Category: reason

It’s finally legal to talk about history in Charleston, South Carolina, without the government’s permission. A U.S. District Court ruled on Friday that the city’s tour guide licensing rules are unconstitutional.

Prior to Judge David Norton’s decision, the City of Charleston mandated that tour guides take a 200-question written examination and an oral examination covering a range of topics about the city’s history. The necessary material was covered in an almost-500-page manual published by the city. Getting tested costs $50; the manual is an additional $48.83.

For Kimberly Billups, Mike Warfield, and Michael Nolan, the test was an expensive hurdle full of irrelevant questions. In Billups’ case, the regulation kept her from opening her own business, Charleston Belle Tours. So the Institute for Justice (IJ) sued the city in 2016 on their behalf, arguing that the requirement infringed on the petitioners’ First Amendment rights. “The First Amendment protects your right to speak for a living, whether you’re a journalist, a stand-up comedian or a tour guide,” said Robert McNamara, a senior attorney at IJ, after the decision was released.

The law’s defenders argue that tourism is an important industry in Charleston and that licensure laws are needed to ensure that visitors get accurate information. The judge didn’t buy that: After four days in court and a little over three months of deliberation, he ruled that the law did in fact violate the Bill of Rights.

“The licensing law imposes real burdens on those hoping to be tour guides in Charleston,” writes Norton. “The record demonstrates that the City never investigated or tried to use any less speech-restrictive alternatives.”

Federal courts tend to have mixed feelings about such laws. While IJ has won similar lawsuits in Savannah, Philadelphia, and D.C., New Orleans’ licensing requirements for tour guides were upheld by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

A 2015 Brookings report found that almost 30 percent of America’s workers need a license to do their jobs. Friday’s ruling is a win not just for free speech, but for paring back the rules that lock people out of jobs and artificially limit competition.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has established a working group to draft legislation to legalize recreational marijuana. The group doesn’t have a clear timeline, but they do appear to have a mandate: According to a Quinnipiac University Poll from May, 63 percent of the state’s voters support “allowing adults to legally possess small amounts of marijuana for personal use.”

The government has slowly been getting on board. In January, Cuomo asked the state’s Department of Health and other agencies to study the “health, criminal justice and economic impacts of a regulated marijuana program.” The resulting report endorsed legalization. Prohibition, it concluded, did little to combat the problems of drug use and only exacerbated existing injustices. The working group is the next step in the process.

The news out of New York is part of a broader trend. Thirty states and the District of Columbia permit the sale of medical marijuana, and nine states and D.C. allow for its recreational use. That would have been unimaginable just three decades ago when, according to a Pew poll, only a little over 15 percent of Americans supported legal pot. The number is higher than 60 percent today.

It’s not just coastal elites and limousine liberals who are changing their views. Just this summer, voters in ultraconservative Oklahoma—a state whose governor once vowed to “do anything I can to prevent the legalization of marijuana”—gave medical marijuana a majority of 57 percent.

Meanwhile, the FDA recently approved the first drug derived from cannabis. Onetime drug warrior John Boehner now works for a marijuana lobbying firm. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson conceded some of the horrors of the drug war. And legalization has worked exactly like the prohibitionists said it wouldn’t as Nevada drew in nearly $195 million in legal marijuana sales in the first half of this year. New York will soon give us another milestone—and that’s good news, no matter what nonsense Jeff Sessions may tell you.

Officially, the Trump administration’s position is that tariffs on aluminum and steel are a national security issue.

Unofficially, President Donald Trump has trotted out just about every imaginable justification for new taxes on imports, claiming that the tariffs are needed to create leverage for renegotiating trade deals, that they are meant to punish China for stealing American companies’ intellectual property, even that they’re a retaliation for Canada’s decision to charge high import duties on American milk—as if that were something that would justify a potentially destructive trade war.

In a weekend tweetstorm, Trump raised the bar yet again in his race to offer the most ludicrous justification for his tariffs. Now he says they’ll help the United States pay off the $21 trillion national debt.

