In today's Arizona Republic, Reason.tv Editor Nick Gillespie and Reason magazine Editor Matt Welch write an essay-slash-excerpt from The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America, titled "Free minds and spirits threaten 2 parties' grip." Here's how it begins:
A growing majority of us have responded to the dysfunctional theatrics of Republican and Democratic misgovernance by making a rational choice.
We ignore politics most of the time[.]
Read the whole thing here.
The
results are in from the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa, and Michele
Bachmann has emerged victorious with 4,823 votes. Ron Paul, the
only bearable candidate in the running (*), finished a very close
second with 4,671. A more distant third place went to alleged
contender Tim Pawlenty, and the fourth slot went to Rick Santorum,
whose campaign intended to make a strong showing at the straw poll
but in a terrible mix-up bought tickets to the Gathering of the
Juggalos instead. (**)
Does the Ames event mean much? The conventional wisdom is that it doesn't, but Nate Silver has made a reasonable argument that its predictive track record isn't bad -- not for forecasting the party nominee (who I strongly doubt will be Bachmann) but for showing who has a good chance in the Iowa caucuses. "A relatively low number of Iowans participate" in the straw poll, Silver acknowledges, "but that is also true for the caucuses, a cumbersome exercise which has notoriously low turnout. A candidate's financial position might help him to induce people to vote in the straw poll by buying their tickets and busing them to the event -- but money also helps to secure votes in a variety of ways when the real caucuses takes place. And a candidate's willingness to spend time in Iowa is helpful both in the straw polls and in the caucuses." So while Ames is by no means a perfect precognicator (***), it picks up "a variety of 'intangible' factors that don't show up well in other variables, and therefore serves a useful role as a leading indicator."
One variable that didn't show up in Ames: Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who entered the presidential race with a speech in South Carolina today. Perry didn't have an official presence at the straw poll, but he nonetheless attracted 718 write-in votes -- better than frontrunner Mitt Romney's 567.
* I can bear Gary Johnson too, but he didn't make an effort
in Ames.
** That was a joke.
*** Confession: I made that word up.
One takeaway from last night’s presidential debate was that unskilled Mexican workers—you know, the ones who mow your lawns, build your homes, bring you X-mas trees and raise your children for wages barely enough to have lawns, homes, trees or children of their own—are the new untouchables of American society. They have a lower status than gays, the unborn, submissive women—and white males! Not a single candidate stood up for them.
Every question evoked some disagreement from some candidate—whether it was allowing civil unions, keeping abortion legal, going to war in Afghanistan or imposing sanctions on Iran. But on two questions there was so much unanimity on stage that you could almost hear the strains of kumbaya over the woofing between Michelle Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty: One, all of them said they would have walked away from any debt-ceiling deal that included any tax increases whatsoever, even one that offered $10 or so in spending cuts for $1 in tax increases. But one or more candidate was almost certainly lying about this (I’m looking at you Mitt Romney and John Huntsman). Two, they all agreed that illegal immigration was the bane of America and “securing our border” has to precede comprehensive immigration reform. And about this, unfortunately, I don’t think anyone was lying.
Herman Cain said that we have to secure our borders “by any means necessary” although, apparently, he was only joking when he said that the means ought to include a 20-foot-barbed-wire-electrified fence in addition to a moat with alligators. (Ha, ha. Funny. ROTFL. Hey, I can take a joke, America!) Mitt Romney basically agreed although, to his credit, he tried to change the subject to skilled immigration, saying that it would behoove America to staple a green card to the degree of a foreign student who, say, got a Ph.D. in Physics from an American university. But most disappointing was Ron Paul. He likes to talk in fundamentals about every other issue, but betrayed absolutely no grasp of the fundamental reasons driving illegal immigration.
So here it is for future reference, Dr. Paul et al. What's driving this "problem" is our insane, irrational, and cruel immigration system.
The way this system works right now is that the American government has imposed a blanket ban on immigration. But then it selectively relaxes this ban for certain categories of favored people among whom “unskilled” Third World workers are not included. Indeed, as this Reason Foundation chart shows, there are virtually no legal avenues for “unskilled” aliens to work and permanently live in this country.
For starters, it is literally impossible for poor aliens to get temporary work visas such as the H-2A or H-2B to lawfully enter. That’s because Uncle Sam hands out only a few thousand such visas annually when the demand—before the American economy went down the tube, that is— was in the millions.
And that’s the best part of the system. The worst is that in order to get a visa, poor people have to effectively prove they are not poor. Indeed, they have to show that they have enough assets and connections that they would return home once their job in the U.S. is done. But if they had all that, they wouldn’t really need to come to the U.S. and work for scraps in the first place, would they?
But even if they somehow manage to get the visa, they can’t apply for a green card or permanent residency while working in the Unites States legally. "So what," one might say. What’s so wrong about having them go back to their country and applying for a green card? Nothing at all, except that Uncle Sam won’t accept green card applications from people abroad (other than in the rare instance when they have family members already in the United States willing to sponsor them)!
To recap, then, the United States hands out very few work visas to poor, unskilled aliens. When it does, it requires them to jump through hoops that are virtually impossible for them to jump through. If they somehow manage to jump through them, they are barred from actually applying for permanent residency.
Is there any surprise then that there are 11 million people illegally living in the country?
But what do our venerable candidates suggest we do to fix this system? Erect more walls and fences and barriers.
So here is my question for the candidates for the next debate: “If you were a poor, Third World immigrant, what would you need to do to legally work and live in the United States? You have one minute."
I’ll cook dinner or mow the lawn—but only up to one acre—of any candidate who answers that correctly.
After the murder of his 24-year-old son, Mexican poet Javier Sicilia—who considers the drug war a moral issue, not a political one—played a prominent role in inspiring thousands in Mexico to march in protest last spring. The marchers demanded an end to President Felipe Calderon's confrontational, militarized dealings with cartels which have led to 35,000 dead since 2006.
In an interview with Yes! Magazine in July, Sicilia channels Camus and rather poetically diagnoses the problem at the heart of the rationale for the war on drugs.
The politicians are formulating the drug problem as an issue of national security, but it is an issue of public health. If from the very beginning drugs were decriminalized, drug lords would be subjected to the iron laws of the market. That would have controlled them. That would have allowed us to discover our drug addicts and offer them our love and our support. That would not have left us with 40,000 dead, 10,000 disappeared and 120,000 displaced…
The war is caused by puritan mentalities: like those of [Mexican President Felipe] Calderón and [former U.S. President George] Bush. In the name of abstractions—the abstraction of saving youth from drug addiction—they have brutally assassinated thousands of young people, while transforming others into delinquents. [Emphasis added.]
Albert Camus spoke a terrible truth. “I know something worse than hate: abstract love.” In the name of abstract love, in the name of God and Country, in the name of saving the youth from the drug, in the name of the proletariat, in the name of abstractions, our politicians and war policy makers have committed the most atrocious crimes on human beings, who are not abstractions, who are bones and flesh. That is what our country is living and suffering today: in the name of an abstract goodness, we are suffering the opposite: the horror of war and violence, of innocents dead, disappeared, and mutilated.
For more, read Reason's Mike Riggs on how much legalizing drugs would do to hinder cartel violence on the border.
(Hat-tip to Bob Scott for the interview link).
As the Ames Straw Poll approaches, GOP
presidential hopefuls are rolling up the sleeves of their brand new
flannel shirts and scrambling to be “the guy you want to have a
beer with.” But thanks to outdated regulations and onerous taxes,
Harry Graver writes, it’s tougher to get a beer in Iowa than you
might think—no matter whom you’re drinking with.
Liberal and progressive activists were pleased back in June when conservative 6th Circuit Judge Jeffrey Sutton voted to uphold the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate as a lawful exercise of Congress’ power “to regulate commerce...among the several states.” Now conservatives and libertarians have a Sutton of their own. As Peter Suderman reported earlier, the 11th Circuit today became the first federal appellate court to strike down the individual mandate. And notably, one of the two judges who joined that majority opinion was Clinton appointee Judge Frank Hull. Party affiliation means much less than judicial philosophy, of course, but for those keeping track the cross-partisan score is now even. And since we already have an excerpt from the majority opinion, here’s how dissenting Judge Stanley Marcus (also a Clinton appointee) justifies his solo vote in favor of upholding the individual mandate:
In the process of striking down the mandate, the majority has ignored many years of Commerce Clause doctrine developed by the Supreme Court. It has ignored the broad power of Congress, in the words of Chief Justice Marshall, “to prescribe the rule by which commerce is to be governed.” Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. (9 Wheat.) 1, 196 (1824). It has ignored the undeniable fact that Congress’ commerce power has grown exponentially over the past two centuries, and is now generally accepted as having afforded Congress the authority to create rules regulating large areas of our national economy. It has ignored the Supreme Court’s expansive reading of the Commerce Clause that has provided the very foundation on which Congress already extensively regulates both health insurance and health care services. And it has ignored the long-accepted instruction that we review the constitutionality of an exercise of commerce power not through the lens of formal, categorical distinctions, but rather through a pragmatic one, recognizing, as Justice Holmes put it over one hundred years ago, that “commerce among the states is not a technical legal conception, but a practical one, drawn from the course of business.” Swift & Co. v. United States, 196 U.S. 375, 398 (1905).
The approach taken by the majority has also disregarded the powerful admonitions that acts of Congress are to be examined with a heavy presumption of constitutionality, that the task at hand must be approached with caution, restraint, and great humility, and that we may not lightly conclude that an act of Congress exceeds its enumerated powers. The circumspection this task requires is underscored by recognizing, in the words of Justice Kennedy, the long and difficult “history of the judicial struggle to interpret the Commerce Clause during the transition from the economic system the Founders knew to the single, national market still emergent in our own era.” United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549, 568 (1995) (Kennedy, J., concurring).
ObamaCare is now one giant step closer to the Supreme Court.
It's common enough to blame
youth violent crime on the increasing popularity of violent video
games. But the massive declines in violent crime since the
emergence of realistic violent games suggests that, at minimum,
games haven't caused more crime. And if anything, the opposite may
be true. Erik Kain
notes that large drops in the violent crimes have coincided
with the rise of video game culture:
The fact that crime has been dropping for the past twenty years (along with things like teen pregnancy, etc. as I noted above) while more and more young people consume more and more video games should put a lie to the notion that video games actually increase crime and violence. I did a little Googling and found this paper by Adam Thierer [pdf] which doesn’t exactly support the idea that more video game consumption has directly contributed to less crime, but certainly suggests that it’s a possibility.
Kain also points to Gerald Jones's book Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe, and suggests that video games may provide a sort of role-playing outlet for children to safely act out violent impulses:
Maybe playing video games or getting into these role-playing situations where you can be the villain, the monster, the criminal, or even the hero, the special-ops troop, and so forth is an important way to develop another kind of empathy – an empathy with the person we could be or would like to be, or at least to explore that part of ourselves that we will never become – maybe so that we never become it.
I think you have to pair this idea with the multiple studies showing that access to pornography in specific and violent entertainment in general reduces the prevalence of rape. Violent entertainment seems to contain violent impulses, not unleash them.
More on the effects of porn availability on rape from Steve Chapman here. Read Jacob Sullum on the Supreme Court's recent decision to strike down laws restricting the sale of violent games to minors here.
No, Congress can't just decree that individuals must buy a private product, even if the market has unique properties. To do so would be more than unprecedented; it would be an unconstitutional overreach. That's the gist of what an 11th Circuit appeals court said today when it ruled in favor of 26 state governments by saying that the federal requirement to purchase health insurance contained in last year's health care overhaul is unconstitutional. From the ruling:
The individual mandate exceeds Congress’s enumerated commerce power and is unconstitutional. This economic mandate represents a wholly novel and potentially unbounded assertion of congressional authority: the ability to compel Americans to purchase an expensive health insurance product they have elected not to buy, and to make them re-purchase that insurance product every month for their entire lives. We have not found any generally applicable, judicially enforceable limiting principle that would permit us to uphold the mandate without obliterating the boundaries inherent in the system of enumerated congressional powers. “Uniqueness” is not a constitutional principle in any antecedent Supreme Court decision.
However, the panel, made up of two Democratic appointees and one GOP-appointed judge, did overturn lower court Judge Roger Vinson's decision to invalidate the entire law, preferring to strike only the mandate and related provisions.
More on previous decisions for and against the mandate here and here.
Should the
official price tag for last year’s health care law have been almost
$500 billion higher? A working paper released by the
National Bureau of Economic Research this week suggests that
either the cost may either be much higher than expected—or the
law’s vaunted coverage expansion will be much smaller.
ObamaCare sets up new health insurance exchanges, but under the law, not everyone has access to the exchanges and their middle-class insurance subsidies: Those who can get insurance from their employers are prohibited from buying subsidized insurance on the exchanges—unless, that is, their employer’s insurance is deemed “unaffordable,” which is currently defined as equal to more than 9.5 percent of the employee’s income. Otherwise, however, employees with access to insurance through their jobs are barred from the exchanges—and the generous health insurance subsidies they facilitate.
So the fewer people who have access to the exchange and its subsidies, the less the law costs. But as the NBER paper by Cornell’s Richard Burkhauser and Sean Lyons and Indiana University’s Kosali Simon points out, differing understandings of the affordability requirement’s fine print could dramatically affect the number of people who have access to the exchange subsidies, and thus have major fiscal consequences down the road.
When the Congressional Budget Office delivered the official price tag for the law, they took the Joint Committee on Taxation’s narrow early guidance on how to understand the affordability requirement: As Avik Roy points out at Forbes, when the House took its final vote on the health care law, the CBO relied on JCT guidance that assumed that a relatively small number of people would have their employer’s insurance deemed unaffordable:
JCT defined “unaffordable” coverage as a self-only policy for an individual worker, in which the premiums exceeded 9.5 percent of household income. Because the average cost of an individual-only plan is about one-third that of a family plan, this tweak makes it three times as hard for an employer-sponsored plan to be deemed as “unaffordable.”
Problem is, the JCT’s guidance at the time of the vote seems to have been in error. The month following the vote, analysts at JCT put out a correction updating the affordability standard to one that would likely result in far more employer plans being officially categorized as unaffordable.
What’s that correction worth to
taxpayers? According to the NBER paper’s estimates, the strictest
possible affordability standard—the one that deemed the most
insurer plans unaffordable and thus allowed the highest number of
people onto the exchanges—would add about $48 billion a year to the
cost of the law, or nearly $500 billion over the course of the
usual decade-long scoring window. Even under the most generous
assumptions about the law’s cost estimates (which
aren’t very realistic to begin with), that would devour
all of the roughly $140 billion in supposed deficit reduction the
law was officially scored to achieve.
Now, it's not a given that we'll end up with those higher costs. As others have noted, the authors of the report aren't quite offering predictions about what will happen. Instead, they're estimating the potential range of costs, from most expensive to least, depending on how the law is implemented. So it's possible that we’ll end up toward the lower end of the range, depending on how Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius chooses to proceed.
But landing at the cheaper end of the cost spectrum could undermine other promises made by the law’s defenders—namely the coverage expansion figures. As Roy writes:
If the JCT interpretation is correct, then millions of people who thought they were gaining coverage under the law—spouses and dependents of employed Americans—won’t. If the JCT is wrong, the CBO’s estimates of PPACA’s exchange costs are way too low. Increasing the law’s costs will upset conservatives, but decreasing the law’s coverage expansions will upset progressives...Says Burkhauser, “This is the dilemma. If the HHS Secretary decides that they really did mean single coverage, then you’re going to have several million [people who aren’t going to get coverage under the law]. The family’s [breadwinner] is given affordable coverage, but the families can’t get onto the exchange rolls.”
I can't wait to see what Sebelius does with this one.
It's election season! Time to exploit children for political gain!
Today's entry: This video from Rebuild the Dream, the new organization of former Obama green jobs czar and 9/11 truther Van Jones, in which cute kids mouth bizarrely sophisticated talking points, including words and phrases they almost certainly don't understand, such as "infrastructure," "living wage," and "tax brackets."
A charming tyke with a speech impediment implores viewers to "remove the cap on the social security tax." Another gal with a ponytail wants to "close the revolving door between Washington and high priced lobbyists."
Then the grand finale: A serious child looks into the camera and says "we gotta stop letting corporations be recognized as people. We're the people, they're not!" Then all the kids say "yay!," wave American flags, and start to dance. Seriously.
Excuse me, I have to go kill myself.
But not before I watch this classic Reason.tv video!:
Faced with a 9.1 percent unemployment rate, a deeply disgruntled public and a creeping election season, President Barack Obama is hastily "pivoting" away from the debt ceiling debate toward jobs. In Michigan, where the unemployment rate is 10.5 percent, the president recently proclaimed "We know that there are things that we can do right now that will support job growth." Things like building roads, extending unemployment benefits, cutting payroll taxes, and that old standby, clean energy.
Republicans have their own jobs agenda, but mostly prefer to talk trash about the Democrats. "Spurring jobs and the economy is always next on the Obama Administration’s to-do list," sniped Current House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in an August 3 blog post, "right after more spending, more taxing, and more regulating."
Meanwhile, the American people are raising a collective skeptical eyebrow at both parties on the employment front. A July Pew Research poll showed an even 39-39 split on which party Americans trust more on jobs. But a CNN/ORC poll released Friday finds that only 29 percent of respondants think there will be more jobs in their communities a year from now—and 26 percent think there will be fewer jobs.
In an effort to produce real free-market ideas for boosting employment, Reason asked Robert Higgs, Deirdre McCloskey, Amity Shlaes, John Stossel, Bruce Bartlett, Jeffrey A. Miron, Peter Schiff, and a host of other economists, writers, professors, and entrepreneurs for one concrete policy change they would recommend that would increase job growth.
Are young people being discriminated against?
Founded in 1968, the National Youth Rights Association (NYRA) says yes and works to educate the public on how laws intended to protect young people instead treat them as second-class citizens.
Reason.tv sat down with NYRA’s president Jeffrey Nadel to discuss how drinking, curfew, and other laws punish young adults. Nadel points to New Jersey’s Kyliegh’s law as an example of how the unintended consequences of many laws aimed at protecting youth actually endanger them. The law requires drivers under the age of 21 to have a red decal on the license plates of the vehicles they drive, ostensibly to allow law enforcement to be more protective of them. But the decals have instead lead violent drivers to target those cars; infractions by younger drivers also come with harsher penalties for typical traffic violations. Instead of one-size-fits-all policies that punish responsible youth, Nadel says that decisions about alcohol consumption, work hours, and even voting should be more tailored to individuals, regardless of age.
For more on Kyleigh's Law, read Reason magazine's June 2011 story "Dead Kids Make Bad Laws." And on lowering the drinking age, check out Reason.tv's "21: Is It Time to Lower the Drinking Age" and Reason magazine's "Back to 18."
Interview by Michelle Fields. Shot by Jim Epstein and Joshua Swain; edited by Swain.
Approximately 4.18 minutes.
Scroll down for downloadable iPod, HD and audio versions of this and all our videos and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube Channel to receive automatic notifications when new material goes live.
Over at the Nobody's Business blog, Mark "Windypundit" Draughn
complains about
The Declaration of Independents' title, objects to the
word "politics" in the subtitle, makes a crack about the "insane
amount of promotion" for the book
around
these parts, and then...proceeds with the
most thorough discussion and expansion of the book's ideas yet
committed to pixel. And he's still only on Part I! Since
Draughn starts with a bill of particulars, I'll cheat and skip to
his glowing comment about our passage sketching out a crude
definition of libertarianism:
That might be the single best description of the libertarian mindset that I have ever read. It's exactly why I choose to call myself a libertarian. It's not about Ayn Rand or anti-communism or big business or hard money or even non-coercion. It's because I want us all to live in a world that is "tolerant, free, prosperous, vibrant, and interesting."
See what he's talking about at the link.
So what did noted libertarian
writer/conversationalist Todd Seavey think about the book? I'm late
in linking to it, but
here goes:
It will likely come as no surprise that I loved Declaration of Independents – and admittedly I know or have met several people mentioned above including the authors – but let the record show that I don't love just everything that libertarians spew out. This book, like a 240-page version of a wiseass Gillespie aside, is downright exhilarating in its contempt for the usual two factions in what it terms our stagnant and likely-doomed political "duopoly." It gives one hope that sheer stupidity does eventually bring collapse and renewal. If so, the stupid, one-size-fits-all behemoth called government is plainly overdue for implosion. Perhaps the current debt crisis will be the long-awaited moment.
If not, though, the book gives one hope that we will find ever-multiplying ways to route our lives around the sinkhole that is politics and find happiness. It even gives me hope that people less ideologically inclined to agree with all this might find the book persuasive. I look forward to hearing reactions from non-libertarians, but first they should read it, in large numbers.
It was thirteen years ago (though it feels like yesterday) that a previous Reason editor, Virginia Postrel, suggested ditching the right-left spectrum in favor of a dynamism-stasis spectrum (in her book The Future and Its Enemies), and her editorial successors, Gillespie and Welch, have taken things up a notch here, saying in effect, "Who needs political spectrums at all? Go do your own thing."
Let's do that, and if it confuses the usual commentators, politicians, pollsters, and academic analysts, so much the better.
And here's an excerpt from a review by
Charles Thornton:
It is a fascinating book to say the least. [...]
The authors make the case for the power of freedom by looking at how it has played out in several instances. Some of these chapters were very interesting and I have to admit I got lost in the details of other chapters. For instance, there was a chapter on the role rock and roll played in fall of communism in Czechoslovakia. I got totally confused reading this one. On the other hand the story of how Southwest Airlines changed the airline industry was inspiring.
This is a very intriguing book. I recommend it.
Next book tour stop: Tomorrow in Oxford, Ohio. More at the Declaration 2011 site.
The Environmental Working Group (EWG)
lobbyists issue the "Dirty Dozen" list each
year warning consumers which fruits and vegetables they should
avoid because they are allegedly contaminated with dangerous
amounts of pesticide residues. EWG promises:
The Shopper's Guide to Pesticide in Produce will help you determine which fruits and vegetables have the most pesticide residues and are the most important to buy organic. You can lower your pesticide intake substantially by avoiding the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables and eating the least contaminated produce.
A new study published in the Journal of Toxicology by researchers at the University of California, Davis, says that EWG's list amounts to bogus scaremongering. The researchers find that EWG's analysis is scientifically bunk. The highest level of pesticide residue was found on bell peppers. Should consumers worry? Not at all. As the researchers point out:
The highest relative exposure for a pesticide/commodity combination was for the organophosphate insecticide methamidophos on bell peppers. The RfD [chronic reference doses] for methamidophos was still 49.5 times higher than the exposure estimate, indicating a large measure of consumer protection.... an exposure of 49.5 times lower than the RfD still represents an exposure 49,500 times lower than exposures to methamidophos in laboratory animals that still have not resulted in any adverse health effects.
Note that the chronic reference dose (RfD) represents an estimate of the amount of a chemical a person could be exposed to on a daily basis throughout the person's lifetime that is likely to be without an appreciable risk of harm. In other words, in the worst case scenario in which a person eats "contaminated" bell peppers every day for the rest of his or her life, he or she would not be exposed to an amount of pesticide residue that would plausibly harm his or her health.
The bottom line of the study is:
It is concluded that (1) exposures to the most commonly detected pesticides on the twelve commodities pose negligible risks to consumers, (2) substitution of organic forms of the twelve commodities for conventional forms does not result in any appreciable reduction of consumer risks, and (3) the methodology used by the environmental advocacy group to rank commodities with respect to pesticide risks lacks scientific credibility.
The scientifically honest thing to do would be for EWG to stop misleading consumers and take down its phony list.
Hat tip Raymond Eckhart.
New at Reason.tv: "You're Killing Me! Was a police-related jailhouse death an accident or a homicide?"
In the latest edition of Friday Funnies, Chip Bok
looks at the state of American politics.
Minnesota nice is now Minnesota mean: At the GOP presidential debate in Iowa tonight, the two Minnesotans on the stage—Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Rep. Michelle Bachmann—didn’t quite come to blows, but at times they seemed awfully close.
When Pawlenty, after prodding, doubled down on a
prior claim that Bachmann has no record of results, Bachmann
responded with a recitation of Pawlenty’s lowlights: Support for
cap-and-trade, a long-ago flirtation with an individual mandate to
purchase health insurance, and an old declaration that “the era of
small government is over.”
Pawlenty responded by attacking Bachmann’s “record of making false statements”—and by expanding on his argument that, for all her rhetorical volume, her frequent attacks on liberal policies had produced nothing of substance. She may have led the fights against ObamaCare and raising the debt limit, but those fights, Pawlenty pointed out, were lost. “If that’s your idea of effective leadership, please stop,” he said. “Because you’re killing us.”
The audience seemed possibly ready to kill questioner Byron York after he asked Bachmann whether, as president, she’d continue to be a “submissive” wife—as she’s said she is now. The crowd booed, and Bachmann waited it out before answering gently: "I respect my husband,” she said, confidently avoiding the question. “He's a wonderful godly man. And we respect each other."
Several of the candidates, though, seemed to have little respect for the panel moderators. Pressed about the constitutional basis for the individual mandate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney got snippy, and argued that it wasn't the U.S. Constitution that mattered. “Are you familiar with the Massachusetts constitution? I am,” he all but sneered before proceeding to note that states force people to do all sorts of things, like make children attend school. Why should buying health insurance be any different?
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, meanwhile, twice accused questioners of posing “gotcha” questions—including once for being asked about his conflicting statements both for and against the Libyan no-fly zone. Pushed to answer, he rambled, dissembled, and then insisted that we should “rethink” our entire approach to the conflict. After all, he said, he's running a campaign based on ideas. I suspect it won’t be long before he starts to rethink his troubled candidacy.
Former Pennsylvania Senator and social conservative stalwart Rick Santorum literally had to remind the audience that he was still on stage—waving his hands at one point as if to say “I’m still here!” and grousing repeatedly about the relatively low number of questions thrown his way. Sure, he was there, but you have to wonder why: Santorum’s primary mission seemed to be defending every last aspect of the GOP’s authoritarian streak: militarism in the Middle East, hyper-moralism at home, federal authority over marriage and the states. He bragged about his hawkishness and got in a drawn-out squabble with Ron Paul about the 10th amendment.
Ah yes. Ron Paul was there too. And he acted, well, a lot like Ron Paul usually does: forceful sometimes, rambling others, frequently both at the same time: He naysayed the non-cuts in the final debt deal and answered a question about immigration with partially explained references to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and international drug dealers. He reiterated his dislike for amnesty, and allowing illegal immigrants to vote, but he doesn’t want to force employers to play immigration cops either. For Paul, it’s as much a question of emphasis as anything: “Why,” he asked, “do we pay more attention to the borders over seas and less attention to the borders at home?” Paul's own biggest hang-up came from a question about his longtime professional backyard: the halls of the Capitol. After making a case for far more comprehensive spending cuts, including to the wars, he paused, unsure of himself, when asked whether he could get his plan through a divided Congress.
Jon Huntman tried to avoid divisive talk about civil unions, arguing that his support for them didn't mean those who disagreed were in any way wrong. Civil unions are a good idea. Or a bad one. Whichever one you pick, he thinks you're right. I guess that's what makes him a moderate.
There were no divisions amongst the Republicans about tax hikes, though: Every single one raised their hand to signal they’d turn down a deal that cut 10 dollars of spending in exchange for one dollar of tax increases. Even if it balanced the budget, and the new tax revenues came entirely from closing targeted tax giveaways and loopholes? Apparently.
After a deep-dish response in the last debate, former Godfather’s exec Herman Cain didn’t mention pizza this time around, but he did declare at one point that “America's got to learn how to take a joke.” A lot of Republicans, at least, will probably need to: They’ll be voting for one of these candidates.
Tonight, live from New York City, a special two-hour episode of the fabulous Stossel show on Fox Business Network will feature post-GOP-debate analysis from yours truly, Steve Forbes, Nicki Kurokawa Neily, and Deroy Murdock. The fun begins at 10 pm ET, at which point at least you will already be drunk.
Read John Stossel's latest Reason column here. And here's a bit of randomness, from four years ago last week, just after the last time GOP hopefuls and hope-empties slung the cornpone in Iowa: "It's 2011 and Ron Paul Is President."
30 Minutes or Less is a dopey film, one
you can imagine being cooked up over the course of a beery
Hollywood weekend. The story concerns two idiots who shanghai a
not-much-brighter pizza delivery guy, strap him with a vest full of
explosives, and force him to rob a bank for them or they’ll use
their vest-bomb remote to turn him into a drifting red
mist. The plot is nothing more than a rickety scaffold on
which to drape a succesion of gags, says Kurt Loder—and that's
OK.
Today, while standing on a bunch of hay bales (Why, Iowa? Why?) Mitt Romney slapped on a smile and went to town on some hecklers.
(Click on the image for the non-embeddable video, and skip to the 4:00 mark)
This exchange resulted:
ROMNEY: We have to make sure that the promises we make—and Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare—are promises we can keep. And there are various ways of doing that. One is, we could raise taxes on people.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Corporations!
ROMNEY: Corporations are people, my friend. We can raise taxes on—
AUDIENCE MEMBER: No, they’re not!
ROMNEY: Of course they are. Everything corporations earn also goes to people.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
ROMNEY: Where do you think it goes?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: It goes into their pockets!
ROMNEY: Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets! Human beings, my friend. So number one, you can raise taxes. That’s not the approach that I would take.
Romney doesn't mean that corporations are entitled to some of the legal rights of people in the Citizens United sense. He means it in the sense that the money made by corporations flows in and out of human hands—or pockets, in the language of the heckler who hoisted himself on his own metaphorical petard.
People are already mocking Romney for this supposed gaffe, but even TNR's Jonathan Chait grants that Romney is right on this point—although Chait is careful to point out that corporations are made of people who are richer than average.
Another bonus moment from the same event that almost tempted me to like Romney a little:
AUDIENCE MEMBER: You came here to listen to the people!
ROMNEY: Nope, I came here to speak.
On Wednesday, August 10, Reason Associate Editor Peter Suderman appeared on Freedom Watch to discuss the possibility of a third round of quantitative easing and what record low Congressional approval ratings mean for Obama and the 2012 elections.
When social disorder rears its head, the political class usually offers two responses: more policing and more welfare. (These tend to be presented as radically opposed social visions, though you can easily read "more policing" as "the sort of welfare administered by a prison" and "more welfare" as "the sort of policing performed by a social worker.") In his statement to the House of Commons on the riots that have swept his country, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron has proposed a policy from the police-state side of the spectrum:
Mr Speaker, everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organised via social media.
Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill.
And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them.
So we are working with the Police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.
And how exactly would the authorities "stop" the people they "know" are using social media "for ill" without restricting or surveilling the users acting "for good"? Answer: They can't. This would be an attack on the speech and privacy of everyone in the United Kingdom, not just the people who burn buildings and rob shops.
It is certainly true that the rioters have used social media to organize themselves. The difference between their free-flowing communications and the cops' much more centralized system makes it clear just how dramatically a hierarchy can be outperformed by a network. But it takes an especially stunted mindset to see that contrast and conclude that everyone needs to be herded into a hierarchy. Maybe, just maybe, a decentralized problem demands a decentralized response.
We've already seen several spontaneous examples of such a response. Ordinary people organized community cleanups quickly and efficiently using the same networks employed by the rioters. Civilians also used social media for self-defense—and I don't just mean the neighbors who banded together to protect their communities while Cameron's cops were being so ineffective. How many people looked at those rapidly updated maps of riot activity and changed their movements accordingly? Wouldn't it make more sense to build on such successes than to lock up the tools that made them possible?
If social media made it easier to riot, they also made it easier to survive the riots, and they did so at a time when the institutions that were supposed to ensure survival were in disarray. It's no surprise that people like Cameron would respond to the failure of centralized authority by calling for yet more centralization of authority. But if his suggestion becomes a concrete proposal, I hope the rest of Britain won't let itself be stampeded into saying yes.
The sad thing about the Save Our Schools rally at which Matt Damon came unhinged on Reason.tv was that he was the most sensible speaker there, Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia reports in her later column at The Daily. Among the others were Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond, who aimed a broadside at every ill in American society: poverty, segregation—and volunteer teachers. Then there was Sam Anderson, a founding member of the Black Panther Party, who advocated a Black-Latino alliance to “eradicate the onslaught of privatization” in education. However, she notes:
Notwithstanding its radical billing, SOS is not a force against the establishment but an agent for the status quo… The only radical thing the organization wants is radical unaccountability. Its entire “reform” agenda amounts to: More money, fewer questions.
Read the whole thing here, and check out the Reason.tv video below:
New
tests analyzing fetal DNA found in a pregnant woman's blood can
identify a fetus' sex as early as seven weeks into a pregnancy. As
the New York Times reported:
The appeal of the test, which analyzes fetal DNA found in the mother’s blood, is that it can establish sex weeks earlier than other options, like ultrasound, and is noninvasive, unlike amniocentesis and other procedures that carry small risks of miscarriage. The finding came in a study published online Tuesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association. ...
The journal study analyzed reams of research on fetal DNA tests — 57 studies involving about 6,500 pregnancies — and found that carefully conducted tests could determine sex with accuracy of 95 percent at 7 weeks to 99 percent at 20 weeks.
The study “has wide-reaching implications,” said Dr. Louise Wilkins-Haug, director for maternal-fetal medicine and reproductive genetics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who was not involved in the research. “Individuals need to be careful” to ensure that companies use rigorous laboratory procedures and support accuracy claims with data, she added.
One potential worry is that women might abort fetuses of an undesired sex. Several companies do not sell tests in China or India, where boys are prized over girls and fetuses found to be female have been aborted.
In response to the study, University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan asserts:
Should genetic testing -- in combination with abortion -- purely for sex selection be part of medicine? Is it ethical to end a pregnancy because you don’t want a girl? The answer to both questions is "no." Being male or female is not a disease or a disorder. Wanting a boy is a preference, but it is not one that justifies ending a pregnancy.
But ending a pregnancy because you don’t want a girl may be legal in the U.S., but that does not make it an ethical choice. As hard as it may be for some people to comprehend, there can be good and bad reasons to end a pregnancy. Gender preference is a bad reason.
Perhaps. But assuming that abortion remains legal, does that mean that such tests should be outlawed? Writing with refererence to using pre-implantation genetic selection of embryos, Oxford University bioethicist Julian Savulescu has warned:
The Nazis sought to interfere directly in people's reproductive decisions (by forcing them to be sterilized) to promote social ideals, particularly around racial superiority. Not offering selection for nondisease genes would indirectly interfere (by denying choice) to promote social ideals such as equality or 'population welfare.' There is no relevant difference between direct and indirect eugenics. The lesson we learned from eugenics is that society should be loath to interfere (directly and indirectly) in reproductive decisionmaking.
Savulescu's argument also applies in this case.
The recent police-related deaths of 43-year-old Allen Kephart in Lake Arrowhead, California and 37-year-old Kelly Thomas in Fullerton, California have sent shockwaves through the their respective communities. Indeed, both are being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The death of Thomas, a homeless schizophrenic beaten into a coma by Fullerton police, is also being investigated by the Orange County District Attorney’s Office. His case is not the first time Orange County law enforcement has been accused of applying excessive force to a mentally ill homeless man.
In October 2007, 28-year-old Michael Patrick Lass was living on the streets of Santa Ana when police stopped him for having an open container of alcohol. At the time of his arrest he was alcohol-dependent, schizophrenic, bipolar, and had a history of seizures.
The altercation that led to Lass's death took place at the Orange County Central Jail, where Lass was sentenced to serve five days after pleading guilty to public intoxication. The day Lass would have been able to leave he felt ill and asked for medical attention. Lass was ordered to leave his cell and after repeatedly looking over his shoulder while being directed by a deputy, he was tackled to the ground and a melee ensued.
“He wasn't fighting or anything and he was already in a contained area, locked in a contained area,” Lass's father Frederick, says of the incident. “Immediately there was a second deputy there, a third deputy, a fourth, a fifth, and on and on it went. There was so many deputies that you couldn't count how many deputies were there.”
Lass was shocked with a Taser nine times and the county's autopsy said he had multiple contusions on his body, “involving the head, neck, torso and extremities.” The struggle was captured on film. “I can remember viewing the film and at one point while they are beating him Michael tells them, 'You're killing me.' Literally: 'You're killing me',” says Frederick Lass.
Frederick Lass sued Orange County and six deputies involved in the incident. Although neither was found liable in that case, Orange County later revised its Taser policy so that deputies would not be able to use Tasers on restrained suspects unless they display "overtly assaultive behavior."
While an improvement, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California says the policy didn't go far enough. Executive Director Hector Villagra sent a letter to Sheriff Hutchens in January 2009 urging still-stricter use of Tasers, pointing to five people who have died since 2005 after being stung with the weapon.
Like the cases of Allen Kephart and Kelly Thomas, the death while in custody of Michael Patrick Lass raises troubling questions about police procedures - and the power of surveillance videos to shine a bright light on the workings of the criminal justice system.
The following video includes graphic violence and viewer discretion is advised.
Written and produced by Paul Detrick. Camera: Paul Detrick, Zach Weissmueller, and Alex Manning; edited by Detrick.
Special Thanks: Frederick Lass.
Music by Audionautix.com.
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