Category: reason

Local politicians in the nation’s capital are to blame for delaying an absurd military parade that only one person wants, President Donald Trump said Friday. But hey, at least now we can purchase more jet fighters, he added.

The Pentagon announced Thursday that it was pushing back Trump’s military parade, originally scheduled for November, until 2019. The Department of Defense and the White House “have now agreed to explore opportunities in 2019,” said Pentagon spokesperson Col. Rob Manning.

The timing of Thursday’s announcement was curious. The Associated Press had reported early in the day Thursday that the parade would cost an estimated $92 million—more than three times the White House’s highest projected cost. Trump responded Friday by blaming “the local politicians who run Washington, D.C.”

In a pair of tweets this morning, Trump complained about the cost of organizing a flamboyant display of militarism in one of the most security obsessed cities in the world. “When asked to give us a price for holding a great celebratory military parade, they wanted a number so ridiculously high that I cancelled it,” the president wrote.

“Never let someone hold you up! I will instead attend the big parade already scheduled at Andrews Air Force Base on a different date, & go to the Paris parade, celebrating the end of the War, on November 11th,” he tweeted. “Maybe we will do something next year in D.C. when the cost comes WAY DOWN.”

Trump also suggested that with the money he’s saving the country by not holding the parade in November, “we can buy some more jet fighters!” That assertion seems questionable at best, as a single F-35A fighter jet costs at least $98 million, according to defense contractor Lockheed Martin. That figure doesn’t include operating costs.

While Trump cited the parade’s high cost as the reason for its postponement, Defense Secretary James Mattis pushed back yesterday on the $92 million cost estimate. “Whoever told you that is probably smoking something that is legal in my state, but not in most states,” he told reporters. “I’m not dignifying that number with any reply.”

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, meanwhile, responded to Trump’s tweet this morning by claiming she “finally got thru to the reality star in the White House.”

Yup, I’m Muriel Bowser, mayor of Washington DC, the local politician who finally got thru to the reality star in the White House with the realities ($21.6M) of parades/events/demonstrations in Trump America (sad). https://t.co/vqC3d8FLqx

— MurielBowser (@MurielBowser) August 17, 2018

Though the military parade might still happen in 2019, it would probably be best to just ditch the idea. At least one poll shows that military personnel don’t seem to want it. And even the American Legion said in a statement today that until “we can celebrate victory in the War on Terrorism and bring our military home, we think the parade money would be better spent fully funding the Department of Veterans Affairs and giving our troops and their families the best care possible.”

As Reason‘s Eric Boehm argued yesterday, the parade wouldn’t be worth it even if it didn’t cost anything. “Marching a bunch of tanks through the capital city is something that should only happen in military dictatorships, dystopian movies, and France,” Boehm wrote. “This isn’t something that stable, democratic countries should do, and it’s certainly not something that American taxpayers should have to fund.”

On Thursday, Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill to hold capitalism “accountable” by requiring any corporation with revenues (not profits) exceeding $1 billion to obtain a federal “charter” in order to operate. “The justification for all this is the common, economically sketchy claim of income inequality; that the rich are getting richer and that wages are stagnating,” Scott Shackford noted here yesterday.

While the actual legislation hasn’t been unveiled yet, Warren’s proposal is already generating a good deal of discussion. Obviously, many folks are thrilled. “Instead of advocating for expensive new social programs like free college or health care,” writes Matthew Yglesias at Vox, “she’s introducing a bill Wednesday, the Accountable Capitalism Act, that would redistribute trillions of dollars from rich executives and shareholders to the middle class—without costing a dime.”

“Elizabeth Warren wants to make capitalism great again,” trumpeted Boston.com

Of course, many in media and politics have been preoccupried with What It All Means, and the consensus is that Warren will likely run for president in 2020. Kevin Williamson concurs, but interprets the move much more uncharitably. “Senator Warren is many things: a crass opportunist, intellectually bankrupt, personally vapid, a peddler of witless self-help books, etc. But she is not stupid,” writes Williamson. He continues

She knows that this is a go-nowhere proposition, that she will be spared by the Republican legislative majority from the ignominy that would ensue from the wholehearted pursuit of this daft program. It is in reality only a means of staking out for purely strategic reasons the most radical corner for her 2020 run at the Democratic presidential nomination. The Democratic party in 2018, like the Republican primary electorate in 2016, is out for blood and desirous of confrontation. So Senator Warren is running this red flag up the flagpole to see who salutes.

“Naturally, I share Kevin’s horror,” writes his National Review colleague Charles C.W. Cooke. “But I must confess to being a little amused by how pusillanimous a radical Senator Warren seems to be. Out of everyone in Congress, she is perhaps the most consistent practitioner of the ‘I believe in X, but I really don’t believe in X’ formulation that stains so much of our politics these days.”

On CNBC yesterday, Warren said

I believe in markets. I believe in all of the wealth that markets produce. But markets have to have rules. And together, we decide those rules. You know, like you’ve got to have a cop on the beat.

Markets have to have rules, Cooke writes,

… is the sort of characterization you’d expect to hear from a center-right figure arguing in defense of the existence of the FDA, not from a self-professed radical advocating a nakedly corporatist power-grab of the sort that would have made Alfredo Rocco blush. There’s not much to say for Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez and her band of politically illiterate naifs, but at least they have had the common courtesy to tattoo their Jacobinism onto their foreheads. Perhaps in the belief that she can have it both ways, Elizabeth Warren has not. We are all worse off for her duplicity.

At Economics 21, James R. Copland, director of legal policy for the Manhattan Institute, gets more into the meat of Warren’s proposal (and the historical revisionism it requires). “The the misnomered Accountable Capitalism Act,” writes Copland, “would yank down three principal pillars of U.S. law governing corporations: corporate federalism (leaving substantive corporate law to the states), shareholder primacy (aligning board fiduciary duties with shareholders’ interests), and director independence (eliminating company boards’ conflicts of interest). Senator Warren argues that her legislation would address the rise of inequality in the United States – a phenomenon that is real enough-but her preferred solution would hurt rather than help her intended beneficiaries in the American workforce.”

FREE MINDS

An epidemic of epidemics. Pretty much any social ill or pychological issue that captures national attention will wind up described these days as an epidemic. “Countless things are now described as epidemics: loneliness, selfies, nostalgia, partisanship, fake news,” writes Zachary Siegel in The New York Times. Suicides, overdoses, excessive drinking, obesity, wellness, drugs, guns, sugary beverages, and SoulCycle have also earned the moniker.

“It’s useful to study these problems,” suggests Siegel, but “we sometimes forget ‘epidemic’ is only a metaphor for something much more resistant to treatment.”

In epidemiology, scientists can look at tons of data and sketch patterns undetectable at the individual or small group level. “What’s striking, lately,” writes Siegel, “is the way that logic has spread further beyond the realms of the medical, into spaces once considered too messy and human for science to fully apply—into things like politics and media and popular culture. … The tools of epidemiology are ever more powerful and precise, but they may not be the ones that fix the problem of being human.”

FREE MARKETS

Corona pivots to cannabis.

Big beer pivots to big weed: Corona brewer Constellation is investing $4 billion in a Canadian cannabis company. https://t.co/2xUFy7JJi0

— Jennifer Maloney (@maloneyfiles) August 15, 2018

QUICK HITS

• “One in four federal employees suspended by federal agencies in 2016 had been suspended before, according to a new review, which suggested an array of best practices for agencies to reduce misconduct in the workplace,” a new Government Accountability Office report found.
• Amazon may be getting into the IRL movie business.
• Ajit Pai said he has known for months that an “attack” on the FCC servers was fake but wasn’t allowed to talk about it.
• “Currently, prosecutors operate within an insulated environment where they behave freely with little fear of repercussion,” writes SteVon Felton of the R Street Institute at Crain’s.
• Nevada brothel magnate and political candidate Dennis Hof is suing over the revocation of his Love Ranch license.
• California efforts to end cash bail are moving along.
• Jeff Sessions thinks we aren’t deporting people fast enough.
• In Rhode Island, “Kristen’s Law” allows for lifetime prison sentences for people who sell drugs that lead to fatal overdoses.

We are all brothers and sisters beneath the skin, my people, united in our need to laugh, to cry, and to take in an occasional rom-com. Not a crap rom-com—not a Gigli, or a Glitter, or a Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (that final embarrassment before Matthew McConaughey changed agents or whatever). No, rom-com fans wait and pray for another Moonstruck or Princess Bride, or maybe a fourth Bridget Jones movie. Now, very happily, those prayers have once again been answered, this time by Crazy Rich Asians, writes Kurt Loder.

View this article.

A recent California Supreme Court decision, striking down a San Diego initiative that rolled back pension benefits for new public employees, has rightly been portrayed as a win for public-sector unions—and something that could cost San Diego taxpayers more money as a lower court hashes out a remedy. But the decision is more consequential than the news coverage would suggest.

Quite simply, it was an assault on the constitutional right to qualify initiatives for the state or local ballot. Union demands have now officially trumped our voting rights. California citizens must now meet and confer with union bosses before qualifying any compensation-related initiatives for the ballot if any city officials were actively involved in the process.

The matter goes back to 2010, when San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders and Councilman Carl DeMaio came up with an idea to replace defined-benefit pension plans with 401-k plans for most newly hired employees (police and firefighters were exempted) via a voter initiative. The reform was necessary given how the city’s pension costs were consuming so much of the municipal budget. San Diego was on the cutting edge of a statewide pension-reform movement, as the state faced a budget mess and cities were wrestling with unfunded pension liabilities.

The San Diego ruling is yet a reminder of how deeply union tentacles go into every aspect of this state, writes Steven Greenhut.

View this article.

When the Alameda County, California, sheriff’s office bomb squad saw the package that had fallen from the sky into a local neighborhood, they decided they had no choice but to blow it up. The device hummed, had wires sticking out of it, and had the word “dangerous” on it. It turned out to be equipment launched by balloon to measure ozone in the upper atmosphere, and the note originally read “not dangerous,” but part of it ripped off.

Earlier this week, something momentous, something historic happened in Sumter County, the poorest county in Alabama and a place with a long history of segregation: A publicly funded school opened in which the student body was actually racially integrated.

Welcome to the University Charter School in Livingston, which serves students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Situated on the campus of the University of West Alabama, the school had to fight court battles against the local board of education in order to open and is one of just three charters currently operating in the state.

Charters schools are funded with tax dollars but are free from many of the bureaucratic rules and requirements that traditional, residential assignment schools have. In 2015, according to federal education statistics, about 3 million, or 6 percent of K-12 students, attended charters; in 2000, only 1 percent of students did. Parents and students must choose to enroll in a particular charter, which typically gets less money per student than traditional public schools. Yet charters are routinely attacked for “draining away” money and “skimming the best students” from conventional public schools. As the University of Arkansas’ Jay P. Greene has pointed out, studies that control for individual student ability consistently find charters improve academic outcomes especially among minority students in urban districts. Charters are also criticized for promoting segregation because they disproportionately serve poor and minority students in racially isolated areas. For instance, in her 2017 book Democracy in Chains, Duke historian charges that the modern school choice movement, including charter schools, is a covert way to perpetuate racial division in K-12 education.

Schools such as University Charter put the lie to such claims. Slightly more than half of the students are black and slightly fewer than 50 percent are white, reports AL.com, so the racial makeup of the school doesn’t quite reflect the area’s demographics (county-wide, 76 percent of students are black and 24 percent are white). But “no public school in the county has come close to reaching the percentage at [University Charter], according to historical enrollment documents.”

That’s an understatement. Decades after Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision striking down legal school segregation, many parts of the country, especially in the former Confederacy, dragged their heels on actually integrating schools. It wasn’t until 1969 that federal courts finally forced Alabama to integrate and the response by whites was overwhelmingly to withdraw from traditional public schools and create a private system of “segregation academies” that weren’t covered by anti-discrimination laws. In Sumter County, for instance, a private Christian school called Sumter Academy opened in 1970 and operated until June of last year. In 2017, fully 159 of its 160 students were white, with another being identified as “Asian or Pacific Islander.”

The creation of segregation academies had long-lasting effects on Sumter County’s public schools:

According to the state department of education, during the 2017-2018 school year, all but 11 of Sumter County’s 1,500 [public school] students were black. Black students accounted for nearly 100 percent of enrollment in five nearby counties, all part of the Black Belt region of Alabama, enrolling fewer than 20 white students during the same time period. [Emphasis added.]

