Most people have no idea that pinball was illegal in New York from the early 1940s until 1976, when a journalist named Roger Sharpe finally won his crusade against the city to free the flippers.
The story of that insane ban is the subject of the new movie Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game, which Richard Brody of The New Yorker called "better than all ten of the Best Picture nominees."
The film is written and directed by Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg, longtime producers at Reason best known for collaborating with Remy on his massively popular song parodies, and for making "libertarian" versions of Star Trek, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and other pop culture franchises. A production of MPI Original Films, Pinball is available for streaming on Apple TV, Google Play, Amazon Prime Video, and other platforms.
Nick Gillespie talked with the Bragg brothers about how they came to tell Roger Sharpe's story, what goes into making the perfect satire in an era when reality is far stranger than anything we can imagine, and the libertarian message of Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game.
Produced by Nick Gillespie and Justin Zuckerman; Sound editing by Ian Keyser
Credits: Steve Bealing/Landmark Media / Landmark Media/Newscom; akg-images / Paul Almasy/Newscom; Everett Collection/Newscom
The post He Ended New York City's Insane Ban on Pinball appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>I'm excited as hell to ask you to donate during Reason's annual webathon, the one week each year where we ask you to support our efforts to advance libertarian ideas and policies with fully tax-deductible donations. And I'm even more excited to announce a massive $100,000 matching grant from a supporter—which means that every dollar (or satoshis; yes, we take bitcoin!) goes twice as far for the next hundred grand in donations! If you can't wait, go here right now to check out swag levels and make a contribution.
But first, riddle me this? What was your favorite Reason video of 2022? Of all time? Since I've been with our video platform since it launched in late 2007, I think about this sort of question all the time. We've released over 3,000 videos that have been viewed 260 million times on YouTube alone, so there's a lot to choose from, starting with that early one with the commute from hell, that helicopter ride, and Drew Carey (more on him later).
My answers: For this year, it's our interview with Monty Python's John Cleese at FreedomFest, where the master comedian talked about how "wokeness" is the enemy of creativity—and that creativity is something that can be taught, a skill not unlike carpentry or plumbing. The Q&A clearly tickled more than the funny bones of our audience, as it's racked up 1.6 million views since its August 1 release, making it our single-biggest hit released this year.
And my favorite video of all time? This one is tougher, but I'm going with 2013's "UPS vs. Ultimate Whiteboard Remix," which parodied a popular ad series while laying out an incredibly sophisticated argument about labor law and government regulations in just two minutes. I wrote and performed the script, based on a Reason article by Mercatus Center scholar Veronique de Rugy, and Meredith Bragg provided the absolutely magical animation and editing. This one was a finalist for a National Magazine Award, the highest honor in our space, and I especially love the way we were able to perfectly mimic a super-expensive TV commercial with a green screen and a few thousand dollars worth of camera and editing equipment (cheap technology keeps remaking the world and expanding freedom in all sorts of great ways, as Jim Epstein wrote in this tribute to the Sony VX1000 camera).
In 2022, our videos have so far generated a mind-boggling 24.3 million views on YouTube, our main distribution platform. The content ranges from long-form interviews like the one with Cleese and ones with Jay Bhattacharya and Glenn Greenwald, to incredible documentaries such as Zach Weissmueller's "Forget the Great Reset, Embrace the Great Escape" to the comedy stylings of Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg and Remy to our new weekly livestreams featuring leading thinkers and policymakers.
This is the sort of work your money supports. Reason is here, day in and day out, making the principled case for a more libertarian world in which all of us have more power and control over our own lives. And since 2007, we've been using video to supplement our arguments in the marketplace of ideas. Our video platform is the brainchild of Reason Foundation trustee, comedy legend, and Price Is Right host Drew Carey, who suggested we experiment with making online documentaries at a time when most magazines were still struggling to adapt to the World Wide Web. "Your stories make people think," Drew said, "but with video, we can make people feel too and gain an even-deeper appreciation for the power of 'Free Minds and Free Markets.'" Drew hosted the first dozen-plus videos we put out 15 years ago and of course he headlined our award-winning series, Reason Saves Cleveland with Drew Carey—which, come to think of it, might just be my favorite Reason video of all time.
If you like what we're doing—and make sure to list your favorite videos in the comments!—then please make a donation right now, when the $100,000 matching grant will magically double its value! Thanks for your support!
The post What Was Your Favorite Reason Video of 2022? And How Can You Get More of Them? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When actor Jussie Smollet lied about being attacked by racist, MAGA-hat-wearing Trump supporters, Columbia University linguist John McWhorter actually interpreted it as a sign that "we have come further on race than we are often comfortable admitting."
"Only in an America in which matters of race are not as utterly irredeemable as we are often told," he wrote in The Atlantic, would someone "pretend to be tortured in this way…[because] playing a singer on television is not as glamorous as getting beaten up by white guys."
The unwillingness of both blacks and whites to acknowledge progress on racial equality is a long-running theme for McWhorter, who in 2000 published Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, which argued that "in most cases, [racism] is not an obstacle to people being the best that they can be."
In an influential 2015 essay, McWhorter argued that "Antiracism" had become a new secular religion in America, complete with "clergy, creed, and also even a conception of Original Sin."
"One is born marked by original sin," he wrote. "To be white is to be born with the stain of unearned privilege." Black people, he continued, "will express their grievances and whites will agree" that they are racist. On the right, McWhorter observed, there is a growing sense of hostility on racial issues and, according to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who agree that black-white relations are good is at a 20-year low. And for the first time since the pollster has asked the question, a majority of blacks rate race relations as bad.
I sat down with the 53-year-old McWhorter—the author or editor of 20 books—to talk about his upbringing in a mixed-race part of Philadelphia, his academic focus on Creole language, and the unmistakable signs of racial progress that an increasing number of Americans seem unwilling to acknowledge.
Edited by Ian Keyser. Intro by Todd Krainin. Cameras by Jim Epstein and Kevin Alexander.
Photos by Jim Epstein.
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The post John McWhorter: America Has Never Been Less Racist appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Can the law punish deliberate lies about public matters?
Well, it depends.
Here are the six rules of fake news:
Of course, the law doesn't call this "fake news"—it calls it "defamation."
Written defamation is called "libel." Spoken defamation is called "slander." Radio and TV broadcasts are usually considered libel, except in Georgia, where they're called "defamacast." No really, they made up a new word for it, and it's … well … it's not catching on.
Intentional lies about particular people or companies can lead to massive damages awards, including punitive damages. They can even lead to criminal punishment in states that still have "criminal libel laws," though such prosecutions are pretty rare.
Negligent mistakes about particular people or companies can also lead to damages awards, unless the statements are about public officials or so-called "public figures"—people or businesses who are quite famous or influential. Those plaintiffs have to show the speaker knew the statement was false or at least was likely false.
And in many states, some falsehoods about particular people can lead to damages even if they don't harm a person's reputation. That's called the "false light" tort. Classic example: Baseball great Warren Spahn once won a damages award because a biographer had falsely claimed that Spahn was a war hero—even though that tended to falsely enhance Spahn's reputation rather than harming it.
That's true even for political, religious, or charitable fundraising, which is usually protected by the First Amendment. If you try to get people to donate money to your group, but lie about what it's doing, you could be sued or even prosecuted.
But it's not clear how far this goes. For instance, no appellate court has allowed a fraud lawsuit against a magazine on the theory that it lied in some sensational story so as to sell more magazines.
Commercial advertising is generally less protected than other speech, especially when it comes to false statements.
The federal government can't sue you for defamation even if you deliberately lie about something the government has done. Cities or public universities can't sue for defamation either.
Back in 1798, Congress tried to ban lies about the federal government with the infamous Sedition Act. Some justices at the time thought the law was fine, but the Supreme Court has since concluded that such a ban violates the First Amendment.
So a law banning flat-earth theory, for instance, would be unconstitutional. Same for laws that try to punish falsehoods about, say, climate change or vaccinations. In these "broad areas," the justices say, "any attempt by the state to penalize purportedly false speech would present a grave and unacceptable danger of suppressing truthful speech" [quoting United States v. Alvarez, 132 S. Ct. 2537 (2012)].
In 2012, the Court struck down the Stolen Valor Act, which criminalized falsely claiming that you've won a military medal; while six justices agreed on that result, the reasoning was split into two groups.
Four justices said that most noncommercial lies are broadly protected by the First Amendment, unless they fit into a few categories such as defamation or fraud or perjury.
But two justices concluded that lies are only kinda, sorta, sometimes protected. They held that restrictions on such lies "warrant neither near-automatic condemnation … nor near-automatic approval."
So whether any particular kind of lie is unprotected was left to be decided case by case, without much guidance from the Supreme Court.
Since it generally takes five justices out of the nine to set a conclusive precedent, it's hard to say what's allowed and what's not. You'd think a question that's this fundamental would have been resolved by now, but, uh … no.
For instance, some states ban deliberate lies in election campaigns. Is that constitutional?
Not if it's applied to statements about the government, or about social science, or about history. But what if it's more specific, like a candidate claiming endorsements that he didn't actually get? That's a harder call, and lower courts disagree on whether broad bans on lies in election campaigns are constitutional.
Or what about hoaxes that suck up police resources? Back in 2009, Andrew Scott Haley posted YouTube videos in which he purported to be a serial killer and gave clues to his supposed killings. He was eventually prosecuted for making false statements that he knew would come to the attention of law enforcement and trigger an investigation. The Georgia Supreme Court held that the First Amendment didn't protect such a hoax. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider the case, leaving that issue unresolved outside Georgia.
So, to summarize:
Written by Eugene Volokh, who is a First Amendment law professor at UCLA.
Produced and edited by Austin Bragg, who is not.
This is the third episode of Free Speech Rules, a video series on free speech and the law. Volokh is the co-founder of The Volokh Conspiracy, a blog hosted at Reason.com.
This is not legal advice.
If this were legal advice, it would be followed by a bill.
Please use responsibly.
—
Music: "Lobby Time," by Kevin MacLeod (Incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
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The post Fake News and the First Amendment: Free Speech Rules (Episode 3) appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Once, Microsoft had zero lobbyists. The company focused on innovating.
"Microsoft in the early 1990s was the largest company in the world. Incredibly successful … They had no presence in Washington, D.C. Not a single lawyer," Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute tells John Stossel.
But things changed.
Brook explains how Microsoft's CEO was "literally brought in front of Congress … Orrin Hatch from Utah … said, 'You guys need to get involved here in Washington, D.C. You need to build a building here. You need to hire lawyers here.'"
Microsoft, courageously, didn't. Instead, Brook recounts, "Microsoft walked out of the meeting and said, 'You know what? You leave us alone, we will leave you alone … We're busy. We're running the biggest company in the world. There's a lot to do.'"
But soon after that, Attorney General Janet Reno announced that the Justice Department was charging Microsoft with "engaging in anti-competitive and exclusionary practices designed to maintain its monopoly."
Brook says the government was essentially saying, "we're here to prosecute yo u because you're offering the American public … a product for free. This is Internet Explorer, at a time when we were buying Netscape and paying money for it—they offered it for free, and that was deemed bad business practice."
"For 10 years they had to fight that lawsuit," he adds. "They lost, they got regulated, they got controlled. Guess how much Microsoft spends today in Washington, D.C.? … Tens of millions of dollars."
Stossel calls that "sad."
Now, even worse, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg asks government for more regulation. He wants Congress to "require companies to build systems for keeping harmful content to a bare minimum".
Wouldn't that violate the First Amendment?
Stossel says it also, conveniently, would protect Facebook from competitors who don't restrict content. It also makes it harder for them to innovate in ways that might challenge Facebook.
Stossel and Brook's solution? Smaller government: separation of economy and state.
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The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.
The post Stossel: Enough Crony Capitalism! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 2015, an angry confrontation at Yale over how to dress up on Halloween caused a national sensation. Protesting students called for the university to fire Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist and physician, because they felt he and his wife, also teaching at Yale at the time, did not protect them from possible psychic injury.
The conflict started a week earlier, when the school's Intercultural Affairs Council sent an email encouraging members of the community to be careful not to offend their fellow students with culturally and racially insensitive costumes. Christakis' wife, Erika—an expert in early childhood education—responded with her own thoughts. "Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious…a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive," she wrote. From her perspective, American universities had "become places of censure and prohibition."
Students said that by sending her email, Erica Christakis had failed to create a safe space at Yale's Sillman College, where she served as associate master. Nicholas Christakis jumped into the fray, defending his wife's email, and he tried to engage in a dialogue with protestors in a courtyard. Scenes of students shouting at Nicholas and calling for his firing went viral.
Christakis not only held on to his tenured professorship, but three years later he was awarded the Sterling Professorship, Yale's highest faculty honor. And his confrontation with students kicked off an ongoing national debate about freedom of speech, political correctness, and sensitivity on college campuses.
As a sociologist, the 56-year-old Christakis is no stranger to highly charged group interactions. His new book is Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, which argues that our genetic makeup predisposes us to favor peaceful interaction and respectful co-existence over angry and violent mob rules.
Nick Gillespie sat down with Christakis to talk about his theory that what unites as humans is stronger than what divides us, the power of evolution as an explanatory system for society, and whether Enlightenment values such as civil discourse and intellectual freedom are still respected in our nation's colleges and universities.
Edited by Ian Keyser. Intro by Todd Krainin. Cameras by Jim Epstein and Kevin Alexander.
Music credit: 'Voyeur' by Jingle Punks
Photos by Ragesoss and Sibjeet, under a creative commons license.
The post The Yale Professor Attacked by Angry Students Over Halloween Costumes Believes Evolution Wants Us To Get Along appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If you think that all economists spend most of their time sitting at a desk plotting supply and demand curves, you haven't met Allison Schrager, author of the new book An Economist Walks Into a Brothel.
As her title promises, she visited the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in Nevada to learn how sex workers and their clients manage the risks that come even with legal prostitution. A Ph.D. economist who writes for Quartz, Schrager traveled the country to see how people in high-risk, high-reward fields such as horse breeding, candid celebrity photography, professional poker, and big-wave surfing assess and manage risk. The result is a compelling blend of first-person reporting and high-level economic analysis that gives individuals a new way not to avoid risk, but to make more-informed choices.
"People should feel more comfortable taking risks," Schrager tells Nick Gillespie. "We don't really give people the tools to feel comfortable with risk taking, but you really do need to take risks to make your life move forward and any aspect of your life, [whether] it's a relationship or your job." Their aren't any guarantees in life, she explains, but there are definitely smarter and dumber ways to take risks.
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Jim Epstein.
To listen to separate, longer podcast that Nick Gillespie recorded with Schrager, go here now.
Photo credits: s_bukley/Newscom, Blainey Woodham/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Scott Serio/Cal Sport Media/Newscom, Steve Marcus/REUTERS/Newscom, Erich Schlegel/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Richard Hallman/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Tony Heff/ZUMA Press/Newscom.
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The post An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: What Prostitutes and Big-Wave Surfers Can Teach Us About Risk appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>You've probably heard about how it's critical to eat breakfast—that it may have health benefits, and even help you lose weight.
John Stossel looks at the evidence with nutritionist Ruth Kava, and finds that there's no proof of any of those things.
For example, people push breakfast because, as one cereal maker's ad puts it, "a study from none other than Harvard University states that men who regularly skip breakfast have a 27% higher risk of suffering a heart attack."
That's true—but that's largely because the type of people who skip breakfast are also the type of people who are more likely to smoke, drink alcohol, and eat unhealthy foods. After adjusting for those things, breakfast itself has no significant effect.
As this study notes, "it remains unknown whether specific eating habits … influence coronary heart disease."
Another myth is that eating breakfast helps people lose weight. The US Health and Agriculture Departments claimed in 2010 that "consuming breakfast has been associated with weight loss." Wonderful! But no, a recent review of studies found that, if anything, the opposite is true. The government backed away from its claim.
One possible reason for the myth is industry funding of scientific studies.
"Of the 15 studies involving children mentioned by the government, five list funding from General Mills or Kellogg," Stossel says to Kava.
She replies: "Yeah, well, they're the ones that are interested in having their products sold."
Industry funding doesn't always mean bias. Dr. Andrew Brown, a health professor at Indiana University, told Stossel about a study that found that eating breakfast does not help lose weight.
"The study was supported by Quaker Oats, and presented as abstracts by the authors, but not published as a paper for years," Brown said. "Quaker Oats actually followed up with the authors to make sure the authors published the study that conflicted with their interests."
Kava says: "Good for Quaker Oats."
Bottom line, says Stossel, don't worry about skipping breakfast.
Instead, Kava says, just eat when it feels right to you, adding, "Eat breakfast if you're hungry."
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The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.
The post Stossel: The Breakfast Myth appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"To resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel must first achieve defeat of the Palestinian movement."
That was the topic of a debated hosted by the Soho Forum on March 18, 2019. It was an Oxford-style debate, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious.
For the affirmative, Elan Journo, a fellow and director of policy research at the Ayn Rand Institute, argued that the Palestinian movement is irreedemably corrupt and must be defeated as a necessary condition to achieve peace. The P.L.O. and Hamas have a long history of inciting terrorism and suicide attacks, and they aremore concerned with destroying Israel than with winning justice and prosperity for the Palestinian people, he argued. The defeat of the movement will require a coalition of governments to wage a sustained campaign of economic, diplomatic, and military efforts.
Danny Sjursen, a U.S. Army strategist and former history instructor at West Point, rejected Journo's characterization of the Palestinian movement. He argued that most Palestinian organizations, including Hamas, are more willing than ever to make reasonable compromises for peace, accept a two-state solution, and at least tacitly recognize Israel's right to exist. The only way to achieve a lasting solution to the middle east crisis is to treat the Palestinian leadership as potential negotiating partners.
Sjursen prevailed by convincing about 14 percent of audience members to change their minds.
Journo's latest book is What Justice Demands: America and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. He is co-author of Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism: From George W. Bush to Barack Obama and Beyond and editor of Winning the Unwinnable War: America's Self-Crippled Response to Islamic Totalitarianism.
Sjursen served tours with reconnaissance units in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written for The Nation and The American Conservative, he is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.
'Modum' by Kai Engel is licensed under CC BY 4.0
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The post Does Middle East Peace Require a Two-State Solution or a Palestinian Defeat? A Debate appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Occupational licensing laws apply to nearly one in three U.S. jobs, but the most "most broadly and onerously licensed state" of all, according to the Institute for Justice, is Arizona. The Grand Canyon State required a license to work for 64 occupations, costing on average $455 in fees and almost 600 days of education and experience.
Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican and the former CEO of Coldstone Creamery, has made reforming Arizona's occupational licensing regime a priority. "Our focus [has been] on improving that structure of government and really stopping the bullies that were part of the boards and commissions," he told Reason. He's now backing a bill that would allow Arizona to recognize occupational licenses granted by other states.
"Just because somebody packs up that moving van in Chicago, Illinois, they don't lose their skills on the way to the state of Arizona," says Ducey. "Why should somebody have to have suffer the burden of thousands of dollars or weeks or months of recertification in a skill that they already have?"
HB 2569, which was introduced by Rep. Warren Petersen (R–Gilbert), would allow anyone who has an occupational license from another state to be automatically eligible for the same license in Arizona as long as they are in good standing in their home state and don't have a disqualifying criminal history. It would extend an existing state law that recognizes out-of-state licenses for military families. New state residents would still have to pay a fee to the state licensing board and certain professions would have to pass a test on relevant Arizona laws.
"My issue is that we don't really know what the standards are in these other states," says Rep. Pamela Powers Hannley (D–Tucson), who opposes the bill. "Why should we dumb down our standards? I see this as sort of deregulation for the sake of deregulation."
Ducey, who predicts that the bill will pass and that other states will follow Arizona's lead, says he's confident that it has the necessary "guard rails." In 2017, he issued an executive order requiring that state licensing boards review and provide justification for every rules that the governor's office deemed excessive. The next day, he signed the Right to Earn a Living Act, which restricted state boards from issuing any new occupational licensing rules that can't be justified on health and safety grounds.
"I think it's important that we remember who the voters are and who the citizens are and we're here to serve them," Ducey says. "Too many of these boards and commissions exist to stop competition, to stifle and protect the status quo. And we're changing that in Arizona."
Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Paul Detrick and Andrew Belcher.
Photo credits: Monica Almeida/REUTERS/Newscom, Samantha Sais/REUTERS/Newscom, Nicole Neri/REUTERS/Newscom, Ben Moffat/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Fred Young/agefotostock/Newscom.
Additional footage courtesy of Foundation for Government Accountability.
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The post Why Do You Need a License To Blow Dry Hair? Arizona Gov. Ducey Fights the 'Bullies' in His State appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As Venezuela collapses, many people say, "don't blame socialism."
"Blaming socialism for Venezuela's riches to rags story is grossly misleading," an Al Jazeera reporter claims.
John Oliver claims: "If you follow conservative media at all you might have seen it frequently painted as the inevitable dire consequences of a socialist government." Oliver blames it instead on "epic mismanagement."
But John Stossel says: "Mismanagement is what happens under socialist governments. It always happens, because no group of central planners is wise enough to manage an entire economy. Even if they have good intentions, the socialists eventually run out of other people's money."
In Venezuela, when their socialist government ran out of money, they just printed more. When business owners raised prices to keep up with inflation, the government often took away their businesses.
Yet celebrities praised Hugo Chavez, who started Venezuela's socialism. Model Naomi Campbell visited Chavez, calling him "a rebel angel."
After Chavez's death in 2013, Oliver Stone tweeted, "Hugo Chavez will live forever in history. My friend, rest finally in a peace long earned." Sean Penn told The Hollywood Reporter that "poor people around the world lost a champion."
Stossel says the good news is that, unlike American celebrities, "most Venezuelans who escaped their country's socialism do understand what went wrong."
In Florida, reporter Gloria Alverez talked to Venezuelan immigrants, and most of them told her socialism doesn't work. One said, "It's never gonna work." Another man explained, "It's something that breeds and leads to other misery and destruction."
Stossel warns that if we don't realize that socialism is to blame for Venezuela's destruction, "other tragedies like Venezuela will happen again and again."
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The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.
The post Stossel: Venezuela <em>Is</em> Socialism appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>According to Republican Congressman Devin Nunes, the abuse he's endured on Twitter is of a "breadth and scope" that "no human being should ever have to bear and suffer in their whole life." He's been called a "presidential fluffer and swamp rat," a "Putin shill," an "unscrupulous, craven, back-stabbing, charlatan and traitor," and "voted 'Most Likely to Commit Treason' in high school."
Now this California lawmaker and Trump ally is suing Twitter for $250,000,000 for "emotional distress and mental suffering, and injury to his personal and professional reputations." He's also asking the court to force Twitter to reveal the true identities behind the "Devin Nunes' Mom," "Devin Nunes' cow," "Fire Devin Nunes," and "Devin Nunes Grapes" accounts.
On what grounds can an elected official sue a social media platform for speech that offends him? "Twitter is not merely a website," the lawsuit alleges: "it is the modern town square"—a "public forum" with a "private owner."
Named in the quarter-of-a-billion dollar lawsuit, right alongside "Devin Nunes' Mom" and "Devin Nunes's Cow," is Liz Mair, a Republican strategist and self-described libertarian. Mair angered Nunes for, among other things, delivering a pair of yellow New Balances to his congressional office after he ran out of a committee hearing on the Russia scandal.
Reason's Peter Suderman sat down with Mair to talk about the lawsuit and what it means for free speech on the internet.
Cameras by Todd Krainin and Meredith Bragg. Edited by Ian Keyser. Intro by Todd Krainin.
"Complect for…." by Kosta T is licensed under CC BY-NC_SA 3.0.
Photo credits:
JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS/Newscom
CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS/Newscom
Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Newscom
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The post Devin Nunes' Lawsuit Against Twitter Is an Attack on Every American's Right to Free Speech appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A parody of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Californication" written by Remy.
Music tracks, mastering, and background vocals by Ben Karlstrom.
Video produced by Austin Bragg.
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LYRICS
There's a non-foregone phenomenon in any prosperous nation
When primal fears all disappear the brain then gets a sensation
The medical name we gave this pain is affluenflammation
Ol' Bill Tub is chugging a jug of cold bovine lactation
When his eyes then realize that carton side's got information
And since his life contains no strife it's affluenflammation
For the better part of history diseases all were raging
Measles, mumps up on your junk like they were Kevin Spacey
Then came Jonas Salk
Makes you wonder what all for…
Cuz we've got affluenflammation
We've got affluenflammation
Ol' Chip Black is cracking the back of twelve live-steamed crustaceans
For the perks and glee of living free he starts to lose appreciation
And if you probe his frontal lobe—yep—affluenflammation
Through the course of human history each day we faced starvation
Rats and pox and chamber pots, streets filled with defecation
Free markets changed the norm
Makes you wonder what all for…
Cuz we've got affluenflammation
We've got affluenflammation
We've got affluenflammation
We've got affluenflammation
The post Remy: Affluenflammation (Red Hot Chili Peppers Parody) appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Seven academic journals recently published papers that were actually hoaxes designed to show the absurdity found in such academic fields as gender studies, race studies, and queer studies. The hoaxers intentionally submitted papers that were ridiculous. One included gibberish about rape culture in dog parks. Another was a section of Hitler's Mein Kampf re-written with feminist buzzwords.
Six journal editors would not talk to Stossel, but one—Roberto Refinetti, editor in chief of Sexuality and Culture—agreed to an interview.
He condemns what the hoaxers did: "You're deceiving people without much of a reason."
He complains, "If you're going to do your research with people, you have to propose your research, submit to a body called an Institutional Review Board."
One of the hoaxers, Peter Boghossian, was found guilty by his employer (Portland State University) of violating its rules requiring him to get approval for the experiment. Of course, since the Institutional Review Board would have insisted that the researchers inform the journals that they were being tested, the test wouldn't have worked.
Stossel says he thinks the hoaxers had good reason not to go to the review board first. "Their hoax woke us up to the fact that some academic journals publish nonsense," he says.
Refinetti's journal, for instance, published the hoax paper titled, "Going in Through the Back Door: Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria, Transhysteria, and Transphobia Through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use."
The paper touted "encouraging male anal eroticism with sex toys" because it would help make men more feminist.
Sexuality and Culture published that paper after its reviewers praised it glowingly. One called it "an incredibly rich and exciting contribution…timely, and worthy of publication."
Refinetti defends his journal, saying that it publishes mind-expanding questions.
"What is the problem with [the subject of the paper]? I don't see a problem….It's nothing really absurd or unusual," Refinetti says.
He also says: "Let's question our assumptions, because maybe we're making assumptions that we shouldn't be making….When homosexuality was considered a mental illness. People pushed, the psychiatrists got together, and said…'it's a perfectly fine thing to choose and not to call it mental illness.' So that's the type of thing that a journal in sexuality and culture does, is discuss."
Discussion is good, Stossel agrees. But in journals today, it seems that only certain conclusions are permitted. The hoaxers complain that in many university fields: "A culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed, like those that make whiteness and masculinity problematic."
"I wouldn't be surprised to find out that in some places that is correct," Refinetti agrees.
"Is that a problem?" asks Stossel.
Refinetti replies: "How big of a problem is it? Is it worse than hunger? Is it worse than people shooting each other?"
But a lack of diversity of ideas does make it harder to find truth—and more likely for ridiculous ideas to thrive. Today's colleges have an extreme lack of diversity: A National Association of Scholars report found that professors at top liberal arts colleges are 10 times more likely to be Democrats than Republicans.
Refinetti says that's not surprising.
"I think it's very reasonable—because what is the job of learning?…Being more open to new ideas, which is what being a liberal is," he says.
Stossel pushes back: "This is your left-leaning definition; it's conservatives that proposed changes like school vouchers…privatizing air traffic control."
"That's an interesting point," Refinetti responds. "Then the hypothesis is shut down. See, that's how things work. You show the idea, you discuss the idea, and get it."
Refinetti says his journal publishes multiple viewpoints. It has published articles that question feminist orthodoxy.
Stossel says he's grateful that Refinetti was willing to have a conversation, but he still cheers the hoaxers for revealing that much of what passes for scholarship at colleges is bunk.
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The post Stossel: Debating a Hoaxed Journal Editor appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 2016, Clint Bolick became an associate justice on the Arizona State Supreme Court, making him one of the most influential—and consequential—libertarians in today's legal world.
That appointment is merely the most recent career highlight for the 61-year-old activist, author, and policy wonk. Bolick worked under Clarence Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the 1980s before moving to the Justice Department. While he was there he published his first book, which argued that the civil rights movement should focus on removing government barriers to economic opportunity.
In 1991, Bolick and Chip Mellor founded the Institute for Justice, the country's premier libertarian public-interest law firm. In 2007, he became vice president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute, Arizona's leading free-market think tank, where he took on restrictive licensing, zoning, and business regulations—and became a nemesis to Joe Arpaio, the self-proclaimed "toughest sheriff" America.
Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Bolick in Phoenix to talk about his legal philosophy, the politics of immigration, the most interesting case he's encountered on the bench so far, and why he sports a scorpion tattoo on what he calls his "typing finger."
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The post A Tattooed Libertarian on the Arizona Supreme Court: Clint Bolick's Long Fight for Freedom appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On 60 Minutes, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) recently said "people are going to have to start paying their fair share in taxes."
Anderson Cooper then asked her what a "fair share" would be.
Ocasio-Cortez responded that in the past, "Sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60-70 percent."
Soon, that became the progressive plan.
But economic historian Phil Magness, of the American Institute for Economic Research, says that progressives miss an important fact: The high tax rates that America had in the past actually didn't bring in much revenue.
When rates were at 70 percent, Magness tells John Stossel, "A millionaire on average would pay 41 percent."
That's because rich people find loopholes. When America had its highest top tax rates, newspapers ran ads like "Cruise for free…$2,499 value."
Magness explains: "Basically [you could] take a vacation around the Caribbean, but while you're onboard the ship, you attend, say, an investing seminar or a real estate seminar—then write off the [whole] trip."
Stossel says that deductions became so complex that rich people, instead of investing in, say, a precursor to the iPhone, hired accountants and tax lawyers to study the tax code. Some also worked less.
This led President Ronald Reagan, with bipartisan support from Democrats, to lower rates and remove deductions. That began the path to the 37 percent top rate that rates that we have today.
Despite the lower rates, federal government revenue—as a percentage of the economy—is still about the same as it was when the top rate was 70 percent. It's even about the same as it was when the rate was 90 percent.
Stossel asks Magness about the claim that "the government will collect more and do good things."
"You're asking for an economic disaster," Magness replies. More money will be wasted in the hands of government. "Do we leave it in the private sector where the market decides? Or do we subject it to corrupt politicians?"
Stossel says: Let the market decide, even though that means some get really rich, because economic growth benefits everyone.
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The post Stossel: Tax Myths appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On January 3, 1999, Andrew Goldstein wandered onto a New York City subway platform and shoved a stranger named Kendra Webdale into the path of an oncoming train. As the story made national news, reporters dug into Goldstein's past and found that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and had a history of violent episodes. He had been in and out of psychiatric facilities, but his caretakers had repeatedly released him back onto the streets against their better judgment because of a shortage of available beds.
The murder of Kendra Webdale brought attention to Americans with severe mental health problems and inadequate treatment, a social problem that 20 years later is still ongoing. Prisons and jails are filled with inmates who exhibit symptoms of mental illness. So do many of the homeless people crowding the streets of cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. Violent episodes, like the Webdale murder and some recent mass shootings, have brought renewed calls to entrust the state with more authority to force psychiatric care on patients against their will.
This story looks at the history of mental illness, institutionalization, and the role of coercion in psychiatry. It features an array of voices and viewpoints, including Linda Mayo, the mother of twin daughers with severe psychiatric diagnoses, who advocates for court-ordered psychiatric treatment; Richard Krzyzanowski, a patients' rights advocate who fights against coercive treatment laws; DJ Jaffe, the founder of Mental Illness Policy Org., who argues that the state should make it much easier to commit mental patients; the late Thomas Szasz, a controversial libertarian psychiatrist who fought compulsory treatment and questioned the very existence of mental illness; and Scott Zeller, a psychiatrist who's developed a new model that he hopes will reduce coercion in the system. (Disclosure: Zeller has in the past donated to Reason Foundation, the 501c3 that publishes Reason.)
Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Weissmueller, Jim Epstein, Meredith Bragg, and Alexis Garcia.
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Photos of Adderall: Kristoffer Tripplaar/Sipa USA/Newscom
Photo of Andrew Goldstein: Marty Lederhandler/Associated Press
Photo of Gov. Pataki signing Kendra's Law: Jim McKnight/Associated Press
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The post We Shut Down State Mental Hospitals. Some People Want to Bring Them Back. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Three academics conducted what they call a "grievance studies" experiment. They wrote fake papers on ridiculous subjects and submitted them to prominent academic journals in fields that study gender, race, and sexuality.
They did this to "expose a political corruption that has taken hold of the universities," say the hoaxers in a video which documented the process.
John Stossel interviewed James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian who, along with Helen Pluckrose, sent so-called research papers to 20 journals.
They were surprised when seven papers were accepted. One claimed that "dog humping incidents at dog parks" can be taken as "evidence of rape culture." It was honored as "excellent scholarship."
Another paper rewrote a section of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf as intersectional feminism.
Stossel assumed that the journals would apologize for publishing nonsense and question the quality of their scholarship. But instead they criticized the the hoaxers, complaining that they "engaged in flawed and unethical research."
Of course, that was the point of the hoax.
Boghossian is unapologetic, telling Stossel the hoax shows "scholarship in these disciplines is utterly corrupted … they have placed an agenda before the truth."
When Stossel suggests, "maybe you are just conservative hacks looking to defend your white privilege." Lindsay replied "I've never voted for a Republican in my life." Boghossian added, "Nor have I."
Stossel says what upsets him is that after the hoax "no university said 'we're not gonna use these journals' and no editor publicly said, 'we have to raise our standards.'"
Instead, Portland State University began disciplinary procedures against Boghossian.
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The post Stossel: Academic Hoax appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Former Gov. Jerry Brown was a steadfast supporter of the California's bullet-train boondoggle despite cost overruns, lawsuits, and a lack of private support. But in his first State of the State Address, current Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that he would scale back the project.
"He's spit in Jerry Brown's eye," says Joel Kotkin, a fellow in urban studies at Chapman University.
Gov. Newsom says he'll push forward with one portion of the high-speed rail line—the stretch running from Bakersfield to Merced, or span of about 175 miles. But neither city is a big job center, and it's not a heavily traveled route. "This is the ultimate train to nowhere," says Kotkin.
He says that backers of the Green New Deal, a plan that would crisscross the country with new bullet trains, should take notice. "The real battle in the Democratic Party is between reality and fantasy. And this was a big win for reality," says Kotkin.
"Is any other state going to be as stupid as we are?"
Produced by Paul Detrick.
Photo of Gavin Newsom; Credit: Mike Blake/REUTERS/Newscom
Photos of Jerry Brown in legislature; Credit: Hector Amezcua/MCT/Newscom
Photo of Jerry Brown; Credit: Fred Greaves/REUTERS/Newscom
Photo of Joel Kotkin; Credit: Nick Agro/ZUMA Press/Newscom
Photo of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; Credit: G. Ronald Lopez/ZUMA Press/Newscom
Photo of trains; Credit: Chapman University urban studies fellow Joel Kotkin says Governor Gavin Newsom's scaling back of a high-speed rail project in California is a shot across the bow for the Green New Deal, which hopes to use high-speed trains to combat the effects of climate change.
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Former Gov. Jerry Brown was a steadfast supporter of the California's bullet-train boondoggle despite cost overruns, lawsuits, and a lack of private support. But in his first State of the State Address, current Gov. Gavin Newsom annoucned that he would scale back the project.
"He's spit in Jerry Brown's eye," says Joel Kotkin, a fellow in urban studies at Chapman University.
Gov. Newsom says he'll push forward with one portion of the high-speed rail line—the stretch running from Bakersfield to Merced, or span of about 175 miles. But neither city is a big job center, and it's not a heavily traveled route. "This is the ultimate train to nowhere," says Kotkin.
He says that backers of the Green New Deal, a plan that would criscross the country with new bullet trains, should take notice. "The real battle in the Democratic Party is between reality and fantasy. And this was a big win for reality," says Kotkin.
"Is any other state going to be as stupid as we are?"
Produced by Paul Detrick.
Photo of Gavin Newsom; Credit: Mike Blake/REUTERS/Newscom
Photos of Jerry Brown in legislature; Credit: Hector Amezcua/MCT/Newscom
Photo of Jerry Brown; Credit: Fred Greaves/REUTERS/Newscom
Photo of Joel Kotkin; Credit: Nick Agro/ZUMA Press/Newscom
Photo of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; Credit: G. Ronald Lopez/ZUMA Press/Newscom
Photo of Trains; Credit: Imagine China/Newscom
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The post California's High-Speed Rail Disaster Is a 'Shot Across the Bow for the Green New Deal' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Was the 2008 financial crisis caused by market distortions or market failure?
That was the topic of a public debated hosted by the Soho Forum in New York City on February 20, 2019. It featured John Allison, former CEO of BB&T Bank and former CEO and president of the Cato Institute, and Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Moody's Analytics. Allison argued that market distortions led to the financial crisis, and Zandi attributed the crisis to market failure. Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein moderated.
It was an Oxford-style debate, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious. Allison prevailed by convincing about 10 percent of audience members to change their minds.
Today Allison is an executive in residence at the Wake Forest School of Business. He's author of The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism is the World Economy's Only Hope (McGraw-Hill, 2012). Zandi is the author of Financial Shock: A 360º Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion, and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis.
The Soho Forum, which is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village.
Music: "Modum" by Kai Engle is licensed under a CC-BY creative commons license.
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The post What Caused the 2008 Financial Crisis: Market Distortions or Market Failure? A Debate appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The U.S. sugar program is "Stalin-style price controls," Ross Marchand of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance tells John Stossel.
The U.S. government uses a complex system of loans, domestic quotas, and limits on how much sugar we can import. The goal is to control the price of sugar.
Stossel calls it "welfare for the rich." Economists say the program costs consumers billions a year. And yet the sugar industry makes videos that say "it costs taxpayers nothing."
Economist Vincent H. Smith writes that the "Stalinist-style," supply control, "substantially increases U.S. prices–on average U.S. sugar prices are about twice as high as world prices."
Yet politicians from sugar-producing states defend the program. "It basically allows our sugar industry to compete with other countries that are heavily subsidized by their home countries," Senator Marco Rubio said in an interview with Fox News.
Stossel takes Rubio's claim to Marchand, "It's only fair to our sugar producers who don't get subsidized, who can't compete with these subsidized countries."
Marchand replies, "Is it fair for customers to pay double the world rate for sugar? Is it fair for taxpayers to have to bail out a handful of super rich super-connected sugar processors? No."
Ryan Weston, representing the Sugarcane Growers, goes on TV programs and says, "we are a no cost program, no cost to the taxpayer."
"That's absolutely bogus, taxpayers do pay the cost," retorts Marchand. When sugar prices drop, "Government will buy sugar from the sugar processors and sell it to ethanol producers at a below market rate. Who's paying the difference? Who's footing the bill? U.S. taxpayers."
Why aren't people upset with these crony capitalists?
In a video produced by Learn Liberty, Economist Diana Thomas explains that the U.S. sugar program cost each of us "about $10 more on sugar products a year. So we don't even notice it." But sugar producers will lobby hard for their special deal because "each American sugar farmer made roughly $3 million dollars a year extra."
The people who do notice the price controls most are candy makers. According to an Iowa University study, 20,000 American jobs a year are lost because of high sugar prices. Marchand says, "there is one candy cane producer left in Ohio. That's absolutely ridiculous. And look at all those jobs."
Stossel challenges Marchand by saying that it's probably good that we eat less sugar and candy. Marchand replies, "the fact that sugar is in everything means that healthy and unhealthy products alike are going to cost more."
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The post Stossel: Sugar's Sweetheart Deal appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Why should Congress cough up the money to build a border wall? President Trump claims it would help stop the flow of deadly drugs coming in from Mexico.
Historically, in terms of sheer weight, marijuana has been Mexico's leading illicit drug export to the U.S. But last year, "the average Border Patrol agent was seizing just 25 pounds [of marijuana] for the entire year, or less than half a pound per week—a drop of 78 percent from 2013," writes David Bier, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, in the cover story of Reason's April 2019 issue.
This trend has nothing to do with increased border security, or a crackdown on the Sinaloa Cartel and its former leader, Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán, who was found guilty on 10 criminal counts in U.S. federal court last week. The falloff in pot smuggling, Bier argues, is a direct result of state-level legalization here in the U.S.
Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Bier to discuss why easing pot prohibition is doing what the failed war on drugs never could.
Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Austin Bragg and Todd Krainin.
Photo credits: Edgard Garrido/REUTERS/Newscom, Tomas Bravo/REUTERS/Newscom, Gary Moon/ZUMA Press/Newscom.
Lightless Dawn by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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The post Legal Weed Did More to Stop Drug Smuggling Than Any Wall appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Here are three rules you should know about "Hate Speech" and the First Amendment:
Rule 1. The First Amendment protects all ideas, loving, hateful, or in between.
In the United States, "hate speech" is just a political label, like "un-American speech" or "rude speech." Some people use the phrase broadly, some more narrowly—but there's no legal definition, because there is no "hate speech" exception to the First Amendment..
As the Supreme Court held in 1974, "Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the competition of other ideas." [quoting Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323 (1974).]
Or, in 2017:
"…the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express 'the thought that we hate.'" [quoting Matal v. Tam, 137 S. Ct. 1744 (2017).]
That's from Matal v. Tam, in which the government denied a trademark to an Asian-American band, because the band's name—The Slants— was seen by some as a racial slur. The government wasn't even trying to ban the name; it was just denying a generally available benefit—trademark registration—to people who used the name.
But even that, the Court concluded, was unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination, and thus violated the First Amendment.
Rule 2. Some speech is not protected by the First Amendment, but that's true regardless of whether it's bigoted or hateful
For instance, threats of violence are constitutionally unprotected. That includes all threats–racist threats, threats to police officers, threats to business owners, threats to the President, anyone.
Likewise, intentionally inciting immediate violence is sometimes punishable. Classic example: Giving a speech to a mob outside a building, urging them to burn it down. But again, it doesn't matter if the speech is outside a synagogue, a police station, or a recycling center.
Personal insults said to someone's face might also be punishable, as so-called "fighting words."
Again, though, that's true regardless of whether the insults stem from personal hostility or group hatred related to race, religion, and the like.
Indeed, in 1992, the Supreme Court struck down an ordinance that specially targeted bigoted fighting words. Such an ordinance, the Court said, unconstitutionally discriminates against particular viewpoints.
Rule 3. Hate crime laws are constitutional, so long as they punish violence or vandalism, not speech
The classic example is Wisconsin v. Mitchell, the 1993 case in which the Supreme Court unanimously upheld hate crimes laws. Todd Mitchell, a young black man, urged some friends to beat up a white boy because the boy was white.
Wisconsin law made the beating into a more serious crime because the boy was targeted based on his race. The Court said this is fine, because "a physical assault is not by any stretch of the imagination expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment."
And while the law increased the punishment because of the defendant's intent, the law often punishes people more because of why they did what they did.
Killing someone for money will get you a harsher punishment than killing them out of momentary anger. Likewise, firing an employee because of his race will get you a civil lawsuit; firing an employee for most other reasons won't.
None of this covers the mere expression of hateful ideas, or the use of words that some see as hateful. Those are indeed generally protected by the First Amendment.
But why? The Justices generally agree that racist ideas, for instances, are wrong and dangerous. Why would the Justices say hate speech is constitutionally protected?
Because they don't trust government officials to decide which ideas are wrong and dangerous.
They worry that if government officials had the power to ban evil ideas, that power would quickly stretch to punishing a wide range of debate and dissent. And they see the First Amendment as requiring that distrust.
In the words of Justice Black, echoed by the Supreme Court in 1972, "The freedoms…guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish." [quoting Healy v. James, 408 U.S. 169 (1972).]
So to sum up:
1: There is no "hate speech" exception to the First Amendment
2: Threats of violence and incitement to violence are not protected, but that has nothing to do with "hateful" content.
3: and Hate crime laws can punish violence or vandalism based on the offender targeting particular groups, but that doesn't allow punishment of supposed "hate speech."
Written by Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment law professor at UCLA.
Produced and edited by Austin Bragg, who is not.
This is the second episode of Free Speech Rules, a video series on free speech and the law. Volokh is the co-founder of the Volokh Conspiracy, which is hosted at Reason.com.
This is not legal advice.
If this were legal advice, it would be followed by a bill.
Please use responsibly.
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Music: "You Make Me Alive" by The Slants
Wookie Icon by Jory Raphael, symbolicons.com
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]]>Last week, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Democratic Senator Edward Markey introduced the Green New Deal, a non-binding resolution that would radically overhaul America's economy in the name of fighting global climate change. The resolution bundled together a variety of big-ticket progressive policy priorities, not all of which were obviously related to climate change, from universal health coverage to a jobs guarantee to subsidized college.
The proposal was swiftly praised by much of the 2020 Democratic presidential field—yet even some liberals wondered if it was trying to do too much at once. In attempting to be all things to everyone, would the Green New Deal end up being nothing to anyone?
Veronique de Rugy, a Reason columnist and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, joins us to explain what the Green New Deal means, why it would be so expensive, and why even socialist countries in Europe don't try to do this much.
Interview by Peter Suderman. Edited by Meredith Bragg, Todd Krainin, and Mark McDaniel. Cameras by Bragg and Krainin.
FRACTURES by Ryan Little.
Photo Credits:
STEVE FERDMAN/UPI/Newscom
JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS/Newscom
Estelle Ruiz/ZUMA Press/Newscom
Alex Edelman/SIPA/Newscom
The post Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal: A Bizarre Grab-Bag of Terrible Ideas appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>3 million kids (mostly boys) are given medication that's supposed to make them sit still and focus.
But what if schools, not kids, are the problem?
One former public school student, Cade Summers, tells John Stossel that he hated the effect of the drugs–that it was like he had been "lobotomized."
Cade's parents took him off the "attention deficit" drugs and sent him to other schools. But Cade hated them all. "I would come home and I would sometimes just cry," Cade tells Stossel.
Then he heard of a new type of school in Austin, Texas. It promised to let kids discuss ideas, and to do real-world work.
But the school, the Academy of Thought and Industry, is a private school that charges tuition.
So Cade started getting up at 3 a.m. to work in a coffee shop to help pay the tuition.
What kind of school could possibly be worth that to a kid?
The school's founder, Michael Strong, says kids learn best when they are given actual responsibility, real life work. "Teens need responsibility…Ben Franklin, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, started their careers at the age of 12 or 13," he points out.
Nowadays people consider that abusive child labor, Stossel notes.
"I worked as a teen," Strong replies. "I loved it. Teens very often want to work."
Strong's schools do many things differently. Students get Fridays off to work on their own projects. School starts at 10 a.m. There are no lectures–instead students read, and then discuss what they read.
That's different from schools Strong once attended–and hated.
"School is 13 years of how to be passive, how to be dependent," Strong tells Stossel.
"School is about aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, and never get stuff done. So I want students who just go out there and get stuff done, fail, get up, try again. That's how we become creators, entrepreneurs…We want them to do what they love now."
For Cade, that meant doing a marketing internship Fridays, where he did actual work.
When he completed Strong's school, he got a job right away–at a tech startup that normally requires a college degree.
Another Academy graduate runs a successful metal music festival called "Austin Terror Fest."
All kids at Strong's schools work on some kind of project.
"I'm currently working on making a web-based chat application," one boy told us. "I wanna be a programmer. I love programming".
A girl at the school works at a paintball range on weekends. "If they love paintball, then they should do a business in that," says Strong.
Most of his students also end up going to college. Strong points out, "We've had students admitted to top liberal arts colleges. Bard, Bennington …"
"Of course they do well," Stossel interrupts. "You're charging fat tuition. Only rich kids can afford to go there and they're going to do well."
"The kind of kids that we get come from all walks of life," Strong responds. "We had a student from New Jersey…he was incapable of functioning in the highly structured public school systems…in the public schools needed a full time aide…He was costing the state an enormous amount of money. He came to our school…He did not need an aide."
"Coming here is just healing. It's incredible," that student, Josh, told us.
Strong hopes his schools will be a model for other schools that let kids learn through real world work.
That approach works so much better for some kid that they willingly wake up at 3 a.m. to go to work to help pay tuition.
"It was me choosing my life," Cade says.
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]]>The Austin-based nonprofit Defense Distributed, which defends and facilitiates the homemade firearm movement, has had a wild seven months: It reached a settlement in a longstanding federal lawsuit, it reposted all of its downloadable gun files on the internet, it was sued by 25 states, and then it had to pull all those files back down. It also just launched a new product: the Polymer80 kit for finishing a Glock-style handgun on the company's Ghost Gunner milling machine in about half an hour.
But the most consequential event for the company was the arrest and indictment of its charismatic founder, Cody Wilson. In September 2018, Austin police announced a warrant for Wilson's arrest for allegedly paying for sex with a 16-year-old female he met through an app called SugarDaddyMeet—in a state where the age of consent is 17. Police discovered Wilson was in Taiwan, and he was detained and sent home. Wilson is currently out on bail awaiting trial.
Stepping up as Defense Distributed's new director was Paloma Heindorff, who had little experience on the public stage and hadn't even fired a gun prior to 2015.
So where does Wilson's arrest and resignation leave Defense Distributed, a company oriented around Wilson's brash public persona and vision of all-out war between the state and the individual? And what's the future of its legal battle to protect the First Amendment right to distribute gun files? Reason's Zach Weissmueller went behind the scenes at America's most controversial gun company.
Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Jim Epstein, Mark McDaniel, and Weissmueller. Additional graphics by Epstein.
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]]>Nearly a dozen Democrats are already running for president. The highlights so far include an interview about immigration livestreamed from a dental chair, a former Harvard professor popping a beer like jes' plain folks on New Year's Eve, and a draconian former prosecutor pledging her allegiance to Wakanda. Democrats are tripping over each other to pitch Medicare for All, Free College for All, Guaranteed Jobs for All, and laying taxes on wealth as well as income.
And then there's Howard Schultz.
The former CEO of Starbucks is considering a run for president as a "centrist independent." He says that the national debt threatens economic growth, that we shouldn't demonize successful entrepreneurs, and that the government can't be all things to all people.
That brought public hate, contempt, and character assassination from every conceivable angle.
It's not just anti-globalist lefties on the attack. The New York Times' op-ed page says he's narcissistic, delusional, and fanatical. His potential run, his critics claim, would be nothing short of "reckless idiocy."
But Schultz's belief that neither major party represents America is widely shared. A plurality of Americans don't identify with either party. And nearly three-quarters of us think the country is headed in the wrong direction, which helps to explain why neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump won a majority of the popular vote in 2016.
The two-party duopoly and its supporters in the media understand how widely disliked they are, which is why they want to kneecap anyone who isn't on Team Red or Team Blue.
You don't have to agree with Schultz to understand that having more voices and ideas on the table at this point in the election cycle is a good thing—especially when you consider the alternatives.
Democrats fear people such as Schultz because they think he will drain votes from whoever their nominee ends up being, giving Trump a path to re-election. But that's actually a faulty analysis.
Former Republican Rep. John Anderson was blamed for pulling votes from Jimmy Carter in 1980, but almost half his supporters would have gone with Reagan as their second choice.
In 1992, the GOP fingered Ross Perot as a political saboteur, but the 19 percent of Americans who pulled the lever for the Texas Billionaire were equally split between Bush and Clinton as their fallback. In 2016, socially liberal and fiscally conservative voters—Schultz's demographic—broke for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, suggesting the coffee-shop magnate would pull votes from the incumbent president rather than his Democratic challenger.
Four years ago, during his attempt to win the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) complained that we don't "need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants." If variety in armpit aroma isn't his thing, I'd like to believe that the Vermont socialist would at least favor more choice at the ballot box. Right now, there are more forms of hepatitis than viable political parties in America.
So it's kind of fitting that the former CEO of a company that introduced infinite choice in coffee drinks is now being dragged for threatening to expand the political spectrum all the way from A to C. If American politics can't stand even the possibility of an independent candidate who praises capitalism, opposes massive tax increases, and wants to reduce federal debt, we're already screwed.
Edited by Mark McDaniel. Cameras by Jim Epstein. Graphics by Joshua Swain.
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The post Don't Fear Independents Like Howard Schultz! Politics Should Be More Like a Starbucks Menu appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>San Francisco is one of America's richest cities, yet it has a major problem with homelessness and crime. An average of 85 cars are broken into daily, yet fewer than 2 percent lead to arrests.
The homeless themselves are often harassed. "They run around and they shout at themselves," one man who usually sleeps on the streets told our crew. "They make it bad for people like us that hang out with a sign."
Since store owners can't rely on city cops for help, some have hired private police to patrol their stores. There used to be hundreds of these private cops citiwide—and then the city's police union complained. There are fewer than 10 left.
San Francisco's politicians have promised to help the homeless going back decades. In 1982, Mayor Dianne Feinstein bragged about creating "a thousands units right here in the Tenderloin." In 2002, Mayor Willie Brown said "you gotta do something about it." In 2008, Mayor Gavin Newsom boasted about moving "6,860 human beings off the street." In 2018, San Francisco passed a new local tax to help pay for homeless services.
Why have the results been so lackluster? One reason: San Francisco has the nation's highest rents.
Laura Foote runs the non-profit "YIMBY Action," which stands for "yes in my backyard." The organization promotes policies that encourage more housing construction as a way to bring down prices.
Many San Francisco residents object to this mission.
"I would hate it," one woman told John Stossel.
"I think it'd be really congested," said another.
"Let me build," said developer John Dennis. He spent years trying to get permission to replace a graffiti-covered, long-defunct meat-packing plant with a 60-unit building. He eventually got permission—but it took 4 years.
"And all that time, we're paying property taxes and we're paying for maintenance of the building," Dennis told Stossel.
"I'll never do another project here," he says.
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]]>Promised an improved way of life, Remy does everything he can to believe in a new ideology–except the math.
Post Malone parody written and performed by Remy. Video produced by Austin Bragg. Music tracks and mastering by Ben Karlstrom.
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LYRICS
Listened to those leaders so intently
Those Che Guevara shirts all seemed so trendy
Thought that things would be so good and friendly
So why'm I eating my neighbor's dog Benji?
Twenty million killed, sure, that's stuff I don't like
But I could stay on Momma's plan for the rest of my life
A guaranteed job digging ditches? Well, what's not to like?
It's failed miserably each time so trying again seemed wise
Now I'm looting, looting, looting, looting
Grabbing wieners like I'm Kevin Spacey
Told a crowd "we need free markets instead"
Now my neck is no longer attached to my head
They promised things would all be better now, better now
If pure equality was finally found, finally found
Now we're all grocery shopping at the pound, at the pound
Said that we'd have everything
Now we don't have anything
Whoa…
How much plasma are they gonna take?
Before I finally have enough to trade?
For toilet paper or a rodent steak?
I keep on looking back on better days
They promised things would all be better now, better now
If free expression it was not allowed, not allowed
But I just caught my Roomba texting Mao
Said that we'd have everything
Now we don't have anything
They promised things would all be better now, better now
If men with guns took farmers' land and plow, land and plow
Now it's another night of Rat Kung Pao, Rat Kung Pao
Said that we'd have everything
Now we don't have anything
They promised things would all be better now, better now
If we just nationalized oil in the ground, in the ground
Now somehow gasoline can not be found, not be found
Said that we'd have everything
Now we don't have anything
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]]>As she begins her 2020 presidential campaign, Sen. Kamala Harris is trying to position herself as a reformer who tirelessly works to correct the abuses of the criminal justice system. But the California Democrat has one big problem: her long record as a law-and-order prosecutor.
Harris's new memoir, The Truths We Hold, makes no mention of her past as an old-school drug warrior, a defender of dirty prosecutors, and a political opportunist who made life more dangerous for sex workers. Harris doesn't apologize for her previous stances, even those she now disavows; instead, she's decided to try to convince voters that she's always been a progressive prosecutor.
Here are some parts of her record that Harris is hoping you'll forget in the run-up to 2020.
HARRIS ON SEX WORKERS
Harris's political rise has been propelled by a yearslong, high-profile campaign against alleged sex traffickers. What she's actually done is help throw women in jail for having consensual sex, while trampling on the rule of law to advance her own political ambitions.
Ignoring the pleas of sex workers and human rights advocates for over a decade, she fought against campaigns to decriminalize consensual adult prostitution in California. As California attorney general, she helped lead a statewide program to get truckers to report suspected sex workers to police. These policies didn't stop traffickers, but they did land plenty of sex workers behind bars.
Harris fought to destroy Backpage.com, a classified ads site that sex workers used to find and screen clients, even though she publicly admitted that the site's founders, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, were protected from prosecution under federal free speech laws. But a month before Election Day in her Senate race, Harris went ahead and had them arrested anyway, parading them before cameras on pimping charges, which were then promptly dismissed by a judge.
When Harris got to Congress, she kept up her crusade, becoming a big proponent of the 2018 law known as SESTA-FOSTA. The result was that many sex workers no choice but to return to the streets, where soliciting clients is considerably more dangerous.
Meanwhile, Harris declined to intervene in a real underage sex-trafficking scandal that involved dozens of police and other local authorities in the Bay Area.
HARRIS ON PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT
In her memoir, Harris decries America's "deep and dark history" of "people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice," by framing innocent men or hiding exculpatory evidence. But during her time as California's top cop, she contributed to that history by repeatedly going to bat for dirty prosecutors.
Her office appealed the dismissal of a case in which a prosecutor had fabricated a confession to secure a conviction and fought an appeal in a case where the prosecutor lied to a jury during trial. In 2015, Harris tried to stop the removal of the Orange County District Attorney's office from a murder trial after it repeatedly failed to turn over evidence to the defense.
Her office even tried to keep a man in jail who had been wrongfully incarcerated for 13 years—even after a judge ruled he had proven himself innocent—because the man hadn't delivered the proof fast enough.
And as San Francisco District Attorney, Harris hid known misconduct by a crime lab technician who admitted to deliberately tainting evidence. The debacle has since led to the dismissal of hundreds of criminal cases.
HARRIS ON THE WAR ON DRUGS
Harris is a former drug warrior who is now refashioning herself as pro-legalization. That's a positive shift—but not a reason to rewrite the past or ignore the patterns it reveals in her judgment. For years after the cultural tide had turned in support of criminal justice reforms, Harris continued to support lock-'em-up policies that disproportionately hurt minorities.
As California Attorney General, Harris opposed marijuana legalization as late as 2014, promoted civil asset forfeiture without a conviction as a way to fight drug rings, and sought to more aggressively police prescription drug use.
In her new book, Harris reveals that her drug warrior mentality hasn't changed; it's just that her emphasis has shifted. Now she's hoping to funnel even more funds to law enforcement to "cut off the supply of fentanyl from China," and to "reinstate the DEA's authority to go after the major pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors."
HARRIS ON MASS INCARCERATION
Harris is now an outspoken critic of America's system of mass incarceration, but she's worked hard over the years to lock more people up, for longer. And once these people were in prison, Harris saw to it that they'd have a hell of a time getting out.
Before her recent about-face, Harris chose not to endorse proposed sentencing reforms on the California ballot in 2012 and 2014, and she defended the constitutionality of cash bail until 2016.
Harris's office also fought an order to reduce California prison populations after the Supreme Court determined the conditions amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Though she later claimed to be "shocked" at what they had done, Harris's attorneys argued that non-violent offenders should stay behind bars because the state needed the cheap labor they provide.
As she blazes her path to the White House in 2020, Kamala Harris is trying to rewrite her last chapter. But her record remains as a testament to her instincts and priorities when given real opportunities for change.
Hosted by Katherine Mangu-Ward. Written and Edited by Justin Monticello. Shot by Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg. Additional graphics by Joshua Swain. Music by Matt Harris.
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]]>Mercedes-Benz Stadium is home to the Atlanta Falcons and the site of this year's Super Bowl. Costing $1.5 billion, it's one of the most expensive stadiums in America.
The owner of Atlanta's football team, billionaire Arthur Blank, persuaded Atlanta officials to force taxpayers to pay for more than $700 million in subsidies for his stadium.
John Stossel says he understands why politicians subsidize stadiums. "They like going to games, and like telling voters, 'I brought a team to our town!'" says Stossel.
He also understands why billionaires take the money, "if politicians are giving money away, Blank's partners would consider him irresponsible not to take it."
And when it comes to already-rich people getting poorer people to fund their stadiums, Atlanta is not unusual. The Oakland Raiders got $750 million of taxpayer money to move the Raiders to Las Vegas.
"In the last two decades…taxpayers across the country have spent nearly $7 billion on [NFL] stadiums," according to a Huffington Post article.
In fact "12 teams … actually turned a profit on stadium subsidies alone," according to a Fox News report.
Politicians claim their subsidies are "an investment." They argue the economic benefits a stadium will bring a city outweigh the cost. Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman said, "It really is a benefit to us that really could spill over into something."
Stossel says this "spillover is bunk." Numerous economic studies have shown that stadiums are a bad investment for taxpayers.
One by George Mason University concludes, "Despite the many millions of dollars spent on professional sports, little or none of that money makes its way back to the taxpayers who subsidize professional sports teams." In fact "… sports teams may actually hurt economic growth."
Economist J.C. Bradbury points out that while money spent at football games is the "seen benefit, the unseen cost is that those people would otherwise be spending their money elsewhere in the local communities. At the local bar there's one less bartender. There was one less waitress hired at another restaurant. A movie theater that had one less theater full."
Stossel reminds everyone, "When politicians brag about their stadium and the many economic benefits, let's also remember all the jobs they destroyed and taxpayer money they squandered."
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]]>Over 30,000 public school teachers, nurses, counselors, and librarians went on strike last week in Los Angeles—the first teachers' strike there in nearly 30 years.
Driving the protests were union demands for higher salaries, smaller class sizes, and more funding for school nurses and counselors. District administrators said those demands would hasten the system's descent into insolvency.
While teacher salaries haven't increased much in inflation-adjusted terms since the 1990s, total teacher compensation has soared because of ballooning health care and retirement contributions. There's a growing disconnect between what teachers see in their paychecks and what their employers are actually paying for their services.
Reason spoke with Chad Aldeman, an editor at TeacherPensions.org and a senior associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners, to discuss what's really driving schools to the brink of bankruptcy. The interview is based in part on Aldeman's article in Education Next, "Teachers Have the Nation's Highest Retirement Costs. But They'll Never See the Benefits."
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Garcia, Justin Monticello, Meredith Bragg, and Mark McDaniel.
Photo credits: Christian Monterrosa/Sipa USA/Newscom, Ronan Tivony/Sipa USA/Newscom, Jonathan Alcorn/REUTERS/Newscom, Leah Mills/REUTERS/Newscom.
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]]>Anita Rios-Sherman has six children under the age of 18, and five of them are on the autism spectrum. When the local school system failed to meet the needs of her oldest son, Rios-Sherman decided to try a homeschooling curriculum. When one of her kids resisted, she took a more radical step: drop the curriculum altogether, and let her son decide what he wanted to spend his time learning. In her view, he benefited from a totally unstructured approach. Next, she tried the same method with her other children. It's an education philosophy known as "unschooling."
On a typical weekday, the Rios-Shermans might visit a local museum, go to the park, watch a documentary, play with each other at home, or surf the internet.
"Most days we just kind of finish up where we left up the day before on a project, or sometimes we're just spontaneous," says Rios-Sherman. "There are many things about the unschooling philosophy that work well for kids on the autism spectrum. A lot of it has to do with allowing them to explore their passions and them not having to earn that time."
There are unschooling groups in every major American city, with some specially themed versions—even Pagan unschooling. The movement dates back to the 1970s and was shaped by the work of educator and author John Holt.
"School is a place where children go to learn to be stupid," Holt once said in a televised interview. "And the process that makes them stupid…is other people trying to control their learning."
Holt, who died in 1985, began his career as a progressive school reformer, but lost hope that meaningful change was possible within the formal system. So he turned to the burgeoning homeschool movement as the most promising avenue for fixing what he viewed as America's broken education system. Some modern homeschoolers reference Holt as the movement's founding father, but his radical vision differed from that of the conservative religious practitioners who dominate public perception of homeschooling today.
Holt argued that children are natural learners, who intuitively act as "scientists", learning through the empirical processes of observation, experience, and trial-and-error. Rather than fostering that instinct, schools quash it with standardized curricula that discourage creative and independent thought. Holt ultimately concluded that any intervention, by either teachers or parents, to direct the education of a child is more likely to disrupt learning than to encourage it.
"[Educators] treat [children] like empty receptacles into which they are going to pour whatever learning they think they ought to have," Holt said.
Holt's approach is being tried in a growing number of arenas. Homeschooling rates roughly doubled between 1999 and 2012, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). And as Reason contributor J.D. Tuccille notes, NCES found that only 16 percent of survey respondents homeschool for purely religious reasons, while an increasing number cite "school environment" and dissatisfaction with the instruction. In addition, alternative schools that prioritize "self-directed learning" exist in all 50 states.
Watch the video above to learn more about the history of the unschooling movement, and to meet some of its modern practitioners, like the Rios-Sherman family. We also visited a school in Houston, Texas, that operates on the "Sudbury model," in which the kids decide how to spend their time, and vote on issues such as how to handle disciplinary matters and the allocation of school funds.
Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Jim Epstein, Mark McDaniel, Brynmore Williams, and Weissmueller.
"Float," "Ether Oar," Don't Force This," "Goodnight Shapeshifter,"Bubble," "Tides," and "Sanguine Bond" by Joel Corelitz are licensed under a Creative Commons attribution license.
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]]>"Racial segregation in America was, to a large degree, engineered by policy makers in Washington," writes the Economic Policy Institute's Richard Rothstein in the February 2019 issue of Reason, in an article adapted from his book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America (2017).
The Manhattan Institute's Howard Husock agrees, calling Rothstein's book an "admirable work" in a 2017 review. But the two part company over Rothstein's confidence "that government today is the appropriate instrument to effect housing integration" and his dismissal of the idea that "the private housing market, guided by rigorously enforced antidiscrimination laws, offers African-American buyers the surest route to wealth accumulation and upward mobility."
On January 14, 2019, the Soho Forum hosted a debate between Rothstein and Husock. The resolution read: "Since the federal government fostered housing segregation in the 20th century, the government should foster housing integration in the 21st."
The Soho Forum, which is partnered with the Reason Foundation, is a monthly series held at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village. It hosts Oxford-style debates, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious.
Husock prevailed by convincing over 13 percent of audience members to come over to his side.
Comedian Dave Smith, host of the podcast Part of the Problem, was the opening act.
Rothstein is also a fellow of the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and is the author of Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right (2008), Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap (2004), and other titles.
Husock is the author of Philanthropy Under Fire (2013) and The Trillion-Dollar Housing Mistake: The Failure of American Housing Policy (2003). From 1987 through 2006, he was director of case studies in public policy and management at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
Edited by Todd Krainin.
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]]>It's school choice week. Many kids don't have choice in where they go to school. The school choice movement is trying to give them that opportunity.
Of course, having choice when it comes to what kids learn is important too.
Many schools teach kids that capitalism hurts people.
So John Stossel started a charity called Stossel in the Classroom. It offers teachers free videos that introduce kids to free market ideas. Students rarely hear about these ideas in school.
Graduates from Queens Technical High School in New York City who watched the videos while they were in high school explained that the videos were different from what they were used to.
"They really opened up my mind to think differently" said Xiomara Inga. Antonio Parada added the videos "changed the way that I viewed the world."
Gabriel Miller was so inspired by videos about the founding of America, he decided to enlist in the National Guard. He explains, "We are taught that this country is horrible." But after watching the videos, "I felt ashamed for what I initially believed…[so] I wanted to give back."
Diony Perez was inspired to open his own business, an auto leasing company called Familia Motor Group. "The Stossel videos helped me become more of an entrepreneur," Diony said.
Other students explained that certain videos like "The Unintended Consequences …" and "The Evil Rich" stuck with them. Johann Astudillo learned about unintended consequences from a video about minimum wage, "minimum wage increase priced out young people from getting jobs into the market."
Victoria Guerrero learned that most rich people get rich by providing some benefit to society. "If it wasn't for Steve Jobs … our life would not be as easy as it is today."
Stossel says he is glad his charity helps students understand free market ideas.
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]]>The government shutdown is now longer than any in history. The media say it's a "crisis."
The Washington Post talks talks about the "shutdown's pain." The New York Times says it's "just too much."
John Stossel says: wait a second. Looking around America, everything seems pretty normal. Life goes on. Kids still play and learn, adults still work, stock prices have actually increased during the shutdown. It's hardly the end of the world.
But he adds that the government shutdown is still a problem. For some 400,000 furloughed workers, and another 400,000 working without pay for now, the shutdown hurts.
But while New York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls it "Trump's big libertarian experiment," Stossel notes that the shutdown is not libertarian. Government's rules are still in effect, and soon workers will be paid for not working. Stossel calls that an un-libertarian experiment.
Libertarians want to permanently cut government, not shut down parts for a few weeks and then pay the workers anyway.
There are lessons to be learned from the shutdown.
Government stopped collecting trash and cleaning up public parks in DC, so volunteers stepped in to pick up trash. Without so much government, Stossel says, private citizens will often step in to do things government workers used to do.
Stossel says the shutdown highlights where some government waste can be trimmed.
Farmers don't get their "support" checks during the shutdown. But Stossel asks–why should they get checks at all? While the big subsidies go to grain and corn farmers, most fruit and vegetable farmers get no subsidies. They survive without them. Other farmers could, too.
FDA inspection of food has stopped during the shutdown. Paul Krugman asks smugly, "does contaminated food smell like freedom?"
But Stossel notes that the main reason food is safe isn't government. It's competition. Companies worry about their reputation. Just ask Chipotle, Stossel says. Their stock fell by more than half after food poisoning incidents at their stores; since then they have instituted far more food inspection than government requires.
Most food producers already do that. Beef carcasses undergo hot steam rinses, and microbiological testing goes well beyond what government requires. Market competition protects us better than rule-bound government bureaucrats.
Stossel says most of government could be done away with or privatized.
Even airport security. TSA workers aren't getting paid. But some airports (San Francisco, Orlando, Kansas City, and 19 others) privatized security. Those workers are still getting paid. They also do a better job. A leaked TSA study found that the private security agents, in test runs, are much better at detecting weapons in bags than the TSA. A congressional report found they are also faster at processing passengers.
Stossel says that while politicians bicker about $5.7 billion in wall funding (much less than 1 percent of the federal budget) what they really should worry about is that America's debt will soon reach $22 trillion because government squanders money on useless things.
At union protests, government workers say "We are essential!"
But based on the above, Stossel says: Give us a break.
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]]>A string of high-profile mass shootings over the past few years has spawned a movement to outlaw so-called assault weapons, in particular the popular AR-15.
On January 9, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.) introduced a federal bill to ban assault weapons—legislation that's been depicted as life-saving, common sense policy. But its definition of an assault weapon is totally arbitrary.
Proposals like Feinstein's latest draft bill leave shooters with plenty of equally deadly alternatives.
"An assault weapon is whatever is covered by an assault weapon ban," says Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum, author of a feature story on the topic in our June 2018 issue. "The criteria that are used to identify assault weapons are things that have little or nothing to do with how useful or how deadly an assault weapon is in the hands of a mass murderer."
The federal government banned assault weapons in 1994, when President Bill Clinton signed a bill also sponsored by Sen. Feinstein. That legislation expired 10 years later. Meanwhile, seven states and the District of Columbia have enacted their own assault weapon bans.
There's little evidence that the 1994 legislation reduced gun deaths, in part because it was mostly a symbolic gesture.
"Unless you really delve into the specifics of what these bills do, you don't understand how utterly arbitrary they are," says Sullum.
In both the original 1994 bill and the new version of the legislation, assault weapons are classified not by what they do but by how they look.
Assault weapon bans typically use criteria like pistol grips, adjustable stocks, threaded barrels, and barrels shrouds to determine whether or not a gun is an assault weapon. These features are cosmetic.
"You can have a gun with any one of those features and it is now an assault weapon," says Sullum. "Exactly the same gun without those features is not an assault weapon. And in fact, there are a bunch of examples like that."
To illustrate this point, compare the Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifle with the AR-15. One looks like a hunting rifle and the other looks like a military weapon. Although the rifles have different manufacturers and lineages, for all practical purposes they are identical. They fire at the same rate, they can fire the same caliber of ammunition, and because they have similar barrel lengths, the ballistics are almost identical. But only one is an "assault weapon."
Another misconception is that assault weapons are "automatic" firearms, which fire continuously until the trigger is released or the gun runs out of ammunition. The federal government banned the manufacture of new automatic weapons for civilian use in 1986.
Most modern civilian guns are semi-automatic, which means they only fire one round per trigger pull.
"But if you're talking about how many rounds you get out of the gun within a certain amount of time," says Sullum, "any semi-automatic is gonna fire be capable of firing the same number of rounds."
Another myth is that assault weapons are more powerful than other guns. In reality, the power of a firearm depends mainly on the cartridge, not the gun. Again, compare the Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifle with the AR-15. Both shoot the same .223 caliber bullet, at the same velocity.
"You will see that lots of hunting rifles are more powerful [and] can do more damage at the same distance than so-called assault weapons," says Sullum.
One of the most common cartridges used for hunting is the .308 Winchester, which has more than double the impact force when compared to the ammunition used in an AR-15.
Another common refrain is that assault weapons can fire more rounds than other guns before reloading. But it's the magazine, which is just a detachable box and a spring, that determines how many times you can fire. And many guns that are not identified as "assault weapons" accept high-capacity magazines.
"You can get high-capacity magazines or large-capacity magazines, meaning holding more than 10 rounds…for guns that are not considered to be assault weapons," says Sullum. "So again, this is not a feature that distinguishes assault weapons from other kinds of guns."
Banning guns solely based on appearance is counterproductive. It makes it difficult to have a good-faith discussion about effective solutions to gun violence.
"I'm not going to say everyone should own an AR-15," says Sullum, "but people have their reasons for wanting to have them and the government shouldn't be second-guessing those reasons without a very powerful justification. And the justification offered for banning assault weapons is virtually nonexistent because it doesn't make sense."
Produced and edited by Mark McDaniel. Cameras by Jim Epstein, Zach Weismuller, and McDaniel.
"Day Into Night" by Rho is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
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]]>Ten states plus Washington, D.C., have legalized pot for adults.
In several states, it's been legal now for five years. How has it worked out?
John Stossel visited legal weed stores in California and talked with people on the street.
Almost unanimously, people said that legalization has worked well.
"See any disasters? Seems pretty alright to me," one man told Stossel.
One woman added: "There's a dispensary around the corner from my house and it's actually probably cleaned up the corner."
"Why would it clean up the corner?" Stossel asked.
"They have a lot of security … they really paid attention to who's on the sidewalk, who's interacting with their customers. They're actually pretty much a class act."
But Paul Chabot, a drug warrior who served in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, disagrees. Years ago, he told Stossel that legalization would create all kinds of problems. He hasn't changed his mind.
Chabot tells Stossel that "Colorado youth have an 85% higher marijuana use rate than the rest of the country."
But Stossel pointed out that a New England Journal of Medicine study says that teen use actually dropped slightly after legalization.
On the other hand, data on marijuana-linked traffic fatalities is mixed.
Chabot tells Stossel that "pot driving fatalities in Colorado are up 151%." But that statistic is misleading because many of those people may not have been high while driving. The 151% includes anyone who tests positive for marijuana after an accident, even though traces of marijuana stay in a person's system for weeks. A more stringent measure that more reliably predicts whether someone was high at the time of an accident indicates cannabis-related accidents are up 84 percent.
That's still an increase. But the total numbers are low—just 35 accidents in 2017. More study is needed.
Marijuana is not harmless, but Stossel notes that the drug war usually does more harm than the drug itself. Banning marijuana drives sales into a black market, where criminals make the profit. Driving sales underground also deprives consumers of the quality and safety testing now provided by competitive legal markets. It doesn't stop teenagers from using the drug. A study before legalization found that teens said marijuana was easier to buy than alcohol. A black market leads dealers to sell in schools and may even increase marijuana's use.
America once tried banning alcohol. That, like the drug war, created organized crime, and much more violence.
"Prohibition hasn't worked," Stossel tells Chabot.
"Just because something doesn't work doesn't mean that we end it … doesn't mean we quit," Chabot replies.
"At some point when it's doing more harm than good, shouldn't we quit?" Stossel responds.
"No, because then we give up. And that's not American," Chabot tells him.
But more and more, Americans are giving up on the drug war. New Jersey and New York plan to legalize marijuana soon. Stossel says that's a good thing.
"Adults should have the right to make their own decisions about what to put in their own bodies." he says.
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The post Stossel: Legal Weed So Far appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If New York City moves ahead with a proposal to landmark the home of the Strand Book Store, it would be putting a "bureaucratic noose" around the business, says owner Nancy Bass Wyden. "The Strand survived through my dad and grandfather's very hard work," Wyden says, and now the city wants to "take a piece of it."
Opened by her grandfather, Benjamin Bass, in 1927, the Strand is New York City's last great bookstore—a four-story literary emporium crammed with 18 miles of merchandise stuffed into towering bookcases arranged along narrow passageways. It's the last survivor of the world-famous Booksellers Row, a commercial district comprised of about 40 secondhand dealers along Fourth Avenue below Union Square.
On December 4, 2018, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission held a public hearing on a proposal to designate the building that's home to the Strand as a historic site. If the structure is landmarked, Wyden would need to get permission from the city before renovating the interior or altering the facade.
"It would be very difficult to be commercially nimble if we're landmarked," Wyden tells Reason. "We'd have to get approvals through a whole committee and bureaucracy that do not know how to run a bookstore."
Wyden's outrage derives in part from her family's decades of struggle to keep the business alive.
The Strand survived, she says, because of "my grandfather and my dad's very hard work and their passion…Both worked most of their lives six days a week" and they "hardly took vacations."
Why can 11 unelected individuals of the Landmarks Commission curtail Wyden's property rights? Signed into law in 1965, New York's Landmarks Act was challenged as unconstitutional 13 years later by the owner of Grand Central Terminal, which sued the city for preventing it from building a skyscraper on top of the train station.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law in a 6–3 decision, setting a precedent that in the dissenting opinion of Justice William Rehnquist undermined constitutional protections. As Rehnquist wrote, the city had "in a literal sense, 'taken' substantial property rights" from the company without offering just compensation, as required by the Fifth Amendment.
Since that ruling, the number of landmarked properties in New York has more than doubled to about 36,000, encompassing more than a quarter of all the buildings in Manhattan.
Wyden (who is married to Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden) has a big platform, as the owner of a literary landmark in the media capital of the world; The New York Times, The Guardian, Fortune, and the New York Post have all written about her fight with the Landmarks Commission. "I think that there are other business owners like me that ended up just kind of getting trapped in this situation without much of a voice," Wyden says.
In her simple message to the city—"leave me alone"—Wyden is unwittingly echoing the line of retired public school librarian Ella Suydam, owner of a Brooklyn farmhouse built by her Dutch ancestor, which the city first tried to landmark in 1980. "Who the hell are you to tell me what I can do with my house," Suydam told the Commission in 1980, intimidating its members into backing off.
The city waited until 1989, when Suydam was dead, to landmark the house.
Most building owners are less successful in their dealings with the Landmarks Commission. When the city proposed designating Manhattan's former meatpacking district—a neighborhood comprised of 104 buildings—one property-owning family opposed the plan, testifying at a March 13, 2003, public hearing.
"If the buildings become part of a landmark district, this will essentially eliminate new construction," said Richard Meilman, whose grandfather, a Russian-born butcher, had purchased multiple properties in the area in the 1940s.
The Landmarks Commission designated the properties later that year.
Wyden is committed to preserving the Strand. "I want to continue the Strand forever," she says. "That's my legacy and my goal in life." She just objects to the loss of control.
"Our family's been a great steward to the building," Wyden tells Reason. "Two years ago there was a massive sewer fire. It blew out two stories of our windows and rocked the foundation. We restored the windows to the prior look and we restored the pillars to the way they originally had been even before we bought the building."
The Landmarks Commission will vote on designating Wyden's building next month. She's not optimistic.
"I've been told that nobody wins with Landmarks, but I want to fight them because it's just so wrong, and so unjust, and so unfair, and we can't let them keep running over everybody in their way."
Written, shot, and edited by Jim Epstein. Hosted by Nick Gillespie. Additional camera by Kevin Alexander.
Music: Eubie Blake, "Charleston Rag" and "Chevy Chase"; Johnny Otis his Drums & his Orchestra, "Harlem Nocturne"; The Charlie Shavers Quintet, "Dizzy's Dilemma"; Sharkey & His Kings of Dixieland, "Peculiar Rag." Source: The Great 78 Project, Archive.org.
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The post Leave the Strand Alone! Iconic Bookstore Owner Pleads With NYC: Don't Landmark My Property appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Asian Americans are suing Harvard for illegally discriminating against them.
The lawsuit forced Harvard to release admissions data which reveal that admitted Asian applicants score 22 points higher on the SAT than whites and 63 points higher than blacks.
Harvard admits to using race as a factor in admissions for the sake of diversity. But the school says it does so without any hard quotas or race-based points system—that they merely consider it informally. Past Supreme Courts have allowed that.
But the Asian Americans suing Harvard argue that the university gives them artificially low personality ratings to keep their admissions rate down. They say Harvard treats Asian Americans as "boring little grade grubbers."
Harvard's data show that a typical Asian applicant is less than half as likely to get a good personality rating in Harvard's admissions process than a typical black applicant.
Lee Cheng of the Asian American Legal Foundation says the data show clear, systematic discrimination based on race.
"Harvard didn't just use race as one of many factors. It was the determinative factor," Cheng tells Stossel.
Many experts say that Harvard's case may reach the Supreme Court. If it does, then the court—with President Trump's new appointees—might strike down all college racial preferences. Ending racial preferences would increase the share of Asian and white students in colleges, but decrease the share of black and hispanic students.
Harry Holzer, an economist and Harvard Alum who studies affirmative action, says that would be a big mistake.
"When you have a long history of discrimination based on race, you have to take race into account," Holzer tells Stossel.
But Cheng says Harvard's preferences don't help disadvantaged people.
"Race based affirmative action helps rich people….70 percent of the students of every ethnic group at Harvard come from the top 20 percent of family income," Cheng tells Stossel.
Holzer responds: "It's okay….Race in America matters at any level of income."
But Cheng responds that when wealthy people use race to get a leg up, poor whites and poor Asians get hurt.
He first became passionate about racial discrimination when he faced it in high school. San Francisco had a strict racial quota for admission to the Lowell public magnet high school. Because there were many Chinese kids in the area, Cheng and other Chinese Americans had to score higher than kids of other races.
"I was just shocked," Cheng tells Stossel. "I was just taught in civics and history that in America everybody was supposed to be equal under the law."
Cheng got in, but he says he saw many of his friends get left behind because of racial preferences.
"The kids who were negatively affected … were the kids of the dishwashers and the seamstresses and who lived in Chinatown, who were very poor."
Cheng eventually sued San Francisco and forced them to end their quotas. Now he hopes the lawsuit against Harvard will do the same to universities.
"I have three kids," Cheng says. "I'll be damned if I'm going to not fight very, very hard to make sure that they don't get treated as second class citizens in the land in which they were born."
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The post Stossel: End Racial Preferences at Colleges? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Bob Tillman has spent nearly five years and $1.4 million on a legal battle to turn his coin-operated laundromat into an apartment building. His saga perfectly encapsulates the political dysfunction that's turning San Francisco—once a beacon for immigrants and home of the counterculture—into an exclusive playground for the ultra-wealthy.
The median cost of a single-family home in San Francisco is already five times the U.S. average, and the city now has the highest rent per square foot of any municipality in the nation. The explanation for the crisis is simple: As the city's population has surged, developers have found it nearly impossible to construct more housing. About 80 percent of San Francisco's existing buildings were already standing in 1980.
Tillman has owned his small laundromat in the Mission District for 20 years. In 2013, with the housing market hitting record highs, he decided to tear it down and build an eight-story, 75-unit apartment building. (Christian Britschgi first covered Tillman's project for Reason back in February.)
At first, it didn't seem like a controversial project: Nobody lives above the laundry, the building wouldn't displace anyone, it qualified for a density bonus and streamlined approval process under state law, and the site was already zoned for housing. While San Francisco passed a comprehensive zoning code in 1978 that restricted the construction of new housing to certain areas, mandated design elements, and limited the height of new structures in some parts of the city to just 40 feet, none of those regulations stood in the way of Tillman's plans.
"If you can't build here, you can't build anywhere," he told Reason.
But San Francisco developers are still required to get permission from city officials for any new construction, so, in early 2014, Tillman began submitting paperwork to the City Planning Department. He went through an environmental review, an application for a conditional use permit, and multiple public hearings.
In late 2017, the Planning Commission was ready to vote on Tillman's project, three and a half years after he first applied to build. That's when the real fight started.
The first hurdle came when the Planning Commission ordered a detailed historical review, based on a claim that various community groups had offices on the property in the 1970s and 80s, so the site might qualify for preservation. The resulting 137-page study cost Tillman $23,000 and delayed him an additional four months. It found that the laundry didn't merit landmark status.
But Tillman's project was still far from being approved. City law says that any individual or group, no matter where they live, can pay a $617 fee to appeal a decision by the Planning Commission. In this case, the challenge came from an organization called Calle 24, which declined Reason's interview request.
Calle 24 is one of several neighborhood groups determined to stop gentrification in the Mission, a neighborhood that's home to a working-class, Latino community. In the late 1990s, wealthier white residents starting moved in, driving up housing prices faster than in the rest of San Francisco. The group opposes market-rate housing on the grounds that it displaces low-income residents, and it set out to extract major concessions from Tillman.
Todd David, the executive director of the non-profit San Francisco Housing Action Coalition, attributes displacement in the Mission to the failure to build new housing. "When you have people with resources competing with people with fewer resources for a limited commodity, who's going to end up with that commodity?" David told Reason.
San Francisco's stringent rent control laws can slow that process. In buildings that were constructed prior to June of 1979, which describes about three-quarters of the city's existing rental properties, landlords can't increase rent by more than the rate of inflation. One year, owners of controlled units were allowed to boost rents by just 0.1 percent. In the Mission, this has allowed some long-term tenants to stay put, but rent control discourages new housing construction and merely delays the inevitable. When a tenant dies or moves out, landlords can raise the rent to market levels.
The city has tried to slow gentrification by requiring that all new buildings set aside a portion of their apartments for subsidized housing. In the case of Tillman's project, 11 percent of the units would be available only to families that earn less than 55 percent of the area's median income.
Organizers with Calle 24 said this wasn't nearly enough. At Tillman's first hearing before the Planning Commission, advocates asked for another delay to work out a deal for him to sell the laundry to a nonprofit that would use donations and government subsidies to build 100 percent affordable housing.
In November of 2017, the Planning Commission approved Tillman's project over the fierce objections of anti-development activists. After the Commissioners rejected another delay tactic, Calle 24 appealed the ruling to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the city's primary legislative body. That process would take another seven months.
Tillman feared his project was dead. The laudromat is in an area of the city represented by Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who's closely allied with the community groups fighting to stop the project. (Ronen didn't respond to Reason's interview request.) When the 11 members of the legislative body consider a local project, they generally defer to the supervisor who has home jurisdiction.
The Supervisors held a public hearing on the project on June 19, 2018. Four and a half years into the process, Ronen and the other Supervisors raised a new issue: Citing the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), an environmental law, they expressed concern that the building would cast a partial shadow on a playground next door. The Supervisors voted to delay the project.
Tillman says such shadows are not a legitimate grounds for appeal under CEQA, and that the Supervisors manufactured the issue to delay his plans further. So he sued San Francisco for $17 million in damages, or what he says his building would have generated thus far if not for the city's illegal delays. Litigation is rare tactic by San Francisco developers, who fear political retaliation on future developments. With only one project, Tillman had less to lose.
But in October of 2018, just two months after Tillman filed his lawsuit, the Planning Commission delivered a surprise. It had independently studied the shadow issue and found that it wouldn't have a significant negative impact on the playground next door. The Commission quickly reapproved the project, and Calle 24 declined to appeal.
Tillman finally has the green light to move forward, but he hasn't yet withdrawn his lawsuit out of concern that the Board of Supervisors is devising new ways to try to derail his project.
"We're in a hole," says Tillman. "And the first rule of holes is when you're in a hole, stop digging."
Produced, written, and edited by Justin Monticello. Camera by Monticello and Zach Weissmueller. Additional sound by Ian Keyser. Music by Spazz Cardigan, Silent Partner, The 126ers, Topher Mohr and Alex Elena, Gioachino Rossini, StrangeZero, and Riot.
As I Figure—Latinesque by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Back on Track—Latinesque by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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The post This Insane Battle To Block a New Apartment Building Explains Why San Francisco and Other Cities Are So Expensive appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Deck the halls and spread some Yuletide cheer. Or don't. You're your own person.
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Written by Austin Bragg, Meredith Bragg, and Andrew Heaton. Performed by Heaton, Austin Bragg, and Remy. Edited by the Braggs.
Music:
"Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies," "Deck the Halls," "Jingle Bells Calm," "Silent Night," "The Snow Queen," and "We Wish you a Merry Christmas" by Kevin MacLeod. Available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Download link: https://incompetech.com/music/royalty…
The post A Very Libertarian Christmas appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Today at 1:30 P.M. ET/10:30 A.M. PT, Reason's Nick Gillespie will talk with Michael Shermer, columnist for Scientific American, publisher of Skeptic magazine, and member of the Intellectual Dark Web, according to New York Times columnist Bari Weiss. They'll discuss Reason's video on "libertarian postmodernism," the limits of rationalism, and what various members of the Intellectual Dark Web get right and wrong about politics and philosophy.
You can ask questions in advance by emailing questions@reason.com.
The post Nick Gillespie and <em>Skeptic</em> Magazine's Michael Shermer on Postmodernism, Rationalism, and The Intellectual Dark Web appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Reason's Zach Weissmueller talked with Christian O'Brien of the conservatarian YouTube channel 1791. Topics included the future of the political right in America, the rising star of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the ongoing Jordan Peterson phenomenon, how digital media affect discourse for better and worse, and the challenges of creating controversial political content in the era of deplatforming.
You can ask questions in advance in the YouTube chat or by emailing questions@reason.com.
The post Christian O'Brien on the Future of the Right appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Reason's Zach Weissmueller hosted a livestream conversation with Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).
Topics included the latest advancements in psychedelic medicine, the history of psychedelic research in America, the path to legalization, and more.
Watch the full interview above.
The post The Past and Future of Psychedelics with Rick Doblin appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Have a Tesla on your Christmas wish list? Don't thank Santa—thank Tom in Ohio.
Parody written and performed by Remy. Video by Austin Bragg. Music tracks, background vocals, and mastering by Ben Karlstrom
LYRICS:
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Everywhere you go
Folks with six-figure salaries
Are shopping in galleries
With a gift card paid by Tom in Ohio
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Roadsters all around
And while Tom can't afford a car
He'll buy part of one for John
Cuz somehow that's allowed
Well a black Model X and a tax credit check
Is the wish of Connor and Ken
And a dark Model 3 that is partially free
Is the hope of Bobby and Ben
While Tommy takes the bus and eats Vienna sausages
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Hear those sleigh bells ring
But what else could you expect
With a tax code so complex?
Ensuring just these things?
Yes a car with aplomb that's, in part, paid by Tom
Is the wish of Victor and Von
A sedan that can drive and takes years to arrive
Is the hope of Lenny and Lon
While Tommy pinches pennies never flushing number one
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Soon the credits end
But the funniest sight to see's
When typical for DC
They're renewed again
Everything's renewed again
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The post Remy: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Reason's Zach Weissmueller hosted a livestream conversation with Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids and co-founder of Let Grow, an organization devoted helping parents "future-proof" their children.
Topics included Skenazy's free-range parenting philosophy, how her new venture with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt intends to make children more resilient, the risks that should actually worry parents, and more.
Watch the interview above. You can ask questions in advance by emailing questions@reason.com.
The post Freeing Your Kids (and Yourself) in the 21st Century with Lenore Skenazy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Leaked emails show some Google engineers blaming their company for Trump's 2016 win, suggesting that the site should censor outlets like The Daily Caller and Breitbart.
Google says the company never did that, but for many people, it raises the question: could Google executives flip an election?
"Google's senior management was heavily in favor of Hillary Clinton," The Creepy Line writer Peter Schweizer tells John Stossel. "Their ability to manipulate the algorithm is something that they've demonstrated the ability to do in the past…and the evidence from academics who monitored 2016 was clearly that they did."
Schweizer's film features psychologist Robert Epstein, whose research claimed that people rated Google's top search results in 2016 as more positive to Hilary Clinton than to Donald Trump.
Stossel says that it doesn't prove that Google's results were biased. It may just be that major media outlets ran more positive headlines about Clinton, and since Google's results rely on the major media, that would bring more positive Clinton headlines, even without any bias on Google's part.
Even if Google's search algorithm is fair, major social media outlets do manipulate us by determining what we can not see.
The film plays a clip of psychologist Jordan Peterson, who points out: "They're not using unbiased algorithms to do things like search for unacceptable content on twitter and on YouTube and on Facebook–those aren't unbiased at all. They're built specifically to filter out whatever's bad."
Stossel notes that Google and Facebook employ human content monitors, some of whom despise conservatives, to determine what is "bad."
Peterson himself has reason to worry. After he criticized a Canadian law that would mandate use of people's preferred pronouns (like "ze" or "xir"), Google briefly shut down Peterson's YouTube channel. They even blocked him from his own Gmail account.
"That's a real problem," says Peterson. "You come to rely on these things and when the plug is pulled suddenly then that puts a big hole in your life."
Stossel wonders: what can consumers do about possible social media manipulation or censorship? One speaker in Schweizer's film says, "delete your accounts!" Stossel tells Schweizer: "I don't want to delete my accounts–and you can't, without cutting yourself off from much of the best of the world."
Schweizer admits that it's a challenge, but says he's switched to Google's competitors.
For simple searches, Schweizer uses DuckDuckGo.com instead of Google.
For email, Schweizer uses the encrypted service ProtonMail.com, based in Switzerland, rather than Gmail.
The web browser Brave provides an alternative to Google's Chrome. Brave was founded by Brendan Eich, who created the browser Firefox but was then forced to leave his own company because he once donated to a ballot proposition against gay marriage.
But most people won't switch. Stossel hasn't switched. He wonders if a few individuals switching will change much.
"That's all we have? A pathetic act that won't make any difference?" he asks.
Schweizer replies: "If people make clear to Google that they don't like their manipulation, and they don't like their invasion of privacy … they will be forced to make changes. That's part of the reason we love and support the market the way we do."
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The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.
The post Stossel: Does Silicon Valley Manipulate Users? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>