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Matthew Cavedon

Brent Skorup

For decades, US government officials have secretly coerced and prodded media distributors into withholding news and information, sometimes even big secrets and coverups. Historically, government officials dubbed this government‐​media collaboration “voluntary censorship.” The House Judiciary Committee this month released new documents, mostly internal emails from social media companies, showing how “voluntary censorship” and government coercion operate today. The emails challenge conservatives’ and the government’s views about social media companies.

Both conservatives and the US government maintain that social media companies, such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, always work voluntarily with government to restrict speech. Some conservatives believe woke tech companies and the government have common censorship aims. The government also often depicts the government‐​media collaboration on content removal as social media companies assisting the government, and that these companies simply share the government’s views on what violates their vague content policies. The government adopts this view because the “voluntary censorship” system currently risks being dismantled by the Supreme Court in the pending Murthy v. Missouri case.

In any case, the sometimes‐​frank internal emails released by the Judiciary Committee undermine both the government’s and social conservatives’ arguments: the emails make clear that in the past few years federal officials have cowed Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon officials into taking down more content than those companies wanted to remove. Top officials at the companies typically submitted to government demands and content moderation changes only after resisting government “requests” to censor. They also knew that the executive branch could punish them indirectly for noncompliance.

Consider their predicament. The president of the United States is the most powerful officeholder in the world, with authority over thousands of attorneys in hundreds of agencies. Many executive branch employees make multi‐​billion‐​dollar decisions affecting tech companies. The Department of Justice reviews mergers and acquisitions. Cabinet officials negotiate international digital trade deals. Government agencies purchase IT and cloud computing services. Further, the president also shapes the priorities and actions of agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, and the CFTC, which regulate and scrutinize tech services.

So when, as the emails show, frustrated White House official Andy Slavitt told Facebook executives in March 2021 that “Internally we have been considering our options on what to do about” Facebook’s reluctance to censor more COVID-19 content and share censorship metrics with the White House, all parties understood Facebook’s vulnerability. Facebook and YouTube’s changing content moderation practices at that time must be interpreted in light of these conversations with executive branch officials.

It is widely known that even implicit government threats coerce companies, something government officials discreetly and regularly use to their advantage. Law professor Tim Wu, a former Biden White House official, noted years ago that, “Rule by threats … is, under certain circumstances, a superior means of regulatory oversight.” Government officials can even use threats as a substitute for binding law. “If successful and widely respected,” Wu notes, “it is possible that a threat may create an industry norm, removing the need for rulemaking at all.”

The newly released emails, then, suggest that most joint action between social media companies and the government in removing “misinformation” was not voluntary.

Facebook is probably the clearest example of this. The company’s about‐​face regarding censorship of users happened rapidly as government pressure ramped up in 2020 and 2021. Notably, in the fall of 2019, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made public commitments—including a Wall Street Journal op‐​ed and a speech at Georgetown University—to free speech and Facebook’s prospective hands‐​off approach to misinformation and speech by politicians. Except for “complete hoaxes” and “misinformation that could lead to imminent physical harm,” Zuckerberg promised a permissive approach to contested and distasteful speech. “[W]e’ve found,” he said, “a different strategy works best: focusing on the authenticity of the speaker rather than the content itself.”

Yet, in 2021, Facebook moderators were plainly censoring newsworthy and credible information—about the COVID-19 lab leak theory and other topics—from authentic accounts of Americans, as the Judiciary Committee report documents. The threats and badgering from the White House, FBI, and CDC help explain Zuckerberg’s and Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg’s private complaints about the government’s intense pressure to censor.

These companies knew, based on the censorship “requests,” and demands for frequent follow‐​up meetings with the White House and FBI about those “requests,” that noncompliance could be costly—the executive branch has countless ways to punish a company. As Clegg emailed internally in July 2021, “Given the bigger fish we have to fry with the Administration, … [it] doesn’t seem a great place for us to be, so grateful for any further creative thinking on how we can be responsive to their concerns.” YouTube teams that discussed “fight[ing] harmful misinformation” in April 2021 likewise talked about how they sought “to work closely with this administration on multiple policy fronts.”

The US government is currently ramping up its efforts to “partner” with social media companies to remove “foreign disinformation” on social media. Since the FBI’s broad definition of a “foreign malign influence” includes social media posts from American citizens, companies must be very wary of any government requests. Voluntary partnership with the government can at some point become “joint action,” which, as the Supreme Court reiterated in the 2019 case Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, transforms a private company into a state actor.

Therefore, social media companies must resist “partnerships” with government agencies. To the extent government input on content removal is necessary, as my colleague, and former Meta employee working content moderation, David Inserra says, companies and government should be transparent about their communications. It’s time for executive branch agencies to retire the secretive “voluntary censorship” system and restore some Americans’ trust in their government.

Neal McCluskey

Book “banning” battles continue in public schools, and while more attention has been paid to what books public school libraries stock to begin with since Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom published our October analysis of viewpoint balance, what books libraries acquire has still received scant attention relative to book removals. This prompted us to search for more titles using our nationally representative, random sample of school districts.

The Data

We looked for twenty‐​five titles and book collections, the latter including particular authors or series. In theory, this encompassed ninety‐​seven titles, but as soon as we found one title from a series or author we ceased searching for others. We sampled 200 traditional districts—no charters or specialty districts—with a focus on middle and high schools, yielding 408 schools that included at least one grade six through twelve.

If a district had multiple schools at different levels, we selected one in each. We conducted searches for some titles at different times, and some library catalogs were or were not publicly accessible at those times. Final numbers are typically not out of 408 schools, but how many schools were searched will vary somewhat by title or series.

The table below shows the titles and series we searched for, including several books by libertarian author Ayn Rand, whose most popular titles are The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. I classified all books or series as liberal, neutral, or conservative, based on my judgment of how the “average” reader would likely identify them. This includes classifying the libertarian Rand offerings as “conservative.”

Overall Results

The most readily available books tend to be classic fiction, including the Lord of the Rings and Narnia fantasy series, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Also among the top titles is The Hate U Give, a newer book (published in 2017) about an African‐​American girl from a black neighborhood who goes to a predominantly white prep school and is torn when a neighborhood friend is killed in a police shooting that touches off mass demonstrations and unrest.

In addition to fiction, we included several nonfiction books dealing with political and social issues from diverse ideological perspectives. These include books of a distinctly popular, political nature, largely written by hosts of political television or radio programs, as well as historian Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.

As seen in the chart below, we found that public school libraries were more likely to carry liberal than conservative books, with liberal books accessible in an average of about sixty schools and conservative in twenty‐​one. Neutral books, such as fantasy, dominated both, carried in an average of 207 libraries.

Given our sample size, the difference between liberal and conservative books is right on the border of being able to confidently assume we have captured a true imbalance. Of course, even with our larger sample of titles than our previous work, relative to all books ever published it is small and these findings should be interpreted with caution. Still, the result is concerning if public school libraries are supposed to offer a wide array of opinions, as the Supreme Court has suggested.

Pairings

To dig a bit deeper, I paired political books by “genre.” The table below shows which books I placed in each category, and the graph below displays the average holdings by ideological leaning for each pairing.

The first finding of note is that school libraries almost never carry “pop modern politics” books, dominated by talk‐​show host authors. Both conservative and liberal titles in this grouping were, on average, in just one school.

The next closest split is in “ideological storytelling”—narratives that comment on American society from a particular ideological perspective. These books are not only fiction—Gender Queer is autobiographical, and some Rand books are nonfiction—but the books tend to be in the form of stories. Liberal books in this group tend to be accessible in more schools than conservative, with averages of about 115 and 87 schools, respectively.

Given the sample size, this might not indicate an actual difference nationally. On the flip side, the five‐​book Rush Revere series and the thirty‐​two‐​book Rand collection increase the chances of finding a conservative book, so the relative likelihood of finding a conservative book is possibly overstated.

One other note from this paring: The national debate might overstate the presence of one of the liberal books. Gender Queer, a graphic novel about the nonbinary author’s coming of age, was found in only 18 libraries. Still, it has been the top‐​challenged book in public libraries for several years.

The third closest ideological pairing is “classic political economy,” including Marx’s historically crucial The Communist Manifesto and Adam Smith’s classic free‐​market work, The Wealth of Nations. The former is much shorter than the latter and might therefore be more accessible, so we paired Communist Manifesto with a highly readable, arguably modern free‐​market classic, Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. Here again, the liberal side predominates, with the Manifesto found in fifty‐​six schools while the conservative counterpoints were, on average, in fewer than fourteen. The higher performer of the conservative books—The Wealth of Nations—is accessible in less than half the number of schools as the Manifesto, and Friedman’s work is in only one school.

Finally, “race nonfiction” consists of discussion of systemic racism in American society. This is what we analyzed in our October paper, but we moved Rush Revere to a different category this time. This is also where we find the biggest imbalance, with books positing that systemic racism is a major problem accessible, on average, in about sixty‐​five schools, versus just one school for each book critiquing such thought.

Conclusion

This larger sample of books adds more weight to what our October analysis suggested: There is a left‐​leaning imbalance in public school library collections. But it does not establish why that might be. Biased librarians? Book reviewers? Better marketing for liberal books?

We plan to look deeper into the possible drivers of collection imbalance. Still, the overall findings suggest that public school libraries tend to give students access to a slanted field of opinions. That is a problem when everyone must fund these schools.

Walter Olson

One big theme of my recent paper on election policy for the Nevada Policy Research Institute is that states need to make it a policy goal to tabulate and report election results promptly. I write:

Speedy reporting of election results is considered a hallmark of good election practice worldwide; it’s not just some quirk of Red‐​Blue politics in America. Candidates and many others want to know who won so that they can begin planning for matters of governance. Should there be later political stages to navigate—a recount, or later rounds in a primary season—the relevant parties can embark on this process once they have accurate information. Without quick results, as we have recently witnessed, the atmosphere is conducive to rumor and misinformation. Slow reporting of results comes at a real cost.

It’s sometimes argued that slow result reporting is an inevitable consequence of mail voting, but that’s not actually a good excuse:

With the right laws and procedures, there’s no reason an all‐​mail state can’t count votes reasonably quickly after the polls close. At present, however, the eight states in this category mostly take a relaxed approach in their methods, often sacrificing speedy tabulation in hopes of eking out a bit of extra convenience or flexibility for last‐​minute voters. Voter interactions that could have been accomplished earlier instead contribute to a last‐​minute crunch, in which they are most likely to distract from smooth operation and perhaps contribute to hasty errors.

More here on how the state of Florida, which lets people vote by mail if they wish, also reports the outcome of most races by the time residents go to sleep on Election Night.

Now the Associated Press reports on a case in which California took nearly two months to resolve, through recount, a top‐​two primary for a Bay Area House seat in which there was an initial tie for second place. (All candidates were Democrats, so partisan control of the seat was not at issue.) While ties are quite unusual, a 2022 California House race decided by a wider margin, 564 votes, still took nearly a month to resolve.

The AP does mention some of the policy choices that make vote tabulation in the Golden State so slow, including an indulgent “cure” process for imperfect (e.g., unsigned) votes and a reluctance to discourage or dis‐​incentivize voters from waiting until the very last minute to post mail ballots.

Conspiracy theories can fester during the long reporting delays. If counting is paused overnight, some will see that as suspicious, while if it continues around the clock with the result that some totals get reported in the middle of the night, some will see that as suspicious. Other advanced democracies get the job done much more speedily, and we should too.

Colleen Hroncich

Ashley Brodbeck was a classroom teacher for ten years, spending time in district, charter, and private schools. But when her daughter was born, she started seeing things differently. “I look at it firstly as a mom now, then an educator—versus just through an educator’s lens,” she says. She realized there were things she was required to do that she wouldn’t want for her own child.

Her background is middle school math and language arts, and she spent the first five years of her career teaching fifth grade. Her husband was in the military at the time and received orders that involved a move, so she left that school. Then she taught middle school math for three years. “And that’s when I thought, things just aren’t the same as they used to be. I don’t have that passion, that drive, that excitement, to teach any longer,” she recalls. She was frustrated by the students’ attitudes and disrespect. “The kids weren’t motivated, and it seemed like no matter what I did—I could put the most engaging lesson together, I could stand on my head with fireworks—nothing mattered to the kids. I couldn’t reach them.”

Ashley realized she wasn’t doing her students, her family, or herself any favors staying in a job where she was getting burned out just trying to get them to care. And she wanted to spend more time with her own daughter. So she left at the end of the school year to open Riverside Educational Services. “I kept the name very vague in the terms of services because I didn’t know what I was going to do with it,” she explains. “I knew I wanted to teach, but being in the traditional classroom setting just wasn’t working any longer. So I opened it up under the umbrella of this vagueness.”

She started with a tutoring business, where she was able to help 30 kids throughout the school year. She also held a reading class and various summer workshops last year. She says the most popular ones were the science workshops because the local school district doesn’t do much science in the early grades.

Starting next school year, Riverside will offer a full‐​time K‑5 microschool. Ashley originally thought of doing Monday through Thursday to have three‐​day weekends and use Fridays for at‐​home learning and field trips. But as she spoke to parents, the feedback was that many needed five days a week to make it work. She decided to take a flexible approach, offering the full‐​time 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. option and two part‐​time options so local homeschool families who are interested can also participate. As she describes it,

I’m going to do math, reading, and writing, the three core, in the morning. With my experience in the classroom, you gotta get the most important stuff done before lunch. Otherwise, they’re gone. Then in the afternoons it’s going to rotate: two days a week will be science, two days will be social studies. I’m going to have “fun Friday,” but that’s really just catch up, some private tutoring, one‐​on‐​one support. And then electives will be in the afternoons, too. So hopefully those home school families could say, ‘I want to come for the academic chunk’ or ‘I want to come for the more hands‐​on elective chunk in the afternoon.’ So I’ll offer it that way, and we’ll see what happens. I’m giving priority to those who are coming full day versus half day.

Riverside is a participating entity in the Indiana Education Scholarship Account Program, which is an education savings account (ESA) that allows students with special needs to use a portion of state education funding for a variety of educational expenses. She has two students who already use it for private tutoring, and she thinks any student who qualifies will be able to use the funds at the microschool next year as well. She’s reached out to the state to see if she’s right, but she doesn’t have a definitive answer yet.

However, she’s not currently planning to participate in the Indiana voucher or tax credit scholarship programs because of the regulations that are attached to them. “Without me being an accredited school, I can’t touch some of those funds,” she explains. “But I purposely am not going to become accredited. I’ve been told what to do within the classroom for so long that I don’t want to be told what do anymore.” She acknowledges that some parents see that and think it means Riverside has less value. But Ashley says, “I see it as the complete opposite. I have the option to tweak things as I need to for your kid. I’m not committed to doing something. The government can’t come in and tell me I have to do standardized testing with your student anymore. So I see the value in not being accredited, and it’s something that I’m going to have to educate parents on.”

Ashley’s in this for the long haul. She’s currently offering up to fifth grade and plans to add a grade each year with those older kids until they reach eighth grade. She’s not sure what, if anything, she’ll do about high school. Her vision is for Riverside to outgrow the church she’s currently using and for her to eventually house it on her own property.

“I don’t want to not teach,” Ashley says. “And that’s what I tell people—I didn’t leave the classroom because I don’t want to be a teacher. I left the classroom because I didn’t want to be in that environment. So I’m building an environment I do want to be a part of.”

Scott Lincicome

Though grocery inflation has moderated in recent months, Bloomberg recently reported that food prices remain at the top of Americans’ inflation concerns. Unsurprisingly, this issue has become a major theme of the 2024 presidential election, with Joe Biden and Donald Trump—and Democrats and Republicans in Congress—pointing fingers at each other and making their case before American voters.

Yet, as I wrote in my column this week at The Dispatch, few people in Washington actually seem interested in lowering grocery prices—instead, some have been actively trying to increase them in recent cases by using protectionist trade policies to restrict available supply of products, such as beef, frozen shrimp, and fresh tomatoes. These recent actions (which are described in greater detail in my column) are moreover just the latest examples of long‐​standing US food protectionism.

For starters, as Table 1 shows, the United States still maintains high most‐​favored nation (MFN) tariffs on many food products, including produce that can’t be easily grown in most parts of the country, meats from different animal sources, and various dairy products.

Not included in the table are special tariff rate quotas, which impose additional tariffs on products such as sugar, milk, butter, cheese, baby formula, ice cream, peanuts and peanut butter, canned tuna, chocolate, and many others once imported quantities rise beyond a certain threshold within a specific timeframe. These quotas can significantly raise prices—the US International Trade Commission in 2017 found that Americans pay 12 percent, 15 percent, and 21 percent more for imported tuna, cheese, and butter, respectively, because of these trade restrictions. And altogether, the US Department in Agriculture (USDA) estimated in 2021 that eliminating US agricultural tariffs would increase consumer well‐​being by $3.5 billion per year.

Yet “standard” tariffs are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to US agricultural protectionism. As Table 2 shows, there are 38 antidumping or countervailing duty orders on various foodstuffs, some dating back to the 1990s. These duties are additional to any MFN tariffs already in the books, and as I have written previously, they are imposed through laws that are intended to increase domestic prices whilst barring the investigating agencies from considering the harms that any action could cause to consumers, the broader economy, or even other US foreign policy interests.

And then there’s the “regulatory protectionism” that the federal government has long used to restrict the importation of items like beef, tuna, catfish, produce, and biofuels. Though such regulations may be imposed under the guise of protecting humans, animals, and the environment, they often protect special interests without any legitimate health, safety, or environmental basis. Notable examples of such regulatory restrictions include Obama‐​era mandatory Country of Origin Labeling requirements (which cattlemen and their congressional allies are seeking to revive); Food and Drug Administration sanitary restrictions on infant formula imported from high‐​standard countries in Europe and Australia and New Zealand; the Renewable Food Standard; and USDA‐​sanctioned produce marketing orders.

On a more optimistic note, American food abundance is very likely to increase in the future if individuals here and abroad remain relatively free to exchange goods, services, and ideas. As the Simon Abundance Index developed by Cato’s Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley documents, the relative abundance of 50 basic commodities, including many foodstuffs, exhibits a long‐​term increase and bounced back strongly last year after a brief, pandemic‐​induced decline. Meanwhile, the USDA projects that grocery inflation should continue to decelerate in 2024. (In some cases, prices may even decline.)

Were these gains to materialize, Americans should rightfully celebrate them—while keeping in mind that, in many respects, they happened not thanks to the folks in Washington.

Adam N. Michel

President Biden’s Treasury Department has been the key driver of the Organisation for Economic Co‐​operation and Development’s (OECD’s) project to create a global tax system that raises the cost of international investment and taxes the most profitable American companies. As the global tax begins to be implemented around the world, it has become clear that the administration negotiated a bad deal for American businesses, their employees, and the US Treasury.

The administration and some Democrats in Congress are now trying to shift blame to Republicans, claiming that by pointing out the structural flaws in the deal, it’s Republicans’ fault that Americans are staring down a costly global tax hike. Republicans are right to criticize the OECD, and as appropriations season gets underway, they should renew efforts to limit US funding of the OECD for projects that raise taxes or otherwise promote government‐​centric policy solutions.

A US‐​Led Effort, a Biden‐​Created Problem

In her testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee in May, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen characterized the OECD global tax deal as a US‐​led effort and told Congress that “we have pushed our allies” to adopt the deal. While true, this is a remarkable understatement.

For the past three years, administration officials have been waging a campaign to pressure our allies into adopting the new tax rules. They have done this while knowing that the OECD tax hikes are not supported by the US Congress, including some Democrats.

The most public pressure was put on Hungary in the summer of 2022, when the US Treasury canceled a tax treaty with the small European country in what the Wall Street Journal called a “counterpunch against” the country, which had emerged as a vocal obstacle to the global minimum tax deal. This is just one piece of the relentless pressure campaign waged by US officials to push other countries to the bargaining table and ultimately to adopt the global minimum tax system.

Now that some portions of the global tax increase are moving forward without the United States, Treasury officials are beginning to “recognize that US multinationals are in somewhat of a unique situation and face compliance difficulties that a lot of other countries’ multinationals don’t face.” This is because the Biden administration negotiated a complicated new tax system that allows 140 countries to claim new taxing rights on primarily American businesses.

Proponents of the deal in Congress and the Treasury Department have claimed that Republicans’ unwillingness to accept the bad terms the administration has negotiated will make a bad deal even worse. This is a contortion of the facts. The new costs faced by US multinationals are the direct result of the deal dragged across the finish line by the Biden administration.

Budget Inconsistencies

It’s not clear from reading the president’s budget if the administration believes its own rhetoric about the OECD deal being good for the world and good for the United States. President Biden’s fiscal year 2025 budget proposal includes a number of significant tax increases that ostensibly align the United States with the OECD’s global tax deal. For example, the Green Book describes modifications to global intangible low‐​taxed income—the existing US minimum tax—to make it OECD‐​compliant. However, the proposal increases the new minimum tax rate to 21 percent (instead of the 15 percent US‐​negotiated OECD rate). The Green Book also raises the Inflation Reduction Act’s new corporate alternative minimum tax from its 15 percent rate to a 21 percent rate.

These proposals should leave Congress and peer nations around the world with several questions for the administration and how it sees its proposals as consistent with what it’s pushed for at the OECD. Does the administration think that its negotiated minimum tax rates are insufficient? Does the United States think the global minimum tax rates should be 6 percentage points higher (21 percent versus 15 percent)? And why have multiple overlapping corporate minimum taxes in the United States? Does the US Treasury believe the OECD global minimum tax is flawed in some way? There is also nothing in the Green Book to implement Pillar One, the second component of the US‐​negotiated global tax plan. The administration has negotiated a deal it doesn’t seem to believe in fully.

Appropriations Season Presents an Opportunity

Republicans are right to question the value of the global tax deal as negotiated by the Biden administration. As a matter of process, wholesale accepting an international tax increase on American business, negotiated by the president without any congressional input, sets a concerning precedent and undermines Congress’s constitutional role in setting tax policy and advising and consenting to treaties.

The primary message other countries are hearing from the United States is from Treasury officials, like Secretary Yellen, who have an ideological stake in the success of the OECD global tax increases. A louder and more forceful congressional message rejecting the OECD deal could go a long way toward undermining the administration’s pressure campaign for other countries to adopt the OECD rules.

Last spring, 10 House Republicans, led by Rep. Adrian Smith (R‑NE), asked the Appropriations Committee to prohibit US funding for the OECD from being included in next year’s budget. Members who are concerned by the Biden administration–led OECD effort to increase global taxes on Americans businesses should again push to withhold OECD funding—and ultimately US OECD membership—if the organization continues to facilitate implementation of its global tax system.

A more vocally opposed US Congress would help slow the adoption of the OECD system and could help undo the damage that has already been done.

Nicholas Anthony

Last week I wrote that if Congress truly cares about the Constitution, it should step in and reform the sweeping financial surveillance that is now the norm. Unfortunately, Representative Sean Casten (D‑IL) answered that call by doubling down and attempting to further restrict financial privacy in the United States with the introduction of the “Blockchain Integrity Act.”

In short, the Blockchain Integrity Act would first establish a two‐​year moratorium that prohibits financial institutions from going anywhere near cryptocurrency that has been routed through a mixer (a page out of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D‑MA) playbook). With that two‐​year moratorium in place, the Blockchain Integrity Act would then require the Department of the Treasury to study how people use mixers and other privacy‐​enhancing technology.

While the bill may be better than an outright ban, it’s not much better. Let’s consider the two provisions of the bill more to understand why.

A Two‐​Year Prohibition for Banks and Other Financial Institutions

As far as the prohibition is concerned, it would be illegal for financial institutions to “handle, use, or transact” cryptocurrency that has been routed through a mixer in the past or is routed directly (by a bank) to a mixer in the future.

Each violation carries up to a $100,000 penalty. Yet what’s perhaps more concerning is the ambiguity regarding past transactions. For example, the second condition is somewhat clear in that a bank is not allowed to send cryptocurrency “directly” to a mixer. This language suggests that a bank is no longer liable if a customer withdraws funds and then sends it to a mixer in a separate transaction at some later point. Yet the language describing previous transactions seems to suggest that a cryptocurrency must be blacklisted if it goes through a mixer at any time in the past.

This requirement is deeply concerning because it means the list of prohibited cryptocurrencies would only continue to increase so long as people continue to use mixers. Yet it is even more concerning for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, where there is also a finite supply. In other words, if people continue to use mixers for Bitcoin, then financial institutions could effectively become prohibited from touching Bitcoin at all once all 21 million bitcoins are run through mixers.

It likely wouldn’t take such an extreme scenario. Once some critical amount is reached (e.g., 50 percent of all bitcoins), it’s likely that banks would say the risk is too high and shut down operations. And that critical amount may not be too far away given that estimates suggest 1.6 million bitcoins were sent through the mixer known as Bitcoin Fog. That alone accounts for 7.6 percent of all bitcoins that will ever exist.

A Request to Find Out What Privacy Is

The second half of the legislation—the request for a study—is less concerning if it’s considered alone and without the surrounding context. The request seeks information regarding different types of privacy‐​enhancing technology, illicit and legitimate use history, and an analysis of what the government’s role might be here (among other things). Those are all reasonable inquiries.

Again, without additional context, it’s an encouraging sign that Representative Casten is interested in learning more about how this technology is used for both better and worse. Yet what isn’t encouraging is that Representative Casten introduced the bill saying that “until we’ve studied [privacy enhancing technologies like mixers] and have a good audit trail, the presumption should be that these are money laundering channels.” So, without reservation, the stated position is that the presumption should be guilty until proven innocent.

If it were not for this statement and the stance that privacy should be banned until the government understands the technology, then the study would be welcome. But there is little getting around the reality that the bill effectively admits a lack of understanding while simultaneously calling for what it doesn’t understand to be prohibited.

Conclusion

As I cautioned last week, policymakers should rethink how financial privacy is treated. Americans would be less likely to seek out privacy tools if companies were not required to collect all of their information just to open an account. Rather than double down on decades‐​old surveillance, it’s time to rethink and reform how the system works.

Jeffrey A. Singer

Casual readers might misinterpret reports of yesterday’s decision by the federal Canadian government to make it illegal to consume illicit drugs in public spaces in British Columbia to mean that the federal government has just squelched the province’s three‐​year drug decriminalization. That is not the case.

In 2023, lawmakers in Ottawa exempted British Columbia from federal drug prohibition laws, permitting the province to begin a three‐​year pilot program decriminalizing the possession of all illicit drugs for personal use. Advocates of the idea argued decriminalization would allow law enforcement to focus resources on violent crime and drug trafficking.

Many residents of Vancouver and other British Columbia municipalities have grown upset viewing drug use and disorderly behavior in public spaces and complained to the provincial government. The provincial government requested federal lawmakers to modify British Columbia’s exemption to prohibit drug use in public parks, public sidewalks, and other public spaces.

The government will still allow adults to possess illicit drugs for personal use, but they must use them in private spaces and legal residences, overdose prevention centers, or other facilities operated by harm reduction organizations.

It is understandable and not surprising that many residents of British Columbia communities don’t want people openly using mind‐​altering drugs, especially in front of their children. They may get particularly upset if people under the influence of these drugs crowd public walkways, the doorways of their businesses, or congregate in public parks and near children’s playgrounds.

I think it is crucial for libertarians—and others who seek an end to the war on drugs—to make clear that we have no problem, in principle, with public nuisance laws. However, lawmakers must overcome a high bar when designating certain behaviors as public nuisances. And law enforcement should be reasonable, empathetic, and discretionary when they enforce such laws. I made this point in this blog post.

State and local governments have long had laws that prohibit openly consuming alcohol in public spaces. And public nuisance laws have their roots in English common law.

If harm reduction advocates and drug war opponents hope to see incremental reforms such as drug decriminalization avoid a public backlash, they should stress two major points:

Decriminalization is not as effective as legalization. It preserves the black market, enriching the drug cartels and incentivizing them to develop even more potent forms of illicit drugs. Decriminalization also means drug users must still obtain their drugs on the dangerous black market, where they cannot be sure of the potency and purity of the drugs they purchase or even if they are the drugs they believe they are buying. Advocates of decriminalization should avoid promoting unrealistic expectations of decriminalization’s impact on overdose deaths.
They should clarify that there is nothing wrong with enforcing public nuisance laws, as I discussed in this blog post, as long as they are enforced rationally and non‐​violently. (The same principle applies to homeless people camping on commercial streets or in front of residential properties.)

Mary Anastasia O’Grady made a similar point when she wrote of Ottawa’s adjustment to British Columbia’s decriminalization experiment in the Wall Street Journal this week: ”The U.S. gave up alcohol prohibition in 1933 but to this day you can’t walk down Fifth Avenue with an open bottle of vodka. It isn’t too much to ask that drug use be contained to private spaces.”

Jeffrey A. Singer

The iron law of prohibition—the harder the law enforcement, the harder the drug—is the reason why, in recent years, fentanyl has replaced heroin, the veterinary tranquilizer xylazine began being added to fentanyl to make more potent and deadly tranq, and, more recently, the synthetic opioid isotonitazene (“iso” or “tony”) has made its debut in the dangerous black market that prohibition fuels. As policymakers keep doubling down on law enforcement strategies to prosecute the futile war on drugs, they provide greater incentives for drug trafficking organizations to create new and more potent drugs and drug combinations to meet market demand.

State lawmakers have begun to crack down on xylazine by designating it a controlled substance. Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia have already done so, and several other state legislatures are also considering doing so. The American Veterinary Medical Association has called on Congress to add xylazine to the schedule of controlled substances, and a bill before Congress that would designate xylazine as a Schedule III drug has drawn bipartisan support.

Enter medetomidine/​dexmedetomidine, or Domitor. Law enforcement first detected this veterinary tranquilizer in fentanyl, fentanyl analogs, and cocaine samples seized in Maryland in 2022. The DEA has since detected it in St. Louis and in clandestine laboratory seizures in Florida, Ohio, and Canada.

Like xylazine, medetomidine is a potent veterinary anesthetic/​analgesic. Estimated to be 200 times more powerful than xylazine, PAGround​hogs​.org, a Pennsylvania non‐​profit harm‐​reduction drug testing organization, found it in two bags of fentanyl in Philadelphia and two dozen samples from Pittsburgh, Cambria County, and Blair County in Pennsylvania.

Look for medetomidine to become more prevalent if policymakers make it more difficult for drug traffickers to access xylazine.

Last year, in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Crime and Government Surveillance, I warned lawmakers that nitazenes were on the horizon and that doubling down on law enforcement to address the fentanyl overdose crisis may make a nitazene crisis come sooner. Instead, Congress passed the FEND OFF Fentanyl Act, which President Biden recently signed. Intended to put more pressure on the makers of illicit fentanyl and fentanyl precursors, the new law is likely to incentivize drug trafficking organizations to switch more rapidly to nitazenes, the precursors of which will be easy to come by but harder for law enforcement to track.

As is usually the case in the war on drugs, policymakers are fighting the last battle while drug trafficking organizations are opening new fronts.