u/lemon_lime_light

The “Great Enrichment,” a term coined by Deirdre McCloskey to describe per capita income growth after 1800, of the past few decades has been spectacular: The world is now much richer and far less prone to extreme poverty....So, what caused the Great Enrichment? How can it be sustained?

First, the rapid acceleration of technology...

Second: markets. China, India and many other countries abandoned the worst excesses of central planning after the late 1970s and, within a few decades, transformed. Markets work. They provide incentives to allocate resources efficiently, accumulate capital and adopt technology...

Third: an international order grounded in the rule of law, free trade and multilateral cooperation. Humans are at their best when they can interact peacefully under clear, stable rules...

Unfortunately, all three forces are under attack. Many intellectuals and much of the public increasingly distrust technology, free markets and the rules-based international order. This distrust is not baseless. The costs of technological change, international trade and immigration have fallen on specific workers and places, while the gains have been diffuse.

(Note: the author here uses "libertarianism" to "denote essentially the same ideology" as "classical liberalism".)

In an insightful recent article on the Liberalism.Org website, prominent libertarian political philosopher Matt Zwolinski argues that libertarians should place a higher value on democracy ["it is a way of keeping power in check. Democracy's distinctive function is to keep power contestable, so that the people who hold it can be removed without violence"].

I agree in part, but also differ on some key points. Libertarians should generally prefer democracy to other forms of government. But democracy should not be a first-order libertarian priority...

[I]t doesn't follow that democracy should be a first-order libertarian priority, on par with liberty, constraining coercion, property rights, and increasing human happiness. Once you recognize (as most libertarians and many other liberals do) that democratic government is not genuinely consensual, that it is prone to various pathologies,  and that democratically enacted policies are not exempt from moral censure, it becomes hard to argue that democracy is inherently valuable. Rather, democracy is an institutional tool that can - if properly constrained - help achieve genuinely fundamental values. In that respect, it is similar to such institutions as federalism, separation of powers, and judicial review. All of these can have great instrumental value. But none are valuable in and of themselves.

The two lawyers vying to replace Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty say she is misusing a new law that allows prosecutors to request sentence reductions in special cases.

The candidates, Anders Folk, former acting U.S. attorney for Minnesota, and DFL state Rep. Cedrick Frazier of New Hope, both condemned the use of the new law in this case. Frazier’s objection comes despite the fact that he co-sponsored the law while serving in the Minnesota House.

Earlier this year, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office requested to reduce Kemen Taylor II’s life sentence for his role in the murder of a 13-year-old boy and attempted murder of two other teenagers in 2011.

In its petition, the county argued Taylor was punished at trial for not accepting a plea deal and that his sentence did not accurately represent his culpability in the crime. The county also said he is no longer a danger to the public.

After the boy’s father strongly objected to the county’s move, both candidates to be the next Hennepin County attorney said the request should be denied by a judge.

A coalition of states [including Minnesota] and local governments sued the Trump administration Monday over what they called a “catastrophic” new policy that would make it harder for immigrants to obtain green cards if they rely on public benefits...

Trump officials have said the policy, known as the “public charge” rule, is necessary to protect public resources and to restore “the basic principle that immigrants must be able to support themselves"...

Many immigrants who do not have green cards are already ineligible for public benefits programs. But immigrant advocates fear that the rule would discourage noncitizens from using benefits programs even if they have U.S. citizen children who are legally eligible for food stamps, housing aid and other programs.

Federal law has long barred immigrants from obtaining green cards if they are likely to become primarily dependent on the government for subsistence. Immigration officers have historically considered the use of cash assistance programs or institutionalized long-term care, but not the use of benefits like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or Medicaid.

The Trump administration’s policy would reverse the long-standing practice, expanding the federal programs that immigration officers can consider before determining that someone is likely to become reliant on the federal government.

>A Hennepin County judge ruled Thursday that a man who killed a beloved Minneapolis grocery clerk is not guilty due to mental illness he was experiencing at the time, meaning he will remain confined indefinitely to a state hospital....People deemed mentally ill and dangerous...can petition for a reduction in custody, at least every three years, according to state law....It’s possible [the killer] could be released in the future if his condition improved, but [Hennepin County Attorney Mary] Moriarty said it’s “really, really, really hard” to be considered for that once someone is committed for a murder this serious and this severe of mental illness.

Do you think this is a good outcome? Is this how a good justice system should function?

Minneapolis may allow autonomous vehicles to roam the city, but only with someone in the driver’s seat as a “safety monitor” being paid at least minimum wage...

Council members say the rules, which also require all autonomous vehicle companies to be licensed with the city, would be groundbreaking nationally. The “safety monitor” would need to have a driver’s license and “immediate access to controls for steering, braking, and acceleration"...

The four ordinance authors — Council Members Robin Wonsley, Aurin Chowdhury and Jason Chavez and Vice President Jamal Osman — released a statement saying without regulations, automated vehicles may create significant safety risks, disrupt traffic, hinder the city’s transportation and sustainability goals, and displace thousands of workers.

Gallup says 71 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, near a record high. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says 10 percent of American workers are in labor unions, near a record low. What gives?

[T]he problem is not that [Chiara Cordelli's entry on 'capitalism' in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy] is critical of capitalism. There is nothing wrong with criticising capitalism, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman or classical liberalism. The problem is that much of the discussion does not pass even a modest ideological Turing test. An ideological Turing test asks whether one can state an opposing position so accurately that its proponents would recognise the argument as their own before one proceeds to criticise it. Here, too often, they would not.

This points to a common reflex in debates over ‘capitalism’ and ‘neoliberalism’. The vocabulary is often not used to define but rather rationalise already-held ideological priors. The characteristics one dislikes are incorporated into the definition of the system, after which those same characteristics are rediscovered as criticisms of it. The conclusion has, in part, been smuggled into the premises...

Some examples help show this usual reflex. When describing the ‘market capitalism’ advanced by Hayek and Friedman, Cordelli claims that they believed capitalism required ‘complete, private, and unregulated markets’, and that this stemmed from their acceptance of a ‘general equilibrium’ view, with the implication that ‘capitalism goes wrong when it is politically interfered with’. But both claims – which underlie much of the entry – are massively incorrect. Not minor quibbles, mind you, but major and easily verifiable errors. Friedman initially advocated antitrust laws and, while he moderated on this front later in life, he still believed they did some good. He supported a negative income tax – a variant of a guaranteed minimum income – and schooling vouchers. Hardly the mark of someone who believed in the complete absence of political interference. Hayek for his part rejected the idea of general equilibrium altogether and preferred to speak of competition and markets as discovery processes. He defended regulation of natural monopolies and he also spoke in favour of some basic welfare state functions.

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent accused of shooting and injuring a man during the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown in Minneapolis earlier this year was federally charged Wednesday with lying to investigators about the incident, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The case against Christian Castro, 52, is the first known instance of the Justice Department seeking to prosecute a federal immigration officer for their actions during the Minneapolis operation...

Prosecutors...allege that Castro misled investigators about the circumstances behind a Jan. 14 incident in which he fired his service weapon through the door of a duplex where an immigrant he was pursuing had fled after a car chase.

President Trump confirmed late Friday that the U.S. reached a deal with Venezuela to secure control of a big chunk of the Latin American country’s oil reserves...

Since ousting [former President] Maduro in January, Trump has pushed U.S. oil companies to plow money into the country in a bid to shore up oil production. But many have been hesitant to do so.

Friday’s deal would give the U.S. a foothold in some of the most promising oil-and-gas fields. The country says it has some 300 billion barrels of proven reserves, the largest in the world. In comparison, the U.S. has about 46 billion...

[Delcy] Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim president, has granted a private company—a joint project of the U.S. government and a private operator in Venezuela—a 100-year lease for the oil fields, a U.S. official said. The entity would be the world’s second-largest corporate holder of proven reserves after Saudi Aramco.

The U.S. government would hold a 55% share, split between equity ownership and oil production. As the company scales production, the oil would help fill the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the official added.

Direct U.S. involvement in foreign oil production is rare.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said Tuesday that her office will not file felony riot charges against far-right activist Jake Lang and others over Lang’s latest confrontation in Minneapolis, citing “prior communication” between police and Lang’s security detail.

Moriarty’s office did not detail the nature of that exchange, but said in a news release that: “After a review of extensive evidence of communication and logistical coordination between the Minneapolis Police Department and Lang’s security detail, there is not a path forward for felony charges to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Lang, 31, was arrested Saturday after the vehicle he was in drove onto a sidewalk in front of Minneapolis City Hall and towards a crowd of people as Lang raised a large sign with the N-word on it.

The Star Tribune reports that "A national coalition made up of millions of teachers, school staff and other union members has launched a boycott against Target in protest of the retailer’s decision not to publicly denounce the surge of immigration enforcement officers in the Twin Cities earlier this year".

The press release from the American Federation of Teachers urges teachers and families to "shop at retailers other than Target for their school supplies" after Target "fails to speak out against ICE activity".

Is this a good thing? Will you be joining the boycott?

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) is widely known as a reputable and accessible compendium of articles on complex scholarly subjects, offered free of charge to the public since 1995. Think of it as Wikipedia for philosophy, but with authors who are known experts in their subjects and peer review to maintain quality control.

That quality control broke down last week when the SEP published a new entry for “capitalism,” its first-ever foray into the subject. The concept of “capitalism” is an admittedly complex topic, and one might reasonably expect that an encyclopedia article on it would include not only its theoretical underpinnings dating back to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, but also its critics such as Karl Marx.

Instead of attempting some semblance of balance, the new SEP entry author Chiara Cordelli, a professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago, used this platform to air her own personal grievances with capitalism as an economic system. The resulting product gives scant attention to proponents of free-market economics. By contrast, Cordelli’s article is loaded with content from the Marxist or socialist far left. Space devoted to critics of capitalism far outpaces even basic descriptions of the economic concept, and proponents of capitalism are reduced to shallow parodies.

In an era when academia is under fire for a well-documented leftward ideological shift as well as declining standards of scholarly rigor, the publication of an encyclopedia entry with a pronounced anti-capitalism skew only confirms the public’s declining trust in our university system. Rather than serving as a curator and disseminator of knowledge, higher education has become an institutional home for a single specific brand of ideological activism.

Sweden is the paradoxical home of individualism done collectively.

The case for Sweden being a socialist Utopia is as traditional as its cinnamon buns. This is a country that soaks the rich...to fund a government whose spending amounts to nearly half of GDP, among the highest in the world...[In Sweden's welfare state,] new parents are showered with up to 480 days of paid leave. Other lefty shibboleths include free universities, low income inequality and the rich world’s most sweeping rent controls. Two-thirds of working Swedes belong to a trade union, the most of any country bar tiny Iceland.

Yet it is equally fair to argue that Sweden has a libertarian side...The state may be large, but public services in Sweden are often delivered by the private sector: around a third of Swedish children graduating from high school do so at an institution run by non-state operators, many of them run for profit. Sweden is a rare country with no inheritance tax. During the covid-19 pandemic, it stood out for imposing fewer restrictions than most countries, whether strict lockdowns or mask mandates. It lacks a national minimum wage, bucking the norm in rich economies (including America). Employers are largely free to hire and fire, unlike in most of Europe. All this has resulted in Sweden having around 50% more billionaires per person than America. If this is socialism, it is a variant that is surprisingly good for yacht sales.

In their rush to claim credit for Sweden’s success, both sides get part of the story wrong. The socialist case was more accurate before the state was sharply slimmed down in the early 1990s. The libertarians gushing about the lack of a minimum wage fail to grasp that in most sectors pay rates are agreed by unions haggling with employers—hardly the stuff of Milton Friedman’s dreams.

But the Scandinavian paradox exists because something more curious is afoot. For Sweden is indeed different. In developed countries collectivism and individual liberty are generally treated as rivals: the more responsibility government assumes, the less room remains for citizens to fend for themselves. Sweden followed a different path. During the 20th century the state expanded not merely to soften inequality or insure people against hardship, but to reduce their reliance on other people—including their own families. A large impersonal state is seen as bolstering autonomy: when in need, Swedes feel it is better to be beholden to an impersonal bureaucracy than to a parent or some charity. Seen this way, a bigger state translates into more freedom, not less.

Though [Mayor Jacob Frey’s] administration has pitched an 11.3% increase in the overall property tax levy next year, some taxpayers would see a bigger hike if it’s approved. That’s because the levy represents the total amount of taxpayer dollars needed to fund the budget, not the individual share that each property owner must pay, and factors like declining commercial property values mean some homeowners could get sticker shock when they open their bills...

Because commercial property values have plummeted since 2020, residential property has had to pick up the slack. Homeowners’ share of the city’s tax burden has gone up over 8 percentage points since 2020, when more office workers began working remotely. Last year, downtown property values plummeted for the fifth straight year, and homeowners now shoulder nearly 56% of the city’s tax capacity.

A Minneapolis church is asking a federal judge to hold the Department of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) in contempt after it discovered the agency had infiltrated it as part of an effort to investigate alleged violence against federal immigration agents — despite a court order forbidding the feds from conducting immigration enforcement operations on church property.

The motion, filed in federal court in Massachusetts Thursday by a national coalition of churches on behalf of Minneapolis’ University Baptist Church, comes after HSI’s surveillance and undercover operations were revealed to be part of an ongoing federal case against protesters accused of being “Antifa.” The filing argues HSI’s activities violated an injunction put in place last year barring immigration enforcement activities on or near church premises.

From Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Ellison, a case challenging a new election law:

>A group of Minnesotans want to express their belief that certain felons cannot vote. Can the state criminalize their speech? In denying a preliminary injunction, the district court thought so. We disagree.

More from Bloomberg Law:

>Minnesota’s law criminalizing false statements about elections violates the First Amendment, a federal appeals court ruled in a decision clearing an anti-felon voting group to message before the midterms.

>The state law barring any person within 60 days of an election from making false statements that “intends to impede or prevent another person from exercising the right to vote” regulates speech protected by the federal constitution and doesn’t pass the high strict scrutiny bar, the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled.

>“Curbing unprotected speech, like fraud, is one situation,” Judge David R. Stras said. “But Minnesota’s statute does not work like a fraud statute because, like the one in” a military stolen valor US Supreme Court case, “it targets mere knowing misstatements,” with “no requirement that someone listening acts upon it to their detriment.”