The Shaky Evidence That Flock Cameras Reduce Crime Rates

Flock has been promoting a recent study of its cameras' impacts on car theft. But the paper didn't demonstrate a causal effect.

By Autumn Billings of Reason. 

"Do Flock cameras actually reduce crime? A new analysis by the Institute for Justice casts doubt on Flock Safety's claims that its automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) significantly reduce car theft and increase clearance rates. 

Flock Safety has been promoting a working paper that examines whether the company's controversial and hotly debated cameras improve outcomes for motor vehicle theft. To test the effects of Flock's surveillance network, the study uses data from 216 agencies that began using Flock in the period from 2017 to 2023, and 3,108 agencies that did not. The authors then evaluated the cameras' effects on monthly motor vehicle thefts, arrest rates for motor vehicle theft, and the recovery time of stolen cars following ALPR deployment.

The study's findings include an 11 percent drop in motor vehicle theft, a 15.9 percent increase in motor vehicle theft arrests, and a reduction of 0.28 days in the median recovery time for some stolen cars. The authors concluded that "fixed ALPR deployment is associated with lower theft and higher [arrests], alongside a modest reduction in recovery lag among recorded recoveries."

But the data aren't actually that clear, according to a new analysis from the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian law firm and home of the Plate Privacy Project. 

IJ Senior Researcher Analyst Matthew West found that motor vehicle thefts and arrest rates in those jurisdictions were already trending in the favored direction months before Flock's cameras were ever in use. Unsurprisingly, many of the places that chose to deploy ALPR systems did so when experiencing high levels of vehicle theft, and engaged in crime-fighting initiatives beyond partnering with Flock. Because the study doesn't compare places on similar trajectories, it is unclear how much credit the cameras, as opposed to those other initiatives, deserve for causing motor vehicle thefts to fall and arrests to rise. 

"Because there were already differences in arrests and thefts trends before ALPR deployment, we don't know if the differences in ALPR deployment were caused by ALPR deployment," West explained in a statement. 

West goes on to point out that the authors were able to obtain an 11 percent drop in motor vehicle theft only "when the data are weighted in favor of agencies that had a bigger problem to begin with." By contrast, if "the data are instead averaged across all agencies (or weighted by population), the study finds no statistically significant change" in the number of thefts.

The study's data have other complications that the authors did not fully account for. One is the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, which impacted both the level of crime and the number of people driving across the country. Another is the viral "Kia Challenge" on social media, which led to increased Kia and Hyundai thefts. Such "events may have contributed to motor vehicle theft rising and falling at different times in different places," writes West, further complicating whether ALPR cameras did, in fact, cause favorable changes in the data. 

hese criticisms don't necessarily mean the study's results are wrong, but they do show that the full picture hasn't been explored.

Flock has been using the working paper's results to defend its cameras against an ongoing national backlash. But as much as the company may wish otherwise, the scrutiny of ALPR surveillance technology is far from over."

A 5 Percent Wealth Tax Would Destroy a Lot More Than It Raises

 By Jack Salmon. Excerpts:

"the billions of dollars in wealth held by the almost 1,000 billionaires in the U.S. isn’t cash that is being hoarded under a mattress waiting to be taxed. For instance, Elon Musk’s roughly $900 billion fortune is mostly stock held in SpaceX and Tesla."

"Musk’s personal fortune represents only about one-third of the combined value of the companies he has founded."

"The remaining two-thirds is represented by factories, equipment, intellectual property, business assets, and claims held by other shareholders, including pension funds, mutual funds, and ordinary Americans who own shares directly or indirectly. The companies also employ tens of thousands of workers whose wages support household incomes and consumption.

For other billionaires, the share of wealth kept for themselves versus the share granted as value created for wider society is even larger than that of Musk. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal fortune represents about 13 percent of the market value of Meta. The other 87 percent is owned by shareholders, ordinary investors, or represented as data centers, servers, other productive assets, and nearly 79,000 employees.

 

In other words, the wealth of billionaires is a small share of the trillions of dollars in private wealth that they have created for millions of ordinary American’s. The free enterprise system rewards this kind of entrepreneurial activity and innovative behavior that in turn promotes productivity and growth. Removing these rewards by confiscating their personal assets and handing them over to the state would instead punish such activity.

A 5 percent wealth tax is a 99 percent income tax

The second thing to recognize is that the proposed 5 percent tax on wealth is a much larger tax on the returns of investments.

But we also have to account for the invisible tax that we all pay—inflation. Once inflation is factored in, market returns drop to 5.48 percent. At that level, the wealth tax is a 91 percent tax on investment returns. If we also assume that capital gains taxes are applied to dividends, then the after-tax return drops to just 5.05 percent. In this case, the wealth tax is effectively a 99 percent tax on investment income.

