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.
]]>The great conservative thinker William F. Buckley in 1963 wrote that he would rather "live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University." Buckley recognized the great "brainpower" among the university's faculty, but feared the "intellectual arrogance that is a distinguishing characteristic of the university which refuses to accept any common premise."
I thought of that oft-quoted line four years after the COVID-19 panic. It was a very real public health threat, so much so that it enabled Americans to transfer wide-ranging and largely unchecked powers to the experts. For two years, it was exactly as if Buckley's fears came true and we were ruled by the type of people found in the faculty lounge.
It's no secret that American universities are dominated by progressives, who don't typically accept the "common premise" of limited governance. A core principle of progressivism, dating to its early 20th century roots, is the rule by experts. Disinterested parties would reform, protect, and re-engineer society based on their superior knowledge. Although adherents of this worldview speak in the name of the People, they don't actually trust individuals to manage their own lives.
Looking back, COVID-19 shows the nation's founders—rather than intellectual social engineers—had it right. The founders created a system of checks and balances that made it hard for leaders to easily have their way. "A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions," wrote James Madison. The pandemic stripped away those precautions, albeit (mostly) temporarily.
In fairness, the response to COVID by many ordinary Americans left much to be desired. Social media provided a megaphone for conspiracy theories and idiotic home remedies. Instead of acting responsibly by voluntarily embracing the best-known practices at the time, many Americans defied even the most sensible rules and acted out against store clerks and others. I was left disgusted by the edicts of our leaders and the behavior of many of my fellow citizens.
Nevertheless, the skeptics generally were correct. "The coronavirus shutdowns have created a dichotomy between those who tend to trust whatever the authorities say—and those who don't seem to trust any official information at all," I wrote in May 2020. "It's not even slightly conspiratorial, however, to question the forecasts, data and presuppositions of those officials who are driving these policies. They have shut down society, forced us to stay at home, driven businesses into bankruptcy, caused widespread misery, and suspended many civil liberties."
Yes, many of us told you so.
The experts and politicians touted the "science" even though that was really just a way of telling us to shut up and follow orders while they muddled their way through it. We've since learned that masks and plastic sneeze bars, lockdowns, school shutdowns, and the panoply of makeshift protections were, likely, of marginal value. Critics who questioned official death statistics were tarred as conspiratorialists. But even a 2023 Washington Post report found that officials seemed to be counting people who died "with" COVID rather than "from" it.
And don't get me started on how politicians reacted. Some of the initial emergency edicts were justifiable, but then governors realized they could ram through unrelated (or tangentially related) political priorities by invoking fear. One former Assembly member compiled a 123-page list of Gov. Gavin Newsom's COVID-related executive orders. The courts ultimately struck down a handful of them, but the governor certainly didn't let a good crisis go to waste.
The nation is still reeling from pandemic blowback. Inflation is soaring, sparked by supply chain disruptions and federal spending sprees that started with the shutdowns. Big cities such as San Francisco have hemorrhaged population as workers learned they no longer needed to commute into offices. Transit ridership plummeted, sparking yet another funding crisis. Large segments of the public have become more dependent on government handouts. Municipal budgets are in shambles. Anti-eviction edicts further screwed up our rental markets.
Many downtowns, such as Sacramento, have yet to recover from the lockdowns, as shuttered businesses—each reflecting a personal tragedy for their owners—remain boarded up. And don't get me started on the impact on education, especially for the poor. There's a lost generation of students, victimized by school systems that couldn't master distance learning—resulting dismal test scores and soaring absentee rates. We saw unions resist school re-openings because their priorities are workers, not students. Even some experts now research the resulting psychological harms.
I'm not saying that COVID didn't require a reasonable response, but by listening solely to the equivalent of progressive academics and ignoring the concerns of Buckley's proverbial first 2,000 names in the phone book, our government failed its people.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
The post The Lesson of COVID-19: Don't Give Government More Power appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Frozen cherry pie manufacturers have finally been liberated from one of the most unnecessary Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations. And it only took nearly 20 years of lobbying!
On March 14 ("Pi Day," of course), the FDA announced that "standards of identity and quality" for frozen cherry pies that were implemented in 1971 were revoked as of April 15. These standards of identity mandated how many cherries needed to be in frozen cherry pies (25 percent by weight) and how blemished they were permitted to be (only 15 percent) in order to be included in these pies.
What made these standards unusual, even taking into account the reams of FDA regulations that exist, is that these regulations applied only to cherry pies, and specifically to frozen cherry pies. Fresh cherry pies did not have to meet these standards. Frozen apple pies did not have to meet these standards. Only these pies did.
There are costs to these regulations, to be clear. There's an entire complicated compliance process the FDA implemented in 1971 to make sure manufacturers put the right amount of high-quality cherries into pies.
What was absent from all of this was any evidence that Americans needed the federal government's protection from lower-quality frozen pies. The American Bakers Association submitted a petition to the FDA all the way back in 2005 to see if this rule could be revoked.
Eventually the FDA agreed and announced plans for a rule change. As an example of how long it takes for even the tiniest amount of deregulation to happen, this initial announcement came in December 2020, under former President Donald Trump's administration. But that was just the announcement of the pending rule change; the whole lengthy process wasn't actually completed until March 2024.
The FDA explained when it announced the change was finally coming:
No standards of identity and quality exist for any other types of frozen fruit pies, or for any non-frozen fruit pies, including non-frozen cherry pie. We conclude that the standards of identity and quality for frozen cherry pie are no longer necessary to promote honesty and fair dealing in the interest of consumers.
Reason covered the announcement of the change back in 2020, noting at the time, "The reality is that it's not 1971 anymore, and innovations in both agriculture and food preparation have given Americans more options and competition, such that people don't actually have to settle for crappy frozen cherry pies." If some pie manufacturer decides to put out unpalatable cherry pies now that the government has eased the rules, consumers can simply buy somebody else's, or even make their own much more easily than they could have in 1971.
It has taken nearly 20 years to eliminate a petty food regulation that doesn't really serve a purpose, one that advancements and improvements in the marketplace had already rendered obsolete.
The post After Nearly 20 Years, They Finally Freed the Frozen Cherry Pie appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Emergencies are, by definition, unexpected and urgent situations requiring immediate action—except in Congress, where the term is increasingly used to justify spending decisions that should be part of the normal budget process.
Congress has authorized more than $12 trillion in emergency spending over the past three decades, according to a report released in January by the Cato Institute. About half of that total was spent in direct response to the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic, but much of the other half was used for purposes that strain the definition of emergency.
Because emergency spending bypasses some of the scrutiny applied to the normal budgetary process, it has become a convenient way for lawmakers and presidents to hike spending—and add to the national debt. In 2023 alone, Congress and President Joe Biden proposed using emergency spending for many obviously nonemergency situations—including the items listed below.
"We must not let fiscally irresponsible legislators hoodwink their colleagues and the public into accepting spending increases by slapping the 'emergency' label on them and calling it a day." —Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy, Cato Institute
The post 'Emergency' Spending Is Out of Control appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Pennsylvania-based U.S. Steel company recently agreed to be purchased by the Tokyo-headquartered publicly traded company Nippon Steel. This deal makes sense to economists. It will encourage other foreign companies to invest in the U.S., creating wealth and new job opportunities, and further shoring up the U.S. economy, particularly amid inflation worries. More importantly, this deal makes sense to the owners of U.S. Steel.
And yet, in our age of government shoving its fingers into everything, President Joe Biden announced that he opposes this purchase for muddled, misguided reasons. Former President Donald Trump agrees, showing once again that when it comes to trade there is little difference between the two presidents.
Such government meddling is what American steel producers get for having clamored for decades—often successfully—that they need protection from foreign competition. The Trump steel tariffs are the latest expression of this attitude. But one stupid policy move doesn't justify a second. As soon as the announcement of Nippon's $14.1 billion deal with U.S. Steel was made public, fans of protectionism and industrial policy, including prominent policymakers, came swarming out of the woodwork to explain why the government should be able to override, or at least modify, the decision of the rightful owners of a company to sell their company to a particular buyer.
Assertions of dangers to "national security" are being used to scare Americans into thinking that a good deal for investors, employees, and the U.S. economy will somehow make America less militarily secure. This is nonsense.
Japan has been a strong ally of the U.S. for over 60 years. In a recent piece, the Cato Institute's Scott Lincicome and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon remind us that "the Defense Department doesn't currently buy from U.S. Steel, and DOD needs just 3 percent of domestic steel production to meet its procurement obligations." Furthermore, U.S. Steel, despite its historic significance, is no longer a major player in the steel industry and could benefit from Nippon Steel's investment and technology enhancements. Besides, foreign investments, including those from Japan, are typically beneficial to the domestic economy and workforce—and to the millions of Americans holding corporate shares in retirement portfolios.
According to the fearmongers, Nippon Steel, being a Japanese company, perhaps harbors secret plans to spend $5 billion above U.S. Steel's market capitalization to shutter it. Obviously, this is total nonsense. It should go without saying that investors don't purchase companies to then shut down those companies' profitable operations. Yet it needs to be said, since that's one of the main fears about the acquisition. The fact is that Nippon, by saving U.S. Steel and enhancing the domestic production of steel, will bolster our national security. Opponents of the deal ignore this reality. Yet again, the facts don't seem to matter to those who use nationalist rhetoric to oppose Americans' peaceful commercial dealings with non-Americans—in this case, even a crucial, decadeslong ally.
The business practice of buyouts is not inherently bad. Nippon Steel will save U.S. Steel and make it better through new ownership. John Tamny wrote at Forbes on March 4 that "neither bankruptcy nor buyouts signal the vanishing of businesses as much as they signal the happy, pro-employee and pro-business scenario of physical and human capital being shifted into the hands of more capable stewards." Tamny is right, and U.S. Steel is in a good position if another successful company sees value in purchasing the company to make it more efficient and productive. For all the protectionist handwringing, you'd think policymakers would recognize that this buyout will save the company from eventual bankruptcy without the deal and might secure the jobs of U.S. workers.
The merged company will be able to provide for the massive demand for high-grade steel in the United States—demand exploding in no small part because of increased domestic production of electric vehicle motors. It makes economic sense for Nippon Steel to invest in this Pennsylvania-based company to meet the growing demand for steel in the U.S.
Nippon Steel has the potential, and the incentive, to restore U.S. Steel into a strong and leading steelmaker once again, unless the U.S. government and the hordes of economic nationalists get in the way. As meddling in the dealings of successful companies increases, the American economy will suffer the creeping statism that has hamstrung so many European economies, where intrusive government control impedes private enterprise.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM.
The post Opposition to U.S. Steel Sale Shows How Similar Biden and Trump Are on Trade appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If you've heard of the concept of "luxury beliefs," you can thank writer Rob Henderson. Henderson's concept refers to cultural and political ideas that are predominantly held and advertised by individuals in society's upper echelons—those persons with significant economic, social, and cultural capital—to demonstrate that they are on the side of the downtrodden, minorities, and the poor.
Henderson's new memoir, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, discusses luxury beliefs, a concept he developed during his time at Yale. Henderson had a difficult childhood spent in foster care, and he felt distanced from his Ivy League contemporaries, who espoused fashionable but unworkable or outright harmful views that they themselves were insulated from by some combination of status, wealth, and familial stability. The luxury beliefs Henderson witnessed were a way to signal and maintain elite status by supporting social concepts or policies that sounded empathetic. Yet in reality, they made life worse for those at the bottom rungs of society.
Henderson argues that luxury beliefs are not just harmless opinions. They can have negative real-world implications, influencing policy and societal norms in ways that might exacerbate inequality or disconnect the elite from the broader societal consequences of the positions that they advocate.
As one might expect from a concept born out of alienation from Ivy League privilege, most of the discussion around luxury beliefs has focused on the left. The left has adopted this sort of self-serving worldview in many ways.
In a recent interview with Henderson, however, writer and podcaster Jesse Singal raised a different question: What are some of the luxury beliefs of the right?
It turns out the political right—especially those in the New Right, its growing nationalist/populist faction—has plenty of luxury beliefs too. They support policies designed to elevate their own status while making it seem as if they are on the side of lower-class workers. But those policies would actually make life worse for those they say they want to help.
The so-called New Right has built its movement on the idea that conservatives should care first and foremost about workers as a reason to justify a shift in economic policies away from so-called "market fundamentalism," deregulation, and smaller government and toward more top-down big government policies such as protectionism, support for unions, and industrial policy. In other words, they have embraced policies that were usually supported by Democrats.
Among the leaders of these efforts are the who's who of the elite conservative world. They include senators, Harvard and Yale university graduates, and six-figure-income pundits. Unfortunately for lower-income workers, their situation will be worsened by these measures, as such interventions inevitably backfire. More infuriatingly, these New Right leaders won't shoulder the burden of the negative effects of their policies—negative effects such as higher prices, slower growth, or work displacement—as these elite conservatives are part of the protected class likely living in the world's most recession-proof region: Washington, D.C. and its suburbs.
Take the New Right's full-throated embrace of protectionism and industrial policy. This romance with protectionism started in the 1990s with former GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, gained enormous traction under former President Donald Trump, and is still going strong today.
The conservative push for more active government management of trade policy represents a significant shift in economic policy that already had, and will continue to have, wide-ranging effects on the economy. These won't be pretty.
While protectionist policies, with its tariffs on imports and wholesale rejection of globalism, are often justified on the grounds of supporting domestic industries, preserving jobs, and enhancing national security, they also carry significant downsides, particularly for the most economically vulnerable populations.
Tariffs are taxes on purchases of imported goods, and these additional costs are passed down to consumers in the form of higher prices. For everyday items that are imported or contain imported components, this means an increase in costs for consumers. Essentials such as clothing, food, and household goods can become more expensive, stretching already tight budgets even thinner. To that, New Righters object that economic efficiency and lower prices aren't everything. But that's easy to say when your income is large and paying much more for necessities leaves you with plenty of cash to spend on other things.
The poor, however, spend a larger proportion of their incomes on basic goods and services, and feel these price increases most acutely. As the cost of essentials rises, families will find it more difficult to acquire basic necessities, leading to greater financial insecurity and hardship. This can exacerbate existing socioeconomic disparities and increase the burden on social safety nets.
The same is true of the New Right's rediscovery of protectionism's close cousin, industrial policy. Here, the belief is that China's trade expansion pushed down the country's throat by market fundamentalists is the cause of the decline in U.S. manufacturing employment. As such, this view holds that the government needs to restructure the economy to rebuild American capitalism and, among other things, bring manufacturing jobs back. Their preferred policy tools are tariffs and subsidies.
Unfortunately, when all is said and done, industrial policy will only expand the swamp without delivering benefits to most of the workers who the New Right claims to fight for.
Take, for instance, Trump's attempt to bolster U.S. steel manufacturing with tariffs. Ignoring the fact that U.S. steel was doing more than fine, with 70% to 90% of the U.S. steel consumption produced by domestic steel in the last decade, tariffs rose to please steel producers and a thousand steel-making jobs were secured. Meanwhile, these same tariffs destroyed 75,000 other jobs in steel-consuming industries.
Adding insult to injury, when our trading partners retaliated with their own tariffs on American goods, including on farm goods from soy to corn, the Trump administration tried to cover for its policy errors by bailing out damaged farmers with $28 billion in subsidies. After all this, U.S. Steel decided to sell itself to the Japanese company Nippon, causing outrage among New Right senators and pundits.
This episode is unlikely to prompt a reconsideration of these luxury beliefs. And why would it? The belief-holders are neither farmers nor workers in steel-consuming factories. They also have higher incomes to shelter them from the full impact of these price hikes or the failure of the top-down policies. Better yet, they, not workers or middle or lower-class Americans, will benefit from the new policies whether or not they succeed.
Protectionism and industrial policy require the bolstering of the bureaucratic state capacity. Bureaucrats after all will be the ones controlling the allocation of resources and many other aspects of industrial policy. That task will be massive if these guys are serious about reinventing capitalism or achieving "common good capitalism."
You need people deciding who gets the money, where to send the checks and the tax credits, and what to spend it on. It will take an extra level of power and maybe a few more agencies to enable bureaucrats to decide who, exactly, can export what, precisely, to which countries, and how and where corporations can invest their capital. Who do you think will get these powerful jobs if not our New Right friends?
Many of the left's luxury beliefs are trendy cultural attitudes with political implications. But the New Right's embrace of destructive economic policies meets the definition of luxury belief in just about every way: It's self-serving and counterproductive, designed to elevate one's personal status without regard to the practical consequences for those with less power and privilege in the world. Throughout history, industrial policy and protectionism have been shown to be costly to individuals and the larger economy: These beliefs are luxuries we can't afford.
The post The Political Right Has Luxury Beliefs, Too appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Four years ago, government officials told us, "Stay home!" We have "15 days to slow the spread."
Days turned into months and then years, while officials chipped away at our freedoms.
I have long been wary of politicians, but even I was surprised at how authoritarian many were eager to be.
Some demanded police to go after people surfing. They took down the rims of basketball hoops. Children's playgrounds were taped up like crime scenes. They told people in rural Utah and Wyoming to stay in their homes.
In the name of safety, politicians did many things that diminished our lives, without making us safer.
They complied with teachers unions' demand to keep schools closed. Kids' learning has been set back by years.
Politicians destroyed jobs by closing businesses. Some shutdown orders were ridiculous. Landscaping businesses and private campgrounds were forced to shut down.
Both former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden sharply increased government spending. Trump's $2.2 trillion "stimulus" package, followed by Biden's $1.9 trillion "American Rescue Plan," led to so much money printing that inflation doubled and then tripled.
This week, the fourth-year anniversary of "15 days to stop the spread," my new video looks back at politicians' incompetence.
First, government probably killed people with its endless red tape.
At least the Trump administration broke Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules to speed vaccine approvals. But FDA rules kept perfectly good American COVID-19 test kits off the market because they hadn't gone through its multiyear approval process.
Michigan's Gov. Gretchen Whitmer banned "public and private gatherings of any size." Residents were told they could not see friends or relatives.
Many of her rules seemed random. She banned motorboats and jet skis, but allowed kayaks and canoes. She closed small businesses, but exempted big-box stores if they blocked off aisles offering plant nurseries and paint. Why?
Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) "six-foot rule" under Trump was arbitrary, says former FDA commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb. COVID travels in aerosols that flow much farther than six feet.
When some Americans became fed up and protested, they were vilified for "threatening the public." Some were fined. A few were arrested.
It's clear now that restrictive rules were not the best way to protect people.
Sweden took a near opposite approach. They mostly left people alone.
Swedish officials encouraged the elderly and other at-risk people to stay home.
But beyond that, they let life carry on as normal. Sweden didn't impose lockdowns, school closures, or mask mandates.
They followed standard pre-COVID wisdom that the best protection is what epidemiologists call "herd" or "collective" immunity. Once a critical mass of people are infected and recover, collective immunity will reduce the total number of infections.
Arrogant American politicians and media "experts" sneered at Sweden's approach.
NBC "reported" on what it called, "Sweden's failed experiment. How their dangerous Covid gamble went wrong."
CBS confidently stated, "Sweden becomes an example of how not to handle COVID."
Time magazine headlined: "Swedish COVID-19 Response Is a Disaster."
But the media's experts were just wrong. Swedish health officials were right.
Yes, at the beginning of the pandemic, Sweden suffered high numbers of COVID deaths, but as predicted, over time, herd immunity protected people. Sweden's excess death rate was the lowest in Europe.
Sweden's economy got through the pandemic much healthier than other countries. Because Swedish schools never closed, Swedish students didn't suffer the learning losses that American kids did.
Four years later, have media blowhards who were wrong apologized? Corrected their stories? No.
Have American politicians apologized and begged forgiveness for their arrogance, for destroying jobs, restricting our freedom, and needlessly pushing us around? No.
Let's not give politicians power like that again.
COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC
The post '15 Days To Slow the Spread': On the Fourth Anniversary, a Reminder to Never Give Politicians That Power Again appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This week's featured article is "After a Century, the Federal Tea Board Is Finally Dead" by Eric Boehm.
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>: After a Century, the Federal Tea Board Is Finally Dead appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"I see no reason," the late Sen. Harry Reid (D–Nev.) once declared on the Senate floor, "why those in this country who enjoy drinking tea need someone else to tell them what tastes good."
Yet for nearly 100 years that is exactly what the government did, thanks to one of the strangest agencies ever to be a part of the federal bureaucracy.
In addition to the usual beverage regulations aimed at ensuring proper storage and safe handling, imported tea was required for decades to pass a literal taste test before it could be sold in the United States. The task fell to a group of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) appointees, who would gather annually in a converted Navy warehouse in Brooklyn to smell, slosh, sip, and spit the various oolongs, greens, and Earl Greys that tea merchants sought to sell to Americans.
This was the federal Board of Tea Experts.
The board's members would taste dozens of teas over the course of several days. The process was more an art than a science. According to a 1989 Washington Post profile, there was no uniform method for tasting. Some board members worked in silence while others slurped their tea or gargled it loudly. Some preferred to taste the tea hot; others let it cool first. The warehouse where they gathered was outfitted with pictures of old-timey sailing ships, a kitchen sink, several kettles for boiling water, boxes upon boxes of tea, and large windows. The board's then-leader Robert H. Dick told the Post thatto properly inspect the tea, "I have to have a north light."
When Reid voiced his objection to the tea board in 1995, the agency had already survived two decades' worth of efforts to shut it down. Congress finally ended the board's oversight of tea imports a year later, but the federal Board of Tea Experts technically still existed for another 27 years. It was officially terminated on September 19, 2023.
The bizarre history and surprising longevity of the federal tea-tasting board is something of a mixed bag for anyone who wants to see more federal programs iced for good.
On one hand: The board was eventually shut down.
On the other: If it takes nearly 50 years to get rid of something as useless and insignificant as the Board of Tea Experts, what hope can there possibly be to do away with larger governmental entities backed by more powerful special interests? Hardly an election season goes by without some (usually Republican) presidential hopefuls promising to abolish this department or that agency—the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency are perennial favorites. Are those efforts doomed before they begin? Will those promises always be empty?
The weird tale of the Board of Tea Experts holds a variety of lessons for anyone interested in shrinking the size and scope of government. It's a warning about the stickiness of bad ideas, about an inertia that can limit even the smallest attempts at trimming the state.
"This is the reason people are upset about government," Reid said in that 1995 Senate floor speech. "What an absolute waste of taxpayers' money is it to have them spend $200,000 a year swishing tea around in their mouths."
Anthropologists believe human beings were drinking tea before recorded history. In China, where tea was first cultivated, accounts of the drink's benefits for keeping healthy and staying awake date back at least as far as the Shang dynasty (founded around 1700 B.C.); physical evidence of tea consumption and the tea trade goes back well over 2,000 years.
The relationship between tea and the state is ancient too. According to one Chinese legend, the drink was invented when leaves were accidentally blown into a cup belonging to Emperor Shennong, who was fond of sipping boiled water. The resulting brew tasted good, and presumably gave the mythic ruler one of humanity's first caffeine highs.
Tea made its way to Europe (and then the Americas) in the 1600s. A 1657 listing from a London coffee shop offered tea for sale starting at 16 shillings per pound—roughly $190 per pound today. Governments all over the world tried to subsidize and monopolize the tea trade at various times, and many collected bountiful revenue from their citizens' and colonists' addictions.
In the New World, that quest for revenue helped spark a history-altering backlash. The uprising in Boston Harbor on the night of December 16, 1773, wasn't the first tax revolt in American history, and it wouldn't be the last. But it remains the most memorable, and a crucial part of the country's founding mythology. The lingering cultural memory of the Boston Tea Party might have even played an indirect role in the creation of the federal Board of Tea Experts more than a century later.
"Since the British drank a lot of tea, they would pick the best teas, and then a lot of times when they had something they didn't want, that was left over, or maybe even damaged or something, they would fill the order from the United States with some of that tea," Dick, whose tenure on the Board of Tea Experts lasted from 1947 until 1996, explained in a 1984 interview published as part of an internal history of the FDA.
Worried that British tea exporters were taking advantage of their less sophisticated American customers, Congress passed the Tea Importation Act of 1897. The act created a new federal commission charged with ensuring the quality of the nation's tea supplies. But from the start, the board's standards seem to have been quite open to interpretation. When the Tea Importation Act was first passed, it merely said "that the tea should be rejected if it was unfit," Dick explained in that interview. "Well, unfit meant different things to different people."
Over time, tasting standards for different types of tea were put into place. Imported tea had to match the federally approved flavor profiles to be legally sold, with the tasters responsible for setting the standards. After the FDA was created in 1906, the tea-tasting board was rolled into the new agency, which would eventually grow to regulate cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and, of course, food. But the Board of Tea Experts remained a unique element of the FDA's sprawling portfolio. "Tea is the only food or beverage for which the [FDA] samples every lot upon entry for comparison to a standard recommended by a federal board," noted a 1996 analysis from the House of Representatives.
As the Post detailed in its 1989 profile, the annual gathering of the tea-tasters was not meant to identify the best teas or set particularly high standards for what would be allowed into the country. Rather, "the task is to select the worst that are still drinkable" and then use those standards as the basis for what would be permitted to enter the country for the rest of the year. At the height of its vague yet absolute powers, the tea board employed testers based in Boston, New York, and San Francisco; their job was to translate the board's standards into practice. A separate but related entity, the Board of Tea Appeals, provided due process for anyone wronged by the tea-tasters' opinions.
Even with some standards in place, bureaucratic laziness sometimes prevailed. At one point, Dick recalls being told by a then-senior member of the board that "you don't need to look at all of those teas because you can look at the prices and you can tell which is the good tea and which is the bad tea." Too bad consumers couldn't be trusted to do the same.
If the board was protecting consumers, it doesn't seem to have been protecting them from much—the board rejected less than 1 percent of the teas submitted for approval each year. But Dick argued the mere threatof rejection was a protection.
"If you eliminate the Tea Act then you've got a case of where somebody is going to take chances," Dick said in 1984. "If they have a poor tea, they don't know whether it will be rejected or not, and they don't know whether it would be sampled or not, and they may be tempted to ship it. So, it would make a difference."
There is a long history of domestic industries using made-up or exaggerated concerns about consumer safety to seek political power, then using that power to limit competition or create cartels. It's tempting to project that narrative onto the history of the Board of Tea Experts.
But there's a problem with that theory, says Ryan Young, a senior economist at the pro-market Competitive Enterprise Institute. There was not much of a domestic tea production industry in the 1890s. Even today, the vast majority of tea consumed in the United States comes from abroad, primarily India and China.
There may have been legitimate reasons to worry about the quality of tea being imported into the U.S. at the time the board was created, says Young. But it was private industry, not government, that solved it.
"Back then, groceries were often sold out of crates and barrels, often with no way to know who the producer was or where the product came from," he says. "Brands are an extremely important self-regulation device in markets. They improve trust and accountability, whereas anonymous producers can get away with all sorts of shenanigans."
By the middle of the 20th century, private self-regulation had solved the problem that the Board of Tea Experts was supposed to fix.
But government programs don't just go away when they become obsolete.
Can drinking tea help you live longer? Some studies suggest as much. Research published in Advances in Nutrition in 2020 found that regular consumption of tea is correlated with a lower risk of death from various cardiovascular issues, including strokes. The study's authors attributed tea drinkers' longer life spans to "flavonoids"—a pigment found in many tea leaves that is thought to be a powerful antioxidant.
I know of no peer-reviewed study suggesting government bureaucracies tasked with tea tasting have longer than average life spans. But the available evidence suggests that, indeed, they are quite difficult to kill.
"These tea-tasting people are just like lizards," Sen. Reid declared in 1995, comparing the board to critters he said he'd catch as a kid, ones whose tails would grow back even after they were yanked off. "You grab them and jerk something off and they are right back."
By then, the Board of Tea Experts had survived more than a quarter-century with a target on its back.
The first attempt to eliminate the tea board occurred in 1970, when the Nixon administration tried to redirect the board's budget of $125,000 (almost $1 million today) to other parts of the FDA. Nixon was looking for an easy public relations coup, according to a contemporary New York Times report. Killing off the tea-tasting board would be a symbol of the federal government's commitment to belt tightening, or so he thought.
The tea industry fought for the board's survival, arguing that the president had no power to drain the board's budget unless Congress first repealed the 1897 law that authorized it. With Congress apparently uninterested, Nixon quietly surrendered.
The attempt at least provided one lasting moment of hilarity. While digging through boxes of documents at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in 2021, Ashton Merck, a postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State University, came across a letter ostensibly mailed from a dormitory at the University of California, Berkeley. The letter writer claimed to represent a group of individuals who were "appalled at [Nixon's] proposal to eliminate one of the few remaining bastions of tradition and culture in this country" and the planned liquidation of Dick's job as the only full-time employee of the board.
The name of this alleged group taking the time to bend the ear of the most powerful man in the world? "The Committee To Keep Dick Tasting."
In the ensuing years, the tea-tasting board routinely turned up on lists put together by groups like Taxpayers for Common Sense as a target for federal budgetary pruning. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan both made half-hearted attempts to kill the board, without success.
In the '90s, Congress finally organized a serious revolt against the board's existence. Reid, an unexpected advocate for shrinking government, took on the role of Sam Adams. In a 1993 speech supporting his bill to cut off funding for the tea-tasting board's expense reimbursements, including a $50 per diem for each member, Reid reached for the obvious metaphor. A "congressional tea party" was necessary, he said, to "dump the tea experts overboard."
The bill passed. But even after losing their per diems and expenses, the board simply poured another cup.
Two years later, Reid aimed to bag the board for good. Working across the aisle with Sen. Hank Brown (R–Colo.), Reid pushed through a proposal to cut off all taxpayer funding for the board's staff. But that provision was struck from the final version of the bill during a conference committee meeting, following what The Washington Post termed "last-minute lobbying" from the industry.
"It's a sign of how difficult it is in Washington," Brown told The New York Times in September 1995. "Defeating some of this nonsense is going to be a long tough job. The tea board is quite resilient."
At that point, Reid boiled over. No longer content merely to pull the metaphorical tails off the tea bureaucrats, Reid and Rep. Scott Klug (R–Wis.) drafted bills to repeal the Tea Importation Act of 1897 and abolish the Board of Tea Experts for good. The bill passed both chambers of Congress unanimously and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on April 9, 1996.
The Board of Tea Experts had boiled its last kettle. Or so it appeared. Technically, the tea-tasting board outlived the man who played the biggest role in killing it. Reid died in late 2021, after a long Senate career that culminated in an eight-year stint as majority leader (during which time he battled a congressional Tea Party of a different kind).
Fifteen months after Reid passed away, the federal Board of Tea Experts was finally gone for good—after existing in a sort of limbo for more than two decades in which it had no members and no budget. Its obituary: a brief September 2023 notice in the Federal Register, which records the doings of the executive branch agencies, announcing that the FDA was removing "the Board of Tea Experts from the Agency's list of standing advisory committees" in accordance with the law passed by Congress in 1996—yes, 27 years prior.
A lot of things happened in American politics during the two and a half decades that the Board of Tea Experts existed in a sort of bureaucratic limbo. One of the more amusing moments took place on a debate stage in Michigan on November 9, 2011, where Gov. Rick Perry of Texas had a political moment for ages.
"And I will tell you, it's three agencies of government when I get there that are gone: Commerce, Education, and the, uh, what's the third one there? Let's see," the presidential hopeful said, awkwardly trying to recall what he wanted to tell you.
This was near the peak of the GOP's Tea Party era—a small-government populist movement that recalled that other, more famous story about the intersection of tea and American politics—and the candidates vying for a chance to challenge President Barack Obama were competing to see who could make the most aggressive promise to slash government.
"You can't name the third one?" asked moderator John Harwood, incredulously. The crowd laughed. Other candidates shouted suggestions. But it was hopeless. "The third one. I can't. Sorry," Perry concluded, before meekly adding, "Oops."
Perry's campaign limped along a little while after the remark, but for all intents and purposes, that was the moment it ended. It was a moment that mattered not only because of the comedy of a polished politician coming unglued on national television, but because it highlighted the humongous gap between Perry's campaign-trail blather and the reality of governing. How could anyone believe he had a workable plan to close entire federal departments when he couldn't even remember his own talking points?
A few years later, then-President Donald Trump appointed Perry to run the Department of Energy—the same department Perry couldn't remember he wanted to abolish.
With the annual federal budget deficit now nearing $2 trillion and the national debt reaching unsustainable levels, it's important for politicians to have big goals for cutting government. But ambition means nothing if not backed up with a practical plan of action. That's the difference between Nixon's failed attempt at killing the Board of Tea Experts as a public relations maneuver and Reid's serious, yearslong effort that finally buried it.
Trying to tear down old programs that no longer make sense—if they ever did—also cuts against the natural tendency of most politicians.
"Every new president and committee chair wants to make a mark, and so they push to create new programs of their design," says Chris Edwards, a budget policy expert at the Cato Institute. "They don't bother trying to repeal the related old and outdated programs because that would use major political capital they would rather use creating new programs."
The Board of Tea Experts is not the only federal agency or program to be successfully closed or privatized. Edwards points to the Office of Technology Assessment, an internal congressional study committee that produced reports on a wide range of scientific and technological issues for about 20 years before being shuttered in 1995 for being duplicative and unnecessary.
But the vast majority of the traffic is moving in the opposite direction. According to Downsizing the Federal Government, a Cato-affiliated project that Edwards runs to track the sprawling size of the federal government, there were 2,418 grant or subsidy programs on the books this year, more than double the number that existed in 1990.
That's why the best time to plan to close regulatory bodies and other government agencies isn't when they become obviously unnecessary—it's when they are created.
At first, every government agency has some reason for existing, even if it's not a good one. Even the Board of Tea Experts, which was rooted in those late–19th century worries about Americans being served subpar tea. Once it's created, regulators and their rules warp markets and create constituencies that benefit from preventing change—including the regulators themselves.
In the mid-1980s, Dick was arguing for the tea board's continued relevance by pointing to potential consumer harms that were no longer realistic in a world with grocery stores and extensive private quality-control operations. Nearly 30 years after the Board of Tea Experts was effectively shuttered, there's no indication that Americans are drinking worse tea—because the board and its standards weren't accomplishing anything the market hadn't already sorted out decades ago. And, of course, the FDA still holds the power to regulate tea (as it regulates all food and drink in the United States), even in the absence of a special board tasked with sipping each imported batch.
Is there a way to ensure programs and agencies that have outlived their usefulness are actually shut down? Young of the Competitive Enterprise Institute points to Texas. The state's Sunset Advisory Commission, which periodically reviews government agencies and recommends to the state Legislature when one is no longer serving a purpose, claims to have played a role in abolishing 41 agencies, consolidating another 51, and saving taxpayers more than $1 billion.
With mandatory sunsets, Young says, "ineffective or unneeded agencies can still shut down, even if Congress can't muster up the courage for a vote."
Absent some kind of institutional reform, federal programs only seem to end up on the chopping block when they make an enemy of someone in a powerful position. Without Reid, the Board of Tea Experts might very well be holding its annual tasting session right now.
When any changes do happen on their own, they tend to be incredibly slow.
In October, the Prune Administrative Committee—a federal entity that oversees the "handling of dried prunes"—took the first step toward abolishing itself after an internal review found that the costs of the board's regulations "outweigh the benefits to industry members."
But it isn't going away for good just yet. No, the committee will continue to exist for at least another seven years, during which time it will issue no rules or regulations. If America survives that wild experiment with ungoverned dried plums, the committee and its parent, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, will decide whether to make the arrangement permanent.
"Inertia might be the strongest force in all of politics," says Young. "If it takes 50 years of reform efforts to close down a tea-tasting board, then larger reforms are doomed without some kind of institution-level change
The Board of Tea Experts was a uniquely silly and superfluous part of the federal bureaucracy. No other product has ever been subjected to literal taste testing by federal officials before it could be legally sold.
Sadly, it is not the only silly or superfluous part of the government. A comprehensive list of pointless and wasteful government programs would be too long to print, but here are six others begging to meet the same fate as the tea board.
Popcorn Board: Created by Congress to "develop new markets for popcorn and popcorn products." The board funds itself by charging fees to popcorn producers—fees that presumably are passed along to popcorn eaters. Maybe that's why it's so expensive at the movie theater? Similar user fee–funded boards include the National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Board, the National Mango Board, the National Potato Promotion Board, and the National Watermelon Promotion Board.
Mushroom Council: They say no one wants to see how the sausage of government gets made, but what about the shit it's grown in? A part of the Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Mushroom Council is supposed to "maintain and expand existing mushroom markets and uses." Imported mushrooms are taxed 0.0055 cents per pound to pay for that critical work.
Denali Commission: Created in 1998 to fund infrastructure projects in Alaska, the Denali Commission was targeted for elimination by both Barack Obama and Donald Trump—but Congress keeps funding it anyway. Mike Marsh, the commission's inspector general, wrote in 2013 that the agency is "a congressional experiment that hasn't worked out in practice" and urged Congress to "put its money elsewhere." In FY 2023, the Denali Commission had a budget of $13.8 million.
Christmas Tree Promotion Board: A 12-member board (one for each day of Christmas?) created in 2011 to "expand the market and uses of fresh-cut Christmas trees" and funded with a new fee of 15 cents on all real Christmas trees sold in the country. Nothing says "Merry Christmas!" like a new tax on the people who are already using your product. Interestingly, this was not created by an act of Congress but by the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service, which Congress authorized in 1996 and gave the ability to create new boards and agencies like this one. Oh, administrative state, how lovely are thy line items.
Corporation for Travel Promotion: Established in 2010, this 11-member board within the Department of Commerce is charged with "providing useful information to those interested in traveling to the United States," as if there weren't already dozens of websites and tour books doing the same thing. It's now known as Brand USA. Foreigners seeking visas to enter the United States pay a $4 fee to fund the corporation, even though they likely don't need to be convinced to visit.
Rural Utilities Service: The Rural Electrification Administration was created as part of the New Deal in 1936 to expand the nation's power grids and phone lines to far-flung homes and communities. These days it's pretty difficult to find homes that lack electricity or phone service, but the administration is still around (though it was renamed in 1994). This tiny corner of the USDA—yep, it's not even part of the Energy Department—cost taxpayers $154 million this year.
The post After a Century, the Federal Tea Board Is Finally Dead appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For years, iPhone users have been saddled with an unusual feature: The popular Apple smartphone used a proprietary cable, called the Lightning cable, for charging.
By the 2020s, most manufacturers of comparable devices had switched to a universal standard, USB-C. Even some other Apple devices—including the iPad, which in many ways resembles an oversized iPhone—moved to the common USB-C. But the iPhone remained stubbornly attached to its Apple-specific cord.
Inevitably, this caused headaches and complications for some iPhone users, even those fully ensconced in the ecosystem of Apple devices. What if you want to borrow a friend's charging cable and that friend uses an Android phone? What if you're also lugging around an iPad? How many charging cords does one person really need to carry?
But the iPhone 15, released in 2023, uses the USB-C port for charging—in Europe, the U.S., and everywhere else. Starting with this model, Apple customers won't have to worry about what type of phone their friends have when asking to borrow a charger.
This change didn't come from a new innovation or from consumer demands. It was mandated by European regulators.
In September 2021, the European Commission proposed a common charger regulation, claiming it was appropriate to reduce electronic waste and consumer frustration. The proposal was passed in 2022, and the mandate goes into effect in 2024.
This might sound like a boon for users. But in the long term, this sort of rule threatens to thwart future innovation by locking tech companies into government-determined feature sets that can be updated or improved only with regulatory approval. Rules like this turn bureaucrats into product designers.
The charging rules are a symptom of a larger problem. E.U. bureaucrats' "regulate-first" approach has been spreading beyond Europe's borders to impact American companies and American consumers. Unfortunately, many American policy makers seem to be looking to Europe as a model.
Many Americans first experienced the impact of the European regulatory approach in May 2018, when they started noticing more click-through requirements to accept cookies and updated privacy policies. All those annoying security pop-ups and repeated notice of updates to terms of service on websites were the direct result of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), an E.U. policy that required companies to adopt specific practices around interactions with user data and users' rights related to those data.
The GDPR didn't just bring a bunch of annoying pop-ups, it also caused huge corporate compliance costs. When the GDPR went into effect in 2018, companies reported spending an average of $1.3 million on compliance costs. A Pricewaterhouse-Coopers survey found that 40 percent of global companies spent over $10 million in initial compliance. These weren't one-time costs; some companies spend millions annually to comply.
Unsurprisingly, some organizations decided to pull out of the E.U. market entirely rather than comply with these rules. Others chose to deploy these changes all around the world rather than try to tailor compliance to the European Union. In other words, they treated the E.U.'s rules as global requirements.
This is a common result of tech regulations: Laws passed in one region end up affecting citizens located in other areas as companies standardize practices.
Consider the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a European regulation that went into effect in 2022. Under this law, regulators can put additional restrictions on otherwise legal business practices for companies labeled "gatekeepers." In September 2023, regulators gave six companies—Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon, Apple, ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok), Meta (the parent company of Facebook), and Microsoft—the gatekeeper label. Notably, five of these six companies are American, and none are European. Meta and ByteDance have challenged their designation as gatekeepers, while Microsoft and Google have announced they do not plan to challenge the change.
The DMA's rules aren't yet finalized. But they could keep companies stuck with the gatekeeper designation from prioritizing their own products or services, and they might impose restrictions on messaging and advertising.
The Digital Services Act (DSA) is another European regulation that could significantly change the way users experience the internet both in Europe and beyond. The DSA was part of a legislative package with the DMA, but it's focused on disinformation and supposedly harmful online content. The law gives regulators more power to require that online platforms respond to their requests for information about content moderation actions and speakers and even allow regulators to mandate takedowns.
Even prior to the DSA, European governments had far greater ability to intervene in moderation decisions than U.S. officials, who are mostly limited to making nonbinding requests. In contrast, companies subject to the DSA risk fines of up to 6 percent of their annual turnover.
Europe also adopted an AI Act in December. While E.U. bureaucrats trumpeted the law as the "first of its kind," that's not something to brag about. The regulation will create a series of stringent requirements on various artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. If there's good news, it is that some nations in Europe, including Germany, France, and Italy, are pushing for AI self-regulation instead. Although they probably won't stop new AI controls completely, their objections could at least reduce the regulatory burden that AI companies face and signal awareness of the impact such regulations can have on innovation.
Europe seems committed to forcing innovators to prove to regulators that a technology will not cause harm rather than making rules designed to stop proven harms. This approach to regulation—sometimes described as "the precautionary principle"—presumes a technology is guilty until it is proven innocent.
In 2015, President Barack Obama applauded U.S. technological success and warned that European lawmakers were trying to use regulation to hamstring American business. "We have owned the internet," he told Recode. "Our companies have created it, expanded it, perfected it in ways that they can't compete. And oftentimes what is portrayed as high-minded positions on issues sometimes is just designed to carve out some of their commercial interests." He cast European regulation as a way to "set up some roadblocks for our companies to operate effectively there."
Obama isn't the only American leader to worry publicly about the E.U.'s overreach. In 2019, President Donald Trump said, "Every week you see them going after Facebook and Apple and all of these companies….They think there's a monopoly, but I'm not sure that they think that. They just think this is easy money." In 2022, a bipartisan group of senators warned that the DMA and DSA, "as currently drafted, will unfairly disadvantage U.S. firms to the benefit of not just European companies, but also powerful state-owned and subsidized Chinese and Russian companies, which would have negative impacts on internet users' privacy, security and free speech."
Such concerns are far from misguided. Remember, five of the six designated gatekeepers under the DMA are American. Similarly, the DSA designated 19 companies as "very large online platforms" or "very large search engines" subject to increased regulatory scrutiny and specific requirements within the areas they are deemed potential gatekeepers. Of the 19 companies slapped with a "very large" designation, 15 are American and only two are European.
At times, some of these regulations seem constructed in such a way to directly target American companies—while giving a boost to the few European companies that might otherwise be subject to their regulations.
This growing array of requirements could have unintended consequences for how products function far beyond Europe—and how we can use them to speak online.
Supporters of the GDPR claimed the law would preserve privacy and online safety. But some E.U. tech rules could actually make software and devices less safe. For example, requiring platforms to allow third-party payment processors or "side loading"—essentially installing software that isn't explicitly authorized by the phone or operating system manufacturer—is intended to level the playing field for smaller competitors. But making devices and software more open to third-party modification could also make them vulnerable to hacking. The likely global reach of these rules would mean those vulnerabilities wouldn't be limited to Europe.
More rules on product design, meanwhile, could produce a chilling effect on new tech. Companies may be less likely to try new products or privacy tactics that might not comply with European regulations if they know that will foreclose a big market. Even an innovation that improves privacy and cybersecurity might struggle to comply with GDPR requirements designed with a different model in mind.
It is not just innovation and security that are at risk. Americans may soon find themselves subject to European bureaucrats' norms when it comes to free speech.
Already, many European and Latin American countries have created laws governing hate speech or harmful content. These laws are likely to result in more aggressive takedowns by social media companies, especially on hot-button political issues. If tech companies decide to enforce a single global standard for community guidelines, American internet users will end up communicating in online spaces where the rules were designed to comply with foreign hate speech laws that aren't restrained by the First Amendment's protections.
While some American officials have criticized these E.U. regulations, others have seen them as an opportunity to argue that the U.S. should change its own approach. A growing number of American policy makers are looking to Europe as an example—or even actively collaborating with E.U. tech regulators.
In March 2023, the Federal Trade Commission sent officials to Brussels to aid in implementing and enforcing the DMA. At the same time, the agency has taken an increasingly aggressive approach domestically, attempting to enforce antitrust standards that resemble Europe's by waging a yearslong legal campaign against mergers in the tech sector. (This campaign has failed repeatedly in U.S. courts.)
Some policy makers have directly applauded the European approach. In June 2022, Sens. Ed Markey (D–Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) sent a letter asking the secretary of commerce to "restore the sanity" and follow the E.U. in requiring a universal charger for smartphones and certain other electronic devices.
Meanwhile, European regulators seem eager to gain a greater foothold in the United States. The E.U. has opened an office in San Francisco to promote compliance with its technology regulations, a move that seems to more than just tacitly acknowledge that these regulations will have a big impact on American companies.
The stakes are high. A 2022 study found that 16 percent of European companies would be willing to switch to a Chinese tech provider due to anticipated cost increases from the DMA. Others might turn to providers that are not subject to the regulations but provide inferior products either in quality or security. These policies would punish successful American companies while benefiting those of more questionable regimes.
The U.S. needs to be an alternative to such heavy-handed controls. It should stick with the relatively hands-off approach that has helped make America a global leader in tech.
In 1996, when the modern internet was in its infancy, Congress made clear it was the policy of the United States "to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation." As Rep. Christopher Cox (R–Calif.) said at the time, America does "not wish to have a Federal Computer Commission with an army of bureaucrats regulating the Internet because, frankly, the Internet has grown up to be what it is without that kind of help from the Government."
Similarly, the Clinton administration's Framework for Global Electronic Commerce not only described the potential benefits of the internet for global commerce but criticized the consequences of overregulation by declaring that the internet is presumed free. This nonregulatory position allowed the internet to flourish without tight constraints.
"For this potential to be realized fully, governments must adopt a non-regulatory, market-oriented approach to electronic commerce, one that facilitates the emergence of a transparent and predictable legal environment to support global business and commerce," read the Clinton report. "Official decision makers must respect the unique nature of the medium and recognize that widespread competition and increased consumer choice should be the defining features of the new digital marketplace."
Further, it cautioned that governments could "by their actions…facilitate electronic trade or inhibit it." This approach told innovators and investors they were free to try. It is miles from what we're seeing from politicians eager to crack down on tech companies today.
We have a new iPhone charger now. For some users, it might be more convenient. But consider what would have happened if this decision had been made a decade earlier.
In 2012, smartphones were still evolving. Apple used cumbersome 30-pin chargers for their phones. Other companies used older USB options, such as micro- and mini-USB, which were clunky in different ways. When the Lightning cable arrived, it was faster, smaller, more durable, and more physically secure. It offered an improved user experience relative to the other options, which in turn spurred adoption of the USB-C standard.
A more regulated marketplace might have stopped this development in its tracks, letting bureaucrats who prioritize uniformity over all else decide on a single standard rather than letting the market evolve.
The debate about European tech regulations and their ripple effects on American companies and consumers is often framed in terms of safety or privacy or the consumer experience. But at heart, it's about a much simpler question: Who gets to design the future—the government, or innovators?
The post Don't Let E.U. Bureaucrats Design Americans' Tech appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The House of Representatives voted 352-65 on Wednesday for a bill that threatens to ban the social media platform TikTok. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act would ban TikTok from app stores unless its Chinese parent company ByteDance gives up ownership within six months.
The vote moved America a little bit closer to the Chinese-style online censorship that TikTok's opponents decry. Whether they acknowledge it or not, TikTok's opponents are using the same arguments that Chinese and Iranian censors can—and do—use to justify cracking down on social media in their own countries.
Chinese authorities have long maintained a "Great Firewall" over the country's internet, driven by the idea that the success of American tech companies is a threat to their "cyber sovereignty." The Iranian government, too, has begun to embrace the idea of "internet sovereignty," banning foreign social media networks in favor of Iranian-controlled platforms.
American lawmakers have started to push the same notions. In a March 5 joint statement, Republican and Democratic members of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party claimed that foreign control of a social media platform is a threat to U.S. sovereignty.
"America's foremost adversary has no business controlling a dominant media platform in the United States," committee chairman Rep. Mike Gallagher (R–Wis.) said. Ranking Member Raja Krishnamoorthi (D–Ill.) added that the TikTok bill will protect Americans "from the digital surveillance and influence operations of regimes that could weaponize their personal data against them."
