No Place To Go

by Christian Britschgi, Reason, October 15, 2024

Excerpt:

In September, the city council of Kalispell, Montana, took the unusual, and likely unprecedented, step of revoking a permit it had given to a local shelter that had allowed it to offer warm beds to the rural community’s homeless during the winter months.

City councilmembers blame the privately funded Flathead Warming Center for attracting out-of-town homeless people to the community, who they say have caused an uptick in crime and disorder in the surrounding neighborhood.

The Flathead Warming Center says those accusations are unfounded and the revocation of its permit was done via an ad hoc, illegal process.

DRH comment: Without government, who would take care of not allowing private shelters to exist?

Rebel Ridge Is an Effective Fantasy but the Reality Is Even Worse

by Clark Nelly, Cato at Liberty, October 15, 2024.

In reality, America’s criminal justice system is often rotten to the core. Contrary to the scenario in Rebel Ridge, cops and other system actors need not be staring down the barrel of a fiscal crisis to deploy civil forfeiture in a manner scarcely distinguishable from outright theft. Instead, the combination of perverse incentives, lax procedures, and near-zero accountability practically ensures abuse. Those who object will discover that the so-called “blue wall of silence” is very real and far more effective at protecting perpetrators of serial police misconduct than the ragtag conspiracy of country bumpkins portrayed in Rebel Ridge.

And in our system there’s no need to sandbag defendants by flatly denying access to counsel when you can accomplish the same functional result by persistently underfunding and overworking public defenders to the point where it becomes impossible for them to provide a truly zealous defense to all—or even most of—their clients.

Will Rivian Automotive Last Long Enough to Use All of Its State Subsidies?

by Marc Joffe, Cato at Liberty, October 17, 2024.

Electric vehicle marker Rivian is struggling to make cars and earn a profit, but it has proven adept at winning subsidy and tax credit packages from governments around the country. If the company cannot reverse its financial fortunes, it could go under before it uses all the incentives it has been offered.

According to Good Jobs First’s Subsidy Tracker, Rivian has gotten incentive packages from four states with an aggregate value of over $2.3 billion since 2016. The company started small, receiving $1.72 million from the Michigan Business Development Program to set up its corporate headquarters in Livonia, Michigan, and hire up to 170 employees. It later moved to the nearby city of Plymouth, Michigan, before transferring its headquarters out of state to Irvine, California.

DRH comment: These two paragraphs, as well as the whole article, are interesting in themselves. The other item of interest is that there’s actually a “subsidy tracker.” As well there should be.

The Debanking of America

by Rupa Subramanya, The Free Press, October 17, 2024.

Excerpt:

Being unable to process payments would make running his crowdfunding platform impossible. So Blauvelt, now 40, left a family vacation in Florida to fly to Stripe’s San Francisco headquarters to straighten things out.

A dozen people, mostly from Stripe’s compliance division, were waiting in a conference room. Blauvelt explained that LaunchGood, which crowdsources donations for Muslim charities around the world, was all about things like providing food aid in Syria, clean drinking water in Gaza, flood relief in Bangladesh, and so forth.

Blauvelt, who was born in Malaysia to a Protestant family, converted to Islam as a teenager. He knew the unspoken concern of those in the room. As he told me, he explained to Stripe, “We’re not terrorists. We’re trying to bring humanity together.”

Stripe’s Arboleda told Blauvelt it was out of their hands: Stripe’s banking partner, Wells Fargo, had made the call to cut ties. She said that was all she knew—and, in fact, it was all she was allowed to know. Banking laws prevented banks from disclosing their reasons for severing ties with customers.

Reminder: The banking sector is one of the sectors that Joe Stiglitz thinks was deregulated.