“If Canada’s new impaired driving laws are passed police could show up on your doorstep — up to two hours after you arrive home — to demand a breath or saliva sample.” The proposals would “[drop] the requirement that officers must first have reasonable suspicion before demanding a breath test,” and shift to the accused the burden of proving that the timing of drinking as reflected in a breath test was legally innocent. Critics predicted a challenge under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to the changes, “which were announced the same day the federal government unveiled its bill to legalize marijuana.” [Bryan Labby, CBC]
Archive for May, 2017
May 3 roundup
- Sixth Circuit ruling breaks new ground in disturbing ways: employer can be sued under Fair Housing Act if it withdraws job offer based on disapproval of accepted applicant’s public position on a housing controversy [Linkletter v. Western Southern Financial Group Inc.; Chiodi]
- A request from blogger Coyote: he’s looking to interview folks who run 10-40 employee firms [details]
- “Massachusetts is just one of six states that prohibit employers from donating to candidates while allowing unions to donate,” and the only one that prohibits employers from administering a PAC [Paul Craney and James Manley, Commonwealth Magazine]
- California voters sought to fix gerrymandering in races for state and federal office, but omitted to address the county level. Guess what’s happening now? [AP] No one is really fooled by Maryland legislature’s pledge to reform redistricting if five (5) nearby states all agree to enact exactly the same reforms [Nancy Soreng and Jennifer Bevan-Dangel, Washington Post; Rachel Baye/WYPR and related audio, legislation]
- D.C. should concentrate on deregulating hotel and apartment provision, rather than try to choke off AirBnB. [David Alpert, Greater Greater Washington, rounding up various views] “California will audit Airbnb hosts for racial discrimination” [ABA Journal, Guardian]
- Securities class action settlements continue steep rise [Harvard Corporate Governance Project]
“Speech is not violence, and violence is not speech”
From Matt Enlow on Twitter, in response to my request:
@walterolson Added a little bit pic.twitter.com/7VIe5WO9et
— Matt Enlow (@CmonMattTHINK) May 2, 2017
Not only did I put it to use as a avatar, but so did two of the staunchest free-speech advocates on Twitter, Popehat and Christina Hoff Sommers.
I’ve noticed that many who seek to blur the speech-violence distinction believe that doing so will enable more effective social disapproval of hurtful speech. But perhaps its more salient effect is to undermine the basis for drawing lines against frank violence of action, as is already happening.
Ed Glaeser for Brookings on reforming land-use regulation
Self-recommending, as Tyler Cowen likes to say.
Public employment roundup
- From 2014, missed earlier, and relevant to bounty-hunting and public sector incentive systems: George Leef reviews Nicholas Parrillo’s Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government [Regulation]
- “Los Angeles’ Pension Problem Is Sinking The City” [Scott Beyer]
- Firefighter unions throw their weight around in Arizona local politics [Jessica Boehm, Arizona Republic]
- Public employee pay studies: “In this instance, I’d argue that casual intuition has a higher signal-to-noise ratio than does formal empiricism.” [Arnold Kling]
- Public sector employees aren’t sicker than comparable private employees but do take more illness/injury days off [Steven Malanga, City Journal]
- Mayor concedes there’s no “rational justification” for California city’s six-figure pensions, but that’s what the union got in its contract [Eric Boehm, Reason]
Paid leave entitlements that backfire
Paid leave and child care policy mandates make women differentially more expensive to employ. And then? Vanessa Brown Calder speaks to Caleb Brown in a Cato podcast, after discussing the issue in an earlier blog post:
Though the United States doesn’t have a federally-mandated paid leave policy, it did enact a federally mandated unpaid leave policy, Family & Medical Leave Act (FMLA), in 1993. And despite FMLA being an accepted part of the modern legislative fabric, the consequences of the policy are not all stellar. Analysis suggests women hired after the policy are five percent more likely to be employed but eight percent less likely to be promoted.
Though the U.S. hasn’t adopted a paid leave mandate, a few states have. Research on policy outcomes in California show female labor force participation rising after implementation of paid leave (maybe good?) and childbearing-aged female unemployment and unemployment duration rising, too (unambiguously bad). This is probably because the mandate made women universally more expensive in employer’s eyes, whether professional women intend to use benefits or not.
In the end, free benefits are not free. Notes Calder in the podcast: “Over the course of women’s lives, they are actually paying the price for some of these policies, and that’s something that is not part of the current debate.”
Medical roundup
- Scott Gottlieb likely to steer FDA in right direction [Daniel Klein]
- Study of shorter versus longer medical consent forms “finds no significant difference in comprehension, satisfaction, enrollment” [Grady et al., PLOS via Michelle Meyer]
- C’mon, ACLU and Covington: “Lawsuit Aims to Force Catholic Hospitals Perform Transgender-Related Surgeries” [Scott Shackford]
- So much: “What The New York Times Gets Wrong On Vaping Regulation” [Sally Satel]
- “Should you be compensated for your medical waste, especially if it turns out to be valuable? The right answer is: no.” [Ronald Bailey, Reason on Henrietta Lacks story]
- Kimberly-Clark: we’ve sold 70 million MicroCool hospital gowns without a single complaint of injury from alleged permeability. Calif. jury: that’ll be $454 million [Insurance Journal]