Category: reason

Thanks to the overspending of Congress and successive presidential administrations, America’s debt totals $22 trillion, and it is projected to grow faster and larger in the years to come. Legislators have been shielded from the consequences by three decades of low interest rates and the fact that the United States is still one of the best places in the world for foreigners to invest. However, a time will come when no level of cheap debt will make up for Washington’s fiscal recklessness, writes Veronique de Rugy.

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Data privacy issues can be tricky for libertarians. On the one hand, the shortcomings of government intervention are significant and predictable. Regulations often fail to accomplish intended goals while empowering incumbents and burdening consumers. A “cure” should not strengthen the disease.

On the other hand, internet platforms can be really terrible. One needn’t be a commie pinko to take umbrage with invasive, misleading, or even outright fraudulent data tracking and advertising practices—to say nothing of some tech giants’ sneaky little habits of sharing data or tracking technology with governments.

We don’t need to choose between clumsy government regulations or submission to uncontrolled data harvesting. We have already had a robust market solution to marking tracking for about a decade now: Digital cash is a market escape from the financial panopticon. Andrea O’Sullivan explains.

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Following a complaint, the San Francisco Fire Department has forced EMTs to remove a cat they adopted five years ago from Station 49. Officials said the cat had to go because the station is an ambulance deployment facility, and having the cat there posed “public health and safety concerns.” But those who work at the station said the cat was not able to get into the clean room, and medical supplies are boxed up anyway.

I’ll be on the Kennedy show on Fox Business tonight around 9:30 P.M. (Eastern time), talking about whether the recently ditched Amazon deal was good or bad for New York, taxpayers, potential employers, and others. Go here for more information on the show.

Amazon would have received around $3 billion in tax incentives and other subsidies for building a giant new complex in Long Island City and adding a widely reported 25,000 jobs that paid six figures. Backers of the plan said that the deal would generate about $27 billion in new tax revenue over the next 20 years.

After encountering anger and resistance from a wide array of local politicians and activists, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Amazon pulled out as progressives mostly cheered. They wanted assurances that Amazon would allow workers to unionize, build affordable housing, and kick in for a wide variety of other infrastructure- and community-related initiatives. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who helped broker the deal with Gov. Mario Cuomo, published an angry op-ed in The New York Times, saying Amazon’s withdrawal underscores “what the concentration of power in the hands of huge corporations leaves in its wake.” De Blasio is particularly stung because, like the most-vocal critics of the plan, he considers himself a “lifelong progressive.” And now he has nothing to show for it other than what is usually considered the highest combined state-and-local tax burden in the country.

Amazon’s pullout should be considered a blessing in disguise, and an opportunity for New York (city and state) to change the way it does business. The entire deal smacks of crony capitalism, in which politically connected business get to set preferential rules for themselves. Such deals rarely work out well for taxpayers, whether we’re talking about car companies or sports teams. And even if they do, it’s wrong for government to pick winners and losers in a free-market economy. Rather than trying to create carve-outs for particular companies or business sectors (such as the film industry), de Blasio and Cuomo would be far better off working to reduce the tax-and-regulatory burdens for all residents. As it stands, Cuomo is scrambling to cover a stunning, unexpected revenue drop of $2.8 billion this fiscal year. New federal tax legislation that caps deductions for state-and-local taxes at $10,000 has led to a massive exodus of New Yorkers for places elsewhere. When Cuomo took office as governor in 2011, he said that New York had to reduce taxes and become more business friendly to compete with other parts of the country. Instead of working toward such goals, he has instead pushed programs such as Start-Up NY, which spent $28 million to create “maybe” 76 jobs, shut down fracking, and caved to public employees over benefits and pay.

Rather than huffing and puffing over the loss of Amazon, which New York City will survive easily, Cuomo and de Blasio should take a step back and ponder the way that Cuomo in particular talked at the beginning of his tenure.

“We spend too much money,” he said. “You cannot spend more money than you make in life.”…

Cuomo said that families across the country have been doing more with less during the recession.

“It’s time that government goes through the same exercise,” he said.

Pledging to lead by example, Cuomo said he would reduce state agency spending by 10 percent, including wage, salary and pension savings. He said he would lay off 9,800 workers only under a “worst-case scenario.”

Cuomo also said he would look to eliminate 3,500 prison beds and reform the juvenile justice system.

With New York the highest-taxed state in the nation, Cuomo said tough decisions need to be made now to ensure the state’s future.

“On one side, you have the road to ruin,” he said. “On the other side, you have the road to success.”

Creating a sustainable level of taxation, regulation, and certainty will go much, much further toward economic progress than trying to woo business with cronyist giveaways.

Related: “Desperate Mayors Compete for Amazon HQ2”

The day after the January 28 drug raid that killed a middle-aged couple and injured five undercover narcotics officers, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo lavished praise on Gerald Goines, the 34-year veteran who had been shot in the neck after breaching the door and entering the house to assist his wounded colleagues. “He’s a big teddy bear,” Acevedo said. “He’s a big African-American, a strong ox, tough as nails, and the only thing bigger than his body, in terms of his stature, is his courage. I think God had to give him that big body to be able to contain his courage, because the man’s got some tremendous courage.”

Acevedo struck a different note on Friday, when he described Goines as a liar who had broken the law and embarrassed the department by inventing the heroin purchase that was the pretext for the raid, during which police killed Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas in their home at 7815 Harding Street. But as Keri Blakinger and St. John Barned-Smith reported on Friday night in the Houston Chronicle, there were warning signs that Goines was not a paragon of police professionalism long before he invented a confidential informant and a controlled buy to justify the no-knock search that put him in the hospital but did not discover any evidence of drug dealing.

“Previous allegations surfaced about Goines in at least two drug buys, with the officer accused of lying under oath and mishandling drug evidence, and questions arising about his use of a confidential informant,” Blakinger and Barned-Smith write. One case, where witnesses contradicted Goines’ testimony tying the defendant, Otis Mallet, to a stash of crack cocaine, is still making its way through the courts. “The new evidence discovered in this case shows that Officer Goines testified falsely and that no drug deal, as described by Goines, took place,” Mallet’s lawyer wrote in a brief. “Mallet was convicted based on Goines’ perjured testimony.”

Blakinger and Barned-Smith also note incidents in which Goines was reprimanded for unprofessional behavior, including threats of violence, and a confrontation in which Goines was shot while undercover by a man who believed “the officer was menacing him with a weapon.” A grand jury declined to indict the man, which suggests his fear was reasonable in the circumstances. “Despite the occasional reprimands,” Blakinger and Barned-Smith say, “Goines generally garnered positive evaluations.”

Here is the best defense of Goines a former supervisor could muster: “He was a good narcotics officer. He’s not corrupt, but he’s lazy with his paperwork. He has a history of not doing his reports until afterwards.” Even if Goines was never “corrupt” in the sense that he was on the take, sloppiness like this is a warning sign of someone who is cutting corners in a way that can not only jeopardize cases but get people killed, as happened here.

Acevedo says police will be examining a sample of Goines’ cases to see if there is a pattern of dishonesty, which would cast doubt on any convictions in which the officer’s testimony played a role. At this point, Acevedo said on Friday, “I don’t have any indication it’s a pattern and practice.” Maybe he should read the Houston Chronicle.

While Acevedo’s view of Goines has evolved, he is not ready to modify his portrayal of Tuttle and Nicholas as scary heroin dealers. A reporter at Friday’s press conference noted that relatives and neighbors “told us…consistently, ‘These were not drug dealers. These were nice people. Sure, they may have smoked some pot, but…we’ve known them for 30, 40 years, and this is not who they were.’ And it turns out, they were right.”

Acevedo pushed back. “We all have seen people that murder people,” he said. “We’ve all seen people that molest their kids. We’ve all seen people that have done some horrific things. And guess what the neighbors always have said? ‘Oh, my God. I never knew. I thought they were the nicest guys.’ So I’m not going to go there with you, and I’m not going to make any conclusions on that until we’ve finished the investigation.”

