Checking in with reason.com

reason.com is a somewhat funny magazine because the standards for writing for it seem almost nonexistent.

Reason recently had a summer intern, Sophia Mandt, who is a second-year undergraduate student at Hillsdale College, a Christian school in Michigan which is famous for, among other things, trying to de-woke history education by “downplaying racism, the Great Migration and the power of the Ku Klux Klan”.

While at Reason, Sophia authored articles like "New York City Tried To Seize Lucy the Pig. Mayor Eric Adams Says the Family Can Keep Her—If She Leaves Town”. She wrote on her LinkedIn page that she enjoyed her internship, and “found great satisfaction in proudly writing against the ever-growing surveillance state!” If the “surveillance state” (in this case, an anonymous 311 call) is what’s stopping my neighbors from giving me swine flu, more power to it.

I don’t know much about many things, but I do know more than most about New York City. And if the quality of Reason articles about my city is representative, the entire staff might as well be Hillsdale interns.

Take this one, for example: "New York Doubles Down on Delivery Wage Disaster. After restaurant delivery drivers quit in droves and costs soared, the city is expanding minimum wage rules to grocery couriers.” The article is written by C. Jarrett Dieterle, who, as far as I can tell, has a drinking problem.

He published a book called "Give Me Liberty and Give Me a Drink” (about irrational, Prohibition-era laws that are still on the books), and a sizable fraction of his reason.com output is complaining about how the government is cracking down on booze. (”Tariffs Are Starting To Crush America's Small Liquor Businesses”, “Alcohol Escapes a Government Crackdown—for Now”, “Michigan Wineries Win $50 Million in Fight Against Local Zoning Rules”, “Abolish the Federal Alcohol Tax and Regulation System”, “New USDA Organic Rules Put Wine Importers in a Bind”, you get the idea).

I assume his main gripe with New York increasing the minimum wage for delivery workers is actually that, if it becomes a model for other cities, it might start eating into his Drizly budget.

There’s not much to the article. The author spends several paragraphs on a non sequitur about Seattle (where the delivery wage is much higher, $26/hour vs New York’s $21/hour). As far as I can tell, the only arguments presented against New York’s policy is this solitary paragraph:

New York's experiment with delivery driver wage mandates hasn't gone well. Pay went up after the 2023 rule kicked in, but so did prices—and many drivers left the market altogether. The city saw an 8 percent drop in its delivery workforce, while food delivery costs rose 10 percent, including a 12 percent jump in restaurant prices and a staggering 58 percent spike in app fees. Tips, meanwhile, plunged 47 percent. Platforms even started capping drivers—at one point, Uber Eats reported more than 27,000 New Yorkers were on their driver waitlist.

The author is trying to overwhelm you with a litany of figures and scare words (”plunged”, “staggering”, etc.), but here are the key facts. Driver pay in aggregate increased by more than 20%. Hours worked decreased by 20%. So, overall, driver compensation per hour (wages + tips) increased by 40-50%. And tips — which “plunged” by 47% — were down largely because of "changes some apps made to their platforms that made it harder to tip using the app interface”.

Yes, it’s true people who order delivery are paying higher prices — you can rarely get something for nothing. But, overall, it seems like a big victory for some of the hardest working people in NYC. (And one that would have been even larger if not for "Tips Tricks” from some of the worst companies in NYC.

(As an aside — what were those tricks? "Doordash now only provides a tipping option after a customer’s order and payment are completed and a delivery person has been assigned. And Uber Eats now only offers a tipping option after the food has been delivered to a customer. Customers were previously allowed to tip as soon as they placed their orders for delivery — an amount that, by law, must be shown to workers before they accept an order.”)

There’s a bigger point here. You could have learned more just by clicking through one of the links in the paragraph I quoted, to the report produced by the authoritarian government that Reason loves to rail against.

You simply can’t trust these people — libertarians, conservatives — to convey information accurately. If the author had said, “the tradeoff between employment, wages, and prices induced by the new delivery wage law is not worth it”, that would have been a reasonable take, although one I disagree with. But to portray New York’s law in such a bad light, by using cherry-picked statistics and the written equivalent of gish galloping, should be grounds for getting fired from any self-respecting magazine.

Here’s another article about NYC, this time about the mayoral election. It was written by Jack Nicastro. Nicastro is fresh out of school, having graduated from Dartmouth College in 2024. During his four years there, he interned at, was funded by, or otherwise worked for the American Enterprise Institute (a right-wing think tank, where he apparently discussed “the pursuit of human happiness” with the notorious racist Charles Murray), the Hertog Foundation (Jewish/Israeli-focused right-wing think tank), the American Institute for Economic Research (libertarian think tank, author of the Great Barrington Declaration), the New Civil Liberties Alliance (conservative legal group, funded by Charles Koch and Leonard Leo to take on the “deep state”), the Competitive Enterprise Institute (another right-wing think tank), the Koch Internship Program (funded by the aforementioned Koch), the Fund for American Studies (an educational non-profit that teaches students about “limited government” and “free-market economics”), the National Review (right-wing magazine), Free the Facts (an ostensibly nonpartisan group that tries to convince students Social Security and Medicare are bankrupt), Students for Liberty (libertarian student organization), the Cato Institute (libertarian think tank), and the Foundation for Economic Education (conservative/libertarian think tank).

It must be nice being a right-wing 20-something. Money and opportunities flow towards you, seemingly of their own accord. It’s probably what they think welfare is like. (See also my piece about Alyssia Finley from 5 years ago for an eerily similar story.)

This list reveals how libertarianism is embedded in a larger structure of right-wing and billionaire-funded politics. Nicastro learned from race “scientists”, Zionists, Covid denialists, free-market propagandists, Federalist Society hacks, and anti-New Deal types. Some of those are clearly libertarian, but not all. Given this “intellectual” lineage, it’s not surprising that the lines between libertarianism and bog-standard conservatism are blurry. We might think naively, from a political compass style depiction, that libertarianism is a hybrid of right- and left-wing thought, that it borrows from the right on economic issues and from the left on social issues. But it’s not as if Reason writers are doing internships at the ACLU to study civil liberties, or volunteering at Planned Parenthood to learn about the importance of the rights to contraception or abortion, or working with immigrant rights or criminal justice groups to oppose the carceral state. The borrowing is largely from one source, not the other.

Anyway, Nicastro apparently grew up in Brooklyn, and attended The Bronx School of Science, although he now lives in a DC suburb. (All very libertarian places, of course.) In the article I mentioned, he slammed Mamdani’s plans to have city-run grocery stores, saying “The democratic socialist's proposed "public option" reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the market.” He writes,

Mamdani objects that "private grocery store operators…are not even required to take SNAP/WIC," but 100 percent and 82 percent of sampled grocery stores accepted SNAP and WIC, respectively, according to a 2016 study conducted by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The same study found that 87 percent of bodegas accepted SNAP—93 percent of which offered fresh produce, laying waste to claims of healthy-food deserts.

History shows that government ownership of food production and distribution can produce catastrophic outcomes.

Did you catch that? Nicastro says that there aren’t “healthy-food” deserts in New York because 93% of our ubiquitous bodegas (corner stores) offer fresh produce.

Bruh.

How did you spend 18 years in Brooklyn and the Bronx and never shop at a bodega? The “fresh produce” they have, if they have any at all, consists of a week-old carton of eggs and slightly suspicious-looking lemons and limes. 90% of the people who shop at bodegas are looking for Arizona Iced Tea, alcohol, coffee, candy, toilet paper, or condoms. Lettuce isn’t even close to the top of that list.

It’s worth remembering that New York already has a city-run program for fresh produce: New York City Green Carts. I haven’t found much social science research on their effectiveness, but one paper, published a few years after the program was rolled out, claims “we are pleased to find that the Green Carts may be increasing the availability of fresh fruits and vegetables in the areas of the city in greatest need….We hope other urban environments with low fruit and vegetable availability learn from our experiences and consider adopting a similar initiative.” (The same article also notes that “Most of [NYC] corner stores sell primarily unhealthy processed foods and few, if any, fresh fruits and vegetables”)

I have no idea whether Mamdani’s city-run grocery stores will even get off the ground, let alone address real problems of access to healthy, reasonably-priced food. But it’s embarrassing that reason.com claims that these problems don’t exist, and that the private sector has solved them. It’s also embarrassing that the “catastrophic outcomes” it warns us about are the “great famine” in 1930s USSR. (A previous article about Mamdani’s plans, entitled "New York Should Not Run a Grocery Store”, featured a picture of bread lines.)

The list goes on. reason.com has published pieces like "Brandon Johnson's Chicago Is a Preview of Zohran Mamdani's New York. Big city mayors' progressive ambitions are on a collision course with fiscal reality.”, “With Cigarette Taxes Sky High, More New Yorkers Than Ever Turn to the Black Market ”, and "Zohran Mamdani's bus plan makes no sense”.

I don’t have time to fisk all of these. You can rest assured, though, that most are written by people who don’t know what they’re talking about, who have never worked a real job, who have had their entire (short) careers funded by billionaires, and who can’t even step outside to do basic journalism (like visiting a bodega, and trying to buy ingredients for a salad). What Reason produces is right-wing slop. In that, it’s emblematic of the broader right-wing ecosystem. It’s thin analysis and sensational headlines and slippery slope arguments about the Soviet Union and the same links copied and pasted and self-cited ad nauseam.

To be fair, Reason can be better than many right-wing outlets. Its writers complain about tariffs and ICE and government shakedowns; they aren’t full MAGA. But it’s a bit sad that this, apparently, is the best that libertarian media has to offer: Hillsdale interns who want my neighbors to have pigs, alcoholics who misrepresent the reports they quote from, and native New Yorkers who know less about New York than I do.