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A New Jersey Lesson in Minor League Baseball

Time will tell, but Rhode Islanders should keep a healthy eye, over the next couple of decades, on whether we dodged a bullet when we declined to bear financial risk for the construction of a new minor league baseball stadium.  Eric Boehm’s report from New Jersey gives reason to expect that it will prove to be so:

Taxpayers spent more than $18 million to build the stadium that would eventually be named Campbell’s Field, as part of a minor league ballpark-building frenzy across New Jersey that saw similar stadiums erected in Newark, Atlantic City, and Somerset—all part of redevelopment schemes that attracted independent minor league teams (that is, minor league teams not affiliated with the Major League Baseball farm system).

Less than two decades later, taxpayers in New Jersey will pay another $1 million to tear down Campbell’s Field. …

Camden’s not the only city to dump a ton of money into a minor (or major) league ballpark under the guise of economic development, only to see the project become a fiscal black hole. The minor league teams that moved into Newark and Atlantic City around the same time as the Riversharks started playing in Camden have met similar fates. The Atlantic City Surf survived for 11 years before going bankrupt and the Newark Bears folded in 2014. Their riverfront stadium in downtown Newark is also set to be demolished less than 20 years after it was built.

Yes, maybe it looks bad that Rhode Island is losing its icons and blocking new development, but that negative appearance doesn’t justify making risky deals.

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Confirming a Conservative Response to Poverty

Writing about public policy day in and day out, one can forget that not everybody follows every argument with close attention.  Broad philosophical points of view and underlying intentions can therefore be lost.

Just so, I almost didn’t bother reading a brief essay in which Michael Tanner promotes and summarizes his forthcoming book offering a broad explanation of a conservative policy response to poverty.  It’s worth reading, though, because he summarizes some conservative policies specifically in terms of their human objectives:

  • Keeping people out of jail can promote work and stable families.
  • Breaking up “the government education monopoly and limit[ing] the power of teachers’ unions” is rightly seen as an “anti-poverty program.”
  • Preventing government from driving up the cost of living, especially housing, will give poorer families a chance to get their feet on the ground.
  • Policies that discourage savings also discourage healthy financial habits.
  • A heavy hand in regulating the economy tends to target economic growth toward the rich and powerful.

As he concludes:

An anti-poverty agenda built on empowering poor people and allowing them to take greater control of their own lives offers the chance for a new bipartisan consensus that rejects the current paternalism of both Left and Right. More important, it is an agenda that will do far more than our current failed welfare state to actually lift millions of Americans out of poverty.

My only objection is that I’m not sure that the “paternalism of the Right” is a view that conservatives actually hold rather than a caricature that the Left spreads about us.  Of course, the fault is arguably ours, if we don’t often enough express our real intentions.

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Center Recommends Constitutional Amendment to Codify Legislative Process Reforms

The legislative sausage-making process in Rhode Island is in dire need of reform. Those reforms that should be codified through a constitutional amendment, so that Senators and Representatives will have greater capacity and freedom to represent their individual districts, rather than being compelled to back the personal agendas of Senate and House leadership. Now is the time to demand better government.

Our state needs less control by leadership over what legislation will advance, with more power provided to legislative committees.

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The Noises of an Expected Problem

This sure looks like an action done with the awareness of Rhode Island’s chief executive, with full knowledge that overspending was part of a long-term budget-management scheme:

House Finance Committee Chairman Marvin Abney publicly vented his “disappointment″ that the directors of Rhode Island’s overspending state agencies did not come to the hearing to answer lawmakers’ questions.

The House’s chief fiscal adviser, Sharon Reynolds Ferland, shared her own frustration at what she described as the lax response of state agencies to direct instructions from the state budget office to lay out specific options for averting a potential $47.2-million deficit this year, and scaling back their budget requests for next year.

She attributed the potential current year deficit “primarily … [to] unmet expenditure savings and unbudgeted policy choices.”

They don’t have plans because they don’t feel like they need them. Everybody in state government is on basically the same page about the primacy of government spending. This will continue until (1) politicians start paying a price for going along with it or (2) bankruptcy.

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The Constitutional Importance of Our Legislators’ Authority

Rhode Island has had lengthy debates about who, outside of the legislature, should have authority to judge what our state representatives and senators do in their official capacity, and few questioned whether that sort of protection belonged in the state constitution. Yet, nobody has yet suggested that legislators deserve the same level of protection from the abuses of other legislators, specifically when it comes to the House and Senate rules.

