I had the privilege of first meeting Walter when I was a 23-year-old graduate student in economics at GMU. I was his research assistant for one academic year, then a student in his graduate-level courses in labor economics. Later, Walter was a faculty member on my Ph.D. dissertation committee, and after graduate school, he was a reference for jobs. Walter was generous with his time—I spent many hours with him discussing my dissertation, economics, and life.

Anyone who heard Walter speak knows that he was quick with a joke and could communicate important economic concepts to his students and to the public using simple, often humorous, examples, while never losing sight of the key role of individual rights in a free society. He inspired me and many others. A reoccurring subject throughout his career, which spanned a half-century, was race in America. Since it is particularly relevant to current discourse, I want to summarize Walter’s work in this area using his words whenever possible.

On Racism

Walter did not deny that some people are racist or that people discriminate based on race, but his central argument was that racial discrimination was not the primary determinant of problems confronting many Black people today:

There is discrimination of all sorts, and that includes racial discrimination. Thus, it’s somewhat foolhardy to debate the existence of racial discrimination yesteryear or today. From a policy point of view, a far more useful question to ask is: How much of the plight of many blacks can be explained by current racial discrimination?

According to Walter, the answer is very little: “At the root of most of the problems black people face is the breakdown of the family structure” and the “rotten public schools” that issue “fraudulent diplomas” across America:

Let’s look at whether black fatherless homes are a result of a “legacy of slavery” and racial discrimination. In the late 1800s, depending on the city, 70 percent to 80 percent of black households were two-parent.

As late as 1950, only 18 percent of black households were single parent [today it is more than 70 percent]. From 1890 to 1940, a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults. In 1938, black illegitimacy was about 11 percent instead of today’s 75 percent. In 1925, 85 percent of black households in New York City were two-parent. [A study of family structure in 1880 Philadelphia found that 75 percent of black families were two-parent, with only small differences between racial groups.] Today, the black family is a mere shadow of its past. . . .

At many predominantly black schools, chaos is the order of the day. There is a high rate of assaults on students and teachers. Youngsters who are hostile to the educational process are permitted to make education impossible for those who are prepared to learn. As a result, overall black educational achievement is a disaster.

“During slavery and as late as 1920,” Walter noted, “a black teenage girl raising a child without a man present was a rarity. . . . The absence of a father in the home predisposes children, especially boys, to academic failure, criminal behavior, and economic hardship, not to mention an intergenerational repeating of handicaps.”

In a 2011 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Walter said, “Today I doubt you could find any significant problem that blacks face that is caused by racial discrimination. The 70 percent illegitimacy rate is a devastating problem, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with racism. The fact that in some areas black people are huddled in their homes at night, sometimes serving meals on the floor so they don’t get hit by a stray bullet—that’s not because the Klan is riding through the neighborhood.”

Elsewhere, Walter wrote, “Political hustlers like to blame poverty and racism while ignoring the fact that poverty and racism were much greater yesteryear but there was not nearly the same amount of chaos.” And in a separate piece he said, “If today’s weak family structure is a legacy of slavery, then the people who make such a claim must tell us how it . . . managed to skip nearly five generations to have an effect.”

It is not the legacy of slavery, racial discrimination, or poverty that account for the disintegration of Black families and rotten schools, Walter maintained. Rather, it is government programs, pushed by liberal elites, that devastate Black communities, subsidize irresponsible behavior, and block community efforts to fix problems without waiting for government.

Regarding policing, a topic of much debate today, Walter said that people should not “excuse bad behavior by some police officers.” But based on statistics, people concerned about Black deaths should focus more on Black-on-Black violence and other criminal behavior in troubled cities than on shootings by police. Walter did note, however, the low homicide clearance rate by the Chicago Police Department (less than 15 percent) and by police departments in other major cities. (For more on policing reform, see my commentary “What the George Floyd Protesters Should Demand: Five Top Reforms.”)

On Race Hustlers, Poverty Pimps, and the Victimization Lobby

Walter reserved some of his harshest criticism for Black and white elites who push for government programs in the name of rescuing Black people from their plight:

Intellectuals and political hustlers who blame the plight of so many blacks on poverty, racial discrimination, and the “legacy of slavery” are complicit in the socioeconomic and moral decay. Black people must ignore the liberal agenda that suggests that we must await government money before measures can be taken to improve the tragic living conditions in so many of our urban communities. Black and white intellectuals and politicians suggesting that black people await government solutions wouldn’t begin to live in the same high-crime, dangerous communities and send their children to the dangerous schools that so many black children attend.

As a young man, Walter read the words of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and other Black civil rights leaders of the time, but Malcolm gained his favor: “I was more sympathetic to Malcolm X than Martin Luther King because Malcolm X was more of a radical who was willing to confront discrimination in ways that I thought it should be confronted, including perhaps the use of violence,” Walter told the Wall Street Journal in 2011.

One passage by Malcolm X, in particular, resonated with Walter as “an important lesson,” so he quoted it at length in a 2019 commentary titled “The Worst Enemy of Black People.” Malcolm said,

The worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked, or deceived by the white liberal, then Negros would get together and solve our own problems. I only cite these things to show you that in America, the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems. Our problems will never be solved by the white man.

Walter maintained throughout his career, as he did here in a 2019 commentary, that,

Black people could benefit from an honest examination of the bill of goods they’ve been sold. Such an examination would not come from black politicians, civil rights leaders, or the black and white liberal elite. Those people have benefited politically and financially from keeping black Americans in a constant state of grievance based on alleged racial discrimination. The long-term solution for the problems that many black Americans face begins with an absolute rejection of the self-serving agenda of [race] hustlers and poverty pimps.

Walter singled out Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Benjamin Hooks, and others in the civil rights movement as race hustlers who make a living on the grievances of Black Americans and who advocate for government programs that make problems worse and make upward mobility less likely.