Alabama had been slow to adopt a charter school law and University Charter is the only such institution in a rural county. As AL.com reports:

Until Sumter Academy closed, families had to choose between an all-black public school system or an all-white private school.

University Charter School board member Anthony Crear said now families have a choice. “It’s an opportunity for whites and blacks to go to school together,” Crear said, “to give the kids in Sumter County an educational experience that they perhaps have not had before.”

For more on charter schools, go here.

Hat tip: Alan Vanneman.

In 2015, Reason TV‘s Jim Epstein explored the public school system in Camden, New Jersey while exploring “Why Government Money Can’t Fix Poverty”—and why school choice can.

An 18-year-old Afghan native seeking asylum in Austria may have had his application denied because he didn’t act gay enough.

The unnamed teenager, who’s been living in Austria since 2016, first applied for asylum on the basis of his Hazara heritage, according to Deutsche Welle (DW). The Hazara minority is persecuted in Afghanistan.

Later, he said he couldn’t go back to his home country because he’s gay. Homosexuality is against the law in Afghanistan and many other Muslim-majority countries.

“Of course it’s difficult to tell people that you’re gay, when you live in asylum accommodation centers where you still have to hide your sexuality. He was a teenager—they need time and a trustful environment,” LGBT rights activist Marty Huber tells The Washington Post. Huber works for Queer Base, a human rights organization that’s representing the Afghan teen.

But the teenager’s asylum application was rejected by an Austrian official who didn’t think he acted gay enough. “The way you walk, act or dress does not show even in the slightest that you could be homosexual,” the official wrote in his assessment, according to AFP.

The official also based his assessment on the fact that the teen had gotten into several fights and appeared to be something of a loner. “You appear to be capable of a level of aggression which would not be expected among homosexuals. You didn’t have lots of friends.…Aren’t homosexuals usually more sociable?” the official said.

There’s more. AFP reports:

The official rejected the statement that the Afghan teenager had kissed straight men, saying he would have been beaten if he had done so, the Falter reported.

He had said he became aware of his sexuality when he was 12 years old, but the official found that was “rather early” and so not likely, particularly in a society such as Afghanistan “where there is no public sexual stimulation through fashion and advertisement”.

Austria’s Interior Ministry wouldn’t confirm the details of the case to the Post. But it noted that “using a few sentences out of” the 120,000 asylum decisions the government has made in the last two years “does not reflect reality.”

“Asylum-seekers must substantiate their reasons for fleeing,” the ministry said in a statement to DW. “There are no concrete rules of proof, but the authorities must show if and why a claim was found to have been substantiated.”

The teen is appealing his asylum rejection.

After a report found that 301 Catholic priests, clergy, and lay teachers in Pennsylvania sexually abused over 1,000 children, several in the state government hope to both lift and expand the statute of limitations for child sex crimes.

The disturbing report, which is 884 pages long, found that systemic sexual abuse occurred over in six Pennsylvania dioceses over the span of at least 70 years. The report also established a pattern that revealed Bishops and others in church leadership were aware of the sexual abuse and chose to act in a way that often protected the predators from repercussions. In several instances, Bishops dissuaded victims from reporting abuse and actively worked to prevent meaningful investigation into the allegations.

Among its many revelations, the report exposed the way some used Pennsylvania’s statute of limitations on reporting child sex abuse to their advantage. Many of the victims are now too old to see their abusers prosecuted. The current statute of limitations lets victims of child sexual abuse sue their abusers, and those complicit, in civil court until the age of 30. PennLive reports that a bill sponsored by Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati (R) would raise the age to 50. Additionally, the bill, Senate Bill 261, would completely eliminate the statute of limitations for any future criminal prosecutions for child sex abuse.

As reported, Scarnati’s bill was unanimously approved in the Senate, but has been stalled in the House since February 2017.

Supporters of the expanded window hope to see Scarnati’s bill joined with a “real deal” amendment proposed by Rep. Mark Rozzi (D), who himself is a victim of clergy abuse. PennLive also reports that Rozzi’s amendment would give victims an additional two years to pursue civil action. Rozzi has since argued that it can take victims a long time to come to terms with the abuse they suffered, often times after the window is closed.

