David Boaz, a libertarian intellectual giant and former executive vice president of the Cato Institute, passed away today. Boaz’s contributions to the liberty spanned decades, several books, and countless articles. His work has – directly and indirectly – shaped the thinking of generations. The Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) is saddened at the news of David’s passing. David Boaz inspired me and will inspire countless future generations as a North Star of libertarian thought. He was a man of rare understanding, rare intellect, and rare commitment to the cause of individual liberty. His mark on the liberty movement is deep and will not soon fade. His writing and speaking molded countless young libertarians during his life. TPA extends its condolences to Boaz’s family, friends, and colleagues at the Cato Institute. In a time when true giants have become increasingly uncommon, we were all blessed to have known, learned from, and been led by David Boaz. David may be gone, but his
intellectual presence will last forever.


Gigi’s Conflict of Interest

The American Association of Public Broadband (AAPB), headed by former Federal Communications Commission (FCC) candidate Gigi Sohn, failed to disclose her financial relationship to a touted provider in a recently published how-to guide for cities looking to build government-owned networks (GONs). AAPB (of which Sohn serves as executive director) and the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society collaborated on the handbook entitled “Own Your Internet: How to Build a Public Broadband Network.” In that guide, the groups lay out a blueprint for how government entities can create their own GONs, which now number an estimated 650 around the United States. The guide includes profiles of example communities that AAPB holds in high regard. This includes Colorado Springs, which is in the process of building a citywide open-access fiber network at an estimated cost of $600 million (Yes, a six followed by eight zeroes). The Colorado city of about 500,000 residents selected provider Ting as the anchor
tenant for the network and hopes to lease excess fiber capacity to other providers.

A fact the guide omits is that Sohn serves on the board of directors of Ting’s parent company, Tucows. And Sohn received 6,875 shares of stock in Tucows in the third quarter and fourth quarter of 2023. At the time those were rewarded, they were worth nearly $140,000. The guide notes that the private sector “has profit as its prime motivator” and that “the profit and loss statement and the balance sheet are the key measures of success.” But as AAPB claims that a municipal broadband network differs by making “community benefit as its primary purpose,” the group praises a GON from which Sohn stands to financially benefit without revealing the connection.

The Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) reached out to the media relations liaison for AAPB to seek comment from Sohn on the issue, but she did not respond to the request. From incumbents with slower speeds or expensive prices to the need to “future proof” the internet with fiber to the home, “Own Your Internet” advocates the usual rationales for cities to build their own networks. The guide omits the various risks that TPA has written about in its reports such as “GON with the Wind: The Failed Promise of Government Owned Networks Across the Country.” These include low take rates, government corruption, and higher-than-expected construction costs. These various challenges have led to many failing GONs bailed out by taxpayers. But AAPB doesn’t include such information in this report, just as it keeps Sohn’s financial conflict of interest close to the vest.

What You Should Be Reading

Cato Institute: “A Guide to Content Moderation for Policymakers”

A new paper from the Cato Institute identifies – and attempts to ease – perhaps the most troublesome problem now plaguing debates about social-media regulation. While lawmakers in each party worry about sometimes legitimate ills, “efforts to regulate content moderation often reflect a lack of understanding of how content moderation works.” The paper’s author, David Inserra, knows of what he speaks. Inserra spent years on Meta’s trust and safety teams, and he details the labyrinthine intricacies and stunning immensity of social-media content moderation at scale. On a bipartisan basis, lawmakers have determined to regulate social media – though for different ends. Inserra argues that new regulation will likely foreclose innovative moderation models, including decentralized models that will empower users. Caught in inflexible regulatory vices, social media platforms cannot innovate and experiment. Thus, lawmakers who seek to fix the status quo instead threaten to calcify it. Frustrated
Republicans – many of whom claim that Big Tech “censors” right-wing speech – should carefully note two sections of Inserra’s report. First, it’s true (he writes) that tech-sector employees lean left; but observers must remember that “trust and safety” teams – no matter their members’ ideological biases – have an “structural” bias towards prioritizing “trust and safety,” not maximally free expression. “Some platforms, however, mitigate this problem by exerting less centralized control over content policies and grant greater control to individual communities or users,” Inserra also suggests.

Moreover, free-speech advocates have largely abandoned attempts to sway social-media platforms towards permissive policies. Expression-adverse activists have marched through the institutions of the digital world, but civil libertarians have beat a rapid retreat therefrom. Left-wing “academics and aligned interest groups are actively, consistently, and aggressively telling social media companies about the many harms of freer expression, effectively setting the norms of what speech should and should not be allowed,” reports Inserra. Activists’ successful efforts to tighten content-moderation guideline yield concentrated benefits (e.g., Media Matters efforts to stigmatize right-wing speech increases its statute with its donor base). However, “the cost of reduced expression is felt across the platform in often dispersed ways.” Having declined to combat this cultural illiberalism, the right should not wonder that content-moderation decisions often skew censorial. Read the full piece here.
([link removed])

American Enterprise Institute: “Understanding Trends in Worker Pay over the Past 50 Years”

Statists of every bent predicate their command-and-control schemes on the notion that modern American capitalism has failed everyone but the wealthy. The inconvenient truth is that the data usually marshaled to support these arguments lack consistency, necessary context, or other basic hallmarks of credible analysis. In a new report from the American Enterprise Institute, Scott Winship shreds claims that workers’ wage gains have dramatically lagged productivity. Sensationalist analysis purporting to show a stark divergence obscure basic methodological errors, Winship writes. These include calculating productivity and compensation using different sections of the economy, measuring inflation to minimize workers’ apparent pay increases, ignoring non-wage compensation, and many more. Capitalism seems a failure when viewed through the dirty lens of methodological sloppiness. As bias-confirming sloppiness so often does, the doomers’ data gamesmanship obscures truly useful insights. As Winship
relates, beginning in the 1970s, “growth in the productivity of the median worker has slowed, causing growth in the pay of the median worker to slow.” Even within firms, more productive employees enjoy disproportionate compensation increases. Men, particularly, suffered from productivity and wage stagnation. As women entered the workforce en masse, and the economy pivoted towards services, men’s wage growth slowed. Fortunately, however, Winship reports that “The painful transition for men is largely behind us, and the median male worker has seen significant pay growth over the past 30 years.”

Policy makers convinced of capitalism’s total failure to benefit workers will arrive at wildly different policy conclusions than those who understand that wages – like any price signal – offer information about more foundational market dynamics. The doomers’ attempts to increase workers’ lots by diktat succeed only in decoupling compensation from productivity. As Exhibit A, consider the (newest) New Right’s affection of labor unions, whose aims include slowing technological (i.e., productivity-boosting) innovation and extracting ever-cushier benefits packages from employers. Better economic minds – those who understand prices – instead question how policy reforms can boost productivity and allow wages to naturally rise thereafter. Instead of rubbing dirt in the cut to make it appear less red, the better treatment is to disinfect the wound, removing whatever regulatory impediments prevent workers and businesses from exercising fully their capacities for productivity and wealth generation.
Read the full piece here. ([link removed])

Competitive Enterprise Institute: “Achieving Change at the Federal Trade Commission”

A new paper ([link removed]) from the Competitive Enterprise Institute examines the recent failures of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The authors (former FTC chairman Timothy J. Muris and multi-time senior FTC official, J. Howard Beales III) contend that, beyond any current policy disputes, current leadership misunderstands the mechanics of effective administration and institutional change. Moreover, they argue, the agency has violated myriad norms, eroding its credibility and effectiveness. Muris and Beales recount the history of previous FTCs, indicating that systemic change, if attempted competently, can be made. Revolutionizing an agency requires administrative competence, good strategy, and close attention to the creation of an effective staff – all of which the current FTC lacks. “The new leaders want transformative policies in both antitrust and consumer protection to restrain what they call the
excessive power of major American corporations—policies likely impossible under existing law,” Muris and Beales write. “We see no evidence of efforts to replicate the brick by brick approach that built the legal underpinnings of the past 40 years, widely accepted by the current judiciary.”

The current FTC leadership has attempted to effect change by brute force, hamstringing itself. It has conspicuously dodged congressional oversight, alienated career staffers in favor of progressive outsiders, withheld information from dissenting commissioners, and more. “In at least two merger reviews, Commissioner Wilson was unable to obtain copies of the staff’s second request for information from the staff itself,” the report states. “Instead, she had to take the step, unprecedented in our experience, of asking for the information from parties under investigation.” What’s more, in a highly public and unprecedented step, Chair Lina Khan contravened an ethics official’s recommendation that she recuse herself from the case against Meta’s acquisition of virtual-reality developer Within. In the end, a quote from John Wooden, found at the top of the report’s first section, puts it best: “Never mistake activity for achievement.”

BLOGS:

Monday: What You Should Be Reading: May 2024 ([link removed])

Tuesday: Gigi Sohn Touts GON Partner Without Revealing Financial Ties and Personal Conflict of Interest ([link removed])

Wednesday: The New Populist Right Is Making the Same Old Economic Mistakes ([link removed])

Friday: The Good, The Bad, and the Unanswered in Sen. Schumer’s AI Roadmap ([link removed])

Media:

May 30, 2024: Our Community Now quoted me in their article, “$17 million in federal funding coming to Maryland for electric school buses.”

May 30, 2024: WBFF Fox45 (Baltimore, MD) interviewed me for their story on electric buses.

May 31, 2024: WKRC NBC (Cincinnati, OH) interviewed me about stadium subsidies.

May 31, 2024: Latin Times quoted TPA in their article, “IRS Direct File program will now be a permanent option for taxpayers across all states.”

May 31, 2024: Inkl (Australia) quoted TPA in their article, “IRS Direct File program will now be a permanent option for taxpayers across all states.”

May 31, 2024: Impact News Service (India) quoted TPA in their article, “What They Are Saying: H.R 8372, the Debt Per Taxpayer Information Act.”

Jun 1, 2024: The Herald (New Britain, CT) ran TPA’s article, “FDA's mixed messaging on e-cigarettes undermines health.”

Jun 3, 2024: WBFF Fox45 (Baltimore, MD) interviewed me for their story on Maryland driver registration fees.

June 4, 2024: The Dispatch quoted David McGarry in their article, “Mexico Breaks the Glass Ceiling.”

June 4, 2024: The Rock Hill Herald (Rock Hill, SC) quoted David McGarry in their article, “Mexico Breaks the Glass Ceiling.”

June 4, 2024: The Maryland Daily Record (Baltimore, MD) ran TPA’s op-ed, “Mixed messaging on e-cigarettes.”

June 4, 2024: Issues & Insights ran TPA's op-ed, "There's More Than One Reason for Postal Delays."

June 5, 2024: Charleston Gazette-Mail (Charleston, WV) ran TPA’s op-ed, “Strict oversight needed on broadband spending.”

June 5, 2024: Patrick Hedger appeared on Real Talk with Riggin KZIM (Cape Giradeau, Missouri) to discuss the IRS expansion of Direct File.

June 6, 2024: WBFF Fox45 (Baltimore, MD) interviewed me for their story on Maryland’s financial outlook.

June 6, 2024: Bond Buyer quoted Johnny in their article, “Officials still wrestle with troubled Kentucky internet project.”

June 6, 2024: I appeared on WBOB 600 AM (Jacksonville, Fla.) to talk about the deficit and debt and tax reform.

June 6, 2024: The Daily Caller ran TPA’s op-ed, “Senate Report Shines Light On Dysfunctional American Foster Care.”

June 6, 2024: WPTA (Fort Wayne, Indiana) interviewed David McGarry for their story on rental assistance fraud.

June 7, 2024: Real Clear Markets ran TPA's op-ed, "Lina Khan's 'Wins' Are Judicial Rebukes of Her Radical Theories."

Have a great weekend!

Best,

David Williams
President
Taxpayers Protection Alliance
1101 14th Street, NW
Suite 1120
Washington, D.C. xxxxxx

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