Tag: news

The American Spectator, a conservative magazine,
recently invited me to debate William Tucker about the death
penalty. Our point/counterpoint, which appeared in the July/August
Spectator, is
now online. Here’s how my side of the dispute begins:

The typical
conservative is well informed about the careless errors routinely
made by the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Postal Service, and
city hall. If he’s a policy wonk, he may have bookmarked the Office
of Management and Budget’s online list of federal programs that
manage to issue more than $750 million in mistaken payments each
year. He understands the incentives that can make an entrenched
bureaucracy unwilling to acknowledge, let alone correct, its
mistakes. He doesn’t trust the government to manage anything
properly, even the things he thinks it should be
managing.

Except, apparently, the minor matter of who gets to live or die.
Bring up the death penalty, and many conservatives will suddenly
exhibit enough faith in government competence to keep the Center
for American Progress afloat for a year. Yet the system that kills
convicts is riddled with errors.

To read the rest,
follow the link.

Tucker, meanwhile, points out that murder rates rose after
the death penalty was abolished nationwide and fell after “states
started executing people in significant numbers in the 1990s.” But
states that do not have the death penalty have also seen
murder rates decline in the same period—indeed, they’ve
enjoyed a somewhat greater decline—so I’m not convinced he’s found
the reason for the rise and fall.

He also offers an argument about incentives:

For a criminal pulling off a holdup—or a rapist,
or a “surprised” burglar caught by a homeowner—there’s a very
simple logic at work. The victims of your crimes are also the
principal witnesses. They will call the police the minute you
depart. They can identify you. They will probably testify at your
trial. There’s a very simple way to prevent all this: kill
them.

The purpose of the death penalty is to draw a bright line between a
felony and felony murder. If the penalty for rape or robbery is
jail time, and for murder is more jail time after that, there isn’t
a huge incentive to prevent you from pulling the
trigger.

I didn’t mention it in my Spectator piece, but I have
invoked that same bright line elsewhere to show why, if there
is a death penalty, it should not apply to any crime less
serious than murder. If a criminal can be executed for, say,
kidnapping, he may well decide that he might as well kill people to
evade capture, since arrest already means a strong possibility of
being put to death. But while that bright line makes sense as an
argument against a particularly poor way of applying the death
penalty, I don’t think it works as well as an argument for the
death penalty itself. The same incentive, after all, applies to a
murderer: He might decide to kill more people to evade capture
too.

At any rate, you can read both Tucker’s full argument and mine

here, and then you can join the debate yourselves in the
comments.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said that a new voting rights bill he’s
working on would help him reach out to new demographics, especially
minorities. Paul plans to introduce a bill that would
restore the vote for people convicted of minor drug
offenses. 

“Three out of four people in prison are black or brown for
nonviolent drug use. However, when you do surveys, white kids are
doing drugs at an equal rate, and they are a much bigger part of
the population. So, why are the prisons full of black and brown
kids? It is easier to arrest them. It is easier to convict them.
They don’t get as good of attorneys,” Paul said.

Read the full article here.

Timothy Egan over at the
New York Times
opined in a poorly argued, talking-points-laden screed about
how terrible Walmart is. Typically this would be dog-bites-man
stuff. It contains stupid sentences like this one: “It’s a sad day
when we have to look to corporations for education, health care and
basic ways to boost the middle class,” as though the money the
government grabs to attempt to (extremely poorly) manage these
things would exist at all were it not for the marketplace that
created corporations in the first place (and as if the extremely
poor government management isn’t what is driving up prices of
health care and education as well).

But something different happened this time, causing a bit of
viral buzz in conservative-libertarian circles. Walmart took a red
pen to Egan’s column and
posted it on their site, with corrections. In response to Egan
calling Walmart a drain to taxpayers, they argue they’re the
biggest taxpayer in the country. In response to him claiming the
company forces employees onto public assistance, they point out
that they are responsible for moving employees off public
assistance. They even note that one piece of evidence of Walmart’s
bad behavior was
debunked by Politifact. In response to a simplistic
back-of-the-napkin mathematical claim by a Fortune writer
that Walmart could increase the wages by all their employees by 50
percent with no consequences, Walmart suggests checking out the
description of the company from a gentleman named Jason Furman.

Read the whole thing
here. (Tip to Walmart’s public relation’s folks: If you want
people clicking on links, actually make them links, not images of
site addresses that can’t even be copied or pasted.)

Walter Olson over at the Cato Institute noted
Furman is President Barack Obama’s current chairman of the Council
of Economic Advisers and what he had to say about Walmart:

Wal-Mart’s low prices help to increase real wages for the 120
million Americans employed in other sectors of the economy.
And the company itself does not appear to pay lower wages or
benefits than similar companies, or to cause substantially
lower wages in the retail sector…

[T]o the degree the anti-Wal-Mart campaign slows or halts the
spread of Wal-Mart to new areas, it will lead to higher prices that
disproportionately harm lower-income families…

By acting in the interests of its shareholders, Wal-Mart has
innovated and expanded competition, resulting in huge benefits
for the American middle class and even proportionately larger
benefits for moderate-income Americans.

As usual, during this poorly argued babble about the “income
gap,” what is left out is how much more the poor and middle class
are able to get for their wages thanks to places like Walmart. It
will not be the one percent flooding the stores come Black Friday
buying television sets the size of dinner tables. It’s interesting
how the things that are allegedly becoming less and less obtainable
for the poor and middle class (education and health care) have been
heavily regulated and managed by the government.

The booking photo of Jeremy Meeks became kind of
a thing (“meme“) on
the Internet last week. Since then, his bail has been raised to $1
million. According to friends, Meeks’ wife is upset with the
attention his mugshot has gotten. “She’s furious. Her man is in
there and people are taking it as a joke, thinking it’s funny
talking about his looks, saying all kinds of crazy things,” a
friend told
CBS Sacramento.

More interesting, however, is what led to Meeks being booked and
what his arraignment hearing last week was about. Via CBS
Sacramento:

Meeks was arraigned on eleven felony counts related to firearm
possession, street gang membership, and violating his
probation.

Stockton Police said he’s not a good guy. Meeks is a convicted
felon, having spent two years in prison for grand theft in
2002.

So the police label Meeks “not a good guy” based on a conviction
more than a decade ago, for which Meeks has done his time. Now he
is in the crosshairs of law enforcement largely because he has been
before. None of the felony charges listed above are for violent
crimes. Firearm possession is a Second Amendment right, street gang
membership arguably a First Amendment right, while probation is
largely a jobs program built on the backs of felons who have done
their time but whom the state wants to keep under adult supervision
anyway. One of the charges, not mentioned above, appears to be
called “street
terrorism.” It’s a dangerous perversion of the word “terrorism”
to include not just politically-motivated violence by non-state
actors but violent crime in general.

And yet in this case, Meeks is not accused of any specific
violent crime, while Stockton apparently has a
serious crime problem. The community may be better served if
cops target suspects accused of specific violent crimes rather than
engaging in the kind of pseudo-preventative law enforcement that
leads them back to the same low hanging fruit over and over again
while crime remains a problem.

Private and public university
dormitories keep getting nicer and nicer—and more
expensive—courtesy of soaring tuition prices and generous support
from taxpayers.

Students may be graduating $30,000 in debt, but at least they
live in relative opulence for four, five, or six years. From

the Associated Press:

Campus living for students today is a far cry from the cramped
dormitories of generations past. New facilities are geared to
handle laptops, smartphones and tablets and offer Wi-Fi
connectivity and extra room outlets. Suites housing two or more
people — with a shared bathroom instead of communal ones — are also
popular, and some of the new halls feature computer labs, study
centers, cafes and even a gaming room.

Fifty-two new residence halls at private and public schools to
house 19,000 students opened last year or will open this year
around the U.S., with a price tag of more than $2 billion,
according to Paul Abramson, an analyst with New York-based
Intelligence in Education who tracks college construction. Overall,
the number of new residence hall construction is up from 40 that
Abramson counted a year ago for his annual May survey.

The surge comes as U.S. schools are simultaneously trying to
attract students with the comforts of home while fighting
perceptions that tuition hikes and other expenses are putting
college out of reach for a growing number of Americans. But even as
costs go up, demand for updated residence halls and other amenities
is motivating schools to keep spending.

Wichita State University provides a good example of what this
means for students:

At Wichita State, a new $65 million residence hall and dining
facility at the center of campus has a waiting list while openings
are plentiful at the university’s older, lower-priced halls. It’ll
cost between $10,000 and $12,000 a year (including meals) to live
in the new facility, compared to $6,800 a year for older residence
halls.

Nicer stuff is nice, sure. Infrastructure gets old and needs to
be replaced. And campuses can certainly support a range of
differently-priced living options.

All that said, the trend seems to be toward more opulent
housing, even as students have fallen a trillion dollars into debt
to get degrees that are less and less likely to guarantee jobs.
Since the federal government’s loan program helps students pay the
cost of college up front—no matter how insane it is—colleges have

every incentive to keep raising the price.

Now that so many graduates are having trouble repaying their
loans, the government is considering a number of measures to reduce
or forgive their debts. It’s easy to see where this leads. Since
the government made the loans, taxpayers take the hit.

In other words, students may not be able to afford a night at
the Ritz Carlton University, but as long as the bill doesn’t come
for years—or gets sent to taxpayers instead—who will notice?