WHEN BANKS TRY TO HELP, AND REGULATORS STOP THEM. A reader emails:
Just a little Covid tidbit from the small business world. My bank reached out to me early this week and said that they were allowing all of their commercial customers to go to interest only payments simply by sending them a request. They called back today to say that their regulator, the OCC, had informed them that they would consider any such modifications TDR ( Troubled Debt Restructuring). Needless to say, the bank can no longer do it. It’s almost as if the bureaucracy is actively working against us.
Sheesh. Somebody get on this, pronto.
UPDATE: So pronto I think they were ahead of this post. As noted in the comments, the FDIC chair has has asked the FASB (Financial Accounting Standard Board) for a number of changes, including this one: “Excluding COVID-19-related modifications from being considered a concession when determining a troubled debt restructuring (TDR) classification.”
Okay, FASB, the ball’s in your court. Get it done, and communicated to banks.
ANOTHER UPDATE (FRIDAY): My reader emails: “That was the word that I received yesterday, too. The bankers were not over confident that FASB would listen.”
Plus: “New York Governor Cuomo has agreed to start using the drug in his state immediately!”
UPDATE: Don Surber issues a correction: “Benny Johnson and others jumped the gun, as I did. I apologize. Chloroquinine can be prescribed for COVID-19, but it was not approved for use.”
“All the grocery stores are going to have pallets of toilet paper sitting in the aisles, and nobody is going to buy it, because who needs to buy toilet paper when you’ve got a year’s worth sitting in your garage?” Daniel Stanton, a supply chain expert and author of “Supply Chain Management for Dummies,” tells CNBC Make It.
But what about food?
Even if the COVID-19 pandemic stretches over months (President Donald Trump said it could last until August), there will be no big food shortages, especially on staples like milk, eggs, cheese, bread and meat, according to three supply chain experts who spoke to Make It.
But your favorite brand or the exact kind of fruit you want could be scarce.
“The brand that you normally want may not be available. But, hey, there’s some other kind of pasta. Or instead of rice, we’re going to have potatoes for dinner,” Stanton says.
“The U.S. produces a huge amount of food. We’re also an exporter of food, so we’re going to be okay,” he adds.
The VodkaWife and I aren’t quite preppers, but we keep enough dry foods and frozen meats on hand — the basement chest freezer is seven feet long — that we haven’t had to sweat through a crisis yet.
Researchers have discovered extremely rare black-and-white footage of the extinct Tasmanian tiger. One of the best known recent examples of a species ...
Government management of supply chains would cause massive shortfalls. I would contend that partial management of supply chains in the form of laws against raising prices during events like this are a significant reason for disruptions to the supply chain.
William Galston writes that “Resilience in the face of unexpected shocks is a public good, and experience is confirming what economic theory predicts: In the relentless quest for increased efficiency, which remains a key source of competitive advantage, the decisions made by individual market actors will produce, in the aggregate, a less-than-optimal supply of resiliency, a public good. To solve this collective-action problem, government must act as a counterweight” (“Efficiency Isn’t the Only Economic Virtue,” March 11).
Not so fast. Each company has powerful incentives to strike what is for it the optimal balance between keeping its current production costs as low as possible and ensuring against disruptions of its supplies of inputs. Equally important are these two additional facts. First, each company has better access than do government bureaucrats to the detailed knowledge necessary to strike this balance optimally and, second, the optimal balance for one firm differs from the optimal balance for other firms.
In short, nothing about striking this balance optimally fits economists’ criteria for being a public good.
Mr. Galston thus too quickly concludes that the coronavirus’s disruption of supply chains ‘confirms’ that the market produces less-than-optimal levels of resiliency. Today’s disruptions are no more evidence of market failure than are the supply-chain disruptions routinely sparked by hurricanes and earthquakes. Even less is the coronavirus’s disruption of supply chains evidence that government officials could and would ensure better than do private companies against excessive disruptions of supply chains.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
The United States is home to the most innovative biotech companies and university research laboratories in the world. That fact should have given our country a huge advantage with respect to detecting and monitoring emerging cases of COVID-19 caused by the new coronavirus outbreak.
Instead, as TheNew York Times reports in a terrific new article, officials at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stymied private and academic development of diagnostic tests that might have provided an early warning and a head start on controlling the epidemic that is now spreading across the country.
As the Times reports, Seattle infectious disease expert Dr. Helen Chu had, by January, collected a huge number of nasal swabs from local residents who were experiencing symptoms as part of a research project on flu. She proposed, to federal and state officials, testing those samples for coronavirus infections. As the Times reports, the CDC told Chu and her team that they could not test the samples unless their laboratory test was approved by the FDA. The FDA refused to approve Chu's test on the grounds that her lab, according to the Times, "was not certified as a clinical laboratory under regulations established by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a process that could take months."
In the meantime, the CDC required that public health officials could only use the diagnostic test designed by the agency. That test released on February 5 turned out to be badly flawed. The CDC's insistence on a top-down centralized testing regime greatly slowed down the process of disease detection as the infection rate was accelerating.
A frustrated Chu and her colleagues began testing on February 25 without government approval. They almost immediately detected a coronavirus infection in a local teenager with no recent travel history. Chu warned local public health officials of her lab's finding and the teenager's school was closed as a precaution. The teen's diagnosis strongly suggested that the disease had been circulating throughout the western part of Washington for weeks. We now know that that is likely true.
Did the FDA and CDC functionaries commend Chu for being proactive? Not at all. Washington state epidemiologist Scott Lindquist recalled, "What they said on that phone call very clearly was cease and desist to Helen Chu. Stop testing." On February 29, the FDA finally agreed to unleash America's vibrant biotech companies and academic labs by allowing them to develop and deploy new tests for the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
The Times notes:
The Seattle Flu Study illustrates how existing regulations and red tape—sometimes designed to protect privacy and health—have impeded the rapid rollout of testing nationally, while other countries ramped up much earlier and faster. Faced with a public health emergency on a scale potentially not seen in a century, the United States has not responded nimbly.
Due to red tape, the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. will be worse than it should have been.
WHO SAYS BERKELEY PROFS ARE OUT OF TOUCH? This physics prof is ready for SHTF teaching with backup plans for his backup plans. Though as a ham operator myself, I do want to note that digital modes like Olivia and JS8Call are very robust and much more accessible than CW as long as you have a computer.
The University of California-Santa Barbara hid an agreement with federal regulators from a judge considering how to penalize the university for violating a student’s rights, according to his lawyer.
The existence of the September 2018 “resolution agreement” with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights could have led the judge to award “John Doe” hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees.
Instead, Santa Barbara Superior Court Judge Thomas Anderle issued a mild chastisement to the taxpayer-funded institution for running an “arbitrary and unreasonable” Title IX proceeding.
Lawyer Robert Ottilie had asked for $465,000 in “private attorney general fees” about a month after UCSB signed the agreement with OCR. Instead, he got $5,000 on the basis that his client’s win did not help students at large.
Ottilie told The College Fix in a phone interview that the existence of the agreement shows that UCSB misrepresented the status of the federal investigation to Anderle.
Higher education is not distinguishing itself on a moral or intellectual level these days.
Compare that to NASA and its Space Launch System, the big rocket that the space agency has been developing for a decade and for which Boeing only recently completed a single core stage. This core stage is about 15 meters taller than Starship but lacks its complexity. NASA will, in fact, toss each SLS core stage into the ocean after a single use. And Boeing doesn’t have to make the engines, as the rocket uses 40-year-old space shuttle main engines. Despite this, and with nearly $2 billion in annual funding from NASA, Boeing’s stretch goal for building core stages is one to two per year… some time in the mid-2020s.
SpaceX’s stretch goal is to build one to two Starships a week, this year, and to pare back construction costs to as low as $5 million each.
“That’s fucking insane,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s insane,” Musk replied.
“I mean, it really is.”
“Yeah, it’s nuts.”
“As I look across the aerospace landscape, nobody is doing anything remotely like this,” I said.
“No, it’s absolutely mad, I agree,” Musk said. “The conventional space paradigms do not apply to what we’re doing here. We’re trying to build a massive fleet to make Mars habitable, to make life multi-planetary. I think we need, probably, on the order of 1,000 ships, and each of those ships would have more payload than the Saturn V — and be reusable.”
The allegations against Kevin Morgan were alarming. They described just the sort of circumstances that Florida legislators had in mind when they approved that state's "red flag" law in 2018, three weeks after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.
Morgan's estranged wife, Joanie, claimed he was depressed, suicidal, and obsessed with the apocalypse, which he thought was imminent. She said he was stockpiling food, gold, guns, and ammunition in anticipation of the end times; that he talked about seeing, hearing, and wrestling with demons; and that he had performed a ritual that involved rubbing "oils" on their children and the walls of their house. She reported that he was abusing the drugs he had been prescribed for chronic pain, had talked about dismembering his former wife, had intimated he would do the same to her if she ever disrespected him, and had threatened to kill her with succinylcholine, a paralytic agent used during surgery and intubation.
On the strength of such claims, Joanie Morgan obtained a temporary domestic violence protection injunction, an involuntary psychiatric evaluation order under the Florida Mental Health Act (a.k.a. the Baker Act), and a temporary "risk protection order" under the red flag law, which authorizes the suspension of a person's Second Amendment rights when he is deemed a threat to himself or others. All three were ex parte orders, meaning they were issued without giving Kevin Morgan a chance to rebut the allegations against him.
But when it was time for a judge to decide whether the initial gun confiscation order, which was limited to 14 days, should be extended for a year, Morgan got a hearing, and the lurid picture painted by his wife disintegrated. By the end of the hearing, in an extraordinary turn of events unlike anything you are likely to see in a courtroom drama, the lawyer representing the Citrus County Sheriff's Office, which was seeking the final order, conceded that he had not met the law's evidentiary standard, and the judge agreed.
This bizarre case vividly illustrates why legal representation and meaningful judicial review are necessary to protect gun owners from unsubstantiated complaints under red flag laws, which 17 states and the District of Columbia have enacted. But it also shows that police and prosecutors, who in Florida are the only parties authorized to file red flag petitions, are not necessarily diligent about investigating allegations by people who may have an ax to grind. That problem is especially serious in the states that allow petitions by broad categories of individuals whose accounts may be colored by personal animus, including current or former spouses, lovers, and housemates as well as in-laws and close or distant blood relatives. Without adequate safeguards, respondents can lose their constitutional rights based on little more than an aggrieved individual's unverified assertions.
'It Wasn't Him That Had Gone to the House'
Circuit Judge Peter Brigham
Circuit Judge Peter Brigham issued the ex parte risk protection order against Morgan on September 18, 2018, six months after Florida's red flag law took effect, in response to a petition by Rachel Montgomery, a detective with the Citrus County Sheriff's Office. It was the first time the sheriff's office had used the law.
In the affidavit supporting her petition, Montgomery said she responded to a complaint from Joanie Morgan alleging that her husband had violated the temporary domestic violence protection injunction by returning to the house in Citrus Springs they used to share and retrieving clothing, medications, "several firearms," and his Ford Mustang. Montgomery paraphrased the claims Joanie Morgan had made in her petitions for the injunction and the Baker Act examination: that "the respondent has had a decline in mental stability over the last four months" and "has displayed irratic [sic] behaviors to include making threats to dismember a former paramour and threats to kill his entire family while yielding [sic] a vial containing a paralytic agent." She added that "the respondent has purchased several firearms and ammunition during this time period."
At this point, Montgomery later testified, she had done no investigation beyond talking to Joanie Morgan and reading her petitions. Montgomery said she subsequently discovered there was no basis for the claim that Kevin Morgan had violated the injunction by visiting the house. "I determined that it wasn't him that had gone to the house," she said. "It was actually a pool maintenance worker that had been by the house." Furthermore, "the firearms had been transferred prior to his risk protection order" in response to the domestic violence injunction, meaning there were no guns for Morgan to retrieve from the house.
Montgomery did read the Baker Act petition that led to Morgan's court-ordered psychiatric evaluation, but she did not mention the outcome of that evaluation. On September 13, 2018, police handcuffed Morgan and took him to The Centers, a mental health facility in Ocala, where he spent the night. The next day, a psychiatrist determined that he did not meet the law's criteria for involuntary treatment. A discharge form dated September 14, 2018, described Morgan as "alert and oriented" and "calm and cooperative." It explained that "Kevin was evaluated by the psychiatrist and it was determined that Kevin does not present as a danger to himself or others."
Yet here was Montgomery, four days later, asserting that there was "reasonable cause to believe" Morgan "poses a significant danger of causing personal injury" to himself or others "in the near future." Judge Brigham agreed, and there was no reason to think he wouldn't. Statewide data indicate that Florida judges always grant petitions for ex parte risk protection orders.
A follow-up mental health report from The Centers, written two days after Brigham approved the temporary risk protection order, described Morgan's appearance as "appropriate," his behavior as "compliant," his mood as "stable," his thought process as "organized," and his judgment and impulse control as "good." Based on prescription records and a drug screen, Stefanie Glover, a licensed mental health counselor at The Centers, reported that Morgan was "displaying no drug abuse." She also said Morgan "did not display any signs or symptoms of paranoia, psychosis or delusions." In the "trauma" section of the form, Glover typed: "Client is being mentally and emotionally abused by his wife. Client stated that he filed for a divorce on Monday September 17th, 2018."
Glover's conclusions about Morgan jibed with an August 29, 2018, letter from his personal physician, Ulhaus Deven. "He has shown no sign of abusing the opioids prescribed to him," Deven wrote. "He has not had any indication of depression or suicidal ideation."
'This Puts Us in an Awkward Situation'
On September 28, 2018, 10 days after Brigham issued the temporary risk protection order, he held a hearing to determine whether there was "clear and convincing evidence" that Morgan posed "a significant danger" to himself or others. That is Florida's standard for issuing a final risk protection order, which lasts up to a year and can be renewed for another year.
At the hearing, the sheriff's office was represented by its lawyer, Robert Batsel, while Morgan was represented by Crystal River attorney J. Michael Blackstone. I listened to the official audio recording of the hearing, which lasted about two hours and 20 minutes. It included testimony by Kevin Morgan, Joanie Morgan, and her mother as well as Detective Montgomery.
In addition to refuting the claim that Kevin Morgan had violated the domestic violence injunction, Montgomery described him as "very calm" when he was taken into custody for the Baker Act examination. Responding to questions from Blackstone, she said Morgan was polite and cooperative, neither raising his voice nor behaving erratically, and seemed to be in control of his faculties.
Joanie Morgan's testimony was tearful, highly emotional, scattered, and frequently vague. She reiterated her earlier allegations and added a few more. But when Blackstone asked whether she had any evidence to corroborate what she claimed her husband had said and done, she admitted that she did not.
There were no witnesses to confirm his alleged threats and no photographs of oil on the walls, of the hypodermic needles he allegedly had stashed away to inject the succinylcholine, or of the food, gold, weapons, and ammunition he allegedly had accumulated in preparation for the end times. Nor had police ever visited the house to confirm any of those details. Blackstone also noted that, despite Joanie Morgan's portrait of her husband as dangerously deranged, she was planning to build a new house with him on property they had purchased together in April 2018, and she had left her children overnight with him that August, in the midst of his supposed breakdown, to attend a conference in Tampa.
Joanie Morgan's mother, Susan Harper-Clements, tried to back up her daughter's portrayal of Kevin Morgan as dangerous, but the evidence she offered fell notably short. For example, she mentioned "conversations" after the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas. "Kevin had told me that the NRA…was all into this gun thing and that you couldn't even buy the bullets you wanted, because people were stockpiling," she said. "And he said, 'When they're all through with this, you won't be able to buy guns and ammunition.'" On cross-examination, Blackstone noted that such comments hardly proved homicidal intent. "He has never threatened anyone in your presence, has he?" he asked. "No," Harper-Clements replied.
Kevin Morgan's demeanor at the hearing was as Montgomery and the staff at The Centers had described it: calm, polite, and cooperative. He denied seeing demons, making threats, or obsessing about the apocalypse. He denied that he had recently been stockpiling guns, saying he had acquired his collection of roughly 40 rifles and handguns over the course of more than two decades. The only guns he had acquired recently, he said, were three black-powder pistols he had bought the previous spring and summer—antique replicas ill-suited for the end times.
What about the mostly empty vial of succinylcholine that his wife had presented to sheriff's deputies as evidence of Morgan's deadly designs? Morgan recalled that his wife, a nurse who had worked at two local hospitals, had once accidentally brought home just such a vial, saying she had put it in her lab coat pocket after participating in the treatment of a patient who had suffered a cardiac arrest. Morgan, who also has a nursing degree, had managed the emergency room at one of those hospitals, but he left that job in January 2015 because of a disability caused by spinal stenosis. After that, he no longer had access to drugs such as succinylcholine. Given the expiration date on the vial that his wife gave to police, Morgan said, it was clear he could not have been the person who had obtained it.
After the last witness testified, Blackstone asked Brigham to deny the petition by the sheriff's office. "The testimony, frankly, does not make any sense," he said. "There's no objective evidence for the court to base a ruling on. There's been ample opportunity. The police could have gone and looked at the inside of the house and verified that there were gold coins or gold bullion or oil on the walls or anything else. We basically only have the word of a woman that's in the early parts of a divorce. Most of the testimony has already been contradicted by Mr. Morgan. It's unpersuasive under any circumstances, and the standard is 'clear and convincing.' With all due respect to Mr. Batsel, who I think a lot of, I don't think he's carried that burden. At best, it's a swearing match."
At this point, Batsel got up and admitted that Blackstone was right. "I've conferred with my client," he said, and "they won't object to me tending to agree. This puts us in an awkward situation. The sheriff's office is coming into this with all the best intentions…The legislature has put us in a bit of a box, and that's OK; we're going to figure it out. But in a 'he said, she said,' where the evidence, I frankly will agree, does not meet 'clear and convincing,' we don't want to waste the court's time."
Blackstone thanked Batsel for his candor. "I can't tell Mr. Batsel how much I appreciate, in the world today, somebody standing up and just accepting what the facts are," he said. He also thanked the sheriff's office. "I think we're all learning as we go," he said. "It's a new statute. It's going to put huge burdens on everybody."
Brigham ratified the agreement between both sides that the sheriff's office had failed to make its case. "I don't think I've heard clear and convincing evidence," he said. "I found Mr. Morgan's testimony to be credible." Explaining his decision in an order he issued later that day, he said, "The issue came down to a credibility determination between the respondent and his current wife. The court found the respondent credible and that the petition was not proved by clear and convincing evidence. [Regarding] the only piece of physical evidence, a vial of drugs, [it] was never clearly, or convincingly, explained from whence it came."
'You Have to Go in and Prove That You're Not Guilty'
Blackstone, who supports red flag laws in principle, thinks Florida's statute worked as intended in this case. "I thought you had a well-intentioned police officer who sat on the stand and told the truth," he says. "I thought you had an exceptionally well-intentioned and competent attorney for the Citrus County Sheriff's Office who did a fabulous job. I thought I did a competent job in representing Kevin, and I thought that the law worked the way it was supposed to."
At the same time, Blackstone recognizes that it's important to have a lawyer in situations like this. "It's always dangerous to go into court without a lawyer," he notes. Without "competent counsel," he says, this case "might have turned out the same way," but "it might have turned out entirely different."
Florida, like nearly all of the states with red flag laws, does not provide court-appointed counsel for respondents. Colorado is the only state that guarantees a right to counsel for respondents who can't afford a lawyer or choose not to hire one.
Kevin Morgan
Blackstone estimates that a single red flag case ordinarily would cost $2,500 to $5,000 in legal fees. Morgan says Blackstone, who also is handling his divorce, charged him about $1,500. That was on top of the attorney fees and extra living expenses he incurred as a result of his other legal battles with his wife. "I had about $13,000 or $14,000 in savings, and by the time all this was done, I had nothing," he says. "I was lucky to have a lawyer. I was lucky to be able to afford it."
Morgan's take on Florida's red flag law is less sanguine than Blackstone's. The law ostensibly puts the burden of proof on the agency seeking an order. But in practice, Morgan says, "you have to go in and prove that you're not guilty."
The automatic issuance of ex parte orders means that when a respondent gets his day in court, the playing field is slanted sharply against him. The judge is deciding whether to maintain the presumptively protective status quo or change course and give the respondent legal access to guns he might use to kill himself or someone else. That prospect tends to loom larger than the possibility that a respondent who does not really pose a threat will unfairly but temporarily lose his Second Amendment rights. Those dynamics help explain why judges in Florida issue final orders about 95 percent of the time.
Morgan's case nevertheless shows that the standard of proof matters. In the end, both parties and the judge agreed that the sheriff's office had not presented clear and convincing evidence. While that is the standard in most states with red flag laws, four states and the District of Columbia require only proof by "a preponderance of the evidence," meaning any probability greater than 50 percent. When laws combine a low standard of proof with undefined terms such as "a significant risk," "a significant danger," or "a risk of danger," the respondent does not have much chance of prevailing.
Another safeguard is requiring that petitions be filed by police or prosecutors, as Florida does. While anyone who knows a potentially dangerous person can still share his concerns with the authorities, police are supposed to act on those concerns only when they consider them well-grounded. The idea is to have dispassionate officials evaluate complaints from people who may have personal biases. But that goal is defeated if police simply record and pass along allegations by aggrieved parties.
Even allowing for Citrus County's inexperience with the red flag law at the time it sought the orders against Morgan, one has to ask why a law enforcement agency would go to court with a case so weak that its own attorney ended up throwing in the towel at the end of the hearing. Police should not seek ex parte orders without evidence of an imminent threat, and they should not seek final orders unless they are confident they can meet the law's requirements. Such caution is especially important when judges can be expected to rubber-stamp ex parte orders and approve nearly all of the final orders police request.
The possible cost of deciding not to seek or issue an order—a preventable suicide or homicide—has to be weighed against the certain cost of suspending someone's constitutional rights. Police should conduct a thorough investigation before trying to do that. In this case, easily discoverable facts—including the existence of Morgan's supposed hypodermic needles and end times stockpile, the whereabouts of his guns prior to the temporary risk protection order, and the provenance of the succinylcholine—were either not clarified until the hearing or remained unresolved even then.
The sheriff's office "jumped into a civil action without completing a proper investigation," Morgan says. "I don't think the average person understands just how dangerous these laws are. Hopefully, if my story can get out, folks will see how easily [red flag laws] can be used against someone for revenge or to get an upper hand in [a custody dispute]. I want people to know how these laws can be used improperly, in the hope that some reforms will take place. We need protection for falsely accused individuals and stiff punishment for those who abuse the system."
Greenville, South Carolina, is hemorrhaging food trucks—despite city efforts to promote itself as a food-truck friendly locale. And overbearing regulations are to blame.
This week, the Greenville Newsreported that rules intended "to make food trucks safer have left some parked for good."
"Some" may be an understatement. According to the News, 22 of the 32 food trucks that were active in Greenville last year are no longer operating there or—in at least some cases—anywhere at all.
The new rules require food trucks to have exhaust hoods, automatic fire-suppression systems, and other tools and systems in place—along with passing annual fire inspections. Those rules have been in place statewide since the beginning of the year.
While food truck owners aren't complaining about the fire-code rules per se, the way the city has gone about implementing them has led some to suggest Greenville is treating them differently than it would brick-and-mortar restaurants.
Those complaints have merit. According to the News, other cities in the state have given trucks in their jurisdictions time to come into compliance with the law. But not Greenville, where the rules took effect on January 1.
One food truck owner told the News he only learned of the new fire-code requirements from the city in late November—just weeks before the rules were set to take effect.
"Say a major fire code [modification] came about for all restaurants, you can't tell me they would have done this the same way to every restaurant in the city limits of Greenville," Eric Edmondson, a truck owner, told the News.
Edmondson is right. But a closer look at the regulatory climate for food trucks in Greenville also suggests these new rules may be nothing more than the straw that broke the camel's back. That's because the city already had some awful food-truck regulations in place.
A 2014 Greenville News piece painted the city as patently unfriendly to the handful of food trucks operating there.
"Though [a] city ordinance passed last year was meant to give food trucks a solid place in downtown, many truck owners have found the restrictions actually hurt their business rather than helped," the Newsreported then. "While the city has the biggest customer demand for food trucks, the cost to operate and restrictions on where trucks can operate hinder business, food truck owners say."
The Greenville ordinance requires food trucks to operate in a limited number of designated public parking spots and to be at least 250 feet from each and every brick-and-mortar restaurant unless they get approval from those brick-and-mortar restaurants.
That latter requirement is a notorious food-truck killer.
In Chicago, the city's infamous ban on food trucks operating within 200 feet of a brick-and-mortar restaurant has helped cause the number of trucks operating in the city to fall by half.
Like Chicago lawmakers, who baldly protect the city's powerful restaurant interests for no legitimate moral, health, or safety reasons, Greenville's city council has sought to "balance concerns from restaurant owners," the News reports. This purported "balance," as it always does, protects brick-and-mortar restaurants and their landlords while harming food trucks and consumers.
"Our primary goal was to develop a plan whereby existing restaurants can continue to be successful, not feel threatened by food trucks, and introduce the growing food truck industry to Greenville in a profound and meaningful way," then-Mayor pro tem David Sudduth told WYFF in 2013.
When a city has as its "primary goal" to regulate one industry in order to protect another, competing industry, nothing good—nevermind profound or meaningful—will result.
In a piece last week on the purportedly welcoming business climate in Greenville, TheNew York Times discussed how the city's successful pitch to larger businesses—including automaker BMW—centered on the city's status as "a cheap, practical place to do business." That same piece details how Greenville is home to many of the "the hallmarks of a thriving city[,] like food trucks."
If food trucks are a hallmark of a thriving city—and I also think they are—then impractical city regulations have ensured Greenville thrives a little less every day.
Another year, another disaster, another economically misguided tug of war over the merits of "price gouging." The arrival of COVID-19, otherwise known as coronavirus, ushered in a predictable boost in prices for essential goods, as well as well-intentioned but ill-advised government attempts to cap what businesses can charge for those items. Such measures certainly leave an impact: eBay, for example, responded to that pressure yesterday, announcing that it would leave the market entirely and pull all coronavirus-related supplies from its virtual stores.
"As you may have noted, we are seeing literally small hand sanitizers like this going for as much as $17," said California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, calling the widespread price increases in the state "unconscionable" and "usurious." Violators in Newsom's jurisdiction face up to a $10,000 fine and a year in jail. Sen. Ed Markey (D–Mass.) specifically turned to Amazon: While the company and the suppliers it works with "have a right to expect a reasonable return on the products they sell," he wrote in a letter to CEO Jeff Bezos, "they do not have a right to impose unjustifiably high prices on consumers who are seeking to protect themselves against the coronavirus."
The immediate implications are alarming: How can a private business owner be subject to crippling fines (or even imprisonment) for setting his or her own prices? Yet that question misses the full point. It fails to address that prices responding to the market—as they tend to do—is a good thing, even in the face of a deadly pandemic.
Accusations of greed hurdled toward price-gouging business owners are understandable, particularly when people are suffering. But compare that with a world of government-imposed price caps. Those ceilings force businesses to sell in-demand goods at artificially low prices, which fail to signal that said goods are scarce. Absent that marker, supplies are then quickly exhausted, depriving many vulnerable people of the ability to get their hands on any.
Though most critics claim price-gougers are the ones depriving needy people of important goods, that's rarely true in practice. Consider this hypothetical: Businesses across the state of California (a nod to Newsom) opt to not raise prices on hand sanitizer, greatly increasing the likelihood that a small cohort of people concerned about coronavirus will buy a large share of the item in bulk. Since there is a limited supply of hand sanitizer in the marketplace, the immobile elderly woman next door who hadn't yet made her assisted sojourn to CVS is basically out of luck. And, in this case, she is more at risk of succumbing to the disease, should she contract it.
Perhaps worst of all, regulatory restrictions on pricing can, in some cases, force third-party sellers to exit the market entirely, as seen with eBay. Though it sounds like a doomsday scenario, it's exactly what the retail giantchose to do yesterday when it began pulling all surgical face masks, hand sanitizers, and disinfectant wipes, opting not to go head-to-head with the 34 states that have strict price-gouging regulations. While the consequences vary across the U.S., the liabilities clearly outweighed the risk of selling vital goods.
"We will continue to monitor the evolving situation and quickly remove any listing that mentions COVID-19, coronavirus, 2019nCoV (except books) in the title or description," the company wrote in a blog post. "These listings may violate applicable US laws or regulations, eBay policies, and exhibit unfair pricing behavior for our buyers."
This is quite literally why we can't have nice things.
[Biden] is a vicious self-serving political hack, for one thing, one whose ambition leads him from time to time into shocking indecency. You may have heard that Biden lost his wife and daughter in a horrifying drunk-driving wreck, the fault of a monster of a man who irresponsibly “drank his lunch,” as Biden puts it.
Never happened.
Biden’s wife and daughter did, in fact, die in a car wreck. That is true. It is not true that the driver of the other car was drunk, that he had been drinking, or that there was any reason to believe he was drunk or had been drinking — or even that he was at fault.
The late Mrs. Biden “drove into the path of [the] tractor-trailer,” the police report says. But Biden, like every other third-rate ward-heeler of his ilk, thinks and speaks only in terms of good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats — and if something bad happens to good people, then it must be because somebody in a black hat did something nefarious.
The driver of that truck went to his grave haunted by Biden’s lies, to the point where his children were forced to beg the vice president to stop defaming their late father. The casual cruelty with which Biden is willing to subordinate the lives of ordinary people to his political ambitions — for the sake of a petty tear-jerker line in one of his occasionally plagiarized stump speeches — is remarkable.
For instance, do you understand that we actually have no idea how many people are infected, because there are very few tests? And btw, to all the lefties screaming there are few tests because we need more centralized control: PFUI.
In which case what we SHOULD be doing is NOT containment and isolation. It’s preparing to look after the truly vulnerable who will be hit by this: people who are health-compromised and the elderly. Because those are the ones who are in danger.
Locking the barn door after the horse has fled AND driving down the economy is NOT actually going to help anyone. Well, except maybe the democrats, but I think they’re beyond help.
and I aren’t quite preppers, but we keep enough dry foods and frozen meats on hand — the basement chest freezer is seven feet long — that we haven’t had to sweat through a crisis yet.
On the strength of such claims, Joanie Morgan obtained a temporary domestic violence protection injunction, an involuntary psychiatric evaluation order under the Florida Mental Health Act (a.k.a. the Baker Act), and a temporary "risk protection order" under the red flag law, which authorizes the suspension of a person's Second Amendment rights when he is deemed a threat to himself or others. All three were ex parte orders, meaning they were issued without giving Kevin Morgan a chance to rebut the allegations against him.
Kevin Morgan's demeanor at the hearing was as Montgomery and the staff at The Centers had described it: calm, polite, and cooperative. He denied seeing demons, making threats, or obsessing about the apocalypse. He denied that he had recently been stockpiling guns, saying he had acquired his collection of roughly 40 rifles and handguns over the course of more than two decades. The only guns he had acquired recently, he said, were three black-powder pistols he had bought the previous spring and summer—antique replicas ill-suited for the end times.
