Category: reason

The Department of Justice is not waiting for Apple to file its formal objections to a judge’s order that they assist the FBI in getting access to the contents of San Bernardino terrorist Syed Farook’s iPhone. They’ve just filed a brief asking a judge in California to compel the company’s cooperation.

The DOJ is objecting to the characterization by Apple CEO Tim Cook that what the government is asking for could threaten the security of other apple products or of everybody else’s data privacy:

It’s one of those arguments that is technically correct yet hopes that everybody (or the judge, at least) ignores the entire encryption debate going on. Senators are literally right now drafting laws that would force tech companies to weaken encryption. We know full well that while the Farook case may be unique in its particulars, it is absurd to attempt to argue to act as though this will be an isolated request. And it, like many defenders of the order, hopes to disguise the issue with legalese. They’re not making Apple create “back doors” into encryption! They’re just making Apple bypass certain security features so that the FBI can more easily hack into the phone! That’s totally different.

More insultingly (but predictably), the order dismisses any effort on Apple’s part to fight for the data security of its users as a “marketing” issue to protect its brand name rather than actual concern about privacy rights.

All I can say to that, as an iPhone owner, is thank God somebody here is concerned the accessibility of my private, personal data. Because clearly the DOJ, based on the condescending and arrogant way it is responding to Apple’s concerns, does not.

Read the DOJ’s filing here.

Also: Why everybody should be worried about this push.

The Nova episode Rise of the Robots is half of double shot of PBS don’t-fear-the-tech documentaries, along with The Human Face of Big Data. Both are crisply written updates on the tech revolution that are somewhat airy on the dark underbellies of their subjects.

Much of Rise of the Robots revolves around a million-dollar contest among engineers to see whose robot can most quickly negotiate an obstacle course including eight simple tasks. But, television critic Glenn Garvin notices, Rise of the Robots takes little notice of the identity of the contest’s sponsor, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which over the years has spent a lot more time and money on developing Predator drones and Arclight missiles than on rescuing kittens from trees. It may well be true at, for the moment, the only targets really threatened by robots are the jobs of $15-an-hour “living wage” burger-flippers at fast-food restaurants—a Big Mac is not significantly more challenging than a pancake—but count on DARPA to extend their range as quickly as possible.

View this article.

The IRS is finally acting justly by retroactively applying new standards in civil forfeiture (that is, naked government theft) law to an older case out of North Carolina, as announced today by the Institute for Justice (I.J.).

I.J. represented the injured convenience store owner Ken Quran, who had his life savings taken from him for the “crime” of making withdrawals from his bank in amounts the federal government finds suspicious.

Details from an I.J. press release today:

Ken’s money was seized under so-called “structuring” laws. These laws were designed to target criminals evading bank-reporting requirements. But under IRS policy at the time of the seizure, the IRS applied the structuring laws to seize cash from individuals and businesses accused only of frequent under-$10,000 cash transactions.

The IRS changed its policies in October 2014 to prevent such seizures. But those changes came too late for people like Ken, whose property was seized before the policy change.

So, in July 2015, the Institute for Justice submitted a petition to the IRS on Ken’s behalf, arguing that the IRS should apply its policy retroactively to Ken’s case. The petition argued that the money “would not be seized—much less forfeited—under current government policy” and urged the IRS to “do the right thing and give the money back.”

This week, IJ sent a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen following up on the petition—and urging the IRS to act quickly to give Ken his money back.

Today’s letter states that Ken’s petition is granted “in full.”….

According to data obtained by the Institute for Justice from the IRS via the Freedom of Information Act, the IRS forfeited about $43 million in 618 structuring cases between 2007 and 2013 in which the IRS reported no suspicion of criminal activity other than the mere fact of sub-$10,000 cash deposits.

Jacob Sullum reported earlier this month on a very similar I.J. victory involving another North Carolina convenience store owner Lyndon McClellan, when the IRS was ordered to return his stolen cash plus interest and legal expenses.

Past Reason writings on the bullshit crime of “structuring”.

Institute for Justice video on the story:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), in a presidential campaign speech in South Carolina earlier this week, made it very clear that, despite any old Tea Party talk about shrinking government, he as president intends to spend more, more, and more on America’s military establishment. His military spending goals as percentage of GDP amount to a plan that, if applied this year, would have meant a military budget 23 percent higher than its actual $583 billion.

