Tag: in-the-news

Today is May Day. Since 2007, I have advocated using this date as an international Victims of Communism Day. I outlined the rationale for this proposal (which was not my original idea) in my very first post on the subject:

May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their [authority]. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes’ millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so….

Our comparative neglect of communist crimes has serious costs. Victims of Communism Day can serve the dual purpose of appropriately commemorating the millions of victims, and diminishing the likelihood that such atrocities will recur. Just as Holocaust Memorial Day and other similar events promote awareness of the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, and radical nationalism, so Victims of Communism Day can increase awareness of the dangers of left-wing forms of totalitarianism, and government domination of the economy and civil society.

While communism is most closely associated with Russia, where the first communist regime was established, it had equally horrendous effects in other nations around the world. The highest death toll for a communist regime was not in Russia, but in China. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward was likely the biggest episode of mass murder in the entire history of the world.

November 7, 2017 was the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, which led to the establishment of the first-ever communist regime. On that day, I put up a post outlining some of the lessons to be learned from a century of experience with communism.  The post explains why most of the horrors perpetrated by communist regimes were intrinsic elements of the system. For the most part, they cannot be ascribed to circumstantial factors, such as flawed individual leaders, peculiarities of Russian and Chinese culture, or the absence of democracy. The latter probably did make the situation worse than it might have been otherwise. But, for reasons I explained in the same post, some form of dictatorship or oligarchy is probably inevitable in a socialist economic system in which the government controls all or nearly all of the economy.

While the influence of communist ideology has declined since its mid-twentieth century peak, it is far from dead. Largely unreformed communist regimes remain in power in Cuba and North Korea. In Venezuela, the Marxist government’s socialist policies have resulted in political repression, the starvation of children, and a massive refugee crisis—the biggest in the history of the Western hemisphere. The regime continues to hold on to power by means of repression, despite growing international and domestic opposition. The struggle for freedom in Venezuela is continues even as I write these words.

In Russia, the authoritarian regime of former KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin has embarked on a wholesale whitewashing of communism’s historical record. In China, the Communist Party remains in power (albeit after having abandoned many of its previous socialist economic polcies), and has recently become less tolerant of criticism of the mass murders of the Mao era (part of a more general turn towards greater repression). In the West, only a small minority advocates communism. But many more tend to downplay its evils, or are simply unaware of them.

In a 2012 post, I explained why May 1 is a better date for Victims of Communism Day than the available alternatives, such as November 7 (the anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia) and August 23 (the anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet Pact). I also addressed various possible objections to using May Day, including claims that the date should be reserved for the celebration of labor unions.

But, as explained in my 2013 Victims of Communism Day post, I would be happy to support a different date if it turns out to be easier to build a consensus around it. If another date is chosen, I would prefer November 7; not out of any desire to diminish the significance of communist atrocities in other nations, but because it marks the establishment of the very first communist regime. But I am more than willing to endorse almost any other date that could command broad support. Unless and until that happens, however, May 1 will continue to be Victims of Communism Day at the Volokh Conspiracy.

NOTE: Much of this post is adapted from last year’s Victims of Communism Day post.

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was hit with a 50-week prison sentence in a British court on Wednesday for jumping bail.

In 2012, Assange faced allegations of sexual assault, with Sweden requesting he be extradited to that country. As a result, Assange successfully sought refuge at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he stayed until Ecuadorian officials got tired of harboring him and revoked his asylum last month. British police quickly took him into custody.

“By entering the embassy, you deliberately put yourself out of reach, whilst remaining in the U.K.,” Judge Deborah Taylor said in court Wednesday, according to Sky News. “You remained there for nearly seven years, exploiting your privileged position to flout the law and advertise internationally your disdain for the law of this country.” His stay in the Ecuadorian Embassy cost British taxpayers 16 million pounds (about $21 million), Taylor said, as police had to continuously monitor the building until last month. “It’s difficult to envisage a more serious example of this offense,” Taylor said.

Swedish prosecutors have since dropped the assault charges against Assange. But as The New York Times notes, it’s possible they could reopen the case now that he’s no longer confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy. Assange’s efforts to seek asylum “undoubtedly affected the progress of the Swedish proceedings” regarding the sexual assault allegations, Taylor said, according to The Washington Post.

