The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published a new proposed regulation today, requiring employers to pay a $103,265 fee—or more accurately, tax—merely for the right to file a petition requesting an H‑1B foreign worker. The H‑1B visa program is the most common way for employers to hire or retain high-skilled foreign workers in the United States because the green card caps are so low and the wait times are so prohibitively long. 

It is not a fee because it is not a charge for a service. Rather, it is an attempt to reduce the hiring of H‑1B workers. The new fee-tax will crush the H‑1B program, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of talented workers. This mass exodus will trigger a series of devastating effects for the US economy: disinvestment from the US economy, offshoring of US jobs, a decline in innovation and entrepreneurship, and an enormous blow to the US Treasury.

This week, the Treasury Department, under Secretary Scott Bessent, announced it would at least double the size of its long-end buyback operations, lifting the ceiling from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation. This decision was in response to a further climb in the 30-year yield to its highest level since 2007. Yields initially dipped on the news—as the Treasury would have hoped—but then markets erased nearly the entire drop within a day.

To run a buyback, the Treasury purchases longer-dated Treasury bonds and funds the purchases by issuing short-term Treasury bills, swapping long-term government debt for short-term government debt, and removing the long-term bonds from private hands. 

The Bank Secrecy Act doesn’t just violate our freedoms; it also crushes small businesses. 

The Trump administration expanded financial surveillance last year by decreasing the reporting thresholds for currency transaction reports from $10,000 to just $200. After public pushback and a legal challenge by the Institute for Justice, the threshold was raised to $1,000. 

Yet, the damage was done. Evangelina Ornelas told The Guardian that her business was already destroyed. Ornelas runs a small, family-owned grocery store that used to have long lines of customers waiting for their money services (e.g., check cashing and remittances). Those lines have dried up, however, due to privacy concerns under the new surveillance.

Writing in the fall issue of American Affairs, Rep. Riley Moore (R‑WV) argues that American deindustrialization was a choice—that Washington refused to protect the steel industry and that a West Virginia steel mill and others like it died because of choices made by policymakers. He proposes much higher tariffs, direct federal investment through a new industrial bank modeled on the Development Finance Corporation, the enactment of the Defense Production Act to speed up permitting, and a requirement that the Defense Department buy more specialized domestic steel.

History supports neither the argument nor the remedy. Protection has virtually never been withheld from the steel industry. It was granted continuously for six decades, and the legacy mills declined anyway.

After the Supreme Court struck down his first order restricting birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara, President Trump signed a new order on August 6. At first blush, the new order seems like only a blatant attempt to ignore the Supreme Court. That might be true, but there’s an alternative reading that is more bizarre and potentially frightening: The president might believe he can unilaterally decide whether US law applies to any particular person or groups of people.

The entire order rests on the assertion that presidents can decide who is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and, therefore, US law. In a way, this is a far more dangerous claim. For instance, diplomats receive immunity not only from federal but also from state and local prosecution. If the president can suspend the laws—not just the enforcement of them but the laws themselves—the order would not only strip citizenship from many Americans, it would also create a massive new power for presidents to abuse.

The strange new order is already being challenged in court, but we still don’t know how the government will defend it.

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Why, As a Muslim, I Defend Liberty is a little big book I wrote in 2021 for Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org, a Cato project, to summarize the key Islamic arguments for classical liberalism. In 2023, its Swedish edition was published by Timbro: Varför Jag Som Muslim Försvarar Frihet. Three years later, in July 2026, it was launched in Pakistan, with the title: 

کیوں، بطور مسلمان، میں آزادی کا دفاع کرتا ہوں

— or, in plain English, “Why, As a Muslim, I Defend Liberty.”

The book, published by the Cato Institute, was translated into Urdu by Fida Ur Rahman, a lecturer in Islamic studies at the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology, who has also organized the printing of physical copies and the promotion of the book in Pakistan. At the same time, Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org offered the free digital download of the book in PDF format.

On July 23, Khurshid Ahmed Nadeem, a prominent Pakistani intellectual, devoted his column in Dunya News, a national Urdu daily, to the question, “What is Muslim liberalism?” The piece is essentially a review of my book Why, As a Muslim, I Defend Liberty, whose Urdu edition was recently launched in Pakistan, and my edited volume, No Compulsion in Religion—No Exceptions: Islamic Arguments for Religious Freedom, which Cato published earlier this year.

Nadeem appreciated some of the ideas behind “Muslim liberalism”—of which he kindly described me as its “most prominent advocate”—but also shared some reservations about rethinking Islam “while taking the liberal paradigm as its standard.” I sent him a respectful response, which he graciously published in full in his own column. Its English version follows: