Check out this video put together by the good people at the Global Post — an online mag that has done much to establish itself as a serious news outlet, only to have its efforts set back by this piece of fear-mongering trash. 

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Throughout the year, we are constantly bombarded by bad news. Stories about hunger, violence, oppression and illness flow from our television sets and radios, and fill the pages of our newspapers. And true enough, for far too many people, 2013 was not a good year. We must, however, distinguish between stories of individual unhappiness and disaster, and long term trends – which are, on the whole, positive. Over the last couple of weeks a number of stories pointed to these positive developments and I include them below:

NPR Morning Edition “Tired of Doom And Gloom? Here’s the Best Good News of 2013”

Cracked​.com “5 Amazing Pieces of Good News Nobody is Reporting”

Washington Times “Most Things are Better Now”

The​At​lantic​.com “Is the Pope Right About the World?”

For nearly 30 years, Connecticut beverage distributors received the unclaimed refund value of recycled bottles as part of the state’s Bottle Bill, which set up a refund system for used bottles as an attempt to encourage recycling. As in other states, the law requires beverage dealers to pay refunds for every bottle turned in.

Fiscal troubles in 2008 prompted Connecticut to amend the law, however, to require a “deposit account” from which distributors were to pay the refunds. This requirement was intended to aid the state environmental agency to study the rates of deposit payments and returns. The following year, the fiscal situation worsened, and the Bottle Bill was again amended, this time to require the remaining funds in the deposit accounts (after returns were paid out) to be paid to the state—retroactively including any unpaid remainder funds since the accounts went into effect in 2008.

A. Gallo & Co. and other beverage distributors in Connecticut saw this as an uncompensated taking of their property and sued the state. They took their case through the state court system, but even the Connecticut Supreme Court turned a blind eye, holding that beverage distributors never had a property right in the remainder funds in the first place. The distributors have now asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their case, and Cato joined the New England Legal Foundation, the Southeastern Legal Foundation, and the National Federation of Independent Business on a brief supporting their petition.

We argue that Connecticut’s budgetary troubles are no excuse for violating a longstanding property right without compensation. Moreover, by twisting its statutory interpretation to satisfy political pressures, the Connecticut Supreme Court has made itself complicit in the uncompensated taking. It’s bad enough when strapped-for-cash legislatures unfairly force public burdens onto the shoulders of private parties to feed their spending addictions, but when all three government branches — including the one entrusted with soberly interpreting the law, especially in times of fiscal emergency — get drunk on power and deny even the existence of a property right, it’s time for a Supreme Court intervention.

The Supreme Court will decide by winter’s end whether to take the case of A. Gallo & Co. v. Esty.

One of the big Obama administration trade initiatives going on right now is negotiations with eleven countries in the Pacific region, called the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). What exactly is being talked about in these trade talks? Is it really about free trade? Based on standard media coverage of the issue, it’s not easy to discern. Here’s an example from the Washington Post.

In the print version of the piece, the title notes that the U.S. is seeking “to shape global trading rules”; and the sub-title says that the goal of the talks is “a freer flow of world commerce.” That sounds free trade-ish. But is it free trade? And if not, what is it?

When you look at the substance that is described in the article, the talks seems much broader, and do not have a very free trade feel. Take a look at these examples:

When Vietnamese officials issued new Internet rules this year, the U.S. tech industry gave a shudder.

The regulations clamp down on political speech, require companies such as Facebook and Google to invest in local computer infrastructure to store information on Vietnamese users, and could force chipmakers to strip standard encryption features from their processors.

Only one of these is about free trade (the local computer storage requirements). The rest are all domestic laws that affect trade. But perhaps more accurately, the U.S. trade goal here is changing other countries’ domestic laws so as to increase US exports, which isn’t free trade at all.

Some of these changes may be good (e.g., taking on speech restrictions); I’m less certain about others, such as the stronger intellectual property rules mentioned later in the article. But the article gives away the real policy goal, when it says:

the more significant fights … are over issues such as the regulation of the Internet and e‑commerce, the rules for the patent and sale of biopharmaceuticals, and the oversight of logistics, consulting, energy management and other service industries where the U.S. holds an edge.

Putting it this way, the talks seem to be about economic nationalism pursued through trade agreements! Make everyone use our rules, which will give our companies an advantage. Along the same lines, the online title of the article is as follows: “Through trade treaty, U.S. hopes rules that favor its companies will become the norm.”

There is real free trade in these talks, of course. There will be lower tariffs and liberalized services trade, and government procurement will be opened up to foreign competition. But the shift to other subjects as the focus, and the emphasis on giving advantages to U.S. companies, has fundamentally altered the nature of these agreements and the debate, and in the process left the media confused about how to talk about free trade and trade agreements. They keep trying to make these agreements sound like they are about free trade, but with the hurdle that much of what’s in them is not.

December 26 is the 120th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s birth, typically a date of great celebration in China. But this year the Chinese government seems somewhat ambivalent about celebrating Mao’s disastrous achievements. It’s about time. 

Many countries have a founding myth that inspires and sustains a national culture. We’ve just seen South Africa and the world celebrate the accomplishments of Nelson Mandela, the founder of that nation’s modern, multi-racial democracy. In the United States we look to the American Revolution and especially to the ideas in the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776. 

The Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, is the most eloquent libertarian essay in history, especially its philosophical core:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The ideas of the Declaration, given legal form in the Constitution, took the United States of America from a small frontier outpost on the edge of the developed world to the richest country in the world in scarcely a century. The country failed in many ways to live up to the vision of the Declaration, notably in the institution of chattel slavery. But over the next two centuries that vision inspired Americans to extend the promises of the Declaration—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—to more and more people.