But to hear Assange’s attorney tell it, the whistleblower skipped out on his bail because he didn’t want to be extradited to the U.S. The WikiLeaks founder is perhaps most well-known for publishing hundreds of thousands of classified documents about the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s also been accused of working with the Russian government to release thousands of Democratic National Committee emails prior to the 2016 presidential election.

Assange “was living with overwhelming fear of being rendered to the U.S.,” his lawyer, Mark Summers, told the court, the Associated Press reported. Assange was worried U.S. authorities might send him to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, which is normally reserved for terrorists, Summers said.

In a letter that Summers read to the court, Assange expressed regret for some of his actions. “I apologized unreservedly to those who consider that I have disrespected them by the way I have pursued my case,” he wrote, per the BBC.

“I did what I thought at the time was the best and perhaps the only thing that could be done—which I hoped might lead to a legal resolution being reached between Ecuador and Sweden that would protect me from the worst of my fears,” the letter added. “I regret the course that this took; the difficulties were instead compounded and impacted upon very many others.”

But Taylor wasn’t buying it. “Whilst you may have had fears as to what may happen to you, nonetheless you had a choice, and the course of action you chose was to commit this offense,” she said.

So what comes next for Assange? On Thursday, he’ll be in court again. This hearing could determine whether he’s extradited to the U.S., where federal prosecutors have charged him with helping to crack a password stored on government computers in order to access classified information back in 2010.

The organization Assange founded, meanwhile, doesn’t think he’s getting a fair shake. “Julian Assange’s sentence is as shocking as it is vindictive,” the group wrote on Twitter following his sentence. “We have grave concerns as to whether he will receive a fair extradition hearing in the UK.”

For more Reason coverage of Julian Assange, you can click here.

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Dissatisfied with media coverage of the results of his investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, Special Counsel Robert Mueller wrote a letter to Attorney General William Barr in late March expressing frustration that Barr’s four-page memo to Congress summarizing Mueller’s findings “did not fully capture [their] context, nature, and substance.”

That’s according to The Washington Post, which obtained a copy of the letter on Tuesday. The Post did not publish the letter in full, which means we are relying here on their interpretation of a letter that supposedly complains about Barr’s interpretation of Mueller’s report. From The Post:

The letter and a subsequent phone call between the two men reveal the degree to which the longtime colleagues and friends disagreed as they handled the legally and politically fraught task of investigating the president. Democrats in Congress are likely to scrutinize Mueller’s complaints to Barr as they contemplate the prospect of opening impeachment proceedings and mull how hard to press for Mueller himself to testify publicly.

At the time Mueller’s letter was sent to Barr on March 27, Barr had days prior announced that Mueller did not find a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian officials seeking to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. In his memo to Congress, Barr also said that Mueller had not reached a conclusion about whether Trump had tried to obstruct justice, but that Barr reviewed the evidence and found it insufficient to support such a charge.

Days after Barr’s announcement, Mueller wrote the previously undisclosed private letter to the Justice Department, laying out his concerns in stark terms that shocked senior Justice Department officials, according to people familiar with the discussions.

“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

According to The Post, the two men talked on the phone after Barr received the letter, and this conversation was friendlier in nature.

Barr is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday and the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Barr previously testified that he didn’t know whether Mueller supported his conclusions.

FREE MINDS

“Camille Paglia should be removed from UArts faculty and replaced by a queer person of color,” reads a recent student-created petition calling for the firing of the legendary art critic whose views on gender and sex have occasionally offended the modern progressive left. “UArts: you are disrespecting your students and putting them in danger. Do better.”

This is hardly the first time Paglia has endured such calls. When her first book, Sexual Personae, was published in 1990, faculty members at Connecticut College compared it to Mein Kampf. At the time, it was intellectually curious students who defended the book.

Now the situation is largely reversed, notes The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf.

FREE MARKETS

The situation in Venezuela may be reaching a climax: Embattled dictator Nicolas Maduro had plans to flee the country but was convinced by Russian forces to stay, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed on Tuesday. Maduro disputes this. According to NPR:

U.S. officials have been characterizing the situation in Venezuela as nearing its endgame, and opposition leader Juan Guaidó called for the “final phase” of the uprising Tuesday in his attempt to remove Maduro from power. But Venezuela’s military handily stamped out pockets of resistance, and despite word from American officials that key Maduro allies are abandoning him, the country’s defense minister proclaimed his continuing loyalty. More than 50 countries support Guaidó’s claim to power.

