An article in last week’s New York Times joins others in asking us to sympathize with the beleaguered transit industry, whose ridership has dropped every year since Uber and Lyft arrived on the scene. The article notes that Uber and Lyft subsidized the 5.6 billion rides they carried last year to the tune of $2.7 billion, or almost 50 cents a ride.

“The risks of [transit] privatization are grave,” the Times article warns. Uber and Lyft are taking “a privileged subset of passengers away from public transit systems” which “undermines support for public transportation.”

What the article doesn’t say is that, in order to carry 9.6 billion riders last year, public transit demanded more than $50 billion in subsidies from taxpayers, or more than $5 per ride. In other words, transit subsidies per rider are more than ten times greater than Uber and Lyft subsidies.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but there is also a crucial difference between ride-hailing subsidies and transit subsidies: the money Uber and Lyft are spending is voluntarily given to them by investors who hope to eventually make a profit. Tax subsidies are taken involuntarily from taxpayers to support systems that, as long as they are publicly owned, will never come close to making a profit.

Instead of bemoaning the loss of transit riders to ride-hailing services, we should be celebrating the fact that a fast, convenient, and affordable service is taking away the need to subsidize slow, inconvenient, and expensive transit systems. It’s worth adding that Uber and Lyft might not be losing $2.7 billion a year if they didn’t have to compete with a transit industry that gets $50 billion in annual subsidies.

Further, the argument that ride hailing is stealing well-off passengers away from transit doesn’t stand up to the facts. As I’ve shown elsewhere, census data reveal that low-income people are buying cars and reducing their use of transit for commuting. The biggest growth market for transit is among people who earn more than $75,000 per year. They don’t need other taxpayers to subsidize their rides to work.

Congress will revisit these issues next year when it has to reauthorize federal highway and transit spending. Today, the Cato Institute published my new report urging Congress to put transportation programs on a pay-as-you-go basis, with funding mainly out of user fees rather than tax dollars.

For those who are interested in finding out what is happening to transit in your urban area, I’ve created a spreadsheet that has charts showing key variables for transit systems in more than 100 urban areas. As described in the instructions for this spreadsheet, all users have to do is find the number of the urban area they are interested in on the spreadsheet, enter that number in cell F1, and it will automatically make eleven charts for that area.

More on the State Department’s new Commission on Unalienable Rights, about which I wrote in this space on Friday. Aimed at providing Secretary Pompeo “with fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights,” the commission has raised several concerns. Chief among them is whether “natural law” is code, signaling that the department in future might “focus less on protecting women and LGBT people,” as put by Politico, which broke the story on Thursday afternoon. 

Giving weight to those concerns, ABC News late Friday reported that, according to a source familiar with the plans for the commission, Princeton’s Robbie George has played a prominent role in its creation. I’ve known Prof. George for some time now. He’s a first-rate scholar and advocate for religious liberty. In fact, he spoke at Cato’s 2016 conference on religious liberty, which we memorialized with our book Deep Commitments. But as co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage and a prominent voice in Catholic circles, he has long argued against the gay-rights agenda, especially same-sex marriage.

If this is the course the commission takes, this “fresh thinking about human rights” could seriously complicate the work of the department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, especially in countries with draconian anti-gay laws and practices. But at a theoretical level too, as noted in my earlier post, the promise this “fresh thinking” raises for correcting some of the misconceptions that afflict today’s rights talk could easily be lost by coupling natural law and religious belief. A word is in order on that matter. 

Start with this: Natural law and natural rights are not the same thing. True, natural rights emerged historically from natural law. And in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson did speak of our rights as being “endowed by [our] Creator.” But that was a very general invocation, suited properly for “a candid World” wherein was found a variety of beliefs. Properly understood, however, especially as modern natural rights theory has evolved, our rights are not grounded in a prescriptive natural law, much less in any belief system, religious or otherwise, but in universal human reason, as John Locke and many of the Founders understood. They saw that liberty—the right to pursue happiness by our own subjective lights—was the very essence of natural rights. 

Thus, on this understanding, natural rights are not derived from natural law. On the contrary, natural law—the rules suited to securing our logically prior natural rights—is derived from those rights. In fact, if you look at the famous second paragraph of the Declaration, that’s exactly the order you’ll find. Jefferson sets forth the moral vision first, defined by our natural rights; only then does he set forth the political and legal order—the law—that is “instituted among Men” to secure those rights. 

Historically, of course, many have associated natural law with, and grounded it on, religious beliefs, and many still do, although the ancient Greeks, especially the Stoics, and Roman Law did not so ground it. But the American founding emerged from the Enlightenment—English, Scottish, and continental—and so is best understood as having eschewed an undue reliance on theological considerations—though I grant that on that historical question it’s a mixed record, despite the theory of the matter. 

As a practical matter, however, it would be far better if this commission emphasized natural rights and the nation’s founding principles rather than natural law, because the former does not carry what many today see, not without reason, as the “baggage” of the latter. I presume that we all want a world that respects liberty, including religious liberty, not one that restricts our freedoms. That is what animated us at Cato’s Center for Constitutional Studies as the same-sex cases were coming along. Thus, we filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court defending, on equal protection grounds, the liberty of same-sex couples to marry and, after that, the liberty of bakers and others, on religious freedom grounds, to decline to participate in various ways in same-sex weddings. In both cases, the principle was the same—liberty. 

As I intimated in Friday’s post, albeit with a focus on aberrations that have arisen from modern “human rights” thinking, this commission, properly staffed and conducted, affords an opportunity to redirect our public debate to America’s first principles—and to do so on many issues. Given the state of liberty today around the world, the concerns raised so far about this commission should be seen not as something to be countered but to be embraced. There will be close calls, to be sure, and some differences. But in the end, those raising the concerns and those calling for fresh thinking should be focused on the same thing—the liberty that natural rights are all about. 

I think Arnold Kling is one of the most insightful bloggers around so I am pleased that he likes my latest Cato policy analysis. He remarks:

My worry is that American culture no longer supports free speech…But hurting someone’s feelings should not count as direct harm. Racist remarks or Holocaust denial may be uncouth, but in a culture of free speech they should be permitted.

I agree with Kling about extreme speech. I am not sure that the culture for free speech has changed all that much. We first learned in the 1950s that while Americans overwhelmingly supported the First Amendment in the abstract, majorities or significant minorities often opposed freedom of speech in concrete cases (like letting unpopular minorities speak). But beyond America’s general culture of free speech, things have changed. In the past elites supported free speech. Now I wonder if they do.

Some attribute the problems of free speech (especially among elites) to the rise of identity politics. In his excellent book Identity, Francis Fukuyama sees identity politics as the demand for public recognition of the dignity of each person’s inner self. That inner self should be authentic rather than imposed by society. Authenticity in turn implies connections to a group and to history. Speech that offends this dignity of the inner self contravenes identity politics.

But need identity and free speech be at odds? Free speech is, itself, vital to the realization and expression of authentic identity. It is possible to imagine a society of mutually recognizing individuals, each secure in reciprocal recognition of their inner selves. The culture of such a society would discourage speech that denigrates the identities of others. Giving such offense would be a kind of attack on the underlying framework of mutual recognition. Perhaps such a society would censor offensive speech to defend its foundations in mutual recognition. However, we might imagine that the members of such a society would tolerate free speech. Its citizens might see offensive speech as an opportunity to recall why mutual recognition is valuable.

That story might seem fanciful. Such a society would surely be illiberal. Perhaps, but I do not think the problem is necessarily identity per se. Rather, in our society identity politics are often associated with a politics of the oppressed. Let me explain.

In his book The Three Languages of Politics, Arnold Kling notes that Progressives generally see the world as divided between oppressors and the oppressed. (I would add a third group, the Guardians or the political class). Some social groups are oppressors, others their victims, the oppressed. The job of the Guardians is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” or more generally, help the oppressed in their endless struggle against their oppressors. In this view of the world, speech may just be a weapon used in several ways by the oppressors to subjugate the oppressed. It directly attacks the dignity of the oppressed. Oppressors cast doubt on the harms to the dignity of the oppressed. The speech of the oppressor justifies a society marked by oppression. He demands recognition of a universal self that excludes the lived experiences of the oppressed. In this world with these harms, censorship is not really an abuse of power. It is an obligation of the Guardians, a necessary task for the good ruler. It is this view of politics – oppressed versus oppressor – that transforms identity into censorship.

