Category: reason

It’s not just in your head: When it comes to how we all experience life, “Bad is generally stronger than good.” 

We remember trauma more than joy, we’re brought down by criticism more than we’re elevated by praise, and we pay more attention to bad news than good. 

A new book called The Power of Bad, by journalist John Tierney and psychologist Roy F. Baumeister, explores “the negativity effect,” or the “universal tendency for negative events and emotions to affect us more strongly than positive ones.” The negativity effect shapes everything we do, from our personal relationships to our careers to how we vote to what media we consume.

But The Power of Bad isn’t one more cause for despair. Its subtitle is How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It, and it offers practical tips on all sorts of ways to approach life so that we can be happy, productive, and well-adjusted.

Nick Gillespie sat down with Tierney, a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and a former New York Times columnist and reporter, to talk about the root causes of the negativity effect and how to combat it.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

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11/24/2009: Justice Elena Kagan “was probably at a Chinese restaurant.”

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Former Pike County, Ohio, Sheriff’s Deputy Jeremy Mooney was caught on sheriff’s office security video pepper-spraying and repeatedly punching an inmate who was bound in a restraint chair. Thomas Friend had been arrested for misdemeanor disorderly conduct and had reportedly spit on other inmates in the transport van. Mooney resigned after the sheriff’s office began an investigation of his actions. The sheriff’s office suspended without pay for two weeks and demoted to corporal Sgt. William Stansberry, a supervisor who witnessed part of the assault but did not try to stop it. Pike County, Ohio, Prosecutor Rob Junk has asked the FBI look into the matter.

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This week, children may learn about that greedy man, Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge is selfish until ghosts scare him into thinking about others’ well-being, not just his own.

Good for the ghosts.

But the way Scrooge addresses others’ needs matters.

Today’s advocates of equality, compassion, increased spending on education, health care, etc., say “we care” but demand that government do the work.

Controlling other people with the power of government doesn’t prove you care.

If you want to help the poor, clean the environment, improve the arts. Great! Please do.
But if you are compassionate, then you’ll spend your own money on your vision. You will volunteer your work and encourage others to volunteer theirs, by charity or commerce. You don’t force others to do what you think is best.

But government is not voluntary. Government has no money of its own. Whatever it gives away, it first must take from others through taxes.

If you vote for redistribution of wealth, welfare benefits, new Medicare spending or free education, you can tell yourself you’re “generous.” But you’re not. You’re just forcing others to pay for programs you think might help. That’s not generosity. That’s control. The more programs you demand, the more controlling you are.

In fact, you are worse than greedy old Ebenezer Scrooge.

With Scrooge, people have a choice. They can work for Scrooge or quit. They can do business with someone else.

Governments don’t offer us choice. Governments say: “Comply or we will lock you up. Pay taxes and we will decide whom to help. No one may escape the master plan.”

Why, then, do people react to big government ideas as if they’re generous instead of scary? Because most people don’t think clearly about what it means to tell government to use force against their fellow citizens. They think about society the way their ancestors did.

“Our minds evolved tens of thousands of years ago, when we lived in small groups of 50-200 people,” says HumanProgress.org editor Marian Tupy. “We would kill game, bring it back, share it.”

The idea of everyone getting an equal share still makes us feel warm and cozy.
Some of you may feel that coziness this week, sharing a Christmas meal. Great. But remember that if you decide that society’s resources should be redistributed, that’s much more complex than passing meat around a family table.

Seizing control of a big society’s resources has unforeseen consequences—ripple effects that are hard to predict.

Back in the cave, you stood a pretty good chance of noticing which hungry relative needed a bigger share of meat. In the tribe, that sort of central planning worked well enough. It doesn’t work as well once the tribe numbers thousands or millions of people. No tribal elder knows enough to plan so many different people’s lives.

Today’s politicians, for instance, don’t know how many workers will be laid off if they raise taxes on Walmart. They don’t know what innovation will never happen if they cap CEOs’ salaries. They don’t know how much wealth creation will be lost if they tax investors’ money in order to fund another government program.

Government’s built-in ignorance explains how it can spend trillions on failed poverty programs, and then respond to the failure by demanding more funds to continue the same programs.

You stand a better chance of getting good results if you do real charity, close to home, where you can keep an eye on it—and without coercing anyone else to do things your way.

We can invent new ways to give to each other. Philanthropy evolves, much the way markets do, harnessing new technologies and social networks that span the globe.
Innovative ideas, like microlending, start in one kitchen. If they work, they grow.

By contrast, government grows even when it doesn’t work. It bosses people around even when it’s not really helping them.

Big hearts are a good thing. Big government is no substitute for them.

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The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 includes a “requirement” that Americans “shall…ensure” that they and their dependents have “minimum essential coverage” for medical care. Seven years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts provided the decisive vote to uphold this requirement, also known as the “individual mandate,” after counterintuitively concluding that it was neither a requirement nor a mandate but was instead merely a condition for avoiding a tax that the law describes as a “penalty.”

As of January, thanks to a tax bill that Congress passed in 2017, that penalty was reduced to zero. Consequently, a federal appeals court ruled last week, the mandate that became a tax is now a mandate again and therefore unconstitutional, a decision that is simultaneously logical and puzzling, revealing the triumph of form over substance in the judicial branch’s failure to stop Congress from exercising powers it was never granted.

In the 2012 case National Federation of Independent Business v. Sibelius, five justices agreed that forcing people to buy health insurance was not a legitimate exercise of the power to regulate interstate commerce, which has long been the favorite excuse for federal legislation that the Constitution otherwise does not seem to authorize. But Roberts was determined to save the individual mandate anyway, so he reinterpreted it as a tax, contrary to what he called the “most straightforward” and “most natural” understanding of the law, and joined four other justices in upholding the provision.

Explaining the danger of reading the Commerce Clause broadly enough to encompass a command to buy health insurance, Roberts observed that the clause “gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it.” If that distinction were ignored, he said, the Commerce Clause would “justify a mandatory purchase to solve almost any problem,” such as a command that people buy broccoli because it is good for their health.

In a dissent joined by three other justices, Antonin Scalia amplified that point. Upholding the individual mandate under the Commerce Clause, he said, would transform it into a “font of unlimited power, or in Hamilton’s words, ‘the hideous monster whose devouring jaws…spare neither sex nor age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor profane.”

The cage designed by Roberts does not do much to keep that hideous monster confined. In his view, Congress cannot constitutionally impose a fine on people who decline to buy broccoli, but it can constitutionally impose a tax on them.

If Congress chooses the latter approach, it does not even have to claim that insufficient vegetable consumption has a “substantial effect” on interstate commerce. As Roberts put it, “the breadth of Congress’s power to tax is greater than its power to regulate commerce.”

Roberts emphasized that regulation via taxation “leaves an individual with a lawful choice to do or not do a certain act, so long as he is willing to pay a tax levied on that choice.” Yet people who decide not to pay a tax can get into plenty of legal trouble, including criminal prosecution as well as liens and forfeiture.

For political reasons, Congress barred the IRS from using those scary remedies to extract the penalty for failing to maintain health coverage. But future “tax” legislation aimed at getting Americans to behave as members of Congress think they should may not be so gentle.

Now that the penalty for disregarding the individual mandate is zero, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled last week, Roberts’ “tax” is not a tax anymore. “The provision no longer yields the ‘essential feature of any tax’ because it does not produce ‘at least some revenue for the Government,'” the court said. Hence “the provision’s saving construction is no longer available.”

In other words, when Congress was punishing people for not buying health insurance, the provision was constitutional. Now that the penalty has been eliminated, rendering the provision unenforceable, it clearly exceeds the federal government’s constitutional powers. Take that, hideous monster!

© Copyright 2019 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

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The continued illegality of marijuana under the federal Controlled Substances Act complicates any attempt to claim that the First Amendment protects a state-licensed pot store’s right to advertise its wares. But state constitutional protections for freedom of expression can still be used to overturn inadequately justified regulations of cannabis-related commercial speech, as demonstrated by a recent King County, Washington, ruling in favor of a marijuana shop that dared to hang Christmas lights spelling out the word POT in its window.

After Hashtag Cannabis in Redmond displayed that festive decoration during the 2017–18 holiday season, the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board (LCB) cited the store for violating state restrictions on the size, number, and nature of retail signs. The regulations limit marijuana merchants to no more than two signs “identifying the retail outlet by the licensee’s business name or trade name,” each of which must be “affixed to a building or permanent structure” and no larger than 1,600 square inches. Hashtag already had two regular signs, pot was not part of its trade name, the string of lights was not “affixed,” and it exceeded the allowed size by about 2,300 square inches.

Hashtag challenged the citation on free speech grounds. While the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld prohibitions of commercial speech “related to illegal activity,” King County Superior Court Judge David Keenan noted in his ruling last month, state law allows cannabis sales to adults 21 or older by licensed retailers such as Hashtag. While conceding that “the issue is novel,” Keenan concluded that the cannabis industry’s legal status in Washington means state regulations of marijuana advertising must comply with Article I, Section 5 of Washington’s constitution, which says “every person may freely speak, write and publish on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of that right.”

In applying that provision to restrictions on commercial speech, Washington courts use the test laid out in the 1980 Supreme Court case Central Hudson Gas & Electric v. Public Service Commission. To be constitutional under the Central Hudson test, a regulation of nonmisleading commercial speech must “directly and materially advance” a “substantial governmental interest,” and it must be “narrowly drawn” to advance that interest.

The LCB defended its rules as a precaution against encouraging minors to consume cannabis. Keenan acknowledged that the state’s asserted interest was “substantial,” as Hashtag conceded. But he concluded that “the advertising restrictions do not directly and materially advance the State’s substantial interest in preventing underage consumption” and “are not sufficiently tailored to advance the State’s interest.”

Keenan reached that conclusion based on seemingly inconsistent aspects of Washington’s advertising rules. “Given other provisions in the advertising restrictions which continue to expose potential underage consumers to marijuana advertising,” he said, “the restrictions are a poor fit with the State’s substantial interest in preventing underage consumption.”

Notwithstanding its picayune restrictions on store signs, Keenan noted, Washington’s rules allow marijuana billboards that are much bigger. In fact, such billboards must be at least 55 square feet, or 7,920 square inches, five times the maximum size for store signs. A marijuana merchant might even rent a billboard right near his store, which would be a far more conspicuous advertisement than Hashtag’s string of lights.

“Hashtag could have a sign using the word Pot if it just registers that business or trade name, and it could conceivably have an entire billboard next door to its store with the word Pot,” Keenan observed. “If the State wishes to minimize the risk of capturing the attention of children, restricting retailers to two permanently affixed signs displaying the business or trade name of no more than 1,600 inches on premises, but allowing billboards off premises, and allowing businesses to register business or trade names such as Pot, does not directly advance that goal.”

Keenan drew an analogy to the old federal rule prohibiting information about alcohol content on beer labels, which the Supreme Court overturned in the 1995 case Rubin v. Coors Brewing. “As the court put it in Rubin, where the government’s asserted interest was to ‘suppress strength wars,’ it made ‘no rational sense’ to prohibit alcohol content advertising on labels, but allow it in advertising, where advertising ‘would seem to constitute a more influential weapon in any strength war than labels,'” Keenan wrote. “As in Rubin, where the state’s asserted interest is to prevent underage consumption of marijuana, it makes no rational sense to restrict advertising in marijuana retailers where underage consumers are not allowed to enter or make purchases, but not restrict billboards, where billboards would seem more effective at capturing the attention of potential underage consumers.”

Although Keenan does not mention it, the Supreme Court overturned state restrictions on outdoor advertising of cigars and smokeless tobacco in the 2001 case Lorillard Tobacco v. Reilly, finding that the goal of preventing underage consumption did not justify rules that severely impeded communications between manufacturers and adult consumers. Hence it seems unlikely that a ban on marijuana billboards aimed at making Washington’s rules more consistent would survive the Central Hudson test.

Hashtag co-owner Logan Bowers told The Stranger‘s Lester Black it cost $30,000 in legal fees to challenge the rules prohibiting his shop’s string of lights. “I was just really pissed,” he said. “We were frustrated with being dicked around. Sometimes doing the right thing costs a ton, and it’s a little bit of a bummer. Even when you win, you still kind of lose, because you have to spend a lot of money, and it means if you don’t have money, you don’t get justice.”

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