Category: reason

In prison for life, Remy looks back on his violent past and contemplates where it all went wrong who’s to blame.

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Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), who was assaulted by his neighbor in November and suffered several fractured ribs, has filed a civil suit against the man who attacked him.

Citing “physical pain and mental suffering,” Paul is seeking punitive and compensatory damages from Rene Boucher, according to a civil complaint filed Friday in Kentucky’s Warren County Circuit Court by Paul’s attorney, Kyle Bumgarner.

It wasn’t immediately clear exactly how much money Paul is asking for, but the senator does want Boucher to pay his medical and legal bills.

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, he was slapped with a $10,000 fine.

Though Boucher admitted committing the assault, he has claimed he only attacked Paul because the Kentucky senator was stacking yard debris near the boundary between their properties.

In Friday’s court filing, however, Bumgarner claimed Boucher has engaged in a “pattern of stalking and harassment” of Paul and his family. Without a court injunction keeping Boucher from contacting the senator and his family, Paul is worried this alleged pattern will continue.

The filing also had some harsh words for Boucher’s motives, saying he acted in a way that was “unnecessarily cruel” and “malicious” and displayed “a total reckless disregard for [Paul’s] rights, life and liberties.”

Aside from the fractured ribs, Paul has dealt with pneumonia following the attack, according to the Bowling Green Daily News.

The civil complaint alleged that due to Boucher’s attack, Paul has suffered “increased likelihood of, and susceptibility to, injury and disease.” Moreover, the suit says, Paul “has been deprived of his enjoyment of life.”

But Boucher’s attorney, Matt Baker, does not believe Paul has a civil case.

“To the best of my knowledge, Sen. Paul has not suffered any loss of any income and doesn’t appear that he will in the future,” Baker told the Bowling Green Daily News. “It was established at the sentencing hearing that he does not have any out-of-pocket medical expenses in this case, and at some point after the incident he told Fox News in an on-camera interview that he has not taken any prescription pain medication, and so all that is to say we’re going to defend this civil suit just like we would any other and see if we can get it resolved as efficiently as possible.”

According to the suit, Paul is seeking a trial by jury.

High-speed rail is working out in Europe about as well as it is here in America—that is, not great.

A new report by the European Court of Auditors (ECA)—the E.U.’s spending watchdog—found that the continent’s web of high-speed rail lines are “not a network, but an ineffective patchwork” that suffers from chronic cost overruns, delays, and poor performance.

“High-speed rail infrastructure is expensive, and is becoming more so,” reads the report, noting that the average high-speed rail project cost €25 million per kilometer ($29 million) and that “cost overruns…and delays were the norm instead of the exception.”

The ECA’s audit looked at 10 completed or under-construction rail lines in six E.U. countries, finding that a major cost driver was the tendency to shell out for extra-expensive high-speed rail lines that go on to carry conventional trains at conventional speeds.

Of the six currently operating lines examined in the ECA’s report, trains were running on average at speeds of 45 percent of each line’s design capacity. None of the lines saw trains averaging above 250 kilometers an hour (the speed that many consider to be truly high-speed rail).

Had these European countries stuck to building or upgrading conventional rail lines, says the ECA, “costs involved could in fact have been far lower, with little or no impact on operations.”

This failure looks even more galling when you compare the time saved by these high-speed rail lines to the costs of building them. In four of the lines looked at in the ECA’s report, transportation officials spent over €100 million ($116 million) for every minute of travel time saved.

For instance, a planned German high-speed rail line is expected to get you from Munich to Stuttgart 36 minutes faster than conventional rail lines at the cost of some €13 billion ($15 billion). That shakes out to €368 million ($423 million) per minute saved. (A flight between the two cities takes 45 minutes.)

The ECA’s report also stressed the poor coordination between European countries when building their high-speed rail lines, making for poor continent-wide connectivity and suppressing ridership.

All these problems will, of course, sound familiar to watchers of the slow-rolling disaster that is California’s high-speed rail project.

Originally sold to voters at the low, low price of $68 billion, the Golden State’s bullet train now costs $98 billion and will not be fully operational until 2033. Once promised to deliver commuters at blistering speeds straight from Los Angeles to San Francisco, California’s high-speed rail will now wind through the state’s Central Valley on a mix of high-speed and conventional rail tracks.

None of this has dampened California Gov. Jerry Brown’s enthusiasm for high-speed rail. In a January State of the State address—his last as governor—Brown tried to shore up support for his pet project by directing his audience’s attention beyond the sea.

“I like trains and I like high-speed trains even better,” said Brown. “Eleven other countries have high-speed trains. They are now taken for granted all over Europe.”

Given the continued cost overruns, delays, and politicized design decisions, Brown has already succeeded in delivering a European-style rail experience.

Over at The New York Times, Charles M. Blow in his column, “White Extinction Anxiety,” cites reactionary provocateur Patrick Buchanan’s recent warnings against the menace that immigrants purportedly pose to the survival of our Republic. The first comes from his interview last week on the Laura Ingraham Show:

“This is the great issue of our time. And, the real question is whether Europe has the will and the capacity, and America has the capacity to halt the invasion of the countries until they change the character—political, social, racial, ethnic—character of the country entirely,” said Buchanan.

Over at his blog, Buchanan asserted, “The existential question, however, thus remains: How does the West, America included, stop the flood tide of migrants before it alters forever the political and demographic character of our nations and our civilization?”

Sadly, this is not the first time in our history when bigots have urgently prophesied that America would soon be destroyed by a rising tide of allegedly unassimilable immigrants. We are now in the midst of the third such anti-immigration panic.

Sentiments very similar to Buchanan’s were expressed in 1850s by the anti-immigrant Know Nothing Party‘s newspaper American Patriot: “American Citizens! We appeal to you in all calmness. Is it not time to pause? Already the enemies of our dearest institutions, like foreign spies in the Trojan Horse of old, are within our gates. They are disgorging themselves upon us, at the rate of HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS EVERY YEAR! They aim at nothing short of conquest and supremacy over us.”

The American Patriot further warned: “We are burdened with enormous taxes by foreigners. We are corrupted in the morals of youth. We are interfered with in our government. We are forced into collisions with other nations. We are tampered with in our religion. We are injured in our labor. We are assailed in our freedom of speech.”

The threat of tides of national-character-altering immigration as a political bogeyman has a long and undistinguished history in America. Just before the outbreak of the Civil War, foreign-born immigrants comprised just over 13 percent of our nation’s population—about what it is today.

A bit of historical sleuthing turned up the below nuggets of insight about the deleterious effects of the tide of Irish and German immigration in the 1840s and 1850s from Massachusetts Governor Henry J. Gardner in his annual addresses to that state’s legislature. At that time, more than 20 percent of Massachusetts’ residents were foreign-born. Today 16.2 percent of folks living in Massachusetts are foreign-born.

From Gardner’s 1857 address:

Born and brought up under totally dissimilar principles of government, and accustomed to be led by the clannish influences which surround them rather than by enlightened individual responsibility, aliens are unfitted to appreciate or rightly use the great trust, in the exercise of which they are unwisely permitted to participate. …we may properly, and should necessarily, remember that the class of aliens, to whom we specially refer, are blindly attached to a religious faith whose cardinal principle is implicit obedience to its temporal head, and that temporal head a foreign potentate, which forbids independence of action and the right of private judgment; which claims not only the power to inflict temporal ills on those who dare question its infallibility; but also entail future and eternal vengeance; whose prelates notoriously coerce politically as well as spiritually its followers; and which arrogates to itself, and actually exerts, a potent and malign political influence at war with the teachings of our Constitution and the essence of our government. …

Witnessing this vast influence of evil, which is continually swollen by accessions from the old world, and seeing, year after year, the manifold dangers which not only threaten the future but are pernicious to the present, it seems strange that all who value the exhortations of the fathers of our country, the teachings of past history, or the repeated warnings of the present, do not unite to counteract this acknowledged danger….

From Gardner’s 1855 address:

The present European immigration is deeply prejudicial to the fair remuneration of American labor. The mechanic, the artisan, the agriculturalist, daily suffer from its influence. There is no statement in political ethics more palpable or fundamental than that honest industry should receive its due reward. Those who hourly feel the oppressing competition of alien labor, depreciated under the taskmasters of the old world, and schooled in self-denials and modes of existence there so universal, properly believe that their own elective franchise should be exercised for the protection of American labor. …

The report of the Secretary of the Treasury, recently transmitted to Congress, shows that our imports, during the past year, have exceeded our exports twenty-six millions of dollars. … Thirty-eight millions of dollars in gold – over nine-tenths of all our receipts from California during the year, as officially reporte – have simply passed through the country, in transit, and have been shipped away to for imported products of European labor, and the interest on our European debt. …Had this golden gift of Providence been retained at home to enrich the American artisan and tiller of the soil, instead of having been squandered to purchase foreign luxuries and the products of alien labor, we should this day, as a nation, doubtless have enjoyed prosperity in every branch of industry….

The periodic panic over “white extinction” reached a second peak in the decade before 1920 when the foreign-born population stood (as it does today) at about 14 percent. One of the most notable expressions of this racial anxiety was the classic 1922 anti-immigration screed by Saturday Evening Post correspondent Kenneth Roberts, Why Europe Leaves Home: A True Account of the Reasons which Cause Central Europeans to Overrun America. “The American nation was founded and developed by the Nordic race,” asserted Roberts. “If a few more million members of the Alpine, Mediterranean and Semitic races are poured among us, the result must inevitably be a hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and Southeastern Europe.” They came and then became Americans.

In his blog post, Buchanan specifically worried, “The U.S. Hispanic population, already estimated at nearly 60 million, is predicted to exceed 100 million by 2050, just 32 years away.” So what? Recent reports find that Hispanic immigrants and their children are assimilating into American culture at least as fast as earlier groups of immigrants did.

To the extent that there is actually such a thing as “white extinction anxiety,” a new study by two political scientists, Dowell Myers and Morris Levy of the University of Southern California, finds that using an inclusive definition that “counts as white anyone who so identifies (even if they also identify with another race or ethnicity), the white population is not declining; it’s flourishing. The Census Bureau’s inclusive projections show a white population in excess of 70 percent of the total for the foreseeable future.” They note that when white folks are exposed to the actual facts of ethnic melding and assimiliation, concerns over an allegedly minority-white future are greatly abated.

The two researchers correctly conclude that “stories about the impending demise of white America are rooted in outmoded notions of racial exclusivity. These stories of white decline obscure the ongoing changes to America’s color line, and they serve only to divide. Fortunately, the white American public seems far more content with the more inclusive future that is actually destined to emerge.”

And this process is already well under way. A recent Pew Research Center study, “Hispanic Identity Fades Across Generations as Immigrant Connections Fall Away,” finds that lots of people with Hispanic heritage do not identify themselves as being Hispanic when filling out Census survey forms. By the third generation, 56 percent of respondents simply identify themselves as American.

Depressingly, it seems that white extinction panics have occurred each time the foreign-born population of the United States has risen above 13 percent. Donald Trump is just the latest demagogue to rise to power by stoking white folks’ ethnic fears.

Buchanan’s assertions amount to a kind of blood-and-soil tribalism that is simply un-American. I’ll say it again: Americans of whatever ancestry living in 2050 will look back and wonder why anyone cared about the ethnic makeup of our country’s population. America is an ideal, not a tribe.

Anti-immigrant fearmongers of demographic doom proved wrong in the 19th and 20th centuries, and today’s dire prognostications will turn out to be just as wrong in the 21st century.

A closely divided U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in favor of President Donald Trump’s executive proclamation banning travelers from certain largely majority-Muslim countries. “Because there is persuasive evidence that the entry suspension has a legitimate grounding in national security concerns, quite apart from any religious hostility,” declared the majority opinion of Chief Justice John Roberts in Trump v. Hawaii, “we must accept that independent justification.” This decision reverses a lower court ruling that had blocked the travel ban from going into effect.

At the center of the case is Trump’s September 2017 “Proclamation No. 9645, Enhancing Vetting Capabilities and Processes for Detecting Attempted Entry Into the United States by Terrorists or Other Public-Safety Threats.” At issue before the justices was whether this proclamation represented an invalid exercise of federal immigration power and also whether it violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause by heaping official disfavor on a religious minority, particularly when the proclamation is viewed in light of Trump’s long record of making anti-Muslim statements.

Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch, ruled in Trump’s favor on both counts.

“By its plain language,” the chief justice wrote, federal immigration law “grants the President broad discretion to suspend the entry of aliens into the United States. The President lawfully exercised that discretion based on his findings—following a worldwide, multi-agency review—that entry of the covered aliens would be detrimental to the national interest.”

Roberts then had this to say about the Establishment Clause challenge:

Plaintiffs argue that this President’s words strike at fundamental standards of respect and tolerance, in violation of our constitutional tradition. But the issue before us is not whether to denounce the statements. It is instead the significance of those statements in reviewing a Presidential directive, neutral on its face, addressing a matter within the core of executive responsibility. In doing so, we must consider not only the statements of a particular President, but also the authority of the Presidency itself.

Writing in dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, argued that the Court should not have decided the case until it had the opportunity to hear additional arguments about the real-world implementation of the travel ban, particularly on how its “exemption and waiver” process is actually functioning. “If this Court must decide the question without this further litigation,” Breyer wrote, “I would, on balance, find the evidence of antireligious bias.”

In a separate dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, charged the majority with turning a blind eye to the president’s blatant Establishment Clause violation. The Court “leaves undisturbed a policy first advertised openly and unequivocally as a ‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States’ because the policy now masquerades behind a facade of national-security concerns,” Sotomayor wrote. “Based on the evidence in the record, a reasonable observer would conclude that the Proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus. That alone suffices to show that plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their Establishment Clause claim.”

At its heart, this case was about how much deference the federal courts owe to the executive branch when the executive is acting in the name of national security. According to the Court’s 5-4 ruling, the executive is entitled to significant deference in such matters. “The Government has set forth a sufficient national security justification to survive rational basis review,” wrote Chief Justice Roberts. “We express no view on the soundness of the policy.”

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Trump v. Hawaii is available here.

In retaliation against President Donald Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, the European Union has imposed tariffs on a number of U.S. goods. Now whiskey drinkers will pay the price.

On Monday, as Reason‘s Eric Boehm reported, iconic American motorcycle brand Harley-Davidson announced it would shift some of its manufacturing overseas so as to avoid the 25 percent tariffs imposed by EU officials on American made goods.

Now, the latest major American company to take action in response to those tariffs is the Brown-Forman Corporation, which makes Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey.

Brown-Forman spokesperson Phil Lynch told the Associated Press on Monday that EU consumers should expect to see a price hike of roughly 10 percent on Jack Daniel’s products. The increases are set to go into effect over the next several months, and prices will vary as local sellers decide how much they plan to charge, Lynch said.

About one-fourth of Brown-Forman’s sales come from Europe, so the EU tariffs have the potential to significantly hurt the company’s bottom line.

The EU was not alone in imposing 25 percent tariffs on American goods. Mexico did the same, but since Brown-Forman recently opted to raise the price of Jack Daniel’s in that country, another price hike is not imminent, Lynch said.

These new trade barriers, which affect goods like bourbon, orange juice, and motorcycles, were a response to tariffs imposed by Trump on steel and aluminum imported into the U.S.

Trump justified the new tariffs by saying that he was looking to bring jobs back to the U.S., but his actions have made many American CEOs wary of a trade war. As a result, some domestic employers are reportedly looking to scale back on hiring, according to CNN.

However, Trump has defended his hardline stance on trade and even criticized Harley-Davidson on Tuesday for moving some of its production outside the U.S.

On Twitter, Trump accused the company of “using Tariffs/Trade War as an excuse” to move jobs out of the country.

Early this year Harley-Davidson said they would move much of their plant operations in Kansas City to Thailand. That was long before Tariffs were announced. Hence, they were just using Tariffs/Trade War as an excuse. Shows how unbalanced & unfair trade is, but we will fix it…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 26, 2018

He also warned the company that “they won’t be able to sell back into U.S. without paying a big tax!”

….When I had Harley-Davidson officials over to the White House, I chided them about tariffs in other countries, like India, being too high. Companies are now coming back to America. Harley must know that they won’t be able to sell back into U.S. without paying a big tax!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 26, 2018

A federal district court has dismissed the nuisance lawsuit filed by the California cities of Oakland and San Francisco against five major private oil companies seeking to obtain climate change damages. As I argued earlier, the court made the right decision.

The five companies—BP, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell—collectively are responsible “for over 11 percent of the carbon dioxide and methane pollution that has accumulated in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution.” The cities asserted that they were entitled to billions of dollars in compensation on the grounds that companies knew that their sales of fossil fuels were damaging the climate. As a result of rising global temperatures, municipalities argued that they will be forced to pay for changes in infrastructure required to adapt to consequences of this warming, such as rising sea levels.

Judge William Alsup of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California had earlier ordered both the plaintiff cities and defendant oil companies to brief him on the scientific background of man-made climate change as well as the costs and benefits of burning fossil fuels. In his opinion, Judge Alsup provides a succinct history of the evolution of science with regard to climate change and notes: “The issue is not over science. All parties agree that fossil fuels have led to global warming and ocean rise and will continue to do so, and that eventually the navigable waters of the United States will intrude upon Oakland and San Francisco. The issue is a legal one—whether these producers of fossil fuels should pay for anticipated harm that will eventually flow from a rise in sea level.”

Alsup observes that the cities’ claim “rests on the sweeping proposition that otherwise lawful and everyday sales of fossil fuels, combined with an awareness that greenhouse gas emissions lead to increased global temperatures, constitute a public nuisance.” The judge then does a close analysis of federal public nuisance law and prior court decisions. In order to find that a defendant’s activities amount to an actionable public nuisance under federal common law, courts must find they have engaged in an “unreasonable interference with a right common to the general public.”

Judge Alsup noted that legal commentary on public nuisances requires that courts consider a balancing test aimed at “determining whether the gravity of the interference with the public right outweighs the utility of the actor’s conduct.” To conduct that test, “it is necessary to consider the extent and character of the interference, the social value that the law attaches to it, the character of the locality involved and the burden of avoiding the harm placed upon members of the public.”

In his decision, Alsup observed:

With respect to balancing the social utility against the gravity of the anticipated harm, it is true that carbon dioxide released from fossil fuels has caused (and will continue to cause) global warming. But against that negative, we must weigh this positive: our industrial revolution and the development of our modern world has literally been fueled by oil and coal. Without those fuels, virtually all of our monumental progress would have been impossible. All of us have benefitted. Having reaped the benefit of that historic progress, would it really be fair to now ignore our own responsibility in the use of fossil fuels and place the blame for global warming on those who supplied what we demanded? Is it really fair, in light of those benefits, to say that the sale of fossil fuels was unreasonable?

This order recognizes but does not resolve these questions, for there is a more direct resolution from the Supreme Court and our court of appeals, next considered.

In his review of prior relevant Supreme Court and other federal court decisions, Alsup concludes that applying federal common law in this case is legally inappropriate. First, because Congress, through the Clean Air Act, has vested in the Environmental Protection Agency the problem of greenhouse gases and given it plenary authority to solve the problem at the point of emission. And second, because man-made climate change is a global problem, it necessarily involves foreign affairs which are properly under the purview of the Executive and Legislative branches of our government.

As Alsup writes:

This order fully accepts the vast scientific consensus that the combustion of fossil fuels has materially increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, which in turn has increased the median temperature of the planet and accelerated sea level rise. But questions of how to appropriately balance these worldwide negatives against the worldwide positives of the energy itself, and of how to allocate the pluses and minuses among the nations of the world, demand the expertise of our environmental agencies, our diplomats, our Executive, and at least the Senate. Nuisance suits in various United States judicial districts regarding conduct worldwide are far less likely to solve the problem and, indeed, could interfere with reaching a worldwide consensus.

Quite right.

The judge further noted that neither city has so far spent any money on building seawalls or other infrastructure to guard against rising sea levels.

John Coté, a spokesman for the San Francisco city attorney, told The New York Times: “This is obviously not the ruling we wanted, but this doesn’t mean the case is over,” he said. “We’re reviewing the order and will decide on our next steps shortly.” However, Mr. Coté added, “We’re pleased that the court recognized that the science of global warming is no longer in dispute,” he said. “Our litigation forced a public court proceeding on climate science, and now these companies can no longer deny it is real and valid. Our belief remains that these companies are liable for the harm they’ve caused.”

Here’s hoping that other judges who are hearing similar lawsuits against oil companies, brought by New York City among others, will heed this decision.

At three manufacturing plants in Arkansas, some 1,500 workers are waiting to hear whether the Commerce Department will let them keep their jobs.

Those workers make a product that you’ve probably never thought much about: tire cords. They are the lattice-like structures, often made of steel fibers, that line the inside of rubber tires to help them maintain their shape. The owners of those three Arkansas-based tire cord manufacturing plants say they will have to close their doors and lay off their workers, Arkansas Today reports, because the type of steel wire needed to make tire cords is not available from domestic manufacturers and foreign suppliers are now subject to a 25 percent import tax. They have applied for a special exemption from President Donald Trump’s steel tariffs, and the Commerce Department is considering the request.

Perhaps nothing else about the ongoing debate over tariffs so clearly demonstrates the quiet horror of the Trump administration’s attempt at central planning. Workers and factory owners who produce a necessary but unremarkable product, filling a hole in a supply chain that few Americans ever notice, now fear that they will be forced out of business if their application for relief does not find favor with federal bureaucrats.

They are hardly alone. 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.

“The only reason the Commerce Department is supposed to grant companies waivers is if a certain steel or aluminum item they need cannot be made anywhere in the United States,” The Washington Post’s Heather Long noted in April, when the waiver process began. Businesses applying for waivers from the tariffs have to argue that they need a specialized item not produced domestically, “but the Commerce Department has wide latitude to make the call if that is truly the case.”

In other words, the federal government is literally picking winners and losers. It’s a cliche, yes, but the idea of the government picking winners and losers used to drive conservatives mad when the Obama administration was seen as doing it in less direct ways.

Last week, the first set of seven winners were announced by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. At the same time, the department rejected 56 applications from 11 different companies.

Those that do get exemptions get more than a lifeline. They also gain a huge advantage over any competitors not lucky enough to score an exemption from federal bureaucrats.

Ross is “doling out to the early comers a huge market advantage in the form of these exemptions, which might not be available for everyone else,” Dan Ikenson, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Trade Policy Studies, tells Reason. “Don’t make companies waste their time and resources standing in line to kiss his ass down at the Commerce Department.”

Far from being “good and easy to win,” the Trump administration’s determination to pursue protectionist economic policies requires ever more government intervention into the economy. The tariffs, which are really just import taxes paid by consumers and businesses, are a burden for all. More insidious still, the waiver system empowers the government to relieve that burden at its own discretion.

Now, Ross is talking about yet another potential intrusion into the market. He told the Senate Finance Committee last week that the administration is launching an investigation into whether American businesses might be unfairly profiting off the White House’s decision to slap tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. While the tariffs, which are taxes paid by consumers on imported goods, were meant to increase the price of imported steel by 25 percent (and imported aluminum by 10 percent), Ross says the White House has seen evidence of higher price spikes.

“That’s clearly a result of antisocial behavior by participants in the industry,” Ross told the committee.

Speculation is a part of any global commodity market, of course. Instead of being evidence of “antisocial behavior,” though, the rising prices caused by the Trump administration’s trade policies are another indication of the extent to which this White House has underestimated the complexity of the global marketplace. Huge changes to current policy—like imposing tariffs on America’s $29 billion annual steel import market—have consequences that ripple out in all directions.

Once the government has made that mess, it will have justified further intruding into the marketplace, picking more winners and creating more losers. Someone has to clean it up, after all.

Indeed, Ross’ idea of targeting companies that have supposedly cheated the tariffs for profit has been encouraged by some businesses and industries that opposed the tariffs in the first place. Now, they have a perverse incentive to invite this additional governmental interference.

Jim McGreevy, President and CEO of the Beer Institute, a national craft brewing trade association that had sharply criticized Trump’s aluminum tariffs when they were implemented, says he supports government efforts to ensure that “unfair market practices do not disproportionately harm end users, such as the beer industry.”

There’s a lot of money at stake. According to the Beer Institute, the beer industry purchased 36 billion aluminum cans and aluminum bottles, which contain about $2.7 billion worth of aluminum.

But this is all folly. The underlying assumption is that the tariffs will work if only the federal government can pull the right levers and enforce the right penalties against those who try to cheat—which, in this case, is anyone who responds to the economic incentives created by the tariffs. It is a socialist mentality, and a “new form of central planning,” as Jeffrey Tucker argues.

Ross made the rounds on cable news in March and April to assure Americans that tariffs on steel and aluminum would barely be noticed. America would reap all the benefits of getting tough on trade without having to pay for any of the costs. “They should have known at the outset what they were doing,” says Ikenson, “and realized it was going to be more complicated.”

Taken together, the stories I’ve reported from people hurt by these tariffs belie the big claim Trump made at the beginning of this economic nightmare: that trade wars are “good, and easy to win.”

Worldwide, there are about 857 million firearms in civilian hands—up 32 percent from the last Small Arms Survey estimates in 2006. For comparison, there are about 133 million firearms controlled by the world’s militaries and 22.7 million in the hands of law enforcement across the planet. This means a growing numbers of civilians around the world are in a position to push back against police and militaries that serve often-abusive governments and are already outmatched in terms of raw weaponry.

The disparity in arms between government forces and civilians is common in much of the world, notes J.D. Tuccille, but particularly dramatic in the United States.

Despite the high-decibel shouting over the rights and wrongs of private gun ownership, civilians are pretty well armed around the world and becoming increasingly so over time, Tuccille writes. Will that rebalance power between individuals and the state?

It looks like we’re going to find out.

View this article.

Last week, I reported that the American Civil Liberties Union appeared to be having an internal discussion about whether it would continue to take controversial free speech cases, prompted by pushback from progressives—some within the ACLU itself—concerned about the organization’s defense of the far-right Charlottesville protesters.

Some free speech activists think the memo is yet more evidence that the ACLU is going soft on the First Amendment in an attempt to appease the kind of far-left campus activists who think free speech enables violence and “liberalism is white supremacy.” Others insist the ACLU hasn’t changed its position at all. In fairness to both perspectives, I’ve collected some eloquent arguments from both sides below.

An internal memo, obtained by former ACLU board member Wendy Kaminer and published by The Wall Street Journal, encouraged local ACLU affiliates to consider “actors such as the (present and historical) context of the proposed speech; the potential effect on marginalized communities; the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values; and the structural and power inequalities in the community in which the speech will occur.”

Kaminer characterized the guidance as reflective of “a demotion of free speech in the ACLU’s hierarchy of values.”

ACLU National Legal Director David Cole strongly disagreed with Kaminer’s description of the memo. In a statement, Cole said that the ACLU’s commitment to defending the First Amendment was as robust as ever:

After the tragic events in Charlottesville, we reaffirmed our commitment to defending speech with which we disagree. The ACLU Board—the only entity with the authority to change ACLU policy—discussed Charlottesville, and no one on the staff or the board asked the board to change our policies.

