At a blistering 2021 speed, the screen shifts from archaic interfaces to modern emojis without giving as much as a second to focus before clearing the display for text reading “It’s been 25 years since comprehensive internet regulations were passed. It’s time for an update.” It is part of Facebook’s pro-regulatory advertisement push entitled, “Born in ’96” part of the larger “It’s Time” campaign.

As advertisements go, this one is remarkably effective, if a little overbearing. Would you expect anything less from the king of every corner in the advertising market?

The ecosystem created for the internet in ‘96 by the Communications Decency Act (CDA) has clearly not impeded Facebook’s success. After being created in 2004, Facebook was established in a post-CDA world and has played a leading role in establishing that world’s bounds. Nevertheless, the company’s anxiety over ambiguities in the ancient digital legislation is understandable.

Rather than letting Facebook’s executives design the social media market of the future, what if there were free competition? Not the kind of competition that Twitter and even Parler provide Facebook, rather, a type of decentralized competition that challenges the structure that the Silicon Valley giants are built on. In other words, how about a polycentric organization of competition that makes the CDA obsolete and breaks up vertical monopolies on user-generated content and use data? Thanks to an unexpected source, that competition may not be far away.

To Moderate or Not to Moderate is NOT the Question

Chances are, if you are made uneasy by a social media giant lobbying to change the rules that govern it and its competitors, that dubious feeling may come from a general distrust of Facebook itself. Facebook may or may not have lost your trust after Russia used the platform to target Americans with divisive advertisements during the 2016 election, or after CEO Mark Zuckerberg was summoned to Congress to testify in 2018 about the site’s alleged internal content moderation bias against conservatives. Even without negative associations, however, new regulations on established markets create barriers to entry and disincentivize competition. In this case, new regulations would mandate that social media companies practice internal content moderation—otherwise simply known as moderation—something that has strained Facebook’s abilities up until recently.

At the root of Facebook’s legal issues is the CDA. Although originally intended to determine what content was suitable for television, the CDA became one of the most foundational regulations for the burgeoning internet. Insofar as the internet is concerned, the CDA mandates that a site may not publish certain indecent, and often independently criminal, content. It also delegates the enforcement of these rules to a regulatory agency, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), instead of leaving the justice system to sort out victims and perpetrators. Notably, the CDA also creates a distinction between “publishers,” standard websites that curate or create content, and “platforms” like social media sites that allow anyone to post and merely aggregate and serve content to consumers.

Distorting the justice system by inserting executive agencies between victim and perpetrator creates a topsy-turvy system. As it stands, proving the facilitatory guilt on the part of a social media company is far easier than proving that any crime outside of the scope of the CDA had been committed in the first place.

Under the CDA, there are two systems of online content production. Publishers are obligated to internally moderate content such that it remains within the bounds of what the law considers acceptable speech. On the other hand, platforms are not held to this standard and are, by the nature of the distinction, barred from behaving as publishers. Although this clause, better known simply as “section 230,” has been touted by many as the saving grace of the CDA from the perspective of free speech, it is also the wedge that causes Facebook to take flack from both the left and right.

Facebook has been scrutinized for not moderating content strictly enough in 2016 and for being too politically restrictive ever since. New regulations would certainly clear up Facebook’s role, especially if Facebook’s on-staff legal team would have a say in the verbiage of any proposed bill, which it likely would. Either way, moderation of user-generated media, and therefore free speech online, will either be centralized under a federal agency or only distributed between a few massive companies which themselves have nothing to do with content production.

The free market provided several alternatives to Facebook and Twitter but few gained traction in the face of such established competitors and steep regulatory obligations. One of these start-ups, Parler, managed to gain a healthy following when President Donald Trump was controversially removed from almost every other online platform following the storming of the Capitol on Jan 6. After gaining millions of users overnight, Parler’s web-hosting service, a subsidiary of Amazon, decided to sever ties with the company over its moderation policy. This effectively moderated the entire website off of the internet by refusing to do business with them.

Many were attracted to Parler’s moderation policies, or lack thereof, and, had it not been shut down, the site would have posed a competitive threat for a portion of Facebook’s disaffected user base. Although providing a place for truly unfettered conversation, Parler segmented conversation and would never be a comfortable place for the majority of social media users who prefer some community standards beyond the legal bare minimum to be enforced.

Besides, having a second, slightly edgier public square just outside the first is not a substitution for effective public discourse. The French third estate’s self-separation from the estates general did not, after all, create a more healthy political dialogue for the French people during the beginning of the French Revolution.

Parler was shuttered for two months while the site’s founders procured alternative web hosting services. Although currently functional, Parler’s existence is not a long-term competitive solution to the problem of legally obligatory moderation because it frames moderation, in and of itself, as a bad thing. The same could be said for President Donald Trump’s new media outlet if it is ever opened up to public contribution.

Moderation, when done offline, is a daily practice for most. Whether by choosing the members of your inner circle or choosing to only have two slices of pizza, people self-moderate their lives all the time. Centrally planned moderation, however, is called prohibition and often causes more harm than good.

Enter the Decentralized Social Media (DSM) model, a polycentric model of online interaction recently proposed on Medium by Ross Ulbricht, the currently imprisoned founder of Silk Road, an infamous illicit online marketplace that jump-started the popularity of Bitcoin in the early 2000s.

The Innovation of Decentralized Social Media

Moderation of something as big as social media is incredibly difficult and would take a massive amount of manpower if done entirely manually. Some of Facebook’s most closely guarded secrets determine the algorithms the company has developed for use in ad targeting and to facilitate moderation. The CDA both disallows this moderation and requires it, depending on which side of Section 230 a site falls on.

To oversimplify, Ulbricht’s DSM model would remove those automatic and manual moderation tools from under the hood of a social media’s servers and place those same processes in the device of the social media user under the control of separate companies that stand to profit from providing moderation and aggregation services at the discretion of the device owner. Users could access any or all of the web’s available social media content feeds at once and only be fed content within their own acceptable parameters while retaining ownership of their user data. All of this would be done through the operant function of Bitcoin, the encrypted blockchain.

In practice, the seemingly small distinction between where these algorithms are processed and who owns those functions resolves several of the questions raised and created by the CDA without having to create or pass any new laws.

Where the CDA consolidates and centralizes the responsibility for moderation under the content aggregator’s purview, start-up companies following Ulbricht’s model would compete to moderate and aggregate both user content and advertisements from social media platforms, thereby creating a market where there previously was only mandate.

Users would simply open an app wherein social media content is centralized. Users could pick and choose moderation and aggregation providers to reward with a portion of the advertisement revenue that their engagement latently generates and freely switch between providers.

Rather than having aggregation and moderation be centralized by legal obligation to a few social media companies, levels of moderation, advertisement service, and content prioritization would all be separate overlapping markets which independently compete to provide superior service and control for negative externalities.

Algorithmic moderation is a powerful tool that, along with manual moderation, can create comfortable digital environments. If moderation and aggregation were divorced from the social media platform and made a competitive marketplace, users would be free to use whatever network or combination of networks that they preferred and have the content they are served moderated however they see fit. If users could be in control of the moderation they facilitate and are subject to, the arrangement would be considerably more consensual. Social media companies under a decentralized model would not be held responsible for users misusing their digital infrastructure as content regulation would be the responsibility of the client-side moderation algorithm and the companies that compete to provide those services most effectively. If a user was ever dissatisfied with the moderation they were provided those would have market remedies.

Should someone use social media as a means to harass or threaten another, there would be no intermediate party at fault, freeing the judicial system to bring justice to guilty and affected parties alike.

Side-effects may include

Besides sidestepping the CDA’s ineffectual regulations, a DSM would protect the privacy of users by encrypting the user generated data used by moderation algorithms and keeping a function of that unique data as the user’s encryption key or proof of identity.

The value of the advertising market and the size of Facebook’s share of it are both due to the incredible amount of data that Google, Facebook, and other companies collect on every person who uses their services. This information is the company’s to sell, use to target ads, or train algorithms with. Under a DSM model, that information would be yours to sell and distribute among service providers.

The value of this information is worth much more than the emotional value of privacy. Companies like Facebook make much of their money in one way or another from the accuracy and scope of their user data collection. If that information were to become yours by using a DSM, so too would the money it generates.

As it stands, Facebook and Google data-mine users in exchange for a service. Were they to have to adapt to a DSM model, companies like this would need to shift to more traditional models where payment is offered directly for a service rendered. Ulbricht’s model would allow businesses to accommodate liquid payment between service providers like web-hosts or advertisers and the users so that the app constantly allows users to be in control of how much of their data they would like to share and how much usability they want to pay for by receiving ads.

Innovation always trumps regulation

Rather than offering prescription for what ails the social media marketplace, Ulbricht’s paper is a prediction from a prison cell. The unstoppable march of innovation is sure to further segment the digital marketplace for social programs into intricately specialized niches. The distributed social media model is merely a description of how those businesses and technologies would need to operate.

Because Ulbricht was not granted the clemency from the Trump administration that he so hoped for, the infamous programmer will not be the one to found the moderation or content aggregation start-ups that he describes. Public figures such as Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, and Tim Pool have all claimed to be creating platforms that in some way aggregate social media, beginning the process of decentralizing—or polycentrizing—the social media market. It remains to be seen if these or any start-ups will truly realize Ulbricht’s ideas, but if the CDA is not soon updated, it will likely be circumvented.

Just as 3D printers have shown several gun laws to be archaic, if not entirely obsolete, the best way to counter a bad set of laws or regulations is to create a technology or idea that renders it pointless. Ulbricht may not be the one to lead the charge, but his simple Medium post certainly opened a door.

Gavin Hanson (born in ’96) is the Editor-in-Chief of Catalyst

Published with permission from Catalyst. Read the original article here.

The post Regulation, Moderation, and Social Media Decentralization appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

First and foremost, the COVID-19 pandemic posed enormous challenges to American institutions, and continues to do so. Frankly, we were not prepared. We need to diagnose what went wrong, so that we are never caught unaware like this again. Fortunately, the diagnosis is straightforward. COVID-19 was going to be bad, no matter what. But the failures of big government made it much, much worse.

In particular, the Centers for Disease Control, Food and Drug Administration, and public teachers’ unions are the great American villains of 2020. Meanwhile, the heroes of this year are almost entirely in the private sector. From Zoom to vaccine development, Big Pharma and Big Tech—yes, you read that right—made this horrible year bearable. Even amid a crisis that led so many to cry out for vigorous government action, we saw that private markets still work best.

For progressives and so-called “national” conservatives who support big government, 2020 represented the ultimate test for their philosophies. Although they disagree on cultural issues, they see eye-to-eye on the role of government. Both want a big, energetic state promoting what (they believe to be) the good of the nation. Well, here was their chance for the government to shine.

The result was shameful failure. The COVID-19 crisis put left-wing and right-wing statism on trial—and both were found guilty of ill-intent and gross incompetence.

After all, the CDC is the reason America lagged behind other nations for so long in terms of COVID-19 testing. We had the virus genome fully mapped in January, which enabled the rapid production of private testing kits. But the CDC forced these operations to shut down, coming up with its own test—which was flawed, and even contaminated! Testing and tracing could have stemmed the worst of the COVID-19 tide.

On this issue alone, CDC ineptitude is likely responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. Its red tape and incompetence made containing the COVID-19 pandemic, like a few other countries were able to, impossible.

How about the FDA?

It is no secret that the vaccine was delayed because it needed FDA approval. Indeed, several working vaccines could have come much earlier, were it not for our bungling bureaucrat gatekeepers. (Dear FDA: Can you please speed things up a little, so people do not, you know, die? It would make us ever so happy if you did. Thanks.)

As for schools, the data show that young people and children are at very low-risk from COVID-19, and that schools are not “super spreaders.” Despite this, largely due to pressure from public teachers’ unions, many schools remained closed in the fall. In fact, the US was pretty much the only country to pursue the alarmist policy of keeping schools closed.

The toll on school-aged children is immense, from psychological trauma to impeded learning. Low-income families were hit especially hard. They often lacked the means to participate in distance learning, and having their kids at home made it harder for parents to earn much-needed income.

Fortunately, there seems to be some well-deserved backlash against the crony public education establishment. Hopefully a mass exodus to more effective and accountable learning platforms will follow, whether that is charter schools, private schools, or homeschooling. Even more hopefully, parents will realize public education racketeers are not their friends. They should demand loud and clear: Fund students, not systems!

In stark contrast to these unacceptable failures by government agencies and employees, the private sector delivered.

Big Pharma and Big Tech are the winners here. Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and many other companies did amazing work getting the vaccines developed as quickly as they did. Public health “experts” repeatedly claimed a vaccine would not be available for 18 months, at the earliest. (Shows what they know!)

As for Big Tech, companies like Facebook and Twitter helped us stay connected while we were forced physically to remain apart. Amazon responded well to a huge surge in demand, stemming from the curtailment of in-person shopping. Faced with an immense logistical challenge, the online retailer surpassed expectations.

These sectors and their star performers are not perfect, of course.

In the past, Big Pharma lobbied for many of the regulatory roadblocks that made fighting COVID-19 so hard. Big Tech got egg on its face for covering up the Hunter Biden laptop story. Nevertheless, the takeaway is clear: 2020 would have been much, much more miserable without these supposedly evil big businesses in our corner. We owe them far more than we give them.

2021 is the perfect time to revisit our basic beliefs about the role of government and business in society. Both were unexpectedly challenged by the greatest public health crisis in recent memory.

Government failed. Business triumphed. Statism should be discredited, hopefully for an entire generation. Any coherent political philosophy for the 21st century must start from this basic truth.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The post Why the Real Villain of 2020 Was Big Government appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Each of these proposals would expand the FTC’s power considerably and make businesses, large or small, in almost every sector of the US economy more susceptible to politicized enforcement of antitrust and competition law.

For Sen. Hawley, politicizing American competition policy to take on “Big Tech” is exactly the point. He believes social media operators like Facebook and Twitter have enabled “some of the worst of America,” and he has admonished the current FTC’s approach to the tech sector for being “toothless.” In his plan, Hawley accuses the FTC of being “in no shape to ensure competition in today’s markets, let alone tomorrow’s” and condemns it for having “stood by as actors in digital markets violated the law to obtain monopoly power.”

Clearly, this proposal is not out of character for Hawley, who has introduced legislation specifically aimed at combating “social media addiction,” but it does show how willing he is to massively expand the size and scope of government power, just to go after a few companies he disfavors.

[Sen. Hawley’s Moral Panic Over Social Media]

Principled advocates of limited government and free markets should oppose Hawley’s plan. The FTC has significant, vague, and broad authority to regulate the vast majority of the economy, with a few narrow carveouts. The agency also has significant discretion to determine its own jurisdiction, as well as what constitutes “unfair methods of competition” and “unfair or deceptive acts or practices.” This is precisely why Congress tried to cabin the power that the FTC can exercise.

Congress made the FTC an independent agency headed by a five-person commission, only three of which can be from the same party. The goal was to insulate them from the political whims of one particular party that may be in charge at any given time. Otherwise, the FTC could very well be used as a regulatory hammer to smash political rivals.

The reason Congress created procedural safeguards and gave the FTC limited ability to impose civil penalties for a first violation was that, despite its limited rulemaking authority and responsibility to enforce certain statutes, much of its legal principles come from ad hoc enforcement and the precedent it creates. Often, the FTC doesn’t know if something is a violation until it actually happens. As such, Congress confined the FTC so that companies would have to notice that something is illegal before facing large fines and penalties.

But Hawley’s proposals would substantially undermine both of these safeguards that Congress wisely put in place. Instead, the FTC’s significant power would be placed in one individual under the executive’s thumb who would be given the authority to impose steep civil penalties on companies for behavior they did not even know was illegal. It would also give states a far greater ability to go after companies themselves, even if the FTC refused. This would constitute a major expansion of government power, giving the president and state executive officers a dangerous tool to punish those they disfavor.

While supporters of Hawley’s plan may applaud such an idea when the Trump Administration can carry out its priorities, imagine the outrage and scandal that would result from the same authority being placed in a Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders appointee. Hawley’s plan may not be surprising, given his disdain for large tech companies, but it is very telling. It shows just how easy it can be for personal prejudice to get in the way of principled advocacy.

It is time for Senator Hawley’s colleagues to remind him that the Republican party is supposed to stand for smaller, not bigger, government.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The post Josh Hawley’s Plan to Overhaul the FTC Would Create a Monster Far More Dangerous Than “Big Tech” appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

The British science fiction author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke gave rise to three iconic laws, where only the third has, as we say in the twenty-first century, gone viral: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

This law can be easily illustrated by some early first contacts with isolated human tribes. In several books, Jared Diamond discusses that phenomenon with respect to European voyages across the Pacific and in greater detail the “last first contact” of Highland tribes of Papua New Guinea. From the earliest recorded first contacts to the latest, many curious items brought by visitors have starstruck indigenous populations. The encounters, however doubtful, describe fascination and awe before guns and mirrors and many are the tales of fear before a camera’s mighty ability to capture one’s soul.

Over even short periods of human existence, technologies that we take for granted today would have seemed absolutely magical to some of our ancestors. For many things, we don’t even have to make centuries-long comparisons. The late Hans Rosling famously told the story of human progress with the aid of a washing machine: for their premier wash Rosling’s parents invited grandma, who, after a life of handwashing, was predictably mesmerized. “To my grandmother,” says Rosling in his characteristic Swedish accent and charmingly recognizable lecturing style, “the washing machine was a miracle.”

We can tell similar stories with smartphones, with fintech and modern payment technologies, with cars and trains and air travel. In the 1920s, John Maynard Keynes famously reflected on the amazing amenities of the times, where an

“inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep.”

Let’s consider another underappreciated candidate for magical abilities: search engines and the easy access to the sum knowledge of humankind they allow. These perfectly normal and much-maligned techniques give us the truly magical ability to find almost anything we want, constituting the face of “The Internet” for most of its billion daily users.

As Phil Magness last month exposed the academic Voldemort Principle – where those one intolerantly disagrees with become nameless non-persons – I’d like to invoke Harry Potter’s magical world for a more mundane purpose: illustrating our world’s technological superiority over the fictional world that Harry and his friends inhabit.

The struggles of studying at Hogwarts

The wonderful world of magic created by J.K. Rowling has captured the hearts of many more than my own generation’s fair share of nerds and bookworms. Film, musicals, theme parks, computer games, spin-offs and its own little celebratory enactment of Platform 9¾ at London’s King’s Cross station has the Money magazine estimate the Harry Potter brand to somewhere around $25 billion.

And what a world it is. Full of strange magical creatures, dragons, wands, adventures and, did I mention magic?

Magic allows wizards and witches to automate household chores (with the aid of magic, the dishes in the Weasley home literally wash themselves), make items hover in mid-air, produce light whenever needed or conjure things out of nowhere – proverbially pulling rabbits out of their pointy hats. The summoning charm Accio, a prime candidate for the most useful real-world spell in the Potter universe, allows wielders to never again get up from that comfy couch.

There are some laws that do limit this world – and I don’t mean pesky human-made legislation, but the natural boundaries on the use of magic. From Hermione, one of Harry’s two closest friends and the prime identifier for those of us that admire books and knowledge, we learn the first of the five Principal Exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration: food. Food cannot be made by magic, which explains the countless house-elfs the wizarding school Hogwarts employs for its majestic feasts.

While the other four exceptions are never explicitly revealed, fans have eagerly discussed what they might be based on events in the books.

Money is one exception that appears on most people’s lists. Just like our banks cannot create money “out of thin air” – I posit and in the process enrage MMTers on the left and hardcore Austrians on the right –neither can the wizarding world conjure up gold and arbitrarily make themselves rich. Events in the books show us as much: the Leprechaun gold in The Goblet of Fire disappears after a while; in The Deathly Hallows, we are acquainted with the Gemino Curse, used by the Gringotts bank – the only known example of a private 100%-reserve bank in existence in either of our worlds – to protect treasures from being acquired by intruders.

Some other possible exceptions are magical objects (wands, potions etc.) and most importantly for our purposes here: knowledge. If knowledge could be acquired, Matrix-style, by the twitch of one’s wand, there would be very little reason to have a rigorous school in the first place. Similarly, Dumbledore’s quest in the latter two books to uncover Tom Riddle’s past would have been entirely in vain had wizards and witches been able to summon knowledge magically.

Hermione is the closest thing the protagonists have to the indexed and instantly-available knowledge that search engines provide us Muggles. With those technologies, searching for spells or examining their consequences would be trivial tasks. When Harry in The Half-Blood Prince encounters the Sectumsempra curse, its effects remain hidden to him until he impulsively uses it – despite much tiresome search through the Hogwarts library. With search engines, finding out the effects of an unknown spell found in an altogether mystic textbook would be rather simple. At Hogwarts, however, surrounded by the most extraordinary magic imaginable, Harry still can’t solve this elementary problem.

Another example involves the antagonist Malfoy as he attempts to find a way for Death Eaters to enter Hogwarts, ultimately in an attempt to assassinate Dumbledore. For months on end he works on a broken “Vanishing Cabinet,” whose twin, if operating properly, would create a passage between Dark Magic vendor Borgin and Burkes and Hogwarts. How do you figure out what’s wrong with it, how it’s supposed to work and how best to fix it? Malfoy tries and tries, and the task almost overwhelms him. With access to search engines and the endless knowledge of humankind (well, the Wizarding World), he could simply have watched a YouTube video or found the instructions at Khan Academy.

Without access to YouTube tutorials and Google to assist him, he fumbles along haphazardly.

The technological improvements that follow (or cause…?) our economic progress solve problems that we previously thought were insurmountable, often in ways that are entirely incomprehensible to most of us. Hence, their quasi-magical attribute. On some intellectual level I understand that my laptop does not work on magic, that magic does not keep my apartment and food in the fridge cold, but sometimes it sure seems that way. My ancestors no more than four or five generations back would surely have thought so.

In most ways that matter, we live better lives today than the aristocracy and the richest of our forefathers did in the past. But in some ways, we also live better lives than the wizards and witches of J. K. Rowlings’ wonderful world. While Harry and his friends can conjure up things, conveniently compress items into the smallest of places or instantly transport themselves from one place to another, they are still wedded to outdated informational technologies. They manually look through ancient books for knowledge and they often struggle with accessing books that might contain the information they’re looking for.

Advanced technology might be indistinguishable from magic, but sometimes it’s even better than that. Access to the sum knowledge of humankind, delivered and made available to us via search engines, trumps magic. Search engines beat Hogwarts.

The post Search Engines are Better Than Hogwarts appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

These are the battle lines of the emerging movement against dollar stores. Tulsa, Oklahoma, Mesquite, Texas, Dekalb County, Georgia, New Orleans, Louisiana, and other municipalities nationwide are trying to limit the number of dollar stores that can serve their population.

The people who actually shop at dollar stores love them. The most frequent customers are seniors on fixed incomes, cash-strapped students, and busy parents. If you don’t have a car or access to public transit, there’s probably one within five miles of your house. If you drive, there’s a dollar store on your way to just about anywhere.

In a compact space, dollar stores stock household staples like toothpaste, toilet paper, soap, and pet supplies at rock-bottom prices.

Only Dollar Tree still prices all its goods at $1, but Family Dollar and Dollar General might have 10,000 products for that price, and reasonable deals on $2-$10 goods. It’s a place where almost anyone on any budget can splurge a little on treating themselves.

Sixty-two percent of adults surveyed by brand intelligence firm Morning Consult say Dollar Tree “has a positive effect on my community” (compared to 51 percent for Starbucks and 59 percent for Target).

People who can afford more choices—driving out to a big-box store, buying in bulk, ordering online, patronizing a farmer’s market—simply can’t see the perspective of someone for whom the dollar store is the most practical option.

Relatively wealthy dollar store detractors exhibit the obliviousness of an out-of-touch aristocracy. According to legend, Marie Antoinette, queen of France, when told that her subjects were going hungry for want of bread, responded blithely, “Let them eat cake.”

Now, politicians and middle-class activists seek to ban sources of $1 bread with an unspoken, “Let them eat Whole Foods.”

“Terrible food…and such small portions!”

Opponents of dollar stores often contradict each other or even themselves.

Critics objected when suburban growth sent stores running for whiter, more affluent suburbs. But dollar stores’ explicit attempts to reverse this trend—to set up affordable retail options in poorer, underserved neighborhoods—are somehow also the target of scorn.

You’ll also hear critics claim dollar stores engage in “predatory” behavior by offering prices that are simultaneously too low (undercutting potential competitors) and also too high (as compared to a per-unit cost at the Costco 15 miles away).

Haters complain retail jobs offered by dollar stores are “low quality and low-wage” but also that dollar stores don’t create enough of these low-quality, undesirable jobs. One is reminded of the Woody Allen line complaining about a restaurant’s “terrible food…and such small portions!”

A Tulsa councilwoman begrudgingly confirmed that dollar retailers offer essentials like toothpaste and school supplies, bread and eggs, in areas where supermarkets “have consistently failed.” Why this is condemnable, rather than laudable, she does not explain.

With backward economic thinking, CNN claimed dollar stores “limit poor communities’ access to healthy food,” blaming low-cost retailers for the gaps they try to fill.

Bans on walkable, ultra-affordable stores do nothing to increase the availability of fresh food; they merely stamp out the only existing option.

A Failure to Relate

So if not those surface-level concerns, what’s really driving dollar-store bans? Could it be a simple lack of empathy?

In the neighborhoods and rural areas where dollar retailers are most popular, they offer affordable groceries to those with tight budgets, packed schedules, and limited mobility.

These laws are proposed by people who don’t shop in dollar stores and can’t understand why anyone would want to.

A planner and architect from Baltimore said dollar stores were popping up in poorer neighborhoods, “like a parasite.” Bill Torpy, columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution said County Commissioners were right to be “disgusted” as dollar stores moved in (the headline has since been changed to “rightly sees little value in”).

Residents of Chester, Vermont, rejected a proposed dollar store because residents feared “the beginning of the end for Chester’s Vermontiness.” Dollar store skeptics nationwide say they value “community character” and reject the “unsightliness” of dollar store signage.

For people with cars, free time, and disposable income, “just drive two miles to the grocery store” may seem like benign advice. But for people just getting by, it’s dismissive of their real challenges.

If the same work had been done by a food bank—30,000 locations providing ultra-affordable, shelf-stable groceries, concentrated in areas with the most need—would we applaud it?

Perhaps, but only if the signage were subtle and they weren’t close enough that people could walk to them. We wouldn’t want to look like the kind of neighborhood that needs those.

It’s not wrong to care about community character or beautiful streets. But it’s an injustice to care about them so much that you’ll use government power to block (other) people’s access to affordable bread, pencils, and toilet paper. And it adds condescending insult to injury to claim to be doing so “for their own good.”

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The post “Let Them Eat Whole Foods”: The Appalling Elitism of Dollar Store Bans appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

A recent example of this was an NPR story that aired last week with the headline, “How Should We Regulate Homeschooling?” Short answer: “We” shouldn’t.

Learning Outside of Schools Is Safe

The episode recycled common claims in favor of increased government control of homeschooling, citing rare instances in which a child could be abused or neglected through homeschooling because of a lack of government oversight. Of course, this concern ignores the rampant abuse children experience by school teachers and staff people in government schools across the country.

Just last month, for example, two public school teachers in California pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a student, a public school teacher in New Mexico was convicted of sexually assaulting a second grader after already being convicted of sexually assaulting two fourth graders, two public school employees in Virginia were charged with abusing six, nonverbal special needs students, and the San Diego Unified School District in California is being sued because one of its teachers pleaded guilty to repeated sexual abuse and intimidation of a student.

Child abuse is horrific, regardless of where it takes place; but the idea that government officials, who can’t prevent widespread abuse from occurring in public schools, should regulate homeschooling is misguided. Many parents choose to homeschool because they believe that learning outside of schooling provides a safer, more nurturing, and more academically rigorous educational environment for their children. The top motivator of homeschooling families, according to the most recent data from the US Department of Education, is “concern about the environment of other schools.” Being regulated by the flawed government institution you are fleeing is statism at its worst.

Homeschooling Is Growing

Brian Ray, Ph.D., director of the National Home Education Research Institute, offered strong counterpoints in the otherwise lopsided NPR interview, reminding listeners that homeschooling is a form of private education that should be exempt from government control and offering favorable data on the wellbeing, achievement, and outcomes of homeschooled students.

Homeschooling continues to be a popular option for an increasingly diverse group of families. As its numbers swell to nearly two million US children, the homeschooling population is growing demographically, geographically, socioeconomically, and ideologically heterogeneous. Homeschooling families often reject the standardized, one-size-fits-all curriculum frameworks and pedagogy of public schools and instead customize an educational approach that works best for their child and family.

With its expansion from the margins to the mainstream over the past several decades, and the abundance of homeschooling resources and tools now available, modern homeschooling encompasses an array of different educational philosophies and practices, from school-at-home methods to unschooling to hybrid homeschooling. This diversity of philosophy and practice is a feature to be celebrated, not a failing to be regulated.

The collective “we” should not exert control over individual freedom or try to dominate difference. “We” should just leave everyone alone.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Image: Flickr

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Over the holidays the Trump administration raised the legal age to buy tobacco and nicotine vaping products from 18 to 21. It also took the opportunity to micromanage the flavors companies like Juul can provide. Menthol is in, mango is out.

It’s laughable to think a rule meant to apply to thousands of shops nationwide that can’t all be monitored will prevent any 18-year-old from finding a coveted pack of Parliaments. Our track record of keeping banned products people want out of their hands is abysmal. But with enough enforcement, it would be hard to argue that raising the smoking age wouldn’t prevent at least some young people from picking up the habit, and ultimately save lives.

A 2015 report commissioned by the National Academy of Medicine and touted by the American Lung Association in its efforts to raise the age nationally “revealed that ‘Tobacco 21” could prevent 223,000 deaths among people born between 2000 and 2019. While empirical projections like these are notoriously sensitive to the biases and assumptions every researcher brings to the table, numbers even a fraction of this size cannot just be ignored.

This is a gut-check moment for those of us, including myself, who believe that government bans and minimum ages are virtually never the right approach to society’s ills. We can parse the above report’s methodology and likely find the number of lives saved is overstated. We can point out the inevitability that such a move will have unforeseen and unintended consequences–look no further than the current heroin epidemic fueled in part by the government’s crackdown on prescription narcotics for an even more tragic recent example. Finally, we can point to prohibition and the war on drugs as nearly unassailable proof that bans do not work.

These arguments are important and correct, but in making them all we’ve done is preserve the right of 20-year-olds to smoke. The deeper truth is that a healthy society doesn’t have questions of public health or morality dictated to it by government or other large institutions. Rather, it places trust in parents and young adults to make these decisions for themselves. From these millions of decisions emerge shared cultural and moral standards far more robust than rules that are inevitably broken.

What Would Adam Smith Do?

If that sounds a bit like the difference between a market economy and central planning, it should. As many readers will likely know, the same enlightened Scotsman both celebrated and vilified for championing an economy arising from individual freedom spent the early part of his career investigating morality in much the same way.

Adam Smith first published his Theory of Moral Sentiments seventeen years before The Wealth of Nations, at a time when few would have even thought to question that mankind was given morality from on high–God, clergy, king and aristocracy. But as is evident in both his major works, Smith was one of those rare scholars who understood that when millions of people think and act on their own, the whole is different and vastly greater than the sum of its parts.

Anyone unfamiliar with Smith’s earlier masterpiece can find ample synopses as well as the man’s own words in abundance online. For our purposes, suffice it to say that Smith identified our ability to care about both our own self-interest and the interest of others, the latter of which he called sympathy but is today closer to our concept of empathy. Smith also surmised that people could step back and view the actions of themselves and others through the lens of an imagined impartial observer. Through empathy, learning, and millions of ongoing human interactions, morality emerges and evolves.

But what happens when rules are imposed from on high? In a recent piece on a seemingly very different topic, Jeffrey Tucker identified several examples in industry where rules imposed from the top stifled the creativity and vigilance of companies which had every reason to provide safe and high-quality products and services. This is simple human psychology–if you know what you’re going to be told to do, it’s often easier to just do it and expend your limited mental bandwidth on something else.

This would appear to fit perfectly into Smith’s moral framework. Relieved of the “burden” of deciding between right and wrong by government and church, the process that requires each person thinking for themselves would grind to a halt.

Cigarettes and Sentiments

What does this digression, almost worthy of Smith himself, have to say about smoking? I believe it says we’ve been asking the wrong question all along. Rather than comparing the incremental costs and benefits of raising the smoking age, what if we consider a world with no smoking age at all?

At first this sounds unfathomable. But let’s recall Milton Friedman’s famous observation that “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” I see a corollary to Friedman’s idea here–it’s a mistake to judge government policy as an expression of society’s values rather than by its efficacy. People recoil at this suggestion because they feel somehow as though we’re endorsing a six-year old picking up a carton of Newports on the way home from school. That’s ridiculous, but let’s look at the more realistic dilemma of how striking the smoking age from the books would impact teens.

With no smoking age on the books, Smith’s process could much more fully kick in. Instead of shopkeepers asking “will I get caught selling cigarettes to teenagers?” the relevant question becomes “should I sell cigarettes to teenagers?” On the consumer side moral responsibility also accompanies choice. Groups of kids whose default behavior may be scheming to get ahold of cigarettes now lose this rebellious endeavor and along with at least involved parents have vastly greater agency.

Many will say that this approach benefits teens with attentive parents, likely to be prosperous and educated, while leaving the poor out on a cigarette break in the cold. But bodegas in poor neighborhoods are exactly the places law enforcement are likely to ignore, at least for a petty crime like selling cigarettes to minors. Putting that moral responsibility on shopkeeper, teen, and parent could be more effective.

We see examples of nearly this exact phenomenon in history. Around the turn of the twentieth century, there were no laws against pharmacists selling products containing cocaine. This wasn’t for lack of public apprehension–the drug was already being sensationalized in the press as a substance that would whip black men into dangerous frenzies, a playbook repeated all too often.

But concerns over cocaine caused many pharmacists to simply not sell this lucrative product. One journalist claimed that of twenty pharmacists approached, only one was willing to sell the drug, the other druggists providing “the curt rejoinder, ‘No you can’t buy that rotten stuff here.’”

On the consumer side we see similar results that while at first appearing counterintuitive make sense in light of Smith’s framework. Take, for example, the often repeated idea that European countries with lower drinking ages, if any at all, seem to struggle less with binge drinking by young people. This is casual empiricism without a doubt, but one sees its plausibility. Individuals with agency over such decisions and the ability to learn from and react to each other often yield spontaneous outcomes we would initially think impossible.

There’s a telling moment in the 2015 National Academy of Medicine report when the authors argue that while more lives would be saved by further raising the smoking age from 21 to 25, the returns would diminish quickly. The mechanism proposed by the authors is plausible–it’s less the twentysomethings’ futures at stake as teens, who are far more likely to receive cigarettes bought by 18-21 year olds than those over 21. But the observation is clearly a preemptive strike against a sort of unraveling I noted on Twitter with a good bit of sarcasm and more than a little anger.

Just like any age, 21 is arbitrary. At some point, without an all-out war on tobacco, we must allow people to make potentially life-threatening choices. And that’s where Smith’s framework most importantly informs this debate. Individuals and their friends and families, older siblings and mentors all have just a little bit of knowledge about what makes sense for any given person.

The process of discovering each individual’s best balance between instant gratification and health risks down the road is messy. Smith’s critics, as they do in his economics treatise, falsely assume he ascribes super human rationality to his subjects. That only came later when future generations tried to fully mathematize the work of the classical economists.

There is no magic bullet. Whether government-mandated or left in the hands of individuals, tobacco use will lead some to tragic consequences. Kids will get cigarettes either way, and adults will try and fail to stop. In this scenario of no good choices, the course that encourages responsibility and humanity seems like something we might want to try.

Max Gulker

This article is republished with permission from the American Institute for Economic Research.

Image: Valentin Ottone

The post What If There Was No Legal Smoking Age? appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Chris White

Ireland is fast-tracking legislation that will effectively ban all gas-powered vehicles within a decade, leaving customers who are buying cars in January confused about what to do next, local reports show.

The country’s Climate Action Minister Richard Bruton plans to publish the Climate Action (Amendment) Bill 2019 enforcing such a ban, the Independent.ie reported Monday. The ban was officially announced in June, according to the report. One of Ireland’s political parties is pushing back.

“Fianna Fáil is mindful that families and businesses remain extremely reliant on petrol/diesel cars and that any phase out must be combined with greater investment in EV charging, public transport and cycling infrastructure,” Fianna Fáil climate spokesman Jack Chambers told the Independent.

Chambers noted that any phase out of fossil fuel-powered vehicle required an immediate transition to electric vehicles. The country’s automotive industry also suggested fast-tracking such a proposal, which was designed to eliminate carbon emissions, could create a lot of confusion.

“This only adds to the confusion, at a time when people are buying new cars. January is the biggest selling month for new cars,” Brian Cooke, director general of Society of the Irish Motor Industry, told reporters.

He added: “There are around 35,000 new cars sold in January, so it’s the key month for us.”

Ireland’s push coincides with one U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York proposed in October.

“That’s why I am announcing a new proposal designed to rapidly phase out gas-powered vehicles and replace them with zero-emission, or ‘clean,’ vehicles like electric cars,” Schumer wrote in an editorial that month after suggesting scientists agree that climate change represents an imminent threat to the U.S.

He added: “The goal of the plan, which also aims to spur a transformation in American manufacturing, is that by 2040 all vehicles on the road should be clean.” The plan would remove more than 63 million gas-powered cars from the road by 2030, Schumer estimates.

The senator’s office expects the proposal to cost roughly $392 billion over a decade. The Washington Post referred to the idea as “essentially ‘Cash for Clunkers’ on steroids,” referring to a policy from the Obama-era encouraging Americans to trade their old vehicles for fuel-efficient cars.

Cash for Clunkers was the mechanism allowing the federal government to offer incentives of between $2,500 and $4,500 to citizens who traded in their older vehicles for newer ones.  Critics called the idea, which received generous media fanfare, a failure even if it was designed with the best of intentions.

Schumer has not responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

This article is republished with permission from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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“The game shouldn’t be allowed,” said the former bad boy prince. “It’s created to addict. An addiction to keep you in front of a computer for as long as possible. It’s so irresponsible.”

Nobody, as far as I know, has yet proposed legislation to ban the popular game, which is played by 125 million people and reportedly generates $2 million in revenue per day. But the anecdote serves as a reminder of how cavalier humans tend to be about prohibiting things they personally object to.

At different points throughout history, Americans have banned Christmas, alcohol, and bikinis. Other “threats,” like comic books, were not outright banned but ruined through regulation.

If you think silly and arbitrary bans are a thing of the past, think again. If anything, the impulse to ban and regulate has only increased in a world that has gotten much faster.

These laws are usually proposed to serve a greater good or to protect people. Unfortunately, they usually miss the mark and often have adverse consequences. Here are a few of the worst laws proposed and passed in 2019 in no particular order.

10. Massachusetts Lawmakers Try to Criminalize Saying “B*tch” (Proposed)

Massachusetts is looking to up the ante in the war on pottymouths. State Rep. Daniel Hunt (D–Boston) proposed legislation (H.3719) that would make it a crime to say “the b-word” (as my children would say) “to accost, annoy, degrade or demean” someone. Those found guilty would face a $200 fine and up to six months in jail(!).

9. California’s Crackdown on the Gig Economy (Passed)

A reported 57 million Americans work as freelancers, adding an estimated $1 trillion to the economy each year in flexible gig work. That number is about to shrink, however. California lawmakers, in an effort to save us, passed Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5), which uses a complicated ABC test that redefines many gig workers as full-time employees. Unsurprisingly, many companies cannot take on swaths of new full-time employees, who would become eligible for numerous benefits. So thousands of workers lost jobs, including 200 workers let go by Vox Media a week before Christmas. Three months earlier, Vox had called the legislation “a victory for workers everywhere.” That’s what economists call a Cobra Effect.

8. Florida’s “Cutting Edge” Anti-Hazing Act (Passed)

Hazing is said to go all the way back to Ancient Greece, where Plato wrote of “practical jokes played by unruly young men” at his academy. It’s not uncommon today to see young people get carried away with this tradition, however. One such case can be found in Andrew Coffey, a Florida State University pledge who in November 2017 died after excessive drinking. In response, Florida lawmakers passed what has been described as the “most cutting edge” anti-hazing law in the US. Though no doubt well-intentioned, the law allows prosecutors to charge people who weren’t even present for a hazing but were simply involved in its discussion. It’s not difficult to see how an accidental tragedy could end up ruining even more lives.

7. Alabama’s “Anti-Road Rage Act” (Passed)

Nobody likes slow left-lane driving. I’m on the record saying it’s my worst pet peeve. But Alabama’s “anti-road rage” law, which prohibits drivers from driving in the left lane for more than a mile and a half without passing, is hardly the solution. Drivers are more than capable of policing slow drivers through the usual means—excessive horn beeping, silent cursing, and arm-waving. The stiff fines—up to $200 a pop—will likely fall on unsuspecting out-of-state drivers and be little more than a cash cow for police.

6. Pennsylvania’s “Violent Video Game” Tax (Proposed)

Early in 2019, a bipartisan group of Pennsylvania lawmakers floated one of the silliest proposals of the year: a 10 percent tax on video games rated “Mature or Adults Only.” The bill was a transparent cash grab and went nowhere in the legislature. The legislation’s poor showing was probably less attributable to the dubious link between video games and violence and more to stiff opposition from the $43.5 billion gaming industry. Either way, the episode affirmed Gideon J. Tucker’s famous axiom: “No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session.”

5. California’s Ban on Single-Use Shampoo Bottles (Passed)

Anyone who has traveled is familiar with the little bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and lotion hotels provide their guests. Well, you won’t find them in California much longer. In October, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill that will ban (starting in 2023) hotels from supplying the little bottles as part of an effort to use less plastic. Violators will be fined $500 for their first offense and up to $2,000 for additional violations. Meanwhile, as lawmakers wage war on tiny shampoo bottles, the Golden State continues to struggle with a human excrement problem that has resulted in a surge of typhus.

4. Virginia Raises the Smoking Age to 21 (Passed)

Smoking is bad for you. Don’t take it from me; it says it right there on the pack. SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, And May Complicate Pregnancy. Despite the warning, an estimated 34 million US adults smoke. That’s their choice, right? Well, Virginia lawmakers took it upon themselves to prevent young adults (18-20) from legally purchasing cigarettes. The law amounts to little more than a condescending intrusion into the lives of young people since they’ll just have friends purchase their smokes for them. But it’s still annoying, especially since many of these people are legally obligated to sign-up for selective service.

3. & 2. Oregon and California’s Statewide Rent Control Laws (Passed)

Economists disagree on a lot of things, but they pretty much all agree on this: Rent control is really harmful. “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing,” observed Swedish economist (and socialist) Assar Lindbeck. Alas, new laws in Oregon and California, the first of their kind, show how little politicians understand about economics. The caps on rent are sure to further reduce housing supply and quality, and increase housing prices in the long run. California’s housing problems are well documented. Unfortunately, they’re about to get a lot worse. (As FEE has observed, the solution to high housing costs is more housing, not price controls.)

1. California’s Water Tax (Proposed)

California Governor Gavin Newsom has the unfortunate distinction of making the list a fourth time. Newsom’s water tax, a proposal he ultimately withdrew, was perhaps the strangest. As Carey Wedler noted on FEE earlier this year, the “Environmental Protection” section of Newsom’s budget sought to

establish a new special fund with a dedicated funding source from new water, fertilizer, and dairy fees, to enable the State Water Resources Control Board to assist communities, particularly disadvantaged communities, in paying for the short-term and long-term costs of obtaining access to safe and affordable drinking water.

Ensuring citizens have clean water is a noble goal, to be sure. But the means are highly questionable. Utilizing markets is the best way to address water shortages, not passing new taxes. Newsom’s proposal, which sparked sharp pushback from his own party, is sort of like passing a food tax to make sure people don’t go hungry.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

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As previously reported by The Libertarian Republic, Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire wrote an op-ed defending why the federal government should regulate pornography. I would remind those who agree with Walsh that even if their motives are pure, to advocate for the government to pass laws regulating the sexual behavior of consenting adults is both an assault on individual liberty and, yes, I would even say not supported biblically.

I write these words as a libertarian Christian who sees the roots of this for what it is. Christians who desire to use the government as a political weapon to enforce what they see as moral on everybody else, whether they like it or not.

As Matt writes, “ You might argue that this is something for parents, and not government, to handle. But this argument ignores the reality of the situation. Parents cannot possibly shield their children from a porn epidemic that is so ubiquitous and accessible. Even if they restrict all internet access in their own homes, and refuse to allow their children to have phones with internet access (a wise move, to be sure), all it requires is one friend whose parents have not taken that step. And every kid will have at least one friend like that — probably many more than just one. This is a problem that parents cannot handle on their own. That’s why the state may have a role.”

I do not argue against Walsh’s point that porn has a negative effect on the viewer and the participants involved in X-rated videos. Both of his claims mentioned in the article are well documented with much evidence backing these claims.

However, to suggest that government must regulate pornographic films would be antithetical to the biblical teaching on free will, which is foundational to the Christian faith. Need I remind Christians in Genesis, according to the creation story, God told Adam and Eve “not to eat of the fruit of the tree, or they would die.” He didn’t build a wall around the tree with angels to guard it. Without free will, that would make God nothing more than an eternal tyrant.

Matt’s claims that the state must play a role in protecting American children from the harmful effects of explicit videos reminds me of the comments made by Hillary Clinton in 1996, where she claimed that it “takes a village” to raise a child. This should be alarming to those of us who believe in an expressly limited government that someone who claims to champion our cause would make such a suggestion.

I am inclined to agree with Austin Petersen’s comment on the subject when he tweeted, “Calls by conservatives to ban pornography is a tacit admission that their churches have failed.”

I will tell you from first-hand experience that too many churches in America today don’t talk about sex in a healthy manner – if they even talk about it at all. They don’t teach a truly biblical view of sex, that it is a beautiful thing created by God to be shared between a husband and wife. You will likely hear a list of commands about why premarital sex is sinful, and that’s as far as it goes.

Instead of trying to ban everything that Scripture teaches is sinful, why not be the Church of Jesus Christ? Why not try to walk out the faith He demonstrated instead of trying to turn our Constitutional Republic into a theocracy? It is time that we take the personal responsibility we have lacked for too long and be better families instead of looking to an already inept government as the moral judge of society.

If we have learned anything from Prohibition, it’s that banning porn would do nothing except effectively serve to make the problem worse. If the government could do anything to better the problem, it would be to legalize legitimate sex work, satisfying the demand for people who wish to engage in those activities. Austin Petersen made this point well in an op-ed on Springfieldnews-leader.com, during his 2018 Senate run.

“The solution then is the solution now — give adults the freedom to make their own choices about what they do with their own bodies. And the moment those choices hurt others, have a system in place that fights for and defends the victims. By decriminalizing prostitution, we give people back their innate right to make choices, and we pull back the curtain on a dangerous underworld, making it safe for those who choose to engage in it,” Petersen said.

I fight for freedom for all people. Even the individuals whose decisions I disagree with most. Because that is the only time it truly matters or requires any courage.

I despise pornography on a personal level because I, myself, have struggled with it for many years. Still, I shudder at the thought of a society where government controls our choices, however right or wrong they may be deemed.

Let people be free. Remember, the same government that can tell people who they can’t and can’t engage in consensual sex with could also control every other area of our personal lives. I assure you, legal porn will not plunge America into hell, but a tyrannical government will.

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