We’ve reported many times on the syndrome of towns outside St. Louis which, often lacking another promising tax base for municipal services, run ticket mills so as to get by on fine and fee revenue. Missouri law limits the share of their budget that can be derived from traffic fines, but not other fines, which means that some towns like Pagedale hammer their homeowners and other locals with regular fines over untrimmed trees, barbecue sets left in front yards, and other minor offenses. But is this illegal? An Institute for Justice lawsuit seeks class-action status on behalf of persons fined for violations as minor as mismatched blinds. [Scott Shackford, Reason]
Archive for 2015
Twilight of Stan Chesley
A judge has issued an arrest warrant for disgraced and disbarred Stan Chesley, once “Master of Disaster” of tort cases and a key figure in the Kentucky fen-phen scandal [Cincinnati Business Journal, Cincinnati Enquirer]
The thin blue ego: head of police union menaces Tarantino
Forget boycotts and protests: the executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police knew what he was doing when he warned Quentin Tarantino about a “surprise” at the hands of police who would wait until seizing the “right time and place” to “try to hurt” the filmmaker (who has lately criticized police shootings). Asked to clarify, Fraternal Order of Police executive director Jim Pasco said he wasn’t talking about physical violence, but didn’t rule out the other ways police can use the powers of their office to hurt people. I’ve got a post at Cato wondering where this sort of talk will lead. Meanwhile, Scott Shackford at Reason suspects that Pasco’s we-know-where-you-live hinting will end in an anticlimax, like bringing out an inflatable rat or something.
NYT public editor: yes, nail salon series had problems
Poynter: “A blockbuster investigation from The New York Times that provoked officials to intervene in poor workplace conditions in nail salons throughout New York ‘went too far in generalizing about an entire industry,’ Public Editor Margaret Sullivan wrote Friday morning.” That’s, well, cautiously worded: as critics have demonstrated, the series got basic facts wrong and its falsehoods have hurt thousands of New Yorkers, especially struggling immigrants, in multiple ways.
Major congratulations to Jim Epstein, Elizabeth Nolan Brown, and the others at Reason and elsewhere who relentlessly exposed the faults in the Times coverage. And Sullivan’s letter is revealing about just why editors until now ignored Epstein’s Reason coverage, which blew up some of the series’ central allegations about advertised pay rates in the Chinese-language press and about supposed clusters of health effects. “The Times has not responded [because] editors think the magazine, which generally opposes regulation, [is] biased.” Some Twitter responses:
So NYT editors dismiss criticism if coming from a magazine with point-of-view? https://t.co/7WhA24d5Aj pic.twitter.com/zpaFgMBjJd
— Michael Calderone (@mlcalderone) November 6, 2015
Worth noting that NYT opposes letting illegal immigrants work https://t.co/IsX0Xlv9bC Send them back to Fujian? pic.twitter.com/oAtjxxDCCI
— Virginia Postrel (@vpostrel) November 6, 2015
My adventures in redistricting reform
What the reform panel is proposing is about as far removed from party bosses as feasible. …. one thing is clear, the commission is headed in the proper direction.
— Baltimore Sun editorial, November 2
Gerrymandering is rife across the country, resulting in artificially drawn districts intended to protect or defeat certain incumbents, maximize one party’s share of power, or achieve other political goals. My own state of Maryland suffers from a famously awful Congressional gerrymander, including the notorious District 3, compared with a “broken-winged pterodactyl” or the blood splatters from a crime scene.
I’ve had a chance to do something about this problem over the past three months as co-chair of the Maryland Redistricting Reform Commission, created by Gov. Larry Hogan in August to gather information and draft recommendations for a new and better way of doing things. Following public hearings, testimony from experts and considerable research, we filed our report with the governor on Tuesday.
Len Lazarick at Maryland Reporter sums up some of the key points. If enacted, our plan would make Maryland the only state in which elected legislators and the governor would no say at all — zero — in deciding who should sit on a line-drawing commission. Our plan follows several elements of California’s ground-breaking plan, including screening of volunteers and randomized pools, simplified and adapted to the circumstances of our smaller state. In addition to requiring congruence with county and city boundaries where possible, contiguity, and compactness, we would join a very few states in instructing the drafters of lines to ignore partisan indicators such as voter registration and past voting results, as well as the place of residence of incumbents or any other person.
Full report here. Some more coverage: Carroll County Times editorial; Naomi Eide, Capital News Service; Josh Hicks, Washington Post; Erin Cox, Baltimore Sun; Fox Baltimore; Jen Fifield, Frederick News-Post (this last quoting me at length, and see also this profile in August).
From the comments: arrestees stay out?
Commenter Gitarcarver on yesterday’s item about how some in the Charlotte Police Department have talked about designating “public safety zones” where persons who have previously been arrested would be forbidden to go:
The City wants to make these zones based on arrests (not convictions.)
At the same time, an employer cannot ask whether a person has been arrested. Of course, there is now the push for “ban the box” which means an employer cannot ask about a conviction.
The City wants to say it can ban people and arrest people from public property, but those private companies can’t even ask about those convictions (much less arrests) during the initial hiring process.
Yeah.
THAT makes sense.
Banking and finance roundup
- Robert Litan in Fortune on why Elizabeth Warren went after him;
- “Economists have no idea how to measure the value created by the financial sector.” [Arnold Kling]
- W$J at end of August had an investigative report on the (opaque, high-discretion, unaccountable) system of installing “monitors” in banks and other financial institutions to settle civil or criminal charges;
- Update: in a sidebar to my City Journal piece on New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman this summer, I covered his charges of “redlining” against small upstate banks that did not operate in inner cities; now Schneiderman has extracted $825,000 from a Buffalo bank [NY AG press release]
- No kangaroo courts at the SEC, please [Bloomberg View editorial on in-house adjudicators, earlier here, etc.]
- How the FATCA law, deplored in this space for years, makes life hard for U.S. expatriates/spouses [Colleen Graffy, WSJ]
- “Except for the ten to twelve million people who use them every year, just about everybody hates payday loans.” [New York Fed “Liberty Street Economics” via Tabarrok] Despite reports of FDIC back-off, Operation Choke Point controversy not over [Ballard Spahr via Kevin Funnell]
“Arbitration is everywhere and not all bad”
Yale’s Stephen Carter on some of the problems with that New York Times hatchet job attacking consumer arbitration [Bloomberg View, earlier]
Election results special
In an outbreak of economic sanity, voters in Portland, Maine on Tuesday rejected a $15 minimum wage, while San Francisco voters turned down a measure to crush AirBnB (complete with lawsuit-generating component). Ohio voters soundly defeated a proposal for a legalized, but monopolized, marijuana trade that many libertarian commentators considered worse than no bill at all. And after a race notable for its high volume of interest-group contributions, Pennsylvania voters chose to fill three seats on the state’s supreme court with a slate of three Democratic candidates backed by trial lawyers.
Police and prosecution roundup
- Mark your calendar: December 1 Cato hosts a policing conference in Washington, D.C.;
- “Note: DOJ thinks flying from Chicago to Los Angeles is suspicious.” Well, no wonder they did a forfeiture then! [@bradheath]
- Mississippi voters on Tuesday returned longtime Attorney General Jim Hood to office by 56-44 margin [Radley Balko; Jackson Clarion-Ledger; earlier Balko on Hood’s spotted record as prosecutor]
- “No! Mine is more unconstitutional!” Police and council in Charlotte, N.C. mull “whether to create ‘public safety zones,’ city areas where people with past arrests would be prohibited from entering.”‘ [Charlotte Observer]
- Harvard lawprof Jeannie Suk on the St. Paul’s sexual assault case and the rapidly changing definition of rape [Jeannie Suk, New Yorker]
- Prison “pay to stay” charges can far exceed any reasonable ability to pay, and few outside the world of ex-offenders “even know it’s happening” [Scott Greenfield]
- “Was it a turf war gone mad? Or a botched police response?” [Nathaniel Penn, GQ, on the Waco biker gang shoot-out, earlier here, here, here]