Meat eaters can be thin-skinned.
In the Netherlands, Wakker Dier, an animal-rights charity, discovered that the previous minister of agriculture, Carola Schouten, vetoed the inclusion of eating less meat in a “what you can do to fight climate change” campaign for fear of upsetting carnivores.
That such fears are not unfounded is borne out by the experiences of politicians in France and Spain. (more…)
Child-care workers without a college education will have to give up their profession in Washington DC.
Regulations that were meant to go into effect in 2020, applying to all daycare centers and some home-based child-care businesses, were challenged by two child-care workers and a parent, but a federal court ruled for the district this week. Reason has the story.
The two workers, Altagracia Sanchez and Dale Sorcher, have 49 years of child-care experience between them. Both have Bachelor’s degrees — but not in early-childhood education, making them ineligible under DC’s new rules. (more…)
Ronald Reagan summarized government’s view of the economy: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.”
Economists now call this cost-disease socialism: first restrict supply, then subsidize the costs. The United States does this with everything from health care (examples here) to housing (although Joe Biden’s reforms go in the right direction).
Democrats are making the same mistake with their technology and climate laws.
There is plenty to like about the CHIPS and Science Act and the (albeit misleadingly-named) Inflation Reduction Act. The first doubles government funding of research into 6G communications, advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence and other breakthrough technologies; the latter creates a 15-percent minimum tax on the largest corporations, lowers annual out-of-pocket drug payments for Medicare patients from $7,050 to $2,000 beginning in 2025 and will allow Medicare to negotiate some drug prices starting in 2026.
But both laws also spend billions of dollars in subsidies and tax credits to prop up technologies and industries that could have been deregulated instead. (more…)
Dutch police chief Andy Kraag revealed in an interview this month that three out of four of his detectives are working on drug cases.
Even if that’s a mild exaggeration (Kraag meant to underscore the scope of the drug problem), police for sure devote more resources to drugs than any other crime. 20 to 30 percent of their budget, between €1.1 and €1.6 billion, goes to fighting the drug war every year.
Drugs are only 1.6 percent of all reported crimes in the Netherlands. I argue in Sargasso, a Dutch news and opinion blog, that police priorities aren’t just wrong; they’re dangerous. Worse criminals go unpunished.
Police will argue not all crimes are reported and not all crimes are the same. Vandalizing a busstop and smuggling 500 kilograms of cocaine are both counted as “a” crime. That doesn’t mean they deserve equal police time.
So I compare drugs with another underreported but high-impact crime: sexual assault. Reportedly 1.1 percent of all crimes, experts believe the real figure is at least ten times that. When asked which crimes police should prioritize, most Dutch people would rank sexual violence in second place after murder.
Last year, police found a suspect in 51 percent of sexual-assault cases, down from 66 percent in 2020. Of those, 34 percent were brought to trial within six months. Both police and prosecutors say their goal is 80 percent. They’ve never met it. They don’t have the resources to investigate and prosecute all cases. When a Dutch news program requested the figures earlier this year, they learned that 808 investigations into sexual violence were on hold due to lack of funding or manpower or both.
There is no such backlog in drug cases. Between 2015 and 2019, the number of police investigations into organized drug crime alone — not counting small-time dealers and drug labs — nearly doubled from 341 to 613.
In 2019, parliament gave police an extra €15 million to investigate sexual assaults. It raised funding for the drug war by €150 million. It’s not just the police whose priorities are out of whack.
Including prevention programs, prosecutions and prisons, the war on drugs costs the Dutch taxpayer between €1.8 and €2.7 billion per year.
It’s not that the money goes to waste. Thousands of drug labs have been dismantled. The amount of cocaine intercepted in the port of Rotterdam has quadrupled in four years, from 20,000 to 80,000 kilos. One in ten cases police bring to prosecutors are drug-related. Half are taken to court. (Remember the figure for rapists was a third.) One in five prisoners were convicted of a drug crime.
Yet the price of cocaine hasn’t budged from €50 per gram in fifteen years. (Lower than in the United States.) It seems the more drugs customs and police intercept, the more drug cartels ship to Europe. Cocaine production in South America is believed to have tripled in the last ten years.
Half of under-35s in the Netherlands have tried ecstasy, the country’s most popular drug after cannabis, which is manufactured locally. Only 3 percent used ecstasy in the last year. The figures for amphetamines, cocaine and other drugs are even lower, and below the European average. Drug use in the Netherlands is low — and stable.
Some 130,000 Dutch people are addicted to drugs, half to cannabis, which is decriminalized. 600,000 are addicted to opioids and one million to either alcohol or tobacco. All of which are legal.
224 drug users died of an overdose or complication in 2018, the most recent figure available. 20,000 smokers die in the Netherlands every year. Alcoholism kills almost 2,000. But cops aren’t chasing brewers and bartenders.
For every action there is a reaction. When police devote more resources to fighting a crime, criminals will devote more resources to evading them — or resort to more brutal methods.
Sometimes the tradeoff is worth it. If we’re talking about child-pornography rings or human traffickers, I’m less worried about escalation than I am about saving the victims.
But most “victims” of drug crime are criminals, not users: teenagers from poor families, who are recruited to sell drugs, and who tend to end up either in prison or dead; dock workers, customs officials, security guards, even police officers, who are bribed or threatened to look the other way in the port of Rotterdam.
Police and government officials point to the destructive effect not of drugs, but of drug crime — on families, neighborhoods and businesses — to argue it would be “naive” to legalize drugs. That is circular logic: criminalizing drugs has led to suffering and violence, which is why drugs must be criminal.
At least half the rapists in the Netherlands go free, because our detectives are investigating an unending stream of drug criminals. We spend billions of euros to fight drug crime each year. Yet every year, the crime gets worse and drug use remains stable. We are doing more of the same and expecting a different outcome. What is that if not naive?
Germans are urged to ration gas. “We are in the midst of a gas crisis,” according to economy and climate minister Robert Habeck. “From now on, gas is a scarce asset.” Russia has reduced supplies to what used to be its largest customer in the EU in anger over the bloc’s support for Ukraine.
All consumers, whether in industry, in public institutions or private households, should reduce their gas consumption as much as possible, so that we can make it through the winter.
Habeck is auctioning gas supplies to industry to incentivize conservation, providing €15 billion in credit to pay for non-Russian gas supplies and reopening mothballed coal power plants.
If Russia cut off gas completely, Habeck fears the economic impact would be “worse than the COVID pandemic.” The Green party leader has likened a Russian gas stop to a “Lehman Brothers effect.” The American investment bank’s collapse triggered the 2008 financial crisis.
Yet even now, Habeck will not keep Germany’s three remaining nuclear plants, which provide 5 percent of its electricity, online. They are slated to be retired at the end of the year. (more…)
Alberto Núñez Feijóo took over Spain’s conservative People’s Party two months ago. The hope was that the relatively moderate Feijóo would put an end to fruitless purity contests and return the once-dominant Christian democratic party to the center-right.
He may have achieved the first, but he seems less interested in the second. (more…)
Few countries regulate housing more tightly than the Netherlands, yet politicians keep blaming “the market” when there isn’t enough (affordable) housing.
Housing minister Hugo de Jonge recently told Trouw that, “For too long, we believed the market would solve the problems on its own.”
In an op-ed for the same newspaper, I argue the opposite is true: government won’t leave the housing market alone. (more…)
Joe Biden has unveiled five new policies to alleviate America’s housing shortage.
Two are related to financing, which I’m not qualified to assess. The goal is to make it easier for low-income Americans to build and buy homes. I just hope that doesn’t lead to a repeat of the subprime mortgage crisis, which was at least partly caused by the federal government underwriting mortgage loans homeowners could not afford.
A third seeks to make it more difficult for investors to buy family homes. I don’t know if that’s worth the tradeoff, but there is one. The left-wing city government of Amsterdam has done the same, arguing all investors do is buy properties, renovate them and raise rents. But that renovation part is important! Maintaining buildings that are centuries old is expensive. Investors raise rents to recuperate the costs, but at least they can spread out those costs over multiple renters and multiple years. Banning property investment could cause monumental buildings to either become unaffordable to all but the wealthy or fall into disrepair, which happened in Amsterdam during the 1930s and 40s, and is why entire neighborhoods, like the Jewish Quarter, were demolished after the Second World War.
Biden’s last two policies are the most interesting to me: ending discrimination against prefabricated and modular homes and encouraging local zoning reform. (more…)
The republican Sinn Féin has become the largest party in Northern Ireland for the first time. Although mostly as a result of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) going down. In elections this week, Sinn Féin defended their 27 seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly with a 1.1 percent increase in votes. The DUP went down from 28 to 25 seats.
The winner was the nonsectarian Alliance party, which doubled its seats from eight to 17.
The results call the longevity of Northern Ireland’s obligatory power-sharing between Catholics and Protestants into question. (more…)
There’s not much elected politicians can do about high inflation. They might have inadvertently caused it with massive COVID-19 rescue and recovery programs, which saved businesses and jobs but also put money in the hands of consumers at a time when supply chains were strained. When producers can’t meet demand, prices rise.
Central banks have the strongest tools to fight inflation, but there is something governments can do: cut tariffs and regulatory barriers to trade. More and cheaper imports would reduce costs for consumers. (more…)
What happened to the party of free enterprise?
In Florida, Republicans are revoking Disney World’s self-government and not even pretending it’s anything but retaliation for the company’s opposition to their education policy.
“I will not allow a woke corporation based in California to run our state,” Governor Ron DeSantis said. “Disney has gotten away with special deals from the state of Florida for way too long.”
Disney World is Florida’s largest employer and manages its own utilities, including firefighting, garbage collection and water reclamation, in the so-called Reedy Creek Improvement District. It can also build homes and attractions without permission from the state or local government.
The arrangement dates from the 1960s, when Disney committed to develop the former swampland into a theme park and town.
The entertainment giant drew DeSantis’ ire when it came out against his Parental Rights in Education law. It prohibits teaching gender identity and sexual orientation to children under the age of 10 in ways that are not “age-appropriate” — without specifying what age-appropriate means. Critics have dubbed it the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
Whatever the merits (for the record, I think schools should teach what they think is best, parents should be able to send their kids to whichever school they think is best, and the Florida law is at a minimum poorly written), punishing a company, or indeed anyone, for their beliefs is an overreach. It is neither conservative nor liberal, and the sort of thing we’d expect in China, not the United States.
It is also rushed. DeSantis does not appear to have thought through what will happen to the Reedy Creek Improvement District’s $1 billion in debts. Taxpayers could be on the hook.
Yet his is not an isolated case. (more…)
Experts and retailers caution against it, but the mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, is determined to ban the sale of cannabis to tourists.
In an op-ed for the NRC newspaper, I explain why it’s such a bad idea. Far from deterring the worst tourists, a ban would lead to more petty crime, more public consumption of weed and more nuisance to residents.
Here is a summary in English. (more…)
I once hailed the French voting model as an alternative to America’s. Unlike the first-past-the-post system, which encourages voters to sort into two major parties lest their vote go wasted, France’s two-round voting system encourages temporary, not permanent polarization. Multiple parties thrive in the first round. Voters choose between two finalists in the second.
Until 2017, third parties seldom made the runoffs. But they played an important role by conditioning their support for one of the two major parties on policies or cabinet posts.
Under François Hollande, several members of the Radical Left and Greens served in a Socialist-led government. Nicolas Sarkozy had ministers from small centrist and center-right parties who backed him in the presidential election.
But what if the major parties don’t qualify for the runoffs at all? That has now happened in two presidential elections in a row, and it calls the stabilizing effect of the two-round voting system into question. (more…)
The easiest way to win an election is to appeal to the voter in the center. Fanatics will come up with all sorts of reasons to deny it, and lose. It’s not a perfect rule. In a tight election, turning out your base matters too. But in a two-party system, the party that puts the most distance between itself and the median voter is the one most likely to end up in opposition.
Take Britain’s Labour Party. It kept Jeremy Corbyn as leader for five years through six defeats. His supporters insisted his policies (raising the minimum wage, a four-day workweek, universal child care) were popular, and many, polled individually, were. But his approval rating was always under water. Middle England didn’t trust the man who opposed the Falklands War in 1982 and the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999; who called the assassination of Osama bin Laden a “tragedy” and praised Hamas for their commitment to “peace”. Corbyn’s fans mistook his refusal to compromise for principle. It accomplished nothing for Labour voters.
Democrats in the United States are in the process of making a similar mistake. Many of their policies — the $1.9-trillion coronavirus recovery program, $1 trillion in infrastructure spending, canceling the worst of Donald Trump’s immigration policies, subsidizing child care, rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement — are popular, but the party is not.
43 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Democrats. 42 percent support Joe Biden and 42 percent plan to vote for a Democrat in the midterm election.
The only consolation is that Republicans are disliked even more: just one in three have a favorable view of them. Yet 46 percent would vote Republican in November. It seems Republicans don’t need to be loved to win. (more…)
The revelation that dozens of Catalonia’s separatist leaders were hacked should compel Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez to finally make good on his promises to the region.
The Citizen Lab, based in the University of Toronto, Canada, discovered that at least 65 Catalans, ranging from the president of the region to its members of the European Parliament, were targeted or infected with an Israeli spyware that is only sold to governments. Spain’s National Intelligence Center hasn’t confirmed it was behind the hacks, but who else would be interested in spying on Catalan leaders?
Catalans didn’t have much faith in the Spanish government to begin with. This news threatens to shatter what little hope there was of negotiating a way out of the impasse that has lasted for five years.
“It is really hard to trust anyone when everything points to the fact that they’ve been spying on you,” Catalan president Pere Aragonès told reporters.
Imagine if the British government had been listening in on the conversations of Nicola Sturgeon and her cabinet. Would Scots still trust London to negotiate in good faith?
The difference, of course, is that the United Kingdom recognizes Scotland’s right to self-determination and allowed the country to hold an independence referendum in 2014 whereas Spain sent riot police into Catalonia and suspended the region’s autonomy when it voted to break away in 2017. (more…)
