Category: reason

While self-proclaimed “democratic socialists” win Democratic primaries in America, actual socialists in Cuba are finally backing away from some of the ideas that kept Cubans poor. On Sunday, Cuba’s National Assembly approved a draft of a new constitution that recognizes a right to own private property.

That’s progress, writes John Stossel. The U.S. should be happy about the changes, and the last thing we should do when we want to encourage free market changes in a country is slap an embargo on it. Yet some conservatives want to do that, and President Trump has even reversed some of President Obama’s “Cuba opening.”

Socialists are economically clueless, Stossel observes. But conservative embargo advocates are just as bad.

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Lawmakers in the Austrian state of Lower Austria are considering a bill that would restrict the sale of kosher meat to observant Jews. Officials say the law would somehow protect the welfare of animals.

Samantha Whitney Jones, a 30-year-old woman in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is facing criminal homicide charges over the apparently accidental drug-related death of her 11-week-old baby boy.

The charge itself may give you pause. Jones is addicted to opioids and is on methadone as treatment. Studies show that very little methadone is transferred from mother to baby via breastfeeding. Women on methadone are encouraged by experts to breastfeed if possible.

According to police accounts, in the wee hours of April 2, Jones breastfed her boy. Later that morning she fed him some formula. Then she put the boy in a basinet and fell asleep. When she woke up an hour later, the baby was pale and not breathing. Jones and her mother tried to revive the baby and called 911, but the baby didn’t make it.

A toxicology report as part of the baby’s autopsy found methadone, amphetamines, and methamphetamine in his bloodstream. And so they’ve charged Jones with homicide for the baby’s death on the belief that she transmitted the drugs into the baby’s system via breastfeeding (no drugs were found in the formula).

Nobody seems to be arguing that Jones intentionally killed the boy. It all seems like a horrible tragedy, though, obviously there’s still a lot of information that hasn’t yet come out. When it came time to determine Jones’ bail, the judge set it for $3 million dollars, an extremely high amount. Last week a judge knocked it down to $500,000. Records show that her mother was able to pay the 10 percent deposit necessary today ($50,000) to cover it.

Jones isn’t breastfeeding any other babies, and the family didn’t try to conceal what happened. They tried to save the baby. This seems like a situation where the judge determined bail based on the severity of the crime, not on the basis of any risk Jones poses for the community. The high amount prompted Philadelphia Inquirer opinion writer Abraham Gutman to ask some questions, and he eventually spoke with Philadelphia Defense Attorney Marni Snyder. Snyder explained that sometimes judges used the severity of the charges themselves as evidence of the potential flight risk, thus demanding the high bail amounts.

Gutman is concerned at the consequences:

“If the crime is really upsetting, all of a sudden they are considered a danger to the community, without looking whether or not their crime is likely to be repeated on the street,” Snyder explains. According to the criminal complaint, the physician that performed R.J.’s autopsy “advised [that] R.J. ingested the combination of fatal drugs through breast milk.” In addition to the high bail, the judge imposed a condition that Jones will not come in contact with anyone under the age of 18. What is the judge scared of, that Jones will breast-feed teenagers after using drugs? It seems improbable, if not impossible, that Jones would be able to repeat the alleged crime.

Why the high bail then? Snyder says that often the official setting the bail – which could be a judge, magistrate, or commissioner depending on the court — “uses their gut reaction to the crime to set a high bail to make a statement about how upsetting the offense is, and that is not right.”

It happens a lot, and the end result is that people who cannot afford bail end up stuck in jail prior to their trials not because they’re dangers to the community, but because a the pile of disproportionate charges prosecutors dump on them create a threat of a massive jail sentence that prompts judges to declare a possible flight risk.

Then, when stuck in jail because they cannot afford to cover bail, defendants are more likely to accept plea deals or face harsher criminal penalties because they feel as though they have no other choice, and it’s much harder to fight charges from the inside of a jail cell. These outcomes due to extremely high bail amounts have helped drive a movement to reform the bail system so that money is not the primary determinant of who gets to be free to fight their case and who ends up stuck behind bars waiting for justice. It’s the focus of Reason‘s cover story for the August/September issue. Read it here.

With a trade war in its early stages against China, the election of a left-wing populist in Mexico, and several new cases against trading partners in the World Trade Organization (WTO), there aren’t a lot of reasons to be optimistic about the state of free trade in the United States. Unfortunately, the outlook in Canada is no better. Negotiations on NAFTA have been at a standstill since the Trump administration demanded that Canada accept a sunset clause to the agreement and abandon its unfair trade policies that protect its dairy industry, often referred to as supply management.

Trump is right to call out Canada’s trade policies on dairy. But he neglects to mention the trade-distorting subsidies that the United States grants to its own dairy farmers. In 2015, U.S. dairy farmers received $22.2 billion in direct and indirect subsidies, according to a report commissioned by the Dairy Farmers of Canada. In other words, there are people to blame on “both sides”, writes Evan Haynes in his latest piece at Reason.

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A Philadelphia-area teacher is being investigated for his after-hours wrestling persona.

By day, Kevin Bean teaches fifth and sixth grade in the Spring-Ford Area School District. At night he enters the ring as Blitzkrieg the German Juggernaut, a character who sports red, white, and black tights and delights in throwing out Nazi salutes and waving an Imperial German tri-color flag replete with a large iron cross.

Bean has been wrestling under this moniker for years, and he has made no attempt to disguise his activities. In fact, he’s gained a strong local following among fans of the World Wide Wrestling Alliance (WWWA), a decades-old Eastern Pennsylvania league. A picture of Bean dressed as Blitzkrieg is featured on the league’s “Superstars” page. He is the organization’s 2017 World Tag Team Champion, along with his cartoonishly British partner, Wyndham James Winthorpe III.

Trouble for Bean began last week, when Pro Wrestling Sheet editor Ryan Satin tweeted out a video of Bean performing. In a comment with the clip, Satin registered his disgust at the gag:

A wrestler named Blitzkrieg “The German Juggernaut” using a nazi gimmick at a recent local show in Pennsylvania.

This video makes me sick.

Watching the guy do nazi salutes on his way to the ring while children in the crowd cheer him on like a good guy is terrifying. pic.twitter.com/wheTXDyAah

— Ryan Satin (@ryansatin) July 18, 2018

This triggered an investigation from the school district, which also sent parents a vague letter informing them that Bean’s actions “do not represent the core values of the school district.” Parents, in turn, seem split on the matter. One told a local CBS affiliate that he thinks the issue is being “blown out of proportion” and that Bean’s afterhours activities were well-known. Others have expressed shock and disapproval.

WWWA President Dino Sanna has explained to the press that Bean’s Blitzkrieg persona as a “gimmick,” a character he adopts to play the villain in the ring. They do not make him an actual Nazi, any more than Marlon Brando was an actual mobster. Such over-the-top characters are a familiar part of pro wrestling—indeed, Bean’s alter ego appears to be modeled pretty closely on the 1990s wrestler Fabulous Blitzkrieg, who sported a similar lightning-blot-themed outfit.

I’ve seen no indication that Bean’s off-the-clock activities have diminished his effectiveness as a teacher. Nor does he have a record of piledriving his students. Unless something comes out that radically changes this story, let the man conduct his macho moonlighting in peace.

Mitch Daniels was never going to be president. Too bad.

There was a brief boomlet around the former Indiana governor before the 2012 election, but people quickly found out who he really was: Daniels was too boring, too wonky, too level-headed, too focused on fiscal policy, too unwilling to fight the culture wars. And as some observers noted, he was short.

He was, in other words, too competent and too sensible for a political office that, especially now, could benefit from some competence and common sense.

Since leaving the governor’s office, Daniels has stepped away from politics and taken the top job at Purdue University, which, as George Will wrote in 2016, now has the president the entire country should.

As president of Purdue, Daniels has preached the virtues of hard work and self-determination. He has also put the university itself on excellent footing. Since Daniels took the job in 2013, tuition has been frozen. Accounting for inflation, the Ohio University economist Richard Vedder estimates that the effect is something like a 10 percent reduction in tuition, even as costs at other universities have soared.

The school has also created an unusual financing mechanism called an Income Share Agreement. Under this system, the school contributes a portion of the tuition fees in exchange for a small cut of the student’s post-graduation income, treating students, essentially, as investments. In other words, it makes the school more affordable and accessible to the student body while creating a revenue stream for the institution.

Vedder notes that the school has also started making and selling one of the most important elements of the college experience in-house: beer.

Boiler Gold American Golden Ale is the first beer developed by Purdue, quickly selling out at this year’s first football game. As President Daniels has explained to me, Purdue has a rich agricultural tradition, and beer is an agricultural product—I believe the hops are grown nearby under Purdue’s direction. Purdue has a Hops and Brewing Analysis Lab, a School of Food Science, and so forth.

Improving the productivity and utility of agriculture was a core mission of schools like Purdue created out of the 1862 Morrill Act. Money made from beer sales is supporting agricultural research (as well as Purdue athletics). Research into developing craft beers has led to a partnership with an alumnus who does the actual brewing for Purdue.

Although he has focused on running the university, Daniels hasn’t gone completely silent on national political issues. In an op-ed for The Washington Post today, Daniels tackles state-level budget problems, arguing against a federal rescue plan:

Sooner or later, we can anticipate pleas for nationalization of these impossible obligations. Get ready for the siren sounds of sophistry, in arguments for subsidy of the poor by the prudent.

In fact, this balloon was already floated once, during the crunch of the recent recession. In 2009, California politicians called for a “dynamic partnership” with the federal government. Money from other states, they said, would be an “investment” and certainly not a bailout. They didn’t succeed directly, although they walked away with $8 billion of federally borrowed “stimulus” money. Such a heist will be harder to justify in the absence of a national economic emergency.

In the blizzard of euphemisms, one can expect a clever argument might appear, likening the bailout to another important compromise of the founding period: the assumption of state debts by the new federal government. But that won’t wash. Those were debts incurred in a battle for survival and independence common to all 13 colonies, not an attempt to socialize away the consequences of individual states’ multi-decade spending sprees.

Today, President Donald Trump announced plans to spend $12 billion bailing out businesses harmed by the trade war he started. The contrast is revealing—and more than a little depressing.

As a national politician, Daniels might not have been as exciting or charismatic as some of his competitors (although he was plenty appealing, in an understated way). He might not have tweeted, and if he did, it probably would have been about things like the congressional budget process or the federal deficit. He might have had a domestic policy agenda beyond deficit-financed tax cuts and bipartisan spending deals. I doubt that Daniels, whose personality is defined by a gentle Midwestern reserve, would have started a pointless, unwinnable trade war predicated on proving personal dominance over America’s international rivals.

Which is to say, he almost certainly would not treated the Oval Office as the set of political reality show on which he was the star. He probably wouldn’t have sparked very many internet flame wars, and the once he did prompt probably would have been relatively low-heat.

But he would have been good at the job of being president—at the nuts and bolts of information-gathering and decision-making and operational efficiency and level-headed communication about policy decisions.

I’m glad Mitch Daniels is president of Purdue, where he appears to be making a real difference in showing a path forward for public higher ed. But I wish that American voters had been more interested in giving him a bigger job, and every now and then I find myself wistfully imagining what a Daniels presidency might have been like. He’ll never be president of the United States, but he’ll always be president of my heart.

Dan Harmon, co-creator of the Adult Swim animated cartoon Rick and Morty, is the latest Hollywood star to be called out for something dumb he posted online years ago. In this case, Harmon apologized after a 2009 comedy sketch resurfaced in which he plays a baby-rapist.

