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Trump’s Promised ‘New Foreign Policy’ Must Abandon Regime Change for Iran – Article by Ron Paul

December 15, 2016 Ron Paul Comments 0 Comment

Ron Paul

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President-elect Donald Trump told a Cincinnati audience in early December 2016 that he intends to make some big changes in US foreign policy. During his “thank you” tour in the midwest, Trump had this to say:

We will pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past. We will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments. …In our dealings with other countries we will seek shared interests wherever possible…”

If this is really to be President Trump’s foreign policy, it would be a welcome change from the destructive path pursued by the two previous administrations. Such a foreign policy would go a long way toward making us safer and more prosperous, as we would greatly reduce the possibility of a “blowback” attack from abroad, and we would save untold billions with a foreign policy of restraint.

However as we know with politicians, there is often a huge gap between pronouncements before entering office and actions once in office. Who can forget President George W. Bush’s foreign-policy promises as a candidate 16 years ago? As a candidate he said:

I am not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world saying ‘this is the way it’s got to be.’ … If we’re an arrogant nation they will resent us, if we’re a humble nation but strong they’ll welcome us.

Unfortunately as soon as he took office, George W. Bush pursued a completely different foreign policy, attacking countries like Iraq at the urging of the neocons he placed in positions of power in his White House and State Department.

Some people say that “personnel is policy,” and that much can be predicted about Trump’s foreign policy by the people he has appointed to serve his Administration. That is where we might have reason to be worried. Take Iran, for example. While Trump says he wants the US to stop overthrowing governments, on the issue of Iran both the candidate and his recent appointees have taken a very different view.

Trump’s pick for National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, has said the following about Iran: “I believe that Iran represents a clear and present danger to the region, and eventually to the world…” and, “…regime change in Tehran is the best way to stop the Iranian nuclear weapons program.”

Trump’s CIA choice, Mike Pompeo, has said of President Obama’s Iran deal, “The Iranian regime is intent on the destruction of our country. Why the President does not understand is unfathomable.”

And Trump’s selection for Defense Secretary, General James Mattis, was even more aggressive, saying, “The Iranian regime in my mind is the single most enduring threat to stability and peace in the Middle East. …Iran is not an enemy of ISIS. They have a lot to gain from the turmoil in the region that ISIS creates.”

Donald Trump’s words in Cincinnati don’t seem to match up with the views of the people that he’s assigning to high places. At least when it comes to Iran.

While I hope we can take President Trump at his word when it comes to foreign policy, I also think we should hold him to his word – especially his encouraging words in early December. Will the incoming president have the ability to rein in his more bellicose cabinet members and their underlings? We can be sure about one thing: if Trump allows the neocons to capture the State Department, keeping his foreign-policy promises is going to be a lot more difficult.

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Could the Market Really End Meat? – Article by Alex Tabarrok

December 14, 2016 Alex Tabarrok Comments 1 comment

Alex Tabarrok

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Animal rights will be the big social revolution of the 21st century. Most people have a vague feeling that factory farms aren’t quite ethical. But few people are willing to give up meat, so such feelings are suppressed because acknowledging them would only make one feel guilty. Once the costs of giving up meat fall, however, vegetarianism will spread like a prairie wildfire, changing eating habits, the use of farmland, and the science and economics of climate change.

Lab-grown or cultured meat is improving, but so is the science of veggie burgers. Beyond Meat has sold a very successful frozen “chicken” strip since 2013, and their non-frozen burger patties are just now seeing widespread distribution in the meat aisle at Whole Foods. Beyond Meat extracts protein from peas and then combines it with other vegetable elements under heating, cooling, and pressure to realign the proteins in a way that simulates the architecture of beef.

I picked up a two-pack on the weekend. Beyond Meat burgers look and cook like meat. But what about the taste?

The taste is excellent. The burger has a slightly smokey taste, not exactly like beef, but like meat. If you had never tasted a buffalo burger before, and I told you that this was a buffalo burger, you would have no reason to doubt me. A little sauce and salt and pepper, and this is a very good-tasting burger, not a sacrifice for morality.

The price is currently more than beef, $6 for two patties, but that’s Whole-Foods expensive, not out-of-reach expensive. I will buy more.

The revolution has begun.

The second picture is the BuzzFeed version. My burger wasn’t quite so artfully arranged but was still delicious, and I attest to the overall accuracy.

This post first appeared at Marginal Revolution.

Alex Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He blogs at Marginal Revolution with Tyler Cowen.

The Good News They’re Not Telling You – Article by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

December 12, 2016 Thomas E. Woods, Jr. Comments 0 Comment

Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

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As we look at things that impress us technologically we also have a certain trepidation, because we’re told that robots are going to take our jobs. “Yes, the internet is wonderful,” we may say, “but robots, I don’t want those.”

I don’t mean to make light of this because robots are going to take a lot of jobs. They’re going to take a lot of blue collar jobs, and they’re going to take a lot of white collar jobs you don’t think they can take. Already there are robots that can dispense pills at pharmacies. That’s being done in California. They have not made one mistake. You can’t say that about human pharmacists, who are now free to be up front talking to you while the robot fills the prescription.

Much of this is discussed by author Kevin Kelly in his new book The Inevitable, with the subtitle Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape Our Future. It’s incredible what robots can do and what they will be able to do.

Automation Really Is Taking Our Jobs

To me, just the fact that one of Google’s newest computers can caption a photo perfectly — it can figure out what’s happening in the photo and give a perfect caption — is amazing. Just when you think “a machine can’t do my job,” maybe it can.

What kind of world is this we’re moving into? I understand the fear about that. But, at the same time, let’s think, first of all, about what happened in the past.

In the past, most people worked on farms, and automation took away 99 percent of those jobs. Literally 99 percent. They’re gone. People wound up with brand new jobs they could never have anticipated. And in pursuing those jobs we might even argue that we became more human. Because we diversified. Because we found a niche for ourselves that was unique to us. Automation is going to make it possible for human beings to do work that is more fulfilling.

How is that? Well, first let’s think about the kinds of jobs that automation and robots do that we couldn’t do even if we tried. Making computer chips, there’s no one in this room who could do that. We don’t have the precision and the control to do that. We can’t inspect every square millimeter of a CAT scan to look for cancer cells. These are all points Kevin Kelly is trying to make to us. We can’t inflate molten glass into the shape of a bottle.

So, there are many tasks that are done by robots, through automation that are tasks we physically could not do at all, and would not get done otherwise.

Automation Creates Luxuries We Didn’t Know Were Possible

But also automation creates jobs we didn’t even know we wanted done. Kelly gives this example:

Before we invented automobiles, air-conditioning, flat-screen video displays, and animated cartoons, no one living in ancient Rome wished they could watch pictures move while riding to Athens in climate-controlled comfort. … When robots and automation do our most basic work, making it relatively easy for us to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, then we are free to ask, “What are humans for?”

Kelly continues:

Industrialization did more than just extend the average human lifespan. It led a greater percentage of the population to decide that humans were meant to be ballerinas, full-time musicians, mathematicians, athletes, fashion designers, yoga masters, fan-fiction authors, and folks with one-of-a kind titles on their business cards.

The same is true of automation today. We will look back and be ashamed that human beings ever had to do some of the jobs they do today.

Turning Instead to Art, Science, and More

Now here’s something controversial. Kelly observes that there’s a sense in which we want jobs in which productivity is not the most important thing. When we think about productivity and efficiency, robots have that all over us. When it comes to “who can do this thing faster,” they can do it faster. So let them do jobs like that. It’s just a matter of — so to speak — robotically doing the same thing over and over again as fast as possible. We can’t compete there. Why bother?

Where can we compete? Well, we can compete in all the areas that are gloriously inefficient. Science is gloriously inefficient because of all the failures that are involved along the way. The same is true with innovation. The same is true of any kind of art. It is grotesquely inefficient from the point of view of the running of a pin factory. Being creative is inefficient because you go down a lot of dead ends. Healthcare and nursing: these things revolve around relationships and human experiences. They are not about efficiency.

So, let efficiency go to the robots. We’ll take the things that aren’t so focused on efficiency and productivity, where we excel, and we’ll focus on relationships, creativity, human contact, things that make us human. We focus on those things.

