Why The Atlantic Is Wrong about Indiana's Religious Freedom Law | The Weekly Standard

Why The Atlantic Is Wrong about Indiana's Religious Freedom Law | The Weekly Standard

Garrett Epps writes at The Atlantic that I am wrong to say there aren't "significant" differences between the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and Indiana's RFRA.

According to Epps, who teaches creative writing and constitutional law at the University of Baltimore, there are two major differences between the Indiana law and the federal law. "First, the Indiana law explicitly allows any for-profit business to assert a right to 'the free exercise of religion.' The federal RFRA doesn’t contain such language," writes Epps. "Second, the Indiana statute explicitly makes a business’s 'free exercise' right a defense against a private lawsuit by another person, rather than simply against actions brought by government."

"I am not sure what McCormack was thinking," writes Epps, referring to my claim that there aren't any "significant" differences between Indiana's RFRA and the federal RFRA.

If Epps could have continued reading just a bit longer, he would have discovered that I back up this claim by directing readers to the writings of University of Virgina law professor Douglas Laycock, Stanford University law professor Michael McConnell (a former federal judge on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals), and South Texas law professor Josh Blackman: "Indiana's RFRA makes it explicit that the law applies to persons engaged in business as well as citizens in private lawsuits, but until quite recently it had always been understood that federal RFRA covered businesses and private lawsuits. (See this post by law professor Josh Blackman for more on these matters.)"

In an email to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock explains why the Indiana RFRA's inclusion of corporations isn't really different from federal RFRA:

On corporations: The United States has what is commonly known as “The Dictionary Act.” At the very beginning of the United States Code (Title 1, section 1) is a series of definitions. As used in this Code, unless the context otherwise requires, these words have the following meaning. The federal RFRA protects every “person,” and the Dictionary Act defines “person” to include corporations. Most states have the same sort of Dictionary Act, and the same definition. In Indiana, they put it directly into the RFRA, presumably because of the litigation culminating in Hobby Lobby. That’s not really a difference.

Epps wrote that a "lot of legal thinkers thought that idea was outlandish until last year’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, in which the Court’s five conservatives interpreted the federal RFRA to give some corporate employers a religious veto over their employees’ statutory right to contraceptive coverage." What Epps doesn't acknowledge is that only two of the nine Supreme Court justices (Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) dissented from the majority opinion's holding that closely-held coporations may defend themselves under federal RFRA (Kagan and Breyer didn't take a position).

As for Epps's claim that the Indiana RFRA differs from the federal RFRA in allowing people to defend themselves in private lawsuits, Josh Blackman points out that there hasn't been unanimous agreement, but "four federal courts of appeal and the Obama Justice Department have all taken the position that [federal] RFRA can be used as a defense in private suits."

So I stand by my original claim that these two features of the Indiana law cited by Epps are not significantly different from the federal law.

But does Indiana's RFRA differ from other state RFRAs?

Epps points out that the New Mexico Supreme Court did not allow a RFRA defense in a private lawsuit, and he suggests that Texas is the only state besides Indiana that allows such a defense. But Stanford's Michael McConnell has argued persuasively that other state RFRAs cover private lawsuits: "The New Mexico RFRA specifically covers action by 'a government agency.' The Arizona RFRA applies to all action by 'government' and extends to 'all state and local laws and ordinances and the implementation of those laws and ordinances.' Courts are not agencies, but they are an arm of government. 'All' law includes common law; civil suits are a means of implementing and enforcing law."

It is worth noting that the Illinois RFRA--which Barack Obama voted for as a state senator--also applies to all state and local laws: "This Act applies to all State and local (including home rule unit) laws, ordinances, policies, procedures, practices, and governmental actions and their implementation, whether statutory or otherwise and whether adopted before or after the effective date of this Act."*

So how did the confusion arise as to whether or not RFRA applied in private lawsuits in New Mexico? In his email to TWS, Douglas Laycock explains:

On private lawsuits, the federal RFRA was clearly intended to provide a possible defense (subject, as always, to the compelling interest test) when a religious organization or believer is sued, whether by a government or a private citizen. The statute specifically mentioned relief against a government, because of concerns about sovereign immunity (the rule that you usually can’t sue a state). And that created an ambiguity; did it mean only against a government?

Most states copied the federal language, and copied the ambiguity. And the New Mexico Supreme Court took advantage of that, and said no RFRA defense in a suit by a private citizen. So the Indiana bill addresses that ambiguity. If your church is feeding the homeless, and the neighbors don’t like it, it really doesn’t matter whether you get sued by the neighbors or by the city.

The New Mexico court was clearly hostile to the religious claim, rejecting every argument she made; if it had not had the ambiguity about private lawsuits, it would have just found a compelling government interest, which is what the state trial court in Washington did in the florist case. And what the Minnesota Supreme Court did thirty years ago in the only reported case of a business claiming a religious justification for discriminating against gays just because they are gay.

It's unfortunate that Epps didn't make any effort to respond to the arguments made by McConnell, Laycock, or Blackman. Perhaps a public debate is in order. Isn't that what C-SPAN is here for?

*Update (11:40a.m.): Here's Michael McConnell's analysis of the Illinois statute:

Here is the relevant part [of the statute]:

If a person's exercise of religion has been burdened in violation of this Act, that person may assert that violation as a claim or defense in a judicial proceeding and may obtain appropriate relief against a government. A party who prevails in an action to enforce this Act against a government is entitled to recover attorney's fees and costs incurred in maintaining the claim or defense.

It allows the person to assert RFRA as a claim or defense in any judicial proceeding, but seems to authorize appropriate relief only against a government. That seems to suggest RFRA can be asserted as a defense in a lawsuit brought by a private person, but not to allow suits by RFRA claimants against other private parties -- or at least, not to get relief. Perhaps a RFRA plaintiff could get a declaratory judgment that a particular act violates RFRA.

This does not make much sense. What it really might mean is that RFRA plaintiffs cannot obtain affirmative relief such as damages against private parties, but only protective relief like an injunction. In any event, the hypothetical cases people have been raising involve RFRA claimants being sued by other persons who want to compel them to take actions contrary to their religion.

The second sentence reinforces the idea that RFRA applies to lawsuits between private parties, because if it did not, there would be no need to restrict attorneys fees to those cases involving government.

The New Intolerance - WSJ

The New Intolerance - WSJ

In the increasingly bitter battle between religious liberty and the liberal political agenda, religion is losing. Witness the media and political wrath raining down upon Indiana because the state dared to pass an allegedly anti-gay Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The question fair-minded Americans should ask before casting the first stone is who is really being intolerant.

The Indiana law is a version of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) that passed 97-3 in the Senate and that Bill Clinton signed in 1993. Both the federal and Indiana laws require courts to administer a balancing test when reviewing cases that implicate the free exercise of religion.

To wit: Individuals must show that their religious liberty has been “substantially burdened,” and the government must demonstrate its actions represent the least restrictive means to achieve a “compelling” state interest. Indiana’s law adds a provision that offers a potential religious defense in private disputes, but then four federal appellate circuits have also interpreted the federal statute to apply to private disp

utes. The federal RFRA followed the Supreme Court’s Employment Division v. Smith ruling in 1990 that abandoned its 30-year precedent of reviewing religious liberty cases under strict scrutiny. Congress responded with RFRA, which merely reasserted longstanding First Amendment protections.

In 1997 the Supreme Court limited RFRA’s scope to federal actions. So 19 states including such cultural backwaters as Connecticut, Rhode Island and Illinois followed with copy-cat legislation, and Indiana is the 20th. Courts in 11 states have extended equally vigorous protections.

Indiana was an outlier before the new law because neither its laws nor courts unambiguously protected religious liberty. Amish horse-drawn buggies could be required to abide by local traffic regulations. Churches could be prohibited from feeding the homeless under local sanitation codes. The state Attorney General even ruled Indiana Wesleyan University, a Christian college which hires on the basis of religion, ineligible for state workforce training grants.

Becket Fund Executive Director Kristina Arriaga discusses the controversy surrounding the Hoosier State’s religious freedom law. Photo credit: Associated Press. In February, 16 prominent First Amendment scholars, some of whom support same-sex marriage, backed Indiana’s legislation. “General protection for religious liberty is important precisely because it is impossible to legislate in advance for all the ways in which government might burden the free exercise of religion,” they explained.

That hasn’t stopped the cultural great and good from claiming Indiana added the religious defense in private disputes as a way to target gays. If this is Indiana’s purpose, and there’s no evidence it is, this is unlikely to work.

The claim is that this would empower, say, florists or wedding photographers to refuse to work a gay wedding on religious grounds. But under the RFRA test, such a commercial vendor would still have to prove that his religious convictions were substantially burdened.

And he would also come up against the reality that most courts have found that the government has a compelling interest in enforcing antidiscrimination laws. In all these states for two decades, no court we’re aware of has granted such a religious accommodation to an antidiscrimination law. Restaurants and hotels that refused to host gay marriage parties would have a particularly high burden in overcoming public accommodation laws.

In any event, such disputes are rare to nonexistent, a tribute to the increasing tolerance of American society toward gays, lesbians, the transgendered, you name it.

The paradox is that even as America has become more tolerant of gays, many activists and liberals have become ever-more intolerant of anyone who might hold more traditional cultural or religious views. Thus a CEO was run out of Mozilla after it turned out that he had donated money to a California referendum opposing same-sex marriage.

Part of the new liberal intolerance is rooted in the identity politics that dominates today’s Democratic Party. That’s the only way to explain the born-again opportunism of Hillary Clinton, who tweeted: “Sad this new Indiana law can happen in America today. We shouldn’t discriminate against ppl bc of who they love.”

By that standard, Mrs. Clinton discriminated against gays because she opposed gay marriage until March 2013. But now she wants to be seen as leading the new culture war against the intolerant right whose views she recently held.

The same reversal of tolerance applies to religious liberty. When RFRA passed in 1993, liberal outfits like the ACLU were joined at the hip with the Christian Coalition. But now the ACLU is denouncing Indiana’s law because it wants even the most devoutly held religious values to bow to its cultural agenda on gay marriage and abortion rights.

Liberals used to understand that RFRA, with its balancing test, was a good-faith effort to help society compromise on contentious moral disputes. That liberals are renouncing it 20 years after celebrating it says more about their new intolerance than about anyone in Indiana.

Employment Div. v. Smith. :: 494 U.S. 872 (1990) :: Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center

Employment Div. v. Smith. :: 494 U.S. 872 (1990) :: Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center

What will the Indiana religious freedom law really do? - The Washington Post

What will the Indiana religious freedom law really do? - The Washington Post

Are the claims made against the new Indiana law accurate? Not really. This law, like other RFRAs, merely requires that state laws meet a demanding, but hardly insurmountable, test before infringing upon the religious practice or conscience of religious believers. If the law imposes a substantial burden on religious belief, the law must yield unless the law serves a compelling state interest and is the least burdensome way to advance that interest. Here’s more background on how these sorts of laws work.

Courts have routinely upheld the application of nondiscrimination laws against RFRA-based challenges on the grounds that preventing discrimination is a compelling state interest. Of course it’s possible that a court in the future would reach a different conclusion, but there’s no reason to think such a result is likely, and there is nothing about the Indiana law that makes it a particular threat in this regard. That is, such a court decision is just as possible in one of the other dozen-plus states that has had its own RFRA on the books for years or in one of the many other states that have equivalent protections for religious belief under their state constitutions.

The Indiana RFRA is not identical to every other RFRA, but the textual differences are not particularly material. Here, for instance, is a useful comparison of the Indiana law and the federal RFRA, as applied in the courts.

Does the new minimum wage mean an end to tipping? « Hot Air

Does the new minimum wage mean an end to tipping? « Hot Air

Rushing through a steep increase in the minimum wage is going to have a number of effects on businesses, the prices consumers pay and employment. All of that is pretty much a given as we’ve discussed here on multiple occasions. At the LA Times, Michael Hiltzik takes a look at how such a change will affect one particular subset of lower wage workers, as well as one of the long established customs of American society… tipping. Strangely, the author seems to feel that tipping is not a plus for wait staff workers who excel at their jobs and bring home more money, but some sort of anchor around their necks.

The gradual move toward a higher minimum wage in many localities has revived the debate over restaurant tipping–not that it’s ever been too far below the surface.

There’s a good reason for the new attention on tipping: a differential between the minimum for tipped and non-tipped workers has been introduced in some places along with the higher minimum. It’s also advocated elsewhere, typically at the suggestion of restaurant owners who say it would moderate the strain on their bottom lines…

[T]ipping is an unfair mess. That’s absolutely true. As it’s practiced in the U.S., tipping is not even well understood by the diners who pay it. It causes resentment among recipients and headaches for their employers, and it’s subject to racial and gender distortions. As fundamental components of workers’ wages, tips are exploitative. According to the National Employment Law Project, they’re “notoriously erratic,” varying from shift to shift and by season, and shrinking during economic downturns.

Hiltzik’s argument will sound familiar to anyone who follows liberal complaints on virtually any subject which touches on the economy. Tipping, he seems to argue, is unfair to the lower paid worker because not everyone receives the same benefit and outside factors can affect how well the worker is compensated. In conservative circles, the explanation for this is summed up in easily digestible terms. The author is looking for equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity.

JSTOR: Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 123, No. 2 (April 2015), pp. 497-545

JSTOR: Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 123, No. 2 (April 2015), pp. 497-545

Abstract:

This study investigates the antipoverty efficacy of minimum wage policies. Proponents of these policies contend that employment impacts are negligible and suggest that consumers pay for higher labor costs through imperceptible increases in goods prices. Adopting this empirical scenario, the analysis demonstrates that an increase in the national minimum wage produces a value-added tax effect on consumer prices that is more regressive than a typical state sales tax and allocates benefits as higher earnings nearly evenly across the income distribution. These income-transfer outcomes sharply contradict portraying an increase in the minimum wage as an antipoverty initiative.

The Best Reason I'm Wrong On Gay Marriage

The Best Reason I'm Wrong On Gay Marriage

My personal view on marriage is that it is the union of one man and one woman, joined together permanently, exclusively and monogamously. But as for the marriage wars, I’ve long argued that government should not be involved. People should be free to join together in whatever groupings they want and the government should not favor one such group over another.

To be clear, I do not mean by this that I support the government redefining marriage to include same-sex unions or other groupings. You can read more on my views in “The Rise of the Same Sex Marriage Dissidents.” I’ve never been persuaded that such a redefinition is an appropriate or coherent act for government or leads to greater liberty. We’ve definitely seen the loss of liberty that comes with it.

Marriage existed prior to government. It is public, not private, but it does not intrinsically require legal recognition. Our tax laws shouldn’t play favorites based on marital status. I wish the government were much smaller and less involved in marriage, whether that plays out in forcing florists to provide bouquets for marriage ceremonies they believe to be sinful or firing teachers who don’t wish to violate their beliefs in how they teach about marriage. In fact, I think that the stronger the family, churches, and other institutions are, the less invasive the government. The stronger and more involved the government is in regulating marriage law, the weaker these other institutions are.

Still, my position gives me pause in a few different ways. And has for years since I began thinking more deeply on this topic, if I’m being honest. One is simply the recognition that it’s based on unrealistic thinking. We don’t live in a world where people seek less government involvement.

More importantly, though, what does it really mean to get the government out of marriage? What singled marriage out throughout all time and human history as a different type of recognized relationship is that sex was involved. There’s only one bodily system for which each of us only has half of the system. The unit is the mated pair. In sexual congress, in intercourse between a man and a woman, you are literally coordinated to a single bodily end. And not infrequently, that end involves the creation of another human being. What does it mean to get the government out of marriage when you’re thinking of the natural end of coital sex? That is, children.

Abolishing the many laws regulating marriage sounds like a way to decrease state involvement, but it undeniably opens up avenues for greater state involvement in lives. Would each group of people seeking to join together draw up their own contracts? Who would adjudicate the violations of such contracts? This is an already complicated process when everyone’s operating on similar understanding. Family court judges are meddlesome enough, but imagine the layers of appeals that we would see in a “privatized” situation, appeals that would go to the Supreme Court to establish precedents.

....

Patterico's Pontifications » My Hopefully Final Response to Dan Gillmor on Net Neutrality: Why I Trust the Market Over Government, Every Time

Patterico's Pontifications » My Hopefully Final Response to Dan Gillmor on Net Neutrality: Why I Trust the Market Over Government, Every Time

The argument comes down to this: in a free market system, consumers’ ability to fight Big Business by choosing to spend money elsewhere isvastly superior than voters’ ability to fight Big Government by voting for someone else. Let’s look to public choice theory for some of the reasons, which (as you will see) are largely interrelated.

First, there is the issue of whether the actor is informed. Now, obviously consumers are not always as informed as they could be. However, when you compare an important purchase to an important election, a consumer’s incentive to research his purchasing options is much greater than a voter’s incentive to research politicians or political issues. Consumers mulling over a new computer or car or iPad are much more likely to spend time looking over resources containing detailed reviews and specifications about competing products, as compared to the time the typical voter spends researching a candidate. Part of the reason is that a purchase costs money. A vote costs nothing but the time it takes to cast.

Second, and related, is the issue of whether your action will have an effect. This can be expressed in terms of the existence and immediacy of incentives to make a good choice, and disincentives to make a bad choice. It is related to the first issue, because the lower your incentive to research, the less informed you are likely to be.

When you choose to spend your dollar on Product A vs. Product B, this has an immediate and undeniable effect on your well-being. You personally enjoy the benefits of your selected product, or feel the ill effects of its shortcomings. If your computer runs like a dream, or if your car is a lemon, these experiences provide immediate and concrete feedback to your dollar-spending decision. True, your one dollar or purchase will not make or break a company, but the incentive to reward good products and punish bad ones is clearly strong, and those strong incentives add up collectively.

For a voter, by contrast, your feedback is weak and sometimes nonexistent. If your preferred candidate (the one for whom your voted) loses, you will never feel the consequences of your choice, good or bad. If your preferred candidate wins, he has no obligation to live up to his promises. And in any event, even if he does, some of the promises he carries out may offend you, unless you happened to agree with him on every single issue.

This is not a situation that incentivizes being an informed voter.

Let’s compare apples to apples to show how stark the difference in incentives truly is. Imagine the following scenario:

You go to a store to buy a product for your company. Your company does not know you are the one making the purchase, so you will never be held accountable if the purchase turns out to be bad. Your purchase will cost you nothing, personally. Any effect the product’s quality has on your life will be so indirect that you will rarely think about it. The store policy is that you may not get the item you choose. If you do happen to get the item you choose, there is no guarantee it will work.

How much research are you going to do for that purchase, compared to the research you will do on a product you are buying for yourself?

Voters are also aware that, unless the election is tied and their vote breaks the tie — which never, ever, ever happens — their vote is utterly and completely meaningless. So voters rationally conclude it’s pointless to vote — and if they do, they rationally conclude that it is pointless to become informed.

All this leads to a pretty dismal reality. No company can consistently provide bad products and survive for long. But politicians can offer the same bad service, year in and year out, and people will routinely show up and vote for the least bad option. There is no real choice and your act has no effect.

So the free market wins out as regards your ability to effect change and your ability to be informed. But meanwhile, what about the supposed benefits of the First Amendment? Gillmor tells us that companies are not bound by the First Amendment (which is true) while the government is.

Me, I don’t trust the courts to protect my rights to free speech. Call me cynical, but that’s where I am. We live in a country where free speech rights have been violated by government since the very founding of the nation, with regularity and impunity. Yes, the First Amendment has protected us at times. Other times, it has not — just ask Eugene Debs.

I’ll take the market, thanks very much.

The Daily Bell - Three Myths of Rape That Need Sunlight

The Daily Bell - Three Myths of Rape That Need Sunlight

A pivot point occurred within feminism on the issue of rape in 1975 when the book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape by Susan Brownmiller appeared. In its pages, Brownmiller attempted to chart the history of rape from the Neanderthal through to modern man, placing great emphasis on periods of war and crisis. Against Our Will reportedly gave rape its history. It became a founding document of the "rape culture," which further propelled the feminist movement from liberalism to political correctness, which has also been called gender or radical feminism.

In her book, Brownmiller maintained that rape is the primary mechanism through which men subjugate women. "Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire, and the first crude stone ax. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." [Emphasis in the original.]

Some of today's most prevalent myths about rape were cemented into the culture by Brownmiller. In particular, Brownmiller presented three interrelated myths:

1. rape is a part of patriarchy;

2. men have created a 'mass psychology' of rape; and,

3. rape is a part of 'normal' life.

I dispute each one of them.

Energy Sense from an Unlikely Source | Power Line

Energy Sense from an Unlikely Source | Power Line

 It is in a series called “Getting to Zero” (as in zero carbon emissions), written by a self-described liberal convinced about climate change disaster, and described thusly:

In this series GETTING TO ZERO we will take a very hard-headed look at current energy policy and energy strategies. We will ask hard questions: does this really get us to zero? How much would it cost? How rapidly can it be deployed? We may find some answers along the way, but don’t expect them to be easy.

We’ve all read those rosy optimistic stories about renewable energy, and how in some given month 100% of new electrical capacity in the US was all renewable; or about how during some hour in the dead of night all of the electricity demand in Denmark was met by wind. You read those stories and you think, “Hey! We’re making progress in the climate fight!”

And that impression is dead wrong.

The second installment of this series looks at the economics of renewable energy and, citing a study in the journal Energy, concludes that it really blows (so to speak). The discussion gets a bit technical at this point, with an extended discussion about EROI (energy return on investment) and “buffering” (meaning essentially backup supply for sources like wind and solar that are intermittent) along with some very interesting charts, but the author ends up concluding that wide scale adoption of renewable energy “will reduce GDP. The economy becomes less efficient as we deploy less efficient energy sources to run it.”

The discussion of wind power is especially interesting:

Wind is a tricky case. If you ask most people, they will tell you that we don’t currently have energy storage for wind. In fact we do, but the buffering for wind comes from natural gas powerplants, which are typically built at the same time wind is deployed. When the wind dies, the backup gas plants are turned on, to keep the grid power reliable. Thus the energy storage for wind is embodied in the natural gas that isn’t burned when the wind turbine is producing peak output.

This means that wind, as it’s used now in the US, isn’t really zero-fossil. It’s a hybrid system that’s part wind, part natural gas. And considering the availability of wind (30% is typical for a wind turbine), most of the energy actually comes from the fossil side of the equation. We’re using the wind to offset some of the CO2 emissions from the gas plant (which is good), but instead of getting to zero, we’re just walking toward the cliff instead of running toward it.

Denmark currently is one of the most wind-energy-intensive countries in the world, which works because they buffer their wind energy against hydroelectric power from Norway and Sweden. When the wind is blowing in Denmark, they export electricity to Sweden, which then can turn down its hydro plants (thus keeping more water stored in the reservoirs behind the dam). When the wind dies, Sweden turns up the taps on the hydroelectric production, and exports that stored energy back to Denmark. It’s a great zero-fossil system, but it’s only possible because of the unique geography that places a flat windy country right next to a couple of wet mountainous countries.

The author concludes that we need a lot more hydropower and nuclear power—both forms of energy that environmentalists hate. (In fact, most state “renewable portfolio standards” specifically exclude hydropower as an option to satisfy the RPS mandate.)

The third segment in this series looks at energy efficiency, which many greens seem to think is the magical pathway to a carbon-free future. Here the author is even more scathing:

There’s just one problem. They [the efficiency/conservation advocates] are all completely and totally wrong. Increasing energy efficiency does not, has not, and will not ever reduce overall demand for energy. This is not just an opinion; it has been demonstrated with the cold hard equations of physics, based on the second law of thermodynamics.

Now don’t get me wrong. Energy efficiency has obvious economic benefits, and those benefits are often enough to make such improvements worthwhile. It’s not that we should stop being more efficient. It’s just that we should not expect those improvements to reduce energy demand or carbon emissions. Because they won’t do that.

So what Koch-supported, flat earth, denialist site hosted these sensible reflections?

The Daily Kos.

