Merchants pay fees to debit card networks (called “swipe” or “interchange” fees) each time a consumer uses a card. In 2010, the Durbin Amendment capped debit card interchange fees in the United States. On October 26, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Federal Reserve exceeded its authority by including costs such as a share of expected fraud losses as part of interchange fees, thus setting the cap too high. In 2025, a district court in Kentucky had upheld the Fed’s rule: if the Sixth Circuit upholds the Kentucky court, the conflict between the circuits could reach the Supreme Court. 

The legal details—including the courts’ disquisitions on economic theory and comma placement—though interesting, are a distraction: the real problem is that the Durbin Amendment is a misadventure in price controls. Price controls on financial services harm consumers, for the same reasons that price controls on gasoline or fire insurance harm consumers. When regulators force prices down, firms react by raising other prices or by cutting services or service quality. 

Read the rest of this post →

The terms “Old Right” and “New Right” are commonly used today, but it’s useful to know that they have a long pedigree. 

The Old Right of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, led by Robert Taft politically and people like Frank Chodorov intellectually, generally favored free markets at home and free trade abroad and placed a high value on individual liberty. In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of figures emerged, calling themselves members of the New Right. Their goal was to push the Republican Party in a more nationalist, protectionist, and socially conservative direction. Many of today’s national conservatives, or NatCons, have happily assumed the moniker New Right to distinguish themselves from those conservatives who continue to support aspects of the Old Right credo and favor important parts of their predecessors’ project. Though these two New Rights are not identical, they share many beliefs, especially the use of government power to advance their agenda, which threatens economic freedom and individual liberty. 

Libertarian Roy A. Childs, Jr., warned about those ideas in his essay, “The New Authoritarians,” published in Inquiry magazine in 1982. That article, a review of three books on the New Right, is included in the 2026 edition of Liberty against Power, a collection of Childs’ essays published by Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org, a project of the Cato Institute.

Read the rest of this post →

For the better part of the year, artificial intelligence (AI) policy has, reasonably, focused on establishing guardrails to mitigate some of the biggest risks in developing and deploying frontier AI models. This year has seen a rapid expansion in model capabilities, with the release of the first models capable of conducting advanced cyberattacks. We have also witnessed the first instances of models becoming advanced enough to outsmart the humans stress-testing them, raising some concerns about potential loss of control over frontier AI. In response, policymakers have enacted measures to mitigate some of the risks associated with the development and use of these advanced models. From the White House evaluation framework to the Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities, rules setting up the AI industry’s duties and responsibilities have progressively increased.

However, while the industry faces increasingly intense scrutiny, there is worrisome vagueness about the government’s role and authority as a regulator. 

Read the rest of this post →

AI researchers, scholars, and commentators gathered in the Bay Area for The Curve earlier this month. Operating under Chatham House Rule, employees at the frontier AI labs shared warnings about the capacity of their company’s respective models. One speculated that hospital systems could be taken offline by agentic “swarms” like those that hacked into Hugging Face. Another forecasted AI agents gaining control of weapons systems and refusing to accede to human commands. From my mixing and mingling, most attendees appeared to agree; they hadn’t seen sufficient evidence that labs knew how to prevent agents from escaping testing environments and wreaking havoc. 

In rare cases, threats could materialize from the use of malign AI and may even necessitate governors exercising emergency powers to respond to a natural or man-made disaster. However, conversations around such authorities often neglect the critical detail of which powers should be called on, to what ends, and how to end things when the true crisis is over. 

Read the rest of this post →

Over 30 people die per day in drunk driving crashes, according to national estimates. 

One mechanism for reducing these deaths might be restrictions on the kind of business that can sell alcohol. Researchers studied such laws in Texas, where 

cities can use local option elections to decide whether to permit particular types of alcohol sales [e.g, at on-premise locations like restaurants versus off-premise locations like liquor stores]. 

The findings suggest that

Read the rest of this post →

Recently, the White House and some of the leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies released a “Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities.” This voluntary document charts a path toward a self-regulation standard for governing frontier AI systems. The document is an innovative approach that provides both the government and industry with the flexibility to adapt to the rapidly evolving capabilities of AI systems and helps prevent some of the most common pitfalls of government intervention. This commitment should provide a valuable building block for the regulation of the AI industry, but some questions are left unanswered. 

While the responsibilities and commitments of the industry are explicit and clear, the document does not address key questions regarding the role of government and leaves the industry with a lack of clarity on when, how, and under what justification the government can intervene in the market and what tools it is allowed to use.

Read the rest of this post →