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Donald Trump is the poster child for the primacy of recency – or endorsing the last thing that someone said to him. And he did it again during his rally in Macomb County, Michigan last week. Evidently, as he was flying into town on Air Force One, members of the Michigan delegation, particularly State Republican representative Paul Mitchell, impressed upon him how the nation-wide labor shortage was hurting Michigan ag and they really needed a guest worker program.

Right on cue, after first regaling the audience with the need for the Great Wall of Trump to make America’s borders strong, Trump abruptly pivoted and talked about letting more guest workers in, leaving the audience mighty confused, my friend and former Detroit News colleague Henry Payne reports.

(Here’s a rough transcript of his speech. Check the 33-minute-mark of this video.)

For the farmers, OK, it is going to get good. We are going to let your guest-workers come in…We have to have your workers come in. The unemployment picture is so good, so strong. We have to let people come in. They are going to be guest workers. They’re going to work on your farms. We are going to have a lot of things happening. Then they have to go out. We are going to let them in because you need them. You need them. They’ll come on H-2Bs. And then they’ll leave. In Wisconsin, I was very instrumental in getting FoxConn to come. A good friend of mine and a great guy. They make a lot of that Apple IPhones. They are incredible and incredible company. They are building a fantastic plan. It is under construction now. They are recruiting and getting people. They are doing it professionally. We need people to be able to come in to our country, do your jobs, help you on the farms…Guestworkers….Don’t we agree. We have to have it happen.

Now, if the president were serious about implementing a guest worker program, he could draw on Reason’s copious work on the subject. Indeed, as I and others at Reason have written numerous times, scrapping the 1965 barcero program with Mexico sowed the seeds for America’s unauthorized population because it took away the main avenue for hooking up willing workers with willing employers. And implementing a new and improved version is the bestest, cheapest and freedom-friendly way to stop illegal entries and truly secure the border – not misguided walls.

But of course every time Trump sounds semi-sane on the subject, Ann Coulter goes totally insane. That’s not surprising for someone who once said that she wouldn’t care if Trump performed abortions in the White House so long as he implemented his plan to conduct mass deprations and restrict future immigraiton. She instantly lit into Trump:

The president needs to understand, unless he drops his bizarre and totally uncharacteristic desire to bring in people to do your job, the voters might just bring in someone else to do his.

The plus side of the midterm elections is that liberals have gone mad. The minus side is that voters intensely hate Republicans. Liberal insanity is not going to save a GOP dead set on pleasing the donor class by screwing over ordinary Americans. As usual.

It was hatred for Republicans that drove millions of voters to Trump in the first place.

The same conservative talking heads who think the GOP is going to be fine by focusing on those great tax cuts —we’ll get to immigration soon, promise!—spent the first six months of Trump’s candidacy indignantly informing us that he was “not a Republican.”

They said it was “unhealthy” for the party to be debating mass deportations. Trump “hasn’t really stood for Republican things.” The “summer of Trump” would come to a quick and deserved end. The danger, standard-GOP conservatives told us, was what Trump’s candidacy “can do to the GOP brand…

The cowardly GOP was too terrified of the media to ever run on any awesome issues. Only Trump did, and, for that reason, nothing could stop him.

But now he seems to think he can win the midterms by hewing to the loser wing of the Republican Party. We’ve got to save the GOP “brand”! What does Marc Short say? RUN ON TAX CUTS!

Yeah, that’ll do it.

No, starving the economy of its most precious resource—human talent and grit—will do it, Ann.

Liberals said they’ll move to Canada if Trump got elected. Will she move to Cancun if Trump implements a guest worker program with Mexico? Canada is no doubt no option for her given the saccahrine Trudeau!

Negotiators from 197 countries will be meeting for the next couple of weeks in Germany, where they’re preparing for a larger United Nations climate change conference in Poland this fall. So how are all those countries when it comes to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases?

