The Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) says it has found that former CBI forensic scientist Yvonne "Missy" Woods manipulated data in the DNA testing process or posted incomplete test results in hundreds of cases. The CBI says it has found 652 cases affected by Woods' work between 2008 and 2023, when she was placed on administrative leave and then retired. It is currently reviewing her cases from 1994 to 2008. The CBI says it has not found any evidence that Woods falsified data, but it says she cut corners and did not follow standard protocols, leaving the reliability of her work in question, and deleted or altered data to conceal her actions.
The post Brickbat: Science Doesn't Lie, but Scientists Do appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It is ORDERED that plaintiffs are the prevailing parties in this action under 42 U.S.C. § 1988(b). Plaintiffs and their counsel are entitled to recover their reasonable attorney's fees, costs, and expenses for work related to litigation before the district court. It is further
ORDERED that the First Amendment's Free Speech Clause prohibits Colorado from enforcing the Accommodation Clause of Colorado's Anti-Discrimination Act ("CADA"), Colo. Rev. Stat. § 24-34-601(2)(a)), to compel plaintiffs to create custom websites celebrating or depicting same-sex weddings or otherwise create or depict original, expressive, graphic or website designs inconsistent with her beliefs regarding same-sex marriage. It is further
ORDERED that the First Amendment's Free Speech Clause prohibits Colorado from enforcing CADA's Communication Clause to prevent plaintiffs from posting the following statement on her website or from making materially similar statements on her website and directly to prospective clients:
I firmly believe that God is calling me to this work. Why? I am personally convicted that He wants me – during these uncertain times for those who believe in biblical marriage – to shine His light and not stay silent. He is calling me to stand up for my faith, to explain His true story about marriage, and to use the talents and business He gave me to publicly proclaim and celebrate His design for marriage as a life-long union between one man and one woman.
These same religious convictions that motivate me also prevent me from creating websites promoting and celebrating ideas or messages that violate my beliefs. So I will not be able to create websites for same-sex marriages or any other marriage that is not between one man and one woman. Doing that would compromise my Christian witness and tell a story about marriage that contradicts God's true story of marriage – the very story He is calling me to promote.
It is further ORDERED that defendants, their officers, agents, servants, employees, attorneys, and those acting in active concert or participation with them who receive actual notice of this order are permanently enjoined from enforcing:
[a.] CADA's Accommodations Clause to compel plaintiffs to create custom websites celebrating or depicting same-sex weddings or otherwise to create or depict original, expressive, graphic or website designs inconsistent with her beliefs regarding same-sex marriage; and
[b.] CADA's Communication Clause to prevent plaintiffs from posting the above statement on her website and from making materially similar statements on her website and directly to prospective clients….
For more on the reasoning, see the full order. The quick summary of the underlying factual dispute:
Plaintiff Lorie Smith, through her business, plaintiff 303 Creative LLC …, offers a variety of creative services, including website design, to the public. Ms. Smith intends to expand the scope of 303 Creative's services to include the design, creation, and publication of wedding websites. However, plaintiffs will decline any request to design, create, or promote content that promotes any conception of marriage other than marriage between one man and one woman. Plaintiffs have designed an addition to 303 Creative's website that includes a statement that they will not create websites "celebrating same-sex marriages or any other marriage that contradicts God's design for marriage."
The post District Court Judgment in <i>303 Creative v. Elenis</i> (the Wedding Web Site Design Case) appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"In England, the phrase is still used in all Court of Appeal decisions when the judgment is reserved; that is, not delivered after the hearing." In America, for better or worse, it seems extremely rare; but in the Third Circuit, it's a thing, with the phrase generally being something like "hold the case c.a.v."
The post C.A.V. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>People lie to gain access to private property in a surprising variety of contexts. Civil rights "testers" create fake identities and pose as potential buyers or renters to investigate race discrimination by real estate agents and landlords. Union activists secure jobs at nonunion workplaces so they can organize the company's workers. Law enforcement agents pose as drug dealers to gain access to a narcotics warehouse. An investigative journalist infiltrates a white nationalist group so she can write a story about the group's philosophy and propensity for racially motivated violence. A private investigator working with a seniors' advocacy organization gets a job at a local nursing home to document elder abuse. In prior work, I have described these practices as "investigative deceptions," "intentional, affirmative misrepresentations or omissions about one's political or journalistic affiliations, educational backgrounds, or research, reportorial, or political motives to facilitate gaining access to truthful information on matters of substantial public concern."
Each of these situations bears important similarities. First, they all involve the intentional and material misrepresentation of the speakers' true identities, motives, and actual employers or sponsors. Second, the lies are told with the intent of deceiving the target of the investigation and the goal of gaining entry to private spaces and proximity to people who would not consent to such access if they knew the truth. Third, the access achieved through these lies potentially implicates some common law rights. Fourth, all of these liars seek a benefit not for themselves personally but for a greater social good. The information they discover will be used to enforce laws, facilitate political association, inform public discourse, and advance legal and social reforms. And finally, the persons deceived in each case would strongly prefer that the information that comes to light from these investigations not be publicly disclosed. In a sense, all of these lies could be categorized as a form of fraud.
The similarities among these types of investigate deceptions do not, however, carry over to the way that the law, ethics, and perhaps society view them. Civil rights testers, undercover police officers, and union salts are all widely accepted, legally permissible forms of investigative deception. However, much of the journalism profession disputes the ethics of undercover news investigations, and tort claims have been brought against news outlets and reporters for conducting such investigations. The legality of undercover investigations by advocacy groups has also been questioned. Some states have criminalized the investigative deceptions used by animal rights organizations, while others have enacted statutes creating new tort claims against undercover investigators; although some courts have declared those laws to violate the First Amendment, the doctrine is still evolving.
This essay explores the different contexts in which investigative deceptions are employed and seeks to understand why the lawfulness and acceptability of these lies are so divergent.
Why, for example, are some types of investigative lies both legally and ethically acceptable and other comparable lies condemned? Across all of these contexts, there is an implicit, or sometimes explicit, balancing of interests. Are the harms caused by investigative deceptions outweighed by the greater public good that they achieve? Balancing may inform that decision, but the larger question is whether American law, courts, and society understand investigative deceptions to be a desirable practice within our social order. In carrying out that balancing, we might unify our understanding of these investigations as a valuable social practice.
Part I of this essay provides a descriptive account of investigative deceptions in five distinct contexts, while also surveying the legal (and sometimes ethical) infrastructure through which these deceptions are constructed, evaluated, and sometimes contested. Part II then seeks to explain that understanding the similarities in these investigative deceptions as desirable social practices helps inform the First Amendment doctrine as applied to government attempts to restrict or prohibit them.
The post Journal of Free Speech Law: "Investigative Deception Across Social Contexts," by Prof. Alan Chen appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>New York's botched attempt to roll out an adult recreational marijuana market is facing even more scrutiny amid claims of whistleblower retaliation, favoritism, and the unchecked spread of illegal dispensaries.
The chief equity officer for New York's Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) was put on administrative leave last week, and Gov. Kathy Hochul has ordered an overhaul of the beleaguered program, which even she has admitted is a "disaster."
At the center of the story is Jenny Argie, CEO of Jenny's Baked at Home Company, a New York marijuana processor. Argie says the OCM retaliated against her after she leaked a recorded conversation with Damian Fagon, the OCM chief equity officer. In the recording, Fagon admitted that the agency wasn't enforcing rules against unlicensed pot dispensaries and brands that were importing untracked, untested marijuana from other states.
"They got power-drunk and forgot that these are real people's lives with promises they had made to them," Argie tells Reason. "And the more we spoke up, the more they closed the door on us."
New York gave the green light to recreational marijuana in 2021, and Argie was one of the first licensed cannabis processors. She invested significant money and took out a second mortgage on her house, hoping to establish herself early in the new industry.
But a two-year-long delay in the rollout of the legal marijuana industry, continuing long waits for licenses, and dubiously sourced pot saturating the market has all but crushed many small operators like Argie. There are over 2,000 illegal marijuana dispensaries in New York City alone and only about 85 licensed ones statewide. New York marijuana growers simply don't have enough legitimate dispensaries to sell to.
"For anybody who's trying to enter a market as a small business, cash flow is king," Argie says. "We've already spent two years dying on the vine, waiting for the market to open up, which they told us was going to open but kept putting it off and putting it off."
Processors like Argie also quickly discovered that they were being boxed out of the limited market by large out-of-state companies offering dispensaries sweetheart payment terms and consignment deals that were supposed to be against the law.
Argie began speaking out about the problems facing New York marijuana growers and processors like herself. She wrote op-eds in local newspapers and testified before the New York state Legislature in October.
Her public comments led to a phone call that month with Fagon. When Argie confronted Fagon over the fact that she knew companies and dispensaries were illegally sourcing marijuana and breaking regulations, Fagon said the OCM would "probably" start cracking down on them in early 2024.
"We're not going to start a full-fledged crackdown," Fagon said in the recording. "We'd have to lose half of our dispensaries, probably, and it would further cripple the market."
Argie sent the recording to NY Cannabis Insider, an outlet covering the New York marijuana industry. According to the outlet, after the story was published last November Fagan called the reporter, screaming and cursing and saying he knew that it was Argie who leaked the call.
In December, a month after the story was published, state regulators issued a recall for Argie's marijuana—the state's first-ever recall for marijuana—because one of her edible products was 1 milligram lower in THC potency than advertised on the packaging. Argie had already fixed the issue but had neglected to have the product retested.
The recall made headlines across the state.
"In a state of over 10,000 illegal dispensaries selling to children—[marijuana] we know has pesticides, heavy metals, and all the things that they do in these illegal dispensaries—to make me the example was just heartbreaking," Argie says. "I realized I was dealing with an agency that had no oversight at that point."
Multiple news reports have found that New York dispensaries are selling counterfeit or mislabeled products and marijuana tainted with high levels of bacteria, fungus, pesticides, and heavy metals. State labs are supposed to ensure the safety of marijuana products, but a NY Cannabis Insider story published last September found "a product with lab results showing 250-times the medical limit for yeast and mold and noncompliant pesticide testing today sits on a New York City dispensary shelf."
(The reason for this is an amusing example of government logic: New York required marijuana to be grown outdoors in the name of sustainability, but when it discovered that outdoor growers couldn't keep the levels of mold, mildew, and yeast below required limits, it simply eliminated those limits.)
Argie decided that since she was already being selectively targeted, she might as well reveal herself as the leaker to bring more attention to the issue.
Earlier this month, six days after NY Cannabis Insider notified OCM that Argie was going on the record, state inspectors arrived at her facility for an unscheduled inspection and issued a full stop-work order, as well as a quarantining of all of her products.
The justification for the stop-work order was that Argie's processing facility was using an unapproved solvent in one of its machines. The solvent is approved by the Food and Drug Administration and the European Union, but not in New York's marijuana industry. Argie notes that a pharmaceutical version of the solvent is used in children's asthma inhalers. And more importantly, she says, it was listed on the packaging that inspectors had ample opportunity to review during the December recall.
Argie owns up to her company's lapses and says she worked to fix the problems as soon as they were discovered. She submitted a corrective action plan to OCM regarding the solvent, which the agency rejected earlier this month. What outrages her is that she knows there are plenty of New York marijuana businesses flouting the rules and operating in bad faith, yet they have been allowed to flourish while she is on the verge of bankruptcy.
"It was a hammer instead of grace," Argie says. "They tried to destroy my company because I spoke out."
Argie filed a lawsuit against the OCM this month alleging selective and retaliatory enforcement against her company, which remains shut down. She is seeking an injunction to lift the stop-work order and quarantine and asking the court to approve the solvent for New York's marijuana industry.
The OCM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The post New York Regulators Shut Down a Marijuana Processor After She Criticized the State's Lax Enforcement appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When they ratified the Second Amendment, our Founders did not intend to bind the nation in a straitjacket of 18th-century legislation, nor did they mean to prevent future generations from protecting themselves against gun violence more rampant and destructive than the Founders could have possibly imagined. At a minimum, one would think that the states' understanding of the Second Amendment at the time of the "Second Founding"—the moment in 1868 when they incorporated the Bill of Rights against themselves—is part of "the Nation's historical tradition of firearms regulation" informing the constitutionality of modern-day regulations.
Indeed, since the Supreme Court tethered their constitutionality to the existence of historical precedent in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), we and the other Courts of Appeals have consistently looked to Reconstruction-era, as well as Founding-era sources, and, even as the Supreme Court has acknowledged the "ongoing scholarly debate" about their relevance, it too has relied on Reconstruction-era sources in each of its recent major opinions on the right to bear arms. Notably, the Supreme Court is expected within the next few months, if not weeks, to issue its next seminal opinion, clarifying its historical methodology in the absence of Founding-era analogues.
Yet despite our own precedent acknowledging the relevance of Reconstruction-era sources, our recognition in an en banc opinion just last year that the Supreme Court relies on both Founding-era and Reconstruction-era sources, and an imminent decision from the Supreme Court that may prove dispositive to this case, the panel majority here announced— over Judge Restrepo's compelling dissent—that all historical sources after 1791 are irrelevant to our Nation's historical tradition and must be "set aside" when seeking out the "historical analogues" required to uphold a modern-day gun regulations. The panel majority then held—based exclusively on 18th-century militia laws and without regard to the voluminous support the statutory scheme finds in 19th-century analogues—that Pennsylvania's prohibition on 18-to-20-year-old youth carrying firearms in public during statewide emergencies is unconstitutional.
The panel majority was incorrect, but more importantly, it erred profoundly in the methodology to which it purports to bind this entire Court and with far-reaching consequences. Against this backdrop, we should be granting Pennsylvania's petition for en banc review, supported by 17 other states and the District of Columbia as amici, or at least holding it c.a.v. pending the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Rahimi. But instead, over the objection of nearly half our Court, we are denying it outright.
I respectfully dissent from that denial for four reasons. First, without en banc review, the panel majority's pronouncement cannot bind future panels of this Court. We have held Reconstruction-era sources to be relevant in decisions both before and after Bruen so, under our case law and our Internal Operating Procedures, en banc rehearing is necessary before any subsequent panel can bind our Court to a contrary position. Second, en banc review would allow us to apply the proper historical methodology, which would compel a different outcome in this case. Third, en banc review is necessary for error correction: Even if we limit ourselves to Founding-era sources, the panel failed to recognize that legislatures in that era were authorized to categorically disarm groups they reasonably judged to pose a particular risk of danger, and Pennsylvania's modern-day judgment that youth under the age of 21 pose such a risk is well supported by evidence subject to judicial notice. And fourth, the majority's narrow focus on the Founding era demands rehearing because it ignores the Supreme Court's recognition that "cases implicating unprecedented societal concerns or dramatic technological changes may require a more nuanced approach." For each of these reasons, discussed in turn below, en banc review should be granted….
The entire dissenting opinion is much worth reading, as is the panel majority opinion that held that 18-to-20-year-olds are protected by the Second Amendment; an excerpt:
Through the combined operation of three statutes, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania effectively bans 18-to-20-year-olds from carrying firearms outside their homes during a state of emergency. Madison Lara, Sophia Knepley, and Logan Miller, who were in that age range when they filed this suit, want to carry firearms outside their homes for lawful purposes, including self-defense…. The words "the people" in the Second Amendment presumptively encompass all adult Americans, including 18-to-20-year-olds, and we are aware of no founding-era law that supports disarming people in that age group. Accordingly, we will reverse and remand….
The Commissioner … [argues] that, "[a]t the time of the Founding—and, indeed, for most of the Nation's history—those who were under the age of 21 were considered 'infants' or 'minors' in the eyes of the law[,]" "mean[ing] that they had few independent legal rights." True enough, from before the founding and through Reconstruction, those under the age of 21 were considered minors.
Notwithstanding the legal status of 18-to-21-year-olds during that period, however, the Commissioner's position is untenable for three reasons. First, it supposes that the first step of a Bruen analysis requires excluding individuals from "the people" if they were so excluded at the founding. That argument conflates Bruen's two distinct analytical steps. Although the government is tasked with identifying a historical analogue at the second step of the Bruen analysis, we are not limited to looking through that same retrospective lens at the first step. If, at step one, we were rigidly limited by eighteenth century conceptual boundaries, "the people" would consist of white, landed men, and that is obviously not the state of the law.
Second, it does not follow that, just because individuals under the age of 21 lacked certain legal rights at the founding, they were ex ante excluded from the scope of "the people." As then-Judge Barrett explained, "[n]either felons nor the mentally ill are categorically excluded from our national community." But "[t]hat does not mean that the government cannot prevent them from possessing guns. Instead, it means that the question is whether the government has the power to disable the exercise of a right that they otherwise possess."
Third, consistency has a claim on us. It is undisputed that 18-to-20-year-olds are among "the people" for other constitutional rights such as the right to vote, freedom of speech, peaceable assembly, government petitions, and the right against unreasonable government searches and seizures…. [W]holesale exclusion of 18-to-20-year-olds from the scope of the Second Amendment would impermissibly render "the constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense … 'a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.'"
The post The Second Amendment and 18-to-20-Year-Olds appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Argentine President Javier Milei announced his plans to slash 70,000 government jobs in an effort to shrink government expenditure and reduce the national deficit to zero. The cuts are part of his broader strategy to achieve fiscal balance at any cost.
Milei announced the cuts during his closing speech at the International Economic Forum of the Americas in Buenos Aires this week.
Over 50,000 of Argentina's approximately 3.5 million public sector employees have already been dismissed, but more cuts were on the way. According to a statement by the presidential office, the remaining 70,000 new job terminations will proceed in stages, with at least 20 percent (14,000 jobs) expected to be cut by the end of March. The rest of the timeline will be announced in April.
The move has sparked significant backlash, particularly from Argentina's powerful unions. The Association of State Workers (ATE), one of the unions representing public employees, claimed that at least 10,000 state workers have already been let go as of Thursday. ATE leader Rodolfo Aguiar called the layoffs "illegal" and "unjustified" and called for a national strike on April 3.
Beyond cutting jobs, Milei announced plans to halt public works, "something of which I am deeply proud, because public works are a great source of corruption, of theft, which I imagine all good people should oppose." He also said he was cutting funding from provincial governments and eliminating over 200,000 "irregular" social welfare plans.
Milei described his approach as a combination of a "chainsaw" and "a blender," both of which he claims are necessary for a rapid transformation of the economy. Argentina's inflation rate has reached a three-decade high at over 250 percent, with an estimated 57 percent of the country living in poverty. To end the economic crisis, Milei has slashed state subsidies, reduced the number of government ministries by half, closed state agencies, and devalued the peso by 50 percent.
The president anticipates a "V-shape" recovery for the economy, with short-term hardships before things get better. "There is a lot of talk that this is not sustainable. We did what we had to do and that implies doses of courage that others do not have," he said.
Milei's economic policies are showing early signs of success. In his speech, he highlighted how the peso's futures are aligning with the central bank's incremental adjustment strategy and that the central bank is moving toward net neutral reserves.
Milei assured that he would move forward with reforms "in spite of the politics." He said that the Senate's recent rejection of his bills was an opportunity to expose corrupt politicians, those "who do not want to give up their jobs and seek to maintain their privileges." Looking ahead, the Argentine president said he plans to introduce 3,000 more reforms after the 2025 congressional elections.
The post Milei To Slash 70,000 Government Jobs To Reform Argentina's Economy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A financial institution shall not deny or cancel its services to a person, or otherwise discriminate against a person in making available such services or in the terms or conditions of such services, on the basis of:
(1) The person's political opinions, speech, or affiliations;
(2) Except [for a financial institution that claims a religious purpose], the person's religious beliefs, religious exercise, or religious affiliations;
(3) Any factor if it is not a quantitative, impartial, and risk-based standard, including any such factor related to the person's business sector; or
(4) The use of a rating, scoring, analysis, tabulation, or action that considers a social credit score based on factors including:
(A) The person's political opinions, speech, or affiliations;
(B) Except [for a financial institution that claims a religious purpose], the person's religious beliefs, religious exercise, or religious affiliations;
(C) The person's lawful ownership of a firearm;
(D) The person's engagement in the lawful manufacture, distribution, sale, purchase, or use of firearms or ammunition;
(E) The person's engagement in the exploration, production, utilization, transportation, sale, or manufacture of fossil fuel-based energy, timber, mining, or agriculture;
(F) The person's support of the state or federal government in combatting illegal immigration, drug trafficking, or human trafficking;
(G) The person's engagement with, facilitation of, employment by, support of, business relationship with, representation of, or advocacy for any person described in this subsection (c); or
(H) The person's failure to meet or commit to meet, or expected failure to meet, any of the following as long as such person is in compliance with applicable state or federal law:
(i) Environmental standards, including emissions standards, benchmarks, requirements, or disclosures;
(ii) Social governance standards, benchmarks, or requirements, including environmental or social justice;
(iii) Corporate board or company employment composition standards, benchmarks, requirements, or disclosures based on [ace, creed, color, religion, sex, age or national origin]; or
(iv) Policies or procedures requiring or encouraging employee participation in social justice programming, including diversity, equity, or inclusion training.
At least one jurisdiction already bans discrimination based on political opinion in financing (e.g., Howard County, Maryland), but to my knowledge this is the first state to do so. (Federal law and the law in many jurisdictions already generally bans various kinds of financial discrimination based on race, religion, sex, and the like.) Thanks to Prof. Howard Friedman (Religion Clause) for the pointer.
The post Tennessee Generally Bans Political and Religious Discrimination by Financial Institutions appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Former President Donald Trump's plan to impose a 10 percent tariff on all imports to the United States would hike prices and cost the average American household $1,500 annually.
That's the sobering conclusion reached by a new economic analysis from the Center for American Progress (CAP) Action Fund, a left-leaning think tank and advocacy organization. The proposed tariff, which would be applied on top of existing tariffs according to Trump's campaign, would translate into $1,500 in higher costs for the average American household. That includes "a $90 tax increase on food, a $90 tax increase on prescription drugs, and a $120 tax increase on oil and petroleum products," according to Brendan Duke and Ryan Mulholland, the two economists who authored the report.
The 10 percent tariff is one of the few policy proposals that Trump has outlined in any detail as he campaigns for a return to the White House. Though he originally mentioned it in an offhand way during an interview with Fox News in August, Trump's campaign website now promises more tariffs as a "linchpin of a new Strategic National Manufacturing Initiative that will rebalance the global trading system and dramatically strengthen America."
Anyone who needs to buy groceries might discover a different reality. A 10 percent tariff, the CAP Action Fund report notes, would have a direct impact on food prices—which have already climbed significantly in recent years due to inflation—because 60 percent of the fresh fruit consumed by Americans is imported, as is 99 percent of all coffee and more than 70 percent of seafood.
Advocates for more tariffs frequently argue that imposing higher taxes on imported goods will help spur domestic production of those same goods. The evidence for that is pretty thin—but even if it were true, it wouldn't make a difference for foods that can't be grown or caught within the United States. (Sorry, but there's just no way to grow bananas in East Atlanta).
Consumers would have to pay higher taxes to consume imported food or go without it. That's an unappetizing choice.
"Consumers would likely buy fewer imported goods to avoid the tax, but that itself is a form of paying the tax," wrote Duke and Mulholland. "A family that switches from imported fresh berries to frozen domestic berries in the winter may purchase an untaxed item, but they are not purchasing their preferred form of berry and would experience a decline in living standard."
To make matters worse, the tariff would also raise the cost of producing food in the United States. That's because American farmers would face higher costs to obtain fertilizer and farm equipment, much of which is imported.
The CAP Action Fund analysis on Trump's proposed tariff is in some ways colored by partisan politics. The report attempts, unconvincingly, to suggest that President Joe Biden's efforts to boost American manufacturing with billions of tax dollars have been more successful than Trump's tariffs, when in fact both have pretty dismal track records.