China of course followed a different vision, the vision of Mao Zedong. Take Mao’s speech on July 1, 1949, as his Communist armies neared victory. The speech was titled, “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship.” Instead of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it spoke of “the extinction of classes, state power and parties,” of “a socialist and communist society,” of the nationalization of private enterprise and the socialization of agriculture, of a “great and splendid socialist state” in Russia, and especially of “a powerful state apparatus” in the hands of a “people’s democratic dictatorship.”

Tragically, unbelievably, this vision appealed not only to many Chinese but even to Americans and Europeans, some of them prominent. But from the beginning it went terribly wrong, as really should have been predicted. Communism created desperate poverty in China. The “Great Leap Forward” led to mass starvation. The Cultural Revolution unleashed “an extended paroxysm of revolutionary madness” in which “tens of millions of innocent victims were persecuted, professionally ruined, mentally deranged, physically maimed and even killed.” Estimates of the number of unnatural deaths during Mao’s tenure range from 15 million to 80 million. This is so monstrous that we can’t really comprehend it. What inspired many American and European leftists was that Mao really seemed to believe in the communist vision. And the attempt to actually implement communism leads to disaster and death.

When Mao died in 1976, China changed rapidly. His old comrade Deng Xiaoping, a victim of the Cultural Revolution, had learned something from the 30 years of calamity. He began to implement policies he called “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which looked a lot like freer markets — decollectivization and the “responsibility system” in agriculture, privatization of enterprises, international trade, liberalization of residency requirements.

The changes in China over the past generation are the greatest story in the world—more than a billion people brought from totalitarianism to a largely capitalist economic system that is eroding the continuing authoritarianism of the political system. On its 90th birthday, the CCP still rules China with an iron fist. There is no open political opposition, and no independent judges or media. And yet the economic changes are undermining the party’s control, a challenge of which the party is well aware. Five years ago Howard W. French reported in the New York Times:

Political change, however gradual and inconsistent, has made China a significantly more open place for average people than it was a generation ago.

Much remains unfree here. The rights of public expression and assembly are sharply limited; minorities, especially in Tibet and Xinjiang Province, are repressed; and the party exercises a nearly complete monopoly on political decision making.

But Chinese people also increasingly live where they want to live. They travel abroad in ever larger numbers. Property rights have found broader support in the courts. Within well-defined limits, people also enjoy the fruits of the technological revolution, from cellphones to the Internet, and can communicate or find information with an ease that has few parallels in authoritarian countries of the past.

The Chinese Communist Party remains in control. But it struggles to protect its people from acquiring information, routinely battling with Google, Star TV, and other media. Howard French noted that “the country now has 165,000 registered lawyers, a five-fold increase since 1990, and average people have hired them to press for enforcement of rights inscribed in the Chinese Constitution.” People get used to making their own decisions in many areas of life and wonder why they are restricted in other ways. I am hopeful that the 100th anniversary of the CCP in 2021 will be of interest mainly to historians of China’s past and that the Chinese people will by then enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness under a government that derives its powers from the consent of the governed. 

Two of my lifelong interests — government over-regulation and scrumptious Scandinavian baked goods — have finally intersected:

…scientists have now discovered that too much of the most commonly used type of cinnamon, cassia, can cause liver damage thanks to high levels of coumarin, a natural ingredient found in the spice.

The EU has accordingly decreed that coumarin levels must be kept below 50 mg per kg in “traditional” or “seasonal” foodstuffs eaten only occasionally, and 15 mg per kg in everyday “fine baked goods.” This is triggering a crisis in Denmark:

Last month, the Danish food authority ruled that the nation’s famous cinnamon swirls were neither traditional nor seasonal, thus limiting the quantity of cinnamon that bakers are allowed to use, placing the pastry at risk – and sparking a national outcry that could be dubbed the great Danish bake strop.

The president of the Danish Bakers’ Association, Hardy Christensen, said: “We’ve been making bread and cakes with cinnamon for 200 years. Then suddenly the government says these pastries are not traditional? I have been a baker for 43 years and never come across anything like this – it’s crazy. Using lower amounts of the spice will change the distinctive flavour and produce less tasty pastries. Normally, we do as we’re told by the government and say OK, but now it’s time to take a stand. Enough is enough.”

The one thing cinnamon buns have been missing all these years is a sense of outlaw defiance of authority. Now they are perfect. [adapted from Overlawyered]

Last week President Obama commuted the sentences of eight inmates caught up in the crack cocaine sentencing fury, all of whom had served at least 15 years for what was often relatively peripheral involvement in the drug trade. Clarence Aaron, for example, was serving three life sentences without possibility of parole for a first-time nonviolent offense. Many advocates from all political viewpoints pushed for Aaron’s release, among them Debra Saunders who wrote dozens of columns on his case in the San Francisco Chronicle over the past 12 years. 

I’ve got a new op-ed for Bloomberg View (my first appearance there) calling the new venture in presidential clemency “mingy and belated”: 

According to the Washington Post, one of the administration’s motives was, oddly, its wish to help “eliminate overcrowding in federal prisons.”

If that’s the case, Obama is trying to bail out Lake Michigan with a paint can. The federal prison population has increased by more than 700 percent since 1980 and the number of inmates now exceeds the Bureau of Prisons bed capacity by 35 percent to 40 percent, requiring the use of contract prisons, halfway houses and other makeshifts.

Even if the president could free another batch of eight prisoners every week for a year, his mercy will still have touched only about one-fifth of 1 percent of the inmates in federal prisons.

One argument I’ve heard on behalf of the White House is that this is a trial balloon, and if the President doesn’t suffer political damage from it, he may be back with broader pardons later, perhaps after the mid-term elections. It’s a politically coherent argument, I suppose, but I can’t think it’s one that’s especially flattering to Obama as he will appear to later historians. 

[cross-posted and adapted from Overlawyered]