This reality of outright lying during campaigns is so familiar that we excuse it. It’s just what politicians do.
But suppose that a business owner did the equivalent in the market. Such behavior wouldn’t be tolerated by customers or by law-enforcement officials. For example, suppose that the owner of Acme Furniture, in a scheme to get more sales, outright lies with a radio ad that promises that everyone who buys any piece of furniture from Acme will get half of the purchase price refunded in 12 months. “Wow! Darn good deal!” consumers think. They flock to Acme and buy furniture.
One year later, Acme customers submit their applications for the refunds of half of the purchase prices they each paid. But these customers, rather than getting what Acme promised, instead get a note from Acme explaining that the promise of a refund was made in jest; it was designed only to get more consumers to buy furniture from Acme. “But don’t worry!” the letter from Acme continues, “you’re still better off having bought furniture from Acme than from any of Acme’s competitors. Trust me on this! Yours Sincerely,….”
From time to time unscrupulous (and, typically, also really stupid or myopic) business people pull fraudulent stunts such as this one. Yet – rightly – no one excuses these stunts as being par for the course in business. One reason, of course, is that such stunts are not par for the course in private business; far from it. But such stunts are indeed par for the course in politics. And yet, despite this reality, we are constantly told that businesses operating in competitive markets cannot be trusted to behave honestly unless they are regulated by politicians and bureaucrats operating in political ‘markets.’
Politicians lie and such lying is excused because it’s normal. But it’s not normal; it’s not normal in the private sector; it’s normal only in the very abnormal world of politics.
Don Boudreaux, “Politicians Lie Openly and Such Behavior Is Excused Because It’s ‘Normal’”, Café Hayek, 2016-09-05.
July 25, 2018
QotD: How can you tell when a politician is lying?
July 14, 2018
Hernando de Soto Knows How To Make the Third World Richer than the First
ReasonTV
Published on 13 Jul 2018The Peruvian economist says blockchain technologies and social media will transform the planet by securing property rights.
—————-In the spring of 1989, Chinese students occupied Tiananmen Square, erected a replica of the Statue of Liberty, and called for democracy and individual rights. By the fall, people living in East Germany took hammers and chisels to the Berlin Wall, unleashing a wave of revolutions that ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was an auspicious year for human freedom.
Nineteen eighty-nine was also the year that Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto published The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in The Third World, which radically challenged conventional wisdom about the underlying cause of persistent poverty in the post-colonial landscape. Drawing on his extensive field work with the Peruvian-based think tank the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, de Soto argued that people were pushed into the black market and wider informal economy because governments refused to recognize, document, and promote legal ownership of land and other assets.
Without clear title and the right to transfer property, common farmers understandably refused to invest much in the land they tilled, and they couldn’t use it as collateral. This created what de Soto later called “citadels of dead capital” with value that could never be fully accessed.
No one, he argued, would plan for the future if everything they accumulated could just be taken away. As much an activist as an intellectual, De Soto has been called “the world’s most important living economist” by former President Bill Clinton. He is credited with changing policy in Peru and elsewhere by pushing governments to create property regimes that are public, transferable, and secure. His latest endeavor is a partnership with Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne and others to use blockchain technology and social media to create totally public and perfectly transparent records of ownership.
Reason‘s Nick Gillespie caught up with de Soto in Washington, D.C. in June, where he received the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Julian L. Simon Memorial Award, named for the late free-market economist who believed that “mankind is the ultimate resource.”
July 9, 2018
Nominating Amy Barrett “would be a tactical masterpiece on the level of Napoleon’s conduct of the Battle of Austerlitz, or Hannibal at Cannae”
I have no idea who President Trump will announce later today as his nominee for the vacancy on the US Supreme Court, but Conrad Black is plumping for one particular candidate:
The desperation of the Democrats to stop the apparently inexorable rise of a president they so completely discounted and despised, and assumed they could remove or emasculate just by turning up the volume and activity of their media organ monkeys, may drive them to accidental suicide over the latest Supreme Court vacancy. I have no standing at all to intuit whom the president may nominate. But if, as I suspect, it is Judge Amy Barrett, it would be a tactical masterpiece on the level of Napoleon’s conduct of the Battle of Austerlitz, or Hannibal at Cannae.
The U.S. Senate confirmed Barrett to the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on October 31, by a 55-43 vote. Three Democrats voted for her and two did not vote. It would not be easy to justify changing their votes now, as she has served unexceptionably. At her confirmation hearings, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Judiciary Committee’s aged ranking Democrat, asked Barrett about her religious views, and the nominee responded that no judge should allow personal views, whether based on faith or anything else, to influence the imposition of the law. “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that is a concern,” Feinstein said infamously. This was an outrageous comment; Feinstein doesn’t know anything about the dogma of the Roman Catholic Church, and she has no idea what privately motivates Judge Barrett.
The fury and haste of the Democrats once the starting gun went off with the announcement of the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy from the Supreme Court, expressed their blind panic that their entire protracted regime of encroachments and embellishments on the Constitution — buttressing their centralized and authoritarian notion of administrative juridical governance with pretense to defending the rights of women, affirmative action, and the legislative role of the judiciary generally — was now under mortal assault.
[…]
I believe the president will nominate Barrett, that the Democrats will take definitive leave of their depleted senses, apostrophize the judge as a Trojan Horse of female submission, that she will clear her hearings with flying colors while the president’s formidable battery of social media and talk show supporters roast the Democrats for attacking an exemplary female achiever and a fine jurist whose only offense is to be a member of the Roman Catholic Church, by far the largest in the country with more than 70 million adherents. Remember, too, the Supreme Court in the final days of its term ruled that crisis pregnancy centers need not advertise the virtues of abortion with Planned Parenthood, and in 2016 said the Little Sisters of the Poor could not be compelled to pay for birth control and sterilization.
As at Cannae and at Austerlitz, the center of the defending force (Democrats), will crumble and President Trump will sweep the field. The Democratic playbook of endless ear-splitting allegations of serial outrages by the president, will not, finally, bring him down. On this issue, of mobilizing unfounded sexist paranoia against a flawless nominee, thereby insulting tens of millions of American women and U.S. Roman Catholics, before raising the objections of fair-minded non-Catholic men, at least another 20 percent of the population, the Democrats will immolate themselves in an unprecedentedly spectacular launch of their midterm election campaign.
Of course, no matter who is put forward, that person will immediately become the target of a supersized version of the “two-minute hate” that will literally last for months, or until the nominee is driven to decline the nomination, at which point the hate will be directed at the next nominee. Pedantically, however, Black’s use of Cannae and Austerlitz is only metaphorical: at Austerlitz, the allied centre did crumble, but at Cannae, it was the Roman cavalry on the flanks that crumbled, allowing the Carthaginians to envelop the rear of the main Roman army. Two very different battles.
July 7, 2018
QotD: Crony rules
The direction [by government] of economic activity thus necessarily involves discrimination between persons, the creation of monopoly and privilege, while the aim of the Rule of Law is the abolition of all privilege, be it in favor of the strong or of the weak. And it is no less fatal to freedom if exemption from general legal rules is granted to the weak than when it is granted to the strong. Once the door is opened to differentiation on the ground of deserts or needs, it will be arbitrary will instead of objective rule which will govern men.
F.A. Hayek, “The Political Ideal of the Rule of Law”, 1955.
July 5, 2018
The soon-to-be-announced target of the two-minute unceasing hate
At Reason, Jacob Sullum says Trump did well with his first Supreme Court pick, and the unwillingness of Trump’s opponents to acknowledge that shows how much blind partisanship has gripped the left:
Anthony M. Kennedy, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, swears in Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch on Monday, April 10, 2017, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, D.C. Also shown, Gorsuch’s wife Louise stands on stage holding a family Bible. Justice Gorsuch is the Supreme Court’s 113th justice.
White House photo via Wikimedia Commons.
“We have to STOP the next Trump nominee!” says a pop-up solicitation on People for the American Way’s website. Before you rush to “donate now,” you might want to consider the organization’s assessment of Trump’s last Supreme Court nominee.
“Far from being a fair-minded constitutionalist,” PFAW says, Neil Gorsuch “has proven to be a narrow-minded elitist who consistently votes in favor of corporations and the powerful.” The gap between that description and Gorsuch’s actual performance on the Court speaks volumes about the blind partisanship of Trump critics who care more about scoring political points than defending civil liberties.
PFAW is echoing the criticism of Democratic senators who worried, before Gorsuch was confirmed in April 2017, that he was not inclined to stand up for “the little guy.” Gorsuch’s record during a decade on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit belied that claim, and his 15 months on the Supreme Court provide further evidence that he is not shy about defending the principles that protect politically disfavored individuals from the whims of the powerful.
In sharp contrast with the man who nominated him, Gorsuch worries about abuses of the government’s power to take people’s property “for public use.” In June 2017, when the Court declined to hear a case that raised the question of whether a state can impose limits on the “just compensation” it owes for takings under the Fifth Amendment, Gorsuch, joined by Clarence Thomas, urged his colleagues to address that issue at the “next opportunity.”
That pairing was notable because Gorsuch is on record as admiring Thomas’s passionate dissent from the widely condemned 2005 decision in which the Court approved the use of eminent domain to transfer property from one private owner to another in the name of economic development. Big businesses routinely use such arrangements to override the wishes of little people who get in the way of their plans.
July 2, 2018
QotD: Perverse incentives, death penalty edition
People cheered when, in the 1990s, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich advocated mandatory executions for drug dealers. But economists wondered why Gingrich wanted to decrease the penalty for murder. How does the death penalty for drug dealers decrease the penalty for murder? Think about it this way: Suppose that Gingrich’s bill becomes law and the police bust into an apartment where three drug dealers have hidden their stash. What happens? The drug dealers know that if they give up, they will be put to death. So why not try to kill the police? If the dealers are lucky, they get away. If the dealers are unlucky, they are no worse off than if they didn’t fight because when drug dealing is a capital offense, drug dealers face no additional penalty for murder.
Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, Modern Principles: Microeconomics (3rd Edition), 2015.
June 28, 2018
US Supreme Court rules on the Janus case
Eric Boehm reported soon after the decision was announced on Wednesday morning:
More than four decades after the Supreme Court ruled that public sector workers could be required to pay dues to unions even if they do not join one, a 5–4 majority on the high court overturned that precedent in a closely watched case that could have major ramifications for the future of public sector unions.
“Under Illinois law, public employees are forced to subsidize a union, even if they choose not to join and strongly object to the positions the union takes in collective bargaining and related activities,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion. “We conclude that this arrangement violates the free speech rights of nonmembers by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern.”
In the short-term, the ruling in Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees means that plaintiff Mark Janus was successful in his decade-long fight to prevent the union from taking $50 out of his paycheck every two weeks. Over the years, Janus estimates, he’s contributed more than $6,000 to the union.
More broadly, Wednesday’s ruling could end the automatic deduction of union dues from millions of public employees’ paychecks, forcing unions like AFSCME to convince workers to voluntarily contribute dues — something workers would do, presumably, only if they have a reason to do so.
“So many of us have been forced to pay for political speech and policy positions with which we disagree, just so we can keep our jobs. This is a victory for all of us,” said Janus in a statement. “The right to say ‘no’ to a union is just as important as the right to say ‘yes.’ Finally our rights have been restored.”
The ruling is “a landmark victory for rights of public-sector employees,” said Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which supported Janus’ lawsuit.
