Over the holidays, President Trump announced that the US Navy would begin building a new class of battleship, unsurprisingly called the “Trump class.” The United States faces a delay in shipbuilding capacities, with these ships necessary to bolster America’s grand strategy to project its power across the globe.

Yet, building these battleships—or any battleship for that matter—is a terrible idea. Plenty have already commented on the futility of building this class of ship. It would be decommissioned once Trump’s final term in office ends, and battleships are now vulnerable to air power, submarines, and missiles. However, it’s essential to briefly highlight the wastefulness and inanity of this plan to build the battleship, as it reflects the inadequacy of the present US military-industrial complex. Namely, US policymakers’ inability to invest in weapons to achieve America’s political objectives.

The first question that defense planners must ask themselves is how a weapon system will help achieve America’s strategic interests. To quote former US defense officials Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith, “Requirements depend on what we want to accomplish in the national security field, tempered by what we are willing to give up elsewhere.” Yet, it’s unclear what geopolitical goal the Trump battleship would accomplish. Surface ships are vulnerable to increased anti-access/area denial capabilities. Moreover, arming these massive surface ships with nuclear cruise missiles makes them more obvious targets for America’s adversaries and doesn’t add to America’s secure second-strike deterrent capability. 

Instead of investing funds and time into vulnerable and costly surface ships, the Pentagon should prioritize more worthwhile naval systems, such as submarines, which have a better chance of surviving enemy air and missile strikes.

While this sort of spending adds little to deterrence, it lines the pockets of defense contractors. From 2020 through 2024, 54 percent of the Pentagon’s discretionary spending­—roughly $2.4 trillion—was given to military contractors. Despite the Trump battleship’s slim chance of ever being built, defense contractors will profit.

This is hardly a unique case. There are scores of weapons systems just as wasteful as these ships. They include the F‑35, with its multiple malfunctions and repairs when performing basic missions and flights, and the Littoral Combat Ship, with the US government decommissioning seven of these ships due to their mechanical failures on the open seas. Of course, the inadequacy of these programs only comes to light after billions are captured by companies to research and build them. 

Put bluntly, the US government provides corporate welfare to defense companies, benefiting Lockheed and Boeing more than America.

Policymakers should be more selective and scrutinize the sort of weapons the United States builds and the contracts it awards to defense companies. However, with policymakers often benefiting from insider trading and defense lobbying, many are disincentivized from addressing the corruption in the defense industrial base. Policymakers should summon the courage to put their country and their fellow citizens ahead of defense corporate interests.

The United States places an unusually heavy share of the tax burden on higher earners. You wouldn’t know this from hearing some politicians claim that the rich escape next to tax-free or deserve to be taxed at higher rates. In reality, the data show the opposite. The most recent example is a study by the Fraser Institute, which shows the US ranks first out of 33 developed countries as having the most progressive tax system.

Progressive tax systems, where tax rates and tax shares increase with income, are often idealized by big-government redistributionists, but they come with trade-offs. As tax systems become more progressive, they make each additional hour of work or investment less rewarding, weakening incentives to work longer hours, take entrepreneurial risks, start new ventures, or invest in continuing education. Over time, these effects compound, slowing economic progress and material well-being for everyone. Highly progressive tax systems are also more volatile revenue sources, unfairly treat similar citizens in vastly different ways, encourage avoidance and evasion, and increase administrative complexity. 

The Fraser Institute authors construct an index of five measures of a tax system’s progressivity, capturing differences between the top and bottom income tax rates, the top bracket threshold and personal exemptions as a share of the average wage, the income tax share of total revenue, and the consumption tax share of total revenue. The final index, summarized in Figure 1, ranks countries from 0 to 10, with 10 being the most progressive tax system.

The index separates out subnational governments with significant taxing authority and evaluates combined national and subnational tax systems. On this measure, California tops the chart, pairing the top US federal income tax rate (37 percent) with the highest state income tax rate in the country (13.3 percent) and ranking highly on the other measures of progressivity. California is followed by Newfoundland and Labrador, the most progressive Canadian province, with a top provincial tax rate of 21.8 percent, combined with Canada’s federal income tax of 33 percent. The combined top rate is higher than California’s, but the rest of the Canadian tax structure is less progressive, giving California the top spot.

