Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“The war is being fought in Ukraine, and Ukrainians are certainly suffering the most. But the costs incurred by Ukraine’s primary backers, the United States and Europe, will determine Ukraine’s capacity in defending itself against Russia. Without Western support, Ukraine’s recent victories in the counteroffensive will be difficult to sustain.”
“Taiwanese student Ti “Joyce” Chun-Shan demonstrated English proficiency daily when she came to the United States at age 39. She took college classes in English, maintained good grades and earned a certification in ESL.
Chun-Shan, who finished a massage therapy program and earned an associate’s degree at Chandler Gilbert Community College in Arizona, also spoke English with clients as part of her training.
Nobody complained about a language barrier. Yet when Chun-Shan applied for an occupational license—a formality for most of her classmates—the Arizona Board of Massage Therapy singled her out for extra scrutiny.
State law requires massage therapists who are not native English speakers to demonstrate “communication proficiency.” So regulators told Chun-Shan, who grew up speaking Mandarin, that she would have to take an English test and exceed board-imposed standards in four sections: reading, writing, speaking and listening.
The board sets minimum standards outrageously high. Scores must exceed the median for all groups of test takers, including native English speakers and college graduates. Rather than waste her time and money—up to $325—Chun-Shan refused to take the test.
Other states lay similar traps, sometimes indirectly. Licensing programs and exams, for example, are often available only in English. Washington, D.C., added another barrier to those who don’t speak English fluently in 2016, when the district decided that daycare providers must have an associate’s degree in early childhood development or a closely related field.
The law says nothing about English proficiency, yet a 2018 analysis showed that all qualifying programs at nearby colleges were taught exclusively in English. As part of the coursework, aspiring daycare providers must earn credit in language-intensive subjects like public speaking and composition.”
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“Florida passed sweeping licensing reforms in 2020. And Utah has passed several bills in recent years to ease the regulatory burden on service providers. Among other reforms, Utah has exempted hairstylists from cosmetology licensing and reduced the training hours necessary to perform limited massage therapy.
Connecticut is moving in the opposite direction. In 2019, the state restored an abolished licensing requirement for manicurists, an occupation dominated by Vietnamese immigrants. Meanwhile, Louisiana and Oklahoma have dug in—following lawsuits from the Institute for Justice—to protect licensing requirements for eyebrow threaders, an occupation dominated by South Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants.
Unnecessary regulations like these that prevent immigrants from being able to make a living are wrong in any language.”
“A 2011 study commissioned by the U.K.’s Environment Agency found that “the paper bag has to be used four or more times to reduce its global warming potential to below that of the conventional [plastic] bag.””
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“Other factors include transportation and disposal. Two thousand single-use plastic bags weigh about 30 pounds, while 2,000 paper bags weigh 280 pounds. By one estimate, it takes seven trucks to transport the same number of paper bags as one truck loaded with plastic bags. Paper bags also take up more space in landfills.”
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” A 2020 United Nations Environment Programme report looked at several life-cycle analyses published since 2010. “Paper bags contribute less to the impacts of littering,” it concluded, “but in most cases have a larger impact on the climate, eutrophication and acidification.””
“California will ban the sale of internal combustion engine vehicles, just as it has banned the sale of new lawnmowers and other power equipment that’s powered by gasoline engines. It’s the state’s latest attempt at technology forcing—”a strategy where a regulator specifies a standard that cannot be met with existing technology, or at least not at an acceptable cost,” as Science Direct explains.”
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“the same week that California policy makers announced an ambitious plan to shift California’s 27-million drivers into electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids, they also announced that Californians who currently own electric vehicles better not charge them for several days because the grid can’t handle the load.”
“You can take down the big targets, the Pornhubs and Kiwi Farms of the world, easily enough. Maybe you toss their owners in jail or hit them with big fines.
But when their erstwhile users make a new site, or a thousand new sites—and they will—will they all get taken down too? Will you get everyone who uploads a video or leaves a comment? Everyone whose internet history shows they’ve visited these sites? What about emailing the banned content to download for offline viewing—is that illegal too? What kind of mass surveillance apparatus are you willing to build to catch everyone who bypasses the ban?
And if you catch them, what then? Would the government fine people? Garnish their wages? Put them on a sex offender registry? Take away their children?
Would we imprison people over pornography? For how long? (Remember, we’re talking about a ban on all porn or other objectionable but currently legal content, not already and rightly illegal things like child pornography, nonconsensual pornography, or the swatting to which Greene was subjected.) Is a family better off if the dad gets three strikes and goes to prison for a year and can’t find a job when he gets out? Will putting a young man addicted to pornography in the criminogenic environment of prison make him more or less likely to get his life on track?
None of this is to suggest porn is a good thing or that I’m sorry to see Kiwi Farms go. I believe pornography is evil, and from what I know of Kiwi Farms, good riddance. But as Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter observed in 2014, “making an offense criminal” doesn’t simply show “how much we care about it.” Ultimately, every ban creates the possibility “that the police will go armed to enforce it.”
Don’t get squeamish, prohibitionists. Tell us what stick you have in mind. Content ban plans can’t be taken seriously until you explain what, exactly, you want the state to do to people who break your rules.”
“Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) led a bipartisan group of lawmakers—all of them from Florida—in submitting a petition to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai seeking “an investigation” into what the lawmakers call “the flood of imported seasonal and perishable agricultural products from Mexico.” They ask Tai to invoke Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose “trade remedies” that will protect American growers from the scourge of…low-priced produce.
While they don’t come out and say it directly, it’s obvious from the letter that Rubio and his colleagues are seeking tariffs on Mexican produce. Section 301 is the same mechanism the Trump administration used to impose wide-ranging tariffs on goods imported from China. It’s a law that grants the executive branch broad, unilateral power over trade.
Rubio and the other lawmakers say the Mexican government is subsidizing its domestic agricultural infrastructure as part of a scheme to undercut the prices charged by U.S. growers. “Mexico poses a direct threat to Florida’s seasonal and perishable agricultural industry,” they conclude.”
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“Anyone who has taken a basic economics class should be able to explain what’s happening there. A high level of supply tends to push prices downward. Whether grown in Mexico or Florida, it makes sense that cucumber prices would be at their lowest when there are a lot of cucumbers in the market.
But that’s not how Rubio and his colleagues see it. Instead, the petition describes this minor pricing difference as “a clear attempt to displace Florida cucumbers from the U.S. market.”
Take a moment to enjoy the fact that some of the most powerful men and women in the U.S. government are freaking out over the idea that American consumers might get to save a few cents on their next cucumber purchase. Then amuse yourself with the optics of American agricultural special interests—which are, of course, pulling Rubio’s strings here—complaining about subsidies, as if “direct government aid” doesn’t account for nearly 40 percent of American farmers’ annual income.
“These Florida politicians are following a time-honored tradition of trying to help their local constituents at the expense of Americans in other states, who benefit from low-priced fruits and vegetables regardless of where they are grown,” says Bryan Riley, director of the free trade initiative at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. “
“In 2013, Angus McCoubrey became convinced a Boston cab driver was taking a long route to run up the fare, so he paid only $5 of the $7 fare. The driver filed a complaint with a police officer, and the officer issued a citation. But McCoubrey, who doesn’t live in Boston, never received it. Earlier this year, McCoubrey was in a fender bender in Chilmark, Mass. When police ran his information, they found an outstanding warrant, not for misdemeanor taxi fare evasion but for felony tax evasion. The person who had entered the charge in the system all those years ago had dropped the “i” and left out the word “fare.” McCoubrey spent two days in jail before the issue was corrected. It turns out the original charge against him was also in error. The police officer wrote him up under a law that applies only to evading Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority fares. Prosecutors dismissed that charge.”
“partisan animosity suits the authoritarian elements on the left and right just fine. Their goal is power, and they have little patience for procedural niceties that interfere with its exercise. As history teaches, a base whipped up into fear and fury is ready to accept almost anything to ensure its own survival. Perhaps even the destruction of the institutions and ideals that make America distinctively itself.”
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“At a time of polarization, you might expect the right to react by doubling down on support for free markets and private property. Instead, concurrent with democratic socialism’s ascendance, many prominent conservatives have taken a leftward turn of their own.
In June 2019, Tucker Carlson spent five full minutes during his prime-time Fox News show praising a plan from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) to promote “economic patriotism.” The proposal, which called for “aggressive” government action to bolster domestic manufacturing and keep American companies from creating jobs abroad, “sounds like Donald Trump at his best,” Carlson enthused.
President Donald Trump exhibited a high degree of comfort wielding state power for mercantilist ends, from his imposition of tariffs to his use of subsidies and bailouts to support American companies facing competition. Now a rising cadre of nationalist conservatives (a.k.a. “natcons”) are happy to provide the intellectual ammunition for this America First agenda.
In 2019, Republican policy wonk Oren Cass appeared at the inaugural National Conservatism Conference to argue for industrial policy—a robust program of federal interventions meant to resuscitate American manufacturing. He went on to found a think tank, American Compass, that promotes such familiar policies as making corporations give board seats to labor representatives.”
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“Economics is the arena in which the left-right convergence is most obviously apparent. But there are other places in which the two movements, though superficially worlds apart, are tracking in the same disturbing direction at a deeper level.”
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“This is what feels most broken in our politics. It’s not the ways left and right are further apart than ever; it’s the ways they’re closer together, with powerful elements on each side having jettisoned the longstanding liberal ideal of respecting the rights of even those with whom you strongly disagree.
The two camps, of course, have different substantive moral visions for the society they wish to construct. But each views a broad conception of individual liberty as a barrier to achieving that vision.
Economic liberty, including international trade and private property rights, stands in the way of progressives’ desire for an egalitarian and democratic order in which no one is ever again expected to work for someone else—and in the way of natcons’ desire for a revivified American manufacturing sector in which male breadwinners can support a large family on a single income. Speech protections prevent both sides from controlling the conversation as they wish. Religious freedom is seen as either a cover for rank bigotry or a rationalization for excluding God from the public square. And liberal toleration, with its norms of fair play and civility, is at odds with the reigning conception of politics as total war.”
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“Individual liberty, equality under the law, protections against the arbitrary exercise of governmental power—these are unmistakably American values. While influential elements on both the left and the right have turned against them in recent years, most Americans are not on board with total-war politics.
Much has been made of rising affective polarization, and there is some evidence to support the concern. People have become more likely over time to say they would be displeased if they had a son or daughter who married someone from the opposite political party, for example. Yet Americans from both parties are still significantly more likely to say they would not be bothered at all. In fact, a 2020 survey commissioned by The Economist found just 16 percent of Democrats and just 13 percent of Republicans saying they would be “very upset” in that situation. Severe affective polarization remains mostly an elite phenomenon.
In a poll commissioned last year by the group More in Common, three in four respondents agreed that “the differences between Americans are not so big that we cannot come together.” Demonization of the other is a powerful political weapon, and those inclined toward authoritarianism are particularly comfortable using it. But what is sometimes called the “grand liberal bargain”—a social truce in which each side broadly agrees to respect the other’s freedom, even if it doesn’t like what the other side will do with it—is a powerful defense, and one in keeping with the natural ethos of America. It’s not too late to choose it.”