A 99 percent tax on investment income will have a significant impact on the incentives of investors. One of the incentives that will undoubtedly change is that people will take less risks. Low risk investments have lower rewards, and this will be felt by everyone, not just the billionaires that the policy targets.

Slower capital formation, weaker productivity, lower wages and fewer opportunities for workers and businesses affect all workers and consumers, not just wealthy ones.

We already have a wealth tax of sorts

As Stanford economist John Cochrane recently pointed out on his Substack, the U.S. already taxes wealth in certain circumstances. For example, the estate tax applies to the assets of the deceased when it is passed onto an heir.

Importantly, I should point out that a tax on the transfer of property is very different to a tax recurring tax on property ownership. The Supreme Court has also made a strong distinction between these types of taxes too, as it considers the estate tax an indirect excise tax on the transfer of property.

As Cochrane points out, the estate tax attracts a significant amount of perfectly legal avoidance. Although the tax applies at a much lower threshold than the proposed wealth tax, at $13.99 million, the Treasury estimates, that combined with gift tax receipts, the estate tax raised $29 billion in revenue in FY2025, or less than 0.1 percent of GDP.

Even a study published by supporters of a wealth tax found that the estate tax collects just 300-to-400ths of a percent annually of the Forbes 400 wealth.

The revenue gain is about $200 billion a year

So how much revenue do proponents of a wealth tax suggest it would raise if implemented in the U.S.?

French economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman estimate that a 5 percent wealth tax will raise $4.4 trillion over 10 years. To get this figure, they assume a tax evasion rate of 10 percent. This implies an elasticity of taxable wealth around -2. This assumption is significantly out-of-whack with the bulk of economic literature.

Evidence of savings effects based on Norwegian micro data estimate elasticities of taxable wealth around -7 under a comprehensive tax base. Similarly, evidence from Switzerland using cantonal variation finds that a one-percentage-point reduction in the wealth-tax rate increased reported taxable wealth by at least 43 percent after six years.

One 2021 journal article used rich administrative data from Colombia and a government-designed program for voluntary disclosures of hidden wealth to estimate the behavioral effects of wealth tax. The authors found that two-fifths (40%) of the wealthiest 0.01 percent evade taxes, with these evaders concealing one-third of their wealth offshore.

Using Danish administrative data, Jakobsen et al. find that reductions in the wealth tax increased taxable wealth by 31 percent among the very wealthy over eight years. Their estimates incorporate saving, portfolio and asset-composition responses, legal avoidance, and possible evasion of self-reported assets. The net-of-tax rate elasticity is therefore estimated at around -11.

With these estimates in mind, budget scoring organizations often use more realistic elasticity estimates that are more aligned with the economic literature. For example, the Tax Foundation models wealth tax proposals using a semi-elasticity assumption of -8, while Penn Wharton applies semi-elasticities of evasion and avoidance around -9.

If we replace the elasticity assumptions of Saez and Zucman with a more realistic semi-elasticity of around -8, then the revenue raised by the tax drops from $4.4 trillion to $3.3 trillion over 10 years. This isn’t an outlier assumption. In fact, Sanders and Warren used a 33% avoidance assumption in their 2020 wealth tax campaigns.

Factoring in baseline avoidance in the existing tax system and stronger behavioral responses, tax scholar Kyle Pomerleau applies an elasticity of -13. This results in a 10-year revenue yield of $2.3 trillion, or roughly half the Saez-Zucman figure. This amounts to a little over $200 billion a year in additional revenues, or about 10 percent of current deficits.

A high price for the U.S. economy

A 5 percent wealth tax isn’t just a tax on billionaires, it is a tax on investment, a tax on risk-taking, a tax on capital accumulation that drives productivity, higher wages, and job growth. The people who ultimately bear those costs would include workers, consumers, retirees, and the millions of ordinary Americans whose savings are invested in the companies billionaires helped build.

Wealth is not cash sitting idle in a bank account. It is the factories, companies, technologies, and investments that generate future income for millions of people. Taxing wealth at punitive rates may satisfy a desire to punish the rich, but it risks shrinking the very economic base from which future prosperity will come.

Let’s not tax away our productivity, innovation, and growth for the sake of political symbolism."

Rideshare Licensing Fails the Consumer Protection Test

By Ryan Bourne and Nathan Miller of Cato.

