California Governor Gavin Newsom is spending millions in taxpayer money on free diapers.

He's doing it through a nonprofit that has dubious political connections.

So is this just another example of wasteful government spending and corruption

in California? And is this going to open up the race in the L.A. mayor's race so that a Republican

might actually have a chance. Welcome to the Reason Roundtable. This is your Libertarian

Review of News and Culture from the editors of Reason magazine and friends.

I am your host, Peter Sutterman, and today I am joined by my colleague, Catherine Mangy Ward, as well as special guests.

Reasons very own Robbie Suave and Reim Ibrahim.

Happy Monday, everybody.

Okay, so let's talk about California here.

Catherine, the controversy is that Newsom wants to spend millions, at least six million. That's his number, and maybe more like $20 million, to send mothers home from the hospital with diapers. And he's running this through something called baby to baby, which is a nonprofit that has some friendly personal connections to Newsom's wife.

So I have two questions for you to start with here.

What, if anything, is wrong with spending money to give mothers free diapers?

And also, couldn't he have just gone to Amazon or Costco?

Yeah, I'm extremely mad because this scandal made me try to calculate the per diaper cost of this boondoggle.

And I didn't even do that when I was buying diapers for my kids.

I was like, these ones seem fine.

So I really don't want to do it for random Californians.

But I guess this is where our political discourse is now.

Free stuff always sounds good. And free stuff distributed our political discourse is now.

Free stuff always sounds good, and free stuff distributed by the government is always the most expensive free stuff.

That's just always true. It's always true. It's true. In this case, it's true in the case of free train rides.

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