On Tuesday, Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore signed over 270 bills into law. With public scrutiny focused on bills related to crime and immigration, several bills that expand government to address housing shortages and integrate AI into public education have flown under the radar. Here are five examples.

1. The Maryland Housing Certainty Act

Maryland faces a housing shortage of about 100,000 units. To keep pace with its growing population, the state would need an additional 590,186 units by 2045, according to the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development. At first glance, the Maryland Housing Certainty Act appears to be a fix to the issue by targeting one of the main barriers to housing construction: ever-changing regulations that increase uncertainty for developers.

It’s a high bar, considering Maryland is the sixth most regulated state for housing development, with construction costs 27 percent higher than the national average. Previously, housing projects were subject to changes in local regulations, even with prior approval. 

The act freezes local zoning laws and land use policies for housing developments, allowing only regulations applicable “at the time of submission” to be considered for project approval. The law also prohibits the collection of development impact fees and excise taxes until after a project is complete, smartly reducing the front-loaded costs of new construction and reducing a barrier to market entry for smaller developers.

Unfortunately, the bill ostensibly undermines its efforts at deregulation by doubling down on local jurisdictions’ ability to “require approvals or permits for each phase of a housing development project.” 

Maryland approved roughly 3,500 fewer permits in 2025 than the previous year—despite admissions from its housing department that the state’s current permitting structure only increases “housing cost burdens,” causing residents to “leave the state to find housing.” 

Instead of cutting regulations that prolong the completion of housing projects, the act merely trades one layer of government control for another.

2. The Maryland Transit and Housing Opportunity Act

In the Maryland Transit and Housing Opportunity Act, lawmakers rightly recognize that density restrictions and parking requirements are common regulatory tactics used to prevent the construction of new housing. 

The act designates housing projects centered around public transit areas as “enterprise zones,” subsidizing their development with property and income tax credits. It also includes prohibitions on land-use restrictions for publicly owned land. It prevents local jurisdictions from imposing “off-street parking requirements” on development projects within a quarter mile of a public transportation hub. 

Still, the bill makes clear that none of its provisions should be seen as limiting a local jurisdiction’s authority to deny projects based on “environmental or natural resources concerns,” “public health and safety considerations,” or “adequate public facilities ordinances,” meaning developments can still be denied if the government deems it lacks local infrastructure like schools, roads, water, sewer, and EMS. Meanwhile, the use of tax credits equates to the government picking winners and losers based on location and artificially propping up housing developments that might otherwise fail. 

3. The Maryland Fair Chance Housing Act

Any Maryland landlord that “manages or owns five or more residential rental units” is now prohibited from requiring their prospective tenants to submit to drug or alcohol tests until a conditional offer is made. Landlords in the state are also barred from “requesting or requiring” prospective tenants to consent to the release of information about drug prevention or treatment programs. Under the Maryland Fair Chance Housing Act, if a landlord checks the criminal history of one prospective tenant, he “must do so for every prospective tenant.”

Rental leases are voluntary agreements. The bill unnecessarily usurps the judgment of private landowners for the government’s. Red tape, such as the bills’ mandatory assessments and reassessments, can translate to real dollars in the form of lawyer fees or lost income while the unit sits vacant. At the same time, the $500-per-violation fine creates a potential money pit for property owners who might unwittingly run afoul of the new regulations.

4. Artificial Intelligence Ready Schools Act

When it comes to AI, Maryland policies and governance are crafted to “first do no harm.” For lawmakers, that inevitably translates to more regulation. 

The Artificial Intelligence Ready Schools Act creates statewide AI guidance and governance structures for K-12 schools. This includes a requirement that the Maryland State Department of Education provide “local school systems, educators, parents, and students” with guidance on which AI tools are acceptable for use, and a rubric for scoring AI tools used by educators. 

The bill creates a slew of new administrative burdens for schools, including designating AI coordinators, new reporting requirements, guidance systems, training programs, and procurement structures—adding to the administrative layer cake that already devours Maryland’s school funding.

5. Maryland Artificial Intelligence Partnership

Maryland’s push to regulate AI includes establishing an Artificial Intelligence Partnership with the state’s university system. While the bill aims to support AI innovation and integration in the state’s public institutions, it does so by creating a new regulatory office complete with a director, partnership hubs, subcabinets, fellowships, annual reports, and planning structures.

Prioritizing government-backed innovation hubs over a decentralized approach where the market rewards entrepreneurship is another way for lawmakers to steer resources, such as capital and labor, toward favored projects. Mandating that technology development aligns with the government’s way of thinking is a surefire way to slow innovation in a rapidly growing industry like AI.

Maryland’s road to growth starts with deregulation. Unfortunately, the state will continue to take one step forward and two steps back until lawmakers curb their appetite to feed the administrative state.

The post 5 Bills Signed by Wes Moore That Will Impact Housing and AI Development in Maryland appeared first on Reason.com.

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The minimum wage is on the rise in the U.S. Thirty states, the District of Columbia, and at least 68 localities have set hourly compensation above the federal floor of $7.25. New York City, Long Island, and Westchester are at $17. In California, fast-food establishments are required to pay their workers $20 per hour.

Advocates for these laws point to academic studies that claim higher minimum wages don’t cost jobs. Many of them use statistical techniques that generate misleading results or are misinterpreted by the media. A 2024 paper published in The Review of Economic Studies titled “Minimum Wage Employment Effects and Labor Market Concentration” didn’t get as much press attention as some studies in this canon, but the paper is still worth examining because its statistical missteps are typical of academic research published in prestige journals.

Co-authored by five economists, the paper found that minimum wage increases haven’t led to job losses at big-box stores, concluding that these “monopsonistic” establishments therefore must systematically underpay their workers. The University of Pennsylvania, where one of the co-authors works, promoted the study in an article titled, “Increasing minimum wage has positive effects on employment.”

The authors reached their conclusion by dividing American counties into those with retail sectors dominated by a few large employers (call these “the Big-Box counties”) and those with more diverse retail employers (“the Mom-and-Pop counties”). Next, they looked at how employment of store clerks, order fillers, retail salespeople, and cashiers in the general merchandise sector responded to minimum wage increases relative to overall county employment.

They found that in Big-Box counties, a 10 percent higher minimum wage was associated with 1.12 percentage points lower job losses among store clerks than among county workers overall. In Mom-and-Pop counties, the same wage increase was associated with 1.79 percent larger job losses among store clerks than among overall county workers. In other words, the relative loss of low-level retail jobs was smaller in the Big-Box counties than in the Mom-and-Pops.

The authors presented this finding as evidence that workers were being underpaid in areas that experienced smaller job losses. Big-Box employers have “more wage-setting power” and thus must “tend to pay workers less,” as the University of Pennsylvania summarized it. The Washington Center for Equitable Growth cited this paper in an essay arguing for expanded antitrust enforcement and higher minimum wages. The study also appeared (in its preprint form) in a roundup by Noah Smith of recent scholarship demonstrating how economists have become “unlikely crusaders” against monopolistic power.

The study took a bizarre logical leap. A reasonable interpretation of why Big-Box counties experienced lower unemployment after a minimum wage increase is that store clerks at companies like Walmart already earn more than clerks at Mom-and-Pop establishments, so a minimum wage increase is less likely to artificially boost their earnings above the marginal revenue product of their labor. The study also didn’t prove that minimum wage increases cause employment increases, as the University of Pennsylvania claimed; it only showed that average county workers get laid off at higher rates than Walmart clerks.

There’s another problem with this paper that’s common in academic research: its overreliance on “p-value,” which indicates the statistical significance of its findings. A p-value is not enough to tell us whether a finding is the result of pure chance. For that, we also need to know two more p‘s—prior probability and the power of the test. This study, like many, leaves out the two extra p‘s.

To illustrate what I mean, consider going to a baseball game and seeing one player get four hits in four at-bats. That’s a good day for the player, but four-for-four games happen about twice a week during the Major League Baseball (MLB) season. Nevertheless, our single observation could support a paper claiming that the player is the best hitter in baseball history, “significant at the 5 percent level.”

What exactly does “significant at the 5 percent level” mean? Let’s say that to be the best hitter in baseball, the player has to at least match Tetelo Vargas’ batting average of 0.471 in 1943. The chance of a 0.471 hitter going four-for-four is 4.92 percent. Since that’s less than 5 percent, we say we reject the null hypothesis that the hitter we just saw had a batting average of 0.471 or lower at the 5 percent level. So we can publish the claim that we just saw the best hitter in baseball history. But remember, going four-for-four happens about twice a week in MLB, and every player who achieves this feat has a lower batting average than Vargas.

The problem is that we over-relied on the p-value and ignored prior probability and power. There have been about 25,000 hitters in MLB history. If we test all of them at the 5 percent level, we expect 1,250 of them to be falsely identified as the best hitter in the history of baseball. That’s why prior probability matters.

Meanwhile, if we did happen to catch Tetelo Vargas during the 1943 season, he went four-for-four in only one of 30 games. That makes this a low-power test; we catch only one out of 30 true results. So we get 1,250 false results and one-thirtieth of a true one.

Back to the minimum wage paper. Its p-value is around 2 percent, which is below the required 5 percent threshold for publication, supporting the claim that a 10 percent higher minimum wage is associated with 1.12 percentage points lower job losses among store clerks than among overall workers in Big-Box counties.

The authors committed the same fallacy as claiming that a player is the best hitter in history based on going four-for-four in one game. The test is too low-powered. There are only three counties in the U.S. with county-wide minimum wage regulations higher than state and federal rules: Howard County, Prince George’s County, and Montgomery County, all in Maryland. All are Big-Box counties. Their minimums range from $15.30 to $17.65. There’s not much ability to notice a 1.12 percent difference in job losses from that sample.

I’m simplifying the analysis; the authors do make use of less direct comparisons. But given all the noise and complexities, it seems unlikely a 1.12 percent difference would stand out. I think I’m being generous in saying there’s 20 percent power to their test

Let’s say we run this test on 1,000 similar hypotheses. The hypothesis that minimum wage increases affect average county workers more than Walmart clerks has a low prior probability. So let’s say 5 percent (50) of the 1,000 are true. At our assumed 20 percent power, we flag 10 to publish as claims. Of the 1,000 hypotheses, 950 are false, and at a 2 percent p-value, 19 of them pass statistical muster. So, it’s 10 out of 29, or a 34 percent chance, that this claim is true. No reasonable combination of prior and power assumptions makes the study’s result more likely true than false.

Researchers do not report priors and power because they are not required to. Journals don’t require priors and power because there is no consensus on how to estimate them, and because requiring them would force authors to make a much weaker claim than “statistically significant at the 5 percent level.” Press offices love p-values because the word significant sounds scientific. Journalists rarely look past the press release. Activists and politicians cite the resulting headlines as if they were settled facts. Each link in the chain has a small incentive to keep the misunderstanding going, and almost nobody has an incentive to break it.

I picked on the minimum wage paper because it’s an unusually clean example of overemphasizing p-values, but this practice is a common distortion in academic studies.

The argument against minimum wage increases must be made on its own terms. I’m taking aim at this trick of taking a marginal academic finding, stripping out its uncertainty, and restating it as a sweeping policy claim.

The same trick is run on every spending program, every regulation, every tax, and every policy of any constituency that wants to dress something up as a scientific finding. A study reports a 1.12 percent effect with a 2 percent p-value, and, somewhere downstream of the press release, a politician quotes it as proof that a favored policy is the wise course of action. The reader who has learned to ask for the prior and the power is, structurally, a much harder reader to fool. Run the arithmetic on the next study you see cited as an established fact, with whatever priors you find honest. Most of the time, the implied probability that the claimed result is correct will land somewhere between a quarter and a half.

The federal minimum wage has not moved since 2009. The state laboratories of democracy have, in the meantime, run an enormous natural experiment on the question of what happens when you raise it. But the science has been badly weaponized for a policy fight, exploiting a popular view that a p-value below 5 percent is enough to draw a meaningful conclusion.

This article is excerpted from the book Wrong Number: How to Extract Truth From a Blizzard of Quantitative Disinformation by permission of Wiley. The book is based on Aaron Brown’s video series of the same title with Reason.

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Today’s guest is Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin E. Roth, the author of Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work.

He talks with Nick Gillespie about why some voluntary transactions provoke moral outrage even when no one is being directly harmed. Roth explains why black markets often emerge when governments try to ban activities with persistent demand, why both markets and prohibitions require social support to function, and how unintended consequences can make moralistic policies backfire. They discuss the war on drugs, prostitution, surrogacy, same-sex marriage, price gouging, and why Iran remains the only country in the world with a legal market for kidney donors.

They also explore Roth’s work designing kidney exchange networks and school choice systems, how digital technology and private transactions make certain bans harder to enforce, and why harm reduction may work better than prohibition in areas ranging from drug policy to sex work.

0:00—Repugnant transactions and organ sales

9:30—Blood plasma, coercion, and class bias

16:46—School choice reform

22:59—Same-sex marriage, abortion, and contraception

29:59—The war on drugs and moral economics

38:55—Roth’s theoretical origin story

43:45—Uber, AI, and technological efficiencies

51:26—Price gouging and consumer resentment

54:27—Pornography, prostitution, and privacy

1:05:21—Has America become more economically moral?

1:12:15—Biden’s economic agenda and Trump’s tariffs

1:17:04—Winning a Nobel Prize

Producer: Paul Alexander

Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser

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The Illinois Legislature is busy advancing a bill that’s one of the most egregious examples yet of the grift between professional sports teams and state and local governments. 

Under House Bill 910, projects designated as “megaprojects” would have their assessed value frozen at a base-year level, effectively shielding all new construction from property taxation for up to 45 years. Just two developments would qualify for the maximum duration under the current language: the proposed Chicago Bears stadium in Arlington Heights and the One Central mixed-use development near Soldier Field in Chicago.

Rank-and-file property owners in Illinois pay the highest property taxes in the nation, but middle-class taxpayers get no relief under the bill. Instead, it’s likely their taxes will go up even more. The language says “megaproject” developers (for projects that cost at least $100 million) would be able to negotiate a payment in lieu of taxes with local taxing bodies, with the duration of the tax break varying by the total cost of the development. For example, if a property tax analysis of the Arlington Heights stadium estimates it to be a $5 billion development on land currently valued at $100 million, this bill would reduce the developer’s annual tax liability from roughly $350 million to approximately $7 million.

What happens to the difference of $343 million in this example? Local governments can still count the full value of the megaproject when calculating how much they’re allowed to tax and borrow—they just can’t actually collect taxes on most of the megaproject. Given the record of local governments in Illinois, it’s a pretty good bet they’ll find that revenue elsewhere by raising taxes. The legislation, as it stands, does basically nothing to address this.

The bill passed the Illinois House in April. The bill passed 78–32, with 10 Republicans crossing party lines to support it. Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker is busy pressuring the state Senate to get it across the finish line before the end of May. Pritzker (and the rest of the Legislature) are feeling pressure to pass the bill due to the looming threat of the Bears moving to northwest Indiana. Hoosier lawmakers, especially Republicans, have a standing offer for the Bears to relocate just across the state line for over $1 billion in public subsidies. (At least Indiana is in better fiscal health than Illinois.)

Keeping the Bears in Illinois is not Pritzker’s only interest in the bill, though. He and his family, the wealthy owners of the Hyatt hotel chain, stand to gain from similar property tax schemes for billionaires. (Pritzker and his wife once had five toilets removed from a vacant mansion they owned next door to their primary residence, with the goal of having the property classified as “uninhabitable” in a property tax appeal. The mansion’s assessed value was thus lowered from $6.3 million to about $1.1 million.) Hyatt operates a state-owned, tax-exempt property, Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, that just received tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded renovations, approved by a board partially appointed by Pritzker.

Grifting off taxpayers via property tax schemes is a practice that goes way back for Pritzker, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that he’s seeking to extend these property tax breaks to other billionaires. If he gets his way, Illinois residents will be stuck paying for these sweetheart deals while billionaires get a break.

The post Illinois Plans Tax Break for Billionaires and the Chicago Bears. Everyone Else Could End Up Paying More. appeared first on Reason.com.

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In my book, in defense of considerably more constitutional protection for student speech, I make an autonomy-enhancing argument, relying not only on the importance of respect for student autonomy on the part of school authorities, implying that in almost all circumstances, students should be able to say what they want to say and how they want to say it, without fear of being punished. I also underscore the extent to which the exercise of free speech rights over time can help students develop their autonomous capacities, as speakers, listeners, and thinkers. That is not to say that other free speech arguments are bad. I just happen to think that an autonomy-enhancing one, coupled with the inability of school officials to censor competently or impartially, is particularly well-suited for the context of secondary education.

Although I’m not a libertarian, I am very libertarian about some things, including free speech. I might be even more of a free speech absolutist than Professor Volokh is (if that is logically possible, ha ha). I detest paternalism, that is, justifications for restrictions on free speech that maintain that not being allowed to speak or be exposed to the ideas of others is for the good of the speaker or the listener. I would prefer to live in a society where normally, lawmakers do not tell people what to do, as if they are wiser or know a person better than that person knows him/herself. I find it arrogant for anyone to assume that they know what is better for me than I do and to think they should be able to use political power to coerce me for my own well-being.

For similar reasons, paternalistic defenses of censorship of student speech do not work. Respect for the autonomy of each student on the part of school authorities requires a very strong presumption in favor of letting students express themselves, even when they express false, offensive, or stupid ideas. By “autonomy,” I mean the right to make personal choices about the most important aspects of one’s life and to be responsible for the consequences. People are supposed to be persuaded, not manipulated, threatened, or coerced, and that includes giving them access to the information and ideas that enable them to exercise their autonomous capacities. That way, each agent can evaluate, as carefully as possible, the considerations for and against life decisions, especially the most important ones concerning which ends to pursue, how to pursue them, and when (or whether) to revise them.

Simply put, censorship at a public school is incompatible with respect for the autonomy of each student. As a generalization, at my undergraduate institution, I have found Gen Z students to not be independent or resilient. In fact, they do not seem to like trying to figure out things for themselves. Instead, they would rather ask me what to do. I find this trend to be problematic for multiple reasons. When you treat teenage students as children in junior high or high school, including policing their speech, they will act like children. Nobody learns how to become more independent and responsible by being told what to do. Besides, a student speaker is not likely to harm herself by speaking or writing. Nor are those in the intended audience likely to be harmed by exposure to her speech. A “verbal” assault is just a metaphor. Indeed, the opposite is more likely to be true: students will benefit from self-expression and that of others when they are exposed to a variety of ideas, regardless of whether they agree. Restrictions on speech stunt intellectual growth, self-reflection, and the acquisition of knowledge, thereby undermining the development of the autonomous capacities that help to make us who we are.

Paternalism as a justification for censorship at a junior high or high school would be more plausible if very few teenagers were capable of educationally benefiting from the experience of exchanging reasons with their classmates in the public discourse at the school. Even when the average teenager cannot express herself as effectively or thoughtfully as an adult, that is beside the point. The bar should be low, when the goal is gradual improvement, as she learns to form her own ideas and share them with others on campus. One does not deny someone the chance to develop an important skill in life because she lacks it at the outset. As William Glod remarks, “Paternalism frustrates a person’s self-development and is thus wrong for that reason.”^[1] All teenagers can participate in the marketplace of ideas as their school in one way or another if they choose to do so. After all, there is no such threshold for adults in other circumstances or for undergraduates at a public university. Everyone is allowed to participate in public discourse, regardless of their motivations, intelligence, thoughtfulness, and knowledge.

One can concede an obvious point to critics of more constitutional protection for student speech –that many teenagers are immature and will try out ridiculous ideas—without also accepting the much less defensible conclusion that all students are so immature that none of them should be able to engage in free speech. Whereas we might not want to let a thirteen-year-old vote (or let her parents vote for her), the implication is not that she also should not be able to express herself at her junior high school if she wants to write an editorial in the school newspaper or criticize the principal or a teacher on social media. Between early and late adolescence, students’ ability to think improves. Thus, one can surmise that their future selves, when they are older, have a very important interest in being able to think more independently.

Although the exercise of autonomy does not always produce good consequences, including happiness, satisfaction of desires, improved welfare, or emotional well-being, it is still intrinsically valuable insofar as the person who is exercising her autonomous capacities is doing what a human being is meant to do, inasmuch as she conceives of herself as a free and equal being, by using her rational capacities, making decisions, and acting accordingly. My reasons may be hard for you to understand or may turn out to be bad reasons by an objective standard (if there is one when it comes to life decisions not involving facts) yet they are still my reasons. As such, the government should not be vetting them.

Even young children have partial autonomy. Poor choices do not necessarily mean that a teenager lacks such capacities, no more than they do when adults make bad decisions, which is not uncommon. Even when a thirteen-year-old does not have a right to vote, she still should be able to exercise her constitutional right of free speech, grounded in respect for autonomy. In terms of cognitive abilities, by 14/15 at the latest, teenagers are indistinguishable from adults. Like adults, children have degrees of autonomy, and some of them are not only more autonomous than their classmates but are more autonomous than many adults are. Just as it would not make sense to treat a four-year-old as if she were eighteen, it also would make no sense to treat an eighteen-year-old like a four-year-old. Everyone falls somewhere on a continuum provided that they have autonomous capacities. While it may make little sense to assert that preschoolers should have free speech rights, older and more cognitively sophisticated students fall into a different category for free speech purposes. Enough of them can assess the plausibility of claims, compare alternatives, and even call into question a teacher’s competence or motivations. In my junior high and high school, I still can recall a fair number of decisions by school officials that did not make sense to me then and still do not make sense to me now, forty years later. Usually, older students find themselves on a different part of the learning curve.

If the exercise of autonomy and the development of autonomous capacities had little to do with speech, communication, and thinking, the constitutional protection of student speech would be less imperative. But that is not the case. From the standpoint of autonomy, it should be assumed that as both speakers/writers and listeners, students should be able to express themselves. People cannot be nearly as autonomous as they could be when they cannot openly communicate with others. As a result, students must have ample opportunity to develop confidence in their own voices, and that requires continual practice. A school, which is an educational institution after all, is an ideal place for students to begin exercising their free speech rights before they become adults.

[1] William Glod, Why It’s Okay to Make Bad Choices (Routledge, 2021), 14.

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