by C.J. Ciaramella, Reason, December 3, 2024.
Excerpts:
Indiana prosecutors will return $42,000 in cash they seized from a California small business, several months after the owners filed a class action lawsuit alleging that law enforcement is exploiting a major FedEx shipping hub in Indianapolis to seize millions of dollars in cash from innocent owners.
The Institute for Justice (I.J.), a public interest law firm, announced last week that prosecutors in Marion County, Indiana, have agreed to return the money to its clients Henry and Minh Cheng, who run a California jewelry wholesaler business. Police seized the cash from a FedEx package en route to them from a client in Virginia. County prosecutors then filed a lawsuit to forfeit their money through a process called civil asset forfeiture, claiming the Chengs’ money was connected to a violation of a criminal statute. However, the complaint never stated which statute.
And:
“I’m ecstatic at the prospect of getting my money back,” Henry Cheng said in an I.J. press release, “and this is just the beginning. What happened to my company shouldn’t happen to anyone. Indiana should stop trying to steal from law-abiding citizens by seizing property and figuring out later whether there’s any basis for keeping it.”
DRH comments:
First, it is not true that the prosecutors said, “Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.”
Second, this is another victory for the Institute for Justice, one of the charities I give to annually.
by David Friedman, David Friedman’s Substack, December 4, 2024.
Excerpts:
A commenter asked how it was possible for Biden to be both corrupt and a decent man. My response is that I judge someone’s personality mostly by how he treats the people immediately around him; people we interact with directly are more salient, more real, to us than distant people, even distant people affected by actions we take. Morally speaking, stealing from Walmart is the same offense as stealing from a friend or a colleague but it doesn’t feel the same and it leads to a different prediction of future behavior. Someone who steals from a friend will feel free to steal from Walmart if he thinks he can get away with it, but probably not the other way around. Someone who gives up his weekend plans to drive a friend to the hospital in a medical emergency and take care of his kids and pets until the emergency is over might do less good for the world than someone who donates ten thousand dollars to a well chosen medical charity but he has given better evidence of being a good person, someone friends can rely on. A decent man.
And:
I saw it not as a question of what Joe should have done but of what the thing he did do tells us about what sort of man he is. A Joe Biden who cared enough about keeping his promises and preserving trust in the legal system, about his duty to the American people, to let the son he loved go to jail, would be a better man than the Joe Biden who pardoned his son — but that Joe Biden would not have taken millions of dollars of bribes funneled through his son to his family and this one did. A Joe Biden who let his son go to jail to spare himself the embarrassment, the loss of status, from pardoning him after repeatedly promising not to, would be a worse man than the Joe Biden who pardoned the son he loved. He would not be a decent man — and this one might be.
Or might not. The pardon not only covered the crimes Hunter had been convicted of but also any crime he may have committed from Jan. 1, 2014, to Dec. 1, 2024. The innocent explanation is that Joe feared further prosecution of his son after he was no longer in a position to protect him. The less innocent one is that Joe feared legal action against Hunter for offenses in which his father was a co-conspirator, leading to legal action against Joe.
DRH comment: This is the most interesting thing I’ve read on the Hunter Biden pardon. That does not mean that I totally agree with it. Notice in the first 2 sentences of the first quote above that David shifts from talking about morality to talking about personality. I would say more but I’m still pondering. I put this up mainly because I think many readers will find it interesting.
by Jacob Sullum, Reason, December 5, 2024.
Excerpt:
What “crimes” did Patel have in mind? Lying about people might, depending upon the circumstances, amount to defamation, but it is not a crime, and any civil remedy for it would depend on lawsuits by the affected individuals, not the Justice Department. Rigging elections, if it involves the sort of fraud that Trump claims denied him his rightful victory in 2020, is a crime. But Trump never presented any evidence to substantiate his stolen-election fantasy, which in any case did not involve journalists who allegedly dumped phony ballots or manipulated vote counts.
DRH comment: Reading about Patel’s comments reminded me of the same misunderstanding of freedom of the press that Tim Walz showed in his debate with J.D. Vance.
by Steven Greenhut, Reason, December 6, 2024
Excerpt:
The big news from last week is the Justice Department said that Google should divest itself of its Chrome browser to comply with the court’s finding that the company exerted monopoly power in the search business. “Google’s exclusionary conduct has, among other things, made Google the near-universal default for search and ensured that virtually all search access points route users’ valuable queries and interaction data to Google,” the government argued.
I don’t find it particularly shocking that successful companies dominate some aspects of the internet marketplace. Other companies are free to develop their own search engines. I relied on Chrome for the research for this column because it’s the best choice available. It costs me nothing to use it and I had other choices, so it’s unclear how the government is protecting me. If the court follows DOJ’s lead, it will likely make searching more convoluted and less secure.
As Google’s chief legal officer explained in a blog post, the DOJ’s filing represents “unprecedented government overreach” as the feds seek to, for instance, require “two separate choice screens before you could access Google Search on a Pixel phone you bought.” Government bureaucrats, attorneys, and the courts shouldn’t be dictating specific application designs, but to populists that’s fine because, well, they’re sticking it to Big Tech.
DRH comment: The Google suit reminds me of the suit against Microsoft in the late 1990s, which I wrote about here. It also reminded of the suit against Alcoa in the 1940s. I quoted from the Alcoa judge’s comments in my article on Microsoft.
CNBC, December 5, 2024.
