Bill de Blasio’s Proposed ‘Robot Tax’ Is Completely Unnecessary, Just Like His Candidacy

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s latest attempt to jump-start his inert presidential campaign includes a call for a new federal tax on robots. This unnecessary burden on businesses would expand the federal bureaucracy and fund boondoggle projects, and it is based on a faulty understanding of the relationship between jobs and automation.

In an column published last week by Wired, de Blasio outlines how his “robot tax” (his words) would work. Businesses that “eliminate jobs through increased automation” would be required to pay five years of payroll taxes, up front, for every employee replaced by a robot, de Blasio says. That tax revenue would be used to fund government make-work projects (not his words) in health care, the environment, and other areas.

“Displaced workers would be guaranteed new jobs created in these fields at comparable salaries,” de Blasio writes. “A ‘robot tax’ will help us create stable, good-paying middle-class jobs for generations to come.”

The tax plan comes with a new bureaucracy to regulate automation in the workplace: the Federal Automation and Worker Protection Agency, which would be in charge of determining which jobs were eliminated by automation and how much “robot tax” employers would owe.

“A worker pays income tax. You take away millions and millions of workers, that’s a lot less revenue to take care of all the things we need in our society, and it means, of course, millions and millions of people don’t have a livelihood,” de Blasio explained during an appearance on Fox News. Tucker Carlson nodded along as de Blasio said automation “could be the single most disruptive force in our society that we’ve ever experienced.”

It’s true that automation could disrupt to the American workforce significantly in coming years, but de Blasio—and others, including fellow Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who has centered his campaign on fears of automation-driven unemployment—is likely overstating the negative effects. Machines have been replacing manual labor literally for centuries, and that process has made society richer, safer, and healthier.

As technology advance, human jobs don’t disappear—they just change. The advent of the automobile meant there were fewer jobs in the carriage making and blacksmithing professions, but it created a host of new opportunities on assembly lines and in mechanic shops. The very blue-collar jobs that de Blasio wants to protect from automation were the result of a similar tech-driven disruption in the past.

Proposals like de Blasio’s are based on the notion that the current iteration of widespread automation is a greater threat than similar events in the past. Some studies seem to back that claim. De Blasio points to a Brookings Institution paper estimating that 36 million American jobs are “highly likely” to be automated in the next few decades. Another oft-cited study is a 2013 survey from Oxford University showing that nearly half of all jobs in the United States are at risk of being automated away during the next two decades.

But other studies suggest those fears are overblown. In 2017, the Centre for European Economic Research, a German think tank, found that the “automation risk for U.S. jobs falls from 38 percent to 9 percent when allowing for workplace heterogeneity.” That’s because “the majority of jobs involve non-automatable tasks” and “workers of the same occupation specialize in different non-automatable tasks.”

In other words, many workers won’t be displaced; they’ll simply take on different roles as parts of their jobs are automated. That makes a lot of sense. The automation of publishing—the very thing that allows you to read this article on a website instead of on a piece of paper stamped by a handset typeface—allows writers and editors to do different tasks and to work more efficiently.

Automation doesn’t just change how work is done; it actually creates more jobs than it destroys. As Reason‘s Ron Bailey explained in a 2017 feature:

When businesses automate to boost productivity, they can cut their prices, thus increasing the demand for their products, which in turn requires more workers. Furthermore, the lower prices allow consumers to take the money they save and spend it on other goods or services, and this increased demand creates more jobs in those other industries. New products and services create new markets and new demands, and the result is more new jobs.

Or consider what’s happened in the past few years. American companies installed more robots in 2018 than in any previous year, but the addition of more than 28,000 automated workers last year did not cause unemployment to spike. In fact, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of Americans working hit an all-time high.

“The world economy continually faces this cycle of disruption and reinvention. Yet we have more people working today than at any point in history,” writes Robert Huschka, director of strategies at the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), which tracks the number of robots involved in the American workforce. According to A3, the use of robotics in the workplace parallels overall employment trends—which is not what you’d see if robots were replacing workers on a large scale:

There’s no doubt that more advanced robots and the development of artificial intelligence will change how Americans work. But there’s nothing to suggest that this is a problem requiring an expensive new federal program. De Blasio’s “robot tax” is a desperate attempt by a flailing candidate to achieve some level of relevance by selling an economic panic.

From check-out scanners to MRI machines, robots have made us better off. Forcing future Americans to do manual labor that could be automated instead isn’t “saving” them from job losses—it’s trapping them in jobs that could be made more efficient, more productive, and more rewarding.

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English School Mandates Trousers for All Students

BBC reports:

Priory School in Lewes, East Sussex, made trousers compulsory for new and existing students for the new term.

The school said “concerns” had been raised over the length of girls’ skirts and new rules also catered for a handful of transgender pupils.

As best I can tell, the school is a government-funded school that’s something like what some American states call a “charter school”; despite the name, it doesn’t seem to be a religious school or what Americans would call a private school.

Unisex uniform policies are of course not unheard of, for instance in police departments or in the military. Pants are sometimes required for safety reasons; and, more broadly, rigid uniform requirements are sometimes imposed in paramilitary organizations (such as the police) for “morale and esprit de corps, and public confidence.” But my sense is that such requirements are on balance fairly unusual, even in institutions (such as schools) that have uniforms. And I think they’re hard to justify when there’s no real safety need, and when they’re not a condition of a government paycheck needed to improve the employee’s effectiveness.

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Did You Download an App that Connects to Your Rifle Scope? If So, the Justice Department Wants to Know Who You Are.

If you’ve ever downloaded a gun scope app called Obsidian 4, the Department of Justice wants to know about it. Rather than asking, it’s trying to order the app maker to hand over your personal data.

Thomas Brewster, a cybersecurity writer at Forbes, got his hands on a court order filed by the Department of Justice on September 5. The feds want the American Technology Network Corp. (ATN) to hand over personal data from the thousands of users who have downloaded an app that allows them connect their phone to certain rifle scopes and allows the recording and livestreaming of footage viewed through the scope.

It wants this info because Immigration and Customs Enforcement is trying to track down people who have been illegally exporting the scopes overseas. But rather than requesting information on specific potential suspects, they are fishing for the data on everybody who has download the app.

After Brewster got access to the filing, the court sealed it, so members of the public doesn’t have the opportunity right now to review the request on their own. ATN subsequently told American Military News that the Justice Department hadn’t contacted the company for any information about its users. Nor, it said, have Google or Apple. It added that it “will protect its customers and their identifying data to the absolute extent possible under U.S. law. And, it will not provide any information regarding the identity of our customers to any third party unless specifically required by law,”

That is good news for customers who care about their own privacy, because unfortunately, the private data stored on phone apps and online platforms still don’t have the same level of Fourth Amendment protections as private information you keep yourself. If the FBI wants to take your computer and inspect the private data you keep stored on there, agents have to get a warrant, based on probable cause that they suspect you have information stored there related to a criminal investigation. The data you share with apps and store online does not have the same level of privacy protections, and so police, prosecutors, and federal officials frequently attempt to take advantage of these looser standards to fish for data.

We’ve seen this before, as when the Justice Department attempted to track down the identities of every single person who had visited an anti-Trump “resistance” site because it was trying to identify people who had illegally disrupted events in D.C. during President Donald Trump’s inauguration. We’ve seen this play out on a local level as well, as police departments attempt to force Google and Apple to hand over the location data of the cellphones of people who just happened to be near the scene of a crime, even if they aren’t actually suspects.

It’s fortunate—and it’s good business!—that these tech companies are willing to stand up for users’ privacy when the government comes knocking. While Apple and Google haven’t responded to the Forbes story yet, Google does its best to keep user names anonymous when police sort through cellphone location records until they’ve narrowed it down to actual suspects. And it’s entirely possible that a judge will order the Justice Department to narrow its request in this case and not demand that ATN hand over the private data of everybody who has downloaded the app. But we should be concerned that the Justice Department keeps attempting to make these broad demands for private data and that they try to keep its efforts as quiet as possible.

Meanwhile, a bunch of people have decided to download the Obsidian 4 app even though they don’t have rifle scopes, and then post reviews stating that they’re doing so to express their objection to the Justice Department’s actions. Prior to this fishing expedition, interestingly, reviews of the app were not terribly positive and lots of users complained that it didn’t work properly, or at all.

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Congressional Report on ‘Deaths of Despair’ Highlights the Hazards of Drug Prohibition

Last week’s U.S. Joint Economic Committee report on “deaths of despair” shows that long-term trends in suicide and in deaths related to alcohol and illegal drugs cannot be fully explained by readily identified economic and social factors. It also shows that prohibition-based policies aimed at curtailing the harms caused by substance abuse may instead magnify those harms.

The report notes that by 1920, the year that National Alcohol Prohibition took effect, alcohol-related mortality “had fallen from its 1907 high of 15.1 deaths per 100,000 to just 1.1,” but “alcohol-related deaths actually rose through much of Prohibition.” In the 1930s and ’40s, “alcohol-related deaths were much further below their pre-1920 high than were suicide deaths, even though alcohol consumption had risen nearly back to its old high by the mid-1940s.”

The report notes that alcohol consumption continued to rise and “hit a new peak in 1980,” which it says “may account for much of the rise in alcohol-related deaths between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s.” Yet the age-adjusted rate of alcohol-related deaths “actually peaked in 1974 at 10.2 per 100,000,” while alcohol consumption was still rising. Consumption “fell significantly after 1980,” and alcohol-related deaths continued falling through 2000.

Per capita alcohol consumption has increased since then, but it remains far below the 1980 peak. Meanwhile, according to the Joint Economic Committee report, the rate of alcohol-related deaths among middle-aged non-Hispanic whites rose to 24.3 per 100,000 in 2017, the highest level ever recorded.

The relationship between per capita alcohol consumption and alcohol-related deaths is clearly not straightforward or proportional. Drinking patterns also matter. Since 2000, the prevalence of “binge drinking”—defined (rather arbitrarily) as consuming five or more drinks on one “occasion” for men and four or more drinks for women—has risen by 0.72 percent a year, according to a 2018 meta-analysis of survey data. That is more than twice as big as the annual increase in total alcohol consumption. Furthermore, the increases “were large and positive for ages 50 to 64 and 65 and up, and smaller, negative, or nonsignificant [depending on the survey] for ages 18 to 29.”

Given the importance of drinking patterns, it is not surprising that alcohol-related deaths rose during Prohibition. By making commerce in alcoholic beverages illegal, Prohibition drove a shift from beer and wine toward distilled spirits, which are easier to smuggle and conceal because they pack more doses into the same volume. Prohibition also made alcoholic beverages more dangerous, since black-market booze could contain dangerous contaminants, such as the methanol that was added to industrial ethanol under a government edict aimed at discouraging diversion. And Prohibition replaced a culture of moderate drinking with an all-or-nothing ethos that encouraged rapid consumption on the sly.

The story of drug prohibition is similar. The Joint Economic Committee report notes that drug-related deaths were already falling by the early 1900s, before Congress banned nonmedical use of opiates and cocaine in 1914. But “drug-related deaths have been rising at an accelerating rate since the late 1950s,” notwithstanding the government’s increasingly expansive and aggressive efforts to suppress the illegal drug trade. “The increase has been especially sharp over the past 20 years,” the report notes. And while “the proliferation of opioid deaths was initially a result of oversupply and abuse of legal prescription narcotics,” the report says, “the crisis…shifted toward illegal drugs—first heroin and then more lethal synthetic opioids like fentanyl”—after “policy changes restricted the supply and form of prescribed opioids.”

The upward trend in opioid-related deaths not only continued but accelerated after the government succeeded in reducing opioid prescriptions, pushing nonmedical users toward black-market substitutes. It’s not hard to see why: Legally produced opioids come in uniform, predictable doses, while illegal opioids vary widely in potency, making fatal mistakes more likely. The emergence of fentanyl and its analogs as heroin boosters and replacements has only magnified that hazard. Based on mortality data published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, combined with drug use estimates from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health and the RAND Corporation, heroin is roughly eight times as deadly as prescription opioids.

Just as prohibition made drinking more dangerous, it has made drug use more dangerous, both by favoring more-potent products and by creating a black market where consumers do not know what they are buying. After considering the broader puzzle posed by “deaths of despair,” the report concludes that “we clearly remain in the grip of a national opioid crisis that requires the attention of policymakers.” But depending on the form that attention takes, it can easily make matters worse rather than better.

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Boat Company and Border Officials Tell Different Stories About Rejection of Dorian-Displaced Bahamians

Confusion over rules for Bahamians fleeing hurricane. Bahamas residents displaced by Hurricane Dorian were told that they could come to the U.S. by simply showing their passports and police records—no visa needed. But when a boatful of Bahamians was bound for Florida from Freeport on Sunday, its passengers were told that if they didn’t have visas, they had to get off the boat.

Hundreds of passengers “trying to evacuate [were told they] could leave with Bahamian passport and police record like normal but then ferry crew says US Government called and changed plan last minute,” tweeted WSVN-TV reporter Brian Entin last night. “One woman told Entin that as many as 130 people left the ferry after the announcement,” reported CNN.

Disbelief and outrage spread quickly…

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) denies that there has been a rule change.

“CBP continues to process the arrivals of passengers evacuating from the Bahamas according to established policy and procedures—as demonstrated by the nearly 1,500 Hurricane Dorian survivors who arrived at the Port of Palm Beach, Fla., aboard a cruise ship on Saturday and were processed without incident,” the agency said in a statement.

As for the ship in question, “CBP was notified of a vessel preparing to embark an unknown number of passengers in Freeport and requested that the operator of the vessel coordinate with U.S. and Bahamian government officials in Nassau before departing The Bahamas,” said the agency. “CBP is not denying or discouraging evacuation efforts and empathizes with the plight of the Bahamian people.”

But CBP’s statements have only added to the confusion. The agency’s website states that “Bahamian citizens who meet the requirements…may apply for admission to the United States without a visa at one of the US Customs and Border Protection Pre-clearance Facilities located in Nassau or Freeport International Airports.” One of these requirements is that Bahamians arrive in the U.S. by plane.

Entin followed up on his initial tweets by noting that the flight/boat distinction had been temporarily suspended due to Hurricane Dorian, and Bahamas citizens who would otherwise be permitted without a visa were still OK if they came by boat.

CBP officials in Florida blamed the boat company, Balearia, for passengers being told otherwise. Balearia is blaming CBP.


FREE MINDS

“It’s time to create a libertarian ecosystem that doesn’t welcome racists,” writes Bonnie Kristian at The Week, echoing sentiments voiced by Tim Carney and Ross Douthat about Republicans and the right:

The American right’s racism problem is not about conservative ideas per se. That racists like some of the same things you like does not, of itself, make those things racist (though certainly it may prompt their re-examination)—see The New York Times‘ Ross Douthat’s recent column teasing out some of this distinction. But, as Carney and Douthat both describe, the mainstream conservative movement has not made itself adequately inhospitable to racism.

“Every extended conversation I have with 20-something conservatives includes a discussion of how to deal with racist flirtations in their peer group,” says Douthat, while Carney calls his fellow conservatives to the urgent task of “doing something to make clear that conservatism and racism don’t mix.”

Let me call libertarians to do the same.

Whole thing here.


FREE MARKETS


ELECTION 2020

The latest Democratic candidate rankings, courtesy of a new ABC News/Washington Post poll:

    • Joe Biden: 27 percent (-2 points from July)
    • Sen. Bernie Sanders: 19 percent (-4 points from July)
    • Sen. Elizabeth Warren: 17 percent (+6 points since July)
    • Sen. Kamala Harris: 7 percent (-4 points from July)
    • Pete Buttigieg: 4 percent (total unchanged)


QUICK HITS

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Study Finds That the Vast Majority of Respiratory Diseases in Vapers Are Linked to Illegal THC Products

According to a new report on patients in Illinois and Wisconsin who experienced severe respiratory illnesses after vaping, 83 percent admitted using black-market cannabis products. While 17 percent said they had used nicotine only, some of them may have been reluctant to admit using illegal drugs, and it’s not clear that any of them were using standard e-cigarettes.

These findings cast further doubt on the wisdom of general warnings about “vaping” and “e-cigarettes,” which imply that legal nicotine products are implicated in these cases. Such warnings may encourage former smokers who are now vaping to start smoking again, a decision that exposes them to much greater health risks.

The new study, reported Friday in The New England Journal of Medicine, focused on 53 patients who had vaped within 90 days of their symptoms, typically within the previous week. Their median age was 19, and nearly a third were younger than 18. Among the 41 patients who were “extensively interviewed,” 80 percent reported using THC products, 7 percent mentioned CBD products, and 17 percent said they had vaped nicotine only. The authors note that “information on product use is based on reports by the patients, and patients may be reluctant to report illicit drug use.”

The description of the vapes used by the patients indicates that most were black-market products represented as containing cannabis extracts. “Patients reported using 14 distinct brands of THC products and 13 brands of nicotine products in a wide range of flavors,” the researchers say. “The most common THC product that was reported was marketed under the ‘Dank Vape’ label (reported by 24 of 41 interviewed patients [59%]). Patients reported use of a number of different e-cigarette devices to aerosolize these products.”

It’s not clear whether any of the products in the THC-only cases were closed-system devices such as Juul, as opposed to refillable vaporizers. Nor is it clear whether the cartridges or e-liquids used in the devices were legally produced, illegal knockoffs, DIY solutions, or mystery fluids concocted by third-party suppliers.

At last count, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had identified “over 450 possible cases,” including five fatalities, in which pulmonary diseases may have been caused by vaping. Data from California and New Mexico, like the Illinois and Wisconsin cases analyzed in the NEJM study, point to THC products as the main issue.

E-cigarettes have been in wide use for years, while these cases have cropped up only recently. It therefore seems likely that the agents responsible for the symptoms are relatively new.

The theory currently favored by public health officials investigating lung diseases among vapers, The New York Times notes, is that “some dangerous chemical or combination of chemicals has been introduced into the pipeline of vaping products.” Investigators “believe that when people vape this noxious cocktail, it sets off a dangerous, even lethal, reaction inside the lungs.” They “have said repeatedly that they do not yet know which substance or device may be causing this reaction, and that is the subject of their urgent investigation.”

One possible culprit, identified in most samples of cannabis extracts tested by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and health officials in New York, is vitamin E acetate, an oil-based nutritional supplement that may be dangerous when inhaled. “Legally sold nicotine based e-cigs are not harmless,” former FDA chief Scott Gottlieb said on Twitter last week. “But most of these severe cases, so far, appear to be symptoms that can occur when either oils or lipid-containing substances enter lungs. This points to illegal products that are being cut with dangerous chemicals as a culprit.” He added that “legitimate e-liquids are generally based on chemicals that are water soluble, not oils that can cause acute lung injury.”

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The Joyful Contrarianism of Gordon Tullock

What kind of crank wants to put bayonets in steering wheels, praises political corruption as “working out rather well,” and thinks that competition can be harmful and should be discouraged? Gordon Tullock, the late George Mason University professor of law and economics, made all those arguments with a (more or less) straight face, while also helping invent the then-new discipline of sociobiology. His insights have proven to be more durable, and more sensible, than his many critics expected.

To be fair, economists tend to value counterintuitive arguments, where surprising conclusions emerge from innocuous assumptions. In 2019, we will pass the 70th anniversary of the Communist takeover of China, an event that Tullock witnessed in person from the vantage point of his diplomatic post in Tientsin. That experience launched his thinking about the problem of governance, anarchy, and the importance of rules. Looking back, many of the insights that powered his work from that time—once dismissed not just as counterintuitive but as outlandish—have now become conventional wisdom.

There are lots of contributions worth examining, including his work on voting, bureaucracy, and constitutional theory. But those fit reasonably well into the “public choice” tradition, which Tullock helped found, and are easily accessible to those interested in that approach. I will consider three of Tullock’s less well-known, but probably even more important, insights—regarding safety regulation, corruption, and the rationality of evolved behaviors—and see how this work has stood the test of time. The three are very different, but they are unified by one feature that is the hallmark of the economic approach: In every case, Tullock reached a conclusion but pressed further to ask, “And then what?”

Safety Regulations

Should governments mandate more safety in products? The usual terms of debate weigh reduced injuries—the “human toll”—against increased cost, with only heartless “rational choice” trolls actually worrying much about costs. The idea that perfect safety is morally undesirable, because such policies have enormous opportunity costs, is obviously, annoyingly important—and a big part of the reason economists often end up standing alone at parties, studying the wallpaper pattern.

Safety is valuable, of course. But economists pitch their arguments “at the margin,” meaning for the last increment. The first improvements in safety are cheap and uncontroversial: reliable brakes, turn signals, seat belts, safety glass in windshields. The next increment—airbags, anti-lock braking systems—comes at much greater cost and with a smaller associated reduction in injuries. Ultimately, the only way to make cars completely safe is to park them and throw away the keys. Driving is dangerous.

Tullock’s contribution was to ask, “And then what?” The problem is worse, actually much worse, than the increasing marginal cost of safety improvements. The safety of the car, after all, is just one factor; drivers and their attitudes toward danger are the key missing variable. The state can only mandate the safety of the car. Ultimately, the driver’s behavior determines the risk of driving.

This observation is now sometimes called the “Peltzman Effect,” after the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman, but Tullock had argued some versions of it for decades. As the University of California, Irvine economist Richard McKenzie recalls it, Tullock noticed that safer cars reduced the costs of accidents for drivers. If the government “subsidizes” accidents by mandating airbags, there will be more accidents. Worse, because of increased automobile speed and recklessness, there will be more pedestrian injuries and deaths. Safer cars mean more injuries.

Tullock’s famous counterproposal was to place a long, sharp dagger firmly in the center of the steering column. His earliest notion of this was to have the tip pointing back and locked one inch from the driver’s chest. By the time I talked to him about it, in the 1990s, the idea had evolved to work more like an airbag, so that the dagger would be hidden but would deploy with explosive force in the event of an accident.

Calling this conclusion counterintuitive is an understatement—but there is an important insight underlying Tullock’s drollery. The risk of injury is jointly determined by the behavior of all the people who are driving in a particular area. If I’m aggressive and cause a wreck, I’ve imposed additional risk on you. If safety “improvements” subsidize risk-taking, and some—not all, necessarily, just some—people drive more aggressively, then the observed reductions in injuries from safer cars will be much less than regulators expect. Worse, no individual driver can, by behaving safely, escape these bad effects. Safety regulations have negative externalities.

The most annoying thing about Tullock was that he was usually right. He was even right about car safety regulation (though maybe not about the dagger!): According to the American Automobile Association, there have been substantial increases in driver aggressiveness since 2000, with eight out of 10 drivers admitting to having intentionally tailgated another car and nearly half saying they have bumped, rammed, or gotten out of their cars to threaten the occupants of another vehicle. While the direct causal mechanism is complex, this increase in aggressiveness tracks the imposition of universal requirements for airbags and anti-lock brake systems in 1998.

This problem is borne out in the real “national sport” of America, NASCAR. Starting in 1988, the racing entity imposed “restrictor plates” as a safety measure, limiting the airflow into an engine (and therefore the horsepower, and speed, of cars). Restrictors were required in response to the horrific “going airborne” May 1987 accident of Bobby Allison at Talladega, where the car flew into the upper restraining fence and disintegrated, injuring five spectators, including one who lost his eye. But two refereed journal articles, one in the Southern Economic Journal in 2004 by J.B. O’Roark and W.C. Wood, and one in 2010 in Public Choice by A.T. Pope and R.D. Tollison, concluded that safety improvements had increased the number of crashes and multi-car pileups in the sport (though they had not affected the total number of deaths).

That is what you would expect. If speeds are suppressed and safety equipment is improved, the risks of death and serious injury are lowered. The result should be increases in risky behavior by drivers, including close drafting and “trading paint,” the euphemism NASCAR uses for high-speed bumping.

In February 2018, NASCAR switched from restrictor plates to the more precise and consistent “tapered spacers,” which have the same effect and the same “safety” rationale. The 2018 NASCAR “Cup Series” champion, Joey Logano, was clear about the likely outcome: “I totally expect to crash more cars,” the Associated Press quoted him saying. “As cars are closer and drivers are more aggressive, a mistake will create a bigger crash. We can’t get away from it.”

Of course, Tullock would ask, “And then what?” NASCAR is not stupid; it may not be an accident (sorry) that there are more crashes with the same level of driver safety. That may very well be the point: NASCAR fans come for the racin’, but they stay for the wreckin’. Using a “safety” rationale—particularly one that really does reduce injuries slightly—as a means of increasing the number of wrecks makes a lot of economic sense. If the authorities really wanted to prevent accidents, NASCAR would put big daggers in steering columns, not little tapered spacers in carburetors.

Corruption

Corruption may or may not be illegal, but it’s always a bad thing. Isn’t it?

Some think of corruption—the misuse of public trust in the powers of political office for private gain—as comparing (a) the honest services and choices of a public official with (b) actions “corrupted” by considerations that are not legitimate. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig has claimed that a decision is corrupt if the official is improperly, even if only subtly, influenced by the anticipation of some sort of economic gain or loss. Fordham University law professor Zephyr Teachout has claimed that if a public official acts in consideration of a private benefit outside of the standard compensation for his or her office, the action is automatically corrupt.

Suppose, though, you are an entrepreneur in a developing nation and you have a good idea for a new company. It normally takes six months to have a telephone or internet line set up, because the state monopoly utility company is notoriously inefficient. But if you pay lagay (“speed money” in Tagalog), or if you khilana para (“feed him” in Hindi), a happily willing, competent work crew will be there tomorrow. Who will actually cough up the cash? Whoever values the service most. Which means that the most economically productive firms and the best new ideas will get to jump the queue.

In a system with bad rules or limited state capacity, tacit endorsement of corruption improves the working of the system. The more inefficient the system, the greater the efficiency increase in the near term, as scarce resources are directed first to higher-value uses.

But as Tullock asks, “And then what?” In this case, two things happen. First, because the scarcity of the resources is artificial and discretionary, the state actors who formally and informally control those resources will adjust access strategically so as to increase the quantity of “rents” (i.e., undeserved benefits) they receive. In my example, the phone company might announce a mandatory two-year waiting period, increasing the value of access to the “informal” workaround of bribes. Second, those with control over the resources and thus access to the rents will start competing—very likely by offering bribes of their own—to maintain their lucrative positions.

Tullock noticed this phenomenon for himself at several points during his career. When he was briefly in private practice as an attorney in Chicago, his job as a junior associate involved paying bribes to minor officials in the Kelly-Nash political machine to ensure that his firm had fast access to records that might otherwise take weeks to secure through normal channels. Later, while working for the U.S. Foreign Service in Tientsin, China, he had the experience of being there on the ground during the Communist takeover of 1948–49.

Tullock was struck by a presentation from an academic who decried the corrupt practices of the Chiang Kai-shek regime in Taiwan but lauded the new Communist regime on the mainland. In particular, the academic pooh-poohed the supposedly “restrictive” travel policies of the Communists, noting that it was easy to bribe officials to obtain passes.

To Tullock, both regimes seemed corrupt. But he also realized that corruption, far from being an immediate problem, was the only thing that made the cumbersome Rube Goldberg governing mechanisms work at all. “While corruption usually meets with disapproval,” he wrote in Contemporary Economic Policy in 1996, “it may have some redeeming features. It may make possible smaller or no salary payments to officials who, if carefully supervised, will still carry out their functions on a fee-for-service basis. The purchase of government jobs usually is thought to be corrupt, but in some cases, it has worked out quite well.”

He filed this lesson away in the late 1940s and often came back to puzzle over it for the next 65 years. If corruption is actually a benefit—at least in countries with bad institutions or sharply limited state capacity—then what is the problem? All we need to do is suggest that developing nations cultivate corrupt systems and voilà! Problem solved.

Of course, that’s not right, and this realization is what led Tullock to his signature contribution to the study of public policy: the problem of “rent-seeking.” In China, he said, officials write laws with the explicit expectation of selling “permits” that would exempt the “customers” from having to obey the regulation. In addition, officials may purposely limit the total number of exemptions so they can auction them off to the highest bidder. In the short term, corruption is a workaround for bad government, but in the long run corruption locks in bad government and encourages abuses of state power.

Tullock used the example of an official in Fukien (now Fujian), a province from which many citizens illegally traveled to Indonesia to work, returning with substantial sums of cash and goods. Local officials set up elaborate programs under which going abroad to work was technically not allowed but in fact actively encouraged for those who could expect to earn good wages. Officials charged licensing fees that were high enough to substantially enrich the “sellers,” but they made sure the cost was not so high that it would deter workers from traveling abroad in the first place.

The problem is that the system became firmly entrenched, and the bribes came to be capitalized in the “prices” for getting a job as a local official in Fukien. In fact, the “salaries” of government officials could be rendered as negative numbers. The opportunity to collect bribes was so lucrative that the positions were essentially sold as franchises, with officials paying their superiors, who paid their superiors, and so on.

This system, once in place, is nearly impossible to root out. In open, noncorrupt systems, parents might save or borrow to pay for law school or some other training for their children. But in a corrupt system, people save or borrow to pay the bribes necessary to get the kinds of jobs where bribes from citizens provide a good living. If a new, reform-oriented government comes into office, the reaction from government officials is likely to be fierce, possibly violent. After all, they paid for their corrupt jobs fair and square, and they expect to be able to collect.

“Evidence suggests that officials tended to draw a large part of their personal income from bribes,” Tullock wrote in his 1996 paper. “Indeed, it is almost certain that once a government structure has been set up so various people make profits, changing the structure in such a way to shrink the profits will be extremely hard, regardless of whether the profits are legal or not. Firing civil servants may be even harder than firing college professors.”

A passage from a recent New York Times article on illegal “sand-mining” in India puts the situation in stark relief: “Construction is the business where criminals have the best opportunities to launder the most money, [one real estate agent] explained, and a cascade of bribes go ‘to the topmost levels in the government.’…You pay 6 percent in bribes up front. Then, after the first payment, you pay another 7 percent, half of which goes to the state’s top politicians. The development authority’s junior engineer gets 3 percent. The associate engineer gets 1.5 percent. The senior manager gets 3 percent, and so on—until the total reached an astonishing 30 percent.”

For Tullock, the really interesting question is not why so many governments are corrupt. Instead, the puzzle is how any government manages to solve this problem and avoid corruption. The benefits, to those in power, of creating arbitrary restrictions and then selling indulgences to exempt the wealthy and powerful seem irresistible. The U.S. Internal Revenue Code is replete with relatively high income tax rates, at least on paper. But as each industry or investment group pays its “bribe” to Congress by organizing voting support, making campaign contributions, and the like, the actual rates to which it is subject are reduced, often sharply, via esoteric subsidies, tax credits, or deductions.

In the early 16th century, Martin Luther recognized this kind of corruption in the Catholic Church. In his “Thesis 27,” Luther complained of priests “who say that as soon as the coin jingles into the money box, the soul flies out of purgatory.” He was referring to an actual jingle, dating to long before Mad Men—perhaps the first ever used in advertising. A little rhyme, attributed to a German monk named Johann Tetzel (1465–1519), translates to: “As soon as the money in the chest rings, a soul from purgatory to heaven springs.” The very idea of judgment had been hijacked by some members of the Church as a way to increase their revenue, selling “Get out of purgatory” cards.

A lot of work has been done since Tullock first wrote about this problem. Our understanding of the temptations of corruption, especially in developing nations—he called it “the transitional gains trap” in a famous article in 1975—is now standard economics. But Tullock saw the problem clearly in the 1950s.

Bio-Economics

Many scholars—think of Karl Marx, F.A. Hayek, Ronald Coase, Douglass North, and Elinor Ostrom, just to start—have claimed that human societies are complex adaptive systems that are subject to evolutionary processes. Evolution requires at a minimum two dynamic forces: a source of variation and a source of selection. In biology, variation comes from genetic mutations, while selection comes from predation and competition for space and resources, both within and across species. But in market systems, the source of variation is entrepreneurial energy and creativity, and the source of selection is the requirement that private organizations must cover their cost of operations—the “profit and loss” test explained so clearly by Ludwig von Mises.

Evolved systems are internally coherent, sometimes so much so that they may appear to have been designed. The Anglican clergyman William Paley famously argued in Natural Theology (1902) that the extraordinarily complex structures we call “eyes” demonstrate the existence of a designer. Paley famously used the metaphor of a watchmaker: If someone finds a watch, it’s only sensible to conclude that there must be a watchmaker to design such a complex and highly functional instrument.

Yet the “coherence” produced by evolution is not the same as efficiency, equity, or any other admirable property. One of the most coherent, and persistent, arrangements of matter on Earth are the insects called “cockroaches.” No one would claim they are good. They just are. The same thing might well be said about the outcomes of public choice processes. It is perfectly true that institutional structures of domination and control may be persistent features of political economies that survive. But that tells us nothing about whether these features are desirable.

In economics, evolutionary forces are conceived as operating through markets. Yet for nonhuman species, markets are not available as an institutional context for interaction. That would appear to imply that biology and economics are separate, and cannot be approached with any similar models. If you want to study biology, you have to stop being an economist.

Tullock thought that was wrong. It’s true that Darwin’s “natural selection” takes the form of profit in markets and survival in biology, but a closer look shows surprising similarities. “Indeed, it could be argued that I have never left economics,” he wrote in 1979, “that all of my ‘biological’ articles are simply economics articles in which I have rather unusual sets of entities maximizing a rather unusual utility function.” In other words, economists can study the efficient allocation of resources among competing desirable ends, regardless of whether those maximizing choices are being made by consumers or animals and plants.

As early as 1971, Tullock, in a letter to the editor of The American Naturalist, recognized that biological optimization could be achieved even in “social” or behavioral patterns, rather than just in physical shape or function. He was notorious for reading obscure things that would trigger his future work. In this case, I’m afraid the explanation for his interest in the subject may have been the title of an article he cited in his letter: “Tits and Their Food Supply in English Pine Woods: A Problem in Applied Ornithology.” Admit it. That title caught your eye, too, didn’t it?

It turns out that the article, by J. Gibb, dealt with “coal tits,” a small perching bird common in much of Europe. Tullock noticed that there was a figure describing the “shopping behavior” (Tullock’s description, not Gibb’s) of coal tits in finding the eucosmid moths that were one of their primary food sources. The pattern of search used by the coal tit was very close to an optimizing “comparison shopping” algorithm that could have only been the result of a clever application of calculus.

Except, of course, that birds don’t know calculus—they don’t even know about “shopping.” Tullock’s point was that evolution selected for behavior that is clever “as if” the creatures were clever, even though they were not. Thus, it’s not just an animal’s shape, such as efficient wings or beaks adapted to particular food sources, but also behavior, even complex behavior, that can be passed on as part of a genetic lineage. As Tullock put it, “We need not, of course, argue that the coal tits have thought the matter out in the same way that human beings would. Presumably, they have inherited an efficient pattern of behavior resulting from natural selection which would eliminate inefficient heritable behavior patterns.”

Tullock noted that the analogy he was using—birds doing comparison shopping based on price as a mechanism for minimizing energy expenditure in finding and eating moths—may appear to be “bizarre.” But he argued convincingly for the value of the theory as a means of making predictions, and he was quite right.

The next question, as always, is “And then what?” Tullock thought that creatures which have developed highly specialized, precisely adapted behaviors may be more fragile, in the sense that they may have limited ability to adjust even to small changes in the environment. That’s why the coal tit’s decision rule was so interesting. The key variable in his analysis was energy expenditure, because “search” was expensive: Flying around looking for moth grubs in places where there are none uses up a lot of energy. Even if the coal tit did find a new source of food, it was likely no better than the sources it had already found. So according to Tullock, the coal tits adopted a “strategy” that involved always going back to the same place, but with an apparently random element in which they sometimes—it’s not clear why—looked somewhere else. That strategy is both efficient and robust with respect to changes in the environment, because the search combines known solutions and a random component for searching out new solutions.

Specifically, the coal tit was a “careful shopper” in the sense that it had an optimal pattern for finding nourishing grubs hiding in pine cones. The birds weren’t looking for lower prices, as a human shopper would. Instead, they were “hungry, lazy, and curious.” This approach meant that a change in the environment—say, a favorite copse of pine trees getting bulldozed—was not catastrophic, because the birds had pursued what game theorists call a “mixed” strategy: usually searching in places that have proved grub-dense but sometimes looking elsewhere.

In another paper, called “The Edge of the Jungle” (2005), Tullock explored how the “discipline of continuous dealings” undergirds the fundamental institutions of social order. To illustrate the problem of competition over scarce resources, he used the example of a pride of lions. It turns out smaller lions often engage in threatening behavior toward larger lions in an attempt to secure food. As Tullock pointed out, such behavior can only successfully deter larger lions if the smaller lion is prepared to fight, at least on occasion, if the larger lion does not give way. But this is problematic: If the larger lion “calls the bluff,” engaging in the fight is likely to end badly for the smaller lion.

What, then, leads smaller lions (sometimes) to not back down? “The mechanism which makes this possible, I believe, is ‘loss of temper,'” Tullock wrote. “Individuals make threatening noises about things that they want for rational calculations. The actual serious fighting…however, requires temporarily behaving in what is an irrational way. You threaten your opponent with irrational behavior on your part and the threat is indeed rational. Therefore, a built-in, hereditary reaction pattern such that you will, on occasion, behave irrationally may be quite rational in the long run.” The passage anticipates one of the central insights of evolutionary psychology: “Hard-wired” emotional responses can allow animals to engage in behavior that is evolutionarily advantageous but difficult to sustain under a regime of purely “rational” decision making in any particular situation.

If I fight, I might get hurt. But if the larger animal thinks I might go crazy and fight anyway, he’ll leave me alone.

This kind of argument was also developed by Friedrich Hayek, particularly in his book Law, Legislation, and Liberty. It relies on the existence of an evolutionary process that selects at the level of institutions or group norms rather than genes. As the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson famously (and controversially) said, “The competition between [selfishness and altruism] can be succinctly expressed as follows: Within groups, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. Or, risking oversimplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue.”

Emotions allow us to suspend our rationality and act in the interests of the group. If you see someone violate group norms (say, cutting in line at a ticket counter), your rational mind might say, “Let it go. You might get hurt.” But your evolved, emotional brain screams, “NO! YOU MUST FIGHT NOW!” even though cutting in line is a dumb thing to fight over.

On the other side, someone who tries to cut in line will likely experience shame—a physical reaction involving blushing and increased heart rate. Those negative feelings cause us to consider the reactions of others, even if we would rather not. Consequently, the group norm of queueing is supported even if there are no police around.

Tullock recognized this tendency even in himself. I say “even” because he saw himself, with some cause, as an extremist intent on choosing only the most rational course of action in any situation. But when he arrived on the Normandy beachhead as part of a replacement rifle detachment just seven days after the initial “D-Day” landing, Tullock was quite content simply to follow orders. He later wondered at this, because his rational mind thought the invasion was a bad idea: He saw the war as “three-sided” and worried that a defeat of Germany would leave a dangerous power vacuum. “I suspected that the end would leave Russia without any European country to hold them in check,” he wrote in 2002. “Nevertheless I had no particular doubts about going forward and perhaps being killed….I was clearly not selfishly maximizing.”

Notice the nuance in this account, which for Tullock amounted to an embarrassing tell-all of a moral failure. Not selfishly maximizing? Horrors. He was not a member of a rifle company because he was a slave fearful of punishment. Rather, his sense of belonging to a group, and his (acquired) respect for the norms of that group—ranging from patriotism when he was young to military training once he joined the Army—had been internalized.

This capacity for human social cooperation is what makes civilization possible, but it is also a psychological hook that demagogues can use to catch mass populations. As Napoleon is said to have bragged, his particular genius lay in his ability to make men willing to die for little pieces of ribbon. If he had had more ribbon, he claimed, he could have won more battles. Patriotism explains some of the best, and most of the worst, human behavior. And it’s a product of evolution, not reason.

‘And Then What?’

If we had to select a single question to always be asking politicians and regulators, Tullock’s “And then what?” would be a strong candidate. Some of Tullock’s work has been misinterpreted, perhaps willfully, to try to portray his perspective as extreme. He did not believe that it was descriptively accurate to claim that all creatures, including humans, always act to further only their own narrow self-interest. In fact, he believed that much of what determines whether people act virtuously or viciously depends on the system of rules in which they operate. And he certainly didn’t believe, as some have claimed, that people should act only in their self-interest, a common mischaracterization of the public choice school.

But it is true that he could be abrasive and enjoyed shocking his audience, either in lectures or in print. He did not cultivate a following, and in fact he could be rather hard on his friends. The last time I saw Tullock was at the 2008 Public Choice Society meetings. He wasn’t getting around very well, and his voice had lost its strength. He walked up and stared at me sideways through thick glasses, wheezing: “You don’t make sense.”

Here we go. “Why don’t I make sense, Gordon?”

“Because you have long hair. So you must be a leftist. But you are carrying an umbrella. So you must be a conservative. You don’t make sense.”

A crowd was gathering; I had to get out of this. “Yeah, well, Gordon, maybe I’m just complicated!” I exclaimed.

“No, no, no. I’ve read your work. It’s not complicated, just incoherent. There’s a big difference.” Then Tullock walked off, shaking his head with exaggerated pity. The onlookers, as the Brits say, fell about.

That abrasiveness was of a piece with Tullock’s view of rules and institutions. We can’t rely on love and mutual good feeling to guide the way we govern ourselves. If we do, there’s no way to handle sudden changes in the environment. To make the system robust, we have to design rule structures as if they were going to be operated by fools or knaves. Because as Tullock well knew, they almost certainly will be.

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Brickbat: Going Out with a Bang

In Georgia, Philip Woodward, the Juvenile Court judge for Whitfield and Murray counties, has announced his retirement, a week after a newspaper revealed he had fired a gun in his office at the Whitfield County courthouse several months earlier. Woodward told a sheriff’s office deputy who responded to the shot he was just getting a feeling for a new Glock pistol. Woodward said he took the magazine out and racked it to make sure it was empty. He said when he put the magazine back in he must have inadvertently chambered a round. He then pointed the gun to the floor under his desk and pulled the trigger. The sheriff’s office closed the case administratively without filing any charges.

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Former S.C. Congressman Mark Sanford Launches Longshot Primary Bid One Day After GOP Cancels S.C. Primary

Mark Sanford, a former governor and former congressman from South Carolina known for his fiscally conservative views, will challenge President Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination.

Sanford announced his primary bid on Sunday morning during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.” He told host Chris Wallace that Republicans have “lost our way” during the Trump years, and said he hoped his entry into the race would help spark “a real conversation on debt and deficits and government spending.” He joins former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld and former Illinois congressman Joe Walsh in trying to unseat Trump.

I am compelled to enter the Presidential Primary as a Republican for several reasons—the most important of which is to further and foster a national debate on our nation’s debt, deficits, and spending,” Sanford wrote on Twitter shortly after his announcement. “We, as a country, are more financially vulnerable than we have ever been since our Nation’s start and the Civil War. We are on a collision course with financial reality. We need to act now.”

Though it seems unlikely that Sanford will prevail against Trump—more on that in a moment—the entry of a candidate who wants to discuss the growing national debt and annual budget deficits should be welcomed. The national debt has ballooned from $19 trillion to more than $22 trillion under Trump’s watch, and the Congressional Budget Office says current policies have put the country on track for record-high levels of debt by the 2040s.

Sanford voted against the 2018 budget deal that passed a Republican-controlled Congress and was signed by Trump. He was no longer a member of Congress when another budget-busting spending plan was approved with bipartisan support and signed by Trump in July of this year.

In announcing his candidacy on Sunday, Sanford called Trump “king of debt”—repurposing a phrase Trump has used in the past to describe himself, positively, during his time as a real estate developer.

Politically, Sanford’s effort—like Weld’s and Walsh’s—is almost certainly doomed to fail. Despite Trump’s general unpopularity (just 39 percent approve of his handling of the job in the latest Gallup poll, while 57 percent disapprove), the current president is viewed favorably by more than 90 percent of self-identifying Republicans. In the few surveys that have included Trump’s Republican primary opponents, Sanford has so far not polled above 4 percent and Weld has rarely broken into double-digits.

The GOP has become the party of Trump, and the sitting president seems to have little to fear from Sanford or other “Never Trump” Republicans. He seems to know it, too:

Still, that only makes some recent decisions by Republican officials even more cowardly.

Republican parties in Arizona, Kansas, Nevada, and South Carolina are expected to cancel their 2020 primary elections, Politico reported earlier this week, in an attempt to limit the viability of the longshot anti-Trump efforts. Republican party officials and the Trump re-election campaign appear worried about an outcome along the lines of what happened in 1992, when upstart candidate Pat Buchanan scored 37 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary against incumbent President George H.W. Bush. Though Bush prevailed in the primary, the New Hampshire result changed the public perception of Bush and may have played a role in his eventual general election loss—the last time an incumbent president failed to win re-election.

The loss of the South Carolina primary—state party officials confirmed on Saturday that it would be scrapped—is a particular blow to Sanford, who may have been able to build some momentum against Trump with a good showing in his home state’s election, which would have come early in the primary schedule.

But Sanford seems realistic about the limitations of his primary campaign. “I don’t think anybody is going to beat Donald Trump,” he told Fox News in July. When pressed by Wallace to asses his chances on Sunday, Sanford offered a slightly more optimistic view. “I’m saying you never know,” he said.

Ironically, Trump’s takeover of the GOP blunted what would have once been a disqualifying detail from Sanford’s bio. He infamously disappeared for six days in July 2009—supposedly to hike a portion of the Appalachian Trail. In fact, he was having an extramarital affair with an Argentine woman, María Belén Chapur. Though he finished his term as governor, the incident changed the course of his political career.

Prior to La Affaire Argentine, Sanford was regarded as a possible White House contender. Following Ron Paul’s 2008 dark horse presidential run, he and then-governor of New Mexico Gary Johnson (along with, of course, Rand Paul) were often identified as the heirs apparent to the libertarian wing of the GOP.

“I wear it as a badge of honor, because I do love, believe in, and want to support liberty,” Sanford said in 2009 when he was labeled a “libertarian” by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.).

In the age of Trump, adultery is hardly political suicide anymore. But is there room in the Republican party for a fiscal conservative who opposes bailouts, loves Atlas Shrugged, and disdains political tribalism?

Probably not. When Sanford was defeated by a Trump-backed primary challenger in June 2018, the president openly celebrated the then-congressman’s second political demise with a tweet suggesting Sanford “would be better off in Argentina.”

That the thrice-married Trump, who has had at least one extra-marital affair with a porn star, has shown no reservations about attacking Sanford for his own infidelities provides a pretty good illustration of the current state of the GOP’s collective moral compass.

That Sanford is likely heading for an electoral pasting—one that he will receive while trying to talk substantively about the importance of the debt crisis facing America, while the current figurehead of the Republican Party retweets memes—provides an equally useful illustration about the health of his party.

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Hells Angels Meet Housewives on Harleys

On a rainy night in 1974, Charles Umbenhauer pulled his Yamaha motorcycle into the parking lot of a hotel in New Jersey so that he and his wife could wait out the storm before finishing their ride from his hometown of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to the Jersey shore. The front desk clerk would let them stay under one condition.

“If you push the motorcycle up the street there and it’s not in the parking lot, I’ll go ahead and rent you a room,” Umbenhauer recounted in 2008 to American Motorcyclist, the membership magazine of the American Motorcyclist Association (AMA).

The request stung Umbenhauer, who had served two years in the Army and considered himself an upstanding citizen. He and his wife, Carol, said no thanks. Instead they found a “really crappy” hotel that allowed them to keep their bike in the lot. A couple of years later, when a friend invited the couple to attend a new motorcycling group’s first rally for their rights at the Pennsylvania State Capitol, Charles and Carol hopped on the bike and went.

This was the ’70s, and bikers faced discrimination not just from fearful business owners but also from state and federal governments. A group called MAUL—Motorcyclists Against Unfair Legislation—wanted to broker a truce with lawmakers to oppose helmet laws and other restrictions. The coalition drew motorcyclists of all kinds. In particular, the wrong kind.

“We went to the rally, and I knew it wasn’t going to work,” Umbenhauer says. For starters, the group had shown up to the state legislature on a Sunday. “People were streaking, there were beer kegs, but there was no legislative session. I gave it a 10 on having a great time but a zero on doing something to benefit bikers.” The Associated Press reported the morning after that one motorcyclist rode around the rally naked “except for black socks” and that several riders had burned their helmets.

Umbenhauer voiced his concerns to other MAUL members, and they asked him to organize their next trip to the statehouse. His first act was to hold the event on a Monday. “I said we’re gonna do it when the legislature is in session, and someone said, ‘Half these people won’t come.’ And I said, ‘Good. We don’t need people drinking beer on the Capitol steps.'”

Over the next 40 years, Umbenhauer, now 74, and his fellow bikers organized, professionalized, and lobbied their way to legitimacy. But the victory has been bittersweet. Motorcyclists have more freedom than ever, but the gains they fought for are going to waste. Whether legitimacy has made motorcycling uncool or safety has simply become more of a priority, young people just aren’t becoming bikers. “My grandson,” Umbenhauer says, “doesn’t ride.”

Motorcycle interest groups are almost as old as motorcycles. Munich’s Hildebrand & Wolfmüller began mass-producing motorrads in 1894. During the next 10 years, engineers in the United Kingdom and the United States followed suit, launching such iconic motorcycle brands as Triumph, Indian Motorcycles, and Harley-Davidson. These new machines—not as big or as fast as cars, far more powerful than bicycles—drew fans and haters alike.

“The peculiar character of the motor bicycle has left its status open to various definitions, and as a result in many states…the laws applying to big motor cars are brought to bear on motorcycles with oppressive force,” reads a notice published in The New York Times on August 24, 1903. Authored by the leaders of the Alpha Motor Cycle Club and the New York Motor Cycle Club, the notice likely referred to the patchwork of road laws then governing gasoline-powered vehicles, which were considered a nuisance. Some cities required vehicles to have hand-operated noisemaking devices that drivers were supposed to honk and ring whenever they drew near pedestrians. Other cities weren’t sure whether to treat motorcycles like pedal-powered bicycles (which they closely resembled) or like cars.

New York riders wanted to protect themselves as cities and states figured out new rules for the era of gasoline. “One cannot freely pass from one state into another without fear of arrest because of such laws,” the notice continues. “To combat such measures, to insist that the highways are free to all alike, and that the right to use them is irrevocable, is one of the objects to be served by organization.” They would go on to name the new group the Federation of American Motorcyclists.

By 1910, motorcycles were coming into their own as a feature of daily American life. Motorcycle cops chased down baddies, adrenaline junkies broke speed records, and the U.S. military learned biker messengers were twice as fast as riders on horseback. After visiting the 1910 motorcycle trade show in Madison Square Garden, the Times‘ C.F. Wyckoff declared that these “little distance annihilators” had graduated from the “poor man’s automobile” to a “pleasure vehicle” and a “utility vehicle.”

Through the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, motorcycles made headlines for miraculous feats (“MOTORCYCLISTS ON WAY: Two Argentinians Reach Mexico City En Route to New York”), for upsetting the apple cart (“Town Hunts Motorcyclist; Broke 30-Year Sabbath Calm”), and for their role in daily life (“DOG TRAILS MOTORCYCLISTS; Hunts for Dead Owner, Killed in Crash”). Much ink was spilled on accidents, but the same was true for cars back then. All of which is to say that motorcycle culture was considered an anodyne subgenre of sporting and adventure.

That assessment began to change toward the end of World War II, when some American veterans started riding stateside for camaraderie and to escape the disorienting placidity of post-combat life. “Searching for relief from the residual effects of their wartime experiences, [veterans] started seeking out one another just to be around kindred spirits and perhaps relive some of the better, wilder social aspects of their times during the war,” William Dulaney wrote in a 2005 issue of the International Journal of Motorcycle Studies. Former American airmen even brought their wartime style to motorcycling: leather jackets to protect them from the elements, goggles to protect their vision.

The nonrider view of bikers changed permanently for the worse when the Pissed Off Bastards of Bloomington and the Booze Fighters Motorcycle Club showed up at a hill-climbing event in California hosted by the AMA in 1947. Other rowdies showed up as well, and together the interlopers supposedly shocked the small town of Hollister and their more straight-laced fellow riders by drinking to excess and brawling. At least, that’s how out-of-town media outlets portrayed the weekend. Aided by sensational coverage in the national media and The Wild One—Hollywood’s gussied-up retelling of the incident—the “Hollister riot” introduced Americans to a new type of biker.

It turned out to be a prelude to a full-on P.R. nightmare. In 1950, several members of the Pissed Off Bastards broke away to form a new group, which they named for the planes some of them had flown in the war. They called themselves Hells Angels.

After Hollister, the American Motorcyclist Association declared rowdy bikers personae non gratae and barred them from joining AMA chapters. The national press had dragged the organization into new and unfamiliar territory. Founded in 1924—a descendant of the Federation of American Motorcyclists, which folded during World War I—the AMA’s slogan at launch was “An organized minority can always defeat an unorganized majority.” The group spent most of its time organizing competitions and helping riders start local AMA clubs, similar to chapters. It also advocated for motorcyclists’ rights on the road. It was not prepared to take responsibility for supposedly traumatizing a small American town.

The troublemakers responded to their exclusion from the AMA by acting like an even smaller organized minority. They developed patches that mimicked those worn by AMA members, used military-style hierarchies to govern themselves, and set up clubs of their own. They took to calling themselves “one-percenters” and “outlaws,” labels apocryphally coined by the AMA itself in a statement after Hollister.

Newspapers still wrote light stories about speed records, but by the late 1960s, they were obsessed with the Hells Angels, Pagans, Warlocks, and Banditos. The Angels became arguably the most famous gang in America in 1965 when California Attorney General Thomas C. Lynch released a six-month study focused on the group’s activities in the state.

A new kind of headline began to appear in the same papers that had once celebrated the motorcycle: “Eight Are Arrested in the Torture of East Village Youth, 20, for Two Days”; “Hint of Summer Stirs Fears in Hells Angels’ Neighbors”; “California Takes Steps to Curb Terrorism of Ruffian Cyclists”; “New Hampshire Town Cleans Up After Quelling Cyclists Riot.”

Lawmakers and prosecutors went after the outlaw gangs, but that still left mainstream motorcyclists with the task of preserving their own reputation. The motorcycle industry and mainstream riders organized by the AMA collaborated to make a case for motorcycling as a wholesome American hobby, suitable for the whole family.

A magazine called Bike and Rider launched in 1971 with the motto “Motorcycle’s New Image.” An issue from August of that year features an ad discouraging bikers from cutting down their mufflers, a common practice that ratcheted up the decibel level of a motorcycle engine. “You see before you, death,” the ad copy reads. “You see, this rider kills. His instrument is noise, his weapon—a bike with muffler sawed away.” The ad, paid for by the Motorcycle Industry Council, concludes with the words “Noise kills.”

The very next page features an ad for the publication itself featuring a white man in a light-colored suit sitting side-saddle on a parked Honda. The copy reads, “The image portrayed by the new motorcycle enthusiast is no longer that of the outlaw, but that of the people: the dentist, the electrician, even the housewife.”

The motorcycle industry did its part as well. A Honda ad in a March 1973 issue of Sports Illustrated depicts a woman in corduroy pants atop a small-engine ST-90—the attitudinal antithesis of a big-engine Harley hog. She appears to be getting a riding lesson from her husband while her teenage children watch from the side. The ad copy: “At Honda, we want everyone to discover just how much fun motorcycling can be. Mom. Pop. Even the grandparents.” The family is standing in front of a suburban house with a green yard and a garage.

Speaking of Harley-Davidson: The company’s mass-market print ads from this era are not exactly family-friendly, but they’re not scandalous either. Spots featuring trim white men in stylish clothes, always wearing helmets when depicted in motion, conjure up Steve McQueen rather than Angels leader Sonny Barger or, well, a dentist. Harley sold craftsmanship, performance, and status to squares and the middle class. Bikers sold Harleys to each other in publications like Easyrider, the pioneering magazine by and for the bad boy set, which promised to publish “Entertainment for Adult Bikers.”

The AMA was helped on the P.R. front by its membership rolls. Issues of American Motorcyclist from the early 1970s featured a recurring column by Lois Gutzwiller called “Motor Maids,” featuring profiles of mild-mannered female AMA members. While the association began admitting people of color in the mid-1950s, the profile subjects are mostly middle-class white women with names like Norma and Mary Ann and Gerdi and Sue. The AMA’s entire October 1971 issue is dedicated to wholesome women riders. Mayra, a New Jersey librarian and grandmother, started riding after an introduction from her daughter; Jeanette, meanwhile, prefers being a passenger on her husband’s bike.

The public relations effort by motorcycling’s most upstanding citizens worked, at least a little bit. In between horrifying tales of biker gangs, The New York Times in 1971 found space for a story about the rise of white-collar motorcycle commuters. “The ‘cycle’ has grown in popularity in recent years for recreation and pleasure trips among some middle-class nonrebels,” the paper noted. “Motorcycle couriers delivering messages have been joined on the road by accountants, lawyers, stockbrokers, filmmakers, computer analysts, and letter carriers.”

Perhaps motorcycling would survive the Hells Angels. But winning the P.R. war wouldn’t matter if bikers couldn’t figure out how to win at politics as well. And by the end of the Summer of Love, it was clear to motorcycle groups that they were losing with legislators even if they were holding their own in the marketplace.

As the 1960s drew to a close, motorcycling groups and their members watched in frustration as the federal government made a small portion of highway funding contingent on states’ passing mandatory helmet and seat belt legislation. Pennsylvania’s 1968 helmet law was what drew Charles Umbenhauer to the statehouse in ’76. At the time, he didn’t like wearing a helmet and thought the choice should be left to individuals. In 1980, he joined ABATE—A Brotherhood Against Totalitarian Enactments, started by Easyriders magazine—to push for legislative changes. That’s when he saw how tough grassroots politics could be.

“We had to convince our members that ABATE needed to hire a lobbyist,” Umbenhauer says. “Then our first lobbyist told us we needed a political action committee. The bikers wanted to know why we needed a PAC, and the lobbyist said, ‘There’s only two things you can do for a legislator. You can vote for them, and you can give them money.’ The bikers were furious.”

Biker rage at the pay-for-play nature of politics makes sense. These men and women, many of whom had served in Vietnam, just wanted to choose whether or not to wear helmets. Hadn’t they and their loved ones paid enough for that right?

As it turns out, hiring a lobbyist and starting a PAC couldn’t get Pennsylvania motorcyclists what they wanted overnight. The state’s ABATE chapter reorganized in 1983 as the more mild-mannered Alliance of Bikers Aimed Toward Education, but it didn’t succeed at reforming Pennsylvania’s mandatory helmet law until 2003. Getting it done required Congress to drop the highway funding threat, and it required bikers to synthesize the P.R. efforts of the late ’60s and early ’70s with a keen understanding of state politics.

ABATE did more to improve its image than change the group’s name. In 1980, members began organizing an annual toy run for patients at the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania. Motorcycle clubs around the country had been doing that kind of community volunteer work for decades, and bikers in the Keystone State knew it would draw media attention and build goodwill with their neighbors. The volunteerism paid off in a more concrete way when Umbenhauer, who became ABATE’s lobbyist in 2000, ran into Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell at a toy run soon thereafter.

“Rendell said that if he ever became governor, he’d sign a helmet reform bill for us,” Umbenhauer says. “He knew who ABATE was and that we were organized and doing good things.” But first, Rendell needed bikers to vote for him in the statewide primary. Umbenhauer says he changed his registration from Republican to Democrat and encouraged his comrades to do the same.

“A lot of our people did that,” he says. “Ed won the primary and became the governor. The first two things he said he wanted to do after he was sworn in were bring gambling to Pennsylvania and change the helmet laws for bikers. And he did both of those things.”

Pennsylvania still has a helmet law, but it applies only to riders under 21. People over that age can forgo a helmet after they’ve been licensed for two years, or forgo it immediately by taking a state-approved motorcycle safety course. All riders of every age and experience level must wear eye protection, a concession that makes bikers less of a liability to other people on the road. Umbenhauer and ABATE call the new law “helmet choice,” which Umbenhauer sold with a nifty elevator pitch: “The only snappy one-liner I ever had was, ‘Hey man, we live in Pennsylvania, the cradle of liberty. Let those who ride decide.'”

Diehards like Umbenhauer are still lobbying to protect biker rights, but their constituency is dwindling. His son rides occasionally; his grandson has no interest. The lack of appeal is a little disheartening for a man who loves motorcycles so much that he asked his daughter to schedule her wedding around ABATE’s legislative calendar. Umbenhauer blames the internet and handheld devices, which provide young people with a different kind of thrill.

The reality is that the American motorcycle industry and the biker scene that supports it are both in a transition phase. Harley-Davidson, perhaps the most iconic motorcycle brand in the world, is relying on nostalgic boomers with deep pockets to keep it profitable while it tries to develop and market a bike that young Americans will buy and ride. And while outlaw biker gangs are still a thing here in the United States, Umbenhauer says, “they don’t have the biker wars anymore, burning down each other’s clubhouses and killing each other.” Umbenhauer is glad that those conflicts are (mostly) over. But he seems wistful that young Americans don’t see riding a motorcycle the way he did when he was their age.

In 1971, Easyriders columnist Don Pfeil wrote that “a chopper is just about the ultimate in ‘look at me—I’m different and I’m proud of it.'” Perhaps no symbol can claim that title in the internet age, when there are almost as many ways to be “different and proud of it” as there are people who want to say that about themselves.

American domestic motorcycle sales now make up roughly 2 percent of the global total, and the most popular bikes outside the U.S. are actually more akin to scooters. Small engines and light frames make them more nimble and thus better suited than American hogs for navigating congested streets in the densely populated cities of Europe and the developing world.

It might also be the case that bikers are victims of their own success. They worked hard for decades to raise the social standing of motorcyclists, and now any and every kind of person can commute to work on a motorcycle or cruise on the weekends. Young people might see boomer enthusiasm as a turnoff—the biker lifestyle can read as dated, like steakhouses and big Cadillacs. Maybe, to love a chromed hog and ape-hanger handlebars and the sound of a V-Twin hitting its sweet spot, you had to be alive and young when riding that kind of motorcycle was synonymous with opting out of polite society or bucking the generation that preceded you. Young people today have safer ways to opt out; meanwhile, their parents have matching helmets.

Umbenhauer made peace with that possibility earlier this year when he rode his Harley to a movie theater near Harrisburg to catch a 50th anniversary rerelease of Easy Rider. The 1969 film spoke to and for bikers in a way that no film has before or since. Peter Fonda’s character is neither a thug nor a square playing weekend warrior. He is instead the biker archetype—outside the system but also above it, neither itching for a fight nor scared of one. Umbenhauer was 24 when he first saw the movie. He worried the rerelease would sell out.

“I got there early,” he says. But he could’ve taken his time. There were no motorcycles in the parking lot and only about 20 people in the theater. “Everybody was either in a wheelchair or walking with a cane.”

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