Sep
14
2024

Ho Ho Ho!

Our Eye Candy du Jour is an old Michael Ramirez cartoon, apparently from 2013, but Daniel J. Mitchell dug it out to illustrate The Santa Claus Election.

For libertarians, this is a very depressing election (a feeling we tend to have every four years, so a familiar experience).

What basically happens is that two politicians try to bribe us with our own money.

This year, we have Kamala Harris, who was even worse than Bernie Sanders in the big-spender contest.

And we have Donald Trump, who managed to increase spending faster than it grew under Barack Obama (and I’m not even counting the orgy of COVID spending in his last year!).

The latest from Trump is that he wants to exempt overtime pay from income taxation. A few weeks after he said he wanted to exempt tips from income taxation.

I noticed Scott Lincicome's query:

Also of note:

  • Might be useful if you venture onto a college campus. Greg Lukianoff guests on Quillette to provide Answers to 12 Bad Anti-Free Speech Arguments. Let's just look at the first one:

    Assertion 1: Free speech was created under the false notion that words and violence are distinct, but we now know that certain speech is more akin to violence.

    Answer: Speech equals violence isn’t a new idea. It’s a very old—and very bad—idea.

    On campus, I often run into people—not only students, but professors—who seem to think they’re the first to notice that the speech/violence distinction is a social construct. They conclude that this means it’s an arbitrary distinction—and that, since it’s arbitrary, the line can be put where they please. (Conveniently, they draw the line based on their personal views: if it’s speech that they happen to hate, then it just might be violence.) But, ironically, the whole point of freedom of speech, from its beginning, has been to enable people to sort things out without resorting to violence. A quotation often attributed to Sigmund Freud (which he attributed to another writer) conveys this: “The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilisation.”

    Yes, a strong distinction between the expression of opinion and violence is a social construct, but it’s one of the best social constructs for peaceful coexistence, innovation, and progress that’s ever been invented. Redefining the expression of opinion as violence is a formula for a chain reaction of endless violence, repression and regression.

    What I learned from this: Freud wasn't wrong about everything.

  • It's not just the left, but OK. Jonathan Turley has a WSJ op-ed describing The Left’s Assault on the Constitution.

    Kamala Harris declared in Tuesday’s debate that a vote for her is a vote “to end the approach that is about attacking the foundations of our democracy ’cause you don’t like the outcome.” She was alluding to the 2021 Capitol riot, but she and her party are also attacking the foundations of our democracy: the Supreme Court and the freedom of speech.

    Several candidates for the 2020 presidential nomination, including Ms. Harris, said they were open to the idea of packing the court by expanding the number of seats. Mr. Biden opposed the idea, but a week after he exited the 2024 presidential race, he announced a “bold plan” to “reform” the high court. It would pack the court via term limits and also impose a “binding code of conduct,” aimed at conservative justices.

    Ms. Harris quickly endorsed the proposal in a statement, citing a “clear crisis of confidence” in the court owing to “decision after decision overturning long-standing precedent.” She might as well have added “because you don’t like the outcome.” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) has already introduced ethics and term-limits legislation and said Ms. Harris’s campaign has told him “that your bills are precisely aligned with what we are talking about.”

    Turley has gathered an impressive collection of quotes from (mostly) professors and politicians, decrying (in one case) "that little piece of paper", the Constitution, that's an obstacle on the Road to Serfdom.

  • On the "crack down" watch. Ars Technica reports the latest: Biden moves to crack down on Shein and Temu, slow shipments into US.

    The Biden administration has proposed rules that could make it more costly for Chinese e-commerce platforms like Shein and Temu to ship goods into the US.

    In his announcement proposing to crack down on "unsafe, unfairly traded products," President Joe Biden accused China-founded e-commerce platforms selling cheap goods of abusing the "de minimis exemption" that makes shipments valued under $800 duty-free.

    Platforms taking advantage of the exemption can share less information on packages and dodge taxes. Biden warned that "over the last 10 years, the number of shipments entering the United States claiming the de minimis exemption has increased significantly, from approximately 140 million a year to over 1 billion a year." And the "majority of shipments entering the United States claiming the de minimis exemption originate from several China-founded e-commerce platforms," Biden said.

    As a result, America has been flooded with "huge volumes of low-value products such as textiles and apparel" that compete in the market "duty-free," Biden said. And this "makes it increasingly difficult to target and block illegal or unsafe shipments" presumably lost in the flood.

    I've seen a lot of Temu ads online, offering low low low prices on crap I don't want.

    But this "crack down" sounds like yet another anti-consumer protectionist move, with the usual excuses about "safety", and substituting the government's judgments of "value" for the customer's.

  • USPS delenda est. At Reason, Jack Nicastro asks the musical (and rhetorical) question: 10 Years and $3 Billion for a New Mail Truck?.

    The new U.S. Postal Service (USPS) Next Generation Delivery Vehicles (NGDVs) have delighted drivers since hitting the road in Georgia last month, the Associated Press reports. But given the $5 billion investment required, taxpayers might be a tad less enthusiastic.

    USPS prides itself on being "generally self-funded" through revenue from the sale of stamps, products, and services. As laudable and uncommon as this general self-funding is for federal agencies, USPS received $3 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act. USPS also has a pension system with a $50 billion unfunded liability for which the taxpayer may ultimately have to foot the bill, Reason's Eric Boehm explains.

    Altogether, USPS expects its total investment in new vehicles to reach $9.6 billion. Considering a significant portion of this investment comes out of the U.S. Department of the Treasury (read: from taxpayers present and future), the public is entitled to scrutinize how this money was spent.

    So scrutinize away, suckers taxpayers.

    I did a stamps-by-mail order a few months back, and now the USPS sends me their quarterly catalog USA Philatelic, which is a slick compendium of "stamps and stamp-inspired products" that they'll be happy to sell you. (You can request your very own copy here; browse an incomplete archive of past issues here.)

    Even a philistine like me can appreciate the beauty of some stamps. But I can't help but wonder how much money USPS would save by just issuing one Forever Flag stamp, and leaving the beauty to the private sector.

    A "Forever" stamp will run you 73¢ these days, by the way.