Category: reason

Hooray for common sense over really stupid regulatory behavior that is clearly designed to protect entrenched government interests! Skim milk is skim milk!

This calls for a more detailed explanation, obviously. A creamery in Florida, Ocheesee Creamery, has been fighting with state regulators over its skim milk. One might assume that skim milk is simply milk with the cream removed. That’s what thinking for yourself gets you. According to the Florida Department of Agriculture, in order to actually call your skim milk “skim milk” in the marketplace you are required to add vitamin A to replace what has been removed from the process.

Ocheesee doesn’t want to add vitamin A (or anything else) to its skim milk and has been fighting state regulators. The state wanted Ocheesee to label its milk “imitation skim milk,” which is absurdly not true. It is actual skim milk but without added vitamin A. It even offered to label the lack of vitamin A, but it wasn’t enough for regulators.

Baylen Linnekin, who writes about food law and food policy issues weekly for Reason, had been covering the case and was even retained as an expert to explain in a report that consumers would not be misled by the fact that Ocheesee’s pasteurized skim milk was still pasteurized skim milk regardless of whether vitamin A had been added.

Linnekin also noted that the larger dairy industry was more than happy to side with regulators given the opportunity to keep potential competitors with different kinds of choices out of the marketplace. Note how dairy interests are trying to also convince the feds to prohibit products like soy milk or almond milk from calling themselves “milk,” though there’s no real consumer confusion here that necessitates government intervention.

A federal judge initially sided with the Florida regulators against Ocheesee, but this week a panel of federal judges reversed the decision on appeal, ruling “The State was unable to show that forbidding the Creamery from using the term ‘skim milk’ was reasonable” and that Ocheesee was not misleading consumers.

It’s also yet another win for the freedom-protecting lawyers of the Institute for Justice, who were representing the creamery in court. Read more about the case here.

Peter Beinart has a detailed article in The Atlantic about the anti-Islamic theories of Frank Gaffney, a man who thinks that Islam in itself is a subversive force and that the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to turn America into a caliphate. Beinart’s piece, which is convincing on most points, looks both at how Gaffney’s views have grown more influential in the Trump era and at how they fit into the longer history of conspiracy theories about minority groups. I found this passage particularly interesting:

It was not September 11 that made conservatives receptive to Gaffney’s theories. It was America’s failed post-9/11 wars. Joseph McCarthy won a following in the early 1950s, when Americans were exhausted by the stalemated war in Korea, by arguing that the real communist threat could be vanquished cheaply and nonviolently by ferreting out traitors at home. Gaffney argues something similar. “We can kill as many semi-literate bad guys as possible in the world’s most hellish backwaters,” he declared in 2012, “but as long as we ignore, or worse yet, empower and submit, to the toxic ideology they share with highly educated and well spoken Islamists in this country and elsewhere, we are doomed to defeat.”

Over the last decade, conservatives disillusioned by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and alienated from their party’s interventionist elite, have found in Gaffney’s theories an appealing alternative.

Beinart has overstated his case here. The grassroots right did see an increase right after 9/11 in Gaffney-style crank theories about Islam. (And for that matter, the postwar Red Scare began before McCarthy’s antics, and indeed before the Korean War.) But the real growth in Gaffneyism did come later, and I think Beinart’s theory helps explain why. War-weariness can express itself in many ways. Gaffney himself shows no sign of being war-weary—his organization, the Center for Security Policy, is constantly hyping one external threat or another—but his ideas about Islamic subversion have an obvious attraction for conservatives disillusioned both with Bush-era ideas about how to fight jihadism and Bush-era ideas about Islam as a religion of peace.

In any event, Beinart’s piece is worth a read. But before you rush over to check it out, a couple of parting thoughts on McCarthyism.

