New rent control law in St. Paul causes landlords to raise rents, converting their buildings to condominiums, or sell them

From Reason

"With a new rent control law taking effect on May 1, many landlords in St. Paul, Minnesota, particularly small landlords and those who rent to low-income people, are raising rents, converting their buildings to condominiums, or selling them. The Pioneer Press reports this is exactly what critics of the measure said would happen. Voters approved the rent control referendum in November. It limits rent increases to no more than 3 percent a year and does not allow them to be raised to market rates when an apartment is vacated."

Sixty years after John Glenn orbited Earth, the private sector leads in space travel

See Who Built That Spaceship? by Andy Kessler. 

"The Mercury program cost $2.2 billion in current dollars, more than $300 million a launch. Elon Musk’s SpaceX announced last week that launches into orbit will cost $10 million within two or three years." 

"Let’s look at the numbers. In 2019 U.S. research and development spending was $656 billion—three quarters by business, the remaining $170 billion divided among the federal government, universities and nonprofits. Google spent $26 billion on R&D in 2019, Microsoft about $17 billion, Apple $16 billion, Intel $13 billion. I guess they did build that. For the record, federal money for research goes, in order, to the departments of Health and Human Services, Energy, and Defense, and then NASA.

A lot of that nonbusiness R&D spending is for basic research, as it should be. Where does basic research end and development begin? Alphabet, Google’s parent company, funds an experimental R&D group named X, which it describes as a “moonshot factory,” funding projects like self-driving cars, robots, internet-access balloons, geothermal energy, and advanced artificial intelligence. That’s a lot of basic research before product development. Unlike government projects, Google management can decide when to expand or kill projects based on their economic merit, not on how it affects a senator’s state. Universities can provide valuable basic research, as can government labs. But turning them into commercial products that scale to millions or billions isn’t a government trick."

"Stop with the “you didn’t build that.” Every entrepreneur knows he stands on the shoulders of giants. Even though government-run GPS satellites orbit the earth, do you think Chuck Schumer could write code to direct an Uber to your location?

Government might still be good at basic research, but certainly not at execution. Remember when the Food and Drug Administration required CD-ROMs sent by paper mail for the early Covid-test applications? Or how in 2020 New Jersey put out a call for Cobol programmers to upgrade ancient unemployment-benefits software? The private market’s accountability would never have permitted these errors."

Breaking Up Amazon: The Great Tech Debate: ‘Assertions of predatory pricing are like Bigfoot sightings.’

Letters to The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Joe Lonsdale makes “The Case for Splitting Amazon in Two” (op-ed, Feb. 8) on the theory that the high-gross-margin Amazon Web Services is supporting a retail operation that sells below cost. But is the retail business really running at a loss? All those warehouses and distribution centers are built with favorable depreciation rules, a legitimate part of the tax code that encourages job-producing business expansion. On a cash basis, Amazon’s retail business is probably nicely profitable.

David Robinson

University of California, Berkeley" 

"Mr. Lonsdale commits a subtle but telling error by claiming that the consumer-welfare standard “holds that certain anticompetitive behaviors may be permissible if they provide value to consumers.” In fact, the standard holds that all practices that provide value to consumers are competitive, regardless of the impact on rival firms.

So how are consumers faring? Quite well! That the low prices enjoyed today by Amazon’s customers perhaps result from Amazon’s shareholders spending some of their wealth to make these low prices possible is no antitrust offense.

Mr. Lonsdale will reply that these low prices become an offense if they are “predatory.” But assertions of predatory pricing are like Bigfoot sightings: Proof is never found. The profit motive is too powerful, entrepreneurs too creative and markets too dynamic to make predatory pricing a viable monopolizing strategy in reality. History knows of no unambiguous instance of a private firm, operating in the market, that sold at predatory prices only to later gain monopoly power used to harm consumers for any length of time.

History does know of many instances of government officials and courts—especially before the consumer-welfare standard became dominant—mistakenly identifying competitive prices as “predatory” and then using antitrust to deny consumers the benefits of competition.

Prof. Donald J. Boudreaux

George Mason University

Fairfax, Va."

People moving from high tax states to low tax states

See States Get Serious About Tax Cuts: Eight states have no levies on income, and lawmakers in a dozen others are moving toward that goal by Grover Norquist. Excerpts:

"In 2021 the 10 states that gained the most residents from domestic in-migration had an average total state and local tax burden as a percentage of income of 7.7%, notably lower than the 9.9% of the 10 states that lost the most residents. Interstate migration and tax competition are increasing for four reasons: 

First, two years of working from home during Covid taught employees and employers that it isn’t necessary to live in high-tax states.

Second, thanks to the limits on the deductibility of state and local taxes in the 2017 tax reform, blue states with high income and property taxes no longer have the cost of their high-tax policies hidden and subsidized by reduced federal income taxes.

Third, Americans have noticed that high-tax states don’t provide better roads, education or other services. Florida (with 22 million residents) has no income tax and the state spends half as much as New York (20 million residents). New York has a top state income tax of 8.82% (soon rising to 10.9%) and was the only state to raise its personal income-tax rate during the pandemic.

Fourth, state leaders have discovered that they can reduce marginal income-tax rates by relying on triggers that permanently reduce the state income tax when revenue rises above a predetermined spending limit. Tax reduction is enabled by spending restraint. North Carolina provided the best example of this strategy over the past seven years."

Inside the Woke Indoctrination Machine

After watching 100 hours of leaked video, we now fully grasp the danger of this ideology in schools 

By Andrew Gutmann and Paul Rossi. Mr. Gutmann is founder of Speak Up for Education and a co-host of the podcast “Take Back Our Schools.” Mr. Rossi is a contributor to Legal Insurrection and co-host of Chalkboard Heresy, a channel for dissidents in education. Excerpts:

"In workshops such as “Integrating Healing-Centered Engagements Into a DEIA School Program” and “Racial Trauma and the Path Toward Healing,” we learned how DEI practitioners use segregated affinity groups and practices such as healing circles to inculcate feelings of trauma. Even students without grievances are trained to see themselves as victims of the their ancestors’ suffering through “intergenerational violence.”

The next step in a school’s transformation is “inclusion.” Schools must integrate DEI work into every aspect of the school and every facet of the curriculum must be evaluated through an antibias, antiracist, or antioppressive lens. In “Let’s Talk About It! Anti-Oppressive Unit and Lesson Plan Design,” we learned that the omission of this lens—“failing to explore the intersection of STEM and social justice,” for instance—constitutes an act of “curriculum violence.”

All school messaging must be scrubbed of noninclusive language, all school policies of noninclusive practices, all libraries of noninclusive books. Inclusion also requires that all non-Bipoc stakeholders become allies in the fight against the systemic harm being perpetuated by the institution. In “Small Activists, Big Impact—Cultivating Anti-Racists and Activists in Kindergarten,” we were told that “kindergartners are natural social-justice warriors.”

It isn’t enough for a school to be inclusive; it also must foster “belonging.” Belonging means that a school must be a “safe space”—code for prohibiting any speech or activity, regardless of intent, that a Bipoc student or faculty member might perceive as harmful, as uncomfortable or as questioning their “lived experience.” The primary tool for suppressing speech is to create a fear of microaggressions.

In “Feeding Yourself When You Are Fed Up: Connecting Resilience and DEI Work,” we learned techniques, such as “calling out,” that faculty and students can use to shut down conversations immediately by interrupting speakers and letting them know that their words and actions are unacceptable and won’t be tolerated. Several workshops focused on the practice of “restorative justice,” used to re-educate students who fall afoul of speech codes. The final step to ensure belonging is to push out families or faculty who question DEI work. “Sometimes you gotta say, maybe this is not the right school for you. . . . I’ve said that a lot this year,” said Victor Shin, an assistant head of school and co-chairman of the People of Color Conference, in “From Pawns to Controlling the Board: Seeing BIPOC Students as Power Players in Student Programming.”

With the implementation of diversity, inclusion and belonging, schools can begin to address the primary objectives of DEI work: equity and justice. NAIS obligates all member schools to commit to these aims in their mission statements or defining documents. Equity requires dismantling all systems that Bipoc members of the community believe to cause harm. Justice is the final stage of social transformation to “collective liberation.” The goal is to remake society into a collective, stripped of individualism and rife with reparations.

In sessions such as “Traversing the Long and Thorny Road Toward Equity in Our Schools,” “Moving the Needle Toward Meaningful Institutional Change,” “Building an Equitable and Liberating Mindset” and “Breaking the White Centered Cycle,” we learned that the only way to achieve equity and justice is to eradicate all aspects of white-supremacy culture from “predominantly white institutions,” or PWIs, as NAIS calls its member schools, irrespective of the diversity of a school’s students. Perfectionism, punctuality, urgency, niceness, worship of the written word, progress, objectivity, rigor, individualism, capitalism and liberalism are some of the characteristics of white-supremacy culture in need of elimination. In “Post-PoCC Return to PWI Normal,” DEI practitioner Maria Graciela Alcid summarized: “Decolonizing white-supremacy-culture thinking is the ongoing act of deconstructing, dismantling, disrupting those colonial ideologies and the superiority of Western thought.” 

DEI was “another thing to put on the plate, and absolutely now, it is the plate on which everything sits” said teacher Gina Favre, describing her school’s transformation.

No longer are private schools focused primarily on teaching critical thinking, fostering intellectual curiosity, and rewarding independent thought. Their new mission is to train a vanguard of activists to lead the charge in tearing down the foundations of society, reminiscent of Maoist China’s Red Guards."

Greenland’s Melting Ice Is No Cause for Climate-Change Panic

The annual loss has been decreasing in the past decade even as the globe continues to warm

By Steven E. Koonin. Excerpts:L

"the amount of ice that Greenland has lost every year since 1900, averaged over 10-year intervals; the annual loss averages about 110 gigatons. (A gigaton is one billion metric tons, or slightly over 2.2 trillion pounds.) That is a lot, but that water has caused the planet’s oceans to rise each year by only 0.01 inch, about one-fifth the thickness of a dime."

"Since human warming influences on the climate have grown steadily—they are now 10 times what they were in 1900— you might expect Greenland to lose more ice each year. Instead there are large swings in the annual ice loss and it is no larger today than it was in the 1930s, when human influences were much smaller. Moreover, the annual loss of ice has been decreasing in the past decade even as the globe continues to warm. While a warming globe might eventually be the dominant cause of Greenland’s shrinking ice, natural cycles in temperatures and currents in the North Atlantic that extend for decades have been a much more important influence since 1900. Those cycles, together with the recent slowdown, make it plausible that the next few decades will see a further, perhaps dramatic slowing of ice loss."

To date, the number of truckers displaced by autonomous vehicles is zero, despite predictions otherwise

See ‘The Cloud Revolution’ and ‘The Work of the Future’ Review: Anticipating a Boom: Could it be that advances in technology, already embedded in our daily lives, will create broad, exponential economic growth? by Marc Levinson.

"Years before a purported shortage of truck drivers brought us empty supermarket shelves, a purported surplus of truck drivers was making headlines. In 2016, the Council of Economic Advisers warned that nearly all jobs driving heavy trucks were threatened by self-driving vehicles. A year later, Goldman Sachs foresaw 300,000 jobs vanishing annually when autonomous vehicles take over. The Guardian reported that “self-driving trucks are set to lay waste to one of the country’s most beloved jobs—and the fallout could be huge.” Perhaps such carnage will yet devastate the truck-driving profession. To date, though, the number of truckers displaced by autonomous vehicles is zero."

"'many U.S. manufacturers still reject robots, which are seen to be inflexible and hard to integrate into a production process. Similarly, artificial intelligence has replaced human labor only for certain specialized tasks: It helps answer the questions that customers ask through an insurance company’s website, but it hasn’t supplanted insurance agents. AI and robotic applications are coming, but “they are not as close as some would fear.”"