This is the era in which we are all being drafted in the Culture War. It doesn’t matter if you’re secular or religious, political or apolitical, frat boys or geeks, hipsters or bros. Nobody gets to be neutral or sit on the sidelines, because we’ll all be expected to make our obeisance to the latest politically correct opinion handed down to us by a Twitter mob.
By now, we know the basic ingredients of a typical skirmish in Culture War 4.0. It goes something like this: a) a leftist claque starts loudly pushing the “correct” Culture War position onto b) a field previously considered fun, innocuous, apolitical, purely personal, or recreational, and c) accusing anyone who opposes them of being a racist, sexist, bigot who relies on oppressive “privilege” to push everyone else down, while these claims are d) backed up by a biased press that swallows the line of attack uncritically and repeats it.
Any of that sound familiar? It’s just daily life for anyone on the Right, and it’s slowly becoming daily life for everybody else. Ask Comet Guy.
The innocuous field in which the personal is suddenly discovered to be very political might be fashion, music, toys, sports, or sex, not to mention weddings, flowers, cake‐baking, and pizza.
Or video games. Or science fiction.
Which explains the latest, wide new front of the Great Social Justice War: Gamergate*, and the battle over the Hugo Awards, a prestigious annual fiction award for science fiction and fantasy writers.
Hugo nominations are not made by a cloistered group of experts. They are voted on by anyone who becomes a “supporting or attending member” of the World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon. This has usually meant that the voting is limited to a small pool of a few thousand die‐hard science fiction fans. But in practice it means that anyone willing to shell out $40 can cast a ballot.
Science fiction has always been a fertile arena for exploration of big ideas—much more so, these days, than highbrow “literary” fiction. The use of fantastical science fiction premises allows authors to project a future in which everything is done differently, or in which human nature itself has been altered, and this leads them to ask questions about what is really natural, necessary, or essential to human life and what is merely conventional, artificial, and unnecessary. It has been remarked that “big‐idea novels are more likely to have an embossed foil dragon on the cover than a Booker Prize badge.”
Clearly, all of this freewheeling exploration of ideas has got to stop. So in marched the Social Justice Warriors, a term adopted in the Gamergate controversy to describe the kind of politically correct busybodies who decide that the output of every field has to be remade to promote the proper, “progressive” social agenda—or else.
A few years back, conservative science‐fiction author Larry Correia noticed that left‐leaning participants at Worldcon were engaged in a whispering campaign against one of his nominated books because of his political views. Many of them had not even read his novels. They opposed him, not because of the quality of his work, but because of who he was. In effect, the Left was enforcing a blacklist in which no right‐leaning science fiction writer can be allowed to win awards.
All of which sounds drearily familiar. Believe me, when you’re in my line of work, you don’t expect to win any of the mainstream awards, either. They just don’t give those things to people like us. It’s a part of our professional life that most writers on the right have just given up on. And maybe we shouldn’t have.
To counteract the voting bias, Correia organized a campaign called “Sad Puppies”—because, he explains, “boring message fiction is the leading cause of Puppy Related Sadness.” Which gives you a small sampling of the kind of goofy, irreverent humor with which the campaign has been conducted. The idea was simply to suggest a slate of authors Correia thought were likely to be overlooked or slighted because of their views—and to counteract that effect by lobbying in their favor.
His goal wasn’t even to win, but just to bring attention to the issue. Here is how he described it:
1. I said a chunk of the Hugo voters are biased toward the left, and put the author’s politics far ahead of the quality of the work. Those openly on the right are sabotaged. This was denied.The goal was simply to bring the leftist bias out into open view.
2. So I got some right wingers on the ballot.
3. The biased voters immediately got all outraged and mobilized to do exactly what I said they’d do.
4. Point made.
But then things got out of hand. This year, the Sad Puppies campaign (and a related slate of recommendations called Rabid Puppies) swept the field. The response was a total meltdown among the leftist elites who had assumed, in previous years, that they (and their favorite publisher, Tor) basically owned the Hugos. So they did what the Left always does: they smeared everyone who disagrees with them as racists.
Correia notes that on April 6, eight different news sites, from Entertainment Weekly to The Guardian, all published suspiciously similar hit pieces describing the Sad Puppies campaign and its organizers as racist and misogynist. Clearly, someone was feeding these sites the new official narrative, and they all swallowed it without any attempt at basic research. So for example, the original version of the Entertainment Weekly piece claimed:
The Hugo Awards have fallen victim to a campaign in which misogynist groups lobbied to nominate only white males for the science fiction book awards. These groups, Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies (both of which are affiliated with last year’s GamerGate scandal), urged sci‐fi fans to become members of the Hugo Awards’ voting body, World Science Fiction Convention, in order to cast votes against female writers and writers of color.But the article had to be repeatedly corrected, adding this humiliating admission:
After misinterpreting reports in other news publications, EW published an unfair and inaccurate depiction of the Sad Puppies voting slate, which does, in fact, include many women and writers of color. As Sad Puppies’ Brad Torgerson explained to EW, the slate includes both women and non‐caucasian writers, including Rajnar Vajra, Larry Correia, Annie Bellet, Kary English, Toni Weisskopf, Ann Sowards, Megan Gray, Sheila Gilbert, Jennifer Brozek, Cedar Sanderson, and Amanda Green.As the sardonic saying goes: “Other than that, the story was accurate.” Obviously, the “correction” guts the central point of the whole piece, and what is really required is a wholesale retraction. And more: any journalistic entity worthy of the name would decide that the real story is, who is smearing Sad Puppies as racist, and why?
(Brad Torgerson, by the way, posted his own moving refutation, leading with a photo of himself with his black wife and mixed‐race daughter.)
The other thing we’ve come to expect from the Social Justice Warriors is a bitter, dismissive hatred for the fans of their own field, who stubbornly refuse to be reformed by their betters. A rant from “progressive” writer Philip Sandifer, echoing last year’s proclamation that “Gamers Are Dead,” declared “The Day Fandom Ended.”
Sandifer argued for “the moral duty of progressive voices to form a blocking majority, and to loudly admit that fandom as it stands is broken, and that any work proclaimed to be the best of the year by a fandom this broken is demeaned by the association.” So he advocates that “progressives” should buy their way into the final ballot and vote for “No Award Given” in every category. “The 2015 Hugos should simply be blank.”
In other news, he’s going to take his ball and go home.
Not to be outdone, “Jeopardy Jerk“ Arthur Chu decided to live down to his epithet by denouncing “democracy” as such. It’s like Stalin said: the problem with elections is that you never know ahead of time who’s going to win.
To be sure, it is possible some of the Sad Puppies nominees won because of their right-leaning politics rather than their quality. And it also appears that the proprietor of the competing slate, Rabid Puppies, has said a few genuinely objectionable things. But the science-fiction establishment might want to take a moment to ask how they have so alienated their core audience as to provoke this kind of mass protest vote. Than again, forget I said that. “Progressives” never ask that question. Inherent in leftism is the notion that we all must be guided by a small elite, a revolutionary vanguard, and that if we resist our indoctrination, it is necessary to dissolve the people and elect another.
From our perspective as draftees in the new Culture War, the 2015 Hugo Awards lay out the pattern for a successful counter-attack. Sad Puppies and its sympathizers have discovered how to use the Internet effectively as a tool to mobilize the “silent majority.” They have managed to wrest control of an existing institutions from an entrenched establishment—roughly the equivalent, say, of getting Binyamin Netanyahu nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Above all else, both Gamergate and Sad Puppies are managing to mobilize people who were previously unengaged with politics, or who come from the center-left but are disillusioned after being hectored by a holier-than-thou claque of super-radicals.
In short, this is the one area where our side is winning the Culture War and making some headway at beating back the left’s politicization of every aspect of life.
*Correction: This article originally referred to the 2015 Hugos controversy as an “outgrowth” of Gamergate, which was strongly implied by some of the sources I’ve read. I have since heard from people who are connected to or knowledgeable about the Sad Puppies campaign, who tell me that the two events are independent and there is less overlap than I had assumed between gamers and sci-fi fans. So I removed that description.—RWT
Saturday, April 11, 2015
The Hugo Awards: How to Fight Back in the Culture War
The Hugo Awards: How to Fight Back in the Culture War
Patterico's Pontifications » Yes, Sally Kohn, Laws Are Coercive
Patterico's Pontifications » Yes, Sally Kohn, Laws Are Coercive
Who knew?
Who knew?
Some readers may remember Sally Kohn from such articles as “I’m gay. And I want my kid to be gay too.” Kohn’s latest Dispensed Wisdom is an argument that, hey, government’s not forcing you to cater a gay wedding with your pizza, because you don’t have to sell pizza:
This issue of government force is a funny one. You could also argue that the government is forcing you to drive below the speed limit or wear a seatbelt in your car. But it’s not. There isn’t a police officer holding a gun to your head literally forcing you to buckle up. In fact, you are 100 percent free to speed and not wear your seatbelt—and simply deal with the consequences if you’re pulled over. Is the threat of the fine for breaking the law amount to “forcing” you to follow the law? No.
And more to the point, the government certainly isn’t forcing you to drive. If you don’t like the speed limit and seatbelt rules, and don’t want to be subject to the consequences of breaking them, then you can not drive. Whether to drive or not is your choice.
This all seems simple when we talk about driving, but somehow a fringe set of rightwing conservatives want us all to believe that hapless business owners are somehow being forced, against their will, to serve pizza to gay people. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you don’t want to serve pizza to gay people, by all means, don’t—which, by the way, is legal in Indiana and 28 other states, but even where it is illegal, you’re still free to do so and deal with the consequences of breaking the law. That, pizza shop owner, is your choice. And if you don’t want to deal with those consequences, well, no one is forcing you to be in the pizza business. You’re free to do something else.
. . . .
Don’t like following the laws that apply to businesses—including serving all customers equally? Then don’t start a business. That’s your choice.
Yes, I suppose that you could say that people don’t “have” to drive, or sell pizza. By the same logic, people don’t “have” to have sex. So I guess that means that if government wanted to pass laws mandating that any sex be heterosexual, then by Kohn’s logic, that wouldn’t be “forcing” people to have heterosexual sex.
In other words: Don’t like laws that apply to everyone having sex? Then don’t have sex. That’s your “choice.”
Right, Ms. Kohn?
But even if you could mount an argument that such laws would not “force” homosexuals to have heterosexual sex, it’s more difficult to argue that these examples do not involve government coercion. Even if you’re not literally “forced” into the behavior government demands, you are indeed being coerced into either a) performing that behavior, or b) giving up a major life function.
Kohn doesn’t seem to understand that labeling coercive action as coercive (or even as “force”) does not necessarily make that action wrong. Government “forces” those who drive to drive on the correct side of the road, and that is a proper function of government. Rather than make lame arguments that coercive action isn’t coercive, the honest approach is to recognize coercion for what it is, and defend it . . . if you can.
Kohn is busy digging deeper holes on Twitter, and exposing herself further as someone who can’t hold her own in logical debate. For example, she dismisses the example of sodomy laws I give above, which has been raised by many people, with the following “logic”:
But the cherry on top of this delicious hypocrisy sundae comes courtesy of Sean Davis, who sent me a link to Kohn’s article on the Hobby Lobby decision. You’ll never guess what she said there (OK, actually, you will). Namely, she said that conservatives were trying to “force” their religious beliefs on America.
To put it mildly, our forbearers would be appalled by how right-wing conservatives are trying to use government to force their religious views on all of us.
We’ll place to one side, for the time being, the question: “What the hell is a forbearer?” To put it mildly, our forebears would be appalled at seeing their language mangled like this. But they would also be amused, as I am, by the inconsistency of Kohn’s “laws don’t force people to do stuff!” argument, as contrasted with her Hobby Lobby position.
Ms. Kohn: you don’t like religious freedom laws that apply to Hobby Lobby and other similar closely held corporations? Don’t work for said closely held corporations. That’s your “choice.” Where’s the “force”?
In the end, the Hobby Lobby decision isn’t actually coercive because there is plenty of freedom to work for companies that are not closely held corporations run by highly religious people. By contrast, your life is severely restricted if are told you can’t drive, or engage in your chosen occupation, or even engage in sexual activity. So governmental restrictions on such activities should be absolutely necessary — because they are inherently coercive.
Ultimately, all government laws are coercive, because resistance always ends up with men coming to your door and pointing guns at you. Keeping this precept in the forefront of the minds of the citizenry is critical, because it helps focus our attention on the fact that passing laws is serious business. Laws and government should protect the public. They should not be used for much else. Certainly, laws should not be used to force you to make me a sandwich. Although I would like a sandwich.
Friday, April 10, 2015
Sally Kohn Doesn't Understand How Laws Work
Sally Kohn Doesn't Understand How Laws Work
Governments pass laws to change behavior. Sometimes government uses carrots — engage in this particular activity we like and you’ll be rewarded with subsidies. And sometimes government uses sticks — engage in this particular activity we don’t like, and you will be punished.
Kohn appears to grasp that last part. After all, she specifically wrote that if you don’t follow a law, you might have to “suffer the consequences.” Unfortunately, she doesn’t expend any mental energy following that logic all the way through. In the absence of force, how are any consequences possible? Who has been sanctioned by government to impose this suffering?
Americans don’t pay taxes out of the goodness of their hearts. They pay taxes to avoid force in the form of government fines or levies. We don’t generally drive the speed limit because it’s fun to go slow. We do it to avoid fines and arrest, an act which requires literal physical force. Martin Luther King, Jr. didn’t end up in a Birmingham jail cell because he longed for the quaint, cozy confines of prison. He ended up in that cell because police forced him into it for the crime of peacefully protesting segregation. That’s how laws — even vile ones like those of the Jim Crow era — work. Blacks didn’t choose to use different water fountains or lunch counters. They were forced to do so by police, hoses, and dogs.
A law is nothing but a threat backed up by force. This principle is not “ideological,” as Kohn tried to suggest on Twitter. It is definitional. The threat of force is what converts a mere recommendation into an actual law.
At one time, Kohn appeared to roughly understand the principle of government force. During the debate over the Obamacare contraceptive mandate, Hobby Lobby argued in court that it should not be forced by the government to pay for abortifacients for its employees. The arts and crafts supplier said that if employees wished to use abortifacients, they were free to purchase those with their own money.
This was unacceptable to Kohn, who claimed in a 2013 column for The Daily Beast that “right-wing conservatives are using the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case on contraception to force their religious views on the nation”:
She asserted the existence of government force five separate times in that article. Granted, she had it completely backwards, but at least she accepted the premise. Hobby Lobby didn’t want to force anything on anybody. Its owners wanted the freedom to not pay for items they considered to be abortifacients. Hobby Lobby never argued during the case that its employees should be forever banned from using certain types of birth control. The company merely suggested that maybe people should buy some things with their own money. Perish the thought.
But to Kohn, even though a company choosing not to pay for something has nothing to do with government force, that was an example of blatant government force, a dynamic which as of yesterday she said did not even exist. Kohn apparently believes that government force doesn’t exist, that individuals can be forced to “suffer consequences” in the absence of force, that fines and imprisonment for non-compliance don’t constitute force, and that, somewhat paradoxically, an individual choosing to abstain from an activity is a perfect example of the use of government force.
As I noted previously, Sally Kohn has a law degree from NYU.
While the Indiana religious freedom debate raged on last week, I joked that many same-sex marriage supporters had moved the goalposts from “if you don’t like gay marriage, then don’t have one” to “if you don’t like having your conscience violated, then don’t have one.” I didn’t expect to be proven right in less than a week, but Sally Kohn is a charitable person who decided that I needed to be vindicated in short order.
“Don’t like following the laws that apply to businesses,” Kohn asked at the end of her column for TPM. “Then don’t start a business. That’s your choice.”
Segregationists made the exact same argument during the Jim Crow era. Thank goodness that people like Martin Luther King, Jr. ignored them, government force notwithstanding.
The debate over religious freedom has officially broken the collective liberal mind. Rather than just admitting that many same-sex marriage supporters wish to use the power of government to force people of faith to violate their consciences, at least one skeptic of religious freedom has invented a new legal theory on the matter.
In a column for TPM,
liberal media personality Sally Kohn asserted that it makes no sense to say the government is forcing people of faith to violate their consciences, because government can’t force you to do anything:
You may have heard that the government is forcing businesses not to discriminate. It isn’t. If you chose to run a business, you have to follow the laws. If you don’t, that’s a choice—and you choose to suffer the consequences.
Kohn, who has a law degree from NYU, carried her theory even further, stating that members of the police force aren’t really using force to enforce the law unless they put a gun to your head:
This issue of government force is a funny one. You could also argue that the government is forcing you to drive below the speed limit or wear a seatbelt in your car. But it’s not. There isn’t a police officer holding a gun to your head literally forcing you to buckle up. In fact, you are 100 percent free to speed and not wear your seatbelt—and simply deal with the consequences if you’re pulled over. Is the threat of the fine for breaking the law amount to “forcing” you to follow the law? No.
Eric Garner, who was choked by Staten Island police and later died at the scene of his arrest for selling untaxed cigarettes, might disagree with Kohn’s description of what does and doesn’t constitute force. Unfortunately, Kohn fails to see the linguistic hints embedded in the words we use to describe how government compels legal compliance.
We use the phrase “force of law” for a reason: laws that are not backed by force aren’t laws; they’re suggestions. We use the phrase “law enforcement” for a reason. We use the phrase “police force” for a reason. If a law is not followed, it is not unusual for the government to dispatch its resources to force compliance or to levy punishment.
One gets the impression that @sallykohn hasn’t thought about government a great deal. http://t.co/xKwzTuazXK pic.twitter.com/0wbmEFm5Ok
Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) April 6, 2015
Governments pass laws to change behavior. Sometimes government uses carrots — engage in this particular activity we like and you’ll be rewarded with subsidies. And sometimes government uses sticks — engage in this particular activity we don’t like, and you will be punished.
Kohn appears to grasp that last part. After all, she specifically wrote that if you don’t follow a law, you might have to “suffer the consequences.” Unfortunately, she doesn’t expend any mental energy following that logic all the way through. In the absence of force, how are any consequences possible? Who has been sanctioned by government to impose this suffering?
.@sallykohn If there's no government force involved, why would I pay this hypothetical parking ticket? I'd ignore it and do whatever I want.
Sean Davis (@seanmdav) April 7, 2015
Americans don’t pay taxes out of the goodness of their hearts. They pay taxes to avoid force in the form of government fines or levies. We don’t generally drive the speed limit because it’s fun to go slow. We do it to avoid fines and arrest, an act which requires literal physical force. Martin Luther King, Jr. didn’t end up in a Birmingham jail cell because he longed for the quaint, cozy confines of prison. He ended up in that cell because police forced him into it for the crime of peacefully protesting segregation. That’s how laws — even vile ones like those of the Jim Crow era — work. Blacks didn’t choose to use different water fountains or lunch counters. They were forced to do so by police, hoses, and dogs.
A law is nothing but a threat backed up by force. This principle is not “ideological,” as Kohn tried to suggest on Twitter. It is definitional. The threat of force is what converts a mere recommendation into an actual law.
At one time, Kohn appeared to roughly understand the principle of government force. During the debate over the Obamacare contraceptive mandate, Hobby Lobby argued in court that it should not be forced by the government to pay for abortifacients for its employees. The arts and crafts supplier said that if employees wished to use abortifacients, they were free to purchase those with their own money.
This was unacceptable to Kohn, who claimed in a 2013 column for The Daily Beast that “right-wing conservatives are using the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case on contraception to force their religious views on the nation”:
To put it mildly, our forbearers would be appalled by how right-wing conservatives are trying to use government to force their religious views on all of us.
[…]
Hobby Lobby wants to go one step further. This corporation, which already takes advantage of special government benefits by incorporating as a private business in the first place (entitling Hobby Lobby to tax benefits and liability shelters to which individuals alone are not entitled), wants to use its government-created corporate status with the help of government-run courts not just to express its religion on a poster or what have you but to force its employees to comply with the supposed religion of the corporation’s founders. This is, plain and simple, a corporation trying to contort government to impose the religious views of some onto many. This is precisely what our nation was founded against.
She asserted the existence of government force five separate times in that article. Granted, she had it completely backwards, but at least she accepted the premise. Hobby Lobby didn’t want to force anything on anybody. Its owners wanted the freedom to not pay for items they considered to be abortifacients. Hobby Lobby never argued during the case that its employees should be forever banned from using certain types of birth control. The company merely suggested that maybe people should buy some things with their own money. Perish the thought.
But to Kohn, even though a company choosing not to pay for something has nothing to do with government force, that was an example of blatant government force, a dynamic which as of yesterday she said did not even exist. Kohn apparently believes that government force doesn’t exist, that individuals can be forced to “suffer consequences” in the absence of force, that fines and imprisonment for non-compliance don’t constitute force, and that, somewhat paradoxically, an individual choosing to abstain from an activity is a perfect example of the use of government force.
As I noted previously, Sally Kohn has a law degree from NYU.
While the Indiana religious freedom debate raged on last week, I joked that many same-sex marriage supporters had moved the goalposts from “if you don’t like gay marriage, then don’t have one” to “if you don’t like having your conscience violated, then don’t have one.” I didn’t expect to be proven right in less than a week, but Sally Kohn is a charitable person who decided that I needed to be vindicated in short order.
“Don’t like following the laws that apply to businesses,” Kohn asked at the end of her column for TPM. “Then don’t start a business. That’s your choice.”
Segregationists made the exact same argument during the Jim Crow era. Thank goodness that people like Martin Luther King, Jr. ignored them, government force notwithstanding.
Thursday, April 02, 2015
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?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?
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.
*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.
Wednesday, April 01, 2015
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.
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Monday, March 30, 2015
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.
Friday, March 27, 2015
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.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.
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.
Thursday, March 26, 2015
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.
....
Saturday, March 21, 2015
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.
Thursday, March 19, 2015
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.
Saturday, March 14, 2015
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.In other words, no Burlingtons for you, Colorado.
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.
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
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.
Saturday, March 07, 2015
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.
Friday, March 06, 2015
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).
Thursday, March 05, 2015
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].”
Wednesday, March 04, 2015
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.”
Monday, March 02, 2015
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?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.
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?
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.
Sunday, March 01, 2015
Bring Back the Bush Doctrine—with One Addition
Bring Back the Bush Doctrine—with One Addition
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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.
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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.
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