Archive for May, 2008
Kerr Defends the Third-Party Doctrine
Orin Kerr is a law professor at George Washington University and a blogger on the popular Volokh Conspiracy. He is a thoughtful, open-minded legal scholar, but I don’t think it’s unfair to say that he reliably sides with law enforcement on Fourth Amendment issues.
He recently posted a draft article defending the third-party doctrine, which is an interpretation of the Fourth Amendment holding that a person sharing information with a third party cannot make a Fourth Amendment claim to protection of that information. Use an ISP to transmit your email? No Fourth Amendment protection for its contents. Have a bank account? No Fourth Amendment protection for your banking records. Etc.
He treats as similar two issues that I see as separate: revelations gleaned from informants/agents and from business records. I have always thought of the third-party doctrine as being about business records. My remarks here apply to that area only.
I think the third-party doctrine was never right, and that it grows more wrong with each step forward in modern, connected living. Incredibly deep reservoirs of information are constantly collected by third-party service providers today. Cellular telephone networks pinpoint customers’ locations throughout the day through the movement of their phones. Internet service providers maintain copies of huge swaths of the information that crosses their networks, tied to customer identifiers. Search engines maintain logs of searches that can be correlated to specific computers and usually the individuals that use them. Payment systems record each instance of commerce, and the time and place it occurred. The third-party doctrine exempts law enforcement from the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness and warrant requirements when it looks at these records.
It’s wonderfully contrarian to run against the grain and defend the third-party doctrine, which has plenty of detractors, but sometimes contrarians can be wrong. I think Professor Kerr is, and here I’ll briefly lay out a few of the fundamental differences I have with his paper—all toward the end of perfecting it before it’s published in the Michigan Law Review next year, of course!
Filed under: Cato Publications; Law and Civil Liberties; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Texas Supreme Court: Return the Children
Yesterday, the Supreme Court of Texas ruled that Child Protective Services (CPS) abused its discretion by seizing 468 children from the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints ranch in Eldorado. Eugene Volokh has a roundup of the legal analysis.
I wrote about this case a few days ago at NRO, but space limitations kept me from going into more detail about how the women and children were treated while in state custody. For those who have not followed this matter closely, the children were seized by CPS but the mothers were ”permitted” to remain with their children on the condition that they comply with all CPS rules and commands.
CPS invited some mental health workers to the various shelters to help care for the hundreds of children. The mental health workers were disturbed by what they saw of CPS’s treatment of the women and children, and their written reports corroborate the bitter complaints of the FLDS mothers. I don’t think the news media has given this aspect of the story the attention it deserves — so here are some excerpts from the various reports that have been made public:
- “Women were constantly lied to about where their children [were] and when they could see their lawyers and about when they would be reunited with their children.”
- “Constant reminders that the adult women were only guests and that they were not in charge of the children and what CPS did to them. [The children] belonged to CPS now and they could talk, interrogate, separate and treat them any way [CPS] wanted. This included physical exams and x-rays without [parental] supervision.”
- “I sat with Audrey while three of her children were removed for six hours of questioning.”
- “The children arrived healthy and happy and left sick and crying.”
- Read the rest of this post »
Patent Failure
This week I’m filling in for libertarian blogger Megan McArdle at the Atlantic. Yesterday I finished a three part discussion of Patent Failure, an excellent new book on the patent system by James Besson and Michael Meurer.
The use of the phrase “intellectual property” to describe patents and copyrights has become so commonplace that we barely give it a second thought. I think that’s unfortunate, because the question of whether patents can sensibly be considered a kind of property is an empirical question, not merely a matter of semantics or tradition.
In my first post, I discuss the key characteristics of a patents system — clear boundaries and positive incentives for innovation, and argue that the patent system tends to fulfill those characteristics with respect to the chemical and pharmaceutical industry. In my second post, I shift my attention to the rest of the patent system, and show evidence from Bessen and Meurer that the patent system seems to be creating dis-incentives for innovation in industries other than chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Finally, in my third post, I suggest that the problem is a lack of clear boundaries, and discuss some of the reform proposals Bessen and Meurer offer to fix the patent system’s problems.
The best thing about the book, from my perspective, is that it takes the idea of patents as property seriously and then tries to bring some empirical evidence to bear on whether the patent system behaves the way we expect a property rights system to behave. Because of the analytical clarity of their approach, it gives us a meaningful yardstick with which to judge potential reforms.
