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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Congress is vastly overspending, and federal debt is rising by $2 trillion a year. Without major spending reforms, the government is headed toward a financial crisis. But it is also true that even if the federal budget were balanced, many spending programs would continue undermining the economy because their costs outweigh their benefits. 

Such negative-value spending is the focus of my recent “Leaky Bucket” study with Ryan Bourne. We argue that the federal budget is riddled with wasteful “leaks.” The government scoops up trillions of dollars into its budget bucket, but many of them spill out due to inefficiencies and policy mistakes. The Trump administration has focused on reducing fraud, but that is only one type of leak from the federal budget bucket.

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My colleague Stephen Richer has already weighed in with observations on the New Jersey voter registration fiasco, in which a software error mistakenly registered roughly 6,600 persons to vote between June 12, 2023, and June 25, 2024, even though they had affirmed they were not US citizens. Of these, somewhat fewer than 400 later voted. 

So far as I am aware, this is by far the biggest instance of unlawful noncitizen voting in the US unearthed in the past generation, so it may matter that it seems to be widely agreed that the mistaken registration did not result from intentional misconduct by the persons added to the rolls, the state, or its software vendor. Damningly, however, when the error was found and the software fixed, the state “never notified affected residents or removed their names from the rolls,” according to the NYT account. Incoming Gov. Mikie Sherrill at a press conference called this “unacceptable.” That’s for sure. 

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