The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity is signing on to calls for rules that reduce the power of legislative leaders and give it back to legislators, but with the caveat that it ought to happen where new factions can’t change the rules back if they take control:

In calling for a dual-legislative track, the Center’s primary objective is to ensure that elected Senators and Representatives will have greater capacity and freedom to represent their individual districts, rather than being compelled to back the personal agendas of Senate and House leadership.

The first piece of legislation would immediately implement certain reforms for the 2019 General Assembly session, while the second piece would call for a ballot-referendum in 2020, whereby voters could approve codification of those reforms into the Rhode Island constitution.

The political Left, in particular, has exhibited a tendency to back individual rights until such time as Leftists are able to impose their preferred regime, at which point individual dissent suddenly becomes illegitimate. With legislative rules, as with our rights, we should move them as far out of reach as possible while we still have some semblance of representative democracy.

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A Great Year for Worker Freedom – Help Spread the Word

This year was a GREAT year for worker freedom across the country, and here in the Ocean State. Early in the summer, the SCOTUS decision in the historic Janus case determined that state and local governments are forbidden from forcing their employees to join unions as a condition of employment. The ruling means union leaders can no longer automatically plunder the pocketbooks of public employees to fund the unions’ political agendas.

In August, we launched our MyPayMySayRI.com campaign to educate public servants about their restored First Amendment rights.

But the insiders want to keep workers in the dark, and in the unions… at any cost.

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Are State Agencies Really “Overspending”?

Unfortunately, we have to admit that this is nothing new:

Overspending by state agencies has opened up a $42-million hole in this year’s budget, according to new estimates from the state budget office.

The state departments of Children, Youth and Families; Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals; Labor and Training; and Revenue were among eight agencies over budget in the first quarter of the fiscal year that started July 1, according to a memo from State Budget Officer Thomas Mullaney on Thursday.

Some doubt is arising, however, whether we can really claim that these agencies are “overspending.” When departments regularly spend more than their budgets and the governor and General Assembly simply add money in a supplemental budget as the books come to a close and then audits come in much lower, it begins to look as if the departments are simply following the ordinary course of operation.

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For fiscal years 2012 through 2017, the state government increased its supplemental budget by an average of 2.4% and then actually spent an average of 4.7% less than that.  Every year, the state estimates that it is overspending and adds money to the supplemental budget.  The local news media for some reason tends to trumpet the increase from the supplemental amount to the next year’s final, which looks more reasonable because the bulk of the increase is in the supplemental.  All of this happens with plenty of fluff above the actual spending of the state, with a reliable 2.6% annual increase.

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Asking the Wrong Question When the Toy Company Thinks About Leaving

I join others in wondering why it is, exactly, that nobody in Rhode Island government happened to mention that Hasbro was considering a move out of the state until the day after the election.  But the election is over, so we return to our regularly scheduled observations about politicians’ flawed mindset.  Oddly the most telling sentence on this subject has been removed from Tom Mooney’s Providence Journal article since last night:

Grebien said city officials have been talking to Hasbro for several months but that Grebien remains unclear specifically what Hasbro wants in order to stay in the city.

That is simply the wrong question and the wrong attitude, and it shows how politicians’ desire for every decision to run through their hands has put our communities at risk of extortion.  In a healthy political system, Pawtucket Mayor Donald Grebien would be asking what the city and state governments are doing that makes companies want to leave, because we’re doing something wrong if its directors feel as if they can’t remain in the state of their business’s birth.

If the state isn’t doing anything wrong and some factor beyond our control creates the necessity for the move, then we should admit that Rhode Island may no longer be the best fit for the company, or the company for Rhode Island, and society would be better off with more-efficient use of its resources.

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Dr. Prakash Chougule: Choose Flanders for Balance of Representation in Congress

It’s been almost three decades since we have had balance of power in Rhode Island’s representation of U.S. Senators in Washington DC. Senator John Chafee(R) and Claiborne Pell(D), both highly regarded and respected across party lines, made Rhode Islanders proud at home and in Washington DC.

Time has come for Rhode Island to do it again.

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Funny How Rhode Island Works

Readers know that I’m not a fan of our campaign finance regime.  It imposes a complicated, intimidating set of laws for grassroots candidates and groups that creates opportunity not only for prosecution of them, but also political attacks on their donors.

I have a hard time, therefore, getting worked up about the apparent probability that the campaign of Democrat Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello funded a mailer allowing Republican Shawna Lawton to endorse him in a high-profile way against his Republican challenger, Steven Frias.  To the extent the activity is illegal, it is because of this complex, unconstitutional labyrinth we’ve built, with incentive to find workarounds.

That said, the investigation is unearthing an education in the way Rhode Island politics work, and the stunning thing is that the most objectionable things are treated as incidental… and they’re all completely legal.  I’ve already highlighted one connection:

House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello has put Edward Cotugno, the mail-ballot guru who helped him eke out an 85-vote victory in 2016, back on his campaign team and given his son a $70,000 a year State House job.

Mattiello, D-Cranston, hired Michael Cotugno as the legislature’s new associate director of House constituent-services.

Here’s another:

Included in the evidence packet that the board provided to The Journal on Friday, in response to a records request, was an Aug. 14, 2016, text from “Teresa” to [political consultant] “Jeff” [Britt] and his partner, Daniel Calhoun, who is still listed as a $60,891-a-year legislative employee on the state’s transparency portal.

Think of this.  Under Mattiello, the legislature has given well-paying legislative jobs (of unknown difficulty) to the son of his “mail-ballot guru” and the man who shares a nice Warwick house with one of his campaign operatives, and the thing we’re supposed to be upset about is a relatively small contribution toward political free speech!

But arguing that the campaign finance investigation is the only reason we know about the rest doesn’t justify burdensome campaign finance laws.  When people act in suspicious ways (like endorsing people of other parties or independent spoiler candidates), we should… well… suspect them of having some ulterior motive, unless they can express a persuasive rationale for the odd decision.  And if somebody who benefits from that persuasion wants to fund it, their money doesn’t change the validity of the argument.

Ultimately, the answer is just to reduce the size of government and the value of controlling it.

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Whom Elected Officials Really Represent

Snippets from the AFL-CIO’s endorsement meeting leave no doubt that Rhode Islanders generally have scant representation when our supposed representatives negotiate with labor unions:

Seeking the blessing of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education Convention this past Wednesday, elected officials came bearing their own visions of a better world for workers.

If reelected, Gov. Gina Raimondo promised to raise the minimum wage “again and again and again.”

General Treasurer Seth Magaziner said he’d help combat the U.S. Supreme Court’s “Janus” decision by working on legislation to keep government-employee information out of the hands of union-disaffiliation campaigners.

Senate President Dominick Ruggerio, a high-placed Laborers’ International Union official until last year, vowed to work on bills that would allow public-sector unions to stop representing non-members. (State lawmakers this year passed a bill letting police and fire unions do this, but legislation allowing it across government stalled.)

As Providence Journal reporters Patrick Anderson and Katherine Gregg put it, to the labor unions, “all of Rhode Island is a future job site.”  Implied is that this perspective leaves government as the mechanism that is able to take money and land and hand it over.  Raimondo would burden our economy.  Magaziner — inexplicably, if one believes his role is to steward taxpayer funds — wants to throw obstacles in the path of those who would help employees to be more independent.  And Ruggerio is intent on lightening unions’ burden while maintaining their near monopoly on employment with government.

By comparison, Republican gubernatorial candidate Allan Fung’s only promise appears to be that he is no longer in favor of right to work laws.  That’s bad enough, but it’s a far cry from a pledge to shape the laws of our land in the unions’ favor even more than they already are.  Interestingly, Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello (D, Cranston) is not mentioned in the article.

Two questions arising from the article:

  • Why did “just the phrase ‘right to work'” trigger “tense words between firefighters and building trades workers”?
  • Why didn’t the Providence Journal reporters note that they are members of the AFL-CIO, and did they vote on the endorsements?
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Innovative Ways to Corrupt Government

I suspect this sort of thing (or perhaps more-mild variations) are more common than we know:

“Public records obtained by CEI show a pattern of law enforcement offices turning to off-the-books payments for privately funded lawyers to push a political agenda that was roundly rejected at the ballot box by the American people,” said Horner. “The scheme raises serious questions about special interests setting states’ policy and law enforcement agendas, without accountability to the taxpayers and voters whom these law enforcement officials supposedly serve.”

These public emails and documents reveal the details of an unprecedented, coordinated effort between environmental groups, plaintiffs’ lawyers, and major liberal donors using nonprofit organizations to fund staff, research, public relations, and other services for state attorney general offices. One nonprofit uses a center, established by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to pay for Special Assistant Attorneys General (SAAGs) for the AG offices that agree to advance progressive legal positions. Offices that have taken on board a privately funded prosecutor are Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Washington, and the District of Columbia. Senior attorneys from the activist AG offices have even flown in to secretly brief prospective funders of another nonprofit, Union of Concerned Scientists, which has recruited AGs and served as their back-room strategist and advisor on this since at least 2015.

Government has so much power that special interests will inevitably seek innovative ways to leverage it.  Yesterday, my Twitter stream was full of investigations into relatively low-dollar campaign finance questions concerning relatively unknown candidates for office, as if the inherent corruption of big government’s every day operation is less scandalous!

However one balances newsworthiness, the solution is the same: shrink the size and authority of government and thereby reduce the incentive to invest in corruption.  Unfortunately, people tend to support big government because they want it to do a particular thing.  If their fellow citizens disagree and bring about an elected government that is less inclined to do that thing, they’ll seek other means.

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The Balance of Freedoms in Rhode Island

A thousand discussions could be sparked by the Cato Institute’s Freedom in the 50 States ranking and Rhode’s Island’s 42nd place ranking.

The datapoints that go into the index cover a wide range of issues and are subjective.  For example, Rhode Island is number 1 in “marriage freedom,” largely on the strength of its same-sex partnership laws, but some might suggest that the use of government to redefine a cultural institution is hardly a marker of freedom.  Some might also note that same-sex marriage accounts for 2% of a state’s overall score while religious freedom accounts for only 0.01%.

On the other end of the spectrum, the only area in which Rhode Island is dead last is asset forfeiture. However, another low rank for the state could arguably be considered its defining problem: labor market freedom.  Here, our 49th place ranking results from laws on:

  • General right-to-work law
  • Short-term disability insurance
  • Noncompete agreements permitted
  • Minimum wage
  • Workers’ compensation funding regulations
  • Workers’ compensation coverage regulations
  • Employer verification of legal status
  • Employee anti-discrimination law
  • Paid family leave

The total effect of these policies has been that Rhode Island hasn’t budged from 49th since the first year measured: 2000.

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Rhode Island has a great deal going for it, but if people can’t find work here, they won’t live here.  The Ocean State is roughly in the middle fifth for fiscal and personal freedom — although dropping from 18th to 27th in fiscal freedom from 2000 to 2016 and from 12th to 31st in personal freedom.  If we take Cato’s weightings as our guide, that decline has been making life less free.  But those changes pale in comparison to our languishing at the edge of the bottom fifth in regulatory freedom throughout, and that’s an area in which we need great resolve and quick action to improve.

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Michael Riley: Rhode Island May Have Dodged a Bullet, No Thanks to Our Treasurer

In assessing the effort to keep the PawSox in Rhode Island, it is important to review the role of General Treasurer Seth Magaziner. The state treasurer was asked to analyze the costs and opine on affordability, as would be expected with a large borrowing like this. Mr. Magaziner opined in October 2017 and in June 2018 as numbers changed along with the terms of the deal and then opined again recently, finally giving a nod to the deal.

But what everyone needs to know is that $350 million dollars in debt for Pawtucket’s other post-employment benefits (OPEB) for former employees was not used in his analysis. This is more than twice the city’s pension debt! In fact, it was purposely left out by Magaziner. Including OPEB debt would obviously have made the City of Pawtucket’s borrowing look dangerous and ill-conceived. Ignoring OPEB allowed for an outrageous abuse of taxpayer dollars by the treasurer.

Think about it.  Seth Magaziner violated his own risk recommendations by hiding a liability in his analysis; this is the type of stuff they did with 38 Studios. Mr. Magaziner owes it to taxpayers to lay all the cards on the table and not to fall in line with political winds. Had he actually laid the cards on the table, looked at all the debt, and been transparent and honest, the PawSox deal would appropriately have never seen the light of day.

As can be seen in the comprehensive Debt Affordability Study, Pawtucket already exceeds Magaziner’s limits for debt, along with Woonsocket and Providence, before even considering borrowing for the new stadium or the $350 million in OPEB liability, which the board is to reconsider as a component next year. This $350 million is so significant and overwhelming, it would be irresponsible for any treasurer to think Pawtucket absorbing new debt was a good idea.

