Tag: hit&run

Let’s take it as a bedrock moral principle: Government-enforced eugenics is always wrong. State agencies should never be allowed to tell parents what sorts of children they may or may not bear.

The Arizona State bioethicist J. Benjamin Hurlbut violates this principle in “Human genome editing: ask whether, not how,” an essay in the current issue of Nature. Hurlbut notes that the Chinese researcher He Jiankui recently announced the birth of two babies he had gene-edited as embryos with the goal of resisting infection by HIV. This announcement provoked a storm of condemnation from most other researchers in the field, largely because He’s CRISPR editing has not yet been shown to be safe. Thus his editing may have introduced unanticipated genetic damage that will affect the future health the two infant girls. Furthermore, did the infants’ parents understand the procedure? If they didn’t, they couldn’t give true informed consent to the genome-editing.

But neither safety nor consent was Hurlbut’s chief concern. Instead, he claims that the “crucial and as-yet-unanswered question” is “whether it is (or can ever be) acceptable to genetically engineer children by introducing changes that they will pass on to their own offspring. That question belongs not to science, but to all of humanity.”

Hurlbut asserts the alleged need for determining a “broad social consensus” about “a decision that belongs to all of us.” At stake, he declares, “are the ways in which we as a human community guide and govern our technological futures.” He also eschews leaving human genome-editing to national (as opposed to global) regulation, let alone to markets. Doing that, he claims, “denies humanity a role in judging what futures should be brought into being.”

By “humanity,” Hurlbut means “government.” He makes that clear when he favorably cites the fact that 29 European countries have ratified the 1997 Oviedo Convention, which declares that “making heritable genetic modifications to people violates human rights and dignity.” In other words, these governments are telling parents that even after genome editing has been shown to be safe, they will not be allowed to use it to benefit their prospective children. Governments have decided for parents that they should remain at risk for passing on such genetic diseases to their children as cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, hemophilia, sickle cell disease, fragile X syndrome, and Huntington’s disease.

Decisions about having children do not and should not “belong to all of us.” As I have earlier argued:

Twentieth-century eugenicists used government power to forcibly prevent parents from passing on traits they deemed deleterious. Now 21st-century eugenicists contend the government should require parents to risk passing along genes that the parents think are deleterious to their children, whether they want to or not. Individuals may not always make the right decisions with regard to reproduction, but, as history has shown, parents are more trustworthy guardians of the human gene pool than any government agency.

This week Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) announced the latest version of her “assault weapon” ban. “Americans across the nation are asking Congress to reinstate the federal ban on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines,” she claims. “If we’re going to put a stop to mass shootings and protect our children, we need to get these weapons of war off our streets.”

Since this bill, like its predecessors, does not apply to firearms that Americans already possess, it won’t actually take anything “off our streets”— or, to be more accurate, out of anyone’s gun cabinet, basement, or garage. That’s better than the alternative of mass confiscation, but it gives you a sense of Feinstein’s dishonesty on this subject that she claims to be eliminating guns at the beginning of her press release, only to note five paragraphs later that “owners may keep existing weapons.” Since Americans own more than 16 million guns that are covered by Feinstein’s definition of “assault weapons,” that is no minor detail.

Feinstein has not posted the text of her bill yet, but it sounds a lot like the 2017 version. The 2019 bill, like the previous one, bans “205 military-style assault weapons by name,” along with any firearm that “accepts a detachable ammunition magazine and has one or more military characteristics,” such as “a pistol grip, a forward grip, a barrel shroud, a threaded barrel or a folding or telescoping stock.” It also “exempts by name more than 2,200 guns for hunting, household defense or recreational purposes,” which is supposed to show us how generous Feinstein is being. But this list, which consumed nearly 100 pages of the 2017 bill, is completely gratuitous, since any gun that’s not banned by name and does not fit the general definition would remain legal regardless of whether the bill said so explicitly.

The bill’s arbitrariness should be obvious, since features that do not make a gun any more deadly in the hands of a mass shooter, such as a folding stock or a threaded barrel, nevertheless transform it into an intolerable “assault weapon,” as opposed to a gun suitable for “hunting, household defense or recreational purposes.” The picture above, which shows a Ruger Mini-14 Tactical Rifle and a Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifle, starkly illustrates Feinstein’s silliness. The two models fire the same ammunition at the same rate and have the same magazine capacity. Yet the one on top was specifically banned by the 2017 bill, while the one on the bottom was specifically exempted.

The 2019 bill includes a new provision that provides further evidence of Feinstein’s wacky approach to gun control. According to the senator’s press release, the bill “bans Thordsen-type grips and stocks that are designed to evade a ban on assault weapons.” Feinstein is talking about products like the FRS-15 Enhanced Stock Kit (left), made by the California company Thordsen Customs. The kit replaces an adjustable stock and pistol grip on a gun that would otherwise qualify as a prohibited “assault weapon” under state bans like California’s. Once you switch out the parts, the gun has neither of those forbidden features. In other words, the kit enables a gun owner to comply with an “assault weapon” ban, which Feinstein perversely characterizes as evading the ban.

“What our rifle stock does is remove both of those individually named items and replace them with a single-piece, solid, traditional-style rifle stock like you can find on any other traditional-style rifle,” says Alan Thordsen, founder and CEO of Thordsen Customs. “That’s all it does.”

Thordsen is bemused by Feinstein’s disapproval of products that enable people to follow the arbitrary dictates of legislation like hers. “We are complying with the ban,” he says. “If there’s a feature that is banned, we change the feature. That’s not evading. That’s not skirting the law or violating the spirit of the law. We are conforming with the law and creating products that enable law-abiding people to keep their legal firearms in a legal configuration so that they are not criminals.”

Although “they singled our product out by name,” Thordsen says, “more generally they were talking about any device or product that will convert your current assault-weapon configuration to a non-assault-weapon configuration,” which is “one step closer to a total semiautomatic rifle ban….The whole thought of banning parts or devices that will take your possibly noncompliant firearm, if this bill were to pass, and make it compliant again is ridiculous.”

By the same logic (if that’s the right word), smooth rifle barrels should be banned because they can replace threaded barrels, transforming a prohibited “assault weapon” into a legal gun. The problem here is not sneaky entrepreneurs like Thordsen but irrational legislators like Feinstein. Thordsen’s real offense, one suspects, is highlighting how pointless bills like Feinstein’s are.

“Military-style assault rifles are the weapons of choice for mass murderers,” Sen Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) claims in Feinstein’s press release. That is not true, since mass shooters are much more likely to use handguns. Even if it were true, and even if a bill like Feinstein’s could make those “military-style assault rifles” disappear (which it does not even purport to do), mass murderers would still have plenty of equally lethal options. It therefore requires colossal chutzpah or monumental self-delusion for Feinstein to claim her ban would “put a stop to mass shootings.”

This week saw the reintroduction of the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act. Sponsored by Sens. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa), Joni Ernst (R–Iowa), Todd Young (R–Ind.), and Ted Cruz (R–Tex.), the REINS Act tackles two major libertarian priorities: reducing burdensome regulations and reining in executive power. By passing it, Congress would reassert its role as a check on both runaway presidents and the administrative state.

As a joint statement released by the senators introducing the bill explains, the bill would require “that Congress affirmatively approve every new ‘major rule’ proposed by the Executive Branch before it can be enforced on the American people, as opposed to the status quo, where regulations ultimately take effect unless Congress specifically disapproves.” (A “major rule” is defined as “a regulation that may result in an economic impact of $100 million or greater each year.”)

This would be a welcome change. With active affirmation rather than passive consent, there would be much more scrutiny over the rules imposed on Americans and far fewer regulations would pass muster. Grassley is right when he says that “even when well-intended, government regulations are all too often ineffective, counterproductive or even outright harmful.” He’s also right that “more needs to be done to reclaim the rightful role of Congress as the lawmaking body of government,” writes Corie Whalen in her latest for Reason.

View this article.

Most social media users still know bullshit when they see it, a new study suggests. In a study of social media behavior during the 2016 election, more than 90 percent of their sample “shared no stories from fake news domains,” a trio of researchers reports in Science Advances.

The study has been getting a good deal of media attention, mainly for the parts that confirm people’s biases. “Conservatives were more likely to share articles from fake news domains,” states the study abstract. And “on average, users over 65 shared nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains as the youngest age group.”

The conservative bit comes with a caveat: In 2016, fake news domains “were largely pro-Trump in orientation.” So it’s not necessarily that conservatives are more susceptible than moderates or liberals to propaganda; it could just be that there was more propaganda aimed at them.

The research team—Andrew Guess of Princeton, Jonathan Nagler of New York University, and Joshua Tucker of New York University—considered the possibility that older people were more likely to be Trump fans. But they found “the age effect remains statistically significant when controlling for ideology and other demographic attributes.” Older liberals shared a lot of fake news too.

