The Reason Roundtable

The president and his detractors both bungle scare stories in the outrage-politics contest that passes for our immigration policy debate.

A new book makes the case against education. Who would argue against education?

Economics professor Bryan Caplan. He tells John Stossel that "what we need to do is to go back to a world where college is not so accessible."

That's because most people don't learn much in college. Studies find that a third of people haven't learned anything detectable after four years in college.

Yet government pours about $80 billion a year into college subsidies.

TV shows like CSI, Law & Order, and NCIS depict incredible technology for identifying criminals.

In one NCIS scene, a 3D hologram identifies a person's teeth, precisely matching the killer's bite to a bite mark on a victim. "A little 3D magic for clarity and I give you—the killer's incisors!" NCIS character "Abby" announces proudly.

John Stossel loves crazy Abby, but notes that in the real world, court-approved experts reach similar conclusions—without good science to back them up.

Civil debate, whether on Trump/Russia, gun policy, or fungible abortion funding, begins in the workplace.

Nadine Strossen, who served as the president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1991 to 2008, is the author of the new book Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, which lays out a compelling argument against policies that try to restrict what individuals are allowed to say. Attempts to legally prevent and criminalize hate speech, Strossen writes, typically end up being used against the very people and groups they are intended to protect. What's more, she says, the alleged harms caused by ugly speech are routinely overstated.

Strossen, a professor at New York Law School in Manhattan, sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to talk about her new book, why hyperpolarization in American politics makes free expression more difficult, and the best ways to counter bad, stupid, and hate-filled speech.

Seattle's City Council passed a new tax Monday. It will charge big companies $275 for every employee.

The "head" tax is supposed to fund housing for the homeless. Supporters of the tax chanted "Housing is a human right!" at a protest lead by Councilwoman Ksharma Sawant, a member of the Socialist Alternative party.

Seattle homelessness has doubled in the last 8 years. Politicians blame a shortage of "affordable" housing, but John Stossel says that the politicians' own bad policies helped create that shortage.

Developers can't build big apartment buildings because in most of Seattle's residential land area, high-rises are illegal; zoning rules say only single-family houses may be built.

This week, Amazon partly won its fight. Seattle's city council approved a $275 per employee tax instead of the $540 that Sawant and the other leftists proposed.

Sawant accused Seattle's Mayor of "dramatically weakening [the] Tax Amazon bill. Grim reminder: working people can't rely on corporate politicians."

Corporate politicians? The $275 tax will hurt job creation too. No wonder Amazon is looking to build its next headquarters outside of Seattle.

The New York City Subway is the circulatory system for the global capital of finance and media, and today this 114-year-old engineering marvel is coming apart. Stalled trains, signal breakdowns, and constant line closures are complicating the lives of New Yorkers, who ride the trains more than five and a half million times a day.

The MTA, the public agency that runs the subways, is woefully mismanaged, fiscally irresponsible, and politically captured. Thanks to the clout of the Transit Workers Union, subway workers on average make $155,000 in total annual compensation, or more than twice as much as the passengers they serve.

The political response to this crisis has been mainly to devise new ways to collect more money for this troubled operation, such as a new "millionaires tax" or by imposing additional tolls and surcharges on cars.

But a major lesson from the first 114 years of subway history is that giving the MTA more money from outside sources is like bringing an alcoholic to an open bar. The path to real reform and accountability is to make the subway live off its customers once and for all.

From ripping families apart to nominating a torture-enabler as CIA director, the administration is calling the GOP's bluff, Reason editors argue.

"I think that when you are in that chair, or standing there with a microphone, you are not there for yourself," says CNN anchor Jake Tapper, whose new novel, The Hellfire Club, is a dark thriller set in 1950s Washington. "You're there for the people at home and you should be asking the questions and conducting yourself in a way trying to think about what they would want you to do. 'Well, you didn't really answer that question, or isn't it true that something'—we're there to challenge that. At a time when there is just this waterfall cascading over us of bullshit, it's important for us to put up an umbrella, try to provide a safe space for viewers to know we're trying to not have any bullshit here."

In a wide-ranging interview with Reason's Nick Gillespie, Tapper talks about how his roots in alternative media such as the Washington City Paper, Salon, and the pioneering satire site Suck give him an advantage over journalists trained more conventionally in mainstream media. "I was a crime and police reporter for City Paper and [my editor, the late David Carr,] was always on my case for not being sufficiently skeptical of police. He thought I was too pro-police. He never came out and said it, but I knew that he thought that," says Tapper. "That was good, that back and forth that I had with him, and while I think it's important to support police when they need help and they're doing the right thing, I also...recognize that there are times that the police need to be questioned. That's an important part of my job. Same thing with decision makers in the military, less so individual soldiers on the ground. I think being willing to challenge American institutions while also being respectful of the people who are the beat cop or the private."

Edited by Ian Keyser. Intro by Austin Bragg. 'Deadly Roulette' by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under CC BY 3.0