who told her to give the baby something salty to gnaw on and then wait for his thirst to get the better of his discomfort. This trick worked for us (we used Bamba), and no E.R. visit was necessary.
Brereton argues that the effectiveness of the Google-Reddit combo is damning for both platforms, since Reddit's own search function also doesn't work well alone. Most of the follow-up commentaries he inspired agree that the top layer of the internet is over-monetized, over-optimized junk. But for me, the Reddit hack was a reminder that getting the best information when we need it has always been a challenge and likely always will be.
"The best way of utilizing knowledge initially dispersed among all the people is at least one of the main problems of economic policy," F.A. Hayek wrote in "The Use of Knowledge in Society," published in The American Economic Review in 1945. "The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form." Hayek was arguing against central economic planning, but that bit of wisdom also applies to firms and individuals. Most problems boil down to a knowledge problem.
Although it is almost certainly doing a better job than search.gov could, not even Google is capable of delivering "all the knowledge which ought to be used but which is initially dispersed among many different individuals." But it might get close if you add Reddit to your search query.
The post No, Google Isn't Dying. Internet Search Is Better Than Ever if You Know How To Use It. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 2017, an amendment to an international treaty threw American guitar makers into a panic. In order to stop the overharvesting of rosewood for use in Chinese furniture, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) was updated to impose permit requirements for all 183 treaty member states on all international movement of all products containing any amount of rosewood. Rosewood crossing borders without such a permit was now contraband.
U.S. guitar manufacturers, whose product lines prior to this often contained small amounts of the wood (which instrument makers love for its natural oils, stunning dark grain, and historical importance), worried about the legality of shipping instruments to countries where it had been perfectly fine to do so just months before. Retailers, buyers, and traveling musicians now had to fret about guitars being seized in global transit.
The answer to these concerns, CITES advocates said, was simple: Just get the permit. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was inundated with CITES permit applications, and agency turnaround times stretched for months. American guitar exports plummeted—28 percent for acoustics and 23 percent for electrics, according to Music Trades magazine.
Manufacturers, many of them preservationists, were distraught. "We have orders for the guitars. We have customers. The customers have the money to pay for them, and we can't ship them because the paperwork is stuck somewhere," Chris Martin, chairman and CEO of C.F. Martin & Co., told the Associated Press in April 2018.
After nearly two years of compliance confusion and major losses by instrument companies, the U.N. in October 2019 announced that CITES had been amended once again, this time to exempt finished musical instruments containing rosewood—minus Brazilian rosewood, banned since 1992—from the treaty requirements.
The post Review: Rosewood Restrictions Riled U.S. Guitar Makers appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Joe Biden is on the verge of announcing $10,000 in federal student loan forgiveness per borrower for millions of Americans, according to The Washington Post.
"The White House's latest plans called for limiting debt forgiveness to Americans who earned less than $150,000 in the previous year, or less than $300,000 for married couples filing jointly," write Post reporters Tyler Pager, Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, and Jeff Stein. Their sources did not say "whether the administration will simultaneously require interest and payments to resume at the end of August, when the current pause is scheduled to lapse."
Federal student loans have been frozen since March 2020. Since then, borrowers have not been required to make any payments, nor have their loans accrued interest, thanks to an executive order issued by President Donald Trump at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The moratorium has also allowed participants in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program—which forgives federal direct loans after borrowers make 120 payments while working for a government agency or a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization—to count each month of the pandemic as a qualifying payment, even though they actually paid nothing.
The repayment moratorium was extended twice by Trump, and four times by Biden. Borrowers who first expected to resume payments in September 2020 are now looking to Biden's latest deadline of September 2022—a little more than a month before midterms.
Like the repayment moratorium, student debt cancellation is also a kicked can: In December 2020, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) challenged Biden to unilaterally forgive $50,000 per borrower. "You don't need Congress," Schumer said. "All you need is the flick of a pen." Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has repeatedly called for the same. Shortly before his inauguration, however, Biden called on Congress to pass a law forgiving $10,000 worth of federal student loans per borrower. That never happened and will not happen before the midterms, when Democrats may lose their majority in Congress.
With the prospect of legislative forgiveness but a pipe dream, many progressives within and outside of Congress have insisted that Biden should use executive authority to forgive at least $50,000 per borrower, if not the entire $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio owned by the Department of Education. The $10,000 figure is simply unacceptable to most Democrats who want loan forgiveness.
The case against student loan forgiveness at this scale is that it primarily benefits educated people who don't need the help. Democrats know this. An analysis touted by Warren notes that $10,000 in forgiveness per person "zeroes out" out the federal loan balances of only 14 percent of borrowers who owe more after 12 years than they initially borrowed. This is why Warren wants $50,000 in debt forgiveness per borrower, except that payment would not only zero out the balances of 67 percent of borrowers who owe more after 12 years, but it would also reduce the number of indebted households in the top 10 percent of wealth from 4 percent to 3 percent.
In other words, any amount of blanket loan forgiveness will either not help truly distressed households enough or also help truly rich households; meanwhile, every figure proposed by Democrats helps some number of people who are financially better off having borrowed for college.
What about targeted student loan forgiveness programs, aimed at helping low-income borrowers who went to terrible schools or were defrauded? Well, we already have that. Billions of dollars worth, in fact. We also have the aforementioned PSLF program and income-driven repayment plans, which allow borrowers to pay a percentage of their adjusted gross income for 20 or 25 years, after which the balance is forgiven and the forgiven amount is treated as taxable income. The Biden administration has already expanded eligibility for both of these programs, and the Education Department is already actively working toward adjusting borrowers' accounts if they meet the relaxed criteria.
It makes a certain kind of political sense that once you help the very bottom (forgiveness for borrowers who attended shuttered schools) and the very top (PSLF for government and nonprofit workers, many of whom have advanced degrees), you should throw a bone to the comfortable-but-anxious middle quintiles.
That leads us to the question, soundness aside, of whether Biden can use executive authority to grant broad student loan forgiveness. Lawyers for the Department of Education under Secretary Betsy DeVos concluded last year that mass loan amnesty exceeded the statutory powers of the Education Department. A former Education Department lawyer under Obama wrote a private memo for a client this time last year arguing that mass loan forgiveness is illegal. Current Education Department lawyers, or their replacements, may have since reached a different conclusion. But as economist Carlo Salerno observed in The Hill this week, the White House refuses to publish the legal memo on loan forgiveness Biden had prepared last year.
Perhaps if Biden moves ahead with $10,000 in forgiveness per borrower, we'll also get to see the legal justification for putting every taxpayer in the country on the hook for erasing the federal student loan debt of not just the very poor, but also the upwardly mobile and even the upper crust.
The post Biden Tiptoes Closer to Mass Forgiveness of Federal Student Loan Debt appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Los Angeles Press Club on Monday announced the finalists for the 64th Southern California Journalism Awards recognizing work published in 2021. Reason, which is headquartered in Los Angeles, is a finalist in eight categories.
We'd like to thank both the judges who reviewed our submissions, and the Reason readers, viewers, and listeners who make our work possible through their financial support. Without further ado:
Senior Editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown is a finalist in the national political/government reporting category for "The Bipartisan Antitrust Crusade Against Big Tech." The cover story for our July 2021 issue, Brown's feature susses out the partisan motivations behind seemingly bipartisan efforts to bring Big Tech under government control, as well as the nearly nonexistent role consumer benefit plays in modern antitrust efforts:
Is Facebook a monopoly? Should Amazon be forced to do business with the new social media platform Parler? Is Apple harming its customers—and maybe democracy—by installing the Safari web browser on iPhones? Did Google bully people into using its search engine?
All of these questions have been raised in recent U.S. antitrust probes and lawsuits. The queries are unlikely to result in widespread improvements to the welfare of tech consumers—which, these days, includes just about everyone. Yet some of the country's top prosecutors, pundits, bureaucrats, and elected officials have made them a priority, often in open defiance of a longstanding principle that says ordinary customers should be at the center of conversations about antitrust.
Editor at Large Matt Welch is a finalist in the sports commentary category for "How Government Devastated Minor League Baseball." A feature in our November 2021 issue, Welch's story explains how Congress helped Major League Baseball put the screws to farm teams:
Through a mix of obfuscating patriotism, congressional camera hogging, and legal reasoning more twisted than a kosher Cyclones pretzel, Washington over the past century-plus has granted latitude to MLB that no other professional sport enjoys. Baseball's preeminent global league has not only blocked all halfway serious competition to its legally protected North American monopoly; it can dictate the most fundamental of operational details—employee salaries, game rules, even existence—to the once-independently owned professional teams and leagues that groom talented young men in the vast expanses between school and The Show.
Joanna Andreasson, Reason's art director, is a finalist in the best issue category for her design of our truly stunning December 2021 issue marking the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union:
Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward is a finalist for best magazine columnist for "The Unexpected, Predictable End of the War in Afghanistan," which ran in the November 2021 issue and in which Mangu-Ward argued that America's withdrawal from Afghanistan was both "a predictable disaster" and "an incredible, surprising anti-war victory." Good herbs for your peace pipe here:
The hawks' trump card has always been the notion that victory was just out of reach, that just a little more time, a little more money, a little more leeway would make it all worth it.
But sending more people into harm's way for ill-defined goals does nothing to justify the tragic loss of those already gone. If anything, invoking their deaths to continue in a fruitless struggle multiplies them—the horrible compound interest of war. And make no mistake, the struggle was indeed fruitless, as the rapid collapse of everything Americans had worked for demonstrated in short order.
Reporter C.J. Ciaramella is a finalist in the magazine investigative category for "The $2 Drug Test Keeping Inmates in Solitary," which ran in our July 2021 issue:
Forensic experts say the tests can't be relied on alone; they're not admissible evidence in court; and the manufacturers explicitly warn that all tests should be sent to crime labs to be verified. New York's prison system suspended the use of similar tests last summer because of such worries. Yet the federal Bureau of Prisons relies solely on such tests to put inmates in solitary confinement, take away good behavior credits that count toward early release, and strip them of visitation rights. Meanwhile, low evidence standards make it just about impossible for federal inmates to challenge the results of these tests in court. Steffey and other formerly incarcerated people say inmates are being jammed up on bad evidence with virtually no avenue for recourse.
The inimitable Remy is a finalist in the humor/satire writing category for "Dogecoin Rap," which absolutely still holds up:
And Zach Weismueller, senior producer, is a finalist in not one, but two categories: "Los Angeles Is Squandering $1.2 Billion While Homeless Face a 'Spiral of Death'" is a nominee in the TV/film investigative category, and "Why I Left California for Florida" is up for an award in local political/government reporting. Watch both below:
Once again, thank you to our readers, viewers, and listeners for their attention and their financial support. Not yet a supporter, but feeling inspired by the stories above? There's a page for that.
The post <em>Reason</em> Is a Finalist for 8 Southern California Journalism Awards appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Despite caricaturing (some) gun owners, Nick Mamatas' conspiracy-fueled science fiction novel The Second Shooter avoids moralizing in favor of dark humor. His protagonist is Mike Karras, a cynical anarcho-leftist writer working on a book about mass shooting survivors who claim to have seen second gunmen where official reports say there were none. Karras lives for the dopamine hit of checking his notifications, but never likes what his phone shows him. His arch-nemesis is not a shadowy government agency, but the conspiracy theory–obsessed host of an internet radio show and his devoted fans.
As he travels from the site of an active domestic terror attack in the Midwest to the aftermath of a church shooting in the Bay Area, Karras finds himself becoming a character in the eerie string of violent acts he sets out to chronicle, unable to maintain his privacy or his belief that the people he interviews are mistaken about what they saw.
Chewy hypotheticals abound: If every mass shooting is a psy-op carried out by crisis actors, does that mean we live in a world with no actual mass shootings? If your cellphone was tapped, would you know how to find the nearest pay phone? What if there was a second shooter on the grassy knoll in 1963?
The third-act twist will feel like either a cop-out or a treat, depending on whether your preferences lean toward Jack Reacher or Doctor Who.
The post Review: <i>The Second Shooter</i> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The United Nations has yet to recognize the Free Republic of Liberland—a micronation established in 2015 between Croatia and Serbia by Czech libertarian Vít Jedlička—but Patrik Schumacher of the internationally renowned Zaha Hadid Architects isn't waiting around. Schumacher, also a libertarian, released a video in February showing plans for Liberland Metaverse, a capital city that will exist (for now) solely in the cloud.
The post Photo: A Libertarian City in the Cloud appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>During the last year, several professional athletes and two big-city mayors announced that they would take a portion of their salaries in bitcoin. If you get paid via direct deposit and are bullish on bitcoin, you too can turn your salary into satoshis. (There are 100 million satoshis in a single bitcoin.)
For most of us, getting paid in bitcoin doesn't mean our salary is denominated in bitcoin. Rather, it means your employer directly deposits part of your fiat-denominated paycheck into a bank account connected to a crypto exchange, which then uses the money to purchase bitcoin and deposits that amount into your crypto wallet.
Coinbase, the most widely used cryptocurrency exchange, rolled out this direct deposit function in late September. Users can print the direct deposit paperwork from Coinbase's website and send it to their employers or, if the employer contracts with any one of several large payroll processing companies, set up direct deposit entirely online. They can then choose to have a specific dollar amount from every paycheck, or a percentage, converted to bitcoin or any of several other cryptocurrencies.
The basic process is not novel. Investment companies such as Vanguard and Fidelity allow customers to directly deposit their paychecks into brokerage accounts. Some people have their paychecks divided and direct-deposited across traditional checking and savings accounts, or even accounts at different banks.
The new option might sound like buying crypto yourself, but with extra steps. "In my opinion it's probably just marketing," wrote one member of the r/Bitcoin subreddit in November. "Oh this famous athlete is getting paid in Bitcoin and endorses whatever exchange. His fans might follow and buy bitcoin on that exchange bringing in revenue for that exchange."
There is a lot of truth to that. Cryptocurrency exchanges make their money on transaction fees, and more users means more transactions.
But just like banks, cryptocurrency exchanges compete with each other to get users on their platforms. Coinbase, for instance, charges you a fee to purchase crypto with your bank account but waives that fee if you set up direct deposit. You will still pay fees when you sell, but that's true of bitcoin regardless of what exchange you use or whether you use one at all, because the "miners" who record your transaction to the blockchain don't do so for free.
Why trust a crypto exchange to make your purchase on a schedule when you could time the market yourself? The boring answer comes from investor and author Ken Fisher, who once wrote, "Time in the market beats timing the market—almost always."
Think about it this way: Bitcoin as of this writing is trading at $41,000 per coin. While some people likely have made a lot of money by accurately predicting the bottom of a price dip, everyone who bought bitcoin in 2018—whether they bought at $17,089 on January 5 or $3,183 the following December 14—is richer today, especially if he made regular purchases over the course of that year. This is the beauty of dollar-cost averaging.
That said, getting paid in crypto is not the same as a pretax contribution to a retirement account. Your automatic crypto purchase is made from your after-tax earnings and won't lower your taxable income. Using your bitcoin salary, either to make a purchase or to convert it back into dollars, is a taxable event if your investment has appreciated. But for some folks (including me!), the cost of spending bitcoin—just like the cost of accessing a retirement account early—is a feature, not a bug. "If you make it effortless to save, and a chore to spend, most people are likely to spend less," wrote another poster on the r/Bitcoin subreddit.
And if you believe bitcoin's most valuable days are behind it? Well, I won't try to convince you otherwise. But I will say that it's very easy to dip your toe into crypto without believing it will replace the dollar. And it's getting easier every day.
The post Getting Paid in Bitcoin appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Reason's December special issue marks the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. This story is part of our exploration of the global legacy of that evil empire, and our effort to be certain that the dire consequences of communism are not forgotten.
Of all the countries to emerge from the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Tajikistan has arguably fared the worst. It ranks 149th out of 180 countries in Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index, worse than every other former Soviet republic except Turkmenistan. It has the highest poverty rate of the former Soviet republics; a full 27 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) is the result of remittances sent home by Tajik migrants working mostly in Russia; and its GDP per capita for 2021 ($810) ranks 179th out of the 195 countries for which the International Monetary Fund has data.
Why is Tajikistan so poor? It is landlocked, which means importing and exporting are more expensive and the country is more vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. And the violent civil war that followed the USSR's fall, which pitted the incumbent Soviet power holders and their militias against a coalition of liberal reformers, anti-Soviet Islamists, and ethnic minorities, killed tens of thousands of people and displaced over 1 million Tajiks.
But geography and past conflict only explain so much. Tajikistan is rich with largely untapped mineral resources, and its mountain ranges are ideal for the kind of ecotourism that has made Nepal one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.
Tajikistan is the sick man of Central Asia because it is ruled by a despot who has enriched himself and his relatives at the expense of millions of his malnourished countrymen. Emomali Rahmon has been Tajikistan's official president since 1994 and "Leader of the Nation"—a lifetime appointment that provides him with immunity from prosecution—since 2015. In all but name, he is a king.
Like most despots, Rahmon has an ironclad grip on every aspect of his country, from media to business to the practice of religion. Many of his relatives hold key positions of power, with his son Rustam serving as the mayor of the capital city, Dushanbe, and one of his sons-in-law holding a key position at the National Bank of Tajikistan.
Rahmon's rule has been predictably poor not just for the rights of Tajiks but also for the country's economy. The Economist found that a state-owned aluminum refining operation overseen by the Rahmon family has been routing hundreds of millions of dollars annually to a shell company in the British Virgin Islands.
While Tajikistan has welcomed foreign investment with open arms and nominally generous terms, it has found few takers. According to a 2020 U.S. State Department Investment Climate Statement, "bureaucratic and financial hurdles, widespread corruption, a largely dysfunctional banking sector, non-transparent tax system, and countless business inspections greatly hinder investors."
The post The Sick Man of Central Asia appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 1979, Eugene Huskey was a graduate student at the London School of Economics when he landed the opportunity to spend a year at Moscow State University studying the Soviet legal system. By the time he departed, the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan and the United States had announced a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics.
In the late '80s, Huskey was invited by the renowned Sovietologist Jerry F. Hough to join a team of American scholars studying the Soviet Republics as the USSR began to unwind under General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. After the Soviet Union disbanded, Huskey was among the first Western academics in modern history to visit what is now known as Kyrgyzstan and meet with members of its government.
A professor emeritus of political science at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, Huskey is the author of 2018's Encounters at the Edge of the Muslim World: A Political Memoir of Kyrgyzstan (Rowman & Littlefield). He spoke to Reason's Mike Riggs in September about studying in Soviet Moscow and the politics of Central Asia after communism.
Q: Did you ever feel in danger while studying in the USSR?
A: No. In fact, quite the opposite. I had been there three times before 1979. I might be on the street at 3 a.m.—not very often, but occasionally—and I felt completely safe.
The people who tried to teach me fear were Soviets. I remember one young woman, who was a psychologist and the daughter of a famous scientist there, came into our dorm room at Moscow University and immediately turned on the water, took a pencil and stuck it in our telephone, and turned on music in the background.
Q: I'm guessing that whatever conversation you had with her probably seemed pretty anodyne.
A: This is the nature of an authoritarian regime. You don't quite know where the boundaries of acceptable discourse are. Everything is uncertain. In the Stalin era, you were worried that anything could be used against you. It was obviously much more open when I was there in the height of the [General Secretary Leonid] Brezhnev period, but there were still boundaries that people really didn't know whether they were crossing or not.
Q: When you first visited independent Kyrgyzstan, what awareness did the leaders there have of concepts like negative rights and civil liberties?
A: Very, very few people had any understanding at all of the kinds of concepts that you're mentioning. Their tradition was in dialectical materialism and the history of the working class. They were from the Soviet Union's higher party schools.
Q: Was it exciting for them to hear about these concepts?
A: I think many of them found it disorienting. And if you come forward and advocate the idea of fair play, economic competition, political competition, hiring with no favoritism and no cronies—all that is so deeply ensconced in the system that the ideas we're talking about are a threat.
Q: What are the obstacles to fair play?
A: In places like Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and even Azerbaijan, what you have is a family empire where sons, brothers, sometimes cousins are given key positions in government and access to rents, as the economists call them—you know, unfair profits. It's very difficult for people to compete with that. In fact, you really can't.
Q: How do heads of state hold power in the post-communist world?
A: They rely on this sort of cult that they've created; they rely on the legitimated devices of courts, elections, and a constitution; but they also rely on a network of elites who are in a kind of pyramid, with the leader at the top. Either through jobs, or rents, or something else, they're part of a dense network that is loyal to the leader in part because they're financially better off.
There's an exchange relationship that's taking place that's extremely important, and central, it seems to me, to the stability of these regimes. But that means they've got to work at getting their people elected in the right numbers and making it seem somewhat legitimate, and they've got to constantly be dealing with this really immense client network to make sure that they're on board and that those relationships are stable.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
The post Eugene Huskey on the Soviet Legacy in Central Asia appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Los Angeles Press Club held its annual Southern California Journalism Awards gala this past weekend, and as in years past, Reason managed to pick up some hardware. We were finalists in 15 categories and ended up on the podium for 12 of them, including two first-place finishes.
Without further ado:
ReasonTV contributor Qinling Li's "Meet the Trans Activists Fighting for Sex Worker Freedom" received first place honors in the category of Gender and Society. Judges' comment: "Strong, sympathetic look at a stigmatizing issue, and great storytelling through the featured activists—well done!"
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Qinling Li's "The Reawakening of the Black Gun-Rights Movement" took second place in the category of national/political reporting.
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Associate editor Christian Britschgi's "Why Does Hollywood Hate Real Estate Developers?" received first place in the category Culture/Arts, over 1,000 words. Judge's comment: "Feels like one of those why-have-I-not-read-this-before stories, deeply researched, wittily argued and engagingly written."
Contributor Jacob Grier's "Coronavirus Cuisine" received third place honors in the category Pandemic Reporting; Managing Editor Stephanie Slade's "Against the New Nationalism" received second place honors in the category Commentary (magazine); and Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward finished third for Columnist (magazine).
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"Every Political Ad Ever," by Meredith Bragg, Austin Bragg, and Remy, received second place honors in the category Humor/Satire Writing, broadcast.
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"Hospital Technicians Ignore Copyright Law to Fight COVID-19," by Senior Video Producer Paul Detrick, received second place honors in the category of Solutions Journalism.
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Detrick's "OnlyFans Didn't Save Sex Workers, Sex Workers Saved Themselves" placed third in the category Documentary Short, under 25 minutes.
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"Venezuelans Fleeing Socialism Find Community at a Miami Storage Facility," by ReasonTV Executive Editor Jim Epstein and contributor Claudia Murray, received second place honors in the category Immigration Reporting.
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Epstein's "Cypherpunks Write Code" received third place honors in the category of Investigative.
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The Reason Roundtable's "The Great Bernie Freakout" episode took second in the category of Talk/Public Affairs.
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If you read, shared, or supported Reason's work in 2020, we are grateful for your support. You make it possible for us to do what we do.
The post <em>Reason</em> Has 12 Podium Finishes at the Southern California Journalism Awards appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Hwang Dong-hyuk's Squid Game is currently the most popular Netflix show on Earth and on track to be the most popular show the streaming service has ever produced. The nine-episode series tells the story of 456 heavily indebted South Korean men and women who agree to play six children's games in exchange for a life-changing sum of money, only to realize once the first game starts that if they lose, they die.
The show is bloody, horrifyingly cruel to its characters, cruel in a different way to the viewer, and yet my wife and I binged the series in four nights. I'm not sure if I enjoyed it more as a brilliantly paced battle royale, or as a dark and occasionally incoherent commentary on the wealth gap and the burden of consumer debt.
Hwang said in an interview that he drew his inspiration for the show from "Japanese survival comics." For Americans who aren't steeped in manga, Squid Game shares some DNA with the Hunger Games franchise, and the broader universe of stories where several people enter a place and most of them die (Aliens, And Then There Were None). Squid Game combines that story model with an eerily childish setting, a large ensemble cast whose members span the personality gamut, and an unorthodox approach to brutality, which is visited on characters either with no emotion whatsoever or in the angriest way possible. It's also genuinely tough to predict who will die when.
All of this makes Squid Game a perfect suspense thriller, and probably explains most of its popularity. But the show also has some interesting things to say about consumer debt.
In the first episode, we meet an underemployed middle-aged man named Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) who is both a deadbeat dad and a moocher son. Seong gambles away his mother's money, dodges loan sharks, and humiliates himself for cash. He eventually wakes up inside a massive bunker wearing a numbered tracksuit. He and several hundred other contestants are soon informed that they all have large personal debts that can be erased by winning a series of games.
Like Bong Joon-ho did in 2019's Parasite, Hwang invites us to recoil at the contestants before he allows us to like them. The ones who are not outright bad still seem cursed to do bad things. As a character says to Seong in a moment of frustration, he is someone who has "to get into trouble to know it's trouble." That kind of person is pitiable, but no one who knows Seong has any pity left for him.
Yet the first time they are led by armed men through a pastelized Escher scene, you get the sense that it is far worse to be most of these people than to be scammed or pestered by them. Their failure to provide for themselves in a socially acceptable way (and to accept whatever kind of life that amounts to) has made them a nuisance to their neighbors and family but deadly to themselves. South Korea's upstanding citizens, even if they have to exert themselves to avoid scammers and crooks, have no need to play deadly games for debt relief.
Despite making explicit nods toward South Korea's haves and have-nots, Squid Game is not a neat morality play. For starters, the villains are wealthy individuals, not ephemeral systems of inequality. And unlike in Bong's film, the well-off in Squid Game are cautionary, not aspirational; all of these people have parasites.
That the contestants must slowly lose their humanity in order to win the game also muddies the subtext. Almost immediately, the average viewer should get the sense it would be better to spend the rest of your life in debt than live a comfortable life stained by this experience. And yet, Hwang's characters choose to play, both before and after they know the stakes.
Are these contestants what Bong called "ordinary people who fall into an unavoidable commotion"? Or are they just caricatures of the average South Korean credit card user? We get a brief glimpse of that real-life background in one scene featuring a news report on South Korea's total consumer debt, which is currently nearing the country's gross domestic product.
While borrowing is a universal phenomenon, South Korea has a unique case of the IOUs. The country has offered a tax rebate for credit card use since 1999, and revoking the subsidy is a tough sell politically. As of 2019, South Koreans held an average of 3.9 credit cards, compared to 2.7 in the U.S. Reuters recently reported that lending limits imposed by the South Korean government have not deterred younger borrowers, who see taking out loans to invest in stocks and cryptocurrency "as the only way to outpace richer babyboomer parents" in a country where owning property is increasingly difficult. In August, The Korea Herald reported that South Korea became the first major Asian economy to raise interest rates since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic (from 0.5 percent to 0.75 percent) in order to "curb the country's household debt and home prices, which soared in recent months."
Squid Game will not provide viewers with all of the above political context, but it does make clear that our contestants will be hounded endlessly by creditors, cops, and familial obligations if they don't give it the old college try.
That setup won't please everyone ("Do they not have Financial Peace University in South Korea?" might be a thing I briefly wondered), but I suspect the show works more like a magic mirror than a tempered glass lens, the way White Lotus revealed different truths to different viewers and Parasite inspired debate about who we were supposed to dislike the most.
While Squid Game lacks a clear political message, it also doesn't need one.
The post <em>Squid Game</em> Is a Bloody Commentary on Consumer Debt appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>While progressive Democrats in Congress have yet to pass a universal student loan forgiveness bill, the Department of Education has nevertheless forgiven billions of dollars in federal student loan debt since Joe Biden became president. And even without new statutory authority, the federal government is slated to forgive increasingly more student loan debt in the future, thanks to the Biden administration's expansive interpretation of the Education Department's existing authorities, as well as a law signed by George W. Bush way back in 2007 that mandates loan forgiveness for certain borrowers.
Let's start with the federal student loan debt forgiveness for low-income and disabled borrowers, which the Department of Education says has erased "$9.5 billion, affecting over 563,000 borrowers," since January 1, 2021. That sum breaks down roughly as follows:
Yes, that looks like $9.7 billion. But there is likely some overlap between the groups.
There is also an interesting wrinkle to the disability discharge announcement. The Education Department press release says that 98 percent of the 41,000 borrowers who are having their loan discharge reinstated initially lost their discharge because they "did not submit the requested documentation, not because their earnings were too high." To prevent their discharges from being revoked in the future, "the Department will indefinitely stop sending automatic requests for earnings information even after the national emergency ends. This continues a practice that the Department announced in March 2021 for the duration of the national emergency. Next, the Department will propose eliminating the [3-year] monitoring period entirely in the upcoming negotiated rulemaking that will begin in October."
The above actions can be traced to the Biden administration's interpretation of a section of the Higher Education Act of 1965 that authorizes the secretary of education to "enforce, pay, compromise, waive, or release any right, title, claim, lien, or demand, however acquired, including any equity or any right of redemption." The Education Department under President Donald Trump took a far more limited view of that authority, though it did use the law in an unprecedented way when it suspended payments and interest on federal student loans at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. (You can read my analysis of the debate over that authority here.)
Aside from people with disabilities and former attendees of for-profit colleges, an entirely different class of federal student loan borrowers is also receiving federal student loan forgiveness, thanks to George W. Bush and the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007.
The College Cost Reduction and Access Act states that anyone with a Federal Direct Loan who makes 120 qualifying payments after October 1, 2007, while employed by a nonpolitical 501(c)3 nonprofit or a government agency, will have the remainder of their direct loan forgiven under a program called Public Service Loan Forgiveness. It doesn't matter how large your loan is. If your employer qualifies, your loan type qualifies, and you make 120 payments in a timely manner, the remainder is forgiven with no taxes on the forgiven amount.
According to a Department of Education spokesperson,
From July 2020 through June 2021, the cumulative number of borrowers receiving Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) has increased from 2,860 to 8,334, and the cumulative total amount forgiven has increased from $201 million to $756 million.
From July 2020 through June 2021, the cumulative number of borrowers receiving Temporary Expanded PSLF (TEPSLF) has increased from 1,943 to 3,724, and the cumulative total amount forgiven has increased from $83 million to $166 million.
While $756 million and $166 million are far less than $9.5 billion, the more important figure, vis a vis the larger debate over student loan forgiveness, is the per-borrower forgiveness amounts. Using the numbers listed above,
Those last two numbers are why I think PSLF (which is a nondiscretionary entitlement program) and, to a lesser extent, TEPSLF (which is constrained by the appropriations process) are more significant to the larger student loan debate, even if for-profit attendees and disabled borrowers have snagged most of the headlines.
Given the high loan default rate among for-profit college borrowers and the truly awful business practices of some for-profit colleges, those low-income borrowers are a sympathetic group. While I have previously argued that making student loan debt dischargeable in bankruptcy would go a long way toward properly aligning incentives and bringing down higher education costs, discharging a poor person's federal student loan in bankruptcy has the same impact on the public fisc as forgiving it. The same argument applies to the permanently disabled. With the federal government all but displacing the private student loan market over the last decade, bankruptcy versus forgiveness is a distinction without a difference.
PSLF recipients are not nearly as sympathetic. They have good jobs in government and at nonprofits. They are well-educated. While some job types command significantly higher salaries in the for-profit world, many master's and bachelor's degree holders can make more in combined salary and benefits working for the government. Terminal degree holders can make more in the private sector, but they are also the most highly compensated public sector workers.
The PSLF program, meanwhile, is designed so that all of these borrowers pay as little as possible towards their principal balance by using "income-driven repayment" (IDR) rather than the standard 10-year repayment scheme. This means what you pay each month is a small percentage of your income, rather than determined by the life of your loan. For years, the Education Department has given presentations to financial aid administrators showing that PSLF makes sense only if you use IDR, as there'd be no debt to forgive after 10 years of standard repayment. What's more, PSLF applicants received an added bonus from the Education Department during the pandemic: While all federal student loan payments and interest accumulation have been frozen since March 2020, and will be through at least January 2022, PSLF applicants get to count each month in this period as a qualifying payment even if they didn't actually make a payment.
And while there are currently not many PSLF beneficiaries, there soon will be. When the first cohort of borrowers reached eligibility on October 1, 2017, student loan watchers expected a flood of forgiveness. In July 2021, the Education Department published a request for comment in the Federal Register stating that "to date, nearly 98 percent of student loan borrowers who have applied for PSLF did not receive forgiveness at the time of their application."
But the Education Department is working, with the support of Democrats in Congress, to change that. From October 1, 2017, to April 1, 2021, $452.7 million in student loan forgiveness went to 5,467 approved PSLF applicants. That comes to $82,804 per borrower. We are now up to 8,334 people, $756 million, and $90,712 in forgiveness per borrower.
Those first two numbers are virtually certain to increase. PSLF applicants are encouraged to submit a form to the Education Department once a year, so that the department can tell borrowers whether their employer qualifies for PSLF and how many payments they have made toward forgiveness. The Education Department received 391,333 of these forms from November 2020 to April 2021. Of that number, 168,197 forms met the criteria for PSLF.
So while student loan forgiveness to the worst-off borrowers may be commanding the headlines, America's white-collar government and nonprofit workers are quietly getting a massive reprieve from a debt they took on to advance their careers. And more is likely on the way.
It's likely only a matter of time until millions of private-sector workers begin to wonder why you have to be poor or work for the government or a nonprofit in order to get your loans forgiven. And we can partially thank George W. Bush for helping to heighten that contradiction.
The post Mass Student Loan Forgiveness Is Already Happening appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Los Angeles Press Club today named the finalists for the 2021 Southern California Journalism Awards. I am proud to share with Reason readers and supporters that our writers, producers, and contributors are up for the win in 15 categories across print, online, and broadcast media.
Now in their 63rd year, the Southern California Journalism Awards honor stories published in and about Southern California by a broad spectrum of media outlets and journalists. The Reason Foundation, which publishes this magazine, is headquartered in Los Angeles and has been a member of the LAPC for over a decade. We consider it an honor to have our work critically examined and recognized by members of other press clubs, who hold a range of views and serve as judges.
Without further ado, let's fête some of that good work. Winners will be announced on October 16.
"Every Political Ad Ever," by Reason TV Director of Special Projects Meredith Bragg, Producer Austin Bragg, and Remy, is a finalist for best humor/satire writing in the print/online category and in the broadcast category:
"Hospital Technicians Ignore Copyright Law to Fight COVID-19," by Reason TV Senior Producer Paul Detrick, is a finalist in the solutions journalism category:
"Coronavirus Cuisine," written by contributor Jacob Grier and published in our August/September 2020 issue, is a finalist in the pandemic reporting category:
A few months into life under COVID-19, we're beginning to figure it out. The combination of state lockdowns and public fear of the virus has gutted the hospitality industry at all levels, taking down businesses of every size and stature. Serving a quality product and cultivating a loyal following is no guarantee of success in the present crisis. Through no fault of their own, many beloved places will shutter forever. But amid the grim news, some of the top bars and restaurants in the country are finding innovative ways to survive. They provide hopeful glimpses into the possible future of a drastically altered dining culture.
Our October 2020 special issue on fixing American policing, designed by Reason Art Director Joanna Andreasson, is a finalist for best single issue.
"Against the New Nationalism," written by Reason Managing Editor Stephanie Slade and published in our April 2020 issue, is a finalist for commentary published in a magazine:
Today's nationalists think the federal government has an obligation to actively pursue what they call the "national interest." Any agenda that assumes the existence of such a thing must begin by making a variety of determinations, from who should be allowed to join the polity to whether to privilege the producer's bottom line over the consumer's. And in anything short of a monolithic society, that means overriding some individuals' preferences—and often their right to make choices for themselves.
Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward is a finalist for magazine columnist based on the submission, "The Dangerous Lure of Political Violence," which appeared in our December 2020 issue:
It's a mistake to conflate bad tweets with revolutionary violence, but it is worth pointing out that in the waning days of the election season, Bhaskar Sunkara, a co-founder of the aptly named Jacobin magazine, tweeted: "I think killing little Romanov children was justified. But it's not surprising why these views are controversial given most people's ethical and moral frameworks."
Sunkara ultimately took down the tweet. But the thing he may have been most wrong about was the notion that most people's moral and ethical frameworks can't accommodate violence in the name of political change. Increasing numbers of Americans see those who disagree with them as subhuman and view politics as a worthy cause for violence, even if they're not ready or willing to do violence themselves. For these new Jacobins, the romance of the guillotine persists.
"Why Does Hollywood Hate Real Estate Developers?" written by Associate Editor Christian Britschgi and published in our August/September 2020 issue, is a finalist for arts/culture feature in the magazine category:
At the heart of all these portrayals is a fantasy of a world without tradeoffs or even annoyances, one in which the only spaces anyone needs or wants are the ones they already have. It's wishful thinking that works from the assumption that housing just exists without having to be provided. Embedded in this worldview is a denial of the fact that preventing development and change means some people inevitably have to go without, while politically connected interest groups profit from higher rents and home values. The politicians who make this all possible are in turn rewarded with campaign donations and easy reelection. The bias is toward the status quo, and a corrupt one at that.
"The Reawakening of the Black Gun-Rights Movement," by contributor Qinling Li, is a finalist in the national political/government reporting category and in the category of news feature over 5 minutes:
"Venezuelans Fleeing Socialism Find Community at a Miami Storage Facility," by contributor Claudia Murray and Reason TV Executive Editor Jim Epstein, is a finalist in the immigration reporting category:
"Meet the Trans Activists Fighting for Sex Worker Freedom," by contributor Qinling Li, is a finalist in the gender and society category:
"Cypherpunks Write Code," a series by Reason TV Executive Editor Jim Epstein, is a finalist for investigative reporting:
"OnlyFans Didn't Save Sex Workers, Sex Workers Saved Themselves," by Reason TV Senior Producer Paul Detrick, is a finalist in the documentary short category:
And last, but not least, the Reason Roundtable is a finalist in the inaugural radio/podcast category for talk show. The episode we submitted was one of our most popular of 2020: "The Great Bernie Freakout."
Please join me in celebrating these folks and the excellent work they did in 2020 and continue to do in 2021. I would also like to thank our donors, readers, viewers, and listeners, without whom Reason's work would not be possible.
The post <em>Reason</em> Is a Finalist for 15 Southern California Journalism Awards appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For roughly half a decade, a small contingent of criminal justice reformers has beseeched Americans to divert some of our attention from opposition to the drug war to mercy for violent offenders.
"We can't get from where we are to where we need to be just by releasing the innocent and harmless," the late criminologist Mark Kleiman wrote in 2015. "More than half of today's prisoners are serving time for violent offenses, and even those now in prison for nonviolent crimes often have violent histories. Solving mass incarceration requires releasing some seriously guilty and dangerous people. The problem is how to do that while also protecting public safety by turning ex-criminals into productive, free citizens." The Fordham law professor John Pfaff made a similar argument in 2017's Locked In (Basic Books), which rejected what Pfaff calls the "standard story" blaming the drug war for mass incarceration.
The latest contribution to this genre is David Alan Sklansky's A Pattern of Violence. A former prosecutor, Sklansky argues that "violent crime" is a fluid and relatively recent legal construct. "We take it for granted that violent crimes are the serious crimes, the ones that deserve stiffer sentences," he writes. In an era when no one seems able to agree on anything, many Americans and nearly all of our political elites agree that violent offenders should be "remove[d]…from our midst," as Vice President Kamala Harris put it when she was a district attorney in the early 2000s.
This consensus has various implications. One is the stark distinction between criminal law, where statutes categorize behaviors as either violent or nonviolent, and criminal procedure, where the "use of force" by police ranges from necessary to unnecessary. The book also covers violence by and against minors, violence in prisons, the law's evolving treatment of rape and domestic violence, and the ways America's deference to free speech, private gun ownership, and self-defense has undermined both left-wing and right-wing efforts to expand the legal definition of violence.
U.S. laws governing violence vary from place to place and era to era. They're influenced by race, class, social mores, and social upheaval, and as a result they're far from standard. There is, however, a tendency across jurisdictions to widen the concept of "violence" to include ever more offenses.
One other common thread identified in Sklansky's book—a reform-minded text that makes very few reform suggestions—is that the addition of new violent crimes to the criminal code is not always bad. In the 1970s and 1980s, many jurisdictions adopted statutory and procedural changes that recognized spousal rape and domestic violence as crimes, limited defense attorneys' ability to enter testimony about rape victims' consensual sex lives, and "weakened or abandoned" the requirement that prosecutors prove a rape victim "exhibited 'utmost resistance'" against her attacker. These reforms moved the legal focus from women's purity to the actions of their attackers. They also helped unwind sexual deviancy as an offense category, which benefitted gays and lesbians.
Of course, once the legal system accepted that raping and hitting women were violent crimes—rather than an unfortunate consequence of male lust or a private spousal matter—it became imperative for victims to prove that violence. Many women who have been victimized by men, especially in or adjacent to professional settings, cannot meet this standard. Criminal law can make quick work of a violent rapist, but it won't help you if you're hoping to prosecute less forceful transgressions, including most of the events brought to light by the #MeToo movement.
Should the law be brought to bear on those cases that involve violation but not violence? Since the 1980s, feminists have been divided on the question. Catharine MacKinnon wanted to legally define rape as "any physical invasion of a sexual nature under circumstances of threat or use of force, fraud, coercion, abduction or the abuse of power, trust, or a position of dependency or vulnerability." This definition, she believes, would criminalize not just violent sexual assault but also sex work and pornography. Other feminists, such as Marcia Pally, have argued that broadening the definition to enable censorship of pornography infantilizes women and mistakes the causes of sexual violence. The modern debate about sex work and porn continues to pit feminists who believe that prohibiting the sale of sex erodes female agency against feminists who believe that all sex work is violent because it debases the women who do it.
Though they predate her work, most of the laws banning prostitution in the U.S. essentially reflect MacKinnon's position. That has not exactly worked out in women's favor, considering that nearly every sex work bust that involves actual sex workers (rather than cops in disguise) results in charges against both the johns and their "victims."
Sklansky's book is rich with such paradoxes. If we consider violence to be so detrimental that it must have its own category of law, why do we allow so much violence in our correctional facilities? If we punish violence because it causes harm, why don't we punish harmful behaviors that don't leave a mark? Maybe it doesn't need spelling out, but Sklansky does so anyway: Human beings don't find all or even most violence objectionable. We like boxing and wrestling. We glorify soldiers. We send children to karate classes and let them play contact football. Some types of violence are seen as funny, as evidenced by the millions of people who have watched America's Funniest Home Videos for the last 30 years.
You don't have to be a libertarian to distinguish between consensual boxing and attacking someone against his will. But the creation of "violent crime" as a legal category—which did not happen at the federal level until 1984 with the Armed Career Criminal Act—was not so much about the absence of consent as the presence of violence. That is what makes these paradoxes so striking. We have always prosecuted (some of) the people who damaged the bodies and property of others. But only in the last few decades has violence itself become the point of emphasis.
Meanwhile, agents of the state can do things to other individuals that regular folks could never get away with. Cops are an obvious example but not the only one. Most states have enhanced penalties for adults who commit violence against minors—unless the adult is the minor's parent, in which case the violence must be especially grievous (or the parent poor, in which case another arm of the state can exercise powers that the criminal courts will not). Yet we cannot say that violence against a minor is only acceptable if committed by a parent, because it remains legal in 19 states for public school officials to assault wayward children. Education Department data from 2014 suggest that school administrators legally assault roughly 100,000 U.S. students each year. In 2016, researchers Elizabeth T. Gershoff and Sarah A. Font offered an even larger estimate, suggesting that administrators assault roughly 160,000 students annually.
I just referred to paddling (the most common form of standardized corporal punishment) as "assault," because that's what most people would call it if three adult men dragged a 14-year-old boy into a room, two of the men bent him over, and a third man beat the boy's buttocks with a flat heavy piece of wood so hard that the child later needed painkillers and laxatives to use the restroom. That is what happened to one of the plaintiffs in 1977's Ingraham v. Wright. But after the Supreme Court heard that case, brought by two black Miami-Dade junior high school students who sued their school district after administrators paddled them for tardiness, the Court's conservative majority ruled that students are not entitled to "notice and a hearing prior to the imposition of corporal punishment in the public schools, as that practice is authorized and limited by the common law,"* and that corporal punishment does not violate the Constitution's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. As is often the case, the Court is more permissive when it comes to state violence than with violence between private individuals.
Sklansky's book highlights a few efforts at making our justice system less nightmarish. For example, he writes approvingly of various diversion models that allow defendants to avoid prison and jail, though he notes with regret that they are largely unavailable to "violent" offenders. But A Pattern of Violence is not a policy treatise. The author has no grand solutions to share, just historical asymmetries and their consequences. His only call to action is that readers resist the temptation to think of violence as "an easily recognizable, objectively distinguishable, superlatively condemnable set of behaviors, engaged in by an easily recognizable, objectively distinguishable, superlatively condemnable category of people."
A Pattern of Violence: How the Law Classifies Crimes and What It Means for Justice, by David Alan Sklansky, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 316 pages, $29.95
*Correction: The original version of this article misstated the majority opinion's finding on the 14th Amendment question raised in Ingraham v. Wright.
The post Mixed Martial Messages appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that the Department of Education is forgiving $500 million in Federal Direct Loan debt owed by 18,000 former students of the for-profit higher education chain ITT Technical Institute. The chain closed all 140 of its locations and fired most of its 8,000 employees in 2016, following a legal battle with various state attorneys general and the U.S. Department of Education.
"These borrowers will receive 100 percent loan discharges," according to a Department of Education press release. "This brings total loan cancellation under borrower defense by the Biden-Harris Administration to $1.5 billion for approximately 90,000 borrowers." In March, the Education Department forgave $1 billion in student loan debt held by 73,000 other borrowers who attended for-profit colleges found to have engaged in deceptive marketing practices.
This latest announcement is yet another expensive reminder that federal subsidies for higher education creates incentives for garbage people to start garbage programs for clueless borrowers who stand little chance of ever repaying their student loans.
The "borrower defense" concept says that students are able to apply for loan forgiveness of their Federal Direct Loans if the students "were misled" by the schools they attended or if their "schools engaged in other misconduct in violation of certain laws." In this case, the Education Department says its investigation "found that ITT made repeated and significant misrepresentations to students related to how much they could expect to earn and the jobs they could obtain after graduation between 2005 and the institution's closure in 2016. In reality, borrowers repeatedly stated that including ITT attendance on resumes made it harder for them to find employment, and their job prospects were not improved by attending ITT."
In the last administration, the federal government had much stricter rules about who could benefit from the borrower defense rule and how much forgiveness they could receive. A major sticking point with loan forgiveness advocates was then–Education Secretary Betsy DeVos' use of a formula that granted borrower defense applicants only partial forgiveness of Federal Direct Loans. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has tossed that formula and replaced it with 100 percent forgiveness, which will be retroactively available to anyone who previously qualified for partial forgiveness.
Is the new borrower defense policy a roundabout way of executing mass student loan forgiveness without going through Congress? Probably. Do many of the criteria for borrower defense also apply to nonprofit liberal arts colleges? Absolutely. Is it troubling that the new application for borrower defense loan forgiveness does not require applicants to submit a W-2? It absolutely should be.
But what I find most concerning is that American policy makers continue to ignore a larger lesson of the last 40 years: Federal lending for higher education has been a disaster for many low-income borrowers.
A lot of journalism about for-profit higher education shenanigans—which are real and heinous—dates back to Occupy Wall Street. It tends to imply that President Barack Obama's Education Department was the first to stand up to the worst grifters, and that this is a relatively recent problem. But it was William Bennett, President Ronald Reagan's education secretary, who first sounded the alarm, way back in 1985.
Congress had loosened lending criteria in the 1970s, which allowed unprepared students to borrow federally guaranteed money to attend fly-by-night schools. As a result, the student loan default rate skyrocketed in the 1980s. Bennett called for and secured a tightening of the higher ed credit market, which reduced the number of these schools and also the student loan default rate. A few years later, these restrictions were lifted, and the process repeated itself two more times: Defaults went up, lending tightened, defaults went down, lending loosened, etc. Wash the argument, rinse the taxpayers, repeat.
While inducing low-income people to borrow money they can't repay for an education they can't use is likely the worst consequence of federal higher ed subsidies, we also know now that easy lending has inflated the cost of "good" colleges and universities, which compete with each other by upping costs in order to suck up subsidies that they can invest in prestige points rather than workforce preparation: nicer buildings, fancier dining services, more extracurriculars, and an abundance of non-academic staff to make attendees—particularly those at nonprofit liberal arts colleges, which progressives seldom criticize for their ever-increasing sticker prices—feel like they're staying at a resort with the occasional class.
Despite the most recent spat between DeVos and progressives, the history of this cycle is not entirely partisan. The late Rep. Alcee Hastings (D–Fla.) stanned hard for this awful system while raising campaign funds from crappy schools that mooched off taxpayers and ripped off poor students of color. His partners across the aisle were conservatives like Rep. John Kline (R–Minn.)*, who claimed funneling taxpayer money to unaccountable firms was a form of "deregulation" that advanced "academic freedom."
None of this comports with the original intent of federally subsidized student loans, which was that students would borrow money to attend good schools, graduate to good jobs, and repay their loans in full—with interest—so that future students could then do the same. Whether that was ever a reasonable expectation (I submit that it was not) is almost moot. Today, the Education Department uses pretzel logic to spend money that was never appropriated while Congress repeats the worst mistakes of the previous decade, all while ignoring promising (but undertested) models like income share agreements.
There is so much else we should be doing differently. Many for-profit programs would likely not exist without occupational licensing requirements, such as those for the cosmetology industry; other for-profit programs, such as those that train students for administrative roles in medicine, are the result of the American health care system's metastatic need for paper-pushers who can manage labyrinthine billing operations and regulatory compliance.
Instead of confronting any of these issues, federal lawmakers have created an increasingly large and disillusioned population of student borrowers and paved the way for endless cycles of unpayable debt followed by occasional bursts of loan forgiveness.
*Correction: This story originally misidentified the state in which former Rep. Kline was elected. It has been updated.
The post Biden's Latest Round of Student Loan Debt Forgiveness Is an Indictment of Federal Higher Education Subsidies appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A novel cannabis drug is popping up in cities across the U.S., eliciting concern from members of the cannabis and hemp industries, state legislators, and a chemist who reviews cannabis drugs for safety. While the newly popular compound of delta-8-THC is not expressly prohibited by the Controlled Substances Act, people I spoke to are concerned that it is being produced unsafely and not receiving the same scrutiny that regulators apply to legal marijuana.
The arrival of delta-8-THC—which is being sold in various places as a tincture, in vape pens, added to food, and sprayed on hemp flower so that it can be smoked—coincided with the passage of the 2018 Farm Bill, in which Congress repealed the federal prohibition on hemp and its byproducts. While delta-8-THC occurs in only trace amounts in hemp and cannabis, it can be synthesized from CBD isolate, the main commercial compound derived from hemp plants.
After the farm bill passed, investment flooded into the hemp industry based on the expectation that it would be only a matter of time until farmers could sell hemp products as nutritional supplements.
"Everyone anticipated that big grocery and pharmacy retailers would line their shelves once hemp and CBD were legal," Jim Higdon, co-owner and co-founder of Cornbread Hemp in Kentucky, tells Reason. But selling to national grocery and pharmacy retailers hinged on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) classifying hemp-derived CBD, short for cannabidiol, as a nutritional supplement. Instead, the FDA explicitly declared that CBD could not be sold as a nutritional supplement.
"The CBD industry in 2017 and 2018 had this rush with people wanting to get in," says Eric Steenstra, president of Vote Hemp. "In 2018, we had about 3,500 licenses for growers in the U.S. In 2019, we had over 19,000 licenses for growers." Then, when the FDA made it clear that hemp-derived CBD could not be marketed as a nutritional supplement, "you had all these people producing all this CBD, and there were suddenly way more producers than purchasers," Steenstra says. The prices of hemp and hemp-derived CBD isolate plummeted and remain low. "Lots of people couldn't sell their hemp flower and a lot of producers were sitting on CBD isolate trying to figure out what to do with it."
That's when some enterprising chemist found that CBD isolate could be synthesized into delta-8-THC, a cousin of delta-9-THC. While delta-9, the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, is prohibited by the Farm Bill and the Controlled Substances Act, neither piece of legislation mentions delta-8. Though it's not inherently dangerous, says Christopher Hudalla, the founder and chief science officer of ProVerde Laboratories, which provides testing services to state-legal cannabis businesses in Massachusetts and Maine, Hudalla has yet to test a delta-8-THC product that contains only delta-8.
When he first saw products containing delta-8-THC in 2018, Hudalla says, "I thought, 'This is cool, this is novel.' But then I was like, 'What do we know about this?'"
The products Hudalla tested contained delta-8-THC, but also other THC isomers as well as chemical byproducts. "These byproducts are not found in nature. Chemists are using very, very strong reagents—strong acids, strong bases. If you don't know what you're doing, it's very possible to pass along some of those reagents to your customer."
Hudalla looked at numerous samples, finding not only chemical byproducts unfit for consumption but also chemical isolates he couldn't identify. He says that when pharmaceutical companies produce a drug and can't get rid of all the chemical byproducts, they are required to prove that the byproducts are safe. The delta-8 producers he's spoken with, many of whom are using unsophisticated labs, do not have the resources or the know-how to conduct those studies.
Hudalla couldn't tell his clients that their delta-8-THC products were pure, so he wrote lab reports for them declaring that the products were not fit for human consumption. The decision has cost him business, and many producers have simply shopped for a lab that will write them a purity report they like. But he stands by the decision, citing lessons learned from the wave of lung injuries caused in recent years by THC vape pens sold on the black market. "I don't want to be responsible for someone hurting someone else, and I don't want a certificate of safety with my name on it found in a DEA bust," Hudalla says.
Steenstra is equally concerned that some members of the hemp industry have turned to producing delta-8-THC. "These products are being produced who knows where, under who knows what conditions," Steenstra says. "There's been no research into whether delta-8-THC products are safe."
Like Higdon, Steenstra is frustrated that the FDA refuses to roll up its sleeves and do the work of regulating hemp and CBD products as nutritional supplements. "These products are not being regulated by the FDA, but they should be," Steenstra says. "There are lots of good companies making good products, but they're doing it voluntarily. Which means there's a lot of poor-quality stuff out there as well." The thinking among hemp advocates is that smart regulations would give the hemp industry a path toward commercial viability, stabilize prices, and discourage the diversion of CBD isolate toward grey and black market delta-8-THC products.
The adult-use cannabis industry is also concerned about the rise of delta-8-THC. "Very little is known about the health effects of delta-8 and almost all current production is entirely unregulated," says Morgan Fox, media relations director for the National Cannabis Industry Association. "Until we know more about delta-8, its production and sale should be regulated just like delta-9 under existing state cannabis licensing and oversight systems."
Fox also says that prohibition in general, not just the FDA's refusal to regulate hemp, is driving the delta-8-THC trend. "Keeping delta-9-THC—which is naturally present in cannabis at usable levels and has a long history of research and longitudinal data showing its relative safety—either illegal or so heavily regulated that it becomes prohibitively expensive for consumers creates an unnecessary demand for alternative inebriating cannabinoids. We are seeing that even though there is some limited demand for delta-8 in states with regulated cannabis markets, the vast majority of interest is in prohibition states."
While many defenders of delta-8 insist that it's perfectly legal under federal law, no one I spoke with thinks the legality is the most pressing issue. "It scares me that hemp is being marketed this way. It's a black eye for the hemp industry," Steenstra says. "If you go to a dispensary in a state where medical or recreational cannabis is legal, it's tested for everything and comes with a data sheet. In places where it's not legal, you're buying delta-8 at a gas station and have no idea."
No one I spoke to objected to the creation of a novel cannabis compound, they just don't want to harm consumers or erase the goodwill they've accumulated by submitting to regulation and oversight. "If someone can produce a delta-8 product that is actually delta-8 and not a garbage product, I don't have a problem with that," Hudalla adds. "That's a regulatory issue. As of right now, we're using consumers as guinea pigs."
The post How Regulatory Uncertainty Helped Give Rise to a New Street Drug appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Education Department announced on Tuesday that it will freeze collections and return garnished wages and tax refunds to student loan borrowers who have defaulted on their Federal Family Education Loans (FFEL). More than 1 million borrowers will be covered by the new policy, and they will join 40 million other Americans who, since March 2020, have not accrued interest or been required to make payments on student loans already owned by the Education Department.
Exactly who are the borrowers in this category? Anyone who took out a Stafford or PLUS student loan prior to 2010 borrowed that money from a commercial lender with a federal guarantee under the FFEL program. If your FFEL loan is in good standing, congratulations! Your loan remains with a commercial lender and Tuesday's action does not apply to you. However, if you defaulted on your FFEL loan and it has been transferred to a federally funded guaranty agency—but has not been in default so long that the guaranty agency has already transferred collections to the Education Department (in which case, it was already frozen)—then you are the intended beneficiary of Tuesday's announcement. Your loan repayment will be frozen until at least September 2021, any wages or taxes garnished since March 2020 will likely be returned (at some point), your loan will be restored to good standing, your credit score will hopefully be depenalized, and you will have the option to request a refund of any voluntary payments you made on your defaulted loan during the pandemic.
I qualified many parts of the above because the Education Department does not yet know exactly how many people will benefit from this policy, exactly how much money will be taken from the Treasury in the form of refunded garnishments, how it will return garnishments or refund voluntary payments, or how it will coordinate the various parties needed to make this policy work. For instance, assuming the Education Department can quickly identify every borrower who will be affected by Tuesday's announcement, it can probably stop the IRS from withholding their 2020 tax refunds, unless, perhaps, those people have already filed. But how quickly can it identify—or get guaranty firms to identify—which employers should stop garnishing defaulted borrower's wages and communicate that information to them?
If this policy turns out to be a hot mess, it will largely be because the FFEL program was a hot mess.
Under FFEL, the Education Department paid commercial lenders a fee to lend to students and their parents. When a borrower enters repayment and defaults, the commercial lender files a claim with a guaranty agency; the guaranty agency then uses Education Department funds to buy the loan from the commercial lender for about 97 cents on the dollar; that guaranty agency then charges the Education Department to collect on the loan and contracts collections out to various other firms. If the guaranty agency's debt collection contractors can't collect, the Education Department takes over loan service and collections.
As that chain of responsibility suggests, FFEL was a case study in moral hazard. Not only did lenders and guaranty agencies make money without taking on risk, but annual limits on how much each student could borrow incentivized lending to as many people as possible, regardless of whether they were likely to complete their degree or had enrolled in an institution that was preparing them for gainful employment.
In the wake of the 2008 mortgage crisis, many private lenders no longer had the capital to issue new FFEL loan disbursements to students who were already enrolled, which left students in the lurch. Asking colleges to charge a fraction of their pre-crisis rates overnight was out of the question, so Congress allowed the Education Department to buy newly issued FFEL loans from the very banks the department had previously paid to issue those loans so that students could continue borrowing. Ultimately, the Education Department purchased roughly $150 billion in FFEL loans issued between 2007 and 2009.
The Education Department's FFEL purchase in 2009 is why some FFEL borrowers have already benefited from the loan repayment freeze. Other FFEL borrowers have already benefited from the freeze because they were in default so long that their debt had already been moved from the commercial lender to the guaranty agency to the Education Department. To complicate matters further, some guaranty agencies that are servicing FFEL defaulted loans voluntarily froze repayment at the same time the Education Department did. This makes total sense, in a way, because the Education Department already owns the loans that commercial lenders have transferred to the guaranty agencies, but the Education Department does not know exactly which FFEL borrowers in default whose debt remains in the care of guaranty agencies have had their payments frozen.
Again, if this all sounds ridiculously complicated and poorly designed, that's because it is. Congress killed the FFEL program in 2010 for all the reasons mentioned above and replaced it with Federal Direct Loans, or FDLs, all of which have been frozen since March 2020. But FFEL's complexity still haunts us because some 8 million FFEL borrowers are still out there, chipping away (or not!) at their ballooning balances.
While there are likely some deadbeats among the beneficiaries of Tuesday's announcement, the median borrower who is struggling to make minimum payments on loans issued prior to 2010—with some active FFEL loans dating back to the 1990s—probably does need some debt relief and isn't providing much in the way of garnishment regardless. If you believe in means testing, Tuesday's policy is better than the blanket freeze on all student loans owned by the Department of Education, which benefitted not just households that lost income, but also white-collar workers who didn't miss a paycheck over the last year.
However, we should consider whether the Education Department is creating a new moral hazard or other bad incentives. For instance, Tuesday's announcement says that "any of these [FFEL] loans that went into default since March 13, 2020, will be returned to good standing. The guaranty agencies that hold those loans will assign them to the Department and request that the credit bureaus remove the record of default." Might some people interpret that to mean they can or should default on FFEL loans that they are currently repaying? What if you defaulted earlier in the pandemic but can now afford repayment—why bother? What message does this send to the 5 million FFEL borrowers whose loans remain with commercial lenders? What message does this send to people who are having their wages garnished for other kinds of debt? What about people who defaulted before COVID-19 tanked the economy, and the people who will default after the economy recovers?
Lastly, when are policymakers going to acknowledge that federal student loans have played a major role in driving up the cost of education, and that dipping into the public fisc to pay off debts incurred due to cost inflation is a vicious cycle that is bound to repeat itself?
The post Education Department To Suspend Payments, Refund Garnished Wages and Tax Returns for Student Loan Borrowers in Default appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Netflix adaptation of Walter Tevis' 1983 novel The Queen's Gambit has punched above its weight since it started streaming in October. The sets and costume are gorgeous and the acting is good, but the stakes are nonexistent: We know from the first episode that child chess prodigy Beth Harmon (played by 24-year-old Anya Taylor-Joy) is going to win a lot of matches, even with a tranquilizer habit clinging to her back.
But there is more to this story than a phenom making the most of her gifts. Set in the 1950s and '60s, The Queen's Gambit has more to say about geopolitics and culture than it does about opening moves. Episode by episode, we learn that America's best players were largely anonymous, duking it out in drabby hotels and high school cafeterias, while in other countries—particularly Mexico, France, and the Soviet Union—chess was a celebrated and even glamorous sport.
It's fascinating to watch Taylor-Joy as the only woman climbing the American ranks, but her speedy evolution into an anti–Cold Warrior is the better subplot. Upon qualifying to play in Moscow against the USSR's top talent, Harmon is recruited first by a Christian nonprofit hellbent on fighting the evils of atheism and then by a State Department apparatchik who cares only that Harmon can beat the Soviets "at their own game."
She rebuffs both parties by refusing the former's funding and the latter's instructions to bash the Soviet Union. For Harmon, chess no more "belongs" to any nation or gender than does the moon. When she wins, it's for her, not the jingoists.
The post The Queen's Gambit appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>So let's say psilocybin mushrooms are newly decriminalized where you live, and you are now open to having your first psychedelic experience. Allow me to share some of the practical knowledge I have gleaned from talking to experts and old heads, reading books and articles, and consuming various amounts of magic mushrooms in various settings.
Begin by trying very hard to find a reason why you should not consume shrooms. What exactly are the laws where you live? Are you on parole or probation? Do you take any prescription drugs? Google your medication's name and "shrooms." Do you have epilepsy? Search drug forums to find out how other epilepsy sufferers have fared on psilocybin. Do you need to monitor your glucose throughout the day? Search drug forums for the experiences of diabetics.
Avoid rehab websites and focus instead on forums where people talk about their own use, such as shroomery.org and erowid.org, both of which contain countless "trip reports." You will find more anecdotes than hard research, but you can still learn a lot. If a self-assessment does not put you at ease, you can also tell your doctor or therapist that you are considering taking shrooms and ask for his or her informed opinion. Be honest and fair with yourself. Not all drugs are for everyone, and there are other ways to open the doors of perception. While psilocybin is not poisonous to your organs, it does leave you vulnerable to external dangers. Anyone taking a prescription drug for depression or anxiety should do extra research, as some drugs mute the effects of the tryptamines in psilocybin, while other drugs amplify the effects.
Once you have conducted a clear-eyed risk assessment, it's time to find some fungi. I recommend dried mushrooms (the standard method of preservation), because they are easy to measure and they keep for a while. You can grow a personal stash and dry them discreetly at home (turn again to that internet browser and search for "PF Tek" for instructions), or you can buy one-eighth of an ounce, likely for $25–$40. If you have adventurous adult children, ask them to help you find a trustworthy source. The marijuana user in your life probably knows someone who knows someone, and he will not think you are weird for asking him. It is unwise to purchase shrooms from Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace or from a stranger without an introduction. Foraging for wild shrooms is also an option, but please seek help from someone who's done it before. It can take hours to feel the effects of eating the wrong kind of wild mushroom, by which point it will likely have damaged your kidneys and liver.
Shrooms in hand, pull up your calendar and pick out a Saturday. You only need one day for your experience, but you'll want to set aside all of it. If you take a dose at 10 a.m., you will begin to feel the effects by 10:45. The "peak" will arrive between 11:30 and noon and last for two or three hours. By 4 p.m. you will feel close enough to normal to know that your trip is completed. But again, it's a good idea to give yourself an entire day in case you want to take the shrooms earlier or later, or in case your own experience does not quite match up with the time windows above. Once you have taken the shrooms, I strongly advise you not to operate a vehicle again until you've had a good night's sleep.
This brings us to the "setting" component of the famous psychedelic shorthand "set and setting." Choose a space you can occupy for the day and where you feel comfortable, safe, and secure. Depending on how much you take your first time, you could experience profound emotions that make you laugh and cry. Some folks prefer the privacy and comfort of their own homes. Others like a secluded spot in nature. Know how you'll get to and from that place and who will be with you. I recommend first-timers have someone around whom they trust. This "trip sitter" doesn't need to be an experienced psychedelic user; he just needs to be kind, level-headed, positive, and empathetic. (To learn more about supporting someone else who is tripping, you can freely read Mark Haden's Psychedelic Guide Manual on the website of the Zendo Project, a nonprofit that provides lay-friendly psychedelics education.)
"Set," which is short for "mindset," is also important. Sometimes I approach a mushroom trip with a sense of mission. If I feel like I'm in a rut or need an attitude adjustment, then I go in knowing that I will think about those problems. Many people describe such trips as work. You can also approach shrooms with a sense of adventure, curiosity, and excitement. In that case, you might spend your trip looking at cool art, marveling at nature, or listening to music. Just remember that shrooms increase activity in your amygdala, which is the part of your brain that tells you when it's time to haul ass. Be kind to yourself and avoid media content that's meant to frighten, anger, or otherwise evoke strong negative emotions.
How you consume the shrooms is a matter of personal preference. Maya priests of the Actun Tunichil Muknal cave, in what is now Belize, used deer bladders attached to hollowed-out bones to deliver psilocybin rectally. I prefer pouring a cup of boiling water over ground shrooms, letting the tea cool to room temperature, and then drinking it down—pulp and all—as quickly as I can. Some folks put dried shrooms on a piece of peanut butter toast. They taste terrible, but you're not eating them for the flavor.
If you are very nervous about using shrooms, I recommend you start with 1 gram dried. Ingesting this amount will feel mostly like a new kind of buzz that simply lasts a long time. Up to around 1.5 grams will feel like an even stronger buzz, but with no perceptible change in your vision or hearing or in how well you speak and follow normal conversation. Exceeding 1.5 grams will likely cause you to think and speak differently. People who take between 2.5 and 3.5 grams report perceptible visual effects (seeing faint geometric patterns where there are none, for instance) and a very active, stream-of-consciousness mental state. The "heroic dose" popularized by psychonaut Terence McKenna is 5 grams. People who have taken this amount say the trip is very psychologically taxing but also provides the longest-lasting increase in emotional well-being. (Clinical trials do not use dried mushrooms, but the largest doses of psilocybin they administer are roughly in this range.) For more on the experience of the "heroic dose," read "The Mushroom Moment Manifesto," page 20.
But don't feel the need to be a hero. Start with the smallest dose that makes you comfortable. If the resulting experience is insufficiently trippy, get out your calendar, find another Saturday, and take a larger dose. Keep in mind that weighing out dried plant material is not the most exact way to take any drug, which is why cardiologists administer the cardiac drug digitalis, not dried foxglove flower, for congestive heart failure. And since you can't untake shrooms, err on the side of underdoing it.
A little nausea is normal in the first 45 minutes. Try to ride it out! Shrooms are not ayahuasca, and puking is not necessary. Stay hydrated even if you don't feel thirsty.
Once you are under the influence, what then? Shrooms can be a useful tool for testing connections between ideas. Many of us believe things about ourselves and the world that make our lives harder than they have to be. Shrooms can evaporate those beliefs and render superior ideas stickier and more influential. If you have ever wanted to believe what seemingly happy people believe but found their worldview both irritatingly saccharine and maddeningly out of reach, shrooms can help their Hallmark truisms wedge themselves in your brain and illuminate your outlook for months afterward.
I believe shrooms have increased my baseline sense of gratitude and helped tame my desire to control things I cannot and should not (such as the behavior of others). They have also made me reluctant to escalate interpersonal conflicts. I like these changes, although I don't know how replicable they are for anyone else. The faultiest mental connections can elude even the most dogged psychic excavator, and it is too much to ask of any drug that it undo decades of neurological wiring.
What if your exploration of the inside of your head, or just some random external stimulus, leads to the proverbial "bad trip"? Then you have a bad trip. Remind yourself that you are on a drug and that it will eventually wear off. If you plan to take a larger dose, consider obtaining a benzodiazepine and entrusting it to your trip sitter. If you have a panic attack or feel overwhelmed in a way that does not subside as your trip progresses, a single Valium or Xanax will level you out for the remainder of your psilocybin experience.
Despite the pitfalls, it's worth trying to push through whatever negative emotions overwhelm you, especially if you have a trip sitter present. Everyone's got something eating at them, and shrooms are a good tool for facing those things with a new and conciliatory attitude. It doesn't always feel that way when it's happening, but that's part of the shrooms paradox: Even a "bad" trip can produce great results.
The post How To Take Shrooms appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Congressional Democrats and President Joe Biden's administration are at odds over how to cancel student loan debt. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) insist that Biden can and should cancel up to $50,000 of loan debt per borrower using an executive order. Biden's team reportedly prefers that Congress pass a bill giving the Department of Education authority to forgive up to $10,000 of outstanding student loan debt per person.
While neither of those proposals will address the cost disease plaguing higher education in the United States, the Warren proposal relies on a rather Trumpian approach to appropriations.
The Warren proposal, which you can study here, notes that section 432(a) of the Higher Education Act of 1965 authorizes the Secretary of Education to "enforce, pay, compromise, waive, or release any right, title, claim, lien, or demand, however acquired, including any equity or any right of redemption," as relates to loans issued under the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) Program; now, the Federal Direct Loan Program. Warren and other student loan forgiveness advocates interpret that clause to mean that the Education Department may adjust individual loan values down to zero if the loan is owned by the Education Department (more than 90 percent of student loans are). They say that this interpretation was shared by the Trump administration, which cited section 432(a) in justifying a temporary waiver of interest on student loans due to COVID-19's economic impact.
Warren's proposal to permanently forgive the debt of tens of millions of student loan borrowers (and which would cost substantially more than the revenue lost by temporarily suspending interest payments), uses an income-based sliding scale to determine the forgiveness amount: $50,000 in debt forgiveness for household incomes less than $100,000, scaling down to zero for household incomes over $250,000. The scale is tied exclusively to the prior year's tax filing and the corresponding amount would be forgiven automatically. Her proposal also calls for the IRS to not treat the forgiven loan amount as taxable income (which it currently does for loans forgiven after 20 or 25 years of income-based repayment).
A letter to Warren from members of Harvard University's Project on Predatory Student Lending suggests that this route is perfectly legal, and that "the only statutory limitation" on the Education Department's authority to "compromise" a loan "is the requirement that the Secretary 'may not enter into any settlement of any claim under [Title IV] that exceeds $1,000,000' without requesting 'a review of the proposed settlement of such claim by the Attorney General.'"
While rich with detail, the letter from the Project on Predatory Student Lending focuses largely on a close literal reading of the Higher Education Act. There is no suggestion by the letter authors that the Higher Education Act, the Federal Claims Collection Act, or the Federal Credit Reform Act was intended or amended explicitly to give the Secretary of Education the power to discharge $650 billion worth of student loans (the amount Warren expects the U.S. government to forgive if her plan is implemented). Yet the letter nevertheless claims that "Congress has granted the Secretary a more specific and unrestricted authority to create and to cancel or modify debt owed under federal student loan programs in the Higher Education Act (HEA) itself" and that "that provision empowers the Secretary to execute the broad debt cancellation plan you have proposed." It is right there in the bill that Lyndon B. Johnson signed in 1965, the power for a political appointee to spend $650 billion without so much as a "by your leave" from Congress.
This is perhaps why Schumer is under the impression that Biden can forgive all those student loans "with the flick of a pen."
In a memorandum sent to former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in January, Reed D. Rubinstein, then deputy general counsel for the Department of Education, argued that the secretary does not, in fact, already have these broad powers.
Rubinstein argued that the Constitution assigns the power of the purse to Congress, that federal law requires appropriated funding "be applied only to the objects for which the appropriations were made except as otherwise provided by law," and finally, that Congress has not voted to allow Education Department funding to be used in the way Warren and Schumer want. This is the same argument House Democrats used in 2019 when they sued Trump for using a national emergency declaration to divert military spending toward a border wall after the House refused to appropriate the $5.7 billion he requested.
"Congress does not impliedly delegate a policy decision of massive economic and political magnitude—as blanket or mass cancellation, compromise, discharge, or forgiveness of student loan principal balances, or the material modification of the repayment terms or amounts thereof, surely would be—to an administrative agency," Rubinstein wrote. He calls Warren's reading of section 432 "hyperliteral and contrary to common sense."
And yet, Congress doesn't always intervene when executive agencies take interpretative license in order to make decisions of "massive economic and political magnitude." Aside from a handful of critical quotes from a few Senate Republicans, Congress did not intervene in September 2020 when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) imposed a nationwide eviction moratorium in response to COVID-19 on the grounds that Congress had vested the agency's director with "the power to take any measures deemed 'reasonably necessary' to prevent the interstate spread of communicable disease, including 'inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, and destruction of animals or articles believed to be sources of infection.'" In fact, Congress later wrote the CDC's plan into law.
Rubinstein adds that in the event a legal case could be made for allowing the mass forgiveness of student loans without Congress granting new power or approving new spending, "doing so might be appropriately and necessarily considered a legislative rule under the Administrative Procedure Act," subject to public notice and comment. Somewhat ironically, the Trump administration struggled with APA compliance for his entire term.
Biden did not initially appear to be very fond of this game. Politico notes that Biden in December called Warren's plan "pretty questionable," and said, "I'd be unlikely to do that." But according to a tweet from White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, "Our team is reviewing whether there are any steps he can take through executive action and he would welcome the opportunity to sign a bill sent to him by Congress." The Hill reports that the White House Office of Legal Counsel is conducting that review.
Regardless of how Democrats under Biden choose to address the real and perceived deficiencies of our current system for funding higher education, taxpayers and borrowers deserve a break from rule by executive order. Many of these ideas are bad no matter what process Democrats use to implement them, but debating them in Congress might make them less so.
The post Can the Secretary of Education Really Wave a Magic Wand and Erase All Our Student Loans? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When modern Singapore's founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, died in 2015, The Atlantic's obituary claimed that Singapore's transition in just half a century "from third world to first"—the title of Lee's memoir—"leaves students and practitioners of government with a challenge."
Singapore has combined classical liberal policies such as free trade, an open port, and low taxes with an authoritarian single-party government that centrally plans large swaths of the island's economy and infrastructure, plays the role of censor in practically every media sector, canes petty criminals, and executes drug offenders. Because of, or despite, this seemingly incongruous combination, Singapore for most of the 21st century has reported higher annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth than the U.S., as well as lower infant mortality, greater trust in government, a comparable GDP per capita, and a longer life expectancy. The island city-state, as its proudest inhabitants love to mention, is also cleaner than the U.S. and has much less crime.
Perhaps American elites should feel challenged by such a mix of liberalism and authoritarianism, but they tend to talk about Singapore as a policy buffet from which they can take what they like and skip what they don't. In 2006, President George W. Bush, while trying to convince Congress to pass a trade deal with Vietnam, traveled to Singapore, where he praised the country for demonstrating that "open markets are capable of lifting up an entire people." That same year, then–Sen. Barack Obama bemoaned at a campaign event that America wasn't "providing math instruction and science instruction for our children that matches countries like Taiwan and Singapore."
Somewhat ironically, Singapore became what it is today by treating the American system like a buffet. Lee Kuan Yew admired America's clean-cut corporate culture and wanted U.S. companies to set up factories in Singapore. So he reflected back to American executives what they liked (golf courses, smooth roads, comfortable hotels) while erecting significant obstacles to Western individualism. As a result of this strategy, Lee in the late 1960s was able to convince a host of major American semiconductor manufacturers to build factories in Singapore without importing any other major aspect of late 1960s American culture.
While many policy enthusiasts in the U.S. have something to say about Singapore, one group has taken an interest that borders on obsession: American libertarians and fellow travelers. From an orthodox libertarian perspective, Singapore should not be thriving, yet it is; many of us want to dismiss its success, but we can't.
The cause of Singapore's success, and to what extent it's replicable, is a perennial topic of debate among American market enthusiasts, going back at least to when Milton Friedman visited the island in 1981 and tried to convince an audience of academics and civil servants that the country was thriving despite its interventionist government. During the Q&A period, one person asked Friedman if he really believed that Singapore's spending on infrastructure counted as "excessive government spending." In a winding answer, Friedman argued that "Hong Kong is an even greater success, in the sense that it had so much more difficult a problem. And yet Hong Kong did it without government involvement of the kind that you were describing." This led to several audience members in a row challenging the fairness of the comparison, and Friedman attempting to explain that Singapore's success did not mean its model of government could work everywhere or anywhere else in the world. The audience would not accept this. "Have you seen the slums in Hong Kong?" one questioner asked. "Can you find a slum in Singapore?" Eventually, a harried Friedman concedes, "I would much rather live in Singapore than I would in Hong Kong. I am not questioning that."
That tradition continues today, and no three American economic thinkers have written more about Singapore in recent years than George Mason University economists Bryan Caplan, Garett Jones, and Tyler Cowen. The latter two espouse a mostly positive view of the diminutive nation in the South China Sea, while Caplan is a Singapore skeptic.
Are there practical policies that Americans broadly and libertarians specifically can adopt from a country that combines free markets with forced collectivism? Or does a close look at Singapore teach us why that country is, and will continue to be, so immutably different from our own?
Singapore is tiny: 5.6 million people packed into roughly 280 square miles off the coast of Malaysia. If it were an American city, it would have a land area slightly smaller than Lexington, Kentucky, with a population roughly the size of Cook County, Illinois, home of Chicago. To keep it simple, think of it as New York City in Southeast Asia. And not just because it's a small, mostly urban metropolis with lots of people.
Like New York, Singapore has what's called a "one-party dominant" government, which means that the same political party forms the government, election cycle after cycle, and thus does not have to govern by coalition or bipartisan consensus. In Singapore, the People's Action Party (PAP) has formed the country's government continuously since 1959, yet its leaders chafe at the idea that the country is undemocratic. "Nobody questions whether there is a democracy in New York," Singapore Minister of Law Kasiviswanathan Shanmugam told a gathering of American attorneys in 2009.
Shanmugam has a point. Chicago has not had a Republican mayor since William Thompson left office in 1931. Detroit has had only Democratic mayors since 1962. Washington, D.C., has elected exclusively Democratic mayors since the federal government created the office in 1973. And save for Republican Sanford Garelik's stint as president of the New York City Council in 1970–1973, that body has been controlled by one party longer than Singapore's parliament has been controlled by the PAP.
To understand why Singapore is not New York City, let's start by looking at a policy area with which many Americans are now intimately if reluctantly familiar: the government response to COVID-19.
Singapore was prepared, partly because it had been woefully unprepared for the 2003 SARS-CoV outbreak. The country recorded 238 cases and 33 deaths from that virus, the fifth-worst SARS-CoV outbreak in the world.
While those numbers seem inconsequential compared to the global impact of COVID-19, SARS-CoV catalyzed a major change in how Singapore prepared for pandemics. "The government did not just lay in wait because SARS-CoV was over," wrote medical researchers Oppah Kuguyo, Andre Pascal Kengne, and Collet Dandara in an August 2020 article for OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology. "Instead, they went on to establish 900 rapid response public health preparedness clinics (PHPCs) across the country, ear-marked for improved response to pandemics and outbreaks." When COVID-19 arrived in Singapore from Wuhan this year, those clinics—of which there are now roughly 1,000—served as a geographically dispersed sorting system.
After Singapore recorded its first COVID-19 case on January 23, 2020, the country relied on temperature checks and contact tracing to control the spread. Initially, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's government echoed the World Health Organization (WHO) by telling people to wear masks only if they were sick. But on April 3, Singapore's government switched to encouraging universal masking. That same day, Lee announced a "circuit breaker" stay-home policy for nonessential workers for one month beginning on April 7. On April 14, Singapore made wearing a mask outside one's home mandatory. "The minute you leave your house, you have to wear a mask when you go out," Education Minister Lawrence Wong told the media.
On May 2, Singapore announced that all businesses in the country would need to use the SafeEntry contact tracing system to participate in phased reopening. SafeEntry requires visitors, students, patients, and employees to check in on a mobile app any time they enter a business, store, school, or hospital—almost like punching an epidemiological timecard.
Despite these measures (and a high rate of compliance), Singapore had recorded 57,951 infections and 28 COVID-19 deaths at press time. Not a particularly impressive record on infection control compared to fellow "Asian Miracle" countries Taiwan (population 23.78 million), which recorded only 548 total infections and seven deaths as of the same date, and Hong Kong (population 7.45 million), which had recorded 5,285 cases and 105 deaths.
There's actually a simple explanation for why Singapore has seen the worst outbreak, as a fraction of its overall population, in Asia. As of August, 94.6 percent of Singapore's COVID-19 infections had occurred in company dormitories housing some 300,000 migrant workers.
Singapore needs low-skilled laborers from foreign countries, but it grants them fewer protections compared to high-skilled permanent residents. They are required to live in crowded dormitories where their movement is closely tracked, and COVID-19 has further limited their mobility. Meanwhile, non-governmental organizations that advocate for immigrant laborers claim many employers have for years quietly repatriated laborers injured on the job in order to avoid paying for their care. In other words, Singapore's centrally planned public health infrastructure didn't fail; its centrally planned immigration system did.
Even with massive COVID-19 clusters breaking out in its worker dorms, Singapore's case fatality rate (CFR)—the percentage of people who die of COVID-19 out of all the cases identified—is just 0.04 percent. That's lower than Hong Kong's, and much lower than America's, which stands at 2 percent nationally as of this writing.
It is tough to fully explain Singapore's low CFR. One obvious factor is a world-class health care system that, at its core, reflects the disdain with which Lee Kuan Yew regarded both "free" government-provided health care and what he saw as grossly inefficient private models.
"It was quite obvious it didn't work," Lee said of Britain's National Health Service in a 2001 interview with PBS. "These are scarce resources. You've only got a limited number of top-class surgeons or doctors, and if you promise everybody that they are entitled to the same treatment, it's just not practical. So the system malfunctions, [but] they can't dismantle it now because it's too popular; it's gone into the national psyche."
When one of his ministers returned from a tour of several Beijing hospitals in the 1970s and insisted that Singapore go the fully public route, Lee Kuan Yew called bull. "I said I did not believe they had such medical standards for everyone in Beijing, let alone for all in China," he wrote in From Third World to First. But he also didn't think highly of American health care, writing that "American-style medical insurance schemes are expensive, with high premiums because of wasteful and extravagant diagnostic tests paid for out of insurance."
Lee wanted Singapore to chart a course that would keep the country healthy without overburdening the public fisc, so he and the PAP developed a multipronged approach that required nearly all Singaporeans to pay some portion of their own medical bills while using the threat of social censure and a network of competitive public hospitals to keep provider costs down.
In 1984, they introduced MediSave, a health savings account that was part of the country's mandatory savings scheme, called the Central Provident Fund (CPF). Adding the MediSave bucket to the fund (which also has a bucket for housing and a bucket for retirement) forced all Singaporeans to pay something for medical care. This was followed in 1990 by the introduction of a catastrophic insurance policy called MediShield Life that is mandatory for all Singaporeans and permanent residents. Finally, in 1993, Singapore introduced MediFund, a government-managed endowment for Singaporeans who cannot cover their medical bills using the above two funding methods, cash, or family assistance. Interest from the endowment is given to certain health care institutions to underwrite the bills of patients who can't pay. (The family help aspect is important, as MediSave funds can be used to pay the health bills of an immediate family member.) Although the country also has a supplemental private insurance market, Singaporeans under 55 must contribute 20 percent of their salaries, and their employers another 17 percent, to the CPF.
A network of public hospitals are meant to encourage what Lee Kuan Yew called a "self-administered means test." Patients can choose any kind of hospital "ward" they like, but the subsidies slide based on consumer income and ward grade. A public hospital's cheapest ward might sleep four patients to a room and lack air conditioning, while its most expensive wards sleep one person to a room and are cooled. While the vast majority of Singapore's hospital beds are in public facilities, there are also private hospitals. (The situation for primary care and clinics, where care is cheaper, is the opposite: Most practices are private.)
Singapore has found that making people pay a nominal amount for every type of medical service discourages unnecessary consumption and that the spectrum of service upgrades—from shorter wait times to one-person rooms—allows prices to work as a mechanism for allocating resources. The system is greatly aided by a requirement from the Ministry of Health (MOH) that all public hospitals report to the government what they charge. The MOH then posts facility-specific averages on an easily searchable website where consumers can sort hospitals and wards by how much they charge for specific procedures. Private hospitals aren't required to submit this information to the MOH, but many do so voluntarily. The differences are stark: The median cost of repairing a one-sided lower abdominal hernia at Singapore's cheapest public hospital ward in 2018–2019 was $966. The median cost for the same procedure at Singapore's most expensive private hospital was $15,729.
Singapore's high COVID-19 infection rate and low death rate reflect two sides of the governing coin. The country's health care system works well for nearly everyone who lives there and consumes less than 5 percent of GDP. (America's health care system, by contrast, does not work all that well and consumes 17 percent of GDP.) But the system's successes were partially undermined by an immigration policy—hardly unique to Singapore—that allows white-collar workers the freedom to socially distance while requiring employers to warehouse blue-collar workers in close quarters.
What about people who did not comply with Singapore's COVID-19 orders? Since 1994, when Singapore made global news by sentencing an 18-year-old American accused of vandalism to be whipped across his butt with a rattan cane, the country has enjoyed a reputation for punishment. COVID-19 has not inspired any rod sparing.
In May, an American FedEx pilot was sentenced to jail for leaving his Singapore hotel room during a mandatory 14-day quarantine. Brian Yeargan, 44, was told to stay in his room as a precaution because he'd flown through China and other hot spots in the weeks prior to his arrival. But the day before he was scheduled to fly from Singapore back to the U.S., Yeargan, still under quarantine, left his hotel room to buy a thermometer and masks for his wife, who had told him those things were hard to come by back in Alaska. He was busted by a security guard who stopped by the room to make sure Yeargan and his co-pilots were complying with the order.
Yeargan admitted his guilt, apologized to the court, and was given four weeks in jail. His attorney, Ronnie Tan, told the Associated Press that Yeargan was relieved by the verdict: He'd gotten only half as much time as prosecutors requested. In August, as Singapore was reopening its borders, it began requiring some people coming into the country to wear bluetooth and GPS tracking devices that would alert the government if they violated quarantine.
Yeargan, at least, understood enough about Singapore to admit fault and express regret. Around the same time, a woman named Paramjeet Kaur captured national attention after appearing on cellphone videos taken at a market on April 30. In the video, Kaur is maskless and loudly declaring herself "sovereign" (that is, a "sovereign citizen" who is not beholden to government statutes) in response to marketgoers insisting she wear a mask. "I have no contract with the police," Kaur tells them in one video. "They have no say over me." Several days after the market incident, Kaur was arrested, charged with violating COVID-19 rules and causing public disruption, and remanded to a mental hospital for two weeks before being released on $10,000 bail. No media outlet in Singapore has reported on her case since May.
Even minor quarantine violations are not taken lightly in Singapore. Tay Chun Hsien, 22, did not test positive for COVID-19 but was still ordered to self-quarantine from March 19 until noon on March 22. At 11:30 a.m. on the 22nd, he left his apartment to get breakfast. At 11:40 a.m., according to Singapore's The New Paper, a security officer "made a video call to Tay's mobile phone to check if he was home" and found that he was not. Perhaps because he ended his quarantine just 30 minutes early, Tay was spared jail and only fined $1,500.
Even the most severe pandemic-related penalties look light compared to the fate suffered by Nigerian man Chijioke Stephen Obioha, who was caught trafficking just under six pounds of cannabis into Singapore in 2007. Obioha, who had moved to Singapore to play soccer, spent nine years in prison and then was hanged in 2016 for violating the Misuse of Drugs Bill.
A Malaysian man named Nagaenthran K Dharmalingam was convicted in 2010 and sentenced to death after he was caught entering Singapore with 42.72 grams of heroin strapped to his thigh. A 2012 reform allows judges—who decide capital punishment cases without a jury—to give drug traffickers life sentences instead of the death penalty. Dharmalingam's legal team tried and failed to get his execution commuted to a life sentence once an independent psychiatric examination revealed that he had an I.Q. of 69, which is the cusp of intellectual disability in the United States and most developed countries. Both the appeals court and the prosecution conceded that Dharmalingam's I.Q. was as low as his attorneys claimed, but they said it was not so low that he didn't understand it was illegal to bring heroin into Singapore. Dharmalingam is now awaiting a response to a request for a presidential pardon. (In Singapore, the president is elected to serve six-year terms and is the nominal head of state, while the cabinet, led by the prime minister, is vested by Singapore's constitution with determining the "general direction and control of the Government.")
In May, as residents were social distancing due to COVID-19, one Singapore judge used Zoom to sentence 37-year-old Punithan Genasan to die for his role in coordinating the importation of 28.5 grams of heroin—about six sugar packets' worth.
In From Third World to First, Lee writes that his support for the death penalty dates back to 1951, when he defended a group of Singapore men accused of murder, shortly after finishing his law degree at Cambridge University. "I got all four men acquitted, but it left me with grave doubts about the practical value of the jury system for Singapore. Seven men, deciding by majority verdict, made for easy acquittals."
When as prime minister he set out to abolish juries for -capital cases, Lee did so on the grounds that Asian juries preferred "acquittal or conviction on a lesser charge" over ordering a person's death; abolishing jury trials would result in "fewer miscarriages of justice arising from the vagaries of jury sentiments." In an interview from the late 1990s with former BBC HARDtalk host Tim Sebastian, Lee said, "If you come in with a few kilos [of a prohibited drug], which will destroy hundreds, thousands of families, one death is too kind, because you are killing that family, every day, for years and years and years." When then told that the per capita execution rate in Singapore is higher than in the United States, Lee replied, "Per capita of what? Per capita of drug traffickers? Or per capita of Singaporeans? I am executing foreign drug traffickers."
If limited survey data are to be believed, Singaporeans are fine with all this. In 2019, the Ministry of Home Affairs published the first survey the government had ever conducted on Singaporean attitudes toward the death penalty and drug trafficking. Out of 2,000 respondents, 902 of whom were "young people aged 13 to 30," 97.8 percent "agreed that Singapore should continue to maintain tough anti-drug laws" and 97.5 percent felt "that drug consumption should remain illegal." A bare majority—52.7 percent—of respondents between the ages of 13 and 30 felt the death penalty was an appropriate response to drug trafficking, compared to 74.6 respondents over the age of 30.
The combination of single-party dominance and widespread public approval leaves this system—a brutal outlier in the developed world—unchallenged and largely unexamined.
Singapore doesn't control just the pharmaceutical choices of its residents; it also controls most of their media choices. Consider that Singapore's buskers—the independent street performers one sees in public transportation systems and parks around the U.S.—not only need a permit (as is the case in Boston and several other American cities) but "are required to attend an audition to ensure consistency in the quality of busking activities," according to guidelines published by Singapore's Media Development Authority (MDA). Video games and movies "deemed to undermine public order" or that are "likely to be prejudicial to national interest" are prohibited. Press freedoms are nonexistent.
In 2015, the MDA revoked the publishing license of a blog called The Real Singapore because it ran content that was "objectionable on the ground of public interest, public order and national harmony." The site's co-founders, husband and wife Yang Kaiheng and Ai Takagi, were charged with sedition for publishing articles that stoked racial tension (for instance, by reporting "that a Chinese woman had encouraged her grandson to urinate in a bottle while traveling on Singaporean public transport," according to the Committee to Protect Journalists). Yang and Ai, who was pregnant at her trial, were convicted of sedition and sentenced to eight and 10 months in prison, respectively.
Meanwhile, The Straits Times, Singapore's largest news media outlet, operates like a shadow press agency for the government. Its former political editor previously worked for Singapore's Internal Security Department (the country's version of a secret police) and now works for the National Security Research Centre in the prime minister's office. The CEO of Singapore Press Holdings, which owns The Straits Times, is Ng Yat Chung, a former chief of defense for the Singapore Armed Forces, and most of the company's top executives going back to the company's founding have served in the People's Action Party. A dispatch published in the trove of U.S. State Department embassy cables that WikiLeaks obtained and released in 2010 claimed that one Straits Times bureau chief confided to an American official that the paper's "editors have all been groomed as pro-government supporters and are careful to ensure that reporting of local events adheres closely to the official line."
Controlling speech is also consistent with Lee Kuan Yew's philosophy. From Third World to First contains an entire chapter on "Managing the Media," in which Lee recounts the many times he and other PAP officials succeeded at reining in foreign media with lawsuits and reduced circulation (which is set by the government) in retaliation for their being "tendentious at the expense of the facts." Speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1988, Lee said that his country "allowed" American media to report in Singapore, "but we cannot allow them to assume a role in Singapore that American media play in America, that is, that of invigilator, adversary, and inquisitor of the administration."
The many sides of this debate occasionally meet at a stark nexus, as in December 2005, when the Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA) reported that Singapore had denied a performance license to a theater group that planned to put on a play about the country's execution of drug courier Shanmugam Murugesu six months earlier. Unfortunately for the performers, the play was scheduled to premiere the day after Singapore was to hang Australian national Nguyen Tuong Van (also for transporting drugs) despite formal protests against the execution lodged by the Australian government.
According to SEAPA, "local coverage of Tuong Van's trial, conviction and sentence has been almost non-existent in [Singapore's] government-owned media." The government demanded that the play be rewritten to omit any mention of executing drug traffickers, and the same week, an installation at Singapore's LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts was "altered" to remove a reference to Tuong Van. Artist Matija Milkovic Biloslav "had displayed under falling nooses a single standing stool carrying a card with Tuong Van's execution number, C856," according to SEAPA. "The college, which receives government funding, said the artwork was about suicide and hastily removed the card."
In 2019, Singapore's government introduced the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, which allows the PAP to exercise the same censorship powers on social media platforms that it has historically wielded against print and broadcast outlets.
Even people who abhor the draconian policies in Singapore begrudgingly admit that it is a well-put-together place. The science fiction writer William Gibson visited the island for a 1993 Wired article in which he described the airport, streets, and buildings as perfectly maintained and the flora as immaculate. He could find no "wrong side of the tracks" or dilapidated infrastructure. The whole country was safe and polite and advanced. "Only the clouds were feathered with chaos," Gibson wrote.
Following the publication of the piece, which described the country as "Disneyland with the death penalty," Singapore banned the distribution of Wired.
Singapore is complex, but its core tension comes from the pairing of highly effective public and private institutions that take into account how people respond to incentives while engaging in shocking incursions on personal liberty and bodily autonomy. Imagine for a moment that it were possible for America to import what's "good" about Singapore—the effective institutions, the economic growth, the tranquility. Could it be done without accidentally importing what's bad?
George Mason's Garett Jones has some ideas. At the start of his most recent book, 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less (Stanford University Press), Jones asks readers whether they would "be willing to support longer terms for politicians, tightened voter eligibility, and a single, hegemonic political party in exchange for a 300% raise." Jones later points out that a majority of Singaporeans have done just that. They're 23 times richer per person today than they were six decades ago; the country's GDP exploded from just under $1 billion in 1960 to $372 billion in 2019. "It's worthy to discuss how to get to Denmark," Jones writes of the Nordic nation, which funds a massive welfare state with high taxes and a market economy, "but it's wise to discuss how to get to Singapore."
Jones' argument will be familiar to anyone who has studied the literature on the tradeoffs that come with granting universal suffrage. He cites evidence from around the world that strongly suggests democratic participation produces a Laffer-style inverted U-curve: Too little and too much democracy can both stunt economic growth, but the right amount of people power paired with a free market makes an economy go vroom.
Accordingly, Jones' prescriptions range from the purely technocratic (have fewer elected positions with longer terms between elections; appoint bureaucrats using "merit commissions"; grant independence to central banks and the judiciary) to the explicitly and purposely illiberal (require a high school diploma or equivalent degree to vote; disenfranchise anyone with a felony conviction). He believes his suggestions would lower the volume of the hoi polloi chorus and afford government actors—who would behave better thanks to their longer terms, and who would eventually be better thanks to a more informed electorate—the security to implement policies that grow the economy and keep inflation low, to the betterment of voters and nonvoters alike.
When Trump and North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un met in Singapore in 2018, Jones' boss at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Tyler Cowen, wrote a Bloomberg column sounding a similar note and suggesting that the two men could learn from Singapore's mix of big- and small-government policies. Cowen noted that Singapore is one of the few countries in the world where the public sector outbids the private sector for talent, thanks to the fact that "cabinet level pay may exceed U.S. $800,000, with bonuses attached that can double that sum for excellent performance." The country's culture of public service is also bolstered by "complex and overlapping incentives whereby top public sector workers are…respected highly and develop the personal networks for subsequent advancement in either the public or private sectors."
While these suggestions do not represent the full extent of Cowen's and Jones' assessment of what Singapore has done right, it's hard enough to imagine implementing just these two things. Legally restricting the franchise is out of the question. Universal suffrage is protected by law in the United States. It's just not going anywhere. Even when it comes to felons, the last 20 years have seen most states conditionally restore voting rights, while only three maintain a blanket ban.
Paying government employees more, meanwhile—especially in an era of multitrillion-dollar deficits—seems like an impossible sell to voters. It also might be a misdiagnosis of the problem. How many of the 17,000 employees at the Food and Drug Administration, which failed spectacularly in the first several months of the COVID-19 crisis, have an M.D. or a Ph.D.? Either the government happens to have hired the worst terminal degree holders on the market, or American governance is plagued by ills that better talent can't fix.
When the U.S. does imitate Singapore (whose early success, remember, came from imitating us), our politicians generally make a mess of it. Singapore courted foreign investment in the 1960s and succeeded in convincing Texas Instruments, National Semiconductor, Hewlett-Packard, and General Electric to reorient semiconductor production to the island country, boosting Singapore's economy into rarified heights. Compare that to Wisconsin's 2018 deal with the Taiwanese LCD manufacturer Foxconn. The company negotiated for $3 billion in state subsidies in exchange for employing 13,000 people, which comes out to more than $200,000 per job. Two years later, the factory is unfinished and will instead be a storage facility, and "high labor costs" have caused Foxconn to hire fewer than 300 people in Wisconsin.
Despite his admiration for Lee's legacy, Jones does not suggest that rich democracies go full Singapore, as "the chance of a horrifying outcome, even if low to moderate…is too high." But even his softer approach feels like a risky gambit for America in 2020, where neither the electorate nor the leaders of the two major political parties endorse the kind of free market policies Jones favors. It would certainly not guarantee a more libertarian country, considering that senators already serve the longest elected terms in government and seem comfortable taking extreme positions (nationalizing tech companies, to name a major one) without fear of political consequences. And while it's conceivable that even longer terms and a smaller electorate would create the conditions for passing unpopular-but-necessary policies, who's to say Congress would stop at entitlement reform? What, exactly, would stop a politically insulated government from being as authoritarian as Singapore, especially considering that the people most harmed by government overreach in the civil liberties sphere would be disenfranchised in greater numbers?
By contrast with his colleagues, Bryan Caplan has argued that Singapore is unique in a way that does not bode well for policy adoption in either direction. In a 2009 paper, he summed up the "Singapore paradox" thusly: The island nation "persistently adopts policies that the democratic process would overturn almost anywhere else on earth, but the same party keeps winning election after election by a landslide. Why doesn't a rival party promise to abolish the PAP's unpopular policies and soar to power? How, in short, is Singapore's political-economic equilibrium possible?"
Caplan probed several explanations in his paper, which he presented in Singapore. He ruled out the idea that the country is not actually a democracy, since it has free and fair (though not competitive) elections. Instead, he found strong survey evidence that Singaporeans were both "unusually concerned about economic performance" and deferential to the party that has delivered consistent economic growth for decades. The 2002 World Values Survey, where Caplan derived his data, reported that 58.8 percent of Singaporeans say "a high level of economic growth" should be their nation's top priority, compared to 48.6 percent of Americans. In terms of political culture, the differences were much starker: 3.2 percent of Singaporeans reported being "very interested" in politics, and 32.8 percent were "somewhat interested" in politics. In America, the World Values Survey reported those numbers at 18.3 percent and 47.2 percent respectively.
Based on both the last eight months of social upheaval and on the United States' decadeslong preference for swapping Democrats and Republicans in and out of federal power, Americans are almost certainly less deferential than are Singaporeans. And therein lies the rub: Being 10 percent less democratic requires American voters to trust elites and government far more than they do and, frankly, far more than they should.
Caplan is not the first person to take a stab at figuring out the Singaporean body politic, and others have also arrived at explanations that hardly suggest America could chart a similar course. Yana Chernyak, the assistant director of strategic initiatives at the American Enterprise Institute (and Cowen's stepdaughter), wrote a guest post for Cowen's Marginal Revolution blog in 2014 in which she posited that people "run in circles discussing whether Singapore is replicable based on its public and economic policies" and generally miss that "what actually makes Singapore so unique and probably impossible (or at least very difficult) to replicate" is its culture—specifically, Peranakan culture, which is passed down by the descendants of pan-Asian merchants and which holds a "positive view of commercial activity as the machine of wealth creation and basis of improving one's life."
Lee Kuan Yew was a big believer in the superiority of Singapore's culture. He wrote in his memoir of "fundamental differences between East Asian Confucian and Western Liberal societies. Confucian societies believe that the individual exists in the context of the family, extended family, friends, and wider society, and that the government cannot and should not take over the role of the family." This is why East Asians (Singapore is 76 percent ethnically Chinese) found so many aspects of American society—such as our focus on individual expression at the expense of collective cohesion—"totally unacceptable."
While placing his country's culture closer to China than America, Lee also argued that Singaporean Chinese have a profoundly different view of their place in the world. "No Chinese doubts their ultimate destiny after they have restored their civilization, the oldest in the world with 4,000 years of unbroken history. We, the migrants who have cut our own roots and transplanted ourselves on a different soil, in a very different climate, lack this self-confidence. We have serious doubts about our future, always wondering what fate has in store for us in an uncertain and fast-changing world." This may be how Americans would feel about our own country if we had to get all of our fresh water piped in from Canada, the way Singapore gets its water from Malaysia.
Culture, for better and worse, is as central to America's current predicament as it is to Singapore's, and American political culture is such that best practices are rarely nonpartisan. American Democrats are unequivocally opposed to abolishing the capital gains tax, lowering income tax rates across the board, and requiring that unionized public sector employees perform as well as nonunion private-sector employees, all of which are fundamental aspects of Singapore's "country as corporation" model. It will be many years before Republicans return to supporting free trade and immigration, without both of which Singapore would have died—and still might—on the global economic vine. The American health care industry, to name but one example of a private sector obstacle, would empty its lobbying war chests to fight against anything resembling Singapore's price transparency.
If anything, the policies Americans are most amenable to borrowing are the ones that are most corrosive: Among its more unappealing traits, Singapore's government is openly hostile toward media companies it doesn't own and has historically treated Marxists as enemies of the state, arresting them without the evidence necessary for a successful prosecution and holding them indefinitely.
While Jones, Cowen, and many others of a free market bent wish the U.S. could borrow some of the genuinely good pages from the book of Lee Kuan Yew, America writ large would rather read something else altogether. Thankfully, this is a country where we can read something else.
The post Singapore Is Not the Model for a More Libertarian America appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"It's that time of year again" doesn't land quite right this year. It is, in fact, that time of year again—the time for religious festivals and giving thanks, for peppermint candy and evergreen needles, for wassailing and hall-decking, and for the sounds of Mariah Carey's Christmas renditions playing on repeat. (In the spirit of honesty, I admit I am known to play a certain Carey holiday classic on loop in the Reason offices no matter the time of year, but I digress.)
It's also the time for gift-giving!
But this year, is, uh, a bit different. The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on 2020, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who hopes we never again have a time of year like this one. This is my grown-up Christmas list.
Yet the world keeps on turning in these unorthodox times, and you still have to find a way to get that shopping done—even if you're in, say, California, as I am, where stay-at-home restrictions have made patronizing your favorite businesses a bit difficult. Take heart! The Reason team has you covered with a slew of creative and personality-driven suggestions to make your present-hunting a bit easier in these trying times.
I would be remiss if I didn't recommend A Glorious Liberty: Frederick Douglass and the Fight for an Antislavery Constitution, a new book by Reason's own Damon Root about the man who, perhaps more than anyone, insisted that the U.S. live up to its founding principles. "Root and Douglass, like root beer and ice cream, are an irresistible American combination," writes The Washington Post's George Will in a review. Yum.
Also at the very top of everyone's lists should be Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting by Reason's Ron Bailey and the Cato Institute's Marian Tupy. It makes a highly compelling case that the world is, in fact, getting better, which, according to the data, will surprise the vast majority of America. (Shocking!) Don't just take their word for it, though—they've brought the receipts. The poverty rate? It's plummeted. Life expectancy? It's more than doubled over the last century. Natural resources? There's more of them, and they cost less. After the year we've all had, we could use some good news. This book is good news.
And for any number of miscellaneous ideas, check out the weekly recommendations from The Reason Roundtable, our flagship podcast where editors sign off with their favorite cultural items of the moment, whether it be a novel, a video game, a cocktail-infused newsletter, or, in last week's case, Reason magazine itself. (We sell yearly gift subscriptions for less than $20, which is well worth the cost of converting a friend!)
As for a personal recommendation, I love to give experiences—Celine Dion tickets, a trip to the ballet, a bird-watching cruise, oh my!—but those are likely moot for the next several months. The birds will have to wait. So might I suggest you do one better and donate an experience in the name of that friend or family member who has a soft spot for criminal justice reform? There's the Pawsitive Change Prison Program courtesy of Marley's Mutts Dog Rescue, a group that hopes to reduce recidivism by teaching inmates how to train at-risk shelter pups over a rigorous 14-week curriculum. For the more religious giftee, you can send your dollars to a number of initiatives at Prison Fellowship; my favorite is the Prison Fellowship Academy, which employs a personalized approach to tackling the root cause of an inmate's criminal past so that they'll avoid a criminal future. And if you're looking for a family bonding activity, pick out some prison pen pals and send some holiday cheer via snail mail.
Now, without further ado, here are your Reason writers' and editors' carefully honed and versatile picks for spreading some holiday cheer. Glad tidings! —Billy Binion, Assistant Editor
For the budding scientist (or the hardheaded science denier):
What is science? A serviceable definition can be summed up as follows: It is the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world using a systematic, evidence-based methodology.
Scottish psychologist Stuart Ritchie persuasively and urgently makes that case in Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth: "Science, the discipline in which we should find the harshest skepticism, the most pin-point rationality, and the hardest-headed empiricism," he writes, "has become home to a dizzying array of incompetence, delusion, lies, and self-deception. In the process, the central purpose of science—to find our way ever closer to truth—is being undermined."
That might sound familiar right about now as we navigate a pandemic where swaths of people disagree on the facts. Fortunately, Ritchie outlines the necessary steps to take in order to restore trust in science by, among other things, encouraging replication, applying anti-plagiarism algorithms, requiring open access to all data, and reducing the incentives to overhype findings. —Ron Bailey, Science Correspondent
For the picky (yet practical!) coffee snob:
Getting through 2020 has required a lot of caffeine, but it's also changed how I've prioritized the coffee-making experience. Side trips to the office coffeemaker or the café down the block have been limited. Using a pour-over kit or French press might be nice for that first cup, but there's no way I'm going through that whole process five or six times before 3 p.m.
And yet efficiently making a large enough volume of coffee to last all day presents other problems. How do you keep it warm without being left with burnt dregs, the unavoidable result of a glass carafe sitting on a warming plate for hours?
The Hamilton Beach BrewStation has been the answer for me. It makes 12 cups at a time—enough to keep even the most hardened addict set for a few hours—and has an internal reservoir with a built-in heating element to limit burning. The last cup won't taste exactly like the first sip, but then again, nothing ever does.
And it costs less than what you used to spend on Starbucks in a couple of weeks. Once the BrewStation pays for itself, use the savings to order up some bags of fresh beans from a local coffee shop (or someplace halfway across the country), get out your Reason mug, and offer cheers to the globe-spanning supply chains that make it all possible. —Eric Boehm, Reporter
For the seasoned gamer:
Euphoria is just one emotion you'll feel when playing this ultra-complex, post-apocalyptic-themed, worker-placement board game from Stonemaier Games.
Between two to six players compete to "build a better dystopia" by collecting resources and artifacts in a Brave New World-like landscape, all while trying to keep their workers' morale high and their intelligence low (lest they get dissatisfied with their station in this totalitarian future).
The gameplay itself resembles other worker-placement games like Settlers of Catan, though it comes with a lot more rules, pieces, and ways to win. That occasionally frustrating level of detail creates a steep learning curve for beginners, but also a tremendous amount of replay value for veteran players trying to find the optimal path to victory.
Euphoria's strategic depth and bizarre—yet charming!—artwork help justify the higher-than-average list price, making it the perfect gift for that special board game nerd in your life. —Christian Britschgi, Associate Editor
For the fashionable libertarian:
I bought one of these
scarves at the Free State Project's Liberty Forum last February and have had so many people ask where I got it. It's a really nice weight and texture and has held up well with washing. Plus, it can double as a face covering, with some libertarian flair, in a pinch!"No one will step on THIS snake while you wear it," reads the product description. Can confirm. —Elizabeth Nolan Brown, Senior Editor
For the self-care queen (or king):
Libertarians, it's time to take a break. It's been a hard year for everyone and it looks like the discourse will only get worse. So after reading some Reason stories for the day, treat yourself or someone you love to the gift of self-care.
Start with a blessed bar of soap from Monastery Creations. This ain't your momma's bar of soap! It's actually your sister's. Well, a Catholic sister's, created entirely by the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. I personally recommend the sage meadow bar, which has worked wonders for my face. Each batch is made with a few drops of holy water and a prayer—something we all could use a little of after this unsettling year.
Pair with this ginger/orange/eucalyptus candle from Reason icon Lauren Krisai, who's been an important criminal justice reform advocate over the years.
And lastly, listen to queen Blue Ivy Carter narrate Matthew Cherry's "Hair Love" in the background, a book which I may or may not be recommending because the main character shares a name with another Reason writer who also cares a lot about criminal justice reform. (That would be me.) —Zuri Davis, Assistant Editor
For the baby crypto bro:
"How do I invest in bitcoin?"
That's a question that more people than ever will be asking the libertarians in their lives this holiday season, thanks to the recent stunning price surge and bullish chatter on CNBC and elsewhere. The simple answer: Open an account on Coinbase or the Cash App, or buy some on PayPal, which recently started allowing U.S. customers to purchase cryptocurrencies inside their accounts. These platforms are like any other exchange or financial account: Send them money, and they'll purchase and take care of your bitcoins for you.
That's the easy way to do it, but it doesn't take advantage of one of bitcoin's game-changing attributes. Satoshi Nakamoto created the first digital asset without third-party intermediaries. That means you can physically hold possession of your own bitcoins, so governments will have a harder time confiscating them. If you think that's wildly implausible, remember that in 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order making it illegal for Americans to own gold. It wasn't repealed until 1974. So this holiday season, encourage the budding bitcoin enthusiasts in your life to use Nakamoto's invention the way it was intended. Gift them "hardware wallets," which are basically flash drives with all sorts of advanced security features built in to keep cryptocurrency from being lost or stolen.
How will they get bitcoins onto the device? They'll be able to connect their hardware wallets to a computer to transact with other users or cryptocurrency exchanges. It's like having your own digital gold vault doubling as a full-service bank that conveniently slips into a pocket or a desk drawer.
There are a handful of reputable brands, including Trezor, which sells the entry-level "model one" for $55. Many people also swear by the elegant Ledger Nano S, which retails for $59. Buy only direct from the companies to make it less likely that the built-in software has been tampered with by hackers. Being your own bank is terrifying and exhilarating. Help your friends and family join the monetary revolution! —Jim Epstein, Executive Editor of Reason TV
For the boomer who still enjoys a little Reefer Madness:
This year, why not give the gift of a safe, increasingly legal way to get a little distance from reality? Thanks to at least some form of legalization or decriminalization in every state, there has never been a better time to make and share edibles with your loved ones.
I particularly recommend pot brownies for your boomer friends and relatives, who likely have residual nostalgia for THC in baked-goods form, but may not have the wherewithal to acquire their own supply in the current grey market. Remember that while many states have legalized it, cannabis has yet to be legalized at the federal level, so be cautious about interstate shipping. If you're looking to buy close to your recipient, try Where's Weed. But everyone loves a homemade gift, so consider making your own according to my well-tested official Reason recipe. Feel free to hit me up on Twitter if you have questions or just need help with the math. —Katherine Mangu-Ward, Editor in Chief
For the self-reliant problem-solver (with a resilient stomach):
For many years, I relied on chemical clog-busting gels to fix a slow bathtub drain, knowing full well that such products are bad for the environment and corrosive on pipes. But when Drano failed me earlier this year, I took some inspiration from desert DIYer and Reason Contributing Editor J.D. Tuccille, and I set about finding a more sustainable and hands-on approach.
My local hardware store sold me a short metal snake that had a claw on the end and a spring-loaded trigger on the other. This device is very cool, but proved impossible to get through the cross grate caulked into the floor of my bathtub. As a renter, I didn't feel comfortable disassembling anything I couldn't put back together with a screwdriver. I also didn't like the idea of asking my landlords to pay a plumber for a hairball problem.
So I asked myself: What would J.D. do?
I went back to researching, and that's when I discovered the Annie Sullivan of plumbing products: a flexible plastic strand with teeth and a pull tab. No matter how small your tub drain, this plastic thing can get through it. No matter how thick the hairball lurking in your pipes, this plastic thing will grab it and pull it out. A pack of them on Amazon costs less than $10, and each one can be used several times apiece.
My advice? Snake the drain after a shower. The hairball will be wet and slimy and easier to pull out in one giant, satisfying mass. —Mike Riggs, Deputy Managing Editor
For the friend who still uses a filing cabinet (and who really should stop doing that):
The reMarkable 2 is part of that class of luxury object that does very little—but does it very well. It's a black and white tablet that can't play music and won't let you surf the internet. Instead, it offers a digital replacement for paper that looks and feels almost like the real thing. Take notes by hand and the software will convert your words to text and email them to the destination of your choice. Sketch out ideas during a brainstorming session and then use the reMarkable desktop app to refer back to the results. Read and mark up (grayscale) documents and save them in the cloud, freeing up coveted office storage space that might otherwise be filled by notebooks and three-ring binders. A Chrome browser extension even lets you convert web articles to PDF and transfer them to your device for offline consumption.
Billed as the thinnest tablet on the market, the reMarkable 2 features an eye-friendly (and energy-efficient) E Ink display—the kind made famous by old-school Kindles. Its user interface is simple and relatively intuitive. And its pressure sensitivity allows the stylus to impressively mimic the experience of writing or drawing with a real pen or marker. There's no question that $399 feels steep for a device that won't even let you check Facebook. But the lack of distractions is part of the selling proposition: By cutting out everything that's not essential, the reMarkable suggests, it can bring focus and pleasure back to the tasks of reading, writing, and thinking. —Stephanie Slade, Managing Editor
For the bar-hopper who can no longer hop to bars:
Bitters are an essential part of many classic cocktails, including the Old Fashioned, the first cocktail in the American tradition. A boozy infusion of herbs, roots, and spices, bitters are generally used in tiny drops, as a kind of cocktail flavoring. They're the bartender's spice rack.
Sadly, the cocktail bitters that were used in early drinks were lost by Prohibition. Today they exist only as replicas, like The Bitter Truth's Bogart's Bitters, a historical recreation of the brand first mentioned in Jerry Thomas's seminal 1862 cocktail book, extra booze you've been buying in 2020. —Peter Suderman, Features Editor
For the modern John Wayne:
Who doesn't like a .22 caliber gun? They're handy plinkers, capable of clearing varmints out of the garden, and of putting small game in the pot. They don't cost a lot to feed and can be handled by pretty much anybody who cares to develop shooting and survival skills. And the caliber is available in everything from classic revolvers, to single-shot youth rifles, to semiautomatics that can be tricked out in ways that make coastal politicians suffer heart palpitations.
But sometimes you want to blast bunnies in the backyard without getting the neighbors all hot and bothered. That's where the .22 air rifle comes in—a punchier bigger brother to the classic .177 caliber. After years of pumping an ancient Benjamin air pistol to knock down rabbits—which conveniently rely on "make more rabbits" as their survival strategy—I recently purchased a break-action air rifle.
My choice was the Stoeger S4000-E, a single-shot weapon powered by a gas piston that compresses when you open the action (with a fair exertion of strength) to insert the pellet. Unlike firearms, pneumatics can be fitted with sound suppressors without regulatory muss and fuss, and this Stoeger has one integrated. The result is a remarkably quiet shooter that can knock down pests and small game without raising eyebrows.
Like many air guns, the Stoeger is finicky about pellets. But at a time when even .22 long rifle ammo can be pricey and difficult to find, pellets remain abundant and inexpensive for even the better brands. The trigger is a bit mushy no matter how you adjust it, so feel free to go up-market if your budget allows (the Diana 34 is well-regarded). But for me the price vs. quality point is right and I have no complaints so far. In most jurisdictions, pneumatic weapons are unregulated or subject to light regulation relative to firearms, so chances are you'll be able to ship this directly to the recipient with little or no hassle. —J.D. Tuccille, Contributing Editor
For the nostalgic Middle-earth vagabond:
There is a persuasive argument to be made that, like the Beatles catalog, there really are no nourishing crumbs left from the never-ending lembas cake that is J.R.R. Tolkien and his signature Hobbit/Lord of the Rings stories.
Besides the books themselves, plus the lovingly realized and controversially expanded Peter Jackson film adaptations, and even the wince-inducing Led Zeppelin lyrics, there's plenty more for completists to scratch their itches with—the lousy 1978 animated movie, the probably-shoulda-stayed-unpublished Silmarillion, the mercifully shorter Leonard Nimoy song. There was a young-J.R.R.-in-love biopic as recently as last year, as many video games as Gandalf has nicknames, and, oh yeah, the sprawling Amazon TV series is back in production this month.
Yet in this age of ephemeral, cloud-based media-on-demand, there's a hole near the center of the Middle-earth content mill that can be filled only with a fairly significant chunk of change…and shelf space. It's well-known that Tolkien was a top linguist and unbeatable world-maker—writing book-length backstories, inventing whole languages, and drawing and redrawing meticulous maps. But the diminutive writer was also one hell of a visual artist, painting and sketching often in vivid purples and pinks the Lonely Mountain, the mines of Moria, the bucolic valley of Rivendell.
Most of Tolkien's submitted artworks, alas, were rejected by his publishers for reasons of cost, and so tens of millions of us first and most lastingly encountered his startlingly thorough vision through dog-eared paperbacks with smashed-up words and the odd hand-drawn map of Mirkwood. An immersive literary experience, to be sure, but less than what could have been.
Two special editions of the source material started the process of redressing that oversight. The 50th anniversary hardcover edition of The Hobbit from 1987, currently retailing at $125, has a handsome gold cover with some authorial rune work, plus some fine black-and-white drawings, more maps, and rich color renderings of Hobbiton and the dragon Smaug. The 50th anniversary hardcover of The Lord of the Rings from 2004 (just $70.49!) similarly includes some fold-out maps, color paintings, and gilded packaging.
More recently, and more competitively priced, is the 2015 collection The Art of the Lord of the Rings, which showcases most of Tolkien's visual output in one volume. But my main recommendation is tied to the 2019 Morgan Library & Museum exhibition that first opened my eyes to the philologist's surprisingly good paintings. Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, by Catherine McIlwaine, is only $57.27, the largest repository of Tolkienia ever assembled, and—I can testify!—a crowd-pleaser for the LoTR fanatic in your household. —Matt Welch, Editor at Large
For the wanderlust-ridden globetrotter catching the first flight post-pandemic:
I am a glutton for coffee-table books, with their glossy pages and their strange specificity—long-haired surf stars of the early aughts? Vogue magazine covers? Cabin porn? Pantone colors over the last hundred years? I'll take them all, gladly swimming through stacks of them whenever fancy house parties exist again and I can enter other people's living rooms with happy abandon. But none stands out so much as the recent release Xi'an Famous Foods: The Cuisine of Western China, from New York's Favorite Noodle Shop, which is best categorized as a mix of the two most glorious mediums: cookbook and coffee-table book.
If you've never been to one of Xi'an Famous Foods' dozen or so locations in New York City, make haste and remedy that. But since the pandemic has rendered travel much more difficult, you can also live vicariously through this book, and even take a stab at some of their recipes and techniques from the privacy of your own kitchen.
If you're an eating enthusiast, but not much of a cook yourself, you'll benefit from the guide to NYC's various Chinatowns (Flushing in Queens, Sunset Park in Brooklyn, and the classic one in Manhattan). If you're a drinker, you'll appreciate the green tea/Hennessy cocktail recipe that purports to help you "lose your karaoke stage fright" in a hurry—something we might all need help with after a year of being boring shut-ins. And if you're just, well, a libertarian, you'll appreciate Jason Wang's family's immigration story from Xi'an—a "dry, dusty city in northwestern China," heavily influenced by the flavors of the Middle East, full of charcoal smoke and "rough, ragged street noodles swimming in bright red chili"—to Michigan, then Connecticut, then finally Queens.
Wang tells the story of his dad, David Shi, laboring for years, working in restaurants all over the Eastern Seaboard before finally opening up the first Xi'an location in a 200-square-foot basement stall in a shopping mall in Flushing. Shi logged 20-hour days, the simple street fare gained a massive following, and eventually the food-world documentarian Anthony Bourdain came in with a film crew, helping to propel the restaurant to a place of well-deserved prominence.
The operation has expanded in the years since, and has even put out meal kits so customers can try their hand at reproducing Xi'an's famous hand-ripped noodles and spicy cumin lamb at home. In a world that's looked especially bleak for restaurateurs over the last year, put your dollars toward helping some really great labors of love survive, and subtly make the case to skeptics on your gift list that immigration makes America tastier and more entrepreneurial (among other perks) while you're at it. —Liz Wolfe, Staff Editor
The post The Ultimate 2020 Libertarian Gift Guide appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>With Democrats staring down the possibility of Republicans maintaining control of the Senate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and 12 other Democratic Senators want President-elect Joe Biden to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt by using the Education Department's power "to modify, compromise, waive, or release student loans."
Warren promised during her own presidential campaign that she would, if elected, "direct the Secretary of Education to use their authority to begin to compromise and modify federal student loans consistent with my plan to cancel up to $50,000 in debt for 95% of student loan borrowers (about 42 million people)." It appears she'd like Biden to do the same.
This would be quite a gift for many student loan borrowers who still have outstanding balances (myself included). As the Manhattan Institute's Beth Akers noted last year, the typical four-year college graduate completes their degree with less than $30,000 in student loan debt. Meanwhile, the College Board's most recent effort to calculate the lifetime earnings premium of a college degree finds that the average four-year degree holder makes $400,000 more over their working lifetime than someone with just a high school diploma. In 2015, researchers Christopher R. Tamborini, ChangHwan Kim, and Arthur Sakamoto published a paper in Demography that measured the 50-year lifetime earnings gap between high school graduates and bachelor's degree holders at $896,000 for men and $630,000 for women. In 2011, Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce pegged the B.A. earnings premium at $964,000. Whether the premium is shrinking or we're just getting better at measuring it—or some combination of both—it's still a good return on what comes out to roughly $7,000 in interest for borrowers who repay the average-sized loan in the standard 10-year timeframe.
As I outlined in a feature earlier this year, many student loan borrowers do not feel like they're getting a good deal. That's because while federally issued and guaranteed loans have made it possible for the poorest Americans to attain education, those subsidies have also driven up the cost of education at a rate multiple times higher than inflation. It is also now quite clear that making student loan debt easy to accumulate but nearly impossible to discharge in bankruptcy (which I also cover in the above-linked feature) has helped millions of students get ahead while enabling a smaller (but still large) number of students to borrow money they can't repay in order to purchase degree programs they can't complete, can't utilize, or can't recognize as crap.
A Democratic administration is unlikely to do nothing on student loans, but even when it comes to borrowers who have the hardest time making their payments, there are policies that do not involve giving money away to the upper-middle class. As education researcher Susan Dynarski wrote in The New York Times in 2015, it's actually people who borrow the least amount of money that have the hardest time repaying it:
Defaults are concentrated among the millions of students who drop out without a degree, and they tend to have smaller debts. That is where the serious problem with student debt is. Students who attended a two- or four-year college without earning a degree are struggling to find well-paying work to pay off the debt they accumulated.
Most borrowers have small debts, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; 43 percent borrowed less than $10,000, and 72 percent less than $25,000. And borrowers with the smallest debts are most likely to default. Of those borrowing under $5,000 for college, 34 percent end up in default. The default rate steadily drops as borrowing increases. Among the small group (just 3 percent) of those borrowing more than $100,000, the default rate is just 18 percent.
If the Education Department forgave up to $50,000 in student loan debt for every borrower, it would be helping many people like myself who don't need it at the expense of the public fisc (and where is the "free" money for people who paid off their student loans, or haven't gone or won't ever go to college?). The stimulus effect would likely be small, considering that the money a liberated borrower would now have to spend on something other than student loans is not the full amount of the loan, but the monthly payment. As with the COVID-19 stimulus checks, borrowers might bank that amount or put it toward other debts.
The most libertarian policy preference in my view is two-pronged: get the federal government out of the lending and guaranteeing game, and make student loan debt reasonably dischargeable in bankruptcy. These two policies would realign the incentives of colleges, lenders, and students to bring down prices and saddle fewer potential students with loans they are unlikely to repay.
If that is a bridge too far for Biden and a Democratic Congress—and it probably is, considering those policies would also make it harder for low-income students to borrow and the market upheaval would probably snuff out a significant number of schools—Dynarski's writing has convinced me that rethinking repayment timeframes is an acceptable middle way:
One solution is to lengthen the timeframe of loan repayment. In the U.S., the standard is for borrowers to repay their loans in ten years. Other countries let students pay back their loans over a far longer horizon. In Sweden, students pay their loans back over 25 years. For a $20,000 loan with an interest rate of 4.3 percent, this longer repayment would mean a monthly payment of $100 instead of $200.
Borrowers with very low earnings will struggle with even a payment of $100. Some countries, including England and Australia, therefore link payments directly to income, so that borrowers pay little to nothing during hard times.
Income-driven repayment (IDR), various forms of which U.S. borrowers have been able to apply for since 2009, caps your monthly payment as a percentage of your income and extends the repayment period from 120 months to 300 months. Make 25 years' worth of payments under any one of several IDR plans, and your balance is forgiven, with the forgiven amount taxed as income.
Researcher Daniel Herbst found that transitioning struggling borrowers onto IDR reduced payment delinquency and increased their credit scores. The Congressional Research Service issued a report in 2019 on loan forgiveness and repayment plans in which it said it is too soon to measure (or even estimate) the full impact of IDR. Some estimates predict 33 percent of IDR participant will fail to pay off their balance after 25 years, but the amount they pay over 300 months could still exceed the amount they borrowed for all but the poorest loan holders (and you're not getting blood from those stones no matter how hard you squeeze).
A longer repayment plan tied to income is also a sensible way to think about the returns of student loan debt, which under the conventional 10-year repayment model sees borrowers making the highest monthly payments when their income is lowest, and their lowest monthly payment after 10 years of post-college earnings. People who'd rather get payments done in 10 years (or sooner) would, of course, reserve that option. People who are struggling right out of school could pay more as they earn more, while people who will carry their debt to the grave no matter how it's structured should be able to seek relief in bankruptcy (which carries enough of a stigma to discourage abuse by physicians, lawyers, and other white-collar degree holders who accumulate large debts but also make a lot of money).
Working with Congress to improve the IDR process and allowing the most overleveraged borrowers to discharge their student loan debt in bankruptcy would go a long way toward alleviating real problems without further increasing the already generous premium enjoyed by people who complete four-year (and two-year!) college degrees.
The post Senate Democrats Want Biden To Unilaterally Forgive Billions of Dollars in Student Loans appeared first on Reason.com.
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