Tag: hit&run

Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary Explains Donald Trump’s Success

“I have never in my life seen an economy like this. This is even better than the ’60s. It is phenomenal. And I think [it’s] primarily because of deregulation, not tax reform. My companies in California, in Texas, in Florida, in Illinois…have been set free.”—Kevin O’Leary

For the past 10 years, the reality TV show Shark Tank has entertained and edified millions of viewers by dramatizing how entrepreneurs pitch venture capitalists. And none of the “sharks”—the investors who compete with each other to fund businesses they think will be successful—is more entertaining or edifying than Kevin O’Leary, whose signature insult to unsuccessful contestants—”You’re Dead To Me”—has become a pop culture catchphrase.

But O’Leary isn’t just a small-screen blowhard. Born and raised in Canada, the 65-year-old investor got rich by developing educational and family-oriented computer software in the 1980s and ’90s and holding firm to a gospel of thrift, savings, and reinvestment that he’s outlined in best-selling books such as Cold Hard Truth on Men, Women, and Money. Over the years, he’s diversified his investments into vineyards, storage facilities, and more, and he’s dabbled in politics, too, briefly considering a run in 2017 to head the Conservative Party in Canada. His brash nature earned him easy comparisons to Donald Trump but O’Leary, who lives in Boston, is openly free trade and pro-immigration. He’s long been in favor of marijuana legalization and gay rights and opposed to military interventionism.

Nick Gillespie sat down with O’Leary at FreedomFest, the annual gathering of libertarians in Las Vegas. They talked about why Shark Tank is so popular, why Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is so bad, and whether “democratic socialism” is really a threat to the free market capitalism that O’Leary says makes us richer and happier. They also discussed why O’Leary thinks Donald Trump has been great for the economy despite a personal style so many, including O’Leary himself, find unappealing.

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Ian Keyser. Intro by Mark McDaniel. Cameras by Jim Epstein and Meredith Bragg.

Some highlights from the conversation (edited for clarity):

Trump “is a great entertainer.”

“Great politicians, great leaders, great CEOs are phenomenal entertainers. Going back to the days of Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Bismarck, they used to hold council at night, have big dinner parties or sit around the fire with their men and tell stories. They would tell stories of great defeats, great battles, great loves, and that would spread through the troops…and it would capture the hearts and minds of the people. Donald Trump is exactly that. He is a great entertainer.”

The chance Donald Trump “doesn’t get a second term…is zero.”

“The chance [Trump] doesn’t get a second term in my view is zero. And I’ll tell you why. I don’t recall in modern times when going into a second term at full employment, the incumbent of any party has ever lost their mandate ever.”

“Saving baby whales is not what businesses do.”

“I believe that…the DNA of a business is to provide to its constituents. Clearly, customers come number one, number two, employees, somewhere in there are the shareholders…. You who started it, you’re the last. When you try and shift business’s true purpose and say that it’s going to save society, you will fail. Not some of the time, but 100 percent of the time. Saving baby whales is not what businesses do.”

“The role of government is to provide basic services.”

“I think it’s the role of government to provide basic services…. I’m particularly fond of what they do in Switzerland, where they basically have multiple tiers of things like health care and support for those that are poor. What they do is they’ll say, OK, if you’re a wealthy Swiss citizen in Geneva and you want to get an MRI because you want one tomorrow morning at 10 o’clock, you’re going to pay for it. They’re going to take the proceeds of that and they’re going to redeploy it into purchasing more MRI machines so those that aren’t as fortunate can get free MRIs.”

“Everybody’s a socialist when they’re young.”

“I was a socialist when I was 18 years old too. I was left wing. I got my first paycheck and I saw something called tax on it. Everybody’s a socialist when they’re young, until they start working and they start realizing how tough it is out there and they start realizing how much money government wastes when they take half their income and taxes. And that’s when you become a conservative. The older you get, the more realistic you become. And a majority of those people make the transition in their mid-twenties. That’s what happens. I never worry about it.”

Why he prefers investing in women-run companies.

“[Women] are very, very good at mitigating risk….I’m almost sexist in the sense that even the producers have to say to me, you’ve got to invest in some guys. I said, why? They don’t make any money. These women made me all this money…. Why should I take risks with men who can’t cope, who have testosterone sales targets they never hit, and all the rest of that stuff? I’m very biased about people that understand financial independence. Women mitigate risks. Women know how to manage time. Women set reasonable goals, have very sticky cultures in business. That’s all women.”

“I don’t fear any innovation at all. I fear regulation.”

“Capitalism over the last 200 years has destroyed many industries and reborn others. Forty years ago, you couldn’t have ever dreamt that someone who sat in front of a screen and wrote code would make half a million dollars a year in their first job…. Men and women will never be replaced by machines because they’ll always be finding new purpose in new problems being solved. I trust capitalism to do that. I don’t fear any innovation at all. I fear regulation. I fear burdensome government. I fear that a third of every dollar raised by government through taxes is wasted in every capitalist society.”

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Biden Gets Pummeled for Obama’s Ugly Immigration Record

Many top Democrats now favor decriminalizing “illegal entry.” During the second night of the second round of Democratic Party 2020 debates, former Vice President Joe Biden was asked to answer for immigration policy under former President Barack Obama.

Moderator Don Lemon asked, “Vice President Biden, in the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly 800,000 immigrants were deported, far more than during President Trump’s first two years. Would the higher deportation rates resume if you were president?”

Biden said “absolutely not” to that. But he also disagreed with many of his rivals about decriminalizing undocumented border crossings. “The fact of the matter is that, in fact, when people cross the border illegally, it is illegal to do it unless they’re seeking asylum,” said Biden. “People should have to get in line.”

Democrats overall have come a long way from Obama’s immigration policy since he left office. Both this round of debates and the first featured questions about whether unauthorized border crossings should be criminalized. And both times, former Housing Secretary Julián Castro has called for the repeal of Section 1325 of the Immigration Nationality Act. Last night, Castro also chastised Biden for not having “learned the lessons of the past.”

Section 1325 is what makes entering the U.S. without permission a federal crime, rather than merely a civil infraction. As immigration reporter Dara Lind explained after the first 2020 debate,

Castro wants to get rid of it—so that being an unauthorized immigrant in the US would still be a civil offense but no longer a federal crime.

And he’s pushing the rest of the Democratic field to join him.

In that first debate in June, only Beto O’Rouke opposed the repeal of Section 1325 among that night’s debaters. “In a Democratic primary that has shown the party has shifted leftward on several issues since the Obama administration, this exchange was still remarkable,” Lind commented. “In fiscal year 2016, immigration offenses—illegal entry and reentry chief among them—made up a majority of federal criminal prosecutions.” (Emphasis mine.)

Last night, several candidates agreed with Castro, several candidates were unclear, and Biden and Michael Bennet emphatically disagreed. Here are the most relevant portions of their statements:

Joe Biden: “If you cross the border illegally, you should be able to be sent back. It’s a crime.”

Michael Bennet: “I disagree that we should decriminalize our border.”

Cory Booker: “An unlawful crossing is an unlawful crossing, if you do it in the civil courts or if you do in the criminal courts. But the criminal courts is what is giving Donald Trump the ability to truly violate the human rights of people coming to our country….Doing it through the civil courts means that you won’t need these awful detention facilities that I have been to.”

Julian Castro: “The only way that we’re going to guarantee that these kinds of family separations don’t happen in the future is that we need to repeal this law. There’s still going to be consequences if somebody crosses the border. It’s a civil action. Also, we have 654 miles of fencing. We have thousands of personnel at the border. We have planes; we have boats; we have helicopters; we have security cameras….What we need are politicians that actually…have some guts on this issue.”

Bill de Blasio: “Why are we even discussing on one level whether it’s a civil penalty or a criminal penalty, when it’s an American reality? And what we need is comprehensive immigration [reform], once and for all, to fix it.”

Tulsi Gabbard: “We will have to stop separating children from their parents, make it so that it’s easier for people to seek asylum in this country, make sure that we are securing our borders and making it so that people are able to use our legal immigration system by reforming those laws.”

Kirsten Gillibrand: “I don’t think we should have a law on the books that can be so misused. It should be a civil violation and we should make sure that we treat people humanely.”

Kamala Harris: [At border detention facilities] “I saw children lined up single file based on gender being walked into barracks. The policies of this administration have been facilitated by laws on the books…that allow them to be incarcerated as though they’ve committed crimes. These children have not committed crimes…and should be not treated like criminals.”

Jay Inslee: “We have to make America what it’s always been, a place of refuge. We got to boost the number of people we accept. I’m proud of being the first governor saying, ‘Send us your Syrian refugees.'”

Andrew Yang: “We can’t always be focusing on some of the distressed stories. And if you go to a factory here in Michigan, you will not find wall-to-wall immigrants; you will find wall-to-wall robots and machines. Immigrants are being scapegoated for issues they have nothing to do with in our economy.”

A full transcript of the debate is here.

QUICK HITS

  • Tulsi Gabbard was the most-searched candidate on Google in every state following Wednesday night’s Democratic debate.

  • Kirsten Gillibrand tried to have her Biden-attack moment during Wednesday night’s debate, criticizing the former vice president’s record on women’s issues. Biden looked baffled, saying she had always championed his work with women and been part of his efforts in the past. Indeed, in old tweets, Gillibrand praised Biden for things like his “unwavering commitment to combating violence against women.”

  • Bill de Blasio took his closing speech time last night as an opportunity to promote taxthehell.com, a site that announces de Blasio’s plan to “tax the hell out of the super rich.”
  • Columbus, Ohio, police “brought departmental charges on Wednesday against five officers who were involved in the arrest of Stormy Daniels at a strip club last year.”

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Mark Sanford Gives Himself Two Weeks to Decide if He Wants to Be Trump Roadkill

Since trial-ballooning a primary challenge to the incumbent president two weeks ago, former South Carolina governor and congressman Mark Sanford has been busy making such cheery proclamations as “We are caught up in a weird time” and “I don’t think anybody’s going to beat Donald Trump.”

As if to underscore the latter notion, Sanford’s name was included in a national presidential poll for the first time in a July 23–28 McLaughlin & Associates survey released Wednesday. The results were grim for the South Carolinian—just 4 percent of 415 likely voters preferred Sanford, compared to 81 percent for Trump. The only candidate with worse polling day yesterday was former Massachusetts governor and 2016 Libertarian Party vice presidential nominee Bill Weld, who limped home with 2 percent.

Sanford said he will make a decision about whether to run over the next two weeks, but it’s hard to imagine the math getting any better. Trump’s approval rating among Republicans has been between 87 percent and 91 percent all year, and it’s been resting comfortably at 90 percent since mid-June. That 81 percent is the highest he has scored in the monthly McLaughlin poll since it began last year. He is outfundraising Weld by a ratio of 150 to 1, and he has rigged the Republican National Committee to an extent that would make Hillary Clinton jealous.

The former Freedom Caucus congressman, who was bounced as an incumbent in a primary last year by an opponent Trump backed at the last minute (who in turn got beaten by a Democrat), has maintained that the central premise of his candidacy is to foreground discussions of debt and deficits at a time when Republicans in power no longer want to hear about the subject. “Fiscal conservatism may be on life support,” he told Real Clear Politics this week, “but I don’t believe the patient is dead.”

Fiscal sobriety is also a core Bill Weld concern, and it’s earned him consistent 75-percentage-point deficits in national polls. Gary Johnson made debt/deficits his number-one issue running for Senate in his home state of New Mexico, and it got him just 15.4 percent of the vote, half as much as his unknown Republican opponent. The GOP is the party of trillion-dollar deficits, and fiscal hawks who remain in office are rapidly becoming an endangered species.

“We’re the only party that cares about [debt],” Libertarian Party National Committee Chair Nicholas Sarwark told me at Freedom Fest last month. “Do you want to bankrupt your children and grandchildren or not? With issues like this, where neither of the two old party nominees are going to even address the issue, we can unite the country…around the idea of fixing problems and dealing with the issues that Americans have that have been ignored for too long.”

Asked to explain why Weld is getting thumped running on that issue, Sarwark quipped, “He picked the wrong team.” Asked whether Sanford is making the same mistake, Sarwark said, “Probably.” But then Sarwark argued that having libertarian-leaners compete for the GOP nomination is a good thing.

“I wish Bill Weld all the success in the world for the Republican primary,” he said. “I think the vehicle can’t be saved, but he’s doing what he can to save something that he knew. I think that that’s noble. I think that to the extent that he can hurt a bad president, I think that’s noble. It’s a good fight, but it’s not our fight….

“The work that Bill Weld is doing is a good step for some people, because if he’s speaking libertarian language to Republican primary voters, and he doesn’t win that primary, those people are going to have to go somewhere; they’re not going to go for the president. They’re either going to go for whoever the Democratic nominee is, or they’re going to go for the Libertarian nominee. And that creates opportunities for us.”

It remains to be seen whether those opportunities will be leveraged by a high-profile contender such as Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.), by one of the lower-profile candidates who have already declared, or by some as-yet-undeclared pretender to the third-party throne (maybe even Mark Sanford!). Whoever it is, he or she will be swimming against currents much less favorable than in 2016.

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Occupational Licensing Is Keeping Americans Stuck in Place

There isn’t much that Americans agree on these days, but one of the few issues that brings most of us together is the no-brainer effort to reform the tangle of occupational licensing rules that are strangling Americans’ mobility and prosperity. But as party-line-crossing as support for this reform may be—and despite the accumulating evidence of the damage these laws do—state governments across the country continue to launch legal assaults on entrepreneurs and willing customers doing business without government permission.

Earlier this month, Ivanka Trump urged states to end “excessive licensure.” And Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang called for easing licensing requirements that make it hard for people to move between states. “Americans are moving across state lines at multi-decade lows. This is bad for our labor market and for people who are seeking new opportunities,” Yang pointed out.

Yang’s proposal for encouraging state regulatory authorities to recognize licenses issued by other states won support from Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican. Whatever their differences, the two men agree that restrictive licensing rules are bad for Americans. “@AndrewYang – good policy knows no party,” Ducey tweeted. “Arizona has led as the first state to recognize out-of-state occupational licenses. Would love to hear this issue brought up at the next debate.”

In April, Ducey signed a law under which his state recognizes all occupational licenses issued by other states, when such licenses are required to work in Arizona. It’s an effort to alleviate the damage to mobility done by occupational licensing, since people whose work requires licenses usually must pay the fees and take the time to get licensed all over again when crossing a state border.

“The share of the workforce that falls under some sort of licensing requirement has risen from 5 percent in the 1950s to almost 25 percent in 2008,” urbanist Richard Florida noted in 2017. “Such licensing requirements make it hard for people in those professions to move from place to place, where wages are higher or where their services are more needed.”

Our ability—or inability—to move is “dividing Americans into three classes,” Florida added. “The mobile, who derive the benefits of economic dynamism; the stuck, who are trapped in place and unable to move; and the rooted, who are strongly embedded in their communities and choose not to.”

An awful lot of people are arguably stuck because of growing occupational licensing requirements.

“The percentage of Americans moving over a one-year period fell to an all time low in the United States to 11.2 percent in 2016,” according to the Census Bureau.

That’s unfortunate, because there’s a lot of room for agreement on important reforms.

Increasing interstate recognition of occupational licenses helps to increase people’s ability to move where the jobs are. But what about completely clearing away the barriers that licensing creates to unlicensed people trying to get a foothold in the economy?

As Ivanka Trump pointed out on Twitter: “In 1950 less than 5% of occupations were licensed. Today it is closer to 30%.” That means an awful lot of jobs require a permission slip from the government. That permission slip isn’t free.

“On average, the licensing laws for 102 lower-income occupations require nearly a year of education or experience, one exam, and more than $260 in fees,” the Institute for Justice found in 2017. “In serving as a bottleneck for entry into an occupation, licensing restricts the supply of practitioners, allowing those who are licensed to command more for their services—a cost that is borne by consumers and the wider economy.”

This isn’t just an issue for Ivanka Trump and her father’s administration. The previous administration shared identical concerns about occupational licensing.

“Estimates find that unlicensed workers earn 10 to 15 percent lower wages than licensed workers with similar levels of education, training, and experience,” cautioned an Obama White House report in 2015. “Licensing laws also lead to higher prices for goods and services… Moreover, in a number of other studies, licensing did not increase the quality of goods and services, suggesting that consumers are sometimes paying higher prices without getting improved goods or services.”

People who insist on official assurances that their barber isn’t lethally incompetent might take heart from a Brookings proposal that voluntary certification of professional skills could replace licensing. Those who want to see a piece of paper could go to certified providers. The rest of us could take our chances with businesses we trust through experience and reputation.

But for now, the sniping continues, and so do the crackdowns.

“Utah Department of Commerce, Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing completes national construction fraud sting, nabs unlicensed contractors statewide with 96 Administrative Citations and $543K in fines,” the Beehive State government trumpeted last month in a press release heavy on gloating about interfering in voluntary deals among people seeking work and others eager to hire them.

“Sting Operation by New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs Catches 29 Unlicensed Movers in ‘Operation Mother’s Attic’,” Garden State officials announced after just one in a series of crackdowns on businesses that operate without jumping through government hoops.

These enforcement actions, under Republicans and Democrats alike, are also nonpartisan efforts. They’re the stupid kind of cross-aisle agreement, on which politicians from opposing affiliations can collaborate in crippling opportunity and prosperity.

Fortunately, the weight of evidence, decency, and common sense is in favor of sweeping away the worst excesses of occupational licensing. People like Trump, Obama, Yang, and Ducey all agree that it should be easier for Americans to work without asking for government permission. If they can overcome the partisan cynics and control freaks in their own parties, we all might find common ground for working together to make each other a little freer.

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Brickbat: Steamed

Heritage train companies, which run steam engine tours, will have to shell out big money to retrofit passenger cars to comply with new safety regulations in the United Kingdom. The new rules mandate the cars must have bars over the windows to keep passengers from leaning out. And the companies must install central locking systems that keep doors from being opened until the trains come to a complete stop. The train cars had operated for 70 years without incident until 2016, when a man died after leaning out of a window and striking his head on a signal gantry.

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Colorado’s Paid Leave Proposal Ignores Trade-Offs

There are no valid free market arguments for a nationwide, one-size-fits-all federal plan to provide paid leave. But should experimentation with this policy be off-limits to states? The beauty of a federalist system is that states can experiment and innovate with their own policies. This diversity can teach us what works and what doesn’t. In this sense, Colorado’s commitment to implement a new state-level, paid leave entitlement program—the Family and Medical Leave Insurance (FAMLI) Act—is consistent with federalism.

The FAMLI Act would provide paid leave benefits to workers who have family events, such as the birth or adoption of a child or the need to care for a loved one, but the hefty price tag would be paid for by collecting a “premium” from employers and employees. So, while it’s ill-advised for the state government to intrude in this way, depending on what the plan ends up looking like, the rest of the country will learn a valuable lesson at Colorado’s expense.

After years of being dead on arrival, the FAMLI Act passed in the last legislative session. A task force was established to “study” the idea. According to Colorado’s Department of Labor and Employment, the task force consists of “private employers, organized labor, worker advocates, labor economists and state agencies.” Its final recommendations are due in January.

The legislators claim the reason for this policy is simple: Not everyone gets paid leave. That’s true. As American Action Forum data show, between 66 percent and nearly 84 percent of middle- and high-income workers, respectively, already have paid leave through their employers. On the other hand, a little over 33 percent of workers in low-income families have access to this benefit. But is that a reason for the government to provide it?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m fully in favor of the private provision of paid leave as a benefit. There’s no denying the value of paid leave to families and young parents. Many companies understand that they will gain from providing this type of benefit to their workers. That’s why the data demonstrate that a vast majority of employers accommodate their employees’ desire for paid leave.

It’s no secret why high-income workers are more likely to receive such leave than are low-income workers. Low-income workers are often part time and prefer getting all their compensation in the form of cash rather than fringe benefits. As a result, relatively speaking, low-income workers stand to lose the most from Colorado’s FAMLI Act.

Moreover, we can only shake our heads in dismay that yet another state is willingly jumping in headfirst to provide a benefit that will impose a considerable tax hike. It will also reduce women’s employment and promotion opportunities as an unintended consequence. We can predict these unfortunate results because of the large number of studies that have been done on the issue. From Norway to France, Canada to Sweden, California to New York, economists have found that government-provided paid leave leads to lower wages for women, fewer prospects for advancement, and overall reduced employment.

Worse yet, the trade-offs are more dire for lower-income employees, whom the legislation’s sponsors claim they want to help. For example, consider that for 50 years, Canada has tinkered with its paid parental leave program, trying to design a program that doesn’t simply redistribute from low-income workers to higher-income ones. But it has failed so far.

The truth of the matter is that nobody would oppose a world with more benefits and higher wages for everyone, as well as fulfilling jobs in which no one ever has to choose between one’s vocation and family care. But that world doesn’t exist when you consider the real costs, trade-offs, and economic reality. There’s also no getting around the fact that a payroll tax—which will likely be used to pay for the benefit—is regressive, with its burden falling more heavily on lower-income earners. It defies logic that this tax will create a net benefit for low-income workers.

In fact, the government makes these trade-offs so much worse that when women are more fully informed, their support for any mandatory paid leave program collapses. Colorado can ignore these lessons and implement a punitive FAMLI Act, but it will be at their own citizens’ expense.

COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

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Biden Says He Supports the Trans-Pacific Partnership, And Also Does Not Support the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Former Vice President Joe Biden said during Wednesday’s Democratic debate that he would not try to re-insert the United States into the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the 12-nation trade deal that the Obama administration was unable to finalize before leaving office.

But Biden did voice support for the idea of a trade deal that would bring together American allies as leverage against China—which was basically the goal of the TPP.

“I would not rejoin as it was originally put forward,” Biden said, though he also said he would “join with the 40 percent of the world that was with us [in the TPP].”

“That’s what we have to do. Otherwise [China is] going to write the rules of the road,” the former vice president said Wednesday.

Biden’s answer on TPP was not entirely coherent—at one point, he referred to the pact deal as the “TTP”—but it does appear to be a pretty significant retreat from the unabashedly pro-TPP stance he took as President Barack Obama’s second-in-command. Through 2016, Biden was still acting as the chief cheerleader for the trade deal, and he was deployed to coax Democrats to support a bill authorizing the administration to enter a final round of negotiations for the deal.

Part of his shift is an acknowledgment that politics have changed since 2008, when the TPP was first proposed. The TPP became politically toxic on both sides of the aisle during the 2016 campaign, as Trump’s anti-trade views swamped the previously TPP-friendly Republican Party, while Sanders’ opposition to the deal eventually convinced Hillary Clinton to change positions and oppose it too. One of Trump’s first actions after being inaugurated was to yank America out of the TPP negotiations; the other 12 countries eventually finalized a deal that does not include the U.S.

Still, polls show that most Americans support free trade as a concept and believe that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other trade deals have made the country better off.

Another way to view Biden’s answers on Wednesday is as an attempt to find a middle ground between the two factions on trade policy that appear to be emerging within the 20-plus candidate Democratic field. In Tuesday’s debate, clear lines were drawn between progressive candidates ,like Sens. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who are vocally skeptical of trade deals like the TPP and NAFTA, and more moderate candidates, like former congressmen Beto O’Rourke and John Delaney, who say they would reverse Trump’s anti-trade policies.

The TPP itself never came up for a vote in Congress, but a bill granting the Obama administration the authority to negotiate the deal—technically known as “Trade Promotion Authority”—did. Both Warren and Sanders voted against granting that authority. During Tuesday’s debate, both stuck to their guns and bragged to the crowd about that vote.

Biden’s retreat on TPP, even if only a minor one, would appear to be a victory for the anti-trade half of the Democratic field.

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Why Are Democrats Working So Hard to Win the Woke Left?

Wednesday’s Democratic debate was the first one that felt like it was taking place inside the classroom of a critical theory instructor. Several candidates confessed their various privileges, speaking in terms that might appeal to the minority of Democratic voters who are progressive activists but are likely to alienate everyone else.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee lead the way, admitting that he had no idea what it felt like to be a black teenager, or a woman being talked over in a board meeting, or an LGBTQ person hearing a slur. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.) quickly followed suit, vowing to berate suburban white women for being insufficiently woke.

“I don’t believe that it’s the responsibility of Cory [Booker] and Kamala [Harris] to be the only voice that takes on these issues of institutional racism, systemic racism in our country,” said Gillibrand. “I think as a white woman of privilege, who is a U.S. senator, running for president of the United States, it is also my responsibility to lift up those voices that aren’t being listened to. And I can talk to those white women in the suburbs that voted for Trump and explain to them what white privilege actually is, that when their son is walking down a street with a bag of M&Ms in his pocket, wearing a hoodie, his whiteness is what protects him from not being shot.

“When his—when her—when their child has a car that breaks down, and he knocks on someone’s door for help, and the door opens, and the help is given, it’s his whiteness that protects him from being shot. That is what white privilege in America is today.”

This is Intersectionality 101, and it has become the operating system for progressive activists. People are oppressed because of their overlapping marginalized identities—for reasons of race, gender identity, LGBT status, class, religion, ability, size, etc.—and it’s the job of everyone else to center the marginalized in every policy discussion. In practice, this often means policing language in a manner that is off-putting to all but the ardent progressives.

It’s important to remember, as The Atlantic‘s Yascha Mounk pointed out in a writeup of a survey that found more than 80 percent of people despise political correctness, that the number of Americans who think people should routinely check their privilege constitute a tiny minority. It seems curious that Democrats are so determined to win them.

For more on this subject, check out my book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump.

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Cory Booker Is Right: Joe Biden’s Criminal Justice Record ‘Destroyed Lives’

A sharp exchange at tonight’s Democratic debate showed that, no matter how much he’d like to, former Vice President Joe Biden won’t be able to sidestep his disastrous record on criminal justice.

CNN moderator Jake Tapper asked Biden to respond to New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker’s criticism that Biden’s recently unveiled criminal justice reform proposal was “an inadequate solution to what is a raging crisis in our country.”

“Right now, we’re in a situation where, when someone is convicted of a drug crime, they end up going to jail and to prison,” Biden said. “They should be going to rehabilitation. They shouldn’t be going to prison. When in prison, they should be learning to read and write and not just sit in there and learn how to be better criminals.”

Booker took the opportunity to describe Biden’s record on policing and incarceration.

“Mr. Vice President has said that, since the 1970s, every major crime bill—every crime bill, major and minor, has had his name on it,” Booker said “And, sir, those are your words, not mine. And this is one of those instances where the house was set on fire and you claimed responsibility for those laws. And you can’t just now come out with a plan to put out that fire.”

Biden responded by attacking Booker’s record of lax police oversight as mayor of Newark, but Booker stayed on the offensive.

“We have a system right now that’s broken, and if you want to compare records—and frankly I’m shocked that you do—I am happy to do that,” Booker shot back. “All of the problems that he’s talking about that he created, I actually led the bill that got passed into law reversing the damage your bills did.”

“There are people right now in prison for life for drug offenses because you stood up and used that tough-on-crime phony rhetoric that got a lot of people got elected but destroyed communities like mine,” Booker continued.

Booker was right. As Reason‘s Christan Britschgi has written, Biden’s new criminal justice reform platform is a rather explicit repudiation of, well, pretty much Biden’s entire legislative career:

When he was a senator from Delaware, Biden was one of the original co-sponsors on the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. That law imposed mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders and created the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, two policies Biden now says should be eliminated completely.

Biden was also a sponsor of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, which expanded the application of the death penalty—another policy he now says should be abolished […]

Biden also supported the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act—indeed, he sometimes calls it the Biden Crime Law. That piece of legislation helped to drive mass incarceration at the state level by expanding federal funding for prison construction.

Now, it’s not true that any of Biden’s bills single-handedly created mass incarceration, which was largely a state-level phenomenon. Those bills were also all the product of wide bipartisan agreement. But they all did their part to make the criminal justice system larger and crueler. 

It was only this year, and through an enormous amount of bipartisan effort, that more than 3,000 federal inmates serving draconian sentences under the 100:1 crack/powder cocaine disparity finally had their sentences reduced. 

This is Biden’s chief legacy, and he can’t run from it. As one of Reason‘s recent podcasts put it “Hair-Sniffer Joe Biden Should Apologize For His Whole Career.”

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The Debate Hecklers Were Right; the Officer Who Killed Eric Garner Should Be Punished

When New York Mayor Bill de Blasio gave his opening speech at tonight’s Democratic primary debate, there was a brief shout from somebody in the audience. It was hard to decipher, but it became clear that the mayor was being heckled when Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) gave his opening statement, only to be interrupted with chants of “Fire Pantaleo!”

The target wasn’t Booker. It was de Blasio. NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo was the man responsible for the aggressive chokehold that led to the death of Eric Garner five years ago. The takedown of Garner—police were responding to a call about a fight, suspected Garner of selling loose cigarettes, and attempted to arrest him—became a national rallying point to demand police accountability.

But so far nothing has come of it. A grand jury declined to charge Pantaleo, and this month the Department of Justice decided it would not file federal civil rights charges in Pantaleo’s death. New York City has finally begun administrative proceedings to decide whether to discipline or fire Pantaleo at all. There is anger among not a few folks in New York about the foot-dragging. Hence the heckling.

Much later in the debate, the moderators asked Julián Castro, former secretary of housing and urban development under President Barack Obama, about whether Pantaleo should still be serving. Castro bluntly said that the officer should be fired. “He knew what he was doing….He should have been off the street.” The audience responded with very loud cheers.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.) agreed. She said that she’s met with Garner’s mother and added, “If I was mayor, I’d fire him.”

De Blasio, given the chance to respond, deflected responsibility to the federal Department of Justice. He claimed that the department told New York City that he could not act on Pantaleo’s behavior because of the federal investigation. That is not true. De Blasio was asked to refrain from acting during their investigation, but he was not ordered to keep Pantaleo on the force. And, in fact, the city actually finally went ahead and began administrative proceedings against Pantaleo before the Justice Department formally announced they were not pressing charges.

On Twitter, de Blasio responded to the heckling by vaguely saying he “heard” the protesters, understood their pain, but believed in “respecting the process”:

Unfortunately for Garner’s family, the “process” is dominated by deference to police union agreements that make it hard to fire bad cops, that shield them from accountability, and that keep individual officers’ histories of misconduct a secret from the public. We might not even know what sort of discipline, if any, is ultimately handed down in the case.

De Blasio also spent a lot of the debate declaring his own support for union influence over domestic policy. The process that has kept Pantaleo on the force appears to be one that de Blasio supports.

De Blasio also said that there would “never be another Eric Garner.” Given that he has, since Garner’s death, increased the price of cigarettes in New York City even further, fostering the black market that led police to arrest the man, he is in no position to make such a promise.

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