Tag: hit&run

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has now spent more than $10 billion this year to bail out farmers affected by President Donald Trump’s trade war, according to updated U.S. Department of Agriculture data.

Illinois and Iowa have received more than $1 billion each, while Minnesota, Texas, and Kansas have received more than $700 million each, according to the USDA’s data. The bailout payments cover a wide variety of crops, and allow farmers to receive between $15 and $150 per acre, depending on what crops and where in the country the farm is located.

Trump has authorized up to $16 billion in bailout spending this year, on top of $12 billion spent in 2018.

All told, the price tag for Trump’s trade war farm bailout now far exceeds the $12 billion in net losses (after loans were repaid) incurred by the Obama administration to bail out domestic auto manufacturers in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis—a policy that was roundly criticized by Republicans and by Trump.

Trump says the farm bailout is being paid for by China, but that’s inaccurate in two ways. First, the tariff revenue that’s supposedly covering the cost of the bailout is coming from American consumers and businesses that are paying higher taxes because of Trump’s tariffs.

Second, the tariff revenue is insufficient to cover the cost of the bailout.

But even if the math added up, the farm bailout would be poor policy. Trump is trying to shield farmers from the loss of a huge export market; China has largely cut-off purchases of American agricultural goods in response to American tariffs on Chinese-made goods. But bailout checks are a poor substitute for a free market. An analysis of the bailout by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), an agricultural policy watchdog, shows that the government largess is flowing mostly to large farms and is not adequately covering farmers’ losses.

According to EWG’s analysis of more than $6 billion in bailout funds distributed between early July and the end of October, half went to just 10 percent of all recipients. The bottom 80 percent of recipients received an average of just $5,130. And thanks to what the group calls “laughably lax eligibility rules,” relatives with no direct connection to farms can cash-in on the bailout—a problem that has long plagued other forms of farm subsidies.

No wonder many farmers say they would much rather be able to sell their goods to China than wait for government checks to arrive.

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A new study of vaping-related lung injuries in Minnesota by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reinforces the case against vitamin E acetate, a diluting and thickening agent found in black-market THC products. The study, published yesterday in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, also provides evidence that use of the additive is a relatively new phenomenon, which might explain why cases like these were not reported until recently.

In light of the accumulating evidence implicating illegal cannabis products in the lung disease outbreak, which as of November 20 included 2,290 cases and 47 deaths, the CDC has modified its advice about vaping. But it continues to imply, without evidence, that legal nicotine products, which have been used by millions of Americans for years without causing acute respiratory reactions like these, might have something to do with the lung injuries.

In the new study, researchers interviewed 58 Minnesota patients, 91 percent of whom reported obtaining THC products from “informal sources such as friends, family members, or in-person or online dealers.” Just two patients said they had vaped only nicotine. It is not clear whether those reports were accurate, since patients may be reluctant to admit illegal drug use and may not actually know the contents of black-market products. Previous research has found THC in the lung fluid of patients who did not report vaping it. Without urine or blood testing, it is impossible to verify reports of exclusive nicotine use.

The researchers analyzed 67 product samples provided by patients, 46 of which contained THC. The most common THC brand by far was “Dank Vapes,” a label widely used by bootleggers. Of the 12 patients who provided THC products, all but one submitted samples containing vitamin E acetate, which was not found in any of the nicotine products tested. Lung fluid samples from five patients all contained the additive, which is consistent with an earlier CDC study of 29 patients. Comparing 10 THC products seized by law enforcement agencies in 2018 to 20 THC products seized in September 2019, the researchers found vitamin E acetate in all of the latter but none of the former.

“The findings support a potential role for vitamin E acetate in lung injury,” the study says, noting that the additive “has been detected in a high proportion of THC-containing products” used by patients, including samples tested in Minnesota, in New York, and in Utah as well as samples from 25 states analyzed by the Food and Drug Administration. The researchers also note that the CDC’s analysis of lung fluid from 29 patients in 10 states “found vitamin E acetate in all specimens.” And while “vitamin E acetate was not detected in the limited number of tested products seized [by Minnesota authorities] in 2018, it was detected in products seized in 2019, suggesting that vitamin E acetate might have been introduced recently as a diluent or filler.”

The researchers caution that “further research is needed to establish a causal link” between respiratory disease and inhalation of vitamin E acetate. Nevertheless, they say, “These Minnesota findings highlight concerns about e-cigarette, or vaping, products that contain THC acquired from informal sources. Because local supply chains and policy environments vary, CDC continues to recommend not using e-cigarette, or vaping, products that contain THC or any e-cigarette, or vaping, products obtained from informal sources.”

The latest version of the CDC’s official advice about vaping likewise emphasizes the potential hazards of vitamin E acetate and black-market THC products. But the CDC is still describing the problem as “e-cigarette, or vaping, product use associated lung injury (EVALI),” a phrase that is not only absurdly cumbersome but highly misleading, since most people, when they read “e-cigarette,” think of legal nicotine vaping products.

The CDC also continues to say that “the only way to assure that you are not at risk while the investigation continues is to consider refraining from use of all e-cigarette, or vaping, products.” Meanwhile, it contradicts itself by warning smokers who have switched to vaping that they should not return to their former habits, which are indisputably much more dangerous.

It’s instructive to compare the CDC’s general warnings about vaping to its much more specific advice concerning the recent outbreak of illnesses caused by E. coli contamination of romaine lettuce harvested in or near Salinas, California. “CDC’s current advice applies to all brands, use-by dates, and types of romaine lettuce grown in the Salinas growing region,” it says. The CDC is not suggesting that people stop eating, or that they avoid all fresh produce, or even that they stop eating romaine lettuce in general. The evidence points specifically to romaine lettuce from the Salinas area, so the CDC’s advisory appropriately focuses on those products.

Although the conspicuous role of black-market THC products in vaping-related lung injuries has been apparent for months, the CDC has been slow to acknowledge it. The agency’s nomenclature and its advice about vaping betray an irrational bias against e-cigarettes that has nothing to do with “EVALI.” Its muddled message has done real harm to public health by failing to give cannabis consumers adequate warnings and by scaring smokers away from products that provide a much less hazardous source of nicotine.

A Morning Consult poll conducted in September found that 58 percent of respondents, based on what they had “seen, read, or heard on the news lately,” believed people had “died from lung disease” caused by “ecigs, such as Juul,” compared to 34 percent who said the cases involved “marijuana or THC e-cigs.” Meanwhile, the share of Americans who recognize that e-cigarettes are less dangerous than the conventional, combustible kind continues to decline, a trend that is bound to be accelerated by “EVALI” scaremongering.

According to survey data reported this month in The Journal of the American Medical Association, just 26 percent of respondents perceived “electronic nicotine delivery systems” (ENDS) as less harmful than cigarettes in 2018, down from 39 percent in 2012. Between 2017 and 2018, the researchers noted, “an increase in perceiving ENDS as much more harmful than cigarettes was observed among cigarette smokers, which may influence their decision to try or switch to ENDS use.”

The lead author of the JAMA study, Georgia State University public health researcher Amy Nyman, amplified that point in a press release. “Smokers who perceive too much risk from e-cigarettes may decide against using them to quit smoking and may instead continue with their combustible smoking habit,” Nyman said. “The increase in perceived harm of electronic cigarettes may reflect growing concerns about the surge in e-cigarette use among young people, and the subsequent media coverage of the teen vaping epidemic.”

Notably, the 2018 survey preceded the outbreak of vaping-related lung injuries. “If this survey were to be done again,” one of Nyman’s co-authors told Vox, “it would probably be shocking in terms of even more negative perceptions.”

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Rhode Island and Hawaii are the only states in the nation that prohibit the ownership of stun guns and Tasers. A new federal lawsuit filed in Rhode Island seeks to scrub the state from that list.

On Nov. 22, plaintiffs Michael O’Neil and Nicola Grasso filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island challenging the state’s ban on “electronic weapons”—devices like stun guns and Tasers. O’Neil is the vice president of the Rhode Island Second Amendment Coalition and Grasso is the former president of the Rhode Island Federated Sportsman’s Association. Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha and Rhode Island State Police Col. James Manni are named as defendants in the suit.

O’Neil and Grasso’s lawsuit argues that Rhode Island’s ban on electronic weapons violates the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution because the law is inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s rulings in 2008’s District of Columbia v. Heller and 2016’s Caetano v. Massachusetts, as well as other rulings in state and federal cases. The lawsuit points to Heller‘s holding that the Second Amendment protects weapons in “common use” (about 200,000 stun guns were in private hands as of 2009) and Caetano‘s reaffirmation that “the Second Amendment extends… to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding” to argue against Rhode Island’s ban.

Caetano dealt specifically with the question of whether stun guns are constitutionally protected weapons under the Second Amendment and whether Massachusetts had the authority to ban them. The suit was filed by Jaime Caetano, who was arrested for possessing a stun gun she obtained to protect herself from her ex-boyfriend. At the time, state law forbade private ownership of stun guns.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld Caetano’s conviction by arguing that the Second Amendment doesn’t protect weapons that were not in common use at the time of the Second Amendment’s enactment, erroneously citing the Supreme Court’s language in Heller. The Supreme Court’s decision in Heller had actually rejected the notion that only guns existing during the 18th century fall under Second Amendment protection as “bordering on the frivolous.” This, in part, resulted in the Supreme Court unanimously deciding that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had misapplied the Heller ruling in Caetano’s case. Massachusetts subsequently repealed its stun gun ban.

Rhode Island’s governmental agencies appear to concede that the state’s ban won’t hold up in court. Sid Wordell, executive director of the Rhode Island Police Chiefs Association, tells WPRI that his organization recognizes that Rhode Island’s electronic weapons ban makes the state an outlier nationally and that they’re likely “going to have to legalize them.”

Similarly, Providence Public Safety Commissioner Steven Pare told WPRI that he accepts that the Second Amendment protects ownership of stun guns, but expressed his belief that the state should, “be real restrictive [sic] with the persons who can carry these types of devices and where they can carry [them],” stating that he, “wouldn’t want to see someone carrying a stun gun which can incapacitate people in banks and government buildings and sensitive areas.”

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National Louis University relieved a professor of teaching duties for the rest of the semester after students complained about an assignment that appeared to question whether the Holocaust actually happened. In reality, it did no such thing.

The student backlash stemmed from a misunderstanding of the assignment—a misunderstanding that media outlets covering this case seem to share. Let me explain.

The unnamed marketing professor wanted students to ponder some very badly worded questions as a cautionary tale about the harms of double negatives. Here was one example used: Does it seem possible or does it seem impossible to you that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened? The four available answers were: Very possible, possible, impossible, or very impossible.

Several students found this example so outrageous that they informed the university administration, took a screenshot of the question for social media, and sent an urgent plea for assistance to a campus Jewish group. The university quickly sprang into action, suspending the professor while and opening an investigation. The administration also issued the following statement:

“National Louis University is committed to achieving a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment where every individual is heard, respected, valued and welcomed.

Every day, we strive to create a community where everyone is empowered to live their full authentic selves. We are taking this incident seriously. We do not tolerate discrimination in any form and have a no retaliation policy for individuals who file claims of discrimination. We are currently investigating and will determine the appropriate course of action once our investigation is complete.”

The Anti-Defamation League applauded the university’s actions and bashed the professor for “trivializing the traumatic history of the Holocaust.”

But here’s one very clarifying detail: The question comes from an actual, real-life poll conducted in 1992 by the American Jewish Committee. The question was very poorly worded, and thus produced a suspiciously high rate of Holocaust denial: 22 percent. When the confusing wording was eliminated, the rate of Holocaust denial dropped to 1 percent, with 8 percent unsure.

I presume that this was the point of the professor’s lesson: Precise language is important because misunderstandings can skew results and lead to bad public policy. Must we erase from history the fact that a Jewish group once inadvertently inflated the number of Holocaust deniers, because in 2019 some students are too sensitive to even grapple with context?

Both Inside Higher Ed and NBC Chicago mentioned the question’s historical relevance but did not argue that this was an acquitting detail. Here’s Inside Higher Ed:

Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University and author of Denying the Holocaust and Antisemitism: Here and Now, among other books about the Holocaust, said the professor’s first statement appeared to be one infamously included in a 1992 Roper poll for the American Jewish Committee. The poll turned up a surprisingly number of Holocaust deniers because people didn’t understand the question. A reworded polling question showed many fewer deniers just two years later—hence the 22 percent and 9 percent notes next to each question on the assignment.

Nevertheless, Lipstadt said it wasn’t a “wise choice on the professor’s part” to use that example, “especially in today’s atmosphere.” Doing so, she said, suggests that the issue “is open to debate, which it is not.”

Historians of the Holocaust debate many things, Lipstadt said: Whose idea it was, how early did Adolf Hitler have it in mind, would a stronger response earlier on from other nations have given the Nazis pause? But debating whether or not the Holocaust actually happened—as some still do—is “ludicrous.”

Lipstadt said the Holocaust is the most extensively documented genocide in the world and that everyone involved, including survivors, bystanders and historians, would have to be in on the hoax.

“The deniers have no evidence, no narrative, no witnesses,” she said.

This is maddening! It makes it sound like the professor was denying the Holocaust when all of the available evidence suggests he was trying to prevent students from making mistakes that spread disinformation. If only they had listened.

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Life expectancy trends downward for three years in a row. A recent reversal in upward longevity trends is being driven by young and middle-aged adults, according to new research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The findings fall in line with other recent research on U.S. longevity and public health, placing the bulk of the blame for younger deaths on suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol abuse, along with “a diverse list of organ system diseases.”

Researchers Steven H. Woolf and Heidi Schoomaker looked at U.S. mortality data published from January 1990 through August 2019. They find that U.S. life expectancy peaked in 2014, at 78.9 years old, and has been declining since.

For 2017, life expectancy was down to 78.6 years.

“The recent decrease in U.S. life expectancy culminated a period of increasing cause-specific mortality among adults aged 25 to 64 years that began in the 1990s, ultimately producing an increase in all-cause mortality that began in 2010,” they write in the JAMA paper. “During 2010-2017, midlife all-cause mortality rates increased from 328.5 deaths/100 000 to 348.2 deaths/100 000. By 2014, midlife mortality was increasing across all racial groups, caused by drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, suicides, and a diverse list of organ system diseases.”

These trends were strongest in New England (up 23.3 percent in New Hampshire, 20 percent in Maine, and 19.9 percent in Vermont) and what they term the Ohio Valley (up 23 percent in West Virginia, 21.6 percent in Ohio, 14.8 percent in Indiana, and 14.7 percent in Kentucky). “The increase in midlife mortality during 2010-2017 was associated with an estimated 33,307 excess U.S. deaths, 32.8% of which occurred in four Ohio Valley states,” the authors write.

Between 1959 and 2016, U.S. life expectancy rose from 69.9 years to 78.9 years, increasing the fastest between 1969 and 1979. Then:

Life expectancy began to advance more slowly in the 1980s and plateaued in 2011 […] The National Center for Health Statistics reported that US life expectancy peaked (78.9 years) in 2014 and subsequently decreased significantly for 3 consecutive years, reaching 78.6 years in 2017. The decrease was greater among men (0.4 years) than women (0.2 years) and occurred across racial-ethnic groups; between 2014 and 2016, life expectancy decreased among non-Hispanic white populations (from 78.8 to 78.5 years), non-Hispanic black populations (from 75.3 years to 74.8 years), and Hispanic populations (82.1 to 81.8 years).

In addition to drugs and alcohol, other lifestyle factors can be blamed for the rise in younger deaths:

Between 1999 and 2017, age-adjusted midlife mortality rates for hypertensive diseases increased by 78.9% (from 6.1 deaths/100 000 to 11.0 deaths/100 000) and for obesity increased by 114.0% (from 1.3 deaths/100 000 to 2.7 deaths/100 000).

Early studies reported increasing midlife mortality from heart disease and lung (notably chronic pulmonary) disease, hypertension, stroke, diabetes, and Alzheimer disease, but the trend appears to be even broader.

As Ron Bailey pointed out yesterday, however, the JAMA study isn’t all bad news:

Some good news is that mortality rates continued to fall at the tail ends of the age distribution. Between 1999 and 2017, the infant mortality rate dropped from 736 to 567 per 100,000 births while mortality among children ages 1 through 14 declined from 22.9 to 16.5 deaths per 100,000. Older Americans are living longer too: The mortality rate among adults between the ages of 65 and 84 fell from 3,774.6 to 2,875.4 deaths per 100,000.

Considering the bulk of the decline in longevity comes from “adults with less education and in rural areas or other settings with evidence of economic distress or diminished social capital,” the authors of the study suggest things like prescription opioids are to blame. But as Bailey writes:

They fail to note the unintended consequences of the federal government mandate for an abuse-deterrent reformulation of prescription opioids that resulted in the massive rise in overdose deaths as users switched to street heroin and fentanyl.

What to do? A good start would be to end the drug war and adopt policies that enable folks to get out of the local poverty traps in which they are stuck.

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FREE MINDS

Due process shouldn’t conflict with #MeToo goals. David Harsanyi calls foul on the idea that due process somehow stands in opposition to holding people accountable for sexual harassment and assault. From a Monday article (not an opinion piece!) in The Washington Post:

While the #MeToo movement brought increased public scrutiny to harassment and assault, the Trump administration’s proposal pushes the pendulum in the reverse direction by strengthening due process protections for those accused of offenses.

Writes Harsanyi:

If on the one side of the pendulum is increased scrutiny over sexual assault, then the “reverse” can’t be the right to due process. The two, in fact, aren’t even on the same pendulum. Due process concerns itself with procedure, not substance. It allows “emotionally charged conflicts,” as the Post helpfully puts it, to be adjudicated in an impartial manner. The opposite of increased public scrutiny to harassment and assault is less scrutiny, not fewer rights for the accused. It’s alarming that this even has to be debated.

More here.

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FREE MARKETS

The abject stupidity of the war on vaping. I’m in Spectator USA this week on the ways in which anti-vaping advocates are emulating crusaders against “Big Tobacco,” but without actually protecting anyone’s health. New York and California are both suing JUUL, for instance. A lot of politicians are keen on banning flavored vaping products (for the children, obviously), something leaders in New York City and Massachusetts voted for just last week. Meanwhile:

The American Medical Association (AMA) is now recommending a “total ban on all e-cigarette and vaping products” that aren’t classified by the U.S. food and Drug Administration as “smoking cessation” aids.

Interestingly, President Donald Trump has emerged as a rare realist when it comes to vaping. He told reporters last Friday that if the U.S. banned flavored nicotine vaping products, they were just “going to come here illegally.” Trump continued:

That’s the one problem I can’t seem to forget. You just have to look at the history of it. Now, instead of having a flavor that’s at least safe, they’re going to be having a flavor that’s poison.

It’s been black-market THC vapes causing illnesses and deaths, with most cases linked to products that used synthetic vitamin E as a filler.

To respond to that set of facts by banning flavored nicotine vaping products is like the government responding to counterfeit multivitamins killing people by banning all supplements except Riboflavin. It makes no sense.

More on the madness here.

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ELECTION 2020

New Quinnipiac national Dem WH poll

Biden 24%
Buttigieg 16%
Warren 14%
Sanders 13%
Bloomberg 3%
Harris 3%
Bennet 2%
Booker 2%
Castro 2%
Yang 2%https://t.co/zGDNDEVb1b

— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) November 26, 2019

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QUICK HITS

• A federal judge just blocked (for now) the Trump administration’s attempt to require proof of health insurance before receiving a visa.
• More evidence that it’s vitamin E acetate—not nicotine, and not vaping generally—that is causing illnesses and deaths.
• The Supreme Court will hear a Louisiana abortion case in 2020.
• A California county’s ban on marijuana delivery now has the state attorney general’s office joining in—against the county. The state has been fighting against locales setting their own marijuana regulations and rules.
• Vice is freaking out because “some nootropics contain a substance not approved by the FDA.”
• Are you ready for police robopups?
• Next week is Reason‘s annual webathon, where we ask you to support our journalism! We’ll be taking your questions on a special Reason Roundtable podcast on December 3. Please submit your questions for Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, and Peter Suderman to podcasts@reason.com.

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The current political focus may be on Ukraine, but there are reasons to be just as concerned about how President Trump may have made U.S. policy toward Turkey subservient to his personal interests.

Tim Miller has a rundown on The Bulwark of what we know about Trump’s financial and other entanglements in Turkey, in addition to key events that suggest reasons for concern. The TL;DR is as follows:

Trump enabled a despot who has significant leverage over his business in a brutal ethnic cleansing of our ally, cutting an opaque sweetheart deal negotiated by the sons-in-law of Erdogan, Trump, and Trump’s business partner.

Meanwhile, Erdogan has empowered Trump’s business partner, making him Turkey’s key man in Washington, which gives him inordinate influence on the administration and ensures that the financial interests of all involved are maintained.

The relevant relationships and policies cry out for further investigation. The story here may be more complicated than the Ukraine “quid pro quo,” but it’s no less troubling.

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11/27/1964: WGCB carried a 15-minute broadcast by the Reverend Billy James Hargis as part of the “Christian Crusade” series. This broadcast gave rise to Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. Federal Communications Commission (1969).

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The Santa Clara, California, district attorney’s office says it is investigating a prosecutor police say used his daughter as bait to find a man now charged with molesting her. Ali Mohammad Lajmiri has been charged with lewd and lascivious acts on a minor under the age of 14 years, lewd and lascivious acts on a minor under the age of 14 years by the use of force, violence, duress, menace or fear and false imprisonment for molesting the 13-year-old girl while she walked her dog. Police say that her father brought her back to the scene of the attack several times, hoping to catching Lajmiri. He finally succeeded, but not before Lajmiri reportedly pulled the girl onto a bench and kissed the top of her head before she was able to get away. According to the police report, the father directed his daughter to walk back and forth along a wooded trail and to let Lajmiri touch her if she encountered him again.

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Are you confident that police will not break down your door tonight? If so, it’s probably because you assume the warrant required for such an armed invasion of your home has to be based on reliable evidence of criminal activity.

But that is not true in Houston, as a federal indictment unsealed last week shows. According to the indictment, a drug raid that killed a middle-aged couple on January 28 was based on lies from start to finish, which should alarm anyone who thinks the Fourth Amendment protects Americans from unreasonable searches.

The indictment says the no-knock raid at 7815 Harding Street, which found no evidence of drug dealing but set off an exchange of gunfire that killed Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, was based on a false tip and a fraudulent search warrant affidavit. The Justice Department says Gerald Goines, a narcotics officer who retired in March after 34 years with the Houston Police Department (HPD), invented a heroin purchase by a nonexistent confidential informant.

Goines, who already faced state murder charges in connection with the raid, is now charged with civil right violations that could send him to prison for life. Steven Bryant, a narcotics officer who backed up Goines’ story of a drug deal that never happened, is charged with falsifying records. Patricia Garcia, the neighbor whose 911 calls prompted the investigation of Tuttle and Nicholas, is charged with conveying false information to police.

It would be easy to blame this scandal on a malicious tipster and a couple of rogue cops. But the indictment of Goines, Bryant, and Garcia is also an indictment of the policies and practices that allowed this disastrous operation to unfold.

Michael Doyle, a lawyer hired by Nicholas’ family, says supervisors let the raid go forward even though they knew Goines had not properly documented his contact with the fictitious informant. Although Goines supposedly had been investigating Tuttle and Nicholas for two weeks, he did not know their names. And although his affidavit said he had “advised” the informant that “narcotics were being sold and stored” at the house, he cited no evidence of that.

Goines had a history of mishandling evidence and making dubious statements under oath. Over 12 years, The Houston Chronicle found, Goines obtained nearly 100 no-knock warrants like the one used in this case, almost always claiming that informants had seen firearms in the homes he wanted to search. But he reported recovering guns only once, a pattern no one seems to have noticed.

The Chronicle also found that, notwithstanding an expert consensus that undercover officers should be frequently rotated to other assignments, 71 officers have served a decade or more in the HPD’s Narcotics Division, which at the time of the Harding Street raid had gone 19 years without an audit. You can start to see how the division might have developed a culture of insularity and impunity that led Goines to believe he could get away with his deadly fraud.

The Harris County District Attorney’s Office is reviewing more than 2,000 cases in which Goines and Bryant were involved and has already dropped charges against dozens of defendants. Yet even after Goines’ lies were revealed, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said, “I don’t have any indication it’s a pattern and practice.”

After the raid, Acevedo described Tuttle and Nicholas’ home as a locally notorious “drug house” and “problem location.” He even claimed the couple’s neighbors, who publicly contested that description, had thanked police for raiding the house.

To this day, Acevedo erroneously insists that “we had a reason to be in that house” based on “probable cause.” He calls the officers who killed Tuttle and Nicholas “heroes.”

The raid prompted Acevedo to impose new restrictions on no-knock raids and belatedly require narcotics officers to wear body cameras while serving warrants. But it seems clear that more systematic reforms are required. Judging from his comments, Acevedo is not up to that task.

© Copyright 2019 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

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Families will argue this Thanksgiving.

Such arguments have a long tradition.

The Pilgrims had clashing ideas about how to organize their settlement in the New World. The resolution of that debate made the first Thanksgiving possible.

The Pilgrims were religious, united by faith and a powerful desire to start anew, away from religious persecution in the Old World. Each member of the community professed a desire to labor together, on behalf of the whole settlement.

In other words: socialism.

But when they tried that, the Pilgrims almost starved.

Their collective farming—the whole community deciding when and how much to plant, when to harvest, who would do the work—was an inefficient disaster.

“By the spring,” Pilgrim leader William Bradford wrote in his diary, “our food stores were used up and people grew weak and thin. Some swelled with hunger… So they began to think how…they might not still thus languish in misery.”

His answer: divide the commune into parcels and assign each Pilgrim family its own property. As Bradford put it, they “set corn every man for his own particular…. Assigned every family a parcel of land.”

Private property protects us from what economists call the tragedy of the commons. The “commons” is a shared resource. That means it’s really owned by no one, and no one person has much incentive to protect it or develop it.

The Pilgrims’ simple change to private ownership, wrote Bradford, “made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.” Soon they had so much plenty that they could share food with the natives.

The Indians weren’t socialists, either. They had property rules of their own. That helped them grow enough so they had plenty, even during cold winters.

When property rights are tossed aside, even for the sake of religious fellowship or in the name of the working class, people just don’t work as hard.

Why farm all day—or invent new ways of farming—when everyone else will get an equal share?

You may not intend to be a slacker, but suddenly, reasons to stay in bed seem more compelling than they did when your own livelihood and family were dependent on your own efforts.

Pilgrim teenagers were especially lazy. Some claimed they were too sick to work. Some stole the commune’s crops, picking corn at night, before it was ready.

But once Bradford created private lots, the Pilgrims worked hard. They could have sat around arguing about who should do how much work, whether English tribes or Indian ones were culturally superior, and what God would decree if She/He set rules for farming.

None of that would have yielded the bounty that a simple division of land into private lots did.

When people respect property rights, they also interact more peacefully.

At this year’s Thanksgiving dinner, if people start arguing about how society should be run, try being a peacemaker by suggesting that everyone should get to decide what to do with their own property.

If your uncle wants government to tax imports or thinks police should seize people’s marijuana, tell him that he doesn’t have to smoke weed or buy Chinese products, but he should keep his hands off other people’s property.

If your niece says everyone loves socialism now, remind her she has enough trouble managing her own life without telling the rest of the world what to do. When families don’t agree, they certainly shouldn’t try to run millions of other people’s lives.

In America today, religious groups practice different rites but usually don’t demand that government ban others’ practices. Private schools set curricula without nasty public fights. Businesses stock shelves without politicians fighting about which products they should carry.

All those systems work pretty well. That’s because they are private.

In most of our lives, private ownership makes political arguments unnecessary.

I’m thankful for that.

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