Tag: posts

‘Fake News’ Is a Really Dangerous Excuse for Censorship

You know what’s not fake news? It’s that politicians scream about the alleged dangers of “fake news” to justify efforts to censor speech that rubs them the wrong way. As Singapore’s rulers join a growing list of their peers in America and around the world promising to punish “false statements of fact,” it’s important to remember that the supposed plague of misleading and harmful information on the internet is nothing new, nor is governments’ desire to muzzle anybody who says inconvenient things.

Without a doubt, there’s bullshit on the Internet. Some of it results from sloppy fact-checking, and some is deliberate publication of untrue information and propaganda. But this isn’t a peculiar quality of online publishing—it’s an inevitable product of any publishing platform.

People want to reach the public with their messages, and they use the tools available to them.

Politicians like that power when it’s targeted at their enemies, but they resent it when they’re on the receiving end.

We’ve Been Here (Long) Before

“There has been more new error propagated by the press in the last ten years than in an hundred years before 1798,” President John Adams complained of his treatment by opposition newspapers at a time when news—fake or real—was printed by hand.

Adams’s Federalist allies in Congress responded to the president’s concerns about fake news with legal restrictions on “any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government.” Unsurprisingly, the first person charged under the law was an opposition lawmaker—Rep. Matthew Lyon of Vermont—who accused President Adams of “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp.”

Ironically, the then-president’s own cousin, Samuel Adams, had been an especially effective propagandist and publisher of arguably misleading information in the years leading up to the American Revolution. But that was the sort of fake news to which John Adams had no objection.

Censorship in Singapore

Striking a note that John Adams and company would have recognized, Singaporean newspaper The Straits Times suggests that speech controls are necessary because “an erosion of trust in governments and institutions has threatened the very foundations of democracy worldwide” and the “spread of fake news on new media have deepened this crisis.”

Presenting the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Bill for debate, Singapore’s Home Affairs and Law Minister K. Shanmugam said it was “an attempt to deal with one part of the problem. The serious problems arising from falsehoods spread through new media. And to try and help support the infrastructure of fact and promote honest speech in public discourse.”

Shanmugam’s party has held power continuously since 1959, largely by suing into bankruptcy any opposition figures who dare to utter speech critical of the regime.

His position is unlikely to become less secure now that government ministers have the unilateral power, “to prevent the communications of false statements of fact in Singapore” by requiring people to change or recant what they’ve published under threat of fines and imprisonment. The law—passed May 8—is intended to apply to information published not just inside the country but also elsewhere, a response to the government’s frustration with the international reach of the Internet.

That Singapore follows in the wake of Malaysia, another managed sort-of-democracy, is no surprise. That country last year banned the publication of “news, information, data and reports which is or are wholly or partly false” in a move transparently aimed at the opposition.

But traditional liberal democracies with supposedly firmer civil liberties protections also feel the allure of speech controls.

Information Fallacieuse and British Spies

Channeling his own internal John Adams, France’s President Emmanuel Macron demanded government action against “propaganda articulated by thousands of social media accounts.” He went on to sniff, “If we want to protect liberal democracies, we must be strong and have clear rules.”

France’s lawmakers obliged their president with a law allowing government officials to order the removal of online articles deemed to be false.

They then erupted in outrage when Twitter determined that the French government’s own online efforts couldn’t be brought into compliance with the law and so rejected a voter registration campaign.

Macron continues to pressure online platforms to eliminate information he doesn’t like, meeting just days ago with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May also finds too much information published online to be inconvenient. She has accused Russia of “weaponizing information” and claims that Internet “companies have not done enough to protect users, especially children and young people, from harmful content.”

Without bothering with legislation, the British government is creating a “fake news” rapid response unit that is tasked with monitoring social media and going after stories officials claim are false. The government also proposes to hold online publishers liable for “inciting violence and violent content, encouraging suicide, disinformation, cyber bullying and children accessing inappropriate material.”

“The era of self-regulation for online companies is over,” Digital Secretary Jeremy Wright bluntly claims. “Voluntary actions from industry to tackle online harms have not been applied consistently or gone far enough.”

Censors plan, yet again, to suppress speech through involuntary means when people won’t muzzle themselves? What a shock.

Not that modern American politicians are immune to such temptations…

Speech Suppression Efforts at Home

Luckily the First Amendment, for now, poses a barrier to Singapore/Malaysia/France/UK-style suppression of disapproved speech in the U.S. But modern American politicians are far from immune to such temptations.

