Month: December 2017

Five helpful New Year’s resolutions for Congress to do in 2018.

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Back when then-president Barack Obama used to lament and lament some more that the United States no longer builds amazing infrastructure projects like the Golden Gate Bridge (setting aside for the moment that it wasn’t the federal government that created America’s finest span), buzzkills like us would point out that A) the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 included a whopping $105 billion for infrastructure, characterized by Obama at the time as “the largest new investment in our nation’s infrastructure since Eisenhower built an Interstate Highway System in the 1950s,” and B) “Every dollar that governments spend on every level gets inflated by contracting rules, social engineering, environmental aspirations, and sops to public sector unions.”

A detailed and infuriating illustration of that latter point comes in today’s New York Times, which, following up on a previous indictment of how the city and state of New York have let the subway degenerate into almost comical disrepair, deconstructs “The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth.” The nut:

For years, The Times found, public officials have stood by as a small group of politically connected labor unions, construction companies and consulting firms have amassed large profits.

Trade unions, which have closely aligned themselves with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other politicians, have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world, documents show.

Construction companies, which have given millions of dollars in campaign donations in recent years, have increased their projected costs by up to 50 percent when bidding for work from the M.T.A., contractors say.

Consulting firms, which have hired away scores of M.T.A. employees, have persuaded the authority to spend an unusual amount on design and management, statistics indicate.

Public officials, mired in bureaucracy, have not acted to curb the costs. The M.T.A. has not adopted best practices nor worked to increase competition in contracting, and it almost never punishes vendors for spending too much or taking too long, according to inspector general reports.

As a resident of the Empire State, I do not want to hear another goddamned word out of Chuck Schumer’s mouth about how the forthcoming federal infrastructure spending plan must be 100 percent public.

When Democrats talk about the evils and corporatey-corporateness of letting (involuntary shudder) private companies finance and maintain stuff like roads and bridges and trains and tunnels and airports, know what they are defending: a system of money-sloshing shielded at all levels from the discipline of competition. You just want the one percent to get richer!, they will cry, as the status quo they defend continues to build bupkus while diverting taxpayer money to the millionaire friends of the Cuomo dynasty.

There is a better way. For those serious not about graft but about building and maintaining the best and most cost-effective transportation infrastructure at all levels, begin with the half-century’s worth of work put into this topic by Bob Poole and the Reason Foundation. Here’s hoping the infrastructure bill resembles Poole’s vision more than the corrupt swamp from which President Donald Trump emanated.

When it comes to online media, engagement—the minutes spent reading, watching, or listening—is the new likes.

With that in mind, I’m happy to share the 10 most-engaging stories from the thousands of articles we posted at reason.com this past year. They cover the waterfront in terms of topics, takes, and temperament, but they are all energized by our principled libertarian belief in “Free Minds and Free Markets.” A plurality involve some form of state abuse of power, including literal violence against unarmed and innocent citizens and coercive force via insane regulations and occupational licensing requirements. None of the stories is about Donald Trump, which is a tribute to you, our readers, although one article by Features Editor Peter Suderman broke the story of Trump’s IRS decision not to enforce Obamacare’s individual mandate. Our top story of the year, which pulled the equivalent of over 71,000 hours of reader engagement, is a profound analysis of how ongoing panic over the presumed psychological and emotional fragility of children and young adults is a grave disservice to American youth. In the best Reason tradition, it doesn’t simply diagnose a problem but offers concrete ways to improve things.

If you like what you read and watch here, please subscribe to the print or digital edition and consider making a tax-deductible donation to Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website.

Here they are, in ascending order of “total engaged minutes” according our analytics program, Parse.ly.

10. Sen. Rand Paul Introduces Replacement for Obamacare: Paul’s bill equalizes tax deductibility on insurance whether obtained through employer or not, makes creating private group insurance easier, relies on Health Savings Accounts.

Brian Doherty|Jan. 25, 2017 7:14 pm

Total engaged minutes: 178, 846

9. Arizona Cop Acquitted for Killing Man Crawling Down Hotel Hallway While Begging for His Life: Body camera footage released after jury reaches verdict.

Scott Shackford|Dec. 8, 2017 11:40 am

Total engaged minutes: 183,960

8. Texas Cops Spent 11 Minutes Searching a Woman’s Vagina, Found No Drugs: Harris County deputies were initially indicted for the “offensive and shocking” search, but those charges were dropped last week.

Eric Boehm|Aug. 15, 2017 10:17 am

Total enaged minutes: 187,554

7. After Challenging Red Light Cameras, Oregon Man Fined $500 for Practicing Engineering Without a License: “Anyone should be allowed to talk about the traffic signals without being penalized,” says Mats Järlström. He’s suing the board.

Eric Boehm|Apr. 26, 2017 9:40 am

Total engaged minutes: 200,682

6. Absurd State Licensing Rules Could Send a Woman To Jail Just for Touching a Horse: Of course. State board says she has to go to veterinary school to learn something she already knows and the schools don’t teach.

Eric Boehm|Feb. 17, 2017 11:20 am

Total engaged minutes: 226,360

5. Every Cop Involved in the Arrest of This Utah Nurse for Refusing to (Illegally) Draw a Patient’s Blood Needs to Be Fired (UPDATED): The Supreme Court decision forbidding unwarranted blood collection is a year old.

Scott Shackford|Sep. 1, 2017 12:07 pm

Total engaged minutes: 239,241

4. Amherst Student Expelled for Sexual Misconduct Can’t Defend Himself—It Would ‘Impose Psychological Trauma’ on Accuser: John Doe says there’s evidence his female accuser assaulted him. But a judge won’t make her cooperate.

Robby Soave|Jan. 31, 2017 9:30 am

Total engaged minutes: 299,990

3. Moral Outrage Is Self-Serving, Say Psychologists: Perpetually raging about the world’s injustices? You’re probably overcompensating.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown|Mar. 1, 2017 8:45 am

Total engaged minutes: 307,402

2. Major Blow to Obamacare Mandate: IRS Won’t Reject Tax Returns That Don’t Answer Health Insurance Question: The tax agency has stopped requiring individual filers to indicate whether they maintained health coverage or paid the mandate penalty as required under the law

Peter Suderman|Feb. 14, 2017 9:44 pm

Total engaged minutes: 536,485

1. The Fragile Generation: Bad policy and paranoid parenting are making kids too safe to succeed.

Lenore Skenazy & Jonathan Haidt from the December 2017 issue

Total engaged minues: 4,284,023

• President Donald Trump sarcastically tweets about global warming and the cold weather in the northeast, and that becomes news.
• He also thinks the reason the United States Postal Service is losing money is because it’s not charging Amazon (and therefore his enemy Jeff Bezos) enough for delivering packages. In reality, package delivery is what’s keeping the United States Postal Service afloat at all and it’s what subsidizes postal delivery to less populated places.
• An apartment fire in New York City has killed 12 people and injured 14 more.
• At least 12 have been killed in Islamic State attacks on Coptic Christians south of Cairo in Egypt.
• South Korea is holding a Hong Kong-flagged ship accused of violating sanctions by delivering oil to North Korea.
• The Drexel University professor who famously tweeted last December “All I want for Christmas is White Genocide,” (which he insisted was a joke) has resigned.

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Your money belongs to you, not the government.

Steven Greenhut writes:

An acquaintance who owns a large California business likes to talk about the negligible impact of the tax code on his personal life. As he puts it, well-off folks can afford the homes, cars and vacations they enjoy. Their lifestyle is static. When the government taxes them at a higher rate, that simply means they have less money to expand their business. It won’t force them to subsist on macaroni and cheese, sell the Tesla or feel any personal discomfort.

That’s a key point to consider when you listen to the rhetoric from Democratic leaders about the supposed evils of the recently passed Republican tax plan. The left wants to punish the rich, but defending higher taxes mainly punishes everyone else.

View this article.

The CBC canceled a broadcast of the documentary “Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?” just hours before it was scheduled to air after complaints from activists. The BBC documentary questions whether transitioning is the best path for every child with gender dysphoria. Activists said that was harmful.

Claims by police apologists that a “war on cops” ensued from a reform movement that emerged after the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri has no statistical support.

Preliminary data from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF) finds that 128 police officers died in the line of duty in 2017—44 of them were fatally shot. Last year 64 officers were fatally shot. And since 2011, the numbers have largely gone down.

In the meantime, police have fatally shot 971 people so far this year—the youngest of them just 6 years old. Last year, 963 people were fatally shot by cops.

Because the numbers include a wide variety of deaths, they are easy to misrepresent. The broad number, which includes traffic and other accidents as well as illnesses (mostly heart disease), is used to support claims that “a cop is killed every so many hours. In 2014, Michelle Malkin claimed a cop was killed every 58 hours, using line-of- duty death statistics that included heart attacks, traffic accidents, and even accidental falls.

The claims that a public backlash demanding police accountability has lead to violence against cops are divorced from reality. There were slightly more police deaths in 2011, long before police reform gained any substantive national attention, than in 2016. And 2016 didn’t compare to the annus horribilis that was 2007, when 204 cops died in the line of duty, 67 of them shot.

The 10-year high for line of duty deaths was 180 dead cops in 2011, of which 68 were shot, according to the Officers Down Memorial Page, which offers more detailed historical data than NLEOMF.

And none of those numbers compares to those posted in the 1970s and 1980s—145 cops were shot and killed in 1975 alone.

The NLEOMF is not yet offering a detailed breakdown of the deaths. Aside from the 44 cops who were shot, 47 died in traffic-related incidents and 37 of “other causes.” For comparison, the leading “other cause” in 2016 was “job-related illness,” which killed 15 police officers, according to NLEOMF.

• Roy Moore’s last-minute attempt to stop the certification of the results of Alabama’s senate election has been rejected by a circuit judge. Doug Jones has been formally declared the victor.
• The IRS says that people who prepaid their property taxes for 2018 in order to take advantage of deductions that are being scaled back under the tax overhaul may not be able to deduct as much as they think they can.
• Oregon’s Court of Appeals has upheld a $135,000 fine against a bakery owner who refused to make a wedding cake for a lesbian couple.
• The editor’s notes in the manuscript for Milo Yiannopoulos’ book that was ultimately rejected (after being accepted) by Simon & Schuster have become public thanks to court records and Yiannopoulos’ lawsuit against the book publisher. The notes are not kind, to say the least.
• “Airstrikes in Yemen kill 68 civilians in a single day.”
• Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner—the man who died after being put in a chokehold by police in New York City over selling loose cigarettes—has been declared brain dead following a heart attack.

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The Institute for Justice ends 2017 with one more win as a Baltimore circuit judge ruled the city’s tough laws restricting food trucks are too vague to be enforced.

Baltimore is a city where leaders have placed strict controls on where food trucks can park for the explicit purpose of protecting restaurants (and farmer’s markets, in this case) from competitors. Baltimore’s law forbids food trucks from parking within 300 feet of a restaurant that is selling similar foods.

The Institute, representing two food trucks (Pizza di Joey and Madame BBQ), sued to block the ban, arguing that it violates Maryland’s constitution and the rights of the truck operators. The city does not have a legitimate interest to justify these restrictions on where mobile food vendors can operate, and that the law itself has been written too vaguely, its lawyers argued.

Its vagueness won the case for the Institute. It’s not just a civil code violation when a food truck parks too close to a competing restaurant; it’s a misdemeanor criminal violation with a fine involved. But the law doesn’t define how to determine whether a food truck is selling similar food as a nearby restaurant or how the 300 feet should be measured. Judge Karen Friedman ruled food truck operators do not have enough information to be able to determine whether they’re violating the law or not. She is enjoining the city from enforcing the law until it has been clarified.

Don’t celebrate this win for freedom just yet. The judge accepted the city’s claim that it had a legitimate interest in protecting restaurants from food truck competition. The city argued it had a stake in protecting its property tax revenue and the stability of commercial districts by keeping food trucks at a distance. The judge actually determined the city has a legitimate interest in protecting brick-and-mortar restaurants from this sort of mobile competition.

The work of the Institute for Justice is, unfortunately, probably not done in Baltimore, as the lawyers noted when announced their win:

“Today’s ruling means Charm City is one step closer to food truck freedom,” added IJ Senior Attorney Robert Frommer. “But until the Maryland courts declare once and for all that cities cannot make it a crime to compete, we will keep fighting.”

Read the ruling here. John Stossel just covered Pizza di Joey’s case in Baltimore earlier in December. Watch below: