Over 30 people die per day in drunk driving crashes, according to national estimates. 

One mechanism for reducing these deaths might be restrictions on the kind of business that can sell alcohol. Researchers studied such laws in Texas, where 

cities can use local option elections to decide whether to permit particular types of alcohol sales [e.g, at on-premise locations like restaurants versus off-premise locations like liquor stores]. 

The findings suggest that

Read the rest of this post →

Recently, the White House and some of the leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies released a “Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities.” This voluntary document charts a path toward a self-regulation standard for governing frontier AI systems. The document is an innovative approach that provides both the government and industry with the flexibility to adapt to the rapidly evolving capabilities of AI systems and helps prevent some of the most common pitfalls of government intervention. This commitment should provide a valuable building block for the regulation of the AI industry, but some questions are left unanswered. 

While the responsibilities and commitments of the industry are explicit and clear, the document does not address key questions regarding the role of government and leaves the industry with a lack of clarity on when, how, and under what justification the government can intervene in the market and what tools it is allowed to use.

Read the rest of this post →

America has big plans. Getting permission to build a big project is another story. The new Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, or BAAJA (pronounced like, and just as bold and refreshing as, Mountain Dew’s Baja Blast), aims to remove political barriers that keep projects on hold. Senators Capito (R‑WV), Lee (R‑UT), Whitehouse (D‑RI), and Heinrich (D‑NM) introduced the bill text—a whopping 417 pages—on September 30. BAAJA builds on previous reform efforts, such as Manchin-Barrasso’s EPRA in 2024 and this term’s SPEED and PERMIT Acts. Unlike earlier efforts, BAAJA is already gaining strong bipartisan support, giving it a fighting chance to clear the Senate’s 60-vote requirement when it reconvenes the week of November 9. 

This moment is different for myriad reasons—electricity demand growth is reaching levels not seen this century, costly Biden-era energy subsidies have mostly been cut or curtailed, and Democrats now understand how much damage a president can inflict when he despises certain forms of energy. The Keystone XL oil pipeline was the poster child for Democrats’ arbitrary cancellation of major energy projects under Presidents Obama and Biden, and Trump has spent his second term applying the same playbook to solar and wind projects. 

Read the rest of this post →

Prediction markets allow people to trade contracts on future events, from interest-rate decisions to sports results, and the exchanges that list these contracts are overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Illinois says that is not enough. It wants any exchange offering sports contracts to get a state license as well, and it treats operating without one as a crime.

In April 2025, Illinois sent a cease-and-desist letter to Kalshi, a CFTC-registered exchange that had started listing sports contracts that January. When Kalshi, its partner Coinbase, and the CFTC challenged that demand in federal court, a judge in Chicago ruled on October 2 that federal law likely overrides it for the sports contracts central to the case. The preliminary ruling bears on a question that extends far beyond Illinois, namely, whether these markets answer to a single federal regulator or face a patchwork of state-level rules.

Judge Martha Pacold of the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois found that contracts like one on a Chicago Cubs victory in the 2026 World Series are likely “swaps,” and federal law gives the CFTC exclusive authority over swaps traded on the exchanges it oversees. She further concluded that Illinois’s licensing rules likely conflict with the federal framework, not least because complying with them would “force Kalshi to build a market solely for Illinoisans.”

Read the rest of this post →

Financial scams cost American consumers and businesses billions of dollars a year, so it’s good that Republican and Democratic legislators are taking notice. The House Financial Services Committee voted unanimously to advance H.R. 4936, the Taskforce for Recognizing and Averting Payment Scams Act, and the Senate is considering a similar bill. The bills would create a bipartisan task force to address payment scams. The task force would bring together federal agencies, banks, online platforms, telecommunications carriers, and other key players in developing coordinated approaches to stopping scams.

Scams are a real problem. But how do concerns about scams intersect with concerns about growing federal power, enforcement abuses, and overregulation?

Unlike regulations such as price controls, catching bad actors who cheat people strengthens markets. The goal is market-friendly, but the mechanisms might not be. Policymakers addressing a crisis may, for instance, create institutions, rules, or practices that erode liberty, markets, and individual rights. With this caveat in mind, I offer recommendations below that a new task force on scams should consider:

• Read the rest of this post →

The Trump Administration recently weakened the Endangered Species Act. 

A new paper suggests that, for advocates of increased housing development, these lessened restrictions could provide an opportunity. 

The paper

examines how environmental land-use regulation under the ESA affects housing construction. The findings indicate that an additional endangered species listing reduced annual housing permits by … about 9–10 percent of the average annual permitting rate. … [A]pproximately 70 percent of the local permit decline represents housing that was deterred altogether rather than displaced.

Read the rest of this post →

AI is on everybody’s mind right now, and for good reason. Tech executives are begging for regulation. Lawmakers are scrambling to find solutions. Regular people are picketing data centers. And the Trump administration is embracing an “America First” approach.

It’s entirely disorienting trying to make sense of a technology that’s developing this quickly, so I turned to the experts. 

In my most recent column for the New York Post, I wrote about a conversation I mediated between an AI optimist, University of Washington Professor and AI entrepreneur Oren Etzioni, and an AI doomer, MIT Professor Max Tegmark. Despite their differences, both agreed that AI should be regulated. But there were several points of interest to me as a libertarian that might also be of interest to you.

In particular, I asked the pair about the rush to regulate AI and the burst of populist energy surrounding the issue. I was interested to ask them because Tegmark had just hosted a Pro-Human Conference this month that brought together the likes of Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders. Etzioni’s response was especially interesting:

Rikki Schlott: I’m pretty libertarian in my orientation, and I’m suspicious of when everyone all of a sudden becomes very populist and passionate about an issue. And I think that oftentimes in history, that doesn’t lead to the best possible solutions. And especially as we’re talking about China and other nations being involved in this race, how do we make sure that we orient what I think is a really valid and popular concern that I share towards productive solutions and not appeals to populism or quick fixes that are not really adequate or could potentially backfire?

Oren Etzioni: There’s a famous line that democracy is a terrible system; it’s just better than all the other ones. But I’m terrified of what the democratic process does, particularly when it sets its mind to regulate something that we don’t understand, particularly when it does so out of fear and fear that’s being fanned by … cynical forces at play. 

I am terrified [of] this process becoming a political hobby horse, which politicians will cynically manipulate to their own ends, which typically are getting elected and, in the case of more and more officials, also lining their pockets. So we need to have good solutions, not popular ones.… I worry more about human stupidity than about artificial intelligence. 

I also asked the two professors about how they made sense of the Hugging Face swarm attack, where they see us in the coming years, how to think about China’s artificial intelligence trajectory, and what, if any, regulations they think are called for in the age of AI. The full hour-long conversation is available to watch on the New York Post’s YouTube channel.

(Note: The photo accompanying this post is a screenshot from the New York Post’s YouTube channel.)