These concerns, of course, are valid. Yet focusing only on the DOJ’s partisan misuse misses another important problem: the Department cares more about political theater than enforcing the law. Much of its dysfunction arises from that fact.

Take a look at the record. Under Attorney General Pam Bondi, the DOJ used its powers of investigation and prosecution as a populist gimmick, driven by popular grievances against the administration’s perceived enemies, from Harvard to the NFL. Real reform means more than just stopping the DOJ’s attacks on the left. It means resisting the Department’s misuse for populist ends. Senate should demand that throughout the confirmation process.

Since returning to office, President Trump has decided there’s virtually no popular complaint that can’t be fixed with a federal inquiry or indictment, and DOJ has gladly obliged. Universities, long the subject of conservative frustration, were one of the first groups to meet the brunt of the new DOJ. The Department swept in to demand that schools “screen out [foreign] students who demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values.” In 2025 alone, the government extractedover $400 million in settlements from just four universities.

Other DOJ targets have done nothing more than follow the laws of economic reality. While Trump’s one-page “Great Healthcare Plan” has failed to spur legislative action for lower prices, he has directed the attorney general to go after drug companies for unspecified “anti-competitive practices.”

As Trump’s “Liberation Day” trade war drove up prices for food and fertilizer, he ordered DOJ to create a special “Food Supply Chain Security Task Force” and start prosecuting any agricultural businesses engaging in “criminal collusion.” Of course, going after American farmers could conflict with populism, so Trump highlighted his special concern about “foreign-controlled companies.”

It is true that medicine and food are essential and, certainly, too expensive. This owes more to ham-handed government interventions than shadowy industry conspiracies, though at least the priority is rightly placed. But under Trump and AG Bondi, the DOJ has taken on populist crusades over far lesser matters. The president quickly prioritized DOJ going after Ticketmaster. “America’s live concert and entertainment industry is the envy of the world,” an executive order breathlessly declared, but “it has become blighted by unscrupulous middlemen.” Whatever merit antitrust enforcement may have here, it is overshadowed by the president making his own show of calling in the federal prosecutors to protect the Swifties rather than letting career prosecutors decide what merits their attention.

A year later, another pillar of mass entertainment needed “urgent national action,” even in the absence of congressional action. Trump sent in AG Bondi to the defense of college football and basketball, supposedly under existential threat from changes concerning “pay-for-play” and eligibility rules. Again, an executive order from the White House, rather than the judgment of seasoned lawyers, decided what merited a DOJ inquiry.

This spring, the president quarterbacked yet another DOJ campaign concerning sports. Perhaps still smarting over his failed attempt to buy an NFL franchise 40 years ago, and bolstered by populist anger dating back to Colin Kaepernick’s national-anthem protests, DOJ just launched a new investigation into the league’s livestreaming deals.

Americans deserve a Justice Department that prosecutes crimes instead of chasing headlines. Every hour spent investigating whichever industry or institution has become the administration’s latest political target is an hour not spent on the Department’s core responsibilities. So the Senate will have a choice: Does it want a DOJ that acts with the restraint expected in a constitutional republic—or one that is chasing the next standing ovation?

As we’ve discussed, the issue of forced labor is real and complicated. Walk Free, a human rights group that tracks it, estimates that as of 2023 roughly 28 million people were in some form of forced labor worldwide, and the International Labor Organization puts about 5.5 million in tradable-goods industries. Even free marketers like me readily admit that trade in goods made by forced labor isn’t really “trade”—voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange—at all.

In the current Section 301 case, however, “forced labor” is nothing more than legal cover. As Rick Woldenberg, CEO of Learning Resources and a lead plaintiff in one of the Supreme Court tariff cases, wrote when the investigation was launched, the case looked like a “sham” from the start because “the decision to impose these taxes has already been made.”

What the Trump administration eventually produced has sadly proven Woldenberg right.

The findings were clearly predetermined. The methodology is thin to the point of embarrassment. The remedy is both ridiculously blunt and wildly out of proportion to any measurable economic distortion. The action gives targeted countries no way to get the tariffs lifted by eliminating their supposedly bad behavior. And the whole thing establishes precedent for an “automatic tariff generator” that Trump or a future president can deploy at will. It makes a mockery of a real issue and might poison legitimate reform. And Congress probably won’t do anything about it.

Background.

After the Supreme Court invalidated the administration’s “emergency” IEEPA tariffs in February, the White House scrambled for a replacement. It reached first for Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a rarely used balance-of-payments provision, to slap a flat 10 percent tariff on goods from nearly every trading partner. Those tariffs are legally and economically dubious, a lower court has already knocked them down (the case is on appeal), and by design they expire 150 days after imposition—a deadline that arrives tomorrow.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has suggested the administration might simply announce another “balance of payments crisis”—and another round of Section 122 tariffs—when the current ones end Friday, but that raises even bigger legal problems than the current taxes have. Thus, eventually, Section 301 will take over. The only question is when. (Don’t you just love policy uncertainty! Sigh.)

Unlike Section 122, Section 301 requires an actual investigation, public notice and comment, and a formal report before the executive branch can act. Under the statute, the U.S. trade representative may respond to foreign “acts, policies, and practices” that are “unreasonable or discriminatory” and that “burden or restrict” U.S. commerce, with “unreasonable” acts being those that are “unfair or inequitable.” As I wrote in a 2022 paper, this is dangerously broad and ambiguous language that’s ripe for abuse—abuse the Trump administration is now undertaking in the forced labor case.

Yes, it’s a reverse-engineered sham.

In June, Greer’s office closed its investigation, finding that 54 economies had failed to impose any prohibition on imports made with forced labor and that six more had failed to enforce the laws they had on the books. The agency recommended tariffs of 12.5 percent on goods from 46 of the lawless (ha) economies and 10 percent on goods from 14 more (the six with allegedly inadequate enforcement and eight more that had pledged to implement prohibitions under their Trump trade deals). Collectively, the targeted countries constitute nearly everything the United States imports.

USTR’s stated justification is that these economies’ failure “to impose and effectively enforce a forced labor import prohibition” is “unreasonable” and a burden on U.S. commerce, “by subjecting U.S. producers to unfair competition from forced labor goods both in export markets and the U.S. market, and by displacing foreign goods produced without forced labor or forced labor inputs into the United States and other markets.”

Strong words. There are several reasons to doubt that USTR really means any of it.

The administration said the tariffs were coming before the investigation ended.

Under Section 301, USTR is supposed to investigate first, decide later, and—if all else fails—impose countermeasures to push a foreign government to fix its burdensome or “unfair” trade practice. One can argue about whether a given case’s findings and recommendations are correct, but we can all agree that—as plainly stated in the law itself—the conclusions aren’t supposed to be written in advance.

Here, by the administration’s own admission, they were.

Long before the forced-labor investigation closed, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent repeatedly said the tariff revenue would be “back in place at the previous level” by the time the Section 122 duties lapsed this month, and administration officials have described the Section 301 push as a way to recover the revenue lost when the Supreme Court struck down IEEPA. Trump himself said much the same right after the court issued its ruling, noting that, along with Section 122, “We are doing the various investigations necessary to put fair tariffs—or tariffs, period—on other countries.” A few weeks later, USTR Greer confirmed the timeline, saying he hoped to conclude the investigations “before the 10 percent tariffs imposed by President Trump in February under Section 122 expire in July.”

When the president, the treasury secretary, and the United States trade representative all confidently promise that a case will produce a certain result before it’s finished, the “investigation” part is a formality—boxes to be checked for legal cover and nothing more.

The forced-labor report is remarkably thin.

The report itself reinforces this conclusion. For a document meant to justify tariffs on more than $1 trillion of trade with 60 countries (including several close U.S. allies), the report is nearly devoid of evidence. For example, USTR offers essentially no proof that the targeted countries actually export goods made with forced labor. In most cases, the report simply notes that a country lacks an express ban on goods made from forced labor and then simply assumes certain “forced-labor goods” are getting through. The entire country-specific assessment totals just 31 pages—around half a page per country—and much of that is just the same empty passages copy-pasted dozens of times. And USTR even admits that foreign governments and private companies “may perform forced labor due diligence” and protect against trade in forced labor without an express legal requirement to do so. Its only retort is that “some” might not—hardly ironclad evidence of wide-scale wrongdoing and harm.

The agency also offers no proof or analysis of its central assertions that forced labor creates “unfair export competitiveness,” or that forced-labor goods undercut U.S. producers (and thus meet the law’s requirements for remedying a supposed “burden” or “restriction” on U.S. commerce). In reality, a firm that uses forced labor might sell at market prices and pocket any savings from using low- or no-wage labor. In the largest recent U.S. forced-labor prosecution, in fact, the Georgia “Blooming Onion” case, the alleged offenders—some in the U.S. and some in Latin America—did this very thing, netting more than $200 million by paying trafficked farmworkers pennies but selling produce at ordinary prices. The beneficiary was the trafficker, not American shoppers getting ultracheap groceries (at law-abiding competitors’ expense). In the Section 301 report, however, USTR simply assumes that the opposite occurs, harming American producers in the process.

There’s likewise no explanation for the blanket tariff rates assigned to targeted countries. Most egregiously, USTR gave the same 12.5 percent tariff rate to Angola, Libya, Russia, Venezuela, and Kazakhstan—developing countries that rank low on the Walk Free forced labor index (and have other issues!)—as it did to developed, “good actor” countries like Norway, Japan, Switzerland, and Australia. Why? USTR never says, nor does it explain its proposed reduced tariff rate for certain imports of apparel and textile products, which are among the most common manufactured goods linked to forced labor globally. (Spoiler: Ask the lobbyists.) Instead, the proposed tariffs just so happen to approximate the expiring Section 122 rates and the various “deals” the administration has struck over the past year. And they just so happen to include most of the same exemptions—for politically sensitive goods and for products already hit by other tariffs—that the IEEPA and Section 122 regimes contained.

I’m sure it’s all just a coincidence.

The United States is itself hardly a forced labor angel.

Meanwhile, findings that USTR does provide often run from questionable to absurd. Most notably, the United States isn’t exactly in a great position to lecture other countries about forced labor. Section 307 of the Tariff Act of 1930 has banned imports made with forced labor since 1930, but it was lightly enforced for more than 80 years due to a wide “consumptive demand” exception that allowed imports of goods not domestically produced “in such quantities as to meet U.S. consumption needs.” Congress narrowed this exception in 2022 to target goods made in Xinjiang, China (via the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act), but this change still wasn’t a global sourcing ban. Just as importantly, the Trump administration’s enforcement of Section 307 appears to be more lenient than it was under Joe Biden. According to a recent letter from Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, in fact, the U.S. Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force hasn’t added a single firm to the UFLPA “entity list” since January 2025, and U.S. Customs detained just $166 million in shipments under the UFLPA last year, down from roughly $1.76 billion in 2024 and $1.42 billion in 2023.

By Walk Free’s own index, moreover, the United States is actually worse on forced labor than almost half (26) of the countries on USTR’s tariff list. (Treat the EU bloc as a single economy, and America still lands in 19^th place.) Indeed, the U.S. is somewhat unique globally in that our Constitution contains an explicit carve-out for prison labor, which exists today across the country. As the Marshall Project just reported, “Incarcerated workers are responsible for producing over $2 billion in goods annually” and are typically paid less than a dollar per hour (or aren’t paid at all). A lot of this work is for government entities like schools and the DMV, but, as the Associated Press found in 2024, a good chunk of it ends up in private, open markets and even “in the supply chains of goods being shipped all over the world via multinational companies, including to countries that have been slapped with import bans by Washington in recent years for using prison and forced labor themselves.” The Trump administration, for its part, doesn’t seem too worried about any of these forced labor goods.

The tariff cure dramatically overshoots the forced labor disease.

Even assuming the targeted countries were truly at fault, the remedy proposed by the United States is orders of magnitude too big. As already noted, the U.S. government bans imports produced by forced labor, and these restrictions have—even during the tougher Biden years—targeted just a tiny share of all U.S. imports. Trump’s new tariffs, on the other hand, target trillions.

The UFLPA totals, of course, don’t capture the total extent of forced labor on U.S. commerce because some imports could (and surely do) slip through various cracks. But back-of-napkin estimates indicate that, while forced labor is a serious issue, its aggregate effects on the U.S. economy are microscopic compared with the tariffs being proposed.

Using Walk Free’s latest forced-labor estimates (from 2023), global manufacturing employment data from the International Labor Organization, and U.S. government import figures, we can approximate both forced labor’s share of the global manufacturing workforce and the amount of global goods trade that plausibly originates from forced labor. We found the overall share of forced labor in the manufacturing workforce of the 60 targeted economies to be 4.16 percent (17.8 million out of 426.9 million workers in all) and multiplied that by the $2.46 trillion in manufactured goods that the U.S. imported from these countries in 2023 (the last year of forced labor data). Even generously assuming that every forced laborer in a targeted country’s private sector works in manufacturing and that everything they make is either exported to the United States or competing with U.S. exports in other markets, that’d give us an absolute ceiling of just $102 billion in “tainted” goods out of the $3.05 trillion that entered the U.S. in 2023 (around 3 percent) and the $26 trillion in goods traded worldwide last year (0.4 percent).

This estimate is obviously an overshoot, and USTR’s own theory of harm is much narrower. Its report claims that the requisite injury to U.S. commerce is the competitive advantage that forced labor confers on goods made therefrom (i.e., the costs a firm avoids by not paying its workers market wages and complying with labor regs). If we assume that labor is around 15 to 25 percent of a firm’s total manufacturing cost, we can estimate that the “avoided-wage advantage” embedded in that $102 billion is between $15 billion and $26 billion. So, a tariff actually designed to offset that distortion, which is what Section 301 calls for and what USTR’s report describes, would work out to less than 1 percent (0.5 to 0.84 percent, for those keeping close score at home).

USTR wants 10–12.5 percent.

These are obviously just rough calculations with lots of assumptions, but other estimates reinforce the conclusion that the tariffs are way too big. Most notably, Peterson Institute economist William Cline applied a different model to estimate both the U.S. exports lost to unfair forced-labor competition in OECD markets and the direct cost of forced-labor goods entering the United States. His result—lower, as expected from a macro model measuring total trade distortion as well as the dilution of forced-labor inputs in the global value chain—suggests a warranted forced-labor tariff just 0.23 to 0.25 percent.

Just looking at tariff revenue gives us the same result. According to the Committee for a Responsible Budget, the Section 301 tariffs could raise around $97 billion annually over the next decade—an amount that dwarfs a “forced labor distortion” that’s measured in the low billions (or less).

Three different methods all give the same conclusion: This is Trump tariff replacement with a human-rights label glued on top.

There’s no off-ramp.

In response to these calculations, USTR might argue that forced labor is so odious that it warrants a deliberately punitive tariff to force international compliance, proportionality be damned. Yet, even leaving aside that this isn’t the theory USTR advanced (or what the law says), it’s flatly contradicted by the tariffs’ design. In particular, the proposed 301 action offers no compliance off-ramp for targeted countries and conspicuously skips several developing countries (e.g., Turkmenistan, Malawi, and Mauritania) that trade with the U.S. and have serious and documented forced-labor problems.

Section 301 directs USTR to target foreign practices that injure U.S. commerce and to achieve a change to or the removal of the offending policy (some history here). If these tariffs really were about eliminating forced labor, USTR would offer to completely remove the tariffs if targeted countries implemented new laws or demonstrated tighter enforcement. (Indeed, Canada, the European Union, and Mexico all maintain or are implementing forced-labor import bans, and the EU’s arguably reaches further than America’s.) Yet USTR offers no benchmarks that a country could meet to see the tariffs eliminated. A country could even adopt the United States’ exact forced-labor framework and still see its imports tariffed—because tariffs are the point.

Here’s how this is supposed to work.

Perhaps the best way to understand the forced labor tariffs’ emptiness is simply by comparing them to the Section 301 tariffs on Chinese imports that Trump imposed during his first term. Trump’s case against Chinese intellectual-property and industrial policy wasn’t without fault, but it still required an eight-month investigation and produced a nearly 200-page report on a single country. And the recommended tariffs—initially set at $50 billion to match/​offset the alleged harm from the targeted Chinese policies—came only after U.S.-China negotiations collapsed. (The tariffs then ratcheted up dramatically in response to Chinese retaliation.)

This time, USTR claims to have fully investigated 60 economies in just 82 days. Its 80-page report gave each country just a few empty paragraphs, and the agency went straight to disproportionately huge tariffs without any serious negotiations with the alleged offenders—tariffs it had promised in advance and that just so happen to mirror the regime the president has spent a year-plus trying (and failing) to keep in place.

Summing it all up.

The forced labor action is a clear abuse of the law and a serious departure from past U.S. government practice—even under President Trump. By no reasonable measure can it be considered anything other than a ham-fisted way to reinstall Trump’s tariff wall and protect it from another IEEPA-like defeat in federal court. In the latter case, the administration might be successful: Section 301 is more legally durable than the untested IEEPA and, while the forced labor action is obviously flimsy, a court might simply be unwilling to question the president’s determinations and actions. We shall see.

If the courts do rubber-stamp these tariffs, their problems will likely extend well beyond just this sham case. Section 301 could become a way for USTR to tariff any country, at any rate, and for any reason and duration, as long as it checks the law’s minor procedural boxes. The actual merits of the case, the quality of the agency’s findings, or its efforts to consider public input won’t really matter. Just say a country doesn’t adequately do something you say is harmful and then apply blanket tariffs after meaningless hearings and comments. Voila.

This is precisely the open-ended tariff power grab the courts checked with their IEEPA rulings, just with a little more procedural window-dressing. In such a case, Section 301 would be a broad tariff generator instead of the targeted tool Congress thought it designed, and it’ll surely be used by Trump or any future president who wants to tariff trading partners over carbon emissions, labor standards, AI regulation, or anything else. Republicans cheering the forced labor tariffs today should consider how they’ll feel when a Democrat holds the tariff pen.

Forced labor is a serious issue that deserves a serious policy. This ain’t it. And by dressing Trump’s tariff dreams in the language of human rights, the 301 action risks discrediting diplomatic, economic, and enforcement tools that might actually work and fueling political pushback in places that desperately need to improve. That’s a shame, and it’s surely not the last one we’ll endure before Trump’s gone. (There’s another Section 301 action—on excess capacity—reportedly coming soon.)

The only real question is, once again, whether enough people in Congress will ever care enough to do something about it.

Markets FTW

Independent distributors and lab-grown diamonds are killing off the very bad, often corrupt global diamond cartel: “De Beers is halting production at South Africa’s biggest diamond mine for at least two years due to collapsing prices, as the product goes for about half of what it did four years ago.”

Chart of the Week

Exploding farm subsidies (related):

Not good:

Creative destruction:

On the right, President Donald Trump wants AI companies to give “something back to the public,” and Sen. Josh Hawley (R‑Missouri) has expressed openness to taxation to make sure AI companies “are actually working for the public good.” On the left, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I‑Vermont) wants the public to own half of the biggest AI companies, and Rep. Ro Khanna (D‑California) has called for a tax on AI tokens, the basic data unit processed by large language models.

The various tax proposals rely on different mechanisms, but the same story motivates them.

It’s a story based on a zero-sum assumption — that gains for capital automatically mean losses for labor. Before becoming treasury secretary, Scott Bessent bought into it, arguing that since the 1980s, “capital has gotten treated better to the detriment of labor.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman linked the story to AI, claiming that he can “imagine” all the ways AI “breaks capitalism” by further shifting economic leverage from labor to capital. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)

A third piece of the narrative is the belief that work is taxed at higher rates than capital — that is, that workers’ taxes are higher than those applied to the income from the investments used to create the AI systems and hardware supplanting them.

All three parts of this story are wrong.

Start with labor’s share of national income. If capital were dominating workers to their detriment, it would be clear in the data. Wages would stagnate. Capital’s share of economic output would climb. But this hasn’t happened. Measured properly, labor’s share of national income has fluctuated around 70 percent for almost a century. Workers are doing well by other measures, too, despite claims to the contrary. Real wages are up more than 40 percent since the 1990s. And a middle-class life has gotten cheaper over a similar period.

The more fundamental mistake is the setup. There is no existential tug-of-war between capital and labor. New tools such as AI make workers more productive, increasing their value and their ability to command higher wages. The digital spreadsheet didn’t wipe out accountants; it freed them from manual tabulation so they could focus on more valuable analysis that, in turn, led to higher pay. New investments expand the economic pie so both capital and labor can win.

The final misconception is that capital is undertaxed relative to labor. The statistics that give this illusion are mostly acts of accounting timing. Labor and capital both face top marginal federal tax rates of about 40 percent and average tax rates close to half that. Workers pay income and payroll taxes. Taxes on capital are usually levied at two levels, first through the corporate income tax and again through taxes on capital gains and dividends.

So, if new AI taxes are not the way to help workers, what should Washington do instead?

First, if the goal is to help workers directly, let them keep more of each paycheck. Congress can cut income and payroll taxes, paired with spending cuts. Spending cuts can have the additional benefit of shedding government programs that discourage work, crowd out private savings and divert capital from investments that actually raise wages.

Second, if the worry is about huge AI fortunes going untaxed in the loophole-riddled tax system, the answer is to tax wealth when it’s spent by reforming existing levies, not adding new ones. Rather than burdening electricity, machines, wages or investment when they are being productive, tax the consumption they fund. Tax the AI fortune when it’s spent, not the investment that builds tools that benefit everyone.

Finally, don’t tax AI, but don’t subsidize it, either. Letting companies immediately deduct their investments is equal treatment, not a handout. But there are plenty of handouts to repeal: transferable energy credits for the nuclear, geothermal and storage projects built to power data centers. Chips Act money for the circuits inside the data centers. And the cash grants, construction-wage credits and property-tax abatements some states offer data centers. End them all.

Taxing the machine to help the worker gets the economics backward. The story getting traction in Washington is exactly wrong: Capital, and the AI it funds, is more likely to be workers’ road to a raise than to their replacement.

Alas, their prescriptions aren’t new. Rather, they offer standard “leftish” economic nostrums. The only good news is that most of these “socialists” really aren’t socialists. At least in any normal sense of the term.

Start with Bernie Sanders. He had a genuine radical past, serving as an elector for the Socialist Workers Party in 1980 (a Trotskyite enterprise whose presidential candidate won all of 75 votes in Vermont that year) and spending his honeymoon taking a boat ride on the Volga River while visiting the Soviet Union. These days he appears, as a millionaire who owns three homes, to have cheerfully accommodated capitalism. His political program basically would leave the rich oppressors undisturbed so long as he gets to rake off a chunk of their earnings to redistribute.

So it is with most DSA candidates. Or at least, that is what they say. They typically push Medicare for all, demonize billionaires, promote higher taxes and social spending, etc. One can argue against such policies, which, alas, aren’t likely to well serve the American people—as economist Milton Friedman once said, “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” (TANSTAFL!) However, this program is well within the normal political discourse of most Western democracies. There is coercion, since you must pay your taxes, or face confiscation and even imprisonment. Nevertheless, no one of note is advocating the wholesale federal takeover of private property, including businesses and other enterprises.

Of course, these issues are mostly prudential, not theological. Notably, Christian scripture does not prescribe any economic system. The “socialism” evident among the New Testament community, including donating and sharing property, was voluntary. “All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need,” we are told. (Acts 2:44–45) Neither the Jewish religious authorities nor the Roman imperial government were involved.

In his letter to the Corinthian church the Apostle Paul lays on a tough guilt trip should his correspondents fall short in aiding members of the Jerusalem church, telling them that “I am sending the brothers in order that our boasting about you in this matter should not prove hollow.” (2 Corinthians 9:3) However, he explicitly refuses to command them to give, instead testing “the sincerity of” their love. (2 Corinthians 8:8) Nor does he suggest that, if they fall short, the local public administration should step in and deliver the necessary funds.

As for current issues, God says nothing about, say, further socializing the health care market. A good society should care for those in need. But how? God leaves us to work that out. It is not enough to wish people well and walk away, according to Jesus’ brother James. (James 2:14–17) However, it also is not enough to advocate whatever fits our policy predilections if it doesn’t meet the need. For instance, to provide better health care it would be best to liberalize a service already under manifold governments’ (state and local as well as national!) control and place it under greater patients’ control.

Unfortunately, America’s professed “socialists” are inadvertently rehabilitating traditional socialism when they misuse that label. Younger Americans who were not alive when history delivered its judgment on the Soviet Union need to understand what real socialism is and why we are blessed that it is not on America’s policy agenda. Clearly inconsistent with Christianity is the Marxist-Leninist variant that characterized the death states of the 20^th Century. Most notably the Soviet Union, People’s Republic of China, Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia), and Democratic People’s Republic of Korea were serious about socialism and equally serious about forcing people to worship the state and its rulers as if they were gods. The result was mass impoverishment, degradation, and death. Worthwhile references include RJ Rummel’s Death by Government and The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, among many others.

Alas, any other system that sought to transfer most productive social assets to government also required systemic and sustained repression, almost always carried out with great brutality and cruelty. Go down the list—Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, the potpourri of Eastern European “satellites” of the Soviet Union, and assorted, usually short-lived, Third World socialist dictatorships. None respected personal autonomy, dignity, or liberty. None recognized individuals’ reliance on conscience, search for transcendent meaning, or commitment to God. None avoided the temptations and abuses of untrammeled, unaccountable, and especially absolute power.

Most American “democratic socialists” appear to be hyper-liberals/progressives. I don’t agree with them, but they are free to peddle their dubious political elixirs. However, they should come up with a different name for their movement. If they really are socialists, they should own up to what they are proposing. Applying the traditional principles of truth-in-advertising requires no less.

The reaction told its own story. Many readers – especially those on the American right who associate Israel with the defense of the West against political Islam – were stunned. “Why the hell” were there sharia courts in Israel, one asked. Israelis, another said, must have “lost their minds!”

They have not (at least not on this issue). And the surprise itself is worth unpacking, because it says something about how narrowly many people in the West have come to understand the legal traditions of Islam.

An Ottoman Legacy

First, some history: Israel’s sharia courts are not an Israeli invention. They are a holdover from the Ottoman millet system, under which the empire governed its many religious communities – Muslims, Jews, Orthodox Christians, Armenians, and others – not through a single uniform law, but by letting each community regulate its own internal religious and family affairs. Marriage, divorce, inheritance, and similar matters of personal status were left to the religious authorities of each community. More public matters (taxation, criminal law, land, commerce) remained under the Sultan’s civil administration. It was a remarkable example of what modern scholars call “legal pluralism,” which allowed a vast, multi-religious empire to hold together for centuries without forcing all its subjects into a single legal mold.

When the Ottoman Empire collapsed after the First World War, the British Mandate authorities in Palestine largely preserved this structure, and the newly declared State of Israel inherited it in 1948. Accordingly, the Jewish citizens would have rabbinical courts, while the Druze and various Christian communities would have their own religious tribunals. The same was true for the Muslim citizens of Israel proper – whose legal status differs sharply from that of Palestinians in the post-1967 occupied territories – who continued resolving their personal-status matters in state-run sharia courts, whose judges are elected through a public process involving the Knesset. Their jurisdiction is “limited to matters of personal status of Muslims only,” as the Israeli Ministry of Justice explains on in its website. So, they deal with issues such as marriage, divorce, alimony, financial relations between spouses, and “prevention of domestic violence.”

Greece’s Liberal Sharia

Israel is not alone in this. Greece – a European Union member state, a Christian-majority democracy quite far from anything associated with Islamic law – also has its own version of sharia law, in the northeastern region of Western Thrace.

This story, too, goes back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which was followed by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne between Turkey and Greece. Here the latter agreed to let its historic Muslim minority – some 100,000 to 120,000 people, mostly ethnic Turks – settle family and inheritance matters according to Islamic law, administered by government-appointed muftis in the towns of Komotini, Xanthi, and Didymoteicho.

This system in Greece has continued to date – only with a liberal reform in 2018, which came after the case of Hatijah Molla Sali, a Muslim widow who objected to getting a smaller share of her husband’s estate due to the sharia courts. The European Court of Human Rights found her objection valid, and Athens responded by making the sharia jurisdiction optional: Greek Muslims could now choose between sharia courts or the civil Greek courts for these matters, making sharia observance voluntary rather than compulsory.

In other words, the sharia system in Greece ended up being more liberal than in Israel, where religious courts are the only available option for family law – for Jews, Muslims, and others. In Greece, there is instead civil law for every citizen, while sharia is now optional for Muslims of Western Thrace.

Meanwhile, thanks to these surviving vestiges of Ottoman legal pluralism, both Israel and Greece ended up carving out more room for sharia law than Turkey does, since the latter went fully secularist with the Kemalist revolution of the 1920s and 30s. So, quite ironically, there are today sharia courts in Jewish-majority Israel and Christian-majority Greece, but not in Muslim-majority Turkey.

What About Stoning, Lashes, Executions?

But what about all the scary things about sharia that have shocked Western audiences for decades, with all those appalling stories from the Taliban’s Afghanistan or the Islamic Republic of Iran? What about all those harsh rules like stoning adulterers, amputating the hands of thieves, or flogging wine drinkers? What about sharia rules on executing apostates or blasphemers – crude violations of the freedoms of religion and expression?

These are legitimate questions. First, such violent and oppressive interpretations of sharia do exist. They are, in fact, somewhat mainstream teachings in medieval Islamic legal manuals in both Sunni and Shiite traditions. Moreover, there are Islamist groups willing to implement them in the modern world as much as they can. The political orders they aspire to are clearly at odds with some of the modern notions of human rights and freedoms. In a new book, Sharia Versus the U.S. Constitution, Egyptian-American scholar Ayman. S. Ibrahim highlights these stark contrasts. He points to some real problems – but his argument also leaves out some useful context.

It’s worth noting that most of these controversial aspects of the sharia belong to its penal code, which covers various religious and moral “crimes” are punished with archaic corporal punishments. But the penal code is a relatively small part of sharia. Other parts include commercial law, family law, and personal religious practices, areas that Muslims can follow without violating anyone’s freedoms – as they indeed do.

For Western Christians, who may be relatively unfamiliar with the concept of religious law, there is a helpful analogy: the halakha, or Jewish religious law, which is the closest parallel to Islamic sharia. (No wonder Israelis understand this much better than some of their Western supporters do.) Just like sharia, the halakha governs the personal practices of believers, the morals of the community, and the laws of the ideal theocratic state – which once also included things like stoning adulterers or blasphemers.

The big difference is that in the Jewish case, the theocratic state is long gone, and the penal code has been obsolete for nearly two millennia, while believers follow much of the halakha voluntarily, as a matter of tradition and piety. The same transformation – separating religious law from the coercive powers of the modern state – has not yet fully matured in Islam, but it is possible. (It is the kind of reform I myself have been advocating. See, for example, my book No Compulsion in Religion – No Exceptions.)

The better news is that this separation between sharia and state power is already the lived reality of over a billion people in the Muslim-majority world. Sharia’s penal code is enforced in only about a dozen “Islamic” states, like Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, or Saudi Arabia. The rest of the Muslim world, some 40-odd states, are either fully secular, like Turkey or Uzbekistan, or apply sharia only in family law, like Jordan or Indonesia (except Aceh Province). And while pious Muslim citizens of these countries may be careful to get married or according to sharia, for their own religious reasons, not all are eager to enforce it on others by making it the law of the land.

That is why there’s a name for those who are eager for such sharia triumphalism: they are called “Islamists.” While they may pose a potential threat to freedom – just like Christian, Jewish, Hindu, or other triumphalists – the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not, even when they honor the sharia.

Freedom Versus Coercion

The key measure here is freedom versus coercion: When a Muslim abstains from alcohol or wears a headscarf out of his or her own choice, without dictating it to anyone, that is sharia observed, not enforced. Similarly, when a Muslim couple wants to get married or divorced in the sight of an Islamic qadi rather than a secular judge, they are observing sharia for themselves, not enforcing it on others.

The sharia courts in Israel, as well as in Greece, give us an idea of how this live-and-let-live accommodation could be structurally arranged. The sharia councils in the UK – not “courts” with binding decisions – present a less formal version, operating on the basis of the British Arbitration Act, which also allow Jewish religious councils called Beth Din. And in the United States, the Constitution already secures robust religious freedom. “And that’s all we ask for,” as one American imam said recently at a congressional hearing on “Islam, Sharia, and the U.S. Constitution.”

Such syntheses between modern liberal states and Islamic piety, and honest conversations about them, are much needed today. They will help us avoid spending the rest of this century in clashes of religions and civilizations. They will also help more Muslims appreciate the value of freedom, which is all they need to practice their religion.

At least he ended his participation on a positive note.

“There was tremendous unity in that room,” declared the president. “There was a love in that room. It was great. So this was a tremendously successful summit.” Of greatest policy relevance was his announcement that “We want to remain with you.”

These came after an unnamed NATO diplomat told Politico Europe: “I’m sick and tired of panicking about Trump.” The diplomat nevertheless praised Europe’s increased defense efforts: “We have to do this for ourselves.”

Most European states are taking their defense responsibilities more seriously, which is welcome. Washington’s overwhelming military role in NATO was necessary at the beginning of the Cold War. Western Europe and Japan had been ravaged by war and were vulnerable to diplomatic coercion and even military attack. No one knew if the Soviet Union would do so, but no one wanted to risk such dangerous uncertainty.

That world disappeared, however, after America’s defense dependents recovered economically. Unfortunately, both sides continued to support the US military dole. Members of Washington’s bipartisan foreign policy “Blob” preferred to dominate global and allied affairs, despite the policy’s significant cost. Allies preferred to focus on domestic development, including their burgeoning welfare states, leaving security to the US.

Eventually, the imbalance grew too great, and a succession of American officials pushed the Europeans, in particular, to do more, with only indifferent success. In 2011 Defense Secretary Robert Gates famously warned future American officials “may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.”

Donald Trump seemed to be that person. Despite his rhetorical excess, though, the president did not make good on his threat to leave the alliance in either his first term or the first 18 months of his second term. Rather than negotiate a structured political and military withdrawal from NATO, leaving the Europeans to decide on their own security policy, he evidently prefers using America’s continuing presence to shake down allies economically, imposing tariffs, obstructing regulations, and forcing investment. For him, the military is more a mercantilist than a security tool, and it worked on Europeans who abhorred the cost of declaring independence from the US.

Now he is reversing that approach, turning mercantilism into a security tool, though in practice he is more likely to harm America’s international position by doing so. Trump has long targeted Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez for rejecting NATO’s increasing spending standards, despite their manifold loopholes. Sánchez’s position is understandable: no one believes that Vladimir Putin’s legions will imminently approach the gates of Zaragoza, Barcelona, Seville, Valencia, or Madrid. Moreover, Sánchez’s stand against US military and foreign policy, along with other high-profile progressive advocacy, has bolstered his popularity, a particularly important factor given the political misconduct scandals besetting his government.

Now Trump is considering reverse mercantilism by cutting off US trade with Spain even though the latter buys more from America than it sells, thereby reducing America’s global trade deficit, a long-time Trump goal. Last year the president complained that Spain was “unbelievably disrespectful” and threatened to end trade with that nation, and in March repeated that position. The issue then faded as he appeared to lose interest in favor of his Washington, DC construction projects and Middle East warmaking.

Alas, the latest NATO summit apparently rekindled his anger and he again threatened economic war against Madrid. He termed it a “terrible partner in NATO” and a “wasted cause. We don’t want to do any trade business with Spain anymore.” 

Sánchez denied any tension, responding: “Relations between the United States and Spain are very positive relations in social, cultural, economic and also political terms.”

This time Trump issued instructions. In Ankara, the president publicly told Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent: “I don’t want to do any trade with them, alright?” He added: “I don’t want anything to do with Spain. Cut off all trade with Spain, please, including visits, OK?”

Bessent responded “yes, sir” and several agencies began developing a “menu” of products to be banned. Most likely, the administration would use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to embargo some or all Spanish imports. This follows similar threats from four months ago. Then the president appeared to flip-flop again, declaring: “They honored a request for lots of payments, and if they didn’t, we wouldn’t have even talked to them.” (Apparently, Madrid convinced him that it met the current NATO standard.)

Had he moved forward, the administration would have had to ground its decision in national security and declare a national emergency, as it previously did against Cuba and North Korea. But Spain poses no comparable challenge, no threat by any serious definition. No doubt, the issue would have ended up in court. As the president discovered in February, his power over trade is not plenary. The Supreme Court rejected his attempt to use the IEEPA to launch trade wars with virtually every other nation on earth. Although jurists tend to defer to presidential claims in such cases, they recognized that he was grossly abusing emergency provisions for partisan policy purposes. Trump’s continuing, extravagant demands stirred opposition even among the long-submissive GOP congressional caucuses.

Cutting off Spain would be bad policy. Americans benefit from commerce with the Spanish.  

From them, Americans purchase olive oil, refined petroleum, electrical transformers, perfumes, vaccines, ceramics, wine, gas turbines, tires, aircraft parts, and nuts. From us, the Spanish buy crude petroleum, pharmaceuticals, petroleum gas, vaccines and other medical products, gas turbines, aircraft and spacecraft, soybeans, and nuts. Then there’s investment banking: “BlackRock holds €104 billion ($119 billion) worth of Spanish equities, debt and other assets, and Spain is the US-based firm’s main bet at a global level for the next six months,” Reuters reported.  

Fundamental liberty is also at stake. Trade is not government-to-government, but person-to-person and firm-to-firm. Nor is it a restricted legal privilege. Commerce occurs because both sides gain. The president might want nothing to do with Spain, but millions of Americans do. They trade with people and visit Spain. US policy should not be based on a president’s arbitrary anger and personal pique. It should reflect America’s national interest, not his belief that he is “running the world” and therefore is entitled to arbitrarily impose his will. Ironically, Sánchez is implementing Trump’s governing philosophy, a form of “Make Spain Great Again,” acting in Spain’s interest rather than that of other nations, including the US.

Mercantilism was largely abandoned because it hindered economic success and undermined national development. It was bad when Trump adopted that failed model as America’s new approach. It became much worse when Trump malformed security policy to reinforce his mercantilist approach. Punishing Spain, or any other nation that ends up in his sights, would hurt Americans even more.

NATO’s Ankara summit delivered little of the expected fireworks. Unfortunately, however, though superficially successful, it reinforced the outdated policies of American primacy and European dependency. It also highlighted Trump’s mercantilist bent and willingness to sacrifice Americans’ economic interests for dubious political ends.

We all are likely to be poorer as a result.

In New Jersey, scarcity isn’t just measured by waiting in line for electricity — it shows up every month when utility bills continue to climb.

The problem isn’t simply that electricity has become more expensive. It’s that energy policy has become focused on managing scarcity instead of creating abundance.

Think about electric lighting. Two centuries ago, people relied on candles and oil lamps. Businesses closed when the sun went down, and families carefully weighed whether another hour of light was worth the expense.

Today, almost no one thinks twice about flipping a switch. Lighting didn’t become affordable because governments became better at rationing candles. It became affordable because innovation made electricity abundant — and increasingly efficient.

Throughout history, predictions of energy scarcity have repeatedly underestimated human ingenuity. Railroads, aluminum production, air conditioning, the internet and now artificial intelligence have all been portrayed as threats to limited energy supplies.

Yet history tells a different story. When markets are free to innovate, entrepreneurs build more supply, engineers improve technology, investors expand infrastructure and yesterday’s scarcity becomes today’s ordinary convenience.

New Jersey needs more energy, not more rationing

New Jersey should embrace that same mindset. Rather than debating how to divide a limited supply of electricity more efficiently, policymakers should focus on producing more of it.

That challenge is especially relevant today. Electricity demand is rising rapidly as artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and data centers reshape the American economy. A growing economy requires a growing supply of affordable, reliable electricity.

Fortunately, New Jersey doesn’t have to start from scratch. One of North America’s largest natural gas resources sits just across the Delaware River in Pennsylvania.

Yet policies that have restricted pipeline development and limited new energy infrastructure have made it harder to deliver affordable energy to New Jersey consumers. When supply is constrained, higher prices are the predictable result.

The same supply-focused thinking is beginning to emerge elsewhere. Gov. Mikie Sherrill recently signed legislation designed to encourage continued investment in New Jersey’s nuclear fleet — a recognition that preserving and expanding reliable, around-the-clock generation must be part of any long-term affordability strategy.

Recent reforms are a good start

Against that backdrop, Sherrill recently signed an electricity reform package that deserves recognition.

The legislation strengthens oversight of utility transmission spending, eliminates an outdated incentive related to regional electricity markets and requires the largest new electricity customers to bear more of the costs they impose on the grid.

For New Jersey families who saw electricity prices rise sharply in 2025, these reforms are a welcome first step.

The changes could save New Jersey ratepayers more than $1 billion annually. More importantly, they signal a shift in thinking.

For decades, energy affordability has often meant rebates, subsidies, tax credits or bill assistance after electricity prices had already increased.

Those policies may help consumers cope with higher costs, but they do little to address why energy became more expensive in the first place.

The next step is even more important: building an energy system capable of producing enough affordable, reliable electricity to support long-term economic growth.

Building an energy-abundant future

One promising reform would allow large new electricity users — such as data centers and advanced manufacturers — to develop privately financed electricity systems operating independently from the traditional grid.

Rather than requiring every major new customer to use the same monopoly framework, New Jersey could allow companies to build private electricity networks tailored to their needs.

Creating this parallel path would accelerate investment, encourage innovation in how electricity is produced and delivered and strengthen New Jersey’s ability to compete for the industries driving the next generation of economic growth.

Abundance-minded reform means making it easier to build new generation, modernize transmission infrastructure, encourage private investment, expand opportunities for privately financed electricity systems and allow companies to finance the energy resources they need.

It also means embracing an energy strategy that preserves dependable baseload generation while expanding new sources of reliable electricity.

New nuclear energy, expanded natural gas infrastructure, renewables where they make economic sense and emerging technologies all have a role to play.

The objective should not be choosing winners and losers. It should be ensuring New Jersey has enough electricity to power the next generation of economic growth.

Consumers don’t care whether affordable electricity comes from a Republican idea or a Democratic one. They care that the lights stay on, businesses continue investing and monthly bills remain affordable.

The purpose of energy policy isn’t to manage scarcity. It is to create abundance. New Jersey’s future prosperity depends on producing more affordable, reliable electricity and the infrastructure needed to deliver it.

And he didn’t announce radical steps like the federal control of election administration (at least not yet). 

But the biggest surprise: The documents shared by the White House in real time refuted, or failed to support, Trump’s speech. It’s even more remarkable that these are the documents the White House’s newly formed “government transparency task force” chose to publish in its opening salvo, and they are very bad for Trump’s claims. I can only assume further document releases will be even worse for Trump.

The speech divided (albeit roughly) into five topics: (alleged) Chinese interference, the (alleged) national security deep state, (alleged) voting equipment security vulnerabilities, the Department of Justice’s (alleged) failure to prosecute a voter registration agency in Michigan, and noncitizens (allegedly) registered in four states (California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada). Weirdly, the corresponding White House website and document portal only divide into four topics.

I’ll save the China and deep state allegations for national security experts. I’m better equipped to respond to Trump’s claims about election equipment and noncitizen voter registrations.

It’s important to remember that, unlike in many European countries, U.S. elections are largely governed by state law and administered in more than 9,000 local jurisdictions (typically counties). There is no election mothership that can be hacked to corrupt the elections of the entire country. Each state has its own set of rules and its own election equipment, unconnected to other states.

It’s also important to remember that about 98 percent of Americans vote with a paper ballot. The majority of U.S. voters hand-mark a paper ballot. Other American voters, about 26 percent, make their choices on a digital touchscreen that then prints a paper ballot to be verified by the voter and read by the tabulator. Paper ballots are unhackable, digitally immutable, and auditable; the security community loves them.

Trump, per usual, largely ignored these realities, stating that “our election infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot counting systems [are] dishonest, almost all. They’re vulnerable and easily compromised.” Remarkably, the documents released in the first “pillar” of the new White House website—“Vulnerabilities in Electronic Voting and Ballot-Counting Systems”—very much undermine Trump’s claims. 

Take the document titled “Foreign Threats to 2020 Federal Elections,” for example. Produced by the National Intelligence Council on August 19, 2020, the report states:

Similarly, in a January 15, 2020, document titled, “Vulnerabilities in US 2020 Election Infrastructure,” the national security experts wrote:

The same document considered the greater threat to be “wholly fabricated claims, such as announcing that [adversaries] have compromised all US voting machines, a claim that would be difficult and time-consuming–or impossible–for the US Government to disprove.” Trump didn’t quote that passage for some reason.

The reports did identify the comparative vulnerability of systems connected to the internet, like election office websites and voter registration information. But as the assessments note, successful attacks on these systems could “forc[e] voters to use provisional ballots” or “caus[e] delays.” Nowhere do these reports give any credence to “flipped votes,” “counterfeit ballots,” “phantom voters,” or any of the other theories popular among Trump-inspired election skeptics.

If anything, the documents can be read as a celebration of the progress election offices made in the lead-up to the 2020 election. As the report on potential vulnerabilities in election infrastructure states, “Direct recording electronic machines, which record and process votes digitally and store tabulation data in removable memory, are particularly vulnerable to cyber operations, especially machines with no paper backup. Such machines, however, are used far less than other, more secure types of voting machines.” In the years before November 2020, a number of states, including Georgia, switched from direct recording electronic machines to election systems with paper ballots. Only Louisiana continues to make heavy use of paperless systems.

Trump’s other major election administration claim—that “more than a quarter of a million foreigners illegally registered to vote”—isn’t undermined by the released documents, but is woefully unsupported. Trump stated that the Department of Homeland Security “identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.” That’s a big number, but the number of documents offered by the White House in support of the claim is much smaller: one. The one-page, undated document by the Department of Homeland Security reads:

That’s it. No discussion of the methodology. No theory of how such a large number of noncitizens registered. No explanation for how DHS identified those four states for scrutiny. And certainly no itemization of the unlawful registrants.

Careful listeners probably noticed two things about Trump’s brief noncitizens claim. First, he said these are registrants, not voters. They might not have ever voted. Every state investigation on this topic has found the number of noncitizen voters to be only a small fraction of the number of noncitizen registrants. Many noncitizens have paper voter registration forms stuck under their noses, only to find out later that they can’t vote unless they’re U.S. citizens. Others are registered when obtaining a driver’s license, a process so easy that quickly checking the voter registration box is understandable, especially for those less comfortable with English.

Trump also alleged that the four offending states “refused to share their voter files.” It’s highly unlikely, then, that the federal government could have performed “hard matches.” If the states didn’t share their voter files, the federal government would not have had access to Social Security or driver’s license numbers to pair with each registrant. “Soft matches” using only a full name and date of birth are notoriously unreliable. In 2021, when the Cyber Ninjas—a private company run by Doug Logan, who had previously endorsed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election—audited the Maricopa County, Arizona, election results, it used soft-matching techniques to allege that 33,102 voters cast unlawful ballots because they had moved. When Maricopa County, under my direction, spent hundreds of hours investigating these records, we found just five such votes had been cast. 

Hard matching and soft matching aside, the White House needs to show its work. A single one-page document doesn’t constitute proof. Compare this bare-bones approach to the recent citizenship audit done by Utah that resulted in a 27-page narrative of its process and conclusions. Of more than 2 million registered voters, Utah found 27 confirmed noncitizens, 12 of whom voted in the November 2020 election. Similarly, Michigan reported in detail its recent audit of Macomb County’s some 725,000 registered voters. It found four “apparent noncitizens” on their voter rolls, including one who voted. 

Ever since Trump entered politics, he has alleged stolen elections. He claimed widespread fraud when he lost to Ted Cruz in the 2016 Iowa caucus. He claimed fraud in his 2016 victory against Hillary Clinton. And he of course claimed massive fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

He promised proof. His speech didn’t deliver that proof. And the documents released by the White House? They didn’t help his case.

Trump claimed in his speech that some 278,000 non-citizens illegally registered to vote . There is no real evidence to support this, and even he didn’t claim proof there was any significant actual illegal non-citizen voting. Decades of efforts to find such evidence — including by the right-wing Heritage Foundation — have turned up no more than a few dozen cases, over a span of several decades. A search of the Heritage’s election fraud database turns up only 99 supposed cases of non-citizen voting from 1982 to 2025.

Trump also claimed foreign powers intervened to prevent his election in 2020, and that China “obtained” some 220,000 voter files. In January 2021, the US intelligence community — then led by Trump’s own first-term political appointees — concluded foreign interference did not tilt the election against him and that China did not even try to do so. The voter-file access claim makes no sense. As my Cato Institute colleague Walter Olson — an election law specialist — points out, “this means nothing” because it is possible to buy or rent voter information from states that make them public information.

These claims are intended to bolster Trump’s long-standing assertions that the 2020 election was somehow “stolen” from him. Overwhelming evidence shows the contrary. In 2020–21, Trump and his political allies filed 64 court cases challenging the results in six key swing states. As detailed in “Lost, Not Stolen,” a review of these cases conducted by prominent Republican lawyers, election law specialists, and former federal judges, none of these decisions found significant evidence of voter fraud.

While some cases were dismissed on procedural grounds, 30 were decided on the merits, and in 14 others the plaintiffs voluntarily withdrew their suits (likely because they lacked evidence to substantiate their claims). Trump only prevailed in one case — a Pennsylvania decision involving procedural flaws that did not involve near enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s over 80,000 vote margin of victory in that state. Later investigations conducted in various swing states — including those undertaken by Republicans in Arizona and Michigan — likewise found no meaningful evidence of significant fraud.

If some combination of Democrats and foreign powers had managed to “steal” the 2020 election while Trump was in the White House, and avoid detection in the process, one wonders why they didn’t do it again in 2024, when a Democratic president was in power and in control of the Justice Department and the intelligence community. The fact that no such thing happened then is yet further evidence that it didn’t happen in 2020.

The real purpose of Trump’s ongoing lies about the 2020 election and election security may be to bolster his efforts to “nationalize” control of the 2026 midterm elections, so that he can skew results in his party’s favor, at a time when most pollsters and election analysts expect Republicans to lose control of at least one house of Congress, and possibly both.

Fortunately, Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution gives states primary responsibility for election administration, subject to override by congressional legislation. No current federal law gives Trump the authority he seeks. Numerous federal courts — including in cases presided over by Republican-appointed judges — have rejected his attempts to change voter ID rules by executive order and take control of state voter rolls. Courts should similarly rule against any potential efforts to use federal law enforcement agencies or — worse still — troops, to seize control of polling sites and ballots, just as the Supreme Court in December rightly rejected Trump’s illegal efforts to use the National Guard in Illinois and other blue states. State governments should also do everything possible to resist such power grabs through the political process and mobilize public opinion against any attempts..

America’s decentralized system of election administration has downsides, as well as virtues. But, as leading election law scholar Richard L. Hasen notes, it provides valuable protection against “a president hell-bent, like Trump, on election subversion.” Hasen, previously an advocate of election law centralization, adds that this has led him to reconsider. Americans would do well to heed Hasen’s point and also reject Trump’s bogus claims of fraud, intended to pave the way for his own very real efforts to undermine our elections.

Nor are most self-described socialists really socialists. Sen. Bernie Sanders is a millionaire owner of three homes who has never, to my knowledge, proposed nationalizing the entire economy. Rather, he wants to use abundant resources generated by private enterprise to fund his social objectives. Heck, that’s even Chinese Communist leader Xi Jinping’s strategy: “socialism with Chinese characteristics” uses largely private economic activity to advance the ruling regime’s interests.

Nevertheless, there always have been softer variants of economic collectivism advanced by Social Democrats and their fellow travelers who imagined an electoral process that turned control of relatively free societies over to well-intentioned, all-knowing social engineers. As IRD has documented—and resisted—over the years, the mainline religious leaderships have often trended in this direction. Exhibiting similar tendencies among evangelicals were the Sojourners community and Ron Sider and Evangelicals for Social Action (now Christians for Social Action), which he founded. These activists generally sought to use the state to address genuine human trials and crises, but, unfortunately, with all too often counterproductive results.

Now nominal conservatives increasingly appear to be turning in a similar direction. President Donald Trump has never held to any consistent ideological position, so it comes as little surprise that he is seeking to return the United States to the past when mercantilism was in vogue. More unsettling may be Vice President JD Vance’s seeming enthusiasm for a state-directed economy.

Of course, the Bible does not enshrine any economic system. Fostering development and increasing growth weren’t the mission of the prophets and apostles. Indeed, the operation of neither the ancient Hebrew kingdom nor the New Testament Christian community offer much useful advice about how to organize and maintain a modern industrial society. People’s good intentions also mattered little. As James asked: “Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, ‘go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?”

As Jesus’s brother understood, practical results matter. By that measure the president’s approach is falling short. For instance, his trade policy, if it deserves to be called that, is essentially a trade war on the entire world. His campaign has raised consumer prices, increased producer costs, crippled domestic manufacturers, and destroyed American jobs. The vice president recently insisted that “the economy is a tool to serve the dignity of the human person.” If so, he shouldn’t be talking up Trumponomics.

Particularly curious were Vance’s potshots at Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who did much in the 1970s and 1980s to revive classical liberal economic thought, along with the sort of policies generally promoted by President Ronald Reagan. I have a particular affection for Friedman, who I met while I was attending Stanford Law School and working part-time at the Hoover Institution. He later nominated me for membership in the Mont Pelerin Society, a haven for classical liberals that had been created during the difficult days of the Cold War.

Vance dismissed Friedman’s ideas as most relevant “in a world where there are Christian guardrails on everything.” Actually, the vice president gets that precisely wrong. As Lord Acton famously warned, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” A free, competitive market system is most vital when the temptation and opportunity of government officials to misuse power is greatest. Then market dynamics may be the most powerful force available to limit the abusive and even tyrannical use of state power.

Vance correctly criticized turning economic development “into a sort of idol”—God has warned us against the love of money, after all—but the vice president should not dismiss the importance of economic growth, especially for those with the least. Even Marx recognized that the economic productivity of capitalism brought most of the world out of immiserating poverty. The expanding opportunities which Friedman helped create did more than any government program to reduce poverty and enhance dignity.

Moreover, governments have consistently gotten more wrong than right with their economies. The 20^th century was the triumph of The Plan. World War I produced “war socialism,” which left the continent of Europe in ruins. Out of that conflict came the communists, fascists, and Nazis. Their attempts to create a “New Man” economically as well as socially and ideological varied in details but were uniformly a bust. The more moderate welfare states of the West, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, did much to impede recovery and slow growth. Nevertheless, “industrial policy” later became the rage in Washington, when US policymakers feared that Japan was going to overtake America economically. In 1991 a book appeared even predicting military conflict between the US and this new rising power. However, that nation’s economy soon stalled and everyone lost their belief that Tokyo was the future. While the US today frets over China’s advances, the latter has spent billions to bolster a semiconductor chip industry that continues to lag that of America.

While markets remain imperfect, government control is even less pristine. Private ownership limits the harm caused by any one incompetent or corrupt actor; state policy all too often multiplies the ill consequences of bad decisions. Moreover, the Trump family’s ostentatious profiteering from government policy offers an important caution to turning even more power over to any president. The reason influential economic interests spend billions of dollars to control American governments at all levels is to protect themselves from that authority and, all too often, otherwise use that power for their own benefit.

God doesn’t instruct us what to think about economics or politics. Only the totalitarian ideologies are foreclosed to believers. The notorious Nazi jurist Roland Freisler, who tried the July 1944 plotters against Adolf Hitler, opined: “There is one thing … which we National Socialists and the Christians have in common, and only one: we both demand the whole man.”

However, a market system better protects liberty. And more effectively responds economically. We should promote human flourishing. That is more likely to occur in a world in which the economy is broadly free and public officials, like the vice president, have only very limited authority to bend it to their will.

Somehow, this has yet to sink into the national consciousness.

The precise timing is a projection. The cuts are not. They’re activated automatically following the law: Once the trust fund is empty, Social Security can pay out only what it collects. And the zero hour keeps moving toward us. This year’s trustees report pulled the projection forward a full year. The program has promised to pay out roughly $30 trillion more than it will take in over the next 75 years.

Yet few candidates are talking about this in any serious way. It pays to say nothing. Evidently, lots of legislators believe that the political cost of telling voters the unhappy news today exceeds the cost of letting the cuts occur tomorrow. That’s how we ended up just one term from disaster.

When politicians do raise the issue, they make the fix sound easy. Sens. Bernie Moreno (R–Ohio) and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) want you to believe that eliminating the cap on payroll taxes would fix the problem. That solution fails on its own terms.

Using data from the Social Security Administration’s own actuaries, my colleague Jack Salmon demonstrates that scrapping the taxable maximum closes only 58 percent of the gap. National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru noted last month that it would push the federal marginal rate on top wages to an untenable 49.4 percent, and overall rates would climb past 60 percent in high-tax states like California and New York.

The senators aren’t alone in wanting to tax our way out of this problem. In one recent survey, 89 percent of Americans aged 65 and older favored protecting current retirees’ benefits even if doing so requires higher taxes on younger workers.

That position is popular only because it rests on the image of retirees living off nothing but Social Security. That image, partly an artifact of bad data, fails to capture the situation.

In a March 2025 government survey, 24 percent of seniors reported that Social Security supplies 90 percent or more of their income. But when Census Bureau researchers matched responses with IRS filings and benefits records, they found that retirees frequently omitted their 401(k) and IRA withdrawals, making the real figure only about 14 percent. Meanwhile, 58 percent of retirees draw less than half their income from the program.

The remaining 42 percent are the retirees that Social Security reform of any kind should protect. They already receive a raw deal under the current formula, which does a much better job of protecting wealthier seniors.

As the Cato Institute’s Romina Boccia and Ivane Nachkebia documented last month, seniors aged 65 to 74 had a median net worth of $410,000 in 2022, compared with only $135,600 for those aged 35 to 44 (who pay a significant share of the taxes). Roughly 34 percent of Social Security dollars go to filers with adjusted gross incomes above $100,000. Too often, Social Security is less a need-based program than a transfer of wealth from the young and unpropertied to the old and comfortable.

A March 2026 paper from the Committee for a Responsible Budget puts it plainly: Despite facing large deficits, Social Security now pays the wealthiest couples roughly $100,000 in annual benefits, more than five times the poverty threshold for a retired household. “In inflation-adjusted terms,” it adds, “the maximum couple’s benefit has doubled since 1990 and is projected to double again around 2070. By that point, the wealthiest couples will receive $200,000 in combined benefits.”

The best reform is one proposed by Boccia: Return Social Security to a mission of poverty prevention. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that giving new beneficiaries a flat benefit at 125 percent of the poverty level (roughly $1,660 a month) would erase the entire 75-year deficit while raising benefits for the lowest earners.

Next, index eligibility ages to longevity and allow workers to own compounding assets through personal accounts rather than relying on a political promise that the next generation must be conscripted to keep.

Many people will dislike reading this, I’m sure, and wonder why we can’t just borrow to pay for the benefits. The answer is that between Social Security, Medicare, and interest payments, we’re short by $115 trillion over 30 years. The moment Congress commits to that much borrowing, the likelihood of a historic inflation burst increases. Even this painful hike in the price level would not manage to devalue enough debt to save us, since Social Security benefits are indexed to inflation. The obligation would survive; retirees’ bond portfolios and other assets would lose value.

The senators we elect this year will not be able to avoid these decisions. Don’t let them avoid the question, either.

AOC made the socialist stance clear in 2020, a year after joining Congress. “No one ever makes a billion dollars,” she said. “You take a billion dollars.”

But the idea that wealth is taken from others rather than created is an idea economists rebutted 155 years ago.

Early economists, such as James Mill and David Ricardo, theorized that the physical labor exerted to create a good is the real measure of its value. Karl Marx took the concept to its extreme: If labor creates all value, then profit must require unpaid labor, making every employer an expropriator and every fortune a crime.

Then, beginning in 1871, economists countered the labor theory of value. Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons and Léon Walras demonstrated independently that value resides not in hours of toil but in the judgments of consumers. Writing a 500-page novel takes the same amount of physical labor as typing out 500 pages of the word “banana” repeatedly. Only the novel commands a price. Value is created whenever someone rearranges the world into a shape that others want. It is measured by the buyer, not the worker.

Entrepreneurs are the arrangers. Economist Israel Kirzner argued that entrepreneurship is alertness — noticing an opportunity that nobody else has found. The entrepreneur sees that resources combined in a certain way and priced at a certain level can be recombined into something consumers will value even more. The gap between the two is profit. Nothing is taken from workers, who are paid the wage they agree to, or from customers, who buy the product only when the purchase leaves them better off.

Yet socialists long to punish successful entrepreneurs for their achievements. In November, Californians will vote on a 5 percent wealth tax on all billionaire residents in the state. Researchers at the Hoover Institution estimate that, thanks to billionaires fleeing California, the net present value of the tax will be negative $24.7 billion.

Wealth taxes aren’t a new idea. In 2019, Sanders introduced a tax plan engineered to cut U.S. billionaire fortunes in half within 15 years. Europe already ran this experiment. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that 12 member countries, all in Europe, taxed net wealth in 1990. Only four did by 2017. According to one estimate from economist Éric Pichet, France’s version of the tax cost roughly twice what it collected and drove out approximately 200 billion euros, or around $228 billion, in capital. French President Emmanuel Macron abolished the tax in 2017.

Socialists, seeing the problem of capital flight, have a solution: a global tax on billionaires. Brazil, in its capacity as president of the Group of 20 in 2024, commissioned a blueprint for a worldwide 2 percent wealth tax on billionaires. The plan would require global cooperation and special tax mechanisms to compensate for holdout countries, so establishing the levy would be difficult.

But if socialists ever succeeded, everyone would suffer. The net worth of most billionaires primarily consists of equity. Taxing those assets every year pushes entrepreneurs to sell down their stakes in their own companies. And these taxes compound: A 2 percent annual tax confiscates one-third of a fortune within 20 years before any of that equity is sold for a profit.

According to economist William Nordhaus, innovators keep 2.2 percent of the surplus they create, and the public keeps the rest. A tax that shrinks an entrepreneur’s share removes their incentive to innovate. That shrinks our 97.8 percent along with it — in the form of companies never founded, cures never developed and wages never raised.

Taxes also change behavior. Confronted with a levy on wealth, innovators won’t simply write a check and return to developing their start-ups. They will hire estate lawyers. They will move their fortune into trusts and foundations. And they will learn that the surest way to keep what they have built is to stop building — a wealth tax punishes unrealized, illiquid, risk-laden assets most. The global tax would redirect some of the nation’s most productive minds from the hard work of innovation to the sterile work of wealth preservation.

A movement that believes wealth is stolen will tax it, cap it and make everyone poorer. Ideas drive growth, and ideas come from people who can profit from them. A world that cherishes entrepreneurs will enjoy advanced chips and revolutionary cures. A world that punishes its innovators will at least enjoy plenty of slogans.

No doubt, Asmara needs financial support, given its disastrous dirigiste policies and Eritrea’s forbidding economic conditions. According to Bertelsmann Stiftung: “Eritrea remains one of the world’s poorest countries, and poverty is endemic. … the poverty rate is very high, and most Eritreans rely on support from relatives in the diaspora to survive. Consequently, the majority of the population is structurally excluded from opportunities to earn a decent living, leading to a continuous mass exodus.”

Isaias may also hope for military assistance, or at least Washington’s willingness to warn neighboring Ethiopia against attempting to reacquire a port and coastline and perhaps even force regime change. Eritrea emerged as an independent country only after three decades of armed struggle and remains entangled in Addis Ababa’s affairs. Eritrean forces currently occupy areas of Tigray, an Ethiopian region recently at war with both its national government and Asmara. During the conflict, Eritrea’s military was accused of civilian massacres and sexual enslavement. It continues to pillage and otherwise abuse the local population.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration appears receptive to rapprochement. “Donald Trump’s top Africa adviser is reported to have met the dictator in late 2025,” reported The Economist. “Marco Rubio, America’s secretary of state, has talked of a ‘new era of US–Eritrea relations.’ Much chatter suggests America will soon lift the sanctions it imposed five years ago, perhaps opening the way for Mr. Isaias’s wider rehabilitation.”

Washington would gain little economic advantage from such an opening, since Isaias has shown no interest in serious and sustained policy reform. More likely, the administration hopes to reduce conflict in an important region and gain local assistance in any renewed conflict with Yemen’s Houthis, who could again seek to shut down Red Sea shipping. Washington might also be seeking greater access to Eritrea’s abundant mineral deposits, an industry currently dominated by China.

Critics complain that Asmara has done nothing to warrant what would amount to a reward. However, that is the wrong standard for lifting sanctions. Greater engagement deserves a serious look because current policy has failed. Sanctions imposed during the conflict with Tigray neither changed Eritrea’s international course nor moderated Isaias’s tyrannical rule. Indeed, Eritreans remain desperate to escape what amounts to a national prison. The Economist reported:

No panacea is at hand. However, the administration should incorporate concern for Eritrea’s people, promoting greater protection for their liberties and well-being, in any policy change. Asmara languishes among the world’s most repressive governments, alongside those of North Korea, Turkmenistan, Burma/​Myanmar, Equatorial Guinea, and South Sudan, according to the latest Freedom House rankings. In May, Mohamed Abdelsalam Babiker, the UN’s special rapporteur for Eritrea, issued a harsh assessment, decrying possible “crimes against humanity.”

The Trump State Department has highlighted credible reports of major human rights abuses, including

Particularly brutal has been Asmara’s attack on those who believe in more than politics. According to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, “religious freedom conditions in Eritrea remained extremely poor. The government continued to systematically persecute individuals based on their religious beliefs.” The Eritrean government, the report continues, has detained members of religious communities in abysmal conditions, subjecting them to “sexual violence and physical abuse such as electrocution, exposure, waterboarding, hanging, noise torture, and denial of medical treatment, any of which can result in death.” The regime “also coerced detainees to renounce their religious beliefs and banned praying aloud, singing, preaching, and possessing religious books.”

USCIRF concluded that religious persecution is “systematic, ongoing, and egregious,” with all faith groups at risk. The Commission noted, “Government authorities targeted specific communities, including Baptists, Pentecostals, and evangelical Christians, for persecution and arrest.” Babiker has explained that Muslim communities also “continue to face deep-rooted structural repression,” including the closure of religious institutions and the seizure of property.

So, what to do about Eritrea, which has gained strategic importance even as its domestic practices have deteriorated? Washington’s ability to influence the internal politics of other nations will always be limited, but engagement might work better than isolation at improving the Eritrean government’s behavior.

President Trump deserves credit for reconsidering high-minded, apparently well-intentioned policies that have evidently failed. Nevertheless, he should mix some idealism in with realism in addressing difficult cases like Eritrea. Even as he seeks to take advantage of Asmara’s geographic position, the president should remember the plight of the Eritrean people, denied the most basic of freedoms, including the rights to choose their government and live their faith.

In isolation, the tariff-happy Trump administration’s fertilizer decision is a comical footnote in a lamentable Iran war saga – a mundane, albeit legally dubious, government move to alleviate a sliver of the war’s inflationary effects and to placate an important political constituency before the Fall midterms.

Yet this is no one-off. Instead, it’s the latest in a long string of US trade actions that no one in an increasingly protectionist Washington is eager to acknowledge: Seemingly every time domestic supplies of essential goods – and politicians’ standing with voters – are at risk, the government lets imports ride to the rescue:

• When avian influenza crippled egg supplies in February, the Trump administration’s solution centered on importing 100 million eggs to stabilize the market and help temper prices.
• In November, Trump responded to palpable voter anxiety over grocery affordability by issuing multiple proclamations to lift “reciprocal tariffs” on a wide range of agricultural commodities. Early this year, he addressed beef shortages – caused by droughts and screwworm – by expanding quotas on Argentinian beef.
• After the Iran war started, the White House moved to stave off domestic energy shortages by issuing an unprecedented waiver of the protectionist Jones Act, which normally restricts domestic shipping to American-made ships.
• And broad tariff exemptions for imported hardware and related items are fueling the artificial intelligence buildout that powers the US economy and stock market.

Similar moves predate Trump’s second term. When problems at a Michigan infant formula factory caused the worst supply chain crisis of the pandemic era, Congress suspended formula tariffs, and the Biden administration waived regulatory barriers, launching “Operation Fly Formula” to pilot it in from Europe. Biden also invoked the same “emergency” authority Trump used for Moroccan fertilizer when he waived duties on imported solar panels to alleviate shortages that supposedly threatened energy security, the renewables buildout, and his signature legislative achievement — the Inflation Reduction Act. And between 2020 and 2022, the government modified the tariff schedule 10 times for pandemic-related reasons, with every change running in the direction of freer trade (mostly waiving or suspending duties on imported medical goods).

From these actions, spanning six years and three different presidential administrations, we can draw two important lessons.

The first is political. Protectionists in the government have routinely dismissed American business pleas for tariff relief in supposed service of loftier goals like national security and supply-chain resiliency. National objectives, so they say, must take precedence over the financial health of a few companies suffering from tariff-induced shortages and sky-high production costs. Yet when short supplies and high prices threaten these same officials’ political future, tariff relief arrives with remarkable speed, and bedrock nationalist principles melt away. This is a classic case of revealed preferences, and it’s hardly flattering.

The second lesson is larger and should reframe how Washington talks about “resiliency” today. The dominant story since 2020 is that the pandemic exposed the dangers of globalization: open trade and long, complex supply chains had left the United States “vulnerable” to economic shocks and intensely “dependent” on foreign suppliers. The typical fix was to reshore the domestic production of critical items via tariffs, subsidies and other localization policies. “Resiliency” had become synonymous with onshoring.

Yet time and time again, one of Washington’s most reliable responses to an actual shock – whether it originated in a foreign war, a domestic factory shutdown, or a global pandemic – has been the opposite of onshoring. It’s been import liberalization, not protectionism, and supply diversification, not autarky.

Rhetorical misdirection aside, the government’s real-world response is welcome – and consistent with economic research from the pandemic. Studies have found that, contra the conventional wisdom, goods dependent on international supply chains didn’t face greater disruptions than ones sourced domestically. If fact, global production units frequently proved more resilient than their nationalized counterparts, largely because the former had diversified sources and could more easily adjust. Even in sensitive sectors involving “non-friendly” nations, trade proved remarkably resilient – helping to alleviate critical bottlenecks rather than cause them. And the product that failed most spectacularly during the pandemic was the one the United States had already walled off from foreign competition: baby formula.

None of this means that economic openness should be the only policy governments adopt to prepare for or adjust to supply shocks, whether foreign or domestic. The global economy can raise genuine security concerns when, for example, adversaries have a stranglehold on critical goods with no adequate substitutes. And the global economy’s surprising resilience during the Iran war has shown how emergency government stockpiles can calm markets and fill temporary gaps in supply.

But the war, the pandemic, and other recent crises have also shown how freer trade and economic “interdependence” can cushion domestic shocks, speed adjustment, and help a stressed US economy keep chugging when local production falls short. They’ve shown that the easiest kind of “resiliency” policy is to just stop blocking the imported things that Americans need. And they’ve shown that even policymakers who demonize globalization understand its security benefits – if, at least, their own reelection’s at stake.

But Fortgang has a larger agenda that I’d like to examine. It’s implicit from the start when he poses his immediate, skeptical concern: “Can judicial decisions finding new individual rights without a textual basis—and thereby limiting elected state legislatures and officials from exercising police powers—actually promote democracy?” Fortgang burnishes his post-New Deal democratic, yet conservative, inclinations when he adds: “Unelected judges stymie the will of the people when they declare laws invalid, which is why they can only do so in limited circumstances and with utmost justification,” about which more anon.

After further outlining the Nejaime/​Siegel thesis, commenting critically along the way, Fortgang moves toward the kill by first noting that the authors “frame their argument as a path to saving substantive due process from its most infamous application, in Lochner v. New York.” But the Lochner Court’s alleged misuse of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause to protect economic rights, the authors contend, “should not tarnish substantive due process’s potential to do other good things.” They attribute the persistence of the Lochner accusation and its application to social rights cases to cultural stigma, the exclusion of women and gay scholars from the legal academy, and the condescension of critics like Robert Bork and John Hart Ely. But “this glosses over the main argument underlying Lochner’s disrepute,” Fortgang writes, “which has nothing to do with any class of litigants’ circumstances. Unenumerated rights,” he contends, “must be governed by an intelligible principle that can distinguish between constitutional rights and legitimate exercises of state power.” These authors offer no such principle.

Fortgang elaborates: “In other words, the problem is not that substantive due process is undemocratic per se.” Rather, it “has no contours. It turns the Fourteenth Amendment into a shapeless license to overrule legislatures and establish enlightened juristocracy. Precisely because it is based on an irrationality—the notion that a procedural safeguard includes substantive protections—it is unmoored. The concept of ‘liberty,’ equally beloved and contested by all, is empowered to override democratic laws.”

It’s good that Fortgang has gone after what he calls the counterintuitive Nejaime/​Siegel democracy-promoting approach to protecting unenumerated rights, which is likely going nowhere. But his critique is itself a good example of what happens when a critic jumps into the middle of a complex issue and then tries to work his way out without ever going to the first principles of the matter. True, Fortgang seems to have something of a first principle, at least by implication. It’s that democracy trumps liberty, mostly. Problem is, that’s not the Constitution’s first principle, which is what I meant when I spoke earlier of Fortgang’s burnishing his New Deal democratic, yet conservative, inclinations. For that’s when the Court of that day turned a constitution written to secure liberty through limited government on its head, crafting instead a document that authorized government to redistribute and regulate liberty as never before, all in the name of majoritarian democracy.

From beginning to end, the Constitution rests on a presumption of liberty.

Moderns tend to start with rights, as did the Founders, but not the Framers, for whom powers were paramount. The Founders’ aim was to outline a legitimate moral, political, and legal order, which our Declaration of Independence did—our first legal document, modern conservative protestations notwithstanding. Thus, they argued in the state-of-nature tradition where systematically discerning our natural rights was primary, from which they derived the legitimate means for securing those rights—government and governmental powers grounded in the consent of the governed. Rights first. Powers second.

By contrast, the Framers focused on powers, the main purpose of which, as the Declaration said, was to secure our rights. Consistent with the Declaration, therefore, all of the broad purposes listed in the Preamble reduce to liberty or public goods defined as economists do given the free rider problem. So too with the Constitution’s structure. Article I, sentence one implies only limited legislative powers as enumerated in Section 8, as implied by the division and separation of powers, and as expressly provided for by the Tenth Amendment, to say nothing of the Ninth Amendment, which states expressly that we have both enumerated and unenumerated rights. Pace many of today’s conservatives, the Bill of Rights added only specificity. It added no rights we didn’t already have prior to its adoption. As Wilson, Hamilton, Sherman, and others said, our protection was in showing that the government had no power. Thus, a plaintiff had to make out only a prima facie case, after which the burden shifted to the government. In sum, from beginning to end, the Constitution rests on a presumption of liberty, with democracy designed to fill offices with officials constrained by constitutional limits on their power.

The Fourteenth Amendment brought those strictures in relevant ways against the states, especially through its Privileges or Immunities Clause. It was the tragic 1873 decision in the Slaughterhouse Cases that undercut that plan, leaving us with only the Due Process ­of Law and Equal Protection Clauses, although commentators have thought the former to offer substantive protections since at least Magna Carta.

Having shown that “there is no principle at play” in the Nejaime/​Siegel argument, Fortgang cites Washington v. Glucksberg for its “requiring that substantive-due-process rights be ‘deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition’ and defined with careful specificity”—“a limiting principle designed to prevent courts from manufacturing preferred rights under an open-ended liberty clause.” The problem is, if that test “tends to reinforce behaviors that have already gained popular acceptance,” as Fortgang grants, then why is there a case before the court? Popular speech doesn’t need protecting. Are we to wait until flag desecration is popular before we call it a right?

We cannot articulate all of our manifold liberties. We can government’s powers, which the Constitution’s structure and its presumption of liberty, in all of its right-respecting permutations, require us to do. That is the vision, Madison’s vision, that the Cato Institute, the Institute for Justice, the Goldwater Institute, the Pacific Legal Foundation, and even the Manhattan Institute, among others, have increasingly been pressing before our courts, and with no little success.

The president posted on social media Wednesday that “we cannot give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” But he’s wrong. His own adviser, White House border czar Tom Homan, has admitted that vehicle stops are not an important enforcement tool, and that permanently ending them would better protect ICE agents, their targets and the public.

It’s true that ICE officers receive less training on vehicle stops. That’s because, before this administration, most arrestees came straight from federal, state or local custody, and when ICE had to go to the streets, it carefully planned operations — surveilling suspects to learn their routines, sometimes for weeks, and working as a team of agents and creating a pre-enforcement action plan.

To speed up arrests, however, ICE reportedly eliminated the pre-enforcement planning last year as it started targeting areas more than specific people. “It’s hard to fill out a worksheet that just says, ‘Meet in the Home Depot parking lot,’” one former ICE official told NBC News. Enforcement went from targeted and planned to indiscriminate and opportunistic, which led to more chaotic interactions.

Reflecting this lack of planning, both of the immigrants shot and killed in the past two weeks were not the individuals ICE agents were originally looking to arrest, according to lawmakers who spoke to officials. A similar situation played out in Minnesota earlier this year, when ICE agents mistook a DoorDash driver for their target before shooting him after he ran into his home. (That officer was charged after video evidence from a city traffic camera contradicted his account.)

Even when pre-arrest surveillance of a specific suspect is conducted, ICE agents appear to relish the car chases and often fail to stop the suspect before they drive away. One Department of Homeland Security supervisor described the attitude to The New York Times as “we’re adrenaline junkies who want action, foot chases, car pursuits.”

In October 2025, for instance, agents waited outside the home of Carlitos Ricardo Parias, a TikTok influencer, whom ICE was particularly interested in arresting. But rather than leap immediately into action, they let him get into his car. This led to a vehicle stop at which an ICE agent shot Parias, and the bullet ricocheted into a U.S. marshal.

Another shooting in California in April 2026 followed the same pattern. ICE did the surveillance but let the suspect get into their car. This appears to have been intentional. In June, surveillance video captured what appears to be a targeted ICE arrest in Milwaukee, in which officers allowed the suspect several minutes to get a snack and re-enter his vehicle before the team moved in for the arrest.

When stops do happen, as a Wall Street Journal investigation found earlier this year, ICE agents commonly use tactics that place themselves in unnecessary risk: failing to tell drivers to turn off their engines, grabbing cars when they start to move, placing their bodies — rather than vehicles — in the way, and then shooting at uncooperative drivers.

DHS’ use-of-force policy already gets most of these issues right. It prohibits officers from “intentionally and unreasonably placing themselves in positions in which they have no alternative to using deadly force.” It bars shooting drivers unless there is an imminent risk of serious bodily harm.

Outside of a terrorist attack where the car is the weapon, shooting the driver does not lessen the threat; it enhances it. After an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot Renee Good, the car didn’t stop. It accelerated until it crashed. In Maine, ICE officers had to try to grab the car on foot to stop it after the injured driver lost control, and the car circled blindly. Eventually, an ICE agent used his vehicle to stop it.

ICE’s suspension of most vehicle stops would force agents to spend time learning new tactics, but doing so would have gone a long way to protect agents, targets and bystanders. Rather than a temporary reprieve, in fact, ICE should have made it permanent.

On Fox News Tuesday, Homan admitted that there’s no downside. “I hear a lot of noise right now, ‘this will affect ICE arrests.’ It’s not going to,” he said. “Before he gets into the car, you can arrest him then. You can wait until the vehicle gets to its destination,” he said — unless the target is a violent criminal. He added, “If we can take that 2‑ton ‘weapon’ away from them, that’s good.”

Homan is admitting what the record shows: ICE has been endangering its officers and others for no enforcement benefit. Ending vehicle stops won’t end all the problems, or even all the deaths. But continuing them means more danger for ICE personnel and the public.

Both numbers confirm what we’ve been seeing over the past year. The economy appears to be settling into a new normal of cooler growth and hotter inflation.

Tariffs and wars are temporary contributors to inflation. In the long run, persistent inflation pressure comes courtesy of federal deficits. The more the government borrows, the more upward pressure it puts on real interest rates. That annoys borrowers. The more the Federal Reserve tries to push interest rates back down, the more upward pressure it puts on inflation. And that annoys consumers.

The deficit is our first long-term economic threat, and it stems from our actions. The second, population stagnation, arises from what we don’t do. Too many Americans aren’t having babies. Babies are barely being born fast enough to replace Americans who die. Recent restrictions aside, today we tend to create more new Americans through immigration than through the old-fashioned way. And that slowed population growth contributes to our slowed economic growth.

People matter for economic growth because people are the ultimate resource. Of course, people produce labor, but they do so much more. They invent things that didn’t exist and discover things that were unknown. Our technological progression from human muscle to domesticated animals to machines to computers to AI is driven by human invention. Our energy progression from wood to coal to plant and animal oils to mineral oils to natural gas to uranium to solar is due to humans discovering new resources. Only a fraction of humans have what it takes to attempt to pull off that kind of innovation. And only a fraction of those find themselves in the right place at the right time to make it happen. Discovery and invention are rare. If you want a lot of it, you need a lot of humans. Stagnating population growth yields stagnating invention and discovery, which yields a stagnating economy.

We can learn some timely lessons if we take a moment to look around. The United States is a nation of 50 relatively similar but importantly different states. Some of these states are attracting people, and some are repelling them. From 2024 to 2025, more Delaware residents died than were born. Yet Delaware’s population grew almost 1 percent, putting the state among the top 10 for population growth. How can this be? Conditions in Delaware attracted people from other states and from abroad. Delaware attracted so many people that the positive in-migration more than counteracted the negative natural growth.

At the other extreme, California ranks among the top 10 states for natural growth. From 2024 to 2025, almost 110,000 more Californians were born than died. Yet California’s population shrank as conditions there caused residents to flee the state faster than the good people of California could make more.

A state’s economic growth depends on its population growth, and its population growth increasingly depends on in-migration. People move to states that offer better conditions for living, working and raising families than the alternatives. Some of those conditions, like climate, culture and familial ties, lie beyond the reach of policy. Many do not. And among the conditions lawmakers can affect, one that appears especially important is the size of state and local government.

States with larger governments (as measured by state and local government spending per state GDP) appear to crowd people out. In 2025, the 25 states with the largest governments averaged 1.9 percent economic growth vs. 2.3 percent for the 25 states with the smallest governments. Adjusted for differences in cost of living, median household incomes were 7.6 percent higher in the half of states with the smallest governments. Compared with larger government states, smaller government states have lower poverty rates, lower income inequality, and lower state and local government debt burdens.

People are already voting with their feet, and they’re not voting for places that make life harder, poorer or more precarious. Population growth is no longer automatic. Economic growth is no longer something the country can counterfeit with borrowed money and rosy forecasts. That leaves states with a simple but uncomfortable truth: They do not create prosperity. They create the conditions under which productive people decide whether to come, to stay or to leave. Prosperity follows that decision.

But even as mortality spikes, Europeans continue to resist the one technology that could save their lives: air conditioning.

Air conditioning is one of modern civilization’s most important yet underappreciated inventions. One study from the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that the spread of air conditioning in the United States led to a roughly 75 percent decline in heat-related deaths during the 20th century. But policymakers in Europe have discouraged this technology through taxes, regulations and a stubborn refusal to admit its benefits.

The consequences have been tragic. Heat waves kill more than 175,000 Europeans every year, according to the World Health Organization. Eighty percent of the continent’s population does not have AC. In the United States, almost 90 percent does.

The rules limiting AC use in Europe come in many forms. Heritage permit requirements imposed by countries such as Austria, Germany and Hungary, which were originally created to protect historic buildings, have delayed AC installations even in non-historic ones. Several countries require AC installation to be approved by the equivalent of a homeowners association or impose noise ordinances that increase compliance costs and paperwork.

In Geneva, air conditioning requires a permit, and residents must show they need one — usually by presenting a medical certificate. Slovakia demands periodic AC inspections that create a perpetual compliance burden. Local planning councils in Britain regularly reject AC installation requests, citing a need to limit noise and preserve community aesthetics.

Among the minority of Europeans fortunate enough to enjoy air conditioning, some are being forced to give it up. In Britain, where only about 3 percent of homes have air conditioning, laws restricting “active cooling” technology have forced some homeowners to remove their AC systems.

Though localities cite many reasons for opposing air conditioning installation, Europe’s broader war on AC is largely due to the belief that this technology is an energy-guzzling and wasteful luxury.

In 2021, Emmanuelle Wargon, who is now the president of the French Energy Regulatory Commission, said cooling systems present “a significant problem in terms of energy consumption.” During a heat wave in 2022, María Isabel Ruiz, a Spanish civil servant, told a European news outlet she was “in favor of saving energy and that this requires sacrifices” even as she criticized regulations that at one point prohibited thermostats from being set below 80 degrees.

But as European countries fret over energy consumption, modern AC systems have become increasingly energy efficient. The U.S. Energy Information Administration notes that even as the share of U.S. homes with AC has increased, average household energy use has declined, partly thanks to “improved efficiencies of … cooling equipment.”

Europe’s AC phobia has also fueled an irrational health panic. During a heat wave in 2022, one Frenchwoman said AC “makes you sick, and it gives you a headache.” Left-wing French politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon has claimed air conditioning “destroys your sinuses.”

European media, consumer groups and even the French government have said that cooling a room to more than 15 degrees below the outdoor temperature can trigger “thermal shock.” This condition, they say, causes nausea, fainting or even respiratory arrest. This ailment is mysteriously absent from the United States, where indoor temperatures are often kept at around 75 degrees even when it’s 100 degrees outside.

Opponents of AC forget history at their peril. The Book of Judith (probably written between 150 and 100 B.C.) contains an early description of someone dying of heatstroke. The extreme European heat wave of 1540 was so severe that some religious figures, including Martin Luther, believed that it presaged the end times.

Relief from boiling summers remained elusive in the early modern era. The 18th-century English physician George Motherby noted that “exposure to a hot sun often produced an inflammation that was speedily fatal.” He recommended treatment with history’s favorite quack cure-all: bloodletting.

“Bleed as freely as the strength will admit,” he wrote.

Thankfully, modern understanding has advanced, and not just in medicine. Humanity now knows how to cool buildings with technology and that the best way to treat heatstroke is rapid cooling, not bloodletting.

AC opponents like to imagine they are leading humanity toward a wiser, more sustainable future. But forgoing air conditioning is a refusal to move on from a lethally hot past.

This year’s surface transportation reauthorization bill is no exception.

Supporters describe the U.S. House Transportation Committee-passed package as a major safety bill designed to make America’s transportation system more secure and efficient.

Beneath their rhetoric lies the familiar Washington story of a bill shaped less by evidence than by the demands of organized interests.

Perhaps the clearest example comes from the rail provisions.

If the bill is being driven by a coherent safety philosophy, why would legislators soften rules requiring the faster replacement of old hazardous-materials tank cars, despite repeated recommendations from the independent National Transportation Safety Board?

Some safety recommendations are treated as essential, while others become negotiable once influential people object.

The reason, of course, is politics, which come with clientelism.

Much of the debate over freight-car inspections didn’t center on the frequency, timing or type of inspections required — things the conversation would focus on if safety was the overriding goal. Instead, most of the argument centered on who would perform inspections.

Labor organizations pushed provisions that would narrow who counts as qualified to inspect freight cars, thereby reserving those jobs for organized carmen.

They opposed railroads’ de facto practice of routing inspection volume to non-carmen staff (conductors) as a cost-saver that didn’t affect safety.

Legislators ultimately crafted a compromise that reflects the competing interests of these two powerful stakeholders more than measurable safety outcomes.

This is regulatory capture in action.

The role of organized labor is especially revealing.

At a recent U.S. Senate hearing, Teamsters officials openly acknowledged that autonomous trucking is going to happen and that workers have historically adapted to technological changes.

Rather than trying to prevent deployment of the technology altogether, they argued that policymakers should proactively focus on worker transition issues.

This is sensible enough.

Yet many of the same labor groups strongly oppose automation and technology deployment in freight rail, including with systems believed to improve safety and detect defects far earlier than traditional inspection methods.

Why is automation acceptable in trucking but unacceptable in rail?

The distinction, once again, is less about safety than politics.

Where technological change threatens existing, strongly pro-labor work rules, opposition is intense. Where resisting new tech is less practical, the conversation shifts to something else.

That may be understandable from a labor-relations perspective, but legislators should not treat it as a sound basis for national transportation policy.

The broader bill suffers from a litany of problems. Together, they point toward the same influence issues.

Fiscal conservatives, assuming there are still enough of them to be heard in Congress, should be particularly concerned about a package that authorizes roughly $580 billion in spending while doing little to address the long-term insolvency of the Highway Trust Fund.

Legislators are instead choosing to promise more spending while avoiding the structural reforms necessary to put transportation funding on sustainable footing.

Meanwhile, they inserted a controversial new federal registration fee structure for electric and hybrid vehicles.

Progressives oppose it because they believe it discourages EV adoption.

Many conservatives oppose it because it expands federal fee collection and further entangles state governments in administering federal policy.

The growing coalition of critics extends well beyond those issues.

Transit advocates argue the bill underfunds transit and passenger rail. Environmental groups oppose permitting and climate-related provisions.

Labor unions object to autonomous-vehicle language. Federalism-minded Republicans question federal preemption provisions.

When a bill generates opposition from nearly every direction, it is worth asking whether legislators are solving problems or trying to accommodate too many competing interests.

That’s the deeper lesson here. Congress increasingly treats transportation policy as an exercise in stakeholder management.

Instead of establishing clear goals and allowing innovation and competition to deliver results, legislators pile on mandates, carveouts, protections and special-interest provisions designed to satisfy whichever constituency has secured a seat at the table.

The result is predictable: Every organized interest receives something of value. Taxpayers inherit the costs.

The Senate will have an opportunity to reject this approach. Senators should evaluate every one of the House’s mandates and favors using a simple test: Does it produce a measurable public benefit that likely exceeds its cost?

If the answer is no, it should be removed.

Transportation policy should be guided by safety outcomes, economic efficiency and fiscal discipline — not by whichever stakeholders have the strongest lobbying operations.

Unfortunately, Washington still struggles to distinguish between the public interest and the interests of those who are in the room.

Nearly 700 years old, the series of fresco paintings includes a depiction of a bustling city illustrating the effects of good government, as well as representations of the decay that results from arbitrary and unjust rulers.

The visual treatise on political economy holds important lessons for us today.

Lorenzetti’s city isn’t thriving because its government is energetic or ambitious.

It’s thriving because a wise government knows its place.

The people creating its wealth aren’t politicians.

They’re merchants opening shops, artisans practicing their crafts, builders raising new homes, farmers bringing goods to market, families walking safely through the streets and a couple getting married.

Prosperity comes from their voluntary cooperation.

The government appears as the guardian of the rules that make prosperity possible: justice, security, predictable laws and limits on arbitrary power.

That distinction is everything. America did not become the richest nation in history because Washington, D.C., was exceptionally good at directing the economy.

It thrived because its institutions largely prevented Washington from interfering.

The rule of law and constitutional limits have allowed millions of individuals to make sound decisions that no central authority could possibly coordinate.

Lorenzetti understood that institutions shape incentives, and incentives shape civilization.

When political institutions protect a people’s liberty, property and contract rights, they will invest, innovate, trade, build and cooperate.

When institutions become vehicles for arbitrary power, society reorganizes itself around politics instead of production, and everything decays.

That’s why the most troubling trend in American politics today isn’t just how remarkably bloated the government has become.

It’s that both major political parties are now comfortable using their power to direct private economic life, and they seem unbothered by whether this undermines the rule of law.

Federal spending and debt continue their relentless rise because politicians prioritize today’s voters over future generations.

They support industrial policy to prop up their favorite industries.

The Trump administration is taking equity stakes in companies like Intel and USA Rare Earth, with some members enriching themselves in the process.

Meanwhile, many Democrats champion taxes on held wealth and unrealized capital gains, challenging the principle that property exists independently of political permission.

Genuine socialists who aspire to subordinate property rights and voluntary exchange to political power are now winning elections.

Today, Democrats and Republicans share an understanding that the government should actively allocate resources, direct investment and determine economic outcomes, which can translate to votes, campaign contributions or other benefits.

That’s a shift Lorenzetti’s frescos implicitly warned against.

The danger is not poorly executed government; it’s that society’s rules eventually begin to break down.

• Businesses learn that political influence matters as much or more than serving customers.
• Investors devote increasing attention to Washington rather than to innovation. Entrepreneurs spend more time competing for subsidies than for customers.
• Citizens become clients of the state instead of participants in a free society.
• Political discretion displaces voluntary cooperation.

This transformation rarely arrives dramatically.

It instead comes one exception at a time: one bailout, one industrial policy, one new entitlement, one emergency spending bill, another emergency bill that no one feels any need to repay, one “golden share,” one creative tax hike.

Together, these changes reshape the relationship between citizen and state.

Lorenzetti’s companion depiction of a bad government is often interpreted as a portrait of tyranny. Justice lies bound at the feet of a horned, demonic ruler, her scales broken and cords cut.

Around them, the city decays: Buildings crumble, the streets are empty of commerce, stores are looted, and the only workshop still doing business belongs to the armorer.

Soldiers seize a woman — a dark reflection of the happy bride processing through the city on the opposite wall — while a man lies slain at her feet.

Similarly, in one painting of the countryside, the figure of Security, guaranteed by law and not by whim, flies above cultivated fields.

In another, Fear hovers over villages burning and barren ground. Same land, same people, different institutions.

But tyranny isn’t simply oppression. It’s the condition under which political power, no longer constrained by enduring principles, becomes society’s organizing force.

That’s where bad becomes worse.

High taxes become levies meant to punish and confiscate. Regulating industries becomes the locking down of an economy. Constraints on speech become censorship and book burning.

That’s why institutions matter.

A constitutional government’s purpose is not to directly produce prosperity.

It’s to prevent political power from suffocating the countless acts of creativity, exchange, investment and cooperation through which free people produce prosperity themselves.

America’s greatness has never rested on the brilliance of its politicians.

It rests on institutions that leave enough room for people to flourish. The lesson from Siena is that we must restore and preserve what keeps political power in check.

Without it, the government does not merely redistribute wealth; it coarsens and corrupts the character of the people, leading to its destruction.

Four months later, I’m happy to admit I was too pessimistic. Yes, real damage occurred, some of it will linger, and things could deteriorate now that hostilities have seemingly resumed. But the global economy’s response to what the International Energy Agency has called “the largest supply disruption in history” has been much more impressive than most analysts expected, leaving me much less concerned about what lies ahead. It’s both a useful reminder that global markets are incredibly powerful things—if governments allow them to operate—and a new indication that we shouldn’t use a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic to guide U.S. “resiliency” policy.

Let’s start with the obvious: crude oil.

When U.S. and Israeli strikes began on February 28, the quick closure of the Strait of Hormuz took out around a fifth of the world’s crude oil supply—10 million-plus barrels a day—overnight. Markets justifiably panicked, with benchmark crude prices in the U.S. and abroad quickly exceeding $100 per barrel, and prices for physical (“delivered”) cargoes going even higher. Gasoline prices soon followed, hitting a U.S. record in mid-May (and causing many a Republican major heartburn). With no resolution to the war in sight, many industry insiders—not point-scoring politicians and pundits—warned that things would get much worse as time passed and local inventories dwindled.

It didn’t play out that way. Even before the official ceasefire memorandum of understanding (MOU) was signed on June 17—and despite the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz—oil prices trended downward throughout May and early June. Even after hostilities renewed this week and President Donald Trump claimed the deal was off, Brent hovered below $80 a barrel—not even $10 more than where it was before the war started.

A new report from the IEA details how the worst was avoided—and it’s pretty much what Econ 101 would predict. Along with some excess supply being in the market before war broke out, the organization identifies three major reasons why global oil prices didn’t skyrocket.

First, there were large releases from private storage “as oil prices incentivised market participants to draw down inventories at record rates.” Governments and the IEA also pushed emergency stockpiles into the market. Collectively, global oil inventories have added around 3.8 million barrels per day to global supplies since the war broke out.

Second, oil producers responded to the shock with crude output and sales that avoided the conflict zone. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, for example, utilized alternative transportation routes—like the Saudis’ East-West pipeline—to bypass the strait and boost non-Hormuz oil exports by several million barrels per day.

Adding to these flows were non-Gulf oil exporters, especially the United States:

Refiners in the U.S. and Africa also boosted output and exports, especially for jet fuel to Europe—avoiding the dire consequences that many airline analysts predicted.

Third, consumers around the world adapted. Most obviously, people and firms reduced their purchases of crude oil and refined products (e.g., by driving less or switching to energy alternatives)—what economists call “demand destruction.” Chief among the drivers here was China, a massive energy importer that—thanks to a multitiered stockpile system, increases in alternative energy generation (clean and dirty), a still-sputtering domestic economy, and curbs on industrial oil consumption—unexpectedly “cut purchases by about 4 million barrels a day from usual levels since the Iran war broke out in late February,” thus helping to “balance global supply and demand and cap prices below $100 a barrel.”

(Let us now pause for a moment to gawk at the grim irony: What was billed as a war actually intended to kneecap energy-dependent China has instead revealed that Beijing is stronger than expected and just helped save Trump’s political bacon.)

Overall, the IEA now estimates that “global oil demand will drop by almost 5 million barrels per day in the second quarter of 2026 year-on-year, and by 1.1 million barrels per day on average for the full year”—compared with its pre-war forecast of global demand growth of 850,000 barrels per day for 2026. And the agency just warned of a 2027 supply glut, a remarkable turn from March’s talk of the “greatest global energy security challenge” in history. Maybe that prediction will change in the days ahead, but—for now at least—few oil traders seem to think so.

Other moves were also important on the margins. Smuggling of Iranian oil, for example, proliferated during the U.S. blockade of Hormuz, thanks to a “shadow fleet” of already-full tankers—and an entire shadow economy to support them—that emerged in recent years to avoid Western sanctions. Governments made other policy adjustments to smooth markets and temper prices, beyond releasing emergency stockpiles (and jawboning markets). Most notably, the Trump administration waived the Jones Act for an unprecedented 150 days, thus boosting U.S. energy supplies (and security) by allowing foreign-flagged vessels to move American-made crude, refined products, and fertilizer between U.S. ports. So far, the waiver has allowed tens of millions of barrels and dozens of voyages that would’ve been banned by law in nonwaiver times.

Few, if any, of these adjustments were costless—trade-offs always exist—and the market remains fragile. But even with the conflict still percolating, the doomsday scenario that many smart, nonpartisan eggheads predicted simply never materialized.

And the reason is textbook stuff: A massive supply shock triggered a dramatic increase in prices that was based on the expectation of reduced future supplies. Those high prices signaled to the rest of the world to supply more—by pump, export, or stockpile—and/or consume less. And, because crude oil is an easily transportable commodity traded on a global market that’s relatively transparent and free (and, thanks to liberalizing moves like Trump’s Jones Act waiver, made even freer after the shock hit), prices remained well below what most experts predicted based on an educated—but static—view of existing supply and demand patterns.

Similar adjustments happened elsewhere.

Oil was the biggest, most visible adjustment story, but it was hardly the only one. American farmers responded to spiking fertilizer prices—a 25 to 30 percent increase for nitrogen-based urea and ammonia—by shifting some of their acreage toward less fertilizer-intensive crops. The USDA’s Prospective Plantings survey has thus found that corn and wheat acreage, the most nitrogen-hungry crops, are down roughly 3 percent from 2025, while acreage for less demanding soybeans is up about the same amount (4 percent).

Then there’s aluminum, supplies of which were hit by both the Hormuz closure and related Iranian strikes on Middle Eastern smelters. The U.S. Midwest Premium (the markup we Americans pay for primary aluminum over the global price) hit fresh records as domestic supplies shrunk, but scrap aluminum and global recyclers stepped into the breach. Thus, European scrap exports jumped nearly 75 percent in March, and U.S. scrap imports rose 24 percent, as tariff-exempt recycled metal offered a solution that tariffed primary aluminum couldn’t.

Helium was another chokepoint after a giant producer in Qatar went offline. But cash-flush Asian semiconductor producers responded by diversifying their foreign suppliers and tapping “extensive helium storage caverns and onsite inventories” to keep their factories running full tilt. Global sulfur supplies—needed to make fertilizer and various electronic goods—were boosted by Chinese copper producers ramping up imports and processing of sulfur-rich pyrite (aka fool’s gold) “to capitalize on a price rally fueled by the Iran war, which has disrupted shipments from the Gulf, which typically supplies about half of the world’s seaborne sulfur.”

The list goes on and on—and these are just the market adjustments we know about. Many others, invisible to almost everyone, occurred daily in response to prices and other market signals. They never made a headline because nothing dramatic happened … and that, of course, is very much the point.

Lessons learned? I doubt it.

So, in response to a global supply shock that worried even a shoulder-shrugger like me, markets adjusted quickly. And, even with bombs flying and the ceasefire apparently scuttled, oil prices have climbed just a few percentage points from their July lows. From this nonevent we can draw several lessons.

First, high prices for oil and other commodities did their job (whether politicians liked it or not). These clear signals simultaneously encouraged more supply and less consumption from millions of people reacting with localized knowledge in expected and unexpected ways. This result surely isn’t novel, but it’s worth emphasizing today because so many cases for industrial-policy and other resiliency strategies presume static, fragile markets—and often single “nations” acting therein—that must be planned into submission, lest the worst happen. The Iran war is yet another data point suggesting otherwise—assuming prices are allowed to work.

Second, a key part of “resiliency” policy is freeing markets, not blocking or controlling them. A recurring subplot in the Iran episode (and several others like it) has been policymakers, including the protectionist Trump administration, discovering that trade and other supply-side restrictions were compounding an energy crisis they were trying to manage—and then suspending some government barriers (e.g., the Jones Act or oil sanctions) to boost supply, remove inefficiencies, and temper prices. Recent events don’t necessarily argue that there’s no role for government action in managing supply shocks—stockpiles have clearly played a role here, too—but Washington’s Iran response is a vivid, counterintuitive illustration of how open trade and freer markets are a huge benefit during “supply chain crises.” And they produce results that are faster, cheaper, and better—especially in the longer term—than what could be achieved by “emergency” measures like price controls, trade (import or export) restrictions, subsidies, or other interventions that have been proposed since the war broke out.

All too often, the biggest resilience threats are self-inflicted, and markets can absorb a lot of punishment as long as governments get out of the way.

Finally, the Iran episode has me increasingly confident that Washington policymakers really need to stop using the pandemic as an appropriate guide for setting future U.S. supply chain resiliency policies. In retrospect, the pandemic era was historically unique in terms of its scale and depth: It didn’t just take a chunk of global supply or demand offline; it took everything offline all at once (and closed borders too). Then, governments sporadically and unpredictably reopened and closed markets and borders repeatedly—and at varying times and speeds—for the next nine months or longer. It was, thankfully, a once-in-a-lifetime disaster.

Iran, on the other hand, has been a more conventional shock: a large, sudden, and concentrated—in terms of geography and products—supply disruption that market participants and governments could analyze, price, and mitigate using conventional tools (storage, diversification, substitution, conservation, innovation, etc.). As a result, the war has been economically costly—and in my view very misguided—but it hasn’t been catastrophic, even though it was literally the biggest energy shock ever. And it shows that a model of “supply chain resilience” calibrated to the pandemic is one that treats a 100-year flood like an annual thunderstorm, potentially imposing massive and needless costs to respond to a scenario that never repeats.

Maybe, I dunno, we shouldn’t do that.

None of this should be read as a defense of the war or as minimizing the real economic costs it has imposed. But in terms of what globalized, open markets can absorb without breaking, the last four months have been a remarkable lesson. Will anyone in Washington learn it?

Markets FTW

A new study adds to the growing pile of econ literature showing that AI is actually boosting jobs in the industries that disproportionately adopt it: “In a sample covering more than 21,000 U.S. firms, we find that companies that invest heavily in AI grow headcount 10% over the two years following adoption. Entry-level headcount grows 12%.” Jevons paradox is real, folks.

Chart(s) of the Week

Nation of immigrants, etc., etc.

China’s property crisis still isn’t over:

For you goalies out there, some data on World Cup PKs since 2002:

The Houston shooting is just the latest instance of a disturbing trend that continues to play out across the country. And it shows why, when federal agencies deploy lethal force on city streets, city and local governments must not cooperate.

The chilling blueprint for federal immigration enforcement operations was demonstrated earlier this year with “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis, where an unprecedented deployment of 3,000 federal agents — dwarfing the city’s 600-officer police department and essentially occupying the city.

Following the killing of Renée Good, federal authorities simultaneously refused to investigate and completely stonewalled local oversight. The FBI seized Good’s vehicle, blocking local forensic teams from examining it, while the Department of Justice refused to provide investigative files to Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty.

Seventeen days later, a Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

These incidents closely resembled prior encounters across the country where DHS accounts were later determined to be false. In October, federal agents shot Carlitos Parias in Los Angeles, accusing him of ramming vehicles; a U.S. District Judge later dismissed the indictment with prejudice due to blatant prosecutorial misconduct. In October, Border Patrol Agent Charles Exum shot Marimar Martinez in Chicago under similar claims; a federal judge dismissed those charges after bodycam footage proved the agent had steered his own vehicle into Martinez’s truck. In an earlier incident in Harrisburg, Pa., federal agents relied heavily on the designation of a “weaponized vehicle” — a controversial term that has itself been weaponized by DHS to justify immigration agents’ rampant use of excessive force.

Let’s start with federal immigration agents’ high-risk traffic stops, a common theme of these shootings. This maneuver falls well outside their core purview, and agents are dangerously ill-equipped for it, as evidenced by their frequency of firing upon moving vehicles — a tactic local police heavily restrict.

Constraining these stops would save lives, but that would require either a major DHS policy shift or congressional action. Neither is realistic. The Trump administration won’t curb the practice, and a Republican-controlled Congress continues to acquiesce to the president, locking in, through budget reconciliation, nearly a quarter-trillion dollars in immigration-enforcement funding through the end of Fiscal Year 2029. Federal intervention isn’t likely.

That’s precisely why Houston Mayor John Whitmire should be ordering a city-led investigation. 

Local authorities aren’t powerless bystanders. Though state and local governments cannot dictate how federal agents operate within their boundaries, they can limit federal involvement. Like federal officials, state and local officials take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. Taking this oath seriously creates a clear tension, as cooperating with federal immigration enforcement has become fundamentally incompatible with the solemn oaths state and local officials take to uphold the Constitution.

When local authorities assist or stand aside for an unaccountable federal apparatus that operates beyond standard police protocols, violates constitutional rights with impunity, and actively evades oversight, they betray their sworn duty to defend their constituents’ constitutional rights.

Local authorities that resist are on strong legal footing. Though the Trump Administration may try to subpoena recalcitrant officials, threaten to withhold federal funds or even remove Customs agents from “sanctuary city airports,” the anti-commandeering doctrine is a cornerstone of American federalism rooted in the Tenth Amendment. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that the federal government cannot conscript, coerce or commandeer state and local officials or resources to enforce federal prerogatives like immigration enforcement. The doctrine ensures that state and local governments remain responsive to their own communities rather than serving as an involuntary, uncompensated extension of federal power.

Despite Texas’ history of challenging federal authority, Gov. Greg Abbott has taken a page out of the Trump administration’s playbook in an attempt to restrict the autonomy of Texas municipalities as they attempt to protect their residents from federal overreach.

Local authorities retain the sovereign option to safeguard their communities by immediately withholding local law enforcement personnel, intelligence, facilities and logistical support from federal operations that run afoul of constitutional parameters. Withholding that cooperation is the only way for local officials to stay true to their constitutional oaths.

Consider the Ensign Group. As the largest owner of federally certified nursing home facilities, it gets most of its revenue from the government. Taxpayers aren’t getting much from that arrangement. A recent investigation by the investment firm Hunterbrook shows that these programs are failing to protect vulnerable elderly residents from chronic, sometimes deadly neglect at nursing homes.

One ventilator-dependent Ensign resident died after becoming unable to breathe and pounding the wall for a nurse who never came. The family is suing Ensign for wrongful death. Another Ensign resident suffocated after a bed rail pinned and suspended them upside down. By the time staff arrived, the resident was “completely purple and black” with early signs of rigor mortis.

An Ensign facility was found to have allowed maggots to infest a living resident. Another allowed ants to overrun a nonverbal resident with Alzheimer’s disease. “They crawled on her face, neck, legs, and swollen-shut eyes,” investigators report. “They left bites all over her body.”

An Ensign resident complained of “persistent hygiene and medical failures,” “wet paper towels in place of toilet paper,” “recurring infections,” and another resident who “cried and screamed after going a day without food, without being changed, left in a soaking wheelchair.”

Ensign executives literally extol “customer second” as a core corporate value. It is no coincidence that a company that derives most of its revenue from the government explicitly tells employees to put their welfare ahead of customers.

But the problem isn’t Ensign, at least in particular. Medicare and Medicaid spend more than $400 billion annually on long-term care services and supports. That’s 60% of all long-term care spending and more than $80,000 per recipient. 

The real problem is that government cannot discipline low-quality providers, and it cannot promote market competition. When government develops and implements quality controls for care, providers are almost always the most vocal — and powerful — people in the room. And they wield that power to protect their revenues. Typically, that means ensuring that low-quality providers can keep drawing government subsidies.

In Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care, law professors Charles Silver and David Hyman chronicle the long history of this dynamic undermining quality. Nursing-home chains Mariner and Sava administered anti-psychotic “chemical restraints” just to keep residents quiet. Medicaid and Medicare kept subsidizing them even as the companies paid settlements in 2010 and again in 2021.

In 2017, after Hurricane Irma struck Florida, the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills’s emergency cooling system failed, causing 14 residents to die in the heat, some with body temperatures near 110 degrees. That mass-casualty event led Florida officials to shut down the facility. But Medicare and Medicaid continued to subsidize the owners’ other facilities.

George Houser operated three Georgia nursing homes so deplorable that a federal judge remarked that if they were prisons, they would have violated the Eighth Amendment. Residents endured leaky roofs, hunger, and filth. State inspectors issued multiple citations. Private buyers would have fled.

Medicaid and Medicare, however, continued to funnel nearly $33 million to Houser between 2004 and 2007. Georgia finally pulled the plug in 2007. But it took a 2012 criminal fraud conviction (plus imprisonment) to ensure Medicare and Medicaid would never subsidize him again.

The problem is that the government rewards low-quality care where market competition would not. Ensign, for example, paid $47 million last year to settle claims that it defrauded Medicare and Medicaid, yet those programs keep paying the company. The federal government even gave the company’s ant-infested facility a five-star rating.

Quality improves when buyers care enough to punish low quality. As author David Goldhill observed after an avoidable hospital infection killed his father, providers who had to collect from grieving families rather than an uncaring government would soon find the money to keep patients safe. Buyers certainly care. Government simply doesn’t.

It was market competition that gave us the maxim that the customer is always right. That’s because market competition contains and channels personal greed toward socially beneficial ends. When greed runs amok, it is because a clueless government opened the cage.

Everyone just wants to help.

The tragedy is that the juvenile justice system can leave kids and teenagers worse off than when they entered it. Over the past six years, nearly 1,300 people have sued New Hampshire alleging that they were sexually and physically abused while in juvenile detention. According to New Hampshire Public Radio, this is “the largest government scandal in New Hampshire, and one of the largest youth detention abuse cases in American history.” On the opposite end of the country, California charged 30 juvenile corrections officers at a single facility last year for arranging “gladiator fights” among the youth they were tasked with helping. The indictment recounted 70 bouts over the course of just five months, with some of the 140 victims as young as 12. In spite of the ideals professed by lawmakers, officials, and the public, the juvenile justice system often hurts young people instead of helping them.

A decade ago, the juvenile justice system was new to me. I was a rookie public defender assigned a juvenile court caseload in a small county in north Georgia. Over the four years that followed, I kept that responsibility even as my adult court assignments shifted me to another community. I went to child custody hearings and got to know hundreds of kids in trouble with the law. I made regular trips to the Regional Youth Detention Center, where young people are held on a short-term basis. I also talked to a lot of lawyers whose life’s work is in juvenile courts.

Though I’m not on the front lines anymore, on June 12, I testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about mental health in juvenile justice facilities. I told the commissioners about the conflicting mindsets that beset the law—on the one hand, a belief that people who commit crimes are problems, and on the other, confidence that youth merely have correctable problems. I spoke about the reasons I doubt the system will ever truly live up to its promise. And I noted ways to try to prevent and repair the harm the system will cause.

Just days before, I drove by the Youth Development Campus, a facility in my home city of Augusta, Georgia, where kids and teenagers are incarcerated long-term. I couldn’t help but think of both the promise of the system and its perils. The promise is that detainees there can receive a diploma from an accredited high school. Foremost among the perils is dehumanization. The whole place is down past the paper mills and slaughterhouses on the swampy side of town, sitting on barbed-wire acreage just 2,000 feet from the county jail.

W.E.B. Du Bois once asked what it felt like to be a problem. Certain people have problems. Others are condemned to being problems. That is most apparent in the adult criminal justice system, though it is reflected in the juvenile one, too. The adult system has long been tasked with resolving people deemed to be problems, and in large measure, that remains the case despite the rise of rehabilitative and restorative justice models. Using substances means one is an “addict.” Violating the law makes one a “danger to society.” A person, so reclassified, goes to a designated place for problem people—a concrete facility with barbed wire, armed guards in towers, and padded isolation cells.

Rehabilitation in such places is a distinctly secondary consideration, and it is not allowed to override the treatment of the person as a problem. The Supreme Court had to tell a prison to let a chaplain touch a convict undergoing lethal injection because prison officials initially thought that gesture too decent. First-class opioid-use rehabilitation is available in only a small minority of prisons. Family visitation helps manage problems, but letting mothers and fathers hug their sons and daughters is considered too humanizing. Conjugal visits have given way to video “visitation.” (As one North Carolina official explained in justifying this change, “You certainly don’t want a young child to be hugging a family member and their time expires and you have to pull them out of their arms.”)

Even after one graduates from whatever rehabilitation is on offer, an adult convicted of a criminal offense remains a “felon,” a status virtually as unchangeable as the color of one’s eyes—and one far costlier to one’s ability to earn a living. Adults who run afoul of the law are thought of as problems, then treated in a way that makes their problems grow.

We tell ourselves we treat kids and teenagers differently. The entire reason we have a separate juvenile criminal system is society’s discomfort with writing off people before their 18^th birthday, during a time in life characterized by (in the Supreme Court’s words) “immaturity, irresponsibility, impetuousness, and recklessness.” Perhaps most of us remember having problems when we were like this. There are plenty of people who cannot imagine calling the police on young people they know and love. Sara steals $100 while babysitting? Take away her car keys, yell sense into her, and make her go watch the kids for free until she’s learned her lesson. Joey had a beer at his friend’s house and they got into a tussle? Call the friend’s parents, make Joey write a letter, and have him pass the sniff test every time he comes home. Sara and Joey get to have problems. They’re good kids just making dumb mistakes.

On some level, we recognize that kids and teenagers in poorer neighborhoods, where the temptation to break the law is even stronger, deserve the same leeway. So we promise ourselves that we’ve come up with a gentler, more humane system.

Does the system deliver on that hope? Sometimes. Most of the young people I represented did end up getting help that my adult clients could not reasonably expect from the system. There was the teenager struggling with truancy who received a few months’ respite at a good camp while his grandfather cleared out cockroaches from their home. There was the girl who finally opened up after months of proceedings and admitted that her aunt—whom she had been accused of committing battery against during a fight—was in fact abusing her. I will never forget the trust it took for these young people to acknowledge that they weren’t the problems.

But the courts definitely deem some youth to be problems. The Supreme Court specifically tells judges that if they decide some young Alyssa demonstrates “irreparable corruption,” they can sentence her to life in prison without the possibility of parole. For all our compassionate understanding that kids and teenagers have problems, apparently there are things they can do that break our faith.

As for those who are not deemed broken beyond all hope, they are sometimes dehumanized, too. In Louisiana, just three years ago, the governor temporarily transferred 25 mostly black boys incarcerated by the juvenile justice system to live in the former death row unit of the state’s infamous Angola prison. He did so after a mass escape led to a shooting, revealing serious security gaps endangering detainees, staff, and the community. Youth aren’t always treated differently from adult prisoners after all.

Still, as evidenced by the Louisiana shooting, there are kids and teenagers who commit killings, rapes, and robberies. While they very often do have serious problems, these are not ones that can safely be wrestled with in the community while those facing them continue to cause other people new problems. Nor would it be justice not to bring these young people to account for their crimes. So facilities will have to continue to exist.

And so must scrutiny. These facilities must be used as a last resort. If a young person’s problems can be handled in the community, that is where they must be addressed. The court I practiced in relied on family therapy, mentorships, social service roundtables, and regular conversations with school administrators for much of its work. Most problems were handled inside the very community where they arose, rather than being treated as a reason to pull a young person out of that community altogether. For most kids, teenagers, and families, that was what they needed—and a harsher approach would have caused more disruption with less to show for it.

As for those youth who do have to be incarcerated, systems and officials must be pressed again and again to treat facility personnel issues no less seriously than they would those in schools, hospitals, or any other setting with vulnerable people. A system that cannot police its own officers will not be able to police those entrusted to it. And the last thing kids and teenagers inclined to disorder, violence, and crime need to see is that these things can be overlooked so long as the one committing them has power.

Rehabilitation must also be the driving principle for facilities. Religious chaplaincy, psychological care, family repair, substance abuse treatment, educational opportunity—these are not aspirations. They’re the bare minimum.

Here’s one more: accountability. Those who have been harmed by the system deserve a way to have their complaints heard and the injustices they suffer recognized in a court of law. They deserve some measure of compensation. So long as it remains exceedingly difficult to sue government officials, these remedies will remain illusory. Detained youth who allege that juvenile officers sexually assaulted them, as did a 14-year-old in Tennessee, cannot recover damages from governments unless they can prove that the officers were inadequately vetted, trained, or supervised. Kids and teenagers who claim that officers were grossly negligent in failing to prevent rape by fellow detainees cannot recover: As a federal appeals court held in the case of an 11-year-old Alabama boy, only deliberate indifference by officers can authorize damages. These decisions reflect a system that protects adults in authority rather than the young people entrusted to them. And they reinforce the impression that kids and teenagers will be punished severely for their infractions while those in power will escape scrutiny for adult brutality.

While the system sometimes does deliver rehabilitation, in contrast with the young people who endure it, it does not merely have problems. It is one. Scrutiny on it should never be less than that placed upon the young people imprisoned by it.

And it’s about time.

It’s a response to a shocking fact: Graduates of more than 800 college programs across the country — including at institutions like the University of Southern California and New York City’s New School — make less than the average high-school grad four years after getting a degree, despite all that time, effort and tuition money.

Now the American government will have no part in propping up degree programs that may not even lead to a livable wage. A provision of the Big Beautiful Bill cuts them off from federal aid access if they can’t break the non-grad salary baseline.

Graduates of more than 800 college programs across the country make less than the average high-school grad four years after getting a degree, despite all that time, effort and tuition money, according to a new report.

Programs that fail the test for two out of three consecutive years will no longer be able to bury kids in debt — at least not on the taxpayer’s dime.

These Big Beautiful Bill revisions represent “the biggest set of changes to financial aid in decades,” according to Robert Kelchen, head of the Department of Educational Leadership at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. And change is much needed.

Teens and twentysomethings should be protected by the federal government from making a catastrophic financial decision, like taking on debt to finance a degree that ultimately could decrease their earnings potential. But until now the government has been enabling those decisions by underwriting loans without regard to the value of the investment.

The Big Beautiful Bill’s alteration to the federal student loan program represents the biggest changes in decades, per experts.

“It makes complete sense from a student perspective and also from a taxpayer perspective [to stop giving] money to programs that leave students financially worse off,” Michael Itzkowitz, president of the HEA Group, said.

The HEA Group, a policy organization focused on higher education and economic mobility, used Education Department data to compare average graduate earnings from some 32,000 bachelor degree programs around the country with average high school graduate wages in the same states.

According to the findings, 804 programs — 2% of all undergraduate programs which graduate 40,000 students annually — were flagged as potentially failing the new policy changes, including several at high-profile universities.

Graduates with music degrees from the University of Southern California, Juilliard and the New School earned less on average four years after graduation than high school graduates — making $34,124, $32,842 and $32,930, respectively.

Music majors from the University of Southern California were earning roughly $34,000 four years after graduation, according to Department of Education numbers.

Graduates of the Fine and Studio Arts program at New York City’s Cooper Union pulled in just $24,920 on average four years out, and students with degrees in Liberal Arts as well as Fine and Studio Arts from Bard College made slightly below the typical high school grad, at $34,571 and $34,667, respectively.

The Post reached out to these schools for comment.

Mark Kantrowitz, author of “How to Appeal for More College Financial Aid,” says that we can expect to “see some chaos resulting from” these new changes. The Department of Education will analyze tax records from the Treasury Department to calculate the return on investment for students by school and program.

Graduates of the Fine and Studio Arts program at New York City’s Cooper Union pulled in just $24,920, on average, four years out.

“We may see some colleges discontinuing some of their programs when they see significant shifts in enrollment and borrowing patterns,” Kantrowitz said. “The higher-cost colleges that have the least generous financial aid [are] going to be the most impacted.”

Itzkowitz says that the new earnings provision actually is exactly what students are asking for: “If you speak to any [college] student … they will want to earn more than someone that has a high school diploma. They would probably [not] want to attend a program if the majority of students can’t even earn that amount.”

But Andrew Gillen, an educational researcher at the Cato Institute, says the changes from the Big Beautiful Bill “don’t go far enough.”

“You could still have programs that just barely increase their graduates’ earnings but load them up with so much debt that it’s still a terrible financial investment for the student and for the taxpayer,” he said.

Higher education researcher Andrew Gillen says that the new changes to the student loan program actually don’t go far enough.

Yes, it might be uncomfortable or even emotional for some in academia to acknowledge that many degrees, particularly in the humanities, are poor investments for many students. But it’s time we confront that truth so that students can make informed decisions about their futures.

The student loan system enabled by the federal government spent years foisting debt onto teenagers who were told that college is the singular pathway to success, without ever asking whether the programs accomplished what they promised.

Predictably, schools raised tuition, passed the bill over to the taxpayer, and buried kids in debt that they can’t repay. That’s why more and more young people are concluding that college simply isn’t worth it and dismissing the value of education altogether.

More responsible federal lending can prevent young people from throwing the baby out with the bathwater and help us reach a healthier middle ground — where colleges have a duty to make their product worth it, and students can pursue education with the confidence that they’ll be better off for it.