Category: reason

President Donald Trump today suggested that he didn’t have to declare a national emergency to fund his proposed wall on the U.S.–Mexico border, but did so because it would be “faster” than the alternative.

The president’s comments came during a Rose Garden press conference, where he officially announced he would be declaring a national emergency. NBC’s Peter Alexander asked Trump to “concede” that he was “unable to make the deal that you had promised in the past, and that the deal you’re ending up with now from Congress is less than what you could have before a 35-day shutdown.”

Prior to the partial government shutdown, congressional leaders were willing to provide roughly $1.6 billion of the more than $5 billion Trump had demanded. The deal they reached earlier this week allocates just $1.375 billion for the construction of 55 miles of border barriers.

Trump would not concede the point. “I went through Congress. I made a deal. I got almost $1.4 billion when I wasn’t supposed to get $1,” the president said. “But I’m not happy with it.”

“I also got billions and billions for other things,” he added, citing “ports of entry” and “the purchase of drug equipment.”

“But on the wall, they skimped. So I was successful, in that sense, but I wanted to do it faster,” he said. “I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this. But I’d rather do it much faster.”

In saying he “didn’t need to do this,” Trump seemed to be admitting that the situation at the border is not the crisis he’s made it out to be. And with lawsuits challenging his declaration of a national emergency inevitable, he may have figuratively shot himself in the foot.

Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, seemed to recognize this, tweeting: “keep talking mr president.”

Trump acknowledged that his administration will likely be sued over the national emergency. He predicted that just as the Supreme Court upheld his travel ban, it will in his favor on this issue as well. “Sadly, we’ll be sued and sadly it will go through a process and happily we’ll win,” he said.

It remains to be seen if he’s right. David Bier, an immigration policy analyst for the Cato Institute, told Reason last month: “My belief is that the president can get away with doing almost anything he wants in the name of national security.” Maybe. But if he keeps making comments like he made today, maybe not.

During Rick Snyder’s eight-year tenure as governor of Michigan, he received 4,000 requests for clemency. He has granted fewer than 100. The Republican’s most recent, and likely final, act of clemency was to pardon Jim Jagger, a man one prosecutor described as a “career drunk driver.”

Though the motive behind Snyder’s pardon is not immediately clear, Jagger sought clemency for his felony drunken-driving conviction because he wants to be the next president of the Michigan Association of Certified Public Accountants. Jagger currently makes $144,000 a year in his role as the group’s vice president.

Meanwhile, according to a 2017 report from the state’s Department of Corrections, Michigan’s prison population of 40,000 includes 3,000 incarcerated for drug offenses and nearly 7,000 for other non-assaultive offenses. (Non-assaultive offenses include anything from breaking and entering to weapon possession to failure to pay child support.) These numbers do not include the roughly 17,000 people in local jails and 189,000 on probation or parole. All that incarceration costs Michigan taxpayers $36,106 per prisoner.

Melanca Clark, president and CEO of the Detroit-based Hudson-Webber Foundation, pointed out last year that barriers such as occupational licensing have cut off ex-convicts’ access to 20 percent of employment opportunities. Clark also noted that of the approximately 13,000 juvenile offenders arrested each year, 90 percent have entered the legal system for nonviolent offenses. And some of the state’s practices, Clark wrote, have the unfortunate side effect of keeping more people in prison for longer. For example, Michigan is one of four states that prosecutes 17-year-olds as adults.

To give credit where it’s due, Snyder has signed some criminal justice reform bills, including a 2017 measure that removed enhanced sentencing for habitual drug offenders. But executive clemency is often the quickest and most effective resource for those facing long sentences for drug and other nonviolent offenses. Jagger and a few dozen others got it. Thousands of others, many of them guilty of offenses far less reckless than Jagger’s, are still waiting for a second chance.

Democrats were jubilant after they made a deal with their Republican counterparts on a border deal that gave Trump “only” a fifth of what Trump had demanded for his border wall money. Their thinking: If he refused to sign it, the government would shut down and he’d get the blame.

But that was a big miscalculation even before Trump announced that he’d declare a national emergency to get the balance of funds. Why? Because Trump got something in exchange for nothing at all, argues Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia.

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After a week of speculation, Amazon announced yesterday that it would be pulling the plug on its plans to open a new 25,000-person headquarters in New York City in exchange for $3 billion in local and state incentives.

“After much thought and deliberation, we’ve decided not to move forward with our plans to build a headquarters for Amazon in Long Island City, Queens,” read the company’s statement.