Scarnati’s bill is expected to come up for a vote in the fall. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who presented the report to the public, urged state lawmakers to pass the bill.

Victims in other states are looking for similar actions. WVUE reports that an older Louisiana man brought allegations against a former deacon in the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Louisiana faces similar issues with its statute of limitations on child sex abuse.

The absurd military parade that literally only one person wants to see happen this November will cost an estimated $92 million—more than three times what the White House initially said would be highest possible price tag for the event.

When President Donald Trump first pitched the idea of having the American military flex its way down Pennsylvania Avenue—after he returned from watching a Bastille Day celebration in Paris last year—his budget-makers said the whole thing could be done for no more than $30 million and possibly as little as $10 million. But like all defense spending, the budget for Trump’s parade has ballooned to several times the initial projections, the Associated Press reports, citing an anonymous Pentagon official.

About $50 million of the parade’s cost will cover the Pentagon’s equipment, personnel, and other support, the AP source said. The rest will be used for security—because, yeah, you apparently have to spend $40 million to protect a parade of the world’s most powerful, expensive, and well-equipped military from being attacked by terrorists during a six-block walk. Asymmetric warfare is a bitch, ain’t it?

The AP also notes that the budget for the November 10 parade is not yet final and needs approval from Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. In other words, the costs could still increase.

Even if the parade were going to cost nothing, it wouldn’t be worth having. Marching a bunch of tanks through the capital city is something that should only happen in military dictatorships, dystopian movies, and France. This isn’t something that stable, democratic countries should do, and it’s certainly not something that American taxpayers should have to fund.

If this parade has to happen, it should be a celebration of the men and women who have fought so bravely during America’s almost 17 year long War on Terror—and it should coincide with the ending of those largely unauthorized conflicts, as Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) has suggested.

Short of that, it should not happen. Polls show that a vast majority of American military personnel are opposed to the idea of having such a parade. Presumably, the America they volunteered to risk their lives for isn’t the type of place where this sort of thing happens. Others have pointed out the disgrace of holding the parade on the eve of Veteran’s Day—a day that, ever since it was called Armistice Day, has been meant as somber remembrance of the horrors that war has inflicted, not as a celebration of the terrible tools used to kill, wound, and maim human beings.

Sure, $92 million is a drop in the bucket of federal spending—heck, it’s barely more than 1 percent of the Pentagon’s budget—but America is going to face trillion-dollar annual deficits over the next few years, and you can’t start saving money until you stop wasting it on frivolous displays of militarism that accomplish nothing except tickling the president’s jollies.

Google’s dominance in so many aspects of our digital lives is “creating a walled garden that’s basically controlled by two nerds in Silicon Valley,” says George Gilder, the author who more than anyone else predicted today’s imperfect online utopia in books such as Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life and Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize Our World.

Of course it’s not just Google (which owns YouTube), Gilder says in a Reason Podcast recorded at FreedomFest, the annual gathering of libertarian held every year in Las Vegas. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and a host of other online ecosystems are working to keep us all within their own specific spaces, the better to sell to us and capture economic and demographic value from users. “This model of creating economic success on the Internet by homogenizing a walled garden doesn’t replicate,” argues Gilder, who says that if Apple or whomever can have their own proprietary space that keeps people tethered to one service on the Internet, then so too will China, Iran, and despotic regimes. “In the end, the internet breaks into fragile fiefdoms and falls apart.”

Long a prophet of transparency, mobility, and cryptocurrency, Gilder says that disruption is coming and, as with earlier shifts from mainframe to personal computers, it will be upon us long before the solons of Silicon Valley know what hit them.

In a wide-ranging conversation, I also ask Gilder how his techno-optimism about the liberating effects of cyberspace and technological innovation square with his old preoccupations in books such as Sexual Suicide and Men and Marriage about preserving traditional gender roles. “I do think reproduction is a vital human function, and if we botch that, we aren’t going to have any future. I really do think maintaining the sexual constitution, as I called it in Sexual Suicide, is important for procreation and having new generations.” Even in a world filled every sort of sex robot imaginable, he says, won’t be able to reprogram that.

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