Benjamin Friedman at Cato points out the purely fiscal implications of this Cruzian dream. 

Cruz’s plan produces a massive increase in military spending: about $1.2 trillion over what would be Cruz’s first term and $2.6 trillion over eight years. Details on the chart are at the end of this post.

Cruz is unclear on how he’ll fund the buildup….The implication, standard among those trying to look fiscally responsible while throwing money at the military, is that you cut administration to pay for force structure. But Cruz doesn’t sustain the pretense beyond attacking the Pentagon’s “bloated bureaucracy and social experiments.” He never identifies what bureaucracy—commands, budget line or contracts—he’d axe. He doesn’t explain how to overcome the Pentagon’s tendency to increase overhead during buildups or betray concern about the meager results of past efforts to shift tail to tooth….

Cruz, of course, will not fund his buildup through taxes. Instead, the plan mentions selling federal assets, unspecified spending cuts, and tax revenue juiced by four or five percent annual growth. Wishful thinking seems a fair summary…

As Friedman further points out, none of Cruz’s spending or restructuring proposals are matched in any intelligent way with an overall plan for military strategy and purpose, in effect “spending a lot more to do what we are now doing. Like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and even Dick Cheney, Cruz’s rhetorical assaults on the Obama administration’s defense policy belie underlying agreement with its premises.”

Politico has more details on Cruz’s clumsy attempts to seem both a fiscal hawk and a military hawk, noting that he used to show more anti-spending backbone on the matter, at least occasionally:

[His] record on national security has come under fire in the presidential campaign. Rubio has criticized the Texas senator’s votes against the National Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes funding for the Pentagon, as well as his support for a budget from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that would have slowed defense spending.

At the same time, Cruz supported an amendment from Rubio himself last year that would have boosted defense spending by hundreds of billions over the next decade….

The biggest challenge he or any other Republican president would face is that the Budget Control Act — which limits both defense and non-defense discretionary spending — kicks back into effect next fall unless Congress acts to change the spending limits.

Even the Obama administration’s budget, which Republicans say is decimating the military, includes $100 billion more than the spending caps allow over the next five years.

The very concept of hard spending caps would have to be sacrificed for Cruz’s hat tip to an endlessly growing military-industrial complex independent of any larger vision of purpose or strategy for that military.

Will this affect Cruz’s quest to win over portions of the “liberty vote” that one might presume would have gone to Rand Paul, were he still in the race? In a likely attempt to appeal to them, Cruz has been outreaching to largely federally-owned Nevadans with a call for divesting federal ownership of its land in favor of the state government out West. Alternately, in another slap in their face, as Ed Krayewski reported yesterday, he’s on the government’s side against Apple and our privacy when it comes to the “decrypting the San Bernardino terror cell phone” argument.

Joel Kurtinitis wrote a long, detailed personal report that ran on Medium about his turn from Paul to Cruz in Iowa this year. Most of the critiques he and some fellow ex-Ron Paulites had of Rand Paul had to do with his being insufficiently protective of issues important to the evangelical right, like gay marriage, and for a general sense he’d “gone establishment” with his endorsements of other Republicans not beloved of Tea Party types.

Kurtinitis says that Cruz’s push for a government shutdown over Obamacare really caught their attention; then after some personal encounters with him on the stump in Iowa he and some other ex-Paul folk concluded:

Cruz spoke our language, and held his own on a wide range of liberty issues including state nullification, the military-industrial complex, and drug policy. There were some areas of disagreement, and his appeal to us wasn’t grounded in ideological purism, but in common policy goals. Still, even those who still had reservations came away with more respect for his candid approach and willingness to engage us directly.

For those of us who hold to ideological consistency as a value in both politicians and voters, one might think that Paul people who do value the Paulite perspective on “the military-industrial complex” might be disillusioned by this latest Cruz move.

While actual rigorous social science on this question of the Ron Paul vote of 2008/12, what they believed and wanted, and where they have gone, remains nonexistent as far as I’ve seen, certainly some observable facts of reality give reason to believe that lots of them have shifted to Cruz, at least in Iowa—and also that lots of them have shifted to Donald Trump (as seems more likely in New Hampshire, where nearly all areas Paul won in 2012 went Trump and only about 15 percent of primary voters seemed to be first-timers) and even Bernie Sanders, as some anecdotal evidence suggests.

Trying to hold such voters to intellectual coherence in a manner typical for a movement libertarian is likely a waste of time. Still, to the extent that anyone attracted to Paul was thus attracted for a couple of his primary characteristics—desire to curb government spending in general and military overreach specifically—Cruz isn’t exactly making himself desirable along those lines.

Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan and NYU statistician extraordinaire, has ducked out of an arranged debate on the topic: “Do GMOs [genetically modified organisms] present cause for moral concern?” Taleb was invited to participate because he and several colleagues had earlier published a very anti-GMO working paper, “The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms.” In that paper, Taleb and his colleagues claimed that “GMOs represent a public risk of global harm,” suggesting that GMOs could result in global “ecocide” and even perhaps “the extinction of human beings or all life on the planet.” Taleb, for unknown reasons, has now withdrawn from the debate. Never mind. Since I have already spent the time reporting and writing a refutation of his arguments, let’s go ahead and debate anyway.

View this article.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has published its annual report on “The Year in Hate and Extremism,” which as always includes its attempt to tally how many hate groups and how many anti-government “Patriot” groups exist in America. This year, both figures rose about 14 percent.

I have repeatedly made two criticisms of these counts and the ways they’re used. One problem is built in to the idea of measuring a movement’s strength by counting the number of groups on the ground. If an organization splinters, that suggests it’s getting weaker, but on these lists the disarray will show up as growth. The SPLC’s Mark Potok more or less acknowledges this problem in his write-up of the numbers this year. The “hardest core sectors of the white supremacist movement—white nationalists, neo-Nazis and racist skinheads—actually declined somewhat,” he notes, with the hate-group count going up because there are more Klan groups and black separatist organizations. But the Klan spike is “probably mainly accounted for” by the fact that two large Klans fell apart last year, leaving their adrift former members to form new grouplets.

I don’t doubt that there’s been some genuine growth in some of these movements. It’s plausible, for example, that the general recent increase in civil rights activism would include some growth on the separatist fringes. And Potok may be right that the outcome of the original Bundy standoff led more people to join militia-style groups. But the numbers being thrown around can be misleading.

That’s especially true when you run into my other recurring complaint—that people try to treat these lists as a proxy for the number of American willing to engage in right-wing terrorism. The problem is that they include nonviolent as well as violent organizations. (This year’s list of anti-government groups, for example, includes 44 chapters of Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, 24 chapters of the John Birch Society, a separate listing for “the John Birch Society Shop,” and the paleolibertarian website LewRockwell.com.) Nonviolent groups can be a stepping-stone to violence, but they can also pull people away from violence; in several cases, nonviolent activists have even turned would-be terrorists in. Potok never tries to account for those dynamics.

The SPLC does caution against using the list as a proxy for the terror threat in another, more self-serving way. Before this latest report came out, we saw several years in which its numbers of hate groups and anti-government groups were both declining. So the center took to playing up the specter of unorganized “lone wolf” violence, noting that such crimes can surge even as actual groups disappear. This year Potok combines the approaches, citing the increasing number of groups while also highlighting the threat of the loners.

So how much lone-wolf terror was there in 2015? The SPLC turns to another group for its answer:

According to a year-end report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “domestic extremist killers” slew more people in 2015 than in any year since 1995, when the Oklahoma City bombing left 168 men, women and children dead. Counting both political and other violence from extremists, the ADL said “a minimum of 52 people in the United States were killed by adherents of domestic extremist movement[s] in the past 12 months.”

If that number seem extraordinarily high, it’s because of that phrase “and other” sitting there between “political” and “violence.” The ADL’s count includes gang slayings, domestic violence, and other apolitical or ambiguous assaults in which the killer also happens to subscribe to an “extremist” worldview. According to the ADL’s bulletin, the number of ideologically motivated murders last year was not 52 but 34. That breaks down to 19 deaths in two Islamist attacks (the mass shootings in Chattanooga and San Bernardino) and 15 killings by people with views resembling the groups covered in the SPLC’s count, with the grisliest incident being the massacre of nine Charleston churchgoers in June. This may be more than usual, especially on the Islamist front, but it’s within the sort of random year-to-year fluctuations that you often see with rare crimes.

If you want to read the SPLC’s full report, it’s here. For a different view of the year that just ended, read my “2015: The Year in Fear.”

The Wall Street Journal appeared to have a scoop yesterday evening: Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr (R-N.C.) was drafting legislation that would actually institute criminal penalties against companies (like Apple) who resist or refuse orders to decipher encrypted messages on the tech devices they’ve created.

Given that Apple CEO Tim Cook is being very vocal about his company’s refusal to compromise iPhone security to help the FBI crack the phone possessed by deceased San Bernardino terrorist Syed Farook, the gesture appeared to be a threatening escalation in the conflict.

But it turns out such legislation is not happening … yet. A spokesperson for the senator said he was looking at tightening the rules surrounding encryption but was “not considering criminal penalties in his draft proposals.”

Burr is famously one of the anti-encryption politicians who simply doesn’t even want to listen to debate about the potential dangers of forcing tech device companies to compromise their security at the demands of law enforcement and prosecutors. He wants to push forward with legislation without a proposed commission to explore the solutions, saying “I don’t think a commission is necessarily the right thing when you know what the problem is. And we know what the problem is.”

But Burr has absolutely no interest in engaging or even acknowledging the potential negative consequences of his solutions, and he makes it abundantly clear in a USA Today commentary. All he cares about is Apple doing what they’re told and helping the government fight crime. He simply dismisses any complaints by saying that Apple isn’t being forced to decrypt the phone itself or provide an actual back door, a semantic argument that ignores a discussion of the potential consequences of what Apple is actually being asked to do. Indeed, even after attempting to suggest this is an isolated case, Burr makes it abundantly clear that he and like-minded folks want Apple to do this on demand in order to help fight the government fight crime. Every time security is deliberately weakened like this, the risk is elevated that the mechanism for breaching phones will escape the control of those responsible and will end up in the hands of criminals, hackers, or autocratic governments. (If you want to learn more about the risks from the government weakening encryption—read here).

It’s easy to suspect that the leaking of the possibility of criminal sanctions was the deliberate floating of the “stick” to punish stubbornness. Now that it’s been presented, stay tuned for the carrot. Here’s what consumers should be worried about: If the government forces Apple and Google and other tech companies to compromise their security, they’ll also have to shield these companies from the consequences if (and when) this all goes sour. If the government makes Apple compromise its security, and then mechanism for doing so gets out and Apple users are targeted for theft and fraud, the company would face tremendous liability. Say you have an iPhone. Apple creates a system to bypass your phone’s security. Somebody uses that system to get into your phone data and get access to your credit card information, for example. Wouldn’t you want to hold Apple legally responsible for knowingly compromising your security?

One likely solution: Shield Apple and other companies like it from legal liability for breaches. Keep consumers from suing them. The government would pretty much have to do this if it makes tech company cooperation mandatory. This was the “solution” in the Cybersecurity Act of 2015, included and passed in the recent budget omnibus. It encourages companies to share data about users and customers with government agencies for the goal of helping fight crime. But it also shields companies who participate from lawsuits over breaches as an incentive and a reward.

So as this fight spools out, definitely keep an eye out for that “compromise.” I have doubts that companies like Google or Apple will deliberately accept it, given how important their users feel their security is (Burr is losing a USA Today poll that was embedded within his own commentary). But liability protection could be implemented in legislation regardless, and it will be consumers who will be screwed over, both by increased risk of fraud and the inability to turn to the courts to hold companies liable.

A bill introduced in the Virginia state legislature would exempt law enforcement officers in the state from open records requests about their names, positions, job classifications, or any other “personal identifying information.”

The exemption applies to state and local police departments and sheriff’s offices, as well as special agents with Alcoholic Beverage Control, Virginia Marine Police, Department of Game and Inland Fisheries officers, Virginia Lotto investigators, Department of Conservation and Recreation officers, motor vehicles enforcement officials, and “animal protection police officers.”

The Virginian-Pilot reports that Sen. John Cosgrove (R-Chesapeake) told a subcommittee hearing that he introduced the bill as a response to a court ruling about The Virginian-Pilot‘s request for the names and positions of police officers across the state. The newspaper was compiling the information to “track officer movement from department to department” and examine “how often officers who got in trouble were able to find other jobs in law enforcement.”

The response to such an idea should be the state trying to set up its own such registry, not to expand open records exemptions so far as to keep the identities of all law enforcement officials secret from the public.

Cosgrove insisted the exemption was for officer safety. “I think this FOIA exemption is probably needed just because we want to make sure their safety is assured,” Cosgrove said of local police officers, “their families are not put at risk just because their information as law enforcement officers is available.”

Neither Cosgrove nor more than a dozen other law enforcement officers, legislators, academics, or open government advocates could provide an example of a police officer being targeted after his name was found through an open records request. Cosgrove told the subcommittee he was “sure” such examples could be found. “All you have to do is talk to any police department. They probably have a good illustration of that happening.”

The Pilot reports Virginia—which got an F and was ranked 38th by the Center for Public Integrity for access to public information—would be the first state with such a broad exemption for releasing the names of law enforcement government employees. Other states, like New Jersey and West Virginia, are exploring proposals of their own to shield the identity of some police officers from the public as a response to increased attention to incidents of police brutality around the country.

The state police union, which lobbies the legislature, supports the legislation, according to The Pilot. “What we’re trying to do is move the ball to the greatest extent possible,” executive director Wayne Huggins told The Poilot, “so as to provide protection and security for our folks.”

Welcome back to the Reason Weekly Contest! This week’s question is:

A few companies seem to be dominating the brand-spanking-new, app-connected sex toy market. There’s We-Vibe, and Evolved Novelties. Come up with the name of the next new app company in this growing field.

How to enter: Submissions should be e-mailed to contest@reason.com. Please include your name, city, and state. This week, kindly type “TOY” in the subject line. Entries are due by 11 p.m. Eastern Time, Monday, Feb. 22. Winners will appear on Feb. 26. In the case of identical or similar entries, the first one received gets credit. First prize is a one-year digital subscription to Reason magazine, plus bragging rights. While we appreciate kibbitzing in the comments below, you must email your answer to enter the contest. Feel free to enter more than once, and good luck!

And now for the results of last week’s contest: We asked you for the name of a proudly Libertarian beer or brewery and you served up:  

THE WINNER:

Atlas Chugged — Chris Roberts, Skokie, IL

SECOND PLACE:

Rand Pauli Girl — Joe Kristan

THIRD PLACE:

Foam Head On Me — Brian Huisman, Burlington Ontario

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Lundwig’s Fun Miesesterbrau — Fatwa Arbuckle

The Free Beer Project — Eric Larsen, West St. Paul, MN

Ryebert Nozick & John Stout Mill present: Lagerty for All — Alexander Krumbach, Sandy Springs, GA

Suds of Libeerty — Andrew Zavage, Philadelphia, PA

Who is John Malt? — Brian E., New York, NY

Free to Booze — Jason Bedrick, Chandler, AZ

Gold Standard Blonde — Rob Blazoff

Audit the Keg™ — Colin Blake, Boston, MA

All the Other Options Suck Brewery — Tom D, Phoenix, AZ

Anarchy, State and Brewtopia — Brett Hoffman, San Diego, CA

Don’t Tread on Yeast

Small Govern-Malt — Adam Kalsey

Stein Rand — Alex Listvinsky, Belmont, CA

Liberty on Tap — Scott Leslie, Fairfield, OH

State Smasher — J.D. Montgomery, Fairfax, VA

Live Free or Drink — S.H.

Galt’s Gulp — Andrew Killion, San Marcos, CA

Electoral Success — we have no idea what it tastes like — Norm B, New Park PA

TANSTAAFB (There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Beer) — Christopher P. Brown, Idlewylde, MD

Live Free or Get  Drunk Brewery — Ed Perovic, Winnetka, IL

Greenspan’s Flawed Model Ale — J.D.

Bitter About Government IPA

Austrian Style Ale

Miller Lite on Government — Tim Whalen, Manassas, VA

AND FROM THE COMMENTS

Bastiat’s

Made with Galted Barley

Regulate This

Fill your scooner with Lysander Spooner’s!

Road to Sudsdom?

No Borders Porters

Atlas Belched

Maltin Friedman

Goldwater

Elizabeth Nolan Brau

Barley Governed

Foster’s Small L lager

Even liberal economists think Bernie Sanders’ economic plans are complete nonsense.

Sanders’ plan to replace the nation’s health care financing mechanisms with a fully government-run single-payer system have drawn particular scrutiny, with Emory University health economist Kenneth Thorpe finding that, in order to pay for the plan, Sanders would need to impose a 14.3 percent payroll tax and his income-based “premium” (which is really a tax) at 5.7 percent. That’s more than double what the Sanders campaign has proposed. It is hardly surprising to find that Sanders has underestimated the tax hikes necessary to pay for his plan. The senator’s home state of Vermont killed a long-gestating plan to pursue state-based single payer after confronting the high tax hikes that would be necessary.

Thorpe’s estimate also undermines Sanders’ claim that under his plan, even with all the new taxes, most families would save money after accounting for the elimination of private health premiums. Thorpe, in contrast, estimates that 71 percent of working homes would actually see an increase in health care spending. Thorpe makes not secret of his generally low opinion of Sanders’ plan. He told The Huffington Post that it is “completely implausible.”

The basic problem with the Sanders health care plan is that he assumes that U.S. health care spending as a percentage of the economy, which at about 17 percent is by far the highest in the developed world, can be easily cut down to a size more comparable to many other countries, creating massive savings. But his plan provides no clear way to do that, except for the imposition of single-payer itself, and in fact would seem to be even more generous in its coverage than America’s current single-payer program, Medicare. He nods toward bringing down the cost of prescription drugs, but doesn’t note that pharmaceuticals only account for about 10 percent of health spending; even if drug spending was eliminated entirely, the U.S. would still be spending more than the rest of the world. 

Thorpe is not the only liberal economist to question Sanders’ attachment to economic reality. Former Obama administration economic adviser Austan Goolsbee recently said that  “the numbers don’t remotely add up.”

And in an open letter to Bernie Sanders this week, four former Democratic economic advisers, three of whom worked for President Obama, produced a harsh assessment of a paper authored by University of Amherst economist Gerard Friedman, and touted by the Sanders campaign, finding that Sanders’ economic plans would produce GDP growth in excess of 5 percent annually—even more than the already empty 4 percent growth target proposed by Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush.

“We are concerned to see the Sanders campaign citing extreme claims by Gerald Friedman about the effect of Senator Sanders’s economic plan—claims that cannot be supported by the economic evidence,” the letter says, adding later that, “As much as we wish it were so, no credible economic research supports economic impacts of these magnitudes.” In other words, they’re total hokum.

Paul Krugman has piled on too. In a column citing the economists’ letter, he argues that “these claims for the Sanders program aren’t just implausible, they’re embarrassing.”

There are various political agendas in play here, of course. This is one of many skirmishes in the left’s ongoing battle between its establishment and activist wings. These economists are all liberals of some stripe, but they are also establishment operators, and they are weighing in against an insurgent candidate. 

But there is also a clear worry that Sanders could end up discrediting the liberal economic agenda. Krugman, for example, writes that he is broadly supportive of higher taxes and an expanded social safety net, he believes that these rosy claims undermine the case for progressive programs:

Good ideas don’t have to be sold with fairy dust.

Mr. Sanders is calling for a large expansion of the U.S. social safety net, which is something I would like to see, too. But the problem with such a move is that it would probably create many losers as well as winners — a substantial number of Americans, mainly in the upper middle class, who would end up paying more in additional taxes than they would gain in enhanced benefits.

By endorsing outlandish economic claims, the Sanders campaign is basically signaling that it doesn’t believe its program can be sold on the merits, that it has to invoke a growth miracle to minimize the downsides of its vision. It is, in effect, confirming its critics’ worst suspicions.

Well, yes. And the reactions from Krugman and his peers confirm that critics are right to be suspicious that the end-state for progressive economic policy—the Bernie Sanders-endorsed democratic socialist extreme favored by activists on the ground—is a radical expansion of government built on economic claims that simply aren’t believable.