Texas comes in fourth, serving as the US benchmark for the least progressive state tax system, since it levies no state income tax and thus reflects only the federal income tax. All other US states fall between California and the seven no-income-tax states, like Texas, on the progressivity scale. At the bottom of the index are Hungary and Estonia, both of which operate flat national income tax systems.

Taking a simple average of the highest- and lowest-progressivity states or provinces, the United States as a whole outranks every other country in the dataset, giving it the most progressive tax system.

The structure of the US tax code plays a central role in the rankings. The federal income tax is highly progressive, with a relatively low marginal rate of 10 percent for lower-income filers and a top rate of 37 percent for higher incomes. Combined with the absence of a broad-based national consumption tax (like a value-added tax), the result is a highly concentrated tax burden on the highest-income Americans.

This is not a novel result. Research by the World Inequality Lab concludes that “the US stands out as the country with the highest level of tax progressivity: the top decile faces a tax rate that is more than 70 percent higher than that of the poorest half of the population.” And recent research from Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman, and co-authors finds that US billionaires pay higher tax rates than their counterparts in the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and France. (I reviewed their study here.) 

The United States is unique among developed nations in relying on such a narrow portion of taxpayers to finance such a large share of government revenue. We can sustain this structure largely because overall US tax levels are relatively low. Taxes as a share of GDP in the US are almost ten percentage points lower than the European average. Historically, low taxes have benefited American workers and businesses. However, if federal spending remains on its projected path, the size of the American government will match average European levels, necessitating a European level and mix of taxation.

We would be better off cutting spending to keep taxes low. But the lesson from the rest of the world is that high spending requires less progressive tax systems and high taxes on the poor and the middle class, not just the rich.

Last year, Congress created a federal tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations (SGOs) that help families choose the best educational options for their children. This tax credit goes beyond the role of the federal government and should not have been created. But, because it’s coming, it is crucial that it be executed well.

In November, the Department of the Treasury, which is tasked with implementing the tax credit, requested comments on multiple issues as it prepares to draft regulations for the program. I submitted comments that emphasized maintaining the highest degree of freedom and flexibility when drafting rules.

Importantly, the department’s rules should not allow the federal government to set parameters around what kinds of schools scholarship-granting organizations can let parents choose based on factors such as their enrollment policies or teachings. It is also essential that all SGOs that meet the § 25F(c)(5) statutory requirements be allowed to participate, rather than participating states imposing further restrictions.

Regarding specific areas where Treasury requested comments, I urged a light-touch administrative model that relies on self-certification and IRS audit authority rather than mandating burdensome verification requirements. I also recommended that organizations operating in multiple states be allowed to determine the most effective way to allocate contributions among those states.

My concerns about the federal government enacting a scholarship program go beyond the lack of constitutional authority. I worry it will eventually result in restrictions on private schools that could harm the innovative educational landscape that has been developing throughout the country. While future administrations may change the initial regulations Treasury adopts, this is a chance to lay a foundation that is rooted in freedom. 

My Cato colleague Dr. Jeffrey Singer recently endorsed New York’s pending legalization of Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD). While his perspective reflects a more conventional libertarian judgment than mine, I want to offer a differing take. 

Dr. Singer is a surgeon and a committed libertarian. I agree with many of his positions, including opposing the War on Drugs, supporting a reduced federal role in health policy, and believing in competent adults’ freedom to make their own decisions about recreation and risk. He and I both generally believe that responsible people should enjoy broad liberty over their bodies.

For Dr. Singer, legalizing MAiD is a straightforward libertarian stance. He writes that the principle of people enjoying liberty “so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others” necessarily includes “the freedom to end one’s own life—and to seek medical help in doing so. When a patient is fully informed and gives voluntary, competent consent, the state has no legitimate role in preventing physicians from honoring that decision.”