That we can imagine a liberal politics of identity does not make it so in reality. Perhaps the interests and ideals that animate our politics mean the politics of identity and oppression are united for the foreseeable future. Perhaps vindicating identity will prompt our Guardians to censor offensive speech; doing otherwise would foster “oppressive tolerance.” But if a world of mutual recognition can be imagined, it might also be realized, thereby reconciling free speech and identity and proving the resilience of liberalism along the way. But realizing that dream will require much from everyone, and it is far from clear than anyone can or will meet that challenge.

The Trump administration continues to pursue an extremely confrontational policy toward Iran, and Washington finds itself increasingly alone in doing so.  Even most of the traditional European allies show little enthusiasm for the U.S. approach.  Indeed, many of them now are openly defying Washington’s wishes.  As I discuss in a recent National Interest Online article, such resistance has been building for some time, but the administration’s newest actions have intensified the opposition.

NATO governments are especially uneasy about Washington’s decision to deploy B-52 bombers, send an additional 1,500 troops to the Middle East, and take other steps in response to Israeli-provided intelligence that Tehran was planning attacks on U.S. forces.  Washington’s withdrawal last year from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) regarding Tehran’s nuclear program already generated noticeable push-back from the other signatories to the agreement, including Britain, France, and Germany.  All three countries made it clear that they would not follow the United States to re-impose economic sanctions on Tehran.  Indeed, they and other European Union (EU) members openly sought ways that they could cushion Iran (and their own businesses) from the worst effects of the U.S. action.

The allies were annoyed again this year when the administration continued to insist that the European signatories withdraw from the JCPOA. Germany and other countries flatly refused.  In April, Washington exacerbated already serious transatlantic frictions when it eliminated some of the boycott waivers it had granted to EU firms.  Allied governments sharply criticized  that step and Washington’s other moves to tighten sanctions.  Iran soon stated that it would no longer abide by some JCPOA provisions and might resume enriching uranium. Tehran’s response confirmed some of the worst European apprehension about the probable consequences of Washington’s strategy.

The fight for marijuana legalization received a boost yesterday as the House Appropriations Committee released a draft bill for fiscal year 2020 Financial Services and General Government funding that includes provisions to protect financial services providers who do business with the marijuana industry.

The key provision of the legislation is Section 633 which states:

“None of the funds made available in this Act may be used to penalize a financial institution solely because the institution provides financial services to an entity that is a manufacturer, a producer, or a person that participates in any business or organized activity that involves handling marijuana, marijuana products, or marijuana proceeds, and engages in such activity pursuant to a law established by a State, political subdivision of a State, or Indian Tribe: Provided, That the term ‘‘State’’ means each of the several States, the District of Columbia, and any territory or possession of the United States.”

The legislation also removes an existing appropriations rider which has blocked the District of Columbia from using local revenues to regulate the production and sale of marijuana, which was legalized by voters in a 2014 ballot measure.

The victory for marijuana advocates is not total, however. Forbes reports:

“The provision only applies to spending legislation covering the Treasury Department, however, and thus would not shield banks from any enforcement activities carried out by the Justice Department, which is funded under a separate bill. It is also attached to the annual appropriations process, meaning it would have to be proactively renewed year after year if it is enacted.”

While it may be premature to celebrate the inclusion of this pro-marijuana language in Treasury funding, positive steps continue to be made in the push for legalization.

Research assistant Erin Partin co-authored this blog post.

President Trump announced that starting on June 10, the administration will impose a 5 percent tariff on all Mexican imports “until Mexico substantially stops the illegal inflow of aliens coming through its territory.” This tariff would escalate by 5 percent per month to an astonishing 25 percent “permanently” by October 1. This idea is a terrible policy. It will punish U.S. consumers with higher prices, and it could easily result in more illegal immigration.

Tariffs will undermine the Mexican economy and lead to more illegal immigration from Mexico.

Mexico’s exports—$195 billion to the United States—account for 38 percent of its GDP. Imposing a 25 percent tariff would make trade with Mexico unprofitable. For context, the U.S. currently has a 25 percent tariff on pickup trucks which virtually bans foreign-made pickups, as only 0.23 percent of U.S. pickups are foreign-made. An end to U.S.-Mexico trade would trigger mass layoffs in Mexico—particularly in northern Mexico. Consequentially, the Mexicans that are unemployed due to Trump’s tariffs would look to the United States for work, increasing illegal immigration and exacerbating the very problem Trump aims to ameliorate.

Indeed, President Trump is so focused on stopping immigration from Central America, which has now overtaken Mexican illegal immigration, that he has forgotten that for nearly a century, Mexicans dominated those flows. A 5 percent tariff by itself would be more than double the pre-North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) tariffs, so Trump is effectively terminating NAFTA in less than 2 weeks, which would devastate the Mexican economy. This would undoubtedly cause layoffs and create Mexicans looking for work north of the border again.

While NAFTA initially may have led to more illegal immigration as Mexico’s economy adjusted, its economy has now grown to the point that Mexican immigrant population in the United States has remained flat for almost a decade, and the illegal population from Mexico has fallen by 1.5 million, meaning that more Mexicans are leaving the United States than entering it. If Trump effectively terminates NAFTA with his tariffs, a reversal of these immigration trends is a very real possibility.

The threat of Mexico closing the border will keep illegal immigration from Central America high this summer.

In normal times, illegal immigration slows in June when temperatures reach dangerous levels and falls until February. Indeed, history shows that apprehensions fall 24 percent on average from May to July. But if Central Americans believe that Mexico might suddenly close the Guatemala-Mexico border, they will likely come to the border regardless of the additional risks—undoing the seasonal pattern of illegal immigration.

We know that immigrants react to the threat of border closures. In late 2016, Trump’s election disrupted this seasonal pattern as immigrants rushed to the border to beat his inauguration based on the (unfounded) fear that Trump would end asylum. Then, in October, Trump threatened to “close the border”, but his threat only scared immigrants to migrate before the seemingly imminent border closure. Indeed, 2018 and 2019 are the only two instances in which January apprehensions were higher than the previous May’s numbers since 2003. June 2017 was the first time on record that numbers rose in June. With the more effective transportation network now, it’s entirely possible that Trump could again break these seasonal patterns and keep illegal immigration higher than it would have otherwise been.

Mexico could retaliate on immigration in a big way.

The Mexican government is already helping carry out D.C.‘s agenda south of the U.S. border. Since FY 2014, the Mexican government has apprehended 692,476 Central Americans. It has stopped fast-tracking humanitarian visas for Central Americans traveling into Mexico. It is accepting thousands of Central Americans back into its country while they wait for asylum hearings north of the border. It has attempted to set up a migrant “containment” belt with federal forces at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec—the shortest point in Mexico. It is intercepting migrants trying to reach legal U.S. ports of entry. President Trump doesn’t appreciate these efforts, but he would regret it if Mexico loosened its policies to punish him for his tariffs.

The United States is unlikely to receive any major concessions from Mexico.

So far, Mexico has not promised to fulfill any of Trump’s latest demands, and it’s difficult to imagine why they would. Trump keeps moving the goalposts and is demanding that Mexico control not just its own actions with respect to enforcement, but also the actions of Central Americans.

Moreover, Trump has already tried to force Mexico to adopt a “safe third country” agreement that would allow him to boot Central Americans requesting asylum back into Mexico without a hearing. But the internal politics in Mexico will never allow it to allow nearly 500,000 Central Americans to be deported back to its northern cities. Tijuana already experienced major protests last year over homeless Central Americans who the U.S. blocked from crossing. Mexico will not accept a deal where the United States makes Central American migration 100 percent their problem. It will bet, hopefully correctly, that the White House really doesn’t want to end trade with Mexico, just as it didn’t want to “shut down” the border with Mexico earlier this year.

We live in a Manichean political world where every person and institution is said to be either good or evil. Facebook used to be in the good column; since November 2016, they are listed among the evil ones, oddly by both left and right. The truth: Facebook is a tremendously successful and innovative business that nevertheless makes mistakes. But beyond making its users happy, Facebook also does good. By defending free speech, for example, at a difficult time.

The case may be familiar to you. (The fact that the case is likely familiar to you is important as we shall see). Recently, someone created a distorted video of House leader Nancy Pelosi (D‑CA). Many thought the distortions suggested Pelosi was drunk. She was not. The video warped her image for political purposes (or perhaps, just for fun). More bluntly, the speech in question – the edited video – was a lie.

The question is not whether political speakers lie. They do and always have. Of course, everyone believes their team upholds truth while the other team lies. As Morrisey sang, “Everyone lies, nobody minds.” Well, everyone minds the other team’s lies and somehow ignores their own.

Political speech comprises lies, truth, and much uncertainty. Who should decide which speech falls into which category? Not the elected officials and unelected bureaucrats we call “the government.” The First Amendment and the courts preclude the government from determining truth (and lies). Elected officials want to be popular and win re-election; speech critical of them works against attaining those goals. Elected officials tend to see such criticism as “lies.” I would if I were an elected official. So would you. The incentives are terrible. Censorship would be a natural response. Hence we have a First Amendment, an unnatural state-of-affairs undergirded in the United States by fifty years of tradition, that is, of judicial doctrine.

So who separates truth and lies (and the in-between) in our unnatural state of free speech? Listeners, citizens, and voters. That’s our democratic faith, or our liberal faith, or whatever you want to call it. It’s a real source of national pride, our unnatural state of speaking freely. It’s a foundation of any American nationalism worth honoring.

But people do lie, and the lies can have terrible consequences. True enough. But our liberal faith and our unnatural state have an answer to lies: more speech. Consider the Pelosi incident. More speech revealed the lie in the video almost immediately. It is true that humans are lazy or uninterested and ignore the revelations of “more speech.” Or they seek only information that confirms their hatred and prejudices. In other words, listeners, citizens and voters often fail to live up to the demands of our liberal democratic faith. To remedy that failure shall we thus turn to “truth seeking” politicians who are too often thin-skinned and ambitious?

With social media we have a third player involved, the companies (above all, Facebook) that own and oversee these platforms for speech. The companies have a right to, and sometimes do, suppress speech on their platforms. The answer to their mistakes in this regard is…more speech. But the companies also rise to the occasion at times by defending our democratic faith in free speech. In the wake of the Pelosi incident, Facebook decided to leave the Pelosi video up on its platform. Monika Bickert, their head of content moderation at Facebook, affirmed that those who heard and saw the video should decide its truth or falsity. The alternative would have been Facebook taking down the video in the name of truth (and against lies). There are many problems with that alternative, not least Facebook would find itself fighting with, or subordinate to powerful politicians like Ms. Pelosi. So the company left the ultimate judgment to citizens and voters. They followed, in short, the American way.

But many people apparently do not like leaving judgments about truth to “more speech” and to Americans. Bickert was pilloried. For her part, Ms. Pelosi said Facebook acted as “willing enablers of the Russian interference in [the 2016] election.” To be blunt again, she accused Facebook of treason.

But Monika Bickert was the real American here, at least judging by our long tradition of free speech and respect for the intelligence of citizens and voters. That tradition is under fire. Perhaps it always has been. But we might wonder if our political class is abandoning freedom of speech.

Many on the right have decided that Carl Schmitt is correct when he wrote “politics is constituted by the distinction between friends and enemies.” The tech firms are perfect “enemies” for the populist right: filled with “woke” young people, located in California, and using technology few understand. The left has been abandoning free speech for a long time because “the corporations started winning” First Amendment cases. They also often judge constitutional rules by their effects on friends and enemies. In the name of that harsh doctrine, both right and left are abandoning the older faith that Americans have the right and the ability to discern truth from lies.

But there are still genuine conservatives and real liberals out there who believe in free speech. Last week Facebook paid a hefty price to be their friend.

This piece also appears at Tech Dirt.