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After paramedics removed George Floyd’s body from the scene of his fatal arrest on May 25, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin defended his use of force in a conversation with a bystander. “We got to control this guy, because he’s a sizable guy, and it looks like he’s probably on something,” Chauvin told Charles McMillian in a body camera video that was played for jurors in Chauvin’s murder trial yesterday.

McMillian testified that Chauvin was responding to his criticism of the way the officer had treated Floyd, who was handcuffed and lying face down on the pavement as Chauvin knelt on his neck. According to prosecutors, Chauvin maintained that position for more than nine minutes, despite Floyd’s repeated complaints that he was having trouble breathing. Chauvin kept his knee there even after concerned bystanders repeatedly warned that Floyd’s life was in danger, even after another officer repeatedly suggested that Floyd should be rolled onto his side in light of his “excited delirium,” even after Floyd was no longer responsive, even after Chauvin was repeatedly told that Floyd had no detectable pulse, and even after the ambulance arrived.

Chauvin said that use of force was justified because he and his colleagues were dealing with “a sizable guy” who seemed to be intoxicated. Former Minneapolis police officer Tou Thao, who is charged with aiding and abetting Chauvin’s assault on Floyd and will be tried separately, shared that impression. “This is why you don’t do drugs, kids,” he jocularly told bystanders as Chauvin knelt on Floyd.

After Officers Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng arrested him for buying cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill, Floyd panicked and struggled with them as they tried to place him in their squad car, saying he was claustrophobic, complaining that he could not breathe, and asking if he could ride in the front seat. Chauvin apparently thought Floyd was behaving that way because he was on drugs. But that consideration should have underlined the danger of the prone restraint he used.

The evidence indicates that Floyd had ingested black-market “Percocet” tablets that contained fentanyl and methamphetamine, and an autopsy report from the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office said both drugs were detected in his blood. The report still classified Floyd’s death as a homicide, saying it was caused by “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” Chauvin’s lawyer, Eric Nelson, nevertheless argues that the drugs were partly responsible for Floyd’s death, which he attributes to “a cardiac arrhythmia that occurred as a result of hypertension, his coronary disease, the ingestion of methamphetamine and fentanyl, and the adrenaline flowing through his body, all of which acted to further compromise an already compromised heart.”

Nelson says Floyd continued to resist even after he was handcuffed and pinned to the ground by Chauvin, Lane, and Kueng. But judging from a bystander video of the encounter, Floyd’s resistance was limited to moving his head and right shoulder (consistent with his complaint that he could not breathe) and begging for mercy. In any case, Floyd’s apparent intoxication should have counted against the restraint technique that Chauvin used rather than in its favor.

In a 1998 case involving a man who died in police custody, for example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit held that the use of force can be excessive “when a drug-affected person in a state of excited delirium is hog-tied and placed face down in a prone position,” which “may present a substantial risk of death or serious bodily harm.” Although Floyd was not hog-tied, the obvious stress caused by the prone restraint plausibly contributed to the “adrenaline flowing through his body” and the “cardiac arrhythmia” described by Nelson—even if you rule out asphyxia, as Nelson does.

The prosecution, meanwhile, argues that Floyd’s breathing was obstructed, so much so that it caused “an anoxic seizure.” But either way, Chauvin’s actions can hardly be viewed as irrelevant to Floyd’s death, even if there were other contributing factors.

Chauvin is charged with unintentional second-degree murder, which applies to someone who “causes the death of a human being, without intent to effect the death of any person, while committing or attempting to commit a felony offense”—in this case, third-degree assault. To prove causation, the prosecution need only persuade the jury that Floyd would not have died if Chauvin had not committed that assault.

Alternatively, the jury could convict Chauvin of third-degree murder. That charge accuses him of causing Floyd’s death by “perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life.” Here, too, causation hinges on whether Floyd would have survived this encounter if Chauvin had acted differently.

Chauvin also faces a charge of second-degree manslaughter, which alleges that he caused Floyd’s death “by his culpable negligence, creating an unreasonable risk and consciously [taking] the chances of causing great bodily harm to another.” Again, that requires showing that Chauvin’s actions were the but-for cause of Floyd’s death.

The second-degree murder charge also requires proving that Chauvin intentionally committed an assault, while the third-degree murder and manslaughter charges require proving either that his actions were “eminently dangerous” and reflected “a depraved mind” or that he “consciously” created “an unreasonable risk” of “great bodily harm.” In these analyses—especially the latter two—Chauvin’s belief that Floyd was intoxicated does not help his case.

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“Are We Much Too Timid in the Way We Fight Covid-19?” asks New York Times columnist Ezra Klein in today’s paper. When it comes to developing and distributing tests and vaccines, we have indeed been too timid—not by choice, but because bureaucrats forced us to be.