QUICK HITS

• Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has appeared on video for the first time since 2014. The self-proclaimed caliph acknowledged ISIS’s loss of territory in Iraq and Syria but promised “there will be more to come after this battle.”
• Japan has a new emperor.
• Plymouth State University must pay $350,000 to an adjunct professor it fired for testifying in defense of a woman facing sexual assault charges.
• Jacob Wohl’s brilliant political strategy, in his own words: “make shit up.”
• Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) accused of violating the separation of church and state with “He is Risen” Easter post.
• The trailer for the upcoming Sonic the Hedgehog movie is the stuff of nightmares.

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Can a web site be liable for things its users post? No, the federal 47 U.S.C. § 230 statute generally provides, whether the posts are libelous, emotionally distressing, crime-promoting, or whatever else (with some exceptions, such as for federal intellectual property laws). But the sites are responsible for their own speech, and their own decisions that themselves create actionable speech.

To give an example from one leading case, the Ninth Circuit Roommates.com decision:

• A web site that features ads for roommates isn’t liable when users themselves post ads that contain discriminatory roommate preferences (even if the law can bar such discrimination in roommate selection, which is a separate question). That’s just the users’ own choice, for which they and only they can be held liable.
• But the site can be liable if it expressly requires subscribers to state such preferences, since then it is itself “develop[ing]” the legally punishable material.

Now say that a web site lets users post ads for gun transactions. Under § 230, it can’t be liable simply because some ad that users posted leads to an illegal transaction. But can it be liable on the theory that some of its design features, such as the ability to search for ads by private sellers, especially facilitate crimes? (Under federal law, private sellers, unlike professional gun dealers, don’t have to do a background check on their buyers; ads from such sellers might thus be especially useful to felons and others who would fail such a check.)

In Daniel v. Armlist, plaintiffs, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, and one Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court (Ann Walsh Bradley), said the site could indeed be liable for this. But the majority disagreed, and said there was no liability. First, the facts and the plaintiff’s theory:

[Plaintiff Yasmeen] Daniel’s tort action [for negligence, negligent infliction of emotional distress, civil conspiracy, aiding and abetting tortious conduct, public nuisance, and wrongful death] arose from a mass shooting in a Brookfield, Wisconsin spa that killed four people, including Daniel’s mother Zina Daniel Haughton. Daniel alleged that the shooter, Radcliffe Haughton, illegally purchased the firearm after responding to private seller Devin Linn’s post on Armslist’s firearm advertising website, armslist.com….

We disagree …. [Title] 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1) prohibits claims that treat Armslist, an interactive computer service provider, as the publisher or speaker of information posted by a third party on its website. Because all of Daniel’s claims for relief require Armslist to be treated as the publisher or speaker of information posted by third parties on armslist.com, her claims are barred by § 230(c)(1)….

Armslist.com is a classified advertising website similar to Craigslist. Prospective sellers may post advertisements for firearms and firearm-related products they wish to sell, prospective buyers may post “want advertisements” describing the firearms they wish to buy. Buyers and sellers may contact one another either through personal contact information they provide on the website, or by using armslist.com’s “contact” tool…. [T]here is no allegation that Armslist itself participates in the purchase and sale of firearms beyond allowing users to post and view advertisements and contact information on armslist.com.

According to Daniel’s allegations, Radcliffe shopped for the murder weapon exclusively on armslist.com because he recognized that the website’s design features made it easier for prohibited purchasers like him to illegally purchase firearms. Armslist.com allows potential buyers to use a “seller” search filter to specify that they want to buy firearms only from private sellers, rather than from federally licensed dealers. Private sellers, as opposed to federally licensed gun dealers, are not required to conduct background checks in Wisconsin. The website also does not require buyers or sellers to create accounts, which encourages anonymity, and displays next to each advertisement whether the account is registered or unregistered.

Armslist.com allows users to flag content for a number of different reasons, including “scam,” “miscategorized,” and “overpriced,” and uses these flags to delete certain posts. However, it does not allow users to flag content as “criminal” or “illegal” and does not take action to delete illegal content. The website contains no restrictions on who may create an account, or who may view or publish firearm advertisements using its website. The website’s lack of restrictions allows buyers to avoid state-mandated waiting periods and other requirements. Armslist does not provide private sellers with legal guidance as to federal and state laws governing the sale of firearms.

Daniel’s complaint also suggests several simple measures Armslist could have taken in order to reduce the known risk of illegal firearm sales to dangerous prohibited purchasers. Daniel alleges that Armslist could have required buyers to create accounts and provide information such as their name, address, and phone number. In states similar to Wisconsin, where there is online access to an individual’s criminal history, Armslist could have required potential buyers to upload their criminal history before their accounts were approved. She alleges Armslist could have allowed users to flag potentially illegal firearm sales. It could have prohibited users from obtaining one another’s contact information until Armslist confirmed their legal eligibility to buy and sell firearms. According to the complaint, all these measures would have reduced the risk of firearm sales to persons prohibited from owning a firearm.

Based on all these features and omissions, Daniel’s complaint alleges that Armslist knew or should have known that its website would put firearms in the hands of dangerous, prohibited purchasers, and that Armslist specifically designed its website to facilitate illegal transactions….

The court reviewed various § 230 precedents from other jurisdictions, and concluded that Armslist was immune from liability. Under § 230, the court held, Armslist could only be liable under state law for posts on its site to the extent that it actually “develop[ed] the content” of the posts by creating them or at least “materially contribut[ing]” to their illegality—and Armslist did not do so:

The concept of “neutral tools” provides a helpful analytical framework for figuring out whether a website’s design features materially contribute to the unlawfulness of third-party content. A “neutral tool” in the CDA context is a feature provided by an interactive computer service provider that can “be utilized for proper or improper purposes.” A defendant who provides a neutral tool that is subsequently used by a third party to create unlawful content will generally not be considered to have contributed to the content’s unlawfulness.

Examples of such neutral tools include a blank text box for users to describe what they are looking for in a roommate, a rating system that allows consumers to award businesses between one and five stars and write reviews, and a social media website that allows groups to create profile pages and invite members. All of these features can be used for lawful purposes, so the CDA immunizes interactive computer service providers from liability when these neutral tools are used for unlawful purposes.

This is true even when an interactive computer service provider knows, or should know, that its neutral tools are being used for illegal purposes…. [T]he difference between a neutral design feature and the development of unlawful content is the potential for lawful use…. [I]f a website’s design features can be used for lawful purposes, the CDA immunizes the website operator from liability when third parties use them for unlawful purposes. …

Daniel’s argument is based primarily on the assertion that Armslist’s design features make it easier for prohibited purchasers to illegally obtain firearms. She asserts that Armslist should have known, actually knew, or even intended that its website would facilitate illegal firearm sales to dangerous persons…. [But under § 230(c)(1),] the issue is not whether Armslist knew, or should have known, that its site would be used by third parties for illegal purposes. Instead, the issue is whether Armslist was an information content provider [and not solely a platform provider] with respect to Linn’s advertisement.

Armslist.com’s provision of an advertising forum and the related search functions are all “neutral tools” that can be used for lawful purposes. Sales of firearms by private sellers are lawful in Wisconsin. Further, private sellers in Wisconsin are not required to conduct background checks, and private sales are not subject to any mandatory waiting period. Accordingly, the option to search for offers from private sellers is a tool that may be used for lawful purposes.

The remainder of the design features referenced in Daniel’s complaint—lack of a “flag” option for illegal activity, failing to require users to create an account, failure to create restrictions on who may post or view advertisements, and failing to provide sufficient legal guidance to sellers—are voluntary precautions that the CDA permits but does not require. Whether or not Armslist knew illegal content was being posted on its site, it did not materially contribute to the content’s illegality.

Daniel attempts to evade the CDA by asserting that creators of armslist.com intended for the website to make illegal firearm sales easier. This is an attempt to distinguish this case from the litany of cases dismissing suits against website operators who failed to screen unlawful content. As the First Circuit has recognized, however, the allegation of intent is “a distinction without a difference” and does not affect CDA immunity….

The one outlier § 230 precedent is J.S. v. Village Voice Media Holdings, LLC (Wash. 2015), but the Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected it:

In J.S., which involved claims against the operator of backpage.com on substantially the same facts as in Jane Doe No. 1 v. Backpage.com, LLC (1st Cir. 2016), the plaintiffs made the same argument as the Jane Doe No. 1 plaintiffs, asserting that backpage.com was deliberately designed to facilitate sex trafficking. The Washington Supreme Court concluded that the plaintiffs’ allegation of intent was enough to escape the reach of the CDA…. [But] the Washington Supreme Court ignored the text of the CDA, and the overwhelming majority of cases interpreting it, by inserting an intent exception into § 230(c)(1)….

Sounds right to me. (Disclosure: My students and I filed an amicus brief on the losing side in J.S.)

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French prosecutors are investigating several of the “yellow vest” protesters for possible “contempt of a person carrying out public authority at a meeting.” They are accused of mocking recent suicides among police officers and shouting “commit suicide” at officers policing their protests.

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When the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published its opioid prescribing guidelines in 2016, the American Medical Association worried about “unintended consequences,” including “the potential effects of strict dosage and duration limits on patient care.” Since then those consequences, including needless suffering, despair, and suicides caused by involuntary dose reductions and patient abandonment, have become painfully clear, as the authors of the guidelines finally acknowledged last week.

Writing in The New England Journal of Medicine, the guidelines’ authors said their advice has been “misimplemented.” But they took no responsibility for the unintended yet foreseeable results of their recommendations, and their warning may be too little, too late for the innocent victims of the government’s cruelly misguided fight against opioid-related deaths, the vast majority of which involve illicit drugs rather than prescription analgesics.

The NEJM article echoed an April 10 letter in which CDC Director Robert Redfield emphasized that his agency “does not endorse mandated or abrupt dose reduction or discontinuation, as these actions can result in patient harm.” Redfield was responding to a March 6 letter in which more than 300 health professionals and addiction specialists, including three former drug czars, expressed concern about the fallout from the CDC’s guidelines.

The letter included reports from hundreds of patients around the country who have suffered as a result of policies and practices based on the guidelines. “Undertreated pain is killing me!” wrote a Syracuse, New York, patient with osteoarthritis and tethered spinal cord syndrome. “You don’t know me, you don’t walk in my shoes, you don’t have my nerve damage, and you don’t have to live with the thought of will today be the day that I kill myself because I can’t take the pain anymore,” said a patient in Washington, D.C.

“This policy is just cruel,” wrote a woman in Albany, California. “Every patient is an individual and should be treated with care and respect so they can live a functional life—and not given inappropriate or ineffective medication.”

When a document is as widely misconstrued as the CDC’s guidelines have been—by insurers, regulators, legislators, pharmacists, and law enforcement agencies as well as clinicians—it is fair to ask how the authors left themselves open to misinterpretation. According to the guidelines, doctors “should avoid increasing dosage” above 90 morphine milligram equivalents (MME) per day “or carefully justify a decision to titrate dosage” above that level.

The implication is that doses of 90 MME or more per day are rarely, if ever, medically justified. It is hardly a stretch for physicians with patients who exceed this arbitrary threshold, including patients who have been functioning well on high doses for years, to worry that they will be perceived as practicing outside the bounds of proper medical care.

Given the scrutiny that regulators and law enforcement agencies have been applying to doctors in recent years, prescribing practices portrayed as extreme and dubious by the CDC are apt to attract unwelcome attention that could jeopardize a physician’s livelihood and liberty. In this context, forced tapering and abandonment were predictable outcomes, even though the CDC guidelines say doctors should reduce doses only when the risks outweigh the benefits and describe the process as collaborative and consensual.

“We all warned of this outcome when the ‘guidelines’ were issued,” says Mark Ibsen, an emergency medicine physician in Helena, Montana. “The CDC guidelines have been as harmful as predicted, and the silence over three years has been criminal.”

Patrice Harris, the AMA’s president-elect, worries that “the guidelines have been misapplied so widely that it will be a challenge to undo the damage.” Lynn Webster, a former president of the American Academy of Pain Medicine, is even less optimistic.

“I am afraid that cultural attitudes, fears, misinformation, and prejudices are baked into the system,” Webster says. “It may take a generation before a more sensible and compassionate approach to treating people in pain with opioids is established.”

© Copyright 2019 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

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Socialists like Bernie Sanders tell us that “the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.”

That’s a lie.

Yes, rich people got absurdly rich. Last year, says Oxfam, “the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased (by) $2.5 billion a day.”

