The Supreme Court, having created the problem of qualified immunity to shield police from being held liable for their misconduct, keeps refusing to fix it.
No one doubts the man, Levi Frasier, had the right to record the stop. To date, six federal appeals courts have ruled there is a constitutional right to record police officers in public, a sentiment shared by the overwhelming majority of constitutional scholars. No federal appeals court has ruled the other way. In fact, the law is so well established that the officers in Denver were trained that citizens have such a right, and to respect it.
Yet the 10th Circuit ruled that because that circuit had yet to rule on the matter, the right was not yet “clearly established.” In a truly remarkable sentence, the court added, “It is therefore ‘irrelevant’ whether each officer defendant actually believed — or even in some sense knew — that his conduct violated . . . the First Amendment.”
In my last column, I looked at the origins of qualified immunity, the court-created doctrine that makes it extremely difficult to sue police officers for abuse and other constitutional violations. As I previously pointed out, legal scholars generally point to 1967′s Pierson v. Ray as the court’s first major decision affording protection to law enforcement (and other government officials) from civil liability for constitutional violations, so long as the violations were in good faith.
But that decision required courts (or juries) to determine the state of mind of the officers accused, always a difficult thing to discern. So in 1982, the court revised the policy and created qualified immunity as we know it today. To successfully sue a police officer, a plaintiff must pass a two-prong test, showing that: (A) the police violated the plaintiff’s constitutional rights, and (B) a reasonable person should have known the officers’ actions were unconstitutional under “clearly established” law.
Even more important is the question of what to do with capital losses. Billionaires do not just make money by exploiting the poor, but are rich because they take on business opportunities that sometimes turn out to be losers. Similarly, stocks and other securities can decline in value. Would billionaires receive tax refund checks in those years? For example, what would happen if the stock market had a sharp selloff in December? Would billionaires receive massive tax write-offs on unrealized losses in their portfolio, leading the IRS to send tax refund checks to Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett?
Keep in mind the original income tax law was sold on the premise it was only to tax the rich.
President Biden’s proposal to require roughly seven hundred US billionaires to pay taxes annually on unrealized capital gains has garnered wide support from Democrats as another step to make the rich pay for the uncontrolled spending by the federal government. House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi says Democrats hope the plan will raise as much as $250 billion to help pay for expanding the social safety net and tackling climate change. The current tax system is already too complicated and adding another layer will not make the system any fairer or make rich people pay more in taxes. More importantly, the proposal is another scheme by the government that defies the reality and raises again questions of government overreach.
The proposal would reinvent how the government taxes investments not for everyone but just for the few hundred richest people. Under the current plan under discussion, capital gains on stocks and other traded assets would be taxed only for US taxpayers with over $1 billion in assets or $100 million in income for three consecutive years. What this amounts to is a different interpretation of the tax code for rich people. When an investor buys an asset, stock, real estate, or even a business, the asset hopefully becomes more valuable over time. Currently, the tax code requires the investor to pay a capital gains tax only when the investor sells the asset. However, under the new proposal the capital gain does not have to be realized in order to be taxed. Lawmakers are aiming to effectively increase the taxes rich people pay by rewriting the rules. Often investors hold on to their investments over many years while their assets increase in value, thus avoiding paying a capital gains tax until many years down the road, except for paying income taxes on the dividends and other cash distributions from the investment. In theory, a person could accrue capital gains indefinitely while never owing any taxes. In the proposal under consideration, the simple increase in the value in a portfolio will be taxed.
While the idea to get billionaires to pay more of their fair share in taxes seems to get lots of support from the public, lawmakers miss a key point in their excitement about having the rich pay more in taxes, the reality of the current tax system. The rhetoric of the super wealthy getting richer during the pandemic without having to pay taxes on the increases in wealth while regular taxpayers have to pay taxes on their income every year sounds very good to the tax-the-rich crowd. Surely, George Soros and other billionaires will comply and hand over their money without resisting. Actually George Soros applauds and supports this proposal while at the same time, according to the ProPublica report from June, Soros has not paid federal income tax for three years in a row. Similarly, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have not paid federal income taxes in some years.
The proposal defies reality as not all assets are as easy to value as publicly traded stocks. For example, a rare but valuable item like a precious painting or music album like the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” would be even more difficult to tax which raises the question on how do you assess the value of less liquid assets. Billionaires are the type of investor with the means to purchase less liquid investments like rare pieces of art. More importantly, as the wealth of people increases, they have a bigger incentive to hire high priced tax accountants and tax lawyers to fight the internal revenue service every step of the way. Ultimately, the government would have to be prepared to fight long and complicated legal battles with billionaires to establish what constitutes a capital gain.
Even more important is the question of what to do with capital losses. Billionaires do not just make money by exploiting the poor, but are rich because they take on business opportunities that sometimes turn out to be losers. Similarly, stocks and other securities can decline in value. Would billionaires receive tax refund checks in those years? For example, what would happen if the stock market had a sharp selloff in December? Would billionaires receive massive tax write-offs on unrealized losses in their portfolio, leading the IRS to send tax refund checks to Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett? Ultimately, this will lead to the question when of valuations for unrealized gain taxes would be determined. Lawmakers forget that just because something increases in value does not mean the owner has the cash to pay taxes. The current rationale of taxing capital gains once the asset is sold avoids two fundamental problems with the proposal. First, the market alone should determine the fair market value of an asset, not the IRS according to some complicated formula defying reality. Secondly, even billionaires may not have the cash to pay taxes on unrealized gains. A tax on realized capital gains avoids those two problems: once an asset is sold, the true value is determined and the seller will have money from the sale to pay the tax bill.
While the current proposal will be supported by a large swath of the public, as the rhetoric is simply too appealing, taxpayers should be alarmed by this proposal. Once lawmakers have the power to tax unrealized gains, it will be just a matter of time before lawmakers running out of tax revenue will take aim at one of the largest sources of wealth hiding from the IRS, unrealized gains in real estate and mutual funds that the public holds. For example, CNBC reported that homeowners with mortgages saw their equity jump by 20 percent from a year earlier in the first quarter, which represents a collective cash gain of close to $2 trillion, or an average gain of $33,400 per borrower. Would it not be nice for the government to tax the increase in value in your house every year?
This proposal is dangerous and should be declared unconstitutional. As Ludwig von Mises explained, “‘Taxing the Rich’ Doesn’t Make Us Better Off,” and new taxes are always a danger to every productive citizen. Author:
Would Burundi Be Better Off If America Impoverished Itself?
The fact is that Americans consume more because Americans produce more. That’s right—more than 6 percent of the world’s potato chips, baseballs, skateboards, and countless other things. If we didn’t first produce, we wouldn’t have it to consume or to trade for what we really wanted. How can such an elementary point, such a basic principle of life and economics, be lost on anyone who doesn’t have to sign his name with an “X”?
wenty years ago, a United Nations report listed the United States as consuming 115,540 kilowatt-hours of energy per person per year. At the same time, each person in the tiny central African nation of Burundi was using up just 120 kilowatt-hours. My guess is that today, the average American is still consuming about a thousand times as much energy as the average Burundian. It’s also a safe bet that the “experts” at the United Nations want Americans to feel just as guilty about the disparity today as 20 years ago.
Is this something about which Americans should flog themselves in unremitting guilt? Does Burundi use less energy because America uses too much? Is world energy a fixed pie, with America greedily hogging more than its quota at the expense of the Burundis of the planet? Would Burundi be better off if America impoverished itself? Questions like these were answered definitively by free-market economists decades ago, but like a nagging mother-in-law, the questions just never go away.
You’ve heard this international class warfare stuff before, from many sources besides the United Nations. A few years ago, the mantra of the international statist community—repeated endlessly in the media—was this: “Americans are only 6 percent of the world’s population but they consume 40 percent of the world’s energy.” Greed was supposed to be the explanation for this disparity, and the solution offered was for America to spread its wealth in foreign-aid gifts to the less fortunate countries of the world.
Energy, of course, wasn’t (and still isn’t) the only thing of which America consumes more than its share of global population. We also eat more than 6 percent of the world’s potato chips and broccoli. We enjoy more than 6 percent of the world’s indoor plumbing, hearing aids, and baseballs. We operate more than 6 percent of the world’s cars, trucks, hang gliders, tricycles, and skateboards. We listen to more than 6 percent of all lectures and read more than 6 percent of the world’s books. And we probably put up with more than our share of nonsense too.
The fact is that Americans consume more because Americans produce more. That’s right—more than 6 percent of the world’s potato chips, baseballs, skateboards, and countless other things. If we didn’t first produce, we wouldn’t have it to consume or to trade for what we really wanted. How can such an elementary point, such a basic principle of life and economics, be lost on anyone who doesn’t have to sign his name with an “X”?
Unfortunately, the U.N. is at it again. Last September it issued a document called “The Human Development Report 1998.” The richest fifth of the world’s nations, declares the report, accounts for 86 percent of private consumption. Never mind the inherently dubious nature of adding up “private consumption” in almost 200 different countries.
The report is yet another lamentation about how the rich have it and the poor don’t: the richest fifth purchase nine times as much meat, have access to nearly 50 times as many telephones, and use more than 80 times the paper products and motorized vehicles than the poorest fifth. While two billion people worldwide supposedly go without schools and toilets, self-indulgent Americans are painting themselves with $8 billion in cosmetics and Europeans are feasting on $11 billion in ice cream. To reduce these horrid inequalities, the report recommends that “consumption levels among the poor” be increased to “basic” levels.
Think about that. The poor nations don’t consume much now, and the U.N. tells us that the answer is for them to consume more. How are the poor nations to get more? Change their ways? Produce more, perhaps? If the U.N. thinks that poor nations’ low productivity is at fault here, there’s little sign of it. As the New York Times revealed, “the report only skirts the issue of what role the poorest nations themselves play in this predicament.”
The sad fact is that in those poor countries like Burundi, indigenous political and cultural barriers to production constitute the overwhelming if not exclusive source of poverty. Routinely, the chronically destitute nations of the world are the ones that make war on private property, keep out foreign investment, impose viciously punitive taxes and regulations, spend inordinate sums on the military, squander resources on corruption and public works boondoggles, and in general, penalize or even kill anybody with enough spunk to start a business. These nations don’t consume much because, as a result of these barriers, they don’t produce much. It’s as simple as that. And it’s no coincidence that reports to the contrary come forth from a world body in which the ranks of the benighted are legion.
What poor nations need to do is to create the enlightened political and cultural conditions whereby capital investment and the resulting production are encouraged instead of suppressed. This is not new information. It’s the same formula by which America emerged from the status of 13 poor backwater colonies to the wealthiest nation on the globe. With a relatively free economy, America has shown the world how to go from Model T’s to space shuttles in less time than most peoples have taken to get from dirt paths to gravel roads. Other countries from England to Hong Kong can boast similar accomplishments as well, and for similar reasons.
It is no disgrace that Americans consume 40 percent of the world’s energy, or whatever the number may really be. Rather, it is a tribute to our ingenuity, creativity, and enterprise. We’ve put our God-given abilities to work within a system that even with all its government intervention is still infinitely more hospitable to production than Burundi’s. If we restricted our energy consumption to just 6 percent of the total world supply, our lives would be shorter, less healthy, and a lot more painful. There would be fewer of us, and not by choice. The rest of the world would be worse off too because poor people cannot materially do much to help other poor people through trade.
People who are interested in ending poverty and really solving economic problems would do well to read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and ignore any report that comes out of the United Nations.
WASHINGTON – The State Department on Friday named a new coordinator for its investigation into cases of Havana Syndrome, responding to increased pressure from lawmakers to investigate and respond to hundreds of brain injuries reported by diplomats and intelligence officers.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken appointed a high-ranking deputy, Jonathan Moore, to coordinate the department’s task force on the cases. He replaces Pamela Spratlen, a retired diplomat temporarily called back into service by Blinken before leaving in September.
Blinken also appointed retired ambassador Margaret Uyehara to lead efforts to directly support care for State Department employees.
Investigators have been studying a growing number of reported cases by U.S. personnel around the world and whether they are caused by exposure to microwaves or other forms of directed energy. People affected have reported headaches, dizziness, nausea, and other symptoms consistent with traumatic brain injuries.
Possibilities under consideration include the usage of a surveillance tool or a device intended to harm. The cases are known as “Havana Syndrome” dating to a series of reported brain injuries in 2016 at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba.
After years of investigation, the U.S. government has still not publicly identified what or who might be behind the incidents or whether they are attacks. But leaders in the State and Defense departments and at the CIA have pushed employees to report possible brain injuries and in some cases removed leaders who were seen as unsympathetic to the cases.
“This is about the health and security of our people and there’s nothing we take more seriously,” Blinken said Friday.
Several hundred cases are under investigation. There have been multiple reports in recent weeks of potential incidents linked to visits by high-profile U.S. officials, including a case involving a member of CIA Director William Burns’ traveling party in India and incidents at the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá, Colombia, before a visit by Blinken.
The State Department said Friday that Deputy Secretary Brian McKeon had met with diplomats in Vienna to discuss possible cases reported this year in Austria.
Democrats and Republicans have pressed President Joe Biden’s administration to determine who and what might be responsible for the cases and improve treatment for victims, many of whom have long said government officials aren’t taking their cases seriously. Biden earlier this month signed a bill intended to improve medical care for victims.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., said at a recent hearing that after speaking to victims, there was still “clearly a disconnect as to what is happening at the top levels of the State Department and how victims are being treated in some cases.”
Shaheen has introduced new legislation to fix what she described as differences in how various agencies are investigating and treating cases.
“There’s still not enough information that’s being shared, not enough coordination that’s being done,” she said in an interview. “There’s not a unanimity of response on how to deal with it.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks while announcing that Jonathan Moore, back, is the new coordinator for its investigation into cases of Havana Syndrome. ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/POOL VIA AP
Nicholas K. Geranios ASSOCIATED PRESS SPOKANE, Wash. – Costs to clean up a massive nuclear weapons complex in Washington state are usually expressed in the hundreds of billions of dollars and involve decades of work.
But one project on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is progressing at a much lower price.
The federal government is moving forward with the ‘cocooning’ of eight plutonium production reactors at Hanford that will place them in a state of long-term storage to allow radiation inside to dissipate over a period of decades, until they can be dismantled and buried.
‘It’s relatively non-expensive,’ Mark French, a manager for the U.S. Department of Energy, said of cocooning. ‘The cost of trying to dismantle the reactor and demolish the reactor core would be extremely expensive and put workers at risk.’
The federal government built nine nuclear reactors at Hanford to make plutonium for atomic bombs during World War II and the Cold War. The site along the Columbia River contains America’s largest quantity of radioactive waste.
The reactors are now shut down and sit like cement fortresses near the southeastern Washington city of Richland. Six have already been cocooned for long-term storage, and two more are headed in that direction. The ninth reactor was turned into a museum as part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park.
While World War II ended in 1945 and the Cold War ended in 1989, the United States is still paying billions of dollars per year for the disposal of the nuclear waste produced by the atomic weapons that played a big role in ending those conflicts. The biggest expense is dealing with a massive volume of liquid wastes left over from the production of plutonium, a key ingredient in nuclear weapons.
While the liquid wastes stored in 177 underground tanks will take decades of work and hundreds of billions of dollars to clean, efforts to secure the nine plutonium reactors are much closer to completion.
The last two reactors, shut down in 1970 and 1971, are about to enter the cocooning stage, when they are covered with steel and cement to prevent radioactivity from escaping into the environment, French said.
The cocoons are expected to last about 75 years, by which time the radioactivity inside will have dramatically decreased and there presumably will be a plan for final disposition of the remaining parts, French said.
Every five years, workers enter the reactor building to make sure there are no leaks or rodent or bird infestations, he said.
Cleanup of Hanford, which has about 11,000 employees and is half the size of Rhode Island, started in the late 1980s, and now costs about $2.5billion per year. The work has been slowed by technical issues, lack of funding, lawsuits from state regulators, worker exposure to radiation and turnover of contractors on the complex job.
But the handling of the old reactors is a bright spot.
The nine reactors – called B Reactor, C Reactor, D Reactor, DR Reactor, F Reactor, H Reactor, K-East Reactor, K-West Reactor, and N Reactor – were built from 1943 through 1965.
They were constructed next to the Columbia River because of the abundance of hydropower and cooling water needed by the reactors during operation.
All have been cocooned except K-East and K-West. Work on cocooning the K-East reactor has already started and should be finished by 2023, French said. Work on the K-West reactor is scheduled for completion in 2026.
The cocoon plan for K-East and K-West is to basically construct steel buildings around them. Each building is 158 feet long, 151 feet wide and 123 feet tall, French said. The two steel buildings will cost less than $10million each.
Future generations will decide the final disposition of the eight reactors, French said. They will likely be dismantled and buried in the central area of the Hanford site, away from the river.
‘Robots may be deployed in the future’ for that work, French said.
Hanford watchdogs generally agree with this process, said Tom Carpenter, director of the Seattle-based watchdog group Hanford Challenge.
‘Nobody is raising any concerns about cocooning,’ Carpenter said. ‘We’re all worried about the tank waste that needs immediate and urgent attention.’
The bigger question is whether future generations will be willing to pay the massive costs of Hanford cleanup, he said. Carpenter said the estimated cost to completely clean up just the tank wastes at the Hanford site is around $660billion.
‘It’s rather grim. It’s multigenerational,’ he said.
Guests on a bus tour of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation view the decommissioned plutonium-producing B Reactor near Richland, Wash., in 2008.Ted S. Warren/AP file
The most free country on earth has shifted over time, from England, to France, to the USA. Just because one country appear to be in decline doesn’t mean freedom itself is going away. It just means that you need to plan properly, and take matters into your own hands in order to preserve your liberty.
