Month: February 2021

New article—Constitutionalizing Choice of Law: The Temptation of the Dark Side

I have a short article out in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, on the Constitution and choice of law. There’s no abstract, but here’s how it begins:

What does the Constitution have to say about interstate relations? Well, it depends on how you ask.

One of the main topics in interstate relations is the question of what is called choice of law, which sounds very technical but fundamentally is the question of who governs—that is, which state gets to govern any given transaction.

The same kind of question comes up at the federal level—federal law versus state law—but it is dealt with by the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which makes clear that if a federal law is constitutional, it is controlling.1But there is no Supremacy Clause for state law, which has forced people who worry about this question to look harder and elsewhere for some sort of hint about which state is supposed to govern which transaction.

Now, the Supreme Court has largely abdicated any control of the topic of choice of law. And just to give a concrete example: in 1981, the Supreme Court decided a case called Allstate Insurance v. Hague. A friend and learned scholar has described this case to me as one of the most indefensible Supreme Court opinions on any topic ever. . . .

But not all issues in interstate relations are left to the states. Last year, in a case called Franchise Tax Board v. Hyatt, the Supreme Court had a very different question of interstate relations—or, at least, what they thought was a very different question—which is whether or not one state, in this case the State of California, ought to be able to claim sovereign immunity in another state’s court, in that case, the State of Nevada.

This too is a question of interstate relations. One might even call it a question of choice of law.

And from the beginning of Part II:

One way forward would be for the Supreme Court to constitutionalize choice of law doctrine. Professor Douglas Laycock has advocated this in a groundbreaking and important article. It uses some constitutional doctrines I do not completely endorse to achieve some results that I think might be good. So, we might call this “the temptation of the dark side of The Force.”

And it is tempting indeed. I would be reasonably happy living in a world where the Constitution and Supreme Court doctrine controlled all questions of interstate relations. This is not an area where the states can be neutral arbiters, and the Supreme Court is as good a neutral arbiter as we have these days.

Yet as I have suggested, I have some textual misgivings about that world. . .

The whole thing is only 13 pages. These remarks grew out of a panel with Steve Sachs, Douglas Laycock, and David Stras that you can watch here.

 

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A Practical Wish List for Joe Biden

biden-march-2021-issue

In his victory speech, Joe Biden promised to be “a healer, a uniter, a tested and steady hand.” If the new president wants to make good on his word, Reason staffers have some ideas for a few items to add to his policy agenda. These are suggestions that Biden might plausibly heed. We’re still gunning for the legalization of heroin, but we’d settle for descheduling marijuana. We’d love to see an end to all foreign adventurism, but just getting out of Afghanistan would be a good start. A robust private market in health insurance would be ideal, but the new administration could at least allow a larger variety of plans. No one expects Biden to be a libertarian president, but here are a few things he could do to make the nation a little bit more hospitable to free minds and free markets.

—KATHERINE MANGU-WARD

Reform the Clemency Process

C.J. CIARAMELLA

If the Biden administration wants to make substantive gains in criminal justice reform without having to deal with Congress, it should turn to one of the least limited tools of the presidency: the pardon power.

The last two presidents have handled the pardon power differently. Barack Obama launched an unprecedented large-scale clemency initiative aimed at nonviolent drug offenders. As a result, 1,715 federal inmates had their sentences commuted or reduced. But the process was dogged by foot-dragging and resistance from the Justice Department, and thousands of inmates were left behind.

Pardon and clemency petitions are typically routed through the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney. This office solicits feedback on petitions from the very federal prosecutors who secured those sentences, which creates a conflict of interest. “This is something we realized was not working under Obama,” says Jessica Jackson, chief advocacy officer at the Reform Alliance, a criminal justice advocacy organization. “That bottlenecked the process. It had to go through so many hands. There were deserving people who didn’t get it because of the pardon office being in the Justice Department.”

That included Alice Johnson, a grandmother serving a life sentence for a nonviolent drug crime. President Donald Trump commuted Johnson’s sentence after a personal appeal from megacelebrity Kim Kardashian West.

The Trump administration sidelined the Office of the Pardon Attorney, instead relying on a small group of informal advisers who vetted and brought lists of potential recipients to the White House. These included federal inmates who’d been passed over by the Obama administration, such as Crystal Munoz, who was serving 20 years in federal prison for a marijuana offense.

While this allowed commutations and pardons that otherwise would have been torpedoed by the Justice Department, the downside was that the number of beneficiaries slowed to a trickle. By the end of Trump’s term, more than 13,000 clemency applications were pending. He was on track to issue the fewest pardons and commutations of any president since William McKinley, until a spree in December bumped him up to 90 total, ahead of George H.W. Bush’s 77. The process also meant that to secure a commutation, you needed to have well-connected advocates and to capture the president’s fleeting attention. (Imagine how this could be abused if, hypothetically, a president was vain and easily impressed by celebrity status.)

Ideally there could be a smoothly operating pardon office, independent of the Justice Department, that handled clemency petitions at volume, with an eye toward the sort of excessive drug sentences that both Obama and Trump decried but never had the stomach to fully address. This wouldn’t require an act of Congress—just the will of a president able to admit the size and scope of the problem.

C.J. CIARAMELLA is a reporter at Reason.

Get Out of Afghanistan

BRIAN DOHERTY

In both 2011 and 2013, the Obama administration announced its intention to get all our conventional forces out of Afghanistan, where they did little but prop up corruption, provide targets for insurgents, and waste taxpayers’ money. As vice president, Biden tweeted that we would be out of Afghanistan in 2014. He failed to come through then, but he can make up for it now.

Washington currently finds itself, by realpolitik necessity, negotiating with the same force—the Taliban—that it sent troops to Afghanistan to overthrow. We stayed long enough, caused enough death and chaos, and funded enough bad governance for the wheels of history to transform a war that looked like a U.S. victory into an occupation that looks sadly pointless. The best thing we can take away from the experience is the wisdom not to pretend we can pacify or transform a troubled nation half a world away and the prudence not to stay in a war long after its futility has become clear.

Waiting until the Taliban stop misbehaving, or the contending sides in their internal conflicts have settled their differences, guarantees Afghanistan will be a forever war—one that Biden declared last year that “it is past time to end.” Ending it requires presidential resolve, not leaving foreign policy decisions in the hands of Afghanistan’s feuding factions or waiting for fantastical “security conditions” that we never had the power to create.

The Trump administration claimed in November to be on track for an end to our presence there by May. Biden should meet that deadline, or even exceed it—not for the sake of honoring his predecessor, but to honor policy sense and the health and welfare of our armed forces.

In the Obama administration, Biden was a voice for a relatively narrow mission of counterterror rather than a broad one of counterinsurgency. The latter has proven hopelessly ineffective and wasteful, and the former does not require thousands of troops permanently stationed. We should cease any role in the aerial bombing of Afghanistan (which increased under Trump), and we should stop financing that government’s incompetence. American authorities never understood the country’s culture, and after toppling the Taliban they never really understood the mission. It was past time to leave when Biden was vice president; now, as president, he can finally fulfill that promise.

BRIAN DOHERTY is a senior editor at Reason.

Don’t Call It ‘Junk’ Insurance—and Don’t Restrict Its Sale

PETER SUDERMAN

Donald Trump’s presidency began with a fruitless quest to repeal and replace Obamacare. The effort, which chewed up much of Washington’s attention during 2017, failed in part because neither Trump nor congressional Republicans managed to unify around a single plan. Trump, in particular, seemed unable to even explain the basics of what the various replacement plans were attempting to do; at best he promised health care that was “better” and “cheaper.”

Yet out of the ashes of policy failure, the Trump administration did deliver an under-the-radar improvement to the health insurance marketplace, by loosening some of Obamacare’s insurance rules.

Obamacare was designed on the premise that health insurance should be comprehensive. One of the law’s major components was a list of “essential health benefits” that every plan sold through the law’s insurance exchanges were required to include. Anything less was derided as “junk insurance” because it didn’t cover every possible health care eventuality.

This had predictable consequences. The highly regulated insurance sold under Obamacare offered a greater array of benefits. It was also substantially more expensive, which proved particularly troublesome for families whose household incomes were just high enough not to qualify for the law’s subsidies. Health insurance premiums rose throughout Barack Obama’s presidency.

The Trump administration saw this as an opportunity: Why not use executive authority to deregulate cheaper plans with fewer benefits? So in 2018, it loosened restrictions on the sale of what are known as “short-term, limited duration” insurance plans. The Obama administration had restricted the duration of those plans to three-month stretches. Under Trump, the plans became available for up to 36 months.

Those less expensive, less comprehensive plans have since become quite popular, with more than 188,000 people enrolled at the end of 2019—possibly many more, as the plans are not tracked in the same way as more comprehensive policies. The insurance that was derided as junk is, to many Americans, a demonstrable value.

One result has been to keep insurance premiums down: In states relying on the federal health care exchange, premiums for typical plans fell from 2018 through 2020. Meanwhile, Obama-care’s subsidized, regulated plans are still there for Americans who want them.

Biden and his health care team will no doubt be tempted to reverse this, but that would be a mistake. Americans should have the choice of cheaper, less regulated, less comprehensive plans, even if it’s not precisely the coverage that Obamacare’s authors had in mind.

PETER SUDERMAN is features editor at Reason.

Let Hongkongers Come to America

LIZ WOLFE

Improving on Donald Trump’s immigration record won’t be a tall order. While America’s 45th president worked hard to scrap the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allowed roughly 640,000 immigrants who came to the country illegally as children to work and study here legally, Joe Biden says he’ll push for giving them a path to citizenship.

But Biden should add a proposal with less precedent in the U.S. His administration should grant visas to Hongkongers looking to flee Chinese rule and start anew in the United States.

In 1997, China’s “one country, two systems” policy extended autonomy to the island as a condition of Britain handing the territory over to China. (The arrangement was supposed to expire in 2047.) For the ensuing two decades, residents of Hong Kong enjoyed due process in courts of law, the freedom to criticize their government as much as they wanted, and the prosperity brought by thriving commerce.

But over the last few years, the mainland has attempted to take control of Hong Kong ahead of schedule. Residents responded by protesting Beijing’s cruel and duplicitous actions. Hundreds of thousands (by some counts millions) of people took to the streets and occupied thoroughfares for months on end. The authorities then enacted a vague national security law that gives the government broad latitude to squash dissent.

Since then, politically outspoken university faculty members have been stripped of their positions. Organizers have been arrested and jailed—including 53 pro-democracy leaders in a massive early January sweep. Twelve protesters attempted to flee by speedboat to Taiwan, getting only a quarter of the way before they were apprehended. Their families begged for their release with their faces obscured, fearing retribution.

Though Hong Kong’s freedoms are largely gone, Hongkongers now have a more profound appreciation for the value of free expression. They’d be wonderful new Americans for that reason alone. On a more practical level, many Hongkongers are highly educated and entrepreneurial; they could breathe fresh air into U.S. regions and towns that need to be reinvigorated. And letting them in would have bipartisan support: High-profile Republicans such as former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky have explicitly (and rightly!) called for providing a “beacon of light” to people fleeing communism. For all these reasons, President Biden should give refuge to Hongkongers yearning to breathe free.

LIZ WOLFE is staff editor at Reason.

Expand Your Marijuana Reform Ambitions

JACOB SULLUM

Unlike most of the candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination (including his eventual running mate), Joe Biden opposes federal legalization of marijuana. Instead, he says he wants to “decriminalize cannabis use,” expunge the records related to such cases, and move marijuana to a less restrictive legal category.

Those first two steps would not have much impact, since the Justice Department rarely prosecutes low-level possession cases. Moving marijuana from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), a category supposedly reserved for exceptionally dangerous drugs with no accepted medical use, to Schedule II, which indicates that a drug has a high abuse potential but can be used as a medicine, might facilitate research. But it would not address the untenable conflict between the CSA and the laws of the 36 states that allow medical or recreational use of marijuana.

That conflict casts a dark shadow over the burgeoning cannabis industry, making basic business functions such as banking and paying taxes needlessly difficult, costly, complicated, and legally perilous. Descheduling marijuana completely, as a groundbreaking bill that the House of Representatives approved in December would do, is the most straightforward way to address that problem. But even if Biden could be persuaded to support that solution, which Vice President Kamala Harris favored as a senator, Republican opposition probably would make it politically impossible. Just five Republicans voted for the House bill, and Senate passage would require GOP support or Democratic unanimity.

A less radical approach, embodied in a 2017 bill that attracted bipartisan support in the House, is to revise the CSA’s marijuana ban so that it does not apply to state-legal conduct. Such an amendment would jibe with Biden’s promise to “leave decisions regarding legalization for recreational use up to the states,” and it should appeal to the federalist instincts of at least some Republican legislators.

If that option is also off the table, Biden might be persuaded to support piecemeal reforms with a better chance of passing both chambers. The Secure and Fair Enforcement Banking Act, for instance, would protect banks that serve state-licensed marijuana businesses from the threat of criminal penalties and potentially ruinous regulatory sanctions. The Small Business Tax Equity Act would amend Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code, which prohibits state-licensed marijuana suppliers from deducting business expenses on their federal returns, a disability that raises their effective tax rates to as much as 75 percent.

The Veterans Equal Access Act would allow doctors in the V.A. health care system to recommend medical marijuana in states where it is legal. It’s a modest reform that should appeal to legislators who want to be seen as standing up for veterans, especially now that more than 70 percent of the states allow medical use of cannabis.

Biden may never come around on marijuana legalization. But he could still support steps like these, which would significantly reduce the harm caused by federal prohibition.

Senior Editor JACOB SULLUM is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Keep Playing Nice With Private Space Companies

KATHERINE MANGU-WARD

Joe Biden doesn’t seem to be much of a space geek. Like virtually all American politicians, he says nice, bland stuff about “a bold space program that will continue to send astronaut heroes to expand our exploration and scientific frontiers.” That’s fine. If he simply sticks to Obama-era space policies, that will be more than enough to protect the incredible progress we have made returning Americans to orbit on privately built and launched vehicles in collaboration with NASA.

In a somewhat unexpected twist, President Barack Obama supported privatization in the space sector, diverting funding to contract with commercial firms for resupply missions and more. That program bore fruit during the Trump administration with the stirring, successful manned missions that sent astronauts aboard SpaceX vehicles to the International Space Station (ISS).

Battles about the new Space Force and climate science funding will likely be highly politicized. But what we know about Biden’s transition team suggests a heartening possibility that he will break with bipartisan tradition and try to terminate funding for the wasteful and porky Space Launch System (SLS), the super heavy–lift rocket built primarily by Boeing and famed for its development delays and cost overruns. SLS is projected to cost as much as $2 billion per mission when it’s done—if it’s ever done. Compare that with $90 million per launch for SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which is admittedly a less powerful rocket but is reusable and has a track record of success.

That said, there’s a good chance inertia will again triumph in the space-industrial complex; many powerful legislators have incentives to keep Boeing happy and the people who work at SLS facilities in their districts employed. Trump planned to end public funding for the ISS, putting the floating lab and habitat in private hands in 2025. Biden will likely reverse or dramatically slow this decision.

On the brighter side, he will also probably push back the Trump administration’s wildly unrealistic plan to return to the moon in 2024. That will give private companies more time to prepare for the challenge, and competitors such as Blue Origin more time to get established in commercial launch.

KATHERINE MANGU-WARD is editor in chief of Reason.

End Trump’s Trade Wars

ERIC BOEHM

President Joe Biden should lift the myriad tariffs that Donald Trump placed on foreign steel, aluminum, solar panels, and washing machines, along with a wide range of Chinese-made goods. Those tariffs have burdened American consumers and businesses—ironically harming manufacturers more than most—without accomplishing much else. Unilaterally repealing them would not be a surrender; it would be a refusal to keep firing a gun at America’s foot.

Trump was right that the United States has a key role to play in standing up to China’s authoritarian tendencies. But our economic interests are too interwoven with China’s for Trump’s zero-sum approach to be successful. The goal should be not to defeat China but to encourage it to change—and to reward it for moving in a pro-freedom direction.

Rather than spurning allies, Biden should take a multilateral approach. Japan, Vietnam, and other major American trading partners share many of our concerns about the economic influence China exerts. It makes sense to pursue a regional trade deal that would lower tariffs for imports from non-China countries. That would give American businesses clear alternatives for overseas investment and force China to change if it wants to keep competing.

That was the basic idea behind the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Obama-era trade agreement that Trump tore up during his first week in office. The other nations involved in that deal went ahead without the United States, but America’s participation would probably be welcomed, though some diplomacy might be necessary. Biden has said he would not rejoin the TPP as it was previously written but that he would leverage America’s allies to hold China accountable for breaking international norms on trade. That’s a good place to start.

Trump’s trade wars were deeply unpopular, and polls show that free trade is now more popular with Americans than ever before. Biden, who has a long history of supporting trade deals that lowered tariffs and boosted American prosperity, should not shy away from arguing that more trade is good both for America and for the rest of the world.

ERIC BOEHM is a reporter at Reason.

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A Practical Wish List for Joe Biden

biden-march-2021-issue

In his victory speech, Joe Biden promised to be “a healer, a uniter, a tested and steady hand.” If the new president wants to make good on his word, Reason staffers have some ideas for a few items to add to his policy agenda. These are suggestions that Biden might plausibly heed. We’re still gunning for the legalization of heroin, but we’d settle for descheduling marijuana. We’d love to see an end to all foreign adventurism, but just getting out of Afghanistan would be a good start. A robust private market in health insurance would be ideal, but the new administration could at least allow a larger variety of plans. No one expects Biden to be a libertarian president, but here are a few things he could do to make the nation a little bit more hospitable to free minds and free markets.

—KATHERINE MANGU-WARD

Reform the Clemency Process

C.J. CIARAMELLA

If the Biden administration wants to make substantive gains in criminal justice reform without having to deal with Congress, it should turn to one of the least limited tools of the presidency: the pardon power.

The last two presidents have handled the pardon power differently. Barack Obama launched an unprecedented large-scale clemency initiative aimed at nonviolent drug offenders. As a result, 1,715 federal inmates had their sentences commuted or reduced. But the process was dogged by foot-dragging and resistance from the Justice Department, and thousands of inmates were left behind.

Pardon and clemency petitions are typically routed through the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney. This office solicits feedback on petitions from the very federal prosecutors who secured those sentences, which creates a conflict of interest. “This is something we realized was not working under Obama,” says Jessica Jackson, chief advocacy officer at the Reform Alliance, a criminal justice advocacy organization. “That bottlenecked the process. It had to go through so many hands. There were deserving people who didn’t get it because of the pardon office being in the Justice Department.”

That included Alice Johnson, a grandmother serving a life sentence for a nonviolent drug crime. President Donald Trump commuted Johnson’s sentence after a personal appeal from megacelebrity Kim Kardashian West.

The Trump administration sidelined the Office of the Pardon Attorney, instead relying on a small group of informal advisers who vetted and brought lists of potential recipients to the White House. These included federal inmates who’d been passed over by the Obama administration, such as Crystal Munoz, who was serving 20 years in federal prison for a marijuana offense.

While this allowed commutations and pardons that otherwise would have been torpedoed by the Justice Department, the downside was that the number of beneficiaries slowed to a trickle. By the end of Trump’s term, more than 13,000 clemency applications were pending. He was on track to issue the fewest pardons and commutations of any president since William McKinley, until a spree in December bumped him up to 90 total, ahead of George H.W. Bush’s 77. The process also meant that to secure a commutation, you needed to have well-connected advocates and to capture the president’s fleeting attention. (Imagine how this could be abused if, hypothetically, a president was vain and easily impressed by celebrity status.)

Ideally there could be a smoothly operating pardon office, independent of the Justice Department, that handled clemency petitions at volume, with an eye toward the sort of excessive drug sentences that both Obama and Trump decried but never had the stomach to fully address. This wouldn’t require an act of Congress—just the will of a president able to admit the size and scope of the problem.

C.J. CIARAMELLA is a reporter at Reason.

Get Out of Afghanistan

BRIAN DOHERTY

In both 2011 and 2013, the Obama administration announced its intention to get all our conventional forces out of Afghanistan, where they did little but prop up corruption, provide targets for insurgents, and waste taxpayers’ money. As vice president, Biden tweeted that we would be out of Afghanistan in 2014. He failed to come through then, but he can make up for it now.

Washington currently finds itself, by realpolitik necessity, negotiating with the same force—the Taliban—that it sent troops to Afghanistan to overthrow. We stayed long enough, caused enough death and chaos, and funded enough bad governance for the wheels of history to transform a war that looked like a U.S. victory into an occupation that looks sadly pointless. The best thing we can take away from the experience is the wisdom not to pretend we can pacify or transform a troubled nation half a world away and the prudence not to stay in a war long after its futility has become clear.

Waiting until the Taliban stop misbehaving, or the contending sides in their internal conflicts have settled their differences, guarantees Afghanistan will be a forever war—one that Biden declared last year that “it is past time to end.” Ending it requires presidential resolve, not leaving foreign policy decisions in the hands of Afghanistan’s feuding factions or waiting for fantastical “security conditions” that we never had the power to create.

The Trump administration claimed in November to be on track for an end to our presence there by May. Biden should meet that deadline, or even exceed it—not for the sake of honoring his predecessor, but to honor policy sense and the health and welfare of our armed forces.

In the Obama administration, Biden was a voice for a relatively narrow mission of counterterror rather than a broad one of counterinsurgency. The latter has proven hopelessly ineffective and wasteful, and the former does not require thousands of troops permanently stationed. We should cease any role in the aerial bombing of Afghanistan (which increased under Trump), and we should stop financing that government’s incompetence. American authorities never understood the country’s culture, and after toppling the Taliban they never really understood the mission. It was past time to leave when Biden was vice president; now, as president, he can finally fulfill that promise.

BRIAN DOHERTY is a senior editor at Reason.

Don’t Call It ‘Junk’ Insurance—and Don’t Restrict Its Sale

PETER SUDERMAN

Donald Trump’s presidency began with a fruitless quest to repeal and replace Obamacare. The effort, which chewed up much of Washington’s attention during 2017, failed in part because neither Trump nor congressional Republicans managed to unify around a single plan. Trump, in particular, seemed unable to even explain the basics of what the various replacement plans were attempting to do; at best he promised health care that was “better” and “cheaper.”

Yet out of the ashes of policy failure, the Trump administration did deliver an under-the-radar improvement to the health insurance marketplace, by loosening some of Obamacare’s insurance rules.

Obamacare was designed on the premise that health insurance should be comprehensive. One of the law’s major components was a list of “essential health benefits” that every plan sold through the law’s insurance exchanges were required to include. Anything less was derided as “junk insurance” because it didn’t cover every possible health care eventuality.

This had predictable consequences. The highly regulated insurance sold under Obamacare offered a greater array of benefits. It was also substantially more expensive, which proved particularly troublesome for families whose household incomes were just high enough not to qualify for the law’s subsidies. Health insurance premiums rose throughout Barack Obama’s presidency.

The Trump administration saw this as an opportunity: Why not use executive authority to deregulate cheaper plans with fewer benefits? So in 2018, it loosened restrictions on the sale of what are known as “short-term, limited duration” insurance plans. The Obama administration had restricted the duration of those plans to three-month stretches. Under Trump, the plans became available for up to 36 months.

Those less expensive, less comprehensive plans have since become quite popular, with more than 188,000 people enrolled at the end of 2019—possibly many more, as the plans are not tracked in the same way as more comprehensive policies. The insurance that was derided as junk is, to many Americans, a demonstrable value.

One result has been to keep insurance premiums down: In states relying on the federal health care exchange, premiums for typical plans fell from 2018 through 2020. Meanwhile, Obama-care’s subsidized, regulated plans are still there for Americans who want them.

Biden and his health care team will no doubt be tempted to reverse this, but that would be a mistake. Americans should have the choice of cheaper, less regulated, less comprehensive plans, even if it’s not precisely the coverage that Obamacare’s authors had in mind.

PETER SUDERMAN is features editor at Reason.

Let Hongkongers Come to America

LIZ WOLFE

Improving on Donald Trump’s immigration record won’t be a tall order. While America’s 45th president worked hard to scrap the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allowed roughly 640,000 immigrants who came to the country illegally as children to work and study here legally, Joe Biden says he’ll push for giving them a path to citizenship.

But Biden should add a proposal with less precedent in the U.S. His administration should grant visas to Hongkongers looking to flee Chinese rule and start anew in the United States.

In 1997, China’s “one country, two systems” policy extended autonomy to the island as a condition of Britain handing the territory over to China. (The arrangement was supposed to expire in 2047.) For the ensuing two decades, residents of Hong Kong enjoyed due process in courts of law, the freedom to criticize their government as much as they wanted, and the prosperity brought by thriving commerce.

But over the last few years, the mainland has attempted to take control of Hong Kong ahead of schedule. Residents responded by protesting Beijing’s cruel and duplicitous actions. Hundreds of thousands (by some counts millions) of people took to the streets and occupied thoroughfares for months on end. The authorities then enacted a vague national security law that gives the government broad latitude to squash dissent.

Since then, politically outspoken university faculty members have been stripped of their positions. Organizers have been arrested and jailed—including 53 pro-democracy leaders in a massive early January sweep. Twelve protesters attempted to flee by speedboat to Taiwan, getting only a quarter of the way before they were apprehended. Their families begged for their release with their faces obscured, fearing retribution.

Though Hong Kong’s freedoms are largely gone, Hongkongers now have a more profound appreciation for the value of free expression. They’d be wonderful new Americans for that reason alone. On a more practical level, many Hongkongers are highly educated and entrepreneurial; they could breathe fresh air into U.S. regions and towns that need to be reinvigorated. And letting them in would have bipartisan support: High-profile Republicans such as former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky have explicitly (and rightly!) called for providing a “beacon of light” to people fleeing communism. For all these reasons, President Biden should give refuge to Hongkongers yearning to breathe free.

LIZ WOLFE is staff editor at Reason.

Expand Your Marijuana Reform Ambitions

JACOB SULLUM

Unlike most of the candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination (including his eventual running mate), Joe Biden opposes federal legalization of marijuana. Instead, he says he wants to “decriminalize cannabis use,” expunge the records related to such cases, and move marijuana to a less restrictive legal category.

Those first two steps would not have much impact, since the Justice Department rarely prosecutes low-level possession cases. Moving marijuana from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), a category supposedly reserved for exceptionally dangerous drugs with no accepted medical use, to Schedule II, which indicates that a drug has a high abuse potential but can be used as a medicine, might facilitate research. But it would not address the untenable conflict between the CSA and the laws of the 36 states that allow medical or recreational use of marijuana.

That conflict casts a dark shadow over the burgeoning cannabis industry, making basic business functions such as banking and paying taxes needlessly difficult, costly, complicated, and legally perilous. Descheduling marijuana completely, as a groundbreaking bill that the House of Representatives approved in December would do, is the most straightforward way to address that problem. But even if Biden could be persuaded to support that solution, which Vice President Kamala Harris favored as a senator, Republican opposition probably would make it politically impossible. Just five Republicans voted for the House bill, and Senate passage would require GOP support or Democratic unanimity.

A less radical approach, embodied in a 2017 bill that attracted bipartisan support in the House, is to revise the CSA’s marijuana ban so that it does not apply to state-legal conduct. Such an amendment would jibe with Biden’s promise to “leave decisions regarding legalization for recreational use up to the states,” and it should appeal to the federalist instincts of at least some Republican legislators.

If that option is also off the table, Biden might be persuaded to support piecemeal reforms with a better chance of passing both chambers. The Secure and Fair Enforcement Banking Act, for instance, would protect banks that serve state-licensed marijuana businesses from the threat of criminal penalties and potentially ruinous regulatory sanctions. The Small Business Tax Equity Act would amend Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code, which prohibits state-licensed marijuana suppliers from deducting business expenses on their federal returns, a disability that raises their effective tax rates to as much as 75 percent.

The Veterans Equal Access Act would allow doctors in the V.A. health care system to recommend medical marijuana in states where it is legal. It’s a modest reform that should appeal to legislators who want to be seen as standing up for veterans, especially now that more than 70 percent of the states allow medical use of cannabis.

Biden may never come around on marijuana legalization. But he could still support steps like these, which would significantly reduce the harm caused by federal prohibition.

Senior Editor JACOB SULLUM is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Keep Playing Nice With Private Space Companies

KATHERINE MANGU-WARD

Joe Biden doesn’t seem to be much of a space geek. Like virtually all American politicians, he says nice, bland stuff about “a bold space program that will continue to send astronaut heroes to expand our exploration and scientific frontiers.” That’s fine. If he simply sticks to Obama-era space policies, that will be more than enough to protect the incredible progress we have made returning Americans to orbit on privately built and launched vehicles in collaboration with NASA.

In a somewhat unexpected twist, President Barack Obama supported privatization in the space sector, diverting funding to contract with commercial firms for resupply missions and more. That program bore fruit during the Trump administration with the stirring, successful manned missions that sent astronauts aboard SpaceX vehicles to the International Space Station (ISS).

Battles about the new Space Force and climate science funding will likely be highly politicized. But what we know about Biden’s transition team suggests a heartening possibility that he will break with bipartisan tradition and try to terminate funding for the wasteful and porky Space Launch System (SLS), the super heavy–lift rocket built primarily by Boeing and famed for its development delays and cost overruns. SLS is projected to cost as much as $2 billion per mission when it’s done—if it’s ever done. Compare that with $90 million per launch for SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which is admittedly a less powerful rocket but is reusable and has a track record of success.

That said, there’s a good chance inertia will again triumph in the space-industrial complex; many powerful legislators have incentives to keep Boeing happy and the people who work at SLS facilities in their districts employed. Trump planned to end public funding for the ISS, putting the floating lab and habitat in private hands in 2025. Biden will likely reverse or dramatically slow this decision.

On the brighter side, he will also probably push back the Trump administration’s wildly unrealistic plan to return to the moon in 2024. That will give private companies more time to prepare for the challenge, and competitors such as Blue Origin more time to get established in commercial launch.

KATHERINE MANGU-WARD is editor in chief of Reason.

End Trump’s Trade Wars

ERIC BOEHM

President Joe Biden should lift the myriad tariffs that Donald Trump placed on foreign steel, aluminum, solar panels, and washing machines, along with a wide range of Chinese-made goods. Those tariffs have burdened American consumers and businesses—ironically harming manufacturers more than most—without accomplishing much else. Unilaterally repealing them would not be a surrender; it would be a refusal to keep firing a gun at America’s foot.

Trump was right that the United States has a key role to play in standing up to China’s authoritarian tendencies. But our economic interests are too interwoven with China’s for Trump’s zero-sum approach to be successful. The goal should be not to defeat China but to encourage it to change—and to reward it for moving in a pro-freedom direction.

Rather than spurning allies, Biden should take a multilateral approach. Japan, Vietnam, and other major American trading partners share many of our concerns about the economic influence China exerts. It makes sense to pursue a regional trade deal that would lower tariffs for imports from non-China countries. That would give American businesses clear alternatives for overseas investment and force China to change if it wants to keep competing.

That was the basic idea behind the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Obama-era trade agreement that Trump tore up during his first week in office. The other nations involved in that deal went ahead without the United States, but America’s participation would probably be welcomed, though some diplomacy might be necessary. Biden has said he would not rejoin the TPP as it was previously written but that he would leverage America’s allies to hold China accountable for breaking international norms on trade. That’s a good place to start.

Trump’s trade wars were deeply unpopular, and polls show that free trade is now more popular with Americans than ever before. Biden, who has a long history of supporting trade deals that lowered tariffs and boosted American prosperity, should not shy away from arguing that more trade is good both for America and for the rest of the world.

ERIC BOEHM is a reporter at Reason.

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Avoid The “Great Reset” In Three Easy Steps

Avoid The “Great Reset” In Three Easy Steps

Authored by David James via Off-Guardian.org,

There are two things that should be understood about the global financial markets as the world faces what is being called the Great Reset, or Bretton Woods 2.

  • The first is that the US dollar rules the world (as distinct from the US nation).

  • The second is that the system is insane.

Sure, it may look rational with all those numbers, charts, ratios, algorithms and impressive-sounding technical terms. But collectively the whole thing is mad. As the great British writer GK Chesterton said:

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

That nicely describes the global capital markets and it does not bode well either for an effective reset or the survival of the monetary system itself.

The US dollar has dominated the global financial markets since 1945, when Franklin D Roosevelt did a deal with King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia to denominate oil trade in the American currency, leading to the creation of the ‘petrodollar’ which then became the world’s reserve currency.

The petrodollar has long since faded; more oil is actually denominated in Chinese yuan now than American dollars (although the yuan is fixed to the US dollar so it is not really separate). But the bulk of international trade and asset buying is still denominated in US dollars out of habit and the US dollar has been further entrenched because of the emergence of the global derivatives market. Derivatives are transactions derived from, or rather are gambles on, conventional financial assets such as currencies, interest rates and shares.

The ‘value’ (whatever that means exactly) of these derivatives is $US500-1000 trillion, give or take the odd $US100 trillion.

This intense financial activity, most of which occurs in microseconds, is like having a massive roulette wheel spinning above the earth. According to the Bank for International Settlements, the daily cross border trades with the US dollar on one side equates with almost $US6 trillion.

To give some idea of how big that notional ‘money’ is, the entire US Federal debt, built up over decades, is about $US27 trillion, or the equivalent of less than five days trading. It has entrenched the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency and allows America to do whatever it likes on its Federal budget, its military spending or whatever other financial excesses it can devise, such as a $US21 trillion hole in the defence budget.

Whatever debt the US issues is swallowed up by the massive demand for dollars in the foreign exchange markets. No other country has that freedom.

It has recently become popular to criticise so-called ‘fiat money’, money that is determined by government edict. The contention is that when President Richard Nixon took America off the gold standard in 1971, because the nation could not pay for the Vietnam War, it ushered in an era of government-created money whose value has been progressively degraded.

Though superficially persuasive the argument is entirely misleading. The repeated crises in the financial markets over the last four decades have not been because of too much government intrusion but the opposite: a refusal by governments to govern properly, which allowed private players to run amok.

It was a cleverly engineered scam.

In the 1980s and 1990s there was a world-wide push, prosecuted by well-funded think tanks and lobbyists, to ‘deregulate’ the financial markets. What nobody seemed to notice, or if they did notice they conveniently chose to ignore it, is that this argument is, literally, nonsense. It is impossible to deregulate financial markets because they consist of regulations. Deregulating financial markets is like trying to take the hydrogen, oxygen and wetness out of water. Other types of markets can be deregulated because regulations are external to the economic activity, but in finance they are the same.

Enter insanity.

By convincing Western governments that deregulation was a fine thing (usually using water metaphors to make it seem that regulations somehow got in the way of monetary ‘flows’) private actors were able to make up their own rules, triggering ‘financialisation’, or wealth extraction by the finance sector at the expense of everyone else.

The ridiculous invention of rules has been most obvious in the derivatives markets, which are a complete free-for-all – think of a bet, any bet. It also occurred in the real economy, where unshackled banks and financial institutions invented different ways to create ludicrous levels of global debt that are now, in aggregate, unpayable. The only option for central banks in developed countries has been to drop interest rates to almost zero in the hope of kicking the can down the street and printing money, known as ‘quantitative easing’, on what is laughably called their ‘balance sheets’.

There were plenty of warnings that ‘deregulation’ was dangerous. In 1998, a derivatives company, Long Term Capital Management nearly brought down the Western banking system. Bizarrely, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, responded by aggressively increasing the number of derivatives traders in the belief that it would all, sort of, balance itself out.

It didn’t.

The 2007-2008 financial crisis revealed the insanity of allowing private players to invent their own rules when there was a near collapse of the entire system. It was only saved because the US Treasury head, Henry Paulson, decided to re-regulate instead of standing back and allowing ‘market forces’ to work.

It was a close run thing, though. On September 18, 2008, $US550 billion went out of the US money markets in a couple of hours. Paulson responded by closing down all America’s money accounts and announcing a guarantee of $250,000 for all bank deposits. That is, he issued a fiat. The Treasury later estimated that had he not done so $US6 trillion would have exited the US financial system by the end of the day. Given that banks lend out roughly 20 times their capital base this would have spelt the end of the monetary system of the world.

Like all good madmen, banks and financial traders, incapable of taking any responsibility for their own actions and faithfully adhering to their smug anti-government rhetoric, outrageously blamed governments for a crisis that they had caused. They got away with it. Almost no financiers went to jail and they continued their debauch of the system, exploiting lower interest rates to increase debt to its current unsustainable levels.

Can a genuine reset be achieved? Not with the current finance technocrats, who have probably never scrutinised an assumption in their lives. Compare these superficial thinkers with John Maynard Keynes, the person who led the British delegation to Bretton Woods 1 in 1944. A member of the Bloomsbury Group Keynes thought deeply both about what money is and how it should function (he is associated with the economics of government spending but that is only a cartoonish version of his thought). Almost none of the current crop of central bankers, heads of global institutions or schemers in the World Economic Forum are capable of such reflection. Most did not even notice that ‘financial deregulation’ is a flat contradiction.

WHAT SHOULD BE DONE?

First:

Remove the central assumption behind the madness and recognise that money is a system of rules in which government has to be a central player, an umpire. The demonization of ‘fiat money’ is rubbish. So is the idea of freeing up market forces by deregulating the finance system. The question is not whether governments should be involved, but how they should be involved – what constitutes good governance of the system.

Second:

Find ways – it will require a jettisoning of the circular arguments of neo-classical economics – to reimpose some sort of control over the quantity of money. Because of financial deregulation, authorities ceded any control over the amount of credit in the system. They can only control the cost of money, the interest rate. With interest rates at close to zero that remaining tool has been rendered useless.

Critics of fiat money get starry-eyed about reintroducing the gold standard or buying Bitcoin. This is because both are finite; in theory they introduce some control over the quantity of money and raise the prospect that it might once again function as a means of exchange rather than something to be debauched in an endless regress. But it is a blind alley. Neither Bitcoin nor gold can be realistically used as a means of exchange, and in any case they are both valued in fiat currency: US dollars. They are just another type of financial asset for investors to play with.

Third:

The financial schemers should, even for their own sakes, shelve any ideas about a global central bank digital currency for cross-border transactions, no matter how seductive it might seem as a power grab. It would be a genuine threat to US dollar dominance, imperilling the US military’s ability to spend what it wants. The centralisation of power it implies also poses a threat to Chinese and Russian military autonomy.

Financiers like to think that soldiers are just guns for hire, that money rules everything. A glance at history suggests otherwise. If the financiers go head to head with military interests they will get some nasty surprises and we will be no closer to a solution to the monetary debauch.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 02/01/2021 – 05:00

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Brickbat: That’s a Stretch

mosque_1161x653

The Pakistani government has told leaders of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA to take down the organization’s U.S.-based website or face prosecution under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. Ahmadis regard the sect’s founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, as a prophet subordinate to Mohammad. They regard themselves as Muslim but are regarded as heretics and officially repressed in Pakistan. The leaders of Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA are all U.S. citizens. But prosecution could make it dangerous for them to visit relatives in Pakistan.

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Huawei Caught Red-Handed In Covert Influence Op To Sway European Policymakers On 5G

Huawei Caught Red-Handed In Covert Influence Op To Sway European Policymakers On 5G

Huawei was recently busted in Europe for waging an aggressive online social media campaign which utilized a small army of fake accounts in order to sway European officials over telecommunications policy. 

In particular the “covert pro-Huawei influence campaign” sought to convince Belgium lawmaker’s to see it China’s way at a moment the United States is targeting its building 5G networks in the West.

The New York Times details that in one documented instance, a now former contract employee wrote a pro-Huawei article arguing that the company shouldn’t be punished based on new draft legislation being considered in Belgium. It then went viral based on a clearly coordinated initiative that went far beyond usual corporate PR and propaganda. 

Via CNN

The author of the Dutch-language article was later surprised to see the article take off and circulate among many “experts” he had never heard of:

First, at least 14 Twitter accounts posing as telecommunications experts, writers and academics shared articles by Vermulst and many others attacking draft Belgium legislation that would limit “high risk” vendors like Huawei from building the country’s 5G system, according to Graphika, a research firm that studies misinformation and fake social media accounts. The pro-Huawei accounts used computer-generated profile pictures, a telltale sign of inauthentic activity.

From there, it went from being shared among the fake accounts, apparently including Twitter bots, to real accounts among top level Huawei executives in what the NYT report admits was a pretty rudimentary scheme:

Next, Huawei officials retweeted the fake accounts, giving the articles even wider reach to policymakers, journalists and business leaders. Kevin Liu, Huawei’s president for public affairs and communications in Western Europe, who has a verified Twitter account with 1.1 million followers, shared 60 posts from the fake accounts over three weeks in December, according to Graphika. Huawei’s official account in Europe, with more than 5 million followers, did so 47 times.

But interestingly and tellingly the Times report stops far short of alleging Chinese state sponsorship to the information op, despite the long record of state support fueling the telecommunications giant’s global rise.

The pattern has been that Russian state “influence ops” are often alleged or assumed on much lesser grounds and evidence, but Chinese interference in Western democracies?

Here’s the Times appearing to brush aside the question, instead of digging deeper:

The effort suggests a new twist in social media manipulation, said Ben Nimmo, a Graphika investigator who helped identify the pro-Huawei campaign. Tactics once used mainly for government objectives — like Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election — are being adapted to achieve corporate goals.

“It’s business rather than politics,” Nimmo said. “It’s not one country targeting another country. It looks like an operation to promote a major multinational’s interests — and to do it against a European state.”

Well, yes and no. Nothing further? Nothing to see here…

In a follow-up statement Huawei all but admitted to the “inappropriate” covert social media influence campaign. “Huawei has clear social media policies based on international best practice, and we take any suggestion that they have not been followed very seriously,” the company statement said. “Some social media and online activity has been brought to our attention suggesting we may have fallen short of these policies and of our wider Huawei values of openness, honesty and transparency.”

How is it actually known that as the Times quoted, “It’s not one country targeting another country…”? By all appearances it seems precisely this, given Beijing and Huawei’s well-documented track record.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 02/01/2021 – 04:15

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Brickbat: That’s a Stretch

mosque_1161x653

The Pakistani government has told leaders of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA to take down the organization’s U.S.-based website or face prosecution under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. Ahmadis regard the sect’s founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, as a prophet subordinate to Mohammad. They regard themselves as Muslim but are regarded as heretics and officially repressed in Pakistan. The leaders of Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA are all U.S. citizens. But prosecution could make it dangerous for them to visit relatives in Pakistan.

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The Glory Of Going Viral – A Fraud Promoted By Big Tech

The Glory Of Going Viral – A Fraud Promoted By Big Tech

Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time blog,

While pondering the current state of the world I stumbled upon the question or idea that one of the things that makes the internet so intriguing is the alluring idea that it holds the potential to elevate the user to a higher level of importance. Nestled somewhere between collecting followers and buying hits is the fraud promoted by big tech that you could go viral. To many people, the idea of instant fame and fortune is akin to winning the lottery. This could explain why so many people are infatuated by the internet, their phones, and social media.

The Internet Gives Hope To The Masses

Many people particularly those that are younger seem to think that one big or lucky break is what it takes to achieve happiness and this is the way life works. All they need is to come up with either “one good app” or an idea and they could become the next Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. Another example rooted in this same line of thought is once people understand just how exceptional they are people might move them to a higher position in life. They might even send them off to Washington to solve the countries many problems in the same way those on the left have embraced Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and moved her into a place of power.

This is also quite visible with the emergence of influence marketing and what has become known as social media influencers. This is where people and organizations are purported to have an expert level of knowledge in their field and positioned to guide others in forming opinions. An influencer may frame their push as testimonial advertising or take the role of a value-added influencer, such as a journalist, academic, industry analyst, or professional adviser. All these roles scream, “I’m important.”

Big tech and social media have a lot to be gained by promoting a few powerful myths. The idea they empower individuals is a biggie. This dovetails with the idea you might suddenly become something far more than you were. All this seems to feed the same pleasure endorphins that people experience when playing the lottery or gambling. If social media and the tech firms are indeed lurking behind this subconscious “subliminal message”  it could make them responsible for the demise of humanity. While such a statement seems a bit over the top, it is clear the internet has been a mixed blessing for society and our culture. While it has great potential as a tool to gather and expand knowledge, it also has an evil side.

You Can’t Download A Better Life

In our society, many people crave what is viewed by many as “fifteen minutes of fame” and are willing to pay dearly for it. This is not an overt promise made by those controlling the huge tech firms but bubbles below the surface and draws many people into social media’s web. It also feeds into the self-image many people have of themselves and tends to further inflate their already oversized personas. This is where say her name becomes, “Say My Name.” This is often evidenced by a person with no real standing opportunistically inserting themselves into the “news story” of the moment.

The pandemic has been a boon to high techs’ ability to spread its influence. It has forced people online which has accelerated the power of technology to physically distance us from each other which started with the spread of high-speed internet. This can be seen as people ride along in the same vehicle with no real conversations due to the fact one is focused on a digital device.

This illusion big tech can transform our lives is invaluable to many average people struggling to get through the day. The idea we could elevate ourselves into instant celebrity status, where everyone would want to know us, and sing our praise speaks volumes of the human psyche and how our egos tend to override both logic and how important we are as individuals.

Social media became a powerful force by convincing us they have the power to bring us closer together and bridge the miles. This has not occurred. Just after starting to write this article I came across an article authored by Josephine Bartosch via The Critic. It was apply titled; The Dehumanizing Danger Of Social Media, it contended that far from facilitating an enriching meeting of minds, the online world is producing a dystopian world that is breaking us apart. The argument can be made that technology corporations and activists are driving society towards hyper-individualism.

May I suggest the illusions and frauds offered by big tech extend far beyond what is first obvious? It extends to the very idea they validate our individuality.  The Guardian recently launched a Genderqueer generation, series of stories centered on the children and young adults who are rejecting traditional gender identities. It is perhaps not surprising that when young people with no solid sense of self, twisted and confused by all the digital exposure put before them, turn online, in search of an authoritative framework to make sense of their feelings. This often leaves them open to falling prey to the censorious, tyrannical “group-think” of big tech. Of course, this is reinforced in the warm, fuzzy mission statements touted by technology companies. 

All this sets mankind up for a rather problematic future where we are more interested in the personas we each now advertise online than what flesh and blood reality we live in day today. This helps explain the burgeoning market for sex robots, or why an increasing number of those under 30 now identify themself as “queer”.  In John Perry Barlow’s stirring 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, he described it as a place where “both everywhere and nowhere … not where bodies live.”

Virtual reality is not real, virtual travel does not take you to a distant land no matter how real it might seem. This is not the sort of thing that glues communities and families together. Adding to my issue with such things is that those pulling the strings can at any time sever them or change the rules leaving those that have become dependent on them unmoored. 

The digital world is a place full of censorship and manipulation. The warped utopian vision of the digital world as a place where freed from prejudice,  our minds  could come together is a dangerous myth. This goes hand in hand with an emerging market in cosmetic surgeries whereby bodies can be cosmetically altered to match a client’s internal sense of self outside initial plans of nature. Technology corporations and “queer theory” activists are fueling the rush into hyper-individualism, destroying our internal structure by which we frame what is a normal human experience.

All this intertwines with what many of us see as the crazy idea children should choose their own gender. The idea we can separate or un-tether the mind from our body has left people adrift, navigating a turbulent online world without the reassuring markers humans require. This all brings forth several questions that society should think about long and hard. What are we becoming? Is this the best we can be? Are we being softened up to where we will surrender our individuality, humanity, and freedom to the forces of AI and those that control it? These are a few of the most important issues we face as a society.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 02/01/2021 – 03:30

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UK Car Manufacturing Suffers Least-Productive Year Since 1984

UK Car Manufacturing Suffers Least-Productive Year Since 1984

As with most industries, 2020 was a bad year for UK car manufacturing. In fact, as Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes, it was a very bad year.

The latest output figures released by SMMT today put the sector down at a level last seen in the 80’s. In total, 920,928 cars rolled off the production lines, representing a decrease of almost 30 percent compared to 2019 and troublingly close to the 908,906 chalked up in 1984.

Infographic: UK car manufacturing suffers least productive year since 1984 | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

Underscoring the graveness of the situation, Mike Hawes, SMMT Chief Executive, said:

“These figures, the worst in a generation, reflect the devastating impact of the pandemic on UK automotive production, with Covid lockdowns depressing demand, shuttering plants and threatening lives and livelihoods.”

Adding:

“The industry faces 2021 with more optimism, however, with a vaccine being rolled out and clarity on how we trade with Europe, which remains by far our biggest market.”

Indeed, the EU is by far the largest importer of UK-produced cars, accounting for 54 percent of those made in 2020.

In comparison, second-placed United States took 18 percent and China were third with just 8 percent.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 02/01/2021 – 02:45

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