Category: reason

If voters in Washington, D.C., go to the polls on Tuesday and approve Initiative 77—a ballot question that would end the city’s minimum wage for tipped employees and raise all restaurant servers’ and bartenders’ wages to $15 an hour by 2025—bartender Ryan Aston says he would actually end up losing money.

More importantly, he says, he’ll probably lose the valuable, but often invisible, help that keeps busy cocktail bars humming along.

“When the cost of business gets too high, the first people to be laid off are going to be the prep cooks, support staff, bussers,” says Aston, who bartends at the Hamilton, an upscale bar just a few blocks from the White House. “When labor costs become too high, I mean, it’s not a charity. You’re in business to make money. I love what I do, but I do it because I get paid.”

And how much does he get paid? “A lot more than 15 bucks,” Aston says with a laugh. Other bartenders and servers in D.C., despite making a “tipped employee minimum wage” of just $3.50 per hour, say they can pull down $350 to $450 in tips on a good night. That’s upwards of $40 an hour.

Of course, not all the nights are that good. But even when things are slow, D.C. law requires that restaurant workers must make at least $12.50 an hour—employers must top-up their pay if they earn less than that much in tips. And once you understand that math, you’ll understand why so many restaurant workers in the nation’s capital are planning to vote against a proposal that, supposedly, is aimed at helping them.

“It’s really frustrating,” says Valerie Torres, who works behind the bar at District Anchor on M Street. “For an industry to have outside people determining how we are going to make our money—it’s insane. There’s no other industry where that happens.”

Unlike other recent fights over raising the minimum wage, both restaurant owners and many of their employees have united against Proposition 77. On the other side of the issue is a union-backed nonprofit called the Restaurant Opportunity Center, or ROC, which has pushed successfully for similar laws in places like San Francisco and Minneapolis. Founded after 9/11 to help displaced workers from the World Trade Center’s Windows on the World restaurant, the group has morphed into a union front. It made headlines during the summer of 2013 for staging Occupy Wall Street-style sit-ins at some restaurants in major cities.

Saru Jayaraman, ROC’s co-founder, bragged in 2003 about the organization’s role in helping organize the “non-union 90 percent of New York City’s restaurant workforce.” ROC aimed at creating a “labor-friendly climate” to pave the way for union organizing drives, the New York Post reported. Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, has praised the group’s work in trying to unionize service sector employees.

“Their endgame is they want to unionize the service industry,” says Torres.

In D.C., the local chapter of ROC says passing Prop 77 means “tipped workers will benefit, poverty will decline, tipping will continue, and restaurants will continue to flourish.”

Aston, who helped found a nonprofit, the Restaurant Workers of America, to oppose efforts like this one from ROC, sees it differently. “Everywhere they’ve gone, people are making less money,” says Aston, talking about ROC. “If this were a good idea, we’d know by now.”

The most frustrating thing about Proposition 77, says Julia Calomaris, a server at Bistrot Du Coin on Connecticut Avenue, is how often people seem to think voting for Prop 77 is helping restaurant workers.

Under a law passed by the city council last year, the minimum wage in Washington, D.C., is $12.50 per hour and will rise to $15 per hour in 2020. But the “tipped minimum wage” is different. It applies only to servers, bartenders, and other tipped employees. Currently, it’s $3.50 per hour and will rise to $5 per hour in 2020. If workers don’t earn enough in tips to reach the $12.50 per hour threshold, their employers are responsible for making up the difference. In other words, all workers already earn at least $12.50 per hour, but tipped workers have the opportunity to earn more—sometimes significantly more.

“People have no idea how much money you can make working in a restaurant,” says Calomaris, who has worked in the industry for 17 years. Imposing a $15 minimum wage and eliminating tips is “giving help to people who aren’t asking for it,” she says.

If Prop 77 passes, the tipped wage system will be phased out by 2025. After that, tipped workers would earn the same minimum wage as all other workers in the city.

Bowser and most of the members of the city council—the same people who passed the city’s $15 minimum wage law just last year—oppose Prop 77, WMAU reports. Only one member of the city council, Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3), supports the initiative.

Opponents of Prop 77, including groups like Save Our Tips (which is backed by the National Restaurant Association), warn that if the tipped minimum wage is eliminated, many restaurants and bars will be likely to institute a service charge on customers’ bills. Servers and bartenders will earn less than they do now, and consumers will possibly end up paying more, Save Our Tips says, while owners of restaurants and bars may be forced to cut back employee hours and eliminate positions.

“We’ve got the best servers and bartenders in the world, here in the United States,” says Aston. “I’ve been to Europe, and the service sucks. There’s a reason for that. American culture lives in the bar, and it’s so important that we maintain that.”

At a White House press briefing on Monday afternoon, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen offered an unqualified defense of the Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant families who enter the country illegally. At the same time, she denied that the separations amount to official policy. Instead, the Trump administration is merely pursuing a zero-tolerance approach to enforcing existing immigration law.

“We no longer exempt entire classes of people who break the law,” she said.

If Congress wants the federal government to follow a different course, it needs to pass new laws, said Nielsen.

Journalists were shocked that Nielsen didn’t sound more contrite about what is happening to these children and families. But there’s solid evidence that Trump’s base supports the policy. According to a Quinnipiac poll, Republicans are in favor of separations, though they are alone in this opinion.

US Voter opinion on separating children from parents after illegal border crossing https://t.co/g7Kb5r8bDh #FamilySeparation GRAPH by partyid pic.twitter.com/Ciw6xTfuSE

— Quinnipiac Poll (@QuinnipiacPoll) June 18, 2018

During an interview on MSNBC, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) accused the Trump administration of holding the children hostage in order to force Democrats to come to the table and back the border wall as part of a compromise immigration bill.

Meanwhile, Pro Publica released haunting audio footage of an immigration detention center featuring a six-year-old girl from El Salvador trying to convince agents to let her call her aunt. The sobs of children pleading for their parents can be heard in the background.

#BREAKING #Texas Senator @tedcruz is introducing emergency leg this week to keep families together after illegally crossing border. “All Americans are rightly horrified by the images we are seeing on the news, children in tears pulled away from their mothers & fathers.” @CBSDFW pic.twitter.com/blDW9kXPcg

— Jack Fink (@cbs11jack) June 18, 2018

Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) plans to introduce legislation that would increase the number of federal immigration judges, mandate that families be kept together except in extreme circumstances, and expedite the asylum review process.

FREE MINDS

In the July/August issue of The Atlantic, journalist Jesse Singal writes about teenagers and gender dysphoria. There are no easy answers, he writes, because while many kids benefit from transitioning, some who would like to transition later have second thoughts and become happy and comfortable as their birth gender:

Meanwhile, fundamental questions about gender dysphoria remain unanswered. Researchers still don’t know what causes it—gender identity is generally viewed as a complicated weave of biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors. In some cases, gender dysphoria may interact with mental-health conditions such as depression and anxiety, but there’s little agreement about how or why. Trauma, particularly sexual trauma, can contribute to or exacerbate dysphoria in some patients, but again, no one yet knows exactly why.

To reiterate: For many of the young people in the early studies, transitioning—socially for children, physically for adolescents and young adults—appears to have greatly alleviated their dysphoria. But it’s not the answer for everyone. Some kids are dysphoric from a very young age, but in time become comfortable with their body. Some develop dysphoria around the same time they enter puberty, but their suffering is temporary. Others end up identifying as nonbinary—that is, neither male nor female.

Ignoring the diversity of these experiences and focusing only on those who were effectively “born in the wrong body” could cause harm. That is the argument of a small but vocal group of men and women who have transitioned, only to return to their assigned sex. Many of these so-called detransitioners argue that their dysphoria was caused not by a deep-seated mismatch between their gender identity and their body but rather by mental-health problems, trauma, societal misogyny, or some combination of these and other factors. They say they were nudged toward the physical interventions of hormones or surgery by peer pressure or by clinicians who overlooked other potential explanations for their distress.

FREE MARKETS

President Trump has nominated Kathy Kraninger to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and neither the left nor the right seems particularly impressed with the unknown bureaucrat. This could be a Harriet Miers situation:

“Kraninger… has neither experience as a regulator nor expertise in consumer financial issues,” said Bartlett Naylor, a financial policy advocate at Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group. “The nation’s leading consumer financial regulator is not an entry-level job.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and others in her party have questioned Kraninger’s qualifications. There also has been some criticism from the right.

“She has no record on the issues and no experience with this policy area,” said J.W. Verret, an assistant professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School and an expert on financial regulation.

“I’m shocked that at the last minute they pulled out this unqualified candidate,” said Verret, who is organizing opposition to the nomination by circulating a letter opposing it to conservative and consumer credit legal scholars.

QUICK HITS

• Trump wants “space force” to be the sixth brach of the military. “I’m hereby directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a space force as the sixth branch of the armed forces,” said Trump. “That’s a big statement. We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force, separate but equal.”
• Why pro-lifers must oppose the separation of immigrant families.
• No state has more sociopaths than Washington, D.C.
• Read this whole Twitter thread:

A long time ago when I was in college I was lucky enough to play in a great D&D campaign called (by the players, anyway) Catholic World. Eric was a superb GM. It was a low magic, high morals world. I don’t think any of us ever scored a +1 weapon, but we knew right from wrong. 1/

— Bryant Durrell (@BryantD) June 18, 2018

Many leftists hate Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto.

They began to hate him after Peterson said he’d disobey a proposed Canadian law that’d force Canadians to call anyone who doesn’t want to be called “he or she” something else, like “ze” or “xe”.

When Peterson said he’d refuse to obey, angry students shouted Peterson down, blowing air horns and screaming to make sure others couldn’t hear.

Peterson defends his position to John Stossel: “I don’t care what people want to be called. That’s fine, but that doesn’t mean I should be compelled by law to call them that.”

Click here for full text, a transcript, and downloadable versions.

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

View this article.

If you hoped for a scathing and yet inconclusive report that would satisfy absolutely none of the partisan players claiming the FBI played favorites in the 2016 presidential election, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz dropped exactly that last week. Basically, the IG found no evidence that the FBI intentionally acted to affect the outcome of the election, but that its staff and leadership behaved like rogue, politicized clowns.

And if that’s all we can agree upon, perhaps it’s enough to pull the plug on this excessively powerful internal security force that’s been playing at politics since its founding, writes J.D. Tuccille.

View this article.

Los Angeles Unified School District has lost 245,000 students over the last 15 years. Officials frequently claim charter schools are taking students and causing LAUSD’s budget crisis in the process. But a new report shows the district’s spending, including its hiring of more administrators as enrollment drops, is to blame.

A new Reason Foundation study finds only 35 percent of LAUSD’s enrollment decline over the past 15 years is due to students going to charter schools. In fact, as the district continues to lose students—losing 55,000 since 2013—a smaller percentage of the loss can be attributed to charter school students, writes Lisa Snell.

View this article.

Officials in Nassau County, New York, have banned the sale and use of sparklers. They say most children injured by fireworks are injured by sparklers.

The French foreign minister accuses the American president of furthering a “divorce” between the United States and its European allies.

“Deep Trade Rift With Allies Seen,” is a headline at The New York Times. “The Roots of Western Disunity” is the headline over another Times piece observing, “Over the last few years, trans-Atlantic differences on foreign policy have become so frequent that most of us regard them as the normal state of affairs.”

“Rising Trade Barriers Stir Memories of U.S. Depression,” is another Times headline, over an article that begins, “A surge of aggressive economic nationalism, as strong as any in the last half century, threatens to overwhelm the free trade policies that have underwritten the postwar prosperity of industrialized nations.” It quotes a House staffer who called the situation “the most dangerous since 1930,” which the Times reminded readers referred to “the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which some say triggered the Great Depression.”

The Times also writes about the president’s “killing off of top foreign-policy officials,” noting that so far the president “has had three national security advisers and two Secretaries of State.”

That may all sound like it is recent press coverage of the Trump administration. Actually, though, it was all coverage of President Ronald Reagan, from back in 1982 and 1983, writes Ira Stoll.

View this article.

President Donald Trump says he supports the idea of creating a Space Force as a co-equal branch of the military in order to project U.S. dominance beyond the reaches of Earth’s gravity.

“When it comes to defending America, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space,” Trump said at a Monday meeting of his National Space Council. “I’m hereby directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces.”

The idea of a Space Force admittedly sounds pretty badass. However, it is also likely unnecessary, unwise, and runs counter to the recommendation of Trump’s own Defense chief.

When a bipartisan group of lawmakers tried to include language creating a new “Space Corps” in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, Defense Secretary Gen. James Mattis strongly opposed the idea, writing in a letter, “I oppose the creation of a new military service and additional organizational layers at a time when we are focused on reducing overhead and integrating joint warfighting functions.”

This “Space Corps” was a notably less ambitious proposal than what Trump seems to be describing. It called for the new Corps to have its own seat on the Military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, but still report to the Department of the Air Force, similar to the Marine Corps’ relationship with the Navy.

In contrast, Trump said today that his Space Force would be a co-equal branch, saying, “we are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force, separate but equal.”

Whatever form it takes, the creation of a new branch of the military will only invite more waste in a Department of Defense bureaucracy that continues to siphon off billions of taxpayer dollars while rarely being held accountable for how it spends its massive budget.

As recently as February 2018, an audit of the Defense Logistics Agency obtained by Politico found that the agency—which functions as the military’s supply arm—failed to account for as much as $800 million. In December 2016, it was revealed that the Defense Department buried an internal study finding $125 billion in administrative waste. (Then there’s the money frittered away by the Defense Department on smaller scale boondoggles, like the $43 million compressed natural gas station we built in Afghanistan.)

Mattis argued that the Pentagon’s priority should be focusing on getting its own shop in order before it goes about creating whole new branches.

Indeed, the idea of militarizing space with a brand-new Space Force departs from some positive noises the Trump administration has made about letting the private sector take the lead in space development.

In February, the Administration floated the idea of converting the International Space Station into a semi-private facility and zeroing out NASA funding for the station by 2025. The space agency has already saved big bucks partnering with private companies to resupply the station. Other private enterprises are getting ever closer to launching manned space flights.

The Trump Administration would do well to let these peaceful, private initiatives develop, as opposed to crowding them out by launching the government’s most bloated bureaucracy into space.

State-sponsored ventures into renewable energy have hit a wall in Germany, the supposed leader of the war on climate change.

The Associated Press reports that Germany’s environment minister, Svenja Schulze, said that the country will probably not meet its carbon emission reduction goals for 2020. This follows the government’s official decision to abandon these goals in January.

Germany set out to establish itself as a leader in the international fight against man-made climate change by promising to cut carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2020 and up to 95 percent in 2050, relative to 1990 levels. The German government now says it will miss the 2020 target by eight percent.

Moving towards cleaner, sustainable energy is certainly a noble goal, but Germany’s attempted green revolution doubled residential energy rates for consumers in the form of greater surcharges. This does little for lower income households who now face much larger electricity bills and much smaller disposable incomes. Furthermore, the higher costs take money away from more productive sectors of the economy, inhibiting innovation and production.

Germany’s failed endeavor shows that fossil fuels are still very much a part of our near future. Alternative energy sources may have potential that can best be explored through the market, but as of now, they simply cannot compete, in terms of efficiency and reliability with fossil fuels, which have played, and continue to play, a huge role in human development. Even after the effort to boost alternative energy, over one-third of Germany’s energy still comes from coal. This slow transition, coupled with Germany’s growing aversion to nuclear power, make it highly unlikely green energy will help Germany meet its carbon emission goals.

Even so, Germany appears adamant about its energy goals, and followed its setback with an even more sweeping promise of achieving a 55 percent reduction in its carbon emissions by 2030. Considering Germany’s failure, American legislators should be wary of similar proposals.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has apologized to Maajid Nawaz for including him on a list of anti-Muslim extremists. Nawaz is a liberal who works to de-radicalize Islamists, and characterizing him as an anti-Muslim extremist was a serious error in judgment on the part of the SPLC, which purports to combat hate, racism, and bigotry.

Even so, this outcome—a result of Nawaz threatening the SPLC with a defamation lawsuit—is concerning on free speech grounds.

The SPLC has agreed to pay a settlement of $3 million to Nawaz and his foundation, Quilliam, which will be used to fund “work fighting anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamist extremism.” In exchange, Nawaz won’t sue the SPLC for defamation.

The SPLC really screwed up here, and it was right to apologize. But unfairly characterizing Nawaz is not defamation, because opinions cannot be defamatory. That’s part of what makes them opinions.

Don’t take my word for it: read Popehat‘s Ken White:

One of the most basic principles of defamation law, mandated by the First Amendment, is that pure opinion can’t be defamatory. Only statements of provable fact — or statements that imply provable fact — can be defamatory. I write about this constantly. An opinion, however moronic or unfair, is absolutely protected by the First Amendment unless it implies that the speaker is relying on undisclosed provable facts. So, for instance, “look at what this guy wrote, he’s a bigot” is by definition not defamatory; it’s based on an interpretation of a disclosed fact, the thing the guy wrote. “I’ve listened to this guy’s conversations and, let me tell you, he’s a bigot” might be defamatory, because it implies undisclosed facts — whatever you claim you heard.

Here, the SPLC’s fatuous Field Guide appeared to be classic opinion based on disclosed facts. The SPLC offered its opinion that certain people were “anti-Muslim extremists” based on facts it set forth and linked. Their conclusion appears unfair, narrow-minded, and uttered in bad faith, but opinions are absolutely protected whether or not they’re unfair, narrow-minded, and in bad faith.

Again, the SPLC backed down due to the mere threat of a defamation lawsuit. The organization has every right to admit defeat, and agree to pay up, even though the theoretical case against it would rest on weak legal ground. The SPLC is an advocacy organization, and it’s possible that it didn’t want bad press, and admitting defeat was the swiftest way to move on from this episode. The organization has occasionally been very sloppy about who gets labelled an extremist, failing to draw distinctions between Ayaan Hirsi Ali—a survivor of religious violence—and anti-Muslim crazy woman Pamella Geller. (I recently criticized the SPLC for warning about the evils of cultural appropriation.)

And yet I’m worried that this settlement could end up chilling free expression. The answer to bad speech—like wrongly labelling people extremists—is more speech, not endless defamation lawsuits.

Nawaz is represented by Libby Locke of Clare Locke LLP, the same defamation lawyer who handled University of Virginia Dean of Students Nicole Eramo’s lawsuit against Rolling Stone. Eramo, you will recall, prevailed in court. That verdict, which I covered at Reason, seemed well-founded to me. Rolling Stone author Sabrina Rubin Erdely didn’t just make errors of opinion—she made factual assertions about Eramo that were false. The magazine refused to correct these errors for so long—in the face of overwhelming evidence that Erdely’s trust in her single source, Jackie, was misplaced—that the significant line of actual malice was crossed. Rolling Stone‘s actions were truly extraordinary.

The SPLC matter is clearly different. The organization expressed a really bad opinion about Nawaz, and was rightly criticized for having done so. But the First Amendment protects our right to express bad opinions—and the integrity of this important constitutional principle is undermined whenever someone surrenders to an unfounded defamation threat.