Category: reason

Today at 4:30, Jeffrey Clark, the Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the Department of Justice will deliver the lecture, “Constitutional Environmentalism, Mature Environmentalism.” Though scheduled as an in-person CLE event, the lecture will instead be webcast live. The lecture is sponsored by the Coleman P. Burke Center for Environmental Law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

Because we won’t have a live, in-person audience, I encourage folks to submit questions I can ask at the conclusion of the lecture. You may post them in the comments or send them to me at my case.edu e-mail.

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In the midst of Sunday’s presidential debate between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, Biden blurted out that his campaign’s high-speed rail plan would take “millions of automobiles off the road.”

This is the second debate in which the former vice president brought up the belief that bullet trains will get people out of their cars. This is, to put it mildly, extremely unlikely.

Biden’s campaign site calls for “the construction of an end-to-end high speed rail system that will connect the coasts, unlocking new, affordable access for every American.” Would bullet trains passing through major cities scattered across the U.S. actually get people out of their cars?

“The answer is no,” explains Baruch Feigenbaum, assistant director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation. (Full disclosure: The Reason Foundation publishes this website.) “High-speed rail primarily takes customers from aviation. Car travel might be substitutable with inner city buses, but we don’t really see it in rail. That’s not why other countries have built high-speed rail.”

Feigenbaum notes that countries that have built high-speed rail have typically done so to reduce crowding on existing rail lines, not as a substitute for roads. The sole exception was China, which used it as an economic development project during a time when its highway system was much less robust than America’s.

“Basically, Biden loves rail,” Feigenbaum says, noting the vice president’s roots in the northeastern Acela corridor. Indeed, the first high-speed rail project Biden says he’ll focus on is increasing the speed of trains traveling from New York City to D.C. That region is the only part of America where rail travel has been shown to be efficient and profitable. Taking that mentality and trying to stretch it across the U.S. is absurd.

And no, this travel will not be all that more “affordable” than air travel—not unless the trips themselves are heavily subsidized. High-speed rail does not help the poor access the job market better or travel more freely.

“High-speed rail benefits wealthy business travelers,” Feigenbaum points out. “How this plan helps the Democratic base is unclear to me.”

Perhaps because—as we’ve seen with California’s efforts in this area—high-speed rail is more of a jobs program than a realistic plan to make mass transportation greener. When Feigenbaum critiqued Biden’s infrastructure plan in December, he wasn’t impressed with Biden’s emphasis on feeding jobs to construction unions over actually fulfilling transportation needs:

We shouldn’t build transportation projects to create a bunch of temporary jobs; we should invest in transportation to improve mobility and the economy, and then the robust economy creates jobs. Further, Biden’s plan reads as though we are still in the throes of the Great Recession of a decade ago, not at the record-low unemployment we are now experiencing….

The plan assumes that investing in high-speed rail (HSR) and light rail would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, studies have shown that bus, not light rail, is more effective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions since most light rail vehicles have few riders outside of peak periods. High-speed rail is extremely energy-intensive to build. The California high-speed rail project would have needed to operate for 71 years at average capacity to neutralize the emissions needed to build the line. If Biden’s goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, there are much easier and cheaper ways to do so than building HSR and light rail.

The inclusion of light rail and HSR won’t help working-class communities, either. Building light rail lines typically leads to gentrification, which increases home prices and forces low-income minorities to move. (The new residents use light rail less frequently than the displaced residents). HSR is frequented primarily by wealthy business travelers. Lower-income residents use intercity buses, which benefit from improved highway conditions, not rail upgrades.

Meanwhile, California’s zombie bullet train project remains a shambling mess that refuses to die. Its estimated price tag increased to $80.3 billion in February. (California voters authorized the state to spend only $33 billion on it.) Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Times reported that managers who were working on the project were told to keep their mouths shut about any problems or face termination. Several have walked away from it, one calling it the “worst job of [his] career.”

California’s efforts should serve as a warning: Politicians and other self-serving interests will declare their pet projects “green” to attract huge chunks of money whether or not the projects actually help the environment. High-speed rail doesn’t “get cars off the road,” won’t reduce congestion in cities, and won’t make travel more “accessible” to the poor. But poor people’s taxes will still be used to subsidize the travels of the business and leisure classes.

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The coronavirus pandemic threatens a world-wide wave of sickness, but it’s the healthiest thing to happen to government power in a very long time. It’ll leave the state with a rosy glow, but our freedom will end up more haggard than ever.

For the sake of their survival, “all animals experience fear—human beings, perhaps, most of all,” wrote economic historian Robert Higgs. His 1987 book Crisis and Leviathan examines how bad times cause governments to grow in scope and power. “The people who have the effrontery to rule us, who call themselves our government, understand this basic fact of human nature. They exploit it, and they cultivate it. Whether they compose a warfare state or a welfare state, they depend on it to secure popular submission, compliance with official dictates, and, on some occasions, affirmative cooperation with the state’s enterprises and adventures.”

Or, as Rahm Emanuel put it in 2008: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

“The Federal Reserve has become the default doctor for whatever ails the U.S. economy,” noted a skeptical Wall Street Journal editorial board. But economic fallout from the virus “relates mainly to the damage to global supply chains and expected limits on travel and commerce as the world tries to mitigate the rates of infection. Nobody is going to take that flight to Tokyo because the Fed is suddenly paying less on excess reserves.”

And will stimulus spending repair disrupted supply chains and put production lines back in operation a minute sooner than demand for goods and services dictates? Not a chance.

Public health has long been a playing field for fear and calculation, giving us intrusive laws that sit on the books, waiting to be invoked by the next microorganism to catch the public’s attention. Those laws include a nearly unlimited power to quarantine people suspected of exposure to infectious diseases.

Coronavirus will leave behind a residue of laws, spending, and precedents for future government actions. That’s because of what Higgs calls the “ratchet effect,” by which the aftermath of each crisis sees government shrink a little, but never back to its pre-crisis status. “Thus, crisis typically has produced not just a temporarily bigger government but also permanently bigger government,” he wrote.

So even after the public panic retreats, the politicians’ calculations subside, and coronavirus becomes more knowable and treatable, we’ll be left with the permanent swelling of government caused by this latest crisis.

Written by J.D. Tucille. Voice-over by Katherine Mangu-Ward. Motion graphics and thumbnail illustration by Lex Villena. You can read the full article that this video is based on here.

Visual credits: 3D Statue Model by jerryfisher (CC BY 4.0), ID 55403234 © Destina156 | Dreamstime.com, Ashleigh Nushawg School of the Americas Protest (CC BY 2.0) 3D Hand Model by quangdo1700 (CC BY 3.0) Procedural Metal Texture by Zantique (CC-BY)

Soundtrack: “11” by Lex Villena

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This morning, the Supreme Court issued the following press release:

In keeping with public health precautions recommended in response to COVID-19, the Supreme Court is postponing the oral arguments currently scheduled for the March session (March 23-25 and March 30-April 1).  The Court will examine the options for rescheduling those cases in due course in light of the developing circumstances.

The Court will hold its regularly scheduled Conference on Friday, March 20. Some Justices may participate remotely by telephone. The Court will issue its regularly scheduled Order List on Monday, March 23 at 9:30 a.m. The list will be posted on the Court’s Website at that time: https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/ordersofthecourt/19.

The Building will continue to be open for official business, and filing deadlines are not extended under Rule 30.1. The Court is expanding remote working capabilities to reduce the number of employees in the Building, consistent with public health guidance. The Building will remain closed to the public until further notice.

The Court’s postponement of argument sessions in light of public health concerns is not unprecedented.  The Court postponed scheduled arguments for October 1918 in response to the Spanish flu epidemic.  The Court also shortened its argument calendars in August 1793 and August 1798 in response to yellow fever outbreaks.

Tom Goldstein has background on how the Court has responded to other crises here.

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U.S. forces launched a massive retaliation Thursday against an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq—a response to a Wednesday rocket attack that killed two Americans.

This weekend, the militia struck again, wounding three Americans and three Iraqi soldiers at the very same base.

The Trump administration had promised to “restore deterrence” against Iran when it assassinated Iranian spymaster Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani outside Baghdad International Airport on January 3. But the army of Iraqi militias armed, trained, and advised by Soleimani is clearly undeterred: The American force in Iraq finds itself repeatedly under fire, in an escalating cycle of conflict with no end in sight.

“Restoring deterrence is not static. It is a daily habit, and you’ve got to get that habit as part of your system, so we every day look for ways to get Iran to go back to its own borders,” Brian Hook, the State Department official in charge of Iranian affairs, had said at a February briefing.

A barrage of Katyusha rockets struck Camp Taji on Wednesday night, killing a U.S. Army soldier, a U.S. Air Force airman, and a British serviceman. A local militia close to Iranian intelligence services called Kata’ib Hezbollah seemed to take credit for the attack in a social media diatribe invoking the “right to resist” America’s “malicious project of occupation.”

American forces responded with what the Pentagon calls “precision defensive strikes” against five of Kata’ib Hezbollah’s weapons depots. Iraq accused the U.S. military of killing Iraqi soldiers and civilians instead of Kata’ib Hezbollah members during its Thursday air raids, aggravating already strained U.S.-Iraqi tensions.

The clashes continued, and Katyusha rockets slammed into Camp Taji again in broad daylight on Saturday. The U.S. military is now leaving some of its smaller bases in Iraq, although a spokesperson for the U.S.-led counterterrorism coalition insisted to CNN on Monday that the move has nothing to do with the latest provocations, but was “a result of the success of Iraqi Security Forces in their fight against ISIS,” the Islamic State.

This weekend was not the first time since Soleimani’s death that pro-Iran forces fired on U.S. troops. U.S. forces in Syria clashed with a militia aligned with Russia and Iran in mid-February, killing one Syrian, and rockets struck the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad a few days later.

Assassinating Soleimani was supposed to have prevented these attacks.

In December, a rocket killed an American translator in Iraq. (The Trump administration blamed Kata’ib Hezbollah, but the Iraqi government has since cast doubt on that version of events.) U.S. forces retaliated with a round of “precision defensive strikes” that killed 25 members of Kata’ib Hezbollah.

The Iraqi militia then incited its supporters to ransack the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Trump called the incident his “Anti-Benghazi,” referring to the deadly 2012 attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya.

And then the President ordered Soleimani killed. Iran responded by firing ballistic missiles at a U.S. airbase in Iraq, injuring more than 100 U.S. troops, and the Iraqi parliament passed a non-binding resolution asking American forces to leave the country.

The Trump administration initially justified the assassination by claiming that Soleimani posed an “imminent threat” to American lives, but it failed to show Congress the specific threat that Soleimani posed. The administration then gradually changed its justification to “restoring deterrence” against Iran.

Soleimani “was very effective, and very lethal, and very well-networked, and so when someone like that is underway…we would have been culpably negligent had we not taken action,” Hook said at the February briefing, which was hosted by the Washington-based newspaper Al Monitor.

Hook also called the Iranian government a “corrupt religious Mafia,” hinting that the Trump administration does not see Iran as a state that can be reasoned with. 

“I don’t know how the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism is entitled to a claim of self-defense. They’re not at peace with their neighbors, because they don’t want to be at peace with their neighbors,” he said. “The regime has some of these Westphalian attributes of a state, but in fact it’s got the [Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps] and the Qods Force and the Guardian Council and all these things that exist, which are really the true nature of the regime.”

Soleimani was the commander of the Qods Force, the covert arm of the Revolutionary Guards. The Guardian Council is a group of Shi’a Muslim clerics that can veto decisions by Iran’s elected government.

This week, neither Hook nor Trump seemed to be very involved in the escalation. Defense Secretary Mark Esper took charge of the response to Wednesday’s attack, and he signalled that he was not looking to escalate against Iran itself.

“I have spoken with the president. He’s given me the authority to do what we need to do,” Esper told reporters on Wednesday. “I’m not going to take any option off the table right now, but we are focused on the groups that we believe perpetrated this in Iraq.”

America’s military leadership has been more concerned with protecting its own personnel than opening a new front with Iran. U.S. counterterrorism forces even secretly drafted plans to withdraw from Iraq in the wake of Soleimani’s death.

But without action from civilian leaders, the cycle of escalation is likely to continue. The Trump administration continues its campaign of maximum pressure against the Iranian economy, aimed at changing an array of Iran’s domestic and foreign policies.

Tehran has dug in its heels, even as protesters brave bullets and tear gas to confront the state and even as a coronavirus epidemic ravages the country’s infrastructure. Covert and overt support to anti-American militias in Iraq is a cheap way for Iran to strike back against the United States at a third country’s expense.

For now, the cycle continues: rocket attacks, “precision defensive strikes,” and the looming threat of a truly endless war.

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