Amazon’s initial decision to open a new headquarters in New York City had been greeted with enthusiasm by both Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill De Blasio, both of whom promised the company some $3 billion in subsidies and tax abatements to seal the deal.

Most New Yorkers seemed pleased with the deal as well, despite the corporate welfare baked into the deal. A Seina College poll from earlier in the week found that 58 percent of New York City residents approved of the plan.

But opposition from a few key local and state officials helped to sink the otherwise popular deal. That includes both New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson and state Sen. Michael Gianaris (D–Queens).

Johnson’s support would have been crucial for shepherding the promised local incentives, which included nearly $1.3 billion in income and property tax breaks, through the city council. Gianaris, a fierce critic of the deal struck by Cuomo and De Blasio, was appointed in early February to the state’s Public Authorities Control Board, a position he could have used to block the $1.7 billion in state incentives, which included $1.2 billion in tax breaks plus between $300 and $500 million in cash grants pegged to job creation targets.

Neither Amazon nor Cuomo were shy about blaming recalcitrant politicians for killing the deal.

“A number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward with the project,” said Amazon in its statement.

“A small group [of] politicians put their own narrow political interests above their community—which poll after poll showed overwhelmingly supported bringing Amazon to Long Island City—the state’s economic future and the best interests of the people of this state,” echoed Cuomo.

Most of the deal’s critics were triumphant at the news that Amazon was cancelling its plans.

“Today’s behavior by Amazon shows why they would have been a bad partner for New York in any event,” Gianaris itold CNBC. “It is time for a national dialogue about the perils of these types of corporate subsidies.”

How New Yorkers themselves should feel about the Amazon deal falling through is a harder thing to say. It’s no doubt a good thing that taxpayers in the state will be spared from having to give direct cash subsidies to one of the largest, most successful companies in the world.

It is also true, however, that most the incentives on offer were simple tax abatements, meaning the state and local governments are no richer for the Amazon deal not going through. The city will also lose out on the jobs and investment that would have come from the e-commerce giant locating in the city.

What the company itself will do next remains to be seen. So far, Amazon has said that it has no plans to solicit bids from more cities for a new headquarters. Nor will it be shifting NYC-bound workers to its other planned campuses in Arlington, Virginia, and in Nashville, Tennessee, even though both locations offer per-job subsidies beyond what Amazon has already committed.

Last week, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam signed an incentive deal that promises per-job subsidies for up to 37,250 Amazon employees, even though Amazon has said it had planned only to add 25,000 jobs to the area. Should Amazon expand its workforce to that 37,250 threshold, it could reap an extra $200 million in cash subsidies.

Something similar could be said of Nashville. The local government there has yet to sign off on any finalized deal. But the original incentive package offered by then–Mayor Megan Barry in November 2017 promised the company a $500 annual grant per job created for 15 years. That offer makes it explicit that this deal was good for an unlimited amount of jobs.

That Amazon is leaving this cash on the table suggests that corporate subsidies—while obviously appreciated by the company—are not the main force driving its decision.

The Mercatus Center’s Michael Farren made this exact point to The New York Times in November when Amazon announced it would be opening a headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, and not nearby Montgomery County, Maryland—which had offered substantially more in subsidies.

“An additional $7.5 billion in subsidies wasn’t enough to get Amazon to move across the river. That just says that subsidies were never what mattered in the first place,” Farren told the Times.

The same thing can be said for Amazon’s initial plans to open up in New York City, which came with $3 billion in incentives, rather than Newark, New Jersey, which was offering $7 billion in local and state sweeteners.

Given that one of the primary reasons Amazon looked to open campuses beyond Seattle was to avoid local politicians blaming them for all the city’s problems, it shouldn’t be too surprising that the company pulled out of New York after they realizing they’d be getting much the same treatment there.

That corporate subsides seem to have been a minor factor in this whole saga should be a lesson to politicians everywhere who are eager to give away the farm in order to attract the next corporate titan.

President Trump has just announced he is invoking national-emergency powers to fund building of a wall on the Southern border. In a rambling talk at the White House, he cited repeatedly “virtual invasion” of the country by drugs and people as the reason to do this.

When he first became president, there was a lot of talk about not “normalizing” his actions and attitudes. As Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) notes, those concerns now extend to the president’s expected declaration of a national emergency to facilitate building a wall along the Southern border:

I, too, want stronger border security, including a wall in some areas. But how we do things matters. Over 1,000 pages dropped in the middle of the night and extraconstitutional executive actions are wrong, no matter which party does them.

