Two years after the U.S. Senate held hearings on the threat that comic books purportedly posed to American youth, a Rhode Island commission reported its findings on the subject to the state legislature. "After months of study of this demoralizing material, it seems to us that what's at stake here is the decency of society," the 1956 report said. "The issue is not censorship but one of self-defense."

Although "we can do little other than urge the publishers or producers to clean house," the commission said, "there is a definite responsibility on the distributor and retailer alike to avoid feeding our children a constant diet of crime, horror, sex, violence and depravity." The report recommended a ban on the sale of such material to minors and the appointment of "a permanent Commission" to "educate the public concerning such publications."

State legislators promptly took up the second suggestion, creating the Rhode Island Commission to Encourage Morality in Youth two months later. The original five members, appointed by Democratic Gov. Dennis Roberts, included a Catholic priest, an Episcopalian minister, an Orthodox rabbi, and a retired librarian. The chairman was Joseph A. Sullivan, a Newport hardware store owner who had served on the comic book commission.

The new commission was supposed to "educate the public concerning any book, picture, pamphlet, ballad, printed paper or other thing containing obscene, indecent or impure language." It was also supposed to "investigate" whether any such material violated state law and "recommend the prosecution of all violations."

If a majority of the commission agreed that a particular publication was "completely objectionable," it would notify distributors of that determination. "The Chiefs of Police have been given the names of the aforementioned magazines with the order that they are not to be sold, distributed or displayed to youths under eighteen years of age," said a typical letter from Albert J. McAloon, the commission's executive secretary. "The Attorney General will act for us in case of non-compliance. The Commissioners trust that you will cooperate with this agency in their work."

The commission had no authority to issue any such "order" and no enforcement powers. And contrary to the language that McAloon initially used, Rhode Island's attorney general was under no obligation to pursue any charges the commission suggested, which would be valid only if a book or magazine qualified as "obscene" (not merely "objectionable") under state law. Acknowledging that point, the commission revised its notices to say "cooperative action will eliminate the necessity of our recommending prosecution to the Attorney General's department."

The U.S Supreme Court nevertheless concluded that the commission's practices were inconsistent with the First Amendment. The Court's 1963 ruling in Bantam Books v. Sullivan is freshly relevant in light of recent efforts to restrict speech through government intimidation that falls short of legal prohibition or punishment.

When the Biden administration sought to curtail "misinformation" on social media platforms, it emulated Rhode Island's morality commission by approaching intermediaries rather than the speakers themselves and by deploying pressure rather than explicit threats. So did a New York regulator when she urged insurers and banks to think twice about dealing with the National Rifle Association (NRA). An Illinois sheriff followed the same playbook when he discouraged credit card companies from facilitating the sale of ads on disfavored websites.

Federal courts deemed all those interventions unconstitutional. President Donald Trump's attempts to influence TV programming seem like an even easier call, since both the president and the man he appointed to run the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have suggested that recalcitrant stations could lose their broadcast licenses.

Along similar lines, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has wielded its regulatory authority against NewsGuard, a company that assesses the transparency and credibility of online news sources for readers and advertisers. A lawsuit that NewsGuard filed against the FTC in February argues that the commission, whose chairman views the company's ratings as biased against conservative outlets, has violated the First Amendment by making intrusive and burdensome demands for information without a statutory justification and by discouraging advertisers from using the service.

Such "jawboning" aims to bully people into changing their behavior, accomplishing a goal that the government could not directly mandate. Bantam Books held that censorial pressure by a government agency, even one with no power to enforce its will, can be unconstitutional if it is apt to discourage people from exercising their First Amendment rights. When suggestions are tantamount to commands, they cross the constitutional line between persuasion and coercion.

Beyond 'Obscene'

Theoretically, Sullivan's commission had a lot on its plate. It was charged with "investigating situations which may cause, be responsible for or give rise to undesirable behavior of juveniles." Based on that research, it was supposed to "educate the public as to these causes" and "recommend legislation, prosecution and/or treatment which would ameliorate or eliminate said causes."

Consistent with that broad mandate, the commission occasionally discussed the dangers posed by drive-ins, drinking, and risqué movies such as the 1959 French version of Dangerous Liaisons. It offered a recommended reading list, sent speakers to cities across the state, and contemplated promoting "morality in youth" through public service announcements. But the panel focused mainly on identifying books and magazines that it deemed unfit for sale to minors.

The year after the commission was born, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two rulings that would ultimately doom such efforts to police the sale of "objectionable" literature. One decision recognized the right of adults to buy books and magazines that might not be suitable for children, while the other recognized limits on that right.

In Butler v. Michigan, the justices unanimously rejected a state law that banned distribution of material "manifestly tending to the corruption of the morals of youth" or "tending to incite minors to violent or depraved or immoral acts." That law, Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, was "not reasonably restricted to the evil with which it is said to deal." Its effect, he said, was to "reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children," which was unacceptable under the First Amendment.

A few months later in Roth v. United States, a six-justice majority held that "obscenity is not within the area of constitutionally protected speech or press." But Roth defined obscenity more narrowly than Rhode Island had. The question, the justices said, was whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards," would conclude that "the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest."

After those decisions, Rhode Island Superior Court Judge Eugene L. Jalbert ruled that the state's obscenity law was unconstitutional because it defined the category to include material "manifestly tending to the corruption of the morals of youth," which was illegal to sell even to adults. In 1959, the state legislature amended the law to excise that phrase, leaving a definition that tracked the Roth test.

In September 1957, the morality commission adopted a "code for judging" that said material "can be considered contrary to Rhode Island law" when "the dominant theme, taken in its entirety, according to average community standards, appeals to prurient interests." But it added half a dozen additional considerations that went far beyond that definition.

A book or magazine might be "objectionable," for example, if it featured "female or male form(s) posed in [an] erotic manner" or "dressed to stimulate sexual interests illicitly." The code also frowned on "lewd, salacious dialogue, drawings, prints, pictures, stills, or movies"; "illicit sex relations made attractive"; "abnormal sex actions drawn or pictured attractively"; and "seduction or rape depicted or described favorably."

Other red flags included "depiction of sadistic crimes" and "excessive description of cruel behavior or punishment." Also suspect: "marriage ridiculed," "police officials demeaned constantly," and "concepts of justice and honor perverted either in stories or illustrations."

Blacklisted Books

In 1957, the commission's first full year of operation, it deemed 50 magazines "objectionable for youths under 18." These were typically "girly" magazines such as Cabaret, Gent, and Modern Man, which featured pictures of nude or scantily clad women along with articles. The commission also identified four "objectionable" books.

One of the disfavored novels was Dark Quarters, a titillating tale of prostitution that fit into a category that collectors would later call "sleaze" paperbacks. But another blacklisted book was Peyton Place, a mainstream 1956 novel by Grace Metalious that became a big hit, remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year. Metalious published a sequel, Return to Peyton Place, three years later. The books inspired multiple movies and TV shows, including a prime-time drama that ran on ABC from 1964 to 1969.

Peyton Place, which is set in the 1930s and '40s, "lifts the lid off" a fictional small town in New Hampshire. It includes a few sex scenes (mild by current standards) and features controversial themes such as adultery, incest, and abortion. But it is not pornography by any stretch of the imagination, and it did not seem to fit the definition of obscenity that the Supreme Court had established in Roth.

Sullivan refused to identify the other two books deemed "objectionable" in 1957 because "he did not feel the commission's goal of fostering the welfare of youth would be served by public disclosure of the book titles," as the Newport Daily News put it. Sullivan evidently worried that teenagers would be especially keen to read books that the commission had blacklisted.

The commission ostensibly was not trying to interfere with adults' right to read material it judged "objectionable." But in practice, that is what happened. After the commission blacklisted Cabaret, Gent, and Modern Man, for example, Newport police raided a local newsstand and seized all 30 copies of those three publications, which they locked in a jail cell as if the magazines were dangerous criminals. In 1959, Rhode Island Attorney General J. Joseph Nugent sought injunctions against the sale of three men's magazines and two paperback novels that the commission had flagged.

After the commission declared Peyton Place "objectionable," Newport police charged Henry B. Settle Jr., a local book wholesaler and retailer, with committing a crime by selling the novel to a 17-year-old boy. Although the charge specifically involved selling Peyton Place to a minor, the judge read the book and deemed it obscene under the Roth test, meaning it was beyond the pale even for adults.

"We're not a goody-goody group," Sullivan insisted in a 1957 interview with the Newport Daily News. "We don't believe in book burning. We're absolutely for the freedom of the press and all the liberties. Some of this stuff is just outright filth."

The commission's activities provoked criticism from the beginning. From July 1957 through December 1961, The Providence Journal ran a dozen editorials arguing that "blacklisting books is dangerous and self-defeating," that "censorship only serves to advertise bad literature," that "the youth commission ignores due process of law," and that "the morality unit" had deployed "shameful tactics" against officials who questioned its agenda.

In 1958, several state legislators complained that the commission had adopted an "especially negative approach" to its mission, "apparently concerned exclusively with censorship of certain books and magazines." The following year, Sullivan praised the police chiefs of Warwick and North Providence for pressuring book dealers to stop selling D.H. Lawrence's 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover. The American Civil Liberties Union's Rhode Island chapter noted that the cops and the commission were "using the prestige of their public position to reach ends without submitting themselves to due process of law or to a proper judicial determination."

