Archives: July 2025
Excerpts from Reason's vaults
15 years ago
July 2010
"Governments can take credit for a list of big inventions, from nuclear weapons to the Internet, from radar to satellite navigation. Yet government is also notorious for its ability to misread technical change. In America a truly breathtaking outburst of government-led idiocy appeared in the 1980s under the name of Sematech. Based on the premise that the future lay in big companies manufacturing memory chips (which increasingly were being made in Asia), it poured $100 million into chip manufacturers on the condition that they stop competing with each other and pool their efforts to stay in what was fast becoming a commodity business. As late as 1988, industrial planners were still criticizing the fragmented companies of Silicon Valley as 'chronically entrepreneurial' and incapable of long-term investing."
Matt Ridley
"Ideas Having Sex"
"Some on the right, including Sen. John McCain (R–Ariz.) and Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have proposed that Pentagon spending be fixed at 4 percent of GDP. It's a strange suggestion: Indexing military spending to GDP makes about as much sense as indexing your rent to your salary. And I suspect McCain and Mullen would not agree that the budget should be slashed from its current 4.6 percent level to the 4 percent ideal. The important question is not how much money we spend but whether we spend it effectively and meet our defense needs in the process. Demanding that military spending be driven by economic growth is just another way of saying that military spending is not about safety. It's about spending as an end in itself."
Veronique de Rugy
"Cutting the Pentagon Budget"
30 years ago
July 1995
"Republicans are resolved to balance the budget by 2002, the supreme vow that undergirds their aim to shrink government and restore the nation's fiscal integrity. But like Pickett's troops before their suicidal charge at Gettysburg, they find themselves facing daunting and possibly overwhelming odds. Not since 1931 has the budget been balanced with any consistency. Doing so would change the course of 20th-century government….Republicans know that they must scale back or end scores of programs that are just as popular with their own allies as with their foes. Business subsidies have to be slashed along with Democratic favorites like welfare and public television. And as a cold matter of arithmetic, Republicans must take on the huge middle-class welfare programs called entitlements."
Carolyn Lochhead
"Guts Check"
45 years ago
July 1980
"The key to solving America's transit problems lies in devising new forms of service that respond to the actual needs of a widely dispersed population. This requires that we find out what these transportation needs are, rather than remain fixated upon moving heaven and earth to get people to use a preconceived idea of what a transit system is supposed to be. What is needed, in short, is an economic and legal climate that encourages experimentation and risk-taking—a free market, in other words. Unfortunately, in most urban areas there is anything but a free market in transportation services. Typically, there is a large municipal rail and/or bus line serving a limited number of fixed routes. There are also one or several taxi companies, in most cases heavily regulated as to the number of cabs, the areas served, and the fares charged. Any efforts to begin other forms of service are usually legally thwarted."
Robert Poole Jr.
"Alternative Transit"
"For many critics of the American public school system, the idea of educational freedom—that is, the separation of school and State—is an idea whose time is fast approaching, if it hasn't already arrived. There is a growing recognition that the many problems of public education are not only insoluble but will multiply and worsen in the coming years. There is also the recognition that, as public education falls more and more under the control of a centralized federal bureaucracy, it will become increasingly incompatible with the ideals of a free society."
Samuel Blumenfeld
"Why Johnny Still Can't Read"
50 years ago
July 1975
"If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism…..I think the government has legitimate functions. But I also think our greatest threat today comes from government's involvement in things that are not government's proper province. And in those things government has a magnificent record of failure."
"Interview: Ronald Reagan"