Except that Acevedo already has drawn conclusions by claiming that “the neighborhood thanked our officers” for the raid “because it was a drug house” and “a problem location.” Even after the faked warrant was revealed, Acevedo insisted that “we had reason to investigate that location,” and “the investigation continues to show that.” But the only evidence he has been able to cite, aside from Goines’ fabricated “controlled buy” is a January 8 call in which “the mother of a young woman” reported that her daughter “was in there doing heroin.” Goines’ subsequent “investigation” was so slipshod that he did not even know the names of the people who lived in the house.

Acevedo condemns Goines’ invention of probable cause yet seems to assume the accuracy of all the other information he’s been fed about the case. He cites the supposed gratitude of “the neighborhood” as evidence that Tuttle and Nicholas were heroin dealers yet dismisses the accounts of actual neighbors who have said not only that the couple was perfectly nice but that they never noticed any suspicious activity at the house—the sort of activity that had to be occurring for the place to be locally notorious in the way Acevedo claims it was.

As I’ve said before, this operation would have been reckless and senselessly violent even if Tuttle and Nicholas were selling drugs. But it looks like the only evidence police had on that point was a tip from an anonymous woman and the fabrications of a dishonest narc, neither of which was sufficient to establish probable cause for a search. Why is Acevedo still calling Tuttle and Nicholas “suspects” when they were clearly the victims of an illegal home invasion?

Multiple news outlets have now reported that Chicago police no longer consider Empire actor Jussie Smollett to be the victim of a potential hate crime. On the contrary, they suspect he faked the January 29 incident, with the help of two acquaintances who now appear to have flipped on him.

Chicago PD has not yet confirmed any of this, and Smollett maintains his innocence. But it’s increasingly difficult to believe that Smollett was uninvolved, given that the two men captured on surveillance video near the scene of the alleged attack are by all accounts Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo, a pair of brothers who worked as extras on Empire.

Many people, of course, suspected that Smollett was lying from the start. His claim that he was attacked by random Trump supporters in downtown Chicago at 2:00 a.m. on one of the coldest nights imaginable was hard to swallow. Those who work in right-leaning and alternative media were most vocal, though I had private conversations with several left-of-center writers who shared my doubts.

In contrast, many left-leaning politicians, celebrities, and media figures rushed to condemn Trump supporters as complicit in an obvious hate crime. GQ‘s Joshua Rivera declared that “The Racist, Homophobic Attack on Jussie Smollett Is Far-Right America’s Endgame.” He also accused all those who referred to Smollett as the victim of a “potential” hate crime of inflicting an additional “wound” on Smollett. Cautious authority figures were engaged in “a careful hedging of bets that don’t need to be hedged,” he wrote. Suffice it to say, this piece has not aged well.

No doubt some conservatives went looking for holes in Smollett’s story because they wanted to rebut a criticism of President Donald Trump (i.e., that his rhetoric emboldens racists and bigots). But many liberal pundits and thinkers simply believed Smollett because it confirmed all of their biases about the president’s supporters. On Monday, in the wake of revelations about Smollett’s likely deception, The Washington Post‘s Jonathan Capehart told MSNBC that what happened to the black, gay actor “fit in with a narrative.” Before he even finished the word “narrative,” he corrected himself: “not a narrative, but a reality for a lot of people in this country since President Trump was inaugurated.” Many on the left believe that Trump has unleashed a wave of racist, xenophobic, bigoted hatred across America, irrespective of the details of a single incident.

But despite Trump’s very real history of making disparaging remarks about all kinds of people, there is not a lot of statistical evidence to support the notion that hate crimes are surging. While it’s true that the FBI’s count of hate crimes rose 17 percent from 2016 to 2017, it’s important to note that 1,000 additional agencies reported information to the FBI in the latter year. It should go without saying, but as the number of agencies participating in the FBI’s count of hate crimes grows more numerous, the total number of hate crimes will undoubtedly rise. This does not necessarily mean that hate crimes are surging—just that the authorities undercounted them previously.

Statistics, of course, are easily mischaracterized. A few months ago, many in the media became obsessed with a figure from the Anti-Defamation League, which purportedly showed that anti-Semitism had spiked a whopping 57 percent under Trump. But part of that statistic reflected an increase in bomb threats against U.S.-based Jewish institutions perpetrated by just one person: a deranged Israeli teenager. Anti-Semitic violence, according to the ADL’s count, actually decreased 47 percent.

Hate crimes do happen. But some alleged hate crimes turn out to be mistakes or hoaxes. Quillette‘s Andy Ngo has compiled a useful list; in writing about free speech on college campuses, I have frequently encountered alleged bias incidents that turned out to be false. (My forthcoming book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, contains many more examples.) Recently, virtually everyone in the media uncritically accepted claims by a Native American man, Nathan Phillips, that a group of Catholic high school boys racially harassed him on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, but additional reporting showed his claims were wildly misleading.

None of this means that racism and other forms of bigotry are nonexistent, or even that they’re rare. But reality is often quite complicated, and it’s important for reporters to add context, clarification, and caveats when discussing the news—no matter how much this displeases the automatically-believe-victims crowd.

(Below, watch Reason contributor Kmele Foster—who hosts the Fifth Column podcast with Matt Welch and Michael C. Moynihan—attempt to inform Vox‘s Liz Plank about the finer points of the FBI’s hate crime statistics as she repeatedly interrupts him.)

“The Trump presidency made a deep descent in December,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) announced in a wave-making Washington Post column in January, just prior to being sworn in. Why that particular month out of the president’s tumultuous first 24?

“The departures of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly,” Romney wrote, “the abandonment of allies who fight beside us, and the president’s thoughtless claim that America has long been a ‘sucker’ in world affairs all defined his presidency down.” In other words, it’s the foreign policy, stupid. When the White House takes minor steps to ratchet back Washington’s default posture of global interventionism, it’s greeted as a catastrophe.

It is amazing what Washington’s proverbial “adults in the room”—as both Mattis and Kelly were frequently characterized as during their Trump tenure—consider to be a red line of presidential comportment, writes Matt Welch.

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The Boston Police Department has opened an investigation of a cop who had his service weapon stolen by two strippers while off duty in Rhode Island. The cop, whose name wasn’t released because he is considered the victim, was placed on paid administrative leave. He reportedly met one of the women on Instagram. Melissa Dacier and Neish Rivera were charged with felony larceny of a firearm and conspiracy.

There is no more satisfying description of democracy than Winston Churchill’s declaration that it “is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Among compliments, backhanded ones are the loveliest, first making a show of retreating and then, like a boomerang, returning to hand. One cannot deny that democratic electorates occasionally lurch into unfortunate decisions, but Churchill consoles us that other systems are prone to worse. (He also thereby consoles himself two years after being turfed out of office by an electorate asking, “Yes, but what have you done for us lately?”) The theoretical case for democracy is not undermined by such wayward episodes because the system’s excellence is comparative, not absolute. Democracy embodies the virtue of moderation in its self-equilibrating disposition to retreat from perils that hurl other political systems off the rails, writes Loren E. Lomasky.

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Last week New York City’s health department, long the bane of food freedom supporters, banned city restaurants from adding cannabidiol—a compound found in both cannabis and hemp that’s commonly known as “CBD”—as an ingredient in food or drinks they sell.

CBD products, purported to offer health benefits to consumers, also offer quite a premium for sellers. A coffee at Bushwick’s Caffeine Underground costs $2.50. A CBD-infused coffee—presumably the same coffee with a couple drops of CBD added—will set you back $6.00.

New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson (who is also a potential mayoral candidate) blasted the health department’s move this week, saying it “doesn’t make any sense.”

Reason columnist Baylen Linnekin agrees with Johnson. But as he explains, the agency’s latest turn against CBD is hardly unexpected.

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