This week, incoming Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger released a policy agenda for her administration that’s allegedly intended to deliver lower living costs for the state’s residents.

None of her initial proposals—mandating utilities build more energy storage capacity, stretching out the eviction process for delinquent renters, and banning health insurers from charging additional fees to tobacco users—seems particularly promising.

As Manhattan Institute scholar Judge Glock pointed out on X, basically everything the governor-elect has proposed will raise, not lower, costs.

This is impressive in that every single one of VA Gov Spannberger's affordability proposals increases costs:
Force health insurers to cover smokers at the same rate (premium increases)
Protect neighborhood pharmacies (drug price increases)
Extend time to terminate leases (rent…

— Judge Glock (@judgeglock) December 30, 2025

That’s pretty disappointing (if not necessarily surprising) for a politician who just won her gubernatorial election by pitching herself as the “affordability” candidate.

Across the political spectrum, everyone is trying to say their agenda will enable Americans to buy more for less, while proposing policies that would leave everyone poorer.

Zohran Mamdani elevated himself from long-shot leftist candidate to soon-to-be Mayor of New York City with a relentless focus on making the Big Apple affordable to working-class residents. (His actual agenda is a lot more focused on using price controls to obscure how much everything actually costs.)

President Donald Trump has likewise claimed the mantle of “affordability,” even as he’s hiked tariffs on imported goods.

It’d be tempting then to dismiss affordability politics as empty messaging or even cynical rebranding for the same tired state interventions from both the left and the right.

And yet, free marketers have cause to be optimistic that partisan politics in 2026 might revolve around the question of affordability.

Whatever its failings at setting a policy agenda, the affordability framing does at least refocus partisan arguments on the thing that free marketers have the best answers for and on which free markets can actually deliver.

To paraphrase Joseph Schumpeter, the achievement of capitalism is enabling average people to consume more things for increasingly less effort.

It’s a promise that free markets keep delivering on. The real cost of the electronic device you’re using to read this article compared to what it would have been a decade ago should be evidence enough of that.

When it comes to questions about how to bring down the costs of healthcare or housing, free marketers have the best answers. Government regulations of prices and production are driving up costs. Eliminating those regulations will bring them back down.

The fact that politicians as different as Mamdani and Spanberger won on a common affordability message is evidence that voters are hungry for policy proposals that promise to bring everyday prices down.

The flawed, interventionist affordability platforms they offer are an opportunity for free marketers to clearly and patiently explain why their interventions will fail.

When they do fail, free marketers can reap the benefits of being right about the thing that people care about the most right now.

It’s fair to say that libertarian politics in 2025 was at a low ebb. A major reason for that is that too many of the political debates that have dominated the headlines and viral X posts have been either irrelevant to the cause of free markets or are divisive among the people who support them.

An appreciation for capitalist-enabled material progress can’t tell you a lot about whether the Jeffrey Epstein files should be released, for instance.

Support for small government doesn’t imply a particular position on whether the East Wing of the White House should be enlarged.

Laws of supply and demand don’t say who counts as a “Heritage American” or what’s the appropriate social sanction for people who said ugly things about the Charlie Kirk assassination.

Anyone remotely invested in the debate about the Trump-Kennedy Center rebranding has almost no time for the stock libertarian interjection that we really shouldn’t have a federal arts venue at all.

When our politics revolves around these squabbles, the cause of generally shrinking the size and scope of government doesn’t get a lot of play in the conversation.

Even when the story of the day did directly involve the proper role of the state in 2025, free marketers in good standing can end up on either side of an issue.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was an incredibly clumsy, mostly unsuccessful effort by the Trump administration to accomplish a libertarian-ish goal of saving taxpayers’ money by making government more “efficient.”

Free marketers, even within the pages of Reason, are split on whether we should be mad at the dismal results or grateful for the effort.

Where Trump’s exercises of executive power have been the most alarming and most extreme, the mainstream debates about them generally devolve into much less compelling quibbling over the details.

Instead of arguing about whether the president can execute suspected drug smugglers on a whim, we end up debating whether two strikes on an alleged drug boat were justified or if one would have been enough.

The administration’s deportation drive has generally provoked procedural criticisms about individual raids and removals, not a more substantive defense of open immigration.

The front page debate about tariffs, and the president’s power to impose them unilaterally, is an exception that proves the rule.

Free marketers have been the leading critics of the Trump administration’s tariff regime, precisely because our ideas and the evidence offer a compelling case that raising taxes on imported goods makes things more expensive and people poorer.

Congressional Democrats have largely failed to turn voter anger about higher tariff-induced prices into their own compelling case against Trump precisely because they’re not free marketers and thus can’t fully abandon their own protectionist sympathies.

It’s notable that part of Spanberger’s winning message was criticism of Trump’s tariffs. (It’s convenient that she, as a governor of a state, has no power over trade policy.)

The daily partisan squabbles that dominate political news have long been of little interest to libertarians, who have a more fundamental critique of state power to share. For all that’s alarming and novel about politics during the second Trump administration, political debates revolving around superficial bullshit are par for the course.

It’s for this reason that affordability politics offers so much promise for the free market message in the coming year.

When a centrist Democrat says that we should make housing more affordable by making it harder to evict non-paying tenants, free marketers can counter with both sound theory and empirical evidence that making the rental housing business riskier for landlords leads them to raise costs to offset that risk.

When a socialist Democrat says we can make housing more affordable by getting rid of market prices entirely, we can point to how well that’s worked in the past.

And when a MAGA Republican says tariffs and immigration restrictions will lower Americans’ costs of living, we can counter with sound arguments that restrictions on the international movement of goods and people will do the opposite.

It’d be naive to think political debates in 2026 will be significantly more substantive than they were in 2025. Culture wars that are orthogonal to free market concerns will still drive much of the conversation.

But to the degree that politicians see an advantage in running on a message of affordability, that’s an opening for free marketers.

Explaining why making things cost more won’t make them cost less is frustrating. It’s also easy and compelling. The rise of affordability politics means that it will offer a lot of opportunities to deliver that simple message in the New Year.

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A few years ago in Connecticut, Mark and Carol Brault complained that state officials had strapped a camera to the neck of a black bear that was known to frequent their property. They alleged that the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), which suspected them of illegally feeding bears, was employing the furry spy in an attempt to back up that allegation. That DEEP strategy, the Braults argued, violated their Fourth Amendment right to “be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

The couple’s claim was complicated by the Supreme Court’s “open fields” doctrine, which says private property beyond the immediate vicinity of a home, a.k.a. the “curtilage,” is not protected by the Fourth Amendment. But it seemed unlikely that Bear Number 119, the camera-carrying animal that Mark Brault had photographed “near the center of our property,” was familiar with the finer points of Fourth Amendment case law. Assuming it was not, there was no assurance that it would confine itself to the Braults’ “open fields” and avoid the “curtilage” around their home.

If police need a warrant to deploy a drug-sniffing dog on the porch of a suspected marijuana grower’s house, as the Supreme Court held in the 2013 case Florida v. Jardines, similar restrictions presumably would apply when the government deploys camera-toting bears against people suspected of feeding them. The problem is that the paths of unsupervised bears do not necessarily follow judicial guidelines.

That case illustrates the point that enlisting bears in law enforcement can be legally risky. But we should not be too hasty in concluding that bears are completely incapable of complying with constitutional requirements and respecting civil liberties. In some respects, they may be better than humans.

‘As Old as the Common Law’

The Braults, who own 114 acres of forested land in Hartland, Connecticut, operate a private nature preserve that charges admission to visitors interested in seeing bears and other wildlife. In a 2020 lawsuit, the town of Hartland accused them of violating a local ordinance against feeding bears, a charge they denied.

In the midst of that dispute, Mark Brault encountered a bear he recognized, but it was wearing a new outfit. On the morning of May 20, 2023, he reported, “I observed Bear Number 119 near the center of our property, within 200 yards of our residence.” The bear “was wearing a video camera,” which was “affixed to a collar” that DEEP “apparently had placed” on the animal. “I have known that bear for a long time,” Brault said. “I know it frequents my property and adjacent properties. I know that it was tagged by [DEEP] previously, but not collared.”

That affidavit was attached to a lawsuit that Brault and his wife filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut 10 days after his unnerving encounter with the camera-equipped bear. DEEP “is conducting warrantless ground-level photographic surveillance of the interior of [our] property,” the Braults alleged. Although the area was “clearly posted with ‘no trespassing’ signs,” they said, DEEP “did not have a search warrant authorizing or permitting photographic surveillance of the interior of [our] property.” Presumably, the bear did not have a warrant either.

According to the Supreme Court, however, neither the presence of signage nor the absence of a warrant was constitutionally significant. “The special protection accorded by the Fourth Amendment to the people in their ‘persons, houses, papers and effects,’ is not extended to the open fields,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote for a unanimous Court in the 1924 case Hester v. United States, which involved illegal whiskey production in South Carolina. “The distinction between the latter and the house is as old as the common law.”

The Court reaffirmed that principle in the 1984 case Oliver v. United States, which involved a marijuana farm discovered by Kentucky state police. “In the case of open fields, the general rights of property protected by the common law of trespass have little or no relevance to the applicability of the Fourth Amendment,” Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote in the majority opinion. Although the marijuana growers “erected fences and ‘No Trespassing’ signs around the property,” the Court rejected “the suggestion that steps taken to protect privacy establish that expectations of privacy in an open field are legitimate.”

The implication was that “open fields” need not actually be open. Even when private property is fenced and marked with “No Trespassing” signs, the Court said, “no expectation of privacy legitimately attaches to open fields.” At the same time, it acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment does apply to “the ‘curtilage,’ the land immediately surrounding and associated with the home.”

Under the “open fields” doctrine, the Supreme Court ruled three years later in United States v. Dunn, police likewise did not need a warrant to approach a barn located about 50 yards from a home, even though they had to cross several fences on the way. Nor did they need a warrant to peer into the barn, where they ultimately found a laboratory producing the methamphetamine precursor phenylacetone, because at that point they were still located in “open fields.” The majority concluded that “the barn and the area around it lay outside the curtilage of the house.”

‘Ill-Founded Reasoning’

The “open fields” doctrine is misbegotten, the Institute for Justice argues. The civil liberties group says the “distinction” that Holmes deemed “as old as the common law” in Hester was based on a misunderstanding.

“The sole citation to support this historical assertion was to three pages of Blackstone’s Commentaries,” Institute for Justice attorneys Robert Frommer and Anthony Sanders noted in a 2017 Supreme Court brief. “The problem with Justice Holmes’ citation is that in those pages, Blackstone was not talking about open fields, officers of the law, or even trespass. Instead, he was discussing the elements of burglary. Blackstone simply lays out the rule that to commit burglary, among other elements, the burglar must break into a home, and do it at night.”

Holmes “took this distinction between burglary and other crimes and gave it constitutional significance by applying it to an area—an open field—that Blackstone does not even address,” Frommer and Sanders added. “By the same, ill-founded reasoning, Hester could have stated that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to the government entering homes during the day, or entering buildings such as barns and warehouses at all, all areas Blackstone contrasted to a break-in of the home at night.”

That highly improbable result, Frommer and Sanders argued, “is the logical conclusion once the citation to Blackstone is actually examined. In short, the citation to Blackstone did nothing to support the Court’s refusal to apply the Fourth Amendment to an ‘open field.'”

