VinFast, a Vietnamese automaker that builds electric vehicles, announced in July that it would not begin production at its North Carolina plant for another four years. While the news is certainly a setback, the disappointment is compounded by the fact that the state is trying to bulldoze a number of private homes, and a church, to make the project happen.

In March 2022, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper announced that VinFast would build its first North American plant in Chatham County. The company would spend $4 billion and create 7,500 jobs, with production from the completed factory set to begin in July 2024. At its peak, the facility would be capable of producing 150,000 vehicles per year.

In exchange, North Carolina lawmakers agreed to give the company $1.25 billion in incentives, including $450 million for infrastructure, including "roadway improvements" and building out the water and sewer capacity; $400 million from the county; and a $316 million state grant paid out over 32 years, linked to the company's job creation promises. In effect, North Carolina taxpayers would be financing over 30 percent of the project.

President Joe Biden called the project "the latest example of my economic strategy at work." CNBC lauded the state's Democratic governor and Republican Legislature for "managing to put aside their very deep political divisions to boost business and the economy" when it named North Carolina America's Top State for Business.

But within two years, the deal was on shaky ground. The company announced in March 2023 that it would not be able to begin production at the factory until at least 2025 "because we need more time to complete administrative procedures," according to a company spokesperson.

Then in July 2024, in a press release about manufacturing output in the previous quarter, VinFast announced that it had "made the strategic decision to adjust the timeline for the launch of its North Carolina manufacturing facility, which is now expected to begin production in 2028," in order to "optimize its capital allocation and manage its short-term spending more effectively."

While this is disappointing news for many—company executives, shareholders, North Carolina state officials—it's worse for residents in the area.

Many of the state and county incentives are dependent upon VinFast meeting certain metrics: While the state doled out $125 million to reimburse the company for site preparation costs, it can claw back that entire amount if VinFast fails to hire at least 3,875 people—just over 50 percent of the required total. There are further clawback provisions if it doesn't hire at least 6,000 people and doesn't invest at least $2 billion into the project.

But even if the deal falls apart and the state gets its money back, some things can't be undone. As part of the deal, the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) would conduct "roadway improvements" at the future site of the facility. As detailed in an August 2022 project overview, "private property is needed to construct the improvements proposed by the roadway project." And while the NCDOT "works to minimize impacts such as the number of homes and businesses displaced by a road project, some impacts are unavoidable."

In total, the state expected that the roadwork would "impact" five businesses, 27 homes, and Merry Oaks Baptist Church, which had stood since 1888. This meant the state was authorized to purchase the properties from the owners—or if the owners refused to sell, the state could simply take the properties through eminent domain.

Eminent domain, authorized by the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, allows government entities to seize private property for public use, as long as the owner receives "just compensation." Of course, the only thing that separates this from a normal real estate transaction is that the use of eminent domain implies that the property owner did not want to sell but was forced to anyway.

While an electric car factory does not qualify as a "public use," the state is planning to bulldoze the houses, businesses, and church to make way for a new roadway interchange that will accommodate traffic to and from the site. Of course, under the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Kelo v. New London, the state would also have been justified to seize property to give to a purely private party, with Justice John Paul Stevens writing that "there is no basis for exempting economic development from our traditionally broad understanding of public purpose."

In fact, that seems to be just what happened: In July, after VinFast announced its latest delay, the Raleigh News & Observer reported that so far the state had spent $96 million—nearly all of it on site preparation and infrastructure—and purchased four homes, with negotiations ongoing with other homeowners and two businesses. And sadly, "North Carolina has acquired two businesses and Merry Oaks Baptist Church through eminent domain, meaning negotiations fell short and the state took over the land after paying the previous owners fair market values assessed by a state-approved appraiser."

In July 2023, VinFast offered to donate up to three acres of land from its 2,000-acre parcel to Merry Oaks Baptist Church so the congregation could relocate. But a better solution would have been for VinFast to simply shoulder the burden of development in the first place, first by footing the bill for the project itself and then by obtaining land where the government did not forcibly remove any obstacles in the way.

The post VinFast Delays Production After North Carolina Seizes Property for Factory Site appeared first on Reason.com.

As of early May, more than three years after New York legalized recreational 
marijuana, just 119 licensed dispensaries were serving that market in the entire state. Unauthorized pot shops outnumbered legal outlets by 20 to 1, according to The New York Times, with more than 2,000 operating in New York City alone. The state had less than one licensed pot store per 100,000 residents—in contrast with about six in
Massachusetts, 10 in Maine, 11 in Colorado, 19 in Oregon, and 48 in New Mexico.

Legislators and regulators could have avoided this "disaster," as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul recently called it, had they learned from the mistakes of other states that have struggled to displace the black market. Yet New York politicians somehow did not anticipate what would happen after people could legally use marijuana but could not obtain it from legal sources.

Legislators did not allow home cultivation, and they initially did not allow medical dispensaries to serve recreational consumers. New York created a complicated, costly, and sluggish licensing process that prioritized "equity" and "diversity" above efficiency. The state imposed 
burdensome fees, taxes, and regulations that made it difficult for legal dispensaries to compete with the unlicensed stores that sprang up to fill the supply gap.

New York did not let medical dispensaries enter the market until last December. Even then, it charged companies $20 million for the privilege of operating up to three outlets.

New businesses faced fees up to $300,000, and regulators gave priority to retail applicants who were deemed 
disadvantaged, including people with marijuana conviction records and their relatives. Those preferences provoked lawsuits that further delayed the licensing process, and they blocked applicants who might have been better equipped to run a successful business.

Despite these problems, Hochul remains proud of New York's "social equity" program. But she has ordered a bureaucratic overhaul to speed up retail license approvals and has voiced support for cutting the state's heavy marijuana taxes, which currently include a three-tiered wholesale tax based on THC content as well as a 13 percent retail tax.

Legislators should keep in mind that licensed shops are competing with a black market where the tax rate is zero. New York also should reexamine the onerous regulations that make legal weed more expensive and less accessible.

Although Hochul has promised to "shut down illicit operators," any such crackdown is apt to inflict the sort of harm that legalization was supposed to ameliorate, punishing entrepreneurs for filling the yawning gap left by the state's misguided policies and administrative incompetence. Nor is enforcement likely to succeed, given the abysmal track record of the war on weed—a crusade that legislators supposedly ended three years ago.

The post The Government Caused New York's Legal Pot 'Disaster' appeared first on Reason.com.

Pastor Joshua Robertson didn't set out to become a leader in the educational freedom movement, but when his community called, he answered.

It was several calls, in fact. In spring 2020, Robertson's phone wouldn't stop ringing. "I was receiving 40–50 calls from parents every single day," says Robertson, the senior pastor of The Rock Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

These were the early days of the COVID-19 lockdowns. The move to remote learning gave parents a closer look at their children's schooling—and they didn't like what they saw.

"All these parents were venting about the school system," Robertson recalls. "They would say to me, 'My kid is smart. I can't understand why they're not doing well academically.' Then throw in the violence in our schools. You're talking about kids who are in fistfights every other day." 

Feeling hopeless, the parents turned to a different kind of teacher.

Turning Point

Our education system has significant problems, and Robertson knows it is especially tough on children in under-resourced communities like the one he serves. He had experienced the system's failures firsthand: Robertson graduated from high school without knowing how to read properly.

Robertson went to college to play football but flunked out his freshman year.

Before failing out, Robertson befriended a bishop while playing organ at a local church. But without school or sports to occupy him, he fell into a dangerous lifestyle, surrounding himself with unsavory characters and illicit behavior. As if he sensed the need to intervene from hundreds of miles away, the bishop called Robertson in the middle of one such indiscretion.

"You're about to ruin your life, aren't you?" the bishop asked. He pleaded with Robertson to come to see him. Robertson went, and the bishop enrolled them both in the local community college. The two sat side by side doing schoolwork together. 

"In less than a week, he saw that I couldn't read," Robertson says. "It's amazing—you can attend twelve years of school, and no one notices that you can't read. But, because the bishop took the time to sit with me, he saw it right away. And over the next year, he sat with me day after day and taught me to read."

The man who flunked out of college because he couldn't read went on to earn both a bachelor's and a master's degree.

When the System Fails Children

"I was failed by a system, not just by a teacher," Robertson explains. "I had a few teachers who cared. But every system has gaps. And I fell into a gap."

Many educators assumed he had behavioral issues. "I was kicked out of every elementary school I ever went to," Robertson says. "What people didn't realize was that my behavior covered up my reading problems. In fifth grade, I got in trouble for hitting a kid in class. I hit him to create a diversion. The teacher was having students read aloud, and I had a feeling she was about to call on me to read."

This behavior is common among students who are left behind by the system. "They'll do something mischievous because they'd rather take the disciplinary consequence than be embarrassed in front of the whole class." Robertson says students who aren't learning well enough at school often lack any support at home, which leads to them getting into worse situations. 

"They have an industry right outside their door where they can make money—the drug industry," says Robertson. "It's right on their block. I knew where people were cooking crack when I was 10 or 11 years old."

Robertson says this is where the school-to-prison pipeline begins. So he has given himself a mission: "We're trying to cut off that pipeline."

From Failure to Flourishing

Parent after parent asked him the same question: "Can my kids come to the church?" 

The pastor's first thought was, "Come here for what?" Then Robertson remembered what the bishop had done for him years earlier.

"He inconvenienced his entire life in order to help me," Robertson says.

One church member had lost her job because of the pandemic, and Robertson realized she could help students with homework and provide other programming. "We took a risk and hired her," he says. "We had the facilities already with our Sunday school classrooms."

Six students from the local school district began coming to the church to do their online learning. The newly hired learning guide helped them with their homework and ensured the students sat at their computers with the cameras on when they had live lessons.

Word spread in the community. Demand continued to grow, even after schools returned to in-person classes. And so, in 2021, the Rock City Learning Center (RCLC) was born. 

During the 2021–22 school year, the RCLC served 30 students—29 of whom were failing academically. By the end of the school year, 10 students finished with an average of 90 or higher across all subjects, 12 achieved an average of 80 or higher, and six finished at 70 or higher.

The following year, RCLC students saw even more significant gains. About 90 percent of the students finished with an average of at least 70, and more than half scored 90 or better.

The learning center filled in the gaps left by the system, and students who were failing are now flourishing.

A Model for Others

"These kids need an intervention—a disruption to the aspects of our schools that limit their ability to offer effective education for all students," says Robertson.

The RCLC prioritizes the student. Students receive their instruction and curriculum from an accredited public cyber charter school. They work in small pods and receive coaching from trained learning guides.

Robertson believes that the RCLC's real innovation lies in the "convergence of the academic community and the community at large." The learning guides are not educators; they are "members of the community who love our children." They provide support that extends beyond academics, customizing the experience for for each student.

When students get the support they need, they thrive. "It's incredible the confidence you see in a kid when they're loved, supported, and disciplined," Robertson says. "They understand…they're in a place that cares about them and their specific needs, challenges, and talents."

Robertson founded Black Pastors United for Education (BPUE) to help others replicate the RCLC model. Harrisburg now has three learning centers, and another opened in nearby York. BPUE was a Yass Prize finalist—a prize that honors organizations delivering "Sustainable, Transformational, Outstanding, and Permissionless education"—and received a $500,000 grant to continue advancing its work.