Foreign censors could rightfully make the same complaints about American social media. The U.S. government has infamously prodded tech companies to hand over user data, both overtly and covertly. The U.S. military and intelligence services even use advertising data to track potential targets.
It's true that TikTok's content moderation falls in line with the wishes of Chinese censors. But again, foreign critics can say the same about U.S.-based social media companies.
The Biden administration has used the specter of "disinformation" to push social media moderation in line with their policies. Meta has censored Middle Eastern content that opposes U.S. foreign policy, while Twitter has created loopholes for the U.S. military to run its own propaganda accounts.
Of course, American law (unlike Chinese or Iranian law) limits how much the government can censor social media. Last year, courts banned and then unbanned the Biden administration from pressuring social media moderators. But the decision ultimately lies in Washington; it's not like European or Latin American voters have any say over the U.S. Supreme Court.
Competition is the strongest force keeping the internet free. Whenever users find a topic banned on TikTok, they can escape to Twitter or Instagram to discuss the censored content. And when Twitter or Instagram enforce politically motivated censorship on a different topic, users can continue that discussion on TikTok.
Forcing TikTok under American control is a way to block that escape route. Instead of protecting Americans from Chinese censorship, it would bring Chinese-style censorship home.
The post TikTok's Opponents Want Chinese-style Censorship in America appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Separation of powers is a core concept of America's Constitution. In the Founders' scheme, Congress, the courts, and the executive are independent branches of government, with their own roles and duties, intended to check one another.
But since 1984, the Supreme Court has hamstrung its own ability to act independently in the face of executive power. In Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the high court adopted a blanket presumption of deference to statutory interpretations put forth by regulatory agencies in any case where the statute was ambiguous, so long as the interpretation was reasonable.
If there is ambiguity about what the text of a law says, the Supreme Court decided in that case, then the courts should defer to the government's experts. This became known as the Chevron deference.
In practice, the Chevron deference undermined the Court's independence, since it forced courts to just accept executive branch interpretations in many tough cases.
The doctrine also creates perverse incentives for the other two branches. For example, by giving deference to agencies in ambiguous cases, it gave executive branch regulators incentive to hunt for ambiguities in order to expand their own power. This led to decades of executive overreach, as administrations used convoluted readings of statutes to pursue agendas Congress never imagined.
By the same token, Chevron deference shifted the burden of making well-written and fully thought-out laws away from Congress. Empowering regulators meant that, at the margins, Congress had less reason to write clear, consensus-based legislation.
The result, over 40 years, has been a shift away from the intended constitutional order, in which Congress writes laws, the executive branch implements them, and the courts rule independently on matters of dispute. We now live under an often dysfunctional system in which Congress is less inclined to compromise and legislate on tough issues, regulators are more inclined to take matters into their own hands, and courts have less power to tell executive branch officials when they have overreached.
The system lends itself to politicized regulatory pingponging, as courts are generally required to defer to the differing and even dramatically opposed interpretations put forth by shifting Democratic and Republican administrations.
This was what was at stake in January, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments that put the legacy of Chevron on trial. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, a group of herring fishermen from New Jersey objected to a federal rule requiring them not only to host government monitors on their boats but to pay the cost of those monitors—about $700 a day.
That requirement was based on the 2007 Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA), which does require some types of fishing operations to host and pay for government monitors. But the fishermen in this case weren't explicitly covered by that requirement, so when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) decided to expand the purview of the MSA in order to cover a budget shortfall, the fishermen went to court.
The fishermen's cause is important on its own merits. But for larger constitutional purposes, it's something of a red herring. The specifics of their complaint are less important than whether or not the courts had to defer to NOAA's newly stretched interpretation of the MSA.
In oral arguments, the three justices appointed by Democrats seemed inclined to keep Chevron as is, with all three suggesting that experts in regulatory agencies are better equipped than courts are to make tough decisions about difficult-to-parse statutes.
But the rest of the Court seemed skeptical. Justice Neil Gorsuch noted that Chevron deference tends to empower agencies at the expense of less-powerful individuals, such as immigrants, veterans, and Social Security claimants. Addressing the Court, Paul Clement, who defended the fishermen, put it this way: "One of the many problems with the Chevron rule is it basically says that when the statutory question is close, the tie goes to the government."
Outside the Court, news reports and activists warned of the consequences of taking down Chevron, noting that much of the federal government's vast regulatory authority rested on its rule of deference. As a USA Today report on the case noted, "The court's decision could undo decades of rules and procedures involving land use, the stock market, and on-the-job safety."
Loper Bright was not the only Supreme Court case to challenge major parts of the government's regulatory authority this term. Sheetz v. County of El Dorado takes aim at regulatory takings, and Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy revolves around the question of whether the government violates the Seventh Amendment's requirements about jury trials when judging securities claims. Collectively, wrote Cameron Bonnell in The Georgetown Environmental Law Review, these cases "indicate the Court's eagerness to continue shaping the proper scope of government regulatory authority."
For too long, the administrative state has run unchecked over much of American life. That might finally be coming to an end with this year's Supreme Court term. In discussing the problems with Chevron with NPR, Clement said, "I think it's really as simple as this, which is: When the statute is ambiguous, and the tie has to go to someone, we think the tie should go to the citizen and not the government." One can hope.
The post SCOTUS Takes on <i>Chevron</i> Deference appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Reason reported in October that the federal government owns millions of square feet of unused office space. Watchdog agencies have long recommended that the government sell off some of its unused real estate, both to save money and to stimulate the property tax base by offloading those buildings to the private sector.
But good luck selling them off when you can't even show whether or not they contain dangerous levels of asbestos.
That's the finding of a report released this week by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The GAO reviewed the General Services Administration's (GSA) policy on environmental contaminants in federal properties, since the GSA "may be legally responsible for the cleanup of environmental contaminants on federal properties it manages" if a building is sold. If an agency wants to get rid of an unneeded building, "the agency must notify GSA of certain environmental contaminants, so that the contamination can either be properly cleaned up before disposal or disclosed to the next owner."
"Federal accounting standards require agencies responsible for environmental contamination to estimate future environmental cleanup costs and to report such costs as environmental liabilities in their annual financial statements," the report notes. Ninety-five percent of the GSA's liabilities are sorted into asbestos and non-asbestos, and its liability estimates have ranged in recent years from $1.8 billion to $2 billion annually.
Asbestos is a fibrous material resistant to heat, which made it an ideal candidate for use as building insulation. Unfortunately, when disturbed, asbestos fibers are highly toxic and can cause respiratory diseases like lung cancer and mesothelioma; the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned its use in new construction in 1989.
Because the danger arises from disturbing it, though, it's not always necessary to remove existing asbestos: "Undamaged asbestos that is properly managed in place poses little health risk," according to the EPA. "If done improperly, removing asbestos has the potential to create a greater health risk than leaving it undisturbed." The same is true of lead-based paint.
As such, GSA policy "requires a baseline asbestos inspection for each building built before 1998, along with re-inspection surveys every 5 years, unless a previous inspection indicates no asbestos in the building," according to the GAO report. "The policy also requires annual surveillance of buildings with asbestos, which is the process of walking through a facility and visually noting any changes in asbestos condition."
But the GSA has been incredibly lax with these inspections. The report finds that the "GSA has not completed asbestos inspections required by its asbestos management policy for approximately two-thirds of buildings within the last 5 years." According to the GSA's own data, 638 out of 955 buildings were out of compliance with the policy. That total "includes 228 buildings that do not have a known date of last inspection and 410 buildings whose last inspection was not within the last 5 years"; of those 410, "214 last had an inspection more than 10 years ago."
The report found that "15 of the 22 property sites GSA disposed of during fiscal years 2018 through 2022 likely included asbestos or non-asbestos contaminants." The GSA countered that this was no big deal, since the agency "is generally allowed to sell or convey properties with such liabilities in their current state, or 'as-is,' with required disclosures," and agency officials "target buyers—such as commercial developers—who understand the risks and are not concerned with the presence of asbestos or lead-based paint."
But the report also found that the presence of potential "hazardous releases," like contaminated soil or groundwater, does affect the amount a buyer is willing to pay for a property. "Property developers who bought GSA surplus property between fiscal years 2018 and 2022 told us that the presence of certain environmental contaminants can affect the property's value and influence the price they are willing to pay," the report says, including in some cases the presence of asbestos. "These buyers said that, depending on the circumstance, they may bid lower for properties with contaminants than those without, partly to offset the necessary cleanup expenses. In addition, these buyers indicated that environmental issues can limit who is willing to buy the property."
In response to the report, the GSA indicated that it was in the process of revising its policy, favoring a more risk-based approach that prioritized annual surveillance and only required further testing when asbestos has degraded or been disturbed. But the GAO report notes that this may be "less effective, because annually reviewing the condition of asbestos relies on having a current asbestos inventory, developed from the more rigorous asbestos inspections."
In other words, the GSA is unable to adopt a less rigorous approach because of how lax it has been with its inspections and record keeping.
The post The Federal Government Doesn't Know How Many of Its Buildings Contain Asbestos appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After enacting sweeping reforms in Argentina, President Javier Milei faced a major protest. Tens of thousands of people marched through the streets, hundreds of flights were grounded, and schools and businesses closed in protest of Milei's radical attempt to fix the troubled South American country.
Milei is a rarity; there aren't many self-described libertarian heads of state in history. To avert economic disaster in a country facing huge deficits and a 160 percent inflation rate (that has since spiked to over 211 percent), he told the country things would likely get worse before they could get better.
In his inaugural address on December 10, Milei acknowledged the daunting challenges ahead: "No government has received a worse inheritance than the one we are receiving….We neither seek nor desire the difficult decisions that must be made in the coming weeks. But unfortunately, we have no choice."
Ten days into his term, Milei issued a "mega-decree" of more than 300 executive measures. He abolished national rent control, which had caused a 75 percent drop in available apartments in Buenos Aires in 2022 and 2023. He repealed price controls, slashed subsidies, and fired more than 5,000 government employees. He allowed direct competition with Argentina's government-owned airline, which he plans to privatize. And he defied the country's powerful labor unions.
Milei's transformative agenda has encountered resistance, notably from Argentina's largest labor union, the General Confederation of Labor, which represents about one out of every five Argentine workers. The union called for a nationwide strike on January 24, bringing portions of Buenos Aires to a standstill.
Their main reason for protesting? Milei had issued an order ending the automatic withholding of union dues, leaving workers free to opt out of union membership. He also banned government workers in sectors such as health care and education from striking. While his measures were temporarily suspended by a court ruling, unions are making a show of force so that Milei's agenda doesn't make it through the National Congress.
Despite the economic challenges and opposition, Milei remains resolute in his pursuit of a freer, less regulated, and less debt-ridden Argentina. Addressing world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum in January, he said the Argentina of the future will be based on libertarian principles.
"If measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of markets, free competition, free price systems, if you hinder trade, if you attack private property, the only possible fate is poverty," Milei said.
Despite the union's opposition, Milei's main political adversaries aren't Argentina's workers. In fact, Milei is calling for increased welfare in the short term to ease the pain for the working class during this transition to a new economic model. As Argentine political economist Marcos Falcone tells Reason, Milei's actual adversaries are wealthy Argentines who have benefited from government largesse.
"Milei is going against crony capitalism, because he is basically trying to kill the businessmen that have lived off of government support," Falcone says. "We need to move forward. And the people need to be able to profit—not just companies because of regulations and privileges."
In his speech at the Davos conference, Milei encouraged business owners not to be intimidated "by the political class or by the parasites who live off the state."
"You are heroes. You are the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we've ever seen," Milei continued. "Do not surrender to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution. The state is the problem itself."
Milei faces a thicket of regulations to cut and massive political resistance in Argentina. It won't be easy to carry out his nation's direly needed economic transformation. We'll have to wait and see if he picked the right chainsaw to cut through the challenges ahead.
The post Milei Is Defying Argentina's Powerful Labor Unions appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It's not particularly surprising that President Joe Biden has become a de facto champion of industrial policy, with his National Economic Council director calling for a "modern industrial strategy" involving "strategic public investments" to bring about "the full potential of our nation's economy." A hallmark of left-of-center economics has always been a high degree of comfort with attempts to manage the economy from the top down.
More surprising has been the rise in recent years of a cadre of self-identifying conservatives who think industrial policy is wise or even necessary. Prominent within that cadre is Oren Cass, who founded the group American Compass in 2020 to push back against the free market "dogmatism" that he says has caused generations of Republicans to resist economic meddling on principle.
Among the strongest arguments for insisting that government remain as hands-off as possible toward the economy is that there is something fundamentally unjust about using public resources to give a leg up to individuals or segments of the population that isn't available to everyone. To sidestep that objection, some industrial policy proponents make a curious claim: that everything government does necessarily involves choosing winners and losers, and so all we can hope to do is to choose wisely—to pick the right winners and losers, if you will.
Cass articulated this view in unusually explicit terms near the end of a recent podcast episode. "Any country is going to have an industrial policy. It's just a question of what industrial policy," he said. "And you're always going to have special interests steering it. So the art is not in draining the swamp or keeping the special interests out. It's in picking the right special interests and having them push towards things that might actually be useful."
A similar idea was floated by the Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar at an event hosted by American Compass last week. "Decisions are always political," she said during one panel. "Everything's an industrial policy in the sense that different interest groups are being prioritized or not."
But is it true that all policy is industrial policy? That's a puzzling suggestion given that one of the core complaints of Cass et al. is that the so-called neoliberal order has failed to do what they consider a sufficient amount of industrial policy. If the only choice is which industrial policy to pursue, then being "for industrial policy" (or even for an increase in industrial policy) would be just as meaningless as being against it.
But as the American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Strain put it during the American Compass event, "I don't think it's the case that all policy is industrial policy. Industrial policy is a set of policies that are designed to prop up a particular industry….Some people may think particular sectors are more important than others. I think a lot of people in this room probably think that manufacturing is particularly important…but let's be clear: The absence of doing that is not itself an industrial policy."
Set aside the semantics. There are, in fact, two broad visions on offer in this debate. One says that people should be as free as possible to make their own resource-allocation decisions, and markets should be allowed to sort things out from there. Economic winners and losers will emerge, but they won't be "chosen." The state's role is to enforce the basic rules of the game, which apply to everyone equally, and it should never abuse its power by tilting the playing field to favor one team over another.
The other vision is one in which markets cannot be trusted to produce good outcomes, so government actors must step in and overrule them. The state isn't a referee; it's a mechanic, and subsidies and regulatory carve-outs are levers that can be pulled and tools that can be employed to fine-tune the economic machine in the best interest of society as a whole. Needless to say, there is a clear substantive difference between these libertarian and technocratic approaches.
Industrial policy advocates will occasionally make a fuss when their position is characterized in terms of picking winners and losers. But industrial policy, as Cass himself defends it, involves making exactly those sorts of judgments about which industries are deserving of a boost from Uncle Sam and which are not. One of Cass' favorite dictums is that producing computer chips serves the national interest more than producing potato chips does, and he wants our public policy to reflect that.
Back in 2019, Cass participated in a high-profile debate at the first National Conservatism Conference (check out my writeup of that event) in which he admitted that his aim was to have Washington privilege "the sector of our economy that makes physical things—traditional manufacturing, resource extraction, energy production, agriculture, some construction, and so forth," because he believes those industries "matter more for the economy's health and long-run trajectory."
There's just no way around it: Cass wants to empower policy makers to put their thumbs on the scale on behalf of certain sectors. And that's a best-case scenario; attempts at industrial policy in practice often devolve into handouts from taxpayers to individual companies that have political connections to those in power. Think of the outrageous amounts of money the Export-Import Bank funnels to Boeing (and how well has that been working out?), or the Trump administration's Foxconn boondoggle, or, well, pretty much everything about the CHIPS Act implementation.
It is true that there will always be special interests vying to capture what economists call "rents," or goodies available to private actors via the political process rather than the market. Some of us look at that reality and resolve on doing everything we can to constrain state interference in the economy, since by reducing the rents that are available you reduce the incentive for private actors to focus their resources on Washington instead of on actually productive pursuits. Others apparently think the fact that rent-seeking interests will always exist gives them moral carte blanche to use public power on behalf of whichever interests they like best.
A helpful example of this distinction was on display during a different panel at last week's American Compass event, when National Review senior writer Michael Brendan Dougherty trained his ire on America's higher-ed financing apparatus, which he correctly noted enables the existence of "bottom-tier colleges" that are surely a net drain on society:
There's one near me, Mercy College. Almost all the students at Mercy College are brought in by advertising saying, 'Hey, you make a million dollars more over your lifetime if you have a college degree.' The college does not advertise that it has like a sub–33 percent completion rate after six years. Almost all of the people who even complete the [degrees] go back to the service industry that they left, with no improvement in their earnings. So what you've done is you've used the government to load a giant debt load onto a low-five-figure-earning worker to subsidize the existence of a totally mediocre six-figure professor and the administrative class around them.
The federally subsidized student loan system is an obvious instance of government tilting the playing field to benefit a well-connected segment of the economy at the expense of the majority of Americans who will never earn a college degree. It's something that libertarians have been beating the drum about relentlessly for as long as it has existed. And it's something that supporters of the Republican Party's working-class turn, which I presume includes Cass and his allies, ought to be particularly aggrieved by.
But there are two crucially different positions that a proponent of student-loan reform might take. One is that the current system is corrupt and we should roll it back, full stop. The other is that we should redirect the resources from one well-intentioned but disastrous federal subsidy program into a different federal subsidy program, benefitting some other, more deserving constituency, in the deluded belief that this time we'll be able to avoid the pitfalls that have plagued so many of the mind-bogglingly wasteful, tragically distortionary, and inherently unfair federal subsidy programs that came before.
Dougherty suggested we have two choices on the higher-ed issue: "Do we want to keep protecting the lowest third of colleges with the way they're given this gusher of money from the government through student loans," he asked, "or do we want to protect some workers with those resources?"
Friends, there is a third option: Just say no. It may be futile to think we can get special interests entirely out of our politics, but we can choose to move, however imperfectly, in the direction of less government interference in the economy.
The post Not All Policy Is Industrial Policy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Biden administration may take redistribution to new extremes if a policy revision floated in December comes to fruition. The White House wants to give federal agencies the right to seize some pharmaceutical patents when they deem drug prices too high.
President Joe Biden claims authority to act under the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which lets nonprofits and small businesses retain ownership of inventions made possible by federal contracts, grants, or cooperative agreements—so long as they patent and license these inventions. Its impetus was all the innovation languishing under government ownership.
"In 1980, the federal government had approximately 30,000 patents, of which only 5% led to new or improved products," according to the Syracuse University Office of Technology Transfer. The government simply didn't "have the resources to develop and market the inventions."
Under the Bayh-Dole system, it's easier for inventions (including pharmaceuticals) to get from the research stage to the market stage. Since the point of the law is to let the public benefit from innovation, it contains a stipulation saying the government can take ownership of an invention if an institution doesn't commercialize it.
This stipulation, known as "march-in rights," was designed as a safeguard against the system being abused by companies who might purchase licenses solely to keep competitors from using new technology. The government has never actually exercised march-in rights before. But they can apply if a patent holder doesn't commercialize an invention in a timely manner or tries to license it on unreasonable terms, among a few other reasons. Notably, these reasons do not include "the White House thinks it's priced too high."
"The purpose of our act was to spur the interaction between public and private research so that patients would receive the benefits of innovative science sooner," wrote former Sens. Birch Bayh (D–Ind.) and Bob Dole (R–Kan.), in a 2002 Washington Post op-ed. They noted that even when early-stage research was government-funded, the financial and temporal input required from private industry was still substantial. "Bayh-Dole did not intend that government set prices on resulting products" or be able to revoke a license "contingent on the pricing of a resulting product."
Now the Biden administration wants to allow use of the law in a way its creators explicitly stated it was not intended to be used. "When drug companies won't sell taxpayer-funded drugs at reasonable prices, we will be prepared to allow other companies to provide those drugs for less," White House economic adviser Lael Brainard told reporters in December.
To this effect, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Commerce have proposed a new framework that allows price to be a factor in determining whether to exercise march-in rights. If enacted, it would effectively give the government control over the price of drugs.
The post Feds Make a Pharma Patent Grab appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Every year, thousands of New York City families are subjected to invasive home searches as part of child abuse and neglect investigations. While less than 7 percent of these investigations lead the agency to file claims of abuse or neglect, a new lawsuit alleges that the city's Administration for Children's Services (ACS) workers often make misleading—or outright false—threats to coerce parents to allow ACS to conduct warrantless searches of their homes.
According to the lawsuit, which was filed on Tuesday, ACS employs a widespread policy of coercing families under investigation to allow case workers into their homes. ACS workers allegedly often tell families that they "must" or "have to" let them search their homes, insist that they do not need a warrant for the search, and even threaten to take noncompliant parents' children away.
Even though ACS workers are technically legally required to obtain a warrant to search homes, the agency very rarely seeks them. According to the suit, of the almost 53,000 investigations conducted by ACS in 2023, it only sought 222 court orders to search families' homes.
"Even assuming ACS completed only one home search during each investigation (it typically conducts several), ACS sought court orders for just 0.4% of home entries," the suit states. "This means over 99.5% of home searches that ACS conducts are 'presumptively unreasonable' under the Fourth Amendment."
Once inside a family's home, the suit claims that ACS workers engage in incredibly invasive tactics, looking "inside medicine cabinets, under beds, in closets and dresser drawers, in the refrigerator, and in cupboards." Even more troubling, strip searches of children are common, with workers demanding that children lift up their shirts or pull down their pants. Over the course of an investigation—the average length is 60 days—families are typically subjected to these searches more than once.
The agency itself seems self-aware about the impact of these coercive techniques. According to one 2020 report by the National Innovation Service, ACS policy "incentivizes [staff] to be invasive and not tell parents their rights." The report noted how "the experience of an investigation, even when an allegation is ultimately determined to be unfounded, too often traumatizes parents and children."
Further, agency leadership has also acknowledged that many reports of child abuse and neglect are completely unfounded, as individuals are allowed to make anonymous reports. A 2023 letter from the New York City Bar went so far as to state that a "significant percentage of" child abuse hotline callers "make false reports, for the purpose of harassment."
In all, the suit argues that ACS' policy of using coercive tactics to enter families' homes without a warrant constitutes a violation of their Fourth Amendment rights, arguing that the agency's "failure to adequately train or supervise ACS caseworkers regarding the protection of parents' Fourth Amendment rights" has directly led ACS workers to use manipulative, false tactics to persuade families to allow them to "conduct warrantless, non-exigent searches of Plaintiffs' and class members' homes."
The post NYC Child Protection Agency Uses 'Coercive Tactics' To Bully Parents Into Allowing Warrantless Searches appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When Teresa and Jeff Williams decided to have an unassisted home birth, they had no idea they would be unable to get a birth certificate for their son nearly two years later.
Despite sending a litany of documents to the Washington, D.C., Health Department, the agency has denied the Williams' requests for a birth certificate and Social Security card for their son, JJ. Now a toddler, the boy has no legal documents at all.
The Williamses live in southwest D.C. with their two young children. Teresa Williams told The Washington Post that she and her husband became interested in home birth after having negative experiences when seeking prenatal care while pregnant with their elder child.
"It was day and night. The midwives actually asked me what I wanted my birth experience to be like versus telling me what it would be like," Teresa Williams told the Post. "I was actually being heard, and I was actually in control of how the environment was for my child to be born."
The couple decided to have their daughter, Tamar, at home, assisted by a doula and a midwife. After Tamar's birth, a home birth company filed the necessary paperwork to get the newborn legal documents.
However, the couple opted to go medically unassisted for the birth of their son, JJ, two years later. When they tried to get a birth certificate for JJ three months after his birth, they learned that they would be required to submit extensive documentation to prove he was their son.
Even though the couple say they submitted the required forms proving that JJ was born alive and in D.C. and that Teresa Williams was pregnant in the first place, the city denied their application. The Health Department told them they could bolster their application with additional medical documents, but because JJ was born at home without medical supervision, the Williamses didn't have the necessary paperwork.
Without a birth certificate and other documents for their son, the Williams say they have lost nearly $5,000 in tax credits. The family is also low-income and says they worry about losing food-stamp benefits if JJ's lack of documents is discovered. As a last resort, the couple has been forced to hire a lawyer and file a request for a judge to order JJ a birth certificate.
"It feels like I am an absentee father even though I am here," Jeff Williams told the Post. "I can't physically show that my son belongs to me because I have no document. And I might now have to go to court to prove my fathership to my child. And I have been here since day one. I haven't left."
The post They Had Their Baby At Home. 2 Years Later, They Still Can't Get a Birth Certificate. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If you've searched online about buying a car, you know you're in for a wave of aggressive come-ons and sales pitches. But I found a way to make car sellers clam up: All you have to do is start asking questions about the increasingly intrusive "nanny" nature of automobiles.
"This is more of an industry question," a Ford representative told me. "You may wish to follow up with the Alliance for Automotive Innovation on this topic."
Like automakers, the Alliance, a trade group, ignored me. But I'm not alone in my concerns.
"Ah, the wind in your hair, the open road ahead, and not a care in the world….except all the trackers, cameras, microphones, and sensors capturing your every move," the Mozilla Foundation warned in a report published in September.
With today's computerized vehicles, "whenever you interact with your car you create a tiny record of what you just did," the report authors added. Because many are wirelessly connected to manufacturers, "usually all that information is collected and stored by the car company."
That report prompted Sen. Ed Markey (D–Mass.) to follow up with a letter urging that "cars should not—and cannot—become yet another venue where privacy takes a backseat."
That's nice, but it ignores the government's own role in turning vehicles into tools of control.
The massive infrastructure bill that became law in 2021 contained a mandate for technology that can "passively and accurately detect whether the blood alcohol concentration of a driver" exceeds the legal limit. If it does, it is supposed to "prevent or limit motor vehicle operation."
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) thinks this is a swell idea and endorsed it in 2022.
We'll be required to pay for that nanny technology, of course, whether or not it works as advertised. My guess is that automated DUI sensors monitoring people of varying mass and metabolism will be slightly less reliable than the seat belt interlocks that were briefly mandatory in the 1970s. Those prevented ignition unless passengers buckled in.
"The result was that grandmas, grocery bags and guard dogs alike triggered the no-start unless the belts for the front seats they occupied were fastened first," Mike Davis, who generally approved of nanny mandates, wrote for The Detroit Bureau in 2009.
Memories of my father getting pointers on disabling the interlock came back to me as I shopped for a new pickup truck and found that most of them remain in near-constant contact with automakers. Through the cell network, they receive software updates and hand off data about drivers. That information is used internally, sold to third parties, and surrendered to government agencies.
"There are so many ways for the law enforcement to unlock the treasure trove of data that's collected by your car," the Mozilla report added. "In the United States, they can just ask for it (without a warrant) or hack into your car to get it."
Like many people, I don't want my vehicle tattling on me to the mothership. If you investigate ways to make sure your car reports only to you, you quickly find a subculture of DIY types hacking their purchases to keep Big Brother out of morning commutes.
"My GTI and my wife's new Toyota had the ability to collect data and transmit it over cellular or wifi," I found posted in one forum. "I disabled it in both cars by disconnecting the antenna connections at the telematics module, it leaves the car unable to communicate, as if it's out in the middle of nowhere."
Disabling snoopy tech is an at-your-own-risk venture. You should assume the warranty goes out the window.
Modifications to make vehicles less intrusive weren't what automakers and bureaucrats intended. But unintended consequences come with the territory. The national preference for SUVs and trucks over old-school sedans, for example, is largely a result of government fuel-efficiency standards that create weird incentives. Tweaking the regulations in 2010 made the problem worse. "Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards create a financial incentive for auto companies to make bigger vehicles that are allowed to meet lower targets," a University of Michigan study found in 2011.
The latest stroke of genius from the NTSB is to propose requiring technologies that "warn a driver when the vehicle exceeds the speed limit" and may even "electronically limit the speed of the vehicle to fully prevent drivers from exceeding the speed limit."
Because why would a driver want the freedom to respond to specific driving conditions?
I predict more DIY modifications in the future—and more unanswered questions about what is being done to our vehicles.
The post Your Car Is Spying on You appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>One of the basic tenets of American conservatism—at least it has been until the Make America Great Again movement has re-jiggered the Republican Party—is that individuals rather than government regulators are best suited to manage their own lives and raise their families. There's always been an authoritarian streak in social conservatism, but progressives have traditionally been the ones to promote what we call the Nanny State.
"Whether it is forcing restaurants in England to print calorie counts on menus or banning energy drinks for under-18s, the government is full of ideas about how to protect people from themselves," explained a 2018 BBC article. Although the term is of British origin, such policies are rampant throughout the United States and California in particular. One can think of any number of recent policies that fit the bill, but they all meddle in our lives to "help" or "uplift" us.
Most of these laws—from bans on single-use plastic bags and super-sized soft drinks to limits on trans-fats and e-cigarettes—accomplish little in terms of public health or the environment. There always are endless workarounds to render the edicts pointless. The Nanny State term is ideal, as we envision a hectoring nursemaid intent on depriving us of the simplest pleasures.
But now conservatives are giving leftists a run for the money. Throughout Republican-run Western states, lawmakers are passing legislation that treats adults as if they are children by mandating a variety of mostly pointless regulations in the name of protecting kids from pornography and other internet nastiness. Everyone wants to protect The Children, which makes it difficult to push back—even when such laws impose restrictions on everyone.
The latest frenzy started in Utah, which in 2021 passed a content-filter law that requires that all new cell phones and tablets sold or activated in the state be equipped with a filter that blocks "material that is harmful to minors," as reports note. Because the law is contingent on five other states approving similar measures, lawmakers in other like-minded states have followed suit. The bills vary somewhat, but ultimately they require some form of age verification to disable the filter.
It's obviously hypocritical for supposedly free-market lawmakers to mandate meddlesome business regulations. Device manufacturers don't always know where their products will be sold or activated. Following the model of progressive California, these conservative legislatures are trying to use their muscle to create a de facto nationwide standard. But that's the least of the problems with these proposals, which raise constitutional and privacy concerns.
If they pass, these laws will certainly get tied up in the federal courts. Previous U.S. Supreme Court decisions have made it clear that legislatures must take the least intrusive approach to limiting public access to websites. By foisting content filters on every device, these efforts take a heavy-handed approach. Such laws, as the court found, presume that parents lack the ability to protect their children.
In fact, parents have a nearly endless array of tools. They simply need to enable the filters and voluntary verification processes that are currently offered. The Competitive Enterprise Institute lists dozens of filter blockers from social media companies, Internet Service Providers, gaming companies, web browsers, and operating systems, as well as standalone app controls.
As the free-speech group NetChoice argued in testimony against Utah's bill, such measures only provide a false sense of security, leading parents to believe their children are protected. Even the best filters are imperfect, so parents still need to be involved. The group also notes that it will stifle market innovation by imposing a one-size-fits-all standard.
There's also a serious slippery-slope argument. I can only imagine what lawmakers in California might propose if the courts uphold these laws. How about mandated filters to block supposed "climate-change denialism" or "hate speech"? Conservative nannies should be careful what they wish for, as they might get it ("good and hard" as H.L. Mencken said).
The bills require age verification, which is problematic. These requirements take two forms. Either users enter their own age or the site demands actual ID, such as a driver's license. Any 15-year-old can claim to be 47, so the former is toothless. The latter are burdensome for businesses and creepy for the rest of us. A case can be made for age verification for actual porn sites, but not for every app or website. Do you want to send more personal information to tech companies?
Compounding the silliness, device-filter bills only apply to cellphones and tablets. Kids could still easily access obscene materials on their laptops, desktops, and game consoles. Each child is different and these filters will end up filtering out legitimate information. I can only imagine the difficulties my daughter, who was actively involved in agriculture, would have had accessing information about animal breeding. Then again, we acted like parents—and didn't expect the government to be her nanny.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
The post Nanny State Social Media Mandates Are No Substitute for Effective Parenting appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>One of my favorite economic rules is simple. Whenever a progressive scold blames capitalism or private companies for a "market failure"—i.e., the inefficient or seemingly inexplicable distribution of goods or services in the economy—it's best to dig a little deeper. Almost always, some government regulation, tax, or law is largely to blame.
One recent example involves the proliferation of mega-pickup trucks. It doesn't take scientific analysis to notice these vehicles, which account for more than 20 percent of all passenger vehicle sales in the United States, have gotten huge. I recently parked my 2012 full-size V-8 RAM next to a new model in a parking lot and mine looked like a toy. They've gotten pricey, too. I paid $19,000 for mine brand new—and the average full-size pickup now approaches $60,000.
"Driving a large pickup or SUV increases the likelihood you'll kill or injure someone; its thirsty power plant… spews more air pollution and greenhouse emissions," according to a report last year in Bloomberg. This has, of course, led to calls for more regulation. The article focused on a proposal by the District of Columbia to impose a $500 annual fee on trucks that exceed 6,000 pounds. The European Union has proposed bans on U.S.-style trucks.
I generally don't care what other people drive, but critics aren't entirely wrong to point out the ill effects of mega-truck proliferation—or the oddity of using a 6,500-pound, 22-foot-long vehicle mainly as a grocery-getter. Pedestrian deaths have reached 40-year highs and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety research shows that as trucks and SUVs have gotten taller and heavier, they likewise have posed greater risks to those outside the vehicle.
But before we engage in a regulatory frenzy, it might be wise to assess how we reached this point. Part of it is due to consumer demand and manufacturer marketing, but that's an insufficient explanation. I live on an acreage and need a truck for routine work duties and hauling a trailer. The anti-car zealots seem to think we all should get around on buses and bicycles, but the bigger question is why there aren't many smaller, affordable truck options.
The automotive media has been abuzz with stories about a new Toyota pickup truck (IMV 0) that, unlike even the smallest pickups available in the states, features a large and useful bed. It's relatively light and fuel efficient. It can be configured in myriad ways, including a flatbed. According to Road and Track, it was developed in Thailand, where nearly half of all new vehicle sales are pickups. It is a bare-bones affair, but—get this—will only cost around $10,000.
This pickup has an authentic "Road Warrior" vibe that, in my humble opinion, is much cooler than the "tries too hard and costs too much" Tesla Cyber Truck. Don't head to your Toyota dealership anytime soon, as it won't reach U.S. markets, although it will be sold in Mexico. I'm guessing even a $20,000 U.S. variant would sell like proverbial hotcakes, but U.S. regulations, tariffs, and other government-imposed hurdles won't allow it.
One reason U.S. pickups have dominated the marketplace dates back 60 years. "When the European Economic Community raised tariffs on imported chicken from the U.S., President Lyndon Johnson retaliated with a 25 percent 'chicken tax' on imported trucks and other items," wrote the Cato Institute's Daniel Griswold. It was aimed at Volkswagen, which used to sell great little pickups. It no longer sells them here, but "the tariff remains in place out of political inertia." It's no surprise these massive taxes (and tariffs are simply a form of taxation) lead to market distortions. Don't blame manufacturers (except for their lobbying to achieve market protections) when government is the culprit.
Basically, U.S. tariffs undercut the competition from foreign producers who specialize in smaller pickup trucks. American companies have always dominated the large truck market, so the lack of competitors helped them cement their dominance. Speaking of unintended consequences, the federal government's bizarre emission rules also led to the public's preference for larger SUVs and trucks.
Regulations promulgated during the Obama administration required cars "to meet tougher emissions and mileage targets than light trucks—a category that includes pickups and many so-called crossover vehicles that look like SUVs but have the mechanical underpinnings of cars," according to a 2020 Reuters report. As a result, car makers offered more vehicles that conformed to less-rigid light-truck standards.
The panoply of regulatory rules, labor standards, tariffs, and taxes also drive up manufacturing costs, which means car makers need to maximize profit per unit. That offers more incentive to push the priciest vehicles possible. Often, Detroit is fine with additional regulations, which cuts out upstart and foreign competitors. That's not market failure, but government failure. So those seriously concerned about massive pickups should consider less regulation rather than more of it.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
The post Why Are Pickup Trucks Ridiculously Huge? Blame Government. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Argentina actually elected a libertarian president.
Javier Milei campaigned with a chainsaw, promising to cut the size of government.
Argentina's leftists had so clogged the country's economic arteries with regulations that what once was one of the world's richest countries is now one of the poorest.
Inflation is more than 200 percent.
People save their whole lives—and then find their savings worth nearly nothing.
They got so fed up they did something never done before in modern history: They elected a full-throated libertarian.
Milei understands that government can't create wealth.
He surprised diplomats at the World Economic Forum this month by saying, "The state is the problem!"
He spoke up for capitalism: "Do not be intimidated by the political caste or by parasites who live off the state…. If you make money, it's because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general well-being. Do not surrender to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution."
Go, Milei! I wish current American politicians talked that way.
In the West, young people turn socialist. In Argentina, they live under socialist policies. They voted for Milei.
Sixty-nine percent of voters under 25 voted for him. That helped him win by a whopping 3 million votes.
He won promising to reverse "decades of decadence." He told the Economic Forum, "If measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of markets, competition, price systems, trade, and ownership of private property, the only possible fate is poverty."
Right.
Poor countries demonstrate that again and again.
The media say Milei will never pass his reforms, and leftists may yet stop him.
But already, "He was able to repeal rent controls, price controls," says economist Daniel Di Martino in my new video. He points out that Milei already "eliminated all restrictions on exports and imports, all with one sign of a pen."
"He can just do that without Congress?" I ask.
"The president of Argentina has a lot more power than the president of the United States."
Milei also loosened rules limiting where airlines can fly.
"Now [some] air fares are cheaper than bus fares!" says Di Martino.
He scrapped laws that say, "Buy in Argentina." I point out that America has "Buy America" rules.
"It only makes poor people poorer because it increases costs!" Di Martino replies, "Why shouldn't Argentinians be able to buy Brazilian pencils or Chilean grapes?"
"To support Argentina," I push back.
"Guess what?" Says Di Martino, "Not every country is able to produce everything at the lowest cost. Imagine if you had to produce bananas in America."
Argentina's leftist governments tried to control pretty much everything.
"The regulations were such that everything not explicitly legal was illegal," laughs Di Martino. "Now…everything not illegal is legal."
One government agency Milei demoted was a "Department for Women, Gender and Diversity." DiMartino says that reminds him of Venezuela's Vice Ministry for Supreme Social Happiness. "These agencies exist just so government officials can hire their cronies."
Cutting government jobs and subsidies for interest groups is risky for vote-seeking politicians. There are often riots in countries when politicians cut subsidies. Sometimes politicians get voted out. Or jailed.
"What's incredible about Milei," notes Di Martino, "is that he was able to win on the promise of cutting subsidies."
That is remarkable. Why would Argentinians vote for cuts?
"Argentinians are fed up with the status quo," replies Di Martino.
Milei is an economist. He named his dogs after Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, and Robert Lucas, all libertarian economists.
I point out that most Americans don't know who those men were.
"The fact that he's naming his dogs after these famous economists," replies Di Martino, "shows that he's really a nerd. It's a good thing to have an economics nerd president of a country."
"What can Americans learn from Argentina?"
"Keep America prosperous. So we never are in the spot of Argentina in the first place. That requires free markets."
Yes.
Actually, free markets plus rule of law. When people have those things, prosperity happens.
It's good that once again, a country may try it.
COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
The post Argentina, Once One of the Richest Countries, Is Now One of the Poorest. Javier Milei Could Help Fix That. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest To End Privacy as We Know It, by Kashmir Hill, Random House, 352 pages, $28.99
"Do I want to live in a society where people can be identified secretly and at a distance by the government?" asks Alvaro Bedoya. "I do not, and I think I am not alone in that."
Bedoya, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, says those words in New York Times technology reporter Kashmir Hill's compelling new book, Your Face Belongs to Us. As Hill makes clear, we are headed toward the very world that Bedoya fears.
This book traces the longer history of attempts to deploy accurate and pervasive facial recognition technology, but it chiefly focuses on the quixotic rise of Clearview AI. Hill first learned of this company's existence in November 2019, when someone leaked a legal memo to her in which the mysterious company claimed it could identify nearly anyone on the planet based only on a snapshot of their face.
Hill spent several months trying to talk with Clearview AI's founders and investors, and they in turn tried to dodge her inquiries. Ultimately, she tracked down an early investor, David Scalzo, who reluctantly began to tell her about the company. After she suggested the app would bring an end to anonymity, Scalzo replied: "I've come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, there's never going to be privacy. You can't ban technology. Sure, it might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can't ban it." He pointed out that law enforcement loves Clearview AI's facial recognition app.
As Hill documents, the company was founded by a trio of rather sketchy characters. The chief technological brain is an Australian entrepreneur named Hoan Ton-That. His initial partners included the New York political fixer Richard Schwartz and the notorious right-wing edgelord and troll Charles Johnson.
Mesmerized by the tech ferment of Silicon Valley, the precocious coder Ton-That moved there at age 19; there he quickly occupied himself creating various apps, including in 2009 the hated video-sharing ViddyHo "worm," which hijacked Google Talk contact lists to spew out a stream of instant messages to click on its video offerings. After the uproar over ViddyHo, Ton-That kept a lower profile working on various other apps, eventually decamping to New York City in 2016.
In the meantime, Ton-That began toying online with alt-right and MAGA conceits, an interest that led him to Johnson. The two attended the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where Donald Trump was nominated. At that convention, Johnson briefly introduced Ton-That to internet financier Peter Thiel, who would later be an angel investor in what became Clearview AI. (For what it's worth, Ton-That now says he regrets his earlier alt-right dalliances.)
Ton-That and Schwartz eventually cut Johnson out of the company. As revenge for his ouster, Johnson gave Hill access to tons of internal emails and other materials that illuminate the company's evolution into the biggest threat to our privacy yet developed.
"We have developed a revolutionary, web-based intelligence platform for law enforcement to use as a tool to help generate high-quality investigative leads," explains the company's website. "Our platform, powered by facial recognition technology, includes the largest known database of 40+ billion facial images sourced from public-only web sources, including news media, mugshot websites, public social media, and other open sources."
***
As Hill documents, the billions of photos in Clearview AI's ever-growing database were scraped without permission from Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and other social media sites. The company argues that what it is doing is no different than the way Google catalogs links and data for its search engine, only that theirs is for photographs. The legal memo leaked to Hill was part of the company's defense against numerous lawsuits filed by social media companies and privacy advocates who objected to the data scraping.
Scalzo is right that law enforcement loves the app. In March, Ton-That told the BBC that U.S. police agencies have run nearly a million searches using Clearview AI. Agencies used it to identify suspects in the January 6 Capitol riot, for example. Of course, it does not always finger the right people. Police in New Orleans misused faulty face IDs from Clearview AI's app to arrest and detain an innocent black man.
Some privacy activists argue that facial recognition technologies are racially biased and do not work as well on some groups. But as developers continued to train their algorithms, they mostly fixed that problem; the software's disparities with respect to race, gender, and age are now so negligible as to be statistically insignificant. In testing by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Hill reports, Clearview AI ranked among the world's most accurate facial recognition companies.
***
To see the possible future of pervasive facial recognition, Hill looks at how China and Russia are already using the technology. As part of its "safe city" initiative, Russian authorities in Moscow have installed over 200,000 surveillance cameras. Hill recounts an experiment by the Russian civil liberties activist Anna Kuznetsova, who submitted her photos to a black market data seller with access to the camera network. Two weeks later, she received a 35-page report detailing each time the system identified her face on a surveillance camera. There were 300 sightings in all. The system also accurately predicted where she lived and where she worked. While the data seller was punished, the system remains in place; it is now being used to identify anti-government protesters.
"Every society needs to decide for itself what takes priority," said Kuznetsova, "whether it's security or human rights."
The Chinese government has deployed over 700 million surveillance cameras; in many cases, artificial intelligence analyzes their output in real time. Chinese authorities have used it to police behavior like jaywalking and to monitor racial and religious minorities and political dissidents. Hill reports there is a "red list" of VIPs who are invisible to facial recognition systems. "In China, being unseen is a privilege," she writes.
In August 2023, the Chinese government issued draft regulations that aim to limit the private use of facial recognition technologies; the rules impose no such restrictions on its use for "national security" concerns.
Meanwhile, Iranian authorities are using facial recognition tech to monitor women protesting for civil rights by refusing to wear hijabs in public.
Coappearance analysis using artificial intelligence allows users to review either live or recorded video and identify all of the other people with whom a person of interest has come into contact. Basically, real-time facial recognition will not only keep track of you; it will identify your friends, family, coreligionists, political allies, business associates, and sexual partners and log when and where and for how long you hung out with them. The San Jose, California–based company Vintra asserts that its co-appearance technology "will rank these interactions, allowing the user to identify the most recurrent relationships and understand potential threats." Perhaps your boss will think your participation in an anti-vaccine rally or visit to a gay bar qualifies as a "potential threat."
What about private use of facial recognition technology? It certainly sounds like a product with potential: Personally, I am terrible at matching names to faces, so incorporating facial recognition into my glasses would be a huge social boon. Hill tests a Clearview AI prototype of augmented reality glasses that can do just that. Alas, the glasses provide viewers access to all the other photos of the person in Clearview AI's database, including snapshots at drunken college parties, at protest rallies, and with former lovers.
"Facial recognition is the perfect tool for oppression," argued Woodrow Hartzog, then a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University, and Evan Selinger, a philosopher at the Rochester Institute of Technology, back in 2018. They also called it "the most uniquely dangerous surveillance mechanism ever invented." Unlike other biometric identifiers, such as fingerprints and DNA, your face is immediately visible wherever you roam. The upshot of the cheery slogan "your face is your passport" is that authorities don't even have to bother with demanding "your papers, please" to identify and track you.
In September 2023, Human Rights Watch and 119 other civil rights groups from around the world issued a statement calling "on police, other state authorities and private companies to immediately stop using facial recognition for the surveillance of publicly-accessible spaces and for the surveillance of people in migration or asylum contexts." Human Rights Watch added separately that the technology "is simply too dangerous and powerful to be used without negative consequences for human rights….As well as undermining privacy rights, the technology threatens our rights to equality and nondiscrimination, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly."
The United States is cobbling together what Hill calls a "rickety surveillance state" built on this and other surveillance technologies. "We have only the rickety scaffolding of the Panopticon; it is not yet fully constructed," she observes. "We still have time to decide whether or not we actually want to build it.
The post Is Facial Recognition a Useful Public Safety Tool or Something Sinister? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last week, the White House announced that the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) would issue $623 million in grants for states to build chargers for electric vehicles (E.V.s). The money comes from the Charging and Fuel Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program, a $2.5 billion fund established as part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. According to the announcement, the project "will fund 47 EV charging and alternative-fueling infrastructure projects in 22 states and Puerto Rico, including construction of approximately 7,500 EV charging ports."
Unfortunately, that money is unlikely to go as far as it would have in private hands. "The CFI Program advances President Biden's Justice40 Initiative, which set a goal that 40% of the overall benefits of federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution," bragged the FHWA press release. "More than 70% of the CFI funding announced today will support project sites in disadvantaged communities."
As an example, it notes "$1.4 million to the Chilkoot Indian Association, an Alaska Native Tribe, to build an EV charging station in Haines, a rural and disadvantaged community where there are no publicly available EV charging stations."
Haines is in Haines Borough, Alaska, which has a population of just over 2,000 people.
It's hard to imagine that "disadvantaged" communities would buy E.V.s if only there were public charging stations available. A November survey from S&P Global Mobility showed that potential buyers cite high E.V. prices as their primary concern, higher than concerns about range or charging infrastructure. And while E.V. prices have declined in recent years, the average new electric vehicle still costs around $50,000.
Not that this is the first instance of poorly planned government spending on E.V. infrastructure. Last month, Reason reported that even though the federal government had dispensed $2 billion out of the $7.5 billion apportioned by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to build public charging stations, no chargers funded by the cash had come online. Speaking to Politico's James Bikales, state and E.V. industry officials blamed "the difficulties state agencies and charging companies face in meeting a complex set of contracting requirements and minimum operating standards for the federally-funded chargers."
"The barrier isn't technological," The Wall Street Journal's editorial board noted this week. "It took Tesla less time to install 80 chargers at its Harris Ranch station in northern California." Rather, "the bureaucrats are getting in their own way."
"The FHWA issued a rule requiring that workers for most projects be certified by the electricians union, or another government-approved training program," the Journal continued. "The Electric Vehicle Charging Association warned that the restrictions 'risk creating a bottleneck by limiting the available workforce.' The agency charged ahead anyway, decreasing the odds of a workable contract."
"In a better Washington, there would be no subsidies for EV chargers," noted the Journal. "The market would meet demand, as it did with gasoline stations. But we live in the age of subsidy," meaning bureaucrats are all too happy to give out your money and mine, with little hope of achieving their intended goals.
The post Feds To Spend Hundreds of Millions of Dollars on E.V. Chargers in 'Disadvantaged Communities' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>About one in every five dollars that passes through the federal welfare system ends up right back where it started, according to a new report.
It's not robbing Peter to pay Paul. It's more like "robbing Peter to pay Peter," wrote the report's author, Judge Glock, director of research at the Manhattan Institute.
As the federal welfare state has grown to a point where many middle-class and even some upper-income households receive benefits, it has become more common for the same households to both pay federal taxes and collect federal transfer payments. Glock's paper shows how significant that overlap is: About 20 percent of the annual funds in the federal welfare system are simply returned to households that paid that amount in federal taxes.
And if you don't count households that are receiving Social Security—the largest federal welfare program, even though it is rarely identified as such—the percentage of welfare payments canceled out by taxes within the same year is 29 percent, Glock's research shows.
Seems like those individuals and families would be better off simply not paying so much in taxes in the first place.
"Such a system of taxing and returning the same amount of money is a pure waste," Glock wrote, "since both the taxes and transfers limit households' options, and there is a bureaucratic cost to circulating income from households to the government and back to households."
Economically, those transfers and taxes simply cancel each other out and households are left—on a balance sheet, at least—no worse off than if the money had never been taken by the government and then returned.
Glock argues that perspective is missing some important, but often overlooked, details. Dollars returned in the form of welfare transfers are often restricted—food stamps can only be used for certain purchases, for example—in ways that dollars never taxed away from someone's paycheck aren't. Or the funds might only be available at certain times of the year, as is the case with welfare delivered via refundable tax credits. There's also the cost of cycling that money through the system: paying for the IRS to collect it and various bureaucrats in other places to oversee its return.
Because of the size of the federal welfare state, that 20 percent represents a huge amount of money being returned to the same households that paid it. In 2022, those so-called netting taxes would have been equal to about $800 billion, or 3 percent of gross domestic product, Gluck calculated.
This relationship between federal taxes and the federal welfare state has little relevance for the most recent effort to expand the welfare state. Congress is currently working on a plan to expand the child tax credit program to make it fully refundable for low-income parents who do not qualify for the full amount of the tax credit under current law.
As it currently stands, a single mother with three kids who earns $10,000 annually gets a refundable tax credit (which is really a transfer payment) of $1,250 while a mother with three kids who earns $150,000 can qualify for a $6,000 tax credit, as The Washington Post noted. The proposed change wouldn't affect the wealthier parent, but would allow the poorer mother to collect $3,750 instead.
The mother earning only $10,000 is unlikely to owe any federal income taxes, so increasing transfer payments to her doesn't increase the amount of "netted" taxes. However, the wealthier mother is a good example of Glock's point in a different context. When the per-child tax credit was temporarily expanded to $3,000 per child during the pandemic, even for families earning six figures, those extra payments were delivered in the form of checks. In many cases, the federal government was simply returning funds that those same families paid in taxes throughout the year.
The same is likely to be true of any other expansion of welfare programs to middle- and upper-income households.
"A large welfare state inevitably ends up taking from the same people it supports," Glock tells Reason, "and the larger the welfare state gets, the more it will do so."
The post 20 Percent of Welfare Spending Goes to the Households Taxed To Fund It appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), which existed for about a century before being mercifully put out to pasture in 1995, is one of the best historical examples of how governmental attempts at regulating the economy can backfire.
Created with the stated goal of protecting consumers from the competitive interests of Gilded Age railroad barons, the ICC was quickly captured by the very special interests it sought to control, then helped entrench a railroad cartel. At the height of its powers, the ICC tried to limit the use of trucks for hauling freight (an effort that thankfully failed) and used its influence to have a critic of the railroad monopoly committed to an asylum.
Naturally, some senators see the ICC as the ideal model for a new agency aimed at regulating Big Tech. Bad ideas never seem to truly die in Washington.
While promoting their bipartisan bill to ramp up federal regulation of successful tech companies in The New York Times, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) pointed to the ICC as one model for what they aim to do. "It's time to rein in Big Tech," they argued, "and we can't do it with a law that only nibbles around the edges of the problem." Warren has also invoked the ICC in posts on X (formerly known as Twitter) and in public comments calling for tighter federal control over companies like Amazon and Facebook.
Indeed, their bill wouldn't nibble. It would create a new federal commission to regulate online platforms. The Digital Consumer Protection Commission would have concurrent jurisdiction (which really means overlapping and duplicative mandates) with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Department of Justice. In the senators' telling, this newfangled ICC would aim to "preserve innovation while minimizing harm presented by emerging industries."
That's far from the whole story of the original ICC.
Created in 1887 with the noble goal of setting "just and reasonable" rates for freight carried by trains across state lines, the ICC "frequently hindered innovation, sometimes drastically," wrote Richard N. Langlois, an economics professor at the University of Connecticut, in The Wall Street Journal in August. It and other federal agencies like the FCC that have been created to regulate private businesses are "generally politicized and opaque," he warned. "And they often worked against the long-term interests of consumers."
Once the railroads and other shipping interests had effectively captured the ICC, it became a convenient tool for limiting competition from other forms of transportation too. Thomas Gale Moore, an economic historian and onetime member of President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers, has written that "persistent lobbying" from the railroads helped bring the relatively new trucking industry "under the control of the ICC" starting in 1935.
After that, the trucking companies had to get a "certificate of public convenience and necessity" from the ICC to operate across state lines. While existing companies were easily granted those permission slips, Moore wrote, new companies "found it extremely difficult to get certificates." Additionally, companies regulated by the ICC had to post their freight rates publicly (for all competitors to see) and were limited in how often they could make changes. Those policies did little to protect the public but obviously benefited the railroads by slowing the growth of trucking as an alternative.
In one of the more bizarre anecdotes in federal regulatory history, the ICC played a role in institutionalizing inventor Eben Moody Boynton, who in 1920 claimed to have invented a new type of railroad model that required only a single track to operate. It took two months and the intervention of a Massachusetts congressman before Boynton was freed. (Boynton's so-called bicycle railroad idea never caught on, but that hardly seems to justify the ICC's efforts to silence him.)
By 1980, with the railroad industry nearing the end of a long decline that was due in no small part to the ICC's cartelization of the industry, Milton Friedman singled out the commission in his book Free to Choose as the paramount illustration of what he called "the natural history of government intervention." What he wrote about the history of the ICC is a particularly prescient warning for anyone encouraging federal regulation of technology and social media.
"A real or fancied evil leads to demands to do something about it. A political coalition forms consisting of sincere, high-minded reformers and equally sincere interested parties," Friedman wrote. The reformers create a new agency to do the work they believe is in the best interest of consumers, but "the interested parties go to work to make sure that the power is used for their benefit. They generally succeed."
That same year, Congress effectively sidelined the ICC with the passage of laws to deregulate the trucking and rail industries. In the absence of the anti-competitive bottleneck created by the ICC, freight railroads have reversed a decadeslong decline and are thriving. Consumers are reaping the benefits: Average rail shipping rates have declined by 40 percent, when adjusting for inflation, in the past 40 years, according to the Association of American Railroads.
The idea that new federal regulatory agencies are in the best interest of consumers was outdated over 40 years ago. The ICC originated because the Elizabeth Warrens and Lindsey Grahams of the late 1800s sought to use federal power to take on the "Big Tech billionaires" of their time. The ICC's myriad failures should be a warning for policy makers today, not a model to be duplicated.
The post Elizabeth Warren's Terrible Model for Tech Regulation appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As a new year dawns, it's customary to reflect on the past and set resolutions for the future. This year, let's resolve to greet three widespread claims with healthy doses of skepticism.
The first dubious claim is that income inequality in the United States has inexorably risen since the 1960s. It's a scary narrative heavily bolstered by the work of three French economists: Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman. According to these researchers, the situation was fueled mostly by tax cuts for top income earners during President Ronald Reagan's administration. Their proposed remedy, not surprisingly, is a sky-high, French-like level of taxation.
As appealing as that may be to the many fans of soak-the-rich policies, I advise against condemning the rich to the tax guillotine quite yet. We should also hold off on trying to tackle the alleged problem with more welfare spending. In the last few years, a series of peer-reviewed studies from very respectable economists have shown that the three Frenchmen's claims of rising income inequality suffer from fatal flaws. For instance, some researchers argue that the rise in inequality is not as pronounced as suggested, pointing to better data sources or interpretations. Others highlight methodological issues, such as the questionable treatment of tax data and government transfers in calculating incomes.
Basically, the incessant narrative of ever-widening income inequality requires, at a minimum, serious skepticism. That leaves the case for further income redistribution weak, even if one admits that welfare spending has increased the income of some poverty-stricken Americans. Unfortunately, it's done so at the cost of economy-wide productivity and sometimes to the detriment of welfare recipients themselves.
Short of adopting this more accurate and comprehensive picture of American wealth distribution and economic mobility, I hope we will at least hear more tempered claims from the left that the world is going to hell.
The second claim warranting skepticism is the one about how years of unchecked globalization have eroded America's industrial foundation. Not only do we Americans still produce an enormous economic output, but the U.S. also continues to be a dominant force in manufacturing. A recent paper by the Cato Institute's Colin Grabow even reports that American manufacturing surpasses the output of Japan, Germany, and South Korea combined. We are the world's second-largest manufacturing economy and, better yet, we are a global frontrunner in critical sectors such as automotive and aerospace.
Further, I hope people finally come to understand that the fact that manufacturing now employs fewer workers and contributes less to gross domestic product than in previous decades doesn't require a change in policy. As Grabow shows, the same thing is happening across all developed countries—and not predominantly due to globalization. It's more a result of advances in productivity (as workers use more machines and computers, they produce more output) and a change in consumer preferences toward services rather than goods.
Besides, while fewer people are employed in manufacturing, those who continue to work there enjoy better and safer work conditions. They also command higher wages. If you're unconvinced of these points, go visit a modern steel mill.
Finally, I wish politicians and pundits—and more of us citizens—would become a lot more skeptical about the idea that government is the solution to all problems. At the very least, I hope they consider the sheer scale of today's government. Despite all the enormous spending and extensive regulating, dissatisfaction among the public persists, and in many cases, problems seem to be worsening. Correlation isn't causation, but this observation alone should puzzle those who believe that simply expanding government is a solution.
In truth, government spending is not inherently efficient or effective. It often leads to a misallocation of resources, bureaucratic inefficiencies, and unintended consequences that exacerbate the problems government aims to solve. And when government fails, its mistakes are hard to correct. It's a sharp contrast with the dynamic and adaptive nature of free markets. The collective decisions of millions of individuals freely spending and investing their own money are incredibly effective at allocating resources, responding to consumer needs and driving innovation. And when the market fails, people with their own money on the line don't hesitate to change course.
As we step into 2024, it's crucial to adopt a better and informed perspective toward these and other prevalent claims. The narrative of ever-increasing income inequality, the supposed erosion of America's industrial base due to globalization, and the belief in government as a panacea are all areas ripe for reevaluation.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM.
The post 3 Economic Myths That Need To Die appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>I don't know whether artificial intelligence (AI) will give us a 4-hour workweek, write all of our code and emails, and drive our cars—or whether it will destroy our economy and our grasp on reality, fire our nukes, and then turn us all into gray goo. Possibly all of the above. But I'm supremely confident about one thing: No one else knows either.
November saw the public airing of some very dirty laundry at OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research organization that brought us ChatGPT, when the board abruptly announced the dismissal of CEO Sam Altman. What followed was a nerd game of thrones (assuming robots are nerdier than dragons, a debatable proposition) that consisted of a quick parade of three CEOs and ended with Altman back in charge. The shenanigans highlighted the many axes on which even the best-informed, most plugged-in AI experts disagree. Is AI a big deal, or the biggest deal? Do we owe it to future generations to pump the brakes or to smash the accelerator? Can the general public be trusted with this tech? And—the question that seems to have powered more of the recent upheaval than anything else—who the hell is in charge here?
OpenAI had a somewhat novel corporate structure, in which a nonprofit board tasked with keeping the best interests of humanity in mind sat on top of a for-profit entity with Microsoft as a significant investor. This is what happens when effective altruism and ESG do shrooms together while rolling around in a few billion dollars.
After the events of November, this particular setup doesn't seem to have been the right approach. Altman and his new board say they're working on the next iteration of governance alongside the next iteration of their AI chatbot. Meanwhile, OpenAI has numerous competitors—including Google's Bard, Meta's Llama, Anthropic's Claude, and something Elon Musk built in his basement called Grok—several of which differentiate themselves by emphasizing different combinations of safety, profitability, and speed.
Labels for the factions proliferate. The e/acc crowd wants to "build the machine god." Techno-optimist Marc Andreessen declared in a manifesto that "we believe intelligence is in an upward spiral—first, as more smart people around the world are recruited into the techno-capital machine; second, as people form symbiotic relationships with machines into new cybernetic systems such as companies and networks; third, as Artificial Intelligence ramps up the capabilities of our machines and ourselves." Meanwhile Snoop Dogg is channeling AI pioneer-turned-doomer Geoffrey Hinton when he said on a recent podcast: "Then I heard the old dude that created AI saying, 'This is not safe 'cause the AIs got their own mind and these motherfuckers gonna start doing their own shit.' And I'm like, 'Is we in a fucking movie right now or what?'" (Hinton told Wired, "Snoop gets it.") And the safetyists just keep shouting the word guardrails. (Emmett Shear, who was briefly tapped for the OpenAI CEO spot, helpfully tweeted this faction compass for the uninitiated.)
wake up babe, AI faction compass just became more relevant pic.twitter.com/MwYOLedYxV
— Emmett Shear (@eshear) November 18, 2023
If even our best and brightest technologists and theorists are struggling to see the way forward for AI, what makes anyone think that the power elite in Washington, D.C., and state capitals are going to get there first?
When the release of ChatGPT 3.5 about a year ago triggered an arms race, politicians and regulators collectively swiveled their heads toward AI like a pack of prairie dogs.
State legislators introduced 191 AI-related bills this year, according to a September report from the software industry group BSA. That's a 440 percent increase from the number of AI-related bills introduced in 2022.
In a May hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, at which Altman testified, senators and witnesses cited the Food and Drug Administration and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as models for a new AI agency, with Altman declaring the latter "a great analogy" for what is needed.
Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.) and Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) released a regulatory framework that includes a new AI regulatory agency, licensing requirements, increased liability for developers, and many more mandates. A bill from Sens. John Thune (R–S.D.) and Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) is softer and more bipartisan, but would still represent a huge new regulatory effort. And President Joe Biden announced a sweeping executive order on AI in October.
But "America did not have a Federal Internet Agency or National Software Bureau for the digital revolution," as Adam Thierer has written for the R Street Institute, "and it does not need a Department of AI now."
Aside from the usual risk throttling of innovation, there is the concern about regulatory capture. The industry has a handful of major players with billions invested and a huge head start, who would benefit from regulations written with their input. Though he has rightly voiced worries about "what happens to countries that try to overregulate tech," Altman has also called concerns about regulatory capture a "transparently, intellectually dishonest response." More importantly, he has said: "No one person should be trusted here….If this really works, it's quite a powerful technology, and you should not trust one company and certainly not one person." Nor should we trust our politicians.
One silver lining: While legislators try to figure out their priorities on AI, other tech regulation has fallen by the wayside. Regulations on privacy, self-driving cars, and social media have been buried by the wave of new bills and interest in the sexy new tech menace.
One thing is clear: We are not in a Jurassic Park situation. If anything, we are experiencing the opposite of Jeff Goldblum's famous line about scientists who "were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." The most prominent people in AI seem to spend most of their time asking if they should. It's a good question. There's just no reason to think politicians or bureaucrats will do a good job answering it.
The post We Absolutely Do Not Need an FDA for AI appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>William D. Eggers is co-author, with Donald F. Kettl, of Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems. He's now the executive director of Deloitte's Center for Government Insights, but 30 years ago, he ran the privatization center for Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason.
Eggers has since worked with dozens of governments at all levels, both in the United States and internationally, and he's written a shelf's worth of books on the proper scope and function of government. Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with Eggers about Bridgebuilders, what he's learned over the past three decades about making government more effective and less intrusive, and why it's long past time to move beyond what he and his co-author call "the vending machine model" of government.
The post Can the Government Be More Effective? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this season of giving, I'll donate to the Doe Fund, a charity that helps drug abusers and ex-cons find purpose in life through work.
Doe's approach doesn't include many handouts. It's mostly about encouraging people to work.
"Work works!" they say.
It does.
Most Doe Fund workers don't go back to jail.
I'll also donate to Student Sponsor Partners (SSP), a nonprofit that gives scholarships to kids from low-income families so they can escape bad public schools. SSP sends them to Catholic schools.
I'm not Catholic, but I donate because government-run schools are often so bad that Catholic schools do better at half the cost. Thanks to SSP, thousands of kids escape poverty.
Yet some on the left say giving time and money to charity is a mistake. Their trust in government leads them to think that government programs are much better at lifting people out of poverty.
"Charity can distract from permanent solutions," claims an article in the Harvard Political Review. "Time, effort and funding that are funneled into charitable acts could be redirected to actual solutions spearheaded by the government, which has the resources to implement concrete change."
Yikes!
Yes, government has "resources," all of which are taken from taxpayers by force. "Concrete" is fitting because government's "solutions" are rigid and immovable.
But as far as promoting change that's actually useful, government has a terrible track record.
Before President Lyndon Johnson launched his "war on poverty," Americans were lifting themselves out of poverty. Every year, the poverty rate dropped.
When welfare checks began, progress continued for about seven years. But then progress stopped! Progress stopped even as America spent $27 trillion on its "war."
What happened?
Government handouts changed people's thinking. They taught millions of Americans: You are entitled to a check.
No longer was it individuals' responsibility to help families, neighbors, and ourselves; now it was clearly government's job.
The result is that people became dependent on handouts. Government rarely teaches people to be self-sufficient; handouts encourage you to be helpless.
Welfare created something never seen before in America: a near-permanent "underclass."
Welfare told parents: don't get married; you'll lose benefits. Don't work; your check will be reduced. Above all, make sure the father isn't home when a welfare worker comes. If he is, your check may be reduced or eliminated.
This changed incentives that motivated parents for generations. The result has been ruinous for millions of children.
Charities aren't perfect, but they are much more efficient and effective than clumsy government.
Charities have the freedom to be selective. They can help people who truly need aid, but also refuse charity to people who need "a kick in the butt." Government's one-size-fits-all rules prohibit that.
Charity is not guaranteed forever. People don't know how long they can expect to receive assistance. They have an incentive to become self-sufficient.
In addition, while charities actually give most of their money to the needy, government doesn't. America's constantly growing welfare workforce today is so bloated that 70 percent of welfare money now goes to the bureaucrats!
As usual, big government is the problem rather than a solution.
Americans are generous. Most of us donate to charities, many of which will provide more permanent help to the needy than government ever will.
Ideally, America would shrink government and lower taxes so more of us would have money to spend how we want. For most, that means giving to those in need.
To help people, we need more rich people.
If only there was a system that made people richer.
Oh, right! There is—capitalism!
Over the past 30 years, more than a billion people climbed out of extreme poverty, thanks to free markets.
As capitalism makes us richer, we each have more opportunity to help others in need.
COPYRIGHT 2023 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
The post Here's Why Charity Is Better at Solving Problems Than Government appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>With President Joe Biden's poll numbers continuing to sag and most Americans still dour about the state of the economy, the White House is understandably trying to change both narratives by pointing to the supposedly transformational benefits of Biden's 2021 infrastructure spending package.
There's just one little problem with that plan: finding actual evidence.
Biden is frustrated about how long it is taking to turn that $1 trillion into new construction sites that would serve as convenient backdrops for reelection campaign press conferences, according to CNN. "There's immense frustration" in the fact that it could be years before some communities see real benefits from the tranche of spending that Biden and Congress authorized two years ago, one unnamed White House official tells CNN.
"He wants this stuff now," says another.
Impatient children have only another few days to wait for Christmas, but Biden will likely be waiting quite a bit longer to see any significant benefits from the infrastructure bill. Too long, perhaps, given that the clock is ticking rapidly toward the 2024 presidential election.
Some of the reasons are beyond the president's control, of course. The government is simply not very efficient at doing much of anything, and major infrastructure projects take time to plan, organize, and execute. You can't actually fix anything by simply dumping money on it, no matter how many times that approach is tried.
However, Biden does bear significant culpability for at least some of the delays that are now frustrating his White House and campaign teams. From the tightening of "Buy American" rules for federal procurement to mandates that limit the ability of nonunion construction shops to bid on these projects, the infrastructure bill Biden signed in November 2021 is loaded with provisions that were always going to slow its implementation and limit its effectiveness.
The outcome was predictable from the start. "Making waivers for Buy America provisions harder to obtain reveals the contradictory aims of Biden's infrastructure policy," Reason's Christian Britschgi wrote in April 2022. "The president wants to make 'historic' investments in infrastructure, but he's also deeply committed to regulations that ensure those investments will buy as little infrastructure as possible."
Rules requiring contractors to use American-made stuff in federally funded projects have been on the books for decades. That's one of the reasons why American mass transit projects are much more expensive than similar projects built in other parts of the world. The infrastructure bill doubled down on those problems by expanding those requirements to cover even basic materials like copper wiring, drywall, and lumber.
"The quick implementation of Buy America requirements for such a broad range of materials will cause delays in project delivery while states, contractors, manufacturers, and suppliers continue working to determine how best to track and verify these materials," Washington state Secretary of Transportation Roger Millar warned federal officials in a letter last year.
The Buy American rules are only part of the problem, however. Biden's stubborn refusal to lift tariffs imposed by former President Donald Trump means that steel (something you need for a lot of infrastructure projects) prices remain artificially high.
The infrastructure law also created delays by adding more paperwork and a confusing patchwork of new federal oversight for projects that sought funding.
"Ordinarily, Washington lets states decide how best to spend transportation money," The Wall Street Journal reported in November 2021. But the infrastructure bill gives the Biden administration a greater role in deciding which projects to fund. Those additional steps slowed everything down: "It will probably take at least a year for the Transportation Department to write the rules around the new grant programs, solicit and evaluate applications and send money to the winners," Jim Tymon, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, told the Journal for that piece.
Finally, it's worth keeping in mind something the infrastructure package didn't include: permitting reform to streamline environmental reviews that routinely hamstring federal construction projects.
For example, it's beyond absurd that it took 15 years for the federal government to approve the construction of a new electricity supply line through a mostly uninhabited area between Wyoming and Las Vegas. And those delays have serious consequences: One Princeton study found that 80 percent of the potential emissions reductions from green energy projects funded by the Inflation Reduction Act would be lost without an expansion of transmission lines.
Biden could have pushed for an infrastructure bill that focused on actually building infrastructure—and that aimed to do so in a speedy, cost-effective way. Instead, the final product was a sop to labor unions and other political allies. At nearly every turn, the infrastructure package opted for policies that limited supplies, hiked prices, added paperwork, and grew government.
Two years later, the White House is only now recognizing the tradeoffs that come with those choices.
The post How Biden Hobbled His Own Infrastructure Push appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It's fashionable to claim that the free market ideas of Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman have failed the country, and that it's time for new policies. Campaigning in 2020, Joe Biden declared that "Milton Friedman isn't running the show anymore." More recently, New York Times columnist David Leonhardt noted that people like Friedman promised that the free market "would bring prosperity for all. It has not."
This is nonsense. For one thing, I wish we lived in a world fashioned more fully by Friedman's ideas. Sadly, while his insights have indeed influenced some U.S. economic policies, particularly during former President Ronald Reagan's administration, the extent of their implementation has been quite limited.
Friedman, for example, would be appalled that federal debt is now roughly the size of annual gross domestic product (GDP), having grown like a kudzu vine since registering at around 25 percent in the early 1980s. Taxes remain lower since the Reagan revolution took place, but our incomes are often taxed multiple times. Nearly every aspect of our lives is regulated by various agencies—local, state, and national. And—no surprise—cronyism is alive and well.
Still, Friedman's critics are right to treat him as a monumental figure. His ideas helped make trade freer and school choice mainstream. His clarity in contrasting markets with government opened many eyes to the benefits of capitalism. We are immeasurably better off for it. If you don't believe me, look at my native France, where Friedman has had almost no influence.
The French economy is weighed down by one of the heaviest tax levels among wealthy democratic nations, with regressive taxes and social security contributions representing a significant portion of GDP. This tax haul funds France's extensive web of social welfare programs, including health care, education, and pensions.
French regulation is also comprehensive, covering many aspects of employment, business operations, and environmental protection. The labor code is particularly onerous. Additionally, its government plays a direct role in the economy, with a significant number of partially state-owned enterprises and interventionist policies intended to safeguard employment and prioritize equality and social cohesion.
Let's see how they're doing.
U.S. GDP per capita is now $76,398; France's is $40,964. The U.S. unemployment rate is 3.9 percent. As of the second quarter of 2023, France's was 7.2 percent—a relatively low figure for a country that often faces double-digit rates even outside of recession periods. We shouldn't be surprised at any of this, considering France's stringent rules on working hours, dismissals, and employee benefits, which make it difficult for businesses to respond to market conditions. The country is slathered with reasons not to hire people.
Youth unemployment is a significant indicator of how well an economy integrates its young population into the job market. As of May 2023, France's youth unemployment rate was 17.2 percent, with historical data showing an average of 20.6 percent from 1983 until 2023. In November of 2012, it peaked at a Great Depression–like level of 28.20 percent. This is the result of well-documented structural issues distorting France's labor market. Rigid labor laws dissuade employers especially from hiring young, inexperienced workers.
In contrast, in October 2023, the U.S. youth unemployment rate was 8.9 percent. These are not just numbers; they have real implications for young individuals' economic prospects, skills development, and long-term career trajectories. As such, American youth, for all its complaints, is much better off than its French peers are.
Some claim that this is a fair price to pay for France's social cohesion and equity. I don't see it. Over the last decade, France has experienced significant social unrest rooted in economic, political, and social issues. One of the most notable periods of unrest was the yellow vest movement that began in 2018. It was sparked by the announcement of another increase in the fuel tax on top of hundreds of other taxes. It quickly morphed into a broader movement against economic inequality and the cost of living. The protests were marked by widespread demonstrations, some of which turned violent.
France is also renowned for its labor strikes, which often bring millions of protesters onto the streets. The frequency and intensity of these protests underscore the challenges that France faces in balancing economic reforms with social cohesion.
The U.S. isn't perfect. Its social cohesion could certainly be better. But given a choice between an economic system that has been somewhat influenced by Friedman and one that's barely been influenced by him at all, my choice is clear. I made it when I left France and became an American.
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM.
The post Yes, Heavy Regulation Hurts the Economy. Just Look at France. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>My first Stossel TV Fellow, Trevor Kraus, initiated this column.
Our video version is called "Freshly Cooked Censorship: Why You Can't Put 'Low FODMAP' on Food Labels."
Kraus reports that rigid government rules prevent food producers from informing you about useful foods, like low-FODMAP foods.
FODMAP is an acronym for sugars prevalent in garlic, onion, apples, honey, and many other foods. Lots of Americans have an intolerance to FODMAPs. For a few, it can be deadly.
Ketan Vakil, who's FODMAP intolerant himself, started a company that sells low-FODMAP foods like bone broths, garlic chive salt, and green onion powder—all with fewer of the ingredients that can cause stomach problems.
"I decided to replace those ingredients with other things that taste great, but don't cause stomach symptoms," says Vakil. "We use the tops of scallions, just the green parts. They taste like onion. Not the exact flavor, but really similar. That part of the plant is lower in FODMAPs."
Sounds great.
But stupidly, the government won't let him say "low-FODMAP" on his labels.
It's not because Vakil is lying about ingredients or their usefulness. He's right in saying his labels have "scientific backing that the medical community accepts."
Doctors acknowledge that FODMAPs are a problem for some people, causing cramping, diarrhea, stomach bloating, etc. Choosing low-FODMAP products would help many.
But the government still won't allow Vakil to put "Low-FODMAP" on the label.
"We had to remove the Low-FODMAP certified symbol, 'gut-friendly,' all the words that would help a shopper find that product for themselves," says Vakil.
The government didn't actually "ban" those words. They just don't allow them because they're not already on the government's approved list.
So Justin Pearson, senior attorney at public interest law firm the Institute for Justice, is helping Vakil sue the government.
"Everyone agrees that Ketan is telling the truth," Pearson points out. "The government just bans it because it's not on the outdated, pre-approved list."
Some of the approved terms don't seem very scientific, or even specific. Ambiguous labels like "home style" and "deli fresh" are approved. But "Low-FODMAP," a more useful term, isn't allowed.
The "approved" list isn't even easy to find. It's scattered throughout several government websites. It took Kraus hours just to compile a partial list of what's approved.
"How do you get on that list?" Kraus asks Pearson.
"With a giant pile of money," Pearson replies, sarcastically referring to the years of lawyering and lobbying that would be required to get the Agriculture Department or the Food and Drug Administration to agree to a wording change.
Does the government ever update its list?
"No," says Pearson. "Why would they? Federal agencies do not respond to the market. Only businesses do."
Of course, some businesses make meaningless and deceptive claims. "We have a job to make sure consumers have access to accurate and useful new information," says the director of the FDA's Center for Food Safety.
Fine. But in this case, the bureaucracy is banning useful new information!
"It's hard enough to get a product out the door," says Vakil. "Not being able to explain it accurately to my customers, who we started the company for, is very frustrating. Laws that have been on the books for years harm my customer."
Lots of people suffer from a digestive problem. They don't want to wait for vendors like Vakil to struggle through the government's lengthy approval process.
Pearson says, "The best-case scenario: They could do it in a couple years. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you."
Vakil doesn't want to wait to help people. "I don't want to solve it for them in eight years. I want to solve it for them tomorrow."
If Vakil and Pearson win their case, it would be a game-changer not just for people who have trouble digesting garlic and onion, but for millions more whose lives could be improved by future diets we don't even know about.
COPYRIGHT 2023 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
The post He Wants To Label Food 'Low FODMAP.' The Government Won't Let Him. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This week's featured article is "The Abundance Agenda Promises Everything to Everyone All at Once" by Christian Britschgi.
This audio was generated using AI trained on the voice of Katherine Mangu-Ward.
Music Credits: "Deep in Thought" by CTRL S and "Sunsettling" by Man with Roses
The post <I>The Best of Reason</I>: The Abundance Agenda Promises Everything to Everyone All at Once appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In summer 2023, American progressivism was spending big and riding high. Despite razor-thin majorities in Congress, Democrats had spent the last two years enacting hundreds of billions of dollars in new subsidies—for green energy, public transportation, domestic manufacturing, scientific research, and more. This progressive pork was now in the hands of Democratic President Joe Biden to distribute as his administration saw fit.
Yet when California Gov. Gavin Newsom looked upon the piles of fresh federal cash, all he could do was despair.
"We're going to lose billions and billions of dollars in the status quo," he complained to New York Times columnist Ezra Klein in June. "The beneficiaries of a lot of these dollars are red states that don't give a damn about these issues, and they're getting the projects."
Newsom was right about the distribution of the funds: More than 80 percent of the new federal funding for clean energy and semiconductors was headed for GOP districts, according to the Financial Times. His outburst spoke to the anxiety of much of liberal America.
Despite a string of progressive policy victories at the federal level, a Democratic Party under the grip of progressives, and ironclad Democratic control over some of the country's largest and wealthiest cities and states, blue America just wasn't delivering what its boosters said the country needed.
"We need to build more homes, trains, clean energy, research centers, disease surveillance. And we need to do it faster and cheaper," Klein himself had written a few weeks before his Newsom interview was published. Yet "in New York or California or Oregon…it is too slow and too costly to build even where Republicans are weak—perhaps especially where they are weak."
The blue strongholds' failure to build had added countervailing losses to all their wins.
These states aren't just losing federal grants. They're losing residents to states where housing construction is easier. They're losing companies to places where the regulatory burden is lighter. They're losing voters, tax dollars, congressional seats, and more to places that build the things people want. If the trend keeps up, the progressive vision for America may be lost as well.
This threat has provoked some surprising self-reflection from liberal wonks, writers, and officials.
America, and particularly blue America, has consciously wrapped itself in red tape, regulations, and special-interest carve-outs, to the point that it has become nearly impossible to convert either government subsidies or private capital into needed physical things.
As Newsom said to Klein, "We're not getting the money because our rules are getting in the way."
A hodgepodge coalition of legacy publication columnists, traditional think-tankers, upstart Substack writers, and obsessive Twitter posters have rallied around the straightforward idea that what the country needs is more stuff, and it isn't going to get it with that thicket of rules standing in the way. Their call to action is what Atlantic writer Derek Thompson calls the "abundance agenda."
According to Thompson, America has produced a lot of technology that allows people to complain about problems, but not much in the physical world to actually solve those problems.
Our "age of bits-enabled protest has coincided with a slowdown in atoms-related progress," he wrote last year. "Altogether, America has too much venting and not enough inventing." Thompson's complaint echoes entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel's famous 2013 quip that "we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." What we need instead, argues Thompson, are policies that will kick-start material growth and technological development here in reality.
For libertarians and free marketers, this new abundance agenda has a lot to offer. Many of its intellectual forefathers and policy foot soldiers are themselves libertarian-leaning. Even when they're not, the abundance agenda remains a directionally deregulatory affair. Once seemingly fringe libertarian hobbyhorses such as abolishing zoning, occupational licensing, and immigration restrictions are now being aired prominently in mainstream center-left and progressive spaces.
At the same time, most of those who favor the abundance agenda are either agnostic about big government or actively supportive of it. In its most statist iterations, the deregulatory elements of the abundance agenda are mostly about clearing away the bureaucratic and constitutional obstacles to government-provided services and government-sponsored megaprojects.
For some abundance-agenda adherents, it's a partisan project as well: The goal is to make blue America more efficient, more effective, and more appealing in the service of making America more Democratic.
And yet: The fundamental policy goal of abundance agenda liberalism is to clear away bureaucratic and political obstacles to useful projects, especially in the housing market. Is this a devil's bargain that libertarians should be willing to make?
Discussions about the abundance agenda quickly get bogged down in wonky specifics. But its pursuit of limitless individual potential powered by limitless growth and energy is nothing short of utopian.
In a 2022 essay for Works in Progress, Benjamin Reinhardt described this futuristic end point through the eyes of someone living in a world of abundant energy "too cheap to meter."
You would wake up on your artificial island off the coast of South America, commute to work via a flying car and Singaporean space elevator, put in a few hours working on new longevity drugs in zero-gravity, and then jet off to Tokyo for a quick dinner with friends before commuting home.
As you return home, Reinhardt writes, you hope that one day you have "the resources to pull yourself out of the bottom 25 percent, so that your kids can lead an even brighter life than you do. Things are good, you think, but they could be better."
In order to achieve this sci-fi world of abundance, we have to unshackle ourselves from growth-phobic institutions riddled with "veto points" stopping new housing, energy, and more.
The American government of today is a highly participatory one. Individual people have substantial opportunity to have their say in public hearings and courtrooms on everything from new housing projects to new power plants.
It wasn't always this way.
As recounted in Yale historian Paul Sabin's book Public Citizens, this level of citizen input was the product of laws passed in the 1970s inspired by slow-growth activists such as Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader.
This group of writers, lawyers, and activists argued that the midcentury liberal era's love of growth and bigness had left corporations free to pollute the environment and flood the market with dangerous products. Meanwhile, unchecked, opaque government bureaucracies built or approved harmful megaprojects that bulldozed private property, often without the owners' consent, and devastated nature in the name of "progress."
To hold fundamentally untrustworthy bureaucracies accountable, citizens were empowered to sue bureaucrats when they didn't follow new environmental regulations or disclose enough information about the projects they approved.
The thinking at the time, writes Sabin, was that "aggressive litigation might make the government work better."
These anti-growth, anti-bigness policies also drifted down to the state and local level. Throughout the 1970s, state legislatures passed their own, often much more expansive environmental reporting laws that allowed citizens to sue to stop private projects such as new housing and businesses, as well as major infrastructure projects.
Local governments, meanwhile, tightened existing zoning codes to drastically reduce the amount of housing that could be built. They also gave local residents (via public hearings, referendums, and discretionary approval processes) more say over the approval of housing that was still technically allowed.
Empowered to sue over projects they didn't like, local "not in my backyard" (NIMBY) activists grew increasingly successful in stopping everything that smacked of progress in their neighborhoods.
Free marketers have been critical of these laws from day one.
The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which has enabled citizens to challenge the approval of both large infrastructure projects and single-family homes, was enacted in 1970.
By 1979, Reason was accusing the law of having "done more damage to home building in that state than anything since the last ice age and the San Andreas Fault." It took several decades for mainstream Democrats like Newsom to start making similar complaints.
Indeed, these laws initially sparked little pushback from liberals. But as their costs have continued to mount in terms of housing units not built and energy not generated, a growing chorus of progressive voices has started demanding reform.
One example is the rise of California's rabidly pro-development "yes in my backyard" (YIMBY) coalition in the mid-2010s. Irritated by ever-rising housing costs, the new YIMBYs started to demand that restrictive zoning laws and procedures that gave neighbors the ability to say "no" to new housing be abolished.
These largely left-wing YIMBYs were fighting for property rights and freer markets in building. Yet their rhetoric is more likely to stress left-wing notions of equality and inclusion: The privileged few shouldn't get to say "no" to housing for the hard-pressed many.
Zoning reform has since become a core of the abundance agenda. Its critique of citizen veto points over housing has quickly spread to other areas of the regulatory state.
When it comes to the approval of infrastructure projects, community input is "fundamentally flawed," wrote Jerusalem Demsas for The Atlantic last year. "It's biased toward the status quo and privileges a small group of residents who for reasons that range from the sympathetic to the selfish don't want to allow projects that are broadly useful."
Riddling the system with these "veto points" has also given rise to a related criticism of modern American governance: what the Times' Klein calls "everything bagel liberalism." (That's a reference to the all-consuming "everything bagel" from the 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once that sucks up so much of the universe that no individual thing ends up mattering.)
The policy implications of the metaphor are clear. If everyone can say "no" to your project, then everyone is going to demand something before they say "yes" to it. That in turn weighs down projects, public or private, with prohibitively costly carve-outs and payoffs.
The abundance agenda's criticisms of excessive veto points and the special-interest carve-outs they breed has made its supporters more friendly to the libertarian view that market incumbents often convert regulation into a protection racket.
In addition to NIMBY housing regulations, abundance agenda supporters criticize occupational licensing laws for propping up the earnings of incumbent day care workers and hair stylists at the expense of consumers and excluded workers. They criticize immigration restrictions that keep out high-skilled foreigners to protect the wages of native-born Americans. They attack "Buy American" laws that force businesses to purchase domestically sourced materials.
"I think a lot of people don't know how much the government does to restrict access to a lot of kinds of goods that we don't have serious disagreements about whether people should have access to them," says liberal pundit Matt Yglesias. "There's a lot of pretty pure rent seeking in the system."
On the flip side, the growing popularity of the abundance agenda has seen free marketers use that framing to pitch their longstanding deregulatory beliefs to a wider left-of-center audience that might otherwise tune them out.
Discourse, a publication of the pro-market Mercatus Center at George Mason University, has published a series of essays on the abundance agenda, most of which argue that a long list of free market policies are necessary for true abundance.
Both libertarian and progressive abundance-agenda supporters have reached back in history to find forgotten strands of liberalism that prioritized growth and progress.
In Neal Stephenson's sci-fi novel Anathem, there exists an order of rationalist monks whose whole purpose is to explain that every supposedly new idea was actually discussed to death centuries ago. If these monks existed in our universe, they'd likely say that, actually, there's nothing all that novel about a progressivism that extols the virtues of growing the private sector and government.
As recently as the mid-2000s, there was a boom in this kind of thinking. Writers like Brink Lindsey (then a vice president of the Cato Institute) and Gene Sperling (one of President Bill Clinton's economic advisers) made their respective cases for a "liberaltarian" or "pro-growth progressive" coalition.
The liberal-libertarian fusionists saw dynamic markets as necessary for the good jobs and tax revenue progressives wanted. They also recognized redistribution as a just and politically necessary means of shoring up popular support for the economic dynamism the libertarians prized.
As a bonus, a growing economy would convert everyday people to socially liberal values, or at least make them less willing to go in for reactionary politics. "It is easier to have a melting pot if it is a growing pot," Sperling wrote in his 2005 book The Pro-Growth Progressive.
Nevertheless, there's a lot that distinguishes today's abundance agenda from the pro-growth progressives of old. The most obvious one is the contemporary group's means of communication and organization. Notwithstanding Thompson's admonition about too much venting and not enough inventing, the abundance agenda is definitely "too online."
Today's abundance-agenda liberals own a lot of real estate at legacy media outlets: Klein writes a column at The New York Times, while Thompson and Demsas write for The Atlantic. More often than not, the prestige publications' version of the abundance agenda is a filtered, polished rendition of broad ideas and specific policies first circulated on social media and in digital newsletters.
Where else but #EconTwitter would thousands of professional wonks and interested laypeople gather to chew the fat about the latest National Bureau of Economic Research working paper explaining low growth rates, or dunk on clips of anti-housing activists saying a new apartment building will ruin their neighborhood?
Where else but in subscriber-supported Substack newsletters could writers find it possible (and profitable) to pen thousands of words on the particulars of energy-permitting regulations or international variation in public transportation project costs?
Out of this wonky internet churn, individual failures to build get synthesized into a coherent group identity around an abundance agenda and its larger call to action.
A representative episode was the uproar over La Sombrita.
La Sombrita was Los Angeles' "radical" new design for shading its bus stops that, on closer inspection, turned out to be a mostly useless piece of metal that cast almost no shade.
Its primary virtue was that it was so small and ineffective that city workers could just go out and hang them from bus stop signs. More substantial shade structures would need multiple sign-offs and approvals from L.A.'s sprawling city bureaucracy.
A quarter-century ago, this small-scale boondoggle might have attracted little notice. Instead, it quickly went viral in the abundance-agenda corners of Twitter, which then produced thinkier Substack pieces about how La Sombrita explained America's material stagnation, which were then followed by coverage in major traditional news outlets.
No "failure to build," no matter how small, would escape the movement's all-seeing eye.
Yglesias, who writes the Slow Boring newsletter on Substack, argues that the online nature of abundance-agenda liberalism has helped rehabilitate market-friendly centrist "New Democratic" thinking from its low ebb in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
That kind of proto–abundance agenda "had a lot of purchase and a lot of institutional backing 20 years ago and then came to be discredited because the particular institutions associated with New Democrats came to be associated with the invasion of Iraq" and the Great Recession, he says.
Thanks to new voices and institutions online, he adds, "there's been a rebuilding and rediscovery of what was correct in that political tendency."
As a sign of its success, the online movement has started to spawn traditional brick-and-mortar institutions in the real world.
One can see this in the rise of an abundance-agenda-adjacent think tank, the Center for New Liberalism (CNL)—previously known as the Neoliberal Project, and before that r/neoliberal. (In its earliest forms in the mid-2010s, CNL was just a humble subreddit, or online forum.)
"It was making really wonky memes about the federal funds rate," says CNL co-founder Colin Mortimer. "It very quickly turned into a community and refuge for non-Bernie [as in socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders] Democrats who wanted a place to talk about still wonky but general politics."
That subreddit community followed the upward ape-to-man trajectory of any successful internet-spawned political movement, growing into a successful Twitter account, a podcast, a website, local in-person meetups, and eventually acquisition by a decadesold center-left think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, in 2020.
The CNL has since spun off into its own independent organization, where a large part of its mission continues to be convincing center-left policy makers that "we just don't have enough stuff" and "we should make it easier to replace that stuff or build new stuff."
That's not the only abundance-agenda institution to grow beyond the confines of simple posting.
For a time, billionaire Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison was content to write about the causes of and obstacles to economic growth on his personal blog. His company has since plowed significant resources into more traditional publishing endeavors to expand on those ideas.
It has launched Stripe Press, which publishes and reprints a number of books helping to lay an intellectual groundwork for growth-obsessed abundance agenda-ers. That includes J. Storrs Hall's Where Is My Flying Car?, which pins our stagnation on regulations that crushed energy production, and Stubborn Attachments, by George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen, which argues we have a moral duty to future human beings to increase economic growth by as much as possible.
The abundance agenda and libertarianism have a significant natural overlap. Nevertheless, the former's goals are higher growth and "more stuff" generally, not a smaller state.
That goal has created an odd-bedfellows coalition of big-government liberals and small-government libertarians and conservatives, all interested in some pruning of the regulatory state. But the progressive members of this coalition want that pruning to unleash the best big government has to offer.
If free markets or small government institutions are seen as an impediment to higher growth and empowered, competent government, then they too have to go.
Klein's "everything bagel liberalism" is a useful framing for discussing the problems of excessive process and special interest carve-outs. He first deployed it in the context of all the cost-increasing regulations attached to affordable housing development in San Francisco. The development he profiled managed to escape a lot of these regulations by relying exclusively on private money.
Nevertheless, Klein's column made it clear he wanted the government to play a significant role in solving the state's affordable housing problems, and indeed, its problems generally.
"Government needs to be able to solve big problems. But the inability or the unwillingness to choose among competing priorities—to pile too much on the bagel—is itself a choice, and it's one that California keeps making," he wrote. That's a far cry from the libertarian view that government will inherently get bogged down with needless process and/or get captured by special interests.
Even where liberal adherents of the abundance agenda support getting rid of government regulation on market actors, it's often part of a larger political project of making progressive policies work and progressive-dominated regions more powerful.
The abundance agenda in many ways started as an effort to liberalize zoning regulations on new housing construction in expensive coastal metro areas. A large part of that was early YIMBY activists and writers correctly understanding that restrictions on market supply are driving up market prices.
At the same time, this focus on zoning speaks to a progressive anxiety that blue America is losing people, power, and influence to places where housing costs are cheaper.
"The population center of gravity keeps shifting to places where they let houses get built is something everyone understands. The political economy consequences of that are dire," says Yglesias. "Do you want to concede that the overall model in Texas is just better or do you want to zero in on how much of that excess growth is caused by housing elements and then do something about it?"
The libertarian political project is to shrink the state generally, not just reduce permitting times for federally approved infrastructure projects.
Many activists and policy wonks who support the abundance agenda argue it's often undesirable and certainly a waste of time for anyone to pursue those larger changes to the nation's political economy.
That's the view taken by Alec Stapp, co-founder of the Institute for Progress. Stapp got his start working on the big questions of tech policy, such as antitrust and privacy regulations.
"It's trench warfare," he says. "Both sides are really well-funded. They've been having these arguments for decades. Has legislation been passed? Have rules and regulations changed? Not really."
Stapp launched his institute with the goal of sidestepping those bigger policy fights in favor of focusing on the "inputs to innovations," such as high-skilled immigration and federal science funding.
"Lots of people talking about should we give [the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation] more billions of dollars or take away their funding," says Stapp. Instead, his group asks: "For any given budget, whether it's a little smaller or a little bigger, how are they spending it?"
That could well be the best way to be an effective policy entrepreneur. But it requires one to make peace with a state far larger and more intrusive than any libertarian could be comfortable with.
Even some abundance-agenda adherents who share the goal of freer markets and a less intrusive state have nevertheless embraced the idea that the modern world requires us to have a better functioning government before we can have a smaller government.
"Our governments cannot address climate change, much [less] improve K-12 education, fix traffic congestion, or improve the quality of their discretionary spending. Much of our physical infrastructure is stagnant or declining in quality," wrote Cowen in a 2020 blog post advocating "state-capacity libertarianism."
"Those problems require state capacity—albeit to boost markets—in a way that classical libertarianism is poorly suited to deal with," he continued. "Even if you favor education privatization, in the shorter run we still need to make the current system much better. That would even make privatization easier, if that is your goal."
Old-school libertarians have criticized this notion. David R. Henderson of the Hoover Institution perceptively replied to Cowen that "the latent power that a large-capacity state would have could more easily be drawn on than the power that a small-capacity state would have."
"Even if large-capacity libertarians wouldn't want the state to throw people in prison for producing, distributing, or using drugs," Henderson warns, "they might not get their wish."
The liberaltarian movement never quite panned out. Will the abundance agenda be a similar flop? It's always tough to read the tea leaves, but there's reason to think a "liberalism that builds" might be a stickier concept.
The pandemic era's trifecta of huge spending, high inflation, and empty shelves has reinforced the notion that you can't just spend your way out of material deprivation. Center-left policy wonks and lay policy enthusiasts are increasingly hungry for ideas about how to grow the pie, not just subsidize and redistribute it.
Pandemic-era migration from blue to red America has made clear the role liberal states' homebuilding regulations are playing in pricing people out. That has helped keep liberalizing zoning reforms on the top of the agenda at the state and local level.
Lastly, the success of congressional Democrats and the Biden administration at squeezing through big spending bills has, ironically, removed one source of friction between the big- and small-government sides of the abundance agenda. Like it or not, those billions in subsidies have already been approved. That's one less point to argue about.
Provided it does stick around, where will an abundance agenda lead us?
One optimistic view is that an abundance agenda will succeed in smashing the veto point–riddled institutions of the 1970s. The inherent inefficiencies of government will mean that its schemes will still flounder, while private capital is at last unshackled to build our housing- and energy-rich future.
Or perhaps Henderson's pessimism is on point. Abundance-agenda liberals (and a few useful-idiot libertarians) will succeed in making a more effective state only to see it slide its interfering tentacles into more and more areas of the economy and individuals' lives.
Maybe the abundance agenda will be truly transcendent, as in Reinhardt's energy-rich utopia. With the problems of material scarcity basically solved, questions about government control versus private initiative will become hopelessly archaic. Taxation will still be theft, of course. But when energy is too cheap to meter, who'll even notice the state pirating a few electrons?
Most likely, we'll end up somewhere in the middle, with the abundance agenda adding another pro-growth, deregulatory spice to the "everything bagel" of Democratic governance. Regulations will become less burdensome, but they won't disappear. Progressive politicians will have to be more mindful of the costs of permitting procedures and "Buy American" rules, but they won't get rid of them entirely.
That seems to be the direction where Newsom's California is headed. After complaining bitterly about CEQA, the governor unveiled some incredibly mild tweaks to the law. They weren't earth-shattering stuff by any means, and they won't fix the state's failures to build.
But directionally, they're deregulatory. Perhaps real abundance starts on the margins.
The post The Abundance Agenda Promises Everything to Everyone All at Once appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show youth smoking at a historic low, with just 1.9 percent of high schoolers lighting up in the past month. Youth vaping is also at its lowest level in a decade at 10 percent, and cigar use is down to 1.8 percent from 2.8 percent the previous year.
That's good news from a public health standpoint, but the data raise questions regarding the Biden administration's plan to ban menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars. A key argument for prohibition is that menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars appeal to youth, especially black youth, and banning them is essential to prevent future generations of addiction and outweighs the risks of illicit markets that are certain to follow. But the CDC data show that smoking rates among black high schoolers are so low they can't be reliably calculated.
A smoke-free society is typically defined as one where cigarette smoking is below 5 percent of the population. Applying this standard to youth, the U.S. has achieved a smoke-free generation. With youth smoking all but eliminated, it's hard to see menthol prohibition as anything other than an attempt to target adult consumers, particularly black smokers who are more likely to choose a menthol product.
Kids may have ditched cigarettes, but there are millions of adults who still use menthol cigarettes. Experiments in menthol prohibition in the European Union, Canada, and even Massachusetts aren't promising examples for the United States. A study of the effect of menthol prohibition in Poland, which had the highest menthol consumption in the E.U. at almost a third of the cigarette market, found no statistically significant change in cigarette consumption after the ban. Canada, which had a far smaller share of menthol smokers at 11 percent of the population, did see 21.5 percent of menthol smokers quit after the ban was imposed. However, 19.5 percent of menthol smokers continued to source their preferred cigarettes through other channels, and 59 percent just switched to nonmenthol cigarettes. Massachusetts became the first state to ban all flavored tobacco products. The ban was a boon to neighboring states like New Hampshire and Rhode Island, which enjoyed a surge in cigarette sales. Massachusetts lost $116 million in cigarette tax revenue in the first 12 months of the ban, according to the Tax Foundation.
The Food and Drug Administration downplays the risks of the illicit market for menthol and flavored cigars, arguing the FDA is only banning the sale, manufacture, and distribution, not individual use. These defenses ring hollow as Eric Garner was killed in 2014 during a confrontation with New York City police over selling untaxed cigarettes. The Volstead Act, which instituted national alcohol prohibition, also didn't ban individuals from consuming alcohol, but the results were disastrous all the same.
Last year, the mothers of Garner and Trayvon Martin, as well as the brother of George Floyd, urged the Biden administration to abandon its plans for a menthol ban. The American Civil Liberties Union and a host of criminal justice organizations have also been outspoken in their opposition to menthol prohibition, fearing that law enforcement responses for controlling the illicit market will be disproportionately concentrated on black communities.
In July, Sens. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.), Bill Cassidy (R–La.), Ted Budd (R–N.C.), and Bill Hagerty (R–Tenn.) wrote to FDA Commissioner Robert Califf expressing concern over the ban, arguing prohibition would enrich Mexican transnational criminal organizations who will seize the opportunity for a new profit center through trafficking flavored tobacco products.
The FDA's rule banning menthol cigarettes currently sits with the White House Office of Management and Budget for review and could be finalized before the end of the month. With the advent of safer alternatives to cigarettes, like vaping, and youth smoking at generational lows, the justification for embarking on a new era of prohibition looks more tenuous than ever.
The post Youth Smoking Nears Zero appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Regulation comes for us all: On Monday, the White House released an executive order on artificial intelligence which "aims to prevent the technology from exacerbating bias, displacing workers and undermining national security," per The Washington Post. But that wasn't the only AI regulation rained down from on high.
Earlier this week, the Group of Seven (G7) released a nonbinding statement on AI: "We call on organizations developing advanced AI systems to commit to the application of the International Code of Conduct."
And today, officials in the U.K. start their two-day summit on "AI safety" (which Vice President Kamala Harris is attending), at which they appear set to brand their efforts as focused on "responsible AI." British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak recently warned that "humanity could lose control of AI completely" but added, after all this fearmongering, that "the U.K.'s answer is not to rush to regulate." Wired called the summit a "doom-obsessed mess," which isn't far off, in my opinion.
"It doesn't make any sense to put in the same phrase that, yes, you see a substantial risk from AI, and then you do nothing about it," Dragos Tudorache, who is working to regulate AI in the European Parliament, told the Post of Sunak's comments.
As for Biden's executive order, "it's hard to see how U.S. national defense can be enhanced by slowing down domestic AI innovation," writes Reason's Ronald Bailey. "After all, U.S. regulations will not apply to foreign competitors who will be able to catch up and surpass U.S. artificial intelligence developers hampered by bureaucratic fetters."
Prominent tech-world watchers have already started rightfully critiquing the Biden administration's approach to AI:
I don't know what the right approach to regulating AI is, but one problem with this particular approach is that it means we're heading toward the government regulating private individuals' computing at an exponential rate. https://t.co/tXPtL74IqL
— Paul Graham (@paulg) October 31, 2023
If you acquire a large amount of compute, you must disclose "the existence and location of these clusters and the amount of total computing power available in each cluster."
Treating compute - an inherently neutral technology - as a dangerous resource that must be regulated. pic.twitter.com/6O5kJz7SAy
— Jeff Amico (@_jamico) October 31, 2023
The new Biden AI executive order issues broad and quite amorphous calls for expanded government oversight across many other issues and agencies, raising the risk of a "death by a thousand cuts" scenario for AI policy in the US. The EO appears to be empowering agencies to…
— Adam Thierer (@AdamThierer) October 30, 2023
There's also, content aside, the mechanism by which it was done: It's not clear how the Biden administration's rules and regulations will be enforced, and executive orders are always vulnerable to simply being invalidated when a new president comes into office. R Street Institute's Adam Thierer opines that the order "appears to be empowering agencies to gradually convert voluntary guidelines into a sort of back-door regulatory regime for AI, a process which would be made easier by the lack of congressional action on AI issues." (More from Thierer here.)
Israel update: The Israel Defense Force's (IDF) ground invasion in Gaza continues. The IDF claims it took out the ringleader of the October 7 attacks and that it has "eliminated dozens of terrorists, anti-tank launching squads, [and] anti-tank launching positions." It has inched closer to Gaza City and seems set to separate the northern part of the territory from the south. The health ministry in Gaza—which is controlled by Hamas, and thus not very reliable—claims that 57 medical facilities have been "targeted" by airstrikes and that at least 15 hospitals and 32 primary care centers are no longer operating due to Israeli bombardment or having run out of fuel.
The health ministry also reports that IDF strikes which took out the October 7 organizer hit the densely populated neighborhood, Jabaliya, killing and wounding hundreds. An IDF spokesperson reports that dozens of Hamas operatives were killed in this strike.
Israel stands accused of using white phosphorus on the northern front, in Lebanon, as well as in Gaza, which Amnesty International and other human rights groups say amounts to a war crime.
Scenes from New York:
Problematic Aladdin costume? Possibly.
Absolutely dope magic carpet skateboard? Definitely.
nothing like halloween in new york city pic.twitter.com/fk8ClyVDJQ
— Alexis Benveniste (@apbenven) October 30, 2023
It would mean a lot to me if you'd read this piece I wrote for @TheFP @bariweiss: https://t.co/AQBYfEglUM Much more personal than ones I normally write! And filled with a bit of mom rage: what are the wealthiest moms getting wrong? Why are so many of them so damn high-strung? pic.twitter.com/9FCKHAKJIH
— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) October 30, 2023
oh good, a committee https://t.co/kSr80CtWJL
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) October 31, 2023
Amid a a surge of carjackings in DC, including a 13-year-old who was shot and killed during a carjacking attempt, authorities have shared the following tips for driving in the area: https://t.co/npyPIGRz3g pic.twitter.com/ZoNgJEZ3Cr
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) October 30, 2023
The post Safety First appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Joe Biden issued yesterday a sweeping executive order aiming to impose federal regulation on the development of artificial intelligence technologies, such as large language models like ChatGPT. The executive order cites the emergency powers of the Korean War-era Defense Production Act as the justification for imposing federal regulation on AI technologies. As my Reason colleague Eric Boehm has pointed out, "the Defense Production Act has become a license for central planning." Taken as a whole, the new order amounts to federal central planning for artificial intelligence.
Among other things, the order will "require that developers of the most powerful AI systems share their safety test results and other critical information with the U.S. government," according to the White House. Specifically, the new federal AI regulators are supposed to oversee any "foundation model" that purportedly "poses a serious risk to national security, national economic security, or national public health and safety" by requiring that developers report to the secretary of commerce the results of extensive "red-team safety tests." Roughly speaking, foundation models are large language models like OpenAI's GPT-4, Google's PaLM-2, and Meta's LlamA 2. Red-teaming is the practice of creating adversarial squads of hackers to attack AI systems with the goal of uncovering weaknesses, biases, and security flaws. As it happens, the leading AI tech companies— OpenAI, Google, Meta—have been red-teaming their models all along.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology is charged with setting up the additional safety standards with which the AI developers are supposed to comply. Complying with such reporting requirements will likely slow down the process of safety and security testing undertaken by Big Tech developers while at the same time driving out smaller competitors who cannot afford the costs of dotting regulatory i's and crossing bureaucratic t's. An even bigger worry is that the new AI safety testing orders will quickly evolve into the digital equivalent of the deadly slow hyper-precautionary FDA drug safety approval scheme.
It's hard to see how U.S. national defense can be enhanced by slowing down domestic AI innovation. After all, U.S. regulations will not apply to foreign competitors who will be able to catch up and surpass U.S. artificial intelligence developers hampered by bureaucratic fetters.
In addition, the executive order directs the Department of Commerce to develop techniques for watermarking the outputs of AI technologies. This means embedding information into photos, videos, audio clips, or text to let users know that they were generated by AI. As it happens, AI companies like OpenAI and Google are already doing that. Of course, scammers and propagandists will simply ignore watermarking when they create their misleading deepfakes.
Biden's order also directs various federal agencies to address the problem of AI "job displacement" and "job disruption." And doubtlessly, such a powerful suite of technologies will affect nearly everyone's work activities and prospects. But keep in mind the dire prediction back in 2014 that robots would steal one in three human jobs by 2025. Only just over a year to go, folks and the U.S. unemployment rate is the lowest it's been since 1969.
On the plus side, Biden's executive order does instruct the Department of Homeland Security to "modernize immigration pathways for experts in AI and other critical and emerging technologies." This is always a good idea since such immigrants significantly boost U.S. technological progress, employment, and economic growth.
"White House executive order threatens to put AI in a regulatory cage," is how the free market R Street Institute characterized the Biden administration's regulatory proposals. In a statement, Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel for the technology lobbying group NetChoice, warned that Biden's new executive amounts to an "AI red tape wishlist" that "will result in stifling new companies and competitors from entering the marketplace and significantly expanding the power of the federal government over American innovation." He added that the executive order "puts any investment in AI at risk of being shut down at the whims of government bureaucrats."
Over at Forbes, Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow James Broughel glumly warns, "Biden's AI safety order could well be the biggest policy mistake of my lifetime."
The post Biden Issues 'A.I. Red Tape Wishlist' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the grand ballroom of American politics, Democrats have long waltzed to the melody of progressivism while ridiculing Republicans' preference for outdated tax cut tunes. Ironically, they don't want to pay for their style of big government with higher taxes on ordinary Americans, which their expansionary ambitions would require. Instead, they loudly proclaim that they want to tax the rich. It remains to be seen how true this is.
Indeed, while Democrats profess their devotion to social justice and fight against income inequality, they often push for policies that favor the rich. Take their nonstop battle over the last five years to ease the tax burden of their high-income constituents.
The State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap, part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), placed a $10,000 limit on the amount of state and local taxes that can be deducted from federal taxable income. This move predominantly affected high earners in high-tax states like New York, California, and many others that are Democratic strongholds.
That's a tax hike on the rich. This shouldn't bother Democrats, who are usually happy to demonstrate their egalitarian chops by clamoring for that very thing. Yet this time, by demanding repeal of the SALT cap, they are on the front lines of a battle to restore tax breaks for the rich. As it turns out, when affluent Californians and Northeasterners felt the pinch, Democrats were ready to cha-cha for tax relief.
Contrast this with the refusal by moderate New York Republicans to vote for Jim Jordan (R–Ohio) for House speaker in exchange for doubling the deduction cap to $20,000 for individuals and $40,000 for married couples. Now, this might mean these guys really didn't want Jordan as speaker, but they wouldn't roll over even in exchange for tax cuts for their own constituencies.
Would New York Democrats be so principled? Back in 2021, 17 of 19 members of this delegation threatened to block a Democrat-sponsored infrastructure bill if the SALT deduction cap wasn't entirely repealed. I would have been OK with that crony bill failing; I highlight this incident only to reveal some Democrats' commitment to tax breaks for rich blue-state voters.
Add to this the fact that big government tends to work out well for people with big bank accounts. Billions of dollars in tax credits and subsidies have gone de facto to high-income taxpayers to buy expensive electric cars, or to large, well-connected companies to build green infrastructure or semiconductors they would have produced anyway.
For all the populist huffing and puffing, many big-government policies squarely hurt middle-class and poorer Americans. A good example is Democrats' starring role in Congress' refusal to reform insolvent entitlement spending. It amounts to supporting an enormous transfer of money, through regressive payroll taxes, from the young and poor to the old and rich.
Even Democrats' support for raising the corporate income tax rate from its current 21 percent to 25 percent is inconsistent with their populist self-identification. As economists have long known, most, if not all, of the economic burden of corporate income taxes is shouldered by primarily middle-class workers in the form of lower wages. It's wrong to call this a tax on the rich.
There are other instances in which Democrats balk at the notion of raising taxes or even, in Republican-like fashion, support tax cuts. In 2010, they heralded the passage of the Affordable Care Act. However, one key funding mechanism was a 2.3 percent excise tax on medical devices.
Many Democrats eventually joined Republicans in calling for this tax's repeal, citing the potential negative impact on the medical device industry. By 2015, even liberal stalwarts like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) were advocating to suspend the tax. It was permanently repealed in 2019 as part of a year-end spending package.
In 2011, Democrats, led by then-President Barack Obama, pushed for an extension of the payroll tax cut, a policy that provided relief to millions of working families. While this move aligned with their commitment to supporting the middle class, it marked another significant departure from their traditional stance on tax cuts, showing a willingness to embrace tax relief when politically expedient.
Soon, Congress must debate the sunset of the TCJA's tax relief provisions in 2025, which are scheduled to raise taxes by roughly $3 trillion over a 10-year period. It will be entertaining to watch Democrats extend a vast majority of these policies, including some for the benefit of very well-off Americans, while continuing to blame former President Donald Trump's tax cuts for raising the deficit.
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The post Democrats Say They're Fighting Inequality. But Many of Their Policies Favor the Rich. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This will be a shocker, I know, but with rare exception, Americans don't think very highly of the federal government. When asked their opinions of 16 different prominent federal agencies, members of the public are more likely to voice negative sentiments than positive ones for about three-quarters of them. Can you guess who gets the most hate? (Hint: it has something to do with April 15.)
"Of 16 federal government agencies and departments included in the latest Gallup survey, just four receive positive job-performance ratings from a majority of Americans, making 2023 the third consecutive year of relatively low readings," reports Gallup. "The U.S. Postal Service (62%), the Secret Service (55%), the Department of Defense (53%) and NASA (52%) are each evaluated as 'excellent' or 'good' by more than half of U.S. adults."
As with most matters in modern America, opinions vary based on partisan affiliation.
"Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents view 15 of the 16 agencies and departments more positively than Republicans and Republican-leaning independents do," notes the polling agency. "Only the VA is rated similarly by both party groups. About one in three of each group views the VA positively."
That said, those four agencies getting a thumbs-up represent consolation prizes, at best. The Department of Defense gets 53 percent "excellent" or "good" assessments in this survey, but in separate results released in July, Gallup noted: "At 60%, confidence in the military was last this low in 1997, and it hasn't been lower since 1988, when 58% were confident." That helps fuel a military recruiting crisis—the Army fell short of recruitment goals again, this month. This is a positively rated agency.
Likewise, the Postal Service wins top spot with 62 percent "excellent" or "good" assessments. You have to wonder if that reflects the service's largely successful efforts to put behind it that unpleasant "going postal" period when, as Vice noted, "in the late 80s and early 90s, a spate of shootings by disgruntled postal workers became the primary way most Americans thought of the post office." Way to go, mail carriers; you shifted your public image to stolen mail from blood spatter!
The Secret Service gets a 55 percent positive assessment, though it's difficult to know whether that's despite or because of agents' hard-partying reputation from Cartagena to Amsterdam to D.C. Who doesn't like a good time?
And NASA, with 52 percent approval, continues to capture Americans' high-flying imaginations. Truthfully, though, it has largely become an office that contracts out the actual space work to private companies such as Northrop Grumman and (especially) SpaceX.
Those are the agencies to which Americans are, on average, favorably inclined. What about the others?
"Majorities of Americans rate the other 12 government agencies as 'only fair' or 'poor,'" adds Gallup. "The IRS is viewed in the lowest regard, with 30% positive and 70% negative ratings, while the Veterans Administration (VA), Department of Justice, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Federal Reserve Board, and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are not far behind, with 32% to 38% rating them positively."
That the IRS is widely despised is hardly news. Its role, after all, is to forcibly extract funds from the population for agencies like the Veterans Administration (66 percent negative), Department of Justice (66 percent negative), Environmental Protection Agency (66 percent negative) and, should you get on the government's bad side, Homeland Security (57 percent negative) and FBI (53 percent negative). An arm-twisting fundraiser for unpopular causes is destined to be unloved.
Beyond that, the IRS sullies its name with incompetence, criminal activity, and politicization. In August, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration revealed "the IRS cannot account for thousands of microfilm cartridges containing millions of sensitive business and individual tax account record."
Last year, the Government Accountability Office found IRS employees are constantly engaged in "willful unauthorized access of tax data."
This summer, IRS whistleblowers claimed superiors "slow walked" the investigation into Hunter Biden and that "Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf told us prosecutors had decided to conceal some evidence from the investigators." That's after the scandal of a decade ago, confirmed by the Inspector General, over targeting of Tea Party groups.
"Since the advent of the federal income tax about a century ago, several presidents – or their zealous underlings – have directed the IRS to use its formidable police powers to harass or punish enemies, political rivals, and administration critics," The Christian Science Monitor reported in 2013.
The FBI has also developed a reputation among conservatives for hostile partisanship. Truthfully, its political interference dates back decades and is less consistently ideological than protective of the powerful.
"The FBI…has placed more emphasis on domestic dissent than on organized crime and, according to some, let its efforts against foreign spies suffer because of the amount of time spent checking up on American protest groups," the U.S. Senate's Church Committee complained in 1976.
The law enforcement agency is a mess. In March of this year, Politico pointed out that "a series of withering federal watchdog reports have faulted the bureau for slipshod compliance with everything from national-security surveillance procedures to its own rules limiting contacts with the media."
Another mess is the universally loathed Veterans Administration. The VA has a history of offering poor care to veterans, gaming waiting lists to conceal the number of patients denied treatment, and retaliating against whistleblowers. Uniting Democrats, Republicans, and Independents in contempt, somewhere in the VA is a lesson on how not to build trust.
With controversial authoritarian policy responses to the pandemic an ongoing matter of public debate, low regard for the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (58 percent negative) and Food and Drug Administration (61 percent negative) is no surprise. Public health figures are being called out for suppressing discussion of the likely lab-leak origin of COVID-19, and the CDC, in particular, has shed credibility with many Americans.
All things considered, it's a bit surprising that any federal agency enjoys the trust and support of significant segments of the public. Perhaps it's just the triumph of low standards. But as overwhelmingly negative opinions for most agencies of the government attest, the most consistent accomplishment of the U.S. government is in its ability to disappoint the American people.
The post Americans Don't Much Like Federal Agencies appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>You've undoubtedly noticed how up in arms everyone becomes when the government is on the verge of shutting down. I've also noticed that the people who most loudly express their horror at the notion of a partial government closure seem totally comfortable with the fiscal wall we are barreling into. That wall is being built, brick by brick, by two political parties that are unwilling to end Washington's spending debauchery.
This isn't to deny that some people would have been hurt by the recently averted shutdown (which, by the way, would not have made our debt smaller). It's a call for consistency from anyone putting their good-government sensibilities on display.
Those sounding the loudest alarms last week are largely silent on the countless occasions when Congress ignores its own budgetary rules. They are rarely outraged when the government is financed with legislation that only expands the balance sheet regardless of whether the money is well spent. All that seems to matter is that government is metaphorically funded, since it usually means growing deficits and explosive debt.
Democrats and Republicans alike engage in fiscal recklessness by passing spending bills they don't have the first cent to pay for. Politicians who won't be around to pay the costs shower today's voters with money that must be repaid by tomorrow's taxpayers, many of whom aren't yet born.
They rashly dispense tax credits, loan guarantees, and subsidies to big companies to do what they were going to do without these government-granted favors. The most recent example of this folly is the Inflation Reduction Act, which doled out billions in subsidies to green energy companies for projects most of the recipients had announced months before the bill was passed.
Republicans and Democrats also share in the habit of re-upping subsidies to large agricultural interests, which often raise the price of food. They sneakily bundled those subsidies into a bill that hands out Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits—popularly known as food stamps—to the tune of $145 billion in 2023 (an increase from $63 billion in 2019).
Beyond the hidden subsidies, the SNAP program is ineffective at lifting families out of poverty. SNAP is designed in ways that likely create disincentives to work. American Enterprise Institute scholars have shown that as many as 71 percent of households receiving food stamps contain no workers and only about 6 percent have a full-time worker. If earning extra money means losing even more in government benefits, many people will understandably choose not to. Ultimately, such a system is bad for recipients and their children, who remain impoverished. Yet it persists because Congress won't do much about it.
But the worst is of course the bipartisan refusal to reform Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Most of this spending is on autopilot, allowing Congress to repeatedly ignore the problem and others to argue that we should further increase benefits. It's also the driver of our current and future debt. Where's the outrage about this fiscal madness? Where are the demands that politicians show us their plans for reform?
One thing's for sure: These calls aren't coming from the shutdown alarmists. How many of them write similarly panicky commentaries about how, in about 10 years, Congress' blatant inaction will lead to across-the-board cuts to entitlement benefits for both the rich and the poor? After all, if legislators decide to borrow more to avoid cuts rather than reforming the programs, it will add another $116 trillion over 30 years to our debt just for Medicare and Medicaid.
Newspapers should be full of reports about how Congress repeatedly fails to perform its core function and avoid this level of fiscal drama altogether. Elected officials should be too embarrassed to show their faces in public. Instead, they can just promise more spending because the real "crisis" is apparently that someone is trying to slam on the brakes—not that there's a fiscal wall looming ahead.
The federal budget is on a treacherous path and Congress is to blame. Politicians are continuously delinquent on their obligation to be good stewards of our fiscal health, but the "irresponsibility" that most reporters and commentators raise their voices against is the risk of shutdown. These people are upset about the symptoms, not the fatal disease.
The ultimate blame rests on the shoulders of the American people. We routinely elect politicians without care for our fiscal situation. Politicians respond to incentives, and voters mostly signal that we won't punish them for poor performance. The alarm is ringing. It's time to wake up, America.
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM.
The post The Real Scandal in Washington Is the Government's Reckless Spending appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Until Monday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had been deadlocked for 2.5 years. It took President Joe Biden six months to nominate a third Democratic commissioner—and after moderate Democrats balked, it took another 17 for him to nominate someone else. The swearing-in of Anna Gomez gave Democrats a majority—two-thirds of the way into President Joe Biden's presidential term. With so much to cram into so little time, the next year will be the most frenzied in the FCC's nearly 100-year history.
The key issue is broadband regulation. It's been five years since the Republican FCC supposedly "killed net neutrality"—yet even after the pandemic's shift towards remote work, remote school, and remote everything broadband service is better than ever thanks to $2 trillion in private investment since 1996. That's by far the largest source of capital expenditures in the U.S., dwarfing public subsidies, even the generous grants included in pandemic stimulus bills.
On Thursday, the Commission released a draft proposal to bring back net neutrality rules by reinstating the 2015 Open Internet Order, a fix for a problem that doesn't exist. Expect the Commission to vote out the proposal for public comment at its next meeting on October 19.
As in 2015, the FCC promises not to impose rate regulation, build-out requirements, or other heavy-handed aspects of common carriage regulation—lest these sap private investment in broadband. But as in 2015, the FCC won't "forbear" from the core provisions of Title II of the Communications Act, which are essentially the same provisions imposed on railroads in the 1880s: regulators get broad discretion over what is "just and reasonable."
Despite promises of a "light touch," the FCC may also impose common carriage regulation upon broadband in another rulemaking. The Infrastructure Act of 2020 included $65 billion in spending on broadband (still less than the $86 billion private providers spent that year). Tucked into this massive spending bill was Section 60506, a provision requiring the FCC to write rules "to facilitate equal access to broadband internet access service…including preventing digital discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin." Last year, the FCC proposed draft rules that would allow it to do exactly what it promised it wouldn't do in its 2015 Open Internet Order: impose build-out requirements, regulate rates, etc. The rules are due by the FCC's November 15 meeting.
Just as blocking and throttling lawful traffic wasn't a problem in 2015 (and still isn't today), there's no hard evidence of "digital discrimination." Yet breathless claims are made to justify prophylactic regulation in both contexts. Under the FCC's proposed rules, plaintiffs needn't prove any intentional discrimination. "Disparate impact" alone would suffice to make a claim, and broadband providers would bear the burden of proving a negative—of explaining why they didn't deploy service, or the same service, in some areas. That burden amounts to common carriage regulation, and it won't be easy to bear. Broadband service offerings vary geographically for a host of reasons, including natural impediments like bodies of water and topography; man-made impediments like highways and railroads; regulatory impediments like zoning issues, rights-of-way, and pole attachment problems; and economic realities like population density and the cost of wiring older buildings.
The FCC is likely to lose in both proceedings. In 2017, the D.C. Circuit upheld the FCC's reclassification of broadband service under Title II. Two Republican judges dissented, arguing that whether to treat broadband like railroads was a "major question" for Congress, not the FCC, to decide. One of those judges was Brett Kavanaugh. Six years later, the Supreme Court has embraced the "major questions" doctrine in a series of "cases in which the 'history and the breadth of the authority that [the agency] has asserted,' and the 'economic and political significance' of that assertion, provide a 'reason to hesitate before concluding that Congress' meant to confer such authority.'" Even President Barack Obamaʼs former solicitors general agree: Title II reclassification "will not survive a Supreme Court encounter with the major questions doctrine."
The FCC is on even weaker ground in the digital discrimination proceeding.
Congress "does not alter the fundamental details of a regulatory scheme in vague terms or ancillary provisions—it does not…hide elephants in mouseholes." If Congress had intended Section 60506 to transform broadband regulation, it would, at a minimum, have placed the provision inside the Communications Act—instead of leaving it a free-standing provision unconnected to the FCC's enforcement powers. Moreover, if Congress had intended the FCC to regulate broadband on the basis of disparate impact rather than intentional discrimination, it would have written a statute that looked more like civil rights laws the Supreme Court has recognized as creating disparate-impact liability; it would have clearly prohibited the denial of equal opportunities. Instead, Congress commanded the FCC only to "facilitate equal access"—which makes sense in a sprawling bill about infrastructure spending.
These are just two of likely dozens of items the FCC will rush to get done in the 16 monthly meetings that remain before the end of Biden's term. But they will dwarf the others in importance. Biden's dithering over his FCC nominee has created a real, but manageable, time crunch. If Republicans sweep the White House, House, and Senate in 2024, they'll likely do in January 2025 what they did in January 2021: use the Congressional Review Act to reverse rulemakings they don't like and bar the reissuance of any "substantially" similar rule without congressional approval. A prompt Congressional Review Act resolution could reach back, at most, to late August 2024. Thus, the FCC has slightly less than 11 months to finalize the Title II rulemaking and anything else controversial.
All of this puts FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel in a painful position. She's under enormous pressure to do things that probably won't stand up in court—and quickly. With progressives still convinced the open internet is somehow in peril—despite all evidence to the contrary—there's no chance Rosenworcel will back down from Title II reclassification.
At a minimum, she shouldn't rush the proceeding. In 2014, she had the courage to break with then-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler on his rush to vote on draft neutrality rules. "Before proceeding," she said, joining Republican Ajit Pai, "I would have taken the time to understand the future" and "taken time for more input." Wheeler allowed the public just two months to file comments on what turned out to be, by far, the most commented-upon rulemaking in FCC history. Ultimately, he relented, allowing three months—plus another month for reply comments. Allowing the same window for comment now would protect Rosenworcel from charges of hypocrisy and set a precedent for good government.
It would also be the smart move. If the FCC has any chance of persuading increasingly skeptical courts that broadband reclassification isn't a "major question," it'll need all the help it can get.
Most helpful will be the back-and-forth on legal questions in reply comments. Allowing an extra month for those would help the FCC's allies help the agency. If, say, the FCC allowed three (or even two) months for comments plus two for reply comments, the final deadline would be around April 1 (or March 1), 2024. The agency would still have nearly five (or six) months to finish its final order—plenty of time to read and respond to comments—before late August.
On digital discrimination, all eyes will be on Gomez. She has more experience at the FCC and practicing communications law than any FCC commissioner in decades. She may well recognize how fundamentally Section 60506 differs from civil rights laws that the courts have interpreted to create liability for disparate impact rather than disparate treatment (discriminatory intent). As the first Latina commissioner in decades, she may also have the political capital to resist pressure from civil rights groups—especially if Commissioner Geoffrey Starks, an African-American, joins her. Approaching the end of a distinguished career, she may just care less about the politics of what the FCC does.
But if Gomez isn't quite ready to take a bold stance, there is a third option: the FCC could issue disparate-treatment rules at the November 15 meeting, as required by Section 60506, but punt on the question of disparate impact by splitting the proceeding with a further notice of proposed rulemaking on the legal questions of how to interpret the statute. As with Title II, the FCC would still have time to finalize whatever rules it writes by August.
Until now, Rosenworcel hasn't had a majority for any controversial item. In a very real sense, her chairmanship begins this week—and it will be defined principally by these two rulemakings and how she administers them.
If she's learned the right lessons from her 11 years on the FCC, she won't treat the public comment process as an inconvenience to be rushed through as quickly as possible. Moreover, she won't treat her fellow commissioners the way Tom Wheeler treated her and then-Commissioner Mignon Clyburn: as foot soldiers to be bullied when they dare to express an independent thought. And maybe, just maybe, Rosenworcel will think twice about when the FCC should defer to Congress.
The post FCC Revives Common Carriage for the Internet appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Five dissenters: Yesterday, five Republicans went against their own party, opposing a spending package full of Pentagon appropriations that was supposed to make its way to the House floor. One of the dissenters, Rep. Ralph Norman (R–S.C.), said "he was opposing all GOP spending initiatives until he received a commitment from [House Speaker Kevin] McCarthy that the House would return federal spending to prepandemic levels without any budgetary gimmicks," per The New York Times.
Norman was joined by Reps. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Dan Bishop (N.C.), Ken Buck (Colo.), and Matt Rosendale (Mont.), who together stymied attempts to bring the new spending package to a vote on the House floor. Though the budgetary infighting is a welcome change, and could in fact bring about good results for libertarians concerned about runaway defense spending, it could also backfire. "In an ironic twist of fate, frustrated Republicans are now growing more open to cutting a deal with Democrats—the worst possible outcome for the conservative hardliners agitating for deeper spending cuts," reports Axios.
Still, it's encouraging to see some representatives opposing the fiscal profligacy that has long plagued Congress. The September 30 deadline for funding the government looms; if a deal can't be reached by then, we'll enter another government shutdown. The government most recently shut down in December 2018/January 2019, when former President Donald Trump and House Democrats found themselves at an impasse involving funding Trump's U.S.-Mexico border wall. (For more on government shutdowns, read Eric Boehm's piece: "Is a Government Shutdown Better Than More Reckless Borrowing?")
"Is the independence of any nation secure?" "The goal of the present war against Ukraine is to turn our land, our people, our lives, our resources into a weapon against you, against the international rules-based order," Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the general assembly of the United Nations yesterday. "If we allow Ukraine to be carved up, is the independence of any nation secure?" Per The New York Times, Zelenskyy forcefully criticized "Moscow's military interventions in Moldova, Georgia, and Syria; its increased control of Belarus; and its threats against the Baltic states" as well as Vladimir Putin's occupation of Ukraine.
It is, of course, possible to vehemently oppose Russia's contemptible actions in Ukraine while also opposing Zelenskyy's bid for U.S. aid, which he reportedly plans to make Thursday in a meeting at the White House.
Reefer Madness DeSantis: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis vehemently opposes recreational weed legalization. Society has "totally decayed" because of pro-drug policies, in his telling. "Legalization, I don't think, has worked," said DeSantis last month. Just one problem: His biggest political backers are also key advocates for pot progress in Florida, reports Politico.
Axiom Strategies and Vanguard Field Strategies, which have been paid $25 million by pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down, have also been paid $29 million by Smart & Safe Florida, a group working on a legal marijuana ballot initiative that would allow adults aged 21 and above to legally obtain weed. DeSantis has said weed "hurts our workforce readiness" as well as "people's ability to prosper."
Speak for yourself—I feel even more ready to write after lighting up, generally speaking. A certain amount of marijuana must be in the system before one can reasonably be expected to wade through DeSantis soundbites!
Scenes from New York: Why on Earth is city council wasting time on proposals to tear down statues of Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Peter Stuyvesant, and Thomas Jefferson? ("In this house, Christopher Columbus is a hero, end of story.")
The post 5 Dissenters in the House appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Congress is back in session, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has captured policymakers' attention. A wide range of committees have hosted hearings on AI generally as well as how it applies to more specific fields, including medicine and disaster response.
As a result, a growing number of bills are starting to proliferate. Among the most concerning of these proposals are a new government agency to regulate AI and a license for using AI.
In what would be a dramatic departure from the light-touch approach that has supported a flourishing of American innovation, a bipartisan group of senators, including Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.)* and Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), are expected to introduce legislation to create a government bureaucracy that would prevent high-risk AI models from entering the market. Under such legislation, AI models would have to receive a "license to deploy" from the government, most likely from a new, independent oversight agency. Concerningly, some leading technology companies, including OpenAI and Microsoft, have supported this approach.
The history of past licenses illustrates how they are a particularly "cronyistic" political tool. Licensure regimes favor large companies that can spend large sums of money engaging with the bureaucracy to gain favorable terms and on the expenses associated with licensing itself.
Furthermore, this process can be corrupted by large companies and existing players who, by increasing costs and influencing the design of requirements, can keep new and more innovative players out.
In addition to licensing regimes, there have also been calls for creating a new agency to regulate AI. However, AI is a general-purpose technology, which means an AI regulator could interfere in nearly every sector of the economy. The United States has long resisted calls for a digital regulator, perhaps recognizing that the administrative state could not only be far more expansive than anticipated but would also increase the risks of agency capture in a rapidly changing environment.
Regulating AI poses the same likely pitfalls, which is why it is ironic that some of the recently introduced bill's sponsors are among the most vocal critics of perceived concentration in the technology sector: A licensure regime would only further create a moat, making it more difficult for new players to challenge existing leaders.
Further, a licensure requirement could possibly encourage start-ups to seek an exit via acquisition rather than deal with the cost and burden of compliance challenges.
Calls for a new licensing regime or a new regulator follow the approach seen in Europe, where a heavy regulatory touch has produced undesirable economic consequences. An examination of the largest global internet companies reveals a notable absence of European players—a trend likely to continue in AI, given the similar approach to regulation. Instead of encouraging entrepreneurial discovery by limiting the role of government, Europe has continued to build a culture with the internet—and now AI—that requires innovators to come to regulators first. This culture has a low tolerance for risk, regardless of the potential for harm.
A better approach than a licensure regime or a new agency is to build on the success of light-touch innovation that has made the United States a world leader in the internet era. Before establishing new, burdensome requirements, American policymakers should examine how existing laws can address AI concerns. This would also allow them to repeal or reform statutes that stand to encumber beneficial applications.
CORRECTION: This article originally misstated which state Richard Blumenthal represents in the Senate.
The post Harsh AI Regulation From Congress Imperils Innovation appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Montreal Biodôme's scarlet macaw named Bouton "will be deported to the Toronto Zoo next Friday after she only spoke English during a government inspection," The Beaverton reported in July 2013. The outlet quoted a government official as saying that the bird "asked for crackers, not craquelins," violating Quebec's laws requiring French in the workplace.
None of that actually happened, of course; The Beaverton is to Canadians what The Onion is to Americans. Though the story of Bouton was "a spoof," The Economist reported, believers were still "shocked" by it. Such is Quebec's reputation for zealously defending the primacy of the French language.
Montreal, Canada's most bilingual city, is a place where English and French coexist easily. When you approach a bagel shop or poutine hideout, you'll most likely be greeted with "bonjour, hi"—a choose-your-own-adventure invitation that recognizes the linguistic diversity of the colorful city. Teenagers on the streets flip constantly between French and English, weaving in American slang.
This linguistic diversity is, in many ways, something the provincial government has tried for decades to stave off in attempts to preserve spoken French. Under British rule in the 1800s, French Canadians lost much of their political power and language rights. They eventually became the linguistic minority in Canada. Beginning in the 1960s, the sovereigntist Parti Québécois was created and the Front de libération du Québec, a militant separatist group, carried out terrorist acts. The so-called Quiet Revolution of that decade saw government secularization, the creation of a welfare state, and pushes for Quebecois independence.
The 1977 Charter of the French Language established French as the province's official language and laid out a huge set of regulations to enforce the use of French in "work, instruction, communication, commerce and business." According to Quebec's Ministry of Culture and Communications, language measures are "all aimed at the same goal: maximizing the French language's chances of thriving on a continent inhabited by nearly three hundred million English speakers."
It's a noble goal, and a personal one. My family goes back hundreds of years in Quebec. I have countless childhood memories of family gatherings in the countryside, all the chatter over hearty farm food in French. Losing your language cuts the central cord holding you to your ancestors, and Quebecois French is no different in that respect.
But strict linguistic regulation is counterproductive, especially if the goal is a happy and cohesive population. It would be impossible to regulate how 8.8 million Quebecers speak without engaging in some silly and strange battles. The government has tried to ban that favorite Montrealer greeting, "bonjour, hi," including at private businesses. A British-themed restaurant in Montreal was cited for using the term fish and chips on its menu and hanging a "gents" sign on a bathroom door. A manager "opening a newly-renovated [Adidas] store spoke a few apologetic words in French—then switched entirely to 'cooler' English," reported the Montreal Gazette, causing a huge stir. The provincial premier even denounced the episode in the National Assembly.
Regulations hang over every area of public life. Businesses with 25 or more employees must register with the Office Québécois de la Langue Française (OQLF), or Quebec Board of the French Language, to certify that they use French throughout the workplace. An employer may not lay off a worker because he speaks only French. Radio stations must abide by French-language song quotas. Concerned citizens can report violations of the Charter of the French Language online or by phone.
The highly publicized incidents of linguistic conflict reflect disturbing trends. A poll conducted for Le Journal de Montréal in 2018 indicated that one in two Anglophone respondents aged 18 to 35 saw relations between Anglophones and Francophones as contentious. Between 1971 and 2021, some 600,000 Anglophones left Quebec for other provinces. A number of large businesses likewise left for greener pastures (ahem, Toronto). "Bonjour, hi" might be an olive branch between Quebec's Anglos and Francos, but the peace is becoming harder to keep.
Language policy in Quebec is strict and getting stricter. The controversial Bill 96, passed in May 2022, further regulates businesses and individuals. Companies with 25 or more workers may have to submit regular reports to the government on their use of French. If the government receives a complaint that a workplace isn't using French, it can trigger an investigation, "and inspectors can search and seize documents without a warrant," noted Politico. Executives at more than 150 companies sent a letter to Premier François Legault warning that the law could seriously damage Quebec's economy and scare away investors.
As for Bouton the parrot, reality can truly be just as strange as fiction. In 1996, a customer at a pet shop in Napierville, Quebec, complained that a parrot named Peek-a-Boo spoke only English. The customer even threatened to file a complaint with the OQLF, according to the bird's owner, Francesca Barron. The complaint was never filed, and, per the Montreal Gazette, the parrot never did learn French.
1977
With the passage of the Charter of the French Language, Kentucky Fried Chicken had to give up its English label. It became Poulet Frit Kentucky in Quebec.
2000
A former member of the Front de libération du Québec, a far-left separatist group, carried out a series of firebombings against several Second Cup café locations because the Canada-based chain's name was in English. Second Cup added the words Les cafés to its signs soon after.
2013
Quebec's language-enforcement agency notified Massimo Lecas, owner of the Montreal-based Buonanotte, that his restaurant was violating the charter. Officials pointed to the Italian words pasta, calamari, and antipasto on Lecas' menu, saying he would need to replace them with French words to conform to provincial language law. Although the government insisted it was just responding to citizen complaints, the incident sparked such backlash and publicity that it came to be known as pastagate.
2014
The Quebec Superior Court ruled that major retailers weren't violating the charter if their storefront signs featured trademark names in languages other than French. The plaintiffs included Best Buy, Costco, Walmart, and Old Navy.
2021
A new policy mandated that only music by Quebecois artists may be played in provincial government buildings and on government-run phone lines. "The time for royalty-free elevator music is over," said Quebec Culture Minister Nathalie Roy.
The post Quebec's Language Restrictions Limit Freedom of Expression appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The monthslong debate over raising the debt limit is barely in the rearview mirror, and already it's time for another round of brinksmanship over the federal government's fiscal future.
This time the stakes are a possible government shutdown at the end of the current fiscal year on September 30. That will happen unless Congress and President Joe Biden agree on a budget before then—which is highly unlikely—or agree to pass a short-term continuing resolution, which is how these fights are usually resolved.
The complicating factor is that some Republican members of the House are threatening to use a possible shutdown as leverage to push a variety of their preferred policies.
Some of those demands reflect important concerns about the fiscal state of the government and the growing budget deficit. The House Freedom Caucus wants to revisit the debt limit deal made by Biden and Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) earlier this year, in the hopes of lowering spending levels for future years. Members are also demanding an end to what they call a "blank check" of military aid and funding for Ukraine.
But the group's demands also include more funding for a wall on the border with Mexico, new limits on which immigrants can be granted asylum, and a crackdown on the FBI. Some members of the group are attaching even-less-related issues to the budget negotiations: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), for example, told constituents last week that she would not vote to fund the federal government unless the House opens impeachment proceedings against Biden, CNBC reported.
Whether or not Biden deserves to be the subject of an impeachment inquiry, making these sorts of but-wait-there's-more demands only serve to distract from the essential debate here: the one over the federal government's unsustainable fiscal trajectory.
And unsustainable it is. The national debt is now larger than the American economy, something that's never happened outside of a few brief years during World War II. The budget deficit for the first 10 months of this fiscal year added another $1.6 trillion to the debt, and the short-term nature of most government borrowing means higher interest rates are adding fuel to this fiscal fire. By the end of the decade, interest costs on the national debt will exceed the size of the military budget and will only keep growing. And then there's the Social Security crisis looming in the early 2030s.
It's unfortunate that the only group of lawmakers trying to slam the brakes on federal spending is constantly being distracted by other, less important issues. Because, when it comes to the country's fiscal status, the Freedom Caucus is pretty much right.
"[People] say, 'The Freedom Caucus is a danger,'" Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told Axios earlier this week. "No, the danger is the status quo." As Axios also notes, Paul is not the only senator who seems sympathetic to the Freedom Caucus' maneuvers, though the majority in the upper chamber seems unwilling to consider a government shutdown. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) has indicated that the Freedom Caucus is essentially McCarthy's problem to solve.
While we wait to see what happens next, it's worth considering how this new fight over a possible government shutdown reveals the foolishness of governing from crisis to crisis. Biden and McCarthy had an opportunity to head off some of the federal government's major fiscal problems earlier this year but instead settled for a debt ceiling deal that largely maintained the status quo—the new limits on discretionary spending do virtually nothing to solve the deficit, spending, or entitlement issues facing the country.
This year's federal budget deadline presents an even better opportunity for beginning the difficult process of solving those problems. At the very least, lawmakers should ask why federal spending has ballooned from $4.8 trillion to more than $6.2 trillion between 2018 and 2022, and how that increase in spending is driving deficits higher.
Punting on those tough questions doesn't make any of them go away. Instead, it will only create another crisis in a few months, and another opportunity for groups like the House Freedom Caucus to leverage the debate.
This is no way for a serious country to govern itself. It's fine to worry about the consequences of a government shutdown, but at some point Congress has to start worrying about the consequences of keeping the government open if doing so requires ongoing borrowing at unsustainable rates.
The post Is a Government Shutdown Better Than More Reckless Borrowing? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>COVID-19 cases are up. Hospitalizations climbed 24 percent last week.
But the media make everything seem scarier than it is. The headline "Up 24 Percent!" comes after dramatic lows. Hospitalizations are still less than half what they were when President Joe Biden said, "The pandemic is over."
Yet the shallow media keep pounding away: "It may be time to break out the masks," headlined CNN.
Frightened people believe. The movie studio Lionsgate reinstated an office mask mandate. Atlanta's Morris Brown College mandated masks and even banned parties.
This month, several school districts in Kentucky and Texas closed. "The safety and wellbeing of our students, staff, and community is a top priority," said the school superintendent in Texas.
But kids rarely get very sick from COVID, and schools aren't COVID hotspots. Studies on tens of thousands of people found "no consistent relationship between in-person K-12 schooling and the spread of the coronavirus."
A Lancet study found Florida had the 12th-fewest excess COVID deaths in the country, even though Florida students went back to school without masks relatively soon.
At least Texas' and Kentucky's closures were isolated and brief. Long-term closures during the pandemic brought America's lowest math and reading scores in decades. Florida's kids suffered less learning loss than kids in other states.
Sweden, which never closed its schools, suffered no learning loss. Sweden's education minister wrote that children were "at much lower risk of serious illness" and that "keeping children learning was vital."
Sweden also imposed fewer restrictions on adults. At the time, Sweden was mocked in the media. NBC called Sweden's openness a "failed experiment."
But Sweden's approach did work. Data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development show that Sweden had fewer excess deaths since COVID than any other European country.
Fortunately, this year, most of America seems less likely to panic.
Unfortunately, that doesn't include Facebook and its idiot authoritarian "fact-checkers." Even though the World Health Organization says kids under 5 should not be required to wear masks, Facebook still censors science writer John Tierney for writing that forcing children to wear masks is unnecessary.
Masks, lockdowns, and closing schools won't stop COVID. We have to live with it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 96.7 percent of us now have some immunity through vaccines or prior infection. That probably means future infections will be less severe.
Still, COVID continues to kill some of us.
I'm skeptical of the anti-vax messages on my social media. Unvaccinated people are five times more likely to die. Vaccines are still the most effective way to protect ourselves.
I'm also skeptical of politicians eager to use force. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis forbade private businesses from requiring customers to wear masks or have vaccinations.
But I say privately owned should mean private. A store owner should be allowed to make his own choices. If customers don't like a policy, there are lots of other businesses to patronize.
I confronted DeSantis about that:
Stossel: If it's my business, and I'm scared, and I want to have that, why can't I?
DeSantis: You had some big corporations basically imposing Fauci-ism, vax mandates, mask mandates…. So we barred [them].
Stossel: But if I have a candy store and want to say you have to stand on your head to buy my candy…
DeSantis: Yeah, but there's certain business regulations that everyone's gotta abide by.
Stossel: I'm just surprised you're pushing them.
DeSantis: Sometimes, you just gotta say, is this something that we want in our state at all? That's how we've come down.
That's how we've come down? The politician decides for everyone?
I hate that tyranny, whether it comes from DeSantis, who had mostly sensible COVID policies, or from worse repressers like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and then–New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
We individuals should get to decide what's best for us.
I'm 76. Nine in 10 COVID deaths happen people over 65.
So I'm glad I've been vaccinated. I'll get the new booster this fall.
I will wear a mask in crowded places when I travel to Chicago to speak at the Heartland Institute next week.
But that's my choice. There's a big difference between choice and force.
Individuals should decide, not politicians.
COPYRIGHT 2023 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
The post Don't Bring Back COVID Authoritarianism appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman consider libertarian responses to natural disasters in the wake of the recent wildfires in Hawaii and examine the outsider candidacy of Javier Milei, a self-described anarcho-capitalist, in his bid for the Argentinian presidency.
0:26: Maui wildfires
23:13: Javier Milei wins Argentina's presidential primary
37:03: Weekly Listener Question
50:34: This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"California Regulations Prevent Insurers From Accurately Pricing Wildfire Risk, so Now They're Fleeing the State," by Ronald Bailey
"When the Government Makes Wildfires Worse," by Tate Watkins
"Dozens Died in California Wildfires. Why Is the State Forcing Insurance Companies To Ignore Risks?" by Scott Shackford
"Can Fire Insurance Manage Wildfire Risks in California?" by Ronald Bailey
"Why Are People 'Outraged' That Private Firefighters Saved Kim and Kanye's Home?" by Joe Setyon
"Rant: Burn the Rich," by Matt Welch
"UnFAIR," by Matt Welch
Annual number of deaths from disasters, 1900-2020, by Our World in Data
"HECO Kept The Power Flowing In Lahaina Even As Poles Toppled," by Marcel Honore
"Confessions of a Welfare Queen," by John Stossel
"Eric Boehm: How Protectionist Trade Policies Screw Us All," a Q&A by Nick Gillespie
"The Jones Act Is Driving Up Prices and Making Crises Worse," by John Stossel
"A Self-Described Anarcho-Capitalist Won a Plurality in Argentina's Presidential Primary," by Marcos Falcone
"Don't Confuse Javier Milei With Jair Bolsonaro," by Daniel Raisbeck
"This Politician Just Won Argentina's Primary. His Hair Is Baffling the World," by Jacob Gallagher
"'Private Tyranny' Is Less Private Than You Think," by Stephanie Slade
"Domination Fantasies," by Ben Compaine
"Mergers and Disquisitions," by Nick Gillespie
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsor:
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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