While today’s ruling certainly shifts the balance towards worker freedom, groups like the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which represented Janus, say they are already prepared for additional rounds of litigation. In states that previously have embraced right-to-work policies, unions have often tried to make it as difficult as possible for workers to renounce their membership.
At Hot Air, Jazz Shaw highlights a few of the key points:
Justice Alito wrote the decision and it followed along with the expectations of those who watched the case play out before the court. Also as expected, this was a 5-4 decision, split along partisan lines. At the heart of Janus was the question of whether or not unions can forcibly extract dues from workers’ paychecks without the worker proactively volunteering to contribute. In parallel to that, the court had to determine whether or not those extracted fees, being put toward lobbying efforts, constituted involuntary political speech on the part of the worker. The ruling answers both questions definitively.
You can read the full decision here [PDF] but I’ve extracted a couple of the key points from the syllabus. First is the issue of whether the previous ruling in Abood (which went in the unions’ favor) erred in allowing the forcible extraction of dues. Alito leaves no room for doubt.
The State’s extraction of agency fees from nonconsenting public sector employees violates the First Amendment. Abood erred in concluding otherwise, and stare decisis cannot support it. Abood is therefore overruled.
The second question was the one about subsidizing the speech of others when it runs contrary to your personal beliefs. Again, Alito is definitive.
Forcing free and independent individuals to endorse ideas they find objectionable raises serious First Amendment concerns. E.g., West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624, 633. That includes compelling a person to subsidize the speech of other private speakers.
A union official, Paul Shearon, the IFPTE Secretary-Treasurer, put out an immediate statement saying that this was based on, “a bogus free speech argument.” He went on to say that the justices voting in the majority “are little better than political hacks.” That was followed up by a threat to take it to the streets.
In the short run, the Janus decision may hurt some unions financially, but in the long run it will serve to make unions and their members more militant and force a stronger culture of internal organizing. The recent statewide teacher strikes demonstrate that when public sector workers face limitations on their bargaining rights they take their case to the streets.
This is going to send shockwaves through not just the unions, but the Democratic Party at large. The amount of money that the unions flush into Democratic coffers every year is likely more than most of you imagine.
Steven Malanga in City Journal provides some rough figures on how much money was at stake for the unions and their political activities:
With the appointment of Justice Neil Gorsuch, unions feared the outcome of the Janus case. After all, many union members have stated that they would give up their memberships if the court ruled that compulsory fees were illegal. An officer of the Communications Workers of America, which represents government employees in New Jersey, told an AFL-CIO convention last fall that only 54 percent of its 60,000 members said that they would remain in the union if they could opt out of paying fees. The California Teachers Association, meanwhile, crafted a 2019 budget that anticipated that as many as 23,000 members would leave if the court overturned the Illinois law. The union will also suffer from the loss of revenues from 28,000 nonmembers who’ve been paying agency fees, and will presumably stop doing so now that they’re no longer compelled. The union, according to a published report, estimated it could suffer a loss of some $20 million annually as a result.
Even before the ruling, government unions were reeling. Their membership has declined from a peak of 7.9 million in 2009 to 7.2 million today — a drop of nearly 9 percent. The portion of government workers in unions, which peaked in the mid-1990s at 38.7 percent, is now down to 34.4 percent, according to unionstats.com. Some of the decline is due to a significant reduction in the number of government workers after the 2008 financial crisis; even today, nine years into a recovery, the total number of government workers remains 10 percent lower than before the recession — a loss of 233,000 positions. But unions have suffered an even bigger falloff, because when government employment began trending back upward in 2014, union membership stayed flat. Many of the gains in government jobs since then have been in nonunion positions.
Unions have suffered big losses in Wisconsin, which banned compulsory unionization in the public sector in 2011. Some 140,000 union positions have dried up as workers chose not to retain their memberships. But other states that continued to compel workers to join a union or pay agency fees have also seen major losses, including New York, where union membership has fallen by 150,000, Illinois (down 88,000), Pennsylvania (down 54,000), and New Jersey (down 50,000). Those declines are reflected in union numbers, too. The National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union, has lost nearly 250,000 members, or about 8 percent of its membership, since 2009. AFSCME’s national membership has shrunk by 200,000, or 13 percent.
June 27, 2018
Calico prohibition
In the current issue of Reason, Virginia Postrel outlines an eighteenth-century French government attempt to prohibit calico cloth:
Calico printing, an image from Wellcome Images, via Wikimedia Commons
On a shopping trip to the butcher’s, young Miss la Genne wore her new, form-fitting jacket, a stylish cotton print with large brown flowers and red stripes on a white background. It got her arrested.
Another young woman stood in the door of her boss’ wine shop sporting a similar jacket with red flowers. She too was arrested. So were Madame de Ville, the lady Coulange, and Madame Boite. Through the windows of their homes, law enforcement authorities spotted these unlucky women in clothing with red flowers printed on white. They were busted for possession.
It was Paris in 1730, and the printed cotton fabrics known as toiles peintes or indiennes — in English, calicoes, chintzes, or muslins — had been illegal since 1686. It was an extreme version of trade protectionism, designed to shelter French textile producers from Indian cottons. Every few years the authorities would tweak the law, but the fashion refused to die.
Frustrated by rampant smuggling and ubiquitous scofflaws, in 1726 the government increased penalties for traffickers and anyone helping them. Offenders could be sentenced to years in galleys, with violent smugglers put to death. Local authorities were given the power to detain without trial anyone who merely wore the forbidden fabrics or upholstered furniture with them.
“The exasperation of the lawmakers, after forty years of successive edicts and ordinances which had been largely ignored, flouted or circumvented on a wholesale basis, can be sensed in this law,” writes the fashion historian Gillian Crosby in a 2015 dissertation on the ban. Her archival research shows a spike in arrests for simple possession. “Impotent at stopping the cross-border trade, printing or the peddling of goods,” she writes, “government officials concentrated on making an example of individual wearers, in an attempt to halt the fashion.”
They failed.
In the annals of prohibition, the French war on printed fabrics is one of the strangest, most futile, and most extreme chapters. It’s also one of the most intellectually consequential, producing many of the earliest arguments for economic liberalism. “Long before the more famous debates about the liberalisation of the grain trade, about taxation, or even about the monopoly of the French Indies Company, philosophes and Enlightenment political economists saw the calico debate as their first important battleground,” writes the historian Felicia Gottmann in Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism (Palgrave Macmillan).
Remy: Violent Video Games
ReasonTV
Published on 26 Jun 2018In prison for life, Remy looks back on his violent past and contemplates where it all went wrong and who’s to blame.
Written and Performed by Remy
Shot and Edited by Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg
Mastering by Ben Karlstrom
Music tracks by Grind Time Production SquadReason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
—————-
LYRICS:
In the clink
In the slammer
Yeah I’m doing hard time
For a crime that I committed
Back in 2009See violent games lead to crimes
Wish I knew from the start
Before I ever got involved
In playing Mario KartI was hugging the turns
Heaving items for thrills
Ain’t seen a toad so damaged by shell
Since that last oil spillBut something happens to your brain
Doing virtual wrongs
Woke up the next morning
And it wasn’t too long before I wasDropping bananas Upon every street
Hurling turtles
Hurting every single person I seeThen I was road-raging at plumbers
Nobody could stop me
I’d run princesses off the road so much
I joined the paparazziNow I’m in prison doing 20 to life
How could such a game be legal man
The danger is rifeWell my fate is sealed
Won’t be doing right
Because I’m playing violent video games tonight
And the things I do I then do in life
It’s a tragedy
I’m gonna be in jail for lifeReminds me of another time
My life went astray
Playing a World War 2 game
Back in 2008I was only playing a minute
Then I felt an unease
Next thing I did right after playing
I interred the JapaneseYears later I would pay the judges
To win every race
It’s just what happens when you play
Too many games by EANow I’m doing life
With no chance of parole
Why didn’t anybody ban these games
How was I to knowCHORUS
Expert here
And forgive me for stalling
But violent video games
The stats are appallingJust look at this graph
And as you can tell
As gameplay’s increased
Youth crime has as wellUh – It’s gone down
Well who needs a chart?
I took 400 grand in loans
So you know that I’m smartLike a guy leaving the mohel
You’re missing the point
Freedom’s when you only get to play
The games we anoint
June 25, 2018
Differences between the United States and the “idealized” United States of Europe
Tim Worstall, in the Continental Telegraph:
There are those who think – urge, wish for perhaps – the European Union is or should become the United States of Europe. Lots of central bureaucratic control, the nation states left as just the remnants of once independent countries like the US states are these days. In some ways the two systems are very much the same already. No US state has any control at all over trade across its own border. Nor does any EU one. Trade is an issue solely the competence of the central organisations, respectively Washington DC and Brussels. Equally, both systems use this central control of trade and trade only to expand that central control.
In the US there was a case that Federal control of trade meant that the Feds got to decide who could grow wheat where and when. The usual sort of planning idiocy led to the Feds telling farmers who could grow how much and when. One farmer claimed he was only growing for his own consumption and this shouldn’t be limited. The centre (the Supreme Court) disagreed, the crux being that if he didn’t grow for his own consumption he would buy, this affected inter-state commerce, he had to obey the Feds. The EU takes this a step further. The Single Market rules are nominally about trade. Anything legal to be buying and selling in one place is such in all is a reasonable explanation of the nub of the matter. Sure, exceptions and all that. But this then smuggles into all law that continental (Roman Law really) idea that what is legal to do is something that the legislation defines. Instead of that Common Law idea that legislation, the law even, defines what it is illegal to do all other things being legal.
Once this is accepted then of course the next step is that there must be regulation of all things so as to tell people what it is legal to do. In this manner all sorts of things get smuggled in. Vacuum cleaner motors must be limited to a certain size or power. Because those whose lives are unfortunate enough that they’ve time to spare to be concerned about legislation on such matters note that they can be and thus incorporate their trivialities into legislation. The extent of this reach is larger than you think. The underlying legal, not political, justification for recycling targets is that some countries – Holland, where digging a hole gains nothing but wet boots – don’t have space for landfill. This would put them at a disadvantage if other countries do have the space, therefore all must recycle.
Giving the centre power always, but always, means an extension of the centre’s power. The two systems aren’t so different then.
June 24, 2018
Europe and the refugees
Theodore Dalrymple on the various European governments’ attitudes and actions on the refugee problem:
Europe, despite its Union, is as divided as ever. Recently, when Italy’s new right-wing government — anxious to prove its credentials — refused to allow a boat carrying 629 African migrants to dock in Italy, Spain’s new left-wing government — equally anxious to do the same — accepted the boat. When the French president, Emmanuel Macron, criticized the Italians for their decision, the Italian government accused the French of hypocrisy, inasmuch as they had refused to take more than 9,000 migrants from Italy that they had previously agreed to accept.
This story is revealing in several aspects. The first is that, whatever attitude governments take to the migrants, no one truly believes that they are more of an asset than a liability. Madrid’s action, for example, was taken on “humanitarian” grounds, rather than because it believed that Spain would benefit from the migrants’ presence. When European leaders discuss the migrant question, it is always in terms of sharing the burden, not the assets, equitably. No one speaks of foreign investment in this way, which suggests that European politicians believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that the free movement of people and capital are different in an important way.
The leaders speak of sharing the burden, then, and are incensed when countries such as Hungary and Poland refuse point-blank to take any migrants from Africa or the Middle East. But I have never seen mentioned in this context the question of where the migrants themselves want to go. They might as well be inanimate toxic waste as far as the discussion is concerned, rather than human beings with wishes, desires, ambitions, and so forth. They are but pawns in a political game. Hungary, for example, is deemed duty-bound to take x number of migrants: no one asks whether x number of migrants can be found who want to go to Hungary. Nor is the question ever discussed in public whether Hungary, having open borders, would be held responsible for making the migrants stay there once they had arrived. Short of penning them in, how exactly would you keep them in Hungary, or in Poland?
Berlin protest planned against EU’s proposed copyright changes
If you’re a regular internet user and you’re anywhere near Berlin, you might want to consider supporting this protest:
On Wednesday, the Legislative Committee of the European Union narrowly voted to keep the two most controversial internet censorship and surveillance proposals in European history in the upcoming revision to the Copyright Directive — as soon as July Fourth, the whole European Parliament could vote to make this the law of 28 EU member-states.
The two proposals were Article 11 (the link tax), which bans linking to news articles without paying for a license from each news-site you want to link to; and Article 13 (the copyright filters), requiring that everything that Europeans post be checked first for potential copyright infringements and censored if an algorithm decides that your expression might breach someone’s copyright.
These proposals were voted through even though experts agree that they will be catastrophic for free speech and competition, raising the table-stakes for new internet companies by hundreds of millions of euros, meaning that the US-based Big Tech giants will enjoy permanent rule over the European internet. Not only did the UN’s special rapporteur on freedom of expression publicly condemn the proposal; so did more than 70 of the internet’s leading luminaries, including the co-creators of the World Wide Web, Wikipedia, and TCP.
We have mere days to head this off: the German Pirate Party has called for protests in Berlin this Sunday, June 24 at 11:45h outside European House Unter den Linden 78, 10117 Berlin. They’ll march on the headquarters of Axel-Springer, a publisher that lobbied relentlessly for these proposals.
If you use the Internet to communicate, organize, and educate it’s time to speak out. Show up, stand up, because the Internet needs you!
Original post, with embedded links, at BoingBoing.
June 20, 2018
Do You Have a Right To Repair Your Phone? The Fight Between Big Tech and Consumers
ReasonTV
Published on 18 Jun 2018Eric Lundgren got 15 months in prison for selling pirated Microsoft software that the tech giant gives away for free. His case cuts to the heart of a major battle going on in the tech industry today: Companies are trying to preserve aspects of U.S. copyright law that give them enormous power over the products we own.
Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
June 9, 2018
The (formerly) friendly Bobby – “The police have been alienating their erstwhile natural friends for some time”
Patrick West on the long decline in public trust for British police:
Metropolitan Police at G20 protests in London, 2009-04-01
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
In Britain, there have traditionally been two sections of society who dislike the police. One type are radicals – or pseudo-radicals, as epitomised by the capitalist-run store Lush and Rik from The Young Ones – who object to the forces of law’n’order on anarcho-libertarian grounds. The police for them are ‘pigs’. The other type are the working class, or sections of it, who object to the police on account of them poking their nose into private matters that don’t concern them. The police for them have historically been ‘the filth’.
Yet the police are now widely disliked beyond those two demographics. These days, even conservatives and the respectable middle class don’t like the rozzers. A story beyond the hoo-ha over Lush and its anti-police ads might help to explain why.
This year there has been a litany of reports about rape cases collapsing owing to police failing to investigate evidence that would have exonerated the defendants. And this week it was revealed that 47 rape and sexual-assault cases in England and Wales were halted between January and mid-February because evidence was withheld from defence lawyers.
This is not entirely the police’s fault. They have been under political pressure from lobby groups obsessed with attaining rape conviction quotas – as if justice was about achieving statistical targets, rather than punishing guilty individuals and letting innocent individuals go free. As the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper that should be a natural friend of the police, put it: ‘It is hard not to conclude that under pressure to increase conviction rates, the police and prosecutors simply withheld evidence that would help the defence, in order to make a successful prosecution more likely.’
The police have been alienating their erstwhile natural friends for some time. This first became evident at the end of the last century, with the jailing of the Norfolk farmer Tony Martin for shooting dead a burglar who had broken into his home. The consequent outrage in the conservative press stemmed from a belief that the police were now more concerned with the human rights of criminals than with crimes against private property, in this case.
June 2, 2018
YouTube Won’t Host Our Homemade Gun Video. So We Posted It on PornHub Instead.
ReasonTV
Published on 31 May 2018Reason has a new video out today explaining how to put together a homemade handgun using some very simple tools and parts you can buy online. But you won’t find it on our YouTube channel.
_____After the March for Our Lives rally, YouTube announced that it would no longer allow users to post videos that contain “instructions on manufacturing a firearm.”
Our video and its accompanying article are part of a package of stories in Reason‘s “Burn After Reading” issue. It includes a bunch of how-to’s, including how to bake pot brownies, how to use bitcoin anonymously, how to pick the lock on handcuffs, and how to hire an escort.
The whole issue is a celebration of free speech and our way of documenting how utterly futile of all kinds of prohibitions can be.
We made a video showing how easy it is to DIY a Glock because we wanted to show how the First Amendment reinforces the Second Amendment. If a bunch of journalists can build a handgun in their kitchen, we can assume it’ll be pretty hard to keep guns out of the hands of motivated criminals.
If YouTube prevents us from uploading the video, have they violated our First Amendment rights?
“YouTube of old days was this amazing thing that has become the digital library of Alexandria on the Internet,” says Karl Kasarda, the co-host of InRangeTV, a weekly YouTube show about guns. The show used to survive on ad revenue, until YouTube started de-monetizing certain forms of content. Once YouTube made it impossible for Kasarda to make money on its platform, he started posting his content to other places, including PornHub.
Last October Prager University, a conservative video production shop, sued YouTube, saying it had restricted the audience for content and alleging that the company was “unlawfully censoring its educational videos and discriminating against its right to freedom of speech.”
But here’s the thing: YouTube is a private platform. There is nothing in the First Amendment (or the Second) that requires them to host our gun video. Reason can turn down articles for any cause that we choose. We can do it because we don’t like the color of the author’s hair, or because we don’t like the font she used in her pitch email. We wouldn’t be violating a single constitutional right by doing so.
We wish YouTube would run our video. It’s awesome. But equally awesome is YouTube’s right — our right — not to run content we don’t like.
Karl Kasarda is correct that YouTube is the closest thing we have to the Library of Alexandria. It still doesn’t mean they have to carry our video.
YouTube is hardly the first to test this principle. In 1972, a teachers union president who was running for state legislature sued The Miami Herald, insisting it run an editorial he had written after he was attacked in its pages. The Supreme Court correctly ruled that ordering a newspaper to print an editorial violates the First Amendment. After all, a newspaper is “more than a passive receptacle.”
Prager University argued that YouTube isn’t entitled to the same editorial discretion as The Miami Herald because it advertises itself as a “platform for free expression” that’s “committed to fostering a community where everyone’s voice can be heard.” A federal judge, thankfully, dismissed the Prager lawsuit, rejecting the company’s argument that YouTube is comparable to a “government entity” and thus must be open-access. A slew of other judges have arrived at the same conclusion.
YouTube deserves the same editorial latitude those judges gave to The Miami Herald in the 1970s and that Reason enjoys today.
And that’s one of the things our new gun video is celebrating. If YouTube doesn’t want to post it to their site, its loss. We’ll just post it to another platform. That’s what the free and open internet is all about. So if you want to see our video, you can watch it here at Reason.com — or head over to PornHub and see how to make your very own unregistered firearm.
Links:
https://reason.com/archives/2018/05/31/how-to-legally-make-your-own-o
https://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=ph5b0460dc60380Edited by Todd Krainin. Narrated by Katherine Mangu-Ward. Written by Jim Epstein and Katherine Mangu-Ward. Cameras by Meredith Bragg.
