Tag: news

For the past 10 years, the reality TV show Shark Tank has entertained and edified millions of viewers by dramatizing how entrepreneurs pitch venture capitalists. And none of the “sharks”—the investors who compete with each other to fund businesses they think will be successful—is more entertaining or edifying than Kevin O’Leary, with his signature insult to unsuccessful contestants, “You’re dead to me.”

But O’Leary isn’t just a small-screen blowhard. Born and raised in Canada, the 65-year-old investor got rich by developing educational and family-oriented computer software in the 1980s and ’90s and holding firm to a gospel of thrift, savings, and reinvestment that he’s outlined in such bestselling books as Cold Hard Truth on Men, Women, and Money. Over the years, he’s diversified his investments into vineyards, storage facilities, and more, and he’s dabbled in politics too, briefly considering a run in 2017 to head the Conservative Party in Canada. His brash nature has earned him comparisons to Donald Trump, but O’Leary, who now lives in Boston, supports free trade and immigration. He’s long been in favor of marijuana legalization and gay rights, and he is opposed to military interventionism.

Nick Gillespie sat down with O’Leary at FreedomFest, an annual gathering of libertarians in Las Vegas. They talked about why Shark Tank is so popular, why Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is so bad, and whether “democratic socialism” is really a threat to free market capitalism. They also discussed why O’Leary thinks Donald Trump has been great for the economy despite a personal style so many, including O’Leary himself, find unappealing. “I have never in my life seen an economy like this,” says O’Leary. “This is even better than the ’60s. It is phenomenal. And I think [it’s] primarily because of deregulation, not tax reform. My companies in California, in Texas, in Florida, in Illinois…have been set free.”

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Some highlights from the conversation (edited for clarity):

Trump “is a great entertainer.”

“Great politicians, great leaders, great CEOs are phenomenal entertainers. Going back to the days of Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Bismarck, they used to hold council at night, have big dinner parties or sit around the fire with their men and tell stories. They would tell stories of great defeats, great battles, great loves, and that would spread through the troops…and it would capture the hearts and minds of the people. Donald Trump is exactly that. He is a great entertainer.”

The chance Donald Trump “doesn’t get a second term…is zero.”

“The chance [Trump] doesn’t get a second term in my view is zero. And I’ll tell you why. I don’t recall in modern times when going into a second term at full employment, the incumbent of any party has ever lost their mandate ever.”

“Saving baby whales is not what businesses do.”

“I believe that…the DNA of a business is to provide to its constituents. Clearly, customers come number one, number two, employees, somewhere in there are the shareholders….You who started it, you’re the last. When you try and shift business’s true purpose and say that it’s going to save society, you will fail. Not some of the time, but 100 percent of the time. Saving baby whales is not what businesses do.”

“The role of government is to provide basic services.”

“I think it’s the role of government to provide basic services….I’m particularly fond of what they do in Switzerland, where they basically have multiple tiers of things like health care and support for those that are poor. What they do is they’ll say, ‘OK, if you’re a wealthy Swiss citizen in Geneva and you want to get an MRI because you want one tomorrow morning at 10 o’clock, you’re going to pay for it.’ They’re going to take the proceeds of that and they’re going to redeploy it into purchasing more MRI machines so those that aren’t as fortunate can get free MRIs.”

“Everybody’s a socialist when they’re young.”

“I was a socialist when I was 18 years old too. I was left-wing. I got my first paycheck and I saw something called tax on it. Everybody’s a socialist when they’re young, until they start working and they start realizing how tough it is out there and they start realizing how much money government wastes when they take half their income and taxes. And that’s when you become a conservative. The older you get, the more realistic you become. And a majority of those people make the transition in their mid-twenties. That’s what happens. I never worry about it.”

Why he prefers investing in women-run companies.

“I’m almost sexist in the sense that even the producers have to say to me, you’ve got to invest in some guys. I said, ‘Why? They don’t make any money. These women made me all this money’….Why should I take risks with men who can’t cope, who have testosterone sales targets they never hit, and all the rest of that stuff? I’m very biased about people that understand financial independence. Women mitigate risks. Women know how to manage time. Women set reasonable goals, have very sticky cultures in business. That’s all women.”

“I don’t fear any innovation at all. I fear regulation.”

“Capitalism over the last 200 years has destroyed many industries and reborn others. Forty years ago, you couldn’t have ever dreamt that someone who sat in front of a screen and wrote code would make half a million dollars a year in their first job….Men and women will never be replaced by machines because they’ll always be finding new purpose in new problems being solved. I trust capitalism to do that. I don’t fear any innovation at all. I fear regulation. I fear burdensome government. I fear that a third of every dollar raised by government through taxes is wasted in every capitalist society.”

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A Granite City, Illinois family recently filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of an ordinance that mandates the eviction of tenants any time anyone in their “household” has “engaged in criminal activity” within the city, “engage[d] in any act intended to facilitate criminal activity” anywhere in Granite City, or committed a “forcible felony” anywhere at all. In this case, the City is trying to evict Jessica Baron, Kenny Wylie, and their three children because a friend of their teenage son who had been temporarily staying with the family committed a burglary at a nearby restaurant. The Institute for Justice, the libertarian public interest law firm representing the family, has more details on the case here. The complaint recently filed in federal district court is available here.

The Granite City ordinance requires eviction of the entire household regardless of whether all the members participated in the crime or even knew about it. It applies regardless of whether the offender is actually a permanent member of the household or merely a temporary one. And eviction is required even if the landlord would like the family to stay (as he does in this case).

Sadly, Granite City is far from the only jurisdiction that has this kind of “crime-free housing” ordinance. Illinois alone has some 50 other jurisdictions with similar laws. An ACLU report documented some 50 others in the Twin Cities area in Minnesota. There are likely more in other parts of the country. These ordinances were apparently an outgrowth of the wave of “tough on crime” laws of the 1980s and 1990s.

Punishing entire families for the crimes of one member—or in this case for those of one family friend—is the kind of barbaric policy we normally associate with brutal authoritarian regimes. It’s not something that should happen in a nation that aspires to be a free society. In 2016, the Obama Administration Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a guidance warning that such laws can have the perverse effect of mandating eviction of domestic-violence victims who report their abusers. Both victims and abusers are often members of the same household, so the law requires the eviction of all of them!

This kind of law is also blatantly unconstitutional. The lawsuit filed by the Institute for Justice on behalf of the Wylie/Baron family contends that it violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. They are right on both counts.

A lease is a type of property right, and long-established precedent indicates that it is covered by the Takings Clause, which bars the government from taking “private property” without paying “just compensation.” In this case, the government has forcibly deprived the family of their lease without paying any compensation whatsoever.

The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment bars state and local governments from depriving anyone of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Under crime-free housing ordinances, entire families can be deprived of their leasehold property rights without any indication of wrongdoing on their part and without any of the protections normally associated with criminal or civil penalties. Unlike in the case of asset forfeitures (another constitutionally suspect practice), the government need not even prove that the leased property had any connection to the crime in question, which (as in this case) could have been committed elsewhere.

The complaint argues that the Granite City ordinance also violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. I am much less persuaded by this theory than the other two. But, regardless, the ordinance should be struck down because it is clearly both an uncompensated taking and a deprivation of property rights without due process of law.

In 2002, the Supreme Court upheld a similar compulsory-eviction policy for federal public-housing tenants. But the Court made clear that it did so largely because “[t]he government is not attempting to criminally punish or civilly regulate respondents as members of the general populace. It is instead acting as a landlord of property that it owns, invoking a clause in a lease to which respondents have agreed and which Congress has expressly required.” In this case, Granite City clearly is regulating tenants “as members of the general populace” and it mandates eviction even in cases where the tenants have not violated any clause in their lease and the landlord wants them to stay. Landlords and tenants are required to abide by the mandatory-eviction rule regardless of whether they have voluntarily agreed to it or not.

NOTE: I have worked with the Institute for Justice on many other property rights cases, and was a student law clerk there during the summer of 1998. But I have no involvement in the present case.

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Unless the United States solves the problem of man-made climate change in the next 12 years—or maybe 10 years—it’s game-over for humanity. At least that’s what viewers for the two CNN Democratic presidential debates might take away from urgent declarations made by various candidates. Let’s go the transcripts.

In the first debate, held Tuesday night in Detroit, former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke declared, “I’ve listened to the scientists on this, and they’re very clear. We don’t have more than 10 years to get this right.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (MA) warned that the “climate crisis is the existential crisis for our world. It puts every living thing on this planet at risk.”

But wait, there was more! “By 2030, we will have passed the point of no return on climate,” claimed Montana Gov. Steve Bullock. South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg said that “science tells us we have 12 years before we reach the horizon of catastrophe when it comes to our climate.”

The candidates in the second Democratic debate, held Wednesday night in Detroit, were a bit more circumspect with regard to setting drop-dead climate deadlines on stage.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) stated that “we must have and adopt a Green New Deal. On day one as president…I would re-enter us in the Paris agreement. And put in place [policies] so we would be carbon neutral by 2030.”

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who has made addressing climate change the center of his campaign, asserted that “the science tells us we have to get off coal in 10 years. Your [Biden’s] plan does not do that. We have to have [sic] off of fossil fuels in our electrical grid in 15.”

During the debate, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii) observed that “long before there was ever a Green New Deal, I introduced the most ambitious climate change legislation ever in Congress called the Off Fossil Fuels Act.” That act says 80 percent of all electricity, new vehicles, and train lines must be fueled by no-carbon sources of energy by 2027, rising to 100 percent by 2035.

While these candidates did not set a climate doomsday deadline during the debate, Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D–N.Y.) did declare that “the greatest threat to humanity is global climate change,” and Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) stated that “everything must be sublimated to the challenge and the crisis that is existential, which is dealing with the climate threat.”

So, are these Democratic presidential hopefuls right that humanity and the planet are really doomed if the U.S. doesn’t stop using fossil fuels and emitting carbon dioxide by 2030? Actually, they all seem to have over-interpreted the Global Warming of 1.5 °C report issued last year by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

That report concluded that in order to keep the planet from warming more than 1.5°C over the pre-industrial average temperature by 2100 that humanity must cut greenhouse gas emissions—chiefly carbon dioxide emitted by the burning of fossil fuels—in half by 2030, and reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Citing a couple of irritated climate scientists, the fact-checkers over at the Washington Post noted that the report definitely did not find that going over the 1.5°C threshold is the end of the world.

For example, Myles Allen, one of the lead authors of the IPCC report, wrote in April, “Please stop saying something globally bad is going to happen in 2030. Bad stuff is already happening and every half a degree of warming matters, but the IPCC does not draw a ‘planetary boundary’ at 1.5°C beyond which lie climate dragons.”

Kristie L. Ebi, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington, told the Associated Press that that “the report never said we only have 12 years left.”

When the IPCC report first came out, I noted:

The report asserts that if no policies aimed specifically at reducing carbon dioxide emissions are adopted, then average global temperature is projected to rise by 3.66°C by 2100, resulting in global GDP loss of 2.6 percent from what it would otherwise have been. Comparatively speaking, in the 2°C and 1.5°C scenarios, global GDP would only be reduced by 0.5 percent or 0.3 percent respectively.

Concretely, the global GDP of $80 trillion, growing at 3 percent annually, would rise to $903 trillion by 2100. A 2.6 percent reduction means that it would only be $880 trillion by 2100. A 0.3 percent decrease implies a loss of $2.7 trillion resulting in a global GDP of $900 trillion. Note that the IPCC is recommending that the world spend between now and 2035 more than $45 trillion in order to endow $2.7 trillion more in annual income on people living three generations hence. Assuming the worst case loss of 2.6 percent of GDP in world with a population of 10 billion that would mean that they would have to scrape by on an average income of just $88,000 per year (the average global GDP per capita now is $10,500.)

Living in the warmer world of 2100 on incomes that are around eight times higher than the current average is not the end of civilization.

During the debate, tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang had an interestingly different take on the challenges posed by man-made climate change. He noted that the U.S. is responsible for only about 15 percent of global emissions, so “even if we were to curb our emissions dramatically, the earth is still going to get warmer.” He added, “This is going to be a tough truth, but we are too late. We are 10 years too late. We need to do everything we can to start moving the climate in the right direction, but we also need to start moving our people to higher ground.”

One interpretation is that “higher ground” in Yang’s lexicon is a metaphor for making it possible for folks to adapt to whatever climate change is coming. (Of course, it more concretely suggests more wealth will make it possible for folks to withdraw from rising seas and flooding rivers.) Yang continued that the best way to get people to higher ground is “to put economic resources into your hands so you can protect yourself and your families.” While Yang is most likely referencing his universal basic income plan, his insight is correct that adopting policies that speed up innovation and wealth creation will enable people to adapt to and even thrive in a warmer world.

Climate change is a problem, but, contrary to the dark apprehensions of many Democratic Party presidential hopefuls, the end of the world is not scheduled for 2030.

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This week’s Democratic debates have gone a long way toward betraying the expressed interests of Democratic Party voters. That’s because they were a showcase for, in the words of countless news outlets, “progressives vs. moderates,” with the progressives always holding the moral and ethical high ground, despite the fact that the majority of Democratic voters say they prefer far more moderate policies.

Pity poor former Rep. John Delaney (D–Md.) for pointing out, correctly, that Sens. Elizabeth Warren’s (D–Mass.) and Bernie Sanders’ (D–Vt.) versions of Medicare for All comprise an “anti-private sector strategy” built on “impossible promises” and “fairy-tale economics,” including the end of non-government medical care.

Sure, Medicare for All might be a political suicide mission but Warren, to great applause in the debate and after, shot back:

I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.

That sort of back-and-forth sums up the tenor of the debates. Delaney is largely correct in saying Medicare for All plans that prohibit private insurance will be too expensive to implement. Rep. Tim Ryan (D–Ohio) is also correct that such plans will be attacked by union members who stand to lose gold-plated private health insurance their leadership fought hard to win. But progressives are the crazy, idealistic dreamers who aren’t going to sit around and be hemmed in by basic laws of political physics. Like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), Sanders, Warren, and others simply exclaim, “You just pay for it.”

The problem for the Democrats is pretty simple: Contrary to media narratives and debate-stage dynamics, very few members of the party are actually progressive. As CNN analyst Harry Enten writes,

Moderates and conservatives make up about 50% of all Democrats. In the 2018 midterms, the exit polls found that moderates and conservatives made up 54% of those who voted Democratic. Pew similarly put moderate and conservative Democrats as 54% of all self-identified Democrats and independents who lean Democratic voters in 2018. Gallup’s 2018 figures had moderates as 47% of all adults who self-identified as Democrats.

And what about Democrats who self-identify as liberal? Enten continues:

While liberals make up about 50% of Democrats, many of them are only “somewhat liberal.” In a Quinnipiac University poll taken last month, people who identified as “very liberal” were only 19% of all Democrats and independents who leaned Democratic. Very liberals made up the same 19% of those who said they were voting Democratic in Suffolk University’s final 2018 pre-election poll. The 2016 primary exit polls discovered that about 25% of Democratic primary voters called themselves very liberal.

Put another way: the moderate/conservative wing of the Democratic Party likely still makes up at least 2 times as much of the party’s voters than the very liberal flank.

That helps explain surveys finding that 54 percent of Democrats want a more moderate party while just 41 percent want one that is more liberal. To the extent that Democratic presidential candidates tack further and further to the left—and most of them are—they will only be alienating the rank and file of their own party, not to mention independents and other voters who still predominantly identify as conservative or moderate. That’s a clear advantage for President Donald Trump, who can brag about a strong economy while kicking dirt over his stubbornly low approval ratings and racist tweets.

For those of us who aren’t members of the Democratic Party, there’s a bigger issue still: The framing of the current Democratic race as between progressives and moderates is deeply misleading when it comes to accurately describing the presidential hopefuls, all of whom are calling for massive expansions in the size, scope, and spending of government. In the first debate of this week, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg made a plea for pragmatic solutions that aren’t discussed in ideological terms:

It’s time to stop worrying about what the Republicans will say. Look, if it’s true that if we embrace a far-left agenda, they’re going to say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists. If we embrace a conservative agenda, you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists. So let’s just stand up for the right policy, go out there and defend it.

Along with characters such as Delaney and former Vice President Joe Biden, Buttigieg is considered a moderate because he has criticized identity politics and “free college for all” plans. Yet he also backs national service, packing the Supreme Court with extra justices, doubling the number of unionized workers in the gig economy, and pushing broad new gun control laws. That’s no more moderate than Joe Biden’s calls to massively expand Obamacare (it’s worth remembering, too, that Barack Obama was nobody’s idea of a tightwad when it came to spending).

The conventional wisdom is that candidates take extreme positions in primaries to appeal to the activists who dominate such proceedings. Then, the candidates move to the center for the general election. But sometimes there’s no coming back from the fringes. At this early stage of the Democratic presidential race, the majority of candidates are already way, way out there, and there are plenty of activists and strategists who aim to keep them well beyond anything resembling the center. But the net effect of Dems embracing causes such as the elimination of private health insurance, taxpayer-funded health care for illegal immigrants, a Green New Deal that aims to radically transform the U.S. economy in a few years’ time, and reparations for both African Americans and gay couples may well be to make Donald Trump and Republicans seem less extreme when it comes to their own nutjob positions.

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