But there is nothing partisan about the idea that higher tariffs would have an inflationary effect on prices for American consumers. That's an economic fact backed up by the empirical experience of the past several years. For example, the U.S. International Trade Commission's recent analysis of the tariffs Trump implemented in 2018 found that "U.S. importers bore nearly the full cost of these tariffs because import prices increased at the same rate as the tariffs."
The CAP Action Fund report also reflects what other estimates of Trump's 10 percent tariff plan have found. An analysis by the Tax Foundation estimates that it would raise taxes on Americans by more than $300 billion. The higher prices created by the tariff would rebound throughout the economy, translating into higher costs for businesses and consumers, shrinking economic growth, and diminished exports. "Taken together, we find Trump's proposal of a 10 percent trade tax matched with in-kind retaliation would shrink the U.S. economy by 1.1 percent and threaten more than 825,000 U.S. jobs," Erica York, a senior economist at the foundation, wrote in that report.
Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a trade-focused think tank, told The Washington Post last year that a 10 percent tariff on all imports would likely raise America's inflation rate by more than two percentage points. In the same article, Casey B. Mulligan, who served as an economic adviser to the Trump administration, acknowledged that hiking tariffs would contribute to inflation.
In short, if you think grocery store prices should be even higher than they already are, Trump's tariff plan probably seems like a great idea. For everyone else, this should sound like a terrible idea.
The post Report: Trump's Proposed Tariff Would Cost Families $1,500 Annually appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Immigration ranks as the second-most important issue among registered U.S. voters and the top issue for Republican voters, according to a Marist Poll/PBS NewsHour/NPR poll released last month. Perhaps that's because of the 3.2 million border encounters documented by Border Patrol in 2023—a new record high that's so far being outpaced this year.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who continues to erect razor wire fencing at the border despite a Supreme Court ruling prohibiting Texas from stopping federal agents from cutting through the barriers, has likely also heightened the salience of the issue for Republican voters. Even politicians in blue cities like New York are calling the influx a problem, with Mayor Eric Adams saying that the arrival of 110,000 asylum seekers over a year and a half would "destroy New York City" as shelters become overwhelmed.
What do libertarians, traditionally in favor of permissive immigration laws, have to say about this? The truth is, there's a divide. Today's episode of Just Asking Questions features two thinkers on either side of that divide laying out what they each believe is the ideal immigration policy.
Libertarian podcaster and comedian Dave Smith said on the Liberty Lockdown show last month that "all of our troops should come home and be stationed around our borders." He continued saying that "if you believe in open borders right now, under current circumstances, you're an insane person, and you're as bad as a communist."
That sparked a social media firestorm, which included exchanges between Smith and today's other guest, Chris Freiman, a professor at the John Chambers College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University and author of several notable papers about the ethics of immigration.
Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
Sources referenced in this conversation:
The post Dave Smith vs. Chris Freiman: What's the Ideal Immigration Policy? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Ronna McDaniel's tenure as an on-air commentator for NBC News is already over: The network fired the former Republican National Committee (RNC) chairwoman this week after enduring a full-on mutiny from other staffers and hosts. MSNBC pundits Chuck Todd, Joe Scarborough, and Rachel Maddow all criticized network heads for bringing McDaniel on board. Todd suggested her commentary would be suspect, since she had only recently departed the RNC; Scarborough said he "strongly objected" to her; and Maddow said the network hiring McDaniel was like hiring a mobster to work at a district attorney's office or a pickpocket to work as a TSA screener (imagine that!). Watch:
"Bad decisions will inevitably happen. Mistakes will be made. But part of our resilience as a democracy is going to be us recognizing when decisions are bad ones and reversing those bad decisions." Rachel Maddow encourages her colleagues at NBC News to 'take a minute' on their… pic.twitter.com/T1FVMh5KIP
— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) March 26, 2024
I criticized Todd's objections to McDaniel earlier this week. If McDaniel's proximity to the RNC means her credibility as a commentator is suspect, then MSNBC host Jen Psaki should be considered a major liability; Psaki served as White House press secretary under President Joe Biden while negotiating her role at MSNBC. There's nothing particularly new or stranger about this—political communications officials frequently move from government to campaigns to cable news and back again. Anyone who pretends that this was the major issue with McDaniel is lying.
Maddow's criticism of McDaniel gets to the actual heart of the matter: Progressives at MSNBC think that McDaniel's political views and actions with respect to former President Donald Trump are disqualifying. They say that McDaniel was part of Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and for that reason, she has committed an unforgivable sin.
The truth, however, is that McDaniel played an "ambiguous role" in promoting Trumpian election denial, explains Reason's Jacob Sullum. She initially gave credence to wrongful claims by Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, and supported Trump's efforts to re-litigate the outcome, but as promised evidence of fraud failed to materialize, she increasingly distanced the RNC from Stop the Steal—infuriating Trump in the process.
In its write-up of McDaniel's sudden rise and fall at NBC, The New York Times credited her for rejecting "Mr. Trump's most far-fetched election-theft scenarios." Nevertheless, the Times chided her for casting any doubt on the validity of the outcome whatsoever, reminding readers that she once said Biden hadn't "won it fair" and had gestured at various fraud allegations.
In merely whining about the supposed unfairness of election, McDaniel is in good company, of course. Indeed, much of the mainstream media seems to have completely memory-holed the fact that numerous Democratic officials and progressive pundits said the 2016 election—won by Trump—was unfair due to alleged Russian interference, voter suppression, and hacks and leaks emanating from the Hillary Clinton campaign. Clinton herself infamously declared Trump an "illegitimate president."
" I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories—he knows that—there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did," she said in a 2019 interview.
Clinton was hardly alone in that belief. When Trump was sworn in as president in 2017, nearly 70 congressional Democrats slipped the inauguration; many of them did so because they viewed the election as illegitimate. The late Rep. John Lewis (D–Ga.), a beloved civil rights icon, explicitly said he would not attend the inauguration because "I don't see the president-elect as a legitimate president." The reason he cited was Russian election interference.
"I think there was a conspiracy on the part of the Russians and others," said Lewis.
He made these remarks during an interview with…NBC's Chuck Todd, who somehow failed to assail Lewis for indulging in election-denying conspiracy theories. In fact, Todd's response was downright agreeable. "That's going to send a big message," said the host.
Then there was Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia in 2018, who repeatedly and brazenly claimed her Republican opponent, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, had stolen the election. Those claims were echoed by current White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre—before she took that job—who had also called Trump's win illegitimate.
To be abundantly clear, neither Clinton nor Abrams nor any of these other figures are morally equivalent to Trump, who took active steps to contest his loss in court. But they did gripe about their losses, and help inspire public doubt in the validity of their outcomes. According to Roll Call, 62 percent of Democrats believe Trump's 2016 win was illegitimate because of Russian interference—even though the most sensational claims about vast foreign influence on social media were substantially debunked.
Would NBC hosts rise up in fury if any of these election deniers were offered plum gigs at the network? Of course not.
I found myself completely baffled by this New York magazine profile of Andrew Huberman, a Stanford University professor of medicine and popular podcaster. Writer Kerry Howley—formerly of Reason—tears Huberman apart for dating multiple women at once (without their knowledge, according to them); the piece reads like an attempted #MeToo-ing, but falls short of offering up anything bad enough to be worthy of such a brutal takedown.
That was my take at least, and Glenn Greenwald and Saagar Enjeti expressed similar sentiments. My Rising co-host Briahna Joy Gray felt differently, however, and we argued about it on the show.
Did you catch the debut of Free Media TV? Watch below. We're just getting started.
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]]>RFK Jr.'s running mate: This week, environmental lawyer/alt-science peddler Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who is running for president as an independent, and polling quite highly—selected Nicole Shanahan, Google co-founder Sergey Brin's ex-wife and a tech entrepreneur in her own right, as his veep.
Shanahan was the main funder and creative mind behind RFK Jr.'s surprisingly good Super Bowl ad:
Of course, this one pays homage to JFK's 1960 campaign ad—a fact that pissed off much of the Kennedy family, who by and large do not share RFK Jr.'s beliefs and seem moderately to severely embarrassed by him.
"My cousin's Super Bowl ad used our uncle's faces—and my Mother's," Bobby Shriver, RFK Jr.'s cousin, wrote. "She would be appalled by his deadly health care views. Respect for science, vaccines, & health care equity were in her DNA."
Now, Shanahan has been picked as running mate—which led to a strange reaction from the Libertarian Party chair. "I think that a lot of libertarians are a little bit confused over why he chose Nicole Shanahan," L.P. Chair Angela McArdle said to The Hill. "I'm sure she's a lovely person, but she doesn't necessarily fit into alignment with any of our views." But why would she need to align with Libertarian voters' views? Well, there's been plenty of speculation that the Libertarian Party seeks to throw RFK Jr. on top of the ticket—an odd choice if you consider what his Environmental Protection Agency would look like, for one.
Up until now, many pollsters and pundits had believed that RFK Jr. running as an independent would hurt former President Donald Trump more than President Joe Biden. "Right after Kennedy went indie, an NPR-PBS-Marist survey showed Biden leading Trump by three points (49 to 46 percent) in a head-to-head contest, but by 7 percent (44 to 37 percent, with RFK Jr. at 16 percent) in a three-way race. Similarly Quinnipiac had Biden leading Trump by one point head-to-head (47 to 46 percent) but by three points (39 to 36 percent, with 22 percent for RFK Jr.) with Kennedy in the mix," reported Intelligencer's Ed Kilgore.
Now, Kennedy appears to be helping, not hurting, Trump's chances: "The RealClearPolitics polling averages nationally now show Trump leading Biden by 1.6 percent (46.6 to 45.0 percent) in a two-candidate race, and by 5.4 percent (40.7 to 35.3 percent, with Kennedy at 12.3 percent) in a three-candidate race."
But Kennedy faces a significant ballot access roadblock ahead—which is solved by accepting the L.P. nom, if that's what's offered to him. Currently, Kennedy is on the ballot in Utah only. But his campaign assures voters that "it has collected enough signatures to also qualify in Nevada, Hawaii and New Hampshire," per Politico. His super PAC also says it's garnered enough signatures to be included in Michigan, South Carolina, Arizona, and Georgia. (I assume the real reason why he won't take the L.P. plunge is because the moderator of an upcoming L.P. presidential debate is yours truly, and I'm no fangirl.)
Branding the Bible: In other news from the very normal campaign trail and our very well-adjusted candidates, Trump has started selling $60 Bibles for Holy Week. "We must make America pray again," Trump said in a Truth Social sales pitch for the bibles, which is interesting messaging for a man who has repeatedly declined to name his favorite verse, called it "Two Corinthians" instead of "Second Corinthians" in a 2016 speech at Liberty University (where you really shouldn't get that wrong), and…didn't regularly attend church before it was politically advantageous to him (still only choosing to attend on holidays and for photo ops).
"People are so shocked when they find…out I am Protestant. I am Presbyterian. And I go to church and I love God and I love my church," said Trump, who has generally declined to name a church he attends regularly, back in 2015. "In one video shared on Truth Social and played at Trump's rallies, a narrator's voice booms: 'On June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, "I need a caretaker." So God gave us Trump,'" reported Axios. And in December, Trump said he wanted to "create a new federal task force on fighting anti-Christian bias."
All of this comes together to look an awful lot like pandering to Christians, while also trying to hawk the word of God for a quick buck. Par for the course for Trump, but forgive me for not being particularly excited about this field of presidential contenders.
Scenes from New York: It's good that the Bronx district attorney isn't asking for more money for her office. But pretty much everything else about her plea to City Council is concerning:
Progressive criminal justice mindset, in one quote: "The lack of resources for youth and mental health are driving violence, subway crime and retail theft. I cannot prosecute my way out of this. … We must invest in communities."
OK, but your job is to *be the prosecutor*, not… https://t.co/uLT3XFNleB
— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) March 27, 2024
Either hire someone or don't. Either print an op-Ed or don't. If you don't want any views or reps that have ever been Trump-aligned, either say that or stand by decision to represent a large part of the electorate. This immediate retreat in face of Slack channels is so lame. https://t.co/TJJN7tAYRx
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) March 27, 2024
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]]>The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that massively screwed up COVID-19 testing now wants to apply its vast bureaucratic acumen to all other laboratory developed tests (LDTs). By insisting on its recondite approval procedures, the FDA at the beginning of the pandemic stymied the rollout of COVID-19 tests developed by numerous academic and private laboratories. In contrast, public health authorities in South Korea greenlighted an effective COVID-19 test just one week (and many more in the weeks following) after asking representatives from 20 private medical companies to produce such tests.
LDTs are diagnostic in vitro tests for clinical use that are designed, manufactured, and performed by individual laboratories. They can diagnose illnesses and guide treatments by detecting relevant biomarkers in saliva, blood, or tissues; the tests can identify small molecules, proteins, RNA, DNA, cells, and pathogens. For example, some assess the risks of developing Alzheimer's disease or guide the treatment of breast cancer.
The FDA now wants to regulate these tests as medical devices that must undergo premarket agency vetting before clinicians and patients are allowed to use them. The FDA estimates that between 600 and 2,400 laboratories currently offer as many as 40,000 to 160,000 tests. Overall, some 3.3 billion in vitro tests are administered to patients annually.
Out of billions of tests given, how often do laboratory developed tests appear to cause harm? In its submissions, the FDA justifies this burdensome oversight by citing problematic medical device reports and unconfirmed "allegations" for a grand total of nine and four different tests respectively between 2009 and 2023. The remaining examples cited by the FDA are tests that had actually been submitted to the agency for analysis and were subsequently rejected or revised as recommended.
A 2023 study in the American Journal of Clinical Pathology analyzed how frequently these tests were deployed in the University of Utah health system. The researchers reported that out of the more than 3 million lab tests ordered in 2021, 94 percent of them had already been approved by the FDA. Only 4 percent of the lab tests were LDTs. They believe their figures are similar across the U.S. health care landscape.
The FDA has received strong and widespread pushback from laboratories and clinicians. In a letter to the agency, American Hospital Association Executive Vice President Stacey Hughes wrote of the proposed regulations that "the unfortunate outcome likely would be the decline in the rate of clinical innovation, which would negatively impact the U.S.' ability to keep our health care system at the forefront of discovery, provide quality care to patients, and respond quickly to emerging public health risks."
The Biden administration is aiming to have the regulations finalized in April. However, MedTech Dive reports, analysts at the investment bank TD Cowen suggested that it remains "unclear if and when FDA will finalize the rule as it has faced considerable opposition and would likely be challenged in court."
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]]>In London, England, the Greenwich council has ordered an award-winning fish and chips shop to remove a patriotic mural. The mural outside the Golden Chippy features an anthropomorphic fish holding a Union Jack flag and reaching into a bag of french fries (chips, as the Brits call them) and a slogan saying "A Great British Meal." Owner Chris Kanizi said the mural has given a boost to business, with tourists coming to snap a selfie in front of the mural and grab a bite to eat. That seems to be the problem, as the council calls it an "unauthorised advert."
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]]>The economy is growing, unemployment is low, wages are up, and inflation is down. However, the American people remain grumpy about the state of the economy. This puzzle was just investigated by four economists. They found that people often know that something is wrong even if statistics don't reflect the problem. In this case, people are perceiving that inflation is still, in fact, high.
For months now, Americans have been told that inflation's downward trend, from almost 9 percent annually to around 3 percent, should make them feel good about the economy. But it isn't working. A recent Gallup poll found that 63 percent say the state of the economy is getting worse and 45 percent think it's already "poor." One reason, many have speculated, is that while the rate at which prices are rising might have slowed considerably, prices remain very high. Food and rent in particular are still expensive. These prices are felt everyday by Americans when they pay for their housing and go to the supermarket.
But that's not all. A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research by economists Marijn Bolhuis, Judd Cramer, Karl Schulz, and Larry Summers finds that a change in the method used to estimate inflation today, compared to the method used in the 1980s, might well cause an underestimation of the true level of inflation.
The paper—"The Cost of Money Is Part of the Cost of Living"—highlights the overlooked impact of the highest borrowing costs consumers have faced in decades. From mortgages to car loans to credit card debt, those costs are up.
As the authors explain, the pre-1983 measure of inflation (the Consumer Price Index) counted the price and interest rate Americans paid to buy housing. The newer measure is based on what it costs to rent housing. Another way to think about it is if you buy a house this month, the monthly payments will be much higher than if you bought one three years ago. The same is true of a car or other purchase. But measuring inflation based on rental costs—which may not incorporate the sky-high interest rates of a new purchase—doesn't reflect that difference.
As Summers, the Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, noted on X, formerly Twitter, "Pre-1983, mortgage costs were in the CPI as were car payments pre-1998. Now, price indexes do not include borrowing costs. Thus, when interest rates jumped last year, official inflation did not fully capture the effects it would have on consumer well-being."
Indeed, if we measured inflation as we did in the 1970s, the inflation that started in 2021 would have peaked at 18 percent—double its reported peak. That's higher than the worst of the 1970 and '80s. Inflation's current annual rate would be about 8 percent.
As Summers notes, measuring inflation the pre-1983 way helps explain "70% of the gap in consumer sentiment we saw last year." Not surprisingly, Americans have a better sense of the state of the economy and their daily lives than the economists who focus mostly on data, models, and indexes for information about the world.
I assume this paper by Summers and co-authors will revive the debate about how we should measure inflation. John Cochrane, over at the Grumpy Economist Substack, observes that to answer this question properly, you have to ask first what you're trying to measure:
The new way is closer to right, if the question is to measure changes in the cost of living right now for the average person.…Most people live in older houses with fixed mortgages, so higher prices and mortgage rates for new houses don't affect them. People who rent don't care. While higher interest rates are a cost to borrowers, and higher house prices a cost to buyers, higher interest rates are higher income to savers and higher house prices a boon to downsizers. Those wash on average.
But if the question instead is whether Americans feel that their lives are improving from a few years ago based on the idea that inflation is allegedly falling and they can rent a house just like theirs for less money, then the answer is different.
The bottom line is that, while the question of how best to measure inflation has no single and straightforward answer, one mystery has been clearly solved by Summers and his co-authors. People aren't crazy. Even if every media outlet and the president continue to insist that ordinary Americans' lives are getting better because of falling inflation, we know that's not right.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM.
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]]>The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge figures to snarl traffic around Baltimore, but the bigger problem might be the downed bridge's effect on maritime activity.
Until the bridge's wreckage can be cleared away, the Port of Baltimore is cut off from the Chesapeake Bay, the Atlantic Ocean, and the global supply chains beyond. It remains unclear how long the port will be closed, but federal Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Wednesday that there could be a "long and difficult path" ahead.
In the meantime, trade flowing through the port will have to be redirected to other ports along the East Coast. That's a disruption that could mean higher costs and other complications—and it is a particularly acute issue for the roughly 15,000 workers who earn a living off the commerce that passes through Baltimore's port.
Clearly, there's every reason to make sure the port can be reopened as quickly as possible. Buttigieg acknowledged as much on Wednesday, and said the White House had given a "clear directive" to "tear down any barriers, bureaucratic as well as financial."
But Buttigieg stopped short of naming any specific federal regulations that might be waived to speed along the recovery efforts in Baltimore. Here's one that should go right to the top of the list: The Foreign Dredge Act of 1906.
The Foreign Dredge Act is an older cousin to the more well-known and infamous Jones Act, which bans foreign-built ships from moving goods between American ports. As a result, it drives up shipping prices to places to Puerto Rico and Hawaii, adds traffic to American highways, and leaves sizable parts of the country without access to natural gas.
Like the Jones Act, the Foreign Dredge Act is a purely protectionist law that forbids foreign-built dredges—vessels built to remove debris from waterways and to deepen and widen shipping channels—from operating in the U.S. Any foreign dredge caught doing work in American waters is subject to immediate forfeiture.
The law was originally meant to protect American dredge-building companies from foreign competition. More than a century later, however, the primary outcome of the Foreign Dredge Act has been severely curtailing the number of dredges available to do important work like removing the wreckage of the Key Bridge. Many that are in use are sub-standard compared to the rest of the world. The Army Corp of Engineers is still using dredges built in the 1930s, for example, while a recent study from Tulane University found that "the combined capacity of the U.S. [hopper dredge] fleet is less than a single EU [European Union] dredging vessel."
Being shielded from competition means American dredge-building companies haven't needed to keep up with developments made elsewhere in the world. Clearing away the debris and reopening the Port of Baltimore is likely to depend on outdated equipment, and will therefore likely take longer than it otherwise might.
Waiving the Foreign Dredge Act now might help in some small way—perhaps better dredges can be brought in from Canada or somewhere else nearby—but the collapse of the Key Bridge is a great reminder that we shouldn't wait until there's a crisis to start undoing bad laws. It would have been better to repeal the Foreign Dredge Act five or 10 or 50 years ago, so that America would already have access to the best dredging technology in the world.
When there's not a crisis, the Foreign Dredge Act is still a problem. It is one of the main reasons why American ports generally have smaller shipping channels and lower capacity than ports in other parts of the world. Those marginal costs might be easy for policymakers to ignore during normal times, but the closure of the Port of Baltimore should throw this problem into stark relief.
What happens next will be telling. Will the Biden administration follow through on its promise to sweep aside policies that will slow the recovery in Baltimore, or will it choose counterproductive protectionism over the interests of the East Coast's economy and 15,000 blue-collar workers?
The post The Obscure Protectionist Law That Will Slow Clean-up of the Baltimore Bridge Disaster appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Recovery efforts remain underway in the aftermath of the collapse of Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge, which was struck by a container ship early on Tuesday. Vehicles and multiple construction workers fell into the river below. Two men were rescued from the water, while six are still missing and presumed dead.
Little is known about why the ship struck the bridge. The National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the incident, is still assessing reports that the vessel lost power before the collision. Numerous far-fetched theories about the incident are now circulating to fill the knowledge gap, including one floated by Fox News host Maria Bartiromo.
"The White House has issued a statement on this saying that 'there's no indication of nefarious intent in the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge,'" said Bartiromo yesterday, prefacing an interview with Sen. Rick Scott (R–Fla.). "Of course, you've been talking a lot about the potential for wrongdoing or potential for foul play given the wide-open border."
Despite Bartiromo's implication that the tragedy at the Key Bridge might be linked to border crossers, the details of Tuesday's incident say far more about the contributions of immigrant workers than they do about the perils of an "open border."
"Jesus Campos, an employee of contractor Brawner Builders, had worked the overnight shift of the bridge work before switching to another," reported The Baltimore Banner. "He said the missing men are from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico." The New York Times confirmed that at least one of the missing men was from El Salvador and two were from Guatemala.
In other words—based on what's currently known about the victims—the men working on the Key Bridge when it collapsed were immigrant workers who sought better economic opportunities and ended up filling difficult jobs. "They are all hard-working, humble men," said Campos, and all came to the country to help their loved ones in their home countries, the Banner reported.
Immigrants have long worked jobs that Americans don't want, including dangerous and grueling ones. "Immigrants are in fact more likely to work in risky jobs than U.S.-born workers," wrote economists Pia M. Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny in a 2009 article in Demography. Physically demanding jobs—including construction and agricultural work—are disproportionately filled by immigrants. Roughly 2.2 million of the country's construction workers, or one-quarter of the total construction work force, was foreign-born as of 2015, the Urban Institute reported.
"This catastrophe has already disproportionately impacted our city's immigrant community, one that often toils in demanding and dangerous jobs to the benefit of all who call Baltimore home," said Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, president of Global Refuge, an immigration services nonprofit based in Baltimore, in a statement yesterday.
The workers who fell into the Patapsco River on Tuesday were doing what many other immigrants do here. They were performing strenuous, dangerous work—work that benefits their American neighbors—to make a living and support their loved ones. Rather than offer clear proof of the consequences of a "wide-open border," the Key Bridge's collapse highlighted the contributions of hardworking immigrants, many of whom take on foreseeable—and, in this case, unforeseeable—risks.
The post The Immigrant Workers Who Died on the Baltimore Bridge Were Hardworking Heroes appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Two weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Ronna McDaniel, then chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), let Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump's lawyer, hold a press conference at the RNC's headquarters in Washington, D.C. During that bizarre presentation, Giuliani and Sidney Powell, another member of the Trump campaign's "elite strike force team," crystallized the craziness of the president's stolen-election fantasy by describing a baroque international conspiracy that supposedly had delivered a fraudulent victory to Joe Biden.
On January 29, 2021, three weeks after angry Trump supporters who believed that fantasy invaded the U.S. Capitol as Congress was about to affirm Biden's election, McDaniel expressed regret about hosting Giuliani's clown show. "When I saw some of the things Sidney was saying, without proof, I certainly was concerned it was happening in my building," she told The New York Times. "There are a whole host of issues we had to deal with: What is the liability of the RNC, if these allegations are made and [prove to be] unfounded?"
That incident reflects McDaniel's ambiguous role in promoting Trump's baseless claims of decisive election fraud in the two months prior to the Capitol riot. Her support for those claims, which stopped short of outright endorsement but nevertheless lent them credibility, was at the center of the complaints that yesterday persuaded NBC executives to abruptly rescind their decision to hire her as an on-air commentator.
As Reason's Robby Soave noted after several NBC and MSNBC personalities publicly objected to McDaniel's gig, it is not at all unusual for news outlets to hire former party or White House officials. But McDaniel critics such as Chuck Todd, Joe Scarborough, and Rachel Maddow argued that giving her a forum on NBC was different from that standard practice because she had assisted Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, undermining democracy by threatening the peaceful transfer of power.
McDaniel "was not the most aggressive or outlandish member of Mr. Trump's team," the Times notes. In fact, "she fell short of Mr. Trump's demands and expectations," prompting "calls from his allies and grass-roots activists to be far more aggressive." But the Times adds that "a review of her record shows she was, at times, closely involved in and supportive of Mr. Trump's legal and political maneuvering ahead of the violent attempt to block Congress from certifying Mr. Biden's victory on Jan. 6."
While that seems like an accurate assessment, NBC's conclusion that McDaniel is beyond the pale raises questions about where exactly a network should draw that line when it tries to present a mix of political viewpoints. Given Trump's domination of the Republican Party, finding former GOP officials who did not acquiesce in his increasingly desperate attempts to remain in office after he lost reelection may prove challenging. And if dissident Never Trumpers are the only acceptable on-air Republicans, news outlets like NBC will be presenting a highly skewed selection that does not reflect prevailing opinions within the party.
McDaniel's public statements about fraud after the election were less extravagant than Trump's but open to various interpretations. On November 6, the day before news organizations called the election for Biden, she said the RNC was looking into "irregularities" in four states, including Michigan. Four days later on Fox News, she cited a Politico poll finding that "70 percent of Republicans don't have faith in the results of this election right now." She suggested they were right to be skeptical:
It's been rigged from the beginning—rigged from the laws that were being passed in the name of COVID to create a porous election, rigged in the sense that they kicked Republicans out of poll watching and observing. Why do you do that if you have nothing to hide? And now you have a media that's rigging it again by saying, "We're not going to even listen to these stories. We're not even going to validate the 11,000 incident reports we have, the 500 affidavits we have across these states, people testifying under oath how they were disenfrachised."…It is stealing when you validate a vote that shouldn't be in. You are stealing from a voter that voted legally.
Here is how McDaniel summed up her message when she posted that clip on Twitter: "The American people deserve to have faith in our elections. That's why the RNC is going to pursue this process to the very end."
Exactly what that meant was unclear. As Trump saw it, "the very end" did not come after Republican officials (including his own attorney general) debunked his claims of systematic fraud, after states certified their electors, after the Electoral College met on December 14, after courts rejected numerous lawsuits challenging the election results, or even on the day that Congress was meeting to ratify those results. But McDaniel's idea of "the very end" seems to have been more conventional.
After Giuliani and Powell took the lead in pursuing remedies for Trump's groundless grievance, the Times notes, the RNC "shifted away from the legal involvement with the Trump team." It "attached its name only to four" of "the 65 lawsuits that Mr. Trump and his allies filed after the 2020 election."
McDaniel continued lending rhetorical support to such challenges, however. "Every illegal vote is stealing from a valid vote, and every state that conducted their election fraudulently is stealing from states that conducted their elections fairly," she told Fox News host Sean Hannity on December 8.
That formulation was consistent with longstanding Republican concerns about voter fraud, complaints about pandemic-related changes to election procedures, and objections to the alleged mistreatment of GOP poll watchers. It did not necessarily imply that fraud was massive or widespread enough to change the outcome of the election. But in the context of Trump's refusal to admit that he had lost the election, McDaniel's comments left the impression that his complaints were valid.
Behind the scenes, meanwhile, McDaniel was helping Trump press those complaints. During a December 6 teleconference, the House select committee that investigated the Capitol riot noted in its report, Trump and his legal adviser John Eastman "solicited the RNC's assistance" with their plan to present "alternate electors" in battleground states, and "McDaniel agreed to provide that assistance." But according to the federal indictment that charges Trump with illegally interfering in the election, Eastman "falsely represented to her that such electors' votes would be used only if ongoing litigation in one of the states changed the results in [Trump's] favor."
McDaniel also supported a quixotic election lawsuit spearheaded by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear, much to Trump's dismay. The Times notes that McDaniel "helped Mr. Trump rally state attorneys general" to join that lawsuit and praised it on Fox News. "I'm so happy about this Texas lawsuit," she told Hannity. "There's going to be more states joining that lawsuit."
The House select committee's report also faults McDaniel for sins of omission. Although "RNC leadership knew that President Trump was lying to the American people," it says, "they did nothing to publicly distance themselves from his efforts to overturn the election."
The afternoon of the Capitol riot, McDaniel condemned that particular result of those efforts. "What these violent protesters are doing is the opposite of patriotism," she said on Twitter. "It is shameful and I condemn it in the strongest possible terms."
That was followed, a few weeks later, by McDaniel's public expression of regret for giving Giuliani and Powell a post-election forum at the RNC. McDaniel told the Times she was immediately "concerned" about the seemingly "unfounded" claims that Powell made "without proof" at that wacky press conference. But as the House select committee noted, she kept her concerns to herself.
Nowadays, McDaniel unambiguously rejects those claims. While "it's fair to say there were problems in 2020," she told Kristen Welker on NBC's Meet the Press this week, it is clear that Biden won "fair and square." She added that "it's certified" and "it's done."
Appearing later on the same show, Todd, a former Meet the Press host who is now NBC's chief political analyst, expressed skepticism about McDaniel's sincerity. "I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation because I don't know what to believe," he told Welker. "She is now a paid contributor by NBC News. I have no idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn't want to mess up her contract."
Sincere or not, McDaniel's avowed view of what happened in 2020 contradicts what most Republicans say they believe. In a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll conducted last December, just 31 percent of Republicans agreed that "Joe Biden's election as president was legitimate," down from 39 percent in a similar poll two years earlier.
That reality presents a problem for TV news executives who say they are trying to present a diversity of political opinions. After canning McDaniel, NBCUniversal News Group Chairman Cesar Conde said the network remains "committed to the principle that we must have diverse viewpoints on our programs." Toward that end, he said, "we will redouble our efforts to seek voices that represent different parts of the political spectrum."
If those "different parts" exclude Republicans who think Trump actually won reelection (which, it's worth noting, would make him ineligible to run this year), NBC already has ruled out most members of the party. And if McDaniel's acknowledgment of reality was too late or too convenient to make the cut, the options are even more limited. When "major Republican Party figures like Ms. McDaniel are deemed unacceptable by viewers or colleagues," the Times wonders, how can an organization like NBC meet "the challenge of fairly representing conservative and pro-Trump viewpoints in their coverage"? It's a good question, and the answer probably will not satisfy anyone.
The post If Ronna McDaniel Is Beyond the Pale, NBC May Have Trouble Presenting 'Diverse Viewpoints' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
Earlier today, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled against Texas in a case where the federal government challenged the legality of the state's SB 4 immigration law. SB 4 is a new state law that criminalizes unauthorized migration, expands state law enforcement officials' powers to detain undocumented migrants, and gives Texas courts the power to order removal of migrants convicted under the law.
Today's decision is not a final ruling on the merits. Technically, all it does is uphold the district court's preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the law until the courts reach a final decision in the case. However, one of the factors courts assess in deciding whether a preliminary injunction is warranted is "likelihood of success on the merits." And in analyzing that factor, the judges made it clear they think SB 4 is in fact illegal, and Texas deserves to lose.
Most of Chief Judge Priscilla Richman's majority opinion in the Fifth Circuit focuses on whether SB 4 is preempted by federal immigration law. For example, she concludes that the law's provisions on detention and removal conflict with federal laws granting many undocumented migrants the right to remain in the United States while they apply for asylum.
But the majority also rejected Texas's argument that the state has the power to enact SB 4 because illegal migration and cross-border drug smuggling qualify as an "invasion:"
Texas asserts that Article I, § 10 of the Constitution (the State War Clause) permits
some applications of S. B. 4. The State War Clause provides:No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.
Specifically, Texas contends that, at a minimum, S. B. 4's application to transnational cartel members is a constitutionally authorized response to an "invasion."
But Texas does not demonstrate why it would be entitled to vacatur of the preliminary injunction. Constitutional text, structure, and history provide strong evidence that federal statutes addressing matters such as noncitizen entry and removal are still supreme even when the State War Clause has been triggered. Such statutes do not pertain to laying any duty of tonnage; keeping troops or ships of war in time of peace; or entering into any agreement or compact with another state or a foreign power….
Texas has not identified any authority to support its proposition that the State War Clause allows it to enact and enforce state legislation regulating immigration otherwise preempted by federal law. One would expect a contemporary commentator to have noticed such a proposition. Instead, in The Federalist No. 44, James Madison glossed over the portion of the State War Clause at issue here by writing: "The remaining particulars of this clause fall within reasonings which are either so obvious, or have been so fully developed, that they may be passed over without remark…"
Thus, we cannot say Texas has persuaded us that the State War Clause demonstrates it is likely to succeed on the merits.
Thus, the Fifth Circuit rejected Texas's Invasion Clause argument (the clause in question is also sometimes called the "State War Clause"). I think this is the right result for reasons I outlined in a recent Lawfare article, and also in my amicus brief in United States v. Abbott, another case before the Fifth Circuit, where Texas has raised the same argument.
But the Fifth Circuit's discussion of the issue is fairly brief and cursory, and doesn't always make the right points. In particular, if illegal migration really does qualify as an "invasion" that "triggers" the Invasion Clause, the text suggests a state really could "engage in war" in response—even if federal law otherwise forbade it to do so. And war powers might include the power to detain or deport citizens of the enemy nation from which the migrants came.
The Fifth Circuit is nonetheless right to conclude that Texas has "failed to provide authority to support its proposition that the State War Clause allows it to enact and enforce state legislation regulating immigration otherwise preempted by federal law." But that's because there is no good evidence indicating illegal migration or drug smuggling qualify as "invasion." The text and original meaning undermine any such notion. A state facing such issues may have various problems. But it has not been "actually invaded."
While the Fifth Circuit reached the right conclusion on the invasion questions, the District Court did a much better and more thorough job of analyzing the relevant issues.
Judge Andrew Oldham filed a lengthy dissenting opinion, most of it devoted to the preemption issues, and to the argument that SB 4 might be legal in at least some applications. But interestingly, he does not consider the "invasion" argument, except to briefly note that the district court rejected it.
For those keeping score, Chief Judge Richman is a conservative George W. Bush appointee. Judge Irma Ramirez, the other judge joining her opinion, is a recent Biden appointee. Judge Oldham is one of the most conservative judges on the Fifth Circuit, appointed by Trump.
In sum, SB 4 is likely to remain blocked for some time to come, even as litigation in the case continues. This—for the moment—concludes a saga in which the Fifth Circuit imposed a temporary "administrative stay" on the district court injunction, the Supreme Court refused to lift it, but the Fifth Circuit itself dissolved the stay within hours, leaving the injunction in place until the court could consider it further.
The Fifth Circuit has now upheld the preliminary injunction, which means the law will remain blocked until the court reaches a final decision in the case or—less likely—the injunction is lifted by the en banc Fifth Circuit or the Supreme Court.
Litigation in this case is going to continue. But today's ruling strongly suggests the Fifth Circuit—like the district court—is inclined to rule against Texas on the merits. That, too, of course, might be reviewed by the en banc Fifth Circuit or by the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, the "invasion" issue will be before the Fifth Circuit again in United States v. Abbott, which will heard by the en banc court (with all seventeen active judges participating) in April.
The post Fifth Circuit Rules Against Texas SB 4 Immigration Law appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In February, Reason reported that Georgia lawmakers were considering modest changes to the state's film and television tax credits. So far, the state senate is backing off even those meager modifications.
For more than a decade, films or TV shows that filmed in Georgia and spent at least $500,000 in the state could qualify for a 20-percent tax credit; putting a "Made in Georgia" logo on the final product would boost the credit to 30 percent. Last year, the state certified $1.24 billion in production tax credits.
Auditors routinely find the production credit program to be a waste of money: Most recently, a 2023 audit conducted by Georgia State University's Fiscal Research Center found that "net job creation is negative" as a result of the credits, and that each job created as a result of the program costs state taxpayers $160,000.
State law also allows the credits to be transferred, and production companies based in California pay very little in Georgia income taxes. As a result, the vast majority of recipients sell the credits: According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 97 percent of credits are sold by film companies, mostly to individuals who use them to offset their own tax liability.
For example, if a studio spends $1 million on a film shoot in Georgia, it could qualify for a $300,000 tax credit, but since the company likely won't owe that much in Georgia taxes, it can sell that credit to someone else and bank the proceeds. State law even requires that any transferred credit be sold for at least 60 percent of face value, so the production company would net $180,000, and the buyer would get a $300,000 credit that he could carry forward for up to three years.
Last month, four state Republican lawmakers announced that there would be changes to the program. They suggested doubling the minimum investment to $1 million and capping the amount of credits that could be sold at 2.5 percent of the previous year's state budget.
While these changes are modest—2.5 percent of last year's budget would still be over $900 million—the state legislature has included language to render them effectively meaningless.
The state House passed H.B. 1180 at the end of February. The bill inserted a provision that the "total amount" of transferred credits "in a calendar year shall not exceed an amount equal to 2.5 percent of the total budget in the General Appropriations Act as passed and signed into law for the corresponding fiscal year."
Last week, a different version of H.B. 1180 cleared the state Senate Finance Committee. This version lowered the cap from 2.5 percent to 2.3 percent, but it also included a notable exception. The Senate bill exempts any productions shooting at a studio sound stage facility "that was substantially completed between January 1, 2023, and June 30, 2027" and cost "in excess of $100 million" to build, or "that has more than 1.5 million square feet of stage space."
That would exempt the biggest and most expensive productions and render the caps moot. Atlanta's Trilith Studios, the largest studio complex in the state, contains 1.5 million square feet of studio space; Marvel's Avengers films and TV series and the upcoming Superman film are shot there, each of which costs hundreds of millions of dollars.
"I can't imagine anybody reaching the cap under the version we have," said state Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Hufstetler (R–Rome).
It makes perfect sense for legislators to feel like changing a law that causes state taxpayers to subsidize billion-dollar companies, especially when those companies turn around and sell the subsidies for cash. But in that case, they should fully commit, if not by scrapping the program altogether then at least by imposing a meaningful cap that doesn't exempt the biggest participants.
The post New Georgia Law Limits Film Tax Credits. But Marvel Would Still Qualify. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Column A is a symbol of New Jersey's notoriously un-democratic Democratic Party primary. Under the "county line" system, party bosses in each county get to choose which candidates show up in the first column of primary ballots, then urge members to "vote Column A, all the way."
Both parties in all but two counties use this system for primaries. Because New Jersey is a safe blue state, putting a Democrat in Column A is basically coronating them for office. "Column A, all the way" has even become a slogan that politicians use to shout down protesters.
But the county line system may soon become a relic of the past. Sen. Bob Menendez (D–N.J.) is facing corruption charges, leaving his seat up for grabs. Rep. Andy Kim, one of the Democratic candidates to replace him, is suing county clerks across the state to have the primary ballot redesigned. Congressional candidates Carolyn Rush and Sarah Schoengood have also joined the lawsuit.
Over the weekend, Kim's main Democratic rival Tammy Murphy dropped out of the Senate primary, and county bosses across the state endorsed Kim, setting up his name to be in Column A. The Burlington County Clerk then implied in a Monday court filing that the lawsuit should be thrown out, since "lead Plaintiff Andy Kim will hold the ballot position this very lawsuit alleges is unconstitutional in every county in the state that utilizes this design."
Kim, Rush, and Schoengood have vowed to press on with their case. In a letter to the court filed on Tuesday night, Kim's lawyers said that he will accept the Column A endorsements but "all Plaintiffs have requested and continue to request" that the system be abolished altogether.
"The clerks' county line primary ballots county line primary ballots continue to violate constitutional rights of all three candidates who are suing, as well as the voters' rights," the plaintiffs' lawyers said in a separate statement to Politico. "New Jersey cannot tolerate one more unconstitutional election."
An expert report submitted to the court by Princeton University neuroscience professor Samuel S.-H. Wang noted that the ballot design is a "powerful force to steer voter behavior towards specific choices." Just looking at a sample ballot in the report is enough to explain why.
Surprisingly, the New Jersey state government appears to agree. Attorney General Matt Platkin said that the county line system was "unconstitutional," adding that he would not defend it in court.
The story of this primary race is the story of a clown car of Democratic Party corruption skidding off the road and crashing. The Senate primary opened up after Menendez was indicted in 2023 for taking bribes—including gold bars and a Mercedes—to benefit patrons from Egyptian military intelligence officers and a Qatari-linked real estate developer to a local businessman accused of loan fraud.
It was the second time in a decade that Menendez was charged with corruption. After he was acquitted of bribe-taking charges in 2017, the Democratic Party allowed Menendez to keep his prestigious committee assignments. But this time around, Democrats quickly turned against him, demanding that he resign immediately. Menendez refused.
Tammy Murphy, the wife of Gov. Phil Murphy, stepped in to run for Menendez's seat. Democratic county chairs across the state, many of whom rely on the governor for funding, immediately endorsed her. Murphy's rivals fired back with what The New York Times called "nonstop claims of nepotism."
The governor accused his wife's rivals of sexism. "I bet you if she were my husband it would be a different story," he told the radio station WNYC. But as polls showed Kim beating her by 12 points or more, Murphy dropped out of the race.
Menendez, meanwhile, has turned against the Democratic leadership that used to guarantee his seat. An hour after Murphy announced her candidacy, Menendez accused her husband of "a blatant maneuver at disenfranchisement" and said that "they believe they have to answer to nobody."
More recently, Menendez has threatened to run as an independent. "I will not file for the Democratic primary this June," he said in a March 21 video. "I am hopeful that my exoneration will take place this summer, and allow me to pursue my candidacy as an independent Democrat in the general election."
In a final twist of fate, the lawsuit against the party establishment might benefit Menendez's attempted return to power.
"If the primary ballot access ballot format is held unconstitutional, it should be possible to get reform for the general election ballot format also," noted Richard Winger, editor of Ballot Access News, in a recent article. Bucking the party bosses might become easier for everyone—even the party bosses themselves.
The post Is This It for New Jersey's Corrupt Primary System? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>We take the facts from [Aaron Norgren's complaint]…. Aaron, who continues to work at DHS, has served as a security counselor with the Forensic Mental Health Program for nine years….
[Aaron and his father, Joseph, who also worked at DHS, received an email] … instructing him to complete [online] workplace trainings titled, "How to be Antiracist (CRT Training)" and "Understanding Gender Identity and Expression: Moving Beyond the Binary." … Commissioner Harpstead also emailed employees that the trainings were necessary to foster "brave conversations" and "change … minds for life" and DHS Assistant Commissioner Karen McKinney told employees that "we need all of you to do this."
The Norgrens alleged that the trainings instructed employees to speak or refrain from speaking on certain political and ideological matters. For example, the trainings mandated a minute of silence for George Floyd. They also directed employees to stop using the phrase "I am not a racist" as a defense, to admit to a specific definition of the word "racist," to confess to racist policies they supported, and to accept that the United States is the root of racist ideas. The Norgrens alleged the gender identity training instructed them to refrain from telling others that their gender identities are wrong. The Norgrens opposed the racism training as violative of the traditional view of equality under Title VII, and they opposed the gender identity training as contrary to their sincerely held religious beliefs….
Aaron expressed opposition to both trainings to his direct supervisor Robert Schweisthal and to Joseph's supervisor Pherson. He … asked for an exemption from both trainings and was denied … with no right of appeal.
The court rejected the claims that the trainings involved impermissible speech compulsion:
Here, while the pleadings alleged that the trainings advanced expressive messages that the Norgrens objected to, the Norgrens failed to plausibly allege that Commissioner Harpstead compelled them to adopt those messages as their own speech.
There was no allegation that the Norgrens were forced to affirmatively agree with any of the statements in the trainings. There was no allegation that they were threatened with any kind of penalty if they did not observe the minute of silence for George Floyd during the training, if they continued using the phrase "I am not a racist" as a defense after the training, or if they expressed their countervailing viewpoints regarding racism or gender identity in the workplace.
The email directing the Norgrens to complete the trainings only told them to watch the videos to the end and then click the exit button. The allegation that Commissioner Harpstead intended the trainings to change minds for life does not by itself demonstrate the required compulsion.
I think that has to be right, on these facts: Government employers have to be able to require employees to watch various training videos or read training materials, and I doubt that courts can effectively sort ones that have undue ideological content from ones that don't. That is especially so because various kinds of training might have some content that some might view as ideological: Just to take one example, imagine incoming soldiers being required to read books or watch videos that aim to inculcate certain patriotic or professional norms, or for that matter to teach contestable interpretations of the laws of war.
But Aaron also alleged that he was denied an interview for a possible promotion, shortly after all this happened, and that this denial was in retaliation for his religious exemption request, and more generally was motivated by disapproval of his religious beliefs, to go forward; and the court allowed that claim to go forward:
"To establish a prima facie case of retaliation, an employee must show that he engaged in protected activity; he suffered a materially adverse action that would deter a reasonable employee from making a charge of employment discrimination; and there is a causal connection between the protected activity and the adverse action." … If the employee establishes a prima facie case at summary judgment or trial, the burden shifts to the employer to articulate a legitimate, non-retaliatory reason for its action. If the employer meets this burden, the burden shifts back to the employee to provide evidence of pretext….
Regardless of whether Aaron satisfied the technical requirements of the qualifications, he alleged that he had worked at DHS for nine years and had been previously considered for positions with the same required qualifications in the past. Aaron alleged that he met the qualifications …, that he was declined an interview after he filed his EEOC charge, and that DHS deviated from its past practice in choosing not to interview him. His complaint is sufficient to raise a plausible inference of discrimination. His claim is further bolstered by the timing, as only three weeks elapsed between the protected conduct and the adverse action….
DHS's deviation from its past practice, the proximity between the protected activity and the adverse employment action, Aaron's strong employment record and his qualifications, and DHS's failure to offer him an interview despite his eligibility [also] give rise to an inference of religious discrimination. The district court gave too much weight to whether Aaron established the existence of similarly situated comparators because courts generally do not inquire about comparators until the "pretext stage" of the inquiry, which arises at summary judgment….
The court also rejected, on factual grounds, Joseph's claim that his work environment had become so intolerable that he was forced to quit; if you're interested, you can read about that in the opinion.
The post State Employer's Requiring Employees to Watch "Antiracist"/"Gender Identity" Videos Isn't Unconstitutional Speech Compulsion appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>What if you come home and find strangers living in your house?
I assumed you order the squatters out, and if they resist, call the police, and they will kick them out.
Wrong.
Pro-tenant laws passed by anti-capitalist politicians now protect squatters. If a squatter just lies about having a lease, the police won't intervene.
"It's a civil matter," they'll say. "Sort it out in court."
Great. Court might cost $20,000. Or more. And courts are so slow, eviction might take years.
In my state, New York, homeowners can't even shut off utilities to try to get the squatter out. That's illegal. Worse, once a squatter has been there 30 days, they are legally considered a tenant.
This month, New York City police arrested a homeowner for "unlawful eviction" after she changed locks, trying to get rid of a squatter.
"Squatter rights," also known as "adverse possession" laws, now exist in all 50 states. As a result, evicting a squatter legally is so expensive and cumbersome that some people simply walk away from their homes!
Flash Shelton may have a better idea.
His mom wanted to sell their house after his dad died. But while they were selling it, squatters moved in.
Shelton did what I would have done—called the police. But the police said there was nothing they could do.
So he tried a new tactic: out-squat the squatter.
"I just felt, if they can take a house, I can take a house," Shelton says in my new video. "I could go in as the squatter myself, [and] gain possession of the property."
When the home invader left for a few hours, Shelton went in and changed the locks. Only then did the squatters leave.
Now Shelton's started a business, SquatterHunters.com, where he tries to help others get their houses back.
"People think of squatters as homeless, destitute," I say.
"They are not homeless," answers Shelton. "They're criminals…people taking advantage of the system."
In fact, one squatter he pushed out was Adam Fleischman, who started the Umami Burger restaurant chain. Fleischman told Shelton, "I'm a victim here." He even called the cops.
"He felt that since he had possession of the house," says Shelton, "that he had the right to call law enforcement and have me removed."
I tried to reach Fleischman to hear his side of the story. No luck.
"Where does he hear that he has this right to squat?" I ask Shelton.
"The city was telling him this," says Shelton.
But now Shelton was a squatter, too, so he was protected by the same pro-"tenant" law.
Still, only when Shelton threatened to bring friends to the house as backup did Adam Fleischman leave.
In Los Angeles, a woman claimed to be a "caretaker" for an elderly homeowner, who said she didn't want the woman in her home. So, she gave Shelton a lease. While the squatter was out, Shelton changed the locks.
"But the squatter is still there?" I ask Shelton.
"Still there," he says, "Climbing through the window because she doesn't have access to the main house."
She's now been there for two years!
Shelton says his team will move in and get rid of the squatter.
"How do you know that will work?" I ask.
"Because once I take possession," says Shelton, "then she'll have to fight in court to try to get back in. Most likely she won't do that."
Why do squatters feel entitled to other people's property?
Probably because people hate landlords. They listen to silly people like Marxist New School professor Miguel Robles-Duran, who calls landlords "parasites" who "provide no social value." Popular TikTok socialist Madeline Pendleton adds that landlords have "guaranteed forever incomes, without having to put in any labor."
No labor? Who does she think buys the land; pays lawyers to decipher the excessive regulations; hires architects, carpenters, plumbers, and electricians; pays the taxes; manages the property, etc.?
It's infuriating!
I'm glad people like Flash Shelton fight back.
COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
The post Squatters Invaded His Mom's House—so He Fought Back appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A majority of American parents want kids to have access to their phones at school, a new survey finds. In addition, most parents think cellphones have a positive effect on their kids' lives.
Debates over teens and smartphones often contain the (assumed or explicit) premise that parents want their kids to stop living what author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls a "phone-based childhood." Popular wisdom today says parents think phones are negatively impacting their childrens' lives and want kids to have less access to phones but feel powerless to change the situation—a premise baked into Haidt's new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (read my review here).
But a survey conducted earlier this month by the National Parents Union challenges this narrative.
In The Anxious Generation, Haidt looks at the rise of various problems among young people and pinpoints two interlocking culprits: the ascendancy of a "phone-based childhood" and the decline of a "play-based childhood." Many folks see this as a simple one-way flow: phones came along and simply wiped out time or motivation for other pursuits. Haidt suggests a somewhat different sequence of events. As parents began to fear everything in the offline world (and instill this fear into their children), individual families and American society more broadly started denying children independence, autonomy, and unstructured free time. "Screen time" started to fill a void that parents, politicians, police, and our culture as a whole had already created.
The new National Parents Union survey perfectly illustrates the way fear-based parenting is driving phone-based childhoods.
In the survey—conducted in February among 1,506 parents of public school students grades K-12—66 percent of parents said their kids have a cell phone and most of these kids (79 percent) take their phones to school. Asked why parents' wanted this, the most common answers were so that kids could "use their phone if there is an emergency" (79 percent agreed) and so parents could get in touch with their children "or find out where they are when needed" (71 percent). Forty percent said it was important for communicating with kids "about their mental health or other needs during the day."
In other words, a lot of parents want their kids to have phones at school because these parents are anxious, afraid, and/or overzealously policing their progeny's whereabouts and feelings.
Hat tip to Bonnie Kristian for first identifying this paradox. "It is increasingly fashionable to talk about the risk phones pose to American kids, especially teenage girls," writes Kristian on Substack:
The dysfunction of the phone-based childhood has become impossible to ignore, thanks in no small part to Haidt's own work. We're all saying it: Make the kids put down their phones at dinner! Ban phones in school! Kick teenagers off social media or confine them to flip phones or take the phones away altogether!
But then there's the second level: When push comes to shove, whatever ideals they may spout about rejecting the phone-based childhood, average American parents want their middle and high schoolers to have phones, preferably smartphones with location tracking kept on their persons at all times.
It seems parents are as attached to their kids having phones as their kids are. In light of this, it's unsurprising that many parents frown on policies that totally deny kids access to phones at school (even though the popular/political narrative around kids and phones suggests this is what parents want).
Fifty-six percent of the people surveyed by the National Parents Union said "students should sometimes be allowed to use their cell phones" in school, while just 32 percent said "students should be banned from using their cell phones, unless they have a medical condition or disability for which they need to use a cell phone."
Even among the group who said most students should be banned from using phones, only 30 percent wanted this ban to apply broadly (i.e., outside of class). Most said phones should be banned during academic instruction but allowed at other times, such as during lunch or recess or during periods between classes.
In keeping with this, relatively few of the parents surveyed supported school policies that keep kids' entirely away from their phones during the day.
Fifteen percent said schools should "require students to place their cell phones in a central location in their classroom, such as a cubby or holder, but don't lock them up" and 14 percent said they should "require students to place their cell phones in a locked cabinet or cell phone lockers in their classroom." Another 8 percent said schools should "lock up students' cell phones in secure pouches or containers that they can carry with them but that prevent them from using their phone."
The most popular answer—shared by 59 percent of the parents surveyed—was that schools should "allow students to keep their phones in their backpack or bag (not locked
up) as long as they don't take them out and keep them on silent."
Reassuringly, very few people (5 percent) think the federal government should make decisions about school phone policies and only 10 percent say it should be a state-level government decision.
Most parents think phone policies should be made at the school district level (29 percent), the school level (28 percent), or at the classroom level (18 percent).
Some of the data in this survey fits popular narratives about kids and phones, like the ideas that they're starting young and spending a lot of time on them.
Among parents who allowed their children to have cellphones, the most popular ages to have given phones to them was between 10 and 13 years old. (The survey does not say what type of phones were given, so it's possible many kids received dumb phones to start.) Only 13 percent of parents waited until a kid was age 14 or older.
Among those whose kids had cell phones, only 18 percent estimated that their child spends less than 2 hours per day on it. Some 28 percent estimated that their kid spends between 2 and 3 hours per day on their phones, with 29 percent suggesting their kid uses it for 4 or 5 hours per day, 12 percent saying 6 or 7 hours per day, and 9 percent saying their kids are on phones for upwards of 8 hours per day.
And yet, most parents seem pretty unalarmed by this phone usage. Just 9 percent said phones had a mostly or entirely negative effect on their kids.
Nearly half—46 percent—said the phone had a mostly or entirely positive effect on their child, while 42 percent said the effect was "about equally positive and negative."
This stands out as at odds with what we commonly hear in the media and from legislators about how parents view kids' phone use. But it's in keeping with what many kids themselves say. In a 2022 survey of American 13- to 17-year-olds, conducted Pew Research Center, kids identified all sorts of plus sides to social media (which is, of course, one of the main things that kids use phones for). And a majority—59 percent—said social media is neither a negative nor a positive in their lives, while 32 percent said it's mostly positive and just 9 percent said it's mostly negative.
It's also in keeping with some earlier research on phone adoption among kids. For instance, a 2022 study from Stanford Medicine researchers followed 250 tweens and teens for five years during which most got a first cellphone, tracking study participants' well-being during this transition. The kids were 7 to 11 years old when the study started and 11 to 15 years old when it ended. The researchers "found that whether or not the children in the study had a mobile phone, and when they had their first mobile phone, did not seem to have meaningful links to their well-being and adjustment outcomes," according to lead author Xiaoran Sun.
• Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law restricting teen use of social media platforms. Under the new law, 14- and 15-year-olds can old start social media accounts with their parents' permission. "This law puts all users' privacy at risk by mandating age verification," said Competitive Enterprise Institute's director of the Center for Technology & Innovation, Jessica Melugin. It also "ignores parents' rightful role in deciding what is and is not appropriate for their child, and may sacrifice too much of the free flow of speech to be constitutional. It's political click bait, but it's not good public policy."
• California lawmakers are considering a bill that would require large online platforms to verify the identities of "influential" users. Influential here is defined to include basically any user that's been at it for a while (that is, if content they've shared "has been seen by more than 25,000 users over the lifetime of the accounts that they control or administer").
• Mother Jones has an interesting interview with Lynn Paltrow, founder of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (now called Pregnancy Justice). "For much of the past 50 years, the mainstream pro-choice groups were focused almost exclusively on the right to abortion," said Paltrow, who believes this was a mistake. "There was no campaign to explain abortion as necessary to the full equality and citizenship—the personhood—of women in this country. They were defending abortion as opposed to the people who sometimes need abortions but always need to be treated as full constitutional persons under the law, whatever the outcome of their pregnancies."
The post Parents Don't Want Schools to Confiscate Kids' Phones appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Nick Gillespie: Last December, you published an op-ed titled "A Five-Point Plan to Save Harvard from Itself" in The Boston Globe. You wrote that Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense, but calling for another Holocaust depends on context, and that deplorable speech should be refuted, not criminalized. But you also note that outlawing hate speech would only result in students calling anything they didn't want to hear hate speech. Can you bring us up to date on the climate at Harvard?
Steven Pinker: Harvard is a big place. There is a diversity of opinion in co-founding the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard. There was a rush of faculty joining us, but still a small percentage of the faculty, many of them vocal, many of them for the first time had an opportunity to just communicate with themselves across the sprawling, multiple campuses at Harvard. Many are upset at the direction that Harvard and other elite universities have taken in restricting the range of expressible opinions to a pretty narrow slice of the spectrum, to criminalizing certain opinions, to getting into needless trouble by taking stands that really should be the prerogative of its students and faculty—there isn't any reason that a university should have a foreign policy—or in general, at the level of discourse, where just calling someone a racist is considered counter-argument or a refutation.
So we formed this council to try to push back, to try to offer emotional support to those who are under attack because it can be devastating to be the target of a cancellation campaign. A lot of the problems that universities have faced have come from the fact that deans and provosts and presidents just want to make trouble go away, and so if someone is yelling at them and making their life miserable, they'll do whatever it takes to get them to shut up. We figure if we also yell at them, then they'll actually have to think about what's the optimal thing to do, rather than just do what makes the noise go down.
Gillespie: Do you feel like this time it's different?
Pinker: I think so. Harvard itself is in a kind of crisis by its own standards, which is to say that donations are down.
Gillespie: It doesn't really need the money, but it wants the money.
Pinker: Yes. And applications are down. It's become a national joke. I have a collection of memes and headlines and bumper stickers, like "My son didn't get into Harvard." An editorial cartoon of a corporate guy saying, "This guy has a stellar resume, straight A's, top scores, didn't go to Harvard." The reputation, which is a huge resource that Harvard has drawn on, is threatened. And when it's threatened, a lot of Harvard's comparative advantage will also be threatened. Harvard has a lot of money, but it also can to some extent coast on its reputation.
Gillespie: And it can only go down, right?
Pinker: At least if the past few months are any indication, it is.
Gillespie: You also pointed out in that The Boston Globe piece, and elsewhere, that it wasn't just that. Does the affirmative action case that Harvard lost play into the sense that Harvard has been moving in the wrong direction for a long period of time and needs to back up and get back on the highway?
Pinker: It certainly got Harvard's attention. The fact that it does have an outsized reputation means that it has a certain cushion. Not every department has to compete to be the best in the country because students will come, graduate students will come, donors will give.
Gillespie: You're saying that psychology doesn't really have to work very hard at all.
Pinker: Psychology has gone through waves. My former colleague Steve Cosslett is here, who made it the best department in the country when he was a chair and working behind the scenes, which is one of the reasons that I decamped [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] for Harvard more than 20 years ago. The actual quality of departments can go up and down. But Harvard has a certain buffer because of its reputation, which is now being threatened.
A lot of the things that we're proposing, like meeting the Council on Academic Freedom, would actually relieve some headaches on the administration itself, even though their prime driver is to avoid bad publicity, keep the donations going. But a lot of the trouble, especially that our former President Claudine Gay found herself in, could have been avoided if Harvard did have a more robust academic freedom policy among other things.
Gillespie: Was the plagiarism a legitimate firing offense or is that kind of a side issue?
Pinker: For me, it was a side issue, and I won't go there because that was her. Her testimony did not differ from the other two university presidents. Focusing on Claudine Gay gave us a bit of a distraction, because the problems are more, as we say, systemic. But among them are the fact that universities and their divisions feel that they have to offer moral guidance, some sort of pastoral counseling to a grateful nation, what they ought to feel in response to various tragedies and outrages. That inevitably gets them into trouble because someone will think it was too early, it was too late, it was too strong. Only one side was represented. If they just could shut up and point to a policy that said, we have to shut up, we don't comment, as the University of Chicago has done for more than 50 years, it would just get them off the hook.
Gillespie: That's the institution of neutrality. And Chicago sticks by that pretty well.
Pinker: Pretty well. That is, if a department or a center puts up a statement, then they're under pressure to take it down. The reason that it's relevant to academic freedom is that it's just prejudicial to the people working in the university, or in particular in the departments. If your department chair is posting some opinion on police shootings, or Palestine, or Ukraine…
Gillespie: Or Donald Trump, I'm sure that happens a lot. "We love Trump, I love Trump, my department loves Trump."
Pinker: All the time, yes. But it is prejudicial to the faculty and the students who have to worry, "Are my professional prospects at stake if I take a position that differs from the official one on my department website?"
Gillespie: In your world of institutional neutrality, would individual faculty be free to issue?
Pinker: Absolutely. It's just that the institution itself should be the arena. It should be the debating club. It shouldn't actually be a debater.
Gillespie: Of the five principles you mention in your article, after institutional neutrality comes nonviolence. It seems insane that you have to say that colleges should be nonviolent places. How does that fit in?
Pinker: I think we'd be actually saving the university from themselves. But the idea that a legitimate form of expression of opinion in a university campus should be forcibly ejecting a dean from his office and occupying the building, that just shouldn't be what a university is about. I think a lot of faculty have a certain nostalgia for when they did it in the '60s to protest Vietnam. It's like, isn't it cute? The younger generation is doing the same thing, but it really isn't okay for a number of reasons. It's commitment to the wrong ideals. The ideal of a university ought to be persuasion, the careful formation of arguments, not chanting slogans over bullhorns and getting in other students' faces.
Gillespie: Nonviolence includes drowning out speakers. It's one thing to protest. It's another thing to preclude somebody from speaking.
Pinker: Exactly. There should not be a heckler's veto. Protest obviously is protected, and protest could involve holding placards. It could include shouting out "you lie" in the middle of a lecture, but it can't involve forcing speakers off the stage, drowning them out, drawing a banner across the stage so that speakers can't see them. That is restricting other speech as an ostensible form of expression.
Gillespie: Do you feel like students and faculty at Harvard or elsewhere understand this isn't simply hypothetical? That nonviolence is actually a principle that we need to hold to?
Pinker: Some of us have had to make the case that it's not okay to invade a classroom and start chanting slogans over bullhorns. But we had to make the case and that the university should be consistent in cracking down on it, again to protect itself, such as the lawsuit filed by these students against anti-Semitism who have pointed to episodes in which Jewish students have been intimidated, blocked, and in one case, were assaulted. If the university just had a policy, that "speech is fine, it's okay, we encourage it, but physical force is not," and acted consistently, then they would be off the hook for selective enforcement.
If they started to enforce it against the often quite disruptive Palestinian student groups, then the Palestinian student groups could file a lawsuit saying, "Well, how come they're enforcing it against us and they don't enforce it against other groups?" If it was just clear, "This is the policy, this is what we recognize as speech, this is what we recognize as force," and be consistent, it would remove a headache from them.
Gillespie: Do you think the bookstore should stop selling Harvard-branded bullhorns?
Pinker: The first of the five-point plan was just consistent commitment to academic freedom. Because another reason that Claudine Gay got into such trouble is that when she was given what admittedly was a kind of a trap that she walked into—that is, if students called for genocide against Jews, would that be prohibited by Harvard's code of conduct—she made a pretty hardcore [American Civil Liberties Union]-style free speech argument, which came across as hollow or worse, because we've had a lecturer who was driven out of Harvard for saying there are two sexes.
There was another professor whose course was canceled because he wanted to explore how counterinsurgency techniques could be used against gang warfare. We had a professor in the School of Public Health who had cosigned an amicus brief for the Obergefell Supreme Court case against a national policy allowing gay marriage. There were calls for his tenure to be revoked, for his classes to be boycotted. He had to undergo struggle sessions and restorative justice sessions and basically grovel in front of a mob. Given Harvard's history of those cases and others, to all of a sudden say, "Well genocide, it's just a matter of I disagree with what you say, but I defend it to the death your right to say it," came off as a little bit hollow and hypocritical.
If Harvard had had a free speech policy that was reasonably enforced before that, then at least you would have had something of a leg to stand on in standing on principle. She was technically correct in the same way that there's no law in the United States that says you can't call for a Holocaust. Hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. But when it's so selectively prosecuted, then it becomes ludicrous and literally becomes a national joke or a national disgrace.
Gillespie: It's worse still that Rep. Elise Stefanik (R–N.Y.), who lead the hearing, was herself a Harvard graduate. Although I guess it would have been worse if she was from Yale or Princeton.
Pinker: There are some theories that there's a little bit of revenge motivation there because of an incident in which she was herself targeted at this invitation at the Kennedy School of Government. But there is a history.
Gillespie: It's wonderful when you find out that all big events in human history are really petty jealousy. Another one of your points is viewpoint diversity. What does that consist of?
Pinker: Academia has rightly resisted external control over content, over hiring, over promotion, which is good in protecting a university against government propaganda. On the other hand, you can get self-contained circles of people kind of conferring prestige on each other. Then you can get entrenched orthodoxies, which no one can challenge because if they do, then they are downgraded in judgments of quality, which are often so subjective.
Gillespie: The American novelist John Dos Passos was considered one of the greatest writers alive by international modernists. Then he had the misfortune of going to the Spanish Civil War and deciding that the loyalists were as bad as the Francoists. Overnight, literally, he became a terrible writer. This kind of stuff happens, right?
Pinker: If you just define viewpoint by the conventional left-right political spectrum, then things look pretty grim because according to at least a survey of The [Harvard] Crimson, 3 percent of Harvard faculty identify themselves as conservative. And out of those 3 percent, a lot of them are in their 90s, so we know where that's going. But it's not just the left-right spectrum. There can be dogmas that become entrenched within academic fields. For example, in our program of women and gender studies, I don't think you could use the words chromosome, hormone, or sexual selection; that would be not an idea that is thinkable.
Now the question is, given that universities do operate by peer review, peer evaluation, how could you open them up to the kind of viewpoint diversity that is intellectually indispensable? It's a shame that we still have to recite the arguments from John Stuart Mill about why you should listen to arguments that you disagree with, namely, maybe they're right and you're wrong. Unless you're infallible, you really should listen to other viewpoints. Maybe the truth lies somewhere in between. Maybe there's some third position you haven't thought of that would only occur to you if you hear the problems with your own position. And, even if you're right, your position is only stronger if you have to defend it against legitimate criticisms. But that case has to be made again 200 years later.
The question is, how do you rescue programs, universities, departments, fields that become self-referential echo chambers? [Psychologist] John Haidt and [political science writer] Phil Tetlock and a number of others in an article about eight years ago called for affirmative action for conservatives. Just as an idea that, especially departments of political science—as we call it, Harvard government—maybe it's not such a terrible thing to have a couple of conservatives around. That should actually be an explicit desideratum, if not a quota. But also, there might be other mechanisms, just opening the process up. We even have at universities a mechanism that's supposed to do that. There are so-called visiting committees where departments every few years are evaluated by academics from other universities, but also donors, trustees. What they're supposed to do is advise deans on whether the department is going in the wrong direction. In practice, they don't have that much influence, and they're often quite cozy with the departments themselves. But if they were more empowered to be alert to intellectual monocultures, to dogmas that have become entrenched, if that was part of their mission, that would be another, less obtrusive way of trying to mix up the ideas.
Gillespie: I suspect there are fewer and fewer Freudians in the psychology department. That's not necessarily a problem, right? As much as independent of what we do academically, we're going to enforce a political or ideological hierarchy or monoculture that has really nothing to do with academics. Is that really the problem that we're talking about?
Pinker: As a field makes progress, certain schools of thought become of historical interest. They've kind of made their contribution. You don't have to have like one Freudian, and one [Noam] Chomsky, and one structuralist, and one functionalist, but there shouldn't be a political litmus test. In many departments there really is. Sometimes it doesn't even have to pertain to the subject matter of the field. It can just be the person's reputation politically.
I was on a hiring committee for another department at Harvard, not psychology. There was an excellent candidate, who was by any standards, including his own, a political liberal, but he had some heterodox positions. He was opposed to affirmative action, for example. The department chair said, "We can't hire him. He's an extreme right-winger," meaning he had criticisms of affirmative action. You often think of academia as being at the Left Pole. North Pole is the spot from which all directions are south. The Left Pole is the hypothetical position from which all directions are right.
Gillespie: That's the final principle that you talked about, [diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)] disempowerment. How does that happen? Why is DEI bad? And how do you minimize it?
Pinker: I have nothing against diversity, equity, and inclusion. But as Voltaire said about the Holy Roman Empire: it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Diversity, equity, and inclusion imposes an intellectual monoculture. It favors certain groups over others. It has a long list of offenses that mean you can be excluded. But it is a strange bureaucracy. It's a culture that is kind of an independent stratum from the hierarchy of the universities themselves. The officers get hired or poached to move laterally from university to university. It's with their own culture, their own mores, their own best practices. It's just not clear who they report to, or who supervises them, or who allows them to implement policy.
One of the things that the Council on Academic Freedom discovered is that—we had to dig to do the research that—a notorious practice of the last decade in many universities has been the so-called diversity statements, where job applicants have to submit not only a statement of their research project, their teaching philosophy, but also their commitment to diversity, which in practice means endorsing a certain canon of beliefs, that there is systemic racism, that its only remedy is racial preferences, that racism is pervasive, that it is the only cause of any disparity in racial proportions. If someone in their diversity statement says, I believe that the most defensible policy is colorblindness and that the reason for racial inequities in universities is because of our educational system in high school, their application would go into the circular file.
Gillespie: How did that come to be?
Pinker: This is a good question. That is a question we've asked ourselves. First of all, no one knew that it was a policy of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Fortunately, unlike some universities like the University of California, where they are taken seriously, they are vetted by DEI bureaucrats before they're even sent to departments, and the ones that don't endorse what we could call a woke ideology are just filtered out.
Gillespie: You mean applications go there first before they go to the department.
Pinker: Yes. Not at Harvard, but at many universities. No one knew that we had this requirement. No one knew who implemented it. The faculty never voted on it. The president never said this is our policy going forward. A dean of arts and sciences must have signed off on it, but no one can remember who or when. But we just live with it. Likewise, freshman orientation consists of indoctrination sessions.
This is emblematic of a trend in universities, that this nomenklatura just got empowered and no one knows exactly how. What often happens is a dean gets into trouble because of some racial incident. They hire a bunch of staff, and that's their way of getting out of the trouble. Then they're there forever. And there is only one way that they've been changing and that's upward. One of the points in the five-point plan is not to necessarily abolish them—although the Florida university system has done that—but at least, just as the military is under civilian control, the DEI bureaucracy should be under the control of responsible deans.
Gillespie: Would that mean they should be under the supervision or discretion of faculty?
Pinker: Faculty or at least academic deans, like the dean of arts and sciences. The policy should be exposed to the light of day. The ones that are defensible should be kept and the ones that aren't should be abolished. But they shouldn't change the entire university structure by stealth, which is what has happened.
Gillespie: With the Harvard admissions policies that got into trouble with the Supreme Court, part of the problem was that they were lying about it. They were saying we weren't penalizing Asian students. If Harvard had been more open about it and said we want a different student body than the one that our current admissions process is giving, would you be okay with that?
Pinker: I think if it was transparent and defensible. It's odd how many policies at a university just got entrenched and no one ever kind of decided on them, defended them against criticism. But the so-called holistic admissions, which is a kind of mystical process where they won't say exactly how they do it because it's holistic, favors some mix of regional diversity. Class diversity is a good thing. Racial diversity was okay if it was for diversity, but not for rectifying injustices, but also activism, and arts, and athletics, and volunteer work, and cultural experiences, which also provided a fig leaf where in practice—as we now know from these documents—Harvard could make sure it didn't get too Asian. De facto, that's what happened. We know that in the elite schools, in the University of California system, they have gotten largely Asian because they're more meritocratic—doesn't seem to have done them tremendous harm. But Harvard did not want that to happen. So the Asian applicants, as with the Jewish applicants 75 years before, just happened to be lower in leadership and creativity, all these things that you can't measure.
Gillespie: You mentioned that Florida has banned DEI statements and things like that. That can affect state-supported institutions or state-assisted colleges. From an academic freedom point of view, this can be troubling, right?
Pinker: That is another kind of menace. I do think that it's not unreasonable for the taxpayers to have some kind of input into what it is they're supporting. But what is the best institutional arrangement where there can be input, there could be safeguards against self-serving, insular communities without it being managed by political ideologues. It's a question of institutional design that I don't even know we have the optimal design for yet. So I don't think it's unreasonable. Here I differ with some of my faculty colleagues who almost define academic freedom as professorial privilege, professorial prerogatives. Professors should be able to do anything they want, and it's no one else's business. I don't think that's right. But you also don't want, as with the McCarthy era, politically motivated, ideological restrictions or loyalty tests to be imposed by the government. But the government does have a legitimate interest in making sure universities don't go off the rails.
Gillespie: Over the past dozen years or so you've emerged as a chronicler of moral and material progress, particularly in books such as The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, which came out in 2011, and Enlightenment Now in 2018. Can you summarize your case for progress?
Pinker: The case is that if you list what you consider dimensions of human well-being, that is, we're better off if we are alive than dead, if our babies don't die, if women don't die in childbirth, if people don't live in extreme poverty, if we're safe from violent crime, if we're not at war, if our environments are clean, if people are discriminated against on the basis of their race or sex, if children aren't beaten. If you list some reasonable things that people tend to agree are good things—it's better not to have a famine, better to be well-fed—and then you look at the best quantitative estimates over time, as you plot the trends, almost all of them get better. Not all; that would be a miracle. And they don't get better everywhere all the time. The trends are not, as we say, monotonic. The bad things don't always go down, and the good things don't always go up. There are often lurches and shocks. But in pretty much all of them, the historical trend has been, things are getting better.
Gillespie: Do you have a theory of social change? Why have things gotten better?
Pinker: I think that as knowledge increases, and as the arena of debate, discussion, power, and deliberation expands, there's just certain things that have to fall by the wayside. Barbaric practices of antiquity, like a human sacrifice—you throw a virgin into a volcano to get better weather—sooner or later you discover that's the wrong theory. That actually does not, in fact, prevent crop failures. Or that certain races are fit for slavery—that's just empirically incorrect. That women are not capable of intellectual work, but are designed just for the home.
Gillespie: Up until the late '70s, girls were not allowed to pole vault because evolution had decreed that they didn't have the upper body strength to pole vault. It seems like evolution has caught up since then.
Pinker: Right, exactly. There's just the sheer gain of knowledge. Voltaire, the way he put it, those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Because there are some things that people do want—they want to be well-fed as opposed to hungry and healthy as opposed to sick—when technology provides them with the means, not uniformly, because there is superstition, but in general, more people get vaccinated than don't—but that's not the only thing. As it's harder for small elites to wield absolute power, as you open up the discussion, then there are certain ideas that just aren't going to fly. You just can't defend apartheid without seeming ridiculous or monstrous.
When the world's nations came together in the late '40s to agree on a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the question is, is there some common denominator that all of the world's countries—in the Muslim [world], in China, and India, and the Western countries—could all agree on? Or would it kind of contract to the null set, as many people suspected? It turned out the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there's a lot of stuff in there. And most of it isn't particularly controversial, like everyone should have an education. People shouldn't be imprisoned for their political beliefs. Now, if they'd started out the drafters with something like, the first thing in the Universal Declaration is that America is a shining city upon a hill, you probably wouldn't have gotten agreement on that. Or Jesus Christ as our Savior and that is the way to redemption. Again, then the Hindus would drop out, or the Chinese. So what's left?
What's left is the conditions of human flourishing. That is, the list of things that I mentioned. It isn't controversial to say that it's better to be healthy than sick, or better for kids not to die. That realization tends to be what survives when the more parochial ideologies become untenable the circle of discourse broadens.
Gillespie: Do you think that material progress and moral progress follow the same logic?
Pinker: I think they are related. This is something that I've been looking at cross-national and cross-temporal comparisons and putting together the data that went into Enlightenment Now, I was surprised at how many good things come from being rich, for countries. People point to Sweden and Denmark and Norway as really nice places to live. You can invoke their egalitarian ethos but these are rich countries. If you look at the plot, almost any good thing—peace, safety and environmental quality against [gross domestic product] per capita—most of the countries fall on a line, with the exception of the Gulf oil states, which are rich but kind of wretched places.
An idea is that wealth is good just because it buys good stuff, like healthcare, like environmental protection, which is a luxury that you can afford after you have electricity and running water and roads and such. Education is expensive, good policing is expensive. Being rich buys you preconditions for a good life. So why isn't Saudi Arabia such a great place? They got no shortage of money. There is an idea that should be congenial to many people in this room, which is that when you have networks of exchange and commerce and markets, and that's the way you get rich, as opposed to digging stuff out of the ground, which can be monopolized by an elite and then fought over, but if the wealth comes from distributed networks of commerce and voluntary exchange, that kind of pushes people toward cooperation.
It's the old enlightenment idea of doux commerce, gentle commerce, that the American founders endorsed, and Emmanuel Kant and Voltaire and others, that if you're in a trading relationship that yokes your well-being to that of other people, so you don't kill your customers, you don't kill your debtors. If it becomes cheaper to buy stuff than to steal it, then that eliminates one of the incentives for conquest and plunder. So countries that are both affluent and get their affluence from networks of exchange tend to be pleasant in other ways.
Gillespie: They tend to be more liberal in a classical sense, right?
Pinker: In the classical and in the American political sense, in that they have more munificent welfare states. As countries get richer, they get more redistributive. Maybe less congenial here. I've heard it called Wagner's Law. The countries that people on the left tend to extol because of their welfare states also have a lot of economic freedom and also are very affluent.
Gillespie: That came up when [Sen.] Bernie Sanders [D–Vt.] was pointing to places like Norway and Sweden, which actually sometimes do better on economic freedom indexes than the U.S. There's a lot of bullshit on both sides of that debate. The people who deny progress, moral or material, what's in it for them?
Pinker: It's a question I thought about a lot. Why do progressives hate progress? I have to say that in the various political factions and bands along the spectrum, it does tend to be libertarians who are most congenial to the idea of progress. That wasn't always true, that's what I found. [Thomas] Hobbes put it well. It's a long-standing phenomenon, because I'm giving you a quote that's almost 400 years old. Let's see if I can remember it verbatim: "Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence for antiquity, for men contend with the living, not with the dead." That is, to criticize the present is a way of criticizing your rivals, your competitors. If there's something that you don't like about the status quo, you want to say how much everything sucks. You don't want to say how much better everything is than it used to be, because then you might be giving credit to the people that you're contending with. That's a big one.
There are also cognitive biases that hide progress from us, such as the availability bias as coined by [psychologists] Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, which is that we tend to judge probability, risk, danger according to how easily anecdotes come to mind. We use our brain's search engine as a surrogate for probability. If there is a disaster, a terrorist attack, a police shooting, a famine in a part of the world, that's our answer to the question. Are things getting better or worse? Well, of course they're getting worse. I just read about the terrorist attack this morning, and that sticks in memory. Also, there's an emotional coloring to memory that even though we remember bad events in the past, we don't remember how bad they were at the time, so that the negative effect tends to wear off of memory, whereas the negative aspects of the present are still keenly felt.
This is not a new phenomenon. I'd like to quote Franklin Pierce Adams that, "nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory." That is really true. Even in our lifetimes, even though there are people, especially younger people, who kind of moan about how this is an unprecedented hellscape, in the '70s, the world had only 33 democracies. Half of Europe was behind the Iron Curtain. Spain and Portugal were literally fascist dictatorships, not just countries that people called fascist, but they called themselves fascist. Greece was under the control of a military junta, all of Latin America. So despite the recent recession, people forget how undemocratic the world was in the lifetime of many people.
Just quality of life. Like if you missed a movie in the local repertory theater, if you did live in a big city that had a repertory theater, you would never see film classics. You couldn't get access to musical performances. You got lost because you didn't have Google Maps. You couldn't look something up in Wikipedia. You had to go to this thing called the Britannica. All of these ways that our lives really have gotten better are very easily taken for granted.
Gillespie: Before we go to audience questions, you are in town partly because your photography is being shown at Brooklyn Sweet Lorraine Gallery, and your exhibition is called "2 1/2 D: The Stereoscopic Photography of Steven Pinker," which sounds like a concept album from the late '60s. Can you explain what stereoscopic photography is, and your interest in photography—and you're quite accomplished at it? Does it tie into your larger intellectual interests?
Pinker: It does. It actually goes back to my Ph.D. thesis. My Ph.D. thesis advisor is actually in the room, Stephen Kosslyn. The term "Two and a Half D" was borrowed from the artificial intelligence of 40 years ago. In particular, a researcher named David Marr proposed that that is the information that the eyes give to the brain. That is, we don't literally see the world in three dimensions because we see in perspective, both when we are physically observing a scene—you stand between two railroad tracks, you kind of see them as parallel, you know that they're parallel, but you also see them converge. You see them in perspective, and as things recede in distance, you can sense they get smaller, even though they're the same size. That's not what you'd get from an actual three-dimensional model of the world, a kind of mental sandbox. But nor is the world as flat as a pancake.
The two-and-a-half dimensions allude to the fact that the third dimension is not like the other two. It's actually computed from a number of sources of visual information. When lines converge toward the horizon, we interpret that as depth. When certain things move in the visual field faster than others, we interpret that gradient of motion as a cue to depth. But one of the most interesting is the difference in the view that the two eyeballs give you, that each eyeball is a different vantage point on the world. The views are slightly different, and the farther away something is, the closer its images are in the two eyeballs. The closer it is, the more they diverge. It's kind of a high school trigonometry problem to triangulate from the distance between the eyes, the angle and the differences in the images to how far away something is.
The brain does that trick unconsciously, and it gives us a very vivid sense of the third dimension. Now, the photography comes from—it's almost as old as photography itself. But in the 19th century, most photography was stereophotography, which means showing two images taken from two vantage points, separated by approximately the distance of the eyes, and figuring out a technological way of getting each image to be seen only by one eye. That can be done with prisms, that can be done with mirrors, that can be done with false color. The recent technology, which is one of the inspirations for the show, when I showed it to the gallery owner, it just blew him away, a new kind of monitor that gives you a stereoscopic image without any headgear, without any glasses, without any gimmicks. It just pops out through some optical wizardry. So I have ultra close-up photos of flowers which kind of reveal their shape and color in hyper-natural detail.
Gillespie: Are you an AI optimist or pessimist, or is that just a silly question?
Pinker: In principle, I am an AI optimist. You never know how technologies will be implemented. I'm not an AI doomer. I don't think that AI will enslave us or turn us into raw materials. The scenario sometimes called the "paperclips ellipse" is the scenario in which an artificial intelligence system is given a goal of maximizing manufacturing of some commodity, like paper clips, and uses every available resource, including our own bodies, to make more and more and more paper clips. That does not keep me up at night.
There are dangers like, impersonation, counterfeit people, spread of disinformation, erosion of the chain of verification of fact. There's the hypothetical technological unemployment, although we're still waiting for that to happen. But there's tremendous promise. It's kind of a shame that the first large-scale implementation of AI was kind of a gimmick: a first-person chat bot, which may have some advantages and may have some misuses. But there is tremendous promise for AI, if it's task-oriented, like autonomous vehicles that could cut down on the million people killed every year in car crashes, or eliminating jobs that no one particularly likes that are repetitive and dangerous.
Gillespie: So DEI enforcement?
Pinker: That could be the first to go. Actually, seriously, one of my postdocs who was on the job market, and she had to write a DEI statement, but couldn't do it in good conscience. So she had ChatGPT write it for her. It's actually pretty good. Very convincing.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
Photo Credits: Nancy Kaszerman/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Nancy Kaszerman/ZUMA Press/Newscom: Rick Friedman/Polaris/Newscom
The post Steven Pinker: What Went Wrong at Harvard appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Oral arguments in abortion pill case: Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the abortion pill case it's currently considering, involving access to mifepristone, which is used in medical abortions up until 10 weeks gestation.
"The justices are examining rule changes in 2016 and 2021 that, among other things, made the drug available by mail and from a medical provider other than a doctor," reports The Washington Post.
The majority of justices seemed skeptical "that the plaintiffs, who do not prescribe abortion pills or regularly treat abortion patients, even had standing to bring the challenge," per The New York Times. It seems the plaintiffs may have failed to make their case that they suffer concrete harm from mifepristone being widely available, though Erin Hawley—a lawyer with the Alliance Defending Freedom, and wife of Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), who was arguing before the court—made the case that, if women suffer from complications after taking mifepristone, pro-life doctors may be forced to choose between helping such patients and violating their deeply-held convictions.
But, "under federal law, no doctors can be forced against their consciences to perform or assist in an abortion, correct?" asked Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Elizabeth B. Prelogar, the solicitor general arguing on the government's behalf, said Hawley and co. did not "come within 100 miles of the kinds of circumstances this court has previously identified" as grounds for standing and disputed plaintiffs' arguments about the safety of the abortion pill. The remedy the plaintiffs seek—nationwide restrictions on mifepristone access—also seems unlikely to fly.
"This case seems like a prime example of turning what could be a small lawsuit into a nationwide legislative assembly on an F.D.A. rule or any other federal government action," said Justice Neil Gorsuch yesterday.
Alabama referendum on IVF decision: In February, Alabama's state supreme court ruled, quite controversially, that frozen embryos deserve the same types of legal protections granted to children.
Yesterday, a woman named Marilyn Lands flipped a state House seat from red to blue after campaigning in opposition to the in vitro fertilization (IVF) decision and to restrictions on abortion (including sharing her own story of getting an abortion several decades ago, after doctors determined her baby would not live long outside the womb).
Republicans will, of course, still hold a majority in the statehouse, but it's an interesting outcome that provides more fodder for the hypothesis that abortion restrictions—and, in Alabama's case, IVF restrictions as well—are unpopular among most voters.
For pro-lifers like myself who favor restrictions on the procedure (contra most libertarians), this is disheartening, but a political reality with which we must contend.
Scenes from New York: Today, the Eric Adams administration started giving out prepaid debit cards to illegal immigrants who have entered the city. The program, which is slated to cost $53 million, aims to provide migrants the ability to secure their own food and necessities—via bodega or grocery store—to address the problem of wasted food in migrant shelters (which I covered in this section several months ago).
According to the city's Housing Preservation & Development office, "a family of four would be given $15,000 a year" under this program. "This cost-saving measure will replace the city's current system of providing non-perishable food boxes to migrant families staying in hotels, much of which is often discarded," said an Adams spokesperson. They claim up to $600,000 per month could be saved with the new program.
But this is an extraordinary amount of spending—underwritten by New York City taxpayers—doled out to an uncapped number of people who have not paid (and possibly will not pay) into the system. What happens when people respond to incentives and the number of illegal immigrants seeking government-provided money and shelter absolutely balloons?
It's increasingly hard to escape the conclusion that the continued push for minimum wage increases despite their predictably bad consequences is a triumph of in-group signaling over a concern for the material welfare of the poor https://t.co/nRQYqQpScn
— Chris Freiman (@cafreiman) March 26, 2024
Worship attendance rates @Gallup pic.twitter.com/uzI0nrVZhA
— @markdtooley (@markdtooley) March 26, 2024
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]]>Here is the panel description:
Are the ABA and the legal profession doing enough to promote viewpoint diversity? A panel including longtime ABA members with diverse approaches will discuss the issue of viewpoint diversity at the ABA and more broadly.
Welcome and Introduction: Mary Smith, President of the American Bar Association
Panelists:
- Josh Blackman, Centennial Chair of Constitutional Law at the South Texas College of Law
- Ellen Rosenblum, Attorney General of the State of Oregon
- Juan Thomas, Of Counsel, Quintairos, Prieto, Wood & Boyer P.A.
- Philip D. Williamson, Partner, Teft Stettinius & Hollister LLP
Moderator: Hon. Danny J. Boggs, U.S. Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit
This panel will discuss whether ABA policies, programs, and membership sufficiently reflect the diversity of viewpoints within the legal profession. Then-ABA President and future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell warned almost 60 years ago: "it is essential that the basic policy of avoiding political involvement be strictly followed except where issues clearly involve the Association's primary responsibilities," arguing that delving into partisan politics "could jeopardize the Association's very existence." As the self-described "national voice of the legal profession," the ABA represents all types of lawyers, with differing political views, and has now adopted many policy positions "on diverse issues of importance to the legal profession" including access to justice, criminal justice reform, gun violence, social justice in voting and many more.
Recognizing that we live in an era of sharp political and policy divisions, a recent ABA president asked that we as attorneys focus on "civics, civility and collaboration" to collectively restore confidence in our legal system. Other leaders urge that the ABA must speak out on controversial issues, on which consensus does not exist, even when lawyers disagree. One of our panelists recently observed in the ABA Journal that the Association "needs ideological diversity to ensure its future." While recognizing that "many attorneys contend that the ABA is insufficiently progressive and the bar is too conservative," he argues that present policies and positions of the Association lack the full spectrum of views, "alienate conservative lawyers" and have likely contributed to declining membership and "a growing disconnect" with state bars on issues of professional conduct and diversity. A new caucus within the ABA has organized to investigate and advocate on these issues and hopes this panel starts a conversation about diversity of viewpoints and professionalism within the ABA.
The post Video: ABA Midyear Meeting Panel on Viewpoint Diversity appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>John Anthony Castro filed this lawsuit on June 16, 2023, alleging that former President Donald Trump, among others, conspired to publish defamatory, verifiably false statements about him on his Wikipedia page. These supposedly false statements include the notion that Castro is a "sleazy tax attorney," did not serve in the military, and is under federal indictment. Castro believes Trump is targeting him as retaliation for the over thirty federal lawsuits Castro has lodged against Trump concerning Trump's actions on January 6, 2021.
The court upheld the Magistrate Judge's conclusion that Castro is a vexatious litigant:
Castro's June 2023 original complaint represented the tenth case he has filed in this District in the last five years, six of which have been filed since April 2021. And that says nothing of his dozens of other cases filed across the country in the last few years….
In his Objections, Castro explains, case by case, how each is meritorious and does not support a finding that he is clogging the judicial machinery with meritless litigation. Of note, roughly half of the cases … have suffered problems related to the same issue: jurisdiction, even to Castro's own admission. Even as recently as March 19, 2024, Judge Terry Means, also of the Fort Worth Division, made yet another finding that Mr. Castro brought a lawsuit that lacked personal jurisdiction….
The Court notices a pattern. Mr. Castro seems to pay no attention or care to where he files his lawsuits. Either he actively chooses to sue where he knows the Court lacks personal jurisdiction, or he fails to understand how jurisdiction and venue work, despite many orders informing him of the standard and explaining why he continuously falls short.
Given that Mr. Castro has a law degree, the Court would have hoped he learned how personal jurisdiction worked during his first-year coursework. Mr. Castro claims that he has "learned a hard legal lesson" about personal jurisdiction due to his many cases suffering the same fate, but it is not the Court's job to continue Mr. Castro's legal education here. Federal courts, particularly in the Fort Worth Division, are far too busy with meritorious lawsuits to entertain litigants "learning" how jurisdiction works through a repeat trial-and-error process.
By declaring Mr. Castro, a vexatious litigant and requiring him to obtain leave of court before filing suit in this district, the Court can help ensure Mr. Castro is filing his lawsuits in the right place, thus preventing continued overload of the Court's docket at his hands. Further, a review of Mr. Castro's other endeavors in federal court indicates Castro has been cautioned elsewhere regarding his inappropriate behavior. See, e.g., Castro v. Oliver (D.N.M. 2023) ("Having put this legal matter to rest, the Court concludes by noting that Castro's filing employs a tenor unfamiliar to this Judge and one that is out of step with practice in this district. The Court cautions Castro and requests that any future filings comport with decorum and the respect practitioners typically afford federal judges."); Castro v. Warner (S.D.W. Va. 2023) (observing that Castro's filings "contain numerous examples of clearly inappropriate attacks" and noting that "derisive commentary is of little value to the Court in resolving motions"). The Court notes similar behavior in this case. See ECF No. 45 at 2 (accusing opposing counsel of lying to the Court and engaging in deception as well as accusing the Court of not enforcing ethical rules).
Considering Mr. Castro's history of brazen, jurisdictionally improper lawsuits, his accusations and ad hominem attacks toward opposing counsel, and the Court's burden of having to continually reeducate him regarding the basics of venue and jurisdiction, the Court determines an adequate sanction for Mr. Castro is to have him declared a vexatious litigant and for him to obtain leave of court before filing any additional complaints in this district….
The court also concluded that in this case the court likewise lacked personal jurisdiction over the defendants, since their actions were not sufficiently closely linked to Texas (to oversimplify in some measure).
The post Don't Forget Your First-Year Civil Procedure Lessons on Personal Jurisdiction appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In January, Argentine President Javier Milei went to Davos, Switzerland, to lecture the rich and powerful about the miracles of capitalism. During his speech at the World Economic Forum, Milei explained to his audience that entrepreneurs are heroes, socialism leads to corruption, and private property is the key to prosperity.
In his address, he referenced Israel Kirzner, an Austrian-school economist and disciple of Ludwig von Mises, who is far outside the intellectual mainstream. He even named his cloned dogs after iconic free market economists Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, and Robert Lucas Jr. Many libertarians have been thrilled to hear their ideas articulated so eloquently by the leader of South America's second-largest nation, sparking widespread enthusiasm.
I'm less enthusiastic. Born and raised in Argentina, I joined the liberty movement at 17. I delved into the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Mises and marveled at how their insights accurately described my experience living under the big government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who was president for most of my adolescence. This led me to devote my career to advocating for the ideas of liberty because I believe they're the best path to prosperity and human flourishing.
To me, Javier Milei poses a threat both to Argentina and to the global liberty movement. I see him as a self-obsessed populist with a savior complex who gratifies libertarians by echoing their ideas. Yet his actions contradict his words: He raises taxes, escalates the drug war, restricts social freedoms, threatens his political opponents, and appoints political hacks from previous corrupt administrations to positions of power.
Milei, known for touting anti-drug policies, appointed Patricia Bullrich as his security minister, a role she previously served under former President Mauricio Macri. Bullrich recently praised El Salvador President Nayib Bukele for his tactics in reducing gang-related crimes, saying she wanted to imitate his measures in Argentina. While Bukele's policies have significantly reduced El Salvador's crime rate, they have also resulted in the arrest of approximately 1 percent of the population, including numerous instances of wrongful arrests and also destroying the rule of law. This heavy-handed strategy in El Salvador has led to a widespread erosion of basic constitutional freedoms.
Bullrich regularly shares updates on social media of drug raids, including videos of herself incinerating seized marijuana. "We are cornering drugs and drug trafficking, " Milei said recently. "We won't concede even a millimeter."
Some argue that fixing Argentina's economy is what really matters in a country facing nearly 300 percent annual inflation. But crime and insecurity also hinder Argentina's economic progress. Violent family-run narco gangs dominate the drug trade, especially in cities like Rosario, where the homicide rate nearly doubled from 2010 to 2020. While the president's anti-drug campaigns make for some attention-grabbing social media posts, they only make the drug trade more violent and deadly.
Milton Friedman famously helped end the U.S. military draft. But Milei's minister of defense, Luis Petri, doesn't share the Nobel laureate's dim view of compulsory military service. Petri said in a recent interview that Milei's administration was "considering" reinstating the draft. Vice President Victoria Villarruel echoed this sentiment, suggesting that the absence of compulsory military service is "making later generations of men (and women) crybabies."
Milei's worldview is infused with mysticism and messianic symbolism. He refers to himself as an "alpha lion," often starting his speeches by saying, "Hello everyone, I am the lion." He compares himself to Napoleon Bonaparte. A self-aggrandizing ruler who boasts of his capacity to fix society if granted the necessary power to override procedural and legislative constraints should trigger some authoritarian alarms.
Milei dubbed the "troll president," craves adoration in ways reminiscent of Latin America's infamous leftwing autocrats, such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez. He surrounds himself with sycophants and loyal supporters, including personalities such as influencer and writer Agustín Laje and other high-profile influencers and paid trolls. This entourage helps Milei mock his enemies, refine his personal brand, and galvanize support among libertarians in the U.S. Milei's circle of followers reminds me of "La Cámpora," a youth group that championed Kirchnerism's political aims. But Milei's bullies are more radical and more violent.
Milei is a publicity genius, and like Bukele and Chávez, he's obsessed with his image. He likes over a thousand tweets a day (mostly from his adoring followers), retweeting accolades and insults about his "enemies." He loves outrage. On one occasion, Milei once said that "the State is like a pedophile in a kindergarten with children chained up and covered in Vaseline."
Both former President Donald Trump and Milei are known for their tendency to appeal to emotions and cast societal divides in terms of "the people" vs. "the elites" or "us" vs. "them." This approach, known as populism, undermines institutions and amplifies the power of the state in ways that should be alarming, regardless of whether it comes from the political left or right. In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek wrote, "the contrasts between the 'we' and the 'they,' the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action." Populism works as a pendulum, suggesting that Milei's actions could provoke a counteraction from the opposite side of the spectrum once his term concludes.
Milei has turned on former allies who question his authority. Ricardo López Murphy, a respected figure within classical liberal circles and former mentor to Milei, declined to support Milei in the primaries over concerns about his populist tendencies. Last month, he criticized Murphy, labeling him "a scumbag" and a "traitor to the ideas [of freedom]." López Murphy responded, "The Milei experience has nothing to do with [classical] liberals."
Although Milei enjoys broad support among American libertarians, several Argentine classical liberals perceive him as a continuation of the country's previous administrations. Economist Roberto Cachanosky compared Milei's approach to Kirchnerism. "I say this because I know him personally," Cachanosky said. "He doesn't tolerate an opinion different from his own."
Economist Diego Giacomini, who co-authored four books with Milei, has become one of his most vocal critics. He describes Milei as a conservative populist "stand[ing] in opposition to the Austrian school [of economics], the most liberal school of thought of all, to which I belong and to which Javier Milei once belonged."
After a dispute between the province of Chubut and the National Government, Milei tweeted the AI-generated image depicting Gov. Ignacio Torres with Down syndrome. The incident was reminiscent of when Donald Trump mocked a disabled reporter at a campaign rally. Milei has said he's "naturally aligned with Donald Trump." When Milei met Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February, he greeted him with a bear hug. Milei promised to "Make Argentina Great Again," and in a video, he told Trump, "You were a great president, and I hope you will be again."
Milei has a politician's knack for adopting positions that will attract a broader support base. During a visit to Israel, he identified himself as Jewish. Yet when he went to the Vatican to meet with the pope, he said he was a "Catholic, Evangelical, and also practices a bit of Judaism." This came after previous statements where Milei described the pope as the "person who represents evil on earth and occupies the throne of God."
Milei embodied a common trait among Latin American politicians: a tendency towards nepotism, entrusting state resources and government positions to unelected individuals based on family connections. Milei appointed his sister Karina as general secretary of the presidency, effectively making her his top adviser. He calls her "the boss." The practice echoes throughout the region: Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega famously referred to his wife as the "co-president of the Republic," while Bukele's brothers serve as his principal advisors in El Salvador. Fidel Castro's successor as Cuba's dictator was his brother Raúl, who had been the most senior member of his administration.
Milei has compared his sister to Moses, characterizing himself as a conduit for her vision. "Moses was a great leader but wasn't good at spreading the word. So, God sent Orion to spread the word. 'Kari' is Moses, and I am the one who spreads the word. I am just a preacher." Milei's slogan is "The forces of heaven," suggesting he may have lost sight of the importance of maintaining a distance between church and state.
Nepotism extends beyond Milei himself, permeating his party. Martín Menem, president of the Lower House of Representatives and member of Milei's party, recently appointed his 23-year-old nephew as an advisor. Milei's spokesperson, Manuel Adorni, hired his brother as an advisor at the Ministry of Defense. Additionally, Vilma Facunda Bedia, an evangelical pastor and senator from Milei's party, recently employed eleven family members, including her three sons, her daughter-in-law, her brother, and her sister-in-law, as political advisors.
Milei recently nominated Judge Ariel Lijo to the Supreme Court, overlooking his role in encouraging Argentina's culture of leniency towards corrupt politicians. Lijo has a history of dismissing high-profile cases, including dropping corruption charges against former Vice President Amado Boudou and clearing money laundering charges against former President Cristina Kirchner. He also dismissed charges against a former intelligence chief implicated in transferring a suitcase full of cash to the Venezuelan regime and dismissed charges in a corruption case surrounding the state-owned energy company YPF.
Héctor M. Guyot, a journalist for La Nación, said that Lijo faces significant criticism from both legal and journalistic fronts for his questionable management of critical cases. He further accused him of working with a network of "judicial operators" from different political parties, which include his brother Freddy Lijo, Daniel Angelici and Scioli's former employee, and Guillermo Scarcella.
When there aren't enough family members to fill key political positions, cronies are often next in line. The Milei administration is no exception. Daniel Scioli, whom Milei appointed secretary of Tourism, Environment, and Sports, is a "caste" politician and a veteran Peronist. Scioli has a long history in Argentine politics: He served as vice president under Néstor Kirchner, a prominent figure in left-wing populism and an ally of Chávez; ran for president alongside Cristina Kirchner against Mauricio Macri; and served as minister of production under former President Alberto Fernández.
Milei's Interior Minister Guillermo Francos was, until recently, executive director for Argentina at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a role he was appointed to by former leftist President Fernández. Between 2000 and 2007, Francos served as the president of Aeropuertos Argentina 2000, the company owned by long-time businessman Eduardo Eurnekian, which has a state-granted monopoly over airport concessions throughout Argentina. Milei also worked for Aeropuertos Argentina in 2000 until three years ago when he had to resign to take office as a congressman.
Julián Andrés Obaid was recently appointed chairman of the Transport Security Bureau, a position he held under Fernández. According to a report from Clarín, Milei has appointed over forty Peronists to important government positions thus far.
On gender issues, Milei aligns with cultural conservatism and right-wing ideas. When referring to his sister Karina, he uses the male pronoun "he, the boss" as a way of signaling her dominant role. He has banned gender-inclusive language in the government, including in all official documents. His administration also prohibited using non-binary uniforms for police and military officers, outlawed tattoos and painted nails, and mandated strict uniform codes—female officers are required to wear skirts unless they are pregnant, while male officers are forbidden from having beards. Yet despite his conservative measures, Milei's government allocated 827 million pesos (almost $1 million) for hormone treatment supplies for children, adolescents, and trans adults.
Milei is a pro-lifer, asserting that life begins at conception, and has vowed to outlaw legal abortions in Argentina. "Abortion is murder made worse by the connection between mother and child," he said recently. In line with his views, nominated Manuel García Mansilla, a well-known critic of abortion rights, to the high court. During his speech at CPAC, he equated abortion to socialism, claiming that it stems from radical environmentalist views that population growth destroys the planet. Pro-choice libertarians would argue the debate is about bodily autonomy and personal liberty. Last week, he tweeted, "Abortion is a murder aggravated…by the disproportion of forces. If you are reading this post and you are one of those who positively weigh this type of aberrations, thank your mother for not thinking the same way."
Milei is eccentric in a way that makes for a good copy—which may be entertaining from afar but is genuinely alarming for Argentines. What would Americans think if President Joe Biden claimed his dog was one of his lead advisors? Milei claims to have communicated with his deceased dog, Conan, through a medium. Conan's clones—Murray, Milton, Robert, and Lucas—are still walking the earth and doing so at taxpayer expense, as Milei recently shared a photo of their new state-funded kennel at the official presidential residence in Olivos.
Despite constantly citing economists such as Rothbard, Henry Hazlitt, and Hayek, it's not clear that he has truly absorbed their work. His books, The Way of the Libertarian and Pandenomics, include passages directly copied and pasted from the work of those writers.
The reality is that Milei's economic policies do not align with his rhetoric. But because he is such an effective communicator, most of his fans haven't noticed. The same president who has impressed foreigners by flying on commercial flights as a gesture of his frugality just signed a decree increasing his own salary by 48 percent and then took it back in response to public outcry.
Despite his campaign pledge to introduce no new taxes, after he promised to sever an arm when signing an agreement with Asociación Argentina de Contribuyentes, live on TV, Milei proposed an income tax hike after returning from Davos, and more recently, he expanded the number of Argentines subject to paying it. "They are looking for the private sector to…spit out dollars," Giacomini said of the move.
Despite calling taxes "theft," Milei has increased the PAIS tax, imposing a 35 percent surcharge on foreign currency transactions. The measure, which effectively acts as an import tax, hinders free trade and has been exacerbated by Milei's decision to increase the exchange range. He has also raised taxes on gas and exports, including wheat (12 to 15 percent), corn (12 to 15 percent), beef (9 to 15), and flour (31 to 33 percent).
Milei was elected on a promise of dollarizing the economy, claiming it would be "super easy" to implement. He's now backtracked. And while he has proposed to privatize 41 public companies, he can't proceed without congressional approval. While this initiative could be a positive development in some cases, it's noteworthy that Milei has excluded the energy company YPF and the national bank from his privatization agenda.
He backtracked on a promise to eliminate the official change rate, which empowers the government to set the price of dollars. While Milei's dog Milton might not have encouraged him to support a free-floating currency exchange, the economist Milton Friedman would have advocated for it, highlighting how a fixed exchange rate caused Argentina's numerous currency devaluations. These controls have also contributed to the country's capital flight and broader economic instability.
Currency controls distort the market, reduce competitiveness, discourage foreign investment, foster black market activity, and contribute to inflationary pressures. An alternate option would be for Argentina to embrace bitcoin as legal tender, though that seems unlikely. Recently, the non-profit Bitcoin Argentina criticized Milei for trying to regulate all aspects of crypto asset trading. Milei's government, through the National Stock Commission, also created a state agency to regulate cryptocurrencies in Argentina. Under the new regulation, entities of individuals transacting in bitcoin and other digital assets above 27 million pesos per month are given 42 days to enroll in the Registry of Virtual Asset Service Providers. According to the legislation, those who fail to register "shall refrain from performing in the country any of the activities or operations covered."
While Milei garners media praise for achieving a government surplus, his administration has also authorized the issuance of more public debt, in contrast to his chainsaw-wielding campaign promises. "The chainsaw plan is coming. Tremble, you thieve politicians. You are going to stop stealing. You are going to have to work like honest people. Keep lying to the people, thieves," said Milei during his presidential campaign. Speaking of plagiarism, it seems that the chainsaw was also borrowed, in this case, from U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R–Ky.).
Milei's administration garnered attention in the American media for achieving a balanced budget marked by tax increases and spending cuts. But it matters what you cut. Bureaucrats and rent-seekers—the "political caste" Milei deplores—have been spared from austerity measures. Menem recently approved a 29.5 percent increase in the salaries of congressional state employees.
Milei promised to cut several government ministries and entertained foreign audiences with a video of him yelling "¡afuera!" or "get out!" while pulling down sticky notes with the ministries' names printed on them. Yet his actions amounted to merely renaming them "secretariats." This change has resulted in practically zero impact on spending while consolidating control in fewer hands, with nine large ministries replacing 18 smaller ones.
Milei says correctly that the government is broke, and yet his administration is planning to acquire 24 U.S. F-16 fighter jets from the Danish government for almost $700 million—the largest military expenditure in the nation's history, despite the fact that the country has no foreign adversaries.
Much of the cost-cutting has come from cutting Argentina's elder care entitlement. By February, the minimum pension in Argentina was projected to fall to a purchasing power even lower than during the 2001 economic crisis. Nowadays, a retiree earns roughly 46 dollars per month in a country with nearly 300 percent inflation. Vice President Victoria Villarruel criticized Milei's actions, emphasizing the issue of pensions and condemning the "liquefaction" of pensions: "I do not agree with continuing to equalize everything downwards. After contributing all his life to the pension system, I believe a pensioner should also receive a decent retirement based on the function, the work, and the time contributed. Let's go up instead of going down."
Argentina desperately needs market liberalization to exit its devastating economic crisis, a situation made all the more urgent by an inflation rate that now surpasses Venezuela. But Milei has made too many false promises. His record so far suggests that he's a typical Latin American populist, and I worry that the failed results of his presidency will become a symbol of a right-wing model and could harm the liberty movement's credibility and progress.
The post Is Javier Milei Making Argentina Great Again? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If you think free speech is under attack in the United States—and it is—you should see its besieged status in the rest of the world. Open contempt for unrestricted debate prevails in even many supposedly "free" countries and finds its expression in laws that threaten harsh penalties for those who dare to speak in ways that offend the powers that be.
"When other communications revolutions like the printing press, radio, and television came along, they were still largely controlled by the elites. But when the internet came along, regulatory bodies like Canada's [Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission] backed off," Lawrence Martin of Canada's The Globe and Mail recently complained while celebrating what he saw as rare U.S. Supreme Court openness to letting government pressure social media companies into suppressing speech. "It was open season for anything that anyone wanted to put out. No license needed. No identity verification."
"The way to reverse the trend is with rigid regulation, but the free speech lobby in the United States is as fierce as the gun lobby," Martin mourned.
Too bad for Martin. But few countries share America's resistance to censorship (and restrictions on self-defense). That's certainly the case in Canada, where the ruling Liberal Party is pushing Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, to regulate speech on the internet.
"Bill C-63 risks censoring a range of expression from journalistic reporting to healthy conversations among youth under 18 about their own sexuality and relationships," warns the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. "The bill imposes draconian penalties for certain types of expression, including life imprisonment for a very broad and vaguely defined offence of 'incitement to genocide', and 5 years of jail time for other broadly defined speech acts."
Ireland is going a step further, with lawmakers working on legislation that would outlaw merely "preparing or possessing material likely to incite violence or hatred against persons on account of their protected characteristics."
"One of the fundamental rights protected under the Irish Constitution is the right of the citizens to express freely their convictions and opinions," barrister (lawyer) Grace Sullivan told the Irish Independent. But under the proposed law, it will be an offence to "incite hatred" but "there is no clear definition of what 'inciting hatred' means," she cautioned.
Scotland, for its part, has already enacted a "hate crime" law targeting speech that authorities believe might "stir up hatred against a group of persons based on the group being defined by reference to" a laundry list of characteristics including race, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, and age.
"The Hate Crime Bill will come into force on April 1, expanding existing legislation to cover comments made in private settings without the intention to offend," Laura Pollock reported last week for The National. She noted police assurances that comedians and actors won't be targeted for their performances, even though such situations were included in training materials.
"The training material was based on the Scottish Government's explanatory notes which accompany the legislation," Police Scotland soothed. "This included examples of a range of scenarios where offences might take place, but this does not mean officers have been told to target these situations or locations."
Unfortunately, restrictive legislation and hollow assurances by the authorities that they'll use their authoritarian powers wisely are far more the global norm than are American-style protections for speech. We complain about government attempts to muzzle, but open censorship is increasingly common in other countries.
"The global landscape for freedom of expression has faced severe challenges in 2023," according to The Free Speech Recession Hits Home, a report by The Future of Free Speech, Danish think tank Justitia, and Aarhus University's Department of Political Science.* "Even open democracies have implemented restrictive measures."
The report surveys speech regulations in 22 democracies since 2015 and finds a grim situation. Besides the examples above, there is Australia's crackdown on alleged disinformation, the UK's Online Safety Bill, the European Union's Digital Services Act, Denmark's revived blasphemy ban, Italy's libel judgments against government critics, France's and Germany's restrictions on pro-Palestinian protests, and more.
Across the countries surveyed, "except for 2015, every year witnessed a majority of developments limiting expression, with a noticeable upsurge in 2022," notes the report. "National security, national cohesion and public safety were the most cited reasons for limiting expression…. Intermediary obligations and hate speech laws accounted for 18.3% and 17.8% of restrictions, respectively, with notable implications in countries like Norway, Denmark, and Spain." As defined in the report, "intermediary obligations" are duties imposed on platforms, such as Facebook, to act as proxy censors.
On the plus side were some strengthened protections for press freedom and protest. Of course, the press must operate under all those restrictions on "hate speech," and protests are subject to curbs when governments find their subjects too sensitive or just inconvenient.
The Free Speech Recession Hits Home records attacks on free speech in the U.S., as elsewhere. But this country, importantly, has a strong free speech culture and real constitutional protections. America is third on Justitia's index of public support for free speech (after Norway and Denmark), and restrictive laws and government schemes to suppress speech are often voided on First Amendment grounds.
That's no guarantee that every attempt to muzzle the public will fail or that the courts will diligently apply the First Amendment. But it's enough of an advantage to dishearten the world's would-be censors.
"The genie is already out of the bottle and there is little likelihood of getting it back in," moans The Globe and Mail's Lawrence Martin about U.S. speech protections. "The greater likelihood is that extremes of free speech will continue to be tolerated."
Let's hope the unhappy authoritarian columnist is right that the U.S. will remain a bastion of protection for free speech. Because nobody else looks eager to take on that responsibility.
*CORRECTION: The Future of Free Speech, which commissioned the report, is an independent think tank located at Vanderbilt University.
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]]>Mayor Earl Johnson of Andalusia, Alabama, has apologized to Twyla Stallworth after an officer entered her home and arrested her for not showing her identification. Under Alabama law, police officers can only demand ID from someone who is in a public place and has committed a crime or whom they suspect is going to commit a crime. Stallworth had called to file a noise complaint against a neighbor. No police officer ever came, so she set off her car alarm to annoy the neighbor, who then called to report her; at that point, an officer was dispatched to the scene. Stallworth was not charged for setting off the car alarm, but she was charged with obstruction, resisting arrest, and attempting to elude. Johnson said all charges will be dropped.
The post Brickbat: Unsafe at Home appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>First, the Court should claw back so called "diversion of resource" standing based on Haven's Realty. As this theory has been interpreted by some lower courts, an organization can claim Article III standing simply by claiming that a government policy forces the organization to divert resources. In other words, the organization would usually spend their resources on X, but because of some state action, the organization now spends their resources to respond to the state action. That injury seems entirely self-inflicted, and is at odds with decades of standing law. Yet some lower courts accepted this theory in legal challenges to Trump policies. I had hoped that the Supreme Court could address Havens Realty in Acheson, but that case fizzled out on mootness grounds.
During oral argument in AHM, several Justices addressed Havens Realty standing. Earlier in the argument, Justice Barrett said that AHM's injury "sound[s] in the Havens Realty associational standing." Barrett added that these are the sorts of "allegations we see by immigration advocacy groups." They claim a "diversion of resources" in the form of "increased expenses that result from the complications of having to address" the state action. Barrett asked Solicitor General Prleogar to distinguish "diversion of resources" from Havens Realty.
Prelogar explained that in Havens, the civil rights group had a "direct and concrete demonstrable injury" apart from the diversion of resources. Specifically, the organization "organization had a contract to provide low-income housing" and "the racial steering practices directly interfered" the "contractual obligations." Prelogar said Havens Realty did not "bless[] a theory of standing that would allow an organization to assert a setback to its abstract social interests." The Solicitor General acknowledged that "in the immigration context," some "lower courts in particular have seemed to read Havens to endorse far broader theories of standing." Prelogar said "we would welcome an eventual clarification from this Court on organizational standing."
Erin Hawley, representing AHM, said that Havens Realty was "on all fours with this case." Hawley said there "was an impairment of the organization's mission" and "an expenditure of resources." That impairment, Hawley said, is sufficient for an injury-in-fact. Justice Thomas said that reading of Havens makes standing "easy to manufacture." The organization would just have to "us[e] resources to advocate their position in court" and say those expenditures "now causes an injury." Hawley acknowledged that "the lower courts have cabined Havens to say where you have sort of prelude to litigation types of activities." It is not enough to have a diversion of resources. Hawley said AHM's actions were "neither a prelude to litigation, nor would they have occurred but for FDA's unlawful conduct in this case." Justice Thomas did not return to the issue.
Justice Barrett turned to Havens with Hawley. She asked "what additional costs [AHM] might have incurred or how [AHM's] resources were diverted in a way that would satisfy Havens"? Barrett pointed to AHM's conducting and analyzing studies. Barrett replied, "Is that it?" Barrett, and Thomas, did not seem persuaded.
During the Solicitor General's rebuttal, Prelogar said that "clarify" that Havens Realty does not permit "every organization in this country . . . to challenge any federal policy they dislike." I suspect progressive lawyers who are keen to challenge future Trump immigration policies were gritting their teeth when Prelogar made this comment.
Second, the Court can cast some doubt on so-called "offended observer standing" under the Establishment Clause. I have long questioned how someone can claim standing to challenge a policy on Establishment Clause grounds based simply on being offended. Justice Gorsuch raised this issue in his American Legion concurrence. And Gorsuch pushed SG Prelogar on this issue. Prelogar attempted to deflect, and "would put the Establishment Clause precedent and First Amendment precedent generally in its own bucket." Gorsuch pushed back. "Standing is standing." There is no First Amendment exception to Article III.
Gorsuch "was looking for some guidance" of how to "stitch it all together." Prelogar acknowledged that an "offense or distress type of injury" would "likely go far too much in the direction of allowing Article III courts to weigh in based on generalized grievances." But she said the Court has found an "cognizable" injury where "there is a kind of direct governmental action producing that type of injury." I'm not sure that distinction works. Article III is not satisfies because some "direct governmental action" offends a person. There has to be an actual, concrete injury in fact. Cases like Van Orden and American Legion are inconsistent with decades of standing doctrine.
Ultimately, there are probably more than enough votes to reverse the Fifth Circuit. It is tempting to write a 9-0 decision that finds a way to rule against AHM, without speaking to these broader issues. But it would be helpful if the Court, or at least a plurality of Justices, clamps down on the other standing theories at play in this case. There is some degree of unilateral disarmament when conservative litigants are thrown out of court but progressive groups can skate in under the radar. The Court can reject the broad reading of Havens Realty, and hold that mere emotional distress is insufficient to establish a concrete injury.
The post The Court Should Cast Doubt On <I>Havens Realty</I> "Diversion" Standing and Establishment Clause "Offended Observer" Standing appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In a recent interview with former President Donald Trump, CNBC's Joe Kernen called entitlement reform "a third rail of politics" and suggested "there's not a whole lot of difference" between Trump and President Joe Biden on the issue. The contretemps that followed confirmed the accuracy of both observations, illustrating yet again the bipartisan refusal to seriously address, or even acknowledge, the looming Social Security and Medicare crises.
"There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements," Trump said. The Biden campaign seized upon the comment as evidence that Trump wants to "slash Social Security and Medicare," and Trump denied any such plan, saying, "I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare."
Biden likewise promised to "protect" both programs. "If anyone here tries to cut Social Security or Medicare or raise the retirement age," he vowed during his State of the Union address this month, "I will stop you."
Biden averred that "many of my friends on the other side of the aisle want to put Social Security on the chopping block." But the truth is that Republican House leaders, at Trump's urging, are disinclined to back serious entitlement reforms, fearing the political electrocution to which Kernen alluded.
Contrary to what Trump and Biden imply, it is impossible to "protect" Social Security and Medicare by doing nothing. Inaction will guarantee automatic benefit cuts in less than a decade.
In 2033, according to the latest projections, Social Security's trust fund "will become depleted," and "continuing program income will be sufficient to pay 77 percent of scheduled benefits." Two years before then, Medicare's hospital insurance trust fund "will be sufficient to pay 89 percent of total scheduled benefits."
The programs' trustees note that "lawmakers have many options for changes that would reduce or eliminate the long-term financing shortfalls." But Trump and Biden have ruled out nearly all of them.
Biden did allude to one possible Social Security reform in his State of the Union address, saying he would "protect and strengthen Social Security and make the wealthy pay their fair share." But as my Reason colleague Eric Boehm notes, raising the cap on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax, currently $168,600, would violate Biden's promise "not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000 annually" and would not "come close to solving the long-term Social Security shortfall."
Tackling "fraud and waste," the solution that Trump seemed to have in mind, would be worthwhile but likewise will not do the trick. In 2023, for example, House Republicans cited an estimate of "$16 billion in improper payments" by Social Security "over the last five years," which is real money but a drop in the bucket compared to the program's projected $4.5 trillion cash deficit during the next decade.
The basic problem with both programs is a mismatch between projected revenue and projected costs, driven by the shrinking ratio of workers to retirees. The only way to eliminate that gap is by increasing revenue, reducing outlays, or (more likely) both.
Those reforms could involve raising the retirement age, increasing payroll taxes on high-income Americans, or means-testing benefits, focusing on retirees who need financial support to cover their bills. As it stands, Social Security regressively transfers money from workers to retirees who are, on average, more affluent. That makes little sense if the aim is to prevent poverty among older Americans, which is how the program originally was framed.
It is no mystery why politicians are reluctant to propose such reforms. Last week, when the Republican Study Committee suggested gradually raising the minimum age for full Social Security benefits from 67 to 69, the White House immediately condemned that modest proposal.
The fear inspired by such attacks encourages politicians to continue kicking the can down the road. But the longer they wait, the more painful the inevitable reckoning will be.
© Copyright 2024 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
The post Biden and Trump Try To Wish Away the Looming Entitlement Crisis appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This week's featured article is "Don't Let E.U. Bureaucrats Design Americans' Tech" by Jennifer Huddleston.
This audio was generated using AI trained on the voice of Katherine Mangu-Ward.
Music credits: "Deep in Thought" by CTRL and "Sunsettling" by Man with Roses
The post <I>The Best of Reason</I>: Don't Let E.U. Bureaucrats Design Americans' Tech appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Another Albuquerque police officer resigned last week amid a widening scandal involving cops who allegedly conspired with a local defense attorney to make drunk driving cases disappear in exchange for payoffs. Joshua Montaño, who had been employed by the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) for 19 years, is the fifth officer to quit after being placed on administrative leave. His March 20 resignation letter, which City Desk ABQ obtained through a public records request, sheds light on the extent of the alleged corruption within the APD's DWI unit, the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation as well as an APD probe.
"When I was put on administrative leave, I thought there would be an opportunity for me to talk to the department about what I knew regarding the FBI's investigation," writes Montaño, who missed several scheduled interviews with APD investigators prior to his resignation. "I thought there would be a time [when] I could disclose what I knew from within APD and how the issues I let myself get caught up in within the DWI Unit were generational. I thought there would be a time where I could talk about all the other people who should be on administrative leave as well, but aren't."
Montaño says he ultimately decided against cooperating with APD investigators. "In order for me to talk to the City about what I knew," he writes, "I needed to not be the City's scapegoat for its own failures." He complains that Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina, who has promised to "make sure that we get to the bottom of this" but is himself under investigation for causing a February 17 accident that severely injured a driver whose car he broadsided, "has made it seem like there are just a few bad officers acting on their own." That is "far from the truth," Montaño says.
Among other things, the FBI reportedly is investigating claims that officers deliberately missed court dates, resulting in the dismissal of DWI cases. But according to Montaño, "officers all know that our attendance, or non-attendance, at Court is watched over and monitored." While "I take responsibility for my actions," he says, the responsibility for the alleged misconduct extends up the chain of command and more than a few years back in time.
Medina "has made numerous public statements concerning APD's knowledge of the FBI's investigation of various APD personnel and made commitments to complete parallel investigations," Montaño's lawyer, Thomas Grover, writes in a separate letter to the department. "However, as is evident in the investigations of Ofc. Montano, the department responded to the FBI' s inquiries in a manner that is haphazard at best and artificial at worst."
Although Montaño wanted to share "his knowledge of how widespread the issues of concern to the FBI are, how far up the supervisory chain they go, and other personnel they involve," Grover says, he "could not provide such a statement because of the myriad of deficiencies APD plagued its investigations of him, and presumably others, with. From procedural errors concerning notice requirements to police officers, to timeline violations by APD, it seems at every turn, the department could not follow basic practices for internal affairs investigations."
While you might discount Montaño's attempt to spread the blame, it is broadly consistent with Medina's description of the conduct that the FBI is investigating. At a February 2 press conference, Medina noted that DWI cases often are dismissed when officers are unavailable to testify. "Systems that struggle, systems that have loopholes, are really open to corruption," Medina said. "We're dealing with stuff that we anticipate started decades ago, and we've done a lot of things that have got us to this point. But we will continue to dig and look and leave no stone unturned and make sure that we get to the bottom of this."
Medina says the problems within the DWI may have "started decades ago," which jibes with Montaño's description of a "generational" phenomenon. That period overlaps with Medina's tenure at the APD, where he began working in 1995. He was an APD officer for 20 years before retiring as a commander in 2014. After a few years as police chief of Laguna, New Mexico, he returned to the APD in December 2017 as deputy chief. Three years later, he became interim chief, a position that was made permanent in March 2021.
Medina, who as a sergeant and lieutenant worked for the APD's "Party Patrol," evidently was not assigned to the DWI unit. But he strove to prevent underage drinking, "work[ing] closely with community partners such as Mothers Against Drunk Driv[ing]," which gave him an award in 2008. The same group picked Honorio Alba Jr. as its New Mexico "Officer of the Year" in 2023, a few months before Albuquerque's Civilian Police Oversight Agency received a letter about his "questionable conduct," which triggered the corruption investigation.
Instead of arresting an intoxicated driver who nearly caused a crash while speeding and subsequently drove onto a curb, Alba reportedly had referred him to a specific local attorney. Alba resigned last month prior to a scheduled interview with the APD's internal affairs division.
Like Alba, Montaño has been implicated in a fishy arrangement with the same DWI defense attorney, Thomas Clear, whose office the FBI has searched as part of its investigation. Federal agents also have searched the homes of APD officers.
So far no charges have been filed. But in response to the corruption allegations, the Bernalillo County District Attorney's Office dropped some 200 DWI cases, saying it could not rely on the testimony of the cops who had made the arrests. KOB, the NBC affiliate in Albuquerque, reports that Alba was the arresting officer in many of those cases. KRQE, the local CBS affiliate, looked at DWI cases filed during the previous six years. It found that Montaño "was named as the officer in at least 36 cases" in which the defendants were represented by Clear, and "nearly 90% of those cases ended in dismissals."
Three other officers who had been placed on administrative leave—Lt. Justin Hunt, Officer Harvey Johnson, and Officer Nelson Ortiz—resigned prior to Montaño. Looking at "85 DWI cases dating back to 2017" involving Clear and Alba, Montaño, Johnson, or Ortiz, City Desk ABQ found that 14 percent ended with trial convictions or plea deals, which is "much lower than the Metro Court average of 56% convictions in DWI cases over the same years." The other 86 percent were dismissed, typically because officers did not show up at pretrial interviews or hearings. The "vast majority" of the defendants were arrested by Alba or Montaño.
According to an APD spokesman, two additional officers are under investigation. "There is a much bigger story here," Grover told City Desk ABQ. "If Officer Montaño is a cinder block in this saga, there's a whole wall to address. It goes outward and upward."
The post A 5th Albuquerque Cop Resigns Amid Widening DWI Corruption Scandal appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Plaintiff Rachel DeLoache Williams has sued Defendant Netflix, Inc. based on Netflix's portrayal of Williams in its docudrama series Inventing Anna…. Here, at least two sets of alleged defamatory statements are actionable at the motion to dismiss stage. Williams's 9th set of alleged defamatory statements reads as follows:
After several scenes about the problems with the credit cards at the Hotel and the private museum tour, there is a long scene in which Noah is shown meeting Williams and suggesting to her that they leave immediately because of the "bad situation." At first, Williams says that the problems are over and suggests that they stay but Noah persists, and she gives in. She finds Anna who is alone in her room, drinking heavily and depressed.
Williams tells her that they are leaving, making a bogus excuse. Sorokin begs her not to leave her, but Williams leaves anyway. She and Noah pack and leave the Hotel immediately, leaving Sorokin alone with a hotel guard stationed outside her room.
Williams's 10th set of alleged defamatory statements reads as follows:
NEFF: Please, Rachel abandoned Anna. Kicked her when she was down, and left her alone in some foreign country. Rachel's happy to call herself Anna's friend when it meant free shit, trips to Morocco, but as soon as times got tough … Some friend.
Williams plausibly alleges that both sets of statements are false statements of fact and defamatory. For falsity, she argues that Williams did not "abandon" Sorokin when Sorokin was "alone, depressed and in trouble" but rather that Williams told Sorokin she was leaving in advance, that Sorokin had company when Williams left, and that Sorokin did not appear to be upset. For defamatory meaning, Williams argues that she "is falsely portrayed as a fair-weather friend who abandoned Sorokin when she was alone, depressed and in trouble in Morocco, and needed help and support" and that "[t]hese are negative personal traits or attitudes that Williams does not hold."
Netflix argues that these sets of statements are substantially true because
Plaintiff did leave Morocco before Sorokin to go to France for work and vacation. And, before knowing Sorokin was a fraud, Williams also decided to "give the relationship some space." Thus, these scenes are substantially true. And debating if this makes Williams "disloyal," cannot be proven true or false.
But the above statements do more than simply show that Williams left Morocco prior to Sorokin or wanted to give the relationship space. As Williams alleges, the statements indicate that Williams "abandoned Sorokin when Sorokin was alone, depressed and in trouble in Morocco." And whether Sorokin was in a troubled state and Williams left her at that point can be proven true or false.
Netflix alternatively argues that the 9th and 10th sets of statements are not defamatory, arguing that
Plaintiff alleges these scenes are defamatory because they show Williams "abandon[ing] Sorokin" in Morocco.
That is not what happens. When "Noah" suggests to Williams they leave Morocco because it seems unsafe, Williams pushes back, not wanting to leave Sorokin. But the Series shows Sorokin wholly unconcerned and uncaring as guards seem to threaten Williams and watch her every move. A reasonable viewer would not fault Williams or Noah for taking their safety seriously and ultimately choosing to leave. In this episode, Kacy also refers to Williams as "a real friend" and a "good person," further eliminating any defamatory meaning. And, while Neff criticizes Williams for leaving, the journalist character (based on Pressler) defends her, asking: "But does a friend charge another friend's credit card without permission?"
Netflix does not dispute that the scenes portray Williams leaving Sorokin when she was alone, depressed, and in trouble. Instead, Netflix points to other scenes in the series to show that the 9th and 10th sets of statements do not have defamatory meaning. But in context, these other scenes do not nullify the portrayal of Williams leaving Sorokin in a troubled state. Nor do they rectify the statements potentially "expos[ing] [Williams] to public contempt, ridicule, aversion or disgrace, or [to] induce an evil opinion of [her] … and [] deprive [her] of [] friendly intercourse in society" for abandoning a friend who is drinking heavily and depressed.
Accordingly, at least with respect to the 9th and 10th sets of statements, Williams has stated a cognizable defamation claim under New York law. And I need not decide at this stage of the pleadings whether the remaining alleged defamatory statements are actionable….
The post <i>Inventing Anna</i> Defamation Case Against Netflix Can Go Forward appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In recent weeks, there has been a lot of media coverage of squatters' rights laws that sometimes have the effect of blocking property owners from removing trespassers who occupy their houses without the owners' permission. Newsweek describes some highly publicized recent cases:
A recent string of incidents in Georgia, New York and Washington has brought squatting, the practice of occupying someone else's property without their consent, into the spotlight.
In Washington, a squatter named Sang Kim made headlines after preventing Jaskaran Singh, a landlord, from possessing his $2 million property following Kim's refusal to pay rent for two years.
Earlier in March, a New York property owner was arrested over unlawful eviction after confronting a group of alleged squatters who had taken over her deceased parents' home in Flushing, Queens, ABC 7 reported. While the woman held the property's deed, one man said he was on a lease for the house—which meant the property owner was barred from kicking him out [he, in fact, did not actually have a lease].
That same month, David Morris, a landlord in Atlanta, told Fox 5 of a group of squatters who were preventing him from building affordable housing on his nine-acre land and whom he was unable to remove because of a moratorium on evictions.
Morris told the outlet he had agreed to let four people stay on the land without paying rent about 10 years ago, but that he found the number of people occupying the property had grown to about "30 campers." Though the squatters were taken away from the land, Morris said he spent $10,000 to clean up their garbage.
John Stossel of Reason made a video focusing on the New York case.
As often happens when an issue attracts media attention, it is hard to tell from early reports how widespread the issue actually is. But even a few cases of successful squatting may be problematic, because they could incentivize imitation. Media attention could accelerate that process.
Ideally, state and local governments should make it easy for property owners to swiftly remove squatters, and should subject the trespassers to civil and criminal sanctions. But where they instead facilitate this violation of property rights, the laws that do so violate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which requires payment of "just compensation" whenever the government takes "private property."
In Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid (2021), the Supreme Court ruled that even temporary government-authorized physical occupations of private property are "per se" (automatic) takings. Thus, the Court struck down a California law requiring agricultural growers to give union organizers access to their land for three hours per day, 120 days per year. At least some state squatter rights' laws are considerably more egregious than that: They enable squatters to completely occupy the property for many weeks or months on end, totally excluding the owner in the process. That is particularly true of New York City's law, which gives squatters who claim to be tenants strong rights against removal if they have been on the property for at least 30 days. Landowners seeking to remove the squatters after that point must go through an eviction process, which can take as long as two years.
Chief Justice John Roberts' opinion for the Court in Cedar Point does outline some exceptions to the rule that state-mandated physical occupations qualify as takings. But squatter rights don't fall within any of them. For example, the squatters pretty obviously aren't government employees conducting health and safety inspections.
Squatters could perhaps argue that their activities fall within what the Court called "traditional common law privileges to access private property." The common law does recognize the right to claim property through "adverse possession." But traditional common law precedent permits that only after squatters have had continuous exclusive possession of the land for a long period of time (usually five years or more), and only if the owner made no effort to assert his or her rights during that time. The New York City law and others like it go way beyond that.
The Takings Clause may not be the best possible remedy for this situation. Filing and winning such a case could take many months. And if property owners do prevail, they generally get only the "fair market value" of the rights lost, which may not fully compensate all of their losses. However, this avenue can provide at least some valuable redress; the longer the squatters remain, the greater the amount of compensation the government will have to pay. And fear of takings liability may incentivize state and local governments to repeal or tighten up the laws that cause the problem.
Legal issues aside, it's worth noting that squatters' rights laws end up harming the very people they are supposed to help: low-income tenants. If property owners have reason to fear that squatters can occupy their land without their consent, they will be less willing to rent property to begin with, charge higher rents, screen potential tenants more carefully (thereby potentially excluding those with low income, few or nor references, and the like), or some combination of all of these measures. They may also be incentivized to impose more costly and elaborate security restrictions on access to land (which in turn is likely to raise rents). All of this predictably reduces the availability of housing and increases its costs.
I hope property owners and public interest law firms give serious consideration to bringing takings challenges against these laws. They are not a panacea for the problem. But they could help.
UPDATE: Prominent takings expert Robert Thomas (Pacific Legal Foundation) comments on this post at the Inverse Condemnation Blog:
In other cases where the courts have upheld regulations and restrictions on an owner's right to recover possession from an actual tenant—you know, someone with whom the owner actually and expressly agreed, and then transferred the right to exclude to the tenant—the courts frequently note that "no one is forcing you to become a landlord."
Well here, the owner is being forced to become a landlord.
Professor Somin wraps by noting, "I hope property owners and public interest law firms give serious consideration to bringing takings challenges against these laws. They are not a panacea for the problem. But they could help."
Since we are part of a non-profit, pro bono, public interest law firm as the good professor describes, we shall note here that the welcome mat is out, and if the above-situation is your situation, let us know.
The post Squatters' Rights Laws Violate the Takings Clause appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>You can watch on YouTube (see here for past episodes), or subscribe on any podcast platform. This series put together by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where I'll be starting as the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow in May.
The post Free Speech Unmuted: Free Speech, Government Persuasion, and Government Coercion appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>American lawmakers, backed by the drone industry, are looking to ban Chinese-made consumer drones. Like the proposed ban on TikTok, Chinese drone bans have been justified by fears of Chinese surveillance, but the real motivation seems to be protectionism: American companies are trying to edge out their foreign competition.
Earlier this year, Congress passed the American Security Drone Act as part of the military budget. The law bans federal agencies from buying drones from any company based in China and gives the Department of Homeland Security the power to declare other drone manufacturers "national security risks."
Several states also issued state-level drone bans last year. Mississippi required state agencies to buy American-made drones, while Arkansas and Florida outright banned state agencies from using Chinese-made drones. After Florida's ban took effect in April 2023, police and rescue services scrambled to replace their drone fleets which had cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The federal Countering CCP Drones Act would go even further, putting the Chinese company DJI on the Federal Communications Commission's list of untrustworthy suppliers. That move would immediately ban new DJI products from being approved for import, and might pave the way to ground existing drones, according to DJI.*
About 90 percent of hobby drones in America are made by DJI—as well as 70 percent of the industrial drones and over 80 percent of first responder drones—so a ban would force hundreds of thousands of Americans to give up their expensive flying cameras.
"Communist China is using their monopolistic control over the drone market and telecommunications infrastructure to target Americans' data and closely surveil our critical infrastructure," the bill's sponsor Rep. Elise Stefanik (R–N.Y.) said in a statement earlier this month. There is no evidence that DJI drones transmit data to the Chinese government.
The Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), a prominent nonprofit representing drone manufacturers and users, opposes Stefanik's ban on consumer drone usage. But the association wants to ban government agencies from buying new Chinese-made drones and push them to transition to American-made alternatives.
"Really, what we are focused on is the domestic supply chain for [unmanned aerial systems]," or UAS, says AUVSI spokeswoman Chelsie Jeppson. "If we are reliant on drones for critical and sensitive operations that come from another place…and if something were to happen where we could not get them securely or use them at a time when we need them the most, then that would be a supply chain issue for the United States."
The news site DroneXL criticized AUVSI for claiming to oppose "immediate" Chinese drone bans while supporting a Utah bill that would immediately ban public agencies from buying Chinese- or Russian-made drones.
AUVSI Government Affairs Manager Elizabeth Sila says that her only engagement with the Utah bill was a single email, of which she provided Reason with a copy. The email both supported the ban on drone procurement and opposed the idea of creating state-regulated "drone highways."
Jeppson emphasizes that there is a difference between procurement and usage. "We do support a movement away from their immediate procurement, but we don't want to ban agencies from using drones that they've already purchased," she tells Reason.
AUVSI issued a white paper in 2023 calling on Congress to use tax incentives, grants, and tariffs to stop China from "flooding the U.S. market" with cheap drones "to the detriment of U.S. manufacturing and global competition."
The Shenzhen-based company DJI was and still is the undisputed leader of the consumer drone revolution. Its Phantom quadcopters kicked off the camera drone trend in 2013, and DJI continues to control over 70 percent of the global market share for consumer drones. Its biggest competitor, Autel Robotics, is also based in China.
American companies simply haven't been able to keep up with DJI's cheap, reliable, and user-friendly products. Camera manufacturer GoPro tried to break into the drone business in the early 2010s but discontinued its Karma flying camera after disappointing sales numbers and performance issues, including drones literally falling from the sky.
Other American drone makers have focused on government contracts rather than consumer products. Skydio has "effectively tapped-out of the consumer and prosumer space," according to drone blogger Chris Fravel, while BRINC markets entirely to first responders.
And they've spent increasingly large amounts of money on lobbying. Skydio went from a lobbying budget of $10,000 and six registered lobbyists in 2019 to a $560,000 budget and 24 lobbyists in 2023, according to OpenSecrets.org, a campaign finance data platform. BRINC spent $240,000 on lobbying in 2023.
DJI has also jumped from spending $390,000 on lobbying in 2016 to $1.6 million in 2023. The company recently hired three new lobbying firms after DJI's former lobbyists dropped the company over some lawmakers' threat to boycott lobbyists for Chinese interests.
The U.S. government has gotten increasingly aggressive against Chinese companies. In 2018, the U.S. military banned troops from buying off-the-shelf drones over cybersecurity concerns. The next year, Congress specifically banned Chinese-made drones for military use. In 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce banned American companies from selling parts to DJI over concerns that the Chinese government was using DJI drones for domestic surveillance and human rights abuses.
In January 2024, a few days before the American Security Drone Act passed, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI issued a joint statement pointing out the risk of Chinese drone manufacturers handing over data to China's government.
DJI insists that its products do not collect or transmit data without the user's consent. The Shenzhen-based drone manufacturer points to several outside security audits of DJI products by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Department of Interior, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Kivu Consulting, and Booz Allen Hamilton.
Another concern is that Chinese companies could remotely disable drones to give China a wartime advantage. That concern is more grounded in reality. DJI's FlySafe feature has long prevented its drones from being flown in restricted airspace, and DJI quietly added large parts of Syria and Iraq to the restricted zone in response to Islamic State attacks.
Autel Robotics recently implemented its own flight restrictions, including not only active war zones such as Ukraine and Israel but also Taiwan, an island whose independence China does not recognize. DJI, meanwhile, has been hit with criticism for not preventing its drones from being used by the Russian and Ukrainian militaries.
These restrictions are easy to get around. Several websites offer cheap software for jailbreaking the DJI app. And there's a simple way to avoid getting hit with new flight restrictions: Don't connect the drone to the internet. Autel Robotics actually advised users in conflict zones not to download any new updates, which is not the behavior of a company that wants to enforce Chinese government dictates.
DJI even rolled out a line of "Government Edition" drones in 2019 that would not connect to the internet, in order to assuage data security concerns. The Defense Department internally cleared those drones for use after reverse-engineering their source code, then walked back its approval after it leaked.
"The nature of the attempts to ban Chinese drones are that if you look at a lot of the efforts, it's 'no Chinese parts, no Chinese software.' So, we would have to really produce a much more expensive drone," Adam Welsh, head of global policy at DJI, said in an interview earlier this month. "Frankly, if you use an iPhone, it's using Chinese parts, and it's manufactured in China. There's a lot of sensitive traffic that goes over people's iPhones. So, I think that's a real problem with this effort."
*CORRECTION: This article initially stated that the Countering CCP Drones Act would ban DJI drones from using American radio waves entirely.
The post America's Drone Industry Is Trying To Ban the Competition appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Hence this question: Are there other legalese phrases of two or more words, in which the modern English sense of every one of the words (perhaps excluding articles and prepositions) does not actually correspond to the legal term? To be sure, plenty of legal phrases involve meanings that go beyond the English words ("freedom of speech" may cover communication that wouldn't normally be labeled "speech," such as handwriting, flag waving, flag burning, and the like). Likewise, plenty aren't understood as being composed of English words at all (such as "res judicata" or "habeas corpus"). But I'm looking here for phrases that do use ordinary English words but use them in a sense quite different from the modern English meaning of each word.
The post The Holy Roman Empire, Actual Malice, and Criminal Conversation appeared first on Reason.com.
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I blogged about Snyder v. Alight Solutions, LLC (C.D. Cal.) on Jan. 27, 2021, when it was first filed, but hadn't heard until today that on Sept. 14, 2022 there was a decision on a motion for summary judgment (by Judge Cormac Carney); the case has since settled instead of going to trial:
Plaintiff Leah Snyder alleges that Defendant Alight Solutions, LLC wrongfully terminated her employment after she posted to a private Facebook page photos of herself at the Washington, D.C. Capitol building on January 6, 2021 and positive comments about the events that took place that day. In short, the parties' disagreement is this: Defendant argues that it lawfully terminated Plaintiff's employment because she violated laws proscribing where demonstrations may take place on Capitol grounds. Plaintiff alleges that this reason for her termination was pretextual, and that her employment was terminated for a political motive—specifically relating to her support of former President Donald Trump—or as retaliation for reporting harassment she experienced in response to her photos and comments on Facebook….
The court allowed the case to go forward to trial under California's statutes that protect private employees' political activity (for more on such statutes in various jurisdictions, see this article and this one):
In general, an at-will employee like Plaintiff may be terminated for an arbitrary reason, for an irrational reason, or for no reason at all. However, an employer may not terminate an at-will employee for an unlawful reason, or for a purpose that contravenes fundamental public policy. "When an employee is discharged in violation of 'fundamental principles of public policy,' the employee may maintain a tort action and recover damages traditionally available in such actions." California courts recognize four categories of public policy cases: "the employee (1) refused to violate a statute; (2) performed a statutory obligation; (3) exercised a constitutional or statutory right or privilege; or (4) reported a statutory violation for the public's benefit."
Plaintiff alleges that she was wrongfully terminated for exercising "constitutional rights to speak freely, peaceably assemble or petition her grievances to the Government," in violation of the public policy described in California Labor Code Sections 1101 and 1102. "Sections 1101 and 1102 … prohibit employers from interfering with 'the fundamental right of employees in general to engage in political activity.'" "[L]iability under §§ 1101(a) and 1102 is triggered only if an employer fires an employee based on a political motive."
{Section 1101 states: "No employer shall make, adopt, or enforce any rule, regulation, or policy … forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics, or … controlling or directing, or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees." Section 1102 states: "No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity."}
Construing the facts in the light most favorable to Plaintiff and drawing all justifiable inferences in her favor, there is a genuine dispute of material fact regarding whether Defendant fired Plaintiff based on a political motive. Plaintiff testified that she visited the Capitol on January 6, 2021 as part of a "fun vacation" to see Washington D.C. and its monuments, and because she wanted to hear then-President Donald Trump speak. She was also interested in attending because Congress was certifying electoral college votes that day, and her "personal opinion is it was probably a rigged election." Plaintiff testified that it was "crowded" but there was "no violence," that she was friendly with "riot cops and military and stuff like that," and that it "was really peaceful" like "just a normal rally." She stated that she did not see or cross any barriers or barricades. And she testified that she believed it was lawful for her to be where she was that day. Indeed, she believed "that the rally organizers had a lawful permit." When she returned home, Plaintiff stated her beliefs on a private Facebook page. To her surprise, Armstrong posted those comments and photos on her employer's Facebook page. Two days later, her employer fired her. Plaintiff recalls that Robinson told her that she was fired for "inciting a riot."
Of course, Defendant has a different characterization of the facts. Robinson denies that she told Plaintiff that she was fired for "inciting a riot." And Defendant's employees testified that Plaintiff was fired because she was present where she was not lawfully permitted to be on January 6, 2021. But deciding whether Plaintiff was fired for a political motive largely comes down to a credibility determination, and the Court does not make credibility determinations at summary judgment. A jury will have to decide which version of the facts is the truth….
Punitive damages may be awarded on a showing of "oppression, fraud, or malice." … As described in the previous section, a reasonable jury could conclude that Defendant terminated Plaintiff with a political motive based on the nature of the events of January 6, 2021, the nature of Plaintiff's experience that day, the nature of Plaintiff's Facebook photos and comments, the differing recollections of the conversations surrounding Plaintiff's employment termination, and other facts. For the same reasons, a reasonable jury could likewise decide that Defendant acted with malice in terminating Plaintiff's employment.
Here's what I wrote about the Complaint back in Jan. 2021:
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Can California Employee Be Fired for Attending the Jan. 6 Protest at the Capitol?
Subtitle: California statutes suggest the answer may be no, so long as the firing is based on the political activity, and not on criminal conduct.
In Snyder v. Alight Solutions, LLC (filed yesterday), Leah Snyder claims that her employer fired her on these grounds. Here is what she alleges in the Complaint:
She listened to speeches being made and walked to the Capitol, and then she left. She did not participate in any rioting, she did not observe any rioting, and she did not hear of any injuries to persons or damages to property during her peaceful visit. On return home, she posted two "selfies" with her friends and at least one smiling police officer in front of the Capitol to a comment thread on the social media of Sean Armstrong. She believed she was engaging in a debate over the nature and scope of a protest at the Capitol….
On January 6, 2021, while on paid time off from work, she visited Washington, D.C. She and perhaps as many as one million other people, listened to speeches made by the President of the United States and other important persons. Plaintiff is not a zealous adherent of any system of beliefs. Her impression of the speeches was that the assembled people were being asked to peacefully show their support for the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law while presenting their displeasure with vote counting procedures during the recent national election. At the conclusion of the speeches, she joined a group of people who were peacefully walking to the Capitol. She reached the Capitol, took several "selfies" with friends, and at least one with a smiling police officer in the background. She did not cross or see any barricades. She did not see nor participate in any rioting. She did not enter the Capitol. She did not observe or hear of any injuries to persons or damages to property. She was not arrested and she did not see anyone who was arrested. On occasion, when she encountered police officers, she inquired if walking with the other members of the crowd was legal, and each time, the officers responded that what she was doing was legal. After spending some time at the Capitol, she left and went home.
She claims she was then fired because of those actions.
If her allegations are correct, then the employer likely violated California Labor Code §§ 1101-02. Those statutes (enacted in 1937) provide,
No employer shall make, adopt, or enforce any rule, regulation, or policy:
(a) Forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office.
(b) Controlling or directing, or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees.
No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity.
[1.] In Gay Law Students Ass'n v. Pac. Tel. & Tel. Co. (Cal. 1979):, the California Supreme Court made clear that "These statutes cannot be narrowly confined to partisan activity" (unlike some more narrowly written statutes in other cases, that are limited to activity related to parties or elections):
"The term 'political activity' connotes the espousal of a candidate or a cause, and some degree of action to promote the acceptance thereof by other persons." The Supreme Court has recognized the political character of activities such as participation in litigation, the wearing of symbolic armbands, and the association with others for the advancement of beliefs and ideas.
Going to a political demonstration would thus be covered.
[2.] The statute seems to be limited to actions pursuant to a "rule, regulation, or policy"; and the California Supreme Court has defined "policy" as "[a] settled or definite course or method adopted and followed" by the employer. But, as the Louisiana Supreme Court held, interpreting a similar statute, "[T]he actual firing of one employee for political activity constitutes for the remaining employees both a policy and a threat of similar firings." And such firing tends to coerce other employees: "[T]he actual firing of one employee for political activity constitutes for the remaining employees both a policy and a threat of similar firings" (I quote again the Louisiana case).
This is especially for large companies these days, in which employment decisions have become much more formalized and bureaucratized (in part because the process of hiring and firing has become a highly legally regulated activity). It seems unlikely to me that the employer (which apparently has 15,000 employees) will say, "Nope, this was just a one-off decision, we might well handle other employees completely differently"; generally, part of its argument would indeed be that there's some policy that this 20-year employee has violated, which is why she was fired. This might be why some recent California cases have basically treated these sections as generally applicable to firings based on political activity, e.g.,
If plaintiff was fired for his particular political perspective, affiliation or cause of favoring Proposition 8 or being against same-sex marriage, so that it may be inferred that (as plaintiff alleged) Safeway was in effect declaring that the espousal or advocacy of such political views will not be tolerated—then Safeway's action constituted a violation of Labor Code sections 1101 and 1102.
Ali asserts he was fired not because the content of his articles contravened the editorial policies or standards of the newspaper, but because outside of the workplace he publicly criticized an influential public official for supporting a particular political candidate. Whether Ali can ultimately prove all the elements of his claim, he has submitted sufficient evidence of a public policy violation to survive a motion for summary judgment
[3.] Now a California employer is free to fire employees because they committed crimes, or even because it believes they committed crimes, apart from their political activity. If, for instance, Alight the employer fires anyone who it has reason to think were engaged in a riot or vandalism, that isn't itself firing for political activity.
But Snyder's allegation is that she didn't commit any crimes. And to the extent that the employer inferred that she must have committed crimes based simply on her attendance at the Capitol protest, I think that has to be treated as a restriction on political activity.
[4.] Naturally, all of this would equally apply to people attending any sort of protest, left-wing, right-wing, or otherwise: e.g., an anti-police-brutality protest at which some of the protesters engaged in vandalism or arson, an anti-abortion protest at which some of the protesters illegally blocked entrances to an abortion clinic, an anti-globalization protest at which some of the protesters violated the law, or anything else along those lines.
The post Private Employee's Claim That She Was Fired for Peacefully Attending Jan. 6 Events Can Go Forward, appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt, Penguin Press, 400 pages, $30
Jonathan Haidt opens The Anxious Generation with what is supposed to be an analogy for kids' use of smartphones and social media: Would you let your child travel to Mars, he asks, if some Silicon Valley CEO said it was safe? It's an absurd comparison: Whatever harms may or may not befall minors with iPhones, they're light-years less apparent, substantial, or universal than those facing kids shuttling through outer space to a desert planet with an atmosphere mainly made of carbon dioxide.
Happily, most of this volume is far less hysterical than that opening might lead you to believe. Yes, this book is filled with unwarranted pessimism, unjustified conclusions, and unsavory solutions. But as he lays out his case that a "phone-based childhood" is replacing a "play-based childhood," Haidt makes many points that even the most ardent opponents of tech panic and state intervention should be able to appreciate. Unfortunately, he can't keep the spirit of that opening analogy from periodically seeping back in.
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Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, believes that young people's rising use of screens and rising rates of emotional fragility both stem from our overprotection of kids in nondigital spaces. He rails against policies that punish parents for letting children have some independence, and against the mindset that tries to shield the young from every possible emotional harm. Parts of the book were even written with Free-Range Kids author (and regular Reason contributor) Lenore Skenazy, with whom Haidt helped found Let Grow, a nonprofit that pushes back against helicopter parenting.
Haidt also stresses that many of his ideas for curbing teen tech use shouldn't be legislated, though he does favor a number of new regulations too. He recognizes the guidelines he offers parents are not one-size-fits-all—that activities OK for most minors might be problematic for some and that things that are generally bad at a certain stage of development may be OK for individual kids.
He also marshalls a lot of data as he tries to tie the recent rises in youthful depression, anxiety, suicide, and learning loss to phone-based childhoods. But here we run into trouble. Haidt seems convinced there is one right way to interpret this data: the way that implicates technology.
Pointing to Jean Twenge's research, for example, Haidt reports that "teens who spend more time using social media are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, and other disorders, while teens who spend more time with groups of young people (such as playing team sports or participating in religious activities) have better mental health." But what does this really tell us? Not that these platforms are causing these problems. That's possible. But it's also possible that teenagers use more social media and avoid more group activities because of their depression or social anxiety—or that some third factor triggers both mental health difficulties and problematic internet use.
Haidt points to data showing rates of depression and anxiety in young people rose at the same time that smartphone and social media adoption skyrocketed among the same age group. But this was also a time period in which awareness of those conditions increased and the stigma around them decreased. And it was a period in which identity politics and a sort of victimhood cache began to permeate places where many young people gravitated online. If phones and social media play a role here, it might not be as a direct trigger—perhaps the veneration of various psychological diagnoses in certain online spaces led more kids to embrace those labels.
Haidt responds to the awareness/destigmatization theories by pointing out that we have been seeing more suicides and self harm in young people. Kids aren't just saying they're struggling, he argues; they're taking action that shows it. But the suicide picture is complicated. Yes, U.S. suicides have been rising. But the rate among older adults—the group least likely to be heavy social media users—has also increased sharply and in fact is much higher than for the youngest cohort. (In 2021, the rate for Americans ages 65 and up was 17.3 suicides for every 100,000 people. For 12- to 17-year-olds, it was 6.5 per 100,000.) In 2022, suicide rates actually went down among younger Americans while increasing among men over 34 and women over 24. (Depression, too, is up across American age groups, even preceding the pandemic.)
It's also notable that youth suicide rates in the U.S. started rising before the advent of smartphones and social media (something Haidt acknowledges) and that their rise over time has not been linear. (The same goes for the general population, with the 2022 suicide death toll about equal to what it was in 1950.) It's also much higher in some states than others, something we'd be less likely to see if a nationwide phenomenon like social media was a leading cause. The rise has not been consistent around the world, even in countries with similar phone and social media adoption patterns. In many places with widespread phone use—France and Russia, for example—teen and young adult suicide rates have fallen, sometimes precipitously.
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Haidt argues that no single thing other than "the great rewiring of childhood" can explain the breadth of data suggesting young people are faring worse than before on an array of measures. Maybe no single thing can do this. Yet for each data point, a variety of nontech explanations could work.
For instance: Haidt cites a 2023 survey in which 68 percent of college students said they felt anxious at least half of the time. Social media could be a culprit, but so could doom coming from professional media and gloom coming from politicians. So could the anxiety emanating from adults around them. So could shifting sexual norms, fears of another pandemic, or a lifetime of what Haidt calls "modern overprotective parenting."
Or take the rise in 12- to 17-year-olds who answered national survey questions in ways suggesting they've suffered a major depressive episode. This rise started in the early 2010s and continued throughout the decade (from 8 percent in 2010 to 11.4 percent in 2014, 14.4 percent in 2018, and 19.5 percent in 2022)—a time period that corresponds with increasing smartphone adoption and the introduction of platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. But this was also a time of economic downturn, a pandemic, unrest in the streets, and extreme turbulence in U.S. politics. Surely some of this could also explain self-reports of hopelessness, sadness, etc. Maybe other health issues, such as rising obesity rates, had a role. Maybe shifts in academic expectations played a part. Or maybe the depression isn't related to events that took place during this period at all; it could stem from something in the way kids coming of age during this period were raised in the preceding decade, or even from genetic factors. Plenty of counterevidence and rival interpretations are available.
That doesn't mean we should simply throw up our hands and declare unlimited screen time to be fine at any age. Parents who look at the evidence may deem it wise to adopt some or all of Haidt's agenda—measures like limiting phone or laptop use to certain times of day, or waiting until your kids are a certain age before letting them own a phone or participate on social media. Tech companies could offer more options—including device-based options—for parents who want to prevent their kids from creating social media accounts or visiting certain sites. Individual schools or school districts could experiment with tough-on-phone policies. Of course, there's the other half of Haidt's prescription: more time for unsupervised play, more play at school, and more autonomy in general for kids.
But the data just aren't strong enough to unequivocally back up Haidt's claims about what smartphones and social media are doing to kids, which seems like a good reason to hold off on government mandates, and not just out of first-principles libertarianism.
Even if we could somehow overcome the privacy and First Amendment concerns that something like a minimum age for social media would pose for adult users (and that's a big if), we still don't know what sort of unintended consequences it might have for young people. Could a lack of online community lead to worse mental health outcomes? Would kids turn to more private methods of communication that make it harder to prevent harm or punish perpetrators? Separated from their digital distractions, would teens start drinking more and having more unintended pregnancies—both of which have decreased in recent decades?
Haidt says that if we wouldn't send our kids to Mars without having all the evidence and knowing all the risks, we shouldn't give them unfettered access to the digital world either. That goes for cutting off their connections to the digital world too.
The post Blaming Tech for Teen Troubles appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Millions of American students rely on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) to afford college. The financial aid form is required for any student seeking federal loans or grants and is used by most colleges offering their own financial aid.
However, this year's rollout of the form has proved a logistical nightmare, with persistent technical glitches making filling out the form all but impossible for thousands of students. Adding to the chaos, the Education Department announced last week that FAFSA forms from around 200,000 applicants will need to be recalculated, leaving students—and the colleges that admitted them—in limbo.
Last week's announcement was only the latest in a string of hiccups The current crisis stems from an effort to streamline the form. In 2020, Congress required FAFSA to be simplified as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act. A simplified form was released on December 31, 2023—nearly two months later than FAFSA's usual release. Notably, the Education Department didn't extend the deadline for completing the form.
The form's release was soon hampered by technical difficulties. Initially, the "soft launch" of the form in December led to students and their families reporting hourslong delays and frustrating bugs. Currently, the Education Department lists a cornucopia of issues on the FAFSA website requiring convoluted workarounds for students to complete the form. Some applicants, particularly those who do not have a Social Security number or whose parents do not have one, still cannot complete the form at all in some circumstances.
According to the Education Department, FAFSA forms filled out by students who reported their own financial assets had been calculated incorrectly, leaving out students' savings and investments. The faulty calculations likely led many schools to offer more generous financial aid packages than they otherwise would have.
While a simplified FAFSA sounds like a good idea on paper, the Education Department's rollout of the new form has been an unalloyed disaster—one that has left thousands of students and their families without crucial financial information.
Colleges are also feeling the brunt of these issues.
"It just continues to snowball the effect on the students who probably have the highest need, and in some instances burdens the institutions that have the least capacity to cope with the ever-changing directives that we receive," Dawn Medley, an administrator at Drexel University, told The Wall Street Journal, adding that the school usually receives FAFSA records for around 25,000 students yet has only been given 10,000 so far this year.
"We're beyond weary, and there's a general distrust that there won't be more errors found," Justin Draeger, president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, told the Journal. "It just feels like the hits don't stop coming."
The post FAFSA Glitch Imperils Financial Aid for 200,000 Students appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In his latest post, Prof. Hamburger accuses me of repeating my "errors." But I remain unrepentant. It is in fact Hamburger himself who has doubled down on his mistakes.
Most notably, he continues to neglect the significance of the fact that the First Amendment protects "freedom of speech." By its very nature, freedom is voluntary choice. Therefore, it cannot be restricted in the absence of some kind of coercion. That's true even if Prof. Hamburger is right (as he surely is) to describe the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment as a "limit on government." The limit it imposes on government is preventing it from using compulsion to restrict speech. By contrast, it does not prevent the government from using persuasion to influence private speech, or from engaging in coordination with private speakers.
Prof. Hamburger continues to emphasize the fact that the First Amendment bans "abridging" of freedom of speech, as opposed to the ban on "prohibiting" freedom of religion. I agree this means free speech gets somewhat greater protection than religious freedom does. But the thing that it is protected against must still be some form of compulsion. Absent compulsion, there can be no restriction of freedom. the distinction in wording just means that relatively mild forms of coercion that may not rise to the level of "prohibition" might still qualify as "abridgement."
Hamburger claims my view would allow the government to "buy off" its critics. But conditioning government benefits on the exercise of constitutional rights (or refraining from exercising them) raises other constitutional problems. Among other things, it implicates the doctrine of "unconstitutional conditions," which prevents the government (at least in many instances) from discriminating on the basis of speech with respect to the distribution of government benefits. Thus, for example, the government cannot adopt a law restricting Social Security benefits to people who express support for the Democratic Party, or at least refraining from criticizing it. Activities like persuasion or "jawboning" do not qualify as such discrimination.
Prof. Hamburger also doubles down on the dubious claim that social media platforms don't have free speech rights over the material they post on their websites. But, as discussed in my previous post, platforms do in fact exercise editorial control over what speech they allow on their sites, through their terms of service. In that respect, they are similar to media entities like Reason or the New York Times.
Hamburger responds that the platforms sometimes took down speech even without changing their terms of service. But he is missing the point. The existence of terms of service with substantive limitations on the types of speech platforms allow on the site shows that it is not the case that they are "public squares" where anyone can say whatever they want. Rather, they are private property where the owners exercise editorial control over speech. They can do that through terms of service. But, unless prohibited by freely undertaken contractual obligations, they can also do that in other ways.
In his latest post, Prof. Hamburger continues to promote a double standard under which he has an extremely broad view of what is prohibited by the First Amendment when it comes to non-coercive government persuasion to bar social media posts, but a very narrow one with respect to Texas's and Florida's attempts to force social media firms to host speech they disapprove of. He now tries to justify this by claiming that social media platforms are "common carriers." This analogy is badly flawed for reasons I outlined here.
Social media firms have never been legally considered common carriers in the past. And state governments cannot make them so just by legislative fiat. If they could, the same strategy could be used to force other private entities to publish speech they disapprove of, by passing laws declaring them to be "common carriers," as well. Thus, they could force Fox News to air more left-wing views, compel the New York Times to publish more right-wing ones, and so on.
Prof. Hamburger accuses me of departing from libertarian principles, due to my focus on coercion. But the distinction between coercion and voluntary action is actually fundamental to libertarianism—and, indeed, to most other forms of liberalism. It is, in fact, usually opponents of libertarianism—particularly left-wing ones—that seek to efface the distinction between the two, thereby justifying government intervention to protect people against supposedly oppressive voluntary relationships. Such arguments are a standard justification for restrictive labor regulation, for example, where it is said that voluntary agreements to work more than certain amount of hours or for pay below the minimum wage are actually "exploitative" coercive.
Finally, Prof. Hamburger complains about my pointing out that speech can be a "public bad," and worries that it is somehow a justification for suppression. I think it is pretty obvious that at least some speech is a public bad, in so far as it can lead to horrific government policies. That was true of Nazi and Communist speech, for instance.
It doesn't follow that the government is justified in suppressing such speech. Even speech advocating awful ideas is still an exercise of an important individual liberty. And there is—to make an obvious point—good reason to distrust government judgments about which speech is harmful and which is not. Thus, there should be at least a strong presumption against allowing the government to deal with this public bad through coercive censorship.
By contrast, the use of non-coercive suasion—whether by the government or private parties—doesn't pose anything like the same risks. Private entities who differ with the government's position will remain free to publish opposing views. And so long as there is a market demand for such views, there will be incentives to publish them. If the government persuades, say, Twitter or Facebook, to take them down, that just creates a market incentive for others to publish them.
In sum, there is good reason to worry about government use of coercion to either suppress speech (as the Biden Administration may well have done in Murthy v. Missouri), or to compel it (as Texas and Florida are trying to do). But the First Amendment does not bar the government—or anyone else—from using non-coercive persuasion.
The post More on Coercion, Social Media, and Freedom of Speech: Rejoinder to Philip Hamburger appeared first on Reason.com.
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