Category: reason

Celebrities, union activists, and politicians demand that the government raise the minimum wage for restaurant workers. They are upset that in 43 states, tipped workers can be paid a lower minimum wage than other workers. The logic behind the lower minimum is that the tips make up the difference.

That’s not good enough for people like Buffalo University law professor Nicole Hallett. She tells John Stossel that, “the problem with tips is that they’re very inconsistent.” She wants to “require restaurant owners to pay the same hourly wage that all other employers have to pay.”

But many restaurant workers like the current system. Waitress Alcieli Felipe tells John Stossel, “don’t change the rules on tips…. If you raise the minimum wage, it’ll be harder for restaurants to keep the same amount of employees.” She works at Lido, a restaurant in Harlem, and says, with tips, she makes $25 an hour, “by the end of the year I made around 48 to 50,000 dollars.”

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The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.

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All your base are belong to us. A leaked memo circulating among Senate Democrats contains a host of bonkers authoritarian proposals for regulating digital platforms, purportedly as a way to get tough on Russian bots and fake news. To save American trust in “our institutions, democracy, free press, and markets,” it suggests, we need unprecedented and undemocratic government intervention into online press and markets, including “comprehensive (GDPR-like) data protection legislation” of the sort enacted in the E.U.

Titled “Potential Policy Proposals for Regulation of Social Media and Technology Firms,” the draft policy paper—penned by Sen. Mark Warner and leaked by an unknown source to Axios—the paper starts out by noting that Russians have long spread disinformation, including when “the Soviets tried to spread ‘fake news’ denigrating Martin Luther King” (here he fails to mention that the Americans in charge at the time did the same). But NOW IT’S DIFFERENT, because technology. “Today’s tools seem almost built for Russian disinformation techniques,” Warner opines. And the ones to come, he assures us, will be even worse.

Here’s how Warner is suggesting we deal:

Mandatory location verification. The paper suggests forcing social media platforms to authenticate and disclose the geographic origin of all user accounts or posts.

Mandatory identity verification: The paper suggests forcing social media and tech platforms to authenticate user identities and only allow “authentic” accounts (“inauthentic accounts not only pose threats to our democratic process…but undermine the integrity of digital markets”), with “failure to appropriately address inauthentic account activity” punishable as “a violation of both SEC disclosure rules and/or Section 5 of the [Federal Trade Commission] Act.”

Bot labeling: Warner’s paper suggests forcing companies to somehow label bots or be penalized (no word from Warner on how this is remotely feasible)

Define popular tech as “essential facilities.” These would be subject to all sorts of heightened rules and controls, says the paper, offering Google Maps as an example of the kinds of apps or platforms that might count. “The law would not mandate that a dominant provider offer the serve for free,” writes Warner. “Rather, it would be required to offer it on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms” provided by the government.

Other proposals include more disclosure requirements for online political speech, more spending to counter supposed cybersecurity threats, more funding for the Federal Trade Commission, a requirement that companies’ algorithms can be audited by the feds (and this data shared with universities and others), and a requirement of “interoperability between dominant platforms.”

The paper also suggests making it a rule that tech platforms above a certain size must turn over internal data and processes to “independent public interest researchers” so they can identify potential “public health/addiction effects, anticompetitive behavior, radicalization,” scams, “user propagated misinformation,” and harassment—data that could be used to “inform actions by regulators or Congress.”

And—of course— these include further revisions to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, recently amended by Congress to exclude protections for prostitution-related content. A revision to Section 230 could provide the ability for users to demand takedowns of certain sorts of content and hold platforms liable if they don’t abide, it says, while admitting that “attempting to distinguish between true disinformation and legitimate satire could prove difficult.”

“The proposals in the paper are wide ranging and in some cases even politically impossible, and raise almost as many questions as they try to answer,” suggested Mathew Ingram, putting it very mildly at the Columbia Journalism Review.

FREE MINDS

Total newsroom employment in the US is down 23 percent from 2008 to 2017, from 114,000 newsroom staffers to 88,000. https://t.co/wIKCt6IQqf

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) July 31, 2018

FREE MARKETS

Telemedicine abortion test sanctioned by FDA. “A nonprofit group is testing whether it’s safe to let women take abortion pills in their own homes after taking screening tests and consulting with a doctor on their phones or computers,” notes Politico.

The group, called Gynuity Health Projects, is carrying out the trial in five states that already allow virtual doctors to oversee administration of the abortion pill, and may expand to others. If the trial proves that allowing women to take the pill at home is safe—under a virtual doctor’s supervision—the group hopes the FDA could eventually loosen restrictions to allow women to take pills mailed to them after the consult.

If FDA took that step, it could even help women in states with restrictive abortion laws get around them, potentially blurring the strict boundaries between abortion laws in different states if—as is likely—the Senate confirms a high court justice who is open to further limits on Roe.

Meanwhile, a rapidly increasing number of state attorneys general are suing over whether its safe to let people print guns in their own homes, after the group Defense Distributed posting of 3D-printed gun plans online.

QUICK HITS

.@foxandfriends playing a clip of Limbaugh this morning egging on Trump’s threat to shut down the government over wall funding: “Trump is showing he is not afraid of a government shutdown which, believe me, the base of this party loves… The Republican base is Trump’s now.” https://t.co/QOW6FKGq46

— Alex Mallin (@alex_mallin) July 31, 2018

• Civil rights activist and former judge Faya Rose Touré, 73, “is facing charges of fourth-degree theft and attempting to elude a police officer after she led cops on a four-block chase through the city,” reports The Appeal. “Touré was the first Black female judge in Alabama and founder of the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma.”
• The publisher of an upcoming book by renowned journalist Bob Woodward is promising that it “reveals in unprecedented detail the harrowing life inside President Donald Trump’s White House and precisely how he makes decisions on major foreign and domestic policies.”
• “As a person seeking ‘substantive change,’ [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] insisted, she was bound to be told ‘you’re crazy’ or ‘you don’t know anything,'” writes Charles C.W. Cooke. “Perhaps she was. But do you know who else is told they’re crazy and don’t know anything? Crazy people who don’t know anything.”
• A former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency personnel department is under investigation for allegedly hiring “college friends and women he encountered on online dating sites, and then, he is accused of transferring some of those women into departments where his friends worked, so that his friends could have sex with them.”

Actor Ving Rhames recently recounted his harrowing encounter with police after a neighbor believed that he broke into his own California home.

As Page Six reports, Rhames spoke with the Clay Cane Show about what he said was his own personal experience with racism. In July 2016, Rhames was watching television at home when he heard a knock on the door. When he opened it, a gun was pointed at his face and a red dot rested on his forehead.

A neighbor had called emergency services to report a “large black man” burglarizing the home. Officers with the Santa Monica Police Department (SMPD) had arrived at Rhames’s home with guns drawn, thinking him to be the suspect. And while Rhames was technically the “large black man” for which they were looking, the police captain eventually realized that a mistake was made.

The captain recognized Rhames because their sons played for opposing schools in a high school sports game.

SMPD Lt. Saul Rodriguez confirmed the incident with PEOPLE, saying that the department responded to calls “from several neighbors” thinking they were watching a burglary unfold. When asked why the police acted as aggressively as they did, Rodriguez said that burglaries had the potential to be violent.

“You don’t know what you’re going to encounter,” he told PEOPLE. “Officers can be very cautious.”

Shortly after the situation was diffused, Rhames took the time to introduce himself to his neighbors to avoid future incidents. While he was personally still shaken by what happened, Rhames worried about the implications for his son.

“What if it was my son and he had a video game remote or something, and you thought it was a gun?” he said in the interview, comparing it to the bag of Skittles found in Trayon Martin’s pocket after he was shot in 2012.

SMPD responded by hosting a “Meet Your Neighbors” challenge in January 2017. Those who participated would have their names entered in a raffle for a chance to win an SMPD-hosted block party. The Santa Monica Police Department has also hosted a number of events to promote interactions between themselves and the community.

Stories about the death toll from the opioid crisis have focused largely on the plight of rural and small-town Americans in the Midwest and Appalachia. But the perils of drug abuse and drug prohibition have also visited urban environments, and none so dramatically as Philadelphia. In April, Reason‘s Mike Riggs spoke with journalist Christopher Moraff about he has learned from getting up close and personal with the city’s overdose crisis.

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Whenever bitcoin is involved with any breaking news story, you can bet that it will get an outsized amount of attention in the media. This was the case with the Department of Justice’s recent indictment against 12 Russian intelligence agents accused of hacking into the online accounts of various U.S. political actors. Unfortunately and somewhat distractingly, some in the press have fixated on DOJ’s reports that Russian agents used bitcoin in the course of their activities to argue that the cryptocurrency is to blame for these dark deeds. In fact, it might be more correct to argue the opposite.

Now, it is not exactly surprising that a criminal enterprise might try to use cryptocurrencies to make shady payments. This has been the case since at least 2013, when the rise of dark net markets that allowed individuals to buy and sell contraband like controlled substances and weapons was fueled in equal parts by cryptography and bitcoin. But as the experiences with dark net markets and Russian hacking both demonstrate, using cryptocurrency to commit crimes is far from a savvy evasive maneuver. It can be a textbook bonehead move.

The reason that some people misunderstand the risk factor that bitcoin poses in facilitating crime is that they incorrectly believe these digital monies to be “anonymous” in the way that a cash payment is anonymous. They are not. Rather, a cryptocurrency transaction is pseudonymous, kind of like sending an email. A person can choose to clearly associate their email address with their real life identity, just like a bitcoin user can post their wallet address on a social media page. Or, a person can take steps to create a large number of private email accounts that are not tied to their real identity, just like a bitcoin user can create as many different wallets as they want. But in both cases, there are still ways for service providers and law enforcement to trace a pseudonymous account back to the source. Andrea O’Sullivan explains more.

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“I was finally able to process all the dark stuff that happened,” Nicholas Blackston, a Marine veteran who served in Iraq, told The New York Times, describing his experience with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. “I was able to forgive myself. It was like a clean sweep.”

MDMA, which was banned by the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1985, could be available by prescription as soon as 2021. The rehabilitation of MDMA, a.k.a. “ecstasy” or “molly,” is directly related to the rehabilitation of veterans like Blackston, who participated in a study that confirmed the drug’s potential as a catalyst for catharsis, writes Jacob Sullum.

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Missouri voters have repeatedly defeated attempts to hike cigarette taxes in their state. By contrast, Illinois doubled its cigarette taxes in 2012, from $0.98 per pack to $1.98. There’s a lot of room for arbitrage in the space between the taxes on a pack of smokes in Missouri and the government’s take in Illinois—and that’s before we even get to the special taxes imposed by Chicago.

Is Illinois raking in lots of cash from these taxes? Hardly, writes J.D. Tuccille. Cigarette tax revenue in Illinois actually decreased 8 percent from 2016 to 2017 (it fell the previous year, too).

If high cigarette taxes aren’t generating revenue—and instead are fueling a huge cross-border smuggling industry—perhaps such sin taxes at least discourage smoking, as advocates claim. Except, as Tuccille points out, the data doesn’t really support that conclusion.

View this article.

Jimmie Williams III has been arrested several times because cops mistook him for a man with a similar name. But while the other man has a felony warrant out for him, Williams had a clean record. At least he did until recently. A San Bernardino County, California, sheriff’s deputy came to his home on another matter, but then tried to arrest him on the other man’s warrant. It ended with the deputy wrestling Williams to the ground and arresting him. The sheriff’s office figured out they didn’t have the man they were looking for but still charged Williams with felony obstruction and resisting arrest.

In a lawsuit filed today in federal court in the Western District of Washington in Seattle, the state of Washington along with seven other states and the District of Columbia insist that the federal government’s decision to settle a multi-year lawsuit with Defense Distributed—a company launched by Cody Wilson, creator of the first usable 3D printed plastic gun, and dedicated to distributing gun-making software and hardware—and the Second Amendment Foundation violates both the Administrative Procedures Act and the states’ 10th Amendment rights.

The federal settlement with Wilson’s company and the Second Amendment Foundation resulted from a lawsuit filed by latter two groups in which they asserted that the federal government’s refusal to permit the distribution of Defense Distributed’s computer files under federal ITAR (International Traffic in Arms) regulations violated, among other rights, the plaintiffs’ First and Second Amendment rights. The settlement does not grant that anyone’s rights were violated, but it does allow the files to be legally distributed.

As summed up in a press release issued this morning in advance of the actual lawsuit filing being made public, Washington’s Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s office claims the settlement is

in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act….there is no indication in the settlement agreement or elsewhere that any analysis, study or determination was made by the government defendants in consultation with other agencies, before the federal government agreed to lift export controls on the downloadable guns. In fact, the agreement states that it “does not reflect any agreed-upon purpose other than the desire of the Parties to reach a full and final conclusion of the Action, and to resolve the Action without the time and expense of further litigation.”

The lawsuit also argues the settlement violates the Tenth Amendment by infringing on states’ rights to regulate firearms. Washington has a robust regulatory system meant to keep firearms out of the hands of dangerous individuals. That system is jeopardized by the Trump Administration’s action and will be undermined by the distribution of Defense Distributed’s downloadable guns.

While I’m no lawyer, the 10th Amendment argument—more or less that the federal government making a decision about how it interprets and enforces its own munitions export law somehow illegitimately prevents state’s from having the gun control laws of its choice—seems frivolous.

Randy Barnett, a law professor at Georgetown University, says in an email that “A state’s claim that the federal government’s refusal to ban a particular item somehow violates the 10th Amendment is as thin as the paper on which the Amendment is written. Conversely, neither does it violate the Supremacy Clause for a state to refuse to ban something banned by Congress. This name for this is ‘dual federalism.'”

And, again, while lawyers and judges will have to hash this out in court, it seems that, as explained in a filing from last week in response to an attempt by various states to prevent the settlement from going into effect in the first place, the decision to license the gun-making files for legal distribution is outside any judicial review, and that—explicitly by law—any court

lacks jurisdiction to review State Department license decisions under the Arms Export Control Act (“AECA”)…The AECA provides that “[t]he President is authorized to designate those items which shall be considered as defense articles and defense services for the purposes of this section and to promulgate regulations for the import and export of such articles and services.” 22 U.S.C. §2778(a)(1)….

the AECA expressly bars the Court from reviewing such State Department designations of articles under the ITAR because 22 U.S.C. § 2778(h) expressly, clearly, and unequivocally precludes judicial review of such decisions:

“(h) Judicial review of designation of items as defense articles or services The designation by the President (or by an official to whom the President’s functions under subsection (a) have been duly delegated), in regulations issued under this section, of items as defense articles or defense services for purposes of this section shall not be subject to judicial review.”

Josh Blackman, one of Defense Distributed’s lawyers, said in an email today that “The District Court in Washington already approved the settlement. This latest suit is another collateral attack on a rule-making process that began in the Obama Administration.”

As reported yesterday, Defense Distributed is already embroiled in its own lawsuit against New Jersey and Los Angeles over those authorities’ threats, and simultaneously is fighting Pennsylvania’s request for a temporary restraining order against them. (Both those states are also part of today’s federal lawsuit filed in the Western District of Washington.)

While the various court filings about this continue to suggest that August 1 is the date on which Defense Distributed will begin distributing the files—which, again, the settlement legally permits them to do—the distribution is already happening.

Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed is already fundraising off the suit via Twitter. He told me five years ago, when I was writing a feature story on the beginnings of his fight with the government over gun-making files, that “This has been a continuous process of different levels of authority figures trying to stop it from happening and thus allowing it to happen…Of course we are going to succeed—because you all are trying to stop me. That seemed natural and ended up being true.” So far, that has continued to be true.

An Ohio dad who spent three years in jail for a sex crime with an 18-year-old female is not allowed to live with or write to his son, 14, because the boy is a minor. He is also not allowed to talk to him on the phone or even possess a photo of him.

Now the dad has filed a federal lawsuit claiming these parole conditions are unconstitutional. As his lawyer points out, his crime wasn’t with a male or a minor. And yet, under Ohio’s five year mandatory “post-release control,” he cannot visit his son without being supervised by a parole officer, whom he must pay. Unemployed, the dad can’t afford a visit. And the rules say that even during a supervised visit, he would not be allowed to hug his son.

WCPO explains:

The Ohio Justice and Policy Center filed the lawsuit on Wednesday on behalf of a 50-year-old former high school teacher who is listed as John Doe in court filings.

In 2014, Doe was convicted of two counts of gross sexual imposition involving an 18-year-old female student at the school where he taught. He has no other criminal history, according to the lawsuit.

“Gross sexual imposition” involves touching someone’s erogenous zones accompanied by force or the threat of force. The 18-year-old was a student at the high school where Doe was employed a teacher.

For this, Doe served his three years. While in prison, his wife and son visited regularly. The family spoke almost daily. They sent letters. They sent emails. In general, they stuck it out. In any case:

Now that Doe is out of prison, he is forbidden from moving back to the family home or having any contact with his son. He could not send his son a card or call him on his 14th birthday.

That’s right: not even a birthday card.

[The lawsuit says,] “Though his offense did not involve a minor, the conditions of Mr. Doe’s PRC include a full prohibition on contact with any minors without the permission of his supervising officer.”

Now Doe is asking U.S. District Judge Michael Barrett for a temporary restraining order that would stop parole officers from enforcing the law, and allow him to live with his wife and son in their Forest Park home.

“Mr. Doe has no history of abusing his son and poses no risk to him … his son will be eighteen — college-aged — by the time his father is allowed to speak with him on the phone, send him a letter, or give him a hug as he did while in prison,” the lawsuit stated.

Yes, Doe committed a crime. He was punished for it, and now he’s out of prison. It might make sense to prohibit him from teaching, but stopping him from going home and being part of his family does not serve anyone’s best interests. It doesn’t protect the son, because this kid was never under threat. It doesn’t protect the mom, now deprived of her husband if she wishes to live with her son. And society is not well-served by a man unmoored from his family once he is out of prison.

The lawsuit was filed against Doe’s parole office and supervisor, and a regional administrator in the Cincinnati parole office. It claims they have denied Doe due process, as well as his fundamental right to be a parent and a spouse.

These parole strictures may or may not be ruled unconstitutional. But it is obvious they serve no purpose other than to torment a man who was already punished for the mistakes he made.