Automation Really Does Make Us Richer

Now, with extraordinary efficiency comes fantastic abundance. And with fantastic abundance comes greater purchasing power, because of the pushing down of prices through competition. So even if we earn less in nominal terms, our paychecks will stretch much further. That’s how people became wealthy during and after the Industrial Revolution. It was that we could suddenly produce so many more goods that competitive pressures put downward pressure on prices. That will continue to be the case. So, even if I have a job that pays me relatively little — in terms of how many of the incredibly abundant goods I’ll be able to acquire — it will be a salary the likes of which I can hardly imagine.

Now, I can anticipate an objection. This is an objection I’ll hear from leftists and also from some traditionalist conservatives. They’ll sniff that consumption and greater material abundance don’t improve us spiritually; they are actually impoverishing for us.

Well, for one thing, there’s actually much more materialism under socialism. When you’re barely scraping enough together to survive, you are obsessed with material things. But, second, let’s consider what we have been allowed to do by these forces. First, by industrialization alone. I’ve shared this before, but on my show I had Deirdre McCloskey once and she pointed out that in Burgundy, as recently as the 1840s, the men who worked the vineyards — after the crop was in, in the fall — they would go to bed and they would sleep huddled together, and they basically hibernated like that for months because they couldn’t afford the heat otherwise, or the food they would need to eat if they were expending energy by walking around. Now that is unhuman. And they don’t have to live that way anymore because they have these “terrible material things that are impoverishing them spiritually.”

The world average in terms of daily income has gone from $3 a day a couple hundred years ago to $33 a day. And, in the advanced countries, to $100 a day.
Yes, true, people can fritter that away on frivolous things, but there will always be frivolous people.

Meanwhile, we have the leisure to do things like participate in an American Kennel Club show, or go to an antiques show, or a square-dancing convention, or be a bird watcher, or host a book club in your home. These are things that would have been unthinkable to anyone just a few hundred years ago.

The material liberation has liberated our spirits and has allowed us to live more fulfilling lives than before. So, I don’t want to hear the “money can’t give you happiness” thing. If this doesn’t make you happy — that people are free to do these things and pursue things they love — then there ain’t no satisfying you.

Tom Woods, a senior fellow of the Mises Institute, is the author of a dozen books, most recently Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion. Tom’s articles have appeared in dozens of popular and scholarly periodicals, and his books have been translated into a dozen languages. Tom hosts the Tom Woods Show, a libertarian podcast that releases a new episode every weekday. With Bob Murphy, he co-hosts Contra Krugman, a weekly podcast that refutes Paul Krugman’s New York Times column.

This article was published on Mises.org and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Fundraiser by Lifespan.io & CellAge: Targeting Senescent Cells With Synthetic Biology

December 11, 2016 CellAge Comments 0 Comment

CellAge

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Editor’s Note: The Rational Argumentator and the U.S. Transhumanist Party support Lifespan.io and CellAge in their work towards groundbreaking scientific life-extension research. Finding a way to repair age-related damage to senescent cells would be a fundamental breakthrough for transhumanism, and we offer our best wishes and support for those striving towards these new technologies.

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Editor-in-Chief, The Rational Argumentator, December 11, 2016

From Lifespan.io and CellAge:

Our society has never aged more rapidly – one of the most visible symptoms of the changing demographics is the exponential increase in the incidence of age-related diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular diseases and osteoarthritis. Not only does aging have a negative effect on the quality of life among the elderly but it also causes a significant financial strain on both private and public sectors. As the proportion of older people is increasing so is health care spending. According to a WHO analysis, the annual number of new cancer cases is projected to rise to 17 million by 2020, and reach 27 million by 2030. Similar trends are clearly visible in other age-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease. Few effective treatments addressing these challenges are currently available and most of them focus on a single disease rather than adopting a more holistic approach to aging.

Recently a new approach which has the potential of significantly alleviating these problems has been validated by a number of in vivo and in vitro studies. It has been demonstrated that senescent cells (cells which have ceased to replicate due to stress or replicative capacity exhaustion) are linked to many age-related diseases. Furthermore, removing senescent cells from mice has been recently shown to drastically increase mouse healthspan (a period of life free of serious diseases).

Here at CellAge we are working hard to help translate these findings into humans!

CellAge, together with a leading synthetic biology partner, Synpromics, are poised to develop a technology allowing for the identification and removal of harmful senescent cells. Our breakthrough technology will benefit both the scientific community and the general public.

In short, CellAge is going to develop synthetic promoters which are specific to senescent cells, as promoters that are currently being used to track senescent cells are simply not good enough to be used in therapies. The most prominently used p16 gene promoter has a number of limitations, for example. First, it is involved in cell cycle regulation, which poses a danger in targeting cells which are not diving but not senescent either, such as quiescent stem cells. Second, organism-wide administration of gene therapy might at present be too dangerous. This means senescent cells only in specific organs might need to be targeted and p16 promoter does not provide this level of specificity. Third, the p16 promoter is not active in all senescent cells. Thus, after therapies utilizing this promoter, a proportion of senescent cells would still remain. Moreover, the p16 promoter is relatively large (2.1kb), making it difficult to incorporate in present gene therapy vehicles. Lastly, to achieve the intended therapeutic effect the strength of p16 promoter to drive therapeutic effect might not be high enough.

CellAge will be constructing a synthetic promoter which has a potential to overcome all of the mentioned limitations. A number of gene therapy companies, including uniQure, AGTC and Avalanche Biotech have successfully targeted other types of cells using this technology. With your help, we will be able to use same technology to develop tools and therapies for accurate senescent cell targeting.

In Defense of My Participation Trophy – Article by Tricia Beck-Peter

December 9, 2016 Tricia Beck-Peter Comments 0 Comment

Tricia Beck-Peter

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I have one participation trophy, from a youth soccer league I joined when I was five. I joined the league, not because I aspired to a career of professional athleticism, but because my mother wanted me to try a sport.

I was awful at soccer. The coach called me “flower child,” because I would grab my teammates by the hand when we ran drills. The coach imagined my motives to be peace and love and friendship, when in reality I was just trying to pull the slower kids forward. My motives were not derived from the hippie upbringing he imagined had shaped me, but out of compassion for those even less athletically inclined than myself.

Too Much Reward?

My participation trophy is the target of ridicule by smug baby-boomers who spout an “up by the bootstraps” ideology. For them, it is a symbol of mollification and complacency. They think it makes me too soft to handle the pressure of this world. This five-inch-tall piece of cheap, gold-painted plastic threatens their entire worldview.

Do they think that children don’t understand participation trophies? Do they think they don’t notice that the better players get bigger, shinier pieces of cheap gold plastic? They do. Even at five I knew my trophy did not mean I was destined to be a famous soccer player.

The trophy meant that I tried. The trophy meant that every Saturday morning, despite the skinned knee earned in that week’s practice that was still healing, I showed up to play. It meant that despite the heat and the way the grass made me itch and the fact that I had never scored a single goal, I kept going to practice. It meant I kept trying to help the slow kids run faster. It meant I kept trying.

Is it so evil to encourage a child to try by offering them a reward? Those who decry participation trophies will say that trying matters less than succeeding, but I disagree. Trying is a requirement for succeeding. To have a fulfilled life, you must try many more things than you succeed in. To accomplish anything, you must try. That trophy is not a pat on the back and a grudging “good enough.” It is a reminder of the time you spent trying.

Trying Is Good

It’s easy to pick on millennials. We enjoy a higher quality of life than any previous generation. The draft is over, there’s a vaccine for polio, and we can watch color TV on the tiny computers that live in our pockets and let us make phone calls. To the outside observer, we are soft, entitled, and complacent.

Yet Forbes calls us “the true entrepreneur generation.” Our smartphones are loaded with more than Netflix and Buzzfeed, they’re loaded with investment apps like Acorns and business software like Square. One study showed that 63% of 20-somethings want to start a business. While they may not be currently starting their businesses, 90% of millennials recognize entrepreneurship as a mentality, meaning they’re entrepreneurial about their work in settings outside the old “entrepreneurs start businesses” model of generations prior.

Maybe this mindset is not in spite of participation trophies, but in part inspired by them. Entrepreneurs fail. They fail all the time, and they keep trying. They keep trying the same way they did when they were children in grass-stained soccer jerseys, in leagues where they earned participation trophies.

Tricia Beck-Peter is a development intern at FEE, and a graduate of Flagler College.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

A Plan to Make Me Great Again – Article by Jeffrey Tucker

December 9, 2016 Jeffrey A. Tucker Comments 0 Comment

Jeffrey Tucker

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I was out shopping for a sweater this weekend and I ran into Donald Trump, who told me that I should stop outsourcing my job.

“You should be knitting your own sweaters.”

I explained that I’m not very good at knitting. I have other things to do, in any case. This whole idea strikes me as a huge waste of time. I just can’t see myself sitting at home doing knitting. It’s true that this would give me a job, but it is not a job I want, especially since someone else wants to do it for me.

But he strongly disagreed, explaining that the problem with this country is that we keep taking away our own jobs and keep giving them to other people, who then get the money. This is a bad thing. This is why we are all suffering so much.

I persisted with objections, so he proposed a deal. If I continue to outsource my job, I will have to pay him a 35% tax, which means that if I spend $50 on a sweater, I will need to send him $17.50. That’s a bummer, we both agreed.

Instead, he said, if I take up sweater knitting, he will reduce my income tax rate to a flat 15%, plus exempt my sweater-making from all existing regulations. I would be free to make any sweater I want. The catch is that I have to knit sweaters, because doing that will make me great.

“Just think of it,” he said, “Jeffrey Tucker is open for business!”

In some ways, this sounds pretty sweet. A bit goofy but OK. It’s awkward but I’ll take up knitting on nights and weekends, producing at least one sweater per month. I will continue to do this in order to earn the promised benefit.

Also, I’ll stop buying sweaters at the store and thus end my addiction to outsourcing my production. It’s true that I have given up a huge amount of my freedom over how I spend my time and use my resources (I have to buy all those yarns and needles), but, on the plus side, I avoid a punishing penalty, pay lower taxes, and obey fewer regulations.

The deal doesn’t strike me as very efficient, but, as Trump said, this focus on efficiency over greatness is precisely what has gone wrong in this country.

Sometimes I wonder why his version of greatness should prevail over mine, but, hey, he is the President.

One Month Later

I finally finished my first sweater, and I’m a bit behind on other things. I gave up my job driving Uber. I stopped selling stuff on eBay. I was doing volunteer work for a local charity and I had to give that up too. But at least now I have a sweater. Maybe I can make money at this after all.

I tried to sell it but I couldn’t find any buyers. It turns out that everyone else who needed sweaters had made a similar deal. They too had been persuaded to become great by knitting their own sweaters. We had all become sweater-self-sufficient.

I hope they aren’t feeling as poor as I feel now.

I gradually came to realize something. If you cooperate with others, share the work, find out what you do best, trade with others, and make your own decisions about what you want to insource versus outsource, you can eventually find the best strategy for using your time and resources well.

As Adam Smith proved so long ago, a key to prosperity is the expansion of the division of labor, that is, finding ways to benefit from the talents of others wherever they happen to be. I can only do this if I am truly free to buy and sell based on my own evaluation of what benefits me the most. And under this system, what benefits me also happens to benefit everyone.

This system, which we can call free trade, has the added benefit of creating a kind of community feeling. Peace. Prosperity. There is something great about that after all.

Jeffrey Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education and CLO of the startup Liberty.me. Author of five books, and many thousands of articles, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World. Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook. Email.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

To Really ‘Make America Great Again,’ End the Fed! – Article by Ron Paul

November 28, 2016 Ron Paul Comments 0 Comment

Ron Paul

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Former Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher recently gave a speech identifying the Federal Reserve’s easy-money/low-interest-rate policies as a source of the public anger that propelled Donald Trump into the White House. Mr. Fisher is certainly correct that the Fed’s policies have “skewered” the middle class. However, the problem is not specific Fed policies, but the very system of fiat currency managed by a secretive central bank.

Federal Reserve-generated increases in money supply cause economic inequality. This is because, when the Fed acts to increase the money supply, well-to-do investors and other crony capitalists are the first recipients of the new money. These economic elites enjoy an increase in purchasing power before the Fed’s inflationary policies lead to mass price increases. This gives them a boost in their standard of living.

By the time the increased money supply trickles down to middle- and working-class Americans, the economy is already beset by inflation. So most average Americans see their standard of living decline as a result of Fed-engendered money supply increases.

Some Fed defenders claim that inflation doesn’t negatively affect anyone’s standard of living because price increases are matched by wage increases. This claim ignores the fact that the effects of the Fed’s actions depend on how individuals react to the Fed’s actions.

Historically, an increase in money supply does not just cause a general rise in prices. It also causes money to flow into specific sectors, creating a bubble that provides investors and workers in those areas a (temporary) increase in their incomes. Meanwhile, workers and investors in sectors not affected by the Fed-generated boom will still see a decline in their purchasing power and thus their standard of living.

Adoption of a “rules-based” monetary policy will not eliminate the problem of Fed-created bubbles, booms, and busts, since Congress cannot set a rule dictating how individuals react to Fed policies. The only way to eliminate the boom-and-bust cycle is to remove the Fed’s power to increase the money supply and manipulate interest rates.

Because the Fed’s actions distort the view of economic conditions among investors, businesses, and workers, the booms created by the Fed are unsustainable. Eventually reality sets in, the bubble bursts, and the economy falls into recession.

When the crash occurs the best thing for Congress and the Fed to do is allow the recession to run its course. Recessions are the economy’s way of cleaning out the Fed-created distortions. Of course, Congress and the Fed refuse to do that. Instead, they begin the whole business cycle over again with another round of money creation, increased stimulus spending, and corporate bailouts.

Some progressive economists acknowledge how the Fed causes economic inequality and harms average Americans. These progressives support perpetual low interest rates and money creation. These so-called working class champions ignore how the very act of money creation causes economic inequality. Longer periods of easy money also mean longer, and more painful, recessions.

President-elect Donald Trump has acknowledged that, while his business benefits from lower interest rates, the Fed’s policies hurt most Americans. During the campaign, Mr. Trump also promised to make Audit the Fed part of his first 100 days agenda. Unfortunately, since the election, President-elect Trump has not made any statements regarding monetary policy or the Audit the Fed legislation. Those of us who understand that changing monetary policy is the key to making America great again must redouble our efforts to convince Congress and the new president to audit, then end, the Federal Reserve.

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Libertarianism and Transhumanism – How Liberty and Radical Technological Progress Fit Together – Presentation by G. Stolyarov II

November 22, 2016 Gennady Stolyarov II Comments 0 Comment

G. Stolyarov II

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Gennady Stolyarov II, as Chief Executive of the Nevada Transhumanist Party and as of November 17, 2016, the Chairman of the United States Transhumanist Party, discusses the complementarities between libertarian and transhumanist philosophies and objectives, encouraging more libertarians to embrace emerging technologies and an “upwing” perspective on progress, tolerance, and cosmopolitanism. Over time Mr. Stolyarov hopes to be able to do similar outreach to persons of other persuasions – from centrists to non-identitarian conservatives to left-progressives to socialists to apolitical individuals, seeking common ground in pursuit of the improvement of the human condition through emerging technologies.

This presentation was made to the Washoe County Libertarian Party Organizing Convention in Reno, Nevada, on November 20, 2016.

Presentation slides can be downloaded here.

United States Transhumanist Party

– Website
– Membership Application Form

Nevada Transhumanist Party

– Constitution and Bylaws
– Facebook Group (join to become a member)

The IRS Believes All Bitcoin Users are Tax Cheats – Article by Jim Harper

November 22, 2016 Jim Harper Comments 1 comment

Jim Harper

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The Internal Revenue Service has filed a “John Doe” summons seeking to require U.S. Bitcoin exchange Coinbase to turn over records about every transaction of every user from 2013 to 2015. That demand is shocking in sweep, and it includes: “complete user profile, history of changes to user profile from account inception, complete user preferences, complete user security settings and history (including confirmed devices and account activity), complete user payment methods, and any other information related to the funding sources for the account/wallet/vault, regardless of date.” And every single transaction:

All records of account/wallet/vault activity including transaction logs or other records identifying the date, amount, and type of transaction (purchase/sale/exchange), the post transaction balance, the names or other identifiers of counterparties to the transaction; requests or instructions to send or receive bitcoin; and, where counterparties transact through their own Coinbase accounts/wallets/vaults, all available information identifying the users of such accounts and their contact information.

The demand is not limited to owners of large amounts of Bitcoin or to those who have transacted in large amounts. Everything about everyone.

Equally shocking is the weak foundation for making this demand. In a declaration submitted to the court, an IRS agent recounts having learned of tax evasion on the part of one Bitcoin user and two companies. On this basis, he and the IRS claim “a reasonable basis for believing” that all U.S. Coinbase users “may fail or may have failed to comply” with the internal revenue laws.

If that evidence is enough to create a reasonable basis to believe that all Bitcoin users evade taxes, the IRS is entitled to access the records of everyone who uses paper money.

Anecdotes and online bragodaccio about tax avoidance are not a reasonable basis to believe that all Coinbase users are tax cheats whose financial lives should be opened to IRS investigators and the hackers looking over their shoulders. There must be some specific information about particular users, or else the IRS is seeking a general warrant, which the Fourth Amendment denies it the power to do.

Speaking of the Fourth Amendment, that rock-bottom “reasonable basis” standard is probably insufficient. Americans should and probably do have Fourth Amendment rights in information they entrust to financial services providers required by contract to keep it confidential. Observers of Fourth Amendment law know full-well that the “third-party doctrine,” which cancels Fourth Amendment interests in shared information, is in retreat.

The IRS’s effort to strip away the privacy of all Coinbase users is more broad than the government’s effort in recent cases dealing with cell site location information. In the CSLI cases, the government has sought data about particular suspects, using a standard below the probable cause standard required by the Fourth Amendment (“specific and articulable facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe”).

In United States v. Benbow, we argued to the D.C. Circuit that people retain a property right in information they share with service providers under contractual privacy obligations. This information is a “paper or effect” for purposes of the Fourth Amendment. Accordingly, a probable cause standard should apply to accessing that data.

Again, the government in the CSLI cases sought information about the cell phone use of particular suspects, and that is controversial enough given the low standard of the Stored Communications Act. Here, the IRS is seeking data about every user of Bitcoin, using a standard that’s even lower.

Coinbase’s privacy policy only permits it to share user information with law enforcement when it is “compelled to do so.” That implies putting up a reasonable fight for the interests of its users. Given the low standard and the vastly overbroad demand, Coinbase seems obligated to put up that fight.

Jim Harper is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, working to adapt law and policy to the information age in areas such as privacy, cybersecurity, telecommunications, intellectual property, counterterrorism, government transparency, and digital currency. A former counsel to committees in both the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate, he went on to represent companies such as PayPal, ICO-Teledesic, DigitalGlobe, and Verisign, and in 2014 he served as Global Policy Counsel for the Bitcoin Foundation.

Harper holds a JD from the University of California–Hastings College of Law.

This work by Cato Institute is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Read the original article.

Culture and the Snare of Group Identity – Article by John Glenn

November 22, 2016 John Glenn Comments 0 Comment

John Glenn

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D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy joins the ranks of several works that explore many of the challenges facing today’s white working class. The book shines a light on Vance’s Scots-Irish hillbilly heritage in Greater Appalachia, one of the most forlorn economic regions in the country.

Vance not only offers readers a timely, first-person perspective on Rust Belt America, but he also brings the cultural politics of an important segment of white America to the forefront. For many minorities, white culture itself has been historically presented as the standard bearer of privilege, but Vance tells a fuller story. One part of that story is that white mainstream culture shouldn’t be conflated with the trailer parks of southeastern Ohio.

It wasn’t long before I realized that some of the traditions and vices Vance grew up with would seem very familiar to other minorities, whether on the southside of Chicago, the Pine Ridge Reservation in Nebraska, or South Boston. But his story doesn’t succeed because it exposes the detrimental norms foisted on many who live in ethnic enclaves. Instead, it takes aim at something more injurious: the tremendous burden of upholding group identity.

The Narcotic Pleasure of Being the Underdog

In his article “Revolt of the Masses,” David Brooks highlighted Vance’s honest and blunt portrayal of hillbilly life. Brooks describes it as a loyalty culture: “Families might be messed up in a million ways, but any act of disloyalty – like sharing personal secrets with outsiders – is felt acutely.”

This is a twisted situation where, by virtue of constructs like class, race, or colloquial street name, fidelity to the group is demanded and freedom of thought curtailed. John McWhorter has remarked that there is a “narcotic pleasure” in the underdog-ism and victimology that plagues groups who see individual effort to pull oneself out of dismal circumstances as betrayal. In this context, social stagnation and failure become legitimate options. McWhorther’s views are similar to Vance’s own convictions that hillbilly culture might be its own worst enemy when it comes to socioeconomic progress.

Over 20 years ago, Thomas Sowell articulated the costs of being beholden to group identity. “Among its more serious social consequences are (1) putting a dangerous leverage in the hands of extremist fringes within each group, and (2) stifling the cultural advancement of lagging groups by sealing them off from the cultural advantages of the larger society around them,” Sowell said.

This is why cultural advancement should be a mainstay in conversations about Americans who have been sidelined economically and nearly hollowed out socially.

But advancement needn’t be about moralizing or federal intervention. In fact, its best incarnation is practical guidance. It’s about helping people recognize existing opportunities, about speaking to the greater capacities people have beyond alcoholism, criminality, family disintegration, and other self-destructive tendencies. On the one hand, some people sense that mobility is possible even within the lowest social strata. On the other hand, in a group context, convenient excuses are abundant (the system, the elites, outsiders, disadvantage) and need to be unveiled for what they are.

The point is that until the stranglehold of group identity can be broken, a paradigm shift, enabling people to get beyond the very real and perceived obstacles, can’t happen.

Even as Vance expresses his love for the Appalachian experience that shaped and molded him – for the family, friends, and homesteads that make up his fondest memories – he doesn’t paper over the domestic chaos. Instead, Vance acknowledges the intense sense of parochialism that’s rife in Appalachia. And he takes a bold step in placing the burden of resolving a myriad of problems on the shoulders of “the broad community of hillbillies.”

This is laudable because it means that Vance isn’t acting in the service of group protectionism. But, why not? Why not completely slime public policy and corporate greed? Why not cite job loss as the culprit? The truth is there’s something more important at stake than the misplaced pride that leaves people self-conscious about being culturally authentic and loyal.

Curtail Liberty to Help the Worse-Off?

Even though authenticity is an age-old sham, there are status points and street cred to be earned by adhering to the neglected group script. Mostly the concept of authenticity rests on the specious notion that some groups experience America as a monolith, without variation. Oddly, there is also the tacit acknowledgment that certain groups, over time, have simply come to demonstrate particular mores – many of which are embraced and celebrated in-group.

This contradiction is what leads so-called underdog groups to brazenly demand acceptance and intervention at the same time.

For example, Linda Tirado, who is well-known for “explaining” to America what it means to be poor and make questionable decisions, offered this opinion: “Poverty is bleak and cuts off your long-term brain. It’s why you see people with four different babydaddies instead of one. You grab a bit of connection wherever you can to survive.” In the article, Tirado cataloged several unhelpful habits and then ended by saying that sympathy wasn’t the goal and that she merely wanted to explain.

But the message that everything from healthcare to decent food to condoms is inaccessible to people because they are not rich prioritizes a false group narrative (in this case about working-class people) over individual experience. The implication is that society should act collectively to meet the needs of this segment of the population rather than hold intact a free society for all. This is the fallacious thinking that cuts across far too many demographics.

Americans everywhere should reject burdensome group identities. Some identities are unfortunately shaped by demanding more accountability from those outside the group than those within it. Others may be even worse because they are overly nationalist and represent what Benedict Anderson called imagined communities.

Let’s hope that one day when the specter of group restraint dissipates and the individual is front and center, Americans will gain not only more liberty, but also clarity about the challenges we face as a nation.

John Glenn is an Assistant Professor of English at Atlanta Metropolitan State College, and his writings have appeared in The Federalist, The Birmingham News, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Library Journal, and elsewhere.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.