Category: reason

Yale University has fancy dining halls. They pay no property tax.

Local restaurants struggle to compete, but their tax burden makes that hard.

“We basically pay one-third of our rent in taxes!” complains Matt West, manager of Koon Thai Restaurant. “Yale is a money-making machine.”

It is. Many colleges are.

Yale has a $31 billion endowment. Harvard’s is $40 billion. My alma mater, Princeton, has $26 billion.

Yet, these schools also get government handouts and tax breaks. How government rips off taxpayers and students by subsidizing colleges is the subject of my video this week.

Yale owns about a quarter of the town of New Haven, Connecticut, but the school pays little property tax. It even has a golf course that’s half tax-exempt.

Politicians tried to tax the school, but they cannot.

“It’s written into the constitution,” complains New Haven Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Myers. “They just don’t have to pay.”

Now the city is ticketing more cars to try to cover its budget shortfall.

Everyone else pays more because colleges get tax breaks, government grants, and government loans.

“De-fund universities!” says Inez Stepman, senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum. “Their entire business model is dependent on the taxpayer.”

I push back: “You make it sound like it’s all government money. But people pay their own way.”

She corrects me: “Without that lifeblood of those federal student loans, very few universities would be able to operate. They are dependent on that federal interference.”

They’re dependent because they’ve raised their prices so much. When I went to college, my tuition was $1,950. Now, Princeton charges $53,890.

After government increased subsidies, colleges raised tuition prices at four times the rate of inflation.

They spend the money not just on golf courses and fancy foods. They build new stadiums, first-class swimming pools, media rooms, and some even offer students housekeeping.

Why not spend? Colleges know they will get more money from taxpayers. The federal government is now America’s biggest largest provider of student aid.

“There is no check on the cost of a college degree,” says Stepman. “If students had to walk into Wells Fargo for those loans, Wells Fargo would look at whether or not those loans would be paid back. The federal government doesn’t ask any of those questions.”

So, money is thrown at students who don’t benefit. Today, almost half the students given loans don’t graduate in six years.

Instead, says Stepman, they have “$50 or $60 or $80,000 in debt, without the degree to show for it.”

Taxpayers lose. Students lose. The winners are bloated colleges.

Colleges say they deserve every loan and tax break because they make “wiser citizens.”

“They’re not,” says Stepman. “They’re making citizens who hate their country.”

I push back again. “Most colleges educate rather than indoctrinate.”

“I wish that were true,” replies Stepman. “I was part of the College Republicans… registering voters. I actually had a professor walk up and spit on me. Another called us the ‘Nazi Youth.’ These are professors!”

“It’s offensive,” she adds, “that we take dollars out of mechanics’ pockets and put them into the pockets of, largely, middle-class and upper-middle-class students.”

It is offensive.

But that’s what America does.

Unfortunately, our next president wants to do even more of it.

COPYRIGHT 2020 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

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Joe Biden has come a long way since his days as a vociferous drug warrior. But judging from last week’s election results, Americans have come further.

The president-elect now opposes the mandatory minimum sentences and death penalties he once championed, and he portrays himself as a reformer determined to ameliorate the mass incarceration he promoted for decades. But Biden’s approach to drug policy remains intolerant and oppressive in several important ways.

Unlike most of his opponents for the Democratic nomination, Biden opposes repealing the federal ban on marijuana. Instead he favors decriminalizing low-level possession, a policy that was on the cutting edge in the 1970s and that won’t have much of an impact at the federal level, since the Justice Department rarely prosecutes minor marijuana cases.

In every state where marijuana was on the ballot last week, voters approved legalization of either medical or recreational use. Most strikingly, deep red South Dakota became the first state to legalize both simultaneously.

Thirty-five states now recognize cannabis as a medicine, while 15, including a third of the U.S. population, also have legalized recreational use. The latest Gallup poll puts public support for legalization at a record 68 percent.

Biden says states should be free to legalize marijuana. Yet he favors maintaining an untenable conflict between state and federal law that casts a dark shadow over the burgeoning cannabis industry, making basic business functions such as banking and paying taxes needlessly difficult, costly, complicated, and fraught with legal peril.

