My answer has generally been some version of this: 9/11 didn’t change us, we allowed it to change us, and in doing so critically damaged our very own political way of life.

We allowed our Arab American and Muslim American fellow citizens to become targets of federal surveillance and to be placed on secret government “watch lists” in the absence of any evidence they’d committed a crime.

We allowed the creation of the most sweeping and invasive surveillance dragnet in American history – first in secret via the National Security Agency’s (NSA) STELLAR WIND program and then openly through the passage of the PATRIOT Act just six weeks after the attacks.

We allowed a previous American president to lead our nation into a war against a country – Iraq – that had nothing to do with al Qaeda’s terrorist atrocities. The drama came complete with a televised presentation of “evidence” to the United Nations Security Council of the continuing threat Saddam Hussein allegedly posed to the region – evidence that turned out to be false.

We allowed those who opposed George W. Bush’s war of choice against Iraq to be targeted by the FBI with surveillance and informant penetration operations that mirrored some of the worst Cold War era tactics employed by J. Edgar Hoover and the organization he led.

We allowed our government to set up secret torture chambers around the world for captured Arab and Muslim men – the CIA’s “rendition, detention, and interrogation” (RDI) program (a.k.a., the torture program). Some, like Khalid Shaik Mohammad (KSM), were directly responsible for the attacks. Others not only had nothing to do with the attacks but no involvement with terrorism at all. And through it all, the U.S. abandoned the very principles of justice under law and due process that it had proclaimed to the world since the trials of German and Japanese war criminals after World War II. That torture program has already damaged the legal case against KSM.

And we allowed the president who authorized these things to get away with all of them and leave office legally unmolested.

I’ve used the phrase “we allowed” because we who are citizens of the Republic cannot escape our responsibility for what George W. Bush did, even if we voted for his opponents in 2000 and 2004.

Yes, there were those who went into the streets to protest the Iraq War and the creation of the Guantanamo prison and its dysfunctional, sham trial system. Those who risked police batons, tasers, and tear gas to raise their voices against unjust wars and the torture of those we captured deserve remembrance and praise. But they were too few in number to alter the course of events because too many of their fellow Americans did not join them when it mattered most.

I witnessed these events from a different angle, that of a senior House staffer working for then-New Jersey Democrat Rush Holt during the final four years of Bush’s presidency. Holt’s repeated efforts to stop runaway surveillance programs from his position on the House Intelligence Committee frequently came to naught because of the refusal of many of his colleagues to join his efforts.

Bush’s authorization of the secret STELLAR WIND mass electronic surveillance program after the 9/11 attacks was a direct violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. It literally represented an impeachable offense, as was his authorization of the CIA’s torture program. And even though multiple impeachment resolutions against Bush or then-Vice President Dick Cheney were introduced, they went nowhere – even though Democrats controlled the House during Bush’s last two years in office.

The fact that not a single House GOP member signed onto any of those resolutions no doubt contributed to the failure to hold Bush accountable for his misconduct in office. It was a posture that stood in stark contrast to the seven House Judiciary Committee Republicans who joined their Democrat colleagues in voting to impeach Richard Nixon for his crimes in office over 30 years earlier.

The degradation of the Congressional ethos of institutionalism and constitutional protection began before 9/11, but the attacks and how we responded to them accelerated the process of political and constitutional decline and the intensification partisan loyalty to the president. Donald Trump did not create this phenomenon, but he and his closest aides have exploited it and pushed it to new depths.

The brutalization of immigrants (legal or otherwise), the legal and political attacks on individuals or entities that oppose Trump’s policies, the expansion of mass surveillance programs, the initiation of multiple illegal military actions – all of this and more has come to pass because of a failure to hold accountable a prior president who engaged in almost identical misconduct in the years after 9/11. Whether that dynamic can be broken and reversed is up to each of us.

Violence has filled the void left by the failure of dialogue, but that void is not merely rhetorical. My years as a scholar of rhetoric, my experiences speaking with those who disagree with me vehemently, my time in civic-engagement initiatives and my work as an educator have led me to this conclusion: Dialogue does not matter to people convinced that they, themselves, don’t matter.

We are in a crisis of mattering. Feelings of loneliness, political impotence and low self-regard seem to be growing. Those feelings may eclipse the mere possibility that one will feel heard, respected and endowed with a sense of mattering.

America’s crisis of political violence may be the result of a deeper crisis of mattering.

Social psychologists define mattering as the perception that we make a difference in the world around us. Generally, scholars agree that a sense of mattering is derived from one’s perceived ability to feel valued or add value. Those who neither feel valued nor think they can add value suffer from what psychologist Gordon Flett calls “anti-mattering”: the internalized conviction that one is invisible and insignificant. A person experiencing anti-mattering can come to believe they are not worth listening to.

Sadly, people in want of a sense of mattering often conclude that violence can provide a form of empowerment, even if it is counterfeit. In 2025, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue identified 74 violent attacks and disrupted plots for violence in the U.S., a 27 percent increase over the previous year. A year after Kirk’s assassination, a recent survey reports that, when asked to identify “the biggest threat to the safety of average Americans,” 33 percent chose “domestic terrorism” and 42 percent chose random acts of violence (e.g., mass shootings), while just 20 percent identified foreign threats. On the eve of the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11, those numbers are striking. Violence remains relatively rare, but a consequential minority considers it justifiable for some political objectives, a proportion that rose modestly from 2024 to 2025.

Loneliness and alienation, to be clear, do not necessarily make someone violent, but research on domestic radicalization suggests how they can become dangerous. Researchers have found that economic and social losses of significance predicted violence among perpetrators of ideologically motivated crimes. Significance-quest theory explains the intervening process: A personal need for significance encounters an ideological narrative that portrays violence as meaningful and a social network prepared to recognize and applaud the perpetrator’s actions. Violence then becomes a perverse method of adding value. Words can be ignored. Bullets, however, have a way of demanding our attention.

Mattering, then, should be a primary topic of conversation for those who want and believe in civil society. If violence offers alienated people a way to feel powerful, to feel like they matter, then civil discourse must offer something better. It must offer the power to act without dominating, to matter without making enemies and to be heard without making others disappear.

But how do we do that?

Organizations attempting to answer that question have emerged. Harvard University’s Mattering Initiative believes that when students have a strong sense of mattering, “they deepen connections, have a sense of meaning and purpose, and are less likely to experience loneliness, anxiety, and depression.” This initiative emerged in collaboration with the Mattering Movement, a nonprofit started by scholar Sarah Bennison and journalist Jennifer Wallace. Bennison has gone on to found Mattering in Action, which translates mattering research into actual curricula, teacher tool kits and campus initiatives, while Wallace has gone on to found the Mattering Institute, which offers leadership training and “mattering audits” for a variety of types of organizations. Zach Mercurio, author of The Power of Mattering, offers classes and workshops on instilling mattering into workplace culture.

The work of mattering is being done, but it has not yet been applied specifically to prevent political violence. This must change. We must see mattering as a civic and violence-prevention program. Organizations like Braver Angels and initiatives like the Beacon Project are adjacent; they seek to promote dialogue to prevent violence. But in order to promote dialogue, we need to promote mattering.

Mattering may not be a panacea. After all, no mattering initiative can prevent every violent act. Yet if our response to political violence consists only of condemning murder and teaching rhetorical skills, we leave a deeper problem untouched. When dialogue fails, the answer is not simply better speech—it is the creation of a civil society in which speech offers people a genuine sense of mattering. Civil discourse necessitates citizens who believe they matter. Helping people acquire that belief is the next step toward preventing tragedies like the killing of Charlie Kirk.

In fact, Putin has never demonstrated such an interest. Obviously, he has no moral objection to the use of military force. But Putin appears to be more Russian nationalist than Soviet communist, and after taking power, he originally sought improved ties with the West. Just a couple weeks after 9/11, he told the German Bundestag:

Alas, his attitude eventually changed. The Clinton administration had chosen to treat Russia as a defeated power, assuming that it, rather like Germany after the First World War, would have no choice but to submit. The Russian people as well as elites were angered by the West’s continuing disdainful treatment of their country. Just as Germany recovered from its defeat, so did Russia. And Putin abandoned efforts at accommodation.

The Russian president told the 2007 Munich Security Conference: “Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force—military force—in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts.” Who to blame? “One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural, and educational policies it imposes on other nations.”

Most importantly, Putin opposed efforts to bring Ukraine into NATO and ultimately waged war to prevent that outcome. Even so, he avoided expanding the Ukraine war into a direct conflict with the rest of Europe and especially with the U.S. After all, Putin went to war primarily to ensure that Russia did not face a long border dominated by the transatlantic alliance. It would make no sense for him to directly attack a NATO state, guaranteeing war with Europe and very likely America as well. The suggestion that after failing to expand the Ukraine conflict he would risk a global and even nuclear conflict just to test the alliance’s viability is too clever by half.

The Ukrainian imbroglio has now raged longer than the First World War and shows no sign of abating. Throughout the conflict, the Europeans and Americans have waged an increasingly bitter proxy war, sustaining Kiev’s defense and helping kill tens of thousands of Russian soldiers. Moscow appears to be intensifying its response, especially if it is responsible, as charged by Germany, for last month’s drone attack on Leipzig Airport.

European policymakers are increasingly concerned about the potential for a broader conflict. Reported the Financial Times: The Leipzig episode “has provided a brutal wake-up call about Moscow’s intensifying hybrid campaign against Europe, and exposed Nato’s failure to deter Russia from staging attacks below the threshold to trigger the alliance’s ‘Article 5’ mutual defense clause.” The Washington Post’s David Ignatius agreed:

To be sure, the situation is dangerous. But it is important to understand the sources of Russia’s confrontational behavior.

Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was criminal and unjustified, as are its war efforts today. Yet Washington and its allies have little moral standing to complain. First, they foolishly treated the Russian government as worthy of no consideration and ignored multiple warnings of Russian redlines. They thus encouraged Moscow’s even more reckless response.

Second, they routinely initiated illegal unilateral military action for their own advantage. Consider the George W. Bush administration’s Iraq invasion—which led to widespread internal strife and mass civilian casualties. The Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations backed Saudi Arabia’s sustained assault on Yemen, which resulted in extraordinary civilian hardship and significant deaths. The Trump administration lawlessly attacked Iran, killing thousands of noncombatants, turning the Gulf states into military targets, and threatening the global economy.

Finally, the U.S. and its NATO partners are now waging a costly proxy war against Russia. Whether the allies are doing so primarily to defend Ukraine or to weaken Moscow is a matter of dispute. In any case, allied support has been critical for Kiev’s resistance. Russians have been injured and killed by Western munitions guided by Western intelligence. Allied officials even claimed credit for the death and destruction.

It is this deadly role that is pushing the Russian government toward a direct confrontation with Europe. Explained Ignatius:

Allied policymakers are now expressing shock at the discovery that Moscow is threatening violence. European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen opined in October 2025,

So far, that means escalation short of war. However, pressure will grow to draw the U.S. more deeply into Europe’s fight for Ukraine. The Trump administration’s reaction is hard to predict. Although the president still focuses on improving diplomacy with Russia, his sentiments appear to have moved toward Ukraine in recent months. And he has largely abandoned his talk of leaving NATO, apparently pleased at his ability to use American forces to extort unbalanced trade deals from European states, whose officials admit to accepting such demands in an attempt to maintain Washington’s military protection.

Meanwhile, most members of the foreign policy establishment, sometimes known as “the blob,” favor not only retaining but strengthening America’s defense dole for Europe. They believe that NATO should in turn confront Moscow. For instance, Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations called for “a steely response to deter Putin from stepping up his attacks on Europe.”

Ignatius argued similarly. “The U.S. should first issue a joint statement with its European allies bluntly warning that continued Kremlin-sponsored strikes on NATO countries will result in severe consequences,” he wrote. “And if Putin continues nonstop attacks on Ukrainian cities, the U.S. and Europe should quietly assist Ukraine in proportional attacks on Russia.”

Alas, this would reinforce the very cause of Moscow’s escalation: the allies’ enabling wider and more destructive attacks on the Russian homeland. Ignatius’s policy would probably push Putin, under ever-greater pressure from Russian elites who favor a tougher and rougher war, to escalate further. This shouldn’t surprise Washington officials, who would never tolerate Russian aid for attacks on the American homeland. For Moscow, the war against Ukraine is existential, and Putin is more likely to double down than retreat, which could imperil his government, or at least his personal control. In contrast, Ukraine matters far less to most European states, and especially to Washington and the American people.

Instead, the allies—at least the U.S.—should step back, reducing their role in the conflict. Putin committed a great wrong against Ukraine, which warranted allied support for its survival. But NATO and especially America should avoid a broader military confrontation.

Washington policymakers typically view themselves as angelic figures dedicated to goodness and light and determined to inaugurate a new utopian age of peace. Unfortunately, no one else, especially Russians, view them this way. The allied proxy war against Moscow is increasing the likelihood of general war. The administration should drop its support for an ever more dangerous proxy battle and press its allies to do so as well. Putting America first surely means avoiding war with Russia over Ukraine.

That’s because the proposal corrects no market failure. It pays people for choices they’re already making. It adds a new claimant class to a budget that cannot carry the ones already promised something. And it does all of this without a workable plan to pay for it.

Under a draft rule now circulating at the Department of Health and Human Services, married couples in which one spouse works at least 35 hours a week and the other stays home would become eligible for the federal child care subsidy — about $9,000 per child, per year — as payment for “parent-based childcare.” The money would come from the Child Care and Development Fund, a $12 billion block grant created in the 1990s to help low-income parents pay for care while working or finishing school.

The CCDF currently covers about 1.3 million children and 870,000 families. Four in five recipient families are headed by a single working parent, usually a mother. The new rule would add no new money to the fund, exclude unmarried couples and send checks to households rather than day care providers.

Vance aims to end what he sees as discrimination against stay-at-home parents, offsetting the income they give up to care for children and making single-earner married families easier to sustain. These, too, are goals that we can debate, but none will be furthered by this proposal.

Start with the threshold question: Why should the federal government subsidize families at all, or put its thumb on the scale about how they do it? Raising children is humanity’s oldest private activity. The state shouldn’t interfere.

If there is a rationale for intervention, the standard one is market failure: The market produces too little of something society wants — in this case, allegedly, stay-at-home parents. Each family has their own financial circumstances, but no market failure prevents a married couple from deciding that one spouse stays home.

Instead, we’re told that the problem is federal policies, including the CCDF, that subsidize going to work and lead to fewer parents staying home with their kids than would otherwise. The claim is that giving parents similar money to stay home would allow a parent to quit their jobs without losing subsidies.

But for the majority of single moms benefiting from the existing child care subsidy, not working isn’t an option, and that $9,000 won’t make up for the loss of a paycheck. That means that the only ones who would benefit are stay-at-home moms who already made their choice before the government intervention, and those whose families can afford for one parent to stop working.

Cash-for-care programs in Norway and Finland, as well as the extension of France’s parental education allowance to second children in the 1990s, reduced maternal employment more significantly for educated women. In Norway and France, the mothers’ earnings losses persisted for several years after the end of eligibility.

If Vance’s goal is more children rather than fewer working mothers, the record is worse. Hungary, Poland, Japan and South Korea have spent enormous sums on pronatalist payments. They have almost nothing to show for it except for changes in the timing of fertility.

There are also fiscal questions. First, is it sound to disincentivize work when the two biggest spending programs and drivers of our debt — Social Security and Medicare — are funded by working Americans? If you don’t want to reform entitlements, don’t pay workers to stay home.

Second, there already aren’t enough CCDF funds to serve all the parents who want them for day care. And as mentioned above, those single parents currently benefiting from the program won’t be able to quit their jobs. That means that expanding eligibility to married couples with one stay-at-home spouse will stress the program further. That’s unless Congress expands the funding. With the entitlement crisis and a deficit now running near 6% of GDP, how will we cover this new federal program?

The claim that child care subsidies like the CCDF discriminate against married couples is also weak. Our tax-and-transfer system is riddled with asymmetries. Stay-at-home spouses collect half their partner’s Social Security benefit, and all of it as survivors, without paying payroll taxes on their own earnings. Homeowners deduct mortgage interest; renters don’t. The answer to a program you object to is to shrink or end it, not to create a parallel program for whoever feels left out.

If the administration wants to help families, it should remove the barriers that make raising children expensive for all parents independent of their work status.

Decentralized election administration is one of the most community-oriented things government does, relying on an army of neighbors as volunteers. Being close to the people helps make it more accountable when something goes wrong. If machines break, supplies run short or there are needlessly long lines at the polls, who will respond faster to your complaints: your elected municipal, county, and state officials, or some distant federal agency?

Local election administration also better fits our nation’s vast diversity. Recently, as Congress has considered bills that would impose one-size-fits-all rules on basic electoral functions – requiring that everyone visit a public office in person to register, for example – there has been pushback from places like Alaska and the rural Southwest where people may live multiple hours away from such an office. Early, mail and lockbox voting play different roles from one community and the state to the next, depending in part on work, commuting and retirement patterns. Why block needed adaptations to local conditions?

Decentralized administration also guards against a catastrophic single point of nationwide failure in election systems. New voting machines and methods spread piecemeal from one jurisdiction to the next rather than by Washington prescribing that everyone adopt them all at once. That means administrators and vendors learn and adjust by others’ experience, and the whole country doesn’t get committed to someone’s flop idea.

And that’s just the glitch side. We are all aware that election systems get targeted by bad actors, domestic and otherwise, seeking advantage or information. Our diverse and decentralized system is much harder to hack than a single nationwide one would be, with the damage limited and compartmentalized.

America has been a great innovator in the realm of elections, introducing many methods new developments from party primaries to early and mail voting. Some innovations fall by the wayside, while others catch on and become standard. Why trade this ferment of democracy for an arrangement where permission from Washington is required for anything new? Why risk foisting a bad method on everyone because someone in Washington liked it?

Above all, the Framers did it this way because they feared that a ruling national faction, whether based in Congress or a White House, might someday gain power over election administration nationwide and use it to entrench themselves in office. America must steer clear of any Venezuela-style National Electoral Council by which those in power could second-guess – and in the end substitute their own preferred numbers for – locally tabulated results.

For a long time, the Democrats were the party infatuated with centralization here. Only a few years ago they promoted an overreaching omnibus bill numbered H.R. 1 that would have invaded the proper province of the states in many ways, heaped massive burdens on local administrators, and put federal bureaucrats in the driver’s seat. Why did the Republicans forget their own former warnings when they took over?

The current push toward central control is based on alarms about supposedly widespread noncitizen voting and voter impersonation that simply aren’t borne out by the evidence, along with theories about the 2020 election that have been uniformly rejected by courts and disproved by impartial investigation. While there is definitely room to improve ID methods, a measure like the SAVE America Act goes far beyond what any state has chosen to enact voluntarily and demands that it all be done on an unrealistically abbreviated timeline.

None of this is to say Congress cannot use its Constitutional authority to make and alter rules in prudent, targeted ways. It could bring a truce to the gerrymandering wars through a few simple rules – compactness of House districts and respect for the boundaries of political subdivisions, no mid-census redistricting except when required by a court – that would check the interstate race to the bottom.

It’s not that states are somehow perfect or above politics in running elections – the record of American history amply documents their sins. But the danger of gathering the reins into one set of hands is greater. Congress has rightly respected the states’ and localities’ lead role, and it should go on doing so.

Setting aside the legal back-and-forth, the strange thing about the saga is that even if implemented, the USPS list-matching rule—the item at dispute in the litigation—would do nothing for election integrity.

There’s been lots of talk about election law, the president’s powers, whether the postal service can actually execute the role the president has tasked it with, and whether election administrators could handle the last-minute change. But overlooked in all the discussions is the fact that the administration is pursuing a change that will do nothing to make our elections more secure.

Before we get to that, some background: On March 31, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity In Federal Elections.” Section 3 of the order directed the U.S. Postal Service to take unprecedented steps to inject itself into election administration. The order gave the postal service until the end of May to issue proposed rules to effectuate the president’s wishes.

Previously, the USPS has treated election offices like any other customer. So long as election officials submitted appropriately addressed and stamped outbound envelopes containing mail ballots, the USPS would deliver them to voters. Under the executive order, USPS will not deliver mail ballots unless the outbound envelope has a certain new design and contains tracking elements, and unless election officials submit to USPS in advance the names and addresses of all mail-ballot voters. 

Public interest groups and Democratic-led states sued less than a week after Trump issued the order. They argued, among other things, that the Constitution doesn’t permit the president to unilaterally change election law nor direct the post office to do things outside of its statutory authority. Throughout the summer, a U.S. district judge in Massachusetts, Indira Talwani, issued injunctive orders against the administration, which appealed her orders to the Supreme Court.

As the litigation continued, USPS issued a proposed rule, and then, after receiving more than 200,000 public comments in response, issued a final rule on August 21. Three days later, the Supreme Court ruled that plaintiffs had filed their original April lawsuits too soon. The suits, according to the Supreme Court, were premised on speculative harm, rather than actual harm, because the USPS had not issued its final rule at the time of initial lawsuits. 

The plaintiffs shrugged their shoulders in response to this ruling and then filed a new lawsuit based on the USPS’s August 21 final rulemaking. Judge Talwani issued a temporary restraining order against the Trump administration and USPS on August 27 and a preliminary injunction on September 4. The Trump administration appealed directly to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court set a briefing schedule for this week. 

The ballot’s in the mail—or is it?

All this comes as election season is already underway. North Carolina mailed out ballots last week—60 days before Election Day, as required by state law. Plenty of other states will join them in the coming weeks. And federal law requires that military and overseas ballots (“UOCAVA” ballots) go out at least 45 days before Election Day.

Even if the Supreme Court ultimately deems the new USPS requirements lawful, the idea that election officials could fully implement them for this upcoming election is absurd. Tammy Patrick—the chief programs officer of the Elections Center, a national organization that trains and certifies elections administrators—explains what the new restrictions on mail voting would mean for election officials in her 63-page declaration accompanying the plaintiffs’ suit. 

Patrick points out to the court that there are more than 10,000 voting jurisdictions in the United States, some with zero full-time election workers. A number of these jurisdictions still hand-address their outbound mail ballot packets. It’s silly to think those offices can, in a matter of days, redesign their envelopes, buy new envelopes, destroy old envelopes, address the new envelopes, assemble new mail ballot packets, and learn how to use a new USPS portal. 

Then there’s the question of whether or not USPS could keep up its end of the bargain. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, made news earlier this month when he released a report from an anonymous USPS whistleblower who called the postal service’s effort to comply with the order “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed,” according to a letter Blumenthal sent to the postmaster general. The whistleblower’s colleagues had a coarser description: “s—tshow.” ProPublica has also reported on concerns from within USPS that large numbers of eligible voters could face significant delays in receiving their ballots or perhaps not receive them at all.

The larger legal questions surrounding the litigation are simply the latest version in the omnipresent question of the past 1.5 years: “Does the president have this unilateral power?” Although I’m a lawyer, I predominantly stay in the lane of a humble election administrator. And from the point of view of an election administration expert, it’s far from clear how these changes further the cause of making our elections secure.

Unclear objectives.

Most news coverage and commentary has focused on the section of the executive order that requires election officials to submit lists of all mail voters to the USPS before handing over the actual addressed ballot packets for delivery by mail carriers. According to the final USPS rule, the USPS will compare the addressees on mail ballot packets with the submitted list. If the addressee is on the list, the USPS will deliver the mail ballot packet. If the addressee is not on the list, the USPS will not deliver the mail ballot packet (and, potentially, none of the other mail ballots in that batch).

But that’s the extent of the USPS role. It’s charged with simply comparing two lists: the presubmitted list and the actual ballot packets. Even if the Supreme Court upholds the executive order, the USPS will not do anything to assess the validity of the mail voters on the submitted list. It won’t check to see if the addressees are real people. It won’t check to see if they’re U.S. citizens, or if they really live at that address, or if the recipient is registered to vote in multiple states, or even if they’re registered in two houses on the same street. 

The USPS acknowledges in its own FAQ that it has no role in determining the eligibility of mail voters beyond confirming they are on the presubmitted list:

The administration has made similar acknowledgments in its court filings, including with the Supreme Court: “USPS will not perform any verification of voter eligibility or the like.” In other words, election officials could give the USPS mail ballot packets addressed to fraudulent recipients, but as long as those fraudulent recipients are also on the presubmitted list, then the USPS won’t do anything about it. “Garbage out” is okay, as long as it matches the “garbage in.”

Some election integrity advocates noticed the rule’s inherent impotence. When publishing the final rule to the Federal Register, the USPS wrote, “some commenters urged the Postal Service to adopt additional measures, including citizenship-verification requirements, as part of a final rule.” 

And yet you wouldn’t know this based on commentary from the administration and MAGA’s most strident election skeptics. When the Supreme Court made its initial determination that the original suits challenging the executive order had been filed too soon, Trump posted to social media: “Supreme Court Delivers Major Election Integrity Victory in Big Win for Trump.” Sen. Mike Lee wrote on X: “An outstanding victory for election security across America”—a comment that earned him a “community note” correction for misconstruing the court’s ruling.

None of these people have explained how matching two lists—both provided by the same election administrators whom Trump has distrusted for many years—specifically improves election security. I suppose one could argue that it creates an additional public record of all mail voters, but that information is already public. You can, for example, make a public records request for a file to see every voter in Arizona who received a mail ballot in 2024 and every voter who returned a mail ballot in that election.

Heck, if I were still the chief election official in Maricopa County, Arizona, I would just submit my entire voter registration roll to USPS. That way, if a voter who is not originally set to receive a mail ballot later decides he wants a mail ballot, he’s already on the USPS list. There’s no penalty for oversubmitting potential voters to the postal service.

A placebo effect, or worse.

When pressed in court on how the rule enhances election integrity, the administration has said it builds confidence in elections. As far as election administrators are concerned, this is all an expensive, administratively cumbersome, legally fraught placebo. The USPS will create a new portal containing the names and addresses of all mail voters, and state and local administrators will jump through a bunch of new hoops, not because it will do anything real, but because it will make people feel better.

It’s especially silly when states like Alabama and Texas say they want to voluntarily comply with the USPS rule, even if the executive order is deemed unlawful. If they wanted to, they could simply post a list of all mail voters on a state elections website. But I suspect this is less about actual election integrity and more about MAGA exhibitionism and the need to be seen as fighting for election integrity.

If this is all about improving public confidence in mail voting, I’d suggest there’s a quicker, less expensive, less legally fraught way to do that: Trump could simply announce on Truth Social that he trusts the security of mail voting, having used it himself, and that even after aggressively pursuing noncitizen voter fraud for months, his federal investigators have turned up only a few cases.

But that, of course, won’t happen. So what’s this push really about?

Here I can only speculate. Perhaps the Trump administration wants a federal “in” to election administration. The executive order is merely the beachhead, and the involvement of USPS in election administration, once firmly established, will expand in future elections. In those future elections, USPS will check the eligibility of all mail voters. It will run citizen checks. 

Another theory is that with election integrity initiatives like the SAVE America Act having stalled, Trump is building a pretext by which to cry foul when the upcoming election is administered in the same way the 2024 presidential election was administered. Oh, the irony.

And then there’s the chaos-for-the-sake-of-chaos theory. Andy Craig at The UnPopulist summarized this theory as envisioned by Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times:

I don’t know what the real reason is. Or if there’s any reason at all.

All I know is that it’s a darn shame that all of this effort is being invested in litigating, stressing out election administrators and USPS employees alike, and building a USPS portal that, even if fully and smoothly implemented, will do nothing to improve the integrity of American elections.

In December 2025, Cruz showed up at the immigration benefits office for an interview for the petition, hoping to advance in the legal immigration process. Everything seemed in order. But after his interview, USCIS didn’t adjudicate his petition. Instead, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents approached him and arrested him.

Douglas has no criminal record. Still, ICE detained him.

Cruz is the victim of a new and terrifyingly common Trump administration practice of arresting the spouses, parents and other family members of U.S. citizens as they go through the standard green card process. USCIS has increasingly collaborated with ICE since last year, reporting applicants who have records of past immigration infractions, even in cases when they might be eligible for legal status.

Cruz was taken to the notorious Broadview ICE facility, which had been sued months prior to his arrival there by the American Civil Liberties Union for “overcrowding, unhygienic conditions, lack of medical care, and deprivation of adequate food.” The lawsuit details that a single bathroom is shared among detainees in the overcrowded cells with “poor sanitation, clogged toilets, and blood, human fluids, and insects in the sinks and the floor.” Although the district court eventually ordered some conditions to be improved, the ACLU accused the government of withholding evidence showing whether it had complied with the order.

Outside the detention center walls, Cruz’s wife and children stared down financial destitution, deprived of their primary financial support. Normally, under any other administration, including the first Trump administration, ICE and Border Patrol detainees can seek bond if they aren’t dangerous and they have sufficient ties to the community and are not deemed a flight risk. But Cruz had run into a second devastating and unprecedented policy shift from last year: the administration’s refusal to grant bond hearings to people who entered without inspection.

Even serious criminal suspects get a bond hearing before trial. This policy meant that Cruz could face months behind bars before the outcome of his case. He filed a habeas corpus petition with a district court to force the administration to give him a bond hearing. His attorney wrote that his detention imposes a “substantial deprivation and burden that puts [him] and his family at risk without his support.”

Thanks to this anti-bond policy, almost 10,000 people each month are filing habeas petitions just like Douglas Cruz in attempts to free themselves from deplorable conditions in ICE custody. ∂

Fortunately, Cruz’s counsel was able to convince the judge that the no-bond policy was illegal and unconstitutional, and the judge ordered ICE to grant him a bond hearing. After almost two weeks of detention, ICE relented and gave him a bond hearing. Based on typical spending per detainee, his stay in detention likely cost the government more than $2,500, for less than two weeks.

Cruz was fortunate to receive some form of legal justice. But he was one of the lucky ones. These situations are growing increasingly common as USCIS sits on legal immigrants’ applications, not processing them and instead waiting for the chance to arrest them. Many immigrants are actually losing their legal status during these lengthy waits as their temporary status expires and they are unable to renew. As of July 2026 there were nearly 1.6 million pending green card applications, and wait times for some categories have grown to multiple years.

USCIS Director Joseph Edlow has emphasized his agency’s “great relationship with ICE.” As a result, USCIS has worked with ICE to arrest spouses of American military personnel, refugees resettled by the U.S. government, and crime victims applying for a visa for immigrants who help law enforcement investigations. Congress has created the U visa for the purpose of allowing some immigrants with temporary or no status to receive status in exchange for cooperation with the police, but ICE often arrests them before USCIS reviews their applications.

The baseless arrest-and-detain strategy is working. Immigrants are increasingly giving up. A growing number of applicants are not showing up for routine immigration hearings and appointments, reportedly out of fear of being detained. In August 2026, less than 60% of ICE removals had a final order of removal — down from 85% at the start of fiscal year 2025. The rest were people abandoning their right to press their case in immigration court. With that kind of “success,” you can bet ICE will be looking for many more people just like Cruz — no matter their immigration application status, lack of criminal record or proven ties to their American community.

Months after Zohran Mamdani became mayor, candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America nearly swept the city’s June Democratic primaries.

In Florida, DSA member Angie Nixon won the Democratic Senate nomination over the establishment favorite.

And it’s not just the DSA’s own candidates: Socialist ideas are being laundered into the mainstream Democratic Party.

In the upper Midwest, Abdul El-Sayed and Peggy Flanagan rode Sen. Bernie Sanders’ endorsement to win Democratic Senate primaries, campaigning on Medicare for All and expansive Green New Deal-like policies.

They insist these sweeping expansions of government shouldn’t be called socialism, but both are key pieces of the agenda socialists are selling to America. 

So I took the DSA platform — dubbed “A Day Without Capitalism,” it’s long on rhetoric and thin on details — and tallied up the costs.

The bottom line: The DSA wants somewhere between $71 trillion and $212 trillion in new spending over the next decade.

At the high end, total government spending could consume as much as 92% of America’s entire economic output.

The DSA’s “no more bills” pitch is clearly enticing to Americans frustrated with high and rising prices.

The socialists claim their plan will do away with rent.

They’ll make health care free and forgive student loans.

Their system will provide utilities, college and food at no cost to the consumer. 

However, making something free at the point of use simply shifts the cost somewhere else — in this case, to taxpayers.

Even with the government in charge, things still have to be paid for.

Medicare-for-All-style health care needs doctors, nurses, hospitals and medicines; universal health care alone could cost $40 trillion to $70 trillion over a decade.

A federal jobs guarantee means paying as much as $60 trillion to cover 10 years of wages for millions of Americans, and eliminating rents and mortgages requires trillions more in subsidies.

Replacing fossil fuels will take massive new infrastructure investments — and no-cost colleges still need professors.

Washington is currently projected to collect about $70 trillion in federal taxes over the next 10 years.

To cover the costs of all those additional services, the DSA agenda requires roughly doubling federal revenue at the low end and quadrupling it at the high end.

Socialists have a reassuring answer: Rich people and corporations will pay.

But are there enough of them?

Start with the super-rich. The 400 wealthiest Americans were worth a combined $6.6 trillion last year.

Imagine Washington could confiscate every dollar of that — liquidate their businesses, sell their homes, strip off their jewelry.

All that covers less than one year of the low-end cost of the DSA’s platform — or not quite four months of it at the high end.

What about corporations? Tax every dollar of corporate profits at 100% (assuming the businesses keep operating), and they’ll fund between half and one-fifth of the DSA agenda. 

Finally, jack up top income taxes to their revenue-maximizing rate on high-income earners: That covers less than 1% of what the DSA has proposed.

Add it all together — confiscate the wealth of the richest Americans, seize every dollar of corporate profit and maximize top income-tax rates — and the DSA is still between $29 trillion and $169 trillion short of covering the costs of its promises.

Only one tax base is large enough to fill a gap tens of trillions of dollars wide: the middle class.

Large European welfare states don’t fund themselves by soaking only billionaires and corporations; Europe’s tax rates on corporate income and billionaires are often lower than in the United States.

Instead, they’re funded with broad-based taxes on workers and consumers — high income taxes, high payroll taxes and high consumption taxes.

Middle-class Europeans pay tens of thousands of dollars more in taxes than Americans do. 

And even Europe’s largest governments, with annual outlays at the low end of the DSA’s spending estimates, stop well short of the DSA’s anti-market vision.

In France and Finland, people still get bills.

They pay rent, and they buy groceries and energy.

They pay for transportation, their health care requires cost-sharing, and income limits and eligibility rules apply to other subsidies.

This is the real role of a socialist government: Without prices, bureaucrats ration access through waiting lists, complex criteria, lower quality, lotteries, geographic restrictions or political favoritism.

Expect to see such rationing in Mamdani’s grocery stores, with price discounts comparable to Aldi — and a $70 million price tag.

The DSA promises a world of plenty, paid for by somebody else.

Simple math says otherwise.

There aren’t enough resources at the top to pay for socialism — which is why the bill will eventually come due for the rest of us.

Mao Zedong, known as the “Great Helmsman,” was the most important founder of the People’s Republic of China. Nevertheless, after his death in 1976, the Chinese Communist Party tolerated criticism of his legacy. Even the CCP admitted that Mao had made mistakes, though it still claimed that he was 70 percent correct.

Unfortunately, this minimal honesty in government has since disappeared. Chinese artist Gao Zhen, a 70-year-old permanent U.S. resident who emigrated to America in 2022, has been convicted of “slandering China’s heroes and martyrs,” namely Mao. Detained while visiting the PRC two years ago, Gao has been sentenced to three years in prison. His wife has been prohibited from leaving as a matter of “national security.” His young son cannot return home without his parents.

Gao’s crime was caricaturing the Red Emperor, a veritable madman responsible for mass death and poverty. Mao ruled the world’s most populous nation for nearly three decades, inflicting upon its people such infamies as the “Great Leap Forward” and “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” along with multiple lesser atrocities. Although casualty estimates approaching 100 million lost lives are probably excessive, the actual numbers still boggle. R.J. Rummel, author of Death by Government, figured more than 35 million dead. Yang Jisheng, who chronicled the catastrophic government-created famine in which his father starved to death, figures that catastrophe alone killed 36 million Chinese. The Black Book of Communism estimates Mao’s death roll at about 65 million. Other guesstimates fall in between. It is true that Mao did not intend all of these deaths. Still, Chairman Mao, as he was commonly known, likely killed more people than any other man or woman in human history. It took a perverse mix of ability and effort to slaughter so prodigiously.

China is not the only nation in which a brutal and cruel ruler created untold horror and hardship both domestically and internationally. However, in most gruesome cases, succeeding generations repudiated the tyrant’s leadership. Adolf Hitler committed suicide amid the rubble of Berlin, his soon-to-be-captured capital city. After dying peacefully, Joseph Stalin was repudiated, and his body was removed from a place of honor in Lenin’s tomb in Moscow’s Red Square. Pol Pot, architect of Cambodia’s “Killing Fields,” and Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu, a notorious crackpot even by communist standards, were reviled in death. Imperial Japan’s Premier Hideki Tojo was executed for war crimes, though Emperor Hirohito was excused from his likely responsibility for political reasons. Few think of the lost Ottoman Empire, let alone War Minister Ismail Enver Pasha, most responsible for the mass slaughter of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks during World War I. Who today even remembers murderous dictators like Ethiopia’s Haile Mariam and Uganda’s Idi Amin Dada?

In contrast, no one visiting the PRC can avoid Mao’s memory. His image adorns the currency. His portrait hangs in Tiananmen Square on the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Moreover, his mausoleum dominates the plaza and draws some 5000 visitors every day. His birthplace in Hunan Province is a favorite tourist location, and Mao tchotchke is widely available. Most importantly, his role as China’s principal revolutionary and nation-builder is celebrated in school textbooks, public museums, and popular culture.

Nevertheless, Chinese who lived through the horrors of Mao’s misrule are not fooled by continuing CCP propaganda. During the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, three protestors defaced Mao’s portrait. One was a bus driver — a common worker rather than an exalted intellectual — who, as a result, served 10 years in prison. After he escaped to Thailand, he observed: “An increasing number of Chinese, I mean overseas Chinese, are more aware of the autocratic, totalitarian, and violent nature of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Despite the bloody Tiananmen crackdown, some space long remained for discussing Mao’s legacy. The PRC was authoritarian, but its controls loosened. Unfortunately, General Secretary and President Xi Jinping has since turned into the reincarnation of Mao, at least in terms of suppressing opinion and debate. One of his more infamous acts was the 2018 law to protect the reputation of “heroes and martyrs.” The measure was “introduced so the country and the people forever remember the sacrifices made by the nation’s heroes and martyrs for the good of the country. The whole of society is required to learn from and defend the nation’s heroes and martyrs. It bans the defamation of heroes and martyrs, and any distorting or diminishing of their deeds. According to the law, people who defame the country’s heroes and martyrs, or sully their reputations and honor, will face administrative or criminal punishments. The law also stipulates that publicity and education about the deeds and spirit of the nation’s heroes and martyrs should be incorporated into the national education system.” The CCP is so serious about the rule by, not of, law that it applied the measure retroactively against acts committed years, even decades, in the past.

Gao long targeted past CCP rule, especially Mao. Reported by the New York Times: “In the early 2000s, he and his younger brother Gao Qiang held secret exhibitions in Beijing and got away with taking on taboo topics like the 1966–76 decade of political turmoil known as the Cultural Revolution, which resulted in the death of their father, and the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre. Known as the Gao brothers, the duo were seen as cultural ambassadors to the West, representing a China that was more willing to face its past.”

However, after Xi steadily regressed to the CCP’s more repressive past, both Gaos emigrated to the United States. Unfortunately, despite warnings that Gao Zhen was at risk, he returned with his wife and son to visit his ill mother-in-law. In August 2024, “almost three months after he had returned to China, more than 30 police stormed Mr. Gao’s art studio in Sanhe City in Hebei Province, near Beijing. Four of the officers grabbed Ms. Zhao, forcing her and their son into the kitchen. She tried to comfort their son as they watched officers pin her husband to a couch and handcuff him.” Since then he has been in detention. Even when the verdict is prearranged, it seems, trials take longer in China than in America. Last week he was finally convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, for art created almost two decades before passage of the law under which he was punished.

Explained the Times: “Mr. Gao was arrested for three provocative sculptures of Mao Zedong that he made with his brother. In one, the revolutionary is depicted with breasts and a Pinocchio nose; in another, a group of Chairman Maos with guns prepare to execute Jesus Christ. The third, called ‘Mao’s Guilt,’ portrays the former leader, who was responsible for years of famine and upheaval, kneeling in repentance.” Insulting though these exhibits might seem, they are only minor retribution for mass killing and immiseration of the Chinese people.

China is an extraordinary country, with a venerated and ancient culture and an entrepreneurial and creative people. Their government freed them to succeed economically when it finally abandoned Marxism as part of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” However, Leninism continues to reign, stronger than ever under Xi, who is determined that the CCP will firmly rule China and that he will firmly rule the CCP.

The Chinese people will be free only when they are allowed to confront the legacy of the communist party and especially of Mao Zedong. He is more responsible than anyone else for creating what has become the modern Chinese state, though he would not recognize the result. Unfortunately, the Chinese people remain in intellectual and political bondage. Only their chains today are made of silver and gold rather than iron.

Someday China will be free. Then the Chinese people will finally be able to bury Mao and his terrifying legacy.

Three events from the last few weeks have shown some of the flaws with this story:

• On August 22, U.S.-Canada negotiations—prompted by new Trump tariff threats—collapsed hours before an already-extended deadline, causing not only the U.S. tariffs to enter into force but also Canadian retaliation, U.S. retaliation for that, and the clear risk of a spiraling trade conflict that threatens almost $1 trillion in annual commerce and one of the United States’ closest military alliances.
• Days earlier, something even weirder had happened. Citing his “very good relationship” with North Korea’s murderous Kim Jong Un, Trump ordered the Pentagon to scale back joint exercises with South Korea—a move reportedly motivated by U.S. officials’ frustration with Seoul slow-walking the $350 billion investment pledge it made as part of a tariff-fueled trade deal with Washington.
• And just this past Tuesday, the United Kingdom announced that, thanks to Canadian approval in July, it became a full member of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP)—a sprawling trade deal that broadly liberalizes trade among 11 other economies (and that Trump abandoned in 2017).

Start with the Vaporware Deals.
Arguably the centerpiece for Trump’s tariff regime was the 20-plus “trade deals” his team announced last year to great fanfare. Yet many of them have turned out to be little more than press releases, if that.

Several promised deals were never finished. The U.S.-India agreement, which U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Jamieson Greer’s team called “99 percent” done last June, remains on hold. Brazil got tariffs instead of a deal after its negotiations collapsed. South Africa’s talks are stalled. Kenya is starting over (again). Free-trading New Zealand never got anything at all; Chile didn’t either. And, obviously, there’s Canada.

Other deals were announced as finished but never actually materialized. Malaysia’s trade minister declared his country’s October 2025 agreement null and void after the Supreme Court’s ruling against Trump’s “emergency” tariffs in February. Indonesia signed its deal a day before the ruling, but Jakarta now says it never entered into force. The framework deals of Vietnam, Taiwan, and Argentina are similarly unratified. The U.S. announced deals with the Philippines and Pakistan, but those governments never confirmed the same terms. Bangladesh signed its deal three days before a major national election, and the new government says it’s now under review. Thailand’s still negotiating the implementation of its October 2025 framework deal, and North Macedonia … who knows, man.

Also into this category fall my personal favorites, the U.S. “trade deals” with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. Those have no treaty text or signed framework (let alone formal approval by the governments’ respective advisory councils) and are instead simply White House fact sheets touting non-binding investment pledges worth a ridiculous $4 trillion—almost double the nations’ collective GDP in 2026 and far greater than anything they’ve ever invested here before. Here, history seems to be repeating: In 2017 the Saudis announced U.S. investments worth $350 billion ($110 billion of it “immediate”), yet measured Saudi direct investment rose by just $5 billion through 2024.

The Real Deals Are Modest—and Temporary.
Four deals have progressed beyond the press release stage, but weaknesses abound here, too.

The U.K. The U.S.-U.K. “economic prosperity deal” was signed on May 8, 2025, but remains incomplete. In July, the House of Commons Business and Trade Committee reported that the EPD, the follow-on (and now paused) “technology prosperity deal,” and a December 2025 pharmaceutical deal are all legally non-binding because they weren’t enacted into law, though a few elements—on expanded beef and ethanol quotas and pharmaceutical pricing—were implemented via secondary legislation. (In exchange, the U.S. gave the U.K. a lower 10 percent baseline tariff rate and preferential treatment for British aerospace, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and automotive goods.) On nontariff barriers (including regulatory standards) and digital trade, the committee’s report shows no progress, while services were never in the deal. Notably, the U.K.’s discriminatory digital services tax is still in place, leading Trump to threaten new tariffs over it and similar European DSTs back in April.

Japan. The U.S. implemented its July 2025 framework with Japan by executive order, while Japan never ratified anything. In fact, Japan told WTO members earlier this month that it has made no tariff concessions, and that the agreement is not legally binding. Instead, the deal—including $550 billion in promised Japanese spending and investments—is an “administrative understanding” that Japan can terminate at any time. The Japanese government promised to buy more American rice but told the WTO that procurement would still be by open tender, with no preference given to any country and no additional quota allocation to the United States. Its promised defense purchases were already planned as part of its defense buildup program.

As we already discussed last February, some new Japanese investments in the U.S. will occur under the tariff deal, with returns eventually tilted in the United States’ favor. However, deals have materialized slowly; Japanese officials say only 1 to 2 percent of the $550 billion will be actual direct investment; and the flagship $40 billion nuclear project with Westinghouse has stalled out.

South Korea. After its National Assembly declined to ratify the full U.S.-South Korea deal, Korea passed a special enabling law in March to unlock the $350 billion in new investment Seoul had promised. As Trump’s North Korea shenanigans indicate, the investments are proceeding slowly: Of the $350 billion, $150 billion is earmarked for shipbuilding but has yet to be spent, and the other $200 billion has never been announced. Earlier this month, Korean news reported that surprise U.S. demands for semiconductor-related investments have thrown Seoul’s first investment “into uncertainty.”

The Korean market was already mostly open to U.S. exports and investment, thanks to the U.S.-Korea FTA—a ratified, comprehensive deal that’s been in force since 2012 (and that Trump’s tariffs egregiously violate). Promised additional movement on intellectual property, digital trade, and nontariff barriers—above and beyond KORUS—has also been slow to materialize. And Washington’s new anger over alleged discrimination against U.S. e‑commerce retailer Coupang shows what the deal’s digital language is worth.

The European Union. The EU deal is probably the strongest case the administration has, but that’s not really saying much. As we’ve already discussed, the EU’s big investment promises are empty because the European Commission has no power to effectuate any of them. Nevertheless, the Europeans in June officially implemented the trade parts of the deal, and the regulation entered into force on July 1. Thus, unlike every other Trump trade deal, this one is binding and now in force for all 27 EU member states.

The details, however, are underwhelming. The EU deal’s biggest deliverable was duty-free access for U.S. industrial goods, but EU tariffs on these items were already super low (a trade-weighted average of just 1.5 percent). As U.S trade negotiators know all too well, the EU’s protected, subsidized, and regulated agriculture market is where the real trade policy action is, but the Europeans’ concessions here are narrow: basically just modestly bigger tariff quotas on “non-sensitive” products like pork, nuts, processed foods, seafood, and a couple dairy products. Left out are not only many “sensitive” farm products, but also European regulations—on beef hormones, GMOs, pork enhancers, poultry treatments, etc.—that have long blocked U.S. farm products from penetrating the EU market in significant quantities. Also omitted are new European regulatory barriers, such as the onerous deforestation regulation that the American Farm Bureau warns could affect almost half of all U.S. agricultural exports to the EU. (Negotiators are supposedly working on it.)

Just as importantly, the EU deal’s implementing legislation contains several elements that will discourage long-term contracts and investments involving U.S. companies. In particular, the regulation sunsets the entire deal on December 31, 2029, suspends it at the end of this year if U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs don’t improve (they still haven’t), and includes a new “safeguard” mechanism that would halt certain U.S. preferences if surging American imports “threaten” EU companies. The whole regime took effect on July 1, and it might stop in December.

The China ‘Deal’ Is Really Just a Temporary Truce (with Tariffs on Both Sides).
As we’ve discussed, the China “deal” is really just a one-year truce that expires in November. There’s no signed agreement or even Chinese confirmation of most of what Washington announced. At the Beijing summit in May, China promised even more agricultural and aircraft purchases, and both sides trumpeted a “Board of Trade” to liberalize a small amount of trade in “non-sensitive” goods. But the board still hasn’t launched; the Boeings were always gonna be bought; and even if the agricultural commitments pan out, the best case for U.S. exports is that they get back to levels enjoyed in 2024, before the trade wars ever started. (Yes, this includes soybeans.) Meanwhile, exporters in Latin America—especially Brazil and Argentina—are slowly taking American farmers’ market share.

The Overall Pattern: Press Releases, Small-Ball, and Running Out the Clock.
With all these these “deals,” a clear pattern emerges: In response to Trump’s tariffs and in exchange for modestly lower ones, foreign governments have offered big, flashy numbers but small, concrete concessions, while maintaining almost all of their “sensitive” sacred cows and looking to run out the clock on everything else. Over time, the commitments have gotten thinner, not thicker, and little of it is set to endure when Trump leaves office in 2029. Meanwhile, continued tariffs and U.S. trade bellicosity have likely undermined what was supposedly the tariffs’ core foreign-policy objective—isolating China.

The pattern is also familiar: The tariff-backed “Phase One” deal with China during Trump’s first term also generated splashy headlines but had minimal follow-through (on both sides) and meager trade effects before it ultimately collapsed in 2021. And as I documented years ago, U.S. efforts in the 1980s and ’90s to use tariffs to open foreign markets ultimately failed far more often than they succeeded, while generating all sorts of unintended harms along the way. In each case, the same lesson emerges: Vague, one-sided U.S. trade deals made at virtual gunpoint tend to fail over time because sovereign foreign governments have little incentive to comply in good faith.

Always Consider Real-World Alternatives.
The results above are meager, but they’re also not nothing. Yet the deals’ modest achievements shouldn’t be compared to a Liberation Day status quo but instead to what the U.S. used to do—and, as my colleague James Bacchus explains in a new Cato paper, what everyone else is still doing today.

The United States has 14 free trade agreements covering 20 countries. Unlike Trump’s deals, these eliminate almost all tariffs—typically more than 98 percent—on both sides. Data from WTO therefore show, for example, that 99.85 percent of U.S.-Canada trade was duty-free in 2024 (i.e., before Trump started tariffing stuff), thanks to NAFTA and then Trump’s own USMCA. Just as importantly, these deals liberalize services and digital trade and establish clear and detailed rules for intellectual property, customs enforcement, government procurement, investment, and more—along with binding dispute settlement procedures for when disagreements arise. And the agreements are hardwired into law by the U.S. and counterparties, meaning they’re far more durable than Trump’s deals.

Being political arrangements, these deals certainly aren’t perfect. They contain politically sensitive carve-outs for things like Canadian dairy, Korean rice, or U.S. “trade remedies” (bah), and new issues can arise, especially in novel legal areas like digital trade. Nevertheless, the combination of real trade liberalization; clear, predictable and consistent rules; and big economic benefits for both parties has been undoubtedly effective: Trade agreement parties tend to comply voluntarily with a deal’s terms because—unlike with today’s gunboat deals—they want it to persist, and covered trade and investment increases substantially after an FTA takes effect. By 2023, in fact, almost half of all U.S. goods exports went to FTA partner countries that had committed to giving these goods duty-free treatment.

The kicker here, of course, is that Trump has violated all U.S. past FTAs and in 2017 walked away from the CPTPP, which is as deep and comprehensive as the other agreements (if not more so) and includes the U.K., Japan, Vietnam, and several other countries now doing “deals” with Washington. In these cases, Americans are now paying billions in new U.S. tariffs for worse terms than what Trump abandoned almost a decade ago. Such a lopsided comparison between “tariff deals” and real FTAs helps to explain why so many other governments are still doing the latter:

Meanwhile, There Are the Costs.
And that gets to some of the tariff deals’ costs. As Bacchus documents in his paper, instead of directly retaliating against U.S. goods and services, most governments have done something more subtle and durable: They went around us with trade agreements of their own—real ones. Some notable examples of deals and negotiations over the last 18+ months include:

• The EU has signed and/​or implemented comprehensive FTAs with India, Mercosur, Australia, and Indonesia, while also deepening its agreement with Mexico and advancing FTA negotiations with Malaysia, the UAE, and the Philippines.
• Mercosur—the Southern Common Market—also opened talks with Japan and restarted negotiations with Canada.
• Canada completed deals with Ecuador and Indonesia, launched FTA negotiations with Turkey, Thailand, India, and the Philippines, and relaunched them with Mercosur.
• Along with its EU deal, India completed FTAs with the U.K., Oman, and New Zealand.
• Fifty-four African Union members are implementing a continental free trade area.
• After adding the U.K., the CPTPP group will soon include Costa Rica, while Taiwan, Ukraine, Indonesia, the Philippines, and the UAE are in the queue (as is China, but this is more posturing than anything).
• China upgraded its agreements with the ASEAN bloc and Switzerland (a major expansion of scope and coverage) and continued talks with Kenya and Ecuador.

These agreements and others like them are deeper, broader, and more legally durable than the U.S. deals—and, importantly, they supplement the hundreds of non‑U.S. FTAs already in force, including the China-backed Regional and Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which will eventually liberalize about 90 percent of all trade among its 15 member countries (including Japan and Korea).

These moves not only allow governments to hedge away from depending on the U.S. market but also allow for “hidden” retaliation against U.S. goods and services: Instead of raising tariffs on American stuff and drawing Trump’s ire, governments can still put U.S. exporters at a long-term competitive disadvantage in their markets by cementing lower barriers to non‑U.S. goods.

Other forms of retaliation have also occurred. China and Canada went the typical route and applied tariffs on U.S. exports—the former to a significant degree. Brazil is now considering the same. As I discussed last year, moreover, foreigners also retaliated by boycotting American goods and services. A new study quantifies some of that damage, finding that foreign tourism—especially but not only among Canadians—declined substantially in response to “Liberation Day” tariffs, reducing U.S. services exports and costing American companies more than $1 billion per month in lost revenue.

