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Robert A. Levy

The challenge for those persons charged with controlling campus unrest is to safeguard protesters’ right to free speech while ensuring that they don’t infringe on the equal rights of others. The difficulties are twofold: First, to identify and enforce legitimate limitations on protected speech; and second, to properly delineate those other rights that may not be violated.

We begin by examining the First Amendment. It directs that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” That text raises two threshold questions. First, it refers to “Congress,” thus suggesting that neither state governments nor private colleges are covered. The “state government” issue was resolved in 1868, when the 14th Amendment was ratified. It authorized federal intervention if a state were to abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens, deprive anyone of due process, or deny them equal protection. Essentially, the 14th Amendment applied nearly all provisions in the Bill of Rights to the states. No longer would states be exempt from the First Amendment’s assurances of free speech.

Private colleges, however, are not technically subject to the First Amendment, which restrains government actions, not the private sector. Still, most colleges have internal codes that guarantee academic freedom—often drawing on the First Amendment—and other rules that specify the rights enjoyed by students, faculty, and administrators. Moreover, many private colleges accept government funding, which may subject them to certain legal obligations equivalent to those that bind state actors. 

The second difficult question raised by the text of the First Amendment is its command that “no law” may limit free speech. And yet, we proscribe falsely shouting fire in a crowded theatre, lying in commercial ads, campaign finance abuse, defamation, etc. So, the right to free speech is not absolute. It can be regulated—even though it’s constitutionally guaranteed. What then is the scope of permissible regulation?

Generally, prior restraints on speech are disfavored, but not totally barred. The more usual case is that speech not secured by the First Amendment can be punished after the fact. Those unsecured categories include incitement to riot, libel, fraud, perjury, compromising national security, some pornography, invasion of privacy, fighting words, threats of violence, and intellectual property infringement. Notably, among the categories of protected speech is so‐​called hate speech, which encompasses sexism, racism, ageism, other offensive discriminatory language, and even some forms of expressive conduct.

Here’s the broad framework under the First Amendment: Restrictions on the time, place, and manner of speech are allowed as long as the restrictions don’t relate to the content of the speech and leave ample alternative channels of communication. Thus, valid regulations can limit the amount of noise, the location of a protest, and even its duration and form—for example, extended closure of a university building. The critical determinant is whether the rights of others in the campus community would be contravened. 

By contrast, government restraints on speech content—e.g., it’s ok to discuss any subject except politics—are scrutinized more rigorously. To justify content‐​based restrictions, regulators have to show they have a compelling governmental objective, the restrictions will be effective in accomplishing that objective, and less restrictive measures would not get the job done. Put somewhat differently, the regulation must successfully address a serious problem and extend no further than necessary to do so. Most regulations will not meet those stringent criteria.

Finally, there are viewpoint‐​based restrictions—e.g., you can criticize the liberal position but not the conservative position, or vice versa. For obvious reasons, there’s little or no chance that such rules would survive First Amendment scrutiny. Our government must be a neutral arbiter. That means even‐​handed enforcement in securing individual rights—including equal access to campus facilities and resources. In that regard, public universities are government entities, and most private universities are similarly bound because they either accept government funding or have quasi‐​contractual responsibilities to their student‐​customers and their employees. 

Indeed, universities are generally well‐​advised to go further than other government entities in maintaining neutrality. Many public servants will, as political players, endorse particular policies on behalf of their government employer. Such advocacy need not conflict with impartial law enforcement. Nonetheless, universities might prefer to practice institutional restraint. The 1967 Kalven principles, adopted by the University of Chicago and the University of North Carolina, put it this way: “[T]he instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”

Non‐​partisan and objective implementation of campus rules means that even offensive ideas such as antisemitism must not be banned—unless, of course, the offensive speech is accompanied by harm‐​inflicting conduct. Typically, students are not shielded from hurtful words, but they must be allowed to engage fully in campus events and activities. That’s the litmus test in defining and circumscribing the rights of all campus participants. 

Recall that Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as well as numerous state analogues, bars discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin by public accommodations—that is, businesses (including educational institutions) that hold themselves out to the public. Accordingly, identity‐​based attacks on Jewish or Palestinian students are forbidden if they rise to the level of physical (and arguably emotional) harassment under the relevant laws. (I’ve argued elsewhere that some provisions of public accommodations laws are constitutionally suspect; but the courts have held otherwise, and the laws are mostly well‐​settled despite their questionable constitutional pedigree.) 

Suppose, however, that a protest qualifies as civil disobedience—construed for our purposes as the public refusal to obey a lawful order with the goal of changing the law or policy. Plainly, such a protest goes beyond free speech, crosses into the realm of active conduct, and transgresses established law. Should it, nonetheless, be permitted? The answer, in my view, is yes—with two qualifications: First, for the protest to be “civil,” it must be peaceful and non‐​violent. Second, the protesters must be willing to accept the consequences, which means no aggressive resistance if authorities execute a proper arrest. Under those circumstances, colleges can appropriately weigh First Amendment liberties against the freedom to teach, study, and learn in peace, even if not in harmony. 

Colleges administrators are professionally, morally, and legally obligated to treat all members of the campus community equally. At the same time, they should afford ample opportunity for peaceful demonstrations—creating a safe harbor for vigorous discourse that allows for civil disobedience but sustains the rule of law. That final proviso is critical. It was nicely condensed in a recent letter, re‐​published in the Wall Street Journal, from president Paul Alivisatos to the University of Chicago community: “[W]hen expression becomes disruption, we act decisively to protect the learning environment of students and the functioning of the University against genuinely disruptive protesters.”

Colleen Hroncich

Jo Lawson and her husband were both public school teachers. When they had children, they planned to alternate years teaching and being home with the kids. It seemed like a perfect set up. Then COVID-19 happened, and things started to look different. That prompted them to really think about what is going on in education right now.

They started hearing about learning pods and microschools, which gave them some ideas. They considered using the Florida Virtual School curriculum, which they liked, and offering an in‐​person place to give the students hands‐​on learning experiences. But as they talked to parents, they found little interest in going back to virtual school. Someone suggested they look into Agile Learning Centers.

As soon as she looked around the Agile Learning website, Jo was hooked—it was the school that she’d been seeking. She’d taught in private, district, and charter schools, always trying to find a place where they were letting kids be creative. So she used the Agile Learning model to create what is now known as Radiant Collective.

The heart of Radiant is the learning center for homeschoolers ages five to fifteen. Families can attend two to five days a week, with tuition prorated based on how many days they choose. Mornings are a blend of structured learning and personal choice, with a variety of organized offerings that emphasize project‐​based learning. Projects are designed to include a range of subjects and skills, encouraging students to dive deep into topics that interest them. They have quarterly showcases that allow the children a chance to show off their projects.

In the afternoons, Radiant offers small group tutoring for a separate fee. Kids can attend lunch and learn sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays, where they focus on reading and math. On Wednesdays, they can participate in adventure labs, where they use creative approaches to experience science and social studies.

Arts are imbued in every aspect of Radiant because of Jo’s passion for art. She’s seen schools that cut art or music programs and is horrified by that. She said she can’t imagine what school would have been like without the arts, but she’s sure it would have been terrible. Even the science classes incorporate art because she thinks it so important for kids to have that way to express themselves.

According to Jo, Radiant Collective is really about collaboration, problem solving, and critical thinking, and those are the skills that are prioritized in the rubric they use for evaluating students. She explains that she tells parents we have no idea what our kids will be doing in the future, but these skills will always serve them well.

Jo admits she laughed at the idea of unschooling when she first heard of it, but now she recognizes the value of it. She sees her own daughters learning so much even when it’s not being formally taught. She’s had to unschool herself to some degree since she attended and taught at traditional schools. The idea of education being teacher led was instilled in her from early on, but she’s seen the growth that’s happening in students at Radiant when they have more independence and flexibility.

When it comes to math, Jo works with the younger kids and tries to incorporate some math concepts from the Waldorf philosophy. This allows kids to really experience math, to explore and discover how things work. Her husband takes the older, more advanced kids and does a lot of hands‐​on, real world math. He frequently uses sports to teach math because many of the students love sports. During football season, he used team and player stats to teach them statistics, and then they had a contest to see who had the most accurate playoff picks. Similarly, he uses March Madness basketball to get them using statistics and other math concepts.

Radiant Collective’s location is purposely very homey because it’s geared towards homeschoolers. But Jo also wants to serve as a resource for the community. She plans to offer afterschool sessions that would be open to homeschoolers and students from public or private schools. This would give the kids and parents a chance to get to know each other and give the conventionally schooling families exposure to a different approach to education.

Jo says she’ll never go back to a conventional classroom. This is what she always wanted her classroom to feel like, but it never could because she always had to stick to a schedule and kids had to stop what they were doing when the bell rang. She thinks there are many teachers out there who want this and don’t even realize it. As options like Radiant Collective spread, more teachers will discover that they can do what they love without the bureaucracy and the lack of flexibility of the education system.

Jeffrey A. Singer

On May 1, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed SB 1084 into law, which prohibits Floridians from buying or selling lab‐​grown meat. In a press release, the governor’s office stated, “Florida is increasing meat production” and urged Floridians to “continue to consume and enjoy 100 percent Florida beef.”

To his credit, unlike his culture war opponents who oppose genetically modified foods, the governor did not engage in hysterical junk science arguments about the safety of eating lab‐​grown meat.

Medical researchers and clinicians have been culturing and growing human tissue in laboratories for decades. In some cases, clinical researchers and oncologists cultivate tissue samples obtained from individuals’ tumors to study their unique biology and the effects that various therapeutic agents have on them.

It was only a matter of time before entrepreneurs applied the same technology to growing animal tissue, which enabled humans to consume meat without raising and slaughtering animals.

Historically, many early opponents of genetically modified foods were associated with left‐​wing politics, who claimed these foods were “an unnatural plot by evil capitalists to enslave food eaters.” Activists claimed genetically modified foods, which they often dubbed “Frankenfood,” were unhealthful. However, there is solid evidence that genetically modified foods are safe.

This time, opposition to lab‐​grown meat seems to be coming from right‐​wing culture warriors, the agriculture lobby, and politicians who pander to them. Lab‐​grown meat critics don’t challenge evidence that it is safe to eat. Rather they oppose lab‐​grown meat mainly because environmentalists and animal rights activists generally like the idea. Though recent studies suggest they may be wrong, many environmentalists have believed that growing meat will decrease the need for raising methane‐​producing cattle, thus helping to ease global warming. Animal rights activists promote lab‐​grown meat as an alternative to slaughtering animals.

But the culture war is not all that animates those opposing lab‐​grown meat. Another factor is good old‐​fashioned protectionism. Just as the taxi cartels united to oppose Uber and Lyft, many in the beef and poultry industries fear competition from lab‐​grown meat. The Florida governor’s press release was quite transparent on this in stating:

We must protect our incredible farmers and the integrity of American agriculture. Lab‐​grown meat is a disgraceful attempt to undermine our proud traditions and prosperity, and is in direct opposition to authentic agriculture.

Protectionism makes for strange political bedfellows. Commenting on Florida’s new lab‐​grown meat prohibition, Senator John Fetterman (D‑PA) posted on X:

Pains me deeply to agree with Crash‐​and‐​Burn Ron, but I co‐​sign this. As a member of @SenateAgDems.and as some dude who would never serve that slop to my kids, I stand with our American ranchers and farmers.

I can’t criticize opponents of lab‐​grown meat for making unscientific claims about its safety, but I can certainly point out the hypocrisy of their claim to be pro‐​freedom.

Neal McCluskey

Watching the events in Israel and Gaza—the horrors of war inflicted on both sides—it is impossible to not be moved. Watching the anger and, sometimes, violence on college campuses across the country also, understandably, spurs powerful emotions, including in the halls of Congress. But understandable feelings do not mean that the federal government should inject itself into debates largely occurring in civil—free—society. It is not the proper federal role, and it threatens to reduce rather than promote harmony.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives took its most concrete action to date, largely spurred by the scenes on college campuses across the country. It passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would require the US Department of Education to “take into consideration” the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) “working definition of antisemitism” when investigating schools for civil rights violations. Essentially, the department would judge if an incident was driven by antisemitism, and presumably if a college were allowing antisemitism to exist on campus.

The problem is that the definition includes all kinds of speech, most of which is not inherently threatening. Government punishment for such speech would be a fundamental violation of First Amendment rights.

IHRA “examples of antisemitism” include:

Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
Denying the Jewish people their right to self‐​determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

These might well be horrible, inaccurate things to say. Those who say them might have antisemitic motives. But it is extremely dangerous to put such speech off limits. For instance, if someone says Israel should not occupy the West Bank, but does not condemn the United States for occupying Native American land, is that antisemitism? If they say checkpoints controlling ingress and egress of Gaza is a “fascist” tactic, should government be able to punish them?

Unfortunately, congressional actions might have encouraged some of the unrest and lawbreaking we have seen on campuses. It is not hard to imagine that demonstrators became more emboldened at Columbia University when the House Committee on Education and the Workforce devoted an entire hearing to antisemitism there, raising the school’s profile in the protest movement. This was on the heels of a hearing featuring the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT that generated a huge amount of attention that also seemed to widen political rifts far beyond concerns about antisemitism.

The committee has another hearing scheduled for May 23, this time to question the presidents of Yale, UCLA, and the University of Michigan. Whether the hearing will shine more light to help deal with hard issues about speech and safety than political heat to burn institutions is an open question.

Congress should also steer clear of campus battles to protect free society.

For Harvard, UPenn, MIT, Columbia, and Yale, the first barrier against federal intrusion should be that they are private institutions. That means they are in charge of their own governance. The committee seems to prefer bringing the heads of such institutions to DC over public colleges, perhaps because they are so high‐​profile. The ostensible justification is that federal money reaches them through aid to students and research funding. But they do not cease to be private by enrolling students who use federal loans or by receiving federal research contracts. The former is funding for students who make their own choices, the latter for research the federal government thinks is important. Neither is to sustain institutions.