I say, so what?

The poor did not get poorer. Bernie’s wrong about that. The poor are much better off.

“As we’ve increased the number of billionaires around the world, extreme poverty has shrunk,” says former investment banker Carol Roth in my video about inequality.

She is right. Over the past 30 years, more than a billion people climbed out of extreme poverty. Thanks to capitalism, more than a billion people no longer struggle to survive on a few pennies a day.

Bernie is correct when he says that the wealth gap between rich and poor grew. In America over the last 40 years, the richest people got 200 percent richer, while poor Americans got just 32 percent richer. But again, so what?

Gaining 32 percent is a very good thing (all these numbers are adjusted for inflation).

Everyone’s better off, despite the improvement not being even. It never is.

Now the myth:

The media claim in America there’s “a lack of income mobility”—that people born poor are likely to stay poor.

Some do. It’s true that people with rich parents have a big advantage. But it’s a myth that Americans are locked into their economic class.

Economists at Harvard and Berkeley crunched the numbers and found most people born to the richest fifth of Americans fell out of that bracket within 20 years.

Likewise, most born to the poorest fifth climb to a higher quintile. Some make it all the way to the top.

In fact, says Roth, “3 out of 4 Americans will hit that top 20 percent at some point in their lifetime.”

You see America’s income mobility on the Forbes richest list. Most of the billionaires are self-made. They didn’t inherit money. They created their wealth.

Still, the very rich are ridiculously rich. The Forbes billionaires have more money than the bottom 64 percent of the U.S. population.

“Unfair!” say the progressives. “It doesn’t matter if nearly everyone got richer, income inequality itself is a huge problem.”

It’s “threatening to tear us apart!” says New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio.

It might, if people come to believe that inequality itself is evil. But one question: Why is that true?

Progressives like to point out that in Scandinavian countries, people say they are happier than Americans. Scandinavians have more equal incomes than Americans.

But that proves nothing. Incomes are more equal in Afghanistan, too. Incomes are more equal when everyone is poor.

Forget money for a moment and think about how impossible it would be to make everyone equal.

I’ll never sing as well as Adele or play basketball like LeBron. The best athletes, singers, dancers, etc., are just physically different. I’ll never be as self-confident as Donald Trump or as verbally smooth as AOC.

“There’s inequality in everything. There’s inequality in free time, inequality in parents. I don’t have any parents or grandparents,” says Roth. “I have two kidneys. There are people out there who need one, don’t have one that functions. Should the government take my kidney because somebody else needs it?”

I suggest to her that some people having so much more than others is just inherently unfair.

“Life is unfair!” she replied. “Unfair is good. Unfair is a feature. It’s not a bug!”

Certainly, it’s wrong if government makes rules that create inequality.

Racist laws forbidding some ethnic groups to do business where they please, or restricting where they live, are evil.

So are government subsidies to rich people and well-connected corporations.

But allowing people to be different from one another, to employ their unique talents and succeed or fail by them, to rise as high as the market will bear—that’s an important part of freedom.

We won’t all end up in the same place, but most of us will be more prosperous than if government decided our limits.

And we will be freer.

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To date, the new movie Avengers: Endgame has grossed over $1.3 billion worldwide, a testament to the popularity of the superhero franchise and the ability of Disney, which owns Marvel Studios, to deliver what an audience wants at a price it’s willing to pay.

But to Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, there is only exploitation and immiseration. “What would be truly heroic is if Disney used its profits from Avengers to pay all of its workers a middle class wage, instead of paying its CEO Bob Iger $65.6 million – over 1,400 times as much as the average worker at Disney makes,” he tweeted. If that sounds a bit familiar, it might be because a year ago the senator tweeted, “We need to SHAME Disney. I want to hear their moral justification that while making billions of dollars they have workers going hungry.” At a June 2018 rally, he also argued, “I want to hear the moral defense of a company that makes $9 billion in profits, $400 million for their CEOs and have a 30-year worker going hungry.”

Here’s a thought: Disney doesn’t need to make a moral justification to Bernie Sanders or anyone else about how it does business as long as it operates within the law. The purpose of a company isn’t to be all things to all people, especially to politicians who can threaten onerous regulation. Disney needs to be accountable to its shareholders (along multiple dimensions, not simply in terms of making money) and its customers, and it needs to be able to attract and keep employees for its various operations, including its theme parks, which Sanders is alluding to when talking about “30-year worker[s] going hungry.” An NPR report from last year included this comment from a worker at Disneyland in Anaheim, California:

“I’ve been 29 years with Disney. I only get $15.70 an hour,” an unnamed full-time concierge who is living with a friend told [researchers for The Coalition of Labor Resort Unions]. “Sometimes I go without food.”

Last summer, Disney reached an agreement to boost starting pay for most hourly workers at Disneyland to $15 an hour. It’s safe to assume that management caved for a variety of reasons, including bad publicity in the wake of Sanders’ comments, which came at a rally held in Anaheim. He also wrote an op-ed in The Guardian attacking Disney for being miserly in its pay. “At a time when the three wealthiest people in America own more wealth than the bottom half and corporate CEOs have seen their incomes skyrocket,” wrote Sanders, “we must create a moral economy which demands that if you work 40 hours a week, you do not live in poverty.”

If that is Sanders’ main demand, he can already declare victory and go home. In 2016 (the latest year for which I could find data), the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that just “3.1 percent of those usually employed full time” reported income below the poverty line. On that rudimentary but important score, the system is working just how Sanders wants. But more than that, Sanders’ rage at CEO compensation is a non sequitur. As Alex Edmans, a finance professor at the London Business School, writes,

CEOs and workers operate in very different markets, so there is no reason for their pay to be linked — just as a solo singer’s pay bears no relation to a bassist’s pay. This consideration explains why CEO pay has risen much more than worker pay. As an analogy, baseball player Alex Rodriguez was not clearly more talented than Babe Ruth, but he was paid far more because baseball had become a much bigger, more global industry by the time he was playing. Even if the best player is only slightly better than the next-best player at that position, the slight difference can have a huge effect on the team’s fortunes and revenues.

Just as the baseball industry has gotten bigger, so have firms (also due to the global marketplace), and so it is worth paying top dollar for top talent. Average firm size in the Fortune 500 today is $20 billion. Thus, even if a CEO contributes only 1% more to firm value than the next-best alternative, this contribution is worth $200 million — much higher than the $10 million average salary. Gabaix and Landier show that the sixfold increase in CEO pay since 1980 can be explained by the sixfold increase in firm size.

You can lop off pay for the top of a company and it’s not going to raise up the salaries for regular employees. At the same time, if a company keeps banking record profits and doesn’t share the wealth with its workforce, employees will start to defect (this is one of the reasons why corporate profits and employee compensation generally move in the same direction over time).

More importantly, if you care about improving the quality of life and living standards over time, the essential question is always about creating broad-based, sustainable economic growth. What are the conditions that are most likely to help the economy get bigger, stronger, and more resilient? At the top of the list is a government which promulgates simple, predictable, and widely enforced rules; spends within its limits and doesn’t pursue arbitrary trade wars and military interventions; and doesn’t bog down the future with an ever-increasing mountain of debt that tamps down growth and freezes out investment. Near the bottom of the list is something that is part of Sanders’ policy repertoire: Announcing bold new plans (Medicare for All! Free College for All!) without even pretending to know how to pay for them.

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President Donald Trump on Monday ordered new restrictions on those seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, including imposing fees on asylum applications and barring work permits from those who cross the border illegally.

The move comes as an influx of Central American migrants continues to flood the system. Many of those arriving are families that are released into neighboring border towns while they await a court date. The president’s actions also follow the resignation of Kirstjen Nielsen as secretary of homeland security, which reportedly came after she declined Trump’s request to stop accepting asylum seekers altogether.

A presidential memo, sent to Kevin McAleenan, the acting secretary of homeland security, further requires that asylum cases be adjudicated within 180 days. More than 850,000 cases are currently lodged in the court system with an average wait time of two years. 

“The purpose of this memorandum is to strengthen asylum procedures to safeguard our system against rampant abuse of our asylum process,” Trump said in the memo.

Administration officials have 90 days to create regulations in line with the restrictions stipulated by Trump. They are likely part of his deterrence strategy, made infamous by his “zero tolerance policy,” which endeavored to prosecute every adult who crossed the border illegally and soon led to family separations. The effort to dissuade would-be immigrants with harsher immigration enforcement has shown no measurable impact, however, as more than 103,000 undocumented migrants crossed the border in March.

The new restrictions will almost certainly be challenged in federal court. If they survive the inevitable legal challenges intact, the new fees on asylum applications could cripple the ability of some migrants—many of whom say they are fleeing humanitarian crises in their home countries—to seek asylum the legal way. Migrants are currently not charged any fees when applying for asylum protections.

Fees would also be placed on work permits, which allow migrants to legally obtain employment while awaiting their court hearings. Work permits would be revoked completely for those who crossed the border illegally until their asylum claims are adjudicated.

If border crossings are any indication, with March’s tally the highest in over a decade, asylum seekers without the necessary funds will almost certainly still make the trek. The thought of an application fee is considerably less spooky than the allegations of persecution many such migrants are fleeing—even for those who acknowledge they are only running from destitute financial conditions, which does not qualify for asylum. But they will be incentivized to cross illegally.

Trump has consistently railed against undocumented immigrants. In recent months, however, he has shown a new openness toward those that take the legal route. “I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever,” he said during his State of the Union Address. “But they have to come in legally.” His administration, however, is making it more and more difficult to do just that.

Trump’s aspiration to declutter the courts and adjudicate all cases within 180 days is a sensible one. But it would require a substantial investment in the system, which currently relies on approximately 400 judges to wade through the hundreds of thousands of cases that are rapidly piling up.

Keren Zwick, associate director of litigation for the National Immigrant Justice Center, told The Washington Post that processing the inflow of claims within that time frame would be a near impossible feat and would corrupt the integrity of the process. “There’s a fine line between quick adjudication and being railroaded through the system,” she said. “It’s not like asylum seekers want to sit here in limbo forever. But they also don’t want to be punished for seeking asylum.”

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Protests turned violent today in Venezuela as demonstrators opposed to President Nicholas Maduro clashed with security forces on the streets of Caracas. A brutal video obtained by multiple news organizations shows an armored police vehicle plowing into a crowd of opposition protesters, hitting several, and spraying others with water cannons.

Warning: the below footage depicts graphic violence.

Today’s protests follow a call earlier this morning for a military uprising from opposition leader Juan Guiadó, who released a three-minute video from a Caracas airbase, declaring that “the moment is now” and that soldiers who joined the opposition would be acting to protect the Venezuelan Constitution.

Venezuela’s socialist government dismissed the street protests as a coup attempt hatched by right-wing “traitors,” calling on Maduro supporters to rally at the presidential palace. Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza called out the U.S. government for instigating the violence, saying via Twitter that “the heads of the coup d’état admit their responsibility without scruples. The Trump administration, in its despair, attempts to spark an internal conflict in Venezuela. Venezuela’s democratic institutions guarantee peace in the country.”

The Trump administration has not been shy about endorsing the opposition protesters.

“The U.S. Government fully supports the Venezuelan people in their quest for freedom and democracy. Democracy cannot be defeated,” tweeted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Today interim President Juan Guaido announced start of Operación Libertad. The U.S. Government fully supports the Venezuelan people in their quest for freedom and democracy. Democracy cannot be defeated. #EstamosUnidosVE

— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) April 30, 2019

“To Juan Guaidó, the National Assembly and all the freedom-loving people of Venezuela who are taking to the streets today in #operacionlibertad—Estamos con ustedes! We are with you! America will stand with you until freedom & democracy are restored,” tweeted Vice President Mike Pence.

To @jguaido, the National Assembly and all the freedom-loving people of Venezuela who are taking to the streets today in #operacionlibertad—Estamos con ustedes! We are with you! America will stand with you until freedom & democracy are restored. Vayan con dios! #FreeVenezuela

— Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) April 30, 2019

In February, President Trump called for the Venezuelan military to abandon Maduro and support the Guiadó-led opposition.

Carlos Vecchio, the Venezuelan opposition’s envoy to Washington, said in a news conference earlier today that the U.S. played no role in coordinating today’s protests.

It’s currently unclear how many people have been injured as a result of today’s demonstrations. Despite Guiadó’s calls for a military uprising, and Maduro’s denunciation of the “coup” attempt, it’s also not clear how much military-backing the protesters are receiving.

According to the Associated Press, “demonstrators have been clashing with pro-Maduro troops, but the revolt so far seems to have only limited military backing.”

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