The sketch was the second and final installment in a series called Daryl, which was supposed to be a spoof of Showtime’s Dexter. It shows Harmon simulating sex with a baby doll. The video’s existence hasn’t been a secret over the last nine years, but no one really paid much attention to it, and Harmon went on to achieve mainstream success—first with NBC’s Community and later with Rick and Morty.

But the skit received widespread attention this week. Polygon reports that discussion about the video spread across 4chan—a forum not ordinarily known for delicate sensibilities when it comes to offensive comedy—and the story was eventually picked up by a popular right-wing subreddit called The_Donald. Soon, far-right provocateurs such as Mike Cernovich and Ethan Ralph were telling their Twitter followers about it as well.

Harmon was quick to apologize for the sketch. “In 2009, I made a ‘pilot’ which strove to parody the series ‘Dexter’ and only succeeded in offending,” he said in a statement today. “I quickly realized the content was way too distasteful and took the video down immediately. Nobody should ever have to see what you saw and for that, I sincerely apologize.” Harmon also deleted his Twitter account.

Adult Swim has condemned the video but said it accepted Harmon’s apology. “Dan recognized his mistake at the time and has apologized. He understands there is no place for this type of content here at Adult Swim,” the network said.

It doesn’t look like Harmon’s career will sustain as much damage as that of James Gunn, director of the Guardians of the Galaxy films. Like Harmon, Gunn made some disgusting pedophilia-themed jokes years ago; as with Harmon, right-wing trolls gleefully sounded the alarm years later. But Gunn was fired and Harmon wasn’t.

As I wrote yesterday, these crusades are nothing more than acts of retaliation against the left (Gunn and Harmon are both anti-Trump liberals), perpetrated by far-right hypocrites who are just as committed to weaponizing P.C. culture as anyone on the other side of the spectrum.

President Donald Trump’s proclamation that trade wars are “good and easy to win” now has competition for the honor of being the most ridiculous thing America’s protectionist-in-chief has said about his anti-trade policies. This morning he dropped this whopper:

Tariffs are the greatest! Either a country which has treated the United States unfairly on Trade negotiates a fair deal, or it gets hit with Tariffs. It’s as simple as that – and everybody’s talking! Remember, we are the “piggy bank” that’s being robbed. All will be Great!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 24, 2018

The kicker to the tweet came a few hours later, when The Washington Post reported that the White House was preparing to spend $12 billion to subsidize farmers stung by tariffs. The funds will be available around Labor Day, according to the Post.

To sum up: Tariffs are so great that the federal government has to create new spending programs to compensate the tariffs’ victims. If you think that doesn’t make sense, you must not be sufficiently committed to making America great again.

More seriously, this is further proof that Trump’s argument for trade barriers is completely unraveling. The White House has never made much of an effort to outline exactly how these tariffs would improve America’s relationships with the affected trading partners, even as analysis after analysis suggests the policy would do exactly what it has done: hike prices and threaten jobs, with manufacturing and farming hardest hit.

As those consequences move from the theoretical to the practical, the White House has stubbornly refused to recognize the problem. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has said job losses triggered by tariff are mere “hiccups along the way.” The way to what, exactly, remains unclear. While some members of Congress have tried to rally support for legislation that would limit Trump’s ability to damage the economic with more tariffs, others, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.), have shrugged their shoulders and told Americans to get ready for a little pain before we win the trade war.

But dismissing the consequences of tariffs becomes more difficult—or at least requires a higher degree of cognitive dissonance—when you are simultaneously subsidizing people because they were hurt by the tariffs. How many mere hiccups require a $12 billion program to abate their effects?

It’s wrong to view these subsidies solely as an economic program. They are probably better thought of as a public relations campaign. “White House officials hope it will quiet some of the unease from farm groups,” the Post reports. Indeed, farmers (and Republican lawmakers from farming states) have been some of the loudest critics of Trump’s trade polices. But throwing other peoples’ money at interest groups to stop their complaining won’t solve the fundamental problems created by Trump’s trade war.

