tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-67524147293502126602024-03-18T09:48:24.279-04:00Generic Blog News and CommentaryGeneric News and Politics. Generic Blog is a clearinghouse of News and opinions.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger34713125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-3825941952217638502024-03-18T09:47:00.001-04:002024-03-18T09:47:50.231-04:00Energy workers advocacy group urges House panel to investigate John Podesta<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TAvKVsJ3gbg/WLJxUAsuD3I/AAAAAAAAJmo/nbmt2cdqcLgdArI0_5OpjkHpC2U-2CKCgCLcB/s1600/watchdog.png" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
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By By Moira Gleason | The Center Square contributor - March 15, 2024 at 01:33PM<br />
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(The Center Square) – A non-profit organization that advocates for American energy workers is urging the House Energy and Commerce Committee to investigate the role of climate envoy John Podesta in President Joe Biden’s recent decision to pause U.S. liquefied…<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-70523819421413973592024-03-18T06:57:00.001-04:002024-03-18T06:57:26.678-04:00Archives: April 2024<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wNMDiISstqM/WdGjtWDANfI/AAAAAAAAJxs/LQ3XwbNuCXQWPbAwbfaUXzcblC9w24ESQCLcBGAs/s320/reasonlogo.jpg" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
By Reason Staff - March 18, 2024 at 06:00AM<br />
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<div class="img-wrap"><picture style="max-width: 100%; height: auto"><source type="image/webp" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/02/archives.jpg.webp 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/02/archives.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/02/archives-800x450.jpg.webp 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/02/archives-600x338.jpg.webp 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/02/archives-331x186.jpg.webp 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/02/archives.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/02/archives.jpg.webp 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <source type="image/jpeg" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/02/archives.jpg 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/02/archives.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/02/archives-800x450.jpg 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/02/archives-600x338.jpg 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/02/archives-331x186.jpg 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/02/archives.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/02/archives.jpg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <img src="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/02/archives-800x450.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto" width="1200" height="675" alt="archives | Illustration: Joanna Andreasson, April 2019 issue of Reason" /></picture></div>
<h4>5 years ago<br />
April 2019</h4>
<p>"Pot, and the impoverished undocumented immigrants who often bring it, are no longer flowing across the border at the rate they once were. This decline has virtually nothing to do with expensive security innovations at the border and everything to do with legalization in the United States. If it were any other industry, one imagines the president would be delighted: When it comes to pot, customers prefer to buy American."<br />
David Bier<br />
<em>"The Wall Won't End Pot Smuggling at the Border. Legalization Will."</em></p>
<p>"It's just accounting. If you spend more than you earn, someone is giving you a loan. If the U.S. imports computers from China more than it exports soybeans to China, 'we' have to provide nice-looking IOUs—for example, engraved portraits of Ben Franklin that cost 12.5 cents each to print. For one of Ben's portraits we get $100 worth of computers. Pretty good, eh?"<br />
Deirdre Nansen -McCloskey<br />
<em>"Quit Worrying and Learn To Love Trade With China"</em></p>
<h4>15 years ago<br />
April 2009</h4>
<p>"In the 1880s, when a French crime fighter named Alphonse Bertillon pioneered the mug shot as a unique form of portraiture, the photographs he took were expected to do one thing: help establish an individual's identity at a time when driver's licenses, fingerprint files, and Facebook pages didn't exist. Today mug shots are still used to identify, but we also want them to punish, deter, and entertain. Unfortunately, they do such a good job of the latter that we've been indifferent to the ways they short-circuit due process. But while we're gawking at the haunted eyes of a Midwestern meth freak or the haunted hair of Nick Nolte, cops across America are using virtual rogues' galleries to normalize the idea that the government has the right to punish you without bothering to convict you of a crime."<br />
Greg Beato<br />
<em>"Criminal Verite"</em></p>
<h4>30 years ago<br />
April 1994</h4>
<p>"Feminists who today draw attention to the absence of women's rights in the Muslim world are correct, but they overlook the point that men also lack such rights. Men may indeed be free to oppress women at home or in the workplace—but they may themselves be oppressed by others acting with the authority of the state. As David Pryce-Jones has amply documented in <em>The Closed Circle,</em> the weak are at the mercy of the strong in the Arab world, and in a polity based on power women are bound to be the losers."<br />
Tom Bethell<br />
<em>"The Mother of All Rights"</em></p>
<h4>40 years ago<br />
April 1984</h4>
<p>"If freedom lovers are to judge foreign policy by the same standards as domestic policy, we cannot adopt the view that a good end justifies any means. And from the perspective of constitutional limited government, it is difficult to see any principle that justifies sending U.S. armed forces around the world to secure <em>other people's</em> freedoms. Since the large majority of governments systematically violate their citizens' rights, such a standard would amount to carte blanche for intervention everywhere."<br />
Robert Poole<br />
<em>"Defending Everyone?"</em></p>
<h4>45 years ago<br />
April 1979</h4>
<p>"Everyone agrees that we have to get off the fossil-fuels kick of the past two centuries—not so much because we are running out, but because of the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The dynamics of the process are poorly understood at present, but we have some reason to believe that continued dependence on fossil fuels could, in two more centuries, raise the mean temperature of the biosphere by six to eight degrees centigrade because of increased opacity of the atmosphere to infrared radiation (the so-called greenhouse effect)."<br />
Peter Vajk<br />
<em>"No More Doomsday"</em></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reason.com/2024/03/18/archives-april-2024/">Archives: April 2024</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reason.com">Reason.com</a>.</p>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-33451701844555401252024-03-18T05:29:00.001-04:002024-03-18T05:29:46.491-04:00Brickbat: Pint-Sized Prison<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wNMDiISstqM/WdGjtWDANfI/AAAAAAAAJxs/LQ3XwbNuCXQWPbAwbfaUXzcblC9w24ESQCLcBGAs/s320/reasonlogo.jpg" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
By Charles Oliver - March 18, 2024 at 04:00AM<br />
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<div class="img-wrap"><picture style="max-width: 100%; height: auto"><source type="image/webp" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_147437157-2400x1350.jpg.webp 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_147437157-1200x675.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_147437157-800x450.jpg.webp 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_147437157-600x338.jpg.webp 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_147437157-331x186.jpg.webp 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_147437157-1200x675.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_147437157-1920x1080.jpg.webp 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <source type="image/jpeg" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_147437157-2400x1350.jpg 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_147437157-1200x675.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_147437157-800x450.jpg 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_147437157-600x338.jpg 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_147437157-331x186.jpg 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_147437157-1200x675.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_147437157-1920x1080.jpg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <img src="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_147437157-800x450.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto" width="1200" height="675" alt="A child's hands clutch prison bars. | Tinnakorn Jorruang | Dreamstime.com" /></picture></div>
<p>A girl in the United Kingdom's Wetherby Young Offender Institution twice <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68470183">had her clothes removed</a> while being restrained by an <wbr />all-male team of prison officers, according to a report by the Inspectorate of Prisons. The girl was reportedly trying to use her clothes to harm herself. Wetherby is a correctional institution for people aged 15–18. The report found 24 children were strip-searched in one 12-month period, half of them forcibly; pain-inducing restraint techniques were used nine times over the same period. The report said that not one use of such techniques was found to be appropriate by an independent review panel. It also discovered that one use of the restraint injured a child, but this was not reported to officials.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reason.com/2024/03/18/brickbat-pint-sized-prison/">Brickbat: Pint-Sized Prison</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reason.com">Reason.com</a>.</p>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-25978595685708345502024-03-18T04:29:00.001-04:002024-03-18T04:29:41.590-04:00Monday Open Thread<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wNMDiISstqM/WdGjtWDANfI/AAAAAAAAJxs/LQ3XwbNuCXQWPbAwbfaUXzcblC9w24ESQCLcBGAs/s320/reasonlogo.jpg" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
By Eugene Volokh - March 18, 2024 at 03:00AM<br />
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<p>The post <a href="https://reason.com/volokh/2024/03/18/monday-open-thread-44/">Monday Open Thread</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reason.com">Reason.com</a>.</p>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-51978018029162205682024-03-17T15:29:00.001-04:002024-03-17T15:29:46.037-04:00I've Won an Argument about Israel I Wish I Hadn't<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wNMDiISstqM/WdGjtWDANfI/AAAAAAAAJxs/LQ3XwbNuCXQWPbAwbfaUXzcblC9w24ESQCLcBGAs/s320/reasonlogo.jpg" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
By David Bernstein - March 17, 2024 at 12:02PM<br />
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<p>Over my 20+ years of blogging at Volokh, commenters have often questioned why I focused my attention on what I saw as unfair attacks on Israel, rather than on Israeli policies I disagreed with that might be obstacles to a future peace deal. My response was consistent: debates over specific Israeli policies were a sideshow. Israel's harshest critics simply wanted Israel to cease to exist, and given that this goal could likely be achieved only via genocide, I chose to focus my attention on that. My commenters were also pretty consistent, arguing that I was being paranoid, that the vast majority of critics, even the harshest ones, wanted a two-state solution, not to eliminate Israel.</p>
<p>We have had something of a test of this debate since 10/7. Hamas is a terrorist theocracy with explicitly genocidal goals. It carried out a taste of those goals on 10/7, and its leaders promised to repeat those atrocities again and again until the "Zionists" were driven from Israel.</p>
<p>So whatever one thinks of Israeli policy, or Israel's eventual response to 10/7, one would think, based on my interlocutors' position, that critics of Israeli policy would nevertheless agree on one thing: Hamas must be deposed, one way or another. There is no plausible two-state solution with Hamas in power; the harsh critics are almost all self-styled progressives, and there is nothing progressive about Hamas's policies toward freedom of religion, LGBTQ rights, women, militarism, antisemitism, and so on, nor its constant theft of humanitarian. Hamas's rule in Gaza is essentially every Progressive's worst nightmare.</p>
<p>Yet, ever since at least 10/10, when it became clear that Israel's reaction to Hamas's atrocities was not going to be to capitulate, the harsh critics have been all but unanimous in calling for Israel to essentially surrender ("immediate ceasefire") with Hamas still in power, and have almost to a person not called on Hamas to surrender and abdicate. (And self-styled human rights organizations have <a href="https://instapundit.com/617135/">felt free to make up human rights law</a>, including contradicting their own past public positions in other conflicts.)</p>
<p>I have to admit that I underestimated the mendacity of these people. As much as I knew that hated Israel much more than they were concerned with the well-being of Palestinians, I didn't imagine that they would be willing to run interference for, if not outright support, Hamas, certainly not after Hamas put its brutality and genocidal intentions on display for all the world to see. I would have expected something more like "immediate ceasefire, but the world has to work on replacing Hamas with something else."</p>
<p>Of course, there are those who take the latter position, or the Biden position, which is to support Israel but be critical of specific wartime policies and the lack of a long-term plan. But the remarkable thing is that I have yet to see even this position among the harder left: "I wish Hamas would surrender and release the hostages, because that would be good for all sides, but since I don't think it's possible to get Hamas to surrender, I think Israel needs to desist for humanitarian reasons."</p>
<p>Indeed, if you ask prominent folks on X, people who are complaining the loudest about civilian suffering in Gaza, "would you prefer the war go on, or that Hamas release the hostages and surrender," basically no one is willing to say publicly that he or she would prefer Hamas to surrender. Israel losing is more important than ending civilian suffering in Gaza, than any sort of peaceful resolution of the conflict (which obviously requires an end to Hamas rule), than innocent hostages being released, or anything else. If you are a progressive and you find yourself carrying water for a truly reactionary, genocidal organization like Hamas, maybe it's time to do some soul-searching.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reason.com/volokh/2024/03/17/ive-won-an-argument-about-israel-i-wish-i-hadnt/">I've Won an Argument about Israel I Wish I Hadn't</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reason.com">Reason.com</a>.</p>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-34492889920796179102024-03-17T11:47:00.001-04:002024-03-17T11:47:40.601-04:00Teacher unions backing downstate Republicans ‘very rare,’ says researcher<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TAvKVsJ3gbg/WLJxUAsuD3I/AAAAAAAAJmo/nbmt2cdqcLgdArI0_5OpjkHpC2U-2CKCgCLcB/s1600/watchdog.png" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
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By By Catrina Petersen | The Center Square - March 17, 2024 at 10:05AM<br />
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(The Center Square) – Teachers unions have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to certain Republican candidates’ state legislative primary campaigns, a national trend that can be seen in incumbent state Rep. Adam Niemerg, R-Dieterich, and primary challenger Jim Acklin’s…<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-27055389654549095882024-03-17T10:29:00.001-04:002024-03-17T10:29:54.579-04:00Today in Supreme Court History: March 17, 1777<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wNMDiISstqM/WdGjtWDANfI/AAAAAAAAJxs/LQ3XwbNuCXQWPbAwbfaUXzcblC9w24ESQCLcBGAs/s320/reasonlogo.jpg" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
By Josh Blackman - March 17, 2024 at 07:00AM<br />
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<p>3/17/1777: <a href="https://conlaw.us/courts/the-taney-court/">Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney's</a> birthday.</p>
<p><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-8050961 aligncenter" src="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/q60/uploads/2020/03/1836-Taney.jpg" alt="" width="402" height="500" srcset="https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/1836-Taney.jpg 402w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/1836-Taney-241x300.jpg 241w" sizes="(max-width: 402px) 100vw, 402px" /></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reason.com/volokh/2024/03/17/today-in-supreme-court-history-march-17-1777-5/">Today in Supreme Court History: March 17, 1777</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reason.com">Reason.com</a>.</p>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-83238396262742177412024-03-17T07:29:00.001-04:002024-03-17T07:29:55.845-04:00After a Century, the Federal Tea Board Is Finally Dead<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wNMDiISstqM/WdGjtWDANfI/AAAAAAAAJxs/LQ3XwbNuCXQWPbAwbfaUXzcblC9w24ESQCLcBGAs/s320/reasonlogo.jpg" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
By Eric Boehm - March 17, 2024 at 06:00AM<br />
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<div class="img-wrap"><picture style="max-width: 100%; height: auto"><source type="image/webp" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/02/featuretea2.jpg.webp 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/02/featuretea2.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/02/featuretea2-800x450.jpg.webp 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/02/featuretea2-600x338.jpg.webp 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/02/featuretea2-331x186.jpg.webp 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/02/featuretea2.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/02/featuretea2.jpg.webp 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <source type="image/jpeg" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/02/featuretea2.jpg 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/02/featuretea2.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/02/featuretea2-800x450.jpg 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/02/featuretea2-600x338.jpg 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/02/featuretea2-331x186.jpg 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/02/featuretea2.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/02/featuretea2.jpg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <img src="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/02/featuretea2-800x450.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto" width="1200" height="675" alt="Members of the federal tea board sit around a table to taste tea | Photo: Members of the Board of Tea Experts meet to taste teas, 1947; Getty" /></picture></div>
