Category: reason

The popular post-9/11 slogan “See Something, Say Something” is getting a digital makeover in Congress. A bill introduced by Sens. Joe Manchin (D–W. Va.) and John Cornyn (R–Texas) would repurpose the war on terror’s pro-snitching mantra by requiring that tech companies monitor their customers more closely and share user data with the federal government. The bill, dubbed the See Something, Say Something Online Act, also would let people report “suspicious” social media posts and any other content they don’t like directly to the Department of Justice (DOJ).

A new DOJ office would handle these “suspicious transmission activity reports” (STARs). The tips would be exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests, and tech companies would not be allowed to publicly acknowledge or discuss the information reported.

Each STAR submitted by an internet company would have to contain the name and geographic location of the user in question, along with any other associated metadata and identifying information in the company’s possession. All online entities—not just Big Tech platforms like Twitter and Facebook—would be expected to comply with the law.

What kind of content would warrant a STAR? The Manchin-Cornyn bill is (perhaps deliberately) vague about that. The only two concrete examples it mentions are “an active sale or solicitation of sale of drugs or a threat of terrorist activity.” But companies would be obliged to report any content that may facilitate, promote, incite, or otherwise assist “the commission of a major crime.”

Failure to submit STARs would cost a company liability protection under Section 230, a law designed to distinguish between internet platforms and their users. Section 230 says “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” In effect, it means individuals are responsible for their own speech, while services that merely act as conduits for that speech are not (with some exceptions). Without Section 230, it would be very difficult for most of today’s web platforms to exist.

Section 230 has long been a target of politicians who want more control over, and access to, people’s internet speech. The See Something, Say Something Online Act may also be aimed at gutting encrypted communications, since it requires STARs not just for publicly posted content but also for private user communications. The Manchin-Cornyn bill would cover “any public or private post, message, comment, tag, transaction, or any other user-generated content or transmission.” Platforms that currently encrypt communications shared directly and privately between users could miss “suspicious” activity and thereby risk potentially running afoul of the law.

“The bill would put online services into the impossible position of determining what is or isn’t evidence of a crime, with crippling liability for failing to make the correct determination,” said the Internet Association, a tech lobbying firm, in a statement about the bill. “This could result in an enormous amount of user information being shared with the government, with little constraint on its use.”

First introduced in September 2020, the See Something, Say Something Online Act got a boost this year from the riot at the U.S. Capitol, which revived interest in old “tough on terror” policies. The bill was reintroduced in late January. But like so many of those measures, this one seems ill-suited to stopping actual terrorism. While the legislation would subject many innocent people to DOJ scrutiny, federal agents probably would be so overwhelmed with reports that separating real threats from the noise would be impossible.

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From the Bureau of Justice Statistics Prisoners in 2019 data (tables 14 & 15), aggregating state and federal prisoners:

Violent	50.83%
Property	14.99%
Drug possession	3.35%
Drug other	14.63%
Weapons	6.29%
DUI	1.54%
Other	8.36%

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New Jersey resident John Bellochio recently filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 (NOTA), the federal law banning the sale of kidneys and other human organs for transplant:

A New Jersey man found out it was illegal to sell his own organs after he attempted to do so when he was short on cash, and he is now suing the federal government.

John Bellocchio filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court against U.S. Attorney General Merick Garland Thursday for the right to sell his organs, The New York Post first reported.

Bellocchio’s attorney, Matthew Haicken, told the Post in a statement “if John ever had the opportunity, he should be legally free to sell his kidney.”

“I believe the current law is unconstitutional. People should have the right to do with their body whatever they want,” Haicken said.

Much as I wish it were otherwise, I fear the lawsuit has little, if any chance of succeeding. Under current Supreme Court precedent, laws restricting economic transactions are subject only to very minimal “rational basis” scrutiny. I believe that precedent should be reversed, or at least significantly revised. But that is unlikely to happen any time soon.

But even if the lawsuit fails, perhaps it can call attention to the enormous harm caused by NOTA. The ban on organ markets quite literally kills thousands of Americans every year, who die because they cannot get kidney transplants  in time to save them. It also condemns many more people to years of needless suffering on kidney dialysis.

I summarized some of the issues at stake in this comment to Fox News, which interviewed me on the subject of the lawsuit:

Many who are opposed to a legal market for organs argue that it would lead to the exploitation of poor people, but Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, said this concern is misguided.

“Donating a kidney is actually less risky than all sorts of other things that we allow people to do all the time, including poor people, like being a lumberjack. That’s much more risky in terms of risk of death and serious injury, but no one says, ‘Poor people shouldn’t be allowed to be lumberjacks,'” Somin told Fox News….

Even though there may be some risks, Somin argued that the benefits of a legal market for organs far outweigh the costs.

“Whatever objection you have to this, whether it’s a left-wing objection or right-wing objection or something else, you have to ask: not only is there some sort of a problem, but is it a great enough problem that we should be willing to consign thousands of people to death every year, and many more thousands to kidney dialysis?” Somin said.

I also agree with Bellocchio’s attorney, when he points out (in the same story), that “‘My body, my choice,’ shouldn’t just be for abortion.” Legalizing organ markets is indeed an implication of the “my body, my choice” principle at least as much as being pro-choice on abortion (which I also am). In my view, the former is actually an easier case than the latter.

I addressed “exploitation of the poor” and other objections to organ markets in greater detail here and here.

Paranthetically, it was interesting to me that the Fox reporter who interviewed me on this issue was so sympathetic to the idea of organ markets, even though much of Fox’s socially conservative audience probably opposes it based on religious or “sanctity of the body” objections. On the other hand, increasing allowable compensation was for expenses incurred by organ donors was one of the Trump administration’s relatively few good policies, as explained in this piece on the liberal Vox site, which rarely had much occasion to praise the Trump administration on other issues.

The organ market issue actually cuts across conventional partisan and ideological lines, with libertarians, economists across the political spectrum, and liberals concerned about increasing access to health care aligned against left-wingers who fear exploitation of the poor, and social conservatives concerned about protecting what they view as the sanctity of the body.

Over time, I hope more people will see the enormous life-saving and misery-reducing potential of organ markets. Even if they don’t set aside their concerns entirely, they might begin to recognize that any such issues are not weighty enough to justify forcibly consigning many thousands of people to suffering and death.

 

 

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Grocery stores in the United Kingdom should stop selling alcohol, a controversial new study suggests. The study, published this month in the Journal of Public Health and authored by researchers from the University of Cardiff and elsewhere, suggests inexpensive food sold at groceries that also sell alcohol may encourage more alcohol sales.

“People who pop into the supermarket with a budget are attracted to cheap food offers and therefore spend more on alcohol,” lead author Simon Moore told the Daily Mail this week.

“If the way alcohol is retailed influences consumption then consideration should be given to how alcohol is retailed in the U.K. and whether separate stores for alcohol and food… provide greater opportunity to challenge the harms associated with alcohol consumption,” the study concludes.

The study looks favorably at countries in which governments “hold a monopoly over alcohol retail” alcohol sales, including Finland and Canada, while contrasting it with the U.K., where “alcohol is not subject to a state monopoly… it is available through various retail outlets, the prominent suppliers of which are local convenience stores and large grocery stores.” That means, as Moore notes, “you can go and buy a bottle of wine with your bread and Sunday paper from a supermarket or local shop.”

Predictably, reports on the study raise the specter of the “nanny state.”

“Stripping alcohol from supermarket shelves could help to curb Britain’s drinking problem, according to ‘nannying’ scientists,” the Daily Mail reported in an article this week on the study.

Importantly, as the Daily Mail piece also notes, the study was spurred in part by a pair of failed policy interventions.

In Britain, according to a recent parliamentary study, there’s “a widespread belief that most of the alcohol that contributes to drunken behaviour is irresponsibly priced and sold.” In response, Scotland and Wales have implemented minimum-pricing laws, while England bans the sale of alcohol beverages below their taxed value (or “below the level of alcohol duty plus VAT”).

But the new “study found hiking alcohol prices in Scotland and Wales barely had any effect on [alcohol] consumption,” the paper reports.

Despite those minimum-pricing policies having failed to achieve their objectives, the study authors nevertheless conclude that these failures indicate the need for still more policy interventions to make the original failed policy work. Minimum “pricing policies might be undermined,” they opine, “if retailers offset an increase in alcohol price by reducing the price of food or increase the availability of alcohol.”

Alas, doubling down on policy errors has become one of modern government’s chief functions, something critics are also noting.

“This just looks like public health trying to double down on its previous failures, and moderate drinkers will once again suffer the consequences,” the Adam Smith Institute told the Daily Mail.

There’s been no shortage of recent studies on food and alcohol in Britain. One concluded that the pandemic-related lockdown has seen Britons load up on food and drink at rates higher than those elsewhere on the European continent. Another found that people who drink even a little tend to consume more calories from food. And another concluded that younger British drinkers are consuming less alcohol than that same cohort did a decade ago.

I wonder if the authors of the new study considered other options that might yield the results they desire. For example, grocers could be forced to raise food prices—perhaps by government banning grocer discounts on the purchase of fresh produce—which would leave consumers with less money to buy alcohol. Or government could prohibit grocers from selling food. Or, better still, the law could force grocers to stop selling both food and alcohol entirely. (On second thought, none of these ideas are very good, either.)

As I explained in a 2015 column, government attempts to socially engineer food choices tend to end in failure. Policies that restrict food freedom do not make people healthier, as evidenced by the catastrophic failure of a Los Angeles ban on new fast-food restaurants, the failure and repeal of Denmark’s so-called ‘fat tax,’ and damning research on mandatory menu labeling in the United States. Banning grocers from selling alcohol belongs on the same sordid list.

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An article by a criminal law professor Thursday in the Columbus Dispatch included this assertion:

The reality is that Black-on-Black crime is a myth, and that Black and white people routinely commit crimes at similar rates, but Black people are overwhelmingly targeted for arrest.

Yet I think this is not the reality, at least as to violent crimes of the sort that are usually labeled “black-on-black” when committed by black criminals against black victims. (Blacks and whites do seem to commit drug possession and drug distribution crimes at relatively similar rates, but in this post I focus on violent crimes.) As best we can tell,

• blacks appear to commit violent crimes at a substantially higher rate per capita than do whites;
• there seems to be little aggregate disparity between the rate at which blacks commit violent crimes (especially when one focuses on crimes where the victims say they reported the crimes to the police) and the rate at which blacks are arrested for crimes; and
• the black-on-black crime rate is especially high.

Of course, it’s always hard to measure what the actual crime rate is for any group (whether for purposes of claiming that the rates are similar or that they are different). Still, the most reliable data, to my knowledge, is generally the National Crime Victimization Survey, and the U.S. Justice Department Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that are based on that survey. Indeed, the link in the quoted sentence from the article goes to a source that relies on such data.

Because the NCVS surveys a large group of people about their experiences with crime victimization, it is not based on what is reported to the police and what the police do with it. (The Uniform Crime Reports is based on data from police departments, and is thus generally a less reliable measure of actual crime.) Naturally, there are possible sources of bias in victim reports. But the NCVS seems to be the best data we have, and I know of no better source that yields other results. (If you do know, please let me know.)

Here, then, is the data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees, 2018, with regard to “rape/sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault“:

And here is the data for serious nonfatal violent crimes, which excludes simple assaults, and thus focuses on “rape/sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault”:

Blacks, which here means non-Hispanic blacks, were 12.5% of the U.S. population, and non-Hispanic whites were 60.4%. It thus appears from this data that the black per capita violent crime rate is roughly 2.3 to 2.8 times the rate for the country as a whole, while the white per capita violent crime rate is roughly 0.7 to 0.9 times the rate for the country as a whole.

It also appears that the arrest rates for violent crime are roughly comparable to the rates of offending, especially if one takes into account those offenses reported to the police (which is a choice of the victims, not of police departments). And the great bulk of such violent crime is intraracial.

The disparity is even more striking for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, which the NCVS doesn’t measure (since the crime victim can’t respond to the survey), and which thus relies on the police department reports in the UCR:

When the race of the offender was known, 55.9 percent were Black or African American, 41.1 percent were White, and 3.0 percent were of other races.

Here is the more specific data:

Many homicides are unsolved, and of course there is the risk of race-based investigation and enforcement. But again this is the best data we have, and it’s consistent with victim demographics—it’s clear that blacks are disproportionately likely to be murder victims—and the broadly accepted view that the overwhelming majority of homicide is intraracial.

Now naturally this reflects just aggregate statistics; the great majority of people in all racial groups don’t commit violent crimes, and even the aggregate data may differ from place to place. Moreover, this doesn’t tell us about property crimes (other than robbery, which is classified as a violent crime), because it’s so hard to approximate the true rates of offense commission there: Most such property crimes are unwitnessed, so it’s hard to gather survey data. And again, I’d love to hear any other data that might shed a different light on the violent crime statistics as well.

Still, the best data that I know of suggests that

• black-on-black violent crime is not a myth;
• blacks and whites generally commit violent crimes at substantially disparate rates (and, for homicides, sharply disparate rates); and
• as best we can tell, the disparity in arrest rates for violent crimes is pretty close to the disparity in crimes that are committed, and especially crimes that the victims report to the police.

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