Tag: hit&run

D.C. Bill Would Let Regular Citizens Issue Parking Tickets

If you follow enough transportation advocates or local government agencies in the Washington, D.C. area on Twitter, chances are you’ve seen tweets like these:

Wherever a car parks too close to a crosswalk, a fire hydrant is blocked, or a bike lane is intruded upon, code enforcing vigilantes are quick to snap a photo and tag the relevant local department demanding action be taken against the offending motorist.

Soon enough these bike lane Batmen might get to play police for real under a proposed pilot program that would give citizens the ability to ticket each other for parking violations.

Last week, D.C. City Councilmember Charles Allen introduced a new Vision Zero omnibus traffic safety bill that adopts the ambitious goal of eliminating traffic fatalities in the District.

In 2018, 34 people died on the District’s roadways, including 15 pedestrians, eight motorcyclists, seven people in cars, three bicyclists, and one scooter rider, according to data parsed by DCist.

In order to bring that number down to zero, Allen’s bill would change up road rules to lower speed limits, create more four-way stop signs, ban right-on-red turns, and increase penalties for those found violating any of these rules.

More broadly, Allen’s bill would commit the city to reduce car trips to just 25 percent of all commuter trips by 2032, down from 39 percent in 2017, according to Census Bureau data.

As an extra means of enforcement, Allen’s bill would direct the city’s Department of Public Works (DPW) to establish a Citizen Safety Enforcement Pilot Program. Under the pilot program—which would run for one year—10 citizens from each of the District’s eight wards would be authorized to ticket drivers parked illegally.

After first being trained in D.C. traffic laws, these 80 vigilantes would be given access to a DPW-created app, which they would then use to submit photos of cars blocking crosswalks, bike lanes, fire hydrants, or the city’s singular streetcar line.

Submission of a photo through the app would be treated as if it were a police officer or other city official issuing the violating driver a ticket.

While the goal of increased road safety is laudable, one can imagine a lot going wrong with the panopticon-like citizen-operated surveillance system that Allen’s bill would create.

Road rules, even the ones most necessary for public safety, require a little bit of flex and discretion when it comes to enforcement.

One can easily imagine those who sign up to ticket their fellow citizens being a little overzealous. There’s also the possibility that those with access to this app would let personal prejudices and self-interest influence which cars they decide to ticket or even which violations they go searching for.

Unlike city employees, whose enforcement activities can be restrained or redirected by an internal set of rules and informal practices, these new citizen parking enforcers would be accountable to no one. Citizen meter maids would be penalized only for submitting false information through the app or for letting an unauthorized person use it.

In essence, D.C.’s new traffic safety bill would seemingly empower a nation of narcs to ticket any violation they come across, regardless of how necessary that might be.

Allen introduced his Vision Zero Omnibus Bill on Tuesday of last week. No votes or hearings have been held on it yet, but according to WTOP, several council members have already signaled their support for it.

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You Can Now Legally Possess Nunchucks in Arizona

Arizona’s Republican Governor Doug Ducey signed a bill on Friday to remove nunchucks from the state’s list of deadly weapons.

The deadly weapons list is intended for items that are specifically “designed for lethal use.” Because nunchucks were included on the list, their ownership was illegal for most Arizonans. While there was an “understanding,” of sorts, that nunchucks were legal for martial arts competitions, nunchuck owners previously worried that a misunderstanding during transportation could lead to charges.

“It’s good to know that nobody’s going to get arrested for carrying their nunchucks to their training,”  Shawn Sample, a karate instructor in Phoenix, told AZfamily. Sample also observed that the ban made little sense in a state where open-carry of firearms is legal. 

Whether the Second Amendment protects nunchuck ownership is a hot question right now. In December 2018, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York overturned the state’s 44-year-old nunchuck ban, citing D.C. v. Heller, which affirmed an individual’s right to possess a weapon that was both “common use” and “typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes.”

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Supreme Court Majority Speaks Against “Ahistorical Literalism”

Hyatt argues that we should find no right to sovereign immunity in another State’s courts because no constitutional provision explicitly grants that immunity. But this is precisely the type of “ahistorical literalism” that we have rejected when “interpreting the scope of the States’ sovereign immunity since the discredited decision in Chisholm.” Alden, 527 U.S., at 730; see id., at 736 (“[T]he bare text of the Amendment is not an exhaustive description of the States’ constitutional immunity from suit”). In light of our constitutional structure, the historical understanding of state immunity, and the swift enactment of the Eleventh Amendment after the Court departed from this understanding in Chisholm, “[i]t is not rational to suppose that the sovereign power should be dragged before a court.” Elliot’s Debates 555 (Marshall).

Indeed, the spirited historical debate over Article III courts and the immediate reaction to Chisholm make little sense if the Eleventh Amendment were the only source of sovereign immunity and private suits against the States could already be brought in “partial, local tribunals.” Elliot’s Debates 532 (Madison). Nor would the Founders have objected so strenuously to a neutral federal forum for private suits against States if they were open to a State being sued in a different State’s courts. Hyatt’s view thus inverts the Founders’ concerns about state-court parochialism. Hall, supra, at 439 (Rehnquist, J., dissenting).

Moreover, Hyatt’s ahistorical literalism proves too much. There are many other constitutional doctrines that are not spelled out in the Constitution but are nevertheless implicit in its structure and supported by historical practice—including, for example, judicial review, Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 176–180 (1803); intergovernmental tax immunity, McCulloch, 4 Wheat., at 435–436; executive privilege, United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683, 705–706 (1974); executive immunity, Nixon v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 731, 755–758 (1982); and the President’s removal power, Myers v. United States, 272 U.S. 52, 163–164 (1926). Like these doctrines, the States’ sovereign immunity is a historically rooted principle embedded in the text and structure of the Constitution.

I have no firm opinion on the proper scope of constitutional sovereign immunity, and it may be that the dissent has the better view of that scope than the majority does. But I wanted to quote this passage, because it’s a reminder that none of the Justices on the Court is a pure textualist: They all consider at least the text, the original meaning, and “historical practice.” And that is in large part because the Constitution is widely understood as having been enacted against a backdrop of established law and practice, and therefore in some measure implicitly adopting aspects of that law and practice, rather than being limited to what is within the four corners of the document.

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Abortion Restrictionists Go Bold

The political/culture wars are once again at full throttle as Georgia becomes the latest in a series of states to enact serious abortion restrictions, in this case a ban on the procedure when a fetal heartbeat can be detected. Is the longstanding legal/cultural consensus (or political standoff) about abortion—that it should be legally available during the first trimester—giving way to a more extreme agenda by polarized advocates on each side? That’s the thorny question underlying this week’s Editors’ Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch.

Other items up for discussion include our latest “constitutional crisis,” the most recent installment of that television show, and also this tweet:

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Relevant links from the show:

“‘Heartbeat Bills’ Banning Almost All Abortions Are Back,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Let Midwives and Nurse Practitioners Provide First-Trimester Abortions, Says Federal Court,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“The Abortion Divide Shows a Fight Growing Ever More Bitter,” by Glenn Garvin

“‘Record Low Are ‘Pro-choice,’ Yet 75 Percent Support Abortion Rights,” by Nick Gillespie

“Abortion & Libertarianism: Nick Gillespie, Ronald Bailey, Mollie Hemingway, and Katherine Mangu-Ward,” by Nick Gillespie and Joshua Swain

“Debate: Libertarians Should Support Abortion Rights,” by Tibor Machan and Karl Pflock

“Wishing for a Constitutional Crisis,” by Keith Whittington

“The Real Constitutional Crisis Is Congress’ Unwillingness to Do Its Job,” by Matt Welch

“Forget Robert Mueller. Trump’s Attacks On Syria Are a Reminder We’re Already in a Constitutional Crisis,” by Peter Suderman

“Firing the FBI Director Is Not a ‘Constitutional Crisis,’” by Jacob Sullum

“Bernie Sanders’ New Plan Will Make It Tougher for Poor People To Get Credit Cards,” by Peter Suderman

“Three Cheers for Usury,” by Katherine Mangu-Ward

“Payday of Reckoning,” by Katherine Mangu-Ward

“In Defense of Payday Loans,” by Nick Gillespie and Jim Epstein

“On Game of Thrones, Absolute Power Corrupts Daenerys Targaryen Absolutely,” by Robby Soave

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Trial (Sort of) Begins Over Police Officer’s Conduct in Eric Garner’s Death

It’s been five years since Americans saw a cellphone video of Eric Garner wheezing “I can’t breathe” as a police officer appeared to put him in a choke hold. Garner would later die, and the officer’s actions would get part of the blame.

That officer, Daniel Pantaleo, is now finally facing some sort of accountability for his actions. A departmental trial is supposed to determine whether Pantaleo violated the law, or even just violated police procedures, on that day. He could be fired. Or he could lose some vacation days. Or nothing might happen at all.

The police who confronted Garner suspected he was illegally selling “loosies,” single cigarettes, to people who want to get around New York City’s incredibly high cigarette taxes. Garner refused to cooperate with the cops, and the cops responded with the violent and ultimately fatal takedown.

It has taken years for the New York Police Department to take any sort of action here, in part because they were waiting to see if the Department of Justice was going to get involved. The district attorney for the Staten Island area sent a case to a grand jury in 2014, but the jurors declined to indict.

Of the police slayings that have sparked protests over the last few years, Garner’s was particularly egregious, given he was not himself accused of any violent activity. He had a long history of getting in trouble with police, but only for low-level offenses like selling loose cigarettes and possessing marijuana.

This trial is supposed to determine what sorts of consequences Pantaleo will face. But it’s unclear whether we’ll actually learn the officer’s fate. The New York Times explains:

The courtroom is in the Police Department’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan. The trial is open to the public, but no court transcripts will be available, and lists of testifying witnesses will not be provided.

Even the judge’s decision will be not necessarily be disclosed. It will be sent to the police commissioner, James P. O’Neill, who has the authority to uphold, modify or even vacate the ruling.

There is no mechanism for compelling Mr. O’Neill to announce his conclusion, though it is expected to be revealed by people with knowledge of the decision.

New York state law includes incredibly thorough demands that records of police conduct be kept secret, with the open goal of protecting officers from public embarrassment. The fact that Pantaleo had a history of misconduct before the confrontation with Garner only become public because somebody leaked it to the press.

California has finally changed its laws to improve access to records of police misbehavior. New York State has not followed suit. New York City passed an ordinance in 2016 that simply requires the NYPD to provide some statistical data on the number of officers who have engaged in misconduct in a given year—and the police aren’t even complying with that demand. New York desperately needs reforms to force more transparency about police conduct.

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Illinois Survey That Supposedly Shows Support for Legalizing Marijuana Is ‘Dwindling’ Actually Shows It Is Rising

A recent poll commissioned by the anti-pot group Smart Approaches to Marijuana supposedly shows that support for legalization is slipping in Illinois, where Gov. J.B. Pritzker and his allies are hoping to pass a legalization bill by the end of the month. The poll actually indicates that support for legalization is on the rise. It also shows that the way people respond to questions on this subject depends on how they are framed.

In March a poll by the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University, using a sample of 1,000 registered voters, found that 66 percent favored “the legalization of recreational marijuana if taxed and regulated like alcohol.” That result is strikingly similar to what Gallup found in a national poll last fall, when it reported that 66 percent of Americans thought “the use of marijuana should be made legal.”

The new survey, commissioned by Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM) and conducted last week by Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy based on a sample of 625 registered voters, found that 41 percent supported “legalizing commercial production, use and sale of marijuana for recreational use.” That’s up from 23 percent in a similar SAM-sponsored survey conducted in November 2017. But the Chicago Tribune compared the Mason-Dixon survey to the Simon Poll and reported that “support for legal pot” is “thinning.” WSIL, an ABC station in Southern Illinois, likewise reported that “support is dwindling for recreational marijuana.”

That conclusion seems suspect, given the difference in wording between the two polls. Here is how SAM asked about legalization:

Currently, possessing 10 grams of marijuana—enough for about 30 joints—is not a crime in Illinois. Instead, it is a civil violation like a traffic ticket. Many people call this policy “decriminalization.” Medical marijuana use is also legal in Illinois. Knowing that personal marijuana possession is already decriminalized in Illinois, which one of the following marijuana policies do you prefer:

– Keep the current policy of decriminalization and medical marijuana

– Keep the current policy of decriminalization and medical marijuana but also allow for past misdemeanor marijuana convictions to be expunged

– Change the current policy of decriminalization by legalizing commercial production, use and sale of marijuana for recreational use

– Make all marijuana use illegal

Given those choices, 31 percent of respondents favored the current policy, down from 47 percent in November 2017, while 41 percent preferred full legalization, up from 23 percent in the previous poll. Another 16 percent wanted to keep the current policy while expunging marijuana misdemeanors (an option that was not included in the earlier poll). Only 9 percent thought marijuana should be completely illegal, down from 18 percent in the earlier survey, while 3 percent weren’t sure, down from 8 percent in 2017.

SAM argues that the Simon Poll presents a “false dichotomy” and that offering more than two options shows that support for legalizing marijuana is lower than commonly thought. That may or may not be true. One could also argue that the Simon Poll’s comparison to alcohol, while it apparently makes legalization more palatable, puts the issue in the proper context, while SAM’s failure to mention regulation is misleading. But by SAM’s own logic, the two polls are not comparable. Meanwhile, its own polling, using the wording it prefers, shows that support for legalization is up 78 percent since November 2017, while support for complete prohibition has been cut in half.

It also should be noted that SAM’s description of current Illinois law is misleading. Leaving aside the debatable estimate that an average joint contains just one-third of a gram, possessing more than 10 grams of marijuana—about a third of an ounce—is still a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail for a first offense and a felony punishable by one to six years in prison for a second offense. In other words, people can still be arrested and incarcerated for possessing personal-use quantities of marijuana, so in that sense it is not really true that “personal marijuana possession is already decriminalized in Illinois.”

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Florida’s Republican Governor Vetoes State Legislature’s Ban on Straw Bans

Florida’s straw-banning cities sucked victory from the jaws of defeat on Friday, when Gov. Rick DeSantis vetoed a bill that would have banned their straw bans.

Two weeks ago, the Florida Legislature overwhelmingly passed HB 771, a recycling bill that included a five-year moratorium on localities passing new plastic straw regulations or enforcing the ones they already have on the books.

The target of the moratorium was the 10 towns that had passed either all-out straw bans or straw-on-request laws, which make it illegal to give out unsolicited straws. The law’s passage was a rare victory for straw ban opponents, who had tasted little but defeat since anti-straw mania began sweeping the nation in early 2018.

The Republican’s veto message makes it clear that his veto was meant to preserve the straw bans already on the books.

“A number of municipalities, including Sanibel, Ft. Myers Beach, and Miami Beach, have enacted ordinances prohibiting single-use plastic straws,” it says. “These measures have not, as far as I can tell, frustrated any state policy or harmed the state’s interests….[T]he State should simply allow local communities to address this issue through the political process.”

Despite a less-than-liberal record on green issues when he was a member of the U.S. House, DeSantis has surprised many by supporting several progressive environmental policies. He has boosted funding for Everglades restoration, opposed offshore drilling, and established two new state-level environmental offices. So his veto should not be a shock.

Nevertheless, the governor’s veto statement displays from some puzzling logic. DeSantis tells Floridians “who oppose plastic straw ordinances can seek recourse by electing people who share their views.”

That is exactly what they did by electing a Republican state legislature that then went on to pass the bill that the governor is now vetoing. In a political system where power is divided between state and local governments, people who lose the policy fight at city hall can take their issue to the state house.

Indeed, Florida already has passed a law forbidding localities from banning plastic bags.

Lawmakers in Colorado and Utah have introduced similar straw-ban preemption laws. Neither made much progress in those legislatures. With DeSantis’ veto, the tactic appears to be a bust in Florida as well.

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Trump’s Latest Trade War Scheme Might Be the Nuttiest One Yet

In a series of tweets starting Friday and continuing over the weekend, President Donald Trump outlined a plan for the federal government to use tariff revenue to buy agricultural goods from American farmers and redistribute it to other parts of the world.

It is, well, a pretty wild idea.

Though Trump has repeated this notion in a few other tweets, none of them go into much detail.

He seems to be proposing to use tax revenue paid by farmers—and by other Americans hurt by tariffs—to pay farmers to grow products they cannot sell, then to buy up the excess supply and spend more money shipping it to other countries where there is a demand for food.

If only there were some other mechanism for balancing supply and demand, right?

This Rube Goldberg–esque scheme is a good indicator of how convoluted Trump’s trade war has become. Even before last week’s ramp-up of U.S. tariffs and today’s retaliatory action from China, the trade war was already warping international supply chains. Brazil, for example, was shipping more soybeans to China after China, the world’s top consumer of soybeans, cut off imports of the crop from the United States. Brazil was sending so many soybeans to China that it actually had to import some from the U.S. to meet domestic demand.

Because trade, uh, finds a way.

Those alternative export markets weren’t enough to make up for the loss of the Chinese market, where nearly 50 percent of all U.S.-grown soybeans ended up prior to the trade war. The Trump administration tried to ease farmers’ pain by making $12 billion in payments to farmers stung by the trade war. Predictably, that became a boondoggle.

Now Trump wants to make this even more of a mess. Paying farmers to grow crops that they won’t be able to sell sounds a lot like something China would do, as Reuters columnist Karen Braun points out:

Even the seemingly altruistic part of this wacky idea—handing out American surplus goods to the rest of the world—would likely be a disaster in practice.

For one, simply dumping American-grown agricultural goods into other countries would likely wreck local markets—and would probably violate World Trade Organization rules prohibiting such behavior.

For another, shipping goods all around the world requires a massive logistics operation that the federal government does not currently possess and likely would not handle well. And unless Trump is planning to nationalize the shipping industry too, there would be very real questions about who is paying for these shipments to “poor and starving countries.” I’ll give you one guess about the likely answer.

Prices and markets do a great job of predicting where supply will be needed to meet demand, even on the opposite side of the globe. There’s no reason to think the federal government, once it buys up all those excess goods from American farmers, will be anywhere near as efficient. The most likely end result of Trump’s Buy American policy is lots of American farm goods rotting in federal warehouses.

 

 

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‘Fake News’ Is a Really Dangerous Excuse for Censorship

You know what’s not fake news? It’s that politicians scream about the alleged dangers of “fake news” to justify efforts to censor speech that rubs them the wrong way. As Singapore’s rulers join a growing list of their peers in America and around the world promising to punish “false statements of fact,” it’s important to remember that the supposed plague of misleading and harmful information on the internet is nothing new, nor is governments’ desire to muzzle anybody who says inconvenient things.

Without a doubt, there’s bullshit on the Internet. Some of it results from sloppy fact-checking, and some is deliberate publication of untrue information and propaganda. But this isn’t a peculiar quality of online publishing—it’s an inevitable product of any publishing platform.

People want to reach the public with their messages, and they use the tools available to them.

Politicians like that power when it’s targeted at their enemies, but they resent it when they’re on the receiving end.

We’ve Been Here (Long) Before

“There has been more new error propagated by the press in the last ten years than in an hundred years before 1798,” President John Adams complained of his treatment by opposition newspapers at a time when news—fake or real—was printed by hand.

Adams’s Federalist allies in Congress responded to the president’s concerns about fake news with legal restrictions on “any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government.” Unsurprisingly, the first person charged under the law was an opposition lawmaker—Rep. Matthew Lyon of Vermont—who accused President Adams of “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp.”

Ironically, the then-president’s own cousin, Samuel Adams, had been an especially effective propagandist and publisher of arguably misleading information in the years leading up to the American Revolution. But that was the sort of fake news to which John Adams had no objection.

Censorship in Singapore

Striking a note that John Adams and company would have recognized, Singaporean newspaper The Straits Times suggests that speech controls are necessary because “an erosion of trust in governments and institutions has threatened the very foundations of democracy worldwide” and the “spread of fake news on new media have deepened this crisis.”

Presenting the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Bill for debate, Singapore’s Home Affairs and Law Minister K. Shanmugam said it was “an attempt to deal with one part of the problem. The serious problems arising from falsehoods spread through new media. And to try and help support the infrastructure of fact and promote honest speech in public discourse.”

Shanmugam’s party has held power continuously since 1959, largely by suing into bankruptcy any opposition figures who dare to utter speech critical of the regime.

His position is unlikely to become less secure now that government ministers have the unilateral power, “to prevent the communications of false statements of fact in Singapore” by requiring people to change or recant what they’ve published under threat of fines and imprisonment. The law—passed May 8—is intended to apply to information published not just inside the country but also elsewhere, a response to the government’s frustration with the international reach of the Internet.

That Singapore follows in the wake of Malaysia, another managed sort-of-democracy, is no surprise. That country last year banned the publication of “news, information, data and reports which is or are wholly or partly false” in a move transparently aimed at the opposition.

But traditional liberal democracies with supposedly firmer civil liberties protections also feel the allure of speech controls.

Information Fallacieuse and British Spies

Channeling his own internal John Adams, France’s President Emmanuel Macron demanded government action against “propaganda articulated by thousands of social media accounts.” He went on to sniff, “If we want to protect liberal democracies, we must be strong and have clear rules.”

France’s lawmakers obliged their president with a law allowing government officials to order the removal of online articles deemed to be false.

They then erupted in outrage when Twitter determined that the French government’s own online efforts couldn’t be brought into compliance with the law and so rejected a voter registration campaign.

Macron continues to pressure online platforms to eliminate information he doesn’t like, meeting just days ago with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May also finds too much information published online to be inconvenient. She has accused Russia of “weaponizing information” and claims that Internet “companies have not done enough to protect users, especially children and young people, from harmful content.”

Without bothering with legislation, the British government is creating a “fake news” rapid response unit that is tasked with monitoring social media and going after stories officials claim are false. The government also proposes to hold online publishers liable for “inciting violence and violent content, encouraging suicide, disinformation, cyber bullying and children accessing inappropriate material.”

“The era of self-regulation for online companies is over,” Digital Secretary Jeremy Wright bluntly claims. “Voluntary actions from industry to tackle online harms have not been applied consistently or gone far enough.”

Censors plan, yet again, to suppress speech through involuntary means when people won’t muzzle themselves? What a shock.

Not that modern American politicians are immune to such temptations…

Speech Suppression Efforts at Home

Luckily the First Amendment, for now, poses a barrier to Singapore/Malaysia/France/UK-style suppression of disapproved speech in the U.S. But modern American politicians are far from immune to such temptations.

President Donald Trump famously denounces every inconvenient news story and critical report as “fake news.” His use of the term is so frequent that it was named word of the year for 2017 by the American Dialect Society.

Trump’s Democratic opponents may not agree that Trump should occupy the White House, but they share his resentment that online speech is out of (their) control.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) frets that Russia uses social media “to sow conflict and discontent all over this country” and threatens government intervention. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) openly envies the UK’s regulation of online media and says the U.S. should probably follow suit.

Last month, members of Congress from both parties alternately pushed extremism and political bias as reasons for government regulation of online speech.

Not that the rationale for regulating speech matters. The fakest news of all is the claim that politicians respect our liberty, including our free speech rights. Whatever excuse they raise, government officials will always find an excuse to try to suppress criticism and ideas they find uncomfortable. It’s our right to speak out anyway.

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The New Green Serfdom

“Until you do it, I’m the boss,” said Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist congresswoman from the Bronx, responding to critics of her Green New Deal in February. Later that night, the freshman congresswoman doubled down on her comment, tweeting that people who “don’t like the #GreenNewDeal” should “come up with your own ambitious, on-scale proposal to address the global climate crisis. Until then, we’re in charge—and you’re just shouting from the cheap seats.”

Much has rightly been made of the Green New Deal’s fuzzy-headed utopianism and its impossible goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero in 10 years. But we should also pay close attention to the plan’s authoritarian impulses, particularly in light of its historical inspirations: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and the command economy he established during the Second World War.

If proponents of the Green New Deal are serious—and there’s no reason to doubt them—then they’re proposing a return to a militaristic America where Uncle Sam’s heavy hand intervenes in all aspects of life, curtailing individual freedom in pursuit of their collectivist goals. And like the planners of the Roosevelt years, their intentions are clear and grandiose: They want the power to regiment a society of nearly 330 million people in pursuit of a pipe dream they liken to a war for survival.

‘The New Deal and the Analogue of War’

After FDR defeated Herbert Hoover in 1932, the new president rolled out his first New Deal to confront the Great Depression. Roosevelt saw the economic collapse as directly analogous to war. In his first inaugural address, he said that Americans “must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective.”

Like President Woodrow Wilson during World War I, President Roosevelt and his New Dealers moved to cartelize the economy with the enthusiastic support of business executives such as Gerard Swope, president of General Electric. “There was scarcely a New Deal act or agency that did not owe something to the experience of World War I,” according to FDR scholar William E. Leuchtenburg in an excellent paper published in 1964, “The New Deal and the Analogue of War.”

The best example of this was the creation of the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which was essentially a peacetime version of Wilson’s War Industries Board (WIB). Headed by the Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, the WIB coordinated purchases, allocated commodities, and fixed “prices and priorities in production” while guaranteeing a profit to the big business that helped fuel the war machine.

If the WIB could coordinate an economic mobilization during wartime, the Roosevelt administration thought, then a peacetime equivalent could defeat the Great Depression by mobilizing America’s productive powers. The NRA held industries to “codes of fair competition,” which set wages, working hours, and prices. By doing so, Roosevelt and his New Dealers believed they were overthrowing the cut-throat and chaotic competition they blamed for the Depression.

Companies that didn’t cooperate with the NRA were ostracized. Under the NRA’s Blue Eagle Campaign, businesses that played ball were given a blue eagle symbol for their windows and packages to advertise their adherence to the administration’s rules and regulations. Those that didn’t faced boycotts. As General Hugh Johnson, head of the NRA, put it, “Those who are not with us are against us.” Some businessmen who violated NRA regulations were arrested.

Socialist leader Norman Thomas called this “a scheme which in essence is fascist.” The NRA itself issued a report that stated, “The Fascist Principles are very similar to those we have been evolving here in America.” In 1935, the Supreme Court ruled the NRA’s “codes of fair competition” unconstitutional, saying they violating the Constitution’s separation of powers as well as the Commerce Clause. Small wonder that New Left historians accused the agency of championing a corporatist economy.

The Green New Dealers should also be wary of using the original New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which sent young unemployed and unmarried men onto federal, state, and local government lands for conservation purposes, as a model. In her defense of the Green New Deal at The Intercept—aptly titled “The Battle Lines Have Been Drawn on the Green New Deal”—Naomi Klein cites the CCC as an inspiration, noting that it began with 200,000 volunteers but then expanded dramatically due to its popularity. She doesn’t mention that the CCC was really an Army program with a titular civilian head.

Leuchtenburg points out that the CCC was “consciously devised to provide the moral equivalent to war” and that it “aimed to install martial virtues in the nation’s youth.” When the men woke up in their army tents in camp, they heard “Reveille.” During lights out, they heard “Taps.” It shouldn’t be surprising that when the draft returned in 1940, as Charles E. Heller writes, CCC alumni “provided the pretrained manpower to fill the U.S. Army’s ranks upon mobilization with men who readily assumed the role of Non-Commissioned Officers.”

The World War II Homefront

But then, the Green New Dealers seem to see that war as a model for domestic policy. In a widely lampooned FAQ document that an Ocasio-Cortez advisor erroneously claimed was a hoax, the Green New Deal is called a “10-year plan to mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War 2 to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and create economic prosperity for all.”

Americans should pay attention to what the country was like on the homefront during World War II. Prosperity it was not.

Unemployment did come down—to less than 2 percent—though that’s largely because more than a fifth of the U.S. workforce was conscripted and sent overseas to sacrifice life and limb. The workers who remained were focused on producing military goods, such as guns and ammunition, while consumer goods were either underproduced or not produced at all. Other goods—such as gasoline, tires, nylon, shoes, bicycles, sugar, meat, canned fish, cheese, and canned milk—were strictly rationed. Income tax rates applied to more and more people, including lower-income earners; hit confiscatory levels, with the highest marginal tax rate rising to 94 percent; and were rigorously enforced by the IRS through a new system of automatic payroll deductions.

American people did extraordinary things to win World War II, but it took an authoritarian society to achieve it—one that nobody should want to return to.

When the United States goes abroad to do widescale social engineering, that’s rightly called imperialism by libertarians and socialists alike. But when widespread social engineering is done at home through the federal government, people like Ocasio-Cortez call it progressivism and point to the New Deal and World War II to sell the plan.

When she says “I’m the boss,” pay attention. She’s describing America under a Green New Deal: a place where you’ll do as you’re told.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2LGw3Gt
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