An unsettling thought. Some allegations are so ugly that it’s hard to reserve judgment until the accused has had a chance to explain. This report from the Today Show is a reminder as to why our legal system has trials and a presumption of innocence.
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An unsettling thought. Some allegations are so ugly that it’s hard to reserve judgment until the accused has had a chance to explain. This report from the Today Show is a reminder as to why our legal system has trials and a presumption of innocence.
Business network CNBC outflanks Fox Business Network by running a new promo ad featuring Milton Friedman’s 1979 interview with Phil Donahue, wherein Friedman challenges Donahue’s views about capitalism and “greed”:
Lefties don’t like it. They don’t like it at all; they want you to write CNBC and complain. Yet they’re forced to concede that the video shows “the Right’s financial guru besting a liberal talk show host.” (Milton Friedman called himself a liberal, or a libertarian, not a conservative or rightist.)
Let’s just hope MSNBC doesn’t find out!
Over at Think Progress, a bevy of commenters dispute an anecdote shared in my book Market Education. Here’s what I wrote, in the teaser to chapter 8:
In late October of 1995, officials of the Pepsi company announced at Jersey City Hall that their corporation would donate thousands of dollars in scholarships to help low-income children attend the private school of their choice. The immediate response of the local public school teachers’ union was to threaten that a statewide boycott of all Pepsi products could not be ruled out. Pepsi vending machines around the city were vandalized and jammed. Three weeks later, company officials regretfully withdrew their offer.
What are government school teachers’ unions so afraid of?
The source article for this episode is of course cited in the book, but here is the link to that article on the Education Week newspaper’s website.
Some of the commenters made the point that policy should not be driven by anecdotes. I agree, which is why I already blogged the evidence that only private sector competition can control skyrocketing public school spending.
This week Obama announced that he intends to prosecute prisoners before military tribunals. The administration is taking pains to point out that Obama is not embracing the Bush policy. These will be Obama’s tribunals, not Bush’s. But since Mr. Obama’s executive order can be revised or withdrawn at any time, the new and improved procedures do not amount to much. The tribunals were wrongheaded under Bush and the critique applies equally well to Obama’s “new” policy.
As others have noted, Obama has now embraced tribunals, Gitmo, and the Patriot Act. Bad news, but at least Obama kept his promises to end the wars and get us on a sound financial footing.
For additional Cato work related to military tribunals, go here and here.
Over at the Fordham Institute, Senior Fellow Peter Meyer continues the assault on logic that Fordham has insisted on perpetrating when it comes to national curriculum standards. Writing about a New York Times story on the deceptive curriculum “guidelines” manifesto released by a number of national-standards supporters earlier this week, Meyer declares that:
Contrary to popular belief (especially in some Tea Party circles), a national curriculum, done properly, does not threaten local control. As we learn in this story, plenty of folks, including Randi Weingarten and our own Checker Finn, have signed on to a “common curriculum,” which its proponents say will constitute only about half of a school’s “academic time.”
Maybe I’m missing some very small but incredibly powerful wrinkle in the logic here, but it seems to me that by definition forcing local districts to use national standards must threaten local control. Indeed, it must not only threaten it, it must actually defeat it. And this is in no way changed by the curriculum having to account for “only about half” of a school’s time: Hours formerly controlled locally are now controlled nationally, which is inescapably a major incursion on local control.
Maybe in some dimension white is black, black is white, and ants are really walruses. But in this dimension, as far as I know, the laws of reality and logic must still apply — even to national curriculum standards.
It seems that Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack took exception to Ezra Klein’s recent blog post on “Why we still need cities”. Someone at the USDA emailed Ezra, outlining the Secretary’s concerns and to set up a time for the two of them to talk. Ezra took notes during their discussion and, yesterday, posted a “lightly edited” transcript of their conversation.
The Secretary had plenty of the standard talking points on hand — and some new ones, like the fact that we should support farm subsidies because rural America has good values and farmers don’t feel appreciated — but Ezra expertly took him to task, deftly pushing back on the non-sequiturs, questionable assumptions and enduring myths about the need for farm subsidies. He even gets in a worthy swipe at sugar tariffs and the “need” to produce all our food in America. Read the entire thing; it is worth your time.
(HT: Justin Logan)
Is this the last blog in America that hasn’t commented on the Charlie Sheen meltdown? There isn’t much of a public policy angle, of course. Oh sure, employment-law analysts are looking at whether Warner Bros. has the right to fire Charlie Sheen. John Stossel and Bill O’Reilly talked about that question Tuesday night. But I’ve got another contribution. If Sheen is gone, Warner Bros. is going to need another actor — and a new “situation” — to keep its hit show “Two and a Half Men” on the air. Here’s my treatment:
A womanizing actor (John Stamos) is delighted to buy a Malibu beach house at a fire-sale price when the owner (Charlie Sheen) suddenly leaves town. Then he’s shocked to discover that the brother and nephew of the previous owner are living in the house, not paying rent, and refusing to leave. He tells them to get out, but Stamos brings in a lawyer (Julianna Margulies) who tells him that under California lawyer-tenant law he can’t evict the people who are living there.
Warner Bros. might want to seek out the writer of Pacific Heights, a 1990 thriller that is almost a documentary on the horrors of landlord-tenant law. A young couple (Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith) buy a big house in San Francisco and then rent an apartment to a young man (Michael Keaton). He never pays them, and they can’t get him out, and then things get really scary. The lawyer lectures the couple — and the audience — on how “of course you’re right, but you’ll never win.” I just knew this happened to someone — maybe the screenwriter or someone he knew. Sure enough, when Cato published William Tucker’s book Rent Control, Zoning, and Affordable Housing, and I asked the director of Pacific Heights, the legendary John Schlesinger, for a jacket blurb, he readily agreed to say “If you thought Pacific Heights was fiction, you need to read this book”; and he told me that the screenwriter had a relative who had gone through a tenant nightmare.
Of course, Warner Bros. might prefer to hire that screenwriter for a movie about a company that hires a charming and handsome new employee (Charlie Sheen) who brings in lots of money but turns out to be a nightmare to work with. Can they fire him? Hilarity ensues.