The McCarthy era is widely remembered—with good reason—as a time of conformity, with people feeling pressure to conceal dissenting views. But what makes the McCarthy period stand out from the rest of the postwar Red Scare is that the senator aimed his accusations at some of the central institutions of American life, finally crashing after he attacked the Army. There is a tension between enforcing conformity and disrupting institutions, and that tension didn’t disappear entirely with McCarthy’s fall; the fiercest segments of the anti-Communist right continued to amp up their domestic distrust after he departed the stage. The John Birch Society, for example, gradually moving from seeing powerful Americans as agents of the Communists to seeing Communists as agents of powerful Americans.

If you seriously believe that the country’s most powerful institutions are being infiltrated by the enemy, then there comes a point when you start seeing those institutions as enemies themselves. The fear of subversion itself breeds subversive suspicions. And that wasn’t just true during the Cold War. Ask any Bush-era national-security conservative who today is overflowing with suspicion of the Deep State.

Yet this sort of fear can also have a de-radicalizing effect. A distrust of institutions can be displaced by a distrust of the people who happen to occupy the institutions at the moment. The Obama years didn’t end with the election of a veteran Tea Partier; they ended with the election of a veteran birther. The noisiest Deep State–fearing conservatives are less interested in rolling back the intelligence agencies than in purging them. And on the other side of the spectrum, the opposition to Trump often seems less interested in constraining the power of presidency than in exposing the president as a puppet of a foreign government. Paranoid nationalism comes in many flavors.

Yesterday’s opening session of the Neil Gorsuch Supreme Court confirming hearings was defined chiefly by the fact that nothing substantive actually happened. The 11 Republicans and nine Democrats of the Senate Judiciary Committee delivered one long-winded opening statement after another, employing mostly hollow slogans and partisan talking points to mind-numbing effect.

The real action began this morning when Gorsuch and his Senate interrogators finally came to grips. Early questioning centered on a few primary lines of inquiry.

“How do we have confidence in you that you won’t be just for the big corporations? That you will be for the little men?” asked Sen. Diane Feinstein, who was up first for the Democrats.

Gorsuch replied by pointing to numerous cases in which his opinions sided with “the least among us,” such as ruling in favor of an undocumented immigrant over the Board of Immigration Appeals in a major statutory interpretation case and in favor of multiple criminal suspects in Fourth Amendment cases.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, meanwhile, repeatedly pressed Gorsuch to prove his independence from President Donald Trump and asked Gorsuch to share his legal views on the constitutionality of Trump’s recent executive orders banning travelers from certain Muslim-majority countries.

Predictably, Gorsuch refused to weigh in on those ongoing legal disputes.

What about “the president’s national security determinations,” Leahy pressed on. “Are those reviewable by the Court?” The Trump administration, Leahy pointed out, has “asserted that their national security determinations are un-reviewable by the Court.”

“Senator, no man is above the law,” Gorsuch replied.

A few minutes later, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham circled back to the issue of Gorsuch’s judicial independence from the president who nominated him.

“Do you agree with me that the detainee treatment act prevents waterboarding?” Graham asked, alluding to President Trump’s numerous comments in favor of waterboarding.

“Yes, Senator, that’s my recollection of it,” Gorsuch replied.

“In case President Trump is watching,” Graham said with a smile, “if you start waterboarding people you may get impeached, is that a fair summary?”

Gorsuch demurred on that, saying only that the impeachment power belonged to the Senate and that he refused to speculate about any possible future prosecutions of Trump or anybody else.

“But no man is above the law,” Graham stressed.

“No man is above the law,” Gorsuch immediately agreed. “No man.”

If President Trump is watching, I doubt he will like the sound of that.

As President Donald Trump ordered in the earliest days of his leadership, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has released its first weekly list of law enforcement agencies that refuse to cooperate with orders to detain immigrants in the United States illegally.

ICE’s first report covers people released by law enforcement agencies between January 28 and February 3, but the actual detainer requests can go back much longer, even several years. But of the 3,083 requests by ICE to detain immigrants and hand them over to the feds, only 206 requests were declined. And the majority of the refusals were concentrated in a handful of communities, particularly Travis County, Texas, home of Austin.

Furthermore, of those declined requests, slightly more than half the immigrants on the list are people who have only been charged with crimes and not yet convicted. And while some of the charged crimes are very serious and violent (there’s a person charged with homicide in Philadelphia), ICE is also trying to detain and possibly deport people charged with much lesser crimes like prostitution and drug possession. They’re even trying to get their hands on a Venezuelan in Florida convicted of a traffic violation.

It’s also not clear how accurately we should treat the report. A section of the report lists all the law enforcement agencies in the country who have limits or restrictions on how much they cooperate with ICE on detaining and handing over immigrants. The New York Times notes that Nassau County in New York is listed among these agencies, but in fact the county’s sheriff’s office assures they’re very, very cooperative with ICE. In Texas, Williamson County’s sheriff said the same thing. He says the four people ICE claims they refuse to detain for them were actually moved to other jurisdictions that subsequently refused to cooperate.

It’s the first report of its kind, so perhaps some kinks are to be expected. The numbers may also end up increasing, though it’s not clear of the degree. The report introduction notes that law enforcement agencies don’t often inform ICE that they’re refusing the detainer request, so the report is based on what ICE employees are able to figure out for themselves. This could explain the Williamson County mistake. The report also notes that ICE had previously stopped sending detainer requests to law enforcement agencies with a history of non-cooperation. Under Trump’s orders, ICE is going to start sending them requests again. The report notes, “As a result, the number of issued detainers will increase over the next several reporting periods.”

So the number of refusals may increase, but that doesn’t mean that there’s a dramatic increase in crime caused by immigrants here illegally. Keep that in mind (and the fact that many people on the list have merely been charged) when examining future trend coverage of these reports. Evidence shows that immigrants are not major sources of criminal activity.

Read through the report yourself here. Note that a lot of the agencies listed as not cooperating aren’t simply flat-out refusing to detain immigrants on ICE’s demand. Many require a warrant or a court order of some sort.

“We’re using the rhetoric of cuts, and fiscal responsibility, and Republicans pairing things down to the bone for a budget that’s not actually smaller than its predecessors,” says Reason magazine Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward.

And thus we lose.

On our latest Reason podcast, Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, and Nick Gillespie discuss a preliminary federal budget that “takes the things that lefties like and dumps it in to the things that righties like;” the “strangulation of Big Bird in his nest;” the existential despair at three-year-old birthday parties in Washington, D.C.; Jeff Bezos and the coming of the robot overlords; Chuck Berry as our cultural Apollo project (or is it Wikipedia?); the coming, extended, nauseating theater of the Gorsuch hearing; and the greatness of pop music as “an endless parade of freaks differentiating themselves.”

Click below to listen to the conversation—or subscribe to our podcast at iTunes and never miss an episode.

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Scientists and fans of science are getting all worked up over a proposed 20 percent cut to the budget of the National Institutes of Health. If they’re looking for someone to blame for those cuts, they can start by blaming the National Institutes of Health.

Seriously. From funding experiments that gave cocaine to quails and rats, to studying the sex habits of hamsters and goldfish, there are few parts of the federal government that have made a better case for budget cut than the NIH.

Adrienne LaFrance has a piece at The Atlantic that takes the hysteria over President Donald Trump’s first budget proposal to new heights. The budget, which includes a cut of $6 billion to the NIH, has scientists bracing for “a lost generation in American science,” according to LaFrance, who says scientists told her that the “consequences of such a dramatic reduction in public spending on science and medicine would be deadly.”

One of those scientists, Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, tells LaFrance that the proposed cuts “would bring American biomedical science to a halt and forever shut out a generation of young scientists.”

Please.

Behind all the hysterics is one simple fact. Even if Trump’s budget cuts are enacted, as proposed, by Congress (which they won’t be), the NIH would be funded at the same level as it was in 2003. That’s less than 15 years ago. It’s hardly a return to the Dark Ages—heck, that’s hardly a return to the pre-iPhone ages—or to the era when smallpox and polio were running rampant. If the generation of young scientists that went to school in the 1990s and early 2000s managed to survive and get funding for research without the NIH at its current levels, then surely the next generation will.

Before going any further, though, an important note on Trump’s budget. It’s terrible. His proposed cuts are not a serious effort at reducing the size of the federal government, but rather a way to pay for a mostly useless wall on the border with Mexico and to feed the Pentagon more money ($52 billion more, to be exact), so the military can flush it down the toilet of endless wars, overpriced weapons systems, and who-knows-what-else because not even government auditors can figure out how the Department of Defense manages to waste so much taxpayer money.

The terrible spending decisions in Trump’s budget, though, do not make his proposed cuts any less legitimate, and few government agencies have made a better, stronger case for having their own budgets reduced.

More than 80 percent of the NIH’s annual budget is used to fund research grants, mostly for universities and post-grad students. While there is plenty of good research funded by the NIH, there’s also no shortage of examples that make you wonder if they’re secretly conducting a study on how many ridiculous, wasteful studies they can fund before Congress or the president cuts their budget.

Perhaps the most infamous example of pure WTF research funded by the NIH is the $175,000 grant given to the University of Kentucky to study how cocaine affects the sex drives of Japanese quail.

“It’s hard to think of a more wasteful use of American taxpayers’ money than to give cocaine to quail and studying their sexual habits,” deadpanned then-Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) in highlighting the study in his 2011 report on wasteful government spending.

There are plenty of other head-scratching examples, like the $509,000 grant used to study how meth-heads responded to text messages using “gay lingo.” The NIH spent more than $2.8 million over four years funding a study to determine why “nearly three-quarters of adult lesbians overweight or obese,” and why gay men generally are not. More than $600,000 from the NIH helped finance a study on the sex habits of hamsters, and another $3.6 million from the NIH allowed researchers at Bowdoin College to ponder “what makes goldfish feel sexy?”

My personal favorite is the 2012 NIH-funded study that determined rats on cocaine prefer listening to jazz music instead of classical. Specifically, they like listening to Miles Davis’ classic album “Four” more than Beethoven’s “Fur Elise.” Don’t worry, the researchers did the same experiment with rats high on methamphetamine, too, and found that they also enjoy Miles Davis. Cool.

Not to be outdone, researchers at the University of Illinois used a $242,600 NIH grant to get honeybees high on cocaine, ultimately discovering that the intoxicated bees are “about twice as likely to dance” and moved 25 percent faster than sober bees.

Other NIH studies simply prove what everyone already knows, like when a $548,000 grant helped demonstrate that adults over age 30 who frequently binge-drink tend to be less mature than their peers. Or when the NIH spent $666,000 on a study that found watching re-runs of old television shows make people happy, because it gives them an “energizing chance to reconnect with pseudo-friends.“

Even when they try to clean up their act, the NIH ends up raising questions about how it’s spending taxpayer money. After a government audit found that the NIH had blown $823,000 on a Las Vegas conference (enough to fund five more studies about the drug habits of Japanese quail, can you believe?) in 2010, the agency created new levels of bureaucratic oversight to make sure that didn’t happen again. The problem: Bloomberg reported in 2015 that the additional oversight costs as much as $14.6 million annually, roughly equal to how much the agency spends each year researching Hodgkin’s disease.

The hilarious examples of waste at the NIH are just a drop in the bucket of the federal deficit, of course, but it certainly seems like the agency could do a little trimming without losing any critical medical research.

Even without budget cuts, that research is increasingly being driven by the private sector anyway.

In her piece at The Atlantic, LaFrance points out that the federal government funded 60 percent of research and development in the United States in 1965. By 2006, however, more than 65 percent of R&D funding was coming from private sources, she notes.

This, we’re meant to believe, is a bad thing. A sign that government—that all of us—is not doing its part to finance the scientific discoveries that make the modern world such a wonderful place to live. For shame.

Get rid of the percentages, though, and a different picture emerges. Funding for the NIH has increased by about 3.5 times between 1970 and 2015 (not quite enough to keep pace with inflation, but pretty close). Most of that increase has been in the past two decades. In just five years, from 2000 through 2004, the NIH’s budget grew by a whopping 58 percent, and there was another huge boost in NIH funding during the Obama administration’s stimulus program (lots of shovel-ready jobs in labs, one assumes).

There hasn’t been a reduction in public funding for research and development, but government funding now makes up a smaller portion of the overall pie because privately funded research has grown so quickly that it’s overtaken government as the main patron of science. That’s not a bad thing! Sure, privately funded research is subject to approval from corporate overlords at times—in her piece, LaFrance quotes an associate professor of psychiatry at Yale who proclaims that only “sexy, hot” science will get private funding, instead of the tedious research that leads to most important breakthroughs—but if that means fewer studies on why rats like Miles Davis, I think we’ll survive.

Similarly, I think we’ll be okay if a smaller budget for the NIH means the agency has to prioritize important things like research into deadly diseases ahead of questionably useful studies on the drug habits of Japanese birds, the importance of old television shows, and the sex habits of small mammals.

• Today is the second day of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
• FBI Director James Comey has confirmed that the agency is investigating possible contacts between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia.
• “Passengers traveling to the United States from 10 airports in eight Muslim-majority countries will be prohibited from bringing laptops, tablets and other portable electronic devices on board with them when they fly, according to new rules set to take effect Tuesday.”
• The European Union will hold a summit of its member states on April 29 to plan for Brexit.
• Martin McGuinnes, the former chief of staff of the Irish Republican Army, has died at age 66.

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Jury nullification angers judges and prosecutors, but it’s all just part of the jurors’ role in protecting us from the government.

J.D. Tuccille writes:

Why juries do what they do is often a mystery, especially when they protectively interpose themselves between the government and a defendant. Outsiders can’t know what really goes on during jury deliberations, and jurors themselves have no way of knowing what truly motivates their colleagues to bring a not guilty verdict. That’s why jury nullification—acquittals of defendants who jurors believe did violate the law but don’t deserve punishment, either because of specifics of the case or because jurors oppose the law in question—isn’t always obvious. It’s extraordinarily rare for jurors to tip their hands by setting people loose and then telling them they should keep up the good work, which is what happened in a recent case from New York.

But, as with much of what jurors do, nullification is important and potentially powerful.

Prosecutors and their groupies don’t really care why they were thwarted—just that they didn’t get their way. When refused convictions in high-profile criminal cases, they tend to act as if the government has been denied something to which it’s entitled by divine word and the laws of nature. Amidst whining by prosecutors about spending a week with “12 idiots,” and huffing by editorial boards over an “absurd verdict,” it’s difficult to know whether a not guilty verdict represents an act of juror rebellion or a simple statement that the government didn’t live up to its obligation to prove its arguments. Although, either way, jurors likely consider themselves to be doing what’s right.

View this article.

An overcommitment to renewable energy by Germany has already had negative consequences.

Marian Tupy writes:

Recently, I came across a report by Fritz Vahrenholt, Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Hamburg, entitled Germany’s Energiewende: a disaster in the making. It made for interesting reading.

In the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster in 2011, the German government decided to shut down its 19 nuclear power stations, which supply nearly 30 percent of the country’s electrical power, by 2022. Driven by social pressure, the German government now plans to get rid of all fossil fuels, thus increasing the share of renewable energy to 95 percent of total energy supply by 2050.

To accomplish its goal, the government has introduced a “renewable” levy on power bills, thus doubling the price of electricity. This additional cost amounts to €25 billion ($26.8 billion) annually. In a nod to rationality, the government has exempted energy-intensive industries (steel, copper and chemicals) from the renewable levy, thus maintaining their competitiveness.

View this article.

A cyanide bomb planted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture sent a 14-year-old Idaho boy to the hospital and killed his dog. The devices are used to kill coyotes and other predators. The USDA is supposed to put signs up around them, but both the boy and the local sheriff say there were no signs around that bomb, which was planted near the boy’s home.