Reason has been nominated for 17 Southern California Journalism Awards, the Los Angeles Press Club announced Monday. We have nominees in magazine, video, and podcast categories. The winners will be announced on June 28 at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

MAGAZINE

Columnist

Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward for “Hypocrisy on Bodily Autonomy at the DEA,” from the February 2025 issue of Reason; “Why Free Movement Is Essential to a Free Society,” from the August/September 2025 issue of Reason; and “Don’t Fear ‘Frankenfood.’ We’re Already Living in the Lab-Grown Future,” from the October 2025 issue of Reason.

Investigative

Reporter Billy Binion for “Not Guilty but Punished Anyway,” from the May 2025 issue of Reason. This delves into a little-known aspect of the U.S. criminal justice system: Defendants can be sentenced for charges a jury rejected.

Feature, Entertainment (Over 1,000 Words)

Assistant Editor Joe Lancaster for “How the Punisher, a Murderous Anti-Hero, Became the Mascot for Increasingly Militarized Police Forces,” from the December 2025 issue of Reason. This explores how law enforcement figures have adopted Marvel’s Punisher as an aspirational symbol rather than a cautionary one.

PRINT/ONLINE

NATIONAL POLITICS/GOVERNMENT REPORTING

Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey for “Can America Get Out of the Gerontocracy Trap?” from the May 2025 issue of Reason. This examines the harms of America’s gerontocracy and explores a surprising solution.

IMMIGRATION REPORTING, Sociopolitical

Deputy Managing Editor Fiona Harrigan for “An El Paso Christian Charity Is Caught Up in Texas’ Border Fight Against the Feds,” from the February 2025 issue of Reason. This reports on the government’s pursuit of a Christian charity that feeds, shelters, and clothes immigrants.

PRINT

BUSINESS REPORTING

Reporter Eric Boehm for “Trump’s War on Chocolate: ‘There’s No Way for Us To Source This Domestically,’” from the November 2025 issue of Reason. This probes how tariffs have been hurting American chocolatiers.

activism journalism

Reporter C.J. Ciaramella for “Texas and Florida Have Become National Models for Using the Police State To Wage Culture War Battles,” from the November 2025 issue of Reason. This explores how some governments are using culture-war battles to fuel a police state that threatens individual freedom.

ONLINE

INVESTIGATIVE, Government Related

Reporter Christian Britschgi for “New Jersey Town Says Small Setbacks, Stray Cats Allow It To Seize Private Property.” This examines allegations that a local government is trying to seize property from business owners by using flimsy accusations of blight.

ART/PHOTOGRAPHY

BEST ISSUE

Art Director Joanna Andreasson for her work on the August/September 2025 issue, which looks at freedom around the globe.

BROADCAST—TV/FILM/RADIO/PODCAST

Humor/satire writing

Producer Andrew Heaton, Senior Producer Austin Bragg, Director of Special Projects Meredith Bragg, and Producer John Carter for “Andor v. Star Trek: How Star Wars gets government right.”

Producer Andrew Heaton, Senior Producer Austin Bragg, Director of Special Projects Meredith Bragg, and Producer John Carter for “Every confirmation hearing ever.”

activism journalism

Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller, Editor John Osterhoudt, and Motion Graphics Artist Lex Villena for “Snowden was right. Now Trump should pardon him.”

solutions journalism

Editor at Large Nick Gillespie, former Producer Justin Zuckerman, Editor Hana Ko, Audio Engineer Ian Keyser, and Motion Graphics Artist Lex Villena for “How Texas beat California on housing.”

TELEVISION/FILM BROADCAST

Investigative

Contributer Aaron Brown for “Are poor geniuses being shut out of science?,” “Does legalizing sex work increase human trafficking?,” and “The global warming rat apocalypse debunked” from Wrong Number, his series that challenges common narratives based on misreadings of data.

HUMAN INTEREST FEATURE (Over 5 Minutes)

Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller, Editor John Osterhoudt, and Motion Graphics Artist Lex Villena for “Why Trump made a deal to free Ross Ulbricht.”

AUDIO JOURNALISM

PERSONALITY PROFILE/INTERVIEW, Entertainment Personalities (Over 10 Minutes)

Editor at Large Nick Gillespie for “Alton Brown: A Culinary Legend Offers Food for Thought.”

PERSONALITY PROFILE/INTERVIEW, Non-Entertainment Personalities (Over 10 Minutes)

Reporter Billy Binion for “Helen Prejean: Why This Nun Is Fighting To End the Death Penalty.”

The post <em>Reason</em> Receives 17 Nominations for Southern California Journalism Awards appeared first on Reason.com.

Secret Service agents reportedly subdued a gunman Saturday at the Washington Hilton hotel, during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

“A man charged a security checkpoint armed with multiple weapons, and he was taken down by some very brave members of Secret Service,” President Donald Trump said while posting security camera footage to social media.

Officials later identified the assailant as Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old California man, and said he was armed with a shotgun, handgun, and knives. Allen reportedly exchanged gunfire with Secret Service, and one agent was hit, though further details are still unknown.

Allen reportedly told law enforcement he was targeting “Trump administration officials,” not Trump himself. But in a digressive manifesto purportedly sent to family members, and published by the New York Post, Allen criticized a number of Trump policies and seemingly deemed the president “a pedophile, rapist, and traitor.”

Some, on both the left and the right, see Allen’s near-miss as a failure that requires more extensive security measures in the future. That’s a mistake, and we should always proceed with caution before subjecting ourselves to more extensive scrutiny.

Trump said the event underscores the need to build a giant ballroom at the White House, in place of the East Wing he recently demolished, where such events could be safely held in the future. “We need the ballroom,” he said in an address later that night. “Today, we need levels of security that probably nobody’s ever seen before.” Many on the right immediately took the same position.

Earlier this month, in response to a civil lawsuit, a federal judge halted construction on the ballroom. On Sunday, Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche posted a letter on X asking the plaintiffs to “voluntarily dismiss” their “frivolous lawsuit today in light of last night’s assassination attempt on President Trump.”

But as Reason‘s Eric Boehm notes, “the White House Correspondents’ Association is a private entity, and the president is a guest at their dinner. Assuming that the dinner would take place at the White House, if it had a ballroom, seems erroneous.”

This doesn’t mean the Washington Hilton is the most secure possible venue. It has, after all, already been the site of a previous presidential assassination attempt. The New York Times noted in 1999 that the Hilton was simply “the only hotel with a banquet room large enough to hold the 2,700 guests.” MS NOW’s Carol Leonnig writes that the hotel “boasts one of the largest ballrooms in the city but is a functioning hotel that is difficult to secure.”

The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday on the “simple security flaws” that allowed a gunman to get near a sitting president who, less than two years ago, survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Allen, Saturday’s assailant, even wondered in a postscript to his manifesto, “what the hell is the Secret Service doing?…I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat. The security at the event is all outside, focused on protestors and current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before.”

Within hours of Saturday’s events, The Daily Beast executive editor Hugh Dougherty published an article about his experience, when he discovered the shooter was booked in the hotel room next to his own.

“It does not take a security expert to unravel the layers of failure that happened at a Washington, D.C. hotel on Saturday night,” Dougherty wrote. “How on earth could someone with a disassembled long gun check into a room at a hotel where the president was going to speak?”

Dougherty complains that security was simply too lax, that when he and a colleague checked into the hotel on separate days, security didn’t check their luggage or usher them through a metal detector.

But these complaints ignore the fact that the Secret Service actually performed its task reasonably well. Unlike the fiasco in Pennsylvania in 2024, when a single shooter with a long gun shimmied up the side of an unsecured building within range of a major presidential candidate, agents at the Hilton successfully prevented Allen from entering the ballroom.

“Guests were able to access the Hilton’s lobby and lower levels without going through security scans, and only passed through magnetometers before they entered the ballroom where the dinner was held,” marveled The Wall Street Journal. But that checkpoint is where Allen, likely aware he couldn’t get through with his weapons, apparently tried to simply sprint past the agents, who successfully subdued him before he reached the event.

“It’s not—and shouldn’t be—the job of the Secret Service to secure the whole building. There was a threat to the president and it was stopped well before it could pose a threat to the president,” Garrett Graff wrote on Substack. “So far as we know right now, this seems like the system basically working as designed amid the always necessary trade-offs of security in a free society.”

Indeed, Dougherty—and, ironically, Allen—would apparently prefer the Secret Service either lock down the entire 1,100-room hotel, or subject every single guest to an invasive search of their luggage and effects, any time the president briefly appears at a private event.

Such an expansion of public security calls back to post-9/11 security theater. Desperate to prevent a repeat of that day’s terror attacks, officials dedicated trillions of dollars to tasks like shoring up airport security, taking over a job previously done by the private sector. Years later, the agents of the federal Transportation Security Agency (TSA) not only do no better than private screeners, but they do considerably worse, failing to catch weapons in 90 percent of tests.

The post The Correspondents' Dinner Shooting Is No Excuse for More Security Theater appeared first on Reason.com.

In late March, European Union (E.U.) officials announced they had taken down a five-country cigarette-smuggling operation and seized over 40 tons of tobacco products. The ambitious network reportedly transshipped the cigarettes far and wide to obscure their sources and destinations, while also hiding them in hidden compartments built into cargo containers. Why would smugglers go through such effort to move perfectly legal products, and why would the authorities care? In Europe, as in the United States, the answer is the same: sky-high taxes.

Smuggled Smokes in Hidden Compartments

In announcing its efforts against the smuggling network operating in Italy, France, Poland, Switzerland, and the U.K., the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, which worked with international law enforcement agencies as well as police in all five countries, noted the smugglers used “maritime and commercial routes designed to evade customs inspections,” passed shipments “through Georgia, Kenya, the Netherlands and Turkey, in order to hide the true origin of the illicit goods,” and that “false bottoms were used as hidden compartments built into containers to conceal the tobacco.”

At the conclusion of the investigation, “enforcement activities were carried out at the Port of Genoa, leading to the seizure of close to 41 tonnes of manufactured cigarettes, with an estimated loss of customs duties, excise duties and VAT exceeding €10 million.”

Absolutely nothing motivates government officials like the extraction of taxes from the public. And lots of tax money is at stake when it comes to cigarettes.

Taxes Make Up Most of the Price of Cigarettes

This month, the Tax Foundation, which has a branch in Brussels, reported that “cigarette smokers in the European Union pay far more in excise taxes than they do for the cigarettes themselves.” Report authors Jacob Macumber-Rosin and Adam Hoffer wrote that excise taxes in the E.U., which are intended to deter smoking as much as to raise revenue, start at the equivalent of $2.11 per pack and that the “total excise duty is at least 60 percent of the national weighted average retail price.” Value-added taxes are tallied after excise duties are levied.

“The highest tax in the EU is levied in Ireland at €10.71 ($12.58) per pack of 20 cigarettes, followed by France at €8.09 ($9.51) and the Netherlands at €7.77 ($9.13),” they added.

Of the countries implicated in the recently busted smuggling ring, Switzerland and the U.K. are not members of the E.U. But taxes make up almost 60 percent of the roughly 9 Swiss francs ($11.52) average price of a pack of cigarettes. According to the U.K. Office of Budget Responsibility, “the rate on cigarettes is 16.5 per cent of the retail price plus £7.07 on a packet of 20” (the British price per pack of cigarettes averages about £16, which is the equivalent of $21.71).

With taxes representing the majority of the price of cigarettes across Europe, there’s ample incentive to smuggle cigarettes from low-tax jurisdictions or illicit manufacturers. Underground entrepreneurs have responded accordingly.

Growing Black Market for Tobacco

“Illicit consumption in the 38 markets grew marginally by 0.2% in 2024 to 52.2bn cigarettes; representing 10.0% of total consumption,” KPMG reported last summer in a study of Europe’s black market for cigarettes. “The marginal growth in illicit consumption has been due to volume growth across a wide number of markets, but especially in France and the Netherlands” partially offset by declines in Greece, the U.K., and war-torn Ukraine.

By purchasing their cigarettes from black market vendors, European smokers escaped paying (and deprived governments of) an estimated €19.4 billion in taxes, or $22.88 billion. Given the stakes, of course smugglers are building secret compartments into cargo containers.

“Higher tax rates incentivize smuggling,” the authors of the recent Tax Foundation report on EU cigarette taxes commented in an earlier look at European tobacco smuggling. “As tax rates increase, consumers and suppliers search for ways around these costs. In cigarette markets, consumers tend to shop across borders where the tax rates are lower, and illicit market entrepreneurs develop black and gray markets to sell illegally to consumers, paying little or no tax at all.”

The extent to which consumers embrace black markets can be expected to depend on a variety of factors. These include the rapaciousness of taxes, of course, but also cultural attitudes towards government extractions and acceptance of measures for thwarting the authorities. In Europe, this has resulted in the largest black market for cigarettes developing in France.

KPMG noted that “France continues to remain the largest market for illicit cigarettes across the 38 markets in the study and saw the largest increase in illicit consumption in 2024 at 2.0bn cigarettes, driven by a 1.5bn cigarette increase in Counterfeit, and a 1bn increase in Illicit Whites [cigarettes legally manufactured in one country and smuggled into higher-tax jurisdictions], partly offset by a 0.5bn decrease in Other [counterfeit and contraband cigarettes].”

The Tax Foundation, it should be noted, puts the black market’s share of France’s cigarette consumption at 38.5 percent, just slightly exceeding the 37 percent share in Ireland.

Cigarette Black Markets Are Even Larger in the U.S.

But there’s plenty of room for growth in Europe’s illicit tobacco economy and loads of incentive with such high taxes. In the United States, smuggled cigarettes make up more than half of the market in both California and New York. That’s despite the fact that, at $2.87 per pack in California and $5.35 per pack in New York (plus another $1.50 in New York City), cigarette taxes in those states are less burdensome than in Europe—though obviously still unacceptably high for consumers. So long as there are lower-tax jurisdictions or underground factories from which to source cigarettes, demand for cheaper smokes will drive supply.

Politicians who simultaneously see high taxes as a means of extracting revenue from the public and as a means for discouraging people from engaging in disapproved behaviors, like tobacco consumption, inevitably trip themselves up. People have limited patience for being mugged and manipulated by the powers that be. When they’ve had enough of being pushed around, they’ll break the law to gain themselves more freedom. That’s the way it has always been and will always be.

European Union officials may boast of busting one cigarette smuggling network, but fed-up members of the public will make sure there are more to take its place.

The post Sky-High European Cigarette Taxes Drive Thriving Black Market appeared first on Reason.com.

Vendors have the right to do business with whoever they please, and to put conditions on the purchase of their goods and services. Buyers have a matching right to choose among vendors, and to enter only deals that serve their purposes. But when government officials go further and use their power to punish private businesses that won’t sell them what they want, they may run afoul of constitutionally protected rights. That’s the case in the battle between AI firm Anthropic and the Trump administration.

A Company With Ethical Boundaries

Anthropic is a leading tech company whose AI model, Claude, reportedly played a role in the capture of former Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. But, like many companies, Anthropic limits the use of its technology for reasons of internal beliefs, public relations, or both. The company’s philosophy is based on the idea that AI is potentially dangerous and should be built around “good personal values, being honest, and avoiding actions that are inappropriately dangerous or harmful.”

In a February 26 press release, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei pointed out that his company “chose to forgo several hundred million dollars in revenue to cut off the use of Claude by firms linked to the Chinese Communist Party” because it didn’t want to enable an authoritarian regime. Likewise, “in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values” when used by any government, including authorities in the United States.

“Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do” Amodei added. “Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now: Mass domestic surveillance” and “fully autonomous weapons.”

As limitations go, refusing to participate in the creation of a totalitarian police state or the production of killer robots seem reasonable lines to draw. But that doesn’t matter, because Anthropic has the right to draw whatever lines it wishes. The U.S. government can then respect those limits or take its shopping needs elsewhere.

But that’s not what the federal government did. Instead, the president and his allies threw public temper tantrums over Anthropic telling them “no.”

Feds Target a Corporate Philosophy for Punishment

“THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS!” President Donald Trump huffed on Truth Social. “Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology.”

“@AnthropicAI and its CEO @DarioAmodei, have chosen duplicity. Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of ‘effective altruism,’ they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission – a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives,” sniffed Secretary of Defense War Pete Hegseth. “In conjunction with the President’s directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic’s technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.”

In their comments, administration officials made it clear they were punishing Anthropic for its corporate beliefs, not because the company poses an actual danger to the country.

“Designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk would be an unprecedented action—one historically reserved for US adversaries, never before publicly applied to an American company,” Anthropic responded prior to filing a lawsuit against the federal government. “We believe this designation would both be legally unsound and set a dangerous precedent for any American company that negotiates with the government.”

Legally unsound and dangerous are good descriptions for a government policy that is openly intended as retaliation against a company for its corporate philosophy.

The First Amendment Is at Stake When Government Punishes Private Ethics

“The claim implicit in the Pentagon’s reported demand is…that when national security is invoked, the state’s judgment supersedes the moral constraints of the supplier. The company may sell — but only on terms that dissolve its own ethical boundaries,” notes Walter Donway for the American Institute for Economic Research’s The Daily Economy.

Importantly, the Anthropic–Pentagon dispute raises the issue of whether the government can punish a company for disagreeing with government officials as to what constitutes ethical behavior.

“Though the media is busy framing this as a national security showdown, it actually poses a constitutional concern,” warns John Coleman for The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). “It is a test of whether the federal government can weaponize its contracting power to force a private company to bend the knee.”

That doesn’t mean the federal government must do business with Anthropic. But it can’t forbid federal contractors to use the company’s products as a punishment.

“The government’s actions, which are designed to harm Anthropic’s business, raise serious constitutional concerns, including threats of compelled speech and retaliation against a company for taking positions disfavored by government officials,” Coleman added.

FIRE filed an amicus brief with the U.S. District Court of Northern California supporting Anthropic’s First Amendment case against the federal government.

It should be noted that Anthropic is not the first company to put conditions on the sale of its products to governments. For years, Barrett Firearms has refused to sell its products to agencies in jurisdictions that don’t allow civilians to own large-bore guns. Home Depot had a longtime policy against doing business with the federal government because it didn’t want the bureaucratic headaches that came with being classified as a federal contractor; it reversed that policy amid public blowback during the Iraq War.

Nobody, the Defense Department included, should be forced to do business with Anthropic. But, nor should the government be allowed to penalize private parties that refuse to do things they consider wrong.

The post The Federal Government's Crusade Against Anthropic Raises First Amendment Concerns appeared first on Reason.com.

Growing national outrage over Minnesota’s welfare fraud is justified, but not because of where it took place or because it implicates members of any immigrant community. It’s much more than a “Minnesota” story.

The outrage is justified because Americans are finally getting a concrete look at what happens when pushing public money out the door matters more than verifying the eligibility of the recipients, confirming services were delivered, or, ultimately, being a good steward of taxpayers’ money.

Since 2022, investigators have uncovered a staggering amount of fraud, including $250 million siphoned from pandemic-era child nutrition programs to a network of individuals and shell companies, and have secured dozens of indictments with more prosecutions underway. But it goes beyond that.

Federal prosecutors now suggest that up to half of the $18 billion spent on 14 Medicaid-funded Minnesota programs since 2018 may have been tied to fraud. The scandal touches programs covering housing assistance, autism therapy, and other welfare services. Even if those estimates are ultimately revised downward, the pattern is unmistakable. Fraud did not merely slip through the cracks. It became routine.

Minnesota is not the exception but rather the example Americans finally noticed. Medicaid fraud has been endemic at the state and federal levels for decades. Politicians haven’t done much, even with scholars and journalists raising the alarm.

Medicaid reports $543 billion in “improper payments” over the past decade, though that figure omits one of the largest sources of error: whether states correctly determined the eligibility of the individuals they enrolled and paid providers on behalf of. According to Paragon Institute calculations, this brings improper payments to $1.1 trillion over those 10 years.

Improper payments are not identical to fraud; many involve missing documentation or administrative errors. But that distinction offers little comfort considering how little money is recovered. They are also an open invitation for more abuse.

Actual fraud, meanwhile, is widespread and persistent. In 2024 alone, state Medicaid Fraud Control Units reported more than 1,151 convictions and more than $1.4 billion in civil and criminal recoveries. Federal enforcement recovers a tiny share of what is stolen. Fraud that goes undetected never appears in the data.

That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Medicare, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and many other welfare programs also suffer from massive fraud. The Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) exchange subsidies provide another cautionary example.

A recent Government Accountability Office report shows that the fraud risks in the ACA’s advanced premium tax credit remain severe a decade after they were first identified. The ability to gain subsidized coverage for fictitious applicants without providing required documentation, tens of thousands of Social Security numbers used for overlapping coverage, and more than $21 billion in subsidies never reconciled with tax filings are among the findings. Nonetheless, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has not updated its fraud risk assessment since 2018 and still lacks a comprehensive anti-fraud strategy.

It’s tempting to treat the Minnesota scandal as a morality play about managerial incompetence. And yes, Gov. Tim Walz deserves some blame. When red flags persist for years across multiple programs, failure of leadership is part of the story. But focusing on a single official or state misses the deeper lesson.

The problem is not administrative capacity; it’s incentives. Spending other people’s money with little personal consequence for failure leads to a collapse of accountability, regardless of who’s in charge. In addition, voters have limited incentives to monitor complex programs. Interest groups, by contrast, have strong incentives to organize around government spending.

None of this requires bad intentions—it’s predictable human behavior flowing from predictable incentives—but it creates an environment for waste and fraud to take root.

What would a serious anti-fraud agenda look like?

First, simplify the structure of the programs that produce improper payments and fraud. Federal matching grants, which Medicaid is largely built around, push states to build systems far larger than they would ever fund themselves, diluting accountability and encouraging growth for its own sake.

Second, do away with automatic enrollment and the “pay now, scrutinize later” style of oversight, which lets temporary errors turn into recurring bills. Any beneficiary’s eligibility must be regularly affirmed. If this can’t be done at scale, the honest response is to scale back on unsustainable promises, not to add more bureaucracy.

Third, ultimately, no oversight regime can police a government so large and complex. Some programs must be split up or entrusted with fewer responsibilities. Those that can’t account for where their dollars go should operate with tighter budgets.

The public is right to be angry. In fact, it should be angrier, and in a more bipartisan way. But we should not demand tougher rhetoric, more task forces, or another round of enforcement layered onto the same broken structure. If we want less fraud, we need less government. Minnesota is not the whole story, but it’s a fraud alert that’s hard to ignore.

COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

The post The Minnesota Fraud Scandal Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg appeared first on Reason.com.

While campaigning, President Donald Trump said, “We’re a nation in decline.”

Now that he’s president, the left agrees.

“We are witnessing the collapse and implosion of the American empire,” says Cornell West.

Are the predictors of doom correct? Will America collapse like so many civilizations before us?

If we don’t learn from history, says historian Johan Norberg, that might happen.

“It’s a clash within every civilization on whether they should keep going, be open to innovation and progress, or whether they should retreat and decline,” he says in my new video.

His book, Peak Human: What We Can Learn from History’s Greatest Civilizations, looks at the “golden ages” of Ancient Athens, Ancient Rome, Song China, the Abbasid Dynasty in Baghdad, Renaissance Italy, the Dutch Republic, and the Anglosphere.

Norberg argues that once people acquire a certain amount of comfort, they say, “‘We want stability, protection, we want someone to take care of us.’…That’s what leads to stagnation.”

People in power are generally comfortable with that.

“They’ve built their power on a particular system of production, certain ideas, a particular mentality….Whereas trade, innovation, growth, it’s all about change….What sets these golden ages apart is that, for a period of time, they managed to lift themselves above that and give more people more freedoms. That also allowed them to experiment more and come up with better technologies and raise living standards.”

Greece once led the world. Rome, too. Not anymore. Why?

Because people want “safety, stability, protection,” says Norberg. “They slow things down, get that stability, but they also get stagnation and poverty.”

China experienced a golden age during the Song Dynasty.

“They had more freedom than other Chinese dynasties….More openness to new ideas from strange places….[Farmers] were allowed to experiment with new grain, new forms of rice from Vietnam, and to trade with others. They came up with constant innovations. It became a very urbanized society that ushered in incredible experiments with iron, steel, textile, machines.”

The government scrapped laws that had limited what could and couldn’t be sold. They allowed markets to stay open all night (something not allowed before).

“In traditional Chinese society, people had fixed areas where they were allowed to live and where they had to return after having done a day’s work. People did not mingle and meet people from other classes, other professions….Under the Song Dynasty, the walls were torn down….They began to mingle with one another….They could do more business, listen to concerts, go to religious ceremonies. Eventually, Chinese society realized that this is how you make progress. This is how we become wealthier. When more people meet, when more people exchange goods and services and ideas, they prosper.”

But after the Mongols invaded, the Chinese banned ocean voyages and foreign trade. They stifled the experimentation that had made them rich.

“They wanted stability after all this uncertainty and chaos. ‘How do we do that?’…By regulating everything, telling people to stay in their places….They got stability. They also got 500 years of stagnation, 500 years that turned the richest and greatest civilization on the planet to a desperately poor country.”

If any country is in a golden age today, I would think it’s America, and Norberg agrees.

“I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in human history. We have made such remarkable progress when it comes to expanding freedoms, reducing poverty, increasing life expectancy.”

But the American experiment is now 250 years old. Few golden ages last that long. Once affluent, people want stability, and a government that resists change.

“That then undermines the innovation that we need to keep golden ages going,” warns Norberg. “If we want a golden age to keep going, we have to fight for it.”

How?

“Double down on the institutions of liberal democracy, free markets, and unleash new waves of innovation and of progress. There is still time. We can still save this golden age.”

COPYRIGHT 2025 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post The Real Reason Golden Ages Collapse—and How the U.S. Can Avoid It appeared first on Reason.com.

The new year will bring a new administration, and I’ll be watching to see if President-elect Donald Trump’s team finally puts an end to the worldwide taxation of individual Americans’ income. Fixing this is imperative. It would not only be sound fiscal policy but could keep millions of law-abiding Americans living overseas from being treated like financial pariahs.

Trump seems to agree. “I support ending the double taxation of overseas Americans,” he promised in a campaign statement. This problem is rooted in America’s bizarre worldwide tax system.

Most people don’t realize it, but if you’re a U.S. citizen, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) wants to know about all the dollars or euros you earn, no matter where in the world you earn them. This isn’t about jet-setters or Americans hiding money in offshore accounts. It’s a tax grab that applies even if you haven’t lived here for decades and pay your fair share in another country. It’s like having the IRS follow you around the globe, demanding an account of every paycheck, bank account, or investment.

Here is how it works: If you live and work exclusively outside of the United States, you must file a U.S. tax return reporting your income, foreign bank accounts containing over $10,000, retirement accounts, investments, and other financial details. You’re responsible for paying U.S. taxes on income above certain thresholds and navigating complex forms and rules to avoid or minimize double taxation.

This is not only unfair but uniquely so. The United States is the only developed nation that taxes based on citizenship rather than residency. We are in terrible company. As the Cato Institute’s Adam Michel writes, “Eritrea’s brutal dictatorship is the only other country to come close, imposing a 2 percent levy on all expatriates.”

Double taxation most commonly sets in when you live in one of the many countries not covered by a tax treaty, or for foreign-earned income not protected by the Section 911 exclusion (which currently exempts up to $126,500) or other provisions that “allow foreign tax credits to offset similar taxes paid to other governments,” Michel explains.

Common financial activities that are tax-advantaged in one’s country of residence (like retirement accounts or home sales) may still trigger U.S. tax liability. Americans living abroad must essentially maintain two parallel tax lives and shoulder a higher burden than either U.S.-based taxpayers or those in their country of residence.

The better alternative is a territorial tax system, based on the principle that income should be taxed where it’s earned. Under such a system, if you are an American living and working in Singapore, the income you earn there is taxed only in Singapore. Territorial taxation is a fundamental concept of sound tax policy that the U.S. citizenship–based system violates. In fact, Trump’s tax reform of 2017 changed the worldwide taxation of corporations to quasi-territorial.

But the worst of it lies in how remarkably difficult banking has become for many Americans overseas. Thanks to the misguided Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), foreign financial institutions often choose to deny services to U.S. citizens living abroad rather than deal with the complex reporting requirements. These individuals can thus encounter enormous difficulty in opening bank accounts, getting mortgages, and participating in local investment and retirement plans.

To recap, Americans abroad must pay taxes in their country of residence, file and potentially pay additional U.S. taxes on the same income, and can’t always expect adequate financial services, all despite typically receiving very few U.S. government services. Some who face these burdens maintain minimal ties to the United States.

The penalties for noncompliance are wildly disproportionate. Simple filing mistakes can result in tens of thousands of dollars in fines, even when no tax was owed. Complexity makes such mistakes easy to commit, even with professional help.

While the administration has tools to limit FATCA enforcement, altogether ending it would require congressional repeal. The best way, of course, would be for Trump and Congress to work together.

As for the underlying problem of worldwide taxation, the U.S. should join the rest of the developed world and adopt a residence-based tax and reporting system. This would address all the aforementioned problems and stop treating solid citizens like criminals—all while maintaining the ability to tax U.S. residents on their worldwide income and combat actual tax evasion.

Such a reform would also save government resources wasted on processing complex returns from Americans abroad who ultimately owe no taxes. It would encourage global mobility for U.S. citizens, including many who are abroad promoting U.S. companies, and make American workers more competitive internationally.

COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM

The post It's Time To End Double Taxation for Americans Living Abroad appeared first on Reason.com.

America’s greatness lies not in perfection but in her relentless pursuit of it. For nearly 250 years, this nation has strived to fully realize the revolutionary ideals laid out in its founding documents. While we have often fallen short, our capacity for self-reflection and renewal inspires hope and spurs improvement.

Let us hope the efforts of President-elect Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and others to reassess the aspects of government that border the presidency are performed in that same spirit. Let us also hope that Congress steps up to the plate and engages in its own self-reflection.

For the past few decades, Congress has transformed its constitutional “power of the purse” from a tool of responsible governance into an instrument of fiscal destructiveness. The most visible sign is a national debt that just crossed the $36 trillion threshold, barely three months after reaching $35 trillion. This is nuts. This year’s budget deficit is $1.9 trillion and will be $2.8 trillion in 10 years. Instead of practicing careful budgeting and oversight, Congress repeatedly relies on massive omnibus spending bills, often passed in haste without proper review.

The abdication of duty is bipartisan. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have shown genuine commitment to restoring fiscal responsibility. Basic oversight functions, like passing individual appropriations bills on schedule or conducting rigorous cost-benefit analyses, are regularly ignored. And, of course, very few in Congress want to take the steps needed to stabilize the major drivers of the government’s future debt: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Beyond this cowardice, Congress’ fiscal frivolity is visible everywhere. Take the issue of expired authorization. The newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already flagged “$516 billion to programs whose authorizations previously expired under federal law. Nearly $320 billion of that $516 billion expired more a decade ago.”

This, again, is nuts. It not only reveals that Congress doesn’t care much about its own rules and oversight power—if members want to continue spending on these programs, they should duly reauthorize them—but shows that the government is way too big for Congress to handle.

Next, take the issue of improper payments. According to the Government Accountability Office, payments that “should not have been made or that were made in an incorrect amount” reached $236 billion last year. Since 2003, the total has been $2.7 trillion. Medicare and Medicaid each account for over $50 billion annually, while the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program had $3.6 billion. GAO offers recommendations to address a small part of the problem, but Congress has failed to adopt them. Improper payments continue and even grow every year.

Congress also ignores large-scale fraud throughout the budget. GAO estimates the annual financial loss at “between $233 billion and $521 billion” based on data from 2018 through 2022. According to reports, the estimated annual fraud for Medicare and Medicaid was at least $100 billion in 2023.

No private-sector company would stay afloat were its officials to permit this level of fraud and waste. Yet the federal government suffers no consequences because neither we nor our representatives in Congress hold it accountable. Twenty-first century technology could likely prevent the vast majority of the fraud and improper payments. That may be the most effective use of DOGE, with all the engineers and geeks who can bring a precise, scientific approach.

Last but not least is the Department of Defense, which has failed its seventh audit since 2018. Its size, we’re told, is the main reason why. It spent over $824 billion and employs 3.4 million service members and civilians deployed over many countries. In this case, Congress has demanded a clean audit—by 2028. Here’s to hoping.

I could go on, but in the end, the message is clear: Congress isn’t doing its job.

The sheer size of the federal government has created a self-perpetuating vortex of dysfunction. The bureaucracy and scale of spending have grown so vast and complex that meaningful oversight has become nearly impossible. But while Congress cannot effectively monitor the thousands of programs, agencies, and expenditures under its purview, by making only token attempts to live up to its constitutional responsibilities, it all but ensures even more waste, duplication, and programs that continue long past their usefulness.

The only cure is to shrink the size of government. Trump is talking about it, but it’s mostly in Congress’ hands.

COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM

The post Congress Is Fiscally Reckless. Will Lawmakers Step Up? appeared first on Reason.com.

What does it take for a parent to get arrested?

Surprisingly little.

Scott and Heather Wallace of Hewitt, Texas, encourage their three boys to play outside on their own to build independence.

One day, driving home from karate practice, 8-year-old Aiden misbehaved. So, half a mile from home, Heather stopped the car and told him, “Walk the rest of the way on your own.”

He’d done it before. But this time, before he got home, someone called the police.

“There’s a little boy walking down the sidewalk,” she told 911. “He’s a perfect target for somebody to kidnap!”

Police picked Aiden up and drove him home.

His parents share their story in our new video.

“You weren’t worried about [Aiden]?” I ask them.

“Not at all,” says Heather.

Scott adds, “It’s a safe neighborhood.”

It’s true. Based on data from the FBI, their town is among the safest in Texas.

Nevertheless, the cops arrested Heather! They kept her in jail overnight.

“It was terrifying,” she tells me. “I was just waiting, crying.”

The cop told her, “To have an 8-year-old…walk by himself, that’s a big problem….We don’t know who’s in that white van.”

That’s just dumb, says Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids.

“99.99 percent of white vans are guys coming to fix your toilet or mow your lawn.”

She says ignorant media mislead us about what’s really dangerous. News reports cite Justice Department data and claim “460,000 kids are reported missing every year!”

But that just means: “460,000 children are late for dinner, stayed at school and forgot to tell their mom….The definition of ‘missing’ is missing for an hour!”

Kidnappings by strangers are extremely rare. Just being in a car is 400 times more dangerous.

“You don’t see people saying, ‘I could put Johnny in the car, but what if we’re T-boned?” Skenazy points out. “We’ve come up with a culture that sees a kid outside and fantasizes not just something bad but the very worst-case scenario.”

The officer who picked up Aiden argued the worst-case: “You have a lot of crazy people out here,” he told Heather. “I don’t trust my child out of range [of] about 20 or 30 feet from me.”

Twenty or 30 feet?

“It was a lot of his opinion,” Heather tells me.

Police officers can act on their opinions.

Local prosecutors went even further. They indicted Heather, claiming she placed her son in “imminent danger of death” and acted “against the peace and dignity of the state.”

Really!

When her employer heard that, Heather lost her job.

Good thing officials weren’t this obsessed with stranger danger when I was a kid. I walked half a mile every school day.

Crime was much worse then. Even including recent upticks, crime has dropped sharply over the past 30 years.

What’s changed is media hysteria. Any dramatic incident, anywhere, appears instantly on our phones. Frightened, gullible, math-illiterate officials say, better safe than sorry.

Now Scott and Heather say that, too.

“Will you drop your kids off again?” I ask.

“No!” says Heather. “We’re scared.”

“It’s not that we don’t think it was the right decision,” says Scott, “But what they decided for us was not very affordable. [Now] we don’t even leave them in the car to go into the convenience store.”

“Not because someone’s going to take them,” Heather adds, “but because someone’s going to see and call the police!”

Lenore Skenazy has persuaded eight states to pass “childhood independence” laws. They clarify that letting kids do things on their own isn’t abuse.

“You don’t want the government telling you when you can let your kids do things,” she says. “You know your children better than they do.”

COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post This Mom Was Arrested and Jailed for Making Her Son Walk a Half-Mile Home appeared first on Reason.com.

What’s wrong with American health care?

That’s the question that drives the new season of Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, the Reason limited-run podcast series. Over the past few months, host Eric Boehm has been speaking with some of the doctors, medical professionals, and activists who are pushing back against the special interests, government contractors, and bad laws that make the American health care system such a mess.

Some of those problems are obvious. Prescription drugs are often too expensive and sometimes not available when you need them.

Others are less obvious, such as a series of state-level regulations that make it harder for medical professionals to offer their services. Or a monopoly government contractor that’s a big part of the reason why thousands of Americans die every year waiting for a new kidney.

On the new season of Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, you’ll hear a whole new set of stories about how the government is making Americans poorer and sicker, and how we can cure those ills. 

It all kicks off next Thursday, September 5, with special guest Mark Cuban. He’s the co-founder of Cost Plus Drugs, an innovative attempt to inject some market competition into the prescription drug industry.

Tune in to new episodes every Thursday through October 10—and if you haven’t listened to the first season of the show, check it out now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 

• Producer: Hunt Beaty

The post Trailer: <em>Why We Can't Have Nice Things</em> Season 2 appeared first on Reason.com.