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Politics : The Castle -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (564)	6/20/2011 12:41:03 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Respond to of 7936

Overdrawn at the Ideas ATM By Iain Murray on 6.17.11 @ 6:08AM President Obama recently blamed today's high unemployment on… automation. Yes, you heard at right. He singled out automatic teller machines (ATMs), which he said have eliminated many human bank teller jobs. Blaming an invention for job losses is a display of economic ignorance worthy of the Luddites. Not only are Obama's comments wrong at a factual level, they display a complete lack of basic knowledge about the means of human progress. For a self-styled "progressive" to make this mistake displays how bankrupt that ideology is. For a start, President Obama is wrong as a matter of fact. From 1985 to 2002, U.S. banks added some 300,000 ATMs around the country, but also added 42,000 bank teller jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted in 2010 that a further 40,000 or so teller jobs would be added by 2018 -- presumably not as the result of mass removal of ATMs. ATMs allow banks to employ tellers in more useful services than simply counting and distributing money, as well as serve customers during late night hours when it is not feasible to keep branches open. Automation doesn't destroy jobs. It frees us from mundane tasks so that we can do other, more complex -- and more rewarding -- tasks. The washing machine didn't put housewives out of work; -- it enabled them to have careers. The industrial revolution allowed people to leave the fields and enter factories, where, despite popular conceptions of "satanic mills," they could earn far better livelihoods. As the great economist Joseph Schumpeter noted, the genius of the free market and the automation is that it "does not typically consist of providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort." This, incidentally, is why affordable energy is important. We burn fossil fuels to provide energy so that men and women do not have to supply their labor directly. As Thomas Edison remarked, "I am ashamed at the number of things around my house and shops that are done by animals -- human beings, I mean -- and ought to be done by a motor without any sense of fatigue or pain. Hereafter a motor must do all the chores." The progressives' failure to appreciate the value of automation is at its most apparent in their greatest invention -- bureaucracy. At a time when, by my calculations, a quarter of the American labor force works either directly or indirectly for government, the administration appears intent on increasing that number. As more and more pages of new rules are added to the Federal Register (a record 81,000 of them last year), more and more people must be employed, not by the government, but by businesses to comply with the new rules. So far from freeing humanity from fatigue and drudgery, which is the story of automation, "progressive" policies have only added to the burden. Lip service to more "efficient" government does not obviate the fact that people have to read, interpret, and understand the regulations in the first place, under penalty of law. The more new rules accumulate, the harder this task becomes. It is no wonder that the stimulus failed, if the President so misunderstands the way the world works. In Los Angeles, two city departments received between them $111 million from the stimulus but "saved or created" a mere combined total of 55 jobs. Such is the cost of bureaucracy. Automation is a product of innovation, which is America's genius, and has proved essential to making our lives better. When the President denounces it as a bad thing, we may be in economic trouble, indeed. spectator.org

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (564)	8/24/2012 8:30:15 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7936

The Rise of Asset Forfeiture Abuse Ilya Somin • August 23, 2012 4:55 pm Co-blogger Orin Kerr describes a planned effort by one local government to raise revenue by increasing asset forfeitures through the use of drug-sniffing dogs. Unfortunately, this is just one example of a growing trend of using asset forfeiture as a fundraising tool for law enforcement agencies. In this recent post, I rounded up many sources documenting the problem, including excellent articles by Radley Balko and George Will, and this report by the Institute for Justice. Asset forfeiture laws frequently victimize property owners who haven’t even been convicted of any crime, and in some states give them little or no opportunity to challenge the forfeiture of their possession, thereby flagrantly violating the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which denies government the power to take away property without “due process of law.” This column by Steven Greenhut is a good summary of the problem: Few groups of “sinners” were singled out in biblical accounts more than “tax collectors,” who were not merely state agents collecting revenues that taxpayers rightfully owed to the government. They were the source of particular loathing because they were extortionists, who profited personally by shaking down as much money from citizens as possible... The Gospel accounts provide an early lesson in the danger of marrying the profit motive with governmental power. The possibility for abuse is great. Yet throughout the United States, government agencies increasingly rely on “civil forfeiture” to bolster their strained budgets. The more assets these modern-day tax collectors seize, the more money they have for new equipment and other things.... If, for instance, your neighbor borrowed your green Buick and sold some marijuana to an undercover agent, the law enforcement agency can seize the car. The owner might not have done anything wrong, but the car was indeed used in the commission of a crime. Activists point to instances where the government has become more creative in seeking assets—homes, cars, bank accounts—based on minor violations of the ever-expanding criminal code... As the number of regulatory crimes grows, the cases in which the government can seize assets grows along with it.... There is something terribly disturbing about this “policing for profit” trend, especially in our current world where the number of laws keeps growing. We’ve all become accustomed to police increasing their ticket-writing to backfill their budgets, but asset forfeiture takes the profiteering to a new and disturbing level. Agencies know that it’s so costly for people to fight their forfeiture proceedings that many victims simply cede the property without a fight. That’s wrong. The Supreme Court planned to address some of the constitutional issues raised by dubious asset forfeitures in the 2009 case of Alvarez v. Smith, but ended up dismissing the case on procedural grounds. As a lower court judge, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote an opinion curbing especially egregious asset forfeitures that violate the Due Process Clause. Hopefully, the Supreme Court will eventually follow her example on this issue. In the meantime, awareness of asset forfeiture abuse is slowly rising. But reform efforts are hindered by the reality that most of the victims are relatively poor and lack political clout. In addition, law enforcement agencies and local governments are unwilling to part with this lucrative revenue source, especially in difficult economic times. UPDATE: It’s worth noting that drug-sniffing police dogs are often highly inaccurate, because dogs want to please their human handlers and therefore may turn up a false positive because that’s the reaction they think the handler wants. As Radley Balko explains, this can lead to bogus asset forfeitures: The consequences of misusing police dogs go well beyond unconstitutional searches. A drug dog’s alert can help establish a connection between a suspect’s property and drug activity, allowing police to seize the property for possible forfeiture. Even if the owner is never charged with a crime, the burden is on him to go to court to win back what was his, a process that often costs more than the property is worth. In a case I reported last year, for example, college student Anthony Smelley had $17,500 in cash that he’d won in an accident settlement seized when police in Indiana pulled him over and a drug dog alerted to Smelley’s car. It took Smelley more than a year to win the cash back in court, even though a subsequent hand search turned up no illegal substances. The danger of a false positive induced by a dog’s desire to please is especially great when asset forfeiture is a possibility, because law enforcement officers often have a strong desire to maximize the amount of property they can seize for their agency’s benefit. Moreover, many of the dogs used for drug-sniffing are retrievers. And, as my fellow retriever owners know, retrievers are even more eager to please than most other dog breeds. volokh.com