Better late than never. Both houses of Congress have passed a war powers resolution on Tuesday to end the U.S. war with Iran—nearly three months after the shooting stopped, and a week after the U.S. and Iran agreed on a peace memorandum. The resolution passed the Senate on the 10th try, after four Republicans voted for it and war hawks Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) and Dave McCormick (R–Pa.) were no-shows.

Despite the war already being over, President Donald Trump lashed out at the resolution for restraining his powers. He wrote on Truth Social that the “poorly timed and meaningless” vote by “Dumocrats” and “Four Republican Losers” told “the Number One Sponser [sic] of Terror in the World that the United States doesn’t  like what I am doing to them, and I must stop, and by so doing has provided aid and comfort the Enemy.”

The long wait for a war powers vote was not just a matter of Congress moving slowly. Although Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) supported it from the beginning and Sen. Susan Collins (R–Maine) fulfilled her promise to vote for the resolution after 60 days—the original War Powers Act requires the president to get congressional permission within 60 days of a war starting—it took more time for Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R–Alaska) and Bill Cassidy (R–La.) to flip.

And Democratic leaders engaged in more subtle tactics to delay a war powers resolution in order to avoid a testy political fight.

“Republicans didn’t want to stand up to Trump, the ones who put this over the top were ones who lost their primaries; and Democratic leadership played nice with Republicans, likely to protect their own members who didn’t want to vote against [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] but who eventually saw the writing on the wall and voted for the resolution,” says Etan Mabourakh, national organizing manager at the National Iranian American Council, a nonprofit diaspora organization.

Before the war began, Democratic leadership privately discouraged Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) from introducing a resolution—alongside libertarian-leaning Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.)—to prevent Trump from attacking Iran. They eventually agreed to schedule a vote in the first week of March, which turned out to be a few days after Trump started the war. The Khanna-Massie resolution failed due to Democrats defecting, and Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D–N.J.) tried to supplant it with his own resolution giving Trump a month to end the war.

Meanwhile, House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Gregory Meeks (D–N.Y.) refused to force a vote on any war powers resolution for the first 60 days, telling Drop Site News on March 27 that “we can’t win. When you see me put a vote on the floor, that means we’re going to win.” He eventually agreed to hold a vote in mid-April, but was proven right, as the resolution failed by one vote, with four Republicans abstaining.

In May, when Meeks was confident he had the votes, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) called an early recess to delay the vote by several more weeks.

It’s worth adding that the war is much less popular with Americans than it is inside Congress. The war started with a historically small minority of Americans supporting it, and it only got more hated from there. A recent CBS News poll found that only 31 percent of Americans thought the war was worth it, and 78 percent of Americans want to end it now.

“While some may suspect that Democrats were able to wait until the war was over to pass this, what actually took place was that activists pressured Democrats to expedite the votes, and then the disastrous nature of the war and economic impact moved up the timeline,” says a staffer at an antiwar organization involved in the legislation, who spoke to Reason on condition of anonymity.

He adds that the fight to pass the resolution was valuable because it gave “doves within the administration, to the extent that they exist, more leverage, more of a talking point, more of an ability to tell Trump that now is the time to wrap it up to avoid an embarrassing fight with Congress over an unpopular war.”

Mabourakh, meanwhile, says that the resolution is important to “prevent Trump from backsliding into this one again.” Trump has been threatening to restart the war if Iran does not give in to his demands, though peace talks seem to be going well for now.

And the struggle in Congress isn’t over. Sen. Tim Kaine (D–Va.) is pushing for a resolution with more strongly binding legal language, which would require a two-thirds majority to override a presidential veto. If Congress reflected public opinion, it would pass in a landslide—but the last six months show that Congress doesn’t work that way.

The post Why Did Congress Vote To End the Iran War After It Finished? appeared first on Reason.com.

You have probably heard the news: The Democratic primary elections in New York City went very well for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, leveraged his popularity and star power to propel three of his best friends to victory over more establishment figures, two of them incumbents. The winners are all but guaranteed to advance to Congress: Brad Ladner—whose ouster of incumbent Rep. Daniel Goldman (D–N.Y.) was a proxy battle over the Israel issue—Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier.

Avila Chevalier, the most overtly radical of the three, is an interesting figure because she represents a stunning triumph for modern campus progressive activism; she will be the first person elected to Congress who comes directly from that world. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) is a democratic socialist and a progressive activist, but she was not a central figure in those movements until well after she graduated from Boston University. Avila Chevalier, on the other hand, was a prominent far-left activist at Columbia University throughout the 2010s and remained involved with the pro-Palestinian campus protests there in 2023 following Israel’s attacks on Hamas in Gaza.

She co-founded Columbia University Apartheid and Divest (CUAD), an organization that did not merely oppose the state of Israel but also celebrated terrorism outright. After the death of Yahya Sinwar, CUAD’s Substack published a glowing eulogy of the Hamas terrorist who masterminded the October 7 attack on Israelis. CUAD hailed him as a “hero of the revolution” guided by “pragmatic optimism.” The group called on its followers to “reflect on how we can make ourselves more like him.”

Avila Chevalier was also involved with the related group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which explicitly celebrated the October 7th terrorist attack as a “historic win.”

It’s characteristic of these activists that they do not see the Israel/Palestine issue as distinct from any other issue they may care about, but rather part of a broad and interconnected battle with the United States. Intersectionality is a key facet of this tradition, and so it is not enough to merely express concern for the plight of the innocent Palestinians; to be in good standing with the movement requires fervent denunciations of every other -ism known to man. In fact, one of the defining features of modern campus radicals is that their own mundane feuds with university administrators are cast as manifestations of a global struggle against colonialism, capitalism, and U.S.-led imperialism. In 2024, Columbia protesters demanded the right to occupy administrative buildings, and also to receive food and water from the administration so that their occupation could continue.

So it should come as no surprise that Avila Chevalier is not merely furious about the state of Israel. She is part of an activist movement that favors “the total eradication of Western civilization,” a goal that—somehow—is not viewed as in tension with the movement’s stated desire to prevent genocide. (One wonders how Avila Chevalier plans to make Western civilization go extinct without anybody getting hurt.) In keeping with her stated desire to eliminate the U.S.-led West, Avila Chevalier has previously commented in favor of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; i.e., she is not merely opposed to American involvement in the conflict (a defensible position) but affirmatively on the side of the attackers.

Indeed, Avila Chevalier’s past statements on X—Twitter at the time—are a veritable gold mine of 2010-era radicalism. For instance: She wants to abolish not just the police but the very concept of policing entirely. For good measure, she views interracial relationships with suspicion, thought COVID-19 originated in France, and thinks white people are not hygienic.

In an interview with The New York Times editorial board from earlier this month, Avila Chevalier declined to walk back her most controversial statements. She refused to say, for instance, that murderers belong in prison.

In 2019, when I published my first book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, I predicted that the era’s campus protesters would not shed their radicalism when they graduated college and moved out into the so-called real world—rather, they would force the world to conform to their quixotic expectations. This would be particularly felt in the areas of American life most susceptible to their influence: education, media, entertainment, and eventually, politics.

Now that day has finally arrived. Welcome, congresswoman.

The post Darializa Avila Chevalier Will Be This Congress' First Campus Radical appeared first on Reason.com.

It was a little after 6 p.m. on Sunday night—that bizarre time when buying booze is simultaneously legal and illegal in Minnesota.

I’d been catching up with some old friends at Utepils Brewing in Minneapolis and, as we headed for the door, I grabbed a few cans of the brewery’s signature pilsner, intending to bring them home. The bartender refused to let me buy them.

Had I had too much? Hardly. In fact, she would have been happy to pour another round of drinks for all of us.

The beer was perfectly legal to be sold, and the cans in the cooler marked “to go” were available for purchase—just not at this very moment.

In Minnesota, to-go alcohol sales are allowed only until 10 p.m. most days of the week, but the cutoff comes four hours earlier on Sundays.

The more you think about it, the less sense that rule seems to make. If I’d wanted to have another pilsner while sitting in Utepils’ gorgeous beer garden, I’d have been welcome to do so. If I wanted to buy six beers to share with my friends, that would have been perfectly legal. If I’d gone to the bar a few minutes earlier—before the arbitrary 6 p.m cutoff—I would have been allowed to legally buy those cans and take them to go. If it had been any other day of the week, the purchase would have been legal.

I was a willing customer, and there was a business that would have happily consented to taking my money in exchange for six cans of beer.

Alas, there was someone I’d forgotten to ask: Minnesota legislators.

Of course, Minnesota is hardly alone when it comes to silly, arbitrary rules for buying and selling alcohol. In my home state of Virginia, I have to go to two different stores to buy beer and tequila. In Indiana, grocery stores are forbidden from selling cold beer. Every place has its own weird restrictions, and navigating them successfully is one of the markers of being from that place. On Sunday night, the confused look on my face as I was told that I couldn’t buy beer to go from a cooler that was literally labeled with a “to go” sign surely marked me as an out-of-towner.

These rules are always arbitrary—there is no rational public health reason to allow beer sales at 5:55 p.m. on a Sunday but not 10 minutes later—and they almost always carry a political dimension. In Minnesota, that underlying factor is that liquor stores in the state are also required to close at 10 p.m. during the week and at 6 p.m. on Sundays. Breweries, bars, and restaurants are allowed to stay open longer, but the limit on to-go sales is meant to prevent competition with liquor stores. Here’s a crazy idea: Just let people buy and sell whatever they want, whenever they want.

And, in fairness, Minnesota has been making strides in the right direction.

Until 2017, you couldn’t buy beer or liquor to go on Sundays at all. Hosting a Super Bowl party and you waited until the last minute to buy booze? That’ll cost you a round trip to Wisconsin, where liquor stores line up at the border to capture the sales that Minnesota forbade.

Sunday sales are now legal, which means that the annoying and arbitrary 6 p.m. cutoff is actually evidence of improving personal freedom in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. The state has also loosened its booze rules in a bunch of other ways recently, like legalizing THC-infused seltzers.

Freedom is a journey, not just a destination. But it’s a journey that you still can’t take with a six-pack on a Sunday night.

The post Buying Beer Is Both Legal and Illegal on Sunday Nights in Minnesota appeared first on Reason.com.

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Be careful where you jump a fence this week, or you might face federal charges.

So a country with a bad government is in the World Cup. Should you root for them, stay away, or maybe it’s not that simple? We’ll dive into the situation with Iran’s men’s soccer team, then move on to what might be the worst new thing about this World Cup (not hydration breaks, sorry!), and close with five thoughts about golf’s U.S. Open.

Locker Room Links

• Congratulations to Giannis Antetokounmpo on going from Wisconsin’s 7.65 percent income tax rate (10th-worst in the nation!) to Florida’s 0.0 percent. This is going to save him at least $4 million a year.
• The PGA Tour has announced a major shake-up to its schedule and format.
• The caddies at Pebble Beach voted to unionize—possibly because their employer moved them from contractor status to full-time employees. “It is believed that this is the first time that elite caddies at a major golf destination have voted to unionize.”
• After (wisely!) rejecting a big subsidy for the Chicago Bears, Mayor Brandon Johnson wants to spend a $425 million subsidy on infrastructure for the Chicago Fire’s stadium.
• NASCAR’s race weekend on Naval Base Coronado in San Diego involved “no federal spending,” according to documents seen by The Athletic thanks to a FOIA request. The Navy got to keep all the money from alcohol sales.
• The MLB proposed a draft overhaul that would raise the age floor (two years past high school graduation for American players), shorten the draft, create a separate international draft, and make picks tradeable. The players union was not happy about it. College baseball fans should be! For better or for worse, I also think a higher age floor will make the draft a more effective way to rebuild.
• The Protect College Sports Act, which I covered before here, passed a Senate committee vote and could get a full Senate vote soon. The bill now restricts the Big 12 and ACC from conference expansion (the bill originally intended this only for the Big 10 and SEC). It also tries to close a loophole that may have unintentionally allowed for a super league. The NFL and NBA players unions, and the NFL itself, support the bill. The SEC and Big 10 are still opposed. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R–Auburn), a former college football coach, suddenly withdrew his support.
• Elsewhere in Reason, the sports takeover continues. On the Giants Pride Night controversy, we have “Major League Baseball Teams Have the Right To Offer Pride Uniforms. Should They?” by Billy Binion (update here). On the World Cup, we have “England Fans Warned Not To Chant ‘Keir Starmer’s a Wanker’ at World Cup,” by our favorite English/Moroccan/Egyptian staffer, Reem Ibrahim.
• This is why no one outside of New York was rooting for the Knicks.
  

  The Knicks overcame the odds and won the NBA championship.

  We can also overcome the odds, beat the oligarchs and create an economy that works for all, not just the few. https://t.co/BrIly7rb9r

  — Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) June 18, 2026

The Case for Rooting for Iran

If you love freedom, you wouldn’t root for the North Korean soccer team to win the World Cup, would you? (Perhaps you’d root for them to at least qualify, so a few players could courageously defect.) You wouldn’t root for the Soviet Union to win at Lake Placid in 1980. You’d probably never root for China, even if they paid you millions of dollars to do it.

So why should you root for Iran to succeed in a World Cup on U.S. soil?

It’s a nasty regime, after all. Dissent is brutally and murderously repressed. Rights are hard to come by. Even simple daily freedoms—like, say, going to a soccer match as a woman—are heavily restricted. The regime and sports in Iran are deeply intertwined. “In the Islamic Republic, sports are too serious to be left to the athletes,” as Kambiz Foroohar wrote for the Middle East Institute in 2021. “Over the past two decades, most sports clubs and related bodies have been taken over by political or security-military organizations, with former Revolutionary Guards holding the top positions.”

In theory, Iranian victories at the World Cup are a vindication of the regime. But somehow they have an opposite effect: Major victories by the men’s soccer team have often been the spark of anti-regime demonstrations.

When the men’s team qualified for the 1998 World Cup, thousands of young women went to the main stadium in Tehran to celebrate, even though the media called on them to stay home. Soon after, Iran won a World Cup match for the first time—against the United States. The New York Times‘ report on the celebrations mentions some anti-American sentiment, but plenty of exuberance that surely went beyond what the religiously conservative regime would have appreciated: “The young woman flung her head scarf off and hung out the window of the blue Volkswagen, her long red hair flying wild in the wind….A man and a woman sat halfway out of their car windows and swayed to the American rock music that blared from their car.”

This “support the team, not the regime” sentiment was on full display at Iran’s first World Cup match on June 15, against New Zealand. The stadium in Los Angeles was overwhelmingly full of local Iranian supporters—who booed the regime’s national anthem, snuck the prerevolutionary Iranian flag past security, and steadfastly supported the team that technically represents the regime anyway (because of travel restrictions, it’s not like current Iranian residents were making the trip). The match was an exciting 2–2 draw.

My friend, the freelance journalist Natalie Fertig, was at the match and said the Iranian fans largely separated their support for the team from their negative view of the Iranian regime. She saw several flags that even blended together the American stars and stripes with the prerevolutionary Iran flag, and one “Make Iran Great Again” hat. The non-Iranians in attendance, whether American or European, generally seemed supportive of the Iranian team too. (A scuffle broke out in her section toward the end of the game over a flag, though it was unclear to her which flag and who felt aggrieved by it.)

Overall, she described a family atmosphere. Iranian-Americans brought their kids, greeted each other, and were proud to support the soccer team representing the country of their heritage, even if they don’t support those in government power (something even some Americans need to learn). “A lot of people want an excuse to love their country, even if they don’t agree with everything that its government does,” Natalie tells me. “That was really the sense that I got from the Iranian fans that I was around, was that they were so excited for this moment to support their identity and their culture, even if they were going to take the moment during the anthem to show opposition to the current government.”

So even if Iran makes it out of their group, or even wins a knockout game or two, don’t expect it to be used by the regime to tighten their tenuous stranglehold on the country. Iranians, at home and abroad, don’t seem to view the team as an extension of their government. The World Cup is a place for the team and their global fans to represent Iran (much like regular Americans should be the “face of America,” not whoever is president).

“That’s the World Cup, right? It’s people finding ways to separate what governments do from who people are,” Natalie says. “And that oftentimes, people no matter where they live, want the same things out of life.”

As it turns out, people can have nuanced opinions on the Iran regime, the Iran soccer team, and the Iran war all at the same time. Maybe America’s geopolitical enemies don’t always have to be our sporting enemies, too.

The Worst Rule at the World Cup?

It’s great that FIFA is trying to crack down on racist abuse against players, whether it’s coming from the stands or from the other team. But this rule is giving me major “if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about!” vibes.

HISTORIC SENDING-OFF

Paraguay's Miguel Almirón becomes the first player at the 2026 World Cup given a red card under the new rules barring players from covering their mouths to conceal discriminatory behavior. pic.twitter.com/mE4PnzZ3oe

— Men in Blazers (@MenInBlazers) June 20, 2026

The theory, I guess, is that if players are about to say something racist or insulting, they’ll cover their mouths so that the lipreaders in the peanut gallery can’t turn them in. But banning mouth-covering is a bit like banning guns or banning VPNs—it assumes there are no legitimate uses and anyone who wants to use this or do that must have nefarious reasons for it.

But in the sporting context, as any (American) football coach can tell you, there are very important reasons to cover your mouth when speaking in the middle of a game. The rule does specify that it’s supposed to involve “a confrontational situation with an opponent,” but it still seems likely that an overzealous referee might punish a player for an innocent action or inoffensive language.

If someone facepalms or wipes their face while talking to an opponent, is that deserving of a red? We’ll find out!

Especially since covering your mouth doesn’t affect gameplay, the punishment being a straight red card (thus kicking the player out of the game and his team can’t replace him) instead of a yellow card seems harsh. If a player says something racist, give them a red card—but don’t kick them out for something that maybe, you’re not sure, could have been done to conceal saying something racist.

That said, I’m sorry that I can’t get worked up about the hydration breaks that soccer purists are mad about. Maybe I’m just used to commercial breaks as an American, or used to seeing Arsenal use an injury break to take a drink and get some coaching. The breaks seem to change up momentum a little bit, and I’m fine with that. If you were FOX, you’d gladly use them to make $250 million (or more) too.

The Worst Golfer, Par None

Since I invested a lot of time and energy into consuming U.S. Open content this week, here are some quick thoughts:

• I really do not like Wyndham Clark. There are a lot of golfers I like, there are some I’m ambivalent about, and some I don’t care for. I don’t think I hate any of them, but Clark comes close. Even the LIV Golf defectors have (mostly) only given me one reason to not like them, and I at least understand why they defected. Clark has given me several reasons to not like him.
• Thankfully, sports are better when there’s a villain to root against, and golf is desperately in need of one as the power of the LIV Golf defectors fades away.
• I’d still rather live in the universe where this putt on the 18th hole drops and we get to see a playoff instead. Putting is based more on randomness and luck than you’d think!
• The U.S. Open is run by the United States Golf Association, who governs golf for pretty much everyone in the country who isn’t a professional player—your weekend hackers, your regular Joes, and even your played-in-college-but-not-Tour-material players. (It does decide rules of play and equipment standards for professionals, too). As such, I think they should only have the U.S. Open at public courses that everyone has access to (everyone who can afford them, anyway). They don’t have to be municipal courses (like Bethpage), but this would still include many iconic courses like Pebble Beach, Pinehurst, Torrey Pines, etc. Leave the fancy, exclusive country club courses for the PGA Championship. The point of the U.S. Open’s site selection should be “You could play here too!”
• I’m not related to Miles Russell, but I’d like to be. This is awesome stuff.
  

  

  Miles Russell's father, Joe, took over as caddie for his son's final walk up 18.

  What a Father's Day gift! pic.twitter.com/7tfHKSrjyx

  — U.S. Open (@usopengolf) June 21, 2026

Replay of the Week

The best soccer teams always know how to utilize the sport’s most secret weapon: the own goal.

1-0! GOOOOAL FOR USA!

Flo Balogun charges in and the @USMNT finds the back of the net on the own goal pic.twitter.com/GdivDaeNt9

— FOX Sports (@FOXSports) June 19, 2026

That’s all for this week. Enjoy watching the real event of the weekend, pickleball’s 2026 APP Vlasic Classic Cincinnati (we need more pickle sponsorships in sports).

The post You Can Root for Iran at the World Cup Without Rooting for the Iranian Regime appeared first on Reason.com.

The owners of Big Back’s Cajun Kitchen say the officials in College Park, Georgia, have unfairly targeted their restaurant with repeated inspections, citations, and accusations that it is operating an illegal nightclub, even though they say they have the proper permits and licenses. Restaurant owner Shawn Perkins and her business partners believe the actions were prompted by Mayor Pro Tem Joe Carn, a claim the city attorney denies. However, College Park Mayor Bianca Motley Broom publicly supported Perkins, calling the city’s actions harassment and saying elected officials should not use their power to target businesses. Carn did not respond to requests from a local TV station for comment.

The post Brickbat: Taking a Bite appeared first on Reason.com.

About one-third of Brazilians in formal employment have a “6×1” workweek—six days of work followed by one day of rest—which is particularly common in sectors such as air travel, hotels, healthcare, retail, and food service. In late May, Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies approved a constitutional amendment that would effectively ban this work arrangement, sending the proposal to the Senate for ratification. 

The proposal would reduce Brazil’s constitutionally set cap on weekly working hours from 44 to 40 and require two paid rest days per week. In Brazil, service workers are typically paid a fixed monthly salary rather than an hourly wage, as is more common in the United States. Because the amendment would prohibit employers from reducing those salaries to reflect the shorter schedule, employers would have to pay the same monthly wage for roughly 10 percent fewer hours of work. 

The amendment was introduced by federal deputy Erika Hilton, a member of Brazil’s lower house from the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). In Hilton’s view, “Working six days just to get one day off isn’t a life. It’s exploitation….You can’t live only one-seventh of your own life.”

The proposal quickly captured Brazilian attention and gained political momentum, clearing the lower house in a 461–19 second-round vote. For actors and social media influencers, public support for the measure seemed almost mandatory. In an Instagram Reel with over 1 million views, actress Letícia Colin declared: “6×1 is a political project. It’s a system created to keep workers exhausted.” A recent poll found that 63 percent of Brazilians support ending the 6×1 work schedule.

Supporters argue this is a long-overdue reform for workers in grueling service-sector jobs. “I know what it feels like to have swollen feet from standing for eight, 10, 12 hours. I know because I lived it,” said Dandara Tonantzin, a federal deputy from the Workers’ Party, the party of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is seeking reelection this year.

But banning 6×1 is more likely to harm the very workers it is supposed to help. By forcing employers to pay the same salary for fewer hours of work, the proposal would raise the hourly cost of formal labor without increasing workers’ productivity. To manage higher labor costs, businesses may hire fewer workers, raise prices, or automate where possible.

The result would be to push more employees to the informal sector, which already accounts for about 40 percent of workers in Brazil. In fact, many 6×1 workers are already in the informal sector and thus would not be affected by the amendment at all.

As Kim Kataguiri, one of the few federal deputies who voted against the amendment, explained in his floor speech, almost everyone would like to see the end of the 6×1 schedule—the disagreement is over whether this amendment will actually deliver it. “I am not going to lie to a worker and tell him that just because the constitution now says his schedule will be 5×2, that will happen in practice,” Katarguiri said. “That is a lie….The sooner it starts, the sooner people will realize it’s a farce; that their lives haven’t changed, haven’t improved.”

The proposal would also likely make entry-level service work harder to find. Young and inexperienced workers require more training and time on the clock before they become productive. If the hourly cost of employing someone rises, employers will likely have stronger incentives to favor experienced workers over first-time job seekers.

Even for those who keep their jobs, banning 6×1 might make service jobs even more unpleasant. Many of these jobs depend on multiple workers per shift. Under the new rule, employers might simply expect the current workforce to handle the same customer flow with fewer coworkers on the floor.

More generally, the proposal rests on the faulty premise that everyone wants to work less. As it turns out, most people don’t want to work less; they want to earn more.

It’s the same faulty assumption underpinning John Maynard Keynes’ 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in which he theorized that, if the productivity gains he observed in his lifetime continued, his grandchildren would work only 15 hours a week—and mostly for fun.

Yet, more than 100 years later, the average American with a full-time job works at least 40 hours a week. That’s because many of us have chosen larger homes, better health care, vacations, and education over shorter workweeks.

The tradeoff is even sharper in Brazil because the constitutional amendment would primarily affect some of the country’s lowest earners. Many of them earn salaries near the minimum wage, which is roughly $300 a month. For workers with basic needs still unmet, an extra day of rest may not feel like liberation; it may simply become time for a side gig. The source of their discomfort is not the lack of free time. It’s poverty.

The prevalence of the six-day workweek in Brazil is a symptom of a stagnant economy. Shorter workweeks and better working conditions emerge from productivity gains and competition for labor. Labor law merely codifies these gains.

An outright ban on demanding work schedules is not the solution. Brazilian workers need productivity growth, more formal job opportunities, and a labor market in which employers compete for them. Mandating across-the-board improvements in working conditions before productivity gains materialize will only exclude the most vulnerable workers—delaying their economic ascent.

The post Brazil Moves To End the Six-Day Workweek appeared first on Reason.com.

Does the U.S. government have enough ammunition for all its wars and potential wars? Ask two different Pentagon officials and get two different answers.

In May 2026, acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao told Congress that “we’re doing a pause” on sales to Taiwan “in order to make sure we have the munitions we need” for the Iran war. A few days later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth backpedaled. “Hung Cao is fantastic, but I would not couple the two in any way at all,” he told reporters. “And I feel good about not only where we are, but where we are in future production rates as well.” It was the latest in a series of statements from Hegseth and other Trump administration officials complaining that the media were exaggerating munitions shortages.

The lady doth protest too much. Warning lights have been blinking for years about the United States’ ability to prepare for future conflicts while also supporting proxy wars in Europe and the Middle East. The direct war with Iran burned through U.S. magazines at an even faster pace.

“The U.S. has stockpile requirements that reflect contingency plan requirements. Of course, it accepts some risk when it needs to,” explains Josh Paul, previously the State Department official in charge of weapons sales. In other words, the question of how much ammunition is enough is a question of acceptable danger.

The current shortages are especially dire when it comes to air defense ammunition. That introduces a kind of danger that the U.S. and its partners simply aren’t used to. After generations of U.S. aerial dominance, the economics of war are exposing American troops—and First World societies—to being bombed from above.

The main round of U.S.-Iranian fighting ended in April 2026 with 14 Americans dead and 409 wounded. There are signs that the situation would have gotten dramatically worse if it had continued. Just before the ceasefire, Iran was achieving an increasing hit rate with smaller barrages because the U.S. and its partners had used up so much of their air defense ammunition. Israel was rationing its high-end missile interceptors, whose numbers had fallen to “double digits,” a U.S. source told Drop Site.

Future U.S. wars may look “more like Ukraine,” with heavy bombing on both sides, says Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “The Americans like to insulate ourselves and our friends from adversaries’ ability to retaliate, but that’s extremely costly.”

Shortages are already being felt in Ukraine itself. After a June 2026 air raid by Russia killed 22 people, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pleaded with European allies to speed up deliveries of the American-made Patriot air defense system, adding that the issue was “no longer about financing.” There just wasn’t enough inventory to go around. The Ukrainian government proposed “borrowing” Patriot ammunition from Germany, emptying German warehouses in exchange for an IOU.

Meanwhile, Taiwan is waiting for the Trump administration to approve a $14 billion arms sale that Congress has already signed off on. Part of the holdup seems to be political; President Donald Trump told Fox News the delay was “a very good negotiating chip for us” against China and a way to get both sides to “cool down.” But shortages are another part of the calculation, as Cao admitted. Reuters reports that the deal, whose contents have not been publicly reported, “largely consists” of Patriot ammunition and other air defense weapons.

“Everybody wants to adopt the American way of war, but nobody can afford it, including the Americans,” Logan says. “The ability to sustain political support drops like a lead balloon when we can’t intercept retaliation.”

How Drones and Cheap Missiles Ended America’s Free Pass From Enemy Fire

For most of the last century, the United States has gotten used to fighting one-sided air wars. Before the recent Middle Eastern conflicts, U.S. troops were last killed by hostile aircraft during the Korean War in 1953. In recent years, the feeling grew that the U.S. military could simply bomb other countries with no real cost. The public took little notice as the Obama, Biden, and Trump administrations waged “light footprint” air campaigns around the world.

“It works for a time, when you have this enormous asymmetry, but adversaries of all kinds learn to adapt,” says Kelly Grieco, a fellow at the Stimson Center. “There were warning signs long before this war.”

One important change was the drone revolution. Advances in electronics allowed small countries to get in on the game by the dawn of the 21st century. Israel became a leader in drone technology, which Turkey purchased and Iran stole. Chinese hobby drones hit the civilian market in the early 2010s, making this type of warfare even cheaper. The Islamic State group obtained a small “air force” by strapping grenades to photography drones.

When the U.S. fought the Islamic State in 2014’s Battle of Mosul, a U.S. Army colonel told Grieco that it was the first time that he “ever had to look to the sky and be concerned about the enemy.”

Meanwhile, Iran took lessons from Iraq, which had invaded Iran in 1980 and in turn suffered a U.S. invasion in 2003. The Iranian government concluded that it couldn’t build a competitive air force—but it could produce overwhelming numbers of ground-based missiles domestically.

The final turning point for the old model of war may have come during a conflict most Americans haven’t heard of: the 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Azerbaijani forces debuted the use of Israeli “kamikaze drones,” which fly themselves into a target and explode, alongside conventional Turkish drones. Two years later, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the Ukrainian army invested in those same Turkish drones, while the Russian military imported Iranian experts and designs to mass-produce the Shahed 136 kamikaze drone.

As the war in Ukraine dragged on, each side adopted the Islamic State tactic of using hobby drones to drop grenades on individual soldiers. When radio jamming made drone attacks harder, the armies then equipped their drones with spools of fiber-optic cable. Battlefields have become littered with miles of discarded wires. Beyond the front lines, Russia and Ukraine have been using long-range drones to bomb each other’s infrastructure and drone fighters to shoot down (or stab down) those drone bombers.

The United States and its Middle East partners were used to a higher level of protection than Russia or Ukraine found possible to achieve. Israel’s Iron Dome, an air defense system for short-range rockets and artillery, had a reported 90 percent interception rate in small wars from 2011 to 2023. The oil-rich Arab monarchies were even more casualty-averse. When Yemeni rebels drone-bombed Saudi Arabia in 2019 and the United Arab Emirates in 2022, both air raids caused a national crisis.

This year’s war with Iran unleashed the first sustained air attack those countries faced from someone more sophisticated than ragtag guerrillas. They tried to maintain the previous level of insulation at a massive cost. Ukrainian military advisers told the The Times of London they were “astonished” to see Arab militaries firing off eight Patriot interceptors to shoot down a single Iranian drone. Israel used up 80 percent of its entire stockpile of high-end Arrow interceptors in 16 days, according to a study by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in Britain. On top of that, the U.S. military fired more interceptors in Israel’s defense than the Israeli army itself did, according to The Washington Post.

The Israeli and U.S. militaries also burned through their offensive weapons, according to RUSI. Hegseth warned Japan that the U.S. no longer had enough Tomahawk cruise missiles to spare, the Financial Times reported. When it runs low on these “standoff munitions,” which allow U.S. aircraft to fire from a distance, the U.S. has “to fight closer in, and when you fight closer in, there’s greater risk,” Grieco says.

Part of the U.S. problem with Iran seems to have been the assumption of a quick victory. Trump said both publicly and privately that he expected Iran to fold within days. At the beginning of the war, the U.S. military touted its ability to proactively suppress Iranian missile fire in the immediate term by blowing up launcher trucks or caving in underground base entrances. But the launchers were simple to replace—they’re just normal trucks with some extra hydraulics, after all—and caved-in base entrances could be dug out.

The worst-case near-future scenario for the U.S. military, a war with China in the Pacific, would combine all of these issues with several new ones. U.S. allies Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are all high-tech economies within range of Chinese and North Korean missiles. China has much more formidable air defenses than Iran, making missile suppression almost impossible. And because Taiwan is an island that is easy to isolate, all of its defense weapons would have to be imported before a crisis starts.

In January 2023, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) ran a war game simulating a Pacific war caused by a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The simulation found that the U.S. military would run out of Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles (LRASM) within days and Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSMs) within two to three weeks. The center concluded that the U.S. could defeat an invasion of Taiwan, but at a cost of hundreds of aircraft—and more human casualties in a month than Americans had suffered over the past generation of wars combined.

Why the Pentagon Can’t Just Build Its Way Out of the Ammo Crisis

After three years of European and Middle Eastern fighting, the munitions situation is now significantly worse. The U.S. military used up about 25 percent of its JASSMs in the Iran war, according to the RUSI study. A separate CSIS study from May 2026 found that rebuilding those missiles could take until mid-2027; it would take another two years to bring various air defense magazines back to prewar levels, and it would be the 2030s before Washington could replace all the Tomahawk cruise missiles used in the war.

The Pentagon wants to pour gargantuan amounts of money into doing so. The military budget request for fiscal year 2027, a historic $1.5 trillion, includes $52 billion for high-priority munitions—nearly a fivefold increase over the previous year—and another $100 billion to build up the industrial base. On top of the annual military budget, the Trump administration also planned to ask Congress for $200 billion for supplemental Iran war funding, though the administration later shrunk that request and folded much of it into the annual military budget, The Washington Post reports.

A closer look at the budget request shows how unbalanced the math of air defense is. The latest model of Patriot interceptor, the PAC-3, will cost approximately $4 million per unit. (Remember, Arab armies were firing up to eight of them against a single drone.) While the cost of the Shahed 136 is not public knowledge, an Iranian source told the American economics magazine Phenomenal World that each drone costs 6 billion rials, which came out to $4,000 on the most up-to-date exchange rate.

Even more important than the dollar price are the resources and time each weapon takes. Adjusting for the local cost of parts and labor, Phenomenal World calculated that the real equivalent price of a Shahed 136 would be around $7,000 per drone, still much lower than the interceptor used to shoot it down. While a single Shahed factory in Russia can make 5,500 drones per month, the total production of PAC-3s is currently less than 1,000 per year. In the two-year journey of a PAC-3 from order to delivery, new workers must be trained in specialized skills and vetted for security clearances; manufacturer Lockheed Martin has to source parts from more than 400 companies.

The PAC-3 is often competing with other weapons for the same components—and these components compete with other industries and other countries for raw materials. In April 2025, the Chinese government imposed strict export controls on rare earth minerals and permanent magnets, sending the Pentagon on a frantic and expensive quest to identify new sources, according to the CSIS.

Investments can increase production. The United States and its allies have been fairly successful at pumping out more 155mm artillery shells, one of the chief concerns two years ago. But the process of expanding production itself takes years. Lockheed Martin is planning to increase its annual production of the PAC-3s to around 2,000 by fiscal year 2030.

The long time for these investments to pay off is a structural barrier. “The challenge has always been the private sector’s willingness to reinvest profits in production,” says Paul, the former State Department official. “For instance, if you’re a publicly traded company, would you rather have a full 10-year book, or spend a chunk of your own capital to build a new production facility, reducing your book to 5 years, for a system that may be outdated in 10 years?” 

Despite these problems, the United States is still the world’s largest supplier of arms. Its share of the global market has actually grown since 2016, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in Sweden. When journalists ask her whether the United States has sufficient munitions, Grieco always responds, “Sufficient munitions to do what? Because no country other than maybe China has the kind of depth that we do in munitions.”

Ultimately, the issue with munitions is less a shortage of supply and more an excess of demand. The United States wants to be involved in conflicts around the world while retaining the ability to start new ones, such as the Iran war. At the same time, societies like ours “are built on assuming away the prospect of punishment” in war, Logan says.

That’s not sustainable anymore, thanks to advances in missile and drone technology. “Warfare is about larger numbers of smaller, cheaper, plentiful things that strongly favor the defense,” Grieco explains. Ironically, the abundance of offensive weapons means that the defender can punish the attacker more easily.

Rather than trying to fight this trend, the United States can stop putting itself in the position of an attacker. Washington’s chief stated foreign policy goals outside the Middle East are repelling an invasion of Ukraine and deterring an invasion of Taiwan. If the U.S. can resist the temptation to launch more wars, then the technological changes “ought to be good news,” Grieco argues. “We should be leveraging this defensive potential.”

The post America Spent a Fortune Shooting Down Cheap Drones. Now the Missile Stores Are Bare. appeared first on Reason.com.

Throughout his nascent tenure, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has positioned himself as a champion of Big Apple small businesses. Just two weeks onto the job, he declared: “You cannot tell the story of New York without our small businesses.” He went on to decry costly city regulations that have “long made it too hard for these same businesses to open their doors.”

Perhaps on account of his love for food, Mamdani has shown particular adoration for NYC’s network of independently owned bodegas: “I can’t imagine New York City without bodegas. They represent our hustle and entrepreneurial spirit.” But so far, the mayor’s self-proclaimed concern for the little guy has proven more rhetoric than reality—especially in the realm of groceries.

Mamdani’s primary initiative in the grocery space, of course, has been to push his $70 million plan to build a city-owned grocery store in each of Gotham’s five boroughs. But during a New York City Council hearing last week, the mayor’s budget chief disclosed that the administration has failed to conduct a small-business impact study on how these government-backed stores would affect nearby mom-and-pop outlets, which operate on thin profit margins.