The price of soy beans, for example, has tumbled to a 10-year low as China puts a retaliatory tariff on American soy bean exports. Producers in other parts of the world have happily stepped into the opening created by the trade war. So China still gets its soy beans, while American farmers are left with an oversupply that can’t find a market.

Trump’s steel tariffs have driven up the cost of raw steel by 25 percent, leaving a slew of down-the-supply-chain businesses with higher overhead costs. Some have responded by cancelling expansion plans, laying off workers, or threatening to move overseas. Some, including America’s largest maker of steel nails, might go out of business entirely. Are you tired of winning yet?

The Trump administration’s response to those troubles has been the same as its new policy of bailing out farmers: more government.

More than 1,200 businesses have filed over 20,000 requests for exemptions from the Trump administration’s steel tariffs. The Commerce Department is sorting through them, one by one, deciding which companies get a special favor from the government and which have to deal with an unexpected new tax that might force layoffs or, worse, destroy entire businesses. Not only is the exemption process a bureaucratic nightmare, but it is ripe for cronyism. As CNN reported last month, large companies such as U.S. Steel are actively trying to block many exemption requests made by smaller business—because, of course, U.S. Steel is better able to absorb the added cost of tariffs than, say, a small metal fabrication business with 20 employees.

There’s no reason to think that this newest White House program will be any different. The subsidies will flow to the farms that already have enough access to be first in line. The rest? Too bad.

Far from being “good and easy to win,” the administration’s determination to pursue protectionist economic policies requires ever more government intervention into the economy. More could be on the way. Ross has announced plans to investigate whether American businesses might be unfairly profiting off the White House’s decision to slap tariffs on imported steel and aluminum.

Trump seems to think tariffs will succeed through sheer force. His administration will keep trying to pull the right levers, enforce the right penalties, and hand out the right subsidies until it finds a mix of those policies that work. This trust in central planning, all in pursuit of a goal that remains completely unclear, is sheer madness.

After a suggestion from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the White House is considering possibly revoking the security clearances of some big name officials who have been critical of President Donald Trump.

Among the names that have been floated are former CIA directors John Brennan and Michael Hayden, former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, fired FBI Director James Comey, and fired former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Those last two no longer have national security clearances anyway, so there’s been some mocking of the White House for floating those names without even checking.

No former federal official has a right to a security clearance, and the president has a significant amount of leeway to operate here. Historically, though, security clearances are revoked for misconduct, not for speech critical of an administration. But accusations of political motivations are not unheard of, and you can see some examples from previous administrations. Here’s a case from President Barack Obama’s State Department.

Currently, there are more than 4 million people with security clearances of various levels. The New York Times notes that the maintenance of these security clearances serves a couple of functions. First, it allows the federal government to bring in former staff to consult and advise, which happens fairly frequently. Second, the access provided by the security clearance has market value. It translates into job opportunities in the private sector with consultants and lobbyists who want to influence government policy.

It’s that second part that Trump and Paul seem to be targeting. Paul says that government officials shouldn’t be using their security clearances to leverage speaking fees or cable appearances.

But why not? I mean, if the market places value in these prior relationships, what exactly is the ethical problem here if the private sector is willing to pay for these ties? But let’s say there is an ethical problem. Why is this push only targeting Trump critics? If this is profiteering off of political access, shouldn’t it be targeting a much wider swathe of people?

There’s potentially a case that, yes, too many people maintain these security clearances and it fosters a marketplace in Washington, D.C., that revolves around the capacity to influence government spending and regulations. That’s the whole “swamp” that Trump and his supporters go on about. Tackling this component of the swamp would involve reducing the size and scope of our government’s defense and national security apparatus, which is pretty much the opposite of what Trump is doing. Trump loves the part of the swamp where all the defense contractors live.

This proposal does not in any meaningful way tackle the larger issue of the revolving door between government employees and private lobbying and consulting firms. It is instead an extremely transparent way for the administration to attempt to punish critics with ties to the government.

And to be clear here, this group the White House is targeting will do just fine. They’re powerful and known enough and have enough experience to not need their security clearances. Brennan and Hayden both said that this wouldn’t affect them in any way. And nothing short of a meteor strike can puncture Comey’s overinflated sense of self-regard.

It’s what happens downstream we need to pay attention to. What does this threat mean for those in the FBI responsible for investigating the role Russia played in meddling with the 2016 election? What does this mean for whistleblowers or anybody connected to the government who may attempt to warn the public of misconduct? Because this is not an effort to “drain the swamp” in any real way, it’s really threatening that anybody who puts out information critical of the president could lose their security clearance and thereby lose job prospects. This isn’t about stopping the revolving door between government and private lobbying; it’s the White House deciding who gets to spin through that door based on how they treat the president.

That’s pretty nasty, and if this happens, there will be further consequences. Patrick Eddington, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, is, like myself, no fan of men like Clapper, Brennan, and Hayden. These are men with lengthy histories supporting violations of Americans’ civil liberties in the name of national security. But over at Just Security, Eddington sees the long game if Trump goes forward with this proposal:

The real losers in this are the professional civil servants elsewhere in America’s vast national security bureaucracy, especially anybody working at the Justice Department. Trump’s real target is the FBI agent in his mid-40s, with two kids on their way to college and a mortgage to pay, who happens to be working on the Russia investigation. Or, it could be his counterpart, a federal prosecutor who’s in the middle of her career and helping to guide the investigation. Trump’s crude message to the bureaucracy is clear: Do anything to embarrass or implicate me in a crime, and I’ll take away your meal ticket: Your security clearance.

It’s a viable threat. There’s no statute, much less a constitutional provision, that prevents Trump from revoking any executive branch employee’s security clearance—for any reason or no reason. And without a valid security clearance, you can’t hold a job as an FBI agent, FBI intelligence analyst, or attorney in the Justice Department—because those jobs require agents and lawyers to have access to sometimes highly classified information on potential suspects, particularly but not exclusively foreign national suspects. Like known Russian intelligence operatives.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said today he thought Trump was just “trolling people” with this proposal. But is he trolling people like Clapper and Hayden or is he trolling the sort of FBI agents that Eddington mentions?

United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley has issued a warning to young conservatives about their social media habits.

On Monday, Haley spoke with students attending the High School Leadership Summit at George Washington University. According to The Hill, Haley asked the students to raise their hands if they ever “posted anything online to quote-unquote ‘own the libs.'” As reported, many of the students raised their hands.

“I know that it’s fun and that it can feel good, but step back and think about what you’re accomplishing when you do this—are you persuading anyone? Who are you persuading?” she continued. “We’ve all been guilty of it at some point or another, but this kind of speech isn’t leadership—it’s the exact opposite.”

Haley then presented the students with a different approach. “Real leadership is about persuasion, it’s about movement, it’s bringing people around to your point of view,” she said. “Not by shouting them down, but by showing them how it is in their best interest to see things the way you do.”

The idea of “owning the libs” has turned into a social media rallying cry among young conservatives determined to get a reaction out of liberals and progressives. Many times, however, the efforts descend to a level that reflects much more poorly on conservatives, as satirized by cartoonist Matt Bors.

@MattBors distills the mentality pic.twitter.com/X7tynfMjeZ

— To Own The Libs (@ToOwnTheLibs) November 19, 2017

The high school summit was hosted by Turning Point USA (TPUSA), whose members have gone to extreme lengths in an attempt to paint liberals and progressives in a negative light. In October 2017, for example, students from TPUSA’s Kent State chapter dressed up in adult diapers and toddler clothes and laid in a simulated playpen. This demonstration was reportedly done to poke fun at safe spaces, but quickly turned into jokes about the group’s personal fetishes.

Today, @TPUSA held a demonstration against save spaces saying “safe spaces are for children.” @KentState pic.twitter.com/urytAgP0gC

— Austin Mariasy Photography (@austin_m18) October 18, 2017

After the demonstration received intense backlash, TPUSA created new guidelines to avoid a copycat incident.