A federal judge ruled yesterday that women of all ages can purchase emergency contraception without a prescription. This ends the ban that kept young women under 17 from being legally allowed to buy the morning after pill.

If you’re surprised this ban existed, that makes sense, as the morning after pill has been proven safe for young women. Not only that, but the drug does not cause abortions, as some have claimed, but instead works by preventing fertilization.

Sadly, counterintuitively, the contraception backwardness that led to the ban affects both the left and right. Obama-appointed U.S. secretary of health and human services Kathleen Sebelius denied the last challenge to the age restriction, despite having no evidence to offer regarding any potential adverse effects of lifting the ban.

The right has also supported using government force to keep girls under 17 from purchasing emergency birth control.

Right-wing writer Katie Pavlich has called the ruling an “exploitation of girls.” She recently wrote, puzzlingly, that making more contraception choices available to young women disempowers them. Her claim that it causes “negative psychological and physical consequences,” is supported by only one Daily Mail article profiling a total of two women who “regularly use Plan B as their Plan A when it comes to sex.”

What strikes me about right-wing opposition to the ruling is its willful disregard of the law of unintended consequences. You can find article after article about the unintended consequences of, say, Obamacare on the site Katie writes for. But won’t artificially limiting the availability of emergency contraception also have consequences conservatives might not intend?

I have a fundamental question to ask Katie and other supporters of reproductive interventionism: what do you think the ban accomplished? Surely you don’t think teen girls chose not to have sex because they needed their parents’ permission for the morning after pill? No, the most likely result of making emergency contraception harder to find was more unplanned pregnancies, which undoubtedly led to more abortions.

We will never probably never know the actual results of the ban. We can only surmise. But conservatives, if you understand how the law of unintended consequences applies to the health insurance market, gun control, energy and other pet issues, can you not take a second to do young women the service of trying to understand how it applies to them as well?

Because as crappy as it is that small business owners will be dissuaded from expanding by Obamacare, is it not as crappy that a 16-year-old girl had to choose abortion when she could have avoided pregnancy because she couldn’t get in to see a doctor in 72 hours?

Is her freedom to be able to choose the medicine she needs not as vital as your choice in firearms? Seriously, I’m asking.

If you enjoyed the first mortgage lending financial meltdown, you’ll love part 2! Today the Washington Post reported that the Obama administration wants to assure banks that he’ll bail them out (again!) when risky borrowers default on their home loans.

Obama is sadsies that many young people and deadbeats still can’t get mortgages. Though it might seem like making homes loans available to all borrowers would help low-income families, it’s actually going to screw them big time for three main reasons.

First, Obama’s only gonna bail out banks, not individual borrowers. The loans are by definition going to people who not super likely to be able to make their payments. When these people default, they’ll have bills in the tens of thousands of dollars, plus damaged credit. All while the bank executives will receive bailout checks and bonuses.

Second, when you subsidize something, you make it more expensive. Making anything, homes, food, gas, more expensive obviously hurts poor people the most. Home loan guarantees are guaranteed to lead low-income individuals to take out bigger loans for the same amount of house. Then, when they in turn default, it’ll be even more ruinous than they would have been in an unsubsidized market!

Third, owning a home makes it harder to move when you need a new job. Research shows that labor mobility is especially essential to low-income, low-skill individuals. It’s hard to work your factory job remotely. Plus, low-income people are least likely to have months of financial cushion built up to pay their mortgages while they look for a new job.

It’s great that President Obama cares about the ability of poor people to buy homes. But more expensive, risky, mobility-decreasing mortgages are actually the last thing that poor people need. The only people who actually, consistently benefit from making mortgages available to poor people are bankers, who get all the reward in interest payments and the mortgage-backed security market, and none of the risk through bailouts and government assurances. While poor people will be paying back banks for years to come, bankers will float away in golden parachutes financed by taxpayer dollars.

Photo

Tweets from @CathyReisenwitz/politics

Sean Malone crafted a great graphic using data from economist Antony Davies that shows what minimum wage increases do to unemployment, broken up by education level. Hint: it’s not good! Click twice to view at full size.

Here’s Julie Borowski on the subject:

Here’s some background 

And here’s a site to follow for more info: http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog

Yesterday, former congressman Ron Paul sent the following Tweet:

Chris Kyle’s death seems to confirm that “he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.” Treating PTSD at a firing range doesn’t make sense

— Ron Paul (@RonPaul) February 4, 2013

Chris Kyle, highly-decorated veteran, was killed at a Texas gun range by another veteran over the weekend.

The Tweet is an example of what happens when you address tragedy without demonstrating sufficient empathy.

Yes, by all accounts Kyle “lived by the sword.” Fox News reports that Kyle was the most lethal sniper in the U.S., with 160 confirmed kills. For those of us who see the US intervention abroad that Kyle participated in as illegitimate, it may be difficult to view Kyle and his fellow veterans sympathetically. But Kyle was a real person, not a lesson.

The knee-jerk desire to hold people accountable when they don’t measure up to our standards of conduct is understandable. But even the most dovish of us would do well to understand that Kyle was a victim before he was shot. Indeed, he was simultaneously a victim and a perpetrator of the tremendous, powerful machinery of American foreign policy. Kyle was a victim of the military industrial complex and mainstream media which seeks to strike fear into the hearts of the American people and justify any means necessary to keep Americans safe from attack.

He was quoted as explaining the combat actions that garnered him multiple awards thusly: “I did it because I felt like it was something that needed to be done and it was honorable,” Kyle said. “I loved the guys.” By all accounts it appears that he risked his life in combat because he believed he was keeping America safe.

I believe that Kyle was mistaken, and that US military intervention makes Americans less safe.

And I believe that it’s wrong to flippantly use a decorated veteran’s tragic death to make political potshots.

I want to say on behalf of the noninterventionist foreign policy community that Tweets like this don’t represent us. I want us to extend my deepest sympathies to the victims and families of victims like Kyle, his killer and countless veterans who get injured and die everyday due to widespread and persistent deception.

If we believe that he who lives by the sword dies by the sword, let’s stop turning our swords on each other through our words and instead fight for and on behalf of veterans.

Two posts went up this week! First, I wrote about Google again for Doublethink with Google should say au revoir to France:

Yahoo Finance reports that the French government has decided to go after American web giants Google and Amazon for billions of dollars in back taxes. This comes on the heels of a recently released report from the French government that proposed a new tax on data collected from the country’s users.

The moves are part of an effort to alleviate the country’s economic woes. In an effort to raise revenue, French politicians are claiming that American companies are unfairly advantaged in the marketplace because they avoid the high taxes French companies have to pay. However, Money Morning reports that many claim that Google and Amazon are just taking advantage of perfectly legal tax-code loopholes by, for example, setting up shop in European countries with lower taxes such as Ireland.

Either way, raising taxes on profitable companies is a short-term fix. Ultimately the only long-term solution to the France’s fiscal woes is to slash entitlement spending and institute policies that spur economic growth.

Heavily taxing the most innovative and profitable companies operating in your country is not the way to encourage innovation or profit. Nor is creating an environment where companies think they know what their tax burden is, only to find out later that they owe much more than they thought they did. The data collection tax is especially problematic, as it taxes based on how many users companies track, essentially disincentivizing customer acquisition.

Then I covered fat-shaming for Thoughts on Liberty with Libertarians Let Fat-shaming Statists Off the Hook While the Collectivists Win:

For those of you who have been living under a thin-but-not-too-thin rock, there’s a debate raging in the news and blogosphere about thin-privilege, fat-acceptance and public health. One of the latest installments is the Atlantic’s A Case for Shaming Obese People, Tastefully.

The article quotes a “bioethicist” named Daniel Callahan who justifies fat shaming on the grounds that it’s good for them. He claims, with zero evidence, that creating more stigma around being fat can help encourage the overweight to make better food and exercise choices. He then cites shared health care costs as justification for shaming people with costly fat-related illnesses like diabetes, blaming them for being drains on the system.

There are three main reasons why everyone, libertarians in particular, should stand up to this line of thinking. First, fat shaming doesn’t work. Second, the forced collectivism of Obamacare is the problem here, not fat people. Third, fat shaming is at best thinly-veiled victim blaming, and libertarians already have a bad rap on that front.

Click the titles to read them in their entireties!

Sacre bleu! France’s President François Hollande has proposed that companies like Facebook and Google pay taxes for the privilege of collecting French users’ data.

The proposal is part of a report on how the French government can profit from internet companies not subject to high French capital gains, dividend and corporate taxes.

The report tries to justify the tax on data collection by claiming that Google and Facebook’s users are “in effect, working for these companies without pay by providing the personal information that lets them sell advertising.”

This is the pinnacle of French innovation.

Jigga what? Google and Facebook’s users willingly trade their data for services. Taking bits of information rather than dollars from customers doesn’t change the nature of the trade. Secondly, even if users were working for free (which they’re not), but instead exchanging data for services, what business is it of the French government if they do?

The irony here is that the impulse to tax anything remotely innovative or profitable to death is a huge part of the reason France isn’t producing their own Facebooks and Googles. That, plus huge regulatory barriers to entry and the government’s readiness to prop up failing incumbents with subsidies.

The ability to turn data into profit may be the most important innovation we’ve seen in our lifetimes. We’ve given Google and Facebook our information. And what we have gotten in exchange has completely changed life as we know it for the better. Google has absolutely revolutionized the way information is organized. What used to take months is now done in seconds. The wealth created solely through Google’s search algorithm is absolutely incalculable. Facebook similarly has vastly improved the way we connect with each other online. It’s now possible — easy, in fact — to keep up with hundreds of contacts in seconds. All this, plus these companies have made advertising more closely aligned with users’ needs than it’s ever been before.

If you want less of something, tax it. The worst thing the French government could do right now is disincentivize companies’ efforts to turn French data into profit. Here’s hoping they realize this before implementing this boneheaded tax.

Photo by gtrwndr87

I got choked up watching this Verizon wireless ad. It reminded me that innovation is the most powerful answer to the world’s problems and the single biggest contributor to increases in standards of living.

A more libertarian world helps foster the innovations required to move past problems of scarcity and disease.

It helps us lead longer, fuller, healthier, freer lives. The video shows what innovations can do.

Leave me a comment about the innovations that inspire you most. And, as always, if you haven’t yet, subscribe!

See ya next week!

The recent suicide of Aaron Swartz, open-internet activist and the genius behind RSS and Reddit, has left many people questioning the legitimacy of copyright laws and selective, overzealous prosecutions.

Swartz faced up to 35 years in prison if found guilty of violating a handful of laws protecting intellectual property after he was accused of what some have called “liberating” academic papers from JSTOR’s paywall and making them available to the general public.

People are asking whether Swartz was bullied by an overzealous prosecutor. They are asking whether he actually broke the laws he was accused of breaking.

But I haven’t heard anyone bring up what to me is the unavoidable conclusion Swartz’s potential prosecution leads us to. I believe Swartz’ case demonstrates how all prosecutions meant to make examples out of people are dehumanizing and wrong.

First things first. People are not examples. People are people. Sacrificing 35 years of a person’s life, whether that person was a brilliant contributor to society like Swartz or just an unlucky soul, to try to deter people from breaking a law that is by and large unenforceable is a moral outrage and shouldn’t be tolerated in a civil society.

For any prosecution to serve as an “example” to potential offenders, most offenders must be avoiding prosecution. No one should have to live in a society where they can’t know whether they will be prosecuted for breaking laws. If they cannot assume that they will, the prosecutor needs to do his or her job better, or the laws need to be changed so that they’re able to be uniformly upheld.

What should never happen in the face of a lazy prosecutor or hard-to-enforce laws is that random unlucky people become victims of extraordinarily severe consequences after breaking laws they reasonably assumed wouldn’t be enforced.

It’s my second video! Here I am not responding to anyone, just giving my own thoughts about California Attorney General Kamala Harris’ privacy recommendations to app developers.

Basically I’m all, if these are good for apps, which just want to serve you better ads, it’s good for governments, who want to throw you in jail.

Check it out: