This morning, we got news of yet another ICE murder of an observer in Minneapolis. I already covered the completely unjustified shooting of Renee Good. Now we have another man shot to death by federal agents.

We only have some of the recordings of this so far, but here’s what I’ve been able to piece together. The man was standing, holding his phone, recording federal immigration agents, when he is approached by them. And they start swarming him, about six guys trying to tackle him down to the ground. One of the agents shoots him, then another shoots him. And here’s the worst thing. As he’s lying on the pavement motionless, they stand back and fire more shots into his body. That’s what looks to me like—it’s just an execution.

Donate with ActBlue

The federal government claims the victim was carrying a gun. From the video, it is extremely clear that when they approach him, he is holding a phone, not a gun. We only have their say-so that he was armed, and look, ICE, Border Patrol—this administration has a long pattern of lying through their teeth. So I’ll believe them when I get some independent confirmation.

We’ve seen multiple stories recently about people filming ICE agents being told to stop—but this is something people absolutely have a right to do. And after the shooting of Renee Good, they are told, “Haven’t you learned anything from the past few days.” These are people who are recording from 30 feet away, and ICE agents are walking to come up to them, so they’re not interfering or impeding. ICE and Border Patrol have just been itching to use extreme and deadly force against observers. And now they’ve done it—again.

Why are these observers there? You’ve probably seen a lot of stories recently about the brutal and abusive tactics of ICE agents—and if you haven’t, my brother, you need to turn off Fox News or Newsmax and broaden your media diet. This is stuff like rounding up five-year-olds, or breaking down the door and dragging an old man in his underwear out into the freezing temperatures—and it turns out he’s a U.S. citizen.

But the only reason we know about this stuff is because people have been filming it. That’s why the observers are there. So these shootings amount to: “If you try to let the world know what we’re doing, we’ll kill you.” That’s the approach of secret police in a dictatorship.

You’re gonna find people trying to spin this to make it sound OK. And what I want you to notice is that they keep trying to tell you that your government has the right to use extreme and deadly force against you without warning, at a moment’s notice, the second you stick a single toe out of line. That’s not how things work in a free society. That’s how things work in a police state.

As a veteran of the Tea Party movement, what I find saddest and most shocking about this is how many people seem to have gone from “don’t tread on me” to “obey or die.”

But all of this comes just days after the House of Representatives passed a bill approving more funding for the Department of Homeland Security and ICE. Seven Democrats voted for that funding, and the Democratic leadership in the House refused to punish anyone who voted for it.

We don’t just need a Democrat to represent our district in Congress. We need a Democrat with principles and guts, somebody who recognizes the fight we’re in and won’t flinch from it. Because that’s not the Democratic Party establishment right now.

Now, if I were in Congress—if you vote for me—what do I think we should do?

I think we need to wake up and realize that “Abolish ICE” is now the moderate position. Of course we should abolish ICE. We should zero out their funding and shut the whole agency down.

We have a pattern. They’re supposed to arrest “criminal illegal aliens,” the “worst of the worst.” But they have repeatedly arrested and beaten US citizens. Most of the immigrants they round up and put in camps have no criminal records. A lot of the people they grabbed were going through the system, doing all the paperwork, and they found some excuse to throw them in jail, anyway.

Their tactics are brutal and inhumane and just plain illegal. We just found out there is a secret memo circulating at ICE saying it’s OK to break into houses without a warrant, which is a total violation of the Fourth Amendment. This is literally one of the things our Founders fought a revolution to stop.

When you have an abuse of power so widespread, so systematic, so thoroughly a part of the organization—you can’t reform it away. You have to shut down the whole thing.

It’s not just ICE. We need to get rid of the Department of Homeland Security, because creating that department was the big mistake that got us here. The DHS is not very old, we didn’t always have it. It was created in a moment of panic after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and that’s the problem. What “homeland security” did was, it took a bunch of stuff that wasn’t really about terrorism and put it under agency that treated it like it’s terrorism.

So flash forward 20 years, and no wonder they’re acting as if the busboy at El Ranchero is Osama Bin Laden, and they’re rolling out into the streets of Minneapolis in full battle rattle like it’s Fallujah in Iraq.

The mistakes of the War on Terror are coming home, like some kind of curse, and we’re now occupying our own cities and treating our own citizens like they’re the enemy.

We can get rid of ICE, we can get rid of the Department of Homeland Security. It would just reset us to 2002. Anything we actually need these agencies to do, they can be done the way they were before. What we can’t afford is to have lawless out-of-control goon squads going out across the country to kill people. And we can’t afford to have an agency created to fight terrorism that now thinks everything we citizens do in our own damn country is terrorism.

This was a big mistake we made 20 years ago, and we’re paying a big price for it, in our freedoms and now in lives. It is absolutely urgent to fix that mistake.

Dismantle the Department of Homeland Security, move its legitimate functions back to other agencies, and make sure we never build another rotten agency like this again.

Abolish ICE. This is the sane, sensible, moderate position. It’s the pro-American, pro-Constitution position.

So let’s just do it. That’s what I’m asking you to vote for.

Support my campaign so we can take this fight to the US Congress!

Donate with ActBlue

Save the credit card processing fees and mail a check to Tracinski for Congress, PO Box 6997, Charlottesville, VA 22906.

Donors must be US citizens and spending their own money. Campaign finance laws limit donations to $3500 per person per election.

I have a new working paper with Bart Wilson titled: “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car: Moral Intuition for Intellectual Property.” 

The title of this post, “everyone take copies,” comes from a conversation between the human subjects in an experiment in our lab, on which the paper is based. The experiment was studying how and when people take resources from one another. 

The people in the game each control a round avatar in a virtual environment, as you can see in this screenshot below. 

In the experiment, “seeds” represent a rivalrous resource, meaning multiple people can’t possess and use them at once. In other words, they operate like most physical goods. If the Almond colored player in the picture takes a seed from the Blue player, then Blue will be deprived of the seed, in the same way that if someone’s car is stolen, they don’t have it anymore. 

Thus, it is unsurprising that the players called the taking of seeds “stealing,” as you can see from the speech bubble in the picture. This result was expected, and it is in line with Bart Wilson’s previous work on the origins of physical property.

Our research question considers whether similar claims will emerge after the taking of non-rivalrous goods that we call “discs.” Non-rivalrous goods are goods that can be used by multiple people without any loss to the other users. If participants exercise the ability to take a disc, then the original disc holder still has a disc and can still consume the full value of it. 

The human subjects are not forced to interact via the chat function, but they often choose to form a community and use language to try to obtain the available surplus in the environment. The following quote from our paper indicates that the subjects do not label or conceptualize the taking of digital goods (discs) as “stealing.” 

In our paper, we write:

We encourage you to read the manuscript if you are interested in the details of how we set up the environment and mechanisms of exchange. We conclude that, contrary to the desired comparison in the “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car” advertising campaign attempted by the Motion Picture Association of America in the early 2000s, people do not intuitively view piracy as a crime. 

Humans can state that digital piracy is illegal and take measures to prevent it. However, it will be difficult to cause an individual engaging in piracy to feel guilty as they do when they believe they are directly harming another human. 

This has implications for how the modern information economy will be structured. Consider the model recently labeled “the subscription economy.” Increasingly, consumers pay recurring fees for ongoing access to products/services (like Netflix, Adobe software) instead of one-time purchases. Gen Z has been complaining on TikTok that they feel trapped with so many recurring payments and lack a sense of ownership. 

In a recent interview on a talk show called The Stream, I speculated that part of the reason companies are moving to the subscription model is that they do not trust consumers with “ownership” of digital goods. People will share copies of songs and software, if given the opportunity, to the point where creators cannot monetize their work by selling the full rights to digital goods anymore. “Everyone take copies.”

A feature of our experimental design is that, when a disc was shared, even though the creator was rarely compensated directly, the attribution of who originally created the disc was secure. A disc made by the Blue player is blue, so all can see who gets credit for providing it. The reason for this design choice was to allow the Blue player to easily see their work being passed around. 

A recent development in information technology, that of large language models, means that many idea creators are not getting credit when their original work informs the answers users are getting from tools like ChatGPT. In a recent settlement, Anthropic agreed to pay for some of the written training material that went into making Claude. The way in which human creators are (or are not) compensated for providing inputs to AI models will shape the future ideas landscape. Understanding how people think about those inputs illuminates our thinking about that process. 

The post Everyone Take Copies appeared first on Econlib.

Tweet

… is from pages 178-179 of Thomas Sowell’s Compassion Versus Guilt, a 1987 collection of some of his popular essays; specifically, it’s from Sowell’s May 31st, 1985, column titled “Staff Infection”:

People in many occupations serve the public: grocers, doctors, bus-drivers, telephone repairmen. Indirectly, so do farmers, factory workers, and in fact everybody who produces a good or service that others use. But when the deep thinkers speak of going into “public service,” with that special unction in their voice, they mean becoming a bureaucrat or politician.

The vision that is unfurled to the departing graduates is one of self-sacrifice for the common good. This is contrasted with going into the grubby world of business to make money for yourself.

Why it is nobler to seek power over others rather than be a producing part of the economy is never really explained.

The post Quotation of the Day… appeared first on Cafe Hayek.

Tweet

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal warns of ill consequences to come if the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to restrict the power of the president of the executive branch to remove Federal Reserve governors. Two slices:

In 1913 Congress established the Fed to maintain a stable currency and financial system. Modeled on the quasi-private First and Second Banks of the U.S., it was structured to be insulated from political winds. Board member terms run for 14 years. The Fed draws its funding from regional reserve banks and open-market operations rather than Congressional appropriations.

Congress in 1935 removed executive-branch officials from the board and instituted removal protections for its members. The Federal Reserve Act lets a President fire governors “for cause,” though it doesn’t define the term, unlike other statutes with removal restrictions. The Federal Trade Commission Act defines “cause” as “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

The Administration says the Fed law’s broad language grants the President sweeping authority to fire board members. “Congress chose to allow removal ‘for cause,’ without specifying required causes. That gives the President discretion so long as he identifies a cause (which excludes policy disagreement),” Justice says.

Under its argument, there are no constraints in practice on a President’s removal authority. That’s because the Administration also argues that Article III courts cannot stop the President from removing Fed officers. If the President can fire Ms. Cook based on mere allegations of misconduct without judicial review, the for-cause restriction is meaningless.

…..

But regarding the Fed, America’s framers sought to prevent the nation’s currency from being manipulated by the executive because they understood the risks of political control over monetary policy. This is wisdom born out in countless examples across the world.

The Fed has made many mistakes and taken on more executive power than it should over financial regulation. Congress can address both if it wishes. But handing Presidents control over monetary policy is more power over money in one man’s hands than the framers wrote into the Constitution.

Jim Geraghty – appalled by Trump’s childish message to Norway’s Prime Minister – decries Trump tearing NATO apart “over a trinket.” Three slices:

The president’s diatribe is unhinged, false, or bonkers in at least ten ways.

One: The Norwegian government does not award the Nobel Peace Prize; the Nobel committee does; its members are appointed by the Norwegian parliament; current members of the Norwegian government or parliament are barred from serving on the committee.

…..

Three: Trump has not “stopped 8 wars plus.” Let’s give him credit for Israel and Hamas, and Israel and Iran. Everything else is an exaggeration, either about the intensity of the conflict or the U.S. role in ameliorating it. Trump’s persistent boast that he ended the shooting war between India and Pakistan is a serious, and entirely unnecessary, irritant to the Indian government.

…..

Nine: Trump contends, “The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.”

As many have observed, up until Trump took office, the U.S. and Denmark largely agreed on their roles protecting the island. I hate to disrupt a good controversy with facts, but the U.S. already plays a significant role in the national defense and economy of Greenland. The island is the location of the Pentagon’s northernmost installation, Pituffik Space Base (pronounced “bee-doo-FEEK”), formerly known as Thule Air Base.

Ten: Trump sounds like an angry toddler throwing a tantrum; in his recent interview with the New York Times, Trump emphasized that his priority is to own Greenland because of his feelings, and ownership is “what I feel is psychologically needed for success.”

Here are some other National Review staffers on “Trump’s ‘manic’ Greenland pursuit”:

“If the United States genuinely believes,” Charlie [Cooke] says, “that the acquisition of Greenland is necessary for its national security — and that’s an argument that Trump has started to make in fits and starts — then it can advance that case without, for example, sending missives to the Danish authorities complaining that the president didn’t receive a Nobel Peace Prize, without randomly threatening tariffs on the United Kingdom, on France.”

“He’s unfocused, and he’s wild. I don’t know if it warrants the 25th Amendment, but we ought not to downplay how capricious and manic he seems.”

Noah [Rothman] agrees, saying, “This whole enterprise is impossibly stupid. This administration privileges and is very sensitive toward the intangible aspects of statecraft. They are really obsessed with honor and respect and prestige, and they are very sensitive to violations perceived or otherwise of that. But totally dismissive of any other country that might privilege the same intangibles as they do, and they mete out embarrassment after embarrassment, provocation after provocation, and expect no response.”

George Will, of course, offers wise thoughts on Trump’s quest for Greenland. A slice:

Trying to imagine the unimaginable is a useful mental calisthenic. So, suppose Vladimir Putin faced this choice: He could assuage his fury about the Soviet Union’s disintegration by conquering Ukraine. Or he could destroy the cause of that collapse — NATO. Now, imagine that he might not need to choose, because of the American president’s obsession with seizing a possession of Denmark.

Averse to using a scalpel when there is a machete at hand, the president threatens Greenland with military conquest if Denmark will not sell the island. Were Congress to refuse funds for this purchase, he would declare a national emergency and “repurpose” money appropriated for other uses.

Using chest-thumping mob-speak, he says, “If we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.” If NATO, history’s most successful collective security instrument, perishes, he might consider that a bonus.

And here’s Holman Jenkins on the Greenland calamity. A slice:

If Donald Trump’s foolishness over Greenland gets out of hand, recall the U.S. Senate has ratified numerous treaties codifying U.S. duties under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which under the U.S. Constitution are now the “supreme law of the land.” NATO’s Article 1, for instance, makes it illegal for the U.S. to exercise the “threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.”

The U.N. Charter, adopted by the Senate 89-2 in 1945, giving it also the force of U.S. law, bans the U.S. from issuing the “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity” of a nonoffending member state. In 2023, for the benefit of any adjudicating judge, Congress further expressed its will by preventing a president from withdrawing from NATO without a two-thirds Senate vote.

This isn’t international law, MAGA types, it’s U.S. law. A Trump order to occupy an otherwise peaceful and unthreatened Greenland would likely be illegal six ways from Sunday. The U.S. military wouldn’t obey it. The Supreme Court would enjoin it.Congress might promptly remove such a president through impeachment.

These realities, widely unmentioned in the current moment, probably aren’t lost on Mr. Trump. The whole kerfuffle fits better under the heading: Why is he throwing his presidency away? Look at his tariff and immigration overkill, his sagging approval ratings, likely GOP defeat in the House midterms, his probable impeachment soon after.

Jack Nicastro is correct: “Trump threatens NATO members with tariffs paid almost entirely by Americans.”

Also correct is Eric Boehm: “America’s large and growing national debt is not just a budgetary liability, but increasingly a geopolitical one too.”

My Mercatus Center colleague Alden Abbott is no fan of the Department of Justice’s antitrust prosecution of Visa. A slice:

The government isn’t alleging collusion, price-fixing, or output restrictions. Instead, it takes aim at Visa’s use of volume discounts and contractual incentives that encourage banks to route debit transactions over its network—standard tools firms use to win business.

The DOJ recasts these arrangements as “de facto exclusivity,” claiming they prevent rivals from reaching efficient scale. But that framing stretches antitrust law past its limits, treating price competition and customer loyalty as exclusionary conduct and risking the mistake of condemning success in the market rather than harm to competition.

Yuval Levin reflects on America’s founding. A slice:

The founding generation of our nation was trying to do something we are also trying to do: enable a vast, diverse, complicated society full of dynamic, crazy, freedom-loving people to live together and address common problems while taking the truths about the human condition seriously. In some respects, they did it better than we could. George Washington was a better natural leader than any of us. James Madison thought more deeply about institutional design than any of us. We should preserve and reinforce what they built.

In other respects, they failed terribly to live up to their own standards and to ours. Washington and Madison both held other human beings in bondage. We should not excuse that. We should learn from it about the human temptation to avert our eyes from plain injustice—a temptation to which we are far from immune today.

A mature patriotism can hold these truths together. The founders were neither superhuman heroes nor subhuman villains. They were human beings confronting human problems, and they left us institutions and lessons of incalculable value. We can be grateful, clear-eyed, and reverent all at once—rooted in the knowledge that we did not earn the gift they bequeathed to us, but confident that we can earn it now by handing it down improved to our children.

The post Some Links appeared first on Cafe Hayek.