Trump’s trade deals also, of course, require historically high U.S. tariffs backed by a flimsy legal rationale in permanent flux—hundreds of billions of dollars in chaotic new taxes that are mostly borne by U.S. companies, will likely depress investment, output, and, ironically, exports in seen and unseen ways, and have even fueled a “sell America” movement of foreigners slowly divesting from U.S. dollars and debt. Before all this started, U.S. tariffs averaged around 2 to 3 percent and were relatively transparent and simple. Since then, they’ve roughly quadrupled in magnitude and become mind-bendingly complicated. Throw in never-ending modifications and court litigation, and it’s an environment almost tailor-made to discourage companies—foreign and domestic—from making long-term bets on the U.S. market.

And for what? As I wrote last time, tariffs have likely been a drag on U.S. manufacturing output and capacity over the last 18 months, with the sector’s recent upswing focused on less-protected industries and driven by nontariff factors like the AI buildout. Prior to the trade wars, the U.S. had long been the top global recipient of foreign direct investment (FDI)—much of it going into manufacturing—and had seen real goods exports grow at about 3 percent a year from 2000 to 2019.

So far, there’s little sign of Trump’s deals improving on these figures. Last year, the United States remained the largest destination (and the largest source) of foreign direct investment, but the American share of global inflows continued to fall, from about 22 percent in 2022 to roughly 17 percent in 2025. (And the 2025 decline happened in a year when global FDI rose 6 percent, so we lost share in a rising market.) Foreigners’ direct spending on new or expanded U.S. facilities last year was $13.8 billion—a perfectly respectable clip but below 2023 in nominal terms. Promised future FDI of $66.1 billion was an improvement over 2024, but much of it is scheduled to land in 2028 or later. It’s also well below the $104.1 billion reported in 2022, not to mention the trillions the White House keeps reporting.

In short, the “tariff investment boom” still hasn’t materialized/​shown up in the hard numbers, and—as shown above—there are strong reasons to believe it never will.

American exports, meanwhile, rose 2.7 percent in real terms last year, a little below the historical average and much of it owed to nonmonetary gold, which moved for reasons only tangentially related to U.S. trade policy. Beyond tourism, U.S. exports exposed to direct retaliation or high tariff-related costs—especially agriculture and autos—fell hard in real terms, with the farm situation so rough that it necessitated yet another multibillion-dollar government bailout.

Economists have long said that “a tax on imports is a tax on exports,” thanks to retaliation, higher input costs, currency adjustment, and resources shifting from export-oriented to import-competing industries. So far, the rule still applies.

Finally, there are the costs we can’t put in a chart. Studies have shown that past Trump tariff salvos have eroded U.S. “soft power” in measurable ways, and it seems to be happening again—much to China’s benefit. In July, Pew found that China was viewed more favorably than the United States in most of the 36 countries surveyed, with big swings coming in allied nations like Canada, Australia, France, and Germany. Middle-income countries, meanwhile, saw China as a more “reliable partner” than the U.S. and more likely to “contribute[ ] to peace and stability around the world.” A few months earlier, Gallup found China’s median global approval passing America’s across more than 130 countries and by a historic margin. Foreign policy isn’t a global popularity contest, but public opinions can affect foreign officials’ willingness to sign on to U.S.-led initiatives. And—as we just saw this week at the G20 finance ministers meeting in Asheville, North Carolina—few, if any, countries are eager to join U.S. efforts to choke off Iran or ring-fence China, partly because of tariff policy. (And let’s not even start on the Greenland tariff debacle.)

To the extent that projecting American power abroad depends on a strong and growing U.S. economy or on softer forms of persuasion, Trump’s tariffs have been a clear headwind.

Summing It All Up.
On the foreign policy front, Trump’s tariff experiment has produced a handful of tangible wins on market access abroad and foreign investment at home. What really matters, however, is how those narrow victories compare to what’s been promised and what real-world alternatives have achieved—and how much they cost. By these metrics, the tariff-first approach to U.S. foreign policy has been a demonstrable failure. We got big, empty promises and small, ephemeral deliverables that are dwarfed by what comprehensive, ratified trade agreements have achieved, and the process imposed substantial economic costs while pushing many countries—including many close geopolitical allies—to diversify away from the United States in real and long-lasting ways. Meanwhile, the nation’s biggest geopolitical challenges remain untouched.

In the end, the president’s tariff-centric approach—and the “world minus one” system it spawned—will make America less influential in trade and foreign policy and less secure overall, while emboldening China along the way. Oh, and we’ll be poorer, too.

If this is the best case that tariff advocates can make, I’d hate to see what the others look like.

Democratic socialism is a terrible ideology. If implemented, its agenda would cause grave harm and imperil democracy itself. And in seeking massive state control of the economy, today’s socialists ironically have much in common with the MAGA nationalists they claim to oppose.

Both promote government control over the economy, and both paths undermine liberty, prosperity and democracy. Socialists do not control the Democratic Party in the way MAGA largely dominates the Republicans. But their influence is growing.

What’s the DSA’s Agenda? Let’s Look at the Socialist Wish List.
The democratic socialist agenda goes far beyond a marginal increase in economic regulation or welfare spending. It amounts to sweeping government control of the economy and society, on a scale that invites comparison to Cuba, North Korea and the old Soviet Union.

The platform of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), America’s most prominent socialist organization, states the goal plainly: a system in which “food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods” – which is to say, a complete government takeover of those industries.

The DSA also envisions a society with no debt, no mortgages and no landlords, which would require government control of most housing, plus extensive rent control and a $20 an hour or higher minimum wage on whatever remains in private hands.

Economists across the political spectrum agree that this kind of wage floor would price millions of workers out of the labor market, and that rent control would greatly shrink the housing supply.

All told, the DSA agenda would add $71 trillion to $212 trillion in new federal spending over the next decade – at least doubling, and possibly tripling, today’s $7.4 trillion in annual federal outlays, which are already unsustainable on their own. And there’s no way to cover it by taxing “the wealthy” alone: Confiscating the entire net worth of the 400 richest Americans would cover, at most, 9% of the low-end estimate.

Democratic Socialists are MAGA’s Mirror Image
Ironically, democratic socialists have more in common with MAGA nationalists than either likely wants to admit. President Donald Trump has pursued his own version of economic central planning: ruinous tariffs, severely restrictive immigration policy and government equity stakes in Intel, U.S. Steel and roughly 30 other companies.

Tariffs and immigration restrictions are both major forms of government control over the economy. Immigration restrictions, in particular, curtail economic freedom more than any other current U.S. policy.

MAGA nationalists are also fiscally reckless much like socialists – Trump’s signature spending bill is projected to add $3.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, with no serious effort to reform the entitlement programs that drive most federal spending.

Socialists promote an egalitarian ideology, while nationalists generally believe that government should promote the interests of the ethnic and cultural majority in a society. But, despite different rhetoric, they have similar economics and similar flaws.

The fiscal cost is far from the worst of it. A century of socialist experiments prove that.

How Socialism Becomes Authoritarianism
When government takes over most of the economy, it destroys the incentive to produce. In a market economy, producers compete on price and quality to win customers. Under state control, those incentives vanish, and industries become government monopolies immune to competition. The result, time and again, is waste and shoddy goods.

As an old Soviet joke put it: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”

Even enterprises that want to produce quality goods are generally unable to do so under socialism. As Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek showed in a classic article, in market economies the price system sends producers useful signals about what consumers want. Higher prices signal strong demand that producers are incentivized to respond to. Government control of production largely eliminates these price signals, leaving even well-intentioned planners without good information on how to allocate resources.

The result was massive shortages of needed goods, combined with waste elsewhere. This is one of the reasons why the socialization of agriculture and industry in the former USSR, China and elsewhere led to shortages and mass famines, killing millions of people.

One of these – Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward in China – was the biggest mass murder in history, taking up to 45 million lives. The Soviet Union and many other socialist states had similar catastrophes.

Government control of the economy also requires coercion to suppress private enterprise and concentrates enormous power in the hands of central planners. That combination breeds oppression, as in the Soviet destruction of the “kulaks” (independent farmers), and the small business owners Joseph Stalin’s regime marked for elimination.

Concentrated power also hands rulers an obvious tool for persecuting political rivals and ethnic and religious minorities. Such repression recurred across many socialist states throughout the last century.

Right-wing nationalism has similar flaws. It, too, stifles growth by dulling incentives, and its central planning is also subject to the information problems Hayek identified. Tariffs and immigration restrictions reduce competition and growth, and government takeovers of major firms are their own form of central planning.

Despite different rhetoric and ideology, and some divergence on policy specifics, both MAGA and democratic socialists advocate massive central planning of the economy, with similar results.

Nationalist movements also have a long history of repression, and there are elements of it in Trump’s second term: U.S. citizens, as well as immigrants, have been wrongly detained and even deported amid the mass deportation push, and these deportations imperil Americans’ civil liberties in many ways.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has repeatedly threatened broadcasters’ licenses over coverage the administration dislikes.

Nationalist repression tends to target immigrants and ethnic minorities more often than the socialist version does. But the parallels are real.

I Was a Refugee from Soviet Communism. I know Socialism Doesn’t Work.
Today’s socialists say they will avoid this fate because they champion “democratic” socialism, not the authoritarian kind. But near-total state control of the economy has never coexisted with democracy for long. A government that controls the economy can starve opposition parties of resources and weaponize control of basic goods to crush dissent.

That’s exactly what happened in Venezuela, where a democratically elected socialist government became a dictatorship.

Right-wing nationalist regimes have followed a similar path, in Germany, Italy, Spain and many Latin American nations.

Many of today’s socialists even admire authoritarian socialist regimes and hope to emulate them:

• The DSA praises Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro, who turned that country into a totalitarian state.
• Prominent socialist “influencer” Hasan Piker praised Mao – the biggest mass murderer of all time – as “one of the great leaders of this world.”
• Sen. Sanders has a long history of praising communist despots.

“Postliberal” MAGA nationalists similarly often admire right-wing despots, like Spain’s Francisco Franco, Portugal’s Antonio Salazar and others.

Progressives and others should consider whether they trust someone like Trump to have the kind of sweeping control over the economy socialists advocate for. There is no guarantee such a person – or worse – would not come to power under socialism. Far from it – as cases like those of Castro, Stalin, Mao and others show.

If nothing else, we should heed the powerful evidence of people “voting with their feet.” Almost every socialist regime in history has produced a mass exodus toward market economies, never the reverse. Venezuela’s exodus is the largest refugee crisis ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere, and Cuba has had multiple waves of refugees over six decades.

I know firsthand: I was a refugee from Soviet communism myself. If socialism worked as advertised, people would be fleeing market economies to live under it, not the other way around. Right-wing nationalist regimes have produced their own refugee outflows. Refugees from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, for instance, helped build American science, including the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb.

The choices of people voting with their feet are the most powerful verdict on both these ideologies.

Property rights were a central focus of the early liberal tradition. John Locke famously wrote that the purpose of government was the protection of “life, liberty, and property.” Many of the American Founders made similar statements. At the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton avowed that “one great obj[ect] of Gov[ernment] is the personal protection and security of property.” James Madison—Hamilton’s great adversary on many issues—agreed, writing in his famous 1792 essay on “Property,” that “Government is instituted to protect property of every sort… This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.”

In more recent times, many—including many left-liberals—have downgraded property rights, and advocated that they be severely limited, often supposedly to protect the interests of the poor and disadvantaged. Yet the poor and disadvantaged have the most to gain from strengthening protection for property rights. Stronger protections would raise living standards for them, and for society as a whole.

The Guardian of Every Other Right
As early liberals understood, property is essential to liberty. Almost every important human activity requires the use of property. This is most obviously true of those involving property in land, such as housing or most types of work. But the same is true of those requiring other types of material goods. We cannot feed and clothe ourselves without property rights in objects.

Property is also essential to the exercise of almost every type of liberty and autonomy. There is no meaningful freedom of speech without property rights in books, computers, newspapers, printing presses, internet connections, and other facilities necessary to disseminate our words. There is little, if any, freedom of religion without property rights in locations needed to hold religious services, propagate religious doctrines, and operate other religious institutions. The right to contraception protected by the Supreme Court’s famous decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, though usually thought of as a “privacy” right, depends on the right to acquire and possess property rights in contraceptives.

We can make similar points about almost any other form of liberty. If exercising it requires the use of land or material goods, that exercise depends on property rights. Without such rights, the government could at any time negate the liberty simply by denying the ability to use property needed to exercise it.

Moreover, liberty depends not just on the mere legal ownership of property, but on the right to use that property for the purposes the owner decides. A mere right to “exclude” other people isn’t enough (even though some property theorists claim exclusion is the central element of property). It is of little avail if you are officially the owner of a printing press or a computer, but are not allowed to use it to publish and disseminate your words. Being the owner of a church is of little spiritual value if you cannot use it to hold services. And so on.

Ultimately, in most situations, we seek to own property for the purposes of using it. And the right to use is not only the foundation of property ownership itself, but also essential to the exercise of almost all other liberties. For this reason, among others, Arthur Lee—a publicist and diplomat during the American Revolution—called property “the guardian of every other right.”

Socialists and many left-liberals may retort that reasoning like the above shows that a system of private property gives liberty only to the rich. As the saying goes, “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” But this underrates the many ways in which private property guarantees liberty to all. In a pluralistic, competitive market economy, the owners of productive property have incentives to use it in ways that meet a variety of preferences. If there is a market demand for, say, left-wing speech or right-wing speech, property owners have an incentive to use their facilities to meet the demand. If some owners do not want to serve a particular market niche, that creates an opportunity—and an incentive—for others to fill the gap.

The same goes for the demand for religious services, for contraceptives, and so on. Markets allow us to accommodate a diverse range of preferences. People who rent property also acquire crucial property rights, even if not the same as those that belong to the owners of land or production facilities. And similarly, landowners who rent out homes to tenants have incentives to cater to a wide variety of preferences and lifestyles. Some allow pets, some not. Some allow religious services on site, others not. Some have rules severely restricting noise, while others are more permissive. And so on.

By contrast, if the state imposes a single rule for these issues and others like them, it destroys the options created by pluralism and competition. The same occurs if the government simply owns the relevant properties outright, as in a socialist system. That’s true regardless of whether the government’s rules reflect the views of the majority of the public, a coterie of “experts,” or narrow interest groups that manage to “capture” the political process.

How Undermining Property Rights Harms the Poor and Disadvantaged
The erosion of property rights over much of the last hundred years has worked to the great detriment of the poor and disadvantaged. Strengthening those rights could do much to enhance liberty and opportunity for the least well-off, and to boost economic growth and innovation in society generally.

This is most obviously true in the case of the housing crisis—perhaps the biggest obstacle to opportunity for the poor and disadvantaged in the United States today. And exclusionary zoning is the biggest cause of that crisis.

Exclusionary zoning involves restrictions on land use that constrain the amount and type of housing that can be built in particular areas. Some 70 percent of all residential property in the United States is zoned for single-family residences only. A broad cross-ideological array of economists and land-use scholars agrees that zoning is responsible for massive housing shortages, and that it also cuts off millions of people—particularly the poor and minorities—from economic and social opportunities. As a result, millions of people have their liberty restricted. They are also prevented from being as productive and innovative as they otherwise could be.

The people blocked from moving by exclusionary zoning and other, similar restrictions are disproportionately the poor and minorities. Historically, as various scholars have documented, zoning restrictions were often adopted for the explicit purpose of keeping out Blacks and other minorities, excluding the poor, or both. A combination of economic ignorance, racial and ethnic bigotry, and NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) resistance to development has led to the establishment and persistence of restrictions that cause enormous harm.

Exclusionary zoning has grown since the Supreme Court’s badly flawed 1926 decision in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. upheld it against constitutional challenge. In a 2024 Texas Law Review article and a shorter version in The Atlantic, Joshua Braver and I outline why most exclusionary zoning violates the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which requires payment of “just compensation” whenever the government takes private property. This is true from the standpoint of both originalist and living constitutionalism. In a recent follow-up article, we describe how state constitutional law can be used to combat exclusionary zoning. I have also published a shorter, nonacademic version of the latter at the NYU Brennan Center State Court Report. In these works, we also describe how exclusionary zoning can be curbed through a combination of litigation and political action. I am a libertarian, generally sympathetic to originalism. Braver is a progressive and a living constitutionalist. Our collaboration here is an example of how expanding property rights can unite different elements of the liberal tradition.

Zoning restrictions and other similar regulations are potentially justifiable in rare situations where they forestall a serious threat to public health or safety, such as the spread of pollution or contagious disease. As described in our Texas Law Review article, these kinds of considerations are at the heart of the traditional “police power” that states have historically enjoyed. This police power constitutes an exception to the constitutional rule that governments must compensate property owners when their property is taken. But that exception should be construed narrowly, and the government must bear the burden of proof, in order to prevent the police power from being used as a pretext for suppressing normal housing construction.

Exclusionary zoning is just one of several ways in which undermining property rights has destroyed liberty and opportunity for the poor and minorities, often on a massive scale.

The same is true of many state and federal courts’ decisions to allow state and local governments to use eminent domain to condemn private property for almost any purpose they want. The Fifth Amendment only allows condemnation of private property for a “public use.” The dominant early understanding of this provision was that a public use could only be for a government-owned project, or one owned by a private party legally required to serve the entire public, such as a public utility. Unfortunately, beginning with the Supreme Court’s terribly reasoned decision in Berman v. Parker (1954), federal courts started to interpret “public use” to include any possible benefit to the public.

In my book The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain, I describe how the result of this ruling and others like it at the state level was to empower state and local governments to forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of people—mostly poor and minorities—through “blight,” “urban renewal,” and “economic development” takings. James Baldwin famously described “urban renewal” as “Negro removal.” He was not far off, given the demographics of those displaced. While victims of these takings get compensation, the amounts often fall well below the “fair market value” required by Supreme Court precedent, and that metric itself often fails to fully compensate the owners and displaced persons for their losses.

This caused great suffering, and in most cases it has destroyed more economic value than it created. Government officials who approve condemnations at the behest of well-connected developers and other interest groups have little incentive to ensure that they actually produce the economic and social benefits that supposedly justify them. Moreover, destroying communities and making property rights insecure predictably reduces investment and development in the long run.

