President Donald Trump loves a data center: Last year, the president signed an executive order that “expedites federal permitting, facilitates construction on federal land and makes qualifying projects eligible for financial incentives,” notes The Washington Post. Trump is a huge fan, but much of the rest of his party reflects voters’ fears that data centers will burden residential areas.

Data centers—the huge warehouses needed to store all the specialized hardware that’s required to run AI models—have grown in salience as a political problem in recent months.

Building out and using AI models at scale requires enormous computational demands; data centers, which consume large amounts of energy, are necessary to power these models. A huge data center could create demands that power grids weren’t built for and can’t effectively handle, leading to service outages for residential areas. It’s also possible that costs of improving grids—to serve AI companies—could be passed on to households via rate increases paid by all customers.

That said, if we want more AI applications, and believe them to potentially be transformative, we’re going to need more computing power. And we’re going to need more data centers. (But you can perhaps understand why some people, when met with the “AI might render work as we know it obsolete” line, don’t feel especially accommodating.)

“If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it because the jobs are enormous, and the money paid, the taxes paid are just enormous,” Trump said last week.

Contrast this with how Republican politicians are talking about them. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced a moratorium on data centers within his state earlier this month, saying his regulators need to determine whether the power grid can handle the new facilities. (Right now, Texas appears to have 335 data centers, second in number only to Virginia.) The Wisconsin gubernatorial race has featured Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Republican, repeatedly arguing that his opponent, Democrat David Crowley, is soft on data centers, and that Tiffany will protect residents of his state from the scourge. In Michigan, Mike Rogers—who is running for Senate as the Republican against Democrat/socialist Abdul El-Sayed—has called for a moratorium on new data center construction (a reversal of how he had been talking about them). In Florida, Rep. Byron Donalds, who won the Republican primary for governor, says he’ll “protect” the state from data centers, also a reversal of how he had formerly approached the issue.

“The Senate GOP campaign arm, in a private memo to top AI companies, warns that toxic views of U.S. data centers are killing the party’s chances of holding a vital seat in Ohio,” reported Axios last week. “In the memo, obtained by Axios, the National Republican Senatorial Committee says Democrats have made data centers a ‘centerpiece’ of their campaign to defeat Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio)—and that it’s working. ‘If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice—and they will not go near the next one,’ the memo says. ‘This has become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle.'”

So why are so many Republicans so willing to break with Trump on this issue, when fealty to El Jefe has for so long been table stakes?

“Trump just personally cares about this topic,” an anonymous source familiar with his thinking told The Washington Post. “You just can’t change his mind about it.” But polling data indicates other Republicans are doing a better job of reading the room: Per Pew data back in March, “around one-in-five Americans or more say they aren’t sure of data centers’ impact in each of the five areas we asked about. Others say these facilities have neither a positive nor negative impact in each area or haven’t heard about data centers at all.” Now, voters seem to have heard an awful lot more about them, and made up their minds: An August poll from The Economist/YouGov found that 61 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built in their community, including 47 percent of Republicans. More than half of Americans disagree with Trump’s perspective on data centers when asked about it.

Scenes from New York: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) just renewed her lapsed membership in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) after a seven-year hiatus. What could this mean? Is she gearing up for a presidential run? A Senate run? Something more nefarious?

QUICK HITS

• “A Russian barrage of missiles and drones hit a children’s hospital, a school, apartments and warehouses around Kyiv last week, killing at least 16 people. Ukraine, lacking Patriot interceptors, didn’t shoot down any of Russia’s ballistic missiles. Ukraine’s response this week included a drone strike that caused a massive fire at one of Russia’s largest oil refineries, near Nizhny Novgorod, on Wednesday. Meanwhile, in the central Russian region of Tambov, a warehouse belonging to e-commerce giant Wildberries burned,” notes The Wall Street Journal. “The air war between Russia and Ukraine has entered a new phase. With expanded aerial arsenals and inadequate air defenses, both sides are bludgeoning each other in a bare-knuckle fight that is causing a widening swath of destruction and a rising civilian toll.”
• “Hispanics make up about 15% of the U.S. population. The percentage of Hispanic Americans identifying as religiously unaffiliated rose steadily from 18% in 2013 to 23% in 2025,” reports Axios, per Public Religion Research Institute data. “Among Catholic Latinos, the declines were historic. An Axios review of Pew Research Center data found that the share of Latino adults identifying as Catholic plummeted from 67% in 2010 to 43% in 2022.”
• Tim Carney has a great thread calling into question government-produced walkability indices. He has better ideas for how we could measure this:

This, btw, would be revolutionary: Make a walkability index. Then empirically measure if people are walking more in the "more walkable" places. https://t.co/CQ1cDW9eHL

— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) August 26, 2026

• Yayoi Kusama, the pop artist who was obsessed with both polka dots and depicting the phallus (as a means of overcoming earlier traumas), died earlier this week. I loved Kusama, who was helped along by Donald Judd, king of minimalism.
• Imagine using Italian-made AI for your antifa group. They’re not sending them their best!

Breaking: The US State Dept has connected Portland's Rose City Antifa to a foreign tech company that provides infrastructure to violent far-left extremist organizations.

The Oregon-based terror group has been using Italy-based A/I Collective to disseminate target information,…

— Katie Daviscourt (@KatieDaviscourt) August 26, 2026

The post Data Center Savior appeared first on Reason.com.

One of the most enduring principles of liberty is owning property. “America’s Founders understood clearly that private property is the foundation not only of prosperity but of freedom itself,” Roger Pilon, founder of the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies, wrote in 2017.

And yet all too often, bureaucrats put unnecessary rules and regulations on how we can use our property. One couple is fighting with their town over the right to just let people go for a walk on their land.*

Charles Copley met his wife, Elizabeth, at Oxford University, while they were each pursuing a Ph.D. After living a few years in his native South Africa, they moved with their children to Connecticut to be closer to Elizabeth’s family.

Wanting to make the area their permanent home, they purchased two plots of rural land in Roxbury totaling 50 acres in 2022. They hoped not only to live on the land but to really make it their own: farming, planting, and otherwise tailoring the property to their family while protecting and preserving its natural beauty.

They hired a forester to draw up a 10-year forest management plan, which the town approved, and then began removing invasive species and cutting miles of walking trails throughout all 50 acres.

The trails would keep the invasive plants at bay, but they would also need to be maintained. To help accomplish that, the Copleys started using Sniffspot, an app like Airbnb that lets property owners rent out land by the hour for hikes or dog walks. They only charged $10 per hour, while the app handled scheduling and processed the payments. In return, the steady foot traffic would keep the trails from being overrun.

That worked well for several months—until April 2025, when the Copleys suddenly received a letter from the city. A zoning enforcement officer wrote that the Copleys were “operating a ‘dog park,'” and he warned, “this business cease operation unless the home enterprise requirements are met.”

As it happened, the town had adopted an ordinance one week earlier that regulated short-term rentals, like Airbnb. But as Charles tells Reason, “one of the things that that short-term rental ordinance did was to prohibit any kind of hourly rentals.” (Elizabeth says that when they raised an objection at an earlier town meeting, they were told—inaccurately, it turned out—that the ordinance would not affect them.)

Confused but hoping not to run afoul of the law, the Copleys applied for a home enterprise license. But their property consisted of two plots, and the trails covered both; town officials said they couldn’t cover two plots with the same business license. They could apply to join the plots together, but that would involve an expensive surveying process, potentially decrease the value of the property, and prevent them from being able to freely build on it in the future.

This set off several months of conversations in which officials gave conflicting answers on how the Copleys could legally let people hike on their property, and when pressed, they could not point to a specific town ordinance that forbade it.

To reiterate, the conduct at issue is charging $10 per hour to hike on their land.

This was only meant to be a very minor part of the Copleys’ overall yearslong plan for their property. “I am running a farm here, I need to be able to make a plan,” Charles says. “I’ve got nut trees I want to plant. I’ve got invasives I need to remove.” And yet the hiking trails have taken up an inordinate amount of the family’s time.

On Thursday, the Institute for Justice (I.J.), a public interest law firm, sent a letter to the town of Roxbury on the Copleys’ behalf.

“We’d like the town to tell us what ordinance prohibits the Copleys from inviting people onto their property for a small fee, to walk on their trails in the same way that…any other private landowner would be allowed to invite people onto their property,” I.J. senior attorney Ari Bargil tells Reason. “And if there is no such ordinance that they can point to, we’d like the town to confirm that they could resume their operation as they were before, peacefully and harmlessly allowing people onto their property.”

While the town’s ordinances don’t explicitly address by-the-hour trail rentals, the letter notes, “all agricultural uses—and all attendant ‘accessory uses’—are permitted by-right,” meaning they conform to existing zoning codes and are inherently allowed. The letter notes that Roxbury already approved the Copleys’ forest management plan, which “identifies recreational uses like hunting, hiking, wildlife watching, snowshoeing, and cross-country skiing as consistent with the broader goals of ‘[e]xpand[ing] and improv[ing] the trail system for forest fire suppression, forest management,'” and “‘property maintenance.'”

The case is particularly galling because it involves prohibiting the use of one’s property in whatever way they see fit, even just using an app to let people hike. “The government’s stance seems to be that because something isn’t expressly permitted, it must therefore be prohibited,” Bargil adds.

But if anything, the app actually introduces a level of security that would be missing in a previous era, when by-the-hour trail rentals would just be conducted by word of mouth and cash under the table.

“One of the things that was really important to us was to know who the person was that was on our property and when,” Charles says. “I actually think that this is a more regulated use than a lot of public parks: I know who the person is, I meet them, I explain how everything works. So it’s even more bizarre to me that this would be a problem.”

The letter demands an answer by September 30, otherwise, the Copleys will resume hosting hikers on October 1.

*CORRECTION: This article originally misstated the Copleys’ demands.

The post A Connecticut Couple Is Fighting for the Right To Let People Hike on Their Land appeared first on Reason.com.

Police officials in Manchester, England, said officers did nothing wrong when they arrested a man carrying a baseball bat in the city center. Video of the arrest, which showed an officer tackling the man to the ground, went viral, sparking criticism online. The man, who wasn’t named, was later released with no further action because investigators could not prove he intended to use the bat as a weapon. Under British law, carrying an ordinary object such as a baseball bat in public is not a crime unless police can show the person carrying intended to use it to harm someone.

The post Brickbat: Swing and a Miss appeared first on Reason.com.

Last April, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that it was reviewing the broadcast licenses held by ABC’s eight network-owned TV stations years before they were scheduled for renewal. The FCC had not conducted an early review of any broadcast license in more than half a century, and it had never done so simultaneously for all the stations operated by a particular network.

That unprecedented action, ABC and its parent company, Disney, argue in a federal lawsuit filed last week, is part of an unconstitutional intimidation campaign that has already had a chilling impact on broadcast journalism. A bipartisan group of former FCC officials, including commissioners appointed by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, agrees that the agency has launched “an assault on free speech disguised as regulatory process” to “punish speech disfavored by the Trump administration.”

President Donald Trump has been threatening to yank the licenses of broadcasters who irk him since his first term. But this time around, the FCC’s Trump-appointed chairman, Brendan Carr, seems eager to act on that vindictive impulse.

Carr portrays the ABC review as a response to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs that may qualify as “unlawful discrimination.” But he has made it clear that the FCC also is considering the broader question of whether ABC’s stations are serving “the public interest,” a vague statutory mandate that he views as a license to override freedom of the press.

The president’s beef with ABC includes news coverage he views as overwhelmingly negative, its fact-checking during a 2024 presidential debate, anti-Trump commentary on shows such as The View and Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and the network’s refusal to air his July 16 primetime speech, which followed a long line of similar calls by TV networks under prior administrations. Carr, who routinely amplifies such complaints, agrees that they demand the FCC’s attention.

Shortly after taking office, Carr reopened an FCC investigation of ABC’s allegedly biased debate moderation. Last September, Carr threatened ABC stations with fines or license revocation if they failed to punish Kimmel for suggesting that conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassin was a Trump supporter.

Carr, who announced the early review of ABC’s licenses the day after Trump and his wife objected to a joke Kimmel had made on his show, says the network’s decision against broadcasting Trump’s speech will figure in that process, which could drag on for years. Carr also has threatened to rescind The View‘s longstanding “bona fide news exemption” from the FCC’s “equal time” rule, which in practice would amount to a ban on interviews with political candidates.

Such regulatory threats have an observable impact. ABC and its affiliates immediately met Carr’s demands by suspending Kimmel’s show for a week last fall, The View has stopped interviewing political candidates, and ABC says it carried Trump’s whole speech on its streaming channel only because it was worried about antagonizing the FCC.

The effects extend beyond ABC. Once TV networks understand that the FCC’s objections to their reporting or editorial judgments can pose an existential threat to the stations they operate, they are apt to think twice before making decisions that might upset the president.

From Carr’s perspective, that is the whole point. “Through this proceeding,” the former FCC officials say, the commission “seeks to censor Disney’s and ABC’s speech and send a chilling message to all broadcasters: carry speech we don’t like at your peril.”

Carr, an avowed First Amendment champion, improbably claims he is trying to “re-empower local TV stations” by “reminding them” about their “unique public interest obligations.” It is hard to see how threatening to put broadcasters out of business empowers them to do anything but kowtow to the president.

“It’s not our role to be the speech police,” Carr told Politico last month. Yet Carr, who brags that Trump is “winning” his fight against “the fake news media,” clearly sees himself as a warrior in that battle, which conflates “the public interest” with the president’s personal grievances.

© Copyright 2026 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

The post Brendan Carr's Vendetta Against ABC Conflates the 'Public Interest' With Trump's Personal Grievances appeared first on Reason.com.

The surveillance contractor Flock Safety argues that police customers don’t need a warrant to track drivers with its automated license plate reading cameras because drivers have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” on public roads. So YouTube host Benn Jordan applied the same logic back on Flock. He sat outside Flock’s recent police convention in Atlanta with radio equipment and a drone, which he used to unmask attendees and even listen to microphones inside the convention hall.

“Flock values their privacy. Oh well,” Jordan wrote in the title of his video on the convention.

His plans didn’t quite start out that way. Jordan, an early and outspoken critic of Flock, wanted to visit the convention to see what the relationship between police and the company was like after a string of cases in Georgia involving police misusing Flock products, he tells Reason. After downloading the conference app, he looked inside the source code and found that it revealed the entire guest list. Jordan alerted Flock to the data breach.

Once the company caught wind that Jordan was coming, it canceled his tickets. But the attempts to keep Jordan out went further than that. An employee from Flock called the hotel to cancel Jordan’s room reservation, which he had booked himself, according to a video Jordan posted of a call with the hotel. (Flock did not respond to Reason‘s request for comment.) Jordan even found out that all of the rest of the rooms and even the parking lots surrounding the hotel had been booked.

Still, he was able to find a public parking spot within view of the hotel, where he parked a van with dozens of WiFi adapters, a parabolic dish antenna, and a dipole array. This equipment picked up the signal from the convention hall’s wireless microphones, allowing Jordan to hear attendees’ conversations. “Everything was on public channels,” he says. Then he used a drone to photograph attendees walking out and used facial recognition to figure out their identities.

Ironically, government regulations helped Jordan with his surveillance, because the Federal Communications Commission limits wireless microphones to broadcast on very specific frequencies.

Although it’s within a private company’s right to choose who can and can’t come to its conference—and Jordan acknowledges that keeping outsiders away from the hotel can be a reasonable security measure—many of the attendees were police officials, presumably attending on the taxpayer dime. More fundamentally, it’s an issue of different rights for different people. While Flock and its police customers are happy to erode the expectation of privacy in everyday life, they carve out ultra-private spaces for themselves.

Indeed, Jordan is careful not to reveal anything he picked up from his radio surveillance, telling Reason that the point was simply to show that it could be done. “Public officials should know that you can’t go to a private thing where journalists aren’t allowed and not expect anybody to fly a drone from public view. You should be a little unsettled about going to something like that,” Jordan adds. He says that he’s ultimately happy that his stunt drew attention to the lack of transparency.

Although automatic license plate readers have been raising privacy concerns for years, the growth of Flock is particularly alarming because the company plugs police departments around the country into a central database that isn’t subject to court orders or the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. And the lack of oversight isn’t just theoretical. Police officers have been caught using Flock data to stalk romantic interests. One woman spent two weeks in jail, and another was detained at gunpoint because of mistaken identifications from Flock cameras.

The American public is becoming increasingly hostile to these cameras. At least 56 cities and towns have ended their Flock contracts in 2026 over privacy concerns. Ring, a doorbell camera company owned by Amazon, also canceled its planned partnership with Flock over public backlash. More alarmingly, citizens have started vandalizing the cameras.

Jordan, whose YouTube channel covers eclectic science topics from animal hearing to modern train synthesizers, accidentally found himself at the forefront of the movement against Flock. He saw mysterious new cameras in his neighborhood early last year, followed his instincts to reverse engineer everything, and found security vulnerabilities allowing anyone to access Flock footage without a password.

In response to Jordan’s video, Flock CEO Garrett Langley sent officials around the country a letter in December 2025 claiming that “Flock has never been hacked” and is “under coordinated attack…from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness.” The city of Staunton, Virginia, published the letter in its announcement that it was ending its relationship with Flock.

Although he hasn’t gotten any response for his surveillance of the Flock conference, Jordan tells Reason that he’s had police show up outside his house “and just blast their siren” in the past. He claims he also spotted a private investigator (who is unlicensed and a convicted felon) hanging around his house, but couldn’t figure out who hired them.

Despite the unwanted attention, Jordan has continued speaking to city councils and police departments around the country. While he says that he would prefer no license plate tracking to begin with, he has been pitching a solution to cities that are going to do it anyway: locally owned cameras feeding into locally owned databases that police need a warrant from a judge to access.

“I want there to be an end to this investigation…I generally never make a video about the same thing twice,” Jordan tells Reason. “But unfortunately, I have cameras everywhere all around my neighborhood, so I can’t not think about it.”

The post This YouTuber Got Kicked Out of the Flock Convention. So He Ran His Own Surveillance. appeared first on Reason.com.

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump’s latest round of tariffs against Canada went into effect as talks between the two countries collapsed after weeks of negotiations.

As always, Trump’s protectionism is shortsighted and self-defeating. This particular round risks alienating one of our closest allies and trading partners with little to show for it in return.

Last month, Trump announced 50 percent tariffs on a number of Canadian goods, some of which were already subject to tariffs.

The order was only expected to affect about $20 billion in total goods, totaling just under 5 percent of all U.S. imports from Canada. But it targeted a confusing jumble of products: The largest targets included lumber, alcohol, dairy, and textiles, but they also encompassed flags, Christmas ornaments, hockey sticks, dog leashes, and wigs.

In a Truth Social post Monday, Trump said he had added “all Cars, Trucks, both large and small, Automotive Parts, and Steel” to the list.

In February, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Trump’s previous attempt to impose tariffs on the rest of the world. Other statutes—like Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930—also would have allowed Trump to implement tariffs, though with more restrictions.

Trump’s new tariffs cite Section 338, which has not been invoked in over 75 years. It’s almost certain to face further judicial scrutiny: “This part of Smoot-Hawley was superseded long ago” and “has never been used to impose a tariff,” Philip Zelikow, senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, wrote last year.

“Even by the standards of Trump’s second term,” added Reason‘s Eric Boehm, “this latest move against Canada seems economically illiterate and legally dubious.”

Canada and Mexico have been targets of Trump’s ire since his first term, when he scrapped the quarter-century-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and replaced it with the U.S.–Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), a nearly identical treaty that he called “the best agreement we’ve ever made.” Then last month, the administration announced it would not renew the agreement, and Trump imposed new tariffs just a couple of weeks later.

Trump has offered different reasons, many of them simply ridiculous, from combating the flow of fentanyl across the northern border to insisting that Canada must become the 51st U.S. state. (After talks fell apart last week, Trump said Canada wanted “the benefits of being a State, without being one.”)

Even if Trump’s new tariffs do result in additional revenue—which of course will come from American consumers—it’s hard to imagine it’s worth the damage being done to the U.S.’s relationship with one of its largest trading partners.

“The United States and Canada enjoy the world’s most comprehensive trading relationship, which supports millions of jobs in each country,” totaling “nearly $2.6 billion a day in goods and services,” according to a 2022 fact sheet from the U.S. State Department. “Canada and the United States are each other’s largest export markets, and Canada is the number one export market for more than 30 U.S. states.”

“Canada has consistently been one of the top two trading partners for the United States,” adds the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. “Most recently, in 2024, Canada was the top destination for U.S. exports and the third-largest source of U.S. imports. Canada exported over three-quarters of its goods to the United States and imported almost half of its goods from the United States.” Trade between the two countries totaled “an estimated $872.3 billion in 2025.”

Yet Trump is willing to risk that entire relationship over…what, exactly?

In various proclamations, Trump cited actions Canada had taken against certain American products, like dairy and alcohol. But “these policies originated as retaliation for earlier, unjustified American tariffs on Canadian products,” writes Cato Institute trade policy analyst Alfredo Carrillo Obregon. “The Trump administration is weaponizing Section 338 in response to policies engendered by its own weaponization of other executive trade authorities.”

In turn, he is alienating one of our closest allies.

“We have recognised from the beginning that America has changed, and that we will not return to our old relationship,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a statement. “Our government understood, before many, that America is altering all its trade relationships. Putting tariffs on its closest allies and charging for access to its vast market.”

When the U.S.’ tariffs go into effect, Carney said he would “match those tariffs dollar for dollar.”

Carney is not the only Canadian official to recognize Trump’s unreliability. “Everybody knows the American president by now, he’s erratic, he’s irresponsible, and he’s not to be trusted,” Wab Kinew, Premier of Manitoba, said last week. “And this is the person that we were supposed to make a deal with, and we’re going to make additional concessions for it. That’s why I say you can’t make a good deal with a bad person, because who’s to say it’s not going to be undone?”

“He underestimates Canada. We’re all in,” added Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who said Trump had “declared war, economic war against his closest friend and ally.” Ford later added, “He can kiss my ass.”

Hopefully, whenever Trump exits the White House, whoever replaces him has some appreciation for free trade. In the meantime, there’s no telling how many of our international agreements he’ll blow up, with little or nothing in return.

The post Trump Threatens U.S. Relationship With Canada as Trade Talks Collapse appeared first on Reason.com.

Yesterday, Donald Trump imposed massive 50% tariffs on numerous Canadian imports after trade negotiations with Canada broke down, largely due to the Trump administration’s insistence on maintaining earlier 50% tariffs on Canadian aluminum products and other goods.

Section 338 was a part of the notorious Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which gravely exacerbated the Great Depression. In a previous post, I summarized the reasons why Section 338 tariffs are an illegal usurpation of congressional authority by the president.

As Philip Zelikow of the conservative Hoover Institution explained in a guest post here at the VC blog, last year, Section 338 was superseded by new legislation enacted in 1962 and 1974, and is therefore defunct. For that reason, it has not been used to impose tariffs since at least the 1940s.

In a more recent guest post, Georgetown University trade law specialist Peter Harrell explained why the then-planned Canada tariffs are illegal even if Section 338 is not defunct. Trump’s tariffs don’t meet various requirements for invoking the law. I expect there will be legal challenges to these tariffs, and those challenges will deserve to prevail.

This is the latest of a series of efforts by Trump to usurp congressional tariff authority and impose harmful and dangerous trade restrictions that damage the US economy and poison relations with key allies and trading partners, of which Canada is one of the most important. These usurpations include the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court in February, in a case I helped bring, the  Section 122 tariffs  invalidated by the US Court of International Trade in April (the case has been appealed, and his massive new Section 301 tariffs imposed on the bogus pretext of combating “forced labor.”

Courts should continue to strike down these power grabs. And, as I explained in my recent Dispatch article on the Section 301 tariffs, they should learn from previous mistakes, and refuse to stay injunctions imposed against illegal tariffs:

The post Trump Imposes Harmful and Illegal Section 338 Tariffs Against Many Canadian Imports appeared first on Reason.com.

Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek and the great political philosopher John Stuart Mill both reached generally libertarian conclusions. But, as prominent Harvard law Porf. and political theorist Cass Sunstein points out in an excellent recent post, they did so for quite different reasons:

Mill was a romantic about choosers (about you and me, and what we know, and what we are capable of), while Hayek was not a romantic about choosers at all (not close). He was a romantic, or something like that, about undesigned orders and traditions, and a skeptic about planners.

Mill put a bright spotlight on individuals, their knowledge, their potential, and their agency. Hayek put a bright spotlight on markets and traditions, and on government planners and what they cannot know.

In sum, Mill emphasized the merits of individual freedom of choice, which he famously argued would enable each person to exercise control over his or her affairs, and result in valuable “experiments in living.” By contrast, Hayek emphasized the defects of government planners, and their lack of knowledge.

As Sunstein notes, these two ideas are not inherently opposed. They can even be mutually reinforcing, in so far as they provide alternative justifications for the same conclusion. But there is a tension, in so far as Hayek also emphasized the value of “spontaneous order” and the traditions it generates, which he viewed as better guides to decision-making than the unaided reason of individuals. This contrasts with Mill’s emphasis on individual autonomy and reasoning skills.

Moreover, if tradition is so valuable, as Hayek suggests, why not use government power to enforce it against people who go against it? And if individual reason and experimentation are so beneficial, as Mill argued, why not trust voters’ judgements at the ballot box, and let them use those decisions to constrain individual choice?

I cannot resolve all tensions between these two perspectives. But the gap can be greatly reduced by recognizing that individuals make better decisions in some circumstances than in others. In particular, they do better when the “vote with their feet” than when the vote at the ballot box. And that divergence bolsters both Mill’s confidence in individual autonomy, and Hayek’s condemnation of planning and support for spontaneous order.

As I have explained previously (and more fully in my book book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom), people can vote with their feet by making choices in the private sector, by deciding with jurisdiction to live in within a federal system, and through international migration. What unites these three types of choices is that, in each case, the individual makes a decision that is highly likely to have a decisive impact. By contrast, when you vote at the ballot box, the odds that your vote will have a decisive effect on the outcome are infinitesimally small: usually one chance in a million or even less (perhaps 1 in 60 million in a US presidential election, though the exact figure varies by state).

As a result, foot voters have strong incentives to seek out relevant information and evaluate it objectively. As discussed in my book and elsewhere, historical and experimental evidence shows they often make good decisions even under bad conditions, as in the cases of people fleeing totalitarian regimes that censor information from the outside world, and poorly educated Blacks fleeing slavery and segregation. By contrast, a combination of “rational ignorance” (lack of incentive to seek out political information) and “rational irrationality” (lack of incentive to engage in unbiased evaluation). In combination, these ensure they are often ignorant of very basic political information (such as what the three branches of government are or which officials are responsible for which issues) and often act as biased “political fans” in evaluating the information they do learn.

Once we recognize that individuals generally make much better decisions as foot voters than as ballot box voters, Hayek and Mill’s perspectives are much easier to reconcile.

In the case of Hayek, this distinction can explain why he had respect for traditions developed through “spontaneous order,” but was also highly critical of conservatives’ support for the enforcement of tradition through state power, as in his famous essay “Why I am Not a Conservative.” The answer is that traditions generated by individuals’ foot voting choices are likely to have greater epistemic value than those imposed by force, whether by democratic governments or authoritarian ones.

Hayek was not actually an across-the-board fan of tradition. He was more than willing to reject traditions imposed and perpetuated by government coercion. For example, he rejected anti-sodomy laws and other restrictions on consensual sexual activity, even though they were longstanding traditions. The distinction between foot voting and ballot box voting decisions can help justify this stance.

The same goes for Mill’s emphasis on individual autonomy. Foot voters are likely to make better choices than ballot box voters, and thus also create better “experiments in living.” Mill, in fact, worried greatly about the problem of voter ignorance. In Considerations on Representative Government, he emphasized that voters have a duty to become well-informed, and advocated giving extra votes to more educated voters in order to improve the quality of decision-making.

But he failed to consider that even relatively more educated voters are still susceptible to rational ignorance (though they do, on average, know more than the less-educated) and still likely to act as biased “political fans.”  Any given set of people are likely to make better decisions when voting with their feet than at the ballot box. The superior incentives of foot voters justify granting them greater scope and autonomy, while tightly limiting the power of government to override their choices.

As I argue in Free to Move and other writings, these circumstances also justify decentralizing government power so as to give people more opportunities to vote with their feet in federal systems. This last is a point consonant with Hayek’s advocacy of decentralized federalism in some of his early writings, including a 1939 article where he emphasized the importance of “do[ing] away with the impediments as to the movement of men, goods, and capital between the states.”

In sum, incorporating the problem of voter ignorance and the informational advantages of foot voting bolster both Hayek’s argument for liberty and Mill’s. Liberty enables people to make better-informed decisions in the private sector, thus reinforcing Mill’s emphasis on autonomy. Voter ignorance further reduces the quality of government planning, thereby bolstering Hayek’s argument against the latter, while helping to explain why he supported some traditions, but not others.

The points covered here don’t do away with all differences between Mill and Hayek. And, by themselves, they don’t make a comprehensive case for a libertarian/classical liberal political system. But they do show how the superior decision-making of foot voters relative to ballot box voters bolster both Hayek and Mill’s arguments, and make them mutually reinforcing.

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As if New York City weren’t already an expensive enough place to live, legislation introduced to the City Council could soon make delivering packages in the five boroughs far costlier. Cloaked in the language of improving safety, the bill—recently endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani—is little more than a thinly veiled attempt to strengthen the power of unions.

Introduced by NYC Council Member Tiffany Cabán in February, the misleadingly named “Delivery Protection Act” would require companies like Amazon and FedEx to directly hire employees for last-mile delivery, rather than contracting this service out to subcontractors. Last-mile delivery, which constitutes the final steps a package takes before hitting a consumer’s doorstep, is the most expensive part of the delivery process, since it requires drivers to stop at many homes, often amid dense urban environments. The proposed legislation will only make this type of package delivery more expensive.

One of the main rationales behind the bill is safety. Proponents like Mamdani argue that Amazon’s last-mile delivery service—which relies on subcontractor companies that hire their own workers—exacerbates traffic safety incidents in the Big Apple. Under this theory, ending the use of subcontractors would result in lower staff turnover and shift liability directly onto Amazon, which in turn could lower safety incidents and better protect the drivers themselves from injury.

But in recent years, Amazon has invested over $12 billion in technology and safety features for its delivery contractors, which it reports has led to a 48 percent decline in accident rates since 2020. This includes the creation of “DNY7″—a state-of-the-art Amazon training facility in Brooklyn where worker onboarding goes beyond federally mandated safety training—and through the acquisition of camera-equipped vans and modern electric bikes.

While proponents of the bill have pointed to statistics showing that the worker injury rates of Amazon’s last-mile subcontractors is 8.3 per 100 workers versus 2.4 for all private employers, this comparison is essentially meaningless. The relevant comparison would be the national injury rate average for couriers—which is 8.0, suggesting that the Amazon’s last-mile subcontractors are in line with industry norms.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the New York City Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO are backing the bill. Under federal labor law, Amazon’s subcontracted last-mile delivery partners can be individually unionized, but the labor contract wouldn’t be signed with Amazon itself. Banning subcontracting for last-mile delivery would force Amazon to hire these deliverers as direct employees, making them easier to organize.

As attorney Alex MacDonald has noted, this is part of a larger strategy being employed by unions in recent years: If they are unable to organize through “organic, boots-on-the-ground campaigns,” they now lobby for laws like this one that “read like a shortcut to organizing.” In other words, what can’t be accomplished by collective bargaining is pursued through direct regulation.

But these types of laws generally—and NYC’s proposed ban on last-mile delivery services specifically—are arguably preempted by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). As MacDonald argues, the NLRA was designed to be a “scheme of overlapping rights, obligations, and zones of self-help” that create a cohesive national labor code—one which emphasizes “private negotiation and the free play of market forces.” The more that progressive locales and labor unions undercut this carefully calibrated scaffolding, the wobblier it gets, until it is eventually undermined completely.

Ironically, NYC’s last-mile delivery bill is also being opposed by those it purports to help: The City Council hearing stretched to seven hours long as several hundred last-mile delivery workers unexpectedly showed up to testify against it. These workers make around $24 per hour on average and have employer-funded healthcare through the subcontracted companies.

Amazon’s last-mile subcontractors are also something else: small businesses. These 40 or so businesses represent a cross-section of New York City itself, with 25 percent operated by black or Hispanic owners, while another 10 percent are veteran-owned, according to testimony from Amazon. If the legislation passes, these businesses would be destroyed.

Amazon has also testified that the bill’s passage could eliminate an estimated 5,000 jobs within the five boroughs, as the company warns it may need to relocate delivery operations outside of New York. At the very least, the effect will be to disincentivize the creation of further last-mile facilities in the city—in favor of neighboring counties or states—and further increase automation.

Another possibility is that New Yorkers will see yet more “regulatory response fees” tacked onto deliveries (or to Amazon Prime memberships), similar to Instacart’s $5.99 surcharge that was introduced in response to NYC’s recent minimum wage law for grocery delivery.

The Mamdani-backed effort to end last-mile delivery subcontracting in New York City is supposedly about safety. In reality, it will mostly serve to boost unions, eliminate jobs, and raise the cost of package delivery. It’s an idea that deserves to be sent back to the warehouse.

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