Tariffs are working big time. Every country on earth wants to take wealth out of the U.S., always to our detriment. I say, as they come,Tax them. If they don’t want to be taxed, let them make or build the product in the U.S. In either event, it means jobs and great wealth…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2018

..Because of Tariffs we will be able to start paying down large amounts of the $21 Trillion in debt that has been accumulated, much by the Obama Administration, while at the same time reducing taxes for our people. At minimum, we will make much better Trade Deals for our country!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2018

It’s amazing thing just how many falsehoods Trump manages to pack into roughly 500 characters.

No, the tariffs are not “working big time.” If they were, the White House wouldn’t be planning to spend $12 billion bailing out farmers who have been hurt by the trade war. Nor would thousands of companies be lining up at the Commerce Department to ask for exemptions from those tariffs. Indeed, the fact that Trump keeps flailing around for new arguments to justify his policy is a sign that his protectionist scheme is unraveling, both intellectually and diplomatically.

No, the tariffs are not paid by foreigners. Trump says he wants “every country on earth” to be taxed when they come to America to do business. But this is exactly the opposite of how tariffs work. When steel or aluminum is imported into America, the tariff inflates the product’s price for whomever is buying it. That means the higher price is paid by American businesses purchasing the imported steel and aluminum to make nails, beer kegs, and lots of other things. Because tariffs are really just taxes, those higher costs are passed along to the consumer. If foreigners were paying those costs, why would American businesses seek those exemptions?

No, the tariffs do not mean “jobs and great wealth.” Even protectionist think tanks like the Coalition for a Prosperous America say Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs will, on net, cost American jobs. The White House’s own report on the tariffs, released in early June, showed that they would raise prices and slow economic growth. Businesses both large and small are already feeling the pain. Higher taxes are not a recipe for wealth creation and, again, tariffs are just taxes.

And now we get to the real whopper. No, we aren’t going to pay down the national debt with tariffs. Not even close.

Before getting into the debt numbers, let’s think for one more minute about how tariffs work. By increasing the price of imported goods, they are supposed to boost domestic manufacturing by reducing the imported competition. Trump wants to limit the amount of steel and aluminum into the country—supposedly for national security reasons—but he also wants to rely on steel and aluminum imports to pay off the debt?

Even if this made sense intellectually, it doesn’t add up mathematically. The current tariffs on steel, aluminum, and some Chinese-made goods will generate an estimated $21 billion this year, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank. That’s roughly 0.1 percent of the $21 trillion national debt.

Every little bit helps, of course, but there’s no reason to believe the Trump administration is going to spend every red penny of tariff revenue on debt reduction. For one thing, there’s already that $12 billion pledged to farmers injured by the trade war. If other industries successfully lobby for similar bailouts—and already that talk is beginning—the price tag would be $39 billion, according to an analysis that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce published last week. As a revenue question, that would put the tariffs in the red even before you take into consideration how they could reduce future growth.

That growth will be critical to any realistic shot at balancing the budget. Current projections, assuming generous rates of future growth with no slowdowns caused by tariffs or anything else, show $1 trillion annual deficits into the next decade. You can’t begin paying off the national debt until you stop adding to it.

The national debt is an important topic—and, unlike imported metals, it actually is a threat to America’s national security in the long term—so it’s good to see an occupant of the White House talking about addressing it. But what he said isn’t a serious suggestion, and surely even Trump realizes as much. It’s just another half-baked attempt to retcon a justification for a trade war that will leave America poorer, less competitive, and less able to pay off the overdue bills on the national credit card.

The story of the Parkland mass shooting is one of catastrophic incompetence at every level: the sheriff, school resource officers, school security guards, the FBI, and the school itself. On Friday, we learned about two more mistakes critical junctures in the life of Nikolas Cruz, who would go on to murder 17 of his former classmates at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14, 2018.

More than a year before the shooting, education specialists told Cruz, who was struggling, that he should transfer to Cross Creek, an alternative school for students with special needs, according to a report obtained by The Sun-Sentinel. Cruz bucked this recommendation, choosing to stay at Stoneman Douglas. Under school district policy, he was still entitled to special-needs assistance while at Stoneman Douglas. But the school failed to provide with him the help.

That was mistake number one. Mistake number two came months later, when Cruz belatedly decided to enroll at Cross Creek after leaving Stoneman Douglas. According to The New York Times:

The district was required to respond to Mr. Cruz’s request for special-needs services, known as exceptional student education, within 30 days, the report found. Instead, the district told Mr. Cruz that it would need to evaluate his eligibility for assistance—despite his 15-year record in the school system—and that the process could take six weeks.

The process never began: For a new special-needs evaluation to take place, Mr. Cruz first had to re-enroll in Stoneman Douglas. An administrator said it was too late in the school year to take him back.

Cruz bought an AR-15 three days after failing out of Stoneman Douglas. His bad choices are his own, and it’s certainly possible that in an alternate timeline he simply would have shot up a different school. No one is response for his actions except him.

But the Parkland schools bureaucracy failed at absolutely every turn. We don’t know what would have happened if school officials had done thier jobs properly, but we do know that they were required to make an attempt to help Cruz. They did not. They left him to his own devices, adrift in the world, despite every warning that he was a disturbed and dangerous individual. This was a colossal screw-up—arguably one of the most consequential in the histories of public education and law enforcement.

Apparently, we do negotiate with terrorists. A U.S.-backed military coalition in Yemen has “cut secret deals with al-Qaeda fighters,” according to an Associated Press (AP) investigation.

Throughout the past two years, the coalition—led by Saudi Arabia—”has claimed it won decisive victories that drove al-Qaeda militants from their strongholds across Yemen and shattered their ability to attack the West,” the AP reports. “Here’s what the victors did not disclose: many of their conquests came without firing a shot.”

The “without firing a shot” part sounds good, until you realize how they got these guys to leave key places in Yemen—places publicly portrayed by U.S. authorities as dangerous strongholds of extremists from whom the we needed to wrest control and free the inhabitants. According to the AP, the coalition simply paid some al-Qaeda fighters to leave. Others were allowed to take cash and weapons with them in exchange for leaving peacefully, while hundreds more were admitted into the Saudi-led coalition.

Terrorism analyst Michael Horton tells AP there was “much angst” in certain segments of the U.S. military about this, but that “supporting the UAE [United Arab Emirates] and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia against what the U.S. views as Iranian expansionism takes priority over battling [Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] and even stabilizing Yemen.” UAE and Saudi pledges to fight Al Qaeda are mostly “a farce,” Horton adds. In fact, the AP found that the coalition actively recruited current or recent Al Qaeda fighters because they were good at what they did.

American Enterprise Institute Research Fellow Katherine Zimmerman tells the AP that “in some places, it looks like we’re looking the other way” when it comes to Al Qaeda.

Last week, U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley told the U.N. Security Council that the U.S. government is beginning to grow concerned over our allies’ actions in Yemen. “The idea that a Saudi-led coalition had air strikes today against a fish market and a hospital in Hodeida that may have caused dozens of casualties,” said Haley. “The idea that strikes almost hit some of the water tanks, with the cholera outbreak, all of these things are starting to show a disregard for the people on the ground in a time when they are already suffering so much.” Haley suggested that “we’ve hit a new day now” in terms of U.S. policy there. We’ll see.

The Saudi-led coalition’s conduct in relation to al-Qaeda in #Yemen is impossible to defend here, even on the coldest reading of self-interest/preservation. https://t.co/JbcqLQ1Xhe

— Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) August 6, 2018

The AP notes that Washington has sent billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to the coalition, has given the coaliton “intelligence used in targeting on-the-ground adversaries in Yemen,” and has provided American jets for air-to-air war-plane refueling. We don’t directly give money to the coalition, which was launched in 2015.

Amid the chaos, Al Qaeda is gaining ground. “[A]l-Qaeda says its numbers—which U.S. officials have estimated at 6,000 to 8,000 members—are rising,” AP reports. “An al-Qaeda commander who helps organize deployments told the AP that the front lines against the Houthis provide fertile ground to recruit new members.”

Meanwhile, everyone’s declaring mission accomplished left and right.

In February, Emirati troops and their Yemeni militia allies flashed victory signs to TV cameras as they declared the recapture of al-Said, a district of villages running through the mountainous province of Shabwa—an area al-Qaeda had largely dominated for nearly three years. It was painted as a crowning victory in a months-long offensive, Operation Swift Sword, that the Emirati ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, had proclaimed would “disrupt the terrorist organization’s network and degrade its ability to conduct future attacks.”

But weeks before those forces’ entry, a string of pickup trucks mounted with machine guns and loaded with masked al-Qaeda militants drove out of al-Said unmolested, according to a tribal mediator involved in the deal for their withdrawal.

Under the terms of the deal, the coalition promised al-Qaeda members it would pay them to leave, according to Awad al-Dahboul, the province’s security chief. His account was confirmed by the mediator and two Yemeni government officials. Al-Dahboul said about 200 al-Qaeda members received payments.

The earliest such deal that the AP uncovered took place in 2016 and involved Mukalla, Yemen’s fifth-largest city and a major port:

The militants were guaranteed a safe route out and allowed to keep weapons and cash looted from the city—up to $100 million by some estimates—according to five sources, including military, security and government officials….Coalition-backed forces moved in two days later, announcing that hundreds of militants were killed and hailing the capture as “part of joint international efforts to defeat the terrorist organizations in Yemen.”

No witnesses reported militants killed, however. “We woke up one day and al-Qaeda had vanished without a fight,” a local journalist said, speaking to AP on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

In other Al Qaeda news: Osama bin Laden’s mom spoke out for the first time last week:

“We knew from the beginning [that it was Osama], within the first 48 hours. From the youngest to the eldest, we all felt ashamed of him.” Via @martinchulov in @guardian: https://t.co/Ua8NmQaXPS

— Ajit Pai (@AjitPaiFCC) August 4, 2018

Meanwhile Osama’s son, Hamza bin Laden, “has married the daughter of Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker in the 9/11 terror attacks,” The Guardian reports.

FREE MINDS

No segregated subway cars for white nationalists. “Metro will not be providing a special train or special car for anyone next Sunday,” said Jack Evans, chair of the Washington, D.C., public transit board. Metro had originally floated the idea of setting up separate trains for protesters attending an upcoming “unite the Right” protest in Washington, D.C. The rally is organized by the same group responsible for the white nationalist tiki-torch mafia that took to the streets of Charlottesville last summer.

FREE MARKETS

If you tax them, they will come?

Tariffs are working big time. Every country on earth wants to take wealth out of the U.S., always to our detriment. I say, as they come,Tax them. If they don’t want to be taxed, let them make or build the product in the U.S. In either event, it means jobs and great wealth…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2018

Read more on the disasters of Trump’s trade policies from Steve Chapman and Shikha Dalmia.

QUICK HITS

• Former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio appeared on Sacha Baron Cohen’s show Who Is America? and talked to a plastic donut about giving President Trump a blowjob.

• “Whom to believe—the accused liar, or the admitted one?” asks The Washington Post. A Virginia jury is scheduled to hear former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates testify against former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, whom Gates had worked with independent of the campaign for many years.

• Dick Wolf of Law & Order fame is launching a new CBS series titled FBI.

• The actual FBI has released information on British agent Christopher Steele’s pay for producing the infamous Trump-Russia dossier. “Because of the redactions, it is not possible to tell when payments to Steele began,” notes NBC, “but it has previously been reported that he assisted the FBI with past investigations, including a probe of corruption in international soccer.”

Last week, President Donald Trump took to twitter to attack the Koch brothers after they confirmed that they would look to bankroll Democratic candidates who share their values in the mid-term elections. It is no secret that the bros have been deeply disturbed by the protectionist, restrictionist, statist and racist turn of the GOP under Trump.

Trump denounced them as a “total joke” and “globalists” who don’t put “America or the American workers” first. Such rhetoric, while alarming, is par for the course for this POTUS. But you know who beat him to similar attacks on the Kochtopus three years ago?

Bernie Sanders.

Yes, the silver haired, social-democratic senator from Vermont who is the darling of the left for his high-minded altruism. But he’s an America Firster like the best of them. And the similarity between him and Trump doesn’t just end there, I point out in my column at The Week. There’s more. Much more.

Go here to read the piece.

Donald Trump is as far as you can get from a free trader. He hates NAFTA—”the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere.” He has a pathological aversion to trade deficits, which he blames for destroying jobs and hobbling growth. During the campaign, he proclaimed, “It’s time to declare our economic independence once again.”

But as Steve Chapman observes, Trump’s ideal of “economic independence” is the exact opposite of what economists recommend.

View this article.

Beverly Hills police have been cracking down on people riding electric scooters without a helmet or without a driver’s license. They issued 100 citations or warnings in just one week recently.

Founded in 1968, Reason has been celebrating its 50th birthday all year long. We’ve already cracked open the bubbly several times this year at events in New York, D.C., and Vegas, but the mother of all parties for our golden year is taking place in Los Angeles on November 3, at the downtown Ritz-Carlton.

If you sponsor the event, you’ll attend an intimate dinner at Bavel (one of the “best new restaurants” in America) on Friday, November 2 with an intimate group of Reason personnel and supporters.

All tickets to the gala (go here for pricing) include admission to a Saturday morning program emceed by Matt Welch and me and packed with Reason luminaries such as Jacob Sullum, Ronald Bailey, Robby Soave, and of course Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward.

We’ll be joined by fellow travelers such as the ACLU’s Nadine Strossen, Scientific American‘s Michael Shermer, The Los Angeles Times‘ Gustavo Arellano, The Volokh Conspiracy’s Eugene Volokh, and more (the program is, like the national debt, always growing, but in a good way). We’re going to have fun, celebratory conversations and remembrances about how far we’ve come since 1968 and what we need to be pushing toward over the next 50 years.

Lunch will feature broadcasting legend John Stossel, who credits Reason with turning him into the fire-breathing libertarian he is, and who is currently burning bright on YouTube and Facebook with a series of Stossel on Reason video docs and op-eds. Fox Business star Kennedy will host the dinner program, which will boast remarks from 2002 Nobel Prize-winning economist Vernon Smith. Former federal budget director, two-term Indiana governor, and current president of Purdue University Mitch Daniels will offer up his views on Reason‘s influence, impact, and inspiration.

We’ve all come a long way since 1968. The Vietnam War was raging, with no end in sight for it or for the military draft. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy sparked riots in Detroit, New York, Washington, and over 100 other American cities. The Chicago police busted heads at the Democratic National Convention, Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring, and Olympic athletes raised their fists from the medal platform.

In the midst of such turbulence, a Boston University student named Lanny Friedlander (1947–2011) launched Reason magazine. His new publication featured a clean and striking graphic design and, even more important, a clean and striking ethos. Friedlander’s editor’s note in the first issue of Reason proclaimed:

When REASON speaks of poverty, racism, the draft, the war, student power, politics, and other vital issues, it shall be reasons, not slogans, it gives for conclusions… Proof, not belligerent assertion. Logic, not legends. Coherence, not contradictions. This is our promise: This is the reason for REASON.

Fifty years on, Reason has evolved from an irregularly published mimeographed ‘zine into the planet’s largest source of news, culture, policy, and ideas from a principled libertarian perspective. Our mission is more relevant than ever in a world where proof still struggles against belligerent assertion, logic battles legends, and coherence fights the good fight against contradictions. For every battle we’ve won, a new one arises!

So take a few days off from your own personal fights for freedom and come join us in Los Angeles on November 3. It’s going to be an unforgettable celebration of how far we have all come since 1968—and an inspiration to us all as we tackle the work that’s still ahead of us in our next 50 years.

Go here for more information.

WeWork has gone (mostly) vegetarian. The company, which provides shared office spaces and similar services across the United States and in nearly two-dozen countries, announced last month it was pulling its food dollars out of most meat.

Critics have been quick to pounce, arguing that it offends omnivores and could hurt business. But there’s one thing about the company’s decision that is certainly not true. Vanity Fair called the new policy, which doesn’t forbid employees from eating meat, but simply denies them reimbursement for meat purchases, “every libertarian’s nightmare.”

As Baylen Linnekin argues, a private company using its money to express its values in a non-coercive way is an exceptionally libertarian policy.

View this article.