by Christian Britschgi, The reasonOctober 15, 2024
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In September, the city council of Kalispell, Montana, took the unusual, possibly unprecedented, step of revoking a permit it had given a shelter that had allowed it to provide warm beds to the rural homeless community during the winter months.
City council members blame the privately funded Flathead Warming Center for attracting homeless people from out of town to the community, which they say has fueled crime and unrest in the neighborhood.
The Flathead Warming Center says those allegations are baseless and that the revocation of its permit was an ad hoc, illegal process.
DRH Comment: Other than the government, who would care not to allow private shelters to exist?
by Clark Nelly, Cato at LibertyOctober 15, 2024.
In fact, America’s criminal justice system is often rotten to the core. Contrary to the situation in Rebel Ridgethe police and other program participants do not have to look down the pipe of the financial situation to use confiscation of public property in a very different way from theft. Instead, a combination of perverse incentives, lax procedures, and almost non-existent accountability ensure abuse. Those who oppose it will find that the so-called “blue wall of silence” is real and far more effective in protecting the perpetrators of police misconduct than the evil conspiracy of the country’s exposed country bumpkins. Rebel Ridge.
And in our system there is no need to bog down defendants by completely denying them access to counsel when you can achieve the same result by continually underfunding and overworking public defenders until it becomes difficult for them to provide a truly zealous defense for all—or. even many—their customers.
by Marc Joffe, Cato at LibertyOctober 17, 2024.
Electric car maker Rivian has struggled to make cars and turn a profit, but has shown a knack for winning subsidies and tax credit packages from governments across the country. If a company can’t reverse its financial fortunes, it can go under before it uses all the incentives it has been given.
According to Good Jobs First’s Subsidy Tracker, Rivian has received stimulus packages in four states with a combined value of more than $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 workers. It later moved to the nearby city of Plymouth, Michigan, before moving its headquarters out of state to Irvine, California.
DRH’s Comment: These two sections, along with the rest of the article, are interesting in their own right. Also of interest is that there is a “subsidy tracker.” It should be so.
by Rupa Subramanya, The Free PressOctober 17, 2024.
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Not being able to process payments can make running his fundraising platform impossible. So Blauvelt, now 40, left a family vacation in Florida to fly to Stripe’s headquarters in San Francisco to sort things out.
A dozen people, mostly from Stripe’s compliance department, were waiting in a conference room. Blauvelt explained that LaunchGood, which collects donations from Muslim charities around the world, is about things like providing food aid in Syria, clean drinking water in Gaza, flood relief in Bangladesh, and so on.
Blauvelt, who was born in Malaysia to a Protestant family, converted to Islam at a young age. He knew the unspoken concerns of those in the room. As he told me, he explained to Stripe, “We are not terrorists. We are trying to bring humanity together.”
Stripe’s Arboleda told Blauvelt that it’s out of their hands: Stripe’s banking partner, Wells Fargo, has made the call to sever ties. He said that was all he knew—and, in fact, that was all he was allowed to know. Banking laws prevent banks from disclosing their reasons for terminating relationships with customers.
Reminder: The banking industry is one of the sectors that Joe Stiglitz thinks is out of control.
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