Jack

The opinion is here; the court concluded that Palin had adequately alleged "actual malice"—a misleading term meaning that the New York Times editor responsible for the article over which she was suing knew it was false or likely to be false—and the district judge therefore erred in dismissing the case. (This of course doesn't show that Palin has proved such knowledge, only that she should be offered a chance to prove it.)

Here are the facts that led to the lawsuit:

On January 8, 2011, Jared Loughner opened fire at a political rally for Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona ("the Loughner shooting"), killing six people and injuring thirteen others. Representative Giffords was seriously wounded in the attack.

Shortly before the tragic attack, Sarah Palin's political action committee ("SarahPAC") had circulated a map that superimposed the image of a crosshairs target over certain Democratic congressional districts (evoking, in the view of many, images of violence). Giffords' district was among those targeted by the SarahPAC crosshairs map. The image had been publicized during the earlier political controversy surrounding the Affordable Care Act, but in the wake of the Loughner shooting, some speculated that the shooting was connected to the crosshairs map. No evidence ever emerged to establish that link; in fact, the criminal investigation of Loughner indicated that his animosity toward Representative Giffords had arisen before SarahPAC published the map.

Six years later, on June 14, 2017, another political shooting occurred when James Hodgkinson opened fire in Alexandria, Virginia at a practice for a congressional baseball game. He seriously injured four people, including Republican Congressman Steve Scalise ("the Hodgkinson shooting"). That same evening, the Times, under the Editorial Board's byline, published an editorial entitled "America's Lethal Politics" ("the editorial") in response to the shooting.

The editorial argued that these two political shootings evidenced the "vicious" nature of American politics. Reflecting on the Loughner shooting and the SarahPAC crosshairs map, the editorial claimed that the "link to political incitement was clear," and noted that Palin's political action committee had "circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs," suggesting that the  congressmembers themselves had been pictured on the map.2 In the next paragraph, the editorial referenced the Hodgkinson shooting that had happened that day: "Though there's no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack, liberals should of course hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask of the right."

The Times faced an immediate backlash for publishing the editorial. Within a day, it had changed the editorial and issued a correction. The Times removed the two phrases suggesting a link between Palin and the Loughner shooting. Added to the editorial was a correction that read: "An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly stated that a link existed between political incitement and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established." The Times also clarified that the SarahPAC map had overlaid crosshairs on Democratic congressional districts, not the representatives themselves.

Twelve days after the editorial was published Palin sued the Times in federal court….

The Times moved to dismiss the case, and the district judge held an evidentiary hearing to decide whether the allegations of "actual malice" against the Times were plausible; the judge concluded that the allegations weren't plausible, based on the testimony of "James Bennet, the editorial page editor at the Times and the author of the editorial":

Bennet was the hearing's only witness. Bennet explained  at the hearing that his reference to Palin in the editorial was intended to make a rhetorical point about the present atmosphere of political anger. He also recounted the editorial's research and publication process and answered inquiries about his prior knowledge of the Loughner shooting six years earlier and any connection to Palin. Bennet testified that he was unaware of any of the earlier articles published by the Times, or by The Atlantic (where he had previously been the editor‐in‐chief), that indicated that no connection between Palin or her political action committee and Loughner had ever been established. In addition to answering questions from the Times' counsel, Bennet responded to questions by Palin's counsel and the district judge.

No, said the court of appeals: Among other things, the district judge's decision "relied on credibility determinations not permissible at any stage before trial." And the court of appeals held that Palin's proposed amended complaint sufficiently alleged knowledge of falsity or likely falsity on Bennet's part:

The [Complaint] alleges that, from 2006 to 2016, Bennet was the editor‐in‐chief of The Atlantic, where "he was responsible for the content of, reviewed, edited and approved the publication of numerous articles confirming there was no link between Mrs. Palin and Loughner's shooting." The complaint references several articles about the Loughner shooting published by The Atlantic during Bennet's tenure, the most notable of which is entitled "Ten Days That Defined 2011." The part of that article discussing the Loughner shooting reads: "… the bad thing to come out of this already terrible story was a round of blame hurling, with people rushing to point at Sarah Palin's infamous target map …. In truth, Loughner is clinically insane and this was not really about politics at all."

At the hearing, Bennet stated that he could not recall reading those articles, and even if he had read them, he did not have them in mind when he published the editorial. The district court, in rejecting Palin's theory as implausible, credited this testimony as truthful when it found that Bennet's failure to read the articles was simply a research failure that did not rise to the level of actual malice.

By crediting Bennet's testimony, the district court rejected a permissible inference from the articles: that one who had risen to editor‐in‐chief at The Atlantic knew their content and thus that there was no connection between Palin and the Loughner shooting. That Palin's complaint sufficiently alleges that Bennet's opportunity to  know the journalistic consensus that the connection was lacking gives rise to the inference that he actually did know.

The [Complaint] also includes allegations suggesting that Bennet in particular was more likely than the average editor‐in‐chief to know the truth about the Loughner shooting because he had reason to be personally hostile toward Palin, her political party, and her pro‐gun stance. Bennet's brother, a Democrat, had served as a United States Senator for Colorado since 2009. In 2010, Senator Bennet was endorsed by two House members whose districts had been targeted by the SarahPAC map. Two days before the Loughner shooting, a man threatened to open fire on Senator Bennet's offices, and thereafter both Bennet brothers became "outspoken advocate[s] for gun control." Also, during the 2016 election, Palin endorsed Senator Bennet's  opponent  and  Representative  Giffords  endorsed Senator Bennet.

The district court gave no weight to these allegations, finding that political opposition did not rise to the level of actual malice. We agree with the district court that political opposition alone does not constitute actual malice, but we conclude that these allegations could indicate  more  than  sheer  political  bias—they  arguably  show that Bennet  had  a  personal  connection  to  a  potential  shooting  that animated  his  hostility  to  pro‐gun  positions  at  the  time  of  the Loughner shooting in 2011. Palin's allegations are relevant to the credibility of Bennet's testimony that he was unaware of facts  published on his watch relating to the Loughner shooting and that he made a mistake when he connected Palin to the that shooting. Palin's allegations present a plausible inference that Bennet's claim of memory loss is untrue.

At a minimum, these allegations give rise to a plausible inference that Bennet was reckless when he published the editorial without reacquainting himself with the contrary articles published in The  Atlantic  six  years  earlier.  And  that  plausible  inference  of recklessness is strengthened when added to Palin's allegations that Bennet had reason to be personally biased against Palin and pro‐gun positions in general. When properly viewed in the plaintiff's favor, a reasonable factfinder could conclude this amounted to more than a mistake due to a research failure.

Second, the PAC also alleges that certain aspects of the drafting and publication process of the editorial at The New York Times permits an inference of actual malice. Elizabeth Williamson, the editorial writer who drafted the initial version of the editorial, had hyperlinked in her draft an article entitled "Sarah Palin's 'Crosshairs' Ad Dominates Gabrielle Giffords Debate." The article stated, contrary to the claim in the published editorial, that "[n]o connection" was made between the SarahPAC map and Loughner. The link was also included in the final version of the editorial, a version that Bennet essentially rewrote. The Times argues that the hyperlink shows the absence of malice. But  the PAC alleges that, by including a hyperlink that contradicted the argument of his editorial, Bennet "willfully disregarded the truth."

The district court, siding with the Times, concluded that including the hyperlinked article was further evidence of simple mistake. After crediting Bennet's testimony that he did not read the hyperlinked article, the district judge concluded that a mistake was the only plausible explanation. But the inclusion of the hyperlinked article gives rise to more than one plausible inference, and any inference to be drawn from the inclusion of the hyperlinked article was for the jury—not the court. In any event, under these circumstances, it was arguably reckless for Bennet to hyperlink an article that he did not read.

Third, the district court concluded that the correction swiftly issued by the Times again demonstrated that the only plausible explanation for the erroneous statements was a mistake. Yet, it is also plausible that the correction was issued after a calculus that standing by the editorial was not worth the cost of the public backlash. Bennet could have published the editorial knowing—or recklessly disregarding—the falsity of the claim, and then decided later that the false allegation was not worth defending.

At bottom, it is plain from the record that the district court found Bennet a credible witness, and that the district court's crediting his testimony impermissibly anchored the district court's own negative view of the plausibility of Palin's allegations.

The district court at one point stated that Bennet's "behavior is much more plausibly consistent with making an unintended mistake and then correcting it than with acting with actual malice." Perhaps so, but it is not the district court's province to dismiss a plausible complaint because it is not as plausible as the defendant's theory. The test  is  whether  the  complaint  is  plausible,  not  whether  it  is less plausible than an alternative explanation.

The jury may ultimately agree with the district court's conclusion that Bennet was  credible— but it is the jury that must decide. Therefore, at the pleading stage, we are satisfied that Palin has met her burden to plead facts giving rise to the plausible inference that Bennet published the allegedly defamatory editorial with actual malice. We emphasize that actual malice does not mean maliciousness or ill will; it simply means the statement was "made with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not." Here, given the facts alleged, the assertion that Bennet knew the statement was false, or acted with reckless disregard as to whether the statement was false, is plausible.

The case can now go forward. Thanks to Alan Kabat for the pointer.

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• The first two rounds of Democratic primary debates have come and gone, and the Democratic primary field will likely narrow down over the next few months with stricter requirements for the September debate.
• To qualify for the debates in September and October, candidates much reach 2% in four DNC-sanctioned polls and obtain 130,000 donors by August 29. 
• When making their own judgments of who should participate in primary debates, Democratic primary voters place much more weight on a candidate's national and early primary state polling performance than fundraising. 
• 51% said performance in national polls should be considered and 49% said performance in early primary state polls should be a factor.
• Just 21% who said a candidate's donor count should be a factor.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The first two rounds of Democratic primary debates have come and gone, and the Democratic primary field will likely narrow down over the next few months as candidates will likely fail to meet the qualifications for the next debate in September. 

INSIDER polled 421 respondents who identified themselves as likely Democratic primary voters, asking them, "which of the following factors do you believe should be considered when selecting which candidates appear on DNC-sanctioned televised primary debates?"See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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See Also:

• POWER RANKING: Here's who has the best chance of becoming the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee
• The 2020 Democratic primary is filled with very good cats and dogs
• Andrew Yang is running for president in 2020. Here's everything we know about the candidate and how he stacks up against the competition.

SEE ALSO: POWER RANKING: Here's who has the best chance of becoming the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee

The Democratic presidential candidate John Delaney proposed this week that the government partner with private companies and unions to create a national program of forced labor. He calls it “John Delaney’s Plan for National Service.” “Every American will complete a minimum of 1 year and a maximum of 2 years of mandatory national service when they graduate high school, or turn 18,” it states.

“No exceptions,” a press release clarifies. (Tough luck, pregnant 18-year-olds.)

With the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, the Constitution guaranteed that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude … shall exist within the United States.” Delaney obviously doesn’t see it this way, but mandatory national service is plainly involuntary servitude.

Nevertheless, the former congressman is arguing for it.

“It’s time to bring the country together, restore our sense of shared purpose and a common and inclusive national destiny,” Delaney said. “By mandating national service, we build a future where young people begin their adult lives serving their country and working alongside people from different backgrounds. Where people from Massachusetts and Florida and Oklahoma work alongside each other; where people who grew up in the suburbs, in farm towns, in coal country, in urban communities get to know each other, get to learn from each other, and get to see firsthand that we still have a lot in common.”

I sympathize with the impulse to expose Americans from different backgrounds to one another in the hopes that it will lead to better cooperation. I’d support all sorts of voluntary initiatives with that purpose in mind. But I am repulsed by the notion that every American can or ought to be united around a single “purpose” or agree on the country’s “destiny,” which even John Adams and Thomas Jefferson could not do. And forced labor transgresses against natural rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

How strange that any Democrat fails to see associated perils at this moment. If mandatory national service were in place today, it would be run by Donald Trump. How would the Trump administration marshal the nation’s youths if it were able to compel the labor of each young man and woman, “no exceptions”?

Perhaps the White House political adviser Stephen Miller would help decide where to assign them and how best to advance the “national destiny” as he sees it. Perhaps some would be assigned to help patrol the border.

Or say that Delaney wins the presidency. Would national unity be advanced by drafting every 18-year-old with a MAGA hat into national service under the new, Democratic administration? Perhaps we would have a culture-war fight about whether volunteering at Planned Parenthood should count toward discharging one’s obligation. In any case, as Scott Shackford writes at Reason, “Forcing an entire younger generation to do an older generation’s bidding will not bring a ‘sense of shared purpose’ any more than drafting them to fight in Vietnam did.”

Even setting aside the costs to 18-year-olds, the assumption that this workforce would better serve the nation than the status quo is unwarranted at best.

Individuals are simply better equipped than the federal government to assess where they can best contribute to society, given their interests and aptitudes—would you have wanted LeBron James, Serena Williams, or Natalie Portman to spend their respective 19th years installing solar panels in the Mojave Desert? I don’t want the next generation of much-needed primary-care doctors to delay the day when they’ll see patients and practice for one fewer year of life.

And even if central planners could know where to place each 18-year-old to best advance the national interest, the politicians, bureaucrats, private companies, unions, and more would all try to bend the process to their own advantage.

Meanwhile, important projects would suffer from an influx of unskilled labor.

“To implement infrastructure apprenticeships,” Delaney’s plan states, “all federal contractors would be required to design and implement an apprentice program.”

I can see it now: the bridge in need of repairs to guarantee its safety; the snarled traffic every day that it’s closed; and the federal contractor fixing it even less efficiently than before because, by government mandate, it’s running something like an untaped The Real World: Seismic Retrofit. “Foreman, sorry to bother you as a steel delivery is coming in, but Mason and Isabella broke up again, Chaden is dangerously hungover, Alejandra wants to know if we can move the crane so there’s no shadow in her TikTok video, and Liam’s mom is on the phone again to make sure you told everyone about his peanut allergy.”

There’s nothing wrong with an apprenticeship program for young people. But an apprenticeship for 18-year-olds who don’t want to be there is a recipe for dysfunction.

So long as millions of Americans regard mandatory national service as immoral, unconstitutional, or economically illiterate, imposing it anyway, even with majority support, would do far more to divide the country than to unify it.

At the very least, there would be lawsuits, public denunciations of creeping tyranny, protests, and calls for civil disobedience to thwart its implementation as antiauthoritarians revolted against coercive claims on the lives of young adults.

As the legal scholar Ilya Somin once put it, “Mandatory national service is not just another policy proposal. It is an idea that undermines one of the fundamental principles of a free society: that people own themselves and their labor. We are not the property of the government, a majority of the population, or some employer. Mandatory national service is a frontal attack on that principle.”

A free people should fight it accordingly.

[Conflict of interest notice: I’ve volunteered for both private and public charities, but more often private. I received a small amount of money for work done for a private charity ten years ago. Some of the private charities have been partially funded by billionaires.]

From Vox: The Case Against Billionaire Philanthropy. It joins The Guardian, Truthout, Dissent Magazine, CityLab, and a host of other people and organizations arguing that rich people giving to charity is now a big problem.

I’m against this. I understand concern about the growing power of the very rich. But I worry the movement against billionaire charity is on track to damage charity a whole lot more than it damages billionaires. Eleven points:

1. Is criticizing billionaire philanthropy a good way to protest billionaires having too much power in society?

Which got more criticism? Mark Zuckerberg giving $100 million to help low-income students? Or Mark Zuckerberg buying a $59 million dollar mansion in Lake Tahoe? Obviously it’s the low-income students. I’ve heard people criticizing Zuckerberg’s donation constantly for years, and I didn’t even know he had a $59 million Lake Tahoe mansion until I googled “things mark zuckerberg has spent ridiculous amounts of money on” in the process of writing this paragraph.

Which got more negative press? Jeff Bezos donating $2 billion for preschools for underprivileged children? Or Jeff Bezos spending $2 billion on whatever is going to come up when I Google “things jeff bezos has spent ridiculous amounts of money on?”.

Billionaires respond to incentives like everyone else. If donating to charity earns them negative publicity, and buying a private yacht earns them glowing articles about how cool their yacht is, they’re more likely to buy the yacht.

Journalists and intellectuals who criticize billionaires’ philanthropy but not their yachts, or who spend much more energy criticizing philanthropy than yachts, probably aren’t doing much to promote a world without billionaires. But they’re doing a lot to promote a world where billionaires just buy yachts instead of giving to charity.

2. If attacks on billionaire philanthropy decrease billionaires’ donations, is that acceptable collateral damage in the fight against inequality?

That depends on your values. But for most people’s values, the answer is no.

Nobody knows exactly how many lives the Gates Foundation has saved. The Guardian says it’s some appreciable fraction of the 122 million lives saved in general from progress fighting infectious diseases over the last few decade. This article says Gates has saved seven million people through his vaccination campaign alone, provided another seven million with antiretroviral treatment (usually life-saving), “tested and treated” twelve million people for tuberculosis (often fatal, but there’s a big difference between testing and treatment), and been responsible for a big part of the seven million lives saved from malaria. I expect these numbers are inflated, but even by conservative estimates the Gates Foundation may have saved ten million people.

Suppose Jeff Bezos is watching how people treat Bill Gates, and changes his own behavior accordingly. Maybe in the best possible world, when people attack Gates’ donations, Bezos learns that people don’t like ruthless billionaires, decides not to be ruthless like Gates was, and agrees to Bernie Sanders’ demand that he increase his employees’ pay by $4/hour. But Bezos also learns people criticize billionaires’ philanthropy especially intensely, decides not to be charitable like Gates was, and so ten million people die. You’ve just bought an extra $4/hour for warehouse workers, at the cost of ten million lives.

In my moral system, this means billionaire philanthropy is not acceptable collateral damage in the war against inequality. Even if for some reason you believe that criticizing billionaire philanthropy is a higher-impact way to fight inequality than criticizing billionaires’ yachts, you should stick to criticizing the yachts.

3. Do billionaires really get negative reactions from donating? Didn’t I hear that they get fawning praise and total absence of skepticism?

Vox quotes Rob Reich (not the same person as the former Labor Secretary), a prominent critic of bilionaire philanthropy. Reich writes that billionaires “ask everyone involved to bend over in gratitude for her benevolence and genius in sprinkling around some social benefits” and so we need to “stop being merely grateful to donors and instead direct our skepticism and scrutiny at their activities”.

How much gratitude vs. scrutiny do billionaire donors get?

The three most publicized recent billionaire donations were Zuckerberg to Newark schools, Bezos to preschools, and Gates to malaria. I looked at Twitter to examine how much fawning vs. scrutiny people were giving each. Specifically, I searched “Zuckerberg Newark”, “Bezos preschool” and “Gates malaria”. I then coded the first twenty-five tweets on the Top Tweets page for each as positive, negative, or neutral. I ignored mismatches that weren’t about the donations, and also ignored the genre of people using Zuckerberg’s donation as a way of criticizing Cory Booker (which was more than half of the Zuckerberg tweets).

Searching “Zuckerberg Newark”, I counted 2 positive tweets, 4 neutral tweets, and 19 negative tweets:

This looks similar to failed effort of the Zuckerberg (Facebook) Foundation to "reform" Newark schools. Also serves similar purposes: Private interests control the policy agenda and evade progressive taxation.

— Robert Cotto Jr (@RobertCottoJr) April 5, 2019

Zuckerberg’s costly effort to remake Newark’s public school system may have failed, but that hasn’t put a damper in his plan to transform the educational landscape with his “personalized learning” schemes.https://t.co/0LgY85NjGb

— The Baffler (@thebafflermag) January 14, 2019

Searching “Bezos preschool”, I counted 5 positive, 7 neutral, and 14 negative tweets:

I am still mad that Jeff Bezos thinks he can solve for preschool in America. Y'all. We have a model that works beautifully. It is called Head Start. Just give it to everyone. The end.

— Abby Norman MDiv (@abbynormansays) September 14, 2018

So Jeff Bezos is putting $2 billion into homelessness and preschool. Laudable. But you have to ask — is this better than just taxing the wealth of the richest man in the world, and making that money democratically accountable? https://t.co/PcGKJWcMhJ

— Lydia DePillis (@lydiadepillis) September 13, 2018

Searching “Gates malaria”, I counted 15 positive, 4 neutral, and 6 negative.

Read The Business Of Changing The World. @BillGates, phenom philanthropist gets it. Gates was worth $91b when he did the giving pledge about ten years ago, he’s given $50b. His net worth today is around$110b. He’s also on the verge of eradicating malaria. https://t.co/RuCQNRKcDX https://t.co/2AJE2lBFQQ

— María Teresa Kumar (@MariaTeresa1) May 10, 2019

The @gatesfoundation efforts to eradicate malaria are undemocratic in this rubric. If billionaires like Gates/Buffet were prevented and that money was with the government, it would likely be spent elsewhere.

Billionaires can be useful for #AWorldThatWorksForEveryone

— Eric Minick (@EricMinick) July 18, 2019

The same is true of Google search. I examined the top ten search results for each donation, with broadly similar results: mostly negative for Zuckerberg and Bezos, mostly positive for Gates.

But when people talk about “billionaire philanthropy” in general, they tend to elide this distinction and focus on the bad. A twitter search for “billionaire philanthropy” produced 2 positive, 3 neutral, and 20 negative tweets, more negative than for any individual donation. A Google search for “billionaire philanthropy”, and the top ten results contained 1 positive article, 5 neutral articles, and 4 negative articles.

"For the super-rich, giving is really taking. Taking power, that is, from the rest of society."

This is why I prefer taxation to philanthropy.https://t.co/2D2BYyL8D7

— Cameron Graham (@camerongraham) July 20, 2019

If billionaires paid their fair share of taxes we wouldn’t need #philanthropy. It is just a facade to look like social heroes while actually engaging in tax evasion and demanding #TaxHolidays. #EatTheRich #ProletariatRevolution

— Time To Change The World (@end_patriarchy) July 19, 2019

Although some donors like Bill Gates are generally liked, others, like Zuckerberg and Bezos, are met with widespread distrust. This might be because Gates has worked harder to target his donations well, or because he made his money a long time ago and nobody is too angry about his business practices anymore. But on a broader scale, the media and social media consensus is already parroting anti-billionaire-philanthropy talking points.

If everyone were unreflectively praising philanthropic billionaires, there would be a strong case for encouraging skepticism. But if most responses to billionaire philanthropy are negative, we should worry more about the consequences of the backlash.

4. Is it a problem that billionaire philanthropy is unaccountable to public democratic institutions? Should we make billionaires pay that money as taxes instead, so the public can decide how it gets spent?

From Dissent:

Big philanthropy is overdue for reform. The goal should be to reduce its leverage in civil society and public policymaking while increasing government revenue. Some possible changes seem obvious: don’t allow administrative expenses to count toward the 5 percent minimum payout, increase the excise tax on net investment income, eliminate the tax exemption for foundations with assets over a certain size, and replace the charity tax deduction with a tax credit available to everyone (for example, all donors could subtract 15 percent of the total value of their charitable contributions from their tax bills). In addition, strict IRS oversight of big philanthropy—especially all the “educating” that looks so much like lobbying and campaigning — is crucial […]

Private foundations fall into the IRS’s wide-open category of tax-exempt organizations, which includes charitable, educational, religious, scientific, literary, and other groups. When the creator of a mega-foundation says, ‘I can do what I want because it’s my money,’ he or she is wrong. A substantial portion of the wealth — 35 percent or more, depending on tax rates — has been diverted from the public treasury, where voters would have determined its use.

This makes the same argument as some of the other articles linked above. Since billionaires have complete control over their own money, they are helping society the way they want, not the way the voters and democratically-elected-officials want. This threatens democracy. We can solve this by increasing taxes on philanthropy, so that the money billionaires might have spent on charity flows back to the public purse instead.

Two of the billionaires whose philanthropy I most respect, Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, have done a lot of work on the criminal justice reform. The organizations they fund determined that many innocent people are languishing in jail for months because they don’t have enough money to pay bail; others are pleading guilty to crimes they didn’t commit because they have to get out of jail in time to get to work or care for their children, even if it gives them a criminal record. They funded a short-term effort to help these people afford bail, and a long-term effort to reform the bail system. One of the charities they donate to, The Bronx Freedom Fund, found that 92% of suspects without bail assistance will plead guilty and get a criminal record. But if given enough bail assistance to make it to trial, over half would have all charges dropped. This is exactly the kind of fighting-mass-incarceration and stopping-the-cycle-of-poverty work everyone says we need, and it works really well. I have donated to this charity myself, but obviously I can only give a tiny fraction of what Moskovitz and Tuna manage.

If Moskovitz and Tuna’s money instead flowed to the government, would it accomplish the same goal in some kind of more democratic, more publically-guided way? No. It would go to locking these people up, paying for more prosecutors to trick them into pleading guilty, more prison guards to abuse and harass them. The government already spends $100 billion – seven times Tuna and Moskovitz’s combined fortunes – on maintaining the carceral state each year. This utterly dwarfs any trickle of money it spends on undoing the harms of the carceral state, even supposing such a trickle exists. Kicking Tuna and Moskovitz out of the picture isn’t going to cause bail reform to happen in some civically-responsible manner. It’s just going to ensure that all the money goes to making the problem worse, instead of the overwhelming majority going to making the problem worse but a tiny amount also going to making it better.

Or take one of M&T’s other major causes, animal welfare. Until last year, California factory farms kept animals in cages so small that they could not lie down or stretch their limbs, for their entire lives. Moskovitz and Tuna funded a ballot measure which successfully banned this kind of confinement. It reduced the suffering of hundreds of millions of farm animals and is one of the biggest victories against animal cruelty in history.

If their money had gone to the government instead, would it have led to some even better democratic stakeholder-involving animal welfare victory? No. It would have joined the $20 billion – again, more than T&M’s combined fortunes – that the government spends to subsidize factory farming each year. Or it might have gone to the enforcement of ag-gag laws – laws that jail anyone who publicly reports on the conditions in factory farms (in flagrant violation of the First Amendment) because factory farms don’t want people to realize how they treat their animals, and have good enough lobbyists that they can just make the government imprison anyone who talks about it.

George Soros donated/invested $500 million to help migrants and refugees. If he had given it to the government instead, would it have gone to some more grassroots migrant-helping effort?

No. It would have gone to building a border wall, building more camps to lock up migrants, more cages to separate refugee children from their families. Maybe some tiny trickle, a fraction of a percent, would have gone to a publicly-funded pro-refugee effort, but not nearly as much as would have gone to hurting refugees.

The idea that we should divert money from freeing the incarcerated, saving animals, and reuniting families – to instead expanding incarceration, torturing animals, and separating families – seems monstrous to me, even (especially?) when cloaked in communitarian language.

5. Those are some emotionally salient examples, but doesn’t the government also do a lot of good things?

Yes, but the US government is not a charity. Even when it’s doing good things, it’s not efficiently allocating its money according to some concept of what does the most good.

Bill Gates saved ten million lives by asking a lot of smart people what causes were most important. They said it was global health and development causes like treating malaria and tuberculosis. So Gates allocated most of his fortune to those causes. Gates and people like him are such a large fraction of philanthropic billionaires that by my calculations these causes get about 25% of billionaire philanthropic spending.

The US government also does some great work in those areas. But it spends about 0.9% of its budget on them. As a result, one dollar given to a billionaire foundation is more likely to go to a very poor person than the same dollar given to the US government, and much more likely to help that person in some transformative way like saving their life or lifting them out of poverty.

But this is still too kind to the US government. It’s understandable that they may want to focus on highways in Iowa instead of epidemics in Sudan. Yet even on issues vital for the safety of the American people, the government tends to fail in surprising ways.

How much money does the US government spend fighting climate change? This 538 article explains why this is a hard question, but it tries to give the best answer it can:

The 2018 GAO report found that, while the Office of Management and Budget has reported that the federal government spent more than $154 billion on climate-change-related activities since 1993, much of that number is likely not being used to directly address climate change or its risks. Many of the projects reported as “climate-change-related activities” are only secondarily about climate change.

For instance, the U.S. nuclear energy program predates serious concerns about climate change and would likely exist in its current form even if it did not produce fewer greenhouse-gases than some other forms of energy production, like burning coal. But the nuclear program’s budget is counted as climate spending. All told, when the GAO evaluated six agencies that report their climate spending to the OMB, it found that 94 percent of the money was going to programs that weren’t primarily focused on climate change — things like nuclear energy. The money marked as climate spending wasn’t going to new initiatives. Instead, “it’s a bunch of related things we were already doing,” Gomez told me. Numbers like that $154 billion total can be used as political props, but that kind of accounting isn’t much good for understanding what the government is actually doing about climate change.

$154 billion * 6% primarily focused on climate change / 25 years = $369 million per year. It might be higher than the 25-year average now, because of increasing awareness of climate change, but it might also be lower, because Trump. I have low confidence in the exact estimate but I think this is the right order of magnitude.

In 2017, the foundation of billionaire William Hewlett (think Hewlett-Packard) pledged $600 million to fight climate change. One gift by one guy was almost twice the entire US federal government’s yearly spending on climate issues.

This isn’t some parable on how mighty billionaires have become or how much power they have accrued. Mr. Hewlett’s budget is still only one ten-thousandth the size of the government’s. It’s not that he’s anywhere near government-sized, it’s just that the government doesn’t care at all, so a billionaire can outspend them if he cares a little.

Thanks to Hewlett and a few other people like him, I calculate that about 3% of billionaire philanthropy goes to climate change, compared to 0.01% of the federal budget.

Not every billionaire spends their money on global health or fighting climate change. There’s a lot of criticism of billionaires who “waste” their donations on already-well-endowed colleges and performing arts centers, and I agree we should push them to think harder about their choices. But charity, like investing, is in what Nassim Taleb calls Extremistan – almost all the value lies in getting it very right once or twice. An investment fund that picks a hundred duds plus 2004 Facebook is still an amazing investment fund. A form of philanthropy that produces a hundred duds plus Bill Gates (and Dustin Moskovitz, and Cari Tuna, and Warren Buffett, and Ben Delo, and…) is still an amazing benefit to the world.

I wish I could give a more detailed breakdown of how philanthropists vs. the government spend their money, but I can’t find the data. Considerations like the above make me think that philanthropists in general are better at focusing on the most important causes.

I think this also makes intuitive sense. Charities are capable of laserlike focus on the most important and desperate causes. Give their money to the government instead, and it will get spent on fighter jets, bombing brown kids in Afghanistan, shooting brown kids in Chicago, subsidizing coal companies, jailing anyone who tries to dress hair withoug a hairdresser license, and paying farmers not to grow crops – and then, at the end of all that, maybe have a tiny bit left over to spend on the desperately important problems that affect the most vulnerable people.

Governments are a useful type of organization that should exist. I don’t want to get rid of them. But right now we’re thinking on the margin, and on the margin an extra dollar given to a charity will do more good than that same dollar given to the government.

6. The point of democracy isn’t that it’s always right, the point is that it respects the popular will. Regardless of whether the popular will is good or bad, don’t powerful private foundations violate it?

Reich again:

The modern foundation is an institutional oddity in a democracy.

In a democracy, officials responsible for public policy must stand for election. Don’t like your representatives’ policy views? Vote against them in the next election. This is the accountability logic internal to democracy — responsiveness to citizens. It does not always work this way, but the logic has some real force.

But foundations have no electoral accountability. Don’t like what the Gates Foundation did with its $3.4 billion in 2011 grants ($9.3 million each day of the year), or what it has done with $25 billion in grants since its inception in 1994? Tough, there’s no way to vote out the Gateses.

I realize there’s some very weak sense in which the US government represents me. But it’s really weak. Really, really weak. When I turn on the news and see the latest from the US government, I rarely find myself thinking “Ah, yes, I see they’re representing me very well today.”

Paradoxically, most people feel the same way. Congress has an approval rating of 19% right now. According to PolitiFact, most voters have more positive feelings towards hemorrhoids, herpes, and traffic jams than towards Congress. How does a body made entirely of people chosen by the public end up loathed by the public? I agree this is puzzling, but for now let’s just admit it’s happening.

Bill Gates has an approval rating of 76%, literally higher than God. Even Mark Zuckerberg has an approval rating of 24%, below God but still well above Congress. In a Georgetown university survey, the US public stated they had more confidence in philanthropy than in Congress, the court system, state governments, or local governments; Democrats (though not Republicans) also preferred philanthropy to the executive branch.

When I see philanthropists try to save lives and cure diseases, I feel like there’s someone powerful out there who shares my values and represents me. Even when Elon Musk spends his money on awesome rockets, I feel that way, because there’s a part of me that would totally fritter away any fortune I got on awesome rockets. I’ve never gotten that feeling when I watch Congress. When I watch Congress, I feel a scary unbridgeable gulf between me and anybody who matters. And the polls suggest a lot of people agree with me.

In what sense does it reflect the will of the people to transfer power and money from people and causes the public like and trust, to people and causes who the public hate and distrust? Why is it democratic to take money from someone more popular than God, and give it to a group of people more hated than hemorrhoids?

If the people want more money to be spent by private philanthropists instead of Congress, and they use the democratic process to produce a legal regime and tax system that favors private philanthropy, their will is being represented.

7. Shouldn’t people who disagree with the government’s priorities fight to change the government, not go off and do their own thing?

Suppose I was donating money to feed starving children, and it was going well, and lots of starving children were getting fed. Then you come along and say “No, you should give that money to the Church of Scientology instead”.

I say “No, I hate Scientology.”

You: “Ah, but you can always try to reform Scientology. And maybe in a hundred years, it won’t be racist anymore, and instead it will try to help starving children.”

Me: “So you’re saying that I should work tirelessly to reform Scientology, and then in a hundred years when they’re good, I should give them my money?”

You: “Oh no, you have to give them all your money now. But while you’re giving them all your money, you can also work toward reforming them.”

Why would I do this? Why would it even cross anybody’s mind that they should do this? I am not saying that the government is evil in the same way as Scientology. But I think the fundamental dynamic – should you give your money to a cause you think is good, or to an organization you think is bad while trying to reform it? – is the same in both cases.

Also, do you realize how monumental a task “reform the government” is? There are thousands of well-funded organizations full of highly-talented people trying to reform the government at any given moment, and they’re all locked in a tug-of-war death match reminiscent of that one church in Jerusalem where nobody has been able to remove a ladder for three hundred years. This isn’t to say no reform will ever happen – it’s happened before, it will surely happen again, and it’s a valuable thing to work towards. Just don’t hold up any attempts to ease the suffering of the less fortunate by demanding they wait until every necessary reform is accomplished.

Also, a lot of billionaires are trying to reform the government (eg George Soros, Charles Koch) and that makes the anti-billionaire-philanthropy crowd even angrier than when they just help poor people.

8. Is billionaire philanthropy getting too powerful? Should we be terrified by the share of resources now controlled by unaccountable charitable foundations?

From Dissent:

Right now, big philanthropy in the United States is booming. Major sources of growth have been the wealth generated by high-tech industries and the expanding global market. In September 2013 there were sixty-seven private grant-making foundations with assets over $1 billion. The Rockefeller Foundation, once the wealthiest, now ranks fifteenth; the Carnegie Corporation ranks twentieth (Foundation Center). Mega-foundations are more powerful now than in the twentieth century—not only because of their greater number, but also because of the context in which they operate: dwindling government resources for public goods and services, the drive to privatize what remains of the public sector, an increased concentration of wealth in the top 1 percent, celebration of the rich for nothing more than their accumulation of money, virtually unlimited private financing of political campaigns, and the unenforced (perhaps unenforceable) separation of legal educational activities from illegal lobbying and political campaigning. In this context, big philanthropy has too much clout.

The yearly federal budget is $4 trillion. The yearly billionaire philanthropy budget is about $10 billion, 400 times smaller.

For context, the California government recently admitted that its high-speed rail project was going to be $40 billion over budget (it may also never get built). The cost overruns alone on a single state government project equal four years of all the charity spending by all the billionaires in the country.

Compared to government spending, Big Philanthropy is a rounding error. If the whole field were taxed completely out of existence, all its money wouldn’t serve to cover the cost overruns on a single train line.

If this seems surprising, I think that in itself is evidence that the money is being well-spent. Billionaire philanthropy isn’t powerful, at least not compared to anything else. It just has enough accomplishments to attract attention. Destroying it wouldn’t enrich anyone else to any useful degree, or neutralize some threatening power base. It would just destroy something really good.

9. Does billionaire philanthropy threaten pluralism?

From Reich’s Vox interview again:

I am, by contrast, a pluralist; I want to champion the decentralization of what would otherwise be a majoritarian decision-making structure for the spending of tax dollars to produce various forms of social benefits. And I think part of what makes ordinary charitable giving a good thing is the conversion of every individual’s idiosyncratic, eccentric preferences into some civil society-facing project that by extension produces a diverse, pluralistic civil society, which is good for democracy.

I am having trouble following the argument. We need pluralism and decentralization. Therefore, we should ban anyone from doing their own thing, and instead force them to go through a single giant organization?

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) sponsors research into mental health uses of psychedelic drugs. You might have heard of them in the context of their study of MDMA (Ecstasy) for PTSD being “astoundingly” successful. They’re on track to get MDMA FDA-approved and potentially inaugurate a new era in psychiatry. This is one of those 1000x opportunities that effective altruists dream of.

The government hasn’t given this a drop of funding, because its official position is that Drugs Are Bad. MAPS writes:

Every dollar has come from private donors committed to our mission. The pharmaceutical industry and federal government have not yet supported our work, so the continued expansion of psychedelic research still relies on the generosity of individual donors and foundations.

Most of the funding for their MDMA trial came from the foundation of billionaire Robert Mercer. Because there were actors other than the government with enough money to fund things they believed in, we were able to get some great work done even though it wasn’t the sort of thing the government would support.

Or: in 2001, under pressure from Christian conservatives, President Bush banned federal funding for stem cell research. Stem cell scientists began leaving the US or going into other area of work. The field survived thanks to billionaires stepping up to provide the support the government wouldn’t – especially insurance billionaire Eli Broad, who gave $25 million to the cause, and eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who sponsored a California ballot initiative to redirect state funding to cover the gap. Time after time, the government has stopped supporting things for bad reasons, and we’ve been lucky that we didn’t bulldoze over the rest of civil society and prevent anyone else from having enough power to help.

Or: despite controversy over “government funding of Planned Parenthood”, political considerations have seriously limited the amount of funding the US government can give contraceptive research. It was multimillionaire heiress Katharine McCormick who funded the research into what would become the first combined oral contraceptive pill. More recently, it was Warren Buffett who funded RU-486 and the IUD. Together with similar work by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, these have prevented millions of unwanted pregnancies.

When there are hundreds of different actors who can pursue their own projects, we get hundreds of genuinely different projects, some of which go great. If we restrict individuals from pursuing their own projects, and everything has to be funded by a single organization with a single agenda, we reduce the possibilities for progress to a monoculture, vulnerable to any minor flaw in the hegemon’s priorities.

In other cases, billionaires and government agencies are performing the same tasks in parallel. For example, both Bill Gates and the CDC are fighting infectious diseases in the developing world; both Elon Musk and NASA are working on space exploration.

Both groups bring different institutional cultures and priorities to the fight. The Gates Foundation is not run along exactly the same lines as the CDC; SpaceX has a different institutional culture from NASA. When one organization gets stuck in a dead-end, or isn’t up to a certain task, there’s a chance that the other will have the right structure to succeed. Some of this is random variation, some of it is structural differences between the public and private sector. I think it’s really healthy to have multiple diverse institutions trying to pursue the same goal. Robustness against obvious failures like “the government just banned all stem cell research” is just a special case of this principle.

I am using Reich as a foil, but in other places he seems to agree with this. At the end of this article he writes about “the case for foundations”, and says:

I believe there is a case for foundations that renders them not merely consistent with democracy but supportive of it.

First, foundations can help to diminish government orthodoxy by decentralizing the definition and distribution of public goods. Call this the pluralism argument. Second, foundations can operate on a longer time horizon than can businesses in the marketplace and elected officials in public institutions, taking risks in social policy experimentation and innovation that we should not routinely expect to see in the commercial or state sector. Call this the discovery argument.

I agree with all of this (and am now confused about to what degree Reich and I disagree at all), but I take this as meaning that private philanthropy, far from threatening pluralism, exemplifies it.

10. Aren’t the failures of government just due to Donald Trump or people like him? Won’t they hopefully get better soon?

Billionaires sometimes do a better job than the government at funding things like stem cells and the fight against climate change. But this is because of bad decisions by bad government officials. Obama overturned the stem cell ban; hopefully the next Democratic president will fix the climate funding situation. Does this make it unfair of me to compare the government vs. billionaires on this axis when there’s a hopefully-temporary reason the government is as bad as it is?

No. My whole point is that if you force everyone to centralize all money and power into one giant organization with a single point of failure, then when that single point of failure fails, you’re really screwed.

Remember that when people say decisions should be made through democratic institutions, in practice that often means the decisions get made by Donald Trump, who was democratically elected. At the risk of going Civics 101, we’re not supposed to be a pure democracy. We’re a complicated system of checks and balances that uses democracy in some of its components. But we deliberately have other, less democratic components to deal with the situations when the demos f@#ks up. The demos seems to be f@#king up pretty regularly these days and I’m glad we still have those other institutions.

11. So you’re saying these considerations about pluralism and representation and so on justify billionaire philanthropy?

I’m bringing up these considerations as counterarguments to some of the things opponents say. But I think they’re the wrong thing to focus on.

The Gates Foundation plausibly saved ten million lives. Moskovitz and Tuna saved a hundred million animals from excruciatingly painful conditions. Norman Borlaug’s agricultural research (supported by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation) plausibly saved one billion people.

These accomplishments – and other similar victories over famine, disease, and misery – are plausibly the best things that have happened in the past century. All the hot-button issues we usually care about pale before them. Think of how valuable one person’s life is – a friend, a family member, yourself – then try multiplying that by ten million or a billion or whatever, it doesn’t matter, our minds can’t represent those kinds of quantities anyway. Anything that makes these kinds of victories even a little less likely would be a disaster for human welfare.

The main argument against against billionaire philanthropy is that the lives and welfare of millions of the neediest people matter more than whatever point you can make by risking them. Criticize the existence of billionaires in general, criticize billionaires’ spending on yachts or mansions. But if you only criticize billionaires when they’re trying to save lives, you risk collateral damage to everything we care about.

A blistering heat wave across Europe shattered a number of all-time temperature records across the continent on Thursday.

By the numbers: On Thursday, Paris reached 42.6°C (108.7°F) — by far its hottest temperature on record, according to Météo-France.

Other places broke all-time records as well:

• The Netherlands at 4o.4°C (104.7°F).
• Belgium at 40.6°C (105°F).
• Germany at 41.5°C (106.7°F), according to the German Weather Service, and reported by DPA News.
• London broke its July temperature record at Heathrow Airport with 36.9°C (98.4°F) with the country's all-time temperature record at risk, according to the Met Office.

The big picture: Many indoor homes and gathering places across Europe do not have air conditioning, often an expected feature in the U.S., leaving both the elderly and very young especially at risk during extreme heat events.

Why it matters: A repeated trend toward record-breaking temperatures is indicative of a warming climate, driven by human activity. Climate change increases the odds that similar extreme heat events will occur throughout the world.

• Climate scientists warn that heat waves that are now considered exceptional events will become the norm in coming decades if emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases are not sharply curtailed.

Go deeper: Earth's 5 warmest years on record have occurred since 2014

Researchers at Adobe have developed a new type of transparent display that allows virtual images and video to appear convincingly next to real objects.

Why it matters: Glasses offer one way to bring together the digital and physical worlds, but that approach requires each person viewing to have a headset on, while this approach would allow the same effect to be shown to many people at once, which would be more useful for retail and other settings.

The company plans to detail the effort, known as Project Glasswing, at the Siggraph conference next week, but gave Axios a sneak peek at company HQ on Thursday.

Traditional LCD displays can be transparent, but only by removing the backlight, which makes them dim and unable to truly overlay an object behind them.

How it works: Adobe's approach combines a transparent LCD layer with the kind of technology used in smart glass that quickly shifts between total opacity or full translucency.

The cash register-size unit contains a standard PC along with the two display technologies, plus a touch-screen layer, that sit in front of a light box that can hold the real-world objects.

The resulting screen is like a Photoshop image with layers: The digital part is the top layer that sits in front of whatever real objects are behind the glass inside the light box.

Importantly for Adobe, the content for Glasswing's display can be easily created from existing Adobe apps like Photoshop, After Effects or Premiere Pro.

The effort took a five-person research team about a year and the materials cost several thousand dollars, with most of the money going towards the smart glass and controller, which had to be custom ordered from Latvia at a cost of around $4,000. But, if produced in volume, the technology could be made much cheaper,

"It’s not an exotic device that’s intrinsically expensive," Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis said in an interview.

The bigger picture: Parasnis said Adobe is looking at a number of ways to bring the digital and physical worlds closer together for content creators. While Glasswing is a research project, two other efforts are expected to be made available as products later this year.

• Aero is a means to allow people to easily turn Photoshop and Dimension content into augmented reality objects.
• Fresco aims to create a digital canvas that more closely resembles a real-world surface with the ability to add liquid or even wind to a digital watercolor.

What's next: Adobe isn't looking to get into the monitor-making business, but hopes the effort will help convince display manufacturers that the idea is worth pursuing.

In the long term, Parasnis believes the approach could be used on giant pieces of glass to allow entire workplace walls or windows to alternate between acting as a giant display or a transparent surface.To really get a feel for how Glasswing works, it's best to see it in action. Check out this video.

The Department of Justice has approved T-Mobile's deal to acquire Sprint, requiring the companies to divest some assets that Dish Networks can use to build a new fourth national U.S. wireless network.

Why it matters: T-Mobile and Sprint have argued that a combination of their resources will help them compete with market leaders Verizon and AT&T. Opponents of the deal argued that it will reduce competition.

The Justice Department and five states reached the settlement with Sprint and T-Mobile, which calls on the companies to:

• Sell Sprint's prepaid brands (Boost, Virgin and Sprint Prepaid) to Dish Network.
• Make available at least 20,000 cell sites to Dish
• Divest some spectrum in the 800MHz range to Dish
• Provide Dish with "robust access" to the T-Mobile network for at least 7 years while Dish builds out its 5G network
• engage in "good faith" negotiations about leasing some of Dish's existing 600MHz spectrum

Yes, but: Dish already has been sitting on a bunch of spectrum that it has yet to use and many wireless industry experts doubt its ability to emerge as a serious fourth player in the market.

What they're saying:

• Assistant Attorney General Makin Delrahim said that the merger "would be anti-competitive” if not for the remedies the agency includes in its settlement.
• Former FCC official Gigi Sohn: "The state AGs who sued to block the merger shouldn’t be fooled by this weak attempt to maintain competition in the mobile wireless market.... A new mobile wireless entrant that starts with zero postpaid subscribers and that must rely on its much bigger rival, the new T-Mobile, just to operate is not a competitor. It's a mobile Frankenstein."
• T-Mobile CEO John Legere noted in a statement that the Dish deal won't change "previously announced target synergies, profitability and long-term cash generation" projections.
• Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen said the deal will help fulfill two decades of work and more than $21 billion in spectrum investments. Dish also notes in a press release that the deal requires it to "use its spectrum to deploy a nationwide 5G broadband network covering at least 70 percent of the U.S. population by June 14, 2023" or else "make voluntary contributions to the U.S. Treasury of up to $2.2 billion.”

What's next: A court will have to approve the deal, and 10 other states have separately sued to block it. Those states have asked the court for more time in the event of a DoJ settlement that changed the terms of the deal, as is now the case.

• The FCC also needs to give the agreement formal approval, but Chairman Ajit Pai had signaled his support even before the Dish deal and says he will now circulate a draft order approving the transaction.

Last week, I noted that Bernie Sanders is winning over Democratic primary voters on health care. Whether you love, hate or are indifferent toward his “Medicare for All” plan, polls show Sanders leading when Democratic voters are asked which candidate they think is best able handle to health care.

The thing is, though — according to new polling from Marist College this week — Sanders’s plan isn’t actually the most popular idea in the field. Instead, that distinction belongs to what Marist calls “Medicare for all that want it,” or what’s sometimes called a public option — something very similar to Joe Biden’s recently unveiled health care plan, which claims to give almost everyone “the choice to purchase a public health insurance option like Medicare.”

In the Marist poll, 90 percent of Democrats thought a plan that provided for a public option was a good idea, as compared to 64 percent who supported a Sanders-style Medicare for All plan that would replace private health insurance. The popularity of the public option also carries over to independent voters: 70 percent support it, as compared to 39 percent for Medicare for All.

Americans want Medicare for All … who want it

Share of respondents who agreed that these versions of a Medicare for All plan were a good idea

Source: Marist COLLEGE

But none of this is meant to negate what I wrote last week. Sanders’s plan is still fairly popular with Democrats, and there’s more to winning elections than just picking whatever policies happen to poll best; Medicare for All is consistent with the sort of revolutionary change for which Sanders advocates.

At the same time, the public option is potentially a winning issue for Biden, and one that allows him to reinforce some of his core strengths. It offers greater continuity with the legacy of the Obama administration (since the public option is a more gradual change from Obamacare — not to mention, something Obamacare initially tried to include), and allows him to double down on his electability message, since it polls better than eliminating private insurance. That may be why Biden has gone on the offense against Medicare for All.

Stuck in the middle, as I wrote last week, are Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, who (along with other Democrats) have co-sponsored Sanders’s bill rather than developing a health care plan of their own. They aren’t getting credit from voters for leading on health care like Sanders, and they’re also left defending a plan that isn’t as popular as Biden’s among Democrats nor very popular among general election voters. We’re not in the prediction business — that’s a lie, we are — but it wouldn’t be surprising in the least if one or both of them issued their own health care plan within the next few months.

I knew Mark when he was at the School of Public Policy at UCLA, and much enjoyed his company; I highly recommend the substantive and gracious obituary here at Reason by Jacob Sullum, who worked in the same field as Mark did. An excerpt:

Back in 1989, Mark Kleiman published a book, Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control, that exemplified his calm, methodical, just-the-facts approach to drug policy. Kleiman argued that federal efforts to curtail cannabis consumption were ineffective and diverted resources from programs that had a better public safety payoff. Three years later, in Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results, he came out in favor of legalizing marijuana, arguing that the costs of prohibition outweighed its benefits. At a time when three-quarters of Americans still supported marijuana prohibition, Kleiman's position was striking, especially coming from a widely quoted and consulted academic who had the ear of policy makers….

I did not always agree with Kleiman's conclusions [such as Kleiman's support for continued criminalization of drugs other than marijuana and psychedelics], but I admired his method, which acknowledged subtleties and uncertainties, anticipated counterarguments, and insisted on empirical support for claims that were frequently asserted as articles of faith.

"Eventually we must learn to discuss our drug policies without raising our voices," Kleiman wrote in Against Excess. "A drug-crazed drug warrior can be as great a public menace as a drug-crazed addict." He never lost sight of the burdens imposed by coercive drug policies, even when he supported them.

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Thor 4! Black Widow! Doctor Strange 2! And so, so much more.

For the first time in years we finally have an idea of what Marvel Studios has planned for the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The studio revealed its upcoming schedule during its Hall H panel at San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday night, announcing at least 10 projects to expect over the next two years. The biggest revelations include the news that Natalie Portman will wield Thor’s hammer; Mahershala Ali will star in a new Blade project; and a confirmation from Marvel that it’s working on movies featuring some of the studio’s recently acquired characters.

Marvel’s business plan and marketing strategy has long been to hype what’s next, with much of that hype being driven by its signature post-credits scenes and panels at fan conventions like Comic-Con or Disney’s D23. And for awhile, it was customary for the studio to announce its release schedule several years early — in 2015 Marvel announced movies like 2018’s Black Panther and 2019’s Captain Marvel.

But even the studio’s two most-recent films — April’s colossal cinematic juggernaut known as Avengers: Endgame and this month’s Spider-Man: Far From Home — arrived in theaters, Marvel still hadn’t revealed what movies it’s launching in 2020, or if it plans to launch any at all. Meanwhile, the studio had kept relatively quiet save for a few casting and crew announcements (like we found out this week that Taika Waititi would be directing the fourth Thor movie).

Here’s what Marvel announced during its Comic-Con panel:

• Black Widow, starring Scarlett Johansson and Rachel Weisz and directed by Cate Shortland, arriving in theaters on May 1, 2020
• The Eternals, starring Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek and directed by Chloe Zhao, arriving in theaters on November 6, 2020
• Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, starring Simu Liu and directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, arriving in theaters on February 12, 2021. Shang Chi will be Marvel’s first film with a lead character of Asian descent.
• Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Elizabeth Olsen (yes, Scarlet Witch) and directed by Scott Derrickson, arriving in theaters on May 7, 2021
• Thor: Love and Thunder, directed by Taika Waititi and starring Natalie Portman (who will wield the legendary hammer as the first female Thor), Tessa Thompson, and Chris Hemsworth, arriving in theaters on November 5, 2021

Marvel studios president Kevin Feige also confirmed upcoming movies involving the Fantastic Four and the X-Men’s mutants — characters who were previously owned by Fox, but which now fall under Marvel’s purview thanks to the recent Disney-Fox merger. He also confirmed that the sequels for Black Panther and Captain Marvel, are in development. Black Panther is Marvel’s biggest solo superhero movie to date, having made $1.3 billion worldwide, and Captain Marvel, its first solo superhero film to center on a female hero, also passed the $1 billion mark.

Vying for the biggest surprise of the evening was Feige bringing Mahershala Ali to the Comic-Con stage to announce a new Blade project. Ali previously appeared as the villain in Marvel’s Netflix series Luke Cage, so the new Blade film project possibly signals that Marvel’s television projects with Netflix and its cinematic universe are completely separate entities.

Marvel also revealed its television series lineup for Disney’s forthcoming streaming service Disney+, which is scheduled to launch in November:

• The Falcon & Winter Soldier in fall 2020
• WandaVision in spring 2021
• Loki in spring 2021
• WHAT IF ...? — an animated series featuring characters from the MCU in summer 2021
• Hawkeye in fall 2021

For fans who can’t wait until 2020 for Marvel’s next best thing, rest assured. The studio will probably have more surprises to share next month — and perhaps even first-look footage or concept art from its upcoming projects— at Disney’s D23 convention, which will take place from August 23 to 25, 2019 in Anaheim.

City leaders in Mesa, Arizona, operate a municipality where the interests of police officers are valued more highly than ordinary citizens, including those the police have wronged.

Two years ago, I wrote about Daniel Shaver, an unarmed 26-year-old who in 2016 was shot to death in a hotel hallway while begging for his life. The killer, Mesa Police Officer Philip Brailsford, was put on trial for murder. Jurors were not allowed to know that he had scratched “You’re fucked” into his service weapon. He was acquitted of murder and manslaughter, despite video of as chilling and egregious a police killing as I’ve ever seen.

Brailsford was at least fired from his job as a police officer. But that isn’t how the story ends.

Laney Sweet, Shaver’s widow, wrote about her family’s suffering on Facebook. She related that their 8-year-old daughter was so despondent that she tried to choke herself at school, then declared when taken to a local hospital that “I want to be with Dad.” The family filed a wrongful-death lawsuit. They’ve yet to be compensated by the city or the police department.

As for the cop who pulled the trigger, he was “temporarily rehired by the department so he could apply for a monthly pension,” The Arizona Republic reported this month. In 2018, he was reinstated for 42 days and applied for accidental disability. “An accidental disability is one that occurred while the employee was on the clock and permanently prevents the employee from doing his or her job,” the newspaper explained, adding that the pension in question “totals more than $30,000 annually.” A widowed single mother could use a payout like that.

And the nature of the cop’s disability claim? According to an investigation by the local ABC affiliate, Brailsford said the incident in which he had shot Shaver had given him PTSD. “He’ll get a neutral reference if a future employer calls Mesa,” it reported. “And he’s not willing to talk about how his termination for killing an unarmed man turned into a check for life.”

That’s right: He killed an unarmed man, then claimed associated trauma to get a paycheck for life. In this effort, he was successful.

The people of Mesa could recall the city officials who enabled this miscarriage of justice. Absent that, they should not expect police accountability in the future. Brailsford could sign that pension over to the widow and child of the man he killed. Absent that, it’s hard to see how he achieves redemption.

Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has died, ABC News first reported Tuesday. He was 99.

The big picture: Stevens was the 3rd-longest-serving member of the Supreme Court before he retired in 2010, per NBC News. After being appointed to the court by President Ford in 1975, he went on to have an impact on almost every area of the law, writing the court’s opinions in several landmark cases, the Washington Post notes.

After starting out as a moderate conservative, Stevens went on to become a leader of the court's liberal wing. He acted to limit the death penalty, establish gay rights, promote racial equality, preserve legal abortion and protect the rights of undocumented immigrants facing deportation, per AP.

• Stevens told the New York Times in 2007, "I don’t think of myself as a liberal at all. I think as part of my general politics, I’m pretty darn conservative."

During his retirement, Stevens remained an active voice on big issues. In October last year, Stevens said Brett Kavanaugh should not be appointed to the Supreme Court because of his performance at Senate confirmation hearings.

In his 2019 autobiography, "'The Making of a Justice," Stevens addresses notable landmark cases the Supreme Court dealt with when he was on the bench — including Bush v. Gore, which led to former President George W. Bush winning the 2000 election.

• In the book, he writes he was confident while watching the Florida recount that the incident wouldn't end up in the Supreme Court, because "the Constitution, after all, expressly delegates the 'time, place, and manner' of elections to the states," according to an excerpt of the book in the Seattle Times.
• He was shocked when a majority of the court intervened to stay the Florida recount — a ruling he dissented. (Stevens dissented from the court's rulings more frequently than any other justice during his tenure, NPR notes.)

This article has been updated with more details, including the Supreme Court statement.

Imagine if the government gave people a subsidy of $5000 each time they bought a new car. That would be inefficient, encouraging the excessive purchase of new cars. Now imagine that the subsidy was 40% of the price of the car, up to a price of $25000. That would be even more inefficient, encouraging the excessive purchase of cars, and also encouraging the purchase of cars of excessively high quality. Now imagine a 40% car subsidy that had no upper limit. That would be extremely inefficient.

That last option, a “Cadillac subsidy”, is a good description of our health care system. The government effectively pays roughly 40% of the cost of private health insurance, via tax subsidies. That means if you buy a health care plan that costs $20,000/year, it actually only sets you back roughly $12,000/year. This subsidy encourages people to consume too much healthcare.

By far the best aspect of the Obama healthcare bill was the “Cadillac tax” on expensive health care plans. The best way to think about this “tax” is that it essentially removed the 40% subsidy on health insurance premiums, above a certain level. It’s analogous to going from a 40% subsidy on all new cars, to a 40% subsidy on only the first $25,000 spent on a new car.

In my previous post I discussed the awesome power of the health care industry. According to this article, tomorrow we may see an example of that power in Congress:

Congress will be voting Wednesday on a repeal of what is known as the “Cadillac Tax”—a provision of the Affordable Care Act which would place a 40% tax on employer-sponsored health care plans which provide excess benefits.

Think tanks and industry advocates have been fighting the implementation of the tax for years, and successfully delayed it until 2023.

The tax was supposed to be a funding source and would include 40% on anything greater than the value of health insurance benefits surpassing approximately $11,200 for individuals and $30,150 for families in 2022, according to the Tax Foundation. . .

And now it seems like it’s headed for the chopping block.

Needless to say, any repeal is unlikely to be offset by tax increases or spending cuts in other areas. We’ll just add the bill to the tab that we are already leaving to the next generation. The deficit will continue to reach unprecedented levels for a period of peace and prosperity.

Is there any constituency for sensible economic reforms, in either party?

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The Trump administration recently announced a change in policy regarding organ donations. Henceforth, donors will be compensated for lost wages and some other expenses. There are some other organizational changes in organ transplant management that should also boost transplants. This is probably the best thing the Trump administration has done since taking office, and it will likely save many lives.

But it’s just a start. The government needs to compensate organ donors at a level sufficient to eliminate the shortage of transplant kidneys and livers. This would save tens of thousands of American lives each year, and would also save billions of dollars in tax money. Learn from Iran!

It’s appalling that no previous administration did what the Trump administration did this week. And a future generation of Americans will be appalled that we did not go even further in deregulating organ transplant markets. Still, it’s a very nice first step.

PS.  Steve Hanke agrees:

President Trump’s actions go near the edge of what current law allows. As I wrote in a December 2018 Forbes column, the federal government should go further. It should allow compensation to donors in addition to the payment of lost wages and expenses. Reasonable levels of compensation should be enough to eliminate the shortages of kidneys and livers entirely. This would require action by the Congress to reform the National Organ Transplant Act.

HT:  Frank McCormick

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People often point to the fact that President Trump appoints Supreme Court justices “such as” Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. But do these two actually represent a distinct type? Maybe, but an article on “538” suggests that it’s too soon to know for sure:

Using SCOTUSBlog’s final statistics, I looked at the justices’ votes throughout the term. In these pairings, Kavanaugh closely aligned with Roberts and Alito, voting with Roberts 94 percent of the time and with Alito 91 percent of the time. But he only voted with Gorsuch 70 percent of the time — which meant that he voted with his fellow Trump appointee as often as he voted with liberal justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer. Gorsuch, by contrast, voted most frequently with Thomas.

Two quick points:

I understand that many Supreme Court cases are non-controversial, so voting with liberal justices 70% of the time doesn’t tell us very much.  In this sample, 39% of the cases were unanimous.  But both Kavanaugh and Gorsuch would (by definition) vote with the liberals in those cases.  So it remains true that Kavanaugh voted with liberals as often as with Gorsuch in even the more controversial cases.

I also understand that Kavanaugh has only been there for one term, and hence the sample may not be statistically significant.  (I believe it was around 72 total cases.) It’s too soon to draw firm conclusions.

It’s also unclear as to why these two justices differ so often.  Kavanaugh seems in some sense more “moderate” in his voting, but there are exceptions:

Roberts and Kavanaugh are more ideologically moderate than Gorsuch, but Gorsuch was more of a loose cannon. He joined the liberals in more closely divided cases than any of his conservative colleagues. That made him the “swingiest” conservative on the court, even though it was Roberts who ultimately determined the outcome of one of the most closely watched cases of the term when he voted to keep a question about citizenship off the 2020 census form for the time being.

Here’s a question for commenters who follow this more closely than I do.  I am aware of different types of “judicial conservatives”.  Some view the Constitution as a document that severely restricts what the federal government can do.  Others, such as the late Robert Bork, prefer that the courts mostly defer to the decisions of the legislative and executive branches.  Is it possible to discern a systematic difference in the type of conservatism practiced by these two new justices?  Thanks.

HT:  David Levey

The San Francisco Bay area is one of the most productive regions in the world, particularly the Silicon Valley area near San Jose. Unfortunately, many workers are priced out of moving there due to extremely high real estate prices. But what if we could build a brand new city from scratch, for a million people. The city would be near San Jose and would be much less dense than San Francisco. A developer could create sensible transit, bike paths, parks, etc. Sort of like Irvine, California, but much larger.  The rolling countryside would allow for quite attractive residential neighborhoods:

You might say that it would be impossible to put together a piece of land near San Jose that is large enough to house more people than San Francisco, and at a much lower density.  Where would one find the land?

Actually, this sort of parcel is currently for sale.  And it is almost 70% larger than San Francisco, which is a city of 880,000 people:

That’s right, the N3 Cattle Company is currently for sale, and it is much larger than San Francisco.

But what developer could possibly afford such a vast piece of land in one of the most desirable spots on Earth?

Actually, the asking price is surprisingly low.  Here’s the WSJ:

A working ranch larger than the city of San Francisco is asking $72 million. The property, just 40 miles from Oakland, is believed to be the largest piece of land for sale in the state of California, according to the listing agent.

At 50,500 acres, the property accommodates up to 1,500 cow and calf pairs. The right buyer is someone who “wants to relive the Old West,” said listing agent Todd Renfrew of California Outdoor Properties.

The N3 Cattle Company ranch has been in the same family for about 85 years and spans four counties, including Santa Clara County, Alameda County, San Joaquin County and Stanislaus County.

To put that number in perspective, it is 7% of the cost of a single new skyscraper in San Francisco, and less than 2% of the cost of the new $5 billion Apple headquarters in Silicon Valley.  Indeed these 79 square miles are selling for less than half the cost of the land under the new Apple headquarters.  In other words, this parcel capable of producing the most spectacular new city in the world, in an area with a vast need for new housing, is selling for a pittance.

I don’t know all of the reasons for the low price, but I suspect it reflects the fact that California will not allow the new owners to build the city I just described.  If I am correct, then the regulation that prevents this from occurring (a regulation that likely did not exist in the 1970s when the Irvine Ranch was developed) has the effect of destroying hundreds of billions of dollars in potential wealth.

Does this regulation help the environment?  Probably not, as California is quite energy efficient, indeed much more so than the US as a whole.  While I can’t be certain given all of the indirect effects, it seems likely that people moving into this new city from elsewhere in America would be reducing their carbon footprint.

Of all the “low hanging fruit” actions we could take to “make America great again”, the lowest fruit of all is to reform our zoning laws.

Undoubtedly there’s a bit of hyperbole in this post; perhaps some of the land is too mountainous to develop. But the losses from regulation of land use are enormous, under any reasonable assumptions.

PS.  Rather than having a buyer who “wants to relive the Old West” for him and his family, I’d prefer a buyer who wants to recreate the California dream of the 1970s for a million Americans stuck in cold, boring, unproductive rustbelt cities.

PPS:  Thank God that the environmentalists didn’t have the upper hand when it was time to develop the lovely hills of Orange County, where I live.  (Actually I live far inland from Laguna Beach, pictured below, but it’s still nice.)

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I’ve seen a lot of recent criticism of San Francisco, particularly its problem with homelessness. Thus I looked forward to spending a few days there to see for myself.

I stayed in the “Tenderloin” district, which contains San Francisco’s largest concentration of homeless. Each day I spent an hour or two exploring different parts of the city on foot, in different directions.  Here are my highly subjective observations.

1. There is a lot of homelessness in San Francisco, but much of it seems concentrated in a few small areas, including the area where I stayed.  LA’s problem is far worse.

2. Homelessness is obviously a problem for the homeless themselves, but it doesn’t seem to me to be much of a problem for most residents of San Francisco, except in a very restricted area. I walked by lots of homeless people and was not hassled a single time. I don’t doubt that problems occur, but the issue seems overrated to me. As far as cleanliness, that may be a generational thing. I grew up in an America where pets were allowed to poop on the sidewalks, so I don’t freak out about the dirt and the needles.

3. The vast majority of San Francisco remains America’s most beautiful city, by far. Boston recently built a new neighborhood along the harbor just south of downtown, and San Francisco has built a far more impressive one in the same general location. I visited the new bus station the day it opened (yesterday), and it has to be the most impressive bus station in the world. There’s a huge park on the roof that is vaguely reminiscent of NYC’s Highline, but less crowded (see below). The airport and mass transit system are far superior to those in LA.

4. San Francisco is a much denser city than LA, but even so there’s still lots of room to put up 20 story apartment buildings in older industrial areas, such as south of Market Street. That’s already being done, but much more is needed.

Visiting both San Francisco and San Jose on this trip, it was clear how much these cities have pulled away from middle American cities like St. Louis and Cleveland. The wealth and sophistication in the Bay Area is visible everywhere; it’s perhaps the first time I intuitively grasped the difference between the 20th and 21st centuries. While much of Middle America is still in the 20th century, the SoMa district most certainly is not.

5. I doubt whether San Francisco’s success is due to good governance. More likely, the incredible natural beauty, mild climate, and the proximity to Silicon Valley are bigger factors.

It was a lot of fun walking through the city.

Tyler Cowen recently made this observation:

I was in San Francisco last week, and most of my conversations eventually turned to the same topic: Could some other region supplant the Bay Area as America’s tech hub? San Francisco, after all, has sky-high rents and taxes — not to mention dirty streets, unpleasant strip clubs and numerous homeless. . . .

[C]onsider the virtues of the Los Angeles area. It has splendid weather — warmer and sunnier than San Francisco — and a deep pool of talent. . . .  It even has a subway, albeit an underdeveloped one. I would argue it has much better food, and of course a much larger and more diverse entertainment scene. You might reasonably conclude that top talent might prefer to live in or near Los Angeles rather than the Bay Area. . . .

Northern California had an original advantage over Southern California as a center of free thinking and thus as a tech hub. Think back to Haight-Ashbury, the 1960s, Beatniks, LSD and the Whole Earth Catalog, the psychedelic movement, the bohemian and gay cultures of San Francisco. All of that bred an atmosphere of rebellion, and it helped birth the personal computer and a large movement of non-conformist hippie programmers, often working out of their proverbial garages.

But those cultural roots have largely faded, and if anything today San Francisco and the Bay Area are better known for political correctness and a conformist culture of scolding and groupthink.

At my age I prefer the sunny warm weather of SoCal, and the convenience of driving in Orange County.  But if I were young, I’d vastly prefer the San Francisco area, and it’s not even close.  To say LA’s subway system is “undeveloped” is an understatement—I’ve found it to be worthless.  Both cities have political correctness, but judging by the delightful and colorful gay pride parade I witnessed over the weekend, San Francisco is still free of the dreary, hypocritical puritanism that mars so much of American culture.  Whole families attended, obviously not concerned that their darling little ones would be scarred for life if they saw a bit too much skin.  (I won’t offer an opinion on whether San Fran’s strip clubs are of the “pleasant” or “unpleasant” variety, as I lack the expertise to challenge Tyler’s judgment.  But I presume that those who don’t care for that sort of thing would just stay away.)

Despite these reservations, LA may well be the next Silicon Valley, for the reason’s identified by Tyler.

PS.  Just to be clear, while the city has some nice architecture, I would not rate San Francisco number one without its natural beauty.

PPS.  I often criticize Trump, but to his credit he recently admitted that America’s homelessness problem began after he was elected president:

After the president mildly protested that only “some of our cities” are like that, the Fox News star said that New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles all “have a major problem with filth.”

“Why is that?” Carlson wondered aloud.

“It’s a phenomenon that started two years ago,” Trump declared. “It’s disgraceful. I’m going to maybe—I am looking at it very seriously.”

Yes, do that.

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