HIT & RUN BLOG

ATFThis week, as one of their first legislative initiatives after taking control of the House, Democrats unveiled the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019, which would require that almost all firearm transfers involve federally licensed dealers. The aim is to make sure that all gun buyers undergo background checks to verify that they are legally allowed to own firearms.

This policy is very popular, favored by 84 percent to 94 percent of respondents in recent national polls. It's not hard to see why: Assuming that Congress has selected fair and logical criteria for owning guns, shouldn't those rules be enforced to the fullest extent possible? Why make an exception for private transfers, thereby giving potentially dangerous people a way to complete purchases that would otherwise be blocked?

On the face of it, there is no downside to broadening the background check requirement, and it might stop would-be mass shooters and other violent criminals from arming themselves. Advocates portray a system of "universal background checks" as the epitome of "commonsense, bipartisan gun violence prevention legislation," the sort of policy that unites reasonable people across the political spectrum. It seems you'd have to be a crazy extremist to oppose the idea. Yet if you dig into the details, you will find sound reasons to be skeptical. I can think of at least four:

1. "Universal background checks" are not really universal. I am not talking about the exceptions for police, military personnel, and transfers between close relatives. I am talking about the impossibility of enforcing a requirement that all gun sales go through federally licensed dealers. Last year researchers who looked at what happened after Colorado, Delaware, and Washington imposed that requirement reported that "background check rates increased in Delaware, by 22%–34% depending on the type of firearm," but "no overall changes were observed in Washington and Colorado." It's easy to understand why the average gun owner might balk at the hassle and expense of bringing his firearm to a licensed dealer so he can legally dispose of his own property. People who knowingly sell guns to criminals are even less motivated to comply. The government may want to record all heretofore private transfers, but there is no practical way of accomplishing that goal.

2. The criteria for owning guns are not fair or logical. Federal law prohibits gun sales to millions of Americans who pose no threat to others, including anyone who uses illegal drugs, anyone who was ever subjected to involuntary psychiatric treatment, and anyone with a felony record, whether or not the offense involved violence or even a victim. Assuming that a broader background check requirement actually results in more background checks, more people will unjustly lose their Second Amendment rights because a database shows they were convicted of marijuana possession or treated for suicidal impulses. While most "unlawful users" of controlled substances probably can avoid detection, they will have to lie on the federal firearm purchase form, which is itself a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. And as the form explicitly says, unlawful users of controlled substances include people who use marijuana for medical or recreational purposes even when it's allowed by state law.

3. Background checks won't stop mass shootings. While 70 percent of respondents in a 2018 Gallup poll thought "requiring background checks for all gun sales" would be "very effective" in "preventing mass shootings," the perpetrators of these attacks typically do not have disqualifying criminal or psychiatric records. Those who are not legally allowed to own guns can still get them from people who are, as the perpetrators of the Columbine and Sandy Hook massacres did.

4. Background checks won't stop ordinary criminals from getting guns. Violent criminals are already breaking the law by using guns to commit crimes and even by owning the guns if they have felony records. What are the chances that they or the people who sell them guns will suddenly decide to obey the law when it requires background checks for all transfers?

The Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019, in short, would criminalize actions that violate no one's rights, impose burdens on innocent gun owners, and deprive harmless people of the right to armed self-defense without doing much of anything to improve public safety. No wonder it's a top priority for Democrats.

JOSHUA ROBERTS/REUTERS/NewscomRep. Steve King, the nativist Republican congressman from Iowa who has likened illegal immigrants to "livestock," is just asking questions. In a New York Times interview, he says:

"White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?" Mr. King said. "Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?"

In the recent past (2017) King insisted that "we can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies," and only a few years before that (2013) he insisted that "there isn't anyone that can fairly characterize me as anti-immigrant." Which pretty much tells you what kind of bubble the guy is living in: He's openly hostile to immigration, both legal and illegal, but refuses to admit as much.

Still, even if the Vietnam draft-dodger can't be swayed, it's worth at least pointing out to those who might be open to discussion that equating America with whiteness is fundamentally un-American. The United States has a deeply troubled history with race and racism, but one of the few things that makes our country different is that we aspire to be a nation that aspires (and often achieves) a sense of identity that goes far beyond blood and soil. Take it away, Jean de Crevecouer in Letters from an American Farmer (1782):

What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds.

He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.

I've noted elsewhere that Crevecoeur has his limits (among other things, he speaks only of men and he owned slaves for a time). But he accurately captures a process by which America is a country that has long aspired to be a place where people could be judged, in Martin Luther King's phrase, by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

It's disturbing that members of the federal government, such as Steve King, persist in identitarian politics. Yet in a country that is more genuinely diverse and less racist than ever, his sort of thinking signals nothing more than the death rattle of the racial collectivism that has always stained American history.

ARIANA DREHSLER/UPI/NewscomBefore he became president, Donald Trump promised to build an "impenetrable" barrier on the U.S.-Mexico border. "On Day One, we will begin working on an impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall," he said in August 2016.

But if that barrier gets built, it looks like it'll be pretty, well, penetrable.

At first, Trump wanted a concrete wall. Now putting aside for a moment the many arguments against constructing a wall, concrete would tough to breach—though not impossible. A February 2018 Customs and Border Protection report, which KPBS obtained in September, stated that all eight of the steel and concrete border wall types ordered by the president were vulnerable to breaching, though many of the specific breaching techniques were redacted.

In any case, Trump has recently shifted to calling for a steel-slatted barrier. That way, border agents on the U.S. side can see what's happening on the Mexican side. But it also means people with the right sawing equipment can cut through the wall. At least, that's what a photo of a breached steel slat prototype obtained by NBC News shows:

Dept. of Homeland Security testing of a steel slat prototype for border wall proved it could be cut through with a saw, according to a report by DHS.

A photo obtained by @NBCNews shows the results of the test. https://t.co/SNxn6YneG9 pic.twitter.com/UP9EgHGxDx

— NBC News (@NBCNews) January 10, 2019

NBC says the photo was taken after Marine Corps experts at "Pogo Row" (a testing location near the California-Mexico border) "were instructed to attempt to destroy the barriers with common tools."

San Diego Sector Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott tells NBC that the prototypes tested at Pogo Row were not as big as the ones toured by Trump when he visited the border in March. But that shouldn't matter much: If they're made of the same material, they should be vulnerable to the same breaching technique, no matter how big.

Jonathan McIntosh via Foter.comPresident Donald Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are locked in a battle of wills over the border wall. After declaring a "barrier...absolutely critical to border security" during his Oval Office address, Trump walked out of a meeting with Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer when they refused to budge on the wall money. This may well be a prelude to Trump acting on his threat to declare a national emergency and using unobligated Pentagon funds to get the military to build a wall.

That would be a terrible abuse of his power, because there is no wall-worthy national security threat at the border.

Contrary to Trump's claims, a wall won't do much to stanch the flow of drugs to this country. Why? As best as can be determined, most of the heroin and cocaine intercepted on its way to the U.S. comes through legal ports of entry. And even if the wall did substantially block smugglers, the same sorts of drugs—or close substitutes—would be instead generated domestically, as long as there is a demand for them.

As for the human beings coming across the southern border, they are increasingly asylum seekers, and their cases deserve to be heard and processed quickly—which means investing in more immigration judges, not misdirecting resources on a misguided wall.

No matter how many times it is pointed out to Trump, he simply won't admit that the flow of illegal immigration is rapidly trending downwards. In 2000, the authorities apprehended 1,643,679 unauthorized migrants. In 2017? 303,916. There was a slight uptick in 2018, but nothing approaching a "crisis"—a word that Trump used six times in his seven-minute national address earlier this week. So going by the sheer numbers, if there was ever a time for a wall, it has already passed.

If the quantity of immigrants doesn't justify a wall, their "quality" doesn't either.

The administration has already taken a walloping for its whopper that 4,000 terrorists were apprehended at the southern border in 2017, a figure that was off by 4,000. Yes, about 3,000 "special interest" people were flagged entering from that side, but that merely means that they hail from countries that are a potential source of terrorism, not that they are terrorists themselves. No one who has come in from the southern border has ever conducted a terrorist attack. Even the ultra-restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies acknowledges that the administration is vastly exaggerating the terrorist threat.

What about other kinds of criminals? Trump has never backed away from his statement that Mexico sends us "rapists" and "criminals" rather than its "best" people. In truth, Mexico no longer sends us very many people at all—unlike back in 2000, when Mexicans made up 98 percent of the total migrants and Central Americans about two percent. As Stephanie Leutert, director of the Mexico Security Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin, points out, the split is now close to 50-50.

And among those coming in, criminals are the rarest of rare exception.

Leutert notes:

Since the Trump administration took office, the Border Patrol has detected fewer gang members crossing irregularly than during the Obama administration. In FY2017, these detections amounted to 0.075 percent of the total number of migrants (228 MS-13 members out of 303,916 total migrants). When combined with MS-13's rival, the Barrio 18 gang, the number rises only slightly to 0.095 percent. This is far from the "infestation" of violent gang members described by the president.

Furthermore, unlike the immigrants coming from Mexico, 98 percent of who were working-age men looking for better economic opportunities, half of the apprehended immigrants from Central America are families, many of them not-so-threatening women and children without men, predominantly from three countries: Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

Leutert notes that although the migrants from Guatemala tend to come from rural areas to escape extreme poverty (often mortgaging their farms to make the journey), those from Honduras and El Salvador are predominantly urban dwellers trying to get away from gangs. (Those gangs, in turn, formed after America started deporting criminal aliens back in droves.)

The previous unaccompanied minor "crisis" occurred not because Central American parents were acting irresponsibly, as many restrictionists claim. It was because they were trying to extricate their kids from the clutches of gangs trying to recruit them. "Boys of eleven years old (or younger) may be recruited as lookouts and teenage girls may be eyed for becoming members' 'girlfriends,'" Leutert says.

Families are now coming together to seek asylum. One would think that would gain them some brownie points from immigration hardliners who were slamming them for sending kids alone. But no! Now they are being accused of using kids as "pawns" to gain entry into the United States (because, per the Flores ruling, kids can't be kept in detention for longer than a few days so families who come with them are more likely to be "caught and released"). But that's not the case. Families are all fleeing together because gangs have started charging exorbitant extortions that are beyond the means of small mom-and-pop businesses to pay. And the price for failing to pay up, Leutert points out, is often death.

If there were lots of criminals and terrorists trying to sneak across the border undetected, a wall might help. But asylum seekers are actually trying to get caught because they want to live and work legally in the country. Indeed, as Vox's Dara Lind points out, they turn themselves in to the first border agent they encounter—at a port of entry if they can, but if those are too backed up, or if they're forced to languish for days and weeks because the Trump administration will only let a few in at a time (an illegal practice called metering), then between ports.

All a wall would do in that case is seal off access points between ports, creating bigger backups at ports of entry. Far from alleviating the brewing humanitarian situation at the border, as Trump claimed in his address, a wall would exacerbate it.

Restrictionists also claim that asylum-seeking families that are "caught and released" typically just disappear, never to be heard from again. But that's a highly dubious claim, to say the least. In one Obama-era program where asylum seekers were paired with case managers before being let go, the asylum seekers had a 100 percent attendance record at court hearings. They also had a 99 percent rate of check-ins and appointments with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to a Department of Homeland Security report.

More generally, the immigration advocacy group American Immigration Council published a report four years ago that looked at studies from over the previous two decades examining how well asylum seekers fulfilled their legal obligations. It found "very high rates of compliance" among those "who were placed into alternatives to detention."

The report cited a 2000 U.S. government-commissioned study that found an "83 percent rate of compliance with court proceedings among asylum seekers who were found to have a credible fear in the expedited removal process." It also showed an 84 percent compliance rate among asylees under minimal supervision, and 78 percent among those who were unsupervised.

This makes sense: The penalty for living in the country without authorization—both legal (given that unauthorized people have a very hard time obtaining visas) and in lost wages—is so high that asylum seekers have a built-in incentive to do things by the book. That's why, far from wasting money on the wall, it would be better to invest in more judges and legal hearings for a speedy dispensation of asylum cases.

The real crisis will be if Trump declares a national emergency to deal with his fake threat.

Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/NewscomHas California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris settled on a presidential run and picked a date to announce her candidacy? A variety of media outlets have reported as much, citing San Francisco talk radio station KCBS as the source. On Wednesday, KCBS reported that Harris would announce her candidacy on or around Martin Luther King Day (January 21), "probably at a campaign rally in Oakland." Their intel allegedly came from anonymous sources close to Harris.

But today, Politico's Christopher Cadelago reports that "a formal announcement date is not settled," per "a person close to her."

Take all that for what you will. The bottom line is likely the same: Brace yourself for the Harris 2020 campaign to officially launch sometime soon.

If you need a refresher on Harris' horrible history, here's C.J. Ciaramella reviewing her newly released book.

In The Truths We Hold, Harris touts her record as a "progressive prosecutor," but the book glosses over numerous instances where her office defended prosecutorial misconduct.

Harris recounts her career as a line prosecutor in San Francisco, up through her tenure as California Attorney General and her election to the U.S. Senate. The book is a rather clear attempt by Harris to preemptively defend her record on criminal justice, which has emerged as an important issue, especially on the left flank of the Democratic Party....

What her book doesn't address, however, is the many times her own office contributed to that dark history.

And a bit more of Reason's Harris coverage:

• Democrats Created a Birth-Control Banning Bogeyman Out of Brett Kavanaugh. Called Out, Kamala Harris Doubled Down
• New Kamala Harris Bill Asks Federal Taxpayers to Subsidize California's High Housing Costs
• Kamala Harris: No Friend to Criminal Justice Reform
• The Phony Feminism of Kamala Harris
• Kamala Harris Went to Bat for Dirty Prosecutors as California Attorney General

FREE MARKETS

Malcolm Gladwell is full of crap about marijuana and the dangers of its decriminalization. Yesterday, Reason's Jacob Sullum tackled a fearmongering anti-pot piece from The New York Times. But there are a lot of bad takes like it these days, including a recent New Yorker story by Malcolmn Gladwell. For some fun, see this Twitter thread from journalist Dave Levitan, which takes on the bad stats and misrepresentations point by point. A sample:

Gladwell: studies of twins suggest a gateway effect!

