Tag: in-the-news

Paying Too Much for Natural Gas? Thank the Jones Act.

The northeastern U.S. is in the midst of a natural gas shortage that a terrible, cronyist federal law is making it harder to solve. It appeared in April that President Donald Trump was thinking of easing the problem, but the latest news suggests otherwise.

The issue here is the Jones Act, a 100-year-old protectionist law that requires cargo being transported between U.S. ports to be put on U.S.-built ships and crewed by Americans.

Natural gas being produced in Southern states could be transported by ship up to the north. There are not enough pipelines to deliver it by land. There also aren’t enough Jones Act–compliant ships to comply with the law and deliver the gas domestically.

This has led to a particularly absurd outcome. Despite the fact that we produce our own natural gas, Massachusetts was left with little choice but to import it from Russia last year in order to meet demand. Bloomberg reports:

Oil industry leaders argue that the Jones Act restrictions undermine Trump’s American “energy dominance” agenda, by encouraging imports of foreign oil and gas despite abundant supplies inside the U.S. Russian LNG was delivered to Massachusetts last year to help supply consumers in the Northeast U.S. And inland oil refiners argue requirements to use U.S.-flagged vessels boost the costs of obtaining raw crude, effectively subsidizing foreign competitors.

“The Jones Act is completely contrary to the president’s energy agenda, in large measure because it encourages the importation of energy—diesel from Europe, LNG from Russia—rather than the use of energy made in America and developed and refined by American workers,” said Mike McKenna, a Republican energy strategist. “If you’re in favor of the Jones Act, you’re in favor of damaging consumers and helping very specific interests line their pockets at consumers’ expense.”

Those “very specific interests” are the domestic shipping industry and the lawmakers who represent them. They continue to prop up the law despite the fact that it punishes American consumers, particularly those who live in areas that depend on ports to receive goods. Hawaii and Puerto Rico pay exorbitant amounts of money to ship in goods from the mainland. It costs more to ship something from the continental U.S. to Puerto Rico than to nearby Jamaica, thanks to the Jones Act.

As with tariffs, the Jones Act doesn’t really accomplish the effects its supporters say it does. As the Cato Institute’s Colin Grabow notes, the Jones Act’s rules make it cost five times as much to build ships in the United States, so it’s just not worth it. The end result of the law has actually been a decline in domestic shipping even as the economy grows.

Trump had reportedly been considering a 10-year waiver from the Jones Act for natural gas shipping. But according to the Washington Examiner, Trump has now told Louisiana’s Republican senators that he won’t follow through.

As you read the defense of the Jones Act by these two Louisiana lawmakers below, again, keep in mind that one of the results of this law was that Massachusetts had to import gas from Russia:

“We cannot let the United States become dependent on foreign countries to transport energy and critical products within the United States,” [Sen.] Bill Cassidy said. “The Jones Act is essential to preserve our domestic shipping industry and protect our national and economic security.”

Sen. John Kennedy, also of Louisiana, released a similar statement, saying “after talking to President Trump, I am confident that he realizes how important the Jones Act is to Louisiana’s maritime industry and that no changes will be made.”

Other lawmakers who recognize that the Jones Act is essentially forcing the entire country to subsidize the private shipping industry have been trying to get rid of the antiquated law, but it’s got a tough road ahead.

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And Then There Were 22: Sen. Michael Bennet Enters the Presidential Race

Sen. Michael Bennet (D–Colo.) announced today he’ll seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2020. Bennet is one of 22 Democrats running, so he could have trouble setting himself apart.

“I think this country faces two enormous challenges,” Bennet tells CBS This Morning. “One is a lack of economic mobility and opportunity for most Americans and the other is the need to restore integrity to our government.”

Bennet has been a U.S. senator since 2009. Prior to that, he was the superintendent of Denver’s public school system. The 54-year-old announced last month that he’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer; he has since undergone surgery to have it removed.

To say that Bennet faces an uphill climb if he really wants to be president would be a massive understatement. He’s one of the seven incumbent U.S. senators seeking the nomination, meaning that nearly 15 percent of the Democratic-caucusing senators are running. And candidates like Sens. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), Cory Booker (D–N.J.), and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) undoubtedly have significantly more national name recognition than Bennet. Even lower-profile candidates, such as Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.), have an advantage over Bennet by virtue of having announced their runs more than a month ago.

And that’s not even considering former Vice President Joe Biden, who announced he was running last week and leads in most national polls. Bennet is not even the only Coloradoan running—former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, who used to employ Bennet as his chief of staff, has also thrown his hat in the race. A list of the Democrats running—with the exception of Miramar, Florida, Mayor Wayne Messam—is below. Montana Gov. Steve Bullock will reportedly announce his own presidential bid in the coming weeks as well.

Bennet realizes he doesn’t have the name recognition of some of the other candidates. “You probably don’t know me because I don’t go on cable news every night,” he says in a campaign announcement video. How does he feel about the sheer number of Democrats running? “This is the opportunity for us to show what we stand for, for us to have a competition of ideas,” he tells CBS. “I think it’s phenomenal that we’ve got as diverse an array of candidates as we have, in all respects, and that we’ve got the number that we have.”

So what does Bennet stand for? He’s something of a moderate—by 2019 standards, anyway—since he opposes Medicare for All and universal free college. “I don’t think 180 million Americans want to give up the insurance they already have through their work or their union,” he says in his announcement video. Bennet and Sen. Tim Kaine (D–Va.) previously introduced “Medicare X,” a plan that “would create a new public option for health insurance—an idea that was originally part of Obamacare but was jettisoned for being seen, at the time, as too progressive,” Politico reported in March.

Bennet wants to focus on “investing in education, from pre-school through college,” as well as in job training. “But I’m not going to pretend free college is the answer. I’m not going to say there’s a simple solution to a problem if I don’t believe there is one,” he says.

Other platform planks include reforming the campaign finance system, ending gerrymandering, and prohibiting members of Congress from becoming lobbyists after they leave office.

While Bennet is not one of the better-known 2020 presidential candidates, he has made headlines several times in recent months. In January, while parts of the federal government were shut down, he accused Sen. Ted Cruz of shedding “crocodile tears” after the Texas Republican said it was Democrats’ fault that federal employees weren’t being paid. In March, he slammed President Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for using eminent domain to build a wall on the U.S. Mexico border. Trump’s past remarks on eminent domain were “the kind of language you’d expect out of some autocrat someplace, not in a democracy,” Bennet said.

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Minnesota City Will Soak Taxpayers To Build a Water Park at the Mall of America

The Twin Cities have spent gobs of public money on new baseball, football, and soccer stadiums in recent years. Not to be outdone, a Minneapolis suburb is now planning to flush away $7.5 million designing what would be one of the country’s largest indoor water parks.

The city council of Bloomington, Minnesota, voted unanimously last month to team up with the privately owned Mall of America (located in Bloomington) on the water park project. That $7.5 million covers 75 percent of a development contract that will design the park; the Mall of America is paying for the other 25 percent. The mall plans to build the park on land currently occupied by a parking lot, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports.

The water park itself will be owned by a nonprofit that will lease the land from the corporation that owns the mall. If the water park failed to turn a profit, Bloomington would be allowed to impose a sales tax on the Mall of America to make up the difference—thanks to the state legislature, which passed a bill several years ago allowing the city to create a special sales tax zone specifically for the Mall of America.

“There really haven’t been any red lights that have popped up as this thing has been looked at and studied,” Mayor Gene Winstead tells the paper.

He must not be looking very hard. As the Star-Tribune previously reported, the Mall of America has sought for years to build a giant water park alongside the nation’s biggest shopping mall, but Mall executives don’t think the water park would generate enough revenue to be viable if it were privately funded.

That’s a pretty damn big red flag right there.

In the long run, taxpayers could be soaked for another $50 million to pay for a parking garage (or “parking ramp” in Minnesotan) and another $8 million in infrastructure upgrades to get the site ready.

The project doesn’t just look like a waste of Bloomington taxpayers’ money. It seems fundamentally unfair. There’s already a niche market for indoor water parks across the Upper Midwest, where they provide an easily accessible faux-tropical respite from the bitterly cold winters. If chains like Great Wolf Lodge—which owns an indoor water park literally right across the street from the Mall of America—and other privately owned  operations can survive without government handouts, there doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason for Bloomington to dive into that market.

“Cannibalizing existing business enterprises in order to add a new attraction for the Mall of America is bad strategy for long-term business development and tax stability,” Murray Hennessy, CEO of Great Wolf Resorts, wrote in a letter to the Bloomington City Council. “If the water park project does not perform as projected, to recoup losses, Bloomington would have to levy additional taxes on admissions, food/beverage, lodging and sales tax. The additional taxes would further hinder tourism, and burden residents who routinely visit the Mall of America with their families.”

After years of lobbying city officials and the state legislature, the mall seems to be closing in on getting the public funds it wants. Bloomington has approved what the Star-Tribune calls an “intricate plan” that “stretches the intended purpose of tax-exempt borrowing” to make all the numbers work.

“It appears like there is a desire by the [Mall of America] to have a water park attraction but not necessarily a tenant who wants to rent out the space and build it out to meet its needs,” says Kimberly Lowe, a Minnesota-based attorney who specializes in nonprofit law. She tells Reason that the city may be trying to help the mall because “traditional lenders” are now less willing to finance mall projects given the recent contraction in retail sales.

The logic, such that it is, seems much like the justification for spending public money on sports stadiums. Sure, those are privately owned facilities built for privately owned teams, but they sorta seem like public spaces, since they serve as a gathering point for so many people. But in the end they’re just cronyist giveaways to politically favored activities—a list that now apparently includes “watersliding.”

If the city cared to look for more red flags, it could cast its eyes south to Nashville, Tennessee, where city officials recently drained $14 million out of public accounts to help build a private water park at the Gaylord Opryland Resort, open exclusively to hotel guests. In a 2017 poll conducted by the Beacon Center of Tennessee, a pro-market think tank, voters named that water park project the second worst example of government waste in the state (trailing only a state-level economic development program that spent $67 milllion to create 55 jobs).

At least Bloomington’s taxpayer-funded water park won’t require a $250-per-night hotel stay for access, but that hardly justifies the project. If the Mall of America can’t make a splash without getting a handout, maybe it should stay out of the pool.

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Here Are 3 Bad Reasons We’re Still in Afghanistan

“[Y]ou can’t meet a general anywhere in the Pentagon who believes there is a military solution to the Afghan war,” Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) mused in a recent radio interview. “That’s the main question I harangue them with when they come up to Capitol Hill to testify before our committees: I say, ‘Is there a military solution?’ And they all admit there is none. There’s been mission creep that’s now nation building, but they all admit no military solution.”

So why are we still fighting America’s longest war? Why continue our military intervention in Afghanistan after nearly two decades, when there is no prospect of anything resembling success?

The question becomes all the more pressing given that key players in the Trump administration appear to agree with the Pentagon consensus Paul describes. President Donald Trump himself has repeatedly expressed a desire to end the war, and he ordered a partial reduction in the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan in December. His current secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has acknowledged that peace in Afghanistan will have to be achieved via Afghan-led negotiations, not U.S. military action. Former Defense Secretary James Mattis said the same, arguing last year there is no “military victory” available to the United States. Rather, he said, “the victory will be a political reconciliation.”

Paul proposed three explanations for this gap between word and deed. The first is a personnel matter: “The problem is that several of [Trump’s] advisers that he has appointed don’t necessarily agree with him” about getting out of Afghanistan, Paul said. “So they either countermand his sentiments or talk him into delaying actually ending the war.”

Trump’s national security advisers have been particularly pernicious in this regard. First the office was occupied by H.R. McMaster, who endorsed “state-building in places like Afghanistan and Iraq,” and consistently seemed to steer Trump toward unjustifiably aggressive foreign policies. The seat is now filled by John Bolton, whose complete and reckless hawkishness is detailed anew in a lengthy New Yorker profile this week. “Bolton is a hawk,” Trump reportedly said of his adviser shortly before hiring him. “He’s going to get us into a war.” At the very least he’s managed to keep us in half a dozen, and it is unlikely Trump will be able to deliver on his more sensible foreign policy impulses so long as voices like these have his ear.

The second problem Paul identified is that “there are still a number of people [in Washington] who are of what I call the Vietnam village strategy—take one more village and we’ll get a better negotiated settlement.” Pompeo certainly seems to be of this ilk, describing the U.S. position in the Afghan peace talks as one of ensuring the Taliban realizes “they can’t win on the ground militarily.”

While it is true the U.S. military can skirmish with the Taliban forever, this is no argument for prolonging the war. Pompeo is no doubt right that Taliban leadership understands it cannot trounce the most powerful military on the planet, but that hardly means continued U.S. intervention has the Taliban cornered. On the contrary, the group has been resurgent in recent years, gaining control over larger portions of the country even after massive and costly U.S. military efforts. And if that’s the case, as Paul said, “I don’t want to send my kid, your kid, or my nephew to Afghanistan—because if there is no military solution, what is one more death going to do over there?”

It is utterly indefensible to spill more blood and treasure to, at best, maintain a stalemate. Negotiations, already underway, will proceed with or without U.S. boots on the ground. If anything, American military exit might imbue the talks with a fresh sense of urgency, prompting necessary compromises neither side is presently willing to make.

The third delaying factor is how the mission has morphed. “[W]e just need to acknowledge that our original mission was to go after those who plotted or attacked us on 9/11,” Paul said, “and there’s frankly none of them left….We’re [now fighting] forces that are associated with forces that are associated with forces that are associated with somebody else. It’s so tangential to have any link to 9/11 that it really doesn’t exist.”

That calls into question the legality of this evolving intervention, since the original Authorization for Use of Military Force specifically cited the 9/11 attacks. It also raises serious practical and strategic concerns. It serves the interests of neither the U.S. nor local populations for Washington to perpetually police the world, moving endlessly from one parochial fight to another, offering military solutions to problems that need political and diplomatic resolutions orchestrated by the people whose lives they’ll affect.

Each of these obstacles—bad advice in Washington, a needless maintenance of stalemate, and strategically reckless mission creep—can and must be overcome if Trump really intends to make good on his promise of a new direction for American foreign policy. There is no military solution to be had here; it is time to simply come home.

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Anjelica Huston on Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, and Shitty Hollywood Men: Reason Roundup

Would she work with Woody Allen again? She would. I’ve been out of the loop the past few days, in recovery from having two wisdom teeth removed, but in my limited purview the best (and most controversial) thing on the internet in that time has been Vulture‘s interview with actress Anjelica Huston. In a wide-ranging interview conducted by Andrew Goldman, Huston touches on everything from her famous father to why she doesn’t like edibles, how Bill Murray snubbed her on the Life Aquatic set, Oprah’s beef with her, and Jack Nicholson’s cocaine habits.

Of course, the part that’s been generating some of the most attention is Huston saying she would work with Woody Allen again.

You were in two Woody Allen films, Crimes and Misdemeanors, alongside Mia Farrow, and then Manhattan Murder Mystery. Woody Allen is basically unable to make films now because of the outcry about the molestation allegations.
I think that’s after two states investigated him, and neither of them prosecuted him.

Well, the industry seems to be treating him as though he’s guilty. Would you work with him again?
Yeah, in a second.

Huston touches on Roman Polanski, too, in what critics have been describing as a “defense” of the disgraced director. But the answer given by Huston—whose “first serious boyfriend” was 42 when she was 18, and who earlier in the interview mentions wishing she could’ve been in Romeo & Juliet as a teen so she could’ve been “off in Italy having a romance on set with Franco Zeffirelli”—is more an offering of context than absolution:

You were arrested because you happened to be in Jack’s house when Roman Polanski raped 13-year-old Samantha Geimer. How did you feel about that?
Well, see, it’s a story that could’ve happened ten years before in England or France or Italy or Spain or Portugal, and no one would’ve heard anything about it. And that’s how these guys enjoy their time. It was a whole playboy movement in France when I was a young girl, 15, 16 years old, doing my first collections. You would go to Régine or Castel in Paris, and the older guys would all hit on you. Any club you cared to mention in Europe. It was de rigueur for most of those guys like Roman who had grown up with the European sensibility.

Huston situates Polanski’s attitudes and acts as products of their time period but also not all that different than the attitudes many men in Hollywood have toward women today. Far from downplaying the depravity, she refuses to simply position Polanski and/or that era as an anomaly which we can condemn from a safe and smug distance while congratulating everyone on how far they’ve come:

Among a lot of Hollywood men, it was acceptable at that time to treat women as though they were disposable. 
I think they’re still doing it. I was at the hairdresser’s yesterday, and I heard tales of such horror from women. There was one other client and two girls who were working in this rather small hairdressing shop. And one of the girls had been passed a Mickey Finn in a bar and had woken up on a couch with a guy ejaculating wildly all over her face. And as she was telling the story, another girl who worked in the salon came in and said, “The weirdest thing happened to my friend last night. She was found at four in the morning in the Wilshire district, coatless, shoeless, with scratches and bruises all over her body. She doesn’t know whether she was raped. So, I’m trying to stop her from having a bath because we need to get her to the police.”

Later, Goldman asks Huston if she had any “#MeToo experiences”:

Yeah, yeah.

What happened?
You’d have to ask me that on a daily basis, practically. That’s how often it happens, that you’re objectified, or misread, or put down. I think men do it a lot, and I don’t really think half the time they know what they’re doing. That’s how inured they are.

Huston goes on to describe Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as “all that believable.”

Throughout the interview, her answers are candid and colorful while failing to fall into neat liberal/conservative (or woke/canceled) lines. Ignore the Twitter haters, and read the whole thing for yourself here.

FREE MINDS

FOSTA lawsuit update. The group challenging FOSTA, last year’s law banning prostitution ads, just got a boost from an unlikely source: 21 state attorneys general. Cathy Gellis at Techdirt explains:

The important thing to remember about this appeal is that the question before the appeals court isn’t really about the constitutionality of FOSTA itself. What’s being appealed is the case having been dismissed for lack of standing by the plaintiffs. The district court never directly ruled on the constitutionality of the law; it only ruled that these plaintiffs had no right to complain about it to the courts. According to the district court these plaintiffs weren’t being hurt, or likely to be hurt, by FOSTA, and so it dismissed their case. What the parties are fighting about now is whether this assessment by the district court was right.

For the plaintiffs it makes sense to keep pressing the constitutional issue because shining a light on the unconstitutionality of the law illuminates the injury the unconstitutionality has already caused and will continue to cause. But the defense has a different and much simpler job. All the DOJ [Department of Justice] has to do to defend FOSTA is say is, “The district court was right. These people were not hurt by FOSTA and will not be hurt by FOSTA, so keep this case dismissed.” If the appeals court agrees that there has been no injury, and that there is unlikely to be any injury, then the case remains dismissed and this constitutional challenge goes away.

Thus, Justice Department’s defense has continued to be that the plaintiffs aren’t actually being harmed by FOSTA. And yet, Gellis writes,

that’s exactly what the amicus brief by the twenty-one state attorney generals does not do. Although it is intended to support the DOJ’s defense of the statute, rather than supporting the DOJ’s argument that the plaintiffs’ complaints are much ado about nothing, their brief instead reads as a bright flashing neon sign warning the court that there is plenty of reason for them to be worried. Because, in contrast to the DOJ’s arguments about what FOSTA does not do, this brief reads as a paean to everything FOSTA is going to let the states do, including to people just like the plaintiffs.

More here.

FREE MARKETS

“Democracy Dollars.” Senator and 2020 presidential hopeful Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.) yesterday proposed a plan to give every American $600 to give to politicians. Calling them “Democracy Dollars,” Gillibrand is trying to sell this as a way to give big-money interests and Washington insiders less influence in politics.

Nicholas Clairmount at The Independent has a good piece on why this such a bad plan. A sample:

First, it would simply multiply the amount of money in politics by an order of magnitude, with effects that wouldn’t be good for the political system at large, but would be good for ad buyers and PR flacks and political operatives….

There are roughly 235 million eligible voters in the United States. Say roughly half of them bothered to use the $600 (about 60 per cent of Americans vote in presidential years and about 40 per cent in midterm years). That means, conservatively, politicians would be looking at a little more than $70bn a cycle. What Gillibrand would have accomplished, then, if her initiative to deal with money in politics were hugely successful, would be to multiply the $6.5bn cesspit of corruption and division that is the long race for the White House by more than ten. I somehow doubt Washington’s lobbyist and political operative class hates this idea.

FOLLOWUP

The fallout and fanfare continues from yesterday’s grilling of Attorney General Bob Barr by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Reason‘s Eric Boehm has torn apart Lindsey Graham’s shameful performance during it.

Republicans certainly didn’t have a monopoly on disgusting displays of self-aggrandizement and partisan hackery. Democrats have been using this as an opportunity to demand that Barr resign over the testimony he gave yesterday. Barr’s departure would make many of us libertarians happy, but the grounds offered here just doesn’t cut it, alas. Still, flimsy pretense hasn’t stopped senators who are also 2020 presidential candidates from milking the opportunity for all they can…

Barr was supposed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee today, but he has decided against it “following a dispute between House Democrats and the nation’s top law enforcement officer over whether Barr would publicly face questions from committee staff attorneys,” reports CNN.

QUICK HITS

  • Foreign policy journalist Spencer Ackerman is writing a book about how the War on Terror contributed to America’s “nationalist moment.”
  • Florida is the latest state to ban plastic straws.
  • Celebs are jumping on the Equal Rights Amendment bandwagon:

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10 Colleges Where You Won’t Have To Walk on Eggshells

In recent years, dangerous trends and ideas about speech have been spilling from academia into the world beyond campus. Walking on eggshells, exercising extreme caution about respecting taboos, reporting colleagues for jokes overheard, and deflecting substantive arguments with ad hominem counterattacks may soon be common features of corporate and community life. College-bound students who want to master those skills can choose from a wide range of America’s top schools.

But perhaps you (and your kids) would prefer a different kind of academic culture: one that exposes students to a variety of views, teaches them skills of critical thinking so they learn to habitually ground claims in evidence, and emboldens them to speak up for what they think is true, good, and beautiful, while being open to arguments from their peers that they just might be wrong. If that’s what you’re seeking, you’ve come to the right place.

At Heterodox Academy, we’ve had a front row seat for the recent trials and tribulations of American higher education. We are an organization of more than 2,500 professors who believe that viewpoint diversity and freedom of inquiry are essential components of a good academic culture. We’ve spoken with dozens of college presidents and administrators about their efforts to broaden students’ minds and promote constructive disagreement. We have found that the great majority of presidents value free speech and open inquiry, but many face obstacles in translating those values into policies and implementing those policies into practices that shape culture.

Below we highlight 10 schools that stand out from the crowd, listed in alphabetical order. These are schools—large and small, public and private—where evidence suggests that students will have better odds of developing the habits of heart and mind necessary to thrive in a world of complexity, nuance, and difference.

Arizona State University

Tempe, Arizona

With an undergraduate enrollment just north of 61,000, students looking to engage with people who think differently than they do will surely find willing others here. ASU counts 24 members of Heterodox Academy among its faculty and administration, tied for the second highest total across the country. Its new School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership recently ran a speaker series on polarization and civil disagreement.

OpenMind, a free interactive platform designed to depolarize communities and foster mutual understanding, has been deployed by five professors in 13 courses on campus since 2017. Data collected by College Pulse show that 67 percent of the 2,575 ASU students surveyed feel that freedom of speech is secure on their campus, and 88 percent agreed that the ASU administration values free speech. Among a subsample of 918 students, 24 percent self-identify as libertarian.

ASU is also home to BridgeASU, one of the first chapters of BridgeUSA, a student organization that “create[s] an environment where students can come together and share their political views in a place where all views are accepted, but challenged.The goal is for everyone to figure out what they truly believe and to become more understanding of those with differing opinions by challenging and exposing ourselves to an open way of thinking.” BridgeASU hosts events such as a round-robin discussion that drew 175 people interested in hearing fresh perspectives on a range of political topics. The desert air seems hospitable to open inquiry.

Chapman University

Orange, California

Chapman President Daniele Struppa is an outspoken advocate of academic freedom and freedom of speech. In fall 2018, for example, a member of the Chapman faculty invited to class Max Landis, a screenwriter and producer accused of sexual assault. Students objected on moral grounds. In an op-ed piece published in the Chapman student newspaper, Struppa, alongside Dean of Students Jerry Price and Chief Information Officer Helen Norris, defended faculty members’ right to invite to class any speaker who will advance the class goals, writing, “The price of having academic freedom is that sometimes we will have speech we detest, or speakers we despise. We can’t have one without the other.”

Seventeen members of the Chapman faculty, including Struppa, are also members of Heterodox Academy. Many are involved in high-profile efforts, including the Economic Science Institute (which examines the role human institutions play in creating social rules and order and also builds and tests market and management systems) and the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy (which integrates humanities and economics). Chapman was among the first five institutional adopters of the Chicago Principles, which outline an institution’s specific commitments to protecting free speech and free expression.

Claremont McKenna College

Claremont, California

A small, private residential college, Claremont McKenna stands out among liberal arts schools for its administration’s commitment to open inquiry. In April 2017, shortly after protesters blocked others’ access to hear a speaker, both the dean and the president released statements affirming the community’s right to hear views and engage with controversial ideas.

Voter registration research conducted by Mitchell Langbert suggests a 3.7-to-1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans among tenured and tenure-track faculty members, making it a much more ideologically balanced faculty than on most other campuses included in the study. (For the sake of comparison, the overall average across all 51 top liberal arts institutions included in Langbert’s study was 12.7-to-1, with extreme outliers ranging from 120-to-1 to 136-to-1.) Nine members of the CMC faculty, including the academic dean, are members of Heterodox Academy. Students likely will take courses with professors who hold a variety of political views and who value open inquiry. Impressively, this small campus welcomes more than 100 ideologically diverse speakers each year to its Athenaeum, the campus hub of intellectual engagement.

The college’s new Open Academy initiative, which comes with a $20 million price tag and a 10-year commitment, will further enable students to develop the intellectual and social skills needed to express themselves, debate with respect, and listen actively. In addition, supported by a significant grant from the Mellon Foundation, professors from different ideological vantage points co-teach courses, providing students with models for—and practice at—developing a common understanding of critical issues. In fall 2018, Jon Shields, a CMC professor of government, and Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology at Pitzer College, co-taught a class titled “The University Blacklist” in which students read the books of controversial speakers before coming to a position on the scholars’ ideas.

Kansas State University

Manhattan, Kansas

According to College Pulse, 90 percent of the 332 K-State students surveyed agreed with the statement, “In general, my school’s administration values free speech.” Seventy percent felt that freedom of speech is secure on their campus. These are positive indicators of a campus community engaged with ideas and each other, and they suggest that the values espoused in the school’s freedom of expression statement are manifest on campus.

In addition to a reasonably balanced voter registration ratio of 4.9 Democrats to each Republican, seven members of the K-State faculty are members of Heterodox Academy. And among a small sample of 95 students surveyed by College Pulse, 26 percent self-identified as libertarian.

K-State is home to the Institute for Civic Discourse and Democracy, whose mission is “to build community capacity for informed, engaged, civil deliberation” with a vision for “stronger democracy through enhanced public deliberation.” K-State offers undergraduates the opportunity to earn a Primary Texts Certificate by taking “courses emphasizing original works instead of textbooks,” akin to a minor in Great Books.

Kenyon College

Gambier, Ohio

Situated 45 miles outside Columbus, Kenyon is a small, private liberal arts college with a total undergraduate enrollment of approximately 1,700. By virtue of a 2.7-to-1 Democrat-to-Republican ratio among the faculty, students are essentially guaranteed to learn alongside both liberal and conservative faculty. Kenyon’s freedom of expression statement sets the stage for the Kenyon Listens series, during which community members engage in structured, topical dialogues about issues, including their sense of belonging, ability to speak freely, and experiences with openness and trust.

BridgeKenyon, one of several student groups committed to promoting constructive dialogue, meets weekly to engage diverse political viewpoints, discuss politics on campus, and learn good practices of debate. The Center for the Study of American Democracy promotes the exploration of America’s history, culture, and politics. According to the center’s website, “Kenyon always has prided itself on a dedication to debating the issues of the day, no matter how controversial, through deliberative inquiry and civil, probing conversation. Drawing on this tradition, the Center for the Study of American Democracy seeks open debate toward a subtle understanding of history, timeless questions, and fundamental principles.”

Linn-Benton Community College

Albany, Oregon

Located between Portland and Eugene in a perfectly purple district (in aggregate, voters there do not lean toward either major political party), LBCC is a small community college that has made big strides in creating a campus that welcomes and celebrates viewpoint diversity. In an October 2018 report, President Greg Hamann, reflecting on the college’s new freedom of expression and academic freedom policy, said, “We now need to live individually and collectively in ways that respect and promote these freedoms, and we need to learn how to do so in ways that develop and preserve the culture of inclusion that we seek.”

Students concerned about the absence of deep engagement across political divides created the LBCC Civil Discourse Club, which promotes dialogue that enhances understanding among individuals with diverse viewpoints in an open and respectful manner. The club has just four rules of etiquette: no partisan attacks, no self-promotion, substantiate your claims, no personal attacks. In spring 2018, LBCC deployed Heterodox Academy’s Campus Expression Survey to figure out which groups of students were afraid to engage which topics and why. With results in hand, the school has launched a series of campus conversations and initiatives designed to strengthen an already strong campus expression climate.

Purdue University

Lafayette, Indiana

In May 2015, by an act of its Board of Trustees, Purdue became the first public university to endorse the Chicago Principles, a decision supported by the governing bodies of the undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty. New and existing programs and initiatives suggest Purdue’s commitment to open inquiry extends beyond that mere statement. For example, a new political discourse club seeks to counter broader political polarization by engaging in moderated discussions about divisive political topics. The first-year student orientation program features a freedom of expression module that teaches incoming students about the First Amendment, its relevance to Purdue as a public university, and their rights and responsibilities within a community committed to open inquiry.

President Mitch Daniels speaks frequently and passionately about the importance of free and open inquiry, and hosts speakers such as Ben Domenech, publisher of The Federalist, and Ezra Klein, co-founder of Vox, for conversations about the state of free speech and political discourse. In a message to the Purdue community at the start of the 2017 school year, Daniels and interim provost Jay Akridge wrote, “At Purdue, we protect and promote the right to free and open inquiry in all matters and guarantee all members of the University community the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn. But with this right comes responsibility. As Boilermakers, we must continue to hold ourselves to a higher standard that begins with civility and respect for others.”

St. John’s College

Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico

“Johnnies question everything: their world, each other, and themselves,” states the St. John’s College website. Our research supports this claim. The curriculum consists of more than 200 great books, which the students read and discuss alongside members of the faculty, who are called “tutors” in recognition that their job is to guide students in how to think rather than to profess knowledge, as a professor might do. Close reading, textual analysis, and student questions center small seminar discussions, which never exceed 20 students and usually have two tutors.

Each Friday night, when politically diverse speakers enter the back of the auditorium, the campus community rises to welcome the speaker, ready to engage with respect and rigor. These Friday night lectures, which are faithfully attended by a significant percentage of faculty and students, are always followed by a “question period,” which continues until the last question has been addressed, often hours after the lecture itself has ended, a testament to the seriousness with which the students and faculty engage each other and big ideas.

“Knowing that all questions will be addressed allows our students and faculty to feel that even if they disagree with the speaker, they will have the opportunity to express their own opinions,” says Panayiotis Kanelos, president of St. John’s College in Annapolis. “This is what is often missing when speakers speak on campuses—the feeling that communication will flow in both directions. Knowing that there will be opportunity for exchange and dialogue allows everyone to be more generous in hearing out opinions that differ from their own.” Voter registration data shows a ratio of 2.9 Democrats to each Republican on the college’s faculty, making it one of the most politically balanced in the United States.

University of Chicago

Chicago, Illinois

In 2014, predating the current expression controversies on campus and thus with great foresight, the University of Chicago created its “Statement on Principles of Free Expression” (a.k.a. the Chicago Principles). It provides a framework for thinking about the importance of dissent and the role of the university as a platform for debate. These principles, or substantially similar ones, have since been adopted by 55 schools across the country.

“The University of Chicago,” notes President Robert Zimmer on the school’s website, “is distinctive in many respects, but perhaps in none more so than our singular commitment to rigorous inquiry that demands multiple and often competing perspectives. We have an obligation to see that the greatest variety of perspectives is brought to bear on the issues before us as scholars and citizens.” The college attracts stellar students and faculty by promising that “here, your ideas will be heard, supported, questioned, tested, and honed.” In June 2018, the University of Chicago received Heterodox Academy’s Institutional Excellence Award in recognition of the stellar culture it creates in support of open inquiry.

As University of Chicago cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder observes in Rob Montz’s Silence U video about the university, “You’re entering a rather special place: an institution that’s dedicated to asking deep questions, being willing to challenge received truths. The University of Chicago is off the scale in terms of intellectual intensity.”

University of Richmond

Richmond, Virginia

University of Richmond student Riley Blake shared the following in an op-ed published last fall in the student newspaper: “I’ve never felt threatened or intimidated for voicing my conservative beliefs in the classroom or in The Collegian. I’ve never worried that I’ll hurt my grade by expressing an opinion different from my professors’. In fact, I’ve often felt the opposite was true. Professors and students at UR will go out of their way to hear an opposing view, because they realize it will make them better academics.”

Last fall, as the University of Richmond community considered adopting a free speech resolution, the College Democrats and College Republicans co-authored an op-ed piece for The Collegian in support of the resolution, noting, “In our search for truth, we may stumble over ideas that challenge us or that we reject, but that is no reason to shy away from the search. Rather, it is reason to embolden ourselves and find those few great truths that enhance life. In our search, what is the worst we will find? Truth, and with truth may come a burden that what we find may not fit into our beliefs and ideologies, but that is the life we choose at a university.”

President Ron Crutcher’s principled leadership on these issues has set the tone for the campus. In a summer 2018 article for The Hechinger Report, an education news website that covers inequality and innovation, Crutcher reflected on a Gallup/Knight Foundation survey finding that 61 percent of students nationwide felt the climate on their campus prevented some people from speaking freely. He committed himself and his administration to being “unapologetic champions for the free and open exchange of ideas and for the potential of debate and discussion to transform society.” He continued: “This is the purpose of higher education: to interrogate truths, support arguments with fact and reason, discover new knowledge and create greater understanding. We know that students learn best when they’re challenged to tackle hard questions, and when they’re taught to have these conversations in thoughtful ways. Colleges and universities are uniquely positioned, and have an explicit responsibility, to model substantive disagreement and dialogue that foster change—to give students information they can take into the classroom, living room, workplace and voting booth.”

Crutcher takes an active role in crafting and hosting the Sharp Viewpoint Series, which brings people with varied ideological perspectives to campus to converse with the community about challenging social and political issues.

These are just a few of the colleges actively working to cultivate campus climates that support open inquiry and welcome diverse people with diverse viewpoints. Here are five strategies you can use to assess whether a particular school is doing so as well:

· Visit Heterodox Academy to see how many professors and administrators at the college publicly support the following statement: “I believe that university life requires that people with diverse viewpoints and perspectives encounter each other in an environment where they feel free to speak up and challenge each other. I am concerned that many academic fields and universities currently lack sufficient viewpoint diversity. I support viewpoint diversity, mutual understanding, and constructive disagreement in my academic field, my institution, my department, and my classroom.”

· Visit the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to see if the school gets a “green light” for its speech codes and policies, and to see if it has endorsed the Chicago Principles or a similar statement, such as the excellent one crafted at Colgate University, in support of open inquiry. (Search “Chicago Statement: University and Faculty Body Support” on the FIRE website.) While there, also check whether the leaders of the school have issued any public statements in support of free and open inquiry. Wesleyan University President Michael Roth, for example, has made 20 such statements, a clear signal of strong leadership on these issues. (Search “Leader Statements” on the FIRE website.)

· Search the college’s website for phrases such as “open inquiry,” “freedom of expression,” and “freedom of speech.”In doing so, you may find references to classes, institutes, or policies that will help characterize the institution’s orientation toward these issues. On the website of Bard College, for example, this search highlights the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, “the world’s most expansive home for bold and risky humanities thinking about our political world inspired by the spirit of Hannah Arendt, the leading thinker of politics and active citizenship in the modern era.”

· Poke around the college’s calendar of events for evidence that speakers with diverse perspectives are regularly invited to campus. Pay special attention to signs of a well-conceived speaker series that deliberately puts a range of perspectives into conversation around a challenging topic.

· Visit the campus. Take the admissions tour. Talk with actual students about their experiences and their read on the campus expression climate. Whatever your politics, ask conservative, progressive, and libertarian students if they feel free to speak up in class. We recommend asking the following questions to help characterize the expression climate on campus:

  • Does your student orientation discuss civility, viewpoint diversity, or academic freedom?
  • Does the college have a speaker series featuring people with diverse views?
  • How many speakers have been disrupted by protests in recent years?
  • How often do student groups of differing political orientation host events together?
  • Are the professors open to differing opinions?
  • Are students welcome to share their perspectives in class if most others disagree?

As our list of schools suggests, institutions of any type and size can differentiate themselves by emphasizing open inquiry in their curricular and co-curricular efforts. By welcoming diverse people with diverse views to campus—and, crucially, creating opportunities for the community to learn and practice nuanced, respectful engagement—colleges can both advance their core academic mission and equip graduates to thrive in their post-graduation pursuits.

As part of Heterodox Academy’s effort to highlight and celebrate institutions that are leading the way in advancing open inquiry and viewpoint diversity, we will continue to build this list based on our research and your recommendations. If you would like to put a school on our radar, please email us at HxAcademies@heterodoxacademy.org.

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Trump Keeps Spreading Terrible Ideas About Trade

The United States has been plagued with uncertainty ever since President Donald Trump started his trade disputes with many of our trading partners. From steel and aluminum tariffs to renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and replacing it with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), trade rules have been in flux, with U.S. consumers caught in the crossfire—and with no end in sight.

This drama started in March 2018, when the Trump administration announced that it would impose 25 percent tariffs on steel and 10 percent tariffs on aluminum for imports from all countries that he deemed to be treating America unfairly. The duties were levied in the name of national security, even though they would actually punish many of our NATO allies. At the time, the administration made no secret about the fact that it planned to use the tariffs as leverage to renegotiate the 25-year-old NAFTA with Canada and Mexico.

Whether the strategy worked is still up for debate. Yes, NAFTA was renegotiated through the USMCA, but that agreement hasn’t been approved by the U.S. Congress or ratified by Mexico or Canada, either. In other words, NAFTA is still the law of the land. Unfortunately, the uncertainty over whether (and when) the USMCA will replace NAFTA places a significant economic burden on companies trying to make investment decisions and predictions throughout North America.

What’s not up for debate is the fact that in some important ways, the USMCA is more protectionist than NAFTA. It’s true that the USMCA includes a few improvements over NAFTA, such as an update of the digital trade rules. The internet was barely a thing when NAFTA was adopted, so the agreement did need to be modernized on this front. The USMCA also includes the slight opening of a few markets, for example the Canadian dairy market. That said, several of these provisions were already agreed to in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement, which Trump withdrew from soon after he entered office.

On the negative side, the USMCA’s new automotive “rules of origin” are much more restrictive than the ones in NAFTA, including a new minimum wage provision requiring that 40 percent of a car be made in plants where the workers are paid at least $16 an hour or tariffs will be imposed on those cars. No such requirement exists in NAFTA. These changes will make producing cars in North America, and in the United States specifically, more expensive. Considering that the automotive industry’s future lies in large part with exporting, it’s unwise to raise the cost of producing cars in the United States, as it makes it more difficult for U.S. car companies to export them.

That said, in spite of its problems, approving the USMCA would at least put an end to some uncertainty. In fact, according to a recent report by the U.S. International Trade Commission, some of the biggest economic gains from adopting the USMCA would come from ending the current uncertainty.

So how close are we to adopting the USMCA? It doesn’t look too good.

For starters, the Democrats would like to see even more significant labor provisions imposed on Mexican workers. The House leadership said that it wasn’t anywhere near putting it up for a vote.

On the Republican side, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa warned the president that he shouldn’t expect his team to support the USMCA as long as the metal tariffs are still in place, writing in The Wall Street Journal, “If these tariffs aren’t lifted, USMCA is dead. There is no appetite in Congress to debate USMCA with these tariffs in place.” The metal tariffs have hurt American consumers of foreign metals. And once retaliatory tariffs from Canada and Mexico went up, everyone suffered even more.

What’s more, Canadian and Mexican officials have shown very little interest in bringing the new deal to a vote in their own countries. The window for a vote is closing fast, as there are elections coming in Canada; observers predict that if the deal hasn’t been approved by then, it will have to wait until 2020.

Ultimately, for all the talk about using these tariffs as leverage, it seems that Trump’s true goal for the duties was to protect the steel industry. He is a protectionist, period. As such, he won’t let those tariffs go easily.

So, get used to the uncertainty.

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Gillibrand Proposes Giving Every Voter $600 To Donate to Campaigns

In her first major policy proposal of the 2020 presidential election, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–NY)—a long shot candidate for the Democratic nomination—is suggesting that every voter be given $600 to donate to federal election campaigns. Affectionately named “Democracy Dollars,” she says the taxpayer-funded venture will clean up elections and “attack the corrupting influence of money at its core.”

All eligible voters would qualify for the lump sum, which would then be doled out in $200 payments for each individual’s House, Senate, and presidential candidate of choice.

“If you want to accomplish anything that the American people want us to accomplish — whether it’s healthcare as a right, better public schools, better economy — you have to take on the greed and corruption that determine everything in Washington,” she told NBC News.

Gillibrand says she’ll finance her plan by eliminating a tax loophole for CEOs—which, between the various nominees, is starting to sound like a cure-all for society’s ill. Those making more than $1 million or 25 times the median salary of their employees—whichever is less—would finance Democracy Dollars with $60 billion in additional taxes over 10 years, according to Gillibrand’s plan.

The Democratic senator references Seattle as her inspiration, whose Democracy Voucher program allots $100 to every eligible voter to donate in each municipal election. Yet the results of the program’s pilot attempt in 2017 were that everything stayed pretty much the same: Only 3.3 percent of recipients participated, and the winning slate was dominated by incumbents and those backed by the establishment.

“When you say that we are going to allow public funds to go to candidates, voters are going to give the vouchers to people they are familiar with, they know, that they are comfortable with, and those are going to tend to be incumbents,” Ethan Blevins, an attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, told Reason following the election. That’s a far cry from Seattle’s mission statement to elevate “more candidates, including women, young people and people of color, to run viable campaigns against big money candidates.”

“By leveling the playing field of who’s powering federal campaigns, my plan amplifies the voices of Americans who haven’t been heard for too long — young people, women, and people of color,” Gillibrand’s plan reads.

Only candidates who refuse to accept individual contributions over $200 would be allowed to cash in on Democracy Dollars. The current limit is $2,800, which candidates could still opt to accept if they forego the publicly funded vouchers. While it seems unlikely that most candidates would relinquish that opportunity, Gillibrand tells NBC that she expects they’ll do that, “because the potential of how much you could raise in this system is exponentially higher.”

That wouldn’t stop those same candidates from seeking big money support, though: Adherents to Democracy Dollars could still solicit help from super PACs, which Gillibrand’s plan does not address. Although super PACs are barred from donating directly to a particular individual or party, they often spend enormous wads of cash to indirectly fund a candidate, often via advertising blitzes. They are under no spending limit when doing so.

But perhaps the more pressing issue here is a First Amendment one, as a small group of taxpayers would be forced to fund candidates, some of whom they would inevitably object to. Yet whether they disagree with them is almost beside the point: Gillibrand’s plan is a form of compelled speech.

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Lindsey Graham Continues To Demonstrate Everything That’s Wrong With Republicans in the Age of Trump

Almost three years to the day from when he issued a now all-too-prescient warning on Twitter—”If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed….and we will deserve it”—Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) gave a performance that reminds us of just how deeply Trumpism has corrupted the Republican Party.

Graham, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was nominally the man in charge of the committee’s hearing on Monday—a hearing in which Attorney General William Barr offered his testimony and answered questions about his handling of the release of the report written by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller.

Right from the start, Graham made clear that he did not see the hearing as an opportunity to clear up the remaining confusion about key differences between Barr’s initial statements on the Mueller report and the details in the Mueller report itself. Instead of seeking answers, Graham picked up where Barr had left off in doing damage control for the president.

“After all this time and all this money, Mr. Mueller and his team concluded there was no collusion,” said Graham, borrowing from Trump’s favorite characterization of the Mueller report’s outcome.

“As to obstruction of justice, Mr. Mueller left it to Mr. Barr to decide,” Graham continued. “After two years and all this time, he said to Mr. Barr ‘you decide’ and Mr. Barr did.”

Incredibly, that’s an interpretation—some might say spin—that’s even more generous to Trump than Barr’s original framing of the Mueller report, which Mueller has criticized for not fully capturing the “context, nature, and substance” of his investigation.

Graham’s claim that Mueller found “no collusion” is an oversimplification, at best, of the first half of the report, which details numerous attempts by both the Trump campaign and the Russian government to find common ground during 2016. Whether you agree with the senator’s assessment likely depends on your existing opinions about what, exactly, constitutes “collusion.”

But Graham is objectively wrong to claim that Mueller left the obstruction question for Barr “to decide.” In fact, Mueller explicitly tossed that specific ball into Congress‘ court.

“The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law,” the Mueller report states.

That’s probably the right thing to do since longstanding Department of Justice precedent says a sitting president cannot be indicted. Mueller’s report outlines 10 times that Trump attempted to interfere with the investigation—going as far as telling then-White House counsel Don McGahn “Mueller has to go. Call me back when you do it.” Mueller was allowed to continue his investigation only because McGahn flat-out refused to follow a direct order from the President of the United States.

That same pattern emerges again and again in the Mueller report’s damning second volume. “The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests,” the Mueller report says.

How did Graham describe Trump’s actions?

“The president never did anything to stop Mueller from doing his job,” Graham said Wednesday.

Members of Congress are free to draw their own conclusions from the Mueller report, of course, and that is exactly what Mueller appears to have intended by tossing the obstruction question into their court.

And to be fair, the Mueller investigation and report have driven nearly everyone in Washington to the brink of insanity. When Trump’s critics inflate details of the report to create wild conspiracy theories completely unsupported by the facts, they are doing an equally significant disservice to the dialogue surrounding the president and what he may have done or not done with regard to Russia and the subsequent investigation.

Still, Graham’s mischaracterization of both the report’s findings and the legal process used to arrive at them is a telling indication that GOP leadership remains loyal to Trump’s cult of personality.

Graham’s “evolution” during the Trump years has been more dramatic than most, but his performance on Wednesday was on par with how many other Republicans have handled the explosive details in the Mueller report. Instead of using his immense power as the chairman of a powerful Senate committee to determine whether Trump’s presidency should continue, or at least to get straight answers about why Barr apparently misled Americans about the content of Mueller’s report, Graham is now making a show of rolling over for a president that he once said was a “kook” and “unfit for office.”

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