The Tyranny of Social Justice

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” ―C.S. Lewis

Capitalism: The motivating fear that something, somewhere, could be more convenient

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently signed into law a broad salvo for powerful special interests against the less privileged New Yorkers he purports to champion. I’m referring, of course, to the latest instance of grotesque regulatory capture that is the Empire State’s new anti-Airbnb legislation. Put mildly, it has the insidious effect of protecting politically connected businesses—i.e., the hotel industry—from the healthy, consumer-friendly pressures of free-market competition.

To be clear, the chairman of the Hotel Association of New York City, Vijay Dandapani, admits this openly:

“This smart and innovative legislation will allow law enforcement agencies to better target, track, and penalize lawbreakers, while also protecting one of New York’s most vital economic contributors—the hotel and hospitality industry.”

Famed New York hotelier Donald Trump would be pleased.

The usual term for such manipulation of government power to serve special interests is cronyism. New York has a well-documented hostility to the kind of policies that encourage innovation by forcing companies to sink or swim on the strength of the comparative value they provide consumers, rather than the elasticity of their government connections. So, as my college friend Jay Schweikert once said of the 2016 cycle, this development is hardly surprising but freshly disappointing.

But, as C.S. Lewis notes of the worst tyrannies, Cuomo and the New York cronyists social justice warriors don’t just satisfy themselves with the mere fact of regulating away opportunities for the politically disadvantaged. As they seem always compelled to do, these elites invoked the eternal progressive shibboleth of looking out for ordinary people while actually screwing them over.

Democratic Assemblywoman and bill sponsor Linda B. Rosenthal of Manhattan described it to The New York Times as follows:

“New York is taking a bold step that will hopefully set a standard for the rest of the country and other countries in the world that are struggling with the impact of Airbnb on affordable housing.”

 The same article included this telling contextualization of a statement from Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi:

Regulators and affordable housing advocates around the world worry that Airbnb is making it easier to illegally rent out apartment units for short stints to travelers, taking units off the market for full-time residents and driving housing costs higher. Mr. Azzopardi said that illegal rentals “compromise efforts to maintain and promote affordable housing by allowing those units to be used as unregulated hotels.”

If you simply took the Times reporting and New York officials’ statements at face value, you might be inclined to think state leaders had scored a victory of some merit against rapacious corporate powers. But this willful legerdemain disguises two severely inconvenient but highly relevant truths. First, the new law imposes steep fines, not on Airbnb, but instead on ordinary people, like you and me, who advertise openings through the service. (A federal lawsuit argues this is illegal and unconstitutional.) So if you want to fill some empty beds in your place to help pay your rent, you could get slapped with a $7,500 bill from a government that ostentatiously pretends to fret that your cost of living is too expensive. Second and relatedly, Airbnb, unlike the hotel industry, provides flexible income and economic opportunity to people who can’t afford lobbyists:

The politicians are responding to hoteliers and unions that claim that mini-Donald Trumps are buying up properties and renting them as “illegal hotels.” This doesn’t check out: More than 95% of New York Airbnb hosts sharing their entire home post only one property, and the company last year yanked roughly 3,000 illegal listings out of some 44,000 in New York. The hotel industry also riled up some affordable housing groups to say that Airbnb is driving up the cost of rent. One irony is that more than three-quarters of hosts say that sharing their space helps them pay rent.

The real complaint is that Airbnb is unwelcome competition, and here’s how you know: The company already offered Empire State regulators everything they claimed to want. Airbnb said it would ban New York hosts from renting more than one property; require online registration for hosts; ban users who break policies three times; and collect state taxes so that hosts couldn’t cheat. That’s right: Airbnb wanted to help New York dig up more revenue.[…]

This is a classic restraint of trade, and all the more odious that it will hurt the people Democrats claim to champion. Airbnb points out that hosts in zip codes with the highest percentage of black New Yorkers earned $43 million from rentals in 2015, and that more than 21,000 millennials host an Airbnb property.

The astute observer will note that progressives imposed exorbitant housing and hotel prices on Airbnb users, many of them lower-income minorities, from New York to San Francisco, long before modern technology made Airbnb possible. The progenitors and supporters of these regulatory labyrinths almost certainly had the best intentions in maintaining policies that keep rents high and undercutting innovation, like Airbnb, that helps people pay those rents. But as famed paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant reminds us, some of the worst things imaginable have been done with the best intentions.

A similar dynamic played out with the curious story of ridesharing services in the notoriously progressive metropolis of Austin, Texas earlier this year. The taxi industry in the Lone Star capital pushed through a package of onerous regulations, including fingerprinting requirements for drivers (who are already subject to background checks), in the guise of promoting “consumer safety,” a “level playing field,” and other anodyne lies. In reality, the rules undercut Uber and Lyft’s ability to operate efficiently and compete with taxi companies in the city. Incidentally, the new security requirements were about as conducive to safety as the TSA, with comparable downsides for minorities. Brishen Rogers sums up the point well in a white paper for the UChicago Law Review:

[Background] checks are no panacea. As the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has emphasized, background checks have limited predictive value and can have a disparate impact on minority drivers. More generally, however, there is no indication that criminal law will not deter assaults just as well in Uber cars as it does in taxis. In fact, criminal law may work far better, since any passenger who suffers an assault by an Uber driver will actually be able to identify their driver. Not so in a street-hailed cab.

Rogers goes on to note, among other things, that ridesharing companies’ transparent ability to track data on driver and passenger interactions afford Uber and its peers the ability to combat the rampant racial discrimination for which taxis are notorious. But notwithstanding all that, the taxi industry succeeded in chasing Uber and Lyft from Austin, and 10,000 drivers  who benefited from flexible schedules and supplemental income, as even famed Obama loyalists acknowledge, were effectively pink-slipped.

For those keeping score: progressives who claim to value consumer safety, non-racism, accountability, economic security, and equal opportunity directly favored an allegedly racist industry with weaker mechanisms for accountability by reducing economic security for thousands of people through diminished opportunity without making anybody safer. The taxi industry’s expulsion of ridesharing from the second-largest state capital in the country is primarily a blow against the members of and aspirants to the city’s middle class who benefited from a boon in transportation choices.

That cronyism for progressive donors (in this case, Big Taxi) made for effective manipulation of progressive voters’ obsession with good, social justice intentions (to drive out competition for those donors) to achieve harmful results (see above) is how the game works.

“I shop at Whole Foods, and I’m here to help!”

The treacherous campaigns against the sharing economy are reminiscent of Obamacare springing from its Trojan fact checks and administrative lies to torch Medicare recipients and the besieged middle class with catastrophic deductibles and coercive spikes in costs. Obamacare, the exclusive product of “economic justice” warriors and the progressive donor class, saved its worst for the little guys who can’t afford progressive elite’s sanguine abstractions about a poor product and growing suffering. But, as with everything else, we are to believe this cratering fiasco is good for the people it mobs. Apropos, Matthew Yglesias at Vox (because, of course) argues the solution to Obamacare’s rising premiums is stiffer penalties on cash-strapped folks who lost their former plans and can’t afford the mandated new ones.

As technology improves and ambitious entrepreneurs develop more disruptively valuable products and services, the friction between legacy industries and innovative market paradigms will only increase. Desperate but well-connected benefactors of obsolescing fiefdoms will ever more rapaciously seek to restrain the economic progress that would subdue them. They will always claim to champion the interests of the very constituents they ravage for their misbegotten sustenance, as taxis and hotels cannibalizing the income of their once-emancipated subjects. But either progress will devour the dependents of cronyism, or the restraints will nibble away at the powers that impose them.

Someday, perhaps, New York, Austin, Washington, and other locales will have leaders who understand this—and make the right call.

Recession & the City

Update: This post was adapted by The Daily Caller. You can find that article here.

“Where are the jobs?” –Middle America since 2009

Don’t live here if you can’t drive. Look at your life; look at your choices.

I left the hospital to go home for the first time in the back of a car. Thereafter, I grew up driving everywhere. After the Army took our household away from Florida, our habitual roundtrip drives stretched across the Southeast to locales as distant as Maryland. But whether I was heading down half the Eastern seaboard or simply to football practice, the mode of transport was an SUV, minivan, flatbed, or sedan—all of which were fixtures of my youth. Thus is life in suburban America.

You can imagine my bemusement when I encountered New Yorkers and other urbanites in college who had never sat behind the wheel of a car. But after college life in Greater New York, I now understand the broad restraining orders their hands hold against steering wheels. In New Haven, most amenities were within a fifteen to twenty minute walk of our residences near downtown. For greater bustle, frequent Metro North trains would take us down the Connecticut coast to New York City in less than two hours. While my friends living in nearby Hamden or Seymour had to commit to a 10-minute drive, even for a quick bite to eat, it would have been indescribably inconvenient to own a car in the Elm City.

Now that I’m in Northern Virginia—and let’s be honest, D.C. public transit, while admirably cleaner, is not remotely as functional as in New York—I confess to missing the convenience, even as I enjoy the old brand of freedom a car allows. Yet it turns out my urban friends’ peripatetic lifestyles, abetted by public transport, are becoming more normal in 2010s America, especially among my generation. Part of this shift predated the Great Recession, but the lasting effects of a staggering economy have clearly cast their shadow.

In post-recession America, many cities are now growing faster than their suburbs. Of course, rural living has been on the decline for quite a while—even the famously “country” land of Dixie has long been mostly urban-suburban. But for years, it has been a truism that the tale of Middle America is set in suburbia, which remains as distinct from downtown as from the sticks. To have “arrived,” we have always been told, is to have a spacious yard and white-picket fence, which amenities are not well suited to Manhattan or Dupont Circle. However, millennials are increasingly “arriving” to lives of perpetual internships and the soul-crushing yawn of socioeconomic uncertainty. Meanwhile, the white-picket fence and the cars that pass it are sinking into poverty as our so-called recovery breezes airily past even exceptionally talented people cursed with the trappings of ordinary living.

Cities are beating out suburbia because people are looking for more compact, economical ways to live. For many, this means concrete needs like driving less, so as to be as close as possible to the office, the store, and a respectable array of entertainment options. It’s about doing more with less, even as the flow of wealth toward downtown makes compact living ever less affordable. But that’s really just a nice way of saying that folks are increasingly stuck, and there is no clear end game in sight. What happens, after all, when a growing number of Americans cannot afford either a car or to live where public transport is actually useful?

This problem is bipartisan. For liberals, the escalating costs of alleviating suburban poverty will exacerbate the strain on a weakening welfare state, which conservatives increasingly distrust. For the Right, masses of young people stuck in unflattering college-like circumstances are not exactly the most fertile circumstances for building a robust new generation of stable families and conservative disposition from what is now an overwhelmingly liberal demographic that wants government to do more.

At some point, our political leaders will redouble the focus on jobs and broad economic growth that has so far eluded the policies of this government. Whatever one thinks about the economic effects of immigration reform, modernizing our immigration system will not alone be enough to save the American Dream. For that we’ll need to figure out how to pull the cars and white pickets back from underwater—and to set the promising interns in the cities free.

Jason Collins and the Minority Report

“In our gradually shrinking world, everyone is in need of all the others. We must look for man wherever we can find him… We have many monsters to destroy.” –George Seferis

Ball so hard, the twofer-hunters wanna find me.

It’s an interesting experience being a compound minority in America. On the one hand, people make offhanded assumptions about your politics, history, culture, preferences, and familiarity with the law based on your skin color. On the other, there are confident expectations of your tastes, mannerisms, speech patterns, and so on based on your perceived or confirmed sexual orientation. Being a black, gay man in a country that segregated my grandparents and still sanctions a broad array of legal discrimination against me produces precisely the kind of experience that most Americans—being white and straight—will never properly understand, although some do sincerely try.

Before we continue, let’s clarify a few things about me.

Politically, I lean libertarian (a popular disposition in the military community), but philosophically, I have much sympathy for traditionalism, which logically extends to committed gay families. Culturally, I love to watch football, particularly FBS, and am a zealous fanatic of the SEC (Gator denomination). I am largely ignorant of (and indifferent to) Cher or Barbra Streisand, was introduced to Lady Gaga by a straight fraternity friend, have a lukewarm appreciation for musical theater, would rather my food be fried than organic, abhor vegetarianism, prefer house music to hip hop (although the two occasionally blend magnificently), and grew up playing more soccer than basketball. I was exceptionally good at math in grade school. My teachers usually loved me.

My poison of choice is bourbon, usually on the rocks, but I will take a good Scotch. I learned how to change a tire, adjust automobile fluids, and properly handle a weapon in my youth. My Yale education notwithstanding, I feel at best a fragmented connection with those who marinate in “narratives of oppression” and are the target consumers of The New York Times (which I do occasionally read) or an ethnic studies department. I am not urban. If there is a personal hell, mine is based on New York City. Michael Bloomberg, naturally, plays the role of Beelzebub. He is too busy warring on freedom to take his Oscar.

Given how well-adjusted I sound, it may seem odd that I should care personally that a mid-30s NBA free agent has come out of the closet as a gay man in the twilight of his career. In truth, whether or not Jason Collins gets signed again is of infinitesimal relevance to my personal life. But when I see people bitterly contrasting the media treatment of Collins to that of Tim Tebow (of whom I was quite the fan) or bemoaning public confessions about private life, I am forced to remember that for all my well-to-do middle-American sub-urbanity, it still means something somewhere in America that some people are black and gay.

Christians in America are not wanting for role models. Every president and governor professes the faith, as do countless athletes, actors, media pundits, businessmen, military leaders, doctors, other prominent figures, and a nominal majority of the country. Christian freedom from persecution is written into our Constitution. Growing up on Army bases and in suburban Virginia, it was not remotely unusual for strangers to aggressively assume the Christianity of new acquaintances in casual conversation. I was frequently asked variants of, “How is your relationship with Christ?” by people whose names I never learned. It may be a while longer before we see such broadly effusive willingness to talk about being gay in public in many parts of America.

It does not occur to most heterosexuals to wonder if their sexuality might impede their life goals. At most, some people might wonder whether marriage or children would fit logistically into a desired career path or envisioned standard of living. But rarely would a straight man or woman fear for their livelihood should their preference in partners become publically known. In fact, that preference is taken for granted and often encouraged, even in the office (e.g. photographs, cards, and flowers). Hence, it is generally pointless for a straight person to announce their sexuality, as it is broadly assumed and will not be held against them.

Over time, mainstream America has rapidly become refreshingly more accepting of LGBT Americans, and there are prominent gay and Lesbian figures aplenty. But as black and other minority Americans know well, old-style prejudices can give way to new, more insidious typecasting born ironically of well-intentioned attempts to be more understanding. Just as it is not enough to have black or Hispanic role models relegated to music labels, professional sports, and goofy or chronically aggrieved media characterization, it is not enough for gay role models to be largely products of Hollywood, cable news, or the fashion industry, or to be chronically portrayed in trite stereotypes.

That Jason Collins is out and proud and receiving praise everywhere from U.S. presidents to Kobe Bryant allows for a new public face of what it means to be a multifaceted minority in America. Like millions of “gaybros” going about their lives beyond glittery bars in San Francisco and New York or successful black people who went to Stanford and are considering graduate school instead of prison, Collins is not a stereotype. He is a necessary and valuable reminder that gay people are truly no different than anyone and can do and be any- and everything their straight peers take for granted—and that there is no one way to “be black.”

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with or illegitimate about being “effeminate,” loving Madonna, or living in the Castro or Brooklyn, any more than there is anything shameful about listening to hip hop, hanging in the barber shop, or knowing dozens of Gospel hymns by heart (and on key). The people who get mocked or dismissed for conforming more to contemporary expectations of gays or other minorities are actual people with actual lives, tastes, interests, and dreams that matter. But despite the outsized representation of certain limited personas in media, there is a much richer portrait of America that needs to be seen precisely because many of us seldom see it.

In truth, Jason Collins may not matter all that much in a year or a decade. After all, he was a decent enough player to last a dozen years in the NBA, but he was hardly anything to write home about. For now, though, he is putting a new face on parts of America that are too often obscured by the blinding heat of ignorant assumptions. Someday, perhaps, the flow of new, inspiring faces will overrun the gates of our experience and broaden our imagining.

Until then, we still have many more stories to tell.

Speed of Change

“You’re never as clever as you think you are.” –Mom

I was impatient as a kid. As has become archetypical of my generation, I wanted everything immediately and perfectly, and I read injustice in the heavens at my every frustration. You see, entitlement, particularly of the sloppy, Digital-Age variety, is an intensely emotional commitment. Whether it manifests in idle resentment or exhibitionist rage, a debt denied is an existential offense to the moral order that happens to linger in your orbit. So when I wanted snacks, I deserved them now. When I finished my homework, I assumed it was eo ipso done right—who has time to check their work when the universe beckons with dodgeball and moon pies, hide-and-seek and fireflies?

Fortunately, the many responsible adults in my young life disagreed with my less-than-adorable assessment of universal truths. I was required to wait for my turn or the appropriate time or the rightful owner’s consent in order to do things. I was made to double-check my math, proofread my writing, defend my assertions, and right my wrongs. In short, I was made to check my work. Moreover, I was taught the world would expect such things of me because those who run the world expect such things of themselves, and that is how good men behave. You get ahead by being on point, and thus you earn your keep.

What happens when you check your work. Stay in school, kids.

It seems the world didn’t get my upbringing.

As the recent Manti Te’o scandal marinates in memes, a recurring wonder reaches crescendo: why didn’t any of these reporters bother to check their work? From Sports Illustrated to CBS to The Chicago Tribune to Salon to the Associated Press, a story got reprinted over and over again with hardly anybody confirming anything. How was this possible? How often does such a thing happen without our knowing it? Perhaps the most chilling insight into this ridiculous affair comes courtesy of NPR:

“The truth is that much of the time, reporters are just like everyone else: They largely believe what they read in the papers and see on TV. So each successive journalist unconsciously relied on the last for confidence in what he or she was presenting to the public. And this story was one they wanted to believe.”

As disturbing as that might sound, something about it rings true. We are, after all, a culture fond of propagating frequently misattributed quotes—often from Shakespeare or Morgan Freeman—and jumping on celebrity causes—from Kony 2012 to It Gets Better—with devils for entrails. Speaking of videos, doctored accounts have led our federal executives to fire people in embarrassingly hurried error and our trustworthy pundits to double down on discredited network lines. While we’re at it, how many people, news anchors, and governments have been fooled by satire to date?

In our current debates over violence, there has been much appeal to raw emotion to blunt the sobering checks of reason. From the offset, the rhetorical issues surrounding so-called “assault weapons” has degenerated so far that Wikipedia is now more credible on this matter than The New York Times. Beyond that, there has been the bizarre notion that feel-good, do-something bans on rifle cosmetics and rare-in-crime magazines is a “sensible” way to credibly reduce any kind of violence. But notwithstanding all that confusion, we still have partisans like Andrew Cuomo and Rachel Maddow calling for “moving fast” on “sensible” gun laws and “common-sense” restrictions, even as Vice President Biden notes the established ease of getting around bans.

There were many practical lessons I learned growing up an impatient, quick-tempered brat in the singular nexus of ethnic and cultural diversity that is the U.S. Army. One key understanding was that “fast” and “sensible” are competing goods, and there is nothing common about “common sense” (another way of saying, be wary of groupthink). Sometimes, the situation demands immediate decision and you cannot afford to “overthink”. Deliberation does have costs, after all. The other side of that coin, however, is the old adage: there’s never enough time to do it right, but there’s always enough time to do it over. Enter: New York.

In wake of the tragedy and outrage of Newtown and the ubiquitous desire to do something about it, Andrew Cuomo set out to push the “toughest gun control legislation in the country” before anyone could stop and think too much about what it was they were passing. And so they did. It is illegal to have unfashionable rifles and old magazines with eight or more clips in New York. There are no exceptions to this law. Now, as every police officer in the Empire State prepares to become a gun criminal, Governor Cuomo and the nation’s gun-control enthusiasts are learning that hallmark lesson of my childhood: always check your work.