As the International Energy Agency recently reported,

Global energy-related CO₂ emissions grew by 1.4% in 2017, reaching a historic high of 32.5 gigatonnes (Gt), a resumption of growth after three years of global emissions remaining flat. The increase in CO₂ emissions, however, was not universal. While most major economies saw a rise, some others experienced declines, including the United States, United Kingdom, Mexico and Japan. The biggest decline came from the United States, mainly because of higher deployment of renewables.

The U.S.’s performance contrasts with that of the European Union, whose carbon dioxide emissions increased by 1.8 percent last year. This, even though many E.U. countries participate in a carbon market and are engaged in vast efforts aimed at replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar power.

Although the Trump administration is generally hostile to international climate change agreements, the Environmental Protection Agency reports that the U.S. reduced its carbon dioxide emissions by 2 percent in 2016. This drop is largely attributable to a continuing market-driven switch from coal to natural gas, to more renewable generation, and to a relatively mild winter.

The upshot is that both the U.S. and the E.U. have reduced their greenhouse gas emissions substantially over the past decade. In fact, a World Resources Institute report last fall concluded that the greenhouse gas emissions of 49 countries (including the U.S.) have already peaked. The majority of countries whose emissions have peaked did so well before any international climate agreement such as the Kyoto Protocol came into effect.

Seattle is preparing to pass a literal tax on jobs.

On May 14, City Council is scheduled to vote on an “employee head tax,” which would impose a 26 cent levy on every hour worked by an employee at companies making more than $20 million a year. The tax would hit between 500 and 600 businesses; it is supposed to raise about $75 million a year for homelessness and affordable housing services.

Versions of this proposal have been circulating for a while. They’ve been nicknamed the “Amazon tax”—of that $75 million in revenue, $20 million is expected come from the online retailer.

Amazon isn’t taking the tax lying down. On Tuesday the company announced that it is pausing construction planning for a 17-story building intended to serve as office space for some 7,000 Amazon employees. Amazon is being uncharacteristically explicit about the reasons for the stall.

“I can confirm that pending the outcome of the head-tax vote by City Council, Amazon has paused all construction planning on our Block 18 project in downtown Seattle and is evaluating options to sublease all space in our recently leased Rainier Square building,” company spokesperson Drew Herdener said in a statement.

Supporters of the tax were incensed at this unintended yet totally predictable consequence of their policy.

“If Amazon generally wants to engage about how they can be part of the solution, we welcome that conversation,” Councilmember Mike O’Brian said Wednesday, according to The Seattle Times. “But we need companies that are profitable and making billions of dollars every year to help with the folks that are being forced out of housing and ending up on the street.”

Councilmember Kshama Sawant—a self-proclaimed socialist who has endorsed the nationalization of another Seattle-area corporate titan, Boeing—was less subtle. Sawant calls Amazon’s refusal to passively accept the taxation “blackmail,” and she organized a Thursday rally outside Amazon’s headquarters.

Despite these protestations, support for the tax is starting to flag.

Business groups have been opposed to the idea from the get-go, arguing that the city should do a better job spending the record revenue it is already raking in before it asks for more.

The goal of the new tax is “simply to raise more money instead of truly solving the homelessness facing our region,” write the heads of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, the Downtown Association, and the Greater Seattle Business Association (an LGBT business group) in a Seattle Times op-ed, noting that in the past two years the city has increased spending on housing and homelessness by 50 percent only to see a 37 rise in the homeless population.

“It is time to ask: What is behind the dramatic increase in city spending, and what is there to show for it?” they conclude.

These business groups have been joined in their opposition by trade unions.

“To reduce the jobs only increases the possibility of additional homelessness,” Chris McClain of Iron Workers Local 86 tells the Times. His union organized a counterprotest at Sawant’s Amazon demonstration, shouting down pro-tax speakers with chants of “No head tax, no head tax!”

This is not the first time capital and labor have joined hands to fight some of the ideas coming out of Seattle City Hall. Teamsters and retailers both fought in vain to stop the city’s sweetened beverage tax last year.

Vocal opposition from so many corners is encouraging some Seattle politicians to backpedal. Mayor Jenny Durkhan has thrown some shade on the idea of head tax in recent public statements. Some city councilmembers have suggested delaying the scheduled May 14 vote.

Whether this will all be enough to kill the tax plan remains to be seen. But the fight demonstrates a growing weariness among workers and businesses owners when it comes to handing over more tax dollars to a city government that has proven less than adept at putting the money to good use.

In an effort to stop criminals from using pawn shops, one Pennsylvania city is going to treat everyone like criminals.

A new ordinance in Allentown will require owners of pawn shops and other second-hand retailers to take photographs and collect thumb prints from customers before purchasing or exchanging any merchandise. They are also required to catalog any inventory purchased and to upload that information (along with the photos and fingerprints) to a police database. They cannot re-sell anything for 15 days.

The rules were passed last year to make it easier to track stolen items and intercept them before they can be sold again. But the broadly written law has swept up all second-hand sellers in the city, including comic book stores, consignment shops, and antiques markets, The Morning Call reports.

James Holmes, owner of Double Decker Records, tells Reason that he only found out about the ordinance a few days ago and is now rushing to comply with the unexpected rules. Holmes says he understands the motives behind the law but thinks it goes too far.

“A lot of people are going to be taken aback by that, I mean, most people have never been fingerprinted in their lives,” says Holmes. “When you think of fingerprinting, you think either you’re going for a very sensitive job or you’re a criminal. You don’t get fingerprinted for anything else.”

Holmes says he regularly buys boxes of old records from people who are cleaning out their houses, gives them a quick review to see if there’s anything particularly valuable, and then tosses the rest into his discount bins. Now he’s going to have to catalog every record that comes across his counter, along with forcing his customers to agree to having their photos and thumbprints taken.

Keith Feinman, manager of Encounter Comics & Games, tells The Morning Call‘s Emily Opilo that the 15-day waiting period can be a serious cash flow issue for small businesses.

Meanwhile, people who want to buy or sell a used item can simply cross the city lines and do it somewhere else—whether it’s stolen or not.

“If someone refuses [to be fingerprinted], and they have really good stuff, they’ll just go to another town or sell it online,” says Holmes. “Some people just have privacy concerns. Like, where is this information going?”

It’s going into a police database, and city taxpayers get to pay for the privilege. The “Regional Automated Property Information Database” is maintained by a vendor that charges the police force $200 per business, with part of the cost offset by a $100 registration fee that businesses must pay. Allentown is one of several municipalities, mostly in the northeast, using the service.

The unintended consequences of the law so far don’t seem to be swaying city councilman Daryl Hendricks. “Anything new is going to have some resistance,” he tells Opilo.

In last week’s edition of the Friday A/V Club, we looked back at Pyongyang’s propaganda broadcasts during the Korean War. This week we’ll fast-forward to Vietnam, and to another kind of oppositional radio—one run not by the other side but by the soldiers themselves.

For about three weeks in 1971, a man calling himself Dave Rabbit transmitted acid rock to the troops from a makeshift station in a Saigon brothel. His operation, dubbed Radio First Termer, featured records they often refused to play on the official Armed Forces Vietnam Network, plus a lot of comedy and commentary, most of it centered around sex and drugs. Some antiwar sentiments slipped in too. In one broadcast, Rabbit quoted a bit of latrine graffiti: “Eighteen days until I can go home to picket and protest this fucking waste of human lives that lifers and the government call a war.”

Rabbit wasn’t the only pirate broadcaster among the American forces, but he’s probably the best-known of them, thanks to tapes that kept circulating long after the war was over. Here’s a 50-minute sample of his show:

If you just want to hear his comments, with most of the music stripped out, you can listen to an edit here.

Rabbit was C. David DeLay, Jr., an Air Force sergeant from Texas doing his third combat tour in the country. He died in 2012. The Dallas Morning News reports that for the last three years of his life he worked as the public address announcer at Southern Methodist University’s football games.

(For past installments of the Friday A/V Club, go here. For another edition involving pirate radio, go here. For my book about pirate radio, go here. For a Radio First Termer fan site, go here.)

Donald Trump’s economic advisers have gone from ridiculing tariffs and subsidies to promoting pure protectionism because of the paradigm-shifting, reality-distorting, cringe-inducing, and corrupting influence of power. The Republican Party’s U-turn on free trade is the sad story of a team of presidential advisers with two opinions for every man. It’s a cautionary tale of how the temptations of political power promote personality over principle.

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Reedies Against Racism, a student group at Reed College, is demanding that the school’s Humanities 110 course remove all European texts and replace them with non-European reading materials as “reparations for Humanities 110’s history of erasing the histories of people of color, especially black people.”

Whitewashed curricula are worth fighting. But the Oregon college will repeat the error in the opposite direction if it decides that European and Mediterranean authors have nothing to contribute by virtue of their whiteness, writes Liz Wolfe.

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“When I was in college,” explains journalist, author, and speaker Virginia Postrel, “I developed the career aspiration to be the editor of Reason magazine.” Just a few years after graduating, she had accomplished that goal (and much, much more), joining Reason‘s staff in 1986 and then running the magazine from July 1989 until January 2000.

Founded in 1968 by Lanny Friedlander (1947–2011), Reason is celebrating its 50th anniversary by hosting a series of in-depth conversations with past editors about how the magazine has changed since its founding, what we’ve gotten right and wrong over the years, and what the future holds for believers in “free minds and free markets.”

No one has had a more profound intellectual and journalistic influence on Reason than Postrel. During her tenure, Reason.com was launched in the early days of the web revolution; Reason was a four-time finalist for National Magazine Awards, the highest honor in the industry; and Ronald Bailey, Brian Doherty, Jacob Sullum, Jesse Walker, and I all joined our masthead. Postrel became one of the leading public intellectuals of her generation, publishing her first book, The Future and Its Enemies, in 1998. Since leaving Reason, Postrel became a pioneer in blogging; served as a columnist for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal; and published The Substance of Style (2003) and The Power of Glamour (2013). She is, in the words of Vanity Fair, “a master D.J. who sequences the latest riffs from the hard sciences, the social sciences, business, and technology, to name only a few sources.”

In this wide-ranging discussion, Postrel lays out how her vision of the magazine differed from her predecessors’ and talks about how many of the issues that dominated her tenure—immigration reform, trade and regulatory policy, the biotech revolution—remain front and center in public discourse.

She also speaks to the strengths and limits of libertarian thought. “A lot of libertarians like to imagine that we can start with a clean slate…and have what I call ‘libertarianism as algebra,'” she says. “But that’s not how society works. We’re all embedded in history.”

Envisioning Reason as “a mainstream intellectual magazine with an unusual point of view,” Postrel explains, “I wanted Reason to be part of a long and deep and broad and complicated classical liberal tradition stretching back through thinkers, not just 20th century thinkers like Friedman and Hayek…that stretches back not only through those kinds of thinkers but also through the Scottish Enlightenment people, Smith and Hume.”

She also discusses her next book, “whose working title and I think final title is The Fabric of Civilization. It is about textiles, technology, and trade from prehistory to the near future.” She says the book allows her to explore topics ranging from human nature to history to computer code.

Postrel currently writes regularly for Bloomberg View and Reason; all her work, including many talks, lectures, and upcoming appearances, are archived at vpostrel.com.

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Recent Reason intern Alec Ward squared off against cagey county prosecutors and Virginia’s notoriously stingy Freedom of Information Act in an effort to get body camera from the Chesterfield County Police Department. You can read about his fight for transparency here:

“You want to file a what, now?”

