A conviction for growing marijuana turned Rob Jenkins' life upside down.
"The police ran in there and took my whole garden apart and trashed my whole apartment," Jenkins says of the 2008 raid on his Oakland, California, home. "I got a notice two weeks later that said get the hell out."
Jenkins was originally charged with a felony—he had a firearm in his home at the time of the raid—but the charges were dropped to a misdemeanor after law enforcement officials confirmed the gun was legally registered. He was able to avoid jail time with a plea deal including two years probation, but his criminal record made it difficult to find a job. So he went back to illegally growing and dealing marijuana.
"I had to sell clones and pretty much risk going back to jail while on probation," Jenkins states. "If you're keeping me from getting a job, but you want me to pay all these legal fees…it's kind of hard."
Jenkins—who resides in a state where recreational cannabis is now legal—is one of an estimated 20 million people nationwide in the last three decades who have been arrested for a marijuana-related violation.
In a move reminiscent of the end of the Prohibition era, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued some 1,300 pardons for alcohol-related offenses, officials are now looking for ways to clear these convictions from the public record.
When California voters legalized cannabis in 2016, they also approved a proposition that allowed the state to expunge past convictions. But the law hasn't worked as intended. There are too many bureaucratic hurdles in the path toward expungement.
"The way the legislation was written really kind of put it all on the people that had been convicted," says San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón. "It didn't prohibit us from doing anything about it, but then it also didn't spell out that you should."
Gascón became aware of the magnitude of the problem when his office first started tackling the process of identifying records eligible for expungement. In 2017, the city had more than 9,000 residents eligible for expungement, but only 23 people had petitioned to wipe their records clean.
"It's a really small number and often the people who seek relief are the people that are well off. They're more sophisticated," Gascón says. "There were people that were harmed by decades of bad policy, and I think the government has an obligation to make some reparation. The question became, 'How do we do this, and how much work is it going to take?'"
Gascón turned to Silicon Valley for help, partnering with the non-profit Code for America to come up with a technological solution to the problem of too much red tape.
"A criminal record is an enormous barrier to jobs, to stable housing, to education, to being able to engage in your kids' school activities," says Evonne Silva, Code for America's senior program director. "The technology is actually really simple. It also starts to shift the way in which people relate to their government, because now this is a service provided [by] government as opposed to government being seen as an obstacle."
Silva's group is aiming to clear a quarter-million cannabis-related convictions in California by the end of the year. The program, which is an extension of the group's Clear My Record campaign, uses an algorithm designed in conjunction with each county district attorney. The software examines and flags records eligible for expungement and can automatically file the paperwork with the courts to clear the conviction.
"The difference is, it on average takes an attorney 15 minutes to review one criminal record and evaluate eligibility and prepare the paperwork," Silva states. "We were able to process over 8,000 convictions in San Francisco in a matter of minutes."
While San Francisco was the first county in the state to implement this program, Code for America is partnering with other jurisdictions, including Los Angeles and San Jose, as part of a pilot program across the state. It's hoping to eventually apply its technology nationwide.
Jenkins, who had to pay thousands of dollars in attorney's fees to get his conviction expunged, welcomes the move in cities embracing technology to deal with tedious and time-consuming paperwork.
"It's great," says Jenkins, who now operates his own legal grow operation. "But there's still people in jail right now for cannabis-related offenses. I know eventually they might get released and eventually they might have their record expunged, but that's days lost, time lost with your family. I lost everything when I got arrested. That was a lot of resources that I could have used towards the business im trying to start from scratch right now."
Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Zach Weissmueller and John Osterhoudt.
Photo credits: Everett Collection/Newscom. Additional footage from the Drug Policy Alliance.
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]]>Over the last year, nine states have passed aggressive anti-abortion measures that aim to restrict access to early abortion procedures. The new bans, which have yet to take effect, are a direct challenge to the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, which established a woman's right to obtain an abortion without excessive government restriction.
The wave of new state laws criminalizing the procedure has generated protests from pro-choice advocates and has inflamed an already complicated debate that centers on how to best protect life while also maintaining women's liberty in making reproductive choices.
Before Roe v. Wade, government prohibition wasn't particularly effective in eliminating the practice. Even after the first state laws criminalizing abortion were passed in the late-nineteenth century, women found ways to obtain the procedure, all while faced with the threat of arrest and prosecution. Upper-class white women were more likely to find relatively safe ways to break the law, while minorities and the poor turned to shady operators, risking infertility and death.
Abortion Before 1850: Commonly Practiced and Perfectly Legal
Before the 1850s, local papers from Kansas to New York had ads for "female pills" promising "relief for ladies." Female physicians like Madame Restell solicited clients looking "to be treated for obstruction of the monthly period." But the use of coded language merely reflected the Victorian-era's sensibilities. Up until the 19th-century, abortion of early pregnancy was legal and common.
These abortion ads stirred little controversy. Bearing children was risky and women were about 40 times more likely to die giving in childbirth than today.
Abortive tonics and potions were generally ineffective and potentially dangerous, but determined women could turn to midwives or physicians for procedures that roughly mirrored modern techniques. When Abortion Was a Crime by University of Illinois historian Leslie Reagan documents how terminating pregnancies was both common practice and an open secret. An estimated one in five women had an abortion during this period, and they tended to be married and upper-class.
Prevalent cultural attitudes of the time only viewed abortion after the first trimester as immoral. Before the 1850s, the turning point from legal to illegal was known as the "quickening," or when a woman could feel the fetus move, which generally happens in the second trimester. Quickening was an important distinction under common law and Catholic doctrine.
Abortion After the 1850s: The Medical Establishment vs. Expert Midwives
Public sentiment shifted in the second half of the nineteenth century. The criminalization of abortion began mainly as a business tactic to bring women's reproductive health under control of the emerging physician class.
Accredited male doctors campaigned to pass abortion bans at the state and federal level as a way to shut down unlicensed, and mostly female, practitioners with the end goal to establish state control over the medical profession.
It was the newly formed American Medical Association, under the direction of Dr. Horatio Storer, that led the effort in criminalizing abortion. Storer made a passionate moral argument against the procedure, which had the effect of delegitimizing expert female practitioners.
Again, media coverage skewed the reality of abortion procedures. The death rate from abortions performed by midwives and physicians were nearly identical, yet news reports blamed non-accredited female practitioners with sensationalized stories of women bleeding to death from botched procedures.
Storer also capitalized on fears of falling birth rates among white, native-born women, arguing that if they were allowed to abort it would hasten the takeover of the country by foreigners and people of color. He envisioned the "spread of civilization" west and south to be done by native-born white Americans, not by people of color. In 1894, then New York City Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt called white women who sought abortions "race criminals."
The American Medical Association's efforts were a resounding success in driving the practice underground. By 1880, most states had passed laws that prohibited abortion except when a woman's life was in danger—and generally male doctors got to make the decision when it came to a woman's personal health. The American Medical Association also scored a victory at the federal level with the passage of the 1873 Comstock Law, an anti-obscenity bill that prohibited sending abortion and birth control information through the U.S. Postal Service.
Abortion from 1900 to 1941: The Failure of Criminalization
While abortions were illegal, most women were still able to obtain one from sympathetic physicians and midwives who tended to disregard the law and comply with their patient's requests. Over more than a century of criminalization—from after the Civil War to the passage of Roe v. Wade—scholars, including Regan, estimate that a quarter of all pregnancies ended in abortion.
Another consequence of abortion bans was law enforcement interfering in private lives. Cops fought back against illegal abortions with arrests, interrogations, and prosecution. Police officers and prosecutors threatened doctors with jail time to get them to collaborate with local law enforcement in punishing women who sought their services.
In 1902, the Journal of the American Medical Association advised physicians to demand bedside statements of exoneration before treating women who had undergone botched abortions. Men whose lovers had died while having a pregnancy terminated were sometimes arrested and charged with failing to fulfill their paternal obligations.
By the Great Depression, abortion was illegal in every state and yet the practice had become more common. Medical studies and sex surveys indicated that women of every social class turned to abortion in greater numbers as the economy deteriorated.
But only the wealthy and well-connected could safely obtain the procedure through the loophole of medical necessity. This generally involved paying out of pocket to be examined by three doctors including a psychiatrist, who would make a recommendation to a hospital board.
Women who couldn't afford this option turned to illegal providers, whose methods brought the risk of permanent infertility or death.
Abortion from 1941 to 1973: The Crackdown Intensifies—And Still Fails
The crackdown on abortion intensified with World War II. Physicians joined hospitals and clinics en masse, which brought institutional scrutiny of their decisions. States tried to close the loophole exploited by wealthy women by mandating approval from a hospital-appointed committee. Police raided abortion facilities and then physically examined the arrestees while in custody.
Getting a safe abortion became harder, so the practice went further underground. Organizations like The Clergy Consultation Service, founded by a group of Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis, ferried women to states where abortion was legal. By 1970 the group was helping an estimated 150,000 women a year terminate their pregnancies. Other groups helped women travel to Mexico or Puerto Rico to have the procedure done safely.
Women who could not access reliable services turned to nefarious, untrained practitioners. The result was a spike in death rates from abortions in the 1960s. Researchers at UCLA predicted that criminalization would result in the deaths of five thousand women each year during this time period.
Abortion from 1973 to the Present: The Roe v. Wade Era
Hospitalizations from botched abortions became a national epidemic. Treating women who had abortion complications helped convince a segment of the medical community that once called for restrictive bans to push for decriminalization.
The profession's about-face set the stage for the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which struck down state laws criminalizing abortion as unconstitutional.
Today, that decision could be overturned by the high court's conservative majority. If that happens, it will not only once again drive the practice underground, but also result in a whole new realm of state surveillance and misapplication of laws to monitor women's bodies.
As with the prohibition of drugs, alcohol, and sex work, a legal ban on abortion wouldn't be effective because a majority of Americans don't believe that the practice should be illegal.
But they also have an easier time than ever before of not getting pregnant in the first place. One of the biggest changes since the days when abortion first became a crime in the nineteenth century is better birth control. Today wider access to contraception has driven the U.S. abortion rate down to its lowest levels since the passage of Roe v. Wade, and that number could be brought down even further by making the pill available over-the-counter.
The major lesson of history is that activists should focus on changing individual minds because outlawing a widely accepted practice always leads to more human suffering.
Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Paul Detrick. Archival graphics research by Regan Taylor.
Photo credits: Dan Anderson/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Steve Pellegrino/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Lorie Shaull/Flickr, Library of Congress, U.S. Senate/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Everett Collection/Newscom, National Library of Medicine, AiWire/Newscom.
Historical Footage: Library of Congress.
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The post Abortion Bans Failed in the 19th Century. They'll Also Fail in the 21st. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>With 20 states considering Right to Repair bills this legislative cycle, the fight over who can fix the stuff consumers buy and own has become a national policy debate, bringing together an eclectic mix of advocates from across the tech, medical, and farming industries. Even presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has addressed the issue, indicating that she would support a national right-to-repair law that applies to farm equipment.
On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) held a workshop, "Nixing the Fix: A Workshop on Repair Restrictions," which focused on testimony from experts on how manufacturers limit repairs by consumers and independent repair shops. The event highlighted the growing momentum—and potential for more federal involvement—behind the issue.
"The Nixing the Fix workshop was a big day for Right to Repair," says Nathan Proctor, the director of the Right to Repair Campaign for US PIRG, a consumer rights organization. "Perhaps manufacturers thought they could wait out our side—that eventually people would just become used to manufacturers deciding for people when they can fix devices that we own. But instead of petering out, calls for action are growing, drawing interest from more states, now the FTC. I wouldn't be surprised if Congress took note of the campaign next."
Repair advocates are pushing for state measures that would require manufacturers to make tools, parts, and information more accessible to consumers and independent third-party repair shops. But major manufacturers like Apple and John Deere have pushed back aggressively against such legislation, often using copyright law to preserve their monopoly over the post-purchase repair market. As a result, consumers have fewer options to fix their own products when they break—for a period of time Apple was disabling iPhone 6s when the company detected work had been done at independent repair shops, and John Deere continues to force many tractor owners to travel hundreds of miles to authorized retailers for simple fixes to farm equipment.
"The basic question is why is repair being monopolized?" says Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of The Repair Association, a trade association representing independent repair workers. "It is just money. If you dig in any one of these corners you will find a pot of money."
According to Repair.org, there are over 3 million repair and reuse professionals operating in the U.S. Those independent operators help people save money and prevent the pileup of electronic waste. But tech firms like Apple are quick to argue that passing right-to-repair legislation would put consumers and manufacturers at risk. George Kirchner, who attended the panel on behalf of the Rechargeable Battery Association, argued that customers could hurt themselves if they were allowed to replace their own cellphone batteries, and that manufacturers could be held liable for "mishandled" equipment.
"The cure for unsafe products is more repair. The cure for getting rid of faulty parts is more repair, not less," responded Gordon-Byrne.
Last year, Reason highlighted the case of Eric Lundgren, an e-waste entrepreneur, who was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison for copying and selling CDs for restoring the Windows operating system on broken PCs—discs that Microsoft gives away for free.
"I've been telling these manufacturers: Right to Repair is happening," states Proctor. "It's time they got in front of it, instead of trying to stop it."
The post The Feds Are Finally Getting Involved in the Fight Over Right To Repair appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Reason's Robby Soave has been writing about culture, free speech, due process, and moral outrage on campus since joining the magazine in 2014. His first book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, which will be released tomorrow, examines the ascendancy of the intersectional left and the identitarian right.
Soave was one of the first reporters to question the veracity of a Rolling Stone article that accused several fraternity brothers of a horrific gang rape at the University of Virginia—a story that the magazine later retracted because of insufficient evidence. Earlier this year, when a clip of MAGA-hat-wearing high school students appearing to intimidate a Native American man went viral, Soave was one of the first journalists to carefully scrutinize the raw video, discovering that the interaction was more complicated than the initial reports had claimed. Major media organizations later looped back to acknowledge that they had erred in their reporting.
Reason's Zach Weissmueller sat down with Soave to talk about his experience reporting and writing the book, today's political climate on campus, and why he thinks the college activists' emphasis on identity is misplaced.
Interview by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Alexis Garcia, Paul Detrick, and Justin Monticello. Edited by Ian Keyser and Alexis Garcia. Intro by Alexis Garcia.
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]]>After the death of conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace him. A moderate liberal, Garland likely would have shifted the balance of the high court to the left. But Senate Republicans refused to hold a hearing on Garland's nomination until after the presidential elections—which saw Donald Trump elected to the White House, effectively ending any hopes for Garland's appointment to the highest court in the land.
Once in office, Trump nominated the conservative judge Neil Gorsuch to replace Scalia. When Justice Kennedy—the high court's most frequent swing vote—retired, Trump chose the solidly conservative Brett Kavanagh to take his spot. Liberals, concerned that a conservative majority may dominate the Court for a generation and overturn key precedents like Roe v. Wade, have responded by calling for expanding the Supreme Court to include as many as 15 justices. Several presidential candidates, including Pete Buttigieg, Beto O'Rourke, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand have all endorsed proposals to alter the makeup of the Supreme Court, with former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder saying the idea of court packing should be "seriously" considered.
The idea of expanding Supreme Court membership hearkens back to the 1930s when FDR aggressively pushed the idea of court-packing because his New Deal policies were being declared unconstitutional.
"If court-packing does happen and you get this cycle of retaliation, this quite valuable institution would be undermined," says Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University and contributor to The Volokh Conspiracy blog. "Protections for our civil liberties, for separation of power, for limits on the power of federal government—all of that would be significantly weakened over time."
Somin sat down with Reason to discuss the revival of court-packing proposals on the left and how they could undermine the institution of judicial review.
Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Meredith Bragg and Todd Krainin.
Photo credits: Pete Souza/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Cheriss May/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Ron Sachs/picture-alliance/Consolidated/Newscom, Doug Mills/picture-alliance/Consolidated/Newscom, Between the wars/UPPA/Photoshot/Newscom, Kevin Dietsch-Pool via CNP/MEGA/Newscom, akg-images/Newscom, Mark Hertzberg/ZUMA Press/Newscom.
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]]>What will American drug culture look like once prohibition is finally over and we can start to use more drugs in more settings?
No one is better situated to start that conversation than Hamilton Morris, the 32-year-old host of Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, a show that explores what sorts of drugs are available, how they work, and how we might best use them to fulfill our hopes and dreams.
In one early episode, Morris confounds the conventional wisdom by telling "a positive story about PCP," a drug that even legalizers typically have nothing good to say about. He visits with Timothy Wyllie, an artist and visionary who uses the drug as part of his creative process. In another, he travels to the Brazilian Amazon, where locals get high on a drug taken from frogs. In a third, he gains access to an abandoned laboratory in a volcano that was once central to the production of MDMA.
Morris also does laboratory work at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, where he and his collaborators create new drugs for testing and research trials. He sat down with Reason to talk how the drug war has warped the discussion about legal and illegal drugs and what the post-prohibition landscape will look like.
To listen to an audio podcast version of this interview, go here.
Edited by Mark McDaniel and Alexis Garcia. Cameras by Jim Epstein.
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]]>As more states legalize recreational marijuana use, another part of the cannabis plant has found a market niche. CBD, short for cannabidiol, is a molecule that can be derived from hemp or cannabis. It doesn't contain THC, so it won't get you high.
The compound has become a common ingredient in trendy wellness products because of its purported therapeutic benefits.
"I became really like obsessed with CBD," says Jonathan Eppers, founder of Vybes beverages. "I always tell people it's like liquid yoga."
Eppers, whose company makes CBD drinks that are sold in nearly 250 U.S. grocery stores, coffee shops, and hotels, says that he launched the beverage startup in 2017 after using CBD oils to treat his own anxiety. But the products that he sells are illegal—even in states like California where recreational marijuana is now widely available.
"I didn't really didn't think too much about the regulations around CBD because CBD oil was being sold in grocery stores here in LA," Eppers says. "But once I got into it we sort of realized we were in a gray area with CBD."
In January 2019, Eppers said officials from the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) showed up to one of his Los Angeles warehouses and confiscated $140,000 worth of Vybes beverages. Eppers says state officials put an embargo on his product and went after a company that helps package his products in Northern California.
"Basically for two months, we haven't been able to sell Vybes which is costing us hundreds of thousands of dollars," states Eppers.
California is just one of many states where CBD sales are legally murky. The law clearly allows for the sale of cannabis-derived CBD products, but items that contain the hemp version of the molecule are prohibited.
"The Department of Public Health here is of the view that CBD can't be put in foods, beverages, animal foods you name it," says Griffen Thorne, a cannabis lawyer with Harris Bricken. "It is kind of interesting that you have marijuana, which is still federally illegal and there's a path towards sales for companies that want to actually make and sell marijuana products. Whereas CBD is derived from a plant that's no longer federally illegal and there are a ton of roadblocks and there's zero clarity on how to do it for many products."
Just months after Eppers launch his company, the CDPH released an FAQ document that echoed the Food and Drug Administration's stance on CBD, stating that products containing the compound could not be sold by unlicensed retailers. But the document contained no guidance for enforcement, and many retailers—unaware of the state's stance on CBD—have continued selling the product to consumers.
"I was confused because CBD had been sold in California for several years and it's only getting bigger," Eppers says. "And all of a sudden they were coming out and saying we couldn't put this in food and beverages. So it was like what changed?"
While continuing to sell his product, Eppers asked the state for legal clarification. He was hopeful that passage of the 2018 U.S. Farm Bill, removing hemp from the Controlled Substances list, would establish that his products are fully legal. But he soon discovered that wasn't the case.
"It wasn't until after the Farm Bill passed that California became a lot more aggressive and actually [started] going after companies here in California that were producing CBD products," says Eppers.
Kenny Morrison, a cannabis industry veteran who runs VCC Brands and serves as president of the California Cannabis Manufacturers Association, sees parallels between today's CBD market and the early days of recreational marijuana.
"It's all just layovers from prohibition," Morrison states. "The retail model of cannabis being sold at a storefront, in order for that to become accepted and commonplace people had to sort of break the law or interpret the law in a new way. And we're seeing that with CBD as well. So it's kind of ironic that now cannabis is super regulated and CBD isn't. Yet cannabis paved the way for CBD."
With consumer sales of CBD products projected to top $2 billion by 2020, lawmakers in several states, including California, are pushing for bipartisan legislation that would legalize the use of CBD in food, beverage, and cosmetic products.
California's CBD bill, AB 228, is currently making its way through the statehouse, a move Eppers and others hope will clean up the regulatory mess left over from prohibition.
"What's happened with the state kind of clamping down on this is it's really brought the industry together," Eppers says. "The state will fix this legislatively."
Produced and shot by Alexis Garcia. Additional camera by Zach Weissmueller, Paul Detrick, and Justin Monticello.
Photo credits: Hollandse-Hoogte/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Jens Kalaene/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom, Michal Fludra/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Lucy Nicholson/REUTERS/Newscom, Jevon Moore/SplashNews/Newscom, and Vybes. Additional footage provided by the Drug Policy Alliance.
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]]>If you think that all economists spend most of their time sitting at a desk plotting supply and demand curves, you haven't met Allison Schrager, author of the new book An Economist Walks Into a Brothel.
As her title promises, she visited the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in Nevada to learn how sex workers and their clients manage the risks that come even with legal prostitution. A Ph.D. economist who writes for Quartz, Schrager traveled the country to see how people in high-risk, high-reward fields such as horse breeding, candid celebrity photography, professional poker, and big-wave surfing assess and manage risk. The result is a compelling blend of first-person reporting and high-level economic analysis that gives individuals a new way not to avoid risk, but to make more-informed choices.
"People should feel more comfortable taking risks," Schrager tells Nick Gillespie. "We don't really give people the tools to feel comfortable with risk taking, but you really do need to take risks to make your life move forward and any aspect of your life, [whether] it's a relationship or your job." Their aren't any guarantees in life, she explains, but there are definitely smarter and dumber ways to take risks.
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Jim Epstein.
To listen to separate, longer podcast that Nick Gillespie recorded with Schrager, go here now.
Photo credits: s_bukley/Newscom, Blainey Woodham/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Scott Serio/Cal Sport Media/Newscom, Steve Marcus/REUTERS/Newscom, Erich Schlegel/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Richard Hallman/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Tony Heff/ZUMA Press/Newscom.
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The post An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: What Prostitutes and Big-Wave Surfers Can Teach Us About Risk appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Occupational licensing laws apply to nearly one in three U.S. jobs, but the most "most broadly and onerously licensed state" of all, according to the Institute for Justice, is Arizona. The Grand Canyon State required a license to work for 64 occupations, costing on average $455 in fees and almost 600 days of education and experience.
Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican and the former CEO of Coldstone Creamery, has made reforming Arizona's occupational licensing regime a priority. "Our focus [has been] on improving that structure of government and really stopping the bullies that were part of the boards and commissions," he told Reason. He's now backing a bill that would allow Arizona to recognize occupational licenses granted by other states.
"Just because somebody packs up that moving van in Chicago, Illinois, they don't lose their skills on the way to the state of Arizona," says Ducey. "Why should somebody have to have suffer the burden of thousands of dollars or weeks or months of recertification in a skill that they already have?"
HB 2569, which was introduced by Rep. Warren Petersen (R–Gilbert), would allow anyone who has an occupational license from another state to be automatically eligible for the same license in Arizona as long as they are in good standing in their home state and don't have a disqualifying criminal history. It would extend an existing state law that recognizes out-of-state licenses for military families. New state residents would still have to pay a fee to the state licensing board and certain professions would have to pass a test on relevant Arizona laws.
"My issue is that we don't really know what the standards are in these other states," says Rep. Pamela Powers Hannley (D–Tucson), who opposes the bill. "Why should we dumb down our standards? I see this as sort of deregulation for the sake of deregulation."
Ducey, who predicts that the bill will pass and that other states will follow Arizona's lead, says he's confident that it has the necessary "guard rails." In 2017, he issued an executive order requiring that state licensing boards review and provide justification for every rules that the governor's office deemed excessive. The next day, he signed the Right to Earn a Living Act, which restricted state boards from issuing any new occupational licensing rules that can't be justified on health and safety grounds.
"I think it's important that we remember who the voters are and who the citizens are and we're here to serve them," Ducey says. "Too many of these boards and commissions exist to stop competition, to stifle and protect the status quo. And we're changing that in Arizona."
Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Paul Detrick and Andrew Belcher.
Photo credits: Monica Almeida/REUTERS/Newscom, Samantha Sais/REUTERS/Newscom, Nicole Neri/REUTERS/Newscom, Ben Moffat/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Fred Young/agefotostock/Newscom.
Additional footage courtesy of Foundation for Government Accountability.
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The post Why Do You Need a License To Blow Dry Hair? Arizona Gov. Ducey Fights the 'Bullies' in His State appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Tesla has hit another roadblock when it comes to selling their cars in Texas. The state has some of the most restrictive laws in the country which prohibit the direct sales of automobiles to consumers. Now a new bill would prevent the electric car company from servicing their own vehicles.
