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The 2020 presidential election is shaping up to be a choice between a man who wants to spend America further into oblivion to solve a problem that money can’t fix, and a man who believes being president gives him license to regulate the personal behaviors of more than 330 million people (and also wants to spend America into oblivion).

In the first corner is President Donald Trump, who is now trying to paper over his administration’s many, many early mistakes in handling the coronavirus by running the federal printing press at warp speed.

Trump on Wednesday agreed with Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that more stimulus spending is necessary. In May, Pelosi’s House passed a $3 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill—that’s $3 trillion on top of about $4 trillion in emergency coronavirus spending already authorized, some of which remains unspent—but the Republican-controlled Senate has refused to pass it. Citing concerns about the size of the deficit, Senate Republicans have pushed for a smaller package that would cost about $500 billion.

Trump left no doubt where he stood on Wednesday.

“I like the larger amount,” he said from the podium in the White House briefing room yesterday evening. “Some of the Republicans disagree, but I think I can convince them to go along with that.”

Over 13 million Americans remain out of work in large part due to the pandemic. There may be a good argument for a limited federal response that helps those most hurt by the pandemic and by mandatory shutdowns. Another round of business-focused aid might be necessary as the crisis drags on. But the “higher number” that Trump prefers in the House-passed stimulus bill is a mess of special interest handouts and unnecessary aid to states that shouldn’t be looking to the deeply indebted federal government for help in the first place.

It is difficult to comprehend just how much money the federal government has already spent because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here’s a useful illustration—compare the total government spending during this year to the 2009 stimulus, which looks like a tiny bump in comparison:

Continuing to spend like this is beyond reckless.

Meanwhile, Trump’s opponent in November’s election also made coronavirus-related news yesterday—but not in a good way.

During a news conference in Delaware, former vice president Joe Biden said he believed the president has the authority to issue a national mandate requiring the wearing of face masks in public. “Our legal team thinks I can do that, based upon the degree to which there’s a crisis in those states, and how bad things are for the country,” Biden said, according to CBS News.

Biden has been beating the “mask mandate” drum since the Democratic National Convention but has not been forthcoming about the details of that plan, like how his administration would enforce such a rule.

Wednesday’s remarks, however, suggest that Biden’s team is actually building a legal case for having a president require that individuals dress in a certain way. That’s beyond ridiculous, of course, and seems likely to be unconstitutional.

Should all Americans wear masks when they are unable to socially distance during the pandemic? Yes. Should the president be ordering this behavior? Absolutely not.

As Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote last month, the biggest problem with a national mask mandate is that someone has to enforce it. “That means either turning federal agents to the task of monitoring mask-wearing or giving more funds to state and local police departments so they can do so,” she argued. “No matter how it’s accomplished, there’s no way that doesn’t lead to more spending on law enforcement, more government surveillance, and more contact between cops and communities that are already overpoliced—all at a moment when millions of Americans are demanding just the opposite of that.”

Oh, and Biden also supports the passage of the House’s $3 trillion stimulus package—part of roughly $11 trillion in new spending that Biden’s campaign is proposing to pay for with about $3 trillion in new taxes. You can do that math on that one by yourself.

What neither Trump nor Biden has figured out yet is that it is impossible to stimulate your way out of an economic crisis that’s been created by people being unwilling or unable to spend money. When the federal printing press churned out $1,200 checks for every American at the start of the pandemic, personal savings rates shot through the roof. There are some people who might need additional help to get through this crisis, but throwing money at the rest of us—to say nothing of bailing out the postal service and the Kennedy Center—makes no sense.

The mask mandate has a similar problem. It is impossible to enforce, so the only realistic option is to convince Americans to voluntarily wear masks—which is something you can do without a mandate. The president, like all other government officials, should encourage the wearing of masks and endeavor to provide accurate, timely information to all people so they can make their own risk assessments. That’s all. Just please do that one thing.

It is a near certainty that either Trump or Biden will be elected president less than two months from now. It is also a near certainty, regardless of who wins, that federal spending will continue to rise and that presidential power will continue to metastasize.

