Category: free trade & free markets

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Accountability crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets general freedom local leaders nannyism national politics & policies responsibility too much government

Kick the Addiction, Save Money

marijuana, tax revenue, taxes, spending, war on drugs, opioid epidemic

The political case for the War on Drugs has always been intuitive. “Drugs are bad” has trumped practical concerns. But the actual, responsible case for the political crusade has depended upon some concept of “social cost.”

Now that marijuana is being legalized state by state, the case against the greater War on Drugs is being taken seriously — enough to rethink all varieties of costs. Indeed, many now see the opioid epidemic as being driven, in part, by the War on Drugs, and not just as an excuse for a stronger crackdown.

Nevertheless, coming to some accounting — especially “social cost” accounting — remains difficult. This is especially true so long as its effects on freedom and the rule of law do not get figured in.

Somewhat surprisingly, even the budgetary effects of legalization have proven a bit tricky.

So it is welcome to read Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron’s study of marijuana legalization as it has occurred in the states of Washington, Oregon, and Colorado. He compares results of legalization with the predictions he had made eight years ago, in a previous Cato Institute study. It turns out that while tax revenues are far greater than expected, law enforcement costs have not gone down.

“Early experience suggests that governments will reallocate rather than reduce those expenditures,” Miron writes. “That reallocation may be beneficial, but it does not have a direct effect on the budget deficit.”

On a federal level, though, we might expect greater savings. How? We could shut down whole bureaus.

Yet, achieving such savings would require progress on Washington’s biggest addiction:  spending.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

Studies cited:

Jeffrey Miron, “The Budgetary Effects of Ending Drug Prohibition,” Cato Tax & Budget Bulletin, Number 83, July 23, 2018.

Jeffrey A. Miron and Katherine Waldock, “The Budgetary Impact of Ending Drug Prohibition,” Cato Institute white paper, September 27, 2010.

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Accountability crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets general freedom moral hazard nannyism responsibility too much government

Taking a (Lemonade) Stand

lemonade, freedom, regulation, FDA, free market, law, authoritarian, media

When life hands you lemons. . . .

Once upon a time, putting up a summertime lemonade stand was the American way for kids to learn about hard work, good will, and entrepreneurship. Almost every kid had one, making some spendable profit selling the nectar.*

Some of the youngsters grew up to become Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and, well, lemonade’s one heck of a gateway drink.

But then, along came “progress” — that is, mandates and regulations slapped upon businesses. And the hordes of regulators required to enforce the morass of rules — “swarms of Officers.”

Soon lemonade stands were vanquished from our neighborhoods.

And America was made safe (at long last!) for . . . inane bureaucracy.

“Reports of kids’ lemonade stands being shut down for breaking local health or permitting laws have long left grown-ups feeling sour,” today’s Wall Street Journal informs. But the story also details how “a growing movement of adults is fighting back.”

So, when government policies hand you lemons, what do you do?

Make a map of all the lemonade stand clampdowns.

“I think the Constitution covers [lemonade stands] as written,” Dave Roland told the Journal, explaining the map he and his wife Jenifer have produced. “But if there’s any doubt about that, let’s get it fixed.” The Rolands run the Freedom Center in Missouri, but theirs is a regrettably national map.

Last month, the popular lemonade maker Country Time started “Legal-Ade,”  pledging to come to the defense of any kid “busted” for trafficking in lemonade.

Seriously.

“When life gives you arcane laws,” the company’s video says, “make lemonade.”

Taste the Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The profit was made possible largely by pushing their costs off onto their parents. But isn’t that sorta what parents are for? And good lessons were still learned.

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Accountability crime and punishment free trade & free markets general freedom media and media people moral hazard responsibility

Blame the App?

WhatsApp, India, murder, responsibility, cause, effect, law, ban, blame

Who spreads “fake news”?

Gossips, politicians, publicity agents, Twitter eggs, partisan bloggers, lying news journalists?

Or . . . the medium of communication they use?

Do envelopes, stationery, telephones, email, and messaging apps have moral agency?

And who commits the crimes that news (true or false) is used to rationalize?

A New York Times story discusses “How WhatsApp Leads Mobs to Murder in India,” which is like saying that civilization, flying lessons and boarding passes “led” terrorists to 9/11.

The Times reports that fake news about children being kidnapped — dramatized by doctored video clips and forwarded via WhatsApp, a messaging app — provoked anger and fear in many Indians. Some were then willing to attack anyone who “seemed” about to kidnap children.

In recent months, dozens of people have been murdered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Without social media and the mega-popular WhatsApp, the murders probably would not have happened, at least not the way they happened. That seems certain. But this doesn’t mean that without WhatsApp, nobody in India would spread false stories or assault innocent people.

Mob violence in the country antedates the Internet.

Perhaps a thousand material circumstances directly or indirectly enable any particular act of wrongdoing. But no such prerequisites “lead to” anything without individual choices.

If someone pretends it’s okay to kill innocent persons — or persons whose guilt or innocence he doesn’t care to know — he, the killer, is the guilty party. The telecommunications network or messenger app used to provide grist for excuse-making is innocent.

Apps don’t murder people. People murder people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets general freedom judiciary local leaders moral hazard nannyism Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

Ought Implies Cantifornia

microstamping, bullet, California, law, guns, gun control

“Strip away the absurdity,” writes Scott Shackford at Reason, “and it’s essentially a very technical ruling.”

Shackford is explaining a bizarre recent judgment of the California Supreme Court.

Politicians in Sacramento had, years ago, passed a gun control measure requiring gun manufacturers to “implement microstamping technology that would imprint identifying information on bullets as they were shot from semi-automatic weapons.” In 2014, Smith & Wesson announced that it would pull some guns from the California market rather than comply. Why? The technology just wasn’t ready yet.*

Since California’s Civil Code contains a section reiterating an old commonsense principle to the effect that the “law never requires impossibilities,” the National Shooting Sports Foundation sued to block the law.

But the group just lost.

The Court did say it could protect citizens from punishment, but it refused to nullify the legislation on constitutional grounds.

Unanimously.

Why do this? Apparently to protect California politicians in their ongoing social engineering schemes.

The dollar costs of trying to comply with impossible demands are huge, of course. But the biggest costs may be more subtle.

In moral philosophy, it is a truism to say that “ought implies can.” In natural law as understood long ago, an impossible law was thought not a law at all, justifiably ignored by anyone and everyone.

In a just state, flouting of maddening regulations like California’s would lead not merely to the defense of the absurdly put-upon citizen — as this court ruling still allows — but also to the nixing of the “impossible” law.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Shackford notes that “a cynic might theorize that this is the law’s actual intent.” I wouldn’t limit that suspicion to folks given to cynicism. Pragmatists and political scientists and almost anyone else would be placing bets on that, too.

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Accountability crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy property rights responsibility too much government

Working to Boost Unemployment

occupational licensing, hair braiding, permission, law, crime, employment, unemployment, control, health

Some government officials work overtime to throw people out of work.

What I’m referring to differs from losing your job or business because of slack performance or slackening sales. Instead, you lose the right to earn your living a certain way so that the government can benefit competitors at your expense.

Occupational licensing is great at dis-employing people. The regulations are especially galling when the work being regulated obviously requires no formal training in order to be done well and safely.

Hair braiding, for example.

The Institute for Justice — which has done incredible work over the years representing victims of destructive government mandates — just won a victory for hair braiders in Iowa. Thanks to IJ’s efforts, a new law there exempts braiders from having to waste time and money getting a cosmetology license in order to practice their craft.

Such battles are never won permanently, of course. Washington, D.C., recently started requiring day care providers to get a college degree or lose their job. (As I have argued in a Townhall column, the same “logic” would justify forcing people to get college degrees to become parents.) IJ is helping affected parties to challenge the absurd law.

It is time for a new licensing requirement. Nobody gets to become a local, state or federal lawmaker unless he first writes a million times in a row, “I will never help violate the rights of any man or woman to earn an honest living.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders nannyism national politics & policies privacy

Legalize Cancer Fighting

Cannabis World Congress, Marijuana, legalization, decriminalization, law, initiative, citizens, democracy

“Do all former congressmen have to get cancer before we’re gonna get medical marijuana or recreational marijuana?”

That’s what Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie asked Billy Tauzin at the Cannabis World Congress and Business Exposition. Tauzin’s a former Representative for Louisiana’s 3rd District. He moved from Congress to lobbying for Big Pharma — I mean, PhRMA, a drug lobbying group — and then to Lenitiv Scientific, where he works now.

The company produces “a line of innovative, high quality cannabis and hemp-derived CBD products,” its website informs. These products, says the former Republican politician, are so effective that he now expresses some regret that he could not have had access to such drugs when he was fighting cancer more than a decade ago. Today’s cancer patients have it easier, because of cannabis-derived products, including CBD.

Hence Gillespie’s question — which almost answers itself.

With a No.

The number of states that have legalized or decriminalized marijuana for recreational or medicinal uses (or both) is growing all the time, usually without the help of politicians with or without cancer.

The movement has mostly been carried on by We, the People through initiative and referendum. Especially the crucial early steps.

But politicians are beginning to follow our leadership.

Which, in a society where citizens are in charge, is all to the good.

Though powerful opposition remains, Tauzin speculates, “I think if we took a silent vote, secret ballot, we’d win tomorrow easily.”

So, given a little more time for Congress to catch up with the culture, freedom can prevail, no cancer necessary.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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crime and punishment free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies privacy property rights responsibility U.S. Constitution

Wouldn’t Freedom Be … Easier?

cake, gay rights, Supreme Court, freedom of association, discrimination, law. nanny state

To bake or not to bake, that is the question.

Actually, the question was may a state discriminate against Christians in regulating “public accommodations”? The Supreme Court has decided, in a supermajority 7-2 ruling, that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission wrongly prosecuted a Christian baker who would not make a special wedding cake for a gay couple — while the Commission shrugged when it came to bakers who wouldn’t bake Bible verse cakes.

The ruling came down along the lines I suspected in December: Equal protection. This narrow ruling focused “on what the court described as anti-religious bias on the Colorado Civil Rights Commission when it ruled against baker Jack Phillips,” Fox News informs us.

In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy censured the “Commission’s hostility” to Phillips. And Kennedy recognized the root problem, the “difficult questions as to the proper reconciliation of at least two principles”:

  1. “the authority of a State and its governmental entities to protect the rights and dignity of gay persons”;
  2. “fundamental freedoms under the First Amendment, as applied to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Ah, discrimination. Has picking at this, like a scab, really increased comity? It sure would be easier were we to stick to freedom of association.

Wouldn’t that dredge up less animus?

States should not engage in invidious discrimination. Sure. Vital.

But businesses? Must they serve anyone and everyone? Even when it requires the baker or florist to create something custom — or the pianist to perform? Especially when customers can easily go to a competitor?

Besides, in Colorado, anti-discrimination laws were used by government to persecute Christians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets insider corruption media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies porkbarrel politics property rights responsibility too much government

Déjà vu All Over Again

housing, bust, financial, meltdown, Government-Backed Mortgages, jail, punishment, cause

One of the stand-bys of the post-2008 mortgage finance bust, at least from left-of-center policy mavens, has been to ask: why has no banker gone to prison? They played a game of fraud and got rich. What a protected class — Cronyism! Plutocracy! Capitalism!

The why is much easier to understand if you read up on Round Two of the aughts’ boom-bust scenario, as in Prashant Gopal’s coverage in Bloomberg, “Getting Rich on Government-Backed Mortgages.” Gopal spotlights a non-bank mortgage broker, Angelo Christian, who is making a killing selling houses to people with horrible credit, just as happened before 2008.

“Christian can do this kind of deal because he is, in effect, making the loan on behalf of the federal government through its most important affordable housing program,” Gopal writes. “It’s a sweet deal: He gets his nearly risk-free commission. [His client] puts no money down. If things go south, the government ultimately bears the risk.”

So, should he go to jail?

Not really. He’s merely doing Congress’s bidding.

Gopal notes that it is not banks that dominate this round. They are under too much scrutiny. But non-banking loan intermediaries like Mr. Christian are swarming like flies on a cow’s behind.

There’s a problem in Gopal’s account though. “No one is saying the system is close to another collapse.”

Well, plenty of people are saying that.

The Cassandras are just not being heeded.

Of course, they don’t know when the bust will happen.

They just know it will.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Photo by Images Money on Flickr.

 

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Accountability free trade & free markets general freedom media and media people national politics & policies responsibility too much government

Working for Whom?

Rand Paul, John McCain, Vladimir Putin, balanced budget, spending cap

Two articles on Sen. Rand Paul appeared in my Reason feed the other day. Up top.

So it was hard not to look.

They were “John McCain: It ‘Wasn’t Incorrect’ to Say Rand Paul Was ‘Working for Vladimir Putin’” and “Rand Paul’s Plan to Balance the Budget by 2023 Will Get a Senate Vote This Week.”

The latter story is the bigger one, of course. In it, Eric Boehm asked, “Do Republicans have the guts to impose strict spending caps?”

His answer was “probably not.” Good guess.

“Passing the Kentucky Republican’s so-called ‘Penny Plan’ would be a dramatic reversal for Congress,” Boehm wrote, “which earlier this year approved enormous spending hikes that busted Obama-era spending caps and threaten to put the country on pace for a $1 trillion annual deficits. . . . Paul tells Politico that it will be a ‘litmus test for Republicans who claim to be conservative, but are only too happy to grow the federal government and increase our debt.’”

I am afraid the litmus paper has turned . . . red. As in red ink. As in accumulating debt till we drop.

Yesterday Paul’s plan was voted down, 21-76.

In the other Reason piece, Matt Welch noted that Arizona’s senior senator stands by his calumny, last year, against Kentucky’s junior senator. Paul had delayed “ratification of Montenegro’s entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).” McCain, a gung-ho NATO expansion proponent, accused Paul of “working for Vladimir Putin.”

If Putin really seethes with ill will towards America, wouldn’t he want to see the country burdened with debt?

So, on this vote, those 76 senators who didn’t “stand with Rand” are undoubtedly working for Putin.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Photo of Rand Paul by Gage Skidmore | Photo of John McCain from Wikimedia Commons

 

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Accountability folly free trade & free markets ideological culture local leaders moral hazard nannyism property rights too much government

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Is …

Jeff Bezos, Amazon, Seattle, taxes, homeless tax, business

A half a year ago, when trying to make sense of the much-publicized search for Amazon’s “HQ2” — a second headquarters city, away from Seattle — I concentrated on the subsidies that cities and metro areas were apparently throwing at Amazon.

It all seemed desperate, indecent.

But there was a story behind the story. Amazon has every reason to be looking for an escape route from the Evergreen State’s biggest city.

The city’s leadership is nuts.

“Seattle City Council members have finally released draft legislation,” the Seattle Times’ Daniel Beekman wrote last month, “for a new tax on large employers that would raise $75 million next year to address homelessness.”

The council blames the big companies for enticing workers into the city, thereby driving up rental costs and housing prices.

The tax would be on employee hours, would go into effect next year, and “in 2021, it would be replaced by a 0.7 percent payroll tax on the same category of companies,” explains the Seattle Times.

Now, if you tax something you discourage that something. That’s why progressives like sin taxes on sodas and fast foods. To discourage consumption.

So when progressives seek to tax big producers, they are apparently trying to tax away the housing crunch by driving away big business.

Amazon reacted. It put a halt to an expansion project.

“Jeff Bezos is a bully,” said Kshama Sawant, the confessed socialist, speaking for the council. “I think we are in broad agreement on that.”

If that is her attitude, and that of the council — and the consensus of the city’s denizens — then what Amazon’s Jeff Bezos really is?

A “good businessman.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Photo by JD Lasica