The Fourth Amendment guarantees that every person shall be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." This means government agents cannot enter your home or rifle through your stuff without a warrant, signed by a judge and based on probable cause. That right extends to the digital sphere: The Supreme Court ruled in 2018's Carpenter v. United States that the government must have a warrant to track people's movements through their cellphone data.

But governments are increasingly circumventing these protections by using taxpayer dollars to pay private companies to spy on citizens. Government agencies have found many creative and enterprising ways to skirt the Fourth Amendment.

Cellphones generate reams of information about us even when they're just in our pockets, including revealing our geographical locations—information that is then sold by third-party brokers. In 2017 and 2018, the IRS Criminal Investigation unit (IRS CI) purchased access to a commercial database containing geolocation data from millions of Americans' cellphones. A spokesman said IRS CI only used the data for "significant money-laundering, cyber, drug and organized-crime cases" and 
terminated the contract when it failed to yield any useful leads.

During the same time period, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) paid more than $1 million for access to cellphone geolocation databases in an attempt to detect undocumented immigrants entering the country. The Wall Street Journal reported that ICE had used this information to identify and arrest migrants.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spent $420,000 on location data in order to track "compliance" with "movement restrictions," such as curfews, as well as to "track patterns of those visiting K-12 schools."

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) admitted in a January 2021 memo that it purchases "commercially available geolocation metadata aggregated from smartphones" and that it had searched the database for Americans' movement histories "five times in the past two-and-a-half years." The memo further stipulated that "DIA does not construe the Carpenter decision to require a judicial warrant endorsing purchase or use of commercially
available data for intelligence purposes."

Even in the physical world, governments have contracted out their spying. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) spent millions of dollars paying employees at private companies and government agencies for personal information that would otherwise require a warrant. This included paying an administrator at a private parcel delivery service to search people's packages and send them to the DEA, and paying an Amtrak official for travel reservation information. In the latter case, the DEA already had an agreement in place under which Amtrak Police would provide that information for free, but the agency instead spent $850,000 over two decades paying somebody off.

It seems the only thing more enterprising than a government agent with a warrant is a government agent without one.

The post The Feds Are Skirting the Fourth Amendment by Buying Data appeared first on Reason.com.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won applause at the Libertarian National Convention by criticizing government lockdowns and deficit spending, and saying America shouldn't police the world.

It made me want to interview him. This month, I did.

He said intelligent things about America's growing debt:

"President Trump said that he was going to balance the budget and instead he (increased the debt more) than every president in United States history—$8 trillion. President Biden is on track now to beat him."

It's good to hear a candidate actually talk about our debt.

"When the debt is this large…you have to cut dramatically, and I'm going to do that," he says.

But looking at his campaign promises, I don't see it.

He promises "affordable" housing via a federal program backing 3 percent mortgages.

"Imagine that you had a rich uncle who was willing to cosign your mortgage!" gushes his campaign ad. "I'm going to make Uncle Sam that rich uncle!"

I point out that such giveaways won't reduce our debt.

"That's not a giveaway," Kennedy replies. "Every dollar that I spend as president is going to go toward building our economy."

That's big government nonsense, like his other claim: "Every million dollars we spend on child care creates 22 jobs!"

Give me a break.

When I pressed him about specific cuts, Kennedy says, "I'll cut the military in half…cut it to about $500 billion….We are not the policemen of the world."

"Stop giving any money to Ukraine?" I ask.

"Negotiate a peace," Kennedy replies. "Biden has never talked to Putin about this, and it's criminal."

He never answered whether he'd give money to Ukraine. He did answer about Israel.

"Yes, of course we should,"

"[Since] you don't want to cut this spending, what would you cut?"

"Israel spending is rather minor," he responds. "I'm going to pick the most wasteful programs, put them all in one bill, and send them to Congress with an up and down vote."

Of course, Congress would just vote it down.

Kennedy's proposed cuts would hardly slow down our path to bankruptcy. Especially since he also wants new spending that activists pretend will reduce climate change.

At a concert years ago, he smeared "crisis" skeptics like me, who believe we can adjust to climate change, screaming at the audience, "Next time you see John Stossel and [others]… these flat-earthers, these corporate toadies—lying to you. This is treason, and we need to start treating them now as traitors!"

Now, sitting with him, I ask, "You want to have me executed for treason?"

"That statement," he replies, "it's not a statement that I would make today….Climate is existential. I think it's human-caused climate change. But I don't insist other people believe that. I'm arguing for free markets and then the lowest cost providers should prevail in the marketplace….We should end all subsidies and let the market dictate."

That sounds good: "Let the market dictate."

But wait, Kennedy makes money from solar farms backed by government guaranteed loans. He "leaned on his contacts in the Obama administration to secure a $1.6 billion loan guarantee," wrote The New York Times.

"Why should you get a government subsidy?" I ask.

"If you're creating a new industry," he replies, "you're competing with the Chinese. You want the United States to own pieces of that industry."

I suppose that means his government would subsidize every industry leftists like.

Yet when a wind farm company proposed building one near his family's home, he opposed it.

"Seems hypocritical," I say.

"We're exterminating the right whale in the North Atlantic through these wind farms!" he replies.

I think he was more honest years ago, when he complained that "turbines…would be seen from Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard… Nantucket….[They] will steal the stars and nighttime views."

Kennedy was once a Democrat, but now Democrats sue to keep him off ballots. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls him a "dangerous nutcase."

Kennedy complains that Reich won't debate him.

"Nobody will," he says. "They won't have me on any of their networks."

Well, obviously, I will.

I especially wanted to confront him about vaccines.

In a future column, Stossel TV will post more from our hourlong discussion.

COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post RFK Jr. Pays Lip Service to the Debt While Pushing Policies That Would Increase It appeared first on Reason.com.

The government has a long history of using tracking technology to ascertain our whereabouts, our habits, and even our preferences. From cellphones and cars to snow plows and garbage trucks, governments seemingly want to track anything that moves—or moos.

The USDA recently finalized a rule—set to go into effect in a few months—that will require all cattle and bison being moved across state lines to be tagged with radio-frequency identification (RFID) ear tags. RFID technology uses radio frequency waves to transmit and collect data by way of a system of electronic tags and scanners. The technology is best viewed as a type of electronic or remote barcode, in which scanners can read an RFID chip anywhere from a few meters away to around 100 meters away. In some ways analogous to a shorter-range GPS system, RFID can track geographic location and also operate as a system of data collection and storage.

In the context of livestock, a quick scan of an RFID tag can pull up information like a cow's date of birth, weight, vaccine records, ownership history, what farms it has been to, and what movements it has made. The USDA is justifying its RFID mandate on public health grounds, claiming that it can help trace and eradicate potential disease outbreaks among livestock, such as mad cow disease or hoof-and-mouth disease. 

While plausible at first blush, it is far from clear that the mandate will accomplish its intended objective, and it is very clear that it will disproportionately hurt small and independent ranchers and cattle farmers.

For one thing, most ranchers already want to be able to identify their cattle and have used physical metal tags for years to do so. Electronic RFID tags are twice as expensive as traditional metal tags and also require an upfront investment in scanners and software, making the switch cost-prohibitive for many small farms. Farmers also complain that electronic tags are harder to identify visually from a distance, which matters during cattle drives and other large and quick-paced movements of livestock. Most farmers that use electronic tags therefore also still tag their animals with traditional physical tags, necessitating a double-investment in two types of tags.

There's also the issue of tag retention. "I've talked to many people who have used these RFID tags and their cows have lost 50 percent after five years," Ken Fox, a South Dakota cow farmer and chair of R-CALF USA's Animal Identification Committee, told Wisconsin State Farmer. "By year nine or ten only 14 percent of the tags were left; and our beef cows can be with us for 15 to 20 years, so that's a serious concern." Fox also notes that the RFID scanners often need to be replaced every four or five years.

Fox points out that not all livestock operations are created equal. For dairy farmers who keep their livestock penned up, frequent replacing of tags is more logistically feasible, if still expensive. But for cattle ranchers, tag replacement can be entirely impracticable. "That just doesn't work when we've got cattle on 10,000 or 30,000 acres of range land and we handle those cattle maybe twice a year," said Fox. "If they lose those tags, how are we going to know who those cattle are?" Amish farmers have also opposed electronic tagging on moral grounds given their opposition to technology.

Large cattle operations can afford to double-tag their livestock with physical and electronic tags, and in fact, many have already done so voluntarily—which means the mandate's burden will fall heaviest on small and medium-sized farms and ranches. The USDA rule also favors large cattle operations more directly, including allowing them to use so-called "group identification" for livestock herds of a certain size and continuity.

"The new rule also provides for large-scale cattle operations to use one ID per group of a certain size, instead of one ID per animal," writes Remington Kesten in a blog post for David's Pasture, a small-scale cattle operation in Missouri. "This means that the smaller farms will actually incur more cost per animal once the mandate takes effect, than the big players will." 

Worse yet, this group identification actually undercuts the USDA's entire disease-traceability rationale for mandated electronic tagging. "This intentional loophole also reduces the traceability for large farms and exporters, contradicting the USDA's primary reason for mandating RFID Ear Tags in the first place," notes Kesten.

The rule also fails on its own terms. While supporters point to the 2003 mad cow disease outbreak in Washington state as an example of a situation where electronic tagging could have allowed for quicker identification of where the disease originated, it's worth noting that the government was still able to track the original diseased cow back to its birthplace farm in Canada within 13 days.

It's also worth recognizing that livestock disease outbreaks are exceedingly rare in the United States. An article in Lancaster Farming, which takes a generally favorable bent toward the USDA mandate, notes that hoof-and-mouth disease was last found in America in 1929. Farmers such as Fox have also highlighted the successful combatting of brucellosis in the United States, which was accomplished without electronic tagging. 

If anything, it is large-scale commercial farms that are most responsible for disease outbreaks. "There is no data in over a decade showing that food borne illnesses have resulted from disease on small farms," writes Kesten. "All major disease outbreaks in recent years have occurred on large farms." In other words, small and independent ranchers are bearing the brunt of a new rule in the name of fixing a problem that they have nothing to do with.

Finally, the USDA rule creates significant data privacy concerns. RFID tags cannot distinguish between scanners—which are portable and easily carried in hand—so potentially anyone with a scanner could access the data contained in each tag. Ominously, the USDA rule opts to use the term electronic identification tags instead of the RFID acronym, although for now RFID tags are the only technology approved by the USDA for livestock tagging. 

This flexible language means that USDA is explicitly leaving the door open to even more comprehensive tracking technology. This could come in the form of "active" RFID tags (instead of "passive" ones as currently contemplated) that have a greater range of readability or even GPS tracking of cows via satellites.

One small beacon of hope for American ranchers is that Congress appears to finally be waking up to the USDA's overreach. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) recently introduced legislation that would prohibit the USDA from implementing any rule that mandates electronic tagging technology for cattle and bison.

The USDA is attempting to find a solution for a problem that has already been largely addressed through current practices. 

Fox puts it more colorfully: "Someone told me this story—NASA spent millions trying to develop a pen that could work in sub-zero temperatures and zero gravity. The Russians just used a pencil."

The post The Government Wants To Track Your Steak appeared first on Reason.com.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry last week signed a law that criminalizes approaching police officers within 25 feet, provided that the officer tells any would-be approachers to stand back, effectively creating a legal force field that law enforcement can activate at their discretion.

"No person shall knowingly or intentionally approach within twenty-five feet of a peace officer who is lawfully engaged in the execution of his official duties after the peace officer has ordered the person to stop approaching or to retreat," the law states. Offenders could receive a $500 fine and be jailed for up to 60 days.

The bill was authored by state Reps. Bryan Fontenot (R–Thibodaux), Michael T. Johnson (R–Pineville), and Roger Wilder (R–Denham Springs). Fontenot argued that the legislation would give law enforcement officials "peace of mind" as they carry out their duties. That's the same argument Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made to justify signing Senate Bill 184 in April, which criminalizes approaching within 25 feet of a first responder with the intent to threaten, harass, or interfere with the official.

But some opponents of these laws believe they are overly broad and unnecessary.

"Requiring a 25-foot distance from a police officer may not be a practical or effective approach in many situations," state Rep. Delisha Boyd (D–New Orleans) tells Reason. "Policing situations vary widely, and a blanket requirement for a 25-foot distance may not account for the diverse scenarios officers encounter. Who on the scene will determine what exactly is 25 feet away? What happens if within that 25 feet is on my personal property?"

Louisiana already has a law outlawing "interfering with a law enforcement investigation." Critics of the new law say that an additional law proscribing the simple act of approaching police is superfluous.

One such critic is Meghan Garvey, the legislative chair and former president of the Louisiana Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Police work "is already protected from interference by current law," she tells Reason. "The measure criminalizes citizens for engaging in constitutionally protected activity and discourages citizen oversight of law enforcement."

The law, "like many other bills brought this session, seeks to make Louisianans more subservient to government," Garvey concludes.

The Louisiana Legislature passed a similar bill, House Bill 85, in June 2023, but that measure was vetoed by former Gov. John Bel Edwards. "The effect of this bill were it to become law would be to chill exercise of First Amendment rights and prevent bystanders from observing and recording police action," Edwards said in a statement explaining his veto.

Though the Supreme Court has declined to address the issue, there is significant legal precedent in the circuit courts—including in the 5th Circuit, which contains Louisiana—that the First Amendment's press and speech clauses collectively safeguard a "right to record the police." Last year, a federal judge struck down an Arizona measure that outlawed filming police from within 8 feet after receiving a verbal warning because it "prohibits or chills a substantial amount of First Amendment protected activity and is unnecessary to prevent interference with police officers given other Arizona laws in effect."