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) February 14, 2019

Paul is protesting both the budget deal that was passed yesterday and the president’s declaration of a national emergency, and his protest needs to repeated again and again. (For more background on the history of national emergencies, read Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Joe Seyton.)

It also needs to repeated again and again that there is no national “emergency” on the border, and certainly none that requires Trump to route around Congress. The president’s partisans can come up with arguments that this is all just politics as usual, but his behavior is an affront to beliefs in rational discourse and limited government.

Trump’s discourse about what’s happening on the border is completely unsupported by facts. Border apphrehensions are one-quarter of what they were in 2000; illegal drugs and asylum seekers mostly enter the country through ports of entry, not vast stretches of empty, unguarded land; his claims about epidemic human trafficking are made up out of thin air; and places such as El Paso show that walls don’t lead to reductions in crime in border cities (which are remarkably safe). The president and his champions are fear-mongering as a way of trying to shut down rational debate.

In this, they have been helped by many Democrats and moderate Republicans who insist the key issue is “border security” rather than facilitating people’s ability to migrate peacefully and legally.

Looking forward to hearing explanations about how declaring a national emergency to circumvent Congress is conservative.

— 25thHat (@Popehat) February 14, 2019

Regardless of how the inevitable court cases play out, using national emergency powers for something like this is exactly the sort of abuse of executive authority that used to make conservatives go bananas. (Remember all the anger at Barack Obama over his immigration orders?) It stinks all the way down, too: Some of the money that will be rerouted to pay for the wall will come from asset forfeiture, much of which has simply been stolen from people haven’t even been charged with crimes. Beyond trying to stop people from entering the country, Trump repeatedly stressed a major reason for the wall is to perpetuate the war on drugs, which is a failure from every reasonable perspective.

It’s good to see Rand Paul call out his own party’s leader for failing to adhere to principles more important than partisanship or momentary political advantage. It will be better yet to see large number of Republicans and conservatives doing this. The failure to do so won’t “normalize” Trump but it will work to normalize presidential overreach.

A Wyoming state senator used some curious logic to explain why she opposed a bill that would have abolished the death penalty. If not for capital punishment, Lynn Hutchings (R–Cheyenne) argued from the Wyoming Senate floor yesterday, then Jesus Christ would not have been able to save humanity from its sins.

“The greatest man who ever lived died via the death penalty for you and for me,” said Hutchings. “Governments were instituted to execute justice. If it wasn’t for Jesus dying via the death penalty, we would all have no hope.”

From a Christian point of view, her statement is factually correct but logically absurd. Christians believe Jesus was crucified by the authorities, died, and later rose from the dead, thus atoning for the world’s wrongs. But this did not make killing him OK. In the Bible, the people who called for Jesus’ death were motivated by jealousy, not justice. They knew Jesus has not done anything worthy of the death penalty, but they wanted to kill him anyway because he threatened the status quo.

Equating Jesus’ death at the hands of selfish people in power to the modern death penalty as it’s used currently—mainly to execute murderers—makes absolutely no sense.

Hutchings’ pro–death penalty argument would still be flawed even if she had not invoked Jesus. As I’ve argued in the past, the government should not be in the business of killing its own citizens, even mass murderers. “The death penalty is uncivilized in theory and unfair and inequitable in practice,” the ACLU rightly says. “Well-publicized problems with the death penalty process—wrongful convictions, arbitrary application, and high costs—have convinced many libertarians that capital punishment is just one more failed government program that should be scrapped,” Ben Jones adds at Libertarianism.org.

Add to that the numerous questions over the death penalty drugs administered to death row inmates, as well as the fact that states often operate in the shadows when it comes to procuring these drugs. Meanwhile, studies from various states suggest it’s more expensive for the government to put someone to death than it is to keep them behind bars for life, according to Amnesty International. In Wyoming, incarcerating the average death row inmate costs 30 percent more than keeping general population prisoners locked up, Wyoming Department of Corrections Director Bob Lampert tells the Casper Star-Tribune.

Reason‘s Nick Gillespie may have put it best in arguing against the death penalty back in 2014:

The state’s first role—and arguably its only one—is protecting the lives and property of its citizens. In everything it does—from collecting taxes to seizing property for public works to incentivizing “good” behaviors and habits—it should use the least violence or coercion possible.

No matter how despicable murderers can be, the state can make sure we’re safe by locking them up behind bars for the rest of their—and our—lives. That’s not only a cheaper answer than state-sanctioned murder, it’s a more moral one, too.

The proposed bill to eliminate the death penalty in Wyoming ended up failing in the state Senate by an 18–12 vote.

What the hell is happening today? In another timeline, the swearing in of new Attorney General William Barr would be the biggest politics story yesterday. Instead, it could barely compete with the cacophony of extremely pricey temper tantrums coming from the White House and the weary, shutdown-stung dealmaking in Congress. (“A surreal, discordant day,” The New York Times called it.) Today, President Donald Trump is set to sign the $1.375 billion appropriations bill Congress approved yesterday. He also will reportedly declare a national emergency over the delusional melodrama he fancies is happening on the U.S.–Mexico border. The declaration would loosen up $3.5 billion from the Department of Defense to go toward constructing Trump’s border wall.

Any such declaration would be at least be temporarily blocked by a federal court. But what could happen in the longer term is unclear. (See Joe Setyon’s post here yesterday for more details.) According to ABC News, the Justice Department is telling Trump not to do it.

So are a lot of fellow Republicans, although reliable sycophants like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) are gung-ho. More importantly, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he would support the declaration.

What a bad (frankly, embarrassing) day for constitutional and fiscal conservatism. The Senate confirms Bill Barr as attorney general, congressional leaders conspire to advance a $333 billion wasteful spending bill, and @POTUS plans to declare an emergency for a non-emergency.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) February 15, 2019

Here’s a good primer on national emergencies and what presidents can do during them, from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University law school. It found “the president has access to emergency powers contained in 123 statutory provisions,” as the center’s Elizabeth Goitein explains in The Atlantic:

While many of these tee up reasonable responses to genuine emergencies, some appear dangerously suited to a leader bent on amassing or retaining power. For instance, the president can, with the flick of his pen, activate laws allowing him to shut down many kinds of electronic communications inside the United States or freeze Americans’ bank accounts. Other powers are available even without a declaration of emergency, including laws that allow the president to deploy troops inside the country to subdue domestic unrest.

This edifice of extraordinary powers has historically rested on the assumption that the president will act in the country’s best interest when using them. With a handful of noteworthy exceptions, this assumption has held up. But what if a president, backed into a corner and facing electoral defeat or impeachment, were to declare an emergency for the sake of holding on to power? In that scenario, our laws and institutions might not save us from a presidential power grab. They might be what takes us down.

All of this sums up nicely why the presidency should never have been given so much power in the first place. In any event, national emergency declarations are common, but they usually have at least some tie to actual emergencies. From USA Today:

After the terrorist attacks in 2001, President George W. Bush signed an order giving him broad powers. A subsequent executive order, signed in November of that year, activated the same law the White House may be considering now for the wall—a provision that allowed the president to redirect military construction money for other purposes.

In 2009, President Barack Obama declared a state of national emergency for the H1N1 swine flu pandemic. That emergency, which expired a year later, allowed for waivers of some Medicare and Medicaid regulations—for example, permitting hospitals to screen or treat an infectious illness off-site—and to waive medical privacy laws.

Meanwhile, in Congress, the negotiation bill (intended to avoid another government shutdown) failed to include promised funding for criminal justice reform initiatives. Eric Boehm explains:

The FIRST STEP Act authorized $75 million in spending annually from fiscal year 2019 (the current fiscal year) through fiscal year 2023, with most of that funding directed to the federal Bureau of Prisons, which is part of the Department of Justice. It was widely assumed that funding would be included in the omnibus bill now before Congress—the most high-profile element of which is funding for President Donald Trump’s border wall—but there is no explicit funding for the FIRST STEP Act included in the bill.

The omission is particularly glaring since President Donald Trump had highlighted the passage of the bill just 10 days ago at the State of the Union address. Among the White House’s guests for the occasion was Alice Johnson, whose story, Trump said, “underscores the disparities and unfairness that can exist in criminal sentencing—and the need to remedy this injustice.”

FREE MARKETS

Smug anti-corporate sloganeering doesn’t pay bills. The New York Times editorial board chastises smug New York politicians over their gloating that Amazon will no longer build a headquarters in Queens. “There were all sorts of problems with the deal New York cut to bring Amazon to the city, and Amazon is no paragon, but its abrupt withdrawal was a blow to New York, which stood to gain 25,000 jobs and an estimated $27 billion in tax revenue over the next two decades. This embarrassment to the city presents a painful lesson in how bumper-sticker slogans and the hubris of elected—and corporate—officials can create losers on all sides.” It notes that “polls showed wide support for Amazon’s move to Queens,” but elected officials seemed more keen to use Amazon in inequality talking points than have “a constructive conversation about how to improve the deal and make it work for the tech giant and the city.”

There is a financial literacy epidemic in America.

Quick lesson: NYC wasn’t handing cash to Amazon. It was an incentive program based on job creation, producing tax revenue.

There isn’t a $3 billion pile of money that can now be spent on subways or education.

— Andrew Ross Sorkin (@andrewrsorkin) February 14, 2019

QUICK HITS

• This is a fun:

What would the US look like as 100 citystates? I made a map! Enjoy: https://t.co/APJHzlmpfh

— Nolan Gray (@mnolangray) February 14, 2019

• “Jessica Rosenworcel, a member of the Federal Communications Commission, does not like TV and radio ads for e-cigarettes, and she seems to think they can be banned by reinterpreting the 1970 law that prohibited broadcast ads for conventional cigarettes,” reports Reason‘s Jacob Sullum. “She is wrong.”
• “While it’s very unlikely that Weld (or anyone else, for that matter) is going to beat Trump in the totality of the 2020 primary contest, or even grab a substantial number of delegates, Weld running as the anti-Trump Republican might not be as stupid a move as a lot of people seem to think,” writes Liz Mair.

Ordinarily I’m fond of cranks, maybe excessively so. You say extremist; I say charmingly kooky freethinker. You say cult; I say fascinating young religion. You say lunatic conspiracy theory; I say spooky new addition to America’s homegrown mythology. But even my tolerance has its limits, and one of those limits is Lyndon LaRouche.

LaRouche, who died Tuesday at age 96, was a despicable old fraud, and the warmest feeling I’ve ever been able to conjure for his devotees is pity. Fiercely authoritarian in both his political ideals and his personal life, LaRouche fed his followers a stream of lies, psychological abuse, and paranoid fantasies. Those fantasies featured a big cast of villains, from the queen of England to Aristotle to “Dope, Inc.” to gay people, not to mention whichever follower or ex-follower was the designated scapegoat of the moment. One such scapegoat, Ken Kronberg, committed suicide after the denunciations turned his way.

LaRouche didn’t limit his abuse to the people who chose to cast their lot with him. He aimed it outwards too—most infamously during “Operation Mop-Up,” when his followers in several cities used fists, bats, chains, and nunchuks to attack members of the Communist Party and other leftist groups. When those assaults began in 1973, LaRouche considered himself a part of the radical left; Operation Mop-Up, he hoped, would establish his “hegemony” over the competition. But a few years later he was aligning himself with Klansmen and the far-right Liberty Lobby. He had a habit of flipping positions like that.

He also had a habit of running for president—first as the 1976 nominee of the U.S. Labor Party, then as a recurring contender for the Democratic nomination. His biggest successes came in the North Dakota primary of 1992 and the Michigan primary of 2000, when he managed to outpoll everyone else on the ballot. This sounds less impressive when you learn that (a) in both cases, for quirky reasons, none of the major candidates were actually on the ballot, and (b) LaRouche still managed to lose both primaries. In North Dakota he was beaten handily by some write-in votes for Ross Perot, and in Michigan he was outvoted by “uncommitted.”

Most people’s direct encounters with LaRouchism came in one of two ways. The first was to stumble on one of the candidate’s prime-time infomercials, in which he’d inform viewers that Walter Mondale is a Soviet agent, that the government should “quarantine” people with AIDS, or whatever other idea had caught his fancy at the moment. (LaRouche pushed his AIDS idea with a front group called—I swear I am not making this up—PANIC, for the Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee.) The second was to run into his followers as they handed out literature in public places. My most memorable encounter with LaRouchie leafletters was in Ann Arbor in the early ’90s, where they had made a big sign that said “EATING ARAB BABIES ISN’T KOSHER.” (I’ve heard people call LaRouche a “coded” anti-Semite. In that case you didn’t have to work hard to crack the code.)

Yet LaRouche and his circle occasionally entered, or at least wandered near, places of power. Dixy Lee Ray, Democratic governor of Washington from 1977 to 1981, later took to touting the LaRouchite magazine 21st Century Science & Technology. (“I’m not interested in their politics,” she told environmental writer David Helvarg, “but they’re doing some of the best work on cold fusion and other technologies frozen out by the science establishment.”) And in the ’80s they hung around the edges of the Reagan administration, trying to find ways to build influence. In 1984, Dennis King and Ronald Radosh reported in The New Republic that LaRouche’s people had “gained repeated access to a wide range of Administration officials—including high-level aides at the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency.” (LaRouche himself scored a meeting with Interior Secretary James Watt, though he apparently didn’t make a good impession. Watt told The New Republic that LaRouche “used all the right words, but you instinctively felt something was off.”) Former National Security Council staffer Norman Bailey insisted to NBC that LaRouche had “one of the best private intelligence services in the world”; he later reiterated the thought to The Washington Post, declaring that LaRouche’s operatives “can operate more freely and openly than official agencies.” They also operated more freely when it came to making shit up, but I guess they told Bailey what he wanted to hear.

