Tag: hit&run

Law enforcement in New York confiscated a record $30 million worth of illicit fentanyl, 195 pounds of it , in two combined seizures from four defendants over the past two months. The haul dwarfs the previous record of 97 pounds, set in June of this year by Drug Enforcement Administration agents in San Diego.

We should expect to see more of it. JFK Airport receives one million pieces of international mail every day. U.S. Customs officials at the facility recently told USA Today they’ve been able to intercept 40 percent of the fentanyl that comes through their doors, which means most of the fentanyl bound for America passes right on through JFK. The same is likely true at other U.S. ports of entry as well as the Mexican and Canadian borders.

“The sheer volume of fentanyl pouring into the city is shocking,” New York City Prosecutor Bridget G. Brennan told NBC.

We can thank our own stubborn refusal to embrace harm reduction strategies, and, of course, China. According to a report from the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission, the PRC and Hong Kong “continue to divert chemicals from legitimate pharmaceutical uses and adulterate legitimate pharmaceuticals during production” due to the “fragmented and disorganized administrative system overseeing chemical production and exports.”

With roughly 160,000 Chinese chemical facilities operating legally and illegally, it shouldn’t surprise us that the second largest pharmaceutical market in the world and the largest global producer of chemical precursors has a major diversion problem. It also shouldn’t surprise us that we don’t have enough drug-sniffing dogs, Customs agents, or screening devices to catch all the fentanyl coming through the mail.

We do have one thing going for us, however, which is that most of the people who use fentanyl-tainted heroin just want the heroin. A 2015 study in the Harm Reduction Journal found that 73 percent of heroin users whose urine tested positive for fentanyl didn’t know they’d taken any fentanyl at all. The sample size for this study was small, but it squares with what I’ve heard from non-medicinal opioid users in the U.S.: Most people take fentanyl inadvertently. They’d rather not take it at all, considering both how deadly it is and the fact that a person needs substantially more naloxone to reverse an overdose.

And before many Americans turned to heroin, many of them just wanted to use prescription pills, which is the safest option of the three. But we also made that incredibly difficult by cracking down on prescribing practices and requiring pharmaceutical companies to introduce tamper-proof formulations.

Every day of this horrendous epidemic has been a good day to ask why we don’t just allow people to take heroin. The Swiss pursued this line of investigation at the height of their own HIV/AIDS epidemic, which was driven by injectable drugs. After the launch of the country’s first heroin-assisted treatment clinic in 1994, Switzerland saw huge declines in drug-related deaths, drug-related crime, and AIDS-related deaths. Participants were given clean, accurately-dosed heroin three times a day under doctor’s supervision. As a result, researchers saw “major disengagement from criminal activities,” reductions in the use of heroin obtained outside the program, and “marked improvements in social functioning.”

Heroin-assisted treatment isn’t cheap: Countries with HAT programs spend roughly 15,000 Euros annually per patient, compared to roughly 2,000 Euros for medication-assisted treatment (which is also too scarce in the U.S.). But according to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, “If an analysis of cost utility takes into account all relevant parameters, especially related to criminal behaviour, [HAT] saves money.”

Or, you know, we could keep doing what we’re doing.

In his first address to the United Nations, President Trump displayed both his show business chops and the contradictions inherent in his foreign policy choices. Many of those choices are far more mainstream than Trump’s rhetoric, or the commentary on it, suggests.

Trump says he wants a July 4 military parade that mirrors the French’s Bastille day festivities, with a celebration of military strength. That’s certainly different, but not substantively, from Trump’s predecessors, who were often laudatory of and deferential to military leaders.

Trump is reportedly looking to expand the drone war. Obama did a good job maintaining an illusion of accountability for the CIA’s drone program. Trump may dispel this illusion, but he’s not changing the nature of the program—it was always a dangerous program with little transparency and no effective accountability.

Since his election, Trump’s foreign policy has not looked that much different from his predecessors. On Afghanistan, for example, Trump made the decision to stay, as did Presidents Obama and Bush. He merely couched it in different language.

Trump talks about the need for Europe to take more responsibility for its own defense and contribute more to NATO, yet he has embraced NATO as well as its ill-advised expansion.

His administration had taken the same meddling posture as past establishment foreign policy figures when it comes to respecting the rights of sovereign countries to govern their own affairs.

At the UN speech itself, Trump intoned that Americans “do not expect diverse countries to share the same cultures, traditions, or even systems of government.”