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Government Involvement in the Internet Isn’t About Freedom

Here’s something I don’t get:  Not that long ago the word went out that retracting net neutrality rules would end the open Internet as we know it, bringing it all the way back to the distant, dark days of January 2015.  So one would expect new proposals reportedly leaked from Senate Democrats to rev up the outrage machine again.  The plan is extremely broad, but a major plank is requirements for verification of users’ identities (at least for non-hackers), as well as…

Other proposals include more disclosure requirements for online political speech, more spending to counter supposed cybersecurity threats, more funding for the Federal Trade Commission, a requirement that companies’ algorithms can be audited by the feds (and this data shared with universities and others), and a requirement of “interoperability between dominant platforms.”

The paper also suggests making it a rule that tech platforms above a certain size must turn over internal data and processes to “independent public interest researchers” so they can identify potential “public health/addiction effects, anticompetitive behavior, radicalization,” scams, “user propagated misinformation,” and harassment—data that could be used to “inform actions by regulators or Congress.”

Of course, this proposal and net neutrality are only at odds if the people pushing either attempt to use the rhetoric of freedom.  If the goal is government control of the Internet, then they’re both perfectly in line, in which case net neutrality supporters were either deceived or have an unjustifiable faith that government overlords will always favor the content they desire.

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The Lead Questions from the Other Side of America

Somehow, it seems like the sorts of questions that John Hinderaker posed the other day don’t seem to be asked very often in the course of reporting on national political scandals.  Yesterday, I summarized the two sides on the scene, and I think it’s important for people in Rhode Island to understand that there are live questions not answered by the standard Democrat-media talking points.

Here’s a marker of what many of us have no sense we don’t know:

Time was getting short for the insurance policy.

Four days later the same team was emailing about rushing to get approval for another FISA warrant for another Russia-related investigation code-named “Dragon.”

I confess that I can’t keep up with the ever-expanding FBI scandal, but do we know what “Dragon” is, and how it differs from “Crossfire Hurricane”? Whatever Dragon was, it apparently had to do with stopping the Trump campaign, as Strzok and Page were eager to get it off the ground.

Now, one can reasonably speculate about what direction all this will go, whether there is anything of substance here, and whether peculiar actions by government agents were justifiable, but one can’t reasonably dismiss these questions as a distraction.  At the very least, there is plausible evidence of an actual, honest-to-goodness conspiracy within government to affect our political process and the resulting presidency.

Frankly, I have trouble trusting anybody who encourages us to look away from that.  What do such people not want us to discover, or is their real fear that they’ll lose their ability to do such things in the future?

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Incentive for a Disability

News of a former employee of the Rhode Island House Minority office who has filed a disability discrimination lawsuit claiming that Minority Leader (and gubernatorial candidate) Patricia Morgan discriminated against her raises a topic to which our society has perhaps not devoted sufficient debate:

Masciarelli says in her complaint that she suffers from depression, and she alleges Morgan told multiple people she needed to be fired before she was covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Morgan says Masciarelli was fired due to her poor work ethic and she never knew of the woman’s disability. Morgan says she was cleared by the state Commission for Human Rights.

If emotional conditions are going to start carrying the same protections as physical conditions, we’re entering a legal thicket.  When a disability is physical, one can more-easily differentiate between employment decisions that have directly to do with an ability to accomplish necessary tasks and discrimination.  With emotional conditions, where does a “poor work ethic” end and a protected disability begin?

Indeed, the availability of such protections creates incentive for employees to seek diagnoses, and because psychology is more subjective than physicality, fraud would be more difficult to prove.  Even without bringing fraud into the picture, though, doesn’t anything that creates incentive to have a mental health problem make it less likely that the person will overcome it?

How long, one wonders, until people begin to claim that the stresses of their jobs created the hazardous (i.e., stressful) condition circumstances that led to emotional disabilities?

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In Rhode Island, Everything’s in a Name

The Rhode Island House Republicans’ Twitter account tweeted out a bit of deep insight from Mike O’Reilly of the Federal Communications Commission on C-SPAN:

“I was dealing with Rhode Island. They decided they were not going correct it, withstanding all the promises early in the year. They rename the program for the following year, thinking it’s going to fix the problem.” FCC Commissioner @mikeofcc

He’s talking about the 911 fee that the state government has come under scrutiny for misappropriating, but this is common in Rhode Island.  After 38 Studios, the General Assembly changed the name of the Economic Development Corporation (EDC) to the Commerce Corporation and, voila, all is right with Rhode Island policy.  In the season of education reform, Rhode Island shifted some names and org charts of state-level education boards around and all of a sudden children began a new educational voyage… I guess.

Once again the reminder:  Elected officials will keep doing this stuff until it stops working for them.

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Notable Powers for Notary Publics

During our weekly on-air conversations, John DePetro and I have long pondered the increasing significance of notary publics to political campaigns. A campaign with some extra money can deploy people to go out and get votes by bringing absentee ballots to them and signing off on their signatures.

Today, John noticed a statement from Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea touting the General Assembly’s passage of legislation implementing “a model” that only 11 other states have pursued “designed to standardize notarial requirements and procedures.” I’ll freely admit that my knowledge of the subject leaves me unable to assess how different the provisions of the new law are to current practice, but whether the following provisions will be new or are already in place, they are conspicuous in light of this increase in the prominence of political notaries:

  • Another person can sign for somebody who is “physically unable to sign a record.” That inability is not defined, but it seems likely to include not only physical impairment (like broken hands), but also an inability to write for any other reason. (“Physically,” in this reading, would be meant as a distinction to prevent people from signing for somebody who can’t sign because he or she is somewhere else, for instance.)
  • Notaries in other states or even other countries would be able to verify signatures.
  • Notaries could accept “signatures” by digital technology, meaning “an electronic symbol, sound, or process.”
  • Notaries don’t need to check ID if “the individual is personally known to the notarial officer.”
  • To the extent that ID is needed, a notary can accept IDs that have expired within the prior three years.
  • “Errors” don’t carry any penalty unless they can be shown to be outright fraud.

In short, it’s very easy to see how notaries could haul in votes as if with fishing nets even without doing anything fraudulent, and be separated with several layers of ambiguity from actual fraud.

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The Conditions Under Which Progressives Will Lease Us to Businesses

One last minute bill in the Rhode Island General Assembly, H8324, may or may not be going anywhere, but it’s worth a look as an educational exercise.

Very simply, it would require any “hosting platform” (e.g., AirBnB) that allows people to “offer any property for tourist or transient use” to be responsible for making sure that the rentals are in compliance with state and local laws and regulations.  It would also require the platform operators to take a more active role in the collection and transfer of all relevant taxes.

This little change in law, affecting a narrow portion of a single industry in the state, carries some important questions of the sort that we don’t consider thoroughly enough.  What is the nature of commerce?  Who works for whom?  Who has responsibility for whom?

From a free-market perspective that starts with the individual as the origin of all economic activity, the property owners are responsible for the product that they are offering, and the hosting platforms work for them.  Because they are the constituents of state and local government, they have a say in that government and can arguably be said to have consented to granting it some authority to regulate their activities.

The progressive perspective that has long been insinuating itself into Rhode Island government and encroaching on Rhode Islanders’ rights is very different.  That view doesn’t begin with individuals as autonomous sources of responsibility and power.  The Rhode Islanders seeking to rent their property don’t truly have ownership of themselves.  Rather state and local government has claims on their activities, and the hosting platforms own their rental businesses.  It is therefore reasonable for the government to require platforms to make sure that their workers comply with its requirements.

From a free-market perspective, a government that imposes requirements on people might create incentive for them to hire a contractor to do tasks for them — for AirBnB to provide inspections for regulatory compliance, for example, with an extra fee.  But from a progressive perspective, the government has a right to tell companies that intend to draw profits from its people what conditions they must impose, or else they cannot do business here.

In other words, progressives implicitly believe that the government is renting us out to the companies.

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A Big Lesson from a (Relatively) Small Tax Increase

I’ve got an op-ed in the Valley Breeze today taking the opportunity of a new sales tax on software as a service products to illustrate the harmful thinking of our legislators:

In short, the state government is going to tax an innovation that empowers productive, motivated Rhode Island families who are making the most of technology that levels the economic playing field. Even if it’s “only” $4.8 million, why would the state government do that? …

So, when Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello, a Democrat from Cranston, tells reporters that “to not expect (the budget) to rise every year is not realistic,” he’s really saying it is unrealistic to expect state government only to grow at the same speed or more slowly than the household budgets of Rhode Island families. If that’s the expectation, then the governor and the General Assembly must find new ways to take more money from Rhode Islanders.

After all, the politicians have to find some way to pay for election-year raises for unionized state employees. If they’re going to increase the tax credits for producers who film movies here, they’re going to have to start taxing your Netflix account. If they’re going to promise a big chunk of the state’s income, sales, and corporate taxes to the PawSox for a new stadium, they’re going to have to increase those taxes even more to break even.

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