"Occupational licensing is sold as consumer protection that screens out incompetent or dangerous workers. Today, about 22 percent of the American workforce needs a government license to do their jobs, and that safety and quality argument is what state and local lawmakers use to justify the entry barriers, licensing fees, and training hours that typically accompany it.

The trouble is that the claimed benefits have historically been difficult to test or measure, so the debate over whether licenses really protect anyone was fueled mostly by anecdotes. That’s why a new NBER working paper by Jonathan Hall, Jason Hicks, Morris M. Kleiner, and Yun taek Oh is so interesting. It leverages Uber data and finds no consistent evidence that a government occupational license improves riders’ ratings or drivers’ behavior on the road. The results suggest that, once a platform is already screening and monitoring its drivers, licensing adds no detectable, additional consumer protection.

Why Uber Is a Good Testing Ground

Uber’s vast datasets from trip tracking and consumer ratings have proven a goldmine for researchers on an array of economic questions. 

One of us has written before about how data on female and male drivers’ earnings gave good insights into non-discriminatory causes of gender pay gaps. Now similar data can be used to examine the effects of occupational licensing laws for rideshare drivers.

Uber dispatches drivers mainly by proximity. So when a licensed and an unlicensed driver are both near a rider, which one is dispatched is essentially a coin flip. The researchers use that quasi-random assignment along with data Uber collects about the ride quality, such as the rider’s star rating and telematics data on how carefully the car was driven (by measuring things like hard braking and hard acceleration, which are tied to greater crash risk).

The authors exploit two settings that allow a test of licensing’s effects. First, New York City licenses rideshare drivers through the Taxi and Limousine Commission, which, at the time covered by the study, required a fingerprint background check, a defensive-driving course, and a 24-hour vehicle for hire course and exam. Neighboring New Jersey does not have these requirements, yet drivers from both areas serve the same New Jersey riders. 

Second, in 2017, Texas preempted local occupational licensing of rideshare drivers, abolishing Houston’s restrictive licensing requirements. That let the researchers compare previously licensed drivers with those who entered the market after the entry restrictions were lifted.

The researchers sampled 213,000 trips in the New York area from April to August 2017 and nearly 497,000 in Houston from September 2017 to January 2018 to look for differences between drivers with and without an occupational license. They checked for differences across seven metrics:

1. Star rating (1–5)
2. Proportion receiving ratings less than 5 stars
3. Proportion receiving 1‑star ratings
4. Prevalence of hard braking
5. Whether more than 20 percent of brakes in a trip were hard brakes
6. Prevalence of hard acceleration
7. Whether more than 20 percent of accelerations in a trip were hard accelerations.

No Sign Licensing Helps Anyone

Across both metro areas, the paper finds no consistent evidence that licensing improved consumer outcomes. 

In the New York vs. New Jersey comparison, licensed drivers actually earned slightly lower ratings than their unlicensed counterparts—0.0228 fewer stars on Uber’s five-star scale, or less than half a percent off the unlicensed mean score of 4.78. 

Just one of the seven metrics compared came out in licensing’s favor. Licensed drivers logged fewer trips with a high share (20 percent or more) of hard-braking events, yet even that result didn’t survive robustness checks the authors undertook. It faded once the authors widened their sample window and swung wildly depending on whether they controlled for vehicle model and year. 

The results were similar in Houston. The researchers could not detect a statistical difference between the drivers who entered after deregulation and previously licensed drivers on all seven outcomes, despite the two groups differing sharply in experience (288 prior trips versus roughly 2,584 for the licensed) and age. This is strong suggestive evidence against the common fear that ending entry requirements would flood a market with worse providers.

When previously licensed drivers were instead compared with unlicensed drivers who had already been on the platform, the only differences ran against licensing: on three of the four driving-behavior measures, the previously licensed drivers braked and accelerated harder, with roughly 15 percent more of the high-hard-braking trips that flag risky driving.

Licensing Is a Costly Regime

A large body of research has already established the costs associated with occupational licensing. A strict licensing regime restricts entry into a market, thins the supply of workers, and thus tends to push prices up. 

As was summarized earlier this year in Cato’s Handbook on Affordability, stringent nurse-practitioner scope-of-practice rules raise child checkup costs between 3 and 16 percent, home improvement jobs are between 15 and 50 percent more expensive (depending on the job type) in states with the strictest home technician licensing regimes, and in one Virginia case study of hair braiding, the number of beauty shops grew 7 percent faster than in bordering states after Virginia deregulated in 2012.

So, although this paper doesn’t examine how occupational licensure affects fares, it’s reasonable to think based on existing literature that licensing rideshare drivers simply means fewer drivers and (absent substitute platforms outside the license regime) higher fares. This paper supplies evidence that despite that added cost, licensure often buys nothing in the way of improved quality or safety. 

Rideshare markets already have methods that go a long way to vetting drivers’ quality—reputational feedback, ratings, reviews, or the threat of account deactivation. That makes further government licensure redundant. The new paper is a strong complement to what Cato argued in our handbook earlier this year: the cheapest way to lower the price of a service is often just to let people provide more of it."

The Food Revolution Nobody Planned

By Byron Carson.

"Long before policymakers conceived New York City Groceries, entrepreneurs fed people. They did it cheaply, and they made people better off in unimaginable ways. 

The approximately 63,000 grocery stores in the US (according to 2023 Census estimates) indicate a great deal of competition, which encourages owners to lower prices and improve food quality. The figure below indicates that these stores must also compete with approximately 650,000 domestic food and beverage retailers.

That’s a lot of competition, and it helps lower prices while producing a dizzying array of goods and innovation that makes the mythical land of Cockaigne look paltry. While higher prices understandably attract attention — recent CPI data for food indicates a 3 percent rise over the previous year — innovation takes place in myriad ways that are easy to overlook.

Open-air marketplaces and food halls are just some of the ways people innovate. To clarify, think about the mundane problems associated with acquiring food. There are myriad transaction costs associated with finding a seller interested in selling what you want, assessing the quality of an item, trusting that the seller isn’t cheating you, and so on. Entrepreneurs develop public or open-air markets and food halls to earn profits, and they do so by lowering transaction costs for consumers and providing innovative services. 

Historical and modern examples alike indicate the extent of innovation. Since 1742, Boston’s Faneuil Hall, or “The Cradle of Liberty” (and later the Quincy Market), has provided organized spaces for people to buy and sell food in mutually beneficial ways. The Redding Terminal Market is now a popular indoor marketplace and food hall, but it developed from the open-air markets in Philadelphia during the late nineteenth century. Similar kinds of commercial activity even developed in New York, perhaps ironically, in places now being touted as sites for government-owned grocery stores. La Marqueta, or the Park Avenue Market, emerged from the haphazard commerce underneath a viaduct, where people sold goods to customers willing to pay for them. Such commercial activity expanded so much that by 1936, the city enacted a more orderly marketplace. 

Food halls, food courts, food truck parks, and similar ventures are now common, reflecting entrepreneurs’ efforts to earn profits by providing goods and experiences customers value.

On recent trips to Tampa and London, I learned of two interesting examples of people developing food halls through private enterprise. In Tampa, the Oxford Exchange (opened in its current form in 2012) was once home to an arcade of shops in the 1920s. It was converted from a bookstore in the 2010s and now hosts several dining rooms, a coffee and wine bar, lounges, meeting spaces, and shops. London’s Mercato Mayfair (one of several food halls owned by Mercato Metropolitano) is located in a deconsecrated church and houses various food and beverage vendors.

From my brief visits, these places seem like vibrant focal points where eating is perhaps the least interesting thing to do. They offer comfort and service, novel and quality foods, places to meet, and more. The profit motive and the search for innovation, not governmental food policy, drive these efforts.

WorldFoodTrucks offers another case of private food innovation. Located in Kissimmee, Florida, WorldFoodTrucks is the first and largest food truck park in the US, where customers can find more than 100 trucks, each offering different culinary options, including more than 80 world cuisines. The park is open every day of the year (until 4 am on weekends), and its operators report serving more than 13 million customers since the park opened around 2023. Not only does the park offer food, but it also provides a convenient and inexpensive way to feed larger groups of people with interesting cuisine at corporate and celebratory events, such as graduations and weddings. Such market-driven opportunities are innovations because they satisfy several goals people value beyond simply providing cheaper food. 

The economist Steven Horwitz wrote that grocery stores are indicators of American progress. We should broaden these indicators to include food halls, food trucks, and other ways entrepreneurs try to feed people. Such progress benefits picky eaters, the fitness-conscious, people who want to grill out on a nice day, those trying to meal prep for the week, people making dinner for date night, those preparing a family meal on a tight budget, and many others. Progress is progress for rich and poor alike, and it serves myriad individual goals.

Rather than devise policies that consistently fail to make people better off, perhaps we should understand how entrepreneurial activities actually put food on the table and make people better off in ways they value."

  

Health-care costs for typical Canadian family will reach over $21,000 this year

By Nadeem Esmail, Nathaniel Li and Milagros Palacios of The Fraser Institute.

The Price of Public Health Care Insurance, 2026

• Canadians often misunderstand the true cost of our public health care system. This occurs partly because Canadians do not incur direct expenses for their use of health care, and partly because Canadians cannot readily determine the value of their contribution to public health care insurance.
• In 2026, preliminary estimates suggest the average payment for public health care insurance ranges from $6,464 to $21,115 for six common Canadian family types, depending on the type of family.
• Between 1997 and 2026, the cost of public health care insurance for the average Canadian family increased 2.3 times as fast as the cost of food, 1.7 times as fast as the average income, and 1.5 times as fast as the cost of shelter. It also increased much more rapidly than the average cost of clothing, which has fallen in recent years.
• The 10 percent of Canadian families with the lowest incomes will pay an average of about $637 for public health care insurance in 2026. The 10 percent of Canadian families who earn an average income of $88,572 will pay an average of $8,644 for public health care insurance, and the families among the top 10 percent of income earners in Canada will pay $66,350.

 

The cost of lighting has decreased by over 1000x

Tweet from Paul Graham. 

"One data point in technology making everyone richer: the cost of lighting has decreased by over 1000x."

  

 

The Tax Gains from Moving Across State Lines

Comparative tax burden · Tax year 2026

By Daniel Di Martino of The Manhattan Institute. 

"Americans have been moving from high-tax states to low-tax states for a long time, but the trend has become more acute since the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world in 2020. The increasing availability of remote work allowed many workers to move elsewhere and keep their jobs, and many companies also chose to relocate or reduce office occupancy. In addition, Americans are increasingly self-sorting according to political preferences. Most coverage of this trend has focused on the rich and how much they have to gain by moving from high-tax to no-income-tax states. Obviously, multimillionaires can keep more of their income if they move from a high-tax jurisdiction like New York City to Palm Beach, where there is no state or local income tax. My new income tax tool shows that not only the rich, but also low- and middle-income Americans, have a lot to gain from moving across state lines.

Take a couple earning $120,000 in New York City. The husband has a decent job paying $100,000, and his wife makes $20,000 working part-time. They have two children still in school. That couple does not benefit from itemizing deductions in their federal tax return, so they take the standard deduction and owe $10,040 in federal income taxes. Since they have two minor children, they will receive a $4,400 child tax credit to offset their tax liability.

Since they both have traditional jobs, their employers will owe $9,180 in Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, while they will pay the same amount from their salary in payroll taxes, out of an effective compensation cost to their employers of $129,180. Since they live in New York State, they owe $5,186 in state income tax and $581 in payroll taxes for paid family and disability leave (both spouses contribute), but they also benefit from an $800 state child tax credit. Finally, since they live in New York City, they will pay an additional $3,727 in city local income tax.

All in all, out of a compensation cost of $129,180, the couple pays $32,693 in income and payroll taxes, or 25.3% of their income, leaving them with a take-home pay of $96,487. This couple faces an effective 36.3% marginal tax rate.

Would this couple be better off if they moved from New York City’s metropolitan area to the Nashville metropolitan area? Imagine the cost of this move is that the wife loses her $20,000 job and thus their income falls. This is a big hit, but they would pay no state and local taxes, and their federal income tax would also be much lower due to the progressive tax structure. Their federal income tax would be, net of the child tax credit, just $3,240, while their payroll tax liability would fall proportionally. Out of a new employer compensation of $107,650, this couple would pay a total of $18,540 in payroll and income taxes, for a take-home pay of $89,110. But every dollar goes much farther in Nashville than in New York City, as housing and everyday goods and services are cheaper—specifically, 14.48% cheaper. While New York City is 12.6% more expensive than the average U.S. territory, Nashville is 3.7% cheaper. Thus a take-home pay of $96,487 in New York City is equivalent to $85,690, while one of $89,110 in Nashville is equivalent to $92,534. In other words, even with a $20,000 lower nominal income, a married couple with two kids can still increase their real take-home pay by nearly 8% by moving across state lines. If they managed to keep their full income, or the wife later found another job, their real income would actually increase to $109,221—over $23,000 in additional real income, a 27% increase.

Now take the case of a middle-income single worker in Los Angeles, making $60,000 per year. His take-home pay would be $47,961. Say he lives in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, so his price-adjusted take-home pay is lower, at $42,219. If he moves to Orlando in Florida, his take-home pay will rise to $50,390, and adjusted for cost of living it would be $49,694. In other words, his after-tax pay rises by $2,429 per year, or over $200 per month, and his price-adjusted after-tax pay rises by $7,475, or over $600 per month—a nearly 18% increase.

While tax and cost-of-living gains are increasing with income, even the lowest-income earners in the United States can see increases of over 10% by moving across state lines, while the richest can see gains of over 30%."