President Donald Trump famously denounces every inconvenient news story and critical report as “fake news.” His use of the term is so frequent that it was named word of the year for 2017 by the American Dialect Society.

Trump’s Democratic opponents may not agree that Trump should occupy the White House, but they share his resentment that online speech is out of (their) control.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) frets that Russia uses social media “to sow conflict and discontent all over this country” and threatens government intervention. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) openly envies the UK’s regulation of online media and says the U.S. should probably follow suit.

Last month, members of Congress from both parties alternately pushed extremism and political bias as reasons for government regulation of online speech.

Not that the rationale for regulating speech matters. The fakest news of all is the claim that politicians respect our liberty, including our free speech rights. Whatever excuse they raise, government officials will always find an excuse to try to suppress criticism and ideas they find uncomfortable. It’s our right to speak out anyway.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2Hi2abf
via IFTTT

‘Fake News’ Is a Really Dangerous Excuse for Censorship

You know what’s not fake news? It’s that politicians scream about the alleged dangers of “fake news” to justify efforts to censor speech that rubs them the wrong way. As Singapore’s rulers join a growing list of their peers in America and around the world promising to punish “false statements of fact,” it’s important to remember that the supposed plague of misleading and harmful information on the internet is nothing new, nor is governments’ desire to muzzle anybody who says inconvenient things.

Without a doubt, there’s bullshit on the Internet. Some of it results from sloppy fact-checking, and some is deliberate publication of untrue information and propaganda. But this isn’t a peculiar quality of online publishing—it’s an inevitable product of any publishing platform.

People want to reach the public with their messages, and they use the tools available to them.

Politicians like that power when it’s targeted at their enemies, but they resent it when they’re on the receiving end.

We’ve Been Here (Long) Before

“There has been more new error propagated by the press in the last ten years than in an hundred years before 1798,” President John Adams complained of his treatment by opposition newspapers at a time when news—fake or real—was printed by hand.

Adams’s Federalist allies in Congress responded to the president’s concerns about fake news with legal restrictions on “any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government.” Unsurprisingly, the first person charged under the law was an opposition lawmaker—Rep. Matthew Lyon of Vermont—who accused President Adams of “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp.”

Ironically, the then-president’s own cousin, Samuel Adams, had been an especially effective propagandist and publisher of arguably misleading information in the years leading up to the American Revolution. But that was the sort of fake news to which John Adams had no objection.

Censorship in Singapore

Striking a note that John Adams and company would have recognized, Singaporean newspaper The Straits Times suggests that speech controls are necessary because “an erosion of trust in governments and institutions has threatened the very foundations of democracy worldwide” and the “spread of fake news on new media have deepened this crisis.”

Presenting the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Bill for debate, Singapore’s Home Affairs and Law Minister K. Shanmugam said it was “an attempt to deal with one part of the problem. The serious problems arising from falsehoods spread through new media. And to try and help support the infrastructure of fact and promote honest speech in public discourse.”

Shanmugam’s party has held power continuously since 1959, largely by suing into bankruptcy any opposition figures who dare to utter speech critical of the regime.

His position is unlikely to become less secure now that government ministers have the unilateral power, “to prevent the communications of false statements of fact in Singapore” by requiring people to change or recant what they’ve published under threat of fines and imprisonment. The law—passed May 8—is intended to apply to information published not just inside the country but also elsewhere, a response to the government’s frustration with the international reach of the Internet.

That Singapore follows in the wake of Malaysia, another managed sort-of-democracy, is no surprise. That country last year banned the publication of “news, information, data and reports which is or are wholly or partly false” in a move transparently aimed at the opposition.

But traditional liberal democracies with supposedly firmer civil liberties protections also feel the allure of speech controls.

Information Fallacieuse and British Spies

Channeling his own internal John Adams, France’s President Emmanuel Macron demanded government action against “propaganda articulated by thousands of social media accounts.” He went on to sniff, “If we want to protect liberal democracies, we must be strong and have clear rules.”

France’s lawmakers obliged their president with a law allowing government officials to order the removal of online articles deemed to be false.

They then erupted in outrage when Twitter determined that the French government’s own online efforts couldn’t be brought into compliance with the law and so rejected a voter registration campaign.

Macron continues to pressure online platforms to eliminate information he doesn’t like, meeting just days ago with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May also finds too much information published online to be inconvenient. She has accused Russia of “weaponizing information” and claims that Internet “companies have not done enough to protect users, especially children and young people, from harmful content.”

Without bothering with legislation, the British government is creating a “fake news” rapid response unit that is tasked with monitoring social media and going after stories officials claim are false. The government also proposes to hold online publishers liable for “inciting violence and violent content, encouraging suicide, disinformation, cyber bullying and children accessing inappropriate material.”

“The era of self-regulation for online companies is over,” Digital Secretary Jeremy Wright bluntly claims. “Voluntary actions from industry to tackle online harms have not been applied consistently or gone far enough.”

Censors plan, yet again, to suppress speech through involuntary means when people won’t muzzle themselves? What a shock.

Not that modern American politicians are immune to such temptations…

Speech Suppression Efforts at Home

Luckily the First Amendment, for now, poses a barrier to Singapore/Malaysia/France/UK-style suppression of disapproved speech in the U.S. But modern American politicians are far from immune to such temptations.

President Donald Trump famously denounces every inconvenient news story and critical report as “fake news.” His use of the term is so frequent that it was named word of the year for 2017 by the American Dialect Society.

Trump’s Democratic opponents may not agree that Trump should occupy the White House, but they share his resentment that online speech is out of (their) control.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) frets that Russia uses social media “to sow conflict and discontent all over this country” and threatens government intervention. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) openly envies the UK’s regulation of online media and says the U.S. should probably follow suit.

Last month, members of Congress from both parties alternately pushed extremism and political bias as reasons for government regulation of online speech.

Not that the rationale for regulating speech matters. The fakest news of all is the claim that politicians respect our liberty, including our free speech rights. Whatever excuse they raise, government officials will always find an excuse to try to suppress criticism and ideas they find uncomfortable. It’s our right to speak out anyway.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2Hi2abf
via IFTTT

The New Green Serfdom

“Until you do it, I’m the boss,” said Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist congresswoman from the Bronx, responding to critics of her Green New Deal in February. Later that night, the freshman congresswoman doubled down on her comment, tweeting that people who “don’t like the #GreenNewDeal” should “come up with your own ambitious, on-scale proposal to address the global climate crisis. Until then, we’re in charge—and you’re just shouting from the cheap seats.”

Much has rightly been made of the Green New Deal’s fuzzy-headed utopianism and its impossible goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero in 10 years. But we should also pay close attention to the plan’s authoritarian impulses, particularly in light of its historical inspirations: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and the command economy he established during the Second World War.

If proponents of the Green New Deal are serious—and there’s no reason to doubt them—then they’re proposing a return to a militaristic America where Uncle Sam’s heavy hand intervenes in all aspects of life, curtailing individual freedom in pursuit of their collectivist goals. And like the planners of the Roosevelt years, their intentions are clear and grandiose: They want the power to regiment a society of nearly 330 million people in pursuit of a pipe dream they liken to a war for survival.

‘The New Deal and the Analogue of War’

After FDR defeated Herbert Hoover in 1932, the new president rolled out his first New Deal to confront the Great Depression. Roosevelt saw the economic collapse as directly analogous to war. In his first inaugural address, he said that Americans “must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective.”

Like President Woodrow Wilson during World War I, President Roosevelt and his New Dealers moved to cartelize the economy with the enthusiastic support of business executives such as Gerard Swope, president of General Electric. “There was scarcely a New Deal act or agency that did not owe something to the experience of World War I,” according to FDR scholar William E. Leuchtenburg in an excellent paper published in 1964, “The New Deal and the Analogue of War.”

The best example of this was the creation of the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which was essentially a peacetime version of Wilson’s War Industries Board (WIB). Headed by the Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, the WIB coordinated purchases, allocated commodities, and fixed “prices and priorities in production” while guaranteeing a profit to the big business that helped fuel the war machine.

If the WIB could coordinate an economic mobilization during wartime, the Roosevelt administration thought, then a peacetime equivalent could defeat the Great Depression by mobilizing America’s productive powers. The NRA held industries to “codes of fair competition,” which set wages, working hours, and prices. By doing so, Roosevelt and his New Dealers believed they were overthrowing the cut-throat and chaotic competition they blamed for the Depression.

Companies that didn’t cooperate with the NRA were ostracized. Under the NRA’s Blue Eagle Campaign, businesses that played ball were given a blue eagle symbol for their windows and packages to advertise their adherence to the administration’s rules and regulations. Those that didn’t faced boycotts. As General Hugh Johnson, head of the NRA, put it, “Those who are not with us are against us.” Some businessmen who violated NRA regulations were arrested.

Socialist leader Norman Thomas called this “a scheme which in essence is fascist.” The NRA itself issued a report that stated, “The Fascist Principles are very similar to those we have been evolving here in America.” In 1935, the Supreme Court ruled the NRA’s “codes of fair competition” unconstitutional, saying they violating the Constitution’s separation of powers as well as the Commerce Clause. Small wonder that New Left historians accused the agency of championing a corporatist economy.

The Green New Dealers should also be wary of using the original New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which sent young unemployed and unmarried men onto federal, state, and local government lands for conservation purposes, as a model. In her defense of the Green New Deal at The Intercept—aptly titled “The Battle Lines Have Been Drawn on the Green New Deal”—Naomi Klein cites the CCC as an inspiration, noting that it began with 200,000 volunteers but then expanded dramatically due to its popularity. She doesn’t mention that the CCC was really an Army program with a titular civilian head.

Leuchtenburg points out that the CCC was “consciously devised to provide the moral equivalent to war” and that it “aimed to install martial virtues in the nation’s youth.” When the men woke up in their army tents in camp, they heard “Reveille.” During lights out, they heard “Taps.” It shouldn’t be surprising that when the draft returned in 1940, as Charles E. Heller writes, CCC alumni “provided the pretrained manpower to fill the U.S. Army’s ranks upon mobilization with men who readily assumed the role of Non-Commissioned Officers.”

The World War II Homefront

But then, the Green New Dealers seem to see that war as a model for domestic policy. In a widely lampooned FAQ document that an Ocasio-Cortez advisor erroneously claimed was a hoax, the Green New Deal is called a “10-year plan to mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War 2 to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and create economic prosperity for all.”

Americans should pay attention to what the country was like on the homefront during World War II. Prosperity it was not.

Unemployment did come down—to less than 2 percent—though that’s largely because more than a fifth of the U.S. workforce was conscripted and sent overseas to sacrifice life and limb. The workers who remained were focused on producing military goods, such as guns and ammunition, while consumer goods were either underproduced or not produced at all. Other goods—such as gasoline, tires, nylon, shoes, bicycles, sugar, meat, canned fish, cheese, and canned milk—were strictly rationed. Income tax rates applied to more and more people, including lower-income earners; hit confiscatory levels, with the highest marginal tax rate rising to 94 percent; and were rigorously enforced by the IRS through a new system of automatic payroll deductions.

American people did extraordinary things to win World War II, but it took an authoritarian society to achieve it—one that nobody should want to return to.

When the United States goes abroad to do widescale social engineering, that’s rightly called imperialism by libertarians and socialists alike. But when widespread social engineering is done at home through the federal government, people like Ocasio-Cortez call it progressivism and point to the New Deal and World War II to sell the plan.

When she says “I’m the boss,” pay attention. She’s describing America under a Green New Deal: a place where you’ll do as you’re told.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2LGw3Gt
via IFTTT

The New Green Serfdom

“Until you do it, I’m the boss,” said Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist congresswoman from the Bronx, responding to critics of her Green New Deal in February. Later that night, the freshman congresswoman doubled down on her comment, tweeting that people who “don’t like the #GreenNewDeal” should “come up with your own ambitious, on-scale proposal to address the global climate crisis. Until then, we’re in charge—and you’re just shouting from the cheap seats.”

Much has rightly been made of the Green New Deal’s fuzzy-headed utopianism and its impossible goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero in 10 years. But we should also pay close attention to the plan’s authoritarian impulses, particularly in light of its historical inspirations: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and the command economy he established during the Second World War.

If proponents of the Green New Deal are serious—and there’s no reason to doubt them—then they’re proposing a return to a militaristic America where Uncle Sam’s heavy hand intervenes in all aspects of life, curtailing individual freedom in pursuit of their collectivist goals. And like the planners of the Roosevelt years, their intentions are clear and grandiose: They want the power to regiment a society of nearly 330 million people in pursuit of a pipe dream they liken to a war for survival.

‘The New Deal and the Analogue of War’

After FDR defeated Herbert Hoover in 1932, the new president rolled out his first New Deal to confront the Great Depression. Roosevelt saw the economic collapse as directly analogous to war. In his first inaugural address, he said that Americans “must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective.”

Like President Woodrow Wilson during World War I, President Roosevelt and his New Dealers moved to cartelize the economy with the enthusiastic support of business executives such as Gerard Swope, president of General Electric. “There was scarcely a New Deal act or agency that did not owe something to the experience of World War I,” according to FDR scholar William E. Leuchtenburg in an excellent paper published in 1964, “The New Deal and the Analogue of War.”

The best example of this was the creation of the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which was essentially a peacetime version of Wilson’s War Industries Board (WIB). Headed by the Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, the WIB coordinated purchases, allocated commodities, and fixed “prices and priorities in production” while guaranteeing a profit to the big business that helped fuel the war machine.

If the WIB could coordinate an economic mobilization during wartime, the Roosevelt administration thought, then a peacetime equivalent could defeat the Great Depression by mobilizing America’s productive powers. The NRA held industries to “codes of fair competition,” which set wages, working hours, and prices. By doing so, Roosevelt and his New Dealers believed they were overthrowing the cut-throat and chaotic competition they blamed for the Depression.

Companies that didn’t cooperate with the NRA were ostracized. Under the NRA’s Blue Eagle Campaign, businesses that played ball were given a blue eagle symbol for their windows and packages to advertise their adherence to the administration’s rules and regulations. Those that didn’t faced boycotts. As General Hugh Johnson, head of the NRA, put it, “Those who are not with us are against us.” Some businessmen who violated NRA regulations were arrested.

Socialist leader Norman Thomas called this “a scheme which in essence is fascist.” The NRA itself issued a report that stated, “The Fascist Principles are very similar to those we have been evolving here in America.” In 1935, the Supreme Court ruled the NRA’s “codes of fair competition” unconstitutional, saying they violating the Constitution’s separation of powers as well as the Commerce Clause. Small wonder that New Left historians accused the agency of championing a corporatist economy.

The Green New Dealers should also be wary of using the original New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which sent young unemployed and unmarried men onto federal, state, and local government lands for conservation purposes, as a model. In her defense of the Green New Deal at The Intercept—aptly titled “The Battle Lines Have Been Drawn on the Green New Deal”—Naomi Klein cites the CCC as an inspiration, noting that it began with 200,000 volunteers but then expanded dramatically due to its popularity. She doesn’t mention that the CCC was really an Army program with a titular civilian head.

Leuchtenburg points out that the CCC was “consciously devised to provide the moral equivalent to war” and that it “aimed to install martial virtues in the nation’s youth.” When the men woke up in their army tents in camp, they heard “Reveille.” During lights out, they heard “Taps.” It shouldn’t be surprising that when the draft returned in 1940, as Charles E. Heller writes, CCC alumni “provided the pretrained manpower to fill the U.S. Army’s ranks upon mobilization with men who readily assumed the role of Non-Commissioned Officers.”

The World War II Homefront

But then, the Green New Dealers seem to see that war as a model for domestic policy. In a widely lampooned FAQ document that an Ocasio-Cortez advisor erroneously claimed was a hoax, the Green New Deal is called a “10-year plan to mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War 2 to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and create economic prosperity for all.”

Americans should pay attention to what the country was like on the homefront during World War II. Prosperity it was not.

Unemployment did come down—to less than 2 percent—though that’s largely because more than a fifth of the U.S. workforce was conscripted and sent overseas to sacrifice life and limb. The workers who remained were focused on producing military goods, such as guns and ammunition, while consumer goods were either underproduced or not produced at all. Other goods—such as gasoline, tires, nylon, shoes, bicycles, sugar, meat, canned fish, cheese, and canned milk—were strictly rationed. Income tax rates applied to more and more people, including lower-income earners; hit confiscatory levels, with the highest marginal tax rate rising to 94 percent; and were rigorously enforced by the IRS through a new system of automatic payroll deductions.

American people did extraordinary things to win World War II, but it took an authoritarian society to achieve it—one that nobody should want to return to.

When the United States goes abroad to do widescale social engineering, that’s rightly called imperialism by libertarians and socialists alike. But when widespread social engineering is done at home through the federal government, people like Ocasio-Cortez call it progressivism and point to the New Deal and World War II to sell the plan.

When she says “I’m the boss,” pay attention. She’s describing America under a Green New Deal: a place where you’ll do as you’re told.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2LGw3Gt
via IFTTT

Race and Partnership Rates at Large Law Firms

Heather Mac Donald writes about this at the City Journal. The most striking data is on the average grade breakdown of incoming associates by race (which stems from what appear to be quite aggressive racial preferences in hiring), which comes from my colleague Rick Sander’s The Racial Paradox of the Corporate Law Firm (2006); note that it is from the “After the JD” study of lawyers who joined the bar in 2000, though my sense is that not much has changed (at least as to blacks and whites) in law schools and law firms since then:

To the extent that grades measure legal ability—and I think they do to a considerable extent, though of course the two aren’t perfectly correlated—it’s not surprising that the disparity coming in would yield disparity in attrition and in partnership rates, though of course this doesn’t preclude other possible causes for the latter disparity. For a response to Sander’s article, see this piece by James E. Coleman, Jr. & Mitu Gulati.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2YvtJDL
via IFTTT

Race and Partnership Rates at Large Law Firms

Heather Mac Donald writes about this at the City Journal. The most striking data is on the average grade breakdown of incoming associates by race (which stems from what appear to be quite aggressive racial preferences in hiring), which comes from my colleague Rick Sander’s The Racial Paradox of the Corporate Law Firm (2006); note that it is from the “After the JD” study of lawyers who joined the bar in 2000, though my sense is that not much has changed (at least as to blacks and whites) in law schools and law firms since then:

To the extent that grades measure legal ability—and I think they do to a considerable extent, though of course the two aren’t perfectly correlated—it’s not surprising that the disparity coming in would yield disparity in attrition and in partnership rates, though of course this doesn’t preclude other possible causes for the latter disparity. For a response to Sander’s article, see this piece by James E. Coleman, Jr. & Mitu Gulati.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2YvtJDL
via IFTTT

Kamala Harris Lies About Truancy Laws, Defends Criminalizing Parents Whose Kids Miss School: Reason Roundup

Maybe journalists are just confused. Maybe some are partisan hacks trying to rehabilitate Kamala Harris’ image for her. Either way, there’s been a rash of recent pieces suggesting that the Democratic senator from California and 2020 presidential candidate has revised her tough-on-crime tactics and stances. And almost every time they talk specifics, it turns out to be wrong.

First, the headlines told us that Harris wants to decriminalize prostitution. Pressed on CNN in April, Harris made clear that this wasn’t so.

We were also told last month that Harris “regrets” the truancy laws she helped pass—first in San Francisco and then statewide in California—to criminalize parents if their kids miss school. Headline after headline made it sound like she’d had a genuine change of heart. But all Harris actually said was that she stands by her efforts but regrets that some parents were arrested under the law, saying this “was not the intention.”

But prosecution of parents was the express purpose of these laws. These arrests were no more an unintended consequence than arrests for breaking the laws against burglary or sexual assault. Sure, it would be nice if no one committed these crimes and no arrests had to be made under the laws prohibiting them. But arrests are by no stretch of linguistics an unintended consequence in any case.

In any event, Harris explicitly defended her truancy crime laws—and lied about them—in an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN that aired Sunday. Harris told Tapper, falsely, that “not one parent was sent to jail” because of her initiative:

TAPPER: Well, you pushed for a statewide law, right, a statewide truancy law.

HARRIS: And the state…

TAPPER: And people were thrown into jail under that law.

HARRIS: Not by me.

TAPPER: Not by you, but you supported the law.

Of course they weren’t literally put in jail by Harris, who was attorney general of California when the truancy law was enacted and not an arresting officer. Yet no common understanding of “no one was sent to jail” means People were sent to jail, but they weren’t personally put there by the attorney general. Again, we see Harris trying to rewrite her record and history.

Regardless, avoiding actual jail time doesn’t make prosecution painless. Parents charged under the truancy law were still arrested and put through long and embarrassing ordeals, even when students had very legitimate reasons for missing school. You can read about one of these parents in this HuffPost piece, “The Human Costs of Kamala Harris’ War on Truancy.”

Harris admits in the CNN interview that she had a homeless mother of three who was working two jobs arrested when her kids missed school—but she insisted that this was for the woman’s own good. (The idea that having to take time off work to meet with prosecutors and judges, pay court fees, and take mandatory parenting classes actually helped this overworked and indigent mother and her family is the kind of logic that only a cop or politician can love.) Arrest allowed them to get the homeless woman the services “that she needed and didn’t know was available,” argued Harris.

That’s a refrain we often hear for why it’s important to arrest homeless people, drug users, minors in the sex trade, adult sex workers, and members of many other groups whose “crimes” are not against others but against themselves or “society.” And it’s always bullshit. Incarceration, a criminal record, fines and fees, etc. don’t help anyone, and they’re regressive in that they hurt the hardest the poorer and more marginalized someone is.

There are always better ways to get people services they need. And when caging someone or threatening to is the only way to get them to accept your “help,” it’s probably a good time to rethink how helpful you’re actually being.

FREE MINDS

San Francisco reporter Bryan Carmody woke up to police officers bashing in his door on Friday morning. A few weeks prior, Carmody had refused to give police the name of his source for a story on the death of San Francisco public defender Jeff Adachi. Now police were back with a warrant to search his home.

Carmody “wasn’t about to give up his source on Friday either, despite the escalation—not to the police or two FBI agents in suits who questioned him about the case,” The Washington Post reports:

“I’m smart enough not to talk to federal agents, ever,” Carmody said. “I just kept saying ‘lawyer, lawyer, lawyer.'”

So he stayed handcuffed for the next six hours, he says—a certificate of release from the police department that he distributed says he was in custody from 8:22 a.m. until 1:55 p.m.—as investigators searched his home, then his office, where they found the report in a safe. A search warrant filed in the case notes that it was issued as police investigated “stolen or embezzled property.”

“There’s only two people on this planet who know who leaked this report—me and the guy who leaked it,” Carmody said.

The raid on Carmody’s home and office drew wide First Amendment-related attention in the Bay Area over the weekend. And it added a new twist to the intrigue that surrounded the death of Adachi, who had built up a high profile as a public defender in the 16 years he had held the office.

The only elected public defender in California, Adachi was known as an watchdog on police misconduct. His death, on Feb. 22, at the age of 59, was attributed in early reports to a heart attack.

Then more information came to light.

FREE MARKETS

China is targeting free market economists. Researchers with the Unirule Institute of Economics have been harassed for months, reports Bloomberg:

Unirule is the brainchild of Mao Yushi, a respected 90-year-old economist who was among the first scholars to spread free-market ideas such as deregulation and privatization within China. Until recently, the think tank was one of the country’s more influential nongovernmental organizations, benefiting from the relative liberty granted to economics since the rule of Deng Xiaoping, who once declared that he didn’t care “if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.” So long as they stayed mostly clear of politics, scholars were free to discuss Western thinkers and how their ideas applied to China. The result was a vibrant intellectual community that interacted with government decision-makers, providing data-driven reality checks for officials with little experience outside the Communist Party.

That space has shrunk drastically under President Xi Jinping, who has forcefully reasserted the party’s power and the state’s economic role, and has attacked the civil society that emerged under his predecessors.

QUICK HITS

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2W4awLy
via IFTTT

Kamala Harris Lies About Truancy Laws, Defends Criminalizing Parents Whose Kids Miss School: Reason Roundup

Maybe journalists are just confused. Maybe some are partisan hacks trying to rehabilitate Kamala Harris’ image for her. Either way, there’s been a rash of recent pieces suggesting that the Democratic senator from California and 2020 presidential candidate has revised her tough-on-crime tactics and stances. And almost every time they talk specifics, it turns out to be wrong.

First, the headlines told us that Harris wants to decriminalize prostitution. Pressed on CNN in April, Harris made clear that this wasn’t so.

We were also told last month that Harris “regrets” the truancy laws she helped pass—first in San Francisco and then statewide in California—to criminalize parents if their kids miss school. Headline after headline made it sound like she’d had a genuine change of heart. But all Harris actually said was that she stands by her efforts but regrets that some parents were arrested under the law, saying this “was not the intention.”

But prosecution of parents was the express purpose of these laws. These arrests were no more an unintended consequence than arrests for breaking the laws against burglary or sexual assault. Sure, it would be nice if no one committed these crimes and no arrests had to be made under the laws prohibiting them. But arrests are by no stretch of linguistics an unintended consequence in any case.

In any event, Harris explicitly defended her truancy crime laws—and lied about them—in an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN that aired Sunday. Harris told Tapper, falsely, that “not one parent was sent to jail” because of her initiative:

TAPPER: Well, you pushed for a statewide law, right, a statewide truancy law.

HARRIS: And the state…

TAPPER: And people were thrown into jail under that law.

HARRIS: Not by me.

TAPPER: Not by you, but you supported the law.

Of course they weren’t literally put in jail by Harris, who was attorney general of California when the truancy law was enacted and not an arresting officer. Yet no common understanding of “no one was sent to jail” means People were sent to jail, but they weren’t personally put there by the attorney general. Again, we see Harris trying to rewrite her record and history.

