Archives: April 2024

Excerpts from Reason's vaults

5 years ago
April 2019

"Pot, and the impoverished undocumented immigrants who often bring it, are no longer flowing across the border at the rate they once were. This decline has virtually nothing to do with expensive security innovations at the border and everything to do with legalization in the United States. If it were any other industry, one imagines the president would be delighted: When it comes to pot, customers prefer to buy American."
David Bier
"The Wall Won't End Pot Smuggling at the Border. Legalization Will."

"It's just accounting. If you spend more than you earn, someone is giving you a loan. If the U.S. imports computers from China more than it exports soybeans to China, 'we' have to provide nice-looking IOUs—for example, engraved portraits of Ben Franklin that cost 12.5 cents each to print. For one of Ben's portraits we get $100 worth of computers. Pretty good, eh?"
Deirdre Nansen -McCloskey
"Quit Worrying and Learn To Love Trade With China"

15 years ago
April 2009

"In the 1880s, when a French crime fighter named Alphonse Bertillon pioneered the mug shot as a unique form of portraiture, the photographs he took were expected to do one thing: help establish an individual's identity at a time when driver's licenses, fingerprint files, and Facebook pages didn't exist. Today mug shots are still used to identify, but we also want them to punish, deter, and entertain. Unfortunately, they do such a good job of the latter that we've been indifferent to the ways they short-circuit due process. But while we're gawking at the haunted eyes of a Midwestern meth freak or the haunted hair of Nick Nolte, cops across America are using virtual rogues' galleries to normalize the idea that the government has the right to punish you without bothering to convict you of a crime."
Greg Beato
"Criminal Verite"

30 years ago
April 1994

"Feminists who today draw attention to the absence of women's rights in the Muslim world are correct, but they overlook the point that men also lack such rights. Men may indeed be free to oppress women at home or in the workplace—but they may themselves be oppressed by others acting with the authority of the state. As David Pryce-Jones has amply documented in The Closed Circle, the weak are at the mercy of the strong in the Arab world, and in a polity based on power women are bound to be the losers."
Tom Bethell
"The Mother of All Rights"

40 years ago
April 1984

"If freedom lovers are to judge foreign policy by the same standards as domestic policy, we cannot adopt the view that a good end justifies any means. And from the perspective of constitutional limited government, it is difficult to see any principle that justifies sending U.S. armed forces around the world to secure other people's freedoms. Since the large majority of governments systematically violate their citizens' rights, such a standard would amount to carte blanche for intervention everywhere."
Robert Poole
"Defending Everyone?"

45 years ago
April 1979

"Everyone agrees that we have to get off the fossil-fuels kick of the past two centuries—not so much because we are running out, but because of the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The dynamics of the process are poorly understood at present, but we have some reason to believe that continued dependence on fossil fuels could, in two more centuries, raise the mean temperature of the biosphere by six to eight degrees centigrade because of increased opacity of the atmosphere to infrared radiation (the so-called greenhouse effect)."
Peter Vajk
"No More Doomsday"