Tag: in-the-news

Another Federal Court Allows Warrantless Cellphone Searches at U.S. Border

If you possess a cellphone on U.S. soil, the Fourth Amendment generally prevents law enforcement officials from searching your phone’s contents without a warrant. But what happens if you carry a cellphone at the U.S. border while returning from a trip outside the country? Does the Fourth Amendment also stop border agents from warrantlessly snooping inside your device?

Not according to a pair of recent federal court opinions. “Border searches never require a warrant or probable cause,” said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in a 2018 case, United States v. Vergara. That ruling centered on a U.S. citizen whose cellphones were subjected to warrantless forensic searches at the border, a highly intrusive procedure that typically involves retrieving deleted files and other inspections of a phone’s digital records.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reached a similar conclusion about warrantless cellphone searches at the border last week. “Border officials may conduct suspicionless manual searches of cell phones,” the 9th Circuit held in United States v. Cano, “but must have reasonable suspicion before they conduct a forensic search.” Unlike probable cause, which is the standard required for obtaining a search warrant, reasonable suspicion is a more lenient rule that lets law enforcement officials conduct searches without getting a warrant first.

The U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized a “border search exception” to the Fourth Amendment’s normal warrant requirement. But the Court has yet to address whether that exception deserves to hold sway in the current era of smartphones and related high-tech devices.

It is one thing, after all, to let border agents rummage through your suitcase or through the trunk of your car without a warrant. It is something else to let those same agents download and examine every digital record on your cellphone—a treasure trove of highly sensitive personal information—without at least getting a warrant first.

Judge Jill Pryor, the lone dissenter in the Vergara case, suggested a good way for the federal courts to handle the issue going forward. “Due to the extreme intrusion into privacy posed by a forensic cell phone search,” Pryor wrote in her Vergara dissent, “my answer to the question of what law enforcement officials must do before forensically searching a cell phone at the border…’is accordingly simple—get a warrant.'”

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Blaming Breathing Problems on ‘Vaping’ Is Like Blaming Food Poisoning on Eating

Health says the recent hospitalization of about two dozen people in the Midwest who had breathing problems after vaping shows “why e-cigarettes are so dangerous.” Since we don’t know what these patients were vaping or whether it was actually the cause of their symptoms, that conclusion is quite a leap.

So far 15 cases have been reported in Wisconsin, at least six in Illinois, and at least four in Minnesota. In addition to shortness of breath, the patients’ symptoms have included coughing, fever, vomiting, diarrhea, headache, dizziness, and chest pain. “It’s unclear exactly what the patients—many of whom are young adults—had been inhaling or what type of devices they were using,” NBC News reports. “Nor do doctors know where they had purchased the devices or e-liquids.” The New York Times notes that “officials are not yet clear whether vaping caused the injuries, and if so, what ingredient in the e-cigarette or vaping systems was responsible.”

The assumption that vaping caused the breathing problems seems to be based on little more than supposition. “We are continuing to interview patients so we can identify a possible cause,” Andrea Palm, secretary-designee of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, said in a press release. “All patients reported vaping prior to their hospitalization, but we don’t know all the products they used at this time. The products used could include a number of substances, including nicotine, THC, synthetic cannabinoids, or a combination of these.”

Emily Chapman, the chief medical officer for Children’s Minnesota, a pediatric health system based in Minneapolis, told NBC, “We know there are certain characteristics in common with these cases, but we have not been able to get to the bottom of exactly what aspect of the vaping habit or product or solvent or oil is causing the injury.” David Gummin, the medical director of the Wisconsin Poison Center, likewise told the Times: “We don’t yet know the causative agent. We have no leads pointing to a specific substance other than those that are associated with smoking or vaping.”

The Times says “one hypothesis” is that “the teenagers had purchased a nicotine or cannabis-derived vaping product that had been used once, and then refilled with dangerous substances that would be hard to detect.” The paper notes that “patients reported using open-tank systems and devices with interchangeable cartridges,” meaning they were not necessarily using commercially produced e-liquids.

At least some of the patients were vaping not nicotine but a cannabis extract, or what they thought was a cannabis extract. “People will buy them from the states where it is legal and they’ll bring them back to states such as Wisconsin where it’s not legal,” the brother of one patient told NBC. “You don’t know if you’re buying something from a middleman that picked it up from a dispensary or if you’re buying it from somebody who has tampered with it and made their own mixture. You literally don’t know what you’re inhaling into your body.”

In this context, linking these cases to Juul, the leading e-cigarette company, seems like a non sequitur. Yet that is what both NBC and the Times did, citing a 2018 study that found some flavoring agents used in e-cigarettes, when mixed with solvents, produce acetyl compounds that can irritate the lungs. It’s not clear what that has to do with breathing problems people experience after vaping black-market cannabis extracts or synthetic cannabinoids.

“There are still many unanswered questions, but the health harms emerging from the current epidemic of youth vaping in Minnesota continue to increase,” Ruth Lynfield, medical director at the Minnesota Department of Health, said in a press release. Since the “unanswered questions” include which products the patients used and what drugs they delivered, tying these cases to the “epidemic of youth vaping,” a phrase associated with the use of commercially produced nicotine delivery devices such as Juul, makes little sense.

Lynfield added that “we are encouraging providers and parents to be on the look-out for vaping as a cause for unexplained breathing problems and lung injury and disease,” which pretty much guarantees that we will hear about more cases supposedly caused by e-cigarettes. “Could it be that these particular patients were smoking something in common?” Christy Sadreameli, a pediatric pulmonologist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, said in an interview with NBC News. “Definitely possible. It’s also possible that as clusters become evident to physicians, we start to look out for things more.”

In other words, once people hear that “vaping”—of what exactly, we’re not sure—causes breathing problems, they are more likely to attribute breathing problems to vaping, reinforcing the impression that a causal relationship has been established, which in turn encourages more such reports, and so on. Even when symptoms actually are related to vaping, the specific agent and causal mechanism, which may differ from case to case, are lost in a sea of anecdotes. Without that information, blaming these cases on “vaping” in general, implying that all forms of it are equally dangerous, is about as helpful as blaming food poisoning on eating.

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Why Did Narendra Modi Crackdown in Kashmir?

India has been described as an enigma wrapped in a riddle shrouded in mystery. But last Thursday, on the 73rd anniversary of its independence from British rule, it also became a monumental irony: Even as Indians celebrated the overthrow of colonial rule, the Indian army had turned the Himalayan state of Jammu and Kashmir into an open-air prison, where seven million residents were being held under curfew and banned from calling, tweeting, publishing—much less protesting. Their state legislature had been disbanded, their leaders were under house arrest, and the constitutional provisions granting them a measure of autonomy from New Delhi had been suspended.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who engineered all this without any forewarning 10 days ago, is claiming that “fully integrating” (read: forcibly annexing) this ravaged state into broader India will turn it into a mecca of prosperity whose herbal products will find global markets and where tourists will once again roam. But there is every reason to suspect that Modi’s Kashmir stunt is meant to distract from the fact that instead of delivering growth and “acche din”—good times—to India as he had promised six years ago, he is presiding over a cratering economy.

Modi likes to surprise. But unlike his last big surprise, when he scrapped 80 percent of the national currency one evening three years ago as part of his so-called demonetization effort, his Kashmir move is wildly popular.

His Hindu nationalist supporters are cheering it because they have long dreamed of extending their religious dominion over this predominantly Muslim area. The Indian Parliament rubber-stamped Modi’s request to scrap Article 370, which had handed Kashmir special status to have its own constitution and flag, and Article 35A, which restricted the rights of noncitizens to own land (a problematic constitutional arrangement, but one that India offers to a half-dozen other states). Within hours, these nationalists started jubilantly floating maps of India draped in their trademark saffron turban audaciously perched on Kashmir. They didn’t even bother masking their true intention by using the tri-color Indian flag.

But even Indians who aren’t militant Hindus are foursquare behind Modi. Many see Kashmir with its snow-peaked mountains and lush valleys as India’s crown jewel. And some blame its “special status” for allowing Pakistan to make inroads into it.

Pakistan has always resented that even though Kashmir has a large Muslim population, the British did not hand it this coveted bit of land when they left in 1947. Rather, they let the Hindu prince who ruled Kashmir at the time make an alliance with India. Since then, Pakistan has waged four wars, dispatched foreign jihadis, and funded a separatist insurgency in the Kashmiri valley to undermine India’s control.

