Category: reason

Last week, voters in Washington, D.C., approved Initiative 77—the proposal that will require bars and restaurants to raise the minimum wage for tipped employees from $3.33 an hour to $15 an hour. Let’s hold off on popping the champagne.

Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), an advocacy group made up of people who are not service industry professionals, spearheaded the charge to pass the measure. Diana Ramirez, D.C.’s ROC director, says that one fair wage would provide waitstaff with financial stability and reduce sexual harassment.

But if the “VOTE NO” signs were any indication, the vast majority of restaurants in the District opposed it. Perhaps more importantly, a great deal of servers publicly protested the proposition leading up to the vote, fearing decreased hours, reductions in staff, and closed storefronts. Tips allow local service professionals to earn far more than minimum wage, they said, and even if gratuities fall short, employers are required by law to make up the difference.

Essentially, the initiative attempts to fix something that is not broken.

The proposal sparked a heated national debate that isn’t likely to end in the near future. It’s true that politics in the District operate in the limelight, but the tipping quandary resonates because it’s likely coming to a city or state near you—and soon.

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A New York state agency meant to foster economic growth says spending over $1 million dollars to rebuild an old movie theater in one of the state’s richest counties will create a mere six jobs.

Unfortunately, when it comes to subsidizing movies—whether making them or showing them—that’s pretty typical.

On Saturday, New York state officials participated in the groundbreaking for the Sag Harbor Cinema Arts Center. The center will reportedly “restore the Sag Harbor Cinema and preserve the showing of independent, foreign and documentary films on the East End of Long Island.”

The center is being developed by the nonprofit Sag Harbor Partnership, which pledged $13 million toward the project. However, they aren’t the only investors. The Regional Economic Development Council awarded the Hampton theater a $1.4 million grant last December through Empire State Development. The result of that massive bill to the taxpayers? Six jobs, according to the government’s own report. That’s over $230,000 per job!

This isn’t the first instance of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s cronies throwing money at the movie business and getting almost nothing back. Just a few weeks ago, Reason’s Nick Gillespie pointed out that New York spent $15 million in 2014 to build a brand new film studio that was supposed to attract the entertainment industry to the Empire State. The studio was then sold to Onondaga County for a hefty sum of one dollar.

New York is hardly the only state engaging in these types of corporate handouts, which often take the shape of tax breaks or direct grants. There are 33 states (plus Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.) offering some form of taxpayer-funded incentive to encourage film production. Supporters of these incentive programs claim the movies and television shows brought to their states will boost growth, help small production companies, and create jobs for locals. But study after study has shown quite the opposite. These programs do little to boost employment and end up wasting enormous amounts of taxpayer money.

“There’s simply no objective evidence that incentives for film and television production create that many permanent jobs, if they create any at all,” says Michael Thom, professor of public policy at USC, “the motion picture industry is skilled at convincing the public that something fake is actually real. That skill is not limited to what we see on televisions and in the movies. Sadly, it has spilled over into economic development policy.”

Thom’s research found no long-term wage growth or job growth created by film incentive programs. He also found that the short-term gains were realized almost exclusively by individuals already involved in the film business.

The idea that these incentives give a helping hand to small production companies is also a myth. In a piece for Reason in 2016, Jared Meyer, senior research fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability, said that 98 percent of the film tax credit budget in Maryland went to the production of House of Cards and VEEP, hardly small productions that required the assistance of a benevolent state legislature.

In addition, film incentives don’t create any revenue for the state. “Almost every other study has found film tax credits generate less than 30 cents for every $1 of spending,” according to another study by the conservative Tax Foundation, discounting research paid for by the Motion Picture Association of America and economic development authorities. They also saw that adopting film subsidies simply shifted economic activity, instead of creating real, productive growth.

This is the sort of grave misallocation of resources that happens when governments make investments. Governments are immune to the price signals that dictate entrepreneurs to invest effectively, which means big bucks from the taxpayers, but no bang.

It’s not just fiscal conservatives who are opposed to this big budget program. The left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found themselves in agreement with their colleagues from across the ideological aisle. “State film subsidies are a wasteful, ineffective, and unfair instrument of economic development,” reads their report.

Despite overwhelming evidence of their wasteful nature, film subsidies persist. Like many government programs, subsidizing film production through grants, fancy studios, or tax breaks, is yet another example of corporations in bed with the government.

Thom asserts that in those states that offer film incentives, “the motion picture industry and its labor unions lobby hard against any effort to cut or repeal incentive programs. Their efforts include funding shoddy research studies that policymakers then use to justify keeping the incentives in place.” Crony capitalism, plain and simple.

State governments should not be expanding programs that cushion production for film producers with millions of dollars under their belt, who lobby for these incentives even though they clearly don’t need them. Netflix, for instance, threatened to leave Maryland if they didn’t bump up its incentive program, and even had Kevin Spacey show up at the governor’s door, leading to a doubling of the program’s budget. The list of big-budget films and television shows living off the taxpayer’s wallet goes on: The Avengers, Split, Madam Secretary, all massively successful productions; successful enough to do without government handouts.

In a 2013 article for US News & World Report, Mercatus Center’s vice president of policy research Eileen Norcross asked the right questions: “What’s so special about film companies? Why not make the rules business-friendly for everyone?” If state legislatures are so keen on attracting businesses, all round tax cuts would be far more effective than handing out selective tax breaks to companies that need them the least in drawing businesses from across the country to invest and develop.

Regular readers of Baylen Linnekin’s weekly columns know that food freedom does not happen in a linear fashion. Laws and regulations get better in some parts of America, while worsening in others. It will likely come as no surprise that international food laws reflect this same frustrating dichotomy.

There’s the good, which oftentimes takes the form of deregulation. In Poland, for example, a bill would let local farmers sell their produce directly to grocers, restaurants, and other food businesses. And in Quebec, lawmakers recently passed a law that will legalize the service of alcohol by restaurants to customers who don’t order food. (That may leave another law still on the books in Canada—British Columbia’s ban on hamburgers that aren’t well done, which I wrote about earlier this year—as the nation’s dumbest.) There’s the bad. In France, for example, lawmakers are pushing for mandatory GMO labeling of animal feed.

And then there’s the truly awful. Perhaps the most unsettling recent international food-law news comes out of Hungary, where the country’s anti-immigrant government is threatening to imprison people who provide food to refugees.

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The early 1970s were a strange, chaotic, terrifying time. Exactly how strange, chaotic, and terrifying has been largely forgotten, to judge from how many Americans on both sides of the Donald Trump divide view our current tensions as unprecedentedly intense.

Journalist-historians Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis are not deliberately trying to deliver a message about historical perspective. But in their thrilling The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD, they show how bad things got in a nation truly troubled by vicious culture wars, wracked by violent ideological conflict, and ruled by a near-lunatic abusing his power to pursue personal and political grudges, writes Brian Doherty in his latest review for Reason.

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Last night, I appeared on Fox Business’s Kennedy to discuss the Trump administration’s plans to consolidate the Department of Education and Department of Labor into a single operation, move food stamps (SNAP) out of the Department of Agriculture and into Health & Human Services, and related ideas.

Overall, these are generally good ideas and definitely worth thinking through. We often think of cabinet-level agencies as part of the natural landscape, but they change all the time. Education didn’t become its own department until 1979 (Ronald Reagan promised to kill it but instead increased its funding), Veterans Affairs was added in 1989, and Homeland Security only in 2002.

Here’s the segment:

.@nickgillespie on the Trump administration announcing plans to reorganize Cabinet departments: “This is a great idea… It makes sense to condense these programs.” https://t.co/uvuZy3jqKY pic.twitter.com/CvrM5pG2BT

— FOX Business (@FoxBusiness) June 22, 2018

As Damon Root noted earlier today, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s dissent from Carpenter v. United States reads more like a concurrence, agreeing with the majority’s conclusion that police need a warrant to obtain cellphone location data but disagreeing with its reasoning. In fact, Gorsuch is bolder than the majority, recommending a broader reconsideration of the doctrine that says the Fourth Amendment imposes no limits on the government’s access to information that people entrust to third parties. At the same time, Gorsuch agrees with Clarence Thomas, who also filed a dissent in Carpenter, that it makes little sense to draw the boundaries of Fourth Amendment rights based on expectations of privacy that judges deem reasonable.

The Supreme Court developed the third-party doctrine in United States v. Miller, a 1976 case dealing with bank records, and Smith v. Maryland, a 1979 case involving “pen registers” that record the phone numbers called from a particular location. As the Court explained the principle in Miller, “the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the obtaining of information revealed to a third party and conveyed by him to Government authorities, even if the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited purpose and the confidence placed in the third party will not be betrayed.” Gorsuch recognizes the sweeping implications of that principle in an age when sensitive information is routinely stored on remote servers:

What’s left of the Fourth Amendment? Today we use the Internet to do most everything. Smartphones make it easy to keep a calendar, correspond with friends, make calls, conduct banking, and even watch the game. Countless Internet companies maintain records about us and, increasingly, for us. Even our most private documents—those that, in other eras, we would have locked safely in a desk drawer or destroyed—now reside on third party servers. Smith and Miller teach that the police can review all of this material, on the theory that no one reasonably expects any of it will be kept private. But no one believes that, if they ever did….

Can the government demand a copy of all your e-mails from Google or Microsoft without implicating your Fourth Amendment rights? Can it secure your DNA from 23andMe without a warrant or probable cause? Smith and Miller say yes it can…But that result strikes most lawyers and judges today—me included—as pretty unlikely.

Sonia Sotomayor, who joined the majority opinion in Carpenter, expressed similar concerns in United States v. Jones, the 2012 decision that said monitoring a suspect’s movements by attaching a GPS tracker to his car counts as a “search” under the Fourth Amendment. In that case, Sotomayor observed that the third-party doctrine is “ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.”

Gorsuch notes that “the Court has never offered a persuasive justification” for the third-party doctrine. A person’s willingness to share information with someone else for a particular purpose does not imply that he is willing to share it with the world, and his awareness of the risk that it will nevertheless be divulged to others does not give those people permission to peruse it. Gorsuch draws an analogy to paper mail, which the Supreme Court since the 19th century has recognized as protected by the Fourth Amendment because the sender entrusts it to the postal service for delivery. The content of letters is protected even though people surrender possession of them and understand that they may be vulnerable to snooping.

Gorsuch is equally leery of linking Fourth Amendment rights to a “reasonable expectation of privacy,” as the majority does in Carpenter. That standard, which was invented in the 1967 eavesdropping case Katz v. United States, is hard to apply in a principled way, since everything depends on which expectations count as reasonable, a question judges may not answer the same way most people would. “Katz has yielded an often unpredictable—and sometimes unbelievable—jurisprudence,” Gorsuch writes, citing a couple of examples (citations omitted):

Take Florida v. Riley, which says that a police helicopter hovering 400 feet above a person’s property invades no reasonable expectation of privacy. Try that one out on your neighbors. Or California v. Greenwood, which holds that a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy in the garbage he puts out for collection. In that case, the Court said that the homeowners forfeited their privacy interests because “[i]t is common knowledge that plastic garbage bags left on or at the side of a public street are readily accessible to animals, children, scavengers, snoops, and other members of the public.” But the habits of raccoons don’t prove much about the habits of the country. I doubt, too, that most people spotting a neighbor rummaging through their garbage would think they lacked reasonable grounds to confront the rummager.

Gorsuch also notes that the Katz test has little to do with the text of the Fourth Amendment, which makes no mention of expectations or of privacy per se. Rather, the amendment protects “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” That guarantee, as Thomas shows in his dissent, is intimately related to property rights. “This case should not turn on ‘whether’ a search occurred,” he writes. “It should turn, instead, on whose property was searched.”

For Thomas, the answer is clear: The property belonged not to Timothy Carpenter, whose location records were used to implicate him in a series of armed robberies, but to MetroPCS and Sprint, the companies that provided his cellphone service. Gorsuch, by contrast, thinks it’s “entirely possible a person’s cell-site data could qualify as his papers or effects under existing law.” He notes that federal law treats those records as “customer proprietary network information,” which people generally cannot obtain without the customer’s permission.

Gorsuch sees advantages to “a Fourth Amendment model based on positive legal rights,” as advocated by a brief the Institute for Justice filed in Carpenter, which draws on the work of law professors William Baude (University of Chicago) and James Stern (William & Mary). Under that model, the Fourth Amendment is implicated whenever the government seeks special access to information that ordinary people cannot legally see without the subject’s consent. That approach offers a promising alternative to the infinitely malleable Katz test, which invites judges to constitutionalize their own privacy preferences, and a Fourth Amendment that covers your data only as long as you retain physical possession of it.

“Where are they?,” famously asked Italian physicist Enrico Fermi in the 1950s. By “they,” he meant space aliens. Fermi figured that if the galaxy contained space-faring civilizations it would only take them a few tens of millions of years to populate it. So why hasn’t there been a saucer-landing-take-me-to-your leader moment already? This is the Fermi Paradox.

In 1961, American astronomer Frank Drake devised an equation in which he tried to estimate the number of technological civilizations that might exist in our galaxy. Depending on the values plugged into it, the galaxy could be brimming with extra-terrestrials or we might its only technologically advanced denizens.

A new paper in arXiv seeks to “dissolve the Fermi Paradox” by specifying various values for the parameters in the Drake Equation. The paper is by three researchers from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, research fellow Anders Sandberg, nanotechnologist Eric Drexler, and philosopher Tod Ord. As the researchers note:

We examine these parameters, incorporating models of chemical and genetic transitions on paths to the origin of life, and show that extant scientific knowledge corresponds to uncertainties that span multiple orders of magnitude. This makes a stark difference. When the model is recast to represent realistic distributions of uncertainty, we find a substantial ex ante probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable universe, and thus that there should be little surprise when we fail to detect any signs of it. This result dissolves the Fermi paradox, and in doing so removes any need to invoke speculative mechanisms by which civilizations would inevitably fail to have observable effects upon the universe.

By “fail to have observable effects upon the universe,” they are trying to address, among other issues, the prospect of a Great Filter that causes advanced civilizations to destroy themselves before they can colonize other stars or that aliens find watching television at home more edifying that traveling among the stars.

So what do the three conclude? From the article:

When we take account of realistic uncertainty, replacing point estimates by probability distributions that reflect current scientific understanding, we find no reason to be highly confident that the galaxy (or observable universe) contains other civilizations, and thus no longer find our observations in conflict with our prior probabilities. We found qualitatively similar results through two different methods: using the authors’ assessments of current scientific knowledge bearing on key parameters, and using the divergent estimates of these parameters in the astrobiology literature as a proxy for current scientific uncertainty.

When we update this prior in light of the Fermi observation, we find a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our observable universe (53%–99.6% and 39%–85% respectively). ‘Where are they?’ — probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable.

Two takeaways: First, there is no reason for us to keep quiet and cower at home as some timorous souls have counseled. And second, the galaxy is ours for the taking. Let’s go.

Nearly seven years after America helped topple Muammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya, the conflict has fallen off the front pages but still extracts a bloody toll.

According to a new report produced by the watchdog groups Airwars and New America Foundation, at least 242 civilians have been killed and at least 324 wounded by over 2,000 airstrikes, some of which were carried out by the American military.

Invading Libya without a clear exit strategy was possibly President Obama’s biggest foreign policy blunder—something even he acknowledges—and Libyans are still paying the price. The new report says that less than half of the airstrikes in Libya are officially declared, with over 500 strikes bearing American origin. Gen. Khalifa Haftar and his Libyan National Army, however, are responsible for a majority of the strikes as the country continues to be roiled by civil war—a war that America bears at least some responsibility for causing.

“It’s much more violent than before. It’s the case that even a bad, brutal government is often better than none, or several ineffective governments,” says Defense Priorities Foreign Policy Fellow Benjamin Friedman. “As in Syria, it seems that the choice is sort of between a dictator who rules through coercion and chaotic civil war. We got the latter.”

It’s true that Gadhafi was a brutal, murderous dictator, but it is difficult to argue that the present situation in Libya is somehow superior to its condition prior to the NATO-led incursion in 2011. Just as the invasion was a mistake, it’s unlikely that staying in Libya will bring it closer to any reasonable notion of stability.

A coherent plan for peace cannot include sporadic airstrikes that create blowback against the American presence and, contrary to official claims, kill civilians. As long as the civil strife rages on, it may be best for the United States to take a back seat in this conflict, and instead seek to pursue trade and diplomacy when the dust settles.

“The chaos after Gadhafi fell was predictable, and there will be more chaos if we continue to be involved in a significant military capacity in the area,” Friedman tells Reason.

Critics rightfully fault the Libyan intervention for lacking an exit strategy and a plan to rebuild the country once Gaddafi’s regime was toppled. Unfortunately, that description holds true for U.S. foreign policy well beyond Libya. In reality, we’ve lacked a tenable, cogent exit strategy in all of our military excursions in the Middle East: Libya in 2011, Iraq in 2003, Afghanistan in 2001, the Gulf War in 1990, and even as far back as the removal of Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953. Instead of fighting wars that make the world “safe for democracy,” the U.S. often ends up substituting one barbaric dictator for another.

Should the U.S. Constitution be interpreted and applied according to the original meaning of its text?

On June 11, 2018, two leading constitutional legal scholars, Georgetown’s Randy Barnett and Cornell’s Michael Dorf, debated “originalism,” which seeks to protect against arbitrary and personal interpretations by jurists, while making the law stable, predictable, and consistent in its application.

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The Trump administration’s sweeping plan to overhaul the structure of the federal government sets lofty goals and contains some worthwhile ideas, but it is not likely to achieve a significant shrinkage of the leviathan.

The proposal is admirable in its ambition. Most of the headlines have focused on the plan to merge the Departments of Education and Labor into a new cabinet-level office called the Department of Education and Workforce. But the plan would also consolidate public assistance programs into a renamed Department of Health and Public Welfare, would combine some duplicative food safety programs run by the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, and would seek to privatize the postal service and air traffic control services.

Mick Mulvaney, director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, called the plan the biggest reorganization of the federal government since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Politico reported.

“Today’s Executive Branch is still aligned to the stove-piped organizational constructs of the 20th Century, which in many cases have grown inefficient and out-of-date,” the administration’s 130-page proposal states. “Consequently, the public and our workforce are frustrated with Government’s ability to deliver its mission in an effective, efficient, and secure way.”

Unfortunately, much of the inefficiency of—and resulting frustration with—government services results from them being, well, government services. Changing the name plates on the front of Washington D.C.’s many, many brutalist filing-cabinets full of bureaucrats won’t inject more competition or motivation into those departments. Nor will it it guarantee a reduction in the scope of governmental power over the lives of individuals.

Moving programs from one department to another might help streamline the federal organizational chart, but it’s not likely to save much money. “Eliminating a department while transferring its programs in essentially unchanged form to other departments or agencies would probably result in little or no budgetary savings,” the Congressional Budget Office concluded in a review of departmental merger proposals in 2013, “because most of the costs incurred by departments are the costs of the programs themselves.”

That doesn’t mean that efforts to eliminate unnecessary or ineffective programs, reduce duplicative services, or streamline government agencies are not worthwhile. They are. But it’s disappointing to see so much of the Trump administration’s plan focused on shuffling government programs from one department to another, rather than seriously considering which functions could be abolished or privatized.

Some of the proposals seem to amount to little more than conservative-friendly rebranding—like the idea of renaming the Department of Health and Human Services as the Department of Health and Public Welfare (though the administration also calls for bringing non-HHS public assistance programs, like food stamps, into the newly renamed department).

Others seem aimed only at reducing weird internal government contradictions. Mulvaney told Politico that one of his “favorite” examples of goofy government is the fact that a salmon swimming in the ocean is regulated by the Department of Commerce, while a salmon swimming up an American river is regulated by the Department of the Interior. Those examples are a dime a dozen. You may recall that President Barack Obama, in announcing a more limited government reorganization plan in 2013, complained about how pepperoni pizza is regulated differently than cheese pizza. But why should the federal government have to regulate salmon and pizza at all?

“It is disappointing that the opportunity was not taken to propose a wholesale reduction in the size of government,” says Iain Murray, vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank.

It’s also hard to envision Congress doing much with this proposal before the November midterms. As The Wall Street Journal notes, lawmakers have typically been reluctant to embrace such ideas in the past. Even with the cancellation of the August recess, there’s not much reason to expect Congress to engage in major policy debates before the election. Heck, Congress might not even pass a budget.

In the end, this proposal from the Trump administration is likely to end up on a shelf collecting dust beside previous government consolidation proposals from the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. In fact, parts of the Trump plan—including the high-profile plan to merge the Departments of Education and Labor—seem to have been lifted from those previous, unsuccessful efforts. But even if the administration’s reach exceeds its grasp, there are a few relatively light lifts that could and should be added to the congressional agenda.

Chief among those is the privatization of the air-traffic control system, something the Reason Foundation (which publishes this blog) has been advocating for a long time. As Reason’s Director of Transportation Policy Bob Poole noted in a feature last year, the American air traffic control system is out-of-date and out-of-touch with developments in the rest of the world. Airlines, the air traffic controllers’ union, business groups, and many professional transportation policy analysts agree that air traffic control should be spun-off from the Federal Aviation Authority. It’s possible that Trump’s grand plan for reorganizing the government could help undo the inertia that has so far blocked this relatively simple, cost-saving reform.

Maybe the best example of the gap between the ambition and the reality of the Trump administration’s plan lies in the Education-Labor merger. The change would “allow the federal government to address the educational and skill needs of American students and workers in a coordinated way, eliminating duplication of effort between the two agencies and maximizing the effectiveness of skill-building efforts.”

But at the same time, the proposal goes to lengths to emphasize the goal of eliminating “one-size-fits-all” government.

It’s tough to square that circle. As long as the federal government is taking a central role in American education and labor, there will always be one-size-fits-all regulations that limit innovation and effectiveness. If the Trump administration wanted a truly revolutionary plan, it would acknowledge as much.