Archives: February-March 2026

Excerpts from Reason's vaults

5 years ago
February 2021

"Good luck forgetting about presidential politics when the president has the power to shape what our health insurance covers or unilaterally forgive student loans, the ability to launch a trade war from his couch or a shooting war with Iran. You may not want to be interested in the presidency, but the presidency is interested in you. After Trump, the office will still be invested with more power than any single, fallible human being can safely be trusted with. Unless and until we start taking that power back, it's only a matter of time before politics gets all too interesting once again."
Gene Healy
"Trump Wasn't a Dictator, but He Played One on TV"

5 years ago
March 2021

"The weight of evidence through history is that concentrated government power in the best case leads to incompetence and waste, while in the worst case it degenerates quickly into tyranny. Whether your main concern is material enrichment or the protection of human rights, limited government has been shown on the proving grounds of experience to be the best available means to that end."
Stephanie Slade
"Is There a Future for Fusionism?"

35 years ago
February 1991

"Clearly, any court that is asked to impose [medical] treatment decisions should move cautiously. The presumption should be in favor of the values and choices of the individual or family. There are surely cases where well-meaning religious devotees choose unwisely and thereby endanger the health of their children. But often cases that give rise to charges of this sort are far more complex than the legal system can easily resolve. Controversies that are depicted as conflicts between science and faith may in fact be conflicts between two kinds of faith—one of them the unquestioned belief that medicine knows best how to handle any problem."
Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky
"What's Up to Doc?"

"Washington is poised to sidetrack Eastern Europe's opportunity for a true free market by joining the World Bank and related organizations in promoting a variety of rear-guard socialist planning efforts…..During international negotiations over the creation of the European Bank in early 1990, U.S. Treasury officials portrayed the institution as a new and improved development bank. They suggested that the bank will play an important role in Eastern Europe's privatization efforts. Yet multilateral development banks have never linked significant amounts of assistance to privatization of bloated, money-losing state enterprises. The World Bank's emphasis remains rehabilitation, not privatization. Despite its market-oriented rhetoric, it continues to tinker with socialism and central planning."
Melanie Tammen
"Planning for Capitalism"

40 years ago
March 1986

"For the citizen confronted by Special Agents of the IRS, there is only one course of action to follow: Keep your mouth shut! Be polite about it, but don't invite them in and don't answer their questions. And don't worry about making them suspicious. Things are already way beyond that stage. Just shut up; and when they're gone, call your lawyer—not your accountant, but your lawyer. This is not a bookkeeping problem you're involved in—it's the real thing."
Warren Salomon
"When the IRS Comes Knocking"

50 years ago
March 1976

"My opposition to gun control stems from a basic libertarian view of man and society. I oppose gun control for the same reason that I oppose censorship, antimarijuana legislation, or any other victimless crime laws. Government should protect individuals from the initiation of force. Otherwise, what a person does with his life and property is no concern of the State. Neither individual freedom nor individual responsibility is compatible with laws which seek to protect people from themselves. Gun control, however, is far more dangerous than other forms of prohibition. It is a direct, and rather substantial, assault on the right to life itself. For in our violent society guns have become an increasingly necessary instrument of survival, just as they were in frontier days. Gun control, which seeks to ultimately ban these survival tools, will leave the peaceable individual totally vulnerable to the criminal element."
Donald Feder
"A Libertarian Look at Gun Control"