Category Archives: Op-Eds

The Biden Administration is All Wet When it Says You Can’t Be

Photo by turydddu. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Photo by turydddu. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Toward the end of his otherwise tumultuous term, former President Donald Trump leaned into his role as Whiner In Chief to do something nice for all of us. Something minor and, in a sane world, completely non-controversial, but nice nonetheless.

“Showerheads —  you take a shower, the water doesn’t come out,” he complained. “You just stand there longer or you take a shower longer? Because my hair — I don’t know about you, but it has to be perfect.”

The reason: US Department of Energy “conservation rules” that limit how much water (2.5 gallons per minute) a shower head is allowed to pour over you.

And by golly, he did something about it (the water flow, not his hair):

He directed the US Department of Energy to roll back its restrictions to the glory days of 1992, when showers could still rain down cleanliness on you such that it was possible to get wet, washed, dry, and dressed during the last segment of “Unsolved Mysteries” and not miss the opening scene of “Seinfeld.” Or, unfortunately, the entirety of “Charles and Diana: Unhappily Ever After.”

It was a minor change,  however lovely, and not yet implemented by shower head manufacturers when the Biden Administration nixed it on July 16.

The excuse is “water conservation.” The real reason, one has to assume, is “because it was a Trump thing, and all Trump things must be undone.” The rule reversion probably won’t save an ounce of water.

For one thing, if you have to spend twice as long in the shower to get clean, using half as much water per minute doesn’t save any. It just wastes your time.

For another, weak showers drive many people back to an old-fashioned and much more water-wasteful alternative, the bath.

And, finally, a little secret: Anyone with a pair of needle-nose pliers and access to YouTube can quickly and easily build a time machine that re-locates your shower to the pre-1992 era!

Millions of Americans  have pulled the “flow restrictors” out of their shower heads, hopefully wagging their middle fingers in the direction of Washington, DC as they did so. Manufacturers are required to put those flow restrictors in the shower heads they sell, but you’re not required to leave them there. Yet.

If the Biden administration is serious about water conversation, it should look into options like reducing water-wasteful methanol subsidies instead of dirty tricks like mandating inferior shower experiences.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Note to Joe: Try These Two Easy Tricks to Promote Freedom in Cuba

Protests in Havana against the government of Cuba, July 12, 2021. Photo by 14ymedio.  Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
Protests in Havana against the government of Cuba, July 12, 2021. Photo by 14ymedio. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

“We stand with the Cuban people,” US President Joe Biden says in an official White House statement, responding to protests across the Caribbean island country, “and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime.”

Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel disagrees as to the nature of the protests. “All this discontent, these feelings of dissatisfaction, what is the ultimate cause of all that?” he asks. “It’s the blockade. This is part of the U.S. playbook to destabilize us, to generate chaos, to break our will and spirit.”

Diaz-Canel has a point.

There’s no actual “blockade,” but there is an embargo, now yearly 60 years long, under which most trade with Cuba is forbidden to American businesses (and foreign business which operate the US).

The supposed purpose of the embargo has been, simply put, to make life hard enough on the Cuban people that they rise up and overthrow the communist regime. So when Diaz-Canel blames the embargo for popular discomfort and dissatisfaction, a US claim that he’s wrong is essentially an admission that the embargo serves no worthwhile purpose whatsoever.

Which seems to be the case. Six decades of failure to achieve its purpose kind of speaks for itself, don’t you think?

If Biden really wants to “stand with the Cuban people,” there are two easy steps he can take to do so in an honest way.

First, he can ask Congress to lift the embargo and declare a policy of unilateral free trade with Cuba. If Cubans aren’t going to be permitted to trade with Americans, let the Cuban regime, not the US regime, be the ones to say so — and to pay any price in popularity that comes with the decision.

Second, he can ask Congress to end all restrictions on travel and migration between Cuba and the US. If you’re a Cuban who wants to visit or live in America, or vice versa, and if you can can find a way to make the journey, the US government won’t stand in your way (again, if the Cuban government does, that’s on them).

Will those two things happen? Not likely. Florida’s a swing presidential state with a strong lobby and associated Cuban-American voting bloc that favors economic protectionism in the name of an “anti-communism” that aims to keep Cuba’s Communist Party in charge at all costs.

But if he dares risk it, Biden can actually stand up for freedom — in a way that invites the Cuban people to reveal and act on their true preferences, whatever those preferences may be — instead of just mouthing dishonest platitudes.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Internet Censorship: The Real Monopoly Threat

Screenshot of suspended account realDonaldTrump on Twitter 2020-01-09. Public Domain.

“If [Donald] Trump and [Bernie] Sanders take the same position on Big Tech censorship,” David Catron writes at The American Spectator, “the issue deserves serious attention.”

He’s right, but in pretty much the opposite of the way he intends. When the mainstream “right” and “left” agree on anything, that’s almost always a blazing neon sign warning us that our freedoms are under threat.

Catron (and Trump and Sanders) want the US government to seize control of social media platforms and dictate which users those platforms must accept and what kind of content those platforms must permit publication of. They don’t put it quite that baldly, of course, but who would? Their cause is implicit in their criticisms of “Big Tech” as a “monopoly,” which requires government regulation to promote competition in the “marketplace of ideas.”

Social media platforms aren’t monopolies. If you don’t like Facebook or Twitter, you can go to Minds, MeWe, Diaspora, Mastodon, Gab, Discord, et al.

The US government, however, IS a monopoly. Everyone’s forced to “do business” with it, and in many areas it forcibly forbids or limits competition with its own offerings.

Arguments in favor of government regulation of social media platforms aren’t arguments against monopolies. They’re arguments in favor of extending the government monopoly’s reach into new markets. In this case, markets constitutionally protected by the First Amendment and by that amendment’s codification in statute vis a vis the Internet, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

Social media platforms’ banning and content moderation decisions aren’t “censorship.”

Censorship is “you can’t say that.”

“You can’t use OUR PLATFORM” to say that isn’t censorship.

If you tell me I can’t sing my favorite Irish ballad, and that if I do you’ll have me arrested (assuming you have the power to do so), that’s censorship.

If you tell me I can’t sing “Foggy Dew” on your front porch at midnight, that’s not censorship. I’m free to sing it on my own front porch, or on the sidewalk, or at karaoke night at the local bar.

By way of arguing the point, some of my friends point out that politicians bully major Internet platforms into “censoring by proxy.” The popular example is US Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) successfully leaning on Amazon Prime Video to remove “anti-vaccine” documentaries.

My friends are right. It’s a problem.  Politicians attempting to compel platforms to host speech they don’t want to host is the flip side of the same problem, not a different problem.

Whatever the solution to that problem may be,  repeal of the First Amendment or “reform” of Section 230 aren’t part of it.

Ideally, bad actors like Schiff, Trump, and Florida governor Ron DeSantis would be impeached and removed from office, or charged with conspiracy against rights (18 US Code § 241), or both.

Barring that, we should work to ensure that these evil-doers lose in Congress, in the courts, and at the ballot box. We mustn’t sacrifice Internet freedom, or freedom of speech and press in general, to politicians and their schemes.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY