Category: reason

9/10/1949: Justice Wiley Rutledge dies.

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Life-saving plasma therapies are essential for many patients, but every year we flirt with a shortage. Plasma collected in the United States is the source material for more than 70 percent of the world’s supply; humanity is nearly always one market disruption away from global catastrophe.

American dominance in this realm is explained by one simple fact: In the United States, it’s legal to pay people for their plasma. Millions of Americans regularly give plasma in exchange for $30–$50 per donation. The average American donor gives 21.4 times per year. If you add plasma obtained from Germany, Austria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic—the other places where compensation is offered—paid plasma accounts for a staggering 89 percent of all the plasma used to make plasma therapies for the whole world.

Most foreign countries refuse to pay for plasma because of outmoded guidance from the World Health Organization. Its decades-old policy was initially motivated by the concern that payment would attract people from lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder who are more likely to be carriers of transmissible infections. Those concerns no longer apply: There have been significant improvements in testing technology since the 1970s, and modern manufacturers now have the ability to use virus removal and inactivation techniques, rendering samples safer than ever. Yet the organization’s guidance has not changed.

Some theorize that we don’t have more volunteer plasma donors because we just haven’t asked in the right way. But millions have been spent on TV, radio, and newspaper advertisements encouraging unpaid donation. Others say paid plasma is exploitative, but they don’t explain how prohibiting compensation would help people who currently feel the need to sell their plasma. Countries that have made the switch to paid donation have not seen altruism pushed out. The Czech Republic legalized compensation for plasma donations in 2008. Within three years, total donations increased sevenfold, making the country self-sufficient in plasma therapies.

Due to the coronavirus, plasma donations have fallen 15–20 percent across the United States. Between the depressed supply of plasma and the possibility that demand will rise as new COVID-19 treatments that rely on plasma are developed, the world could well be heading for a devastating shortfall. The problem could be quickly and cheaply remedied if it weren’t for irresponsible guidance from global health bodies and an unfounded bias against paid donation.

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The Pima County, Arizona, Board of Supervisors has suspended Constable Oscar Vasquez until Dec. 31, the end of his term, after an attempt to serve legal papers on one woman saw him drive to a neighbor’s home and try to serve the paper’s there, urinate in the neighbor’s yard, and drive across the lawn of the woman he was looking for, leaving behind visible ruts. The Constable Ethics, Standards & Training Board has repeatedly investigated and reprimanded Vasquez in the almost four years he has been in office. His offenses include repeatedly using a handicapped placard that doesn’t belong to him, getting caught speeding in county vehicles multiple times, and failing to take mandated driving safety and anger management classes. Vasquez is running for re-election and won the Democratic primary with no opposition. No Republican is running against him.

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As the saying goes, “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” This advice applies to the hole Congress leapt into by bailing out the airline industry back in March through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Now, these companies want even more taxpayer money. The federal government should refuse another bailout.

Like many industries affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, airlines have lost a lot of revenue. But unlike other industries, the coronavirus relief bill authorized up to $32 billion for payroll support for airlines through Sept. 30, for roughly six months. Basically, the way it worked is that every airline that got a loan could furlough its employees, but those that took both a grant and a loan couldn’t. Of course, it’s difficult to tell if the U.S. Treasury Department was ever serious about enforcing these requirements.

Traditional objections to the first bailout were ignored in the name of saving airline workers’ jobs. Unfortunately, that reasoning was mistaken. Many airline employees still lost their jobs, while others suffered severe reductions in employment. For instance, part-time workers only had to be paid for minimum hours. As a result, many airline employees still had to apply for unemployment insurance to cover their lost hours.

Unless the worries around the COVID-19 virus quickly disappear and consumers are willing to soar in droves through the friendly skies once again, that bailout would have merely postponed layoffs through September. Sure enough, here comes the airline industry again, with its captain’s hat in hand, asking for another $25 billion bailout.

Several members of Congress have already signed a letter urging their colleagues to extend the bailout, and President Donald Trump is even considering an executive order to accomplish that goal, echoing the airline unions’ claim that 75,000 employees would be furloughed without it. If you do the math, that’s $333,333 per job “saved” until the money runs out.

Let’s remind everyone why we shouldn’t bail out airlines. Yes, the coronavirus crisis is both a public health and an economic tragedy. But this doesn’t justify the government granting special privileges to private firms, at least not without those firms first taking other available steps to potentially avoid the need for a bailout.

There are other options they could pursue.

First, the airlines still have plenty of access to private capital markets. They own significant amounts of durable assets that they can sell or use as collateral to get additional financing. Indeed, they’ve been able to secure substantial private capital since the beginning of the pandemic.

Second, if private financing fails, some airlines can and should do what they’ve done in the past when in such a predicament: declare bankruptcy. Past bankruptcies tell us that airlines can continue flying safely even during a bankruptcy, so there’s no systemic risk posed to the economy at large.

To be sure, bankruptcy would mean that, for the time being, airlines may fly on more limited routes. But that shouldn’t be a problem in light of a collapse in demand, which won’t be resolved as long as Americans remain wary of flying.

There’s no easy solution during this pandemic. Many people and businesses have no options at all. But an airline bailout would bring about more negative consequences. The first is that it’s a huge expense for taxpayers to shoulder with no promise for a solid return. We’ve already bailed out the airlines, and all this past coddling has done is to postpone the inevitable layoffs of its excess employees.