The deputy clerk looked up at me from behind her glass window in the county courthouse with an expression that showed both skepticism and confusion.

“A Petition for a Writ of Mandamus,” I said.

“I don’t think we can do those,” she said. “Hold on. Let me get a supervisor.”

Her confusion was understandable. The General District Court for Chesterfield County, Virginia, mostly handles cases involving traffic fines, evictions, and debt collection. They do not, I suspect, handle a lot of magazine interns trying to file pro se lawsuits against the local police department. And yet there I was.

The two hours it took me to convince the clerks that I was not crazy and that what I was trying to do was actually legal was my first indication that this might be more complicated than I had hoped.

View this article.

Illinois passed a law three years ago requiring police to get warrants before use drones for most surveillance purposes. But a bill being pushed by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his allies in the state legislature would blow a massive hole in these restrictions by allowing the government to use drones to monitor protests and large gatherings.

The American Civil Liberties Union is raising hell, noting that the change in the law would allow Chicago police (who have a history of secret surveillance against political activists) to take pictures, record video, and even use facial recognition tools against protesters. The Chicago Sun-Times reports:

“If this bill is passed, as drafted, during the next large scale political rally, drones could identify and list people protesting the Trump administration,” added [Karen Sheley, director of the ACLU’s Police Practices Project].

“The sight of drones overhead, collecting information, may deter people from protesting in a time when so many want to exercise their First Amendment rights….This is too much unchecked power to give to the police—in Chicago or anywhere.”

Representatives for the mayor’s office say this is all about “ensuring the safety” of people attending large events. The bill requires regular reporting of when police use drones and says any data collected must be deleted after 30 days unless it’s connected to a “criminal matter.” It also forbids arming the drones with any sort of weapon, but only for this particular addition to the surveillance rules. Sheley worries that this new bill therefore creates a loophole that would allow police to arm drones for use in other circumstances.

Drones can be useful tools for emergency responders in crisis and rescue situations when it’s dangerous to send in human beings. So the value of drones in the hands of police shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. But the one thing critics of drone surveillance are most opposed to using them for—snooping on public political activism—is the exact thing this bill is attempting to authorize.

Meanwhile, California lawmakers are considering a very different police surveillance bill. SB 1186 would require that local law enforcement agencies each to submit a surveillance tech use policy to its city or county governing body, which would then vote on them. They’d have to make these policies available online, and they would be forbidden from sharing or selling data collected from surveillance with anybody other than permitted law enforcement agencies (including the Department of Justice).

This is not a bill that permits or forbids types of tech surveillance. It requires counties and cities to be open with citizens about what sort of tools they use, and it puts city and county elected officials in an oversight position. They can decide which surveillance tech to permit and which to forbid.

SB 1186 is currently in the state Senate’s appropriations committee and is scheduled for a hearing next week. The ACLU supports the legislation, and is encouraging citizens to contact their lawmakers, noting:

Local surveillance rarely stays local. It starts with local law enforcement agencies purchasing high powered technologies like drones, license plate readers, or facial recognition software, or conducting social media surveillance.

Increasingly, this secret surveillance creeps into almost aspect of our lives, leaving the door open to monitoring and detention not just by local police, but also by the federal government. Whether it is the monitoring of #BlackLivesMatter protestors and leaders, or the tracking of immigrant and Muslim community members, this secret surveillance must stop.

It’s not entirely clear if this bill is going to get them what they want, given that there are cities in California resisting the state’s “sanctuary” law that attempts to restrict how local police share information about people’s immigration status with the feds. A number of communities could very well give this “secret surveillance” their full stamp of approval and in fact encourage its use to track the very people the ACLU wants to protect.

Nevertheless, transparency and oversight are certainly preferable to letting police operate however they choose. It at least gives the community the chance to hold elected officials responsible if they expand surveillance in ways that violate civil liberties.