In a free society, private institutions must have a huge amount of latitude to make their own decisions, and accountability will come by educators, students, and others freely deciding whether or not to work with them, and under what conditions.

Public institutions are closer to falling under federal jurisdiction, but universities such as UCLA belong to states, and it is states that should control them, not Washington. Barring pervasive and egregious discrimination by schools, which is not in evidence in most colleges even if there have been some clear antisemitic acts or rhetoric, Washington should leave states and their institutions alone to deal with protests and tensions.

Essentially, what Congress should do is respect subsidiarity: If lower levels of society can possibly handle situations themselves, they should be allowed to.

Why?

Aside from liberty being an essential good unto itself, first because there are very important, but also conflicting, priorities in play. Foremost, free speech versus security: When does speech become a threat so great it makes it impossible for someone at which it is directed to function at a school? There is no bright line defining that, and it is much better if we allow fifty, or hundreds, or thousands of jurisdictions to draw lines in different locations than impose one on the entire country. Not only are all communities different, but get the national definition wrong, and everyone in the country suffers.

Second, diverse human beings place different weights on freedom and safety. Some will want to matriculate at schools that emphasize freedom to speak no matter what is said. Others will prefer a focus on academic study undisturbed by campus protests and inflammatory speech. Still others will want rules in between. Allowing private colleges, freely chosen by students, to make their own rules and handle their own problems is essential to providing such diverse options.

Finally, when the federal government makes decisions—national decisions—it pulls every American, even if they live nowhere near a college campus, into culture war. One possible reason we are so polarized as a nation is that we have, over the decades, increasingly centralized control over many aspects of our lives, reducing space for people who think differently from one another to each live as they see fit. We see it especially in government‐​dominated, increasingly centralized, K‑12 education, with our battles over “book banning,” “critical race theory,” and much more.

The urge to “do something” when one sees suffering or injustice is very human, and very understandable. But that does not mean that doing something is the best way for Washington to deal with college campus unrest.

David J. Bier

Immigrant workers seeking a green card—which denotes legal permanent residence in the United States—now face a wait time of more than three years to make it through the government’s regulatory morass. Paying a $2,805 fee could cut this wait to “only” two and a half years. The government has added 15 months to the average green card process since 2016. These processing delays come on top of the time to wait for a green card cap slot to become available under the annual green card caps (which is often many years). They also do not include the time spent complying with regulations prior to the first filing step. This prefiling period can take months.

Total green card processing times

2024 regular processing time (end of Q1): 1,146 days / 38 months / 3.1 years

If paying $2,805 premium processing fee: 961 days / 31.6 months / 2.6 years

2023 regular processing time: 1,046 days / 34 months / 2.9 years

If paying the premium processing fee: 930 days / 31 months / 2.5 years

2016 regular processing time: 705 days / 23 months / 1.9 years

If paying the premium processing fee: 567 days / 19 months / 1.6 years

Most employer‐​sponsored immigrants pass through a six‐​part series of bureaucratic steps. Employers must initiate the process, but the employee must participate in each stage.

Prefiling stage: This stage requires the applicant and employer to gather the necessary documents to prove the applicant’s eligibility for a green card. This includes proof of degrees, the employer’s ability to pay, and work experience letters. These letters must contain detailed information about the employee’s job duties and tenure, and there is no particular reason why a past employer would want to provide this information.

2024 Q1 time: The public has effectively no information about how long this stage will take. Attorneys say that it could take anywhere from a few weeks to several months.

Prevailing wage determination: The Department of Labor (DOL) evaluates the job duties, skill requirements, and location of the job to assign a specific occupational classification, skill level, and area code. Based on these factors, the DOL uses its Online Wage Library to issue a prevailing wage determination. The average wait for the prevailing wage has nearly tripled since 2016.

2024 Q1 time: 186 days / 6.1 months

2023 time: 197 days / 6.5 months

2016 time: 76 days / 2.5 months

US worker recruitment: Under DOL regulations, employers must also recruit US workers through a specified process that involves multiple newspaper advertisements. They must conduct interviews of applicants if their résumés meet the “basic” criteria, even if they do not meet all the criteria. DOL data show that it takes employers on average six months to get through this stage and file a labor certification (see step number four).

2024 Q1 time: 190 days / 6.2 months

2023 time: 153 days / 5 months

2016 time: 131 days / 4.3 months

Labor certification: Employers must then apply for a labor certification from the DOL, which will certify that no “minimally” qualified US worker responded to the job advertisements and that the employer did the required steps.

2024 Q1 time: 375 days / 12.3 months / 1 year

2023 time: 303 days / 10 months 

2016 time: 180 days / 5.9 months

Employer petition: Employers must then file a petition with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The DHS will verify that the worker is qualified for sponsorship and confirm the employer’s ability to pay. This is one of the few procedures where employers can pay to skip the waiting. The regulations allow an employer to pay a $2,500 fee (compared with $700 normally) to receive a response in 15 days (unless the government wants additional information).