The first big bureaucratic failure occurred when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) insisted that state public health agencies use a COVID-19 diagnostic test it developed. For about two months, the government forbade biotech companies and academic laboratories from developing and deploying their own tests. But the CDC test was so flawed that it was useless, and the undetected virus spread widely. Contrast that with the public health authorities in South Korea, who worked with private companies to develop and deploy a COVID-19 diagnostic test within a week after the first 4 cases had been detected.

In March 2020, I urged that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) get out of the way of at-home COVID-19 testing, which private companies were already developing that month. Instead, the agency ordered them to stop and to destroy the patient samples they had collected. It took the FDA until December to finally get around to approving a supposedly over-the-counter at-home COVID-19 antigen diagnostic test—and it’s still unavailable to consumers. And yesterday, that’s right, yesterday, the FDA approved two more over-the-counter at-home COVID-19 diagnostic tests.

Thanks to the unprecedentedly rapid roll out of various COVID-19 vaccines, the end of the pandemic is in sight, at least for rich countries like the United States. On the positive side, these clinical trials were developed in less than a year—compared to an average of 10.7 years for earlier vaccines. But the rollout could have been so much faster.

Moderna devised the recipe for its COVID-19 vaccine in just two days, and the company injected it into the first volunteer on March 16, 2020. But FDA bureaucrats insisted that the vaccine makers follow the usual path of Phases 1, 2, and 3 clinical trials for testing safety and efficacy. It would have made much more sense to authorize human challenge trials, in which young volunteers are given either the vaccine candidate or a placebo and then exposed to the virus to see if the shot works. Instead of waiting around for the virus to find both vaccinated and unvaccinated folks in the wild, as researchers do in regular Phase 3 trials, this would speed things up by bringing the virus to the volunteers.

If this had been done, we could have known by last summer how amazingly effective the new vaccines are. Keep in mind that by September 1, 2020, some 6.4 million and 190,000 Americans had been diagnosed and died respectively of the disease. Now the disease has been diagnosed in some 31 million Americans and has killed 565,000.

On April 29, 2020 the Trump administration unveiled Operation Warp Speed, with a goal of making 300 million doses of effective COVID-19 vaccines available by January 2021. On May 4, George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok and colleagues proposed that the U.S. government “go big” and commit $70 billion to encourage pharmaceutical companies to build out facilities for manufacturing COVID-19 vaccines. Ultimately, the Trump administration allocated about $13 billion to Operation Warp Speed. That’s some of the best money that the U.S. government has ever spent.

But again Americans faced unnecessary limits. Back in December, the clinical trial results from the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines showed that they were about 90 percent effective at preventing COVID-19 after just one dose. Given those data, some of us asked, why use two doses when one dose works almost as well? By delaying the second doses for the vaccines, we could double the number of Americans protected from the severe COVID-19 infections.

So far, nearly 100 million Americans have received at least one dose of the two-dose vaccines and 56 million are fully vaccinated. Had the second doses been delayed, 156 million Americans could now have been vaccinated—nearly 50 percent of the population.

Even more Americans could have been vaccinated by now if the FDA would accept the safety and efficacy evaluations of brother bureaucracies such as the United Kingdom’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. Britain’s regulators approved the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine three months ago, on December 30. The U.S. is sitting on a stockpile of around 30 million doses of that vaccine. Nevertheless, the FDA has yet to approve it, despite clinical trial results indicating that it is 76 percent effective against symptomatic COVID-19 and 100 percent effective against hospitalization and deaths.

So far, the pandemic has brought us tens of millions of infections, nearly a million hospitalizations, and 565,000 deaths. Economically, millions of jobs were lost, the economy shrank by 3.5 percent, and the U.S. government has wracked up trillions more in debt. Speedier rollouts of both testing and vaccines could have substantially ameliorated these losses. But timid bureaucrats stood in our way.

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How important was the “Green Revolution” to feeding people in developing countries and improving living conditions? A new paper in the Journal of Political Economy suggests it was quite substantial. The abstract for the paper, “Two Blades of Grass: The Impact of the Green Revolution,” by Douglas Gollin, Casper Worm Hansen, & Asger Wingende is as follows:

We estimate the impact of the Green Revolution in the developing world by exploiting exogenous heterogeneity in the timing and extent of the benefits derived from high yielding crop varieties (HYVs). We find that HYVs increased yields by 44 percent between 1965 and 2010 with further gains coming through reallocation of inputs. Higher yields increased income and reduced population growth. A ten-year delay of the Green Revolution would in 2010 have cost 17 percent of GDP/capita and added 223 million people to the developing world population. The cumulative GDP loss would have been US$83 trillion, corresponding to one year of current global GDP.

This is a lengthy and fascinating paper, high-lighting the importance of innovation (and agricultural biotechnology in particular) to improving human well-being.

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Since last summer, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have used an obscure federal regulation to impose a nationwide moratorium on a huge chunk of residential evictions. This is constitutionally dubious, to say the least. But the CDC just extended it through June.

The moratorium’s proponents argue that federal authority over interstate commerce permits this move. But the Interstate Commerce Clause isn’t a plenary power over all areas of life simply because everything, at a certain point, can be linked to commercial activity. The Tenth Amendment makes clear that all powers not expressly delegated to the federal government are left to the states. Still, the Commerce Clause has been used to justify a myriad of regulations that involve no commerce “among the several states,” and in some cases no “commerce” at all. Notable examples include prohibiting cannabis grown in your backyard for personal medical use, or stopping the control of a rodent population that has no commercial value and lives only in southwest Utah.

Courts since the 1930s have often validated federal overreach under cover of the Commerce Clause. But in United States v. Lopez (1995), the U.S. Supreme Court held that gun-free school zones had nothing to do with interstate commerce. The Clause, it cautioned, does not invite a court to “pile inference upon inference in a manner that would…convert congressional authority…to a general police power of the sort retained by the states.”

At the time, Lopez seemed to be a game-changer. But officials have found creative new ways to keep an impossibly broad Commerce Clause alive, and the Court has sometimes approved such schemes, as in the medical marijuana case Raich v. Gonzalez (2005). But in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), even as Chief Justice John Roberts saved Obamacare’s individual mandate, he also joined a majority of justices in holding that the Commerce Clause is not so broad as to justify forcing people to engage in a commercial activity.

The CDC eviction moratorium is especially egregious because it’s not even a statute; it’s an edict. Moreover, the regulation the CDC is relying on could be interpreted to permit any measures the agency “deem[s] reasonably necessary” to prevent the spread of communicable disease if it believes local responses “are insufficient to prevent the spread.” Taken to an extreme, that provision could justify the regulation of every aspect of life, all to “prevent the spread” of the common cold. Although the regulation’s language likely limits the agency to actions like those the rule actually lists—”inspection, fumigation, disinfection”—if it is extended to an eviction moratorium then there is no logical limit to what it could cover, essentially enabling the CDC to rule by decree. The Framers could not possibly have intended this result.

As Lopez teaches, it would take more than a few inferences to conclude that the landlord-tenant relationship is anything other than local (not interstate) activity. Those who disagree ought to heed District Judge J. Campbell Barker, who in a recent ruling against the CDC remarked that the “federal government cannot say that it has ever before invoked its power over interstate commerce to impose a residential eviction moratorium.”

Meanwhile, a majority of states imposed eviction moratoriums of some kind during the pandemic, though some have lapsed. Whether or not they are wise policy, they certainly do a far better job of accounting for local economic conditions than the CDC’s one-size-fits-all approach could ever do. Constitutional defects aside, the CDC rule simply isn’t necessary.

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Scandinavia is supposed to be a democratic socialist model for America: a land of low poverty, free college, and free health care. That comes with higher taxes—but not across the board. The governments of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway all understand that relatively low corporate taxes are better for productivity, and thus better for society.

President Joe Biden disagrees. He wants to raise trillions for infrastructure spending by hiking America’s corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent. Denmark and Norway, by contrast, have a 22 percent corporate tax rate, while Sweden’s sits at 20.6 percent.

Indeed, the U.S.’s current corporate tax rate already puts it right in line with some of the most centralized welfare states—the very same ones that politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) tout as an end goal.

Prior to 2017, the U.S. corporate tax rate was a stratospheric 35 percent, the highest in the developed world. That year’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act lowered corporate taxes to the current rate, which many panned as a boon for the wealthy.

It’s true that corporate tax cuts likely help the rich get richer. But they also likely help the poor get richer. That is not a particularly controversial point.

“High corporate taxes divert capital away from the U.S. corporate sector and toward noncorporate uses and other countries,” wrote Mihir A. Desai, the Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance at Harvard Business School, in a 2012 issue of the Harvard Business Review. “They therefore limit investments that would raise the productivity of American workers and would increase real wages. This is the cruel logic of a corporate tax in a global economy—that its burden falls most heavily on workers.”

A research paper from the nonpartisan American Economic Association found that workers shoulder approximately 50 percent of the corporate tax burden, with the bulk of that falling on “low-skilled, young, and female employees”—in other words, the most vulnerable groups. As it pertains to Biden’s hike specifically, experts estimate that between 66 to 100 percent of the strain will fall on workers.

On the campaign trail, Biden zeroed in on companies like Amazon for paying what he claimed was too little in taxes. Yet the U.S. tax code was specifically reformed over the years to incentivize investment, innovation, and growth, all things that directly impact workers’ well-being. The social democrats of Scandinavia understand how that works. Why doesn’t Biden?

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