Category: reason

A review board found that British Transport Police officer Imran Aftab breached multiple professional standards, violated COVID-19 social distancing guidelines, and was guilty of misconduct when he attempted to use his office to chat up a woman while off duty. Aftab approached a jogger and told her she was “too curvy to be Asian” and used his professional ID to obtain her phone number. The woman texted a friend asking for help during the encounter. The woman gave Aftab her number to try to deescalate the situation, planning to block him later. He sent her six messages before she could do so. The review board gave Aftab a final warning for his conduct.

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It is not surprising that the Chinese Communist Party, which this week further loosened its legal limits on reproduction, still does not admit the “one-child” policy that Deng Xiaoping imposed four decades ago was a grievous error, tyrannical in theory and brutally oppressive in practice. But the extent to which Western apologists have downplayed that ugly reality is surprising—and shameful.

In 2009, Financial Post columnist Diane Francis declared that “a planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate.” Four years later, BBC documentarian David Attenborough joined Francis in praising China’s policy, although he regretted “the degree to which it has been enforced” and acknowledged that it “produced all kinds of personal tragedies.”

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who admires what a “one-party autocracy” such as China’s can accomplish when it is “led by a reasonably enlightened group of people,” thinks the one-child policy is a good example. In his 2008 book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Friedman said restrictions on family size “probably saved China from a population calamity” and expressed the hope that the Chinese government would show the same dictatorial fervor in pursuit of “net-zero buildings.”

In a 2015 HuffPost essay titled “In Praise of China’s One-Child Policy,” Israeli environmentalist Alon Tal cited the famines that killed an estimated 45 million Chinese in the late 1950s and early ’60s as evidence that strict population control was necessary. He did not mention Mao Zedong’s calamitous Great Leap Forward, which caused those food shortages in a misguided attempt to modernize the Chinese economy by government fiat.

The assumption that coercion was necessary to reduce China’s birth rate is contradicted by trends in other developing countries that never adopted such a policy. As Cato Institute Senior Fellow Marian Tupy notes, “plenty of other countries experienced dramatic declines in fertility, which is highly correlated with income and education, and does not necessitate draconian intervention by the government.”

The “personal tragedies” that Attenborough lamented were not, as he seems to think, an unfortunate side effect of an otherwise enlightened policy. They were necessary to enforce the government’s dictates, which people predictably resisted.

The enforcement measures, which varied widely by time and place, included “family planning contracts,” birth permits, gynecological surveillance, fines that could amount to several years of income, property confiscation, home demolitions, beatings, arbitrary detention, kidnapping of unauthorized children, denial of employment and government services, and forced abortions, sterilizations, and IUD insertions. While not all those methods were officially blessed by the central government, Brookings Institution scholar Wang Feng observed, the national policy was “so extreme that it emboldened local officials to act so inhumanely.”

In her 2019 documentary One Child Nation, Nanfu Wang returns to the farming village in Jiangxi province where she was raised and talks to an uncle and an aunt who mournfully remember the infant daughters they felt compelled to abandon. Wang’s grandfather says he had to dissuade local officials from sterilizing her mother after Wang was born.

A former family planning official tells Wang that “sometimes pregnant women tried to run away” from forced abortions, often performed at eight or nine months, and “we had to chase after them.” A midwife estimates that she performed 50,000 to 60,000 sterilizations and abortions.

“Many I induced alive and killed,” the midwife says. “My hand trembled doing it.”

In 2011, notwithstanding the horrific consequences of China’s reproductive controls, then–Vice President Joe Biden told students at Sichuan University that “your policy” is “one which I fully understand” and “I’m not second-guessing.” The problem, Biden said, was that it had led to a rising ratio of retirees to workers, which was “not sustainable.”

The Chinese government now seems to agree with Biden. But the problematic demographic results of China’s experiment in coercive “family planning,” which include a gender imbalance as well as an aging population, are hardly the worst thing that can be said about it.

© Copyright 2021 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

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Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie are back from Memorial Day weekend and ready to dish on The Reason Roundtable about the presidential spending bill, vaccination requirements, and our pandemic progress.

Discussed in the show:

0:36: President Joe Biden presented his budget proposal and the Roundtable breaks it down.

35:09: Weekly Listener Question: There is a strong case to be made to prohibit cruises from requiring vaccine confirmation. As soon as you grant the premise that the CDC can boss you around unilaterally, we will never go back. I see no problem with Florida and other states mandating that businesses grow a spine and tell the CDC to fuck off. We cannot be governed by the CDC and other medical tyrants at any cost. Discuss.

52:00: Media recommendations for the week.

This weeks links:

• “Covid’s Deadliest Phase May Be Here Soon,” by Zeynep Tufekci
• “Joe Biden’s $6 Trillion Budget Proposal Will Hike Spending, Keep Deficits Near Record Highs,” by Eric Boehm
• “Expanding tax credit ignores precedent,” by Veronique de Rugy

Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

Today’s sponsors:

• If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Assistant production by Regan Taylor.
Music: “Angeline,” by The Brothers Steve.

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In 2017, the Boston-based Future of Life Institute released a chilling 7-minute arms control video entitled Slaughterbots. It featured swarms of autonomous killer drones using facial recognition technology to hunt down and attack specific human targets. Now, according to a new United Nations (U.N.) report on military activity in war-torn Libya, that fictional scenario may have taken a step towards reality.

Specifically, the report notes that retreating convoys and troops associated with Libyan strongman Khalifa Haftar “were subsequently hunted down and remotely engaged by the unmanned combat aerial vehicles or the lethal autonomous weapons systems such as the STM Kargu-2 and other loitering munitions.” The report adds that “the lethal autonomous weapons systems were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect, a true ‘fire, forget and find’ capability.” In other words, once they were launched, the drones were programmed to act without further human intervention to identify and attack specific targets.

In the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, STM CEO Murat Ikinci observed that his company’s kamikaze drones “all have artificial intelligence and have face recognition systems.” Weighing less than 70 kilograms each, they have a range of 15 kilometers and can stay in the air for 30 minutes with explosives. In addition, the Kargu drones can operate as a coordinated swarm of 30 units which cannot be stopped by advanced air defense systems. 

The U.N. report notes that making such weaponry available to armed groups in Libya violates the 2011 U.N. Security Council Resolution 1970, which declares that all member states “will immediately take the necessary measures to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer…of arms and related materiel of all types, including weapons and ammunition, military vehicles and equipment” to combatants in Libya. Supplying one group in the Libyan conflict with autonomous drones violates that resolution.

In response to the new U.N. report, Future of Life Institute co-founder and Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Max Tegmark tweeted, “Killer robot proliferation has begun. It’s not in humanity’s best interest that cheap #slaughterbots are mass-produced and widely available to anyone with an axe to grind. It’s high time for world leaders to step up and take a stand.” 

In a 2015 open letter, Tegmark and his colleagues at the Future of Life Institute argued that world leaders should institute a “ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.”

Other researchers believe that such a ban would be premature because, they argue, autonomous weapons systems could behave more morally than human warriors do. Nevertheless, Tegmark is correct that the Kargu drone attack in Libya takes the discussion of how to govern warbots from the realm of languid theorizing to urgent reality.

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President Joe Biden often talks about how his father used to tell him, “Joey, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity.”

It’s ironic, because on Biden’s watch, a war on work is gathering momentum.

“Working Less Is a Matter of Life and Death” is the headline over a Sunday New York Times staff editorial. It relies on a newly published study by a World Health Organization (WHO) and International Labor Organization team that claims working more than 55 hours a week “led to” 745,000 deaths from stroke and heart disease in 2016.

Neither the editorial nor WHO specify how many deaths might be attributable to people not working enough. That is relevant information. Without it, the public health message becomes “work less,” rather than “find the golden mean of moderation between working too much and working too little.”

At this point, WHO has zero credibility. Syria, a brutal regime that routinely bombs hospitals and uses chemical weapons, was just elected to the WHO executive board. The WHO is to blame for what The Wall Street Journal calls the “Wuhan Whitewash,” a report that downplayed the lab leak hypothesis for the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic and that instead pushed the far-fetched idea that the virus got to China via frozen food.

Yet WHO’s war on work is aligned with recent U.S. public policy. Over the past 20 years, the civilian labor force participation rate has plunged to 61.7 percent from 66.9 percent. Some of that is the demographics of baby boomers retiring, but some of it reflects shifting priorities and choices.

Biden’s proposed higher tax rates will punish those who work hard. Instead of subsidizing work via the earned income tax credit or incentivizing work via welfare time limits, domestic policy increasingly pays people not to work, through programs such as expanded unemployment and the expanded child tax credit.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, recently announced it would offer “$500 no-strings-attached monthly payments” to 120 households. The announcement press release said, “Cambridge joins a growing number of direct-cash pilot projects across the country, including Baltimore, MD, Paterson, NJ, Oakland, CA, Madison, WI, and 13 other cities.”

Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, the group behind the experiments, has a statement of principles that says, “everyone deserves an income floor through a guaranteed income, which is a monthly, cash payment given directly to individuals. It is unconditional, with no strings attached and no work requirements.”

This delinking of welfare payments and work requirements threatens to reverse one of the major bipartisan achievements of the 1990s, the welfare reform enacted by former President Bill Clinton and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R–Ga.).

Urban Democrats are leading the war on work, but Republicans, too, have enlisted. Former President Donald Trump’s administration created the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Program that provides payments to, among others, parents who stay home to supervise their child’s remote learning. In Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address, he said, “I was recently proud to sign the law providing new parents in the federal work force paid family leave, serving as a model for the rest of the country. Now I call on the Congress to pass the bipartisan Advancing Support for Working Families Act, extending family leave to mothers and fathers all across our nation.”

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article by Sohrab Ahmari adapted from Ahmari’s new book “The Unbroken Thread.” Ahmari, a Catholic and the editor of the conservative New York Post, appreciatively quoted Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s words about the Sabbath: “He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil.”

I’m an admirer of the Sabbath and of Heschel, but without commerce or toil on the other six days, the Sabbath is just another vacation day, not special at all. The Bible talks about observing the Sabbath, but it also talks about working the other six days. Psalm 128 says people who eat from the work of their own hands are happy.

It’s great that Biden can, by quoting his father, convey that, as the president put it May 18 in Michigan, a job is “about respect. It’s about your place in the community.” Republicans have been intermittently good at explaining how Democratic tax increases erode incentives to work, but they haven’t quite risen to the task of explaining the war on work as an attack on basic American values like industry, upward mobility, self-reliance, human dignity, earned success, and the pursuit of happiness. Gingrich used to frame the choice as “food stamps versus paychecks,” which is stark, but getting close.

Biden’s father died in 2002. For America to thrive in the decades ahead, it will need more messengers, in both parties, who can articulate why a job beats “no-strings attached” cash payments, family leave, or extended unemployment. Never mind WHO and the Times editorialists: The real threat the country faces isn’t overwork, it’s the rising percentage of Americans who aren’t working at all.

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