Tag: in-the-news

A friend of mine and his wife recently took a trip to Europe that almost ended in disaster because of positive COVID-19 tests. Fortunately, the results weren’t theirs; four other members of their tour group who stood in line at the same pharmacy to get swabbed received the unwelcome results and remained stranded at their own expense while my friend and the rest of the group returned home. It was a reminder that some officials still have trouble letting go of pandemic-inflated power.

“All air passengers 2 years or older with a flight departing to the US from a foreign country at or after 12:01am EST (5:01am GMT) on December 6, 2021, are required show a negative COVID-19 viral test result taken no more than 1 day before travel, or documentation of having recovered from COVID-19 in the past 90 days, before they board their flight,” according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Applying even to vaccinated and boosted travelers, and with a daunting 24-hour timeframe, the CDC rules make the U.S. an outlier in a world that otherwise seems eager to turn its back on two years of chaotic overreactions to COVID-19. Even Italy, where just months ago people rioted against draconian requirements that they show proof of vaccination to work, shop, and play, dropped its Green Pass within its borders in May and for entry to the country last week. But America’s rules linger on and cost people time and money.

“Travel agents and travel insurance companies say they are hearing more tales of travelers stuck abroad due to the U.S. government’s rule that people produce a negative test to enter the country by air,” The Wall Street Journal reported last week. “Vacationers and business travelers testing positive face pricey extended stays and rebooked flights, confusion over which quarantine rules reign and a near daily scramble to test negative or get a doctor’s note vouching for recovery from Covid.”

“For Americans traveling internationally, a positive COVID-19 test before returning home can result in thousands of dollars in additional costs for extending hotel stays and rebooking flights,” adds Healthline.

Asked in May if the federal government had any plans to eliminate testing requirements for entering the country, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said she was “not aware of a timeline for that.”

Thousands of dollars in unanticipated costs and uncertain return dates threaten to make travel a luxury once again, accessible only by those with time and money to burn. That’s an unpleasant turnaround just a few years after people marveled at how affordable air travel had become in the decades since deregulation. Unfortunately, residual pandemic policy doesn’t stop there.

“More than two years after the COVID-19 outbreak forced school officials to shift classes and assignments online, teens continue to navigate the pandemic’s impact on their education and relationships, even while they experience glimpses of normalcy as they return to the classroom,” Pew Research Center noted last week. And costs for these kids aren’t measured in dollars or vacation days.

“From declining test scores to widening achievement gaps, teachers, parents and advocates have raised concerns about the negative impact the pandemic may have had on students. Beyond academic woes, experts also warn that these disruptions could have lingering effects on young people’s mental and emotional well-being,” Pew added. 

Researchers find that children suffered “significant anxiety and depression during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic,” according to a May 2021 article in Pediatric Clinics of North America. “Social isolation, loneliness, lack of physical exercise, and family stress may contribute to these problems.”

Battles over closures, masks, and bungled remote learning poisoned families’ relations with school administrators. New York City schools still require masks on younger children despite protests. Other public schools used the pandemic to impose surveillance states. And there’s no guarantee that next year will return to normal. During a press conference, White House COVID-19 coordinator Ashish Jha answered a question about whether schools will be open in the fall with: “Sorry, I have to run off.”

Yes, it’s true that most pandemic-driven restrictions have been eased or rescinded in most places. We can again dine indoors, walk unmasked in public, and go to the gym through the front door instead of sneaking in the back in defiance of lockdown rules. But there’s a sense that the powers-that-be don’t want us to get accustomed to free movement and uncovered faces.

“We’re going to be dealing with this virus on a chronic basis,” Anthony Fauci, White House chief medical advisor, recently commented in the tone of an official who is having trouble surrendering his moment in the limelight. “We are not going to eradicate this.”

But while “the pandemic has resulted in an unprecedented withdrawal of civil liberties among developed democracies and authoritarian regimes alike,” in the words of The Economist‘s Democracy Index 2021, American officials still have limited power when people push back. At some point, they have to loosen their grip or else get sued, voted out of office, or ignored. Areas where they exercise relatively unchecked power, such as government schools and ports of entry, are windows into what officialdom would like to do if they had a free hand. But even when they get their way, that doesn’t mean there’s no escape. Just watch families flee public schools.

