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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Over the coming decade, financing Medicare’s doctors’ services and outpatient care (Part B) and prescription drug coverage (Part D) will put roughly $10.7 trillion straight onto the national credit card. That is worse than the Trustees projected a year ago, and prescription drug spending accounts for nearly all of the deterioration. Medicare’s financial deterioration is happening on autopilot, but Congress chose to put it on an unsustainable course.

Prescription Drug Spending Increased Sharply

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In Argentina, talk of leaving or at least bypassing Mercosur—the South American trade bloc that also includes Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay—is ramping up as the Javier Milei administration seeks to open the country’s economy. On August 20, Minister of Foreign Affairs Pablo Quirno said that “we have no time to lose” in finding new trade partners. “We want to do it with Mercosur, but if the bloc doesn’t keep pace with what we need, we’ll move forward bilaterally,” he added. 

On August 21, Deputy Minister of Economy José Luis Daza posted on X that “Mercosur has condemned its people to worse technology, worse goods, and much higher prices.… It’s time to seize all the opportunities the global economy has to offer and abandon protectionism.”

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Last week, Williams—a natural gas company—hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a power plant called Socrates South that just began operating in New Albany, Ohio. Notably, this natural gas plant is fully disconnected from the public power grid, supplying the data centers of a Meta affiliate, Sidecat, without affecting anyone else’s electricity. 

Speed to Power

The New Albany site is part of a growing trend of data centers acquiring electric service more rapidly than traditional timelines of six, eight, or even ten years. The Socrates South plant came online in just 17 months, with the first filings made with the Ohio Power Siting Board in March of 2025. 

This is a big victory for the local community, the developer Williams, and their customer Sidecat, but also the Ohio lawmakers behind the legislation that made it possible: last year’s HB 15. That bill provided the regulatory certainty that a fully off-grid generation plant could avoid the long queue for grid connection and bring “speed to power” to customers who don’t want to wait. It’s aligned with a framework we’ve been advocating, called consumer-regulated electricity (CRE), which creates space for new, privately financed electric utilities to supply non-residential customers, such as data centers, without interconnecting with the existing grid.

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The draft of the CFPB Reform Act of 2026 includes provisions that clarify the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s duty to perform a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of proposed rules. Addressing the bureau’s carelessness in conducting CBAs should improve the quality and stability of its rules, so this change is overdue. 

The improvements will be greatest if the bureau does not enact rules that fail a CBA. However, subsections 103 (5)(A) (viii) and (ix) require the bureau to publish the justification for a rule enacted even when a CBA shows that another rule would be better or the rule’s costs exceed its benefits. This implies that the bureau may enact rules that fail a CBA, reducing the effectiveness of the reforms. 

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Religion & Liberty, a publication of the Acton Institute, published an insightful review of our edited book, No Compulsion in Religion—No Exceptions: Islamic Arguments for Religious Freedom. Penned by Nour Zerelli, a PhD student in Islamic intellectual history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the piece aptly summarized the book’s key message—one also captured in its title: “Liberty as a Qur’anic Value.”

Zerelli first summarized the gist of the book:

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