Given the persistence of this exception to the Fourth Amendment, however, it is not surprising that DEEP argued, in its motion to dismiss the Braults’ lawsuit, that “all the activity alleged in the complaint falls squarely within the ‘open fields’ doctrine.” Nor did Frommer think the Braults were likely to prevail in arguing that DEEP’s ursine surveillance violated the Fourth Amendment. Their best bet, he suggested shortly after they filed their complaint, would be to emphasize the unpredictable meandering of camera-bearing bears.

“The problem with slapping a camera onto a bear and then unleashing it into the wild is that you can’t control where that bear goes,” Frommer said. “For all the officer knows, the bear could park itself right outside somebody’s house, with the camera capturing everything therein.” Or as he put it in a more colorful turn of phrase, “turning wildlife into unguided surveillance drones is unbearable,” and “Connecticut should paws its animal camera program so as not to infringe on Nutmeggers’ privacy and security.”

‘Not Practicable To Secure a Warrant’

While the distinction between “open fields” and “curtilage” might escape the average bear, that does not necessarily mean bears cannot be trusted to follow other Fourth Amendment principles laid down by the Supreme Court. In the 1988 case California v. Greenwood, for example, the Court ruled that people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the trash they leave on the curb for collection. Bears seem to instinctively understand that you don’t need a warrant to rummage through someone’s garbage.

A century ago in Carroll v. United States, the Supreme Court likewise held that police do not need a warrant to search motor vehicles. The case involved two suspected Michigan bootleggers whom federal prohibition agents stopped as they were driving west on the road from Detroit to Grand Rapids. The agents searched the car and found 68 bottles of whiskey and gin hidden behind the upholstery of the seats. “Contraband goods concealed and illegally transported in an automobile or other vehicle may be searched for without a warrant,” the Court ruled.

As the majority saw it, that leeway was a practical necessity. “It is not practicable to secure a warrant” in such cases, Chief Justice William Howard Taft explained, “because the vehicle can be quickly moved out of the locality or jurisdiction in which the warrant must be sought.” But there was a catch: Police still need “probable cause for believing” a car contains contraband.

The Supreme Court has said probable cause is equivalent to a “substantial chance” or a “fair probability” that evidence of a crime will be discovered. The Court has not defined the concept more precisely than that. Since humans struggle to understand what probable cause means in practice, it seems unrealistic to expect that bears will do any better. The evidence suggests they are not even trying.

If bears did worry about probable cause, they might be able to supply it with a simple sniff of the air. In the 2013 case Florida v. Harris, the Supreme Court unanimously held that an “alert” by a dog trained to detect illegal drugs is enough, by itself, to justify a car search. Although the Court has not addressed bears in this context, there is reason to think it also would view them as four-legged probable cause generators.

“Bears are known for their exceptional sense of smell,” the San Diego Animal Sanctuary notes. “In fact, their olfactory abilities are often considered the best among all animals on Earth.”

They’ve got numbers to back that up: “The average dog’s sense of smell is roughly 100 times better than that of a human. A bloodhound, which is one of the best tracking dogs, is 300 times better. But a bear’s olfactory ability is 7 times better than a bloodhound’s.”

With certain notable exceptions, however, bears are unlikely to be sniffing for drugs, as opposed to honey, berries, porridge, or picnic baskets. And even if they do decide to search a car, we can be pretty sure they will not assert the right to seize any cash they come across, as human police officers routinely do under civil forfeiture laws.

Watching the Watchers

Just as bears have no interest in your money, they generally do not seem to mind, or even notice, when people record them as they go about their business. Sometimes they even seem to like it. That also stands in sharp contrast with the behavior of human cops, who frequently object (or worse) when bystanders use cell phones to document their official conduct, even though several federal appeals courts have held that people have a First Amendment right to do that—a point on which the U.S. Department of Justice concurs.

Bears also compare favorably to humans when it comes to the use of deadly force. While more than 600 people are killed by American law enforcement officers each year, The Alaska Frontier counted just eight fatal bear attacks in the United States from 2020 through 2022, an average of fewer than three a year. That is pretty reassuring, even taking into account the fact that the United States has more cops (about 720,000) than bears (around 340,000).