Analysts don’t think air travel will return to prepandemic levels for several years—some say up to seven. Let’s assume that it takes five years for air travel to return to its previous level. That would require taxpayers to extend up to $320 billion in bailout funds to the airlines.

Not surprisingly, bailouts beget more bailouts. My colleagues at the Mercatus Center, Matthew Mitchell and Tad DeHaven, write, “We know from the history of bailouts that the true cost of a bailout is not the taxpayer expense (which is often recouped) but the expectation it sets for future bailouts, an expectation that invites future disaster.”
Bailing out airlines the first time around was a bad idea; doing it again would be even more counterproductive. It only delays the inevitable.

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Here is what seems to be the USC Marshall School of Business Dean’s response about the controversy:

September 6, 2020

Dear Marshall alumni and friends,

I wanted to take a moment to clarify my message to students at the Marshall School. It was absolutely not my intention to cast any aspersions on specific Mandarin words or on Mandarin generally.

The student complaints we received had nothing to do with the Mandarin language but focused on the use of a polarizing example Professor Patton used when trying to make a reasonable and important point about communication. In his apology to students, he noted he could have chosen a better example to illustrate his point. With Professor Patton’s agreement, he did not finish his accelerated course for our MBA students that ended last week. We are now following standard university procedures to explore the complaints students have raised.

Since I began my tenure at USC Marshall just two months ago, I have been an enthusiastic supporter of the school’s ongoing and future globalization efforts. USC Marshall is blessed with students, faculty and staff from many countries and cultures. I want nothing more than to build relationships with all members of the Trojan family, including and especially the extensive network in Asia.

One of the reasons I am so thrilled to be dean is that the Marshall community is committed to developing and strengthening a learning environment that values greater cultural understanding, one in which all members feel seen, heard, and valued. We respect and honor unconditionally all languages and cultures of our students, faculty and staff and believe each has an important place in our community.

And here is the USC Provost’s response:

September 6, 2020

Dear Marshall alumni and friends,

I wanted to take a moment to clarify my message to students at the Marshall School. It was absolutely not my intention to cast any aspersions on specific Mandarin words or on Mandarin generally.

The student complaints we received had nothing to do with the Mandarin language but focused on the use of a polarizing example Professor Patton used when trying to make a reasonable and important point about communication. In his apology to students, he noted he could have chosen a better example to illustrate his point. With Professor Patton’s agreement, he did not finish his accelerated course for our MBA students that ended last week. We are now following standard university procedures to explore the complaints students have raised.

Since I began my tenure at USC Marshall just two months ago, I have been an enthusiastic supporter of the school’s ongoing and future globalization efforts. USC Marshall is blessed with students, faculty and staff from many countries and cultures. I want nothing more than to build relationships with all members of the Trojan family, including and especially the extensive network in Asia.

One of the reasons I am so thrilled to be dean is that the Marshall community is committed to developing and strengthening a learning environment that values greater cultural understanding, one in which all members feel seen, heard, and valued. We respect and honor unconditionally all languages and cultures of our students, faculty and staff and believe each has an important place in our community.

It seems to me, though, that the statements don’t really discuss the core problem here. Prof. Garrett was talking about business communication, and in particular about filler words (“um,” “er,” and the like). In the process, he gave an example not from Albanian (to give some arbitrarily selected language), but from the most widely spoken native language in the world, and one with which Prof. Garrett—as an expert on business in China—was understandably quite familiar.

That word, often transliterated “neige,” sounds somewhat like the English-language slur “nigger.” But to the extent that this is “polarizing” because it upsets some students, it is the job of USC to teach those students that they should not be upset by such accidents of language. Rather, they should be taught that business school graduates should expect to hear this word if they ever find themselves around Chinese speakers, and to react to it without upset.

Instead, USC concluded that this incident should lead to an utterly extraordinary remedy (whether or not truly voluntary on the professor’s part): replacing the professor a third of the way through the course. That’s not just a message that the professor gave an example that “could have been better chosen” (even if one agrees that a different example should have been chosen). Normally, in such a situation of simply an ill-chosen example, the professor would simply say “Sorry, I could have chosen a better example.”

Rather, the message is that the professor did something very wrong indeed—that English-speaking listeners should rightly treat ordinary use of “neige” when talking about Chinese as a grave offense, rather than catching themselves and saying to themselves “Oh, wait, this is Chinese, of course this is just an accidental homonym.” And implicit in that is the message that Chinese speakers should watch what they say, not just in examples but in ordinary conversation that could be overheard, or risk being pushed into similarly extraordinary (even if supposedly “voluntar[y]”) remedies for acting in an “[ill-]chosen” or “polarizing” way.

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Class 7: Enumerated Powers V – The Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) (9/9/20)

• Textbook: The Affordable Care Act (305)
• NFIB v. Sebelius: Commerce, Necessary and Proper, and Taxing Power (306-338).
• NFIB v. Sebelius: The Spending Power (339-346)

Class 7: The Recording Systems

• Introduction, 661-667
• Luthi v. Evans, 667-674
• Orr v. Byers, 678-682
• Types of Recording Acts, 682-686
• Texas Recording Act

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