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20 Jun 00:10

Going Down?

by Eric Boehm
a handful of dollar bills | Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Inflation cooled slightly to 3.3 percent in May, the Department of Labor reported on Wednesday morning. That's a welcome sign that tees up the possibility the Federal Reserve will signal plans to cut interest rates later today.

A rare one-two punch that will indicate whether the fight against inflation is being won makes Wednesday one of the most important days of the year for economic news, CNBC reports. This morning's consumer price report from the Department of Labor was an encouraging sign, and all eyes now turn to this afternoon's decision by the central bank's officials. The Federal Reserve has raised interest rates 11 times since March 2022 to help combat inflation, and those increases have made mortgage rates, car loans, and other forms of credit more expensive. The central bank has not raised rates since July, when it set the baseline interest rate just north of 5 percent, but it hasn't cut them either.

For the past year, the tug-of-war between inflation and interest rates has been a stalemate. After falling to a post-2022 low of 3 percent in June 2023, inflation has bubbled back upwards in recent months. At its last meeting in May, the Federal Reserve declared "a lack of further progress" in combating inflation.

This morning's consumer price index report showed prices holding steady after increasing by at least 0.3 percent in each of the past four months. Food prices remained mostly flat and energy prices fell during May, but services and housing continued to get more expensive.

Even a hopeful inflation report is unlikely to have an immediate impact on the Fed's decision about interest rates. "Officials are widely expected to leave interest rates unchanged, no matter what happens. But the fresh inflation reading could help shape officials' estimates of how many times they will cut rates this year, because policymakers will have a chance to update their forecasts in response to the data," writes Jeanna Smialek, The New York Times' Federal Reserve reporter.

However, "a well-behaved May inflation report is a likely prerequisite for the Fed to consider lowering interest rates after that, as officials have said they want to see a series of readings that rebuilds their confidence inflation will head lower," The Wall Street Journal explained.

Americans are understandably eager to see both inflation and interest rates fall toward the historically low levels that were enjoyed before the COVID-19 pandemic. We are likely still a long way from that point, but today may turn out to be a significant turning point in the ongoing battle against higher prices and more expensive debt.

Hunter Biden, the president's son, was convicted of three felony gun crimes on Tuesday. All three counts are related to the younger Biden's 2018 purchase of a handgun, which he was not legally allowed to own because of his track record of using illegal drugs.

Biden was never accused of threatening or harming anyone with the handgun, and he likely never would have been prosecuted at all if he hadn't revealed in a 2021 memoir that he'd been addicted to crack cocaine around the time that he'd bought the gun. (Never memoir, kids.) Yes, there's arguably a good reason for the government to try to prevent reckless drug abusers from owning guns, but this overly broad intersection of federal anti-gun and anti-drug laws doesn't make much practical sense, as Reason's Jacob Sullum explained yesterday:

Judging from survey data on drug use and gun ownership, something like 20 million Americans are committing that felony right now. The Justice Department prosecutes only a minuscule percentage of those potential defendants. That is partly because such cases are not a high priority, which tells you something about the logic of treating this offense as a felony that is currently punishable by up to 15 years in prison (thanks to legislation that Biden's father signed in 2022, which also created a new potential charge in cases like this).

Biden could get up to 25 years in prison for these crimes, though it is unlikely that he'll be given the maximum penalty. Congress should change the law so that less privileged individuals are also spared the threat of federal prison in similar circumstances.

An end to gerontocracy? Voters in North Dakota on Tuesday approved a ballot measure that sets a maximum age for the state's U.S. representatives and senators. The ballot measure amends the state's constitution to prohibit candidates from running if they would turn 81 years old (or older) during their term in office.

The U.S. Constitution sets minimum ages for office-holders (25 for House, 30 for Senate, 35 for president), and I've argued before that setting upper limits on who can be elected to those positions makes a lot of sense. But North Dakota's anti-octogenarian rule will likely have to survive a court challenge. As The New York Times notes, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that states may not restrict eligibility for federal offices beyond the age limits written into the Constitution.

There is, of course, one surefire way to free America from the doddering ancients who run much of the federal government: Stop voting for them.

Scenes from Washington, D.C.: A popular café in Washington's ossified Georgetown neighborhood might be forced to close by a combination of stupid zoning laws and grumpy neighbors (who are eager to use those stupid zoning laws to drive away a successful business.) A neighborhood commission has formally asked the city government to yank Call Your Mother's permits and force it to close, Axios reports, due to "large crowds" and "objectionable conditions."

This is, I hasten to note, a shop that primarily sells bagels and coffee—not a raging nightclub or noisy bar. But, of course, Washington is a city populated almost entirely by people who desire to meddle in the affairs of others.

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The post Going Down? appeared first on Reason.com.

06 Mar 21:35

N. Korea Could Face Prosecution For 'Crimes Against Humanity'

by timothy
An anonymous reader writes with this news from The Telegraph: "North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, has been warned that he could face prosecution for crimes against humanity after a United Nations inquiry accused him of some of the worst human rights abuses since the Second World War. In some of the harshest criticism ever unleashed by the international community against the Pyongyang regime, a UN panel branded it 'a shock to the conscience of humanity.' Michael Kirby, a retired Australian judge who has spent nearly a year taking testimony from victims of the regime, said much of it reminded him of atrocities perpetrated by Nazi Germany and Pol Pot's Cambodia. Yesterday his team published a 374-page report detailing allegations of murder, torture, rape, abductions, enslavement, and starvation, describing North Korea as a dictatorship 'that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.' In a bid to put pressure on Kim Jong-un, 31, Mr Kirby has taken the unusual step of writing to the North Korean leader to warn him that both he and hundreds of his henchmen could one day face prosecution." More at the BBC, including a cache of the report.

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08 Jan 16:49

The Great Inequality Debate

by A. Barton Hinkle

Writing in Commentary not long ago, Seth Mandel drew out a nice point about the resurgence of the Democratic left: “Complaints over the last few years about the GOP being pulled to the right by conservatives,” he wrote, “were not about liberals’ desire to meet in the middle and compromise, no matter how much they might decry the supposed extremist drift of the right. What they wanted was their very own Tea Party.”

The Occupy movement briefly seemed to provide one, but it lacked the Tea Party’s staying power. Still, the passions that animated the Occupiers have breathed new life into the left, from the East Coast — where Bill de Blasio won election as New York’s new mayor on a promise to end economic inequalities — to the West, where Kshama Sawant, a member of the Socialist Alternative Party, won a seat on the Seattle City Council by campaigning for a $15 minimum wage.

Victories like those have inspired imitation: Several candidates in the Northeast have expropriated de Blasio’s “tale of two cities” theme for their own campaigns, and President Obama ended 2012 with a speech calling economic inequality “the defining issue of our time.”

All of this has the liberal commentariat rapturous. The abstract notion of equality is the lodestar of the American left, just as the abstract notion of liberty is the lodestar of the right. Or at least some liberty: Most conservatives care greatly about the economic kind, and the sight of an entrepreneur caught up in red tape enrages them. But certain conservatives care less about other kinds of liberty, such as the freedom of gays and lesbians to pursue their own happiness as they define it, or the freedom of a young black male in a hoodie to walk down the street with a bag of Skittles unaccosted.

Likewise, the left is selective in its ardor for equality. It is stirred by the cause of social equality for minority groups, and by economic equality for all. Other kinds of equality matter less — e.g., to evangelicals, the belief that we are all equal in the eyes of God is an immensely important social leveler. To at least the secular left, this solidarity of faith seems not only insignificant but potentially malignant — an “opiate of the masses,” as Marx called religion generally.

Even on the question of economic inequality, many on the left tend to focus only on one dimension: the gap between the rich and poor. Conventional liberal opinion holds that the gap is bad not only because of its consequences, but inherently — and the bigger the gap, the worse things are.

But that doesn’t follow. As self-described “liberaltarian” Will Wilkinson noted in a 2009 paper, U.S. inequality as measured by the Gini Coefficient (the most common measure of such inequality) is about the same as in Ghana. But being poor in the U.S. is much better than being poor – or for that matter rich – in Ghana. This raises another point Wilkinson makes, about consumption: When you look at how people actually live, what they have in the bank matters much less than their daily experience.

The difference between having a car of any kind or none at all is vastly greater than the difference between having a used Chevy and a new Porsche. And while the rich in the U.S. have gotten richer, so have the poor: Since 1979 the income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans has almost doubled, and market economics has provided them with riches, such as cellphones, once available only to the most well-off. This helps explain why the difference in happiness among income groups in the U.S. is vastly smaller than the difference in wealth. Which of those measures should matter more?

Focusing only on inequalities of result also ignores another important dimension to the question. Again, Wilkinson: “It’s not enough to identify a mechanism of rising inequality. An additional argument is required to show that there is some kind of injustice or wrongdoing involved.”

It is possible that inequality is rising because the system has grown more rigged. But as Mickey Kaus pointed out recently, while you would expect inequality in a rigged system, you also should expect it in a fair one: “Once the meritocratic centrifuge has sorted everyone out, there won’t be that many talented people at the bottom to rise in heartening success stories.” Divining how much truth there is in these competing narratives is vastly more complex than ideologues of any stripe would like to think.

Correcting inequalities caused by system-rigging is desirable, but “correcting” (as opposed to merely alleviating) inequalities caused by merit-sorting would actually be unjust. It also would require creating an inequality of a different sort: the inequality of authority.

Perpetual market interventions in the name of economic equality require a perpetual class of interveners who have the power to overrule the free choices made by everyone else.

Naturally, those coercive interventions require handing the levers of coercion over to progressives — which explains why this sort of inequality never seems to bother them in the slightest.