On balance, it is fair to say that bears, despite their general ignorance of constitutional law, pose a much less grave threat to your civil liberties than humans do. But the factors that weigh in favor of bears—a lack of interest in your contraband or money, a tendency to mind their own business, and a disinclination toward violence unless they perceive a threat to themselves or their cubs—probably make them ill-suited to careers in law enforcement.

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From a Justice Department press release two weeks ago (I learned about the case just today from the excellent Science Fictions podcast [Tom Chivers & Stuart Ritchie] [formerly The Studies Show], one of the few podcasts to which I pay to subscribe):

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Inc. (Dana-Farber) has agreed to pay $15,000,000 to resolve allegations that, between 2014 and 2024, it violated the False Claims Act by making materially false statements and certifications related to National Institutes of Health (NIH) research grants….

As part of the settlement, Dana-Farber admitted that its researchers used funds from six NIH grants to conduct research that resulted in 14 publications in scientific journals containing misrepresented and/or duplicated images and data. The publications reused images to represent different experimental conditions; duplicated images to represent different testing conditions, mice, and/or timepoints; or rotated, magnified, or stretched images. Further, Dana-Farber admitted that a supervising researcher failed to exercise sufficient oversight over these researchers, and that Dana-Farber spent funds from those six NIH grants that were unallowable.

As part of the settlement, Dana-Farber also admitted that another researcher received four NIH grants after submitting grant applications that discussed a journal article authored by the researcher but did not disclose that certain images and data in that article were misrepresented and/or duplicated. The United States contends that Dana-Farber caused the submission of false claims to NIH by falsely certifying compliance with grant terms and conditions, spending grant funds on unallowable expenses, and obtaining grants through false and misleading statements.

Dana-Farber cooperated with the government in this matter and received credit under the Department’s guidelines for taking disclosure, cooperation, and remediation into account in False Claims Act cases. Among other actions, Dana-Farber summarized voluminous materials relevant to the government’s investigation, voluntarily disclosed additional allegations of research misconduct relevant to the government’s investigation, voluntarily produced materials without a subpoena, sought to resolve this matter expeditiously, accepted responsibility for its conduct, and implemented remedial measures.

The civil settlement includes the resolution of claims brought under the qui tam or whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act by Sholto David. Under those provisions, a private party can file an action on behalf of the United States and receive a portion of any recovery. David will receive $2,625,000 under today’s settlement….

You can see the Settlement Agreement for more details, including a list of the 14 potentially affected publications and their authors.

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An excerpt from Arnstein v. Stein Saks, PLLC, decided last week by New York County trial court judge Judy Kim (currently being appealed) (you can also read plaintiff’s Complaint and legal argument opposing the motion to dismiss):

Plaintiff alleges that defendants defamed him in their motion to dismiss an action filed against them …, Mark Goldberg v. Mark Rozenberg Esq. et al… (the “Bronx Action”). The plaintiff in the Bronx Action, Mark Goldberg, sued defendants for defamation based on statements made in yet another lawsuit, … entitled The Natural Sapphire Company v Marz Rozenberg et al.

Plaintiff contends that, as part of defendants’ motion to dismiss the Bronx Action, they “gratuitously referred to [p]laintiff by name and included salacious statements regarding his past conviction—accusing him of forgery and labeling him a ‘convicted felon’—without any connection to the issues or parties in that case.” Plaintiff asserts claims for defamation and abuse of process ….

“[A] statement made in the course of legal proceedings is absolutely privileged if it is at all pertinent to the litigation.” … Here, defendants’ statements about plaintiff in the Bronx Action were pertinent to the motion to dismiss that action. While plaintiff was not a party in the Bronx Action, defendant asserted that he was the principal of the Natural Sapphire Company and, in that capacity, employed Goldberg, and was part of a coordinated campaign of meritless actions filed against defendants after defendants filed in Federal Court against The Natural Sapphire Company asserting violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This information is pertinent to, inter alia, defendants’ request for sanctions in the Bronx Action. Accordingly, they fall within the absolute litigation privilege, precluding the defamation claims asserted here.

Even setting this aside, plaintiff does not dispute the truthfulness of defendants’ statements about his criminal conviction. As such, no defamation claim based on this statement lies…. “[T]ruth is an absolute defense to a defamation action” ….

Neither has plaintiff stated an abuse of process claim. [Details omitted. -EV] Finally, defendants’ request for sanctions is granted to the extent that plaintiff is enjoined from commencing any new litigation in the New York State courts against any defendant herein without obtaining prior approval from the court. The record reflects that such relief is necessary “to prevent use of the judicial system as a vehicle for harassment, ill will and spite.”

Here’s a post on the original forgery case; for more on the broader pattern of attempts to vanish online material using (among other things) forged or fraudulent orders, see my Shenanigans (Internet Takedown Edition):

9 Months in Prison for Forging Court Orders Aimed at Vanishing Online Material

“Arnstein … submitted the counterfeit orders, which appeared to be valid on their face, to Google and requested that Google de-index the websites containing the purportedly defamatory information.”

From a Justice Department press release put out last Friday, about a case you may have seen discussed here and here:

Michael Arnstein was sentenced today to nine months in prison for conspiring to forge a federal judge’s signature on counterfeit court orders that Arnstein submitted to Google to get negative reviews about his business removed from Google search results. Arnstein pled guilty on September 15, 2017, before U.S. District Court Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr., who imposed today’s sentence.

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said: “Michael Arnstein’s blatant criminal scheme to exploit the authority of the federal judiciary for his company’s benefit was outrageous. As Arnstein has learned, his attempts to remove negative reviews about his business from Google search results by forging a U.S. District Court judge’s signature may have worked in the short term, but it also earned him nine months in a federal prison.”

According to the allegations contained in the Complaint, the felony Information to which Arnstein pled guilty, and statements made during court proceedings:

Between February 2014 and February 2017, Arnstein engaged in a scheme to submit counterfeit federal court orders to Google, Inc. (“Google”) in an effort to get websites containing unfavorable postings about Arnstein’s business de-indexed from Google’s internet search results. In furtherance of this scheme, Arnstein and others forged the signature of a United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York on more than 10 counterfeit court orders. These counterfeit orders listed the websites containing purportedly defamatory information about Arnstein’s business and ordered the removal of such information from the websites. Arnstein then submitted the counterfeit orders, which appeared to be valid on their face, to Google and requested that Google de-index the websites containing the purportedly defamatory information.

* * *In addition to the prison term, Arnstein, 41, of Yonkers, New York, was sentenced to three years of supervised release, the first five months of which Arnstein must serve in home detention. Arnstein was also ordered to pay a fine of $20,000 and to perform 200 hours of community service during his term of supervised release.

Mr. Berman praised the outstanding investigative work of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States Marshals Service. He also thanked Google for its helpful assistance in this investigation.

The prosecution of this case is being overseen by the Office’s Complex Frauds and Cybercrime Unit. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Sheb Swett and Daniel S. Noble are in charge of the prosecution.

Here’s an excerpt from an e-mail from Arnstein mentioned in the criminal complaint:

[N]o bullshit: if I could do it all over again I would have found another court order injunction for removal of links (probably something that can be found online pretty easily) made changes in photoshop to show the links that I wanted removed and then sent to ‘removals@google.com’ as a pdf – showing the court order docket number, the judges [sic] signature – but with the new links put in. google isn’t checking this stuff; that’s the bottom line b/c I spent $30,000 fuckin thousand dollars and nearly 2 fuckin years to do what legit could have been done for about 6 hours of searching and photoshop by a guy for $200., all in ONE DAY ….

I should note that the Lumen Database was also instrumental in the prosecution.

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