There might be good reasons to vote for either Biden or Trump—and there are plenty of reasons to vote against both, as the new issue of Reason explores—but when it comes to their plans for the next stage of dealing with this pandemic, neither man deserves our confidence.

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The federal government shouldn’t dictate what local schools across the country teach—and in the past, conservatives have rightly denounced the idea that it should. Here, for instance, is Phyllis Schlafly in 2014 railing against Obama-era Common Core standards, which Schlafly saw as an “attempt to compel all U.S. children to be taught the same material and not taught other things parents might think important.” Yet like so many other conservative principles, this one seems to have fallen by the wayside in the Trump era. Now, President Donald Trump is announcing plans for (yet another!) executive order, this one to create a “patriotic education” curriculum for U.S. public schools.

“Today I’m also pleased to announce that I will soon sign an executive order establishing a national commission to promote patriotic education,” Trump said Thursday in a speech at the National Archives Museum. “It will be called the 1776 Commission.”

Trump opined that “American parents are not going to accept indoctrination in our schools”…while detailing his own plan for more indoctrination into our schools.

Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.) has the right idea about this:

Keep the federal government out. My family doesn’t need or want this president or any president telling our kids’ schools what to teach. https://t.co/JAqOkjTwKA

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) September 17, 2020

Not only is Trump’s plan an attempt to impose curriculum on local school districts across the country with merely the president’s pen and phone, but that curriculum sounds like the sort of propaganda we’ve come to expect from authoritarian regimes.

If Trump’s announcement speech is any indication, the kind of “patriotism” the president has in mind comes with a hefty dose of MAGA rhetoric about the “anti-American” left trying to indoctrinate small children with “Marxist doctrine holding that America is a wicked and racist nation.”

“It is so urgent that we finally restore patriotic education to our schools,” Trump continued. “Under our leadership, the National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a grant to support the development of a pro-American curriculum that celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history.”

The curriculum “will encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and make plans to honor the 250th anniversary of our founding,” he added.

There’s of course nothing wrong with honoring America’s roots and teaching children about all the beautiful and positive things in American history. (And we currently do just that!) There’s also nothing wrong with teaching the children the truth about all the ugliness in American history too. A good education should—in age-appropriate ways—encompass both.

Many schools fall short of this ideal at present. One way to ensure that gets even worse is to have whoever is in power in Washington—be that Trump, or Joe Biden, or some future unknown leader—setting an American history curriculum for every single student in every public school district across the country. Whoever is in charge, that’s a recipe for a biased and propagandistic version of history.

It’s not the President’s business if local schools have bad curricula.

— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) September 17, 2020

Can individual states, cities, or school districts do much better? Some will, some won’t—but the beauty of a decentralized system is that 1) it’s easier for parents and teachers to change the bad parts of a local curriculum than it is a national one, and 2) it leaves room for parents to pull their children out of schools that don’t do well at this, or at something else, and enroll them a school that does better.

Ultimately, the best antidote for politicized lessons and public-school propaganda is school choice. When parents can choose between a range of local education options—traditional public schools, traditional private schools, charter schools, online schools, small-group-based “education pods,” homeschooling, etc.—we leave fewer kids trapped in schools whose values don’t align with their families and communities—and less room for whoever is in the White House to try to set everyone’s lessons from on high.

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An Introduction to Constitutional Law: 100 Supreme Court Cases Everyone Should Know was released one year ago. Randy and I launched the book at Georgetown University Law Center on, fittingly, Constitution Day. We are proud to report that we have sold 16,779 paperback copies, 10,431 of which were sold on Amazon. We also sold 3,460 copies of the ebook on Kindle. These numbers are humbling. Truly.

Last summer, our publisher printed a first run of 2,000 copies, which they expected would last for the first year or so. We sold out every copy before the book was even released. Throughout the past year, the book was consistently out of stock on Amazon. At one point, after Randy’s appearance on the Mark Levin show, we spiked to #4 on the Amazon best-seller list. We were behind Elmo and ahead of Jessica Simpson.

