Month: February 2014

When Solicitor
General Donald Verrilli stands before the U.S. Supreme Court

next month to defend the Patient Protection and Affordable Care
Act against the charge that it violates religious freedom by
requiring employers to provide certain forms of birth control
coverage, the Obama administration will be facing a surprising
opponent in the case: former U.S. senator and current Vice
President Joe Biden. As Robert Barnes explains in The
Washington Post, then-Sen. Biden was one of many leading
Democrats to support the passage of the 1993 Religious Freedom
Restoration Act (RFRA), the very law now being used to challenge
Obamacare. Barnes writes:

When the RFRA was proposed, it had the support of the American
Civil Liberties Union and religious lobbyists, rolled through
Congress with near-unanimous support, and was happily signed by
President Bill Clinton.

Now it is at the center of challenges against the contraceptive
requirement. The Supreme Court next month will hear from
arts-and-crafts giant Hobby Lobby and a Pennsylvania cabinet-making
company named Conestoga Wood; owners of both enterprises say they
run their businesses to reflect their deeply held religious
beliefs.

The First Amendment holds that “Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion [the establishment clause]
nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof [the free-exercise
clause].” Against that backdrop, the cases raise important
questions of separation of church and state, equal treatment for
female workers, and whether corporations, a la Citizens United,
have a right of religious expression to which the RFRA applies.

Read the whole thing
here.

For a libertarian critique of the health care law’s birth
control requirement, see Jacob Sullum’s “Obamacare
and Contraception Exceptions.”

I’ve
complained here before about the ways the argument over a
universal basic income often ignores basic-income-style policies
that actually exist in the world. The
last time I said this, I was pointing to the dividend checks
that the state of Alaska distributes to its citizens. Here’s
another example: Of the nearly 240 tribes that run gambling
operations, the AP reports
that “half distribute a regular per-capita payout to their
members.”

Supporters of basic income grants will be happy to hear that
such payouts have
been a real help for low-income Indians. They might be a bit
shaken by another apparent effect of the policy. From that AP
story:

Mia
Prickett’s ancestor was a leader of the Cascade Indians along the
Columbia River and was one of the chiefs who signed an 1855 treaty
that helped establish the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde in
Oregon.

But the Grand Ronde now wants to disenroll Prickett and 79
relatives, and possibly hundreds of other tribal members, because
they no longer satisfy new enrollment requirements.

Prickett’s family is fighting the effort, part of what some experts
have dubbed the “disenrollment epidemic” — a rising number of
dramatic clashes over tribal belonging that are sweeping through
more than a dozen states, from California to Michigan….

[I]n Michigan, where Saginaw Chippewa membership grew once the
tribe started giving out yearly per-capita casino payments that
peaked at $100,000, a recent decline in gambling profits led to
disenrollment battles targeting hundreds.

The Grand Ronde, which runs Oregon’s most profitable Indian
gambling operation, also saw a membership boost after the casino
was built in 1995, from about 3,400 members to more than 5,000
today. The tribe has since tightened membership requirements twice,
and annual per-capita payments decreased from about $5,000 to just
over $3,000.

The article notes that the “tribes deny money is a factor in
disenrollment and say they’re simply trying to strengthen the
integrity of their membership.” And there’s certainly some
truth to that: Not all of these battles have taken place within
tribes that issue payouts to their members. But it’s easy to see
that reducing a tribe’s membership rolls means more money for the
people left over, and it’s hard not to notice that this wave of
battles began just as casino wealth started taking off in the
1990s.

The fact that a citizens’
dividend can encourage conflicts over citizenship seems
significant. So is the question of why such disputes would emerge
in some places but not in others. And moving past that one
issue, I’m sure the casino profit-sharing experience is full of
relevant lessons that hardly anyone’s aware of because hardly
anyone’s bothered to look at it with this topic in mind. People
need to stop thinking of the basic income as just a what-if
exercise or a policy debate from the past. It’s a living experiment
producing data as we speak.

I’ve
complained here before about the ways the argument over a
universal basic income often ignores basic-income-style policies
that actually exist in the world. The
last time I said this, I was pointing to the dividend checks
that the state of Alaska distributes to its citizens. Here’s
another example: Of the nearly 240 tribes that run gambling
operations, the AP reports
that “half distribute a regular per-capita payout to their
members.”

Supporters of basic income grants will be happy to hear that
such payouts have
been a real help for low-income Indians. They might be a bit
shaken by another apparent effect of the policy. From that AP
story:

Mia
Prickett’s ancestor was a leader of the Cascade Indians along the
Columbia River and was one of the chiefs who signed an 1855 treaty
that helped establish the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde in
Oregon.

But the Grand Ronde now wants to disenroll Prickett and 79
relatives, and possibly hundreds of other tribal members, because
they no longer satisfy new enrollment requirements.

Prickett’s family is fighting the effort, part of what some experts
have dubbed the “disenrollment epidemic” — a rising number of
dramatic clashes over tribal belonging that are sweeping through
more than a dozen states, from California to Michigan….

[I]n Michigan, where Saginaw Chippewa membership grew once the
tribe started giving out yearly per-capita casino payments that
peaked at $100,000, a recent decline in gambling profits led to
disenrollment battles targeting hundreds.

The Grand Ronde, which runs Oregon’s most profitable Indian
gambling operation, also saw a membership boost after the casino
was built in 1995, from about 3,400 members to more than 5,000
today. The tribe has since tightened membership requirements twice,
and annual per-capita payments decreased from about $5,000 to just
over $3,000.

The article notes that the “tribes deny money is a factor in
disenrollment and say they’re simply trying to strengthen the
integrity of their membership.” And there’s certainly some
truth to that: Not all of these battles have taken place within
tribes that issue payouts to their members. But it’s easy to see
that reducing a tribe’s membership rolls means more money for the
people left over, and it’s hard not to notice that this wave of
battles began just as casino wealth started taking off in the
1990s.

The fact that a citizens’
dividend can encourage conflicts over citizenship seems
significant. So is the question of why such disputes would emerge
in some places but not in others. And moving past that one
issue, I’m sure the casino profit-sharing experience is full of
relevant lessons that hardly anyone’s aware of because hardly
anyone’s bothered to look at it with this topic in mind. People
need to stop thinking of the basic income as just a what-if
exercise or a policy debate from the past. It’s a living experiment
producing data as we speak.

During the Super Bowl, Bob Dylan’s
“buy American” ad for Chrysler provoked outrage from fans and
critics alike. Nick Gillespie explains that the man behind “Like a
Rolling Stone” is just doing what comes naturally:

Dylan is an artist that purposefully makes his fans
uncomfortable, not out of anger or contempt for his audience, but
out of an undiminished sense of adventure, exploration, and
creativity. In this, Dylan is the polar opposite of the recently
deceased and Pete Seeger, who famously wanted to cut Dylan’s
electricity at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and never, ever
discomfited his fans (or the Comintern, for that matter) for a
second. Where so many writers, filmmakers, artists simply repeat
themselves or flatter their audience’s sense of itself, Dylan is,
after all these years, “still on the road/Heading for another
joint.”

View this article.

During the Super Bowl, Bob Dylan’s
“buy American” ad for Chrysler provoked outrage from fans and
critics alike. Nick Gillespie explains that the man behind “Like a
Rolling Stone” is just doing what comes naturally:

Dylan is an artist that purposefully makes his fans
uncomfortable, not out of anger or contempt for his audience, but
out of an undiminished sense of adventure, exploration, and
creativity. In this, Dylan is the polar opposite of the recently
deceased and Pete Seeger, who famously wanted to cut Dylan’s
electricity at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and never, ever
discomfited his fans (or the Comintern, for that matter) for a
second. Where so many writers, filmmakers, artists simply repeat
themselves or flatter their audience’s sense of itself, Dylan is,
after all these years, “still on the road/Heading for another
joint.”

View this article.