Discussing Intellectuals and Race, a 2013 book by Thomas Sowell, the noted economist and historian based at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Walter wrote, “black people waged a successful civil rights struggle against gross discrimination. It’s white and black liberals, intellectuals, academics, and race hustlers who have created our greatest hurdle [today].” “Politics and white liberals will not solve these and other problems,” Walter concluded.

Politics Is Not the Solution to Problems Facing Many Blacks

A consistent theme in Walter’s writings is that political power is not the solution for the problems facing many Black people:

My argument has always been that the political arena is largely irrelevant to the interests of ordinary black people. . . . Much of the 1960s and ’70s civil rights rhetoric was that black political power was necessary for economic power. But the nation’s most troublesome and dangerous cities, which are also cities with low-performing and unsafe schools and poor-quality city services, have been run by Democrats for nearly a half-century—with blacks having significant political power, having been mayors, city councilors, and other top officials, such as superintendents of schools and chiefs of police. . . .

Whoever is the president has little or no impact on the living conditions of ordinary black people, even when that president is a black person, as the Obama presidency has demonstrated. The overall welfare of black people requires attention to devastating problems that can be solved only at the family and community levels.

Mountains of evidence demonstrates that outcomes are not favorable for children raised in female-headed households. Criminal behavior is greater, and academic achievement is much less for such children. This is a devastating problem, but it is beyond the reach of a president or any other politician to solve. If there is a solution, it will come from churches and local community organizations.

In a 2018 commentary titled “Enough’s Enough: Blacks Must Seize Control of Own Lives,” Walter wrote,

More money from taxpayers could not fix the problems of these communities [communities with high crime rates and failing schools]. Over the past 50 years, more than $16 trillion has been spent on poverty programs. The majority of those programs have simply made poverty more comfortable by giving poor people more food, health care, housing, etc. What’s needed most is to get poor people to change their behavior.

Less than a month before he died, Walter emphasized that “the solution to most of the major problems that confront black people will not be found in the political arena or by electing more blacks to high office.” Instead, the solutions are to be found in free-market capitalism, civil society institutions, and the transformation of black subculture. Government programs that are intended to help solve problems confronting many Black people have instead made problems worse: “If we wait for Washington to solve our problems,” Walter said, “we’ll be waiting for a long time.”

“Intentions Are Irrelevant”: The Effect of Government Programs on Blacks

When Walter entered graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the mid-1960s, UCLA had one of the top economics programs in the world. At the time, Walter’s political philosophy was “progressive.” For example, he believed that legally mandated higher minimum wages unquestionably helped poor people. He recounted in 2011 that he “probably became a libertarian through exposure to tough-minded professors”—Armen Alchian, James Buchanan, Milton Friedman, among others—“who encouraged me to think with my brain instead of my heart. I learned that you have to evaluate the effects of public policy as opposed to intentions. . . . Sometimes I sarcastically, perhaps cynically, say that I’m glad that I received virtually all of my education before it became fashionable for white people to like black people. By that I mean that I encountered back then a more honest assessment of my strengths and weaknesses. Professors didn’t hesitate to criticize me—sometimes to the point of saying, ‘That’s nonsense.’” (Discover here on EconTalk how Seagram’s Gin was responsible for Walter attending UCLA.)

After earning his PhD in 1972, Walter applied “UCLA price-theory” analysis to government programs that were enacted to purportedly counter racism and improve the well-being of Black people. Walter concluded that these programs, although intended to help, have the effect of making a large segment of the Black population worse off. In his classic 1982 book The State Against Blacks, Walter argued that laws regulating economic activity among consenting adults, especially labor laws, are much larger impediments to upward mobility among Black Americans than is racial discrimination. His favorite targets for condemnation were public schools, the minimum wage, welfare, rent controls, and affirmative action.

On government schools Walter said, “The Ku Klux Klan couldn’t sabotage chances for black academic excellence more effectively than the public school system in most cities.”

On the minimum wage, Walter argued, consistent with economic theory and overwhelming empirical evidence, that increasing the legally mandated minimum wage causes unemployment among the least-skilled workers, who are often Black adults and Black teenagers because of the poor quality of public schools. “The unemployment effects of the minimum-wage law are felt disproportionately by nonwhites,” Walter wrote in an article titled “Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly.” High rates of unemployment in legal markets also push many blacks into illegal underground markets.

In addition to discrimination against the employment of low-skilled workers, many of whom are Blacks, the minimum wage, Walter noted, “denies them the chance of sharpening their skills and ultimately earning higher wages. The most effective form of training for most of us is on-the-job training.” Mandated minimum wages eliminate the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, depriving the least advantaged in society from the pursuit of happiness.

Walter also emphasized that racists around the world have used minimum wage laws to harm blacks, for example: “Why would South Africa’s racist unions support minimum wages for blacks? The answer is easy. Mandated wages are one of the most effective means of pricing one’s competition out of the market, and historically, mandated wages have been one of the most effective tools in the arsenal of racists everywhere.” The stated intent of minimum wage laws in the United States is not overt racism, of course, but the effect of the laws in the United States is the same—higher Black unemployment.

Regarding welfare, Walter said, “The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn’t do, what Jim Crow couldn’t do, what the harshest racism couldn’t do. And that is to destroy the black family.” Subsidizing unwed pregnancy and other irresponsible behavior through various government assistance programs has destroyed the human spirit, crushed the work ethic, and disintegrated black families over many generations. (Walter called this “spiritual poverty.”) The government has become the father in Black families, making Black males dispensable. As noted by Thomas Sowell, welfare has gone from an “emergency rescue to a way of life.” (In a remembrance article, Sowell described Walter as “my best friend for half a century. There was no one I trusted more or whose integrity I respected more.”)

Regarding rent controls, Walter criticized it in memorable fashion: “[S]hort of aerial saturation bombing, rent control might be one of the most effective means of destroying a city.” Rent controls that keep rents below market rates create an excess demand for rental units, also called a shortage. The shortage becomes worse over time as demand for rental units increases. Initially, in response to binding rent controls, landlords reduce maintenance of their buildings to reduce their costs, causing a prolonged deterioration of the housing stock. Long term, landlords convert apartments to condos to escape the rent controls or abandon the buildings altogether, further shrinking the stock of rentals. In many American urban areas, some predominately Black, it is common to see block after block of abandoned, boarded up buildings, victims of rent control and magnets for crime and fires.

Walter also opposed government affirmative action programs [government-mandated racial preferences and quotas for hiring and/or admissions], writing in 1989 that “official policy calling for unequal treatment by race is morally offensive whether it is applied to favor blacks or applied to favor whites.” In other words, an historical inequity is not remedied by repeating that inequity. Racial preferences by governments are always immoral regardless of the intent or the beneficiary.

Rather than create more government programs with ever-expanding budgets that produce counterproductive results, a better approach relies on free-market capitalism, civil society institutions, and the transformation of black subculture.

The Path to Sustained Upward Mobility for Black Americans

Poverty has been the normal state of affairs for people during most of man’s time on earth. Only with the emergence of capitalism has ordinary people achieved high standards of living that was once attained only by kings and dictators through the plunder of wealth. Therefore, free-market capitalism rooted in constitutionally limited government and individual rights, and the civil society institutions that reinforce it, are key to sustained upward mobility for Black Americans, and for people of every race. Walter also advocated for cultural transformation.

Free markets, among other things:

• Allow individuals to pursue their dreams unencumbered by burdensome government restrictions such as occupational licenses, minimum wages, and confiscatory taxation;
• Allow all people to compete at whatever wage they can command in the market through voluntary negotiation;
• Allow individuals to acquire the on-the-job training and life skills essential for upward mobility; first as a teenager and later as an adult moving up the economic ladder;
• Encourage people to be alert to entrepreneurial opportunities, perhaps even to start a business themselves, and encourage people to invest in themselves through quality education;
• Allow rivalrous competition between education entrepreneurs to transform dangerous, rotten schools into low-cost, high-quality learning environments;
• Encourage individual responsibility and individual accountability by ending government programs that subsidize destructive, irresponsible behavior through welfare and other programs that erode civil society institutions;
• Allow families, community organizations, churches, and other groups in civil society to flourish, providing targeted assistance to people, which is customized to individual needs and voluntarily funded, to help them get back on their feet.

Free-market capitalism has the added benefit of imposing financial penalties on people who discriminate against Blacks, or any race, based on skin color rather than productivity or the ability to perform the job. Consider one of Walter’s favorite classroom thought experiments: Imagine if former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, a white racist, owned an NBA basketball team and refused to hire any Black basketball players. Not only would he win few games, but as a result, ticket sales would plummet, and television revenues would tumble. The value of the team would not be maximized, making it an attractive takeover target.

Competitive markets impose costs on people who exercise their discriminatory racial preferences that are unrelated to productivity. The cost is higher in more competitive markets and lower in less competitive markets, for example, heavily regulated or taxed markets. Competitive markets, in other words, are allies of black people.

Finally, Walter sought a transformation of Black subculture such that both Blacks and whites condemn dangerous, antisocial behavior:

The fact that black parents, teachers, and civil rights organizations tolerate and make excuses for the despicable and destructive behavior of so many young blacks is a gross betrayal of the memory, struggle, sacrifice, sweat, tears, and blood of our ancestors.

The sorry and tragic state of black education is not going to be turned around until there’s a change in what’s acceptable and unacceptable behavior by young people. That change could come only from within the black community.

In one of his final columns, Walter scolded whites and Blacks:

Many black problems are exacerbated by guilt-ridden white people. Often, they accept behavior and standards from black people that they would not begin to accept from white people. In that sense, white liberal guilt is a form of disrespect in their relationships with black Americans. By the same token, black people should stop exploiting the guilt of whites.

Walter favored “shaming self-destructive behavior” and encouraging “constructive behavior,” which he role modeled throughout his life.

A Final Remembrance

The morning that James M. Buchanan, professor of economics at GMU, was notified that he had won the 1986 Nobel Prize in economics I was in Buchanan’s office when Walter came in with an expensive bottle of champagne. In classic Walter Williams style he said, “Congratulations, Jim. I always knew you’d make something out of yourself.” They laughed, talked for a while, and then Walter left to teach a class on microeconomics to undergraduate students.

Walter loved to teach, and he especially loved to teach economic principles in auditorium-size classrooms filled with a 100 or more students. He was a great communicator, debunking myths, challenging orthodoxies, and applying price theory to every issue imaginable while demonstrating the moral superiority of individual rights, free markets, and constitutionally limited government.

I am reminded of the quote attributed to Martin Luther, “Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. So help me God.” That was Walter’s life.

Selected Books on Race and Economics by Walter E. Williams

The State Against Blacks (New Press, 1982); Walter’s first book

South Africa’s War Against Capitalism (Praeger, 1989)

Race & Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination? (Hoover Institution Press, 2011)

And a book review written by Walter E. Williams of The Origins and Demise of South African Apartheid: A Public Choice Analysis (The Independent Review, Summer 1999). Walter was a member of the Board of Advisors of the Independent Institute.

Walter E. Williams’s Autobiography

Up From the Projects (2010)

PBS documentary on the life and career of Walter E. Williams

Walter Williams: Suffer No Fools (2014)

Obituaries of Walter E. Williams

New York Times

Washington Post

The post Walter E. Williams on Race in America: A Tribute by His Former Student appeared first on The Beacon.

President Donald Trump expressed this view when he tweeted to four Democratic members of Congress “who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe” that they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

The “fix your own government” argument has always struck me as especially naive and morally reprehensible.

In a recent Cato Institute online book forum, Ilya Somin, a professor of law at George Mason University, did a masterful job at countering the “fix your own government” argument. Professor Somin is the author of the 2020 book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom (Oxford University Press), which was the subject of the forum.

Somin provided four arguments against the “fix your own government” position:

1. It would invalidate the history of the United States, Canada, and other countries founded by immigrants, or the descendants of immigrants, who left their home country rather than trying to fix its problems.
2. It suggests that people are somehow owned by their home governments or home societies and have an unchosen duty to stay with them, which is a burden contrary to notions of human freedom generally (and, I would add, contrary to natural law).
3. It assumes that these immigrants had the power to fix their home governments, which is rarely true especially of migrant groups who typically are not politically well-connected or wield great political power.
4. It ignores the truth that migration can often pressure home governments to enact beneficial reforms because migration drains tax revenue and talent; sparks communication of liberalizing ideas back home; and generates remittances to family and friends in the home country that can make some people less dependent on their government and more willing to speak out against it.

The goal, Somin concluded, should not be to fix particular governments, but rather to “increase the number of people who live in greater freedom, and happiness, and prosperity, and the fastest way to do that for the largest number of people is, in fact, by allowing freer migration.”

Nobody has a moral responsibility to risk their safety or their life, or the lives of their family members, by trying to reform their home country’s government. Nor should anyone be condemned to a life of poverty and despair—trapped by an accident of birth—in the slim hope that they someday would help reform or overthrow an oppressive government.

The old chestnut “living well is the best revenge” applies to many things, including escaping government oppressors through freer migration.

Watch the video below as Professor Somin presents the case against the “fix your own government” perspective (about a three-minute response to a question). His book Free to Move develops his arguments in more detail.

The post What’s Wrong With the “Fix Your Own Government” Argument Opposing Immigration? appeared first on The Beacon.

As I reported in my book on government-employee pension systems, California Dreaming: Lessons on How to Resolve America’s Public Pension Crisis, former San Francisco Police Chief Heather Fong was paid more than $528,000 in her last year as chief, but more than $303,000 of that were payouts for unused sick, vacation, and comp time before retirement, which was used to increase her lifetime pension.

When Fong left office at age 53, she received a government pension of $277,656 a year, a lot more money than she received when working ($187,875). I noted in California Dreaming that other retired law enforcement officers—for example, former Ventura County Sheriff Bob Brooks and former Merced County Sheriff Mark Pazin—are also making more money retired than when they worked. Apparently, cops don’t mind ripping off hard-working taxpayers.

One way that government employees accomplish this scam is through “pension spiking,” using “special compensation” in their final year or years of work to boost their final pay, which is used to calculate their lifetime pension benefits. The special compensation could include overtime pay, unused vacation and sick day cash outs, allowances, and bonuses. Fong claimed more than $300,000 of special compensation in her final year. Each government employee has an incentive to bump these up in the last few years of service since these are the years used to calculate their pensions. Pension spiking adds to the immoral mountain of pension debt that our children and grandchildren will have to pay. But two recent court decisions have begun scaling back pension spiking.

Former Gov. Jerry Brown (D) and the California Legislature sought to rein in pension spiking through reforms included in the 2013 California Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act (PEPRA). The Alameda County Deputy Sheriff’s Association, and other groups, filed lawsuits over PEPRA to keep certain types of compensation pensionable, such as accumulated vacation cash outs, in order to inflate their retirement pensions.

In a unanimous ruling on July 30, 2020, the California Supreme Court upheld PEPRA reforms that closed loopholes used by county workers to spike pensions. The decision is limited, however, to employees of 20 California counties that operate their own independent pension systems under the parameters of the County Employees’ Retirement Law of 1937. But the “1937 Act counties,” as they are called, are some of California’s most populous counties, including Alameda, Contra Costa, Los Angeles, Orange, Sacramento, San Diego, and San Mateo. Unfortunately, the court did not make sweeping changes to the “California Rule,” which should be abolished, as I explain in my book.

The Supreme Court ruled that the governor and state legislature did not violate contracts by enacting PEPRA to amend the law governing the 20 county pension systems, even though the reforms affect employees hired before the law went into effect on January 1, 2013.

“It would defeat this proper objective [preventing abuse of the pension system] to interpret the California Rule to require county pension plans either to maintain these loopholes for existing employees or to provide comparable new pension benefits that would perpetuate the unwarranted advantages provided by these loopholes,” Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye wrote in the court’s decision.

By calling spiking practices “unwarranted advantages” and “loopholes” that are not protected by contracts, the California Supreme Court has opened the door to future lawsuits to further restrict spiking practices. Steve Berliner, an attorney with the Los Angeles-based law firm Liebert Cassidy Whitmore, said, “There could be other circumstances where there are similar types of spiking that may be subject to further pension reform and under this ruling would appear to be something that can be changed.”

This ruling is yet another setback for pension spiking. Last year, in another unanimous decision, the California Supreme Court upheld PEPRA against a challenge by Cal Fire Local 2881, the union representing Cal Fire firefighters, who wanted to continue inflating their pensions by purchasing additional years of service credit through the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS). From 2003 until 2013, the state allowed government employees to purchase up to five years of service credit that would boost their pensions as if they had actually worked that time. The court’s 2019 ruling upheld the 2013 repeal of the “air time” benefit, which had allowed service time to be untethered from actual work time.

As California’s progressives look for ways to “Defund the Police,” a good place to start is to end pension spiking by law enforcement officers, who are paid to protect our children, not to burden them with billions of dollars of pension debt. But the long-term goals should be to eliminate all forms of pension spiking by all government employees, abolish the “California Rule,” and end California’s outdated defined-benefit government pensions and replace them with more reasonable and fiscally sound 401(k)-style defined-contribution plans. The gravy train must end.

The post California Supreme Court Curtails Pension Abuse by Law Enforcement Officers, Others appeared first on The Beacon.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE PEOPLE OF HONG KONG

From: Members of the Economic Freedom of the World Network

We the undersigned of the Economic Freedom of the World Network stand with the people of Hong Kong as their rights and freedoms are threatened by the actions of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

Hong Kong was left devastated at the end of World War II yet by granting its people the highest level of economic freedom in the world, Hong Kong rose to become one of the most prosperous places on the planet. The growth in quality of life was astonishing. In 1950, Hong Kong was about tied with the world average per capita GDP at just over $2,000 in constant 2010 US dollars; in 2018, Hong Kong’s per capita GDP reached $40,000, four times the world average. The OECD, formed in 1961, had an average per capita income more than three times that of Hong Kong then; now they are equal.

Civil and personal freedom blossomed too since Hongkongers were not dependent on government or other powerful players and were protected by a strong and impartial rule of law. Hongkongers came to enjoy the highest level of personal freedom in the world, according to the Human Freedom Index. This includes security and safety, the right to practice a religion of one’s choosing, the freedom to associate and assemble, the right to join political organizations, freedom of personal expression, freedom of the press, freedom to use the internet and freedoms to establish one’s own identity. China, unfortunately, fails to provide its citizens with many of these basic human freedoms.

Hong Kong is the world’s most entrepreneurial society, with new business formation the highest in the world, at 28.6 per thousand working age population, compared to an OECD average of 3.8 and a world average of 1.5. In the World Bank’s Human Capital Index, Hong Kong at .822 scores fourth globally, compared to an OECD average of .751 and a world average of .567.

To protect the Hong Kong miracle, when Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, China agreed that the economic and political systems in Hong Kong would not be changed for 50 years. That is, China would abide by the “one nation, two systems” principle. Over the past several years, communist China has been attempting to strip from Hong Kong its long-held status as one of the freest places in the world and undermining the “one nation, two systems.”

Most recently, China has ordered large scale arrests of dissidents and, on May 28, China’s National People’s Congress imposed a security law which attacks Hong Kong’s freedoms and Hong Kong’s Basic Law (effectively, a freedom-protecting constitution) by bypassing Hong Kong’s Legislative Council. While the CPC has yet to release details, the law is intended to allow mainland authorities to crush freedom in Hong Kong and extend absolute CPC rule.

Pro-democracy demonstrators, young and old, Chinese, and the many other groups that populate Hong Kong, are demonstrating to protect their freedoms and hopes for the future of their children and grandchildren. We stand with the people of Hong Kong as they attempt to protect their freedoms and rights and believe a strong global response is critical.

Download the Open Letter (PDF)

The post An Open Letter to the People of Hong Kong appeared first on The Beacon.

Typically, the governmental response involves creating a task force to investigate the police department at the local, state, or federal level; reports are published; news conferences held; training is modified, but the institutional structure of local policing remains intact. Another unjustified police killing occurs soon thereafter.

Demonstrators are partly to blame for the lack of reform because they often fail to advance a specific set of demands that would create long-term benefits. Slogans and symbolism are not a substitute for a concrete agenda for institutional change.

Here are five specific reforms that the George Floyd protesters should demand:

1. Allow every local neighborhood in America, if they choose, to hire a private policing agency to serve their neighborhood.

Today, it is impossible to replace your local government monopoly police force when it fails to deliver quality service. Police departments do not fear being replaced. This must change. The absence of competition and market discipline produces perverse incentives that operate against quality customer service, fiscal responsibility, and, most importantly, public safety. I have more choices for garbage collection in my neighborhood than I do for policing services.

If serious problems arise with private contractors, they can be audited, prosecuted, and replaced. Such flexibility and accountability are absent when the government effectively controls every police department. Competition helps to impose discipline and efficiency. A private policing agency subject to potential replacement will provide better service with greater care than a monopoly government police department. And, over time, the public will trust and respect it more, offering greater cooperation to solve serious crimes.

George Floyd was killed in the Powderhorn Park neighborhood of Minneapolis (about a mile from my childhood home, the Standish neighborhood). Powderhorn Park, and all neighborhoods, should have the option of hiring its own private policing agency. Many universities have their own private police including Boston University, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Southern California. These private police forces patrol both the campus and the nearby community. All neighborhoods should have the option to hire private law enforcement as an alternative to the government police.

The authority to hire also includes the authority to fire when the private policing agency provides poor service. Ironically, the Minneapolis Public Schools and the University of Minnesota exercised this authority and ended their security contracts with the Minneapolis Police Department days after George Floyd’s murder. The Powderhorn Park neighborhood should have the same ability to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with another agency. Every neighborhood in America should have the option to hire and fire its policing agency. A supermajority of the Minneapolis City Council has voiced support for dismantling the Minneapolis Police Department for a yet-unstated alternative. Minneapolis should lead the way by adopting a decentralized model of private law enforcement throughout the city.

2. Every neighborhood district should have the authority to reassign individual officers for substandard performance, whether the officer works for a government police department or for a private policing agency.

Today, it is nearly impossible to fire an abusive cop because of special union protections and other legal privileges. And often bad cops who are fired are later reinstated through arbitration. Police officers do not fear losing their job for poor performance or misconduct. This must change.

Neighborhoods should be able to reassign individual officers who patrol their community, so that residents feel safe and comfortable. The customer should be king. A private policing agency would risk losing its contract if it did not reassign or terminate troublesome officers. Government police departments today have no such fear, so at the very least, neighborhoods should have authority to reassign officers for substandard performance. An officer who knows he or she can be replaced will provide better, more respectful, service.

3. Governments must stop indemnifying police officers for nearly all civil damages arising from their conduct while on the job. And qualified immunity should be abolished in order to hold abusive officers accountable.

Throughout the United States, a public entity must typically defend an employee in a civil case over actions taken within the scope of his or her employment. This is why, almost without exception, taxpayers are on the hook for the bad behavior of police officers. This must change.

Taxpayers ought not be required to pay civil damages for police officers who commit torts while engaging in behavior clearly outside the bounds of their job descriptions. These claims, if proven true or agreed to, should be paid by the misbehaving officer from personal funds or insurance policies. Misconduct will continue as long as wrongdoers can walk away with no accountability and no personal financial cost. An efficient private insurance market has the potential to price bad cops out of a job.

If a police officer’s vehicle hits a parked car along the road while pursuing a murder suspect’s car, a city should indemnify the officer since property was damaged while the officer was properly conducting his job. But nowhere does an officer’s job description say he can sexually assault a person in police custody, yet this allegation is common, and cities routinely pay large settlements for officers accused of, or proven to have, sexually assaulted someone while on duty (see, for example, here, here, here, and here).

Every police officer should be held financially responsible for all torts arising out of conduct that is outside of their job description, inconsistent with the field manual for proper conduct, or outside clearly established moral standards. Under these conditions, civil tort proceedings should determine monetary settlements or judgments, if any, and these should be paid by offending officers, not taxpayers. Police would exercise better judgment if they knew they would be held financially responsible for their misconduct.

For this to happen, qualified immunity must be abolished. Qualified immunity is an unjust legal doctrine created by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967, which, with few exceptions, shields police officers, and other government agents, from personal financial responsibility for violating a person’s constitutional rights, for example, due to the use of excessive force or civil rights violations. Over time, qualified immunity protections have expanded to the point that it is “the cornerstone of our near zero accountability policy for law enforcement,” according to Clark Neily, vice president for criminal justice at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. It has become “a get out of accountability free card,” Neily says.

Qualified immunity must be abolished to hold abusive cops accountable in court for violating individuals constitutional rights (see here for a highly influential law review article arguing against qualified immunity by University of Chicago law professor William Baude).

Due process also requires, however, that accusers be subject to defamation liability if their claims are proven untrue. Fairness requires equal treatment: false accusations against officers should be discouraged and victims of such false accusations properly compensated.

4. All allegations of serious police misconduct should be investigated by an outside independent prosecutor who decides if criminal charges are filed.

Local prosecutors and local grand juries, with a few exceptions, typically have poor records of filing criminal charges and achieving convictions for serious police misconduct.

One solution to this problem, which is gaining acceptance, especially among law professors and activists, is to adopt a system whereby independent prosecutors investigate allegations of serious police officer misconduct. The primary benefits of this approach are that independent prosecutors have no relationship with the local law enforcement community and they are not elected by local citizens. The special prosecutor decides whether to file criminal charges. If no charges are filed, the special prosecutor’s investigative file can be reviewed by any future special prosecutor, especially if new evidence becomes available, or publicly discussed by future special prosecutors, which provides added incentive for the initial prosecutor to be thorough and unbiased.

The independent prosecutor, not the local prosecutor, also should be the trial prosecutor. An independent prosecutor would oversee investigations of serious misconduct, whether by government police or private police, and prosecute, if warranted.

5. Eliminate unnecessary laws that increase police violence.

Any interaction between the police and a citizen has the potential to escalate into violence and even death. It is important, therefore, to minimize the number of interactions by eliminating laws and regulations that needlessly create potentially aggressive points of contact between the police and citizens.

For example, Eric Garner was killed by police in New York City when the police, responding to political pressure, cracked down on the underground “black” market for cigarettes. Garner was participating in the sale of black-market cigarettes. Underground markets emerge, however, as a response to excessive government regulation and taxation. Eliminating unnecessary regulations, taxes, and other laws would free police to focus on serious crimes that threaten life and private property.

Excessive regulation and taxation of “recreational marijuana” in California has produced a thriving black market. Now there is a proposal to create a new police agency in California to crack down on this black market. The California Bureau of Cannabis Control wants to build its own 87-member police force. Unquestionably, a new police agency will lead to more violent interactions between police and citizens.

Unnecessary economic interventions by the government leads to escalating police involvement in the lives of ordinary citizens and, in turn, escalating violence in society. Protesters should work to abolish unnecessary government laws that invite police violence.

These five demands, if adopted, would go a long way toward preventing future tragedies similar to the death of George Floyd.

With a few exceptions, such as abolishing qualified immunity, America’s neighborhoods do not need more federal intervention in local policing nor more politicization of police operations, as proposed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D−Calif., and other top Democrats in the House and the Senate. Police unions, in fact, welcome this approach because they know it is a game they can win, ultimately molding rules to their favor through lobbying and campaign contributions. Police unions and police departments do not fear Nancy Pelosi. They fear community control, competition, and accountability.

Government police forces are fundamentally state-protected monopolies, staffed by government employees defended by powerful unions, managed by government employees, typically overseen by boards overwhelmingly comprised of government officials, allegations against officers are investigated by government employees, and ultimately prosecuted by government officials. What could possibly go wrong with this organizational structure? George Floyd is Exhibit A.

It is past time to establish true community policing whereby residents determine who patrols their neighborhoods, and private policing agencies and their personnel are responsible for their conduct and held accountable by customers and the law. Monopoly government policing is a flawed model, perpetuated over time through increased government coercion, that produces unwarranted death and destruction.

*****

Many of the themes mentioned above are discussed in more detail in my commentaries on policing:

• “Lessons from Eric Garner’s Death and Cigarette Taxes,” by Lawrence J. McQuillan (Washington Times)
• “Taking the Law Into Their Own Hands, In A Good Way,” by Lawrence J. McQuillan and Nathaniel J. Bennett (Washington Times)
• “Bureaucrats Or Citizens: Who Should Control the Police?” by Lawrence J. McQuillan and Kelly R. Lester (The Daily Caller)
• “Rise of Private Security is Citizen Response to Declining Police Service,” by Lawrence J. McQuillan and Adriana N. Vazquez (East Bay Times, Oakland, CA)
  

Additional resources on private law enforcement by Independent Institute scholars:

• To Serve and Protect: Privatization and Community in Criminal Justice, by Bruce L. Benson
• The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society, edited by David T. Beito, Peter Gordon, and Alexander T. Tabarrok
• Privatization in Criminal Justice, by Bruce L. Benson
• Private Policing in San Francisco, by Edward P. Stringham
• Crime Control Through Private Enterprise, by Bruce L. Benson (The Independent Review)
• The Benefits of Privatized Crime Control, by Bruce L. Benson
• The Countervailing Trend to FBI Failure: A Return to Privatized Police Services, by Bruce L. Benson
• Why Crime Declines, by Bruce L. Benson
• Police Services: The Private Challenge, by Erwin Blackstone and Simon D. Hakim

Other material on the militarization of the police:

• The Militarization of U.S. Domestic Policing, by Christopher J. Coyne, Abigail R. Hall (The Independent Review)
• Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, by Radley Balko, Book Review by Anthony Gregory (The Independent Review)
• Why the Disadvantaged Bear the Cost of Police Militarization, by Abigail R. Hall
• Trading Places: Swapping the Roles of Police and Military Is Bad for the Republic, by Ivan Eland
• SWAT Team Raids: Overkill Fit Only for a Police State, by Robert Higgs
• From Welfare State to Police State, by Stephen Baskerville (The Independent Review)
• Police Misconduct and Public Accountability, by Wendy McElroy

The post What the George Floyd Protesters Should Demand: Five Top Reforms appeared first on The Beacon.

Here’s what the architect came back with:

• A four-story building
• 10-by-12-foot units (about half the size required by the existing building code)
• Microwave in each unit
• Sink in each unit
• Toilet in each unit (partitioned, but not separated)
• Communal showers at the end of each hall

Remarkably, San Diego waived its building code, and the building was built for less than $15,000 per unit, allowing people to rent each room for $50 per week. The building was immediately filled with grateful occupants.

Mortenson conducted his experiment in the late-1980s. Today, the inflation-adjusted costs would be about $34,000 per unit to build and $110 per week to rent ($440 per month), still a bargain. The cost to build one apartment unit to code in San Diego County ranges from $192,000 to $375,000, according to an analysis by Xpera Group. The average monthly rent in San Diego for a one-bedroom apartment is $1,808, according to RentJungle.com.

Mortenson showed that it is possible to build affordable, yet profitable, SROs if the government gets out of the way. Government is the root cause of unaffordable housing in California, and government impediments have dramatically increased since the late-1980s (for more on government barriers to housing development in addition to building codes, such as impact fees, permits, environmental reviews, zoning, and other land-use restrictions, see How to Restore the California Dream: Removing Obstacles to Fast and Affordable Housing Development).

The San Diego experiment was discussed in the book The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America by Philip K. Howard, who wrote that building codes “dictate minimum room dimensions, require that bathrooms and kitchens be separate from rooms for every other use, and mandate hundreds of other details. Good ideas and technological advances fill every page of the code book. Who can object to any of this? No one, provided society can afford it.” Low-income people, however, cannot afford it, resulting in more homelessness as building codes make it impossible to build inexpensive housing in California.

Building codes have eradicated low-cost housing for decades. Sold by politicians as “getting rid of substandard housing” and “improving the lives of poor people,” William Tucker explains in Housing America: Building Out of a Crisis, “buildings are condemned as ‘firetraps,’ for not having adequate ventilation, not providing kitchen or bathroom facilities, and for not offering people ‘a decent place to live.’” Too often, the streets become the next home for people forced out of low-cost housing by burdensome, idealized codes.

Politicians and bureaucrats argue that “it’s in the best interests of poor people” to have their apartments “upgraded to code” lest they live in “crowded unsanitary substandard deathtraps.” The problem, of course, is that every so-called “improvement” will price many people out of a home, pushing some to the street. Howard notes that “the virtual extinction of single-room-occupancy buildings illustrates the side effects of this drive toward mandated perfection.”

In addition to building codes, some cities have eliminated SROs using density limits, occupancy restrictions, or “urban renewal” projects that raze entire neighborhoods, often targeting minority communities. (Walter Thompson wrote an excellent historical series on the disgraceful Fillmore project in San Francisco: “How Urban Renewal Destroyed the Fillmore in Order to Save It” and “How Urban Renewal Tried to Rebuild the Fillmore.”)

Philip K. Howard reminds us that,

Real people tend to have their own way of doing things—a little borrowed, a little invented, and so forth. Law, trying to make sure nothing ever goes wrong, doesn’t respect the idiosyncrasy of human accomplishment. It sets forth the approved methods, in black and white, and that’s that. When law notices people doing it differently, its giant heel reflexively comes down.

Inexpensive housing would be built in California if government allowed it. Instead, streets teem with 151,000 homeless people, a human and moral tragedy caused, in part, by government barriers to housing development in California.

The post California Would Have Low-Cost Housing If Government Allowed It: The Mortenson Experiment appeared first on The Beacon.

The People of the State of California hereby find and declare the following:

(a) Whereas, Californians are suffering from an unprecedented housing affordability crisis caused by state and local government regulations, fees, mandates, and prohibitions that have overly restricted housing supplies and increased prices to record levels; and

(b) Whereas, California needs about 4 million additional housing units merely to stabilize prices given current conditions; and

(c) Whereas, California issued about 80,000 residential building permits annually during the past 10 years; and

(d) Whereas, 50 years to stabilize housing prices is too long, and by then, California will likely need millions more housing units; therefore, be it

Resolved that the People of the State of California hereby create the following constitutional right to build residential housing, known and cited as the “Affordable Housing Amendment,” to address the housing affordability crisis:

An individual or private entity has a right to build, on privately owned land, residential housing that complies with applicable fire codes and which does not violate the terms of an agreement covering the property arising from a private homeowner’s association or a private neighborhood/community association.

At least six months before the start of construction, the builder(s) must publish a “Plan to Build,” defined as a public notice along with contact information and blueprints of the project posted on the appropriate city-council website or county-board website. This begins a six-month period from the date of publication during which any member of the public may negotiate with the builder(s), if each party chooses, voluntary modifications or limits to the project.

Builders must provide any necessary private roadways, roadway repairs, and/or utility connections. These costs cannot be offloaded onto third-party residents.

The environment is important to Californians; therefore, builders must remedy any actual and meaningful environmental damage (tort) directly caused by the builder(s) during construction of the residential housing project, but environmental review(s) cannot be used to delay or halt a residential housing project.

Purposes and Intent of the Affordable Housing Amendment

(a) Create a constitutional right to build residential housing that would encourage rapid housing development, while also favoring local decision making

(b) Encourage the formation of private associations to address negative externalities or to pay for commonly held assets

(c) Require that changes to proposed projects be the result of voluntary negotiations, during a limited time period, among builders and the public (the sole exception is applicable fire codes)

(d) Hold builders responsible for any actual and meaningful environmental damage imposed on others as a result of their project, per common law principles of torts

The Affordable Housing Amendment reaffirms a simple, yet fundamental, economic freedom: People should be allowed to build housing on private land. Private property rights derive from people’s rights to life and liberty, and are necessary to sustain and enhance our lives. It is immoral, therefore, to use government force to stand between someone who wants housing and someone who is willing to build housing for them on privately owned land.

A crisis of this magnitude demands bold action. California had a Tax Revolt in the 1970s when homes were seized because homeowners could not afford to pay outrageously high property tax increases. Today, California needs an Unaffordable Housing Revolt in the form of a ballot initiative led by Californians to overcome government restrictions on property rights that artificially constrain housing supply, causing sky-high home and rental housing prices.

[For more information on California’s housing affordability crisis, see How to Restore the California Dream: Removing Obstacles to Fast and Affordable Housing Development.

I welcome civil and constructive edits to the proposed constitutional amendment. Please submit edits below in the comments section. Anyone interested in moving the initiative forward, with thoughts on funding sources, please contact me.]

The post A Proposed California Constitutional Amendment to Resolve the Housing Affordability Crisis appeared first on The Beacon.

Bernie Sanders is proud to be a socialist. In July 2015, he told The Nation, “Do they think I’m afraid of the word? I’m not afraid of the word.” As far back as 1989, Sanders said, “I think there has been too much of a reluctance on the part of progressives and radicals to use the word socialism.” Sanders chooses to emphasize selective aspects he considers “positive,” while ignoring socialism’s brutal history.

In the 1960s, Sanders joined the Young People’s Socialist League, the youth wing of the Socialist Party USA. To Sanders, socialism means using government power to forcibly redistribute income and wealth from one group of people to another, which he thinks can be a good thing:

I think it means the government has got to play a very important role in making sure that as a right of citizenship, all of our people have healthcare; that as a right, all of our kids, regardless of income, have quality childcare, are able to go to college without going deeply into debt . . .

But as the old adage warns: A government powerful enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take away everything you have. That includes life itself. Sanders does not give his millennial followers, likely unaware of socialism’s record, a full picture of where concentrated government power inevitably leads.

In 2003, the University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors wrote “Can There Be an ‘After Socialism’?” which tells the story that Bernie Sanders won’t. Here is an extended excerpt:

The goal of socialism was to reap the cultural, scientific, creative, and communal rewards of abolishing private property and free markets, and to end human tyranny. Using the command of the state, Communism sought to create this socialist society. What in fact occurred was the achievement of power by a group of inhumane despots: Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Castro, Mengistu, Ceausescu, Hoxha, and so on, and so on . . .

No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag Archipelago: “No, no one would have to answer. No one would be looked into.” Until that happens, there is no “after socialism.”

The West accepts an epochal, monstrous, unforgivable double standard. We rehearse the crimes of Nazism almost daily, we teach them to our children as ultimate historical and moral lessons, and we bear witness to every victim. We are, with so few exceptions, almost silent on the crimes of Communism. So the bodies lie among us, unnoticed, everywhere. We insisted upon “de-Nazification,” and we excoriate those who tempered it in the name of new or emerging political realities. There never has been and never will be a similar “de-Communization,” although the slaughter of innocents was exponentially greater, and although those who signed the orders and ran the camps remain. In the case of Nazism, we hunt down ninety-year-old men because “the bones cry out” for justice. In the case of Communism, we insisted on “no witch hunts”—let the dead bury the living. But the dead can bury no one.

Therefore the dead lie among us, ignored, and anyone with moral eyes sees them, by their absence from our moral consciousness, spilling naked out of the television and movie screens, frozen in pain in our classrooms, and sprawled, unburied, across our politics and our culture. They sit next to us at our conferences. There could not have been an “after Nazism” without the recognition, the accounting, the justice, and the remembrance. Until we deal with the Communist dead, there is no “after socialism.”

To be moral beings, we must acknowledge these awful things appropriately and bear witness to the responsibilities of these most murderous times. Until socialism—like Nazism or fascism confronted by the death camps and the slaughter of innocents—is confronted with its lived reality, the greatest atrocities of all recorded human life, we will not live “after socialism.”

It will not happen. The pathology of Western intellectuals has committed them to an adversarial relationship with the culture—free markets and individual rights—that has produced the greatest alleviation of suffering; the greatest liberation from want, ignorance, and superstition; and the greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in the history of all human life.

This pathology allows Western intellectuals to step around the Everest of bodies of the victims of Communism without a tear, a scruple, a regret, an act of contrition, or a reevaluation of self, soul, and mind. . . .

The bodies demand an accounting, an apology, and repentance. Without such things, there is no “after socialism.”

Bernie Sanders honeymooned in the USSR and praised the Soviet healthcare system. He traveled to communist Nicaragua in 1985 to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Marxist Sandinista regime and established a sister-city partnership between Managua and Burlington, Vermont. He took a trip to Cuba in 1989, 30 years after the end of the Cuban Revolution, and also praised the Castro regime’s education system two decades earlier. By giving socialism intellectual cover and acceptability, Bernie Sanders helped to hide the bodies.

In a 1989 interview, Sanders said, “Socialism has a lot of different messages to different people. I think the issue of socialist ideology and what that meant or means is not terribly important.” Perhaps it’s not important to Sanders, but it was to the tens of millions of people who died at the hands of socialists or who currently toil and suffer under such regimes.

Sanders chooses to “step around the Everest of bodies . . . without a tear, a scruple, a regret, an act of contrition, or a reevaluation of self, soul, and mind.” He hides the truth from his young supporters. Bernie Sanders is morally unfit to be president.

The post Why Bernie Sanders Is (Still) Morally Unfit to Be President appeared first on The Beacon.