Roughly speaking, there are only two ways of changing someone’s behavior. Either you persuade him, with words or money, or you put a gun to his head. There’s no third way.

Think about it the next time you want to pass another law coercing people, backed by the guns of the state.

The trouble is that putting guns to heads is easier. Louis XIV didn’t need to persuade his subjects, or anyone else. He cast into all his cannons Ultima ratio regum, “The last argument of kings.” It’s easier.

Yet the ease corrupts the holder of the gun. In 1887 Lord Acton (1834–1902), a British Catholic and notably liberal historian, wrote a letter to a US bishop arguing against papal infallibility. He wrote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

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Merchants pay fees to debit card networks (called “swipe” or “interchange” fees) each time a consumer uses a card. In 2010, the Durbin Amendment capped debit card interchange fees in the United States. On October 26, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Federal Reserve exceeded its authority by including costs such as a share of expected fraud losses as part of interchange fees, thus setting the cap too high. In 2025, a district court in Kentucky had upheld the Fed’s rule: if the Sixth Circuit upholds the Kentucky court, the conflict between the circuits could reach the Supreme Court. 

The legal details—including the courts’ disquisitions on economic theory and comma placement—though interesting, are a distraction: the real problem is that the Durbin Amendment is a misadventure in price controls. Price controls on financial services harm consumers, for the same reasons that price controls on gasoline or fire insurance harm consumers. When regulators force prices down, firms react by raising other prices or by cutting services or service quality. 

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For nearly a decade, the conventional wisdom in Washington has been that protectionism is good for electoral politics. Most notably, Donald Trump won in 2016, when he promised to renege on existing trade agreements and impose tariffs on US trading partners for “ripping us off,” and once again in 2024, when he doubled down on his protectionist platform by promising “universal baseline” tariffs and higher duties on discrete US trading partners. From a theoretical perspective, this political instinct makes sense: appealing to constituencies that bear the highly concentrated costs of trade liberalization seems an intuitive strategy for electoral success. To the extent that protectionism truly carried the day in these previous elections—a debatable proposition—recent polling ahead of the forthcoming midterms suggests the opposite is happening: protectionism, specifically through high, sweeping tariffs, is not just failing to attract support among voters but has become a political liability for the president’s party. 

For starters, Americans today care—a lot—about tariffs, a major shift from just a few years ago. In 2018, Cato’s Scott Lincicome documented that, according to various polls, trade was not a priority for most Americans, despite the heavy emphasis on it during the 2016 election. Meanwhile, only 1 percent of Americans surveyed by the Cato Institute/​Morning Consult in 2024 listed trade and globalization as a top three issue. (Hence, why skepticism that protectionism propelled Trump to the White House is warranted.) 

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The most common response I hear when discussing the historical experimentation, failure, and repeal of global wealth taxes is, “What about Switzerland… or Norway?” 

The number of countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) with annual wealth taxes fell from 12 in the 1990s to 4 today. Chris Edwards and I document this history in our policy analysis, “Failures of Wealth Taxation.”

But the four holdouts only strengthen the case against taxing wealth in the US. Each is briefly surveyed below. Norway, Spain, and Colombia are experiencing the same avoidance, evasion, and capital flight that led most of Europe to repeal its wealth taxes. Switzerland’s wealth tax is not immune to these pressures, but its damage is offset by the rest of its capital-friendly fiscal system. 

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On October 25, Brazilians went to the polls for the presidential runoff between left-wing incumbent Lula da Silva and right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro. With 52 percent of the vote, President Da Silva was declared the winner, but election night was anything but normal and once again raised serious concerns about the state of Brazilian democracy.

After 4:20 p.m., Da Silva’s party asked Brazil’s Supreme Court to extend voting by two hours wherever issues were reported. At 4:40 p.m., Bolsonaro’s party asked the country’s Electoral Court, which the Constitution tasks with organizing elections, to extend voting hours in three states where heavy rains kept voters from reaching the polls. 

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Yesterday, the Commerce Department announced equity stakes in four more private companies. That brings the total to 40 announced or completed ownership deals by the Trump administration, which can be viewed in the Government Ownership Dashboard on Cato’s new Restoring Free Enterprise site. 

In a recent essay, I warned that Democratic investigations into the administration’s deals could lead Congress to turn Trump’s improvised portfolio into a permanent, formal ownership operation. Semafor’s Eleanor Mueller reports that Democrats indeed have “shopping plans, too” now that Trump has turned the federal government into a corporate owner. According to Mueller, former Biden administration officials suggested that a future Democratic president could build on “the precedent Trump has set” by “pressuring gun and oil companies.” 

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