Meet the Thighmaster of urban public policy: streetcars.
Municipal politicians across the country have convinced themselves that this costly, clunky hardware can revitalize their flabby downtown economies.
That includes the fearless leaders of America's capital city. The D.C. government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the last decade trying to erect a streetcar line in the up-and-coming neighborhood of H Street. The project has been an epic disaster, perfectly demonstrating how ill-suited streetcars are to modern urban life.
Watch the full video above, or click below for downloadable versions. And subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel for daily content like this.
Run time: About 5 mins.
Produced by Rob Montz, who also hosts. Camera by Todd Krainin. Graphics by Jason Keisling and Meredith Bragg.
The post The Secret Scam of Streetcars: How to Sell a 100-Year-Old Technology as the Future of Transportation appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Meet the Thighmaster of urban public policy: streetcars.
Municipal politicians across the country have convinced themselves that this costly, clunky hardware can revitalize their flabby downtown economies.
That includes the fearless leaders of America's capital city. The D.C. government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the last decade trying to erect a streetcar line in the up-and-coming neighborhood of H Street. The project has been an epic disaster, perfectly demonstrating how ill-suited streetcars are to modern urban life.
Watch the full video above, or click below for downloadable versions. And subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel for daily content like this.
Run time: About 5 mins.
Produced by Rob Montz, who also hosts. Camera by Todd Krainin. Graphics by Jason Keisling and Meredith Bragg.
The post The Secret Scam of Streetcars: How to Sell a 100-Year-Old Technology as the Future of Transportation appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the imagination of the American Left, Scandinavia, that cluster of northern European countries defined by sky-high taxes, expansive welfare policies, and seemingly limitless enthusiasm for snow-related activities, presents the ideal alternative to the rough-and-tumble of American capitalism. They're peaceful. They're prosperous. And they routinely dominate the top spots in global "happiness rankings."
Enter The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia, a cover-to-cover delight from English journalist Michael Booth puncturing the caricature of the region as a semi-socialist paradise. The book, which has just been published in the U.S., is especially powerful in its dissection of the culturally corrosive effects of Scandinavia's expansive state power, which seems to "smother its people's motivation, ambition, and spirit."
A full fifth of Danish adults don't work and live exclusively on public benefits. Norwegian media is so deeply dull that one of its most popular television shows ever is—this is for real—a seven-hour real-time feed from a camera mounted on a train traversing mountains. Booth calls the prevailing Swedish political norms "benign totalitarianism."
And yet, Booth's book is not a takedown. It's just a realistic portrait. And plenty of other things he details about these countries are genuinely admirable. Sweden has spent the last couple decades on a Thatcher-like crusade to privatize large swaths of its public sector and now boasts one of the more business-friendly tax and regulatory environments in the world. Denmark has remarkably high levels of social trust: it's common for diners to leave their toddlers in strollers outside the restaurant. There's also Finland's exceptional gender equality, Norway's savvy management of its massive oil wealth, and Iceland's…uhh…muscle mass?
Reason recently chatted with Booth about his book's core insights.
One of your overriding observations is that Scandinavian cultures tend to breed what Americans would perceive as a stultifying conformity. You give this impression of Denmark, for instance, as a nation filled with dull Ned Flander-types—a bunch of public sector retirees that spend their summers at communal singing retreats.
In other cultures, you have "tall poppy syndrome," where if a reality star makes a record or buys a Lamborghini, they'll get pilloried in the media. The difference in Scandinavia is that tall poppy syndrome applies to everyone all the time. So if you show naked ambition or arrogance, you will get cut down to size. "Don't think you are that special, don't show off, don't boast." No one wears a suit and tie in parliament. It's extraordinary.
If you want an incredibly equal, socially cohesive society, you definitely lose something by way of individuality, eccentricity, diversity. Often I'm asked, "Could the Nordic template be applied to Britain or America?" And the answer is no. You can't just hope that people will suddenly become conformist and driven by equality. It doesn't work that way.
On the other hand, I live here in Denmark, almost out of my own free will. [He's married to a Dane.] And I appreciate so much about it right now. But yeah, there are reservations of course. To put it really brutally simply: living here can be a bit boring.
And that emphasis on equality saturates Scandinavia's much-vaunted public schools, right?
We sent our kids to a mainstream state school, which is based on the principles of raising the lower ability children up to the median. It's all-inclusive, so you can't exclude children if they're badly behaved or have special needs or that kind of thing. That didn't work from our point of view. Our children didn't take well to having chairs thrown at them and teachers not turning up.
I was in Copenhagen a while ago and I saw two or three kids have an impromptu running race on the pavement and one of the kids won and did an American-football-style celebration. His mother grabbed him by the arm and scolded him for that.
My son's class did a production of Treasure Island. The teachers rotated the class so that in every scene someone different played Long John Silver or Jack Hawkins or whatever. It made absolute nonsense of any sense of drama or narrative. But again, it was this idea: Everyone should have their turn. Everyone should be treated equally, rather than celebrate one student who was a great singer or actor.
You seem to have mixed feelings about Denmark's tax rates.
We literally have the highest taxes in the world. They're not just quite high: They're the absolute highest.
I don't see that mirrored in quality of services. The education system ranks about level with the United Kingdom, which is not great shakes and nothing to be proud of. Similarly, the health service is struggling and creaking. Its not commensurate with the highest taxes in the world.
A quick detour to the semi-feral people of Iceland: Their distinctive traits seem to be this overbearing need to try to channel an ancient Viking machismo and the fact that there are so few of them.
If you meet an Icelander, you should consider it as if you've seen a snow leopard. They are kind of an endangered species—well, they're not endangered, actually, because they're good at breeding. They're all quite closely interrelated, which is a bit awkward when it comes to breeding. So there's an app so if you're in a bar in Reykjavík and you meet another Icelander you take a fancy to, you can both use this app to make sure you're not too closely related before you pair off.
Some of these Scandinavian countries have tightly restrictive immigration policies driven by radical right-wing parties that are quickly growing in popularity. You point out that Anders Breivik, the neo-nazi psychopath behind the 2011 mass shooting in Norway, was a member of a political party that now controls something like 15 percent of the Norwegian parliament.
Scandinavian immigration policies are very different depending on what country you're talking about. Sweden has an amazingly humanitarian, open-door policy, which has been extremely beneficial to their economy over the last few years. Norway has been very closed off, with record numbers of repatriations recently.
Breivik left that party because he didn't find them extreme enough, in their defense. But after his attacks, in which 77 people died, the biggest mass killing in the history of Norway, the party actually for the first time was elected into a coalition government. And their leader is the finance minister now. You could call it a mixed message about how Norwegians feel about immigration and integration.
Sweden's immigration policies are obviously admirable, but you detail the serious problems it's had with integration.
Sweden has tended toward ghettoization. Sweden has all sorts of problems because it makes this whole conversation a bit of a taboo. There's a kind of self-censorship in the Swedish media. For the last 100 years, it has considered itself the modernist, progressive country, a moral guiding light for Europe, if not the world. It's an uncomfortable truth to have to face up to that maybe they've got it a little bit wrong.
Now that you've immersed yourself in Scandinavian culture, what most sticks out to you when you visit the United States?
The obvious thing is the diversity—ethnic diversity, economic diversity, cultural diversity. They're exponentially larger in the States. And a superficial things but it means a lot: People are just so friendly and chatty and nice, which you do not get in Scandinavia. Coming to the U.S. is like a warm bath. People talk to you on the street.
As far as politics, you have such an extremely polarized political landscape. It's totally anathema to the coalition, consensus-built model that works in Scandinavia.
The post Scandinavia is a Collectivist Paradise? Not So Much. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Bearing Witness to the Charter School Revolution," Filmed By Paul Detrick, Alex Manning and Zach Weissmueller. Edited by Rob Montz. About 35 minutes.
Original release date was April 21, 2015 and original writeup is below.
"School choice is the single catalytic reform," explains Andrew Campanella, the president of National School Choice Week. "Parents understand that if they choose the right school for their child, great things will happen."
At Reason Weekend 2015, Reason Foundation's annual donor event, Campanella was joined by Lisa Snell, director of education at the Reason Foundation, to discuss how freedom in education is transforming the lives of students all across the country.
The post Bearing Witness to the Charter School Revolution appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"School choice is the single catalytic reform," explains Andrew Campanella, the president of National School Choice Week. "Parents understand that if they choose the right school for their child, great things will happen."
At Reason Weekend 2015, Reason Foundation's annual donor event, Campanella was joined by Lisa Snell, director of education at the Reason Foundation, to discuss how freedom in education is transforming the lives of students all across the country.
About 35 minutes.
Filmed by Alex Manning, Zach Weissmueller, and Paul Detrick. Edited by Rob Montz.
Scroll down for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube Channel to receive automatic notifications when new material goes live.
The post Bearing Witness to the Charter School Revolution appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"School choice is the single catalytic reform," explains Andrew Campanella, the president of National School Choice Week. "Parents understand that if they choose the right school for their child, great things will happen."
At Reason Weekend 2015, Reason Foundation's annual donor event, Campanella was joined by Lisa Snell, director of education at the Reason Foundation, to discuss how freedom in education is transforming the lives of students all across the country.
About 35 minutes.
Filmed by Alex Manning, Zach Weissmueller, and Paul Detrick. Edited by Rob Montz.
Scroll down for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube Channel to receive automatic notifications when new material goes live.
The post Bearing Witness to the Charter School Revolution appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Most successful academic philosophers spend their entire professional lives operating in self-satisfied insularity, exclusively trafficking in opaque jargon in obscure journals on technical issues of approximately zero application to ordinary life.
Colin McGinn is a notable exception. He's also a high-profile victim of the destructive ideological witch hunts now conducted on American college campuses with distressing frequency. Reason recently Skyped with McGinn to get his side of the fall and to discuss his landmark philosophical arguments, which advance an epistemic modesty that should resonate with libertarians. As he puts it, "there's no shame in admitting there's a basic ignorance about our conception of the world."
Born into an English mining town, McGinn's 40-year career includes hundreds of essays and dozens of books specifically geared to a general audience, on topics ranging from Shakespeare to cinema to drug decriminalization.
It's disappointing how little interest the average philosophy department has in this kind of engagement with the broader culture. McGinn says most of his colleagues viewed his non-technical work with a "mix of disdain and envy." The pretense is that professors should be free to indulge in pure reason unpolluted by popular opinion or market demands. Yet so much of the writing produced by academic philosophers is saturated with opaque insidery jargon that's just meant to signal the author's membership in a exclusive intellectual club. "Most philosophical writing is simply unclear. And [the authors are] incapable of being clear."
Ironically, communicating with a broader audience imposes exactly the discipline of thought that's largely absent from academic papers. "You have to go back to the basics and express the basic ideas clearly. If you just write in jargon, you never have to confront the basic ideas and arguments. You just repeat the words that other people use."
At the same time, McGinn's contributions to technical philosophical debates have been substantial enough to secure him tenured posts at several major American universities. That's an exceedingly rare combination of academic accolades and pop-culture fluency.
In 2012, though, something sad happened. His career imploded amidst accusations of an improper relationship with a female graduate student. No one claimed their relationship was sexual. It appears to have been a complicated, power-imbalanced emotional thicket between a star professor and an admiring mentee that may have turned inappropriate without actually violating the university's code of conduct.
But never mind the facts. The academy's self-righteous outrage machine quickly kicked into gear and a bunch of McGinn's colleagues ganged up to denounce him as a sexist predator. The administration at his employer at the time, the University of Miami, urged him to leave before disciplinary hearings had even started. "I wasn't receiving due process. They started asking me to resign. They didn't give me any reason."
After a couple months under intense presure, he complied. "The cards were totally stacked against me because the rules allowed the university to do whatever it wanted." (For more details about McGinn's case, see this excellent investigation from Katie Roiphe in Slate, which describes the professional carnage as "a great deal of destruction for a strange amorphous amorous entanglement.")
That particular blind moral crusade is a symptom of a larger problem. Professors and administrators often "force more complex phenomena into very simplified narratives with stock characters," McGinn says. In his case, they fixated on a politically fashionable story—sexual harassment perpetrated by a powerful white male, equipped with the accent of the Great Colonizer, no less!—that ignores the nuances of an actual human relationship. "That's what ideology does. It's a set of nice simple categories so you can process much more complicated facts."
Within this regime of enforced ideological homogeneity, the expression of unpopular opinions on sacred subjects is considered a kind of mind-violence. "There's lip service to the idea of free speech, but it's only within a narrow band of opinion. You have to toe the line. You can't have an individual point of view on racism or sexism or things like that. Forget it."
How exactly does the moist meat of the brain generate the thinking, feeling, choosing "I" that's now reading this sentence? It's a baffling question. McGinn's major technical philosophical contributions are about this "mind-body problem."
He's skeptical we'll ever fully work out the connection. We should "think of ourselves as having an evolved brain and an evolved intelligence which has some inherent limits. The possible reason we're having such a problem [scientifically explaining consciousness] is because of these inherent limits on our understanding of the world."
This position, commonly called "mysterianism," is grounded in an epistemic modesty libertarians should recognize—and embrace.
The faculty of reason is wonderful. It brought us air conditioning and tapas and the smallpox vaccine. But seeing it as all-powerful is a "strangely egotistical view of humanity. Would we say the same about the other human species that co-existed with us several million years ago. Do you think Neanderthals could necessarily understand every truth about reality?"
McGinn shares my wholehearted enthusiasm for the secular rationalist project. But many of its advocates seem to have simply swapped out the stodgy dogmas of traditional religion for an arrogant scientific triumphalism that quarters no doubt about the power of the human mind. He provides a welcome reminder not to "confuse materialism with the idea that somehow everything in the end will be explained. Why make such an optimistic assumption?"
"The physical world itself is very mysterious. Nothing in evolution says that we should be able to use those brains to understand everything about reality. That's just faith. It would be astonishing if the human brain as it now exists could get to the bottom of every question about nature. That would be an absolute miracle."
The post There's 'Just Lip Service to Free Speech' on College Campuses appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Why Are Pit Bulls Banned? How Media Scare Stories Create Stupid Laws was Produced by Rob Montz. About 5 mins.
Original release date was March 16, 2015 and original write up is below.
"This idea that aggression can be traced back to specific breeds is the folklore of a criminal subculture. This is not an idea that exists in science."
That's Janis Bradley, one of the country's premier experts on canine cognition, dismantling the idea at the heart of laws banning pit bulls, a dog breed that has become synonymous with violence, mayhem, and attacks on humans.
The post Why Are Pit Bulls Banned? How Media Scare Stories Create Stupid Laws appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"This idea that aggression can be traced back to specific breeds is the folklore of a criminal subculture. This is not an idea that exists in science."
That's Janis Bradley, one of the country's premier experts on canine cognition, dismantling the idea at the heart of laws banning pit bulls, a dog breed that has become synonymous with violence, mayhem, and attacks on humans.
Hundreds of counties, cities, and towns single out pit bulls for special attention and treatment, from outright bans on owning them to empowering law enforcement to extract dogs from non-compliant homes. But when we look past media scare stories and focus on how dogs are raised and handled, it turns out that pit bulls are not uniquely aggressive and dangerous, even as governments across the country are codifying scientifically illiterate prejudice into law.
About 5 minutes.
Produced by Rob Montz, who also hosts. Camera by Joshua Swain and Alexis Garcia. Graphics by Jason Keisling.
The post Why Are Pit Bulls Banned? How Media Hysteria Created Stupid Laws appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"This idea that aggression can be traced back to specific breeds is the folklore of a criminal subculture. This is not an idea that exists in science."
That's Janis Bradley, one of the country's premier experts on canine cognition, dismantling the idea at the heart of laws banning pit bulls, a dog breed that has become synonymous with violence, mayhem, and attacks on humans.
Hundreds of counties, cities, and towns single out pit bulls for special attention and treatment, from outright bans on owning them to empowering law enforcement to extract dogs from non-compliant homes. But when we look past media scare stories and focus on how dogs are raised and handled, it turns out that pit bulls are not uniquely aggressive and dangerous, even as governments across the country are codifying scientifically illiterate prejudice into law.
About 5 minutes.
Produced by Rob Montz, who also hosts. Camera by Joshua Swain and Alexis Garcia. Graphics by Jason Keisling.
The post Why Are Pit Bulls Banned? How Media Hysteria Created Stupid Laws appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Pat Tillman Freedom Plaza is situated just a couple hundred yards away from the entrance of the University of Phoenix Stadium, the host of this year's Super Bowl. Built by the home franchise Arizona Cardinals, the memorial features a solemn concrete slab surrounding a life-size bronze statue of its namesake, forever frozen in a warrior's roar. Patrick Daniel Tillman instantly became an icon of self-sacrificial patriotic enthusiasm when he walked away from a multi-million dollar NFL contract to join the Army Rangers in the wake of 9/11. His legend was secured when he was killed in action in April 2004.
Tillman was a man possessed of exceptional bravery and a fiercely independent mind. But his story is also one of cynical image management conducted at the highest levels of the American military in order to foster public support for war. And it's precisely this kind of pernicious narrative building that animates much of the U.S. military's marketing, which, it just so happens, thoroughly saturates NFL games.
Tillman died from "friendly fire." His Ranger platoon was traveling through a valley in Southeast Afghanistan when, in response to a couple of rifle shots from local insurgents aimed at the back half of the convoy, Tillman, another ranger, and a local Afghan militia fighter set up position overlooking the mouth of the valley. One of the tail-end humvees emerged, mistook Tillman and the others for enemies, and opened fire. During several minutes of shooting, three bullets shattered his skull. He'd been repeatedly shouting—screaming—"Why are you shooting at me? I'm Pat fucking Tillman!"
An internal investigation determined Tillman's death resulted from reckless bloodlust and "gross negligence," not exactly unpredictable phenomena when pairing young males with high-powered weaponry. One of the shooters flat-out admitted to investigators he'd failed to follow proper Ranger protocol for identifying a target because he "just wanted to be in a firefight."
The United States government immediately moved to suppress the circumstances of Tillman's death from the public and preserve a useful iconography. In violation of military regulations, Ranger personnel destroyed his body army, helmet and uniform. Top brass ordered his platoon mates not to tell his family he'd been killed by another American soldier. Tillman was posthumously awarded a Silver Star based on forged soldier testimony. And, contra explicit instructions he left on his deployment forms, officials gave him a full military funeral—nationally televised, of course, and including a Ranger eulogy claiming Tillman had died defending against a Taliban ambush.
Pat's mother, who thinks this cover-up extends to the highest reaches of the military, had to battle a stonewalling bureaucracy for years to unearth the truth about her son's death. Her fight culminated in a 2007 congressional hearing which, predictably, devolved into repulsive kabuki theater, capped off with the patented loose-skinned mendacity of one Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Pat Tillman is worthy of awe. But what the government did with his death is propaganda, full stop. It constructed a false narrative to advance a political agenda. And this is not an isolated incident. Such calculated image-crafting undergirds a lot of the American military's $700 million a year public marketing efforts.
You'll definitely see this in action today, as the NFL audience is replete with the military's prime recruitment demographic. The biggest chunk of that overall marketing total—about $200 million—goes to the Army, giving it the single biggest ad contract in the federal government. And the Army devotes a full five percent of its marketing budget just to television advertisements during NFL games.
An emblematic spot draws a crass parallel between competitive sports and combat:
Another from the Navy—which I've seen pop up while bearing witness to the sustained exercise in expensive mediocrity that is the Washington Redskins—scores a series of slow-motion action shots to some soldier testimonies filled with capitalized warrior watchwords ("Democracy," "Freedom," "Honor," etc.):
And I've seen at least one of these ads from the Marine Corps (1:06), whose marketing more than occasionally resembles a Jerry Bruckheimer-directed LSD trip:
This advertising relationship runs both ways. The NFL funnels about $800,000 a year to various military charities through its "Salute to Service" program—a pittance for a multi-billion dollar operation that pays its commissioner $44 million annually—and in return the league gets to drape itself in hollow pro-soldier branding.
We do not live in some sort of Chomskyite dystopia in which all patriotic sloganeering is simply a smokescreen for Halliburton to keep harvesting Arab orphans or what not. And I'm personally sympathetic to an emergent libertarian wing that rejects the extreme isolationism that has historically categorized the movement's foreign policy philosophy.
But marketing that myopically focuses on the theatrical heroics of soldiers does obscure the messy complexities of the battlefield. And it cultivates a reflexive sacralization that draws attention away from the often inept decision-making that puts our soldiers in harm's way in the first place.
And this is always worth repeating: the conception and execution of American wars in the 21st century has often been epically inept. In Iraq, as extensively documented, a complete lack of post-invasion planning left allied forces flat-footed once sectarian violence filled the power vacuum created by Saddam's fall. Seriously: a 21-year-old whose most significant job up to that point had been driving an ice cream truck was charged with purging the central government of Baathist militia.
The cost of this ineptitude comes denominated in corpses. Since 2001, 6,845 US soldiers have been killed in the Middle East theater. Thousands more have returned home ruined by the physical and psychological ravages of combat.
The military's agitprop, exemplified in the Tillman story, actively fosters a kind of lazy patriotism that makes people disinclined to ask tough questions about the broader context of our soldiers' sacrifice. Just snap a selfie with the statue, dutifully bow your head when some "support the troops"-type bromide gets blasted through stadium speakers during warm-ups, and that's it. You've done your duty. Now, can we please just get to the game?
The post Super Bowl XLIX as a Case Study in the Mechanics of Pro-War Propaganda appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>South Africa, reborn in the early 1990s from the ruins of apartheid as a pluralistic democracy, is now in crisis. The country's ruling black establishment is rife with corruption and incompetence. Growing public resentment has fueled the emergence of an evil all-too-common on the continent: Afro-socialist radicalism. Led by the charismatic firebrand Julius Malema, this insurgency recently secured a spot in the country's parliament—and promptly proceeded to disrupt civil debate, stir up toxic racial resentments, and promulgate the land expropriation policies that have devastated other African economies.
In May, ReasonTV investigated the dynamics driving South Africa's decline.
The post Best of Reason TV 2014: Tragedy and Triumph in South Africa appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Over the summer, the proletariat paradise dispatched a fleet of state-trained doctors to West Africa to care for Ebola patients as part of its long-standing "global medical diplomacy" division. Regime officials framed the work as a natural extension of the selflessness animating the country's socialism. Fidel Castro himself called it "the greatest example of solidarity a human being can offer." And that spin was dutifully lapped up by the American media.
But, as is so often the case in Cuba, there's corrupt autocracy lurking under all that romantic sloganeering. The country's medical missionaries aren't working voluntarily—they have their passports confiscated and are kept under constant surveillance. Havana gets paid directly by foreign governments for their services and, instead of fairly compensating doctors, simply pockets most of the money to the tune of about $8 billion every year.
So Cuba successfully sold a cash grab as medical heroism. Nice.
Despite the undeniable failures and fascist abuses of Castro's revolution, Cuba still retains a sacred space in the imagination of the fashionable Left. Indeed, The Nation recently announced it had secured a special travel license from the Treasury Department to host a week-long "cultural exchange" cruise to Cuba early next year.
But what's most interesting about the country these days is that it has actually started making concessions to capitalism that would have been denounced and suppressed as anti-revolutionary not too long ago.
These are not concessions of choice; they're forced by extenuating circumstances. After the implosion of the Soviet Union, Venezuela stepped in as Cuba's chief enabler, supplying the island with up to 100,000 barrels of heavily-subsidized oil every day—a haul that constitutes fully 15 percent of Cuba's GDP. But the political and economic turmoil now wrecking Venezuela has put this patronage in jeopardy. Reporter Ann Louise Bardach—author of Without Fidel: A Death Foretold in Miami, Havana, and Washington—told me the spigot could get shut off entirely as early as next year.
Cuba's other major source of income is tourism. From an international commerce perspective, the country is basically a decaying museum that has successfully diversified into the underage prostitution space. However, its tourist operations don't generate enough money to ward off economic disaster.
A few years ago, President Raul Castro (who took over for his older brother in 2008) announced a "311 point" plan for liberalizing the rules governing private business. The average Cuban can now buy and sell a cell phone, car, or house. And there is a limited entrepreneurial class, mostly in the form of independent cab drivers, hairdressers, and restaurateurs, according to my friend and Guardian contributor Michael Paarlberg, who's done extensive reporting in the country.
But economic liberalization hasn't been coupled with social reform. The Cuban government still jails dissidents and journalists. It still bans non-state newspapers and TV stations. Eleven million people are still forced to live in the spiritually-deadening atmosphere created by constant state surveillance, a struggle beautifully exhibited in filmmaker Nick Brennan's soon-to-be-released documentary chronicling Cuba's most popular hard rock band.
This year, 25,000 Cubans illegally fled for America. That's a 20-year high. Many made the 90-mile voyage by sea in homemade vessels powered by car engines. It's unclear how many more tried and failed. Would it spoil the fun of the The Nation's "cultural exchange" cruise for attendees to know they're traversing waters dotted with floating corpses, the last evidence of desperate attempts at a better life?
It's great to see the Cuban economy getting less insane. But those bodies are sufficient evidence to prove Raul's reforms aren't enough.
The post Are Cuba's Economic Reforms For Real? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>That's Martin Masse, one of the leading figures in the Canadian libertarian movement. Back in the late 90s, when libertarianism was a thoroughly marginal ideology in the country, Masse started Le Quebecois Libre, an online gathering place for allies to the cause.
Things have since changed. Free market ideas now inform Canadian public policy to a degree that's probably surprising to the average American. Reason TV recently sat down with Masse to find out about this transformation and the problems with Canada's centralized health care system.
Watch the full video above, or click below for downloadable versions. And subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel for daily content like this.
Run time: 6 minutes.
Interview by Todd Krainin. Camera by Jim Epstein. Edited by Rob Montz
The post Canada's Emergent Libertarian Movement appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Reason TV recently sat down with Martin Masse, one of the leading figures in Canada's libertarian movement. Masse explained to us how free market ideas now inform Canadian public policy to a degree that's probably surprising to the average American. Watch above or click on the link below for video, full text, supporting links, downloadable versions, and more Reason TV clips.
The post New Video: Canada's Emergent Libertarian Movement appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>That's Martin Masse, one of the leading figures in the Canadian libertarian movement. Back in the late 90s, when libertarianism was a thoroughly marginal ideology in the country, Masse started Le Quebecois Libre, an online gathering place for allies to the cause.
Things have since changed. Free market ideas now inform Canadian public policy to a degree that's probably surprising to the average American. Reason TV recently sat down with Masse to find out about this transformation and the problems with Canada's centralized health care system.
Watch the full video above, or click below for downloadable versions. And subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel for daily content like this.
Run time: 6 minutes.
Interview by Todd Krainin. Camera by Jim Epstein. Edited by Rob Montz
The post Canada's Emergent Libertarian Movement appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Killer Mike's twitter bio reads: "I like My Woman, My Kids, Weed, Polo and Politics. I am a Pan Africanist Gangster Rapper, Civic Leader & Activist."
That description cannot be improved upon. The rap world was originally introduced to Mike's oozy southern baritone back in 2000 via an impressive guest verse on the Outkast masterwork Stankonia. He's dropped half a dozen smart, increasingly political albums since then, culminating in 2012's booming dystopian treatise R.A.P. Music.
All the beats on R.A.P. Music were cooked up by El-P—a Brooklyn-born industry vet who scored his first record deal before his 21st birthday. He's one of the more important figures in the history of independent hip hop. They eventually formed like Voltron and the result is Run the Jewels.
Last month, Run the Jewels dropped their terrific sophomore album—as a free download. The particulars of their politics can be tough to parse. But RTJ2's lyrics convey a deep skepticism of authority of any flavor. Reason recently sat down with the correctly self-described "top tag team for two summers" to exchange words about government surveillance, gun rights, and the political power of big beats.
You've both been in the music industry for a long time. You've watched the traditional distribution model for albums get wrecked. The particular release strategy of this new LP seems to embody the paradigm that's emerged from that bloodshed: a free download supported by aggressive touring, while also offering some pricey boutique products for super fans.
Mike: You know if the old way doesn't work for you, try and figure out a new way. You want to escape all the label politics and you want to escape the chasing of the secondary and tertiary levels of a major.
El was like: Just give it to the kids. And they repaid us by supporting the fuck out of our shows and by buying our merch. And that created the model that, "Yo, we could do this again and we could just do it ourselves. We don't need anyone."
El-P: It's our contribution to what we desire to be an ongoing relationship directly with the people that have been allowing us to do what we want to do. I mean, when I was a kid I'm the one who coined the phrase "independent as fuck," you know?
I don't want any cynicism involved in what I'm doing. I just want to be as transparent and clear and direct and I think that the music industry is built on cynicism to some degree. There's a lot of larks, and there's a lot of contriving, and the game of trying to sell something and set it up, and prep it in your mind, and really the only game there possibly is, is to make beautiful music, or to make something that can connect with people.
Part of the inspiration for reaching out to you guys is that Mike went on The Independents, which is hosted by Kennedy, and said some really smart things about Ferugson and the militarization of the police.
Mike: I like her show.
El-P: I had a giant crush on Kennedy for so many years.
The families at the center of national controversies like that typically get dehumanized and simply become convenient vessels for outsiders to advance their particular politics. Mike, you made the point that our first duty is to empathize with their suffering, to see them as people.
Mike: We all have to kind of take off our prejudice and bigotries. You have to do that to even enter the part of the conversation I'm talking about. You have to have the human capacity to look past whatever class, color, creed, whatever prejudices that we all harbor. You have to say, "This is a human child that is on the ground, bleeding."
And I do worry about my gun being taken. I do worry about these roadblocks that are popping up for DUIs illegally, these checkpoints in my community. I worry about that.
We're promised not to be treated like that domestically. We're promised that our police cannot act like the military does. But we have allowed not only military machines but military tactics. We're funding local municipalities with drug raids.
Why aren't the people who belong to the organization I belong to, the NRA, why aren't they there when the first tank is rolled out to say: You know what, some of our members might not agree with how that community votes on gun policy. But we shouldn't allow their child to be shot down and then tanks to be marched down in their community, if we really are the guys who preach vehemently against that.
I saw in the 5th Ward of Houston, Texas, a group of white gun owners were going to march down the street holding their guns out through a black neighborhood. Now some people would've just said, "Hey, they want to strike terror in the neighborhood." Later the Black Panthers came into the fold and they said they would also be out there with their guns, almost in an adversarial way.
And I'm thinking: That's the wrong way to handle this. What you should've done is called and said, "We're going to march with you too, because we strongly agree with gun rights."
It's rarely noted that gun rights played an essential role in the black liberation movement. It's about being able to defend yourself against government incursions.
Mike: Absolutely. There's no other minority population in the world that if given the ability would not arm themselves. And the fact that I'm asked by leaders in my community not to is absurd. And it keeps me vehemently angry with them and unable to trust them.
You have a safeguard against tyranny, and you wish to give that up. How foolish are you, you know, how foolish are you?
El, you've been rapping about ubiquitous government surveillance for a long time. I'm wondering how you felt about the Snowden revelations—they must have provided some sense of vindication….but maybe also thrown you into a permanent panic attack.
El-P: That layer of the illusion of the way that we are living is pulled back a little bit, and some of the truth and the ugliness of reality is starting to rear its head in such an obvious way that people who are not normally disposed to think about it or to really question it are being forced to.
I'm not particularly educated. I just have my mind. And I have my heart. And I have, you know, I think I have a decent sense of things. And I think you hear it in my records, I mean honestly it's reflected in my music.
But, I'm grateful that there is a real new awakening in people, and I think that we can't go back now.
That being said, I also fucking smoke weed and drink like a motherfucking insane man because I'm being driven mad like we all are to some degree, you know what I mean? Like, we're just regular dudes, we're musicians, we're rappers, we're just making music, we're not politicians, we're don't have your education, we probably don't even have your real knowledge of perspective. We just have our perception and we tune in to that.
Well, I think you're selling yourself short. I think that music can serve a really vital function in counteracting pernicious political interia—that great music can reshape people's perceptions and stoke a healthy contrarianism. Your music has certainly done that for me.
El-P: Thank you, and that means a lot to hear! And that's very important and I do think that music can play a function and I think the beauty of it is that it's malleable. And so you put an idea out there with art or with music and it radiates way beyond whatever the original idea was, and it becomes and it grows, because it's energy.
I mean I hate to sound like this is abstract—
Mike: It's my wife after yoga class!
(Laughs)
El: It's energy, and good nutrition. It's all about good nutrition, and it may also all be about aliens.
The post Run the Jewels Talks About Gun Rights, Government Surveillance, and the Political Power of Big Beats appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Jason Brennan, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown, is the author of the new book Why Not Capitalism?, which argues that capitalism works because of humanity's inherent lack of kindness and generosity. Reason TV's Rob Montz spoke with Brennan in June about human goodness, the flaws in socialism, and more. To see video of the interview, go here or view it below.
Q: Every college freshman in this country within one week of taking their first political theory class has said-as if they're the first person to ever think it-of course socialism is the best in theory. If we were able to scrub out some of the bugs of humans' programming that's precisely the kind of society that we'd want to set up for each other. Your book is a direct attack upon that idea.
A: What socialists are often missing is that we're not the Borg from Star Trek. We have private lives. We want to engage in private pursuits, projects of our own undertaking that we do by ourselves, not with others.
I like to say to my socialist colleagues: If you can understand why you wouldn't want to, say, write a philosophy paper with the collective or if you can understand why you'd like to paint a painting by yourself rather than having it done as a group project, you can understand why someone might find a kind of meaning in running a business by himself, or having a factory, or having a farm that's his rather than a collective farm.
Q: Can you explain socialism's "information problem"?
A: In order for us to have cooperation on a massive scale-cooperation on a scale of millions or tens of millions-we need some sort of signal that tells us what's going on in the economy. It turns out we get that signal in market societies and it's in the form of prices. We're all making all these private decisions and it modifies prices a little bit and then we respond appropriately. We don't know what's causing scarcity. We don't know what other peoples' desires are or demands are, we can just see that the price of strawberries is cheap over here and it's expensive over here and that tells me everything I need to know as a consumer about what to do. The problem with socialism on a mass scale is that they don't have a substitute for prices.
Q: In Washington, D.C., I do not think that there is a cabal of closeted socialists who want to bring about a Marxist revolution, but there is a very prevalent lighter version of the socialist conceit. A lot of these pundits have an ample number of Ivy League degrees, and they hang around with a lot of other smart people. They begin to operate under the assumption that it's just a matter of putting a couple key super-intelligent people in charge and they'd be able to see everything, hack it all, and figure out how to readjust the economic infrastructure of America.
A: In principle, there are cases where an omni-benevolent, omniscient dictator could come in and fix the market and make it better. It's rarely going to be the case in actuality that a person knows when and how to intervene. Given the limits of human knowledge, given the limits of peoples' ability, and also just given their biases and so on and the fact that they're likely to use this power selfishly rather than for our own good, I think it's better not to empower them to do these things.
Q: You debunk the idea that capitalism engenders or cultivates certain vices-that it actually actively rewards greed and predatory behavior.
A: The biggest cultural predictor that you will be trusting, trustworthy, generous, fair, and so on is the extent to which you come from a market-oriented society. People from traditional societies, from tribal societies, from non- or pre-market societies, and from socialist societies are not nice.
The post Why Capitalism? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Since being granted self-governance in the '70s, Washington, D.C. has largely been run by a comically corrupt and incompetent Democratic monopoly. The lone exception is Adrian Fenty, an ultra-smart former city councilmember who took over the mayorship in 2007.
Fenty's outspoken disdain for the capital's sclerotic municipal bureaucracy inevitably backfired and he lost his 2010 reelection bid to Vincent Gray, a ghoulish government lifer who's now under investigation for running an illegal slush fund during that campaign. Fenty has since decamped to an environment more suitable to his temperament— Silicon Valley, where an abrasive personality and big-think theatrics are the opposite of liabilities. But back when he first became mayor, Fenty made the curious decision of hand-picking a little-known regional neighborhood official to take over his seat on the council: Muriel Bowser.
Bowser didn't share Fenty's grit or outspoken antipathy for DC's broken administrative morass. She specializes in formless progressive promises and tinny nothing phrases like, say, "shaping the landscape of our future."
After seven years on the council, Bowser is now running for mayor. She trounced Gray in the Democratic primary in April. Historically, the general election has been a cakewalk for the party's nominee—just six percent of DC voters are registered Republican. Accordingly, Bowser's initial public relations strategy was to do as little relating to the public as possible and win by default.
But this election has gotten unusually interesting in the interim. Bowser's chief competitor is a gay ex-Republican named David Catania, who's running as an independent. A few months ago, she was leading him by 33 points in the polls. That gap has dramatically dwindled, making this DC's closest mayoral contest in two decades.
Voters are apathetic about Bowser. And for good reason.
DC is undergoing a remarkable boom. The Fenty administration made some smart improvements in transportation and education that significantly enhanced local livability. The federal government provides a permanent economic stimulus. And so the capital has become a mecca for young educated professionals.
The resulting prosperity is not uniformly shared. Split DC down the main thoroughfare of North Capitol Street. On the west side, the average annual income is over $80,000. On the east, the figure is a third of that. The capital is now a place where one in four homes sells for at least a million dollars—and one in four kids lives below the poverty line.
And these aren't parallel universes. Parallel universes don't eat each other. Neighborhoods inhabited with low-income black families for generations are getting flooded with mostly white, upwardly mobile college grads, driving up real estate prices and driving out legacy businesses. Bodegas, shelters and auto repair shops are turning into craft coffee houses, high-end condominiums and Trader Joes.
That's why it's no surprise that affordable housing is the biggest issue in the race for mayor. Bowser's preferred solution is huge new investments in public housing. This is the standard party line, but it's an awkward one for Bowser to take. Her campaign has been plagued by the scandal engulfing Park Southern, the largest public housing complex in the city. Park Southern is a paradigmatic case of a government initiative originally animated by genuine altruism inexorably devolving into a yawning sinkhole sucking down money and human happiness. And its managers are major contributors to Bowser's election bid.
A recent investigation revealed that Park Southern's 700 tenants have been forced to suffer in unimaginable squalor. Property administrators ignored complaints about flooding and mold for years. Rotting pigeon carcasses were left to fester in stairwells. The building's air conditioning was perpetually non-functional during DC's life-sapping swamp summers. Its managers owe over a million dollars in late mortgage payments and utility bills. And it looks like they straight-up pocketed tens of thousands of dollars in security deposits.
Bowser has refused to return the donations since these abuses came to light. As head of the council's housing committee, she declined to hold a public hearing on Park Southern. And there's evidence indicating she tried to prevent the managers from losing control of the property.
And Park Southern isn't an isolated incident. DC's government has demonstrated extreme incompetence in providing people with affordable housing. The city's main homeless shelter, which costs taxpayers $50,000 per family per year, is staffed with sexual predators. It took shelter management seven years to build a playground.
There's a better way to ease pressure in the local housing market. DC has some of the most stringent limits on building heights in the country. Its downtown is markedly circumcised relative to, say, Miami's, Boston's or New York's. Residential real estate near job-dense commercial hotpots is comparatively rare and expensive. Low-wage renters are pushed out to the geographic fringes and have to slog through expensive, time-consuming commutes.
Knock down these artificial restrictions on home supply, fully voucherize rent subsidies, and then let vulnerable Washingtonians live wherever they'd like, switching out the demonstrably ineffective oversight of central regulators for the organic accountability of the market.
Bowser has an equally ignominious record on school reform, one of the other major issues of the campaign. The sum total of her legislative record on education is a non-binding resolution "committing"the city to replicating the success of a popular public middle school.
This is unserious stuff. It's statecraft sourced from The Secret—as if just releasing good intentions into the ether will fix what has long been one of the worst school systems in the country. For most of DC's time under self-rule, such moist banalities have substituted for concrete policy, leaving an entrenched class of administrators and unions to keep crippling the lives of inner-city kids.
Bowser's inanity is all the most frustrating given that there are finally some limited successes to build on. The central act of Fenty's mayorship was seizing control of the schools and installing the all-world figure of Michelle Rhee as their chancellor. Among a long litany of effective reforms enacted under her tenure, Rhee fueled a rapid expansion of charters. DC is now tied with Detroit for highest concentration of charters among major American cities.
The capital is also home to the country's only federally funded voucher program. Installed during the early years of the George W. Bush Administration, it's subject to remarkably few bureaucratic entanglements. A major study led by University of Arkansas education professor Patrick Wolf found that within its first couple years of operation, DC's voucher initiative increased participating students' high school graduation rate by 12 percent. And as Wolf explained to me, researchers increasingly view graduation levels as the most important metric of improvement given the huge economic handicaps facing dropouts.
Competition cuts through the cheap talk about schools. And Bowser should be energetically embracing the emergent model—she herself is the product of two government workers that sent all five of their kids to parochial institutions rather than doom them to a DC public education.
Bowser is dangerously wrong on policy. But she'll probably still win. Elections are about voters reasserting their tribal identities. And one tribe still runs this city. Accordingly, Bowser has responded to Catania's rise by racking up a string of endorsements from elite members of the party establishment, including the repellent reptile creature that occupies the Virginia governorship and—as her new campaign literature will exuberantly inform you—the president of the United States.
The post The Breathtaking Inanity of DC's Next Mayor appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"The Hard-Won Beauty of Entrepreneurship" was originally released on October 23, 2014. The original write-up is below:
Starting a business involves massive emotional and financial risks. Why do it?
"It's all about writing your own script, controlling your destiny," says Chris Viligante, owner and founder of Vigilante Coffee, a roasting house and wholesale bean business based in Maryland. Reason TV reached out to Chris and a few other local millenial-aged entrepeneurs to figure out what motivates them.
The answer we got was different from those offered in popular politics. For these entrepeneurs, their job is a vital source of spiritual satisfaction. They've aligned what they love doing with what the world is willing to pay for. And they're authoring their own lives. As Nick Wiseman, owner of DGS Delicatessen, puts it: "This is my opportunity to actually make an imprint and do something that's my own."
Watch the full video above, or click below for downloadable versions. And subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel for daily content like this.
Run time: About 4 minutes.
Directed and hosted by Rob Montz. Camera by Todd Krainin.
The post The Hard-Won Beauty of Entrepreneurship appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the latest video from Reason, we profile a couple millenial-aged entrepreneurs and find out what motivated them to take the huge emotional and financial risks entailed with starting a business. Watch above or click on the link below for video, full text, supporting links, downloadable versions, and more Reason TV clips.
The post Video: The Hard-Won Beauty of Entrepreneurship appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"It's all about writing your own script, controlling your destiny," says Chris Viligante, owner and founder of Vigilante Coffee, a roasting house and wholesale bean business based in Maryland. Reason TV reached out to Chris and a few other local millenial-aged entrepeneurs to figure out what motivates them.
The answer we got was different from those offered in popular politics. For these entrepeneurs, their job is a vital source of spiritual satisfaction. They've aligned what they love doing with what the world is willing to pay for. And they're authoring their own lives. As Nick Wiseman, owner of DGS Delicatessen, puts it: "This is my opportunity to actually make an imprint and do something that's my own."
Watch the full video above, or click below for downloadable versions. And subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel for daily content like this.
Run time: About 4 minutes.
Directed and hosted by Rob Montz. Camera by Todd Krainin.
The post The Hard-Won Beauty of Entrepreneurship appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"It's all about writing your own script, controlling your destiny," says Chris Viligante, owner and founder of Vigilante Coffee, a roasting house and wholesale bean business based in Maryland. Reason TV reached out to Chris and a few other local millenial-aged entrepeneurs to figure out what motivates them.
The answer we got was different from those offered in popular politics. For these entrepeneurs, their job is a vital source of spiritual satisfaction. They've aligned what they love doing with what the world is willing to pay for. And they're authoring their own lives. As Nick Wiseman, owner of DGS Delicatessen, puts it: "This is my opportunity to actually make an imprint and do something that's my own."
Watch the full video above, or click below for downloadable versions. And subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel for daily content like this.
Run time: About 4 minutes.
Directed and hosted by Rob Montz. Camera by Todd Krainin.
The post The Hard-Won Beauty of Entrepreneurship appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Topping the list of complaints was the allegation that all three had misled their consumers on safety matters and drivers' background checks. San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón wants the firms to remove language from their sites and mobile apps that claims background checks show a driver's complete criminal history.
The complaint also states that the way each company calculates their rideshare service fees is also against state law because it allows passengers going to the same place to split fares.
This isn't the first time companies like Uber and Lyft have been targeted. Earlier in September, the California Public Utilities Commission sent warning letters to the companies stating their services violated state carpool laws.
And earlier this year, the state of Virginia tried to ban Uber and Lyft from operating within the state, but the Department of Motor Vehicles quickly reversed the ban in July after they agreed to submit to stricter and more thorough background checks on drivers.
Back in 2013, Reason TV documented the war on Uber in Washington, D.C., and the powerful taxi lobby in the nation's capital. Written and directed by Rob Montz. Original release date was October 22, 2013, and the original writeup is below the fold.
The on-demand car service Uber is one of the most inventive transportation technologies of the new century. In over 20 countries—and two dozen U.S. cities—Uber uses a smartphone app to connect people who need rides with drivers of a range of vehicles from luxury towncars to regular taxis.
Like most powerful innovations, Uber disrupts the status quo by competing with established business interests. In Washington, D.C., the service was an instant hit with city residents—and almost as quickly found itself at odds with D.C.'s powerful taxi lobby and its allies on the city council.
The result was the Uber Wars, which ended in a striking victory for the company and its customers.
Related Article: "Driving in the Future: How Regulators Try to Crush Uber, Lyft, and New Ride-Sharing Ventures."
About 10 minutes.
Written and directed by Rob Montz (follow him on Twitter @robmontz) and executive produced by William Beutler at Beutler Ink (@BeutlerInk). For more information and inquiries, email TheUberWars@gmail.com
The post Video: Why are Cities Like LA and SF at War with Uber and Lyft? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>One morning in August 1987, three months after my fourth birthday, my mom drove me a couple miles from our home in a cushy Los Angeles suburb and dropped me off for my first day of formal schooling at the local Montessori pre-kindergarten program.
Montessori's educational philosophy famously focuses on cultivating student autonomy and self-expression. My experience was typical. I made my first friends. I learned the proper proportions of a capitalized "B." I became a master craftsman of macaroni necklaces.
This time was probably nothing more than fancy daycare. Exceptionally intensive, well-run pre-k programs might possibly impart lasting cognitive benefits. But the evidence is sketchy at best.
These facts are no foe to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Establishing a government-run "universal" pre-k program was a centerpiece of his campaign for the job. And now, he's about to make good on that promise. The mayor just secured $300 million for the project in the New York state budget. The new pre-k program will click into place over the next two years. It will eventually enroll about 73,250 children at a cost of $10,200 per head. A small slice of the schools are expected to be run in concert with community charities and private providers, but the vast majority will be directly managed by the city's Department of Education.
And here's where the romantic visions driving de Blasio's grand project collide with the intractable reality of what public pre-k in New York City will actually look like in practice. These schools will bear little resemblance to my Montessori experience. They will not be sanctuaries for supple young minds. They will not be exceptionally intensive and well-run. They will be mostly terrible.
We know this because the NYC Department of Education has been running a couple thousand K-12 institutions for decades. It spends about $19,000 per student per year. And its schools are…mostly terrible.
For a full quarter of NYC public schools, at least 90 percent of the student body is below grade level in math and reading. And with the tiny exceptions of some high performing charters and elite magnet schools such as Stuyvesant, the rest perform substantially below overall state averages.
Just 28 percent of the city's public fourth graders score "proficient" or better on the federally-run National Assessment of Educational Progress. Poor, black and Latino students tend to do even worse.
So this is the warped logic undergirding this new pre-k program: Government schools have sucked up huge public resources while failing over and over again to meet their basic obligation to equip students with the knowledge and skills they need to secure a brighter future. Mayor de Blasio looks out at this vast blighted terrain of waste and broken promises and thinks to himself: "Time to expand."
And even if the city's education bureaucrats could somehow break from the past and establish high quality preschools, any cognitive gains imparted on participating kids will evaporate once they've been offloaded into one of those terrible public grade schools. The long-term return on that $300 million investment will approximate zero.
This is exactly the story of Head Start, which, like universal pre-k, occupies a sacred space in the public imagination. The benefits of Head Start were extensively investigated in two separate studies run by the federal government. The aim for each was justifying the program's $100 billion price tag. They accomplished the opposite. Both found no aptitude difference between grade schoolers that had attended Head Start and those that had not.
Mayor de Blasio's delusional pre-k initiative is the natural extension of his deeply broken philosophy about education generally.
Effectively schooling the million-plus students in the NYC system—with their vastly different family backgrounds, learning styles, and personalities—is a challenging problem. Probably the worst possible way to try to tackle it is to have distant technocrats create a single inflexible pedagogical program and apply it uniformly throughout the city.
Here's a superior approach: Provide teachers and administrators the freedom to adapt educational protocols to the needs of their specific pupils. And empower parents to shop around—competition for students creates the incentives for schools to improve.
There's no better testament to the power of an open, innovation-friendly educational platform than NYC's own Success Academy, almost certainly the best charter franchise in the city.
Run by former city council member and likely future mayoral prospect Eva Moskowitz, Success Academy draws its students mostly from low-income minority communities. Because it has been freed from union rules and staid educational paradigms, it can adapt to best meet students' needs by, among other things, lengthening school days and shortening summers.
The results have been phenomenal. Success Academy students post a 94 percent pass rate in national math aptitude assessments and 64 percent in English—both scores dramatically exceed citywide averages. After Moskowitz recently announced she would be opening up 10 new locations, over 14,400 families applied for fewer than 3,000 seats.
Surely, as a true champion of Gotham's struggling poor, Mayor de Blasio has welcomed Moskowitz's success, right? Maybe he's empowered other education entrepreneurs to similarly experiment? Or at least dispatched his policy team to soak up some of Success Academy's best practices?
Not exactly. The mayor's sole interaction with Moskowitz so far is a petty turf war.
Within the first few months of his term, de Blasio moved to expel several Success programs from the public buildings they were housed in. He told a teachers union conference that Moskowitz needs to "stop being tolerated, enabled, supported." The mayor backed down only after some Silicon Valley heavy-hitters bankrolled a concerted counter-campaign.
Moskowitz is a threat to "traditional" public schools, which de Blasio holds sacred. And its that ideal—of a uniform, government-run education system for all the city's children—that animates this new pre-k program.
But it's precisely that system that has so thoroughly failed generation after generation of young New Yorkers. It's certainly not worth saving, let alone expanding.
The post NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio's "Universal Pre-K" Program Is Delusional appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"We're not the Borg from Star Trek. We want to engage in private projects we do by ourselves and not with others," says Jason Brennan, an associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown University
Prof. Brennan discusses his new book — Why Not Capitalism? — with Reason TV's Rob Montz.
The post Why Capitalism is Better than Socialism appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Brennan's new book, Why Not Capitalism?, casts a critical eye on a notion with wide appeal among academics, politicians, and the general public: That even though history has shown that socialism is unworkable in practice, it's still the best way to run society in theory.
Brennan says that such thinking neglects the fact that even in utopia people will have significantly different visions of a life well lived. "You want a system under which you can realize all these different conceptions of the good life and the good community," he argues. Even in a world free of petty rivalries, tribalism, and human failings, capitalism would still be superior because it uniquely affords citizens the rights and freedoms necessary to customize their lives and pursue their own, personally meaningful projects.
Interview by Rob Montz, who also edited the piece.
Camera by Amanda Winkler and Joshua Swain.
About 8 minutes.
Scroll down for downloadable versions of this video, and subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel for daily content like this.
The post Why Capitalism is Better than Socialism appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Brennan's new book, Why Not Capitalism?, casts a critical eye on a notion with wide appeal among academics, politicians, and the general public: That even though history has shown that socialism is unworkable in practice, it's still the best way to run society in theory.
Brennan says that such thinking neglects the fact that even in utopia people will have significantly different visions of a life well lived. "You want a system under which you can realize all these different conceptions of the good life and the good community," he argues. Even in a world free of petty rivalries, tribalism, and human failings, capitalism would still be superior because it uniquely affords citizens the rights and freedoms necessary to customize their lives and pursue their own, personally meaningful projects.
Interview by Rob Montz, who also edited the piece.
Camera by Amanda Winkler and Joshua Swain.
About 8 minutes.
Scroll down for downloadable versions of this video, and subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel for daily content like this.
The post Why Capitalism is Better than Socialism appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Los Angeles hit peak swagger in the mid-1980s. After a decade of dwindling population, Los Angeles County was again gaining, about 120,000 people per year. Hollywood had near-perfected the summer blockbuster. The city's downtown subway system was finally completed. And a Soviet-bloc boycott had left the L.A.-hosted 1984 summer Olympics to serve as an ostentatious demonstration of American exceptionalism.
But the romantic, popular conception of the city that solidified in those years bears increasingly little resemblance to Los Angeles today.
The definitive rundown of L.A.'s problems comes courtesy of the Los Angeles 2020 Commission, an independent 13-member body lead by former U.S. Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor. The commission released a pair of reports earlier this year which provide a precise—and surprisingly strident—diagnosis. L.A. suffers from a deluxe-size version of the vicious urban feedback loop that's already swallowed up several smaller cities in California: a shrinking job market, rapidly escalating public pension costs, and widespread deterioration in general infrastructure.
Los Angeles is the only large metropolitan area in the country to register a net jobs decline over the past two decades. While national employment has jumped by 20 percent since 1990, L.A.'s has dropped by 10 percent.
L.A.'s middle class is shrinking, with citywide median income falling steadily since 2007. And L.A. now has the highest poverty rate among any major American city.
These trends are partially attributable to the lingering effects of the financial crisis and broader transformative forces affecting the entire national economy. But, as the Commission report makes abundantly clear, these have been massively exacerbated by City Hall.
Just consider these two facts about the L.A. fire department:
That same endemic bureaucratic incompetence has left Los Angeles' public school system as one of the most dysfunctional in the country. Fewer than half of its high-school students are even proficient in English. Less than 60 percent graduate. And only about a third complete the course requirements needed to qualify for admission into the state university system.
These failures are not a function of scarce resources. (When are they ever?) Municipal school authorities run with an annual operating budget of $6.47 billion; with 640,000 K-12 students in the system, that's over $10,000 per head. The big problem is that the L.A. Unified School District is institutionally allergic to experimentation. High performing charters like KIPP Academy have a tough time scaling up. Low-income schools aren't encouraged or allowed to incorporate targeted innovations—like longer class days and truncated summer breaks—that have shown promise in closing the achievement gap. Incompetent administrators are almost never held accountable.
The general city budget certainly isn't suffering from scarcity either. In 2011, municipal revenues were only down about 4 percent from their 2008 peak. But those dollars that aren't lost into the bureaucratic abyss are largely gobbled up by exploding public employee pension expenses. Back in 2002, pension costs accounted for about 3 percent of the city's budget. Since then, they've grown 25 percent per year. Now, they constitute 18 percent, totaling $1.3 billion annually.
Meanwhile, city officials are neglecting basic public infrastructure investments that even the most ardent libertarian could love, such as road improvements. Deteriorating street conditions and perpetually delayed highway expansions have exacerbated already horrific traffic congestion and driven up commute times. The average LA worker now spends about an hour a day getting to and from work. About 12 percent spend two hours or more—fully four percentage points above the national average.
Long commutes don't just suck up otherwise economically productive hours of the day, they also kill human happiness. Research has linked commuting with decreased life satisfaction and heightened anxiety. (Long commutes also have the unfortunate effect of propping up the mind pestilence that is political talk radio.)
City leadership has not exactly demonstrated bold leadership in face of all these profound challenges.
L.A. just got off eight years of the uniformly disastrous mayorship of Antonio Villaraigosa, whose only evident talent is self-promotion. This a man who should have risen to no higher station than moderately successful late-night infomercial pitchman. Yet the L.A. voting public freely elected him to office. Twice.
An investigation from LA Weekly at the end of his first term found he spent just about 11 percent of his working days on direct city business. The rest was occupied with banquets, ceremonies, photo-ops, ribbon cuttings, and other meaningless masturbatory activities of mayoral politics. Villaraigosa's bloated staff included 931 deputy mayors. He racked up a $100 million budget deficit. And, you might be shocked to learn, he abused his station for personal gain. Villaraigosa was eventually forced to shell out $42,000 in fines for illegally securing free concert and sports tickets.
Villaraigosa was term-limited out of office last year and replaced by Eric Garcetti, a man embodying the cool, non-threatening technocratic enthusiasm befitting a Rhodes Scholar. He's the natural counterbalance to his predecessor's vacuous flash. It's fair to say Garcetti is not instantly repulsive.
But whatever his merits, the new mayor seems highly unlikely to affect substantial change. Yes, Garcetti may well be able to broker some targeted fiscal reforms and slightly ratchet back the pension problem. But he's operating under clear political incentives to avoid serious structural shakeups. And mayoral power is, by design, tightly circumscribed.
The primary drivers of Los Angeles' fate are unsexy city departments, council staff, and administrators. As the Milken Institute's Kevin Klowden, who contributed to the L.A. 2020 report, told me: "It boils down to if you can change how the bureaucracy works." It's improbable the city can pull that off. Perhaps that's a pessimistic take, but does the recent history of Los Angeles justify anything else?
The post Los Angeles Is Killing Itself appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Life After Liberation: Triumph and Tragedy in South Africa," written and edited by Rob Montz. About 10 minutes.
Original airdate was May 5, 2014 and the original text is below:
"This government—our government—is worse than the apartheid government."—Archbishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize.
South African voters are headed to the polls this week for the fourth national election since 1994, when Nelson Mandela was elected president after the end of the apartheid regime.
Their country represents epic history in our lifetimes. After a decades-long struggle against brutal, state-run racial segregation, the black liberation movement emerged victorious in the early 1990s. Led by the transcendent figure of Mandela, South Africa swiftly dismantled the apartheid apparatus and, defying dour predictions of a bloody race war, peacefully transitioned to majority rule. Mandela's government ushered in pluralistic democracy on a continent long-defined by colonialism and autocracy. State officials established remarkably robust constitutional protections for individual rights.
Black South Africans would finally be afforded the economic and social opportunities they'd been denied for so long.
Or so everyone had hoped.
Two decades later, Mandela's promise of renewal has largely gone unfulfilled as Mandela's party, the African National Congress (ANC) has maintained its huge electoral majority. The beautiful dream animating the South African experiment is crumbling amidst ongoing corruption, violence, and failed economic policies. As Nobel Peace Prize recipient Desmond Tutu has said of the current regime, "This government—our government—is worse than the apartheid government."
"Life After Liberation," directed and hosted by Rob Montz, details the role played by political monopoly in South Africa's post-apartheid decline. The documentary shows how the ANC has grown corrupt and complacent—and how widespread resentment of the ruling political class is now fueling the rise of a populist demagogue, Julius Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters, who is pushing precisely the sort of Mugabeist socialist policies that have ruined so many other African countries.
About 10 minutes.
Produced, written, and edited by Rob Montz. Camera by Josh Swain.
The post Life After Liberation: Triumph and Tragedy in South Africa appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Life After Liberation: Triumph and Tragedy in South Africa" is the latest from Reason TV. Watch above or click the link below for full text, downloadable versions, and more.
The post Life After Liberation: Triumph and Tragedy in South Africa appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>South African voters are headed to the polls this week for the fourth national election since 1994, when Nelson Mandela was elected president after the end of the apartheid regime.
Their country represents epic history in our lifetimes. After a decades-long struggle against brutal, state-run racial segregation, the black liberation movement emerged victorious in the early 1990s. Led by the transcendent figure of Mandela, South Africa swiftly dismantled the apartheid apparatus and, defying dour predictions of a bloody race war, peacefully transitioned to majority rule. Mandela's government ushered in pluralistic democracy on a continent long-defined by colonialism and autocracy. State officials established remarkably robust constitutional protections for individual rights.
Black South Africans would finally be afforded the economic and social opportunities they'd been denied for so long.
Or so everyone had hoped.
Two decades later, Mandela's promise of renewal has largely gone unfulfilled as Mandela's party, the African National Congress (ANC) has maintained its huge electoral majority. The beautiful dream animating the South African experiment is crumbling amidst ongoing corruption, violence, and failed economic policies. As Nobel Peace Prize recipient Desmond Tutu has said of the current regime, "This government—our government—is worse than the apartheid government."
"Life After Liberation," directed and hosted by Rob Montz, details the role played by political monopoly in South Africa's post-apartheid decline. The documentary shows how the ANC has grown corrupt and complacent—and how widespread resentment of the ruling political class is now fueling the rise of a populist demagogue, Julius Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters, who is pushing precisely the sort of Mugabeist socialist policies that have ruined so many other African countries.
About 10 minutes.
Produced, written, and edited by Rob Montz. Camera by Josh Swain.
The post Life After Liberation: Triumph and Tragedy in South Africa appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Uber is a car service that connects drivers and riders via a great smart-phone app. It's upended the way that livery service works in 20 countries and a couple of dozen U.S. cities. It's particularly useful for off-the-beaten-path parts of towns that often get shorted by conventional methods of transit.
Which means that taxi commissions, cab companies, and grandstanding politicians have tried to shut it down or regulate it unto to death all over the place.
Check out the vid above about how the powers that be tried to squelch Uber—and ultimately failed.
And read Brian Doherty's story about Uber, Lift, and other new ride-sharing services that are taking more heat than they should.
The post What Side Are You on in the Uber Wars? appeared first on Reason.com.
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