Yet, later in the same speech, he praised U.S. sanctions on Venezuela and insisted that the internal situation in Venezuela was “completely unacceptable” and that the U.S. could not “stand by and watch.”

“As a responsible neighbor and friend, we and all others have a goal, Trump told the U.N. “That goal is to help them regain their freedom, recover their country, and restore their democracy. I would like to thank leaders in this room for condemning the regime and providing vital support to the Venezuelan people.”

Remarkably, Trump recently said explicitly that the military option was on the table for the South American country.

The interventionist stance on Venezuela Trump expressed at the United Nations could have easily been articulated by most of his predecessors. The difference, as always, is largely rhetorical.

In his speech, Trump also blasted Iran as part of a “small group of rogue regimes” and said the U.S. would “totally destroy” North Korea if it had too.

Rhetoric aside, his approach toward Iran and North Korea has been relatively tame. Trump has so far declined every opportunity he’s had to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. There’s been little substance behind his anti-Iran showmanship.

On North Korea, Trump has made efforts to engage China on the North Korea and to, in general, seek diplomatic solutions. His rhetoric may be more colorful than his predecessors, but here even his rhetoric is not all that different.

At the UN, Trump said the U.S. could destroy North Korea. Obama, too, has noted that the U.S. could destroy North Korea with its arsenal. It’s a true statement and one of the facts acting as a deterrent to a North Korean nuclear strike.

Nevertheless, Trump’s UN speech lead to predictable responses from foreign leaders, not just from countries like Iran but from European allies too.

“It was the wrong speech, at the wrong time, to the wrong audience,” Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom said.

American presidents have been very good at masking destructive U.S. foreign policy in lofty rhetoric. Trump isn’t. But that should be welcomed as an opportunity to make U.S. foreign policy less destructive. Hiding flaws in rhetoric had never been a real solution.

At Marginal Revolution, George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok offers some interesting thoughts on Richard Rothstein’s new book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. “Rothstein is no libertarian,” Tabarrok writes, “but to his credit he does acknowledge that one of the few anti-segregation forces in the early twentieth century was the Lochner influenced reasoning of the Supreme Court.”

Tabarrok refers to the 1917 case of Buchanan v. Warley, in which the Court struck down a Louisville, Kentucky, ordinance that segregated residential housing blocks by race. The Court invalidated that Jim Crow regulation as an unconstitutional violation of property rights and economic liberty under the 14th Amendment.

Here is how Rothstein summarizes Buchanan v. Warley in The Color of Law:

The Court majority was enamored of the idea that the central purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was not to protect the rights of freed slaves but a business rule: “freedom of contract.” Relying on this interpretation, the Court had struck down minimum wage and workplace safety laws on the grounds that they interfered with the right of workers and business owners to negotiate individual employment conditions without government interference. Similarly, the Court ruled that racial zoning ordinances interfered with the right of a property owner to sell to whomever he pleased.

The central holding of Lochner v. New York (1905) was that the 14th Amendment protects a fundamental right to economic liberty, including the right to liberty of contract. It is not an unlimited right; it is subject to reasonable government regulation. But in order for such regulation to pass muster in court, it must serve a legitimate and demonstrable public health or safety purpose. That same reasoning underlines the Court’s opinion in Buchanan v. Warley.

The libertarian lawyer Moorfield Storey argued and won Buchanan before the Supreme Court. A thoroughgoing individualist, Storey championed laissez-faire economics, denounced militarism, and opposed the rise of the populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan. In addition to serving as the president of the American Bar Association, Storey was a founder and president of the Anti-Imperialist League and was the first president of the NAACP.

Storey led the NAACP’s fight against the Louisville segregation law. In his brief to the Supreme Court, Storey (with co-lawyer Clayton B. Blakely) argued that the law “destroys, without due process of law, fundamental rights attached by law to ownership of property.” The law’s purpose was not “to prevent conflict and ill-feeling” between the races, as it claimed, but rather “to place the negro, however industrious, thrifty and well-educated, in as inferior a position as possible with respect to his right of residence, and to violate the spirit of the Fourteenth Amendment without transgressing the letter.”

Lochner v. New York was one of the legal authorities cited in support of those arguments.

In its brief, the state of Kentucky argued that the federal courts had no business interfering with the power of local majorities to enforce their social and economic preferences via regulation. “Whether the legislation is wise, expedient, or necessary, or the best calculated to promote its object,” the state maintained, “is a legislative and not a judicial question.”

The Supreme Court disagreed and nullified the Jim Crow law. It was a far-reaching decision. At that time, other municipalities around the country were considering or even implementing their own residential segregation schemes. Buchanan stopped those schemes once and for all. According to Storey’s colleague at the NAACP, W.E.B. DuBois, Buchanan should be credited with “the breaking of the backbone of segregation.”

That is the landmark case whose reasoning Rothstein slights as a “business rule.”

It is also worth noting that the same “business rule” that helped protect black Americans from Jim Crow in Kentucky also helped to protect Chinese-Americans from racist government abuse in California.

In 1882 the city of San Francisco passed an ordinance that required anyone seeking to operate a laundry business within city limits to first obtain “the consent of the board of supervisors, which shall only be granted upon the recommendation of not less than 12 citizens and taxpayers in the block in which the laundry is proposed to be established, maintained, or carried on.”

That law’s real objective was to prevent Chinese immigrants from further establishing themselves in the laundry business. One of those would-be laundry operators, Quong Woo, filed suit in federal court, arguing that the ordinance served no lawful government purpose.

The court agreed. Writing for the Circuit Court for the District of California, Justice Stephen Field, one of the intellectual architects of the Supreme Court’s later Lochner-ian jurisprudence, held that government regulations may not be used “as a means of prohibiting any of the avocations of life which are not injurious to public morals, nor offensive to the senses, nor dangerous to the public health or safety.” Justice Field struck down the law for violating the 14th Amendment.

The city’s requirement that prospective business owners first receive permission from their neighbors, Field observed, cannot possibly be justified on health or safety grounds. All the requirement did was subject the exercise of a basic economic freedom to “the favor or caprice of others.” Quong Woo, Field pointed out, was more than happy to abide by local regulations and to pay whatever fees the city required; yet on account of the “great antipathy and hatred towards the people of his race,” he simply could not locate twelve neighbors willing to green light his enterprise.

Once again, the “business rule”—otherwise known as the fundamental right to economic liberty under the 14th Amendment—put a stop to an act of racist government abuse.

Two senators announced today that they will reintroduce a bipartisan bill to overhaul federal sentencing guidelines. The legislation failed to pass Congress last year, much to the disappointment of criminal justice reform groups.

The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, originally introduced by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Ia.) and Dick Durbin (D-Il.) in 2015, would reduce the mandatory-minimum sentencing guidelines for repeat drug offenders without serious violent felonies and would broaden the “safety valve” exception to federal mandatory minimum sentences. It would also add new mandatory minimum sentences for interstate domestic abuse and for providing support for terrorists, while strengthening penalties for certain other crimes.

Grassley and Durbin say they will reintroduce the bill this year, although they did not say when.

“While the political landscape in Washington has changed, the same problems presented by the current sentencing regime remain,” Grassley said in a statement, “and we will continue to work with colleagues in Congress and the administration, as well as advocates and members of the law enforcement community, to find a comprehensive solution to ensure justice for both the victims and the accused, and support law enforcement in their mission to keep our communities safe.”

The legislation was hammered out in 2015 and then revised again in 2016 as part of a compromise between skeptical Republicans, like the traditionally law-and-order Grassley, and a bipartisan group of Democrats and Republicans who support reducing or eliminating mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines.

Criminal justice reform advocates saw the bill as their best chance in years to get a major piece of legislation through Congress, but despite passing the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee the bill never made it to the Senate floor for a vote.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), facing opposition to the bill from within his caucus, said he was waiting on the House to pass a package of similar legislation first. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) said he was committed to bringing that package to the floor—but in the midst of a bitter election year, as well as disputes with Democrats over some provisions in the House bill, neither chamber of Congress found the will or time to bring the legislation to a full vote.

Reformers’ disappointment was compounded when President Donald Trump tapped Jeff Sessions to be attorney general. As a senator, Sessions was one of a small but vocal group of Republicans who staunchly support mandatory minimum sentencing and 1980s-style law enforcement.

Yet Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and all-around White House point man, has been meeting privately with senators, including Durbin and Grassley, to discuss criminal justice reform. The subject is reportedly one of Kushner’s areas of personal interest—his father was sentenced to two years in federal prison for tax evasion—and last week he hosted a bipartisan meeting on improving job training and re-entry programs for federal inmates. Kushner’s support could provide valuable political cover for Republicans.

“This legislation is the product of more than five years of work on criminal justice reform,” Durbin said in a statement. “It’s also the best chance in a generation to right the wrongs of a badly broken system. The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country on earth. Mandatory minimum sentences were once seen as a strong deterrent. In reality they have too often been unfair, fiscally irresponsible and a threat to public safety.”

To flush or not to flush? The Kimberly-Clark Corporation is suing D.C. over the question, after a law the city passed last year tried to keep the company from labeling its disposable wipes “flushable.”

The whole matter might seem a little silly for those outside the septic or paper product industries. But it provides a perfect case study in arbitrary regulation and government incompetence.

Under the Nonwoven Disposable Products Act of 2016, passed last December, disposable paper products such as cleansing wipes are forbidden from being labeled as flushable “unless there is competent and reliable scientific evidence to substantiate that the non-woven disposable product is flushable sewer safe, and septic safe.” Products that don’t meet this standard must be labeled with “Do Not Flush.”

Come January 1, 2018, manufacturers of everything from facial tissues to paper towels could face civic penalties and fines for failure to meet the new labeling requirements.

Yet the city has offered no guidance on what counts as “competent and reliable scientific evidence” of flushability, nor information on how the city will test suspicious paper products. And repeated requests by Kimberly-Clark for more information went unanswered.

At hearings about the rule, experts for the city suggested that no disposable cleansing wipe currently on the market was fit to be flushed, and that even some toilet paper wasn’t flushable.

This puts companies like Kimberly-Clark—a major manufacturer of personal care products (including several lines of cleansing wipes that can supposedly be flushed without clogging toilets and pipes)—in a bind. They have no way to determine how to ensure their products will meet D.C.’s standard. But if they fail to follow these unknowable rules, D.C. can punish them.

In a lawsuit filed September 15 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Kimberly-Clark contends that the law is unconstitutional for a host of reasons, including its failure to set clear standards for avoiding sanctions.

The suit also argues that D.C. is violating Kimberly-Clark’s First Amendment rights by forcing the company to make untrue statements about its products and that it impermissably seeks to hold Kimberly-Clark “vicariously liable for the actions of others, namely the unaffiliated businesses that buy Kimberly-Clark’s flushable wipes elsewhere in the United States and then—lawfully—choose to resell them to local consumers.”

And then there is the question of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which grants Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. Kimberly-Clark products are made in South Carolina, where labeling the wipes as flushable is legal. Thus, the suit argues, D.C.’s flushable-product policy “invalidly seeks to regulate the conduct of manufacturers in other states by imposing civil sanctions on conduct that is entirely lawful” there. Meanwhile, the act entirely fails to regulate any local activity:

It remains lawful under the Act for retailers to buy wipes labeled as flushable and to resell those products to consumers in D.C., regardless of whether that labeling is deemed consistent with the Act. Likewise, it remains lawful for D.C. consumers to purchase and use those very same products, no matter how they are labeled. But it is the manufacturers who exclusively bear liability for this activity, as the only thing regulated by the Act is non-local manufacturing and labeling activity. Thus, whether construed as a per se invalid regulation of out-of-state commercial conduct or as a regulation that inordinately burdens interstate commerce, the Act violates the Commerce Clause.

According to a company statement, Kimberly-Clark wipes “are engineered to rapidly lose strength as soon as they are flushed” and “meet or exceed widely accepted industry guidelines for flushability.” In the “largest sewer collection study, conducted in New York City in 2016, not a single Kimberly-Clark flushable wipe was found,” it notes. A Federal Trade Commission investigation agreed that the wipes are sufficiently flushable.

The sponsor of the new law, D.C. Councilmember Mary Cheh (D–Ward 3), derided the lawsuit in a WAMU interview. “Honestly, we compel speech all the time,” she said. “We tell food vendors that they have to label their products. We have labeling requirement all the time, and to characterize it as compelled speech is really no argument at all.”

The same goes for Commerce Clause concerns. “Guess what? A lot of our safety regulation affect manufacturers out of state,” Cheh said.

This seems disingenuous, since the suit isn’t arguing that local governments can’t compel some sorts of commercial speech or set some regulations that affect products made out of state. The issue here is that D.C. has set an impossible regulatory standard, one that companies have no way of knowing whether they meet or fail.

States collectively owe more than $1 trillion in pension benefits to current public workers and retirees, but that oft-cited figure does not include the cost of other retirement benefits for government workers and public school employees.

