For investors, the Greenspan era marked a debate over the Fed’s role in stabilizing financial markets and the belief that the Fed would ease conditions in response to a stock-market crash or to prevent one. This belief was dubbed the “Greenspan put.” A put option pays off when asset prices fall, so holding one lets you own risky assets without fear of downside.

Investors came to assume Greenspan’s Fed was writing them a put for free. Whenever markets cracked — the 1987 crash just weeks into Greenspan’s tenure, the hedge-fund blowup and Russian default in 1998, the demise of the dot-com bubble in 2000 — the Fed cut rates and injected liquidity into the financial system. To many investors this implied that stocks had a floor propped up by the Fed. But the Greenspan put was a myth.

The reason this matters now is artificial intelligence. The run-up in AI stocks has revived the comparison to the late 1990s, when the internet promised to remake the economy and stock valuations climbed to historic levels. In December 1996, with the boom barely underway, Greenspan wondered aloud whether “irrational exuberance” had gripped asset prices. The market kept climbing for more than three years before it broke.

I am neither predicting nor expecting an AI bubble burst. But the hypothetical still begs answering: If AI stocks are an inflated bubble that eventually bursts, should the new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, backstop the stock market as Greenspan supposedly did?

That is, will there be a “Warsh put”?

The honest answer starts with what made the Greenspan years work, and it wasn’t the put. Greenspan was considered a “maestro” who read the economy by feel and distrusted mechanical rules. Yet when economists go back and measure what his Fed actually did, monetary-policy decisions look strikingly mechanical. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond found that a simple formula — akin to what economist John Taylor proposed in 1993, nudging interest rates up when inflation or growth runs hot and down when they cool — closely tracked FOMC rate decisions under Greenspan.

Strip away the mystique and the Greenspan put merely resembles a sensible response to prevailing economic conditions, just as a simple rule designed to account for inflation and growth forecasts would predict.

When the Fed eased after a market rout, it was usually reacting to what the decline foretold. A falling market is an early sign that spending and growth are about to soften. The Fed was moving to counter that slowdown, with any lift to stocks a by-product. The clearest evidence is that the cuts often failed to protect the very investors the Greenspan put supposedly insured. The Fed cut rates in January 2001 as the dot-com market came apart, and stocks kept sliding for almost two more years.

This subtle distinction is crucial. The Greenspan-era stability Wall Street remembers likely came from the predictability of rules-based monetary policy meant to facilitate general economic stabilization, not from a desire to bail out investors. And the Greenspan put, if there ever was such a thing, ran counter to that — as the Fed’s numerous bailout missteps in the years since Greenspan have demonstrated.

So what should Warsh do as AI valuations climb? The temptation will be to play umpire and decide from the chair whether AI stocks are overpriced and then lean against them, or to hint that the Fed will catch the market if they fall. But nobody, Warsh included, can reliably call a bubble in real time. Greenspan couldn’t: His exuberance warning came three years too early. A Fed that sets out to manage asset prices is a Fed making forecasts it has no special power to make.

What investors should want from Warsh is the predictability that made Greenspan’s tenure a success — a Fed that responds to prevailing economic conditions as they show up in the data. Such a Fed will not rescue a portfolio if AI valuations correct. But it will not wreck the wider economy guessing about them. Over a full cycle, that is the better deal, even for the investors hoping for a backstop.

Warsh has said he wants a more disciplined, less improvisational Fed. The lesson of Greenspan’s record is for the Fed to do less, not more. It is to tie monetary policy to a rule — not to ask the chair to outguess the market.

What is sustaining this transformation of the workplace? The inconvenient answer for those who see government action as the source of progress is that this transformation is thanks to freely chosen, mutually beneficial decisions by employers and employees rather than any top-down mandate.

The proof is in how durable these patterns have been. Millions of workers and employers continue to choose them because they work. Roughly half of the U.S. workforce consists of employees who are capable of working remote or hybrid jobs. The most common arrangement sees workers commute two days a week and work remotely the other three. Most workers appreciate the flexibility, with a mere 6% of remote-capable workers saying they prefer to work on-site full-time.

An analysis from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that across industries, the rise in remote work and total factor productivity growth may be positively correlated, and many employees report higher productivity at home. Some research also suggests that hybrid and fully remote work may have positive effects on individual employee productivity, satisfaction, and physical health, as well as employee retention.

Historically, most improvements for workers have followed a similar pattern—wherein the market dictates employer-employee relationships, not government—despite a popular narrative to the contrary. The economist Benjamin Powell observed that legal labor standards, working-hour limits, and the introduction of a minimum wage in the United States and other wealthy countries after industrialization largely mirrored policies that employers had already implemented of their own accord. Legislation merely codified preexisting norms instead of prompting a change in industry practices.

Economist Price Fishback similarly noted, for example, “State laws limiting the number of working hours for women … passed after many employers had substantially reduced hours for women. Recent studies have found that the laws had relatively little effect.”

A century ago, the Ford Motor Company pioneered limiting the workweek to five days. Ford’s example soon inspired manufacturers across the country and around the world to adopt the Monday-to-Friday workweek. That occurred because employers discovered that productivity increased, while employees valued the extra leisure time. As the economist Ludwig von Mises put it, “The nineteenth century’s labor legislation by and large achieved nothing more than to provide ratification for changes which the interplay of market factors had brought about previously.”

Today, remote and hybrid work often benefits both employers and employees, and this work flexibility rise occurred in spite of many outdated government rules that hinder such arrangements. These rules are in desperate need of reform. For example, various federal tax rules discriminate against remote work arrangements, while differing state rules can subject remote workers to double taxation, and occupational licensing rules limit workers’ options to move between states. If anything, the government has stood in the way of the great workplace transformation toward remote and hybrid work.

Calls to legally mandate remote or hybrid work are a misguided attempt to give the government credit for a shift that has already happened independently of government action. Premier Jacinta Allan of Victoria, Australia, announced that her state government will enshrine a legal right for employees, in both the private and public sectors, who can perform their job from home to do so at least two days a week. The law comes into effect in September.

The legal change will benefit few employees, as 65% of Victorians are already hybrid or remote, but it will create more bureaucratic headaches by adding unnecessary red tape for employers and employees alike. “WFH [work from home] is already happening, and there is no reason to legislate a one-size-fits-all approach,” cautioned Andrew McKellar, the chief executive of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

This represents perhaps the first example of a legal entitlement to work from home, coming long after the market has already made such arrangements widespread. “If you can do your job from home, we’ll make it your right—because we’re on your side,” said Allan. In reality, it is employers and employees exercising their freedom in the market, not political mandates, that have made the flexibility of remote and hybrid work widely available today.

At least Bush defeated his Mideast opponent: the regime of Saddam Hussein. Despite Trump’s repeated assertion that Tehran had lost and should surrender, the Islamist regime blocked global oil traffic, wrecked U.S. bases, and destroyed regional energy infrastructure. Unwilling to risk potentially devastating Iranian escalation, the president was reduced to repeatedly announcing plans to destroy civilian targets across Iran, a war crime, only to retreat and claim that he was responding to Iranian pleas. It became a comedy routine that never truly entertained and got old fast.

However, the Blunderer-in-Chief’s disastrous war has at least one silver lining: It inadvertently demonstrated the case for closing U.S. bases throughout the Middle East and bringing American forces home. Disengagement is long overdue, especially for an administration supposedly committed to America First.

Washington’s continued entanglement in the ever-unstable Mideast is a Cold War relic. The U.S. generally eschewed direct military involvement in the region until the 1970s. Then came the so-called Carter Doctrine, intended to prevent Soviet domination of the region’s oil supplies, considered vital for America and its industrialized allies. However, that world disappeared long ago. International energy supplies are far more diverse, and no country is poised to monopolize the market.

Nor is Israel a good reason for America’s continuing presence. It has long been capable of defending itself from all comers and has now become a regional superpower. Disengagement would allow Washington to protect its reputation as Jerusalem seeks Mideast hegemony, brutalizing Palestinians within and other Arabs without its borders.

As for the dictatorial Persian Gulf states—where else do so many antediluvian, absolute monarchies hold so many people in bondage?—Washington should unshoulder the burden of protecting them. The Trump administration’s 2026 National Defense Strategy rightly proposed “to empower regional allies and partners to take primary responsibility for deterring and defending against Iran and its proxies.”

Critics complain that such an approach would signal “America’s unreliability as a strategic partner.” However, Washington has spent decades defending much of the known world. Surely it is time, as Americans confront the price of endless budget prodigality, for other nations to stop offloading responsibility for their security onto the U.S. Will that be easy for the Gulfdoms, which have grown accustomed to paying others to do their nations’ hard work? No, but so what? Americans have no duty to act as bodyguards for dissolute royal families that believe toil is for others. And if the only way to rally their people to the national defense is for these governments to finally put their peoples’ interests first, so much the better.

Reducing Washington’s Mideast commitments would also diminish the tripwires for war. Most U.S. military commitments of recent years had their genesis in the Middle East and nearby regions. Washington threatened war if the Soviet Union intervened in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, fought against Shia forces in the Lebanese civil war in the early 1980s, aided Iraq in its brutal aggression against Iran throughout the 1980s, battled Somali militias in the early 1990s, intervened in both Afghanistan and Iraq in the aftermath of Al Qaeda’s 2001 attacks, launched sustained drone campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen in succeeding years, backed Saudi Arabia’s war on the latter beginning in 2015, conducted naval operations against Yemen from 2023 to 2025, and launched attacks on Iran in 2025 and 2026. The U.S. also has routinely launched more limited strikes throughout the region, such as the 2020 assassination of Iran’s Qasem Soleimani.

Reducing the habit and ease of using military force in the region would force a more serious debate in Washington over the appropriateness of intervention, especially unprovoked aggression leading to a broader war, as with Iran.

Our Middle Eastern bases have become liabilities, literal targets risking the lives of Americans and our allies. Although the Trump administration spent practically the entire Iran conflict asserting that Iran’s military had been essentially obliterated (just like the president claimed Tehran’s nuclear program had been last year), Iran did massive damage to U.S. installations, forcing the evacuation of most personnel.

According to the New York Times, Iran responded to the American-Israeli attack “by launching drones and missiles at American targets across the Middle East, hitting embassies, killing U.S. soldiers, and damaging military bases and air defense infrastructure. … The intensity of the retaliatory strikes has signaled that Iran was more prepared for the war than many in the Trump administration had anticipated, U.S. military officials say.” The Washington Post analysis is even more damning:

Equally shocking, concluded the Post, “The threat of air attacks rendered some of the U.S. bases in the region too dangerous to staff at normal levels, and commanders moved most of the personnel from these sites out of the range of Iranian fire at the start of the war, officials have said.” Many of America’s 40,000 personnel in the region were transferred to civilian hotels throughout the Gulf and to locations as far away as Europe and the U.S., resulting in “one of the largest movements of U.S. military families out of the Middle East in years.” This withdrawal was a humiliating admission that America’s armed forces were unable to protect their facilities and personnel. So much for the president claiming a glorious and victorious campaign.

Washington’s inability to protect the Gulf nations hosting these bases, and its ostentatious prioritization of Israel’s security above their own, has had significant foreign policy consequences. Explained Dalia Ghanem, a senior visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund:

This is forcing allied governments to rethink their relationship with the U.S. These consequences should have surprised no one in the Gulf, given Israel’s pernicious political influence in America generally and the Trump administration specifically, as well as its malicious role as chief advocate of the reckless and lawless assault on Iran. Although Washington’s allies are unlikely to abandon their ties with America, they may reduce their overwhelming reliance on the U.S. for their security. Reported the Guardian: “Gulf nations will seek to add security partners as they rebuild battered economies after the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran and deal with an emboldened Tehran.” They are also likely to seek more self-reliance and distance themselves from American and Israeli hostility toward Iran.

In such a world, Washington should take the initiative and begin withdrawing its military. Even before the misbegotten assault on Iran, it was essential for America to separate itself from the radical, expansionist government in Jerusalem, which is dragging the U.S. into Mideast wars and crushing Washington’s reputation. Future administrations should also transfer control over our bases to the host nations and bring forces home. The region is no longer essential for American security and certainly not worth the cost and risk of new wars.

Trump proved unable to resist Benjamin Netanyahu’s deceitful and misleading arguments for war. Trump also held wildly unrealistic expectations about the war’s likely course, blundering at almost every point of the active hostilities and the peace negotiations. The best, and perhaps only, way to avoid a disastrous reprise is to remove the U.S. military from its needlessly exposed position in the Middle East. The Iran War, though itself a disaster, has presented a golden opportunity to do so.

In our first hypothetical world, the two leading AI labs—Anthropic and OpenAI—give away 3% of their equity. That’s not nothing! Based on current figures, such a contribution could kickstart a public wealth fund of about $55 billion. Let’s then imagine that fund earns 10% a year (a big “if” but let’s run with it). Per The Economist, this AI would reach a staggering $140 billion within ten years. How much would that benefit Americans? If annual payouts were 4% — what the publication reports is a proper amount to keep the fund going and growing — Americans would have an extra $20 in their pocket.

What if we taxed the companies? The Economist also did the math on an annual tax of 0.2% on the market value of AI companies, defined broadly to include AI labs as well as chipmakers. The result? At best, a few hundred dollars a year per American.

Yes, that’s it. Of course, such a fund or tax could be structured in a way that directed a greater share of those annual payouts to individuals from communities with particularly high rates of economic insecurity. But even with some reallocation of the funds, it’s obvious that this is not the AI policy to end all AI policy. In the optimistic case, it’s only ever going to be one of many policy interventions necessary to help Americans transition to the economy of the future.

That’s why it’s essential that these policies not be debated in isolation. Let’s assume that Congress managed to pass some fund or tax, there’s a risk that, given the outsized attention to this single idea, people would feel the temptation to end the economic transition effort there—problem solved, right?

Very unlikely.

The transition ahead will involve tackling a range of more complex, entrenched issues. There’s a clear need for occupational licensing reform so that more people can earn jobs in the care economy without being forced through credentialing programs that often have no tie to public safety. There’s an urgent demand for updating retraining programs that have consistently fallen short of their potential. And, there’s a whole range of barriers that need to be lowered to help more people start and sustain families.

Back-of-the-napkin solutions will not solve any of those issues. There’s no easy way through. Recognition of this challenge will help set expectations and make sure that success is not declared prematurely.

None of this means profit sharing deserves no place in the policy conversation. A modest fund or tax could help at the margins, and a thoughtful design could steer real support toward the communities facing the deepest insecurity. Yet the appeal of these schemes lies in their simplicity, and that simplicity is the tell. The home health aide blocked by needless licensing rules, the factory operator failed by a hollow retraining program, and the young couple priced out of starting a family will not be carried through this transition by a dividend of a few hundred dollars. The upshot is plain: profit sharing can be one tool among many, and the sooner we treat it that way, the sooner we get to the harder work that actually matters.

The data have never left much question.

The answer is economic growth.

Nonetheless, many development economists have spent decades arguing that growth isn’t enough or as important as development aid.

The French report is simply a radical expression of a popular view. So, it’s worth reviewing the evidence again.

Stated plainly, every country that has gotten richer overall has also reduced poverty.

More importantly, no poor country has ever achieved decent living standards without first getting genuinely richer.

Obviously, wealth and basic human wellbeing move together, but the relationship is so reliable that it’s more like a physical law than a social-science finding.

People in poverty have little access to food, clean water, decent shelter, basic medical care and schooling. Adequate amounts do not exist in nature; they must be produced.

As an economy grows, it produces more of these things.

This enables more growth which, in turn, lifts the masses out of poverty.

Two centuries ago, roughly three-quarters of the world could not afford more than tiny living spaces, enough food to avoid malnutrition and some minimum heating capacity. Since then, the share of people in this type of poverty has fallen dramatically.

The reason is an explosion in production that began with the Industrial Revolution and has yet to stop.

Unfortunately, the belief that economic growth in poor countries benefits richer residents and bypasses the needy remains commonplace.

A large body of economic literature shows that this is nonsense. For instance, the work of World Bank economists David Dollar and Aart Kraay and others finds that when average incomes rise, the incomes of the poorest 20% of a population rise at essentially the same rate.

In other words, growth is not systematically biased against the poor.

Further, even in the worst cases where growth skews toward elites, the impact on wellbeing in poor countries is too powerful to ignore.

In a recent Substack post, development economist Lant Pritchett showed that elite-skewed growth in Ethiopia does four times more to improve basic human well-being — clean water, child survival, schooling — than uniform growth in Denmark.

Denmark has already achieved those basics.

Ethiopia has not.

As such, the most important question for poor countries is not who gains most from growth. It is whether growth happens at all. The countries that are home to most of the world’s remaining extreme poor — places like Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique, Malawi and Burundi — have not grown for decades.

Our World in Data’s Max Rosen points out that Madagascar’s GDP per capita today is roughly the same as it was in 1950.

The reason isn’t a lack of development aid.

These are among the world’s most aid-dependent economies.

The DRC has received tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid over decades and $1.3 billion in 2024 from the U.S. alone. In past years, Mozambique received as much as half of its government budget from foreign aid.

These countries have been the focus of development programs, nongovernmental organization activity, World Bank projects, bilateral donor attention and charitable intervention for generations.

Countries don’t get stuck in extreme poverty because the world has ignored them.

They get stuck because they do not produce.

And they do not produce because the institutional conditions that make production possible — secure property rights, the rule of law, open markets, protection from predatory government — are largely absent.

Countries ranking at or near the bottom of economic freedom indexes are also the poorest. Those that liberalize experience across-the-board income increases.

Economist Vincent Geloso’s research finds that economic freedom is one of the strongest predictors of who escapes persistent poverty and who stays trapped.

Colin Doran and Thomas Stratmann have found much the same.

The mechanism is straightforward: Property rights give people an incentive to produce. Lower regulatory barriers let businesses form and labor move toward opportunity. Freedom from predatory government encourages long-term investment.

Remove these conditions and countries stagnate, no matter how much aid they get.

Growth is both necessary and sufficient.

No country has escaped poverty without it. Every country that has achieved higher GDP per capita has also achieved high levels of basic human wellbeing.

Targeted aid can be useful at the margin, but it’s no substitute. Although many supposed poverty fighters are blind to this reality, serious policymakers shouldn’t be.

The Fed held its target for the federal funds rate at 3.5% to 3.75%. While that decision itself was routine (markets had treated it as a near-certainty), the circumstances were anything but. The post-meeting statement was among the shortest in decades; the forward guidance language that long told markets what to expect was gone, and Warsh declined to submit his own forecasts for the Summary of Economic Projections (SEP).

Warsh also announced five task forces to review the Fed’s communications, balance sheet, inflation framework, data and productivity. After half a decade in which the Fed has repeatedly missed its 2% inflation target, a chairman this determined to operate differently and implement regime change is an encouraging development.

Warsh described the meeting as embodying the best of the Fed’s traditions — “rigorous debate, open-mindedness, commitment to mission, responsibility and accountability for performance” — all of which, he said, “add up to one thing: Getting monetary policy right.”

If these served as a statement of principles, Warsh is right and deserves full support. Getting monetary policy right, and being accountable for the results, is exactly what the Fed has failed to do since the pandemic, and a chair who places it at the center of his agenda is starting in the right place.

That focus is especially reassuring given the politics surrounding the appointment. Warsh is President Donald Trump’s pick, and many assumed he would deliver the rate cuts the White House has been demanding for more than a year. Instead, Warsh reasserted the hawkish stance he’s held throughout his career.

With U.S. inflation running hot, the decision this week to hold rates settles little on its own. But everything around it pointed the same way: a hawkish turn in the committee’s rate projections, with nine of the 18 policymakers who submitted forecasts to the SEP now expecting a hike this year, and a forceful commitment that “the committee will deliver price stability.” For anyone worried that the Fed’s independence was about to give way to political convenience, this was a welcome answer.

There is a point in this for the Trump administration as well. The president’s greatest political vulnerability is affordability and his disapproval on it runs higher than it did for President Joe Biden. A Fed pressured into cutting rates while prices are still climbing would only deepen that problem. The most valuable thing an independent central bank can do for Trump is bring inflation down, which is precisely what political pressure to cut would undermine.

The specific changes Warsh made are sound on their own terms. The retreat from forward guidance is long overdue. When the Fed commits in advance to a path, fresh data can later force it to choose between honoring a stale signal and setting present policy correctly. For example, last September a data-based approach to monetary policy pointed to steady or even higher rates, but the committee had so firmly telegraphed easing that it could not reverse course from fear of shocking markets. Moreover, these communications often became a source of disruptions themselves, especially under the post-pandemic monetary-policy regime.

Warsh also noted that constant guidance from the Fed mutes useful information from private markets that are often better at assessing prevailing economic conditions. The Fed’s recent projections make his case. In March, not one policymaker projected a rate hike for the remainder of the year, even with inflation well above target, while markets had already begun pricing one in. The dots in the most recent SEP projecting rate hikes simply caught up to where markets had been for months. This is the kind of noise Warsh is right to want to quiet.

The rest of the Fed’s new agenda runs in the same direction. Warsh voiced openness to private data, a sensible complement to government statistics that arrive late, are heavily revised and crowd out competition and innovation. He has long pressed to shrink the Fed’s bloated balance sheet. And his five task forces take up the questions a serious framework review should ask, far more rigorously than the Fed’s thin 2025 effort, which is why reopening that review topped our Cato Institute reform agenda published the week Warsh was sworn in.

None of this is a finished product, nor could it be after a single meeting. What will matter is how these commitments are carried out in the months ahead, once the task forces submit reports. The balance sheet is the clearest illustration. Trimming its headline size is worthwhile, but the larger opportunity lies in the operating framework behind it. The FOMC’s statement reaffirmed the Fed’s commitment to ample reserves, the post-2008 arrangement in which the central bank keeps reserves plentiful and pays banks interest to hold them. Following Warsh’s instinct to its natural conclusion would mean ending interest on reserves and allowing banks to trade reserves with one another again, so that a market sets the price of overnight money. That would be a fitting charge for the balance-sheet task force.

Warsh’s first meeting suggests he understands the Fed’s problems clearly. He came in promising regime change, and his opening statements looked like the first serious move toward reform in decades. For once, I’d bet against the status quo for monetary policy.

In this nuclear environment, some U.S. policymakers and nuclear experts argue that the United States needs more nuclear weapons to protect its interests. Otherwise, they warn that the United States will fail to dissuade nuclear powers from attacking. To them, having more nuclear weapons will deter nuclear war, and if necessary, win one. Paul Nitze would be proud of these takes.

Pursuing nuclear superiority is a dangerous policy. It has unrealistic expectations of human rationality. It mistakenly views counterforce targeting as a way to protect allies. And it is extremely expensive. To protect its interests and prevent nuclear war, the United States should avoid the pursuit of nuclear superiority and take alternative actions.

Deterrence involves countries showing others that the costs of attacking outweigh the benefits. The more pain threatened in retaliation to an aggressor, the less likely it is to attack. Supporters of nuclear superiority point to this framing of nuclear deterrence to justify building nuclear weapons. They assume human rationality.

But reality is messier. Humans are not as rational as early deterrence theorists assumed. The First World War is an example of this, where each participant underestimated the willingness of the others to fight and stand their ground. During the Cold War, this human fallibility nearly led to multiple nuclear catastrophes.

It remains unclear if rational thinking, luck, or a bit of both has averted nuclear war. With new psychological breakthroughs and historical cases in mind, U.S. policymakers and military planners should be more cautious with posturing and building nuclear weapons. They should avoid the assumption that the other side or themselves will respond to a nuclear crisis in a “rational” way.

But what about America’s allies? Surely the United States needs enough nuclear weapons to reassure them that it will protect them. Counterforce—targeting and destroying another’s nuclear forces and infrastructure—attempts to solve the dilemma of trading “New York for Paris.” The better chances the United States has at destroying enemy nuclear capabilities and limit damage to itself from a retaliatory attack, the more credible are America’s commitments to defend its allies.

Here again, important realities are overlooked. It’s impossible for the United States to destroy all an enemy’s nuclear capability. Under U.S. counterforce targeting, millions of people would still die should war break out; less than under other targeting scenarios, but who’s counting at that point? This leaves the “New York for Paris” dilemma unresolved.

But surely the United States can afford upgrading and building more nuclear weapons. It spends about 3% of its Gross Domestic Product on defense, less than it did during the Cold War.

To put it plainly: the United States can’t afford nuclear superiority. America’s debt and deficit are at record highs, and the federal government spends around $1 trillion annually on its net interest payments. And the percent-of-GDP point is a sleight of hand. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the United States spend more on defense today than at any point during the Cold War.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates U.S. nuclear modernization to cost about $1 trillion. With the Department of Defense’s and military contractors’ track records of going over budget, this $1 trillion is a low-ball figure. And this price-tag excludes costs for building the Golden Dome, currently estimated to cost $1.2 trillion. This leaves the federal government with two poor options to finance nuclear superiority: borrow more money or cut domestic programs. The American people will be unconvinced of either route to fund this defense spending, especially with nuclear superiority being dangerous and unnecessary.

Instead of pursuing nuclear superiority, U.S. policymakers should take four steps to better defense America and avert nuclear war.

First, they should adopt a no-first-use nuclear policy. The use of nuclear weapons is only credible as a last resort. A no-first-use policy would placate other countries that the United States will refrain from using nuclear weapons from the outset of a crisis. This would reduce the temptation for any side to preemptively launch their nuclear arsenals.

Second, U.S. lawmakers should dismantle the country’s intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). U.S. nuclear capable submarines are survivable to an enemy surprise attack and U.S. nuclear aircraft can be recalled if there’s a false alarm. ICBMs have neither feature, making the president more inclined to launch ICBMs during a crisis before the enemy destroys them.

Third, U.S. policymakers should scrap the Golden Dome. It won’t stop enemy warheads from hitting the United States. It will be expensive and will line the pockets of defense contractors. And it will accelerate an arms race between the United States and its rivals.

Fourth, policymakers should reform America’s nuclear chain of command. The president retains the sole authority to launch America’s nuclear arsenal. This launch authority throws caution out the window. Instead, at least two authorities should approve the launch of nuclear weapons.

Though complete disarmament may be unattainable for the time being, arms reduction should be in the offing. The United States should take the lead on this and do all it can to avert nuclear Armageddon.

In a new report for the Cato Institute, I examine the past 46 years of data on state funding, tuition revenue, and total revenue at public colleges and universities. The data could not be clearer: states have been increasing funding over time, not decreasing it. I reproduce one of the figures from the report below, which shows per student funding per student from 1980–2025 in inflation-adjusted dollars. There are some declines, typically during and after recessions, but the long-term trend is unmistakably up. Over the past four and a half decades, states have increased funding by $63 per student per year.

One of the main reasons that the myth of state disinvestment persists is a failure to correctly adjust for inflation. Inflation adjustments are made using a price index, and any conventional price index tells the same story: rising, not falling, state funding. But advocates tend to rely on a cost adjustment that does not accurately account for inflation, called the Higher Education Cost Adjustment (HECA). But HECA is heavily biased:

As the figure below shows, only by using the HECA, rather than a real price index, can advocates claim that disinvestment is happening.

The myth of state disinvestment is often paired with the notion that it explains the rise in tuition revenue. The theory is that colleges are forced to raise tuition to offset declines in state funding. This is wrong for several reasons.

To begin with, we’ve already seen that state funding has been increasing over time, not decreasing, which means that under this theory, tuition should have been falling over the past 40 years.

Another problem with this theory is that it implies constant total revenue, with students paying more when states pay less and vice versa. But this is not true. Total revenue has roughly doubled since the early 1980s, as shown in the figure below.

A third problem with the theory that tuition rises to offset cuts in state funding is that the statistical relationship between the two is very weak. Under the theory, tuition revenue should rise by $1 for every $1 cut in state funding. But as shown in the figure below, for every $1 cut in state funding, tuition revenue only increases by $0.02 to $0.29.

The relationship between changes in state funding and changes in tuition revenue is even weaker at the state level. States that experienced very different changes in state funding often saw very similar increases in tuition revenue. For example, Oklahoma, Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Illinois all increased state funding per student by vastly different amounts from 1980 to 2025, ranging from $1,400 to $14,700. Yet tuition revenue rose by roughly the same amount in each state (around $7,500).

The bottom line is that state disinvestment in higher education is a myth. The related notion that state disinvestment explains rising tuition is also wrong. For state policymakers, this means that trying to reduce tuition by increasing state funding will not work. State taxpayers will pay $1 to save students $0.02 to $0.29.

Before receiving opioid pain medication, many patients today are required to sign a “patient-prescriber agreement,” often called a “pain contract.” The patient agrees to submit to regular drug testing, disclose personal and family histories of substance use, follow strict rules about medication use, and accept that violating those rules may result in discontinuation of care.

Although these agreements are presented as mutual understandings, in practice, they are one-sided behavioral contracts. The physician dictates the terms, and the patient, often already in pain and with few alternatives, must comply or risk losing access to treatment.

How the government normalized suspicion

The federal government itself has helped normalize this approach. The Food and Drug Administration even publishes a model five-page opioid treatment agreement containing roughly three dozen requirements.

Pain contracts are often justified as necessary safeguards against misuse, diversion, and overdose, yet their broader significance is rarely acknowledged: They mark the migration of drug warfare into ordinary medical care. These contracts do not simply regulate patients; they demean them, frighten them, and redefine the doctor-patient relationship around suspicion and control, effectively turning physicians into parole officers.

Doctors are expected to monitor behavior, order drug tests, enforce compliance, and respond to deviations, no matter how minor. These are not traditional clinical roles. The physician becomes, in part, a compliance officer, tasked not only with treating pain but also with policing the conditions under which treatment is allowed.

What makes opioids different?

Physicians did not willingly assume this role. Pain contracts emerged from years of political panic over opioids, aggressive DEA enforcement, pressure from state medical boards, insurer mandates, pharmacy scrutiny, and federal prescribing guidelines that turned opioid prescribing into a legal and regulatory hazard. In response, doctors increasingly practice defensive pain medicine in which surveillance, documentation, and compliance rival clinical judgment itself.

This kind of behavioral contract is virtually unheard of elsewhere in medicine. Patients starting anticoagulants, which carry a real risk of fatal bleeding, are educated about the risks but are not required to certify that they won’t take non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). Those prescribed benzodiazepines, which can cause dependence and potentially dangerous interactions with alcohol, are not routinely subjected to questioning about their drinking. Nor are other controlled substances, such as stimulants, subject to such scrutiny.

In most of medicine, risk is managed through informed consent and clinical judgment, not through preemptive contracts backed by surveillance and fueled by fear. Nor do we impose this framework on other risky consumer choices. Alcohol contributes to addiction, impaired judgment, accidents, and deadly interactions with other substances. Yet adults are not required to sign contracts before buying bourbon or wine. We rely instead on ordinary laws and personal responsibility.

Opioids are not risk-free, but neither are they uniquely dangerous when properly prescribed and responsibly used. What is unique is the system of suspicion, monitoring, and behavioral control that has grown up around them. The difference is not simply pharmacology. It is political and social stigma.

Patients as presumptive addicts

Over the past two decades, opioid policy has increasingly treated pain patients as presumptive addicts rather than people in need of care. Many chronic pain patients live in constant fear that a misunderstood urine test, a pharmacy issue, a missed appointment, or even an arbitrary interpretation of “noncompliance” could abruptly end their treatment. Some patients report being dismissed from care after testing positive for medications legally prescribed by other physicians. Others describe humiliating monitoring procedures that leave them feeling less like patients and more like probationers.

Worse still, there is surprisingly little evidence that pain contracts meaningfully reduce addiction, overdose, or diversion. But they do provide something else: institutional protection. They signal to regulators, insurers, pharmacies, and prosecutors that physicians are policing patients aggressively enough. That is why these agreements continue to proliferate despite weak evidence of benefit and the obvious costs to trust.

In trying to control risk, policymakers have imported the logic of surveillance and compliance into the exam room itself. The opioid crackdown did not merely regulate drugs. It transformed the culture of medical practice.

Medicine depends on trust: Patients must be able to speak honestly without fear of punishment, and physicians must be free to exercise judgment without constantly acting under the shadow of legal suspicion. When treatment begins with contracts, surveillance, and the presumption of guilt, something essential is lost.

Pain patients deserve the same dignity, privacy, and presumption of trust afforded to every other patient group. And physicians should be allowed to practice medicine, not parole enforcement.

But they can also get much better. With proper reforms overseen by the highly educated and well-heeled Cuban diaspora, the island’s economic growth could mirror that of Chile, which implemented free-market economic reforms after the overthrow of the Marxist President Salvador Allende in 1973, or Poland, which started its transition from communism to capitalism with the Balcerowicz Plan in 1989. Both countries were once basket cases, but are now widely recognized as regional success stories. If that happens, other desirables, such as renovated town centers, functioning sewage systems, better roads, and cleaner hospitals, will follow.

But one of the lessons that even a well-executed transition from communism to capitalism teaches us is this: Change takes time and is disruptive. A worker who loses his job because a loss-making enterprise (“loss-making” is the crucial term here) ceases to be propped up by the taxpayer does not blame the central planner for designing a factory that produces stuff that nobody wants to buy. He blames the capitalist who reallocates capital and human resources toward enterprises that can produce goods and services that people at home and abroad desire. Jobs are destroyed, and new ones are created. That churning is the essence of capitalism. It is, in part, what makes Americans rich.

Then there is the money illusion, or the human tendency to focus on nominal prices. Economic transitions are often accompanied by inflation. The Cuban peso, like Eastern European currencies before the fall of the Berlin Wall, is not freely traded. Its value is set by the authorities, leading to as high as a 24-fold gap between (imaginary) official and (real) black-market rates. The same can be said of foodstuffs. Bread is dirt cheap but rationed, and so it commands much higher prices on the black market. That is an old communist trick. Keep the official prices low to boast of how much ordinary people can afford relative to wages, even though, in practice, officially priced goods are hard to come by. When the peso starts floating freely, expect its value to plummet and prices of many goods to skyrocket.

Also, privatization of previously nationalized or state-built enterprises can be accompanied by corruption. That is especially true when the privatizing entity, usually a government-appointed board of some kind, either consists of or is connected to members of the former regime. As was the case in Slovakia, Hungary, and—most notoriously—Russia, self-dealing can have several deleterious consequences. First, it rewards, rather than punishes, ex-communists. Second, it extends ex-communist influence in society. Third, it leads to incompetent management and prolongs economic adjustment. Therefore, extreme care must be taken to offload state assets in a maximally transparent way (such as a blind auction) and, preferably, under international supervision. Importantly, privatization should be open to foreign (including diaspora) entrepreneurs who will bring with them tacit knowledge, including best accounting and production practices.

These issues matter, because humans suffer from selective memory and nostalgia. Returning to the Central (formerly “Eastern”) Europe of my childhood, as I occasionally do, I am struck by what people remember and what they have forgotten about life under communism. Gone are the recollections of long lines in front of stores selling stuff sophisticated Western customers would not glance at. Gone are the memories of widespread bribery that greased the wheels of commerce: “Are you sure you are out of this particular medicine?” Here is a bit of money “to look again.” Shortages? Never heard of them. Conversely, people love to remember (official) prices and contrast them with the present. Wage increases are seldom factored in. Capitalism is blamed for all that still ails society, while socialism is more fondly remembered by the old and idealistically reimagined by the young.

Left-wing demagogues use such quirks of human psychology to salvage from a century of socialist disasters some “positives” and to minimize the salutary effects of free enterprise. That is particularly true of Cuba—a tiny island nation that has for decades withstood the pressure from the American behemoth, thereby winning progressive admiration. Thus, before the Cuba of Che Guevara and the Castro brothers disappears over the memory horizon, it is vital to set the record straight and separate the reality from the myth.

Let us start with the promise of the Cuban Revolution that brought the communists to power in 1959.

Novelist Norman Mailer said Castro was “the first and greatest, hero to appear in the world since the Second World War.” Susan Sontag wrote, “Ever since my three-month visit to Cuba in the summer of 1960, the Cuban revolution has been dear to me, and Che, along with Fidel, have been heroes and cherished models.” French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called Che Guevara “the most complete human being of our age.” His partner, Simone de Beauvoir, wrote of her visit to Cuba, “For the first time in our lives, we were witnessing happiness that had been attained by violence.” Activist Malcolm X praised Cuba’s race relations, while the once-influential sociologist C. Wright Mills praised the revolutionaries for their humanity.

Obviously, things turned out differently.

According to Cuban American journalist Frank Zimmerman’s new book 12 Myths about Cuba: The Power of Narrative, Cuba’s communist regime bears responsibility for thousands of dead and millions forced into exile. From the outset, Castro reinstated the death penalty, ordered firing squad executions, and interned tens of thousands in prisons and forced-labor camps. Che Guevara personally directed summary executions at La Cabaña fortress. Between 25,000 and 30,000 Cubans were sent to forced-labor camps for being gay, religious, or ideologically “deviant.” State-induced scarcity, economic collapse, and a tourism-driven survival economy pushed many Cubans, including minors, into prostitution during the Special Period in the 1990s.

The regime proclaimed the end of racism by decree in 1959, then systematically betrayed Afro-Cubans. For example, the “pre-criminal social dangerousness” law, which allowed imprisonment without a crime, was most frequently applied to young Afro-Cubans. During the July 11, 2021, protests over deteriorating economic conditions made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic, black Cubans were prominent among those arrested, beaten, and given sentences. Structural racism was replaced not with equality but with superficial, folkloric representation on state media. Diversity is permitted only when it applauds power. The moment Afro-Cubans organize autonomously or dissent, repression follows.

In 1958, Cuba’s per-capita GDP topped the equivalent of $24,000 in today’s dollars, placing it among the most prosperous economies in Latin America. By 2025, official figures put it at roughly $7,500—a number Zimmerman finds far too high. Poverty was never eliminated. Instead, it was centralized, rationed, and weaponized as a control mechanism. Private enterprise was dismantled, and independent economic activity criminalized. The military conglomerate GAESA captures an estimated 37 percent of GDP. George Orwell, reflecting on the communist assertion that, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” once famously retorted: “Yes, but where is the omelet?” That’s a question as appropriate regarding Cuba as any other socialist disaster zone.

And so, the left-wing salvage operation got underway.

In 2016, Barack Obama said to Raul Castro, “Look, you’ve made great progress in educating young people. Every child in Cuba gets a basic education. That’s a huge improvement from where it was. Medical care—the life expectancy of Cubans is equivalent to the United States despite it being a very poor country, because they have access to health care. That’s a huge achievement. They should be congratulated.” (To his credit, Obama also noted that the Cuban “economy is not working.”) In 2020, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said, “We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba. But you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad. When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it.”

Likewise, Justin Trudeau opined that “Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.” “They have a superb health system, perhaps the best on earth,” Jimmy Carter explained. Lesser figures, such as Ted Turner and Michael Moore made similar observations. Finally, Nicholas Kristof opined on the pages of the New York Times, “Cuba in health care does an impressive job that the United States could learn from … an American infant is, by official statistics, almost 50 percent more likely to die than a Cuban infant. … A major strength of the Cuban system is that it assures universal access. Cuba has the Medicare for All that many Americans dream about.”

What do the facts say?

Before the revolution, Cuba already had a 76 percent literacy rate, among the highest in Latin America. The pre-Castro republic had functioning universities, a pluralistic press, competing political parties, and educators like Ana Echegoyen Montalvo, who led a national adult-literacy campaign in the mid-1950s. That history was deliberately buried because the regime needed the fiction of an illiterate past to make its harsh rule more defensible. The 1961 literacy campaign did not teach reading so much as it brainwashed the populace. To learn the letter “F,” Cuban children read, “The rifle is Fidel’s; faith sharpens his ideas; the island puts its faith in him.” Every letter was saturated in ideology. What Western leaders praised as emancipation was, in practice, the regime’s first attempt at mass indoctrination.

The same logic governed formal schooling. From primary school onward, children were enrolled in the José Martí Pioneer Organization, chanting daily, “Pioneers for communism: we shall be like Che.” University admission depended less on academic merit than on ideological reliability, including participation in the Union of Young Communists, attendance at political rallies, and demonstrated conformity to official doctrine. Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica achieved comparable educational outcomes without criminalizing dissent or converting classrooms into instruments of surveillance.

The infant mortality figures, the life expectancy comparisons, and the doctors-per-capita ratios similarly fail to describe what really happens when an ordinary Cuban gets sick. Two medical systems operate on the island simultaneously. One serves party cadres, senior military officers, and foreign visitors with hard currency, at showcase institutions like CIMEQ—a well-stocked, functional, and carefully photographed center for medical and surgical research. The other is endured by everyone else: hospitals where operating rooms lose power without warning; where antibiotics are a luxury; where patients are routinely told to bring their own syringes, gauze, painkillers, and bed linens.

According to Zimmerman and other Cuban writers, the average Cuban wage in 2025 stood at approximately $17 a month, which is not enough to purchase basic medicines. What the regime presents as universal healthcare dissolves, at the hospital door, into an informal economy of bribes, favors, and political connections. Care follows loyalty, not clinical urgency. Dissidents report deliberate denial of treatment and medical records share filing cabinets with political profiles.

The island’s medical export program—currently about 25,000 Cuban doctors are deployed in 56 countries—is often held up as proof of the revolution’s success and generosity. It is, in practice, the island’s most lucrative industry and, by the account of serious international observers, a system of forced labor. Host governments pay the Cuban state between $10,000 and $12,000 per doctor per month. The doctors themselves receive between 2.5 and 20 percent of that sum, meaning a physician in Venezuela might pocket $250 to $300 while Havana collects more than $10,000, and one in Qatar keeps roughly $1,000 of the $5,000 to $10,000 paid on his behalf. In 2018, this arrangement generated approximately $6.4 billion for the regime, accounting for Cuba’s single largest source of foreign revenue. The U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report has cited that figure as evidence of forced labor.

If economic and political freedoms survive, future generations will not have to wait in lines for basic goods. They will not have to memorize the propaganda alphabet or bribe the pharmacist for aspirin. They will encounter Cuba the way most people encounter much of history: through the curated myths of admirers, the selective memory of nostalgists, and the romantic imagination of ideologues who never had to live inside the system they celebrate. That is precisely why the Cuban record matters. The literacy campaigns were indoctrination. The hospitals were a two-tier lie. The doctors were, by any serious legal definition, coerced labor. Cuba was not a social-justice experiment that failed for want of resources. It was a system that could not produce resources. It was also a system designed to concentrate power, and it succeeded at that completely. Forgetting these facts about Cuba is not compassionate. It is the precondition for repeating it.

Markets FTW

The Most Important IPO in History

SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share, raising $75 billion and valuing the company at $1.8 trillion. The financial press will spend the next several weeks arguing about whether that number is justified by Starlink’s margins, the Starship program’s trajectory, and the AI infrastructure buildout. Those are reasonable conversations to have. But they are also, in the deepest sense, beside the point. The more important question is not whether SpaceX is worth $1.8 trillion to investors. It is whether the mission that animates the company—a self-sustaining, multiplanetary human civilization—is worth pursuing at all. The answer is unambiguously yes.

Begin with a fact that tends to get lost in debates about climate change: Well over 99 percent of all species that have ever lived on Earth have gone extinct. Five mass extinction events have swept the slate almost clean, and not one of them required human assistance.

The Ordovician-Silurian event 444 million years ago was driven by glaciation, or vast ice sheets that caused sea levels to drop sharply, destroying shallow ocean habitats. The Late Devonian crisis followed as expanding land plants led to oxygen-depleted waters and global cooling. The Permian-Triassic extinction 252 million years ago resulted from massive Siberian volcanic eruptions that released huge amounts of greenhouse gases, causing extreme warming and ocean acidification. Triassic-Jurassic volcanism raised CO₂ levels and destabilized climates. The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction 66 million years ago combined an asteroid strike with volcanic activity, creating global darkness, acid rain, and cooling that ended the dinosaurs.

There is no reason to think that naturally occurring challenges to human survival are a thing of the past. A super volcano eruption beneath Yellowstone could inject enough sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to trigger a volcanic winter, destroying global agriculture. A sufficiently large asteroid strike of the kind that ended the Cretaceous would produce an “impact winter” of similar character. A supernova within 30 light-years of Earth could strip away the ozone layer, exposing all life to lethal ultraviolet radiation. The sun itself will eventually boil the oceans away as it evolves into a red giant.

Just because Earth is habitable today does not mean it will be habitable tomorrow. Our planet is not a sanctuary. It is a rock in an indifferent cosmos, subject to forces against which a single-planet civilization has essentially no defense. The only meaningful hedge against that exposure is to become two civilizations, then several, spread across worlds that no single asteroid, no single super volcano, no single dying star can simultaneously destroy.

That is what the $75 billion raised today is ultimately for. Not Starlink subscriptions, though those matter. Not launch contracts, though those matter too. The deeper logic of SpaceX—the reason Musk has described Mars colonization as a life insurance policy for the human species—is that technological and economic progress must eventually escape the gravitational pull of a single planet.

Chart of the Week

Spain’s Long Descent, and What It Tells Us About the Rise of the West

The chart below tracks the ratio of Spanish to British income per person between 1277 and 2024, and it records one of the most dramatic economic reversals in European history. In a new working paper, Leandro Prados de la Escosura of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid has produced the most careful account yet of why the gap opened. His answer is that Spain stopped being good at using what it had. Using sophisticated price data to measure economic efficiency, he finds that Spain and Britain were roughly equal in worker productivity as late as the 1590s. Then Spain fell behind. By 1800, British workers were more than twice as productive as Spanish ones. The culprit was not a shortage of land or capital. It was a collapse in what economists call total factor productivity—basically, how efficiently an economy turns its resources into output. Spain had the inputs. It just stopped using them well.

Why?

Prados de la Escosura points to several causes. The most important, in his view, is de-urbanization. Between 1591 and 1646, the share of Spain’s population living in cities fell from nearly 15 percent to under 9 percent. That might sound like a small reduction, but it wasn’t. Cities are where commerce, specialization, and productivity gains happen. In northwest Europe, especially England and the Netherlands, growing cities were pulling agricultural workers to be more productive, because urban demand gave farmers a reason to produce surpluses and earn money to buy city goods. Spain ran this engine in reverse. Escosura’s research with Carlos Álvarez Nogal shows that as King Philip II doubled consumption taxes to pay for his wars across Europe, Castilian cities shrank, trade contracted, and incentives for productivity improvement disappeared. Real wages and land returns fell.

Remarkably, Philip II was compelled to raise taxes despite the massive amounts of silver that Spain received from the New World. Scholars continue to debate the effect of silver inflows on the Spanish economy, but silver’s damage to Spanish institutional development is widely accepted. The crown used silver-backed borrowing to finance wars without seeking the consent of the Cortes, or Spain’s parliament. That allowed Philip II to present the Cortes with fiscal faits accomplis: spend first, demand taxes afterward, leaving representatives little choice but to comply. The Cortes, which had genuine potential to evolve into a meaningful constitutional check on the monarchy, as happened in Britain and the Netherlands, was gradually sidelined and eventually met only ceremonially after 1663.

That matters for a much larger debate. A popular argument holds that Western prosperity was built on colonial plunder. Spain’s experience cuts against this story on both logical tests. Was colonial wealth sufficient for prosperity? Clearly not. Spain extracted more treasure from the Americas than any other European power, yet fell into seven bankruptcies between 1556 and 1656, as well as prolonged relative poverty. Was it necessary? Also no. Most scholars, including the Nobel Prize-winning economist Douglass North and the Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Joel Mokyr, agree that Britain’s great productivity surge (the one that left Spain so far behind) was driven by better domestic institutions, including parliamentary checks on the power of the monarch, and the concomitant commercial, scientific and technological dynamism—not by what was taken from foreign territories.

True, Britain also had an overseas empire, though it was less extractive and came later. The most decisive evidence in favor of domestic reforms and endowments rather than colonial exploitation as drivers of prosperity, therefore, comes from countries that had no colonies at all. Switzerland became rich without a single overseas possession. Ditto Norway and Finland. Swedish colonies amounted to little more than St. Barts in the Caribbean. The German colonial footprint was trivial before 1884—by which point the country had already become an economic powerhouse. In that sense, the German Empire in Africa was a result, rather than a prerequisite, for prosperity.

The engine of Western European prosperity was ingenuity and good institutions—things that could be built at home and destroyed there too. Spain’s story, in the end, is not about what was seized abroad. It is about what was wrecked at home by war, by taxes, by the slow suffocation of the parliaments, cities and industries that might have carried Spain into modernity alongside Britain.

But today, Trump has revealed that similar questions loom large. Europe did not want this war, but could not stop it. The offer to help clear the Strait of Hormuz hinges on a permissive operating environment provided by both the United States and Iran, meaning the service itself is of limited value. The sanctions question is somewhat more interesting: It is quite possible to envision Washington wanting to lift sanctions and some European capitals not wanting to. What happens then?

Europe has a limited ability to shape outcomes in the Middle East. At present, any effort to mitigate the war’s damage to European interests must focus on keeping Trump on a path to peace, somehow.

In the United Kingdom, for instance, Prime Minister Keir Starmer suffered another political blow when his defense secretary resigned, warning that the government’s spending plan would “make the country less safe.” Predictably, the Trump administration joined in. Undersecretary of Defense (War) Elbridge Colby wrote Starmer, declaring that “There is again a great need for more British military strength in this critical time. We urge the UK to meet that need with urgency, scale, and determination.” Meaning spend what we desire, not what you believe is expedient.

However, outside pressure is rarely sufficient to override domestic political considerations.

For instance, the administration is even more hostile toward Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who rejected the new NATO spending standard. Trump responded by threatening to—predictably—hike US tariffs. Nevertheless, Sanchez won domestic support, resisting foreign pressure. After all, does anyone in Spain believe the Russian hordes, which still have not conquered Donbas, let alone Ukraine, will soon show up at the gates of Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, and Seville?

Washington should change its approach. Instead of instructing allied states on how to defend themselves, the US should explain its plans and then let its friends and partners act accordingly.

American frustration with free, or at least cheap, riding is longstanding. A cavalcade of US officials before Trump sought to spur greater military spending in Europe. Perhaps most famous was Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who ended his time in Washington warning that “Future U.S. political leaders—those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me—may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.” Trump’s rhetoric has been even more frequent and florid.

However, contrary to US officials’ assumptions, the long refusal of other NATO members to spend more on the military was Washington’s, not Europe’s, fault. Americans were paying too much because they chose to. It was US policymakers who insisted on defending Europe despite that continent’s decision to prioritize its generous welfare state.

Washington could and indeed should decide how much to spend based on US interests, not on European actions. That assessment should be based on continental capabilities, not outlays. There is no cause for Americans to pay to defend others who fail to defend themselves. First, Europe is no more important to people here than it is there. If the latter aren’t willing to put their lives and wealth on the line, then Americans should not. Second, providing an inviolable subsidy ensures that its beneficiaries will take advantage of American generosity. The resulting defense gap inevitably multiplied as European actions increasingly strained resources. The more Washington tolerated cheap riding by allies, the more friendly nations lagged in their efforts. Still, Europeans cannot be faulted for taking advantage of successive US administrations, which preferred to preserve American domination despite the extraordinary cost to the American people of such an approach.

The US is the most secure great power ever, with vast oceans to the east and west and just two neighbors, both weak and pacific, to the north and south. In contrast, China and Russia both border more than a dozen other nations with which they have fought numerous wars over the last century and more. Beijing must also guard its maritime boundary, which includes Taiwan, the Philippines, and Japan, the latter of which has long been a deadly enemy.

America’s defense is easy in contrast. The only reason for Washington to spend anything approaching the administration’s requested $1.5 trillion for the Department of Defense/​War is to be “running the world,” as the president last year claimed to be doing.

Washington should stage a calculated retreat from this role. The administration appears to be disengaging, but unfortunately only in a limited, haphazard, and arbitrary fashion. For instance, the president announced that he intended to withdraw some troops from Germany, a welcome decision in principle, but not as an arbitrary fit of pique, directed at Chancellor Frederick Merz for criticizing Trump’s bungling in Iran. The administration will leave America’s defense obligations unchanged.

Better is the decision to reduce air and naval deployments in Europe, but even here, the policy change is painfully slow. Moreover, Washington should calibrate commitments and capabilities. If the administration is going to devote less firepower to defending the continent, it should first reduce its commitment to do so. The worst outcome would be to promise the impossible, to protect Europe with insufficient forces, essentially drawing lines that it is not prepared to enforce.

The fundamental problem appears to be that this president, even more than his predecessors, wants to set allied as well as US policy. After nearly six years in office, he has made only minimal reductions in Washington’s role in Europe while leaving America’s Asian deployments unchanged and greatly increasing the nation’s entanglement in the Mideast. Despite his persistent criticism of allied policy, he has sought to use the US security guarantee to extract wealth from allies by forcing their acquiescence to punitive and destructive tariffs. This approach appears to have worked in both Europe and Asia. Indeed, officials in the former have admitted to surrendering on trade to preserve Washington’s willingness to defend Europe.

Alas, this is no bargain for America. Washington should not hire out US military personnel for mercantile purposes. The better security policy would be to keep Americans out of other nations’ wars absent compelling justifications, since most conflict would otherwise pass this nation and hemisphere by. For instance, the Trump administration has rightly transferred the overwhelming responsibility for supporting Ukraine over to Europe. Continuing to risk war with a major conventional power that matches America’s nuclear arsenal and believes existential interests to be at stake would be foolish, even reckless.

Europe is not the only problem area. Agreeing to fight Israel’s war against Iran demonstrates how even the best laid military plans of the globe’s superpower can go awry. South Korea possesses 50 times the GDP and twice the population of North Korea, yet Washington continues to deploy nearly 30,000 troops in the South. Japan has long possessed the means to create an effective deterrent to Chinese aggression, but it failed to do so because the US promised to do so.

Of course, Washington takes satisfaction in rising allied military outlays worldwide. However, this has occurred out of necessity, not generosity. America’s defense dependents increasingly fear aggression by their neighbors and abandonment by the US. Security realities have proved to be a much more powerful accelerant for defense than pious lectures.

Most people, including Americans, bridle at other governments telling them what to do, even when the advice seems well-directed. On defense, Washington should allow reality to do the talking. Rather than telling Europe how much to spend on its defense, the Trump administration should begin a phased military disengagement from the continent. And then allow the Europeans to respond as they wish.

In a recent New York Times op-ed, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman argue that several California billionaires “have accumulated enormous fortunes almost tax-free.”That assertion is built on a comparison—wealth versus taxes paid—that sounds straightforward but overlooks the government’s share of the same stream of profits that creates billionaire wealth.

American billionaires pay an average effective federal rate of about 34 percent. Wealth-tax advocates argue that the true rate is lower because unrealized capital gains are not taxed as they accrue. But unrealized gains are not untaxed wealth. They are based on future business profits, which will be reduced by future taxes.

The relevant comparison is not wealth versus past taxes paid. Billionaire wealth is mostly equity, and equity’s value is already reduced by the taxes governments are expected to collect.

The value of a company’s equity is based on expected future profits, not just next year, but over the entire life of the firm. For a public company, that value is reflected in its market capitalization—the stock price multiplied by the number of shares outstanding. If corporate taxes were eliminated tomorrow, the value of many public companies would rise immediately because future profits would be higher.

Consider Alphabet. The government’s share is worth far more than the combined fortunes of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the two men who built the company. Alphabet’s market value is about $4.56 trillion. Its net income, or after-tax profit, in 2025 was $132 billion, after paying $26.7 billion in corporate taxes. Governments take their slice first, and what’s left is after-tax profit. Alphabet’s future profits, along with its market value and the wealth of its shareholders, will also be lower because of taxes.

Alphabet’s market value is about 35 times its 2025 after-tax profit. Profits and taxes are part of the same pretax earnings stream, so we can apply the same multiple of 35 to Alphabet’s taxes, $26.7 billion, to estimate the market value of future tax payments. That comes to about $935 billion.

This is a rough estimate, but it illustrates the magnitude of the government’s claim. Brin and Page together own about 12 percent of Alphabet’s total shares, worth about $547 billion—smaller than the government’s expected $935 billion share derived from future taxes.

This estimate assumes that Alphabet’s future effective tax rate will, on average, equal its current rate of about 17 percent. That is a conservative assumption. The current rate is reduced by tax benefits associated with R&D credits and stock-based compensation, which tend to be larger at rapidly growing firms. As companies mature, growth typically slows and investment declines relative to firm size, causing effective tax rates to move closer to the statutory corporate rate, currently at 21 percent. If we bake in that assumption, the value of the government’s claim would be larger than estimated here.

Saez and Zucman report that during 2020—2023, the value of Brin’s and Page’s shares increased by $133 billion. But because they did not sell their shares, those gains were not subject to tax. Yet Alphabet’s stock price rose because expectations of future profits increased. The same increase in expected future profits that raised the stock prices also raised the value of the government’s future tax take.

The question of how much to tax is an old one. Six centuries ago, the historian Ibn Khaldun observed that heavy taxation is often a symptom of decline rather than a cure for it. Reasonable people can debate the right level of taxation. But the debate should begin with a clear picture of what is already taxed.

Yet universities really are dominated by the left, and their domination has grown over time. Surveys of faculty reveal that left-leaning professors outnumbered their right-leaning counterparts by 2.8 to 1 in 1989, a disparity that widened to 4.9 to 1 in 2017. Another survey (with different methodology) indicates that this might have grown to 6.9 to 1 by 2021. Analyses of voter registration at top colleges reveal an even more lopsided imbalance of 11.5 to 1. Political donations reveal an extreme imbalance of 28 to 1among the 20 colleges whose staff donated the most.

In a country split close to 50/50 politically, it may seem curious that universities are so politically lopsided. Yet current institutional practices magnify a natural imbalance, producing faculties that are far more lopsided than the public at large.

Higher education will naturally tilt left, of course. Left-leaning students outnumber right-leaning students and are more likely to express an interest in graduate school. These facts alone would explain a natural imbalance among faculty of around 2.1 to 1.

Yet this natural imbalance tends to reinforce itself and, left unchecked, it tends to become more pronounced as other institutional forces reinforce it.

The first magnification is motivated reasoning. Most people will uncritically accept ideas and findings that conform to their views but will subject findings that threaten their views to more scrutiny. This means that right-leaning scholars and their findings will face more criticism than their left-leaning counterparts. Diligent scholars can fight this impulse, but not everyone tries and even fewer succeed, with the result that those on the right are disproportionately likely to be screened out over quality concerns.

Since existing faculty are heavily involved in hiring new faculty, outright discrimination by existing faculty has also magnified the initial imbalance. For instance, 4 in 10 American academics indicated that they would refuse to hire a Trump supporter as a colleague. The more lopsided the academic field, the more overt the ideological discrimination. Social psychology is one of the more politically skewed fields, and 82 percent of liberal social psychologists admitted that they would discriminate against a conservative scholar when hiring faculty colleagues.

A particularly pernicious practice that exacerbated the existing ideological imbalance are political loyalty oaths in the form of required diversity, equity, and inclusion statements. For example, at the University of California, Berkeley, more than 75 percent of candidates were eliminated from consideration for not pledging sufficient loyalty to woke ideas.

When you add motivated reasoning, discrimination, and political loyalty oaths to an existing natural imbalance, it is no longer surprising that the left dominates universities. Rather, it is surprising that it took so long for it to happen.

Anyone who values the mission of universities should fight political domination. But efforts to reverse their politicization run into a seemingly inescapable problem: external hiring of faculty will not work because only faculty can accurately gauge the qualifications of faculty applicants. On the other hand, internal hiring is hopeless since existing faculty either passive watched or actively participated in the leftist takeover of universities.

Fortunately, there is a solution to depoliticize universities – establish heterodox centers, or colleges within the existing university, that would add missing perspectives and compete with the traditional departments. Any university board could establish such a center on their campus, and state governments could mandate them at public colleges in their state. There are five key features of the heterodox center or college.

First, the center would be largely independent from the existing college. It should be meant to challenge the status quo, and therefore the status quo cannot be given veto power over it.

Second, these centers would offer competition for students. Previous efforts at ideological diversification have been underwhelming because the new centers were often only able to offer a limited selection of courses, often just a few electives and maybe a minor or major. The result was that the dissidents were effectively quarantined in intellectual ghettos. The solution is to allow the new center to teach any class required for graduation. This will ensure that those with heterodox views cannot be quarantined, while also introducing competition for students that will reduce monopoly power and lead to higher-quality education.

Third, the centers should enjoy equitable funding. Historically, heterodox centers have been required to pay the university, while other departments and centers were paid by the university. That needs to change. The new centers should be funded the same way the rest of the university is. If other departments are funded based on enrollments, then the heterodox center or college should be too.

Fourth, the new center needs to be able to hire without interference by the existing faculty. The only way to depoliticize a field like social psychology is to exclude them from the hiring process for the new center.

Finally, the centers should be provided a level playing field. The core idea is to create a university that hosts a variety of independent centers that compete against each other. This requires fair competition, whereby the university doesn’t privilege some centers or departments over others.

The politicalization of higher education is real. Establishing heterodox centers is the most promising way to reverse this.

Many soccer fans reflexively respond: Americans just don’t get it. But as Nick Greene’s insightful “How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius” explains, these complaints reflect an important truth. Soccer really does violate a basic expectation embedded in the American psyche that sports competition will produce a clear verdict on the merits of the teams.

Major League Baseball has its long postseason. Professional basketball and hockey have similarly extended playoffs. The NFL, too, filters out the mediocre all season long, until the postseason, when the cream of the league plays for a shot at the Super Bowl title. Of course, there are exceptions (witness the hope-for-the-underdogs NFL adage, “On any given Sunday …”), but these sports are statistics-saturated, providing a forensic understanding of what led to success or defeat.

In that sense, soccer is a “poorly designed experiment,” Greene says, citing Gerald Skinner, a scientist who studied gamma-ray astronomy before turning to soccer results. Skinner, one of the book’s many fascinating profile subjects, tells Greene that any win by less than three or four goals in soccer would not provide the confidence in results that scientists would normally want from an experiment. But such emphatic victories in the professional game are relatively rare. Every men’s World Cup since 1962 has averaged fewer than three goals in total per game. Skinner calculates the very “best” team tends to have only about a 28 percent chance of even winning the World Cup.

Quite simply, the one-off contests and sheer scarcity of goals, coupled with game-changing moments like red cards or set plays from free kicks or corner kicks, create a bounty of opportunities for upsets. For soccer skeptics, that is an indictment. For soccer fans, that’s a big part of the attraction.

Even a tie score can be regarded as a stirring triumph by the underdog and a near-humiliation for the higher-quality team, as witnessed in Atlanta on Monday when tiny Cape Verde held powerhouse Spain to a goalless draw.

Yes, over the course of a soccer season or tournament, cream tends to rise. But in any individual match, surprises are relatively common. Some of the most memorable: Senegal beating reigning world champions France in 2002 and, in the 2022 group stage in Qatar, Saudi Arabia defeating eventual champions Argentina.

And that relatively high result variance can also occasionally produce truly unexpected outcomes in tournaments. Morocco and Croatia can make World Cup semifinals, Greece might win the 2004 European Championship, or Leicester City capture the 2015–16 Premier League crown.

Such underdogs rarely go all the way. Yet match by match, underdog romance is built into soccer and has been from the start, with weaker sides employing strategies to defang the strong. Limited teams “park the bus,” clogging the defensive area in front of their goal, hoping for a successful counterattack or a goal from a corner kick to steal a tie or win. Others press man for man. Passing, time-wasting and off-ball movement can change the contours of any match. A player can break a defense by walking into a position that draws defenders away.

My experience, as a Brit in the United States, is that this exasperates many Americans. If they were paying attention at all, they thought it ludicrous this spring that Arsenal, thoroughly outplayed by Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League final, could come within a penalty shootout of winning the title. Yet, for fans, recognizing your team’s limitations and scraping out a win are part of the appeal.

Soccer quality is unusually hard to quantify, and though some are trying, it resists the sort of data analysis and statistics-sifting so common in other sports. Instead, soccer is a 22-person argument with no obvious unit of measurement, outside of goals scored. In Greene’s book, Patrick Lucey, who works on machine learning in sports, likens teams to sentences and players to words whose meanings change with context. That is exactly right. A pass not made can change a game.

With the expanded 48-team World Cup now underway, dominant teams will squash certain poorer sides. See Germany’s 7–1 win over Curaçao in Houston on Sunday. Yet there will also be shocks, or at least teams that unexpectedly take superior opponents to penalty shootouts. Since 1994, half of all men’s World Cup champions have needed to survive at least one shootout. That itself introduces chance.

When I hear Americans who dislike the sport suggest making the goals bigger or even copying the NHL and subtracting the number of players on the field during an overtime period with the score tied, I grimace. Soccer’s low-scoring nature, with sustained tension or frustration that can give way to elation, is not a mistake to be corrected. The game is compelling precisely because it often gives superiority 90 minutes to survive all this uncertainty.

Recent events have proven the cheerleaders right – though almost certainly not for reasons they’ll admit.

Citing “recession-level industry decline,” Whirlpool just slashed its full-year earnings guidance almost in half, suspended its dividend, suffered a 20% drop in its share price in a single session, and laid off hundreds of American workers while, the machinists union points out, simultaneously building new factories in Mexico. Company officials and various analysts place the blame in no small part on the very tariff regime that Whirlpool has doggedly supported.

It would be difficult to construct a clearer cautionary tale of how US protectionism can harm not only American consumers but even its intended beneficiaries.

Whirlpool has been one of the nation’s most vocal proponents of US protectionism since at least 2011. That year, the company requested antidumping and countervailing duties (AD/​CVDs) on imported refrigerator-freezers and washing machines from South Korea and Mexico, resulting in significant new duties on the latter products. When foreign production of washing machines moved to avoid the duties, Whirlpool asked Uncle Sam to target imports from those countries too, eventually winning from the Trump administration “safeguards” on washers from every country except Canada.

In the years that followed, Whirlpool was involved in essentially every available legal channel for import protection – more than a dozen interventions under six different laws – and was often successful. Its Ohio facilities also have been the backdrop for two separate Trump administration events touting the President’s “America First” trade policies.

Beneath the surface, however, lie the mounting costs of Whirlpool’s advocacy. For starters, research shows that that the washing machine tariffs increased prices for both those units and complementary dryers, costing American consumers more than $800,000 per job created in domestic industry. Moreover, according to a 2023 US International Trade Commission report, the industry’s gains came from LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics’ new US facilities, while Whirlpool’s fortunes continued to decline.

Meanwhile, Trump’s other tariffs have become a major headwind for Whirlpool, which has quietly (and in classic fashion) lobbied for them to be applied to its competitors’ products but against them for imports of the parts and materials its US factories need.

Section 232 “national security” tariffs on steel and aluminum have hit the company particularly hard, fueling its $82 million first-quarter loss. Steel makes up around half of washers’ content, rendering US producers of these and other large appliances highly exposed to the high prices that Trump’s 50% tariffs have created.

“Emergency” tariffs on other appliance parts have added to Whirlpool’s costs. The Supreme Court invalidated those taxes in February, but the administration’s replacement levies will cause similar pain. All told, the company estimates it paid more than $300 million in US tariffs last year and will pay hundreds of millions more in 2026, further compressing its profit margins even with multiple price increases. It’s a classic case of the “protected industry trap,” where tariff-related cost increases hit margins immediately, while market-share gains take years to materialize (if they happen at all). And JPMorgan analysts agree, noting in May that Whirlpool’s “lower earnings outlook was driven by higher raw material inflation, a larger net tariff impact, and weaker price and product mix benefits.”

New Trump tariffs have also hurt the company in other ways. In its October earnings call, officials complained that competitors LG and Samsung had flooded the US market in anticipation of tariffs, forcing Whirlpool to offer deep discounts to maintain market share. More recently, they’ve suggested that refunds of Trump’s now-invalidated emergency tariffs – which Whirlpool is also seeking, of course, – have disproportionately benefited foreign appliance producers, allowing them to offer additional discounts that Whirlpool couldn’t match. Tariff-related uncertainty and the Iran war have added to its difficulties. The share price has unsurprisingly cratered.

Despite it all, Whirlpool continues to call for greater protection and to champion the Trump tariff regime. The company in April hosted US Trade Representative Jameson Greer so he could celebrate the president’s use of tariffs to “accelerate America’s reindustrialization” – six years after Trump promised the same thing at the same place. In May, Whirlpool’s CEO celebrated Section 232 tariff increases on steel “derivative” products, including appliances, and assured investors that these levies mean that, finally, “Whirlpool Corporation is structurally positioned to win with our American-made products.”

If millions of dollars in losses and a collapsing share price is tariff victory, I’d hate to see what defeat looks like.

Whirlpool’s enduring weakness is a case study in protectionist failure, not success. Firms that lobby the hardest for protection are often the least capable of competing on quality and price, and tariffs perversely insulate them from the market’s relentless pressure to improve. Windfall profits – generated at consumers’ significant expense – are frequently squandered, while competitiveness still erodes. Protectionist advocacy also often spirals in unintended ways – via trade diversion, tariffed inputs, investment uncertainty, and more – putting protected firms at an even bigger disadvantage. And too often the companies’ response is to request even more protection.

What emerges in the end is not a larger and more productive economy, but a corporate race-to-the-bottom over who can secure the most favorable treatment from Washington. Market competition works differently. It pushes firms to innovate, cut costs, and deliver better products at prices consumers can afford. It’s a reality that, unfortunately for Whirlpool and America’s protectionists, no amount of presidential photo ops can change.

The Fentanyl Supply Shock Hypothesis

Vangelov et al. make an important point. Changes in fentanyl purity and availability could well be contributing to the decline in overdose deaths. However, I think the authors may place too much emphasis on Chinese precursor controls and too little on illicit drug markets’ ability to adapt to supply disruptions.

The authors point to several indicators suggesting that the illicit fentanyl market experienced a significant supply disruption beginning in mid-2023. They note declines in fentanyl purity, reductions in fentanyl seizures, and a surge in online discussions among drug users reporting fentanyl shortages. Because overdose deaths began falling around the same time in both the United States and Canada, they speculate that increased Chinese enforcement against manufacturers and exporters of fentanyl precursor chemicals may have disrupted fentanyl production throughout North America.

One would expect this to be only a temporary phenomenon, as precursor production in other countries will increase to meet demand. Vangelov et al. might be overemphasizing China’s role in supplying fentanyl precursors. As I wrote here in 2024:

The authors acknowledge that traffickers adapt to supply disruptions but do not consider the possibility that producers may respond by shifting to synthetic opioids that rely on different chemical pathways and precursor materials. Benzimidazole opioids such as nitazenes are already appearing with increasing frequency in toxicology reports, and other novel synthetic opioids may follow. A disruption in fentanyl production does not necessarily translate into a lasting reduction in the availability of potent synthetic opioids.

A Longer-Term Perspective

After reading my recent post on the decline in overdose deaths, Donald S. Burke, MD, Professor and Dean Emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health and a co-author of the landmark study showing that overdose mortality has followed a remarkably stable exponential growth trajectory since at least the late 1970s, wrote to say that he found my analysis broadly consistent with his own thinking on the subject. He also drew my attention to a forthcoming commentary that he co-authored with Hawre Jalal in the International Journal of Drug Policy, titled “Long-term Perspective on the Recent Abrupt Decline in Drug Overdose Mortality.”

The paper, currently in press, directly responds to the Vangelov analysis. Notably, Burke and Jalal do not rule out the possibility that a fentanyl supply shock contributed to the decline in overdose deaths. Rather, they argue that the supply-shock explanation captures only part of a much larger story.

Burke and Jalal argue that the recent decline should be understood in the broader context of the overdose epidemic’s long-term trajectory. In their view, overdose deaths during the COVID era were a temporary departure from that trajectory, driven by social disruption, changes in treatment access, labor-market volatility, income shocks, and other pandemic-related factors. As those forces receded, overdose mortality would be expected to return toward its historical trend. They also raise the possibility of “mortality displacement”—the idea that the pandemic accelerated overdose deaths among the most vulnerable, leaving a temporarily smaller population at highest risk. As Burke put it in his email to me, the excess overdose deaths during the pandemic may have consumed some of the “fuel for the fire.” Under that interpretation, the recent decline may reflect a correction after the pandemic-era surge rather than evidence of a lasting break from the epidemic’s underlying dynamics.

The mortality displacement hypothesis also aligns with an observation by my frequent co-author, Josh Bloom, Director of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Science at the American Council on Science and Health. Bloom has wondered whether the pandemic-era surge in overdoses substantially reduced the population of active drug users, while younger cohorts have not replenished that population at historical rates. Gen Z reports lower rates of alcohol, tobacco, and many forms of drug use than previous generations. If that demographic shift is occurring, it could help explain part of the recent decline in overdose deaths and further suggest that no single explanation fully accounts for the trend.

Vangelov and colleagues have identified a plausible factor behind the recent decline in overdose deaths. Burke and Jalal suggest that the decline may also reflect the unwinding of pandemic-era distortions and the effects of mortality displacement. They also point to a broader set of contributing factors, including wider naloxone availability, harm reduction efforts, lower-risk patterns of drug use, and behavioral adaptation to an increasingly dangerous illicit market.

The encouraging news is that overdose deaths have fallen substantially. The less encouraging news is that no one can say with confidence whether the decline will continue. If Burke and Jalal are correct, overdose mortality could eventually return to its historical trajectory. If Vangelov and colleagues are correct, illicit drug markets may adapt to current supply constraints by sourcing new precursors or shifting to other synthetic opioids.

For now, the evidence points to a more complex story than either a drug-war success narrative or any single-cause explanation can capture. The recent decline likely reflects the interaction of several forces rather than a single dominant cause. Changes in drug markets, drug-use behavior, harm reduction, treatment access, naloxone availability, and the lingering effects of the pandemic all appear to be contributing factors. Assertions that intensified drug-war enforcement deserves substantial credit for the decline remain unsupported by the available evidence.

Throughout thousands of extraordinary years of life, Egyptians have never enjoyed the blessings of liberty or democracy. The overthrow of Hosni Mubarak during the celebrated Arab Spring in 2013 briefly offered hope of change, but newly elected Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, proved to be a maladroit Islamist, sabotaging his own presidency. El-Sisi, though appointed to his positions by Morsi, became an enthusiastic frontman for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which helped finance his coup.

El-Sisi proved to be a more effective authoritarian than Mubarak, creating a brutal dragnet for opponents, critics, and most anyone exhibiting even minimal antagonism toward the regime. Indeed, el-Sisi learned from the Chinese government, staging a repeat of Tiananmen Square, only in Cairo. The military violently dispersed demonstrators from Rab’a Square, killing more than 800 people there alone. As many as 65,000 Egyptians were arrested and imprisoned. Torture is widespread, and the regime also shut down NGOs that had monitored the Mubarak government. I visited one of them, the Al-Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence and Torture, which had survived Mubarak’s dictatorship but was closed after publicizing al-Sisi’s abuses.

There has been little improvement over the last decade. Freedom House rates Egypt as not free: “President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who first took power in a 2013 coup, has governed Egypt in an increasingly authoritarian manner. Meaningful political opposition is virtually nonexistent, as expressions of dissent can draw criminal prosecution and imprisonment. Civil liberties, including press freedom and freedom of assembly, are tightly restricted. Security forces engage in human rights abuses and extrajudicial killing with impunity.”

Human Rights Watch reached similar conclusions:

Moreover, elections have been perfunctory, mostly a show for an international audience. The penalty for running against el-Sisi is severe: “several would-be opponents, including with military backgrounds, sought to oppose him, but he arrested or intimidated them all. For instance, Abdel Moniem Aboul Fotouh, a 2012 presidential candidate, was detailed along with fifteen party members and placed on the official terrorism list. Sami Anan, el-Sisi’s predecessor as army chief of staff, was arrested, and a top member of his campaign, Hisham Geneina, el-Sisi’s former anti-corruption chief, was sentenced to five years in prison.” Such was the price of exercising the nominal right to run for office.

Washington was reluctant to criticize Egypt, though the Obama administration eventually delayed some aid to the regime. The latter step mattered little, since the el-Sisi regime enjoyed financial backing from Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. Moreover, members of Egypt’s officer corps use their privileged positions to enrich themselves — they play a huge economic role, controlling up to 60 percent of the nominal private economy by one estimate — and prefer not to risk their futures by allowing democratization. Neither the first Trump administration nor the Biden administration exhibited much interest in the status of human rights in Egypt. Indeed, President Trump referred to el-Sisi as “my favorite dictator.”

Unfortunately, authoritarian regimes that fear their people rarely welcome minority religious faiths. Throughout the Middle East regimes typically seek to maintain public quiescence if not support by discriminating against and, all too often, persecuting non-Muslim faiths. Jews and Christians are the most common targets, though people not considered to be “People of the Book,” such as Baha’is in Iran and Yezidis in Iraq, are treated as apostates and infidels, and sometimes suffer even more.

The el-Sisi government is no different. In Egypt Christianity long predates Islam. Explains Coptic Solidarity:

Christians today make up a larger share of Egypt’s population than anywhere else in the Mideast, other than Lebanon. Alas, they suffer from extensive discrimination and persecution. Notably, el-Sisi’s record on religious liberty is no better than that of his predecessors, despite substantial Coptic support for his overthrow of Morsi. For instance, journalist Jared Malsin reported that “Copts joined the demonstrations against Morsi in large numbers. There were Copts who felt that the one-year-old Islamist regime had failed to protect them from attacks by extremists and had pursued a sectarian agenda.” Indeed, el-Sisi made a pitch for Christian support, and received Tawadros’ high profile endorsement. Although the Egyptian president has maintained “some initiatives to encourage religious inclusivity”— his government remains fundamentally hostile toward Christians and other religious minorities.

For instance, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom reported last year:

The latter incidents are of particular concern. Earlier this year the Commission reported that,

Christians have also been disproportionately prosecuted for blasphemy and expressing “contempt for Islam,” and even labeled as terrorists. Nonbelievers, too, are vulnerable to such charges. Reported Coptic Solidarity:

The government also continues to enforce legal limitations on church construction and dictate the personal status of religious minorities, despite promises of redress. Such factors create significant disabilities for believers. According to Coptic Solidarity: “tens of churches are closed annually due to the bureaucratic, lengthy licensing process, and such difficulties often lead to sectarian attacks.”

Unfortunately, “The courts have proven to be ineffective to rule in sectarian incidents as, according to a study, 45% of these are decided by customary reconciliation sessions. These sessions are usually biased against the Christian participants, and a common result is the forced migration of the Christian family.” Women are particularly vulnerable and have little redress: “Throughout the last decade, hundreds of Coptic minor females have been lured, kidnapped, raped, and forcibly converted to Islam.”

Discrimination and persecution are facilitated by designating a person’s religion on their IDs. Despite a constitutional provision guaranteeing “freedom of belief and the freedom of practicing religious rights,” legal conversion has been barred by refusing to allow Muslims to change their IDs. Detailed Coptic Solidarity:

This is a dismal record on a basic human right which the Trump administration has strongly supported. El-Sisi shouldn’t be a favorite in any sense for the United States. Washington understandably seeks geopolitical stability in the Mideast, and Egypt has long been an allied if repressive state. However, by stoking religious hatred and empowering sectarian extremists Cairo is promoting more division, conflict, and unrest in a region already overflowing with such vices.

President Trump and his administration challenge the el-Sisi regime’s treatment of political dissidents and especially religious minorities. As long as governments treat Christians, Jews, and members of other faiths as second class human beings, the Middle East is likely to be riven with intolerance, discrimination, instability, and violence. Transforming the region remains a distant dream, but ending religious persecution is a necessary starting point. And Egypt, which hosts an ancient Christian church whose members long have been integrated in that society, could — and should — become an example of tolerance and freedom to the rest of the region.

This piece makes a single argument, built from three worked examples. The argument is that you cannot future-proof the executive branch against an unscrupulous President by ordinary statute.

Not because the reformers are unserious—they are often the most serious people in the room—but because every statutory route to the goal runs into one of three walls: the President’s removal power, the Appointments Clause, or, in the newest and most audacious move, the executive’s asserted authority to declare the statute void and decline to enforce it. The three examples are Ervin’s failed 1973 bill, Senator Cory Booker’s 2025 MARSHALS Act, and Representative Jamie Raskin’s sprawling 2026 Protecting Our Democracy Act—read against the Office of Legal Counsel opinion, signed April 1, 2026, that declared the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional and unenforceable in its entirety.

Taken together they form a kind of natural experiment. Each reform attacks the problem of presidential lawlessness from a different angle—independence, relocation, transparency—and each is defeated by a different mechanism. The pattern that emerges is the point: the walls are not bugs in the drafting. They are features of Article II as the current Supreme Court reads it.

I. Ervin’s Quest

Begin with the man who saw it most clearly and still got it wrong. Sam Ervin understood, better than almost anyone of his generation, that the office of Attorney General is a creature of statute—created by the Judiciary Act of 1789, not by the Constitution—and that the Department of Justice itself did not exist until 1870. “All powers of the Attorney General and of the Department of Justice flow from acts of Congress,” he observed. “What Congress gives, Congress can take away.”²

From that premise, Ervin drew a structural conclusion and wrote it into S. 2803 (93rd Congress), introduced December 12, 1973. The bill would have lifted the Department out of the executive departments entirely, fixed the Attorney General’s term at six years, and protected the office from removal except “for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”

Ervin grounded the design on the independent-agency line of cases—Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935) and Wiener v. United States (1958)—and analogized the new DOJ to the Government Accountability Office and the regulatory commissions, agencies that “execute certain laws independently of the President.”³

It was an elegant bet. It was also, by the testimony of the sitting Attorney General, an impossible one.

When the Ervin Subcommittee on Separation of Powers held its 1974 hearings, Attorney General William Saxbe told the senators that genuine independence for the Department “could not be done without a constitutional amendment.”⁴

That single sentence is the hinge of this entire piece.

Saxbe was not making a policy objection. He was identifying a structural ceiling: a statute can rearrange the furniture of the executive branch, but it cannot evict the President from his constitutional authority to control the officers who execute federal law.

The fragility of Ervin’s design lay in its load-bearing element—a single removal-protection clause. The independence of the entire Department rested on the proposition that an Attorney General could be insulated from at-will presidential removal. In 1974 that proposition had the backing of Humphrey’s Executor. Today it is a doctrine in retreat.

In Seila Law LLC v. CFPB (2020), the Court held that Congress may not insulate the single head of an executive agency from presidential removal, narrowing Humphrey’s Executor to multimember bodies exercising no substantial executive power. A criminal prosecutor is the very archetype of an officer wielding core executive power. Ervin centered his proposal on the one clause the modern Court has spent two decades dismantling.

The deeper lesson of S. 2803 is not that it failed—it never reached a floor vote—but why it had to be built the way it was.

Ervin could not simply declare the Attorney General free of presidential control; the Take Care Clause and the Appointments Clause stood in the way. So he reached for the only tool a statute affords: a for-cause removal limitation, plus a fixed term, propped against a line of precedent. Every load the structure had to bear was transferred onto authorities the Constitution assigns the President, secured by a clause a later Congress could repeal and a later Court could read away. The bill was a fifty-year-old preview of the trap every successor would fall into.

II. Booker’s Angle: Protecting Judges

Fast-forward to May 22, 2025. With federal judges reporting threats and at least one warning that the President might order the U.S. Marshals to stop protecting the bench, Senator Cory Booker—joined by Senators Schumer, Padilla, Schiff, and Wyden, with a House companion led by Representatives Swalwell, Raskin, and Johnson—introduced the MARSHALS Act (S. 1873).⁵ Note the name in bold: the lead House sponsor of the bill we will reach in Part III was a cosponsor of the bill in Part II. The reformers are largely a single, coherent group attacking the same problem from successive angles—which is exactly what makes their collective failure instructive rather than accidental.

The MARSHALS Act tris to solve the judge-protection problem by physically relocating the Marshals Service. It would amend Title 28 to transfer the USMS out of the executive branch and establish it as a bureau within the judicial branch, with the Director and each district marshal appointed by the Chief Justice of the United States in consultation with a governing Board.⁶ Where Ervin tried to insulate an executive officer in place, Booker tried to move the officers across the street and hand the keys to the Chief Justice.

This is a more aggressive move than Ervin’s, and it fails at a different point: the Appointments Clause.

The Marshals are not clerks; they carry weapons, make arrests, and use force when required. They are quintessential “Officers of the United States” under Buckley v. Valeo (1976), and principal officers who execute the laws must, under Edmond v. United States (1997) and United States v. Arthrex (2021), sit in a chain of supervision that runs to the President. One of the current Court’s most recent Appointments Clause decision, Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, Inc. (2025), sharpened exactly that framing: the constitutional touchstone is whether the officer’s chain of command runs to the President.⁷ A statute that makes the Chief Justice the appointing authority for an armed federal law-enforcement service—and routes that service’s supervision into the Judicial Branch—collides head-on with that requirement.

Here is the part that makes the MARSHALS Act the cleanest example of the three. It is not merely vulnerable; it is unfixable by amendment within the statutory form.

Every plausible repair—making the Director Senate-confirmed, restoring presidential removal, vesting appointment in a department head—reattaches the Marshals to the executive chain of command and thereby restores the precise political control the bill exists to sever. The constitutional defect and the legislative purpose are the same object viewed from opposite sides. You cannot cure one without destroying the other. The bill is, in this sense, perfectly self-defeating: its unconstitutionality is load-bearing.

That property—a reform whose every viable redraft defeats its own purpose—is the tell that you have hit a constitutional ceiling rather than a drafting problem. A drafting problem has a better draft. A structural ceiling does not. The MARSHALS Act has no better draft, because the thing it wants to do—sever an executive force-wielding agency from presidential control—is the one thing Article II, as currently construed by federal courts, forbids a statute from doing.

III. Raskin’s Wall, and the Solvent the Executive Built to Dissolve It

We now come to the most sophisticated attempt of all—and to the most brutal demonstration of the thesis.

On May 14, 2026, Representative Jamie Raskin (D‑MD) reintroduced the Protecting Our Democracy Act (H.R. 8831), the descendant of the 2021 package the House once passed.⁸ It is enormous—thirty-eight titles across four divisions—and it is, crucially, built almost entirely to avoid the walls that stopped Ervin and Booker.

Raskin plainly learned the lesson of the first two examples. The bill does not try to relocate the Department of Justice or insulate the Attorney General from removal. It does not move an armed agency into the Judicial Branch. Instead it works around the Article II core: it compels disclosure, mandates reporting, tolls statutes of limitations, creates civil-enforcement hooks, and bans the presidential self-pardon. Where it touches prosecution at all—Title XIV’s “Investigative Integrity Protection,” which would force a sworn judicial inquiry when the government moves to dismiss a prosecution of the President—it routes the oversight through an Article III court rather than trying to detach the prosecutor. It is the work of people who studied the ceiling and tried to legislate just beneath it.

For a generation, that lower altitude—transparency rather than control—was assumed to be safe. Congress’s power to make the executive branch document and disclose what it does was the one tool no one seriously thought a President could escape. The reasoning was simple: even if you cannot tell the President whom to prosecute, you can surely require that the record of what he did survive him.

For a generation, transparency was assumed to be the safe ground. That assumption died on April Fools’ Day, 2026.

On that date, Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser, head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the Justice Department, issued a fifty-two-page opinion concluding that the Presidential Records Act—the post-Watergate statute that, for the first time in American history, made presidential records public property and required their preservation—is facially unconstitutional, inseverable, and void in its entirety, such that “the President need not further comply with its dictates.”⁹

The opinion’s reasoning is not confined to records. It is a general-purpose weapon, and it is aimed directly at proposal’s like Raskin’s.

Gaiser’s argument runs in two interlocking steps.

First, Gaiser contends that Congress’s power to compel information from the President is not enumerated; it is an implied auxiliary of the legislative power, and under Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP (2020), demands directed at the President must clear a heightened bar requiring a specific, articulated legislative purpose. A statute that compels disclosure prospectively and in perpetuity, untethered from any contemporaneous legislative need, fails that test by design—it is, in the opinion’s words, a “sledgehammer” where the Constitution permits only a “scalpel.”

Second, and more sweeping, Gaiser asserts that the Presidency is “a constitutional office that Congress did not create and that Congress cannot abolish,” and therefore cannot regulate the way it regulates the statutory agencies it builds. That logic, the opinion makes explicit, reaches not only the President but “the President’s immediate staff, or a unit or individual of the Executive Office of the President whose function is to advise or assist the President,” because those advisers “exist by operation of the Constitution, not by the grace of Congress.”¹⁰

Now lay that template over H.R. 8831 and watch the “safe” provisions disintegrate.

The bill’s tax-transparency title would compel every future President to file ten years of returns—a standing, perpetual disclosure mandate on the office itself. Its visitor-log provision would force a rolling public database of who enters the White House. Its disclosure-of-Presidential-Emergency-Action-Documents provision reaches the most sensitive internal contingency planning of the office. And, most strikingly, its BEACON Act title would install a statutory Inspector General inside the Executive Office of the President.

On that last provision the Gaiser opinion does not merely supply a theory by analogy; it cites OLC’s own 1996 conclusion that an EOP Inspector General “would be unconstitutional, even if the Inspector General would be subject to the authority, direction, and control of the President.”¹¹ And here the detail that ought to give Raskin and his supporters the longest pause: that 1996 opinion was written not by some predecessor of the current administration but by President Clinton’s Office of Legal Counsel, in a memorandum signed by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Randolph D. Moss—later OLC’s chief under Clinton, now a federal judge.

The view that Congress cannot plant an inspector general inside the President’s own office is not a partisan weapon forged for this fight; it is settled, cross-administration executive-branch doctrine, held by Democratic and Republican OLCs alike. The single most structurally ambitious transparency provision in Raskin’s bill is one the executive’s own legal canon—written by the reformers’ own side—had already declared dead, three decades before the bill was introduced.

And here the provenance matters more than it first appears.

That 1996 memo was not the product of a hostile or like-minded administration straining to expand presidential power for its own convenience. It was issued by President Clinton’s OLC, authored by Randolph Moss—a Democratic-administration lawyer who would later be appointed to the federal bench by President Obama, and who in 2000 wrote the companion OLC opinion concluding that a sitting President cannot be indicted.¹²

The proposition that Congress cannot plant an inspector general inside the President’s own office is therefore not a partisan invention of the current Justice Department. It is a bipartisan executive-branch consensus, resting on the same Article II premise—that Congress may not impede the President’s performance of his constitutional functions—that runs through both Moss’s work and Gaiser’s. When the sitting administration reaches for that memo, it is not manufacturing a theory; it is collecting a debt that the reformers’ own side helped underwrite.

The crucial move—the one that separates this example from the first two—is the remedy.

Ervin’s bill would have been tested in court; Booker’s would be tested in court. Gaiser’s opinion needs no court. It ends by invoking the President’s asserted authority to “decline to enforce statutes he views as unconstitutional.”¹³

The PRA was not struck down by a judge. It was nullified by a memorandum. And the same mechanism is available, the moment the ink is dry, against any provision of H.R. 8831 that compels the President or his office to disclose anything. The reformers’ last safe harbor turns out to be defended only by the executive’s willingness to respect it—which is precisely the willingness the reform was meant to stop relying on.

One must be precise here, because precision is what makes the argument durable.

Gaiser does not claim Congress can never obtain presidential information. The opinion carefully preserves the targeted, purpose-specific subpoena and the give-and-take of the accommodation process; its quarrel is with the standing, prospective, suspicionless mandate. That refinement does not rescue Raskin’s bill—it indicts it, because the disclosure titles that form the bill’s spine are precisely standing, prospective mandates on the office. The drafters chose the one form of transparency the opinion was built to defeat. But it does mean the honest version of the thesis is narrow and therefore strong: the claim is not that Congress is powerless, but that the standing structural reforms—the kind that actually future-proof against a future officeholder—are exactly the kind a statute cannot secure.

IV. Three Reform Efforts, Same Doomed Outcome

Step back and the architecture of the failure comes into view.

Ervin was stopped by the removal power. Booker was stopped by the Appointments Clause. Raskin is stopped—preemptively, without litigation—by the executive’s claimed power of constitutional self-help. Three different mechanisms, but a single underlying principle: under the unitary-executive jurisprudence the Court has built from Seila Law through Trump v. United States (2024), the President’s authority over the execution of federal law—and now over the very information that would document that execution—is treated as a constitutional core that ordinary legislation cannot reach.¹⁴

This is why the “future-proofing” ambition is the part that fails most reliably.

A statute aimed at a present abuse can sometimes work, because it can be specific: a targeted subpoena, a particular appropriations rider, a narrow disclosure tied to identified legislation. But future-proofing requires exactly what the doctrine forbids—a standing, prospective, suspicionless constraint that binds the office regardless of who holds it.

Ervin’s permanent independent DOJ, Booker’s permanent relocation of the Marshals, Raskin’s permanent disclosure regime: each is structural and forward-looking by necessity, and each is therefore maximally exposed. The more a reform tries to bind the office rather than the officer, the more squarely it lands in the zone the Supreme Court and the OLC have walled off.

There is a grim irony threaded through all three episodes. Sam Ervin invoked Watergate to argue that the Department must be made independent. The Gaiser opinion invokes Watergate from the other direction—treating the post-Nixon Presidential Records Act as the historical aberration to be undone, a “minor crack” that became a “major fissure.” The same scandal that launched the reform project is now cited as the reason to dismantle it. Watergate produced the statutes; the unitary-executive counter-revolution is unwinding them one by one.

The defect in every statutory reform is that it must be interpreted and enforced by an executive branch the reform is designed to constrain. Ervin’s independent Attorney General would still have been nominated by the President. Booker’s Marshals would still, in any constitutional redraft, answer up the executive chain. Raskin’s disclosure mandates are enforced—or declined—by a Department of Justice the President controls, under constitutional opinions written by an OLC the President controls. And the institutional convictions that doom provisions like the EOP inspector general do not change with the party in power: it was Clinton’s OLC, not Trump’s, that first declared such an office unconstitutional. A statute that depends on the good faith—or even the settled constitutional self-understanding—of the official it restrains has not restrained him; it has merely written down a request.

V. The Only Wall That Holds

The thing that distinguishes a constitutional amendment from every statute surveyed here is that it cannot be narrowed by Seila Law, evaded by the Appointments Clause, or declared void by an OLC opinion. It is not an implied auxiliary of some enumerated power that a court can cabin; it is the supreme law the courts are bound to apply. It does not depend on the President’s willingness to comply, because it is not the President’s to interpret away. The text changes, and the executive’s lawyers must work within it rather than around it.

This is not a counsel of despair about the reformers’ instincts—those instincts are sound, the people who’ve offered them were and are loyal to the constitutional Republic, and the threat they perceive is real and present. It is a counsel about the choice of instrument.

Saxbe said it to Ervin in 1974: it could not be done without a constitutional amendment. The MARSHALS Act proves it again in 2025, as it is unfixable in statutory form. And the Gaiser opinion proved it a third time in 2026, by showing that even the transparency fallback can be dissolved by memorandum. Three statute-based reform proposals three decades apart offered in the same spirit–all incapable of achieving their intended goal, primarily due to a defective constitutional design made worse by multiple Supreme Court decisions and the base desire for maximum power by successive American chief executives and those serving them.

The reformers keep building walls because the danger is real. The walls keep coming down because they are made of the wrong material. There is one material the executive cannot dissolve, because the executive does not own it: the text of the Constitution itself. If the Republic is to be future-proofed against another Nixon—or another Trump—that is the only quarry left to build from.

A page of history, Justice Holmes wrote, is worth a volume of logic. The Gaiser opinion quotes him to argue that two centuries of presidential control over records should defeat the modern statute. The same page of history, read forward instead of backward, teaches the opposite lesson: that for fifty years reformers have tried to bind the office by statute, and for fifty years the office has slipped the knot. The logic of that history points to the amendment as the knot that is unbreakable. In a future edition of The Sentinel, I’ll lay out the details of what such an amendment should like.

The U.S. financial regulatory regime failed catastrophically in 2008. The financial crisis was, at its heart, a classic bank run. Financial institutions lost some money on their assets. People ran to pull their deposits and other short-term investments, leading to a wave of failures. Only a $475 billion bailout from the Treasury Department kept the biggest banks from failing and avoided complete financial collapse.

In the wake of this disaster, leaders had the decency to admit that regulation failed and reforms were needed. But the resulting changes — the Dodd-Frank law and the Fed’s subsidiary regulation — simply piled on the previous approach that focused on managing asset riskiness.

The focus should instead have been on run-prone liabilities. Corporate assets such as data centers and rockets are far riskier than bank assets such as loans and debt securities. Why are the safer assets so much more heavily regulated? Because tech companies are financed by equity. When shareholders lose money, it is not a systemic crisis. Banks are financed with short-term debt (deposits) that can suffer contagious runs and invite government rescues.

The Dodd-Frank reforms were supposed to end bailouts. But in the turmoil of 2020, skeptics were proved right when the Fed and Treasury undertook a second bailout. The central bank intervened in Treasury markets, bailed out money market funds, lent directly to cities and states, and put a floor on corporate debt prices.

In 2023, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, leading to another bailout. The bank issued large uninsured deposits and invested in long-term Treasurys. When interest rates rose, the value of those Treasurys fell and depositors ran. To stop the run, the Fed and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. guaranteed uninsured deposits. That guarantee implicitly extends across the banking system — nearly $9 trillion.

Absent that support, many more banks might have gone under. The post-2008 supervisory apparatus — stress tests, liquidity rules, supervisory teams and model-based oversight — missed an elephant in the room: simple interest-rate risk matched to uninsured deposits. It has failed.

The SVB affair was fueled by earlier Fed errors. In the 2010s, banks tried to create segregated accounts and narrow banks. Both innovations back deposits entirely with reserves, eliminating runs and the need for deposit insurance and bailouts. By giving large depositors a risk-free place to park money, they would have forestalled the SVB fiasco. But the Fed has not allowed either innovation, in part to protect the profitable deposit franchise of big banks. Stablecoins — cryptocurrencies tied to tangible assets — are now entering to try to provide the same service, but so far are hobbled because they are not allowed to pay interest.

In the face of onerous regulation, banks retreated from making loans. Fintech companies and private credit stepped in. These unregulated non-banks voluntarily fund themselves with stable long-term financing and substantially more equity. Fintech companies quickly sell off their loans and hold little risk.

Instead of embracing these crisis-insulated institutions, the Fed is considering a reduction in already low bank capital requirements, to help banks recover lost market share. At the Fed, deregulation has come to mean less capital, not fewer rules.

The Fed cannot rewrite Dodd-Frank by itself — only Congress can do that. But the central bank can revise the subsidiary regulations and review its discretionary implementations. Periodically sunsetting and reviewing each rule would be a good start.

Warsh need not reform the big banks. He can instead allow new and innovative competitors to emerge that provide financial services without run-prone funding. He should focus on simple truths: A crisis is a run and only a run is a crisis. Somebody losing money on a risky investment is not a crisis.

Detailed plans to transition to a safe, deregulated and innovative financial system are sitting on the shelf. Risky investments should be funded by equity and long-term debt. Deposits and other runnable liabilities should be backed by safe, liquid assets or much larger capital cushions. Such plans can end private sector financial crises forever. They just need a visionary leader who is willing to put the plans into place.

There is something deeply unserious about how Washington talks about nicotine. Cigarettes, the most dangerous products in the category, remain widely available. Smoke-free alternatives, however, are often treated as if their very existence is beyond the pale. That disconnect has fueled a regulatory debate that is too often driven by moral panic over nicotine rather than by outcomes.

The debate has drifted far from outcome-based public health policy.

The FDA’s recent approval of several flavored smoke-free products has sparked outrage from familiar quarters, with critics arguing that any legal pathway for flavored alternatives is inherently reckless. Sen. Dick Durbin (D‑IL) posted on X that “these products addict children & expose them to harmful chemicals.”

An adult smoker standing at a convenience-store counter does not face an abstract policy debate. That person faces real choices: continue smoking cigarettes, buy an illicit product of uncertain origin, or try a legal alternative that has undergone review. Any regulatory system that ignores those real-world choices loses touch with reality.

The public health standard Congress created recognizes exactly that reality. The FDA is supposed to assess effects on the population as a whole, not pretend that adult smokers do not exist. That requires regulators to weigh risks to youth while also accounting for the possible benefits of moving adult smokers away from combustible cigarettes, which remain uniquely deadly.

Studies suggest that nicotine e‑cigarettes are the most effective tobacco cessation tools. Surveys of adult tobacco smokers reveal that they find it easier to quit with flavored vapes. Much of the evidence suggests that vaping has displaced rather than expanded youth tobacco use. Youth smoking rates fell dramatically during the rise of e‑cigarettes, and both youth smoking and youth vaping have declined in recent years, reaching an all-time low in 2025.

A credible regulatory system requires a legal, science-based pathway for the appropriate review of smoke-free products.

Without such a pathway, the market moves into the shadows. Unauthorized products continue to flood convenience stores, gas stations, and online sellers. Adults are left with fewer regulated options, and youth protections become harder to enforce. In this scenario, the government signals that legal compliance is for suckers, while the illicit market sets the terms.

Few would support allowing children access to nicotine products. That is why strict enforcement, age-verification measures, marketing restrictions, and retailer accountability all matter. But public policy for adults should not be built around standards designed for minors. Nor should the response be to erase all distinctions between legal and illegal products or between combustible cigarettes and smoke-free alternatives. Public health is not advanced by pretending those differences are meaningless.

Too much of this debate has devolved into performance and moral signaling. Support a lawful pathway for smoke-free alternatives, and you are accused of not caring about kids. Suggest that adults should have access to lower-risk options, and you are treated as if you have abandoned public health entirely. That framing may generate applause and outrage, but it is no substitute for serious policymaking.

Adults who smoke deserve a system that is honest, consistent, and grounded in evidence. They need a government that can distinguish between products that meet the legal standard and those that do not. And they need policymakers willing to admit that reducing smoking-related disease sometimes requires embracing imperfect solutions that are better than the status quo.

The FDA should be judged on whether it builds a system that protects youth, respects the law, and gives adult smokers a realistic pathway away from combustible cigarettes. That is what serious regulation looks like.

The country needs policymakers willing to confront the realities of nicotine use, consumer behavior, and illicit markets.

This year marks the 250^th anniversary of both the nation and a foundational book for America’s incredible free-market economy: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Most people know it as an economics book—covering fundamental concepts like the “invisible hand,” comparative advantage, the gains from specialization, the perils of mercantilism, the trade balance, and much more. And those lessons, many of which we’ve covered here at The Dispatch, are certainly important. Yet as I skimmed through the book in preparation for my talk this week, I was repeatedly struck by how The Wealth of Nations is also a deeply, savagely political book, with practical insights into how commercial policy really gets made—insights that found a home in modern public choice theory and are evident across generations of U.S. trade politics.

Three quotes from the book capture some of Smith’s most salient political ideas—ones that show him not as an 18^th-century economist but as a keen political theorist and someone who could be describing Washington today, not Scotland 250 years ago.

‘A conspiracy against the publick.’

The first quote may be Smith’s most famous line about politics and policy, though it’s frequently misunderstood. In Book I of The Wealth of Nations, he wrote:

The oft-ignored second half of this quote makes clear that, contrary to many modern claims, Smith isn’t here calling for government antitrust cops to break up meetings among private businesses. Instead, he’s making a political economy point: Because industry naturally gravitates toward enriching itself at consumers’ expense (via higher prices), government policy shouldn’t facilitate or encourage such meetings.

Yet this is precisely what U.S. trade policy does—and has done for centuries now.

In the early days of the republic (back when government was really small), tariffs were the primary means of both raising revenue and doling out “rents” to businesses that organized and lobbied for them. The wonderfully named Tariff of Abominations (1828) was heavily influenced by Northern textile and iron producers. The post-Civil War decades were a golden age of tariff rent-seeking, with the U.S. iron, steel, wool, and sugar industries essentially writing U.S. tariff schedules. As I’ve documented at Cato and as Dartmouth economic historian Douglas Irwin thoroughly chronicles in his great book, Clashing Over Commerce, 19^th-century tariff lobbying was in many respects an incubator for the entire U.S. lobbying and interest-group machine that exists today. And it began because American trade policy was openly auctioned off to the highest bidder.

Offer the rents, and the rents get sought.

The pinnacle of 20^th-century congressional tariff cronyism is the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. As economic historian Phillip Magness has documented, tariff-loving congressional Republicans gave industry lobbyists an opportunity for even more price-hiking import protection, and the latter descended on Congress en masse: “Special interests flooded committee rooms, exchanging cash under the table for favorable rates to insulate themselves from foreign competitors amid the unfolding [economic] downturn.” Almost everyone got his own tariff line item, and average tariff rates on dutiable imports hit almost 50 percent, triggering a retaliatory spiral that deepened the Great Depression.

The Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 (RTAA) was Congress’ institutional attempt to restrain itself by delegating trade negotiations and tariff authority to the executive, and it was a move Adam Smith would likely have applauded. The idea was to reduce corporate rent-seeking in Congress by taking tariff rate-setting out of legislators’ hands and by getting U.S. exporters to balance protectionist interest groups by conditioning new market access abroad on continued openness to imports.

That reform worked—for a while. Legislated tariff rates declined, and 19^th-century tariff corruption abated. But America’s protectionist lobbying machine didn’t disappear; it adapted to match the new kinds of protectionism that the government was offering up. And in the 1960s it got a powerful legal backstop: the Noerr-Pennington doctrine. Established by a series of Supreme Court decisions, it held that joint corporate lobbying for policy—even explicitly anticompetitive (price-hiking) policy—is constitutionally protected First Amendment activity and thus immune from antitrust liability. The doctrine is certainly defensible on First Amendment grounds (and, arguably, Smith’s own sense of “liberty and justice”), but it effectively blessed companies’ organized “conspiracy against the publick”—as long they conspired in Washington instead of a corporate boardroom.

The modern trade lobbying complex that Noerr-Pennington enabled is vast and effective. As Cato’s Clark Packard and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon documented in a paper last year, “Big Steel”—through the American Iron and Steel Institute, union groups, and even certain industry-run “think tanks”—has probably won more protective measures than any other U.S. industry. And, far from satiating the industry, each tariff, subsidy, or mandate simply spawned Big Steel’s demands for more. Over the last decade, former steel executives and lawyers have populated numerous high-level offices across the U.S. government.

Then there’s “Big Sugar,” a textbook legal cartel enabled by government price supports and quotas. Everyone in Washington knows that the U.S. sugar program is a costly debacle, but sugar cane and beet growers are concentrated in a handful of electoral swing states, and they’ve organized with U.S. corn growers who benefit from the sugar alternative high-fructose corn syrup. As former House Speaker John Boehner thus memorably put it in his book, members of Congress quickly learn that sugar policy is terrible, but they also learn not to “f—k with” Big Sugar.

These groups certainly aren’t alone. Big Dairy has lobbied successfully for tariff-rate quotas and marketing orders that ring-fence the domestic market and helped cause the 2022 infant formula crisis. Big Ship—a coalition of unions, shippers, and shipbuilders—has prevented meaningful reform of the Jones Act for over a century, even as building vessels here costs four to five times world market prices and as U.S. refineries import crude from Saudi Arabia and Nigeria instead of Texas. Scratch almost any product protected by special import barriers today—textiles and apparel, shrimp, catfish, tomatoes, aluminum, lumber, kitchen cabinets, whatever—and you’ll find an organized interest group underneath, doing exactly what Smith observed in 1776.

And, far from hiding their “conspiracy against the publick,” the organizations openly flaunt it:

‘The most suspicious attention.’

The second Smith quote continues the theme of corporate influence but also considers the public’s reaction. It’s also from Book I:

Here, Smith is implicitly addressing the policy challenge of “rational ignorance”: Voters and consumers have little incentive to learn the details of complex commercial legislation because the per-person cost of any single policy is small, while the cost of becoming informed is high. Industry insiders (“dealers”), by contrast, know every comma of every relevant law and work actively to bury protectionism in legislation that nobody has time to read. Elected officials—interested in reelection instead of the “public interest”—are therefore highly likely to craft commercial legislation benefiting the latter and ignoring the former. Hence, the need for intense public skepticism and scrutiny, something politicians and cronies are keen to avoid.

History is again littered with examples of the problem Smith identified. Smoot-Hawley’s 20,000-plus tariff line items were adjusted largely in committee, most with industry input and without floor debate. Many of today’s tariff peaks—on apparel, footwear, and more—are direct descendants of Smoot-Hawley, surviving decades of U.S. trade policy reforms without notice or revision. Congress has repeatedly amended “trade remedy” rules and Buy American restrictions to help Big Steel and other industry groups. The Jones Act lobby has repeatedly narrowed the conditions for waiving the law. The Byrd Amendment—quietly slipped into a large omnibus appropriations bill in 2000—required that antidumping duties be paid directly to the companies that had filed the petitions for them (it’s protection plus a subsidy!). And don’t even get me started on the farm bill and congressional biofuels policy.

As the above quote indicates, this is precisely the type of protectionism we should expect to be stuffed into must-pass bills that nobody reads. Yet not even the cynical Adam Smith could fully anticipate the scope of the problem today. Smith imagined protectionism as requiring a visible legislative act: a British merchant seeking protection had to petition Parliament directly. And that’s basically how it worked in the United States before World War II, with interest groups lobbying Congress.

Today things are different, with the RTAA pushing almost all routine protectionism to the executive branch and a permanent bureaucracy that can impose, modify, and perpetuate import barriers through regulatory action, executive orders, emergency declarations, and agency guidance—often without a single congressional floor vote. Hundreds of trade remedy measures (mainly, antidumping duties and countervailing duties) are set at the Commerce Department and the International Trade Commission. Section 232 “national security” tariffs go through Commerce. Section 301 restrictions go through the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. The Department of Agriculture manages agricultural “tariff rate quotas” and marketing orders. Maritime protectionism is administered through the Maritime Administration, and tariff classification and enforcement is managed by Customs and Border Protection.

Each legal regime, and others like them, gives industry groups an opaque and byzantine opportunity to lobby an agency for new protection from import competition—and to “capture” that agency through repeat interactions. Clueless outsiders don’t stand a chance.

The agencies themselves, meanwhile, are often hardwired to cater to the companies they supposedly regulate. USTR’s Industry Trade Advisory Committee system (ITACs) formally embeds industry representatives in U.S. trade negotiating positions. Steel and aluminum producers have dedicated contacts at Commerce’s Import Administration. Textile companies have their own office at USTR. USDA has special offices for dairy and other foods, managing price supports, marketing orders, supply controls, and import quotas. And, to the extent Congress is involved in any of this, it’s usually one of the dedicated industry caucuses—the Steel Caucus, the Textile Caucus, and so on— trying to make these laws even more protectionist.

President Donald Trump, of course, has turned this all up to 11, imposing a litany of new tariffs under various laws—some routine, some novel—and centralizing tariff-setting in the White House via an even more opaque and discretionary system. As of January 2026, more than half of all U.S. imports were subject to one or more special tariff measures implemented without Congress. Unsurprisingly, trade lobbying has skyrocketed as firms jockey for exemptions and new restrictions on foreign competition— just as Smith would expect:

Smith called on the public to devote “most suspicious attention” to tariffs and other commercial regulations—and for very good reason. Unfortunately, the administrative state and U.S. trade law make such scrutiny exceedingly difficult, if not impossible.

‘As absurd as to expect that Oceana or Utopia should ever be established.’

The third and final quote is Smith’s most pessimistic—and most prescient. This is from Book IV:

Contrary to the common characterization of Adam Smith as a naïve ideologue, we see here that he understood well the deep structural obstacles to free trade from both the public and, more importantly, from organized industry. The latter’s resistance is classic public choice: Protectionism’s concentrated benefits and diffuse costs mean that protected industries will fight like hell for trade protection—and against reforms. Companies and workers, as well as their communities, suppliers, and political representatives, also capitalize gains from tariffs as higher asset values, wages, and political capital—meaning that these groups all stand to lose real money if protection is removed (the so-called “transitional gains trap”).

Meanwhile, the benefits of trade liberalization—lower prices, more efficient resource allocation, dynamic gains, economic growth, etc.—are surely real and, in fact, much larger in the aggregate than those won by the protectionist groups. But these improvements are smaller per person, invisible, and unorganized. So, we don’t lift a finger.

This dynamic means that it’s extraordinarily hard to repeal protectionist policies, even ones that are universally acknowledged as costly and failed. And the U.S. record again bears this out. We still impose tariffs of almost 50 percent on cheap shoes even though the policy clearly harms American consumers (especially poor and large households) and the U.S. has essentially no cheap shoe industry. Big Steel has won a century of protective measures yet remains a global laggard while downstream manufacturers shrivel due to artificially high input costs. The Jones Act has presided over the long and slow degradation of U.S. commercial shipbuilding and the merchant marine, but even emergency waivers are hard to come by because of a notorious Big Ship blockade (get it?). Heck, even after it was clear that U.S. tariff and nontariff barriers helped cause the 2022 baby formula crisis, those barriers snapped right back into place once most people stopped paying attention—thanks in large part to the efforts of Big Dairy.

Studies repeatedly show that protection imposes large consumer costs while failing to produce a thriving industry, yet it persists in numerous forms because the beneficiaries fight to keep it while everyone else barely notices. Unfortunately, this same political economy will make it difficult to reform Trump’s new tariffs. Even with strong economic evidence of harm and terrible polling, it’s bound to be an uphill climb.

So, what now?

Adam Smith was a pragmatist, if not a pessimist, when it came to politics and free trade policy in practice. But he also spent hundreds of pages optimistically documenting why free trade and free markets were worth fighting for, and his political insights point toward some of the ways advocates can wage that fight.

First, there’s an unceasing need for education and transparency. Generating a “most suspicious attention” among the voting public requires shining light on U.S. protectionism and its hidden costs. Free market organizations do this every day. We at Cato, for example, just created the Jones Act waiver tracker (plug!) to show all the commerce—American trade of American goods—that President Trump’s recent waiver has unleashed (much to Big Ship’s chagrin). Our hope is that it’ll help people see some of the law’s very real harms, be increasingly skeptical of its purported benefits, and maybe even support future efforts to reform it. More of this kind of sunlight is surely needed.

But sunlight alone isn’t enough. The only long-term way to stop the lobbying machines from seeking protectionist rents is to stop offering them so freely. And that requires new institutional checks on the application of tariffs and other protectionist measures—legal provisions that make clear to interest groups that U.S. trade policy isn’t up for grabs. Laws must be amended to include automatic sunset provisions, mandatory cost-benefit analyses, meaningful procedural constraints, hard publication requirements, and genuine judicial review of executive-branch trade actions (instead of near-total deference). As public choice pioneer James Buchanan might remind us, the answer isn’t just better politicians and better arguments; it’s better rules.

This kind of root-and-branch reform isn’t easy to enact, but it’s what two and a half centuries of political economy demands.

Markets FTW

German soccer fan Freddy is in the United States for the World Cup, and he’s live-tweeting his daily adventures—and his amazement at American abundance (including Buc-ee’s).

DUDE LMAO THIS IS A GAS STATION😭😭😭 pic​.twit​ter​.com/​Y​Y​F​m​W​JiCQa

— Freddy🇩🇪 (@FreddyLA7) June 10, 2026

Chart(s) of the Week

U.S. tariff revenue went negative last month:

Shale gas consumer savings:

Small businesses are paying a lot in tariffs:

The Fifth Amendment’s takings clause stipulates that the government may not take “private property” for public use without “just compensation.” There is a long-standing debate over the extent to which regulations that constrain the use of property but don’t seize it outright qualify as takings. Virtually all jurists and legal scholars, however, agree that outright confiscation does.

Very limited uncompensated seizures of apartment buildings might be justified under the so-called police-power exception to takings liability, which permits the government to restrict uses that pose a serious threat to public health or safety. New York 7A program allows the city to take over the administration of dangerously unsafe rental properties. Yet that applies only to extreme cases — fewer than 30 properties as of fiscal 2024 — and generally doesn’t result in permanent confiscation. The mayor’s proposal is far more expansive.

If the government could expropriate property at will, it could pursue widespread seizure from anyone using property in ways the party in power disapproves of, or for purposes of transferring it to cronies and favored constituencies. Such abuses are common in authoritarian states, which is one reason the foudners inserted the clause into the Bill of Rights in 1791. James Madison and others supported it in part because of arbitrary confiscation by British authorities.

The mayor’s proposal doesn’t just violate the federal and state constitutions, which have nearly identical restrictions on takings. It would also make the city’s shortages worse. Faced with the prospect of potential expropriation, many owners would likely withdraw properties from the market or not list them in the first place. New York’s rent-stabilization laws have already induced owners to abandon thousands of apartments that can’t be profitably maintained or upgraded. The mayor seeks to make city policy more severe by “freezing” rents for hundreds of thousands of units, preventing even the modest increases permitted under current law.

As Jason Furman, formerman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, told this paper in 2024: “Rent control has been about as disgraced as any economic policy in the tool kit.” That year a meta-analysis of studies in the Journal of Housing Economics found that rent control greatly reduces the quantity and quality of available housing by deterring owners from building units and putting them on the market.

The mayor often decries the city’s “systemic inequities” that have made living there more onerous. A great opportunity to make good on that rhetoric would be to target the real barriers to access: the exclusionary zoning rules that severely limit the amount and types of housing that can be built on most of the city’s residential land. Economists and land-use scholars across the political spectrum recognize that these restrictions are the main constraints on supply. Progressive legal scholar Joshua Braver and I have argued that such restrictions also violate the takings clause The right to property enshrined in the Fifth Amendment includes the right to use property, which severe limitations on construction abridge.

Mamdani has rightly praised cities like Austin, Minneapolis and Auckland, New Zealand, which have seen the virtue in empowering private owners to build new housing. Such YIMBY — or “yes in my backyard” — zoning deregulation reliably increases supply and reduces prices. The “Block by Block” plan includes a few steps in this direction, such as aiming to make it easier to build new near public transit. But the effect of such measures would be muted by expropriation and expanded rent control. The bulk of the plan involves increasing City Hall’s power, despite government-owned housing’s terrible record everywhere it has been tried.

The political right has its own snake-oil housing policies. Tariffs and mass deportation of immigrants make housing more expensive by increasing the price of building materials and the costs of construction, respectively. Some on both the right and left also advocate barring institutional investors from owning rental properties, even though that, too, is likely to reduce the availability of housing options.

But counterproductive right-wing policies don’t justify Mamdani’s. To alleviate the “deepening housing crisis,” stop digging a hole with more government control of the kind that caused it in the first place. The better course is to respect constitutional property rights and let landowners build housing as they wish.

The Callais decision has some flaws. And the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has made some serious errors in other cases, such as the Trump presidential immunity decision. But court-packing remains a dangerous idea that Americans across the political spectrum should reject. Callais is not without merit, and—at the very least—not as bad as its most strident critics claim. More generally, the Supreme Court is far from being a pure “MAGA” Court and has, in fact, constrained the Trump administration’s abuses on several important fronts, and has allowed lower courts to constrain it elsewhere. Court-packing would create a slippery slope to the destruction of judicial review, thereby benefiting power-grabbing presidents like Trump, and imperiling constitutional rights, particularly those of minority groups. To the extent Callais is a problem, it can be better addressed by steps such as banning gerrymandering. There are also better remedies for various other shortcomings of the Court, such as enacting term limits and imposing an ethics code.

Rights and Wrongs of Callais

Callais is certainly deserving of some criticism. But it is not the abomination many critics depict it as. Most obviously, it is not the death of the VRA or close to it. The act’s provisions barring states from depriving people of the right to vote based on their race remain fully in effect. The same goes for the use of facially neutral disenfranchisement tools historically utilized to remove Black voters from the rolls, such as literacy tests, which remain banned.

Callais does make it very difficult—perhaps almost impossible—to use the VRA to deliberately create majority-minority districts in response to “vote dilution,” which reduces the power of minority voters. Under previous Supreme Court precedent, such districts could be and were created in a wide range of circumstances in which minority influence might otherwise be diluted in the district line-drawing process, even in circumstances where there was no evidence of deliberate racial discrimination.

The VRA enforces the 15th Amendment, which mandates that “[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The ban on racial discrimination with respect to voting is categorical, and does not make any exception for racial gerrymandering intended to increase minority representation, rather than reduce it.

Deliberate racial gerrymandering for purposes of creating majority-minority districts is at odds with this categorical anti-discrimination rule. At the very least, it should be considered presumptively unconstitutional. Callais was right to construe the VRA to accord with such a strong presumption; long-standing precedent requires courts to construe federal statutes in ways that avoid constitutional problems.

Nonetheless, there are entirely reasonable concerns about Callais. The Court’s neutering of long-standing VRA precedent goes against the equally strong presumption against reversing statutory precedent. The majority’s attempt to elide this by claiming they are not really reversing the precedents in question is far from persuasive. The timing of the decision is also problematic, coming just a few months before the 2026 midterm elections. It has set off a gerrymandering scramble by southern red states seeking to increase the number of Republican seats.

It is also reasonable to fear—as Justice Elena Kagan argues in her dissent—that Callais might open the door to anti-Black racial gerrymandering by state legislatures. Because most Black voters support Democrats, race can be used as a proxy for partisan alignment. Callais could end up making it easier for GOP state legislatures to use race in this way, despite the fact that the ruling indicates intentional racial discrimination in redistricting remains illegal. Just this week, in Allen v. Milligan III, the conservative majority in the Supreme Court blocked a trial court ruling against Alabama’s attempt at mid-decade gerrymandering. A three-judge federal district court panel—including two Republican Trump appointees—had ruled that Alabama “intentionally discriminated against Black voters based on race.”

Allen is a short “shadow docket” ruling, with relatively little explanation of its reasoning. Nonetheless, many election-law experts fear that it is a sign that the Supreme Court will interpret Callais in ways that will make it difficult to block state legislatures’ use of race as a proxy for partisan alignment.

The Supreme Court Is Not a MAGA Rubber-Stamp

In addition to citing Callais, advocates of court-packing also contend that the Court is generally a rubber-stamp for Trump and his MAGA agenda. Such claims are falsified by the reality that the Court has in fact ruled against Trump and the MAGA right on several key issues. In Learning Resources v. Trump (a case I helped litigate), the Court struck down Trump’s massive power grab attempting to use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose the highest tariff schedule since that which notoriously exacerbated the Great Depression. The Court emphasized that the president does not have the authority to “impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time,” thereby significantly constraining Trump’s power to impose the MAGA protectionist agenda.

In other cases, the Court blocked Trump’s effort to use the National Guard against blue states (leading him to abandon the effort), and twice it used the “shadow docket” to block deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and signal that courts could review Trump’s invocation of that law (though without issuing a definitive ruling on whether that wartime statute can be used as a tool of peacetime mass deportation). If the oral argument held in April is any indication, the Court will likely invalidate Trump’s attempts to deny birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visa holders. These cases all involve major abuses of power by Trump, often on issues central to the MAGA agenda, such as nativist hostility to immigration and trade. The Court also ruled against Trump and MAGA in a number of key cases that arose during Trump’s first term and in the Biden years, most notably rejecting his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Obviously, the Court’s conservative justices have also issued some flawed rulings supporting Trump’s positions. Notable examples include the Trump v. United States presidential immunity ruling (which, however, did not give the president categorical immunity from prosecution for all actions taken while in office); a seriously flawed ruling constraining universal injunctions; and Trump v. Hawaii, the awful 2018 anti-Muslim “travel ban” case. I do not claim that the Court always rules against Trump when it should, or otherwise gets every issue right. Far from it. But the justices have constrained Trump and the GOP on a number of key issues and cannot be considered mere rubber stamps for MAGA. Absent the Court’s intervention, Trump would have gotten away with several additional major unconstitutional actions and abuses of power.

Perils of Court-Packing

Whatever the shortcomings of the current Supreme Court, court-packing would make things worse. If the Democrats increase the size of the Court (current proposals call for four new justices in order to flip the current 6–3 conservative majority to a 7–6 progressive one), Republicans will surely respond in kind as soon as they get the chance. The end result is that both parties will pack the Court anytime they get simultaneous control of the White House and both houses of Congress. That, in turn, would largely destroy the institution of judicial review. The Supreme Court would no longer be able to strike down laws and regulations backed by the party that controls the White House and Congress. This would destroy the Court’s ability to protect constitutional rights and enforce limits on government power against dominant political majorities.

The damage is unlikely to be limited to the Supreme Court. If the norm against court-packing is undermined, dominant political majorities could similarly move to pack the lower courts—the institutions that hear the vast majority of federal cases. The modern debate over court-packing was, in fact, in large part kicked off by prominent conservative law Professor Steve Calabresi’s 2017 article (which I critiqued at the time) urging Republicans to pack the lower courts. Calabresi’s plan was widely criticized at the time, and congressional Republicans did not seriously pursue it. But such proposals are likely to attract much greater support in the aftermath of any successful packing of the Supreme Court. As legal scholar Steve Vladeck—a leading critic of the current Supreme Court majority—puts it, “Court expansion, whatever its short-term benefits, would touch off a race to the bottom that would serve only to undermine the ability of all federal courts to play their intended constitutional role in the long term.”

Even if the lower courts remain un-packed, for a time, a packed Supreme Court could severely undermine their ability to protect constitutional rights against the administration in power. Such a packed court could use the “shadow docket”—that is, emergency rulings—to block or summarily reverse lower-court rulings inimical to the administration in power, often without giving the cases any detailed consideration. Critics claim the current Court already protects Trump in this way. But, as Vladeck points out, the Court has in fact blocked or overturned only a small fraction of the many lower court rulings against Trump, thus enabling lower courts to significantly constrain the administration to a much greater extent than many appreciate. In immigration detention cases alone, for example, lower courts have ruled against the administration some 11,500 times, including many decisions issued by Republican-appointed judges. Vladeck notes that the administration has not even tried to seek Supreme Court intervention in the vast majority of these cases, likely because they know they would fail. A packed court would be much more aggressive in forestalling lower court rulings inimical to the party in power.

In addition to undermining protection for the constitutional rights of unpopular minorities, a packed judiciary would open the door to dangerous executive power grabs, such as Trump’s imposition of massive tariffs, and other abuses of emergency powers. It is difficult for Congress to prevent such efforts, as doing so requires a veto-proof two-thirds majority. A Congress controlled by the same party as the executive will usually not even try. Absent judicial constraints, such power grabs can seriously imperil the rule of law, by leaving major economic and social policy decisions increasingly subject to the whims of one person. It is no accident that court-packing is a standard tactic of illiberal would-be authoritarians such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

It would also imperil U.S. national security. Allowing one man to unilaterally break commitments to allies—through trade wars and other coercive measures—erodes the credibility that undergirds American power. Dismantling the rule of law carries severe economic consequences as well: investors, consumers, and businesses depend on stable, predictable rules to plan and operate, and without them, confidence is likely to falter and could even collapse. Economic weakness, in turn, compounds the damage to America’s standing in the world and leaves its national security further exposed.

Some Democrats argue that court-packing would simply be a proportional response to the GOP-controlled Senate’s actions in 2016 and 2020, refusing to consider a Democratic Supreme Court nominee in the former year, while rushing through future Justice Amy Coney Barrett in the latter. Democrats would be justified in responding to these actions in kind, by—for example—blocking a Trump Supreme Court nominee should they regain control of the Senate in the upcoming fall 2026 elections. But, as I have explained previously elsewhere, court-packing would be a major escalation over these sorts of actions.

Better Alternatives

A Democratic-controlled Congress and White House has many better options for addressing gerrymandering and various issues related to the Court. Most obviously, Congress could use its power under the Elections Clause of the Constitution to simply ban gerrymandering of congressional districts nationwide. The Supreme Court has noted that Congress has this power in its 2019 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause, which held (wrongly, in my view) that—unlike racial gerrymandering—partisan gerrymandering is a “political question” not subject to judicial review. While Congress might have a tough time figuring out what standard to use in constraining state legislative redistricting, any of several options would be better than simply letting state governments do whatever they want. And any Congress with a majority willing to enact court-packing is likely to be able to enact a ban on gerrymandering.

Congress could also go further and simply impose either proportional representation or a system of multimember districts. These approaches would eliminate gerrymandering more thoroughly than any reform of the single-member districting process. But they might be harder to persuade Congress to enact, because they would imperil the seats of many more current members of the House of Representatives.

Congress could also potentially legislate to address various concerns about the Court. Elsewhere, I have explained that Congress has the power to enact an ethics code, thereby dealing with complaints about the justices taking too many gifts from various private parties. It could also begin the process of imposing 18-year term limits on Supreme Court justices, thereby addressing concerns about justices exercising power for many decades on end. And, unlike court-packing, term limits would not destroy the institution of judicial review.

Term limits would, however, require a constitutional amendment to enact, which is extremely difficult to do. But the idea enjoys broad supermajority support from both experts and the general public (a recent poll finds 67 percent support, including large majorities of Democrats, independents, and Republicans), thereby making an amendment potentially feasible.

Such reforms would admittedly not achieve the goal of swiftly replacing the current conservative majority on the Court with a left-wing one. But the whole point of judicial independence is to ensure that the current political majority cannot bend the judiciary to its will anytime it wants. And progressives who want a judiciary that will protect various types of minority rights cannot achieve that goal by destroying the entire institution of judicial review.

Meanwhile, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan attended Friday prayers at Hagia Sophia, the Byzantine cathedral that was converted to a mosque after the Ottoman conquest, turned into a museum in 1935, and reconverted back to a mosque by Erdoğan in 2020. Later, he also spoke at a conference titled, “From the Conquest of Istanbul to the Conquest of Hearts,” where he hailed Ottoman Sultan Fatih Mehmed, the “glorious commander who conquered Istanbul at the age of 21,” as prophesied by none other than the Prophet Muhammad.

The overall message was unmistakable: The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople was not merely a historical episode but a living pillar of Turkish national identity – which, in Erdoğan’s conservative version, is predominantly defined by Islam.

Across the Aegean Sea, however, other eyes were watching – and not with admiration. Greek media described the commemorations, particularly the ceremonies at Hagia Sophia and the nationalist rhetoric surrounding them, as “provocative.” On social media, Greek nationalist accounts posted about how the fall of Constantinople was a dark episode marked by “violence, enslavement, and looting.” A Greek scholar, who often condemns “Turkish fascism,” criticized the conquest celebrations themselves as evidence of Turkey’s “dominant political culture steeped in anti-Western sentiment.” An analyst from Lebanon had a similar view, depicting the annual celebrations as “periodic reminder that Turkey is a civilizational enemy of the West.”

This annual ritual of grievance and celebration is familiar by now. Every May 29, both sides slip into their assigned roles – the triumphant and the bereaved, the celebrant and the mourner – in parallel narratives that seem hard to reconcile.

Yet there is a deeper irony lurking beneath these conflicting narratives, one that implicates both sides: The Ottomans themselves were more restrained, and more considerate of the sensitivities of others, than their self-proclaimed heirs are today.

The Sultan’s Wisdom

One piece of evidence comes from a little-known episode involving Sultan Abdülhamid II (who reigned from 1876 to 1909). The last Ottoman sultan to exercise genuine authority over a still-functioning empire, he still occupies a peculiar place in contemporary Turkish politics. He is enthusiastically championed by Erdoğan’s supporters and the broader Islamist-nationalist movement as a model of Muslim leadership. Across the Muslim world, too, he is widely respected as the last great caliph who defended Muslim lands against colonial encroachments.

Yet, in the real world, Abdülhamid II was considerate of not just Muslims but also the millions of non-Muslims – including Greeks – who were subjects of his vast empire. We get a glimpse of this from the memoirs of his private physician, Atıf Hüseyin Bey, published by Turkish historian M. Metin Hülagü in 2003 in Sultan II. Abdülhamid’in Sürgün Günleri (Sultan Abdülhamid II’s Days of Exile). Accordingly, the aged sultan – deposed by the nationalist Young Turks in April 1909 and kept under house arrest until his death in 1918 – shared many thoughts with his doctor, including deep concerns about the empire’s affairs. In June 1914, he lamented that “things are not going well with the Greeks,” stressing the importance of maintaining good relations with the Greek Ecumenical Patriarchate. He then said:

This was not merely diplomatic pragmatism. It reflected a fundamentally different philosophy of rule from what some of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s admirers practice today. Even in the age of Mehmed the Conqueror, the Ottoman Empire was not a nation-state in any modern sense. It was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious polity stretching from the Balkans to Yemen, encompassing Muslims, Christians, Jews, Armenians, Arabs, Kurds, Bulgarians, and Greeks. The survival of that vast enterprise depended, in part, on managing extraordinary diversity with a sense of respect for pluralism.

Ottomanism as Pluralism

Such pluralism had deep roots in the Ottoman Empire’s millet system, which recognized Christians and Jews as distinct “nations” within the empire, alongside Muslims. True, this was a hierarchical system in which Muslims were politically and legally dominant. But by the reign of Abdülhamid II, much progress was made towards müsavat, or “equality.” Liberal reforms – launched with the Tanzimat edict of 1839, deepened by the Islahat edict of 1856, and crowned by the Constitution of 1876 – had proclaimed the legal equality of all Ottoman subjects regardless of religion. Discriminatory measures such as the poll tax on non-Muslims were abolished, and Christian and Jewish communities gained the right to maintain and expand their own educational and religious institutions, to enter the bureaucracy, and even to serve in the Ottoman parliament.

One of the relics of this reform era was the Halki Seminary, which the Ecumenical Patriarchate opened in 1844 on a small island in the Sea of Marmara to train its clergy. Another was Robert College – the first American college established abroad – founded in 1863 by Protestant missionary Cyrus Hamlin and New York philanthropist Christopher Robert. (It also happens to be my own alma mater.) Yet another was the famous Ottoman red fez, which was popularized in the 1830s as a universal hat to be worn by all Ottoman men regardless of ethnicity or religion.

In other words, the “Ottomanism” of the late Ottoman Empire had little to do with Turkish nationalism – a post-Ottoman ideology that emerged in the twentieth century to establish and consolidate a nation-state for the Turks, themselves reconstructed from the Muslim remnants of the empire. Ottomanism was rather embodied in the famous words attributed to Sultan Mahmud II, the father of the Tanzimat era, and the grandfather of Abdülhamid II:

Yet, despite all its achievements, nineteenth-century Ottomanism tragically collapsed in the first quarter of the twentieth. What destroyed it – and ultimately replaced it – was a bloody arena of competing nationalisms that tore apart an ancient ethnic and religious mosaic, each movement reshaping the fragments to fit its vision of a homogeneous nation. Balkan Christians (Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians) established their nation-states, a triumph for them, but not for the Turks, Bosnians, Albanians, and other Muslims (and sometimes, Jews, too) that they ethnically cleansed. The same is true of the Turks, who established their own nation-state in 1923, but only at the horrific expense of Anatolian Armenians or Assyrians – who were violently expelled and massacred – and to some extent Kurds, who remained but were forced to assimilate.

Neo-Ottomanism Today

In the aftermath of World War I, war hero Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded the Turkish Republic in 1923, built on a deliberate rejection of the Ottoman legacy. Western observers often praised this new republic for being staunchly secularist while criticizing it for being rigidly nationalist – not always realizing that the two traits were opposite sides of the same coin.

Yet history does not simply go away, and may come back with a surprise. Since the 1980s, there has been a neo-Ottoman revival in Turkey, which peaked in the 2000s under Erdoğan. But while this revival is largely about Muslim power and glory, it often lacks a realistic understanding of the Ottomans themselves – and their far more pluralist sense of the world.

To be fair, Erdoğan’s governments have at times invoked the pluralist side of the Ottoman heritage. They enacted reforms benefiting Christian foundations in the early 2000s, and restored the historic Grand Synagogue of Edirne, one of the largest in Europe, in 2015. There are also reports that Halki Seminary, shuttered in 1971 by the secular-nationalist establishment, may finally be reopened – which would be long overdue, but great news nonetheless. And even while celebrating the “Conquest of Istanbul” last weekend, Erdoğan at least praised it for ushering “tolerance toward people of different backgrounds and beliefs.”

Such all-encompassing tolerance – if not outright acceptance – is the spirit that Turkey and all its post-Ottoman neighbors most need today, instead of the repression of minorities, paranoid xenophobia, and pointless chauvinism that have marred so much of their modern histories.

It is a spirit that also calls for the recognition that what we celebrate as a “conquest” or a “liberation” may be someone else’s tragedy. And, as the last great Ottoman sultan understood, there is no wisdom in provoking other people’s sensitivities just to feel a little better about ourselves.