Modi claims that dismissing Kashmir’s corrupt state government and replacing it with a strong central hand will make it easier to keep Pakistan at bay, root out insurgency, and restore law and order in the state. At the same time, ending restrictions on Indians who wish to settle or buy property will reopen Kashmir for business and investment.

It’s a nice vision—except that local Muslims aren’t buying it, which is why Modi had to mobilize 35,000 additional soldiers to put them in lockdown ahead of his announcement lest they protest and riot.

Why are Kashmiris so skeptical? For starters, as far as they are concerned, opening up the state won’t bring development as much as an influx of Hindus, diluting their presence at a time when Hindu militancy is on the rise, which could worsen the security situation in the state.

Moreover, it’s not like central rule has never been tried in Kashmir. It has. Many times. Indeed, the Kashmiri insurgency originally broke out in the late 1980s precisely because the ruling Congress Party dismissed a popularly elected state government and installed a stooge.

Modi wants everyone to believe the Congress Party failed in Kashmir because it was corrupt and didn’t care about the country’s greater good whereas he is squeaky-clean and driven by national interest. But what he lacks in corruption he makes up in ideological aggression. He doesn’t care about local Kashmiris, which is why there is reason to fear that his rule of brute force will escalate.

Indeed, why did Modi pick this moment to do something so radical? Violence in Kashmir had been trending downwards for the last year, after all. The main reason, besides President Donald Trump’s alarming offer to mediate a settlement, is that he wanted a distraction from India’s mounting economic woes.

India’s GDP growth dropped from over 8 percent to 5.8 percent over the last year, and it is widely expected to dip further. Just as ominous has been the crash in consumer demand. India’s usual problem has been an insufficient supply to meet its voracious appetite for vehicles, cell phones, and other similar goods. But sales figures for all consumer goods have posted a precipitous decline, slamming businesses that are dramatically scaling back investments.

All of this is, to a large extent, the result of Modi’s demonetization blunder, which wiped out India’s farmers and the self-employed. Meanwhile, India’s exports have plummeted. This is partly due to the global trade war between the U.S. and China. But the far bigger reason, notes Swaminathan Aiyar in The Economic Times, is that Indian exports have failed to maintain their international competitiveness due to high labor and land acquisition costs and a 42 percent effective corporate tax rate.

Reversing all this would mean painstaking and painful economic reforms that would require Modi to stand up to a lot of powerful constituencies, including his own party. It is far more politically expedient to take over Kashmir.

But if Modi can’t deliver “acche din” to greater India after six years of rule, there is little reason to believe he can do so in a troubled and traumatized region like Kashmir. Modi’s happy spin notwithstanding, the fact is that authoritarian leaders are better at flexing their muscles and taking land than getting their hands dirty building economies.

Independence is just another word for them.

A version of this column originally appeared in The Week.

 

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Peter Navarro Says the ‘Data’ Show Americans Aren’t Paying Trump’s Tariffs. In Fact, They Show the Opposite.

After a roller-coaster week on Wall Street raised fears of a recession, top White House economic advisor Peter Navarro was dispatched to Sunday’s political talk shows to calm investors’ jittery nerves.

But all Navarro accomplished was demonstrating—yet again—how little the Trump administration seems to understand a trade war that’s proving to be anything but “good and easy to win.”

In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Navarro claimed that the economy remains “very strong” and dismissed worries about U.S. Treasury bonds’ odd behavior last week. But when pressed by Tapper about the impact that the trade war is having—which includes not just the monetary cost of the tariffs but heightened instability and uncertainty for American businesses—Navarro veered into fantasyland.

“The tariffs are hurting China. China is bearing the entire burden of the tariffs,” Navarro said. “Look at the data. There is no evidence whatsoever that American consumers are paying any of this.”

Perhaps Navarro should look at the data too.

He could start with The Wall Street Journal, which last week reported on a Goldman Sachs analysis of consumer price index data released by the Labor Department. That analysis found that consumer goods affected by tariffs have increased in price by about 3 percent since February 2018, while goods not subject to tariffs have fallen in price by about 1 percent.