That’s largely because states don’t bother accounting for their so-called “Other Post-Employment Benefits,” or OPEB, costs in the same way that they do for pensions. Instead of putting money away year-after-year to pay for those liabilities, most states fund OPEB costs on what accountants call a pay-as-you-go basis, meaning that revenue is appropirated from the state budget each year to meet those needs. The majority of OPEB is in the form of health care benefits, including retiree health insurance and other expenses like dental, vision, life, and disability insurance.

States paid more than $20 billion towards OPEB costs during 2015, according to a new analysis from the Pew Charitable Trusts. That sounds like a lot of money, but it’s really just a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated $692 billion owed to public workers over the next few decades.

Some states have done better than others when it comes to keeping up with OPEB costs, but only six states (Alaska, Arizona, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, and Utah) have set aside more than half of the the assets necessary to meet thier long-term OPEB obligations, according to Pew’s analysis. By comparison, 30 states have less than 10 percent of the necessary savings.

Think about it like this. Much like pension costs, OPEB costs are a long-term thing. When a state government hires a new worker, or a school district brings in a new teacher, the employer (the government) has a number of years to save-up for the eventual retirement of that employee. How much those retirement benefits—pensions and OPEB—will cost varies from employee to employee, but actuaries do a pretty good job of predicting costs in the aggregate. Based on those projections, actuaries come up with an “annual required contribution,” which is exactly what it sounds like, except governments often ignore the “required” part.

The ARC is the equilavelnt of a miniumum payment on a credit card bill. Pay this much every year and you’ll meet the obligations that you owe. A large part of the reason why so many states are underwater in pension payments today (though not the only reason) is that they ignored those ARC payments for years. Just like what happens if you fail to make your minimum credit card payments, the result is that the bills got bigger and more expensive.

When it comes to OPEB, most states don’t even pretend to care about the ARC payments. That’s why things are getting worse, not better. Compared with the same survey in 2014, Pew found that 31 states saw their OPEB liabilities grow during 2015. Even though states paid about 6 percent more towards those costs in 2015, the overall liability grew by better than 5 percent.

That’s a worrying tragectory. Many states are already struggling to fund their pension promises, which are eating away at parts of state budgets meant to fund schools, roads, social services, and more. Because most states fund OPEB costs directly from state budgets, the lack of long-term savings threatens to cause more budgetary pain.

Like in Connecticut, for example. Last year’s state budget (the current state budget is still being hammered out) projected $731 million to cover health care costs for retired state employees in 2017, compared to just $698 million for the health care costs of current employees.

Because Connecticut failed to save-up for the long-term costs of their retirees, state taxpayers are now paying more money to cover the costs of people who aren’t providing any government services—because they are retired—than for people who actually are.

“Rocket man” isn’t President Donald Trump’s only concern on the Korean Peninsula.

The Korea-U.S. Trade agreement, or KORUS, is a target for the rank-and-file protectionists who occupy the White house. Trump himself threatened this past April to terminate the free trade deal if he couldn’t renegotiate better terms, saying it has left America “destroyed.” On the campaign trail, Trump was adamant that the deal cost over 100,000 jobs.

Peter Navarro, an economic advisor for the Trump administration, claimed in September of 2016 the deal contributed to the decline of the industrial Midwest. “Any deal that’s going to be negotiated has to increase our growth, decrease our trade deficit, and strengthen our manufacturing base. The South Korea deal is a perfect example of violating every single one of those rules.”

Try as Trump might, blaming job losses in the industrial Midwest on trade with South Korea is nonsensical, says Alan Reynolds, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

The bulk of Korean car imports to the United States occurred between 2010-2015, Reynolds points out, while the bilateral reduction in tariffs on Korean automobiles was scheduled to occur in 2016-2021.

If anything, withdrawing from the deal would considerably hurt the American automobile industry. What KORUS really did was lower Korean tariffs on U.S cars from 8 percent in 2012 to zero in 2016. During that period, American automobiles exports tripled in South Korea, according to the office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Trade isn’t a competition that one side or the other wins. Both countries benefited when, for example, Korean car companies Kia and Hyundai recently built assembly plants in Georgia and Alabama, respectively.

In a 21st Century economy, companies might be located in a certain country but they still rely on global supply chains. Almost half of America’s imports from abroad are used as inputs to create other things. Meanwhile, South Korea is America’s seventh-largest export market for goods. Pulling out of trade agreements will add cost to those supply chains that hurt businesses and consumers in both countries.

“Withdrawing from KORUS, for instance, would likely mean our products would face, on average, a 13/14 percent tariff to enter South Korea (up from zero), Clark Packard, a policy analyst for the R Street Institute, a free market think tank, says. “Products entering the United States would face a tariff of 3.5 percent on average – up from zero.”

The consequences could be felt well beyond the markets for tech and automobiles. The U.S-Korean trade deal, which was negotiated initially by President George W. Bush and ratified under President Barack Obama, has been a particular boon for American agriculture.

South Korea is the fifth-largest importer of American farm products. If the United States were to pull out of the agreement, countries like Canada or Australia would likely move in on the market.

Members of Congress from Midwestern states are pushing back on the Trump administration’s anti-KORUS rhetoric. Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, wrote a letter urging Trump not to break the deal. Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Nebraska, no stranger to criticizing Donald Trump, was loud in his defense of the deal. “His administration holds 18th-century views of trade as a zero-sum game,” Sasse recently tweeted. “I side with our farmers and ranchers who are feeding the world now.” Agricultural advocacy groups from states such as Iowa and Illinois have been vocal about the importance of keeping South Korean markets open to farmers.

For now, at the behest of some of the more establishment members of the cabinet, it seems the White House has decided to leave KORUS as is. But as long as Trump sits behind the Resolute desk and his reputation as a deal-maker is at stake, it’s hard to believe this particular trade fight is over.

“I know there are some globalists in the room right now. And they don’t want them, John, they don’t want the tariffs,” Trump told John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, Axios reported. “But I’m telling you, I want tariffs.”

• President Trump will reportedly ease restrictions on exporting American guns.
• Police in Oklahoma have fatally shot a man for holding a stick.
• Another former Fox News commentator, Scottie Nell Hughes, is suing the company over allegations of sexual harassment and sex-based discrimination.
• Another cop was caught in his colleagues’ prostitution sting.
• Democrats are asking the Federal Election Company to ban foreign entities from advertising on Twitter and Facebook about politics.
• Twitter says that it has received significantly less reports about pro-terrorism accounts recently.
• In Tajikistan, authorities can confiscate food from funerals or weddings that they deem to be too lavish.
• Canada is banning trans fats.
• A look at Instagram’s complex rules for cannabis companies.

Rand Paul is a friend of mine but he is such a negative force when it comes to fixing healthcare. Graham-Cassidy Bill is GREAT! Ends Ocare!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 20, 2017

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The short-lived CBS series Brain Dead, now available on Netflix, is a science-fiction satire about an invasion of Washington, D.C., by extraterrestrial bugs that crawl into people’s ears and hijack their minds as part of a plot to conquer the world. But the most implausible aspect of the story is a dramatic Senate committee vote on whether to authorize military action in Syria.

In the real world, Jacob Sullum writes, no such vote is necessary, because the president does whatever he wants with the armed forces he controls while Congress abdicates its constitutional responsibility to decide when the country should go to war. Last week 61 senators showed they are happy with that situation by tabling an amendment that would have forced a debate about endless, metastasizing wars that cost trillions of dollars and thousands of lives without making Americans any safer.

The amendment, introduced by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), would have repealed the 2001 authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks and the 2002 resolution approving the war in Iraq. The repeal would have taken effect in six months, giving Congress time to consider the justification for continued U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the various other countries supposedly covered by those resolutions.

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Would you trust a tour guide who wasn’t licensed?

John Stossel writes:

Michelle Freenor’s business almost failed before it began.

That would have been a loss, since her Savannah, Georgia, walking tour gets only good reviews from customers. “Top notch tour guide giving us a lot of history of Savannah’s Historic District,” said one five-star Yelp review. “Great, informative,” said another.

But that didn’t matter to Savannah politicians. They said she had to get a government license if she wanted to charge people for tours. And getting the license was difficult.

She had to pay $100 and then “pass a college-level history exam with tons of obscure gotcha questions,” Freenor told us. Passing required “three to five months of studying because it was about 120 pages. I had to map out where I was standing, what I was saying.”

It’s one more example of abuse of licensing rules. Dick Carpenter, author of the book Bottleneckers, lists how these regulations strangle new businesses.

“She also had to do a criminal background check, which meant she had to give a urine sample and a blood sample.” Carpenter told me. “She also had to go through a physical fitness test.”

No matter, said the city, you must pass the test and you must pay the fee.

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