Archives: October 2026
Excerpts from Reason's vaults
5 years ago
October 2021
"Cancel culture operates on at least three different levels: the personal, the corporate, and the political. Each is more troubling than the next, because each casts a broader net and eliminates more and more options. It's one thing for me to cancel my Twitter account after being attacked as morally obtuse, worse to be permanently kicked off the site because its moderators have decided I am beyond redemption, and more troubling still to have the government shut down Twitter because it allowed my awful speech. It's tempting to single out that last level because the other two involve individuals or private entities who ultimately should be free to do whatever they want. Only the government can engage in true censorship, surely. But the three layers work synergistically to increase the cultural and political regulation of thought and expression. To build as free and open a society as possible, we need to challenge the precepts of cancel culture at all levels."
Nick Gillespie
"Self-Cancellation, Deplatforming, and Censorship"
"The U.S. record in Afghanistan does not suggest that any continued meddling would do much good. Most of our aid and reconstruction money was wasted on boondoggles or lined the pockets of corrupt officials and contractors. The U.S. never got any better at understanding the nation's internal dynamics, which were generally united by distrust and disdain for foreign occupiers. No matter how much money the U.S. threw at it, the Afghan government could never produce any semblance of security in most of the nation. The U.S. will not be leaving behind a safe and stable situation, but it was never capable of creating one."
Brian Doherty
"Leaving Afghanistan"
10 years ago
October 2016
"American politics, this year more than ever, is a collective exercise in short-term memory loss. Distracted by populist authoritarians shouting collectivist insults or by machine politicians repeating lies about personal accountability, voters quickly forget or straight-up ignore massive policy shifts happening right in front of their eyes. So it is with the bipartisan approach toward debt, deficits, and long-term fiscal management."
Matt Welch
"Debt Denialists"
45 years ago
October 1981
"Special interests have proliferated in the nation's capital like rabbits. But these particular rabbits are not always peaceful and nonvituperative as they pull this way and that. There are some 200 labor lobbies listed in the Washington Yellow Pages, for example, generally pulling one way, while more than 500 corporate lobbies are generally pulling another. There are a dozen or so gun lobbies—some for gun ownership, some for gun control. Some lobbying groups are antiabortion, others are prochoice. The great bulk of lobbies do agree on one thing, however—more money from Uncle Sam. So the Hill gets to be quite a pressure cooker from myriad campaigns, opposing views, and cries of 'Gimme.'"
William Peterson
"It's a Company Town"
50 years ago
October 1976
"I can only gaze in wonderment at an approach to policy that first keeps conventional fuel prices artificially low (via government controls) and then finds that synthetic fuels will not be developed on a sufficiently large scale without special government assistance. The natural and more sensible state of affairs is far more straightforward. Eliminate the special price controls on existing conventional fuels. This will both encourage further exploration and simultaneously promote greater conservation. As the price of conventional fuel rises to the cost of synthetics, there will be an automatic incentive for private companies to move ahead. But given the normal desire to minimize risk, private investments will be deterred if there is a strong possibility that the Federal government will step in and assume the risk."
Murray Weidenbaum
"Fuel for Bureaucrats—or People?"
55 years ago
October 1971
"From a utilitarian standpoint, wage-price controls, just as rent control laws, cannot work. Their imposition leads to inequities and black markets. When a freeze is lifted and adjustments are allowed to be made under governmental scrutiny (Phase 2), the consequences are bureaucratic expansion and the substitution of political judgments for those of private businessmen. As [Murray] Rothbard has observed, 'trying to check inflation through price controls is akin to combating a patient's fever by manually pushing down the mercury level in the thermometer.'"
Manuel Klausner
"The Wage Price Freeze"