If he wanted to dig a little deeper, Navarro could look at the May 2019 paper published by economists at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. That analysis of the trade war found that China was absorbing about 5 percent of the tariffs’ costs while American consumers were getting hit by the other 95 percent.

Or he could dig up a March 2019 paper published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a London-based think tank, that found the Trump’s tariffs were draining about $1.4 billion out of the U.S. economy every month. That’s above and beyond the actual direct cost of paying the tariffs.

“We find that the U.S. tariffs were almost completely passed through into U.S. domestic prices, so that the entire incidence of the tariffs fell on domestic consumers and importers,” wrote Mary Amiti, Stephen J. Redding, and David Weinstein, the three researchers who authored the paper.

If he’s still not convinced, Navarro could pick up a more specific case study, like this April 2019 review of the Trump administration’s tariffs on washing machines. In 2018, researchers at the University of Chicago and the Federal Reserve found, those tariffs generated $82 million for the U.S. Treasury—but cost consumers about $1.2 billion.

In fact, the tariffs on imported washing machines ended up increasing the retail price of not just washing machines but dryers too—even though dryers were not subject to the new import taxes imposed by the Trump administration in January 2018. The new tariffs caused a spike in consumer prices for both household appliances after a years-long decline.

The data are pretty clear. Tariffs are taxes on imports that translate into higher prices for American businesses and consumers. Navarro’s claims that Americans aren’t paying for them are economically illiterate nonsense. It would be one thing for the Trump administration to claim—as it has on some occasions—that the tariffs are a necessary burden for Americans to bear in pursuit of better trade deals, or as a means to getting China to change its bad behavior. But simply lying about the basic realities of the trade war serves only to undermine whatever strategy the White House is pursuing.

If Navarro’s not convinced by the data, maybe he would be convinced by…Peter Navarro.

Last week, after announcing that new tariffs on Chinese imports would be postponed until mid-December to avoid soaking American consumers during the holiday shopping season, Navarro said the maneuver was “a Christmas present to the nation.”

But why would that be a Christmas present to Americans if Americans aren’t paying for the tariffs?

It’s remarkable that the Trump administration has been able to ignore economic reality for as long as it has. But it’s now becoming clear—on the stock market, in the polls, and from the White House’s own jumbled messaging—that the economists were right all along: Tariffs are taxes, and Americans are footing the bill.

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Kamala Harris Promises To ‘Disarm Violent Hate’ by Seizing Guns From Bigots

Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), who is seeking the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, says that if elected she will push legislation that would authorize federal courts to issue gun confiscation orders against people who express opinions that may indicate an intent to commit a hate crime. These “domestic terrorism prevention orders” would “temporarily restrict a person’s access to guns if they exhibit clear evidence of dangerousness,” including “violent racist threats or anti-immigrant manifestos.”

Harris’ plan to “disarm violent hate” is pretty vague, so it’s hard to say whether it would be consistent with the First Amendment. If the bill she imagines would merely create a federal “red flag” law focused on a subset of people deemed a threat to others, that would be bad enough, since these laws generally give short shrift to due process. But her description of the problem she is trying to address suggests that constitutionally protected speech might by itself be enough to suspend someone’s Second Amendment rights.

“From El Paso to the Tree of Life Synagogue, and from Poway to Mother Emanuel Church,” her campaign website says, “one thing is clear: Guns are the weapon of choice for domestic terrorists and perpetrators of hate crimes….Whether it’s violent racist threats or anti-immigrant manifestos, signs of impending violence are often evident before tragedy strikes.” While that may be true in retrospect, it does not mean that all racists, nativists, white supremacists, or anti-Semites who express their views online, or even a significant percentage of them, are bent on mass murder.

Harris mentions the 2018 shooting in which Robert Bowers murdered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Prior to the attack, Bowers posted a bunch of anti-Semitic comments on Gab. In his bio, he described Jews as “the children of satan,” and his posts and reposts railed against Jews and the Latin Americans whose illegal immigration he believed they were facilitating. “He was clearly obsessed with Jews,” Alex Amend of the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote after the attack. “In the small window into his account currently available, it’s evident he engaged with numerous antisemitic conspiracy theories that have long been in circulation among neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”

But the clearest intimation of impending violence did not appear until the morning of the attack: “HIAS [the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society] likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” By the time that message was posted, it was too late for police intervention, let alone a “domestic terrorism prevention order.”

