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Should We Fear the Era of Driverless Cars or Embrace the Coming Age of Autopilot? by Will Tippens

July 14, 2015/in Culture War, Economy, Regulation, Science/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Driving kills more than 30,000 Americans every year. Wrecks cause billions of dollars in damages. The average commuter spends nearly 40 hours a year stuck in traffic and almost five years just driving in general.

But there is light at the end of the traffic-jammed tunnel: the driverless car. Thanks to millions of dollars in driverless technology investment by tech giants like Google and Tesla, the era of road rage, drunk driving, and wasted hours behind the wheel could be left in a cloud of dust within the next two decades.

Despite the immense potential of self-driving vehicles, commentators are already dourly warning that such automation will produce undesirable effects. As political blogger Scott Santens warns,

Driverless vehicles are coming, and they are coming fast…. As close as 2025 — that is in a mere 10 years — our advancing state of technology will begin disrupting our economy in ways we can’t even yet imagine. Human labor is increasingly unnecessary and even economically unviable compared to machine labor.

The problem, Santens says, is that there are “over 10 million American workers and their families whose incomes depend entirely or at least partially on the incomes of truck drivers.” These professional drivers will face unemployment within the next two decades due to self-driving vehicles.

Does this argument sound familiar?

These same objections have sprung up at every major stage of technological innovation since the Industrial Revolution, from the textile-working Luddites destroying looming machines in the 1810s to taxi drivers in 2015 smashing Uber cars.

Many assume that any initial job loss accompanying new technology harms the economy and further impoverishes the most vulnerable, whether fast food workers or truck drivers. It’s true that losing a job can be an individual hardship, but are these same pundits ready to denounce the creation of the light bulb as an economic scourge because it put the candle makers out of business?

Just as blacksmithing dwindled with the decline of the horse-drawn buggy, economic demand for certain jobs waxes and wanes. Jobs arise and continue to exist for the sole reason of satisfying consumer demands, and the consumer’s demands are continuously evolving. Once gas heating devices became available, most people decided that indoor fires were dirtier, costlier, and less effective at heating and cooking, so they switched. While the change temporarily disadvantaged those in the chimney-sweeping business, the added value of the gas stove vastly improved the quality of life for everyone, chimney sweeps included.

There were no auto mechanics before the automobile and no web designers before the Internet. It is impossible to predict all the new employment opportunities a technology will create beforehand. Countless jobs exist today that were unthinkable in 1995 — and 20 years from now, people will be employed in ways we cannot yet begin to imagine, with the driverless car as a key catalyst.

The historical perspective doesn’t assuage the naysayers. If some jobs can go extinct, couldn’t all jobs go extinct?

Yes, every job we now know could someday disappear — but so what? Specific jobs may come and go, but that doesn’t mean we will ever see a day when labor is no longer demanded.

Economist David Ricardo demonstrated in 1817 that each person has a comparative advantage due to different opportunity costs. Each person is useful, and no matter how unskilled he or she may be, there will always be something that each person has a special advantage in producing. When this diversity of ability and interest is coupled with the infinite creativity of freely acting individuals, new opportunities will always arise, no matter how far technology advances.

Neither jobs nor labor are ends in themselves — they are mere means to the goal of wealth production. This does not mean that every person is concerned only with getting rich, but as Henry Hazlitt wrote in Economics in One Lesson, real wealth consists in what is produced and consumed: the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in. It is railways and roads and motor cars; ships and planes and factories; schools and churches and theaters; pianos, paintings and hooks.

In other words, wealth is the ability to fulfill subjective human desires, whether that means having fresh fruit at your local grocery or being able to easily get from point A to point B. Labor is simply a means to these ends. Technology, in turn, allows labor to become far more efficient, resulting in more wealth diffused throughout society.

Everyone knows that using a bulldozer to dig a ditch in an hour is preferable to having a whole team of workers spend all day digging it by hand. The “surplus” workers are now available to do something else in which they can produce more highly valued goods and services. Over time, in an increasingly specialized economy, productivity rises and individuals are able to better serve one another through mutually beneficial exchanges in the market. This ongoing process of capital accumulation is the key to all meaningful prosperity and the reason all of humanity has seen an unprecedented rise in wealth, living standards, leisure, and health in the past two centuries.

Technology is always uncertain going forward. Aldous Huxley warned in 1927 that jukeboxes would put live artists out of business. Time magazine predicted the computer would wreak economic chaos in the 1960s.

Today, on the cusp of one of the biggest innovations since the Internet, there is, predictably, similar opposition. But those who wring their hands at the prospect of the driverless car fail to see that its greatest potential lies not in reducing pollution and road deaths, nor in lowering fuel costs and insurance rates, but rather in its ability to liberate billions of hours of human potential that truckers, taxi drivers, and commuters now devote to focusing on the road.

No one can know exactly what the future will look like, but we know where we have been, and we know the principles of human flourishing that have guided us here.

If society is a car, trade is the engine — and technology is the gas. It drives itself. Enjoy the ride.

Will Tippens

Will Tippens is a recent law school graduate living in Memphis.

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Film ‘Crying Wolf’: An Exposé on How Illegal Wolf Reintroduction has Harmed Nature and Mankind

July 14, 2015/in Culture War, Environment, Must Read, Policy, Regulation/by Dr. Rich Swier

“Crying Wolf: Exposing the Wolf Reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park” is an eye-opening exposé of the illegal introduction of non-native Gray Wolves to Yellowstone and beyond during the Clinton administration.

Film maker Jeff King grew up in the thick of the wolf controversy. This is the real true story from the people who lived it. The wolf on King’s film cover photo [right] was one caught less than a mile from the King family home when Jeff was a teenager.

Crying Wolf is available for purchase on Amazon.com. The first release of Crying Wolf was on Vimeo where it received close to 100,000 hits.

The “Crying Wolf” exposé has been credited with helping to bring the ‘wolf versus mankind’ issue back to the political table in Montana.

EDITORS NOTE: Jeff King’s new film, Blue Beats Green is a critique of the Green Movement with a vision to replace it with a better alternative. You may support Jeff on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/bluebeatsgreen, Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/bluebeatsgreen and by purchasing Blue Beats Green on Amazon.com.

Marriage and the (Forgotten) Middle Class Welfare State by Daniel Bier

July 14, 2015/in Culture War, Economy, Policy, Regulation, Taxes/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Jason Kuznicki, in his wonderful post on marriage and the state, included this baffling chart of how the marriage penalty/bonus affects couples jointly filing tax returns:

Kuznicki points out that the penalty/bonus part is just an inevitable artifact of the progressive income tax system. The math just works out that way.

But, my friend Sean J. Rosenthal points out, the chart also shows Director’s Law: “Public expenditures are made for the primary benefit of the middle classes, and financed with taxes which are borne in considerable part by the poor and the rich.”

George Stigler, channeling the work of the great Chicago economist Aaron Director, coined the term in a 1970 article in the Journal of Law and Economics.

The logic of Director’s Law is:

Government has coercive power, which allows it to engage in acts (above all, the taking of resources) which could not be performed by voluntary agreement of the members of a society.

Any portion of the society which can secure control of the state’s machinery will employ the machinery to improve its own position.

Under a set of conditions… this dominant group will be the middle income classes.

Stigler went on to describe the Public Choice calculus for a wealthy modern democracy. In a society like ours, with our electoral institutions, the interests of the middle class will always have the biggest sway on public policy, since most people fall in the middle of the income distribution, rather than at bottom or the top.

Politicians will (and must) try to gratify the middle’s desires and shift the costs somewhere else — i.e., the rich and the poor and future generations, since they have relatively less influence on public policy. (Though this general rule is not to say that there aren’t also policies that primarily benefit the poor or the wealthy.)

This explains a lot of features of public policy that don’t fit with the normal “welfare is all about the poor” or “the rich run everything” paradigms.

For instance, Obamacare’s insurance scheme is basically all a big subsidy for older, relatively wealthier middle class people at the expensive of younger, poorer people. The other half of Obamacare, the Medicaid expansion, increases eligibility for Medicaid up to 400% of the poverty line — that safety net is catching some pretty middling fish at this point.

Medicare and Social Security, the marriage penalty/bonus distribution, college student loans, tax write-offs for mortgage payments and employer-sponsored health insurance, small business favoritism, and a host of other policies are essentially giveaways to the middle class, at the expense of the rich and poor.

Nonetheless, we should expect politicians to continue harping on the plight of the middle class, stroking voters’ fears and concerns about the “shrinking middle,” promising to “rebuild the middle class,” pass “tax cuts for the middle class,” save “Main Street,” and on, and on.

And who could ever be against helping middle class? Nobody. And that’s how we end up being content with a marriage policy that punishes poor (and rich) working couples, even while pundits bemoan the state of marriage.

Update #1: As with many later developments in economics, Frederic Bastiat anticipated Public Choice by more than a hundred years. In his Selected Essays on Political Economy, recently republished by FEE, he wrote,

When, under the pretext of fraternity, the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices.

Now, is it the most unfortunate who gain in this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating.

Update #2: I see that Director’s Law was first mentioned in the Freeman, before Stigler published on it in JLE, in John Chamberlain’s coverage of the 1969 Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Venezuela.

Daniel Bier

Daniel Bier is the editor of Anything Peaceful. He writes on issues relating to science, civil liberties, and economic freedom.

The Climate Not Following Obama’s Global Warming Propaganda [+Videos]

July 11, 2015/in Environment, Politics, Regulation, Science/by Dr. Rich Swier

“The Earth could be headed for a ‘mini ice age’ researchers have warned. A new study claims to have cracked predicting solar cycles – and says that between 2020 and 2030 solar cycles will cancel each other out. This, they say, will lead to a phenomenon known as the ‘Maunder minimum’ – which has previously been known as a mini ice age when it hit between 1646 and 1715, even causing London’s River Thames to freeze over”, writes the Daily Mail.

THE MAUNDER MINIMUM

The Maunder Minimum (also known as the prolonged sunspot minimum) is the name used for the period starting in about 1645 and continuing to about 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time. It caused London’s River Thames to freeze over, and ‘frost fairs’ became popular.

This period of solar inactivity also corresponds to a climatic period called the ‘Little Ice Age’ when rivers that are normally ice-free froze and snow fields remained year-round at lower altitudes.

There is evidence that the Sun has had similar periods of inactivity in the more distant past, Nasa says. The connection between solar activity and terrestrial climate is an area of on-going research. Some scientists hypothesize that the dense wood used in Stradivarius instruments was caused by slow tree growth during the cooler period.

Instrument maker Antonio Stradivari was born a year before the start of the Maunder Minimum.

Maunder Minimum (also known as the prolonged sunspot minimum) is the name used for the period starting in about 1645 and continuing to about 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time. It is 172 years since a scientist first spotted that the Sun’s activity varies over a cycle lasting around 10 to 12 years. But every cycle is a little different and none of the models of causes to date have fully explained fluctuations.

Slate Writer: Freedom to Remove Eyebrow Hair Will Make Texas a “Dangerous” Place by Evan Bernick

July 10, 2015/in Courts & Law, Economy, Policy, Regulation/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Texas Court rules that regulations have to make some kind of sense; chaos is imminent.

It’s a tremendous victory for individual rights and for the politically powerless. And progressives are terrified of it.

Over at Slate, Mark Joseph Stern warns that a Texas Supreme Court decision invalidating a requirement that commercial eyebrow threaders undergo 750 hours of training — 320 of which were admittedly unrelated to threading — will plunge Texas into a Dickensian nightmare, where judges will have free reign to strike down humane and necessary laws designed to protect workers.

Stern’s histrionics should not be taken seriously. The Texas Supreme Court did its job, insisting upon a rational, evidence-based explanation for restrictions on liberty that is protected by the Fourteenth Amendment as well as by the Texas Constitution.

As Justice Don Willett explains in an erudite and inspiring concurrence, “The Court’s view is simple, and simply stated: Laws that impinge your constitutionally protected right to earn an honest living must not be preposterous.”

Such judicial engagement is required to protect what liberal Justice William O. Douglas once referred to “the most precious liberty man possesses.”

Although eyebrow threading, a traditional South Asian practice, consists only in using cotton thread to remove eyebrow hair, Texas roped the threaders under the same licensing requirements that are applied to conventional cosmetologists who perform a wide variety of services such as waxing, makeup, and chemical peels.

The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation issued $2,000 penalties to threaders across the state and ordered them to quit their jobs until they completed 750 hours of coursework (not a second of which is devoted to eyebrow threading) in private beauty schools, costing between $7,000 and $22,000, and pass two examinations (neither of which tests eyebrow threading).

In 2009, threaders Ashish Patel, Anverali Satani, Nazira Momin, Minaz Chamadia and Vijay Yogi challenged the requirements under the Due Course of Law Clause of the Texas Constitution. Like the Due Process of Law Clauses of the federal Constitution, Texas’ Due Course of Law Clause prohibits deprivations of liberty that do not serve any legitimate, public-spirited end of government.

The recent decision drew from the history of the state’s Due Course of Law Clause provision, which took its current form in 1875 — at a time when the Supreme Court was examining legislation under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process of Law Clause for a “real or substantial” relationship to public health and safety. From this, the Texas Supreme Court determined that reviewing courts must “consider the whole record, including evidence offered by the parties” in evaluating laws, rather than taking the government’s professions of good intentions at face value.

It went on to evaluate the regulation at issue, emphasizing that, by the state’s own concession, “as many as 320 of the curriculum hours are not related to activities threaders actually perform.” Breaking this down, the Court explained that threaders are required to undergo “the equivalent of eight 40-hour weeks of training unrelated to health and safety as applied to threading.”

Combined with the fact that would-be threaders have to pay for the training and at the same time lose the opportunity to make money threading eyebrows, the court concluded that the regulations imposed an unconstitutionally oppressive burden.

As the court recognized, determining whether the government regulations are constitutionally legitimate, based on record evidence and their real-world effect, can never be a mechanical process. But it is essential to limited government.

Otherwise, there is nothing that would prevent the government from forcing threaders to take, say, 1,500, or 2,500 hours of training unrelated to threading, run marathons, or dig ditches before being certified. Judges would have to rubber-stamp such regulations and tell hardworking entrepreneurs to take it up with their local legislators.

Indeed, that is what happens all too often in cases in which the “rational basis test” is applied in federal courts. So deferential is this “test” in practice that, in the case that ended up before the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges, the same-sex marriage case, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had held that the government may treat people differently for any plausible reason, even pure favoritism.

Remarkably, Stern seems comfortable with that outcome, and laments that the Texas Supreme Court vindicated the threaders’ rights. He advances two arguments against the decision, both of which are unconvincing; indeed, the second is so unconvincing that it is hard to believe that even Stern is convinced by it.

Stern first argues that the “liberty” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process of Law Clause (and Texas’ Due Course of Law Clause) is properly understood to encompass only a small handful of rights “relating to personal dignity and autonomy,” like “marriage and intimacy.”

This interpretation flies in the face of constitutional text, history, and the logic of the Supreme Court’s most recent decision on the subject.

The Due Process of Law Clause refers only to “liberty” — it does not distinguish between “personal” liberty and “economic” liberty, nor do most people neatly divide their lives between activities that are purely “personal” and those that are purely “economic.” (Which category would a dinner date fall under? Does it matter what happens later on?)

After the ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments, state courts and, later, the Supreme Court interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to encompass a wide variety of actions that individuals can take without violating the rights of others.

Thus, in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), the Supreme Court explained that liberty “denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint, but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience.”

The logic of the Court’s most recent “substantive due process” decision tracks this comprehensive understanding of liberty. In Obergefell v. Hodges, which Stern invokes, Justice Kennedy begins by stating that “[t]he Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.”

Few things are more central to defining and expressing our identity and, indeed, sustaining our very lives, than our work. As Professor Laurence Tribe has put it, “the determination of one’s vocation” is an “essential aspect of personhood.”

Stern next argues that even if Texas’s oppressive regulatory scheme “may be a problem” for eyebrow threaders, it is a purely “legislative problem” — not one with which the courts should be concerned. He submits that the threaders could easily solve this problem through the democratic process, “by petitioning the legislature to reduce their training hours.”

Stern is apparently unaware that most of the threaders involved in this case were non-citizen immigrants. Is Stern also unaware that American history is rife with examples of entrenched interests — that is, white males — using their political muscle to prevent newly freed blacks, women, and immigrant groups from entering into or effectively competing in the labor market?

In several key cases (including Lochner v. New York (1905), which Stern disparages), the Supreme Court struck down laws designed to keep immigrants (like the threaders in Texas) from competing against native-born whites.

Even today, although the Supreme Court has declared it is unconstitutional to require full citizenship and exclude legal permanent residents, some states still have licensing laws that restrict certain nongovernmental professions to citizens only. A growing body of Public Choice research documents the reality of special-interest lawmaking designed to benefit established firms at the expense of their competitors and the general public.

But of course, Stern knows that regulations passed in the name of public health and safety are sometimes pretextual and that those burdened by them are often in no position to persuade those responsible for them to “fix” them — indeed, he recently criticized the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for upholding regulations of abortion providers that are purportedly designed to protect public health and safety. So apparently some vocations are more equal than others, in Stern’s view.

Thanks to the Texas Supreme Court’s decision in the threading case, Texans are, as Justice Willett put it, “doubly blessed.” Two years ago, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which also has jurisdiction over federal courts in Texas, struck down a regulatory scheme targeting casket sales in Louisiana, rejecting the state’s “nonsensical explanations” for the scheme after finding them to be factually baseless.

Recently, a federal district court (in a case that Stern does not mention but presumably disapproves of), following the Fifth Circuit, struck down a law requiring African hairbraiders like Isis Brantley to spend thousands of hours taking useless classes and thousands of dollars on useless equipment before they would be permitted to teach hairbraiding at their own schools.

Thus, federal courts and state courts in Texas are committed to judicial engagement in economic liberty cases. In his concurrence, Justice Willett quotes Frederick Douglass, whose account of earning his first two dollars as a free man puts a human face on the right to earn a living that those who read it are unlikely to forget.

For all those whose emotions swell at Douglass’ recognition that “my hands were my own, and could earn more of the precious coin,” and value the freedom that he held so precious, this decision is nothing to be afraid of — it is a cause for celebration.

Cross-posted from HuffPo.

Evan Bernick

Evan is the Assistant Director of the Center for Judicial Engagement at the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm.

About the Warner Amendment to the Senate ESEA Bill

July 10, 2015/in Education, Policy, Regulation/by Mercedes Schneider

On July 08, 2015, the Senate approved by voice vote an amendment to the Senate version of the re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, the Every Child Achieves Act of 2015. The amendment in question, Senate Amendment 2086, sponsored by Senator Mark Warner (D- VA), allows states to spend the administrative portion of ESEA funding grants on “fiscal support teams.” Though not explicitly stated in the amendment language, such support teams could include education businesses and consulting firms.

Senator Mark Warner

In response to the above news, on July 09, 2015, investigative journalists David Sirota and Matthew Cunningham-Cook wrote an article in the International Business Times entitled, “Senate Passes Bill Letting Schools Give Education Money to Financial Consulting Firms.” The article implies that the Warner amendment has the potential to funnel ESEA grant funding to consultant bank accounts and away from needy children.

Not exactly.

Yes, the amendment grants consultants direct access to ESEA funds– but not to at least 95 percent of it.

For each of the grants in the ESEA document, limits are set regarding how much of the funding can be spent on administrative costs. These limits usually range from 1 to 5 percent. In the case of Warner’s SA 2086, the amendment refers to two sections from No Child Left Behind (NCLB), sections 9201 and 9203, both of which concern consolidation of administrative funds. According to these sections, states (and, under the supervision of states, the local education agencies) are allowed to consolidate the administrative allotments from various ESEA grants “if the State educational agency can demonstrate that the majority of its resources are derived from non-Federal sources.” (NCLB, pg 542).

So, yes, according to NCLB language to be retained as part of the Senate ESEA reauth bill, the state is able to spend ESEA funds on consulting firms; however, the states can only spend from the small percentage of ESEA funding allowed for administrative costs and only if the bulk of the state’s administrative funding comes from sources other than the ESEA money it receives.

Sure, it’s an opportunity for those consultants to make money, but not the unfettered opportunity for ESEA funding exploitation that it might appear to be upon first glance.

Nobel Prize-Winning Scientist Says President Obama is ‘Ridiculous’ and ‘Dead Wrong’ on ‘Global Warming’

July 8, 2015/in Environment, Regulation, Science/by Marc Morano

Dr. Ivar Giaever, a Nobel Prize-Winner for physics in 1973, declared his dissent on man-made global warming claims at a Nobel forum on July 1, 2015.

“I would say that basically global warming is a non-problem,” Dr. Giaever announced during his speech titled “Global Warming Revisited.”

Giaever, a former professor at the School of Engineering and School of Science Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, received the 1973 physics Nobel for his work on quantum tunneling. Giaever delivered his remarks at the 65th Nobel Laureate Conference in Lindau, Germany, which drew 65 recipients of the prize. Giaever is also featured in the new documentary “Climate Hustle”, set for release in Fall 2015.

Giaever was one of President Obama’s key scientific supporters in 2008 when he joined over 70 Nobel Science Laureates in endorsing Obama in an October 29, 2008 open letter. Giaever signed his name to the letter which read in part: “The country urgently needs a visionary leader…We are convinced that Senator Barack Obama is such a leader, and we urge you to join us in supporting him.”

But seven years after signing the letter, Giaever now mocks President Obama for warning that “no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change”. Giaever called it a “ridiculous statement.”

“That is what he said. That is a ridiculous statement,” Giaever explained.

“I say this to Obama: Excuse me, Mr. President, but you’re wrong. Dead wrong,” Giaever said. (Watch Giaever’s full 30-minute July 1 speech here.)

“How can he say that? I think Obama is a clever person, but he gets bad advice. Global warming is all wet,” he added.

“Obama said last year that 2014 is hottest year ever. But it’s not true. It’s not the hottest,” Giaever noted. [Note: Other scientists have reversed themselves on climate change. See: Politically Left Scientist Dissents – Calls President Obama ‘delusional’ on global warming]

The Nobel physicist questioned the basis for rising carbon dioxide fears.

“When you have a theory and the theory does not agree with the experiment then you have to cut out the theory. You were wrong with the theory,” Giaever explained.

Global Warming ‘a new religion’

Giaever said his climate research was eye opening. “I was horrified by what I found” after researching the issue in 2012, he noted.

“Global warming really has become a new religion. Because you cannot discuss it. It’s not proper. It is like the Catholic Church.”

Concern Over ‘Successful’ UN Climate Treaty

“I am worried very much about the [UN] conference in Paris in November. I really worry about that. Because the [2009 UN] conference was in Copenhagen and that almost became a disaster but nothing got decided. But now I think that the people who are alarmist are in a very strong position,” Giaever said.

“The facts are that in the last 100 years we have measured the temperatures it has gone up .8 degrees and everything in the world has gotten better. So how can they say it’s going to get worse when we have the evidence? We live longer, better health, and better everything. But if it goes up another .8 degrees we are going to die I guess,” he noted.

“I would say that the global warming is basically a non-problem. Just leave it alone and it will take care of itself. It is almost very hard for me to understand why almost every government in Europe — except for Polish government — is worried about global warming. It must be politics.”

“So far we have left the world in better shape than when we arrived, and this will continue with one exception — we have to stop wasting huge, I mean huge amounts of money on global warming. We have to do that or that may take us backwards. People think that is sustainable but it is not sustainable.

On Global Temperatures & CO2

Giaever noted that global temperatures have halted for the past 18 plus years. [Editor’s Note: Climate Depot is honored that Giaever used an exclusive Climate Depot graph showing the RSS satellite data of an 18 year plus standstill in temperatures at 8:48 min. into video.]

Giaever accused NASA and federal scientists of “fiddling” with temperatures.

“They can fiddle with the data. That is what NASA does.”

“You cannot believe the people — the alarmists — who say CO2 is a terrible thing. Its not true, its absolutely not true,” Giaever continued while showing a slide asking: ‘Do you believe CO2 is a major climate gas?’

“I think the temperature has been amazingly stable. What is the optimum temperature of the earth? Is that the temperature we have right now? That would be a miracle. No one has told me what the optimal temperature of the earth should be,” he said.

“How can you possibly measure the average temperature for the whole earth and come up with a fraction of a degree. I think the average temperature of earth is equal to the emperor’s new clothes. How can you think it can measure this to a fraction of a degree? It’s ridiculous,” he added.

Silencing Debate

Giaever accused Nature Magazine of “wanting to cash in on the [climate] fad.”

“My friends said I should not make fun of Nature because then they won’t publish my papers,” he explained.

“No one mentions how important CO2 is for plant growth. It’s a wonderful thing. Plants are really starving. They don’t talk about how good it is for agriculture that CO2 is increasing,” he added.

Extreme Weather claims

“The other thing that amazes me is that when you talk about climate change it is always going to be the worst. It’s got to be better someplace for heaven’s sake. It can’t always be to the worse,” he said.

“Then comes the clincher. If climate change does not scare people we can scare people talking about the extreme weather,” Giaever said.

“For the last hundred years, the ocean has risen 20 cm — but for the previous hundred years the ocean also has risen 20 cm and for the last 300 years, the ocean has also risen 20 cm per 100 years. So there is no unusual rise in sea level. And to be sure you understand that I will repeat it. There is no unusual rise in sea level,” Giaever said.

“If anything we have entered period of low hurricanes. These are the facts,” he continued.

“You don’t’ have to even be a scientist to look at these figures and you understand what it says,” he added.

“Same thing is for tornadoes. We are in a low period on in U.S.” (See: Extreme weather failing to follow ‘global warming’ predictions: Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Droughts, Floods, Wildfires, all see no trend or declining trends)

Media Hype

“What people say is not true. I spoke to a journalist with [German newspaper Die Welt yesterday…and I asked how many articles he published that says global warming is a good thing. He said I probably don’t publish them at all. Its always a negative. Always,” Giever said.

Energy Poverty

“They say refugees are trying to cross the Mediterranean. These people are not fleeing global warming, they are fleeing poverty,” he noted.

“If you want to help Africa, help them out of poverty, do not try to build solar cells and windmills,” he added.

“Are you wasting money on solar cells and windmills rather than helping people? These people have been misled. It costs money in the end to that. Windmills cost money.”

“Cheap energy is what made us so rich and now suddenly people don’t want it anymore.”

“People say oil companies are the big bad people. I don’t understand why they are worse than the windmill companies. General Electric makes windmills. They don’t tell you that they are not economical because they make money on it. But nobody protests GE, but they protest Exxon who makes oil,” he noted.

Dr. Ivar Giaever resigned as a Fellow from the American Physical Society (APS) on September 13, 2011 in disgust over the group’s promotion of man-made global warming fears.

In addition to Giaever, other prominent scientists have resigned from APS over its stance on man-made global warming. See: Prominent Physicist Hal Lewis Resigns from APS: ‘Climategate was a fraud on a scale I have never seen…Effect on APS position: None. None at all. This is not science’

Other prominent scientists are speaking up skeptically about man-made global warming claims. See: Prominent Scientist Dissents: Renowned glaciologist declares global warming is ‘going to be a big plus’ – Fears ‘Frightening’ Cooling – Warns scientists are ‘prostituting their science’

Giaever has become a vocal dissenter from the alleged “consensus” regarding man-made climate fears. He was featured prominently in the 2009 U.S. Senate Report of (then) Over 700 Dissenting International Scientists from Man-made global warming. Giaever, who is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and won the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physics. (Watch news coveragehere.)

Giaever was also one of more than 100 co-signers in a March 30, 2009 letter to President Obama that was critical of his stance on global warming. See: More than 100 scientists rebuke Obama as ‘simply incorrect’ on global warming: ‘We, the undersigned scientists, maintain that the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated’

Giaever is featured on page 89 of the 321 page of Climate Depot’s more than 1000 dissenting scientist report (updated from U.S. Senate Report). Dr. Giaever was quoted declaring himself a man-made global warming dissenter. “I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion,” Giaever declared. “I am Norwegian, should I really worry about a little bit of warming? I am unfortunately becoming an old man. We have heard many similar warnings about the acid rain 30 years ago and the ozone hole 10 years ago or deforestation but the humanity is still around,” Giaever explained. “Global warming has become a new religion. We frequently hear about the number of scientists who support it. But the number is not important: only whether they are correct is important. We don’t really know what the actual effect on the global temperature is. There are better ways to spend the money,” he concluded.

Giaever also told the New York Times in 2010 that global warming “can’t be discussed — just like religion…there is NO unusual rise in the ocean level, so what where and what is the big problem?”

RELATED LINKS:

Exclusive: Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Who Endorsed Obama Dissents! Resigns from American Physical Society Over Group’s Promotion of Man-Made Global Warming – Nobel Laureate Dr. Ivar Giaever: ‘The temperature (of the Earth) has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.’

2012: Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Ivar Giaever: ‘Is climate change pseudoscience?…the answer is: absolutely’ — Derides global warming as a ‘religion’ – ‘He derided the Nobel committees for awarding Al Gore and R.K. Pachauri a peace prize, and called agreement with the evidence of climate change a ‘religion’… the measurement of the global average temperature rise of 0.8 degrees over 150 years remarkably unlikely to be accurate, because of the difficulties with precision for such measurements—and small enough not to matter in any case: “What does it mean that the temperature has gone up 0.8 degrees? Probably nothing.”

When Science IS Fiction: Nobel Physics laureate Ivar Giaever has called global warming (aka. climate change) a ‘new religion’ -When scientists emulate spiritual prophets, they overstep all ethical bounds. In doing so, they forfeit our confidence’

American Physical Society Statement on Climate Change: No Longer ‘Incontrovertible,’ But Still Unacceptable

Skeptic win… American Physical Society removes ‘incontrovertible’ from climate change position

Politically Left Scientist Dissents – Calls President Obama ‘delusional’ on global warming

SPECIAL REPORT: More Than 1000 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims – Challenge UN IPCC & Gore – Climate Depot Exclusive: 321-page ‘Consensus Buster’ Report

Another Prominent Scientist Dissents! Fmr. NASA Scientist Dr. Les Woodcock ‘Laughs’ at Global Warming – ‘Global warming is nonsense’ Top Prof. Declares

Green Guru James Lovelock on Climate Change: ‘I don’t think anybody really knows what’s happening. They just guess’ – Lovelock Reverses Himself on Global Warming

More Than 1000 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims – Challenge UN IPCC & Gore

Top Swedish Climate Scientist Says Warming Not Noticeable: ‘The warming we have had last a 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all’ – Award-Winning Dr. Lennart Bengtsson, formerly of UN IPCC: ‘We Are Creating Great Anxiety Without It Being Justified’

‘High Priestess of Global Warming’ No More! Former Warmist Climate Scientist Judith Curry Admits To Being ‘Duped Into Supporting IPCC’ – ‘If the IPCC is dogma, then count me in as a heretic’

German Meteorologist reverses belief in man-made global warming: Now calls idea that CO2 Can Regulate Climate ‘Sheer Absurdity’ — ‘Ten years ago I simply parroted what the IPCC told us’

UN Scientists Who Have Turned on the UN IPCC & Man-Made Climate Fears — A Climate Depot Flashback Report – Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” – UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.

‘Some of the most formidable opponents of climate hysteria include politically liberal physics Nobel laureate, Ivar Giaever; Freeman Dyson; father of the Gaia Hypothesis, James Lovelock — ‘Left-center chemist, Fritz Vahrenholt, one of the fathers of the German environmental movement’

Flashback: Left-wing Env. Scientist Bails Out Of Global Warming Movement: Declares it a ‘corrupt social phenomenon…strictly an imaginary problem of the 1st World middleclass’

Does “I, Pencil” Need a Pro-Government Update? by George C. Leef

July 6, 2015/in Economy, Policy, Regulation/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

In a book I recently read, Complexity and the Art of Public Policy by David Colander and Roland Kupers, I was surprised to find a chapter entitled “I Pencil Revisited.” Yes, they meant Leonard Read’s famous essay showing how market prices and competition work to coordinate production in a way that no single person, however powerful or intelligent, possibly could.

The authors aren’t exactly hostile to Read’s message but say that it leaves out something important — the role of government.

They write,

For me to be produced, someone had to protect the property rights upon which the market is based, someone had to guarantee that the contracts between individuals would be enforced, and someone had to be on the lookout for lead, for the safety of machines, and similar problems, which if not addressed might well lead to a society to undermine the institutional structure that produced me.

And, again writing through the voice of a pencil, Colander and Kupers say,

The reason I, Pencil downplayed government’s role is that he was afraid its inclusion would lead some people to expand the role of government to solve the inevitable problems that come about in coordinating production.

I believe that they are mistaken on that. The reason why Leonard Read focused exclusively on the remarkable story of voluntary market cooperation and did not expand the piece to discuss the proper role of government was that he figured most people already had some understanding of the need to protect property, enforce contracts, and settle disputes.

What very few people had any comprehension of was the way individuals all across the globe are brought into cooperation by the market for pencils.

Going into the role of government in the essay would have been like Mozart adding a few extra movements to his Jupiter Symphony.

Here is why the authors make this argument. They don’t like what they call the “market fundamentalism” of Leonard Read, former FEE president Don Boudreaux, and others (like me) who argue that the people of any society will be the most productive, happiest, and best able to deal with the problems they see if the government is kept only to the functions of protecting the rights of life, liberty, and property.

Instead of laissez-faire, Colander and Kupers favor what they call “laissez-faire activism.”

In short, they want us to believe that there is an ideal middle ground between unsophisticated “market fundamentalism” and top-down government planning and control of the economy. The latter, they understand, is bad because such authority will squelch innovation and competition, but the former supposedly doesn’t do enough to allow people to realize their “collective goals.” Here is a crucial passage:

What simplistic or fundamentalist free market advocates sometimes miss is that a complex system works only if individuals self-regulate, by which we mean that they do not push their freedom too far, and that they make reasonable compromises about benefiting themselves and benefiting society.

Of course, the common law framework that thinkers in the Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat, Leonard Read line advocated does put limits on individual action. Rights and the sphere of legitimate action are clearly established, and to the extent that people have collective goals, they are free to pursue them voluntarily. But Colander and Kupers think government can and should do just a bit more.

One of their ideas is that government should adopt policies that will “nudge” people to do what they “really want to do,” but can’t sufficiently discipline themselves to do. They extol the book Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, which purports to show how government can “encourage” people to act in preferable ways, without dictating behavior to them.

But why can’t we rely entirely on voluntary efforts by concerned individuals and organizations to do that encouraging? Churches, for example, have been encouraging people to behave better for millennia; Alcoholics Anonymous has been helping people recover from alcohol abuse since 1935; parents have been “nudging” children to make wiser decisions since time immemorial. Why look to government policy?

Sometimes, the reason why people seem to need “nudging” is that current government policy encourages undesirable behavior. Few Americans save much these days, for instance. But instead of trying to “nudge” them to save more, why not change the tax laws that discourage thrift? Going back towards “laissez-faire fundamentalism” would solve or ameliorate many of our problems.

Moreover, Colander and Kupers ignore the great and, I maintain, insuperable problem of keeping government interference within bounds. If the state has the authority to “nudge” people, what keeps politicians from ratcheting up the power if it doesn’t work? Nudging turns into pushing, then shoving. Interest groups will importune politicians with arguments for policies they favor, crafting them as merely helping “the people” to realize the social goals they “really” favor.

They way democratic politics tends to be captured by interest groups is the big message of Public Choice theory, but Colander and Kupers never think to explain how they’d prevent their “laissez-faire activism” from turning into plain old activism.

After reading Complexity and the Art of Public Policy, I fail to see how government can improve upon capitalism combined with the host of voluntary organizations that spring up in a free society. I, Pencil does not need to be revisited.

George C. Leef

George Leef is the former book review editor of The Freeman. He is director of research at the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

Celebrate Independence With a Revolution Against the Surveillance State by Ryan Hagemann

July 6, 2015/in Culture War, Featured, Policy, Regulation/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

In the decade before 1776, British courts began issuing “writs of assistance” for the general search and seizure of colonists’ documents. The intention was to permit British troops to inspect properties for smuggled goods, but these writs gave officials broad power to enter private homes to search for, and seize, anything and everything that might be considered contraband by the British Empire.

Such general warrants were among the many complaints the colonists levied against the crown and played no small part in the American Revolution.

This Independence Day, it would behoove us all, as Americans, to reflect on the motivations for the colonists’ revolt against Britain. In a 2013 piece at the Huffington Post, Radley Balko spoke on the core meaning of the Fourth of July:

Independence Day isn’t for celebrating the American government and whoever happens to be currently running it, but for celebrating the principles that make America unique.

And in fact, celebrating the principles that [animated] the American founding often means celebrating the figures who have defended those principles in spite of the government.

The list of modern Americans who have stood as stalwart guardians of the principles of liberty is regrettably short. More concerning, however, is what has happened in the years since 9/11, as fear and paranoia over terrorism gripped the American electorate and absconded with many of the basic liberties that the founding generation fought and died to uphold. America just isn’t what it used to be.

But the tides of unrestrained surveillance seem to be receding.

A few weeks ago, thanks to a vibrant and broad coalition of civil libertarians, grassroots organizations, and cross-aisle partners, America finally took the first step in reining in the secret surveillance state that Edward Snowden revealed to us almost two years ago to the day. The USA FREEDOM Act, for all its flaws, stands as the most significant piece of surveillance reform legislation since 1978 and signals Congress’s willingness to work on surveillance reform.

While there is much to do in preparing for upcoming battles over government surveillance, a look back at recent events can help shed light on how we as libertarians can best move forward.

Not surprisingly, the debate left some dissatisfied that the reforms did not go far enough, while others considered anything short of a full USA PATRIOT Act reauthorization to be an unacceptable compromise.

Filled with riotous rhetorical broadsides, the debate featured civil libertarians supporting reform against civil libertarians backing a complete, uncompromising end to the surveillance state, pitting Republican hawks against centrists and Democrats, and Sen. Rand Paul against pretty much everyone.

In a story of strange political bedfellows, Sen. Paul joined hawks such as Sen. John McCain and Sen. Richard Burr in voting against the USA FREEDOM Act. While Paul criticized components of the bill for not going far enough (all criticisms being perfectly fair and true), the political reality was such that this bill, however imperfect, was by far the best chance for reform in the near term.

As Cato’s Julian Sanchez noted prior to its passage: “While ‘Sunset the Patriot Act’ makes for an appealing slogan, the fact remains that the vast majority of the Patriot Act is permanent — and includes an array of overlapping authorities that will limit the effect of an expiration.”

In other words, the limitations of USA FREEDOM would actually be more effective than simply letting a two or three provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act (temporarily) expire.

The heroes of this debate were a broad coalition of civil-society groups, technology firms, and nonprofits dedicated to moving the ball forward on reform, no matter how small the gain.

However, even as some are celebrating this small but important victory, there are troubled waters ahead for privacy advocates and civil libertarians. The upcoming Senate vote on the Cybersecurity and Information Sharing Act (CISA) is the next battle in the ongoing war against the surveillance apparatus. If passed, it would be one step forward, two steps back for the small victories privacy advocates have won over the past month.

I’ve written quite a bit on the issues that many civil libertarian organizations have with CISA, which is little more than a surveillance Trojan Horse containing a host of “information-sharing” provisions that would allow intelligence agencies to acquire information from private firms and use it to prosecute Americans for garden-variety crimes unrelated to cybersecurity, due process be damned.

A broad coalition of organizations has once more come together, this time to oppose CISA, to continue the battle against expanding the surveillance state.

In public policy, the Overton window refers to the spectrum of policy prescriptions and ideas that the public views as tolerable: the political viability of any idea depends not on the personal preferences of politicians, but on whether it falls within the range of publicly acceptable options.

That is why a willingness to compromise is so vital in public-policy discussions. Marginal reforms should be seen as victories in the slow but consistent effort to rein in the excesses of our Orwellian security order.

USA FREEDOM is far from ideal, and the expiration of provisions of the PATRIOT Act, such as Section 215, will not stop government surveillance in its tracks. The government can still use National Security Letters (NSL), and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act can still be creatively interpreted by the intelligence community to justify continued mass surveillance, to say nothing of Executive Order 12333, which covers surveillance conducted outside of the United States.

Nonetheless, the new law is an important first step towards tearing down the most onerous provisions of the PATRIOT Act in a piecemeal fashion. This may seem a daunting and less-than-ideal approach for many libertarians, but the alternative is merely symbolic gesticulation.

So where do we go from here?

Libertarians need to start working with nontraditional allies to support, on an issue-by-issue basis, real, practical reforms to the surveillance state. If we do not, we cannot hope to be effective and valuable partners to those individuals and organizations working tirelessly in support of the same values and freedoms that we all hold dear.

We must also recognize that there are limitations to compromise, and we should never forsake our core principles in favor of political expediency. But, on the margins, we can make significant contributions to civil liberties, especially in the ongoing surveillance reform debate. Recognizing the reality of what is achievable in the current political landscape is necessary for identifying and taking advantage of the available opportunities for restoring liberty.

We have a choice in the upcoming surveillance-reform fights: We can be positive contributors to a legacy of liberty for future generations, or we can continue to fancy ourselves armchair philosophers, ignoring public-policy realities and taking comfort in the echo chamber that never challenges our worldview.

Given political realities, marginal reforms constitute the fastest path forward. The American people are owed their civil liberties; hence, we must fight to move, however incrementally, towards a freer, more civil society.

Ryan Hagemann

Ryan Hagemann is a civil liberties policy analyst at the Niskanen Center.

U.S. Veterans Administration: Still “Dysfunctional” with “Unaccountability at Every Level”

July 6, 2015/in Healthcare, National Security, Policy, Regulation, Video/by Dr. Rich Swier

James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas, reports:

It has been over a year since the truth about the VA’s abysmal and unacceptable practices were thrust to the forefront of American politics, and yet there has been no discernible change in this bureaucratic nightmare. Our nation’s veterans deserve so much more and this continued mistreatment of our nation’s heroes is a troubling trend that shows no signs of any, let alone imminent, improvement.

Watch Project Veritas’ latest undercover video below showing that after more than a year of significant public outcry over incredibly long wait times, which in numerous cases resulted in the deaths of veterans, the VA is still failing to meet the basic needs of our veterans. Project Veritas investigative journalists captured on hidden camera a host of VA doctors, staffers, and one top official speaking about the many problems that persist at the VA despite official claims to the contrary.

Among the outspoken was Dr. Kristoffel Dumon, a general surgeon for the VA in Philadelphia, who told a Project Veritas undercover journalist that the VA has a “culture of unaccountability at every level.”

In this latest Project Veritas video, VA Undersecretary and Brigadier General Allison Hickey was captured on hidden camera saying that once veterans enter “the appeals process all bets are off, the only solution to that is changing the law or more people.”

A Project Veritas journalist also spoke with Scott Westguard, a VA contractor, who said on hidden camera that “it’s messed up, it’s dysfunctional, it’s incapable of getting the job done because people are there simply picking up the paycheck. There’s no accountability.”

Project Veritas also caught up with Dr. Raul Zambrano, a VA Medical Officer in the VISN & Network Office, who stated that: “we’re way below water in terms of the ability to supply, to meet the requests that’s demanded.”

It’s been 16 months since we learned of the waiting time scandal at the VA. In our last video covering the VA scandal, we identified that 22 of our nation’s heroes were dying by their own hands each day, as opposed to on the battlefield. Our first VA video has already been used to brief Congressmenabout overprescribing dangerous medications to veterans at a recent hearing on Capitol Hill.

In this video, we reveal some of the key underlying flaws within the VA which clearly make the system seem absolutely broken. Our veterans clearly deserve better.

Is There a Middle Road between Marijuana Incarceration and Marijuana Legalization?

July 3, 2015/in Culture War, Featured, Healthcare, Policy, Politics, Regulation, Science/by Dr. Rich Swier

As part of its special series titled Race Matters, an investigation by Miami’s CBS4 News this week, provides an opportunity to consider new ways to think about marijuana and racial imbalances in the way our laws are enforced.

CBS4 News gathered and analyzed police records of every misdemeanor marijuana case in Miami Dade County between 2010 and 2014. They found:

Misdemeanor marijuana arrests accounted for ten percent of all cases filed in the court system.
Of 44,860 closed cases, 55 percent had African-American defendants, even though the county is less than 20 percent black.
Just two percent of these cases resulted in a conviction.
- Of these, 74 percent were black.
Prosecutors dismissed or dropped 49 percent of these cases.
- Of these, 56 percent were white.
The other 49 percent of cases were settled by a “withhold of adjudication,” an admission of guilt but not a formal conviction. However, the admission stays in a person’s permanent record, hurts his or her ability to find work or housing, and can prevent the person from enlisting in the military, receiving student loans, or becoming a citizen.
- 65 percent of these were black.

CBS4 News writes, “Miami Dade Police Director JD Patterson and others in his department have argued police officers are not targeting blacks, they are merely making stops and arrests in neighborhoods with a high crime rate. And those neighborhoods just happen to be predominantly black.”

“Donald Jones, a constitutional and civil rights law professor at the University of Miami, says that may have been the initial intent of the police, but what has happened over time is that officers begin looking at everyone in those neighborhoods as a suspect and begin treating them differently as well. ‘It says to me that we’re profiling,’ Jones said. ‘We’ve gotten to a point where we criminalize whole communities. We see certain communities as being communities of criminals and we police them that way.’ Jones said it can have a chilling effect on the relationship between the police and the community. ‘It creates an atmosphere as if this is a different America,’ he said.”

We note that the 44,000-plus marijuana cases CBS4 News examined are only 10 percent of all cases that went through the Miami Dade County court system over the five-year period.

Proponents have built their case for marijuana legalization on racial inequities in the enforcement of marijuana laws like these in Miami Dade County, implying that legalizing pot will end unequal enforcement of the law. But the problem of racial disparities in the criminal justice system is much deeper than marijuana alone, as Professor Jones explains. Until we can see that, we won’t be able to change it effectively.

Few Americans believe that putting low-level marijuana offenders, black or white, in jail is appropriate. Few believe that straddling them with lifetime criminal records is fair or just. Judges in Miami Dade County hope the county commission will adopt a proposed civil citation ordinance that would give police the option of issuing a $100 ticket to marijuana offenders. This would keep them out of the criminal justice system and reduce costs to taxpayers.

We believe that is a good first step, but it does not go far enough. Despite denials from legalization proponents, marijuana is addictive. Some nine percent of people who try the drug will become addicted. The number rises to 17 percent if use begins in adolescence and to 25 percent to 50 percent for daily use. We would like to see a public health/social justice system replace the criminal justice system for low-level marijuana offenders. Its goal would be to provide public health and social services to them after they pay their fines. Such services would medically assess them to determine if they are addicted. Those who are would receive treatment. Those who aren’t would receive educational and social services to help them pursue more productive lives. Money saved from removing marijuana cases from the courts could be used to finance this system.

Or we could do away with the marijuana laws, legalize pot, and ignore the consequences. To do so would be to allow a commercial marijuana industry to emerge that will rival the tobacco and alcohol industries, as all three prey on children, the addicted, the poor and the vulnerable, while simply discarding the victims who can’t handle their products.

Read “Race Matters: Marijuana Cases Flood Court System” here.

THIS COLUMN IS COURTESY OF NATIONAL FAMILIES IN ACTION

National Families in Action and partners, Project SAM and the Treatment Research Institute, welcome our new readers. We hope you enjoy this weekly e-newsletter to keep up-to-date with all aspects of the marijuana story. Visit our website, The Marijuana Report.Org, and subscribe to the weekly e-newsletterThe Marijuana Report to learn more.

National Families in Action is a group of families, scientists, business leaders, physicians, addiction specialists, policymakers, and others committed to protecting children from addictive drugs. We advocate for:

Healthy, drug-free kids
Nurturing, addiction-free families
Scientifically accurate information and education
A nation free of Big Marijuana
Smart, safe, FDA-approved medicines developed from the cannabis plant (and other plants)
Expanded access to medicines in FDA clinical trials for children with epilepsy

Gays Need the Freedom to Discriminate by Jeffrey A. Tucker

July 2, 2015/in Commentary, Courts & Law, Culture War, Policy, Politics, Regulation/by Dr. Rich Swier

Gaining the right to be married is a win for liberty because it removes a barrier to free association. But how easily a movement for more freedom turns to the cause of taking away other freedoms!

Following the Supreme Court decision mandating legal same-sex marriage nationwide, the New York Times tells us that, “gay rights leaders have turned their sights to what they see as the next big battle: obtaining federal, state and local legal protections in employment, housing, commerce and other arenas.”

In other words, the state will erect new barriers to freedom of choice in place of the old ones that just came down!

To make the case against such laws, it ought to be enough to refer to the freedom to associate and the freedom to use your property as you see fit. These are fundamental principles of liberalism. A free society permits anything peaceful, and that includes the right to disassociate. Alas, such arguments seem dead on arrival today.

So let us dig a bit deeper to understand why anti-discrimination laws are not in the best interests of gay men and women, or anyone else. Preserving the ability to discriminate permits the market system to provide crucial information feedback to a community seeking to use its buying power to reward its friends and noncoercively, nonviolently punish those who do not share its values.

Ever more, consumers are making choices based on core values. Does this institution protect the environment, treat its workers fairly, support the right political causes? In order to make those choices — which is to say, in order to discriminate — consumers need information.

In the case of gay rights, consumers need to know who supports inclusion and who supports exclusion. Shutting down that information flow through anti-discrimination law robs people of crucial data to make intelligent buying decisions. Moreover, such laws remove the competitive pressure of businesses to prove (and improve) their commitment to community values, because all businesses are ostensibly bound by them.

A market that permits discrimination, even of the invidious sort, allows money and therefore success and profits to be directed toward those who think broadly, while denying money and profitability to those who do not. In this way, a free market nudges society toward ever more tolerant and inclusive attitudes. Money speaks far more persuasively than laws.

Notice that these proposed laws only pertain to the producer and not the consumer. But discrimination is a two-edged sword. The right can be exercised by those who do not like some groups, and it can be exercised by those groups against those who do not like them.

Both are necessary and serve an important social function. They represent peaceful ways of providing social and economic rewards to those who put aside biases in favor of inclusive decision making.

If I’m Catholic and want to support pro-Catholic businesses, I also need to know what businesses don’t like Catholics. If I’m Muslim and only want my dollars supporting my faith, I need to know who won’t serve Muslims (or who will put my dollars to bad use). If a law that prohibits business from refusing to serve or hire people based on religion, how am I supposed to know which businesses deserve my support?

It’s the same with many gay people. They don’t want to trade with companies that discriminate. To act out those values requires some knowledge of business behavior and, in turn, the freedom to discriminate. There is no gain for anyone by passing a universal law mandating only one way of doing business. Mandates drain the virtue out of good behavior and permit bad motivations to hide under the cover of law.

Here is an example from a recent experience. I was using AirBnB to find a place to stay for a friend. He needed a place for a full week, so $1,000 was at stake. The first potential provider I contacted hesitated and began to ask a series of questions that revolved around my friend’s country of origin, ethnicity, and religion. The rental owner was perfectly in his rights to do this. It is his home, and he faces no obligation to open it to all comers.

On the other hand, I found the questions annoying, even offensive. I decided that I didn’t want to do business with this person. I made a few more clicks, cancelled that query, and found another place within a few minutes. The new renter was overjoyed to take in my friend.

I was delighted for two reasons. First, my friend was going to stay at a home that truly wanted him there, and that’s important. Force is never a good basis for commercial relationships. Second, I was able to deny $1K to a man who was, at best, a risk averse and narrow thinker or, at worst, an outright bigot.

Declining to do business with him was my little protest, and it felt good. I wouldn’t want my friend staying with someone who didn’t really want him there, and I was happy not to see resources going toward someone whose values I distrusted.

In this transaction, I was able to provide a reward to the inclusive and broad-minded home owner. It really worked out too: the winning rental property turned out to be perfect for my friend.

This was only possible because the right to discriminate is protected in such transactions (for now). I like to think that the man who asked too many questions felt a bit of remorse after the fact (he lost a lot of money), and even perhaps is right now undergoing a reconsideration of his exclusionary attitudes. Through my own buyer decisions I was actually able to make a contribution toward improving cultural values.

What if anti-discrimination laws had pertained? The man would not have been allowed to ask about national origin, religion, and ethnicity. Presuming he kept his room on the open market, he would have been required under law to accept my bid, regardless of his own values.

As a result, my money would have gone to someone who didn’t have a high regard for my friend, my friend would have been denied crucial information about what he was getting into, and I would not be able to reward people for values I hold dear.

This is precisely why gay rights leaders should be for, not against, the right to discriminate. If you are seeking to create a more tolerant society, you need information that only a free society can provide.

You need to know who is ready to serve and hire gay men and women, so they can be rewarded for their liberality. You also need to know who is unwilling to hire and serve so that the loss part of profit-and-loss can be directed against ill-liberality. Potential employees and customers need to know how they are likely to be treated by a business. Potential new producers need to know about business opportunities in under-served niche markets.

If everyone is forced to serve and hire gays, society is denied important knowledge about who does and does not support enlightened thinking on this topic.

Consider the prototypical case of the baker who doesn’t want to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. He is within his rights. His loss of a potential customer base is his own loss. It is also the right of the couple to refuse to give this baker business. The money he would have otherwise made can be redirected towards a baker who is willing to do this. It is equally true that some people would rather trade with a baker who is against gay marriage, and they are within their rights as well.

Every act of discrimination, provided it is open and legal, provides a business opportunity to someone else.

How does all this work itself out in the long run? Commerce tends toward rewarding inclusion, broadness, and liberality. Tribal loyalties, ethnic and religious bigotries, and irrational prejudices are bad for business. The merchant class has been conventionally distrusted by tribalist leaders — from the ancient to the modern world — precisely because merchantcraft tends to break down barriers between groups.

We can see this in American history following the end of slavery. Blacks and whites were ever more integrated through commercial exchange, especially with the advance of transportation technology and rising incomes. This is why the racists turned increasingly toward the state to forbid it. Zoning laws, minimum wage regulation, mandatory segregation, and occupational licensing were all strategies used to keep the races separate even as the market was working toward integration.

The overwhelming tendency of markets is to bring people together, break down prejudices, and persuade people of the benefits of cooperation regardless of class, race, religion, sex/gender, or other arbitrary distinctions. The same is obviously and especially true of sexual orientation. It is the market that rewards people who put aside their biases and seek gains through trade.

This is why states devoted to racialist and hateful policies always resort to violence in control of the marketplace. Ludwig von Mises, himself Jewish and very much the victim of discrimination his entire life, explained that this was the basis for Nazi economic policy. The market was the target of the Nazis because market forces know no race, religion, or nationality.

“Many decades of intensive anti-Semitic propaganda,” Mises wrote in 1944, “did not succeed in preventing German ‘Aryans’ from buying in shops owned by Jews, from consulting Jewish doctors and lawyers, and from reading books by Jewish authors.” So the racists turned to the totalitarian state — closing and confiscating Jewish business, turning out Jewish academics, and burning Jewish books — in order to severe the social and economic ties between races in Germany.

The biggest enemy of marginal and discriminated-against populations is and has always been the state. The best hope for promoting universal rights and a culture of tolerance is the market economy. The market is the greatest weapon ever devised against bigotry — but, in order to work properly, the market needs to signaling systems rooted in individuals’ freedom of choice to act on their values.

And, to be sure, the market can also provide an outlet for people who desire to push back for a different set of values, perhaps rooted in traditional religious concerns. Hobby Lobby, Chick-Fil-A, In-and-Out Burger, among many others, openly push their religious mission alongside their business, and their customer base is drawn to them for this reason. This is also a good thing. It is far better for these struggles to take place in the market (where choice rules) rather than through politics (where force does).

Trying to game that market by taking away consumer and producer choice harms everyone. Anti-discrimination laws will provide more choices at the expense of more informed choices. Such laws force bigotry underground, shut down opportunities to provide special rewards for tolerance, and disable the social learning process that leads to an ever more inclusive society.

New laws do not fast-track fairness and justice; they take away opportunities to make the world a better place one step at a time.

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Digital Development at FEE, CLO of the startup Liberty.me, and editor at Laissez Faire Books. Author of five books, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World.

The Ex-Im Bank Is Dead — But Watch Out for Corporate Welfare Zombies by Daniel J. Ikenson

July 2, 2015/in Economy, Politics, Regulation, Taxes, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

At midnight, the gears of crony capitalism ground to a halt at 811 Vermont Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C.

After 81 years of funneling taxpayer dollars to favored companies, projects, and geopolitical outcomes under the guise of advancing some vague conception of the “U.S. economic interest,” the Export-Import Bank of the United States will end its financing operations at midnight tonight.

No more subsidies to Fortune 100 businesses. No more siphoning revenues from unwitting U.S. firms and industries. No more loan guarantees to wealthy, autocratic foreign governments. No more crowding out of private lending. No more taxpayer exposure to a Fannie Mae-like fiasco. No more bribery and corruption scandals. No more collaboration and lending to China’s Export-Import Bank – you know, the entity whose support for Chinese companies is alleged to threaten U.S. exporters and jobs, and is the most frequently cited imperative for reauthorizing Ex-Im.

No more of any of this… for now.

Champions of small government and market capitalism should savor this rare victory. It was won with solid arguments, including over 20 years of analyses from Cato Institute scholars including Ian Vasquez, Aaron Lukas, Steve Slivinsky, Chris Edwards, Doug Bandow, Sallie James, and – perhaps most comprehensively and tirelessly – Veronique de Rugy.

It was won because of columnist/scholar Tim Carney’s persistence in focusing the public’s attention on the corruption bred of corporate welfare and because of the analytical contributions of Heritage’s Diane Katz, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ryan Young, and others who continued to make compelling arguments for shuttering the Bank, despite steep odds against that outcome.

It was won because certain libertarian groups and conservative activists made the issue a priority, recognizing that corporate welfare is as great a threat to liberty as is the Welfare State, and that reining it in should be a priority because success there would lend greater credibility to the effort to rein in the Welfare State.

It was won against great odds, including vast political expenditures and arm-twisting by U.S. business interests on Capitol Hill, a mainstream media that is reflexively unsympathetic to any cause associated with “Tea Party Types,” and a general aversion among establishment organizations to any challenges to the status-quo.

Radical and reckless, excessive and extreme, ideological and idiotic have been the characterizations assigned by media, politicians, and Boeing lobbyists in their attempts to discredit legitimate efforts to purge “crony” and make “market” the new brand of capitalism.

And it was won because House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, knowing the case against Ex-Im reauthorization was more substantive than the New York Times would allow, made good gatekeepers by putting the onus on Ex-Im proponents to answer the critics – a task at which they failed.

So, at midnight, the Export-Import Bank ceased in its capacity to issue new financing. That is something to cheer. It may also be short-lived.

Proponents of the Bank have been regrouping and strategizing to move legislation to reauthorize the Bank at the soonest possible chance. In fact the White House is hosting a conference call for the purpose of advancing that outcome. Here’s the text of the email:

Dear Friend,

Please join us for a conference call on Tuesday, June 30th, at 2:35 PM with President Barack Obama, Senior Advisor to the President, Valerie Jarrett, and Director of the National Economic Council, Jeff Zients, to discuss the importance of reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank of the United States.

The Export-Import Bank is a critical tool to help U.S. businesses and workers succeed in global markets and grow their exports – it supports high-quality jobs, is a vital tool for small businesses, and doesn’t cost taxpayers a penny. Its reauthorization is vital to U.S. competitiveness and leveling the playing field for American small business owners and workers. …

This call is off the record and is not for press purposes nor amplification on social media.

Thank you,

The White House Business Council

The battle may be over but the war continues. Given the sway that conservatives have had on this issue, it will be interesting to see whether and how Speaker Boehner tries to circumvent Hensarling’s committee to get a reauthorization bill to the floor. Majority Leader McConnell believes there’s enough support in the Senate for reauthorization, but most of the Republican presidential hopefuls have expressed opposition to reauthorization.

It seems to me that if Ex-Im reauthorization resurfaces in the weeks and months ahead, it will be an issue that provides Republicans with yet another opportunity to demonstrate commitment to limited government, free market principles. Maybe this time they’ll see the value in reclaiming that brand.

Daniel Ikenson

Dan Ikenson is director of Cato’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, where he coordinates and conducts research on all manners of international trade and investment policy.

EDITORS NOTE: A version of this post first appeared at Cato.org.

Money Will Be Digital — But Will It Be Free? by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

July 2, 2015/in Economy, Policy, Regulation/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Bitcoin offers a glimpse into the future of money — a purely digital form of money that is individual, private, global, and free (free as in speech, not as in beer). Bitcoin is often compared with the existing banking system, juxtaposing its futuristic capabilities with the slow, antiquated, and cumbersome world of wire transfers, checks, “banking hours,” and restrictions.

But the future will not be a choice between “old money” and cryptocurrency. Instead, it will be a choice between two competing visions of digital money: one based on freedom and choice, the other based on control and surveillance, a dystopian totalitarian system of control from which no one can escape.

We are now at the crossroads, and we must choose the future of currency wisely.

Cash, checks, and other forms of tangible money have been gradually disappearing for decades. We are now rapidly moving toward a cashless society where all money is purely digital. In the past, cash payments were expected and preferred; credit transactions were suspect. But as we turned into a debt-based society, cash became the oddity. The inscription “for all debts public and private” no longer rings as true. Today, if you try to buy a car with cash, you’ll be treated with extreme suspicion. Large amounts of cash are now associated with criminal activity and the definition of “large” is getting smaller each day. This is how we arrive at a cashless society: by making cash itself suspect, then criminal.

The transition from cash to digital money is not just a change in form. It is a transition from transactions that are private, person-to-person, and decentralized to transactions that are monitored, intermediated, and under centralized control. In the last two decades, digital payments have become a powerful surveillance tool. Citizens who are concerned about their government monitoring their telephone calls are simultaneously oblivious to the fact that every transaction they make with a plastic card or an online payment network can be scrutinized without suspicion of a crime, without warrants or any form of judicial oversight. Most national governments, under the guise of counterterrorism laws, have empowered their law enforcement and intelligence agencies with unfettered access to financial data. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that these powers are used far more broadly every day, increasingly removed from the originally stated intent.

What a strange world we now live in. Total surveillance of every citizen’s transactions, without any basis or suspicion, is not just normal but presented as a virtue, a form of patriotism. Using cash or wishing to retain your financial privacy is inherently suspect, a radical position, soon to be a crime.

A future where all payments are trackable is terrifying, but a world with centralized control over transactions would be even worse. Digital currency with centralized control means the eradication of property as a right. Instead, your money exists only as a database entry where the balance is controlled entirely by a third party.

By managing the payment networks, a government has effective control over all participants, including banks, corporations, and individuals. Already, banks are extorted into adopting global financial blacklists for fear of being disconnected from networks like the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) and Automated Clearing House (ACH). This web of control is expanding and is used more and more frequently as a weapon of geopolitics.

The future of digital central currencies will make this control entirely individualized and easy to target. Attended the “wrong” protest? Your bank balance is now zero. Bought a suspicious book? Expect a visit from the police. Annoyed someone in power? They can trawl through your transactions until they find something juicy enough to leak.

Your movements can be tracked, your friends identified, your political affiliations analyzed and cross-correlated to your reading habits. No part of your life is private when every form of money is digital and every transaction can be tracked, blocked, seized, and deleted. Your life savings are yours only as long as you don’t offend someone in power. When money is centrally controlled, ownership of anything is a privilege the government can revoke. Property is not an inalienable right, but an advantage afforded to the those who acquiesce to the system. Combining surveillance of communications with complete control over money will result in tyranny the likes of which the world has never known.

Totalitarian surveillance of money is toxic to democratic institutions, and the power of surveillance erodes the social contract and corrupts those in power. There cannot be self-determination, freedom of expression, freedom of association, or freedom of conscience in a society where every penny you spend is monitored and controlled.

Even if you believe that your government is benevolent and will only use these extreme powers against “terrorists,” you will always live one election away from losing your freedoms. Even the supposedly benevolent governments in liberal democracies are already using their power over money to harass journalists and political opponents, while allowing their friendly bankers to finance tyrants, warlords, and militias across the world.

Bitcoin offers a fundamentally different future for currency. Bitcoin is digital cash; its transactions are person-to-person, private, and decentralized. It combines the best features of cash with the convenience, speed, and flexibility of a digital medium.

Bitcoin enables an alternative future of personal freedom and privacy that revokes the surveillance-state developments of the last few decades and reintroduces financial emancipation through the power of mathematics and cryptography. Through its decentralized global network, Bitcoin provides no central point to control, no position of power to enable censorship, no ability to seize or freeze funds through a third party without due process, no control over funds without access to keys.

Lacking a center of control, bitcoin resists centralization. Lacking concentration of power, it resists totalitarian domination. Lacking identifiers, bitcoin promotes privacy and makes total surveillance impossible. Disregarding political borders as network-irrelevant, it eschews nationalism and geopolitical games. Dispersing power, it empowers individuals.

Bitcoin is a protocol of free commerce, just as the Internet’s transmission control protocol/Internet protocol, or TCP/IP, is a protocol of free speech. Bitcoin’s design can be replicated to create myriad forms of decentralized money, all superior to the dystopian future we are otherwise headed for.

We can live in a world where money operates like any other medium on the Internet, free from control or interference. In a decentralized digital future, money will be controlled by individuals, banking will be an “app,” and governments will be as powerless to stop the flow of money as today they are powerless to stop the flow of truth.

In this future, money will be a tool of freedom from tyranny, an escape hatch from corrupt banks, a haven from hyperinflation. Four to six billion people without access to international financial services will be able to leapfrog the banking system and connect to the world economy directly. Individuals will not have to choose between directly controlling their own money and participating in a global financial network. They will enjoy global peer-to-peer finance, where trusted third parties and endless lines of bankers and intermediaries are things of the past.

While the future of currency is undoubtedly digital, it can take two radically different forms. We can live in a financial panopticon, a straitjacket of surveillance and tyranny. Or we can live in an open society where our privacy is protected by cryptography, not subject to the whim of every petty bureaucrat — where our digital money is global, borderless, anonymous, and controlled by the individual. The choice between financial freedom and financial tyranny is a choice between fundamental freedom and tyranny. Choose financial freedom: choose freedom.

Andreas M. Antonopoulos

Andreas M. Antonopoulos is a technologist and serial entrepreneur who advises companies on the use of technology and decentralized digital currencies such as bitcoin.

VIDEO: It’s Easy Being Green When You Have No Choice

July 2, 2015/in Environment, Policy, Politics, Regulation, Science/by Dr. Rich Swier

This feature film is narrated by Brian Sussman, San Francisco radio host (KSFO) and best-selling author of Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam and Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s green Agenda Will Dismantle America.

Some may say there is only circumstantial evidence and others may say it is just a coincidence, however, the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio that presented Agenda 21 and introduced sustainable development to the world as the solution to save the planet from man made global warming likely would not have happened if the Soviet Union continued to be the main rival to America and Western Civilization.

To learn more visit: www.GreenFlick.com. Watch the trailer:

To purchase a copy of the full length film click here.