Nonetheless, it seemed clear to us that guidelines would help ACLU affiliates and national staff in considering cases that might pose conflicts between our values. We are a multi-issue organization, and some cases may present conflicts, such as between gay rights and religious freedom, privacy and women’s rights, or speech rights and equality. The guidelines, which have been distributed to all ACLU staff members, are explicitly designed to help affiliates and national staff think through various factors in case selection decisions.

Kaminer claims the guidelines change our policy. But the guidelines clearly state that they do not “change ACLU policy, which is set by the Board.” They reaffirm our view that free speech rights “extend to all, even to the most repugnant speakers—including white supremacists—and pursuant to ACLU policy, we will continue our longstanding practice of representing such groups in appropriate circumstances to prevent unlawful government censorship of speech.” Nothing in the guidelines supports Kaminer’s claim that “free speech has become second among equals.”

You can read Cole’s full statement here.

Kaminer told me via email that the ACLU has “been in quiet retreat from vigorously defending free speech for over a decade, a retreat manifested mostly in cases it didn’t take and controversies it didn’t enter.”

For Kaminer, the memo merely confirmed the existence of this trend. She wrote:

It has taken 10 or 15 years to change the ACLU into a progressive organization with a secondary interest in free speech. It would take at least another 10 or 15 years to change it back, and only then with new national board leadership and a new civil libertarian executive director. It’s worth remembering that over a decade ago, on Anthony’s Romero’s watch, and Nadine Strossen’s, the national board entertained a proposal to bar board members from criticizing the ACLU. It was shelved only after it was revealed in the NYT. And Romero then told the Times that the ACLU did not support “speech that attacks minorities.”

“Of course he said he’d been misquoted,” Kaminer added, “but if you believe that I’ve got a free speech champion to sell you.”

Ira Glasser, a former executive director of the ACLU who worked for the organization from 1978 until 2001, wrote that he shared Kaminer’s concerns about the organization’s commitment to free speech—and that Cole’s statement did little to ameliorate those concerns:

As a stand-alone statement of principle, David Cole’s statement reaffirms longstanding traditional ACLU policy. But it doesn’t respond to Wendy Kaminer’s op-ed at all, not in any way, and especially not to the language she quoted from the new guidelines about balancing the “extent to which speech may assist in advancing goals contrary to our values” against the right to speak when deciding whether to defend the right to speak.

In other words, the ACLU now advises all its affiliates to consider the content of speech, and whether it advances our goals, before deciding whether to defend the right to speak.

That is a balance never before recognized by the ACLU as legitimate in deciding whether to take a free speech case. To deny that this departure from free speech policy is a departure is intellectually dishonest, an Orwellian smokescreen thrown up to obscure what they are doing.

I spoke with Nadine Strossen, who served as president of the ACLU from 1991 until 2008, about the memo. She stressed that while she welcomed this pushback from Glasser, she did not think the ACLU was actually retreating from its commitment to defending controversial speech. The memo does not state that the message of the speaker “would be a criterion for not taking the case, but rather it is a factor that would be taken into consideration in making sure we can handle the case in ways that enable us to continue to push our entire agenda, which is all fundamental freedoms for all people,” she said.

In Strossen’s view, the memo—which is nonbinding—is merely intended to help local ACLU chapters navigate some treacherous waters.

“I can tell you from the time that I was president and heavily consulting with staff, including Ira [Glasser], that we often took into account in these strategic kinds of decisions the fact that the message of the speech we were defending was particularly offensive, either because it was against civil liberties or profoundly unpopular,” Strossen told me. “That was never a consideration for not taking the case, but it was a consideration for making our advocacy as clear as possible: How can we clearly say to everyone that we aren’t defending what the Nazis are saying, we’re defending their right to say it.”

The memo does not discourage affiliates from taking tough cases, according to Strossen, but “if the affiliates interpret it the way Ira does, they can reject it.”