I shouldn't get so angry. It isn't healthy.

Last week, New York state summoned me to jury duty.

I went, of course. It's the law, and my duty.

A jury may protect the innocent from government abuse. Ordinary citizens, not officials, decide if you are guilty.

But doing our patriotic duty shouldn't mean surrendering hours of our lives to bureaucratic indifference. Serving justice is important. Sitting around doing nothing isn't.

During my 50 years consumer reporting, I've watched greedy capitalists constantly make improvements and find better ways to do things. They use computers, adjust hours, reduce wait times.

If they don't, we consumers quickly switch to competitors who will.

But government bureaucracies—courts, the DMV, the passport office—have no competitors. So they don't try very hard.

Government is force.

My summons arrived on paper, in the mail.

Most businesses now communicate with customers instantly, by text or email. Airlines send boarding passes to our phones. Doctors text reminders. Restaurants send notifications when our table is ready.

But government sends paper.

We summoned jurors meekly arrive at the courthouse and wait. And wait.

I'm old; it's important I hydrate. At least government provides a water cooler and a drinking fountain. Oh, damn, neither works.

We sit another hour.

Eventually, a bored clerk drones through long instructions on how fill out a form. Printed instructions would be better—a video would be much better. But this is government, and government bureaucracies have little incentive to innovate.

Finally, clerks choose 80 of us to be considered for a criminal trial. "Wait in the hall," we're told.

We wait.

Then they tell us, "Go across the street to another building, and wait there."

We go.

After an hour, we're admitted into a courtroom, where another bureaucrat tells us, "Come back Monday."

Monday! This was the Thursday before. Imagine an airline telling 80 passengers, "Welcome to the airport. Your flight is in five days. Come back then."

No airline would survive doing that.

But courts don't have competition.

When court finally starts, a stenographer types away, recording what people say. Computers today transcribe speech instantly, accurately, at almost no cost. But New York taxpayers still pay someone to type every word.

Amazon experiments with faster delivery. Supermarkets install self-checkout machines. Banks let us deposit checks just by photographing them with our phones.

Capitalism protects your time while bureaucrats waste it.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman explained why by pointing out there are four ways to spend money:

No. 1: Spend your money on yourself. Then you're very careful about both cost and quality.

No. 2: Spend your own money on someone else. You're careful about the cost, but don't care as much about the quality.

No. 3: Spend someone else's money on yourself. You care less about cost, but still care about quality.

No. 4: Spend someone else's money on someone else. You don't care about cost OR quality.

That's what government does.

Some court workers work hard, and many want to help people. But they're stuck in a system where saving people's time brings them no rewards.

In my case, 80 prospective jurors sat around for at least six hours, just waiting—that's 12 40-hour work weeks lost. Some had to hire babysitters, reschedule doctor's appointments, tell their bosses they'll try to make up the work at night. Some lost income. Some missed opportunities.

For just one case. Multiply that by thousands of cases: countless hours of human progress vanish.

Why not stagger arrival times? Let jurors wait at home until needed? Use text messages to call people in?

Because innovation takes effort. So courts don't bother.

They act as if wasting our time is free. It's not.

COPYRIGHT 2026 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post My Jury Duty Was a Master Class in Government Inefficiency appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Imagine getting a bill from your local government for $900,000 because they see a greenhouse on your property and just assume you're growing marijuana without a permit.

Imagine government demanding $400,000 because you didn't know to fill out a single-page form.

Or you get slapped with a $100,000 fine for parking your car on your own property.

It sounds absurd, but as my newest video shows, that's really happening.

How can that be? Doesn't America's Constitution say government may not impose "excessive fines"?

It happens because some bureaucrats, savoring their power, act like tyrants.

At least now there is hope for a remedy. One of these excessive fine cases has reached the Supreme Court.

Ken Jouppi worked as a pilot in Alaska for 30 years, until one day, state troopers stopped his plane before takeoff.

"I didn't think we had anything to hide," he says. "They searched the airplane, opened up this lady's boxes of groceries and found beer."

Transporting beer. That was his crime.

"Isn't beer legal in America?" I ask Jouppi's lawyer, Mike Greenberg.

"In most places," he replies. But some towns in Alaska ban beer.

Jouppi was convicted of bootlegging.

Every pilot must know which town has what rule, and search everybody?

"They think pilots should search people's luggage," says Jouppi. "It was such a terrible thing to do to another individual, invade their privacy, and assault their dignity….I just didn't feel right about doing that."

Alaskan officials say the beer was visible, so Jouppi should have known about it. They jailed him for three days and seized his plane.

"That airplane was my primary source of income," says Jouppi. "Without it, I didn't have a business anymore."

I assumed such excessive punishment would be dismissed quickly by a court. But it wasn't.

"Jouppi has been fighting to keep his plane for 14 years," says Greenberg. "The plane is still sitting on a tarmac….It's a ludicrous situation where the state has every interest in going after valuable assets rather than actually fighting supposed harms of alcohol."

Greenberg's law firm, the Institute for Justice, took Jouppi's case, and now the U.S. Supreme Court will hear it.

I hope he wins. It's just wrong when governments destroy lives for small mistakes.

They're also doing that to Tuncay Saydam, a retired professor.

The IRS demands he pay $400,000 because he didn't know to fill out a one-page form about an old bank account in his native Turkey.

"The fines," says Saydam, "will destroy my life….We have never been rich."

His unpaid tax is less than $30,000. But the IRS demands he pay them more than $400,000. A California court upheld that penalty. Northern Californian Chief Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu wrote, "Government suffered a significant tax loss."

Finally, bureaucrats in Humboldt County, California, took aerial photos of people's property to search for unlicensed marijuana farms.

When they saw greenhouses, they fined property owners.

Blu Graham was fined $900,000, "$30,000 a day, when all I've ever done is grow vegetables in my greenhouses."

"There actually was no marijuana on the property!" says Greenberg. "They were just guessing that if you built a greenhouse, this must be connected to marijuana."

Finally, a lawsuit got the county to promise to end its ruinous fine system.

But it took four years.

Why do governments fight to keep outrageous fines that punish largely innocent people?

"Unlike other forms of punishment," says Greenberg, "fines make the government money. The prosecutor's office, state troopers, they get to keep the proceeds. It's an abusive system because they have every incentive to continue to prosecute."

I invited the heavy-fining judges and government lawyers to appear in my video to explain these fines. None would agree to talk about it.

Bureaucrats always want more money. It's a reason the Constitution prohibits excessive fines.

I trust that the Supreme Court will put a stop to these abuses.

COPYRIGHT 2026 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post How Local Governments Turn Minor Violations Into Financial Ruin appeared first on Reason Magazine.