Category: reason

With the announcement Thursday morning that the White House will press forward with a plan to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum from Europe, Canada, and Mexico, it seems that President Donald Trump has taken another step towards the precipice that turns threats and posturing into open conflict.

As the contemporary world’s great powers have edged closer to a major trade war, I’ve thought a lot about something historian Christopher Clark writes in The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went To War in 1914, his excellent account of the run-up to the First World War.

The First World War, most Americans probably know, started because of the assassination of an Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand.

Like many historical facts, that’s only partially true. Ferdinand was gunned down in the streets of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, but troops did not mobilize for battle until the final week of July and it was mid-August before the real shooting began. The intervening time was filled with a flurry of diplomacy as various factions encouraged or dissuaded the war. From the perspective of June 28, though, it’s not at all clear that a conflict was inevitable. Indeed, even a month later it could have been avoided, as officials from Germany and England—neither of which were directly connected to the war’s inciting assassination and had at least some reasons to avoid a bloody conflict—nearly reached an agreement in mid-July that likely would have prevented the outbreak of a continent-wide conflagration.

In other words, the assassination alone did not make war happen. But at some point in the six weeks following Ferdinand’s murder, the prospect of war tipped from possible to unavoidable.

“The outbreak of war was the culmination of chains of decisions made by political actors with conscious objectives,” notes Clark. “The war was in fact ‘improbable’—at least until it happened. From this it would follow that the conflict was not the consequence of long-run deterioration, but of short-term shocks to the international system.”

The analogy between World War I and the looming trade war only goes so far, of course. Thankfully, there are not millions of lives at stake in the decisions that will be made in Washington, Ottawa, Brussels, and Berlin over the next few weeks—though the stakes are still quite high in other ways. Like in 1914, a trade war between the major economic powers of the globe in 2018 would threaten to smash an international system that has, despite some obvious failings, worked well for the better part of half a century.

A trade war, if we’ll have one, is not the result solely of the Trump administration’s economic nationalism or its assassination of domestic businesses. Trump trade policies are another short-term shock to the system, and there is plenty of blame to be shared by China and others.

Still, the inciting incident for the coming trade war will be remembered as Trump’s announcement on March 5 of new tariffs on all steel and aluminum imported into the United States. That kicked off the period of diplomacy, with the White House agreeing to exempt several major U.S. trading partners from those tariffs until May 1, with the goal of reaching bilateral trade deals before then. In some cases, that worked. Deals are in the works with Argentina, Australia, Brazil, and South Korea.

But even an extension until June 1 did not bring Canada, Europe, and Mexico to the negotiating table. Instead, all three threatened to escalate the conflict by slapping retaliatory tariffs on American goods. Elsewhere, the Trump administration has so far fumbled its attempts to use tariffs to bully China into trade concessions.

“As has been the case every day for the past 16+ months, the U.S. and global economies remain exposed to the whims of an unorthodox president who precariously steers policy from one extreme to the other, keeping us in a perpetual state of uncertainty,” says Daniel Ikenson, director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, summing up the current state of affairs.

Now, the clock is really ticking. The exemptions for Canada, Europe, and Mexico will expire at midnight, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced.

The trade war that seemed improbable for weeks is now slipping closer to inevitable.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker called the tariffs “unjustified” and said the EU will prepare countermeasures, CNBC reported. According to The Wall Street Journal, the European response will target some $3.3 billion in U.S. exports. American agricultural exports are likely to take the biggest hit, which is bad news for farmers who depend on export markets because America literally grows more food than it can consume.

Trump has preemptively responded to the expected European response by threatening additional tariffs on imported cars. That move prompted one German officials to wonder whether the United States is abandoning free trade.

Mexico plans to impose retaliatory tariffs on American steel, pork, apples, grapes, and cheese, among other things. The New York Times said the goods were chosen to have an impact on rural Republican congressional districts in the hopes of applying pressure to Trump’s political allies.

Investors and businesses will get hit too. The Dow Jones industrial average fell sharply Thursday after news reports that tariff exemptions for Canada and Europe would expire. Steel-using industries have reported significant price hikes since Trump first announced the tariffs in early March, and a projection released by the Trade Partnership, a Washington-based pro-trade think tank, tariffs are projected to cause 146,000 net job losses—five jobs lost for every job gained—even without accounting for possible retaliation from China, Europe, and other nations.

All sides are still talking to each other and there’s faint hope for a last second deal, but that looks increasingly unlikely. “Every country’s primary obligation is to protect its own citizens and their livelihoods,” Ross said in Paris after meeting with E.U. officials this week, according to the Journal. That doesn’t sound like a man who is backing down.

The tariffs on steel and aluminum, don’t forget, are being imposed on the administration’s vague and unfounded claims that foreign metal somehow undercuts America’s national security. The White House is already gearing up to make a similarly laughable argument for tariffs on cars. But how tariffs on European cars and Canadian steel will address the administration’s worries about a trade imbalance with China—something that isn’t even really a problem—remains completely unclear.

That lack of clarity—or, more accurately, honesty—between the Trump White House and America’s top trading partners is compounded by the administration’s decision earlier this week to pull the rug out from under a proposed deal with China. After first threatening to impose tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese imports, the administration said less than two weeks ago that those tariffs would be on hold, before reversing course again this week—apparently to the surprise of Beijing.

Negotiating for peace becomes incredibly difficult once trust is lost. A state of uncertainty makes improbable, unnecessary conflicts more likely. The First World War, concludes Clark, became inevitable not due to an assassin’s bullet but because “a profound sundering of ethical and political perspectives eroded consensus and sapped trust.”

Trump is walking the world to the precipice of another major conflict. It will be less bloody, but no less tragic for its pointlessness.

Earlier this week, I wrote about the sad ordeal of Keith Mumphery, who was booted from the NFL after news broke that he had been expelled from Michigan State University for sexually assaulting a female student. The university made that determination without Mumphery’s knowledge. The athlete, a graduate of MSU, had no idea he was under investigation, since administrators’ emails bounced back.

This was MSU’s second investigation into Mumphery’s behavior. He was cleared the first time, but his accuser appealed that decision—an option available to her under Obama-era Education Department rules relating to Title IX, the federal statute mandating gender equality on campus. Given that the expulsion prematurely ended Mumphery’s NFL career and MSU apparently failed to notify him of the retrial or its outcome, he has a strong case that the university, which he is suing, violated his due process rights.

Mumphery’s case has received additional media attention in recent days from The New York Times and Fox News. Times sports columnist Michael Powell highlights additional details about Mumphery’s difficult life and upbringing that make what happened to him seem even more tragic:

In more personal terms, Mumphery offers a pretty good personification of what happens when a jury-rigged system breaks down. He runs through the streets of his hometown each morning, pulling an iron sled to stay in shape. His mother was poor, and when the family ran out of water, he and his siblings filled buckets with it at the gas station and toted them home.

His mother lives in a trailer. He amassed excellent grades and excelled in sports. None of this inoculates him against the terrible vagaries of human nature. I can’t say what happened in that dorm room on that early evening in March 2015.

I know only this. A prosecutor decided not to bring charges, and a university investigation found Mumphery was not responsible. The only investigation that found him guilty did so apparently without his knowledge and without his offering a defense.

That’s not a good definition of liberty.

Last night Mumphery and his attorney, Andrew Miltenverg, were interviewed on Fox News Channel’s The Story With Martha MacCallum. Here’s the clip.

It’s great to see this obvious miscarriage of justice getting the attention it deserves. Mumphery’s situation is a perfect example of the damage caused by Obama-era Title IX dictates and reinforces the argument that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was right to rescind the overzealous guidance.

Last year Maryland’s courts approved changes to the state’s bail system, instructing judges not to deny defendants the possibily of release if they were too poor to afford a cash bail demand. The intent was that defendants be jailed prior to trial only if they were flight risks or a danger to the community, not simply because they didn’t have enough money.

Unfortunately, at least in Baltimore, the plan is backfiring. WBAL-TV, the local NBC affiliate, reports that the number of people detained in jail is rising, even as the number of arrests is dropping. Comparing March 2017 to March 2018, the station found that the average number of people jailed each day jumped 31 percent, from 655 to 856 (Note: WRAL incorrectly reports this as a 23 percent increase). What’s happening is easy to explain: Instead of making cash bail affordable, Baltimore’s judges are choosing not to grant it at all in many cases where they previously would have.

Some Maryland counties have embraced pretrial services and monitoring, releasing more defendants and then keeping close tabs on them to ensure that they make their court dates. But as the Baltimore Sun noted last year, Baltimore appears to be lagging behind. WBAL reports that it’s not just violent crimes and felony charges that are leaving defendants stuck in jail but also less serious offenses such as driving with a revoked license, minor theft, and misdemeanor assault.

Research shows that the reflexive use of cash bail ends up punishing defendants before they are convicted by trapping them in jail, disrupting their lives, and compounding their economic insecurity, often prompting them to accept plea deals simply to get out of jail. To address that problem, some court systems and states, including Alaska and New Jersey, are discouraging judges from automatically relying on schedules that determine bail based on the charges a defendant faces. But the bail reform movement can work only if judges cooperate, which requires assuring them that the people they’re releasing without bail will be properly monitored to make sure they return to court. Judges know they are the ones who will take the heat if somebody they’ve released absconds or commits a new crime.

Because of this backfire, we should also be very wary about making the bail bond industry the “bad guys” when the alternatives to cash bail have not been carefully planned out. This month Google and Facebook jumped on board the bail reform movement by announcing that they would no longer accept ads from bail bonds companies. That move doesn’t actually help poor defendants; it just limits their awareness of an important tool for staying out of jail while waiting for trial.

Baltimore’s problems shouldn’t discourage efforts to reduce courts’ reliance on cash bail. But it should serve as a warning that when you force a tough choice on judges, the outcome may be the opposite of what you intended. Last fall the Cato Institute’s Walter Olson, who has been watching Maryland’s bail issues play out, warned, “Judges will reassign cases up or down—but there can be a bias toward up. If a judge releases a defendant who goes on to commit an atrocious crime, he faces a potentially career-ending furor. The incentive is to err on the side of lockup.”

Mark Janus is a child support specialist for the state of Illinois who has lent his name to a Supreme Court case that could dramatically change the landscape for public sector unions. The former Eagle Scout sued the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees when he learned the association could deduct dues from his paycheck even though he wasn’t a member and didn’t want its reps negotiating his salary and benefits. The high court heard arguments in February and will likely issue a ruling this summer. Days before he appeared before the justices, Janus spoke to Reason‘s Nick Gillespie about what he’s hoping to accomplish. Check out the whole interview at the link below.

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Georgia recognizes cannabis as a treatment for epilepsy and notionally lets certified patients possess up to 20 fluid ounces of “low THC oil,” an extract that contains a negligible amount of marijuana’s main psychoactive component but a substantial amount of cannabidiol (CBD), the ingredient that seems to help control seizures. That privilege is mainly theoretical, however, since there is no legal way to produce or obtain cannabis extract in Georgia. Given that glaring defect in the state’s medical marijuana law, it is easy to understand why Matthew and Suzeanna Brill let their 15-year-old son, David, smoke cannabis in a desperate attempt to control his epileptic seizures. It is harder to understand why that decision led the state of Georgia to forcibly separate David from his parents.

David was having several seizures a day, the Brills say, and the drugs he was prescribed for his epilepsy did not work. But after he started smoking marijuana in February, he went more than two months without a seizure. “For 71 days he was able to ride a bike, go play, lift weights,” Matthew Brill told The New York Times. David’s doctors knew why he was suddenly doing so much better, and they did not object. But his therapist ratted out the Brills, which led to a visit by Twiggs County sheriff’s deputies, who demanded that David stop taking his medicine. “We complied, and within 14 hours of complying we were rushing our son to the hospital,” Suzeanna Brill told the Times. “It was one of the most horrific seizures I’ve ever seen.”

The Brills were charged with reckless conduct, a misdemeanor, and Georgia’s Division of Family and Children Services took David away. He has been living in a group home for a month now, away from his parents, his medicine, and the dog that is trained to detect imminent seizures. His parents are fighting to get him back, a process they say may take as long as a year. They are trying to raise money to cover their legal expenses on GoFundMe, where they are more than halfway toward their goal of $30,000.

The Food and Drug Administration may be close to approving cannabidiol as a treatment for epilepsy, and Georgia has already acknowledged its medical utility. Yet when the Brills gave David access to this medicine, the state claims, they endangered his “bodily safety” by “consciously disregarding a substantial and unjustifiable risk,” which constituted “a gross deviation from the standard of care which a reasonable person would exercise.”

The Brills do not see it that way. “For 71 days our son rode his bike, woke up, went to school, played with friends, played outside, and the terror for his life that gripped our hearts and souls began to lift,” Suzeanna Brill writes. “The smiles on our faces reflecting our child getting to be a normal child. Safe in his bed. Doing better in school. Having a great quality of life. We were breaking the law. We saved our son….This is our job as parents, to protect our child even with our own lives.”

Reason has a new video out today explaining how to put together a homemade handgun using some very simple tools and parts you can buy online.

But you won’t find it on our YouTube channel. After the March for Our Lives rally, YouTube announced that it would no longer allow users to post videos that contain “instructions on manufacturing a firearm.”

If YouTube doesn’t want to post our video to their site, its loss. We’ll just post it to another platform. That’s what the free and open internet is all about. So if you want to see our video, you can watch it here at Reason.com—or head over to PornHub and see how to make your very own unregistered firearm.

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The Americans, which ended an outstanding six-season run last night with a remarkable series finale, has always been a show about marriage, about the day-to-day trials of domestic life, but heightened and sharpened by being set against a backdrop of intense Cold War conflict.

It was a domestic drama cloaked as a spy thriller, a show about what it’s like to raise children and keep a peaceful home, and the myriad ways that the compromises necessary to do so can both drag a marriage down and bind a couple together.

The more sensational aspects of the show—the sex, the murders, the spy-agency plots and counterplots—served as both a genre-inflected entry point for its domestic drama and a grand metaphor, in which the great powers struggle of the 1980s often reflected the household struggles of Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, the pair of Russian spies at the center of the show. But that metaphor worked in both directions, with the Jennings’ marriage serving as a mirror for the larger international struggle.

If the Cold War was a metaphor for the Jennings marriage, then their marriage was also a metaphor for the Cold War. So The Americans was a spy thriller about the mundane difficulties of marriage, yes—but it was also a show about geopolitics and the ways in which powerful international rivals interact, conflict, and, maybe, forgive each other, by insisting on treating people as individuals rather than as political and ideological adversaries. (This post includes some spoilers about the series finale.)

That dynamic was at the heart of the series’ long-running dispute between Philip, who is exhausted by spy life and at times wants to defect, and Elizabeth, the determined patriot who is driven by her cause. The series often used that conflict, which hinged on a blend of ideology and personality, to drive the two apart. In the final season, they effectively ended up spying on each other as part of a fracturing of the KGB.

But although the series never shied away from depicting the horrors of Soviet communism, it also never resolved that conflict by deciding that one side was right and the other side was wrong. Instead, it tended to fall back on ideas of familial commitment and devotion. Philip and Elizabeth were forced together by the KGB, which set them up as deep-cover agents operating inside the United States, but eventually, somehow, they fell in love, or something like it, and it was always that love—their deep commitment to the other person, as a person—that kept their marriage from completely falling apart.

Over and over again, the show came back to the idea that political conflict—and the Jennings’ marriage was divided by an essentially political conflict—by looking past politics, and treating the other side as individuals first. Politics, it seemed to say, was the worst way to interact with someone, especially someone you loved.

The same sort of fraught and complicated humanistic impulse was similarly on display in the best, and perhaps most controversial, scene in last night’s finale, an extended standoff between the Jennings (including their daughter, Paige) and their neighbor, FBI agent Stan Beeman.

Part of the genius of the show has always been the way it localized and compressed a sprawling international conflict, making it more relatable while giving it a greater emotional valence. So of course the KGB spies living just outside of Washington, D.C., have an FBI agent for a neighbor, and of course he would become their family’s closest friend, and of course, in the finale, he would discover their true identities, and attempt to place them in custody. In The Americans, the personal and the political are always intertwined—but they are not always inseparable.

The moment when Beeman finally confronted the Jennings and Philip confessed their true identities was the dramatic center of last night’s episode and, arguably, of the series as a whole. And in that moment, Beeman makes a choice that is in some ways difficult to accept: He allows them to go free. Beeman is an FBI agent sworn to protect his country, and the Jennings are KGB spies equally committed to their own nation. But they are also friends and neighbor. And in the end, that is how Beeman chooses to treat them—not as mortal ideological enemies, but as friends, as people, as the family next door.

This negotiation, which is as much about what is unsaid as what is said, requires some lying; Philip denies murders that Elizabeth committed, and Elizabeth denies that they are murderers at all. And given the violence that and mayhem that the two have committed over the year, one could reasonably argue that it doesn’t offer justice, at least not in the way we normally think of it. Instead, when Beeman allows them to run, it is an act of humanity, of forgiveness, of letting go. It is personal, not political.

It’s the defining choice of the show, which over six seasons, consistently returned to the idea that the way to survive (if not resolve) the heated, drawn-out political conflicts that inevitably appear within families and cul-de-sacs, as well as within nations and across international lines, is to focus less on politics and ideology and more on people, who, after all, are our neighbors and family members, our international allies and partners, whether we chose them or not.

You can obviously draw a more explicit contemporary lesson from this idea, if you want, viewing the series as a plea for decency and forgiveness in a time of ideological tension and polarization. That wouldn’t be wrong, necessarily, and in some ways it would even be welcome.

But I’m also not sure it would be entirely in keeping with the spirit of the show and its wariness of putting politics above all else. So I’ll remember The Americans mostly as sublime television, a delicate-yet-gripping drama about flawed people, flawed countries, and the difficulty and necessity of treating people as individuals rather than as avatars of nations or ideologies.

The tweet that caused an uproar that led to the cancellation of Roseanne Barr’s ABC sitcom, writes Steve Chapman, was a reminder of the most illuminating and depressing reality of our time: the stubborn centrality of race and racism in our national life.

ABC should have known what it was getting with Barr, whose show it dropped after she likened Valerie Jarrett, a former aide to President Obama, to an ape. But the network had been willing to overlook her nasty side in hopes of appealing to those forgotten souls who voted for Donald Trump.

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After exiting the DC Comics cinematic universe, director Zack Snyder this week repeated something he’s been saying for many years: He wants to adapt Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, the 1943 novel that, while more about art and the media than politics per se, marked Rand as an effective public voice for individualism.

The only new news here is that Snyder told someone on the social media site Vero that this will be his next project. Rand fans should see this as tentative in the extreme, vaporware until proven otherwise. Why, the movie’s IMDB page doesn’t even mark it as being in pre-production yet, merely “announced.”

In short, Snyder’s interest in filming The Fountainhead doesn’t mean he’ll find the funding, actors, script, and other ingredients necessary to actually get it to a cineplex near you.

All that said, Snyder would be an interesting director to take on Rand’s story of Howard Roark, an architect whose self-driven mind leads him to abandon conventional worldly success to practice architecture only under terms acceptable to him. This eventually leads him to—spoiler alert—blow up an (unoccupied) public housing project.

Snyder’s attitudes toward heroism, as expressed in his DC movies, have been attacked as contrary to what people love about Superman. He made Superman selfish, fans complained. He was slammed for presenting a Kent family that didn’t encourage Clark to publicly use his powers to help others even at risk to his own happiness or peace. He’s been accused of not wanting to present well-rounded human characters but just “contrivances designed to explore whatever idea seems to be on Zack Snyder’s mind,” and of having a “neoliberal” view that heroism is about individuals using their abilities as they wish.

Writing in Splice Today, Todd Seavey, very knowledgeable on the aesthetics of both Rand and superheroes, looks at Snyder’s film 300 through the eyes of a Russian emigre friend and sees the “freedom-fighting she’d come to this country to embrace combined with the superhuman propaganda-poster aesthetic she’d been born into, which is roughly immigrant Rand’s own story.”

Snyder’s views on heroism thus might be perfectly suited to properly present Rand’s Roark, whose heroism is expressed via the freely chosen expression of his own genius, ignoring or fighting against the pressures of the leading minds of his field, of the market, and of other people’s needs.

Roark is most definitely not a hero who sacrifices himself for others. That standard definition of heroism is in fact exactly what Roark fights. See how Roark defends himself against criminal charges for blowing up the unoccupied public housing project Cortlandt Homes:

It is said that I have destroyed the homes of the destitute…but for me the destitute could not have had this particular home….I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need. I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others….The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing….[T]he integrity of a man’s creative work is of greater importance than any charitable endeavor….I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society.

Does the jury buy it? Sorry, no more spoilers here.

Are those lines likely to appear in any possible Snyder-directed film of The Fountainhead? Seems unlikely. But Rand felt that important ideas and a proper sense of life could (at least in theory) be inculcated through art without such explicit political or philosophical messaging.

Rand deliberately wrote the novel as a volley in a war against New Deal–era centralism and statism, marveling at the time that “I performed a miracle in getting a book like this published in these times when the whole publishing world is trembling before Washington….[I]f it’s allowed to be killed by the Reds—our good industrialists had better not expect anyone else to stick his neck out in order to try to save them from getting their throat cut.”

Still, Rand first loved America less for the Declaration of Independence than for Cecil B. DeMille. To the extent that the 21st century lives up to Rand’s sense of human glory, it will be less because of politicians than creators—as I once wrote, “the men and women who will develop new computer technologies; new sources of energy; new methods of bringing the physical world, from steel to our very genes, under our control; and the physical and market techniques to take us off the planet’s surface. It is for those sorts of people—the businessmen and technologists who make life richer and more option filled for everyone—that Ayn Rand is patron saint and inspiration.”

That she should have her vision play out in big-budget Hollywood cinema, whether the results please all her fans or not, is only appropriate.

I deeply regret that Philip Seymour Hoffman didn’t live to get a chance to play the novel’s social and artistic critic-villain Ellsworth Toohey, perhaps as the editor of a Brooklyn-based political-literary journal and website. But maybe Snyder will give us a dramatic slow-motion sequence of Cortlandt Homes blowing up when Roark decides his rights as a creator in designing the public housing project have been violated.

In other possibly-on-the-horizon Rand film news, a TV miniseries based on her book Atlas Shrugged remains a possibility. I reported in real time on the Atlas Shrugged feature film trilogy version that came out earlier this decade: parts one, two, and three.

The trailer for the 1949 Fountainhead film, featuring a screenplay by Rand (though an edit she did not approve of) and Gary Cooper as Roark:

When Marriott International Inc. was considering relocating its global headquarters from Baltimore to Northern Virginia in 1999, Maryland handed over $44 million in grants to keep the hotel chain in the state.

In 2016, after Marriott again made noises about moving out of Maryland, Gov. Larry Hogan, state lawmakers, and local officials coughed up another $62 million in taxpayer subsidies to support the construction of new headquarters in the affluent D.C. suburb of Bethesda.

But even that wasn’t good enough. After padding the bottom line of the world’s largest hotel chain, Maryland lawmakers are now trying to protect it from competition from home-sharing options like Airbnb and HomeAway, writes Reason‘s Eric Boehm.

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