Category: reason

Argentina actually elected a libertarian president.

Javier Milei campaigned with a chainsaw, promising to cut the size of government.

Argentina’s leftists had so clogged the country’s economic arteries with regulations that what once was one of the world’s richest countries is now one of the poorest.

Inflation is more than 200 percent.

People save their whole lives—and then find their savings worth nearly nothing.

They got so fed up they did something never done before in modern history: They elected a full-throated libertarian.

Milei understands that government can’t create wealth.

He surprised diplomats at the World Economic Forum this month by saying, “The state is the problem!”

He spoke up for capitalism: “Do not be intimidated by the political caste or by parasites who live off the state…. If you make money, it’s because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general well-being. Do not surrender to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution.”

Go, Milei! I wish current American politicians talked that way.

In the West, young people turn socialist. In Argentina, they live under socialist policies. They voted for Milei.

Sixty-nine percent of voters under 25 voted for him. That helped him win by a whopping 3 million votes.

He won promising to reverse “decades of decadence.” He told the Economic Forum, “If measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of markets, competition, price systems, trade, and ownership of private property, the only possible fate is poverty.”

Right.

Poor countries demonstrate that again and again.

The media say Milei will never pass his reforms, and leftists may yet stop him.

But already, “He was able to repeal rent controls, price controls,” says economist Daniel Di Martino in my new video. He points out that Milei already “eliminated all restrictions on exports and imports, all with one sign of a pen.”

“He can just do that without Congress?” I ask.

“The president of Argentina has a lot more power than the president of the United States.”

Milei also loosened rules limiting where airlines can fly.

“Now [some] air fares are cheaper than bus fares!” says Di Martino.

He scrapped laws that say, “Buy in Argentina.” I point out that America has “Buy America” rules.

“It only makes poor people poorer because it increases costs!” Di Martino replies, “Why shouldn’t Argentinians be able to buy Brazilian pencils or Chilean grapes?”

“To support Argentina,” I push back.

“Guess what?” Says Di Martino, “Not every country is able to produce everything at the lowest cost. Imagine if you had to produce bananas in America.”

Argentina’s leftist governments tried to control pretty much everything.

“The regulations were such that everything not explicitly legal was illegal,” laughs Di Martino. “Now…everything not illegal is legal.”

One government agency Milei demoted was a “Department for Women, Gender and Diversity.” DiMartino says that reminds him of Venezuela’s Vice Ministry for Supreme Social Happiness. “These agencies exist just so government officials can hire their cronies.”

Cutting government jobs and subsidies for interest groups is risky for vote-seeking politicians. There are often riots in countries when politicians cut subsidies. Sometimes politicians get voted out. Or jailed.

“What’s incredible about Milei,” notes Di Martino, “is that he was able to win on the promise of cutting subsidies.”

That is remarkable. Why would Argentinians vote for cuts?

“Argentinians are fed up with the status quo,” replies Di Martino.

Milei is an economist. He named his dogs after Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, and Robert Lucas, all libertarian economists.

I point out that most Americans don’t know who those men were.

“The fact that he’s naming his dogs after these famous economists,” replies Di Martino, “shows that he’s really a nerd. It’s a good thing to have an economics nerd president of a country.”

“What can Americans learn from Argentina?”

“Keep America prosperous. So we never are in the spot of Argentina in the first place. That requires free markets.”

Yes.

Actually, free markets plus rule of law. When people have those things, prosperity happens.

It’s good that once again, a country may try it.

COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post Argentina, Once One of the Richest Countries, Is Now One of the Poorest. Javier Milei Could Help Fix That. appeared first on Reason.com.

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Five years ago, the Harris County, Texas, Institute of Forensic Sciences sent me reports on the autopsies of two people who had been killed in a Houston drug raid. After I wrote an article based on those reports, the county attorney’s office told me they were not public information because they were part of an ongoing investigation.

Although I did not realize it at the time, I had committed a felony just by asking for that information. You might think a law that criminalizes journalism is obviously unconstitutional. But if so, you are wrong, according to a decision that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit issued last week.

The case involves Priscilla Villarreal, a Laredo gadfly and DIY journalist who was arrested in 2017 for violating Section 39.06(c) of the Texas Penal Code. Under that law, a person who “solicits or receives” information that “has not been made public” from a government official “with intent to obtain a benefit” commits a third-degree felony, punishable by two to 10 years in prison.

Villarreal allegedly did that by asking Laredo police officer Barbara Goodman about a suicide and a fatal car crash. Goodman confirmed the name and job of a U.S. Border Patrol employee who had jumped off a Laredo overpass and the last name of an accident victim. Villarreal included that information in reports on her locally popular Facebook page.

Texas defines “benefit” as “anything reasonably regarded as economic gain or advantage.” According to the arrest affidavits, the “benefit” that Villarreal sought was a boost in Facebook traffic.

Section 39.06(c) defines “information that has not been made public” as “any information to which the public does not generally have access” that is also “prohibited from disclosure” under the Texas Public Information Act. The arrest affidavits did not address the latter requirement at all.

Although this law has been on the books for more than two decades, no one has ever been convicted under it. Nor had Laredo police ever charged anyone with violating it.

After a Texas judge blocked Villarreal’s prosecution, deeming the statute unconstitutionally vague, she filed a federal lawsuit against the officers who were involved in her arrest, arguing that they targeted her because they were irked by her vocal criticism of local law enforcement agencies. She noted that several cops had mocked her after the arrest, laughing while snapping pictures with their cellphones.

A federal judge dismissed Villarreal’s lawsuit after concluding that the officers were protected by qualified immunity, which allows federal civil rights claims only when they allege misconduct that violated “clearly established” law. A 5th Circuit panel overruled that decision in 2021.

“Priscilla Villarreal was put in jail for asking a police officer a question,” Judge James Ho wrote. “If that is not an obvious violation of the Constitution, it’s hard to imagine what would be.”

After rehearing the case, nine of Ho’s colleagues disagreed, ruling that the officers had probable cause to arrest Villarreal and that the law was not so blatantly unconstitutional that they should have recognized it was inconsistent with the First Amendment. The majority faulted Villarreal for using a “backchannel source,” a routine reporting practice that has exposed abuses such as Watergate, the My Lai massacre, Vietnam War deception, and torture at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Seven judges dissented. They noted that Laredo police had spent months investigating Villarreal—a far cry from the “split-second judgments” to which qualified immunity supposedly applies. “If the First Amendment means anything,” Ho wrote, “surely it means that citizens have the right to question or criticize public officials without fear of imprisonment.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) represented Villarreal, who drew support from ideologically diverse groups, including press associations, the Institute for Justice, the Cato Institute, the Constitutional Accountability Center, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Project Veritas, and Young America’s Foundation. Unlike the 5th Circuit majority, they recognized the perils of treating journalism as a crime.

© Copyright 2024 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

The post The 5th Circuit Says Criminalizing Journalism Is Not Obviously Unconstitutional appeared first on Reason.com.

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This week’s featured article is “Comedy’s Truthiness Option” by Peter Suderman.

This audio was generated using AI trained on the voice of Katherine Mangu-Ward.

Music credits: “Deep in Thought” by CTRL and “Sunsettling” by Man with Roses

The post <I>The Best of Reason</I>: Comedy's Truthiness Problem appeared first on Reason.com.

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Vertex Pharmaceuticals is trumpeting the results of clinical trials indicating that VX-548, its new, non-opioid analgesic, is effective at relieving post-surgical pain. While there is nothing wrong with offering patients and doctors another option for treating acute pain, the Phase 3 trials found that VX-548 was no more effective than a combination of hydrocodone and acetaminophen in relieving pain after tummy tucks and less effective for patients who had bunions removed.

As a new drug under patent, VX-548 is bound to be much more expensive than generic versions of Vicodin, and its main selling point seems to be based on a gross exaggeration of that familiar drug’s addictive potential. The introduction of VX-548 therefore could reinforce myths about the risks of prescription opioids and encourage the government’s misguided and heavy-handed crackdown on those medications.

“People who are suffering from severe pain but don’t want to risk addiction to an opioid are closer to a new option for treatment,” The Wall Street Journal reports. The Journal claims “opioids are highly addictive,” which is not true by any reasonable measure.

A 2018 BMJ study of 568,612 patients who took prescription opioids following surgery found that 5,906, or 1 percent, showed documented signs of “opioid misuse” during the course of the study, which included data from 2008 through 2016. The outcome measure that the researchers used, “opioid dependence, abuse, or overdose,” is a broad category that includes patterns of use falling short of what most people would recognize as addiction. That suggests the actual addiction rate in this study probably was less than 1 percent, although it’s not clear how much less. The authors noted that “overall rates of misuse were low.”

Estimates of addiction rates among patients who take opioids for longer periods of time tend to be higher but still lower than the phrase “highly addictive” suggests. A 2010 analysis in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews found that less than 1 percent of patients taking opioids for chronic pain experienced addiction. A 2012 review in the journal Addiction likewise concluded that “opioid analgesics for chronic pain conditions are not associated with a major risk for developing dependence.”

In a 2016 New England Journal of Medicine article, Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and A. Thomas McLellan, a former deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, reported that “rates of carefully diagnosed addiction” in chronic pain patients averaged less than 8 percent. In general, they observed, “addiction occurs in only a small percentage of persons who are exposed to opioids—even among those with preexisting vulnerabilities.” In 2021, a California judge who examined the relevant evidence likewise estimated that the addiction rate among patients was “less than 5%.”

Even a low risk is still a risk, of course, and doctors might prefer to avoid it by prescribing a drug like VX-548. But they should not pretend there are no tradeoffs in terms of cost and effectiveness. The problem is that the government has systematically biased such decisions by discouraging doctors from prescribing opioids in the name of preventing substance abuse.

In response to an increase in opioid-related deaths during the first decade of this century, state and federal officials sought to reduce the prescription of analgesics like hydrocodone and oxycodone. Those efforts included increased scrutiny of doctors’ prescribing practices, raids of clinics identified (rightly or wrongly) as “pill mills,” federal pain treatment guidelines, statutory and regulatory limits, and restrictive policies imposed by insurers, pharmacists, and medical facilities under government pressure.

That campaign succeeded in reducing opioid prescriptions, which fell by 44 percent from 2011 to 2020. But it left many patients to suffer needlessly as doctors became increasingly reluctant to prescribe the medication they needed to relieve their pain, and it did not succeed in reducing the number of opioid-related deaths.

To the contrary, the upward trend that prompted the anti-opioid campaign not only continued but accelerated. The opioid-related death rate, which doubled between 2001 and 2010, nearly tripled between 2011 and 2020. In 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted over 80,000 opioid-related deaths, nearly four times the number in 2010.

What went wrong? Restrictions on opioid prescribing pushed nonmedical users toward black-market substitutes that were much more dangerous because their composition was highly variable and unpredictable. That hazard was compounded by the rise of illicit fentanyl, which likewise was driven by efforts to enforce drug prohibition. Fentanyl, which is 30 to 50 times more potent than heroin, appeals to drug traffickers because it is much cheaper to produce and much easier to conceal. Nowadays it is showing up not just in powder sold as heroin but also in ersatz pain pills that resemble the medications that the government has made harder to obtain, with predictably deadly consequences.

Bona fide pain patients, meanwhile, were left in the lurch as physicians began to see them as a threat to their licenses, livelihoods, and liberty. The horrifying fallout included undertreatment, abrupt dose reductions, patient abandonment, and unrelieved pain severe enough to result in suicides. This is what happens when the government insists that doctors prioritize prevention of opioid abuse above patient welfare and their own medical judgments. Patients paid the price of policies that manifestly failed to reduce opioid-related deaths and instead had the opposite effect.

The availability of non-opioid analgesics like VX-548 should expand pain treatment choices. But in the current political context, it is apt to limit choices instead, reinforcing propaganda and policies that discourage the use of opioids even when they are medically appropriate.

The post A New Pain Medication Could Reinforce the Disastrous Crackdown on Prescription Opioids appeared first on Reason.com.

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After Alabama’s grisly nitrogen hypoxia execution of inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith last week, it looks like another state may adopt the method in a bid to resume executing inmates after lethal injection drugs have become nearly impossible to obtain. 

The bill, not yet named, was introduced in Ohio’s House of Representatives on Tuesday, and state Attorney General Dave Yost has already given his support. It would allow inmates to choose between lethal injection and nitrogen hypoxia but would require nitrogen when lethal injection drugs aren’t available. 

The latter is the exact situation Ohio has found itself in during recent years. The state hasn’t killed a death row inmate since 2018, and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine went so far in 2020 as to say that lethal injection was “impossible from a practical point of view today” due to difficulty finding drugs.

But death by nitrogen hypoxia still brings major concerns for inmate suffering. The method, which involves placing a tight-fitting mask over the inmate’s face and slowly replacing oxygen with nitrogen, causing death by suffocation, is experimental. Smith, who was pronounced dead after about 15 minutes of being forced to breathe only nitrogen last Thursday, is believed to be the first person in the world executed in this way. While Alabama prison officials claimed that the execution went as planned, witnesses reported that Smith “struggled against his restraints” and “shook and writhed on a gurney.”

The details of Smith’s death haven’t held back Ohio Republicans, who seem to view the execution method as a useful way to end the state’s six-year execution moratorium.

“There must be accountability for offenders convicted of the most heinous crimes and prisoners who continue to flout the law behind bars,” Yost said in a Tuesday press release. “The pursuit of justice is a journey, and closure remains elusive for victims’ families until a sentence is fully executed. Ensuring that the consequences align with the severity of an offense is essential to providing solace to grieving relatives.”

Rep. Brian Stewart (R–Ashville), who introduced the bill, echoed Yost’s comments, arguing, “As long as capital punishment remains the law in Ohio, the law should be followed.” Stewart added that “providing an additional method for carrying out capital punishments is necessary to ensure Ohio can continue to impose these sentences in response to the most heinous crimes committed in our state.”

For opponents of the death penalty, many of whom have viewed the increasing difficulty of sourcing lethal injection drugs as a sign that the practice may be waning in the United States, the introduction of nitrogen hypoxia executions is troubling news. If states follow Alabama’s lead and begin executing their death row inmates by suffocation rather than hard-to-source drugs, it’s possible that executions could rise in the coming years.

The post Alabama Killed an Inmate With an Experimental Execution Method. Ohio Could Be Next. appeared first on Reason.com.

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If you need more evidence that America has become a “permission-slip” society, look no further than the City of Portland, Oregon, requiring homeowners to get permits to remove trees that’ve fallen on their houses during recent winter storms.

Portland alt-weekly Willamette Week published a story last week about Joel and Sarah Bonds, who had a large Douglas Fir in the backyard squash their house after it became weighed down with ice. The tree barely missed the Bonds’ young daughter and cat.

As it turns out, the couple were not unaware of the danger posed by the tree. In 2021, they’d applied for a necessary city permit to cut down the tree and another in their backyard. The city’s Urban Forestry division turned them down, citing the trees’ apparent health and the damage their removal would do to the “neighborhood character.”

That decision rankles the Bonds now. Making them even more mad is the fact that the city is requiring them to obtain a $100 retroactive removal permit for the one tree that fell on their house and plant a new one in its place at their own expense.

A Forestry Department employee also advised them to hire an arborist to chop down the second, still-standing tree, but that they should take care to document the work in case they’d need to apply for another removal permit. According to the Willamette Week story, the couple could risk daily $1,000 fines for removing the tree without a permit.

The Bonds aren’t the only homeowners being required to get retroactive removal permits for trees knocked down by the weather. This fact has provoked local outrage and calls for a change in policy.

A recent Oregonian editorial argues that the city should suspend the need to get retroactive removal permits for weather-downed trees, noting that neighboring cities in the area are not requiring such permits. One lawyer who spoke to the paper argued that the city code doesn’t obviously apply to trees felled by bad weather.

The city maintains that the removal permits are required by the city code and that city council action is needed to waive those permitting requirements.

The whole episode is an illustration of how property rights have been turned on their head in America’s cities. The city regulates tree removal to protect surrounding property owners’ interest in the shade and character of the neighborhood. Homeowners’ interests in doing what they please on their land are of secondary concern, even though they have to bear all costs and liabilities associated with keeping these trees on their properties.

The post Portland Requires Homeowners Get Permits To Remove Trees Knocked on Their Homes by Winter Storm appeared first on Reason.com.

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From book bans to anti-ESG legislation, when it comes to dabbling in its citizens’ private lives, Florida’s legislature knows no bounds. The latest intrusion of choice is now aimed at social media.

On January 24, the Florida House passed House Bill 1 (HB1) to ban kids 16 and under from using social media. If HB1 becomes law, social media platforms would be forced to implement prescriptive age verification methods for all users (including adults) and carry disclaimers that their products may be harmful.

Proponents of the bill have framed HB1 as a necessary measure intended to “protect” children from the negative impacts of these “addictive” technologies. Frequently cited are claims that adolescents are subject to cyberbullying and sexual predation on these platforms. Of particular concern is the role that excessive social media use plays on teenagers’ mental health.

However, several studies have shown that these claims are unfounded and, at best, speculative. A study published in 2021 in the journal Clinical Psychological Science found that increased technology use among adolescents is not linked to a decline in mental well-being. More recently, another study published by the Oxford Internet Institute found no association between widespread Facebook adoption and psychological harm. In fact, findings from the Oxford study suggested the opposite—that Facebook membership was linked to positive mental well-being. This makes sense, as Facebook is a social media forum that connects friends and family, and therefore, nurtures relationships. Moreover, such platforms have served as a vital source of social support for teenagers deprived of human connection during the COVID-19 era.

Blaming social media for mental health issues isn’t new. Any time new forms of entertainment and social technologies are introduced, society’s natural response is to react with a mixture of nervous apprehension followed by gradual acceptance of the unfamiliar technology.

Consider the ubiquitous “dime novel” of the 20th century (named for its cheap price). When these sensational and wildly sought-after paperbacks first became popular, many cultural commentators believed they were thought to elicit “promiscuous behavior” and moral depravity among their audience. Social critics fretted that these adventure and romance-ridden novels were leading to so-called “reading mania” and “reading rage.” These fears were so widely embedded in the collective psyche that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther was even blamed for a spate of suicides during its time.

The thought that an “epidemic of reading” could ever be considered a social ill nowadays seems absurd. However, to people back then, these were real and legitimate concerns. Sociologist Frank Furedi aptly described “penny dreadfuls,” as they were called in the United Kingdom, as the media’s “first moral panic.”

Similarly, when video games peaked in popularity in the 1980s, they were blamed for an increase in real-world violence and acts of aggression—even mass shootings. Nowadays, most people consider this argument null. However, these myths are difficult to eradicate among the general population once they take hold. 

Other forms of social entertainment that have been unfairly targeted and subject to the “violence” scapegoat narrative include the radio dramas of the 1940s, comic books and television, and music lyrics.

Unfortunately, this same phenomenon is now taking place in the Sunshine State. Well-meaning politicians “concerned” with declining mental health among teenagers blame social media and seek to censor platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Even if it is true that such platforms adversely affect mental health, the decision to prevent teenagers from engaging with these technologies is still one that ought to rest with the parents, not the government.

While there has been a rise in mental health problems across the U.S., social media is not to blame, but rather insufficient access to mental health services. According to the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, scant access to care is the primary cause of the mental health crisis. Barriers like high cost and paltry insurance coverage, as well as limited options and long waits, hinder access to proper treatment. More than 40 percent of candidates polled in a study named cost and poor insurance coverage as the top barrier for obtaining the help they need. Instead of banning platforms that connect people socially, politicians should consider reforming mental health policy.

It is true that adolescents do not have the same capacities to engage in rational decision-making as full-grown adults. But that is precisely why parents should have the ultimate say when it comes to deciding what ideas and information their children can access.

The Florida legislature is forgetting its original purpose of protecting the rights and freedoms of its citizens and unlawfully engaging in constitutional overreach with the passage of HB1. The government doesn’t try to prevent teenagers from indulging in every single harmful behavior (like eating unhealthy fast food) just because of some negative consequences. That would be considered serious governmental overreach. Florida’s creeping descent into paternalism should be viewed in the same light.

HB1 is poised to reach the Governor’s desk in the coming month. Implementation of a similar law in Utah is going poorly, and up against significant court challenges. For the sake of the First Amendment and free speech writ large, Florida should stop trying to carry out a blanket and unconstitutional ban on Floridians’ freedom.

The post Florida's Youth Social Media Ban Is an Affront to Freedom appeared first on Reason.com.

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“Naadier Riles, the founder of Global Heartbreak, is not an independent creator when it comes to footwear—he is a bootlegger,” is the opening line of a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court of New Jersey last week by Nike, the world’s largest sneaker manufacturer. It’s suing Riles, a 26-year-old clothing designer who works out of his apartment in North Brunswick, New Jersey. Known professionally as Naady, he’s accused of copyright infringement for selling re-imagined versions of the Air Jordan 1 model. 

Nike accused Naady’s company of causing it “to suffer irreparable injury to its business,” claiming that it “will suffer substantial loss of goodwill and reputation unless and until Global Heartbreak is permanently enjoined from the wrongful acts complained of herein.”

Global Heartbreak has produced 400 pairs of Naady’s designs over the years, not all of which have been sold; Nike sells approximately 100 pairs of sneakers every four seconds, or 780 million annually.

The lawsuit was “surprising,” says Brendan Dunne, editor of the top online sneaker magazine, Sole Collector, since Global Heartbreak’s operation is tiny. “I guess nothing is off the table,” he told Reason.

Naady’s sneaker design replaces the iconic Nike Swoosh with a broken heart pierced by a needle and uses different colors and details, though the shape and mold of the shoe are clearly taken from the Air Jordan 1. 

Nike and its law firm, Arnold & Porter, didn’t respond to Reason’s interview requests, but the complaint states the company has a zero-tolerance policy when protecting its intellectual property. “Nike cannot allow bad actors such as [Riles]…to confuse consumers by building a business on the back of Nike’s most famous trademarks, undermining the value of those trademarks and the message they convey.”

This latest lawsuit is part of a recent, more litigious strategy by the sneakers giant. Trademarks are typically reserved for words, symbols, or logos used to identify a brand, such as the Swoosh or the phrase “Just Do It”; Nike has started filing trademarks based on the shape and structure of its products. Its most high-profile lawsuit is against the trendsetting Japanese fashion brand A Bathing Ape, or BAPE for short, which had been selling its sneakers for 20 years before Nike accused it of trademark infringement. The company, which operates its own chain and has far more resources than Global Heartbreak, continues to push for the dismissal of Nike’s lawsuit, and in the meantime, its sneakers have remained on the market. Smaller designers targeted by Nike have often signed out-of-court settlements, similar to the one offered to Naady, that prevent them from further sale of their shoes.

NYU Law Professor Christopher Sprigman, co-author of The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation, told Reason that the derivative designs of the sort sold by Global Heartbreak—known as “trade dress”—are both legal and essential to the creative process. “Copying is what helps set the trend that comes next,” he says. “So the fashion cycle runs and the fashion industry’s successive waves of innovation depend on copying.” 

Sprigman appeared in a recent ReasonTV video titled, Why is Nike Stomping On Independent Creators?, which featured Naady’s sneakers. After Nike’s attorneys watched the video, they sent Naady a cease-and-desist.

Initially, he planned to comply, telling Reason that he’d eat the loss on his unsold shoes and focus on sales of his other merchandise. According to Naady, three weeks later, Nike offered him a confidential settlement, offering 90 days to sell off his inventory, as long as he complied with a list of demands that included publicly posting a statement saying that he was infringing on Nike’s intellectual property. Naady balked at that demand; he says that after he couldn’t get Nike’s lawyers on the phone, he turned to Instagram.

“I’m not signing shit until I get a better agreement from @nike,” Naady wrote in a post featuring a crossed-out version of Nike’s offered settlement. “Ima keep talking until I get a better offer until then suck dick.” He also shared a video of himself setting a pair of his sneakers on fire.

Nike lawyers included a screenshot of Naady’s post in their lawsuit.

“It is what it is,” Naady told Reason. “I guess I’ll take the hit for everybody that had to shut the fuck up. Maybe this is what I had to do to get noticed.” 

“The amount of money Nike’s potentially losing to Global Heartbreak is, of course, minuscule,” says Dunne. “It’s just like, how small do you have to be for Nike not to care?” 

The post Nike Sued Him for Making 400 Pairs of a Reimagined Air Jordan 1 appeared first on Reason.com.

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Some ideas that animate government regulators achieve what seems like universal belief purely due to the volume of repetition. For example, many proponents of antitrust regulation believe increased concentration will increase consumer prices, even though evidence does not solidly back this up.

The theory behind why concentration in a market would lead to increased prices is so ubiquitous most people could probably recite some version of it by memory. It goes something like this: A firm without enough competitors can more or less raise prices at will; with few alternatives, consumers just have to accept the price gouging and pay up.

That claim, espoused by regulators and policy makers, can often be found alongside a similar claim about profit. The White House went so far as to say, “In an economy without adequate competition, prices and corporate profits rise, while workers’ wages decrease.” That tired old song has also been sung by The New York Times and the Economic Policy Institute. Most recently, this claim has led many to insist that the primary driver of the inflation we have been suffering is corporate profits, or “greedflation.”

Former Clinton administration Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and others have so much faith in the “greedflation” explanation that they insist the recent inflation is caused by increased concentration over the last few decades. Underlying the claim about concentration and prices is a claim about concentration and profits, which is the cost consumers pay minus the cost of production to industry. According to greedflation logic, corporate profits indicate that concentration is leading to higher consumer prices.

The problem for proponents of this theory is that studies on corporate profits and concentration are often flawed, or sometimes even find an inverse relationship to their “concentration=inflation” narrative. Out of the studies that find relationships between markups (which are essentially another way of measuring profits) and concentration, the methodology is often flawed, focusing too much on assumptions about market structure.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) ran a series of studies on myths about monopolies, one of which focused on the claim that concentration leads to increased profits. This became particularly relevant as inflation climbed and economists searched for causes.

The ITIF study examining the relationship between profits and concentration found that nonfinancial domestic profits as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) decreased when former Secretary of Labor Reich claimed concentration had increased. Profit shares are lower today than during the 1960s when antitrust regulators were far more proactive against mergers and acquisitions. Though profits are hard to measure over entire markets, the study did not find any relationship between them and the concentration in the market.

The evidence, then, does not indicate that profits, prices, and concentration have a concrete relationship. And the theory behind why they would runs into trouble when you look at the real-world practices of some feared bigger companies. In practice, accused “monopolists” such as Amazon are not often attacked for inflating prices but for harming competition by deflating prices. That’s because, in reality, large firms often have the lowest prices and markups.

The claim that consumer prices increase with concentration is far from settled fact. Yet it still has been used to block mergers under the structural presumption that they will create higher profits and prices on goods and thus harm consumers. Misinformation on the relationship between concentration and profits deprives consumers of the most efficient market, so such claims should be reexamined by antitrust policy makers in light of existing evidence.

The post Debunking Antitrust Assumptions: More Concentration in an Industry Doesn't Necessarily Mean Higher Prices appeared first on Reason.com.

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From Park v. Kim, decided today by the Second Circuit (Judges Barrington Parker, Allison Nathan, and Sarah Merriam); this is the 13th case I’ve seen in the last year in which AI-hallucinated citations were spotted:

We separately address the conduct of Park’s counsel, Attorney Jae S. Lee. Lee’s reply brief in this case includes a citation to a non-existent case, which she admits she generated using the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT. Because citation in a brief to a non-existent case suggests conduct that falls below the basic obligations of counsel, we refer Attorney Lee to the Court’s Grievance Panel, and further direct Attorney Lee to furnish a copy of this decision to her client, Plaintiff-Appellant Park….

Park’s reply brief in this appeal was initially due May 26, 2023. After seeking and receiving two extensions of time, Attorney Lee filed a defective reply brief on July 25, 2023, more than a week after the extended due date. On August 1, 2023, this Court notified Attorney Lee that the late-filed brief was defective, and set a deadline of August 9, 2023, by which to cure the defect and resubmit the brief. Attorney Lee did not file a compliant brief, and on August 14, 2023, this Court ordered the defective reply brief stricken from the docket. Attorney Lee finally filed the reply brief on September 9, 2023.

The reply brief cited only two court decisions. We were unable to locate the one cited as “Matter of Bourguignon v. Coordinated Behavioral Health Servs., Inc., 114 A.D.3d 947 (3d Dep’t 2014).” Appellant’s Reply Br. at 6. Accordingly, on November 20, 2023, we ordered Park to submit a copy of that decision to the Court by November 27, 2023. On November 29, 2023, Attorney Lee filed a Response with the Court explaining that she was “unable to furnish a copy of the decision.” Although Attorney Lee did not expressly indicate as much in her Response, the reason she could not provide a copy of the case is that it does not exist—and indeed, Attorney Lee refers to the case at one point as “this non-existent case.”

Attorney Lee’s Response states:

I encountered difficulties in locating a relevant case to establish a minimum wage for an injured worker lacking prior year income records for compensation determination …. Believing that applying the minimum wage to in injured worker in such circumstances under workers’ compensation law was uncontroversial, I invested considerable time searching for a case to support this position but was unsuccessful….

Consequently, I utilized the ChatGPT service, to which I am a subscribed and paying member, for assistance in case identification. ChatGPT was previously provided reliable information, such as locating sources for finding an antic furniture key. The case mentioned above was suggested by ChatGPT, I wish to clarify that I did not cite any specific reasoning or decision from this case.

All counsel that appear before this Court are bound to exercise professional judgment and responsibility, and to comply with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Among other obligations, Rule 11 provides that by presenting a submission to the court, an attorney “certifies that to the best of the person’s knowledge, information, and belief, formed after an inquiry reasonable under the circumstances … the claims, defenses, and other legal contentions are warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law or for establishing new law.” “Rule 11 imposes a duty on attorneys to certify that they have conducted a reasonable inquiry and have determined that any papers filed with the court are well grounded in fact, [and] legally tenable.” “Under Rule 11, a court may sanction an attorney for, among other things, misrepresenting facts or making frivolous legal arguments.”

At the very least, the duties imposed by Rule 11 require that attorneys read, and thereby confirm the existence and validity of, the legal authorities on which they rely. Indeed, we can think of no other way to ensure that the arguments made based on those authorities are “warranted by existing law,” Fed. R. Civ. P. 11(b)(2), or otherwise “legally tenable.” As a District Judge of this Circuit recently held when presented with non-existent precedent generated by ChatGPT: “A fake opinion is not ‘existing law’ and citation to a fake opinion does not provide a non-frivolous ground for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law, or for establishing new law. An attempt to persuade a court or oppose an adversary by relying on fake opinions is an abuse of the adversary system.” Mata v. Avianca, Inc. (S.D.N.Y. 2023).

Attorney Lee states that “it is important to recognize that ChatGPT represents a significant technological advancement,” and argues that “[i]t would be prudent for the court to advise legal professionals to exercise caution when utilizing this new technology.” Indeed, several courts have recently proposed or enacted local rules or orders specifically addressing the use of artificial intelligence tools before the court. {See, e.g., Notice of Proposed Amendment to 5th Cir. R. 32.3, U.S. Ct. of Appeals for the Fifth Cir., https://ift.tt/1V7RXr4 [https://ift.tt/ke7mnEf] (Proposed addition to local rule: “[C]ounsel and unrepresented filers must further certify that no generative artificial intelligence program was used in drafting the document presented for filing, or to the extent such a program was used, all generated text, including all citations and legal analysis, has been reviewed for accuracy and approved by a human.”); E.D. Tex. Loc. R. AT-3(m) (“If the lawyer, in the exercise of his or her professional legal judgment, believes that the client is best served by the use of technology (e.g., ChatGPT, Google Bard, Bing AI Chat, or generative artificial intelligence services), then the lawyer is cautioned that certain technologies may produce factually or legally inaccurate content and should never replace the lawyer’s most important asset—the exercise of independent legal judgment. If a lawyer chooses to employ technology in representing a client, the lawyer continues to be bound by the requirements of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11, Local Rule AT- 3, and all other applicable standards of practice and must review and verify any computer-generated content to ensure that it complies with all such standards.”); Self-Represented Litigants (SRL), U.S. Dist. Ct. for the E. Dist. of Mo., https://ift.tt/ovkUmJ5 [https://ift.tt/NOzQRgG] (“No portion of any pleading, written motion, or other paper may be drafted by any form of generative artificial intelligence. By presenting to the Court … a pleading, written motion, or other paper, self- represented parties and attorneys acknowledge they will be held responsible for its contents. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 11(b).”). But such a rule is not necessary to inform a licensed attorney, who is a member of the bar of this Court, that she must ensure that her submissions to the Court are accurate.

Attorney Lee’s submission of a brief relying on non-existent authority reveals that she failed to determine that the argument she made was “legally tenable.” The brief presents a false statement of law to this Court, and it appears that Attorney Lee made no inquiry, much less the reasonable inquiry required by Rule 11 and long-standing precedent, into the validity of the arguments she presented. We therefore REFER Attorney Lee to the Court’s Grievance Panel pursuant to Local Rule 46.2 for further investigation, and for consideration of a referral to the Committee on Admissions and Grievances….

Thanks to Andy Patterson for the pointer.

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