It’s not clear how the law Harris supports would distinguish between run-of-the-mill anti-Semites and the tiny percentage of them who, like Bower, translate their hateful beliefs into homicidal action. If everyone who circulates messages like the ones Bower posted would be a candidate for a gun confiscation order, the law would be casting a very wide net, undermining First Amendment as well as Second Amendment rights.

A similar problem is evident in connection with another shooting that Harris mentions: the 2015 attack in which Dylann Roof murdered nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Several months before that attack, Roof posted a manifesto that described blacks as inferior to whites, minimized the evils of slavery, defended segregation, and called for “drastic action” to “take…back” the country. Here is the passage that, in retrospect, distinguished Roof from all the racist idiots with equally odious views who do not commit mass murder:

I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.

Since we know what Roof ended up doing, that passage seems like an obvious threat of violence. But “fight” and “tak[ing] it to the real world” are so ambiguous that it’s hard to see how Roof’s venting would qualify as a “true threat” unprotected by the First Amendment. In combination with other evidence, such talk might suffice to show that someone poses a “significant” danger, the standard typically prescribed by red flag laws. But by itself, racist pontificating is constitutionally protected, and it is rather troubling that Harris does not even mention freedom of speech as a consideration.

Although Harris says the law she favors would be aimed at individuals “who may imminently perpetrate a hate crime,” it’s not clear what that means. As with red flag laws generally, the devil is in the details.

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ThinkProgress Panics Over Unlicensed Cosmetologists

You might think that requiring people to pay elite gatekeepers for the right to accept money for their services would be anathema to self-styled supporters of workers’ rights. Yet for many progressives, the desire to see people in meaningful, well-paying jobs is tempered by total panic over the idea that any aspect of life go unregulated. For them, the idea of anyone performing a profession without a government permission slip (a.k.a. a license) has spawned paranoia about the alleged dangers this poses to consumers.

Now the folks at ThinkProgress have found another asinine reason to oppose occupational licensing reform: because those libertarian boogeymen, the Koch brothers, are pushing it via a new Americans for Prosperity initiative. (Disclosure: Charles and David Koch have also given money to the nonprofit that publishes Reason.) Over the weekend, ThinkProgress sent out multiple pearl-clutching tweets about “unlicensed, untrained cosmetologists” running amok:

The tweets—and the article they promoted—were roundly and swiftly mocked on social media. Thank goodness.

As some pointed out, “unlicensed” is far from synonymous with “untrained.” Most states do not have reciprocal licensing recognition, which means many trained workers are out of a license if they move states. Immigrants to the U.S. may be trained and certified in their home countries but unable to do the same here thanks to language barriers, undocumented status, or other factors unrelated to skill. And in some professions, people will often train informally under family or community members instead of in state certified programs.

Other critics pointed out that fighting against government-mandated occupational licensing for a particular profession (and aggressive enforcement of it) does not necessarily mean eschewing certification altogether. Voluntary programs could still signal the worker’s skill level.

But the piece, by Josh Israel, doesn’t bother with any nuance, going straight for fearmongering about unlicensed neurosurgeons:

While it is likely true that people pay more to be treated by a neurologist who has actually been to medical school and demonstrated basic knowledge of how the nervous system works, it is unclear how public health would be improved by allowing anyone with a stethoscope and a dream to open a medical practice.

A spokesperson for the organization said in an email that they would not take the argument to that far.

“We aren’t suggesting that doctors and pilots shouldn’t have credentials and levels of competency to obtain,”Americans for Prosperity’s director of employment initiatives, Erica Jedynak, said in an email.

Israel displays the worst sort of political tribalism, in which any policy or idea espoused by those considered enemies is automatically treated as suspect or even evil. If the Kochs support occupational licensing reform, the dictates of tribalism say that Think Progress cannot. The End.

But there are some ideas that unite a lot of Americans across political parties. Overhauling the many excessive, expensive, and nonsensical occupational licensing requirements that states have is one of them. Both the Obama and the Trump administrations, both red states and blue states, have endorsed some level of licensing reform.

