Mangu-Ward new editor-in-chief of Reason

Katherine Mangu-Ward Named Editor-in-Chief of Reason - Hit & Run : Reason.com:

Jun. 15, 2016 - "Katherine Mangu-Ward has been named editor-in-chief of Reason, the magazine of 'free minds and free markets.' Mangu-Ward joined the magazine in 2006 and has been Reason's managing editor since 2011.

"'This is my dream job,' said Mangu-Ward. 'I couldn't be more excited about leading Reason magazine's incredible team of journalists as we dig deeply into policy and politics, catalog culture in its high and low forms, and serve up a steady stream of smart, skeptical, sassy libertarian analysis.'

"'Katherine embodies Reason's dedication to great journalism and developing talent,' said David Nott, president of Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason. 'Katherine's humor, smarts and strong work ethic have helped drive her rise from Reason intern to editor-in-chief. I'm thrilled that she'll now lead and shape the magazine's coverage and design with her original, provocative and witty vision for impactful journalism'...

"'Katherine was built for this job. She's a talented journalist and strong libertarian who combines Reason co-founder Robert Poole's rational, can-do optimism with former Reason editor Virginia Postrel's sense of wonder at what free markets will dream up next," said Matt Welch, who is shifting from Reason's editor-in-chief to editor-at-large. 'Her delight at arguing against prevailing opinion, and her futuristic vision make Katherine ideal to lead a vital American magazine'....

"First published in 1968, Reason is the monthly magazine of free minds and free markets. Reason's award-winning print, digital and video properties cover politics, culture and ideas through a provocative mix of news and analysis that always makes a principled case for individual liberty, free markets and the rule of law."

Read more: http://reason.com/blog/2016/06/15/katherine-mangu-ward-named-editor-in-chi
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The racist roots of the progressive movement

Progressive and Racist. Woodrow Wilson Wasn't Alone. - Bloomberg View - Virginia Postrel:

December 8, 2015 - "Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era, by Thomas C. Leonard, reveals the largely forgotten intellectual origins of many current controversies, including disputes over tightening voter identification laws, raising the minimum wage and restricting immigration....

"Early 20th-century progressives transformed American institutions, and the movement’s premises continue to inform thinking and policy across the political spectrum. 'It was the progressives who fashioned the new sciences of society, founded the modern American university, invented the think tank, and created the American administrative state, institutions still defined by the progressive values that formed and instructed them,' writes Leonard, a research scholar at Princeton’s Council of the Humanities.

"The progressives believed, first and foremost, in the importance of science and scientific experts in guiding the economy, government, and society. Against the selfishness, disorder, corruption, ignorance, conflict and wastefulness of free markets or mass democracy, they advanced the ideal of disinterested, public-spirited social control by well-educated elites. The progressives were technocrats who, Leonard observes, 'agreed that expert public administrators do not merely serve the common good, they also identify the common good.' Schools of public administration, including the one that since 1948 has borne Woodrow Wilson’s name, still enshrine that conviction....

"In the early 20th century, the progressive definition of the common good was thoroughly infused with scientific racism.... Leonard argues [that] eugenics and scientific racism fit particularly well with progressive thought: 'Eugenics was anti-individualistic; it promised efficiency; it required expertise, and it was founded on the authority of science.' Equally important, 'biological ideas,' Leonard writes, gave progressive reformers 'a conceptual scheme capable of accommodating the great contradiction at the heart of Progressive Era reform -- its view of the poor as victims deserving state uplift and as threats requiring state restraint.' They could feel sorry for impoverished Americans while trying to restrict their influence and limit their numbers.

"Take political participation. Nowadays, people argue about whether stricter voter identification laws are good-government protections against fraud or discriminatory attempts to deter minority and low-income voters. A century ago, leading progressives happily embraced both goals. 'Fewer voters among the lower classes was not a cost, it was a benefit of reform,' Leonard writes. After progressive reforms, including Jim Crow restrictions sold in part as anti-corruption measures, voter participation plummeted. In New York State, turnout dropped from 88 percent in 1900 to 55 percent in 1920, while national turnout fell from 80 percent in 1896 to 50 percent in 1924.

"Advocates similarly didn’t deny that imposing a minimum wage might throw some people out of work. That wasn’t a bug; it was a feature -- a way to deter undesirable workers and keep them out of the marketplace and ideally out of the country. Progressives feared that, faced with competition from blacks, Jews, Chinese, or other immigrants, native-stock workingmen would try to keep up living standards by having fewer kids and sending their wives to work. Voilà: 'race suicide.' Better to let a minimum wage identify inferior workers, who might be shunted into institutions and sterilized, thereby improving the breed in future generations....

"Although they generally assumed black inferiority, progressives outside the South didn’t worry much about the 'Negro question.' They were instead obsessed with the racial, economic, and social threats posed by immigrants.... So restricting immigration was as central to the progressive agenda as regulating railroads. Indeed, in his five-volume History of the American People, Wilson lumped together in one long paragraph the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act as 'the first fruits of radical economic changes and the rapid developments of trade, industry, and transportation' -- equal harbingers of the modern administrative state. With a literacy test and ban on most other Asian immigrants enacted in 1917 and national quotas established in 1924, the progressives bequeathed to America the concept of illegal immigration."

Read more: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-12-08/woodrow-wilson-wasn-t-the-only-progressive-racist
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Order book here: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10572.html

Reason subpoena shows where real threat lies

Reason Magazine Subpoena Stomps on Free Speech - Bloomberg View - Virgina Postrel:

June 9, 2015 - "Los Angeles legal blogger Ken White has obtained a grand jury subpoena issued to Reason.com, the online home of the libertarian magazine I edited throughout the 1990s. The subpoena seeks information about commenters who posted in response to an article by the site’s editor Nick Gillespie about the letter that Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht wrote to Judge Katherine B. Forrest before she sentenced him to life in prison without parole.... In it, Ulbricht expressed the libertarian ideals he said animated his creation of Silk Road -- the same ideals that Reason upholds. The portion Gillespie reproduced reads:

I created Silk Road because I thought the idea for the website itself had value, and that bringing Silk Road into being was the right thing to do. I believed at the time that people should have the right to buy and sell whatever they wanted so long as they weren’t hurting anyone else.[...] Silk Road was supposed to be about giving people the freedom to make their own choices, to pursue their own happiness, however they individually saw fit.[...]

"Judge Forrest handed down a sentence even more draconian than prosecutors had sought and made a point of condemning Ulbricht’s political views.... Whatever you think of Ulbricht or Silk Road, you can see why libertarians might be upset. A federal judge has just made the belief that it’s good for people to have 'the freedom to make their own choices, to pursue their own happiness, however they individually saw fit' part of her justification for the most punitive sentence short of the death penalty....

"Reason commenters, who often sound like drunk teenage boys trying to one-up each other, ... were furious and, in their fury, some of them got nasty. 'Its judges like these that should be taken out back and shot,' wrote Agammamon. 'Why waste ammunition? Wood chippers get the message across clearly. Especially if you feed them in feet first,' responded croaker. 'I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for that horrible woman,' commented Rhywun. 'I'd prefer a hellish place on Earth be reserved for her as well,' chimed in ProductPlacement. (Reason has since removed the offending comments.)

"No one in their right mind would take this hyperbolic venting seriously as threatening Judge Forrest.... Venting anger about injustice is not a crime. Neither is being obnoxious on the Internet. The chances of one of these commenters being convicted of threatening the judge are essentially nil. Conviction isn’t the point. Crying 'threats' just makes a handy pretext for harassing Reason and its commenters....

"The real threats aren’t coming from the likes of Agammamon and croaker. They’re coming from civil servants in suits. Subpoenaing Reason’s website records, wasting its staff’s time and forcing it to pay legal fees in hopes of imposing even larger legal costs (or even a plea bargain or two) on the average Joes who dared to voice their dissident views in angry tones sends an intimidating message: It’s dangerous not just to create something like Silk Road. It’s dangerous to defend it, and even more dangerous to attack those who would punish its creator."

Read more: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-06-09/reason-magazine-subpoena-stomps-on-free-speech
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