The Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) new platform promises a world without bills. In their utopia, you’d see no rent check. No health insurance premium. No student loan repayment. No electricity bill. Life’s basics, including food, education, medicine, and transportation, would all become “common goods and utilities.” 

That might sound appealing to Americans struggling with the cost of living after a bout of high inflation. But it’s just an accounting trick. A bill reflects the price of the service you were provided and how much of it you used. The DSA can socialize that payment, charging an out-of-pocket price of zero while taxpayers cover the tab. It cannot abolish the underlying cost of providing the service. 

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In most areas of life, when something isn’t working, we look for a better option. In K–12 education, though, children are assigned to public schools based on where they live—and if that school isn’t a good fit, the child is generally seen as the problem. School choice is changing that by expanding access to alternative learning environments. But educational freedom changes lives only if parents and teachers know what options exist, which is why Cato’s Friday Feature highlights the schools, policies, and organizations bringing those choices within reach.

When Robert Barnett was teaching high school math at Eastern High School in Washington, DC, he ran into a problem familiar to teachers everywhere: his students weren’t all at the same academic level.

“I realized that it was impossible for me to teach one lesson per day in such a way that all my students would understand,” Robert recalls. “Some were ahead—they were bored. Some were behind—they were lost. Some were absent.”

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Ninety-one years after Social Security became law, the program faces its largest-ever financing shortfall. Today also marks one year after publishing Reimagining Social Security: Global Lessons for Retirement Policy Changes, with many of the trends we warned about having accelerated, making the case for structural reform even stronger. Since its publication in 2025, Reimagining Social Security has become part of the national conversation on Social Security reform, having been featured in the media, cited by policymakers, and discussed at leading academic conferences. Its core messages include:

• The program has drifted away from its original purpose. Social Security has evolved into an increasingly expensive middle-class income replacement program rather than a focused guarantee against poverty in old age.
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When Hamed Kian was charged in Florida with five counts of practicing chiropractic medicine with a suspended license—a felony carrying up to five years in prison—he was tried before a six-person jury. Convicted on all counts by this truncated panel, Mr. Kian appealed, arguing that Florida’s six-person jury rule deprived him of his right to a trial by a twelve-person jury as required by the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments. The Florida appellate court affirmed his conviction without a written opinion, and Mr. Kian asked the US Supreme Court to review his case.

In trying felony cases before six-person juries, Florida’s reliance on the Supreme Court’s 1970 decision in Williams v. Florida breaks from centuries of tradition. The Framers incorporated the common-law criminal jury into Article III and the Sixth Amendment as a vital structural check against government overreach, overzealous prosecution, and judicial bias. While the Constitution’s text does not explicitly specify a numerical requirement, the Court’s recent originalist jurisprudence—most notably in Ramos v. Louisiana—reaffirms that the Sixth Amendment protects the fundamental attributes the criminal jury possessed at common law. Historically, the requirement that a criminal petit jury consist of precisely twelve members remained undisputed in English and American law for hundreds of years until Williams improperly abandoned that historical scope.

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In a recent letter to the CEOs of artificial intelligence (AI) companies Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, Senator Bernie Sanders (I‑VT) called for a pause on AI development. In the letter, Sanders argues that the recent loss-of-control incidents that occurred while testing OpenAI’s, Anthropic’s, and Meta’s models, and the announcement by a Stanford University research team of the synthesis of new viruses with the aid of AI, justify the pause. At first glance, these examples could build a compelling argument for a pause. But a closer look reveals that, in reality, they are hardly a reason to pause AI development and, in some cases, should even be a source of encouragement for rapid AI growth.

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In an essay in The Atlantic titled “In Defense of Flock,” the Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman rightly recognizes a foundational principle of criminology: The certainty of apprehension serves as a potent crime deterrent. Yet, in framing automated surveillance as a technological panacea, Lehman ignores the critical trade-off at the heart of a free society. As Benjamin Franklin famously warned: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

To test Lehman’s thesis, one need only apply his logic to his own doorstep. Imagine if the local police department installed a high-resolution pole camera directed squarely at his front door. By his own logic, Lehman should be elated: The camera would deter prospective burglars and, should an intruder ignore it, capture their every movement in crisp detail to ensure swift apprehension.

Every government benefit has a recipient, but it also has a payer. Politics tends to encourage us to focus on the first and forget the second.

Many hardships are visible, immediate, and emotionally compelling. They provide a rationale for Congress to pass a law, for an agency to distribute money, and for elected officials to congratulate themselves on their compassion. But almost no one asks the question that the pioneering American sociologist and political economist William Graham Sumner believed mattered most: Who provided the assistance and at what cost?

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