Fighting for Educational Freedom

In June, Pennsylvania's Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill that would cut funding to charter schools. Robertson is fighting against this effort and notes that Pennsylvania's charter schools "serve a higher percentage of low-income and nonwhite students than traditional school districts." If the bill becomes law, the hardest-hit schools would be the cyber charter schools where the RCLC students enroll.

Another goal of Roberston's political fight is a proposal for Lifeline Scholarships. This program would award restricted-use scholarship accounts to students attending Pennsylvania's lowest-performing schools. In 2023, Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro backed out of a budget deal that would have provided $100 million for Lifeline Scholarships.

On June 10, Robertson and nearly 60 other pastors and educators signed an open letter to Shapiro and the state's legislative leadership. The letter called on the leaders to oppose cuts to cyber charter schools and enact Lifeline Scholarships.

The next day, Roberston led a rally for educational freedom in the state Capitol. He also published an op-ed pleading with Shapiro to invest in educational freedom. "Today, a child's zip code determines whether she can read or perform basic math," wrote Robertson. "And this is simply unacceptable."

It has been a long journey for the pastor—from flunking out of college to leading this fight for educational freedom. Looking back on his experience, he says, "The bishop started with one person: me. And that one person he made an investment in is now making this investment in others. That's how it's supposed to work, right?"

The post A Pennsylvania Pastor Leads His Community's Fight for Educational Freedom appeared first on Reason.com.

The question of why the chicken crossed the road is of secondary importance to who gets to claim the bird's carcass if it's killed while attempting the crossing.

For a long time, the rule in a majority of the country was the government got to keep the deceased animal. State laws prohibited drivers from claiming the meat of animals killed on public roads and highways for food. Instead, ownership of the corpses defaulted to whichever agency maintained the roads, wasting countless tons of farm-fresh, slightly battered flesh to rot.

In recent years, a growing number of states have been loosening their highway harvesting bans. The Associated Press reported in 2022 that "30 or so" states now allow people to harvest roadkill. The pace of reform doesn't appear to be slowing down.

Come July, a new Virginia law allowing anyone to claim roadkill all year round will go into effect. Current law allows only the driver who the killed animal to claim the carcass, and only if they hit the animal during hunting season.

Liberalizing roadkill harvesting also stands to unite animal rights activists and fiscal conservatives.

The animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has endorsed roadkill as superior to supermarket-sold meat.

"Animals killed on the road were not castrated, dehorned, or debeaked without anesthesia, did not suffer the trauma and misery of transportation," says the organization on its website.

Virginia Del. Tony Wilt (R–Harrisonburg), the author of Virginia's new law, advocated for the policy change as a way of reducing the burden on the state's transportation department.

"Currently, if nobody takes the animal, it falls back onto [the Virginia Department of Transportation]. There are certain times of the year when those things can stack up," he said during a committee hearing earlier this year, per reporting from WRIC.

Libertarians would obviously be on board with these policies as well. Under an ideal regime of privatized roads, it's possible that road companies might claim animal carcasses for themselves. But so long as the public owns and operates the highways, it seems only fair that the public be allowed to harvest whatever animals are killed on them as well.

The open road, and all it has to offer, has long been associated with a particularly American vision of freedom. Expanding that freedom to what lies on the side of the road can only be considered a win for individual liberty.

The post New Virginia Law Will Let Anyone Harvest Roadkill Anytime of Year appeared first on Reason.com.

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration is once again trying to carve out broad new exemptions to the state's celebrated government transparency law. 

This time, lawyers for DeSantis are arguing that call logs from a high-ranking staffer's phone aren't public record, even though the staffer was conducting government business, because it was a private phone.

The Tampa Bay Times first reported Thursday that lawyers for the DeSantis administration argued in court this week before a Leon County judge that the governor's office shouldn't be compelled to turn over call logs from DeSantis' Chief of Staff James Uthmeier's private cellphone.

The Florida Center for Government Accountability sued the DeSantis administration in 2022 for records concerning the migrant flights to Martha's Vineyard that DeSantis organized that year using state resources. The governor's office has turned over many records so far—and disclosed that Uthmeier and other staff used personal email addresses and phones rather than their state-issued ones—but it is currently defying a court order to release Uthmeier's phone logs.

"Florida is no longer the Sunshine State when it comes to transparency," says Michael Barfield, the Center's director of public access. "The public's right to know is headed into darkness."

Public records laws are commonly interpreted at both the federal and state levels, including in Florida, to cover records created on private devices and accounts if they concern government business. For example, the 2023 edition of the Florida attorney general's Government-in-the-Sunshine Manual states that "the mere fact that an e-mail is sent from a private e-mail account using a personal computer is not the determining factor as to whether it is a public record; it is whether the e-mail was prepared or received in connection with official agency business."

The manual also notes that "a public official or employee's use of a private cell phone to conduct public business via text messaging 'can create an electronic written public record subject to disclosure' if the text message is 'prepared, owned, used, or retained…within the scope of his or her employment or agency.'"

But DeSantis' lawyers are arguing that Uthmeier's call logs are "tertiary data," the Tampa Bay Times reports:

"If you hold that these tertiary data points are somehow public records that also have to be captured by a public records custodian, that is a sweeping — sweeping — interpretation of public records," DeSantis lawyer Christopher Lunny told Leon County Circuit Judge Lee Marsh on Tuesday.

But under that argument, Marsh said, all government business could be shielded from the public.

"We ought to just put out word, 'Let's do all of our business on private, bring-your-own cellphones," Marsh said. "Then we don't need public records laws because there'll be no public records, right?"

As Reason described in a magazine feature last year on Florida's Sunshine Law, the DeSantis administration is not just chipping away at the once-powerful public records law; it's taking a sledgehammer to it. State lawmakers have made the governor's travel records secret, and the DeSantis administration has also tried to invoke executive privilege over other documents, a privilege that is found nowhere in Florida's Sunshine Law and has never been claimed by previous governors.

DeSantis' office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The post Ron DeSantis Won't Stop Trying To Gut Florida's Public Records Law 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.

Today's technology companies are increasingly sandwiched between the regulatory requirements of the European Union (E.U.) and those of California. While the U.S. federal government may adopt a light touch, pro-innovation approach, California's state legislation can undermine this with a regulatory approach with impacts far beyond its borders.

A new California bill imposes a rigorous regulatory regime on Artificial Intelligence (AI), making it the latest technology caught in this potentially innovation-stifling squeeze between Brussels and Sacramento. The term "Brussels Effect" often refers to the outsize influence of E.U. policy—particularly in technology—as a de facto global standard. But now, companies are also experiencing the "Sacramento Effect," where California's stringent regulations effectively set de facto federal policy for the rest of the country.

California is not the only state diving into significant tech policy legislation. Colorado recently enacted notable AI regulations, Montana attempted to ban TikTok, and many states are pursuing data privacy or youth online safety regulations.

For better or worse, states can move faster than Congress, acting as laboratories of democracy. However, this agility also risks creating a fragmented tech policy landscape, with one state's regulations imposing heavy burdens on the entire nation. This is particularly pronounced with California.

The impact is profound not just because many leading tech companies are based in California but rather because of the nature of the technologies California seeks to regulate. For example, in some cases, the only feasible way to implement regulations is at a national level. In data privacy, the laws apply to California residents even when their actions are not occurring within the state's borders, pushing companies toward broader compliance to avoid legal pitfalls.

While some of these laws could be challenged under the dormant commerce clause, without judicial intervention, they become de facto federal policy. Many companies find it easier to comply with California's stringent regulations rather than juggling different standards across states and risking non-compliance.

This dynamic was evident in 2018 when California enacted its regulatory approach to data privacy. Now, we could soon see California—either by regulation or legislation—disrupting the crucial AI innovations currently taking place. Unlike some technologies, such as autonomous vehicles, the development of large language models and other foundational AI models cannot, in most cases, simply be removed from a state due to regulations.

Perhaps the "best-case scenario" from the actions of states like California and Colorado might be a problematic patchwork of AI regulations, but more realistically, California's proposal (if it becomes law) would deter innovation by creating a costly compliance regime. This would limit AI development to only the largest companies capable of bearing these costs and would come at the expense of investments in product improvements.

Moreover, beneficial AI applications could be thwarted by other proposals California's legislature is currently considering. As R Street's Adam Thierer notes in an analysis of state laws surrounding the AI revolution, the California legislature has considered a variety of anti-AI bills that could "ban self-checkout at grocery and retail stores and ban the use of AI in call centers that provide government services, making things even less efficient."

It is not only legislation that could result in California derailing a pro-innovation approach to AI. The California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA), established under California's data privacy laws, has proposed a regulatory framework for "automated decision-making." The E.U.'s General Data Protection Regulation shows how data privacy regulation can inadvertently stifle AI development by imposing compliance requirements designed for older technologies. Regulating "automated decision-making" could give the CPPA an unintended yet significant role in obstructing AI and other beneficial algorithmic uses.

America's tech innovators and entrepreneurs are already facing challenges from the E.U.'s heavy-handed AI regulations. In the absence of federal preemption or an alternative framework, they may also be hindered by the heavy hand of Sacramento. Such a sandwiching of significant regulation could harm not only the tech sector's economy but also all Americans who stand to benefit from AI advancements, as a single state or region's policy preferences dictate the national landscape.

The post AI Could Become the Next Victim of the 'Sacramento Effect' appeared first on Reason.com.

Instead of dispatching an officer each time, several Colorado police departments may soon dispatch a drone to respond to certain 911 calls. While the proposal has promise, it also raises uncomfortable questions about privacy.

As Shelly Bradbury reported this week in The Denver Post, "A handful of local law enforcement agencies are considering using drones as first responders—that is, sending them in response to 911 calls—as police departments across Colorado continue to widely embrace the use of the remote-controlled flying machines."

Bradbury quotes Arapahoe County Sheriff Jeremiah Gates saying, "This really is the future of law enforcement at some point, whether we like it or not." She notes that while there are currently no official plans in place, "Gates envisions a world where a drone is dispatched to a call about a broken traffic light or a suspicious vehicle instead of a sheriff's deputy, allowing actual deputies to prioritize more pressing calls for help."

The Denver Police Department—whose then-chief in 2013 called the use of drones by police "controversial" and said that "constitutionally there are a lot of unanswered questions about how they can be used"—is also starting a program, buying several drones over the next year that can eventually function as first responders.

In addition to Denver and Arapahoe County, Bradbury lists numerous Colorado law enforcement agencies that also have drone programs, including the Colorado State Patrol, which has 24 drones, and the Commerce City Police Department, which has eight drones and 12 pilots for a city of around 62,000 people and plans to begin using them for 911 response within a year.

In addition to helping stem the number of calls an officer must respond to in person, some law enforcement agencies see this as a means of saving money. One Commerce City police official told The Denver Post that "what we see out of it is, it's a lot cheaper than an officer, basically." And Denver intends for its program to make up for an $8.4 million cut to the police budget this year.

On one hand, there is certainly merit to such a proposal: Unless they're of the Predator variety, drones are much less likely than officers to kill or maim innocent civilians—or their dogs. And as Gates noted, drones could take some of the busywork out of policing by taking some of the more mundane tasks off an officer's plate.

But it also raises privacy concerns to farm out too much police work to unmanned surveillance aircraft.

"Sending out a drone for any time there is a 911 call, it could be dangerous and lead to more over-policing of communities of color," Laura Moraff, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, told The Denver Post. "There is also just the risk that the more that we normalize having drones in the skies, the more it can really affect behavior on a massive scale, if we are just looking up and seeing drones all over the place, knowing that police are watching us."

Indeed, while this sort of dystopic panopticon would certainly make life easier for officers day to day, it would signal the further erosion of the average Coloradan's Fourth Amendment rights.

In Michigan, for example, police hired a drone pilot to take pictures of a person's property rather than go to the trouble of getting a warrant. Earlier this month, the state supreme court upheld the search, ruling that since the purpose was for civil code enforcement and not a criminal violation, it didn't matter whether the search violated the Fourth Amendment.

Thankfully, there are some positive developments on that front: In March, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled against state troopers who flew a plane over a suspect's house and took pictures with a high-powered zoom lens to see if he was growing marijuana.

"The fact that a random person might catch a glimpse of your yard while flying from one place to another does not make it reasonable for law enforcement officials to take to the skies and train high-powered optics on the private space right outside your home without a warrant," the court found. "Unregulated aerial surveillance of the home with high-powered optics is the kind of police practice that is 'inconsistent with the aims of a free and open society.'"

The post Colorado Will Replace Cops With Drones for Some 911 Calls appeared first on Reason.com.

While christening a new UCLA technology and research center in January, Gov. Gavin Newsom let loose with some fairly typical rhetoric about California's leading-edge role in tech development: "California is the epicenter of global innovation—from the creation of the internet to the dominance of artificial intelligence, humanity's future happens here first."

Yet for the so-called epicenter of innovation, our state certainly doesn't give innovators a lot of room to experiment with new ideas. California lawmakers and regulators are so intent on limiting and controlling any promising new development that we've instead become the poster child for Ronald Reagan's famous quotation: "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."

Maybe Newsom and the Democratic Legislature haven't noticed, but California has been facing a tech exodus, as many prominent firms leave for states that give them more elbow room to create the next wave of promising innovations. Given the state's dependence on capital gains revenue, it's one reason we're now facing a $45-billion or more budget deficit.

On the good news front, Crunchbase reports that the San Francisco Bay Area may be experiencing a tech resurgence based around artificial intelligence systems, with the region receiving "more than 50 percent of all global venture funding for AI-related startups." But will the state kill that boom before it takes off? Based on the latest actions of the legislature, the answer is "probably."

The Senate Appropriations Committee recently gave the go-ahead to Senate Bill 915, which would "prioritize local control in the decision to deploy autonomous vehicle services." In addition to gaining all the many state approvals, robo-taxi firms would also have to deal with exploding local regulations.

The legislation has been amended to apply to the 15 largest cities and it would forbid localities from banning self-driving cars, but that doesn't ameliorate my concern. This technology is rolling out mainly in big cities anyway. It's easy to kill a technology without outright banning it by, say, forcing these companies to face dramatically different driving rules in every different city where they go.

Like all cutting-edge innovations, self-driving cars strike many of us as an ominous and dangerous development. But most new cars already have various self-driving features (lane assist, adaptive cruise control, blind-spot monitoring). And computers are almost certainly better drivers than people. Nearly 43,000 Americans die in car crashes each year, almost all of them at the hands of human drivers. Widespread A.V. use could save thousands of lives, per research from RAND.

AVs offer fabulous benefits for disabled people, the elderly, and others who cannot or choose not to drive. Yet federal, state, and local officials are worried about a few minor and inevitable problems that have popped up as this technology experiences growing pains—e.g., minor accidents and concerns about traffic violations (as if ordinary drivers don't also sometimes violate traffic laws).

One advocate for S.B. 915 expressed concern about robo-taxis getting stuck at a tricky turn—as if that's a good excuse to add a pointless mish-mash of local regulations to the mix. Ironically, AV development is one area where state regulators have taken an admirably low-key approach. In March, the California Public Utilities Commission gave Waymo, the Alphabet company's driverless-car division, the ability to expand operations in the Bay Area and Los Angeles region and even drive on freeways up to 65 mph. But even when the state takes a sensible approach, the locals want to step in to gum up the works.

And SB 915 isn't the only example of the California Legislature's kneejerk hostility to innovation. Many states are trying to regulate artificial intelligence technology, but California's Senate Bill 1047, which passed out of the Senate and has moved to the Assembly, is easily the most far-reaching example. The bill would create a new state regulatory division to regulate A.I. We all know how effective the state's bureaucrats are at handling complex matters—as well as the impact of lawsuit-promoting statutes.

Basically, the measure forces A.I. developers to mitigate every conceivable harm from their technology by engaging "in speculative fiction about imagined threats of machines run amok, computer models spun out of control, and other nightmare scenarios for which there is no basis in reality," opined an opposition letter from the pro-tech Chamber of Progress. The group rightly fears that the measure undermines California's leading-edge role in the tech sector.

Last week, I wrote about the legislature's effort to limit A.I. technology in a simple, real-world application—self-checkout lanes. Under the guise of helping stores battle retail theft, Senate Bill 1446 is a union concoction designed to limit the use of this technology to protect union grocery jobs.

So, yes, California has been the epicenter of global innovation, but it's apparently not going to continue being so for long. Let's hope Newsom heeds his own words and gets out the veto pen.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

The post California's Regulations Might Steer Self-Driving Innovations to Other States appeared first on Reason.com.

America's most insane occupational licensing law is about to get a whole lot better.

Louisiana is the only state in the country that requires florists to be licensed by the government. A bill that is now on the way to Gov. Jeff Landry's desk sadly won't change that fact, but it will eliminate the mandatory test that prospective florists in Louisiana must pass before being allowed to earn a living by placing different types of flowers together in an arrangement. Going forward, obtaining a florist license will require only the payment of a fee to the state.

The bill cleared its final legislative hurdle with a unanimous vote in the state House on Wednesday. Landry, a Republican who has supported other licensing reforms, is expected to sign it.

Requiring any sort of government permission slip before someone can work as a florist is obviously ridiculous, and Louisiana's florist-testing regime was a uniquely perverse and protectionist scheme. This week's passage of state Rep. Mike Bayham's (R–Chalmette) reform bill is the culmination of a two-decade battle to eliminate it.

That effort began in the early 2000s, when the Institute for Justice filed a lawsuit challenging the florist licensing law. One of the plaintiffs in that case, a woman named Sandy Meadows, had been fired from her job at a Baton Rogue grocery store when state inspectors discovered she had been arranging flowers without the proper license. She tragically died, unemployed and in poverty, before the case could be heard.

Several subsequent lawsuits and legislative efforts have failed to kill the florist licensing law, although Louisiana lawmakers did adopt changes in 2012 that put an end to the practical portion of the licensing exam. Yes, before that, would-be florists were not only quizzed on their knowledge of the profession but also on their subjective skills at arranging flowers. The judges for the exam, naturally, were already-licensed florists.

Even after the exam was pared back to being only a written test, the requirements were still quite onerous, Sarah Harbison, general counsel for the Pelican Institute, a free market think tank that supported the reform bill, told Reason this week. The test would be offered only a few times a year, and would-be licensees had to travel to Baton Rouge to take it in person.

The arguments for maintaining the florist license strain credibility. During a Louisiana Senate hearing on the reform bill earlier this month, Agriculture Commissioner Mike Strain fretted about the risk of "pest and disease problems" if the licensing requirement was removed. Louisiana does not require a license to sell cut flowers—which would presumably carry the same, truly terrifying risks—but does require a license if you want to arrange different types of flowers into a bouquet. And if Louisiana is protecting the public from the danger of unlicensed floristry, why isn't there mass chaos in the 49 other states where florists can work without first passing a government-issued test?

"This will lead to greater sales of flowers. This will help people get jobs. This will expand opportunities for people to sell flowers, and this will get rid of a needless regulation," Bayham said last month when the House first approved his bill.

Good riddance to Louisiana's absurd florist licensing exams. But this week's reforms do leave one dilemma: What will be America's worst licensing law now?

The post Louisiana Finally Fixes America's Dumbest Licensing Requirement appeared first on Reason.com.

In a recent essay in the journal Monash Bioethics Review, oncologist Vinay Prasad and health researcher Alyson Haslam provide a comprehensive after-the-fact assessment of the federal government's rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines.

Their basic takeaway is that the vaccines were a "scientific success" tarnished by flawed federal vaccine policy.

The two argue the tremendous benefits of the COVID-19 vaccines for the elderly were undercut by government guidance and messaging that pushed vaccines on the young, healthy, and previously infected when data suggested that wasn't worthwhile (and was in some cases counterproductive).

Worse still, the government even pushed vaccine mandates when it was increasingly clear the vaccines did not stop COVID-19 transmission, they argue.

To correct these errors for future pandemic responses, Prasad and Haslam recommend performing larger vaccine trials and collecting better data on vaccine performance in lower-risk populations. They also urge policy makers to be more willing to acknowledge the tradeoffs of vaccination.

That's sound advice. We'll have to wait and see if the government adopts it come the next pandemic.

There is one policy that they don't mention and doesn't totally depend on the government getting better at judging the risks of new vaccines: Charge people for them.

Had the government not provided COVID-19 vaccines for free and shielded vaccine makers and administrators from any liability for adverse reactions, prices could have better rationed vaccine supply and better informed people about their risks and benefits.

Without prices, people were instead left with flawed government recommendations, incentives, and rationing schemes.

Those who recall early 2021 will remember the complex, often transparently silly eligibility criteria state governments set up to ration scarce vaccine supplies. This often involved prioritizing younger, healthier, often politically connected "essential workers" over elderly people.

Prasad and Haslam criticize this as a government failure to prioritize groups at most risk of dying from COVID-19.

"While the UK prioritized nursing home residents and older individuals…the US included essential workers, including young, resident physicians," write Prasad and Haslam. "Health care workers face higher risks of acquiring the virus due to occupation (though this was and is offset by available personal protective equipment), but this was less than the elevated risk of death faced by older individuals."

Yet if the government hadn't assigned itself the role of distributing vaccines for free, it wouldn't have been forced into this position of rationing scarce vaccine supplies.

Demand for the vaccine is a function of the vaccine's price. Since the vaccine's price was $0, people who stood to gain comparatively less from vaccination and people for whom a vaccine would be lifesaving were equally incentivized to receive it.

Consequently, everyone rushed to get in line at the same time. The government then had to decide who got it first and predictably made flawed decisions.

Had vaccine makers been left to sell their product on an open market (instead of selling doses in bulk to the federal government to distribute for free), the elderly and those most at risk of COVID-19 would have been able to outbid people who could afford to wait longer. Perhaps more lives could have been saved.

Over the course of 2021, the supply of vaccines outgrew demand.

At the same time, as Prasad and Haslam recount, an increasing number of people (particularly young men) were developing myocarditis as a result of vaccination. Nevertheless, the government downplayed this risk, continued to urge younger populations to get vaccinated, and failed to collect data about the potential risks of vaccination.

That's all a failure of the government policy. Even if the government was slow to adjust its recommendations, prices could have played a constructive role in informing people about their own risk-reward tradeoff of getting vaccinated.

If a 20-year-old man who'd already had COVID-19 had to spend something to get vaccinated, instead of nothing, fewer would have. Prasad and Haslam argue that would have been the right call healthwise.

Without prices, that hypothetical 20-year-old's decision was informed mostly by government guidance, and, later, government mandates.

The government compounded this lack of prices by giving liability shields to vaccine makers. As it stands right now, no one is able to sue the maker of a COVID-19 vaccine should they have an adverse reaction. (Unlike standard, non-COVID vaccines, people are also not allowed to sue the government for compensation for the vaccine injuries.)

If pharmaceutical companies had to charge individual consumers to make money off their vaccines, and if those prices had to reflect the liability risks of the side effects some number of people would inevitably have, consumers would have been even better informed about the risks and rewards of vaccination.

One might counter that individual consumers aren't in a position to perform this risk-reward calculation on their own.

That ignores the ways that other intermediaries in a better position to evaluate the costs and benefits of vaccination could contribute to the price signals individuals would use to make their own decisions.

One could imagine an insurance company declining to cover COVID-19 vaccines for the aforementioned healthy 20-year-old while subsidizing their elderly customers to get the shot. (This is, of course, illegal right now. The Affordable Care Act requires most insurance plans to cover the costs of vaccination for everyone.)

Instead, the financial incentives that were attached to vaccination were another part of the federally subsidized vaccination campaign.

State Medicaid programs paid providers bonuses for the number of patients they vaccinated (regardless of how at risk of COVID-19 those patients were). State governments gave out gift cards to those who got vaccinated and entered them in lotteries to win even bigger prizes.

Leaving it up to private companies to produce and charge for vaccines would have one added benefit: It would make it much more difficult for the government to mandate vaccines or otherwise coerce people into getting them.

One of the things that made it easy for local and state governments to bar the unvaccinated from restaurants and schools was that they also had a lot of free, federally subsidized doses to give away. People didn't have a real "excuse" not to get a shot.

Had people been required to pay for vaccines, it would have been more awkward and much harder (politically and practically) to mandate that they do so.

Economist Alex Tabarrok likes to say that a "price is a signal wrapped up in an incentive." They signal crucial information and then incentivize people to act on that information in a rational, efficient way.

By divorcing COVID-19 vaccines from real price signals, we were left with an earnest, government-led vaccination effort. That effort got a lot of lifesaving vaccines to a lot of people.

But it also encouraged and subsidized people to get vaccinated when it was probably not a necessary or even good idea. When not enough people got vaccinated, governments turned to coercive mandates.

The post The COVID-19 Vaccines Shouldn't Have Been Free appeared first on Reason.com.

Prosecutors in Texas last week dismissed the criminal case against a journalist who, in 2021, was arrested, strip-searched, and jailed for filming police. But his lengthy legal battle is in some sense just beginning and once again demands we probe the idea that real journalists are entitled to a different set of rights than the public.

That's because Justin Pulliam, the man in question, is a citizen journalist. He is not employed by an outlet. Rather, he publishes his reporting to his YouTube channel, Corruption Report, which, true to its name, is unapologetically skeptical of state power and supportive of transparency.

The Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office (FBSCO) has allegedly been vexed by his audacity. In July 2021, Pulliam was expelled by police from a press conference because they alleged he did not qualify as media, and in December of that same year, he was arrested for videoing police at a mental health call, despite that he had stationed himself about 130 feet away from the interaction. Officer Taylor Rollins demanded Pulliam move back even further, and he obliged, although he continued to film the deputy speaking to other bystanders at the scene (none of whom were arrested).

That didn't end well for Pulliam, who was charged with interfering with police duties. (According to his complaint, Officer Ricky Rodriguez, who assisted with the arrest, told another cop at the jail that the ordeal would teach Pulliam a lesson "for fucking with us.") In April 2023, a jury was not able to reach a verdict in the case, with five jurors wanting to acquit and one urging to convict. It took law enforcement more than a year to decide not to pursue the case further.

One wonders if the Fort Bend government is smartly allocating resources in support of public safety when it doggedly went after a case because someone filmed them. Yet at a deeper level, it's worth asking if law enforcement would have taken the case to trial at all had Pulliam worked for a formal media outlet. My guess is no.

It is difficult to reconcile those two things. Journalism is, after all, an activity, consisting of collecting information and reporting it to the public. That venture is not exclusively available to people working at a full-time newsgathering organization, and the strength of the First Amendment should not hinge on whether or not you are on a media outlet's payroll. Even if Pulliam didn't consider himself a journalist at all—citizen or otherwise—his right to film the government employees he pays with his taxes should remain intact. It certainly shouldn't come at the expense of his freedom.

Whether or not he will be able to make that case before a jury in civil court is yet to be determined. Last June, Judge David Hittner of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas allowed Pulliam's federal lawsuit to proceed, declining to award the defendants qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that shields state and local government actors from such claims if their alleged misconduct was not already "clearly established" in the law. 

"The Individual Defendants assert no case law to support their proposition that an indictment precludes a claim for first amendment infringement," wrote Hittner. "Indeed, based on the facts alleged in the complaint, it appears Pulliam was singled out and arrested for exercising his rights under the First Amendment."

Pulliam, however, is not in the clear. He will next have to convince the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which has considered a similar case in recent months: that of Priscilla Villarreal, the citizen journalist in Laredo, Texas, who police arrested in 2017 using an obscure statute criminalizing the solicitation of nonpublic information if there is the "intent to obtain a benefit." If that description sounds a lot like standard journalism—seeking information not yet public—that's because it is. But despite attracting some strange bedfellows in her defense, Villarreal has not fared well in court.

While her case is not identical to Pulliam's, they both raise very similar questions, particularly as it relates to the idea that a certain class of journalists should get more rights than others. "Villarreal and others portray her as a martyr for the sake of journalism," wrote Judge Edith Jones in her majority opinion dismissing Villarreal's suit and giving qualified immunity to the police. "That is inappropriate," according to Jones, because Villarreal, who posts her reporting to her popular Facebook page Lagordiloca, is not a "mainstream, legitimate media outlet." Her free speech rights are suffering as a result.

The post This Journalist Was Arrested, Strip-Searched, and Jailed for Filming Police. Will He Get Justice? 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.

That there are government officials who politicize the law is about as foundational to the discourse as any complaint I can think of. The criticism is sometimes quite fair. And for the latest example of a soft-on-crime politician flouting law and order, we can look to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

Abbott, of course, is no self-styled progressive. But his recent decision to pardon Daniel Perry, who was convicted last year of murdering Garrett Foster, channels the spirit of the progressive prosecutors he criticizes for allegedly refashioning the law to suit their ideological preferences. He just has different targets.

The governor, who last year urged the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend a pardon for Perry, doesn't see it that way. "Texas has one of the strongest 'Stand Your Ground' laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney," he wrote in a statement yesterday, approving the pardon after the board officially obliged his request. (It's worth noting that the board, whose members are appointed by the governor, circumvented its own requirement that "evidence of actual innocence from at least two trial officials, or the findings of fact and conclusions of law from the district judge indicating actual innocence" be submitted to even consider such a pardon.)

It is absolutely true that the right to self-defense is vital. And to argue that Perry—who, prior to killing Foster at a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest, wrote that he wanted to "shoot the [protesters] in the front and push the pedal to the metal"—acted in self-defense is to make a total mockery of that right and those who've had to exercise it.

It is also true that many district attorneys, some of them so-called "progressive" prosecutors, appear to disdain that right. There are the cases across New York City I've covered, for example, where prosecutors are unconscionably seeking lengthy prison terms for people who acted in self-defense but had the audacity to do so with an unlicensed gun. That includes the case of Charles Foehner, an elderly man who shot a mugger in Queens, after which law enforcement brought so many weapons charges against him that Foehner would go to prison for life if convicted on all. That was in June 2023. In November, LaShawn Craig of Brooklyn shot a masked man who'd entered his apartment. Though prosecutors concede the shooting was in self-defense, they also charged him with several weapons offenses, including criminal possession of a weapon, a violent felony.

And then, most famously, there was Kyle Rittenhouse, whose 2021 prosecution for murder polarized much of the nation, despite that, if you knew the facts, it was an obvious example of self-defense—something I made very clear at the time.

There are some interesting parallels between Rittenhouse's case and Perry's case that are hard to ignore. Both men used their guns at protests against police brutality, many of which popped up across the U.S. in the summer of 2020. The shootings happened exactly a month apart. Then their stories diverge considerably, ending in an acquittal and a conviction, because the way they used their firearms was quite different, despite the culture war backdrop being the same. Both of these things can be true.

In July 2020, Perry ran a red light and drove into a crowd of protesters. That in and of itself, of course, is not enough to deduce that he was looking for a fight. His own statements prior to doing so, however, add a great deal of helpful context and show his frame of mind at the time. "I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex," he wrote on social media on May 31, 2020. Also in May, he threatened to a friend that he "might go to Dallas to shoot looters." And then in mid-June, he sent that message about going to a protest, "shoot[ing] the ones in the front," and then careening his car through the hubbub.

This was part of a pattern. Austin police detective William Bursley testified, for instance, that Perry searched on Safari for "protesters in Seattle gets shot," "riot shootouts," and "protests in Dallas live." It is not hard to connect the dots between his searches and messages.

So what about that stand-your-ground defense Abbott alleges the jury nullified? Core to Perry's case and trial was whether he reasonably feared for his life that July evening. Foster indeed had a rifle on him—because open carry is legal in Texas. The Second Amendment does not solely exist for people with conservative views. The big question then: Was Foster pointing the gun at Perry when he approached his vehicle? For the answer, we can go to Perry himself, who told law enforcement that he was not. "I believe he was going to aim at me," he said. "I didn't want to give him a chance to aim at me." But that is not a self-defense justification, as Perry cannot claim clairvoyance.

That the jury reached the conclusion they did is not a mystery, nor is it an outrage. What is outrageous, however, is that a governor who claims to care about law and order has made clear that his support for crime victims is at least in part conditional on having the "right" politics.

The post Daniel Perry's Pardon Makes a Mockery of Self-Defense appeared first on Reason.com.

There's yet another attempt to revive California's shuttered redevelopment agencies—those crony-capitalist abominations that abused eminent domain, ran up debt without a public vote, and distorted development decisions at the local level. This year's redevelopment effort is renamed the Reconnecting Communities Redevelopment Act, but a cute new name doesn't hide redevelopment's sordid history.

It's oddly delusional even by Capitol standards to revive these tax-draining agencies when the state lacks sufficient revenues to meet its current spending. Last year, Assemblymember David Alvarez (D–Chula Vista) proposed recreating the agencies largely as they existed before Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature eliminated them in 2011 to help plug a gaping budget hole. It died in committee, the victim of a budget deficit estimated at around $32 billion.

Alvarez is back this year with Assembly Bill 2945 even though the current deficit is estimated at around $45 billion or higher. The state dissolved the agencies 12 years ago. Since then, lawmakers have passed measures that bring back modest portions of redevelopment—such as Infrastructure Finance Districts that use tax-increment financing to pay for limited infrastructure-related developments.

However, broader redevelopment revivals have failed—and likely will do so again. AB 2945 passed through committee but is headed toward rocky terrain. In 2019, former Gov. Brown threw shade on that year's revival effort: "A lot of people wanted to see it go, and it did free up almost $2 billion a year for schools. And if people want to bring it back they're going to take billions from the schools, and I would assume those people who care about the California public schools will fight that very hard."

Brown was spot on. As much as I'd like to think that free market arguments against redevelopment swayed lawmakers, the real bill killer came from the powerful California Teachers Association. The teachers' union clearly wouldn't ignore efforts to tap their funding sources. Sure the state backfilled those lost education dollars, but California doesn't have the spare cash to do that in the face of its remarkably large deficit.

As a refresher, California created redevelopment agencies in the 1940s to help rebuild inner-city slums. The basic redevelopment financial structure allows city governments to float bonds to pay for infrastructure related to urban-renewal projects. Cities gained the resulting increase in property taxes—called the tax increment—under the thinking that the projects spur gains in property values. That money then paid off the bonds.

By declaring an area blighted, agencies could unilaterally divert property tax revenues from traditional public services toward these privately built projects. Cities could declare virtually anything blighted (too little urbanization or too much of it, buildings with chipping paint, excessive vacant lots, insufficient tax revenue in the area, etc.) and then seek out developers to build new shopping centers or venues, or whatever is preferred in City Hall.

Traditional urban renewal projects caused their share of widely known problems, namely the obliteration of neighborhoods to make way for the above-mentioned developments. I strongly support Proposition 13, which keeps Californians from being taxed out of their homes. But after it limited tax revenues, localities came up with creative means to bolster their tax base. They learned that redevelopment could subsidize auto malls, shopping centers, and hotels that brought in additional sales taxes, so it quickly became a tax-grabbing scheme rather than an urban renewal tool.

Most noxiously, redevelopment law gave cities the power to invoke eminent domain—a property-taking power they used and abused early and often. They bulldozed neighborhoods, drove small businesses off of their land, and bullied people who lacked the resources to fight back. Often, the envisioned projects never materialized, leaving cities with vacant lots. There were some arguably successful projects, but the process worked as one would expect when the government gains unchecked power to take and redistribute property.

Redevelopment advocates claim that California needs to restore these agencies because of the housing crisis. They had set aside 20 percent of their tax increment toward affordable housing, but the state has since stepped up funding of such housing. It's a topic for another day, but because of the various union and environmental rules that come with subsidies, these projects cost far more than market-rate alternatives and haven't made a dent in the state's housing shortfalls. So adding more such spending isn't the answer.

And redevelopment exacerbated the housing crisis by teaching cities to view land-use decisions through a fiscal lens. With redevelopment, cities preferred commercial projects that brought in their sought-after sales-tax bonanza over housing developments. The best way to boost housing supply is to reduce regulations and fees—not give cities an incentive to choose big-box stores over new neighborhoods.

I know it's hard to let go of a shuttered government program, but it's time for lawmakers to move on. There's no conceivable reason to recreate these disastrous agencies.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

The post California Lawmakers Might Resurrect Failed 'Urban Renewal' Program appeared first on Reason.com.

When arguing about whether the Treasury needed to take urgent action to deal with soaring federal debt in the 1980s, the late former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Herb Stein coined Stein's Law. It was simple and obvious: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

I hate to pick nits with such an esteemed economist, but I'll offer Greenhut's Corollary: "Never underestimate politicians' ability to kick the can down the road." In 1986, federal debt was $2.1 trillion. In 2024, the debt is $34 trillion. Debt spending of this magnitude cannot go on forever, but it can fester for a long time and cause economic damage in the process. But, yes, it probably will stop eventually.

I thought of Stein's oft-cited quip when pondering California's pension crisis. A recent CalMatters report reminds us the state never has gotten its pension debt under control and that Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature keep making the problem worse: "More generous-than-expected raises for California state workers are nudging up the cost of public employee pensions."

Back to my corollary: The report adds that Newsom "sidesteps the growing cost of CalPERS pensions" by using an accounting gimmick. The California Public Employees' Retirement System is only 72 percent funded, which means it only has 72 cents on the dollar to pay for the promised pensions—and they are one of the state's senior obligations. If the state budget ever collapses, government retirees are at the top of the list to get paid.

Per CalMatters, the Legislative Analyst's Office questions whether Newsom's shifting of funds from paying down CalPERS debt toward funding next year's pension costs runs afoul of Proposition 2, the 2014 ballot measure requiring the state to pay down certain debts. But let's not get too deeply into the weeds. The point: Even as the state's pension debt continues to spiral, Newsom and the Legislature won't tackle the problem head on.

Peruse the state legislative website and you'll find lawmakers fixated on every miniscule concern—concert ticket monopolies, landlord pet policies, healthcare wages, social-media age-verification policies—but nothing dealing with pension costs. The reason is obvious. The state's public employee unions rule the roost in the state Capitol and lawmakers better not touch their pensions.

Most normal people find pension reform to be mind-numbing. I'm not particularly normal, having written a

While most Californians will depend on Social Security and meager savings for their Golden Years, the state's public employees will retire at ages 50-57 with 60 to 90 percent of their final years' inflated pay. If you think that we're "all in it together," then peruse the total compensation numbers on Transparent California. You'll find the average local firefighter earns well over $200,000 a year and pages of police sergeants with packages in the 400s and above.

This comes at a cost: fewer public employees providing services, higher taxpayer-funded debt, and higher taxes. Note the large number of local tax measures on every ballot. Officials sell them as ways to improve public safety, upgrade parks, provide affordable housing, and fix the roads. But money is fungible. The growth in pension costs is fueling these tax grabs. These costs are "crowding out" spending on public services.

A dozen years ago, pension reformers predicted, a la Stein, that this could not go on forever. Some believed the state's then $30-billion-plus deficit would lead to fundamental budgetary changes. Local governments and voters—even in liberal jurisdictions such as San Jose—passed pension-reform measures that reduced pension formulas (or limited pensionable pay) in the face of budget cutbacks. But they ultimately lost every battle.

The courts rebuked San Jose's measure based on the California Rule, which refers to a series of court interpretations claiming that governments can't reduce pensions even going forward unless they provide something of equal or greater value in return. The California Supreme Court sidestepped that issue when it had a chance to change the rule. A union-friendly state agency derailed San Diego's effort at reform.

In the end, Gov. Jerry Brown passed a useful but exceedingly modest pension reform law and spearheaded large tax increases to fix the budget deficit he faced. The pension reform movement lost steam. As usual, the unions flexed their muscle in the Capitol, in the courts, and in the state's administrative agencies. Reformers tried and failed—and since then talk about serious reform has been verboten in Sacramento.

Can this go on forever? Probably not. The pension problem isn't going away, but neither is the power of the unions or the desire of the state's leaders to delay the reckoning for another day.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

The post California's Leaders Still Ignoring State Pension Debt appeared first on Reason.com.

American federalism is struggling. Federal rules are an overwhelming presence in every state government, and some states, due to their size or other leverage, can impose their own policies on much or all of the country. The problem has been made clearer by an under-the-radar plan to phase out diesel locomotives in California. If the federal government provides the state with a helping hand, it would bring nationwide repercussions for a vital, overlooked industry.

Various industry and advocacy groups are lining up against California's costly measure, calling on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to deny a waiver needed to fully implement it. In the past month, more than 30 leading conservative organizations and individuals, hundreds of state and local chambers of commerce, and the U.S. agricultural sector have pleaded with the EPA to help stop this piece of extremism from escaping one coastal state.

Railroads may not be something most Americans, whose attention is on their own cars and roads, think about often. But rail is the most basic infrastructure of interstate commerce, accounting for around 40 percent of long-distance ton-miles. It's also fairly clean, accounting for less than 1 percent of total U.S. emissions. Private companies, like Union Pacific in the West or CSX in the East, pay for their infrastructure and equipment. These facts haven't stopped the regulatory power grab.

Most importantly, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulation would have all freight trains operate in zero-emission configuration by 2035. At the end of the decade, the state is mandating the retirement of diesel locomotives 23 years or older, despite typically useful lives of over 40 years. Starting in 2030, new passenger locomotives must operate with zero emissions, with new engines for long-haul freight trains following by 2035. It limits locomotive idling and increases reporting requirements.

Given the interstate nature of railway operations, California needs the EPA to grant a waiver. If the agency agrees, the policy will inevitably affect the entire continental United States.

The kicker is that no technology exists today to enable railroads to comply with California's diktat, rendering the whole exercise fanciful at best.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial board explained last November that while Wabtec Corp. has introduced a pioneering advance in rail technology with the launch of the world's first battery-powered locomotive, the dream of a freight train fully powered by batteries remains elusive. The challenges of substituting diesel with batteries—primarily due to batteries' substantial weight and volume—make it an impractical solution for long-haul trains. Additionally, the risk of battery overheating and potential explosions, which can emit harmful gases, is a significant safety concern. As the editorial noted, "Even if the technology for zero-emission locomotives eventually arrives, railroads will have to test them over many years to guarantee their safety."

The cost-benefit analysis is woefully unfavorable to the forced displacement of diesel locomotives. To "help" the transition, beginning in 2026, CARB will force all railroads operating in California to deposit dollars into an escrow account managed by the state and frozen for the explicit pursuit of the green agenda. For large railroads, this figure will be a staggering $1.6 billion per year, whereas some smaller railroads will pay up to $5 million.

Many of these smaller companies have signaled that they will simply go out of business. For the large railroads, the requirement will lock up about 20 percent of annual spending, money typically used for maintenance and safety improvements.

Transportation is the largest source of U.S. emissions, yet railroads' contribution amounts to not much more than a rounding error. The industry cites its efficiency improvements over time, allowing railroads today to move a ton of freight more than 500 miles on a single gallon of diesel. Its expensive machines, which last between 30 to 50 years and are retrofitted throughout their life cycles, are about 75 percent more efficient than long-haul trucks that carry a comparative amount of freight.

As Patricia Patnode of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which signed the aforementioned letter to the EPA, recently remarked, "Rather than abolish diesel trains, CARB should stand in awe of these marvels of energy-efficient transportation."

President Joe Biden talks a lot about trains, but his actions since taking office have consistently punished the private companies we should value far more than state-supported Amtrak. In this case, EPA Administrator Michael Regan and the White House need not think too hard. They should wait for reality to catch up before imposing on the rest of us one state's demands and ambitions.

COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM

The post How California's Ban on Diesel Locomotives Could Have Major National Repercussions appeared first on Reason.com.

Dennis Powanda and Vincent Yakaitis are bound together by a common experience: They were both criminally charged in connection with an attempted burglary. Powanda was the burglar, and Yakaitis was the property owner.

Ah, justice.

Indeed, that's not a misprint, parody, or a bad joke (although I wish it were the latter). Powanda was arrested and charged with criminal trespass and burglary, along with other related offenses, for executing the botched raid a little before 2:00 a.m. in February 2023 at Yakaitis' property in Port Carbon, Pennsylvania. The government charged Yakaitis, who is in his mid-70s, with using a firearm without a license after he shot Powanda, despite that it appears prosecutors agree Yakaitis justifiably used that same firearm in self-defense.

Whatever your vantage point—whether you care about criminal justice reform and a fair legal system, or gun rights, or all of the above—it is difficult to make sense of arresting and potentially imprisoning someone over what essentially amounts to a paperwork violation. That injustice is even more glaring when considering that Powanda, 40, allegedly charged at Yakaitis, who happens to be about three and a half decades older than Powanda.

Pennsylvania's permitting regime does carve out a couple of exceptions, one of which would seem to highly favor Yakaitis. Someone does not need a license to carry, according to the law, "in his place of abode or fixed place of business." Yakaitis owned the home Powanda attempted to burglarize. The catch: He didn't live there—it reportedly had no tenants at the time of the crime—opening a window for law enforcement to charge him essentially on a technicality.

If convicted, Yakaitis faces up to five years in prison and a $25,000 fine. Quite the price to pay for protecting your life on your own property. The misdemeanor charge also implies that Yakaitis has no history of using his weapon inappropriately, or any criminal record at all, as Pennsylvania law classifies his particular crime—carrying a firearm without a license—as a felony if the defendant has prior criminal convictions and would be disqualified from obtaining such a license. In other words, we can deduce that Yakaitis was a law-abiding citizen and eligible for a permit, which means he is staring down five years in a cell for not turning in a form and paying a fee to local law enforcement. OK.

Yakaitis is not the first such case. In June, law enforcement in New York charged Charles Foehner with so many gun possession crimes that if convicted on all of them he would face life in prison. Police came to be aware of his unlicensed firearms when Foehner defended himself against an attempted mugger—the surveillance footage is here—after which they searched Foehner's home and found that only some of his weapons were licensed with the state.

Prosecutors classified it as a justified shooting. And then they hit Foehner with an avalanche of criminal charges that would have resulted in a longer prison sentence than his assailant would have received, had he survived.

There's also LaShawn Craig, another New York City man whose case I covered in December. He, too, shot someone in self-defense and he, too, was arrested for doing so without a license. Like Foehner, he was charged with criminal possession of a weapon, a violent felony in New York. For a paperwork violation.

New York is a particularly relevant case study on the subject, as its highly restrictive concealed carry framework was the subject of a landmark Supreme Court case—New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen—which the majority disemboweled. It wasn't just conservative gun rights advocates who wanted that ruling, although you'd be forgiven for thinking so based on how polarized this debate tends to be. That Supreme Court decision also attracted support from progressive public defenders with The Black Attorneys of Legal Aid, The Bronx Defenders, and Brooklyn Defender Services. As I wrote in June about the amicus brief they submitted to the Court:

[The public defenders] offered several case studies centered around people whose lives were similarly upended. Among them were Benjamin Prosser and Sam Little, who had both been victims of violent crimes and who are now considered "violent felons" in the eyes of the state simply for carrying a firearm without the mandated government approval. Little, a single father who had previously been slashed in the face, was separated from his family while he served his sentence at the Vernon C. Bain Center, a notorious jail that floats on the East River. The conviction destroyed his nascent career, with the Department of Education rescinding its offer of employment.

In many jurisdictions, including New York, it can be expensive and time-consuming to get the required license, which in turn makes the Second Amendment available only to people of a certain class.

So where do we go from here? Those skeptical of rolling back concealed carry restrictions may take comfort in the fact that this doesn't have to be black and white. Governments, for example, can "give eligible persons a 30-day grace period to seek and obtain a permit after being charged, then automatically drop charges and expunge record once obtained," offers Amy Swearer, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, or "remove the criminal penalty entirely" and perhaps "make it a fineable infraction," like driving without a license.

Whatever the case, it should be—it is—possible to balance public safety with the right to bear arms, and, as an extension, the right to self-defense. To argue otherwise is to embolden a legal system that incentivizes elderly men like Yakaitis to sit down and take it when someone threatens their life.

The post This Elderly Man Was Arrested After Shooting a Burglar in Self-Defense—for Carrying the Gun Without a License appeared first on Reason.com.

What do the state's insurance and housing crises have in common? Obviously, homeowner policies have an impact on housing costs, but I'm referring to something different, namely the concept of open-ended risk. Insurers are exiting the market because state policies limit their ability to price policies to reflect the risk of a major wildfire season. They rather pull out of California than risk the destruction of their assets.

I'd argue the same thing is happening in the rental market, thanks to a fusillade of pro-tenant laws that subject landlords to an incalculable level of risk. Landlords have freely entered the business and understand the various ups and downs. They can calculate the costs of mortgages, taxes, insurance, and maintenance. They expect to, say, replace carpets and paint between tenants. They know the cost of the eviction process in those instances where it's necessary.

But the Legislature's anti-property-rights crusade—done in the name of protecting tenants in a tight housing market—has not only increased those easily calculated costs, but also the costs that are potentially devastating. It's one thing to realize it might require x-number of legal fees to remove a bad tenant and quite another to wrap one's head around the possibility of someone staying in a rent-controlled unit forever.

And it's impossible to calculate the emotional drain of, say, fighting with highly sophisticated squatters who have illegally moved into your temporarily vacant home, exerted some right—and are going to strip the place to its studs while you scurry for a legal remedy. I know plenty of would-be landlords who wouldn't dream of renting out their home for those reasons. Most mom-and-pop landlords I know are discussing an exit strategy.

That's reducing needed rental inventory. Why does San Francisco, which has some of the strictest tenant laws in the country, have 52,000-plus vacant rental units? Some of the explanations are ordinary (units are in process of renovation or are on the market), but a major one often is overlooked—especially by city politicians who recently passed an Empty Homes Tax that essentially blames property owners for the situation.

Many owners are afraid if they let strangers rent their units they'll never be able to reclaim them. They rather forego $3,300 a month in rent than take that potentially devastating risk. That's because the risk is not calculable. Investors can navigate their way around costs they understand (extra property taxes, higher insurance rates) but will exit if the risks are too high.

We've seen the news stories. Someone moves into a short-term rental then refuses to leave. In Oakland, a group of organized homeless women commandeered a vacant house. In Los Angeles, alleged squatters turned an empty mansion into a party house. If housing is a "human right," then owners no longer have a right to their property.

The number of incidents has soared, so much so that one entrepreneur has started a business helping landlords retake their own properties. In a sane society, no one should have to worry about this. Other states have passed (or are considering) laws to expedite the removal of these home invaders, but California requires an overly drawn-out process, leaving owners at the mercy of progressive judges.

Does that situation make you more or less likely to invest in rental properties? What's your tolerance for risk? Same questions regarding Assembly Bill 2216 by Matt Haney (D–San Francisco) that's moving through the Legislature. It requires landlords to accept pets and forbids them from charging extra rent or security deposits. Landlords can expect obvious costs (carpet cleaning, various repair costs), but they can't calculate the less-obvious ones.

The landlords would not be allowed to ask tenants if they plan to have a household pet until after they've accepted the application. They would be allowed to impose "reasonable conditions" on the pets, but "reasonable" is ill defined. For instance, the bill refers to "common household pets" but is not limited to cats and dogs. Apparently, that means a tenant could have large aquariums with heat lamps that can cause incredible damage. There's no limit (beyond local ordinances) on the number of pets. It keeps owners from dealing with tenant pet disputes.

Sure, the Assembly analysis explains that a "reasonable condition" includes the right to limit potentially dangerous pets, but it does not allow a prohibition based on breeds, such as Pit Bulls and Rottweilers. Yet insurers typically use a list of potentially vicious breeds that they forbid owners from allowing. If a landlord allows such a breed and it mauls a neighbor, the landlord won't be covered. If this bill becomes law, lawmakers will force landlords to accept an unlimited amount of risk.

I love pets, but don't be surprised when landlords exit the business and invest their money into, say, a mutual fund that doesn't bite toddlers or call them about unplugging a clogged toilet.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

The post California Is Trying To Drive Landlords Out of Business appeared first on Reason.com.

California state Sen. Anthony Portantino, (D–Burbank) has introduced a bill that would require gun owners to annually register their firearms with the state. The registration information would be available to law enforcement agencies. "SB 1160 will give the state better data and help us understand how many firearms are in private hands and who owns them," said Portantino.

The post Brickbat: You Can Tell Us appeared first on Reason.com.

Republican lawmakers in Arizona are advancing a collection of bills targeting illegal immigrants and their activities in the state. One in particular, House Concurrent Resolution (HRC) 2060, has the potential to disrupt all manner of peaceful economic interactions.

Arizona law requires that all employers use the federal E-Verify program to ensure that hired employees are eligible to work in the United States. HCR 2060 would add to existing requirements by mandating that employers use E-Verify to check the legal status of subcontractors and independent contractors. Noncompliant employers could face felony charges and fines of $10,000 per undocumented employee.

HCR 2060 has already passed the Arizona House. If it passes the Senate, it will appear on the ballot in November. And though its sponsor, House Speaker Ben Toma (R–Glendale), says the proposal would keep "Arizona from becoming like California" and stop illegal immigrants from "tak[ing] advantage of Americans," plenty of Arizonans are concerned about its economic consequences.

That includes over 100 Arizona business, faith, and community representatives, who charged in an open letter to state politicians that the "anti-immigrant proposals" being considered by the Legislature "will cause unnecessary disruption to the workforce." Given that "Arizona currently only has 71 available workers for every 100 open jobs," the letter calls for elected officials "to support legal work permits for long-term immigrant contributors" rather than participating in "political gamesmanship."

For all the support E-Verify receives from state and national politicians, the employment verification system has many downsides. It's costly (especially for small businesses), it negatively affects lower-skilled native-born workers, and it's easily gamed. Rather than just impacting undocumented immigrants who want to work, it punishes employers for consensual hiring practices and forces native-born workers to get yet another permission slip to do their jobs and live their lives.

"Nationwide, the surge of E-Verify queries has not coincided with any significant reduction in the number of illegal workers," wrote David J. Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, in 2019. "From 2007 to 2016, the number of illegal workers hovered around 8 million, even as the number of E-Verify queries increased tenfold….The only independent audit of the E-Verify system in 2012 concluded that half of all illegal workers run through the system evaded detection, primarily by borrowing the identification of legal workers."

"The E-Verify program has made significant improvements over the years," says Sam Peak, senior policy analyst at Americans for Prosperity, a libertarian advocacy group. "Despite this, making it mandatory for more people likely exposes them to many uncertainties that could disrupt the hiring process."

HCR 2060's vague language might also leave the door open for Arizonans to face legal consequences, perhaps unknowingly, if the businesses they patronize don't comply with E-Verify mandates. According to the resolution text, any person who "commits obstruction of the legal duty to use E-Verify," including acts "in association with any person who has the intent to obstruct, impair or hinder any person from using the E-Verify program as required by law," is "guilty of a class 6 felony."

What exactly the phrase in association with means is not clear. "What happens if a household unknowingly hires a roofing company that does not use E-Verify?" asks Peak.*

Mandating E-Verify for more Arizona workers will inevitably lead to headaches and increased compliance costs for employers and consumers. Voters would do well to remember those consequences if HCR 2060 appears on the ballot in November.

*CORRECTION: This quote has been updated to correct a mistyped word in the source's comment.

The post Arizona Is Weighing Nonsensical New E-Verify Measures appeared first on Reason.com.

For the price of $77 to $224, Pennsylvania residents can get a personalized license plate that "contain[s] a combination of up to seven letters and/or numbers," per the state's Department of Transportation (PennDOT). 

That is unless your application for a vanity plate is among the 2,872 rejected over the years.

The department keeps a "Do Not Issue" list, effectively banning thousands of "unacceptable configurations" that they interpret as euphemisms, epithets, or obstructions to law enforcement.

These restrictions are backed by PennDot's loosely defined list of 16 criteria, which the department's staff strictly adheres to, using internet slang dictionaries to check if the acronyms pass.

To be fair, it's not the entire list that raises eyebrows. Restrictions on libel or slander—as well as text that meddles with the license plates' primary purpose "to provide a State-issued, visible, and unique alpha-numeric identification mark for display in a uniform manner"—make sense.

But then you have "words which inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace." What does that include, exactly? It includes what the department staff says it includes. 

Also not allowed are acronyms that suggest sexual innuendo, like BLOWME, or contain profane or obscene intent, like DZZNUTZ. Don't even think about references to excretory functions.

Pennsylvania is far from the only state that has banned acronyms from vanity plates. New York doesn't allow NOTPOLCE or, for whatever reason, AY000000. Tennessee banned ILVTOFU back in 2014 for a vegan application. In 2017, Georgia banned Donald Trump's infamous COVFEFE gaffe. Kentucky said no to KARMA.

The examples don't end there; a list of banned personalized plates is commonplace across the U.S. But the constitutionality of the matter is not necessarily settled.

In 2015, a Texas nonprofit argued that displaying the Confederate flag on the organization's special license plate was their First Amendment right. In a 5-4 vote, the court disagreed. 

"In our view, specialty license plates issued pursuant to Texas's statutory scheme convey government speech," former Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the majority. "Were the Free Speech Clause interpreted otherwise, government would not work."

The dissent argued that most people do not recognize speech on a license plate as government policy. "The Court's decision passes off private speech as government speech," wrote Justice Samuel Alito, "and, in doing so, establishes a precedent that threatens private speech that government finds displeasing." 

The Court's ruling, however, applied to special plates with names and logos, not personalized plates. There is thus no official ruling at a national level as to whether vanity plates are private or government speech. This leaves plenty of room for state officials to interpret the propriety of applications for approval, and even to rescind vanity plates to address complaints.

Without an official distinction, however, there have been many instances of successful lawsuits to reverse rejections, from striking down Kentucky's rejection of IM GOD to stopping California's crackdown against messages "offensive to good taste and decency."

Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law, wrote that lower courts, upon petition, have typically recognized the design of the plate as government speech, but not the text itself. But until there's an official distinction by the Supreme Court, rejected applicants who are upset can try suing. Otherwise, the next-best option is taking it up to the department.

And though PennDOT is willing to discuss rejections with applicants, they have a disclaimer: "PennDOT reserves the right to limit or reject certain requests."

The post Your Local DMV May Have No Sense of Humor appeared first on Reason.com.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing back against claims that he sought to include a special exemption in a new minimum wage law to help a longtime friend and donor—but the governor's objections only underline how the entire law was a giveaway to his political allies.

Starting next month, fast-food chains operating in California will have to pay workers at least $20 per hour, even though the minimum wage for other jobs in the state will remain at $16 per hour. Newsom signed the bill to create that higher wage mandate, but the law includes a special carve-out seemingly tailored to exempt Panera Bread (and other chains that sell bread as a standalone menu item). Newsom had pushed for that exemption, Bloomberg reported earlier this week, as a favor to Greg Flynn, owner and CEO of the Flynn Restaurant Group, which operates 24 Panera locations in the Golden State.

After the story took off in the media, a spokesman for the governor's office claimed the allegation of favoritism was false. Newsom "never met with Flynn about this bill and this story is absurd," wrote Alex Stack in a statement to Reason and other media outlets that covered the story. "Our legal team has reviewed and it appears Panera is not exempt from the law."

The first claim might be true in only the narrowest sense. The Associated Press has confirmed that Flynn met with the governor's staff regarding the minimum wage bill and that he suggested exempting "restaurants like bakeries, bagel shops and delis" from the higher minimum wage law. Flynn denied speaking to Newsom directly, but it certainly appears that he attempted to exercise some influence over the lawmaking process.

Meanwhile, the governor's office's claim that the exemption doesn't apply to Panera only raises other questions—like, why is that exemption there at all?

That's a question that reporters in Sacramento have seemingly been trying to answer for months. Asked directly about the bakery exemption at a press conference last year, Newsom said it was "part of the sausage making" of the legislative process. In the wake of the Bloomberg story, Newsom's office has not offered a better explanation for the carve-out. Until that changes, the questions will persist.

"If [Newsom] is unable to provide a better justification for this carve-out, it raises serious questions about the integrity of his administration," a group of Republican lawmakers wrote in a letter requesting that state Attorney General Rob Bonta investigate the matter.

Newsom's explanations about the carve-out seem to be "falling apart in real time, particularly because Californians are accustomed to watching this administration hand out favors to its friends," Will Swaim, president of the California Policy Center, tells Reason. 

Swaim drew a parallel to the aftermath of the passage of California's Assembly Bill (AB) 5 in 2019, which effectively banned freelancing in many industries. After newspapers complained that the law would make it more difficult for them to use freelance labor, Newsom backed a short-term and then a longer-term exemption for the industry.

Of course, the debate over the narrow bakery exemption to the minimum wage law seems to miss the larger point: the entire law is a bizarre exemption from the state's existing minimum wage statute. Maybe a special interest and personal friend influenced that one section of the new law, but there is no doubt that other special interests—labor unions that give huge campaign contributions—are the reason why the rest of the law singles out fast food restaurants while effectively exempting other employers.

In short: Newsom's claims that special interests didn't influence one part of the bill would be more believable if special interests hadn't obviously influenced the entire bill.

"This was a bad bill to begin with—imposing an unsupportable minimum wage on businesses that operate on razor-thin margins has already raised menu prices and accelerated layoffs in the industry," says Swaim. "Its victims will be small franchisees who don't have Panera's pull and workers who are now facing mass layoffs."

The post Of Course Special Interests Shaped California's New Minimum Wage Law appeared first on Reason.com.

Public schools have a mental health crisis and only thousands of new support staff can save them. That's the narrative being pushed nationwide at a time when enrollment has crashed by nearly 1.3 million students and $190 billion in federal K-12 COVID-19 relief aid is set to expire later this year.

"It would take 77,000 more school counselors, 63,000 more school psychologists and probably tens of thousands of school social workers to reach levels recommended by professional groups before the pandemic hit," reports The Washington Post.

Now legislators in states such as Minnesota, New York, and Virginia are introducing bills aimed at getting schools closer to meeting the 250-to-1 student-to-counselor ratio recommended by the American School Counselor Association (ASCA). "We want our children to live in a state where they know they'll be able to access the mental health services they need," says Minnesota State Rep. Kaela Berg (D–Burnsville). According to ASCA, school counselor duties range from helping students manage emotions to planning for postsecondary options, but they don't help with long-term psychological disorders.

Public schools were slow to open during the pandemic and students' mental health deteriorated as a result. But even before COVID-19, schools were staffed at record levels, and policymakers have good reason to be skeptical of ASCA's guidance.

Between 2002 and 2020, public school staff grew by 13.2 percent nationwide while student enrollment increased by just 6.6%, according to a new report published by Reason Foundation. In many states—including New Hampshire, Illinois, and New York—public schools maintained or increased staffing levels despite large enrollment losses. For example, Connecticut lost 8.2 percent of its students but public school staff shot up by 14.1 percent.

But the bulk of new hires weren't teachers, which saw a 6.6-percent increase nationwide. Instead, non-teachers fueled the growth, increasing by 20 percent. For every five new students, about one non-teacher was added to public school payrolls. While a rise in central-office bureaucrats contributed to this trend, school-level personnel such as guidance counselors (up 19.5 percent), instructional aides (up 30.9 percent), and student support staff such as health and social services personnel (up 113.5 percent) were a significant driver.

One reason is that groups such as ASCA, National Association of School Psychologists (NASP), and National Association of Social Workers (NASW) all recommend staffing ratios that are used to sound alarm bells to state legislators about public school resources. While it's unclear how NASP (500-to-1) and NASW (250-to-1 or 50-to-1 for high-need schools) derived their ratios, ASCA's figure (250-to-1) doesn't hold up to the slightest amount of scrutiny.

According to ASCA, it stems from 1955 when researcher Kenneth B. Hoyt "concluded that school counselors should have no more than 400 pupils in their caseload." They adjusted Hoyt's ratio down to its current level in 1965 "as the role of the school counselor became clarified further."

But this figure was called out by a Harvard graduate student for having no empirical basis at all, despite being cited "in almost every piece that you read about school counselors." It turns out, Hoyt's original number was just a back-of-the-envelope calculation he did in a short column, which walks through some basic assumptions about what counseling might look like. At the end, Hoyt even warned against using his example to set policy:

This article has presented one person's point of view regarding the counseling load of the high school counselor. It is not represented as the answer for any particular school system nor as a generalized answer for any combination of the school system. We would not expect to find total agreement on the part of either experts or non-experts on all of the assumptions involved in the point of view presented here.

Notice that Hoyt's article was aimed at high school counselors specifically. This is important because ASCA's ratio lumps together school counselors at all levels (elementary, middle school, and high school). The national average reported by ASCA (385-to-1) exceeds its recommendation, but only because it's inflated by schools serving lower grade levels. When high schools are isolated, the national average falls to an estimated 232-to-1 ratio—well below ASCA's recommendation.

The real problem isn't that there aren't enough school counselors, but that many states already have laws on the books advancing ASCA's flawed recommendation. Then there's the question of mission creep and whether public schools should be delivering mental health services at all. Regardless, public schools have more staff than ever and with enrollment projected to continue declining for years to come, the last thing they need is 77,000 more counselors. Using a baseless metric to further this aim only undermines ASCA's credibility and those pushing their narrative.

The post Do U.S. Public Schools Really Need 77,000 More Counselors? appeared first on Reason.com.

During the height of the pandemic summer of 2020, the proprietors of the Burning Bridge Tavern worked with local officials in Wrightsville, Pennsylvania, to host a series of outdoor gatherings for the community.

For their trouble, the bar's owners got slapped with a series of citations by the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB), the government agency that oversees and manages the sale of alcohol in the state. The citations were ticky-tack offenses, according to Burning Bridge's chief financial officer, Mike Butler. Twice, the bar was cited for noise violations because they'd allowed a band playing at the gathering to plug into the tavern's electricity supply. Another offense occurred when the owners and some family members were drinking inside the tavern, which was closed to the public, during a period when indoor dining was prohibited.

A frustrating situation, but not the end of the world. Burning Bridge's owners paid the fines associated with the citations and assumed that was that. But then the bar had to renew its liquor license.

"They denied it. They said, 'Oh, you're the guys that got all those citations,'" Butler says. "It was a real gut punch."

Turns out, over the past two years the PLCB has pushed dozens of Pennsylvania establishments that racked up pandemic-​related citations to sign "conditional licensing agreements" to renew their liquor permits. In some cases, those agreements have forced the sale of licenses—but in most cases, as with Burning Bridge, they've added additional conditions to the license that could prevent a future renewal from being approved.

While the PLCB cannot revoke existing licenses, the board is empowered to object to the renewal of a license or to demand the license can only be renewed conditionally. "In extreme cases," PLCB Press Secretary Shawn Kelly says, the PLCB can force the sale of a liquor license, though the board only pursues that option when "there is an operational and citation history that calls for such an agreement."

Even though Burning Bridge's owners weren't forced to sell their license, Butler says signing the conditional licensing agreement has come with real costs: The bar's insurance premium tripled as a result of being viewed as a greater risk.

Typically, those agreements have been used to curb nuisance bars or force establishments with a history of legal problems, like serving underage patrons, to clean up their acts. Recently, however, the PLCB has taken a hardline stance against establishments that violated pandemic-era rules.

"The people who violated the governor's mandates and orders should face some consequences," argued Mary Isenhour, one of the PLCB's three board members, at a January 2022 meeting where the first several of the COVID-related conditional licensing agreements were approved.

Isenhour was responding to an objection raised by a fellow board member, Michael Negra, who argued that the PLCB should take the view that businesses had "paid their dues" during the pandemic and should not face additional sanction now. Negra left the PLCB in June 2022 and now works for a ​Pittsburgh-based lobbying firm. He did not return requests for comment.

After Negra's departure, the PLCB has unanimously approved dozens of conditional licensing agreements for COVID-​related violations, including at least 10 that have required the sale of a license, based on a review of PLCB meeting minutes.

Kelly, the PLCB spokesman, maintains that licensees are "under no obligation" to sign conditional licensing agreements.

But any licensee that refuses would face a set of unattractive alternatives: not having the license renewed, or being drawn into a legal battle against the PLCB in state court.

"Do you risk your entire business, your license, the loans, all of that to fight" in a real court, asks Butler. "Or do you just kind of hold your nose and take your medicine? Tactically, for us, we weren't in a position to say, 'Yeah, we'll run that risk.'"

Chuck Moran, executive director of the Pennsylvania Licensed Beverage and Tavern Association, acknowledges that pandemic-era public health orders left many establishments with a difficult choice between following the law and surviving financially. Fairly or unfairly, "those who broke the rules went the wrong way and now they're paying the price," he says.

The whole matter raises some complicated questions about how our political institutions ought to handle, with the benefit of hindsight, the unprecedented circumstances created by the pandemic and policy makers' response to it.

"The feeling was that our government really isn't working to try and help us," says Butler. "At this point, it feels like they're coming after us."

The post Liquor Regulators Are Seeking Revenge on Bars That Broke Pandemic Rules appeared first on Reason.com.

Frozen embryos are "children" under Alabama law, the state's Supreme Court says. Its decision could have major implications for the future of fertility treatments in the state.

Frozen embryos are "unborn children" and "unborn children are 'children,'" Justice Jay Mitchell wrote in the court's main opinion. Only two of nine justices dissented from the holding that an 1872 wrongful death statute applies to the destruction of frozen embryos.

The ruling seems to represent a turn toward judicial activism among members of Alabama's Supreme Court, which for a long time held that the law's text could not justify reading it to include "unborn children"—let alone frozen embryos.

It also portends a creeping Christian conservatism into court decisions, with Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker citing the Bible in his legal reasoning. In a concurring opinion, Parker justifies prohibitions on murder not by invoking classical liberal principles, like natural rights, but rather on the basis of "Man's creation in God's image" and the "you shall not murder" edict of the Sixth Commandment. "Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself," Parker writes.

Embryos Destroyed 

The decision stems from suits brought by former patients of the Center for Reproductive Medicine in Mobile, Alabama. These patients—couples James and Emily LePage, William and Caroline Fonde, and Felicia Burdick-Aysenne and Scott Aysenne—had used in vitro fertilization (IVF) to successfully have several children and still had some embryos stored in the Center's "cryogenic nursery." In December 2020, a patient at the Mobile Infirmary Medical Center (which the Center was a part of) entered the cryogenic nursery unauthorized and proceeded to remove and then drop some of their frozen embryos, destroying them.

The couples sued the fertility clinic and the hospital, citing Alabama's Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. This 1872 law lets parents sue for monetary damages "when the death of a minor child is caused by the wrongful act, omission, or negligence of any person."

The LePages and the Fondes brought a joint lawsuit, and a separate suit was filed by the Aysennes. Both suits alleged negligence and the Aysenne suit also alleged wantonness and breach-of-contract.

A trial court granted the Center's motion to dismiss all but the breach-of-contract claim. "The cryopreserved, in vitro embryos involved in this case do not fit within the definition of a 'person'" or "'child,'" the lower court held.

The three couples appealed, and their suits were consolidated for Supreme Court purposes.

No Exceptions for "Extrauterine Children" 

In a first-of-its-kind decision, the Alabama Supreme Court decided that frozen embryos are, indeed, children, rejecting the lower court's dismissal of the couples' wrongful death claims.

In the court's main opinion, Justice Jay Mitchell referred to frozen embryos in turn as "embryonic children" and "extrauterine children."

While the state's Wrongful Death of a Minor statute doesn't explicitly include "unborn children"—let alone "extrauterine children"—in its purview, "the ordinary meaning of 'child' includes children who have not yet been born," asserted Mitchell.

Furthermore, Alabama's Supreme Court "has long held that unborn children are 'children' for purposes of Alabama's that law," he wrote. The central question in this case, said Mitchell, is "whether the Act contains an unwritten exception to that rule for extrauterine children—that is, unborn children who are located outside of a biological uterus at the time they are killed."

The couples in this case raised some truly ridiculous arguments for why such an "exception" shouldn't exist. They argued that a finding that the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act doesn't apply to unborn children (including frozen embryos) would mean partial-birth abortions are legal, since the baby would no longer be in utero but would also not be fully born. They also suggested it would OK murdering hypothetical toddlers entirely gestated in artificial wombs, since such children—no matter how old they got—would not technically have been born.

Amazingly, the majority lent credence to these crazy arguments. They are "weighty concerns," wrote Mitchell, albeit ones that needn't be resolved at this time since "neither the text of the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act nor this Court's precedents exclude extrauterine children from the Act's coverage."

Dissent, Dissent, Dissent

Not all of the justices agreed with the majority's logic, and some offered quite scathing rebukes of it.

For instance, Justice Brady E. Mendheim—who concurred with the result of the main opinion but disagreed with some of its reasoning—doesn't think that it's so clear cut that "child" includes frozen embryos. For one thing, the wrongful death statute in question was written a century before IVF was even a scientific possibility. Furthermore, other parts of Alabama law, including the 2019 Human Life Protection Act, explicitly define an unborn child as a human being in utero.

Justice Will Sellers also rejected the idea that this is an easy and obvious call. "Any sequence of linguistic gymnastics, cannot yield the conclusion that embryos developed through in vitro fertilization were intended by the legislature to be included in the definition of 'person,' much less the definition of 'minor child,'" he wrote. Rather, the inclusion of in utero children in certain statutes was there to allow for punishment of violence perpetrated against pregnant women. "To equate an embryo stored in a specialized freezer with a fetus inside of a mother is engaging in an exercise of result-oriented, intellectual sophistry, which I am unwilling to entertain," Sellers added.

Meanwhile, Justice Greg Cook—who dissented in full from the main opinion—rejects the idea that the 1872 law meant to include fetuses and zygotes in its definition of children, even when they are in utero.

The main opinion suggested that the "leading dictionary of that time defined the word 'child' as 'the immediate progeny of parents' and indicated that this term encompassed children in the womb," notes Cook. But if you look at the full entry in the cited dictionary, it indicates the opposite, saying "the term is applied to infants from their birth."

Furthermore, interpreting the Wrongful Death Act to include unborn children is a recent phenomenon. "There is no doubt that the common law [in 1872] did not consider an unborn infant to be a child capable of being killed for the purpose of civil liability or criminal-homicide liability," wrote Cook. "In fact, for 100 years after the passage of the Wrongful Death Act, our caselaw did not allow a claim for the death of an unborn infant, confirming that the common law in 1872 did not recognize that an unborn infant (much less a frozen embryo) was a 'minor child' who could be killed."

Thus, applying the wrongful death act to the loss of frozen embryos runs counter to the philosophy of originalism (the idea, common among libertarians and conservatives, that laws should be interpreted only as they were originally intended) and closer to the progressive idea of a malleable "living Constitution," suggests Cook. And he's not a fan. "It is not our role to expand the reach of a statute and "breathe life" into it by updating or amending it," Cook writes. If the legislature thinks the law needs expanding, it can do so.

Cook and Mendheim both object to characterizing the defense's position as seeking an "exception" for frozen embryos, because to declare it an exception to the state's protection of minor children assumes that embryos are minor children—a point that's far from a given. And they both pan the tacit acceptance of the out-there hypotheticals offered by the patients.

"The main opinion ignores the fact that it is not now—or for the foreseeable future—scientifically possible to develop a child in an artificial womb so that such a scenario could somehow unfold," writes Mendheim. Should that become possible, "the answer to this futuristic hypothetical is simple," writes Cook: "the Legislature can address future technologies and can do so far better than this Court."

Bibles and Broad Reach

Pointing out that no other state has interpreted wrongful death laws this way—and a number have specifically rejected it—Cook suggests that being "the sole outlier" should "cause us to carefully reexamine our conclusions."

He concludes the decision could end IVF in Alabama, since "no rational medical provider would continue to provide services for creating and maintaining frozen embryos knowing that they must continue to maintain such frozen embryos forever or risk the penalty of a Wrongful Death Act claim for punitive damages."

This fear was echoed by the defendants in this case, who told the court a finding that the statute includes frozen embryos could make IVF prohibitively expensive.

Barbara Collura, president and CEO of RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, called the court's decision "terrifying" for people "who need in-vitro fertilization to build their families."

Chief Justice Parker's opinion suggests that their fears are not unfounded.

His opinion is chilling in the way is showcases the theocratic underpinnings on which he sees Alabama governance resting. Pointing to a 2018 amendment declaring it "the public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life," he notes that the term sanctity can be defined as "holiness of life and character," godliness, and "the quality or state of being holy or sacred." He goes on to cite the King James Bible, noting that in Genesis man's creation was described as being "in the image of God." Its on these foundations that the legal treatment of frozen embryos should rest, he suggests.

According to Parker, this would not mean the end of IVF in Alabama. But it could mean changes that would seriously upend the IVF process.

In IVF, the process of preparing the body for ovulation and harvesting eggs can be extremely taxing on women's bodies, as well as time-consuming and expensive. After this, not all of the eggs collected may be successfully fertilized. And when viable embryos are created, it may take multiple tries at transferring one into a woman's body before implantation is successful. For all of these reasons, it makes sense for doctors to collect myriad eggs at one time, fertilize these eggs, and then freeze the viable embryos for later transfer, rather than harvesting eggs and creating a single new embryo for each transfer. (This also helps people who may want to create embryos when they are younger to use when they are somewhat older, or who may face illness that will impede their future fertility.) And to maximize the chances of success, doctors sometimes transfer two or more embryos at once.

Treating embryos as having the full legal rights of children could imperil all of these practices.

In Italy, "cryopreservation of embryos" is banned "except when a bona fide health risk or force majeure prevented the embryos from being transferred immediately after their creation," writes Parker. He also points approvingly to countries with other stringent regulations, such as a rule limiting the number of embryos that can be transferred at a time.

"These regulations adopted by other countries seem much more likely to comport with upholding the sanctity of life," Parker concludes, writing that "certain changes to the IVF industry's current creation and handling of embryos in Alabama will result from this decision."

Even if the ruling doesn't end IVF in Alabama, it could pave the way for changes that make fertility treatments more difficult, time-consuming, expensive, and impractical.

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New tires for automobiles could become more expensive and less safe under legislation proposed by Washington state lawmakers. The proposed bill would give the state Department of Commerce the power to ban the sale of tires it deems bad for the environment. The bill targets heavier and more durable tires, which sponsors say have greater rolling resistance, making them less energy efficient. But critics say the bill would effectively ban cheaper tires and make those that are sold less safe. "The easiest way to reduce rolling resistance is to reduce tread depth which will, in turn, reduce wet traction performance," said Tracey Norberg of the U.S. Tire Manufacturer's Association. "It'll reduce tire life, and it'll increase scrap tire generation."

The post Brickbat: So Tired appeared first on Reason.com.