People also often harbor counterproductive intuitions, including a belief that markets erode social bonds, despite evidence that markets foster cooperation and thus generate wealth. Those tendencies stem not primarily from information deficits or irrationality, but from our evolutionary psychology. Our economic intuitions were shaped over thousands of years in a world of tight-knit coalitions and zero-sum intergroup rivalry, rendering modern market dynamics counterintuitive. As such, markets are often rejected even when they are beneficial.

Perhaps the most parsimonious theory explaining why people often behave in economically harmful ways is the evolutionary cognitive model of folk-economic beliefs, proposed by anthropologist Pascal Boyer and political scientist Michael Bang Petersen. Folk-economic beliefs are those convictions about economics held by laypeople untrained in the discipline, which frequently diverge from fundamental economic tenets. These encompass mental representations of varied topics, from prices, taxes, and tariffs to welfare and immigration policies.

Economists have traditionally critiqued those as irrational beliefs or mere byproducts of ignorance, but an evolutionary lens reveals them as predictable outcomes. Ensuring fairness in trade, sustaining social ties, forming stable coalitions, and resolving ownership disputes are all responses to ancestral challenges.

If this theory is right, both actual economic behavior and theories generated to explain one’s own economic behavior are predictable outputs shaped by evolution. When folk-economic beliefs are wrong, they are wrong in predictable ways. We talk about impersonal markets as if they were tribal conflicts. We treat economies built on innovation and surplus as if they were competitions over a fixed pile of resources.

Consider the intuition that international trade is harmful because another country’s gain must come at our expense. From the perspective of standard economics, this belief contradicts the well-established principle of comparative advantage. People benefit from specializing in what they produce most efficiently relative to other goods, even if a trading partner could produce everything more cheaply in absolute terms. For example, a surgeon who happens to type faster than his or her secretary still benefits from hiring the secretary and devoting more time to the operating room. Likewise, America could manufacture its own consumer electronics, but every dollar and worker devoted to assembling phones is one not devoted to designing the software, chips, and financial services where American companies dominate globally. The result is more total output and mutual gain.

But our evolutionary psychology wasn’t built for comparative advantage, especially not across nations or tribes. Human groups historically competed for territory, food, and status in genuinely zero-sum ways. If a rival coalition grew stronger, it often meant danger for one’s own group. When modern individuals read that another nation is exporting more goods to us or running a trade surplus, our tribal instincts activate automatically. Nations are cognitively represented as tribes, and the success of one tribe is interpreted as a threat to another. The idea that both sides could benefit simultaneously—one of the central insights of the founder of economics, Adam Smith—runs against these deeply ingrained intuitions.

The same coalitional logic helps explain folk intuitions about immigration. People opposed to immigration often claim that immigrants steal jobs from native workers while also claiming that immigrants siphon welfare benefits without working. At the level of policy argument, these beliefs are apparently contradictory. But at the level of psychology, it is an expression of a single concern: Outsiders are draining scarce resources, whether the resource is employment or benefits. Humans evolved in groups where membership conferred access to shared resources—food, protection, or status—and where vigilance against free riders was essential to sustaining cooperation. Newcomers were therefore automatically treated with suspicion until they proved themselves contributors rather than exploiters.

When this ancestral heuristic is applied to modern societies, it produces the intuition that outsiders must be consuming resources that properly belong to the in-group. Whether the imagined resource is employment or welfare benefits—or even whether the resources are truly being drained at all—matters less than the perceived threat that group boundaries are being crossed without reciprocal contribution.

The psychology of free-rider detection also helps explain the peculiar ambivalence that many people feel toward welfare programs. While people readily endorse the idea that society should help those who fall on hard times through no fault of their own, they also often worry that welfare encourages laziness or dependency. These views appear inconsistent only if one assumes that the public is applying a unified economic theory. In reality, they reflect two separate intuitions inherited from ancestral exchange systems.

Communal sharing evolved as a form of insurance against bad luck—injury, illness, or an unsuccessful hunt—where helping unlucky group members benefited everyone in the long run. But the same systems also evolved to punish individuals who accepted benefits without contributing. Modern welfare debates, therefore, activate both intuitions simultaneously: compassion toward the unlucky and hostility toward perceived free riders.

Another common folk-economic belief concerns the relationship between labor and value. Many people feel instinctively that hard work should determine how much something is worth. In the hunter-gatherer economy that prevailed throughout most of human history, where the value of goods was closely tied to the labor required to obtain them, strenuous physical effort was intrinsically linked to value production itself. Hunting, gathering, building shelter, or crafting tools all involved visible effort, and individuals who contributed more effort typically produced more resources. When applied to modern economies, however, the same intuition can generate confusion. A programmer writing code, an entrepreneur coordinating supply chains, or an investor allocating capital may create enormous value without performing visible physical labor. Yet because our ownership psychology is sensitive to effort and physical transformation, profits earned through organization or innovation are often framed as morally suspect, particularly in socialist ideology, as if they are thought to represent extraction rather than creation.

Some common opposition to the profit motive itself is explained by evolutionary psychology. In face-to-face exchange within small groups, unusually large gains might indeed signal exploitation or hoarding of limited resources, especially since producing anything of value typically required communal effort. Someone who consistently benefited more than others from trades might be suspected of manipulating information or violating norms of fairness. Modern markets, however, often reward individuals precisely when they discover new ways to produce value—whether by inventing technologies, improving logistics, or coordinating complex networks of production. Because these gains arise in impersonal systems where the beneficiaries are distant strangers rather than known partners, the profits they generate can appear less like the rewards of innovation and more like evidence of exploitation. Our evolved moral intuitions struggle to track value creation in dispersed and opaque market economies.

Likewise, many popular beliefs about regulation reflect ancestral intuitions that authorities can directly control outcomes. If the chieftain declared that food should be shared in a particular way, the order could be enforced through social pressure or direct monitoring. Everyone knew everyone else, contributions were visible, and deviations from the rule could be punished immediately. This experience makes it intuitively plausible that governments—which our minds intuitively represent as tribal coalitions—can simply command economic results. If rents are too high, they can seemingly be capped. If wages are too low, they can seemingly be raised. In naive folk economic theories, prices behave like promises: If the authority decrees a new price, the outcome should follow.

Take rent control. The intuition behind it is straightforward and morally compelling. If landlords raise rents beyond what tenants can afford, people may feel exploited: The owner of a scarce resource is extracting more money without providing more housing. A government rule limiting rents, therefore, appears to be a simple act of fairness. Ostensibly, the authority steps in, declares that rents may not exceed a certain level, and housing becomes affordable again. But in a large market economy, rent is not just a moral claim between two parties; it is also a signal that coordinates investment and construction of new housing. When rents are capped below market levels, the signal changes. Developers build fewer apartments, landlords convert rental units into other uses, and maintenance becomes less attractive when returns are limited. Over time, the supply of housing shrinks, and the shortage intensifies the very scarcity that drove up rents in the first place. The policy fails because the mechanism through which housing supply adjusts is invisible to the mental model that produced the intuition.

The same dynamic appears in debates over minimum wages. If workers are paid very little for difficult or unpleasant jobs, the situation feels unfair. But in a modern labor market, wages also function as signals that coordinate hiring decisions across the entire economy. When the legal wage floor rises above the productivity level of some jobs, employers do not simply pay the higher wage and continue as before. They reduce hiring, substitute machines for labor, or restructure tasks so fewer workers are needed. When the price signal changes, behavior adjusts in ways that the regulation does not anticipate. That often results in the direct opposite of the desired effect.

Our minds are not utility-maximizing computers that simply deviate from optimal choice due to insufficient information or computing power. They are toolkits. Our brains have evolved specialized cognitive inferences, or intuitions, that solved specific recurrent problems in our ancestral environments: “Who is trustworthy enough for exchange?”; “Who belongs to us, and who is a rival?”; “Who is contributing, and who is free riding?”; “Who owns what, and by what right?” These intuitions can be triggered by modern economic situations that resemble ancestral ones, even when the actual circumstances are entirely new.

Folk-economic beliefs persist not because people are irrational, but because they are reasoning with tools that evolved for cooperation in small bands rather than coordination among millions of strangers. The challenge for modern societies is therefore not simply to correct mistaken beliefs, but to build policies that work with—rather than against—the grain of human psychology.

Modern market societies represent one of humanity’s most remarkable cultural achievements. They sprang into existence by harnessing a set of different ancient social instincts—ones that enable cooperation on an unprecedented scale. Systems of property rights, contract enforcement, and voluntary exchange allow millions of strangers to coordinate their efforts in mutually beneficial ways.

The claim here is not that markets are infallible. It is that our evolved intuitions often misidentify the nature of the problem and thus point us toward remedies that make matters worse. In modern economies, visible losses are concentrated, immediate, and emotionally salient, while gains are diffuse, gradual, and spread across millions of consumers and workers. A serious defense of markets should therefore acknowledge adjustment costs and real harms without conceding the larger error: namely, the belief that mutual gain, price signals, profit, and exchange are themselves forms of exploitation.

Some of our evolved instincts—like valuing reciprocity, rewarding contribution, and building reputations for trustworthiness—remain essential foundations of prosperous societies. Markets themselves depend on these deeply rooted norms of cooperation and exchange. Other intuitions, however—such as zero-sum thinking about trade, suspicion toward profitable innovation, or faith that authorities can simply command prices—reflect cognitive shortcuts suited to environments of scarcity and small-group control rather than decentralized abundance.

Recognizing that distinction should not slide into a blanket dismissal of public concern. Not every market outcome is benign, and not all economic anxieties are mere illusions. Trade, technological change, and broader shifts from manufacturing to services can impose real, concentrated losses on particular workers, firms, and regions, especially on lower-skill laborers whose jobs are exposed to offshoring or displaced by new forms of production. A person who loses a job to foreign competition is not simply trapped by faulty intuition. He is often responding to a real personal setback, even if the economy as a whole still becomes more productive and prosperous. The same is true in recessions or cases of fraud and negative externalities.

The question, then, is how societies can address those real costs without defaulting to the very intuitions that misdiagnose their causes.

Human beings are unusual among species in our ability to revise intuitive judgments through abstract reasoning and accumulated knowledge. Economic theory, empirical evidence, and institutional experimentation provide ways of testing whether our intuitions about markets actually match the systems we inhabit. Over time, societies that learn to distinguish between intuitions that promote cooperation and those that misread economic signals tend to design more effective institutions.

Much of the progress of the last two centuries reflects this process of institutional learning precisely. Expanding trade networks, protecting property rights, encouraging innovation, and allowing prices to coordinate decentralized decisions have produced levels of prosperity that would have been unimaginable in the environments where our economic intuitions evolved. Understanding the evolutionary roots of folk-economic beliefs, therefore, helps explain why certain policy ideas remain politically attractive despite poor outcomes—and why sustained progress often depends on institutions that counteract some of our most natural intuitions while reinforcing others that support cooperation, openness, and exchange.

Nearly all these principles have been abandoned by Donald Trump, who neither believes that the United States should be responsible for European security nor sees the value in alliances. Because of his previous criticism of “warmongers and America-last globalists” and “ridiculous endless wars,” Donald Trump has sometimes been seen as an isolationist or, in more contemporary terms, a restrainer. He has assimilated key voices of restraint into his administration and coalition, most prominently Vice President JD Vance.

Therefore, this policy brief examines where the restraint vision for US strategy would take the country by 2035. It juxtaposes this restraint scenario against a likely baseline, laying out its implications for US force posture, priorities, and policy, with particular attention to the transatlantic relationship. The reasonable baseline of a more status quo approach to strategy shows that even those seeking a restoration will be bound by new constraints. The authors conclude that, while restraint poses daunting challenges for Europe, forestalling a reckoning may be even worse.

The First Year of Trump 2.0: All Over the Map

Rhetorically, both the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy of the second Trump administration reflect a more restrained vision of US foreign policy. Restraint is a strategy that calls on the United States to ease tensions with adversaries, step back from existing alliances, reduce its overseas military footprint and spending, and set a higher bar for when force is justified. This approach stands in contrast with “deep engagement,” also known as “primacy,” which had been the dominant US foreign policy approach since the Second World War. It had positioned the United States as the global security leader with commitments to a vast network of allies and partners and large forward military presence.

The focus of both documents on the Western Hemisphere emphasizes a return to homeland defense. They criticize past US approaches as pursuing “permanent American domination of the entire world” and refer to “favorable balances of power” in different theatres as the goal. The Defense Strategy explicitly argues that European countries alone should easily be able to balance against Russia. It cedes responsibility for European security to Europe while the United States offers “critical, but more limited” support.

The administration’s policy toward Ukraine shifts burden and responsibility to European allies and seeks a quick, even highly imperfect resolution – moves that are both consistently restraintist. (This is most obvious in comparison to the Biden administration, which took it for granted that the United States should lead the NATO response and promised to defend the principle of Ukraine’s freedom for “as long as it takes.”) Notably, the language toward China in both strategy documents is less confrontational than the strategies of the Biden administration or the first Trump administration. Trump himself seems to want to defuse tensions with Beijing, even using the term “G2,” frequently seen as shorthand for a US-China condominium.

Yet Trump has recently partnered with Israel to launch war against Iran, just a few months after capturing the leader of Venezuela. In practice, the first year and a half of the Trump 2.0 presidency has been far from consistently restraintist. In early January 2026, Trump even proposed a 50 percent defense spending increase in 2027. Further, it turns out MAGA voters are still willing to support military interventions – at least Trump’s interventions. In an in-depth survey of Republican voters conducted in December 2025 by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, it is clear that MAGA voters still support a “strong and lethal” military.

However, longer term polling from the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs does indicate that Republicans are becoming more restraintist. It found that while, before 2015, “Republicans used to be the most enthusiastic champions of an active US role in world affairs,” they have since “become less positive than Democrats about an active US international role.” There has been “a steady drop every year since 2019” in internationalist support among Republicans, the largest of any group. The polling also found that “[i]n 2023, for the f irst time in five decades of polling, a slim majority of Republicans preferred to stay out of world affairs (52%).” In 2024 and 2025, the majority again flipped in favor of action; nonetheless, more Republicans than Democrats (+8 percentage points) favor staying out of world affairs. In July 2025, 59 percent of Republicans surveyed support an active US role, while 40 percent want to stay out of world affairs.

The current Trump administration has pursued a mixed approach to foreign policy – both more adventurous (Iran) and more restraintist (strategy documents, Ukraine). Trump’s coalition has thus been an imperfect vehicle for a foreign policy of restraint, but restraint is nonetheless a force shaping politics on both the Right and Left. Vice President Vance, who stands a chance of being the next Republican presidential candidate, is known to be more consistently restraintist. Polls also indicate that younger Americans are more restraintist than their elders. Further, three days into the Iran war, nearly 60 percent of Americans opposed it (compared to around 35 to 43 percent who opposed the Iraq invasion of 2003). In fact, restrainers argue that a darkening fiscal picture at home and structural pressures internationally are constraining the US pursuit of primacy overseas; they believe that US policymakers should adopt a grand strategy of restraint before these pressures became acute. Consequently, it is important for Europe to understand and anticipate what a potential US foreign policy of restraint would mean for European and global security.

The Restraint Vision for US Strategy

Restraint views the United States as a uniquely secure country. In an aphorism attributed to the former French Ambassador to the United States Jean-Jules Jusserand, the United States was “blessed among the nations. On the north, she had a weak neighbor; on the south, another weak neighbor; on the east, fish, and on the west, fish.”

The security afforded the country by geography in its early years has been augmented by US possession of a large nuclear arsenal, the world’s largest navy (by tonnage), a comparatively vibrant demographic prof ile, and a large economy that is one of the world’s least trade-dependent, mostly due to its sheer size.

The implications for strategy, drawing from realist international relations theory, are straightforward: US grand strategy should focus on preventing the rise of a peer competitor. A potential peer competitor would need to consolidate political control over a region with the economic and demographic strength that would make it a rival of the United States. The only regions with enough latent power to pose such a challenge are Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Accordingly, in keeping with enduring counterhegemonic interests, restraint counsels a policy of offshore balancing in those key regions.

Today’s realists and restrainers are focused on more modest counterhegemonic aims. Both camps view the United States as having too many enemies, too many dependents masquerading as allies, too much defense spending, and too many wars. Although US policymakers have been urging allies for decades to accept a greater share of the burden of their own defense, those allied dependents have worked assiduously to preserve the status quo and maintain US power as the linchpin of their own security. (In fairness, while they complained about European free-riding, US elites simultaneously tried to keep Europeans dependent on US arms and other forms of support.)

The dynamic in which the United States carries a disproportionately large share of allied defense burdens will not change without Washington forcing the issue on its allies. Pleading and cajoling has not worked and cannot work. The main lever Washington has to force a rebalance is its commitments – particularly, its troop deployments. We wish to explore the implications for Europe if US policymakers conclude that the time for restraint has come. Thus, what follows is a scenario that describes what could happen if, starting in 2026, the United States begins pursuing the strategy in earnest.

As shown above, US strategy under restraint would differ considerably from the US strategy pursued during living memory. Many observers on both the political Left and Right in the United States, and especially those in the transatlantic community, yearn for a return to the status quo ante Trump. However, a reasonable baseline scenario that hews closer to the recent past still shows that US global posture is likely to shrink by 2035. In short, even if Washington does not decide to shift its foreign policy approach, its fiscal picture and political dysfunction will force more restraint.

The options available to the United States in the period from 2026 to 2035 are not like those available to it from 2015 to 2025. Data from the Congressional Budget Office about the deficits facing the United States in the years 2015 and 2025, as well as projections into 2035, offer a dismal picture:

In this second baseline scenario, the authors assume that these fiscal constraints limit the options of the United States. The three largest drivers of US deficits and debt – Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the debt – prove largely impervious to policy reforms that could narrow the deficit and stop the debt from growing. Yet these constraints are only one scissor blade joined with a second: the challenge posed to the United States by the People’s Republic of China, which has a larger GDP relative to the United States than the Soviet Union ever did. The resulting scenario looks something like the following:

Recommendations for Europe to Prepare for a Restrained United States

The first illustrative scenario above describes a designed and coordinated US withdrawal from Europe; the second a slightly delayed erosion of US leadership. While real-world developments will undoubtedly vary significantly, both outcomes are likely enough that they should shape German and European planning. As highlighted in the second scenario, US debt levels are a grave and mostly intractable problem – regardless of who will next reside in the White House. As early as 2012, Admiral Michael Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that the debt is “the single biggest threat to [US] national security.” A number of other prominent officials concur. There is little reason to hope that the American political system is up to the task of tackling its debt problem.

Although not highlighted in these scenarios, a key political fact remains: the American public elected – not once, but twice – a president openly disdainful of alliances, norms, and the rule of law. Further, elected Republicans have been almost entirely unwilling to censure or constrain him. Despite the fact that support for NATO remains above 60 percent among Americans according to numerous polls, Germans must draw sobering conclusions from these domestic developments in the United States. First and foremost: Europeans should no longer feel safe with their security in someone else’s hands.

Indeed, whatever the reason – growing debt insecurity that prevents Washington from sustaining commitment levels; a rational and cooperative retrenchment driven by a restraintist administration; or populist-nationalist strongman politics – there is a significant possibility that US commitment to European security will be softened or sapped by 2035. Thus, Berlin, together with European NATO allies, must now start building alternative security architecture that functions with a much smaller US role and, if need be, can be transitioned to work without the United States. The early steps for either result are largely identical. The one possible positive political outcome of Donald Trump’s insistence that he “needs” Greenland, especially given recent US interventions in Venezuela and Iran, is that it may convince Europe to get serious about designing a European strategy for European security.

Although the next steps are rather well-established and uncontroversial, they are nonetheless challenging:

• Focus on the most urgent gaps: In the short term, doing so means increasing air tankers and airlift assets as well as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities, including European satellite capabilities. It also means integrating European military intelligence structures and mundane updates such as standardizing railway gauges to allow the quicker movement of troops and materiel across the continent. Considering the rapid US burn rate of air and missile defenses, Europe should also aim to bolster production of these platforms.
• Build mass and enhance coordination: In a second step, Europe needs more troops, ammunition, and industrial capacity. Stockpiles of relevant artillery and long-range strike capabilities, armored vehicles, drones, and more need to be expanded while simultaneously finding ways to enhance coordination. Another way to gather mass is to limit fragmentation in national efforts and militaries, also in terms of procurement.
• Europeanize NATO command: As colleagues recently argued, a gradual Europeanization of selected commands is the smart path forward. The recent decision to put Joint Force Commands into European hands is a solid start. US control over the domain commands is a sign of continued US commitment, but it is not in line with a restraintist development. In the medium-term, even more commands, including domain commands, should be Europeanized.

The 2026 National Defense Strategy promises “critical, but more limited” US support for Europe. The European NATO members should not wait for this or future administrations – or US fiscal and political constraints – to determine what is critical and how limited “more limited” is. Instead, a coalition of leading European NATO members should together define what the most critical limited US support in the next three, five, and ten years comprises. Then, they must quickly work to collaborate to provide the rest.

Here are the five most consequential.

This is the most repeated claim in American tax politics and one of the least supported by actual data.

The top 1% of earners take in 22% of total income and pay 40% of all federal income taxes.

The top 10% earn about half the nation’s income and pay 72% of its taxes.

The bottom half of earners, collectively, pay roughly 3% of the tax revenue. The United States, in fact, has the most progressive income-tax system in the developed world.

Myth: We’ll Fix the Budget Deficit by Taxing the Rich

We simply cannot.

The collective net worth of every American billionaire is estimated at somewhere around $8 trillion. The projected federal deficit over the next decade alone approaches $25 trillion.

Even a one-time total confiscation of every billionaire’s wealth wouldn’t come close, and you only get to do it once.

The real driver of America’s fiscal crisis isn’t a shortage of tax revenue from the wealthy. It’s the structural growth of Social Security and Medicare.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that such mandatory spending and interest payments will permanently exceed all federal revenue starting next year.

No amount you could tax the rich will correct an imbalance like this.

Myth: If You Can’t Tax the Rich, Tax Corporations

Corporations are the next most likely target for those who want large government without the middle class paying for it.

The problem is that corporations don’t actually pay taxes. Once you understand why, this starts to look like one of the worst ideas in America’s tax code.

Corporations write checks to the IRS, but they don’t bear the tax burden.

Every dollar collected for corporate tax comes from a human: the worker who’s paid a lower wage, the shareholder who earns less and the consumer who pays higher prices at checkout.

Research shows that workers bear somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of the corporate tax burden through lower wages. If you have a 401(k), you’re paying it too, quietly, through lower returns on every stock in the fund.

Further, corporate profits are returns on investment.

Tax them and you get less investment. Less investment means lower productivity, which leads to lower wages over time.

Decades ago, economists Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka showed a better way: Replace the corporate income tax with a consumption-based system under which businesses deduct all wages and capital investment immediately.

No double taxation, no penalty on investment, and revenue without unintended economic damage.

The corporate tax survives because voters mistakenly believe someone else pays it. This belief is expensive.

Myth: Capital Gains Should Be Taxed Like Ordinary Income

This proposal sounds like common sense, but it’s bad economics.

When a company earns a dollar of profit, it pays roughly 26 cents in combined federal and state corporate taxes before distributing the rest to its shareholders.

When it’s all said and done, the government has taken close to half of every dollar the company earned. That’s not a tax on the rich — it’s two taxes on the same income.

Those who want to raise capital-gains rates assume the U.S. is a low-tax haven for investors. It’s not. America’s combined federal, state and net investment income tax rate on capital gains already sits at 29.2%, well above the average of 19.1% in fellow OECD democracies.

We’re already an outlier, and not in a good direction.

Myth: Tax Cuts Pay for Themselves

Politicians on the right have said this for 40 years.

But it’s not quite true.

Tax rates affect behavior.

Cut the marginal rate on work and investment, and you get more of both, which generates more revenue than a static calculation predicts.

But generating more revenue than expected is not necessarily enough to cover the cost of the rate cut.

The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act proved it. Growth picked up, wages rose, business investment increased, yet the deficit still widened.

The honest argument is different: A tax cut that costs real revenue but improves the allocation of capital and raises long-run productivity is still the right policy.

The question is not whether tax cuts pay for themselves but whether the economic growth is worthwhile.

That’s harder to fit on a bumper sticker, but it’s the version of the conservative tax argument that actually holds up.

That said, we should always offset the loss of revenue when possible.

There is plenty of spending to cut, and there are plenty of tax breaks to close for that.

Mr. Rahe assumes tariffs boost resiliency, but recent history shows the opposite. National security might justify narrow trade restrictions, but tariffs have not insulated Americans from economic disruptions and have frequently made things worse. The baby-formula crisis of 2022 and automakers’ recent struggles to obtain aluminum, each triggered by the sudden closure of a tariff-protected U.S. factory, show that localized supply chains are vulnerable to local shocks—and tariffs block alternatives. Research from the pandemic finds that globalized supply chains performed better and adjusted faster than nationalized ones.

Mr. Rahe also errs on tariffs’ ability to promote manufacturing. Decades of protection failed to create thriving U.S. steel, shipbuilding, textile and footwear industries. More recent duties on solar panels did the same. With around half of imports being manufacturing inputs, tariffs raise American producers’ costs and undermine competitiveness. Combined with uncertainty surrounding executive branch tariffs, this explains why surveys consistently reveal manufacturers opposed to new protectionism.

Mr. Rahe is correct about the intrusiveness of income taxes, but tariffs can’t replace them because import volumes are far too small. Their invisibility, meanwhile, isn’t the benefit Mr. Rahe thinks. Since the 19th century, tariffs have been a breeding ground for rent-seeking and corruption and have persisted after decades of failure, precisely because their costs are hidden and diffuse. Transparency is a hallmark of good tax policy; opacity is its enemy.

Tax credits, cash transfers and larger subsidies can reduce some families’ out-of-pocket bills. They do not, by themselves, make child care cheaper to provide.

In fact, in a sector constrained by rigid staffing ratios, credential mandates and facility rules, more demand-side subsidies are likely to push market prices higher. The result is often fewer informal options for parents and a larger bill for taxpayers.

A better affordability agenda would make it easier to supply care to begin with. States could relax one-size-fits-all staff-to-child ratios and caps on group size, which evidence suggests can materially lower prices by increasing supply in poorer areas.

They could also repeal credential mandates for child care workers and allow home-based care by right, rather than forcing providers through zoning and permitting barriers. Washington could also expand the caregiver work force by liberalizing the au pair program and other visa routes.

In such a labor-intensive industry without automation, rising prices are perhaps unsurprising. But shifting that burden from the child care bill to the tax bill doesn’t solve the affordability problem. It just displaces it.

Mr. Appelbaum is right that the tax code is absurdly complicated. But the I.R.S.’s Direct File program wasn’t a meaningful solution.

The much-hyped experiment in government-run tax preparation proved that bad ideas can be both expensive and unpopular. The I.R.S. estimated that 32 million taxpayers were eligible to use Direct File during the 2025 filing season. Only 751,000 logged into the system. Fewer than 300,000 completed a return — less than half of 1 percent of individual income tax returns. Barely a rounding error.

It was also an expensive rounding error. Estimates put the processing cost — paid by the government using taxpayer money — at roughly $140 per filed return. That’s more per return than most taxpayers spend on the private-sector alternatives it was supposed to replace.

More important, Direct File posed a deep conflict of interest. It asked taxpayers to trust the I.R.S. to be their tax preparer, collector and enforcer. Taxpayers minimize their legal tax liability; the I.R.S. maximizes revenue collection, which it does through aggressive enforcement. In 2024, the I.R.S. lost 57 percent of the dollars it disputed in cases it brought against taxpayers. It is wrong more often than it’s right.

Software cannot solve a problem Congress created through dozens of deductions, credits, phase-outs and special eligibility rules. A government-run portal cannot be a substitute for simplifying the tax code.

And, unfortunately, it just got worse.

U.S. tax complexity is increasingly costly.

Most people who have done their own taxes understand at some basic level that the U.S. system is weirdly, impenetrably complex. The late Donald Rumsfeld’s annual letter to the IRS—telling the agency up front that “I have absolutely no idea whether our tax returns and our tax payments are accurate”—annually goes viral for this very reason. (If you haven’t read it, you should: It’s really funny.)

Yet the sheer magnitude of U.S. tax complexity is no laughing matter—nor are its economic costs—and the problem has worsened since Rummy started sending his famous letters. Recent research finds, for example, that the Internal Revenue Code had grown to 4.3 million words by 2021—up roughly 40 percent over the last three decades and far longer than the five other countries the authors examined (France, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, and Morocco). The next wordiest tax code, in fact, was in France—at a mere 1.25 million words. The statutory text, moreover, is supplemented by regulations and IRS guidance that dwarf the code itself.

That study’s authors add that, while a higher word count might not necessarily mean a more complex tax code, it tracks alternative measures of complexity in the United States. For example, there were 103 income tax sections in 1954 and 736 by 2005. Between 1991 and 2012, meanwhile, the code’s subdivisions and cross-references increased from around 50,000 to nearly 70,000. Data on the number of forms we have to file, as well as on Google searches for tax filing assistance, further support the conclusion that the U.S. tax code is an increasingly impenetrable mess. The tax code is also constantly changing: According to a 2012 report from the National Taxpayer Advocate, Congress amended the Internal Revenue Code more than 4,430 times between 2001 and 2010 alone—an average of more than one change per day, including weekends.

As detailed in a new Mercatus Center report, the tax code’s expansion has been driven by the proliferation of so-called “tax expenditures”—government spending via special tax deductions, credits, exclusions, and exemptions. The child tax credit is a common (and well-intended) example, but there are many others. And there’s been a 35 percent increase in these provisions—from roughly 130 to approximately 175—since 2000 alone.

Every tax expenditure program comes with its own rules, requirements, prohibitions, and exceptions, and Congress is constantly changing the terms to address perceived shortcomings, expand or limit beneficiaries, and make other tweaks. Throw in related case law, and the end result is 50 times longer than War and Peace—and, believe it or not, probably more boring.

The economic costs of this complexity are enormous. For starters, there’s simply the time and money we have to spend complying with an ever-growing and always-changing tax system. According to the Tax Foundation, compliance with the federal tax code cost Americans roughly $536 billion in 2024–2025—or nearly 1.7 percent of 2025 gross domestic product. They conservatively derive this number from two sources: First, there’s $148 billion in out-of-pocket costs for software, tax preparers, and accountants. Second, there’s time: Using a reasonable hourly wage, the 7.1 billion hours Americans spent complying with the tax code translates to roughly $388 billion in lost productivity.

To put these figures in context, $536 billion is more than the corporate income tax will generate this year, around twice as much as Trump’s tariffs will raise, and more than 43 times the IRS budget. The 7.1 billion hours spent complying, meanwhile, is the equivalent to 3.4 million full-time American workers—almost the population of Los Angeles—doing nothing but tax paperwork for a full year. The National Taxpayers Union puts the total compliance burden at $464 billion for 2024, with the average filer spending 13 hours and $290 just to pay his taxes. For many Americans (including me—sigh), tax filing demands multiple spring weekends doing unpaid labor just so we can cut the government another check. (Yes, I am bitter.)

The Mercatus report finds extensive but less visible economic damage beyond the compliance headaches. Increased complexity reduces economic growth by discouraging entrepreneurship (it’s a clear barrier to entry) and encouraging businesses and individuals to make decisions based on obtaining favorable tax treatment instead of maximizing genuine productivity. A separate Mercatus paper estimated that these distortions reduce output by hundreds of billions of dollars each year. The tax code also encourages companies to spend billions on lobbying—for new tax benefits or to keep the ones they enjoy—instead of core business operations.

Tax complexity also makes it harder for people to comply with the law and encourages them to break it. When tax rules are an impossible labyrinth, errors inevitably multiply, outside auditing becomes more difficult, and scofflaws find it easier to hide in the legal weeds. As we’ve seen recently with Trump’s tariffs (see links for more), higher and more complex tax systems tend to feature more errors, avoidance and evasion. This happens with the U.S. income tax, too: Research here and abroad consistently shows a strong connection between tax complexity and evasion, avoidance, and unintentional misreporting. More such behavior also means more government resources devoted to enforcement instead of things like customer service and systems modernization.

Finally, tax complexity has created an increasingly large and lucrative tax preparation industry, as well as a perverse lobbying machine that’s against simplification. Tax filing is costly for individual U.S. taxpayers but a bonanza for software companies, accountants, tax lawyers, and other pros that help us navigate the government maze (for a fee). No surprise, then, that the increase in U.S. tax complexity has coincided with remarkable growth in the tax preparation industry:

Also unsurprisingly, the industry has fought efforts to simplify the system. Most notably, Turbo Tax parent Intuit and accounting giant H&R Block have spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying against efforts to make doing our taxes faster and easier.

The merits of some of those reform efforts are debatable, but the industry’s motivation surely isn’t.

The one big beautiful mess.

Despite the harms of increased U.S. tax complexity, last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) represents a depressing step backward from the simplifying Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Instead of simply extending the TCJA, Congress used the OBBBA to implement a slate of targeted tax expenditures and carve-outs—each with its own eligibility rules, phaseouts, income caps, documentation requirements, and sunset dates—that make the tax code harder to navigate and administer.

The quadrupling of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap, from $10,000 to $40,000, not only was bad economic policy (it should be zero) but also undermined the TCJA’s most important simplification achievement: raising the standard deduction and instituting a relatively low SALT cap so that far fewer filers would have the financial incentive to itemize. Now under the OBBBA, millions of Americans (mostly upper-middle-income households) are again itemizing their deductions—documenting every expense (state/​local taxes, charitable contributions, mortgage interest, medical costs, etc.) and filing more paperwork—to reduce their tax burden. This process not only means more time and money spent on taxes but also more opportunities for error, more incentive to fudge the numbers, and more exposure to an IRS audit.

The Tax Foundation preliminarily estimates that, compared to a 2025 baseline, the OBBBA will translate to roughly 6.9 million additional tax itemizers and a $1.7 billion increase in tax compliance costs this year, largely due to increasing the SALT deduction cap. The provision also ends in 2029, meaning Americans might have to rewire their financial planning again in just a few years—if, of course, blue state politicians and real estate lobbyists don’t get it extended further. Regardless, the SALT cap mess is precisely the kind of complicated and uncertain provision that makes the U.S. tax code such a burden.

A slew of other OBBBA carve-outs makes matters even worse. For example:

• As my Cato colleague Adam Michel wrote earlier this year, the “no tax on tips” and “no tax on overtime” deductions are each a witches’ brew of eligibility criteria, time and income limitations, and elaborate new IRS rules—and thus a “case study in how the tax code gets more complicated.”
• The new deduction for car loan interest — up to $10,000 annually for domestically assembled vehicles—requires additional paperwork (VIN verification, etc.) and phases out as income increases. (It’s also terrible economics.)
• The additional standard deduction for seniors, which allows eligible seniors to claim an additional $6,000 (single) to $12,000 (married), requires age verification, income calculations, and phase-out determinations.
• The new “Trump Accounts” for children, Michel explains separately, “offer only limited additional tax benefits compared to existing personal savings options and are wrapped in complex rules that will discourage widespread use.” They also add yet another tax-advantaged, special-purpose savings vehicle to the dozen-plus we already have (IRAs, Roth IRAs, 401(k)s, 529s, Coverdell ESAs, ABLE accounts, HSAs, FSAs, and on and on).

These and other provisions, such as requirements related to child tax credits, “foreign entities of concern” (FEOC), and partially repealed green energy subsidies, will increase tax complexity and compliance costs. The IRS estimates the OBBBA’s new provisions will generate nearly 26 million additional compliance hours. The Yale Budget Lab calculates that just the tips, overtime, and auto loan provisions will add almost two hours to many Americans’ tax compliance burden (and one hour on average) when compared to simply extending TCJA. And tax experts from Cato, the Tax Foundation, the Tax Law Center at NYU, the Brookings Institution, AEI, and the Manhattan Institute have each warned that the OBBBA carve-outs will substantially increase tax compliance costs going forward.

Problems are already arising. Earlier this month, for example, the Wall Street Journal reported that American taxpayers appear to be substantially overreporting their tax-free overtime, and that nearly twice as many people are reporting overtime than the 2025 OBBBA budgeting expected. Some of this might simply be due to the subsidy encouraging more overtime work (itself an economic distortion), but a lot of it is probably related to complexity:

Adding to the problem here is that, “in the race to implement the tax cuts,” the IRS hasn’t required U.S. employers to report to the agency or to their employees whether the latter had received qualifying overtime. Without this “cornerstone of tax compliance,” they add, “confusion and fudging can take hold.” They even interviewed one local tax preparer who claimed to have lost clients because she resisted such, ahem, fudging.

It’s textbook stuff. Sigh.

To be clear, not everything in the OBBBA was bad on this front. It repealed various green energy credits from the Inflation Reduction Act, each of which had its own murky compliance burdens. And, of course, it made much of the tax-simplifying TCJA permanent. Those are genuine wins, but they’re heavily tainted by the losses—especially when compared to a simple TCJA-extending alternative.

Summing it all up.

The U.S. tax code is a costly mess. Everyone seems to know it and—save the tax preparers and subsidy lobbyists—hate it. Yet Congress can’t resist making things worse because it’s an easy way to reward friends and punish enemies.

On the bright side, it’s possible that AI will reduce our tax compliance burdens in the future—stories have proliferated this season about people using Claude, ChatGPT and other versions of the technology to save time and money on their taxes. But this is a relatively small silver lining: Not only does AI also cost money, but it’s also not available to all taxpayers or guaranteed to be error-free. It’s also only as good as its users, who will still need to ask the right questions and spend countless hours collecting and parsing whatever paperwork they feed into the machine.

AI also won’t touch the economic distortions and bad incentives that a complex tax code creates—including for more evasion—and might actually serve as an excuse to lard on even more complexity. (“My new subsidy is fine, Senator; AI will figure out the tax forms.”) Indeed, as the Tax Foundation found, 94 percent of tax returns are prepared using software and 90 percent are filed electronically, yet compliance costs keep rising because “efficiency gains from increased computing speeds have proved no match for tax complexity, which increases steadily decade after decade.” In other words, AI might help you calculate your overtime subsidy, but it won’t collect the documentation or fix the reason you need to calculate it. (And it won’t be there if the IRS ever comes knocking, either.)

The only real solution is structural tax reform. The obvious place to start—especially for a libertarian like me—is nixing most of the targeted subsidies (especially corporate welfare) now buried in the tax code. Taxes should be about efficiently raising revenue, not social or economic engineering. Yet there are also more practical, less political reforms available. As Michel lays out in a recent briefing paper, for example, complexity on the personal income side would be significantly reduced if Congress simply consolidated the six different child-related subsidies and the 15 different education credits into one benefit each, turned the dozen-plus savings and retirement programs into three (employer-based, individual IRA, and universal savings account), and eliminated all itemized deductions (and, if possible, lowering tax rates with the additional revenue). That alone would go a long way to fixing our tax complexity mess, boosting economic efficiency, too.

It wouldn’t, however, make for a great campaign soundbite, deliver targeted benefits to influential political groups, and let lobbyists and tax prep companies collect their annual $350 billion tithe via the complex system they helped create.

Markets FTW

Satellite internet is an ideal technology for a sparsely populated nation like Argentina, with 47 million people spread out over an area roughly one-third the size of the United States. But until Javier Millei took power in 2023, it was forbidden, and the country had spent $7 billion laying fiber-optic cables. But Millei opened Argentina’s market to satellite-internet providers such as Starlink, and within 18 months, 2 million Argentinians signed up. As Federico Sturzenegger, the country’s minister of deregulation, wrote recently, “Mining and energy operations became more efficient, tourism expanded (a lodge owner in Patagonia told me recently he now gets clients who come precisely because they know they can work remotely), and precision agriculture became viable by simply mounting a satellite dish on farm machinery.”

Chart(s) of the Week

American families are getting richer (and, no, not because we’re overworked)(more)

SHOCK: tariffs did raise U.S. prices (more)

Competition FTW:

U.S. manufacturers don’t like Trump’s tariffs

There’s a more immediate reason to pay attention to Locke’s thinking. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a powerful new tool for expressing ourselves, building new products, and offering novel services. This new modality of labor has ignited legal skirmishes over the extent to which the government may or should interfere with the development and use of AI. 

Consider the ongoing row between the Department of Defense and Anthropic. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth a Supply Chain Risk following Anthropic’s insistence that the government not use its models for domestic mass surveillance and the operation of lethal autonomous weapons, even if those uses would be lawful. Judge Rita F. Lin of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California stayed that designation. In doing so, Judge Lin opened the door for the company to continue its work with the federal government. 

Judge Lin’s conclusion rested on several prongs. She found that the evidence indicated that Anthropic was punished for publicly critiquing the government’s negotiating posture. She also determined that “[n]othing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government.” More generally, she condemned the idea that the power of the state should be used for the punishment or suppression of disfavored expression. Anthropic was also deemed likely to succeed on its challenges under the Fifth Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act. 

It’s unlikely to be the last time questions arise around how the government may dictate private creation and use of AI. (Indeed, there is a separate court proceeding between DoD and Anthropic on this same issue but under a different statute.) Today’s AI is the worst AI we’ll ever use. Today’s rate of AI adoption is the lowest it will ever be. Today’s intensity of AI use is also the weakest it will ever be. For the foreseeable future, every day will mark a new high point in the number of people using increasingly capable AI systems for an ever wider range of tasks. That fact will inevitably invite government attempts to limit or otherwise direct that use. 

You, your friends, and your loved ones may currently be thinking that AI is fairly useless. You may scoff at the idea that accessing these tools would ever justify an extensive legal fight. After all, didn’t you read recently that AI couldn’t ? (Note that this shortcoming is no longer true of advanced models, but that doesn’t stop AI skeptics from citing it as evidence of its purported flaws). If that’s your stance, my hunch is that there’s little I’ll be able to do to change your mind. I’ll instead invite you to think of your children and their children. For better and worse, they will lean on AI tools from a young age and likely to their benefit. Tools like Amira (), Flourish (emotional-resilience AI app), and Waymo (autonomous vehicle) will increasingly help students learn, adapt, mature, and, to be blunt, thrive. Allowing excessive government interference with such tools risks delaying or even denying their full use by current and future Americans.

Before the government comes for our AI, now’s the time to consider how the first principles of our constitutional order may apply to safeguard our use of this novel tool. This exercise warrants much more analysis than a humble essay. There’s much work to be done on the nexus between access to AI tools and self expression, on the right of association, and the right to access information. My aim is merely to start this prophylactic exercise — building a layered defense against any attempted undue intrusions by the state. My hope is that others will join the effort and contribute to the surrounding AI use, building a wall of fundamental legal protections. To start, I’ll focus on AI development and consider it as an extension of our labor and, consequently, as a form of property. In anticipation of mapping out that argument in greater detail in further pieces, I’ll begin the process by pointing to four key lessons on property from Locke, briefly identifying how they relate to battles over AI. 

Lesson 1: AI tools will increasingly be a product of our own labor, lending support to the idea of personalized AI as a form of property subject to heightened protection 

Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this “labour” being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others. 

Under Locke’s labor-mixing theory, AI tools will increasingly take on the attributes of property. We’re in the early stages of personalizing AI tools to our values, personal dreams, and professional goals. Tools today allow users myriad measures to tailor AI to their individual whims. The means of personalization will only increase with time. AI agents of the near future may have access to your emails, texts, files, docs, etc. (all with your consent). The resulting functionalities will neatly and specifically align with each user. As this individualization deepens, the bar for government intervention into AI access and use should increase. 

Lesson 2: AI tools carry liberty interests that likewise justify property protections. 

Man … hath by nature a power … to preserve his property—that is, his life, liberty, and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men. 

As recognized by Judge Lin, the liberty interest protected by the Fifth Amendment covers “the right to follow a chosen profession free from unreasonable government interference.” She asserted that the government’s hasty and legally baseless designation of Anthropic as a Supply Chain Risk stopped the AI lab from offering its tools to many customers. This prohibition did not follow from a sufficiently detailed and thorough process. As states and the federal government consider other limitations on how and when people and private entities offer AI services, this case and Locke’s conclusion ought to come to mind. AI tools can be interwoven with fundamental and essential acts of labor. Economists predict a world in which many Americans may be able to launch entire businesses with a team of AI agents. In such a setting, it will be imperative that governments adhere to clear process requirements before inhibiting such uses.

Lesson 3: The government has a role to play in ensuring broad access to the AI tech stack 

As much as any one can make use of any advantage of life before it spoils, so much he may by his labour fix a property in. Whatever is beyond this is more than his share, and belongs to others. Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy. 

Locke took issue with individuals amassing more property than they could make productive use of. This concern may map onto several domains of the AI tech stack. For one, there’s a dearth of quality training data. As massive studios abuse copyright law as a shield to prevent more exhaustive AI training, this dearth of data will only become more dire. As access to quality data increases, startups will find the barriers to entry grow higher and higher. This will not only concentrate power in the hands of a few firms but diminish the likelihood of new innovation. 

Notably, the Founders, perhaps channeling Locke, regarded intellectual property as a means to an end: the generation and diffusion of knowledge. This functional vision of property conflicts with that of those who seek to generate recurring rents from their hoards of data. As courts continue to debate whether the fair use exception of the Copyright Act of 1976 covers training data, Locke may be a useful citation. 

It may also be the case that single firms controlling ever more quantities of scarce computational resources become a Lockean concern. There’s little question that such compute will likely be used. The more important inquiry is whether there are sufficient means for researchers, scientists, and others to conduct basic R&D that has traditionally been essential to human flourishing. Given this tension, there’s a need to investigate what constitutes “spoilage” in the context of access to and control over computational resources. 

Lesson 4: The purpose of the government is the protection of property, defined broadly. 

Men being, as has been said, by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent, which is done by agreeing with other men, to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living, one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any that are not of it. 

Locke’s social contract is not a grant of power to the state. It’s a leash on it. Citizens trade a portion of their natural freedom for the assurance that their lives, liberties, and estates will be protected from interference, whether by fellow citizens or by the government itself. That bargain doesn’t dissolve when the property at issue is novel or poorly understood. A government that brands an AI company an enemy of the state for expressing disagreement—as the Hegseth Defense Department attempted—inverts the Lockean order entirely. So does a state legislature that restricts which AI tools its citizens may use, or a federal agency that dictates which AI services a private firm may offer, without clear statutory authority and rigorous process. The purpose of government is not to manage innovation. It is to secure the conditions for individuals to innovate freely. As AI becomes more deeply interwoven with how Americans work, learn, and live, that foundational obligation grows more urgent.

Conclusion 

None of this is to say that AI regulation is always illegitimate. Locke himself recognized that property rights carry limits and that the government has a genuine role in preventing the monopolization of resources the community depends on. The concern is not regulation per se. It is a regulation that outruns its justification by arriving before the evidence, foreclosing the technology before its benefits are understood, and insulating the powerful from competition that would otherwise discipline them. That is the pattern worth resisting.

The Anthropic case is an early and unusually clear example of government overreach in the AI context. Most future cases will be murkier. They will arrive dressed in the language of safety, of consumer protection, of national security. Those justifications will sometimes be real. Distinguishing genuine regulatory purpose from pretext, incumbency protection, or hostility to disfavored speakers will be the central jurisprudential challenge of the next decade. Locke’s framework won’t resolve every case. But it establishes the baseline: the burden falls on the government, not the citizen.

Legal scholars have a particular obligation here. The courts hearing these cases are not steeped in AI’s technical architecture. They will need doctrinal frameworks that translate first principles into workable legal tests. The labor-mixing theory, the liberty interest analysis, and the anti-hoarding logic of Lesson 3 can be developed into coherent doctrinal arguments that judges can apply without becoming engineers. That translation work is overdue.

This essay is an invitation. The argument sketched here is deliberately incomplete. What it offers is a direction and a starting premise: that the same constitutional tradition that has protected property, labor, and expression for two and a half centuries is up to the task of protecting the tools Americans will increasingly depend on to do all three. The question is whether enough people will take that premise seriously before the regulatory window closes.

Of the many and often conflicting narratives swirling in Washington to justify this war, none beggar belief more than the claim that this was done to liberate the Iranian people. The notion that Washington actively supported Iranian self-determination contradicts the historical record of US Middle East policy—including in Iran.

For more than eight decades, Washington has rooted its regional strategy in the “myth of authoritarian stability”—the belief that select autocratic states are the best guarantors of regional stability and US interests in the Middle East.

Arguments in favor of supporting such actors have taken many forms, ranging from the belief that the region’s inhabitants are incapable of self-governance to the claim that support for regional dictators will lead them to adopt pro-US policies. But the basic logic has remained relatively constant: dictators are the best guarantors of regional stability and US strategic interests in the Middle East.

The United States has consistently sought to expand its authoritarian client network by acting against adversarial governments in the region with the objective of installing more compliant regimes. Since the end of World War II, Washington has pursued regime change in the Middle East on average once per decade. The governments residing within the US-led regional order also push the United States toward status quo policies to advance their own interests, echoing the same pro-authoritarian rationales used by Washington to justify continued American support.

Freedom, therefore, was never the objective in Iran. Washington initiated the war hoping to decisively subdue Iran—the chief antagonist operating outside the US-led regional order—and, if possible, co-opt Tehran into its network of authoritarian client states. Thus far, it has achieved neither. As the costs of this war become more evident, so too will the chasm between reality and the rhetoric used to justify it.

The myth of authoritarian stability has shaped Washington’s approach to the Middle East since it first became deeply involved in the region’s affairs beginning in the twentieth century. Such policies have helped sustain authoritarianism across the region.

During the Cold War, cooperation with such autocrats was deemed necessary in order to prevent encroachment by the Soviet Union and sustain the free flow of oil out of the Middle East, leading to both Moscow and Washington competing for client states while subverting attempts at self-determination. After the Cold War, the United States emerged as the unrivaled power in the Middle East and entrenched its authoritarian patron-client network to preserve American regional predominance.

The United States doubled down on its pro-authoritarian policies following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, viewing these autocrats as essential partners in combatting global terrorism. Although talk of democracy promotion in the Middle East through regime change in Iraq was ubiquitous in the rhetoric of the Bush administration, this narrative only emerged in force after the decision to invade was already made. It was primarily a hollow legitimizing mechanism adopted by Washington to convince the public that such a war was necessary when other justifications proved fictitious. After the 2011 Arab uprisings, Washington depicted surviving autocrats as the only forces capable of reestablishing order following mass upheaval and state disintegration in Syria, Yemen, and Libya. Today, these authoritarian client states are thought to provide the United States with a comparative advantage in the region as Washington purports to pivot its focus toward China.

The myth of authoritarian stability gets things backward: rather than being the solution to the region’s problems, authoritarian regimes are responsible for producing and exacerbating some of the greatest problems in the region, and Washington’s resolute backing allows them to act with relative impunity both at home and abroad. These relationships are not necessary to protect US interests in the Middle East. In fact, they jeopardize US interests by reinforcing the root causes of unrest and conflict in the Middle East, entangling Washington in the region’s problems, and inciting hostility toward the United States.

US policy toward pre-1979 Iran epitomizes the myth of authoritarian stability and its deficiencies, while its policies since the Iranian revolution have relied overwhelmingly on coercion in the pursuit of compliance—often producing the opposite effect.

Before the 1979 revolution that established the Islamic Republic, Iran, under the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was central to US Middle East policy during the Cold War. Like elsewhere in the region, Washington viewed rising nationalist sentiment inside Iran as concerning, fearing it would create inroads for the Soviet Union to expand its influence. At the forefront of Iranian nationalism was the National Front, led by Mohammad Mosaddegh, who criticized foreign interference inside Iran, particularly external control of the country’s oil sector. After becoming prime minister in 1951, Mossadegh’s boldest initiative was nationalizing the Iranian oil industry, which at the time was dominated by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC)—later known as British Petroleum (BP).

Washington and London feared that Mossadegh nationalizing the AIOC would spark a wave of nationalization in the Gulf and boost pro-Soviet sentiments across the region. Though Mossadegh was not a communist, Washington believed deteriorating conditions and the weakening of the Shah within Iran could strengthen the communist Tudeh party domestically. Ultimately, the CIA and Britain’s MI6 orchestrated Operation Ajax, coupling a widespread propaganda effort to weaken Mossadegh with coordinating anti-government protests and orchestrating a military coup that ultimately overthrew him in 1953.

Once reinstated, the Shah’s Iran joined Saudi Arabia as the foundation of Richard Nixon’s “Twin Pillar” policy in the Gulf until 1979. Between Nixon and his successor, Gerald Ford, Washington approved roughly $17 billion in weapons to Tehran—approximately $120 billion in 2025 dollars. The Shah ruled Iran with an iron fist until the 1979 revolution, which removed Tehran from America’s sphere of influence. At the time, Jimmy Carter did not want to abandon the Shah, whom he referred to as “an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.” Carter’s special envoy to Tehran, General Robert Huyser, urged Iran’s military commanders to “kill as many demonstrators as necessary to keep the shah in power.” Ultimately, Washington could not save the Shah, and he was forced to flee the country in January 1979, after which the Islamic Republic of Iran, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, replaced the monarchy, also ruling with an iron fist and animated by hostility to the United States.

Since 1979, Iran has operated outside the US-led regional order, and the relationship between Tehran and Washington has remained deeply antagonistic. Washington’s approach to Iran since the revolution has relied overwhelmingly on coercion, namely, trying to isolate and pressure Tehran politically, economically, and militarily into compliance. Paradoxically, this approach has often hardened Iran’s resistance to the United States and undermined attempts at reform.

At the core of the Islamic Republic is a “resistance culture” against external interference in Iranian affairs. Within the regime, there are two competing camps—pragmatists who favor more engagement with the West to alleviate sanctions and isolation, and hardliners who prioritize resistance through defiance and military power. Hawkish US policies have historically empowered regime hardliners by fueling their resistance narrative. Iranian foreign policy often reflects internal regime politics, namely, competition between these two camps. As Washington has increased its pressure on Tehran, so too has the balance of power inside the Islamic Republic often tilted in favor of hardliners, leading to a more militarized Iranian foreign policy.

The relationship between the regime and Iranian society is also fraught with tension. The Islamic Republic is a brutal dictatorship, and its legitimacy is fiercely contested by large segments of the Iranian population—particularly among younger generations. Yet, opposition to the regime remains bitterly fragmented, undermining its effectiveness. US policies have often further undermined the opposition, namely through sanctions. US sanctions have dealt great damage to Iran’s middle class, which has historically been a source of moderation and critical to the overall reform movement within the country. Ideologically divided and materially underequipped, the Iranian opposition has yet to coalesce into a coherent political force.

The current war should be viewed within this context of domestic and regional contestation. Operation Epic Fury is the culmination of decades of policy inertia and special interests pushing the United States and Iran toward confrontation. The series of blows to Iran’s strategic position in the more than two years since Hamas’ terror attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel’s war in Gaza, and subsequent Israeli operations targeting Tehran’s regional partners and the Islamic Republic directly further accelerated this momentum. Both Israel and the United States hoped to capitalize on Tehran’s vulnerability and provided a host of fluid and often contradictory narratives to justify a pre-determined course of action.

One of these narratives was liberating the Iranian people. This narrative emerged following mass protests against the regime beginning in December 2025, spurred by a growing energy crisis inside Iran. Trump rhetorically embraced the protests—on at least eight occasions, he urged the Iranian people to continue their marches, claiming help was on the way. The regime ultimately crushed these protests via force by mid-January 2026. Trump seemingly hoped to rekindle them through war, telling the Iranian people, “Now is the time to seize control of your destiny, and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach. This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”

There is considerable evidence that Trump hoped to eliminate Khamenei and replace him with a subservient authority, akin to what he did in Venezuela. Yet, after almost seven weeks of war, the United States and Israel have failed to effect regime change in Tehran. Despite assassinating Ayatollah Ali Khamenei within the first 24 hours of the war, the regime has not collapsed, nor does US intelligence believe it would collapse even if Washington escalated to a full-scale war. Given this reality, Trump has had to walk back his claim that he must “be involved” in selecting the next Supreme Leader to guarantee they are “reasonable to the United States.”

The domestic balance of power inside Tehran has now shifted firmly in favor of regime hardliners—they believe they are creating a new status quo between Tehran and Washington, and that this is only possible by maintaining pressure on the United States until the mounting political and economic costs force the United States to retreat. Instead of eliminating the regime, the war has empowered a new, more hawkish generation within its ranks—one that is far more likely to use even greater force if Iranians return to the streets following the war.

For the Islamic Republic, this fight has been existential. For the United States, it was a war of choice. Tactical victories did not translate into strategic successes, which explains the threats (partially carried out) to expand the war to systematically destroy civilian targets.

The long-term ramifications of this war remain unknown. But reality continues to cast doubt on the notion that Washington initiated this war to liberate the Iranian people—US Middle East policy remains rooted in continuity, not change. It should go without saying that the Iranians, like all people, deserve to live free and determine their own future. But by exploiting domestic opposition to the regime to justify this war, Washington merely uses them as political pawns.

The United States cannot manufacture a new status quo inside Iran—it must be self-sustaining and come from within, not externally imposed via war.

The president’s fiscal 2027 budget is out, and I have two reactions.

The first will sound familiar: Like so many budgets before it, this is not a serious effort to put America’s government on a sustainable path.

The second is more important: It would be a mistake to dismiss it as just another unserious document. That is exactly how we got here.

Start with what the new budget does and does not do.

It’s not a comprehensive fiscal plan.

It covers only about one-third of federal spending, focusing heavily on discretionary choices and largely ignoring the autopilot spending that drives our long-term debt.

The headline item is defense spending.

The administration proposes a jump of $445 billion to reach $1.5 trillion.

That’s a 42% increase in one year, the largest since the Korean War, raising defense spending to roughly 4.4% of GDP.

This is not a onetime surge that will simply recede when things calm down in Iran.

It’s an expansion of the spending base.

Bureaucracies and procurement contracts do not shrink after a buildup.

And procurement cycles, contracting and industrial capacity do not scale quickly. The Pentagon cannot efficiently absorb that kind of increase overnight.

So, whatever one thinks about our national security needs, this budget commits the country to trillions in additional cumulative spending layered atop existing obligations.

The fiscal commitment is permanent even if the operational absorption is slow.

The rest of the proposed budget is largely cosmetic.

The Trump administration calls for cutting roughly 10% from nondefense discretionary spending, but these are the same kinds of proposals that appear every year of Republican administrations and rarely survive Congress and the appropriations process.

They are politically easy to announce, difficult to enact and — if they were to survive — insufficient to change the fiscal trajectory.

More importantly, this budget avoids the core problems.

It proposes no meaningful reforms to Social Security or Medicare, the drivers of our debt.

It offers no comprehensive tax plan.

It does not present a coherent 10-year path for deficits or debt.

It is, in effect, a partial spending request without any underlying fiscal architecture.

Republicans must choose. They cannot implement endless tax cuts, raise defense spending by 42% and also refuse to reform Social Security and Medicare. Something has to give.

Cutting foreign aid, trimming waste or reducing immigration-related expenses won’t begin to close the gap in any meaningful way.

Democrats face the same reckoning.

They cannot be the party of expanded entitlements, climate spending coupled with degrowth demands, student debt relief and the preservation of every program without pushing America further toward a fiscal disaster. Increasing taxes on the wealthy is not a fiscal plan.

The arithmetic does not come close to closing a gap of this magnitude even under the most optimistic assumptions.

The presidential budget relies on overly optimistic assumptions of its own, the likes of which have characterized federal budgeting for decades.

Economic growth projections of around 3% are treated as baseline despite a workforce that is barely growing and policy choices that actively constrain the labor supply.

That would require sustained productivity growth at levels we have rarely achieved outside of exceptional periods.

AI may well boost productivity, but assuming that it will deliver decadelong 3% growth is not serious budgeting.

This is not merely an accounting problem. When markets do not believe official growth projections, they immediately revise down their expectations for future tax revenues and therefore expect smaller future fiscal surpluses.

Those revised expectations are reflected in bond prices and, ultimately, in the price level. Optimistic budget assumptions produce bad spreadsheets and can erode fiscal credibility in real time.

Meanwhile, the bill is already arriving. Interest costs have nearly tripled since 2001, and within a decade, they will consume nearly one-third of federal tax revenue.

Within a few decades, interest could absorb closer to two-thirds of annual taxes — and that’s under relatively benign assumptions about interest rates.

This is the quiet crisis unfolding.

It is the interaction of too much debt, rising interest costs and persistent political unwillingness to act.

Knowing all this, it would be easy to treat this budget as one more unserious document and move on. But that would miss the point, because it is not an outlier. It is part of a pattern that has been building for years and has only accelerated since the Great Recession.

That pattern must end. Year after year, presidents of both parties submit budgets that avoid necessary tradeoffs. Year after year, Congress fails to impose discipline. And year after year, the debt trajectory worsens, imposing a growing burden on the vibrancy of the private sector.

After decades of struggling under one of the strictest gun-control schemes in the country, residents of the nation’s capital might have expected to breathe a sigh of relief when President Donald Trump was reelected. After all, he boasts of “standing up for” the right to keep and bear arms, and his Department of Justice is taking some bold steps in that direction — including filing a lawsuit against D.C.’s ban on many semiautomatic weapons.

The Department should also be joining locals in celebrating the recent court decision in Benson v. District of Columbia. The case began when Tyree Benson was arrested for possessing a gun with a detachable, 30-round magazine. That was illegal because Benson had not registered the gun or obtained a carry license. But Benson had a compelling defense: the District would not have let him register the gun because it bans magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds — and that restriction is itself unconstitutional under the Second Amendment.

D.C.’s highest court agreed and, on March 5, a three-judge panel struck down the ban. A two-judge majority observed that “about half of the magazines in the hands of our citizenry” hold more than 10 rounds and “come standard with the most popular firearms sold in America today.” The Constitution does not let a locale ban such “arms in common and ubiquitous use by law-abiding citizens across this country.” The Benson decision now stands as a monument to common sense, protecting magazines that many Americans rely on.

Surprisingly, the court reached this decision with the encouragement of Pirro’s office. Though she had initially prosecuted Benson, she ultimately agreed that the District’s law violated his rights.

Then something even less expected happened: Pirro asked the court to press rewind. It backed the District’s request for the court to rehear the case en banc, meaning all seven of its judges would participate in the decision.

It is anyone’s guess whether Washington gunowners will manage to run the court’s gauntlet a second time. One of the three judges who heard the case the first time dissented from the decision. All four of the judges who would join the case, if reheard, were appointed by Democratic presidents. Letting the decision stand would vindicate the Second Amendment — rehearing would roll the dice with virtually no chance of achieving a better constitutional ruling.

Pirro attempted to explain her stance. While noting that she continued to believe the District law is unconstitutional, she fretted that the court’s decision went too far, saying it should have merely limited the law’s application to extremely high-capacity magazines. (Never mind that the law the court invalidated is far broader than that.) Further, she argued that the law wasn’t what kept Benson from registering his gun. Had he gone down to the station, the police could have “confiscate[d] the prohibited large-capacity magazine while registering the firearm itself.” Judge Deahl, the author of the majority opinion, deemed this poppycock, writing that the District could “with a snap of its fingers” comply with the Constitution by “no longer conditioning the registration and licensure of firearms upon their firing capacity.”

Setting aside the technicalities of D.C.’s gun-registration laws, Second Amendment advocates are wondering why Pirro is working overtime to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The National Association for Gun Rights said her support for rehearing “risks undermining” the Benson decision. Gun Owners of America warned: “Stop adopting anti-gun positions, DOJ!” The Reload noted that Pirro’s brief “did not even need to exist.”

This is not the first time Pirro has shown hostility toward the Second Amendment. Back in 2004, she said, “There is no legitimate purpose in possessing an assault weapon other than to kill as many people as quickly as possible.” Two months ago, she threatened: “I don’t care if you have a license in another district, and I don’t care if you’re a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else. You bring a gun into this District, count on going to jail, and hope you get the gun back.” Following backlash, Pirro put out a social media video casting herself as “a proud high-heeled gun owner.”

Those heels are doing quite the dance on the Second Amendment. Should President Trump nominate her to lead the DOJ, every American gun owner will get to know the dangers of Pirro’s pirouettes, facing an attorney general who voices support for their rights while undermining them at every turn.

Between ages 12 and 17, I was obese, socially isolated and addicted to the fantasy video game RuneScape. I was home-schooled, lived with just my mother and rarely went outside. I logged over 10,000 hours in that game alone, nearly a third of my waking life during those years.

That doesn’t include countless additional hours I spent on other video games, television and, of course, social media. I made friends through online chatrooms and pen pal websites because I had none in real life. I averaged well over 10 hours a day on devices.

If ever there were a case study for the claim that screens destroy young minds, I would seem to fit it. And yet here I am as a 26-year-old developmental psychologist with a doctorate from Harvard. I am in good mental and physical health, with deep friendships online and off.

Maybe I’m the exception. Or maybe the harms are overblown.

Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling book “The Anxious Generation” argues that smartphones and social media have “rewired” childhood and caused an epidemic of mental illness. The book has helped inspire social media restrictions in Australia and several American states, and shaped how a generation of parents thinks about technology.

Restricting screen time and social media access are reasonable aspirations for child-rearing. But as a matter of public policy, the case for regulation rests on a scientific foundation far weaker than its proponents claim.

Haidt’s argument relies on the observation that adolescent mental health indicators worsened around 2010, when smartphones and social media apps popular with young people — such as Instagram and Snapchat — started becoming widespread. But correlation is not causation, and research suggests that some of the supposed mental health crisis is an epidemic of overdiagnosis. Wealthy Western democracies with the highest smartphone adoption rates have also seen expanded access to psychiatric services and a cultural shift toward identifying and labeling psychological distress, as Abigail Shrier argues in her 2024 book “Bad Therapy.”

Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts. If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.

Many studies have reported on how social media use is associated with mental health problems among the young. However, a 2024 analysis in JAMA Pediatrics of 143 studies featuring data from over 1 million adolescents worldwide found that links between social media use and poor mental health among youth were small, inconsistent across studies and drawn mostly from nonclinical community samples.

One reason studies report mixed findings is that many fail to account for factors such as personality traits and social support that independently predict heavy screen use and mental distress. For example, social media use may be associated with anxiety and loneliness, not because it causes them, but because socially anxious individuals are more likely to seek out connections online. Statistically controlling for such factors often accounts for the relationship between social media and mental health.

I am not dismissing the possibility that some children are harmed by some content in some contexts. Many in my generation have had online exposure to graphic, violent and sexual imagery that no child should encounter. But the blanket claim that social media use drives generational mental illness does not align with the evidence.

Screens didn’t cause my problems. They were coping mechanisms for preexisting problems: loneliness, family instability, social anxiety, an absent father. The variables that predict youth mental health are not hours spent on social media but social support, resilience and a sense of belonging. To help struggling adolescents, the evidence points toward strengthening those capacities, not confiscating phones.

During my most isolated years, online connections were the only positive relationships I had. Internet forums helped me navigate college applications and taught me about calorie-counting, which sparked a weight-loss journey that changed my life. Even in RuneScape, I built discipline and goal-setting habits that I later transferred to academics and research.

Concerns about social media are well-intentioned. But sincerity is not proof. The dramatic assertions that children’s lives would be transformed by reducing social media exposure are more akin to moral panics over past technologies and obsessions — from radio to comic books to video games — fueled by weak social science and strong public emotion. In the United States, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, youth mental health has been improving recently, despite no change in access to social media. The simplest explanation might be that social media is not as harmful as people think.

Iran’s regime has proven resilient, resilient enough to survive decapitation. Indeed, the assassination of “supreme leader” Ali Khamenei has empowered hardline elements within the country, in turn making it harder for Trump to resolve the war via coercive bargaining. As for forcing Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions or trade away its missile programme, the war has weakened internal voices within the Islamic Republic for that path. Depending on which day Trump’s envoys were speaking, the war was supposed to break the regime, or end its prerogative to enrich uranium, or terminate its missile programme. No dice.

Five weeks of pounding has resolved nothing, fixed nothing, achieved nothing momentous or constructive beyond attrition. And that wasteful attrition — including 1600 civilian dead and rising — has come at a price for America. The war consumes scarce military munitions that are needed in other theatres. It bottles up American forces at a time when China still menaces Taiwan. It enriches Russia, thereby weakening America’s bargaining hand against it. Operation Epic Fury may display the superpower’s capacity for destruction. But Iran’s defiance, its refusal to buckle to ever more strident threats, also makes Trump’s war an exercise in impotence, reducing Washington’s prestige. Iran’s regime is physically weakened but politically stronger, even more resolved to pursue a latent nuclear capability. If this is victory, or if victory somehow comes, it will taste of ashes.

The pyrrhic campaign has also inflicted a further harm. It has needlessly damaged U.S. alliances, reducing the amount of available cooperation in the future when America may need it. At the very time Washington ought rationally to prioritise its foreign policy efforts in a serious dialogue with Europe, instead the Trumpists are pleased to set relations on fire. They issue short-sighted public threats and recriminations against Britain, France and other European states. They insist that a condition of NATO is unquestioning support and base access for all operations anywhere. Unlike their forbears Dwight Eisenhower or Lyndon Johnson, they refuse to separate quarrels about individual wars from the need to sustain a wider relationship. This is mindless lashing out. It is symptomatic of a state that entered the war intoxicated with its sense of power, and deeply anxious about its own relative decline, only then to run up against its own limits.

As then, so now, various Washington hardliners decide that the obvious move is to bash Western Europe. Disappointed that their ill-conceived children’s crusade in the Middle East has faltered, they turn their rhetorical guns on other parties who were sceptical of the wisdom of the war to begin with, and who remain strangely reluctant to leap on the bandwagon now that the wheels are falling off.

The last time this happened in earnest, it was a faction in and around the court of President George W. Bush who decided that the rational response to bloody chaos in Iraq was to excoriate transatlantic allies publicly. Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s Secretary of Defence, lambasted “Old Europe”. Colin Powell, despite cultivating a reputation as the respectable face of the Bushites, threatened to punish France for its dissent after Baghdad fell in May, 2003. And now we have the embarrassing spectacle of Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush’s nuncio during that war, giving it a high school try. Here is the dismal fare he offers:

As it happens, the U.S. did pay ransom to the pirates for a time. And isn’t it rather Britain and France’s refusal to acquiesce now that is the source of his grievance, here? Isn’t it not their weakness but the quiet mettle of both countries’ governments that enrages this Fox News prophet, unleashing his pig-ignorance and pig-insolence?

Blunt words deserve a blunt response. Let’s start with the big one, discretely absent from Fleischer’s potted history. In September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany, the greatest threat to civilisation in history. The United States did not. Discuss. It stood aloof, refusing belligerence, content to be a hard bargaining arsenal, donating deficient destroyers in exchange for Britain’s west Atlantic bases. It waited to be attacked. It waited for Adolf Hitler to declare war upon it. And America could only lead an invasion of western Europe in the end because Britain had held out for five brutal years.

If the foreign policies of further back are dispositive of the value of countries like Britain, Fleischer will be intrigued to learn that it was British naval dominance of the nineteenth century, after the war of 1812, that screened the U.S. and enabled it to focus on growth by delaying its own naval expansion. You’re welcome.

Fleischer seems to think that the U.S. is a stranger to Realpolitik and compromise. It’s not a conversation he should invite. Who sold out who over Northern Ireland? Who signed the Doha Agreement? Who cut a large deal indeed with China in 1972? Who sponsored the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s and facilitated the arming of Bosnia’s jihadis in the 1990s? If the test of a country’s valour is its refusal to bargain with evil, it’s a test every great power flunks.

Unwisely, Fleischer wants to turn the botched military campaign of today into a general Socratic dialogue on the historical virtues and vices of the republic and its allies. He wants a bedtime story of American valour and the fecklessness of others. A reminder is due, therefore, that the countries he scorns bled for years in Afghanistan. Tell dead men’s families, from Britain to Denmark, about West European free-riding. Tell the many more maimed and psychically broken by the long war against the Taliban. Fleischer may also be unaware of British and West German divisions that helped hold the line against the Red Army throughout the Cold War, or the Royal Navy frigates and submarines that endured long, bleak deployments in the frigid, storm-ravaged Northeast Atlantic to provide the Alliance’s principal anti-submarine screen. Or perhaps he forgets to mention it.

Fleischer affects to hold Eastern European states in high regard. Yet under Bush, in the summer of 2008 as Russia invaded Georgia, the United States delayed and limited its response, turning up only after a safe interval when the aggressor had left the scene. And this despite Georgia’s participation in Operation Iraqi Freedom, precisely on the basis that the investment would earn repayment in U.S. patronage and protection.

Recall, too, that under Bush, the U.S. prioritised arms control agreements with Russia over the welfare of Chechnya, whom Moscow was brutally flaying. While we are on the topic, if you are an American super-patriot, isn’t the whole question of historical commitments to Eastern Europe rather a minefield, from Yalta and Budapest onwards?

The United States, despite its claims to singularity, is a normal (only larger) great power similar to the countries Fleischer denounces. It tends to pursue its interests, narrowly conceived, and sometimes deliberately stays out of fights that aren’t worth the candle, despite the expectations of third parties. 

Like Marco Rubio and Donald Trump, Fleischer wants to make the NATO alliance a mechanism for automatic allied support beyond the North Atlantic area, for any undertaking a president fancies. The whole point of that alliance, and one reason it survived, is that it is confined to the defence of the North Atlantic. NATO European allies are no more obliged to take part in operations beyond that area than the United States was obliged to help Portugal’s colonial war in Angola, or Britain’s in Malaysia. Or, indeed, Britain and France over Suez.

No matter how strongly Washington demands it, its transatlantic allies reserve the right not to participate in hubristic, self-defeating military campaigns. If the consequence is America’s abandonment of NATO, formal or otherwise, then alas that is how it will be. If the U.S. wants a more distant, more protectionist rearming Europe that tilts towards China, cuts off intelligence sharing and base access, and reduces its orders to U.S. arms firms, it can have it. Is that really the future America looks forward to?

If this makes unpleasant reading for Americans, that is precisely because it is the kind of conversation abroad that loud, warlike voices in the U.S. are encouraging. As it happens, there are those of us who are making a losing argument, that Europe’s best pathway for security is to offer a deal to Washington, to negotiate a gradual, orderly and cooperative burden shift, to offer the U.S. the main thing it says it wants in the region, a European-led defence, in exchange for time and help. But hostile, demagogic rhetoric and overt threats by Fleischer and his ilk are making it harder by the day to make that argument.

Washington would be better served listening to those Americans who warn that it is better to end all this truculence. It isn’t the unipolar era. The world is wide and full of friction. Quieter voices should be heard, who argue that the U.S. should concentrate its strength rather than pick fights everywhere, cultivate and bargain with allies rather than humiliate them, and show “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind”.

The American middle class has prospered in the era of open trade, and U.S. manufacturing job declines—driven mainly by productivity gains—long predate China’s WTO accession. The U.S. was the WTO’s chief architect and reaped significant economic and geopolitical value from the system. Its retreat, which began before the administration, ignored these realities and instead prioritized U.S. farm subsidies and trade remedies, often resisting the disciplines Washington demanded of others.

Fealty to these and other insular political issues stymied multilateral negotiations and motivated four separate U.S. administrations to neuter the WTO dispute settlement by blocking Appellate Body appointments. Washington’s participation in disputes has also ground to a halt. You can’t complain about the rules of the game after you stop playing and strangle the referee.

Worst of all, the U.S. has been a bad-faith abuser of the rules it helped write, blowing through tariff bindings and invoking narrow WTO exceptions for national security and balance-of-payments crises to maintain President Trump’s global tariff wall.

Mr. Greer is right to decry the WTO’s consensus problem and the abuse of certain rules by other WTO members. The institution does need reform. But members’ continued participation shows the institution isn’t dead. And reform can’t happen if the U.S. keeps pretending it didn’t help cripple the institution it’s now eulogizing.

He apparently is preparing to request $200 billion or perhaps even more from Congress to fund his war against Iran. In little more than five weeks, his lawless attack has achieved an unusual trifecta: destabilizing the Middle East, shocking the international energy market, and threatening the global economy—all for the benefit of a foreign nation rather than America.

So far congressional Republicans have refused to assert their constitutional responsibilities over the Iran war. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R‑LA) claimed that a declaration of war is “not required because it’s defensive in nature,” dressing Trumpian logic in Orwellian rhetoric. Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R‑OK), since confirmed as secretary of homeland security, justified his dereliction of duty: “We don’t need 535 commanders-in-chief.” No, but the Constitution empowers Congress to decide whether the one commander-in-chief has a war to fight.

Another oft-repeated argument is that the Islamic Republic has been at war with America, so the president is entitled to bomb, invade, and occupy it without congressional authority. It would be more accurate to admit that America has been at war with Iran for 73 years, beginning with the overthrow of its democracy in 1953. Washington supported the dictatorial shah, even urging Tehran to use lethal force against demonstrators in 1978; aided Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980, while ignoring its use of chemical weapons; participated in the infamous “tanker war,” defending oil shipments used to subsidize Baghdad; shot down an Iranian airliner in 1988, for which President George H.W. Bush refused to apologize; killed a top Iranian official in 2018, while he visited Iraq; and for decades imposed economic sanctions on Tehran, surrounded Iran with military bases, and issued military threats against the Islamist regime.

The president’s performance has been bizarre as well as hypocritical. He insists, as nations around the world stumble toward recession, that he acted for them, so it is up to them to get the oil they need. He removed sanctions on oil sold by Iran while threatening to wipe out Iranian civilization. He declared his support for the Iranian people while warning that he would bomb them back into “the Stone Ages.”

America’s founders would not have been surprised by such a performance. They revolted against not just Great Britain, but an entire monarchical system in which kings, emperors, queens, czars, and other royals ruled arbitrarily. Among monarchs’ chief crimes was callously taking their peoples into senseless wars for economic plunder, territorial aggrandizement, and personal glory—rather like Trump’s Iranian misadventure.

Those who drafted the Constitution wanted to ensure that America didn’t suffer similar travails. Although the president is the commander-in-chief of the military (not the country!), he is subject to Congress’s control. Indeed, its authority is transcendent. Article I, Section 8 provides that Congress is empowered “To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water; To raise and support armies … To provide and maintain a navy; To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces; To provide for calling forth the militia … To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia.”

George Washington, for whom the presidency was essentially designed, observed, “The Constitution vests the power of declaring war with Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject, and authorized such a measure.” Another strong president, Abraham Lincoln, agreed with the Constitution’s authors that war was “the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”

More than a century later, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia insisted, “Except for the actual command of military forces, all authorization for their maintenance and all explicit authorization for their use is placed in the control of Congress under Article I, rather than the president under Article II.” Other conservatives today denigrate Congress’s warpower, even claiming that wars are not wars. But, had the issue been a mere matter of semantics, the founders would have paid little attention to it.

Instead, they took the power to declare war quite seriously. Thomas Jefferson lauded the Constitution for providing an “effectual check to the dog of war by transferring the power of letting him loose.” At the Constitutional convention, Elbridge Gerry rejected proposals for expansive presidential warmaking power, stating that he “never expected to hear in a republic a motion to empower the Executive alone to declare war.” Several drafters explained that they sought to make it more difficult for the chief executive to act, in the words of George Mason “clogging rather than facilitating war.”

James Madison argued that the “fundamental doctrine of the Constitution [is] that the power to declare war is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature.” This system, said James Wilson, “will not hurry us into war,” but rather, “is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress; for the important power of declaring war is in the legislature at large.” Oliver Ellsworth looked at it from the other end, arguing that “it should be more easy to get out of war than into it.” Even Alexander Hamilton, the premier advocate of expansive executive power and quasi-monarchy, wrote in Federalist 69 that “the President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it.”

These sentiments are even more relevant today than in 1787 when the Constitution was drafted. The extraordinary impact and reach of America’s military makes it imperative to circumscribe executive warmaking. As Lord Acton famously observed, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The resulting danger afflicts even the best-intentioned actors, believers in American exceptionalism who imagine that they stand taller and see further, and thus are entitled to “rain down” hell upon an unclean world.

The revolutionary generation that vigorously debated and only narrowly ratified the Constitution would be horrified if confronted by the result of their labor. The Columbia law professor John Bassett Moore observed, “There can hardly be room for doubt that the framers of the Constitution when they vested in Congress the power to declare war, never imagined that they were leaving it to the executive to use the military and naval forces of the United States all over the world for the purpose of actually coercing other nations, occupying their territory, and killing their soldiers and citizens, all according to his own notions of the fitness of things, as long as he refrained from calling his action war or persisted in calling it peace.” In this century alone Washington has squandered trillions of dollars and thousands of lives in dubious wars. Hundreds of thousands of foreigners have died as a result. Many more have been injured, even maimed. The social and economic consequences have been incalculable. As we are seeing in the Persian Gulf today.

Nor is this the first time that foreign interests have manipulated American officials. After the French Revolution Paris sought to enlist the new American nation against Great Britain, creating sharp dissension within the Washington administration. A couple hundred years later an ambitious Iraqi exile played U.S. officials for fools and helped push the US into a disastrous war. Today Israel’s prime minister has gloried in dominating US policy and using Washington to achieve his 40-year ambition of waging war against Iran.

It is time for Congress to reassert its constitutional powers. War, absent instances of exigent self-defense, should never be left to one person, especially one who, like Trump, declared the only limits on his power to be “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” His willingness to wage an illegal war and threaten another nation’s destruction demonstrates Congress’s obligation to reassert its constitutional responsibilities. Legislators should start by rejecting the Trump administration’s request to fund its illegal Iran campaign. Money should be granted only to end rather than extend the combat.

War remains a terrible necessity, but only very rarely. Despite the chaos and instability of today’s world, America remains the most secure great power ever. Military action should always be a last resort, justified only by the most serious, even vital interests. Presidents have consistently proved that they cannot be trusted. Legislators should reassert their constitutional responsibilities.

Successive governments have kept pushing minimum wages up despite the evidence shifting. Westminster seems trapped in the comforting assumptions of the 2000s, when the Low Pay Commission’s (LPC) cautious increases seemed to lift pay without reducing headline employment. That bred a complacency that minimum wage rises might boost employment, or at least finance themselves through a happier, more committed workforce.

After two decades of dire productivity growth, it’s unclear why people still believe this. Fresh American evidence, drawing on state and local wage variation, suggests high minimum wages still reduce new hiring and shut off entry-level jobs. More pertinently, economists now find that there are other significant costs beyond any employment impacts.

Last week the national living wage rose again, to £12.71 an hour, given the government’s two-thirds-of-median-earnings target. Yet the LPC’s latest report, focused on the 2025 uplift, shows many harms beyond the simple employment effects, several of which hurt low-wage workers themselves.

The report depicts an ossified “low-hire, low-fire” labour market, in which companies most exposed to the wage floor have faced “weaker employment growth”, employers have cut recruitment and staff hours in response to the rise, and average hours for minimum wage workers remain below pre-pandemic levels.

This is where modern evidence shows how high minimum wages bite. Not through mass sackings, but slower hiring, weaker workforce attachment and fewer entry-level opportunities. Young people, who rely on first jobs to gain a foothold, suffer disproportionately, compounded now by Labour’s compression of special youth rates towards the national minimum.

Businesses are not charities. Mandate higher hourly pay and they must adapt. The report documents complaints from workers and unions about more “intense and challenging” work, employers changing shifts and increasing performance expectations. This might wring some extra output from staff. But it is by raising work intensity and reducing job quality, rather than the happy tale of investment-led productivity growth.

Minimum wage advocates seem to believe that a higher wage floor necessarily forces businesses to invest more in machinery and training. But many told the LPC that higher wage costs mean they simply “don’t have the funds to train people”, with 44 per cent of Federation of Small Businesses respondents saying they scaled back investment as the minimum wage rose. Add wage compression, which blunts the reward for promotion, upskilling or moving to other companies and you can see how higher wage floors can harm aggregate productivity.

Then there’s the workforce composition effect. Over time, the incentive shifts further against the inexperienced. Employers, quite rationally, prefer to hire workers who already have proven their productivity rather than take a punt on first-job candidates.

When squeezing or replacing workers is not enough, employers look to other ways to control costs. The report notes that more are resorting to zero-hours contracts and irregular shifts in low-wage industries. Some businesses axe non-wage benefits or other pay differentials. Sunday premiums get replaced by flat overtime rates, for instance. Once all adjustments are accounted for, many employees report being little better off.

Whenever I describe these effects, some retort that the LPC says many companies instead raise prices or eat lower profits. But these are not social freebies! Price increases are usually akin to a regressive sales tax. Lower expected profits deter business entry and experimentation. Indeed, when politicians boast that companies absorb the cost, they really say that some businesses will never be created, expanded or sustained.

Every year, increasing this wage floor is treated by ministers as a good news headline. Beneath it, the evidence shows our high minimum wage is undermining incentives for an efficient, dynamic economy.

After repeatedly winning reelection since 2010, Orban and his ruling party, Fidesz, now face a genuine electoral challenge from Peter Magyar and his center-right Tisza Party, which has led in the polls for more than a year while running on an anti-corruption platform. The result will allow the world to gauge Hungarians’ discontent with Orban’s brand of politics. It will also provide an answer to whether it’s possible for an opposition with broad support to win after 16 years under a government that rewrote election laws to its benefit while bringing much of the media under its influence.

The president’s interest in Orban’s political survival is certainly due in part to their rapport, but there’s a deeper nexus, too. Many of Trump’s supporters and allies — including Vice President JD Vance — see Hungary as a bastion of conservative and Christian values in a liberal and secular European Union.

For them, the election carries added significance. Hungary has served as a laboratory for policies promoted by many self-described national conservatives in the United States who want government to positively promote conservative values.

But regardless of the outcome, Orban has already shown that his vision of illiberal nationalism is a dead end that made Hungary poorer and less free.

The project began in 2010, when Fidesz won a two-thirds majority, giving it the power to change the constitution. As Orban put it before coming to power, “We have only to win once, but then properly.” Since then, he has spoken proudly of his ambition to build an “illiberal state,” pointing to countries such as Russia and China as models for the future.

And follow their model he did. To remove checks and balances on Orban’s power, Fidesz upended the judiciary and government agencies. It forced many judges into retirement and packed the constitutional court with loyalists. Key institutions were filled with partisans on unusually long terms, ensuring influence well beyond any single election cycle, and electoral laws were rewritten to hamstring the opposition.

It didn’t stop there. The organization Reporters Without Borders ranked Hungary 23rd in the world for press freedom in 2010. Today, it is 68th, thanks to the Orban government’s efforts to undermine independent outlets through punitive advertising taxes and by withdrawing permits and broadcast licenses.

In 2013, with the media and government firmly under Fidesz control, a takeover of civil society began. Hungary’s central bank gave the government roughly 900 million euros to set up a network of formally independent foundations that fund pro-Orban institutes and networks. In 2021, the government further entrenched itself by transferring universities, businesses and billions in assets to “public interest foundations” controlled by allies, placing this parallel power structure beyond democratic accountability.

The free-market economy, too, turned into a system of political favoritism. Through expropriation and selective taxes and regulations, independent businesses were pushed out. Private pension savings were seized, and foreign landowners lost key property rights. The government, meanwhile, steered public procurement, contracts and credit to a group of aligned oligarchs.

Lorinc Meszaros, a childhood friend of Orban who is the country’s richest man, symbolizes Hungary’s transformation into a state where economic success depends on proximity to power. He famously credited his fortune to “God, good luck and Viktor Orban.” Unsurprisingly, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index now ranks Hungary on par with China and Cuba.

This kleptocracy is Fidesz and Orban’s legacy. By their own stated goals — to make Hungary great, Christian and pro-family again — their model of governance has failed.

Despite receiving more E.U. funds per capita than almost any other country, Hungary’s economic growth rate has been slightly below several regional peers. Spending as much as 5.5 percent of gross domestic product on family support produced only a temporary uptick in the fertility rate to 1.61 births per woman in 2021, before falling to an estimated 1.31 in 2025, far below the 2.1 required to maintain a stable population. Religious affiliation has declined during Orban’s tenure, too, suggesting that politicizing religion through subsidies and legal privileges for favored denominations actually hurts religious adherence.

Today, Hungary is the only member of the European Union not classified as “free” on the Freedom House index.

After 16 years as a laboratory for post-liberal nationalism, the result in Hungary is clear: Sweeping aside institutional constraints on government in pursuit of grand visions of the common good unshackles the smallest, most sordid ambitions of rent-seeking and corruption.

As the scriptures Orban is so fond of quoting say: “Every tree is known by its own fruit.”

In 1972, Laird v. Tatum dismissed a challenge to Army domestic intelligence operations, ruling that a “chilling effect” on protected speech from the mere existence of a surveillance program was too speculative to constitute a cognizable injury.

In 2013, Clapper v. Amnesty International dismissed a challenge to NSA surveillance, ruling that lawyers, journalists and human rights organizations couldn’t prove their communications were actually being collected — even though the government’s surveillance architecture was specifically designed to make that proof impossible.

The result is a closed loop: you can’t sue to challenge surveillance that you can’t prove you’re subject to; you can’t prove you’re subject to it because the government keeps that secret; and the government uses your inability to prove it to defeat standing. The courts call this principled neutrality. Critics call it the structural insulation of the surveillance state from constitutional accountability.

The ground has now shifted beneath those doctrinal assumptions — and the government’s own watchdog has put the evidence on the record.

What the government admits

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, or PCLOB — Congress’ independent civil liberties watchdog inside the executive branch — published a comprehensive Section 702 oversight report in September 2023. The findings are damning, not least because they are self-inflicted.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702 is formally limited to targeting non‑U.S. persons located abroad. In 2022, it targeted 246,073 such persons — a 276% increase since 2013.

The intelligence community’s own general counsel has acknowledged that when targeting those persons, the government will “inevitably” collect communications of Americans who communicate with them. The scale of that incidental collection is unknown. The government has refused to estimate it for nine years, claiming it is “infeasible,” despite published cryptographic methodologies that could answer the question without compromising classified sources.

What is known: The FBI conducted up to 3.4 million warrantless back-door searches of Americans’ communications swept into 702 databases in 2021 alone. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court found this constituted “persistent and widespread violations” of governing rules. Among those queried: BLM protesters, donors to a congressional campaign, members of Congress, journalists and crime victims who had contacted the FBI to report crimes against themselves.

In January 2025, a federal-district court became the first in the country to hold that these warrantless backdoor searches ordinarily violate the Fourth Amendment. That ruling is now on appeal to the Second Circuit.

What researchers have established

Laird and Clapper treated “chilling effects” as inherently speculative. For decades, that skepticism had scholarly backing: Frederick Schauer, who wrote the leading theoretical account of chilling effects, acknowledged in 1978 that its behavioral assumptions were “most likely unprovable.”

The Snowden revelations of June 2013 changed that. They created a natural quasi-experiment — a sudden, documented shift in public knowledge of government surveillance — that researchers across disciplines have exploited to measure what courts assumed could never be measured.

Jonathon Penney’s 2016 study in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal found a statistically significant 20% drop in page views on Wikipedia for terrorism-related articles immediately following the Snowden revelations — a drop that persisted over time. Not self-reported fear: documented behavioral change in a wholly legal activity.

Economists Alex Marthews and MIT’s Catherine Tucker found statistically significant declines in Google searches for government-sensitive terms after June 2013 across the United States and 40 trading partners. Tucker, initially skeptical, concluded: “Our article shows that this chill is definitely happening.” Wayne State University’s Elizabeth Stoycheff demonstrated experimentally that surveillance awareness significantly suppresses minority political expression online, amplifying the well-documented “spiral of silence” effect within democratic discourse.

These behavioral findings converge with self-reported evidence from the professional community most directly at risk. PEN America’s 2013 survey of more than 520 American writers — conducted just months after the first Snowden disclosures — found that 85% were worried about government surveillance; 1 in 6 had already avoided writing or speaking about a topic over surveillance fears; 16% had stopped searching online for topics they considered sensitive; and 24% had avoided certain subjects in phone or email communications entirely.

PEN’s 2015 global follow-up of 772 writers in 50 countries found writers in free democracies self-censoring “at levels approaching those seen in non-democratic countries.” Self-reported data has methodological limits, but when stated behavioral changes match up with independently measured ones, the convergence across different methods strengthens confidence that the underlying phenomenon is real. Here they all point the same direction.

The PCLOB acknowledged the consequence directly: “The knowledge that the government can gather this sort of content can have a chilling effect on speech.” Asked whether it had assessed whether Section 702’s incidental collection had produced such effects, the government told the PCLOB it had not — because it had “no reliable way to do so.”

The government has spent years arguing in court that chilling effects are too speculative to be cognizable, while admitting to its own oversight board that it has never once tried to measure whether those effects exist.

A system, not an accident

What these sources together document is a surveillance architecture that suppresses protected First Amendment activity — speech, information-seeking, association and political expression — at population scale, through mechanisms deliberately designed to be opaque. This is done in ways the government has never studied, using authorities insulated from constitutional challenge by a standing doctrine that demands proof that the program’s own secrecy makes impossible to produce. That is not an accident. It is a system.

The social science has moved chilling effects from constitutional speculation to documented behavioral reality. What it has not done — and cannot do, by design — is produce the individualized, “certainly impending” harm that current standing doctrine demands. The courts constructed that demand to keep diffuse, aggregate, structural harms out of Article III. The demand works. That is precisely why legislative remedy — not constitutional litigation — is the operative accountability mechanism.

Section 702 sunsets again in April 2026. The PCLOB recommended in 2023 that Congress require individualized judicial review of U.S. person queries. Congress has reauthorized Section 702 without a meaningful warrant requirement three times since 2013, knowing each time what the program does.

The empirical and legal record is now sufficient to state plainly what Laird and Clapper assumed was speculative: Surveillance at this scale functionally suppresses First Amendment-protected speech, association and inquiry among the American public. The Supreme Court has said that it can’t be proven in court. The social scientists, the professional communities and the government’s own watchdog have now proven it everywhere else.

Kratom is a plant native to Southeast Asia whose leaves have long been used for their mild stimulant and analgesic effects. In the United States, people often use kratom to manage chronic pain, reduce opioid use or ease anxiety. One of its naturally occurring compounds is 7‑OH, present only in trace amounts in the leaf but responsible for some of kratom’s analgesic properties. More recently, manufacturers have produced concentrated or semi-synthetic versions of 7‑OH and marketed them in higher-potency products.

That emerging market has drawn the attention of regulators—and lawmakers. In Arizona, legislators are now considering a bill − HB 2415 − that would effectively ban 7‑OH products altogether.

Should Arizona ban kratom?

The push for prohibition rests heavily on concerns about overdose risk. But here is the key fact often missing from the debate: fatal overdoses from kratom or 7‑OH are very rare. And in the small number of cases where deaths have been reported, toxicology results almost always show multiple substances in the decedent’s system—frequently including fentanyl, heroin, benzodiazepines, alcohol, or other psychoactive drugs.

In other words, these are not clear-cut cases of kratom or 7‑OH acting alone. They are cases of polysubstance use, where isolating a single cause is difficult, if not impossible.

This distinction matters. Policymaking by anecdote—especially when those anecdotes are incomplete—can lead to serious mistakes.

We have seen this pattern before. A concerning substance emerges, regulators highlight worst-case scenarios, and lawmakers respond with calls for prohibition. The nuance disappears. The risk is exaggerated. And the resulting policies often create more harm than they prevent.

Does kratom contain excess 7‑OH?

To be clear, some products marketed as “enhanced kratom” do contain unnaturally high concentrations of 7‑OH. That raises legitimate safety concerns, particularly in an unregulated market where labeling can be inconsistent. But acknowledging risk is not the same as justifying prohibition.

Kratom contains only trace amounts of 7‑OH, and millions use it without problems. Arizona lawmakers would keep kratom legal but ban 7‑OH products. The black market won’t mind. Thousands of Arizonans who depend on 7‑OH for PTSD or pain relief will turn to illegal sellers or cross state lines—and cartels will be ready to add another product to their lineup.

That shift can be lethal. Potency is often unknown in illegal markets, and contamination frequently occurs.Others may return to opioids, including those laced with fentanyl, the very driver of today’s overdose crisis. In that context, prohibition is not a neutral act. It changes behavior in ways that can increase risk.

What is federal regulators safety record on substances like kratom?

And we should also be cautious about relying on federal agencies as the ultimate decision-makers. The FDA has a history of acting on incomplete evidence and causing unintended consequences—such as approving NSAIDs like Vioxx, which the manufacturer later withdrew for safety reasons, and approving controversial Alzheimer’s treatments like Aduhelm despite weak evidence of benefit. Centralized authority does not guarantee good judgment, especially when political pressure and public fear come into play.

A more sensible approach would focus on harm reduction rather than elimination: accurate labeling, age restrictions, product testing, and consumer education. These measures address real risks without depriving individuals of choices that may help them avoid more dangerous substances.

Arizona lawmakers should keep this in mind as they consider banning 7‑OH. Risk doesn’t disappear when policymakers outlaw a product. It just shifts, usually somewhere less safe, less visible, and more dangerous. We’ve seen this before. Arizona doesn’t need to repeat it.

In effect, the agency has created a FOIA-specific blacklist. Yet when asked, it denies having done so.

The FBI has maintained what it calls a list of “vexsome” FOIA filers for years. The label itself is odd — the proper term would be “vexatious” — but the implication is clear enough. Certain individuals and organizations who file frequent records requests are flagged internally as troublesome.

That practice is deeply at odds with the very text of the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA exists because the late Representative John Moss (D‑CA) spent 10 years encountering delays, evasions, and outright refusals by federal agencies and departments to give him information he needed for oversight purposes. Moss understood that many citizens and watchdog groups asked the same kind of persistent questions of executive branch officials as he did, but they lacked a statutory basis to force such information disclosures. It’s why Moss worked so hard to get FOIA into law. Investigative journalists, transparency organizations and researchers often file dozens — sometimes hundreds — of requests in pursuit of public records. The law anticipates and protects that behavior.

There is nothing in the FOIA statute authorizing federal agencies to maintain lists of “vexatious” requesters or to single out particular citizens for special scrutiny because they use the law frequently. The statute’s presumption is exactly the opposite: that access to government records belongs to the public, and that agencies must justify withholding them.

Yet internal records obtained through FOIA requests by transparency researcher John Greenewald, who runs the document archive The Black Vault, show that the FBI has indeed categorized certain requesters in this way.

The Cato Institute learned this firsthand when the FBI labeled it a “vexsome” FOIA requester during the previous administration. More recently, when I filed a FOIA request seeking records explaining how the FBI defines or uses that designation, the Bureau responded that it could find no records responsive to the request — even though records labeling individuals or groups as “vexsome” were previously available to Greenewald.

The FBI cannot both maintain a category of “vexatious” requesters and simultaneously claim no records exist describing how that category is used. That’s why Cato has filed a new FOIA lawsuit to force the FBI to produce the records at issue.

The deeper problem is what such labeling represents. FOIA was enacted in 1966 to prevent federal agencies from deciding which members of the public deserve access to government information. Congress deliberately structured the law so that requests are judged by their legal merits — not by who submits them or how often they do so. Indeed, the statute has been updated multiple times over the past 60 years in response to agency or department tactics designed to evade the statutes’ very purpose.

Once agencies begin categorizing requesters as nuisances or troublemakers, they create a de facto enemies list composed of the very taxpayers and citizens they are sworn to serve. A system meant to promote transparency risks becoming one in which the government quietly tracks and stigmatizes those who seek to hold it accountable for its conduct — or misconduct.

Agency and department heads routinely claim that FOIA is administratively burdensome — yet they never ask Congress for line-item appropriations to ensure processing is quick and efficient. Agencies process hundreds of thousands of requests each year — and in tens of thousands of cases invoke one or more of FOIA’s nine exemptions to keep information secret that in most cases should never have been withheld in the first place. Those tactics alone force requesters to retain lawyers capable of litigating through the delays, obfuscations, and denials. The FBI’s “vexsome FOIA filer” program takes this bureaucratic game to a whole new level.

It’s worth noting that one of Trump’s earliest public instructions to Attorney General Pam Bondi was a Presidential Memorandum directing her to seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms filing “frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious” lawsuits against the federal government. Trump’s memo exhorted Bondi to go after lawyers or law firms working in the immigration arena, and Cato has active FOIA lawsuits on that topic, one going all the way back to Trump’s first-term “Muslim ban” executive order.

The language in Trump’s memo to Bondi is sweeping enough to place lawyers working on FOIA lawsuits in the administration’s legal crosshairs, and certainly enough for unwelcome FOIA requests to receive “special” disfavored treatment. Cato’s new FOIA lawsuit will hopefully yield answers to those and related questions.

The FBI is charged with upholding the Constitution and federal laws, but its latest actions suggest a troubling departure from both. The Freedom of Information Act exists so citizens can hold their government accountable without resorting to guesswork or suspicion.

Labeling FOIA requesters as “vexatious” not only turns that idea upside down, but it also violates the law. In a system that values transparency, asking persistent questions is not the problem. It is the point.

And, barring another federal court rescue, they’ll only get worse from here.

Trump’s new H‑1B visa fee.

Last September, the Trump administration imposed a staggering $100,000 fee for new H‑1B visas via presidential proclamation—up from just a couple hundred dollars previously. Subsequent guidance from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services clarified that the $100,000 charge applies only to new H‑1B petitions filed on or after September 21, 2025, for workers outside the United States and lacking a valid H‑1B visa (so-called “initial employment” petitions). The fee does not apply to renewals, extensions, amendments, or visa holders already here and switching over to an H‑1B—a significant carve-out that limits the fees’ damage but certainly doesn’t eliminate it. The fee also must be paid before a petition is filed, with no guarantee of a refund even if the application is denied. (This hints at a broader problem with many immigration-related fees today, as my Cato colleague David Bier just documented.)

As one immigration lawyer put it: “The easiest way to think of this fee is as a tariff on the importation of labor.” The analogy couldn’t be more apt.

For starters, the fee’s rollout was a chaotic mess. The proclamation dropped on a Friday evening and was so vague that it created immediate panic among H‑1B holders and their employers, with some confused workers demanding to deplane flights out of the U.S. or cutting trips abroad short to rush back here before the Sunday deadline. Clarifications about the fee’s coverage and implementation tumbled out over the following days, and they continued for weeks thereafter, generating needless legal costs and uncertainty and disrupting hiring plans for thousands of U.S. employers.

Those problems, unfortunately, were just the tip of the iceberg.

The immediate effects.

The most obvious issue is that, contrary to White House claims in September that “all big companies” were on board with the new fee and that it’d raise lots of money, almost no one has actually been willing to pay it. As Bloomberg Law reported in late February, in fact, only 70 U.S. employers have thus far paid the fee for just 85 workers—an 87 percent decline in these H‑1B petitions versus the same period last year, representing thousands of workers not getting hired.

This didn’t mean, however, that U.S. employers stopped pursuing foreign skilled workers and started hiring Americans. Instead, these firms did what all rational economic actors do when faced with a large and poorly designed new tax: They evaded it. Bloomberg reports, for example, that staffing firms for large U.S. tech companies looking to sponsor first-time H‑1B visa applicants are “prioritizing hiring recent graduates and other immigrants who are already in the US and therefore not subject to the $100,000 fee.” Jeans company True Religion, meanwhile, backed off hiring the “perfect” director of production and sourcing—a Guatemalan national living abroad—and, after exhausting other visa options, is now searching for a candidate that won’t come with the $100,000 fee. “It’s a lot of money,” their HR executive told the news agency. Yes, it is.

Given the limited uptake, the visa fee has already failed to achieve one of its stated goals—to raise funds for the government—and is, in fact, comically doing the opposite. Back in September, supporters of the fee claimed that it had been rigorously set at a “revenue maximizing” rate that would slow migrant inflows but still allow enough that, given the fee’s magnitude, would generate much more money than the government was taking in under the old system. This conclusion was based on research from George Borjas, who served as a senior economist on the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors and has advocated for an “optimal” fee based on “average employer wage savings.” Companies save so much by paying foreigners lower wages than native-born workers, so his theory goes, that they’d gladly pay a one-time $100,000 fee to hire the cheaper immigrant. The methodology for those “savings” came from new Borjas research that reportedly underpinned the White House’s $100,000 visa fee and showed that it would raise up to $22.4 billion in new visa fees.

As the Institute for Progress’ Connor O’Brien recently pointed out, however, recent U.S. government court filings show that the visa fee has thus far generated a mere $8.5 million in fees, and that—because the fee discouraged almost everyone abroad from applying—the government has actually lost $20 million overall. (The Laffer Curve is real, folks.) This outcome is hardly surprising. As the Economic Innovation Group’s Jiaxin He and Adam Ozimek documented, the Borjas paper contained significant methodological errors that dramatically overstated the wage gap between native workers and H‑1B workers (and thus the amount employers would be willing to pay in visa fees). In fact, economist Michael Clemens separately corrected Borjas’ errors and found that H‑1B workers are paid more than comparable native-born workers—thus collapsing the visa fee’s revenue justifications (as well as related claims that H‑1Bs undercut American workers).

The current $20 million in losses would seem to support the critics’ conclusions.

The real-world costs.

Just because companies are avoiding the fee doesn’t mean it’s without costs (beyond the revenue hit, I mean). In fact, numerous reports show that the fees have already imposed significant harms by restricting the pool of available workers in specialized or constrained U.S. markets. Here are a few examples:

Academia and nonprofit research organizations. Under U.S. law, nonprofit research organizations in higher education, the private sector, and the government are exempt from the 85,000 annual cap and lottery for H‑1B visas. As Bloomberg reported last year, this exception has allowed various U.S. institutions to hire thousands of faculty, researchers, and staff each year to help run their medical, scientific, and other specialized programs—programs for which there are typically few, if any, native-born alternatives to the super-smart foreigners being hired. (For example: “As of 2023, about 58 percent of all postdoctoral staff in science, engineering and health fields were on a temporary visa like the H‑1B, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.”) Overall, this system has been a boon for U.S. research organizations, their foreign hires, and the U.S. innovation ecosystem and economy more broadly.

Now it’s at risk. For many of the United States’ top research institutions, the new visa fee would result in tens of millions of dollars in new costs—or, more likely, simply block these institutions from hiring the people they need. For smaller nonprofits, the choice is simpler: “The international talent pool for researchers and faculty—that’s turned off.” Should the fee remain in place, these entities’ international hiring, enrollment, and related courses and programs are expected to decline, and it could have a broader “chilling effect” on their efforts to recruit the best and brightest minds in the world. A lawsuit filed in October cited early evidence of research institutions putting their hiring plans on indefinite hold. Other examples of foreign specialists being blocked by the fee have trickled out since then. Some scientists already here, meanwhile, are deciding to leave.

Rural health care. The H‑1B program has long been a lifeline for small hospitals and clinics in less populated areas that struggle to compete for domestic physicians and nurses. Research shows that health systems in rural areas are twice as likely as their urban counterparts to use H‑1B workers—doctors, nurses, assistants, etc.—and about 64 percent of foreign physicians practice in medically underserved areas. The visa fees, experts have warned, will cripple these areas because local providers simply can’t afford them and because workarounds, including other visa options, are themselves costly.

The effects on rural health systems are already becoming evident. In November, for example, a U.S. agency that annually provided hundreds of foreign nurses for systems in rural and low-income Midwestern communities said its hiring this year was at a “standstill” because of the fee. A Shelby, North Carolina, nephrology practice, meanwhile, was blocked from hiring an Indian kidney specialist that the growing community desperately needed. A rural Maryland hospital—the only emergency room in a 650-square-mile county—stopped recruiting 29 overseas nurses. A Ukrainian doctor who’d applied to several programs in underserved areas now can’t find a sponsor—even after spending “thousands of dollars on qualifying exams, including textbooks, credential verification and application fees.”

Given that many immigrant-dependent rural hospitals operate on razor-thin margins and that current national shortfalls for physicians are expected to persist for years, “just hire American” simply isn’t an option—especially in specialty fields like oncology with high shares of foreign-born doctors. The American Hospital Association has thus called for an exemption from the fee—and bipartisan legislation has been offered in this regard. So far, they’ve gotten nothing.

Startups and entrepreneurs. It’s a similar story for tech startups and entrepreneurs that don’t have the deep pockets of their Big Tech rivals—either to pay the visa fee or spend money searching around for alternatives. As TechCrunch reported, startup founders have taken to calling the visa a “talent tariff” that smaller players can’t afford. Immigration lawyers working with early-stage companies have paused their clients’ many H‑1B petitions—a pause that will have real harms, given that the H‑1B program has been disproportionately valuable to small and young firms. If U.S. startups can’t access global talent pools, they grow slower, innovate less, or simply don’t launch at all—and the U.S. economy eventually suffers.

Large firms moving work abroad. Big companies, meanwhile, have more options than the little guys do, and that includes moving work offshore. As we’ve discussed here, research consistently finds that large firms respond to U.S. restrictions on H‑1B visas not by hiring more Americans but instead by expanding their operations in India, Canada, and elsewhere. History appears to be repeating, with news of large U.S. firms in tech/​AI, retail, finance, pharmaceuticals, and other R&D‑heavy industries responding to the new visa fee by freezing or restructuring U.S.-based hiring and by increasing headcounts in India, Canada, and elsewhere. Increasing the cost of foreign hiring doesn’t automatically increase demand for domestic hiring, and it appears we’re relearning this lesson again.

Skilled immigrants looking elsewhere. The fee also may have convinced many skilled immigrants to look elsewhere for work. Bloomberg reported in January, for example, that there was initial evidence of Indian startup founders and tech workers already in the United States looking to return to India after the visa fee was announced. Many foreign governments, meanwhile, are eager to attract these workers. When the visa fee started, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said that his country would work to attract foreign workers blocked from the U.S. by the visa fee, and then the Canadian government announced a $1.2 billion initiative to recruit more than 1,000 foreign doctors, scientists, and researchers. In October, China launched a new K visa to attract foreign STEM professionals with no employer sponsorship requirement—a clear effort to hoover up the talent the U.S. is pushing away. European and Middle Eastern talent hubs have been similarly mobilizing.

Summing it all up.

Given options for avoiding the visa fee and that demand for skilled foreign workers far exceeds the annual 85,000 cap on initial approvals, Trump’s new “talent tariff” won’t totally collapse the number of new H‑1B visa-holders in the United States, but it will still have significant costs. Like any tariff, the fee will limit the supply and variety of skilled workers in the United States, pushing employers to pursue costly workarounds and less-optimal alternatives. It’ll also have disproportionate harms on U.S. companies and industries—in research, health care, tech, and other industries—that don’t have as many choices and need overseas talent to succeed, if not survive. The hit to academia and nonprofit research organizations could be most severe, given their previous exemption from the annual cap on H‑1B visas.

The fee also must be considered as part of a broader attack by the Trump administration and various states on skilled immigration in the United States. Enhanced federal vetting and screening of all H‑1B applications, for example, has caused long delays in visa processing. The administration also has suspended H‑1B processing for 39 countries and employer-sponsored immigrant visas for immigrants abroad for 92 countries (defrauding fee-payers in the process and thus amplifying the risk of paying the visa fee upfront). Serious ethical concerns aside, these restrictions are sure to harm the U.S. economy in myriad ways.

Research shows that skilled immigrants—many of whom enter the United States through the H‑1B program—substantially boost U.S. innovation, entrepreneurship, wages, and government finances (at the federal, state, and local level). These and related benefits thus explain why an October report from the Richmond Federal Reserve estimated the visa fee and related restrictions would deliver large costs and few benefits, and that a permanent 10 percent reduction in college-educated immigrants would reduce native-born Americans’ welfare by almost $3 billion each year. There is, of course, some competition between skilled immigrants and native-born workers on the margins, but their overall effect is unambiguously positive for the vast majority of Americans (and, of course, for tens of thousands of smart foreigners now living abroad).

None of this is to say the H‑1B program is perfect. As Bier documented in 2023, it most definitely isn’t: The annual 85,000 visa cap is way too low, and backlogs are way too long; the lottery system is arbitrary and inefficient and encourages gaming; and tying the visa to an employer creates dependency that can be exploited (though this is often overblown). A serious reform agenda would address these shortcomings. A $100,000 “talent tariff” just makes things worse.

Several lawsuits have been filed against the new H‑1B visa fee that might stop it in its tracks—perhaps, ironically, based on the Supreme Court decision that stopped Trump’s “emergency” tariffs in February. Let’s hope they succeed.

Chart(s) of the Week

Tracking the real-world oil shock:

Treasuries (and mortgage rates) heading back up, thanks in part to the Iran war:

Sunbelt cities continue to attract people:

Oof.

Later that day, Trump suggested he might withdraw the nomination and submit a different one. This follows an earlier false start: During the transition in late 2024, Trump nominated Jeanette Nesheiwat but pulled her nomination in May 2025 after critics pointed out discrepancies in her résumé.

In the meantime, Americans have gone over 430 days without a “nation’s doctor,” as the surgeon general is often called—and few, if any, have noticed. That should raise a more fundamental question: not who should serve as surgeon general, but whether we need one at all.

The surgeon general and the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps are vestiges of a bygone era—institutions that persist not because they are essential, but because they have never been seriously reconsidered. Today, federal public health activity is dominated by sprawling agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health. The surgeon general’s role has diminished to mainly a national spokesperson, issuing advisories that are more symbolic than practical—and that can become a platform for unnecessary political and cultural conflicts.

The Commissioned Corps, for its part—formally led by the surgeon general, though ultimately overseen by the assistant secretary for health—maintains the trappings of a uniformed service but performs functions that largely overlap with those carried out by other federal, state, and local health agencies. However well-intentioned, they add another layer to an already crowded public health apparatus. The past 430 days have offered an unintentional experiment—and the results are telling: The system continues to function just fine without a surgeon general.

In a Cato Institute policy analysis, my colleagues and I examined the origins and evolution of the surgeon general’s office and the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. These institutions trace their roots to the late–19th century Marine Hospital Service, when a centralized, uniformed medical service played a practical role in caring for merchant seamen and controlling the spread of infectious diseases at ports of entry. At the time, a national “chief physician” and a deployable medical corps made sense. But over the decades, as public health responsibilities expanded and were dispersed across a wide array of federal, state, and local agencies, those original functions were absorbed—and often superseded—by larger and more specialized institutions. What remains today is not a critical node in the public health system, but a legacy structure whose original purpose has long since been overtaken.

As we documented in that analysis, the redundancy isn’t theoretical—it shows up in how the system actually operates. The surgeon general no longer exercises meaningful public health authority; those responsibilities have been absorbed by agencies like the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, leaving the office largely as a platform for issuing advisories. Meanwhile, the roughly 6,000-member Public Health Service Commissioned Corps is spread across the federal bureaucracy, often in roles only loosely connected to public health and frequently duplicating work performed by civilian employees.

The result is a system with overlapping roles, diffused accountability, and higher costs—government estimates suggest Corps officers can cost more than comparable civilian staff, and a Department of Health and Human Services analysis has estimated that eliminating the Commissioned Corps could reduce personnel costs by roughly 15 percent—without delivering anything that couldn’t be handled more directly through existing agencies. As a uniformed service, Corps officers also receive many of the same benefits as members of the armed forces, including veterans’ benefits, adding more to the taxpayer burden.

And the office itself is hardly indispensable. President Lyndon Johnson effectively eliminated the position during his administration. Unfortunately, in 1979 the breakup of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education caused the position’s resurrection. That history makes something clear: The surgeon general is not a cornerstone of the public health system; it’s a legacy position that persists largely because no one has seriously asked whether it still needs to exist.

None of this is to question the dedication of the professionals who have served as surgeon general or in the Commissioned Corps. But public institutions should not exist simply because they always have. The past 430-plus days have provided an unintentional test, and the results are hard to ignore: The system continues to function without a surgeon general, and the Corps’ responsibilities can be absorbed by existing agencies or performed more efficiently through civilian hiring. Rather than restarting a debate over who should fill these roles, Congress and the White House should ask a more practical question: Do these positions still need to exist at all?

People still disagree fiercely about economics, of course. But politics usually sorts voters first around one big organising question, and only then around secondary disputes within camps. For decades that sorting question was economic. Now it increasingly is not. Brexit, Trump, and the wider revolt against the technocratic centre worldwide make sense once you see that the primary, animating political questions have become: who are we, who belongs, and who rules? That is why borders, judges, and “woke” institutions carry more political voltage than positions on taxes or trade.

If Davies is right that this alignment issue will stick, the near-term prospects for economic policymaking look grim. Start with the obvious: when politics stops being mainly about economics, economic efficiency is no longer a decisive critique of policy. Voters will back policies that make them poorer if they think those policies restore sovereignty, protect identity or punish elites they despise. Brexit was an example. The emotionally resonant version was to take back control, spend more on the NHS and cut immigration.

Could a coherent free-market “national liberalism” win out on the new right? It’s unlikely, says Davies. The nationalism part tends to eat economic liberalism, not least because there is a bigger voting base for the former. It is no coincidence that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, despite its stated deregulatory and low tax instincts, is slowly combining immigration restrictionism with an openness to industrial policy, nationalisations and dalliances with welfare statism. The same happened in Viktor Orban’s Hungary, with the National Rally in France and in President Trump’s second term.

Nor does the opposition provide much immediate comfort. The pro-cosmopolitan, anti-nationalist camp is economically fractured. It contains technocratic liberals of the centre left and centre right, greens, social democrats and a large hard left. The centrists are widely loathed as defenders of the status quo and out of ideas. The harder left has bad ones.

Even the inklings of new thinking — among the “abundance” or “supply-side” progressives — are market-friendly only when markets help achieve expert-designed ends. Their instincts to remove regulatory barriers to building are all welcome. But usually it is in service of state goals on housing, climate or industrial strategy, not a principled commitment to pro-growth policies. That makes the ideas expendable.

This need not be the final settlement, obviously. When tried, nationalist economics will likely discredit itself. Once it slips liberal restraints, it often curdles into cronyism, patronage, corruption and waste. Favouritism replaces competition; political allocation replaces market discipline. That can make nationalist governments both economically destructive and morally grubby, eventually sowing the seeds of their own defeat. On the cosmopolitan left, Davies expects the centre to win out against the hard left via a reinvigorated liberal coalition.

But that will take time. For now, the bleak arithmetic is straightforward. The side with the strongest emotional connection to voters is becoming more anti-market, and even its market-friendly voices are willing to junk old principles when identity and sovereignty are at stake. The side that is occasionally pro-market is competing with socialists and often treats liberalisation as an instrument, not a creed.

That points to a near-term equilibrium entailing more tariffs, various forms of industrial strategy, immigration controls and more overt political meddling in the economy. I suspect things will get worse before they get better.

Industrial policy refers to government officials channeling resources to particular industries that the market would not. Arguments like national security or protecting “strategic” industries from competitors are often used to justify the policy. Whatever one thinks of these excuses, industrial policy is funded by taxpayers when the chosen instrument is subsidies, funded by consumers when the tool is tariffs, and always funded by the other domestic firms quietly crowded out as capital flows toward their politically favored competitors.

Every dollar directed by bureaucratic decree is a dollar that’s no longer directed by people spending their money on what most deserves it. Which, of course, is what makes markets work.

To be clear, the World Bank’s reversal wasn’t because a new generation of economists finally cracked open the historical record and discovered that state-led industrialization works. It’s because the World Bank’s most powerful shareholders, the United States and Western Europe, turned toward openly and aggressively practicing industrial policy.

With a cascade of green industrial subsidies during the Biden and Obama administrations, and protectionist tariffs and “golden shares” under the Trump administration, it became impossible to lecture developing countries about the dangers of letting governments pick winning businesses. In other words, the intellectual reversal followed the political reversal, not the other way around.

The World Bank’s report thus exists as a manual for governments that are going to do industrial policy regardless of what anyone tells them. It starts with the acknowledgment that all 183 countries surveyed boost at least one industry. But it stops arguing about whether industrial policy is legitimate and instead tries to diagnose which tools governments are capable of using without doing more harm than good. Mapping 15 different policy instruments along a spectrum from simple and low-risk to complex and demanding, the report warns governments repeatedly against blunt instruments that are politically easy but economically costly and urges governments to listen.

They won’t listen, and here’s why.

The report acknowledges that governments regularly botch industrial policy, yet it expresses hope that rising global education levels are giving more countries the human capital to make certain tools work. For example, a software tax exemption in Romania succeeded partly because a critical mass of people was now capable of becoming software engineers. Fair enough.

But while education raises the ceiling on what is theoretically achievable, it does nothing by itself to change a government’s incentives. The obstacle has never primarily been a shortage of capable technocrats or populations. The real hindrances are well documented, structural and bipartisan.

The first obstacle is what economists call the “knowledge problem.” As the Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome notes, centralized attempts to identify critical technologies repeatedly fail because governments cannot predict which will end up being most valuable or how markets will develop. In the 1990s, governments picked the right industries — semiconductors and supercomputers — but the wrong products and companies. No amount of educational attainment by bureaucracies or workers solves this. Only markets aggregate untold amounts of economic knowledge through rough, supply-and-demand responsive prices and voluntary exchange.

The report never grapples with this, suggesting tools like industrial parks aimed at coordination failures and skills-development programs aimed at under-investments in human capital. Someone must still decide where the park goes and which skills get funded for which sectors. These are predictions about what the economy will need, made by the same officials facing the same information constraints as any other planner. They are dressed in more sophisticated language than a tariff but are no less vulnerable to being wrong.

The second obstacle is politics. Educated people, bureaucrats and CEOs operate under and inside governments where industries lobby, ministers have constituencies and failing programs are far easier to throw more money at than to kill. The World Bank’s report concedes as much in calling the bluntest instruments “notoriously difficult to unwind.” But that’s not a technical or educational problem; it’s a political one.

Even in a country as educated as the U.S., a steel industry that has enjoyed decades of political protection does not quietly accept a withdrawn subsidy. It assumes the role of political actor, pressuring politicians for more. As protectionism dulls the industry’s genuine competitiveness, politics matter even more. This is bad even for nations rich enough to shoulder the cost.

The World Bank spent 276 pages telling governments how to do more of what governments most want to do but rarely do well. For developing nations, it’s like receiving a lifejacket that works better for people who already know how to swim and can afford to paddle around.

All of this started because Republicans and Democrats disagreed over immigration enforcement changes in a government funding package. President Donald Trump kept insisting that Congress first pass an unrelated bill for more election regulations. It makes no sense for all of this unrelated political squabbling to ruin so many Americans’ travel plans.

There is a better strategy that Congress can enact: Privatize security screening at the nation’s airports. That means contracting out screening operations to expert security firms and shrinking the government’s role to regulatory oversight and intelligence.

Privatization may sound radical, but that security structure is standard in European and Canadian airports.

In Canada, the federal aviation authority provides contracts to security firms for five years, and whether they are renewed is based on performance. Under their system, 95 percent of travelers are screened within 15 minutes. In Europe, about four-fifths of commercial airports use private screening, including those in Britain, France, Germany and Spain.

In the United States, the TSA took over screening at 430 commercial airports over the past two and a half decades since 9/11. It hasn’t been a glorious run. TSA has misallocated resources, delivered mediocre (at best) security evaluations and wasted vast amounts of traveler time in queues. And it has long scored near the bottom of all federal agencies in annual rankings of best places to work.

Thankfully, the 2001 bill creating the TSA allowed for some private airport screening in the Screening Partnership Program (SPP). As part of SPP, San Francisco International and 19 smaller airports have been using private screening firms for years, and with good results.

How safe is private airport screening? Over the first decade of the TSA, numerous federal investigations found that the security performance of SFO and other SPP airports was at least as good, and sometimes better than, TSA-run airports.

And the TSA results? In recent years, there has been little public information on screening performance, although some data has leaked. In 2015, an undercover test to slip banned items through TSA screening found a shocking 95 percent failure rate, and in 2017 another undercover test found a TSA screening failure rate of roughly 80 percent. Results of more recent tests have been apparently suppressed by the TSA.

This secrecy is another reason why a privatized approach would be superior. TSA has a conflict of interest because it both performs screening and sets standards — and judges its own performance. By contrast, in the Canadian and European systems, the government authority sets the standards and can objectively judge the performance of private screeners at the various airports.

Also, as a near monopoly, TSA has little incentive to improve efficiency or to innovate. But under a privatized system, companies would compete on their records to win contracts at airports, and they could draw on their broad international experience to continuously improve their operations.

While the D.C. budget fight causes a mess in airports across the country, SFO and other private-screening airports are running normally with screeners being paid by their employers. And perhaps more cities would have opted for private screening but for the government’s bureaucratic hurdles. Airports must gain approval from the TSA for SPP, but of course the agency has an incentive to deny requests to retain its near monopoly. And TSA’s labor unions lobby against expanding the SPP program.

The needs of air travelers should come first, and yet they are increasingly sidelined by dysfunction in Washington.

Once Congress fully settles this budget battle episode, our lawmakers should liberalize the SPP process and encourage more cities to go private. Indeed, lawmakers could explore options to decentralize all screening to the nation’s airports. The airports could competitively bid screening to expert firms based on performance.

The budget battles in D.C. will only get uglier as federal debt soars higher and interest costs displace other spending. The risk is not just more shutdowns but that the budget squeeze will cause shortfalls in hiring and investment in airport security screening. 

Allowing this dysfunction to sabotage vacations and business trips makes no sense when there is a proven alternative. Government gridlock shouldn’t ground America’s travelers.