“The coronavirus pandemic ushered in what may be the most rapid rise in homeschooling the U.S. has ever seen,” AP reported in April. “Families that may have turned to homeschooling as an alternative to hastily assembled remote learning plans have stuck with it — reasons include health concerns, disagreement with school policies and a desire to keep what has worked for their children.” 

Likewise, my COVID-negative friend had a Plan B strategy if his test came back with an inconvenient result. Emulating other travelers, he intended to fly to Mexico and then cross the border by road, which is subject to looser rules.

“Entering the United States by air requires a negative coronavirus test,” The New York Times observed at the end of May. “Some people who can’t provide one are using a workaround: flying to Canada or Mexico, then entering via a land border.” Even hockey players in the NHL are taking advantage of the loophole.

Workarounds and escape strategies both reflect and require a spirit of rebelliousness and disgust with the excesses and failures of bureaucrats and politicians. Officialdom clings to aging rules and reminisces fondly about the days of extraordinary power. But for many people, lingering restrictions are expensive reminders of past mistakes and invitations to treat red tape as a challenging annoyance to be overcome.

The post Lingering COVID-19 Restrictions Are Costly Hazards appeared first on Reason.com.

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From FTL Displays, LLC v. Blackout Inc., decided May 27 by the Nevada Court of Appeals (Chief Judge Michael Gibbons, joined by Judges Jerome Tao and Judge Bonnie Bulla):

… Blackout Inc. filed a complaint against FTL, alleging breach of contract. The parties quickly settled the matter and Blackout filed a voluntary dismissal with prejudice.

FTL then filed a motion to seal, seeking to seal the case, prohibiting public access to the documents filed in the case and the names of the parties. In its motion, FTL asserted that sealing the entire case was warranted pursuant to the Rules Governing Sealing and Redacting Court Records (SRCR) 3(4)(h) because the parties quickly resolved the case; FTL’s reputation could be damaged if potential clients discovered the case, despite the fact that it was a mere misunderstanding between the parties; FTL was involved in other litigation and believed the opposing parties in that case may attempt to contact Blackout to “harass and/or coerce them;” and because FTL had partnerships with politically driven companies and wanted to prevent any inquiries into this matter….

On appeal, FTL challenges the district court’s order denying its motion …. “All court records in civil actions are available to the public, except as otherwise provided in [the SRCR] or by statute.” And pursuant to SRCR 3(4), the district court may seal records in a civil action if it finds compelling circumstances demonstrating that privacy or safety interests outweigh the public’s interest in access to the court record.

Here, the district court considered FTL’s stated reasons for requesting to seal the case but concluded that they were insufficient to demonstrate compelling circumstances warranting the same. And based on our review of the record, we cannot conclude that the district court abused its discretion in making this determination.

Moreover, regardless of whether FTL’s stated reasons for seeking sealing were sufficient to demonstrate compelling circumstances under SRCR 3(4), its motion was otherwise deficient, such that the district court did not abuse its discretion in denying it, as the motion impermissibly sought to seal the entire case. SRCR 3(5)(c) (providing that “[u]nder no circumstances shall the court seal an entire court file” and that, at a minimum, the names of the parties and certain other information must be available for public viewing).

For a similar decision rejecting the sealing of the Complaint in a quickly settled case, see Bernstein v. Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann LLP (2d Cir. 2016).

The post Can't Seal Case to Prevent Damage to Business Reputation, Even If Case Settled Quickly appeared first on Reason.com.

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[This month, I’m serializing my 2003 Harvard Law Review article, The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope; in last week’s posts, I laid out some examples, definitions, and general observations, and turned to a specific kind of slippery slope mechanism—cost-lowering slippery slopes. This week, I’ll elaborate on that, and shift to some other mechanisms.]

The example in Friday’s post involves the cost of tangible items: cameras. But another cost of any new project is the cost of learning how to implement it properly, and the related risk that it will be implemented badly.

People are often skeptical of new proposals (from Social Security privatization to education reform) on these very grounds. Broad change B—for instance, an across-the-board school choice program—might thus be opposed by a coalition of (1) people who oppose it in principle (for instance, because they don’t want tax money going to religious education or because they want to maintain the primacy of government-run schools), and (2) those who might support it in theory but suspect that it would be badly implemented in practice. This lineup is similar to what we saw in the camera example. {As before, I express no view here on the merits of this particular B. My question isn’t whether particular policies make sense in the abstract; rather, it’s how people who do oppose B should act to better implement their preferences.}

But say that someone proposes a relatively modest school choice program A, for instance one that is limited to nonreligious schools or to children who would otherwise go to the worst of the government-run schools. Some people might support this project on its own terms. But as a side effect of A, the government and the public will learn how school choice programs can be effectively implemented, for instance what sorts of private schools should be eligible, how (if at all) they should be supervised, and so on.

If A is a total failure, then voters may become even more skeptical about the broader proposal B. But if after some years of difficulty, the government eventually creates an A that works fairly well, some voters might become more confident that the government—armed with this new knowledge derived from the A experiment—can implement B effectively.

A will thus have led to a B that might have been avoided had A not been implemented. In the path dependence literature, this is described as a form of “increasing returns path dependence” that focuses on “learning effects”: “In processes that exhibit … characteristics [such as learning effects], a step in one direction decreases the cost (or increases the benefit) of an additional step in the same direction, creating a powerful cycle of self-reinforcing activity or positive feedback.” And because of this path dependence, “decisions may have large, unanticipated, and unintended effects.”

For those who support broad school choice (B) in principle, this is good: the experiment with A will have led some voters to have more confidence that B would be properly implemented, and thus made enacting B more politically feasible.

But, as in the cameras example, those who support A but oppose B in principle might find that their voting for A has backfired. Some of A‘s supporters might therefore decide to vote strategically against A, given the risk that A would lead to B. The government, they might reason, ought not learn how to efficiently do bad things like B (bad in the strategic voter’s opinion), precisely because the knowledge can make it more likely that the government will indeed do these bad things.

The post Slippery Slope June: Cost-Lowering Slippery Slopes, the Costs of Uncertainty, and Learning Curves appeared first on Reason.com.

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6/6/2005: Gonzales v. Raich is decided.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: June 6, 2005 appeared first on Reason.com.

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The debate over whether businesses can be forced to provide goods and services for gay weddings will return to the Supreme Court in an upcoming case.

In February, the Supreme Court agreed to hear 303 Creative v. Elenis. Lorie Smith owns and runs 303 Creative, a web design firm based in Colorado. Smith planned to design and host sites for weddings, but she has religious objections to same-sex marriage and does not want to be forced to design and host sites for LGBT couples. That puts her at odds with Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act, which prohibits “places of public accommodation” from discriminating against LGBT customers.

In her petition to the Supreme Court, Smith says she is not refusing to serve LGBT customers. Rather, she “cannot create websites that promote messages contrary to her faith, such as messages that condone violence or promote sexual immorality, abortion, or same-sex marriage.”

Historically, the Supreme Court has limited the government’s ability to compel a private business to transmit a message it finds objectionable. A book publisher, T-shirt printer, or social media platform generally cannot be forced to print or host messages that support or oppose any particular cause or policy.

Smith argues that the same logic should apply in her case. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruled that Colorado could legally require her to design and host sites for gay weddings and prohibit her from putting a message on her website stating that her religious beliefs prevent her from supporting gay marriage with her services.

The Supreme Court previously considered Colorado’s anti-discrimination law in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, a 2018 case involving a Lakewood bakery whose owner, Jack Phillips, refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. In a 7–2 ruling, the Court blocked enforcement of a cease-and-desist order against Phillips. But rather than decide whether a bakery could be compelled to make a cake for a gay wedding, the Court determined that Colorado’s law had not been neutrally applied because the Colorado Civil Rights Commission demonstrated “clear and impermissible hostility” to Phillips’ religious views.

If that ruling seemed like a dodge, the Court now appears ready to tangle with the underlying issue in 303 Creative v. Elenis: “whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.”

The post Gay Weddings Return to The Supreme Court appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Kansas Supreme Court has disbarred former Shawnee County chief deputy district attorney Jacqueline Spradling, citing a “serious pattern of grossly unethical misconduct” in her 2012 prosecution of Dana Chandler for double murder. The court had earlier overturned Chandler’s conviction because of prosecutorial misconduct. “She ignored the order of a district court, repeatedly made arguments to the jury that lacked any evidentiary support, intentionally lied to this court in her briefs and in oral arguments, and made false statements during the disciplinary investigation,” the justices wrote.

The post Brickbat: Over the Line appeared first on Reason.com.

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Max Korzh, said to be one of the most prominent Belarusian musicians, just put out this anti-war song (Russian lyrics here), titled “His Home” (or, if you prefer, “His Own Home”); between YouTube and Instagram, I counted about 4M views in just the last couple of days since it was released. I thought the song was especially noteworthy given that Korzh apparently still lives in Belarus, and has extensive plans to continue performing in Russia (though who knows whether that will still happen). And I also appreciated the theme that I have also seen in some other such songs—the pain of senseless waste, of former peace and affection pointlessly and likely irretrievably squandered.

Here is my translation (thanks to my mother Anne for help with some of the words), though I have taken some liberties with it, and may well have erred in various details:

We probably didn’t understand what we had when all was good
We blindly hoped that someone higher up is taking care of it all
From childhood we were raised to be noble, and that the world is saved only by good
The naïve dreamers with backpacks lived and made plans
“We don’t want what belongs to others,” they shouted in their incomparable speeches
Pissed in people’s ears about the friendship of peoples, but they already had a machinegun ready for each of us
In short, there are few options here, sign for your country at the bottom of the enlistment papers
And right from the start, if you believe in God, well—welcome to hell.

[Refrain:]
Hey brother, so long, where will we end up, who knows?
The war is on, and it has its law,
They shoot—you shoot, everyone lies, but know:
He is right who is defending his home.
Spring weeps, Ukraine burns.
The world hasn’t changed, this is the way it is.
Hey brother, so long, where will we end up, who knows?
But he is right who is defending his home.

We probably didn’t think, that it would come to figuring out what we now have to figure out
Our generation always understood each other without borders and passports
There, where we sang about friendship, today people dream only of complete revenge
All that normal people built over the years—all is obliterated
God, how many innocent lives have been taken, killed point blank
How many maimed boys, and for what? No-one can explain even today
How many ordinary people got screwed, all buried in one pit?
What you fucking did, you still don’t understand.

All these armchair warriors, fanning the flames of enmity, adding strife
All these animals, who all these years poured spit into the cauldron of hatred
All these history buffs, who will justify everything, so long as they satisfy their pride a bit
But people just wanted to live, to smile, and to enjoy each day
Whoever couldn’t fucking stay home—it would have been better if he had just banged his head against the walls
Whoever fucking wanted to repeat things—well fucking look at this and put it on repeat
And how everything will turn out—only God knows.

[Refrain]

The post "He Is Right Who Is Defending His Home" appeared first on Reason.com.

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6/5/1916: Justice Louis Brandeis takes the oath.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: June 5, 1916 appeared first on Reason.com.

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Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela, by William Neuman, St. Martin’s Press, 352 pages, $22.08

The Bolivarian Cable Train was an elevated railroad planned for a poor neighborhood in Caracas, Venezuela. It ended up running for only three-fifths of a mile and connecting to nothing.

By 2012, four years into the project, the government had spent about $440 million on it and the project was only partly finished. But the country’s socialist leader, Hugo Chávez, decided that he wanted to take a ride on live television. The contractors told his handlers the train wasn’t ready yet; the cable, motors, and machinery had not even been installed.

“No European engineer is going to tell the people of Venezuela what can or cannot be done,” Chávez’s lackey replied. So the government paid an extra million dollars for a temporary setup that might fool the TV audience. An ebullient Chávez (seemingly oblivious that the fragile, makeshift operation nearly sent him hurtling down the track during the broadcast) boasted that “this is the work of a socialist government so that the people will live better every day.”

Today the train runs intermittently, the Brazilian company overseeing its construction has pleaded guilty to corruption in 12 countries, Chávez has died from cancer, and Venezuela, after more than two decades under the control of Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, has been transformed from a constitutional democracy into a brutal dictatorship. The whole cable train saga is vividly recounted in Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse, a new book by former New York Times reporter William Neuman.

The book gives voice to a woman named Hilda Solórzano, providing a snapshot of what life is like for the Venezuelan poor. Her son’s teeth turned black and fell out from lack of calcium. Her uncle and brother were murdered. Her 10-year-old daughter was kidnapped, tortured, killed, and tossed in a garbage dump. After Solórzano started a successful baking business, a relative stole the money she needed for ingredients. She lives in the same Caracas slum where the government spent around half a billion dollars on the Bolivarian Cable Train.

Neuman also introduces us to bookstore manager José Chacón, the “Last Chavista,” who can’t afford the mayonnaise, beef, and tomatoes he once loved. He skips meals and drops 15 pounds. But Chacón is unswayed. He reveres Chávez and is grateful that the socialist state taught him “to eat healthier.” Someday, after everyone has fled the country, Neuman writes, “you’ll see Chacón, sitting atop the great pile of rubble and ash, holding firm, chewing on the last lentil.”

These are powerful depictions of human beings coping with daily existence in a disintegrating society. But when it comes to explaining why this oil-rich nation experienced one of the largest economic contractions in modern world history, the book is a muddle.

Neuman won’t accept Chávez’s word that he was a socialist. Although the Venezuelan leader used that word relentlessly to describe his policies after 2005, Neuman insists it was just a marketing ploy. “Chávez was neither a Marxist nor in any real sense, despite the rhetoric, a socialist,” he writes. It was “showcialismo.”

Was it? One classic definition of socialism is government control of the means of production. Chávez nationalized banks, oil companies, telecommunications, millions of acres of farmland, ​​supermarkets, stores, the cement industry, a glass container maker, a gold-mining outfit, the steel industry, a fertilizer company, a shipping company, the electricity industry, vacation homes, and more. He imposed capital controls that put the government in charge of all foreign trade, turning Venezuela into a command-and-control economy—aside from its burgeoning black market, another typical feature of socialist societies.

In industry after industry, nationalization led to deterioration, abandonment, and collapse. In 2008, Chávez boasted that he would transform the steel giant Sidor into a “socialist company owned by the socialist state and the socialist workers.” By 2019, at the Sidor plant in Guayana City, “everything was stained with rust,” Neuman writes. “In all that great expanse, nothing moved.” The book is filled with similar accounts.

So it was dumbfounding to read on page 82 that “Chávez made no serious effort to dismantle the market economy.” The book claims he was merely continuing longstanding Venezuelan policies but painting them “a different color.” Neuman is a journalist who tells powerful stories and then misinterprets his own material.

Chávez was not the first Venezuelan president to nationalize companies, fix the exchange rate, or impose price controls. But he pursued these policies on a much larger scale than his predecessors. Chávez also gutted property rights, destroyed the currency, dismantled the judiciary, corrupted the military, and undermined the separation of powers. One lesson of his reign is that when it comes to building sustainable prosperity, institutions matter more than possessing the world’s largest oil reserves.

Neuman’s analysis gets ridiculous in the post-2013 era, after oil profits (which plummeted because of a collapse in production and the end of the price boom) could no longer paper over the hollowed-out economy. That, Neuman writes, meant the state was “reduced to the absolute minimum.” Services disappeared and crime ran rampant, which in his view shows us what happens when “private initiative can flourish, unencumbered.” But “private initiative” depends on the rule of law. In 2019, the Fraser Institute’s Human Freedom Index ranked Venezuela 163 out of 165 countries in the category of “Legal System and Property Rights.”

Neuman sees nothing necessarily wrong with nationalizing industries; he just thinks Chávez did a bad job of it. “You can make an argument that certain industries or certain types of companies might be better under public control,” he writes. But “you ought to make an effort to run them well—to invest in them and to hire competent administrators.”

This argument reminds me of comedian John Oliver’s 2018 claim that Venezuela’s collapse is best understood as a case of “epic mismanagement,” not socialism. It is certainly true that Chávez and his cronies mismanaged the businesses they seized. The country operated as a “mafia state,” a concept developed by the Venezuelan journalist Moisés Naím. Writing recently in The Wall Street Journal, Naím observed that the country’s socialism often served “as little more than a narrative that the powerful used to cover up their plunder of public assets.” But that is true of many socialist regimes. Indeed, it is what we should expect of them.

In his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek argued that the transition to government ownership of the means of production will invariably be spearheaded by the worst types of people. Only a “skillful demagogue,” Hayek wrote, can bring the “gullible” together around “hatred of an enemy”—the United States, in Venezuela’s case—and then show the “ruthlessness required” to centralize an entire economy. For the apparatchiks, “the readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion and power.”

Neuman’s claim that nationalization might make companies “better” also fails to recognize that when governments steal from citizens, they scare off capital. “Investment in Venezuela has disappeared,” said Marcel Granier, the CEO of Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV), in 2007. “Nobody is going to invest in a country where they’re threatened with expropriation.” Granier made those remarks during RCTV’s final broadcast before Chávez forced the station off the airwaves.

Speaking of RCTV: At one point in the book, Neuman travels to a café in Berlin for an interview with former RCTV producer Andrés Izarra. Izarra, who used to serve as Chávez’s minister of communications, is depicted as a pained ex-official “trying to make sense” of everything he went through.

Neuman does not inform his readers that Izarra is one of Chavismo’s great villains—an ideologue who spent more than a decade excusing government crimes. He was central to the propaganda campaign defending the shutdown of RCTV on the grounds that the network had supported a coup attempt in 2002. In 2008, he defended Chávez’s decision to expel Human Rights Watch from the country, accusing the organization of being a cover for planned U.S. interference. In 2010, he broke into uproarious and dismissive laughter during a CNN discussion of Venezuela’s exploding murder rate. That same year, he tweeted: “Franklin Brito smells like formaldehyde.” Brito was a martyred farmer who had died in a hunger strike after the Venezuelan government expropriated his land.

Izarra eventually fled Venezuela and now lives comfortably with his family in Germany. Hilda Solórzano remains stuck in a violent slum, worried about her next meal.

Socialism in Venezuela caused millions of personal tragedies, and I’m glad that Neuman brings many of them to life so vividly. But paying tribute to the victims should also mean being clear-eyed about the cause of their suffering. Otherwise, such catastrophes are apt to be repeated.

The post Former <em>New York Times</em> Reporter Denies in New Book That Hugo Chávez Was a Socialist appeared first on Reason.com.

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You can see the list from the Crime Prevention Research Center; it goes back more than a year, but I counted the incidents just since June 4, 2021. The list is supported by links to media coverage of each incident, so you needn’t trust and can instead verify. I checked a few and they seem to check out, though of course there’s always the possibility of error in news coverage.

Naturally, it’s hard to tell how the incident would have played out had the defender not interceded; and of course this doesn’t tell us whether some particular gun control proposal might, on balance, reduce underlying gun crime in a way that doesn’t unduly interfere with lawful self-defense. Still, it’s worth noting these incidents, to help us keep in mind the possible costs of gun control measures that do unduly interfere with lawful self-defense.

Here’s one incident from the list, from Syracuse (N.Y.), WSYR-TV (Natalie Dascoulias):

Demetrius Jackson, the man killed in the Lodi Street shooting on Tuesday, was in possession of a loaded 9mm handgun while outside of 1808 Lodi Street, District Attorney William Fitzpatrick said.

Jackson threatened multiple people at the location and fired the loaded handgun in the direction of those people, officials said.

Another man, who was on scene and in possession of a 9mm handgun returned fire striking and killing Jackson, Fitzpatrick said.

According to Fitzpatrick, this man has a valid pistol permit for the 9mm handgun.

The District Attorney said in a statement that based on preliminary investigation, it appears the man who shot Jackson saved the lives of several individuals.

The post 10 Cases in Past Year Where Law-Abiding Defenders "Have Stopped Likely Mass Public Shootings" With Guns appeared first on Reason.com.

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