The lack of concern does not come as a surprise to those who are familiar with how this story has played out. Despite the Mamdani administration’s claim that it would target so-called “food deserts” when it came to placing the government-owned stores, the sites selected so far are scarcely bereft of food.

There are already several bodegas and small grocers within blocks of the planned East Harlem site for one of the government-backed stores. A Fox News digital analysis found roughly 45 grocery stores within a 35-minute walk of the proposed location. Out of the 500 largest cities in the U.S., a recent study ranked New York as the third-best city for grocery access, outperforming San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., among many others.

This matters. Mamdani’s stores will be operating at a distinct advantage compared to private grocers: They will not have to pay rent or property taxes. Annual rental prices for storefronts in East Harlem average from $120 to $225 per square foot for high-traffic corridors and $65 to $120 per square foot for secondary retail. For the former, a 1,000-square foot retail space would cost between $10,000 and $18,750 to rent each month; for the latter, it would be between $5,000 and $10,000. (Multiply that by many times, as the city-owned grocery store in East Harlem is slated to be 9,000 square feet.)

The grocery business is also notorious for its tight profit margins—usually hovering around 1-3 percent—further underscoring the potential threat posed by rent-free and tax-free competitors. As a result, local independent grocery stores are pushing the city council to intervene against Mamdani’s government outlets.

The president of the National Supermarket Association, which represents 450 independent grocery stores inside the city, called the government-backed stores a “slap in the face.” One bodega owner pointed out that the irony of the city “using our tax money to compete with us,” since the property taxes that private stores pay will functionally help offset the tax-free existence of the new government-operated competitor stores.

Supporters of the mayor’s plan might argue that competition from a mere five stores spread throughout a city as immense as NYC will have little real impact on existing private grocers. But not every lawmaker wants to stop at five stores.

Last week, a new bill was introduced in the New York City Council to make the city-owned stores permanent and to expand the number to five per borough. “Let’s make sure it’s not something that just our current mayor invests in, but something we can codify into in perpetuity,” said Jennifer Gutiérrez (D–Brooklyn), the sponsor of the bill, in an interview with The City Reporter.

While some have questioned whether Mamdani’s subsidized stores will actually result in cheaper food prices, it’s clear that the mayor himself is unconcerned by that skepticism—and in fact views his stores as a market competitor to be reckoned with. “Now, some will insist that city-owned businesses do not work, the government cannot keep up with corporations,” said Mamdani. “My answer to them is simple. I look forward to the competition.”

The main competitors, however, will not be massive corporations. They will be the nearby mom-and-pop bodegas the mayor says he loves.

The post The Mayor Who Loves Bodegas Is Building Taxpayer-Funded Competitors appeared first on Reason.com.

The United States has gotten used to specific ways of ending wars. Sometimes the U.S. military decisively forces the enemy state to surrender, imposes a new political order, and gets it to stick, as in Germany and Japan in the 1940s or Panama in the 1990s. Other times, rebels wear down U.S. resources and willpower before decisively kicking out U.S. forces, as in Vietnam in 1975 or Afghanistan in 2021.

But the Iran war is ending with something quite unfamiliar to Washington: compromise. The United States and Iran were unable to defeat each other in the first round, and, staring at an unacceptably costly escalation, they came to the table. While a final deal hasn’t been agreed to, the ceasefire memorandum commits both sides to giving things up, with the U.S. promising to lift all economic sanctions if Iran negotiates away its nuclear program.

Big parts of Washington are not taking it well, with Republicans and Democrats alike calling the peace a “blunder” or even a “surrender.” It’s one thing to object to specific terms of the truce. The U.S. may be promising too much and demanding too little at the outset. But some criticisms would apply to any kind of two-sided deal with a former enemy. For hawks, failure to secure the enemy’s surrender is itself a form of U.S. “surrender.” Simply put, hawks have forgotten how to make peace.

Conservative journalist and presidential confidante Mark Levin claims that the memorandum makes the mistake of “trying to incentivize the behavior of 7th century barbaric Islamists with promises of money” and that “the West is being conquered” by agreeing to stop the war short of Iranian surrender. Others have argued that a deal shouldn’t have any benefits for Iran, regardless of what Iran is offering in return. Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) said that a deal shouldn’t “give Iran any money,” because “they’re not great actors.”

To borrow a Russian turn of phrase, this mentality is недоговороспособность, or “agreement incapability.” An agreement-incapable actor approaches diplomacy as nothing but a weapon “to delay, deceive, and destabilise its opponents.” (Levin, for example, suggested using the current negotiations to buy time for restarting the war after the U.S. midterm elections.) The agreement-incapable mind cannot imagine talks leading to “a mutually beneficial settlement.”

In fact, this mindset is baked into U.S. law. Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has repeatedly bragged about his role in creating a “sanctions wall” to prevent a deal. He pushed the first Trump administration to impose layers of economic sanctions on Iran under different pretexts, from the nuclear issue to human rights, so that a future administration could not resume trade with Iran without resolving all of those issues.

To be clear, sanctions relief costs American taxpayers nothing, and some of it will benefit American business interests. For example, the U.S. government will immediately license Iran to spend $6 billion in its own oil revenues on American agricultural products, according to the Financial Times.

But hawks are alarmed at giving away U.S. leverage. Former Rep. Tom Malinowski (D–N.J.) complained that Iran would get relief from sanctions “on human rights abusers and sponsors of terror, with zero Iranian concessions on those issues.” Dubowitz’s sanctions wall worked. In order to offer Iran normal economic relations, President Donald Trump will have to pick a domestic political fight over inflammatory issues like human rights and terrorism.

There are serious criticisms to be made about the memorandum. It is vague about the nuclear concessions Iran has to make to unlock full sanctions relief. Vice President J.D. Vance has implied that there are unwritten “gentleman’s agreements,” which is not exactly reassuring. While the memorandum forces Iran to stop extorting shipping in the Strait of Hormuz in the immediate term, it leaves the “future administration” of the strait up for negotiations.

Any conversation over the costs and benefits of the deal also has to take into account the costs and benefits of the alternatives. In fact, it was trying those alternatives that gave Iran leverage in the first place. Trump started down the road hawks wanted by bombing Iran, calling for regime change, and promising “no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.” The war didn’t collapse the Iranian government, but it did give Iran the opportunity to harass shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, holding the world’s oil economy hostage.

Trump searched in vain for a cost-free escalation, only to discover that none existed. A ground raid to take away Iran’s sources of leverage, its enriched uranium and its oil export terminal, would expose U.S. troops to serious casualties. Escalating the air war by bombing critical Iranian infrastructure would provoke Iran to do the same to its oil-rich neighbors. Trying to sneak ships through the strait during the ceasefire was provoking near-nightly naval combat.

Even maintaining the status quo was rapidly depleting oil inventories around the world, which would have forced either rapid price hikes or outright shortages by the beginning of July, as oil executives were warning. Trump ultimately concluded that the deal was the least bad option. That conclusion, of course, is up for debate. But much of the hawkish rhetoric is meant to shut out debate with emotional cries about surrendering to evil and losing honor.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan—which, unlike the stalemate with Iran, involved an unambiguous U.S. surrender—is a cautionary tale. After the U.S. military overthrew the Taliban government in 2001, the Bush administration declared that it was “not inclined to negotiate surrenders” and turned down the chance to integrate Taliban supporters into the new government.

Nearly two decades of civil war later, the Taliban underground had gained so much strength that both Trump and Joe Biden decided that Afghanistan was a lost cause. Trump cut a deal for an orderly withdrawal, which Biden upheld, only for it to become violent chaos anyway when the Taliban stormed Kabul while U.S. troops were still there in August 2021.

The Bush administration similarly turned down a deal with Iran itself, which offered up a “grand bargain” including everything from its nuclear program to its support for Hamas and Hezbollah in 2002. In return, Iranian leaders wanted an end to U.S. sanctions and a guarantee of noninterference in U.S. politics. A quarter-century and two wars later, the Trump administration is getting less than Iran was offering in 2002 for the same price. Unlike in Afghanistan, the administration is at least getting something from Iran.

Again, the rhetoric about surrender and humiliation is not about weighing the relative merits of that deal or whether a better one is possible. It is about ensuring that there will be no deal at all. And, ironically, that strategy has already led to an actual U.S. surrender at least once.

The post Compromise With Iran Isn't 'Surrender' appeared first on Reason.com.

Major League Baseball (MLB) found itself mired in controversy this past week after three San Francisco Giants players—Landen Roupp, J.T. Brubaker, and Ryan Walker—inscribed Bible verses on their hats that had been designed for the team’s Pride night. Another, Sam Hentges, declined to wear the hat altogether. Whether people were mad at the players for their lack of pride or at the team and league for their alleged abundance of pride depends on vantage point. But people were mad.

Put differently, we are living in Groundhog Day, but make it gay. We’ve had this fight before. Around and around we have gone. A lot of people are wrong. So why are we still doing this?

The MLB may be wondering the same thing. “We have told teams, in terms of actual uniforms, hats, bases that we don’t think putting logos on them is a good idea just because of the desire to protect players,” said MLB commissioner Rob Manfred in 2023, “not putting them in a position of doing something that may make them uncomfortable because of their personal views.” The Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers, however, have continued incorporating the Pride uniforms because of a standing agreement.

This fight is not constrained to the outfield or the infield or the minefield-ridden culture war battlefield. “I write with grave concern over your reported decision to issue a formal warning to three Major League Baseball (MLB) players for publicly expressing their Christian faith,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) said in a letter to Manfred. “You must answer for what appears to be a pattern of discrimination within MLB against baseball players who profess their Christian faith.” The senator was joined by other government actors promising to intervene, including the U.S. Department of Justice’s Harmeet Dhillon, who referred the league to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for an investigation.

“This routine verbal warning not to wear the hat in future games is not disciplinary and had absolutely nothing to do with the content of the message,” the league said in a statement. “We respect players’ right to free expression. However, writing of any kind, with any message, is prohibited per Major League Baseball’s uniform regulations….We have given the same warning numerous times in the past to players for messages such as ‘Dad,’ ‘Happy Mother’s Day, I Love Mom’ and names of family members.”

Dear reader, you are entitled to the view that such a policy is silly. You are also entitled to the view that teams could and should avoid this carousel ride of controversy altogether by not politicizing uniforms. But the MLB’s rule is unequivocally, uncontroversially protected by the First Amendment. Yes, the league receives subsidies (too many, in fact!). So do many private organizations and companies: Amazon, Intel, Boeing, Ford, tech companies and agricultural companies and energy companies and on. That does not mean they forfeit their constitutional rights. Baseball is a symbol of Americana, after all. Appropriately, it is not an arm of the U.S. government.

One person who provides a good reminder that this is constitutionally protected is, ironically, Dhillon. “The Civil Rights Act prohibits MLB and its franchises from unreasonably burdening the rights of players with religious objections to serving as the League’s vehicle for pro-Pride messages,” she writes in her letter. “Federal law is clear: employers must modify their uniform requirements to reasonably accommodate their employees’ exercise of religion.”

They did. The Pride hats were not mandatory; Hentges opted out, which players are permitted to do, and he thus received no verbal warning. That is “reasonably accommodat[ing]” by every measure. A team offered its employees clothing that aligned with its values and the league enforced rules it has about writing messages on uniforms—two things that are indisputably within the purview of private actors. If a franchise gave players hats inscribed with the Ichthys (a.k.a. the Jesus fish), it would be similarly vindicated in admonishing employees who added anti-religious screeds.

The difference, of course, is that an MLB team offering such a hat would be nearly beyond belief, including (maybe even more so?) to the devoutly religious. Which does tell you something.

Teams are working toward a collective. But they are made up of individuals. Some players are religious, some are not. Some support gay rights, some do not. Some believe ranch dressing is the best condiment, some have no taste. This is, fortunately, their right. “I’m thankful we live in a country where, you know, we have the freedom to believe what we want…and express what we want,” Roupp said after the game last week. Pressuring players under a national microscope to take sides on any given political issue mostly just breeds conflict for the sake of virtue signaling. And for what? Expressions of support—for gay rights, or for anything—mean much more when they are done voluntarily, by your own initiative, on your own time.

“By resorting to ‘us’ and ‘them’ instead of truly understanding the humanity of the people asking for help, those who chose to make a statement on or with their hats completely missed the point,” wrote Grant Brisbee in a viral column for The Athletic, a subsidiary of The New York Times. “If anyone is looking to make the world better, they might try listening and understanding.” The author, respectfully, could stand to take his own advice.

The post Major League Baseball Teams Have the Right To Offer Pride Uniforms. Should They? appeared first on Reason.com.