President Trump, who often campaigned on the slogan “too big to rig,” has told reporters he will accept rather than try to overturn the midterm election results. That would be welcome. If so, he might want to offer a token of seriousness by asking the Department of Justice to drop the meritless litigation it is still pursuing, seeking to overrule the state of Alaska’s authority to certify a winner in its Senate race. 

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal is already suggesting that there was no need for “all the hyperventilating about what Mr. Trump might do” to meddle with the midterms—after all, they went forward without incident. The “wildly speculative nightmares about mass election theft,” it avers, were “another partisan panic attack, promoted to gin up interest and enthusiasm”—that is, were promoted insincerely.

The editorial’s chosen narrative requires a great forgetfulness about the actual record. It is clear that for the past 18 months, Trump has indeed been intent on messing with the midterms. 

Democrats won control of both houses of Congress in last night’s midterm elections. Criminal law and civil liberties are likely to be at the top of the legislative agenda once they take office in January. Here are issues they should prioritize—some in response to abuses committed by the Trump Administration, others as efforts to extend an olive branch to the executive branch and their Republican colleagues.

Read the rest of this post →

Today the Cato Institute released the “Freedom in the 50 States” report for 2026. 

This revamped index consists of 97 policy measures over 10 categories sorted into either economic freedom or personal freedom. It assigns scores and letter grades to US states based on this general combined level of freedom. And, for the first time in the report’s history, this edition also scores and grades governors on how well or poorly they have advanced both economic and personal liberty in their states.

You can see the results here. And you can take a deep dive into the scores using the Data Dashboard and interactive maps. There’s plenty to see and analyze for yourself.

The project was over a year in the making. And when you spend that much time on a project, you usually accumulate plenty of insights. So you’ll be seeing more analysis from me based on the data in the index for Cato’s blog, in future policy reports, and elsewhere.

As my colleague Tad DeHaven announced here earlier this week, Cato just launched the Restoring Free Enterprise project to analyze the federal government’s growing and unprecedented ownership of private US companies and to propose ways to reverse this troubling trend. The United States’ new portfolio — now encompassing 35 different companies across a range of industries — raises numerous problems that the RFE project will document, and my latest Dispatch column covers what may be the most basic one: the complete lack of explicit legal authority to do any of these equity deals. 

Read the rest of this post →

Eric Beinhocker, executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, and Nick Hanauer, a successful entrepreneur, give a preview of their forthcoming book, Market Humanism, in the detailed report, “Markets Built for Humans: Creating an Economy for People, Planet, and Democracy.” Their main argument is that “markets should be built to serve human flourishing, and when they are, they produce broader prosperity, stronger communities, and a healthier democracy.”.

In their view, neoliberalism or the “neoliberal consensus” includes “free market theories from neoliberal political economy, neoclassical economics, and libertarian philosophy” (“Markets Built for Humans,” p. 9). They argue that neoliberalism has failed and needs to be replaced by a new paradigm to improve economic well-being and social harmony. The authors blame the global financial crisis on failed markets rather than government failure; advocate for industrial and other activist policies (such as higher minimum wages) to empower workers; reject free trade in favor of managed trade, and propose a “middle-out” versus “trickle-down” theory of economic growth.

Today, the Cato Institute is launching Restoring Free Enterprise, a new project examining the federal government’s growing ownership and control of private companies and how to reverse it.

Washington’s expanding involvement in the businesses it regulates threatens the competition and innovation that underpin American prosperity. Our project will examine the consequences of that involvement and chart a path toward getting Washington out of the boardroom.

The site brings together several resources:

• An introduction by Scott Lincicome explaining the threats to American free enterprise posed by the government’s turn toward corporate ownership.
• Read the rest of this post →

The big news on September 30 was that the Fed’s Inspector General released its report on the Eccles building renovation project. That’s the project that, back in 2025, President Trump and Senator Tim Scott (R‑SC) used to bash Fed Chair Jerome Powell. They criticized him for cost overruns, but it was clearly a political move to pressure Powell because Trump wanted “lower interest rates.”

As my colleagues and I wrote at the time, the Fed’s interest rate target shouldn’t be set based on anyone’s whims or desires, even if that person is the president of the United States. Powell was put in an unprecedented position and was right to stand his ground, regardless of anything else.

Ultimately, Powell decided to remain on the Fed Board of Governors until the criminal investigation was “well and truly over.” And that’s exactly where Powell remains, even though the new chair, Kevin Warsh, is now in charge. But the IG’s report finds “no evidence of administrative misconduct and no grounds to refer anyone for criminal prosecution,” so it could signal the end of Powell’s Fed tenure. (And who wouldn’t want to read his memoirs?)

Read the rest of this post →