In 2005, the Supreme Court largely reaffirmed Berman in a closely divided 5–4 decision in Kelo v. City of New London, which upheld the condemnation of homes for the purpose of promoting private “economic development.” Kelo led to a massive political and legal backlash, as forty-five states enacted eminent domain reform laws, and multiple state supreme courts rejected Kelo as a guide to the interpretation of the public use clauses of their state constitutions. But many of the new reform laws impose few or no meaningful constraints on the use of eminent domain, and much work remains to be done to fully curb this kind of abuse.

Asset forfeitures are another area where weak protection for property rights leads to abuses that disproportionately harm the disadvantaged. In many states, law enforcement agencies can confiscate property that was supposedly used in the commission of a crime, even if the owner was never charged or convicted of anything, and even if he or she had no involvement at all in the supposed offense. And, often, there is little due process given to the victim. Even when a crime has been committed, the forfeitures are often hugely disproportionate to the offense. In a case currently before the Supreme Court, the state of Alaska confiscated a $95,000 plane owned by a “bush” pilot because he had illegally transported a six-pack of beer.

Like exclusionary zoning and the use of eminent domain, asset forfeitures disproportionately harm the poor and minorities. The confiscation of a car or similar property harms them far more than the wealthy. For a working-class person, it can cause the loss of a job or other severe harm. And less affluent people have greater difficulty affording the expense of contesting the seizure in court, which often is almost as great or greater than the cost of the seized property.

Some on both left and right seek to fix housing displacement by increasing government abrogation of property rights rather than reducing it. But such efforts tend to be harmful and counterproductive. Rent control, often touted as a solution for high housing costs, has a long history of exacerbating housing shortages by reducing the amount of property on the market. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to confiscate many apartments could well be even worse. Those on the right who hope to address the housing crisis by deporting immigrants are equally off-base. Increased deportations exacerbate housing problems because undocumented immigrants are disproportionate contributors to the construction workforce.

Government control of property also often threatens civil liberties. The Trump administration’s effort to use the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to force broadcasters to keep critics off the air leverages the FCC’s control over broadcast frequencies. Sadly, it is far from the first time the FCC has been used to target political opponents of the party in power, though Trump’s efforts are particularly egregious. As Nobel laureate economist Ronald Coase showed in a classic 1959 article, we can eliminate this threat to freedom of speech by abolishing the FCC and turning broadcast frequencies into private property.

For similar reasons, we should resist both the Trump administration’s and left-wing democratic socialists’ efforts to have the federal government take ownership of large parts of major industries. Such plans will predictably lead to lower-quality goods and services and give the government leverage with which to suppress diversity and target opponents.

Conclusion
I cannot provide a comprehensive account of property rights in a single essay, nor address all possible objections to them. But liberals would do well to recognize the centrality of private property to the overall liberal project, and to support at least a presumption that land and productive assets should be privately owned, and the owners allowed to use the property as they see fit, barring proof that the use poses a serious threat to public health or safety. Whether you are a libertarian who emphasizes property rights’ role in enhancing liberty and human happiness, an egalitarian focused on the interests of the poor and disadvantaged, or some combination of both, you have good reason to support strengthening protection for private property rights.

The Trump Administration Means Business on Accreditation

When the second Trump administration took office, rumblings about accreditation reform were already underway. As someone who thinks accreditation desperately needs reform, I was hopeful but somewhat skeptical it would happen.

One of the keys to seeing whether the administration was serious would be whether it went after the ABA (technically, the American Bar Association Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar) or SACS (technically, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges), the two accreditors with the longest record of abusing their power, usually at the expense of the political right.

New leadership at SACS and potential public relations problems likely spared SACS. But the ABA is both less sympathetic and poses fewer public relations problems, since law students would still have access to financial aid under the university’s institutional accreditor even if the ABA (a programmatic accreditor) were stripped of recognition.

Taking the fight to the ABA implies that the administration is serious about changing the accreditation landscape.

The ABA Should Have Lost Accreditation Power Long Ago

The ABA has long been the poster child of accreditors abusing their power over college eligibility for federal funding.

The most infamous example of this came in 2006-07, when the ABA pressured law schools to find ways around state laws restricting the consideration of race and sex in admissions and employment. The ABA told schools that “a constitutional provision or statute that purports to prohibit consideration of gender, race, ethnicity, or national origin in admissions or employment decisions is not justification for a school’s non-compliance” with its diversity requirements.

A quasi-private organization using power granted by the federal government to pressure colleges to circumvent the effect of duly enacted state laws is about the clearest case of abuse of authority by an accreditor you can imagine and should have led to the ABA losing its authority to accredit. Yet the ABA escaped unscathed. Until now.

The Administration Could Be Using the ABA’s Own Playbook against It

The ABA was in the vanguard in pushing for diversity in law schools and wasn’t shy about using the power the government granted it to push its agenda. The experience of George Mason University’s (GMU) law school provides an illustration of how this worked in practice. During a routine reaccreditation cycle, the ABA concluded that GMU was not doing enough to boost diversity. GMU grudgingly discriminated more and more in an effort to comply with the ABA’s demands, but for years was told it wasn’t doing enough, with the ABA threatening to withhold the school’s accreditation renewal to force more and more changes.

The ED could very well be adopting this same playbook to use against the ABA. Not renewing the ABA’s recognition will not be a quick process. The initial staff report informs the decisions of an advisory committee, which then informs the decisions of ED leadership on whether to renew the ABA’s accreditation authority. Each stage provides more opportunities to extract concessions. If the ED follows through and does revoke the ABA’s accreditation power, there will almost certainly be a lawsuit that drags on for years. And even if the ED loses a lawsuit, new accreditation regulations that are projected to go into effect next July will give the ED a whole new set of tools to coerce the ABA or hold it accountable, depending on your view.

This Seems Like Getting Al Capone on Tax Evasion

1920s-era gangster Al Capone committed innumerable crimes, including murder and bribery, but law enforcement couldn’t make a case on these serious crimes stick. He was finally brought down not for any of his gangster related crimes, but for tax evasion.

The parallel with the ABA is that, while the ABA has done plenty to justify losing its accreditation authority, such as pressuring law schools to skirt state laws restricting the consideration of race and sex in admissions and employment, those ideological issues don’t appear in the ED’s staff report.

The report finds the ABA out of compliance with a host of regulations, mostly related to not having updated its internal policies and procedures to match statements made to the ED or not providing sufficient documentation to defend the standards it imposed on law schools (e.g., the ABA’s bar passage requirement).

This is probably a smart move by the Trump administration. With roughly half the country disagreeing with the ABA’s diversity campaign and the other half supporting it, a fight over diversity would almost certainly generate substantial support for the ABA. So, instead of fighting about that, the administration is citing things like a legal requirement on separate and independent status that took effect in 2020 but that the ABA still hasn’t complied with as of August 2026.

That is a less controversial case and could cause even judges sympathetic to the ABA to question whether the organization is simply disregarding the law.

Worries about Overregulation and Selective Prosecution

I won’t lose any sleep if the ABA loses the ability to accredit. But the fact that the ED was able to use existing regulations to find around two dozen areas of noncompliance to justify their recommendation is frightening.

While it is possible that the ABA was atypically lax in its compliance efforts and paperwork, more likely is that these types of issues are widespread, if not universal, which in turn indicates that any future administration would likely be able to find any accreditor it wants to out of compliance and revoke its accreditation powers. A combination of everyone’s guilty and but we’ll only prosecute those we don’t like is not compatible with justice; it is fertile territory for politicized lawfare. I don’t know if that’s the case here, but even the possibility that it is worries me.

Overall, these are exciting times in the accreditation space, which is probably the first time those words have ever been true.

But the number of nuclear weapons in the North Korean arsenal isn’t nothing. The Trump administration wants to negotiate with North Korea despite having superior conventional and nuclear capabilities. This should give the United States a bargaining advantage over the Hermit Kingdom. So why is the Trump administration willing to negotiate? Because there’s a chance, no matter how small, for North Korea to inflict immense pain on the United States and its allies in the Indo-Pacific. President Trump’s comment on North Korea confirms the long-suspected conclusion that a small number of nuclear weapons is enough to ensure deterrence. 

Nuclear weapons are humankind’s most destructive weapon. They cause indiscriminate damage and harm the health of future generations, with most having much higher yields than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The destructiveness of nuclear weapons led the famed military scholar Bernard Brodie to conclude, “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them.” The potential horror of nuclear war has been a driving motivator to avoid their use. 

It’s currently impossible for counterforce capabilities and national missile defenses to destroy all an enemy’s nuclear weapons. That’s why this nuclear strategy is called “damage-limitation.” At least one nuke will hit. And by this strategy’s logic, should push come to shove, the United States’ ability to limit nuclear damage to itself will cast doubt in the mind of a rival to launch an attack or be aggressive in the first place.

Yet, this strategy assumes that the United States and its people would be willing to accept nuclear damage, fallout, fires, and deaths. It’s safe to say that Americans and most humans are unwilling to accept such risks, even if the destruction is limited. So while the United States may have broken out of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), it now finds itself in a condition of Mutually Assured Retaliation (MAR). A country like North Korea with its limited nuclear weapons can’t destroy the entire United States. Still, the mere threat, the mere risk of one nuclear detonation on Americans or US allies, is enough to give DC policymakers pause. 

Mutually Assured Retaliation and the Trump administration’s war in Iran may have convinced Tehran’s leaders that their best chance of survival is a fully operational nuclear program. Tom Nichols couldn’t have written it better: “Nuclear deterrence, even with only a few bombs, works. Get a nuclear weapon as soon as you can if you want to be safe and treated with the kind of deference America shows to North Korea.” Non-proliferation has a tough road ahead.

This case with North Korea should cast doubt on America’s damage-limitation strategy and call into question the effectiveness of a nuclear buildup. If a few nuclear weapons are enough to deter somebody, and a damage-limitation strategy fails to give the United States meaningful leverage over a nuclear-armed rival, does the United States need to maintain its massive arsenal, much less expand it? Should it have a preemptive nuclear posture and be willing to strike first? The answer looks like a no.

We need to ask more questions like this. Answers to them will determine what America’s nuclear strategy should look like, what nuclear deterrence means, and the usefulness of nuclear weapons in statecraft.

St. Louis later learned that Turner received a mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years in prison. Even though the judge called the sentence “excessive” and “wrong,” he said the law left him no choice. Turner died shortly into his prison term. St. Louis has said he wishes he had voted differently — he didn’t know he could.

Like most people, St. Louis was not fully informed about what jurors can, and should, do. Until recent reforms in Virginia, courts did not tell jurors what sentence a conviction would trigger, or even whether the judge would have discretion in setting it. Jurors are not told about their ability to acquit a defendant when justice and their conscience demand that they do so — even if the defendant violated the law as a factual matter. Many jurors never hear that the law has protected the freedom of their verdict since before Independence, and that their decision to acquit cannot be overturned on appeal.

Courts and lawyers have gradually chipped away at the role of jurors as the conscience of the community and at ensuring that punishments are imposed only when ordinary people are convinced of the need to do so. Maybe that’s why nearly all modern criminal convictions come from plea bargaining instead of trials — a change that’s stopped government from being run by the people and contributed to a sense that citizens are powerless over the laws.

That is not the system the Founders fought to establish. Virginian Thomas Jefferson called trial by jury “the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” John Adams wrote in 1771 that a juror has a duty to vote according to “his own best Understanding, Judgment and Conscience” — even against the direction of the court.

It’s time to recover the constitutional guarantee of trial by jury. Because judges and lawyers aren’t leading the way, people called for jury duty have to. On Aug. 31, the Cato Institute is launching a nonpartisan civic education campaign called “Your Verdict Counts.” At YourVer​dict​Counts​.org, Virginians will find explainers on the history and power of the jury, plain-English guides to jury service, and the stories of real people like St. Louis.

Jurors have the right and the duty to take their role seriously — to demand real proof, ask hard questions, and treat their verdict as an act of conscience rather than mere box-checking.

Jury service is the most direct exercise of self-government most of us will ever perform. For one case, one defendant, and one moment, the power of the commonwealth rests in the hands of ordinary people. Virginians deserve to know how much their verdict counts.

During his first term, Trump jolted European allies by threatening to withdraw the United States from NATO, arguing that its members were not spending enough on their own defense and were free-riding on American taxpayers. Ultimately, he did not make good on the threat. All his administration mustered was a late, failed effort in the summer of 2020 to remove 12,000 troops from Germany.

This time around, his administration has adopted burden shifting as a rallying cry and seems poised to act on it. Almost immediately after taking office, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth traveled to Brussels to inform his counterparts that the United States would have to focus on priorities other than Europe’s defense. Europe itself, he said, needed to “take ownership of conventional security on the continent.” Last month, to turn this vision into reality, the Pentagon launched its Europe Posture Review, which is intended to be a critical assessment of U.S. troop deployments and basing commitments on the continent. Announcing it at the NATO defense ministerial, Hegseth was clear: “Europe can and must take primary responsibility for its conventional defense.” Such an outcome would amount to a transformation in the transatlantic alliance.

Since the founding of NATO after World War II, the United States has underwritten Europe’s defense and held the top military command position in the alliance. More than 75 years later, it still accounts for about 60 percent of NATO members’ military expenditures and stations some 80,000 troops on the continent and in the United Kingdom. Decades of American dominance have left Europe reliant on U.S. leadership, technology, and spending.

If the Trump administration is serious about shifting defense responsibilities to Europe, then the posture review offers a rare opportunity. A substantial reduction in the U.S. military presence in Europe over the next two years would force the continent to build forces it has so far left to the United States, while also putting Washington on sounder defense footing. The United States is $40 trillion in debt and adding roughly $2 trillion per year, with no prospect of major fiscal reforms. Despite this dire fiscal picture, it spends about $100 billion on Europe’s defense each year.

The problem is not new. Although U.S. administrations since Dwight Eisenhower have urged Europe to do more for its own defense, Europeans have consistently shirked their obligations. Even today, some European leaders hold out hope that if they can wait out Trump’s second term, NATO will return to “normal.” Only the withdrawal of U.S. forces will convince allies that the United States truly intends to turn over responsibility for the region’s conventional defense. Nothing else will force them to plan for a future in which Washington is no longer in the lead. Such a move will draw resistance from European leaders and the U.S. Congress. But a smaller footprint is vital to relieve U.S. overextension, and it can be done without harming American interests.

A TEMPORARY SHIELD

The presence of U.S. military personnel in Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s was supposed to be a temporary shield as Western European states rebuilt economies devastated by war. But the troops stayed long after that rebuilding was complete. At the height of the Cold War, the United States had more than 400,000 troops on the continent. When the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO lost its formal justification.

For Washington, the alliance became primarily about institutionalizing U.S. power and influence, and although the total number of U.S. forces stationed in Europe declined over time, it has never dropped below 60,000. With the Soviet threat gone, European governments were happy to capitalize on the “peace dividend” and expanded their social programs while gutting military spending. At the same time, the alliance took on new commitments, offering Moscow’s tiny, vulnerable neighbors promises of protection with little thought of what their defense would require. By 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, Europe was deeply dependent for its security on the United States, which was already tied up in the Middle East and increasingly focused on China’s rising military power. That situation persists today.

The Pentagon last conducted a formal review of global U.S. military posture in 2021, in the first year of the Biden administration. It made a few modest recommendations, but its general conclusion was that the existing arrangement was just about right. In Asia, it advised seeking more places to operate from and pledged to harden U.S. bases there. But it did little to increase U.S. presence in the Pacific, instead assigning new capabilities to an already substantial force in Europe. For instance, it formalized President Joe Biden’s decision to keep bases across Germany and Belgium open—a reversal of Trump’s plan to consolidate them. And it announced that a newly formed U.S. Army unit equipped with ground-based long-range missiles and advanced electronic warfare capabilities (known as a multidomain task force) would deploy to Germany by 2026.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in early 2022, the U.S. presence in Europe grew. Biden raised troop levels there to about 100,000, backed by seven fighter squadrons, six destroyers, and roughly 100 nuclear gravity bombs. He also described U.S. obligations to NATO in maximalist terms, promising to “defend every inch of NATO territory.” His words went far beyond the language of the alliance’s Article 5 mutual defense clause, which commits members only to take whatever action each “deems necessary” after an attack.

Rhetorically, Trump’s approach to Europe since returning to the White House has been a sharp departure from Biden’s. But so far, he has made only marginal changes in the U.S. military footprint. Last year, the Pentagon pulled roughly 800 of 1,700 U.S.troops stationed in Romania. This spring, it announced a further cut of 5,000 from the continent, although confusion persists about the status and source of that reduction. The administration also cut U.S. contributions to the NATO force model, which governs how many and what kinds of assets members would send in a conflict. And it canceled the long-range missile deployment to Germany that Biden had planned.

These changes have not been enough to convince allies that the United States is serious about handing over responsibility for conventional deterrence. The number of personnel in Europe has fallen only to about 80,000, roughly what Trump inherited in his first term. Despite severe shocks to the alliance, such as the president’s threats against Greenland, some Europeans still believe that if they can just keep Trump happy, the transatlantic relationship will revert to the status quo ante once he leaves office. At the same time, they fear doing too much too fast, lest they trigger the very U.S. withdrawals that they are trying to forestall. The result is stasis—the opposite of what the administration says it wants.

BUDGETS ARE NOT BRIGADES

Although the Trump administration came into office wanting to pull back from Europe, it has instead settled for pushing allies to raise their defense budgets. But a bigger European budget is not the same as a smaller U.S. role. The whole point of Europe doing more is so that the United States can do less.

Trump’s pressure (along with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) has delivered higher defense budgets from many European nations. But counting the number of states spending a given percentage of GDP on defense is a poor measure of Europe’s capabilities. By the administration’s metrics, the top performers include the Baltic states—tiny countries with tiny economies. The denominator matters: a large share of a small economy is not much money or military power. By contrast, consider the five largest European economies: Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Spain. If they spent enough, and spent it well, American interests in the region would be secure without much U.S. involvement, and Washington could finally close bases and reallocate its service members and assets.

European countries have held back for several reasons. Historically, the United States has sent mixed messages to Europeans, encouraging them to step up but then scolding them for seeking autonomy. For example, in the late 1990s, when the European Union began taking first steps toward cooperating on security outside NATO, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright moved to kill the effort, denouncing anything that would diminish, duplicate, or discriminate against what NATO already did. The Trump administration has been similarly contradictory in its approach, pushing allies to do more but often demanding that they continue to spend their defense budgets on U.S.-made weapons.

European leaders also know that any effort by this administration to change U.S. posture will run into resistance in the United States itself. The U.S. Congress, for instance, has already tried to block the Trump administration from cutting forces in Europe by writing minimum troop levels into the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. Europeans have noticed. If waiting Washington out might preserve the U.S. defense subsidy, they would be foolish not to try.

The Europe Posture Review is Washington’s chance to signal its intentions plainly and give allies a managed transition rather than an abrupt one. A clear, written plan for substantial withdrawals would show Europeans that the Trump administration is serious about burden shifting. History suggests that anxious allies who are not reassured by their more powerful patron will invest in their own defense. In the 1980s, for example, Japan’s economy was booming, and Tokyo grew increasingly concerned about the Soviet Pacific Fleet, which was expanding faster than allied naval capacity in the region. When Washington declined to send more ships, Japan acted on its own: defense spending as a share of GDP nearly doubled over the next 15 years.

HOW TO LEAVE

The Pentagon should use its review to state the obvious: Europe will not take responsibility for its own conventional defense unless the United States withdraws troops. For maximum effect, the review should mandate deep cuts in 2027 and 2028 and lay out a schedule for more reductions beyond Trump’s second term. A future president might try to change course, but withdrawals already underway are difficult to undo, since closed bases are hard to reopen and rotational deployments take time to restore. Moreover, Europe’s growing self-sufficiency will make each subsequent cut easier than the last.

The most obvious place to start is with a reduction in ground forces, which are expensive for the United States and the easiest for Europe to replace. Before the end of Trump’s term, the administration should permanently retire the rotational combat brigade deployment in Poland, which consists of roughly 4,000 soldiers. It should also withdraw the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, a similarly sized unit based in Germany. One light brigade would stay in Italy, mobile enough to respond to crises, along with some U.S. combat support personnel. There is a further reason to cut heavy forces first: they are precisely what Europe lacks, so their departure would force Europe to build them.

Pulling the brigade out of Poland—which would also end U.S. contributions to NATO deployments in the Baltic states—would be controversial. Warsaw takes a dire view of the Russian threat and has increased its defense spending by almost 300 percent since 2016. But U.S. forces stationed that far east would likely die in the opening days of a conflict, robbing Washington of choices at the moment it most needs them. Moving these forces back from the likely front would keep its options open and discourage risk-taking by eastern NATO members.

The Trump administration should also reduce the number of U.S. fighter squadrons permanently stationed in Europe from seven to four and cut supporting units. (European NATO members already field roughly 1,700 fighter planes, more than Russia’s entire fleet.) And the United States should recall three of the destroyers based at Rota Naval Station in Spain, either returning them to U.S. ports or reassigning them to the Pacific. That would still leave three destroyers and their Aegis systems to support Europe’s air defenses. U.S. satellites and other intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance resources would stay available to allies, as they are relatively easy to move and can cover multiple missions. The remaining U.S. units on European territory—closer to 40,000 service members than to the 80,000 there today—would handle mainly combat support, air defenses, and nuclear weapons.

UNLEARNING HELPLESSNESS

Critics will object that pulling forces out is a mistake while the war in Ukraine grinds on and the continent remains vulnerable to spillover or escalation. But the war has actually made conditions for withdrawal more favorable. The invasion has raised European willingness to spend more on defense, and the fighting has badly degraded Russia’s armed forces. Even after the war ends, the Russian military and economy will need years to recover, which gives Europe time to build up its own forces. With a combined GDP between five and ten times that of Russia, Europe can manage a future conventional challenge on its own.

Others will argue that Europe provides a crucial launch pad for U.S. wars in the Middle East. If Washington withdraws, European governments may be less willing to let it operate from their territory in conflicts like the current war in Iran. That is true, but making costly and unnecessary wars harder to start belongs in the credit column, not the debit one. Indeed, the war in Iran has exposed not only the limits of U.S. military power but also the gap between commitments and resources. Since the United States attacked Iran in late February, it has burned through much of its stock of interceptors and long-range missiles. These shortfalls leave Washington facing an uncomfortable fact: it might not be able to meet all of its global obligations, and it may be unprepared for a war against a major power. The Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion budget request is a partial acknowledgment of these new constraints, but more money alone cannot fix the imbalance. Washington must also shed responsibilities.

The frustration animating the Trump administration’s rhetoric on NATO stems from an unfair division of labor: Europe can afford to lead on its own defense, yet the United States is still asked to carry the load. Europe has learned helplessness, but it can also unlearn it. The Europe Posture Review is Trump’s opening to follow through on his vision of burden shifting. But he will have to bring U.S. troops home to do it.

However, they can give developers of industrial projects — from data centers to manufacturing to mining — the “speed to power” they need while keeping the grid affordable and reliable for existing customers. All they have to do is remove barriers to private grids.

The regulated grid can’t keep up, so businesses are innovating. New grids that are privately financed and operated separately from the shared grid are a solution that has emerged organically. Large customers like hyperscalers (the largest-scale tier of data center operators) have figured out that, in some cases, building new electricity networks is the only way to get electric service fast enough to suit their ambitions.

The off-grid future is not only possible — it’s becoming mainstream. My team at the Cato Institute is tracking dozens of off-grid construction sites across the country, including in Ohio, West Virginia, New Mexico and Utah. A 200-MW off-grid data center owned by an affiliate of Meta recently came online in Ohio, marking the beginning of the off-grid era. That project, called Socrates, should be a wake-up call for critics who say powering data centers on a private grid is impossible.

Texas could lap the field in this new off-grid race for AI dominance. Amazon is the sole customer at the Gigawatt Ranch project, a massive off-grid facility under construction in Pecos, Texas. Microsoft is the sole customer at a site named Project Kilby, which also is in Pecos, a part of West Texas that offers ample land and low-cost energy. As one article summed it up, the approach taken with Project Kilby “allows companies like Microsoft to sidestep lengthy grid interconnection queues that have slowed other large projects.”

Let Developers Scale
Everything is bigger in Texas. Gigawatt Ranch isn’t just a clever name — the proposed 7.65 GW of planned on-site power would make it the largest private network in the United States and the largest single power plant. In fact, it would be approximately 1/12 the size of the Texas grid. For reference, peak demand in ERCOT is about 91 GW. In other words, a dozen Gigawatt Ranch-sized projects could match the size of the Texas grid.

But Texas law prevents these super-grids from serving more than one customer at a time. Private networks could scale up significantly by welcoming new customers. Developers also could connect with other private networks, forming even larger independent grids. The bigger the independent grids, the lower their operating costs, the greater their reliability and the smaller the environmental impact per gigawatt served.

Under today’s rules, builders can’t form such grids without subjecting themselves to public utility regulation. And no business interested in speed wants to entangle itself in public utility regulation because the process would be bureaucratic, slow and subject to the whims of politicians. The simple language in this model bill would enable speed, scale and reliability while avoiding unnecessary oversight by state regulators.

Give Developers Certainty
Imagine making a final investment decision on a multibillion-dollar project today. That development may not begin service for about three years, just in time for a newly elected president to change the rules of the public grid. For example, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) recently took the lead in the Kalshi prediction market regarding who will be the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee. In June, Ocasio-Cortez introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act, which would prevent the construction of new data centers.

But if Ocasio-Cortez were to become president, she wouldn’t need to convince Congress to pass her bill. She could issue a Day 1 executive order establishing a grid emergency and ordering FERC to pause all new grid interconnections for data centers.

Such an order could build on the record established by the NERC, which has issued warnings that “the grid faces unprecedented challenges from a surge in large power consumers,” emphasizing the need to “address immediate risks posed by computational loads interfacing with the [bulk power system].”

Perhaps the action would be litigated, but the irreversible effect — regardless of the outcome in the courts — would be a depth charge sinking the data center industry as we know it. And no, Texas would not be exempt, because Section 215 of the Federal Power Act (the section covering grid reliability standards) applies to ERCOT and the entire Lower 48.

The only way for Texas to keep the data center boom alive despite an antagonistic president would be to allow new networks to flourish — new grids that are further removed from the federal jurisdiction that accompanies the interconnected, public grid.

Let the Grid Catch Up
What if we have another supportive president in 2029? Aren’t there on-grid reforms that can help? Although most developers of off-grid projects would like to connect to the broader grid eventually, they are more than happy to operate on an island if the alternative is to sit idle.

Power networks feature economies of scale, meaning bigger generally is cheaper. The public grid typically is more reliable because a system with thousands of generators can tolerate more equipment failures than a system with mere dozens.

But one thing today’s heavily regulated grids cannot offer is the speed the technology industry needs. That’s because, when it comes to governing the public grid, speed always takes a back seat to reliability and cost. And policymakers’ focus on reliability is more than appropriate.

Texans who lived through the four days of outages caused by Winter Storm Uri in 2021 understand the need for a grid that’s always on. Power curtailments contributed to more than 200 deaths and untold suffering as many families burned whatever they could to stay warm. (See With Crisis Behind it, ERCOT Now Faces the Music.)

In Texas fashion, ERCOT has come back stronger and now faces some of the fastest demand growth seen in modern times. But even in Texas, it’s unclear whether the transmission lines the broader grid needs can be built. If they can, the projects going off-grid today can always connect in a decade once the new lines are placed in service. If they can’t, Texas should set up a parallel path for grid development that features many fast-moving new grids rather than one public grid stretched to its limits.

Conclusion
Texas can attract the incredible economic growth that comes with the data center buildout. If Texas supercharges private grids, many of the large customers waiting in queues in other states — and other countries — would change their plans and come to Texas instead. In the new era of private super-grids, Texas can build the future bigger, better and faster than anywhere else.

Certainly, the surprise February attack on Iran, again amid negotiations, produced none of these results, despite President Donald Trump’s apparent assumptions to the contrary. He seems to have expected surviving Iranian officials to seek his approval before appointing new leadership. This was a fantasy perhaps understandable over 30 years ago, when President George H.W. Bush, preparing to attack Iraq, declared, “What we say goes.” But no longer.

But it isn’t just the president who overestimates American power. To their dismay, other officials and analysts note that both Russia and China are assisting Iran. For instance, Bradley Bowman and Cameron McMillan of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies are outraged and perhaps even a little shocked at Moscow’s and Beijing’s effrontery:

Yet “these actions by Russia and China” are a predictable response to Washington’s attempt to, in the words of both Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, “run the world.” In fact, it would be surprising if both Russia, a great if declining power, and China, an incipient superpower, acquiesced to exorbitant and arrogant U.S. demands. While neither Moscow nor Beijing seeks direct conflict with America, they also are not willing to accept U.S. domination. Certainly not without resistance, including assisting others battling Washington.

How should the U.S. respond? Bowman and McMillan suggest more of the same. They write:

Increasing American support for Ukraine is unlikely to deter Moscow; indeed, it almost certainly has encouraged Russian support for Iran in the first place. After all, the U.S. has provided myriad forms of assistance to Ukraine, helping it kill thousands of Russians. (Washington did the same to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.) America’s intelligence backing is extensive. The U.S. military helped plan Ukrainian operations. Unnamed Washington officials have taken credit for sinking the Russian flagship of the Black Sea Fleet and killing Russian generals. Even Trump admitted that America had been essentially doing for Kiev what Russia is now accused of doing for Tehran. Greater U.S. assistance for Ukraine would only spur increased Russian support for Iran.

As for Beijing, Washington is preparing to kill thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of Chinese in the event of a conflict over Taiwan. Senior U.S. officials openly talk about the possibility of war and justify almost any expenditure even vaguely labeled “national security” if it could put China at a disadvantage. Beijing’s leaders might be paranoid about U.S. plans, but they know, as Henry Kissinger once observed, that even paranoiacs have enemies.

Would Xi Jinping, China’s leader, nevertheless back down if confronted? Perhaps, but he appears to believe that Beijing has the advantage over the Trump administration. Although China would not go to war on Iran’s behalf, it appears ready to dare a weakened president to strike another economic blow as much against itself as against China. Sanctioning Beijing would further poison an already difficult relationship, putting the president’s desired bilateral trade pact beyond reach, and likely trigger retaliation, including in the sensitive area of rare earth exports. Interdicting Chinese exports to or imports from Iran would risk a direct confrontation with Beijing.

Publicizing Beijing’s support for the Islamic Republic would have minimal impact. The issue matters little to most of the world. Europe is far more concerned about indirect Chinese support for Russia. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the other Middle Eastern nations are already well aware of Beijing’s continuing relationship with Iran.

A far better response to Russian and Chinese involvement in the Iran war would be to simply end the conflict. Effectively turning U.S. foreign policy over to the Israeli government—which views Iran as a chief adversary—violated the president’s responsibility to America and Americans. Attacking Tehran was a mistake both obvious and disastrous. Acting without first building support among allied states was foolish. Assuming a quick and easy victory was reckless. Waging war without a coherent strategy was military malpractice. Continuing the war encourages foreign adversaries to make potentially deadly mischief.

More generally, U.S. officials should eschew foreign wars which lack any essential purpose, and especially reject utopian regime change proposals. After scrapping the Iran nuclear deal in his first term, Trump has failed to sustain any serious effort at negotiations. Last year’s attack damaged Iran’s nuclear program but reinforced the case for the regime to develop nuclear weapons. This year Trump ignored Tehran’s willingness to make serious concessions and instead sought its unconditional surrender, which even his top advisers dismissed as extremely unlikely. Incredibly, the war is looking more foolish than President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, failing to achieve any of its critical objectives, though it has been much less costly in terms of American lives lost.

Forbearance in matters of war and peace would reduce opportunities for Moscow and Beijing, as well as any other discontented adversaries, to undermine U.S. interests and cause Americans harm. Washington would also be better able to rally international support on its behalf. For the Trump administration to complain about foreign interference in America’s war of choice is manifestly absurd. No country interferes in the affairs of other nations more often. No government is more presumptuous in its demands. No nation more frequently uses force against other states.

Russian and Chinese intervention in the Iran war is unfortunate—Americans likely have died and certainly have been injured as a result. Yet the administration shares responsibility for the resulting harm. While Bowman and McMillan contend that Russia’s aid to Iran was “startling,” Moscow’s intervention was inevitable once an appropriate vehicle for retaliation against the U.S. appeared. Washington set a powerful precedent, doing everything that Russia has done, and much more. China’s role is no more surprising.

American policymakers long have viewed themselves as virtuous vestal virgins, entitled, even required, to purify the terrible world around them. Alas, no one else views the solons of Washington in such terms, and for good reason: They have repeatedly failed, often disastrously. It is time for the administration to stop doing needless harm to others by truly putting America first.

The measure’s proponents estimate total revenue of about $100 billion, but a Hoover Institution study that attempted to incorporate tax-avoidant behavioral responses reached a substantially lower estimate—about $40 billion in gross wealth-tax revenue over five years. The authors calculated that six billionaires who left California between the initiative’s filing and the January 1 residency cutoff removed $536 billion, or nearly 30 percent of the potential billionaire wealth tax base. After including their estimate of future state income-tax revenue lost when billionaires leave California, the researchers put the measure’s net present fiscal value at negative $24.7 billion.

That people respond to incentives ought not to be controversial. Economists Enrico Moretti and Daniel Wilson, for example, studied the movement of highly productive scientists among American states and found large effects from differences in personal and corporate taxes. Taxes formed only one part of the location decision. California used to attract scientists despite its relatively high taxes, because the state housed several innovation clusters. Even so, enough scientists and firms responded to tax differences for state policy to affect where innovation took place.

Interjurisdictional competition therefore places some discipline on governments’ appetites. People and businesses can move. A federal wealth tax would reduce that form of competition. In March 2026, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna introduced legislation imposing a 5 percent annual wealth tax on American billionaires. Moving from California to Texas would provide no escape from a federal tax. An American founder could still move abroad, reorganize investments internationally, or choose another country for future ventures.

That is why the French economist Gabriel Zucman has proposed a globally coordinated minimum tax equal to 2 percent of billionaire wealth. His plan includes stronger exit taxes and a mechanism under which another jurisdiction could collect the tax when the billionaire’s home country declines to do so. One of the explicitly stated goals of Zucman’s proposal is to prevent competition among countries from driving taxes downward. Supporters of the measure rightly see global tax coordination as a way to protect revenue collection and make taxation more progressive.

Conversely, opponents of the measure argue that a global tax on wealth would have a chilling effect on innovation and, consequently, growth and prosperity. How? In a recent post on his Substack, the Hoover Institution economist John H. Cochrane details how a wealth tax profoundly distorts economic incentives and chills innovation. The core mechanism operates through effective rates of return. Because the tax is charged on overall assets rather than just profits, an annual 5 percent wealth tax wipes out half of what investors would typically earn from a standard 10 percent stock market return—acting just like a massive 50 percent tax on their income. When layered over existing corporate levies, capital gains taxes, income taxes, and baseline inflation, the cumulative burden of the wealth tax pushes real after-tax returns into negative territory.

By eliminating the financial upside of venture creation, Cochrane argues, the policy disrupts the risk-reward calculus for entrepreneurs and would-be founders. Major technological breakthroughs require massive commitments of personal effort, risk tolerance, and reinvestment of capital. If the potential surplus from betting heavily on groundbreaking ideas is stripped away, innovators will opt for retirement or low-risk, small-scale enterprises over transformative ventures. Furthermore, because cutting-edge firms rely on reinvested equity rather than idle cash, seizing capital drains the funding streams needed to developgrow new technologies, ultimately shifting dynamic economies toward low-growth, low-risk stagnation.

Innovation matters. As the evolutionary psychologist William von Hippel argued in his 2018 book The Social Leap, humans survive through cooperation, but they flourish through innovation. Cooperation allows people to protect one another, divide labor, share knowledge, and solve problems collectively. It is one of the foundations of civilization. But cooperation by itself does not necessarily produce better tools, medicines, machines, or methods of production. Those improvements depend on innovation.

Innovation is also much rarer than cooperation. Most people respond to problems by drawing on existing knowledge or asking others for help. A small minority are unusually inclined to search for new technical solutions. Yet that minority can have an enormous effect because innovations are not consumed by their creators alone. Once someone invents a better engine, vaccine, crop variety, computer chip, or manufacturing process, millions of other people can copy, improve, produce, and use it. Innovation raises productivity, reduces the cost of satisfying human needs, and creates possibilities that did not exist previously.

The relevant question, therefore, is what political arrangements allow innovation to take place. History suggests that one answer is the availability of alternatives.

In his 2019 book The Wealth Explosion: The Nature and Origins of Modernity, the British economic historian Stephen Davies notes that innovation is ancient. Many earlier civilizations went through periods of relatively rapid technological, commercial, and intellectual advance. During these episodes of economic efflorescence, societies experienced something resembling modern growth for a time. The advances eventually stopped, and the old economic pattern of Malthusian stagnation returned.

The central historical puzzle, therefore, is the emergence of “sustained innovation,” which led to what economic historian Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Enrichment, marked by a 3,000 percent increase in inflation-adjusted per capita incomes since 1800. Why, Davies asks, has innovation continued in Europe—before spreading to other parts of the world—long enough to become a permanent process rather than another temporary burst of creativity?

Davies starts by describing the institutions of traditional societies. People living close to subsistence placed a high value on security. Communities developed rules that protected people against sudden economic change. Guilds controlled entry into trades, training, and technology. Other rules restricted prices, arbitrage, and access to important resources. These arrangements made sense in societies where failure could mean starvation and death. They also made experimentation harder. Innovation creates winners and losers, especially in the short run, and traditional societies had strong reasons to protect established ways of doing things.

Rulers had different reasons to fear innovation. Innovation could produce more wealth for rulers to tax, but it could also change the distribution of wealth and power within society. New technologies could undermine established industries. New businesses could create new elites. New ideas could weaken religious or political authority. Davies, therefore, describes traditional ruling elites as ambivalent toward innovation and frequently willing to suppress it. The Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Joel Mokyr captures the problem in one sentence: “Every act of major technological innovation, then, is an act of rebellion not just against conventional wisdom but against existing practices and vested interests and thus will normally lead to some kind of resistance.”

Song-era China shows how far innovation could proceed before modernity. By around 1200, China possessed sophisticated financial institutions, large firms, extensive markets, enormous commercial cities, and substantial movement of labor from agriculture into manufacturing. Davies describes Song China as the closest premodern example of a breakthrough toward modernity. Many ingredients associated with modern growth were therefore present centuries before the Industrial Revolution in Europe.

The early Ming emperors, in contrast, sought greater central control and tried to reverse important developments associated with the Song period. China remained commercially active and continued to grow in population and total output. Rapid and systematic technological advance, however, became much weaker. Davies describes the Ming settlement as a deliberate effort to create a more stable and less innovative society. Crucially, China’s political unity gave the central government a wide area over which to apply that policy.

Europe developed differently after the military changes of the 15^th through the 17^th centuries. Gunpowder, firearms, artillery, new fortifications, naval technology, and new military organizations changed warfare across Eurasia. Large empires emerged across much of the Old World, while Europe remained divided among several states with significant military power.

Davies regards the European outcome as largely accidental. In fact, the Habsburgs, fueled by gold and silver from the New World, came close to establishing a pan-European empire in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Their failure, thanks in part to the French, Dutch, English, and Ottoman pushback, resulted in the Westphalian settlement of 1648. This geopolitical system was characterized by several large and powerful competing states, and coalitions repeatedly formed to contain powers that came close to dominating Europe.

Political division changed the incentives facing rulers. A state that fell behind militarily could lose territory, revenue, independence, or even its ruling dynasty. Governments therefore had strong reasons to adopt useful military innovations developed elsewhere. Davies argues that European rulers eventually reached a position in which suppressing innovation carried the risk of losing out to more innovative rivals. A successful innovation in one country created pressure on others to copy or improve it. Competition turned technological backwardness into a direct threat to political survival.

The same pressure gradually affected economic policy. Armies and navies required money. Raising money required taxes. A large tax base required productive farms, workshops, merchants, financiers, and eventually industries. European rulers therefore competed for wealth as well as military power. A government that suppressed useful economic or scientific advances risked weakening itself relative to governments that permitted them. Europe’s political division prevented any ruler from applying a policy of suppression across the continent.

Political division also protected intellectual diversity. The Reformation split Europe along religious as well as political lines. Individual states still persecuted dissenters, but Europe as a whole contained competing churches, governments, universities, and printers, and the Republic of Letters carried ideas across borders. An idea suppressed in one place could survive in another, and a ruler who suppressed a useful one could watch it enrich a neighbor.

Immigration helped, for disfavored philosophers, scientists, merchants, and artisans could find more welcoming ground elsewhere. René Descartes left France for the Dutch Republic in 1628, then Sweden in 1649. Thomas Hobbes fled England for France in 1640. John Locke crossed to Holland in 1683. Leonhard Euler left Switzerland for Russia in 1727, Prussia in 1741, and Russia again in 1766. Denis Papin and Abraham de Moivre fled France for England. Voltaire went to England, then Prussia, then Geneva, finally settling in France near the Swiss border so he could bolt either way.

Markets mattered. Entrepreneurship mattered. Science, energy, institutions, immigration, and changing ideas mattered. Europe had experienced innovation before, as had China, the Islamic world, and other civilizations. Europe’s unusual achievement was sustained innovation. Political competition helped prevent successful experiments from being extinguished everywhere at once. Over time, innovation became cumulative, producing sustained growth in productivity and eventually transforming material life.

The United States reproduces part of this mechanism through federalism. Elon Musk moved his residence from California to Texas in 2020. Tesla moved its headquarters to Texas, and Musk later moved the headquarters of SpaceX and X from California to Texas. SpaceX changed its state of incorporation from Delaware to Texas. Peter Thiel has explored a more radical version of the same idea by supporting the Seasteading Institute, which sought to create new communities at sea. Singaporean entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan has pursued a related idea through the Network State and his Network School. The latter operated in Forest City, Malaysia, until Malaysian authorities revoked its business license in July 2026. Within hours, Srinivasan signed an agreement to establish a new campus in Kazakhstan.

The common feature of these activities is the search for alternatives. The above entrepreneurs, and others besides them, seek jurisdictions in which governments offer different rules for investment, technology, corporate organization, or community life. Davies’ history suggests that the availability of alternatives matters even for people who never move. Governments behave differently, which is to say “better,” when entrepreneurs, scientists, firms, and capital have somewhere else to go. As such, Davies has warned specifically that a movement toward a single global system of rules could weaken the competition that helps sustain innovation.

Innovation will always disturb established arrangements because successful innovation changes how people live, work, produce, and organize society. That is precisely why innovators need somewhere else to go. A government that taxes too heavily, regulates too aggressively, or protects existing interests too zealously should have to reckon with the possibility that people, capital, and companies will leave. Political competition does not guarantee good policy, but it makes bad policy more costly. A national wealth tax would weaken that discipline. A global wealth tax would come closer to eliminating it. The history of sustained innovation suggests that this is exactly the wrong direction. Prosperity has flourished where power was divided, experiments could escape suppression, and failure in one jurisdiction did not mean failure everywhere. The future of innovation depends on preserving those exits, not closing them.

Markets FTW

Every now and then, a piece of news comes along that makes all the daily political nonsense seem rather small. On August 19, Moderna and Merck announced that their experimental personalized treatment had produced positive results in a large Phase 3 trial against melanoma, one of the deadliest forms of skin cancer. It was the first positive Phase 3 result for a personalized treatment of this kind and for an mRNA-based cancer treatment. That is a big deal.

The treatment, called intismeran autogene, uses messenger RNA, the same technology Moderna made famous with its COVID vaccine, but for a different purpose. After a patient’s tumor is removed, scientists analyze it to find features that distinguish the cancer cells from healthy ones. Moderna then makes a treatment specifically for that patient, using mRNA to tell the immune system what to recognize and attack. It is given with Merck’s Keytruda, an existing cancer drug that helps the immune system fight tumors. In other words, this is not an off-the-shelf cancer vaccine. It is a cancer treatment made for you.

The Phase 3 trial included 1,137 patients whose melanoma had been surgically removed. The key question was whether adding Moderna’s personalized treatment to Keytruda could keep the cancer from coming back or spreading elsewhere in the body. Patients who received the combination did significantly better on both measures than those who received Keytruda alone. Moderna and Merck have not yet released the full numbers, so it is too early to know exactly how large the benefit was. But the earlier Phase 2 trial was encouraging: After five years, patients receiving the combination had a 49 percent lower risk of recurrence or death and a 59 percent lower risk of the cancer spreading elsewhere or causing death.

The melanoma trial is part of INTerpath, Moderna and Merck’s broader program testing the same personalized treatment, usually with Keytruda, against several cancers. Nine Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials are under way in melanoma, lung, bladder, and kidney cancers, while earlier-stage studies are exploring pancreatic and stomach cancers. The companies are betting that the approach can work well beyond melanoma.

The larger significance of this breakthrough is that cancer treatment may be moving further away from the search for a single cure and toward therapies tailored to particular cancers and particular patients. That could be especially valuable after surgery, when doctors are trying to eliminate tiny amounts of cancer left behind before the disease returns or spreads. Melanoma is a promising place to test the idea because the cancer often responds well to treatments that enlist the immune system. Roche and BioNTech have a rival program built on the same broad idea, with Phase 2 studies under way in colon and pancreatic cancers after surgery. Researchers are also working to choose better targets, cut the time needed to make each treatment, and find better combinations with other cancer therapies.

None of that means cancer has been cured. We still do not know whether patients in the Phase 3 melanoma trial will ultimately live longer, regulatory approval is not guaranteed, and making a different treatment for every patient faces obvious manufacturing and cost challenges. But personalized cancer treatment has now passed a major late-stage test. A therapy designed around one patient’s tumor helped keep cancer from returning or spreading when added to an existing drug. Something that would have sounded like science fiction not very long ago is moving closer to medical reality. Markets FTW, indeed.

Chart of the Week

On August 17, Jacobin, the socialist magazine, published an article titled “Capitalism Is Killing Summer.” According to the author, “Wrecking the weather and robbing us of beautiful spaces aren’t the only ways that capitalists deprive us of the full fruits of summer. American-style capitalism and its insane work culture also robs [sic] us of the time to enjoy summer’s pleasures.” Is there anything capitalism can’t do? Joking aside, Jacobin gets the historical trend almost exactly backward.

Consider the chart below. It is based on estimates by the Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Robert Fogel (1926–2013) and reproduced by the University of Oxford’s Our World in Data lab. To understand it, start with the green area: discretionary time. Fogel defined that as the hours in a lifetime left over after the basic biological necessities of sleeping, eating, and personal hygiene. In other words, these are the hours over which we have some meaningful choice. Those discretionary hours rose from about 225,900 in 1880 to 298,500 in 1995, largely because people started living longer. Fogel projected those hours to reach 321,900 by 2040.

But what happened within those discretionary hours is even more striking. In 1880, the typical American devoted about 182,100 lifetime hours to work and had only 43,800 hours left for leisure. Work therefore consumed more than 80 percent of all discretionary time. By 1995, lifetime work had fallen to 122,400 hours, while leisure had risen to 176,100 hours. For the first time, leisure accounted for the majority, about 59 percent, of discretionary life. Fogel projected that by 2040 work would fall to 75,900 hours, while leisure would rise to 246,000 hours, or more than three-quarters of all discretionary time.

Think about what those numbers mean. Compared with 1880, Americans by 1995 enjoyed roughly four times as many lifetime leisure hours while working about one-third fewer hours. Fogel attributed much of that transformation to technological progress: Producing the food, clothing, housing, and other necessities of life came to require far fewer hours of human labor.

The 2040 numbers are projections and should be treated as such. Nor did markets act alone. Labor laws, changing social norms, education, and other developments affected working time. But the direction of travel is difficult to dispute. Our World in Data finds that annual working hours fell dramatically across the countries that industrialized earliest, with workers in many of them going from more than 3,000 hours per year in the late 19^th century to roughly half that amount today.

So, capitalism did not merely make people richer in money. By raising productivity and extending life, the modern economy helped make people richer in time. The scarce commodity that Jacobin says capitalism is stealing from us is, historically speaking, one of the things economic progress has given us in superabundance.

Hegseth justified higher defense spending by inflating the threats America faces and presenting worst-case scenarios. That same week, the House passed the fiscal 2027 National Defense Authorization Act as well as the Trump administration’s latest reconciliation bill.

Contrary to Hegseth’s testimony, however, this threat-inflation and oversized defense budget only makes America weaker.

For starters, it fails to align spending to America’s strategic goals. Lawmakers claim that with all the threats the U.S. is up against, it cannot risk cutting any weapons or defense programs. This budget does not even cut systems like the B‑1B bomber, an aircraft with no stealth capabilities and a higher operational cost than the B‑52, or the Minuteman III, a nuclear missile that is decades old and increases crisis instability between nations on account of its first-strike vulnerability. This keeps the U.S. wasting money on weapons that don not strengthen the nation’s security.

On top of that, policymakers want to add even more unneeded weapons to America’s arsenal. The Pentagon seeks to build battleships, a naval vessel disused since World War II, and is pushing for development of a national missile defense that many nuclear experts deem both wasteful and dangerous, as it would incentivize America’s adversaries to launch a surprise attack in order to have a better chance at their missiles getting through. Some of these billions put toward unneeded weapons could instead be used for useful military investments, like munitions production.

The Trump administration waves off the long-term costs — namely, the interest that comes from federal borrowing. This makes it seem like an increased defense budget doesn’t affect the average American, allowing policymakers to avoid increasing taxes or making immediate cuts to social services. But this just punts the costs to future generations. The U.S. already borrowed money to pay for America’s Global War on Terror and the Iraq War; keeping the tab running will only add to this deferred cost, eventually forcing citizens to choose between massive cuts to social programs and tax hikes or cutting defense programs to help pay it off.

President Trump’s colossal defense budget will only degrade the nation’s economic strength and wellbeing. Defense spending is the most economically wasteful of all federal spending. Advocates for higher defense spending argue that the U.S. sets aside only a small percentage of its GDP to pay for defense, making more spending possible. But this framing leaves out the fact that these billions of dollars were not needed in the first place and could have been saved for higher priorities.

So no, Hegseth and Trump’s high defense budget will not strengthen the U.S. Quite the opposite— it will weaken Americans’ economic security, weaken America’s economic power, and weaken the country’s national security. Instead, the Trump administration and Congress should cut the defense budget, and with it, America’s wars and overseas commitments.

This would avoid costly conflicts and commitments, keep the U.S. secure and strengthen its economic power. And economic strength is important for a country’s security. In the event of a conflict, money is needed to build weapons, and decent roads and railways are required to transport military equipment and supplies across the country. Rather than waste money on unnecessary programs, the U.S. government must get America’s house in order and serve the people.

Greer is basically right on the issue of the tariffs’ direct effects. The problem for both America’s chief trade negotiator and the US economy is that the new levies raise other issues that are much more important – and troubling.

But first, the tale of the tape. According to Michigan State University supply chain whiz Jason Miller’s analysis US International Trade Commission data, Canadian imports hit by the new duties totaled $20.2 billion in 2025 – just 5.3% of the $382 billion in goods the US imported from Canada last year and a little under 0.6% of all goods imports over the same period.

The tariffs omit most of the essential things that Canada supplies in large volumes: energy, fertilizer, minerals, seafood, and the goods – metals, automotive, wood, and more – already facing “national security” duties. And more than third of the US tariff list is just for show: Of the 554 items, 66 saw no Canadian imports at all last year, while another 136 were less than $1 million each. On a static basis, the 50% tariffs would yield about $10 billion in additional tariff revenue, which is around 3% of current collections. None of this will move the macroeconomic needle.

Some discrete pain will nevertheless occur, especially where Canada is a major source of imports. In 2025, for example, Canada supplied 73% of imported whiskey (other than Irish or Scotch), worth $221.5 million. Targeted Canadian plywood and veneer panels were more than 90% of US imports last year, and several other construction materials also had significant import shares. Newly tariffed dairy products, including high-demand whey proteins, were 45% to 95% of imports. Adding a 50% duty on top of existing tariffs will mean real pain for American buyers, maybe prohibitively so. Homebuilders, automakers and other US industries also lose out because the now-scuttled deal would have cut American lumber, steel, and aluminum tariffs that have significantly increased production costs.

Pain certainly lands on the Canadian side, too. Because most products the US targeted have substantial imported alternatives, Americans may switch away from Canadian items (albeit over time and at a cost). Moreover, as Bloomberg News reports, US tariffs disproportionately hit smaller companies in numerous industries, complicating mitigation efforts.

The real action, however, lies beyond the tariffs’ direct economic effects.

First, the spat injects significant new uncertainty into both the trillion-dollar bilateral relationship and the broader global economy. Escalation – the most common trade war fallout – is a real risk, with Prime Minister Mark Carney announcing dollar-for-dollar retaliation beginning Sept. 8 and President Donald Trump responding with a threat to hike duties on Canadian automotive goods to 50% on Jan. 1.

Cooler heads can still prevail, but both the Canadian and US sides see little chance for a quick resolution. And politics will discourage a ceasefire: The now-seething Trump has staked his reputation on countries backing down from a trade fight, but polls in Canada consistently show that fighting Washington is a political winner. It’s a tinderbox, with vocal match-throwers on each side of the border.

The US-Mexico-Canada Agreement also faces new risks. Trump’s “emergency” global tariffs and their replacements importantly exempted USMCA-compliant goods. This not only removed more than 80% of all Canadian imports from the new duties’ coverage but also was a strong indicator of the agreement’s durability. The Section 338 proclamations, on the other hand, feature no such carveout – a distressing sign of where things might be headed.

Trump’s future use of Section 338 – a vague, Depression-era statute with no precedent or implementing regulations – is the biggest risk of all. The law allows the president to impose tariffs of up to 50% on imports from any country he says “discriminated” against US commerce. It requires no investigation, injury finding, or published determination, and – as Trump just showed – the undefined “discrimination” can mean almost anything. A legal challenge to the new Canada tariffs is likely, and many scholars think the White House will lose. But litigation takes time, and a law that’s neutered in two years is a law that works for two years. Markets and trading partners must now wonder who’s next.

Finally, the conflagration is important for political and geopolitical reasons. The US midterm elections are rapidly approaching, and Trump’s chaotic tariffs, which affordability-obsessed Americans overwhelmingly dislike, are a key point of contention. Although the new Canada tariffs are small, the headlines certainly aren’t, and they land right as Trump is promising to lower beef prices by cutting tariffs.

The administration will also take a hit on the international stage. The Canada deal’s collapse will accelerate plans by nation to remove the United States from the center of the global trading system and, as the Washington Post reported, will reinforce negotiators’ view of the US as a bad-faith bargainer whose market isn’t worth the loss of sovereignty needed to enter it. What point is a deal when one party refuses to uphold the terms?

None of this means the US-Canada tariffs are a full-blown crisis – yet. A deal could arrive in the coming weeks, and things could return to almost normal. In the meantime, uncertainty – and the risk of a spiraling conflict that cripples one the world’s most integrated multinational supply chains – will weigh on both economies. Just as importantly, resolving this conflict won’t fix its underlying cause, which is not a capricious, tariff-loving president but US trade laws that let him wreak economic havoc without congressional oversight. Bills to repeal Section 338 are sitting dormant in the House and the Senate. Until they advance, we’ll await the next country found guilty of “discrimination” by a president who gets to define the word.

Describe that offer as “an algorithm using your purchase history to estimate your willingness to pay,” though, and some might get more nervous. Explain it instead as your friends paying more for coffee because of “surveillance pricing,” and many politicians would get a bee in their bonnet.

Algorithmic “personalized pricing” is producing something of a moral panic right now in the US. Last week the Federal Trade Commission proposed warning businesses that undisclosed use of personal data to set prices may fall under deceptive practices. The FTC’s chairman, Andrew Ferguson, said shoppers expect listed prices to be the same for everybody, not attuned to retailers’ estimates of what each will pay.

Really? Here in Britain, retailers, train operators, budget airlines, pub groups and ride-hailing apps discriminate using price between customers every day, just as companies do in the States. Think railcards for the young and the old, advance fares that punish last-minute bookers, Clubcard and Nectar offers tailored to shopping history and loyalty penalties in telecoms.

Flight prices, in particular, vary according to when you buy and how long your trip is, as companies predict whether you’re a leisure or business traveller, the latter being less price sensitive. Algorithms and AI didn’t invent price discrimination, in other words. Better data has just enabled more sophisticated, precise and cheaper profiling of individual customers in more industries.

It’s this shift from categories of people to individuals fueling distaste. New York already requires the magnificently ominous warning: “THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.” Its legislature recently voted to ban surveillance pricing, while preserving specified discounts. Maryland has enacted a law barring large grocers and delivery services from using personalised data to raise food prices.

Britain has so far been refreshingly reluctant to leap to regulation, although there have been tremors in parliament. In 2016, Lord Whitty called it a “very dark art”. In 2018 Greg Clark, then business secretary, commissioned research into the prevalence and consumer effects of personalised pricing, warning companies against abusing customer data. A separate Competition and Markets Authority study that year found little evidence of overt personalised prices.

Its 2021 assessment highlighted the risks posed by opaque pricing, weak competition and the exploitation of inert customers, but admitted that personalised pricing could benefit customers too. The Bank of England says it is now widely adopted across all sectors, in the form of online accounts and loyalty cards.

So far then, we’ve been admirably in line with economic analysis. The popular perception is to see personalised pricing as akin to a monopolist charging everyone the maximum they are willing to pay, so hoovering up consumer surplus to boost company profits. But as Jidong Zhou, an economist at Yale, explains, that scenario assumes that there’s no meaningful competition and companies can perfectly price discriminate. If either assumption buckles, the economic impact of moving from uniform to personalised pricing becomes messier.

Where serving an extra customer costs little for a software platform, gym or online newspaper, personalised prices spread fixed costs across more customers, with discounts widening access. In a world where many firms have access to personalised data, Zhou’s published paper with Andrew Rhodes shows that companies would try to poach others’ customers, resulting in competitive personalised discounting. Information telling one business you are loyal — and ripe for exploitation — alerts another to the discounts needed to win you over.

Personalised pricing, then, is not inherently “good” or “bad.” Its precise impact in any context depends on an industry’s cost structure and competitive dynamics. As an example of this messy reality, Jean-Pierre Dubé and Sanjog Misra used randomised pricing experiments at ZipRecruiter and found that personalisation would raise profits by another 19 per cent over a uniform price and reduce total customer surplus. Yet over 60 per cent of customers would benefit. In many sectors, these price-sensitive customers may well be poorer.

What, then, would a prohibition on personalised pricing mean in practice? Not just a ban on companies squeezing you for more. Applied consistently, it also means no discount to someone with a product in their basket which they passed on, no electronic haggling and fewer ways for new companies to muscle in by undercutting big incumbent players on price.

And, if applied in the more populist way of banning personalised prices from being higher, businesses would often look to achieve the same economic outcome within the law. That might mean raising basic prices and offering more targeted discounts to price-sensitive customers. This would get them to the same place, albeit marketed very differently.

As this sort of pricing proliferates, will British equanimity survive the example of America’s panic? It’s easy to foresee how “personalised discount helps challenger poach customers” could be drowned out by future anecdotes about firms using “AI to charge grieving families more for flowers” here.

It’s also easy to imagine a Labour government promising to lower living costs trying to prove its vigilance on this misunderstood issue. Just last year, then the competition minister Justin Madders acknowledged the Commons business and trade select committee’s “sense that something is not always right” with personalised pricing, before adding: “I am not sure we have the evidence at the moment to support that assertion.”

Ministers should dwell on that distinction. A pricing practice feeling icky warrants investigation, not an assumption of consumer harm. Sometimes a company that knows more about you extracts more. Sometimes it offers a price to entice. And if this all raises profits? That’s precisely the signal for competitors to enter and compete.

Cannabis use has increased as more states have legalized it for adults. That should surprise no one. When a widely used substance moves from an illicit market to a legal one, some who previously abstained will try it, some occasional users will use it more often and people will be more willing to admit they use it.

Yet these recent patterns don’t tell us what cannabis use will look like going forward.

History should make us cautious about extrapolating from the early years of legalization. When Americans repealed Prohibition in 1933, alcohol consumption did not immediately settle into the pattern we recognize today. Consumption rose substantially over the following decades, eventually peaked around 1981 and then declined for more than a decade. Today, the share of Americans who report drinking alcohol is at its lowest level since Gallup began tracking it in 1939.

Along the way, Americans learned to live with legal alcohol. Knowledge, customs, and social norms evolved around its responsible use. We learned to distinguish drinking from drunkenness. We came to strongly disapprove of drinking and driving and of drinking on the job. People learned to recognize their own limits, and friends and families learned to recognize when someone’s drinking was becoming a problem.

None of those norms required us to conclude that, because alcohol can cause addiction, disease, accidents and death, we should prohibit adults from drinking it.

Cannabis may be undergoing a similar period of adjustment.

As cannabis use becomes normalized, consumers can learn more about dosing, potency, frequency, impairment and their individual responses to the drug. Social norms around responsible use can develop as people gain experience with a substance that, for most of the past century, public policy treated simply as something no one should use.

There is already some evidence supporting that possibility.

Canada legalized cannabis nationwide in 2018, providing researchers with an unusually useful natural experiment. A prospective study followed 1,428 Ontario adults from immediately before legalization through five years afterward. Overall, cannabis use frequency increased slightly, yet measures of cannabis misuse decreased slightly. Even more interesting, people who used cannabis frequently before legalization showed the largest decreases in both cannabis use and misuse.

That doesn’t prove legalization caused those reductions. The researchers themselves caution that factors such as people aging out of problematic patterns of use may partly explain the findings. But the Canadian experience should at least caution us against assuming that an initial increase in use inevitably leads to ever-increasing problematic use.

Cannabis is not harmless. Frequent use can be problematic for some people. High-potency products warrant particular attention, as do the risks to adolescents and to people predisposed to psychotic disorders. We should educate people honestly about those risks and discourage them from driving or operating dangerous machinery while impaired by cannabis.

But acknowledging those risks does not justify banning adults from using cannabis.

Prohibition carries risks of its own. It pushes consumers toward illicit markets, where products may have uncertain potency and contents. It exposes otherwise peaceful people to arrest and criminal penalties. And by reducing an enormously complicated subject to “don’t use drugs,” prohibition can impede the development of the knowledge and social norms that help people make safer choices.

We should judge legalization against the real-world alternative of prohibition, with its illicit markets, criminal penalties and unreliable product information.

The latest findings about cannabis use should inform consumers, physicians and policymakers. Researchers should continue monitoring cannabis use patterns and identify which patterns of use and which products carry the greatest risks. Public health officials can provide adults with accurate information without exaggerating risks in hopes of frightening them away from using cannabis. Laws should prohibit sales to minors and driving while impaired.

Adults routinely make choices that involve risk. Some drink alcohol, some smoke tobacco and some participate in dangerous sports. Respecting their autonomy doesn’t require pretending those choices are harmless. It requires providing them with good information and allowing them to weigh the risks and benefits for themselves.

We should treat cannabis the same way.

A free society should be capable of learning to live with potentially risky substances without the government banning them.

In recent years, self-styled socialists or ultra-progressive candidates have notched multiple high-profile election victories. Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, is of course the most prominent. He’s an official member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and since taking office, he has pushed for government-owned grocery stores, universal government-funded child care, government-funded public transit and a favorite failed policy of New York City: rent control.

Katie Wilson, now the mayor of Seattle, campaigned on government-owned housing, aggressive new taxation policies and for “much more land and wealth to be owned and stewarded by communities instead of corporations.” If she looked, I think she’d find that corporations are collections of people, just like communities.

Melat Kiros, a DSA-backed socialist, beat incumbent U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette in the Democratic primary for Colorado’s 1st Congressional District. Donavan McKinney, also DSA-supported, unseated congressional incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar in the Democratic primary. Ultra-progressive Peggy Flanagan defeated moderate Rep. Angie Craig in Minnesota’s Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. And three New York candidates endorsed by Mamdani triumphed over establishment Democrats in New York primaries.

And so on, and so forth.

A recent poll by CNBC found that “46 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 now hold either a ‘favorable’ or a ‘very favorable’ view of Democratic Socialism.” Research by the Cato Institute (where I’m a legal fellow) produced similar findings: Gen Z is more supportive of socialism (53%) than capitalism (45%). The Washington Post reported that “three in four Democrats say they would be open to supporting a democratic socialist for president.”

But socialism’s success in Arizona is mixed.

In May, Tempe voters elected Bobby Nichols, a Democratic Socialist, to City Council, making him the first openly socialist candidate elected in Arizona. Like many socialists, Nichols has seemingly never worked for a private, for-profit employer (in fairness, he only recently graduated from Golden Gate University School of Law). But equipped with endorsements from Mamdani and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, he proudly announced that he “was elected as a Democratic Socialist [and] will govern as a Democratic Socialist.”

Down in Tucson, Miranda Schubert has served on City Council since getting elected in November 2025. She’s less outspoken than Nichols about socialism, but she, like Nichols and Mamdani, is a member of the DSA. Her policy agenda mixes the sensible (“safer streets for all”) with the socialist (“housing is a human right”).

Perhaps most significantly, the state legislature is on track to welcome its first socialist member in January 2027 after 31-year-old Miranda Lopez beat incumbent state legislator Stephanie Stahl Hamilton in the July Democratic primary. Lopez has also never worked for a private, for-profit employer (she calls capitalism an “oppressive system”). But she is currently “#OpenToWork” on LinkedIn, so perhaps that will change. In the meantime, I guess it’s just other people’s taxes that will fund her socialist dreams.

So yes, socialism has had its victories in Arizona. But it’s also had its losses.

Kai Newkirk, an insurgent community organizer whose professional highlight is being “arrested over 25 times,” challenged Rep. Greg Stanton in the Democratic primary for Congressional District 4. Newkirk criticized Stanton for being a “corporate Democrat” and for supporting Israel in its war against Hamas. Newkirk also thought Stanton erred by not supporting Medicare for all and the abolition of ICE.

Stanton won, 68.1% to 31.9%.

In the state legislature, incumbent bipartisan dealmaker Alma Hernandez defeated socialism in the guise of former Tucson city councilman Roque Perez. Perez embraced a wide range of socialist-friendly policies, but he also had to run from his history of violent, sexually explicit and antisemitic social media posts.

Perhaps the best indicator of socialism’s limited foothold in Arizona is Gov. Katie Hobbs. Hobbs is a liberal, yes. She’s pro-choice; she supports the expansion of government-funded health care, and she has the endorsement of the labor unions and the teachers union (Arizona Education Association).

But she’s no socialist. Far from it. The website listing her “key accomplishments” begins with job growth, manufacturing and tax cuts. Next up is “lowering the cost of housing,” which includes “cutting red tape and lowering costs” ― hardly the language of a socialist. Third on the list is “keeping Arizona families safe and secure” by “combatting violent crime,” “cracking down on drug traffickers” and “securing the border and keeping communities safe.”

If you listen to Hobbs on the radio or local television, she usually talks about foreign direct investment in manufacturing, training for skilled jobs, tax cuts and business loans. Some of her critics complain that she can’t take full credit for these successes. But the point is that, unlike Mamdani and Wilson, Hobbs isn’t publicly fantasizing about overthrowing the proletariat and seizing the means of production. Or, more prosaically, she’s not talking about raising taxes or government-owned grocery stores.

Want further proof that Hobbs isn’t plotting the progressive revolution? She just chose former Mesa mayor John Giles as her lieutenant governor. Giles is a longtime Republican turned Independent. He’s male, white, Mormon, mild-mannered, heterosexual, married 43 years, and he has five kids and 10 grandkids ― hardly the profile of a leftist revolutionary.

While mayor of Mesa, Giles mostly crowed about the growth of Mesa’s downtown, new businesses and new restaurants in the city and expanded educational partnerships with Arizona State University and Mesa Community College. His 2024 campaign website bragged that Mesa “continually balances the budget and has no primary property tax” and “Mayor Giles has attracted new companies to Mesa and created thousands of jobs… without increasing taxes or utility rates.” This sounds a lot more like Doug Ducey than it does Karl Marx.

And despite changing his partisan affiliation, Giles insists that he largely hasn’t changed his policy preferences. He recently told KTAR radio, “I continue to identify with a lot of the principles that the Republican Party says it identifies with.” This is the person Gov. Hobbs chose as her running mate.

So is socialism on the rise in America? Yes. Definitely. But in Arizona, it has a long way to go, even within the Democratic Party. And the socialist revolution certainly isn’t going to happen in a Hobbs-Giles administration.

When we recently returned to that spot around our 10th wedding anniversary, we joked with our children that if they attended the same college, perhaps they’d meet their future spouses in that very building, too. Part of me hopes they do. It would make for a cute family story across generations.

But statistically, I know they’re far more likely to one day find love with the help of an online matchmaker. That doesn’t make me sad. I think of the couples I know who met online. They were brought together by an algorithm, yet their marriages are no less happy, and their children are no less loved because of it.

Some, however, lament this new mode of family formation. Others contend, more despairingly, that humanity is about to “scroll its way out of existence,” believing that smartphones are a drag on fertility. Are these devices replacing in-person interaction, romantic relationships and children?

Most Couples Meet Online
The available research suggests smartphones have become the most common way couples meet, which makes them one of the most powerful matchmaking technologies ever built.

According to research from Stanford University, in 2021 more than 50% of new U.S. couples met online, a category that includes meeting through digital forums, social media and dating apps.

That may actually understate the role of technology as an effective matchmaker. The Stanford data also appear to show a post-2010 rise in couples first meeting in “bars and restaurants,” but according to the researchers, that “is due entirely to couples who met online and subsequently had a first in-person meeting at a bar or restaurant.”

A 2024 survey of nearly 8,000 newly engaged couples similarly found dating apps were the single most common way they met, ahead of every offline route. That survey, from The Knot, an online wedding services platform, found couples first connected through a variety of different dating apps including Hinge, Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid, Match, Plenty of Fish and eHarmony.

Technology has long been blamed for inadvertently hindering family formation. Recent research from Northwestern University suggests the typewriter may have lowered birth rates by bringing more women into the workforce. Yet the same research also suggests the typewriter led to many “office romance” marriages — and, presumably, many children.

Today, technology continues to bring couples together. Smartphones are increasingly accused of fueling the global decline in fertility, but the evidence that smartphones reduce fertility is weaker than many think. For example, some economists point out that most of Italy’s fertility decline preceded smartphone adoption.

Studies on average marital satisfaction between couples who met online and offline show mixed results, but some research suggests slightly higher marital satisfaction among the former as well as slightly less separation and divorce. Digital introductions can lead to lasting partnerships, and divorce rates are at their lowest point in half a century. That trend is driven by highly committed married millennials, many of whom met their spouse online.

Although dating apps and other online mechanisms are the leading way couples first connect, there is still significant room for improvement. Rates of couple formation (and, consequently, fertility) declined across many countries, even though most single young adults say they are aspiring toward marriage.

Some would blame the phones. Yet, some data shows a decline in teen dating that predates smartphones, starting in the early 1990s. And research suggests the widespread adoption of online dating between 2008 and 2021 had remarkably little effect on individuals’ romantic preferences or selectivity — that is, their pickiness — to the researchers’ surprise. Nonetheless, many singles still struggle to meet the right person.

Traditional matchmakers are expensive, but AI holds the promise of dramatically lowering the cost and democratizing access to high-quality, personalized matchmaking as well as enhancing matchmaking through higher success rates.

The race is already on to harness AI to improve digital courtship. For example, the company Keeper AI bills itself as “AI-assisted matchmaking for serious, long-term relationships” and claims that with their app, “1 in 10 first dates lead to marriage.” Other new AI-powered dating platforms include Known and Overtone.

Older dating apps also aim to improve their effectiveness with AI. Earlier this year, Bumble introduced an AI-powered profile guidance feature providing users with feedback on their bios, and plans to entirely replace swiping with AI-based matchmaking later this year in select markets. Meta similarly says its AI assistant for Facebook Dating helps users optimize their profiles and highlight their best qualities to appeal to potential matches.

Smartphones and dating apps are frequently criticized for undermining traditional courtship and contributing to declining fertility. Yet if they were to suddenly disappear, couple formation would likely suffer, given that most couples now first meet online. Smartphones, perhaps paradoxically, act as vital family-formation infrastructure in the modern world.