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Many sincere congratulations to this year’s Bastiat Prize winners! The 2012 winners of this contest now sponsored by the Reason Foundation (and for which Russ is one of the judges) are Anne Jolis (1st), John Robson (2nd), and Adrian Wooldridge (3rd) [2]. Honorable Mentions go to Caroline Baum, Peter Foster, Steve Horwitz, Matthew Kaminski, Steve Landsburg, and Frank Miele.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Mary Anastasia O’Grady opens her latest, excellent column [4] with this paragraph:
With voters in Colorado and Washington state approving the legalization of marijuana use on Tuesday, there is hope that the U.S. may be at the beginning of the end of the long, tortuous and fruitless federal war on drugs.
And she closes it with this one:
Americans are beginning to understand that prohibition is not an effective way to discourage drug use. But if [Mexico’s President-elect] Mr. Peña Nieto wants to make Mexico a more just society, he had better not wait for the huge American federal bureaucracy that lives off the “war” to step aside. They are deaf to the message that Colorado and Washington state voters sent last week.
Will the reality-based community vocally embrace the repeated finding that money has little influence in U.S. politics?