2024 Q1 time: 200 days / 6.6 months

Fifteen days if the employer can pay a $2,805 premium processing fee

2023 time: 130 days / 4.3 months

Fifteen days if the employer can pay a $2,805 premium processing fee

2016 time: 180 days / 5.9 months

Fifteen days if the employer can pay a $2,805 premium processing fee

Here is where the employee would wait for a cap number to become available under annual limits.

Green card application: The green card application (Form I‑485) is the request for the employee to adjust status (usually from a temporary work visa status) to legal permanent residence. The worker must undergo a background check and medical screening and confirm that the original job offer still exists.

2024 Q1 time: 195 days / 6.4 months

2023 time: 261 days / 8.6 months

2016 time: 165 days / 5.4 months

This is leading to massive processing backlogs in the employer‐​sponsored immigration system. Again, these processing backlogs are in addition to the backlog of workers waiting for a cap spot to become available. We do not know how many people are going through the recruitment stage, but the total employer‐​sponsored processing backlogs at the DOL and the DHS have more than doubled since 2016.

With a process this long, it is no surprise that well over 90 percent of employer‐​sponsored immigrants going through the labor certification process must already be in the United States to obtain employer sponsorship. These delays create a de facto requirement for employees to use an H‑1B or other temporary work visa before they can access a green card. In other words, the true government processing time is much longer when you factor in the time it takes to obtain a temporary work visa before an employer begins the green card process.

Unfortunately, the DOL has finalized two new rules that, among other problems, will take more resources away from processing prevailing wage and labor certification applications to increase the resources required for the H‑2A farm visa program. This is the exact opposite of what the government should do to alleviate the processing delays in the employer‐​sponsored immigration system.

Indeed, all these procedures are wholly unnecessary. Employees with a green card can negotiate fairly for wages since they can leave to find another employer. There is no reason to require US worker recruitment since immigrant workers create an equivalent demand for US workers elsewhere in the economy. Employers can judge a worker’s qualifications better than a government entity. Requiring health screenings and background checks of workers who were already screened abroad and who have lived in the United States for years is just as absurd.

America will lose the global talent competition when other countries grant green cards in a matter of a few weeks or months, not years. It is time for the US government to radically streamline its immigration system and eliminate unnecessary, burdensome procedures.

This post is an update of a prior post.

Bryan Caplan

“How should government fight poverty?” It hardly seems like a loaded question, but it contains a strong sequential insinuation. Namely: Prior to government lifting a finger, a severe poverty problem exists. Then a helpful government arrives on the scene to fight this pre‐​existing problem. Which swiftly leads to a debate about the best way for government to play the hero. Should it provide education and job training? Subsidize food and health care? Or just hand out cash?

To avoid this sequential insinuation, we have to rephrase the question. In lieu of “How should government fight poverty?” I propose: “How should government change policy to reduce poverty?”

This question remains open to standard redistributive responses. But changing the wording also allows for the possibility that existing government policy is a major cause of poverty. If so, the simplest way for government to reduce poverty is to stop making it worse. Talking about “fighting poverty” pre‐​anoints government as the hero of the story when the truth could be quite the reverse.

My new Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation highlights one of the main ways that modern governments do in fact sharply increase poverty. Namely: By slashing the supply — and thereby raising the price — of the basic necessity of shelter.

A wide range of regulations make it hard for developers to build tall buildings, multifamily housing, and even dense single‐​family housing. While this means more expensive housing for everyone, the poor suffer extra, for two reasons.

First, the poor spend a larger share on shelter. For the richest quintile of Americans, it’s 18 percent. For the poorest quintile, it’s 25 percent.

Second, renters are poorer than owners. To be clear, lower housing prices aren’t always bad for owners; after all, they may hope to upgrade to nicer place, or want their kids to be able to afford to live in their vicinity. But cheaper housing is almost automatically good for renters.

The preceding two arguments boil down to simple arithmetic. If you dig deeper, you’ll find two more ways that housing deregulation helps the less fortunate.

First, as Nobel laureate Angus Deaton and Anne Case point out in their Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, America’s non‐​college males have been doing especially poorly in recent decades. One common remedy is to use protectionism to revive US manufacturing, but the numbers just don’t add up. Housing deregulation is a far more realistic remedy because (a) a large majority of workers in construction are non‐​college males, (b) 11 million people already work in this industry, and (c) most people would gladly upgrade to a bigger home if the price were right. Even modest housing deregulation would therefore create millions of new well‐​paid jobs for non‐​college males.