In 1989 LaRouche went to prison for fraud, and he spent five years behind bars before he was paroled. After that, he and his followers were less likely to get meetings with Washington officials. But his former followers sometimes did well for themselves. Matthew Sweet’s recent book Operation CHAOS notes that a fellow named Clifford Gaddy managed to hop from the LaRouche world to the Brookings Institution, where he co-wrote a book on Putin with future Trump advisor Fiona Hill. (I should probably note that Sweet thinks it possible that Gaddy had been spying on the LaRouchies for the feds all along.) And there are journalists on both the left (Robert Dreyfuss) and the right (David “Spengler” Goldman) who spent time in LaRouche’s orbit before heading off in their own directions.

Below I’ve embedded one of LaRouche’s half-hour campaign broadcasts. It’s from March 1988. The opening strives mightily to present the LaRouche movement as a rising tide, and the man who introduces the candidate hits such familiar LaRouchie notes as accusing the British royal family of “involvement in dope trafficking” and claiming that Moscow has declared LaRouche “Soviet enemy #1.” When LaRouche himself comes on, about halfway through the program, he rambles through his economic proposals before presenting his ideas about AIDS. “You’ve been told that AIDS is a venereal disease,” he warns. “I tell you without quibbling that what most of you heard from official sources is an outright lie….All the talk about safe sex is simply a propaganda stunt.”

There are LaRouche TV specials that consist of nothing but LaRouche himself talking, but I didn’t want to inflict one of those on you. You know why? Because when he’s not saying something utterly crazy, the man is boring. Lyndon LaRouche was a child of the American Weird, but he was too dull to excel even at raving like a lunatic.

Bonus video: If you don’t have the patience to sit through that, here’s a quick snippet from the ’84 campaign where LaRouche lays out the mysterious forces manipulating Mondale:

(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here. For another installment involving LaRouche, go here.)

Nineteenth century historian Thomas Carlyle called economics “the dismal science” because of its predictions about scarcity and poverty. Those are immutable features of all societies, which explains why his snarky term remains widely used. Modern economics writer Thomas Sowell captured the same idea, but expanded upon it. “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it,” he wrote. “The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

In other words, even though the laws of economics are as unchangeable as the laws of physics, the laws of politics remain unchanged, too. Elected officials will always promise more free stuff for the populace that is affordable once, they say, the rich pay their “fair share.” They claim the increased tax rates and new spending will not have any ill effect on the economy, either. These old ideas are making a big comeback as the Democratic Party’s progressive wing expands its influence in Washington, D.C. Free-market folks need to start pushing back.

Ideas like the ones pushed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who recently told a reporter: “I do think a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong.”

We actually are discussing whether the government should allow the existence of billionaires. Here is an economic conundrum. The progressive experiment depends on wealthy people’s continued economic success. California, which smugly touts itself as the national resistance to the Trump administration, is particularly dependent on tax revenues from billionaires and capital gains taxes. Earth to Ocasio-Cortez and others who share her views: Those universal healthcare proposals that California Democrats are cooking up could not move forward if not for the large share of wealthy people existing in the Golden State, writes Steven Greenhut.

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Is pro wrestling fake? Does anyone actually ask that question anymore? According to “Rowdy” Ricky Knight, it’s not important. Sure the sport’s endlessly overacted fight scenarios are pre-determined. What counts, according to Ricky, is that “fans will know if you’re not being real.” There’s a difference, he says.

Ricky is the rotund paterfamilias of a scrappy clan of bottom-rung English wrestlers who were the subject of a 2012 British documentary that has now been refashioned as a feature film by director Stephen Merchant, a creator of the original BBC version of The Office. The virtues of Fighting with My Family are unexpectedly gratifying, given its provenance. The picture was produced in part by WWE Studios, which not long ago gave us a film with the phrase “Robo-WrestleMania” in its title. It also numbers among its producers Mr. Dwayne Johnson, himself a wrestler of some renown, writes Kurt Loder.

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