The most notable critic of the commission was a member of it. The Rev. Howard C. Olsen, rector of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Warwick, voted against the 1957 designation of Peyton Place as "objectionable" and began publicly arguing that his colleagues' understanding of their mission posed a threat to civil liberties. "Censorship in general is a prelude to the downfall of democracy," Olsen warned in 1958, noting that the commission's blacklisting had affected adults as well as minors. "There is a difference between what we preach and what we try to enforce by civil law," he said, adding that "censorship for the young is primarily up to parents."

'Informal Censorship'

The commission's letters to book and magazine wholesalers had a predictably chilling effect on sales of the targeted titles, since the distributors were keen to avoid legal trouble. Bantam Books and three other New York book publishers emphasized that point when they challenged the commission's practices in Rhode Island Superior Court.

"There is no question that the activities of the commission have resulted in the suppression of the sale and circulation of books without any judicial determination as to whether or not they are obscene," Judge William M. Mackenzie agreed in a February 1961 ruling. "These notices with their implicit threats of criminal prosecution are clear violations of the constitutional provisions guaranteeing freedom of the press." In effect, Mackenzie said, the state had appointed Sullivan et al. as "censors," giving them "the power to determine which books and magazines will be distributed and sold in Rhode Island."

The Rhode Island Supreme Court disagreed. "The commission cannot lawfully order anyone to comply with its conclusions regarding the objectionable nature of a publication which it has officially investigated," the court noted 10 months later. The commissioners "were only seeking and received the voluntary cooperation of petitioners' distributor," it said. "He was free to disregard their request for cooperation." And if he did so, he had no reason to fear prosecution as long as "the books in question were not obscene."

What about the "implicit threats" that troubled Mackenzie? "The mere fact that the commission may recommend prosecution does not alter the case," the Rhode Island Supreme Court said. "They cannot order prosecution; that judgment is solely with the attorney general. Any unofficial group may do as much in this respect as the commission."

The U.S. Supreme Court saw the situation differently. "It would be naïve to credit the state's assertion that these blacklists are in the nature of mere legal advice," Justice William J. Brennan wrote for the majority in Bantam Books v. Sullivan, "when they plainly serve as instruments of regulation independent of the laws against obscenity." Brennan quoted Mackenzie's findings and noted Nugent's concession that "the books listed in the notices included several that were not obscene within this Court's definition of the term."

Brennan rejected as "untenable" the argument that the commission "does not regulate or suppress obscenity but simply exhorts booksellers and advises them of their legal rights." He conceded that the commission's power was "limited to informal sanctions—the threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion, persuasion, and intimidation." But "the record amply demonstrates that the Commission deliberately set about to achieve the suppression of publications deemed 'objectionable' and succeeded in its aim," he said. "We are not the first court to look through forms to the substance and recognize that informal censorship may sufficiently inhibit the circulation of publications to warrant injunctive relief."

The commission's letters to distributors, Brennan noted, were "phrased virtually as orders," were "reasonably understood to be such," and were "invariably followed up by police visitations." Although the book publishers' distributor "was 'free' to ignore the Commission's notices, in the sense that his refusal to 'cooperate' would have violated no law," his compliance was "not voluntary" because "people do not lightly disregard public officers' thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around."

The commission's activities "were performed under color of state law and so constituted acts of the State within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment," Brennan wrote. But its "system of informal censorship" fell "far short of the constitutional requirements" for "governmental regulation of obscenity."

'A Life-or-Death Issue'

About a year after that decision, Republican Gov. John Chafee signed a bill that officially abolished the Rhode Island Commission to Encourage Morality in Youth. But the commission's legal legacy remains relevant whenever government officials engage in "jawboning," which Cato Institute policy analyst Will Duffield defines as "the use of official speech to inappropriately compel private action."

Jawboning "occurs when a government official threatens to use his or her power—be it the power to prosecute, regulate, or legislate—to compel someone to take actions that the state official cannot," Duffield writes. "Jawboning is dangerous because it allows government officials to assume powers not granted to them by law."

As Duffield notes, the Biden administration's efforts to suppress "misinformation" during the COVID-19 pandemic featured "traditional elements of jawboning." That initiative, like the Rhode Island youth commission's activities, included public criticism, behind-the-scenes hectoring, and veiled threats.

In July 2021, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory calling for a "whole-of-society" effort to combat the "urgent threat to public health" posed by "health misinformation," which he said might require "legal and regulatory measures." The next day, President Joe Biden accused social media platforms of "killing people" by tolerating posts that might discourage vaccination.

"Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful violative posts," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said around the same time. Because "we're dealing with a life-or-death issue here," she explained, "everybody has a role to play in making sure there's accurate information." Toward that end, social media platforms "should be held accountable," White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield said, raising the possibility of expanding their civil liability for user-posted content.

Psaki noted that the president also "supports better privacy protections and a robust antitrust program." She said that right after declaring that "the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation, and misinformation."

In private, meanwhile, federal officials were pressuring social media companies to remove or downgrade content deemed dangerous to public health and banish the users responsible for it. They alluded to the president's keen interest in the issue and suggested the administration would take unspecified action if the platforms failed to fall in line. The responses from the platforms, including changes to their moderation policies and practices, showed they were keen to assuage the president's anger by addressing his concerns.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg would later acknowledge that Facebook had caved to official pressure. "I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it," Zuckerberg told the House Judiciary Committee in 2024. "We're ready to push back if something like this happens again." Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube, also eventually confirmed that the Biden administration had pressed it to remove content that did not violate the company's rules.

In essence, the Biden administration sought to impose censorship by proxy. That pressure campaign, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty concluded in July 2023, was inconsistent with the First Amendment.

Persuasion Becomes Coercion

Doughty's ruling mentioned Bantam Books, but it drew mainly on Blum v. Yaretsky, a 1982 Supreme Court case involving the impact of state Medicaid regulations on discharge decisions by private nursing homes. Writing for the majority, Justice William Rehnquist said "a State normally can be held responsible for a private decision only when it has exercised coercive power or has provided such significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that the choice must in law be deemed to be that of the State."

Applying that standard, Doughty concluded that the speech restrictions favored by the Biden administration counted as state action because officials either "coerced" or "significantly encouraged" them. Two months later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit agreed that Murthy, the White House, the FBI, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had "coerced" or "significantly encouraged" the platforms, "in violation of the First Amendment," to suppress speech that federal officials viewed as dangerously inaccurate or misleading.

The 5th Circuit's decision paid more attention to Bantam Books than Doughty had, describing the case as an example of "obvious" coercion. But it added that coercion is rarely "so black and white."

In 2015, for example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit held that Cook County, Illinois, Sheriff Tom Dart had violated the First Amendment by asking credit card companies to stop processing payments for ads on Backpage.com. Dart targeted that site because of its sex-related ads, but he aimed to cut off its revenue completely. "As the Sheriff of Cook County, a father and a caring citizen," his letters said, "I write to request that your institution immediately cease and desist from allowing your credit cards to be used to place ads on websites like Backpage.com." Although Dart made no explicit threats, the 7th Circuit thought his invocation of his authority as sheriff and the "cease and desist" language implied that the cooperation he sought was not truly voluntary.

A 2024 Supreme Court case involved a similar scenario. Maria Vullo, superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services, sent "guidance letters" to insurance companies and other financial institutions, urging them to consider the "reputational risks" that "may arise" from doing business with the NRA or "similar gun promotion organizations." Vullo said they should "review" such relationships and "take prompt actions to manag[e] these risks and promote public health and safety."

Again, there were no explicit threats. Yet in National Rifle Association v. Vullo, the Supreme Court unanimously held that the NRA had a plausible First Amendment claim against Vullo, especially in light of her regulatory authority over the businesses that received her letters.

"Six decades ago," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in Vullo, "this Court held that a government entity's 'threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion' against a third party 'to achieve the suppression' of disfavored speech violates the First Amendment….Ultimately, Bantam Books stands for the principle that a government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly: A government official cannot coerce a private party to punish or suppress disfavored speech on her behalf."

The Supreme Court ultimately did not decide whether the Biden administration's social media meddling violated that principle. In Murthy v. Missouri, decided a month after Vullo, the majority held that none of the plaintiffs had standing to sue because none had adequately alleged injuries caused by the government's actions.

Three justices disagreed with the majority's assessment, saying at least one of the plaintiffs had met that test. "As the Court held more than 60 years ago in [Bantam Books], the Government may not coerce or intimidate a third-party intermediary into suppressing someone else's speech," Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. "The principle recognized in Bantam Books and Vullo requires a court to distinguish between permissible persuasion and unconstitutional coercion."

The dissenters thought the government's communications with social media platforms clearly fell into the latter category. "For months, high-ranking Government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans' free speech," Alito wrote. "The officials wielded potent authority. Their communications with Facebook were virtual demands. And Facebook's quavering responses to those demands show that it felt a strong need to yield."

'Big Tech Censorship'

The crucial issue in that case was whether the government's involvement transformed what was ostensibly content moderation by social media platforms into censorship that ran afoul of the First Amendment. By contrast, genuinely private decisions to remove or disfavor certain kinds of content cannot violate the First Amendment, which applies only to government action. Critics of "Big Tech censorship" often seem confused on this point, arguing that businesses violate freedom of speech when they establish and enforce content limits.

In May 2025, for example, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson launched an investigation of moderation practices, touting it as a blow against "the tyranny of Big Tech" and "an important step forward in restoring free speech." Ferguson takes a similar view of NewsGuard, charging the company with abetting "censorship" that is "inimical to American democracy." To "protect the free speech of all Americans," the FTC has subjected NewsGuard to onerous record demands and attacked its revenue by conditioning the merger of two advertising agencies on the resulting company's agreement to refrain from subscribing to the rating service.