In Louisiana, "an officer could be arresting someone in a manner indicating excessive force, have a bystander approach to record the arrest, and the bystander could then be immediately told by the officer 'to stop approaching or to retreat,' chilling the bystander's right to record," Louisiana attorney Philip Adams tells Reason. "Thus, the bystander could be placed in a position in which the First Amendment right to record could be functionally neutered." 

The post Louisiana's New 25-Foot Legal Forcefield for Police Threatens Accountability and Civil Liberties appeared first on Reason.com.

The recent wave of headlines about shoplifting and retail theft, accompanied by viral videos of people brazenly walking out of stores with stolen goods, has captured the attention of the media and politicians. The tough-on-crime crowd has advocated for a crackdown on shoplifters through more aggressive prosecution and harsher penalties. Others have emphasized the need for rehabilitation for offenders. 

One group of progressive California lawmakers claims to have found an even better solution: banning self-checkout machines from stores in the name of fighting crime. In reality, this "anti-crime" bill is nothing more than naked protectionism for union jobs. 

The proposed legislation would prohibit groceries and other retail stores from using self-checkout machines unless a host of conditions are met. These include having at least one staffed employee for every two self-checkout machines (and the employee must be exempt from any other duties), only permitting the machines to be used by shoppers with 10 items or fewer, and ensuring at least one regular cashier lane is also available at all times.

The bill's sponsor, state Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas (D–Los Angeles), calls her approach "smart" on crime instead of "hard on crime," telling The New York Times: "We have so many bills in this Legislature that are trying to increase penalties….We know that what makes our community safe is not more jail time and penalties. What makes our community safe is real enforcement, having real workers that are on the floor." 

To underscore her point, Smallwood-Cuevas cites a study suggesting that retail theft is up to 16 times more likely to occur at self-checkout machines than at traditional registers, leading to an estimated $10 billion in annual losses for retailers. 

A closer look at the fine print of the bill, however, reveals the true intent behind it. The legislation mandates that any store seeking to install self-checkout machines must first produce a study analyzing, among other things, the number of employees "whose duties would be affected by the workplace technology," as well as the "total amount of salaries and benefits that would be eliminated as a result of the workplace technology." The study must then be provided to employees potentially impacted by the technology (or their collective bargaining representatives) and posted "in a location accessible to employees and customers."

Were this a game of poker, this mandated study would be the tell: Smallwood-Cuevas and her fellow progressives are trying to tuck a pro–union jobs bill inside the Trojan horse of crime prevention. 

Smallwood-Cuevas was a labor organizer before her legislative career, and some of the bill's biggest sponsors are labor unions. A press release on the United Food and Commercial Workers' website lauds the legislation, with the president of the local chapter complaining that "employers have increasingly implemented automated checkout to drastically cut staffing and reduce labor costs." The press release does not mention the word crime at all and only uses theft twice and shoplifting once. In contrast, jobs, staffing, and worker displacement are referenced a total of 10 times. 

Efforts to limit self-checkout in other blue states provide corroborating evidence, such as a proposed anti-self-checkout ballot initiative in Oregon that labor interests tried to get on the 2020 ballot, explicitly positioned as a pro–union jobs measure. 

While a pro-labor bill in California may seem utterly unremarkable, some on the right may be buying the bill's anti-crime framing. Both Fox Business and the New York Post ran articles highlighting the bill as an anti-theft measure, with little reference to the real motivations behind the legislation. Given the right's increasing embrace of labor unions, it is not hard to envision an unholy alliance of pro-labor progressives and tough-on-crime populist conservatives supporting bills around the country to eliminate self-checkout.

Supporters of the bill and numerous media outlets have cited two examples of large retail chains making their own internal decisions to reduce or remove self-checkout machines to clamp down on theft. The aforementioned statistics about self-checkout lanes leading to more shoplifting are also frequently referenced. But these points ironically cut against the need for government involvement: If self-checkout machines are really leading to massive inventory losses for stores, then retailers themselves have a direct bottom-line incentive to scrap self-checkout. 

No one cares more about inventory loss than store owners, whose entire business model is predicated on customers actually paying money for their products. That is why some retailers are reevaluating the efficacy of self-checkout and experimenting with new monitoring tactics such as "smart video" cameras that can halt the self-checkout process if they notice a customer declining to scan any items. 

There already is a built-in market response to theft concerns around self-checkout—more government interference is simply not needed. If lawmakers still want to ban self-checkout machines anyway, they should at least be honest about why.

The post The Real Reason for Self-Checkout Bans appeared first on Reason.com.

America's tax code is notoriously convoluted, but the complexity really sparkles when it comes to the federal government's approach to alcohol taxation. Wine, beer, and liquor are all subject to varying tax rates based on intricate calculations, but the so-called "bubble tax" for hard cider is the star of this regulatory circus.

Unbeknownst to most Americans, the tax rate for alcoholic cider is based on, among other things, the amount of carbonation the drink contains. Yes, America technically already has a carbon tax and the feds have literally found a way to tax air. Craft cider makers are being flattened by an arbitrary system that is strangling the industry's long-term potential.

Under the federal code, alcoholic cider is taxed as either hard cider, still wine, or sparkling wine, and the implications of which category applies are not insignificant. Hard cider is taxed at a modest $0.226 per gallon, while sparkling wine is taxed at a whopping $3.40 per gallon—a staggering 1,400 percent increase. For every 100 gallons of cider produced, Uncle Sam either takes $22 in taxes or $340 in taxes. 

What determines how cider is categorized and taxed? A ridiculous three-part formula based on a) what type of fruit is used to make the cider, b) the alcohol content of the cider, and c) what carbonation level the cider contains. 

Imagine you're a cider maker aiming for the lower tax rate to apply to your product. You need to produce a cider that is made from apples or pears (with no other fruit additions), is less than 8.5 percent alcohol by volume (ABV), and has less than or equal to 0.64 grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) per 100mL. However, if you decide to add some blackberries or grapes, it's considered a still wine and taxed at $1.07 per gallon—but only if it has less than 0.392 grams of CO2 per 100mL. If you go over that carbonation threshold, you've unlocked sparkling wine status and with that the $3.40 per gallon tax rate.

Confused? It gets worse. 

If your pear or apple cider is over 0.64 grams of CO2, it gets the sparkling wine rate. But it's knocked back down to the still wine rate if it's less than 0.392 grams of CO2 and the ABV level is 8.5 percent or higher. Whether the bubbles are added via "force carbonated" or "bottle conditioned" carbonation creates another tax delineation for the sparkling wine category. A flow chart is needed just to unpack all the potential permutations and combinations:

The implications of this tax labyrinth extend to consumers. A report from Wine Enthusiast notes that modern drinkers have grown to expect beer-like carbonation levels in their alcoholic beverages, thereby creating pressure for cider makers to add more carbonation to their products. 

One cider maker from Oregon reported that he receives frequent emails from consumers complaining about flat cider, which they incorrectly blame on him rather than the government. If adding more carbonation could financially cripple a small business, it's little wonder many cider makers feel that their hands are tied. 

The disparity is glaring when compared to beverages like beer, hard seltzer, and regular soda, which face no such carbonation-based tax penalties. It's a clear disconnect from market realities and consumer demands, which increasingly favor diverse flavors and more carbonation in ciders.

Craft cider makers are doing their best to diversify the carbonation levels and fruits in their ciders to respond to consumer demand, but it's clear the industry has a hard ceiling on its growth due to these tax rules. This is why many cider makers state that their ability to expand—and the ability of the industry as a whole to thrive—is being pointlessly inhibited.

The bubble tax is now getting more attention due to a recent bipartisan bill introduced in Congress, which aims to level the playing field between apple and pear ciders and those made with other fruits. While promising, the best reform would be to convert the entire system of alcohol taxation to one based simply on a drink's ABV level rather than arbitrary classifications.

Craft cider, a beverage steeped in American history, deserves better. Another Michigan cider maker made it even simpler: "It's not expressing the free market. The government needs to get out of the way."

The post The Federal Government is Literally Taxing Air appeared first on Reason.com.

Retiree Jim Ficken can finally breathe easy. After six years, two lawsuits, and harrying legal wrangling over a $30,000 fine for tall grass in Dunedin, Florida, a new settlement has brought him closure.

The agreement, announced on April 22, ends the city's pursuit to recover $10,000 in attorney fees that Dunedin officials tried to characterize as "administrative expenses" after reducing Ficken's original fine by 80 percent. The reduction was only possible because of reforms the city instituted soon after Ficken filed his first lawsuit.

Initially, the city attempted to tack on $25,000 for out-of-pocket legal expenses before realizing it had miscalculated that figure. As a result of this settlement, Ficken will not have to cough up any amount for bogus fees—an important consolation following setbacks in his first lawsuit.

Ficken attempted to reason with code enforcers before going to court—explaining that his lawn had grown long while he was settling his late mother's estate in South Carolina and that the landscaper he had hired to mow his grass while he was gone had died unexpectedly. He asked for leniency, but the city refused to budge and insisted on full payment: $500 per day for nearly two months, plus interest. They even put liens on Ficken's home and authorized city attorneys to initiate proceedings to seize it.

In response, Ficken filed a federal lawsuit with representation from the Institute for Justice, asserting that the excessive fines and lack of due process violated his Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. He lost in district court in 2021 and again in 2022 at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals—but he won in other ways. His case ignited a media frenzy and public calls for reform, prompting Dunedin to overhaul its code enforcement regime to prevent ruinous fines for trivial offenses.

After his legal battles, Ficken managed to get the fines reduced enough to prevent foreclosure. He thought he was safe. But then the city hit him with the bill for attorney fees, a retroactive attempt to penalize him for seeking his day in court. Left with no choice, he sued again in 2023.

The city could have avoided both lawsuits merely by treating Ficken like a neighbor instead of a cash machine.

While Ficken acknowledged his breach of a city ordinance and expected some penalty, Dunedin's aggressive tactics—aiming to extract tens of thousands of dollars and take his home—were blatantly excessive. American jurisprudence dictates that punishment must fit the crime. Municipalities must balance code enforcement with common sense and respect for property rights.

Dunedin moved in the right direction by making adjustments to its policies; however, the problem of excessive fines and fees is not confined to Dunedin—it is a national issue.

Across the country, similar stories of overzealous code enforcement abound. In Lantana, Florida, homeowner Sandy Martinez was fined more than $100,000 for parking violations on her own property. In Doraville, Georgia, Hilda Brucker was criminally prosecuted for having cracks in her driveway. And in Pagedale, Missouri, Valerie Whitner had to pay a fine for not having a screen on her back door.

Florida demographics create additional pressures. Many residents are retirees on fixed incomes living in single-family housing. People like Ficken have a right to stay, but some officials would prefer younger, more affluent taxpayers in their communities. Aggressive code enforcement is one way to target less desirable residents.

Sometimes enforcement is about preserving a certain aesthetic, as seen in Miami Shores, Florida in 2013. Officials declared vegetable gardens unsightly and threatened Hermine Ricketts and Tom Carroll with daily fines if they did not remove their front yard vegetables.

Regardless of motive, cities and towns must exercise restraint. The Constitution sets the baseline, and without it, abuses can and will grow quickly out of hand, and tall grass will be nothing in comparison.

The post Florida Man's Tall Grass Saga Comes to an End appeared first on Reason.com.

President Joe Biden says, "I know how to make government work!"

You'd think he'd know. He's worked in government for 51 years.

But the truth is, no one can make government work.

Biden hasn't.

Look at the chaos at the border, our military's botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the rising cost of living, our unsustainable record-high debt.

In my new video, economist Ed Stringham argues that no government can ever work well, because "even the best person can't implement change….The massive bureaucracy gets bigger and slower."

I learned that as a consumer reporter watching bureaucrats regulate business. Their rules usually made life worse for consumers.

Yet politicians want government to do more!

Remember the unveiling of Obamacare's website? Millions tried to sign up. The first day, only six got it to work.

Vice President Joe Biden made excuses: "Neither [Obama] and I are technology geeks."

Stringham points out, "If they can't design a basic simple website, how are they going to manage half the economy?"

While bureaucrats struggled with the Obamacare site, the private sector successfully created Uber and Lyft, platforms like iCloud, apps like Waze, smartwatches, etc.

The private sector creates things that work because it has to. If businesses don't serve customers well, they go out of business.

But government is a monopoly. It never goes out of business. With no competition, there's less pressure to improve.

Often good people join government. Some work as hard as workers in the private sector.

But not for long. Because the bureaucracy's incentives kill initiative.

If a government worker works hard, he might get a small raise. But he sits near others who earn the same pay and, thanks to archaic civil service rules, are unlikely to get fired even if they're late, lazy, or stupid.

Over time, that's demoralizing. Eventually government workers conclude, "Why try?"

In the private sector, workers must strive to make things better. If they don't, competitors will, and you might lose your job.

Governments never go out of business.

"Companies can only stay in business if they always keep their customer happy," Stringham points out. "Competition pushes us to be better. Government has no competition."

I push back.

"Politicians say, 'Voters can vote us out.'"

"With a free market," Stringham replies, "the consumer votes every single day with the dollar. Under politics, we have to wait four years."

It's another reason why, over time, government never works as well as the private sector.

Year after year, the Pentagon fails audits.

If a private company repeatedly does that, they get shut down. But government never gets shut down.

A Pentagon spokeswoman makes excuses: "We're working on improving our process. We certainly are learning each time."

They don't learn much. They still fail audits.

"It's like we're living in Groundhog Day," Stringham jokes.

When COVID-19 hit, politicians handed out almost $2 trillion in "rescue" funds. The Government Accountability Office says more than $100 billion were stolen.

"One woman bought a Bentley," laughs Stringham. "A father and son bought a luxury home."

At least Biden noticed the fraud. He announced, "We're going to make you pay back what you stole!

No. They will not. Biden's Fraud Enforcement Task Force has recovered only 1 percent of what was stolen.

Even without fraud, government makes money vanish. I've reported on my town's $2 million toilet in a park. When I confronted the parks commissioner, he said, "$2 million was a bargain! Today it would cost $3 million."

That's government work.

More recently, Biden proudly announced that government would create "500,000 [electric vehicle] charging stations."

After two years, they've built seven. Not 7,000. Just seven.

Over the same time, greedy, profit-seeking Amazon built 17,000.

"Privatize!" says Stringham. "Whenever we think something's important, question whether government should do it."

In Britain, government-owned Jaguar lost money year after year. Only when Britain sold the company to private investors did Jaguar start turning a profit selling cars people actually like.

When Sweden sold Absolut Vodka, the company increased its profits sixfold.

It's ridiculous for Biden to say, "I know how to make government work."

No one does.

Next week, this column takes on Donald Trump's promise: "We'll drain the Washington swamp!"

COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post No One Can Make Government Work appeared first on Reason.com.

It's a fairly well-established principle that the state can intervene when an individual harms another person: Your right to swing your fist ends when it hits my face. But what about when someone's actions harm only themselves?

For some, that's another opportunity for the government to get involved. They're the "fun police," constantly using public policy to nudge, cajole, or outright force you to accept their idea of a healthy, moral lifestyle. In a new limited-run podcast series produced by the Consumer Choice Center, a group that opposes paternalism in various forms, co-hosts Bill Wirtz and Yaël Ossowski turn a skeptical eye toward the do-gooders and nanny-staters who campaign against drinking, smoking, gambling, and more.

Wirtz, Ossowski, and their guests trace the roots of modern neo-prohibitionist movements to the Anti-Saloon League, which laid out the blueprint followed by public scolds today. Bankrolled by the Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford families, the League helped turn the "once-fringe moral movement" of alcohol prohibition into a "social force that dominated political life" and culminated in the 18th Amendment (and disaster). The same model is still deployed today, with wealthy funders such as former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg backing efforts to ban products from vape pens to Big Gulps.

Fun Police veers between practical examples of nanny statism and deeper discussions about the role of the state. It makes a compelling case for letting people live freely, even if that comes with a little risk.

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Separation of powers is a core concept of America's Constitution. In the Founders' scheme, Congress, the courts, and the executive are independent branches of government, with their own roles and duties, intended to check one another.

But since 1984, the Supreme Court has hamstrung its own ability to act independently in the face of executive power. In Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the high court adopted a blanket presumption of deference to statutory interpretations put forth by regulatory agencies in any case where the statute was ambiguous, so long as the interpretation was reasonable.

If there is ambiguity about what the text of a law says, the Supreme Court decided in that case, then the courts should defer to the government's experts. This became known as the Chevron deference.

In practice, the Chevron deference undermined the Court's independence, since it forced courts to just accept executive branch interpretations in many tough cases.

The doctrine also creates perverse incentives for the other two branches. For example, by giving deference to agencies in ambiguous cases, it gave executive branch regulators incentive to hunt for ambiguities in order to expand their own power. This led to decades of executive overreach, as administrations used convoluted readings of statutes to pursue agendas Congress never imagined.

By the same token, Chevron deference shifted the burden of making well-written and fully thought-out laws away from Congress. Empowering regulators meant that, at the margins, Congress had less reason to write clear, consensus-based legislation.

The result, over 40 years, has been a shift away from the intended constitutional order, in which Congress writes laws, the executive branch implements them, and the courts rule independently on matters of dispute. We now live under an often dysfunctional system in which Congress is less inclined to compromise and legislate on tough issues, regulators are more inclined to take matters into their own hands, and courts have less power to tell executive branch officials when they have overreached.

The system lends itself to politicized regulatory pingponging, as courts are generally required to defer to the differing and even dramatically opposed interpretations put forth by shifting Democratic and Republican administrations.

This was what was at stake in January, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments that put the legacy of Chevron on trial. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, a group of herring fishermen from New Jersey objected to a federal rule requiring them not only to host government monitors on their boats but to pay the cost of those monitors—about $700 a day.

That requirement was based on the 2007 Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA), which does require some types of fishing operations to host and pay for government monitors. But the fishermen in this case weren't explicitly covered by that requirement, so when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) decided to expand the purview of the MSA in order to cover a budget shortfall, the fishermen went to court.

The fishermen's cause is important on its own merits. But for larger constitutional purposes, it's something of a red herring. The specifics of their complaint are less important than whether or not the courts had to defer to NOAA's newly stretched interpretation of the MSA.

In oral arguments, the three justices appointed by Democrats seemed inclined to keep Chevron as is, with all three suggesting that experts in regulatory agencies are better equipped than courts are to make tough decisions about difficult-to-parse statutes.

But the rest of the Court seemed skeptical. Justice Neil Gorsuch noted that Chevron deference tends to empower agencies at the expense of less-powerful individuals, such as immigrants, veterans, and Social Security claimants. Addressing the Court, Paul Clement, who defended the fishermen, put it this way: "One of the many problems with the Chevron rule is it basically says that when the statutory question is close, the tie goes to the government."

Outside the Court, news reports and activists warned of the consequences of taking down Chevron, noting that much of the federal government's vast regulatory authority rested on its rule of deference. As a USA Today report on the case noted, "The court's decision could undo decades of rules and procedures involving land use, the stock market, and on-the-job safety."

Loper Bright was not the only Supreme Court case to challenge major parts of the government's regulatory authority this term. Sheetz v. County of El Dorado takes aim at regulatory takings, and Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy revolves around the question of whether the government violates the Seventh Amendment's requirements about jury trials when judging securities claims. Collectively, wrote Cameron Bonnell in The Georgetown Environmental Law Review, these cases "indicate the Court's eagerness to continue shaping the proper scope of government regulatory authority."

For too long, the administrative state has run unchecked over much of American life. That might finally be coming to an end with this year's Supreme Court term. In discussing the problems with Chevron with NPR, Clement said, "I think it's really as simple as this, which is: When the statute is ambiguous, and the tie has to go to someone, we think the tie should go to the citizen and not the government." One can hope.

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Every year, thousands of New York City families are subjected to invasive home searches as part of child abuse and neglect investigations. While less than 7 percent of these investigations lead the agency to file claims of abuse or neglect, a new lawsuit alleges that the city's Administration for Children's Services (ACS) workers often make misleading—or outright false—threats to coerce parents to allow ACS to conduct warrantless searches of their homes.

According to the lawsuit, which was filed on Tuesday, ACS employs a widespread policy of coercing families under investigation to allow case workers into their homes. ACS workers allegedly often tell families that they "must" or "have to" let them search their homes, insist that they do not need a warrant for the search, and even threaten to take noncompliant parents' children away. 

Even though ACS workers are technically legally required to obtain a warrant to search homes, the agency very rarely seeks them. According to the suit, of the almost 53,000 investigations conducted by ACS in 2023, it only sought 222 court orders to search families' homes.

"Even assuming ACS completed only one home search during each investigation (it typically conducts several), ACS sought court orders for just 0.4% of home entries," the suit states. "This means over 99.5% of home searches that ACS conducts are 'presumptively unreasonable' under the Fourth Amendment."

Once inside a family's home, the suit claims that ACS workers engage in incredibly invasive tactics, looking "inside medicine cabinets, under beds, in closets and dresser drawers, in the refrigerator, and in cupboards." Even more troubling, strip searches of children are common, with workers demanding that children lift up their shirts or pull down their pants. Over the course of an investigation—the average length is 60 days—families are typically subjected to these searches more than once.

The agency itself seems self-aware about the impact of these coercive techniques. According to one 2020 report by the National Innovation Service, ACS policy "incentivizes [staff] to be invasive and not tell parents their rights." The report noted how "the experience of an investigation, even when an allegation is ultimately determined to be unfounded, too often traumatizes parents and children."

Further, agency leadership has also acknowledged that many reports of child abuse and neglect are completely unfounded, as individuals are allowed to make anonymous reports. A 2023 letter from the New York City Bar went so far as to state that a "significant percentage of" child abuse hotline callers "make false reports, for the purpose of harassment."

In all, the suit argues that ACS' policy of using coercive tactics to enter families' homes without a warrant constitutes a violation of their Fourth Amendment rights, arguing that the agency's "failure to adequately train or supervise ACS caseworkers regarding the protection of parents' Fourth Amendment rights" has directly led ACS workers to use manipulative, false tactics to persuade families to allow them to "conduct warrantless, non-exigent searches of Plaintiffs' and class members' homes."

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