Regardless, avoiding actual jail time doesn’t make prosecution painless. Parents charged under the truancy law were still arrested and put through long and embarrassing ordeals, even when students had very legitimate reasons for missing school. You can read about one of these parents in this HuffPost piece, “The Human Costs of Kamala Harris’ War on Truancy.”

Harris admits in the CNN interview that she had a homeless mother of three who was working two jobs arrested when her kids missed school—but she insisted that this was for the woman’s own good. (The idea that having to take time off work to meet with prosecutors and judges, pay court fees, and take mandatory parenting classes actually helped this overworked and indigent mother and her family is the kind of logic that only a cop or politician can love.) Arrest allowed them to get the homeless woman the services “that she needed and didn’t know was available,” argued Harris.

That’s a refrain we often hear for why it’s important to arrest homeless people, drug users, minors in the sex trade, adult sex workers, and members of many other groups whose “crimes” are not against others but against themselves or “society.” And it’s always bullshit. Incarceration, a criminal record, fines and fees, etc. don’t help anyone, and they’re regressive in that they hurt the hardest the poorer and more marginalized someone is.

There are always better ways to get people services they need. And when caging someone or threatening to is the only way to get them to accept your “help,” it’s probably a good time to rethink how helpful you’re actually being.

FREE MINDS

San Francisco reporter Bryan Carmody woke up to police officers bashing in his door on Friday morning. A few weeks prior, Carmody had refused to give police the name of his source for a story on the death of San Francisco public defender Jeff Adachi. Now police were back with a warrant to search his home.

Carmody “wasn’t about to give up his source on Friday either, despite the escalation—not to the police or two FBI agents in suits who questioned him about the case,” The Washington Post reports:

“I’m smart enough not to talk to federal agents, ever,” Carmody said. “I just kept saying ‘lawyer, lawyer, lawyer.'”

So he stayed handcuffed for the next six hours, he says—a certificate of release from the police department that he distributed says he was in custody from 8:22 a.m. until 1:55 p.m.—as investigators searched his home, then his office, where they found the report in a safe. A search warrant filed in the case notes that it was issued as police investigated “stolen or embezzled property.”

“There’s only two people on this planet who know who leaked this report—me and the guy who leaked it,” Carmody said.

The raid on Carmody’s home and office drew wide First Amendment-related attention in the Bay Area over the weekend. And it added a new twist to the intrigue that surrounded the death of Adachi, who had built up a high profile as a public defender in the 16 years he had held the office.

The only elected public defender in California, Adachi was known as an watchdog on police misconduct. His death, on Feb. 22, at the age of 59, was attributed in early reports to a heart attack.

Then more information came to light.

FREE MARKETS

China is targeting free market economists. Researchers with the Unirule Institute of Economics have been harassed for months, reports Bloomberg:

Unirule is the brainchild of Mao Yushi, a respected 90-year-old economist who was among the first scholars to spread free-market ideas such as deregulation and privatization within China. Until recently, the think tank was one of the country’s more influential nongovernmental organizations, benefiting from the relative liberty granted to economics since the rule of Deng Xiaoping, who once declared that he didn’t care “if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.” So long as they stayed mostly clear of politics, scholars were free to discuss Western thinkers and how their ideas applied to China. The result was a vibrant intellectual community that interacted with government decision-makers, providing data-driven reality checks for officials with little experience outside the Communist Party.

That space has shrunk drastically under President Xi Jinping, who has forcefully reasserted the party’s power and the state’s economic role, and has attacked the civil society that emerged under his predecessors.

QUICK HITS

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2W4awLy
via IFTTT

Brickbat: Upon Further Review …

Turkish election officials have thrown out the results of an election for Istanbul’s mayor. Turkey’s ruling AKP party contested the election after the results showed them losing the mayor’s seat for the first time in 25 years. Mehmet Bekaroğlu, a member of the CHP party, whose candidate won the election, said AKP officials threatened election officials with prison if they did not vote to overturn the election. A new mayoral election will be held in June.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2WB2bMy
via IFTTT

Brickbat: Upon Further Review …

Turkish election officials have thrown out the results of an election for Istanbul’s mayor. Turkey’s ruling AKP party contested the election after the results showed them losing the mayor’s seat for the first time in 25 years. Mehmet Bekaroğlu, a member of the CHP party, whose candidate won the election, said AKP officials threatened election officials with prison if they did not vote to overturn the election. A new mayoral election will be held in June.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2WB2bMy
via IFTTT