Thursday Open Thread

What's on your mind?

Comments

[apedad]

Justice Department Reaches Settlement with Withlacoochee River Electric Cooperative Inc. to Enforce the Rights of United States Army National Guard Member

“The Department of Justice announced today that it has reached a settlement agreement resolving allegations that the Withlacoochee River Electric Cooperative Inc. (WREC) terminated U.S. Army National Guard Staff Sergeant Garrett Woodard when he returned from military service in violation of the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994 (USERRA).”

OK, the (little bit of) libertarian and rightish-leaning on economic issues in me feels a little uneasy about USERRA.

If I’m a company and I hire someone to do a job, obviously I expect them to be at work (with normal PTO, etc. exceptions).

And while many defense-related companies ask about military affiliation (due to ethics requirements), many (most?), non-defense company don’t ask.

So all of a sudden, my employee comes up to me and says, “Hey, I’m leaving for six months for military duty. See you when I get back,” and not only do I have to accept that, I have to ensure they have the same job/benefits, etc., when they return.

BTW, I’m retired military so I’m not bashing the “military” aspect.
I can see how this could be a tough swallow for some companies.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-reaches-settlement-withlacoochee-river-electric-cooperative-inc-enforce

[Brett Bellmore]

No, I can understand why it's tough to swallow, especially for smaller companies where the guy might not have any ready replacement.

The government does it, because otherwise practically nobody could enlist in the National Guard. But they really ought to find some way to compensate the companies, less stick and more carrot.

[Noscitur a sociis]

So all of a sudden, my employee comes up to me and says, “Hey, I’m leaving for six months for military duty. See you when I get back,” and not only do I have to accept that, I have to ensure they have the same job/benefits, etc., when they return.

An employee must provide advance notice to the employer before their service begins to be entitled to reemployment, and the employer can refuse if it would create an undue hardship, or if their circumstances have changed so as to make reemployment impossible or unreasonable.

[David Welker]

That company would not even exist in a free country except for the sacrifices of our military.

Requiring reasonable accommodations for members of the military so that they can pursue civilian careers along with military service is both reasonable and necessary for national security.

[Brett Bellmore]

"That company would not even exist in a free country except for the sacrifices of our military."

So? A general principle behind our government's operation is that the costs of general benefits are to be born generally. Not by designated fall guys.

So, the government needs land for a public building or a road, the fact that the property owner is among the beneficiaries does not mean that the government can just take the land, and say, "Sucks to be you!". No, the government has to pay fair market value, and levy a general tax.

Why shouldn't the same principle apply here? Pay the company enough to hire a temporary replacement, and finance it from general revenue? After all, it's not as though the company were the ONLY beneficiary of having a military...

[David Welker]

It is usually better for costs to be divided more evenly, assuming that is more efficient.

But in the case of employment, employees develop firm-specific skills that may not be easily transferable. In that case, employers are the lowest cost provider of the benefit of ensuring that the citizen-soldier can develop a civilian career while still serving the country.

I would not be adverse to subsidizing some of the cost to companies negatively impacted so that the burden is more widely shared by the whole society. But entirely paying for replacement employees, as you suggest, would likely be overly generous and exceed the costs of the accommodation.

[Brett Bellmore]

"It is usually better for costs to be divided more evenly, assuming that is more efficient."

It's not just a matter of efficiency, but also incentives and feedbacks. To the extent government can impose specific costs to finance general benefits, in a democracy, it stops mattering politically whether the expenditures make any sense from a cost/benefit standpoint. That's what is so insidious about 'progressive' taxation.

You can have a program that imposes $100 of costs to create $50 of benefits, which is a net cost to society, and if the $50 of benefits are distributed widely, and the $100 of costs are narrowly concentrated, it wins every vote.

Not spreading the cost of general benefits around generally creates perverse incentives!

[David Welker]

The world already has and always will have imperfect incentives. For example, the incentive to fire the citizen-soldier for serving their country out of convenience.

As I said, I am not opposed to a reasonable subsidy to help spread the costs of accommodation. But unreasonably high subsidies would create their own problematic incentives.

The government will never be able to calculate optimal incentives perfectly. That is OK, because the world did not start out with a perfect set of incentives in the first place. The case for government action is not perfection, but instead an improvement over the incentives that would exist absent the government action.

The same sort of theory goes for self-driving cars. Such cars do not need to be perfect to improve safety. They just have to be more safe than humans.

[Ridgeway]

It is basically the same as FMLA. Although FMLA is shorter (12 weeks max IIRC), the likelihood a given worker will utilize it is greater than that they will get deployed militarily.

[dwb68]

Failure of economics literacy: People don't understand that productivity (doing more with less human input) is what raises living standards, not throwing money at people. Throwing more money at people rarely helps. If government is inherently a service, is it doomed to Baumol's disease? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

[Krychek_2]

In general I agree with that, with the following caveat: Thanks to automation, we are eventually going to reach a point at which there aren't enough jobs to go around. When that point comes, we may have no choice but to do some form of a guaranteed income. That day is not here yet, but it will eventually get here.

[ThePublius]

People have been saying that since the dawn of the industrial revolution, and I don't think it will ever happen. Technological advances will drive new employment opportunities, not reduce them; people will just be doing jobs with higher value.

FWIW, try to find a plumber, carpenter, plasterer - any tradesman now. They are in woefully short supply.

[TwelveInchPianist]

"Technological advances will drive new employment opportunities, not reduce them; people will just be doing jobs with higher value."

And keep in mind that the appropriate principle here is comparative advantage, not absolute advantage. If people are relatively more efficient at doing some things than others compared to machines, it still makes sense to use people.

[Stephen Lathrop]

TwelveInch, now figure in cuts to benefits costs, and to employer Social Security contributions, which both subsidize employers to cut workers.

Note also that the principle of comparative advantage depends on an unstated assumption—that workers are fungible. Almost all the workers have to be able to move into almost any job. If they are not able to do that, the principle is bunk. The rust belt experiment on that is nearly complete. The results point strongly toward bunk.

That's why my labor economist friends are hard-put to defend comparative advantage anymore. They still believe in it, but they seem to think they have to repair it big time. And they have no clue what repairs to make. Pointed questions elicit deflections—about how they can only trust the math, it's up to the political process to solve the problems.

[TwelveInchPianist]

1. Benefit costs are just like any other labor costs.
2. If you don't like how labor is taxed compared to capital gains, you are free to change it.
3. Nobody is assuming anything about fungibility. Transition costs are a fixed cost of production.
4. The concept of economic specialization is not bunk. If you believe that, you have some serious misunderstandings.

[Stephen Lathrop]

TwelveInch:

1. Assume single-payer health care, as an all-government program. If that happens, does it change private sector economic incentives to replace workers with machines?

2. That is relevant how?

3. When you say, "Transition costs are a fixed cost of production," you assume fungibility of labor. You assume further that it will be accomplished, and thus assume also an affordable transition cost to accomplish it.

In the rust belt, successful fungibility of labor is little to be found. Degradation of labor abounds. Why?

4. Considered purely as a mathematical hypothesis, national economic specialization appears mathematically valid. As policy hypotheses, even valid mathematical axioms cannot be proved mathematically. They must be proved empirically, as policy experiments.

Without that proof, economic axioms are empty rationalism, no better than crackpot ideology. This nation's experiment with comparative advantage has become multi-generational. Where is the empirical success?

5. Why should anyone suppose without proof the success of policy to make a nation an economic specialist, if to accomplish that it becomes necessary to disable economic specialization among its workers? That is what fungibility of labor demands. Given long-term empirical evidence that trade-off has not worked in the U.S., why keep doing it?

[Archibald Tuttle]

People have been saying that since the dawn of the industrial revolution, and I don't think it will ever happen. Technological advances will drive new employment opportunities, not reduce them; people will just be doing jobs with higher value.

People have been saying that tech will create more jobs than it destroys for the past 60 years. That doesn't make it true or false.

If the technological singularity in 2047 really does take 100% of jobs away from people, we'll be living in a period of abundance. UBI would be only a temporary band aid hardly worth of mention because the whole concept of money goes away in a world dominated by abundance.

[Brett Bellmore]

That's the same mistake you get in these "Pareto efficient" defenses of programs: Just because a given cost creates more benefits than the costs, and so you could afford to compensate the person the costs fall on and still have a surplus, doesn't mean they DO get so compensated.

Suppose the technological singularity in 2047 takes away effectively 100% of the jobs, but the nanofactories are controlled by only 5% of the population? It's good to be a member of that 5%, but sucks to be anybody else, because you've got nothing they need, to trade for 'your' share of their machines' production!

[David Nieporent]

That makes precisely zero sense. What would be the benefit of owning a factory that makes things that one can't sell because there's nobody with money to buy them?

[Stephen Lathrop]

Nieporent, that is an excellent question to ask now, before continuing polices which are plainly headed in that irrational direction.

[Brett Bellmore]

The benefit is that it can still make what YOU want. And things that you can trade/sell with other people who are still capable of producing something you need.

I'm saying that replicators don't automatically benefit people without them, if those people have nothing people with replicators need. Instead of bringing general prosperity, the singularity could just result in its beneficiaries disappearing from the larger economy, because they don't need the larger economy anymore.

You want a capitalist economy that's good for everybody? Everybody needs to be a capitalist. People without capital or valuable skills fare badly under any sort of system, and as automation advances, the sorts of skills that are valuable get less common.

[David Nieporent]

I'm saying that replicators don't automatically benefit people without them, if those people have nothing people with replicators need. Instead of bringing general prosperity, the singularity could just result in its beneficiaries disappearing from the larger economy, because they don't need the larger economy anymore.

I mean, yes, in theory that's exactly what would happen in this ridiculous hypothetical, and it would therefore have no effect on everyone else.

The technology is confusing you. Just think about a hypothetical where someone lives on a farm and is self-sufficient; he doesn't need to buy anything you have. Would that affect you? No. You would just do business with everyone else.

The way one would be affected is if the ratio were exactly the opposite of the one you posit: if 95% of people were self-sufficient, and 5% were not. The 5% would have a hard time. But that's pretty much the way it is now: the small percentage of people who are unproductive are subsidized by the bulk of the population.

[Brett Bellmore]

I've often thought that it's expectation of that day which is inspiring the UBI movement. And Western governments' otherwise inexplicable lack of concern about the birth dearth.

But the implications are rather dystopian, if you think about it. Rather like Kornbuth's The Marching Morons. Or maybe Wells' The Time Machine.

First, getting paid for doing nothing really rots the soul. It's demoralizing, if you've got a normal psychology. (In the Marching Morons, the masses were given make work they were too stupid to realize wasn't accomplishing anything useful.)

Second, picture a world where almost all the production is a result of capital owned by a tiny, tiny fraction of the population, and the complex labor of a small fraction of the population. And almost everybody else is a dead loss.

In the long run, it has to occur to the people doing the work, and controlling the machines, that their lives would be so much better if they didn't have to share the fruits of their labors with a bunch of parasites. That's the Marching Morons fork.

Or they find some use for the teaming masses, who won't have much choice in the matter, because they're not doing anything at all the people responsible for supporting them actually need. The Time Machine fork. Only probably not actually eating them, as such. But the use could be pretty degrading.

In reality, those teaming masses on the dole do have a job: Voting. And that's all: You have a democracy, the teaming masses provide the votes to justify ordering the productive around. Until the productive find a way to escape the situation, and in the mean while this requires the masses to be properly indoctrinated, so they don't get uppity.

I think this is a dystopia we really need to avoid. We're starting to understand the genetics of intelligence, even though the modern Lysenkoists are fighting it every inch of the way, because they don't like what the data is telling them. Ideally, we find a way to uplift the masses, so that they CAN be productive.

Or we radically decentralize, a pastoral future where every family is self supporting on a modest plot of land, and you do external work only for luxuries you need to get from others.

But let's avoid the dystopia where most people are dead weight, sooner or later dead weight gets dropped.

[Sarcastr0]

There are plenty of non-cynical ways for UBI to go. Other countries have UBI, and none of those dystopias have materialized.

People are better, and seek fulfillment beyond material things, more than you think

[TwelveInchPianist]

"Other countries have UBI, and none of those dystopias have materialized."

What other countries?

[BravoCharlieDelta]

An all white Nordic country with kings/queens, state churches, reasonable abortion restrictions and voter ID I bet.

[Sarcastr0]

Alaska isn't a country, but they have it IIRC
Kenya.
I think Iceland.
Italy had a pilot like a year ago.

[Armchair Lawyer]

Alaska has a dividend fund for its residents, based off oil revenue. It's maybe $2,000 a year in a good year. $1000 a year in a poor year.

Kenya has a trial program for 14,000 people. It's not universal.

Iceland does not.

There are lots of "pilot studies" at various times, on small scale. But no country actually has a universal basic income for all its citizens.

[Sarcastr0]

Alaska sure looks like it. But also it's...Alaska.

[Brett Bellmore]

As remarked, Alaska's UBI is tiny compared to living expenses.

[Armchair Lawyer]

Indeed.

[Armchair Lawyer]

Again, Alaska is something of a special situation, because of what it is exactly.

The Alaska Permanent Fund isn't really set up as a "universal basic income". It's an effect of the state's oil revenue. The state of Alaska basically runs off its oil revenue and royalties. 56% of Alaska's total budget (and 90% of its discretionary income) come from oil revenue....Royalties, production taxes, etc. Another 19% of Alaska's budget comes from the Federal Government. And another 19% comes from investment revenue (from the Alaska Permanent fund).

You'll note what's missing here. Alaska doesn't have an income tax. They don't have a sales tax. And there's no state property tax (there's local property taxes). Unlike just about every other state, Alaska just doesn't tax its citizens. And it can get away with it because of the vast oil revenue it has. So, when you're swimming in THAT much money...you can afford to give some of it to the citizens. It's not a "redistribution" like most UBIs...because the state isn't taking anything from the citizens in the first place.

[Sarcastr0]

I don't see the distinction on where the money comes from.

Brett's point that until it's full support it's not a good example is a good one. Yours is not.

[TwelveInchPianist]

UBI is by definition unconditional, Alaska's system is contingent on oil revenue.

[Armchair Lawyer]

"I don't see"

That much is clear. But to reiterate..

1. It's a very small portion of actual living expenses
2. It's conditional on oil revenue
3. The only way it works at all, even on a small amount, is with a government that is so obscenely well off that it doesn't need to directly tax its citizens at all. No sales tax, no income tax

[Sarcastr0]

Conditional on oil revenue means the number changes, but it never goes away.

Seems a pretty fine distinction to me.

[Sarcastr0]

Finland? Or one of those Scandinavian countries. Denmark?

I could Google but I'm busy.

[TwelveInchPianist]

lol. Not too busy to make the claim, but too busy to support the claim. Sounds about right.

[Brett Bellmore]

I think you're being a bit too optimistic, you can see that sort of dystopia starting to take shape in many countries. Places where most of the population is on the dole don't look like art colonies, they look like ghettos.

And for the most part UBIs are only on an experimental basis as yet.

I will say that they seem not to be terribly damaging as long as they're not remotely enough to live off of.

[Don Nico]

"Other countries have UBI"
How big are those as a fraction of average income and in which countries?

[Brett Bellmore]

Here's the data I found.

[TwelveInchPianist]

I don't see anything resembling UBI in there.

[Brett Bellmore]

If that stuff isn't UBI, then it hasn't actually been tried.

Which, yeah, it really hasn't, except for temporary, small scale experiments. Nobody is doing it large scale at a level high enough to allow people to skip working.

[Don Nico]

As I expected those "UBIs" represent a small boost in the income to recipients rather than any sizable fraction of the basic minimum income for a family (say something in the range of ~$40K/year (taxable) in the US for a family of 4.
So the experiment has not really been tried. beyond the usual "tax credits" in the US.

[Brett Bellmore]

On a "don't have to work" scale, nobody can AFFORD to do UBI. Well, nobody inclined to do it can afford it.

[Kevin Smith]

If that is your standard you will likely never see UBI truly implemented. The reason is developed countries already have a lot of welfare programs, and those aren't likely to be eliminated anytime soon, so it only takes a small boost in cash income (if even that much) to put a family of 4 into that 40k equivalent range. My sister in law for example easily receives north of 40k in benefits for her family of 4, between her housing voucher, food stamps, medicaid, energy assistance, free school lunch for the kids, and numerous other free/reduced cost services.

Since removing those benefits will be a poison pill to any UBI, as would deducting their costs from a UBI payment (which would result in wealthier families who don't rely on those programs receiving higher payments that the poor families who do) no true UBI program is likely to pass, here or anywhere else with existing social welfare system

[Don Nico]

It isn't a "standard," but it is a real amount that people could live on with all other entitlements except veterans benefits eliminated. Kids under 18 would also get benefits up to a total of $20K per family. The total cost would be $6.5K per yer
The clawback from taxes would be large. And eliminating the entitlements AND their bureaucracies effectively clawbackeven more for a total "savings" of $3T.
As for your sister-in-law, she would not lose out it would be at less cost to the taxpayer. The drawback is NOT your "poison pill," but the overall cost of $3.5T.
So why are you enamored of existing social welfare systems? They cost a lot, are a hastle for recipients and are complicated to administer. Under the UBI, everyone files a tax return. The only bureaucracy one needs for the UBI is the IRS and the Veterans Administration

[Kevin Smith]

I think you missed my point entirely. You will never see UBI passed that includes the elimination of all other welfare, that is the "poison pill" because congress will never pass a law that eliminates other forms welfare, even to replace it with a superior system. So once again, if that is the standard by which you define UBI, you will never see it, here nor anywhere else.

[Don Nico]

Kevin,
You underestimate the greed of the voters.
But if the preservation of the entitlement bureaucracy is sacrosanct then the Social Security system. And there will never be any meaningful UBI except of pittance payments to buy votes in election years

[Don Nico]

..then the Social Security fund is in trouble.

That got left out.

[Commenter_XY]

Please name them: These countries that have actually implemented UBI (successfully?)

[David Welker]

"First, getting paid for doing nothing really rots the soul."

This assumes you can't figure out how to spend your time. But a lot of people know how to do something that they believe to be productive. And that is a skill that can be learned. Assuming that one must work for someone else in order to fulfill the needs of the "soul" is rather bizarre.

"And almost everybody else is a dead loss."

This assumes that the value of a person comes from property ownership. But why wouldn't people who merely own property ALSO
be a "dead loss" according to your mental model?

"Gain" or "loss" is a mental concept, not an objective concept. We consider certain arrangements of atoms in the universe to be more pleasing, but it isn't objectively so. Implicitly, you are saying that everyone else is a "dead loss" from the perspective of people who own property. But really, that is actually already the case. Billionaires do not have more of their personal needs met by the mere existence of most people. A person is a "gain" for the people who know and care about them. Most others are indifferent. This is why most deaths are not featured on the news, but a whole lot of less important stories do.

"the people responsible for supporting them actually need"

If the machines are doing all of the work (including repairing the machines that break, and repairing the machines that repair the machines that break), why would you assume it is "people" who would be supporting society?

[Jmaie]

"Assuming that one must work for someone else in order to fulfill the needs of the "soul" is rather bizarre."

Agreed, but I'm not all that sure a majority of folks have the imagination or self-direction to deal with not working. I've known a few folks who, upon retirement, watched TV all day and passed away fairly quickly.

The history of the world since the industrial revolution has been about hiding ever-increasing unemployment. Every year governments increase staff to perform unnecessary tasks. Financial and other reporting done only for it's own sake hampers both the public and private sectors. Drastic increase in post-secondary education creating jobs teaching students useless things soon forgotten (at great cost).

And then there's the best invention of all - marketing - driving employment by making things that are sold to people who neither need them nor even knew they wanted them until advertising convinced them otherwise.

Reminds me of the story about a small town lawyer who was mostly starving until a second lawyer moved in.

Cheers.

[Krayt]

Back in college I worked on the garbage/sweeping crew in a factory during summers. One year they had a boss who's life plan was work six months, get them to fire him and max out 6 months of unemployment, rinse repeat.

There's no shortage of desire to game the system and be carried along, and living a bare existence, if no work, is a-ok.

[Sarcastr0]

That's moral hazard.
The existence of assholes doesn't mean you should refuse to help anyone, lest an asshole get unjustly enriched.

[Sarcastr0]

I agree with ThePublius. Capitalism isn't great at everything, but finding stuff for people to do? It's great at that.

[Brett Bellmore]

Yeah, and if we were still a free market economy, I'd be a lot less worried. In a highly regulated crony capitalist society, there's more to worry about.

But the thing is, there's a rising tide, and a lot of boats with heavy anchors, and as the tide rises and the anchor chains go taunt, more and more of those boats are going to take on water.

One of the reasons those jobs ThePublius cites pay well, is that you can't do them if you're not fairly bright. It's the half the population with below average intelligence we have to worry about finding work for.

[David Welker]

The economy has always had high levels of what you call "crony capitalism." And why wouldn't it? That is where the incentives have always led, to a greater or lesser degree.

[Brett Bellmore]

That you can survive a certain parasite load does not mean that there is no parasite load that you couldn't survive. In fact, the level of crony capitalism in America has been rising in lock step with the level of regulatory burden, they go hand in hand.

[David Welker]

I don't think that is true. If anything, I think the government interfered with the economy more previously. Free market ideology is a relatively modern idea. Think about guilds in medieval England, for example.

[Kevin Smith]

Yes are still below historical levels of interference, but to say the government interferes less now than it did 200 years ago is completely false. We are moving farther away from free markets and slowly back towards a feudal system (not saying it will go that far, but we are definitely not moving toward freer markets right now)

[David Welker]

Enforcing slavery seems like the biggest interference with free market principles that I can think of. Having adventurers claim land on behalf of the government and then start wars with natives would also go against the concept of property rights, which is a free market idea. England used to capture American sailors working in commercial enterprises and impress them into the British Navy.

I think the regulations of the past are obviously more severe, both in nature and degree. In contrast, government regulations to protect the commons (e.g. rules against pollution) are both enlightened and arguably really just a re-definition of property rights. (Nobody ever said that you had the right to pollute a river used by many others. To say that you ought to have such a right and that government is interfering in your freedom by preventing from doing so is question-begging.)

[Kevin Smith]

And where do things like requiring 1000 hours of cosmetology school in order to wax eyebrows fall vis-a-vis property rights or protecting the commons?

[Don Nico]

S_O,
I suggest that one study the evolution of employment opportunities in Sweden in which many jobs have been reduced to one with little challenge and the wage scales have be greatly compressed with respect to other EU members. One results is that it has been difficult to retain people at the senior manager level for the most challenging technological projects, especially if they are not native Swedes. They stay on the job long enough to boost their CV and then move on to more lucrative jobs in the EU elsewhere.
Real data versus thought experiments are far more useful in an age in which AI plus robotics have the potential to perform essential functions in society

[Brett Bellmore]

Basically it doesn't get really ugly until we have advance enough AGI that almost all jobs can be easily automated. Right now most of the boats are still floating with some slack in their anchor chains.

[Stephen Lathrop]

On short anchor chains a rising tide sinks all boats.

[Sarcastr0]

I'll do some Googling around. But that seems like a problem because Sweden is part of the EU, and so is very much not an open system.

I also think America's got a pretty special culture around work.

[David Welker]

That isn't necessarily true for everyone. It seems like some level of unemployment is necessary to create enough slack in labor markets to avoid excessive wage inflation.

Capitalism is good at finding stuff for most people to do. But query, whether the "stuff" that capitalism finds for people to do is actually the most productive. (e.g. is working at Taco Bell really a more productive activity for a single mother than supervising and teaching her own children... that depends on how well she does the supervising and teaching, of course... but capitalism can sometimes take people from more productive activities to less productive ones.)

[Sarcastr0]

I do agree that universal employment is impossible due to the structural effect you outline.

I just don't think automation is going to change that number.

Your point about parenting and homeschooling is a good one and absolutely a blind spot of capitalism. But that's a separate issue from automation making us all unemployed.

[dwb68]

"Thanks to automation, we are eventually going to reach a point at which there aren't enough jobs to go around. "

no.

Its been beat to death in other comments. you are more likely to see space aliens before the labor market dies.

[Kazinski]

I think the inflation, supply chain issues and help wanted signs around the country make it plain we don't need UBI.

What we need is people needing a paycheck and having to work.

I'm fine with foodstamps, or EBT as it's called as our UBI. Of course it does need a little more antifraud tweaks.

[Sarcastr0]

Your goes don't seem to be really pro-social so much as they are pro-work.

That is not the right goal.

[TwelveInchPianist]

"Your goes don't seem to be really pro-social so much as they are pro-work.

That is not the right goal."

Work produces the things we need to consume. You can't be pro-healthcare without being pro-work for healthcare providers.

You can't be anti-hunger without being pro-work for people who produce food. Etc.

[Sarcastr0]

The question is what happens when work becomes unrelated to what we need to consume.

I don't think the answer in such a case is to force people to work for work's sake. Though I am open to other ideas about why people should work, and what they could still produce once needs are met.

[Kazinski]

Someday when we get to the point where consumption is unrelated to work then we can start trying solutions.

The ecomomy's response tostimulus checks, enhanced unemployment benefits, paycheck protection, and eviction moratoriums has shown we are nowhere near that point yet.

So yeah, my response to a government engineered labor shortage is pro-work policies.

[Sarcastr0]

The labor participation rate didn't really go down from those policies though.
The issue was lower tier companies losing workers to higher paying, better work. Not that people were quitting to live off the fat of the land.

And the lower tier companies would rather make due with crappier service and fewer employees than raise their prices. That's what you should think about.

[Brett Bellmore]

Give us a break, Sarcastro. The labor participation rate was perking along at 62.5-63 prior to covid.

In February 2020, when the lockdowns started, it took a nose dive to 60.2%. By mid-2020, when the lockdowns eased off, it was back up to 61.7%, and as of this January had finally gotten back to 62.2%, a number not previously seen since the 1970's.

You've got some goofy, indirect explanation for changes that happened as policy changed. That's just because you're determined not to accept that if you pay people to not work, some of them take you up on the offer.

[Sarcastr0]

To what juncture do you think Kaz's thesis applied? Because it looks to me like you supported my point.

[David Welker]

But part of what makes people productive is incentives. That implies having customers able and willing to pay for your services.

By creating more people able and willing to pay for services, we can increase the incentives for productivity.

[dwb68]

no. This is the kind of socialist thinking the periodically leads to inflation. You can't just send helicopter money. Housing and computer chips are the cause of most of the inflation we see now. If you want cheaper housing or cheaper cars you need to build more of those things. Companies are not investing in either of these things because they don't see permanent changes in demand. They are risk averse. they are not going to build a factory that will last for 20 years nased on 2 years of demand. If they think transportation costs are going to iron themselves out in 18 months, they're just going to ride it out.

if you want to improve productivity in housing, transportation, and factory construction you need to do hard things like preventing lawsuits over rare three headed albino shrimp being displaced. Time is money.

[David Welker]

X can lead to Y (which we like) even if it X leads to some level of inflation or even X isn't a good thing overall. And I think you are confusing whether X is a "net good" (which is a more complicated question) with the narrower question of whether X leads to Y. There is no doubt that a helicopter drop creates incentives to serve the wants and needs of some people who would not otherwise have those wants and needs served. If we were to stop the analysis there, Looking at that narrow question only, I don't think you can say that isn't true.

The optimal level of inflation is probably not zero. After all, inflation creates pressure on people to put their money to work to avoid losing its value. You correctly say that many people are risk adverse (although that is a generalization, some people enjoy and embrace risk), but you don't acknowledge the inflation gives people an incentive to overcome risk aversion.

As far as outsourcing goes, that itself is caused by simplistic adherence to the ideology of free trade, where the United States has subsidized the vicious and brutal Chinese Communist Party based on David Ricardo's incomplete theory of comparative advantage.

People kept on saying that is China become more prosperous, it would also somehow become more free. That prediction has turned out to be wishful thinking.

As for lawsuits protecting three headed albino shrimp, you are right that time is money and such lawsuits increase the cost of production.

[dwb68]

Goods and services serve peoples wants and needs, not money. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at people, if the economy produces only one single apple a year, throwing three trillion dollars at consumers will only result in a single three trillion dollar apple, unless some growers decide to plant trees.

Ask Venezuela or Argentina how well throwing money at consumers works out, when the supply side is broken and corrupt.

The optimal level of inflation is not zero, but not for the reason you mention. It has nothing to do with putting "pressure on people to put their money to work to avoid losing its value. " its because prices and wages are sticky. Krugman (whom I otherwise mostly disagree with politically) has some excellent papers and posts about it from the 2011-2012 financial crisis era.

[David Welker]

Money facilitates trade. Without money, people must resort to barter, which is less efficient.

If the government provides people with liquidity who would not otherwise it, that enables them to escape the need to barter. This is a very large efficiency gain.

I am not saying that helicopter drops don't have costs. But I am saying that they have costs.

You should be arguing that the costs of helicopter drops exceed the benefits. You should not be arguing that they do not have any benefits whatsoever.

[Kazinski]

But the money supply needs to be right sized to the productive capacity of the economy. When the economy is at full productive capacity expanding the money supply won't expand the economy.

And if you expand the money supply too much through transfer payments we have good evidence it reduces the productive capacity of the economy.

Enhanced employment benefits, which were in many cases higher than pre-pandemic wages proved that.

[Brett Bellmore]

"When the economy is at full productive capacity expanding the money supply won't expand the economy."

Doesn't need to be anywhere near full productive capacity for expanding the money supply to not be stimulatory. All you need is for production to not be capable of responding to demand.

Regulation can cause that just as easily as lack of productive capacity.

[Stephen Lathrop]

When the economy is at full productive capacity expanding the money supply won't expand the economy.

Kazinski, where does capital come from? Why would anyone suppose there is some fixed quantity we could refer to as, "full productive capacity?"

[Brett Bellmore]

Well, obviously there isn't in the long run. OTOH, it can take considerable time to ramp up production, and in the meanwhile the increased money is chasing a fixed supply.

[Sarcastr0]

Inflation is happening worldwide. And yet you're sure you know the cause.

Your three headed albino shrimp example is pretty myopic. Yes, if you ignore externalities, you get stuff done faster. That's not the hard thing to do; it's the facile thing to do.

[Kazinski]

Inflation isn't a new phenomenon, it's been well studied, and yes economists do know what causes it.

From the Weimar Republic to Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela there is a common thread of government overprinting money.

We also know from the 70's inflation that quadrupling the price of a basic commodity like oil can set off inflation. Or the ethanol induced corn shortages in Mexico triggered food price inflation in Mexico, which cost Mexicans 1.5-3 billion in higher food prices.

Don't pretend inflation is a huge mystery that nobody knows how it starts, or how to stop it.

It's a lot simpler phenomena than global warming.

[Sarcastr0]

This is bromides. Inflation is understood on a theoretical level. In practice there is always a soup of inflationary and deflationary events/policies going on.

Between the stimulus, supply chain effects, Covid, expectations from the media banging the drum, the cause is not clear to anyone who isn't seeking a conclusion.

As I said, looking worldwide plenty of countries who didn't enact a recent stimulus are experiencing inflation on the same order we are. Like the UK for instance. Which makes it look more like supply chain issues. Or maybe it's our stimulus, and brexit for them.

We don't know. Sorry, real-world economics is hard. If you think it's easy, you're probably actually doing politics.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Nah, he's doing ideology.

[TwelveInchPianist]

"But part of what makes people productive is incentives. That implies having customers able and willing to pay for your services."

But the incentives ultimately take the form of real goods, not currency. There are situations in which increasing the supply of currency can increase demand in ways that lead to increased production of real goods, but in general you can't just print your way to prosperity.

[Brett Bellmore]

You can if you're the guy with the printing press. Not general prosperity, of course, but it works out for the guy printing the money.

Are we sure modern governments actually WANT general prosperity?

[TwelveInchPianist]

Inflation functions more or less like any other tax.

If you're the guy with the printing press, you can get a larger share of real output, but you shrink total real output in the process. So even if you're the guy with the press, you lose eventually.

[David Welker]

Really? Imagine if money did not exist. We would have to resort to barter.

How efficient would that be? It would be so inefficient that we could not have a modern economy. We would live in 3rd world conditions or worse.

You can't accurately say that the optimal level to run the printing press is zero. Acting as though money itself isn't valuable independent of goods and services is simply incorrect. Money is incredibly valuable. It is what allows there to be a modern economy. It is what allows people to trade efficiently.

[TwelveInchPianist]

"You can't accurately say that the optimal level to run the printing press is zero."

I guess it's a good thing I didn't say that, then.

[Brett Bellmore]

Eventually you're dead, so you probably don't care.

[OtisAH]

Fewer employees working twice as hard combined with employing fewer people raises the standard of living? Fascinating.

One question: Whose standard of living?

[TwelveInchPianist]

Seems like a clear sign that politics and journalism are becoming too incestuous when a political sex scandal takes out a news organization.

[CJColucci]

Does anyone know what's wrong with the comment button on JB's post?

[Stephen Lathrop]

God's mercy?

[Don Nico]

Excellent guess. We need respite.

[SimonP]

Maybe he decided he didn't want anyone to point out how stupid his idea was, or how lazy he is for simply re-hashing it four years after his original piece, to pad his Newsweek CV.

[WuzYoungOnceToo]

Maybe he decided he didn't want anyone to point out how stupid his idea was

Wishing you had the same ability?

[TwelveInchPianist]

Why do Dem Senators like to erase black SCOTUS judges?

Schumer: "Until 1981, this powerful body, the Supreme Court, was all White men."

Harry Reid: "One thing we are going to do during this work period sooner rather than later is to ensure that women’s lives are not determined by virtue of five white men."

[ThePublius]

Good point.

"Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993) was an American lawyer and civil rights activist who served as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from October 1967 until October 1991. Marshall was the Court's first African-American justice."

Chuckie was off by only 14 years, though, give him a break!

[Sarcastr0]

Kick ass cherry picking. Whatta dunk!

[Sarcastr0]

Next week I'll post covfefe. Prepare yourselves for an amazing own of Trump.

[TwelveInchPianist]

covfefe doesn't erase black people.

[Sarcastr0]

How do you know what it does?

Also, no black people were actually erased by dumbass one-off gaffes. Your attempt to appropriate woke rhetoric is transparent. When they do it it's often a bit woo woo dumb, and you're managing to be even dumber.

[TwelveInchPianist]

"Also, no black people were actually erased by dumbass one-off gaffes."

Lol. Metaphors, how do they work? Talk about dumb.

[Sarcastr0]

Do...do you think I took erase literally?

[TwelveInchPianist]

"Kick ass cherry picking. Whatta dunk!"

Meh. People are getting fired for saying "lesser" instead of "less qualified."

[Sarcastr0]

And that sucks too. As just about everyone here agrees that's bad. So I don't know who this is for.

Actually I do, it's a weak attempt to dunk on the libs.

[Ben_]

Admiration from the master

[Sarcastr0]

Of all my sins, I don't think generalizing anecdotes is one of them.

[Ridgeway]

I do wonder is Chuck S is losing something off his fastball. Like him or not, he has been a pretty shrewd politician over the years. But is handling of the whole Manchin/Synema situation (including that agreement he made with Manchin and then kept secret from everyone) has been far from deft.

[apedad]

Former Louisville, Kentucky Police Officer Sentenced for Using Excessive Force

“A former Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) officer was sentenced today in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky for using excessive force on an arrestee. U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings sentenced Cory P. Evans, 34, to two years’ imprisonment and two years’ supervised release.
Evans previously pleaded guilty to violating the Constitution by using objectively unreasonable force against an arrestee. When he entered his guilty plea, Evans admitted that on May 31, 2020, while he was working as a part of the LMPD Special Response Team, he followed a group of individuals around downtown Louisville to execute arrests for unlawful assembly and violations of curfew. At an intersection, a person in the group surrendered for arrest by getting on his knees and placing his hands in the air. While that person was kneeling in this position, Evans struck him in the back of the head with a riot stick, which created a wound on the back of the kneeling victim’s head. The victim fell forward and was taken into custody by other LMPD officers.”

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-louisville-kentucky-police-officer-sentenced-using-excessive-force

Former Tennessee Law Enforcement Officer Convicted of Federal Civil Rights Offenses

“Former law enforcement officer Anthony “Tony” Bean was found guilty by a federal court today of violating two arrestees’ civil rights by using excessive force against them. Tony Bean, 61, was convicted following a trial in Chattanooga for using excessive force against two arrestees while he was a law enforcement officer.”

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-tennessee-law-enforcement-officer-convicted-federal-civil-rights-offenses

GOOD!

Can anyone name anything worse than a bad cop?

[Brett Bellmore]

A serial killer?

I can name lots of things worse than bad cops, which is not to say bad cops aren't bad, just that the scale for badness extends a long long way past "abusive cop".

Glad he got time, though, and I hope he's barred from ever being a cop again after he's back on the street.

[Noscitur a sociis]

As a convicted felon, I imagine he will find it awfully difficult to meet the basic job requirements (i.e. carrying a pistol).

[OtisAH]

Brett can name lots of people worse than a corrupt person who has the legal authority to detain, arrest, and in many cases execute without consequence his fellow citizens. Liberals, for example…

[Brett Bellmore]

Well, obviously I can name things worse than a cop who unnecessarily punches suspects. You could, too. Like I said, serial killers, for one. How is a serial killer not worse than a cop who merely punches somebody?

You don't have to put conduct at the top of the 'awful' scale to think it awful.

[Commenter_XY]

Can anyone name anything worse than a bad cop?

A corrupt judge.

[BravoCharlieDelta]

You must love the DC Circuit.

[Bob from Ohio]

"Can anyone name anything worse than a bad cop?"

Murderer, rapist, drug dealer, home invader, child molester, Mafia don. car hijacker, human trafficer, pimp, many other criminals.

He punched a couple of guys in the face. Bad but far worse things happen every day.

[David Welker]

The fact that the person is a cop, who people are supposed to be able to trust, makes it much worse.

Members of a profession dedicated to upholding the law ought not be breaking it.

[David Nieporent]

Can anyone name anything worse than a bad cop?

Donald Trump.

[WuzYoungOnceToo]

Can anyone name anything worse than a bad cop?

If you can't, you should just log off right now and never speak again.

[AmosArch]

I have a tiny amount of crypto and was considering actually getting in for real when I hear my high school nephew talking with one of my other relatives about how he and all his friends were knee deep in trading all the hot coins. I quickly discard the idea....

[Stephen Lathrop]

Could it be that the way to profit from crypto is to go counter-cyclical? Just buy gold while crypto goes up, and sell gold for crypto when crypto goes down? I figure there has to be some interplay between the goldbugs and the crypto guys.

[Kazinski]

Yeah I think Facebook stock is a lot safer.

I see it's down 25% this morning, and lost 250 billion in market cap.

They missed their earnings, and they lost users for the first time.

Probably because they aren't spending enough time suppressing misinformation.

[Jimmy the Dane]

I think the Canadian truckers Freedom Convoy as compared to BLM rioting aptly highlights the difference in treatment you get from the government when it endorses your particular brand of speech.

In the Canadian Freedom Convoy case, looks like they are getting to get the jackboot of the Canadian military in the next 24 hours if they don't leave (or maybe because it is Canada they will get tortured by being put in the comfy chair).

If you a BLM rioter though you not only enjoy limited to non-enforcement of generally applicable laws, but in the case where rioters actually set up an autonomous zone in a state Capitol, they got the support of local and state officials for those actions.

Law and order is only a way one street these days. If you agree with the government then you enjoy its protection. If not, you get the jackboot. That is our current cultural dynamic and it is sad.

[BravoCharlieDelta]

There's three tiers of justice.

Citizens whose views aren't favored by the Federal Class.
Citizens whose views are favored by the Federal Class.
The Federal Class themselves.

By far the most lawless and unaccountable are the people in the Federal Class.

[Stephen Lathrop]

BCD, congratulations, you just summarized Madison, circa 1792.

[Brett Bellmore]

Calling the Ottawa protests ‘peaceful’ plays down non-violent dangers, critics say

“By what common understanding of the term does what we are seeing on the ground, on TV, in our social media feeds qualify as ‘peaceful protest?”’ he wrote. “Is it merely the absence of physical violence and injury? That’s not unimportant but is insufficient as a definitional threshold.”

[RabbiHarveyWeinstein]

Well I think intent matter quite a bit when discussing the legitimacy of a protest movement. The peaceful BLM protests were fighting against a racist police state that uses structural white supremacy to dismiss the dignity and humanity of Black and Brown people. On the other hand, the so called "Freedom Convoy" rioters are violating traffic laws by blocking roadways so they can veto the legitimate guidance of Canada's health care services. These truckers might have a right to not get vaccinated against COVID but they also don't have a right to a job, a credit card, a bank, or a social media account. This doesn't go far enough in my opinion. What about my right to be safe against a horrible virus that naturally spilled over from human encroachment into wild bat roosts.

[BravoCharlieDelta]

You have the right to stay at home wearing your double masks and taking your monthly Pfizer-boost (only $99/mo some restrictions apply)

[Jmaie]

RabbiHarveyWeinstein is almost never serious, he's mostly a troll**. I can understand you missing this if you're new here, this was actually one of his least over-the-top comments.

** I don't mean this in a bad way, I often enjoy his exaggerations...

[BravoCharlieDelta]

He must've been doing his Sarcastro impression. Nailed it.

[John F. Carr]

Are you saying we should feed Justin Trudeau to vampire bats?

[RabbiHarveyWeinstein]

No. I'm saying that China needs stricter zoning laws for housing and people wishing to own bats should be required to obtain a license.

[WuzYoungOnceToo]

Are you saying we should feed Justin Trudeau to vampire bats?

Your ideas intrigue me and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.

[jb]

Hopefully this is obvious to everyone, but Canada is a different place with different law enforcement responding than where (almost all of the) BLM protests happened last year.

[Kazinski]

The truckers have probably made their point, they should probably go home now.

And stay there another month.

Then see what Trudeau has to say.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

The truckers afflicting Canada have inclined me to root for accelerated development and implementation of driverless trucks.

They may have plenty of time to reflect on self-improvement soon enough.

[Voize of Reazon]

It's odd that truckers are the ones demanding an exemption. If I am going to mandate prophylactic measures in a pandemic my two highest priorities will be 1. Healthcare workers 2. Anyone who is constantly traveling and interacting with lots of different people along the way.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Wondering about what happens to Social Security viability after automation starts to really take over the economy. Machines replace people in multiples, but pay neither employee contributions nor employer contributions. Erstwhile workers get more needy as jobs get scarcer. The ability to meet their inevitably increasing Social Security program claims declines. That looks like it could go off the rails faster than anyone projects.

[Jimmy the Dane]

The real thing that makes me wonder is what if the futurists are right and life expectation is about to almost double. Society as a whole is going to need to be restructured and the notion of "retirement" is probably going to be ancient history.

[Brett Bellmore]

That's what I'm hoping: I'm 63 now, and think I might go on SS at 67, but in an ideal world some time in my 70's I get a letter in the mail from SS offering rejuvenation in return for my SS going away.

[Jimmy the Dane]

The extended life expectancy is really two fold:
1. There is stopping the aging process. This is actually "easier" to do through current technology.
2. Then there is reversing the damage of aging. This appears to be a lot harder to do and might be impossible.

So for those who have already had the damage of the passage of time it might be too late, at least for modern technology. For those who have not though, they might be able to enjoy the extended expectancy more so.

[Brett Bellmore]

I actually follow this quite a bit.

There are different categories of "damage of aging". Some of them are more susceptible to repair than others.

For instance, tissues accumulate senescent cells. These cells don't just sit there occupying space and consuming resources without doing their jobs. They typically secrete a variety of toxins. There are different approaches to getting rid of them, none seem to be universally effective, but getting rid of them does appear to have a rejuvenating effect. (I've personally experimented with some anti-senescents, with some success.)

Tissues accumulate sugar cross-links between proteins; This tends to stiffen up connective tissues, it's one of the reasons blood pressure rises as you get older, and you develop wrinkles. These cross links could be broken, restoring youthful flexibility. A good deal of progress being made here.

Mitochondria have their own DNA, and it is under heavy attack from free radicals. Occasionally mutant mitochondria take over a cell, and that's a major cause of senescence. In theory they could be replaced. Some experimental success in this area.

With each cell division telomeres on the ends of DNA shorten, when they get short enough working DNA gets eroded. You can lengthen telomeres, but they're a major defense against cancer, so it's risky.

When your body plan is laid out, long range connectivity in the CNS is established, and the cells that are responsible for this can't be replaced, and occasionally die. If nothing else got you, you'd eventually mentally fall apart, a bunch of healthy "chips" on a PC board where the traces have all gone away. Hard to see how this can be fixed short of Drexlerian nanotechnology.

The bottom line is that I think you could take somebody in their 70's, fix a bunch of stuff, and you'd get a very healthy 70 year old person, they wouldn't look young, but they'd be generally functional. Getting beyond that to actual youth would be difficult.

[BravoCharlieDelta]

You can always go the Moloch/adrenochrome route that’s super popular among the elites these days.

[Brett Bellmore]

Nah, my son is afraid of needles.

[Armchair Lawyer]

This assumes automation will end up reducing employment on scale. And yet....decades, even centuries have automation have demonstrated that workers move to other fields.

To give a nice example, Agriculture and Ranching used to employ over 80% of American workers. Due to automation and increased productivity, today just 1.3% of Americans are employed in Agriculture.

If you had said in 1810 that more than 95% of jobs for people in agriculture would disappear due to automation and productivity gains, leading to the loss of employment of more than 75% of the population....what will all the workers do?

But then look at things today...

[Roman Moroni]

What happens when automation becomes so cheap that the cost of gathering materials and making everything by robots is pretty much nothing? Unless governments decide to regulate the economy and screw everything up, the paupers of the future will live better than the billionaires of today.

[Brett Bellmore]

What happens when everybody who wants to can afford to breed like bacteria in a culture medium, because they don't have to do anything else with their time to eat?

Just because we're currently seeing a birth dearth on account of people having to decide between having children or an elevated standard of living, doesn't mean it wouldn't still be possible to have overpopulation if you could have your kids AND standard of living.

[Kevin Smith]

How many people really want to " breed like bacteria in a culture medium" though? I don't see many people choosing to have more than 2 or 3 kids, and even the ones that do choose to have more rarely go past 5. Plenty of people will still choose not to have any kids (since you won't need anyone to financially support you in old age) so I think the population growth will remain sustainable

[Brett Bellmore]

The future belongs to those who show up for it. If any subculture reacts to prosperity by having lots of kids, and having lots of kids doesn't involve any negative feedback, they eventually dominate the population.

[Kevin Smith]

Culture isn't hereditary though, just because your parents had lots of kids doesn't mean you will too. A culture that encourages lots of kids isn't guaranteed to propagate. From my personal experience, people who grew up in households with lots of kids tend to have fewer themselves, because they've seen the stress and chaos of lots of kids

[Brett Bellmore]

Culture is close enough to hereditary, if you raise your own children.

[Kazinski]

The problem with kids isn't that it's hard having them, it's the 24 hours a day job after they are born.

[Stephen Lathrop]

What happens when automation becomes so cheap that the cost of gathering materials and making everything by robots is pretty much nothing?

Moroni, you did not mention it explicitly, but implicit in your premise is unlimited energy at zero cost. Some folks think means might become available to deliver that. If so, you would get the ultimate dystopia. Everything would become an ore.

[Jmaie]

There's a robotic burger place in San Francisco that uses just enough human labor to repair the robot and refill the hoppers from time to time. Makes 400 burgers an hour. They can sell their product for a buck less than the competition and make bank, right up until someone opens up a competing robot restaurant. Quickly thereafter the cost to buy a burger will drop to cost plus a small margin.

Cost for the consumer will drop but so will profits and the thence the Treasury's ability to collect enough in taxes to pay for the non-productive population. Of course we can just go full modern monetary theory and print enough money to pay UBI.

[bernard11]

I think this is the fallacy of composition.

If, society-wide, technology makes us more productive - turning out way more burgers or widgets or washing machines than we do now - there will be ample sources of funds fir the Treasury.

Remember, as Adam Smith taught us, that it is productivity that is the source of the national wealth. Get more productive and you get wealthier.

[Kazinski]

I don't think you understand business very well.

First of all what's the price elasticity of demand for robot made hamburgers?

Second you are supposing burgers are fungible, that RobotoA burger is exactly the same as RobotoB burger with exactly the same size ingredients and taste.

Don't try to tell burger lovers that McDonald's, Burger King, In'N'Out, and Carl's Jr are all the same.

[Brett Bellmore]

Well, obviously they're not. You'd have a much, much easier time distinguishing a Big Mac from a Whopper, (Let alone a Hip Burger!) than you would distinguishing two supposedly wildly different bottles of red wine.

But robotic burger makers allow the burger chains to converge on a better hamburger patty; There's very little question about what makes THAT taste better, it's just that just some chains are better set up logistically to approach the optimum patty.

Still room to distinguish themselves by the bun and veggies, of course. But you might see something more like those robotic soda mixing machines in some places, (Like Firehouse subs) that let you customize your soda.

If I could get a Whopper with Hip Burger patties, that would be ideal!

[Commenter_XY]

lathrop, the SSA program changes, is what happens = what happens to Social Security viability after automation starts to really take over the economy

People get too worked up about SSA. The problems with SSA financing and viability are eminently (but not easily) fixable. SSA is not going to disappear anytime soon, and probably never will. But the program itself will change. That, I am certain about.

[Ben_]

Making up stories about the future and then worrying about them seems self-defeating.

[bernard11]

For once, we agree.

[Don Nico]

If one had a true UBI, say $20K per year per adult then there is no need for Social Security.
BUT (and it is a large BUT) the cost for the US after all the clawbacks and elimination of vast welfare bureaucracies is in the range of $3T per year

[WuzYoungOnceToo]

If one had a true UBI, say $20K per year per adult then there is no need for Social Security.

Tell that to the "$15/hr minimum wage" advocates.

[Eugène de Rastignac]

I've been thinking about whether the GULC/Shapiro fiasco makes Dean Treanor's dreams of being a university president more or less achievable.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

He's probably off the list for all of the conservative-controlled -- fourth-tier (or unranked), nonsense-teaching, censorship-shackled, dogma-enforcing, hayseed-producing, science-suppressing -- campuses.

[RabbiHarveyWeinstein]

Has anyone heard of the recent ban on the graphic novel 'Maus' in McMinn County, Tennessee? Some anti-Semitic rubes thought they had license to ban a book because it was vulgar and contained graphic nudity....of mice! Well, I not sorry to say it but the Shoah was graphic! Over 6 millions Jews died and these hicks think they can cancel history because the TRUTH is somehow related to "critical race theory" (another racist dog whistle courtesy of Faux News). 'Maus' is an excellent Holocaust book for education. The Jews are depicted as gentle and well meaning mice while the Germans are ruthless, bloodthirsty cats. Child need to learn that the Germans are natural savages and the German people have a collective blood curse for eternity because of the Shoah. Does anyone know of any legal recourse to get Maus back into McMinn county schools? We can't let these anti-Semite cancel history!

[Brett Bellmore]

Because the Holocaust actually involved mice? That's the only way this would be canceling history, after all.

Yeah, it's pointlessly stupid, but as long as they're actually teaching the history, it's just "We don't want the kids reading comic books in class" stupid.

[RabbiHarveyWeinstein]

It is a graphic novel, not a comic book!
Check your facts.

[Roman Moroni]

The Rabbi is making an attempt at satire. It only kind of succeeds when he starts talking about German blood lust and being cursed forever.

His problem is that he’s so anti Semitic that he thinks it should be obvious that blaming the Nazis for killing Jews is as ridiculous as suggesting we eat the poor.

Jonathan Swift he ain’t.

[RabbiHarveyWeinstein]

Wrong! I object over two issues, one related to the comic book and one more general to Holocaust education. With respect to the book, I dislike the use of mice and cats to represent Jews and Nazis / Germans. I think it is inappropriate to try to use a hunter / prey relationship between cats and mice to represent the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a crime committed by humans against fellow humans. Does Maus show a cat version of Oskar Schindler (a Nazi party member btw) sheltering Jewish mice from certain death? My second issue related to more general Holocaust education is the gradual process of devaluing human life until industrial mass murder was acceptable. The first people systemically murdered by the Third Reich were the mentally and physically disabled people whose lives were thought of unworthy of life. Does Maus depict handicapped cats being wheeled into a gas chamber with the exhaust fumes of a truck piped in? My point is that mass murder doesn't happen suddenly or because some ethnicities are natural predators. Mass murder happens because of a gradual devaluing of human life. How can intra-ethnic massacres like the Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward, and the Khmer Rouge's Year Zero happen when everyone is a Maus?

[Brett Bellmore]

Oh, I'm sorry, I got the impression you liked Maus as a teaching tool. Personally, I think it's better than nothing, but the alternative isn't nothing, it's actually teaching the Holocaust.

[uncomfortable truths]

Unintended consequences of the race war. Two recent news stories: Human Rights Campaign Sued for Racial Bias by Its First Black Leader, and Brian Flores suing the NFL for discrimination, make it clear that hiring minority candidates in the contemporary environment of poorly crafted anti-discrimination laws poses greater risk than hiring other candidates. This ultimately undermines any benevolent intent behind such legislation and ultimately harms the "beneficiaries" of these laws.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

The Ilya Shapiro story confirms that better schools -- reason-based, highly ranked, liberal-libertarian, mainstream, modern -- should avoid hiring conservatives, particularly movement conservatives, for faculty or administrative positions. Let the clingers work at conservative-controlled campuses that prefer the bigotry, the backwardness, the disdain of science and reason, etc.

The Volokh Conspiracy supports that conclusion, too.

[RabbiHarveyWeinstein]

Finally! A Volokh poster willing to stand up for truth, justice, and the American way.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

The American way is this: The liberal-libertarian mainstream shapes our national progress against conservative wishes and efforts as cranky old clingers take their stale, ugly thinking to the grave and are replaced in an improving nation by younger, better, more diverse, reasoning Americans.

[Fyathyrio]

Serious question, one I've wondered about for years. Why do American Jews overwhelmingly vote for the political party that wants them disarmed and helpless, while that same party gives full-throated support to the Jew's most violent enemies?

(If you want, you can replace Jew with Black in the question above, curious about that, too.)

[ThePublius]

There's a ton out there on this topic - books, articles, etc.

Here's a pretty good one, I think:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/02/jewish-americans-vote-democratic

[RabbiHarveyWeinstein]

The only people who give full-throated support to the most violent enemies of the Jews are the Republicans who enable white supremacist rubes to carry weapons of war! What gives a man the right to carry a tool capable of massacring dozens? Should there be no limits on the Second Amendment? Does every citizen have the right to carry extended clips, grenade launcher capable Picatinny rails, and telescopic sniper scopes?

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

Your schtick is already wearing thin, Harv.

[Roman Moroni]

I’ll take the question seriously.

I’m ethnically Jewish but atheist and libertarian so your question doesn’t directly apply to me. But it did get me thinking about what Jews had to fear historically and why.

I’m guessing that gun rights for the purpose of defending themselves against the State or against a populist anti Semitic movement taking control isn’t high on the list of concerns for modern American Jews. But should it be?

Well that got me thinking about the reasons behind past persecution. For most of the Christian dominated era Jews were hated for religious reasons and suspiciously keeping to themselves rather than integrating into local societies. People tended to focus a lot on the Christ killing and money lending, but not so much the ethnic or racial thing. After all, some of the best Christians started out as Jews. The best one even. So that type of bigotry came later. Even during the inquisition the well meaning Christians only wanted them to convert so their souls could be saved. It was really one of the more compassionate genocides when you think about it.

The Nazis came along and added a twist to it. Sure the Nazis used some of the religious stuff for propaganda purposes, but only because most of the German masses were Christians and quite comfortable with the form of bigotry they were used to. But the Nazis themselves probably didn’t give very many fucks about their supernatural beliefs and practices. Yeah there were some Catholics among them who probably got a kick out of murdering Jews for double the reasons, but Hitler himself leaned more towards the secular type of mass murder. Some of them Nazis even got into Pagan shit and nobody really cared. The Nazis saw the Jews as a race that needed to be done away with on account of science stuff, like being an eight Jewish is Jewish but being sixteenth Jewish isn’t… or something like that. I don’t remember all the specifics of Nazi science.

My point is, why aren’t the Jews that worried about either of those concepts gaining mass popularity in modern America? Well, most American Christians tend to not dwell so much about the Christ killing thing, and tend to be of the mindset that people around today aren’t to be held responsible for the oopsies of their great grandfathers… mostly for principled reasons of course, but they kind of have practical reasons of their own to not waiver from that philosophy. And plus they’ve really come around on this whole money lending thing. Jesus might have been pretty spot on with most things but he was really short sighted with that one. American Jews have also integrated pretty well into society so they’ve mostly fixed that issue. In fact, these American Christians are such rhyme biting culture vultures that they talk about their own morality as a Judeo-Christian thing now. Ain’t that a kick in the head.

Also the really hardcore Christians are huge supporters of Israel. You know, for prophecies and Armageddon reasons. Once that happens the Jews can go to hell where they belong.

As far as Nazi science… well I’m sure there are a few modern students of the field, but it is kind of out of fashion with the mainstream.

Not saying anti Semitism doesn’t exists. It’s just a little more done out of habit nowadays rather than for a principled stance anymore. I mean Jews can be annoying sometimes in how they control the media, but it’s not worth mass extermination or anything. I mean, we still need them to produce the crap that we like. Don’t want to throw the circumcised baby out with the bath water. That circumcising thing is another rhyme of ours that the Christians bit.

So maybe the Jews should be more worried than they are. I don’t know. That’s just my basic theory off the top of my head as to why they might not be.

But I’d never given it much thought before.

[Commenter_XY]

So maybe the Jews should be more worried than they are.

Yes, we should be. It is happening again. The difference this time is we will not meekly lie down and calmly await destruction.

[Roman Moroni]

I’m all for gun rights for all the libertarian and utilitarian reasons that everyone knows already.

But I am curious about this fear of specifically being attacked for being Jewish by the State or a large populist movement that’s just as powerful. I have questions.

Will it be the religious version of anti Semitism or the Nazi genetic sciency version? Or both?

I mean, I’m an atheist who thinks the Jewish religion is as silly as any of them, but I’m ethically Jewish. My sister is now a Christian. She can go to an actual church without breaking into a smirk once. She even says grace before dinner… but only if other people come over. But I still think she means it. She gets annoyed when I only want to thank Baby Jesus for the bounty we have received, like Ricky Bobby. Or the Jesus with a tuxedo t-shirt, because he’s formal but he’s still down to party.

But I digress. Is my sister just as fucked as the local rabbi in this new Jew-ageddon? Is it about belief and practice these days or is our blood just rotten?

If it’s just about religion, hell I’ll convert to Jedi if they’re the ones in power and they feel that strongly about it. All the same shit to me.

[Commenter_XY]

I do not really understand it myself, Roman. Because it is so irrational. But I also know that it is reality = ...specifically being attacked for being Jewish by the State or a large populist movement that’s just as powerful... -- whether I like it or not.

It is utter insanity that in 2022 America I have to even give two seconds thought about my physical security in a synagogue while at prayer. I can scarcely believe it.

I don't see the Nazi genetic science angle at play today. I do see the anti-semitism and intersectionality and collectivist ideology melding together in a toxic brew.

[Brett Bellmore]

JPFO (Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership) is one of the more militant and principled gun rights organizations out there. I'm quite impressed with their work.

The ADL, of course, is fanatically hostile to the JPFO.

[Ridgeway]

@Roman

You did yeoman's work in answering a question that I strongly suspect did not deserve an answer.

One quibble on modern antisemitism, space lasers et al.

I have long maintained that Anglo-Saxon antisemitism has historically been qualitatively different from Continental anti-semitism. The Anglo-Saxon version is much more tied into snobbery and general cultural chauvinism, while the continental version incorporates a lot more deep-seated hatred. It is the difference between non wanting to admit Jews into your country club, and wanting to put them into camps (or at best being indifferent as to whether they are put into camps).

Jack the Ripper is a good historical example. When the police bigwig saw the "Juwes" message scrawled on the wall, he ordered it erased immediately because was concerned that there could be mob violence against the local Jews (in addition to the masonic angle). If the same thing had happened in Munich or Warsaw, I daresay that the local constabulary would have welcomed the opportunity to blame the Jews, and may well have joined in the "fun" themselves.

[bernard11]

Ridgeway,

Well, maybe. Bear in mind, for example, that the blood libel originated in England, and spread to the continent from there. Bear in mind that the Jews were expelled from England in 1290 - lots of other expulsions, of course.

In the 20th Century you are probably right. Certainly many countries in Eastern Europe were explicitly, formally, and violently antisemitic well before WWII. (I've heard it said that the main difference between German antisemitism and the Polish version was that the Germans were better-organized and more efficient.)

[Ridgeway]

True enough, although I don't know that any one ethnicity can take full credit for the blood libel.

Regarding continental antisemitism, if you look at Europe in 1900, if I were setting odds, I'd have thought Germany was one of the less-likely countries for a Nazi-type antisemitic regime to emerge. Had France lost WWI, I suspect it would have been much more likely to develop a Nazi regime in place of Germany's.

[Commenter_XY]

Poles imbibe antisemitism with their mothers milk - Yitzhak Shamir

There is a kernel of truth to this saying.

[bernard11]

The turn to racially based antisemitism, as opposed to anti-Judaism, which was based, largely, on religion, came well before the Nazis. I think it arose on the 19th Century as linguistic distinctions were twisted into racial ones.

Of course, under the "new system" there was no escape - conversion didn't help. So your sister is in trouble.

(Of course there was always a strain of racial antisemitism - read The Merchant of Venice - but it was religion that primarily motivated it for a long time.)

[Ben_]

Most people don’t put much thought into voting. Even here on VC you see 50-100 comments about culture or drama or feelings or some other superficial concern for every comment about policy.

Even your question is mostly not about policy. Modern US individuals have rarely needed arms to protect against government, so it doesn’t seem like a concrete policy question.

(I think it’s wrong to want to threaten and ultimately jail people who hurt no one and can point to language in the Constitution protecting their choices. Gun controllers usually don’t get much beyond guns? yuck! In their thinking.)

[Ben_]

Jay Inslee wants to criminalize speech about elections:

https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/victoria-taft/2022/02/03/pro-free-speech-washington-state-governors-plot-to-criminalize-election-fraud-complaints-moves-forward-n1555537

Will the Ninth Circuit let him?

[RabbiHarveyWeinstein]

I hope so. We can't let people undermine democracy with their flippant opinions!

[Kazinski]

I doubt even Washington courts will let him.

I hear he's gearing up for another presidential run in '24, so this is probably an attempt to make himself relevant to the progressives. Climate change was his big issue last cycle, it didn't seem to catch on.

[BravoCharlieDelta]

What will the Maskholes and Covidians do now that several countries are ending their Covid Tyranny?

Can't say we should be more like Europe with their big government and even bigger working classes (non existent middle class though) if they're not putting babies in Covid Death Camps.

[Jimmy the Dane]

I think the left is going to pay dearly for its violence against liberty and freedom conducted over the last two years. It wouldn't surprise me if this made them a minority party for the next 8 years and cost them a few purple states for the same time period. People are not going to forget this too easily and the press is losing the capability to control the narrative any longer.

[Sarcastr0]

Ah yes, reminds me of the GOP will be a permanent minority party talk in 1999.

[Bored Lawyer]

"Permanent" and 8 years are different things. The Dems got 20 years out of running against Herbert Hoover.

One thing that puzzles me about Trump supporters, though, is why they don't blame him for the shutdowns, etc. If they were a bad idea (they were) why did he not push back against those advocating it? He was the president, and was in the best position to push back against ill-conceived policies. That he did not do so is his failure, not people like Dr. Fauci.

[Illocust]

He did push back rather publicly, and publicly refused to implement top down mandates. Reason condemned him roundly for it.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

" One thing that puzzles me about Trump supporters, though, is why they don't blame him for the shutdowns, etc. "

That they are stupid, bigoted, half-educated, delusional, disaffected, low-quality, backwater, antisocial losers might be relevant.

[Kevin Smith]

It was one of the issues where he behaved like a federalist. For better or worse Covid policy was up to the states, not the federal government and not the president. Had he applied that principle more universally he would have been a better president for it

[Brett Bellmore]

He wasn't a perfect federalist, but he hardly had to be perfect to respect federalism more than most recent Presidents. He was about the least dictatorial President in recent memory, which made the absurd claims he was a dictator all the more obnoxious.

[SimonP]

Democrats have given up on 2022. They shouldn't, but they clearly have taken it as a foregone conclusion that they'll lose the House, and they don't have much of a plan for Senate. They're suffering the same problem that the Republicans had, after Trump won in 2016 - they unexpectedly found themselves in power.

People are not, on the whole, that angry about COVID shutdowns and related mandates, which have had broad popular support, a vocal minority opposed notwithstanding. They are irritated about chaos in the schools and ready to get back to normal, sure, and Democrats are consistently shooting themselves in the foot on that front. They're also concerned about crime, all of a sudden, and Democrats aren't responding well to that trend, either.

But I don't see this as all leading to a long political winter. It may take only two years of McCarthy leading the loony bin in the House to convince voters that Republicans do not belong in there. And it will be interesting to see how the rivalry between deSantis and Trump plays out. We'll also begin to see the effects of abortion bans and throwing election officials and teachers into jail for doing their jobs. I'm sure that will help the Republican messaging a lot.

[apedad]

"I think the left is going to pay dearly for its violence against liberty and freedom conducted over the last two years."

Jimmy, does this mean you and BCD will hold off shooting us for the time being?

[Roman Moroni]

But you should have seen what her avatar was wearing…

I read a story about a woman who claims she was virtually raped in the Metaverse. Another woman whose avatar was groped.

Obviously these were more sexual harassment cases rather than physical assault. The one woman’s avatar was not raped. I don’t even think that’s possible… yet. She was sexually harassed by a group of dudes. She just used the word “rape.” Probably because it made for a better headline.

But it got me thinking about future social norms in virtual reality. What if a white guy chooses a black man as an avatar? Is that a kind of blackface? What if no one knows he’s white? Is it still objectively offensive if no one realizes they should be offended? If you shout the N-word in a forest, is it hate speech if no one’s there to hear it?

This got me picturing two black avatars greeting each other with the N-word (with an a; no hard r obviously) and neither one realizing they’re both white.

But what if people know it’s happening in theory? What if real Nazis get together in the Metaverse and do this with each other as a fun and trolly way to constantly use the N-word?

When they discuss this phenomenon on the view, and they will, what will be the “correct” solve? Should Meta screen their users on a racial bases to prevent anyone from identifying as a different race (obviously identifying as a different gender is just as acceptable as identifying as a Wood Elf). Sounds crazy but this will be suggested.

I doubt Meta will go that far with their rules. Not only is it crazy invasive, but it’s a messy can of worms to define actual policy. How do they decide if someone who claims to be one sixteenth Native American is allowed to have the Comanche avatar?

Even if Meta doesn’t have a rule, when a violator is found out by the mob, no doubt there will be consequence culture galore in the real world.

Just stuff that occurred to me. I’m sure there are gonna be a lot more new issues to wade through that are equally hilarious.

[Roman Moroni]

Actually it’s probably illegal for Meta to offer a specific service to one race and not another. So that lets them off the hook. M.Z. can confidently proclaim, “that sounds like a you problem, not a me problem.”

[TwelveInchPianist]

"I read a story about a woman who claims she was virtually raped in the Metaverse. Another woman whose avatar was groped."

If you don't like it, change the channel.

[Kazinski]

Yes, that seems to be happening, FB missed their earnings and are down 25% today. That's a 1/4 Trillion in market cap.

Ouch.

[Roman Moroni]

Sure we can say that, but it doesn’t mean there won’t be some crazy discussions and fallout resulting in some kind of weird social pressure regarding new politically correct virtual behavior.

If you’re taking about the sexual harassment thing, I’m sure there will be safeguards in place to mute and make invisible avatars you want out of your experience. So if a guy wants to virtually dry hump your leg, you don’t have to be a part of his adventure.

[Ben_]

Why change the channel when claiming you’re a victim pays the rent?

[SimonP]

Why have we read so much here about people like Amy Wax and Ilya Shapiro, from Eugene, Keith, and their pet-cause organizations, but so little about the efforts across the country to legislate against "critical race theory" in schools? It seems to me that many of these laws demonstrate exactly the dangers in trying to regulate speech - categories are left open-ended, administrators (or parents!) are left with ultimate discretion on whether to exact punishment, and the whole campaign is ill-advised from the start. Yet it seems as though the only real threat to academic freedom that the VC cares about is whether a conservative law professor could face professional repercussions for being an outspoken racist.

[Roman Moroni]

I’m not that familiar with the specifics of these laws. I probably agree with you about them being a bad idea. Especially if it is overly vague with harsh punishments.

But if there is a practical difference, perhaps it involves the fact that we’re dealing with minors, where the parents probably should have more say over aspects of their children’s education. I’m not sure public school teachers of children should have total academic freedom in the classroom. But if they can get fired for tweeting about critical race theory, then I have a big problem with that. Is that the case with these laws?

I mean there probably should be repercussions for just bad teaching in general. If a teacher was pushing Nazi race theory as more of a science than a theory, I’m sure you’d have no problem suggesting a new line of work for this individual.

I guess we should go with vouchers. Public schools can push whatever is popular with the teachers’ union and no doubt qualified administrators, and parents can always go a different route if they don’t agree.

But these laws are indeed most likely problematic.

[SimonP]

If you want to go on a deep dive into the subject, you can check out this link, which has compiled a lot of what's out there: https://www.chalkbeat.org/22525983/map-critical-race-theory-legislation-teaching-racism

A lot of things are just proposals, so far. But for example:

A Tennessee law prohibits teaching that a "meritocracy" is "inherently racist or sexist" or anything "promoting division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class, or class of people." The law has a safe harbor for discussing "controversial aspects of history," provided that such discussion is "impartial."

A Texas law on the essential civics education removed previous requirements to teach the history of Native Americans in the U.S., the woman's suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, as well as a whole host of historical documents relating to those movements, replacing it instead with just a bland instruction to teach about the importance of engaging in civic life. It also prohibits what Tennessee prohibits, above, and includes this doozy: teachers are prohibited from saying that "slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality." (Keep in mind we're talking about a Constitution with the 3/5 compromise built right into it.)

Youngkin's first executive order describes critical race theory as "inherently divisive" and instructs superintendents to scrub their curricula of any similarly "inherently divisive" comments. Ironically, the executive order also claims that students should be taught to think for themselves.

Other proposed laws go far further than this and ban instruction on specific texts or give parents the ability to "punish" teachers that are thought to violate the prohibitions. It really seems like 2022 will just be a number of states trying to outdo one another, in legislating against CRT, banning abortion, and criminalizing election administration.

I appreciate that K-12 teachers have less claim to "academic freedom" than university professors, but this doesn't mean that there's no issue - from either an "academic freedom" perspective or from a Free Speech perspective - with laws that single out a particular viewpoint on American history and simply ban it from being uttered in schools.

It's also problematic, in my view, that while most of these laws claim to prohibit teaching things that I would never defend - e.g., teaching that one race is "inherently superior" to another race - it's quite clear that they will not be applied as written. That is, no one (correctly) teaching the concept of "white privilege" is telling white students that they should feel guilty for the sins of their forefathers, or that they are inherently racist because they are white, etc. Yet it is clear that these laws are intended to ban even the correct teaching of white privilege, and certainly will be applied that way.

[Roman Moroni]

I think it’s all very tricky and I’d much rather err on the side of not having laws about it.

I do get your concern about practical effects of these things. That is generally the way of government regulating behavior. The consequences are rarely just the good and noble stuff. That said, I always find this argument at least slightly amusing: critical race theory isn’t even taught in schools. It’s just a conservative fever dream. But by all that is holy don’t stop us from teaching it!

I mean, I’d rather the government waste time passing laws against shit that isn’t happening. Keeps them from doing real damage. At least for a little while. Go ahead and pass laws specifically against pouring molten lead on grade school kids too. Knock yourself out. Make it a priority and take your time with it.

And on a totally besides the point note, I think you know better than to use the 3/5 thing as evil in and of itself. Yes it’s absurd on its face and it certainly reminds us of the evil that necessitated it. But would it have been better if enslaved people were counted as full persons for purposes of congressional representation? The slave states would have loved that. It would have been better if in this context they were counted as 0/5 of a person. Unless you wanted the slave states to have more congressional power, with absolutely zero representation for the actual slaves being counted for this purpose.

[SimonP]

That said, I always find this argument at least slightly amusing: critical race theory isn’t even taught in schools. It’s just a conservative fever dream. But by all that is holy don’t stop us from teaching it!

Part of the problem with this line of argument is that it's not entirely correct to say that "critical race theory" is not being taught in schools. It's correct to note that CRT has its roots, as an academic discipline, in legal academia, and legal CRT thus has little reason to be taught in schools. But the rubric, as actually applied, is broad enough to pick up a lot of what people are teaching in schools, such as notions of white privilege, continuing racial segregation in American society and its roots in centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, and the modern carceral state, and the like. So the common trope that liberals have been offering - CRT isn't even being taught in our schools! - is a bit of a dodge, itself rooted in a kind of ignorance.

And those concepts are definitely the target of these anti-"CRT" laws.

And on a totally besides the point note, I think you know better than to use the 3/5 thing as evil in and of itself.

The point is to say that the subhuman status of enslaved Black people was written into the Constitution itself, which is true. The fact that it could have been worse, or that the compromise suited racists in both the north and the south, for different reasons, is beside the point.

[Brett Bellmore]

"The point is to say that the subhuman status of enslaved Black people was written into the Constitution itself, which is true. The fact that it could have been worse, or that the compromise suited racists in both the north and the south, for different reasons, is beside the point."

You're elevating symbols, and misunderstood symbols at that, over reality. The three fifths clause stated that people who were unfree only counted for 3/5ths for representation purposes. It said nothing whatsover about blacks. Free blacks counted 1 for 1! Enslaved whites would count at 3/5ths. It didn't say they weren't people. All it said was that they weren't worth as much to a state as free people for purposes of apportionment.

The reality of what it did was to reduce the political power of slave states. Not as much as it should have been reduced, granted, that's what made it the 3/5ths compromise. But it was a good thing, it gave the slave owners less power in Congress.

But, desperate to be offended, you pretend it was an insult to blacks. What black of that era would have wanted slave owners to have more political power? None.

Asshole. You're just so desperate to be offended, you stand the clause on its head.

[SimonP]

How many white slaves were there in the American territories, at the time of the founding, Brett, as a proportion of all slaves?

[Brett Bellmore]

A relatively small but non-zero fraction, but the fraction of blacks who weren't slaves was, at the time, quite a bit higher.

It's a mistake not to understand that the institution of slavery at the time of the founding wasn't quite as relentlessly racial as it was by the time of the Civil war. Predominantly, yes, but not exclusively. The notion in the South that blacks had to be slaves, could not be permitted to be free, evolved as part of an ideology attempting to justify slavery in a nation where it was going into ever worse repute.

That's why Taney had to claim, not specifically that black slaves weren't citizens, but that blacks of any status never could be. Because slavery had evolved from an institution that was not racial in theory, and not entirely racial in practice, to one that based its justification for existence on black being sub-human and only suited to be slaves.

None of which has anything to do with the absurdly ahistorical notion that the 3/5ths clause was an insult to blacks, somehow meant that they didn't count as full people for any purpose, rather than that slave owners didn't deserve extra representation on the basis of owning other people.

[rsteinmetz]

I saw an 1840s map of Louisiana which listed the population of various towns. It listed the number of whites, free blacks and slaves. New Orleans was roughly 50% white and the black population was divided about equally between free blacks and slaves. In the more rural areas the proportion of free blacks was much lower.

[Roman Moroni]

Simon, not sure if you’ll come back to this thread, but just in case…

I appreciate your take on how the left is being a bit squirrelly when they claim that CRT isn’t taught in schools. It’s obviously not quite that simple.

As far as the 3/5ths thing goes… c’mon, man. You would NOT consider the constitution to be a more moral document if it allowed the slave states to count slaves as 100%, flesh and blood, full human beings for purposes of Congressional representation. Hell, count ‘em as twice as human as white folks, and the south would have rejoiced even more.

That said, I will attempt to steel man your argument. Maybe you’re saying that just mentioning slaves in ANY context set down down the firm constitutional precedent that the practice of slavery itself was constitutional. Thereby requiring an amendment to dissolve the practice.

Is it something like that?

[Krayt]

We like democracy. Until we don't.

[SimonP]

We like the freedom of speech. Until we don't.

[Kazinski]

Because teachers are idiots and they need to be supervised by parents.

It's not like they are doing such a great job teaching reading and math that they need to fill in the extra time with CRT.

[Roman Moroni]

Do you know if any of these CRT laws restrict what teachers can tweet about or publish on their own time?

[SimonP]

If you're a parent, you may have perfect confidence in your own ability to evaluate what your kids' teachers are presenting them.

You may have less confidence in the other 30-60 or so parents of their classmates, however. When you're talking about "parental supervision," you're not just talking about supervision by a reasonably intelligent and informed parent. You're also talking about the barely-literate wingnut who takes her cues from NewsMax and has ample time to meddle because her "job" is a MLM scheme.

[Sarcastr0]

Read the examples above. It's not CRT, it's just stuff that makes white people uncomfortable.

[Sarcastr0]

https://www.al.com/news/2022/02/alabama-officials-receive-complaints-about-black-history-month-as-state-debates-crt-legislation.html

This is dumb, guys.

[Roman Moroni]

I think both sides are at least somewhat hysterical when it comes to this topic, and I’m sure if I took the time to look at all the laws proposed I’d be against them.

But I have an idea. Probably not original one, but I haven’t heard it yet.

Why don’t Democrats propose the legislation banning the version of CRT that they already don’t teach, but that is a fever dream of right wingers?

Shouldn’t be hard. In every debate I hear what conservatives claim is happening in schools, and I hear the left leaning folks deny that is. That’s perfect! Pass laws against that… whatever that is and then the left are the totally reasonable ones. Write it up.

Pass a law against invisibility too if Republicans think it’s a problem in schools. Who gives a shit, right?

[Brett Bellmore]

"Why don’t Democrats propose the legislation banning the version of CRT that they already don’t teach, but that is a fever dream of right wingers?"

That's literally what the right-wing legislation they're up in arms about does. And they're up in arms about it.

Here's the South Carolina anti-CRT bill.

"SECTION 1. Article 1, Chapter 29, Title 59 of the 1976 Code is amended by adding:

"Section 59-29-12. (A) Public school districts, public schools, and public institutions of higher learning may not:

(1) direct or otherwise compel students to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere to the tenets of critical race theory; or

(2) introduce a course of instruction or unit of study directing or otherwise compelling students to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere to any of the tenets of critical race.

(B) For purposes of this chapter, 'critical race theory' means any of the following tenets:

(1) any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior;

(2) individuals should be adversely treated on the basis of their sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin; or

(3) individuals, by virtue of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin, are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past by other members of the same sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin. "

SECTION 2. This act takes effect upon approval by the Governor."

That's the sort of thing they're freaking out over. I guess because it accurately defines CRT, because if it didn't, it bans something they aren't teaching.

[SimonP]

Here's a really simple way to show your response is in bad faith, Brett:

In your view, would the South Carolina law prohibit teachers from assigning reading from the 1619 Project?

[Brett Bellmore]

Well, that depends:

Does the 1619 project teach that any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior?

Does the 1619 project teach that individuals should be adversely treated on the basis of their sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin?

Does the 1619 project teach that individuals, by virtue of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin, are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past by other members of the same sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin?

If the answer to those questions is, "no", then obviously not.

If the answer to those questions is, "yes", shouldn't it be prohibited?

[SimonP]

I'm not asking you to recite truisms, Brett. I'm asking you to apply the law to the 1619 Project. This is an evasion.

Now, I understand perfectly well why you've chosen to engage in a transparent dodge, rather than answer the very simple question I put to you. You're evading the question because you perfectly well understand that each and every legislator that is enacting the anodyne language you've excerpted, above, to ban teaching anything from the 1619 Project (as, indeed, the Texas "CRT ban" makes quite clear), even if a precise reading of the language they use, and a fair reading of the materials in the 1619 Project, would not point in that direction.

In other words, you understand perfectly well that the words in the codebooks don't matter. The bans will be applied in the way desired, to target certain types of histories and theories that don't say anything about racial guilt or superiority of races, but are proscribed anyway because they refer to things like "white privilege" or link the history of the country to its being founded on chattel slavery and genocide.

Russian and Chinese regulation of dissent works in a similar way. If you look at the words they actually enact, you might not think that Russia has outlawed being gay in public or China has outlawed criticism of the government. But go and try it, and see what happens. You're exactly like their stooges, Brett.

[Ben_]

Do you really think Brett read the 1619 project? And that he remembers it in detail so as to be able retrospectively judge it as content for school lessons?

Maybe he did and he does, but it's beyond strange to assume that.

[Ben_]

That last part about China and Russia … would anyone else like to agree that the text of laws matters the same in authoritarian countries as in the US?

I don’t think anyone at all will agree.

Do you really need teachers to tell young children that they’re bad because of their skin color? Why is that important enough to you to make a bizarre China vs US comparison that no one will back you up on?

[SimonP]

I don't think teachers need to tell young children that they're bad because of their skin color. I don't think that's true, and that's not a takeaway of any actual critical race theory work.

[Brett Bellmore]

Except that what you're doing is No True Scotsmaning CRT, because the definition perfectly describes how it is taught in practice in many classrooms.

[Sarcastr0]

That's not happening in classrooms, no matter how much Tucker may say it is.

[Ben_]

If it’s not happening then prohibitions on it are completely harmless and will have no effect.

[Brett Bellmore]

I'm not reciting truisms, Simon. I'm pointing out that the law bans certain conduct, and that teaching the 1619 project won't be banned if it doesn't involve that conduct.

From what I know of the 1619 project, while it's wrong headed, and shouldn't be taught in our schools just because it's bad history, it ought at least in theory be possible to teach, anyway, without violating that law.

Academic CRT might also be possible to teach without violating it.

But, of course, either could be taught in violation, too.

[Sarcastr0]

That's a tautology. The question is to what *you* think the law applies. Simple application of law to facts.

But it seems you haven't bothered to learn the facts. Which is a fine example of what's going on across the nation - these laws turn out to be more about what people are feeling, not what stuff actually says.

Which kind of vagueness is a recipe for bad law and oppressive/chilling implementation.

But at leas you'll feel like you're striking back at your perceived oppressors.

[Brett Bellmore]

Sarcastro, you can read the damned law, it SAYS what it applies to. Are any of the things it says it applies to things you think teachers should be doing?

I know what you're getting at: You're envisioning some teacher teaching CRT, or, just 1619, without doing anything the law actually prohibits, and because somebody takes it into their head that they're teaching CRT, they'll pretend that they did the things the law actually prohibits.

Bullshit.

Suppose SC passes an anti-BLM law, which defines "BLM related activities" as "looting, and arson of occupied buildings".

You, of course, think that's BS, that BLM doesn't loot or set fire to occupied buildings, because you're so deep in denial you're getting nitrogen narcosis.

The fact would remain that if a random BLM member didn't loot or commit arson, they'd have nothing to fear from such a law.

[Ben_]

If non-white-people were being made uncomfortable you’d be firmly on the other side.

[Sarcastr0]

Nice speculative hypocrisy, Ben.

You think I'm down to exclude from history stuff that makes nonwhite people uncomfortable?

[Ben_]

You’d be ok with a "history" that focuses exclusively on bad things minorities have done?

[bernard11]

Why have we read so much here about people like Amy Wax and Ilya Shapiro, from Eugene, Keith, and their pet-cause organizations, but so little about the efforts across the country to legislate against "critical race theory" in schools?

Partisanship, maybe? Just a suggestion.

[Ben_]

If you’re a university student and you don’t like a professor, you don’t take his class. You’re an adult. You get to choose who you associate with and who you avoid, what you listen to and what you don’t. And even if you’re in a class and decide you hate it, it's only for a quarter or semester an hour or two a couple days a week.

Children are basically prisoners in government schools. If the teacher is racist or some other form of hater, or if the teacher intends to use the children for some hateful agenda, the children are at that teacher's mercy all day, every day for the whole school year. Argumentative children get punished. Children who stick up for themselves get punished. Children who refuse to listen to hateful teachers get punished.

Besides that there are more differences, but that’s more than enough already.

[rsteinmetz]

Because they are law professors interested in what law schools are up to and Amy Wax and Ilya Shapiro teach at law schools?

[Bored Lawyer]

Just got back last week from a short vacation in Orlando, Florida with one daughter. Here are some observations that some might find valuable.

(1) If you order a rental car, make sure the company has a desk in the airport. Ours didn’t, requiring a 45 minute wait for the shuttle to pick us up and bring them to the facility.

(2) I am used to having WIFI almost everywhere I drive, and use Google Maps for navigation. That worked fine from the airport to the tourist area of Orlando. All of a sudden, no internet. Someone explained to me that each hotel has their own WIFI and password, and if you are not checked in, no internet.

A hotel clerk was nice enough to give me a map. That is how we did it in the old days – look at a map. So get a map of Orlando if you are going there.

(3) Daughter wanted to see Harry Potter world. Universal Studios splits it between two parks. We went to both, which was a waste. Enough to go just to the one, the bigger one being at the main Universal Studios Park.

(4) Do try to fill your tank before returning the rental car. I was in a rush, and since I had ¾ of a tank anyway, I just went without filling. Charged me $12 a gallon to refill.

(5) Go to a supermarket and buy food to brownbag for lunch. MUCH cheaper than the overpriced food at the parks. (Someone actually came up to us while we were eating our sandwiches and complimented our foresight.)

(6) Theme parks are expensive, so make sure you are really interested. And expect to do A LOT of walking, they are big and spread out. (One notable exception is ICON Park, that leads you in the main part for free, has a few attractions for a charge, each separately, so you pay ala carte, so to speak.)

(7) The parks all insist on masks for indoor parts, but not outdoors. Most people seem pretty relaxed about COVID, some wore masks all the time, others, like me, only when going into a building.

[Brett Bellmore]

"Do try to fill your tank before returning the rental car. I was in a rush, and since I had ¾ of a tank anyway, I just went without filling. Charged me $12 a gallon to refill."

That's pretty much a standard rental car thing these days, it's not just Orlando.

[SimonP]

Christ, it would be difficult to formulate a more Boomer comment than this.

[Bored Lawyer]

Odd, since I am not a Boomer. Very much a Generation X member, Child of Reagan.

What about my comment qualifies it as a Boomer comment?

[Sarcastr0]

I thought it was good advice 😀

But I'm nearly Gen X.

[Noscitur a sociis]

"Don't rely on your new-fangled phone to do everything for you! Pack a lunch, it's cheaper! Gas up your car before you bring it back!" certainly isn't bad advice.

It is, however, definitely the kind of advice by quintessentially Boomer parents might give, were I jaunting to the exotic hinterlands of central Florida.

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

I don't know about the "Boomer" stuff, but can't your phone access data without wifi? Florida has a lot of problems, but they generally have pretty good cell coverage.

[TwelveInchPianist]

So how about Whoopi getting canceled for what amounts to semantics?

[ThePublius]

No, but what happened does not amount to semantics. She took the position that has been promulgated by the woke, CRT crowd, that racism is only about white racists and black victims of racism.

I don't agree with cancellation, but it should be made clear that the racist is - her.

[TwelveInchPianist]

And by the ADL, which adopted the CRT definition of racism a year or so ago and changed it right after Whoopi made her comments.

But CRT goes further and says that we should see everything through the lens of white supremacy. Whoopi just had an internal definition of racism that didn't include white-on-white ethnic atrocities.

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

I don't think any of that is correct. I think Whoopi just doesn't consider Jews as a separate race. But I don't really know. It's Whoopi Goldberg, who cares? Isn't she there to give edgy opinions?

[rsteinmetz]

You'd think someone who adopted the name Goldberg and claimed to have Jewish ancestors would be a little more sensitive.

[not guilty]

Donald Trump has called on the House January 6 committee to investigate Mike Pence's refusal to reject several states'electoral votes, claiming that Pence is now recognized to have had authority to do that. That is batshit crazy.

Congressional certification of the electoral votes is governed by 3 U.S.C. 15, which directs the president of the Senate to open envelopes, announce results and call for objections. Nothing else. The exclusive means of objecting to a state's slate of electors is presentation of a writing stating the basis for the challenge, signed by at least one Senator and at least one Representative. Resolution of challenges is vested in the two houses of Congress, meeting separately.

The familiar maxim of statutory construction, expressio unius est exclusio alterius, holds that the express mention in a statute of one thing is the exclusion of all other things. Trump is talking out of his ass as to the vice-president's authority, just as he was in the lead up to January 6 last year. He should be prosecuted along with his cohorts in that corrupt endeavor.

[ThePublius]

Prosecuted for what? What's the crime he committed?

[not guilty]

Attempt to obstruct, influence or impede an official proceeding -- the January 6 Congressional certification of the electoral votes.

Trump's recent comments show that he is persisting in his lies about Mike Pence's absence of lawful authority to do what Trump was importuning him to do.

[ThePublius]

That's pretty thin gruel, NG. What's the statute, and what's the specific charge/evidence?

[Krayt]

Would that more politicians refuse to do things for mistaken beliefs they don't have the power.

God knows they orient entire careers around doing things for mistaken beliefs they do have the power.

[Ben_]

Still obsessed

[not guilty]

Call it obsessed or call it what you will. Trump is a common crook who deserves prison time.

[Ben_]

And you’re obsessed just like haters of all varieties are obsessed.

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

The obsession is the pro-Trump commenters who only make a knee-jerk reaction to his last sentence, and not to the rest of his obviously true comment.

[Ben_]

I didn't read that far. Did it say Orange Man Bad?

[hobie]

Looks like Trump is the new Hilary

[not guilty]

18 U.S.C.1512(c)(2) prohibits attempting to corruptly obstruct, influence or impede an official proceeding. Section 1512(k) prohibits conspiracy to do so. Several D.C. District Court judges have ruled that the January 6 Congressional certification of the electoral votes is an official proceeding of Congress.

Trump, John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani and others on January 4 importuned Mike Pence to unilaterally reject several states' slates of electors. As described in my prior comment about 3 U.S.C. 15, Pence had no authority to do that. Trump was entreating Pence to violate the law, based on the demonstrably false premise that Trump had in fact won the election. Trump and his cohorts were acting to obtain a benefit to which Trump was not entitled -- a second term in office. Corrupt from topside to bottom.

Trump on January 6 ginned up the crowd to march to the Capitol in an attempt to to intimidate Pence. When the mob became violent and breached the Capitol, Trump waited several hours to call his fans off. Perhaps not by itself criminal, but evidence of corrupt intent.

This prosecution would be a slam dunk before a properly instructed jury.

[Kazinski]

It's impossible to construe public statements on a matter of public interest as a conspiracy.

Trump was absolutely wrong, but Pence started publically he didn't buy his theory and ignored him.

It's really fantasy to think you can build a conspiracy charge out of a debate held in public.

[Sarcastr0]

Trump asked the following institutions to impound voting machines:

DoJ. DoD. DHS. local state law enforcement.

Don't pretend this was a normal, cool and good operation of our democracy just because Trump's attempts didn't manage to cause as much chaos as he wanted.

[Brett Bellmore]

That's actually a perfectly normal and legitimate thing to want to do if you think there's been a crime: Take the evidence away from the custody of the purported criminals, to preserve it.

Naturally, if you think there was no crime, it looks pointless to you, and if you assume the guy shouting "Crime!" doesn't really think there was a crime, they MUST have nefarious motives for wanting to do it.

But that's only to say that, once you decide Trump must be guilty, you see evidence for his guilt everywhere.

[Sarcastr0]

But. There. Was. No. Crime.

That was clear from the beginning. That is clear now.

Subjective intent only gets you so far. Here is where it gets you:
Ether Trump fervently believes and acts on things that are clearly untrue, and is thus literally insane.
Or the purpose is and was to create chaos and plausibility.

[Brett Bellmore]

Your absolute conviction that there was no crime doesn't get you very far when you're not in charge of the Department of Justice.

[Noscitur a sociis]

Does the same determination by the guys who were in charge of the Department of Justice carry any weight?

[Brett Bellmore]

You mean the guys who were insubordinate flunkies of the guy in charge?

[not guilty]

It was not a debate held in public. Trump and Eastman met with Pence at the White House on January 4 and attempted to persuade him to disregard controlling law, based on a false factual premise in order to obtain for Trump a benefit to which he was not entitled. It doesn't matter that their efforts were unsuccessful. Section 1512(c)(2) penalizes attempts just as it does successful endeavors.

Giuliani coordinated the bogus electors scheme. Those who submitted phony materials to the National Archives may have some conspirator liability.

[Brett Bellmore]

Section 1512(c)(2) does not criminalize unsuccessful legal arguments, it criminalizes bribery and extortion.

[not guilty]

It criminalizes more than that. If that was the limited scope of the statute, it would merely duplicate other laws on the books.

We've had this discussion before. Trump and Eastman were soliciting Pence to perform an unlawful act. Simple parsing of 3 U.S.C. 15 shows that. This entreaty was based on a palpably false premise -- that Trump had in fact won the election. Scores of lawsuits say that he didn't, and this was well known to Trump. The object of the scheme was to obtain a benefit to which Trump was not entitled -- a second term in office. Giuliani coordinated the bogus electors scheme in several states. This endeavor was corrupt topside to bottom.

Eastman reportedly involved his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination 146 times when he was interviewed by the House January 6 committee. He knows what he and Trump did was crooked.

Brett, you have failed to provide any authority that section 1512(c)(2) is limited to bribery and extortion. Hundreds of those who breached the Capitol are charged under this statute, and several D.C. district courts have denied motions to dismiss indictments. The conduct charged there did not involve bribery or extortion. Man up and admit that you are talking out your ass.

[not guilty]

Still waiting for your legal authority regarding 18 U.S.C. 1512(c)(2), Brett.

[Absaroka]

In the "Our Distinguished Solons at Work" category:

"State Representative Darren Jernigan introduced House Bill 1670, which calls for Tennessee to replace the term “deaf and dumb” with “deaf or hard of hearing” in the Tennessee Code Annotated, which outlines vocabulary used in state laws"

If the problem isn't obvious, in this context:
deaf == unable to hear
dumb == unable to speak
so "deaf or hard of hearing” is A)redundant and B)excludes those who can hear but not speak.

[John F. Carr]

About 20 years ago a state representative filed a bill to require Massachusetts traffic signals to use "liquid emitting diodes". So close.

[David Nieporent]

I think you're misreading it. If the phrase were "deaf or dumb," then you're right that "deaf or hard of hearing" wouldn't be a good substitute. But the phrase is "deaf and dumb" — it's a singular phrase, not two independent groups.

And also, "deaf or hard of hearing" is not actually redundant; those aren't the same. Deaf = unable to hear. Hard of hearing = able to hear, but not ell.

[Brett Bellmore]

"it's a singular phrase"

Because they tend to go together; If you're born without hearing, it's very difficult indeed to learn to speak.

[not guilty]

Donald Trump's saying that, if elected again, he may pardon the January 6 defendants is unmitigated moral idiocy. I wonder if that statement was intended for the benefit of those who are being investigated by DOJ but not yet charged, as an incentive for them to decline to cooperate with prosecutors.

Witness tampering?

[Kazinski]

Nope.

The president has a constitutional perogative to pardon whomever he likes. Now he could be charged if he takes something of value for a pardon, but the crime would be soliciting or taking the money, not the pardon.

Especially since it's no slam dunk he will even run again, let alone get nominated or elected. But I suppose most possible GOP candidates would pardon or commute sentences for the Jan 6 rioters, just because their sentences and treatment is so out of line with the rest of the summer of '20 rioters and insurrectionists nationwide.

[Brett Bellmore]

I tend to think most of the ones who'd stand to get a pardon or commutation would already be out of jail by January 2025, so only pardons would make sense.

There are a relative handful of apparent bad actors involved in January 6th, who might plausibly still be in jail by then if convicted, but they'd be less likely to receive a commutation or pardon; Remember, from a Trump standpoint, what happened January 6th was disastrous, and the people responsible are not people you'd want to help, at best idiots the other side found useful.

A Republican President might pardon the small fry, but they'd be more focused on finding out who organized that riot, and especially if the FBI was involved.

That's what you should really look for if a Republican President is elected in 2024, and they have the House and Senate: A serious house cleaning at multiple federal agencies, to make sure they stop taking sides in our politics.

[not guilty]

Those who attempted or conspired to corrupt Mike Pence to disregard controlling law on January 6 are not yet indicted. I suspect that they are the possible pardon recipients that Trump has in mind.

And the suggestion of FBI involvement in the breach of the Capitol is pure fantasy. A right wing fever dream.

[John F. Carr]

The FBI is constantly plotting to blow things up, shoot people, maybe kidnap a governor. I think they were not involved in planning January 6 because they would have had their co-conspirators arrested en route to Washington, and they would have recognized that their little plot was growing out of control and arranged for more security.

Now I'm wondering how many people would have had to be arrested ahead of time to reduce the breach to a loud outdoors demonstration.

[Brett Bellmore]

Sometimes they just screw up and lose track of the people they're entrapping at a bad moment, and the crime actually comes off.

[John F. Carr]

We're having the usual morning technical difficulties preventing comments on the Tiitle IX post.

[John F. Carr]

The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that it's not racist to have different rules for accepting guilty pleas in misdemeanor and felony cases when the parties can't agree on the sentence. In Superior Court the guilty plea is binding as long as the sentence does not exceed the prosecutor's recommendation. In District Court the defendant can withdraw the plea if the sentence exceed the defendant's recommendation. Not something I would have thought to argue.

https://www.mass.gov/files/documents/2022/02/03/r13140.pdf

[not guilty]

I'm missing something. Where is any racial component?

[John F. Carr]

"In September 2020, the defendant filed, and a different Superior Court judge (motion judge) granted, a motion to admit evidence of racial disparities in the Massachusetts criminal justice system."

[Noscitur a sociis]

Good username for this topic.

[Noscitur a sociis]

In District Court the defendant can withdraw the plea if the sentence exceed the defendant's recommendation.

This sounds like one of the dumbest procedural rules I can imagine. How does any defendant in district court get sentenced to more than the minimum possible sentence?

[Brett Bellmore]

Sounds sensible to me: You enter a guilty plea in exchange for lenient sentencing, and then the prosecutor reneges. Why shouldn't you get to renege, too?

[John F. Carr]

It's not the prosecutor's decision, but the judge's. I ask for probation. The prosecutor asks for 60 days. The judge sides with the prosecutor. Nobody has done anything remotely dishonest.

[John F. Carr]

If you reject a deal you might end up convicted at trial and sentenced to more than your lawyer's proposal.

We also have a right of review of a felony sentence by a panel of three trial court judges. This is only for discretionary sentencing issues; claims of legal error go to the Appeals Court. That panel can increase the original sentence as well as decrease it. Do you feel lucky?

[David Welker]

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