- Hillary Clinton’s Quest for Economic Justice
- Congress Strong-Arming Baseball? That’s Foul
- New at Reason.org and Reason.com
Hillary Clinton’s Quest for Economic Justice
“When it comes to fiscal policy, [Sen. Hillary] Clinton seems to see herself as a kindergarten teacher ‘fairly’ doling out cupcakes, giving no thought to who baked them in the first place. In a recent New York Times interview she worried that ‘inequality is growing’ and waxed nostalgic for the ‘confiscatory’ tax rates of the post-World War II decades. Clinton would use higher taxes to pay for universal preschool, universal college, universal health care, and universal high-speed Internet access, among other taxpayer-funded goodies. These she calls ‘the investments we make in each other,’ and they are just like investments, except that there is no reliable test of whether they make sense, since the people paying for them have no choice in the matter and are not the ones who stand to benefit.” – Reason magazine’s Jacob Sullum examines Sen. Clinton’s economic plans and concludes, “If you really believe you have to manage the economy, you shouldn’t be president.”
» Sullum: Entitlement Mentality
Congress Strong-Arming Baseball? That’s Foul
In a column for The Washington Post, Reason magazine’s Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie write that “baseball’s ‘problems’ with steroids are as fictitious as the movie Field of Dreams, if considerably more entertaining…Yet members of Congress, already among the most out-of-touch people in American society, find themselves sputtering with frustration that baseball fans don’t share their pain. Maybe that’s in part because Americans themselves are discovering better living through chemistry, whether for anxiety, sweaty palms or restless legs syndrome. When 84-year-old retired senator Bob Dole, born in a year during which Babe Ruth hit 41 homers, is better known as a shill for erectile-dysfunction drugs than as a statesman, you’ve probably lost middle America on the notion that all drugs are automatically bad. The uncomfortable truth is that illegally obtained muscle-rebuilding treatments exist on a continuum that includes laser eye surgery, Vitamin B-12 shots and Tommy John surgery (a procedure that grafts ligaments from knees or elsewhere onto a wrecked elbow, frequently giving pitchers more velocity than they had before). Sorting out the morality and legality of self-improvement has more to do with aesthetic revulsion and moral panic than with considered science or logic. In other words, it’s not remotely a job for Congress.”
» Balko: Allow Performance Enhancing Drugs in Sports