Second, building off the work of Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag, Build, Baby, Build shows that housing regulation also reduces the upward mobility of the poor. Decades ago, when housing prices were much lower — and more nationally uniform — poor Americans had a clear path to a better life: move to a higher‐​wage part of the country. Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath notwithstanding, this strategy worked well. Now, however, poor Americans who try this route typically find that the extra housing cost in high‐​wage regions eats up more than 100 percent of the wage gain. Lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps is still possible, but used to be quite a bit easier.

Five years ago, I had a debate on poverty policy with my friend, economist David Balan. He broadly agreed with me on the merits of housing deregulation and acknowledged that high housing prices were especially bad for the poor. Yet Balan insisted on purely semantic grounds that housing deregulation doesn’t count as “poverty policy.” Unless you favor government redistribution, your preferred poverty policy is, perforce, no policy at all.

My reply: Anything that reduces poverty counts as poverty policy! Indeed, if you want to help the poor, Effective Altruism 101 urges us to start by adopting all of the policies that cost less than nothing. Shackling construction is a prime example of such a policy. After all, housing regulation hurts the poor by burning taxpayer resources to impede wealth creation. Harm fueled by waste and more waste.

Housing deregulation isn’t just one sort of poverty policy. It is the best sort of poverty policy. Instead of letting government tax the rest of society and hoping that the benefits exceed the costs, housing deregulation shows government a mirror. “You’re not the hero of this story. At best, you can become a repentant villain. Want to help the poor? Then stop hurting them.”

Eric Gomez

April 2024 was a relatively quiet month for the US arms backlog to Taiwan. Congress did not receive any notifications of new arms sales, and there were no reports of US weapons being delivered to Taiwan that would reduce the backlog. On April 24, President Biden signed into law an emergency supplemental appropriations bill that might help clear some of the backlog, but it depends on how the funds are used.

As of the end of April 2024, the Taiwan arms sale backlog amounted to approximately $19.7 billion, a $520 million increase from our March 2024 update. Figure 1 shows the current breakdown of the arms backlog by weapon category, and Figure 2 shows how the backlog has changed from March to April 2024.

The $520 million increase is the dollar value of 18 additional High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), support vehicles, and munitions that were tacked onto an October 2020 sale of 11 HIMARS launchers.

Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (MND) announced the additional HIMARS purchase in May 2023. However, we could not locate an arms sale notification in the Congressional Record around the time of MND’s announcement. Our earlier updates to the backlog data set included the HIMARS plus‐​up without an assigned dollar value. However, in April we located the HIMARS arms sale notification in the December 5, 2022, edition of the Congressional Record while reviewing information about another arms sale.

Reaching an accurate estimate of the US arms sale backlog to Taiwan has been challenging. Data on both arms sales and deliveries exist, but not in one place. Now that we have tracked down the cost information for the HIMARS plus‐​up, we are confident that we have accurate data on all backlogged arms sales to Taiwan. Table 1 shows an itemized list of all arms sales in the backlog.

The arms backlog may begin declining in the near future.

The emergency supplemental appropriations bill contains $1.9 billion available until September 2025 to replenish US military stockpiles of equipment transferred to Taiwan. In the Taiwan Enhanced Resilience Act of 2022, Congress authorized a $1 billion per year ceiling for Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA), which pulls equipment out of US military stockpiles for immediate transfer to a foreign country. However, without appropriations to replenish transferred equipment, there was little incentive for the administration to use PDA. In 2023, the Biden administration only sent $345 million worth of equipment to Taiwan via PDA, and it did not disclose what capabilities it sent.

The emergency supplemental should lead to more PDA transfers to Taiwan because the US military now has the funds necessary to backfill the equipment it sends. PDA transfers could be an excellent tool for rapidly decreasing the size of the arms sale backlog, but currently there is simply too much uncertainty around how the US military will use the new appropriations to predict what will happen. Hopefully the administration will provide detailed information on any future PDA transfers to Taiwan, as they have for PDA transfers to Ukraine.

Download our Taiwan arms backlog data from April 2024.

Bryan Caplan

The Cato Institute has just published my Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation. The book is a non‐​fiction graphic novel. Think of it as the comic book equivalent of a documentary. Together with illustrator Ady Branzei, I combine words and pictures to give readers a tour of housing regulation, with a focus on how government restricts the construction industry, and what would happen if the restrictions were lifted.

About fifteen years ago, Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe opened my eyes to the high potential of graphic non‐​fiction. Gonick’s books capitalize on the adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words” to teach history quickly. They use beauty and humor to hold readers’ attention. And though they look like comic books, they’re carefully researched.

In Build, Baby, Build, I try to emulate Gonick’s virtues. The book distills a vast empirical literature into a few critical lessons. Lessons like:

US housing regulation roughly doubles the cost of housing.
Besides making housing much cheaper, deregulation would increase productivity, equality, social mobility, environmental quality, fertility, and safety.
The standard arguments in favor of regulation are both overstated and one‐​sided.

But what finally convinced me to make this book a non‐​fiction graphic novel was my realization that what drives much, perhaps most, support for housing regulation is aesthetics. Economists focus on cost‐​benefit analysis, but normal people are more likely to ask themselves, “Will development be beautiful?” — then confidently answer, “Absolutely not.”

Faced with such attitudes, economists tend to facepalm in frustration. My reaction, though, is remember 19th‐​century French economist Frédéric Bastiat’s classic essay, “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.” Writing in 1850, Bastiat explained that people focus on the obvious direct benefits of government, while ignoring the severe yet non‐​obvious harms. When government subsidizes universities, for example, people rarely ponder, “What else could have been done with the money?” When government denies permission to build, similarly, we never actually see what would have been built if permission were granted. This makes it easy for critics to visualize the ugliest possible outcomes.

The epiphany that convinced me to write Build, Baby, Build: Instead of trying to argue people out of their aesthetic pessimism, I should use the graphic novel format to fight aesthetics with aesthetics — to show readers the beautiful unseen world that government forbids. And that’s why the fifth chapter of the book resurrects the great Bastiat as a co‐​narrator. After we explore his classic insight on “the seen versus the unseen,” Bastiat joins me on a guided tour through a deregulated world. Which lets me showcase a world that is not merely richer than the status quo, but more aesthetically pleasing as well.

For example, regulators often forbid construction in areas famous for their natural beauty. But why assume that construction would tarnish natural beauty rather than amplify it? Take a look and see for yourself:

To my eyes — and hopefully yours — the bottom panel is more, not less gorgeous than the top panel. And while you can fairly point out that these are fantasy drawings, they are inspired by real life. Who really aesthetically prefers the largely desolate California coastline to the awe‐​inspiring towns of Italy’s Amalfi Coast?

The same lesson holds for so many of forms of housing regulation. Today’s governments strictly regulate skyscrapers. But the beloved skyline of New York City was largely built under near‐​laissez‐​faire conditions. Today’s governments strictly protect historic buildings. But construction of these historic buildings often began with the demolition of an earlier beloved building. The original Waldorf‐​Astoria Hotel really was destroyed to make room for the Empire State Building. That’s what I call building “the history of the future.”

In a critique of my first book, philosophers Jon Elster and Hélène Landemore accuse me of being willing to use almost any rhetorical strategy to get my points across. While they overstate, they’re on to something. Once I’m convinced that my arguments are sound, I strive to sell them. Straightforward logic and evidence are fine, but so are thought experiments, appeals to common sense, humor, and beauty. False modesty aside, I think Build, Baby, Build is a beautiful book. If you like the visual samples I’ve shown you, I think you’ll agree.

Adam N. Michel

A recent Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) report highlights a series of little‐​known, fraud‐​ridden tax credits for biofuel producers. These subsidies are a cautionary case study of how complicated tax credits are often legally and illegally abused. As trillions of dollars in Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) tax subsidies come online, Congress should expect fraud and ballooning costs to continue.

The tax code includes a group of related biofuel tax credits for the production, blending, and use of biodiesel, renewable diesel, second‐​generation fuels, and other alternative fuels. The credits provide a $0.50–$1.75 subsidy per gallon of qualifying fuel. The tax credits generally offset fuel excise taxes and then are available as a credit against income taxes. Some provide a “refundable” credit for a subsidy in excess of tax liability. The IRA extended the biofuel credits through 2024 and created a new credit for sustainable aviation fuel.

Since Congress created the first biofuel credit in 2004, such credits have been subject to legal exploitation and illegal fraud. The tax credits complement other subsidies and blending requirements in the renewable fuel standards program, creating a complex web of lucrative programs administered by multiple agencies with poor oversight and insufficient interagency cooperation. This has led to a staggering amount of theft.

In a brazen account of tax fraud, the operators of Washakie Renewable Energy were sentenced to prison in 2023 for a staggering $1 billion biofuel tax credit conspiracy. Over six years, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) paid out $511 billion in fraudulent tax credits and stopped hundreds of billions more in what the TIGTA report calls “one of the largest fraud schemes in US history.” In reporting on the Washakie case, Bloomberg noted that “by 2017 more than 30 people had been accused of defrauding the IRS in biodiesel tax credit scams.”

In another case, a Colorado man was found guilty of claiming $7 million of biodiesel tax credits for renewable fuel that was never produced. Another story chronicles multiple indictments “for orchestrating a $100 million scheme involving the sale of biofuels and fraudulent claims that the fuels were eligible for tax credits.”

Indicative of poor enforcement and difficult administrability, TIGTA found that one‐​third of audited taxpayers’ biofuel credits should have been denied due to a lack of appropriate documentation of eligibility. Insufficient documentation accounted for about 12 percent of the dollar value of the credits claimed in the audited sample.

The biofuel credits are also susceptible to legal exploitation. In one case, an unintentional loophole increased the cost of the subsidy program more than 12 times.

Poorly defined terms in the $0.50 alternative fuels credit allowed enterprising oil industry lawyers to claim credits for their normally produced gasoline. Doug Sword explains that because butane qualified as an alternative fuel, “refiners had a legitimate claim on the credits since they typically mix butane, an easily liquefied natural gas, into gasoline to reduce emissions and help engines run smoother in cold weather.”

When government scorekeepers incorporated the butane tax loophole into their estimates, the cost of the alternative fuels subsidy jumped from $555 million to $7.1 billion for a one‐​year extension. Had oil companies been able to claim these credits retroactively, taxpayers could have been on the hook for an additional $50 billion. As part of a year‐​end spending package in 2019, Congress clarified the law and made the change retroactive, denying the credit to butane‐​mixed gasoline.

No End in Sight

The TIGTA report concludes that “with the passage of additional and expanded clean energy tax credits in the IRA, there is even greater incentive to take advantage of biofuel tax credits and make fraudulent claims for biofuel that does not exist or does not qualify for the biofuel tax credits.”

The biofuel tax credits are only one small microsome of the problems that follow in the wake of overly generous, targeted federal tax subsidies. In the past, I’ve written about the problems with the Employee Retention Tax Credit, a pandemic‐​era payroll tax subsidy whose cost has ballooned from $77 billion to as much as $550 billion due to a combination of lax rules and outright fraud.

The IRA is estimated to include more than $900 billion in new and expanded energy tax credits over 10 years. Many of the credit programs essentially provide cash subsidies (through tradeable tax credits), often in excess of the cost of producing the energy. For example, a new hydrogen tax credit that one analyst called “the most generous clean hydrogen subsidy in the world” could cover more than 100 percent of the cost of production in some places. Such large subsidies will invariably attract new forms of abuse. In another context, the Department of Energy inspector general has said that the IRA spending and loan programs will create an “unprecedented” level of risk for fraud and financial mismanagement.

Unlike the butane loophole, when Congress and the IRS worked in concert to prevent the worst abuses, the Biden administration has been actively expanding loopholes to increase IRA tax credit eligibility and program costs. For example, under a broad interpretation of electric vehicle subsidies, the credits for leased cars are not subject to Congress’s intended restrictions that apply to consumer‐​purchased car battery component sourcing, household incomes, and vehicle prices.

With hundreds of billions—if not trillions—of dollars of technologically and administratively complex tax credits up for grabs, Congress should expect history to repeat itself. Pioneering lawyers will find ways to exploit the rules legally, and less scrupulous actors will use the programs’ complexities to defraud taxpayers.

Every energy tax credit should be repealed. They are economically destructive, have proven enforcement problems, and create unexpected financial risks to federal budgets.

Jeffrey A. Singer

Yesterday, the Vermont Senate passed H.72, which permits an overdose prevention center (OPC) to operate in one municipality in the state, provided the municipality approves. The mayor and city council of Burlington, Vermont’s largest city, have already signaled that they support this proven harm reduction strategy.

In a Cato briefing paper last year, I reported that OPCs have been preventing overdose deaths and the spread of infections for more than 40 years. In 2023, there were 147 OPCs operating in 91 communities and 16 countries. Two have been saving lives in New York City since December 2021 and had reversed more than 1,000 overdoses by the summer of 2023.

Rhode Island lawmakers approved OPCs in 2022; its first one is about to open in Providence.

A 1986 federal law, 21 U.S.C. Section 856, also referred to as the “crackhouse statute,” makes it illegal to “knowingly open, lease, rent, use, or maintain any place, whether permanently or temporarily, for the purpose of manufacturing, distributing, or using any controlled substance.” Thus, New York City and Rhode Island are defying federal law.

Last year, Minnesota’s governor signed a law authorizing its Department of Health Services to establish OPCs, but the agency has hesitated to open them, stating that “federal law has been interpreted as prohibiting safer use spaces.”

As more state and local governments defy federal law and embrace OPCs, it might move Congress to repeal or amend the “crackhouse statute.”

Vermont Governor Phil Scott (R) has opposed OPCs in the past. He vetoed a 2022 bill that sought to create one in the state. However, Dr. Mark Levine, Vermont’s health commissioner, recently voiced support for OPCs.

H. 72 passed the Senate with a veto‐​proof majority of 21–8, and supporters believe it has enough support in the Vermont House to override a veto. Perhaps the governor’s opinion of OPCs has changed as overdose deaths continue to mount and he will sign the bill.