Archives: January 2026

Excerpts from Reason's vaults

5 years ago
January 2021

"As the market matures and companies begin to merge, antitrust authorities might decide to get involved. They shouldn't. Every restaurant has a choice between hiring its own delivery people or outsourcing to a delivery app. Businesses will choose whichever option has greater upsides for them. Moreover, entering and exiting an app service is easy for both restaurants and drivers. If the app company proves more expensive than in-house employees, no one will use the app. This built-in price competition can never go away and makes it very difficult to argue that any sharing economy–style service has a monopoly."
Ryan Young
"Sometimes Bigger Is Better"

15 years ago
January 2011

"Police across the country are using decades-old wiretapping statutes that did not anticipate iPhones or Droids, combined with broadly written laws against obstructing or interfering with law enforcement, to arrest people who point microphones or video cameras at them. Even in the wake of gross injustices, state legislatures have largely neglected the issue. Meanwhile, technology is enabling the kind of widely distributed citizen documentation that until recently only spy novelists dreamed of. The result is a legal mess of outdated, loosely interpreted statutes and piecemeal court opinions that leave both cops and citizens unsure of when recording becomes a crime."
Radley Balko
"The War on Cameras"

"According to the Sentencing Project, a national organization that focuses on inequalities in the criminal justice system, imprisonment costs three times as much for a geriatric patient as it does for an able-bodied adult. Yet mandatory sentencing and policies like California's 'three strikes' law, which effectively mandates life terms for prisoners convicted of three felonies, mean that prisons will house an ever-increasing number of incapacitated old folks."
Armin Rosen
"Expensive Inmates"

20 years ago
January 2006

"Agricultural protectionism is not news, but even by the generous standards of American farm subsidies, cotton handouts are something special. Per acre, cotton farmers are treated to subsidies five to 10 times as high as those for corn, soybeans, and wheat. The Crop Disaster Program reimburses farmers for the ravages of bad weather; farm loan programs offer credit to those who can't obtain it elsewhere; 'trade and aid' programs guarantee exporters against customer default. Despite all that, prices for U.S. cotton are often higher than global prices—so tax dollars pay textile mills in North Carolina to buy cotton from Texas."
Kerry Howley
"I, T-Shirt"

30 years ago
January 1996

"The benefits to the polity of electorally and ideologically healthy third, fourth, and fifth parties would accrue not just to those who get a chance, finally, to vote for something they really want. With better-defined ideas fencing publicly, drawing the attention of the media gatekeepers of information and argument, the level of understanding of the political choices facing us will rise. And new choices are vital to parsing out solutions to many current problems—tax levels, Social Security, Medicaid, declining education, inner-city decay."
Brian Doherty
"Party On, America"

35 years ago
January 1991

"In the future, the Net—the combination of all the computer networks—will be the primary means of information transmission, with print publication merely its adjunct. The Net will replace the press, and users of the Net must enjoy precisely the freedoms enjoyed by the press. If users of the Net have to worry about police surveillance, if censorship is rife, if the state forbids mere discussion of certain topics—then the liberty for which the Founders fought will have been destroyed, not by war or tyranny, but by mere technological change."
Greg Costikyan
"Closing the Net"

40 years ago
January 1986

"When Margaret Thatcher assumed the office of prime minister in 1979, nationalized industries accounted for a full 10 percent of the gross domestic product. The government dominated the fields of transportation, energy, communications, steel, shipbuilding, and health care. More than 1.5 million Britons worked in state-owned firms. The economy was on the ropes. Had Thatcher pursued the usual Conservative strategy—advancing cautious reforms of the welfare state and trying to introduce new efficiencies in the public sector—her tenure would be a footnote in the textbooks. Instead, she chose radicalism and as a result may well have changed the course of Britain's history."
Madsen Pirie
"Buying Out of Socialism"