Regarding the “opioid crisis,” Biden promises to “stop overprescribing while improving access to effective and needed pain management.” Ignoring the lessons of the last four years, he fails to recognize how ham-handed efforts to curtail prescriptions have hurt both bona fide pain patients, depriving them of the medication they need to make their lives bearable, and nonmedical users, driving them toward black-market alternatives that are much more deadly because their potency is highly variable and unpredictable.

Last week voters in Washington, D.C., overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative that opposes the arrest and prosecution of adults who use “entheogenic plants and fungi,” including psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, iboga root, and plants that contain dimethyltryptamine. Oregon voters, meanwhile, made their state the first jurisdiction in the country to legalize psilocybin use.

Those groundbreaking measures represent a long overdue reevaluation of the government’s authority to police people’s minds by dictating which chemicals they may ingest. It’s not an issue that Biden—even in his new, reform-minded incarnation—seems to have given any thought.

Oregon voters also passed an initiative that decriminalizes low-level, noncommercial possession of all drugs, something no jurisdiction in the U.S. had ever done. The initiative makes personal possession of controlled substances, previously a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail, a citable violation punishable by a $100 fine.

Drug users can avoid the fine by undergoing a “health assessment” at an “addiction recovery center.” But they are not required to do so, and assessments are supposed to “prioritize the self-identified needs of the client.”

Biden, by contrast, claims to recognize that drug users should not be treated as criminals, but he still thinks they should threatened with criminal penalties. “I don’t believe anybody should be going to jail for drug use,” Biden said last month. “They should be going into mandatory rehabilitation. We should be building rehab centers to have these people housed.”

While Biden considers that approach enlightened and humane, there is no moral justification for foisting “rehabilitation” on people who do not want it and may not even be addicted. That policy strips people of their liberty, dignity, and moral agency simply because they consume psychoactive substances that politicians do not like.

Biden, who in the late 1980s was saying “we have to hold every drug user accountable,” now wants to lock drug users in “rehab centers” rather than prisons. If that looks like an improvement, it is only because Biden’s prior record is so appalling.

© Copyright 2020 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

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The Trump Administration may not be willing to acknowledge that Joseph Biden will be the next occupant of the White House, but that has not stopped the Biden-Harris Transition from moving forward. This week, they announced transition teams for cabinet-level agencies and key issue areas.

The list of “agency review” teams is available here. Some of the lists are quite interesting.

As we’re mostly law professors here, it’s interesting how many law professors are on the various lists. The Department of Justice team is headed by Duke Law’s Christopher Schroeder, a veteran of both the Clinton and Obama Administration’s at DOJ. Other law profs on the Justice team are Dawn Johnsen (Indiana), Pam Karlan (Stanford), Richard Lazarus (Harvard), Marty Lederman (Georgetown), Barb McQuade (Michigan), and Christina Rodriguez (Yale).

The DOJ team may have the largest representation of legal academics, but other law professors are sprinkled throughout the other teams. For instance, Kevin Washburn (Iowa) is heading up the Interior Department team, where he is joined by Bob Anderson (Harvard) and Amanda Leiter (American). The Treasury Department team includes Lily Batchelder (NYU) and Mehrsa Baradaran (UC Irvine)(who is also on the Federal Reserve team), and the Environmental Protection Agency team includes Cynthia Giles (Harvard), Joe Goffman (Harvard), and Ken Kopocis (American).

It is also interesting that Leandra English, who temporarily headed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after Richard Cordray stepped down (and until she was removed by President Trump), will head the CFPB’s agency team.

One final tidbit: Jones Day is unlikely to be shut out of the Biden-Harris Administration, as there is one Jones Day partner on the DOJ agency team.

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Some comments on the Michigan AG’s #DetroitLeaks Takedown Demand, and Seditious Libel post reminded me to write about this: Occasionally, we hear about calls to prosecute people for “seditious conspiracy,” but this means

conspir[ing] to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof.

This is just a special case of the broader proposition that conspiring to commit a crime can itself be a crime. You can be punished under state law for conspiring to commit murder or theft or what have you. You can be punished under federal law for conspiring to commit bank robbery, or to defraud the federal government. Likewise, you can be punished under the “seditious conspiracy” statute for conspiring to illegally oppose the enforcement of the law.

This is quite a different statute from the Sedition Act of 1798 (or from the common-law crime of seditious libel), which punished (among other things) false and malicious speech intended to defame the federal government. And to the extent that the seditious conspiracy law punishes agreements to commit crime, which may be expressed by speech, such conspiracy is viewed as constitutionally unprotected, because it is speech integral to the criminal conduct that is being planned. For more on this, see U.S. v. Rahman (2d Cir. 1999).

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Top Trump administration officials and Republican legislators continue to humor the idea that, contra the vote count thus far, President Donald Trump might have won the presidential election and could soon be inaugurated for a second term.

“There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration,” said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with a slight chuckle today in response to a question at a press briefing about whether the U.S. State Department was working with the Biden transition team, and if any delay in working with the transition team would hinder national security.

“We’re going to count all the votes. When the process is complete, there’ll be electors selected. There’s a process. The Constitution lays it out pretty clearly.  The world should have every confidence that the transition necessary to make sure that the State Department is functional today, successful today, and successful with the president that’s in office on January 20th a minute after noon,” said Pompeo.

When asked if he believed that there was widespread voter fraud, as Trump is claiming, Pompeo said that “we must count every legal vote. We must make sure any vote that wasn’t lawful ought not be counted.”

Given his follow up comments, the most plausible reading of Pompeo’s remark about a “second Trump administration” is that it was tactless snark about the Trump campaign’s electoral lawsuits.

It was still an incredibly inappropriate remark given the tensions of the current moment, and the fact that Trump’s legal challenges are still ongoing. That the comment is being so widely interpreted as an endorsement of Trump’s stolen election claims is yet more reason why Pompeo shouldn’t have said it.

The secretary’s churlish comments put him in the ranks of other Republican officials who would rather assuage Trump’s feelings than dismiss his dubious claims of widespread voter fraud.

Attorney General Bill Barr, for instance, issued a letter to U.S prosecutors authorizing investigations into “substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections.”

That letter prompted the resignation of the Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyer in charge of election crimes. As Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown noted this morning, however, Barr’s letter did not endorse claims of widespread fraud, nor did it give DOJ attorneys a blank check.

Similarly, the head of the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages federal government buildings, has thus far declined to declare Biden the winner of the election. That needs to happen before the president-elect’s transition staff can access government offices. The GSA has said in a statement it will certify the successful candidate “once a winner is clear based on the process laid out in the Constitution.”

The White House has also instructed federal agencies to proceed with work on Trump’s budget plans, which are normally released in February, weeks after Biden is expected to be sworn in.

None of these actions or statements fully endorse Trump’s repeated claims that the election has been stolen from him. They are all nevertheless predicated on the idea that the president’s legal challenges could end up undoing Biden’s victory.

A number of Republican elected officials have walked a similar line.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) said on the Senate floor yesterday that Trump was “100 percent within his right” to pursue all legal options open to him, without claiming the currently projected Biden victory would be overturned. Other GOP senators, from Mike Lee (R–Utah) to Susan Collins (R–Maine), have walked a similar line in their own statements on the president’s election lawsuits.

Less careful and more damaging to the perceived legitimacy of the election is the letter issued by Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R–Ga.) and David Perdue (R–Ga.) calling on Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to resign for failing to “deliver honest and transparent elections” in a state that Trump appears to have very narrowly lost. A recount there is all but assured.

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany and RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel both leveled meritless accusations of widespread voter fraud and election irregularities at a press conference yesterday.

As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum wrote last week, Trump’s accusations that he’s the real winner of the election should be understood as an effort to save his own ego, even if it won’t save his presidency. The decisions of White House staffers to delay the transition process, or to look into accusations of voter fraud, until the president’s lawsuits and recount requests have run their course, should be viewed in the same light.

That falls short of wholesale acceptance of the fraud narrative, and doesn’t rise to the level of an attempted “coup.” It nevertheless represents a prioritization of Trump’s own hurt feelings over the smooth transition of power. That’s plenty bad, even if it doesn’t destroy democracy as we know it.

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The Michigan Attorney General’s office sent this letter, apparently to the Big League Politics site:

(Jim Hoft (Gateway Pundit) posted about this yesterday, and I’ve just confirmed the letter’s authenticity with the AG’s Office of Public Information.)

I can’t speak about the factual accuracy of the allegations in the #DetroitLeaks video, or in the AG’s response. But assume for the purposes of our discussion that the #DetroitLeaks allegations are false. Can those who post the video indeed be criminally prosecuted for the falsehoods (even if the government could prove knowing or reckless falsehood on the posters’ part)?

I don’t think so. I think there is some room under the First Amendment, and under the leading precedent (U.S. v. Alvarez (2012)), for laws that ban knowing falsehoods about how, where, and when to vote. There the government’s concern would be that people will be duped out of voting because they’ll show up at the wrong time or in the wrong place. Such restrictions would be narrow and closely focused at protecting the mechanics of the voting process.

But I take it that this isn’t the Michigan AG’s concern here—rather, the concern must be that people will be fooled into overestimating the risk of election fraud (assuming those statements are indeed false), and will thus either be less interested in voting or will view the election results as illegitimate. And that strikes me as a special case of the much broader concern about certain kinds of political lies: Lies about the government or its processes, the theory goes, will wrongly undermine citizens’ faith in the government.

This is a factually perfectly plausible concern. Indeed, it is an old concern, which dates back at least to the Founding era, and in particular to the debates about the Sedition Act of 1798 and similar speech restrictions—laws that generally banned (to quote the relevant part of the Sedition Act),

false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress …, or the President …, with intent to defame [them]  … or to bring them … into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them … the hatred of the good people of the United States.

The Act’s backers stressed that the law (unlike the English common law of seditious libel) was limited to “false” and “malicious” statements; and they noted the importance of restricting those statements. Here is Justice Chase’s instruction to the jury in U.S. v. Cooper, about the Sedition Act specifically:

If a man attempts to destroy the confidence of the people in their officers, their supreme magistrate, and their legislature, he effectually saps the foundation of the government.

And here is one from Justice Iredell in Case of Fries, dealing with a treason prosecution arising out of the Fries Rebellion in Pennsylvania in 1799:

The liberty of the press is, indeed, valuable—long may it preserve its lustre! … [But] can it be tolerated in any civilized society that any should be permitted with impunity to tell falsehood to the people, with an express intention to deceive them, and lead them into discontent, if not into insurrection, which is so apt to follow? … The necessity [of punishing libels against the government is even greater in a republic than in a monarchy], because in a republic more is dependent on the good opinion of the people for its support …. Take away from a republic the confidence of the people, and the whole fabric crumbles into dust.

The Michigan AG’s letter seems to me to be implicitly premised on the same sort of concern.

Again, these concerns are serious concerns, held by serious leaders during the Framing Era. But I think that our legal system has rightly retreated from punishing such seditious libels, partly because criminalizing even outright lies (“false” and “malicious” statements) about the government

• unduly risks suppressing or at least deterring even legitimate opinion,
• unduly risks suppressing allegations that would ultimately prove accurate, and
• unduly risks selective enforcement by officials of that government.

For an example of these problems, see U.S. v. Cooper itself; and the Supreme Court recognized this in 1964, concluding that:

Although the Sedition Act was never tested in this Court, the attack upon its validity has carried the day in the court of history. Fines levied in its prosecution were repaid by Act of Congress on the ground that it was unconstitutional…. The invalidity of the Act has also been assumed by Justices of this Court. These views reflect a broad consensus that the Act, because of the restraint it imposed upon criticism of government and public officials, was inconsistent with the First Amendment….

[Though false, malicious allegations against specific public officials may be punished,] “no court of last resort in this country has ever held, or even suggested, that prosecutions for libel on government have any place in the American system of jurisprudence.”

Nor does it matter what label government officials attach to this, whether it’s “sedition” or “seditious libel” or “misleading and false election information.” I’m not sure that Michigan law actually does purport to ban “misleading and false election information” generally. (The AG’s letter doesn’t cite any such statute, and my quick searches haven’t found one.) But if there is such a Michigan prohibition, then I don’t think it’s constitutional, at least when it comes to allegedly false and public-confidence-damaging claims about the reliability of the election system.

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