The most socialist administration in American history has been resoundingly repudiated by voters. The opposition won the House of Representatives in a landslide and is on track for roughly 255 to 260 seats to about 175 for Trump’s party—its largest House majority since 2008. In the Senate, the opposition holds at least 54 seats to 44 for Trump’s party, with two races in former “Trump country” still uncalled: in Mississippi, its candidate holds a narrow lead, while Alaska’s contest remains too close to call.

Lawlessness, socialist cronyism, corruption, tariffs, and war seem to have sucked the wind out of the MAGA sails. Depending on precise definitions of the extent of government ownership and control, across Donald Trump’s two presidential terms, the federal government acquired ownership or control over about 45 major firms. Those ownership stakes, with one exception (U.S. Steel, where a “golden share” gives the government explicit veto power), do not entail explicit control, but with the added regulatory and subsidizing powers in government hands, effective control over the companies was handed to Donald Trump.

Oddly enough, the Blue Tsunami that has swept Trump’s party from control of Congress includes a small handful of people, identified with “democratic socialism,” whose push for more state ownership of companies would only expand Trump’s control over them.

The vast majority of the Democrats, however, will be on congressional committees examining the self-dealing that has infused many of those “deals,” as Trump describes them. All in all, the election represents an effective repudiation of Trump’s Make America Socialist movement.

This election was even more resoundingly a repudiation of taxes on trade, aka protectionism. The Trump administration’s often blatantly illegal imposition of taxes on people who buy from abroad did what every economically literate person expected. They:

• raised prices paid by businesses for components and ingredients for their products;
• reduced choice for consumers;
• and raised consumer prices on many thousands of goods, from medicines to car parts to furniture to coffee to children’s clothing.

Voters felt the Trump tariffs in their pocketbooks. The most obvious price rise was not the result of an intentional act of blocking trade, as the others were, but was caused by the disastrous war on Iran, which is best described as a mixture of incompetence and sheer reckless stupidity. (After the Iranians attacked Arab Gulf states, the president stated that “they weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East” and that “nobody expected that”; the first claim is laughable and the second is a falsehood, as he had been warned that that was precisely what would happen.)

Lawlessness also played a role in this defeat for out-of-control government, as so many Americans were horrified and angered by the lawless violence perpetrated by ICE and Border Patrol agents on American streets, including well-recorded point-blank shootings that seemed to be essentially extra-judicial executions, but for which there were no legal consequences for the killers. Even many who had supported Trump in the past found those to be steps too far.

Finally, the election represents a return to the separation of powers and the American system of checks and balances, which has been under tremendous strain for years and was then subjected to sustained attack by Donald Trump, who insisted that “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president” and, when asked if there were any limits to his powers, responded, “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” The voters understood that whatever counts as “morality” for Trump is not an effective limit on arbitrary power.

Constitutionally, this election represented a last-ditch defense of the separation of powers and of checks and balances in the American constitutional order. Since the election of 2024, Trump has effectively governed without a real Congress, as its members were intimidated into compliance with his erratic demands. On Nov. 3, one of the last of the checks and balances—voters protected by a still largely independent judiciary and local election officials—asserted itself. Had they not, Trump would have proceeded to stack the judiciary with compliant loyalists and intimidated with threats of imprisonment local election officials, which was already underway, but was blocked by the judiciary.

As with Orbán in Hungary and Vučić in Serbia, lawlessness finally met the voters, who voted in such numbers that they could not be intimidated, overruled, or denied. As in Hungary and Serbia, it seems like the last chance to stop authoritarian statism was finally taken by the people.

It was a close call, but a lawless, socialistic, and reckless president was repudiated. Long live the Constitution of the United States.

Now it looks like much of this panic was overblown. Nine of the 10 materials included in BloombergNEF’s Transition Metals Outlook 2026 are on track to have sufficient capacity through 2050 — a significant improvement over previous forecasts. Graphite, platinum and steel flipped from projected shortages to projected surpluses. BNEF now expects long-term downward pressure on the prices of cobalt, lithium, manganese, nickel and palladium, with oversupply potentially discouraging investment.

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You Should Worry About Copper
Supply capacity and demand for 10 key materials under BNEF’s Economic Transition Scenario, indexed to 2026 demand = 1

What happened to these materials is what usually happens: The market reacted on both the supply and the demand side, with new investments boosting the former and advances in battery and other technologies changing the latter. Prices declined, and the “crises” were averted.

Consider, for example, the evolving market for cobalt, which in December 2020 was cited as proof that China’s state-directed industrial policy had “outmaneuvered” America’s laissez-faire approach. In response to high prices and dire warnings of impending shortages, private investors funded new, non-Chinese projects, and manufacturers developed alternatives to cobalt-based batteries. By 2023, prices had collapsed: Automakers had shifted toward batteries that use less of the metal, output was surging in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Indonesia, and investors were still piling in, all before any new US industrial policies could have mattered.

Tellingly, the cobalt problem that did materialize was government-made. Facing oversupply and a price slump, the DRC restricted cobalt exports in February 2025, causing prices to more than double over the year. The market’s response was, once again, to work around the problem: Along with the aforementioned demand shift, Indonesia’s exports of refined cobalt products more than tripled while recycled supply also picked up. Today, prices are down more than 40% from their summer highs, and BNEF expects longer-term declines as surpluses widen.

This positive development is part of a longstanding pattern. During the pandemic and following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, widespread predictions of supply-chain doom — for medical goods, food, energy and more — never materialized. When the Iran war took roughly a fifth of the world’s crude supply offline, many (me included) worried about the potential fallout. Yet global energy prices, while elevated, never skyrocketed like many predicted, and serious shortages didn’t appear.

Across a variety of supply-chain non-events, the causes were the same: Public and private inventories were tapped, shippers re-routed, new supplies emerged, consumers rationalized, and businesses adapted and innovated. The pending crises made headlines, but the subsequent adjustments didn’t.

So why do the pessimistic forecasts keep missing? First, they’re static snapshots that rely on today’s suppliers, consumers, technologies and prices. They can’t capture millions of producers, workers, recyclers, traders, buyers and (yes) government officials responding to market signals with knowledge — of their own needs, investments ideas, and more — that no forecaster or planner can possibly possess. Instead, the pessimists have what Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek called the “pretense of knowledge,” but also a distinct political advantage: The pessimist can identify a specific problem and offer a specific “solution.” The optimist can say only that markets will somehow adjust. (Good luck winning an election with that.)

Second, the pessimistic forecasts underestimate the ability of humans — guided by prices and markets — to innovate our way out of almost any resource problem. This shortcoming was most famously demonstrated when de-growth biologist Paul Ehrlich lost his bet with economist Julian Simon over the prices of five metals — copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten — between 1980 and 1990. Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07 because, contrary to his predictions, the basket had significantly fallen in price.

Simon has good company in debunking Malthusian catastrophism. In the 1970s, the late Nobel laureate William Nordhaus predicted that markets would prevent modern societies from collapsing from resource exhaustion. More recently, Superabundance authors Gale Pooley and Marian Tupy found that from 1980 to 2025, the prices of 50 key commodities fell by about 71% even as the world’s population grew by 85%. Aided by the free exchange of goods and ideas, people turn out to be a driver of new resources rather than a drain on them.

In BNEF’s 2026 report, copper is the outlier. It projects a supply deficit in 2028 that hits 20 million metric tons by 2050 (44% of projected demand) and will need $332 billion for new mines, which take 17 years on average to open. These are undoubtedly daunting figures, but the safe bet is that the crisis will again be avoided.

For starters, today’s copper market reflects a now-ended “perfect storm” of mine disruptions between May 2025 and August 2026. Demand is also already adjusting: in October, industry pros said that customers balked when copper prices topped $14,000 per metric ton, that grid projects were waiting on lower prices, and that automotive and appliance manufacturers were pivoting to copper alternatives. Scrap collection and recycling are also gaining steam, and “urban mining” — extracting copper from decommissioned sites and old electronics — has become more economically viable.

None of this means that policymakers should stand idle in the face of possible supply challenges. Eliminating trade barriers, reducing regulatory burdens and bottlenecks, improving infrastructure and deepening cooperation with allied countries can help to boost supply, resiliency, and adjustment. Non-market tools such as stockpiling and targeted subsidies can also contribute at the margins.

Overall, however, the maxim holds: The solution to high prices is high prices — and letting these powerful signals motivate market actors. The biggest risks, on the other hand, come not from “unfettered” markets but from governments, particularly ones enacting kneejerk responses to supposed “emergencies.”

Washington isn’t blameless on this score. Copper markets have been thrown into chaos by President Donald Trump’s tariffs and threat of even more, which Reuters reports pulled more than 1 million metric tons into US stockpiles, left Comex-approved warehouses holding roughly 70% of the world’s visible copper, and created shortages elsewhere, fueling a price surge despite a global surplus. Policy uncertainty is today keeping metal in American warehouses — and discouraging investments and other market moves that would alleviate future disruptions.

So, a US government worried about copper security is fomenting the very risks that it fears, and if copper does turn into a crisis, Washington will deserve a chunk of the blame. The market, as usual, will just be doing the math it was given.

Each official will choose between letting a 22% automatic cut to benefits go through, finally making the program’s math work by reforming its outdated design, or letting Washington borrow trillions more to prevent any cuts. Few, if any, of the candidates said a substantive word about it while campaigning.

In fact, fiscal sustainability was remarkably absent all election season. During the 2010s, powerful politicians openly championed “austerity.” As late as 2018, according to AdImpact data reported by The Wall Street Journal, 140 political ads mentioned the debt or budget deficit. During this cycle, only 30 did, putting the subject 52nd among campaign topics.

That’s beyond crazy. It has been widely reported that in the fiscal year that just ended, government debt held by the public reached 100% of GDP, a level last seen following World War II. The deficit is nearly $2 trillion, or 6.2% of GDP. Interest payments have more than doubled in only four years, surpassing the United States’ bill for military spending.

And because the Treasury kept the debt’s average maturity short, high interest rates are hitting the budget very quickly. About one-third of the marketable debt — more than $10 trillion — must be refinanced in the next 12 months. This debt must be rolled over at the new rate, so interest payments will continue to explode.

Indeed, some of that debt was initially borrowed at much lower rates. The 30-year Treasury yield is near 5.31%. The Iran war explains part of that, but investors also question a government and Congress with no plan to back the debt with future surpluses. So, they’re charging more while they wait for answers.

This is the situation many of us warned about 15 years ago. At the time, we all got the same pat on the head. Politicians who ran on fiscal issues were mostly pacified. After all, interest rates were historically low, and markets were buying all the debt that Uncle Sam was putting out there.

With some economists, like Olivier Blanchard, Jason Furman and others, making the intellectual case for the debt having no real cost as long as interest rates stayed below growth rates — and with many of the same people believing that this would be the case indefinitely and that inflation had been defeated — politicians were more than happy to spend away and borrow to pay for it.

However, what we fiscal hawks warned about wasn’t the short-term risk of borrowing at such low rates. We warned about what came next. Low rates were never a law of nature. When they drifted back toward normal, the country got higher rates applied to a now much larger debt.

Public debt was roughly $10 trillion in 2011 (65.5% of GDP). It stands now at $32.6 trillion (100% of GDP).

So here we are. In a world where politicians almost always blame the other guy, nobody gets a pass. In the last two years, Republicans have been cutting some spending and then cutting taxes even more. President Donald Trump promised $5,000 checks to every adult, at a cost of $1.2 trillion, if his party kept control of the House and Senate. And the GOP long ago adopted Trump’s rule that the two programs driving the debt — Social Security and Medicare — are off-limits.

For their part, Democrats want to reverse recent Medicaid savings and restore expanded Obamacare subsidies, and they are of course opposed to any structural reforms of Medicare and Social Security. They pledge more taxes on the rich while sheltering everyone else, which amounts to a European-sized welfare state funded by perhaps 2% of taxpayers.

Voters don’t get a pass either. Polls say Americans worry about the debt, yet few accept the necessary spending restraint. Many had other things on their minds this fall, to be sure. But interest costs and trust-fund expirations won’t care who won on Tuesday.

Of course, many of the new legislators will think raising taxes is the way to go. However, it’s really hard to solve this problem on the revenue side. Revenue collection has hovered around 17% of GDP for the last half-century (including when income-tax rates were much higher than today). Meanwhile, spending has climbed from about 18% of GDP in the 1960s to more than 23%, with this growth concentrated in programs for the elderly.

Closing the tax code’s carveouts to special interests would help, but there is no path to sustainability that avoids cutting (or slowing the growth of) benefits, raising eligibility ages to reflect longer lives and putting Medicare on a budget.

The new class of senators must now deal with reality. I wish more voters had asked them how they’ll do it.

For that he paid with his life. However, popular commemoration of his role in 1989 spurred the collapse of communism not just in Hungary, but throughout Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union as well.

Hungary’s agony, like that of so many of its neighbors, was rooted in the First World War. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was allied with Wilhelmine Germany and collapsed as the Great War proceeded to its devastating conclusion. Hungary emerged as an independent state but lost much of its territory. It suffered through a brief spell of social democratic governance, an even briefer dalliance with Soviet-style communism, and then extended, semi-fascist rule under Miklós Horthy, who served as “regent” to the vacant monarchy.

Unfortunately, the latter sought to reclaim lost territory by joining the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. By 1943 he was looking for an exit, only to be ousted by the fascist Arrow Cross Party, whose control lasted just five brutal months, before the Red Army overran the country. People voted against local communists, but Moscow decided the issue otherwise, leading to the creation of the Hungarian People’s Republic in August 1949 under Mátyás Rákosi. Tens of thousands of Hungarians were arrested and imprisoned, with some sent to the Soviet gulag.

Despite the Soviet occupation, proud patriotic people throughout Eastern Europe chafed at alien communist rule. Some subject populations grew not just discontented, but violent.

Hungary proved the most dramatic case. In July 1956, the hardline Rákosi was ousted. But swapping oppressive communist dance partners was not enough for the Hungarian people. On October 23, some 20,000 students gathered in Budapest to demand change. As they marched their numbers swelled tenfold. Many protesters waved Hungarian flags from which they had excised the communist coat of arms. Along the way they downed an 82-foot monument of Joseph Stalin “gifted” to them five years before, when the Soviet dictator still ruled.

Rákosi’s successor, Erno Gero, rejected their demands and called for Soviet intervention. János Kádár replaced him, and Imre Nagy, a reform communist, reclaimed his position as premier. Red Army units, after sporadic combat, withdrew from Budapest, and revolutionaries targeted former communist security personnel. Nagy declared Hungary’s neutrality and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact.

However, on October 31 the Soviet leadership decided to intervene. Red Army units returned to Budapest on November 4 and were opposed by much of the Hungarian army—most soldiers backed the revolution—and civilian irregulars. It took the Soviets a week to seize the capital. Elsewhere, including in the industrial city of Dunaújváros, revolutionaries held out longer. An estimated 2,500 Hungarians were killed, including more than 1,500 civilians caught in the fighting. Some 20,000 were injured.

The Soviets anointed Kádár as their man in Budapest, and he unleashed a brutal wave of repression. The regime executed Nagy and another 228 revolutionary leaders, as a lesson to all other leaders in socialist countries, it was said. The Communist Party and army were purged. Some 22,000 Hungarians were imprisoned. More than 200,000 fled, crossing the then-open border. (Many ended up in America.)

Over the years, Kádár built a system of “Goulash Communism,” which offered modest economic reform combined with continued political repression. However, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, by the 1980s the population was increasingly restive. The rise of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union made change possible.

In 1988 Kádár was forced into retirement. Several reform communists came to the fore. Reported the Christian Science Monitor:

The second revolution came even more quickly than expected. The following year the increasingly assertive opposition organized a ceremony on the 31st anniversary of Nagy’s execution to rebury him and four of his colleagues with full honors. The revolutionaries had been placed in unmarked graves to prevent even informal commemoration of their sacrifice. In 1988, the police had violently dispersed a small public tribute to the dead.

As reform pressure increased, the communist leadership split over whether to honor the 1956 revolutionaries. Károly Grósz, Kádár’s successor, refused to rehabilitate Nagy, but politburo member Imre Pozsgay, a radical reformer, called the revolt a “popular uprising.” The regime agreed to allow reburial of the dead. Pozsgay and three other liberal party leaders attended in their capacity as government ministers.

On June 16, 1989, at least 100,000—some estimates were double that number—people witnessed the observance, which was the first time that the revolutionaries’ families could mourn openly. Reported the New York Times: “Many in the crowd looked up in shock and seemed to be holding their breath to hear at so public a ceremony, in so sumptuous a setting, words of such astonishing candor. The Government network televised the ceremony live.”

Playing a major role was 26-year-old Viktor Orbán, then spokesman for the Federation of Young Democrats and later prime minister. He lauded Nagy for having “identified himself with the wishes of the Hungarian nation to put an end to the Communist taboos, blind obedience to the Russian empire and with the dictatorship of a single party.” Orbán went on to criticize the communist reformers as latecomers to the cause: “We cannot understand that those who were eager to slander the revolution and its prime minister have suddenly changed into great supporters and followers of Imre Nagy,” Orbán said. “Nor can we understand that the party leaders, who made us study from books that falsified the revolution, now rush to touch the coffins as if they were charms of good luck.”

The ceremony had no formal political impact. However, the party abandoned plans to declare martial law, unsure of the military’s willingness to fight against its own people. After the government tore down the electrified border fence with Austria, the regime’s weaker version of the Berlin Wall, the infamous Iron Curtain was no more. Since residents of the Soviet satellite regimes could travel freely within the bloc, Budapest’s decision triggered a flood of refugees, especially from East Germany, undermining the other Soviet satellite regimes, which all fell before year’s end.

The Hungarian people proclaimed the third Republic of Hungary on October 23, 1989. Soviet troops went home early the following year. Permanently.

With ever more Americans bizarrely rating “socialism” favorably today, we should remember the high price paid by Hungarians to escape real socialism. Hungary’s tortured history reminds us of the fragility of liberty. Tragically, the Hungarian people lost their battle for freedom 70 years ago. However, their loss planted seeds for the ultimate destruction of Moscow’s satellite system and Europe’s liberation from communism.

The promise, as he and others have called it since, was consistent with “America First” — a movement to position the United States away from its role as a global security guarantor and toward a foreign policy guided by the interests of the public. The president’s second term started out strong on this front. But the war with Iran marked a sharp departure from that vision. Certainly, the voters seem to think so.

Heading into the midterm elections, Americans across the political spectrum have sensed a clear shift away from the president’s election night promise on foreign policy. They don’t like what they see.

The voters have not been shy about their displeasure with the president’s foreign policy. Polls in the early months since the war began reflected dissatisfaction in the range of 60%, with concerns about both the war’s immediate economic impacts and the decision to go to war itself. As prospects for a diplomatic solution broke down and the president began threatening major escalation in the summer, voters did not hesitate to make clear the blame they placed on his shoulders. Polling this fall reflected disapproval, with Trump’s handling of the war remaining high in the upper 60% range. With no end to the war in sight, Republican voter negativity toward the president continues trending increasingly higher.

It is widely accepted wisdom in Washington to say that foreign policy is never a top-of-the-ticket issue for American voters. But this midterm election cycle is poised to be an exception. The major polls over the past eight months demonstrate the connection voters are making between the Iran war and its downstream effects on their day-to-day lives, including gas prices and general affordability.

The voters have real reason for their acute disappointment. Trump’s early foreign policy promises teed up a sea change. They signaled a break from the failed policies of Washington’s elites that walked the nation into more than 20 years of seemingly endless wars in the Middle East, traded away critical resources to Ukraine and other partners at the expense of U.S. security, failed to prioritize the rising military threat of China and, at their core, put the security interests of foreign capitals above those of the public.

The president deserves credit for making significant headway to drive and codify the trajectory on which he began his second term. Months into 2025, Trump delivered a historic commitment by NATO allies to spend 5% of GDP on defense, putting the alliance on course to end a decadeslong status quo of American taxpayers subsidizing European security.

In a landmark speech in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, he called out the decades of American adventurism in the Middle East, condemning “nation builders, neocons, and liberal nonprofits” for having “wrecked far more nations than they built,” and wrongly intervening “in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”

By the end of his first year back in office, the president’s National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy set the tone for downsizing America’s role in the world with a clear-eyed focus on defined American interests and priorities. War Secretary Pete Hegseth summarized the shift best in his speech to the Reagan National Defense Forum last year, vowing that “the War Department will not be distracted by democracy building interventionism, undefined wars, regime change, climate change, woke moralizing and feckless nation-building. We will instead put our nation’s practical, concrete interests first.”

What has transpired in the administration since those optimistic days hasn’t gone unnoticed by the voters. Nor are they oblivious to the fact that Congress collectively sat idle while Trump waged war unilaterally against Iran for the past eight months. The trendlines do not suggest that voters are offering a pass for the legislative branch’s behavior. One recent survey shows more than 70% of Americans want Congress to prioritize two things in 2027: bringing down the cost of living and ending the war in Iran. That the two are deeply intertwined is a strong signal of how voters are assessing the current state of play in Washington.

There is no sugarcoating the fact that the president’s decision to go to war with Iran undid his progress toward a foreign policy that reflects the priorities of the American people. He deserves credit for being the first president in the modern era to champion the “America First” vision and challenge the entrenchment and failures of Washington’s foreign policy elites. Yet he also came up short in sticking to it.

The voters have seen that unfold. Expect them to be unforgiving.

But here’s something to think about. Imagine if, as some reformers have long urged, we had set up a federal agency to run elections nationwide.

That agency would have fallen under the thumb of Donald Trump. We would be so cooked.

It’s true that you can like our decentralized election system for other reasons. There’s no way the whole thing can fail at once, so it’s more resilient against hacking or natural disaster. It’s locally accountable. It brings together platoons of neighborhood volunteers for biennial cooperation.

Local officials know their own communities better than Washington does, as we saw this summer when Congress considered requiring everyone to bring their citizenship documents to an election office and officials in the West pointed out that to do that, some of their constituents would have to drive several hours each way or even, in Alaska and Hawaii, get on an airplane.

But let’s face it, the biggest reason of all to be glad we have decentralized elections is one that would have been perfectly familiar to readers of the Federalist Papers: It cuts down on the risk that centralized control of how votes are cast or counted nationwide could fall into the hands of a figure like Donald Trump.

It’s true that Article I, Section 4, of the Constitution gives Congress real power to override state authority. Thus far, however, Congress has been hands-off about using this power (maybe even a bit too hands-off in the case of gerrymandering). Details aside, the outcome has been a genuine if incomplete respect for the decentralized model.

Donald Trump thought he could change that by decree, asserting sweeping power over election administration in a series of blustering executive orders. Sometimes he threatens to jail state and local administrators who ignore his wishes.

After some period of tension and chaos, he almost always loses in court and it once again becomes clear that the genuine power levers at a president’s disposal are few and weak. This is a very good thing.

Here’s a reminder of the dangerous areas where Trump wanted to meddle that federalism prevented:

Demands for voter rolls. Trump appointees have demanded that every state turn over its voter rolls to Washington, along with sensitive information about voters. But the law sees it differently. Twenty-six times in a row federal judges, about half of them appointed by Republicans, have rejected the resulting lawsuits and said that states may or must keep voter information private. (Four cases are still pending.)

It was widely expected that once MAGA officials assembled one big national voter file, they’d start demanding that states set aside the votes of persons the feds considered suspect.

The Trump administration has made a few trial runs at this approach. But its lists of suspected unlawful voters, noncitizen or otherwise, have time and again melted away on closer investigation. The Department of Homeland Security announced that it had found 16,000 potentially ineligible Nevada voters but later narrowed the list by around 99 percent to 185 persons.

Mail ballots. Another Trump scheme, interlocking with the first, would have thrown the midterms into chaos by making the US Postal Service, whose board of governors is appointed by the president, the overseer of voting by mail and directing it to refuse to carry ballots that fully complied with the law of the relevant state but ran afoul of new Trump rules. But the Supreme Court struck down the scheme last month, noting that Congress never authorized the USPS to regulate how states conduct voting by mail.

Voting equipment. Many Trump appointees harbor paranoid fantasies about the supposed role of voting equipment in stealing past elections and have been itching to order states to stop using Dominion, SmartMatic, or whatever other kind they’re fixated on. Surprise! They lack any such power. Some years back Congress did give the feds a modest role in certifying that voting equipment meets certain standards, but it did not require states to use or not use any particular equipment, and it conspicuously refused to give Washington any way to declare any piece of equipment insecure and ban or freeze its use. Had it acted differently, we would almost certainly have witnessed by now a whole line of abuses of power from the Trump administration that would have given it leverage over local governments and stoked its steal narrative.

Monitors at polling places. Laws from the civil rights era empower the US Department of Justice to send monitors to local polling places, and Trump’s DOJ has announced plans to send more than 1,000 this time, hundreds more than the department sent during the last election, when Joe Biden was president. Their impartiality remains to be seen: CNN found that “several DOJ monitors deployed during this year’s primaries helped challenge Trump’s 2020 election loss.” Indeed, during those primaries Wyoming officials complained loudly that the DOJ monitors were pushy and demanding about issues having zero to do with civil rights laws. A Republican county clerk told NBC that the monitors “requested training guides, asked how our new election equipment was acquired, [wanted] to examine our tabulators,” and in general “showed complete disregard for our state laws and administration of our elections.”

Once again the checks of a federalist political culture have kept things from being much worse. Under current law, those federal monitors have no power to enter a polling place without consent from the administrators, much less can they start giving orders. (There used to be a broader geographically defined class of federal inspectors who could enter whether welcome or not, but their power was stripped from them a while back, perhaps ironically at conservatives’ behest as part of the 2013 Supreme Court ruling in Shelby County v. Holder.)

We could march on through other examples, such as voter roll maintenance, in which to the extent there is federal involvement at all, Congress has used a light touch so as to minimize possible hassle for local election administrators.

Trump isn’t about minimizing hassle. His aim is to control. He is drawn to systems of regulation in which the penalties for noncompliance are high yet never really certain, while chaos, ambiguity, or unreasonable deadlines make it hard to be sure you’re complying with all the rules. In systems like this, the regulated parties have more incentive to bow and wheedle and offer unrelated favors to avoid incurring the wrath of the boss man.

Take broadcast regulation by the Federal Communications Commission, for example, where Trump is in his element. FCC rules menace broadcasters with the potential loss of station licenses, which would result in staggering financial losses, if they guess wrong about meeting a vaguely defined public interest obligation. The Trump way is to start an investigation and hold it over broadcasters’ heads for months or years, thus reaping a magical harvest of concessions ranging from pressure on late-night comedians to subtle softening of news coverage.

Trump would love to be able to do the same thing to your state or county elections administrator. Thus a pattern in his schemes to assert control of elections:

Consider his failed push for the so-called Save America Act. Most critical coverage of this elections bill emphasized the way it could pile hassles on people who are in fact citizens but don’t have the right paperwork ready at hand. Less often would it be mentioned that the prescribed timelines for local election managers to comply were wildly unrealistic and that penalties for violating various provisions were hair-raisingly severe.

And hardly ever was it discussed how much discretion Trump appointees would have to set enforcement priorities and interpret the law after it was passed. Would they make an example of administrators in a politically hostile locality who’d tripped over the impossible deadlines? Would they raise or lower the hassle level on particular groups of voters or states based on the president’s political needs of the moment?

Or consider the Postal Service’s mail voting rule. At a point when its legality was still up in the air, Florida was among the states that sought to pre-comply by submitting their ballot mailing materials for USPS review. That was when Leon County, which includes Tallahassee, learned that the service had rejected its outgoing mail ballot envelope — and intended to refuse to carry it in the mail — on the grounds that two fields (placeholders for variable data or prescribed blank space) were 0.014 of an inch too close together. (The county had used the envelopes uneventfully since 2024.) USPS backed down — a good thing since the county said it was too late to print new envelopes and still get the ballots out. “The chaos factor is the real problem,” county election supervisor Mark Earley told the Tallahassee Democrat.

In many cases like these, courts would find it hard to identify selective enforcement and might not intervene in time for it to matter anyway.

This might make a good moment to mention that compliance train wrecks aren’t always engineered by the likes of Trump. Slapdash progressive lawmaking leads to the same place. During the Biden administration, Congress nearly passed a gigantic omnibus election-reform bill called the For the People Act that would have thrust federal power into elections on an unprecedented scale and left enforcement to a Federal Election Commission revamped to be far more responsive to presidential influence.

Writing in The Daily Beast at the time, Jessica Huseman found the bill’s principles “commendable” but said it tried to force states “to rush gargantuan changes on deeply unrealistic time frames” that “administrators cannot possibly meet without throwing their systems into chaos.” Its “alarmingly prescriptive” provisions on voting systems would have been “literally impossible to implement” and also would have prescribed equipment that hadn’t been invented yet, while inviting Washington to harass states that still used the old kind.

Imagine how Trump would have used that power! This skeptical media coverage emerged, by the way, after the House had already passed the legislation on a close party-line vote. (It narrowly died in the Senate.)

Rick Hasen, a well-known election law expert at UCLA, deserves credit for writing an article titled “I Wrote a Book in Support of Nationalizing Elections. Trump Changed My Mind.”

“Our federalist system of administering elections — giving primary responsibility to states, subject to congressional override in congressional elections — turns out to be a strength against would-be authoritarians,” he wrote.

In fact, what Hasen calls the “further diffusion of power by states to the county or sub-county level” complicates the task of a would-be strongman even further. When you think of separation of powers, take a moment to consider the separation we have vertically — between the city, county, state, and national levels — as well as horizontally, between different branches.

This is all worth remembering if progressives gain a 2029 trifecta and begin mobilizing for electoral reform. One important characteristic of such reform is that it does not create new weapons for the next Trump to use.

Integrity and common sense are good things to preserve, but one need not destroy people’s livelihoods indefinitely to do so. I saw this happen often as a result of “woke” initiatives seeking to radically transform the institutions. Now I am seeing it in anti-woke initiatives. Same nonsensical intolerance, different end of the spectrum.

Even if these diversity administrators were involved in discriminatory programs, they should not be subjected to a lifelong punishment. They could join diversity efforts consistent with meritocracy and true equality.

We can challenge ideas and policies without reducing individual human beings to ideological labels. We can criticize DEI policies without treating individuals as political enemies. Defending individual dignity, promoting agency and acknowledging the nuances that make up every human life should be values we all share.

His latest tool is the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, the notorious legislation that gravely exacerbated the Great Depression.

Section 338 of that law is the basis of Trump’s massive 50 percent tariffs on a variety of Canadian imports, including motor vehicles, furniture, dairy products, and more. On October 20, Gellert Global Group Corp., a major food importer and producer based in New Jersey, filed the first lawsuit challenging those tariffs before the U.S. Court of International Trade, the federal court with jurisdiction over tariff cases.

Gellert, which imports Canadian cheese subject to the tariffs, is represented by the Liberty Justice Center, a public interest law firm I worked with on the case challenging the massive tariffs Trump imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). It resulted in the tariffs’ invalidation in February by the Supreme Court, which not only ruled that IEEPA doesn’t authorize tariffs but also emphasized that tariffs are a congressional power, and that the president does not have the power to “impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time.” The Section 338 tariffs are a similar power grab.

They are illegal for multiple reasons, part of an ongoing effort by this administration to usurp Congress’ constitutional authority over tariffs. In addition, they harm the U.S. economy and poison relations with a key ally. Section 338 of the 1930 Tariff Act has never been used by a president to enact tariffs before; Philip Zelikow, a conservative trade policy expert and former Bush administration official, has shown that Section 338 was superseded by legislation enacted in 1962 and 1974.

Even if Section 338 is still operative, Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods violate its requirements. As the complaint explains, the Canadian trade measures cited by Trump as justification for the new tariffs do not discriminate against U.S. goods; Section 338 can only be used against discriminatory policies. Some retaliate against previous tariffs imposed by Trump. Most do not actually treat U.S. goods less favorably than imports from many other countries. In addition, the Section 338 tariffs go well beyond “offsetting” Canadian measures, violating another requirement of the law. They impose the maximum 50 percent rate on all covered goods, even though the Canadian tariffs in question are lower and do not cover as wide a range of products. Some of the Canadian measures are not even import restrictions at all, but merely decisions by Canadian provincial governments to stop purchasing U.S. alcoholic beverages for their government-owned liquor stores. Consumer decisions to stop purchasing a given product are not discriminatory restrictions on trade. Otherwise, such “discrimination” would occur anytime a foreign government chooses to buy anything from a non-American producer when there are U.S. producers that sell similar products.

The administration’s interpretation of Section 338 also runs afoul of the major questions doctrine, which requires Congress to “speak clearly” when authorizing the executive to make decisions of “vast economic and political significance.” Under Trump’s approach, Section 338 can be used to impose 50 percent tariffs whenever a trading partner imposes any restrictions on U.S. goods, or simply chooses not to buy them. And the resulting tariffs need not be calibrated to those they are supposed to “offset.” This is a blank check to impose massive tariffs against almost any imports at any time—exactly the kind of power the Supreme Court, in its ruling on the IEEPA case, determined the executive cannot have. In that case, three of the six justices in the majority relied on the major questions doctrine. And the Federal Circuit lower court decision in the case also relied heavily on the major questions doctrine. That circuit has nationwide jurisdiction over tariff cases, and its precedent is binding.

If Section 338 is still valid and does grant the kind of nearly unlimited authority Trump claims, that would violate the constitutional “nondelegation” doctrine, which restricts delegation of legislative power to the executive. Last year’s Supreme Court decision in FCC v. Consumers’ Research held that delegations of the power to impose taxes (including, presumably, tariffs) must have a clear “floor” and “ceiling” and that “[t]he guidance needed is greater when an agency action will affect the entire national economy than when it addresses a narrow, technical issue.” It also emphasized that even a clear ceiling is not enough if it is so high as to still leave the executive with effectively “boundless power.” A 50 percent tariff is high enough to devastate commerce in most imports, thus ensuring the power claimed by Trump has no meaningful constraint.

Section 338 also has an import-ban provision, which Trump has used to prohibit some Canadian imports entirely, such as Canadian beer and distilled spirits, along with molasses and motorcycles. Gellert doesn’t import products subject to the ban, so this action is not directly challenged in the lawsuit. But it, too, is illegal. Under Section 338, import bans can only be imposed to reinforce the initial Section 338 tariffs in cases where the trading partner in question persists in its discriminatory policies. If the initial Section 338 action was illegal, the same goes for the follow-up ban. The import bans further exacerbate the major questions and nondelegation flaws in the administration’s interpretation of Section 338. Under its approach, the executive would not only have virtually unlimited power to impose up to 50 percent tariffs, but also a nearly unlimited power to ban imports outright. And import bans are also a congressional power, subject to the same major questions and nondelegation constraints as tariffs.

The Section 338 tariffs are part of an ongoing series of import taxes Trump has instituted in the wake of the IEEPA decision, seeking to again usurp the unlimited tariff authority the Supreme Court denied him. He previously tried to use Section 122 and Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to essentially replicate the IEEPA tariffs. In both cases, he sought to transform a narrowly limited tariff authority into a blank check to impose massive tariffs at will. The Court of International Trade invalidated the Section 122 tariffs in May (the case is on appeal), and the Section 301 tariffs (which impose tariffs ranging from 10 percent to 12.5 percent on 60 trading partners) have also been challenged in court. In addition to illegally usurping Congress’ authority under the Constitution, these tariff actions raise prices for consumers, greatly reduce economic growth, would impose some $700 billion in new taxes on Americans over a 10-year period, and have failed to increase manufacturing employment, despite Trump’s claims that they would achieve that goal.

The tariffs against Canada—combined with Trump’s repeated threats to make Canada the “51st state”—have also poisoned U.S. relations with a key ally. The percentage of Canadians with a favorable view of the U.S. has fallen from 54 percent in 2024 to only 33 percent this year—a worse rating than even China’s authoritarian regime. Canadians have stood with the U.S. in two world wars and the Cold War, and their troops fought side-by-side with ours in Afghanistan, where more than 160 Canadians were killed. Canada is one of our biggest trading partners, and we benefit greatly from imports of Canadian food, energy, aluminum, and other products that it can produce better or more cheaply than we can. Canadian imports are vital inputs into the production of numerous U.S. businesses. Alienating a key ally and trading partner doesn’t make America “great again.” It makes us weaker, poorer, and more isolated.

Trump recently rescinded some of the tariffs on Canadian goods, ostensibly to help congressional Republicans fearful of voter backlash in the upcoming midterm election. But most of the Section 338 tariffs and import bans remain in place, and even as he rescinded some tariffs, he extended them for other products. Their imposition should never have been subject to one person’s whim in the first place. Such a concentration of arbitrary power over vast portions of the economy creates dangerous uncertainty and undermines the rule of law.

Courts should strike down the Section 338 tariffs, as they did with the IEEPA and Section 122 power grabs. And Americans in general should repudiate Trump’s actions and make clear we reject this ill-conceived trade war against a close ally.

That mindset increasingly mirrors modern abuses of federal power, under President Trump. Trump’s Justice Department has untethered prosecutors from legal and ethical constraints and unleashed them against the president’s adversaries. Thankfully, the Framers understood this threat and devised a system to shield against it.

The Framers — having felt the heavy hand of a tyrannical regime — understood the danger of a distant, powerful central government. In response, they deliberately interposed a local jury as a procedural safeguard to ensure that criminal sanctions apply only when the community determines an individual is truly culpable. In an era marked by rampant overcriminalization, a reliance on the criminal justice system to police morality, and unrestrained, often highly coercive plea bargaining, often all that stands between a defendant and a felony conviction is a prosecutor’s unilateral decision to file charges. Independent jurors were intended to check this dynamic by refusing to convict under unjust laws, rejecting politically motivated prosecutions, acquitting where potential penalties are vastly disproportionate to the wrongfulness of the crime.

While the political weaponization of the Trump Justice Department is deeply disturbing, it’s not without historical precedent. In 1734, decades before the birth of a new nation, New York was governed by William Cosby, a royal appointee answerable directly to London. When dissident publisher John Peter Zenger printed articles critical of Cosby’s conduct, the British Crown charged him with seditious libel. Under existing English common law, truth was not a defense to libel and criticizing government officials was criminal on its own.

Zenger’s attorney, Andrew Hamilton, appealed directly to the jury’s conscience, urging them to evaluate both the underlying facts and the justice of the prosecution itself. Defying the judge’s explicit instructions, the jury acquitted Zenger, establishing an early American precedent for a jury’s right to refuse to enforce an unjust law.

The Framers codified this principle in the Constitution. The right to trial by jury in a criminal case is the only safeguard enshrined in both the unenumerated text of the Constitution [Article III] and the Bill of Rights [Sixth Amendment]. The Sixth Amendment specifies that jurors must be drawn from the specific state and district where the crime was committed, ensuring that cases are judged by members of the local community. Historically, local juries shielded citizens from federal overreach — most notably when Northern jurors refused to convict abolitionists charged under the Fugitive Slave Act.

Today, this institutional safeguard has been systematically suppressed. Jurors are routinely told that their sole role is that of a mechanical factfinder. The prevailing narrative suggests that prosecutors need only run through a statutory checklist; once each box is checked, the jury is legally bound to convict.

That assumption directly contradicts the historic understanding of the criminal jury as an injustice preventing institution. Today, despite the stark reality that jurors still have the undisputed power to acquit against the evidence in the interest of justice, criminal jurors function exclusively as fact finding body. To accomplish this, modern courts curate the jury pool by identifying and categorically excluding from service prospective jurors who demonstrate an awareness of their proper role of the jury in preventing injustice. During voir dire, judges and prosecutors question potential jurors on their willingness to follow the law strictly as dictated by the court; anyone who indicates an understanding of the power to acquit on principle is struck. Furthermore, during trial, defense attorneys are strictly prohibited from discussing the jury’s fully panoply of powers and prerogatives.

While prosecutors typically won’t ask overt questions about jury nullification, to avoid tipping off prospective jurors to the existence of the very power prosecutors deliberately try to keep secret, prosecutors find other ways to screen out jurors who express skepticism about the underlying law or actions taken by the state. Prospective jurors are asked whether they harbor reservations about the underlying statute or whether they have had negative encounters with law enforcement. Individuals who reside in over policed — often majority-minority — neighborhoods are disproportionately likely to report negative interactions with police. Excluding these citizens removes critical, well-informed perspectives and skews the jury in favor of the state in a manner that renders the Sixth Amendment’s promise of an impartial jury moot. Indirectly, this filtering process produces the very outcome the Constitution expressly forbids — racially skewed jury selection achieved through a facially neutral proxy.

Citizens who make it onto the panel are then instructed in a way to diminish the true scope of their role as jurors. Intend on narrowing their authority, trial judges — who are often themselves former courtroom advocates for the government — routinely instruct jurors that they are mere factfinders who must accept the court’s interpretation of the law without question and disregard potential punishments. Additionally, in many jurisdictions jurors are wrongly instructed that if the government proves its case, they must convict. This framework strips jurors of their agency and historic civic duty to act as the conscience of the community, reducing them to instruments of the state.

Deprived of their civic duty to reject inject injustice, modern criminal jurors often find themselves in a predicament where they feel compelled to convict defendants despite profound misgivings about the underlying prosecution. In 2019, former federal juror Paul St. Louis penned an op-ed in The Washington Post detailing his experience serving as a jury in a 2018 trial in the Eastern District of Virginia. Paul’s jury convicted thirty-seven-year-old Frederick Turner on federal drug charges. Due to charge stacking and mandatory minimums, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis, bristled and lamented that he had no choice but to impose a forty-year mandatory minimum sentence. That sentence, to be served in a maximum-security facility, ultimately condemned Turner to a premature death. When Paul later learned of Turner’s fate, he reflected:

“If I could go back in time, and if I knew Turner faced forty years, I would nullify.”

Had the jury not been instructed to act strictly as a mechanical factfinder, Paul could have — and would have — blunted the unjust application of the law, sparing Turner decades behind bars and potentially saving his life.

A similar dynamic unfolded in the federal prosecution of John Moore and Tanner Mansell. In August 2020, the two Florida seafarers cut an unattended long fishing line to free 19 entangled sharks, genuinely believing they’d stumbled across a poaching operation. John and Tanner immediately reported their actions to authorities who determined that the lines actually belonged to a project authorized by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Federal prosecutors charged both men with felony “theft from a maritime jurisdiction of the United States.”

At trial, the court declined to instruct the jury that theft requires an intent to deprive the rightful owner of their property — instead instructing the jury that the physical removal of the gear satisfied the element of the offense. Jurors deliberated for more than two days—longer than the presentation of evidence and sent seven separate notes to the judge requesting alternate jury instructions, perhaps seeking a means by which to acquit. Constrained by the court’s rigid instructions on the element of the offense and a lack of awareness of their historic prerogative to acquit against the evidence in the interest of justice, the jury ultimately convicted both men. In a concurrence affirming the verdict, Eleventh Circuit Judge Barbara Lagoa criticized the government for an imprudent exercise of prosecutorial discretion, observing that no rational person would consider the captains’ actions criminal. It would appear as though jurors shared this conception but had no way of knowing they factor it into their verdict.

Efforts to inform citizens of the proper conception of the criminal jury continues to face political opposition by those sympathetic to the very abuses the Framers intended jurors to resist. In Washington, DC where juries have rightly scrutinized the actions of federal prosecutions with a fine-tooth comb, Republicans on the House Oversight Committee have launched a formal inquiry into civic organizations distributing informational materials about jury powers to local residents.

A criminal jury trial was never intended to be an administrative exercise where ordinary citizens simply rubber-stamp government assertions. Juries possess the constitutional and moral authority to evaluate rationale behind the law, the severity of the potential penalties, and the fairness of the prosecution itself. Reclaiming this historic prerogative is an indispensable safeguard against executive overreach and the continued expansion of the carceral state.

Minnesota’s Feeding Our Future scandal illustrates the deeper problem. Officials flagged irregularities for years, yet payments continued. Had Minnesota been responsible for the roughly $250 million in federal funds lost to the fraudulent child nutrition scheme, state officials might have had stronger incentives to follow through. Separating the administration of programs from the responsibility for financing them weakens states’ incentives to prevent waste and fraud.

Preventing improper payments is more effective than chasing money that is already gone. The U.S. Treasury prevented $175 million in payments to deceased people in fiscal year 2026, partly through expanded use of its Do Not Pay system. Expanding the system’s access to relevant data and requiring federal and state agencies to use it consistently could prevent further losses.

Congress should also pursue structural reforms that give states a bigger financial stake in curbing fraud in federal programs they run. Real accountability means changing the incentives and structures that invite waste and abuse—not paying people to expose it after the damage is done.

The most obvious case against increasing Europe’s nuclear capabilities is that Russia just has far too many, 4,400 warheads to be exact. This is leagues ahead of the combined 515 warheads that the United Kingdom and France have. It would be very difficult for Europe, specifically France and the United Kingdom, to match Russia’s amount. And if both aim to protect other European countries with nuclear weapons, they would have to match, if not out-match, Russia’s number of nuclear weapons to reassure its allies that they would come to their rescue.

There’s also the issue of nuclear weapons being limited in solving political problems. War and military capabilities are meant to have political goals, some tangible achievement. Nuclear weapons have selected political purposes for truly existential crises. For Europe, its political goals are to deter a Russian invasion of its eastern neighbors to prevent a fait accompli. It’s difficult to envision a scenario where the benefits of using nuclear weapons outweigh their costs. The European continent is small compared to Russia or North America, making the detonation of just one of these weapons horrific and costly for the entirety of Europe. And nuclear weapons have a slim chance in deterring a limited aims attack. The use of nuclear weapons here is overkill, and thus uncredible. It is hard to imagine Paris using nuclear weapons on behalf of Vilnius in Lithuania. At the end of the day, nuclear weapons aren’t credible enough for achieving Europe’s political goals.

Finally, there’s the underlying fact that relying more on nuclear weapons for defense makes it more likely for them to be used. Russia would have to be convinced that Europe would actually use nuclear weapons to defend parts of Eastern Europe from a Russian invasion. With a reliance on nuclear weapons, Europeans would be left with fewer military options for which to deter and potentially fight Russia. This would increase the chances for miscalculation and the preemptive use of nuclear weapons where, in an effort to show their metal, Europeans would feel compelled to launch nuclear weapons if they suspected Russia of launching an attack. Non-nuclear warfare is extremely destructive. The wars in Gaza and Ukraine have shown its ghastly effects. But nuclear war would be opening Pandora’s Box, and the results could be much, much ghastlier.

All this is not to argue that Europe should not have any nuclear weapons; it just needs to not put all its eggs in this basket. Instead, allied European countries should focus on improving conventional military capabilities. Returning to a point mentioned earlier, the political goal of Europe is to deter a Russian fait accompli in Eastern Europe. To do that, Europeans must make their military capabilities painful and credible to the Russians. Conventional military capabilities can accomplish this. Effects of building these up will be more expensive than nuclear weapons, but the efforts will be worth it if they decrease the chances of nuclear weapons being used and prevent Eastern Europe from being invaded.

Nuclear weapons are important for defense and deterrence. Yet, policies for how to use them can’t be applied in a cookie-cutter-like fashion for all countries and situations. Nor should countries discount non-nuclear options for deterrence. Both are important in their own ways, and the means to deploy them depend on a political case-by-case basis. By focusing on the improvement of its conventional military capabilities, Europeans can stand on their own two feet and stand steadfastly.

The heightened surveillance began in March 2025 with a geographic targeting order (or, GTO) issued by the Department of the Treasury. This temporary order lowered the threshold for currency transaction reports (CTRs) from $10,000 to just $200 for money service businesses like Western Union that operate in 30 zip codes along the border.

The surveillance order was quickly met with challenges in court by the Institute for Justice, and other organizations. And for a welcome change of pace, the courts agreed that something wasn’t adding up.

In Texas, the court described the $200 surveillance order as “unreasonable” because it “overreaches,” “defies common sense,” and “likely violates the Fourth Amendment.” The court issued an injunction to put the surveillance on ice until each side could make its case. A similar injunction was issued in California.

Yet, the Treasury had other plans. Instead of respecting the ongoing litigation, it issued a new order with a $1,000 threshold covering four times as many zip codes.

In the announcement of the new order, Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) Director Andrea Gacki said, “The reports generated by this Geographic Targeting Order will continue to help law enforcement investigate powerful illicit networks operating along the southwest border and beyond.” Yet strangely, when Gacki appeared before Congress just a few days later, she was unable to say how many criminals were caught because of this surveillance regime.

Instead, all we have been able to see is that small businesses have become trapped under hefty compliance burdens. And in a cruel twist of irony, the policy meant to catch criminals is likely pushing people into illegal markets.

One small business estimated that it would likely go from filing nine reports per week to filing 50,000 reports per week under the initial order. That is nothing short of an impossible standard to comply with. Another small business watched long lines of customers waiting to cash checks and send money to family dried up as customers became concerned about the new surveillance requirements.

Unfortunately, neither of the lack of results nor the impact on businesses has swayed the Treasury. In September 2026, the order was expanded again. What started in 30 zip codes was expanded to 304 zip codes. What started with a six-month limit has now gone on for nearly two years.

It didn’t matter to the government that there was a court case challenging the surveillance. It didn’t matter to the government that people were losing their businesses. Instead, all that seems to matter is the idea that the government should have unchecked access to our financial lives.

For the average person, it’s easy to write these concerns off. After all, this heightened surveillance regime is supposedly tucked away along the southern border. Yet, what’s happening in the south is only one piece of a vast financial surveillance system built under the Bank Secrecy Act for the past 56 years.

Banks are forced to verify your identity, report you for using more than $10,000 in cash, and report you for doing anything out of the norm. And for what? An estimated $59 billion a year is spent complying with the Bank Secrecy Act as banks file more than 28.7 million reports on customers to the government. Yet, the reports filed initiated only around 275 criminal investigations.

The Treasury should stop this heightened surveillance regime, and Congress should reform the laws that makes it possible. At the very least, geographic targeting orders should require a greater standard of evidence to justify their issuance. However, Congress should go further. It should repeal the Bank Secrecy Act and require law enforcement to get a warrant to go after financial records. Cashing a paycheck, sending money to family, or doing something out of the norm should not automatically put you on a government watchlist.

The people living in these communities should not have to prove their innocence to use financial services. Nor should small businesses have to choose between reporting their customers and closing their doors. It’s time to end unchecked surveillance, in all of its forms.

In just the last two weeks, Trump went to Kansas to announce $8 billion in “Harvest Fuel Relief” to offset record diesel prices, caused in large part by Trump’s ill-fated Iran adventure. Three days later, Vice President J.D. Vance went to Nebraska and unveiled a plan to subsidize U.S. fertilizer production and (somehow) lower fertilizer prices, which both the Iran war and Trump’s tariffs inflated. Both ploys are the latest in a long line of monetary and nonmonetary payoffs to American farmers hurt by Trump’s policies—tens of billions of dollars that haven’t been authorized by Congress, aren’t going to less politically important groups also hurt by these policies, and come atop billions in “normal” government support for U.S. agriculture.

“We just got thrown some more election candy,” grumbled Nebraska Farmers Union President John Hansen after hearing Vance’s fertilizer sop. The candy’s costs—fiscal, economic, and political—just keep climbing.

Adding It Up
Before we get to the tally, let’s first recall why American farmers are hurting. As I wrote last September, most of this “farmer crisis” was government-grown: Tariffs on inputs and machinery, as well as immigration restrictions and deportation raids, raised their costs; foreign retaliation and closed overseas markets depressed their sales prices; and subsidies and other policies discouraged adjustment. Throw in bad weather and high interest rates, and the result was a predictable mess: costs exceeding sales prices, widespread bankruptcies, and worse.

The Iran war exacerbated these problems. Prices of diesel and fertilizer—two inputs of farmers can’t do without—spiked after hostilities began in late February, adding thousands of dollars to their already high monthly expenses. According to the USDA’s September forecast, farmers will spend $5 billion more on fertilizer and $5 billion more on fuel this year, and median farm income is projected to be negative $467 for 2026. As several experts just told the Washington Examiner, the Trump administration never would’ve needed to bail out farmers last week if the tariffs and the war hadn’t started.

But here we are, again.

Since 2018, the Trump administration has unilaterally directed roughly $46 billion in “emergency” aid to farmers hurt by the president’s own policies. Almost all of it comes via the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), which allows the president to spend billions on farm “emergencies” without congressional oversight, and it excludes similarly dubious nonmonetary support for American farmers, pandemic relief, and other farm aid—both emergency and not—appropriated by Congress. Before we get to that other stuff, let’s first document the direct payments:

• During Trump’s first term, farmers received $23 billion in ad hoc “Market Facilitation Program” funds, plus about $2.3 billion in government food purchases and $0.3 billion in export promotion. All of it was intended to compensate farmers for lower prices and lost export sales caused by foreign retaliation to Trump’s tariffs—especially by the Chinese government. And, just like this time around, the money had a clear electoral motive: The first trade war aid arrived in summer 2018, just a few months before that year’s midterms, and Trump announced roughly $13 billion in CCC aid at a Wisconsin campaign rally in September 2020.
• Trump’s second term has already added about $20 billion more to the “emergency” tab: $11 billion in “Farmer Bridge Assistance” announced last December, another $1.6 billion for specialty crops, and now the $8 billion for diesel. In each case, the political motivation was again clear—and championed by the administration at midterm campaign rallies across U.S. farm country.

In the grand scheme of the federal budget, $46 billion is (unfortunately) little more than a rounding error, but it’s still quite big. The annual budget of NASA, for example, was $24.4 billion this fiscal year, and the CHIPS Act spread out $39 billion in manufacturing incentives over five years. Both were approved by Congress, and each is smaller than Trump’s farm payouts.

The $46 billion is also large in terms of who’s paying and who gets paid. Spread out evenly, it’s akin to the government taking $290 from each American taxpayer and then handing about $25,000 to each farm—all financed through borrowing at increasingly high interest rates. In reality, of course, the redistribution is probably even more distasteful, given that farm subsidies are usually concentrated among the largest producers, not struggling family farms.

It’s also important to remember that this $46 billion is only what’s been promised so far. Another year of tariff and war pain could increase the totals, and if farmers are still struggling in 2028, there’s no telling how much cash they could see (sigh).

Finally, the cash comes atop plenty of other special government support for U.S. agriculture. For starters, the Trump administration has used other unilateral levers to line American farmers’ pockets:

• The aforementioned fertilizer plant grants, for example, will cost taxpayers more than $573 million to (supposedly) cut farmers’ fertilizer bills.
• In March, the EPA mandated record biofuel volumes for 2026 and 2027 under the Renewable Fuel Standard, adding an estimated $3 billion to $4 billion a year to U.S. farm income—paid by U.S. refiners and drivers. (Trump just promised Kansas voters even more if they vote Republican next week.)
• The administration lowered minimum wages that farmers can offer guest workers on H‑2A visas, saving them $2.5 billion a year in labor costs.
• And the White House has exempted various farm inputs—fertilizers, machinery and equipment, packaging materials, etc.—from Trump’s tariffs, while also suspending trade remedy duties on Moroccan phosphate, translating into hundreds of millions of dollars in direct tax savings plus billions more via lower U.S. prices.

There’s even more—a Great American Cotton Plan, a USDA/​Federal Trade Commission inquiry into farm-equipment competition on October 7, apparel tariff preferences tied to U.S. cotton purchases, etc.—that we can’t quantify. Some of this stuff (e.g., tariff relief) would be good and defensible if applied broadly and offered to everyone, but it isn’t. Instead, it’s a targeted government transfer to U.S. farmers, with clear political strings attached.

And, of course, it supplements the usual federal farm subsidies, which have also been rising. As we discussed last year, Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act gave farmers billions in “disaster” aid and trade promotion subsidies, while also augmenting traditional subsidy programs. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the latter will add roughly $59 billion to the farm subsidy tab over 10 years, and the USDA earlier this month announced record payouts for the 2025 crop year. Put it all together, and government payments to farmers will hit $55.4 billion in 2026—a nominal subsidy record that represents more than 30 percent of net farm income (up from around 8 percent in 2023 and 2024). And well over half of the 2026 government payments will come from “emergency” aid and other ad hoc funds—$20.6 billion from Trump and $13.9 billion more from Congress—instead of standard subsidy and conservation programs.

Government checks aren’t topping up a healthy farm sector, so much as propping up a weaker one—made that way by U.S. government policy.

The Costs and Consequences.
None of this means that some American farmers aren’t struggling. Market income is down (see chart below). Bankruptcy filings are rising, and farm debt has topped $600 billion. Many of the people receiving “emergency” government support have legitimate gripes with that same government—one that raised their costs and cut their exports by billions of dollars each way.

Yet the $46 billion remains a terrible idea for a host of reasons. At the most basic level, the payments aren’t calibrated to match actual losses incurred. (They’re instead tied to acres and production, which is why the biggest operations collect the most.) And, of course, they ignore the millions of other Americans—businesses and consumers—who generate far more economic output than farming and are also suffering from higher costs, lost jobs, and other pains caused by the very same White House policies the farm payments offset. The only difference is that they (we) don’t matter as much politically.

Yet the problems here run much deeper.

First, this is a textbook case of the “policy quicksand” I warned about earlier this month—and likely to encourage more bad policy in the future. Instead of fixing the first-term trade policies that caused American farmers’ pain in 2018–19, the administration bought farmers off. That papered over the damage from the trade policies and removed the political pressure to reverse them, thus encouraging Trump to go even further on tariffs this time around (and add in a war for good measure). Any accounting of Trump’s tariffs must consider these costs and risks along with the more visible ones (new taxes, higher prices, etc.).

The ad hoc support also helped entrench new demands for even more government sugar this time around. Farm groups are already lobbying to make expanded ethanol (E15) waivers permanent after five straight years of “temporary” ones, and we’re now on to round three of the supposedly temporary “bridge payments” the trade wars started eight years ago. Since Trump has shown little interest in ending the harmful policies that got us into this mess, we should expect the next round of “temporary” relief to already be in the works.

Second, this situation is yet another indictment of congressional inaction, especially by Republicans. The main vehicle for Trump’s farmer payoffs is the CCC, which today functions as an open-ended slush fund for presidential farm supports. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Joshua Sewell documents, abuse of the CCC certainly didn’t start with Trump 1.0, and Biden abused it too. Trump, in typical fashion, has used the law more aggressively and expansively than any other president. Yet Congress has done nothing to stop him, despite several Republican bills proposed to do that very thing. (Sens. Chuck Grassley, Roger Marshall, and Mike Braun, for example, introduced a bill in 2023 to curb the account, but the proposals died with the 2024 farm bill.) Once Trump returned to the White House, revised farm bill text dropped the CCC limit Senate Republicans once backed, and now—naturally—they’re eyeing a different statute to let more farm aid flow. Sheesh.

Third, these government supports should raise serious questions about the long-term stability of the U.S. farm economy and its increasing dependence on government rather than markets. Federal payments are now more than 30 percent of net farm income, and this troubling figure excludes billions more in other, non-cash government supports like biofuels blending mandates. Yet this imbalance makes no good sense: American agriculture is among the most productive in the world, and, as we’ve discussed before, subsidies distort business decisions and markets in numerous harmful ways, while encouraging more dependency (and payoffs). Subsidies inflate land and equipment prices, encourage certain crops and unsustainable planting, favor the biggest operators over smaller ones, and teach every farmer to focus on the next government payment instead of the next harvest. Political payoffs only add to the problem.

Finally, there’s a bigger, broader red flag here for fans of the Senate and the Electoral College (a group to which I belong). Critics of this system have long argued that it gives small, mostly rural states disproportionate influence over presidential elections and federal policy. There are solid counterarguments to these claims, but they’re weakened when a single president can quickly and unilaterally direct tens of billions of taxpayer dollars toward those states (about $25,000 per farm!) and billions more in indirect support, to paper over his own policy failings and sway a national election (and maybe control of the legislative branch). The Senate and the Electoral College are defensible as constraints on majority rule and regional power imbalances. They’re much harder to defend when, thanks to unbridled taxpayer cash and small populations, they become a delivery system for partisan rule.

Next week we’ll learn if they have.

Former International Monetary Fund chief economist Olivier Blanchard of France recently gave this narrative a clear voice. Writing on X, he wondered why California’s wealthiest are spending so heavily to defeat Proposition 40, the supposed one-time 5% tax on the net worth of billionaires. Blanchard added that billionaires “typically have not indicated that they are building their wealth to eventually make the world a better place.”

The entire notion misunderstands how fortunes are made. In a market economy, people don’t build great wealth first and redeem it later through good works. They build it by making the world better first.

When I buy an $800 smartphone, it’s because I value the phone more than whatever else I would have bought with the money. The seller values my $800 more than they do the phone. We both walk away richer by our own measure. Neither owes the other anything more.

Repeat this exchange a few hundred million times, and vast fortunes take shape for the people who create amazing technology so abundantly and affordably that we take it for granted. More importantly, though, people hand over every cent of it voluntarily.

As my colleague Arnold Kling aptly explained over the weekend, “Profits are earned within a positive-sum game for society. Profits induce firms to serve consumers and to innovate.” The drive for wealth taxes relies on “the opposite point of view. It regards profits as something that businesses take from the rest of us, as if we can take innovation and efficiency for granted. (It) acts as if we are in a zero-sum environment in which one person’s gain is necessarily another person’s loss.”

And, yes, the gains are divided more fairly than people think. Nobel laureate and Yale University economist William Nordhaus estimated that innovators in the U.S. business sector personally captured, on average, a mere 2.2% of the social surplus they created between 1948 and 2001. The other 97.8% went to everyone else in the form of lower prices, higher wages, better products and goods, and services that didn’t previously exist.

In short, the world has already been compensated, many times over.

Those urging billionaires to acquiesce also err by blithely assuming that the state that grabs the money will use it well enough to “make the world a better place.” The burden of proof is on them. California’s government already spends roughly $350 billion a year. What will the extra few billion accomplish that the rest hasn’t?

“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys,” as journalist and satirist P.J. O’Rourke used to say. Maybe California’s billionaires aren’t eager to fund a Merced-to-Bakersfield rail line that the state prices around $35 billion and its inspector general puts closer to $48 billion. Perhaps they’re hesitant to backfill pension funds like CalPERS, whose staff concedes is unlikely to hit an assumed 6.8% return without leaning on private equity.

Prop 40’s revenue is earmarked for health care, but money is fungible. In the end, California has one budget. Every earmarked dollar frees another for something else. Some billionaires might simply have concluded that their philanthropy does more good elsewhere, or that their dollars are more beneficial when invested in private enterprises.

The tax also doubles down on California’s worst habit: spend, spend, spend, and then tax, tax, tax. The money is never enough to cover all the spending. A one-time levy spent over five years doesn’t fix that. It funds new commitments with temporary money. Some will want to make the tax permanent, which its intellectual architects clearly prefer and may have made possible. And yet that still won’t be enough.

That’s the commitment problem that Blanchard admits California can’t solve. Billionaires are wise to distrust the “one-time” promise.

What worries me most is the moral framework. When a society convinces itself that the people making life better and less costly are the problem, we eventually stop getting those people.

Contrary to Blanchard’s naive belief, billionaires aren’t lacking in public spirit. Even if we ignore their often massive charitable giving, we can’t forget that the market already collected their contribution and handed a large share of it to the rest of us. We should stop demanding they apologize for the other two cents.

The reason behind all this tension is a new dress code for public schools, issued on Sept. 21, that bars clothing said to violate the “principle of secularism.” The regulation does not specifically name the hijab, the Islamic headscarf, but this is clearly the prime target of the policy. No wonder the Azerbaijani Education Ministry shared a video that put a green check mark next to students without religious headgear, and a red cross next to those with the hijab or prayer caps.

Aside from stirring up emotions inside the country, this “headscarf ban” in public schools has also triggered a crisis between Azerbaijan and its long-time ally Turkey. The two nations, with an almost-common language and a long history of ethno-religious brotherhood, have deep ties that even gave rise to the phrase “one nation, two states.” But Baku’s headscarf policy has enraged Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, his party, and his political base. Turkish officials and pro-government media have strongly criticized the ban. In return, their Azeri counterparts have sent back strongly worded warnings against Turkey to stay out of their “domestic affairs.”

Of course, non-interference in the domestic policies of nations is a good principle. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be criticized. In fact, in the modern world there are universal values of human rights by which every state can be questioned, criticized, and advised. Some of these values are codified in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), whose famous Article 18 protects the freedom to manifest one’s religion.

It is worth noting that, like most other states in the world, Azerbaijan is a party to the ICCPR. So, here are some thoughts – and criticisms – on the headscarf ban in light of the very principle it has pledged to uphold.

First, the religious freedom declared by Article 18 includes “the freedom of individuals to wear attire in accordance with their religion or belief,” as explained in a report, titled Religious Garb Restrictions and International Human Rights Law, issued by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). The report notes that states should refrain from “either prohibiting or mandating the wearing of religious garb,” such as “Muslim women wearing the hijab, Sikh men wearing the turban, Jewish men wearing the kippah, and Christians displaying the cross.” The “Islamic” regimes in Iran and Afghanistan are notorious for mandating religious garb, but the opposite, prohibiting it, is similarly wrong. (No wonder USCIRF just issued a criticism of Azerbaijan’s “public school uniform rules,” which “unfairly exclude or expel young Muslim girls who wear the hijab.”)

Second, there is a common counter-argument to this view: that Muslim women and especially younger girls are forced to wear the hijab by their families or their communities. There may be some truth to this claim, which should be addressed on its own, but it still doesn’t justify government prohibitions of the hijab, for two reasons. For one, many Muslim females do wear the headgear willingly, believing that it is a religious obligation they want to fulfill. For another, a government dictate can’t remedy a social one — it only adds a second layer of coercion. A Muslim teenager who is forced to wear a headscarf by her family doesn’t get “liberated” when she is also turned away by the secular schools and ends up being deprived of public education.

A third counter-argument is that the hijab is a flag of “political Islam” that challenges secular governments – which seems to reflect Azerbaijan’s main concern on this issue. Azerbaijani state television, for instance, defended the new rules by declaring: “The state will block any attempt to inject Arab-Persian values into our national identity.” This was widely taken as a reference to fundamentalist movements originating in the Arab world and Iran. Iran’s influence, especially, has long been an understandable concern for Azerbaijan, which shares not just a long border with Iran, but also a common sect – Shiism, the dominant creed in both – as well as ethnic ties with the millions of Iranian Azeris.

But banning the hijab to defeat “political Islam” – a common passion among staunch secularists – is like throwing fuel on a fire, hoping that it will extinguish it. Instead, it often gives Islamists a new cause, a new impetus. (No wonder Iran began using Azerbaijan’s hijab ban in its propaganda against its northern neighbor right away.)

That is because the hijab – traditional garb worn by most observant Muslim women for centuries – was often politicized in modern contexts where it was disparaged and banned by secularist forces in the first place. An early example was French Algeria: In 1958, colonial authorities staged public “unveiling” ceremonies, and the veil soon became, as Frantz Fanon observed in his 1965 essay “Algeria Unveiled,” a symbol of Algerian resistance.

Another eye-opening example is Iran itself, where the Islamist dictate to wear the headscarf – a hallmark of the Iranian Revolution – was preceded by the secularist dictate to take it off. In 1936, Reza Shah, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, issued a decree known as Kashf‑e hijab (“unveiling”), under which police were ordered to physically remove the veil from any woman who wore it in public. The Shah thought he was “modernizing” Iran with such draconian laws – but he only triggered an Islamist reaction that would ultimately dethrone his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, with the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

A similar, though much milder, political pendulum swing took place in Turkey, where the secularist elite, following in the footsteps of Turkey’s first President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (a good friend of Reza Shah) dictated a strict secularism called laiklik, derived from the French term laïcité. One of its hallmarks was banning the headscarf in public institutions, including universities, from the 1980s until the 2010s, in order to curb “political Islam.”

But this authoritarian policy – opposed not just by religious conservatives but also by secular liberals – only ended up empowering “political Islam,” which ultimately came to power in 2002. The Justice and Development Party (AKP), led by Erdoğan, has been in power ever since. And while the AKP’s early years of political reform and economic growth were later increasingly replaced by authoritarianism, incompetence, and corruption, many conservative Turks still vote for it, because they don’t want to go back to the “Old Turkey,” where their headscarves were banned and their prayer caps were ridiculed.

Notably, at least some of Turkey’s secularists now realize that their decades-old headscarf ban was a big mistake. One of them is none other than Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of the CHP, the arch-secularist main opposition party. He has recently lost some prestige in his own camp, as he returned to the leadership only through a controversial court ruling, widely seen as a manipulation by the establishment, but his liberal take on secularism, which has a longer pedigree, is noteworthy. On Oct. 13, he spoke at his party’s group meeting in the Turkish Parliament, appealing directly to Azerbaijan:

Indeed, letting women “choose what they want to wear” is the right path for Azerbaijan – as it is for Iran, Afghanistan, and any other country that arrogates to itself the power to dictate to its citizens how they should live. Otherwise, every dictate of the state to create the ideal kind of citizen only tramples on the freedom of those who differ, creating social traumas and political reactions, ending up sowing deep divisions and fierce oppositions.

Some other countries, including Turkey, have already gone through this self-defeating authoritarianism, and the bitter lessons are all too visible. Azerbaijan would be wise not to insist on repeating the same mistakes, and to back off from the headscarf ban, for its own good.

People in the past faced few options when it came to marriage. The number of potential partners in one’s tiny village was low—the few available choices might all be one’s cousins, increasing the risk of birth defects in any resulting children.

Peasants typically married within their own villages, which were so insular that local dialects often proved unintelligible to people living just a few miles away. Travel was rarer, and communities were more secluded than a modern person can easily envision. As William Manchester evocatively put it in his book A World Lit Only by Fire, “Each hamlet was inbred, isolated, unaware of the world beyond the most familiar local landmark: a creek, or mill, or tall tree scarred by lightning.” People typically gathered and socialized at a much smaller scale than the modern mind can fathom: The largest crowd recorded in 17th century England, the army that fought at Marston Moor, would easily fit five times over in a modern sports stadium. By the 18th century, little had changed, and the majority of villagers married people living within 10 miles of themselves.

The tiny pool of possible marriage partners often produced matches that might raise eyebrows today, such as blood relatives and couples with large age gaps. As Kirstin Olsen wrote in the book Daily Life in 18th-Century England, “A husband 10 or 15 years older than his bride would arouse little comment,” for such relationships were common.

Given the highly limited pool of marriage partner choices, perhaps it is unsurprising that many people seemingly settled for spouses ill-suited to them. Olsen wrote that “much of the satirical literature of the 18th century…lampooned marriage as a hell or prison sentence for one or both partners. The most typical attitude toward marriage evinced in 18th century literature and visual art is a sly, collegial misery.” The poem “Wedlock” by the Englishwoman Mehetabel Wesley Wright (1697–1750), herself pressured into a loveless marriage with a plumber, paints a typical picture:

The Flemish poet and nun Anna Bijns (1493–1575) similarly advised other women to avoid marriage in her poem “Happy the Woman Without a Man.” She wrote that a newlywed wife becomes “sorry and sad within a single year” as her husband gets drunk, beats her, cheats on her, and “consider[s] her a slave, that’s all.”

Men were also often unhappy in marriage. In 1682, an anonymous writer urged men to avoid the institution:

Disdain for one’s wife was common, and many men were dissatisfied with their wives’ appearance, lack of faithfulness, drinking habits, and temperaments. Emily Cockayne points out that “a curious little work of 1672 illustrated a misogynistic fantasy. It described a Dutch invention to help all unhappy husbands: a windmill to reform bad wives.” The illustration depicts ugly, frowning women entering the mill, led by their husbands, and beautiful, smiling women exiting the contraption. An accompanying description claims that the mill can transform “all sorts of women, as the old, decreped, wrinkled, blear-ey’d, long-nosed, blind, lame, scolds, jealous, angry, poor, drunkerds, whores, sluts; or all others whatsoever. They shall come out of [the] mill, young, active, pleasant, handsome, wise, loving, vertuous and rich.”

Widespread antipathy toward one’s spouse also found expression in distasteful jokes, such as the following from The Spirit of English Wit:

Not Your Grandparents’ ‘Traditional’ Marriage
Those who imagine that the people of the past unfailingly adhered to stricter standards of sexual restraint and chastity might be alarmed at the frequency of shotgun marriages: A third of all brides were already pregnant at their weddings. Moreover, in England, one historian has suggested that in the 17th century, only about half of those regarded as married were actually married according to canon law (i.e., the ecclesiastical legal system). Many couples forwent a formal wedding and simply moved in together; they were treated as married under common law.

Although shotgun and informal marriages were frequent, marriages often ended in a less-than-ideal manner as well, typically with the untimely death of the husband or wife. Life in 17th century Europe was so fraught with disease, war, and accidents that most marriages ended with a spouse’s early death, making remarriage and blended families far more common in the preindustrial past than today, despite what many might assume. Indeed, because life expectancy was low, couples who married in their mid- to late 20s typically had fewer than 20 years together before death ended their union. There often was no lengthy mourning period between a spouse’s death and remarriage. In England, up to one-third of widows remarried, and half of them did so within a year of their husbands’ passing.

The devastation wrought by the death of a spouse was worsened by sexist inheritance laws. Widows were often dependent on the sons who inherited their husbands’ property for support.

Even during wedding celebrations, death was never far from our ancestors’ minds. The rate of death in childbirth for medieval women was astronomical. Manchester writes: “On her wedding day, traditionally, [a bride’s] mother gave her a piece of fine cloth which could be made into a frock. Six or seven years later it would become her shroud.”

Still, people eked out what joy they could get from wedding celebrations. Among ordinary people, weddings were rude and raucous affairs. Olsen explains, “The guests kissed the bride, played practical jokes, sang obscene songs, and ate.” When the couple withdrew to their dwelling after the ceremony, they were offered little privacy, as “outside the revelers sang dirty songs and shouted insinuations about what was going on in the bedroom.” In Scotland, in a tradition called “the blackening,” revelers pelted the bride and groom with rotting food, manure, and mud in preparation for the hardships of marriage.

Weddings were also occasions for alcohol abuse and physical altercations, as historian A. Lynn Martin notes in a research paper:

The situation was no better in France. In the Auvergne region, weddings often ended with evening bouts of violence, after many hours of drunken rowdiness led to fistfights.

Physical fights were far from the only disturbing part of preindustrial weddings. The bride, and the groom for that matter, might both be children. As Manchester writes: “Females could marry…when they reached their twelfth birthday. The age for males was fourteen. Even before she had reached her teens, a girl knew that unless she married before she was twenty-one, society would consider her useless, fit only for the nunnery, or, in England, the spinning wheel (a ‘spinster’).” Even in the 18th century, in England, legally the groom might be as young as 14 and the bride merely 12 years old, though thankfully that was rare in practice. Early marriages did occur, however. In 1623, a London parish clerk wrote disapprovingly of the wedding of a 17-year-old boy working as a thread maker to the 14-year-old daughter of a porter, calling them a “couple of young Fooles.”

People born in ordinary households at least usually had some say in whom they married and when, whereas children in elite families were frequently betrothed from preposterously young ages. Patricians typically arranged betrothals for their children soon after age 7, and in some cases as early as 3.

Following these prepubescent betrothals, marriages could take place soon after the bride reached the age of puberty. Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122–1204) married Louis VII of France when she was 15 and he was 17. Lucrezia Borgia (1480–1519), a prominent Italian noblewoman, was married off to her first husband when she was just 13. The groom was 27. As another example, England’s King John (1166–1216), the monarch who issued the Magna Carta, married Isabella of Angoulême when she was 12 years old. He was 33. In 1533, Charles V negotiated a marriage contract for his 11-year-old niece, Christina of Denmark, and a man four times her age, granting the groom the right to consummate the union immediately.

Our ancestors were not always faithful to their spouses, but the lower classes may have had a slightly cleaner record than the nobles in that regard. Among the nobility, adultery was nearly universal. In fact, Manchester claims: “Those wives in the noblesse d’épée who remained faithful to their husbands were mocked by the others. To abstain from…adultery was almost a breach of etiquette, like failing to curtsy before royalty.”

Abuse, Divorce, Murder, and Wives for Sale
Formal divorce was beyond the means of most ordinary people, so marriages typically dissolved when one spouse died or through abandonment. In 18th century England, only the wealthy could afford the means to secure private acts of Parliament to obtain a divorce, a process that was both complex and extremely costly, requiring both substantial money and influence. A rather shocking (to modern sensibilities) form of divorce known as wife selling sometimes occurred among those who could not afford a formal dissolution of marriage; the Ipswich Journal records such a sale occurring in 1789:

Charles V was a symbol of numerous problems with preindustrial marriage: His deformed jaw was the result of consanguineous marriages in his family, and he also once negotiated a marriage contract between his 11-year-old niece and a man four times her age, granting the right to consummate the union immediately. Portrait of Emperor Charles V, c. 1514.

Such bizarre episodes offer insight into the somewhat quizzical attitude that ordinary people held toward the official marriage code, with local customs and practices varying wildly. Despite the rarity of formal legal divorce among ordinary people, marriage did not usually last long given the high rate of premature death, and it was common for someone to marry several times after being repeatedly widowed.

Many unhappy marriages turned downright abusive. Olsen says, “Domestic violence was tolerated by the courts so long as it was limited to ‘moderate physical correction,’ and a man could even commit his wife to an insane asylum against her will.” Domestic violence was celebrated in works of popular culture such as the upbeat wife beater’s anthem, “The Cooper of Fife,” a traditional Scottish folk song that inspired a country dance and similar English and American folk ballads. The contrast between the lyrics, which tell a tale of domestic violence, and the song’s cheerful tune is jarring to a modern listener. An abused woman’s best hope was often not legal recourse, but the possibility that a male relative, neighbor, or sympathetic passerby might notice her plight and take action on her behalf. Olsen wrote: “Neighbors [sometimes] intervened when men beat their wives, shaming the abusers with public processions and chants, or simply stopping a beating, as a saddler did in 1703, telling the abusive husband, ‘you shall not beat your wife.’ ”

Oddly enough, roving nocturnal gangs of bored, drunken young men were perhaps an abused wife’s most likely defenders. Some such “youth groups,” A. Roger Ekirch relates, “contributed to social control, disciplining adulterers, abusive husbands, and cuckolds for violating common morality. Often occurring at night, charivaris in France, mattinata in Italy, and ‘skimmington rides’ in England subjected errant neighbors to ‘rough music,’ mockery, and on occasion, physical abuse.”

Women, for their part, were also known to engage in criminal cruelty toward their husbands, such as by lethally poisoning them. Sometimes, these murders were committed in retaliation for domestic abuse. “Aqua Tofana,” which one writer called the “bottled revenge of the 17th century wife,” was a poison discovered in 17th century Sicily, notoriously sold through much of Italy by women to other women seeking to discreetly end their husbands’ lives. Hundreds of victims (mainly men murdered by their wives) are estimated to have perished from the colorless, odorless poison, the precise ingredients of which are today unknown. Women were also occasionally known to attack their husbands at night while the latter slept, according to Ekirch:

Interestingly, in England and Scotland, women who killed their husbands were charged not with murder but with petty treason, for defying the “government” of their husbands.

Not all abuse amounted to murder. A church court record from 1598 in Scotland describes a woman named Margaret Schort confessing to throwing a shovel at her husband, splashing ale in his face, cursing at him, and scratching him, for which her public punishment was recommended.

Although women certainly engaged in abuse of men as well, sexist laws frequently enabled men’s abuse of women. Should a woman earn money, her husband could appear at any moment and claim her earnings, which the law recognized as his property. For example, in 18th century Britain, a wife could not enter into a contract, draft a will without her husband’s consent, or determine her children’s education or apprenticeships. In a separation, she lost custody automatically.

With so many difficulties accompanying marriage in the premodern age, it may seem a wonder that anyone married at all. Many people didn’t. Contrary to popular belief, in much of Europe, marriage was less common in the past than in modern times. A large number of people never married. Married people were only about a third of the population, compared with about 50 percent in Western Europe today. In northwestern Europe, being married was not common for most adults until well into the 17th century.

But remaining single in the preindustrial world brought its own challenges, as Olsen notes: “The life of a spinster could be a difficult one, with extended family using unattached female relatives as temporary live-in housekeepers when a wife died.” In other words, marriage was often the only way that women could avoid the fate of becoming unpaid live-in housekeepers to relatives. Economic necessity thus motivated many marriages. Marrying for love only began to emerge as an ideal in the 18th century and became more and more accepted during the 19th century.

Though I was still in the Army Reserve when the crisis started in August 1990 with Saddam Hussein’s unprovoked attack on Kuwait, I wasn’t mobilized or deployed for the subsequent Operations DESERT SHIELD and DESERT STORM. Instead, I worked it from my post at the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC)—a story I’ve told in detail in two books, one focused on the Gulf War Syndrome issue and the other a memoir.

The Agency denied everything. Two days after the story ran, its executive director told reporters that “nobody is hiding anything.” Barely five months later, the CIA held a televised news conference to apologize to veterans for failing to share what it knew about chemical weapons at Iraq’s Kamisiyah depot—documents that, the Times reported, “provided dramatic support” to our allegations.

The institutional lies and policy failures I witnessed—and that DESERT STORM veterans paid for with intractable physical and neurological pain and disability—caused many of them to lose any trust in the institutions that were once central to their lives.

And then on September 11, 2001, the entire country was confronted with the lethal consequences of a fresh and dramatic failure of political leadership and institutions.

As I watched al Qaeda’s attacks unfold that morning, two things were immediately clear to me: who was responsible, and that our inevitable response was going to change America and the world. In the years that followed, it became clear that most of the change for the country and the global community was for the worse.

An American president—George W. Bush—unleashed a war against a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 disaster—a needless conflict that killed thousands of American servicemembers and vastly more Iraqis, paved the way for the rise of ISIS, and politically destabilized the entire region to this day.

And in the rush to respond to Osama bin Laden’s murderous assault on us, the Congress foolishly handed still more power to an already too powerful presidency…and allowed a sitting president to assert powers his office did not lawfully possess.

The sweeping, surveillance-centric PATRIOT Act was signed into law less than two months after the World Trade Center towers collapsed. It originally had more than a dozen provisions that were supposed to end—or “sunset,” in legislative lingo—after several years. All but two of those provisions are now permanent law, and some of the most intrusive, like so-called “sneak-and-peek” searches, were never subject to a sunset at all.

For his part, President Bush authorized a secret electronic mass surveillance program, code named STELLAR WIND, that deliberately bypassed federal courts—a direct violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 and a clearly (to me, at least) impeachable offense.

As the so-called “War on Terror” dragged on, the abuses of the PATRIOT Act and STELLAR WIND came to light through whistleblower revelations and occasional Congressional oversight action. But instead of terminating programs that had clearly violated Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights, Congress only tinkered with the PATRIOT Act and ultimately made a version of STELLAR WIND ostensibly lawful via the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. In doing so, the people we elected to uphold our constitutional rights instead laid the foundation for an American surveillance dystopia that now monitors our communications, our travel, our buying habits, and our associations with other people, organizations, and causes.

In 1996, it took whistleblowers and a paper trail to force the government to admit what it had done. Today, one piece of that surveillance state operates in plain sight—and that is exactly why it is coming under attack from the citizens it targets.

In cities like Fullerton and Santa Ana in California, as well as in my home area of Fairfax County, Virginia, the revolt against Flock cameras is well underway. Fullerton’s city council has voted to switch its cameras off for six months, Santa Ana’s council has ordered a review of its contracts, and Fairfax County’s supervisors have paused new installations.

In the post‑9/​11 era, no government-funded surveillance technology has energized public opposition like the automated license plate readers (ALPRs) manufactured by Flock and a host of its competitors. It’s easy to understand why.

Most forms of data gathering via government surveillance—whether carried out by agencies using their own technology or simply buying it from data brokers—take place outside of public view. The ALPRs are clearly visible, and citizens know the cameras are spying on them—paid for with their own tax dollars and approved by local leaders who, as Fullerton shows, are beginning to fear real consequences for their pro-mass surveillance political acts.

One thing is clear to this very jaded but ever-optimistic constitutional rights defender. People across this country are taking their disillusionment and anger over one component of out-of-control government surveillance and channeling it into organized political action. They are using their own power to, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “alter their former systems of government” to try to end at least one form of domestic government surveillance.

Thirty years ago, it took two whistleblowers to expose what our government was hiding. This time, citizens can see the problem literally staring them in the face—and they are doing something about it. May the “Flock Revolt” spark many more such liberty-centric changes across the land.

Trump’s credibility on living costs has suffered a slow puncture. He won power after President Biden presided over America’s highest peak inflation since 1981. Yet YouGov now puts Trump’s net approval for handling inflation at minus 39 points, below Biden’s worst of minus 35. It is one reason why prediction markets favor Democrats taking both houses of Congress next week.

Republicans’ troubles on living costs pre-date the Iran war. In February, a typical Ipsos poll already found 65 percent of Americans disapproving of Trump’s handling of inflation. Dissatisfaction had grown throughout last year, in fact, even as wages rose faster than prices.

The original sin was Trump’s 2024 election pledge: “We’re going to bring your prices down.” Voters heard a promise of deflation, not slower price rises. They remain shocked that consumer prices are 30 percent above pre-pandemic levels and see that as synonymous with a poor economy. Supermarket prices regularly top their concerns, despite rising just 1.8 percent over the past year. That is because every weekly shop reminds them how much purchasing power they have lost since 2020.

The president’s first mistake was thus overpromising. With monetary policy set by the Federal Reserve, inflation was never within his direct control. In any case, achieving deflation would have required a sudden, miraculous productivity boom, or a destructively tight monetary squeeze from the central bank. Not only did the administration advocate few policies toward either end, but most flagship measures made matters marginally worse.

First, there were self-inflicted supply shocks. Tariffs raised prices for imports, goods using foreign inputs and domestic substitutes, while deportations disrupted labor availability in agriculture and construction. Import taxes largely cause one-off price rises, rather than persistently higher inflation. But voters are clearly concerned about the overall price level right now.

On the demand side, a mammoth deficit of about 6 percent of GDP put upward pressure on Treasury yields and, in turn, mortgage and car loan costs. Trump’s constant demand for Jerome Powell, the former Fed chairman, to deliver cheaper money completed the incoherence.

The war in Iran then added a gasoline price shock to this credibility problem. September’s inflation rate hit 3.7 percent, far above the 2.9 percent Trump inherited. Over the past year, gasoline prices have jumped by more than a third, while average hourly pay, adjusted for inflation, has fallen 0.7 percent. What began as loose links between Trump’s agenda and higher prices has become a measurable squeeze on American’s living standards.

What’s baffling is how the president’s political instincts deserted him on this. He repeatedly recalls spotting gasoline at $1.85 a gallon in Iowa before deciding to attack Iran. When beef prices soared, he eased restrictions on Argentinian imports — a tacit admission that protectionism raises prices. It’s not that he wasn’t warned either. Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, said in 2024 that Trump’s tariffs and macroeconomic ideas alone risked fueling inflation.

As discontent spread, Trump first dismissed affordability concerns as a hoax. Then his administration scrambled for remedies, from targeted deregulation to curbs on institutional investors buying houses. Now he extols inflation’s usefulness in eroding debt. Voters are left wondering if he wants to fight inflation or exploit it.

Democrats hardly possess a credible affordability program of their own. Most proposals amount to damaging price controls, subsidies and regulations that shuffle costs rather than instilling macroeconomic discipline or liberating supply. But it was Trump who taught voters that high prices were a political failure. The issue may now cost his party Congress and defang his legislative agenda.

Since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, his administration has sent mixed messages on arms control. On the one hand, the president has expressed support for efforts at “denuclearization” and for the world to have fewer nuclear weapons. But his administration’s actions paint a very different picture, and actions speak louder than words. The Trump administration is pursuing programs that would fuel the arms race between Russia, China, and the US, such as the creation of the Golden Dome and the testing of nuclear weapons. Reports also indicate that the Pentagon plans to build and deploy more tactical nuclear weapons, a move that would undoubtedly increase the odds of nuclear weapons being used.

Deterrence involves risk, and nuclear deterrence even more so. It goes without saying that nuclear weapons are massively destructive. Threatening to use one risks another being used against the threatening party. This is the risk — and it’s a very dangerous one.

The problem becomes one of credibility, of making sure that the other side understands that a country will use nuclear weapons should push come to shove. The credibility of nuclear weapons rests on their existence. Their destructiveness makes the potential use of just one is horrific enough. If that’s the case, why, then, does the US need more of these weapons?

hose wanting more nuclear weapons seek them to deter non-nuclear attacks. By having lots of nukes and threatening to use them first in a crisis to limit damage from retaliation, the US can credibly threaten nuclear destruction. This is an effort to avoid a rival from deterring our ability to deter with nuclear weapons, from “deterring our deterrent.”

But there are still two problems with this line of thinking. First, having more nuclear weapons and putting them on an offensive footing would increase the chances of them being used. To limit damage, there must be a commitment to use nuclear weapons off the bat, to take out the enemy’s before it launches theirs.

Second, there’s little to no guarantee that increasing the number of nuclear weapons would increase the perception of them being used. The sheer destructiveness of nuclear weapons — and the fact that limiting damage and counterforce targeting would cost millions of lives — makes threats to use nuclear weapons against conventional forces uncredible. More options do not make the US president more likely to use nuclear weapons. It’s a reason why, contrary to popular accounts at the time, US threats to use nuclear weapons failed to end the Korean War; two exhausted sides from a drawn-out war did that. Likewise, it was the fear of a Soviet nuclear strike, not its nuclear superiority, which restrained the US from invading Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Rather than focus on increasing America’s nuclear arsenal, policymakers should strengthen their survivability. This survivability prevents a rival from destroying America’s nuclear weapons before they’re launched, allowing the Sword of Damocles to continue dangling above would-be aggressors. Hardening missile silos and creating stealth technologies for bombers and submarines carrying nuclear weapons are some ways to achieve this survivability.

This means that the US doesn’t need more nuclear weapons, nor does it require the 3,700 stockpile it currently possesses. The US can cut at least a third of these nuclear warheads, and it can do so by disassembling America’s intercontinental ballistic missiles. These sorts of missiles are exposed to enemy surprise attacks, making their preemptive use more tempting, creating a “use-it-or-lose-it” scenario. More missiles fail to strengthen nuclear deterrence and these types of nuclear weapons make their use more likely. Intercontinental ballistic missiles should be scrapped, and disassembling them would leave the US with more than enough nuclear weapons to threaten retaliation.

The insignificance of having more nuclear weapons also means that the US should commit to not using nuclear weapons first in a war or a crisis. This no-first-use posture would reduce temptations for one side to strike out of fear of the US using its nuclear weapons first. In turn, this would also cut down on the number of accidents involving nuclear weapons.

Deterrence is a balance of costs and benefits. Right now, the costs of not taking these measures to reduce the number of nuclear weapons is simply too high for the US and for the world. It would cost approximately $946 billion over a decade, according to one estimate, to modernize all of America’s nuclear weapons. Most importantly, the human costs associated with increased chances to use nuclear weapons are far too high. Even on the lower end of the casualty list where the US uses tactical nuclear weapons in, say, Europe, at least two million people would die. And that is assuming the use of nuclear weapons doesn’t escalate further, which could result in at least 89 million dead. It should also be noted that these casualty numbers are “immediate” deaths. In other words, many more would die from fires, radiation poisoning, and shock waves.

US policymakers should frame and hang the American military strategist Bernard Brodie’s line throughout the Pentagon: “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them.” Doing so would remind policymakers and defense officials of the purpose of nuclear weapons: to deter wars, not to win them. This can be done with fewer nuclear weapons and a less aggressive nuclear posture. With the onset of competition between the United States, China, and Russia, the time is ripe to do so.

Neither side recognizes that the Second Amendment’s reference to the “militia” counts in favor of protecting AR-15s either way.

The challengers emphasize self-defense, an individually focused concern, while the governments argue that AR-15s’ military character is a reason to ban them. But AR-15s are the sort of small arms historically suited for a militia. This is actually the heart of the case, as we argued in a friend-of-the-court brief for the Cato Institute.

Small arms that an infantryman would historically have kept and borne are not marginal to the Second Amendment. Rather, they sit at its center. The amendment’s self-professed rationale for protecting the right to keep and bear arms is that a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state.

Although self-defense is also an important aspect of the right, debates about how useful AR-15s are for that purpose as compared to, say, pistols — or about how useful they are on a modern battlefield versus against a nighttime home intruder — miss the point.

The Second Amendment’s own text says it is protecting an individual right out of a recognition of the militia’s importance. The provision reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The Second Amendment is unique in spelling out both a social purpose and an individual protection. Advocates for gun-control have long argued that the purpose cabins the protection, such that the Second Amendment protects only “the right of the people of each of the several States to maintain a well-regulated militia,” in the words of Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissent from the landmark case District of Columbia v. Heller.

Stevens had a point in taking the amendment’s reference to the militia seriously. But the majority of his colleagues better understood what it means. In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, they observed that historically, the militia referred to “all able-bodied men,” who would be called into duty by the government in emergency situations.

Further, the term “free State” meant “a free polity,” not the specific state governments existing within the United States. The Second Amendment’s Framers deemed an armed population a safeguard for a free society. The militia, writ large, would be “useful in repelling invasions and suppressing insurrections.” It would discourage the establishment of “large standing armies” that could threaten republican liberty. And if need be, a public “trained in arms and organized” would be “better able to resist tyranny.”

This last aim, enabling resistance to tyranny, deserves particular emphasis. The “people’s militia” could fight a tyrant and thus defend freedom. A militia controlled exclusively by the government could not. The Second Amendment guarantees an individual right for more than just individually focused purposes.

It is possible to overread the prefatory clause, and the Heller majority takes care to note that the Second Amendment does not cover dangerous and unusual weapons, nor does it guarantee that the general populace will be able to effectively fight against a modern military. The court also anticipated an objection: If “weapons that are most useful in military service — M‑16 rifles and the like — may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause.” The governments in the Viramontes ruling agree.

The historical context of the Second Amendment’s reference to the militia provides the answer. At the time the Bill of Rights was enacted, men were expected to keep small arms suited to infantry service and bear them when summoned for militia duty. They were not expected to lug around artillery, much less to show up at muster with crew-manned weaponry. The AR-15, a readily portable semiautomatic rifle (indeed, this is a major feature distinguishing AR-15s from M‑16s, which are capable of fully automatic fire), sits neatly within the class of arms a militia member held historically. Far from being a fatal strike against its constitutional protection, that weighs in its favor.

In deciding Viramontes,the court should decline the invitation to build an ahistorical wall between guns for self-defense that enjoy protection and what some courts call “weapons of war” that lack it.

Beneath both claims lie three assumptions: that all US factory jobs are “good jobs,” that they’re attainable for anyone with a high-school degree, and that they’re the kind of jobs Americans want. New research punctures them all.

A September study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland compares manufacturing wages with those of similar workers (same age, education, etc.) in other industries. It finds that the premium US manufacturers paid in the 1980s had turned negative by the early 1990s and, save a blip around 2015, has stayed there. Workers with a high-school diploma or less have faced an even bigger penalty since the late 1980s, excluding only an aberrational pandemic surge. Only college-educated factory workers consistently come out ahead versus their non-manufacturing peers.

The study’s findings are consistent with previous research showing that the long-standing “manufacturing wage premium” has essentially disappeared. For well over a decade, in fact, average hourly earnings for blue-collar (aka “production and nonsupervisory”) workers in manufacturing were significantly less than the same workers in the services sector.

The Cleveland Fed report also deflates the assumption that factory work is much the same today as it was decades ago, when a sole breadwinner with a high-school diploma could count on lifetime job security to support his family and retire comfortably. That may have been true in the early 1980s, when the manufacturing wage premium was positive and almost 80% of industrial workers lacked any college education. By June 2025, however, the US manufacturing workforce had become far more educated: Employees with at least some college outnumbered those without it by a 60.6% to 39.4% margin, and the share of workers with a college degree or higher rose from 10% to roughly 35%.

Research from the Economic Innovation Group, meanwhile, shows that recent gains in US manufacturing jobs — driven by order backlogs and the AI boom, not tariffs — have been concentrated in the advanced, higher-skill aerospace and electrical equipment industries, while most lower-skill industries keep shedding workers, consistent with longer term trends. Separate EIG research further shows that a significant number of US “manufacturing workers” are actually performing higher-skill services — R&D, marketing, human resources, sales, etc. — for “factoryless” producers with offshore facilities or large onshore manufacturers with diverse operations both in-house and outsourced. These aren’t your uncle’s manufacturing jobs.

These realities help to explain why the third assumption — that American workers are itching to fill factory jobs — is also misguided. Start with what people say: A 2024 Cato Institute survey found that, while about 80% of respondents said the US would be better off with more manufacturing jobs, just 25% said they’d personally be better off working in a factory. Cato’s March survey, meanwhile, found that respondents would — assuming equal pay and education requirements — prefer a job in the skilled trades or at an e‑commerce warehouse over one at a factory.

Even this level of interest is probably exaggerated, as Americans’ “revealed preferences” indicate: The main driver of the decline in US manufacturing employment since 1960, according to the study from the Cleveland Fed, is “the lack of younger workers entering the industry,” not a lack of available work. Today, the US manufacturing sector has more than 500,000 job openings — well above pre-pandemic levels — and employers have long cited “attracting and retaining a quality workforce” as a key challenge. Yet, as Bloomberg’s Brooke Sutherland has noted, there are roughly half a million unemployed Americans who last worked in manufacturing, thus suggesting mismatched skills and wage expectations or unappealing work.

None of this means that all American factory work is bad, or that unemployed American manufacturing workers haven’t struggled. But the reality of modern US factory work argues strongly against treating a simple increase in “manufacturing jobs” as goal for national policy or a measure of policy success.

For starters, research shows that all nations tend to lose manufacturing jobs as they develop, regardless of their trade and industrial policies. Jobs get automated, systems get streamlined, and wealthier consumers devote more spending to services instead of goods. (One only needs so many outfits and appliances.) All three have certainly occurred in the US: long-term manufacturing employment declines are almost mirror images of labor productivity gains and track US factories’ embrace of robots. But the loss has also occurred in China, which supposedly stole all the US’s factory jobs yet had 18 million fewer manufacturing workers in 2022 than at its 2013 peak.

A headcount target also invites the wrong policies — ones that can pull finite workers toward whatever jobs are most labor-intensive (and usually the lowest-paying and the easiest to automate) and away from advanced, globalized manufacturers that pay well. Research shows, in fact, that across-the-board tariffs could modestly boost overall US manufacturing employment in the long run (and after a painful adjustment period), but the levies would do so primarily by increasing basic and lower-skill industries while shrinking higher-skilled ones. At the same time, tariffs burden US consumers, including the very ones these policies are intended to support. Male-dominated, blue-collar service occupations — many of them good-paying — today outnumber manufacturing production workers by more than 4‑to‑1. Tariffs on goods only hurt services workers, helping to explain why the levies poll so poorly among today’s working class.

Counting factory jobs reveals only how many Americans work in factories. It says nothing about whether these workers, or the nation overall, are actually better off. America’s politics should adjust accordingly.

The digital ruble is not an app, a card, or simple electronic cash. Instead, it is a direct connection to the Central Bank.

The risks of CBDCs are many. Under ordinary circumstances, governments have to go through commercial banks to access citizens’ money. But the default state of a CBDC is that the government has ultimate surveillance and control over people’s finances and how they use their money. Tracking purchases, freezing funds and locking people out of the economy become only a click away.

Rather than address these concerns head-on, Central Bank official Alla Bakina simply dismissed them as fake news. But how can that be true when the Central Bank itself has said it is investigating how to attach conditions to the digital ruble so that money can only be spent in ways the regime deems acceptable? Moreover, how can that be true when the Central Bank has already imposed restrictions limiting people to a monthly balance of 300,000 rubles ($3,660)?

You don’t need a crystal ball to see how such surveillance and control will be harnessed. Russians who dare to speak out against the Kremlin often find themselves on the state’s list of “terrorists and extremists” and their bank accounts frozen.

Anna Chekhovich, financial director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF), watched powerlessly as the regime went after her organization’s funds. It was only after the fact that she learned that the Anti-Corruption Foundation had been targeted by the Justice Ministry with accusations of money laundering. However, what appears much more likely is that the ACF was targeted for being critical of the regime. Since then, the regime has repeatedly frozen the accounts of both the organization and its employees, even going so far as to designate them as a terrorist organization in 2025.

In such cases, the state used the financial system to go after its opponents. The key difference with a CBDC, however, is that the state has immediate access to people’s money. No more tracking down banks or payment services. It’s in the government’s hands from the beginning.

And the Kremlin has rarely had less reason to loosen its grip. On Oct. 16, United States President Donald Trump waived nearly all of the new sanctions and tariffs Congress had passed to punish Russia’s war on Ukraine. A ruler who feels unchecked, who no longer fears consequences abroad, will not hesitate to use new tools at home to crush any type of dissent.

Despite the Central Bank’s best efforts to stress that the digital ruble is voluntary, it’s worth asking just how voluntary it really is or will become in practice. Banks and retailers are forced to support the CBDC. The regime recently began paying public employees with the digital ruble and the Central Bank announced that peer-to-peer cryptocurrency trading will be illegal starting in July 2027.

That is a lot of pressure for a currency few Russians say they want. In a 2025 state-run poll, 40% of Russians saw no benefit, and 37% struggled to identify how the digital ruble could possibly benefit them. Today, despite the launch of the digital ruble, Russians are using cash in record numbers.

History shows what can happen when demand falls short. In Nigeria, the hybrid authoritarian regime orchestrated a cash shortage in an attempt to spur CBDC adoption. It didn’t go well. Lines outside the banks turned into protests — and those protests turned into riots. In the end, CBDC adoption among the population rose from just 0.5% to 6%.

Nigeria is not an outlier. Around the world, more than 150 governments are exploring CBDCs, which is why the Human Rights Foundation built the CBDC Tracker in 2023 to document the proliferation of these digital currencies and the human rights concerns their implementation amplifies. One finding stands out above all else — the governments that are pursuing CBDCs more aggressively are authoritarian regimes.

Russians deserve to know that the digital ruble isn’t just another form of money. It’s tyranny technology being spearheaded by authoritarian regimes in a bid to secure control over money. That is what the Russian people are being asked to opt into.

On June 23, 2026, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court struck down a misguided ballot measure that would have repealed the state’s 1994 ban on local rent control, instead imposing a binding statewide cap on rents. Now policymakers are proposing a different ineffective “solution”: regulating the tools used to arrive at housing prices through bans on algorithmic rent pricing.

From Cambridge to Boston, policymakers have bought into false assertions that this technology is facilitating collusion and price-fixing. The technology does not, in fact, enable collusion, as each property management company uses the software independently; the pricing recommendations generated for one company are not visible to or shared with other companies. This was the conclusion of an investigation by the Department of Justice, which produced neither an admission of liability nor monetary penalties for the companies.

Property management companies should be free to use algorithmic technology that crunches market data and suggests appropriate rates for their rental units. And lawmakers should focus instead on the underlying problem: a housing supply shortage.

Massachusetts, however, wants to ban algorithmic rent pricing. First, the Cambridge City Council approved a policy order directing staff to begin the process of prohibiting residential property management companies from contracting with firms that use algorithmic models to recommend prices. Now Boston City Council is turning its attention to an order for a hearing to investigate and potentially ban algorithmic price recommendations in the Boston rental market. Similar legislation in Massachusetts and Vermont is aimed at outlawing this algorithmic software.

The truth? These algorithms help landlords price their inventory by analyzing rent prices for comparable units, factoring in vacancy rates and seasonal demand. Using these tools is simply faster and more accurate than clicking through rental listings and doing math with a pen and paper.

These bans are not only ill-advised, they are also redundant. Existing state and federal antitrust laws, like Massachusetts Chapter 93A, already provide guardrails against collusion and improper data sharing. Banning an entire category of business technology is an unnecessary response when such protections are already in place.

Banning modern tools that property owners use to manage their investments without legitimate evidence that the tools cause harm will make it more difficult to finance and develop new housing. Focusing on these mistaken bans distracts from pursuing the one solution economists agree is essential to address affordability: increasing housing supply.

In the next four years, Massachusetts is estimated to need more than 222,000 additional housing units. As it stands, the market will have difficulty responding to this demand, because harmful restrictions prevent it from doing so. Recent research confirms that zoning restrictions drive up the price of housing while increasing the size of housing units and preventing new development. With supply constrained, rents rise regardless of which technology landlords use to determine prices.

Algorithmic technology, when properly designed and monitored, can have a positive impact. It has been shown in many industries to reduce human bias and improve consistency in decision-making. In housing markets, data-driven pricing tools can help standardize rental pricing on the basis of objective market conditions rather than subjective judgment.

Eliminating access to these tools could have unintended consequences, particularly for smaller housing providers. With less access to reliable market data, these landlords may set rents above market to avoid underpricing their properties, resulting in longer vacancies, slower leasing and a less efficient rental market.

Massachusetts lawmakers should improve market functionality by allowing housing providers the tools they need to create an efficient housing market. If lawmakers are serious about improving affordability in Massachusetts, they should refocus their energy away from banning useful technology and towards addressing the housing supply shortage by eliminating restrictions that hinder the creation of new homes.

It’s time Massachusetts lawmakers took action instead of perpetuating distractions.

Even more confused are “Christian socialists.” The traditional model for many of them is the early Jerusalem church, where “All the believers were together and had everything in common.” (Acts 2:44) Moreover, “No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.” (Acts 4:32)

Of course, this had nothing to do with socialism. The community was communal, but not coercive. Indeed, it was subversive of the political order, promoting life apart from the ruling authorities in which people, resources, and activities were beyond control of the Roman Empire and the subservient Jewish religious establishment.

Moreover, even this system evidently faltered. While Ananias and Sapphira had no obligation to turn over their property for the apostles’ use, they lied about the amounts and suffered accordingly (Acts 5:1–11). The Jerusalem model apparently did not spread overseas along with the faith.

Yet the Institute of Christian Socialists declares that it is “Building a Movement of the Ecumenical Christian Left.” The Institute’s mission “is to support US churches, their members, and institutions in confronting the world’s captivity to capitalism and in claiming, embodying, and promoting the radical socialism of the Christian faith and life.”

While there may have been genuine Christian socialists over the last two thousand years, they hardly characterized the faith. Certainly not the apostles. The latter were, according to Biblical accounts, largely indifferent to economic and political systems. They didn’t even dictate Jerusalem-style communalism for believers, declaring that it was voluntary. And the concentric rings of responsibility that moved outward—Christians were expected to work to support themselves, care for their families, support members of the community of faith, and “do good to all people” (Galatians 6:10)—conflicted with genuine socialist tenets.

Paul stated that he was worthy of support from those to whom he ministered but instead chose to support himself. And while pressing the Corinthian church to be generous he refused to instruct its members to share even with needy Christian brothers and sisters. Instead, he urged giving, generous and cheerful, but far short of anything approaching socialist “sharing.” The later church was anything but socialistic. Even the monastic life was often economically productive. The life of participants was abstemious rather than socialist, chosen rather than imposed, and spiritual rather than political.

What does the Christian faith command? The Institute declares: “The Gospel entails a commitment not just to resisting or reforming capitalism, but to overturning it, while working toward new forms of political economy that are life-sustaining, egalitarian, and just.” That may be a gospel, but it is not The Gospel. Jesus said little of political economy and certainly did not inform us that there was only one “life-sustaining, egalitarian, and just” economic system. He lauded the tax collector who repented and promised to repay anyone he had mistreated. Jesus did not demand that everyone turn their wealth over to the authorities, his followers, or anyone else. Nor did Jesus define what constituted a “life-sustaining, egalitarian, and just” order.

Finally, the Institute details its vision as “God’s new creation of a society marked by the interdependent health of our common earthly home, the shared enjoyment of our common wealth, and the just participation of all in our common social and political life together.” However, it’s not clear what any of these have to do with socialism, at least as the system exists in reality.

The foundation of socialism is coercion, in which governing elites rule “our common earthly home” and enforce their view of “the shared enjoyment of our common wealth.” Where has such a system turned out well? As for ensuring “the just participation of all in our common social and political life together,” how many politicians pursue such a course? Sinful human beings, whether those who rule or who are ruled, routinely fall short.

None of this is to deny that capitalism is a flawed system. All human institutions fall short of the glory of God. However, a market-based order has had remarkable success in generating wealth and improving living standards. Advocates of “Christian socialism” may prefer immiserating poverty for all to varying wealth for most, but the chief beneficiaries of such an approach are ideological warriors and government apparatchiks, not the least of these, who desperately seek a better life for themselves and their families.

The challenge posed by capitalism is that it rewards those who are economically productive rather than morally good. However, it provides the wealth necessary for others to help those who are in need. Socialism does neither. Rather, it simply presumes the creation of resources by others, to be redistributed by self-anointed political leaders.

Capitalism also promotes greater liberty and diversity by separating personal wealth and political authority. In contrast, socialism combines the two, increasing the reward for those able to seize the levers of power. Good intentions matter little. As Lord Acton warned us, “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” When has socialism avoided the human frailties common to all?

Indeed, wealthier market-oriented societies tend to be more democratic, though nothing is automatic—and today, at least, China remains a notable exception. However, for all the fears understandably expressed over the influence of money in politics, the influence of politics over money has proved to be much more pernicious. Ultimately, political authority is the more powerful and dangerous force, most in need of balance.

Socialism is a failed system, but Christian socialists still have a message worth listening to. Successful, comfortable believers should beware complacency, especially in a world in which proponents of the “prosperity Gospel” distort Christianity for profit, some evangelical churches act like adjuncts to the Republican Party, and many middle-class believers see little of the often-dire human needs around them. However, socialism, whether secular or Christian, offers no answers.

Democrats are certainly thinking about it. Semafor reports that former Biden officials are licking their chops at the prospect of using government ownership to pressure gun and oil companies. Doug Farrar, who worked for then-Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan during the Biden administration, sees a future president leveraging government ownership to turn the screws on AI companies, “especially a Democrat who wants to seriously regulate this industry.” Remember when the Biden administration bullied social media platforms to remove content it didn’t like during the COVID pandemic? That was done without government ownership.

I warned about this two weeks into Trump’s second term after he signed an executive order seeking to create a sovereign wealth fund, noting that a government investment fund would eventually become a vehicle for Democratic administrations to pursue policies Republicans oppose. The White House ditched the idea for a formal fund and proceeded to cobble together an ad hoc presidential portfolio despite having no clear legal authority to do so.

The Trump administration’s supporters cite its claims that equity stakes are better for taxpayers than blank checks, or that they are necessary to bolster supply chains for national security. Setting aside that they aren’t the administration’s true motivation, neither justifies Washington becoming a shareholder in a portfolio of companies.

Sure, if the government is already handing a company money, getting shares in return sounds better than a straight giveaway. But the trade-offs can’t be ignored.

When the government picks a racehorse, that horse is given advantages and privileges that leave the competing horses at a disadvantage. But the danger goes well beyond current competitors. Upstart firms, including those that don’t yet exist, already face a steep hill to climb in bringing their products and ideas to market. Government ownership steepens that hill, threatening to stifle the entrepreneurial spirit critical to America’s economic success.

The value of the shares on the government’s books isn’t the same as revenue in the Treasury. Realizing the gains requires selling the shares and subtracting what taxpayers put in. And as my colleague Scott Lincicome explains, Intel’s stock gains partly reflect expectations of government favoritism, including pressure on other companies to use Intel products. That points to the possibility that the government is diverting private investment from businesses with better commercial prospects.

Even if the administration could sell its entire Intel stake today, it would net roughly $28 billion—less than 1.5% of the $2 trillion deficit Washington ran up in the fiscal year just ended under President Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress. The stakes the administration has acquired should be divested, regardless. But if the administration wants to raise funds productively, it could revisit Cato’s recommendations to sell excess federal buildings and privatize government businesses like Amtrak.

The national security rationale also sounds reasonable until you realize the federal government already has plenty of ways to support companies on such grounds without becoming an owner. Our Restoring Free Enterprise initiative lays out both market-based and government alternatives to equity stakes that would help bolster critical supply chains. Easing permitting requirements and removing tariffs on production inputs would make it easier for private companies to invest and expand supply. And the government can address specific defense needs through purchase contracts or stockpiles of critical materials.

Invoking “national security” also has a long-standing tradition in Washington as an excuse for politicians to justify actions they might not otherwise get away with. Back in April, the administration pursued a bailout that could have given the government 90% of Spirit Airlines on dubious national security grounds, until a group of the airline’s bondholders balked at the terms.

Last week, Politico reported that the Federal Aviation Administration is exploring an ownership stake in a company that develops software for managing air traffic control. National security or not, having the government become an investor in a company it is supposed to evaluate objectively is an objectively bad idea.

Defenders will also point to promises that the government will remain a passive shareholder and argue that concerns about federal control over the corporate boardroom are overblown. That’s a painfully naïve view of how Washington works. The Trump administration is already using contracts and regulatory authority to favor companies it owns.

While Trump’s supporters may applaud that favoritism today, will they still applaud when a President Gavin Newsom or President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does it?

No.

That is why Republicans should use the time they still have to end this ownership experiment instead of waiting until a Democratic president makes them wish they had.