On August 14, the 91st anniversary of the Social Security Act, I’ll debate Wendell Primus of the Brookings Institution about how to address Social Security’s looming insolvency. We agree that Congress should act to avert automatic and indiscriminate benefit cuts and that Social Security should be reformed without exacerbating the federal budget crisis.

Where we disagree is more fundamental: What should Social Security be?

I believe the program should be changed to provide a fiscally sustainable, predictable retirement benefit based on years worked, while enabling Americans to build wealth through private savings by not increasing their tax burden.

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A federal district court ruled last week that key provisions of the National Firearms Act—including the registration scheme for so-called “silencers” (properly called suppressors), along with short-barreled rifles and short-barreled shotguns—are now unconstitutional. The reasoning is refreshingly simple. 

The NFA was never anything but a tax law: Congress used its Article I taxing power in 1934 to impose steep “transfer and making taxes” on disfavored weapons, and the registration and application requirements existed only to help collect that tax. But in 2025, as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Congress zeroed out those taxes for most NFA firearms. A tax that raises no revenue isn’t a tax at all—and without a live tax to enforce, the regulatory scaffolding built around it has nothing left to stand on. As Judge James Wesley Hendrix put it in Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF, the government cannot retroactively justify a statute under a power Congress never invoked, like the Commerce Clause, just because the power Congress did invoke stopped working.

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Classical liberals stress that all are equal before the law. Although liberals have disagreed about countless questions, they are united by a belief in impersonal, rules-based governance—the rule of law. John Adams captured the ideal when he defined a republic as “an empire of laws, and not of men.” Liberty depends not upon finding benevolent rulers but upon constructing institutions in which no person or group is entitled to stand above the rules governing everyone else. 

Economic liberty is not separate from the rule of law but one of its clearest applications. A free market does not mean anarchy. It means an economy governed by general and predictable rules that apply equally to everyone. The alternative is not more laws but a different kind of law: commands, permissions, and exceptions designed to favor particular industries and professions over others.

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I’ve crossed swords with Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman on health care. But in his latest Substack post, we are largely singing from the same sheet music (forgive the lengthy excerpts; I want to save all of this lest he delete it):

much of U.S. health care is already socialist. In fact, the government’s role is so large that U.S. health care is better described as partially privatized socialism than as anything resembling a free market…

government programs pay more total dollars for medical bills than the private insurers do…

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The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) propose new spending that could more than triple federal outlays. They propose the government pay for health care, housing, higher education, and electricity. Jobs are government-guaranteed, retirement benefits are expanded, paid family leave is universal, fossil fuels are eliminated, and reparations are paid. 

The DSA platform claims that the bill for all this will be sent to “the richest individuals and corporations.” Tally up that bill, and it ballparks between $71 trillion and $212 trillion in new spending over the next decade. Confiscating every dollar of high-end wealth and corporate profits would cover only a fraction of those costs. The DSA agenda necessitates high taxes on middle-class Americans. 

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On August 4, Axios reported that the highly anticipated update of the White House framework for voluntary testing of frontier AI models will not be released to the public. In other words, and as others have put it, the White House is essentially putting the AI testing regime in a black box. This approach contravenes the rule of law, risks becoming as prescriptive as a licensing regime, and, most importantly, fails to fulfill its most basic objective: to build trust in the population.

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Congress is preparing to bail out the federal highway program once again without paying for it. According to a July 9 score by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the House Transportation Committee’s BUILD America 250 Act (BUILD) would add more than $147 billion (about $1,100 per household) to the already unsustainable national debt over five years, while violating the user-pays principle.

BUILD is a five-year highway bill that authorizes $474 billion for roads, mass transit, and other surface transportation programs from the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) for fiscal years (FYs) 2027 through 2031.

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