New York governor admits that a rational business would locate in Texas

by philg

“A $2 Billion Question: Did New York and Virginia Overpay for Amazon?” (nytimes):

Gov. Andrew Cuomo defended the deal, arguing that New York has to offer incentives because of its comparatively high taxes. At 6.5 percent, New York’s corporate income-tax rate is only modestly higher than Virginia’s 6 percent, according to the Tax Foundation. But other business and individual taxes are higher in New York.

“It’s not a level playing field to begin with,” Mr. Cuomo said in an interview Tuesday. “All things being equal, if we do nothing, they’re going to Texas.”

In the history of the U.S., how many times has a governor admitted that, absent special treatment, a company would be better off locating in a different state?

[Separately, any family court plaintiff suing an Amazon worker will be very grateful that the company didn’t move everyone into Texas, where the profitability of a child is capped at about $20,000 per year and “lifetime alimony” typically turns into “no alimony”.]

Related:

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Seventeen years later and we still have a September 11 security fee?

by philg

If you’re traveling today, God help you!

I made it back to Boston from Denver via United Airlines on Wednesday. Buried in the fine print of a “Fare Breakdown” was “September 11th Security Fee: $11.20”. There is also “U.S. Passenger Facility Charge: $9.00”

It has been 17 years since 9/11. Why do we still pay a fee associated with that event? The TSA is not temporary. If we have a permanent high cost of going through an airport, shouldn’t that just be added to the “facility charge”? That would make it an even $20.

Inquiring minds want to know!

(Separately, my hotel in downtown Denver tacked on a mandatory “resort fee” that added roughly 10 percent to the cost of the stay. What stops them from selling rooms at $1 via Orbitz or Expedia and then using fine print to note that there will be a mandatory $175/night “resort fee”?)

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Socrates was not tried for being annoying…

by philg

According to The Great Trials of World History and the Lessons They Teach Us, by Douglas Linder, a professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law.

My dim memory of Classical history was that Socrates was put on trial for asking annoying questions and making people uncomfortable.

Linder’s view, however, is that Socrates was primarily prosecuted for his hostility to democracy and support for Alcibiades and the Thirty Tyrants. Supporters of the tyrants couldn’t be prosecuted for their support per se due to an amnesty, so Athenians went after Socrates on other charges. From the course notes:

Athenians considered the teachings of Socrates—especially his disdain for the established constitution—partially responsible for the death and suffering during those two awful periods. Thugs with daggers and whips roamed the streets, murdering opponents. Many of Athens’s leading citizens went into exile, where they organized a resistance movement. It is no coincidence that Anytus, the likely instigator of the prosecution of Socrates, was among the exiles.

Socrates, unbowed by the revolts and their aftermaths, resumed his teachings. Once again, it appears, he began attracting a band of youthful followers. The final straw may well have been another antidemocratic uprising—this one unsuccessful—in 401. Athenians finally had had enough of their know-it-all busybody. It was time to send a message that the city would do whatever it took to defend its precious democracy.

Anytus, on the other hand, was a well-known politician, highly influential, and the driving force behind the prosecution. Anytus had a number of reasons to be upset with Socrates, including Socrates’s (likely sexual) relationship with Anytus’s son and the philosopher’s antidemocratic political message.

The professor also points out that the Salem Witch Trials conveniently often pitted low-wealth accusers against high-wealth defendants, whose property often ended up in the hands of the accusers after the inevitable hanging. Also, something I hadn’t heard before: accusers and defendants were generally those who’d been on opposite sides of a schism in the local church.

The lecture on the Trials of Oscar Wilde was also interesting.

An 1885 law criminalized acts of “gross indecency,” which had been interpreted to apply to any form of sexual activity between members of the same sex. Interestingly, the 1885 law was widely seen at the time of its passage as progressive legislation. Prior to 1885, sexual assaults on boys over the age of 13 that fell short of rape were not crimes at all. The law was passed to protect boys from preying adults, not to punish consenting adults.

Prior to Wilde’s trials, prosecutions for consensual homosexuality in England were about as rare as they were in the United States at the end of the 20th century. What offended Victorian society about Wilde’s conduct was not so much that it involved sex with other males, but that Wilde had sex with a large number of young male prostitutes. Wilde was not prosecuted because he was the lover of a social equal who happened to be male; he was prosecuted for his participation in a somewhat indiscreet prostitution ring

This guy is a great lecturer. If you’re looking for inspiration to go to law school (at the University of Missouri at least), look no further!

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If we’re so rich, why aren’t we better off?

by philg

Thanksgiving weekend seems like a good time to ponder the big picture.

Here are a couple of potentially helpful articles. From Newsweek:

The United States has spent nearly $6 trillion on wars that directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 people since the 9/11 attacks of 2001.

Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs published its annual “Costs of War” report Wednesday, taking into consideration the Pentagon’s spending and its Overseas Contingency Operations account, as well as “war-related spending by the Department of State, past and obligated spending for war veterans’ care, interest on the debt incurred to pay for the wars, and the prevention of and response to terrorism by the Department of Homeland Security.”

The final count revealed, “The United States has appropriated and is obligated to spend an estimated $5.9 trillion (in current dollars) on the war on terror through Fiscal Year 2019, including direct war and war-related spending and obligations for future spending on post 9/11 war veterans.”

This could explain why many Americans aren’t all that thankful. The economy has grown, but $6 trillion of the growth has been spent on something that does not make us better off.

“Taxpayers Cannot Afford More Subsidies For The Middle-Class” (Forbes):

The federal government spends about $4 trillion per year. Of that, somewhere around $3 trillion is what economists call transfer payments. A transfer payment is when the government just takes money from one person (through taxes or borrowing) and gives it to somebody else. Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare payments, farm programs, corporate welfare, and the like are all transfer payments which simply redistribute money.

Middle-class benefits are an entirely different story, however. The bottom 75% of households by income pay only about 13% of all income taxes. If we define the middle-class as the 70% of households below the top 10% and above the bottom 20% of households by income, the middle-class only pays about 29% of all income taxes, according to IRS data.

Because the middle-class doesn’t pay much in taxes and because they are the largest in number, there is no way to pay for generous benefits for that many people. Today, the middle-class is collecting around $2 trillion per year in federal transfer payments. Yet, even accounting for payroll taxes, they are only paying taxes of $1 or $1.1 trillion per year (29% of all individual income taxes and about 50% of all payroll taxes). Thus, the rich are already fully paying for all the benefits to themselves and to the poor, plus around half of the benefits to the middle-class.

Another reason why we might not be thankful is that many of us expect more than is theoretically possible given the size of our economy. Also, a huge amount of these transfer payments is devoted to subsidizing an inefficient health care industry. So beneficiaries of Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare subsidies are not actually benefitting as much as we might expect given the spending levels.

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Thankful we don’t have lynch mobs anymore

by philg

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

After listening to The Great Trials of World History and the Lessons They Teach Us, by Douglas Linder, a professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law, I’m thankful that we don’t have lynch mobs anymore.

The course covers United States v. Shipp, a criminal contempt case tried by the U.S. Supreme Court that grew out of the almost-surely-wrongful conviction and then lynching of Ed Johnson, a man whom multiple witnesses placed at his place of work when a woman was raped. From the course notes:

The first witness for the defense was Ed Johnson. Johnson spoke in what observers call “a strange voice” and grabbed the arms of his chair with both hands. He denied having attacked Nevada Taylor. Johnson testified that he spent the evening in question working as a poolroom porter at the Last Chance Saloon. He said he had arrived around 4:30 pm and stayed until approximately 10:00 pm, which would have made it impossible for him to rape Nevada Taylor at 6:00 pm. Thirteen witnesses followed Johnson to the stand. Each one swore that he had seen Johnson at the saloon during the time Johnson claimed to be there.

The defense moved on to attack the credibility of Will Hixson. One defense witness testified that two days after the rape, Will Hixson had asked him the name of a black man doing some roofing work at a church. When he told Hixson the roofer’s name was Ed Johnson, Hixson asked him for a physical description—an odd thing to ask about someone Hixson would then identify as the suspect.

The most dramatic event of the Johnson trial occurred on its third and final day. At the request of jurors, Nevada Taylor was recalled to the witness stand. During questioning, a juror rose and asked, “Miss Taylor, can you state positively that this Negro is the one who assaulted you?” Taylor answered, “I will not swear he is the man, but I believe he is the Negro who assaulted me.”

The juror was not satisfied. He asked again: “In God’s name, Miss Taylor, tell us positively—is that the guilty Negro? Can you say it? Can you swear it?” Tears streamed down Taylor’s face. She answered in a quivering voice: “Listen to me. I would not take the life of an innocent man. But before God, I believe this is the guilty Negro.”

The U.S. Supreme Court grants an appeal. The Chattanooga sheriff responds by sending all but one jail guards home for the night, a prearrangement with the mob leaders. The mob then breaks into the jail and drags Johnson out to be lynched off a bridge over the Tennessee River. Johnson died in an almost saintly manner:

Johnson’s last words were: “I am ready to die. But I never done it. I am going to tell the truth. I am not guilty. I have said all the time that I did not do it and it is true. I was not there … God bless you all. I am innocent.” When Johnson was dead, a leader of the mob pinned a note to his body: “To Justice Harlan. Come and get your [n-word] now.”

(Lawyers tend to be more plainspoken than laypeople. The professor actually uses the n-word both in the audio (bleeped out) and in the notes! He did not get the memo about Jonathan Friedland!)

The guys who faciliated the lynching and/or perpetrated it were sentenced to either 60 or 90 days in jail and then returned home to hero’s welcomes (a crowd of 10,000 welcomed Sheriff Joseph Shipp, for example).

So… this year I’m thankful that our society has moved beyond real-world lynch mobs, even if Facebook and Twitter can now facilitate virtual ones.

(The whole lecture series is worth buying, in my opinion just for this one lecture.)

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How many adult New Yorkers can live off a gay black youth?

by philg

Some of my Facebook friends posted in outrage over a synagogue in New York City being defaced with graffiti by a guy named “James Polite” (you can’t make this stuff up!). To them this was further proof of Donald Trump’s unfitness for the office of President. The Democrat-for-most-of-his-life and native New Yorker has been generating a tidal wave of Jew-hatred (especially bad because it takes away energy from the more important task of Israel-hatred to which many of these Trump opponents are devoted?) and plainly this graffiti incident was Trump-inspired.

The discussion motivated checking out “After Years in Foster Care, Intern ‘Adopted’ by City Hall Catches a Break” (nytimes, Dec 14, 2017):

In 2008, at a gay pride rally for Mr. Obama, Mr. Polite met Christine C. Quinn, then the City Council speaker.

Ms. Quinn still remembers their introduction on the steps of City Hall. “James was telling me his story,” she recalled recently in an interview. “And I said, ‘Do you have an internship?’ And he said ‘No.’ And I said, ‘Well, you do now.’”

He interned with Ms. Quinn, a Manhattan Democrat, for several years, working on initiatives to combat hate crime, sexual assault and domestic violence. He also took part in her re-election campaign in 2009 and returned to help with her unsuccessful bid for mayor in 2013.

He was placed with a foster family in Queens. His mother regained custody of him when he was in the third grade.

But he felt pressure mounting as he neared his 21st birthday, which would mark the end of foster care services, including money for room and board.

Months before that birthday, a Brooklyn couple learned about the possibility of fostering him. The couple, Josh Waletzky and Jenny Levison, said they had wanted to foster an “L.G.B.T.Q. youth” on the brink of aging out of the system.

(in others, the expert on fighting hate crime is now accused of perpetrating one).

The article carries a fun correction:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred incompletely to the type of youth whom Josh Waletzky and Jenny Levison sought to foster. It was an “L.G.B.T.Q. youth” on the brink of aging out of the system, not merely a gay youth.

Based on just this one article, let’s see how many adult New Yorkers were mining the resources of a black gay (or “LGBTQ”) youth:

  • the mother (no father is mentioned and, depending on the income of their former sex partner, “single mothers” usually receive either welfare benefits, such as free housing, health care, and food, or child support cash under New York family law)
  • bureaucrats in the New York foster care industry
  • various foster parents, each of whom would be getting paid (table of rates by state)
  • employees of the Children’s Aid non-profit org
  • Christine C. Qunn, who got positive political spin from employing this guy
  • the final foster parents who snagged the laurels associated with an “LGBTQ youth” only “months” before his 21st birthday.

I’m wondering if this shows a path to boost one’s social standing among Manhattanites. Foster a “child” from a fashionable victim group two days before the child turns 21. Then spin the tale of being a foster parent to an LGBTQ youth or South Sudanese refugee or former child soldier at cocktail parties, neglecting to mention that the foster arangement lasted only two days.

Related:

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Michael Bloomberg exacerbates income inequality with donation to Hopkins for financial aid

by philg

“Michael Bloomberg: Why I’m Giving $1.8 Billion for College Financial Aid” (nytimes):

Let’s eliminate money problems from the admissions equation for qualified students.

America is at its best when we reward people based on the quality of their work, not the size of their pocketbook. Denying students entry to a college based on their ability to pay undermines equal opportunity. It perpetuates intergenerational poverty. And it strikes at the heart of the American dream: the idea that every person, from every community, has the chance to rise based on merit.

… I am donating an additional $1.8 billion to Hopkins that will be used for financial aid for qualified low- and middle-income students.

Here’s a simple idea I bet most Americans agree with: No qualified high school student should ever be barred entrance to a college based on his or her family’s bank account. Yet it happens all the time.

Let’s ignore the obvious solution for the Hopkins administrators: raise headline tuition prices by $1.8 billion over the next 10 years, charge families exactly what they were being charged before, but say that “financial aid” has been increased by $1.8 billion. (See “Credit Supply and the Rise in College Tuition: Evidence from the Expansion in Federal Student Aid Programs”, a 2015 paper from the New York Fed; 60 percent of subsidized student loans were captured by increased tuition rates and provided no relief to the purported beneficiaries.)

Suppose that the Bloomberg program works as advertised and therefore that lower income families will actually pay $1.8 billion less over the forthcoming years.

Won’t this exacerbate the inequality that Bloomberg himself was decrying as recently as May 2018 (see “Inaction on inequality could lead to uprising”)? People born fortunate (high academic potential in an economy that rewards cognitive skills) will now go to college for free instead of taking out loans and paying them back from their high earnings. So they will pull yet farther ahead of Americans with low academic ability.

Instead of the rich-in-genetics person with an IQ of 140 paying back student loans that enabled attendance at an elite university, the rich-in-genetics person will now get to use a full 50-60 percent of income (assume 40-50 percent total tax rate in California, New York, and other typical destinations for elite Americans) on consumption and retirement savings. The smart Hopkins grad who came from a lower-income family will essentially get a gift from Michael Bloomberg of luxury clothing and automobiles that will make median-IQ, median-income Americans sick with envy.

In “Protests against Charles Murray inadvertently prove the points he made in The Bell Curve?” I asked “If you like to fret about inequality, the sidelining of less-than-brilliant workers in favor of robots, etc., why wouldn’t you love Charles Murray?”

See also “The Bell Curve revisited,” my 2004 post on the book. Excerpts:

The Bell Curve starts out by talking about how we live in an era where people get sorted by cognitive ability into socioeconomic classes. In 14th century England if you were a peasant with a high IQ or a noble with a low IQ it didn’t affect your life, reproductive potential, or income very much. In our more meritocratic and vastly more sophisticated economy a smart kid from a lower middle class might make it to the top of a big company (cf. Jack Welch, who paid himself $680 million as CEO of GE) or at least into a $300,000/year job as a radiologist. For the authors of the Bell Curve the increasing disparity in income in the U.S. is primarly due to the fact that employees with high IQs are worth a lot more than employees with low IQs. They note that we have an incredibly complex legal system and criminal justice system. So you’d expect people with poor cognitive ability to fail to figure out what is a crime, which crimes are actually likely to be punished, etc., and end up in jail. (A Google search brought up a report on juvenile justice in North Carolina; the average offender had an IQ of 79.) If they stay out of jail through dumb (literally) luck, there is no way that they are ever going to be able to start a small business; the legal and administrative hoops through which one must jump in order to employ even one other person are impenetrable obstacles to those with below-average intelligence.

… For us oldsters, one unexpected piece of cheerful news from this book is that younger Americans are getting genetically dumber every year. Even if you ignore the racial and immigrant angles of the book that created so much controversy back in 1994 it is hard to argue with the authors’ assertion that smart women tend to choose higher education and careers rather than cranking out lots of babies. …  Our population is predicted to reach 450 million or so [by 2050], i.e., the same as India had back when we were kids and our mothers told us about this starving and overpopulated country. An individual person’s labor in India has negligible economic value … It would seem that no enterprise would need an old guy’s skills in a country of 450 million; why bother when there are so many energetic young people around? And how would we be able to afford a house or apartment if there are 450 million smart young people out there earning big bucks and putting pressure on real estate prices? But if the book is right most of those young people will be dumb as bricks.

Whenever anyone talks about “financial aid,” I love to respond with “United Airlines gives more than 95 percent of customers financial aid since the official maximum ticket price is much higher than the typical price paid. Economists call charging each customer according to his or her ability to pay price discrimination, but it sounds better if you say ‘we’re giving these poor souls financial aid.'” (Note that price discrimination is possible
only in markets dominated by monopolies or oligopolies. McDonald’s can’t do this because Burger King is right across the street.)

Readers: Is it logically inconsistent for Michael Bloomberg to say that he wants to reduce income inequality and then give $1.8 billion to reduce college expenses for those Americans who are best set up to earn high incomes after graduation?

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Why don’t we offer free tickets to San Francisco for asylum-seekers?

by philg

“Federal Judge Blocks Trump’s Proclamation Targeting Some Asylum Seekers” (nytimes):

A federal judge on Monday ordered the Trump administration to resume accepting asylum claims from migrants no matter where or how they entered the United States, dealing at least a temporary setback to the president’s attempt to clamp down on a huge wave of Central Americans crossing the border.

Judge Jon S. Tigar [Obama appointee] of the United States District Court in San Francisco issued a temporary restraining order that blocks the government from carrying out a new rule that denies protections to people who enter the country illegally. The order, which suspends the rule until the case is decided by the court, applies nationally.

After the judge’s ruling on Monday, Lee Gelernt, the A.C.L.U. attorney who argued the case, said, “The court made clear that the administration does not have the power to override Congress and that, absent judicial intervention, real harm will occur.”

My comment:

I’m pleased to hear that the virtuous citizens of San Francisco, including at least this one judge, wish to welcome asylum-seekers and also pay them a $15/hour minimum wage. How about we offer plane tickets to SFO, SJC, and OAK for any asylum-seeker anywhere in the U.S.? My understanding is that San Francisco has an ample supply of public housing and other services for those at the lower end of the wage scale (and/or for those whose skills are not sufficient to command a $15/hour wage). Certainly folks in the Bay Area have big hearts and it wouldn’t be fair either to them or to the asylum-seekers for other states, regions, and cities not to assist the passage of all caravans straight through to Union Square.

I’m happy to pay for some Southwest, JetBlue, and Spirit tickets. All that I ask for in return is a Smartphone [Obamaphone?] photo of the welcoming committee in San Francisco.

This was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but why doesn’t it happen? Californians say that they want immigrants, regardless of documentation status or skill level. Americans in other states don’t want more immigrants. Transportation is inexpensive. Why not make it easy for any asylum-seeker or undocumented immigrant to go to San Francisco?

[Separately, why is the ACLU involved? Its web site says that it is “the nation’s premier defender of the rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution,” but do would-be immigrants have rights under the U.S. Constitution? If so, shouldn’t people in Afghanistan and Iraq have had the right to due process before getting bombed and shot? The ACLU is also recently against “due process” for college students who are accused of sex-related misdeeds. They say that this is because of their concern for “women and girls of color”, but Atlantic says that it is disproportionately “men of color” who are accused and kicked out. From the Atlantic article: “In 2015, in The New Yorker, Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor, wrote that in general, the administrators and faculty members she’d spoken with who ‘routinely work on sexual-misconduct cases’ said that ‘most of the complaints they see are against minorities.’ (Professor Suk was a source for us on domestic violence and the potential for a one-hearing divorce, custody, and child support victory.) If the ACLU is enthusiastic about African-American men being stripped of the presumption of innocence in university-run sex tribunals, why wouldn’t they also advocate for the removal of what had been considered due process in ordinary criminal courts?]

Related:

  • “Unlimited Haitians for communities that prepare to welcome them?”: People in San Francisco, Santa Monica, Manhattan, Boston, etc. are criticizing Trump for voicing his opinion (wrong, by definition!) regarding living conditions in Haiti. They also criticize him for being unwelcoming toward low-skill immigrants from unsuccessful societies in general. What if Trump were to offer immigration proponents an unlimited supply of people, without any preference for those capable of working, on condition that immigration advocates use state and local tax dollars to pay for their housing, health care, food, and walking-around money? So if people in San Francisco want to build a 1000-unit apartment complex for Haitian immigrants, and folks will be permanently entitled to live there by paying a defined fraction of their income in rent ($0 in rent for those with $0 in income), and San Francisco commits to build additional apartment complexes in which any children or grandchildren of these immigrants can live, why should the Federal government stand in the way of their dreams? (Of course, the city and state would also have to pay 100 percent of the costs of Medicaid, food stamps, Obamaphones, and any other welfare services consumed by these immigrants or their descendants.) If there were no numerical limits on immigration, but host communities had to pay for the guests whom they were welcoming, Trump wouldn’t have to be the bad guy anymore. … 
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LA Times trashes Robinson Helicopters

by philg

“Danger spins from the sky: The Robinson R44, the world’s best-selling civilian helicopter, has a long history of deadly crashes” (LA Times):

It is the world’s best-selling civilian helicopter, a top choice among flight schools, sightseeing companies, police departments and recreational pilots.

It also is exceptionally deadly.

Robinson R44s were involved in 42 fatal crashes in the U.S. from 2006 to 2016, more than any other civilian helicopter, according to a Times analysis of National Transportation Safety Board accident reports.

That translates to 1.6 deadly accidents per 100,000 hours flown — a rate nearly 50% higher than any other of the dozen most common civilian models whose flight hours are tracked by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Robinson points out that the flight hours reported to the FAA are likely undercounted (e.g., if an owner/operator gets sick of onerous annual surveys and tosses them into recycling… not that I know of anyone that irresponsible…)

I’m not surprised that an owner-flown $400,000 R44 is twice as likely to be involved in a fatal accident than a professionally-flown $3 million Airbus AStar.

Having been an instructor in the Robinson R22, however, I’m shocked that the fatal accident rate for this $200,000-ish (rebuilt) flight school mule is comparable to that of a $3+ million Bell 407 (i.e., less than half the rate for the much-more-forgiving R44). I guess this shows the advantage of being in the training environment, in which encountering bad weather is much less likely than when an aircraft is used for transportation. Alternatively, you could say that this shows the safety advantage of a two-pilot crew. A higher percentage of R22 hours are student and instructor rather than a single pilot. (The Schweizer 269‘s accident rate is even lower; this is a machine that is essentially exclusively used for training.)

Here’s a cited accident that would have been much less likely to occur with two pilots on board:

Take the case of Jim Bechler, an Orange County attorney who had piloted Robinson helicopters for more than 30 years and bought a new R44 in 2008. He was flying home from a business meeting near Temecula when he stopped to refuel at Corona Municipal Airport.

Minutes later, as the helicopter lifted off with 40 gallons of fuel in its tanks, its rotor blades clipped a metal canopy over the fuel island. The R44 flailed briefly, dropped a few feet to the pavement and burst into flames.

(This also shows the tragic backwardness of certified human-occupied aircraft compared to $500 drones. A consumer drone wouldn’t fly itself into an obstacle as described above.)

Given the numbers, the LA Times could have cast the story as “local company makes an inexpensive helicopter that is remarkably safe when flown by two pilots”. The story’s focus on mast bumping does not make sense. The statistics in the article show that the Bell 206, which has a two-bladed rotor system subject to mast bumping, has a lower rate of fatal accidents than the Bell 407, whose 4-bladed rotor system isn’t at risk.

Personally I would like to see robot copilots for both helicopters and airplanes.

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Folks who vote for a larger Welfare State should also discourage the teaching of evolution?

by philg

I’ve been enjoying The Great Trials of World History and the Lessons They Teach Us, by Douglas Linder, a professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law.

One of the trials covered is the familiar Scopes Trial, in which ignorance is pitted against Science.

Professor Linder highlights that one of the reasons William Jennings Bryan was against the teaching of evolution in schools, however, is that he was an advocate for equality and was fighting against attempts to discourage unsuccessful Americans from breeding, e.g., in the Eugenics movement.

I wonder if Jennings Bryan would be perplexed by the situation today in which advocates for a larger Welfare State, which encourages maximum reproduction by the least successful Americans (by providing free housing, health care, food, and smartphones on condition that they have children), are simultaneously loud advocates in favor of teaching evolution in schools.

Readers: Why do people who advocate for maximizing the percentage of Americans who are descended from those who never worked also enjoy rooting out the handful of American Creationists and calling them stupid? Shouldn’t folks who advocate maximum fertility among those on Welfare want to downplay a biological theory that says children will closely resemble their parents?

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