Erosion of Free Speech

Here is a column by Jonathan Turley - he is on target.

I think a case can be made that the unacceptable behavior of the times stems importantly from permissiveness and the failure to require that people take responsibility for their actions.
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I recently wrote how Antifa and other college protesters are increasingly denouncing free speech and the foundations for liberal democracies.  That troubling trend was evident last week with a protest at William & Mary College in Virginia when protesters from Black Lives Matter stopped a discussion with Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia.  Protesters screamed “Liberalism is white supremacy!” the protesters shouted, and “ACLU, you protect Hitler too!”  It was an all-too-common sight and universities have done little to address students who believe that they have a right to prevent others from hearing opposing views.

The protesters livestreamed the demonstration on Facebook as they chanted “The oppressed are not impressed!,” “Blood on your hands!,” and “The revolution will not uphold the Constitution!”

Gastañaga was left sidelined as protesters refused to let her speak. She was there to discuss free speech and can be heard initially saying that this is the issue that brought her to campus and “Good, I like this.”  She added “I’m going to talk to you about knowing your rights, and protests and demonstrations, which this illustrates very well. Then I’m going to respond to questions from the moderators, and then questions from the audience.”

The BLM protesters denounced free speech as a tool of oppression. One organizer declared:

“When is the free speech of the oppressed protected? We know from personal experience that rights granted to wealthy, white, cis, male, straight bodies do not trickle down to marginalized groups. We face greater barriers and consequences for speaking.”

What also concerns me is that fact that these students claimed the right to prevent other students from participating in classes or events — a similar complaint raised against the recent protests against James Comey at Howard University.  The students interrupted a lecture and were reportedly screaming at other students who actually wanted to learn.  I have taken a harsh line on such disruptions of classrooms like a recent incident at Northwestern University.  This violates a core defining values of our academic institutions and such students should be suspended for such conduct.  There is a difference between voicing your views and preventing others from speaking, particularly inside of a classroom. When you claim the right to prevent others from hearing opposing views or speakers, you are at odds with the academic mission of these universities.

William & Mary should suspend students who prevent classes or public events.  Period. Either students come to a school to be exposed to different views and to express their views, or they have no place in an institution of higher learning.


Unfortunately, despite the fact that the protesters are easily identifiable on tape, William & Mary College President Taylor Reveley issued a statement that said nothing of disciplining, let alone suspending, the students:

“This stifles debate and prevents those who’ve come to hear a speaker, our students in particular, from asking questions, often hard questions, and from engaging in debate where the strength of ideas, not the power of shouting, is the currency.  William & Mary must be a campus that welcomes difficult conversations, honest debate and civil dialogue.”

That is the right sentiment but the question is whether Reveley is prepared to protect those values with concrete action.

What Government should not be doing

The Trump Administration has granted an exemption to some employers to the mandate that employer-provided health benefits include contraception.

This is a move in the right direction, but not nearly far enough.

The Government should not mandate anything concerning employer-provided health benefits.

Keep in mind that constraints reduce the set of feasible solutions.

The Anti-Gun Crowd's Statistics cannot be trusted

From the Crime Prevention Research Center.
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If gun control advocates were more confident with their arguments, presumably they wouldn’t have to so grossly exaggerate their numbers. On December 27th, 2016 Politifact evaluated this claim that there are 7 children a day who die from guns, and Politifact’s Chris Nichols concluded that this claim by Congresswoman Jackie Speier that “more than seven children PER DAY have died from gun violence” was “mostly true.”

Politifact relies on a quote from the Brady Campaign’s website: “Every day, 7 children and teens die from gun violence.” The website notes that it crunched CDC data for children and young people through age 19.

Are 18 and 19 year olds “children”?

For 2013 through 2015 for ages 0 through 19 there were 7,838 firearm deaths. If you exclude 18 and 19 year olds, the number firearm deaths for 2013 through 2015 is reduced by almost half to 4,047 firearm deaths. Including people who are clearly adults drives the total number of deaths.

Even the Brady Campaign differentiates children from teenagers. If you just look at those who aren’t teenagers, the number of firearm deaths declines to 692, which comes to 0.63 deaths per day.

Even just excluding 18 and 19 year olds reduces the number of firearm deaths by almost half to 4,047 firearm deaths, 3.7 per day. Defining children as those under 15 reduces the number to 1,312, about 1.2 per day. It isn’t that 18 and 19 year olds aren’t important, but Speier was obviously focusing on “children” for a reason.

Homicides are not Murders

Most people, apparently including the Brady Campaign, just assume that homicides and murders are the same, but the difference between them is that homicides include justifiable homicides. Do you really want to lump in murders with cases where someone uses a gun to stop a murder or other crime from occurring? For murders for those under 18 for 2013 to 2015, the total for those three years is 573 fewer deaths than homicides (1,551 firearm murders (2013 479, 2014 519, and 2015 553) versus 2,124 firearm homicides).

So for those under 18, if you add up murders 1,551, accidents 245, and suicides 1,589, you get a total of 3,385, not 4,047.

So for those under 13, if you add up firearm murders 338 (=92+124+122) , accidents 145, and suicides 77, you get a total of 560, not 4,047. That comes to 0.51 deaths per day.

The CDC numbers that Politifact relies on is making comparisons include mistakes that the CDC still has not corrected.

Mixing in gang murders and other deaths.

The vast majority of these deaths for 15 to 19 year olds involve murders involving gangs, primarily drug gangs. Linking children and guns is done to connote guns in the home for law-abiding households, but the causes and cures for drug gang violence are dramatically different children getting a hold of gun in law-abiding homes. The notion that you are going to be able to pass laws to stop drug gangs from getting guns is about as easy as stopping those drug gangs from getting drugs to sell. For a related discussion see here. This is an additional reason to not include 15 to 19 year olds.

As an aside, during the three years that they studied the number of accidental gun deaths have declined from 59 in 2013 to 44 in 2014 to 42 in 2015.

Importantly disarming law-abiding citizens or locking up people’s guns makes them more vulnerable to criminals

The laws that Congresswoman Speier and the Brady Campaign are pushing lead to more deaths. Regulations, such as “Safe Storage Laws,” disarm law-abiding citizens, thus encouraging criminals to attack and making them more likely to succeed in committing their crimes.

Do we really want Politifact serving as the fact checker for Facebook?

As the CPRC has previously written, fact checkers, such Politifact, have their own biases — usually the same liberal biases that we see in the rest of the mainstream media. This latest example from Politifact just provides additional evidence for those concerns.

Mass Public Shootings

From the Crime Prevention Research Center.

The truth you don't hear about.

Keep in mind that the US population is about five times the population of France.

A Test

DATA

The Crime Prevention Research Center notes that:

During 2014 and 2015 there were 1,761 bombings in the world that killed at least four people. Of those, 1,401 were by radical Muslims, 58 were non-Muslims, and 302 were unknown. It seems likely that most of those unknown attacks were also by radical Muslims, but even if that isn’t the case, at least 80% of these bombings were done by radical Muslims and possibly as few as 3.3% are done by non-Muslims. Obviously, the vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving, but a small percentage of Muslims are responsible for a great deal of harm.

TEST QUESTION

You are told that a bombing has occurred that killed at least four people.  You are asked to guess whether the perpetrator was a muslim on not.  If you guess correctly, $1,000 will be contributed to a charity of your choice.  What is your guess?

If you guess Muslim, congratulations.  You are rational and have maximized the probability of your charity getting $1,000.  You also are a profiler.

If you guess non-Muslim, you are neither a profiler nor rational.

Gun Stuff

The Las Vegas massacre has led the anti-gun crowd to propose lots of gun laws that wouldn't have stopped the Shooter.  They fail to understand that there is no way to prevent a Shooter from obtaining a gun, even an automatic gun.  The experience in Europe proves this.  Even worse, they fail to consider what would happen if erstwhile Shooters did not have access to guns - they would turn to even more lethal killing techniques.  The experience in Europe proves this, too.  Finally, the anti-gun crowd does not consider that, when honest citizens who undergo a background check are allowed to carry concealed firearms, the violent crime rate (murders included) declines.  In fact, allowing concealed carry by honest citizens saves lives, net, even including the loss of life from mass murderers.  See John Lott's "More Guns Less Crime" for the facts, the flaws in the anti-gun crowd's logic and statistics, and their lies.  Virtually everything you hear from the anti-gun crowd is false.

The current rage is to outlaw Bump Stocks, which allow ordinary semi-automatic rifles (rifles that require the trigger to be pulled for each shot) to fire much more rapidly than usual (in effect, they bump the trigger finger back and forth faster than the shooter can do on his own).  I don't mind if Bump Stocks are outlawed - but the logic is faulty.  You can make a Bump Stock out of ordinary materials, so outlawing them will not prevent anyone who wants to kill people with one from making one.

The decline of freedom in Europe and America

Here is a column by Jonathan Turley.

JT is on target.

The US is no exception.

There are endless calls to criminalize speech, writing, and viewing.

Beware those who want to control how you live.

Speak out before you lose your freedom.
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For years, civil libertarians have warned that Great Britain has been in a free fall from the criminalization of speech to the expansion of the surveillance state.  Now the government is pursuing a law that would make the repeated viewing of extremist Internet sites a crime punishable to up to 15 years in prison.  It appears that the government is not satiated by their ever-expanding criminalization of speech. They now want to criminalize even viewing sites on the Internet.  As always, officials are basically telling the public to “trust us, we’re the government.”  UK home secretary Amber Rudd is pushing the criminalization of reading as part of her anti-radicalization campaign . . . which turns out to be an anti-civil liberties campaign.

We have previously discussed the alarming rollback on free speech rights in the West, particularly in France (here and here and here and here and here and here) and England ( here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here).  Even the Home Secretary has been accused of hate speech for criticizing immigrant workers.

Prime Minister Theresa May has previously called for greater government control of the Internet.  Now, the government not only would make reading material on the Internet a crime, but would not necessarily tell you what sites will be deemed the ultimate click bait.  Rudd told a Conservative Party conference that she wants to crackdown on people “who view despicable terrorist content online, including jihadi websites, far-right propaganda and bomb-making instructions.”   So sites deemed “far-right propaganda” (but not far-left propaganda) could lead to your arrest — leaving the government with a sweeping and ambiguous mandate.

The law would move from criminalizing the downloading of information to simply reading it.  The move confirms the long criticism of civil libertarians that the earlier criminalization would just be the start of an ever-expanding government regulation of sites and speech.  Rudd admits that she wants to arrest those who just read material but do not actually download the material.

In the past, the government assumed near total discretion in determining who had a “reasonable excuse” for downloading information.

Britain has long relied on the presumed benevolence of the government in giving its sweeping authority in the surveillance and regulation of speech, including the media.  This move however is a quantum shift in government controls over speech and information.  Indeed, this comes the closest to criminalization not just speech but thought. It is a dangerous concept and should be viewed as disqualifying for anyone who want to hold (or retain) high office.

What is particularly striking is that this new law seeks to create a new normal in a society already desensitized to government controls and speech crimes.  There is no pretense left in this campaign —  just a smiling face rallying people to the cause of thought control.

Sound familiar?

“We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

George Orwell, 1984

Not so obvious that banning guns saves lives

Mass Public Shootings - Europe vs. US

So much for what you hear from politicians, the media, and the anti-gun groups.

John Cochrane: Health Care Policy Isn't so Hard

Here is JC's blog entry.

JC is on target - you will learn a lot (or should).
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Last July, as the last Republican Obamacare bill was imploding, Greg Mankiw wrote "Why Health Care Policy is So Hard" in the New York Times. For once, I think Greg got it wrong. Health care policy isn't hard at all, at least as a matter of economics. (Politics, and ideological politics, is another question, but not Greg's question nor mine.)

There are some important underlying themes uniting how Greg's piece goes wrong (in my opinion)

• A little bit of economic education can be a dangerous thing

While most opinionated people and most "policymakers" are blissfully unaware of any economics, a little bit of economics education can sometimes mislead. Economics is full of pretty fairy tales, passed on through the decades or even centuries. The day after one sees the beautiful tale of the natural monopoly, or the externality, or the public good, then like a two-year-old with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail, one starts to see natural monopolies, externalities and public goods all over the place. Wait a moment. Just because it's in the textbook -- even Greg's textbook -- doesn't mean every single industry and case fits.

The other rhetorical error is of the type, "well, we can't have homeless people who get heart attacks dying in the streets." No, of course not, but, is every single line of the ACA and tens of thousands of subsidiary regulations absolutely necessary to provide for homeless people who suffer heart attacks? Why must your and my health insurance be so totally screwed up -- and so totally micromanaged by the Federal government -- just to solve the problem of homeless people heart attacks? I'm struggling to find just the right category for this sort of argument

• Gross disregard of the size of effects. 
• Straw man -- a theoretical problem with a completely free market justifies any regulation. 
• Disregard of the choice at hand -- it's not benevolent perfection vs. free market. 
• Using problems as talking points. If the same "problems" exist elsewhere and you don't want to or need to fix them, then you're not serious about that "problem" for health. 

Maybe we can come up with a better one sentence characterization later. (There must be a Greek word for these rhetorical tricks!)

Let's review Greg's "why health care policy is so hard" problems.

"...free market sometimes fails us when it comes to health care. There are several reasons.

Externalities abound.  Take vaccines, for instance. If a person vaccinates herself against a disease, she is less likely to catch it, become a carrier and infect others. Because people may ignore the positive spillovers when weighing the costs and benefits, too few people will get vaccinated, unless the government somehow promotes vaccination. 

Another positive spillover concerns medical research. When a physician figures out a new treatment, that information enters society’s pool of medical knowledge. Without government intervention, such as research subsidies or an effective patent system, too few resources will be devoted to research." 

Well, ok. We require vaccinations to enroll children in schools. And basic research might be under funded. But basic chemistry research might be underfunded too. Does the Federal government need to buy half of all chemicals in the country and intensely regulate the other half just to keep basic chemistry research going? There are externalities everywhere. A neighbor mowing his lawn on a Saturday morning might wake you up. Does this justify the entirety of America's exclusionary zoning codes, or make "housing policy hard?" We do have research subsidies and a patent system, by the way. People like Greg and I are paid pretty handsomely to do research!

These "problems" exist in many markets -- and the ACA, or even pre-ACA regulation, is hardly a minimalist solution to the problem of vaccination and basic research!

The logical connection from "free markets sometimes fail us" to "and therefore the Federal Government needs to take a heavy hand as it does for health care" deserves its own place in the pantheon of fallacies. We have a choice between imperfect alternatives.