Here we part ways—and not just for practical reasons. To be sure, concerns about the consequences and context of MAiD give many people pause. Dr. Singer notes that Canada’s experience with MAiD and euthanasia (where doctors, rather than individuals, administer lethal medication) has devolved into making death “just another routine option”—and even created “perverse incentives for physicians and caseworkers to promote euthanasia instead of chronic treatment and support.” 

Worries about how to ensure that consent to die is genuine were detailed by Massachusetts doctors in a 2022 legal brief. That lawsuit ended in a decision by that state’s (historically quite liberal) high court unanimously rejecting any constitutional right to MAiD.

But my objection goes beyond the conditions of consent. Contrary to Dr. Singer’s conclusion, even a maximal approach to personal liberty is compatible with a limit in favor of life. That’s because liberty includes within it the ability to change one’s mind in the future.

This is obvious in the political context. Libertarians do not accept any understanding of the social contract that makes people’s grant of authority to a government irreversible (such as Thomas Hobbes’s). As Zack Sorenson says, “If a people lose the ability to withdraw consent from a governmental system, then that system is not consistent with liberty.” 

The same is true of the liberty over one’s own labor. While armchair libertarian philosophers like to debate the legitimacy of voluntary slavery, it is absurd to defend on the basis of present liberty the decision to permanently and unconditionally surrender all of one’s future liberty to another. As libertarian thinker Murray Rothbard wrote, no one can “rid himself of his own will, which may change in future years, and repudiate the current arrangement.”

For me, that’s the crux of the matter: libertarianism accepts certain guardrails on people’s present liberty in order to preserve their future liberty, and it’s entirely consistent with that principle to oppose the legalization of MAiD.

Of course, libertarianism undoubtedly also accepts the freedom to limit one’s future liberty. Neither government nor contractual arrangements would be possible otherwise. And a liberty only of fleeting impulses, rather than meaningful commitments, would be impossibly shallow. Dr. Singer doesn’t sully his libertarianism by weighing possible future liberty more lightly than the present liberty to choose to die now, especially for the terminally ill patients New York’s proposal is designed for.

Nor is it my position that the government should forcibly install pacemakers in people and chain them to artificial ventilators until death finally overwhelms everything technology can muster. Just like anyone else, libertarians have to wrestle with tough questions about the imminence of death, the action-omission distinction, and the role of third parties—ones that libertarianism does not definitively resolve in one neat direction. 

But that’s my point: libertarians can differ in good faith about life and liberty in the context of life’s end, just like they already do in the context of life’s beginning. Reverence for future liberty provides libertarians with a principled reason to oppose legalizing MAiD, even if others, such as Dr. Singer, arrive at different conclusions.

Newly inaugurated Mayor Zohran Mamdani last week promised New Yorkers that he would “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” He knows what he’s doing in setting up this dichotomy. “Collectivism” is not a slip of the tongue or a vague moral appeal to kindness. It is a loaded ideological term with a long, well-documented pedigree and an even longer rap sheet.

By collectivism, political theorists and its own champions have meant a social order in which the claims of the group—often defined and enforced by the state—override individual choice, property rights, and voluntary exchange. Production and distribution are guided not by prices and consent but by political priorities, and individual autonomy is tolerated only insofar as it serves collective ends. That is not a caricature; it is the standard definition of what’s espoused in fascist, socialist, and communist literature.

The word’s lineage matters. Zohran Mamdani is consciously drawing on a tradition that stretches from Karl Marx, who rejected “bourgeois individualism” in favor of collective ownership, through Vladimir Lenin, who implemented it via one-party rule, to Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, who enforced it at colossal human cost. Even outside the communist tradition, collectivism was proudly embraced by Benito Mussolini, who defined fascism as the negation of individualism in favor of the state as an ethical whole, and by strongmen such as Idi Amin, who expelled ethnic minorities and appropriated their land in the name of the national good.

The historical record is not ambiguous. Where collectivism has moved from rhetoric to reality, the results have been grim. The Soviet Union’s collectivized agriculture led to chronic shortages and mass famine through both disastrous economic policies and by design to suppress dissent. China’s Great Leap Forward killed tens of millions. Cambodia’s agrarian collectivism under Pol Pot destroyed a quarter of the population, resulting in the “killing fields” and perhaps the most brutal regime in modern history. In each case, politics replaced price signals, error correction was treated as dissent, and individuals weren’t free to exit the collective. 

The disastrous results were not accidental policy errors. They followed directly from replacing decentralized decision-making and consent with ruthless political command.

Defenders respond that Mamdani doesn’t mean that kind of collectivism. He’s aware of the dignity that comes with consent and means only to foster solidarity and community—rule by a velvet glove rather than an iron fist. In this reading, his intervention is just reheated Barney Frank—the idea that “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”

But this rhetorical pivot is precisely the trick. Many New Yorkers didn’t choose rent control or nationalized grocery stores. Taxes are non-optional, but I’d bet most New York taxpayers would prefer to keep their money rather than subsidize free buses or childcare. Truly voluntary cooperation between free people for a common goal is great, but it already has a name: civil society.

Individualists don’t pretend to be islands, which is why Mamdani’s jab at “rugged individualism” is a strawman. In modern life, nearly everyone depends on food grown by others and often prepared by others, too. That cooperation is possible only when individual choice and consent are respected. The farmer or cook parts with what they’ve produced only when compensated fairly or out of voluntary kindness and generosity.

Likewise, non-market institutions like mutual aid, charities, families, religious groups, cooperatives, and more are bottom-up institutions grounded in consent. They arise in a framework where individuals are free to cooperate and pursue shared goals on their own terms.

Collectivism, by contrast, is top-down. It inevitably requires someone to decree what the collective wants and to compel compliance from dissenters. To override the farmer’s consent—to steal from him because others claim they want it more—requires collectivism. The supposed “warmth” is a rhetorical sugar coating for using coercive power to do things free individuals would choose otherwise not to do. Things like transitioning private property into a “collective good,” as Mamdani’s director of the Office to Protect Tenants advocated for in a newly resurfaced clip.

This overriding of individual freedom has an economic cost. Countries that most fully rejected collectivist economics—those that protect private property, free prices, and open exchange—are dramatically richer, healthier, and longer-lived than those that embraced state control. That much is clear in the 2025 Economic Freedom of the World report. Those in the freest 25 percent of countries earned, on average, 6.2 times as much as those in the least free. Poverty rates are 25 times greater in the least free countries, even while those countries worked 20 percent more, on average. Meanwhile, in the most economically free countries, people live about 17 years longer, infant mortality is one-tenth what it is in the least free countries, and people even report higher levels of general life satisfaction.

These differences aren’t cultural but institutional. The yawning differences in quality of life and personal incomes between East and West Germany, North and South Korea, or pre- and post-reform China emerged among people with the same language, culture, and history only after institutions divided on collectivism and individualism. Thirty years after reunification, in the case of Germany, GDP continues to lag in the formerly collectivist states.

There is also, more importantly, a moral cost. Collectivism robs individuals of autonomy. Instead, people are treated as a means to an end—to produce as the state dictates. In short, to become modern-day Stakhanovites, the selfless workers who supposedly devoted themselves to the Soviet cause, but who we now know were largely fictional tools of Stalinist propaganda.

Libertarianism begins from the opposite premise: people own their lives. They are entitled to choose, trade, associate, and experiment—even to fail—without needing permission from a planner or politician. That moral foundation and the pluralism it produces are not cold or atomistic. It is what makes genuine cooperation possible and, for most people, what makes life worth living.

The United States Post Office recently updated the Domestic Mail Manual in a way that will affect “Postmarks and Postal Possession.” The USPS’s explainer states:

“[W]e have made adjustments to our transportation operations that will result in some mailpieces not arriving at our originating processing facilities on the same day that they are mailed. This means that the date on the postmarks applied at our processing facilities will not necessarily match the date on which the customer’s mailpiece was collected by a letter carrier or dropped off at a retail location.”

This, in turn, could have an impact on election administration. Fourteen states allow mail ballots to arrive after Election Day if they are postmarked on or before Election Day. According to the USPS explainer, dropping off a ballot at a mailbox on Election Day doesn’t necessarily mean it will be postmarked on Election Day. 

Jim Saksa, writing at Democracy Docket (the website associated with Marc Elias’s law firm), warns that the USPS transportation and language change could significantly impact rural voters. The Washington Post titled its piece on the topic: “Thousands of mail-in ballots could be discounted under new post office policy.” Tess Seger, of the Oregon Secretary of State’s office, claimed that the change is one of a number of recent announcements by USPS that “is not exactly instilling trust at the moment.” 

Contrarian that I perhaps am, I take an opposing view: the USPS rule change is a good thing.

First, the postmark date was always too ambiguous to serve an important legal purpose. The USPS has long discouraged companies and government offices from using the postmark as an official date (“postmarking is not and has not been a service that the Postal Service has provided to the public for such purposes. The postmark has always fundamentally existed to perform functions (including cancelation [sic] of postage) internal to Postal Service operations”).

Second, the USPS rule change might lead to faster election results. If the USPS announcement encourages voters to return their mail ballots earlier, election officials can process the ballots sooner, and we can all get results faster. This could improve confidence in US elections. The latest academic research finds that “longer-than-expected vote counting time induces a large, significant decrease in trust in the election.”

Third, the USPS announcement could incrementally improve the lives of election administrators. Nothing is worse than getting an avalanche of late-arriving ballots when people are already screaming at you for final results. 

Fourth, the US Supreme Court will soon hear an appeal of Watson v. Republican National Committee, in which the Fifth Circuit ruled that it is unconstitutional to allow mail ballots to arrive after Election Day. The Fifth Circuit’s ruling is at odds with other courts, but if the Supreme Court sides with the Fifth Circuit, then voters in the 14 “postmark states” will need to change their behavior. This new USPS announcement starts that process ahead of the Court’s decision.

It has become easier and easier to vote in the United States. Almost all states allow in-person early voting. Most states have no-excuse vote-by-mail. Things looked very different even 20 years ago.

It is not unreasonable for the USPS to make a business decision that might force voters in some states to move up their voting plans by one or two days. In California, voters have 29 days of early voting. It’s pretty darn reasonable to ask these voters in California to mail their ballots back a day or two before Election Day.

It might even be a good thing.

Just before Thanksgiving, the House Judiciary Committee revealed that investigators in the Department of Justice had obtained more than two years of Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R‑OH) phone records. The subpoena, issued in April 2022, demanded “all call detail records” from Rep. Jordan’s phone company from January 2020 to the present.

This disclosure is alarming for several reasons. For one, Rep. Jordan appears to have been singled out for an unusually sweeping investigation into his private communications. As a 2013 Washington Post interview shows, Jordan has long been one of the fiercest critics of government secrecy and domestic spying. Typically, subpoenas for call records cover a period of days or weeks, perhaps a few months at most. I’ve never seen one spanning more than two years. 

Whether this represents retaliation for his oversight work or simply an overbroad fishing expedition—or both—a two-year request for sensitive call records raises serious questions about the DOJ’s investigative approach.

The subpoena also reflects a troubling encroachment by the executive branch into the legislative branch. In response, at least four Senate subcommittees plan to investigate the broader “Arctic Frost” operation—a Biden DOJ probe that swept up hundreds of people and organizations, most of them tied to Trump or the GOP. The investigation focused on determining whether prominent Republicans and conservative groups were behind the 2020 “false electors scheme.”

While the investigation of Rep. Jordan’s records stands out, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R‑IA) also released more than 1,700 pages of documents from the Arctic Frost investigation, offering a remarkable snapshot of the sweeping reach of federal subpoenas in a single probe.

These subpoenas for lawmakers’ and organizations’ financial and phone records have a standard form, but “standard” should not be interpreted as “benign.” They are extremely invasive. The DOJ subpoena to Verizon for Rep. Jordan’s records demanded it turn over many types of records, including:

• User names, screen names, and email addresses
• “All call detail records,” including all phone numbers reached via call or text
• Session times and duration of calls or Internet use
• IP addresses used during Internet use

Although the subpoenas did not demand that Verizon turn over phone or browsing content, the information sought reveals far more than call logs. It allows investigators to map Rep. Jordan’s social networks and perhaps expose journalists and whistleblowers.

For the broader Arctic Frost investigation, the DOJ issued nearly 200 subpoenas to dozens of banks, Salesforce, Google, GoDaddy, Stripe, political consultants, and individuals, seeking, depending on the target:

• credit reports
• all transactions from dozens of banks
• all agreements with 40 law firms
• “all payroll records”
• “all tax returns”
• “all financial records”
• Know Your Customer reports
• “diary entries”
• all MAC addresses associated with certain email accounts
• all records of emails sent or received over a 2‑year period
• “records of [user] session times and durations” over a 2‑year period
• digital marketing KPIs for email and social media, including click-through rates, conversion rates, likes, follows, shares, and donor acquisition costs

Many of these subpoenas were accompanied by gag orders and threatened criminal prosecution for tech or bank company employees who disclosed their existence.

Executive Branch Overreach: Past and Present

While the Arctic Frost investigation appears novel in its scope and intrusiveness, it recalls earlier episodes of executive branch overreach and secrecy. About a decade ago, CIA officers improperly accessed intra-Senate emails and a computer network designated for Senate staff, even referring potential criminal charges against committee staffers after they obtained embarrassing information about the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program.

More recently, after information about the FBI’s surveillance of Carter Page leaked in 2017, the Bureau subpoenaed phone and email providers for records identifying which journalists congressional staffers had contacted. In 2024, the DOJ inspector general concluded:

As a result, dozens of congressional staffers became part of the subject pool in a federal criminal investigation for doing nothing more than performing constitutionally authorized oversight of the executive branch.

Setting aside the serious separation of powers concerns and political issues presented by Arctic Frost, the episode highlights a broader concern: law enforcement agencies’ routine pursuit of digital records raises profound questions about privacy and Fourth Amendment protections.

Importantly, the Trump DOJ possesses these same broad powers and appears prepared to use them. Rep. Thomas Massie, for instance, recently said an FBI official threatened one of his staff members with criminal charges because the Bureau disapproved of Massie’s investigation into the January 5 pipe bomber. Politicized investigations are a perennial temptation. 

The DOJ could, for instance, issue broad subpoenas in an attempt to buttress apparently weak criminal cases against figures such as James Comey and Letitia James. Notably, in the Comey matter, the DOJ seems to have obtained records from the iCloud and email accounts of Daniel Richman, Comey’s friend and former lawyer. Richman has since sued to compel the DOJ to delete and cease using his digital records.

Legal and Industry-Led Reforms for Digital Privacy

Hopefully, these controversies prompt bipartisan concern about the scope of investigators’ subpoena power—whether the targets are in Congress or not—rather than invite further political payback.

Absent legislative reform, tech, financial, and telecommunications companies have ways to preserve their customers’ privacy and resist broad subpoenas. They could clearly stipulate in their terms of service that customers—not the providers—own their phone and computer records. That would place companies on a much stronger legal footing to refuse to comply with overly broad demands like the one seeking two years of Rep. Jordan’s records. A company could then say, “We don’t own those records; we merely hold them on behalf of our customer.” In many cases, a warrant would be required because, as the Supreme Court recognized in Ex parte Jackson (1878), even when someone conveys his personal property or records to another, he may still have a property interest in them.

Courts could also clarify that the targeted request and review of someone’s records, even if held by a third-party company, are still considered a “search” under the Fourth Amendment and require a warrant. As the Supreme Court said in Kyllo v. United States (2001), the Framers understood “search” to mean “to look over or through for the purpose of finding something; to explore; to examine by inspection.” By any plain reading, the DOJ “searched” private records, and a warrant should have been required.

The Arctic Frost investigation underscores the urgent need to reexamine and limit how investigative power is exercised in the digital age. If the executive branch can secretly collect years of communications and financial records from anyone—even lawmakers—it erodes the protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment.