Category: reason

A senator once asked the head of Google’s self-driving vehicle program what sort of legislation was needed to help his industry. “What we have found in most places is that the best action is to take no action,” he replied, adding that “in general the technology can be safely tested today on roads in many states.”

Last week a congressional committee ignored that advice and took action.

In a bipartisan vote of 54–0, the House Energy and Commerce Committee has now forwarded the SELF DRIVE Act* for consideration by the full House of Representatives. (The Senate is working on similar legislation.) The bill’s goal is to set up a national regulatory framework to encourage the development and deployment of autonomous passenger vehicles. But why does Congress need to get involved with autonomous vehicle development at all? After all, between 1900 and 1965 automakers managed to put tens of millions of non-self-driving vehicles on the road – some 90 million by the mid-1960s – with essentially no interference from the federal government.

The federal government didn’t really get into the automobile regulation business until Congress created the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) in 1966. The immediate impetus behind the push to create the new federal automobile safety agency was the publication of Ralph Nader’s Unsafe At Any Speed: The Designed Dangers of the American Automobile, which claimed that GM’s Corvair had a tendency to roll and therefore was a “one-car accident.” In 1972, the very agency that Nader’s alarmism conjured into existence issued a report finding that the “Corvair compares favorably with contemporary vehicles used in the tests…the handling and stability performance of the 1960–63 Corvair does not result in an abnormal potential for loss of control or rollover, and it is at least as good as the performance of some contemporary vehicles both foreign and domestic.” In other words, federal automobile regulation was founded on activist misinformation.

Prior to 1966, automobiles somehow got fitted with such safety equipment as windshield wipers, headlights, and turn signals without federal intervention. (In 1939, Buick became the first U.S. automaker to offer factory-installed flashing turn signals.) Industry standards were generally devised not by bureaucrats but by the Society of Automotive Engineers.

On the postive side, the SELF DRIVE Act would preempt states from adopting their own rules for regulating “highly automated vehicles, automated driving systems, or components of automated driving systems.” A year ago, the California Department of Motor Vehicles proposed a draft regulation that would require all self-driving cars to have steering wheels, pedals, and a licensed, specially trained driver in the front seat. Fortunately, the agency recently backed off those requirements. Nevertheless, 20 states have passed legislation related to autonomous vehicles and 33 states have introduced yet more such legislation this year.

But that’s not all the bill would do. Among other things, it directs the secretary of transportation to issue within 24 months a final rule requiring autonomous vehicle manufacturers to submit safety assessment certifications; creates a Highly Automated Vehicle Advisory Council to undertake information-gathering activities, develop technical advice, and present best practices or recommendations to the Transportation Secretary; requires manufacturers to devise and submit cybersecurity plans; and prohibits manufacturers from selling highly automated vehicles until they have developed privacy plans with respect to the collection, use, sharing, and storage of information about vehicle owners and occupants. Perplexingly, the bill also protects state automobile dealer franchise laws that ban direct sales of cars. Since most autonomous vehicles will likely be operated as robotaxis, dealer franchises are likely to go the way of livery stables.

Curiously, the new bill requires that autonomous vehicles be as safe as conventional cars. Do folks in Congress really think that people would actually get in a robot car that they think is not at least as safe to ride in as a regular automobile? Just as conventional automakers affixed turn signals and windshield wipers to their vehicles, surely companies working on autonomous cars can be expected to add lidars, radar, cameras, GPS, and so forth without direction from regulators. Cybersecurity and privacy plans are great ideas—so great that autonomous car manufacturers are already addressing those issues.

This bill may be well-intentioned, but new federal regulations are more likely to hinder than to help the development of driverless vehicles. For more background, see my 2016 article, “Will Politicians Block Our Driverless Future?“

(* A tortured acronym: the Safely Ensuring Lives Future Deployment and Research In Vehicle Evolution Act.)

Lord Acton said, “Power tends to corrupt,” but it also tends to attract the already corrupt. The left stands to gain by taking this insight seriously, suggests Sheldon Richman.

Good-faith leftists, those who really care about people handicapped by corporatism, should find many public choice insights amenable to their cause. If they care about the economically disfranchised, they should be suspicious of welfare programs and health care plans concocted and run by the very perpetrators of that disfranchisement,arguse Richman. And they should take to heart the analyses of leftists such as Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, who have shown that the U.S government’s apparent beneficence (like Bismarck’s pioneering German welfare state) works by design to tamp down thoughts about radical change. Progress is the child of liberation from, not subordination to, the state.

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Possible police corruption caught in body camera footage has led to dozens of people being freed in Baltimore.

Prosecutors have decided to drop 34 gun- and/or drug-related cases in the city because they involve three police officers who participated in what appears to be planting drug evidence at a crime scene.

The incident was caught in the body camera footage by the officer who planted the evidence. He had planned to capture only the discovery of the drugs, but the body camera system that Baltimore police use is designed to also record the 30 seconds before the camera is formally switched on. In this case, the footage captured the officer deliberately planting the drugs, then pretending to “discover” them on the scene with two other officers.

The officer who planted the drugs has been suspended during the investigation of what happened. The other two have been moved to desk jobs.

Now prosecutors have to go back and look at all the other cases involving the three officers. They have announced that they’re dropping 34 cases. Others will likely be dropped soon—77 additional cases involving the officers are still under review. In 12 others, the authorities have decided to move forward with prosecutions due to independent corroborating evidence.

As The Baltimore Sun notes, there is now a second body camera video that suggests something similar might have happened in a previous case. During a drug arrest at a traffic stop, there’s a gap in video footage between the stop and the discovery of the drugs that led to the arrest.

It’s worth remembering that this all is happening because somebody at the public defender’s office in Baltimore noticed it and flagged it for prosecutors. Even after prosecutors had been informed, they used the officer in the center of the controversy to testify in another case without telling the defense attorney in that case what had happened. It was the public defender’s office who released the body camera footage to the public, not the prosecutors and not the police.

This is very clear evidence that police and prosecutors should not have the primary authority to dictate the terms for releasing body camera footage or dash camera footage to the public. Unfortunately, as police recordings become more commonplace and states have to figure out how to handle access, we’re seeing lawmakers slam the doors shut and declare that these recordings are exempt from public records laws in states such as Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

Instead, members of the public and media have to make the case to police and courts (if they can afford to do so) that some footage should be made public. Officials have wide latitude to decline.

Even though the public defender’s office pushed this matter forward, there’s still a significant problem here. The public defender’s office had this footage since April, but it didn’t get around to watching it closely until July. The man charged in this case was arrested back in January, was unable to afford bail, and had been sitting in jail the whole time.

When citizens have to depend on government officials to have access to footage, they’re stuck waiting for the gears of bureaucracy to turn. There are legitimate reasons for officials to protect the privacy of witnesses and investigatory processes that turn up in police video. But when police and prosecutors operate on the assumption of secrecy rather than openness for this kind of footage, you can get outcomes like this. Or worse yet, the incidents might never be uncovered at all.

In Seattle, sex must be a “leisure activity” for both parties or it’s nonconsensual, according to one area prosecutor. In a splashy Seattle Times feature in which local law enforcement play hero protagonists, Val Richey—a senior deputy prosecuting attorney for King County, Washington, and one of the driving forces behind the area’s anti-prostitution efforts—lays out his tortuous framework for treating all sex workers as victims of rape and, in this case, human trafficking.

“What you have is someone paying this person essentially to turn a ‘no’ into a ‘yes,'” Richey told the paper. “Because as several of the buyers…observed, these women, as a leisure activity, are not looking to have sex with 10 guys in a day. They’re doing it for the money.”

By that logic, anyone who wouldn’t perform their job without remuneration is a victim of labor trafficking!

But Richey is “adamant,” as the Times tells it, that what Korean sex workers in the area “were doing could not be called consensual because they were being paid.”

Alas, this is one of the folks who decide what offenses the county decides to prosecute and how those cases proceed. Richey was integral to the 2016 shutdown of a Seattle sex work forum called The Review Board, and along with it several “brothels” that primarily employed Korean women.

The Review Board case started out as an investigation into human trafficking. Finding no evidence of such, it then turned into a witchhunt against people who posted online prostitution reviews. At this point, more than two dozen men have been charged with promoting prostitution—a felony offense generally reserved for pimps, madams, and others intimately involved with the trade—for writing about alleged sexual escapades on a members-only website.

I’ve been following this story for over a year now, I’ve combed through copious court documents related to the case, and I’ve talked to many of the principal people involved. (See my feature from last fall for an expansive look at the case.) I can say confidently that the Seattle Times‘ telling of the story gets at least as much wrong as it gets right.

To her credit, writer Lynn Thompson does include perspectives from local sex workers, and she doesn’t overdramatize the basic facts of the case. She accurately describes The Review Board as a place where sex workers advertised and their customers—or “hobbyists,” as they called themselves—posted reviews and interacted with each other. Much of the initial coverage of the case erroneously identified it as a forum where men knowingly shopped for and evaluated “sex trafficking victims.” But numerous independent Seattle sex workers considered it a valuable resource both for marketing and for personal safety.

The article also accurately portrays the Korean sex workers involved as women who flew into town independently, worked out of upscale apartments where they were not confined, and were well-paid. Most would stay in town for a few weeks, working as a sort of temp contractor for one of the area’s “K Girl” agencies or renting a room from fellow Korean sex workers who had put down roots in the area, before heading to similar setups in other cities or back to where they regularly resided.

These women had mostly come to the U.S. on tourist or student visas, police say; they were not smuggled in illegally or brought here against their will. Officers from the King County Sheriff’s Office and the Bellevue Police Department made months’ worth of undercover visits to them before raiding the K-Girl “brothels” in January. If these were really “true victims of human trafficking” (as King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg described them at a press conference) who were being raped multiple times per day (as Richey asserts), how do police justify just letting it happen for months and months as they continued to build a case against the men who posted to The Review Board?

Of the 12 women police discovered during the raid, none elected to testify against any of the defendants or stay in contact with police. “Our approach was to allow the women who we recovered from these places to go, without requiring their testimony or requiring them to stay here,” Richey told me last summer. “Many of them I think just wanted to leave.”

But King County was determined to make a case, victims or no victims. Three people were arrested on human trafficking charges—charges later reduced to permitting and promoting prostitution. The worst that could be pinned on one of these so-called “human traffickers” was that “occasionally another woman would come and work” from her apartment, Richey told me. (The alleged trafficker in question was a Korean immigrant and sex worker herself.) As for the other two “traffickers,” ultimately “the evidence was more that [they were] providing a place” and “promoting the prostitution of numerous foreign nationals.”

The Times article reports that one these defendants, Donald Mueller, told the cops the women he employed were typically forced to work in prostitution to pay off debts they or their family owed to corrupt Korean money lenders. In fact, police claim Mueller told them that he likes to employ young Korean women because he found that many had racked up high amounts of credit-card debt. Mueller may not come across as sympathetic either way, but there’s a big difference between selling sexual services to pay off credit-card bills and selling sexual services because a nefarious loan shark is threatening to kill you otherwise. (It should also be noted that almost all of the more damning statements attributed to defendants are presented as paraphrased snippets of conversation, and are not backed up by any textual or recorded evidence.)

Similarly, Thompson’s article mischaracterizes The Review Board owner Sigurd Zitars as limiting ads from Asian women because Zitars was “alert to the possibility that the women were trafficking victims” and might thereby attract police attention.

Zitars did tell an undercover detective that he limited ads from Asian sex workers, according to the charging documents. But he explicitly stated that this was because cops think these women are trafficking victims, even though “that isn’t the case.” In the same conversation, Zitars allegedly lamented that all the money Barack Obama and “the feds” were funneling toward fighting human trafficking was actually being used to target consenting activity between adults.

Zitars fatally shot himself last summer, after having his name slandered across national media as a calculating sexual slaver who helped smuggle Korean women around the country.

The above are just a few of the details the Times gets wrong—small details, sure, but taken together they significantly shape the story in a certain direction and negate any neutrality the writer may have been striving toward.

Bottom line: King County law enforcement ruined dozens of people’s lives with this prosecution and put countless women at risk; a lot of Seattle sex workers complain that clients are now less willing to cooperate with screening measures, leaving those who can’t afford to be picky to take their chances. And all with nothing to show for it in terms of saving victims of sexual exploitation, stopping abusive predators, or discovering deeper criminal networks. The cops are the villains of this story, not the heroes.

• Season 1 of White House: Apprentice ended with John Kelly replacing Reince Priebus as chief of staff. Elaine Duke will replace Kelly as acting Secretary of Homeland Security for now.
• Ambassador Nikki Haley said there was “no point” in the United Nations discussing North Korea’s latest missile test and indicated that the U.S. was dropping efforts to work with China on a new Security Council resolution.
• NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill condemned President Trump’s supportive comments on police brutality, insisting suggesting the use of anything other than “reasonable and necessary” force was “irresponsible.”
• The U.S. condemned Venezuela for holding a vote for the legislature marred by violence that the State Department said was a step toward authoritarian rule.
• Russia has ordered the U.S. to cut its diplomatic staff in the country by 745.
• Saudi Arabia said a demand by Qatar to internationalize the holy sites in Mecca and Medina a “declaration of war.”
• Chris Christie scolded a heckling Cubs fan at a Milwaukee Brewers game.

Certain reforms can increase the store of liberty and equality at the same time—which means both gubernatorial candidates should find them worthy of support.

A. Barton Hinkle writes:

Principled political disagreements in the U.S. tend to revolve around two noble ideals: liberty and equality. Should a Christian baker be free to decline requests for gay-wedding cakes, or must he treat every customer the same? Should some Americans be forced to buy insurance to guarantee medical coverage for everyone?

Virginia’s race for governor entails similar contrasts, although less intensely. Democrat Ralph Northam and Republican Ed Gillespie both inhabit the political center, and they agree on a great deal.

But their differences generally break along the same lines. Gillespie wants to cut taxes, for instance; Northam calls Gillespie’s proposal a “giveaway to the rich.”

Yet the game doesn’t always have to be zero-sum.

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Adi Astl just wanted some stairs on a steep hill in Toronto’s Tom Riley Park. City officials told him it would cost $65,000 to $150,000 to build stairs there. So he went in and built his own for $550. Officials then declared those stairs a hazard and tore them down. They now promise to build a set of stairs there, and they say it will only cost $10,000.

Some conservatives were gratified to see President Donald Trump bar transgender people from the military. Those who pushed the ban believe it will resound with Trump voters. But during the campaign, Trump claimed to be a better friend to the LGBT community than Hillary Clinton, points out Steve Chapman. Trump also criticized North Carolina’s bathroom bill and invited Caitlyn Jenner to use any restroom she wanted at Trump Tower. Trump’s fans didn’t seem to mind.

A lot of conservative Republicans are not lining up with Trump, either. Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama—Alabama!—said, “You ought to treat everybody fairly, and you ought to give everybody a chance to serve.” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah—Utah!—said, “I don’t think we should be discriminating against anyone. Transgender people are people, and deserve the best we can do for them.”

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County officials in Virginia have cancelled plans to build a minor league baseball stadium that could have ended up costing taxpayers as much as $35 billion, but the team might soon be looking for a hand-out somewhere else.

Art Silber, owner of the single-A Potomac Nationals, a minor league affiliate of the nearby Washington Nationals, asked Prince William County officials to withdraw the stadium proposal last week. A planned vote on the stadium deal never materialized in the face of opposition from local taxpayers and two members of the county board of supervisors, according to Inside NoVa, a regional online news platform.

“He clearly saw that he did not have the votes for this to pass,” Supervisor Pete Candland, who had opposed the project throughout the process, told WTOP, a local TV affiliate.

The battle might be over, but the war could go on. Silber is considering other locations in northern Virginia for a new stadium, Inside NoVa reports, meaning that Prince William County’s win could be another area’s loss if local officials offer a similar deal to the minor league team.

Reason reported on the stadium proposal earlier this month, highlighting the role that Prince William County Supervisor Corey Stewart played in the process. Stewart ran for governor—and recently launched a bid to win the Republican nomination for Virginia’s 2018 senate election—promising to be a conservative who would oppose special interests, but he championed a stadium deal that would have included one of the largest public subsidies ever for a minor league ballpark.

Although Silber initially promised to pay for most of the new ballpark, the final plan that ended up before Prince William County officials in late June would have put taxpayers on the hook for at least $17 million to leasing land where the stadium was to be built, along with $7 million in infrastructure upgrades. Worse, the county would have been left holding the bag if the team was unable to make promised lease payments over the next three decades.

“Corporate welfare for professional sports teams is a bad call for taxpayers in Virginia,” says JC Hernandez, state director for Americans for Prosperity, a conservative grassroots group that helped to organize local opposition to the Potomac Nationals’ stadium deal. “Stadium subsidies regularly prove to be bad investments, yet sports owners consistently turn to taxpayers for handouts.”

The group is already preparing for the next fight by throwing its support behind a proposal from state Del. Michael Webert, R-18th District, to prohibit taxpayer financing for stadiums. Webert has submitted his bill to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group of conservative state lawmakers, where he hopes it will become a model for other states to follow.

That’s yet another sign of the growing political opposition to building stadiums with tax dollars. Earlier this year, Sens. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) and James Lankford (R–Okla.), proposed legislation in Congress to ban the use of tax exempt municipal bonds in financing stadium projects. Their bill would not mark the end of government-subsidized stadiums, but would close a major loophole that’s been exploited by cities from New York to San Diego in recent years. According to a recent analysis by the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank, since 2000, 45 major professional sports stadium projects have been financed in part by more than $13 billion in municipal bonds.

Congressional action could be helpful, but the fight against stadium subsidies ultimately has to be won at the local level, one place at a time. Chalk up a win in Virginia.

When a fellow Rollins College student accused Nicholas Mancini of sexual assault in January 2016, Mancini told campus investigators that his accuser had “initiated all physical contact with him ‘without asking for his consent.'” Mancini also maintained that the incident had been limited to some kissing, which his accuser had stopped, “stating that she should not ‘do this’ because she has a boyfriend.” According to Mancini, the college’s Title IX coordinator advised him “to not make a report concerning his Consent Complaint and threatened him to ‘stay quiet’ about his Consent Complaint.”

Mancini’s account may or may not be accurate, write Samantha Harris. It’s just one side of the story. Sexual misconduct hearings exist precisely for the purpose of resolving parties’ conflicting narratives and determining, as accurately as possible, who is telling the truth.

But Nicholas Mancini didn’t get a hearing.

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