You read that right. Here are Part I, Part II, and Part III. I’ve never heard of the author, Keith Pickering, but if he keeps this up, he’s going to get “investigated” by House Democrats for departing from the script.

The High Cost of Energy Illiteracy | Power Line

The High Cost of Energy Illiteracy | Power Line

At the base of this is near total illiteracy about energy. The latest example is the giddy celebration that Burlington, Vermont, has become carbon neutral! And if a New England hippie town of 50,000 can do it, then surely Cleveland can do it too, no?

Take the PBS headline: “Burlington Is First U.S. City to Hit 100 Percent Renewable Energy.” 100 percent renewable energy? So everyone in Burlington has quit driving cars? Did every Ben & Jerry’s-eating yuppie in town sell their gas-fired Viking and Wolf kitchen ranges and gas-fired home furnaces? Are they getting all their groceries and other goods delivered to town by horse-drawn carts instead of trucks? (I guess it is hard to be bothered with the distinction between electricity and energy. And factoring indirect energy use is apparently challenging, too.)

But then the complete PBS report lets out this little detail: “the biggest portion of the city’s renewable production comes from hydropower…”

Ah yes—hydropower: the one form of carbon-free electricity production that environmentalists strenuously oppose as much as nuclear power. Most state “renewable portfolio standards” (RPS) specifically exclude hydropower from the menu of energy options that states can use to meet the mandate.

In fact, in Colorado right now there is a bill in the legislature to remove the barriers to counting hydropower toward the state’s RPS targets. Naturally, “clean energy” advocates are opposed:

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) categorizes hydroelectricity as clean, renewable energy, and the Colorado Energy Office (CEO) determined that it produces air emissions on par with wind and solar. There is no justifiable environmental reason to keep these restrictions in place.

It may then come as a surprise that there are clean energy supporters who are actively fighting against this bill. Conservation Colorado, the Colorado Cleantech Industries Association, and the Distributed Wind Energy Association are all opposing the inclusion of hydroelectricity as a renewable energy resource despite the EPA’s evaluation.

In other words, no Burlingtons for you, Colorado.

The Meaning of Walmart's Wage Hike | The Weekly Standard

The Meaning of Walmart's Wage Hike | The Weekly Standard

Markets work. That’s the message from Walmart’s decision to raise its starting wage for 500,000 of its 1.3 million US employees to $10 per hour starting next year. That’s 37% above the statutory minimum of $7.25. No, the notably cost-conscious company, the largest private-sector employer in America, the world’s largest retailer, and a company that has prospered by making stuff available at prices that lower- and middle-income Americans can afford -- microwave ovens go for $44 -- didn’t suddenly turn wildly philanthropic. Or decide to bow to pressure from President Obama, who recently attacked office-supply company Staples for what he deemed indefensibly low wages in the face of its high profits, or from trade union organizers. Instead Walmart responded to pressure in two markets.

The first is the retail market in which it competes for customers. Until low gasoline prices fattened the wallets of its customers in the fourth quarter of last year and drove customer traffic up for the first time in two years, Walmart was struggling to retain the loyalty of its customers. In part, but only in part, this was because those customers had not benefitted significantly form the economic recovery.

The second market in which Walmart found itself at an increasing competitive disadvantage is the labor market, a disadvantage that affected its ability to compete for customers. The company found itself employing increasingly unresponsive and at times surly sales staff and poor in-store managers. Waiting times to get to cashiers became intolerable, food past its sell-by date was left on display, stores became dingy and unattractive, and staff were not deployed efficiently, leaving stores under-staffed at peak times. The better employees, from starting-level workers to store managers, were being lured away from Walmart by other retailers such as Starbucks, Gap, and Ikea as a recovering labor market drove the unemployment rate down from 10% in October 2009 to 5.7% last month. Hiring by businesses is at its fastest pace since 2000, and the job-vacancy rate at its highest level since 2001 as employers find themselves unable to find suitable workers to fill out their staffs.

Article « The Rape Culture Lie « Commentary Magazine

Article « The Rape Culture Lie « Commentary Magazine

Is rape a serious problem and a horrible crime? Of course. Is there injustice in the world? Absolutely. Is America’s current “conversation” about “rape culture” a complete and total farce? Sadly, yes. In a September essay for Time, Camille Paglia argued that the modern campus is simply incapable of recognizing real evil, criminalizing “oafish hookup dramas.” She may be right, but the problem is deeper and more ambiguous than that.

Juan Williams: America’s Most Influential Thinker on Race - WSJ

Juan Williams: America’s Most Influential Thinker on Race - WSJ

By JUAN WILLIAMS Feb. 20, 2015 6:55 p.m. ET

In his office hangs a copy of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in America. When his critics, and he has many, call him names, he likes to point to it and shout out, “I’m a free man!” This black history month is an opportunity to celebrate the most influential thinker on racial issues in America today—Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas .

Justice Thomas, who has been on the court nearly a quarter-century, remains a polarizing figure—loved by conservatives and loathed by liberals. But his “free”-thinking legal opinions are opening new roads for the American political debate on racial justice.

His opinions are rooted in the premise that the 14th Amendment—guaranteeing equal rights for all—cannot mean different things for different people. As he wrote in Fisher v. University of Texas (2013), he is opposed to “perpetual racial tinkering” by judges to fix racial imbalance and inequality at schools and the workplace. Yet he never contends racism has gone away. The fact that a 2001 article in Time magazine about him was headlined “Uncle Tom Justice” reminds us that racism stubbornly persists.

His only current rival in the race debate is President Obama. At moments of racial controversy the nation’s first black president has used his national pulpit to give voice to black fear that racial stereotyping led to tragedy. But that is as far as he is willing to go. His attorney general, Eric Holder , has gone further by calling Americans “cowards” when it comes to discussing race. And some critics have chastised him even for that.

Justice Thomas, meanwhile, is reshaping the law and government policy on race by virtue of the power of his opinions from the bench. Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American on the Supreme Court, stood up as a voice insisting on rights for black people. Justice Thomas, the second black man on the court, takes a different tack. He stands up for individual rights as a sure blanket of legal protection for everyone, including minorities.

In his dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger, a case that preserved the affirmative-action policies of the University of Michigan Law School, he quoted an 1865 speech by Frederick Douglass : “‘What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice.’ . . . Like Douglass, I believe blacks can achieve in every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators.”

The principal point Justice Thomas has made in a variety of cases is that black people deserve to be treated as independent, competent, self-sufficient citizens. He rejects the idea that 21st-century government and the courts should continue to view blacks as victims of a history of slavery and racism.

Instead, in an era with a rising number of blacks, Hispanics, Asians and immigrants, he cheers personal responsibility as the basis of equal rights. In his concurring opinion in Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena (1995), he made the case against government set-asides for minority businesses by arguing that “racial paternalism and its unintended consequences can be as poisonous and pernicious as any other form of discrimination.” The Constitution, he said, bans discrimination by “those who wish to oppress a race or by those who have a sincere desire to help.”

In the same vein he contends that people who insist on racial diversity as a worthy principle are hiding assumptions of black inferiority. “After all, if separation itself is a harm, and if integration therefore is the only way that blacks can receive a proper education, then there must be something inferior about blacks,” he wrote in his concurring opinion in Missouri v. Jenkins (1995). “Under this theory, segregation injures blacks because blacks, when left on their own, cannot achieve. To my way of thinking that conclusion is the result of a jurisprudence based upon a theory of black inferiority.”

Justice Thomas holds that quality education should be the focus of educators for children of all races and argues there is no proof that integration necessarily improves education. Black leaders, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Thurgood Marshall, he has noted, were educated at black schools.

He also makes the case that diversity in school admissions has never been proven to raise black achievement to the level of people admitted with no special consideration. “Racial imbalance is not segregation,” he wrote in a 2007 case ending Seattle and Louisville plans to reverse racial segregation in schools, “and the mere incantation of terms like re-segregation and remediation cannot make up the difference.” Federal judges, he said, are “not social engineers” charged with creating plans to achieve racial equality.

As he wrote in his concurring opinion in Fisher, even if schools have the best intentions and justify lower standards for blacks seeking college admission in the name of reparations for past injury, “racial discrimination is never benign. . . . There can be no doubt that the University’s discrimination injures white and Asian applicants who are denied admission because of their race.”

This line of thinking has helped to rein in ambitious diversity and desegregation plans in K-12 schools as well as at universities. It has also made Justice Thomas the target of liberal derision. Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson once said he simply “doesn’t like black people” or “being black.” Nevada Sen. Harry Reid once dismissed him as one of “five white men” on the high court. Paradoxically, these bitter attacks are still more evidence that Clarence Thomas is now leading the national debate on race.

Mr. Williams is a political analyst for Fox News and a columnist for the Hill. He is the author of “Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary” (Times Books, Random House, 1998).

Minnesota Mythbusting : Blog : Foundation for Economic Education

Minnesota Mythbusting : Blog : Foundation for Economic Education

His heroic battle with facts continued last week in his column at the Huffington Post. This time he’s managed to single-handedly disprove “trickle-down economics,” a school of thought that doesn’t actually exist. In his words, “It’s official — trickle-down economics is bunk. Minnesota has proven it once and for all.”

Gibson attributes Minnesota’s recovery to three of Governor Dayton’s policies: raising the minimum wage, raising taxes on the wealthy, and guaranteeing equal pay for women. But these changes were all quite small, and none corresponded with the turnaround in Minnesota’s employment, suggesting that they could not have been the cause.

Considering that the federal minimum wage (which covers almost all hourly workers) is already at $7.25 per hour, a $0.75 increase in Minnesota’s minimum wage, applicable only to workers earning less than $8 an hour at businesses grossing more than $500,000 a year, isn’t exactly a radical move, nor would its effects be visible in raw employment data. Moreover, the minimum wage increase only went into effect in the summer of 2014, almost four years after Minnesota's job market began to recover.

Similarly, the Women’s Economic Security Act, which guarantees equal pay for women working for state contractors (not businesses in general) by certifying that they are in compliance with non-discrimination laws that already exist, wasn’t put into effect until May 2014.

And Dayton’s tax hike, which increased the top marginal tax rate by 2 percent? That didn’t occur until 2013, and it only increased state revenues by $1.1 billion (or 0.35% of Minnesota GDP).

In fact, all of the policies Gibson praises were implemented well after Minnesota started experiencing its impressive job growth, and they weren’t especially ambitious in the first place.

As for the supposed benefits of higher taxes, Gibson states that “even though Minnesota's top income tax rate is the 4th-highest in the country, it has the 5th-lowest unemployment rate in the country at 3.6 percent.” But this is the definition of a cherry-picked statistic. If you want to establish a correlation between top marginal tax rates and unemployment, you really have to use more than one data point and control for more than zero variables. (Speaking of cherry-picked statistics, among Midwestern states ranked by job creation from March 2013–2014, Minnesota ranked dead last).

In addition, an international study found that in industrialized countries, such as the United States, higher top marginal tax rates are associated with higher rates of unemployment. This suggests that higher top marginal tax rates may lead to less job creation than would otherwise occur.

Regarding the minimum wage, the empirical literature is mixed, but recent research by Jeffrey Clemens of the University of California raises some serious concerns. His analysis involved tracking thousands of real individuals across the country, comparing the experiences of low-skilled workers in states that increased their minimum wages to that of low-skilled workers in states that did not. Clemens and his co-author used a number of controls to ensure that their findings represented the actual effects of the minimum wage increase, rather than the effects of other variables. The results? Minimum wage increases had “significant, negative effects on the employment and income growth of targeted workers.”

Similarly, a study on economic freedom and income inequality in the states found that “reductions in both state minimum wages and tax burdens would be the most helpful in promoting higher levels, growth rates, and shares of income for the lowest quintile [that is, the poorest households].”

How Walmart Made Liberals Turn Right - Reason.com

How Walmart Made Liberals Turn Right - Reason.com

A couple of weeks ago Walmart announced it would raise hourly wages for half a million employees. The New York Times argued it should be forced to raise pay even further through an increase in the national minimum wage. After all, the paper said, there is “little doubt that Walmart (and other employers) would pay more if low wages were not, in effect, subsidized by taxpayers, who pay for the food stamps and other public assistance that low-wage workers rely on to get by.”

The Times was referring to a study, such as it was, purporting to show Walmart’s low wages cost taxpayers $6.2 billion in public assistance, including food stamps, Medicaid, and housing benefits. Other studies have purported to show similar things about the fast-food industry—which ostensibly costs the taxpayers $7 billion in social-welfare spending.

These tendentious claims have several shortcomings, such as loaded assumptions (PolitiFact has ruled a similar claim, by an MSNBC figure, “mostly false”) and the fact that a slightly smaller percentage of Walmart’s workforce receives public benefits than the average for the U.S. retail sector as a whole.

Imagine, too, what would happen if Walmart and fast-food restaurants went out of business tomorrow. Would other companies snap up all their employees, perhaps even pay them better? Probably not. (In fact, the increase in job applicants might depress wages elsewhere.) It is far more likely that the shutdowns would lead to higher unemployment and therefore even more social-welfare spending. Hence Walmart and other low-wage employers probably reduce the total amount of social-welfare spending in the U.S., rather than increase it.

But forget all that. Assume the company’s critics are right—that Walmart is leaning on public assistance to avoid pay hikes it otherwise would have to make. The criticism here isn’t simply an economic one. It’s also a moral one.

Greed, stinginess, lack of compassion—those qualities that supposedly produce Walmart’s low wages—are character flaws. Indeed, one of the groups criticizing Walmart’s pay scales is Americans for Tax Fairness—and fairness is a question of moral judgment. Another left-leaning group, Demos, lamented in a report on raising Walmart pay that “American workers are working harder for less” even as the rich get richer. Walmart, says The American Prospect, creates “an America where millions of people who get up and go to work each day are nevertheless paid too little to feed themselves.”

You get the idea: Walmart has a moral obligation to pay its workers more—and it would, if not for all the food stamps, housing assistance and medical benefits those workers receive from the federal government.

What is this but the conservative welfare critique applied to a different party? It’s not economic circumstances that have led to Walmart’s low wages, but moral shortcomings. Government assistance has lulled an able-bodied company into dependency and complacency, draining it of the will and the incentive to do the right thing for its workers.

The two arguments continue running in parallel. Conservatives argue that poor people would be better off in the long run if they took even menial jobs, and thereby started to develop the habits of character that are essential for anyone who wishes to prosper.

Liberals argue that Walmart and other low-wage companies would be better off if they paid workers more. As Demos argued two years ago: “Walmart . . . workers earn too little to generate the consumer demand that supports hiring and would lead to economic recovery. . . . If Walmart redirected its current spending to invest in its workforce, the benefits would extend to all stake-holders in the company—customers, stockholders, taxpayers, employees and their families—and the economy as a whole.”

Dear Ultra-Rich Man : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

Dear Ultra-Rich Man : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

You probably don’t know me, but unlike you, I am one of the 99 percent, a proud and unapologetic advocate of free and open markets. I’m writing you because your letter to other rich guys has gone viral. Each time I saw it, I thought, “Somebody should respond to this guy.” I got tired of waiting. So I hope you’ll read this. I leave your prose in italics so I can address your major points in turn.

Can We Know Right and Wrong Without God? | PJ Lifestyle

Can We Know Right and Wrong Without God? | PJ Lifestyle

Believers commonly assert that, without God, there can be no “objective right and wrong.” Yet, such an assertion ignores what it means to be objective. When we identify something as objective rather than subjective, we’re saying it can be observed in the real world. We’re saying it can be perceived, or conceived through reason applied to our perception. Even the most fervent believer must confess that God transcends our human perception, and therefore cannot be cited as a source of objective morality.

Believers offer our appeal to God as the source of “objective morality” in answer to such blatant subjectivism or moral relativism. Right and wrong can’t be left to whim, we argue. But our appeal to God doesn’t solve the problem.

Subjectivism – whether personal, social, or “supernatural” – wreaks havoc on human life and happiness. Until we can answer it with (genuine) moral certainty – that is, until we can show that morality is based on facts – it will continue to do so. From muggings and rapes, to school shootings and truck bombings, to concentration camps and gulags, to religious “inquisitions” and divinely inspired acts of terrorism – all such mayhem is caused by subjectivism. And the is-ought dichotomy is what makes subjectivism seem plausible.

The “Is-Ought” Dichotomy

This “is-ought dichotomy” is the philosophical dead end in which believers spar with secular subjectivists. Our culture has given up on the task of discovering a truly objective morality, because we have largely bought into the notion that values cannot be derived from facts, that we cannot discern an “ought” from an “is.”

The Natural World Provides Guideposts for Appropriate Human Action

The primary such guidepost is a standard of value from which to judge the appropriateness of all other conceived values, an end unto itself which all other ends support.

An end is a goal toward which one acts; a means is the action one takes toward a goal. For instance, if a student studies in order to get an education, the education is an end toward which his studying is the means. Likewise, if a person works in order to earn a paycheck, the paycheck is an end toward which his work is the means. But notice that such goals are not ends in themselves. A student gets an education so that he can pursue a career – which he pursues in order to support himself and earn a paycheck – which he earns in order to buy things – which he buys in order to use for various other purposes – which he pursues in order to accomplish still other goals – and so on. Each end presupposes another. So where does it all end?

If we are to establish an objective, fact-based morality, we need to discover a final end – one toward which all of our other goals and values are properly aimed. Such an end is by that fact our standard of moral value – the standard against which we can objectively assess the value of all our choices and actions. So the question becomes: What is our ultimate goal?

When we identify this ultimate goal, the question of what we ought to do becomes objectively answerable. That, and only that, is how we discern an objective morality.

As this series continues, we will present and evaluate this objective standard of value. Biddle offers it as an alternative to religion. But one need not be an atheist to accept it. Indeed, the discovery of an objective standard for moral action should embolden the believer and deepen our appreciation of God.

As a father, I may answer any challenge from my son with the proverbial “because I told you so.” In doing so, I don’t offer an actual reason. I merely assert my authority. While that authority proves legitimate, my ultimate desire for my son is that he one day understand why my instruction and rules serve his interest.

Similarly, the appeal to God as a moral authority may prove correct, but says nothing of why his prescriptions are good for us. A consideration of objective morality works to bridge that gap.

Bring Back the Bush Doctrine—with One Addition

Bring Back the Bush Doctrine—with One Addition

It is often said that we lack a strategy for defeating our enemies. Actually, we have had a strategy for 14 years, ever since the fleeting moment of clarity right after the 9/11 attacks.

That strategy is called the Bush Doctrine, and it remains the only one that has any chance of working . . . at least if we add a small but crucial addendum — one that should have been obvious enough back in 2001, and that hard lessons of history have now made inescapable.

The Bush Doctrine has become the source of copious rebuke. On the left, that’s because of that four-letter word (hint: It’s not “Doctrine”). On the right, there have been plenty of catcalls, too. The reaction, however, has been against what the Bush Doctrine evolved into, not against the Bush Doctrine as it was first announced. The unadorned Bush Doctrine had two straightforward parts. First, because violent jihadists launch attacks against the United States when they have safe havens from which to plot and train, we must hunt down those terrorists wherever on earth they operate. Second, the nations of the world must be put to a choice: You are with us or you are with the terrorists. Period — no middle ground. If you are with the terrorists, you will be regarded, as they are regarded, as an enemy of the United States.

....

The Bush Doctrine, by contrast, is the path to victory — if we get that one addendum right.

It is this: Our enemies are not driven by American foreign policy, our friendship with Israel, our detention of jihadists at Gitmo, or the supposed “arrogance” our current president likes to apologize for. Those are all pretexts for aggression.

Our enemies are driven by an ideology, Islamic supremacism, that is rooted in a classical interpretation of sharia — Islamic law. Islamic supremacism is rabidly anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Semitic. It rejects the fundamental premise of our liberty: that people are free to govern themselves, rather than be ruled by a totalitarian legal code that suffocates liberty and brutally discriminates against non-Muslims and apostates. And sharia is an actual war on women — denying them equal rights under the law, subjecting them to unthinkable abuse, and reducing them in many ways to chattel.

In the “you are with us or you are with the terrorists” view of national security, any Muslim nation, organization, or individual that adheres to Islamic supremacism is on the wrong side. Failing to come to terms with that brute fact is where the Bush Doctrine went awry.

Sharia and Western democracy cannot coexist. They are antithetical to each other. So insists Sheikh Yussuf Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood jurist who is the world’s most influential Islamic scholar. It may be the only thing we should agree with him about.

Good Economists, Bad Economists, and Walmart : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

Good Economists, Bad Economists, and Walmart : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

Mike Rowe’s Response to Facebook Comments on Walmart Commercial Voiceover « Profoundly Disconnected

Mike Rowe’s Response to Facebook Comments on Walmart Commercial Voiceover « Profoundly Disconnected

Walmart is one of the reasons a lot of manufacturing was lost in the United States. The vast majority of merchandise Walmart sells in the U.S. is manufactured abroad. The company searches the world for the cheapest goods possible, and this means buying from low-wage factories overseas. Walmart boasts of direct relationships with nearly 20,000 Chinese suppliers, and purchased $27 billion worth of Chinese-made goods in 2006. According to the Economic Policy Institute, Walmart’s trade with China alone eliminated 133,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs between 2001 and 2006 and accounted for 11.2 percent of the nation’s total job loss due to trade. With $419 billion in annual net sales, Walmart’s market power is so immense that blah, blah, blah…”

Forgive me Sean, but I’ve replaced the rest of your rant with “blah blah blah” because it appears to have been cut and pasted word for word from a political site dedicated to destroying Walmart. And also because reactions like yours are the reason our country is paralyzed. You’re like the diehard conservatives who freaked out because I sat too close to Bill Maher, and the diehard liberals that got all bent when I got too close to Glenn Beck. You’re stuck in your own narrative.

Step back for a minute. Look at what’s happening here. Walmart has just promised to do something you claim to want them to do. How do you react? Do you encourage them? Do you support them? No. You hold fast to the the party line. You lash out. Our country is falling apart around us, and you criticize me. For what? For doing a voiceover on a commercial that celebrates the dignity of hard work? I realize you’d prefer it if Costco was pushing this campaign forward, but guess what – they’re not.

But, maybe they will? Maybe they’ll all get on board? Target, Best Buy, Kohl’s, Macy’s, Dollar General, Home Depot, Lowe’s…maybe they’ll all make similar commitments to American manufacturing? And maybe Americans will finally make it easy by demanding and buying more American made products. So far – that hasn’t happened. Maybe Walmart will break the logjam. Someone has to at least try, don’t you think?

Seriously Sean, do you and all the other detractors really want to see this campaign fail because it’s coming from a retailer whose policies you don’t approve of? Do us all a favor – try to get over it. Try to get over your disappointment with me. Try to get over your disappointment with Walmart. Try to get past your issues with the messenger, and take another look at the message…

This is what media bias looks like « Hot Air

This is what media bias looks like « Hot Air

NYT: CIA bought, destroyed undeclared Iraqi chemical weapons demanded by UN « Hot Air

NYT: CIA bought, destroyed undeclared Iraqi chemical weapons demanded by UN « Hot Air

If the WMD existed in Iraq, what happened to it? Many suspected that it got transferred to Syria prior to the 2003 invasion, but the New York Times reports today that the CIA actually did find at least some of the suspected and undeclared caches of chemical weapons — and destroyed them:

The Central Intelligence Agency, working with American troops during the occupation of Iraq, repeatedly purchased nerve-agent rockets from a secretive Iraqi seller, part of a previously undisclosed effort to ensure that old chemical weapons remaining in Iraq did not fall into the hands of terrorists or militant groups, according to current and former American officials.

The extraordinary arms purchase plan, known as Operation Avarice, began in 2005 and continued into 2006, and the American military deemed it a nonproliferation success. It led to the United States’ acquiring and destroying at least 400 Borak rockets, one of the internationally condemned chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government manufactured in the 1980s but that were not accounted for by United Nations inspections mandated after the 1991 Persian Gulf war. …

In confidential declarations in the 1990s to the United Nations, Iraq gave shifting production numbers, up to 18,500. It also claimed to have destroyed its remaining stock before international inspectors arrived after the Persian Gulf war. …

The handoffs varied in size, including one of more than 150 warheads. American ordnance disposal technicians promptly destroyed most of them by detonation, the officials said, but some were taken to Camp Slayer, by Baghdad’s airport, for further testing.

This is the first time that there has been any media reporting on finds specific to the disputed munitions that Hussein refused to acknowledge. It sounds as though there were a large quantity of Borak rockets eventually procured, too, not just a few leftovers that might have been innocently overlooked by the previous dictatorship in Iraq. C.J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt also report that these were not the kind of exhausted and expired chemical weapons that the UN had been storing, but still potent enough to alarm the US when they were discovered.

Why this was kept quiet was anyone’s guess, but the secret was tightly held. Perhaps the CIA and Pentagon wanted to keep it under wraps so that they could quietly buy as many of the weapons off the black market as they could, without tipping their hand to the insurgency. That might have been good strategy, but the Pentagon kept it so quiet that it never told veterans serving in Iraq or the VA physicians that treated them later about the possibility that they had contact with chemical weapons from any source. It seems unlikely that the insurgents didn’t get their hands on any of the Boraks — and it’s not entirely clear that the US got them all, either.

The High Cost of Energy Illiteracy | Power Line

The High Cost of Energy Illiteracy | Power Line

“Energy romanticism” is perhaps the single greatest intellectual failing of environmentalists—the dreamy view that we can generate 95 quads of energy with puppy dog treadmills, unicorn flopsweat, and of course their beloved wind and solar. (Of course, most enviros say “What’s a ‘quad’?” when I ask for even a cursory inventory of energy sources that would supply America’s annual energy use.)

At the base of this is near total illiteracy about energy. The latest example is the giddy celebration that Burlington, Vermont, has become carbon neutral! And if a New England hippie town of 50,000 can do it, then surely Cleveland can do it too, no?

Take the PBS headline: “Burlington Is First U.S. City to Hit 100 Percent Renewable Energy.” 100 percent renewable energy? So everyone in Burlington has quit driving cars? Did every Ben & Jerry’s-eating yuppie in town sell their gas-fired Viking and Wolf kitchen ranges and gas-fired home furnaces? Are they getting all their groceries and other goods delivered to town by horse-drawn carts instead of trucks? (I guess it is hard to be bothered with the distinction between electricity and energy. And factoring indirect energy use is apparently challenging, too.)

But then the complete PBS report lets out this little detail: “the biggest portion of the city’s renewable production comes from hydropower…”

Ah yes—hydropower: the one form of carbon-free electricity production that environmentalists strenuously oppose as much as nuclear power. Most state “renewable portfolio standards” (RPS) specifically exclude hydropower from the menu of energy options that states can use to meet the mandate. By my rough estimate, it would require something like 1,000 to 2,000 new dams to replace just our current coal-fired electricity production. And there is only one significant dam proposed in the U.S. right now that I am aware of—on the Yukon River in Alaska. All of the usual suspects oppose that dam, naturally. In other words, policy in most states makes it impossible for other locations to imitate Burlington.

In fact, in Colorado right now there is a bill in the legislature to remove the barriers to counting hydropower toward the state’s RPS targets. Naturally, “clean energy” advocates are opposed:

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) categorizes hydroelectricity as clean, renewable energy, and the Colorado Energy Office (CEO) determined that it produces air emissions on par with wind and solar. There is no justifiable environmental reason to keep these restrictions in place.

It may then come as a surprise that there are clean energy supporters who are actively fighting against this bill. Conservation Colorado, the Colorado Cleantech Industries Association, and the Distributed Wind Energy Association are all opposing the inclusion of hydroelectricity as a renewable energy resource despite the EPA’s evaluation.

The Case Against the Case Against the Crusades - NYTimes.com

The Case Against the Case Against the Crusades - NYTimes.com

The existence of this debate is clearly very strange to many liberal and secular writers, and no doubt seems strange to the president himself; I suspect he thought that a Crusades reference would have been the most uncontroversial of his historical analogies. And in fairness to Obama, stripped of context his specific words should be uncontroversial: “During the Crusades,” he said, “people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” and there is no question that such terrible deeds were committed, in many places and with many innocent victims (Jewish especially as well as Muslim and Orthodox Christian), across the four or five or six centuries (depending on whether you include the later Holy Leagues) in which crusades were officially undertaken or attempted.

But the context matters, and his juxtaposition of the Crusades with institutions that are regarded as comprehensively evil in our culture prompted a wave of writing from Christians justifying those campaigns as essentially “defensive” in intent and therefore justified conflicts. And that, in turn, prompted a lot “you must be joking” responses from liberal journalists — like this one from Will Saletan, which I’ll quote:

“All the Crusades met the criteria of just wars,” says a quote circulated by the Catholic League, conservative news sites, and Tea Party forums. Bill Donohue, the league’s president, asserts: “The Crusades were a defensive Christian reaction against Muslim madmen.” Giuliani, Jonah Goldberg, and Joe Scarborough agree. E.W. Jackson, the 2013 Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia, defends the Crusades as “a response to Islamic aggression.” Erick Erickson, the editor-in-chief of RedState.com, says they were merely “a response to Islamic invasion.”

As for the awkward gap between the Muslim aggression and the so-called defensive reaction—about four centuries—today’s apologists plead that the Crusades were a “delayed response.” Donohue blames the whole thing on Muslims: “They’re the ones who created the war.” In fact, according to the apologists, the Crusaders were liberators. They were trying “to free the holy places of Christendom.”

Clearly lot of the people Saletan is quoting are being apologists, sometimes with a side of bigotry, rather than historians. But the reality is that many of their apologias are still closer to the historical reality than his snideness about the alleged “awkward gap” between Islamic aggression and Christian crusading. Like all complicated historical events, the Crusades were hardly monocausal, and historians will be arguing about the whys and wherefores in the same way that they’ll always argue about the causes of the last century’s global conflicts. But the first Crusade was not summoned, as Saletan implies, in a world where the Islamic empires and Christian Europe had been enjoying a comfortable four-hundred year peace after the original fall of Jerusalem to Muslim armies. Instead the actual context included 1) the gradual rolling back of prior Muslim conquests in Spain and Southern Italy (Saracen raiders had threatened Rome in the 10th century, and the Emirate of Sicily only fell to the Normans five years before Pope Urban II called the First Crusade), 2) the disastrous Byzantine defeat at Manzikert in 1071, at the hands of the Seljuk Turks, which ended with the emperor in chains and prompted Constantinople to call for military assistance from the West, and 3) the Seljuk occupation of Palestine (displacing the Fatimid Caliphate), which visited persecution and pillage on the Holy Land’s remaining Christians and made pilgrimage much more difficult than it had been under some (though not all) of the Fatimid rulers.

The context also included many other factors internal to Western Christendom, which is why historians have wrangled endlessly over the motivations of Urban and others, and over how much explanatory weight to give to geopolitical issues related to Islam versus other goals (increasing papal power, channeling intra-Christian violence elsewhere, forcing a reunion with Orthodoxy, etc.). But the broad story of the era and the movement can’t be explained without a recognition that the context of the crusades, from the 11th century beginning to the echoes at Lepanto and Vienna centuries later, always included 1) ongoing conflict between Islamic and Christian forces in territory that had been Christian before an earlier wave of Muslim conquest and 2) the emergence of new Islamic powers, first Seljuk and then Ottoman, whose advances threatened first Byzantium and then, after its fall, the Balkans, the Christian Mediterranean and eventually Central Europe. One can argue back and forth over whether this or that crusade met “just war” criteria, but none of them sprang de novo from a world of stable borders and religious peace, and all of them were part of a longer story of attack and counterattack in which both sides were playing for potentially-existential stakes.

Which makes a comparison between the Crusades as a historical phenomenon and various specific institutions — the sort of comparison in which “Crusaders” get casually likened to “slave owners”, for instance — seem, well, not even wrong: It’s just a category error, like putting “Franco-British conflict from the 14th through the 19th century” on the same list of great historical wrongs as South African apartheid, and then when challenged invoking Henry V at Rouen and the Vendee to “prove” your point.

Legislative and Oversight Accomplishments of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform | Committee on Oversight & Government Reform

Legislative and Oversight Accomplishments of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform | Committee on Oversight & Government Reform

For instance, in the IRS targeting scandal, the Committee reviewed millions of pages of documents from the IRS, Treasury Department, and other agencies and conducted 52 transcribed interviews that amounted to 309 hours of testimony (p. 69). The Committee’s investigation found that 80 percent of the delayed requests for tax-exempt status were for conservative non-profit groups, and that not a single “Tea Party” group was approved by the IRS between February 2010 and May 2013.

Full report compressed (document p 69)

Since IRS’s first admission of wrongdoing, the Committee has conducted an exhaustive investigation of the IRS’s targeting. The Committee reviewed over a million pages of documents from the IRS, the Treasury Department, the Justice Department, the Federal Election Commission, the IRS Oversight Board, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, and other custodians. The Committee conducted 52 transcribed interviews, totaling 309 hours of testimony. Despite noncooperation from the Administration and the destruction of a sizeable number of emails from Lois Lerner, the investigation presented clear findings. A review of public information showed that while more than 80 percent of delayed applications were associated with conservative groups, less than seven percent were associated with progressive or liberal agendas.316 Between February 2010 and May 2013, not a single group identifying itself as “Tea Party” was approved by the IRS.³¹⁷

POLITICAL PRESSURE ON THE IRS TO “FIX THE PROBLEM” During his State of the Union Address in January 2010, President Obama delivered a stunning rebuke of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. “With all due deference to separation of powers,” the President intoned, “last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections.”330

Over the next ten months, in the lead-up to the 2010 midterm election, the President, members of his Administration, and allies in Congress carried out an orchestrated effort to discourage political speech by conservative nonprofit groups in an effort to fix the Citizens United decision. On the campaign trail, the President called conservative groups “shadowy” entities with “innocuous” and “benign-sounding” names that in reality “are running millions of dollars of attack ads against Democratic candidates.”331 Calling them “phony” and “front groups,” the President urged a “fix” to the Citizens United decision, which he believed allowed these allegedly nefarious groups to “pose” as nonprofits.332 The President’s allies in Congress and elsewhere echoed this call, working aggressively to delegitimize the Court’s decision and the Constitutional protections for nonprofit political speech.333 Senator Jeff Merkley urged action “so that no longer do you have a shadowy front group,”334 and Senator Charles Schumer similarly complained that “the public is under siege by advertising from shadowy special interest groups.”335

This rhetorical assault on the legitimacy of tax-exempt groups engaged in political speech was felt by the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division. As the President’s public statements generated media attention, the IRS identified a Tea Party group applying for tax-exempt status as a “potentially politically embarrassing case.”336 Due to media attention, the IRS’s Washington office ordered the application to be elevated to Washington.337 The attention on media continued through the fall. In response to a tax-law journal article in September 2010,338 Lerner initiated a “c4 project” to assess the political activity of certain nonprofits in wake of Citizens United.339 She told her subordinates: “We need to have a plan. We need to be cautious so it isn’t a per se political project. More a c4 project that will look at levels of lobbying and pol. activity along with exempt activity.”340

The Minimum Wage and Magical Thinking

The Minimum Wage and Magical Thinking

If all other factors remain equal, the higher the price of a good, the less people will demand it. That's the law of demand, a fundamental idea in economics. And yet there is no shortage of politicians, pundits, policy wonks, and members of the public who insist that raising the price of labor will not have the effect of lessening the demand for workers. In his 2014 State of the Union Address, for example, President Barack Obama called on Congress to raise the national minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour. He argued that increasing the minimum wage would "grow the economy for everyone" by giving "businesses customers with more spending money."

A January 2015 working paper by two economists, Robert Pollin and Jeanette Wicks-Lim at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, claims that raising the minimum wage of fast food workers to $15 per hour over a four-year transition period would not necessarily result in "shedding jobs." The two acknowledge that the "raising the price of anything will reduce demand for that thing, all else equal." But they believe they've found a way to "relax" the all-else-being-equal part, at least as far as the wages of fast food workers go. Pollin and Wicks-Lim argue that "the fast-food industry could fully absorb these wage bill increases through a combination of turnover reductions; trend increases in sales growth; and modest annual price increases over the four-year period." They further claim that a $15/hour minimum wage would not result in lower profits or the reallocation of funds away from other operations, such as marketing. Amazing.

Pollin and Wicks-Lim calculate that doubling the minimum wage for 2.5 million fast food workers would cost the industry an additional $33 billion annually. They further calculate that reduced turnover will lower costs by $5.2 billion annually and that three years of sales growth at 2.5 percent per year and price hikes at 3 percent per year will yield $30 billion in extra revenues.

Let's consider turnover first. Pollin and Wicks-Lim claim that an increased minimum wage will substantially reduce the costs of employee turnover, saving money that can now go to pay higher wages. The two fail to grapple with, much less refute, a devastating response to this idea from no less a liberal than the Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. In his review of Pollin's 1998 book The Living Wage, Krugman wrote: "The obvious economist's reply is, if paying higher wages is such a good idea, why aren't companies doing it voluntarily?" (That question goes unaddressed in the current study.) Krugman continues, "But in any case there is a fundamental flaw in the argument: Surely the benefits of low turnover and high morale in your work force come not from paying a high wage, but from paying a high wage 'compared with other companies'—and that is precisely what mandating an increase in the minimum wage for all companies cannot accomplish." So scratch $5.2 billion.

What about Pollin and Wicks-Lim's sales growth projections? Well, sales don't always grow. McDonalds reported a sales decrease of one percent in 2014. Some analysts think that fast food sales may have peaked in the United States.

When should voters defer to the views of scientists? - The Washington Post

When should voters defer to the views of scientists? - The Washington Post

I. The Case for Deferring to Scientists.

This raises the question of whether voters should defer to majority scientific opinion on these issues. Given my research on political ignorance, it is tempting for me to conclude that the answer is almost always “yes.” The majority of the public is often ignorant about basic facts about government and politics, and their scientific knowledge is also far from impressive. You don’t have to believe that scientists are always right about scientific issues to conclude that they are on average more likely to be right than generally ignorant voters are. To the extent that this is true, an electorate that defers to majority scientific opinion on these issues would make fewer mistakes than one that does not, even though neither would be completely error free.

The above reasoning has some merit. But it is important to avoid conflating two different kinds of “scientific” issues. Some of the questions addressed in the Pew survey are almost purely technical questions. For example, the issue of whether GMO foods or foods treated with pesticides are safe, or the issue of whether human activity is the main cause of climate change. On these sorts of technical matters, scientists are indeed likely to know much more than most ordinary people, and there is a good case for deferring to them. But some seemingly scientific policy issues actually include major nontechnical components on which scientists are not likely to have specialized knowledge.

II. The Limits of Scientific Expertise.

Some of the questions raised in the Pew study are actually mixed questions of scientific facts and moral values. For example, the issue of whether animals should be used in scientific research partly depends on the scientific benefits using them; a question on which scientists have special expertise. But it also depends on the moral status of the animals in question, and whether it is ethically permissible to inflict certain types of harm on them. On that latter issue, scientists have no special knowledge. If there is a group of experts that does, it is likely to be moral philosophers and political theorists; and these groups are – on average – more sympathetic to animal rights arguments than the general public is.

Other issues on the survey raise questions of political economy rather than pure science. For example, many more scientists (82 percent) than ordinary people (59 percent) believe that growing population will be a “major” problem in the future. Whether it will be or not depends largely on whether the possible costs of population growth (e.g. – environmental externalities) will outweigh the benefits, such as increased innovation and a greater division of labor. On these latter questions, economists are likely to be more expert than natural scientists are, and economists tend to be much more skeptical of Malthusian arguments than either natural scientists or the general population. They like to point out that Malthusian predictions have proven wrong for some two hundred years, which does not prove that they will always be wrong, but does suggest reason for imposing a high burden of proof on them.

In sum, it makes good sense to defer to the views of experts on areas that are actually within their expertise. But not on questions that may seem related, but actually are distinct. Telling the difference isn’t always easy. Here, as elsewhere, being a responsible, well-informed voter turns out to be a lot harder than we might think.