That condition directly prevented Omnicom, now the world's largest ad placement company, from doing business with NewsGuard. According to NewsGuard's lawsuit against the FTC, it also has lost other clients as a result of the Omnicom consent order—a chilling effect it expects will continue to curtail its revenue. Given Ferguson's "tactics and pronouncements" about "targeting tech and media companies supposedly associated with a 'censorship cartel,' NewsGuard has ample grounds for concern that the FTC aims to find NewsGuard's customers to pressure them, too," the complaint says. "Though today such improper tactics to impose informal censorship are called 'jawboning,' the FTC's demands are also reminiscent of the witch hunts of the McCarthy era."

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who likewise argues that social media companies and services such as NewsGuard pose a threat to freedom of speech, has sought to deter them from making judgments that he thinks tilt the playing field against his political team. But Carr's most dramatic foray into jawboning involved anti-Trump comedian Jimmy Kimmel's ill-informed comments about the man who murdered conservative activist Charlie Kirk last September.

Two days after that monologue, Carr threatened broadcasters with fines or license revocation if they continued to air Kimmel's ABC talk show. In an interview with right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson, Carr improbably suggested that Kimmel's monologue, which inaccurately implied that Kirk's assassin was a Trump supporter, might violate the FCC's rule against "broadcast news distortion." Like Facebook when it was confronted by the Biden administration's complaints, ABC and its affiliate stations evidently "felt a strong need to yield," since they immediately suspended Kimmel—precisely the punishment that Carr had recommended.

Although Kimmel was back on the air the following week, it would be hard to imagine a clearer example of jawboning against speech. It was clear enough to provoke criticism from Republicans, such as Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Rand Paul (Ky.), who are by no means Kimmel fans.

Carr implied that Kimmel's monologue qualified as a "broadcast news report." Yet four months later, he suggested that talk shows like Kimmel's do not "qualify as 'bona fide news' programs," especially when they are "motivated by purely partisan political purposes." Carr deployed that seemingly contradictory argument as a rationale for reconsidering a longstanding exception to the FCC's "equal time" rule. Under that rule, stations that provide a forum for "legally qualified" political candidates must give their opponents similar opportunities.

The implications of extending that requirement to talk shows became clear in February, when CBS told Late Show host Stephen Colbert he could not air an interview with James Talarico, a Texas state legislator who shortly after won the Democratic nomination for a U.S. Senate seat, unless he also was prepared to feature the other candidates in that race prior to the March 3 primary. As a result, the Talarico interview did not appear on The Late Show, although it was available on YouTube and on Paramount's streaming service.

"Brendan Carr's FCC is continuing its streak of naked partisanship by wielding the agency's power in new and laughable ways," Robert Corn-Revere, chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, complained. "By putting pressure on late night talk shows critical of the Trump administration while openly admitting that conservative talk radio is immune from the FCC's ire, he's making himself the poster boy for big government putting its thumb on the scale of political debate."

'Really, Really Sick'

Trump is equally unsubtle when he says TV stations should lose their broadcast licenses for airing news coverage he views as unfair or unbalanced. Carr is sympathetic to Trump's understanding of broadcasters' obligation to operate in "the public interest," saying it requires them to correct the leftward bias of their programming.

Neither Trump nor Carr has actually tried to revoke broadcast licenses, which would require a cumbersome, time-consuming administrative process followed by judicial appeals. You might therefore be tempted to dismiss their tough talk as so much bluster, except that it demonstrably worked against Kimmel and Colbert. The threat of adverse FCC action also played a role in the ongoing transformation of CBS News, which Carr made a condition of approving Skydance Media's acquisition of Paramount, the TV network's parent company.

Unlike the Rhode Island Commission to Encourage Morality in Youth, the FCC has the power to punish the objects of its ire. So if Sullivan's commission violated the First Amendment, Carr's commission is clearly doing the same thing.

Sullivan described the books and magazines targeted by his commission as "absolute filth" that threatened to corrupt young minds with "obscenity, indignity, unchasteness, boldness, immodesty, blasphemous language, and immorality in forms most decent adults never even hear of." Carr likewise described Kimmel's show as "garbage," condemning the "talentless" comedian's "really, really sick" commentary.

Sullivan was entitled to his opinion, and so is Carr. But when government officials try to impose such judgments on others, they cross a line that the Supreme Court drew in 1963.

The post The Supreme Court Ruled Against 'Informal Censorship' 6 Decades Ago but Officials Are Still Jawboning appeared first on Reason.com.

Even before artificial intelligence was a meaningful force in the economy, technologists, politicians, and policy wonks of all political persuasions have endorsed a universal basic income to cope with the mass unemployment that will be caused by the AI revolution.

The familiar case is that an AI-powered economy will be able to automate most economic production, making the economy as a whole much richer, but leaving the average person jobless and destitute. The solution is then to redistribute some of the gains from AI to the public by sending everyone, regardless of income, a check.

Businessman Elon Musk has gone one step further by calling for a "universal HIGH INCOME" to pay for the AI-induced unemployment, which he suggested would be inflation-free thanks to the downward pressure AI will put on prices.

Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.

AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 17, 2026

Musk is almost certainly right that AI will put downward pressure on prices, as one would expect of any productivity-enhancing technology.

He's mistaken in believing that this makes a universal income (regardless of whether it's basic or "HIGH") a wise policy.

Even in a future in which AI does revolutionize the economy, we will not see technologically driven mass unemployment. In fact, a universal basic income would likely result in more of the joblessness it's meant to mitigate.

To the first point, the industrial revolution has been outsourcing more and more tasks to labor-saving machines for roughly 300 years now. While this ongoing process has certainly made lots of individual jobs obsolete, it has not made jobs generally obsolete.

Excepting the monthly ups and downs of the unemployment rate, the total number of jobs in the economy continues to rise precipitously in the long run.

If labor-saving technology destroyed the need for labor, we should have fewer jobs today than ever before. We don't. Even as farms and factories employ fewer people, we keep finding ways to keep ourselves busy.

The AI boosters and doomers argue that this time will be different, because unlike spinning jennies, combine harvesters, and email, AI will eventually be smarter than humans at everything. When there's nothing that flesh-and-blood humans can do better than machines, we'll end up doing nothing at all.

These arguments are obviously speculative because we don't have artificial general intelligence yet. Even when we do, it's reasonable to assume that humans will continue to have employable comparative advantages, if only because humans prize human interaction.

There are lots of jobs today that could be automated but aren't. Plenty of people work in offices even if their tasks could be completed remotely. So long as people are social creatures, I can only assume we'll find something marketable to do with our time.

Outside of speculative future scenarios, here in the real world, the economic impact of AI continues to look similar to the impacts of past productivity-enhancing technological innovations. That's true even in industries that have been most influenced by AI.

Language translation is something that AI has long been pretty good at, and language translation services have become increasingly automated over time.

When journalist Timothy Lee looked at the impact of AI on the industry in 2023, he found that the technology had caused prices for translation to fall, and more consumption of translation services. Translators themselves were adapting by either specializing in translation of legal or medical texts (which still requires human oversight), using AI to increase their productivity, or dropping out of the industry.

The effects of AI on translators weren't all positive. But that basic story of falling prices, rising productivity, some jobs disappearing, and others becoming more specialized sounds a lot like every industry revolutionized by technology.

The evidence that AI will finally be the technology that puts everyone out of work just isn't there.

Economic transitions don't happen automatically. It will take time for people to find new jobs as AI destroys the old ones.

That's precisely why a universal basic income or ("HIGH INCOME") would be so dangerous to adopt.

A pretty robust finding in the research is that giving people unconditional cash grants leads them to work less and even stop working at all if the benefits are generous enough.

Pairing advancing AI with a universal basic income would give people a major incentive not to work, right as many existing jobs are being automated away. Instead of people finding their next comparative advantage in an economy being made more productive but also automated by AI, many would probably just stay home instead.

Far from mitigating the employment effects of AI, a universal income would seem to usher in the jobless dystopia that those convinced of AI's transformative effects are worried about.

We should have a little faith in humans and technology. For centuries, technological progress has made us richer while creating more jobs. The only way AI will be different is if we use its productivity gains to pay people not to work.

The post Elon Musk's Mistaken Call for a 'Universal High Income' appeared first on Reason.com.

Last year, Yale University President Maurie McInnis formed a committee of Yale faculty members to "undertake a project of thorough self-examination." She wanted to know: Why is the public losing trust in higher education institutions like Yale?

This week, after a year of gathering input from students, faculty, journalists, and critics of higher education, the committee released its findings: The culprits for this erosion of trust, as The New York Times summarized, are "Schools like Yale."

The report identified several reasons Yale has lost public favor, including grade inflation, bureaucratic bloat, rising tuition costs, and controversial admissions practices. Notably, the report details at length Yale's shortcomings regarding "matters of free speech, political bias, and self-censorship."

The committee writes that Yale has "repeatedly affirmed" the Woodward Report, a pro–free speech document adopted by the school in 1975. 

"Even so," the committee admits, "the campus has not been immune from pressures toward conformity, intimidation, and social shaming that have affected the rest of higher education and, indeed, the rest of American society. Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that a great deal of campus life is now lived online. "

The report also references the infamous Halloween incident at Yale from 2015, where school administrators emailed the student body and told them not to wear culturally insensitive Halloween costumes. A Yale lecturer subsequently told students to make their own choices about their costumes and quoted her husband (a Yale professor), who advised students to either look away when they see an offensive costume or tell the person why they find the costume offensive. Students surrounded the professor on campus and demanded that he apologize or resign. The viral video of the confrontation sparked national debate about political correctness, student safe spaces, and free expression. 

"Few episodes have done more to raise public questions about Yale's commitment to freedom of expression and open, reasoned debate," the report says.

Reason's Robby Soave warned of the incident's chilling effect on speech at the time, writing, "a great many students, it seems, don't actually desire a campus climate where such matters are up for debate. By their own admission, they want anyone who disagrees with them branded a threat to their safety and removed from their lives."

And it appears the chilling effect on speech has only worsened since 2015. The report, citing a 2025 university survey, says that nearly a third of undergraduate respondents said they did not feel free to express their political beliefs on campus. The committee notes that the figure is "up from 17 percent in 2015," the time of the Halloween episode. The report also says, "post-doctoral fellows and international students at Yale report that they now hesitate to speak out, even about their own research, for fear of government retaliation." 

According to the report, no subject was "more contested" than the issue of ideological conformity on campus. The report notes that among Yale faculty in 2025, "registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 36 to 1 across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Law School, and the School of Management," according to an estimate by the Buckley Institute. While conservative students "said they had found a real home at Yale," there were communities and classes in which they felt unwelcome. Some alumni worry "the campus was trending toward intellectual and ideological conformity," while other "members of the Yale community pushed back against that narrative," seeing "the issue of intellectual diversity as a smokescreen for mounting restrictions on academic freedom." 

The Yale faculty members say the university has taken steps to address these problems and encourage a more open academic environment, including adopting an institutional neutrality policy. The report also lists recommendations for how the school should foster open inquiry and expression going forward. 

Yale's self-critical examination is refreshing to see, even if it's long overdue. Still, the university has a long way to go before it can live up to its free speech promises. Committee reports by tenured faculty and top-down university policies might be the first step, but they can only go so far in ensuring that students and staff can freely express their opinions without fear of retribution. 

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When the Trump administration tore up a trade agreement that allowed fresh tomatoes to be imported from Mexico without tariffs, the White House framed it as a victory for "American farmers, growers, and business owners."

Experts in the produce industry, however, warned that consumers would be paying the price.

The end of the Tomato Suspension Agreement between the U.S. and Mexico was a "big concern," Javier "JJ" Badillo, chair of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas (FPAA)'s tomato division, told FreshFruitPortal.com, a trade publication, in July. Badillo predicted higher prices and diminished volumes of fresh tomatoes, even though it would take "six to nine months" for the consequences to become apparent.

Chalk up another victory for the experts over the politicians.

Nine months after the Trump administration blew up that trade agreement, prices for fresh tomatoes at American grocery stores are skyrocketing. A pound of tomatoes cost an average of $2.26 in March, according to the latest consumer price index report released last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). That's the highest price recorded in eight years, and a 15 percent increase from February to March.

Tomato prices are now 23 percent higher than they were in March 2025, according to the BLS. That means tomato prices have risen significantly faster than overall inflation (up 3.3 percent in the past year) and food prices as a whole (which are up 2.7 percent). Even gas prices, which get more attention, are up just 18.9 percent in the past year.

So why are tomatoes suddenly much more expensive? In part, it's because tomatoes imported from Mexico are now subject to tariffs. With the tomato trade agreement gone, Mexican tomatoes are now subject to a tariff of about 17 percent—and, like with many other products, the tariff gets passed along down the supply chain.

There's also been a notable reduction in tomato imports.

"Tomato imports from Mexico declined by over $500 million," reported Joseph Glauber, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, in a report published this week. That decline, Glauber notes, was due to the elimination of the "long-standing agreement that allowed Mexico to export tomatoes to the US" and the new tariffs "that resulted in fewer imports."

You might expect higher prices for fresh tomatoes to drive up the price of products made from tomatoes—everything from pizza sauce to ketchup. That's unlikely, however, because the supply chains are actually quite different.

The market for processed tomato products is highly concentrated in the United States. About 95 percent of tomatoes used for processing originate in California. Meanwhile, the U.S. imports about 70 percent of its supply of fresh tomatoes, and the vast majority comes from Mexico.

Higher prices for fresh tomatoes are good news for American farmers, as the White House said last year when terminating the trade agreement. Still, the administration's reasoning is quite telling. As the administration was considering terminating the tomato trade deal, Commerce Department officials told The Wall Street Journal last year that the deal "has failed to protect U.S. tomato growers from unfairly priced Mexican imports."

That's a good illustration of how the Trump administration approaches economic issues. Framing trade in terms of "fairness" is a typical left-wing tactic—and it always misses huge parts of the picture.

Those imported tomatoes from Mexico don't just provide inexpensive salad and sandwich components for Americans. They also support tons of American jobs. A 2025 study calculated that imported tomatoes provided more than $8.3 billion in economic impact in the U.S.

When the Trump administration prioritizes the interests of American tomato farmers over the interests of consumers and the rest of the tomato-related market, it is not scoring a victory for fairness or sound economic principles. It is just playing favorites and expecting everyone else to bear the cost.

The post Trump Ended Free Trade for Mexican Tomatoes. Prices Are Up 23 Percent in the Last Year. appeared first on Reason.com.

The Orange County Register Editorial Board once interviewed state Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco) about his bill to decriminalize the use of some psychedelics. We questioned the obvious inconsistency between his anti-prohibition stance on mushrooms and his prohibitionist stance on vaping and flavored-tobacco products. He reminded us that he's a San Francisco progressive and not a libertarian. Fair point.

I recall that encounter as I mulled Wiener's Senate Bill 982, which mainly encourages the state attorney general to sue oil companies "for climate-attributable damage to recover costs and losses suffered by the California FAIR Plan." The Fair Access to Insurance Requirement Plan is the state-created, insurance-industry-funded, barebones insurer of last resort. It has been teetering on the fiscal brink since property insurers began exiting the state or reducing their underwriting, thus overloading the plan with customers.

This legislation wants Big Oil to pay for an insurance crisis caused by the state's price controls. This is non-serious lawmaking—a transparent virtue-signal rather than an effort at problem-solving. Wiener is a thoughtful lawmaker who championed groundbreaking housing-deregulation laws, but in this case the San Francisco progressive won out.

What's wrong with drilling oil companies? For starters, it's wrong to pin the state's wildfire-related troubles on companies that sell a legal, highly taxed and regulated product to consumers. Climate change likely has contributed to severe wildfire seasons, but that's a multifaceted public-policy failure. Senate Bill 982 is just a blame game and an effort to get "free" money from a deep-pocketed third party. It's a fancy way to engage in a financial taking.

The bill's supporters rely on conspiratorial hyperbole that would make a MAGA podcaster proud. This is from an op-ed from Wiener and the bill's co-author Sen. Akilah Weber Pierson (D–San Diego): "Large multinational oil and gas corporations spent decades lying to the public about their products' contribution to climate change and working to undermine the transition to cleaner energy sources. They're uniquely responsible for the mess we're in; it's only fair they share the financial consequences."

Oil companies, and opponents of a government-forced transition to windmills and solar panels, have every right to express views that are contrary to the green-energy mantra. There's substantial academic disagreement and new thinking on many aspects of climate change—and numerous places to assess blame for what's ultimately a global challenge.

For instance, California's government has only conducted a tiny portion of the land-clearance work its own CalFIRE says is necessary to reduce wildfire risk. A University of Chicago report found that a single year of California's "wildfire emissions is close to double emissions reductions achieved over 16 years." In other words, the state's own wildfire failures are obliterating its climate goals. Maybe the AG should start by suing the state government.

State officials are now concerned about the exodus of refiners, which is driving up gas prices. If you don't like the oil industry, fine—but good luck powering the world's fourth-largest economy without it. We already have the nation's steepest prices because of our highest-in-the-nation gas taxes, stringent environmental regulations, and special-fuels mandate that limits our ability to buy gasoline from other states. This could be the last straw for refiners foolish enough to remain here.

Fundamentally, this legislation gives short shrift to the real cause of California's insurance crisis: voters and regulators. Californians in 1988 approved Proposition 103, which created a system of price controls. The insurance commissioner gained the power to approve and roll back rates. And the state has failed to implement those regulations in a way that allows insurers to deftly adjust their underwriting and pricing to reflect risk from a changing climate.

After some ferocious wildfire years, insurers faced massive losses. Their risk soared, but the Department of Insurance capped their rates. Inflation also played a role, as it became more costly to rebuild damaged properties. So insurers started exiting the market or stopped writing new policies, thus reducing competition. This is how price controls always backfire. Meanwhile, the best way to keep rates low is to have a vibrant market filled with competitors.

Until recently, California wouldn't even let insurers use catastrophe models to help determine rates. If the climate is warming, then why would insurers have to base rates on past losses rather than forward-looking models?

Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara created the Sustainable Insurance Strategy, which addressed some of the major issues. It sped up the rate-review process, allowed insurers to factor the rising cost of reinsurance policies in their rates, and bolstered the FAIR Plan. Lara also granted painful but necessary rate hikes. There's much more to be done, but several companies have announced their plans to jumpstart California underwriting.

"No one should be priced out of their homes because they can't afford insurance," the senators wrote. Agreed, but this bill substitutes the long, painstaking, and complex work of fixing California's troubled insurance market with finger-pointing and posturing. One needn't be a libertarian to recognize that reality.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

The post California Progressives Want 'Big Oil' To Fix an Insurance Crisis Created by the State's Price Controls appeared first on Reason.com.