Category: reason

Those looking to celebrate America by blowing up a small piece of it this Fourth of July will want to take an extra close look at their state’s fireworks regulations. At the federal level, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission sets some basic standards about how long (or short) fuses can be, what kinds of chemicals can be used, how much external flame they can produce, etc. But from there, it is a bit of a free-for-all, writes Christian Britschgi.

View this article.

If you take a moment this July 4 to re-read the Declaration of Independence, it may help you make better sense of the latest headlines.

The founders of the United States of America didn’t just declare independence from Great Britain. They wrote a statement explaining their reasoning. Two-hundred-and-forty-two years later, we’re navigating some of the same issues.

It turns out, though, that the issues outlined in the Declaration of Independence—international trade, immigration, choosing judges, political connections with Europe, the threat of “tyranny”—have a way of preoccupying citizens and bedeviling politicians even when the executive is elected rather than crowned, writes Ira Stoll.

View this article.

Toronto police have charged William Whatcott for distributing anti-gay material during the city’s annual pride parade. Whatcott has been charged with promoting hatred against an identifiable group.

This morning the Facebook page of Ron Paul, former Republican congressman and presidential candidate (and also former Libertarian Party presidential nominee), ran a post attacking “cultural Marxism.” The post made wide national news (see coverage in The Daily Beast, Newsweek, and the New Republic) because it was initially illustrated by a cartoon containing offensive stereotypes of a Jew, a black, an Asian, and a Hispanic punching out Uncle Sam with the hammer-and-sickled fist of cultural Marxism. The same picture appeared in a Ron Paul tweet linking to the Facebook post.

The image was quickly replaced on Facebook with a generic “no political correctness” cartoon, and the tweet was deleted. Paul’s Twitter feed, in a tweet actually signed with Paul’s name, later said that “Earlier today a staff member inadvertently posted an offensive cartoon on my social media. I do not make my own social media posts and when I discovered the mistake it was immediately deleted.”

Paul has a history of underlings writing under his name saying things hostile and prejudicial toward blacks and gays. (See this 2008 Reason account of the earlier “Ron Paul newsletter” controversy for more.) Paul has not yet responded to my request for comment about whether the staffer responsible for attaching that cartoon is being discplined in any way.

Ron Paul the presidential candidate, to his credit, didn’t say much (I never heard anything, but I didn’t hear everything) complaining about “what has become of American culture” or bringing up the bugaboo of “cultural Marxism,” a vague conspiratorial theory that roughly claims that various changes in Western cultural character and traditions over the past 70 years are so are the deliberate result of Marxists’ attempts to bring down liberty and impose communism.

Instead of that sort of right-wing culture-war nonsense, presidential candidate Paul spoke of the human tragedies of military empire, the economic disruptions of federal monetary policy, and the unjust foolishness of restricting free choices that don’t directly harm others, from drug use to raw milk consumption. That Ron Paul celebrated how political liberty can unify us and make us the best we could be, as individuals and as a nation.

When Paul began worrying about “cultural Marxism” in the context of the NFL players taking the knee rather than standing for the national anthem, he went far astray from any opinion rooted in respect for individual liberty. Anyone who took Paul’s own just critique of the crimes of the U.S. government both abroad and at home should have enthusiastically joined the football players in refusing ritualized obeisance to the U.S. flag.

Any public figure can have interests that go beyond political liberty, but Paul in his two GOP presidential runs understood that American needed a national politician running on political liberty, its ethical propriety, its wealth-creating powers, and its power to bring us together.

Paul’s post originally illustrated by the cartoon lays bare how inappropriate and counterproductive worrying about “cultural Marxism” is if liberty is your concern. The Facebook post said that for Marxists:

Their original argument of workers being *exploited* by capitalists, didn’t sell. It’s obviously not the case.

So Marxists just shifted their “exploitation” schtick to culture:
— women exploited by men
— gays exploited by heterosexuals
— The old exploited by the young — and vice-versa
— This list goes on and on.

Anything that is true is to be twisted like a pretzel — to the point where people can’t tell what is true anymore.

How do you think they’re doing?

Had enough yet?

Then don’t be afraid to stand up for truth, and speak it!

Otherwise, history can most definitely repeat itself.

And the history of Socialism is as nasty and brutish as it gets. Nothing compares to it in terms of human suffering.

Paul is correct that socialism in political and economic practice caused enormous human suffering of a sort its current proponents like to ignore. But what leads up to that conclusion in that barely-argued post has nothing to do with socialism. Indeed, raising a stink about these supposed depredations of “cultural Marxism” is in most contexts anti-liberty.

Both legally and culturally, American and western culture absolutely have treated women and homosexuals unfairly and unjustly, both in law and in common cultural practice. Pointing that out and fighting it is in fact fighting for both political and personal liberty, not “Marxism.” (While I can guess what he’s grousing about with the lines about women and gays, I’m not even sure how to interpret the “old exploited by the young” part.)

That some people are unhappy with modern relationship, sexual, gender, and ethnic mores and policies is a fact, but that unhappiness is not rooted in opposition to “Marxism” or defense of liberty. The truth is just the opposite. Western law customarily treated women and gays unjustly. To the extent that that’s changed, it is pro-liberty and irrelevant to Marxism as a political and economic doctrine.

To the extent that law and culture treats women and gays more equally and is less tolerant of abuses of them, even private ones, that’s a better culture, one more in line with the benefits of civilization—benefits that arise, as Paul the presidential candidate understood, from a general spirit of tolerance and living and letting live as long as one’s life or justly held property isn’t encroached upon. As Paul said on an October 2016 episode of his online TV series (ironically, one about “cultural Marxism”): “Liberty means allowing [everybody] to make personal choices, personal social relationship, personal sexual choices, personal economic choices.” That, he said, should not be a “threat”; it should “bring people together.”

The mentality behind not just that cartoon, but the essay it illustrated, is the opposite of the attitude Paul expressed correctly in 2016.

The Pentagon’s F-35 Joint Program Office is facing scrutiny from Congress after reports of its purported savings were found to be more than a little inflated. The Office had claimed that it would be saving over a $1 billion in parts by buying in bulk, as Bloomberg reports:

Program office officials sought and won congressional approval last year to spend $661 million as a down payment on parts for 207 U.S. aircraft to be purchased in 2019 and 2020. The pitch was that this would save $1.2 billion for the U.S. and allies that buy the [F-35] fighter, split evenly.

The savings were supposedly verified by in-house evaluators at the Department of Defense (DOD). However, DOD’s own Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) found the number to be much smaller in a report requested by Sen. John McCain (R–Ariz.), who serves as chair on the Senate Armed Services Committee. In fact, the new savings estimate comes out to about $600 million.

After learning of the discrepancy, the Senate Appropriations Committee gave the F-35 program 30 days to explain the hundreds of millions in lost savings.

“The difference between the levels of projected savings is a function of programmatic changes and differing cost model assumptions,” argued program spokesperson Joe DellaVedova.

The F-35 program has long been criticized for its massive cost overruns. In 2011, The Atlantic once criticized a plan to purchase 2,443 of the fighter jets at $382 billion a pop (a price tag totalling $1 trillion) as being more expensive than the GDP of Australia.

Since that time, costs for the program have only risen higher and deadlines have only been pushed back.

In a report about the use of illegal Chinese parts in the aircraft’s construction, Reason‘s Nick Gillespie gives some perspective on the pricey project:

Oh yeah, and while we wait for the GAO report to hit the newsstands, suck on this: The United States already accounts for fully 40 percent of the planet’s spending on military and defense spending rose by 80 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars between 2001 and 2012. And somewhere in Arizona is a military aircraft graveyard packed with over $35 billion (with a b!) in never-used and nearly-new planes.

It has been over a week since Pantera drummer and American metal heavyweight Vinnie Paul Abbott passed away, and the tributes are still pouring in.

At a Sunday public memorial for Abbott—who died in his sleep at age 54—friends, fans, and a long list of musicians that either influenced or were influenced by Abbott expressed sadness at his passing while sharing personal memories of his life.

My favorite memory of Abbott is the role he and Pantera played in ending the Cold War.

In September 1991, Pantera—alongside fellow rock gods Metallica, AC/DC, and The Black Crowes—held a massive, free “Monsters of Rock” concert at a defunct airfield in Moscow, the heart of a rapidly crumbling Soviet Empire.

“It’s a killer thing we are all here together, and music is the universal language,” belted Pantera vocalist Phil Anselmo to roaring approval from a crowd numbering anywhere from 150,000 to 1.6 million. All had turned up that day to hear angry, rebellious music of the kind that was prohibited in the USSR just a few years prior.

Images from the concert are glorious: Pantera guitarist (and Abbott’s brother) “Dimebag” Darrell headbanging along with a shirtless Anselmo; a teeming mass of fans experiencing the fringes of Western culture live and in person for the first time; groups of Soviet policemen impotently struggling to hold back the crowd.

It was a profound cultural moment. It also came at a pivotal time in the USSR’s own history.

Just a month prior, a clique of diehard communist generals had tried to oust liberalizing Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev in a failed coup. Two months after the show, Gorbachev announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ushering in not the freedom and democracy many had hoped for, but rather a lost decade of corrupt authoritarianism, political instability, and economic chaos.

A New York Times write-up of the show reports “scattered arrests” from the day as “police officers wearing helmets and wielding truncheons chased after troublemakers and drunken youth who appeared to be well-represented in the crowd.”

“More than 1,000 militiamen were on guard around the stage, and more were hidden in trucks parked farther away,” notes the Times.

Nevertheless, one can also see in Pantera’s 1991 Moscow show the liberating power of culture on full display.

As Reason editors Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie argue in their 2011 book, The Declaration of Independents, the death knell for Soviet communism was not U.S. defense spending or its propping up of friendly third-world dictators. Rather, it was the Eastern Bloc’s irrepressible desire to join the free, prosperous world they saw on the TV show Dallas, or heard about on Velvet Underground records.

Music critic and writer Andrei Orlov made a similar point to the Times, noting that “Monsters of Rock” gave Soviet citizens a chance to openly express a long-repressed love for heavy metal.

“Look at the graffiti in the city,” Orlov said. “AC/DC is written on every wall.”

At a time when serious people wanted to spread freedom at gunpoint, Pantera and Abbott were liberating the youth with heavy riffs.

Last week was a huge week for Supreme Court related news and on today’s Reason Podcast, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Damon Root (author of 2014’s highly regarded Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court), and I work through the intricacies of Janus v. AFSCME and Carpenter v. United States and assess whether the rulings are wins or losses for liberty (both are wins!). Our regular host, Matt Welch, is on assignment covering the Libertarian Party National Convention in New Orleans.

We discuss whether Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is retiring at the end of the month, was reliably libertarian during his decades on the bench (kind of) and whether his replacement will really be able to overturn Roe v. Wade, which is literally what Donald Trump promised when he was running for president. As a bonus, I put each of the panelists on the spot to say straight up whether they think abortion should be legal and under what circumstances. We also discuss the gruesome murder of five people at Annapolis’s Capital Gazette and ponder if 2018 is starting to look a lot like 1968, the year of Reason’s founding, when there was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air?

When it comes to sharing what we’re reading, listening to, or watching, this week’s recommendations are eclectic as hell and lead into a semi-tense discussion about whether aesthetics and ideology are linked. Suderman gives thumbs up to Kanye West’s latest set of releases; Mangu-Ward admits she’s reading Henry George’s single-tax manifesto Progress and Poverty (it’s for a conference, she says, when asked whether she!); Root, a teenage metalhead, cops to mourning the death of drummer Vinnie Paul by listening to Pantera’s catalog; and I give a rave review to Be More Kind, the new album from libertarian post-punk Brit folkster Frank Turner, whom I properly describe as the Bizarro-world Billy Bragg (the guy has a tattoo of the Sumerian “amagi” and another commemorating the great English Leveller “Freeborn John” Lilburne!).

There’s still time to register for the Reason Media Awards (tickets and more info here), which will be held this year at FreedomFest, the world’s largest annual gathering of libertarians. It takes place in Las Vegas from July 10-14. (Tell them Reason sent you).

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Relevant links from the show:

Janus v. AFSCME : Will Ending Mandatory Dues Kill Public-Sector Unions?: Podcast, Nick Gillespie

Justice Anthony Kennedy Is Retiring and All Hell Is About to Break Loose, Damon Root

Could Sen. Mike Lee Replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court?, Eric Boehm

Kennedy’s Departure Probably Will Give Us a Court More Inclined to Defend Gun Rights, Jacob Sullum

Willett, Bolick, Sykes: Three Great Picks to Replace Anthony Kennedy: Podcast, Nick Gillespie and Damon Root

A Post-Roe World Would Pave the Way for a New Black Market in Abortion Pills, Elizabeth Nolan Brown

Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to “Travel Ban”, Jonathan Adler

How a New SCOTUS Ruling on Abortion Could Permanently Alter Economic Regulation, Elizabeth Nolan Brown

Delaware’s Odd, Beautiful, Contentious, Private Utopia, Jesse Walker

Don’t miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)

Subscribe at iTunes.

Follow us at SoundCloud.

Subscribe at YouTube.

Like us on Facebook.

Follow us on Twitter.

Larry Kudlow, the director of the White House National Economic Council, told Fox Business on Friday that the federal deficit is “coming down rapidly” thanks to the major tax reform bill passed six months ago.

If only. In fact, projections show that the deficit will continue to rise unless Congress acts to make serious spending cuts or raise significantly more revenue.

Kudlow made his false claim during an interview on Morning with Maria, which was centered on the higher-than-anticipated growth achieved by the Trump administration on the six-month anniversary of the tax bill’s passage. Because of the “enormous amounts of the new tax revenues,” Kudlow said, “the deficit is coming down, and it’s coming down rapidly.”

But according to the CBO’s numbers, the federal deficit for the first eight months of fiscal year (FY) 2018 is $530 billion more than the deficit accrued in the first eight months of FY 2017. The CBO’s forecast from April shows that the deficits will rise from $665 billion to $1.5 trillion by 2028.

Increased economic growth is a good thing, of course, and the famous “Laffer Curve” suggests that lower tax rates could produce higher growth and thus generate more revenue for the government.

But the increased growth generated by tax reform will not cancel out the federal government’s current deficit.

“Not only are deficits not falling rapidly—they aren’t falling at all,” says the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in a fact-check of Kudlow’s comments.

This shouldn’t be news to Kudlow. During the debate over the tax bill last year, there was not a single projection that showed the bill would reduce the deficit over the long term. That includes the Treasury Department’s own analysis of the tax cuts—an analysis that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin promised would show that tax reform could “pay for itself.” Even after accounting for economic growth, the Treasury’s assessment largely agreed with other prominent projections saying the tax cuts would add about $1 trillion to the deficit over a decade after economic growth is included.

And continued growth is not a sure bet. Federal Reserve interest rate hikes will likely put a damper on the booming growth that Kudlow’s argument rests on. Kudlow said Friday that he hoped the Fed would move “very slowly” on their interest rate hikes, a tried and tested recipe for recession.

A trade war could also exert a negative effect on the growth numbers that the current administration has been touting. Tariffs and their responses have cut America’s supply of cheap goods and limited the markets for American goods in foreign countries, which bodes poorly for American businesses, who will probably have to end up laying off workers and cutting production.

If genuine deficit reductions are desired by President Trump and his administration, significant spending cuts are the only conceivable way to achieve this goal. Instead, the Republican-controlled Congress spent this year eliminating spending caps to pass a budget that hikes spending on the military and domestic programs. The Trump administration falsely claimed that the budget would also reduce the deficit.

Reductions to the tax rate are always welcome, but it’s dishonest to pretend, as Kudlow did on Friday, that they are a silver bullet to our nation’s serious fiscal quandary.

U.S. Capitol Police have arrested a man who threatened to kill Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) and “chop up” his family with an axe, the senator said Monday.

In a Twitter post, Paul expressed his gratitude to the Capitol Police for detaining the man. “Thank you to the US Capitol Police for their arrest of the man who recently threatened to kill my family and me,” the Kentucky Republican wrote:

Thank you to the US Capitol Police for their arrest of the man who recently threatened to kill my family and me.

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) July 2, 2018

According to the Louisville Courier Journal, the suspect made the disturbing threats over the phone, having called in to Paul’s office in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

“Capitol Police have issued an arrest warrant for a man who threatened to kill me and chop up my family with an axe,” Paul said earlier Monday at an event in Litchfield. “It’s just horrendous that we have to deal with things like this.”

Paul is no stranger to threats to his physical wellbeing. Last June, he was practicing with his Republican teammates for the Congressional Baseball Game at a field in Alexandria, Virginia, when a gunman opened fire. Paul was not hurt, though House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R–La.) sustained serious injuries.

Then, in November, Paul was assaulted by a neighbor who was angry that the senator was stacking yard debris near the boundary between their properties. Paul suffered several fractured ribs and the neighbor, Rene Boucher, was arrested by state police following the attack. He later pleaded guilty to the federal charge of assaulting a member of Congress.

In addition to being sentenced to 30 days in jail, Boucher was slapped with a $10,000 fine. Federal prosecutors have since decided to appeal his sentence, arguing it isn’t harsh enough. Moreover, Paul has filed a civil lawsuit against Boucher, alleging “physical pain and mental suffering” and seeking punitive and compensatory damages.

Needless to say, Paul has dealt with a lot over the past year or so, and he admitted as much on Monday. “It’s been a year where we’re becoming more and more aware of these threats,” he said.

What’s the best way to describe the legal/political views of retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy? For some pundits, the answer has been to label Kennedy a “libertarian.”

As it happens, Kennedy himself weighed in on this very topic back in 2005. “People say I’m a libertarian,” Kennedy told The New York Times that year. “I don’t really know what that means.”

Most libertarian legal experts would probably agree with him. That’s because Kennedy joined the Supreme Court in handing the libertarian legal movement two of its biggest defeats in recent memory. In Gonzales v. Raich (2005), Kennedy joined the Court in recognizing a broad congressional power to control the interstate market in medical marijuana, even though the plants at issue were cultivated and consumed entirely within the state of California (and were cultivated and consumed legally under state law). Then, in Kelo v. City of New London (2005), Kennedy joined the Court in affirming that municipality’s use of eminent domain on behalf of a private developer working in cahoots with the Pfizer corporation. Not exactly strong evidence of Kennedy’s libertarian bona fides.

But things do look a little different when you zoom out and take in the bigger picture. At that point, Kennedy’s overall impact on the Court does start to look a bit more libertarian. As I’ve previously argued, Kennedy stands out in recent years as the one member of the Court “who at least occasionally favors the basic libertarian mix of social and economic freedom.”

Sometimes Kennedy even employs explicitly libertarian arguments. In his 2003 majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, for example, which struck down that state’s sodomy ban, Kennedy repeatedly cited the powerful friend of the court brief filed by the libertarian Cato Institute, which explained why the Texas law was an unconstitutional exercise of state power.

Similarly, when the Supreme Court heard oral argument last March over the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, it was Kennedy whose statements most closely tracked the libertarian legal movement’s opposition to the law’s unprecedented reach. “Here the government is saying that the Federal Government has a duty to tell the individual citizen that it must act,” Kennedy told Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, “and that changes the relationship of the Federal Government to the individual in a very fundamental way.”

Kennedy is the only member of the modern Court who has voted in favor of gays and guns while also opposing Obamacare. Libertarians can relate to that.

Over the years, I’ve seen Kennedy variously described as “libertarian-leaning,” “libertarian-ish,” “quasi-libertarian,” and “modestly libertarian.” None of these labels is entirely satisfying, but that’s just because Kennedy’s jurisprudence was never entirely satisfying. This mercurial justice defies easy categorization.

Related: Justice Anthony Kennedy Is Retiring and All Hell Is About to Break Loose