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Reason Magazine - All Reason Articles from the Past Year: Page 1

New at Reason: Matt Welch on Bailing Out Failing NewspapersToday

What's black and white and red all over? Newspapers looking for a handout, that's what! Matt Welch says that if print journalists having anything to say about it, we shall be hearing much more about a potential bailout of failing newspapers.

Read all about it here.

Bailing Out One of the 20th Century's Best Business ModelsToday

Here's a new holiday cocktail for you: Combine one part bailout seasoning with another part perennial journalistic self-pity, pour it out over the Christmas/New Year's publishing interregnum and presto!—it's time for patriotic men and women to get behind a government rescue of what was until very recently one of the most profitable sectors in the United States: The newspaper industry.

"We're more worthy of a bailout than the jokers on Wall Street," argued Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock on Dec. 20. "You can't have a democracy without us. If newspapers are dying, so is our system of government."

Quite. Without Whitlock in the trenches covering the Big 12 North conference, how is the Republic to survive?

I kid (Whitlock can actually be a pretty interesting journalist) because I love. Newspapers, that is. Not necessarily their employees, and certainly not their employees' self-inflated, anti-competitive, and occasionally please-help-me-Washington ideas about how

Big Corn Muscles Aside Solar, Wind and Geothermal SubsidiesToday

The Environmental Working Group has just issued a report that finds that 75 percent of all renewable fuels tax subsidies in 2007 went to environmentally damaging corn-ethanol production. In addition, the corn ethanol industry, teetering on the edge of collapse despite billions already wasted in subsidies on it, now wants additional billions for a bailout. According to EWG:

A little noticed analysis buried in an April 2008 report from the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA)1 shows that the corn-based ethanol industry received $3 billion in tax credits in 2007, more than four times the $690 million in credits available to companies trying to expand all other forms of renewable energy, including solar, wind and geothermal power.

In the EWG press release, report author and EWG Midwest Vice President Craig Cox says: 

"With America facing an exploding federal deficit and the crisis of climate change, it defies common sense to continue to lavish billions of tax dollars on corn-based ethanol, a fuel that has failed to fulfill its promises at every turn."

"Corn-based ethanol production, spurred by federal subsidies and mandates, is polluting our nation's water, eroding our soil and plowing up precious wildlife habitat -- and worst of all is likely contributing to global warming," Cox said. "As the polluting ethanol industry gets fat at taxpayer expense, proven clean technologies such as solar, wind and geo

There Are Two Kinds of Libertarians....Today

....those who think you can divide all libertarians into two types, and those who don't.

Joining the former, and previous more or less useful classifications such as anarchist and minarchist, paleo and cosmo, utilitarian and natural rightsers, is the division between "policy libertarians" and "structural libertarians," explicated by Jacob Lyles over at "Distributed Republic."

Here is the line of division, Lyles says:

Policy Libertarians (PLs) include the vast majority of the most visible organizations and writers in the modern libertarian movement: the Reason Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Ron Paul campaign, the LP, the Constitution Party, most libertarian economists (e.g. Milton Friedman), and single-issue organizations like Students for a Sensible Drug Policy. PLs, as their name suggests, focus their energies on inventing and advocating a list of policies that governments should follow. For example, you can find policy libertarians opposing liberal eminent domain laws, fighting for lower taxes and deregulation, supporting cultural tolerance, opposing invasive police searches, and advocating the rest of the familiar libertarian manifesto.

Structural Libertarians (SLs) are much rarer in modern times than PLs, although the opposite used to be the case. Structural libertarians include

NudgedToday

All hail the rise of "soft paternalism:"

The incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama will name Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who pioneered efforts to design regulation around the ways people behave, as regulatory czar, the Wall Street Journal reported.

A report on WSJ.com said Sunstein would head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, overseeing "regulations throughout the government, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration."

Will Wilkinson slapped around Sunstein's Nudge in our October 2008 issue.