State Senator Kelly Hancock (R-North Richland Hills) introduced SB 1415 in the Texas legislature last week. The bill would change the state's transportation code to limit the ability of vehicle manufacturers to repair the vehicles they produce.
The bill is the latest attempt from the legislature to impede Tesla's ability to operate in the state. Since 2013, lawmakers have refused to consider four bills that would allow Tesla to sell cars directly to consumers. The company, which prides itself on being a disruptor in the auto industry by eliminating dealership middlemen, runs about 13 showrooms in the state. But employees are prohibited from giving customers pricing information or directing consumers to the company's website.
As Quartz notes, in 2018 the state also "blocked Tesla buyers from receiving the state's $2,500 alternative-fueled-vehicle incentive since the cars are not sold in dealerships."
In 2017, Reason TV reported on Tesla's issues in Texas and why the state continues to enact laws which protect car dealers and limit competition. Watch the full video below.
The post Texas Bill Would Prevent Tesla From Fixing Their Own Cars appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Why should Congress cough up the money to build a border wall? President Trump claims it would help stop the flow of deadly drugs coming in from Mexico.
Historically, in terms of sheer weight, marijuana has been Mexico's leading illicit drug export to the U.S. But last year, "the average Border Patrol agent was seizing just 25 pounds [of marijuana] for the entire year, or less than half a pound per week—a drop of 78 percent from 2013," writes David Bier, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, in the cover story of Reason's April 2019 issue.
This trend has nothing to do with increased border security, or a crackdown on the Sinaloa Cartel and its former leader, Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán, who was found guilty on 10 criminal counts in U.S. federal court last week. The falloff in pot smuggling, Bier argues, is a direct result of state-level legalization here in the U.S.
Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Bier to discuss why easing pot prohibition is doing what the failed war on drugs never could.
Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Austin Bragg and Todd Krainin.
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]]>Over 30,000 public school teachers, nurses, counselors, and librarians went on strike last week in Los Angeles—the first teachers' strike there in nearly 30 years.
Driving the protests were union demands for higher salaries, smaller class sizes, and more funding for school nurses and counselors. District administrators said those demands would hasten the system's descent into insolvency.
While teacher salaries haven't increased much in inflation-adjusted terms since the 1990s, total teacher compensation has soared because of ballooning health care and retirement contributions. There's a growing disconnect between what teachers see in their paychecks and what their employers are actually paying for their services.
Reason spoke with Chad Aldeman, an editor at TeacherPensions.org and a senior associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners, to discuss what's really driving schools to the brink of bankruptcy. The interview is based in part on Aldeman's article in Education Next, "Teachers Have the Nation's Highest Retirement Costs. But They'll Never See the Benefits."
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Garcia, Justin Monticello, Meredith Bragg, and Mark McDaniel.
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]]>When President Donald Trump bragged in his first State of the Union address about cutting red tape, the Democratic response was no surprise. "Deregulation," warned Center for American Progress Senior Advisor Sam Berger in Fortune, "is simply a code word for letting big businesses cut corners at everyone else's expense."
But many leading Democrats had the opposite view in the 1970s. Then, at the dawn of the deregulation era, left-leaning politicians and economists understood that excessive government management of industry let the big-business incumbents get away with lousy performance at the expense of competitors, taxpayers, and consumers. The leading figure in that fight to cut red tape and shut down entire federal agencies was none other than Jimmy Carter.
It was Sen. Ted Kennedy who held extensive Senate hearings in the early '70s, with testimony from the likes of Ralph Nader and liberal economist Alfred Kahn, about the benefits of lifting state controls on the airline industry. The resulting Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, signed by Carter, killed the Civil Aeronautics Board—a federal agency that decided which airlines could fly where, and even what they could charge. The new competition to the old airline cartel reduced fares, expanded destinations, increased safety, and made air travel an option for those of us who aren't rich.
Carter also lifted stifling government oversight of the rail and trucking industries under a Democrat-controlled House and Senate. The result? Competition intensified, prices dropped, and consumers saved more money on everyday products.
In 1978, President Carter signed a bill that lifted Prohibition-era criminal restrictions on home brewing. The legalization of do-it-yourself beer production unleashed a boom of experimentation, paving the way for the craft beer revolution that is ongoing to this day. The year that Carter loosened the rules, the U.S. was home to a mere 50 breweries. Today there are well over 5,000. In two generations of beermaking, America went from global laughingstock to world leader.
The governor of California during Carter's presidency was none other than Jerry Brown, then known as "Governor Moonbeam" for his far-out musings, glittery social life, and lefty politics. Yet Brown, too, could be a fiery skeptic of government. In his terrific second inaugural address in 1979, Brown stated that "many regulations primarily protect the past, prop up privilege or prevent sensible economic choices."
But even while some sectors were unleashed four decades ago by far-seeing Democrats and Republicans alike, too many governments at the local, state, and federal levels have forgotten those lessons, and instead imposed entirely new categories of regulations. Occupational licensing, which applied to about one in 10 jobs 40 years ago, now impacts one in three. Arizona will put its citizens in jail for six months for operating a blow dryer without a license. Texas wants to make it a criminal offense to buy unauthorized pecans. And Washington, D.C., wants to require that all daycare providers have a college degree.
The aggregate cost of these regulations is staggering. Last year, according to the pro-free markets Competitive Enterprise Institute, federal regulations cost Americans $1.9 trillion—or around $15,00 per household. And while President Trump has cut the number of pages in the Federal Register by about one-third since he took office, there are still some 67 federal departments, agencies, and commissions currently working on more than 3,000 new regulations. It seems you can't stop the regulatory state, you can only hope to contain it.
As Alfred Kahn and his liberal contemporaries could have explained, licensing boards and other regulatory bodies tend to be dominated by industry incumbents who are mainly interested in protecting their own turf. Regulation is the friend, not enemy, of big business.
So how did the party of Jimmy Carter and sideburns-era Jerry Brown become the ideological home of Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? One explanation may be that Democratic support for deregulation back then was born out of a sense of nearly hopeless desperation in the face of stagflation. Cutting red tape to foster dynamism was about the last move politicians had left.
Our long economic expansion and stock-market boom will soon come to an end, imposing limits on government precisely at the moment when it's asked to do more. When that day of reckoning comes, the best questions for lawmakers of both parties to ask may just be: What would Jimmy Carter do?
Written by Matt Welch. Produced and edited by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Meredith Bragg and Todd Krainin.
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]]>Republicans and Democrats may genuinely hate each other, but they love their own power even more. That's why they collude so often to keep those pesky Libertarians, Greens, and independents away from the lucrative levers of government.
The 2018 midterms have been chock full of two-party shenanigans, all too often aided and abetted by journalists, pollsters, and the voters themselves.
It all starts with ballot access. If a state government considers you a "major party," getting on the ballot is a snap. Worst-case scenario, you need to collect signatures from a tiny fraction of your own registered voter base. Best case, you just show up.
Third-party and independent candidates, on the other hand, have to collect tens of thousands of signatures in some states—15,000 to run for governor in New York, for example, including at least 100 in each congressional district. Arizona Republicans recently changed the law to say that Libertarians need to collect signatures not just from their own members but from registered independents as well. And by the way, the Green Party is subject to a less stringent set of rules, which is why there's a Green but not a Libertarian running in Arizona's neck-and-neck U.S. Senate race.
Some states push their filing deadlines all the way back to a year before the election. That's one of many reasons why candidates such as Evan McMullin, when they get a sudden itch to run for president, are lucky to make it on even a dozen ballots.
New Hampshire this year herded all third parties under the same ballot line, confusingly titled "Libertarians and Other Candidates." New Mexico tried—and thankfully failed—to institute a "straight party" ballot, meaning voters in this 3–2 Democratic state could automatically vote for all the candidates in one party by checking off just one box.
Gary Johnson's surging poll numbers, I am sure, were purely coincidental.
Getting your name on the ballot doesn't mean it will be included in the polls. The Nevada race for U.S. Senate is universally rated a tossup, and yet the first three independent polls released this October failed to include Libertarian Tim Hagan, even though previous surveys had him at around four percent.
How about debates? Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dale Kerns was assured of a spot on stage, then uninvited. Texas gubernatorial candidate Mark Tippets was told he didn't have enough qualifying press, in part because his coverage in the Spanish-language media didn't count. In Texas. Iowa governor candidate Jake Porter, who's polling higher than any other L.P. statehouse contender, says his debate invitations were rescinded, in part because he refused to buy commercials.
"The freer and more general the competition," Adam Smith wrote in 1776, the more "advantageous" it will be to the public. Competitors, he warned, will "always" try "to widen the market and to narrow the competition." For too long we have allowed our system of government, that other glorious achievement from 1776, to be controlled by the market-rigging forces Smith warned us about. It's about time to make American politics competitive again.
Written by Matt Welch. Camera by Jim Epstein. Edited by Alexis Garcia.
Photo credits: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Newscom, Hill Street Studios Blend Images/Newscom
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]]>In 2015, psychology professor Jonathan Haidt and free-speech activist Greg Lukianoff published "The Coddling of the American Mind" in The Atlantic. It argued that speech codes, trigger warnings, and safe spaces on college campuses are "disastrous for education—and mental health." It quickly became the most-read article in the history of the magazine.
Now they've expanded it into a new book with the same title.
Lukianoff, a lawyer by training, heads FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which fights for free speech on campus. Haidt teaches at New York University and is a co-founder of Let Grow, the free-range parenting advocacy organization, and Heterodox Academy, which promotes intellectual diversity among faculty.
Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with them to talk about why they believe that, as their book's subtitle puts it, "good intentions and bad ideas" about the supposed fragility of young people is "setting up a generation for failure."
Edited by Alexis Garcia. Intro by Todd Krainin. Camera by Jim Epstein and Kevin Alexander.
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The post The Coddling of the American Mind: How Overprotective Parenting Led to Fragility on Campus appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Celebrity hairstylist Jen Atkin made some noise in the beauty world this month when she announced that her OUAI haircare brand would release a small batch of a CBD oil–infused scalp and body scrub. CBD—cannabidiol—is having a moment, and fans of Atkin, who counts the Kardashians among her celebrity clientele, reacted with enthusiasm.
But just a day before the product's scheduled launch on August 21, Atkin announced that plans for the CBD scrub had been shelved.
"We researched CBD months ago and saw it naturally calms inflammation and irritation. We decided to add it to a small special batch of our Scalp + Body Scrub," Atkin wrote on Instagram. "We've recently been told that as of a few weeks ago the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] has decided to change the rules and put a ban on CBD being used in 'food' products. Because body scrub is a topical product it apparently falls under the 'food' category."
CBD is a cannabis compound that can be derived from marijuana or hemp plants. Unlike tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), CBD won't get you high; it's almost impossible to overdose from taking too much of it. The compound has been hailed for its therapeutic benefits and has become a popular alternative for pain management. In January, the World Anti-Doping Agency removed CBD from its list of banned substances, and in June the FDA approved the first CBD drug for epilepsy. Consumers can buy thousands of CBD products—everything from oils to capsules to pet treats— from local retailers and online stores.
But because of the legal grey area around CBD, established beauty brands have largely stayed away from offering the compound in their products. Lord Jones, a natural skincare line that sells cannabis-infused body and face lotions, employs a team of lawyers to make sure its moisturizers don't run into problems with the DEA. In 2017, Target added CBD oil to its online store only to remove it from its website a few hours later. Walmart also removed a CBD dab product from its shelves with no explanation.
OUAI is more of an upstart, but its legal team still advised Atkin not to release the CBD product. "The lines are very blurry right now," she explains to Reason.
Though body scrubs like OUAI's generally qualify as cosmetics under FDA guidance regulations, states like California (where OUAI is based) have a much broader interpretation that could potentially qualify topical cosmetics like scrubs as food—particularly if they use food-grade ingredients in their formulations.
"Under FDA guidelines CBD is recognized as an active drug ingredient," says Alison Malsbury, an attorney with the Harris Bricken law firm. "Any beauty product that contains CBD needs to go through the FDA drug approval process." Even if manufacturers think they are staying within the law by not making medical claims on their labels, Malsbury says including CBD as an ingredient may be enough to trigger the FDA drug approval process. She also notes that CBD, like marijuana, is still a Schedule I controlled substance under federal law.
The confusion around CBD's legal status extends beyond the beauty industry. Even in California, where recreational marijuana sales became legal at the beginning of the year, CBD has become a target of state regulators.
In July, the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) issued a memorandum effectively banning hemp-derived CBD from all food products. CDPH's guidance echoed a June document posted by the FDA. Marijuana-derived CBD and edibles are exempted from the new CDPH rules as long as they are purchased from a state-licensed and regulated dispensary.
"You went from having CBD lattes on almost every corner to this sharp turn," says attorney Daniel Shortt, who also works at Harris Bricken and contributes to the firm's Canna Law blog. "It caught some in the CBD industry by surprise."
Shortt points out that like the FDA, the CDPH does not have an enforcement arm, which means that implementation of the no-CBD-in-food rule is left to local health agencies. The Orange County Register recently reported that health officials visited the Coffee Dose café in Costa Mesa—which offers CBD as an optional beverage add-on—and impounded its CBD supply; they threatened the owners with a fine if they resumed sales of the product.
The U.S. Hemp Roundtable, a trade coalition representing dozens of hemp companies, criticized the CDPH memo in a letter, accusing the agency of making "inaccurate statements about the legal status" of CBD products. The group contends that the 2014 Farm Bill, which partially legalized hemp by allowing states to set up pilot programs for research purposes, gives the crop legal protection under federal law. They're pushing Congress to pass the 2018 Farm Bill, which would legalize all hemp crops across the country.
"The federal farm bill should clear some of this up," says Kenny Morrison, president of the California Cannabis Manufacturers Association.
With hemp's legal status in question, some states have passed measures to clarify the laws around hemp-derived CBD products. Colorado and Indiana legalized various hemp products this year. And Michigan voters will decide in November whether they want they state to legalize marijuana and industrial hemp.
For many entrepreneurs, change can't come fast enough. According to the Brightfield Group, sales of CBD hit nearly half a million dollars in 2017 and will surpass the billion-dollar threshold around 2020.
Atkin still hopes to bring OUAI's CBD scrub to market in the future. "All I can say is call your local senators if you want to see any changes happening anytime soon," she wrote on Instagram to her 2.5 million followers. "Don't forget to vote in Nov and #FREETHESCRUB!"
The post Why Kim Kardashian's Favorite Hair Care Company Cancelled Its Line of CBD Products appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>No legal commentator on cable news is more energetic, constitutionally minded, or libertarian than Andrew Napolitano, who has served as Fox News' senior judicial analyst for nearly two decades. A former New Jersey Superior Court judge, Napolitano is a nationally syndicated columnist—you can read him at Reason—and the author of a shelf full of books about law, history, and race in America.
Reason caught up with the judge at FreedomFest, the annual event held every July in Las Vegas. We talked about Donald Trump's ongoing makeover of the federal judiciary, whether Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will be good for libertarians, what it's like to be an ex-Republican, and the imminent return of Freedom Watch, the popular and controversial show that Napolitano hosted on Fox Business from 2006 to 2010.
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Garcia, Paul Detrick, & Jim Epstein. Graphics by Austin Bragg.
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]]>In his new book, Suicide of the West, National Review's Jonah Goldberg talks about what he calls "the Miracle"—the immense and ongoing increase in human wealth, health, freedom, and longevity ushered in by the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. At turns sounding like Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, and economist Deirdre McCloskey, Goldberg writes, "In a free market, money corrodes caste and class and lubricates social interaction….Capitalism is the most cooperative system ever created for the peaceful improvement of peoples' lives. It has only a single fatal flaw: It doesn't feel like it."
As his book's title suggests, Goldberg isn't worried the world is running out of resources. He's troubled by our unwillingness to defend, support, and improve customs, laws, and institutions that he believes are crucial to human flourishing.
"Decline is a choice," he writes, not a foregone conclusion. While he lays most of the blame for our current problems on a Romantic left emanating from Rousseau, he doesn't stint on the responsibility of his own tribe of conservative fearmongers and reactionaries.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Reason, Goldberg talks about his new book, his persistent opposition to Trump, how his thinking has evolved on a number of culture-war issues, and why he can't just admit once and for all that he's becoming a libertarian.
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alexis Garcia and Austin Bragg.
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]]>Few TV shows—especially few political shows—can compare to Firing Line, the talk show hosted by William F. Buckley, Jr. In its original incarnation, it ran for 33 years and over 1,500 episodes and featured guests ranging from Muhammad Ali to Ronald Reagan to Jack Kerouac to Milton Friedman to Mother Teresa.
The show went off the air in 1999, but now it's back on PBS with Margaret Hoover in the host chair.
Born in 1977, Hoover is the great-granddaughter of Herbert Hoover, a former contributor to Fox News and CNN, and the author of 2011's American Individualism: How a New Generation of Conservatives Can Save the Republican Party.
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Jim Epstein.
"Dark Fog" by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1300031 Artist: http://incompetech.com/
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]]>Eric Lundgren, an e-waste entrepreneur who built the first electronic hybrid recycling center in the U.S., will begin a 15-month prison sentence this month after a six-year legal battle with the U.S. Department of Justice.
In 2012, Lundgren plead guilty to conspiracy to traffic in counterfeit goods and criminal copyright infringement for copying and selling CDs for restoring the Windows operating system on broken PCs—CDs that Microsoft gives away for free.
So why did Lundgren's crime result in a jail sentence? The answer cuts to the heart of a major battle going on in the tech industry today: Companies are trying to preserve aspects of U.S. copyright law that give them enormous power over the products we own. Repair advocates say that in their quest to protect their intellectual property, manufacturers are trampling on our First Amendment rights.
The Rise of Independent Repair Shops
To better understand why Lundgren posed a major threat to the tech industry, consider the third party repair shops that have popped up all over the country, allowing consumers to get their devices fixed faster and cheaper. Repair.org, a trade association representing independent repair workers, estimates that over 3 million repair and reuse professionals operate in the U.S.
iFixit is one example of a thriving independent repair organization. Kyle Wiens, who co-founded the online community in 2003 from his dorm room in San Luis Obispo, Calif., has become a passionate advocate for consumer repair rights.
"I like to say if you can't fix it you don't really own it," says Wiens. "There was this dark period in the '80s and '90s where we had all these new gizmos that were coming out and nobody knew how to fix them. Now that we have the internet, all this information can get shared online."
According to Inc., iFixit has delivered 30 percent growth year over year since its launch 15 years ago. The company did more than $21 million in sales of tools and repair kits in 2016 and has approximately 10 million monthly visitors to its site. iFixit relies on its community of over 50,000 contributors, who offer repair tips that comprise a growing library of open source manuals.
The company is best known for its teardowns of popular tech merchandise like the iPhone. Wiens was one of the first in the world to purchase an iPhone X and take it apart so he could give customers practical advice on how to fix the device.
Tech companies have responded by integrating special screws and adhesives that aren't available from third-party sellers. And for a period of time Apple was disabling iPhone 6s when the company detected work had been done at independent repair shops. The company was later served with a class action lawsuit and reimbursed thousands of affected consumers.
But none of these tactics have slowed the growth of independent repair industry. So tech companies have increasingly turned to a provision in U.S. copyright law, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that makes it illegal to break digital locks protecting copyrighted work. The law's intent was to protect creative content like movies, music, and software from being stolen and copied. With software overtaking hardware under the hood of our devices, companies are using copyright provisions to extend their control over a multitude of products.
Lundgren's Crime
Before Lundgren got in trouble with federal authorities, he managed an e-waste facility in Chatsworth, California that recycles about 40 million pounds of e-waste annually.
"Everybody in the whole town just knew me as the recycler," he says. "By 18, I was doing it for American Airlines, for Coca-Cola. It just blew up very fast." When Lundgren was 19 he moved to Shenzhen, a city in China's Guangdong Province that's known as "the Silicon Valley of hardware," and began learning more about e-waste and sourcing replacement parts for broken electronics.
In 2011, Lundgren was approached by a computer broker named Bob Wolff with the idea to duplicate Windows restore discs, which are commonly supplied by computer manufacturers so users can restore their Windows operating system if their computer malfunctions. The software is usually supplied for free and can only be used if the person already has purchased the license for the Windows operating system. Lundgren thought that by providing people with CDs, he could make it easier for consumers to fix their computers.
"My grandmother and my aunt—they don't know how to burn an ISO image or download something from the internet," says Lundgren. "But everybody knows how to put a repair tool inside of a computer, click enter, and let it do its thing."
The idea was that Lundgren would create the discs in China and Wolff would sell them to PC refurbishers in the U.S.
"When Lundgren took this restore CD to the duplicate shop in China, they didn't just duplicate the software on there," says Jake Swearingen, a tech reporter for New York magazine. "They duplicated everything about the CD. So that includes the labeling on it, the Dell logo, the Microsoft logo, everything about it."
In 2012, one shipment of CDs got flagged by U.S. customs. Wolff was approached by the feds and participated in a sting operation targeting Lundgren, which ultimately led to a federal raid on Lundgren's house in Florida.
After initially facing a 21-count indictment, Lundgren plead guilty to conspiracy to traffic in counterfeit goods and criminal copyright infringement. In April a federal appeals court upheld Lundgren's conviction, sentencing him to 15 months in prison.
"Microsoft may be firm on the law but we can question if their motives are really about protecting the software," says Tom W. Bell, a law professor at Chapman University specializing in intellectual property and copyright.
"When copyright is criminalized, it's not just making a criminal out of this Lundgren fellow," says Bell. If you "sit down and examine what we do everyday," he says, we're all "violating copyright law."
Copyright Protections Grow
U.S. copyright protections have grown increasingly broad over the years, and sanctions against infringing parties have become more punitive.
Bell says this trend doesn't balance public and private interests.
Kit Walsh, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit that defends free speech and civil liberties in the digital sphere, says the ubiquity of software has changed the meaning of copyright law.
"The list of products and technologies that are affected by this restriction is practically infinite because it's anything that has software embedded in it," says Walsh. "There's a lingering hook that the seller has in your property that they are arguing gives them really broad powers to dictate how you use that property going forward."
Walsh says these restrictions are having unintended consequences, in particular for security researchers and creatives who are prohibited from even looking at the code that controls our everyday appliances. She says this violates our First Amendment rights.
"Code is a form of speech," she says. "Courts have grappled with that because code also feels a lot like a tool…Even though we have case law that says if you publish instructions…even instructions that are dangerous to the reader, then that's still speech."
While EFF is challenging copyright protections in court, right to repair advocates are pushing for legislation at the state and federal level. There are at least 18 states considering fair repair bills. The legislation is modeled off the 2012 Automotive Right to Repair law in Massachusetts which led to a national agreement with the auto industry to allow independent repair shops to work on cars.
"What we want is competition in the marketplace," states Wiens. "We want the free market. The independent repair shops shouldn't have an advantage over the Apple store, they should just be able to compete on an equal footing."
"Who owns the products that you buy? You do," says Lundgren. "You need to be able to repair those and use those…If I have to go to prison and it's going to raise awareness, and it's going to spark a conversation, and people are gonna start looking into this, I'm happy to go."
Produced by Paul Detrick and Alexis Garcia. Narration by Garcia. Cameras by Detrick, Garcia, and Jim Epstein.
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]]>"Government made a big mistake with the dietary guidelines," says Nina Teicholz, author of New York Times bestseller The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. "Given the track record that they have so far, you can really make a plausible argument that they've done more harm than good."
Consumption of meat, butter, eggs, and cheese were once encouraged as part of a healthy diet. Then in the 1950s, a Minnesota doctor named Ancel Keys put forth his diet-heart hypothesis, claiming that saturated fats raise cholesterol levels and cause heart attacks.
Keys produced landmark studies of the relationship between diet and heart disease that transformed nutrition science. He became a powerful figure in the science community. Contemporaries who publicly questioned the validity of his findings risked losing their research funding or becoming pariahs. When the U.S. adopted dietary guidelines in 1980, Keys' recommendations became enshrined in national food policy.
"We have made our policy based upon this weak kind of science called epidemiology which shows association, but not causation," Teicholz explains. "We have the situation where we just cannot reverse out of these policies that were originally based on really weak science."
Keys' flawed research is one reason Americans have been getting fatter and unhealthier for decades. Despite major advances in treatment, heart disease is still the leading cause of death for men and women.
"The really dominant view is that the dietary guidelines are good…and the reason America is fat and sick is that America has failed to follow them," Teicholz says. "That's when you start looking at the data…By every food category you can find, we have faithfully, dutifully followed the guidelines."
Today the science behind Keys' dietary findings is once again being challenged. Teicholz has launched the Nutrition Coalition, which aims to inform food policy with rigorous science.
"Our goal is educate people about how the dietary guidelines have not been successful…and to bring this alternative policy viewpoint to policy makers," says Teicholz. "More and more experts are willing to talk out about the science, and I think that will support change."
Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Jim Epstein.
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The post How Big Government Backed Bad Science and Made Americans Fat appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Government made a big mistake with the dietary guidelines," says Nina Teicholz, author of New York Times bestseller The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. "Given the track record that they have so far, you can really make a plausible argument that they've done more harm than good."
Consumption of meat, butter, eggs, and cheese were once encouraged as part of a healthy diet. Then in the 1950s, a Minnesota doctor named Ancel Keys put forth his diet-heart hypothesis, claiming that saturated fats raise cholesterol levels and cause heart attacks.
Keys produced landmark studies of the relationship between diet and heart disease that transformed nutrition science. He became a powerful figure in the science community. Contemporaries who publicly questioned the validity of his findings risked losing their research funding or becoming pariahs. When the U.S. adopted dietary guidelines in 1980, Keys' recommendations became enshrined in national food policy.
"We have made our policy based upon this weak kind of science called epidemiology which shows association, but not causation," Teicholz explains. "We have the situation where we just cannot reverse out of these policies that were originally based on really weak science."
Keys' flawed research is one reason Americans have been getting fatter and unhealthier for decades. Despite major advances in treatment, heart disease is still the leading cause of death for men and women.
"The really dominant view is that the dietary guidelines are good…and the reason America is fat and sick is that America has failed to follow them," Teicholz says. "That's when you start looking at the data…By every food category you can find, we have faithfully, dutifully followed the guidelines."
Today the science behind Keys' dietary findings is once again being challenged. Teicholz has launched the Nutrition Coalition, which aims to inform food policy with rigorous science.
"Our goal is educate people about how the dietary guidelines have not been successful…and to bring this alternative policy viewpoint to policy makers," says Teicholz. "More and more experts are willing to talk out about the science, and I think that will support change."
Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Jim Epstein.
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The post How Big Government Backed Bad Science and Made Americans Fat appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Mexico's most notorious drug kingpin, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, has been awaiting trial in the United States since his dramatic capture in 2016. Federal prosecutors have filed charges of drug trafficking, murder, money laundering, and kidnapping against Guzmán, who ran the notorious Sinaloa cartel for more than 40 years. El Chapo gained notoriety for his daring prison escapes, and for his controversial 2016 interview with Hollywood star Sean Penn while hiding as a fugitive from the law.
The U.S. and Mexican governments have declared Guzmán's capture a major win in the drug war. Harvard economics professor Jeffrey Miron thinks his story better demonstrates the folly of prohibition.
"When we interfere on the supply side with the drug trade by taking out kingpins and other ways, we tend to lower the prices partially because we're making the market more competitive," says Miron, who's also the head of economic studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. "Where there's demand, there's going to be supply."
The capture of kingpins doesn't just tend to make cartels more competitive in the marketplace. It can also increase violence as rival factions battle to fill the power vacuum.
A 2015 research brief conducted by Miron and his Cato colleagues Jason Lindo and Maria Padilla-Romo shows that capturing a leading drug trafficker "in a municipality increases its homicide rate by 80 percent" over a 12-month period. In neighboring municipalities, the homicide rate rises 30 percent in the six-month period after a kingpin's capture.
Over the last decade, the United States has contributed over $2 billion in money and intelligence resources to aid the Mexican government with their counternarcotics efforts, which focus on the elimination of drug cartel kingpins. In 2012, Gen. Charles Jacoby, who led the U.S. Northern Command from 2011 to 2014, admitted to Congress that removing kingpins did not have "an appreciable, positive effect" in limiting the operations and reach of Mexican drug cartels.
"In my view the best policy is to legalize everything," says Miron. "The harms come almost entirely from the prohibitions, not from the properties of the substance."
Reason spoke to Miron about the lessons to be learned from El Chapo's capture and if the Trump administration's latest calls for tougher punishment for drug dealers to combat the "terrible crisis of opioid and drug addiction" is opening a new front in the drug war.
Produced by Alexis Garcia. Cameras by Todd Krainin and Mark McDaniel.
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Photo Credits: Mario Guzmán/EFE/Newscom—Mexican Attorney General's Office—Pgr/Ho/Prensa International/Zuma Press/Newscom—Str/picture alliance/dpa/Newscom—José Menéndez/EFE/Newscom—Henry Romero/REUTERS/Newscom—Edgard Garrido/REUTERS/Newscom—Shawn Thew/Pool/CNP/MEGA/Newscom—Kyle Mazza/NurPhoto/Sipa USA/Newscom
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The post Will El Chapo's Arrest Make the Drug Trade More Deadly? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Mexico's most notorious drug kingpin, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, has been awaiting trial in the United States since his dramatic capture in 2016. Federal prosecutors have filed charges of drug trafficking, murder, money laundering, and kidnapping against Guzmán, who ran the notorious Sinaloa cartel for more than 40 years. El Chapo gained notoriety for his daring prison escapes, and for his controversial 2016 interview with Hollywood star Sean Penn while hiding as a fugitive from the law.
The U.S. and Mexican governments have declared Guzmán's capture a major win in the drug war. Harvard economics professor Jeffrey Miron thinks his story better demonstrates the folly of prohibition.
"When we interfere on the supply side with the drug trade by taking out kingpins and other ways, we tend to lower the prices partially because we're making the market more competitive," says Miron, who's also the head of economic studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. "Where there's demand, there's going to be supply."
The capture of kingpins doesn't just tend to make cartels more competitive in the marketplace. It can also increase violence as rival factions battle to fill the power vacuum.
A 2015 research brief conducted by Miron and his Cato colleagues Jason Lindo and Maria Padilla-Romo shows that capturing a leading drug trafficker "in a municipality increases its homicide rate by 80 percent" over a 12-month period. In neighboring municipalities, the homicide rate rises 30 percent in the six-month period after a kingpin's capture.
Over the last decade, the United States has contributed over $2 billion in money and intelligence resources to aid the Mexican government with their counternarcotics efforts, which focus on the elimination of drug cartel kingpins. In 2012, Gen. Charles Jacoby, who led the U.S. Northern Command from 2011 to 2014, admitted to Congress that removing kingpins did not have "an appreciable, positive effect" in limiting the operations and reach of Mexican drug cartels.
"In my view the best policy is to legalize everything," says Miron. "The harms come almost entirely from the prohibitions, not from the properties of the substance."
Reason spoke to Miron about the lessons to be learned from El Chapo's capture and if the Trump administration's latest calls for tougher punishment for drug dealers to combat the "terrible crisis of opioid and drug addiction" is opening a new front in the drug war.
Produced by Alexis Garcia. Cameras by Todd Krainin and Mark McDaniel.
"Cutting to the Chase" by Kai Engel is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) Source: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kai_Engel/Paradigm_Lost/02_-_Cutting_To_The_Chase Artist: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kai_Engel/
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"Seeger" by John Deley and the 41 Players. Source: https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music
Photo Credits: Mario Guzmán/EFE/Newscom—Mexican Attorney General's Office—Pgr/Ho/Prensa International/Zuma Press/Newscom—Str/picture alliance/dpa/Newscom—José Menéndez/EFE/Newscom—Henry Romero/REUTERS/Newscom—Edgard Garrido/REUTERS/Newscom—Shawn Thew/Pool/CNP/MEGA/Newscom—Kyle Mazza/NurPhoto/Sipa USA/Newscom
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The post Will El Chapo's Arrest Make the Drug Trade More Deadly? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>One Republican member of Congress who won't be sorry to see Speaker of the House Paul Ryan leave office is the libertarian-leaning Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), who also served under John Boehner.
Boehner famously had no use for Amash's principled stand on shrinking the size, scope, and spending of government and was known to swear ferociously at the Michigander. Yet Amash told Reason that compared to Ryan, "In many respects, Boehner was the better speaker." That's because Boehner believed in letting Congress actually debate, argue, and vote on amendments to appropriations legislation in a relatively open manner. Ryan, in contrast, controlled the process tightly and thus stifled the legislative process. In a recent interview with Reason's Nick Gillespie, Amash says:
I would rather have the guy swearing at me and letting me have a vote than not considering me at all…Under [Ryan's] speakership, we've had the fewest open amendments of any speakership. We've had zero….Everything has to be pre-approved by the Speaker…. Under Boehner, you could walk up…and offer an amendment as long as it was germane to the bill, you got to vote on it. And this was true on basically all appropriations bills. Now, we don't even do appropriations bills. They come up with some omnibus bill and spring it on us at the last second and they say, 'This is the bill.'
When asked how the Republican Party might be dragged in a more libertarian direction, Amash didn't miss a beat in suggesting that "you [need to] change the Speaker of the House and have a libertarian Speaker of the House."
With Paul Ryan's departure in January 2019, that opportunity just might arrive.
This interview was conducted at Reason Weekend, our annual donor event, which was held this year in West Palm Beach, Florida.
For more of this interview with Amash, go here.
For a podcast version, go here.
Cameras by Jim Epstein and Meredith Bragg. Edited by Alexis Garcia.
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The post Why John Boehner Was a Better Speaker than Paul Ryan: Justin Amash appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Since arriving in Washington in 2011, Justin Amash has cast more consistently libertarian votes than any other member of Congress. A lawyer by training, the 37-year-old Michigan Republican is an outspoken defender of due process, civil liberties, and defendants' rights. He is also resolutely non-interventionist and friendly toward immigrants. Outspoken in his principles, he rarely misses an opportunity to excoriate his GOP colleagues when they fail to live up to the party's limited-government rhetoric.
"There is such a level of stupidity right now in the way we spend money," says Amash, an opponent of ever-increasing Pentagon budgets and adventurism overseas. He is also a fierce critic of Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.): "The speaker has not been protecting the institution. You need a speaker in there who is an institutionalist, who cares about the institution first, who is not a partisan." Instead, Amash tells Reason's Nick Gillespie, Ryan is protecting individual members from having to cast votes for which they might be held responsible. "Let Republicans and Democrats and others offer their amendments, and let's have votes on all sorts of things, substantive things, not just post offices like they do now."
He is also fed up with Republican scapegoating of immigrants and refugees. "My parents are immigrants," he explains. "My dad's a Palestinian refugee. I think that a lot of his experience rubbed off on me. That he came from a place where he had no rights. He came here as a refugee. He told me all the time how wonderful it was to be in this country. How blessed we were to have been born in this country. That we have an opportunity here."
Amash is known for explaining each of his votes on Facebook and for maintaining a lively Twitter feed, where he excoriates Democrats and Republicans whenever they seek to expand the size, scope, and spending of the federal government.
"The omnibus is one of the worst—and most costly—pieces of legislation ever to become law. Period. That's why I voted no," Amash tweeted after his congressional colleagues passed a 2,300-page bill they clearly had not read.
This interview was conducted at Reason Weekend, our annual donor event, which was held this year in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Click here for full text, transcript, links, and downloadable versions.
The post Rep. Justin Amash on Trump, Ryan, and the 'Stupidity' of How the Government Spends Your Money appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Since arriving in Washington in 2011, Justin Amash has cast more consistently libertarian votes than any other member of Congress. A lawyer by training, the 37-year-old Michigan Republican is an outspoken defender of due process, civil liberties, and defendants' rights. He is also resolutely non-interventionist and friendly toward immigrants. Outspoken in his principles, he rarely misses an opportunity to excoriate his GOP colleagues when they fail to live up to the party's limited-government rhetoric.
"There is such a level of stupidity right now in the way we spend money," says Amash, an opponent of ever-increasing Pentagon budgets and adventurism overseas. He is also a fierce critic of Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.): "The speaker has not been protecting the institution. You need a speaker in there who is an institutionalist, who cares about the institution first, who is not a partisan." Instead, Amash tells Reason's Nick Gillespie, Ryan is protecting individual members from having to cast votes for which they might be held responsible. "Let Republicans and Democrats and others offer their amendments, and let's have votes on all sorts of things, substantive things, not just post offices like they do now."
He is also fed up with Republican scapegoating of immigrants and refugees. "My parents are immigrants," he explains. "My dad's a Palestinian refugee. I think that a lot of his experience rubbed off on me. That he came from a place where he had no rights. He came here as a refugee. He told me all the time how wonderful it was to be in this country. How blessed we were to have been born in this country. That we have an opportunity here."
Amash is known for explaining each of his votes on Facebook and for maintaining a lively Twitter feed, where he excoriates Democrats and Republicans whenever they seek to expand the size, scope, and spending of the federal government.
"The omnibus is one of the worst—and most costly—pieces of legislation ever to become law. Period. That's why I voted no," Amash tweeted after his congressional colleagues passed a 2,300-page bill they clearly had not read.
This interview was conducted at Reason Weekend, our annual donor event, which was held this year in West Palm Beach, Florida.
NOTE: Podcast version contains full interview and audience Q&A. Run time 1 hour.
Cameras by Jim Epstein and Meredith Bragg. Edited by Alexis Garcia.
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THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. PLEASE CHECK QUOTATIONS AGAINST AUDIO FOR ACCURACY.
Nick Gillespie: Over the past couple of months, Congress has passed a budget deal that increases spending by about $300 billion dollars. It lifted the last of the budget caps from 2011, reauthorized domestic surveillance. The House overwhelming passed a sex trafficking bill that goes directly— It'll do less about sex trafficking, but it will open a lot of online speech to government regulation, which it had protected. And my first question, then, to you is remind us why anyone should vote Republican.
Rep. Justin Amash (R-Michigan): First, The Two Parties Must Die is going to be the name of our album, the boy band.
Gillespie: Yes, Amash and Gillespie. It will be like bookends.
Amash: Two Parties Must Die. Why should we vote Republican? Well, because I'm a Republican, so people in my district should vote Republican. But the Republican Party hasn't given people very many reasons to vote Republican. The Democratic Party hasn't given people reasons to vote for Democrats. I think the main reason that people might vote Republican right now is because it's a two-party system, really. I think you have efforts by the Libertarian Party and some other parties. It hasn't really reached beyond, say, 5 percent, 10 percent in most areas.
Gillespie: You're being very generous. Can I ask—
Amash: Part of that is because the system is, in many respects, rigged to prevent a third party from rising up. We have a system that's designed to benefit these parties. The rules are designed to benefit the parties. In the state of Michigan we have the straight-ticket voting where people, basically, are incentivized to vote Republican or Democrat at the top of the ticket, and just walk out of the polling booth. You'd have to change some of the rules, and I think that you have to present alternatives that are broadly appealing. I do think there is a libertarian alternative that is broadly appealing and can be presented.
Gillespie: One of the reasons, I think, there's a sociological reason why the libertarian movement, small l, and Republicans kind of come together. Because Republican rhetoric, at least from Barry Goldwater on through Reagan and to the present day, is often very libertarian. It's about limiting government, it's about maximizing individual liberty. It's about cutting spending and being fiscally responsible. What can be done to pull the Republican Party to at least live up to some of its rhetoric?
Amash: You have to elect the right people. I think people at home keep falling for the same garbage. Now there's some movement within the Republican Party toward nationalism and protectionism. If that's what the party becomes about, then that's a very different sort of Republican Party. I'm not sure that that coalition can hold together.
Gillespie: You also represent— What's interesting about that is you're from Michigan. You represent Grand Rapids, among other parts of Michigan. This is an industrial part of the country that went for Trump. They helped make Trump president, partly based on that populist, nationalist, restrictionist, protectionist appeal. Are you crazy? Are you facing a backlash among your constituents for saying, "No, free trade is still a good thing?"
Amash: No, not in my area. Now, in other parts of Michigan that's true. We can get into Michigan politics and see how the state—
Gillespie: I would rather not.
Amash: —and see how the state breaks down, go blue. In my part of Michigan, in the western part of Michigan, actually, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were less popular than their counterparts in the previous election. Donald Trump did worse than Mitt Romney. Hillary Clinton did worse than Barack Obama. Which actually shows that there is a desire for something else. I did much better than Donald Trump did in my district, and he got clobbered in the city of Grand Rapids, 63 to 30.
I think there is a desire for something else. I think the vast majority of Americans are for that something else. What you have right now are two parties that are relatively small and weak, and, actually the reason they are so partisan right now is because they are small and weak. When you get parties that are that small, that weak, you start to have the fringier elements of each party rise up and make the noise. Libertarian views are actually the mainstream views. If you go around my district and talk to people, most people have generally libertarian views. Now, would they call themselves libertarians, would they say, "Hey, I'm a libertarian?" Not necessarily, but they have a set of principles that are American principles embedded in this culture and this society, and they are fairly libertarian principles. I think we need to be able to present that to them and find some way to present an alternative going forward. I think as these parties get smaller and smaller there'll be more independence, and maybe a third party has a chance. I think the future I see is one where there are no strong parties and more independent candidates. We don't really need the parties anymore.
Gillespie: Talk about that. Is that because of technology? One of the things I suspect many people here are aware of, Rep. Amash explains his votes on Facebook. I know I've done this, and I think a lot of journalists do, like, when you don't really understand what the hell Congress is voting on you can go to his page because, regardless of his decision, he lays out what's going on.
Is it because of technological changes? We also hear money is more important in politics than ever, and you are only going to get money either through personal fortunes or party operations.
Amash: I think the ability to spread information is more important than the money and more important than the parties. You could not have had candidates like me 20 or 30 years ago before the rise of the internet. It would not have happened. The party would have crushed you before you got out of the gate. It used to be the case that with so little information going around you had to depend on the parties to tell you what a member of Congress is about. You wouldn't even hear about what was going on in Washington. You just know that Republicans did this, Democrats did that. You generally knew, "Well, my guy's a Republican, so he went along with the Republicans," and the Democrats had their thing going. You'd hear very little about the individual things that are going on in Congress. Now you can find out what a member of Congress had for lunch because we're tweeting it out, we're putting it on Facebook. You know a lot more, and therefore the power of the parties is waning. That's why they're getting smaller and weaker. I don't think they're as necessary, and Americans, I think, need to wake up to that fact a little more and say, "We don't need these parties to be the dominant thing." I tell young people all the time, "You don't have to be a Republican or a Democrat. You can be whatever you want to be, just go and fight for your beliefs and be as independent as you can. Just do your thing."
Gillespie: Let's talk about fiscal responsibility, which used to be a byword of Republican politics. What specifically worries you about the possible return of trillion-dollar annual deficits? Why is that a bad thing?
Amash: It's bad for the next generation. The debt's going to get out of control, these deficits are going to be, in the near future, they'll be $2 trillion annual deficits. We're going to have a $1 trillion annual deficit coming up. It won't be long before we have $2 trillion annual deficits. There's only so long this can work out. It can't workout indefinitely. It can work out in the near term because the United States remains the dominant economy of the world. We remain the wealthiest country of the world. There are those advantages we have, but those advantages aren't permanent. They're not automatic. They're not guaranteed to us. It depends on how we run our system. If this debt gets out of control the next generation's going to have a problem with it. We are, basically, spending money that they would like to use for things. We are spending money that is borrowed from people who will have to pay it back in the future.
Gillespie: It really kind of sucks to be them.
Amash: It does. It's my children who are going to suffer, and my grandchildren. There are other issues. Interest rates can go way up if you have a massive debt. There are other issues.
Gillespie: You touched on the idea that the United States, at least since the end of World War II, has been able to take for granted that we are the superpower in the world. Were one of two, and then one of one. That's changing now, and it seems as if America— In a weird way Trump promised to make America great again, which implies that we're not as great as we used to be. We're not going to be as great just because power and knowledge and economic growth is spreading out around the world. Things are decentralized more.
Talk about that in the context of national defense. Because this is also something Republicans, one of the reasons they were willing to cut a deal to break budget caps was so that they could fund more military stuff. You're very much of a principled, certainly not an isolationist, but you speak on behalf of non-interventionism or non-stupid wars. Is the Republican party or the Republican leadership going to catch up to the idea that we don't have to be everywhere all the time in the world for it to get on with its business?
Amash: No. This leadership's not going to figure that out. After this election, maybe people will start to wake up a little more. Look, there is such a level of stupidity right now in the way we spend money. It's not just that we're spending a lot, it's stupid. For example, if you take national defense. I think most people in this room, if you read the Constitution, I think most people everywhere agree defense is a top priority for the federal government. That's kind of why we have a federal government. It's so that the states could team up and provide for some kind of national defense. If you look at the enumerated powers, a lot of it's about defense. That doesn't mean we need to keep increasing the defense budget to astronomical levels. Right now we're spending as much as the next, I think, eight countries combined. It doesn't take much more spending to be spending as much as the next 20 countries combined, because the spending gets smaller and smaller. How much is too much?
Most of those countries, by the way, are allies. These are not enemies. If you look at the top 10 spending countries, maybe two of them would have hostile or semi-hostile relationships with us. Most of them are allies. I think it's absurd to have the Department of Defense telling us, "We don't need to spend money on X-item," and then Congress saying, "We're going to spend money on that thing," even though the Department of Defense says we don't need it. What happens in these districts, the defense contractors, they put facilities in 60, 70, 80 districts, and they build part of a machine here, part here, part here, and then they go to every member of Congress who has those facilities and they say, "Well, you don't want these jobs to be lost in your district, do you? It's a jobs program. We have to keep these jobs going." That's why the spending keeps going up. You have special interests coming in and asking for more. It's not because the armed forces are asking for it. It's because of the spending, and then it's because of the defense contractor spending.
Then we have these wars, of course, that we're fighting, like in Afghanistan, where we spend more per year in Afghanistan, and my friend Thomas Massie pulled these numbers up for me, more per year than the entire defense budget of Germany or the entire defense budget of the United Kingdom. We spend that just in Afghanistan. That's crazy.
Gillespie: Defense or national security is not just about the Department of Defense or the Pentagon. It's also about things like the surveillance state, the most recent shakeup. Could you quickly give a sense of are you happy with the idea of somebody like Mike Pompeo, who had been a congressman, was at the CIA, is now secretary of state. He's a big surveillance guy, a big hawk. Gina Haspel is now the CIA chief, and assuming McMaster is fully bounced you get somebody like John Bolton. Is your side winning when this happens?
Amash: No. I know Mike because I served with him. Mike's a nice guy. We had a good relationship. I don't agree with him at all on surveillance issues. The others I don't know.
It's certainly not the type of thing I think President Trump was talking about on the campaign trail. I don't think he imagined sort of a neocon, hawkish foreign policy establishment coming in. If that's what he's going for, it's going to be very different from what he was telling people on the campaign trail, and that would be a real shame. I don't think when people elected Donald Trump they wanted us to go back to George W. Bush. Which is better? We can debate that, but I don't think that's what people are asking for. They're not asking for a George W. Bush type of foreign policy. They're not asking for, I think, a Donald Trump type of foreign policy either. I think both are maybe extremes in different ways. I think we can do a lot better. We should put in some noninterventionist types in the State Department, and we should put in noninterventionist types in his cabinet and advisors, people who will give him realistic perspectives on the world so that we can make sound decisions that protect our country and don't get us entangled in all sorts of wars and other activities that we don't need to be involved in.
Gillespie: You had mentioned trade as a place that the country seems to be going backwards. Your friend Thomas Massie, when Trump pulled out of the Trans Pacific Partnership, he was kind of in favor of that on the grounds of national sovereignty. You guys, the two of you, are pretty much plainly the most libertarian members of Congress, of the House of Representatives. Why is he wrong in that? What does it say about the libertarian contingent that you guys were split on pulling out of a trade deal?
Amash: I couldn't tell you that he's wrong because we didn't get through TPP. I didn't spend time reading it because I thought it wasn't going to come up. I'll tell you where we agreed, though. We believe that Congress should have authority over trade, not the president. It's primarily a congressional function. Now, we understand why you'd have one person or a small group of people negotiating deals, but Congress, ultimately, must make the decision on trade, and we shouldn't delegate that authority. We had this legislation called TPA, which was prior to TPP. We never got to vote on TPP, but TPA was voted on. I voted no on TPA.
Gillespie: That was Trade Promotion Authority?
Amash: That was Trade Promotion Authority. The reason I voted no on that is because they said they wanted to delegate through this bill, delegate authority to the president to negotiate these deals, and then we just get one up or down vote at the end. I think that's a mistake. I think that you have to maintain congressional authority over these things, which means as negotiations are going on Congress should have some input to say to the administration, "Yes, you may continue," or, "No, you may not." Because you have these trade deals going on for, sometimes, seven years in the negotiations. If you just give Congress an up or down vote at the very end, what ends up happening is there is so much political pressure on the members of Congress to support the deal no matter what it is because they're told, "Well, you really don't want to." They get all the businesses coming in from their districts coming into their offices, "Oh, you really don't want to sabotage this trade deal. We were negotiating it for seven years. You want us to start over on this thing?" You really have to have checks along the way, and they didn't have that.
I think Congress has done a bad job. We recently had a bill to give the president authority to lower tariffs on people. I think I was the only member of Congress to vote no. The reason I voted no was because we were, again, delegating our authority to the president, and we shouldn't do that. We shouldn't do that.
Gillespie: You're wearing a lumberjack shirt. He's becoming a lumber-sexual. Look it up, Google it. You're strong, you're brawny. You're like selling paper towels up here. How do you get Congress, this has been a theme over the recent weekend, how do you get Congress to actually do its job and say, "We're not delegating everything anymore?" It's like Congress has been outsourcing its job to the president, and the last three, and, arguably, the last 40-something presidents haven't been that good. What can be done?
Amash: People at home can vote new people in, but at the end of the day the speaker of the House has a lot of authority. I think you need the right speaker of the House in there. We don't have that right now. We didn't have it with the previous Speaker either. We're certainly not going to have it with Nancy Pelosi.
Gillespie: You don't want to bring Dennis Hastert back.
Amash: We don't want to bring Hastert back.
Gillespie: He's done.
Amash: There are no speakers on the horizon, whether it's the current speaker or Nancy Pelosi, who are going to fix this problem. The speaker has to protect the institution. The speaker of the House is not doing that. The speaker of the House is in the business of protecting members of Congress right now, protecting them from themselves. He and previous speakers go out of their way to prevent us from voting on things. They don't want us to go on the record. If there's a war, they want that war to be fought without members of Congress having any input, because then afterwards you can decide whether you supported it or opposed it. You can decide after the fact. Did it go well? OK, I was for it. Did it go poorly? Oh, I was against that the whole time. That's what they want on everything, whether it's trade, whether it's wars. They don't want members of Congress to do their jobs. The speaker has not been protecting the institution. You need a speaker in there who is an institutionalist, who cares about the institution first, who is not a partisan. Let the House work its will. Let legislation come to the floor. Let Republicans and Democrats and others offer their amendments, and let's have votes on all sorts of things, substantive things, not just post offices like they do now. Substantive things, and then if something—
Gillespie: Do a lot of post offices get voted down, by the way?
Amash: They never get voted down. Not one is ever lost.
Gillespie: It's a very safe vote.
Amash: Maybe if I put my post office bill on the floor it might get voted down, but no other post offices lose. Let's have substantive votes, and if a bill or an amendment fails, so be it.
This is what drives me crazy. They don't want to have any failures. They want everything to be rigged. They want to know in advance this is going to fail or this is going to pass. If it's going to fail they don't put it on the floor, but, actually, we should have a process where things can fail, where the American people can see, "This vote was put up, it didn't pass," and we move onto something else. We try something else. At the end of the day if you let the House work its will, libertarians aren't going to be happy with a whole lot of things. There'll be a lot of things we're upset up about. Republicans aren't going to be happy about everything. Democrats aren't going to be happy about everything. But we create a market, we create a mechanism for people to make corrections so people at home can see what happened and make adjustments saying, "I don't like this guy. I don't like the way he's voting. I'm going to vote for someone else." It allows someone like me, who has libertarian ideas, to bring those to the floor and present them and have a debate because right now we very rarely get to debate our ideas. I want to be able to go to the floor every day to debate libertarian ideas and present them and have the American people judge whether people made the right vote or the wrong vote on my amendment or my bill.
Gillespie: You've been talking a lot about libertarianism. One of the themes of this past couple of days at Reason Weekend has been: How do we reach new people, how do we convert people, how do we engage people?
Where did your libertarian ideas come from? Are you winning? Obviously, the past two Republican speakers of the house kind of hate your guts. You're not winning any friends or influencing people there. Where did your ideas come from, and then how to you sell them within Congress and within your district?
Amash: Well, I think I was born libertarian.
Gillespie: It's kind of like fetal alcohol syndrome?
Amash: I don't know what.
Gillespie: It's the genetics?
Amash: I was very much against arbitrary authority from childhood. Back then, for example, I remember our PE teacher, he gave some, I don't know what they call them, timeouts or detentions or something to some students for playing basketball in the gym during recess. I got upset about it. This was like in seventh grade. I said to him, "Well, why are these kids in trouble? We always get to play basketball in the gym during recess. That's just how it is." He said, "Well, this afternoon there's going to be some presentation happening in the gym, and we're setting some stuff up, so they're not supposed to be in there." I said, "Well, did you provide notice?"
Gillespie: I'm seeing the coach's point there.
Amash: "Was there notice to these kids? This seems really arbitrary they're in trouble for something they weren't even notified."
I was fighting for the rule of law at that point. I got into all sorts of trouble because of that stuff with teachers and others. I think it was really ingrained in me at a young age. I've talked about this else where, but my parents are immigrants. My dad's a Palestinian refugee. I think that a lot of his experience rubbed off on me. That he came from a place where he had no rights. He came here as a refugee. He told me all the time how wonderful it was to be in this country. How blessed we were to have been born in this country. That we have an opportunity here. It doesn't matter how poor you are. He came here extremely poor, like, with absolutely nothing. It doesn't matter how poor you are or what your last name is, like, Amash. That doesn't fit in in West Michigan. Maybe Amashstra or Vanderamash or something. It doesn't matter what your name is, you can make it in this country. He always told us when we were kids, "Success is not about being really rich, it's about being able to make decisions for your own life and provide for your family." That's what he wanted us to be able to do. He worked very hard to do that. I think that really made a huge impression on me as a kid, and it's why I was against arbitrary authority. It's why I believed so much in this country. I believe in liberty and the rule of law and our Constitution. It's because of a lot of that, I think.
Gillespie: The rhetoric, I'm sure, is accepted by your colleagues, but does the meat of those arguments, are they like, "Yeah, that's all beautiful, now here's a trade restriction. Here's a war. Here's stupid spending." What are the ways to get past people paying lip service to these great ideals?
Amash: I think two of the problems that I run into with my colleagues, one is that a lot of them don't read the legislation or know much about it. They don't really know what it is when it comes to the floor. The other thing is a lot of them know that I'm right. We'll go to the floor, and I'll say, "Hey, this is a bad bill because of X, Y, or Z," and we'll talk about it. They'll say, "You're absolutely right," and then they'll vote the wrong way. It's because they're afraid the bill title says something about protecting children or it has something to do with a current event, and they're worried about being on the wrong side of public opinion on it. I think that affects a lot of the voting. There'll be people who absolutely know they're doing the wrong thing, and they'll still vote that way because they're worried about public opinion. Massie always tries to convince people by saying, "Well, it's a freebie now. We've had so many bad votes now that you might as well just take this one too." The point is, I think that you should do the right thing, and then go home and explain it to people. I believe in the American people. I believe in my constituents. I think that's—
Gillespie: You left out apple pie and children.
Amash: I think that's one of the things that maybe distinguishes my approach from my colleagues is that I have a deep belief in my constituents. I really believe in them to do the right thing. I really do. I think my colleagues are much more cynical about how the public operates. I think that if you go and you put yourself before them, as I do at town halls and other things, and you explain yourself, people will connect with you. They'll appreciate what you're doing. They may find that they agree with you on so many things that they didn't think they agreed with you on. They'll find that you share the same principles that they share. You just have to put yourself out there and be open. You'll find that people are much more accepting of what you do, and even supportive of what you do than if you don't do those things. If you hide, if you try to go with the pack on everything, I think you never get to experience that like I do. That's why I have just a deep faith in the people back home.
Gillespie: Part of that is your willingness and ability to communicate directly with them, whether it's in town halls— I know Rep. Amash in a couple of seasons where congresspeople were vacationing in France rather than going home to their districts because they were going to get eggs and cabbage thrown at them. You weathered that pretty well. You talked directly to them via the internet. With this sex trafficking bill, SESTA, I guess is the name of it, part of what it does is it attacks the doctrine that a publisher of a website is not necessarily liable for things that people put on a bulletin board or on a job listing or at the comments at a political website like Reason. This was a very important early decision as the world wide web was becoming powerful that there was immunity so that you could have more discussions online. How worried are you about something like SESTA shutting down free speech? What are the other threats to free speech that you see that we really need to be taking seriously?
Amash: I think it's the first step. I don't think it in itself is going to shut down free speech. It starts the movement in that direction, and that makes me nervous. One other thing about that bill, the bill is an ex post facto law as well. It makes punishments retroactive. Something that was legal at the time it occurred, the action occurred, it makes it illegal, which is unconstitutional. Our constitution expressly prohibits that. Even the DOJ came out and said, they sent us a memo saying, "This is unconstitutional." We received a memo in our offices from the Trump Department of Justice saying, "This bill is unconstitutional." Now, I showed that to my colleagues, and they said, "Yeah, I agree it's unconstitutional," and they voted for it.
Gillespie: Are they just dyslexic or something?
Amash: That's disturbing. I think that's really disturbing. I think we're going down a dangerous road with some of the free speech stuff.
I want to be careful about how I phrase that in case it's cut and taken out of context. I love free speech.
Gillespie: We're going to have a field day with that in editing.
Amash: I can't wait til you edit it. We're going dangerously with free speech. We must protect free speech. I think that we're heading into a gray area where some of our free speech protections are being weakened by new laws. Whether it's the right to protest or some of the religious liberty as well. I think we need to be really careful about this stuff and really vigilant. I think it's one of the biggest concerns we have going forward.
Gillespie: Yeah, thank you. Thank Congressman Justin Amash, Republican of Michigan, again. Thanks so much both for speaking so candidly today and also what you do when you're on the clock.
Amash: I want to say thank you to Reason for inviting me here today, but also for influencing me as a young person. Reason is one of the first things I started to read when I started to really think about politics. It made an impact on my life as well.
Gillespie: Thank you so much.
Amash: Thanks.
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]]>The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, have reenergized the national movement to restrict gun ownership following a mass shooting that claimed 17 lives. Their efforts culminated with the massive March for Our Lives Rally on Saturday in Washington, D.C.
The students from Stoneman Douglas have earned praise for demanding that Congress take decisive action. But they also seem to be stoking irrational fear about gun violence in schools.
You would have come away from the March for Our Lives Rally thinking there's a school shooting epidemic in America. But what happened at Stoneman Douglas was extremely rare. American schools are profoundly safe, and most likely getting safer: According to researchers at Northeastern University, shooting incidents involving students have actually decreased in recent years, and in the 1990s the overall crime rate was much higher than it is today. The rate of homicides from firearms in the U.S. has plummeted. In fact, students are orders of magnitude more likely to die in a car crash on their way to school than they are to be gunned down on school grounds.
Yet the protesters were demanding more security in schools—a lot more—even if it means making armed guards a fixture of the lives of children.
Some kids live in constant fear of being shot in their classrooms. This hysteria is leading to claims that we must relinquish our rights in the name of safety—a familiar story, from the drug war to the war on terror.
Teenagers have every right to fight for a cause they believe in, and the students from Stoneman Douglas are justifiably enraged about an event that claimed the lives of so many friends and classmates. But feelings shouldn't trump facts, and we should never craft policies from a place of fear.
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]]>With his tariffs on aluminum and steel, his family-separating crackdowns on nonviolent illegal immigrants, and his authoritarian musings about executing drug dealers, President Donald Trump is a libertarian's nightmare.
Except when it comes to regulatory reform.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a D.C.-based free-market think tank that focuses on the administrative state, tallied up the number of regulations in Trump's first year in office and found "the lowest count since records began being kept in the mid-1970s." CEI's Clyde Wayne Crews told Reason, "I haven't seen personally anything like the regulatory reductions that have taken place."
What's producing these results? Part is the president's early executive orders mandating that for every new regulation two old ones get killed, and that the net imposed regulatory cost of each agency and department be zero. Trump has also appointed some genuine reformers: Scott Gottlieb at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Ajit Pai at the Federal Communications Commission, and Betsy DeVos at the Department of Education.
Chief among the anti-bureaucratic bureaucrats is Neomi Rao, administrator of the obscure but important Office for Regulatory Affairs, which applies cost-benefit analyses to proposed regulations while making sure they still align with legislative intent. Rao, who came to the administration after founding the Center for the Study of the Administrative State at George Mason University, tells Reason, "We have done more in our first year than any president since we've been keeping records, which is back to Reagan."
President Trump appears genuinely enthusiastic about this push, talking up FDA reforms in both of his State of the Union addresses and crowing at a December red-tape-cutting ceremony that the "never-ending growth of red tape in America has come to a sudden screeching and beautiful halt."
But Crews warns that a midterm will be much harder for Trump to navigate than the comparative honeymoon of 2017. "I think in 2018, he's going to have a much tougher time meeting the goal," Crews said. "When you're acting alone as president and you can't make law on your own, the barrier that you run into is you run out of low-hanging fruit."
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]]>"You have two parties in a heterogeneous country where people have all kinds of views," says Morris Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. "It's simply not enough to represent diversity in this country."
In his latest book, Unstable Majorities: Polarization, Party Sorting, and Political Stalemate, Fiorina argues that Americans actually agree with each other on fundamental issues such as immigration, marriage equality, and pot legalization. The polarization we hear about is mostly restricted to political activists and media elites who mistake their own extreme views for those of the common people.
"Everybody worries about the average American being ensconced in a filter bubble," says Fiorina. "Most of the research suggests it's the elites who are in these filter bubbles…and have this biased view of the world."
Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Fiorina to discuss ideological bubbles, why President Donald Trump is a fracture in the two-system, and whether more Americans are becoming true independents (short answer: yes).
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This is a rush transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.
Nick Gillespie: Let's start with the title of your book, Unstable Majorities. You note early on that the four consecutive elections between 2004 and 2010, produced four different patterns of political control of the federal government. So the White House, Congress, and the Senate all flip around in different ways. Since 2000, we've had two people who lost the popular vote but won the presidency. These are extremely atypical events. What's going on here?
Morris Fiorina: Well I think it's very interesting. We're in a historically unusual time. Generally speaking, there is a majority party in the United States. There is no majority party today. In every election each of our three national offices, the presidency, the House, and the Senate are basically up for grabs. It's only eight years ago that the Democrats had the House of Representatives, the Senate is always on knife edge and as you point out, we've had two very close presidential elections where the popular vote winner lost.
Gillespie: And you talk about how even in 2004, which it's funny while I was reading the book, I was like, Bush won that easily, but actually it was pretty close.
Fiorina: Yes.
Gillespie: And 2008, was not exactly a blowout either.
Fiorina: Correct. Even though the party won everything, it didn't win everything by a lot. There has not been a presidential landslide in quite a long time. Whereas when you think back there the previous generation we saw Eisenhower in '56, Lyndon Johnson in '64, Nixon in '72, Reagan in 1984. We haven't seen anything like that in a long time.
Gillespie: Yeah, and for a long time there was…I mean Bill Clinton in '92, won with 43 percent of the vote—
Fiorina: 43 percent.
Gillespie: —which is extremely low.
Fiorina: Yes.
Gillespie: So why is this happening?
Fiorina: Though our parties have traditionally been catch-all parties, in majoritarian systems like ours you typically have a two-party system where both parties are broad-based. We don't have that anymore. We have two parties now that look like the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in Europe at the late 20th century, when they're very, very dominant. And you have two parties in a big heterogeneous country where people have all kinds of points of views that don't necessarily hang together and it's simply not enough to represent the diversity of this country.
Gillespie: So two parties is not enough to represent 330 million people.
Fiorina: Exactly, and the point is because they're so homogeneous, when one party wins it attempts to impose an agenda on their country, which is often not the same issues that the country thinks are the most important issues facing the country. It also more extreme positions on issues that it does take positions on.
Gillespie: But in order to win the parties have to appeal to centrist or independents. You note that it's about 40 percent of the country identify as independents, so in an election season, at least at the presidential level, typically a Democrat or a Republican will kind of move to the center to win but then once they're in power they go to the edges.
Fiorina: Yeah, it's getting harder and harder in today's wired world for a party to move to the center because they have you on film and on the air at everything. But I think it's fair to say we have, if you take turnout into account, we now have a one-third, one-third, one-third party system—that the Democrats have a third, Republicans have a third, and a third are in the middle. So you win the election by capturing the lion's share in the middle but then if you impose an agenda that's your base's agenda, a lot of the people in the middle say, I didn't really vote for that and they abandon you in the next election.
Gillespie: I co-authored a book a couple years ago called, The Declaration of Independents, where my colleague and I, Matt Welch, made the bold argument that independents mattered the most. One of the common criticisms that we met was that there really are no true independents and people are just kind of bullshitting when they say "I'm not a Republican" or "I'm not a Democrat" to pollsters. Are there true independents and how do we know they're out there?
Fiorina: Yeah, there definitely are. I mean it's clear that some are closet partisans, there have always been some people who just like to say, "I'm an independent." But this idea that all independents are closet partisans or even the lion's share, that's been greatly exaggerated. If you look at how independents vote, they vary more across time. For example, they switch their votes whenever a third party candidate appears, independents, even independent leaders are much more likely to go for the third party. The true proportion of true independents I think is unknown, but it is enough that it determines the elections out there.
Gillespie: Yeah, because if you're talking about 46 percent versus 48 percent winning the presidency, that means three percent of the vote is gonna make or break somebody.
Fiorina: Exactly.
Gillespie: And how does that play out in— One of the most interesting things, and we'll talk more about the 2016 election in a minute, but so many counties had seemed or districts that voted for Obama twice, then voted for Donald Trump, is that a sign of independents or is that a sign of kind of cloudy thinking on the part of the elector?
Fiorina: Well I think first of all, we'd have to look and see just how big the changes in the counties were. Maybe if they went from 51 to 49, it doesn't represent a huge change, that is one of the things that happened in the popular vote. But I think it reflects the instability that in contrast to a lot of commentators who say, Americans are locked in these two camps. No, I don't think it does. The same kinds of people who voted for Obama in 2012, come back and say, "I want to vote for Trump this time." Those are people who are not really moored to either of the two parties.
Gillespie: Part of what I've found fascinating about Unstable Majorities is your kind of understated venom towards most political activists and especially political journalists, such as myself, for not knowing what the hell we're talking about. In 2004, this happened and again in 2006, where you saw first Republicans, when Bush won reelection and did OK and the Republicans said OK but you saw people talking about locking in the permanent Republican majority a couple years later when that all ended. Suddenly people were talking about, oh well, it's gonna be the Democrats for the rest of our lifetime.
Why are— I guess I know why party activists, that's kind of wish fulfillment or projection so when they win any election they say, "We're gonna win them all." Why are journalists and even a lot of political scientists so short-sighted in the ways in which this stuff flips and flops and back and forth?
Fiorina: Well in defense of my political science colleagues, I don't think that many of us actually said, these are landslide or shattering realigning elections. I think journalists that, say, talk too often to the activists, they talk to the people who won and there's a kind of triumphalism on the part of either of the winning parties, which then filters through the journalist.
Let me just say something about filter bubbles by the way, that this is a big thing in the news that everybody worries about, the average American being in this constant filter bubble. Well in fact, the average American doesn't follow news very much at all, that most the research suggests that it's the elites who are in these filter bubbles. It's the elites who only talk to each other and who have this simply biased—
Gillespie: Totally ignorant or delusional view.
Fiorina: —view of the world. For example, I'll give a talk and I'll put some data up and say, here's the percentage of Republicans who believe in abortion or who believe in gun control and I'll get emails back saying, "I don't believe your data, I don't know any Republicans who believe that." Those are the people in the filter bubble, they don't talk to anybody.
Gillespie: You have some incredible stats and one of them had said in terms of die-hard Democrats, they think 44 percent of Republicans make over $250,000 dollars a year, which is hilarious. And this might even be better, Republicans think 38 percent of Democrats are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or trans.
Fiorina: Right, yes.
Gillespie: Why is that happening now, as opposed to… It seems so out of touch. What is fueling that kind of completely ridiculous view of the other side?
Fiorina: I think, first of all I should just say, those statistics were produced by some of our graduate students who have access to a polling firm here and were mindboggling when we saw those figures. I don't think we can say for sure, but a lot of it surely has got to be TV. That TV and the internet everybody else… The media in general practice what's called "exemplification," they say, we wanna have a Democrat and then they start the 'What's a Democrat?" Well, it's a protestor, it's a minority, they're the people down here at town and country who protest the 65-year-olds with the long gray ponytails. And then, you want a Republican, OK you wanna be somebody suit and tie, you wanna be maybe an Evangelical or something.
Socially, we're much more segregated than we used to be when I was growing up, though we do live in more homogeneous neighborhoods, etc., although again, that's exaggerated. But I think people, they simply don't get out and know the other side. And so you get this picture from the media, and the picture is simply not very accurate, it's exaggerated.
Gillespie: It's not just from the media though, and I'm thinking about recent books like Our Kids by Robert Putnam, the Harvard sociologist, and the Charles Murray book Coming Apart. And these are two guys who disagree with each other although they come to common kind of analyses of what's wrong with America and one is that everybody is living in a bubble. How do you know then that like regular Americans are not in an ideological bubble, the way the elites are saying they are?
Fiorina: Well, this is personal that I come from, as we were talking, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, which is the heart of Trump country. And I think my county voted something like 96… My county's 96 percent white, they voted more than two-thirds for Trump. And I go back and I talk to relatives and cousins and so forth and they aren't the kind of stereotypes you would see about what those kind of people would look like that you see in the media. And so part of it's just personal, that there aren't many people in either academia or certainly the people who appear on CNN who sort of actually have any experience talking to America in the flyover country.
Gillespie: What are the areas where there are large majorities, where people on culture war issues, where Americans actually agree but then the way that it gets filtered through the political process, people are like, now this is absolutely we're at the barricades.
Fiorina: Sure, the social issues are the best example that most Americans can take [Roe v. Wade] as it is out there and say "I can live with that." That they don't want to outlaw abortion, they're a little uncomfortable with some of the third, well more than a little uncomfortable with third trimester stuff, but basically they can say, "We can live within this middle ground." Same thing with gay rights. On the one hand they don't wanna see a baker forced to bake a cake for a wedding, on the other hand they wanna see gays have equal rights. So they basically can sort of be in a comfortable middle ground. Big majorities… Guns are another thing. Most Americans can, even NRA members can sort of support what are called "common sense" gun control. But in each case we have activists groups in each party's base, the pro-choice/pro-life, pro-gun/anti-gun, pro-gay rights/anti-gay rights, which spouts much more extreme positions than populations as a whole.
Gillespie: It's always interesting with abortion because if you go back to the early '70s, it wasn't clear the party split on that but I don't think there are any Republicans in Washington who are pro-choice, nor are there any Democrats who are pro-life, or maybe one or two. How did that become acceptable? So the parties have sorted and you have these incredible charts where it shows that compared to 50 or 60 years ago, there's no variety in the parties. The Republican Party is a conservative party, the Democratic Party is a liberal party. Why did they sort that way? What changed that we wouldn't have catch-all parties?
Fiorina: That's a great question, and we don't have a good answer. I tried to address that in my middle book Disconnect, I published in 2011, I think. And in some cases you can point out demographic changes really explain it. For example, if you have great internal migration of African Americans from the South to the North, that pushes the northern Democrats in a more liberal direction on social welfare and civil rights. That in turn alienates more of the South and the Republicans sort of look at that and see an opportunity. You can tell a demographic story in something like that.
But on the other hand, if you were trying to guess, before abortion is on the agenda, OK, abortions gonna be a big item, which party's gonna be pro-life? Most people would say the Democrats, they're the Catholic party, they're the evangelical Baptist party, and yet it doesn't work out that way. And by the same token, environmentalism, the Republicans have a long tradition of being the conservation party with Teddy Roosevelt, things like the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club are Republican sort of upper-middle-class Republican organizations. Why did they sort out the other way? And the Democrats being more blue-collar workers whose industries pollute. So I think we really don't have a good handle on how… It has to do with the activist groups, the social groups,but I don't think we have a good handle at all on just how the sorting occurred.
Gillespie: And then the large point is that once the parties have sorted, there's really no way… I mean if you wanna vote, if you wanna be a voting citizen, you really don't have somebody who is… And if you're a normal American, which means you're somewhere in that middle, you don't really have a party that represents you.
Fiorina: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes, there's a good short in the book on that.
Gillespie: So why do people pick… But people then end up mostly voting… In the presidential election what was it, maybe 3 or 4 percent didn't vote for either Republican or Democrat. How do we choose to say, I'm a Republican or I'm a Democrat?
Fiorina: There's a long political science literature on this, both in Europe and here that the wasted vote thesis that you know there's really only two choices, and so you don't want to throw your vote away. And that's why the proportion voting who say they're gonna vote for a third party always diminishes as you get near the end. It's a funny situation where you've got to vote for a party that's wrong for you on one or more issues. I always say, we live in an area here where thousands, tens of thousands of young professionals who are struggling to get by and continually vote for people who are gonna raise their taxes because the alternative is to vote for a party that says we're gonna bash gays, restrict abortions, and log the Redwoods. And so in that situation they're gonna vote for a party that really doesn't represent their economic interests.
Gillespie: There is that idea that demography is destiny in politics and that younger Americans, Millennials or if you want to say people under 40 or whatever, are obviously gonna vote Democratic from here to eternity because of gay rights, because of immigration, because of drug legalization, things like that. Is there a reason to believe, and certainly at least going back to certainly to Obama, I mean the Democrats have totally cleaned the clock of the Republicans when it comes to younger voters, are the Republicans just out of touch with young people and will never win them back? Or what happens with it?
Fiorina: Yes, they're out of touch with young people. As far as never winning them back, never say never.
Gillespie: Yeah.
Fiorina: That in politics, was it Harold Macmillan who said, "A week in politics is an eternity," and at one point you've said, well Catholics gonna vote Democratic forever and then this Catholic social position changed, they started voting Republican much more and more. I think the same thing is true of all the demographic things at some point. I've often said, parties can be stupid but they don't stay stupid forever and at some point there'll be new leadership, cadres coming up with the Republican party who will say we gotta take stock of what this country looks like now. It doesn't look like,it looked like in the late '70s or '80s when all the social issues and the social groups…
Gillespie: And those are when the current identities of the Democratic and Republican parties were founded, and those coalitions don't really exist anymore.
Fiorina: That's right.
Gillespie: And so we're left with this hangover of these husks of old coalitions that don't really speak to anything here.
Fiorina: That's right and it's truly interestingly around the world. Some other countries are ahead of us for example, the whole basically French party system just collapsed. The Social Democrats disappeared…
Gillespie: And a dog without a real party became president.
Fiorina: And see the problem in the United States is we don't have… Our institutions keep a Macron from riding to the rescue like what happened in France. But this is happening around the world, that these calcified old party systems that just don't fit today's issues and today's concerns are coming apart.
Gillespie: What can we learn from previous periods? In the book you talk about the period of no decision in the late 19th century where party control went back and forth and back and forth. One time a Democrat would win the Presidency, a Republican Congress vice versa. What ended that to lock in Republican dominance and then Democratic dominance et cetera, for any period of time.
Fiorina: What ended it was 1896 when a Republican won everything and they governed in a way the population found acceptable and they kept on winning. They won for 14 consecutive years, and stayed the majority party until the Depression. At that point, the Democrats came in and governed in a way the population found acceptable. What we're seeing today is nobody governs in a way that for two years the population finds acceptable, and they'll whack you in the next election.
Gillespie: That's on the table for later this year in the midterm elections.
Fiorina: Exactly.
Gillespie: So the parties have sorted and then at one point you talk about Donald Trump may be a de-sorter. What does that mean and is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Fiorina: Well, I think it's a good thing. Anything that fractures the current party system is a good thing, and I've been saying this and hoping for it for more than a decade but it just hasn't happened. But you remember when Donald Trump comes in and starts emphasizing issues like being anti-trade etc, or if different foreign policy, more 'America first' foreign policy, he's attacked by the conservative leaders who say he's not a true conservative. That is how they define the Republican Party as being this party of true conservatives and I think what they found out, to much of their dismay in many cases, was that a whole lot of Republican voters are not true conservatives. That they are not sorted in the same way that the elites are. And so they found his trade policies acceptable in some cases. They found his more isolationist foreign policies acceptable. And I think the same thing is true in the Democratic Party but you need to sort of have a candidate who sort of is off the main diagonals of the party to show that.
Gillespie: So if Trump is like that with the Republican Party and I can see your point, and he's moderated to a certain degree, he's moderated his stance on immigration and what not, he seems a little less… He's no longer talking about kicking out 11 million people and all of that kind of stuff, although he hasn't walked it all back. On the Democratic side, the insurgent candidate who really gave Hillary Clinton fits was Bernie Sanders, who seemed to be an exaggerated form of what Sean Hannity thinks all Democrats are. Is there somebody who would be a de-sorter for the Democrats that's on the horizon?
Fiorina: I guess off the top of my head I don't see it but on the other hand, if you'd asked me six months before Trump entered the race, is there a Republican, I couldn't have picked one out either.
Gillespie: So maybe it'll be Oprah or something?
Fiorina: Maybe there could be someone who just comes in and sort of takes a different position on some of the identity issues, the social issues and finds there's a real path there, or lane so to speak there.
Gillespie: After the election in 2016, and you have a good deal of fun with this but many observers, mostly journalists, were saying things like, 'American democracy is doomed, Trump's election was an American tragedy, will we be able to stop the obvious rise of fascism.' Why are those sentiments so ridiculous?
Fiorina: OK. Well the first thing was, they overlooked the fact that according to all the poll data we have, Americans thought they had a historically bad choice. People don't realize how poorly Hillary Clinton was regarded by a large part of the American electorate. The Gallup figures and others showed that Trump was the worst candidate, worst-regarded candidate in modern history, Hillary was two. That Trump had the…
Gillespie: And they were the only two in one chart that you have who had disapproval ratings above 50 percent.
Fiorina: They both set records, that Trump completely obliterated…
Gillespie: So this is like that season when Sammy Sosa hit 66 home runs but Mark McGwire hit like 72. This was just like a legendary…
Fiorina: A record-setting season.
Gillespie: And they were probably both… Now that I think about it, Hillary and Trump are both probably using steroids as well.
Fiorina: (laughs) Could be.
And people knew what they were getting in Trump. If you look at the poll data again, they didn't think Trump was qualified, they didn't think Trump had the right temperament, but they voted for him anyway in many cases.
Gillespie: In one part of the book you talk about when there are these moments of instability, it often comes with there are larger factors going on, things like globalization, or transformation of the economy. How is that playing out here and what are those main factors that would give Americans, who were generally I mean we might not be that smart but we're not that stupid either, what are those large events that are giving rise to saying, OK, we'll take a chance on Trump?
Fiorina: I mentioned these in conjunction with the parallels of the late 19th century. When you have large-scale economic and social changes going on, and then it was the Industrial Revolution, today it's this transition to a communications or an informational economy. Then it was population movements from the farms to the cities. In recent years it's been the Frost Belt to the Sun Belt, both are years of mass immigration, more globalization, it's an ongoing process but it surges at various times. And when you have these kind of changes going on, they create dislocations. There are new winners. There are new losers. They strain the old coalitions. Previous allies are now in tension with each other. They create opportunities for new politicians and basically it just creates uncertainty, political uncertainty.
Gillespie: Libertarians, Reason is a libertarian organization, libertarians are sometimes described as socially liberal and fiscally conservative, which also seems to be kind of the way that you and Gallup every survey kind of shows that most people are somewhat moderate, some are centrist and I realize describing libertarians as centrists might set some people's hair on fire. But we want people to live the way they want and we want a government that is vaguely competent but is not doing everything. Is a libertarian sensibility something that describes this centrists American voter, this model American voter? Or what is a term that would do that more fully?
Fiorina: Some of them. In contrast to political elites, which basically they err on a left/right scale, most public opinion analyses find two dimensions. They find this economic and this social dimension. And there are the liberals on both and conservatives on both who are happy with two parties. And then there are two off diagonal groups. The one is libertarians, soft libertarianism that favors sort of economic prudence and minimal government but social liberalism. The other is what they call populists, who are sort of the opposite. They favor the social welfare programs, the safety net and also more conservative on the social issues. So they're in a sense two unaffiliated group, well they're affiliated but loosely, with the two parties.
Gillespie: And I guess at this moment though, either of those groups can really play a big role in elections and it's clear that populists, they won the day in this most recent election.
Fiorina: That's right. But a lot depends on the candidates. It happened that there was a vehicle, Trump, for the populists' movement to come, impulse, we'll call it that. I've always wondered, what if Bill Weld had been the top of the Liberation ticket. I mean I was in Massachusetts when Weld was governor and I have great admiration for him. And so had Weld been on the debate, for example, had Weld been the nominee, you might have seen the expression of the Libertarian impulse coming out simply because otherwise there was nowhere for that to go.
Gillespie: And I guess Weld also, he represents a type of Republican who no longer exists. That Northeastern Republican who would be called a moderate maybe, a country club Republican but that person doesn't exist anymore, that social type.
How much of what's going on in American politics is reflective of global trends because we hear a lot and you write about this in the book, you know that populism is on the march in England and in Europe and the lights are always going out in Europe in this case. Should we be worried, or maybe that's the wrong term. Is European populism and American populism, are they linked or are they independent phenomenon?
Fiorina: They're linked through the common cause, which is the underlying social and economic changes buffeting the societies. I was at a conference in Rome a couple months ago, where scholars from all over Europe there and the commonalities were clear that all over Europe, masses are concerned about immigration and the European elites have tried to keep the lid on this in the same way our elites tried to keep the lid on civil rights for a long time and it's bursting out now because non traditional parties are taking up the mantle of those.
Gillespie: What about the social welfare state? Obviously, Europe has a more robust kind of safety net or social security programs than we do. Are we at the end of the Age of Bismarck, of the idea of a social welfare state that is funded by having lots of younger people who are funneling, relatively a lot of people funneling money to relatively few people and obviously demographically now every country the industrialized world, especially Japan but also in Europe and in North America? We just can't support this and on some level people understand that Social Security is already running an annual deficit, that Medicare is running out of money, etc. And is the anxiety about that coming up either in the form of being anti-immigrant because they're seen as takers as opposed to people supporting the system or we just realize that whatever we're doing here, it's effectively over, it's just a question of when the clock stops?
Fiorina: Well I don't know, which of the two to choose but I can certainly tell you from talking to these other scholars that part of the… You have welfare states that are under pressure just from budgetary reasons, just the age of austerity but clearly a lot of the anti-immigrant sentiment reflects that immigrants are additionally straining the social welfare system. Partially if Muslim women don't work for example, that's a source of resentment in some countries. So that ties into what… These things are all tied together and how it's gonna end up, I'm just not gonna speculate.
Gillespie: In American politics, does foreign policy ever really matter that much?
Fiorina: If there is a shooting war, if people are dying and increasingly if we're acting as advisors and only a few people from flyover country are dying, then it doesn't make it to the national media. But if we're into a serious war—Vietnam for example, in '68, the economy's booming, we're producing war materials. I was working in the steel mills in those days. We were working seven days a week and getting overtime but still Humphrey lost the election, Wallace made hay and a lot of it was just because there was a war, lots of young men from those kinds of areas were dying.
Gillespie: What about terrorism? I realize now I'm throwing a lot of kind of spitballs here but is the age of terrorism… Obviously it exists, we still talk about it a lot but the 9/11 effect, is that fading? Because that was certainly was one of the ways that George Bush won reelection in 2004, but now we're 12, 13 years after that. Is terrorism no longer or that kind of national security question, as relevant as it once was?
Fiorina: I think not but there's set of issues like school shootings, terrorist attacks that have this effect that when it happens there's an immediate surge and then a quick decay. It's amazing what a society can become accustomed to in regard to sort of normal, the occasional shooting, the occasional terrorist attack. But who's to say what would happen with another gigantic attack where 3,000 people died, that might take a while to deteriorate.
Gillespie: A final question, we're seven months out from 2018 the midterms, what is your best guess… we're in an era of unstable majorities right now, the Republicans own the White House, and both houses of Congress, what's gonna happen in November?
Fiorina: Just on the basis, without looking at any data, right after the election I would have said the Democrats' chances of taking over the House are good because they only need 24 seats and in recent memory, midterm elections that well within the realm of possibility. The Senate's a much steeper climb of course, 'cause you're defending so many seats and so many seats are in Trump country. And I still think that's a pretty reasonable prediction, that the Democrats have a good chance in the House, not nearly as good in the Senate but a whole lot depends on things in the meantime, if there are terrorist attacks for example, and the economy. It's interesting that typically the things that determine the midterm losses are the President's performance and economy, which usually run together. The President is regarded highly or not because of the economy. That's an interesting situation where Trump's numbers are pretty bad but the economy is just perking along.
Gillespie: Right.
Fiorina: And so from a political science standpoint, this is a chance to sort of separate these two factors which is sort of nice.
Gillespie: Well, we will leave it there. We've been talking with Morris P. Fiorina of Stanford and the Hoover Institutions, most recent book is Unstable Majorities. Morris, thanks so much for talking.
Fiorina: You're very welcome.
Gillespie: For Reason, I'm Nick Gillespie.
The post Surprise: Voters Aren't More Polarized than Ever, Only Pols and Media Are appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"It's absolutely true that school makes people show up, sit down, shut up and that these are useful skills for people to have in adulthood, " says Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University who blogs at EconLog and is the author of the new book The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money. "So the real question is if all we're trying to do is prepare people for a job, why not prepare them with a job?"
Caplan argues that schools are not only overpriced, but that traditional education fails to prepare students with job skills that reflect the needs of the labor market.
Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Caplan to make the case that the government needs to spend so much on education if it isn't relevant to our success in getting a job and earning higher wages.
Reason is a proud media partner of National School Choice Week, an annual event promoting the ability of parents and students to have greater options in K-12 education. Go here [http://schoolchoiceweek.com] to get more information about events and data about how increasing school choice–charters, vouchers, educational savings accounts, and more—is one of the best ways to improve education for all Americans. For a constantly updated list of stories on education, go to Reason's archive page on "school choice".
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Meredith Bragg and Mark McDaniel.
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This is a rush transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.
Nick Gillespie: I'm Nick Gillespie for Reason and today we are talking with the author of what is almost certainly going to be the most controversial book of the year. Bryan Caplan is an economics professor at George Mason University, and his new book is The Case Against Education. Bryan, thanks for talking with Reason.
Bryan Caplan: Thanks for such an exciting introduction.
Gillespie: Well, let's get right to it. Early on you say flatly, you write flatly, 'This book argues that our education system is a big waste of time and money.' And now you're not simply saying that our schools are overpriced and uneven in quality, you are actually making the case that much of our traditional education system, especially higher ed, is literally a waste of time, right?
Caplan: Absolutely.
Gillespie: What do you mean by that?
Caplan: What I mean is that people are going there to get a higher income, but they're actually not getting much in the way of job skills, which raises a big puzzle for an economist. How can they be getting a higher income if they're not getting much in the way of job skills? And my answer comes down to something called the signaling model of education that says that a lot of the reason why education pays isn't that you learn useful skills, but that you distinguish yourself. That you're getting stamped or labeled. You're getting a sticker on your forehead, Grade A worker.
Gillespie: So it's kind of like you come out as a piece of steak. You're USDA prime, but you haven't been cooked yet. Well, you haven't …
Caplan: Precisely. And the the key thing about this is, selfishly speaking, it doesn't really matter why you're getting more money. But from a social point of view, from the point of view of is this a good use of taxpayer dollars, it matters tremendously because everybody just gets more years in education and all you're doing is showing off. Then you're just raising the bar for how much school you need in order to get a job in the first place.
Gillespie: So let's talk about the magnitude of wasted time and money. I guess for most people, if you go from kindergarten through a B.A. you're talking about 17 years roughly. So that's a lot of time, but how much money do we spend as a society on education?
Caplan: Yeah, so government funding is about a trillion dollars a year when you add up all levels.
Gillespie: Our economy is about 20 trillion dollars, so that's a large chunk of change.
Caplan: Yeah, so you're talking about something like 5 percent of all GDP. And then of course private spending tops it up a bit further, so it's something over a trillion.
Gillespie: And by the way, the one thing that's interesting about this is you don't really make a distinction between private and public education, because this isn't a book about how the public school system is failing kids. It's just how education is useless.
Caplan: I mean, I know libertarians want to hear a different story, but I'm telling the story that I think is true rather than the story that I would even find ideologically most congenial. For me, the main thing is I've gone to public school. I've gone to private school. I don't really see very much difference. And in both cases it seems to me that most of what's going on is showing off in order to look better for the labor market. Which, again, individually makes perfect sense, but socially speaking, everyone can't be above average.
Gillespie: So this is kind of like a private vice is actually becomes a public vice because … Or rather a private virtue becomes a public vice because …
Caplan: Yeah. I mean, I think of education as being a lot like football stadiums, where like the main libertarian complaint about football stadiums isn't that we're not making the right kind of football stadiums. It's that government is pouring a ton of money on something, and really what we need is to have fewer worse football stadiums.
Gillespie: But more money left to for people to spend in a meaningful way.
Caplan: Yeah. But possibly not on football stadiums. Possibly on totally different things.
Gillespie: Before we go into the signaling model per se, talk a little bit about the human capital model of education because these are the two big competing explanations. What is the human capital education model?
Caplan: Yeah, the human capital model is a fancy phrase for what your teachers and politicians and your parents have been telling you, which is you go to school to get smart and to learn all kinds of useful stuff which you're then going to apply in the real world.
Gillespie: You're investing in yourself.
Caplan: Yeah, you're investing in yourself. So you're transforming unskilled laborer into a skilled, talented adult. It's most associated with Gary Becker. You know, a famous Nobel prize-winning economist. But really he was just putting an academic veneer on something that is widely propagandized in favor of the idea of school as a skills factory.
Gillespie: It's not simply … I mean, very few people, and I mean, you point this out continuously in the book and I think accurately, nobody if you go to take a shop class, you're not going to go and learn how to cut ninja stars out of sheets of metal and that's the job you're going to have in a factory. But the idea is that you learn skills. That you learn how to show up on time. You learn how to listen and follow instructions. You learn how to self-learn. And you're saying that this is actually not a very … Like how do you know that that's not an accurate model?
Caplan: Right. That's one of the best arguments in favor of the education we have. It's one by the way that people usually have to be forced into after a series of intellectual retreats. But, you know, here's the main thing that I say about that. It's absolutely true that school makes people show up, sit down, shut up and that these are useful skills for people to have in adulthood. So the real question is if all we're trying to do is prepare people for a job, why not prepare them with a job instead of with school where the overlap … There is a partial overlap in skills, but there of course is a lot of stuff that you're taught in school that is dysfunctional in the real world, like it's very important for everything to be fair. Jobs aren't fair, but school, everything has to be fair.
Gillespie: Talk about the sheepskin effect, because for me, this is the thing that totally whatever affection I had for the human capital model of education, this really kind of kicked that to the curb.
Caplan: So diplomas used to be written on the skins of sheep and the sheepskin effect refers to the fact that a lot of the payoff from education comes from crossing the finish line, from graduation, a disproportionate amount. So like in the book, I just average over a whole lot of studies. So as for college, finishing senior year pays something like seven times as much as a regular year. Seven times as much. Now either we save almost all the useful job skills for graduation year, which sounds really implausible. You know, your senior year is goof-off year, not finally-learn-some-job-skills year. Or there's something going on in the rewards for education that's not about skills that you're learning. And I say, like the main thing that we're getting is it's a signal of conformity. In our society, you are expected to graduate. Everyone tells you to graduate. If you fail to do so despite all of this social pressure, you're saying something very bad about yourself and the labor market responds negatively to you.
Gillespie: Although one of the things that I think is really interesting about the book is that you do steer clear of extremes because there are … Immediately you can hear people saying, "Well, what about Steve Jobs? What about Bill Gates?"
Caplan: Of course.
Gillespie: 'What about Michael Dell?' There's the list of … Or Andrew Carnegie for that matter. So I mean, you're not saying that all of these things are infinite extremely perfectly, right?
Caplan: Yeah, no, of course. So I have two chapters that are the most quantitative part where I sit around trying to crunch the numbers and say what fraction of the payoff for education comes from human capital, what fraction comes from signaling. Of course, you learn reading, and writing, and math in school to some degree. And of course those are useful job skills. But what fraction of the time that you're in school is really learning anything you're ever going to use again? What fraction of the payoff comes from what you've learned rather than what you've demonstrated you can do?
Gillespie: What do you do with the arguments that, well, school maybe or education and particularly K-12 education is not for job skills, but it's for citizenship. And this is … You know, it's … The progressive era talked a lot about that, like we need to make good citizens, especially out of increased numbers of immigrants who had no understanding of American history. Where does that fall in the human capital model?
Caplan: Right. So I mean that would actually be totally outside of it. Again, like human capital versus signaling are trying to figure out why do employers pay you more for it. Now this other stuff, I have a full chapter on it as well, and it just begins with saying, look, the argument in principle is sound, but we have to look empirically to see whether it's really true. You know, I have a big section where I just go over how much civics do American adults even know? And the answer is next to nothing. Next to nothing.
Gillespie: Yeah, I mean, you note that if people who were born here or were citizens had to pass the citizenship test of immigrants I think was something like 70 percent would fail.
Caplan: I'm glad you remember that. I don't. So what we can see is that like even the most basic stuff, like how many senators does each state have, maybe half of American adults know this. And this is not after a one-week course in civics. So, you know, like you say, well, American high school students on average will do three years of civics and history. So three years and yet what do we have to show for it? Next to nothing.
Gillespie: Well, we have football stadiums.
Caplan: Yes, we have football stadiums.
Gillespie: So talk about the signaling model. How does the signaling model work? You say partly it shows that you're willing to conform to certain basic norms that are going to make you appealing to employers, but there's more to it than that, right?
Caplan: Yeah. So I mean, there's a lot of different desirable traits that you are signaling with educational accomplishment. So there's the obvious ones. You're signaling that you're smart. Smart people do better in school. If you've done well in school, natural inference is the person's probably smart. Not necessarily, but generally. You're signaling work ethic because even the smartest person in the world can't do well in school if they don't show up and do a bit of work. And then finally, the most subtle one that I talk about a lot is conformity, signaling you're willing to submit to social norms. And the conformity one is where we really get things like the sheepskin effect. Because if we were just signaling intelligence and work ethic, there still isn't really a good story, well, why does the last year pay so much? Once you accept that a lot of it is about, yes, master, I will conform to what our society demands of me, that's where graduation is so important. That's why in a country where college lasts four years, it's the fourth year that's crucial. Just like in a country where suits are the standard thing you wear to an interview, you better wear a suit or else you look like a weirdo and people don't want to hire you.
Gillespie: Libertarianism is about individualism, but then is there a sliding scale of when you get too conformist, because then you're also not a good worker, right, in many ways? Like you're an economics professor. If you were simply doing what everybody else was doing, that would be a problem.
Caplan: A line that I quote in the book roughly is what employers want is intelligent conformism. They want people who apply their full intellectual power to the task that is given to them. Now sometimes there are creative occupations where they're told be creative on this task. Well, even there, almost no employer wants you to be so creative that you say, 'Hey, maybe this project isn't even worth doing, maybe I should be the boss.' So there's always that. And then again of course most jobs are not really very creative and there's a tendency in the information age to focus on the small share of jobs where we do want people shooting basketball while they shoot the breeze. But I mean, most jobs are not like that. Vast majority of jobs are not like that. It's about there's a customer. He wants a definite product, give him that product or else I don't want you around.
Gillespie: Talk about one of the ways that this system gets enforced is through social desirability bias.
Caplan: Ah, yes.
Gillespie: What is that and how does that inform the larger education network?
Caplan: Right. Social desirability bias is the concept in psychology that is barely known by either economists or libertarians and yet should be the single most cited concept in psychology, social desirability bias. You know, a simple version is people like to say what sounds good. They like to say things that will make people think that they are a kind and … A kind, respectful, and respectable person, right? So you can see this in things like what is the socially desirable answer to, 'Am I fat?' Of course the socially desirable answer is, 'I'm not fat.' Now of course some people aren't fat and then you just tell them the truth, but on the other hand, we know that if someone is in fact fat, our strong temptation is to say something that sounds good but isn't true. This is something where of course we see it in daily life, but also has clear political roles. You know, just think about any time a politician says, 'And we need to put more resources into education, health care, and the environment.' Now these are all things that sound good. And if you could imagine a politician saying, 'We have now done enough for education, and health care, and the environment. We know they're important, but enough is enough.' That's nothing that a politician would ever want to stick their neck out and say because it sounds bad. It sounds like you're not a caring person, you're not a respectable person. What I say is a lot of the support for education is social desirability bias in a sense that if we … The only thing that a good person would say is more and better, never less and worse.
Gillespie: There are obviously entrenched interests in a kind of education industry as well as it helps employers, right? Because employers, even if we're not learning the skills, they're going to train us on the job for whatever we need to do, but they benefit in a way, right, from the signaling process because it makes it … You at one point you say that employers can't look at every individual applicant closely, so they use these as rough sorts.
Caplan: Yeah, I mean, employers benefit from there being some signal. But I don't think employers benefit from the college degree being the signal of quality rather than the high school degree. So something where like in 1950 like about something like 25 percent of American adults would have finished high school at that point, and then an employer could say, "Well, they're a high school graduate. Great. Perfect. They're managerial material." Now it's a college degree. As to why employers benefit from pulling four years worth of labor off the job market, I don't think that they do actually.
Gillespie: Can we talk about that? What is the historical, the kind of material basis for this? You know, again, schools became at least up through sixth grade or eighth grade for most kids, sort of became mandatory in the early 19th century. By the end of the century it was everywhere. Is part of this, is part of the growth of education as being so important and central to our identity, is it simply we need to warehouse kids now that we don't need them to be chimney sweeps or to do like things, you know, kids have little hands. They can work on machines with little hands, things like that, or hawk newspapers. We don't need them to do that labor anymore. Are we just warehousing kids? Like what's the sociology or the genealogy of why we have so much education?
Caplan: Going 100 years back, there is this popular story that employers wanted kids trained to be cogs in the corporate machine. And I would say like if you really wanted to train cogs in your corporate machine, you would not design anything like the public school system we have. It would be like military school. You would whip kids into shape, get them to say, 'Yes, sir.' Give them a lot of propaganda about how great their corporate pay masters are. That's not the way that education looked 100 years ago, and it's certainly not the way that it looks today. This is not a system that really seems to be designed to prepare people to be useful employees. You'd never have the everyone's a beautiful unique snowflake kind of propaganda, the touchy-feeliness. That's not what employers want. Employers want someone that will follow orders, do what they're told, and accept criticism, which is of course crucial for learning. So I don't think that it really makes much sense to think of the current system as something that has been molded for the interest of corporate America. I mean, I think, you know, so if corporate America of course if they can tweak it a little bit in their favored direction they will, but it's …
Gillespie: But what else would we do with kids?
Caplan: Yeah, so there's kids and kids, right? Young kids, of course, they need to be warehoused. So give them day care. Well, even there, as to why kids can't go to school and then learn reading, writing, and math for a few hours and then get to play for the rest of the day within a supervised facility, I've got no clue about why you couldn't just do that rather than boring them to death and making them study stuff they don't care about. But even for older kids, like 13-year-olds, 14-year-olds, 15-year-olds, as to why they can't actually be out in the real world as apprentices. There are countries that do this. Germany and Switzerland do this. No reason why American kids could not do this as well, right? And say like they can't do anything. Sure they can do stuff. Say, well, we don't need them. Well, the economy's not based upon what we need. It's based upon what we got, right? What do we need? We need like a few bowls of rice a day. But what we've got, however, is enough to go and produce vastly more and like I don't see any reason why teenagers could not be part of the labor market at a much earlier age than they are right now, right? And, you know, of course if we're always worried that any kid who's working is being distracted from his much more important studies, this isn't going to fly. But if we realize these studies are not really that socially valuable anyway and it would be better to get kids in the labor force—especially, by the way, kids that are not very academically inclined anyway where they get shoved and prodded to go and succeed and go to college, which is almost certainly never going to happen for them. And by the time that they drop out, they're so bitter about the whole system that they are not suited for really any job. I've got a chapter in the book called One is Greater Than Zero. It's like it'd be better just to train people to do one job rather than zero, which is what a lot of kids leave high school or drop out of high school, are able to do.
Gillespie: So what is to be done? And you write in the concluding chapter of the book, 'Slash government subsidies. This won't make classes relevant, but will lead students to spend fewer years sitting in classrooms. Since they're not learning much of use, the overarching effect will not be de-skilling, but credential deflation.' Talk about that.
Caplan: Yeah, so credential inflation is what we've seen over the last century. The amount of education that you need to get one and the same job has increased dramatically. So basically since World War II it'd be about a four-year increase in the amount of education you need to get a job. This is why we see college graduates doing things like waiting tables, bartending, where we're driving taxis. These are not just ultra rare examples that make it onto the news. These are common jobs for college graduates to have these days, and it does seem like even in these jobs, a college degree does pay. It helps you get promoted and get a position in the better restaurants or the better bars. But the reason is there's so many people with these degrees that employers can afford to be picky and say, 'Well, fine. I want college graduates tending my fancy bar.' You know, like I say this is the function of the proliferation of credentials. And if education were more expensive and the subsidies were lower, fewer people would go.
Gillespie: Now when you're talking about subsidies here, I mean, you have 90 percent plus of K-12 spending is spent on public schools. There's so much federal money and state money going into colleges, as well even private colleges. You're saying cut that?
Caplan: Absolutely. So cut government spending. Cut the subsidies. This is the one of the most egregious cases of industrial policy that we see all over the world, and it's one that's almost totally uncontroversial even though if you go into a classroom and say, "Well, wait, why are we going and teaching these kids this stuff? They're going to forget it anyway, and it's not really relevant to what they're going to do in real life, so why?"
Gillespie: And to save you from a charge of philistinism, you're not saying in the book, 'Well, don't read novels, don't study art, don't study music.' You're simply saying that as part of the curriculum, most of what we learn other than basic mathematics and literacy, including English skills, is kind of useless.
Caplan: Yeah, so useless in the labor market. Now, so you said I'm a professor and I am a high culture kind of person and German upright, Shakespeare. This is the stuff that I like. But I still recognize that there's something twisted about ramming it down a kid's throat. A key part of appreciating this kind of stuff is coming to it in your own good time, actually being curious and ready. So like if you go and actually inspire a sincere affection for Shakespeare or opera, that's great. I see this happening almost never in school. The kids are there. They go and pay lip service to it, and then as soon as they're done, they walk away and say, 'Well, I never want to have to hear that garbage again. I hated that stuff.' This is where I say that while I'm not very optimistic about the potential of online education to really compete with brick and mortar schools, it's already doing a tremendous job in terms of quenching the human thirst for enlightenment. Right, and you need a course, and what's great about the Internet is that you don't have to concentrate all your fire power on kids that are between 15 and 22. You can wait around for adults to say, "I'm 30. Now I'm curious about Shakespeare. It seemed really boring when I was young, but now maybe I would like to go and learn something about it." So, you know, to say that while I'm all on board with the noble goals of enlightening the human spirit, a key part of this is you've got to have volunteers that want to learn. Just trying to ram this down the throat of conscripts, which is what education normally does, is an insult to everything that enlightenment stands for.
Gillespie: You know what? I'm hearing Pink Floyd's The Wall playing in the background.
Caplan: Yes, yes.
Gillespie: And this is the soundtrack of the book. Bryan Caplan's latest book The Case Against Education. He's a George Mason economics professor. Also you wrote a few years ago The Myth of the Rational Voter. I think this book is going to be just as controversial and hopefully as widely read. Bryan, thanks for talking to Reason.
Caplan: Alright, thanks so much. Always great talking to you, Nick.
Gillespie: For Reason, I'm Nick Gillespie.
The post The Case Against Education: Economist Bryan Caplan Says Government Spending of $1 Trillion a Year on Schooling Is a Waste appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Are you sick of being warned about anything and everything when it comes to the holiday season?
Me too. That's why I'm ready to throw an icicle at a group called World Against Toys Causing Harm (WATCH). Every year since 1973, they've published a paranoid list of the "10 Worst Toys" at Christmastime.
These warnings may have been necessary back in 1973 when companies were still selling toy ovens that could smelt ore and chemistry sets that could actually blow things up.
In fact, the toy world was littered with bad ideas—from the Cabbage Patch Kid dolls with mechanical jaws that chewed everything—including chunks of hair from kids' heads—to lawn darts—sharp metal things you'd toss at your friends' toes that caused over six thousand injuries.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission eventually banned those items—and it's hard to disagree with them—but today's toys are so risk averse, so super safe, that there's almost nothing left to warn about. But still the warnings fall like cookie crumbs onto Santa's beard.
It is this zero tolerance for "risk" that WATCH and other consumer groups exploit every Christmas. Among its top 10 dangers this year are the popular fidget spinners.
Also on this year's list is the Wonder Woman Battle Action Sword, which, the WATCH team says, encourages young children "to bear arms"—as if you get a Wonder Woman toy and immediately deploy to Yemen. They also say that the "rigid plastic sword blade has the potential to cause facial or other impact injuries." Yeah…and so does a fork. In fact, so does a candy cane, if you suck it to a sharp point.
Even an innocent looking Disney-themed plush toy did not escape WATCH's nannying notice. The group warns that the toy could be dangerous due to "fabric hats and bows that can detach, posing a choking hazard."
That's a lot of coulds, especially considering the Consumer Product Safety Commission notes on its website that it has had ZERO reports of injuries.
The Toy Association, which is an industry trade group, says WATCH's dangerous toys list is "full of false claims that needlessly frighten parents and caregivers."
It's obvious that toys that explode and toys that are just plain dumb—a boomerang made out of razor blades—are bad. But if they only worked a little harder, I'll bet WATCH could stop kids from playing with toys. Any toys. Ever.
You want a really great gift for the kids? How about they wake up Christmas morning, unwrap the giant package under the tree to find their very own product liability lawyer? Wind him up and watch him sue all the other toys. Hours of fun!
And when the kids get bored, they lock him in the toy chest, and go play with a great toy. A stick.
Written by Lenore Skenazy. Produced by Alexis Garcia and Paul Detrick. Camera by Jim Epstein, Alex Manning, and Paul Detrick.
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]]>In July of 2017, Los Angeles imposed a "road diet" in the quiet beach community of Playa del Rey, replacing car lanes with bike lanes and parking spaces. The roads were suddenly jammed with traffic. The community was livid.
"Most of Playa Del Rey didn't know this was happening," says John Russo, a local resident and co-founder of Keep L.A. Moving, a community group formed to fight back against the city's unilateral decision to reconfigure the streets. "It really created havoc for us because we have no other roads to take."
Road diets are part of a strategy known as Vision Zero, in which Los Angeles aims to eliminate all traffic-related fatalities by 2025. It's an idea borrowed from Sweden, which in the '90s started experimenting with reconfiguring the roads to encourage more commuters to bike or take mass transit to work.
"In order to achieve zero deaths, public officials have been doing some odd things," says Baruch Feigenbaum, the assistant director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation, the 501(c)(3) that publishes this website. Road diets aren't "based on science" or any "empirical findings."
"After the road diets were put in, we actually saw traffic accidents go through the roof," says Russo. "We had an average of 11.6 accidents per year on these roads in Playa Del Rey. We've had 52 accidents in the last four months."
According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2013 American Community Survey, about one percent of Los Angeles' commuters bike to work. Sixty-seven percent drive.
"You're taking something from a whole bunch of people just to benefit a few people," says Feigenbaum. "That's not a good cost-benefit analysis."
City planners also want to incentivize residents to move closer to their jobs. Or, if they do have to commute, to ride the city's public transit system. Los Angeles has the third largest transit network in the country, yet only 10 percent of commuters use it to get to work.
"In Los Angeles, a majority of the folks simply cannot get from their homes to their jobs in a short period of time using transit," Feigenbaum explains. "Trying to force people into one type of behavior doesn't tend to work and it's why, even in Los Angeles, the vast majority of people are still commuting by automobile."
In October, the Los Angeles City Council reversed itself in Playa del Rey after community members filed two lawsuits against the city and launched a recall election of local Councilman Mike Bonin (D), who had backed the plan.
But the city is still planning to implement over 40 road diet projects in other areas of Los Angeles, and major cities like Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, and Atlanta are pursuing similar policies.
"In the 1960s we were building interstate highways, freeways through downtown areas, which was definitely the wrong approach," says Feigenbaum. "Now we don't want to build any roads at all. We just want to build bike paths. We want to narrow lanes. We're saying that transit is going to solve everybody's needs. Neither extreme is what we need."
"It's not about cyclists versus drivers," says Russo. "These are all of our roads and they should be safe for all users. And the road diet didn't make our roads safer and they're not making it better for the cyclists."
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]]>In July of 2017, Los Angeles imposed a "road diet" in the quiet beach community of Playa del Rey, replacing car lanes with bike lanes and parking spaces. The roads were suddenly jammed with traffic. The community was livid.
"Most of Playa Del Rey didn't know this was happening," says John Russo, a local resident and co-founder of Keep L.A. Moving, a community group formed to fight back against the city's unilateral decision to reconfigure the streets. "It really created havoc for us because we have no other roads to take."
Road diets are part of a strategy known as Vision Zero, in which Los Angeles aims to eliminate all traffic-related fatalities by 2025. It's an idea borrowed from Sweden, which in the '90s started experimenting with reconfiguring the roads to encourage more commuters to bike or take mass transit to work.
"In order to achieve zero deaths, public officials have been doing some odd things," says Baruch Feigenbaum, the assistant director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation, the 501(c)(3) that publishes this website. Road diets aren't "based on science" or any "empirical findings."
"After the road diets were put in, we actually saw traffic accidents go through the roof," says Russo. "We had an average of 11.6 accidents per year on these roads in Playa Del Rey. We've had 52 accidents in the last four months."
According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2013 American Community Survey, about one percent of Los Angeles' commuters bike to work. Sixty-seven percent drive.
"You're taking something from a whole bunch of people just to benefit a few people," says Feigenbaum. "That's not a good cost-benefit analysis."
City planners also want to incentivize residents to move closer to their jobs. Or, if they do have to commute, to ride the city's public transit system. Los Angeles has the third largest transit network in the country, yet only 10 percent of commuters use it to get to work.
"In Los Angeles, a majority of the folks simply cannot get from their homes to their jobs in a short period of time using transit," Feigenbaum explains. "Trying to force people into one type of behavior doesn't tend to work and it's why, even in Los Angeles, the vast majority of people are still commuting by automobile."
In October, the Los Angeles City Council reversed itself in Playa del Rey after community members filed two lawsuits against the city and launched a recall election of local Councilman Mike Bonin (D), who had backed the plan.
But the city is still planning to implement over 40 road diet projects in other areas of Los Angeles, and major cities like Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, and Atlanta are pursuing similar policies.
"In the 1960s we were building interstate highways, freeways through downtown areas, which was definitely the wrong approach," says Feigenbaum. "Now we don't want to build any roads at all. We just want to build bike paths. We want to narrow lanes. We're saying that transit is going to solve everybody's needs. Neither extreme is what we need."
"It's not about cyclists versus drivers," says Russo. "These are all of our roads and they should be safe for all users. And the road diet didn't make our roads safer and they're not making it better for the cyclists."
Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Garcia, Alex Manning, Todd Krainin, and Paul Detrick.
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]]>"A biohacker for me is somebody who is doing something clever or interesting in biology," says Josiah Zayner, a molecular biophysicist who runs The ODIN, a company that sells do-it-yourself genetic engineering kits. "They're usually these people that have been fucked by the system who are trying to unfuck themselves."
Zayner is one of the leading figures in the biohacking movement and is the main organizer of the BioHack the Planet Conference, a yearly gathering of citizen scientists. This year, over 100 members of the biohacking community met in Oakland, California to discuss a wide array of issues from at-home genetic engineering to questions on bioethics.
Biohackers have often been compared to computer hackers of the 1980s, but instead of breaking into and manipulating information technology systems, they're focused on hacking living organisms with the hopes of curing illnesses and in some cases obtaining superhuman powers.
Their shared mission is to put this technology into the hands of as many people as possible.
"People should be able to use all the technologies that science develops," says Zayner. "It shouldn't just be patented and given to companies or exclusively given to certain people."
These do-it-yourself biologists say the democratization of science has given them the freedom to do work on projects that are often ignored by larger institutions. They're using gene editing technologies like CRISPR to create personalized treatments for those suffering from rare diseases or cancer, reverse engineering pharmaceuticals like Epi-Pens so people can make their own medicine at home, and even creating glow in the dark beer.
"I think this is the most exciting time thus far in the history of the world to be alive with respect to what we can and will do with life forms," says Hank Greely, the director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University.
But breakthroughs in the world of biohacking are drawing more scrutiny from federal regulators. Earlier this year, the Food and Drug Administration began placing restrictions on non-human genetic modifications and declared that genetically edited animals must be classified as drugs. This gives the agency broad authority over a number of do-it-yourself genetics tests and requires experiments involving animals to go through the same vetting process as a new drug.
"I guess they couldn't call them cosmetics and they couldn't call them foods, so they're like dogs are drugs," states David Ishee, a Mississippi canine breeder who is working on editing out genetic diseases in dogs. "Everybody's worried about what someone could do with this technology and nobody seems to care about the damage that not doing it will cause because these animals are dying."
Increasing regulation could undermine biohacking breakthroughs for humans as well.
"I'm a huge fan of deregulation because I believe in the inherent goodness of capitalism," says Zayner. "Stuff doesn't progress unless people do useful things with it."
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]]>"A biohacker for me is somebody who is doing something clever or interesting in biology," says Josiah Zayner, a molecular biophysicist who runs The ODIN, a company that sells do-it-yourself genetic engineering kits. "They're usually these people that have been fucked by the system who are trying to unfuck themselves."
Zayner is one of the leading figures in the biohacking movement and is the main organizer of the BioHack the Planet Conference, a yearly gathering of citizen scientists. This year, over 100 members of the biohacking community met in Oakland, California to discuss a wide array of issues from at-home genetic engineering to questions on bioethics.
Biohackers have often been compared to computer hackers of the 1980s, but instead of breaking into and manipulating information technology systems, they're focused on hacking living organisms with the hopes of curing illnesses and in some cases obtaining superhuman powers.
Their shared mission is to put this technology into the hands of as many people as possible.
"People should be able to use all the technologies that science develops," says Zayner. "It shouldn't just be patented and given to companies or exclusively given to certain people."
These do-it-yourself biologists say the democratization of science has given them the freedom to do work on projects that are often ignored by larger institutions. They're using gene editing technologies like CRISPR to create personalized treatments for those suffering from rare diseases or cancer, reverse engineering pharmaceuticals like Epi-Pens so people can make their own medicine at home, and even creating glow in the dark beer.
"I think this is the most exciting time thus far in the history of the world to be alive with respect to what we can and will do with life forms," says Hank Greely, the director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University.
But breakthroughs in the world of biohacking are drawing more scrutiny from federal regulators. Earlier this year, the Food and Drug Administration began placing restrictions on non-human genetic modifications and declared that genetically edited animals must be classified as drugs. This gives the agency broad authority over a number of do-it-yourself genetics tests and requires experiments involving animals to go through the same vetting process as a new drug.
"I guess they couldn't call them cosmetics and they couldn't call them foods, so they're like dogs are drugs," states David Ishee, a Mississippi canine breeder who is working on editing out genetic diseases in dogs. "Everybody's worried about what someone could do with this technology and nobody seems to care about the damage that not doing it will cause because these animals are dying."
Increasing regulation could undermine biohacking breakthroughs for humans as well.
"I'm a huge fan of deregulation because I believe in the inherent goodness of capitalism," says Zayner. "Stuff doesn't progress unless people do useful things with it."
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]]>EPA Chief Scott Pruitt has set out to transform the agency he leads to a greater extent than any of Trump's other cabinet appointees, pledging to end what he dubbed the agency's "anti-energy agenda" by loosening requirements on carbon emissions and eliminating land use restrictions.
In his first speech to EPA employees, Pruitt laid out his goal of returning the agency to its core focus of protecting the environment while following what he called "the letter of the law."
"I believe that we as an agency, and we as a nation, can be both pro-energy and jobs and pro-environment," Pruitt told his staff.
Environmentalists vehemently opposed Pruitt's appointment, depicting him as a climate change denier determined to undermine the EPA's core mission of protecting the environment.
One of Pruitt's first targets is a controversial rule on water pollution put in place by the Obama administration that he deemed a "power grab" by environmental regulators.
To better understand why property rights advocates applauded the move, consider the case of fourth-generation farmer John Duarte, who has fought a protracted and costly legal battle with federal regulators over how to till his 450-acre farm in Tehama County, California.
In 2012, the Army Corps of Engineers, working in conjunction with the EPA, accused Duarte of damaging wetland features on his property. He was hit with $30 million in fines and restoration fees.
Duarte's troubles stemmed from a 2015 provision in the Clean Water Act known as the Waters of the United States rule that was meant to better protect large bodies of water by regulating use of the streams, ponds, and ditches that flow into them. The EPA has used this provision to micromanage private land use.
The agency accused Duarte of mismanaging the wetland areas located on his property, claiming that his four-inch plow furrows created small mountain ranges. They contend Duarte should have obtained a permit before tilling his own land.
"The average time to obtain a Clean Water Act permit is close to two years, and the average cost just to hire the consultants and do the studies to get permits approaches a quarter of a million dollars," says Anthony François, a lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation who represented Duarte in his case against the government. "Clearly if you had to undertake that kind of cost and time just to get the necessary permit to plow your fields every year you're not going to grow a lot of food."
In 2016, attorneys general from 31 states (including Pruitt) challenged the Obama administration's overreach on the Clean Water Act. The case is still active in federal court.
University of Virginia Law Professor Jason Scott Johnston, who is also an adjunct scholar at the libertarian CATO Institute, believes it's likely the Supreme Court would strike down the 2015 water regulation. He says that the Obama administration expanded the definition of wetlands beyond the parameters set by the Court in the 2007 Rapanos v. United States decision.
"The broad trend of environmental regulation during the Obama administration was to use the coercive threat or reality of regulation simply to try to shut down entire industries and entire types of economic activity," says Johnston. "They have promulgated a definition of wetlands which clearly contradicts what the Supreme Court said."
In February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing the EPA to repeal the Waters of the United States rule, but getting the regulation off the books could take several years and be delayed by legal challenges from environmental groups.
Meanwhile, Duarte settled his case in August for $1.1 million to avoid paying a significantly larger fine. He hopes Pruitt's focus on regulatory rollback will restore farmers' property rights.
"We become peasants where these federal prosecutors can come in like the Sheriff of Nottingham, decide for themselves what they think a family can pay," Duarte says. "If the federal prosecutors can come on this land with this set of facts, there is no farm in America that is safe from this kind of prosecution."
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]]>EPA Chief Scott Pruitt has set out to transform the agency he leads to a greater extent than any of Trump's other cabinet appointees, pledging to end what he dubbed the agency's "anti-energy agenda" by loosening requirements on carbon emissions and eliminating land use restrictions.
In his first speech to EPA employees, Pruitt laid out his goal of returning the agency to its core focus of protecting the environment while following what he called "the letter of the law."
"I believe that we as an agency, and we as a nation, can be both pro-energy and jobs and pro-environment," Pruitt told his staff.
Environmentalists vehemently opposed Pruitt's appointment, depicting him as a climate change denier determined to undermine the EPA's core mission of protecting the environment.
One of Pruitt's first targets is a controversial rule on water pollution put in place by the Obama administration that he deemed a "power grab" by environmental regulators.
To better understand why property rights advocates applauded the move, consider the case of fourth-generation farmer John Duarte, who has fought a protracted and costly legal battle with federal regulators over how to till his 450-acre farm in Tehama County, California.
In 2012, the Army Corps of Engineers, working in conjunction with the EPA, accused Duarte of damaging wetland features on his property. He was hit with $30 million in fines and restoration fees.
Duarte's troubles stemmed from a 2015 provision in the Clean Water Act known as the Waters of the United States rule that was meant to better protect large bodies of water by regulating use of the streams, ponds, and ditches that flow into them. The EPA has used this provision to micromanage private land use.
The agency accused Duarte of mismanaging the wetland areas located on his property, claiming that his four-inch plow furrows created small mountain ranges. They contend Duarte should have obtained a permit before tilling his own land.
"The average time to obtain a Clean Water Act permit is close to two years, and the average cost just to hire the consultants and do the studies to get permits approaches a quarter of a million dollars," says Anthony François, a lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation who represented Duarte in his case against the government. "Clearly if you had to undertake that kind of cost and time just to get the necessary permit to plow your fields every year you're not going to grow a lot of food."
In 2016, attorneys general from 31 states (including Pruitt) challenged the Obama administration's overreach on the Clean Water Act. The case is still active in federal court.
University of Virginia Law Professor Jason Scott Johnston, who is also an adjunct scholar at the libertarian CATO Institute, believes it's likely the Supreme Court would strike down the 2015 water regulation. He says that the Obama administration expanded the definition of wetlands beyond the parameters set by the Court in the 2007 Rapanos v. United States decision.
"The broad trend of environmental regulation during the Obama administration was to use the coercive threat or reality of regulation simply to try to shut down entire industries and entire types of economic activity," says Johnston. "They have promulgated a definition of wetlands which clearly contradicts what the Supreme Court said."
In February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing the EPA to repeal the Waters of the United States rule, but getting the regulation off the books could take several years and be delayed by legal challenges from environmental groups.
Meanwhile, Duarte settled his case in August for $1.1 million to avoid paying a significantly larger fine. He hopes Pruitt's focus on regulatory rollback will restore farmers' property rights.
"We become peasants where these federal prosecutors can come in like the Sheriff of Nottingham, decide for themselves what they think a family can pay," Duarte says. "If the federal prosecutors can come on this land with this set of facts, there is no farm in America that is safe from this kind of prosecution."
Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Zach Weissmueller and Todd Krainin.
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]]>"The intellectual backwardness of many of Trump's trade advisors contrasts dramatically with some of the very good advice he's gotten in terms of deregulation," says Roberto Salinas-León, president of the Mexico Business Forum and adjunct scholar at the CATO Institute. "Talking about your second most important trading partner in that [derogatory] vein—that's not the 'art of the deal.' That's just very bad business."
Salinas-León, an expert on trade and monetary policy, says that if Trump ends the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it would decimate jobs on both sides of the border.
"Does Indiana depend on jobs because of its trade with Mexico? Does Ohio? Texas? You want to shut down NAFTA? That turns Texas into a Democratic state overnight."
Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Salinas-León at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas to discuss NAFTA's economic impact, his heated confrontation with Trump at Freedom Fest 2015, and how the president's anti-Mexico rhetoric propelled leftist presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador ("a rabid, primitive, vitriolic, populist") to the top of the polls.
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Justin Monticello and Meredith Bragg.
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This is a rush transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.
Gillespie: Let's talk about NAFTA first and your role in it. Is NAFTA a good thing or a bad thing for Mexico, Canada and the US? It's getting a lot of heat lately.
Salinas-León: In the early 1990s, we thought, "Well, wow! Mexico's already a story of trade liberalization. We're exporting 35 billion dollars a year worth of products and so on." Today that number is 365 billions, so from a trade perspective, and this is a trade agreement, from a trade perspective, I don't think there's any question that NAFTA has been a success in the sale side. And then you go to the purchase side, in other words, imports, and you find that you're also importing a vast amount. Guess where those imports come from? In about 80 percent, the United States.
Gillespie: Yeah, exactly.
Salinas-León: So those in Indiana depend … I mean, speaking of Mike Pence, does Indiana depend on jobs because of its trade with Mexico? Does Ohio? Texas? You want to shut down NAFTA? That turns Texas into a Democratic state overnight.
Gillespie: Where do you think the animus against NAFTA, particularly in the United States, and I mean, this is something that Donald Trump ran on. It's also something that Bernie Sanders brought up a lot, the idea that somehow free trade agreements suck jobs out of America and they put them in third-world countries, which due to a lot of economic ignorance, often times they're talking about Mexico as a third-world country, as well. Where does the resentment of something like that come from?
Salinas-León: I think that was one of the great lessons of the Trump campaign, the Bernie Sanders campaign. It's not something that discriminates between Republicans and Democrats or between the right or the left or whatever. What you found out is that there is anger because there's displacement. There is job displacement, and that's a very serious concern. But are we going to address it by closing our economies? By building walls? I mean, wasn't another famous Republican the one who said, "Tear down this wall." The same one that said, "We will always keep our doors open in the shiny city on the hill no matter how many walls it may have." I think those principles have to be kept in mind, but also, to be very serious about trying to alleviate the disruption and the displacement that may come in this era of globalization for those that have lost their jobs.
Gillespie: So, yeah, you mentioned Indiana and Ohio. You can throw Michigan and Wisconsin states-
Salinas-León: Sure.
Gillespie: ..they were very important for Donald Trump to win. It's clear that the-
Salinas-León: Pennsylvania.
Gillespie: …NAFTA message resonated there. How do you help workers who may have been displaced by the idea that certain types of industrial jobs go elsewhere.
Salinas-León: Oh my goodness! That is a hard question. I think you would have to come in three tranches, but this is something purely speculative. The first is that you need some type of, hopefully, market-oriented job loss insurance, that may be funded through the tremendous economic exchange that is done on a trilateral basis, only on a temporary point of view, in other words, as just a measure to alleviate the immediate pain. But then you need something that's more structured, and that would have to be based on retraining, on education and on trilateral efforts, hopefully, more private-oriented than public-oriented, to try and find new workspaces for such people. And I think this is something that independently of NAFTA is an issue in the United States in the next 10 years with the tremendous advances of technologies, because those job displacements owe a lot more to technological disruption and progress than they due to trade.
Gillespie: Right, yeah, I mean-
Salinas-León: And third world, by the way, the idea that low wages are sucking … It's more affordable and more productive worker units. You go down to Hermosillo, Sonora, where they have the Ford plant there, which has suspended production on one of its Ford models, but otherwise Haiti would be the richest country in Latin America. Otherwise, many of these sub-Saharan countries would be by far the most prosperous ones.
Gillespie: How does the Mexican business community view somebody like Donald Trump? I mean, are they worried? Not just because of his rhetoric, but that he'll do policies that actually do real damage to the ability for the Mexican economy, for the North American economy to grow?
Salinas-León: Well, at first, there was a significant worry. We have to understand that NAFTA for Mexico was much more than a trade and an investment agreement. It was importing the credibility of US institutions. If you do investment on a North American level, chances of a future government in Mexico trying to derail that, as it happened to us before, are going to be a lot harder. So that straitjacket effect perhaps is not golden, but it certainly a silver straitjacket. Somebody may want to re-nationalize, re-expropriate the banks or they may want to do all kinds of horrible things in the populist tradition that has characterized many Latin American countries.
NAFTA was a great step forward in trying to, not preclude that completely, but significantly lessen the probability of a future change, and that's what led to a great deal of investment coming into Mexico. It was that credibility that was imported. In that sense, for Mexico the idea of abandoning NAFTA … We'll still trade with the United States at an enormous level. Mexico today is the number one supplier of auto parts in the United States, the number two supplier of automobiles in the United States. NFL helmets are produced in Mexico, assembled in Mexico.
Gillespie: Pretty sure avocados. You guys have cornered the American market.
Salinas-León: The greatest lie, fake news … Can't even call them that. It's just an outright lie. The facts speak very differently about the effect of NAFTA on Mexican agriculture, on the country. It's exploded. It's exploded, and I might still have friends and many people that … I don't know this from reading a statistic, I know this from actually visiting the different farms, whether it's tomato … You know, many of the tomatoes we eat in the best restaurants in Las Vegas or in New York or in Los Angeles, they come from Sinaloa.
Gillespie: So you're saying Mexican tomatoes are taking American tomatoes' jobs?
Salinas-León: No, I'm not saying-
Gillespie: You're selling Trump's idea.
Salinas-León: I'm saying that Donald Trump, when he goes and eats at Daniel Boulud, he doesn't know … It is a very expensive dinner, that he's actually the one that's unemploying American … Now, why isn't there room for both? Why don't you let consumers choose at the end of the day?
This leads, I think, to a great deal of fallacies concerning the trade deficit. I mean, the intellectual backwardness of many of Trump's trade advisors contrasts dramatically with some of the very good advice he's gotten in terms of deregulation and in terms of taxes and in terms of draining the swamp.
Gillespie: When Donald Trump announced for the presidency, literally within five minutes he went on a rant.
What kind of anger or resentment does that stir in you or in Mexicans broadly along with it, increasingly xenophobic rhetoric, both coming out of the Republican Party, but many other parts of America?
Salinas-León: I'll tell you what it has done. It has empowered Andrés López Obrador, who is our equivalent of Hugo Chávez. A rabid, primitive, vitriolic, populist. He's on the top for the 2018 presidential election, today. He's leading on the polls, and that's because he has … Donald Trump became his number one campaign advisor with that vitriol. So, instead of talking to each other, because that's usually what classical liberals do, they learn how to talk to each other and listen to each other, the idea of completely discounting Mexicans and talking about your second most important trading partner in that vein, is just that's not the art of the deal. That is just very bad business. There's other ways of going around it. Look at the Republican Doug Ducey in Arizona, talking with Claudia Pavlovich in Sonora. They don't no longer want to distinguish the states. They want to talk about the megaregion and how they can compliment each other's what? Comparative advantage? Has Donald Trump ever heard of that word? Has Peter Navarro ever read Adan Smith? David Ricardo?
Gillespie: We're speaking at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas, the world's largest annual gathering of libertarians and free market people. Two years ago, Donald Trump actually spoke here and you had a heated exchange with him. You asked him a tough question. Recount for us what the question was, what his response was, and either do you feel like you got through it all.
Salinas-León: Actually, I felt rather humiliated. The man does know how to manage the stage. What I asked him was whether he would build a wall in every single state within the United States to keep Nebraska bad hombres out of Missouri and the bad element of Florida out of Washington state, and what that would do to the economy, because by that logic, that's what you should do and for that matter municipalities and whatnot. And so he said, "no," he would build the wall just for Mexico and he accused me of being sent by the Mexican government.
Gillespie: Were you in fact sent by the Mexican government?
Salinas-León: Of course not.
Gillespie: You were sent by the Russian government.
Salinas-León: Or the Asian government or maybe the Tahiti.
Gillespie: Do you feel like xenophobia is on the rise in the NAFTA zone? I mean, are people in an age where economic growth in many cases globally has been slumming down, certainly in the United States in the 21st century, economic growth has been much lower that it had been for the previous 50 or 60 years, is that breeding kind of resentment or a sense of, "We're fighting over a shrinking pie," and that, "We've got to keep out people who we think aren't like us or can't become us"?
Salinas-León: That I think is a very important challenge. There's definitely an ingredient of xenophobia. I think we're still in time to curtail it. Mexican business people and the government have learned that a lot of what Donald Trump says, a lot of the vitriol and the venom are just that. They're rhetoric, and in reality we'll talk about renegotiating NAFTA, but what does that entail? That may actually provide an opportunity to develop, for instance, new technologies to allow trucks on both sides of the border to cross, maybe a special bridge, after you do full disclosure after you agree to be completely surveilled by satellites and whatnot. And maybe that can even pay a little piece of a wall that we'll still take 27 years to build or some such, by the way, probably by Mexican workers and Cemex, Mexican cements, so that may not be all bad for us. But it's the message is what hurts, is, "You're going to pay for it. I'm going to force you to pay for it."
That's just not good diplomacy and that feeds that xenophobia north of the border, but it also feeds it elsewhere. Donald Trump is not a highly regarded leader of the free world and the rest of the world because of his antics and because of the reality TV that he lives in and because of this fantasy, Freudian complex that he might have, that he wants to be number one and he wants to tweet at every moment of the day that he's number one. That's not how you're going to get things done. That's not the art of the deal in statesmanship and leadership in the global arena.
Gillespie: We will leave it there, but the final question, of course that I ask anybody from Mexico who is a classical liberal or libertarian. Friedrich Hayek or Salma Hayek? Who's your favorite Hayek?
Salinas-León: Oh my goodness! That's an impossible question, but I would have to say Friedrich.
Gillespie: Well, I want to thank Roberto Salinas. He is the president of the Mexico Business Forum, for talking to us while we're at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas. Roberto, thanks so much.
Salinas-León: Thank you, Nick.
Gillespie: For Reason, I'm Nick Gillespie.
The post Ending NAFTA Would Decimate American Jobs appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"It makes no sense that an American manufactured vehicle would be so challenging to get," says Tesla owner Matt Holm. "You have to jump through so many hoops."
When Elon Musk launched the first Tesla sports car in 2008, he didn't just set out to create a mass market for electric vehicles; Musk wanted to disrupt the entire auto industry by cutting out the dealership middleman and selling his cars directly to consumers.
Tesla's sales approach has resonated with customers who want a more interactive car buying experience. Holm, a realtor based in Austin, Texas is one of those Tesla converts. He spends a lot of time on the road driving clients in his Model S. He loves the fact that his vehicle doesn't need much maintenance and can be charged overnight in his garage.
But when Matt went to purchase his Tesla, he couldn't just walk into a store and buy one.
"I actually had to go online, configure it, and order it sight unseen," says Holm. "It was like I was a spy or something getting some James-Bond car delivered."
Unlike the big car companies, Tesla doesn't have a network of independent dealerships that sell its cars. The company runs its own showrooms, but in Texas—along with Connecticut, Michigan, Louisiana, Utah, and West Virginia—the government makes it illegal to walk into a Tesla store and buy a car.
Tesla employees at these showrooms aren't even allowed to give pricing information or to direct customers to the company's website. Test drives require a special permit from the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles.
Almost every state has some sort of restriction on directly purchasing cars from manufacturers. The purpose of these franchise laws, which date to the 1930s, is to prevent car buyers from cutting out the middlemen—a big political constituency. The Lone Star State has nearly 1,300 franchised car dealerships employing about 100,000 people.
The National Auto Dealers Association (NADA) has repeatedly argued that the current system of franchised dealers is necessary to protect consumers and ensure fair competition. In a speech before the Automotive Press Association last October, NADA chairman Jeff Carlson stated that consumers preferred the dealership sales model and that dealership networks were "the best, most efficient, and most pro-consumer way of selling new cars and trucks."
But if car buyers really preferred going through third-party dealers, why do they need government protection?
Car manufacturers have tried to sell straight to consumers prior to Tesla. In the late 1990s, Ford attempted to circumvent the dealerships in Texas by starting its own stores and selling used cars through their own company website. The Texas Department of Transportation ruled that this violated the state's franchise laws and ordered Ford to shut down operations.
Ford was also hit with a $1.7 million state fine. The following year, then Texas Governor George W. Bush signed a law that strengthened protections for the dealership cartel.
Now Musk is taking his own shot at selling direct to consumers. According to figures from the Texas Ethics Commission, Tesla has spent over $1.2 million on Texas lobbyists in the last five years as part of an effort to eliminate the direct sales ban.
Rep. Jason Isaac, a Republican state legislator from Dripping Springs, Texas, introduced a bill in the 2017 legislative session that would get rid of car dealership rules. "It's truly not a free-market approach," says Isaac. "What my bill basically says is that a manufacturer of an automobile can sell direct to the consumer if they want to."
But Isaac has come up against the the politically connected Texas Auto Dealers Association (TADA), which opposes any efforts to change franchise laws. TADA claims that allowing Tesla to sell directly to consumers is a violation of "true free market" principles by giving Musk and Tesla "a monopoly just for them."
Lawmakers didn't act on Isaac's bill this session, making it the third legislative defeat for Tesla's reform effort in Texas.
But Elon Musk's campaign to remake the car industry is a hint of big changes to come. Google plans to bring its autonomous vehicles to market and even Apple, which pulled off one of the greatest retail success stories of the last 20 years by opening its own network of stores, is working on its own car. If Silicon Valley succeeds in its quest to takeover this nearly trillion dollar industry, the dealership model may not last.
"I think consumers are going to start demanding this more and more as they realize, 'Wait there's an autonomous vehicle coming and I can't buy it? Why is that?,'" states Isaac. "We've got to find some free market solutions that allow those companies to sell direct to their consumers."
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The post Elon Musk Can't Sell His Teslas in Texas appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When the White House hosted a meeting of sheriffs from across the country last February, President Donald Trump joked about destroying the career of a Texas state senator who supported reforms to civil asset forfeiture laws—a controversial practice where police can seize cash and property of people suspected—but in most cases never convicted or charged with a crime.
Though Trump's comments were meant to support police, they've had the opposite of their intended impact—it's re-energized the push for reform.
Texas state senator Konni Burton was one of many local lawmakers outraged by Trump's comments. She's a tea party leader from the Dallas-Fort Worth area who also happens to be pro-life and pro-borders. Burton isn't the unnamed state senator Trump offered to destroy, but she's emerged as the state's fiercest opponent of civil asset forfeiture.
"When you give law enforcement the ability to take your property without a conviction that's big government," Burton says.
Last December, Burton filed legislation that would repeal civil asset forfeiture in the state and replace it with criminal asset forfeiture.
"Police can still seize property that they think has been involved in a crime," says Burton, "but for them to keep it … you have to be convicted of a crime."
Texas has tried for years to reform civil asset forfeiture laws after horror stories began to emerge about the practice.
One of the most horrifying cases occurred in 2005, when cops seized $10,000 from Javier Gonzales who was driving from Austin to the border town of Brownsville to make funeral arrangements for his dying aunt. The cops didn't find any drugs or contraband in his car, but they pressured Gonzales to sign away his rights to the cash under the threat of a felony money laundering charge.
Gonzales took the case to court and eventually won his money back in April of 2008.
And in 2012 the ACLU settled a class action lawsuit against the city of Tenaha where cops illegally seized nearly $3 million from traffic stops involving mostly Black and Latino drivers. Victims were told that they could either sign their cash over to the city or go to jail.
Cases like this have earned Texas a D+ from the Institute for Justice for forfeiture laws. Data from the libertarian legal organization shows that the state takes in an average of $41.6 million dollars a year to local law enforcement agencies as a result of these seizures.
Burton's bill has bipartisan support, but it faces an uphill battle in the Texas legislature where it's faced opposition from "tough on crime" lawmakers and law enforcement agencies. Burton says her legislation isn"t about stopping police from doing their job, but protecting the property rights of all Texans.
"Everybody is ready for this to be reformed," Burton says. "You know it's just upside down and antithetical to what our country should stand for."
Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Paul Detrick, Austin Bragg, and Meredith Bragg. Music by the Unicorn Heads.
Lightless Dawn by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100655 Artist: http://incompetech.com/
Be Inspired by Podington Bear is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Podington_Bear/Strummed/BeInspired).
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The post Meet the Texas Lawmaker Fighting Trump on Civil Asset Forfeiture appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When the White House hosted a meeting of sheriffs from across the country last February, President Donald Trump joked about destroying the career of a Texas state senator who supported reforms to civil asset forfeiture laws—a controversial practice where police can seize cash and property of people suspected—but in most cases never convicted or charged with a crime.
Though Trump's comments were meant to support police, they've had the opposite of their intended impact—it's re-energized the push for reform.
Texas state senator Konni Burton was one of many local lawmakers outraged by Trump's comments. She's a tea party leader from the Dallas-Fort Worth area who also happens to be pro-life and pro-borders. Burton isn't the unnamed state senator Trump offered to destroy, but she's emerged as the state's fiercest opponent of civil asset forfeiture.
"When you give law enforcement the ability to take your property without a conviction that's big government," Burton says.
Last December, Burton filed legislation that would repeal civil asset forfeiture in the state and replace it with criminal asset forfeiture.
"Police can still seize property that they think has been involved in a crime," says Burton, "but for them to keep it … you have to be convicted of a crime."
Texas has tried for years to reform civil asset forfeiture laws after horror stories began to emerge about the practice.
One of the most horrifying cases occurred in 2005, when cops seized $10,000 from Javier Gonzales who was driving from Austin to the border town of Brownsville to make funeral arrangements for his dying aunt. The cops didn't find any drugs or contraband in his car, but they pressured Gonzales to sign away his rights to the cash under the threat of a felony money laundering charge.
Gonzales took the case to court and eventually won his money back in April of 2008.
And in 2012 the ACLU settled a class action lawsuit against the city of Tenaha where cops illegally seized nearly $3 million from traffic stops involving mostly Black and Latino drivers. Victims were told that they could either sign their cash over to the city or go to jail.
Cases like this have earned Texas a D+ from the Institute for Justice for forfeiture laws. Data from the libertarian legal organization shows that the state takes in an average of $41.6 million dollars a year to local law enforcement agencies as a result of these seizures.
Burton's bill has bipartisan support, but it faces an uphill battle in the Texas legislature where it's faced opposition from "tough on crime" lawmakers and law enforcement agencies. Burton says her legislation isn"t about stopping police from doing their job, but protecting the property rights of all Texans.
"Everybody is ready for this to be reformed," Burton says. "You know it's just upside down and antithetical to what our country should stand for."
Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Paul Detrick, Austin Bragg, and Meredith Bragg. Music by the Unicorn Heads.
Lightless Dawn by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100655 Artist: http://incompetech.com/
Be Inspired by Podington Bear is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Podington_Bear/Strummed/BeInspired).
________
Subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Subscribe to our podcast at iTunes.
The post Meet the Texas Lawmaker Fighting Trump on Civil Asset Forfeiture appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"We're at a really interesting moment where public-private partnerships could blossom in a pretty dramatic way," says Stephen Goldsmith, former mayor of Indianapolis and professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "If we have technologies that are highly refined…we can anticipate a problem and fix it before it occurs."
Goldsmith, author of 2014's The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance, was the recipient of the Reason Foundation's 2017 Savas Award for promoting public-private partnerships. (The nonprofit Reason Foundation is also the publisher of Reason.com.) As mayor of Indianapolis from 1992 to 1999, Goldsmith trimmed $100 million from the city budget mainly by requiring departments of the municipal government to compete with private companies.
"The ideas…frankly, were from Reason," states Goldsmith. "[Director of Transportation Policy] Bob Poole spent I don't know how many lunches in Indianapolis when I was running for mayor and after I got elected kind of going through A to Z on how to privatize."
Goldsmith states that one impediment keeping struggling cities from embracing public-private partnerships is a basic understanding of the goal. "[It] isn't to monetize assets," explains Goldsmith. "The goal is efficiency."
At the national level, Goldsmith says public-private partnerships could be key to making President Donald Trump's one trillion dollar infrastructure investment program successful.
"Regardless of how much money it is that Washington ends up [spending]… it can't be done effectively without public-private partnerships," Goldsmith states. "Both for purposes of paying back the money and for purposes of maintaining the asset."
Edited by Alexis Garcia. Hosted by Nick Gillespie. Camera by Jim Epstein and Kevin Alexander.
Streetbeat Heat by Podington Bear is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Podington_Bear/Dance_1228/Streetbeat_Heat).
The Dirty by Podington Bear is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Podington_Bear/Electronic_1224/The_Dirty).
________
Subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Subscribe to our podcast at iTunes.
**This is a rush transcript—check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.**
Stephen Goldsmith: Regardless of how much money it is that Washington ends up doing.
Donald Trump: We're gonna start spending on infrastructure big.
Stephen Goldsmith: It can't be done effectively without public/private partnerships.
Nick Gillespie: Hi. I'm Nick Gillespie with Reason. Today we are talking with Stephen Goldsmith, the former mayor of Indianapolis, who has won the newest Reason's Savas Award for pushing public-private partnerships. Mayor Goldsmith, thanks for talking to us.
Stephen Goldsmith: Sure.
Nick Gillespie: You were mayor of Indianapolis from 1992 to 2000, Special Advisor to George W. Bush, Deputy Mayor of New York, and you're now a professor of government at Harvard's Kennedy School, and most recently the author of The Responsive City, which came out in 2014, and we'll talk about that in a second. At your time in Indianapolis you save taxpayers about $400 million by privatizing. What was the impetus for that? Where did the ideas come from?
Stephen Goldsmith: Right. Right. Well, I think we can answer that in two different ways. First, I became mayor. We had a structural deficit in the budget, and we had a Chamber of Commerce report saying we need a billion dollars in infrastructure and our property taxes were higher than our suburbs, but you can't raise taxes. It's not good for the economy. We need to rebuild the infrastructure. So what do you do? Well, you become as efficient as you can. The goal, then, was to reduce the operating costs of government and transfer that into an investment in the infrastructure in the future for the city. So those were the conditions. The ideas about how to get there, frankly, were from Reason. Bob Poole spent I don't how many lunches in Indianapolis when I was running for mayor and after I got elected kind of going through A to Z and how to privatize.
Nick Gillespie: You didn't just go through A to Z, you went through the phone book with A to Z, right? What was the rubric that you used to see whether or not the government should be the sole provider of a good or a service?
Stephen Goldsmith: Right. Thanks. The goal was not to privatize. The goal was to be as efficient and effective as possible. Sometimes that meant you continue to do things the way you have always done, not very often but sometimes. Other times it meant you have privatized the asset. Other times it means you set up managed competitions so labor would have to bid on continue to do the work they've done and become more productive. I've generally found that if, very sophisticated test. Open up the phone book in the Yellow Pages. If there are three or more other businesses in the same area in your city, you're probably not the most efficient provider of those services, and we bid out or did manage competition over 80 times.
Nick Gillespie: Many cities today in America obviously are facing structural deficits. Are they following the path that you blaze in Indianapolis? And if not, what's the biggest problem? Is it not knowing how to do that? Or is it political interest getting in the way?
Stephen Goldsmith: I think the basic problem is an understanding of the goal, right? The goal isn't to monetize assets, so you bring all of the revenues forward like parking meters and then spend it on operating. The goal is efficiency, right? So how do you operate something more efficiently? Is there anybody in the world anybody in the world better than you are in your city at operating streetlights or parking or golf courses or water or wastewater or airports? Then you take the savings and invest that in the future of the city. So I think the thing that's holding people back is that they're thinking about as, "Do we want to privatize or do we want to sell the family jewels?" As contrasted to what is the role of government in terms of managing that asset.
Nick Gillespie: What was a specific asset or thing that Indianapolis was doing, and how did you shift it into a more efficient mode?
Stephen Goldsmith: Right. So we did about 80 of these either managed competition or privatization. We did the first large wastewater privatization in the country. Today there are tens of billions of dollars of mandates against local authorities for water and wastewater EPA appliance and alike. So the city needs to clean its water, right? There are environmental responsibilities. Indianapolis at the time according to Ernst & Young was one of the most efficiently run wastewater treatment plants in the country, and yet then we went ahead and asked for anybody in the world to give us a bit about how to manage our plant. It turns out that the winning bidder had more PhD's than we had employees, right? There was no way that we were as effective as they were. There's no way we had the best technology and no way we had the best management. So essentially, then, they managed the plants for about 25 to 30% less per year, which produced a savings that we could then use for debt or efficiency purposes for some other reason that invested in the infrastructure of the city.
Nick Gillespie: Were there any big mistakes that you made where either the privatization or failing to do that just blew up in your face?
Stephen Goldsmith: Right. If you continue to do a mediocre service and don't change the status quo, you generally don't get criticized. If you try to change the status quo, let's say it's like and you go like this, but you wanted to go like this, it's often viewed as a failure. Still better than it was before, but not as good. So one of the most important lessons we learned was benchmark everything before you begin. Benchmark it in terms of quality and benchmark it in terms of cost. So occasionally we slipped up on that. The other issue, which I don't think is a mistake, but we did make mistakes, a mistake in terms of we shouldn't have done it is, what are the service level requirements after you privatize the asset?
What do you want the experience to be for passengers in the airport? What do you want the quality of the water to be? How high to do you want the grass to be after you privatize the mowing of the medians? So get the service levels right, get the benchmarks right, have the numbers right, and then you can do it correctly, and you occasionally got those wrong.
Nick Gillespie: Let's talk about the next frontiers in public-private partnerships … I mean, actually it's more making government more efficient. How does The Responsive City, your 2014 book, deal with that? Or what is that about?
Stephen Goldsmith: I think we're at a really interesting moment where public-private partnerships could blossom in a pretty dramatic way. If we have technologies that are highly refined. Let's say, go back to water and wastewater, so we put sensors in pipes. We know where the leaks are. We know where the pressure. We know when the water hydrant is gonna be low. We can anticipate a problem and fix it before it occurs. We have a sensor on a bridge that says, "This bridge is vibrating too much in Minneapolis, but it's gonna fall down if you don't come fix it, right?" A streetlight that says, "I'm about to burn out. Come fix me before I burn out, right? So the public/private partnerships and what we talk about in Responsive City is how to use data, how to use data analytics, how to use sensors in order to anticipate problems and solve them before they become serious?
Nick Gillespie: What are the chief impediments to pushing forward on using big data, on using … On pushing this forward? Where's the resistance?
Stephen Goldsmith: The impediments generally are perceived to be, "Is this hostile to labor?" And our experience was, it wasn't hostile to labor at all. In fact, our labor, as it became more productive, earned more money. What we said is we don't need as many managers and we need more technology. So as we look at the uses of technology, we're having a pretty high attrition and retirement rate in the public service, right? Because of the age of the average public employee. So you don't have to lay off anyone. What we're basically saying to the employees is, "As a result of partnering with a private sector, as a result of getting more technology, as a result of using predictive analytics and sensors, we can make your work more effective, therefore you win and the taxpayer wins.
Nick Gillespie: As workers, in the public sector like the private sector generally as they become more productive, which technology help with, they'll be paid more.
Stephen Goldsmith: None of that 400 million dollars we saved was from reducing the wages of employees, employees attritted, they retired, they may have decided they didn't want to work as hard as the private sector made them work, the managers thinned out, but what happened is they became so much more productive that they could win and the taxpayers could win. And data and technology and mobile devices and the like let you do that today in ways that we hadn't even dreamed of.
Nick Gillespie: Looking at a national level, Donald Trump has talked about a trillion dollar infrastructure investment program. Not clear what the details are or anything. Is that the type of thing that should be done exclusive through public-private partnerships?
Stephen Goldsmith: Right. So if you look at public-private partnerships and you think about this trillion dollars and everyone's a little confused about what the trillion dollars is, but somebody's gotta pay back that money, right? The problem with infrastructure is not that you can't borrow the money. There's plenty of people willing to loan you the money, but a mayor or a governor has to pay the money back. So if we thought about public-private partnerships the following things happen. A, there is money locked in those assets like water or wastewater or airports that could be taken out of operations more effectively and used for that service they'll like. Two, if you do public-private partnerships you build faster and less expensively and with more value engineering. And three, you have lifecycle costing.
So regardless of how much money it is that Washington ends up doing, and I don't know how much that will be, it can't be done effectively without public-private partnerships, both for purposes of paying back the money and for purposes of maintaining the asset.
Nick Gillespie: And kind of getting the money in the first place, right? I mean, you can always borrow, but if there are firms that are willing to build roads or expand road capacity or take over water treatment, they're putting in a lot of the money, right?
Stephen Goldsmith: Well, yeah. Firms are willing to put money into equity. They want to partially own these assets. The same firms are saying, "Look, I'll maintain that asset for 20 years so you don't have to worry about me building it in an inferior way so that the cost of maintenance is transferred to the public sector. And also in terms of water and wastewater, airport privatization and the like, we see great new revenue sources that can be produced to help pay back those funds.
Nick Gillespie: Is that one of the biggest lifts, though? I mean, it seems to me it's kind of like this shift from free TV to cable TV. It's hard to do and now nobody would ever go back to free TV. Is there a turn there that we have to make that's gonna be hard to do?
Stephen Goldsmith: Well, it'll be hard to do because there's a lot of support in the status quo, right? If anybody had any idea how inefficiently the public sector does capital assets, and I don't mean corruptly, I just mean efficiently. So you have a long procurement to hire somebody to design it and long procurement to hire somebody to build it, then somebody has to maintain it, probably the government, right? There are handoffs at each of those areas. And so all of those handoffs, all of that inefficiency can become more efficient. A public-private partnership says, "Here's the scope of what we want", the mayor says, "You tell me how you're gonna build it, how you're gonna maintain it, how you're gonna finance it. I'll decide whether the service levels are right, that fairs are right, the fees or the tolls, and the service is right."
Nick Gillespie: Well, we'll leave it there. Thanks so much for talking with us. Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, the recipient of the 2017 Reason Foundation's Savas Award.
Stephen Goldsmith: Thank you very much.
The post How Trump's Trillion-Dollar Infrastructure Plan Could Succeed appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"We're at a really interesting moment where public-private partnerships could blossom in a pretty dramatic way," says Stephen Goldsmith, former mayor of Indianapolis and professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "If we have technologies that are highly refined…we can anticipate a problem and fix it before it occurs."
Goldsmith, author of 2014's The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance, was the recipient of the Reason Foundation's 2017 Savas Award for promoting public-private partnerships. (The nonprofit Reason Foundation is also the publisher of Reason.com.) As mayor of Indianapolis from 1992 to 1999, Goldsmith trimmed $100 million from the city budget mainly by requiring departments of the municipal government to compete with private companies.
"The ideas…frankly, were from Reason," states Goldsmith. "[Director of Transportation Policy] Bob Poole spent I don't know how many lunches in Indianapolis when I was running for mayor and after I got elected kind of going through A to Z on how to privatize."
Goldsmith states that one impediment keeping struggling cities from embracing public-private partnerships is a basic understanding of the goal. "[It] isn't to monetize assets," explains Goldsmith. "The goal is efficiency."
At the national level, Goldsmith says public-private partnerships could be key to making President Donald Trump's one trillion dollar infrastructure investment program successful.
"Regardless of how much money it is that Washington ends up [spending]… it can't be done effectively without public-private partnerships," Goldsmith states. "Both for purposes of paying back the money and for purposes of maintaining the asset."
Edited by Alexis Garcia. Hosted by Nick Gillespie. Camera by Jim Epstein and Kevin Alexander.
Streetbeat Heat by Podington Bear is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Podington_Bear/Dance_1228/Streetbeat_Heat).
The Dirty by Podington Bear is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Podington_Bear/Electronic_1224/The_Dirty).
________
Subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Subscribe to our podcast at iTunes.
**This is a rush transcript—check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.**
Stephen Goldsmith: Regardless of how much money it is that Washington ends up doing.
Donald Trump: We're gonna start spending on infrastructure big.
Stephen Goldsmith: It can't be done effectively without public/private partnerships.
Nick Gillespie: Hi. I'm Nick Gillespie with Reason. Today we are talking with Stephen Goldsmith, the former mayor of Indianapolis, who has won the newest Reason's Savas Award for pushing public-private partnerships. Mayor Goldsmith, thanks for talking to us.
Stephen Goldsmith: Sure.
Nick Gillespie: You were mayor of Indianapolis from 1992 to 2000, Special Advisor to George W. Bush, Deputy Mayor of New York, and you're now a professor of government at Harvard's Kennedy School, and most recently the author of The Responsive City, which came out in 2014, and we'll talk about that in a second. At your time in Indianapolis you save taxpayers about $400 million by privatizing. What was the impetus for that? Where did the ideas come from?
Stephen Goldsmith: Right. Right. Well, I think we can answer that in two different ways. First, I became mayor. We had a structural deficit in the budget, and we had a Chamber of Commerce report saying we need a billion dollars in infrastructure and our property taxes were higher than our suburbs, but you can't raise taxes. It's not good for the economy. We need to rebuild the infrastructure. So what do you do? Well, you become as efficient as you can. The goal, then, was to reduce the operating costs of government and transfer that into an investment in the infrastructure in the future for the city. So those were the conditions. The ideas about how to get there, frankly, were from Reason. Bob Poole spent I don't how many lunches in Indianapolis when I was running for mayor and after I got elected kind of going through A to Z and how to privatize.
Nick Gillespie: You didn't just go through A to Z, you went through the phone book with A to Z, right? What was the rubric that you used to see whether or not the government should be the sole provider of a good or a service?
Stephen Goldsmith: Right. Thanks. The goal was not to privatize. The goal was to be as efficient and effective as possible. Sometimes that meant you continue to do things the way you have always done, not very often but sometimes. Other times it meant you have privatized the asset. Other times it means you set up managed competitions so labor would have to bid on continue to do the work they've done and become more productive. I've generally found that if, very sophisticated test. Open up the phone book in the Yellow Pages. If there are three or more other businesses in the same area in your city, you're probably not the most efficient provider of those services, and we bid out or did manage competition over 80 times.
Nick Gillespie: Many cities today in America obviously are facing structural deficits. Are they following the path that you blaze in Indianapolis? And if not, what's the biggest problem? Is it not knowing how to do that? Or is it political interest getting in the way?
Stephen Goldsmith: I think the basic problem is an understanding of the goal, right? The goal isn't to monetize assets, so you bring all of the revenues forward like parking meters and then spend it on operating. The goal is efficiency, right? So how do you operate something more efficiently? Is there anybody in the world anybody in the world better than you are in your city at operating streetlights or parking or golf courses or water or wastewater or airports? Then you take the savings and invest that in the future of the city. So I think the thing that's holding people back is that they're thinking about as, "Do we want to privatize or do we want to sell the family jewels?" As contrasted to what is the role of government in terms of managing that asset.
Nick Gillespie: What was a specific asset or thing that Indianapolis was doing, and how did you shift it into a more efficient mode?
Stephen Goldsmith: Right. So we did about 80 of these either managed competition or privatization. We did the first large wastewater privatization in the country. Today there are tens of billions of dollars of mandates against local authorities for water and wastewater EPA appliance and alike. So the city needs to clean its water, right? There are environmental responsibilities. Indianapolis at the time according to Ernst & Young was one of the most efficiently run wastewater treatment plants in the country, and yet then we went ahead and asked for anybody in the world to give us a bit about how to manage our plant. It turns out that the winning bidder had more PhD's than we had employees, right? There was no way that we were as effective as they were. There's no way we had the best technology and no way we had the best management. So essentially, then, they managed the plants for about 25 to 30% less per year, which produced a savings that we could then use for debt or efficiency purposes for some other reason that invested in the infrastructure of the city.
Nick Gillespie: Were there any big mistakes that you made where either the privatization or failing to do that just blew up in your face?
Stephen Goldsmith: Right. If you continue to do a mediocre service and don't change the status quo, you generally don't get criticized. If you try to change the status quo, let's say it's like and you go like this, but you wanted to go like this, it's often viewed as a failure. Still better than it was before, but not as good. So one of the most important lessons we learned was benchmark everything before you begin. Benchmark it in terms of quality and benchmark it in terms of cost. So occasionally we slipped up on that. The other issue, which I don't think is a mistake, but we did make mistakes, a mistake in terms of we shouldn't have done it is, what are the service level requirements after you privatize the asset?
What do you want the experience to be for passengers in the airport? What do you want the quality of the water to be? How high to do you want the grass to be after you privatize the mowing of the medians? So get the service levels right, get the benchmarks right, have the numbers right, and then you can do it correctly, and you occasionally got those wrong.
Nick Gillespie: Let's talk about the next frontiers in public-private partnerships … I mean, actually it's more making government more efficient. How does The Responsive City, your 2014 book, deal with that? Or what is that about?
Stephen Goldsmith: I think we're at a really interesting moment where public-private partnerships could blossom in a pretty dramatic way. If we have technologies that are highly refined. Let's say, go back to water and wastewater, so we put sensors in pipes. We know where the leaks are. We know where the pressure. We know when the water hydrant is gonna be low. We can anticipate a problem and fix it before it occurs. We have a sensor on a bridge that says, "This bridge is vibrating too much in Minneapolis, but it's gonna fall down if you don't come fix it, right?" A streetlight that says, "I'm about to burn out. Come fix me before I burn out, right? So the public/private partnerships and what we talk about in Responsive City is how to use data, how to use data analytics, how to use sensors in order to anticipate problems and solve them before they become serious?
Nick Gillespie: What are the chief impediments to pushing forward on using big data, on using … On pushing this forward? Where's the resistance?
Stephen Goldsmith: The impediments generally are perceived to be, "Is this hostile to labor?" And our experience was, it wasn't hostile to labor at all. In fact, our labor, as it became more productive, earned more money. What we said is we don't need as many managers and we need more technology. So as we look at the uses of technology, we're having a pretty high attrition and retirement rate in the public service, right? Because of the age of the average public employee. So you don't have to lay off anyone. What we're basically saying to the employees is, "As a result of partnering with a private sector, as a result of getting more technology, as a result of using predictive analytics and sensors, we can make your work more effective, therefore you win and the taxpayer wins.
Nick Gillespie: As workers, in the public sector like the private sector generally as they become more productive, which technology help with, they'll be paid more.
Stephen Goldsmith: None of that 400 million dollars we saved was from reducing the wages of employees, employees attritted, they retired, they may have decided they didn't want to work as hard as the private sector made them work, the managers thinned out, but what happened is they became so much more productive that they could win and the taxpayers could win. And data and technology and mobile devices and the like let you do that today in ways that we hadn't even dreamed of.
Nick Gillespie: Looking at a national level, Donald Trump has talked about a trillion dollar infrastructure investment program. Not clear what the details are or anything. Is that the type of thing that should be done exclusive through public-private partnerships?
Stephen Goldsmith: Right. So if you look at public-private partnerships and you think about this trillion dollars and everyone's a little confused about what the trillion dollars is, but somebody's gotta pay back that money, right? The problem with infrastructure is not that you can't borrow the money. There's plenty of people willing to loan you the money, but a mayor or a governor has to pay the money back. So if we thought about public-private partnerships the following things happen. A, there is money locked in those assets like water or wastewater or airports that could be taken out of operations more effectively and used for that service they'll like. Two, if you do public-private partnerships you build faster and less expensively and with more value engineering. And three, you have lifecycle costing.
So regardless of how much money it is that Washington ends up doing, and I don't know how much that will be, it can't be done effectively without public-private partnerships, both for purposes of paying back the money and for purposes of maintaining the asset.
Nick Gillespie: And kind of getting the money in the first place, right? I mean, you can always borrow, but if there are firms that are willing to build roads or expand road capacity or take over water treatment, they're putting in a lot of the money, right?
Stephen Goldsmith: Well, yeah. Firms are willing to put money into equity. They want to partially own these assets. The same firms are saying, "Look, I'll maintain that asset for 20 years so you don't have to worry about me building it in an inferior way so that the cost of maintenance is transferred to the public sector. And also in terms of water and wastewater, airport privatization and the like, we see great new revenue sources that can be produced to help pay back those funds.
Nick Gillespie: Is that one of the biggest lifts, though? I mean, it seems to me it's kind of like this shift from free TV to cable TV. It's hard to do and now nobody would ever go back to free TV. Is there a turn there that we have to make that's gonna be hard to do?
Stephen Goldsmith: Well, it'll be hard to do because there's a lot of support in the status quo, right? If anybody had any idea how inefficiently the public sector does capital assets, and I don't mean corruptly, I just mean efficiently. So you have a long procurement to hire somebody to design it and long procurement to hire somebody to build it, then somebody has to maintain it, probably the government, right? There are handoffs at each of those areas. And so all of those handoffs, all of that inefficiency can become more efficient. A public-private partnership says, "Here's the scope of what we want", the mayor says, "You tell me how you're gonna build it, how you're gonna maintain it, how you're gonna finance it. I'll decide whether the service levels are right, that fairs are right, the fees or the tolls, and the service is right."
Nick Gillespie: Well, we'll leave it there. Thanks so much for talking with us. Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, the recipient of the 2017 Reason Foundation's Savas Award.
Stephen Goldsmith: Thank you very much.
The post How Trump's Trillion-Dollar Infrastructure Plan Could Succeed appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Reason presents the three worst—and the three best—achievements of President Trump's first 100 days.
Third Worst Moment: Replace and Repeal FAIL.
Along with his pledge to build a wall on the southern border and deport illegal immigrants en masse, Trump's campaign was all about ramming through the "Repeal and Replace Obamacare Act," which would have cut red tape, gotten rid of the individual mandate, and created a true marketplace for medical insurance. Instead, thanks to the president's own lack of savvy and GOP dithering, it didn't even get a proper vote in Congress.
Third Best Moment: The nomination and confirmation of Neil Gorsuch.
The nomination of an intellectually powerful and highly respected jurist to replace the late Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court demonstrated that President Trump isn't the flake that many critics figured him to be. Neil Gorsuch might not be libertarian, but he is, in the estimation of Georgetown Law's Randy Barnett, a serious thinker who believes that government power is and should be limited.
Second Worst Moment: The Country That Bombs Together.
The one action for which President Trump has received bipartisan praise was the bombing of a Syrian government air base to protest the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. Even opposition leaders such as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) signed on to a starkly humanitarian intervention that served no greater purpose than rallying voters here in America.
Second Best Moment: Deregulatory appointees at the FDA, FCC, and EPA.
There's no question that Trump has picked some terrible cabinet members—Attorney General Jeff Sessions has openly talked about ramping up the war on pot in states where it's legal, for instance. He also defends asset-forfeiture abuse and has hinted at reviving federal porn prosecutions, too. But picks such as Ajit Pai at the Federal Communications Commission, Scott Gottlieb at the Food and Drug Administration, and Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency are serious deregulators who are already starting to prune back regulations that accomplish little but cost taxpayers and innovators lots of time, money, and resources.
Worst Moment: Muslim Travel Ban.
The president has issued two executive decrees calling for a moratorium on travel from several majority-Muslim countries and the suspension of America's refugee program. Both have been stayed by federal courts and it remains unclear if one will ever become the law of the land. Regardless it's anti-American to effectively establish a religious test for travelers and migrants here—and it also undermines attempts to reach out to the vast majority of Muslims who are the primary targets of Islamic fundamentalism.
Best Moment: He's Getting Real.
Every new president enters office thinking they can direct the course of human history via their pen or, in the case of Trump, Twitter feed. For all his bluster and lack of self-awareness, he's also learning that the world is more complicated than he reckoned. He's pushed back deadines for all sorts of projects, from funding for his stupid and useless immigration wall to a timeline for tax reform, which shows that he is living in the real world at least. To the extent he realizes that his best path forward is in cutting economic regulations rather than vilifying immigrants, renegotiating trade deals, and starting new wars, he'll not only be a better president—he'll create a better America too.
Written by Nick Gillespie. Produced by Paul Detrick and Alexis Garcia.
Black Bird—Primal Drive by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Kool Kats by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Artist: http://incompetech.com/
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The post 100 Days of Trump: Three Best and Worst Moments of Presidency So Far appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Really unique in the history of technology is to have a capability and then lose it," says Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of the aviation startup Boom Technology. "We're going to see renewed progress in air travel. My long-term mission at Boom is to make that happen."
Fourteen years after the Concorde was grounded, private companies are on the verge of bringing supersonic air travel back. And this time it'll be built on sound economic principles.
Click above to watch the video. For the original writeup, click below.
The post Future of Flight: NYC to London in 3 Hours appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Really unique in the history of technology is to have a capability and then lose it," says Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of the aviation startup Boom Technology. "We're going to see renewed progress in air travel. My long-term mission at Boom is to make that happen."
When the Concorde made its commercial debut in 1976, it was an engineering marvel that represented the technological promise of the 20th century. But 27 years after its initial flight, the Concorde landed for the final time, ending the era of civilian supersonic travel.
So why did the airliner of the future become a museum artifact?
The Concorde was always a state-funded white elephant so when costs went up and ticket sales dropped, the French and British governments who were backing the venture decided to pull the plug and retire the aircraft.
Another factor that hobbled the evolution of supersonic flight was an overland speed limit imposed in both the U.S. and Europe. The speed ban was pushed by environmental activists—like those in the Anti-Concorde Project and Citizens League Against the Sonic Boom—who claimed that this type of aircraft would generate "the loudest noise" ever heard, or the equivalent to a bomb going off.
"If that was the case there would have been a noise limit, not a speed limit," says Scholl.
Fourteen years after the Concorde was grounded, private companies are on the verge of bringing supersonic air travel back. And this time it'll be built on sound economic principles.
To circumvent the overland travel ban, Boom Technology's aircraft will mainly fly over water. And the company has devised a new form factor for the plane: a three engine jet that can carry up to 55 passengers and flies more than twice the speed of sound.
"My personal favorite feature is a cup holder that is nowhere close to where you put your laptop," says Scholl.
Boom expects to charge $5,000 round trip from New York to London. A ticket for the Concorde set its passengers back about $15,000 in today's dollars.
Scholl's company isn't alone in its quest to speed up air travel. It has several private competitors, and NASA is working with the engineering firm Lockheed Martin to come up with its own version of a supersonic plane. The difference? Boom's demonstrator jet will cost roughly $30 million compared to NASA's plane, which is expected to cost at least $300 million when completed.
"Private industry is able to do this roughly at an order of magnitude cheaper than government and also without requiring any taxpayer money," states Scholl.
Current regulations will prevent companies like Boom from offering supersonic flights between California and New York. Before they can enter that market, the FAA would need to overturn its ban on overland travel.
"Reverse that and now New York to San Francisco could be 2 hours and 20 minutes," says Scholl.
Boom revealed its design for the XB-1 demonstrator jet last November, and is working with Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic to build and test the prototype in 2017. They aim to start flying commercial air passengers in the early 2020s.
"We're fans of speed so we're doing this as quickly as possible," states Scholl. Boom's calculates that if supersonic flight can catch on with business travelers market forces will do their work by improving technology and bringing down costs—making supersonic flight accessible to more people.
"Nobody wants a longer flight," says Scholl. "This is a chance for airlines to make it significantly faster."
Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Austin Bragg. Additional footage courtesy Boom Technology, Department of Defense, and NASA. Music by Vibe Tracks, Jason Farnham, & Audionautix. Cycles by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
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Subscribe to our podcast at iTunes.
The post Here Comes Supersonic Flight: The Rebirth of a Former White Elephant appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Really unique in the history of technology is to have a capability and then lose it," says Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of the aviation startup Boom Technology. "We're going to see renewed progress in air travel. My long-term mission at Boom is to make that happen."
When the Concorde made its commercial debut in 1976, it was an engineering marvel that represented the technological promise of the 20th century. But 27 years after its initial flight, the Concorde landed for the final time, ending the era of civilian supersonic travel.
So why did the airliner of the future become a museum artifact?
The Concorde was always a state-funded white elephant so when costs went up and ticket sales dropped, the French and British governments who were backing the venture decided to pull the plug and retire the aircraft.
Another factor that hobbled the evolution of supersonic flight was an overland speed limit imposed in both the U.S. and Europe. The speed ban was pushed by environmental activists—like those in the Anti-Concorde Project and Citizens League Against the Sonic Boom—who claimed that this type of aircraft would generate "the loudest noise" ever heard, or the equivalent to a bomb going off.
"If that was the case there would have been a noise limit, not a speed limit," says Scholl.
Fourteen years after the Concorde was grounded, private companies are on the verge of bringing supersonic air travel back. And this time it'll be built on sound economic principles.
To circumvent the overland travel ban, Boom Technology's aircraft will mainly fly over water. And the company has devised a new form factor for the plane: a three engine jet that can carry up to 55 passengers and flies more than twice the speed of sound.
"My personal favorite feature is a cup holder that is nowhere close to where you put your laptop," says Scholl.
Boom expects to charge $5,000 round trip from New York to London. A ticket for the Concorde set its passengers back about $15,000 in today's dollars.
Scholl's company isn't alone in its quest to speed up air travel. It has several private competitors, and NASA is working with the engineering firm Lockheed Martin to come up with its own version of a supersonic plane. The difference? Boom's demonstrator jet will cost roughly $30 million compared to NASA's plane, which is expected to cost at least $300 million when completed.
"Private industry is able to do this roughly at an order of magnitude cheaper than government and also without requiring any taxpayer money," states Scholl.
Current regulations will prevent companies like Boom from offering supersonic flights between California and New York. Before they can enter that market, the FAA would need to overturn its ban on overland travel.
"Reverse that and now New York to San Francisco could be 2 hours and 20 minutes," says Scholl.
Boom revealed its design for the XB-1 demonstrator jet last November, and is working with Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic to build and test the prototype in 2017. They aim to start flying commercial air passengers in the early 2020s.
"We're fans of speed so we're doing this as quickly as possible," states Scholl. Boom's calculates that if supersonic flight can catch on with business travelers market forces will do their work by improving technology and bringing down costs—making supersonic flight accessible to more people.
"Nobody wants a longer flight," says Scholl. "This is a chance for airlines to make it significantly faster."
Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Austin Bragg. Additional footage courtesy Boom Technology, Department of Defense, and NASA. Music by Vibe Tracks, Jason Farnham, & Audionautix. Cycles by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Subscribe to our podcast at iTunes.
The post Here Comes Supersonic Flight: The Rebirth of a Former White Elephant appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>