The Trump administration announced a major oil deal with Venezuela on Friday that would purportedly give the United States rights to 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil, or 20 percent of the country’s oil reserves. Much information and key details are still lacking, but everything we know about the deal is troubling:

• It expands state corporatism by giving the US government a large, and possibly majority, stake in a major joint oil venture in Venezuela, an entity the Wall Street Journal reports “would be the world’s second-largest corporate holder of proven reserves after Saudi Aramco.” State-owned enterprises are a bad idea anywhere, but as Scott Lincicome observes, this comes after the US government under Trump has already taken equity in 31 private companies. As Scott says, “This isn’t even ‘creeping’ socialism anymore.”
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This blog was updated at 1:10 p.m., Sept. 1. 

As the United States, under President Donald Trump, endeavors to coerce international trading partners through economic leverage to address both its trade and non-trade concerns, those trading partners are increasingly simply circumventing the United States. 

On April 2, 2025, not long after beginning his second term, President Trump, in violation of international trade law and US treaty commitments as a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), announced steep and sweeping global tariffs on imported products from nearly all countries. He called them his “Liberation Day” tariffs. They were only the beginning. More and more tariffs have since been applied by the US, both globally and on individual countries and their products, even as some of Trump’s supposedly “reciprocal” tariffs have been overruled by the Supreme Court. 

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President Trump’s statement on Truth Social yesterday reminded me of a sad fact: Anyone involved in public life will regularly receive angry messages from others who threaten to invoke the power of obscure government agencies, and — not to put too fine a point on it — those messages sometimes appear insane. Some years ago, a personal-injury attorney repeatedly emailed me to demand that I disclose some of my private correspondence under my state’s Freedom of Information Act (even though FOIA didn’t apply). Another poor fellow repeatedly wrote to contend that a bill I had authored to protect the rights of photographers would violate HIPAA (HIPAA applies to medical and insurance personnel only; it has nothing to do with those who take photographs in public). I guess it’s mildly amusing to read half-literate communiques filled with bizarre, mildly deranged threats of government action, but it is less amusing when those threats come from the president of the United States.

Today, the Cato Institute launches Your Verdict Counts, a nonpartisan civic education initiative anchored by an eight-minute short video designed to help Americans better understand their rights and responsibilities when called to serve on a jury.

The campaign focuses on educating prospective jurors about rights they are rarely told about before entering the courtroom. This includes the ability to vote according to their conscience, protections against punishment for a verdict, and the fact that “reasonable doubt” has no fixed legal definition and is left to each juror’s judgment.

Louisiana is no stranger to violating the constitutional duty to disclose exculpatory evidence to criminal defendants. In fact, half of the Supreme Court’s decisions reversing convictions on this basis come from Louisiana. Juan Matthews’s case is yet another entry in that troubling record and a further example of how Louisiana state courts are failing to uphold the Constitution’s guarantee of a fair trial.

Juan Matthews was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1992 after the state withheld a substantial amount of exculpatory evidence. Over 30 years into his prison sentence, a records request revealed previously undisclosed police files. These files “supplied an eyewitness who described a different man fleeing the scene, showed that the state’s central eyewitness may not have seen the shooting as she claimed, and revealed that a witness who did not have a prior relationship with the victim or his family was shown Matthews’s photograph but did not identify him as the suspected shooter.”

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Recently, I’ve begun to wonder how it is that grand juries—which have recently begun rejecting politically motivated prosecutions—have blessed prosecutions as ridiculous as that of former Olympian David Hearn.

Earlier this summer, a DC-based federal grand jury indicted Hearn on felony charges for allegedly vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. US Attorney Jeanine Pirro was eventually forced to dismiss the indictment against Hearn—and others—because the damage was caused not by Hearn or other vandals but by a Trump-connected contractor’s botched and rushed installation. As the US Attorney’s Office in Washington, DC struggles to secure convictions, the notion that DC grand jurors drawn from that precise community have greenlighted these prosecutions seems far-fetched—unless grand jurors are being lied to, manipulated, or aren’t being presented with the full picture.

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The standard argument for occupational licensing is that it keeps out low-quality providers. Existing evidence, however, does not support this claim; moreover, 

licensing erects barriers that can restrict labor supply and worker mobility, with potentially far-reaching implications for wages, employment opportunities, and economic efficiency.

Indeed, new research suggests that

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