A common denominator in many visits to hoax articles was scrolling through Facebook. That network appears “to be much more common than other platforms before visits to fake news articles,” the study found.

While much has been made over Russian-backed bots and ads promoting propaganda content, the reach and influence of such misinformation attempts may have been greatly overstated. The researchers say it’s “farfetched” to suggest that fake news—which they define as “fake or misleading content intentionally dressed up to look like new articles, often for the purpose of generating ad revenue”—had a strong impact on the election’s outcome.

It’s “important to be clear about how rare this behavior is on social platforms,” they write.

“The vast majority of Facebook users in our data did not share any articles from fake news domains in 2016 at all,” the study notes. Furthermore, “this is not because people generally do not share links: While 3.4% of respondents for whom we have Facebook profile data shared 10 or fewer links of any kind, 310 (26.1%) respondents shared 10 to 100 links during the period of data collection and 729 (61.3%) respondents shared 100 to 1000 links.”

Among respondents for whom they had the appropriate data, only 8.5 percent shared any fake news pieces. About 18 percent of the Republican respondents shared at least one fake news article, as did 3.5 percent of Democrats.

Read more about their findings and methodology here.

Two Republican governors got the new year off to a productive start by striking a small blow against their states’ occupational licensing boards.

In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich signed a bill requiring the state legislature to review all licensing boards at least once every six years to ensure there is a continued public need for the licensing rules. The legislature will also be tasked with determining whether one-size-fits-all licenses are “the least restrictive form” of regulation for specific professions. If it determines that the answer is “no,” the boards can be shuttered. Finally, the legislature will have to determine if a board’s actions have inhibited economic growth, reduced efficiency, or increased the cost of government.

“Occupational licensing should only be a policy of last resort,” says Lee McGrath, legislative counsel for the Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm. A 2018 analysis published by McGrath’s group calculates that licensing laws cost Ohio 68,000 jobs and $6 billion in economic activity annually. “This licensing reform has the potential to create more economic opportunity and save Ohioans billions of dollars,” McGrath says.

The bill also opens the door for Ohioans with criminal records to obtain licenses in some fields. More than a million residents of the state have a criminal record of some sort, and about 25 percent of all Ohio jobs were off-limits to those individuals solely because of their records, according to a recent report from Policy Matters Ohio, a left-leaning think tank.

Licensing rules that automatically disqualify individuals with criminal records continue to punish people long after they have paid their debts to society. Under the reforms that Kasich signed this week, individuals with criminal records will be able to ask licensing boards whether their specific criminal records would be grounds for denying a license before they spend time and money (sometimes years and several hundred dollars) trying to meet the qualifications.

It would be better to require licensing boards to publish a specific list of crimes for which a license application could be denied. It makes sense, for example, to prevent someone with a history of crimes against children from getting a license to be a preschool teacher, but not to keep him from being a carpenter. Still, Ohio’s new law will likely help some residents of the state navigate the complex licensing process and land a job.

In Idaho, the first executive order issued by newly elected Gov. Brad Little will impose a mandatory periodic review of the state’s occupational licensing boards by the state legislature, similar to the reform in Ohio. In his first “state of the state” address, Little promised to put regulatory and licensing reform at the top of his agenda.

The executive order “will deliver more jobs and economic opportunity to Idahoans, particularly our low-income friends and neighbors,” says Wayne Hoffman, president of the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a free market think tank.

Idaho and Ohio join three other states—Louisiana, Nebraska, and Oklahoma—that passed similar licensing sunset provisions last year.

It would be better, of course, for states to strike many occupational licensing laws from the books entirely. A promise that the legislature will review those laws and boards every few years is only as good as the people who sit in the legislature—and lawmakers always have more interesting and politically beneficial things to do than check up on how a bunch of bureaucrats are doing.

But the mandatory sunset periods are an undeniable step in the right direction, even if only as a way to curb some of the boards’ worst behaviors. It’s one thing to pass a rule saying that someone needs 1,000 hours of training before he can safely use a blow dryer on a customer’s scalp when you think you are the final authority on the matter. Simply knowing that you’ll be subject a periodic review might put the brakes on that sort of thing. And if it doesn’t, the periodic reviews give the public (and pro-liberty groups like the Institute for Justice and state-based think tanks) an open door to press for changes or at least to highlight the more problematic laws.

The reforms in Ohio and Idaho are not a guarantee that licensing boards won’t continue to abuse their authority. But they tip the scales slightly toward economic freedom.

When then-president Barack Obama attempted in November 2014 to expand the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to protect an additional 3.7 million illegal immigrants from deportation, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.), a longtime supporter of comprehensive immigration reform, opposed the move. Indeed, he signed onto an amicus brief challenging the executive order at the Supreme Court.

“What is at stake in this matter is nothing less than an effort to supplant Congress’s constitutional power,” the brief read. “There is little doubt that the Executive adopted the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (‘DAPA’) program as part of an explicit effort to circumvent the legislative process.”

Graham, who has since graduated to the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was right then. He’s a disgrace now.

Mr. President, the Democrats are not working in good faith with you.

Declare emergency, build the wall now.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) January 11, 2019

President Donald Trump, according to the latest reporting, is “laying the groundwork for a declaration of national emergency to build [a] border wall,” telling his phone buddy Sean Hannity last night: “Now if we don’t make a deal with Congress, most likely I will do that….I would actually say I would. I can’t imagine any reason why not because I’m allowed to do it. The law is 100 percent on my side.”

Needless to say, people with more familiarity with law don’t share the president’s view. “The validity of this claim is dubious at best,” Ilya Somin explains at The Volokh Conspiracy. “It’s a terrible idea,” editorializes National Review. “Even if it’s legal—which is unclear, at best—it would represent another unwelcome step in America’s long march toward unilateral government by the executive.” Opines NR‘s David French: “If you look at the plain language and clear intent of the relevant statutes, they do not permit Trump to defy Congress and build his wall. He knows it. Congress knows it. His own lawyers know it.”

The congressional Republican most vocally opposed to the national-emergency scheme is, unsurprisingly, the self-described libertarian Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.). “I think it would be a huge mistake,” Amash told Michigan Advance yesterday, “and it would be a massive executive overreach….There’s no national emergency. Obviously, there are problems at the border, but to declare a national emergency—and assume all sorts of powers—would be way beyond what I think is authorized.”

But Amash’s is a lonely view even within his own Freedom Caucus bloc of ostensible constitutionalists. “I would prefer the legislative option,” Freedom Caucus Rep. Scott Perry (R–Pa.) tells The Huffington Post. “But if he keeps on trying and trying and trying, and the other side is so intractable that they refuse to discuss it, what other option do you have?”

This foul immigration cycle—legislative impasse, presidential policymaking, legal challenges, all lubricated by grotesque partisan hypocrisy—long predates Trump. Both Obama and George W. Bush, like the 45th president, deployed National Guard troops to the U.S.–Mexico border as political theater to influence legislation. Both consciously increased deportations as a reaction to Congress—Obama to demonstrate his seriousness about border security as a negotiating precursor, Bush to teach senators what the “consequences” would be for its inaction.

You can have sympathy for the desired ends of a policy while still opposing the unsound means. That’s one of the core principles animating America’s founding documents—redirecting government is supposed to be hard, not easy, requiring arduous navigation of co-equal branches and the protection of individual rights. Overriding congressional intent is supposed to come through the veto power, not situational emergency declarations.

Yes, presidents have wide latitude to prioritize law enforcement resources, declare national emergencies, and invoke “national security.” And yes, Congress has serially and consciously abdicated even the most basic of its constitutionally mandated functions. The presidency gets more imperial by the day.

But the proper response to this pathology is not to shrug and say “what other option do you have,” but rather to rally against America’s creeping re-monarchization. As Mel Brooks taught us, it’s good to be the king—but it’s not so hot to be the king’s subject. In a polarized country where only three of the past seven presidential winners received a majority of the popular vote, ceding new powers to the White House is a recipe for heightened social conflict. Particularly when the new power involves the deliberate trampling of property rights.

The forthcoming Elizabeth Warren administration would no doubt enjoy the power to re-write corporate charters, create a government-run pharmaceuticals industry, and spend a half-trillion dollars on public housing. But the Constitution requires that those who agree with such proposals convince enough legislators to get them passed, while not running afoul of the Bill of Rights. That is how the system was designed.

Congressional Republicans who endorse the declaration of an emergency that isn’t an emergency, who support using presidential action and threats thereof as a backstop to legislative negotiations, might as well turn in their security passes. What is the point of a legislative branch that won’t legislate? If we are to halt the long slide into one-man governance, politicians will have to adopt more than a situational constitutionalism—and voters will have to reject with prejudice those who’d rather kiss the president’s ring than do their damn jobs.

California’s infamous Proposition 187, which banned most public services for illegal immigrants, passed overwhelmingly in March 1994. It received nearly 59 percent of the vote, with only a handful of Bay Area counties voting against it. The measure wasn’t drafted by Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, but he was its most high-profile supporter.

The statewide initiative did more than try to turn off the spigot for taxpayer-funded programs. In opposing the initiative at the time, The Orange County Register complained that “it would also introduce Big Brother elements into schools and hospitals. Immigration and welfare problems should be resolved with less government, not more.” It noted that reporting “suspicious-looking immigrants…will be the conservatives’ unintentional mechanism to create even more racial divisiveness.”

The Prop. 187 campaign was never about a rational debate about immigration, public services and government intrusion. It was an emotional debate, fueled by frustration at the state’s changing demographics. The initiative was blocked by the courts, but no matter. As myriad commentators have noted, the California GOP suffered a steady decline since then.

More than two decades later, Donald Trump won the presidency based in part on his unyielding approach to illegal immigration. By the way, he received the lowest percentage of the California vote of any major political party candidate since 1924. And he continues to stir the immigration pot during the ongoing federal “shutdown.”

All this anger about immigration (and a lack of sympathy for the poor people coming here) is not only cruel, but politically foolish. Republicans are riding high with their tweet-crazy hero at the helm, but don’t be shocked if in a few years the national GOP resembles its barely existent California variant, writes Stephen Greenhut.

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The Upside tells a feel-good story with no real surprises. But that’s okay. The movie’s pleasures lie in its details and its top-drawer performances.

We know exactly what’s coming the minute we see Dell (Kevin Hart), a wisecracking black ex-con, turning up at the palatial New York penthouse of a white millionaire named Phillip (Bryan Cranston). Phillip is a paraplegic (he broke his spine in a paragliding accident) and he’s in need of a new caregiver—someone to lift him from bed to wheelchair every day, to take him outside for walks, and to generally be on call 24/7. The job comes with deluxe room and board, and naturally there are many highly qualified candidates for it, writes Kurt Loder.

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A new California law requires law enforcement officers to record the age, gender, sexual orientation, and race of anyone they stop. The catch? They can’t ask the person any questions about those characteristics and they can’t use the person’s driver’s license or any other documents to gather that information. They can only go by their perceptions. The law is aimed at curbing racial or other types of profiling.

Legislation proposed today by Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) would essentially require the federal government to offer landowners “just compensation” before seizing their property to make room for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Eminent Domain Just Compensation Act, the text of which Amash posted to Twitter, doesn’t specifically mention President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall. But considering the timing—Trump and congressional Democrats are currently at an impasse regarding $5.7 billion in wall funding—the immediate potential impact is pretty clear.

As Amash’s office noted in a press release, the Fifth Amendment does allow the government to take “private property for public use,” as long as “just compensation” is provided. “But in some cases,” the statement explains, “the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other government agencies are using ‘quick take’ condemnations to take possession of private property before just compensation has been determined.”

“It is unjust for the government to seize someone’s property with a lowball offer and then put the burden on them to fight for what they are still owed,” Amash said in a statement. “My bill will stop this practice by requiring that a property’s fair value be finalized before DHS takes ownership.”

The libertarian-leaning Republican does not necessarily oppose building a wall on the southern border. “I don’t have an inherent objection to a border wall,” he told the Ionia Sentinel-Standard last week. But he emphasized that “it should take into consideration private property at the border and environmental concerns.”

There are indeed significant private property concerns when it comes to building the wall. That’s because the federal government owns less than a third of the land on the southern border. The rest belongs to other entities, including states, Native American tribes, and private individuals. Most of the border land in Texas is private property, and as they’ve explained to Reason TV, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press, some of those landowners don’t plan to go down without a fight.

Efrén C. Olivares, racial and economic justice program director at the Texas Civil Rights Project, told the Post one major issue is that landowners who decide to fight the government in court are often forced to give up access to their land in the meantime before a final payout is determined. Amash’s legislation would likely remedy this “by requiring that court proceedings settling compensation be completed prior to the government’s taking possession of the property,” according to the press release.

The bill would thus stop the Trump administration from using what the president referred to on Friday as the “military version of eminent domain.”

“[Lawsuits are] not going to hold [the wall] up because under the military version of eminent domain and under, actually, homeland security we can do it before we even start,” Trump said. If Amash’s bill became law, the government wouldn’t be able to seize land until those lawsuits are settled.