Occupational licensing reform makes common sense. It is not some far-right plot, even if ThinkProgress is either convinced or willing to pretend it is.

For more on recent licensing policy reforms, see:

And for judges striking down bad licensing laws lately, see:

FREE MINDS 

The New York Times Magazine’s new package on slavery‘s role in America’s founding and early flourishing is drawing a ton of praise…and a lot of critics. Some of the criticism revolves around valid academic points, but much has just been bluster about the package’s premise—that “no aspect of the country…has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed” the first African slaves being brought to the Virginia colony in 1619.

FREE MARKETS

Mel magazine profiles Paladin Press, the publisher of titles such as The Art and Science of Money Laundering and Be Your Own Undertaker: How to Dispose of a Dead Body. From its launch, the publisher riled up politicians.

It didn’t take long for the FBI to investigate the publisher. Specifically, in 1982, the FBI was concerned that some of Paladin’s titles could be used by terrorists. A year later, Minnesota Senator Rudy Boschwitz asked a similar question. Fortunately for Paladin, the FBI ultimately decided that even the most eye-popping titles in Paladin’s catalog were completely legal.

The 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, however, changed all of that. Just a few days afterward, Timothy McVeigh was charged with the use of a weapon of mass destruction. Despite the fact that his fate was already sealed, the prosecution brought an additional piece of evidence: copies of three books on how to build explosives that McVeigh had purchased. Dana Rogers, who worked in Paladin’s finance department, testified that Paladin sold these books to McVeigh in the spring of 1993.

Congress feared that allowing bomb-making instruction manuals to be openly sold was a recipe for disaster. As such, in 1996, California Senator Dianne Feinstein led the way in adding a key amendment to the Comprehensive Terrorism Prevention Act. It stated that publishers could be held criminally liable for knowingly selling explosives instruction manuals to someone who intended to use them for a crime. The law didn’t explicitly ban Paladin’s explosives instruction books, but the law was certainly designed to stop Paladin from producing and selling them, which, in turn, made them incredibly difficult to obtain.

Whole thing here.

QUICK HITS

  • Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) just introduced a big new proposal for criminal justice reform. It contains a lot of good proposals, but has upset the sex worker rights community by failing to include their concerns.
  • George Will offers some praise for Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.).
  • Former MSNBC contributor Mark Halperin’s new book deal is raising some eyebrows:

  • Sigh:

 

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The Rent Is Too Damn High—and It’s Going To Stay That Way

The phrase made famous in 2009 by longshot New York City mayoral candidate Jimmy McMillan is now a reality for millions of tenants across the United States.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, inflation has pushed overall consumer prices up by 154 percent since 1984. During the same period, urban rents increased by 227 percent. The website Apartment List finds that the percentage of renters nationwide who are cost-burdened—meaning more than 30 percent of their income goes to rent—rose from 24 percent in 1960 to 49 percent in 2014.

These numbers reflect a regional problem, says Emily Hamilton, a researcher with George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. “It’s not really a nationwide phenomenon,” she explains. Rather, “it’s driven by land use regulations in the most expensive markets that make it nearly impossible to add enough to the housing supply to accommodate the number of people who would like to live there.”

According to data from Zillow, a real estate website, monthly rent for a median-priced one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is $3,500, up from $2,060 in 2011. Seattle’s median monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment nearly doubled in the same period to $2,035. In Los Angeles, the price rose from $1,275 in late 2010 to $2,350 today.

What explains the steady climb in rental prices and all the affordability challenges that come with them? Rising demand and stagnating supply.

Experts say cities should add one unit of new housing for every two new jobs that come to town. America’s boom cities are nowhere close to that. The San Francisco metro area has added 6.8 jobs for every new housing permit issued between 2010 and 2015. In Los Angeles, the ratio was 4.7 jobs for every housing permit. In New York, it was three jobs for every new housing permit issued.

Cities can’t keep up with the inflow of new residents because they’ve made it as difficult as possible to add additional units, accomplishing this with restrictive zoning codes that limit how much new housing can be built and lengthy approval processes that ensure whatever new residential developments are permitted then take years to complete.