Over the summer, our book was consistently the second-best-selling constitutional law casebook, right behind Dean Chemerinsky’s popular casebook.

And our book has (as of today) 359 ratings, 84% of which are five-star. (We received a two one-star ratings, which complained about Kindle formatting).

Our book has been adopted at all levels of education: law school, graduate, undergraduate classes, high school, and home schools. Countless teachers have told me how valuable this resource has been for the flipped classroom during the pandemic. Many of our readers are not in school at all, but find constitutional law worthy of study. We are truly and profoundly honored so many people are learning constitutional law from our book.

And we’re just getting started. We are working on an expanded second edition of the book. We will add coverage of areas that we omitted from the first edition, including Criminal Procedure, Voting Rights, and others. We are also developing a video series on Slavery and the Constitution–a very timely topic. We hope the book and expanded video library will be available in 2022. There is so much more to come.

Last summer I told Randy our book would sell a million copies over its lifetime. He didn’t believe me. I’m sticking with my prediction.

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As Republicans battle Democratic electoral advances in the nation’s politically pivotal suburbs, they’ve been sounding the alarms about a liberal plot to dismantle our beloved single-family neighborhoods. For instance, the conservative National Review in June declared, “Biden and Dems are set to abolish the suburbs.”

This would be shocking if true, rather than a transparent attempt to scare soccer moms into voting for the GOP. “For the past three years, the state senator who represents Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco has led a push to abolish single-family zoning in California,” wrote President Donald Trump and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, in a Wall Street Journal column last month. Good grief.

I’ve long chronicled the disastrous development policies that California’s Democrats have pursued. These include excessive fees, regulations, slow-growth rules and mandates that quash housing construction and hike prices. In their battle against climate change, they have backed urban-growth boundaries that set aside vast tracts of land—and attempt to force new construction into a high-density urban footprint.

Furthermore, the state’s Democrats—and even many Republicans—had backed the state’s now-defunct redevelopment agencies. Those relics of the 1950s urban-renewal era gave local officials the power to play real-life SimCity (a city-building videogame) in their communities, whereby they subsidize favored developers and abuse eminent domain in a perverse quest to grab tax revenue and remake their communities as they choose.

California has among the highest home prices and poverty rates in America thanks in part to such restrictions on housing. So there’s plenty of fodder for Republicans who want to take on Democrats’ misguided land-use policies. It’s ironic, though, that they have chosen to take a stand against the one development issue where many Democrats are on the mark.

Let’s start with semantics. Eliminating single-family zoning does not ban the construction of single-family homes. We should banish the idea’s supporters to the nether reaches of the ugliest imaginable tract suburb for their failure to properly label this modest change. Single-family zoning allows only the construction of single-family homes. Eliminating it, as Oregon has done, allows the construction of other things in addition to single-family homes.

Trump and Carson were referring to Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, who most recently authored the now-defunct Senate Bill 1120, which would allow the construction of duplexes in suburban areas. The senator is wrong on most state policy issues, but he is right about this particular matter. Here, he was championing fewer regulations, freer markets, more consumer choice, and less government micromanagement.

That National Review column argued that candidate Biden is embracing an end to single-family zoning, the creation of “little downtowns” in the suburbs, and an Obama-era housing rule that requires local governments that receive federal housing funds to identify fair-housing barriers. He believes this package will mean “the end of meaningful choice in how Americans can live.”

I thought he was kidding. I like the suburbs, but the government enforces zoning specifically to limit any meaningful choice and to control what other people do on their own property. “All zoning is exclusionary, and is expected to be exclusionary; that is its purpose,” wrote the late Bernard Siegan, a prominent free-market academic.

I rarely agree with any federal housing edicts, but what’s wrong with “little downtowns,” provided they aren’t created with subsidies and eminent domain? Old Towne Orange, downtown Fullerton and Old Pasadena are fabulous attractions—and hardly something to fear. Less zoning leads to more of those places. More zoning leads to endless big-box shopping centers. I’ve got nothing against the latter, but we shouldn’t artificially limit the former.

My neighborhood allows the construction of second units and has done so for years. Instead of a suburban-geddon, we simply have more neighbors who have a place for their elderly parents and adult children. That’s how neighborhoods largely operated in the United States until people realized they could lobby the government to zone out whatever it is they don’t like.

I want to rebut a point raised by my Southern California News Group colleague, Susan Shelley, who is an opponent of the Wiener bill. When people ask her what to say to someone who complains that they can’t afford to live in, say, Pasadena, she offered this answer in a recent column: “Someone who can’t afford Pasadena will have to live somewhere else, or earn enough money to live in Pasadena, or share the costs of living in Pasadena with others.”

Of course, people don’t have a right to live anywhere they want unless they have enough money to do so. But one key reason that many people can’t live there is because Californians back restrictive zoning laws that limit housing supply and drive up prices. Removing single-family zoning will not “dismantle the suburbs,” but it will dismantle the ability of the “get off my lawn” crowd to use the government to control other people’s property.

This column was first published in the Orange County Register.

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We had a very interesting and enjoyable preliminary private conversation on the subject a couple of weeks ago (just for The Practice Effect), and I much look forward to this public version. Please join us! Here are the details:

UCLA Law’s AI Pulse Project and University of Arizona TechLaw present:

The Brinternet: A conversation with futurist and science fiction author David Brin and Professors Jane Bambauer, Mark Lemley, and Eugene Volokh, moderated by Professor Ted Parson

What: Is the dominant advertising-supported business model for Internet news and opinion unsustainable?  In a pair of essays published on Evonomics, David Brin says yes. But alternative models, including subscriptions and paywalls, also increasingly appear unrealistic for most apps and content producers. Can micropayments (in the 1 to 5 cent range) solve this problem?

When: this Friday, September 18, 2020, 2:00 – 3:00 PM Pacific time.

Register to attend here.

Panelists:

David Brin is an astrophysicist whose international best-selling novels include The Postman, Earth, and recently Existence. His nonfiction book about the information age—The Transparent Society—won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association.

Jane Bambauer is a Professor of Law at the University of Arizona. Prof. Bambauer’s research assesses the social costs and benefits of Big Data, and questions the wisdom of many well-intentioned privacy laws. Her articles have appeared in the Stanford Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. Prof. Bambauer’s own data-driven research explores biased judgment, legal education, and legal careers. She holds a B.S. in mathematics from Yale College and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Mark Lemley is the William H. Neukom Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the Director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and is affiliated faculty in the Symbolic Systems program. Prof. Lemley teaches intellectual property, patent law, trademark law, antitrust, the law of robotics and AI, video game law, and remedies. He is the author of eight books and 181 articles, including the two-volume treatise IP and Antitrust.

Eugene Volokh is the Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law and an academic affiliate at the law firm Mayer Brown LLP. He teaches First Amendment law and a First Amendment amicus brief clinic, and has taught copyright, criminal law, tort law, and a seminar on firearms regulation policy. He has been writing on the Internet and the law since 1995.

Edward A. (Ted) Parson (Moderator) is the Dan and Rae Emmett Professor of Environmental Law, faculty co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and the director of the AI Pulse Project at UCLA School of Law.

Background reading: 

Advertising Cannot Maintain the Internet. Here’s the “Secret Sauce” Solution.

Beyond Advertising: Will Micropayments Sustain the New Internet?

Neither micro- nor macropayments are required to attend this conversation.

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After 27 years of memorable work in films by Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Wong Kar-Wai, among many others, Jude Law can still surprise us. In The Nest, he gives one of the strongest performances of his career, playing a man whose life has evolved into a shaky edifice of lies, too many of which he has come to believe himself. Law brings a subtle emotional charge to the picture without unbalancing its carefully controlled tempo, and he’s wonderfully well-supported by his costar, the brilliant Carrie Coon (The Leftovers).

The Nest is writer-director Sean Durkin’s first movie since his well-regarded 2011 film Martha Marcy May Marlene (he’s spent most of his time since then producing). The story is set in the mid-1980s. Rory O’Hara (Law) is an expatriate English stock trader now working on Wall Street, and his wife Allison (Coon), an American, is raising their two children, Samantha (Oona Roche) and Benjamin (Charlie Shotwell), on a large, leafy estate. They are prosperous exurbanites—Allison teaches horse riding to well-off local kids—but not prosperous enough for Rory: He wants to uproot the family and return to his native London to take a new job that he says has been offered to him by his old employer, the avuncular Arthur Davis (Michael Culkin).

As is usually the case with Rory’s plans, everything is not what it seems. Arthur didn’t call Rory and invite him back—Rory called Arthur to ask for the job. And the job isn’t really what Rory is interested in. He’s actually scheming to help another company buy out Arthur’s operation and turn it into a global powerhouse —at great financial benefit to Rory, of course.

The relocation to England is agreeably compressed: After the introductory New York scenes, we simply see the family trying to settle into their new home—a way-too-big manor in the Sussex countryside, which Rory has rented for an amount of money he’d rather not discuss. Before long, Allison realizes that their bank account is running dry. Then their telephone service is turned off. Rory keeps bobbing and weaving—there’s “a huge check coming,” he says. But it never materializes.

The story proceeds in a succession of rich scenes: an awkward visit to Rory’s semi-estranged mother (Anne Reid), a gruesome episode with a dead horse, a heartbroken taxi ride (peak Jude Law), and a dinner party that careens completely off the rails when Allison publicly runs out of patience with her husband. (“You’re so full of shit,” she tells him.)

Through all of this, we can see the slow death of Allison’s feelings for her husband passing wordlessly across Coons’ face. It’s a riveting performance, especially when Allison takes in yet another of Rory’s latest brainstorms and delivers the judgment of terminally fed-up spouses throughout the ages. “You’re exhausting,” she tells him.

No Escape

No Escape has the hunched and gasping air of an old-school torture-porn movie (it much resembles Eli Roth’s Hostel films). But there’s no torture! Or rather, there is torture, but you mostly don’t see it—somebody’s always standing in the way when an ear gets lopped off, or an arm gets severed. There’s some very claustrophobic tension, and a good bit of glopping around in the guts of a fresh corpse, but generally, this movie is torture lite.

Like Videodrome, another picture it resembles, No Escape has something to say about modern media—although not enough to amount to a message, really. The protagonist is a hyper-successful vlogger named Cole (Keegan Allen, of Pretty Little Liars). Cole has spent 10 years traveling the world in search of photogenic kicks and he’s built an audience of millions for his web series ERL (“Escape Real Life”). Now, he and his team—three co-adventurers plus Cole’s girlfriend, Erin (Holland Roden, of Teen Wolf)—are flying first-class to Moscow, where a wealthy fan named Alexei (Ronen Rubenstein) has devised an evening of extreme thrills for them. (Alexei is said to be “next-level loaded,” and he’s the object of the movie’s funniest line: “This guy is so rich that everything he does is legitimately the best.”)

The venue for Alexei’s big night out is an abandoned prison (or something), furnished with all the familiar horrors: an Iron Maiden, an electric chair, a rack, and a Houdini-style glass cabinet with water hose hooked up. Naturally, there are also tables filled with torture implements and gore-slicked goons hulking about in black leather butcher aprons. Once each of his companions has been situated in one of the torture devices, Cole is given one hour to free them all—while a world-wide audience of freaks and troglodytes giggles along under their rocks.

Cole’s mission is exceedingly difficult, as you might imagine, but—spoiler—not impossible. Writer-director Will Wernick—whose last movie was simply called Escape Room—keeps the nonsense moving along, and thanks to cinematographer Jason Goodell, the movie looks a lot better than it needed to. The switcheroo ending, however, is not something that Eli Roth would’ve signed off on.

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