Me, in an actual book with citations and shit: you didn't look at the OTHER twin study that found something else, dick. pic.twitter.com/oi8h3btEGC

— Dave Levitan (@davelevitan) January 8, 2019

FREE MINDS

Good news for Google and free speech. From Fast Company:

For years, Google has been fighting an order from a French regulator, which tried to force the company to follow the law beyond European borders. The legal framework demands that internet companies purge search results about people's personal information. France argued that allowing results to remain in other locations made the law ineffective. Google and other technology advocates rebutted that allowing the law's scope to expand globally would allow repressive regimes to essentially erase all dissenting online content about them around the world.

Now, Google has a legal adviser to the European Union's top court on its side. More here.

QUICK HITS

Story to watch: Texas landowners with land near wall necessary for Trump wall "are digging in, vowing to reject buyout offers and preparing to fight the administration in court."
https://t.co/041cIVdzOW

— Tim Mak (@timkmak) January 10, 2019

• Former Sens. Claire McCaskill (D–Mo.) and Jeff Flake (R–Ariz.) were the least popular members of Congress last year, according to Morning Consult.

• It's a public domain bonanza!

• Hoaxes upon hoaxes:

"A study that claimed to explain why falsehoods go viral has turned out to itself be false." And yes, it went viral. https://t.co/DtQg1CXdgb

— Jesse Walker (@notjessewalker) January 10, 2019

• Glory days...

This tweet is correct about Chomsky's long-held, absolutist free speech views. But it's not just Chomsky. From Berkeley to ACLU, free speech absolutism has long been a central, defining belief of the left, which never used to trust institutions of authority with censorship power: https://t.co/BD7kxm95sl

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 10, 2019

Dreamstime.comIt's been reported that the Department of Justice is drafting an opinion to reverse a 2011 finding from the Office of Legal Counsel that paved the way for states to regulate online gambling as they see fit. Such a move, writes Veronique de Rugy, would not just be a blow to states like Nevada, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania that have already legalized online gambling, as well as the many others considering such action; it would also go against basic federalist principles.

Vladans / Dreamstime.comThe University of Virginia has suspended the Señoritas Latinas Unidas sorority for hazing. Officials agreed with a girl who pledged the sorority that a requirement that members study 25 hours a week violated the school's anti-hazing policy. The sorority has sued the college in federal court, complaining that they are being discriminated against, noting other programs at the college with similar study requirements.

NowThis, a news website that primarily caters to left-of-center millennials and Gen Z-ers, tweeted this on Wednesday: "The CIA's highest level positions are now all held by women—another stride towards progress." The tweet even included a flexed bicep emoji, a symbol of progress that invokes Rosie the Riveteer. Here it is:

The CIA's highest level positions are now all held by women — another stride towards progress pic.twitter.com/Sz4rDw4U7m

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) January 9, 2019

Most of the responses to the tweet involve people dunking on it, and for good reason. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) being run entirely by women is not another stride toward progress. A stride toward progress would be the CIA shutting down, or at the very least renouncing its past misdeeds: torturing prisoners, spying on American citizens, overthrowing foreign governments, etc., etc.

Yes, current CIA Director Gina Haspel is a woman. She also ran a CIA black site in Thailand and was personally involved in the waterboarding of at least one detainee. When asked about these activities during her confirmation hearings, she was unrepentant. She said, essentially, that she was just following orders.

I'm highlighting this tweet because it speaks to intersectionality's corruption of the modern progressive movement. Intersectionality, of course, is the academic tradition from the late 1980s that stressed group-based oppression: particularly racism and sexism. Over the years, proponents of intersectionality have added other areas of concern: everything from transphobia and homophobia to size-ism and able-ism. It's not that the intersectional thinkers are necessarily wrong—transphobia exists, and it's bad—but rather that a monomaniacal focus on group-based oppression can be naïve. Haspel taking over the CIA, for instance, might be a blow to sexism in some very narrow sense, but it does nothing to remedy the CIA's appalling record on civil liberties, something progressives purport to care about.

This is not the first time generic yaaassss slay kween feminism has been used to obscure Haspel's appalling awfulness: My colleague Scott Shackford made a note of The Advocate's coverage, which commended the CIA director for making "herstory" in a tweet that practically demands a barf emoji response.

Recall that some on the left complained Trump had threatened to drop "the mother of all bombs" on Afghanistan—not because killing yet more people in the war-torn country would be wrong, but because the phrase itself is sexist. This approach should frustrate true progressives. It certainly frustrates libertarians who would occasionally like to ally with them.

Screenshot via YoutubeEmboldened by successfully restricting access to plastic straws, California's busybody legislators are now mulling a crackdown on another ubiquitous feature of our consumer society: the paper receipt.

On Monday, Assemblyman Phil Ting (D–San Francisco) introduced a bill that would require businesses to provide their customers with an electronic receipt unless they specifically requested a paper one, in an effort to both cut down on waste and protect human health from the deadly chemicals found on paper receipts.

"It's common sense legislation. We think it's minimal cost, and we think it's really putting the power back in the consumers," said Ting at a press conference, standing next to an expressionless aide wearing a giant paper receipt costume on which were written fun facts about the bill.

Ting's bill is modelled explicitly on the state's recently passed straw-on-request bill, down to the penalties.

Any default provision of a physical receipt would expose the paper proof-of-purchase providing proprietor to daily fines of $25, capped at $300 per year—a carbon copy of the fines restaurateurs face for handing out unsolicited plastic straws.

The similarities between the two policies do not end there.

Straw bans got their start with a number of well-marketed advocacy campaigns from environmental nonprofits with catchy, alliterative names like 'Strawless in Seattle' or 'Skip the Straw.'

Ting's bill likewise draws both its inspiration and most of its facts and figures from nonprofit Green America's Skip the Slip campaign—which does its best to hype the environmental impact and health risks of paper receipts.

According to a May 2018 report from Green America, America's yearly receipt usage costs us 10 million trees and another 21 billion gallons of water. The group also warns that some 93 percent of receipts come coated in Bisphenol-S (BPS) or Bisphenol-A (BPA), everyone's favorite chemicals to hate.

On closer inspection, neither of these data points seem like much to worry about.

The average American uses about 80 to 100 gallons of water a day, which works out to be about 10 to 12 trillion gallons a year for the whole country. About 15 billion trees are estimated to be felled each year globally. Paper receipts are a rounding error.

Reason's Ron Bailey has likewise cataloged how health concerns over BPA—often found in products like water bottles and plastic utensils—are largely unfounded. Green America's report gives few reasons for why BPA on receipts—a product that is not touching the food you eat or the water you drink—would be a concern.

It was the same story with plastic straws, which—despite all the fuss—make up minuscule percentages of beach litter and marine plastic debris.

Passing some sort of receipt-on-request law will not do much to improve the health of California's environment or its residents. If anything, it will ensure that more of them are coaxed into giving over their data for an electronic receipt, which will almost certainly increase digital litter in their inboxes.

It is true that receipts, unlike straws, are becoming less relevant as more and more purchases are digitized. Nevertheless, it should be up to businesses and consumers to figure out how they want to record their purchases.

Albin Lohr-Jones/Sipa USA/NewscomNew York City Mayor Bill de Blasio today proposed a plan requiring private employers to provide their workers with 10 days per year of paid vacation.

The proposal would benefit hundreds of thousands of full- and part-time employees who don't have access to paid time off (PTO), de Blasio's office claims. If the plan is approved by the New York City Council, all private businesses with five or more workers would need to offer their workers two weeks of vacation time.

"New Yorkers need a break," de Blasio said today from City Hall. "If you work hard and you don't get a break, that's not fair."

The proposal is the first of its kind in the United States, according to The New York Times. De Blasio's office specifically highlighted the 470,000 combined employees in the city's professional services, retail, hotel, and food industries who don't get paid vacation.

"It's bad for your physical health. It's bad for your mental health," the mayor said. "It's no way to live."

Under the plan, workers would be able to take time off for any reason once they've been employed for 120 days. Companies would be allowed to require that employees give two weeks' notice before taking time off, or deny PTO requests if too many workers are taking off at the same time.

It doesn't sound like employees could automatically take 10 days of PTO after 120 days of employment. According to The Washington Post, workers would accrue their PTO gradually over the course of their employment.

The proposal probably has a decent chance of passing. The city council is dominated by Democrats, and judging from some of their reactions in de Blasio's press statement, a good number already appear to support the proposal.

But support is far from universal. "Everyone wants employees to have a fair amount of vacation time, but one-size-fits-all government mandates tend to make it harder to hire, grow businesses and create jobs," Michael Steel, a Republican strategist who used to work for former House Speaker John Boehner (R–Ohio), told the Post. "This sounds like that's what this would do."

Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, a local business group, agrees. She called the plan "another example of municipal overreach into the city's private sector economy."

"Most New York City employers are doing whatever they can to attract and keep good workers and do not need the government dictating their benefit policies," Wylde said in a statement. Many of the businesses that would be affected, she said, "are struggling retailers, who are facing rising rents and online competition."

Steel and Wylde bring up fair points. If private employers believe offering their workers paid vacation time will increase productivity, morale, or profits, then they will. Most businesses already do this, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting that 76 percent of private industry workers had access to PTO as of March 2017.

The problem is that PTO doesn't make sense for every business.

"When policymakers like de Blasio mandate benefits, it results in a reduction in salary/wages, or other employee benefits for employees," says Vanessa Brown Calder, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute who specializes in social welfare, housing, and urban policy. "That is because employers are interested in limiting total costs (compensation) for a given productivity level," Calder told Reason in an email.

If private employers are forced by the government to offer those benefits, then they may decide to cut wages as a result. But let's say workers at any particular company make $15 an hour (which is the minimum wage for business in NYC with 11 or more employees): Their wages can't legally be cut any more. In order to make ends meet, the business may end up cutting hours or even laying off some employees.

Mandatory benefit proposals essentially tell workers and companies what kind of compensation packages are acceptable. In reality, some workers would gladly trade higher pay for more time off. "However, not all employees would," notes Calder. "When policymakers like De Blasio mandate benefits, it (counterintuitively) reduces employees choices."

There are other reasons why de Blasio's plan isn't a good idea. "Mandates that make employees more expensive offer less incentive for businesses to hire more and more highly skilled employees (that's bad news for lower-wage workers)," wrote Independent Women's Forum Carrie Lucas in a July 2017 piece for Reason. "A government one-size-fits-all paid leave program would also discourage voluntary alternative work arrangements like job-sharing and telecommuting that benefit employers and employees."

Lucas was specifically referring to proposals that provide new parents with paid leave. But it's the same idea. Paid family leave and paid vacation time are both great policies when employers decide to implement them. But forcing such policies on businesses and their workers can, often does, and likely will have unintended consequences.

"We are fighting for free speech every single day," says Students for Liberty's CEO Wolf von Laer, who also contends that college campuses around the world are "breeding grounds for socialism."

I spoke with Laer, who has a Ph.D. in political economy from King's College (London), and David Clement, director of external relations, about SFL's upcoming LibertyCon, which takes place in Washington, D.C., January 17-20, and pulls together 2,000 students, activists, and libertarians from all over the world.

Reason is a sponsor of LibertyCon and folks such as Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Robby Soave, and Elizabeth Nolan Brown will join Libertarian Party Vice Presidential nominee Bill Weld, FCC head Ajit Pai, legal giants Randy Barnett and Alan Dershowitz, and others for the conference. During lunch on Saturday, Reason will present a "live" version of the magazine, featuring some of your favorite journalists, the musical styling of Remy, and the comedy of Andrew Heaton and Austin Bragg.

Go here for a list of speakers and use the code REASON to get a 40 percent discount on registration.

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

Don't miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)

Subscribe at Apple Podcasts..

Follow us at SoundCloud.

Subscribe at YouTube.

Like us on Facebook.

Follow us on Twitter.

The New York TimesAlex Berenson, the former New York Times reporter who has just published an anti-pot polemic that he aptly named after a notoriously hysterical 1936 anti-pot movie, says marijuana legalization "appears to lead to an increase in violent crime." Like his claim that marijuana causes schizophrenia and other "serious mental illnesses," his claim that it causes violence is based on a highly selective reading of the evidence.

"The first four states to legalize—Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington—have seen sharp increases in murders and aggravated assaults since 2014, according to reports from the Federal Bureau of Investigation," Berenson writes in the Times. "Police reports and news articles show a clear link to cannabis in many cases."

As Jesse Singal notes, selecting 2014 as the starting year seems suspect, since two of those states (Colorado and Washington) approved legalization in 2012. But 2014 does coincide with the lowest national violent crime rate since the late 1960s. The national rate rose by 3.5 percent in 2015 and by 3.4 percent 2016, then fell by about 1 percent in 2017, for a total increase of about 6 percent between 2014 and 2017. It's true that the increase in violent crime was sharper in the four states that Berenson mentions. Can the difference be attributed to marijuana legalization?

Probably not. University of Oregon economist Benjamin Hansen finds that "the homicide rates in Colorado and Washington were actually below what the data predicted they would have been given the trends in homicides from 2000-2012." He says "we can't conclude that marijuana legalization increases violence, and perhaps even there could be small negative effects."

Nor is the effect that Berenson perceives apparent in national data. The share of Americans reporting past-month marijuana use in the National Survey on Drug Use and Health rose by 55 percent from 2002 to 2017, a period when the national violent crime rate fell by 23 percent.

How plausible is it that legalizing marijuana would immediately cause "sharp increases in murders and aggravated assaults"? Here is how a bunch of experts at the RAND Drug Policy Research Center summarized the evidence in a 2013 report commissioned by the Office of National Drug Control Policy: "Even though marijuana is commonly used by individuals arrested for crimes, there is little support for a contemporaneous, causal relationship between its use and either violent or property crime. There is evidence supporting a possible intertemporal relationship, but it is not clear to what extent this is unique to marijuana." The authors flatly state that "marijuana use does not induce violent crime," while "the links between marijuana use and property crime are thin."

Free PressIn line with that research, several studies have found that relaxing legal restrictions on marijuana is not associated with an increase in violent crime. A 2016 analysis of data from 11 Western states, published in the Journal of Drug Issues, found "no evidence of negative spillover effects from medical marijuana laws (MMLs) on violent or property crime." To the contrary, the researchers found "significant drops in rates of violent crime associated with state MMLs."

A 2017 study published in Contemporary Drug Problems compared FBI crime data in states with different legal regimes and found that "property and violent crime rates appear to be lower in both decriminalized and medically legalized states, but the difference is not statistically significant." A 2018 study published by Germany's Institute of Labor Economics compared California counties with different policies regarding medical marijuana dispensaries and found "no relationship between county laws that legally permit dispensaries and reported violent crime." Another 2018 study, published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, found "no causal effects of medical marijuana laws on violent or property crime at the national level" and "no strong effects within individual states, except for in California, where the medical marijuana law reduced both violent and property crime by 20%."

If letting people use marijuana for recreational purposes leads to "sharp increases in murders and aggravated assaults," you would expect to see something similar in jurisdictions that allow medical use, especially when the rules are loose, as they were in California for two decades before full legalization. Yet these studies find nothing of the sort. And if more marijuana use means more "paranoia and psychosis," resulting in "an increase in violent crime," as Berenson claims, you would expect that the national increase in cannabis consumption would have been accompanied by a national increase in violent crime. Yet exactly the opposite happened.

Berenson's book has received respectful reviews in The New Yorker and Mother Jones, along with considerable pushback from people who study these issues. You can expect to see more of the latter.

Senate/ZUMA Press/NewscomLikely 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) released a new memoir this week. In The Truths We Hold, Harris touts her record as a "progressive prosecutor," but the book glosses over numerous instances where her office defended prosecutorial misconduct.

Harris recounts her career as a line prosecutor in San Francisco, up through her tenure as California Attorney General and her election to the U.S. Senate. The book is a rather clear attempt by Harris to preemptively defend her record on criminal justice, which has emerged as an important issue, especially on the left flank of the Democratic Party.

"The job of a progressive prosecutor is to look out for the overlooked, to speak up for those whose voices aren't being heard, to see and address the causes of crime, not just their consequences, and to shine a light on the inequality and unfairness that lead to injustice," Harris writes.

She also addresses police brutality. "I know how difficult and dangerous the job is, day in and day out, and I know how hard it is for the officers' families, who have to wonder if the person they love will be coming home at the end of each shift," she writes. "I also know this: It is a false choice to suggest you must either be for the police or for police accountability. I am for both. Most people I know are for both. Let's speak some truth about that, too."

Of one of her first cases as a prosecutor, Harris writes that she begged a judge to hear the case of an innocent person arrested during a drug raid, so that the woman wouldn't have to spend the weekend in jail. It was "a defining moment" in her life, she writes. "It was revelatory, a moment that proved how much it mattered to have compassionate people working as prosecutors."

Harris explicitly acknowledges the immense power of prosecutors in the criminal justice system and the myriad misconduct issues it has created.

"America has a deep and dark history of people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice," she writes. "I know this history well—of innocent men framed, of charges brought against people of color without sufficient evidence, of prosecutors hiding information that would exonerate defendants, of the disproportionate application of the law."

What her book doesn't address, however, is the many times her own office contributed to that dark history.

Scott Griessel / Dreamstime.comThe liberty-loving attorneys of the Institute for Justice are teaming up with the Cato Institute to fight a federal policy that forbids defendants from discussing the terms of civil settlements they enter into with the federal government. If they don't keep their mouths shut, these defendants are threatened with harsher punishments.

The offending agency targeted in a federal lawsuit filed today is the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The Cato Institute wants to publish a book by an entrepreneur who believes he's the victim of prosecutorial overreach by the SEC. But he can't tell his story for fear of further prosecution.

Normally this is the point where we'd tell you who this person is and why the SEC went after him. But we cannot. As part of the agreement he reached to settle the matter, the plaintiff in the Cato suit had to accept a gag order that prevents him from discussing or criticizing the case. Even though the settlement does not require him to admit guilt, he is nevertheless forbidden from saying anything that would indicate that he thinks the "complaint is without factual basis."

Because this gag order prevents him from talking about the case, it also prevents the Cato Institute from publishing his book. Cato and the Institute for Justice are thus not revealing the man's identity because doing so would also reveal that he disagrees with, and is critical of, his settlement with the SEC. If he violates the gag order, SEC prosecutors could try to vacate the settlement and punish him more harshly.

Over at the Cato Institute, Clark Neily, vice president for criminal justice, explains about as much as he can without revealing the specific case:

The case began when a well-known law professor introduced us to a former businessman who wanted to publish a memoir he had written about his experience being sued by the SEC and prosecuted by DOJ in connection with a business he created and ran for several years before the 2008 financial crisis. The memoir explains in compelling detail how both agencies fundamentally misconceived the author's business model—absurdly accusing him of operating a Ponzi scheme and sticking with that theory even after it fell to pieces as the investigation unfolded—and ultimately coerced him into settling the SEC's meritless civil suit and pleading guilty in DOJ's baseless criminal prosecution after being threatened with life in prison if he refused.

Most SEC cases—98 percent of them, according to the Institute for Justice—end in settlements. If each of these settlements includes a similar gag order, that means almost no one targeted by the SEC can publicly discuss or evaluate the merits of the case against them. We do not have the ability to consider whether citizens are coerced into accepting these deals because they cannot afford to fight back, not unlike what we see in many criminal court cases.

These agreements only bind in one direction. Here's a recent press release from the SEC that details the settlement with a securities firm executive, emphasizing the accusations of fraud against him but noting that he neither admitted nor denied guilt when accepting the judgment. They get to describe these cases how they choose; defendants have to remain silent out of fear. Here's a whole page of links to these press releases.

Jaimie Cavanaugh, an Institute for Justice attorney working on the case, tells Reason that these SEC actions start with the agency threatening their targets with massive prosecutions and then settling for fines and allowing the person to forego an admission of wrongdoing. Those fines seem to correspond with the amount of money that person or company's insurance will cover, Cavanaugh says. That should raise concerns over whether these enforcement mechanisms are being used for revenue generation—a white-collar version of asset forfeiture, if you will. The censorship keeps the public from evaluating the extent that this might be happening.

"We think the book would tell the story of what's happening to lots of people," Cavanaugh says. And it's not just the SEC. Other agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Commodity Futures Trading Commission write similar gag policies into their settlements.

The lawsuit from the Institute for Justice, filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, seeks to have this gag order declared an unconstitutional violation of the Cato Institute's First Amendment right to publish this man's book. They're asking for an injunction to stop the SEC from enforcing these gag orders.

Read the complaint here. A spokesperson from the SEC declined to comment in respone to the filing.

C-SPAN"Our southern border is a pipeline for vast quantities of illegal drugs," Donald Trump said last night while touting the merits of the "big, beautiful wall" he wants to build along the border with Mexico. The border, of course, is not a pipeline, even metaphorically. The pipeline is the route by which illegal drugs cross the border, and here is where the president runs into practical as well as semantical difficulty.

First of all, as Joe Setyon noted last night, illegal drugs that enter the country from Mexico are mainly smuggled through ports of entry, which would still exist no matter how much money the government spends on physical barriers. In 2017, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), only "a small percentage of all heroin seized by [Customs and Border Protection] along the land border was between Ports of Entry." The vast majority is carried through ports of entry by privately owned vehicles or commercial tractor trailers.

The DEA says illicit fentanyl enters the United States largely (maybe mostly, once you take purity into account) in packages delivered by mail or private courier services, either directly or through Canada. Nearly all of the fentanyl seized at the southern border in 2017 was coming in through ports of entry. The picture is similar for cocaine and methamphetamine, the two other drugs that Trump mentioned: The vast majority of the supply would be unaffected by a wall.

The pipeline metaphor is misleading because it invites us to imagine a single flow of drugs that could be blocked if only the government devoted sufficient resources to the effort. But drug traffickers react to enforcement efforts, and if one route becomes relatively perilous they can always switch to another. As Theresa Cardinal Brown explained in the May 2017 issue of Reason, "drug smugglers have already beaten Trump's wall" through a variety of evasive maneuvers. Those include not just hiding drugs inside vehicles going through the wall at points of entry (the currently preferred method) but also using tunnels to carry drugs under the wall, flying or catapulting drugs over the wall, and transporting drugs around the wall on boats and submarines. Thanks to prohibition, Brown notes, "the profit incentives to find ways over, under, around, or through any border infrastructure are high, and the cartels have more than enough money to spend on R&D."

That profit incentive—the huge "risk premium" that criminals can earn by producing, transporting, and selling illegal drugs—is the most fundamental problem with Trump's fantasy of stopping drugs at the border, whether with a wall or with any other conceivable method. "Traffickers can typically purchase a kilogram of fentanyl powder for a few thousand dollars from a Chinese supplier," the DEA says, "transform it into hundreds of thousands of pills, and sell the counterfeit pills for millions of dollars in profit." Taking the average of two actual sales cited by the DEA, a kilogram of fentanyl that costs $2,600 can be pressed into 666,666 fake pain pills, each containing 1.5 milligrams of the active ingredient, generating about $10 million in revenue at $15 each.

No feasible amount of interdiction will stop people from taking advantage of a business opportunity like that, although increased enforcement may push traffickers toward more potent drugs, as illustrated by the shift from diverted prescription pain pills to heroin, from heroin to fentanyl, and from fentanyl to fentanyl analogs. Each of those steps reduces risks for smugglers and increases profits, but it also magnifies the dangers that consumers face by making potency more variable and less predictable. The government's efforts to block the "pipeline" cannot stop drug use, but they can make it deadlier.