In addition, many states have established urban growth boundaries that prevent housing being built on rural or agricultural land at the fringes of urban areas. The idea behind these policies is to protect natural environments. The effect has been to stop the development of affordable suburban housing that would take the pressure off city centers and give workers more choices.

San Francisco, to take the most egregious example, puts strict limits on density, ensuring much of the city’s land is reserved for single-family housing. According to a report from the city Planning Department, single-family homes make up 27 percent of the city’s units while occupying 62 percent of its residential territory.

Should you find a slice of land in San Francisco appropriately zoned for apartments, chances are you’ll spend years (and potentially millions of dollars) getting permission to build on it. An apartment building larger than 10 units takes, on average, more than six years to construct. Nearly four of those years are spent getting all the necessary permits and then fighting to protect them from local NIMBYs claiming your new building will cast too many shadows.

Sometimes, even local governments’ housing schemes are tripped up by their rules. In Los Angeles, Metro—the area’s transit agency—has spent over a decade trying to develop land it owns into supportive housing for the formerly homeless. Neighboring businesses have managed to delay the effort with administrative appeals and lawsuits alleging insufficient environmental review.

For each project that’s delayed, an unknown number of developers are deterred altogether. As a result, there’s just not enough housing to go around.

That’s bad for more than just rental prices. Wealthier residents, unable to move into condos that were never built, outbid longtime residents for formerly affordable apartments, hastening gentrification. Those down the income ladder find themselves competing for an inadequate supply of public housing or moving farther and farther away from work and family.

Cities in 21st century America offer a cornucopia of cultural, social, and economic opportunities that Americans living just a century ago likely could not have imagined. But the more governments try to regulate what these cities should look like, the more exclusive and less dynamic they’ll become.

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Brickbat: Fingered

The North Carolina Court of Appeals says a state trooper did not act illegally when he stopped a motorist for giving him the bird. Writing for the majority Judge Chris Dillon said the trooper had reason to believe the motorist had committed the crime of disorderly conduct, saying it is illegal to make gestures intended to provoke a violent response. A week after that opinion was delivered the court followed up with a new order that, without explanation, withdrew the opinion.

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Lawsuit Against Rappers for Attack by Their Employees in Sneaker Store

In Thompson v. Caldwell (S.D.N.Y.), filed Saturday, Courtney Thompson is claiming that Stunna’s (Khalick Antonio Caldwell’s) and Billion Dollar Baby Entertainment’s employees—Michael Awute and an unknown John Doe—beat up Thompson at Flight Club, a Manhattan sneaker store. Thompson is claiming he was hit in the face and kicked in the head, and is suing for at least $400,000 plus punitive damages.

Now if I beat you up in a sneaker store (not that I would!), you couldn’t get a recovery against UCLA (or against my dean), unless I was somehow on the job. So what is the plaintiff’s theory?

14. Defendant Billion Dollar Baby Entertainment, LLC is a music company that promotes itself as violent and murderous group.

15. Both the principals and agents of Defendant Billion Dollar Baby Entertainment, LLC, including Defendant Caldwell, frequently encourage violence by their employees and agents, through their music and actions.

16. The principals and agents of Defendant Billion Dollar Baby Entertainment, LLC, including Defendant Caldwell, regularly boast publicly about paying others to commit acts of violence on their behalf.

17. At all relevant times, Defendants Awute and Doe were acting as employees and agents of Defendants Caldwell and Billion Dollar Baby Entertainment, LLC. Their acts of violence toward Plaintiff were instigated, condoned, and/or authorized by Defendants Caldwell and Billion Dollar Baby Entertainment, LLC.

Time will tell whether this claim is going anywhere (and I should stress that I can’t speak to the factual allegations, which are just part of the plaintiff’s Complaint, not of any court finding). But I’m skeptical, unless there are some specific facts—beyond just loose claims of “encourag[ing] violence” or even of public boasts with regard to violence by others—that show that Awute and Doe did indeed attack Caldwell as a part of their jobs.

Topically related, though not necessarily legally relevant: DaBaby Fires Warning Shot to Hecklers After Fan Beatdown in Mall; Da Baby Posts Video of Him Beating Up Rival Rapper; DaBaby Sued; DaBaby’s Alleged Assault Victim Says He Beat Up Stunna 4 Vegas.

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