<p>"I see no reason," the late Sen. Harry Reid (D–Nev.) once declared on the Senate floor, "why those in this country who enjoy drinking tea need someone else to tell them what tastes good."</p>
<p>Yet for nearly 100 years that is exactly what the government did, thanks to one of the strangest agencies ever to be a part of the federal bureaucracy.</p>
<p>In addition to the usual beverage regulations aimed at ensuring proper storage and safe handling, imported tea was required for decades to pass a literal taste test before it could be sold in the United States. The task fell to a group of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) appointees, who would gather annually in a converted Navy warehouse in Brooklyn to smell, slosh, sip, and spit the various oolongs, greens, and Earl Greys that tea merchants sought to sell to Americans.</p>
<p>This was the federal Board of Tea Experts.</p>
<p>The board's members would taste dozens of teas over the course of several days. The process was more an art than a science. According to a 1989 <em>Washington Post </em>profile, there was no uniform method for tasting. Some board members worked in silence while others slurped their tea or gargled it loudly. Some preferred to taste the tea hot; others let it cool first. The warehouse where they gathered was outfitted with pictures of old-timey sailing ships, a kitchen sink, several kettles for boiling water, boxes upon boxes of tea, and large windows. The board's then-leader Robert H. Dick told the <em>Post </em>thatto properly inspect the tea<em>, </em>"I have to have a north light."</p>
<p>When Reid voiced his objection to the tea board in 1995, the agency had already survived two decades' worth of efforts to shut it down. Congress finally ended the board's oversight of tea imports a year later, but the federal Board of Tea Experts technically still existed for another 27 years. It was officially terminated on September 19, 2023.</p>
<p>The bizarre history and surprising longevity of the federal tea-tasting board is something of a mixed bag for anyone who wants to see more federal programs iced for good.</p>
<p>On one hand: The board was eventually shut down.</p>
<p>On the other: If it takes nearly 50 years to get rid of something as useless and insignificant as the Board of Tea Experts, what hope can there possibly be to do away with larger governmental entities backed by more powerful special interests? Hardly an election season goes by without some (usually Republican) presidential hopefuls promising to abolish this department or that agency—the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency are perennial favorites. Are those efforts doomed before they begin? Will those promises always be empty?</p>
<p>The weird tale of the Board of Tea Experts holds a variety of lessons for anyone interested in shrinking the size and scope of government. It's a warning about the stickiness of bad ideas, about an inertia that can limit even the smallest attempts at trimming the state.</p>
<p>"This is the reason people are upset about government," Reid said in that 1995 Senate floor speech. "What an absolute waste of taxpayers' money is it to have them spend $200,000 a year swishing tea around in their mouths."</p>
<h2>A Tea Board Is Born</h2>
<p>Anthropologists believe human beings were drinking tea before recorded history. In China, where tea was first cultivated, accounts of the drink's benefits for keeping healthy and staying awake date back at least as far as the Shang dynasty (founded around 1700 B.C.); physical evidence of tea consumption and the tea trade goes back well over 2,000 years.</p>
<p>The relationship between tea and the state is ancient too. According to one Chinese legend, the drink was invented when leaves were accidentally blown into a cup belonging to Emperor Shennong, who was fond of sipping boiled water. The resulting brew tasted good, and presumably gave the mythic ruler one of humanity's first caffeine highs.</p>
<p>Tea made its way to Europe (and then the Americas) in the 1600s. A 1657 listing from a London coffee shop offered tea for sale starting at 16 shillings per pound—roughly $190 per pound today. Governments all over the world tried to subsidize and monopolize the tea trade at various times, and many collected bountiful revenue from their citizens' and colonists' addictions.</p>
<p>In the New World, that quest for revenue helped spark a history-altering backlash. The uprising in Boston Harbor on the night of December 16, 1773, wasn't the first tax revolt in American history, and it wouldn't be the last. But it remains the most memorable, and a crucial part of the country's founding mythology. The lingering cultural memory of the Boston Tea Party might have even played an indirect role in the creation of the federal Board of Tea Experts more than a century later.</p>
<p>"Since the British drank a lot of tea, they would pick the best teas, and then a lot of times when they had something they didn't want, that was left over, or maybe even damaged or something, they would fill the order from the United States with some of that tea," Dick, whose tenure on the Board of Tea Experts lasted from 1947 until 1996, explained in a 1984 interview published as part of an internal history of the FDA.</p>
<p>Worried that British tea exporters were taking advantage of their less sophisticated American customers, Congress passed the Tea Importation Act of 1897. The act created a new federal commission charged with ensuring the quality of the nation's tea supplies. But from the start, the board's standards seem to have been quite open to interpretation. When the Tea Importation Act was first passed, it merely said "that the tea should be rejected if it was unfit," Dick explained in that interview. "Well, unfit meant different things to different people."</p>
<p>Over time, tasting standards for different types of tea were put into place. Imported tea had to match the federally approved flavor profiles to be legally sold, with the tasters responsible for setting the standards. After the FDA was created in 1906, the tea-tasting board was rolled into the new agency, which would eventually grow to regulate cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and, of course, food. But the Board of Tea Experts remained a unique element of the FDA's sprawling portfolio. "Tea is the only food or beverage for which the [FDA] samples every lot upon entry for comparison to a standard recommended by a federal board," noted a 1996 analysis from the House of Representatives.</p>
<p>As the <em>Post</em> detailed in its 1989 profile, the annual gathering of the tea-tasters was not meant to identify the best teas or set particularly high standards for what would be allowed into the country. Rather, "the task is to select the worst that are still drinkable" and then use those standards as the basis for what would be permitted to enter the country for the rest of the year. At the height of its vague yet absolute powers, the tea board employed testers based in Boston, New York, and San Francisco; their job was to translate the board's standards into practice. A separate but related entity, the Board of Tea Appeals, provided due process for anyone wronged by the tea-tasters' opinions.</p>
<p>Even with some standards in place, bureaucratic laziness sometimes prevailed. At one point, Dick recalls being told by a then-senior member of the board that "you don't need to look at all of those teas because you can look at the prices and you can tell which is the good tea and which is the bad tea." Too bad consumers couldn't be trusted to do the same.</p>
<p>If the board was protecting consumers, it doesn't seem to have been protecting them from much—the board rejected less than 1 percent of the teas submitted for approval each year. But Dick argued the mere threatof rejection was a protection.</p>
<p>"If you eliminate the Tea Act then you've got a case of where somebody is going to take chances," Dick said in 1984. "If they have a poor tea, they don't know whether it will be rejected or not, and they don't know whether it would be sampled or not, and they may be tempted to ship it. So, it would make a difference."</p>
<p>There is a long history of domestic industries using made-up or exaggerated concerns about consumer safety to seek political power, then using that power to limit competition or create cartels. It's tempting to project that narrative onto the history of the Board of Tea Experts.</p>
<p>But there's a problem with that theory, says Ryan Young, a senior economist at the pro-market Competitive Enterprise Institute. There was not much of a domestic tea production industry in the 1890s. Even today, the vast majority of tea consumed in the United States comes from abroad, primarily India and China.</p>
<p>There may have been legitimate reasons to worry about the quality of tea being imported into the U.S. at the time the board was created, says Young. But it was private industry, not government, that solved it.</p>
<p>"Back then, groceries were often sold out of crates and barrels, often with no way to know who the producer was or where the product came from," he says. "Brands are an extremely important self-regulation device in markets. They improve trust and accountability, whereas anonymous producers can get away with all sorts of shenanigans."</p>
<p>By the middle of the 20th century, private self-regulation had solved the problem that the Board of Tea Experts was supposed to fix.</p>
<p>But government programs don't just go away when they become obsolete.</p>
<figure id="attachment_8265792" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-8265792" style="width: 1024px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="wp-image-8265792 size-large" src="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/q60/uploads/2024/04/featuretea1-1024x576.jpg" alt="Photo of Alexander J. Grille, chairman of the Board of Tea Experts, in 1961" width="1024" height="576" data-credit="Getty" srcset="https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/featuretea1-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/featuretea1-300x169.jpg 300w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/featuretea1-768x432.jpg 768w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/featuretea1-800x450.jpg 800w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/featuretea1-600x338.jpg 600w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/featuretea1-331x186.jpg 331w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/featuretea1.jpg 1161w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />
<figcaption id="caption-attachment-8265792" class="wp-caption-text">Alexander J. Grille, chairman of the Board of Tea Experts, 1961 (Getty)</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The Long, Slow Death of the Tea Board</h2>
<p>Can drinking tea help you live longer? Some studies suggest as much. Research published in <em>Advances in Nutrition </em>in 2020 found that regular consumption of tea is correlated with a lower risk of death from various cardiovascular issues, including strokes. The study's authors attributed tea drinkers' longer life spans to "flavonoids"—a pigment found in many tea leaves that is thought to be a powerful antioxidant.</p>
<p>I know of no peer-reviewed study suggesting government bureaucracies tasked with tea tasting have longer than average life spans. But the available evidence suggests that, indeed, they are quite difficult to kill.</p>
<p>"These tea-tasting people are just like lizards," Sen. Reid declared in 1995, comparing the board to critters he said he'd catch as a kid, ones whose tails would grow back even after they were yanked off. "You grab them and jerk something off and they are right back."</p>
<p>By then, the Board of Tea Experts had survived more than a quarter-century with a target on its back.</p>
<p>The first attempt to eliminate the tea board occurred in 1970, when the Nixon administration tried to redirect the board's budget of $125,000 (almost $1 million today) to other parts of the FDA. Nixon was looking for an easy public relations coup, according to a contemporary <em>New York Times </em>report. Killing off the tea-tasting board would be a symbol of the federal government's commitment to belt tightening, or so he thought.</p>
<p>The tea industry fought for the board's survival, arguing that the president had no power to drain the board's budget unless Congress first repealed the 1897 law that authorized it. With Congress apparently uninterested, Nixon quietly surrendered.</p>
<p>The attempt at least provided one lasting moment of hilarity. While digging through boxes of documents at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in 2021, Ashton Merck, a postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State University, came across a letter ostensibly mailed from a dormitory at the University of California, Berkeley. The letter writer claimed to represent a group of individuals who were "appalled at [Nixon's] proposal to eliminate one of the few remaining bastions of tradition and culture in this country" and the planned liquidation of Dick's job as the only full-time employee of the board.</p>
<p>The name of this alleged group taking the time to bend the ear of the most powerful man in the world? "The Committee To Keep Dick Tasting."</p>
<p>In the ensuing years, the tea-tasting board routinely turned up on lists put together by groups like Taxpayers for Common Sense as a target for federal budgetary pruning. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan both made half-hearted attempts to kill the board, without success.</p>
<p>In the '90s, Congress finally organized a serious revolt against the board's existence. Reid, an unexpected advocate for shrinking government, took on the role of Sam Adams. In a 1993 speech supporting his bill to cut off funding for the tea-tasting board's expense reimbursements, including a $50 per diem for each member, Reid reached for the obvious metaphor. A "congressional tea party" was necessary, he said, to "dump the tea experts overboard."</p>
<p>The bill passed. But even after losing their per diems and expenses, the board simply poured another cup.</p>
<p>Two years later, Reid aimed to bag the board for good. Working across the aisle with Sen. Hank Brown (R–Colo.), Reid pushed through a proposal to cut off all taxpayer funding for the board's staff. But that provision was struck from the final version of the bill during a conference committee meeting, following what <em>The Washington Post </em>termed "last-minute lobbying" from the industry.</p>
<p>"It's a sign of how difficult it is in Washington," Brown told <em>The New York Times </em>in September 1995. "Defeating some of this nonsense is going to be a long tough job. The tea board is quite resilient."</p>
<p>At that point, Reid boiled over. No longer content merely to pull the metaphorical tails off the tea bureaucrats, Reid and Rep. Scott Klug (R–Wis.) drafted bills to repeal the Tea Importation Act of 1897 and abolish the Board of Tea Experts for good. The bill passed both chambers of Congress unanimously and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on April 9, 1996.</p>
<p>The Board of Tea Experts had boiled its last kettle. Or so it appeared. Technically, the tea-tasting board outlived the man who played the biggest role in killing it. Reid died in late 2021, after a long Senate career that culminated in an eight-year stint as majority leader (during which time he battled a congressional Tea Party of a different kind).</p>
<p>Fifteen months after Reid passed away, the federal Board of Tea Experts was finally gone for good—after existing in a sort of limbo for more than two decades in which it had no members and no budget. Its obituary: a brief September 2023 notice in the <em>Federal Register</em>, which records the doings of the executive branch agencies, announcing that the FDA was removing "the Board of Tea Experts from the Agency's list of standing advisory committees" in accordance with the law passed by Congress in 1996—yes, 27 years prior.</p>
<h2>Time To Kill</h2>
<p>A lot of things happened in American politics during the two and a half decades that the Board of Tea Experts existed in a sort of bureaucratic limbo. One of the more amusing moments took place on a debate stage in Michigan on November 9, 2011, where Gov. Rick Perry of Texas had a political moment for ages.</p>
<p>"And I will tell you, it's three agencies of government when I get there that are gone: Commerce, Education, and the, uh, what's the third one there? Let's see," the presidential hopeful said, awkwardly trying to recall what he wanted to tell you.</p>
<p>This was near the peak of the GOP's Tea Party era—a small-government populist movement that recalled that other, more famous story about the intersection of tea and American politics—and the candidates vying for a chance to challenge President Barack Obama were competing to see who could make the most aggressive promise to slash government.</p>
<p>"You can't name the third one?" asked moderator John Harwood, incredulously. The crowd laughed. Other candidates shouted suggestions. But it was hopeless. "The third one. I can't. Sorry," Perry concluded, before meekly adding, "Oops."</p>
<p>Perry's campaign limped along a little while after the remark, but for all intents and purposes, that was the moment it ended. It was a moment that mattered not only because of the comedy of a polished politician coming unglued on national television, but because it highlighted the humongous gap between Perry's campaign-trail blather and the reality of governing. How could anyone believe he had a workable plan to close entire federal departments when he couldn't even remember his own talking points?</p>
<p>A few years later, then-President Donald Trump appointed Perry to run the Department of Energy—the same department Perry couldn't remember he wanted to abolish.</p>
<p>With the annual federal budget deficit now nearing $2 trillion and the national debt reaching unsustainable levels, it's important for politicians to have big goals for cutting government. But ambition means nothing if not backed up with a practical plan of action. That's the difference between Nixon's failed attempt at killing the Board of Tea Experts as a public relations maneuver and Reid's serious, yearslong effort that finally buried it.</p>
<p>Trying to tear down old programs that no longer make sense—if they ever did—also cuts against the natural tendency of most politicians.</p>
<p>"Every new president and committee chair wants to make a mark, and so they push to create new programs of their design," says Chris Edwards, a budget policy expert at the Cato Institute. "They don't bother trying to repeal the related old and outdated programs because that would use major political capital they would rather use creating new programs."</p>
<p>The Board of Tea Experts is not the only federal agency or program to be successfully closed or privatized. Edwards points to the Office of Technology Assessment, an internal congressional study committee that produced reports on a wide range of scientific and technological issues for about 20 years before being shuttered in 1995 for being duplicative and unnecessary.</p>
<p>But the vast majority of the traffic is moving in the opposite direction. According to Downsizing the Federal Government, a Cato-affiliated project that Edwards runs to track the sprawling size of the federal government, there were 2,418 grant or subsidy programs on the books this year, more than double the number that existed in 1990.</p>
<p>That's why the best time to plan to close regulatory bodies and other government agencies isn't when they become obviously unnecessary—it's when they are created.</p>
<p>At first, every government agency has some reason for existing, even if it's not a good one. Even the Board of Tea Experts, which was rooted in those late–19th century worries about Americans being served subpar tea. Once it's created, regulators and their rules warp markets and create constituencies that benefit from preventing change—including the regulators themselves.</p>
<p>In the mid-1980s, Dick was arguing for the tea board's continued relevance by pointing to potential consumer harms that were no longer realistic in a world with grocery stores and extensive private quality-control operations. Nearly 30 years after the Board of Tea Experts was effectively shuttered, there's no indication that Americans are drinking worse tea—because the board and its standards weren't accomplishing anything the market hadn't already sorted out decades ago. And, of course, the FDA still holds the power to regulate tea (as it regulates all food and drink in the United States), even in the absence of a special board tasked with sipping each imported batch.</p>
<p>Is there a way to ensure programs and agencies that have outlived their usefulness are actually shut down? Young of the Competitive Enterprise Institute points to Texas. The state's Sunset Advisory Commission, which periodically reviews government agencies and recommends to the state Legislature when one is no longer serving a purpose, claims to have played a role in abolishing 41 agencies, consolidating another 51, and saving taxpayers more than $1 billion.</p>
<p>With mandatory sunsets, Young says, "ineffective or unneeded agencies can still shut down, even if Congress can't muster up the courage for a vote."</p>
<p>Absent some kind of institutional reform, federal programs only seem to end up on the chopping block when they make an enemy of someone in a powerful position. Without Reid, the Board of Tea Experts might very well be holding its annual tasting session right now.</p>
<p>When any changes do happen on their own, they tend to be incredibly slow.</p>
<p>In October, the Prune Administrative Committee—a federal entity that oversees the "handling of dried prunes"—took the first step toward abolishing itself after an internal review found that the costs of the board's regulations "outweigh the benefits to industry members."</p>
<p>But it isn't going away for good just yet. No, the committee will continue to exist for at least another seven years, during which time it will issue no rules or regulations. If America survives that wild experiment with ungoverned dried plums, the committee and its parent, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, will decide whether to make the arrangement permanent.</p>
<p>"Inertia might be the strongest force in all of politics," says Young. "If it takes 50 years of reform efforts to close down a tea-tasting board, then larger reforms are doomed without some kind of institution-level change</p>
<hr />
<h1>More Wasteful Than the Tea Board?</h1>
<p>The Board of Tea Experts was a uniquely silly and superfluous part of the federal bureaucracy. No other product has ever been subjected to literal taste testing by federal officials before it could be legally sold.</p>
<p>Sadly, it is not the only silly or superfluous part of the government. A comprehensive list of pointless and wasteful government programs would be too long to print, but here are six others begging to meet the same fate as the tea board.</p>
<figure style="width:1024px; max-width:100%" id="attachment_8265795" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-8265795" class="aligncenter wp-caption"><img decoding="async" class="wp-image-8265795 size-large" style="font-family: itc-slimbach, 'Times New Roman', serif;" src="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/q60/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar1-1024x576.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="576" data-credit="Photos: iStock" srcset="https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar1-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar1-300x169.jpg 300w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar1-768x432.jpg 768w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar1-800x450.jpg 800w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar1-600x338.jpg 600w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar1-331x186.jpg 331w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar1.jpg 1161w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />
<figcaption id="caption-attachment-8265795" class="wp-caption-text">(Photos: iStock)</figcaption>
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<p><strong>Popcorn Board:</strong> Created by Congress to "develop new markets for popcorn and popcorn products." The board funds itself by charging fees to popcorn producers—fees that presumably are passed along to popcorn eaters. Maybe that's why it's so expensive at the movie theater? Similar user fee–funded boards include the National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Board, the National Mango Board, the National Potato Promotion Board, and the National Watermelon Promotion Board.</p>
<p><a href="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/q60/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar2.jpg"></a></p>
<p><strong>Mushroom Council:</strong> They say no one wants to see how the sausage of government gets made, but what about the shit it's grown in? A part of the Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Mushroom Council is supposed to "maintain and expand existing mushroom markets and uses." Imported mushrooms are taxed 0.0055 cents per pound to pay for that critical work.</p>
<figure style="width:1024px; max-width:100%" id="attachment_8265797" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-8265797" class="alignleft wp-caption"><a href="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/q60/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar5.jpg"><img decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-8265797" src="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/q60/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar5-1024x576.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="576" data-credit="Photos: iStock" srcset="https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar5-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar5-300x169.jpg 300w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar5-768x432.jpg 768w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar5-800x450.jpg 800w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar5-600x338.jpg 600w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar5-331x186.jpg 331w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar5.jpg 1161w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
<figcaption id="caption-attachment-8265797" class="wp-caption-text">(Photos: iStock)</figcaption>
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<p><strong>Denali Commission:</strong> Created in 1998 to fund infrastructure projects in Alaska, the Denali Commission was targeted for elimination by both Barack Obama and Donald Trump—but Congress keeps funding it anyway. Mike Marsh, the commission's inspector general, wrote in 2013 that the agency is "a congressional experiment that hasn't worked out in practice" and urged Congress to "put its money elsewhere." In FY 2023, the Denali Commission had a budget of $13.8 million.</p>
<figure style="width:1024px; max-width:100%" id="attachment_8265798" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-8265798" class="alignleft wp-caption"><a href="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/q60/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar3.jpg"><img decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-8265798" src="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/q60/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar3-1024x576.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="576" data-credit="Photos: iStock" srcset="https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar3-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar3-300x169.jpg 300w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar3-768x432.jpg 768w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar3-800x450.jpg 800w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar3-600x338.jpg 600w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar3-331x186.jpg 331w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar3.jpg 1161w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
<figcaption id="caption-attachment-8265798" class="wp-caption-text">(Photos: iStock)</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>Christmas Tree Promotion </strong><strong>Board:</strong> A 12-member board (one for each day of Christmas?) created in 2011 to "expand the market and uses of fresh-cut Christmas trees" and funded with a new fee of 15 cents on all real Christmas trees sold in the country. Nothing says "Merry Christmas!" like a new tax on the people who are already using your product. Interestingly, this was not created by an act of Congress but by the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service, which Congress authorized in 1996 and gave the ability to create new boards and agencies like this one. Oh, administrative state, how lovely are thy line items.</p>
<p><a href="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/q60/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar6.jpg"></a></p>
<p><strong>Corporation for Travel </strong><strong>Promotion: </strong>Established in 2010, this 11-member board within the Department of Commerce is charged with "providing useful information to those interested in traveling to the United States," as if there weren't already dozens of websites and tour books doing the same thing. It's now known as Brand USA. Foreigners seeking visas to enter the United States pay a $4 fee to fund the corporation, even though they likely don't need to be convinced to visit.</p>
<figure style="width:1024px; max-width:100%" id="attachment_8265800" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-8265800" class="alignleft wp-caption"><a href="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/q60/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar4.jpg"><img decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-8265800" src="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/q60/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar4-1024x576.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="576" data-credit="Photos: iStock" srcset="https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar4-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar4-300x169.jpg 300w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar4-768x432.jpg 768w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar4-800x450.jpg 800w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar4-600x338.jpg 600w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar4-331x186.jpg 331w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/teasidebar4.jpg 1161w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
<figcaption id="caption-attachment-8265800" class="wp-caption-text">(Photos: iStock)</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>Rural Utilities Service:</strong> The Rural Electrification Administration was created as part of the New Deal in 1936 to expand the nation's power grids and phone lines to far-flung homes and communities. These days it's pretty difficult to find homes that lack electricity or phone service, but the administration is still around (though it was renamed in 1994). This tiny corner of the USDA—yep, it's not even part of the Energy Department—cost taxpayers $154 million this year.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reason.com/2024/03/17/after-a-century-the-federal-tea-board-is-finally-dead/">After a Century, the Federal Tea Board Is Finally Dead</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reason.com">Reason.com</a>.</p>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-11224934995501627452024-03-16T10:29:00.001-04:002024-03-16T10:29:43.353-04:00Seattle Law Mandating Higher Delivery Driver Pay Is a Disaster<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wNMDiISstqM/WdGjtWDANfI/AAAAAAAAJxs/LQ3XwbNuCXQWPbAwbfaUXzcblC9w24ESQCLcBGAs/s320/reasonlogo.jpg" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
By C. Jarrett Dieterle - March 16, 2024 at 07:00AM<br />
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<div class="img-wrap"><picture style="max-width: 100%; height: auto"><source type="image/webp" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_xxl_207796343-2400x1350.jpg.webp 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_xxl_207796343-1200x675.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_xxl_207796343-800x450.jpg.webp 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_xxl_207796343-600x338.jpg.webp 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_xxl_207796343-331x186.jpg.webp 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_xxl_207796343-1200x675.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_xxl_207796343-1920x1080.jpg.webp 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <source type="image/jpeg" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_xxl_207796343-2400x1350.jpg 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_xxl_207796343-1200x675.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_xxl_207796343-800x450.jpg 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_xxl_207796343-600x338.jpg 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_xxl_207796343-331x186.jpg 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_xxl_207796343-1200x675.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_xxl_207796343-1920x1080.jpg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <img src="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_xxl_207796343-800x450.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto" width="1200" height="675" alt="A delivery driver hands off a paper bag of takeout food to a customer. | Prathan Chorruangsak | Dreamstime.com" /></picture></div>
<p>In 2022, Seattle's City Council passed an ordinance mandating a minimum earnings floor for app-based food delivery drivers in the city. The law finally <a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2024/data-from-seattle-food-delivery-drivers-shows-higher-hourly-earnings-but-less-customer-demand/#:~:text=DoorDash%20said%20the%20new%20law,are%20paid%20more%20while%20working.">went into effect</a> in January 2024, but so far the main result has been customers deleting their delivery apps en masse, food orders plummeting, and driver pay cratering.</p>
<p>The ordinance, part of a legislative package called "<a href="https://www.seattle.gov/council/issues/past-issues/payup">PayUp</a>," was passed under the banner of protecting gig workers. By setting a compensation floor for app-based delivery drivers based on miles driven and amount of time worked, the ordinance operates as a (supremely complicated) minimum wage.</p>
<p>The wage floor is based on labyrinthine <a href="http://seattle.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5544832&GUID=94515F81-C901-4525-AA5F-1EEE5FC1FC01&Options=ID%7cText%7c&Search=120294&FullText=1">calculations</a>: the "engaged minutes" for drivers are multiplied by a "minimum wage equivalent rate," which is then multiplied again by an "associated cost factor" and then multiplied yet again by an "associated time factor<i>.</i>" Next, this sum is added to the total of "engaged miles" of drivers, multiplied by the "standard mileage rate" and then multiplied once more by the "associated mileage factor." (If you're lost, don't worry—the <a href="http://seattle.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5544832&GUID=94515F81-C901-4525-AA5F-1EEE5FC1FC01&Options=ID%7cText%7c&Search=120294&FullText=1">text</a> of the ordinance itself literally does the math for you).</p>
<p>Heralded as a "<a href="https://ogletree.com/insights-resources/blog-posts/seattle-enacts-first-of-its-kind-ordinance-to-provide-minimum-wage-and-other-protections-for-app-based-delivery-workers/">first-of-its-kind</a>" legislative breakthrough when it passed, the first two months of the ordinance's operation have provided a grim real-world Economics 101 lesson. First, the delivery companies were forced to add a $5 fee onto delivery orders in the city to cover the sudden labor cost increase. On cue, news <a href="https://mynbc15.com/news/nation-world/app-based-food-delivery-drivers-and-customers-react-to-seattles-new-hefty-fees-minimum-pay-law-grubhub-doordash-uber-eats-instacart-sky-high-taxes-fees">stories</a> started <a href="https://www.king5.com/article/money/food-delivery-fee-angering-seattle-app-users/281-45019904-27a4-4e9a-9cd1-b7ee4bbdb9b8">popping up</a> of $26 coffees, $32 sandwiches, and $35 Wingstop orders in which taxes and the new fee comprised nearly 30 percent of the total.</p>
<p>Local news station King 5 reported that Seattle residents started <a href="https://www.king5.com/article/money/food-delivery-fee-angering-seattle-app-users/281-45019904-27a4-4e9a-9cd1-b7ee4bbdb9b8">deleting their delivery apps</a> from their phones in response to the spiking exorbitant delivery prices. Uber Eats experienced a <a href="https://medium.com/uber-under-the-hood/the-impact-of-seattles-driver-and-courier-pay-regulations-30fdc817e65c">30-percent decline</a> in order volume in the city, while DoorDash reported <a href="https://about.doordash.com/en-us/news/evaluating-the-harmful-impacts-of-seattles-new-delivery-laws">30,000 fewer orders</a> within just the first two weeks of the ordinance taking effect.</p>
<p>In turn, this decrease in demand directly impacted the pocketbooks of the delivery drivers themselves. A driver who made $931 in a week this time last year saw his earnings <a href="https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle-ordinance-intended-app-delivery-workers-hurting-them/281-9516c79c-3161-41f3-a662-798b9db16d3f">drop by half</a> to $464.81 in a comparative week this year. Another <a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2024/seattle-city-council-president-sara-nelson-very-worried-about-fallout-from-food-delivery-shake-up/">reported</a> consistently making $20 an hour prior to the ordinance, only to see his earnings likewise fall by more than half since its enactment.</p>
<p>In other words, while the ordinance theoretically raises driver earnings to <a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2024/data-from-seattle-food-delivery-drivers-shows-higher-hourly-earnings-but-less-customer-demand/#:~:text=DoorDash%20said%20the%20new%20law,are%20paid%20more%20while%20working.">over $26 per hour</a>—a number that ironically far exceeds Seattle's $19.97 standard minimum wage—drivers are barely logging any hours as a result of the drastic decrease in demand for food delivery. As one Seattle driver <a href="https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/tired-seattles-new-food-delivery-fees-one-driver-took-things-into-his-own-hands/MHCVFIV6AZASLCWHJAJMIR2EDE/">summarized</a>: "It was dead. Demand was dead." A second driver put it more <a href="https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle-ordinance-intended-app-delivery-workers-hurting-them/281-9516c79c-3161-41f3-a662-798b9db16d3f">bluntly</a>: "I've got nothin'. I'm not gonna sit here for hours for one frickin' order."</p>
<p>In addition to drivers, those who have been hardest hit include local mom and pop <a href="https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/seattle-pizzeria-owner-gig-ordinance-impacting-sales/281-e12f7a9c-8cb7-4c3f-b5df-5270102ae18e">restaurants</a> that have seen delivery orders dry up, and even the city's elderly and disabled <a href="https://www.king5.com/article/money/disabled-elderly-say-grocery-delivery-apps-no-longer-an-option/281-ea390ef6-7dae-4afd-aa10-7be0f562d4b1">population</a> who often depend on affordable delivery options for meals. One might imagine that progressive politicians would be quick to repeal a law that hurts workers, noncorporate local businesses, and the elderly and disabled all at the same time, but Seattle's government officials are busy either doubling down or dissembling.</p>
<p>A spokesman for the mayor <a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2024/seattle-mayor-stands-strongly-in-support-of-new-gig-worker-wage-law-as-tech-companies-push-back/">noted</a> that "should the data show there have been unintended impacts for workers and small businesses, we are always open to making improvements"—a criterion which has clearly been met already—but nonetheless clarified that the mayor still "stands strongly in support" of the minimum wage ordinance.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the president of the City Council <a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2024/seattle-city-council-president-sara-nelson-very-worried-about-fallout-from-food-delivery-shake-up/">claims</a> she is "very worried" about the ordinance's impacts so far—and even argues that "it's not the role of policymakers to regulate the profit margins of companies"—before going on to say "I'm not going to redo the whole legislation."</p>
<p>The near future looks even grimmer for Seattle delivery customers and drivers. After passing the PayUp package, the City Council then decided that implementing the minimum earnings portion of the ordinance would require five new full-time government employees in the city's Office of Labor Standards (expanding to nine employees by 2027) and $1.2 million per year (escalating to $1.56 million annually by 2027). To fund these additional costs—as well as other parts of the PayUp package—the Council <a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2023/seattle-passes-new-law-that-creates-10-cent-per-order-fee-for-app-based-deliveries-and-services/">voted</a> this past November to tack on a 10-cent per-delivery fee, which will take effect in 2025 and is projected to generate $2.1 million in annual revenue for the city coffers.</p>
<p>While the desire to protect delivery drivers may be based on good intentions, the solutions pushed by progressive politicians too often hurt more than help. If policy makers really want to support app-based gig workers, they should instead enact rules protecting independent contracting status while also experimenting with <a href="https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/a-flexible-worker-agenda">portable benefit models</a> that actually could help these workers.</p>
<p>But given the recalcitrance of city officials, Seattle residents likely will have to resign themselves to more $26 coffees for the foreseeable future.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reason.com/2024/03/16/seattle-law-mandating-higher-delivery-driver-pay-is-a-disaster/">Seattle Law Mandating Higher Delivery Driver Pay Is a Disaster</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reason.com">Reason.com</a>.</p>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-26949591009853225172024-03-16T08:29:00.001-04:002024-03-16T08:29:55.942-04:00Don't Let E.U. Bureaucrats Design Americans' Tech<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wNMDiISstqM/WdGjtWDANfI/AAAAAAAAJxs/LQ3XwbNuCXQWPbAwbfaUXzcblC9w24ESQCLcBGAs/s320/reasonlogo.jpg" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
By Jennifer Huddleston - March 16, 2024 at 06:00AM<br />
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<div class="img-wrap"><picture style="max-width: 100%; height: auto"><source type="image/webp" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/02/featureBureaucratsplayproductdesigner.jpg.webp 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/02/featureBureaucratsplayproductdesigner.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/02/featureBureaucratsplayproductdesigner-800x450.jpg.webp 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/02/featureBureaucratsplayproductdesigner-600x338.jpg.webp 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/02/featureBureaucratsplayproductdesigner-331x186.jpg.webp 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/02/featureBureaucratsplayproductdesigner.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/02/featureBureaucratsplayproductdesigner.jpg.webp 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <source type="image/jpeg" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/02/featureBureaucratsplayproductdesigner.jpg 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/02/featureBureaucratsplayproductdesigner.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/02/featureBureaucratsplayproductdesigner-800x450.jpg 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/02/featureBureaucratsplayproductdesigner-600x338.jpg 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/02/featureBureaucratsplayproductdesigner-331x186.jpg 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/02/featureBureaucratsplayproductdesigner.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/02/featureBureaucratsplayproductdesigner.jpg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <img src="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/02/featureBureaucratsplayproductdesigner-800x450.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto" width="1200" height="675" alt="An illustration of the European Union flag mangled by a frayed phone charging cord | Illustration: Joanna Andreasson" /></picture></div>
<p>For years, iPhone users have been saddled with an unusual feature: The popular Apple smartphone used a proprietary cable, called the Lightning cable, for charging.</p>
<p>By the 2020s, most manufacturers of comparable devices had switched to a universal standard, USB-C. Even some other Apple devices—including the iPad, which in many ways resembles an oversized iPhone—moved to the common USB-C. But the iPhone remained stubbornly attached to its Apple-specific cord.</p>
<p>Inevitably, this caused headaches and complications for some iPhone users, even those fully ensconced in the ecosystem of Apple devices. What if you want to borrow a friend's charging cable and that friend uses an Android phone? What if you're also lugging around an iPad? How many charging cords does one person really need to carry?</p>
<p>But the iPhone 15, released in 2023, uses the USB-C port for charging—in Europe, the U.S., and everywhere else. Starting with this model, Apple customers won't have to worry about what type of phone their friends have when asking to borrow a charger.</p>
<p>This change didn't come from a new innovation or from consumer demands. It was mandated by European regulators.</p>
<p>In September 2021, the European Commission proposed a common charger regulation, claiming it was appropriate to reduce electronic waste and consumer frustration. The proposal was passed in 2022, and the mandate goes into effect in 2024.</p>
<p>This might sound like a boon for users. But in the long term, this sort of rule threatens to thwart future innovation by locking tech companies into government-determined feature sets that can be updated or improved only with regulatory approval. Rules like this turn bureaucrats into product designers.</p>
<p>The charging rules are a symptom of a larger problem. E.U. bureaucrats' "regulate-first" approach has been spreading beyond Europe's borders to impact American companies and American consumers. Unfortunately, many American policy makers seem to be looking to Europe as a model.</p>
<h2>A Rising Wave of E.U. Regulation</h2>
<p>Many Americans first experienced the impact of the European regulatory approach in May 2018, when they started noticing more click-through requirements to accept cookies and updated privacy policies. All those annoying security pop-ups and repeated notice of updates to terms of service on websites were the direct result of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), an E.U. policy that required companies to adopt specific practices around interactions with user data and users' rights related to those data.</p>
<p>The GDPR didn't just bring a bunch of annoying pop-ups, it also caused huge corporate compliance costs. When the GDPR went into effect in 2018, companies reported spending an average of $1.3 million on compliance costs. A Pricewaterhouse-Coopers survey found that 40 percent of global companies spent over $10 million in initial compliance. These weren't one-time costs; some companies spend millions annually to comply.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, some organizations decided to pull out of the E.U. market entirely rather than comply with these rules. Others chose to deploy these changes all around the world rather than try to tailor compliance to the European Union. In other words, they treated the E.U.'s rules as global requirements.</p>
<p>This is a common result of tech regulations: Laws passed in one region end up affecting citizens located in other areas as companies standardize practices.</p>
<p>Consider the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a European regulation that went into effect in 2022. Under this law, regulators can put additional restrictions on otherwise legal business practices for companies labeled "gatekeepers." In September 2023, regulators gave six companies—Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon, Apple, ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok), Meta (the parent company of Facebook), and Microsoft—the gatekeeper label. Notably, five of these six companies are American, and none are European. Meta and ByteDance have challenged their designation as gatekeepers, while Microsoft and Google have announced they do not plan to challenge the change.</p>
<p>The DMA's rules aren't yet finalized. But they could keep companies stuck with the gatekeeper designation from prioritizing their own products or services, and they might impose restrictions on messaging and advertising.</p>
<p>The Digital Services Act (DSA) is another European regulation that could significantly change the way users experience the internet both in Europe and beyond. The DSA was part of a legislative package with the DMA, but it's focused on disinformation and supposedly harmful online content. The law gives regulators more power to require that online platforms respond to their requests for information about content moderation actions and speakers and even allow regulators to mandate takedowns.</p>
<p>Even prior to the DSA, European governments had far greater ability to intervene in moderation decisions than U.S. officials, who are mostly limited to making nonbinding requests. In contrast, companies subject to the DSA risk fines of up to 6 percent of their annual turnover.</p>
<p>Europe also adopted an AI Act in December. While E.U. bureaucrats trumpeted the law as the "first of its kind," that's not something to brag about. The regulation will create a series of stringent requirements on various artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. If there's good news, it is that some nations in Europe, including Germany, France, and Italy, are pushing for AI self-regulation instead. Although they probably won't stop new AI controls completely, their objections could at least reduce the regulatory burden that AI companies face and signal awareness of the impact such regulations can have on innovation.</p>
<p>Europe seems committed to forcing innovators to prove to regulators that a technology will not cause harm rather than making rules designed to stop proven harms. This approach to regulation—sometimes described as "the precautionary principle"—presumes a technology is guilty until it is proven innocent.</p>
<h2>Europe's Tech Policy Isn't Just About Europe</h2>
<p>In 2015, President Barack Obama applauded U.S. technological success and warned that European lawmakers were trying to use regulation to hamstring American business. "We have owned the internet," he told <em>Recode</em>. "Our companies have created it, expanded it, perfected it in ways that they can't compete. And oftentimes what is portrayed as high-minded positions on issues sometimes is just designed to carve out some of their commercial interests." He cast European regulation as a way to "set up some roadblocks for our companies to operate effectively there."</p>
<p>Obama isn't the only American leader to worry publicly about the E.U.'s overreach. In 2019, President Donald Trump said, "Every week you see them going after Facebook and Apple and all of these companies….They think there's a monopoly, but I'm not sure that they think that. They just think this is easy money." In 2022, a bipartisan group of senators warned that the DMA and DSA, "as currently drafted, will unfairly disadvantage U.S. firms to the benefit of not just European companies, but also powerful state-owned and subsidized Chinese and Russian companies, which would have negative impacts on internet users' privacy, security and free speech."</p>
<p>Such concerns are far from misguided. Remember, five of the six designated gatekeepers under the DMA are American. Similarly, the DSA designated 19 companies as "very large online platforms" or "very large search engines" subject to increased regulatory scrutiny and specific requirements within the areas they are deemed potential gatekeepers. Of the 19 companies slapped with a "very large" designation, 15 are American and only two are European.</p>
<p>At times, some of these regulations seem constructed in such a way to directly target American companies—while giving a boost to the few European companies that might otherwise be subject to their regulations.</p>
<h2>Global Consequences</h2>
<p>This growing array of requirements could have unintended consequences for how products function far beyond Europe—and how we can use them to speak online.</p>
<p>Supporters of the GDPR claimed the law would preserve privacy and online safety. But some E.U. tech rules could actually make software and devices less safe. For example, requiring platforms to allow third-party payment processors or "side loading"—essentially installing software that isn't explicitly authorized by the phone or operating system manufacturer—is intended to level the playing field for smaller competitors. But making devices and software more open to third-party modification could also make them vulnerable to hacking. The likely global reach of these rules would mean those vulnerabilities wouldn't be limited to Europe.</p>
<p>More rules on product design, meanwhile, could produce a chilling effect on new tech. Companies may be less likely to try new products or privacy tactics that might not comply with European regulations if they know that will foreclose a big market. Even an innovation that improves privacy and cybersecurity might struggle to comply with GDPR requirements designed with a different model in mind.</p>
<p>It is not just innovation and security that are at risk. Americans may soon find themselves subject to European bureaucrats' norms when it comes to free speech.</p>
<p>Already, many European and Latin American countries have created laws governing hate speech or harmful content. These laws are likely to result in more aggressive takedowns by social media companies, especially on hot-button political issues. If tech companies decide to enforce a single global standard for community guidelines, American internet users will end up communicating in online spaces where the rules were designed to comply with foreign hate speech laws that aren't restrained by the First Amendment's protections.</p>
<h2>What Not To Do in Tech Policy</h2>
<p>While some American officials have criticized these E.U. regulations, others have seen them as an opportunity to argue that the U.S. should change its own approach. A growing number of American policy makers are looking to Europe as an example—or even actively collaborating with E.U. tech regulators.</p>
<p>In March 2023, the Federal Trade Commission sent officials to Brussels to aid in implementing and enforcing the DMA. At the same time, the agency has taken an increasingly aggressive approach domestically, attempting to enforce antitrust standards that resemble Europe's by waging a yearslong legal campaign against mergers in the tech sector. (This campaign has failed repeatedly in U.S. courts.)</p>
<p>Some policy makers have directly applauded the European approach. In June 2022, Sens. Ed Markey (D–Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) sent a letter asking the secretary of commerce to "restore the sanity" and follow the E.U. in requiring a universal charger for smartphones and certain other electronic devices.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, European regulators seem eager to gain a greater foothold in the United States. The E.U. has opened an office in San Francisco to promote compliance with its technology regulations, a move that seems to more than just tacitly acknowledge that these regulations will have a big impact on American companies.</p>
<p>The stakes are high. A 2022 study found that 16 percent of European companies would be willing to switch to a Chinese tech provider due to anticipated cost increases from the DMA. Others might turn to providers that are not subject to the regulations but provide inferior products either in quality or security. These policies would punish successful American companies while benefiting those of more questionable regimes.</p>
<p>The U.S. needs to be an alternative to such heavy-handed controls. It should stick with the relatively hands-off approach that has helped make America a global leader in tech.</p>
<p>In 1996, when the modern internet was in its infancy, Congress made clear it was the policy of the United States "to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation." As Rep. Christopher Cox (R–Calif.) said at the time, America does "not wish to have a Federal Computer Commission with an army of bureaucrats regulating the Internet because, frankly, the Internet has grown up to be what it is without that kind of help from the Government."</p>
<p>Similarly, the Clinton administration's Framework for Global Electronic Commerce not only described the potential benefits of the internet for global commerce but criticized the consequences of overregulation by declaring that the internet is presumed free. This nonregulatory position allowed the internet to flourish without tight constraints.</p>
<p>"For this potential to be realized fully, governments must adopt a non-regulatory, market-oriented approach to electronic commerce, one that facilitates the emergence of a transparent and predictable legal environment to support global business and commerce," read the Clinton report. "Official decision makers must respect the unique nature of the medium and recognize that widespread competition and increased consumer choice should be the defining features of the new digital marketplace."</p>
<p>Further, it cautioned that governments could "by their actions…facilitate electronic trade or inhibit it." This approach told innovators and investors they were free to try. It is miles from what we're seeing from politicians eager to crack down on tech companies today.</p>
<h2>What's Really at Risk</h2>
<p>We have a new iPhone charger now. For some users, it might be more convenient. But consider what would have happened if this decision had been made a decade earlier.</p>
<p>In 2012, smartphones were still evolving. Apple used cumbersome 30-pin chargers for their phones. Other companies used older USB options, such as micro- and mini-USB, which were clunky in different ways. When the Lightning cable arrived, it was faster, smaller, more durable, and more physically secure. It offered an improved user experience relative to the other options, which in turn spurred adoption of the USB-C standard.</p>
<p>A more regulated marketplace might have stopped this development in its tracks, letting bureaucrats who prioritize uniformity over all else decide on a single standard rather than letting the market evolve.</p>
<p>The debate about European tech regulations and their ripple effects on American companies and consumers is often framed in terms of safety or privacy or the consumer experience. But at heart, it's about a much simpler question: Who gets to design the future—the government, or innovators?</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reason.com/2024/03/16/when-bureaucrats-play-product-designer/">Don't Let E.U. Bureaucrats Design Americans' Tech</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reason.com">Reason.com</a>.</p>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-44091150644587261092024-03-16T06:29:00.001-04:002024-03-16T06:29:33.915-04:00Beverly Hills Cop is a Fourth Amendment Movie<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wNMDiISstqM/WdGjtWDANfI/AAAAAAAAJxs/LQ3XwbNuCXQWPbAwbfaUXzcblC9w24ESQCLcBGAs/s320/reasonlogo.jpg" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
By Orin S. Kerr - March 16, 2024 at 04:57AM<br />
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<p>I recently rewatched <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UV-lUZIyQk"><em>Beverly Hills Cop</em> (1984)</a>, the Eddie Murphy movie, which came out when I was in junior high school. It dawned on me that the movie is not just a vehicle for Eddie Murphy's comic talents. It is that, to be clear; Murphy is fantastic in the movie. But there's a more important legal angle: <em>Beverly Hills Cop</em> is a Fourth Amendment movie.</p>
<p>There are lots of Fourth Amendment issues in the movie. But the key scene, at the warehouse, could be an exam question.</p>
<p>Recall the facts.</p>
<p>Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy's character) is a Detroit cop on vacation who is trying to investigate his friend's murder. He is trying to get the police in Beverly Hills to investigate, but they refuse. The Beverly Hills police chief instead orders Foley out of town, instructing Beverly Hills officer Billy Rosewood (played by Judge Reinhold) to drive Foley to the outskirts of town.</p>
<p>On the drive, however, Foley persuades Rosewood to ignore his orders and to bring Foley and his old friend Jenny Summers to a warehouse where Foley expects to find drugs being trafficked by Victor Maitland, the art dealer turned drug trafficker. Summers has the key to the warehouse because she happens to work for Maitland at his art gallery, although of course she had no idea of his illegal drug activities.</p>
<p>Rosewood parks the car outside the warehouse. Rosewood wants to go inside the warehouse, too, but Foley tells Rosewood to stay in the car. If Rosewood enters, Foley says, it will be an illegal search because they don't have probable cause. I'll come get you if I find evidence, Foley tells him. Foley wants Summers to give him the key so he can search by himself, but Summers refuses and insists on going with him.</p>
<p>Foley and Summers enter the warehouse with Summers' key, and they find a several wood crates that have the gallery's name on them. According to Foley, they are crates from overseas that bypassed customs. Foley uses a crowbar to open the crates, and they find cocaine inside. "Go get Rosewood," Foley tells Summers.</p>
<p>But wait! Maitland and his evil crew are on to them. They capture Foley and Summers in the warehouse. They take Summers away, and Maitland orders his men to kill Foley.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Rosewood is watching from outside. He has seen Maitland and his crew arrive at the warehouse. He then sees Maitland leave minutes later, and he has Summers, who seems to be forced into Maitland's car before they drive off. Rosewood is sufficiently worried about Foley that he breaks into the warehouse himself. After entering, Rosewood saves Foley.</p>
<p>Assume Maitland somehow survives the later shooting at his estate, and that the government seeks to put on the following evidence at trial against Maitland:</p>
<p>(a) Foley's testimony about what happened in the warehouse,</p>
<p>(b) Rosewood's testimony about what he saw in the warehouse;</p>
<p>(c) Summers' testimony about what she saw in the warehouse; and</p>
<p>(d) the cocaine discovered in the warehouse.</p>
<p>Among the issues you might want to consider:</p>
<p>First, was Foley a state actor for 4th Amendment purposes when he entered the warehouse? He was an officer outside his jurisdiction who had been told by both the Detroit and Beverly Hills police departments not to investigate. He did so anyway for personal reasons, to bust the man who killed his friend. Was Foley a private actor or a state actor? Fourth Amendment state action generally requires the knowledge or acquiescence of the government. But who is the government here: The police chiefs? Rosewood? Foley himself?</p>
<p>Second, was Summers a state actor for Fourth Amendment purposes? Note that she is not just going along; she insisted on participating together with Foley and is working together with Foley.</p>
<p>Third, did Summers have common authority to consent to enter the warehouse? If so, does her common authority extend to opening the crates that Foley used a crowbar to open, in which the cocaine was found? If there was not common authority, was there apparent authority?</p>
<p>Fourth, did Rosewood have exigent circumstances to enter the warehouse? Seeing Summers get taken away sure seems bad, but was that the result of a police-created exigency caused by their possibly unlawful entry? Or is this more of a <em>Brigham City v. Stuart s</em>ituation to save Foley's life?</p>
<p>Fifth, assuming the entry into the warehouse was unlawful and the cocaine has to be suppressed, does the scope of the exclusionary rule also go so far as to forbid testimony about what Maitland and his men said and did to Foley and Summers upon stopping them inside the warehouse? Or does the criminal conduct by Maitland and his men break the causal chain and permit the testimony?</p>
<p>Extra Credit: Are any of your answers different if you apply Fourth Amendment law as it existed in 1984, when <em>Beverly Hills Cop</em> was released?</p>
<p><iframe title="BEVERLY HILLS COP | Official Trailer | Paramount Movies" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1UV-lUZIyQk?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reason.com/volokh/2024/03/16/beverly-hills-cop-is-a-fourth-amendment-movie/"><i>Beverly Hills Cop</i> is a Fourth Amendment Movie</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reason.com">Reason.com</a>.</p>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-43270105897873417982024-03-15T00:47:00.001-04:002024-03-15T00:47:17.823-04:00Youngkin takes action on 50 bills<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TAvKVsJ3gbg/WLJxUAsuD3I/AAAAAAAAJmo/nbmt2cdqcLgdArI0_5OpjkHpC2U-2CKCgCLcB/s1600/watchdog.png" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
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By By Morgan Sweeney | The Center Square - March 14, 2024 at 08:06PM<br />
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(The Center Square) — Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin acted on 50 more bills Thursday, signing 30 and vetoing 20.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-42427638033851377032024-03-15T00:29:00.001-04:002024-03-15T00:29:16.206-04:00Second Amendment Roundup: Delaware's "Assault Weapon" Ban Argued in 3rd Circuit<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wNMDiISstqM/WdGjtWDANfI/AAAAAAAAJxs/LQ3XwbNuCXQWPbAwbfaUXzcblC9w24ESQCLcBGAs/s320/reasonlogo.jpg" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
By Stephen Halbrook - March 14, 2024 at 09:41PM<br />
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<p>The Third Circuit heard oral argument on March 11 in a challenge to Delaware's ban on so-called "assault weapons" and ammunition magazines that hold over 17 rounds. Three overlapping cases were consolidated for argument on appeal from the denial of a preliminary injunction. Before the Court got into the meat of the Second Amendment dispute, Judge Stephanos Bibas raised a question about the preliminary injunction standard as it applies in Second Amendment cases: do the plaintiffs need to show that <em>every</em> preliminary injunction factor weighs in their favor, or is it enough to show they are likely to succeed on the merits?</p>
<p>The Supreme Court refers to the preliminary injunction as "an extraordinary remedy" that requires plaintiffs to make a "clear showing" on four factors before being granted: (1) likelihood of success on the merits, (2) that they face irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction, (3) that the balance of the equities favor them, and (4) that the public interest would be served by the injunction. The plaintiffs in Delaware focused on the first point—that they were likely to show the laws they challenged violate their Second Amendment rights. Judge Bibas questioned whether that was enough.</p>
<p>It should be. In fact, while there are putatively four factors to be considered in granting a preliminary injunction, in litigation against the government over the constitutionality of a law, in practice they tend to collapse. In such cases, "likelihood of success" is "the first among equals" and is typically dispositive, <em>L.W. by & through Williams v. Skrmetti</em> (6th Cir. 2023), and the third and the fourth factors, the public interest and the balance of the equities are considered as one. <em><a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/556/418/">Nken v. Holder</a></em> (U.S. 2009). Furthermore, if plaintiffs show that the law they challenge violates the Constitution, then those final factors necessarily weigh in their favor, because "the enforcement of an unconstitutional law vindicates no public interest." <em><a href="https://casetext.com/case/ka-v-pocono-mountain-sch-dist">K.A. ex rel. Ayers v. Pocono Mountain School District</a></em> (3d Cir. 2013).</p>
<p>The same should be true for irreparable harm as well, as the Ninth Circuit recognized in its Second Amendment decision in <em><a href="https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2023/09/07/23-15016.pdf">Baird v. Bonta</a></em> (2023), where it explained that "in cases involving a constitutional claim, a likelihood of success on the merits usually establishes irreparable harm, and strongly tips the balances of equities and public interest in favor of granting a preliminary injunction."</p>
<p><span id="more-8268964"></span>Irreparable harm was the focus of Judge Bibas's questioning in the Delaware argument. It is black-letter law, as the Supreme Court held in 2020 in <em><a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2020/20A87">Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo</a></em>, that "[t]he loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury." There is every reason to think the same is true for the Second Amendment. "Irreparable harm" is an injury that cannot be easily measured in (and therefore compensated by) monetary damages. Some circuits have recognized that <em>any</em> constitutional right deprivation is necessarily "irreparable." <em><a href="https://casetext.com/case/melendres-v-arpaio-6">Melendres v. Arapaio</a></em> (9th Cir. 2012). And the Third Circuit has extended it at least to cover Fourth Amendment rights, noting that "[p]ersons who can establish that they are being denied their constitutional rights are entitled to relief, and it can no longer be seriously contended that an action for money damages will serve to adequately remedy unconstitutional searches and seizures." <em><a href="https://casetext.com/case/lewis-v-kugler-2">Lewis v. Kugler</a></em> (1971). As the Supreme Court made clear in <em><a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/597/20-843/">New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen</a></em> (2022), the Second Amendment deserves equal treatment with the other protections in the Bill or Rights.</p>
<p>In alignment with this, the Seventh Circuit in <em><a href="https://casetext.com/case/ezell-v-city-of-chicago">Ezell v. City of Chicago</a></em> (2011) answered Judge Bibas's question well when it noted that "[t]he loss of a First Amendment right is frequently presumed to cause irreparable harm based on the intangible nature of the benefits flowing from the exercise of those rights. . . . The Second Amendment protects similarly intangible and unquantifiable interests. <em>Heller</em> held that the Amendment's central component is the right to possess firearms for protection. Infringements of this right cannot be compensated by damages."</p>
<p>The limited scenarios in which a constitutional injury does not entitle a litigant to injunctive relief—in the Fifth Amendment takings context, for instance, where the proper remedy is money damages—supports the line the Seventh Circuit drew between "tangible" and "intangible" (but nevertheless real) injuries. Where plaintiffs show a likelihood of success in proving such an intangible injury, it follows that their injury is "irreparable" in nature.</p>
<p>At the Delaware argument, one of the attorneys defending the law argued that an injunction should not be the automatic result in a case showing likelihood of success in proving a constitutional violation, pointing to the <em>Purcell</em> principle. The <em>Purcell</em> principle, named after the Supreme Court case <em><a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/549/1/">Purcell v. Gonzalez</a></em> (2006), is the rule that courts should ordinarily <em>not</em> enjoin challenged election laws shortly before an election is set to occur, out of concern that such an injunction could result in voter confusion. But the <em>Purcell</em> principle is the exception that proves the rule—it speaks only to a very narrow circumstance where an injunction should not enter immediately (though to be sure, election laws can be enjoined immediately <em>after</em> the election upon a showing of constitutional infirmity) because of unique concerns about the fairness of elections. That the Delaware law's defenders would look to such a dissimilar context shows how little they have to support their position.</p>
<p>One other point of interest from this argument. The Third Circuit panel showed some concern that the plaintiffs were pointing to information that was not technically in the preliminary injunction "record" of evidence submitted to the trial court. Judge Bibas asked the attorney for Delaware whether it was appropriate to look at such evidence because it went toward proving certain "legislative facts." The attorney's responded, "The very fact that they are citing expert declarations that plaintiffs in other cases chose to submit to those courts, but that for whatever reason, these plaintiffs chose not to submit here, is precisely evidence that these are adjudicative facts. . . . [and] that this is for trial courts to deal with on the record that is presented before them." That betrayed a serious misunderstanding of the legislative facts that are crucial to Second Amendment (and a lot of other constitutional) litigation.</p>
<p>Legislative facts, as opposed to adjudicative facts, are not the sort of facts typically "found" through trials; they are not case specific but instead are general facts about the world. For instance, whether a plaintiff in a Second Amendment case desires to acquire an AR-15 rifle is an adjudicative fact; it is a fact specific to the plaintiff. Whether AR-15 rifles are in common use for lawful purposes, on the other hand, is a general fact about the world and therefore a legislative fact. The distinction matters because the rules of evidence only constrain courts with respect to adjudicative facts—as far as legislative facts are concerned, a court can find them based on record evidence, or it can find them based on its own research, or by reviewing law review articles and social science papers cited by the parties in their briefs.</p>
<p>And importantly, when a district court makes a decision based on legislative facts, its "findings" do not receive deference from the appellate courts. This makes sense, given that legislative facts are frequently the sort of facts that are used as the foundation for legal rules. That some legislative facts might be found in expert reports (or found in the sources an expert might otherwise cite) does not matter at all to their classification or to whether <em>other</em> courts can consider them without an expert submission of their own.</p>
<p>Take, as a particularly relevant example, the fact that the handgun is the most preferred firearm in America for self-defense is a legislative fact. Regardless of whether the district court received evidence on that question, and irrespective of what it might have purported to "find" about the topic, the Supreme Court in <em><a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/554/570/">District of Columbia v. Heller</a></em> (2008) was free to make its own decision, as the court of last resort in deciding constitutional questions, handling a legislative fact of relevance to constitutional reasoning. And that's what makes Delaware's whole argument so strange. Not only was <em>Heller</em> unrestricted by lower court findings on this issue, there actually were no such findings. <em>Heller</em> was working with a blank canvas. In that case, and in <em>Bruen</em>, the district court had disposed of the case without building any record at all. And yet, both <em>Heller</em> and <em>Bruen</em> made all sorts of factual assertions about firearm use, features, and history, all issues of legislative facts presented to it through the parties' briefs, amicus submissions, and through its own research. It did not matter one whit that there had been no findings on those issues and in fact in both cases it declined to remand for development of an evidentiary record.</p>
<p>If the Third Circuit is considering constraining parties to a narrow "record" in resolving constitutional claims, it will have to look somewhere other than the Supreme Court's Second Amendment caselaw to justify such a rule.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reason.com/volokh/2024/03/14/second-amendment-roundup-delawares-assault-weapon-ban-argued-in-3rd-circuit/">Second Amendment Roundup: Delaware's "Assault Weapon" Ban Argued in 3rd Circuit</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reason.com">Reason.com</a>.</p>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-67025199609802507202024-03-14T07:30:00.001-04:002024-03-14T07:30:04.907-04:00Brickbat: Swift Justice<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wNMDiISstqM/WdGjtWDANfI/AAAAAAAAJxs/LQ3XwbNuCXQWPbAwbfaUXzcblC9w24ESQCLcBGAs/s320/reasonlogo.jpg" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
By Charles Oliver - March 14, 2024 at 04:00AM<br />
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<div class="img-wrap"><picture style="max-width: 100%; height: auto"><source type="image/webp" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_100093815-2400x1350.jpg.webp 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_100093815-1200x675.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_100093815-800x450.jpg.webp 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_100093815-600x338.jpg.webp 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_100093815-331x186.jpg.webp 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_100093815-1200x675.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_100093815-1920x1080.jpg.webp 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <source type="image/jpeg" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_100093815-2400x1350.jpg 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_100093815-1200x675.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_100093815-800x450.jpg 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_100093815-600x338.jpg 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_100093815-331x186.jpg 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_100093815-1200x675.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_100093815-1920x1080.jpg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <img src="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_100093815-800x450.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto" width="1200" height="675" alt="Blurred image of a police vehicle with siren flashing, as if in pursuit. | Niti Wongthai | Dreamstime.com" /></picture></div>
<p>King County Prosecuting Attorney Leesa Manion said she <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/02/22/seattle-officer-wont-face-felonies-jaahnavi-kandula/72699049007/">won't file felony charges</a> against Officer Kevin Dave of the Seattle Police Department, who fatally struck Jaahnavi Kandula with his patrol car in January 2023. "Our legal analysis reveals that the PAO (Prosecuting Attorney's Office) lacks sufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Officer Kevin Dave was impaired by drugs or alcohol, driving in a reckless manner, or driving with disregard for the safety of others," Manion said in a statement. Dave reached speeds of up to 74 mph while responding to an overdose call, but he used his siren only at intersections instead of running it continuously. He struck Kandula in a crosswalk in an area where the speed limit is 25 mph, applying his brakes less than a second before hitting her. Dave's case has been referred to the city attorney's office which will consider a misdemeanor charge of operating a motor vehicle in a negligent manner.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reason.com/2024/03/14/brickbat-swift-justice-2/">Brickbat: Swift Justice</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reason.com">Reason.com</a>.</p>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-31607196314541450782024-03-14T06:47:00.001-04:002024-03-14T06:47:37.129-04:00Lawmakers shed light on mail delivery problems plaguing Virginia<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TAvKVsJ3gbg/WLJxUAsuD3I/AAAAAAAAJmo/nbmt2cdqcLgdArI0_5OpjkHpC2U-2CKCgCLcB/s1600/watchdog.png" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
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By By Sarah Roderick-Fitch | The Center Square - March 13, 2024 at 06:06PM<br />
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(The Center Square) – A bipartisan group of lawmakers from Virginia are shedding light on mail delivery service in the commonwealth, with the Richmond Regional Processing and Distribution Center under audit from the U.S. Postal Service inspector general.<br />
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Read Entire Article Here: <a href="https://www.thecentersquare.com/virginia/article_ed5c86e6-e185-11ee-aac3-27073a403663.html?a" target="_blank">Watchdog National News</a><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-63249187219983230802024-03-14T02:29:00.001-04:002024-03-14T02:29:04.221-04:00Biden's Proposed Corporate Tax Hike Will Punish the Average American<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wNMDiISstqM/WdGjtWDANfI/AAAAAAAAJxs/LQ3XwbNuCXQWPbAwbfaUXzcblC9w24ESQCLcBGAs/s320/reasonlogo.jpg" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
By Veronique de Rugy - March 14, 2024 at 12:01AM<br />
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<div class="img-wrap"><picture style="max-width: 100%; height: auto"><source type="image/webp" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/03/joe-biden-corporate-tax-rate-2400x1350.jpg.webp 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/joe-biden-corporate-tax-rate-1200x675.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/joe-biden-corporate-tax-rate-800x450.jpg.webp 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/03/joe-biden-corporate-tax-rate-600x338.jpg.webp 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/03/joe-biden-corporate-tax-rate-331x186.jpg.webp 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/joe-biden-corporate-tax-rate-1200x675.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/03/joe-biden-corporate-tax-rate-1920x1080.jpg.webp 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <source type="image/jpeg" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/03/joe-biden-corporate-tax-rate-2400x1350.jpg 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/joe-biden-corporate-tax-rate-1200x675.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/joe-biden-corporate-tax-rate-800x450.jpg 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/03/joe-biden-corporate-tax-rate-600x338.jpg 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/03/joe-biden-corporate-tax-rate-331x186.jpg 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/joe-biden-corporate-tax-rate-1200x675.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/03/joe-biden-corporate-tax-rate-1920x1080.jpg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <img src="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/joe-biden-corporate-tax-rate-800x450.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto" width="1200" height="675" alt="President Joe Biden is seen departing the White House in March | Chris Kleponis/UPI/Newscom" /></picture></div>
<p>In the latest volley of policy proposals that seem more rooted in populist rhetoric than economic knowledge, President Joe Biden's budget plan to hike the corporate income tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent strikes me as particularly misguided. This move, ostensibly aimed at ensuring a "fair share" of contributions from corporate America, is a glaring testament to a simplistic and all-too-common type of economic thinking that already hamstrings our nation's competitiveness, stifles innovation, and ultimately penalizes the average American worker and consumer.</p>
<p>Beyond the president's class warfare rhetoric, the lure of putting his hands on more revenue is one of the factors behind the proposal. Biden likes to pretend he is some sort of deficit cutter, but his administration is the mother of all big spenders. He's seeking $7.3 trillion for next year without acknowledging the insolvency of Social Security coming our way or addressing what happens when Congress makes the Republican tax cut permanent in 2025 for people earning less than $400,000 a year.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, no fiscally irresponsible budget is complete without soothing individual taxpayers by promising to tax corporations. Never mind that the burden of corporate income tax hikes isn't shouldered by corporations. Yes, corporations do write the checks to the IRS, but the economic weight will be partially or fully shifted to others, such as workers through lower wages, consumers through higher prices, or shareholders through lower returns on investment. That means that many taxpayers making less than that $400,000 will be shouldering the cost of the corporate tax hike.</p>
<p>It is worth expanding on the fact that much of a corporate tax increase will be shouldered specifically by workers. A recent Tax Foundation <a href="https://taxfoundation.org/blog/inflation-reduction-act-corporate-taxes/">article</a>, for instance, explained that "a study of corporate taxes in Germany found that workers bear about half of the tax burden in the form of lower wages, with low-skilled, young, and female employees disproportionately harmed."</p>
<p>Biden's planned tax hike would raise revenue for sure. Kyle Pomerleau at the American Enterprise Institute told me that it would raise roughly $1 trillion over a decade. However, it will do it in the most damaging way possible.</p>
<p>Indeed, it is well-established by the economic literature that increasing corporate taxes is the most economically-destructive method due to its impact on incentives to invest. Investments that were previously feasible at the lowest rate of capital are now out of reach. Firms forgo machinery, factories, and other equipment, reducing their capital stock. That in turn reduces productivity, output, and overtime wages.</p>
<p>The good news is that the reverse is also true. That's what the Republicans did in 2017 when they cut the federal corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent while broadening the tax base. Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute recently <a href="https://www.cato.org/blog/biden-proposal-raise-corporate-tax-rate">noted</a> that the move increased investments and wages as one would hope—and it also managed to boost federal corporate tax collections from $297 billion in 2017 to a projected $569 billion in 2024.</p>
<p>While this spike was attributed to temporary factors—the revenue is anticipated to decrease to $494 billion in 2025—it also reduced tax avoidance from firms who repatriated much of the revenue they used to keep abroad. Instead of avoiding higher tax rates, they invested more in America and boosted wages along the way.</p>
<p>In addition, for all the concerns about fairness expressed by the administration to justify its tax hike, the corporate tax is quite unfair. Profits are already subject to taxation at the individual level when distributed as dividends or realized as capital gains. Increasing the corporate tax rate will exacerbate the issue of double taxation, distorting investment decisions and reducing economic efficiency, not to mention encouraging aggressive planning for more tax avoidance.</p>
<p>Last, the administration's plan ignores one of its usual priorities: the fact that many U.S. companies must compete on the international stage. Raising the corporate income tax at home makes them less competitive abroad. According to the Cato Institute's Adam Michel, if Biden is successful in raising the corporate income tax to 28 percent, the U.S. would have the <a href="https://www.cato.org/blog/what-does-biden-plan-tax-code">second-highest</a> such rate among the market-oriented democracies that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. America would instantly become less attractive for multinational corporations and mobile capital.</p>
<p>In an era where economic literacy should guide policymaking, reverting to such tax hikes is a step backward—a misstep we can ill afford amid the delicate dance of post-pandemic recovery and an increasingly competitive global economy.</p>
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<p>The post <a href="https://reason.com/2024/03/14/bidens-proposed-corporate-tax-hike-will-punish-the-average-american/">Biden's Proposed Corporate Tax Hike Will Punish the Average American</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reason.com">Reason.com</a>.</p>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-70034103146090545302024-03-14T00:29:00.001-04:002024-03-14T00:29:22.980-04:00Matt Yglesias on the Takings Clause and Curbing Exclusionary Zoning<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wNMDiISstqM/WdGjtWDANfI/AAAAAAAAJxs/LQ3XwbNuCXQWPbAwbfaUXzcblC9w24ESQCLcBGAs/s320/reasonlogo.jpg" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
By Ilya Somin - March 13, 2024 at 09:08PM<br />
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<div class="img-wrap"><picture style="max-width: 100%; height: auto"><source type="image/webp" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-2400x1350.jpg.webp 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-1200x675.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-800x450.jpg.webp 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-600x338.jpg.webp 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-331x186.jpg.webp 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish.jpg.webp 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <source type="image/jpeg" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-2400x1350.jpg 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-1200x675.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-800x450.jpg 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-600x338.jpg 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-331x186.jpg 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish.jpg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <img src="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-800x450.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto" width="1200" height="675" alt="zoning-laws-abolish | Illustration: Lex Villena; Lev Kropotov " /></picture></div>
<figure style="width:300px; max-width:100%" id="attachment_8191333" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-8191333" class="alignnone wp-caption"><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-8191333" src="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/q60/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-300x169.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="169" data-credit="Illustration: Lex Villena; Lev Kropotov" srcset="https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-300x169.jpg 300w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-768x432.jpg 768w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-2048x1152.jpg 2048w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-1200x675.jpg 1200w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-800x450.jpg 800w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-600x338.jpg 600w, https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/zoning-laws-abolish-331x186.jpg 331w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
<figcaption id="caption-attachment-8191333" class="wp-caption-text">(Illustration: Lex Villena; Lev Kropotov )</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In <a href="https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-the-federal-government-can-help">a post at his Slow Boring website</a> on what the federal government can do to alleviate our massive shortage of affordable housing, prominent progressive political commentator and zoning reform advocate Matt Yglesias comments on my forthcoming <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4728312"><em>Texas Law Review</em> article</a> arguing that exclusionary zoning violates the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment (coauthored with Josh Braver):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[I]n mid-February <a href="https://secure-web.cisco.com/189AxwBraee8n_yfBIjS-4e10keM8N99RJebJ1iYBKz53PzBUsgRg48_sHklgOXpkUKrcMsZbbyTzrCLWhVlamg9m7tDht68VzWxxD70NQmquUzsXrGpCLD1MRgCGzILow7PPAbX1naS9Bnn-63G5-9tV-5RS1fv0qI3jXt4pgowDWorS3mPTxf_bOCGS_mIeTFl1408ytwZaAI8O9Xf5zLi7Ibx7eI3JUMH-x4UCCyHuRGo5_I84HfZLzxVIC-FPKMc1n1ZOBwb5nNDwCcGGXs6XNLALIR-4O68bnEYIInzksZ_3ANkmunN-TpAeGmFqd9vcm3dt3IrS3pLNjCaJLRDC4ky74V8FpAQJBC-AtQ6R-JQHV7oGvJo4MgN6qx39AYPMbjUUapQW8u-Xifp0z1SSrW8wAhcJNDI_gjaWdt4/https%3A%2F%2Furldefense.com%2Fv3%2F__https%3A%2Fsecure-web.cisco.com%2F1aamVdZQk3BfHgY1YvBaMMUmNvyrIB9mZUqYVim_eVjVEH09uQPIsEL9HZSaoKR853L7sQLJVDKXRD0IO9aTMnZ7PN5y3P1LkS7VVrQmwRnE-iZZQn8jKkm7K8H11taJ20htupAIB9gHJtsrI4D8n8Lrz_sCUFP3SYS_HMTngTQiafxHRnKGQcZZ41GULs1mfsWUTDHz-QtonW0ggMGNFE4VGj3-2XeWZQ4VUkvvp4QdQfTF81dprBdvBRgk-ywG1rVM8uA134czTkVkrC4ze6yOfVMUeBUdxFUaxxBC3SB3LVYjDnoNhLFbYUKtorO_12Ol3c3r0cBd9rPtLCkcnjF6dfldchSP4xJcNXASapW8b2HMnZ15155-xOjYdynjjAiO8JTrrvaU5KtpzdJZQ5w-f_f2F0tiL5-vzP8Nh0M8%2Fhttps%2A3A%2A2F%2A2Furldefense.com%2A2Fv3%2A2F__https%2A3A%2A2F%2A2Fsubstack.com%2A2Fredirect%2A2F4aca8e84-9044-4e1c-a7d5-43cf907f1f1e%2A3Fj%2A3DeyJ1IjoiNGJkYnYifQ.yt3a2Une8RP8ow5gwY5Wt3jobwNfcF5E2WPPEbWGhY0__%2A3B%2A21%2A21Mak6IKo%2A21LbUzlfMefrax6G_iXMQDwo-oQARjaxlkK8O48zjtv1fXMF7k-xn1y7tZ3-Y1wc7VjFEyY6T7xLYfousT5QISwSs%2A24__%3BJSUlJSUlJSUlJSUlJSUlJSU%21%21Mak6IKo%21Mx4R-itcy5hK9KaHR-qXz-YpJoNwAyoSw5H3YEVdNY-z5dM6878hf2E9gB8-Yyd96OXjEoeFqYKGSP96dnEu%24">Ilya Somin and Joshua Braver published a law review article</a> calling on the Supreme Court to either reverse or sharply limit the 1926 <em>Euclid v. Amber</em> decision and hold that exclusionary zoning is a "taking" under the meaning of the 5th Amendment. I try not to opine on matters of constitutional law, because I think it's mostly just people making stuff up. But the <em>Euclid</em> doctrine is genuinely bizarre. As I first learned by playing SimCity on DOS, the basic point of zoning is to separate industrial, residential, and commercial uses in order to avoid undesirable pollution and facilitate transportation planning. But from the beginning, land use regulation has clearly been put to other uses. Back in the 1917 case of <em>Buchanan v. Warley</em> — decided at a time when racism was mainstream in America — the Supreme Court held that local government couldn't reserve certain neighborhoods for white people and others for Black people. This was long before the Civil Rights Act and also before the school desegregation cases that struck down the concept of "separate but equal."</p>
<p>Then, nine years later in <em>Euclid,</em> they turned around and it said was fine to exclude all apartment buildings from a neighborhood, because rental housing for working class people was a "mere parasite" on single-family homes, which is just rhetoric that doesn't engage with any empirical information. I understand that a lot of people have concerns about expanding the takings doctrine (Somin is a right-wing guy), but I do think that the courts asking that land use regulation have real public purpose would be constructive.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yglesias is right that the exclusionary zoning approved by the Supreme Court in <em>Euclid</em> turned out to be a backdoor to racial exclusion. Indeed, this was predicted by the lower court judge whose decision the Supreme Court overruled (see discussion in Part I of <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4728312">our article</a>). In that respect, <em>Euclid</em> predictably undercut much of the beneficial effect of <em>Buchanan v. Warley</em>. He's also right that the policy rationale for Euclidean exclusionary zoning is flimsy at best. As the <a href="https://reason.com/volokh/2021/09/21/two-more-worthy-additions-to-the-anticanon-of-constitutional-law-berman-v-parker-and-euclid-v-ambler-realty/">district court put it</a>, "[i]n the last analysis, the result to be accomplished is to classify the population and segregate them according to their income or situation in life."</p>
<p>It's not clear to me what Yglesias means by "courts asking that land use regulation have real public purpose." But, as we argue in the article, the best way to ensure that local government can't use zoning to exclude large numbers of middle class and poor people is to rule that doing so without compensation violates the Takings Clause.</p>
<p>Regulations that protect against substantial threats to health and safety may be exempt from takings liability under the "police power" exception (see Section II.C of our article). This may lessen some of the "concerns about expanding the takings doctrine" that Yglesias referred to.</p>
<p>Expanded takings liability would still likely reach some regulatoins progressive zoning reformers like. But that tradeoff is likely worth it, given the truly enormous harmful impact of exclusionary zoning, which cuts off millions of people from jobs and opportunity, particularly the poor and minorities (see Part I of our article, and many of Yglesias' own writings on this topic). More generally, judicial protection of almost any constitutional right involves some tradeoffs. Freedom of speech requires tolerating communists and Nazis. Protecting criminal defendants' rights means some guilty criminals will go free. And so on.</p>
<p>Yglesias also implies that the "concerns" may be heightened by the fact I am a "right-wing guy." Whether I am left-wing or right-wing depends on which issues you focus on. I do indeed hold some conventionally right-wing views, such as advocating massive cuts in government spending and the welfare state. On the other hand, I also favor <a href="https://reason.com/volokh/2022/06/30/a-broader-perspective-on-my-body-my-choice/">abortion rights</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0190054581/reasonmagazinea-20/">open borders immigration</a>, and <a href="https://reason.com/volokh/2023/08/31/republicans-dangerous-plan-to-turn-the-war-on-drugs-into-a-real-war-by-attacking-mexico/">abolishing the War on Drugs</a> (all of it, not just marijuana prohibition).</p>
<p>Perhaps more importantly, my co-author, <a href="https://law.wisc.edu/profiles/joshua.braver@wisc.edu">Josh Braver</a>, is unimpeachably progressive. If I'm a "right-wing guy," he's a left-wing one. The article is <a href="https://reason.com/volokh/2024/02/16/new-article-on-the-constitutional-case-against-exclusionary-zoning/">a project in cross-ideological cooperation</a>. The policy case against exclusionary zoning has long <a href="https://reason.com/volokh/2021/04/28/a-cross-ideological-case-for-ending-exclusionary-zoning/">cut across partisan and ideological lines</a>, as <a href="https://www.slowboring.com/p/housing-reform-shouldnt-be-a-super">Yglesias himself</a> recognizes. Josh and I argue the constitutional case can, as well. As we explain, both originalist theories favored by many on the right, and various living-constitution theories popular on the left converge on similar results here.</p>
<p>We recognize that judicial review probably cannot solve the problem of exclusionary zoning by itself. But, as described in Part IV of the article, it can be effective in conjunction with political reform efforts. That, we argue, is the lesson of many previous successful reform movements that combined litigation with political action, such as the civil rights movement, the LGBT movement, gun rights activists, and others.</p>
<p>Finally, Yglesias is at least partly right that many constitutional arguments involve people just "making stuff up." But, of course, the same is true of many moral and policy arguments, as well. In law, as in policy, the way forward is to try to separate out good arguments from bad ones.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reason.com/volokh/2024/03/13/matt-yglesias-on-the-takings-clause-and-curbing-exclusionary-zoning/">Matt Yglesias on the Takings Clause and Curbing Exclusionary Zoning</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reason.com">Reason.com</a>.</p>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-63609534846669099522024-03-13T02:47:00.001-04:002024-03-13T02:47:41.819-04:00Congressional races about to heat up in Virginia<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TAvKVsJ3gbg/WLJxUAsuD3I/AAAAAAAAJmo/nbmt2cdqcLgdArI0_5OpjkHpC2U-2CKCgCLcB/s1600/watchdog.png" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
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By By Morgan Sweeney | The Center Square - March 12, 2024 at 06:23PM<br />
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(The Center Square) — Virginia’s congressional races will soon heat up, as competitors must declare their candidacy by April 15 to make June’s primary ballot.<br />
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Read Entire Article Here: <a href="https://www.thecentersquare.com/virginia/article_163e0ca0-e0bf-11ee-886f-97445945eafd.html?a" target="_blank">Watchdog National News</a><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-88208136116486887652024-03-13T02:29:00.001-04:002024-03-13T02:29:32.757-04:00The Best of Reason: The Future of Immigration Is Privatization<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wNMDiISstqM/WdGjtWDANfI/AAAAAAAAJxs/LQ3XwbNuCXQWPbAwbfaUXzcblC9w24ESQCLcBGAs/s320/reasonlogo.jpg" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
By Fiona Harrigan - March 13, 2024 at 02:00AM<br />
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<div class="img-wrap"><picture style="max-width: 100%; height: auto"><source type="image/webp" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/03/thebestofReasonmaglong_v2_16x9-format-1-2400x1350.jpg.webp 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/thebestofReasonmaglong_v2_16x9-format-1-1200x675.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/thebestofReasonmaglong_v2_16x9-format-1-800x450.jpg.webp 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/03/thebestofReasonmaglong_v2_16x9-format-1-600x338.jpg.webp 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/03/thebestofReasonmaglong_v2_16x9-format-1-331x186.jpg.webp 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/thebestofReasonmaglong_v2_16x9-format-1-1200x675.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/03/thebestofReasonmaglong_v2_16x9-format-1-1920x1080.jpg.webp 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <source type="image/jpeg" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/03/thebestofReasonmaglong_v2_16x9-format-1-2400x1350.jpg 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/thebestofReasonmaglong_v2_16x9-format-1-1200x675.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/thebestofReasonmaglong_v2_16x9-format-1-800x450.jpg 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/03/thebestofReasonmaglong_v2_16x9-format-1-600x338.jpg 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/03/thebestofReasonmaglong_v2_16x9-format-1-331x186.jpg 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/thebestofReasonmaglong_v2_16x9-format-1-1200x675.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/03/thebestofReasonmaglong_v2_16x9-format-1-1920x1080.jpg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <img src="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/thebestofReasonmaglong_v2_16x9-format-1-800x450.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto" width="1200" height="675" alt="The Best of Reason Magazine logo | Joanna Andreasson" /></picture></div>
<p>This week's featured article is "<a href="https://reason.com/2024/03/09/the-future-of-immigration-is-privatization/">The Future of Immigration Is Privatization</a>" by <a href="https://reason.com/people/fiona-harrigan/">Fiona Harrigan</a>.</p>
<p><i>This audio was generated using AI trained on the voice of </i><a href="https://reason.com/people/katherine-mangu-ward/"><i>Katherine Mangu-Ward</i></a><i>.</i></p>
<p><i>Music credits: "Deep in Thought" by CTRL and "Sunsettling" by Man with Roses</i></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reason.com/podcast/2024/03/13/the-best-of-reason-the-future-of-immigration-is-privatization/"><I>The Best of Reason</I>: The Future of Immigration Is Privatization</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reason.com">Reason.com</a>.</p>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-5287652803783490332024-03-13T01:29:00.001-04:002024-03-13T01:29:31.231-04:00Expanding the Drug War To Include Tobacco Would Be a Big Mistake<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wNMDiISstqM/WdGjtWDANfI/AAAAAAAAJxs/LQ3XwbNuCXQWPbAwbfaUXzcblC9w24ESQCLcBGAs/s320/reasonlogo.jpg" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
By Jacob Sullum - March 13, 2024 at 12:01AM<br />
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<div class="img-wrap"><picture style="max-width: 100%; height: auto"><source type="image/webp" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/03/Brookline-MA-Axel-Drainville-Flickr.jpg.webp 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/Brookline-MA-Axel-Drainville-Flickr-1200x675.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/Brookline-MA-Axel-Drainville-Flickr-800x450.jpg.webp 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/03/Brookline-MA-Axel-Drainville-Flickr-600x338.jpg.webp 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/03/Brookline-MA-Axel-Drainville-Flickr-331x186.jpg.webp 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/Brookline-MA-Axel-Drainville-Flickr-1200x675.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/03/Brookline-MA-Axel-Drainville-Flickr.jpg.webp 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <source type="image/jpeg" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/03/Brookline-MA-Axel-Drainville-Flickr.jpg 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/Brookline-MA-Axel-Drainville-Flickr-1200x675.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/Brookline-MA-Axel-Drainville-Flickr-800x450.jpg 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/03/Brookline-MA-Axel-Drainville-Flickr-600x338.jpg 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/03/Brookline-MA-Axel-Drainville-Flickr-331x186.jpg 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/Brookline-MA-Axel-Drainville-Flickr-1200x675.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/03/Brookline-MA-Axel-Drainville-Flickr.jpg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <img src="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/Brookline-MA-Axel-Drainville-Flickr-800x450.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto" width="1200" height="675" alt="Brookline, Massachusetts | Axel Drainville/Flickr" /></picture></div>
<p>Last month, New Zealand <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/new-zealand-set-scrap-world-first-tobacco-ban-2024-02-27/">scrapped</a> a law that would have gradually prohibited tobacco products by banning sales to anyone born after 2008. But Brookline, a wealthy Boston suburb, will implement a similar scheme now that the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (SJC) has <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/03/08/metro/brookline-ban-tobacco-sales-born-after-1999-upheld-supreme-judicial-court/">cleared the way</a>.</p>
<p>Brookline's bylaw, which <a href="https://www.brooklinema.gov/DocumentCenter/View/25283/Brookline-Town-By-Laws#page=391">bans</a> sales of "tobacco or e-cigarette products" to anyone born after 1999, is unlikely to have much practical impact, since the town is surrounded by municipalities where such sales remain legal. But it reflects a <a href="https://reason.com/2022/04/02/welcome-to-the-nicotine-prohibition-era/">broader transition</a> from regulation to prohibition among progressives who seem to have forgotten the lessons of the war on drugs.</p>
<p>The local merchants who challenged Brookline's ban argued that it was preempted by a state law that sets 21 as the minimum purchase age for tobacco products. They also claimed the bylaw violates the Massachusetts Constitution's guarantee of equal protection by arbitrarily discriminating against adults based on their birthdates.</p>
<p>The SJC rejected both arguments in a <a href="https://www.mass.gov/files/documents/2024/03/08/w13434.pdf">decision</a> published on Friday. The court concluded that state legislators had left local officials free to impose additional sales restrictions. And since birthdate-based distinctions do not involve "a suspect classification," it said, Brookline's bylaw is constitutional because it is "rationally related to the town's legitimate interest in mitigating tobacco use overall and in particular by minors."</p>
<p>The striking aspect of Brookline's law, of course, is that it applies to adults as well as minors. It currently covers residents in their 20s and eventually will apply to middle-aged and elderly consumers as well.</p>
<p>Since anyone 21 or older who wants to buy tobacco or vaping products can still legally do so across the border in Boston, Cambridge, or Newton, Brookline's ban looks more like an exercise in virtue signaling than a serious attempt to reduce consumption. The same could be said of the outright bans on tobacco sales that two other wealthy and supposedly enlightened enclaves, <a href="https://www.beverlyhills.org/citymanager/smokinginformation/informationforbusinesses/">Beverly Hills</a> and <a href="https://www.manhattanbeach.gov/departments/environmental-sustainability/breathe-free-mb-smoke-free-public-areas">Manhattan Beach</a>, enacted in 2019 and 2020, respectively.</p>
<p>The Beverly Hills ban makes exceptions for hotels and cigar lounges, and both cities border jurisdictions where tobacco sales are still allowed. But even as moral statements, these edicts are flagrantly illiberal, standing for the proposition that adults cannot be trusted to decide for themselves which psychoactive substances they want to consume.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.beverlyhills.org/citymanager/smokinginformation/marijuanaregulationsandinformation/">Beverly Hills</a> and <a href="https://www.manhattanbeach.gov/government/city-attorney/cannabis-and-marijuana-regulations">Manhattan Beach</a> also prohibit marijuana sales, which are allowed under a California law that authorizes local bans. But they continue to tolerate liquor sales, and so does Brookline, where you also can legally buy <a href="https://sanctuarymed.com/brookline/recreational/resources/faqs">marijuana</a>.</p>
<p>The details may vary, but the busybody impulse is consistent. And the consequences of that impulse can be seen in Massachusetts, which has <a href="https://reason.com/2023/03/09/massachusetts-tobacco-ban-went-as-badly-as-youd-expect/">prohibited</a> sales of flavored tobacco or vaping products since 2019, stimulating <a href="https://reason.org/commentary/the-effect-of-menthol-bans-on-cigarette-sales-evidence-from-massachusetts/">sales in neighboring states</a>, black-market activity, and <a href="https://reason.com/2022/03/18/who-will-be-the-first-person-to-go-to-prison-for-selling-flavored-tobacco-or-e-cigarettes/">criminal prosecutions</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/cigarette-taxes-cigarette-smuggling-2023/">Cigarette smuggling</a> spurred by high state taxes is a longstanding phenomenon, and the <a href="https://reason.com/2023/09/29/sales-data-indicate-that-restrictions-on-flavored-vaping-products-encourage-smoking/">flavor restrictions</a> that some jurisdictions have imposed compound that problem. Worse, the Food and Drug Administration <a href="https://reason.com/2022/07/06/the-fda-perversely-seeks-to-make-both-cigarettes-and-harm-reducing-alternatives-less-appealing/">plans</a> to ban <a href="https://www.fda.gov/media/158015/download">menthol cigarettes</a> and limit <a href="https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-announces-plans-proposed-rule-reduce-addictiveness-cigarettes-and-other-combusted-tobacco">nicotine content</a>, and it <a href="https://reason.com/2023/11/08/remember-the-teen-vaping-epidemic/">seems determined</a> to erase nearly all of the vaping industry by refusing to approve products in the flavors that former smokers overwhelmingly prefer.</p>
<p>Such policies hurt consumers by depriving them of products they want and driving them toward shady suppliers whose offerings may pose unanticipated risks. Prohibition also invites criminalization, which is why the American Civil Liberties Union opposes the menthol ban.</p>
<p>"Policies that amount to prohibition for adults will have serious racial justice implications," the organization <a href="https://www.aclu.org/documents/coalition-letter-concern-hhs-menthol-cigarette-ban">warned</a> in a 2021 letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra. "Such a ban will trigger criminal penalties, which will disproportionately impact people of color, as well as prioritize criminalization over public health and harm reduction. A ban will also lead to unconstitutional policing and other negative interactions with local law enforcement."</p>
<p>Progressives commonly recognize such problems in the context of the war on drugs. Expanding that war to include tobacco is bound to magnify them.</p>
<p><strong>© Copyright 2024 by Creators Syndicate Inc.</strong></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reason.com/2024/03/13/expanding-the-drug-war-to-include-tobacco-would-be-a-big-mistake/">Expanding the Drug War To Include Tobacco Would Be a Big Mistake</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reason.com">Reason.com</a>.</p>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-34128718433298519272024-03-12T08:47:00.001-04:002024-03-12T08:47:47.492-04:004 Texas House incumbents to face runoffs against pro-school choice candidates<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TAvKVsJ3gbg/WLJxUAsuD3I/AAAAAAAAJmo/nbmt2cdqcLgdArI0_5OpjkHpC2U-2CKCgCLcB/s1600/watchdog.png" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
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By By Bethany Blankley | The Center Square contributor - March 12, 2024 at 07:13AM<br />
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(The Center Square) – Four Texas House Republican incumbents face runoff elections in May against pro-school choice candidates. They are among several incumbents facing runoff elections, but four have been specifically targeted because of their opposition to school choice.<br />
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Read Entire Article Here: <a href="https://www.thecentersquare.com/texas/article_4918985e-dff5-11ee-b8e6-9f02e0d8e1d3.html?a" target="_blank">Watchdog National News</a><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-16326927926578701402024-03-12T08:29:00.001-04:002024-03-12T08:29:44.646-04:00Without More Accountability, Sunshine Laws Are Toothless<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wNMDiISstqM/WdGjtWDANfI/AAAAAAAAJxs/LQ3XwbNuCXQWPbAwbfaUXzcblC9w24ESQCLcBGAs/s320/reasonlogo.jpg" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
By C.J. Ciaramella - March 12, 2024 at 06:00AM<br />
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<div class="img-wrap"><picture style="max-width: 100%; height: auto"><source type="image/webp" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2020/02/lockedfiles_1161x653.jpg.webp 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2020/02/lockedfiles_1161x653.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2020/02/lockedfiles_1161x653-800x450.jpg.webp 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2020/02/lockedfiles_1161x653-600x338.jpg.webp 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2020/02/lockedfiles_1161x653-331x186.jpg.webp 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2020/02/lockedfiles_1161x653.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2020/02/lockedfiles_1161x653.jpg.webp 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <source type="image/jpeg" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2020/02/lockedfiles_1161x653.jpg 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2020/02/lockedfiles_1161x653.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2020/02/lockedfiles_1161x653-800x450.jpg 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2020/02/lockedfiles_1161x653-600x338.jpg 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2020/02/lockedfiles_1161x653-331x186.jpg 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2020/02/lockedfiles_1161x653.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2020/02/lockedfiles_1161x653.jpg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <img src="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2020/02/lockedfiles_1161x653-800x450.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto" width="1200" height="675" alt="locked files | Vchalup / Dreamstime.com" /></picture></div>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This week is</span> <a href="https://sunshineweek.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sunshine Week</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, an annual celebration of transparency laws, which means that government press offices across the country are hard at work pretending they don't spend the other 51 weeks a year undermining those transparency laws.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">If you want to see what your leaders <em>really</em> think of you and your statutory right to know what they're up to, just ask them to comply with the open government laws on the books.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Two Florida Department of Law Enforcement officers</span> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/23/desantis-public-records-lawsuit-fdle-retaliation/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">claimed</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">earlier this month that Gov. Ron DeSantis' office blocked the release of DeSantis' publicly-funded travel records and retaliated against them for arguing that the records were public under the state's Sunshine Law.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As I</span> <a href="https://reason.com/2023/12/03/monkey-herpes-face-eating-and-the-pork-chop-gang-how-public-records-laws-created-the-florida-man/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">wrote last year</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">for</span> <i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Reason</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">'s special issue on Florida, politicians have been chipping away at the state's vaunted public records law for decades, but DeSantis and his allies in the Florida Legislature are taking a sledgehammer to it.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Elsewhere in the Sunshine State, a fire chief</span> <a href="https://www.tampabay.com/news/tampa/2024/03/07/tampa-fire-chief-ordered-police-called-local-journalist-asking-records/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">called the police</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">because a local reporter had the temerity to insist, correctly, that he had a legal right to inspect public records in person.</span> <i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tampa Bay Times</span></i> <span style="font-weight: 400;">reporter Jason Garcia showed up at the headquarters of the Tampa Fire Rescue Department asking to see paperwork related to a firefighter's termination. Florida's Sunshine Law law is unambiguous on this point: "All state, county and municipal records are open for personal inspection and copying by any person."</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nevertheless, two department employees, one of whom was the personnel chief, argued Garcia had no right to see the records since he'd already filed a records request online. Eventually, Tampa fire chief Barbara Tripp called the police to report Garcia for causing a disturbance, although he left by the time reinforcements arrived to end his reign of terror.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The personnel chief claimed in a memo that Garcia "persisted in being argumentative and repetitive and refused to accept the answer and leave." </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">"No matter how you want to spin it, though, journalists are supposed to ask questions and seek explanations," the</span> <i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tampa Bay Times</span></i> <a href="https://www.tampabay.com/news/tampa/2024/03/07/tampa-fire-chief-ordered-police-called-local-journalist-asking-records/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">wrote in an editorial</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">about the alleged hullabaloo. "That may rankle people in power, but it doesn't constitute an unruly disturbance."</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Meanwhile in Virginia, a former Richmond government employee filed a</span> <a href="https://www.wtvr.com/news/local-news/foia-richmond-firing-lawsuit-march-1-2024"><span style="font-weight: 400;">whistleblower retaliation lawsuit</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">earlier this month alleging that city officials told her to intentionally delay and stonewall Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The former employee claims she was fired "in retaliation for reporting and refusing to engage in illegal and unethical activities in violation of FOIA."</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The lawsuit came shortly after local news outlet CBS 6</span> <a href="https://www.wtvr.com/news/local-news/transparency-laws-richmond-feb-27-2024"><span style="font-weight: 400;">reported</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">that Richmond is regularly not meeting FOIA deadlines and sometimes ignoring requests altogether.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">If you want to see more government gone wild, you can peruse the Electronic Frontier Foundation's annual</span> <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/foilies-2024"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Foilies</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, ignominious "awards" for public record violations and abuses. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The reason that government offices get away with flouting record laws is that there is no one to hold them accountable and few consequences in the rare instances that they are scolded.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">An Associated Press</span> <a href="https://apnews.com/article/open-records-government-transparency-lawsuits-sunshine-week-58becea049a4eb5fac688e8aee1aac0e"><span style="font-weight: 400;">survey of all 50 U.S. states</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, released yesterday for Sunshine Week, found that fewer than a third of states have offices to handle Freedom of Information appeals and force agencies to comply with the law. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">"In most states, the only meaningful option for residents to resolve complaints about agencies wrongfully withholding public records is to file costly lawsuits," the AP wrote.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">These ombudsmen and other positions provide crucial layers of oversight. Without them, agencies know that they can delay and frivolously deny requests with little resistance, and even if they lose a lawsuit, the only consequence is usually a small fine, paid for with taxpayer dollars, naturally.</span></p>
<p>"It shows that we have a problem in the United States. We have these laws, but there's really a lack of enforcement," says David Cuillier, director of the Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida, which coordinates Sunshine Week. "The system's stacked against the average person. It's not fair that they have to hire an attorney and take all that time and money to just make sure the law's followed. Who can afford $10,000, $20,000 to do that? Not the average person."</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">If you want a transparent, responsive government, one place to start is by demanding the creation of independent offices to resolve public records disputes outside of costly courtroom battles. Without them, the statutes are, just like government press releases, a lot of empty promises.</span></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reason.com/2024/03/12/without-more-accountability-sunshine-laws-are-toothless/">Without More Accountability, Sunshine Laws Are Toothless</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reason.com">Reason.com</a>.</p>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-84281391382143154022024-03-12T06:29:00.001-04:002024-03-12T06:29:44.830-04:00Brickbat: Texas Tag Trouble<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wNMDiISstqM/WdGjtWDANfI/AAAAAAAAJxs/LQ3XwbNuCXQWPbAwbfaUXzcblC9w24ESQCLcBGAs/s320/reasonlogo.jpg" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
By Charles Oliver - March 12, 2024 at 04:00AM<br />
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<div class="img-wrap"><picture style="max-width: 100%; height: auto"><source type="image/webp" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_212083590-2400x1350.jpg.webp 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_212083590-1200x675.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_212083590-800x450.jpg.webp 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_212083590-600x338.jpg.webp 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_212083590-331x186.jpg.webp 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_212083590-1200x675.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_212083590-1920x1080.jpg.webp 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <source type="image/jpeg" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_212083590-2400x1350.jpg 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_212083590-1200x675.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_212083590-800x450.jpg 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_212083590-600x338.jpg 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_212083590-331x186.jpg 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_212083590-1200x675.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_212083590-1920x1080.jpg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <img src="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/03/dreamstime_l_212083590-800x450.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto" width="1200" height="675" alt="Close-up of a vehicle tag sticker and tag registration form. | Pixelrobot | Dreamstime.com" /></picture></div>
<p>North Richland Hills, Texas, residents Dale and Anne Smith <a href="https://news.yahoo.com/fort-worth-area-couple-billed-120000397.html">received bills</a> totaling $1,065 for unpaid tolls from the North Texas Tollway Authority (NTTA). The bills were for 11 different vehicles, none of which are owned by the Smiths. When they tried to clear the matter up, the NTTA told the Smiths it was up to them to prove they didn't own the cars. The Smiths even got the police involved. The cops found all of the license plate numbers on the bills sent to the Smiths were from temporary tags connected to an Arlington car dealership. But that wasn't enough for the NTTA. Finally, when a local newspaper began digging around on the story, the NTTA told the Smiths it was voiding their debt because it had discovered the vehicles belonged to someone else.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reason.com/2024/03/12/brickbat-texas-tag-trouble/">Brickbat: Texas Tag Trouble</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reason.com">Reason.com</a>.</p>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-3125528937027371162024-03-11T10:29:00.001-04:002024-03-11T10:29:30.862-04:00Lawsuit Hobbles Utah's Plan To Mandate Age Verification Online<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wNMDiISstqM/WdGjtWDANfI/AAAAAAAAJxs/LQ3XwbNuCXQWPbAwbfaUXzcblC9w24ESQCLcBGAs/s320/reasonlogo.jpg" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
By Emma Camp - March 11, 2024 at 06:00AM<br />
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<div class="img-wrap"><picture style="max-width: 100%; height: auto"><source type="image/webp" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/02/topicslaw.jpg.webp 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/02/topicslaw.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/02/topicslaw-800x450.jpg.webp 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/02/topicslaw-600x338.jpg.webp 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/02/topicslaw-331x186.jpg.webp 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/02/topicslaw.jpg.webp 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/02/topicslaw.jpg.webp 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <source type="image/jpeg" srcset="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c2400x1350-w2400-q60/uploads/2024/02/topicslaw.jpg 2400w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/02/topicslaw.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/02/topicslaw-800x450.jpg 800w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c600x338-w600-q60/uploads/2024/02/topicslaw-600x338.jpg 600w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c331x186-w331-q60/uploads/2024/02/topicslaw-331x186.jpg 331w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q60/uploads/2024/02/topicslaw.jpg 1200w,https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1920x1080-w1920-q60/uploads/2024/02/topicslaw.jpg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 753px) 70vw, (min-width: 1190px) 768px, 100vw" /> <img src="https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q60/uploads/2024/02/topicslaw-800x450.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto" width="1200" height="675" alt="A smartphone chained up with a lock | Photo: Eshma/iStock" /></picture></div>
<p>Want to make a social media account? If you live in Utah, you soon may have to hand over your ID. Or maybe not.</p>
<p><a href="https://le.utah.gov/~2023/bills/static/SB0152.html">The Utah Social Media Regulation Act</a>, which was originally set to go into effect in March 2024, aims to restrict minors' access to social media and the kind of content they can encounter once online.</p>
<p>The law would require all social media users to verify their age through privacy-invading methods such as uploading their driver's license, submitting to a facial scan, or providing the last four digits of their Social Security number. Minors must also obtain parental permission before they can create a social media account. Once online, the law would force social media companies to restrict minors' ability to find new content and other accounts and to limit when they can message others on the platforms.</p>
<p>The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment nonprofit, launched a lawsuit challenging the law.</p>
<p>FIRE's suit argues that the law violates the First Amendment, pointing out that it forces social media companies to restrict users' access to protected expression. Additionally, FIRE argues the law's age verification requirements amount to an unconstitutional prior restraint on free expression.</p>
<p>"What Utah has done, and what other states are doing, is to try to impose sort of a magic bullet solution to the whole question of youth mental health," says Robert Corn-Revere, chief counsel at FIRE. "In its rush to address what really is the latest moral panic, the state brushes aside what is a nuanced problem and chooses censorship as the presumptive solution to how it addresses these issues, ignoring the individual differences and the diverse needs of families in the state."</p>
<p>Following FIRE's suit and other legal challenges, Utah's Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, delayed the law's implementation until October 2024. In a legal <a href="https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/show_multidocs3.pdf">filing</a> from January 19, the state noted that the Utah State Legislature "is likely to repeal and replace the law." Less than three weeks later, state legislators introduced two bills that proposed minor changes to the law while keeping the considerable restrictions on accounts held by minors and required age verification in order to create an account.</p>
<p>Utah's law is part of a larger trend—<a href="https://reason.com/volokh/2023/08/31/texas-law-mandating-age-verification-for-sexually-themed-sites-violates-first-amendment/">Texas</a>, <a href="https://reason.org/commentary/californias-online-age-verification-law-is-unconstitutional/">California</a>, <a href="https://reason.com/2023/01/05/louisiana-now-checking-ids-for-watching-porn/">Louisiana</a>, <a href="https://reason.com/2023/09/01/in-scathing-rulings-federal-courts-block-arkansas-and-texas-age-verification-laws/">Arkansas</a>, <a href="https://reason.com/2023/06/16/small-porn-producers-will-be-hurt-most-by-new-age-verification-laws/">Virginia</a>, <a href="https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2024/01/24/florida-house-oks-ban-on-social-media-for-kids-porn-age-verification/72338115007/">Florida</a>, and <a href="https://www.3newsnow.com/new-law-prompts-pornhub-to-block-access-in-montana">Montana</a> have all passed similar legislation designed to restrict minors' access to social media or sexually explicit content online. Federal courts have already blocked many of these statutes.</p>
<p>Utah's law is "much like the whole litany of ineffective and unconstitutional measures that courts have consigned to history, including things like protecting young people from movies or comic books, rock music, racy novels, or, most recently, video games," says Corn-Revere. "Laws like this don't solve the problems they try to address but only make them worse. And in the process, it violates everybody's constitutional rights."</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reason.com/2024/03/11/carded-for-posting-online/">Lawsuit Hobbles Utah's Plan To Mandate Age Verification Online</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reason.com">Reason.com</a>.</p>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6752414729350212660.post-35902811596358104112024-03-11T09:47:00.001-04:002024-03-11T09:47:29.170-04:00State officials quiet on recourse after Rivian pauses $5B Georgia plant<div class="separator" style="clear: left;float: left;margin-bottom:1em;margin-right:1em;text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TAvKVsJ3gbg/WLJxUAsuD3I/AAAAAAAAJmo/nbmt2cdqcLgdArI0_5OpjkHpC2U-2CKCgCLcB/s1600/watchdog.png" style="clear: both;text-align: left;" width="200" /></div>
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By By T.A. DeFeo | The Center Square contributor - March 08, 2024 at 02:58PM<br />
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(The Center Square) — While Rivian Automotive paused its $5 billion plant in Georgia, state officials declined to say how — or if — they might attempt to claw back massive taxpayer-backed incentives they offered the company.<br />
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