Alaska Will Not Implement REAL ID
Passed into law Wednesday:
Section 1. AS 44.99 is amended by adding a new section to article 1 to read:
4 Sec. 44.99.040. Limitation on certain state expenditures. A state agency may not expend funds solely for the purpose of implementing or aiding in the implementation of the requirements of the federal Real ID Act of 2005 (P.L. 109-13, Division B).
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
High Wire
I recently received a complimentary copy of Peter Gosselin’s new book, High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families. Mr. Gosselin is the national economics correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Here is an excerpt from the book jacket:
The recent downturn seems to have brought an end to some of the strongest, smoothest growth in American history–a performance that economists found so sweet they dubbed it the “Great Moderation.” Yet even in boom times, the economy was caught in a cross-current. … [T]he cross-current was neither the product of a misapprehension nor the nation’s normal ups and downs. Instead, it was the result of a quarter-century long conversion of the nation’s economy from one of checks and balances to barely tempered free markets.
Interesting. Query: What baseline (pdf) is Mr. Gosselin using?
“Dog Bites Man” Passes for Legal News These Days
“The Supreme Court this week made big news because it hardly changed the law at all,” reports The Washington Post. “The court broke no new ground in deciding that workers are protected from retaliation for complaining about discrimination, just as they are protected from discrimination itself.” The story goes on to quote part of this press release that I wrote yesterday:
The Gómez-Pérez and Humphries rulings reinforce what should be readily apparent to objective Court-watchers: The Roberts Court is neither necessarily “pro-business” nor “conservative.” Instead, the Court evaluates the legal merits of each case and rules accordingly. Even where the Chief Justice disagreed with his colleagues (and notably with an opinion written by Justice Alito), in the Gómez-Pérez case, the disagreement was a technical one over statutory language and structure — and not anything that involves judicial philosophy or competing theories of constitutional interpretation. The most interesting thing to note from these cases is the difference in the justices’ views of stare decisis, the principle that the Court places heavy weight on its own precedent. Whereas Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito (and perhaps others) no doubt disagreed with the precedent upon which the Humphries decision relied, they went along with Justice Breyer’s reasoning that such disagreement over statutory interpretation does not justify overturning precedent. Justices Scalia and Thomas, on the other hand, consider that the risk to legal stability from overturning precedent to be less than the harm from perpetuating the earlier error. Whatever the significance of this difference of opinion, it is not an ideological dispute.
Perhaps more importantly, as I (and apparently others) said to this reporter over the phone, Roberts and Alito are likely to be more accommodating of incorrect but established precedent when they pertain to statutory interpretation rather than constitutional rights. This is because Congress can always itself “overrule” an erroneous body of statutory construction by passing a new law — but of course the Court has the final word on constitutional issues (barring a constitutional amendment).
More generally, though, the above analysis, relating as it does to technical statutory construction that only reinforces existing law, would not normally be front-page (or, in this case, page A2) news. The nature of the cases to which the Roberts Court grants review, however — more technical, business issues instead of red-meat “culture war” stuff — suggests that we could be in for more “dog bites man” stories in future.
The Global Flat Tax Revolution
There’s good news and bad news in the world of tax policy. The good news is that a growing number of nations now have flat tax systems instead of so-called progressive tax schemes that punish people for contributing more to economic growth. The bad news is that the United States is conspicuously absent on the list of flat-tax jurisdictions. Defenders of the internal revenue code often argue that a flat tax is an impractical idea, but this new video (narrated by yours truly) demonstrates that the flat tax is working very well and spreading rapidly as nations compete to offer more attractive tax policy to the world’s investors and entrepreneurs.
One small correction is already necessary. The video states that there are 24 flat tax jurisdictions, but it has recently been shown that Trinidad & Tobago is now a member of the flat tax club. Hopefully, the list will grow rapidly and the video will quickly be outdated.
Filed under: International Economics and Development; Tax and Budget Policy
Surprise! Stadium Predictions Flawed
The Washington Examiner reports:
Attendance at Nationals Park has fallen more than a quarter short of a consultant’s projections for the stadium’s inaugural year, cutting into the revenue needed to pay the ballpark bonds and spurring a D.C. Council member to demand the city’s money back.
The District’s ability to pay down the debt on the publicly financed ballpark depends in part on the number of people who show up to the games, David Catania, independent at-large, wrote in a letter Tuesday to Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi.
A study was commissioned in 2005 by Gandhi’s office. Written by Los Angeles-based Economics Research Associates, the report predicted attendance at the 41,000-seat ballpark would average 39,130 in year one, dropping to 32,737 in year four.
But paid attendance through 28 games has averaged only 29,141, Catania said, 26 percent lower than the consultant’s estimates. The Nationals are drawing the 15th-best crowd in baseball, according to ESPN, with a team that is in last place in the National League East and a 22-31 record as of Wednesday.
“It appears now,” Catania wrote, “that ERA may have seriously overestimated ticket sales, which represents a major portion of stadium-related revenues.”
Gandhi says it doesn’t matter, the bonds can be paid off with attendance as low as 10,000 per game. Which raises the question: if it’s that easy to pay for the stadium, why didn’t the multi-millionaire team owners agree to pay for it themselves?
So Much for the Past Seven and a Half Years
President Bush told Neil Cavuto of Fox News on Friday, “Fiscal conservatism is one of my defining issues for the remaining months.”
Broad-Minded Failure
Mark Lampkin, Executive Director of ED in ’08, about which I wrote on National Review Online last week, has responded to my piece with a letter to the editor. Apparently, my explanation for why reform efforts within the current system are largely futile, and fundamentally altering the system is the key, was “narrow-minded.” It makes one wonder what’s so broad minded about leaving in place the hidebound, nearly reform-proof government monopoly we currently have, but let’s get to some specifics in Lampkin’s letter.
Lampkin begins with this, which is really the crux of our debate:
McCluskey’s arguments underestimate the severity and urgency of our education crisis and naively bypass the difficult political terrain surrounding education reform. We agree that the system is broken, but we disagree with his suggestion that we should forestall desperately needed reform of the current system.
Now, I don’t think I underestimate the severity of our education problems—I assure you that the day I start saying our system isn’t a shambles is the last day you’ll see me writing on this blog—though I do think Lampkin and Co. tend to overhype national economic threats and education’s ability to negate them. Our real disagreement is on the ability of proposed reforms of the current system to do real, lasting good.
Lampkin seems to assume that ED in ‘08’s proposed reforms will somehow be alive, kicking, and transforming our schools tomorrow if we’ll only hearken back to Nike’s old slogan and “just do it,” while choice and competition are on a much longer timeline:
Choice and competition are very important ingredients in any effort to improve our schools, but we also need a more immediate response to implement a realistic and achievable set of solutions.
It sounds funny to use terms like “immediate” and “realistic” regarding an education system where everyone seems to have a five-year plan that is replaced every third year with someone else’s five-year plan, and in which the No Child Left Behind Act has a twelve-year, full-proficiency timeline almost no one thinks is realistic. It sounds funny, because it is funny. In fact, it might be crazy: Talking about “immediate,” meaningful changes in hugely bureaucratic, politicized, government-run public schooling, is about as grounded in reality as my assuming I’ll wake up tomorrow morning with my male-pattern baldness transformed into rocker-pattern abundance.
Look at this in the context of ED in ‘08’s big goals.
Today, In the Role of David Brooks, Mike Huckabee
A few weeks back, David Brooks was telling George Packer that philosophies of limited government were “politically unpopular and fundamentally un-American.” Now we have Mike Huckabee telling the Huffington Post the same thing:
The greatest threat to classic Republicanism is not liberalism; it’s this new brand of libertarianism, which is social liberalism and economic conservatism, but it’s a heartless, callous, soulless type of economic conservatism because it says “look, we want to cut taxes and eliminate government. If it means that elderly people don’t get their Medicare drugs, so be it. If it means little kids go without education and healthcare, so be it.” Well, that might be a quote pure economic conservative message, but it’s not an American message. It doesn’t fly. People aren’t going to buy that, because that’s not the way we are as a people. That’s not historic Republicanism. Historic Republicanism does not hate government; it’s just there to be as little of it as there can be. But they also recognize that government has to be paid for.
If you have a breakdown in the social structure of a community, it’s going to result in a more costly government … police on the streets, prison beds, court costs, alcohol abuse centers, domestic violence shelters, all are very expensive. What’s the answer to that? Cut them out? Well, the libertarians say “yes, we shouldn’t be funding that stuff.” But what you’ve done then is exacerbate a serious problem in your community. You can take the cops off the streets and just quit funding prison beds. Are your neighborhoods safer? Is it a better place to live? The net result is you have now a bigger problem than you had before.
First, there’s nothing “new” about libertarianism, although it appears someone’s just alerted Mike Huckabee to the phenomenon. Second, this business of the “un-Americanism” of libertarianism is ahistorical, although not particularly surprising coming from a Know Nothing demagogue like Mike Huckabee. Someday, advertising one’s own ignorance about the world won’t be considered a mark in one’s favor by conservatives. Until then, Mike Huckabee.
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Political Philosophy
The E-Verify Debate as it Stands in Kansas
Here’s a good article in the Wichita Eagle on the debate over E-Verify, with particular reference to the state of Kansas, where the legislature recently considered requiring employers to use this system for a federal background check on all new hires.
My paper, “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration,” is here.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Law and Civil Liberties; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy; Trade and Immigration
High Prices for Snickers? Feds Shouldn’t Point Fingers
Recently I blogged about the federal government investigating businesses for keeping the price of milk too high, even though the government’s own policies push up milk prices.
Government policies also seem to work at cross purposes with respect to chocolate. The Wall Street Journal reports that the price of a Snickers bar is up 6 percent over last year as a result of rising cocoa prices, and the government is looking for culprits. ”Chocolate makers are accused of colluding as far back as 2002. The U.S. Justice Department has inquired into their pricing practices….” For their part, chocolate makers are blaming high prices on speculation by hedge funds.
I don’t know why cocoa prices are high, but the other big input to chocolate is sugar. And we know that government sugar controls keep U.S. sugar prices about twice as high as world prices, which hurts consumers and has led to an exodus of sugar-using food manufacturers to Canada and Mexico.
In a report on the sugar industry in 2006, the Department of Commerce found that sugar represents 18 percent of the input costs of chocolate products, which indicates that the government’s high-price policy for sugar is taking a substantial bite out of the budgets of America’s chocoholics.
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Government Pensions
The Washington Post reports that a local police officer has been convicted of shooting and killing an unarmed furniture deliveryman. The judge handed down a sentence of 45 years imprisonment. But get this:
His disability benefits and police pension are not affected by his convictions, county spokesman John Erzen said.
So taxpayers must keep paying this guy’s pension? Good grief. Are there any circumstances in which a government employee’s pension can be canceled?
Myth-Busting Fortunes of the Steel Industry
Today, the Washington Post finally got around to publishing a story about the enviable state of America’s most iconic manufacturing industry — the steel industry.
Steel prices are at record highs, surging more than 70 percent in the past year alone. Industry profits have set new records in recent years. Return on investment has been astronomical. The American Stock Exchange’s Steel Index increased 49 percent per year from 2003 to 2007, as compared to 13 percent per year for the S&P 500. Foreign demand continues to be white hot, while demand from U.S. steel-using industries continues to be stronger-than-expected in a slowing economy.
U.S. steel industry shipments of 106 million tons in 2007 exceeded the industry’s 1970 shipments by 16 percent. Output per worker has soared: in the 1970s producing a ton of steel required 12 man-hours; today it requires 1.2 man-hours. Several billion dollars of new green-field investments are being made by foreign and domestic producers in U.S. production capacity, which is a sure sign that those who know the industry best have faith in America’s manufacturing future.
We at Cato have been reporting about the high-flying steel industry for several years now (here, here, and here), and about the record performance of the U.S. manufacturing sector overall (here and here). But the mainstream media (with a few exceptions) has been silent about these incredible successes, while Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, the Congressional Steel Caucus, other members of Congress, Lou Dobbs, the United Steelworkers, the AFL-CIO, the Alliance for American Manufacturing, and other entities whose agendas require an environment of public fear have had carte blanche to mislead and deceive the public about trade and manufacturing.
The preference in the media for exceptional doom and gloom stories about job loss and manufacturing ghost towns over factual stories about the real state of manufacturing has definitely taken its toll. Opinion polls show irrational levels of antipathy toward trade and globalization among the American public, which simply belies the facts.
I suppose it would be wrong to blame the media for pursuing a proven formula: fear and drama sell advertising. But maybe the commoditization of fear and drama will lead more news media to discover niche markets, like the market for quaint, factual stories couched in perspective.
Filed under: International Economics and Development; Trade and Immigration
Fiscal Responsibility, Bush Style
As we all know, if you just put the word “defense,” or “homeland” or “security” anywhere in the name of a government program, its fiscal impact is immediately zeroed out. But if this mystical transformation didn’t take place, President Bush’s fiscal legacy would be looking darker and darker each day. Noah Shachtman gives us a rundown:
The Pentagon’s internal watchdogs can’t keep up with the explosive growth in military spending. Which means $152 billion’s worth of contracts annually aren’t being reviewed for fraud, abuse and criminal interference by the Defense Department’s Inspector General, according to a newly-unearthed report to Congress. The result: “undetected or inadequately investigated criminal activity and significant financial loss,” as well as “personnel, facilities and assets [that] are more vulnerable to terrorist activities.”
Since fiscal year 2000, the military’s budget has essentially doubled, from less than $300 billion to more than $600 billion. Two wars have begun. But the number of criminal investigators and financial auditors at the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (DoD IG) has stayed more or less the same. So there are now “gaps in coverage in important areas, such as major weapon systems acquisition, health care fraud, product substitution, and Defense intelligence agencies,” according to the report, obtained by the Project on Government Oversight.
[...]
The DOD IG’s office has certainly stayed busy. In just the last few months, the DOD IG caught a Philippine corporation bilking $100 million from the military health care system; nabbed a trio trying to bribe their way into drinking water contracts for troops; busted an Air Force general who tried to steer a $50 million deal to his buddies; and launched investigations into the Pentagon’s propaganda projects and the youthful arms-dealer who sold tens of millions of dollars’ worth of dud ammunition to the government.
Shachtman then observes: “The question is: How much more could they have done, with a bigger staff?” It’s almost like you sink a half a trillion dollars a year into one massive bureaucracy and it’s hard to keep track of it all. President McCain’s going to have to find a lot of earmarks to offset this sort of thing.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics; Political Philosophy; Tax and Budget Policy
Justified Praise for Cult of the Presidency
Gene is too modest to link to it himself (I wouldn’t be!), but George Will’s column in this week’s Newsweek centers on Caesaropapism and, Gene Healy’s new book. Here are the first few paragraphs:
Barack Obama recently said, “I believe in our ability to perfect this nation.” Clearly there is something the candidate of “change” will not change—the pattern of extravagant presidential rhetoric. Obama is trying to replace a president who vowed to “rid the world of evil”—and of tyranny, too.
But then, rhetorical—and related—excesses are inherent in the modern presidency. This is so for reasons brilliantly explored in the year’s most pertinent and sobering public affairs book, “The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power,” by Gene Healy of Washington’s libertarian Cato Institute.
Healy’s dissection of the delusions of “redemption through presidential politics” comes at a moment when liberals, for reasons of liberalism, and conservatives, because they have forgotten their raison d’être, “agree on the boundless nature of presidential responsibility.” Liberals think boundless government is beneficent. Conservatives practice situational constitutionalism, favoring what Healy calls “Caesaropapism” as long as the Caesar-cum-Pope wields his anti constitutional powers in the service of things these faux conservatives favor.
“Faux conservatives” is just right. Elsewhere, Gene has demonstrated that conservatives have shamefully prostrated themselves at the totem of executive power, a position that would have nauseated their intellectual forebears.
A Taxing Argument over School Choice
Today’s Tucson Citizen column by Robert Robb echoes a point I made a couple of weeks ago: it is difficult to argue with the AZ appellate court decision striking down that state’s voucher programs for disabled and foster children.
But Robb goes astray when he asserts that:
Vouchers are much preferable to tax credits. Good tax policy involves low rates on broad bases. Tax credits erode the tax base and depreciate in value as tax rates are lowered. So, reliance on tax credits puts good education policy at odds with good tax policy.
First, it is a mistake to compare two policies solely in terms of their impact on tax policy. There are important substantive advantages of credits over vouchers that outweigh tax policy considerations.
Second, the tax policy case does not actually favor vouchers as it might at first seem. Robb’s argument implicitly compares education tax credit programs with the absence of any government education policies at all, but we must compare credits to the voucher and government schooling alternatives.
Robb advocates low tax rates, but vouchers require much more money to be raised in taxes than do tax credit programs. Tax credits are targeted tax cuts, leaving more money in private hands. Thus, credits win on the “low rates” measure.
Next, the two main reasons for supporting a “broad base” for taxation are:
1) To minimize the extent to which there are favored classes among taxpayers who do not carry their share of the tax burden, and who thus breed resentment among those who must carry a greater burden [undermining public support for the system, and hence the voluntary compliance on which it relies], and
2) To minimize the government’s distortion of taxpayer behavior in the marketplace that can be expected when the state favors some activities and disfavors others.
On both of these scores, tax credits are superior to both vouchers and conventional government schooling.
First, under all three systems — tax credits, vouchers and public schooling – there is a favored class: parents with school-aged children. That class benefits at the expense of all other taxpayers. Nevertheless, tax credits offer the taxpayer a level of discretion and accountability that does not exist under vouchers and government schooling. Under credits, taxpayers choose either the individual recipient of their money or the non-profit scholarship organization that will disburse their money. If a particular scholarship organization ceases to meet their expectations, they can shift their donations to another. This flexibility can reduce the resentment that arises when taxpayers are compelled to pay for types of schooling they find fundamentally objectionable (which can happen under both vouchers and government schooling). This taxpayer choice also exerts market pressure on scholarship organizations to behave wisely and efficiently in order to keep attracting donations. Voucher programs and government schooling undergo no comparable pressure.
Second, both vouchers and government schooling distort taxpayer behavior more than do tax credits. In fact, under those systems, taxpayer behavior is reduced to one of two options: paying one’s education taxes, or going to jail. Tax credits at least offer the taxpayer some level of choice: the option of choosing the specific child or specific scholarship granting organization who will receive his money. Since tax credit programs, to date, impose fewer restrictions on schools than either vouchers or government schooling, they also exert a less distorting effect on the choices of education consumers.
Credits are thus better not only on their intrinsic merits as a means of ensuring universal access to a free and dynamic education marketplace, they are also better from a tax policy standpoint.
Starved for Good Data: 35 Million Not Hungry
America’s supposed hunger epidemic is catching up to crocodiles in the sewers as the most popular urban legend. The difference is that the hunger epidemic is being promoted by the nation’s major media.
Under the headline “Going Hungry in America,” Parade magazine (circulation 32 million) claimed: “More than 35.5 million Americans–12% of the U.S. population and 17% of our children–don’t have enough food, according to the Department of Agriculture.”
This article comes two weeks after the Washington Post led a story: “About 35 million Americans regularly go hungry each year, according to federal statistics.” (And see here).
I’m not a hunger expert, but I actually looked at the official Department of Agriculture data, rather than relying on biased second-party sources, as many reporters seem to do.
In addition to the links I provided in prior blogs, check out this USDA discussion. The 35 million figure includes 24 million that are in a broader group called “low food security.” The USDA notes: “These food-insecure households obtained enough food to avoid substantially disrupting their eating patterns or reducing food intake, by using a variety of coping strategies, such as eating less varied diets, participating in Federal food assistance programs, or getting emergency food from community food pantries.”
Thus, 24 million of the 35 million are not “going hungry” as news reports keep claiming.
“Going hungry” better applies to the 11 million in the “very low food security” group. For this group, the USDA says “food intake was reduced at times during the year because they had insufficient money or other resources for food. In previous reports, these households were described as ‘food insecure with hunger.’ ” Notice that even for this smaller group, episodes of hunger may be fairly rare.
Finally, compare this USDA assessment: “In 2006, 430,000 children (0.6 percent of the nation’s children) lived in households with very low food security among children,” with Parade’s grim report “…17% of our children—don’t have enough food.”
Actual hunger among the poor is, of course, a terrible thing. That is one reason why the federal goverment ought to repeal ethanol subsidies, terminate its Soviet-style controls on milk, and other reform other policies that push up the price of food.
Don’t Talk to the Police?
Professor James Duane has posted a terrific lecture about the Fifth Amendment’s safeguard concerning self-incrimination and the risk of “waiving” that right by speaking to the police.
If you want to divulge your Social Security number and other personal information to a stranger who telephones your home, that’s your choice. You can choose to ignore common sense and risk identity theft. Dealing with the police raises similar risks, as Prof. Duane shows. It’s one thing for you to initiate the encounter, such as by calling the police about your stolen car. But when the police initiate the encounter, it’s a minefield. Watch out.
The Supreme Court should make it as plain as possible that people have the right to remain silent. Unfortunately, the Court is creating a situation where only lawyers will know when they must talk and when they can remain silent.
For additional information, go here.
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