Month: March 2023

These are weird times (aren’t they all?), but I’ve lived long enough to see a resurgence of atrocious ideas that I thought had been debunked years ago. Apparently, humanity can only learn lessons for a short time before a new generation needs to re-learn them. “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” Ronald Reagan said. Perhaps he wasn’t exaggerating.

For instance, the Cold War was a backdrop to my formative years with the collapse of communism marking a great advance in the freedom and prosperity of vast swaths of humanity. Despite the gulags, oppression and deprivation, many left-wing thinkers now spend their days—with full belies and from the comfort of their suburban homes—raging against the evils of American capitalism. Just check your Twitter feed.

Likewise, right-wing provocateurs have crept out from under their rocks. I can’t fathom how anyone can fall prey to fascistic and bigoted philosophies these days. I also can’t understand how some self-styled “conservatives” can champion Hungary’s authoritarian leader as a model. There’s nothing new under the sun, I suppose, but I naively thought such illiberalism had largely gone away.

The revanchist idea that has really left me flummoxed, however, involves Prohibition. Some serious thinkers have surveyed the American landscape and decided that America’s key problem is we don’t have enough laws regulating personal behavior. They see vice everywhere—and perhaps they’re right on that point. Instead of engaging the culture, they turn to the tried-and-failed method of empowering the government.

In a recent Atlantic column criticizing the legalization of online gambling and marijuana, physician Matthew Loftus argues that these moves embrace the idealistic idea that “responsible, independent adults (should) be able to make decisions for themselves about how they spend their money or use their body.” He believes we overlook the degree to which “our habits … are just as often inexplicably self-destructive as they are reasonable.”

His solution is to pass laws requiring that “gambling should take place in casinos, not on smartphones, and marijuana should be used only under a healthcare provider’s supervision.” He even offers a nuanced defense of the Eighteenth Amendment’s alcohol Prohibition, which he credits with reducing alcohol-related illnesses and domestic violence. We should structure our laws to provide “guardrails to help people from driving off cliffs of vice,” he adds.

Debates about virtue and vice have been around since the dawn of humanity. I’m no personal fan of online gambling or any form of gambling, for that matter, nor do I have any particular interest in cannabis. But, as Jacob Sullum noted in a Reason column debunking Loftus’ arguments, only 1 percent of the nation’s gamblers have severe gambling problems and only 1.7 percent of marijuana users have a substance-related disorder related to weed.

It doesn’t make sense—at least not in a relatively free society—to create laws that restrict activities enjoyed (rightly or wrongly) by the general populace to protect a tiny minority that will undoubtedly partake in those activities anyway, albeit in a less-regulated way. When I was a teenager, it was no doubt a bit harder to access marijuana, but it was widely used nonetheless. We’ve all heard the term “bookies,” who facilitate illegal bet-making. We also know about black markets.

The first problem with the New Prohibitionists is they have an almost childish faith in government regulation. Trying to stop vice is like trying to stop water from flowing down a hill. It finds its way somehow. The world’s oldest profession remains illegal yet, I’m betting, takes place pretty much everywhere. Those open-air drug markets that one might find near any homeless encampment involve the sale of drugs that are not—nor likely to be—legal.

The second problem is they focus almost entirely on the ill effects of problem gambling and drug use, but ignore the ill effects of using law enforcement approaches to control people’s deep-seated and “inexplicably self-destructive” desires. There were some (mostly temporary) health benefits to Prohibition, but the Cato Institute notes that, “alcohol became more dangerous to consume; crime increased and became ‘organized’…and corruption of public officials was rampant.”

More recently, the Drug War led to appalling erosions of our civil liberties, as the government gained wide-ranging powers (e.g., civil asset forfeiture) to fight drug cartels—something they promptly used against ordinary citizens. One might argue that personal “vices” are problematic, but no-knock raids and government property thefts seem far more evil.

“Puritans argue against the goodness of creation, finding the source of evil in material things of pleasure (as tobacco, alcohol, art, and so on) rather than in the disordered human will to misuse the good things nature affords us,” wrote the great Christian author G.K. Chesterton. Indeed. If they want to make us more virtuous, today’s Puritans need to spend less time changing laws and more time changing hearts.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

The post Just Say 'No' to New Forms of Prohibition appeared first on Reason.com.

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From Bostic v. Daily Dot, LLC, decided Wednesday by Judge Robert Pitman (W.D. Tex.):

This case revolves around an article … published on February 23, 2021, by the Daily Dot—a wholly owned subsidiary of Clarion Media—which stated that Plaintiff Daniel Bostic … was a “Jan. 6 Capitol riot organizer.” Bostic claims that he “was not connected in any way with the January 6 riots, much less that he was an organizer or coordinator of riots and insurrection.” According to his complaint, Defendants knew or disregarded that Bostic was not connected with the January 6 riot and falsely attempted to portray him as an organizer by using a photo of him at an event from a different rally in November 2020.

Bostic has a background in politics but maintains that he has never been substantially involved in any attempts to overturn the 2020 election. He first interned for and later worked as a staff assistant for Congressman Tim Scott, and in 2018, volunteered with the organization “Stop the Steal,” which protested ongoing recounts in Broward County, Florida. After 2018, he maintained contact with the organizers of Stop the Steal but began to focus on promoting his filmmaking. He attended political rallies in 2020, including some following the November election results, but alleges that he did not play any part in organizing the Stop the Steal rallies planned for January 5 or 6, 2021. While Bostic does not firmly deny that Stop the Steal helped to organize parts of the January 6 protest, he says that the organization did not plan the march on the Capitol or rally at then-President Trump’s speech.

While Bostic acknowledges that he was at a protest in Washington D.C. on January 6, he maintains that he only attended a peaceful portion of the protest. Bostic walked from the White House Ellipse to the media area of the Capitol Lawn and live-streamed a portion of the walk on Twitter via Periscope with “Stop the Steal” chants in the background. He captioned one of the videos “Storming the Capitol#StopTheSteal” but argues that he was so far away from the Capitol building that it should have been obvious that he was not actually storming anything. When he reached the Capitol, Bostic saw the violent scene unfolding, deleted his Periscope stream, and left the protest. According to Bostic, that was the extent of his participation in the events of January 6.

On January 19, 2021, Salon published an article stating that Bostic could be seen on video climbing the steps of the Capitol building. On February 23, 2021, the Daily Dot—an online news organization based out of Austin, Texas—published a short article stating that Bostic would be attending an upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference (“CPAC”). The Article was written by [Zachary] Petrizzo, who Bostic describes as an investigative reporter who has published for the Daily Dot[], Mediaite, Salon, and the Daily Beast….

Bostic sued for libel, and the court allowed the case to go forward as to one of Bostic’s claim. First, the court held that Bostic was a limited-purpose public figure, because he had voluntarily injected himself into debate about the legitimacy of the 2018 and 2020 elections. But the court concluded that Bostic had adequately “pled that the descriptions of him as a Jan. 6 Capitol riot organizer and coordinator of the insurrection were defamatory with the requisite level of falsity”:

The Daily Dot Defendants argue that Bostic did in fact help to organize the events of January 6. They point out that Stop the Steal’s website directed visitors to a funding page for January 6 protestors and promoted a January 6 “Petition Congress” event. In their request for judicial notice, they point to more sites and Tweets that associate Bostic with Stop the Steal. Even assuming these sites were judicially noticeable, they would not warrant a dismissal. Indeed, the Daily Dot Defendants point out that Stop the Steal’s website “[identified] Bostic as a Georgia organizer” but did not suggest a direct affiliation with organizing national or D.C. protests. Nor do Bostic’s tweets, which encourage his followers to come to D.C. on January 6, show that he “organized” the protest. Tweets encouraging attendance at an event are not necessarily the same as “organizing” an event, and it would be premature to draw such an inference against Bostic.

There are reasons to doubt Bostic’s characterization of the events. If Stop the Steal did help organize the portion of the January 6 protest that turned into the storming of the Capitol, that might show that the Article was not defamatory. But neither Bostic’s complaint nor the Daily Dot Defendants’ motion explicitly describes Stop the Steal’s role in the January 6 protests in detail. Bostic alleges that “Stop the Steal [did not] organize[ ] President Trump’s rally or the subsequent march to the Capitol lawn” but he stops short of disclaiming any organizational involvement. Elsewhere, he alleges that he “did not help Stop the Steal organize any events scheduled for January 5, 2021 or January 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C.” But Bostic never describes what events Stop the Steal did plan for January 6. If Stop the Steal did organize events that led to the January 6 insurrection, and Bostic was listed as the media contact for Stop the Steal, such evidence will likely be relevant for summary judgment. However, as such information is not before the Court on the pleadings, dismissal is premature.

Further, the Daily Dot Defendants argue that their description of Bostic as an organizer and coordinator of the January 6 cannot be actionable in defamation because they are not provably false assertions of fact…. The Daily Dot Defendants focus on the labels of the January 6 events as a “riot” or “insurrection.”

Whether this argument is correct or not, it appears to miss the thrust of Bostic’s defamation claim. Bostic alleges that he attended a peaceful portion of the January 6 protest but left once it turned violent. As Bostic states, “Even if ‘riot’ and ‘insurrection’ could be interpreted to include the peaceful events of that day—and they cannot—Defendant’s claims would still be false.” Whether Bostic organized or coordinated the January 6 insurrection does not depend on how that insurrection is classified. Accepting, for the purposes of a [motion to dismiss], that Bostic’s factual claims are true, then the allegation that he was involved with organizing the January 6 riot or insurrection is plausibly defamatory, regardless of the potential meanings of the words.

Moreover, “riot” and “insurrection” do appear capable of containing a provably false assertion of fact…. These words are not the sort of opinion or rhetorical hyperbole that courts have held lie outside the scope of defamation. Instead, it is plausible that “riot” and “insurrection” refer to provable and specific facts and events. Namely, in this context, “riot” does not just characterize the protests, but refers to the violent events on near the Capitol steps and the storming of the Capitol building. The notion that the dictionary definitions of these terms could be used to describe broader behavior does not render them unverifiable in the context of the Article.

And the court concluded that Bostic had sufficiently alleged that Petrizzo knew the statements were false or likely false (the so-called “actual malice” standard), though of course at later stages of the case Bostic would actually have to provide more concrete evidence of that:

“The actual malice inquiry focuses on the defendants’ states of mind … which may be proved by indirect or circumstantial evidence.” Bostic alleges that the evidence relied on by the Daily Dot Defendants in their Article should have alerted them to the falsity of their assertion that he organized the January 6 riot. Petrizzo’s actions after publication of the Article also suggest—at this stage—that he acted with reckless or intentional disregard. Bostic alleges that Petrizzo “contacted organizers of CPAC” and “attempted to get [Bostic] banned from the event.” He further alleges that Petrizzo “filmed [Bostic] entering a restroom.”

While this evidence may not speak to the Daily Dot Defendants’ state of mind leading up to publication, it suggests that malice is at least plausible. It is rare that a plaintiff will be able to definitively assert what a defendant knew prior to publication—and that is not the standard at a motion to dismiss. At this stage, Bostic has shown more than “scant assertions” that the Daily Dot Defendants acted with malice. Drawing inferences in favor of Bostic, both Petrizzo’s conduct and the nature of the Article’s evidence plausibly suggest that the Daily Dot Defendants knew or recklessly disregarded the fact that Bostic did not organize the January 6 riot….

Congratulations to Jason Greaves (Binnall Law Group), who represents plaintiff.

The post Libel Lawsuit Over Daily Dot's Allegations That Someone Was "Jan. 6 Capitol Riot Organizer" Can Go Forward appeared first on Reason.com.

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As U.S. transit agencies approach a fiscal cliff due to dwindling ridership, some public transportation advocates have called for eliminating customer fares in an effort to increase ridership. At the same time, large mass transit systems are experiencing a persistent fare evasion problem that has fed broader public concern about transit crime and safety. But forgoing this source of revenue would worsen transit’s already gloomy outlook as decades of research have found that ridership is more sensitive to service quality than fare price. Instead, advocates should be more realistic about transit’s role in delivering 21st-century transportation in the U.S. and demand efficiency improvements so that transit can function well in the niche markets where it can provide the most value.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused nationwide mass transit ridership to crater by 95 percent at its worst. Congress responded by sending nearly five years’ worth of pre-pandemic federal transit funding—$69.5 billion—between March 2020 and March 2021. Unlike conventional federal transit aid, these funds were largely unrestricted and could be used by transit agencies as they saw fit. 

In contrast to transit’s fiscal bailouts, ridership recovery has been slow. December 2022 ridership remained 34 percent below December 2019 levels, according to the Federal Transit Administration’s National Transit Database, which also indicates that nationwide farebox recovery of operating costs from transit riders fell from 30 percent in 2019 to 13 percent in 2022, with taxpayer subsidies accounting for nearly all of the remaining balance. This figure does not include the capital costs to build and refurbish transit systems, where taxpayers have been responsible for virtually the entire tab since the middle of the 20th century.

Transit experts are increasingly expecting a prolonged ridership winter, with ridership forecasted to remain below 2019 levels at least through the remainder of the decade. As this reality has started to set in, some transit advocates have called for desperate measures to regain lost ridership, most notably transitioning to fare-free transit. 

Supporters of fare-free transit do have a point that ending fare collections can increase transit ridership. But it’s important to understand that not all ridership gains are created equal. Transit is often sold to the public as a solution to social costs related to the use of private automobiles, such as traffic congestion and pollution. Fare-free transit may entice those who were already dependent on transit, as well as people who would have otherwise walked or biked. But it likely won’t draw many new riders who can drive their own cars. This means that while fare-free transit can provide private benefits for riders, it is unlikely to meaningfully increase the social benefits often touted by transit advocates to justify additional government subsidies.

This proposed move to fare-free transit has also been justified on progressive social justice grounds, with some advocates arguing that transit service should be treated as a commons and that fare enforcement unfairly targets individuals living on the margins of society. Critics counter that fares are already low and heavily subsidized and that fare enforcement can be used to stop people from entering transit systems who then commit crimes.

In the real world of scarcity and tradeoffs, eliminating fares may also starve agencies of revenue that could otherwise be used to improve service, including transit security that is generally paid for out of agency operating budgets that fares support. A January 2023 report published by the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies notes that decades of research have shown that “service improvements are likely to be a more effective use of resources than fare reductions, even for low-income riders.”

This tradeoff between eliminating fares and improving service is even more stark in a tightening fiscal setting. Over the next few years, large transit agencies in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Washington, and a handful of other major metropolitan areas that account for the vast majority of nationwide transit trips will have completely spent down their pandemic funding windfalls. Absent large ridership increases, addressing future shortfalls will require some combination of fare increases, service cuts, state and local tax increases, and additional federal subsidies.

With ridership and farebox revenue unlikely to recover in the near future, advocates are expected to appeal to Congress for perpetual transit operating subsidies. However, assuming a divided Congress will even consider it, lawmakers will likely insist on a local match given that transit is fundamentally a local service. Federal transit subsidies have traditionally focused on capital cost assistance for infrastructure construction and vehicle procurement, not day-to-day operations. These grant programs have often required recipients to contribute matching funds equal to 50 percent of project costs. The upshot is that eliminating fare collection will simply dig a deeper hole for transit agencies seeking to raise matching funds needed to access potential federal operating subsidies.

Undoubtedly, some advocates will claim transit is underfunded, especially when compared to highway funding. But this appeal is undermined by national transportation expenditure data. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, combined federal, state, and local government spending on highways was over $2.6 trillion between 2007 and 2019. Transit spending was over $775 billion during this period, accounting for 22.6 percent of total highway and transit spending by all levels of government. 

Compare this spending share to data from the most recent National Household Travel Survey from 2017, in which travel by transit accounted for just 2.5 percent of nationwide person-trips while travel by private automobiles accounted for 82.1 percent of trips. Transit appears to be extremely well-funded compared to its primary competitor. 

Transit’s outsized share of government funding relative to its travel share isn’t commonly acknowledged in the political sphere, at least not with any precision. But economists have long noticed and analyzed this disparity. As a team of University of Pennsylvania and Brown University economists remarked in a 2020 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, “The allocation of expenditure across modes of transportation requires scrutiny. That we spend about the same amount on public transit buses, which provide about 2 billion rides per year, as on the interstate highway system, which provides about 700 billion miles of vehicle travel per year, primarily for local travel, is a central and surprising feature of US transportation policy.”

The biggest single problem facing transit is it tends to be poorly designed to serve modern transportation needs, and this was true even before the pandemic. Transit was always disproportionately used by commuters during the workweek, where transit accounted for 5 percent of journey-to-work trips, according to 2019 Census Bureau estimates. But even in its most favorable setting, transit declines have been steep, with transit’s commuting share dropping from 12 percent in 1960 to just 2.5 percent in 2021, or half of its pre-pandemic share.

The reason for this decline is simple. In the second half of the 20th century, first households and then jobs dispersed from central cities into the surrounding suburbs. As a result, connecting people with employment by transit has become more and more challenging. By 2019, the University of Minnesota’s Access Across America series showed those residing in the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas could on average access 47 percent of metro area jobs by car in 30 minutes of travel, or one hour of bidirectional daily commuting. In contrast, just 8 percent of jobs were accessible by transit in 60 minutes, or two hours of commuting. Working from home first surpassed transit’s commuting market share in 2017, and the COVID-era increase in telecommuting among higher-income urban professionals is expected to remain several multiples above the pre-pandemic telecommuting share.

For transit to continue to serve a valuable role in the few places where it can compete, policy makers will need to rethink how service is provided. They must reconsider commuter-centric transit network designs and service schedules to account for remote and hybrid work, where allocating expenditures to serve high-volume rush-hour travel into central business districts five days a week is no longer defensible. They must somehow get transit capital costs under control, costs that dwarf those incurred by peer countries. They should consider smaller alternatives to better serve routes with fewer customers and avoid running vehicles mostly empty most of the time. Finally, they should pursue new technologies that could significantly reduce operating costs, especially automation, even if that means taking on powerful public employee unions.

Transit’s future in the U.S. is uncertain, although broader societal trends are working against it. Eliminating customer fares may help transit regain some of its lost ridership, but this would likely undermine the flexibility of transit agencies to respond to a changing landscape and accelerate transit’s long-run decline in the transportation marketplace. While transit will remain a niche mode regardless of what policy makers do, responsible leadership demands reevaluating status quo governance and adapting to best serve the customers most dependent on transit.

The post How To Save American Mass Transit appeared first on Reason.com.

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It’s been a while since anyone went to the trouble of making a James Bond knockoff, but here comes Guy Ritchie to take a fresh whack at it. Back in the mid-1960s, after Goldfinger supercharged the nascent 007 franchise, the movie landscape swarmed with Bond rips. They ranged from kind-of-entertaining (James Coburn’s Our Man Flint) to fairly bearable (Dean Martin’s Matt Helm series) to altogether dire Euro spy junk (worst in show: Il vostro super agente Flit, an Italian knockoff of the Coburn knockoff). As lame as a lot of this stuff was, it all fed into the Austin Powers movies of the 1990s, which were fun, and then, a couple years ago, into the flamboyantly violent Kingsman pictures, about a secret spy agency headquartered inside a bespoke menswear shop on London’s Savile Row. The Kingsman movies demonstrated that the old pop-espionage world of the Bond films, however remote in time, was still resonant.

So the new Ritchie picture sounds promising at first. Whatever you think of his movies—the cockney gangster films he started out with, the Sherlock Holmes pictures with Robert Downey Jr., the Will Smith version of Aladdin (a billion-dollar hit at the world box office)—Ritchie’s work, however overamped, is seldom less than lively. But in Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre he seems to take a wrong turn at every turn, starting with the constipated title. A ruse de guerre, for those who weren’t expecting a French quiz at the movies, would be a sneaky military strategy intended to deceive an enemy. As for the Operation Fortune part, that refers to the story’s protagonist, whose name is Fortune—Orson Fortune, I’m afraid.

Orson is played by Ritchie’s longtime collaborator, the stubbly butt-whomper Jason Statham. Statham is an unlikely fit for a character who is a pain in the neck for the intelligence agencies that employ him because he’ll only fly private, only drink “the finest clarets,” and only undergo any necessary post-mission rehab in the expensively sunny Maldives. I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t think of Jason Statham as a “finest clarets” kind of guy.

Orson’s mission this time out is difficult to grasp. Something tech-y has been stolen…by somebody…and we’re not told what or who for a good long while. Obviously, an unidentified something or other is going to be hard to find (although it’s quickly given an inscrutable name: “The Handle”). But Orson’s controller, Nathan Jasmine (Cary Elwes), has every confidence in his man’s bloodhounding talents. So Orson is soon assembling a team, which includes a computer whisperer named Sarah Fidel (Aubrey Plaza, her trademark disdain dialed down by about a third); a muscular factotum named JJ (English rapper Bugzy Malone, distributing exposition); and, before long, a Hollywood movie star named Danny Francesco (Josh Hartnett, projecting actual star quality). Danny is brought aboard Orson’s murky mission when it acquires a suspect, a billionaire weapons dealer named Greg Simmonds (Hugh Grant—could anyone look less like a Greg Simmonds than Hugh Grant?). Since Simmonds is some sort of weird fame groupie, Danny has been roped in as bait. “You can’t catch this fish with conventional lures,” Orson says sagely.

The movie is low on energy (Statham’s sudden punch-ups feel perfunctory), under-edited, and persistently unpersuasive. The filmmakers’ need to globe-hop on a budget results in traditional cost-cutting deficiencies like the shot in which a chyron tells us we’re in Madrid, but all we actually see is Orson getting off a plane. There’s a cocktail scene set on the deck of a luxury yacht in the harbor at Cannes that isn’t quite convincing as anything other than a soundstage setup (Ritchie doesn’t even rock the camera a little). Other problems are location-related. The movie was filmed mostly in Turkey and partly in Qatar (also the source of some of the production budget), which is why we find the billionaire Simmonds based in a villa in the provincial Turkish capital of Antalya (where he drives around in a vintage Mustang with California plates). Ritchie lards the picture with beauty shots of this Mediterranean city, as if he were showing us around the iconic sights of the Île-de-France or the Tuscan countryside; since he’s not, the Bondian travel-porn effect is blunted.

The actors, at least, are fine, although the script, cowritten by Ritchie and his veteran associates Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, gives them little in the way of breezy lines to work with. If you’re going to go to the trouble of signing up Aubrey Plaza for your picture, you should give her some snappy patter. Not things like, “I don’t care where we’re going, as long as I’m drunk.” She manages to deal with that one, but she doesn’t look happy about it.

The post Review: <em>Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre</em> appeared first on Reason.com.

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Nothing focuses the mind quite so intently on the sheer stupidity of government as doing your taxes. What is taken from us is excessive, the intrusiveness is maddening, and the rules are byzantine, which is the distilled essence of most of our interactions with the state. So, it was with a certain degree of anticipation that I told my son that, after working hard at the supermarket in addition to his homeschooling and martial arts, he would have to file his first tax return. Much fun ensued.

Given the complexity of our returns, involving a trust, commercial real estate, and business entities, my wife and I pay an accountant to wrangle our taxes. But before Anthony heads down that path, we thought he should understand what it means to fill out his own return and hope for the best.

“The whole system is based on the premise that the government already knows how much you owe, but won’t tell you. You have to guess,” I told my son.

“What happens if you guess wrong?” he asked.

“Well, there’s no actual right answer in terms of how much you’re supposed to pay. If you can even reach them, IRS employees contradict each other all the time because nobody really understands the rules. But if you come up with something they don’t like, they just might destroy your life.”

“Oh, shit,” he said.

At the IRS website, we clicked on the “File Your Taxes for Free” link which touted “a public-private partnership between the IRS and many tax preparation and filing software industry companies who provide their online tax preparation and filing for free.” The first option was for “guided tax preparation” involving “simple questions” and letting “software do the work.” That sounded like a great way to undergo an expensive and potentially perilous process without understanding what the hell is happening. We opted for “free fillable forms” instead, which walked Anthony through a 1040.

“What the fuck does that even mean?” my son asked multiple times as he worked his way through the usual questions about wages, capital gains, deductions, withholding and the like.

“Pull up the instructions,” I told him, as if they offered much in the way of help.

He doggedly plowed through the dense verbiage. Because I’m not a complete monster, I helped him through the spots where he was stuck. When the 1040 itself was finished, he had to reenter all of the information from his W-2 because scanning has not yet come to the world of free fillable forms. Then, he submitted his return.

Two days later he received an email rejecting his tax return. For reasons unknown, rejections consist of gibberish such as “XML data has failed schema validation. cvc-complex-type.2.4.b.” You copy the email into the IRS’s Error Search Tool to get a (sort of) clear explanation that could have been included in the rejection to begin with. In Anthony’s case, we narrowed it to a missing zip code for his employer on the W-2 form. I could have sworn he filled that in, but who knows? He entered the zip and resubmitted.

Two days later, he received another rejection. This time the Error Search Tool told him that he had checked “Yes” to “the Third-Party Designee area at the bottom of Form 1040” without including a required PIN. That was very helpful, except that he’d printed the forms before submitting and the box in question was definitely checked “No,” so no PIN was required.

Fortunately, the public library had a rack of paper 1040 forms and booklets. Anthony copied the information to the old-school form, stuck it and his W-2 in an envelope with a stamp, and mailed it off.

“Let the IRS do it the hard way,” I told him. “It’s more work for them, which is all the more reason to send them paper forms.”

Then it was on to state taxes. To give Arizona credit, it was actually possible to file a return through the means provided. All Anthony had to do was navigate past the Arizona Department of Revenue (AZDOR)’s prominent warning of “intermittent issues with AZTaxes.gov. Technical staff are actively working to resolve the matter as quickly as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience.” Then he clicked on the box promising that he could “E-File My Taxes for Free” only to find the AZDOR, like the IRS, was trying to slough him off on a “fast, safe and free way to do your tax return online” through partnered services.

“Oh, hell no,” we both said after the experience with federal taxes.

It took an internet search to find that the AZDOR had PDFs of its 140 (individual income tax) form in both it-does-the-math and simple printable formats on its website, along with instructions. We chose the calculating form. It was our own fault that we overlooked the instruction to use it only with stand-alone Acrobat software, since it locks up in web browsers. With just a little drama, Anthony got his return filled out and mailed to the Department of Revenue.

As expected, my son was less than enthusiastic about the experience, amidst much cursing and references to official incompetence. He could have bypassed a lot of the hassle by going with a tax preparer, or one of the answer-easy-questions services. That’s certainly what the tax collectors prefer.

“Filing electronically with direct deposit and avoiding a paper tax return is more important than ever this year to avoid refund delays,” the IRS urged in January. “If you need a tax refund quickly, do not file on paper – use software, a trusted tax professional or Free File on IRS.gov.”

But that would also bypass the full experience of preparing a tax return and wondering over its arcane terminology and the judgment calls necessary for navigating the form’s many entries. It reduces the pain of filing (though not of watching money disappear from your pay) while also diminishing comprehension of the process. There’s a lot of value in having to stop and ask yourself, “What the fuck does that even mean?” as my son did many times while wandering through a minefield of rules.

With part-time income and refunds due, the stakes are low for Anthony. This is a good stage in life for him to experience filling out a 1040 form and a state return and to wonder if he got it right. When his income rises and there’s more at risk, he’ll be able to go to a professional tax preparer with a better understanding of just what he’s sparing himself.

And when his accountants mumble curses under their breath, as mine frequently does, and complain of the arcane red tape and incompetence of tax collectors, my son will know exactly what they mean.

The post My Son Did His Taxes for the First Time. Rage Ensued. appeared first on Reason.com.

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3/3/2019: Schenck v. United States decided.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: March 3, 2019 appeared first on Reason.com.

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