The Trump administration is pressuring local governments to sign cooperation agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by threatening access to grants for ambulance services, police gear, and rape prosecutions. This escalation will lead to fresh rounds of litigation and policy uncertainty. If successful, it would establish a concerning precedent that would allow the executive branch to use the expansive volume of federal grants to coerce other levels of government into following a president’s policy agenda.

Turning Grants into a Power Grab

With many state and local governments refusing to use local resources to support deportation efforts, the Trump administration has used a variety of methods in seeking to eliminate sanctuary policies. This includes attempting to claw back previously disbursed Homeland Security funding and issuing agency-wide memos freezing certain grants based on immigration policy demands. Affected governments sued to retain access to the funds. Although some cases remain ongoing, other cases led to courts blocking the administration’s moves.

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JD Vance’s new book, Communion, includes a chapter railing against economists. The central thesis of his chapter “A Dismal Science” is that the government has preoccupied itself with GDP maximization at the expense of well-being. Americans only seem so well off, Vance argues, because “we bombard [them] with all manner of creature comforts and add their consumption—price club mega-size junk—to our national GDP.” 

The vice president’s criticism is mostly a strawman. I don’t know any economists who advocate GDP maximization. In fact, most economists talk about ill-defined concepts like “social welfare” all the time. The limits of GDP as a proxy for human welfare are emphasized in any 101-level economics course, including this study aid for high schoolers. As my colleague John Cochrane tweeted last month: “GDP answers the question posed to it…. What is the total value of goods and services produced in the market economy…. It is a terrible measure of things it wasn’t designed to measure: consumer surplus, welfare, non-market activity, happiness, etc.”

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In April, the US Department of Justice brought an indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a prominent left-of-center nonprofit, charging it with offenses including making false statements to a federally insured bank and wire fraud at the expense of its donors. On Friday, August 7, federal judge Emily Marks of the Middle District of Alabama denied a defense motion to dismiss the indictment as vindictive, saying the defense had not met the (substantial) burden of showing that the charges were improperly motivated by retaliation against protected speech.

Leaving aside the question of how courts are to distinguish vindictive prosecutions from the regular kind at a time when the president of the United States openly instructs the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents, the merits of the complaint are likely to emerge into sharper focus.

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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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