Those propositions are not especially controversial.

The central disagreement concerned a more fundamental issue: the conditions required to establish the cause of an observed difference.

That is the question causal inference is meant to answer. It is not a fashionable phrase for putting equations next to common sense. It is the discipline of refusing to confuse a pattern with the mechanism that produced it.

“Correlation is not causation” is the bumper-sticker version. This is true, fundamentally, but almost comically incomplete. The real question is this: what comparison would make causation plausible?

This matters when we study school outcomes, crime, drug policy, incarceration, employment, health, policing, poverty, or group differences of any kind. It matters whenever someone looks at a difference in outcomes and says, “There it is. That right there! That is the explanation.”

In most cases, it is not.

The Missing World

Consider a few familiar claims:

• People who attend college tend to earn more than people who do not.

• Neighborhoods with more police may have lower crime rates.

• Counties that expand addiction treatment may see fewer overdose deaths.

• One group may score differently from another on a standardized test.

Each of these statements identifies a pattern, but none provides evidence of causation.

To say that college causes higher earnings, for example, we would need to compare a person’s actual earnings after attending college with that same person’s earnings had they not attended college. But we cannot observe both lives. The person gets one history, not two.

That unobserved alternative history is the counterfactual.

Causal inference is the systematic attempt to construct a credible substitute for the unobserved counterfactual. While it is not possible to observe alternative histories for individuals, cities, or institutions, researchers can seek reasonable comparisons in other persons, places, or time periods.

The challenge is that people and places do not sort themselves randomly.

Students who attend college may differ from non-attendees before enrollment. They may have different academic preparation, family resources, health, career expectations, access to credit, neighborhood conditions, or social networks. Those factors can affect both college attendance and later income.

A simple comparison of average earnings does not isolate the effect of college attendance. Instead, it conflates the effect of college with all the factors that influence the likelihood of attending college.

Economists call this selection. Other disciplines call closely related problems confounding or selection bias. The label matters less than the logic: if the groups differed before one received the alleged cause, a later difference in outcomes cannot automatically be attributed to that cause. Observational research has to grapple directly with selection and confounding rather than assume them away.

The Cleanest Comparison

The ideal solution is random assignment.

Suppose a city wants to evaluate a new reentry-support program but has funds for only half of the eligible applicants in its first year. If applicants are assigned by lottery, those selected and those not selected should, on average, have similar characteristics before the program starts—both the things researchers can measure and, in expectation, the things they cannot.

If employment, housing stability, rearrest, or substance-use outcomes differ later, the lottery gives us a strong reason to attribute at least some of that difference to access to the program.

This is why randomized controlled trials are powerful. Randomization does not make people identical. It makes the treatment and control groups comparable on average before treatment. It attacks the selection problem at its source.

But even a randomized trial is not magic.

People can drop out. Some assigned to treatment may never receive it. Staff may implement the intervention unevenly. Participants may behave differently because they know they are being studied. And a program that works in one jurisdiction may work differently elsewhere.

A randomized study can provide robust evidence regarding a specific intervention, within a defined population and context. It does not justify generalizations beyond the scope of the study.

That limitation is not a defect. It is intellectual honesty.

Most Policy Is Not a Lottery

For many social questions, randomization is infeasible, unethical, or impossible.

States do not randomly decide whether to expand Medicaid. Cities do not randomly experience housing crises. People do not randomly become poor, incarcerated, uninsured, sick, exposed to lead, or discriminated against.

That does not mean causal analysis stops. It means the work gets harder.

Researchers look for institutional rules, policy timing, administrative thresholds, or outside events that create comparisons resembling random assignment. These are commonly called quasi-experiments or natural experiments. They are not shortcuts around causal inference. They are attempts to build a credible comparison from the world as it is.

Several designs recur across economics, public policy, political science, sociology, criminology, and public health. Regression discontinuity, difference-in-differences, instrumental variables, and related designs are among the major quasi-experimental tools used when a conventional experiment is unavailable.

The names can sound forbidding. The basic intuition is not.

Finding Comparisons in the Real World

Difference-in-differences: compare changes, not snapshots

Imagine that one state expands Medicaid while a neighboring state does not. The expansion state may already have a different uninsured rate, income distribution, health-care market, or political culture. A simple post-policy comparison would tell us little.

Difference-in-differences instead asks whether the uninsured rate changed more in the expansion state than it changed in the non-expansion state.

The method’s central assumption is called parallel trends: absent the policy, the two places would have moved along similar trajectories. That assumption cannot be proven directly, because it concerns the unobserved world without the policy. But researchers can examine pre-policy trends, use multiple comparison places, test for implausible early effects, and conduct placebo analyses.

The point is not that difference-in-differences makes skepticism unnecessary. It tells us exactly where skepticism should be aimed.

Regression discontinuity: rules create useful edges

Now imagine a diversion program that accepts defendants with a risk score below 50 and excludes those at 50 or above.

A defendant scoring 49 is likely more comparable to one scoring 50 than to one scoring 12. If outcomes jump sharply at the threshold, and if nobody can precisely manipulate their score, the eligibility rule can approximate random assignment for people near the cutoff.

That is regression discontinuity.

The principal strength of this method is its ability to generate a credible local comparison. Its principal limitation is that it estimates effects only for cases near the threshold, and does not necessarily generalize to individuals far from the cutoff or to other jurisdictions.

A good causal claim always has a jurisdiction. It tells you for whom, where, and under what conditions the estimate applies.

Matching: useful, but not a time machine

Matching tries to improve an observational comparison by pairing treated and untreated people who looked similar beforehand: comparable ages, prior records, education, employment history, family circumstances, health indicators, neighborhoods, or assessed risks.

That is usually better than comparing everyone who received a program with everyone who did not.

But matching only balances what researchers observe. It cannot account for an unmeasured factor that affects both treatment participation and the outcome: motivation, an informal job lead, a supportive relative, an undocumented health condition, a relationship with a case manager, or simply the ability to navigate bureaucracy.

For this reason, controlling for numerous variables is not equivalent to establishing a causal effect. Statistical adjustment can enhance the credibility of a comparison, but it cannot compensate for unmeasured information.

Instrumental variables: an outside push

Instrumental variables use an outside event or institutional feature that changes someone’s exposure to a treatment for reasons plausibly unrelated to the outcome.

Suppose that eligible defendants are more likely to enter treatment court when randomly assigned to a judge who tends to refer people there. If judge assignment is genuinely as-good-as random, it may provide an outside nudge into treatment-court participation.

The difficult question is whether the judge affects later outcomes through anything else. Does the judge also set different bail conditions? Should he impose different sentences? Maybe she should use different supervision practices? If so, the instrument is not isolating treatment-court access.

The method is powerful when its assumptions are credible. It is fragile when you assert them rather than defend them.

Synthetic control: build the comparison you do not have

Sometimes a policy changes in one city or one state, and no single comparison jurisdiction is adequate.

Synthetic control constructs a weighted composite of untreated places to create the closest available counterfactual. If Oregon changes a drug-policy regime, for example, a researcher might combine several other states into a “synthetic Oregon” that closely matches Oregon’s prior overdose trends, demographics, and related indicators.

If actual Oregon diverges from synthetic Oregon after the policy change, that divergence can be informative.

The credibility of this method depends on the quality of the pre-policy match and the absence of contemporaneous events uniquely affecting the treated unit. Synthetic control does not generate causality automatically; rather, it is a transparent effort to approximate the counterfactual.

The Sentence That Begins With “Because”

Every causal design rests on a sentence that begins with because.

We can attribute a difference to the program because access was randomly assigned.

We can attribute a change to a policy because the treated and comparison jurisdictions had been moving in parallel beforehand.

We can attribute a discontinuity to eligibility because cases immediately on both sides of the cutoff were otherwise comparable.

We can attribute a result to treatment because the instrument changed treatment exposure but did not independently affect the outcome.

The entire argument lives or dies in that “because.”

If it is vague, if it assumes what needs to be shown, if the data contradict it, or if obvious alternatives remain unaddressed, the causal claim weakens. It does not necessarily disappear. It simply deserves less confidence.

This is why causal inference does not require researchers to eliminate every imaginable confounder. No serious social scientist can do that. The standard is not omniscience.

The standard is a credible design, clear assumptions, transparent evidence, reasonable robustness checks, and conclusions calibrated to what the evidence can actually bear.

“We cannot know with perfect certainty” does not mean “a plausible story is now a causal finding.”

Back to Group Differences

This brings us back to the dispute that prompted this note.

Suppose someone offers three propositions:

1. Human populations exhibit ancestry-related genetic variation.

2. Some traits are substantially heritable within populations.

3. Broad, socially defined groups differ in an observed outcome.

Each proposition may be true. None, separately or together, establishes a genetic explanation for the observed group difference.

The missing step is causal identification.

Within-group heritability describes variation among individuals in a particular population and environment. It does not tell us what proportion of a difference between group averages is genetic. A 2024 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article states the point in unusually direct terms: aggregate within-group genetic and phenotypic information cannot, by itself, separate group differences into genetic and environmental components.

This does not establish that all observed group differences are environmental in origin. Rather, it demonstrates that within-group heritability is insufficient to resolve the question.

Similarly, enumerating potential environmental mechanisms does not, by itself, constitute a causal explanation. Factors such as school quality, nutrition, health, stress, discrimination, labor markets, family circumstances, neighborhood conditions, and institutional exposure may all be causally relevant, but merely listing them does not provide a causal decomposition. A rigorous argument must distinguish between what is plausible and what is established, regardless of the direction of the claim.

Genetic association research also has its own identification problems. Population stratification can create associations when ancestry is correlated with social and environmental structure; subtle stratification can accumulate in polygenic scores and reproduce environmental patterns. Indirect genetic effects further complicate interpretation, because parental genotypes may influence the environment that children experience.

This is not a demand to declare genetic influences impossible. It is a demand to distinguish a possibility from a demonstrated explanation.

A Reader’s Replication Checklist

Before accepting a headline, a paper, or a confident social-media claim as causal, ask:

• What is the alleged cause? “Policy,” “race,” “culture,” and “the environment” are often too vague to test.

• What is the outcome? Is it measured consistently, and does it capture what the argument says it captures?

• Compared with what? What stands in for the missing counterfactual?

• Why are the groups comparable? Random assignment, policy timing, a cutoff, an external shock, matching, or something else?

• What assumption does the design need? Parallel trends? No manipulation? No unobserved confounding? An exclusion restriction?

• Could cause and effect run both ways? Do more police lower crime, or do police deployments rise where crime is expected to increase?

• What did the researchers do to stress-test the result? Look for placebo tests, pre-trend checks, alternative specifications, sensitivity analyses, and replication.

• How large is the effect? Statistical significance is not the same as substantive importance.

• For whom does it apply? A result at an eligibility cutoff or in one city may not generalize everywhere.

• What remains unknown? Good research names its limits instead of hiding them.

Uncertainty Is Sometimes the Result

Causal inference is not an instruction to remain forever agnostic. Strong designs can reveal important facts about interventions, institutions, harms, incentives, and opportunities. They can tell policymakers what worked, for whom, and at what cost.

But observed differences are not self-interpreting.

A correlation provides a basis for further investigation, but it does not justify asserting a specific causal mechanism. The higher the stakes of the proposed explanation, particularly in matters such as criminality, intelligence, poverty, race, or human worth, the greater the responsibility to provide rigorous evidence.

When the evidence cannot supply a credible comparison, uncertainty is not evasion.

It is the result.

Richard Hanania’s recent essay, “The Strange, Secret, Open Triumph of Race Science,” has the shape of a scientific argument. It invokes ancient DNA, Neanderthal ancestry, recent natural selection, genome-wide association studies, and David Reich’s work on population history. But its central claim does not emerge from that evidence. It is inserted between the lines.

The key move is familiar: human populations differ genetically; intelligence is partly heritable; therefore contemporary racial gaps in intelligence and behavior probably reflect inherited differences, and ordinary racial stereotypes are probably rough descriptions of biological reality.

That is not how causal inference works. It is not how behavioral genetics works. And it is especially not how a careful political scientist or economist should reason about outcomes produced by a complicated interaction of family background, institutions, schooling, health, exposure, incentives, discrimination, neighborhood effects, culture, and genes.

A brief disclosure is appropriate here. Like Hanania, I am neither a biologist nor a geneticist. I am an economist; he is a political scientist. But this is not a dispute in which one needs to claim specialist authority in population genetics to notice a basic analytical problem. When an argument moves from observed group differences, to the heritability of a trait within groups, to a genetic explanation for differences between groups, it has made a causal inference. And causal inference is not a decorative feature of social science. It is the work

Hanania is right about one narrow point: it is not scientifically coherent to say that every possible average genetic difference among human populations is impossible in principle. Population structure exists. Migration, isolation, admixture, mutation, drift, and selection have shaped human genomes.

Fine. Now comes the part he skips: none of that establishes the genetic source of observed racial gaps in cognition, educational attainment, income, criminal justice contact, occupational sorting, or any other socially salient outcome. The difference between “possible” and “demonstrated” is the entire issue.

The Evidence Does Not Say What He Says

Start with the most important distinction: Ancestry is real. Race is a historically contingent social classification that bundles people with varied ancestries into broad, shifting categories.

A geneticist can identify patterns of shared ancestry, often with considerable precision. But that does not mean that census categories such as “Black,” “White,” “Asian,” or “Hispanic” are discrete natural types, much less that they can bear the theoretical weight Hanania places on them. The National Academies has explicitly advised researchers not to use race as a proxy for human genetic variation, because race is a social concept and is often a misleading, inaccurate, and harmful substitute for ancestry in genetic research.

This is not an argument that “genes do not matter.” Genes obviously matter. It is an argument against an illicit mapping:

Genetic population structure → racial hierarchy in socially valued traits.

The implication does not follow.

Consider the passage in which Hanania treats the discovery of Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry as a watershed for racial hereditarianism. It is fascinating science. It tells us that modern human populations have different histories of admixture with archaic hominins. It also tells us almost nothing by itself about contemporary racial intelligence gaps.

A Tibetan high-altitude adaptation associated with Denisovan-derived DNA is a successful example of linking a genetic variant to a biologically intelligible phenotype under a concrete environmental pressure. Oxygen availability at high altitude is not mysterious. The phenotype is measurable. The mechanism is testable.

Compare that to the claim that broad U.S. racial categories differ genetically in “cognitive ability” in a way that explains test-score gaps. There, the phenotype is entangled with education, language, health, stress, childhood development, test construction, peer effects, wealth, and the social organization of opportunity. The causal task is much harder. One cannot solve it by gesturing toward ancient DNA.

Heritability Is Not a Group Explanation

Hanania’s essay depends heavily on a common misunderstanding: if intelligence is heritable within a population, then average differences between populations are likely genetic. That conclusion is not merely premature. It is a category error.

Heritability is a statement about variation within a specified population, in a specified environment, at a specified time. It does not report the proportion of an individual’s trait that “comes from genes.” Nor does it decompose a difference between group averages into genetic and environmental components.

This is easier to see with height. Height is highly heritable within many contemporary populations. Yet average height has changed sharply over time in some countries, too rapidly to be explained by genetic evolution. Nutrition, disease burden, prenatal care, childhood health, and living conditions matter a great deal. A society can have high within-group heritability and large environmentally produced differences in average outcomes across social groups or generations.

The same logic applies to cognitive test scores. A recent analysis in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences makes the point directly: even perfect knowledge of within-group heritability provides no information, by itself, about the heritability of a difference between groups. Without environmental control or a well-specified causal design, one cannot separate aggregate group differences into genetic and environmental components.

This should be elementary for economists. We do not infer the causal effect of schooling from the fact that education predicts income. We worry about selection, omitted variables, reverse causation, family background, and institutional context. Yet when the subject is race and IQ, Hanania suddenly asks us to accept a much weaker standard: visible group differences plus a plausible genetic story.

That is not rigorous skepticism. It is credulity with a scientific vocabulary.

“Just Look Around” Is Not Identification

Hanania says that people who deny systematic psychological or cognitive differences among populations can be refuted by “simply looking at human beings.” This is perhaps the most revealing sentence in the essay.

“Simply looking” is not a research design.

Suppose we observe that one group is overrepresented in a profession, another in a sport, another in imprisonment, another in college completion, and another in a standardized-test distribution. What have we learned? We have learned that outcomes differ. We have not learned why.

Behavioral economics should make this obvious. People respond to incentives and constraints. They are shaped by defaults, social expectations, scarcity, stress, information, and institutions. A child’s cognitive development is not formed in a vacuum. Prenatal conditions, lead exposure, sleep, nutrition, school quality, parental time, neighborhood safety, family income volatility, discrimination, trauma, and access to medical care all plausibly affect measured outcomes.

None of this requires a romantic claim that every person has identical talents or that all group distributions must be equal. It requires only the modest proposition that observed disparities do not explain themselves.

If a bank finds that loan repayment differs across neighborhoods, it does not get to announce a genetic explanation because creditworthiness has some heritable correlates. It must identify mechanisms. Are applicants facing different interest rates? Different labor markets? Different wealth cushions? Different exposure to shocks? Different underwriting practices? A competent empirical researcher begins there.

Race-hereditarian argument often works backward. It begins with the outcome, adds the indisputable observation that humans have evolved, and declares the causal work mostly finished.

The Polygenic-Score Problem

Hanania also treats the advance of genomic research as though it has dissolved the empirical obstacles. In fact, modern genomics has clarified why his confidence is misplaced.

Polygenic scores combine many genetic variants into an estimated predictor for a complex trait. They can be useful in some contexts, particularly when they are developed and validated in similar populations. But their predictive accuracy often declines substantially when applied across genetic ancestries. That limitation is known as the portability or transferability problem.

An eLife study found that polygenic-score prediction varies not only between ancestry groups but also within ancestry groups according to characteristics such as age, sex, and socioeconomic status. A 2024 review likewise notes weaker predictive performance between populations defined by genetic ancestry and even within some ancestry-defined subgroups.

Why does this matter? Because Hanania wants to move from associations in genetic data to claims about genetic causes of differences between populations. But associations can reflect population stratification, nonrandom mating, gene–environment correlation, and indirect genetic effects.

Here is a simple illustration. Children inherit genes from their parents. They also inherit environments partly shaped by their parents: books in the house, school choices, conversational styles, neighborhoods, financial stability, and social networks. If a genetic variant is correlated with parental education, a polygenic score may predict educational outcomes partly because it tags an environment parents created, not because the variant directly causes the child’s outcome.

That is not a speculative concern. A Nature Communications study estimated that indirect, environmentally mediated genetic effects accounted for roughly 36 percent of the population association for a cognitive polygenic score and 40 percent for a noncognitive score across the designs and cohorts studied.

This is not an argument that the direct genetic component is zero. It is an argument that the association is not a clean causal coefficient. A behavioral economist might put it this way: the measured “genetic effect” can bundle an individual’s inherited variants with the institutional and familial environment correlated with those variants. Treating that bundle as a racial genetic ranking is a spectacularly bad identification strategy.

The Flynn Effect Should Humble Everyone

There is another stubborn fact that should make grand hereditarian claims much less comfortable: average IQ test performance has changed across generations far faster than genes could plausibly change.

A meta-analysis covering 285 studies found mean gains of 2.31 standard-score points per decade across the relevant studies. The precise magnitude and pattern of the Flynn effect vary by country, period, and test domain. But the basic lesson is unavoidable: measured cognitive performance is environmentally responsive on a large scale.

That does not prove that all group differences are environmental. It does prove that test scores are not fixed readouts of immutable inherited rank.

The right response to this fact is not to replace one totalizing story with another. It is to take interaction seriously. Genes matter. Environments matter. Genes help shape how people respond to environments; environments shape which genetic propensities are expressed and rewarded. Social institutions influence both the distribution of environments and the returns to traits.

That is messier than Hanania’s story. It is also closer to reality.

David Reich Is Not a Witness for the Prosecution

Hanania repeatedly invokes David Reich, but Reich’s actual caution is precisely what Hanania wishes to escape.

In his 2018 New York Times essay, Reich wrote that genetic differences aligning with some contemporary racial categories are real, while also emphasizing that claims connecting those differences to racist stereotypes lack evidence. He warned that current beliefs about the genetic nature of population differences are likely to be wrong in important respects.

Hanania regards this as evasive. It is not. It is what intellectual discipline looks like when the data do not support a stronger claim.

Reich’s work has transformed our understanding of population history. That does not make it a warrant for turning contemporary stereotypes into priors. To learn that Europeans are descended from the mixture of several ancient populations is not to discover a biological essence called “white intelligence.” Identifying selection on hundreds of alleles is not inferring a racial league table for cognition. And observing that a trait is polygenic does not make it easy to identify its between-group causes.

The American Society of Human Genetics puts the core point plainly: genetic variation is largely distributed along gradients, with substantial overlap among populations; the evidence does not support biologically distinct human racial subcategories or genetics-based rankings of populations.

Individualism Requires Better Science

Hanania closes by insisting that distributions overlap and that individuals should be treated as individuals. Good. But this is not a minor caveat attached to the argument. It should destroy the argument’s political and moral swagger.

If distributions overlap substantially, then group averages are poor tools for judging particular people. If the causal sources of group differences are unresolved, then using group membership as a proxy becomes still less defensible. If social outcomes are responsive to institutions and environment, then fatalism becomes both analytically lazy and politically costly.

The classical liberal case for equal treatment does not depend on pretending human beings are identical. It rests on a more robust insight: institutions should not assign rights, dignity, opportunity, or suspicion by using crude group averages as substitutes for information about individuals.

That insight also has a behavioral-economic foundation. Humans are prone to overgeneralize from salient cases, mistake correlations for causes, and turn descriptive patterns into moral narratives. We are particularly vulnerable when the pattern confirms an existing social stereotype. The appropriate corrective is not denial of human variation. It is a higher standard of evidence before declaring that a social hierarchy has been found in the genome.

Hanania’s essay asks readers to believe that a taboo has concealed an obvious truth. The more prosaic possibility is that he has mistaken an open scientific question for a settled result because he likes where the answer appears to lead.

There is no need to fear population genetics. There is also no need to let it be conscripted into a theory it has not demonstrated.

There is a pleasing simplicity to the newest political housing slogan: where ICE goes, rents go down. The proposition, attributed to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, is that removing undocumented immigrants reduces demand for housing, especially in lower-cost rental markets, and therefore lowers rents.

As with many slogans that survive because they contain a fragment of economic truth, this one leaves out the part of the model that makes the conclusion uncertain. More people competing for a fixed stock of apartments can indeed bid up rents. But removing people from an economy does not only remove renters. It also removes workers, consumers, entrepreneurs, taxpayers, and, importantly, people who build and repair housing.

A theory of housing affordability that counts immigrant households in the demand column but refuses to count immigrant labor in the supply column is not a theory of housing affordability. It is an accounting trick.

The Partial-Equilibrium Temptation

Begin with what is true. In the short run, housing supply is often highly inelastic. A city cannot instantly produce apartments merely because more people want them. Land must be acquired, permits secured, financing arranged, labor hired, materials purchased, and construction completed. In a market where those constraints already bind, an abrupt increase in the number of households can increase market rents.

A recent Dallas Federal Reserve working paper provides evidence consistent with this proposition. Studying the large unauthorized-immigration inflow from 2021 through early 2024, the authors estimate that an increase in unauthorized immigrant-worker flows equal to 1 percent of a locality’s initial employment raised local rents by about 1.4 percent and house prices by about 2.2 percent. They found little evidence that new housing supply rose over that short interval.

That is a serious empirical result, and people who favor more liberal immigration rules should not pretend otherwise. If housing construction is constrained, more residents will put pressure on the existing stock. One need not endorse mass removal, or any particular enforcement policy, to accept that elementary point.

But it does not establish the converse proposition: that ICE enforcement, deportation, or fear-induced departure will reliably produce lower rents. To reason that way is to mistake a short-run estimate of an inflow’s demand effect for a complete causal account of an outflow engineered through enforcement. The two experiments are not mirror images.

The People Who Build the Apartments

Housing is produced with land, capital, materials, rules, and labor. In the United States, immigrant labor is a substantial part of that last category. The Urban Institute estimates that immigrants constituted more than 23 percent of construction workers in 2023, and reports that about half of foreign-born workers in the sector may be undocumented. This is not a minor detail to be appended after the conclusion has been reached. It is the conclusion’s principal complication.

Suppose a construction crew loses its general laborers, roofers, drywall installers, or concrete workers. The effect is not simply that a few workers disappear and native-born workers slide effortlessly into identical positions the next morning. Projects are delayed; bids rise; subcontractors cannot coordinate schedules; financing costs accumulate while buildings remain unfinished. Higher-skilled workers who complement rather than substitute for the missing workers—electricians, plumbers, project managers, inspectors—may find fewer projects on which to work.

This is not merely speculation. Research summarized by the Urban Institute finds that the Secure Communities immigration-enforcement program produced persistent reductions in construction employment and homebuilding, while home prices rose. The relevant lesson is not that every act of enforcement has one identical consequence in every city. It is that the supply-side effect is real, potentially large, and directly contrary to the bumper-sticker certainty that removals must make housing cheaper.

The Dallas Fed paper itself recognizes this ambiguity. Its authors note that unauthorized workers may be disproportionately represented in construction, where they can lower building costs and eventually expand housing supply. It also reviews research finding that the short-run housing-price effects of deportations can reverse when housing supply contracts. In other words, the paper frequently invoked to support the “rents go down” slogan warns against treating immigration and enforcement as a one-variable demand story.

A City Is Not a Spreadsheet Cell

There is a further problem with the claim’s casual application to New York City. New York is not a textbook market in which every landlord can immediately reset rent whenever the number of potential tenants changes. Almost half of the city’s rental apartments are rent stabilized. Rent increases for those units are governed by law and by the Rent Guidelines Board, not by a weekly headcount of who has left the neighborhood.

That does not mean population changes are irrelevant. They can affect vacancies, the unregulated segment of the market, neighborhood businesses, and the eventual political and economic conditions in which rents are set. It means only that a crude one-for-one story about enforcement and rents is especially implausible in a city where a large share of leases does not function as an unconstrained spot market.

Nor are the people targeted by enforcement distributed randomly across the housing and labor markets. A family that leaves may free a unit. But the same community may lose a restaurant worker, a home-health aide, a contractor, a tenant who helped support a local shop, and a parent whose absence disrupts the work decisions of relatives who remain. Enforcement is not a sterile population-adjustment mechanism. It changes expectations, labor-force participation, business formation, and household behavior—often well beyond the individuals formally removed.

That is why even the narrow question, “Will rents fall?” cannot be answered responsibly with a chant. Which rents? Over what time horizon? In what city? Is the city allowed to build? Are displaced workers replaced? Does construction slow? Do native residents move in or out? Does the measure describe asking rents, new-lease rents, regulated rents, or rents actually paid?

The more specific the question becomes, the less useful the slogan becomes.

The Housing Lesson Is Supply

There is a temptation in every housing debate to find a group of people whose disappearance will solve scarcity. At various times the culprit has been speculators, second-home owners, students, investors, migrants, or landlords. These targets differ politically, but the analytical mistake is the same: treating a shortage of homes as though it were principally a problem of too many disfavored people.

America’s housing problem is, at its core, that in many places we have made building difficult, slow, expensive, and legally precarious. Zoning restricts density. Permitting processes impose delay. Parking mandates consume space and capital. Height limits, minimum-lot rules, discretionary review, and neighborhood veto points make new homes scarcer than they need to be. Construction-labor shortages then compound those institutional barriers.

If policymakers genuinely want lower rents, they should make it easier to construct apartments, accessory dwelling units, row houses, and multifamily buildings where people want to live. They should reduce the artificial costs that turn each proposed building into a years-long political negotiation. And they should hesitate before using a policy that removes part of the labor force necessary to build the very housing they say they wish to make affordable.

There is no contradiction in enforcing immigration law while recognizing this economic constraint. A country may choose to regulate entry and residency. But it cannot repeal scarcity by rhetoric. If enforcement reduces housing demand while also reducing the capacity to produce housing, the final effect is an empirical question, not a slogan.

“Where ICE goes, rents go down” is therefore not a serious general proposition. At most, it is an incomplete short-run hypothesis about one side of a two-sided market. The demand effect may be real. But the supply effect is real too, and in a nation already struggling to build enough homes, it is remarkably reckless to pretend otherwise.

Lower rents will not come from discovering ever more people to exclude from the housing market. They will come from allowing more housing to exist.

The phrase “identity politics” is commonly used as though it identifies a departure from ordinary democratic politics. It does not. In a mass republic, politics necessarily operates through groups. The useful questions are which groups are being organized, under which rules, for what ends, and at whose expense.

There is a familiar story about identity politics. On this account, politicians once addressed citizens as citizens: they offered general principles, appealed to the common good, and competed for the support of individuals who assessed programs on their merits. Then politicians discovered race, sex, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, region, and similar markers. Politics became tribal. The universal gave way to the particular.

It is an attractive story, especially for those who would like to place themselves outside the conflict. They do not practice identity politics, they say. They speak for taxpayers, working families, ordinary Americans, the middle class, small businesses, or the national interest. But these are identities and aggregates too. A taxpayer is not an atomized person; neither is a working family, a homeowner, a veteran, a parent, a farmer, or an “ordinary American.” Each is a category through which a large population is rendered politically intelligible.

The ordinary pejorative use of identity politics therefore rests on a false baseline. It imagines a normal, non-identity politics in which officials communicate with fully individualized citizens, and an abnormal politics in which they communicate with groups. In a mass representative system, the former is not an available institutional arrangement. It is a fantasy about scale.

The Impossible Voter File

Imagine a presidential candidate who announces a new strategy: no blocs, no demographics, no constituencies, and no generalizations. She will tailor her platform to the unique utility function of every citizen. She will discover each voter’s particular ranking of taxes, schools, trade, land use, criminal law, war, welfare, and regulation, and then formulate a program specifically responsive to that ranking.

The candidate has discovered retail politics in its purest form. She has also made herself unelectable.

The problem is not only that there are too many voters and too few hours. Most citizens do not have complete, stable, and fully informed rankings over all possible policy bundles. They have partial preferences, conflicting commitments, limited information, and changing beliefs. Candidates must choose platforms before every relevant preference is known; voters must assess proposals they cannot fully study; legislators must make decisions on matters that were not and could not have been fully specified during an election.

This is why political theory treats democracy as a problem of aggregation. Electoral institutions receive inputs from many people and transform them into offices, laws, budgets, and rules. Work on American representation describes several such stages: citizens select officials across districts and states, and those officials subsequently combine their actions into institutional outcomes.

A republic must compress. It has no alternative. Candidates and parties use geographic, occupational, demographic, religious, and ideological categories because they lower the costs of communicating, organizing, and estimating support. Voters use party labels, trusted associations, occupational experience, social networks, and group interests as shortcuts because they cannot independently audit every claim or predict every consequence.

That is not a moral defect uniquely introduced by one faction. It is a structural feature of collective decision-making among millions of people.

Every Coalition Has an Identity

Consider the routine contrast between identity politics and economic issues. It sounds precise until one asks what an economic constituency is.

“Manufacturing workers” is an identity category. It identifies people by occupation, labor-market exposure, location, experience, and usually a recognizable set of political concerns. “Small-business owners,” “homeowners,” “retirees,” “students,” “veterans,” “parents,” “farmers,” “union households,” “technology workers,” and “energy-producing states” work in the same way. They are not arbitrary labels, and their members are not identical. But they are politically useful aggregates.

Some groups are organized principally around demographic traits; others around geography, religion, class, occupation, or industry. Their moral histories and policy claims can differ profoundly. A racial minority confronting a legacy of legal exclusion, a professional association seeking a licensing rule, and homeowners pursuing a local zoning restriction are not advancing interchangeable demands. Their cohesion, their internal diversity, and the burdens they impose on outsiders must all be examined.

But the institutional point remains. Political communication at scale requires categories. A politician cannot credibly address each citizen in exactly the form that citizen’s wholly particular circumstances demand. She must make appeals that are recognizable, repeatable, and actionable for many people at once.

That is why allegedly neutral alternatives to identity politics so often turn out to be identities in disguise. “The forgotten taxpayer” is a constructed constituency. “Real Americans” draws a boundary around an imagined public. “The common-sense majority” is a claim that a particular coalition’s outlook should be treated as normal, while opponents are cast as deviations from it. The language may be universal in tone, but it still selects a social reference group.

The question is never whether politicians will appeal to identities. The questions are how identities are constructed, whether members can dissent or exit, what interests the category organizes, and which rules it asks the state to impose.

A Mechanism, Not a Confession

Mechanism design begins with constraints rather than slogans. What information do participants possess? What incentives do they face? What messages can they credibly communicate? What rule converts those messages into a collective decision? Mechanism design is a formal language for assessing the properties of institutions, though translating formal properties into political or ethical judgments requires additional normative argument.

In political life, the relevant mechanism includes electoral rules, districting, primaries, party organizations, campaign finance, legislative procedure, federalism, administrative law, media institutions, and informal norms. These arrangements do not merely record preferences that exist independently of them. They alter incentives to organize, define interests, acquire information, form coalitions, and bargain.

The literature on political information aggregation starts from this problem. Political actors possess different information and conflicting objectives, while institutional arrangements can either improve or impede the collection and use of dispersed knowledge.

The serious mechanism-design question is therefore not whether politics can be made group-free. It cannot. It is whether the institutions through which groups compete generate informed, peaceful, accountable, and rights-respecting outcomes.

Take three familiar constituencies: farmers seeking crop insurance, coastal homeowners seeking subsidized flood protection, and urban renters seeking housing assistance. It is analytically empty to call one case normal interest-group politics and another identity politics merely because the relevant category is occupational, geographic, or demographic. Each coalition advances a distributive claim. Each relies on a shared category to reduce information and organization costs. Each seeks a public allocation of benefits, costs, or legal authority.

The appropriate questions are more demanding:

• Is the claimed problem genuine?

• Does the proposal address it at a tolerable cost?

• Who benefits and who pays?

• Are benefits concentrated while costs are dispersed?

• Does a rule create an enduring rent-seeking opportunity?

• Does it secure equal citizenship, or confer a privilege unavailable on general terms?

• Are there less coercive alternatives?

Those are questions of political economy. Calling a coalition “identity politics” before asking them is often a way to avoid asking them.

The Tautology Problem

At this point, one may say that all politics is identity politics. I certainly do, by way of offering a corrective. As a corrective, the slogan has force. It punctures the pretense that some political appeals arise from pure universality while others are somehow contaminated by group interest.

As an analytical conclusion, however, it goes too far. A term that encompasses taxpayers, workers, consumers, racial minorities, religious majorities, regions, parents, veterans, immigrants, investors, and citizens has ceased to distinguish among important political phenomena. It tells us nothing about whether a movement seeks equal treatment, legal privilege, cultural recognition, redistribution, exclusion, deregulation, or constitutional reform.

The better response is to use more exact terms. Distinguish descriptive representation from substantive representation. Distinguish interest-group politics from status politics, class politics, ethnonationalism, and constitutional politics. A representative can share salient traits with constituents yet fail to advance their interests; a representative can lack those traits yet represent constituents’ policy preferences effectively. The distinction between descriptive and substantive representation is central to the literature, and the two forms need not be mutually exclusive.

Precision does not make political conflict disappear. It makes the conflict discussable.

The Constitutional Problem

None of this means that group politics is benign. Groups can pursue transfers at outsiders’ expense. Political entrepreneurs can exploit fear, resentment, and status anxiety more readily than they can explain a tax schedule. Organizations can suppress internal disagreement by claiming exclusive authority to speak for a whole category. Electoral rules can amplify some constituencies and mute others.

But these are not objections to identity as such. They are objections to particular coalition structures and institutional incentives. A sound constitutional order cannot abolish aggregation. It can, however, make aggregation less destructive: disperse power, protect individual rights, preserve room for dissent and exit, prevent temporary majorities from treating minorities as spoils, and require political coalitions to bear more of the costs they impose.

Political identities are unavoidable under mass representation. They are organizational and cognitive technologies, allowing people with limited time, knowledge, and bargaining power to navigate collective action. They can be used for domination. They can also make previously unorganized interests visible. The institutional task is not to pretend that politics can return to atomized individuals. It is to build rules under which aggregates compete without converting political victory into permanent subordination.

Identity was already there. So were interests. So were coalitions. So was aggregation.

The only thing newly visible is the machinery.

The Constraint We Ignore

Economists spend a great deal of time thinking about constraints.

Scarcity. Tradeoffs. Opportunity cost. The fact that every choice excludes alternatives. These are treated as foundational features of the world—so basic they rarely require justification. Human beings want more than they can have. Resources are limited. Choices must be made.

But theology offers a different lens.

The World After the Fall

In the Genesis account, the consequences of the Fall are often summarized as mortality: Adam and Eve eat the fruit, and death enters the world (Genesis 3). Yet the curse is broader than death alone.

What follows is toil.

Work becomes difficult. Childbirth becomes painful. Human beings must wrest sustenance from the earth. Relationships become strained. Generations succeed one another. And time itself changes character. It is no longer experienced as an undifferentiated present, but as a sequence of moments structured by necessity, uncertainty, and loss. Genesis 3:17 captures that shift in the curse on the ground: “in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life.”

In economic terms, the Fall introduces constraints.

This is not a claim about reconstructing a literal pre-Fall production function. It is a conceptual claim about the human condition. Whatever one takes the pre-Fall world to represent, the post-Fall world is unmistakably one of finitude.

Human beings confront limits: finite resources, finite knowledge, and—most importantly—finite time.

Opportunity Cost Is Temporal

From this condition, opportunity cost emerges naturally.

To choose one path is to forgo another. To spend an hour writing is to lose the possibility of spending it elsewhere. To invest in one project is to deny resources to another. Every action carries with it a shadow set of unrealized alternatives.

That is the basic intuition behind Lionel Robbins’s classic definition of economics as the study of “ends and scarce means which have alternative uses”. It remains one of the clearest ways to explain why economists care so much about choice.

But that still leaves a deeper question.

Why do these constraints bind so tightly?

Scarcity Follows Time

The standard answer is that resources are limited. But scarcity matters because decisions must be made over time—and time does not permit revision without cost.

Time moves in one direction.

That is why the “time value of money” makes sense even to non-economists: a dollar today is not the same as a dollar tomorrow, because delay changes what can be done with it. The same logic applies far beyond finance. Every delay has a cost. Every waiting period narrows the range of possible responses. Every choice is made before full information arrives.

So perhaps scarcity is not the deepest constraint. Time is.

Resources are scarce because they must be allocated across moments that cannot be revisited. Knowledge is scarce because decisions must be made before learning is complete. Even mortality can be understood as the ultimate temporal constraint; a hard boundary on the set of feasible choices.

The core economic problem, then, is not simply allocation. It is action under irreversibility.

Institutions Are Time Machines

This idea is already embedded in a great deal of economics, even when it is not stated so directly.

When individuals save, they are moving resources across time. When firms invest, they commit capital today under uncertainty about tomorrow. When governments borrow, spend, tax, or regulate, they are shaping behavior through time, not just in a single moment. The Federal Reserve’s own educational materials make this plain: interest rates matter because they affect borrowing, saving, and investment decisions across time.

Across these domains, the structure is the same. Decisions must be made before uncertainty is resolved, and once made, they constrain what comes next.

Human beings act in a world where knowledge is incomplete, the future is uncertain, and choices close off possibilities that cannot be reopened.

Every action is, in a meaningful sense, a commitment.

Same Problem, Different Vocabulary

Seen this way, the language of the Fall maps surprisingly well onto the economic problem of temporally constrained choice.

The theologian describes a condition in which human beings are finite, burdened by toil, and subject to death. The economist describes agents making decisions under constraints, facing tradeoffs across time and uncertainty.

These are different vocabularies. But they describe the same underlying predicament: what it means to be a finite creature moving through time.

Genesis 3 is not just a story about punishment. It is also a story about the structure of postlapsarian life: labor, pain, succession, uncertainty, and the fact that human existence is now lived under conditions of irreversible choice.

Why Institutions Matter

This reframing becomes especially useful when we turn to institutions.

If time is the fundamental constraint, then institutions can be understood as mechanisms for managing temporal tradeoffs. They structure when decisions are made, who makes them, and how the costs of irreversibility are distributed.

Consider capital markets. At a basic level, they allow resources to move across time. Savings today become investment tomorrow. Interest rates reflect time preferences, risk, and expectations.

Or take criminal justice policy. Sentencing decisions impose costs not just in the present, but across an individual’s future trajectory. A longer sentence may increase immediate public safety, but at the cost of long-term reintegration challenges. Reentry policy exists precisely because what happens after release matters for public safety and life outcomes.

Drug policy offers an even clearer example. Harm reduction approaches – such as syringe services programs – aim to reduce immediate harms like overdose and disease transmission. More prohibition-oriented approaches often emphasize long-run behavioral change and deterrence.

These are not simply disagreements about values.

They are disagreements about how to structure tradeoffs across time under uncertainty.

The Weight of the Past

Once time is central, another concept becomes unavoidable: path dependence.

Early decisions shape the set of future options in ways that are difficult to reverse. Legal rules, institutional frameworks, and policy choices create trajectories that persist long after the original decision is made. The past does not merely influence the present; it helps define what the present can be.

In a world without temporal constraints, this would not matter. Mistakes could be undone without cost. Decisions could be replayed with better information.

But that is not our world.

We inherit institutional paths we did not choose, and we make decisions that will constrain people we will never meet.

The Common Ground

This is where the theological and economic perspectives converge most clearly.

The Fall is not merely about death. It is about the introduction of a world in which choices have lasting consequences, knowledge is incomplete, and time cannot be reversed.

A world in which human beings must act…and then live with the results.

Economics, at its best, is an attempt to make sense of that condition.

It asks how we should structure tradeoffs, allocate time, and design institutions in a world defined by irreversibility. How we can mitigate error, distribute risk, and preserve as much flexibility as possible without pretending that constraint can be eliminated.

These are not just technical problems.

They are questions about how to live under conditions we did not choose.

Time, Not Scarcity

Once that is clear, the familiar language of scarcity begins to look less like a starting point—and more like a consequence.

Scarcity is what constraint looks like from the inside.

Time is what makes it binding.

The newly elected Libertarian National Committee has voted to disaffiliate the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire. Some former members and outside observers are treating this as overdue institutional correction. Others have moved quickly to a different conclusion: the worst actors are gone, the adults are back, and critics should return.

A simpler question cuts through the sentimentality: save it for what?

The argument here is not about settling scores or relitigating every internal fight in the Libertarian Party. It is about institutional timing. Institutions are not Markovian systems with negligible transition costs. In plainer language: institutions remember. The route taken changes what futures remain available. A delayed repair after a reputational cascade is not equivalent to prevention, and it is not equivalent to timely boundary enforcement when the first signals appeared. Once an institution has moved through a reputational shock, subsequent corrections operate on changed terrain.

The path matters

Think of an institution as a sequence of states over time: I(0), I(1), I(2). At I(0), an organization may be flawed, ideologically messy, and strategically inconsistent, yet still possess real institutional capital. In the Libertarian Party’s case, that meant ballot-access investments, some coalition breadth, local activists, candidate pipelines, and years of outreach that made the party legible to people outside its core subculture.

Then comes the first transition: I(0) → I(1). This is the phase of boundary failure and reputational shock. After that comes I(1) → I(2), the phase of delayed correction, when reformers try to restore norms after the damage has already compounded.

The key proposition is straightforward:

Let institutional evolution be represented as a simple sequence of states I(0) → I(1) → I(2). Here, I(0) denotes the pre-cascade equilibrium, with whatever mix of capital, coalitions, and ambiguity it initially possessed. I(1) is the phase of boundary failure and reputational shock. I(2) is the delayed corrective phase, when reformers finally attempt repair. The central error of repair discourse is treating I(2) as approximately equivalent to a restored I(0), rather than as a different state constrained by the path already taken.

The path matters because institutions carry memory. Actor composition changes. Coalition partners update. The media builds narratives that persist. Volunteers and donors recalculate. Once the institution traverses I(1), the future set of feasible equilibria narrows. The organization is no longer choosing between the old institution and a repaired version of it. It is choosing among post-cascade futures burdened by the costs of the path already taken.

In ordinary language: one does not burn down part of the house, live in the smoke for several years, and then call the installation of a fire extinguisher a return to the original structure.

What changed in the LP

The Libertarian Party’s I(1) phase had at least two visible dimensions. The first was leadership and ideological shift. The Mises Caucus consolidated control of the national party, and the party’s tone and identity moved toward a more culture-war-oriented, paleolibertarian posture. During this period, long-standing anti-bigotry language was removed from the platform, and positions associated with immigrant outreach and coalition maintenance became less institutionally secure.

The second was reputational shock. The party and some of its state affiliates generated repeated national controversy through social-media rhetoric, internal signaling, and a style of provocation that attracted negative coverage well beyond the usual range of third-party politics. In New Hampshire, especially, inflammatory public messaging produced condemnations and helped fix the affiliate as a reputational liability not just internally, but publicly.

That distinction matters. At a certain point, an organization is no longer mainly managing internal governance. It is managing embedded public narrative. Once the scene becomes a meme, screenshots become archives, and every subsequent actor inherits them. The institution is no longer judged only by what it does next, but by what outsiders have already learned to expect from it.

Exit as Bayesian updating

This is where constituency costs become visible. A person can spend years doing minority recruitment, immigrant outreach, and coalition-building under one institutional understanding, only to discover that the institution has revealed a different equilibrium. The relevant fact is not simply that offensive statements were made. It is that the organization signaled what it would tolerate, reward, and normalize in public view.

That changes the calculation for people who had vouched for the institution. If those who were asked to enter the room look around and conclude that the room is not for them after all, their exit is not necessarily a tantrum or moral performance. It can be a straightforward Bayesian update on revealed institutional preference.

The room spoke. Some people heard an invitation to stay and fight. Others heard a different message and left. That decision may feel personal, but analytically it is about the recalculation of expected value under new information.

Why repair is harder than repair advocates assume

The current reform effort deserves to be described fairly. At the 2026 convention, delegates elected new national leadership, and the Libertarian National Committee moved to disaffiliate the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire. Those actions clearly signal that at least some delegates understand the reputational and organizational damage done during the prior period and want to impose boundaries that were not imposed earlier.

That is not meaningless. Ballot access matters. Party infrastructure matters. Electoral vehicles are real institutional assets and rebuilding them from scratch is costly.

But repair advocates often sneak in a much stronger claim than they defend. They assume that once the institution has corrected itself, trust should be restored on roughly the same timeline as the formal correction. That assumption underestimates temporal costs.

Institutional reputation typically exhibits destructive asymmetry. Trust and coalition breadth accumulate slowly through repeated signals but can be destroyed rapidly by a concentrated run of boundary failures. Repair efforts then operate under higher costs, narrower feasible sets, and altered actor composition compared to the conditions under which the original institutional capital was built.

Those costs are sticky and cumulative:

• Reputational persistence: old headlines, screenshots, memes, and labels continue to circulate long after leadership changes.

• Trust erosion: minorities, immigrants, coalition partners, donors, and volunteers do not update instantly just because a convention vote finally occurred.

• Human-capital exit: competent actors leave, redirect time elsewhere, and become less willing to re-enter a damaged institution.

• Path dependence: the composition of members, delegates, expectations, and feasible futures changes during the damaged phase, which means later leadership inherits a different organization than the one it claims to be restoring.

Repair after I(1) is therefore not “undo.” It is a new optimization problem over a changed state space.

Another case: police reform after scandal

The same temporal logic appears in a very different institutional setting: police departments placed under federal consent decrees after patterns of misconduct. When the Department of Justice identifies systemic violations, the resulting consent decree usually mandates changes in training, supervision, reporting, and oversight for years at a time. The aim is institutional repair rather than abolition.

In many cases, those reforms do improve formal practices. Departments revise policies, establish oversight structures, and alter training protocols under external pressure. Yet the literature on police reform repeatedly notes a recurring problem: once oversight weakens or ends, departments can drift back toward earlier practices, and community trust does not rebound simply because compliance language has changed.

That is exactly the point. A department that reaches the consent-decree stage has already passed through I(1): years of abuse allegations, protests, media attention, and public learning. The decree is an I(1) → I(2) repair attempt, not a prevention strategy at I(0). Residents who lived through the earlier phase do not experience a revised policy manual as a reset. They experience it as an institutional promise made after the institution has already taught them how little earlier promises were worth.

The same temporal costs appear here as in party politics. Reputational damage persists. Trust remains conditional and fragile. Personnel composition shifts. Future reforms operate under a credibility deficit created by the earlier path. This is why delayed institutional correction so often feels inadequate even when the reforms themselves are real.

The real question is resource allocation

Once the problem is framed this way, the central question changes. It is no longer merely whether a damaged institution can be repaired in principle. Almost anything can be repaired in principle. The real question is whether scarce institutional talent should be allocated to that repair project rather than to alternative vehicles with higher expected value.

That is what makes the current LP moment analytically interesting. The people being drawn back into repair are often exactly the kind of adults any institution would want: experienced organizers, former chairs, credible candidates, disciplined operators, and people capable of managing real budgets and reputational risk. The issue is not whether they are intelligent or well-intentioned. The issue is whether this institution, at this stage of its path dependence, is the best use of their finite time.

That is not a complete argument. It is a budget request. Time, reputation, and high-functioning labor are scarce. Every hour spent trying to reverse a long reputational cascade inside one damaged organization is an hour not spent on litigation, policy work, local reform, educational institutions, or other classical liberal projects that may now offer a higher expected return.

This does not prove that the LP should be abandoned. It does force a harder question than nostalgia permits: saved for what future equilibrium?

Fairness to the repair case

A fair analysis has to grant the strongest counterargument. Electoral vehicles are not trivial. Ballot access is difficult to obtain and easy to lose. Party labels, filing structures, donor systems, and legal recognition are all forms of accumulated institutional capital. Abandoning them can itself be irrational, especially in a political system that already punishes entrants.

That much is true. Repair may still be worth attempting. There are cases where preserving a damaged institution is more efficient than rebuilding its functional equivalent from scratch.

But that concession does not change the temporal argument. It sharpens it. The question is not whether the institution once had value. The question is what expected value remains after the institution has already traversed a reputational cascade, lost trust among marginal constituencies, and induced the exit of some of the very people needed to rebuild it. Sunk costs, friendships, and nostalgia are not useless, but none of them answer the forward-looking allocation problem.

The transition had already occurred

The broader claim is not “the LP is bad.” The broader claim is that delayed repair after a reputational cascade is not the same thing as prevention or timely boundary enforcement. Institutions incur temporal costs, and those costs do not disappear when leadership changes hands.

Delayed correction alters the optimization problem rather than resetting the board. That is true in a minor party. It is true in police reform. It is true in any organization that waits too long to discipline boundary violators and then discovers that formal correction cannot cheaply reverse learned public expectations.

The room spoke. Some heard a call to repair. Others heard a different message: the transition had already occurred.

For readers who want a blunter version, the institutional point can be stated in less academic language: you shat the bed, and the scene became a meme. That’s just not going away.

When the Justice Department went to court in 2023 to block the merger between JetBlue and Spirit Airlines, officials said they were protecting consumers from higher fares and less competition. It sounded like a victory for travelers, and US District Court Judge William Young certainly spun it as so in his January 2024 decision. A scant two years later, Spirit’s bankruptcy, JetBlue’s current struggles, and Washington’s flirtation with a federal bailout tell a very different story.

At the time, I argued that blocking the deal would not preserve competition so much as hasten Spirit’s collapse and leave JetBlue weaker, ultimately just strengthening the Big Four carriers that already dominate the market. That is exactly what has happened: Spirit has landed in Chapter 11, and JetBlue’s new CEO has been forced to publicly reassure investors that the airline will not file for bankruptcy this year, while pointedly leaving the prospects for 2027 unmentioned. The merger is dead, Spirit is in restructuring, and consumers are staring at the prospect of fewer flights at higher prices.

Now comes Act II. With Spirit in bankruptcy, the Trump administration is weighing whether to invoke the Defense Production Act to support a rescue package that could include up to $500 million in government-backed financing and warrants to purchase as much as 90 percent of the company once it emerges from Chapter 11. In other words, after the Biden administration’s blocking of a private merger on competition grounds, Washington is now toying with becoming Spirit’s de facto owner, which at least one clever analyst has dubbed an “Amtrak of the skies.”

The original sin: killing JetBlue - Spirit

Spirit was already in trouble when JetBlue proposed the acquisition, with mounting losses, heavy debt, and a business model that had been squeezed by higher fuel costs and intense competition. The merger offered a plausible path to keep its aircraft flying under a stronger, better-financed brand that could integrate Spirit’s planes and routes into a larger network. By blocking that path, DOJ did not freeze the industry in a healthy equilibrium; it simply forced the weakest player to try to survive on its own in a market dominated by giants.

Travelers across the country know what a concentrated airline market looks like. Four carriers already control roughly 70 percent of the U.S. domestic market, and at many major hubs, one airline reigns supreme. Ultra-low-cost carriers like Spirit and Frontier do not just offer cheap seats; they also provide leverage for price-sensitive travelers and a check on how far the big incumbents can push fares. When one of these discount options disappears, the legacy carriers gain bargaining power, whether or not they ever sought a merger.

The irony here is that antitrust officials claimed they were preventing JetBlue from becoming too big a rival to the legacy carriers. In reality, killing the deal simply cleared the way for the incumbents to tighten their grip on an already-captured market with no effort on their part, as Spirit shrinks and JetBlue fights for survival. Regulators protected a logo, not a viable competitor.

What an “Amtrak of the skies” really means

With talk in Washington of the federal government taking a direct stake in Spirit, we can draw an even more troubling conclusion. If private airlines cannot survive in a competitive market because regulators block the transactions that might rescue them, the emerging answer seems to be “don’t rethink the antitrust; embrace a new era of ‘state capitalism’ and take direct ownership instead.”

The structure being floated is not subtle. Reports describe a deal in which the U.S. would lend Spirit roughly $500 million, in exchange for warrants that could be exercised to acquire up to 90 percent of the equity if the airline exits bankruptcy. This is not a simple liquidity backstop; it is a path to effective nationalization – with a robust side quest of moral hazard – putting taxpayers on the hook for a chronically fragile carrier whose troubles were intensified by earlier policy choices.

Calling this “Amtrak of the skies” is not just a clever line. Amtrak’s history is a case study in what happens when the state takes over a struggling transportation system: routes that are hard to kill because they are politically popular, chronic operating losses, and perpetual pressure for more subsidies instead of true restructuring. State-backed airlines abroad, such as Alitalia in Italy, have shown similar patterns, cycling through rescues, political interference, and bankruptcy while governments supply bridge loans to keep the flag carrier alive. Once politicians become responsible for an airline’s fate, it becomes extremely hard to close unprofitable routes, renegotiate labor deals, or shrink capacity to a sustainable level.

In such an environment, the discipline of entry and exit – the very mechanism that is supposed to make markets work – is blunted or even eliminated. Routes are added or preserved to please members of Congress, Il Parlamento, or whatever government body is responsible for appropriations, rather than passengers; inefficient operations are funded with taxpayer money instead of being restructured or shut down. Consumers end up paying twice: first in taxes, then in higher fares from insulated incumbents who know they will be rescued if things go wrong.

Spirit’s potential bailout would be especially perverse because of the sequence. Regulators blocked a merger that might have preserved capacity under a stronger private carrier, then used the resulting collapse as justification for turning Spirit into a quasi-public utility. That these would be the actions of two different administrations is hardly an argument in favor, as it would simply reveal deep systemic issues that impact policy no matter who is in charge. Instead of a compromise between markets and planning, which rarely works in the first place, it is a way of locking in the costs of both.

The institutional mistake, not the market

The lesson of the JetBlue – Spirit debacle is not that airlines are too important to be left to the market. It is that antitrust authorities in Washington need more humility about their ability to micromanage complex, high fixed-cost industries from the comforts of D.C. conference rooms.

Airline economics are unforgiving: aircraft are expensive, fuel costs are volatile, and labor both organized and powerful. In that environment, blocking a merger because it might raise fares on certain routes, while ignoring the very real possibility of bankruptcy and exit, is a recipe for unintended consequences. A firm that cannot realistically survive the next downturn is not a durable competitive force, no matter how many economists who are willing to ignore the benefits of economies of scale you can find to testify about short-run price effects.

Future regulators should approach similar cases with a few simple principles:

• Focus on viability, not just firm counts. A struggling carrier that is just one shock away from Chapter 11 is not the same thing as a healthy competitor, and keeping its brand alive at any cost is not the same thing as protecting competition.

• Weigh dynamic effects. Ask not only “what happens to fares if we let this merger go through?” but also “what happens if we block it and the weaker firm fails anyway – and the government then feels compelled to nationalize the aftermath?”

• Stop hiding industrial policy inside antitrust actions. If policymakers want to subsidize certain regions or routes, they should do so transparently by using straightforward tools, such as programs that pay airlines to serve small markets or voucher schemes that help travelers buy tickets, rather than blocking mergers and then turning failed firms into government-dominated carriers.

Right now, consumers are left with the bill. Spirit is in bankruptcy court; JetBlue is fighting to reassure investors and employees that it has a future. The Big Four carriers still dominate the skies, and passengers across the country face the prospect of fewer low-fare options than they might have had under a combined carrier. The Justice Department set out to protect competition; instead, they predictably made flying less competitive, more expensive, and opened the door to a potential new experiment in state ownership that will almost certainly make matters worse.

Like this kind of wonky autopsy on how Washington actually reshapes markets?

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Viktor Orbán’s electoral defeat is real, important, and deserved. But if the anti-authoritarian story ends with the fall of one man, the lesson will be wasted. Orbán was never just a Hungarian oddity, never merely a provincial strongman with a taste for grievance, media manipulation, and nationalist theater. He was a model, a proof of concept, and for admirers abroad a live demonstration that liberal institutions can be hollowed out from within while elections still occur on schedule.

That is why the question is not simply what happens to Orbán next. The better question is what political entrepreneurs everywhere learned from him. Orbán showed that democratic erosion need not arrive wearing jackboots. It can come draped in constitutional language, carried by parliamentary majorities, and marketed as the restoration of popular sovereignty against decadent elites.

The temptation after a defeat like this is to move immediately to a new villain. Pick the next tyrant. Find the next cartoon heavy. Declare the danger relocated. That instinct is understandable, but it is analytically sloppy. Personalizing structural problems flatters the audience while obscuring the mechanism. If a political order can generate one Orbán, it can generate another, even if the next one is smoother, younger, more articulate, and better dressed.

Orbán Was a Template

Orbán mattered well beyond Hungary because he functioned as a working template for twenty-first century illiberalism. He demonstrated that an ambitious leader does not need to abolish elections to weaken meaningful competition. He needs only to tilt the terrain: discipline public institutions, cultivate loyal media ecosystems, convert cultural anxiety into political capital, and depict every constraint on executive ambition as an attack by enemies of the nation.

That formula traveled. International admirers did not praise Orbán because they were experts on Hungarian administrative law. They praised him because he looked like a statesman who had found the cheat code: use democratic legitimacy to reduce the substance of liberal democracy, all while insisting that one is merely returning power to “the people.” Orbán’s symbolic value to the global right was therefore larger than Hungary itself.

This is also why his loss matters. A template loses mystique when it stops delivering victories. The aura of inevitability disappears. The story shifts from strongman invincibility to institutional exhaustion, voter fatigue, and the accumulated costs of governing through polarization. That is bad news for Orbán personally, but it is worse news for those abroad who used him as evidence that illiberal nationalism was not merely sustainable but ascendant.

The Machinery Behind the Man

The phrase “the Orbán system” should be taken literally. Systems matter more than personalities because systems outlast them. What made Orbán formidable was not charisma alone, nor even ideology alone, but the interaction of narrative, institutional leverage, partisan loyalty, and strategic conflict. He did not simply win arguments. He altered incentives.

That is the part too many critics miss. Strongmen are sustained not only by true believers but by officeholders, bureaucrats, media figures, donors, and ordinary citizens who conclude that accommodation is safer than resistance. The longer such a system persists, the more it trains people to anticipate power rather than challenge it. Fear matters, but so does adaptation. In time, opportunism begins to masquerade as realism.

Every durable illiberal system relies on a similar political technology. First, it identifies an internal enemy and an external menace. Then it fuses the two. Domestic critics become agents of foreign corruption; independent institutions become camouflage for elite domination; procedural restraints become betrayals of the nation’s authentic will. At that point, the leader no longer appears as a threat to constitutional order but as its necessary defender.

This is the real inheritance of Orbánism. It is less a fixed ideology than a governing style. It can wear Christian nationalism, civilizational rhetoric, anti-globalist populism, or ordinary law-and-order politics. The labels change. The operating logic does not.

Why Péter Magyar Is Still Worth Watching

Orbán’s defeat does not automatically resolve the deeper problem, because democratic backsliding can give way to democratic disappointment. Péter Magyar’s rise is newsworthy not just because he defeated a dominant incumbent, but because replacement politics often inherits some of the emotional grammar of the regime it displaces. Opposition figures succeed by channeling frustration, but frustration is not a governing philosophy.

That does not mean Magyar is simply Orbán in different packaging. It means transitions deserve scrutiny instead of romanticism. Voters often remove entrenched rulers because they are exhausted, economically frustrated, institutionally alienated, or morally disgusted. Those are excellent reasons to reject a ruling order. They are not, by themselves, a guarantee of liberal renewal.

This is where anti-Orbán commentary can become unserious. It is easy to cheer the defeat of an entrenched leader. It is harder to ask whether the incoming coalition or party can rebuild habits of restraint, restore trust in impersonal institutions, and govern without reproducing the same politics of existential emergency. The fall of an illiberal incumbent is a beginning, not a conclusion.

The Transatlantic Lesson

Orbán’s importance to American politics was never primarily diplomatic. It was theatrical and ideological. He became a kind of political exhibit for factions on the American right that wanted proof that national conservatism could move from think-piece aspiration to governing practice. Hungary, in that sense, served as a showroom for those who imagined a post-liberal future but preferred to describe it as democratic correction.

That symbolic role linked Orbán to Donald Trump, even where their political circumstances differed. Both men benefited from grievance as a mobilizing instrument. Both treated opponents not as rivals within a shared constitutional order but as hostile forces corrupting the nation from within. Both encouraged supporters to see institutional friction not as a normal feature of republican government but as evidence of conspiracy, sabotage, or illegitimate elite control.

To say this is not to claim that Hungary and the United States are identical. They are not. Institutional scale, constitutional design, federalism, media structure, civil society density, and party history all differ. But political actors borrow scripts across borders all the time. Orbán’s appeal abroad rested on the sense that he had converted diffuse cultural resentment into a coherent governing project. Others noticed.

Why Putin Still Matters

If Trump represents a democratic-world adaptation of strongman politics, Vladimir Putin represents the harder edge of the same anti-liberal impulse. Orbán was not Putin, and Hungary was not Russia. But Orbán’s critics were not imagining things when they placed him in a broader authoritarian continuum. The continuum matters because authoritarian politics often spreads less by formal alliance than by imitation, legitimation, and shared rhetorical habits.

Putinism offers the stark version: centralization, managed opposition, nationalist mythmaking, and the treatment of independent institutions as threats to state power. Orbánism functioned as a softer, electorally dressed variant that could travel in societies not yet willing to abandon the democratic script altogether. Where Putin embodied coercive authoritarian consolidation, Orbán embodied democratic corrosion.

That distinction matters because many citizens in liberal democracies would reject open dictatorship while still tolerating a politics that progressively empties liberal norms of content. They do not want tanks in the streets. They merely want the “right people” unconstrained by courts, media critics, universities, or bureaucratic procedure. That desire is how constitutional democracies begin making excuses for their own erosion.

Why Strongmen Keep Selling

The market for strongman politics is not created by propaganda alone. It is fed by genuine frustrations: stagnation, disorder, cultural dislocation, elite hypocrisy, administrative failure, and the maddening inability of normal democratic politics to act with speed or coherence. When institutions perform poorly, citizens become susceptible to anyone who promises energy, clarity, punishment, and direction.

This helps explain Orbán’s wider allure. He did not market himself as a destroyer of democracy. He marketed himself as the cure for drift. That is how strongman politics usually works in the twenty-first century. It does not denounce popular rule as such. It denounces pluralism, proceduralism, and institutional friction as luxuries that decadent societies can no longer afford.

The sales pitch is always morally flattering to supporters. You are not embracing domination, they are told. You are defending order. You are not rejecting liberty. You are preserving civilization. You are not silencing opponents. You are finally refusing to let the nation be ruled by people who hate it. Once those premises are accepted, extraordinary political measures begin to feel not dangerous but responsible.

The Liberal Error

Liberal critics often answer this challenge with moral denunciation alone. Some denunciation is warranted. But denunciation without institutional analysis becomes therapy for the already convinced. It names the villain, signals virtue, and leaves the operating mechanism intact. Worse, it sometimes reproduces the same personalization it claims to oppose, treating every democratic crisis as the product of one uniquely evil man rather than a recurring pattern of incentives and institutional weakness.

That pattern is harder to confront because it demands more than outrage. It requires asking why so many voters become willing to trade dispersed power for concentrated force, why elites accommodate obvious norm violations, and why institutions designed to check ambition so often hesitate until the damage is advanced. These are less emotionally satisfying questions than asking who the next tyrant is. They are also the only useful ones.[

A politics of restraint cannot survive on procedural piety alone. If liberal institutions want defenders, they must prove that dispersed power, open contestation, and constitutional friction are not just morally superior abstractions but practical safeguards against predation, favoritism, and arbitrary rule. Citizens tolerate messy systems when those systems still appear capable of correction. They stop tolerating them when mess begins to look indistinguishable from decay.

After Orbán

So what tyrant should come next? The truest answer is that the target should not be one man at all. The target should be the machinery that keeps making strongmen intelligible, attractive, and institutionally survivable. Orbán’s fall matters precisely because it reveals that even durable systems can lose legitimacy. But unless the underlying demand for illiberal politics is addressed, the supply will return.

That means watching Magyar without naïveté, criticizing Trump without parochialism, and understanding Putin not as a distant monster but as the hard endpoint of a broader anti-liberal temptation. These are not interchangeable figures. They occupy different regimes, different political cultures, and different levels of coercive severity. But together they map a family resemblance: power justified by emergency, dissent recast as treachery, and institutions treated as obstacles rather than safeguards.

Orbán lost. Good. But the more serious question is whether his defeat marks a repudiation of the style of politics he helped normalize, or merely a pause before that style finds a new spokesman, a new flag, and a new electorate willing to confuse domination with strength. The answer to that question will matter far more than the fate of one former prime minister in Budapest.

The comforting slogan

A recent post making the rounds declares that if America would “embrace capitalism and reject cronyism” in health care, agriculture, military contracting, insurance, media, technology, and banking, we would experience a renaissance unprecedented in human history.

It’s the kind of line that plays well on social media: capitalism good, cronyism bad, problem solved.

But there’s a deeper problem hiding under that contrast. Once you look closely at how modern capitalism actually works, the clean separation between “real capitalism” and “crony capitalism” starts to dissolve. The more you know about how law creates and structures markets, the harder it is to pretend that we can simply peel away cronyism and be left with some pristine, neutral capitalism underneath.

Capital is not a natural object

Start with an uncomfortable fact: capital is not a natural object lying around in the world, waiting for the state to either respect or ignore it. Capital is a legal status.

As Katharina Pistor argues in The Code of Capital, what makes an asset “capital” is not its physical form but the legal code wrapped around it. Land, corporate shares, mortgage-backed securities, intellectual property, even complex derivatives become capital because the legal system endows them with a specific bundle of attributes:

• Priority over competing claims

• Durability over time

• Universality against third parties

• Convertibility into other forms of value

Those attributes don’t come from nature. They come from contract law, property law, corporate law, trusts, bankruptcy codes, and the courts that interpret and enforce them.

In other words, “capitalism” as we live it is already a product of state-mediated legal engineering. The state decides which claims are recognized as property, how far they extend, how easily they can be enforced, and what happens when they collide with other claims.

That’s not an accidental add-on. It’s the operating system.

The state doesn’t just protect property; it defines it

This immediately complicates the popular story in which the state and the market are separate spheres, and the healthy version of capitalism is the one where the state merely “protects property rights” but otherwise stands aside.

Protect what property rights?

• Whether a piece of land can be encumbered by a mortgage and then sliced into tranches for investors is not given by nature; it is a legal choice.

• Whether an idea can be owned as a patent, for how long, and under what conditions is not given by nature; it is a legal choice.

• Whether a bank deposit is just a private IOU or a state-guaranteed claim backed by deposit insurance and lender-of-last-resort facilities is not given by nature; it is a legal choice.

Every one of those choices creates and transfers value. It determines who bears risk and who enjoys upside. It decides whose contracts are credible and whose are fragile.

State action here is not just “intervention” into a pre-existing market order. It is how the order is built in the first place.

Once you accept that, the line between capitalism and cronyism stops being “markets versus government” and becomes a question about how the government’s unavoidable role is structured, and who gets to shape it.

Why capture is an equilibrium, not an accident

If law is the code of capital, who writes the code?

The answer is: legislatures, regulators, judges, and—crucially—the lawyers and lobbyists who translate private interests into legal text.

That brings us to public choice. As James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock emphasized, once government has the power to hand out concentrated benefits—subsidies, tax breaks, regulatory privileges, exclusive licenses—organized interests will invest real resources in capturing those benefits.

Rent-seeking isn’t an aberration; it’s the predictable byproduct of two facts:

1. The state’s legal coding of assets and contracts creates enormous economic rents.

2. The groups most affected by those rents are better organized, better informed, and better funded than the diffuse public that bears the costs.

When a defense contractor lobbies for a procurement rule that only a handful of firms can realistically satisfy, or a bank lobby quietly adjusts the definition of “systemically important,” or a tech platform pushes for expansive IP protection and liability shields, that’s not some foreign substance invading an otherwise pure market. It is capital owners negotiating over the source code of capitalism itself.

From a public-choice perspective, cronyism is what you should expect when the state both:

• defines which assets count as capital and on what terms, and

• retains broad discretion to tweak those definitions in ways that can massively shift wealth.

The engine of crony capitalism is not “markets.” It’s discretion plus rents.

“Just say no to cronyism” is not a policy

This is why the Massie-style slogan—“embrace capitalism, reject cronyism”—is so unsatisfying.

If by “capitalism” we mean a system where private actors own capital and trade in markets under a general rule of law, then the question is not whether the state is involved. It’s involved all the way down, in the very definition of ownership, contract, and enforcement.

The real question is:

• How tightly constrained is the state’s power to single out particular firms, sectors, or constituencies for special treatment?

• How general are the rules that confer the key attributes of capital—priority, durability, universality, convertibility—and how easy is it to carve out exceptions?

You can yell “no cronyism” all day, but if your constitutional and statutory architecture leaves wide, unprincipled discretion intact, you’ve left the engine of rent-seeking running at full speed.

A more honest market liberalism

None of this means we should shrug at cronyism or accept it as inevitable. It does mean that a grown-up defense of markets has to move beyond treating “government” as an exogenous meddler and “cronyism” as a simple moral failing.

If we take both Pistor and public choice seriously, a serious market-liberal position has to start from at least three admissions:

1. Markets are institutional artifacts. They depend on dense, contestable legal coding that defines capital and contract.

2. That coding is politically produced. Legislators, regulators, and judges write it under constant pressure from organized interests.

3. Rent-seeking is endogenous. Whenever there are large, discretionary rents to be had—procurement, subsidies, barriers to entry—private actors will chase them.

From there, the question shifts from “how do we get rid of cronyism and have pure capitalism?” to “how do we constitutionally design the unavoidable state role so that:

• the rules are as general, predictable, and open-access as possible;

• discretion is narrowed and made transparent;

• and the total rent pool available through politics is reduced?”

That’s a very different agenda than simply insisting that the right people refrain from bad behavior.

What reform actually looks like

Concretely, if limiting cronyism is something you desire, you should think a lot about:

• How general our tax and regulatory rules are. The more narrow carve-outs and industry-specific credits we tolerate, the more we invite rent-seeking.

• How we structure emergency powers and bailouts. Discretionary rescue facilities for particular firms or sectors are cronyism magnets, even when initially justified by crisis.

• How easy it is to “opt out” through jurisdictional arbitrage. If the code of capital can be written by picking and choosing among jurisdictions and legal devices, those with the best lawyers will always tilt the playing field.

• How transparent procurement and licensing really are. Defense, health care, infrastructure, and financial regulation all involve vast procurement and licensing regimes where discretion and opacity go hand in hand with political money.

Notice what this list is not: it’s not a checklist of which industries to love or hate. It’s a set of institutional design questions about the relationship between law and capital.

You don’t fix that with a viral post. You fix it, if at all, with painstaking changes to how laws are written, how agencies exercise discretion, and how easy it is to convert political connections into legally protected rents.

The real Renaissance

Would we “experience a renaissance unprecedented in human history” if we could somehow have capitalism without cronyism?

If by that we mean a world where private actors freely invest, innovate, and trade under a stable, predictable rule of law, without having to buy favors in Washington to survive—that would indeed be a massive improvement over our present mix of markets and favoritism.

But getting there requires more institutional realism, not less.

It requires admitting that:

• Capitalism as we know it is already the product of state-made legal code, not its absence.

• Cronyism is not an invading virus but a failure mode of that code, driven by discretion and concentrated benefits.

• The relevant reform margin is not wishful thinking about “real capitalism” but hard questions about constitutional constraints, general rules, and the design of the state’s role in making markets.

That’s a much less satisfying slogan. But it has the virtue of being true.

One of the most common explanations for institutional failure is incompetence. Another is conspiracy.

Both explanations are emotionally satisfying. They also happen to be wrong most of the time.

A far more mundane explanation appears again and again in politics, public administration, corporate governance, and even academic institutions: organizations continue to deploy strategies that previously worked, even after the environment around them has changed.

Learning and Lock-In

Institutions, like individuals, learn from experience.

The difference is that institutional learning tends to be sticky. Strategies that succeed become embedded in norms, procedures, reputations, and career incentives. Leaders rise within organizations precisely because they mastered the tactics that worked under earlier conditions.

When a new crisis emerges, the natural response is therefore not innovation.

It is repetition. Run the playbook.

After all, the playbook worked last time. If it worked once, surely it will work again.

Institutions are nothing if not optimistic about their own past successes.

From inside the institution, this feels like prudence. Experience should count for something. Organizations that constantly reinvent themselves rarely survive long enough to build experience in the first place. From the outside, however, this same behavior often looks like paralysis.

The deeper issue is institutional lag. Environments change faster than leadership structures do. Authority tends to remain in the hands of actors who succeeded under the previous equilibrium. Adaptation therefore trails the conditions that require it.

Sometimes by years. Sometimes by decades.

Institutions as Strategic Systems

Economists have long understood that actors respond to incentives and constraints rather than abstract moral appeals. Even in situations as extreme as political violence, participants behave strategically. Earlier work in political economy has described terrorists and counterterrorist actors as agents operating within a constrained marketplace, maximizing utility under severe limitations rather than acting outside economic logic altogether.

That insight applies far more broadly than its original context.

Institutions are not monolithic entities guided by a single rational mind. They are collections of actors navigating incentives, reputational risks, and organizational constraints. Strategies that once produced success become institutional memory. Procedures are written around them. Careers are built on them. Entire professional identities form around defending them.

Under those conditions, repeating past strategies is not a sign of irrationality. It is exactly what rational actors inside the system are expected to do.

The problem arises when the environment changes faster than those incentives. Institutions then find themselves operating according to a map that describes a world that no longer exists.

Path Dependence and the Comfort of Familiar Tools

Once a strategy becomes embedded within an organization, abandoning it is surprisingly difficult.

The costs are not only operational but reputational. Imagine telling a room full of senior professionals that the very strategies responsible for their careers no longer work. This is not a recipe for calm reflection. It is a recipe for institutional defensiveness.

Path dependence follows naturally. Policies persist because they succeeded in the past. Decision-makers interpret new problems through the lens of previous victories. When the system encounters turbulence, the instinctive response is to apply more of the same medicine. If the cure worked once, surely the dosage just needs adjusting.

Or so the thinking goes.

The result is often a peculiar phenomenon: institutions that appear highly active yet strangely ineffective. Meetings multiply. Reports circulate. Committees form. Press conferences abound.

Activity is not the problem. Direction is.

The organization is running hard. It just happens to be running on yesterday’s map.

Institutional Lag in Real Time

You can observe this mechanism unfolding across modern democracies.

Many opposition parties, for example, still rely heavily on strategies that proved effective during earlier electoral cycles: disciplined messaging, procedural maneuvering, and the expectation that the next election will restore equilibrium. These strategies are not irrational. They succeeded before.

But when the surrounding environment has changed—when trust has eroded, coalitions have shifted, and institutional legitimacy itself has become contested—the old playbook may not produce the expected results. Yet abandoning that playbook is difficult. Party leadership tends to be dominated by actors whose careers were built during the previous equilibrium. Their instincts, understandably, favor the tools that once delivered victory.

Younger political actors often see things differently.

Having entered politics under altered conditions, they suspect that the underlying equilibrium has already shifted. The resulting internal conflict is frequently interpreted as ideological division. In reality it is often something simpler: a disagreement about time horizons. One faction believes the previous equilibrium still exists. The other suspects it quietly expired several election cycles ago.

Neither side can prove its position in advance. So the argument continues.

Meanwhile the public grows impatient.

Why Observers Reach for Conspiracies

To citizens watching from outside the institutional machinery, this lag can be infuriating.

Outcomes appear persistent. Problems remain unsolved. Leadership rotates but the system itself seems strangely immovable. At this point, many observers reach for darker explanations.

Perhaps the system is rigged. Perhaps elites secretly coordinate outcomes. Perhaps nothing will ever change because the system is designed not to change.

The appeal of these explanations is understandable. Humans prefer narratives with intentional villains. Structural explanations, by contrast, are unsatisfying. They lack drama. Worse still, they imply that replacing individuals may not fix the underlying problem.

But most institutional persistence does not require conspiracy. It only requires incentives.

Systems reproduce outcomes because the incentives sustaining those outcomes remain intact. The system behaves “as designed” not because someone secretly designed it that way, but because the existing constraints make the current equilibrium stable. It really doesn’t matter if and when the actors change. If the incentives stay the same, the outcome usually does too; either Edward Norton or Mark Ruffalo still give you a Hulk.

This is less sinister than conspiracy. It is also much harder to fix.

Reform is Hard, Bruh…

If institutional failure were simply a matter of bad leadership, reform would be easy.

Replace the leaders. Elect new ones. Hire different experts. Problem solved.

But structural equilibria do not yield so easily. Evidence alone rarely moves institutions out of stable equilibria. Moral outrage rarely does either. History is full of eloquent arguments and righteous anger that changed absolutely nothing.

Institutions respond instead to changes in incentives. Shift the constraints. Alter the payoffs. Redistribute the risks. Create credible expectations that the environment has changed.

Then—and only then—do strategies begin to evolve.

Until that happens, institutions will continue doing what they have always done. Repeating the tactics that once worked. Defending the playbook. Fighting the last battle.

A Small Dose of Realism

This is the uncomfortable implication many reform debates prefer to avoid.

The problem is rarely that institutions refuse to listen. The problem is that institutions are responding exactly as their incentive structures tell them to respond. In other words, the system is not malfunctioning.

It is functioning perfectly.

Just not in the way anyone hoped.

And that is why institutional reform is so difficult. You are not merely arguing with people. You are arguing with equilibria. Equilibria, unfortunately, do not care about speeches. They change only when the underlying structure changes.

Until then, the pattern repeats. Institutions keep fighting the last battle.

And the next one quietly begins without them.

News of the U.S.–Israeli strike that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, produced an almost immediate demand for judgment. Within hours, commentators sorted the event into familiar categories: decisive success, reckless escalation, overdue deterrence, catastrophic gamble. Modern political discourse rarely tolerates ambiguity. Major events must be interpreted quickly, because democratic politics rewards clarity even when reality does not.

Yet foreign policy decisions unfold across timelines very different from those that produce them. Military and political leaders act under conditions of perceived immediacy—incomplete intelligence, alliance pressures, domestic expectations, and the ever-present fear that inaction today may produce disaster tomorrow. In crisis time, uncertainty feels indistinguishable from urgency. Choices appear compressed, alternatives narrow, and delay itself begins to look like risk.

History operates differently. The consequences that ultimately define such decisions emerge slowly: through institutional adaptation, succession struggles, regional responses, and second-order effects no planner fully controls. Actions taken in hours or days are evaluated over decades. By the time outcomes become visible, the officials who authorized the decision are often gone, replaced by successors tasked not with choosing the intervention but managing its aftermath.

The killing of Khamenei therefore presents less a question of immediate moral or strategic verdict than a problem of temporal accountability. Iran’s supreme leader was eighty-six years old, presiding over a political system already approaching an inevitable succession moment. Whether the strike prevented future instability or merely reshaped an ongoing transition cannot be known now—and may not be knowable for years. What appears necessary in crisis often looks contingent in retrospect.

Democracies nevertheless feel compelled to judge immediately. Praise and condemnation arrive long before consequences mature. The result is a recurring mismatch between the time horizon of decision and the time horizon of evaluation—a structural tension at the heart of modern foreign policy.

The question raised by the Iran strike is therefore larger than the strike itself: how political systems should assess irreversible decisions whose true effects belong to the future rather than the present.

Crisis-Time Decision Logic vs Historical-Time Evaluation

When leaders authorize military action, they do so within a distinct temporal frame. Crisis time operates according to its own logic—compressed, urgent, dominated by the immediate threat of irreversible harm. Intelligence reports arrive incomplete. Allies demand reassurance. Domestic audiences expect resolve. Bureaucratic institutions generate momentum toward action. And beneath it all sits the gnawing fear that passivity today will be indistinguishable from negligence tomorrow.

Decision-makers do not experience this environment as calm deliberation over probabilities. They experience it as urgency made institutional. The question is rarely “should we act?” but “can we afford not to?” The very structure of crisis rewrites the calculus of risk. Delay becomes its own form of hazard. Inaction acquires moral weight. Uncertainty transforms into a reason for movement rather than restraint.

In this environment, the strike on Khamenei’s compound appears as one decision among a constrained set of alternatives, each carrying its own dangers. Allow Iran’s nuclear program to advance further? Risk appearing weak to regional adversaries? Leave Israeli security concerns unaddressed? Permit domestic critics to frame the administration as passive in the face of escalating threats? Each path carries visible costs; the costs of action remain hypothetical.

But historical time operates under different rules entirely. The consequences that ultimately define foreign policy decisions do not arrive on the schedule of crisis. They emerge through:

• Regional actors recalibrating strategies in response to new power distributions

• Iranian political institutions adapting to the vacuum left by decades of centralized leadership

• Successor administrations inheriting commitments they did not authorize

• Second-order effects—refugee flows, economic disruptions, alliance realignments—that no planner fully anticipated

• Domestic political systems reinterpreting the decision’s meaning as new information arrives

What appears unavoidable under crisis conditions frequently reveals itself as contingent when evaluated years later. The intelligence that seemed compelling proves incomplete. The threat that appeared imminent was perhaps containable through alternative means. The action that promised to resolve uncertainty instead produced new forms of instability.

This is not hindsight bias. It is the predictable result of evaluating decisions made under compressed timelines using evidence that only becomes available across extended periods. The officials who authorized the joint operation acted on the information and incentives available in late February 2026. History will judge them using information that accumulates over the next decade.

The temporal mismatch is structural, not accidental. Democratic political systems demand responsiveness to immediate threats. Historical evaluation demands patience for outcomes to mature. These two timelines rarely align.

The strike on Khamenei therefore illustrates not merely a strategic decision but a temporal one. Leaders acted within crisis time, but the meaning of that action now migrates into historical time, where evaluation proceeds according to entirely different standards.

The Illusion of Necessity

One of the more analytically troubling aspects of the Khamenei strike involves what it intervened in, not merely what it accomplished.

Iran’s Supreme Leader was eighty-six years old. He had held ultimate authority over Iranian political life since 1989, longer than many current voters have been alive. The question of succession was not hypothetical—it was inevitable. Iranian political elites had been maneuvering for position for years, aware that the transition would arrive regardless of external intervention. The Assembly of Experts, charged under Iranian law with selecting the next Supreme Leader, already faced the challenge of managing this process.

The strike did not prevent a succession crisis. It accelerated one.

Democracies frequently mistake acceleration for resolution because acceleration produces visible action, while patience produces only uncertainty.

This distinction matters analytically because acceleration and prevention are fundamentally different operations. Prevention removes a problem. Acceleration reshapes a transition already underway, altering its timing and character but not its underlying inevitability. The political and institutional dynamics that would have accompanied Khamenei’s death from natural causes—elite competition, factional realignment, uncertainty over institutional continuity—will now unfold under the shadow of foreign military action.

This raises uncomfortable questions:

• Did the strike solve a problem that required immediate resolution, or intervene in a process that was progressing toward resolution through internal dynamics?

• Does foreign intervention in a predictable succession make the resulting outcome more stable, or does it introduce new sources of instability by appearing to vindicate hardline narratives about Western hostility?

• If the goal was to create conditions for Iranian political reform, does leadership decapitation through military action make reform more or less likely than allowing internal succession pressures to run their course?

States frequently reinterpret optional actions as inevitable ones after the fact. Once irreversible decisions have been made, political systems generate narratives that render those decisions necessary in retrospect. The psychological and political incentives to do so are overwhelming—acknowledging that a major foreign policy action was optional rather than required opens space for criticism that officials acted recklessly or prematurely.

But necessity is a claim about alternatives. To say an action was necessary is to say no other course was viable. In the case of Khamenei, this claim is difficult to sustain. Iran’s succession was coming regardless. The choice was not whether to address succession but whether to force its timing through external military action.

That choice may prove correct. It may generate outcomes that justify the risks undertaken. But it was, structurally, a choice—not a compulsion imposed by circumstances beyond control.

Temporal Distribution of Responsibility

One of the most consequential features of modern foreign policy is how responsibility migrates across time.

Executives authorize military action in a compressed decision window, often hours or days. Military institutions execute the operation within a similarly brief timeframe—the initial U.S.-Israeli strikes reportedly involved nearly 900 individual targets hit within twelve hours. Political praise or condemnation follows almost immediately, structured around the binary logic of success versus failure.

But the consequences emerge across a vastly longer timeline. Iranian political institutions must now navigate a succession process under external pressure. Regional actors—Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq—will recalibrate strategies based on the new distribution of power and perceived Western willingness to intervene directly. Refugee flows, economic disruptions, and proxy conflicts will unfold over years. Future U.S. administrations will inherit the strategic commitments and regional relationships shaped by this action, regardless of whether they would have authorized it themselves.

This creates a fundamental misalignment between decision and outcome. Those who bear the consequences are often:

• Successor administrations forced to manage commitments they did not choose

• Regional civilian populations affected by instability they did not cause

• Military personnel deployed to address follow-on crises

• Future voters who will evaluate candidates based on conditions created by decisions made before they could participate politically

Democratic accountability assumes that those who authorize decisions will face political consequences for their outcomes. But in foreign policy, the timeline of consequences frequently exceeds the timeline of political careers. Officials retire, administrations change, and public attention shifts to new crises before the full effects of prior decisions become apparent.

This temporal distribution of responsibility creates predictable distortions:

1. Frontloading benefits, backloading costs. Leaders have strong incentives to pursue actions that generate immediate political rewards (appearing strong, reassuring allies, demonstrating resolve) while deferring costs that emerge slowly (regional instability, long-term commitments, unintended escalation).

2. Asymmetric information. Decision-makers possess maximal information at the moment of choice—intelligence assessments, military capabilities, diplomatic context. Voters and future evaluators must judge the decision using incomplete information, often relying on selective disclosures and retrospective narratives.

3. Narrative consolidation. Once action is taken, political systems generate success stories to maintain coalition stability and justify resource commitments. Early declarations of victory serve institutional functions—reassuring allies, deterring adversaries, maintaining domestic support—but arrive before outcomes can be observed.

The result is a systematic disconnect between the incentives that produce foreign policy decisions and the accountability mechanisms that democratic systems rely upon to discipline those decisions. Presidents and prime ministers face electoral consequences based on public perceptions of success or failure, but those perceptions form long before outcomes mature.

This is not a problem that better institutional design can fully resolve. The temporal gap between action and consequence is inherent to foreign policy. What can be improved is democratic systems’ awareness of this gap and willingness to build accountability mechanisms that operate across longer timescales than election cycles.

Power Vacuums and Institutional Collapse

Temporal accountability becomes most difficult precisely at moments of political transition. Leadership removal produces immediate observable outcomes, while institutional adaptation unfolds slowly, often invisibly, across years.

The historical pattern is clear enough to warrant concern, even if specific predictions remain impossible.

Removing centralized leadership from authoritarian systems does not automatically produce stable transitions. It removes the institutional mechanism that previously coordinated elite behavior and suppressed internal competition. What follows depends less on the act of removal than on the underlying strength of institutions, the distribution of factional power, and the capacity of successor elites to establish new equilibria.

In Iran’s case, several trajectories appear plausible:

• Consolidation around a new leader. The Assembly of Experts moves quickly to install a successor—possibly Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, possibly a consensus candidate from the clerical establishment—who restores centralized authority and maintains continuity with prior policies.

• Managed reform. Moderate factions use the succession moment to negotiate reforms that reduce the Supreme Leader’s authority, shifting power toward elected institutions and creating space for political liberalization without full regime collapse.

• Fragmentation. Elite competition produces paralysis. The Revolutionary Guard, clerical establishment, and elected government pursue competing agendas. Iran enters a period of institutional uncertainty where no single actor can coordinate national policy effectively.

• Escalation. Hardline factions interpret the strike as vindication of their worldview, consolidate power, and pursue aggressive regional policies to demonstrate strength and regime continuity. Retaliatory strikes against U.S. bases and Israeli targets intensify rather than diminish.

None of these outcomes was determined by the strike itself. The action created conditions—removed a central coordinating figure, forced accelerated succession, provided narratives for competing factions—but the ultimate trajectory depends on Iranian institutional capacity and elite behavior in the coming months.

This uncertainty is precisely the point. Leadership decapitation does not solve the problem of authoritarian governance. It creates a different problem: managing the transition from centralized authority to whatever comes next. Sometimes that transition produces improvement. Sometimes it produces chaos. Sometimes it produces a more hostile version of the prior regime.

The relevant historical examples offer limited comfort:

• The removal of Saddam Hussein created conditions for sectarian conflict that lasted over a decade and produced ISIS

• The fall of Gaddafi left Libya without functioning central authority, creating space for civil war and regional proxy conflicts

• The collapse of authoritarian regimes in Egypt and Syria produced, respectively, a return to military rule and a devastating civil war

These cases do not predict Iran’s trajectory. Iran has stronger institutions, deeper administrative capacity, and a different factional structure than Iraq, Libya, or Syria possessed. But they illustrate the general principle: removing leadership creates opportunity for change, but change can take multiple forms.

The analytical lesson is not that intervention always fails. It is that intervention transfers the locus of uncertainty from “what happens if we don’t act” to “what happens after we act.” Both involve risk. The question is whether democratic systems have the patience and institutional capacity to manage the second kind of risk, which unfolds slowly and requires sustained attention across multiple political cycles.

Post Hoc Justification and the Psychology of Irreversibility

Within hours of confirmation of Khamenei’s death, political leaders across Washington and Jerusalem declared the operation a success. This response was predictable—not because outcomes were already visible, but because irreversible actions create psychological and political pressure to affirm their correctness immediately.

This is not cynicism. It is institutional logic.

Once major foreign policy decisions become irreversible, political systems face strong incentives to generate success narratives quickly. These narratives serve multiple functions:

1. Coalition maintenance. Military operations require buy-in from multiple actors—intelligence agencies, military branches, allied governments, legislative bodies. Early declarations of success help maintain that coalition by framing the action as validated and justified.

2. Domestic reassurance. Publics tolerate foreign policy risk more easily when leaders project confidence. Acknowledging profound uncertainty after irreversible action invites criticism and undermines support for follow-on commitments.

3. Bureaucratic legitimacy. Agencies that planned and executed the operation have institutional interests in framing it as successful. Their future budget allocations, strategic relevance, and internal morale depend partly on public perception of competence.

4. Deterrent signaling. Adversaries and allies alike observe how states characterize their own actions. Projecting confidence—even if privately officials harbor doubts—serves strategic communication functions that admissions of uncertainty would undermine.

Post hoc justification does not primarily persuade opponents; it stabilizes supporters who must continue operating within the consequences of the decision.

The result is a predictable temporal pattern: immediate congratulation, followed by cautious wait-and-see assessments as complications emerge, followed eventually by either vindication or revisionism depending on how events unfold.

But this pattern creates a problem for democratic accountability. Judgment arrives before evidence exists. Officials declare success when the only observable fact is that the target was killed and immediate retaliation remains limited. Whether the operation achieves its broader strategic objectives—regional stability, Iranian moderation, enhanced deterrence—cannot possibly be known yet.

Early celebration is therefore not an assessment of outcomes. It is a social and political act designed to shape expectations and maintain support during the period of maximum uncertainty. This is rational behavior for political leaders operating under democratic constraints. But it makes retrospective evaluation more difficult, because the initial framing becomes embedded in public memory and subsequent developments must overcome that anchoring effect.

Consider the counterfactual: if officials had responded to news of Khamenei’s death by saying “we have achieved the immediate military objective; whether this produces long-term strategic benefits remains to be seen,” that response would be analytically more honest. It would also be politically untenable. Publics demand confidence from leaders, especially after irreversible actions involving military force.

The practical result is that foreign policy debates often occur in reverse chronological order. Instead of deciding first and evaluating later, political systems affirm decisions immediately and only revisit that affirmation if subsequent events become impossible to reconcile with initial success narratives. By that point, officials have moved on, public attention has shifted, and accountability mechanisms have weakened.

This does not make early declarations of success dishonest. It makes them premature. The distinction matters for how democratic systems should approach foreign policy evaluation. If the goal is to improve decision-making over time, evaluation must occur on a timeline that allows consequences to materialize—not on the timeline that political incentives demand.

Democratic Guardrails Under Foreign Policy Shock

One of the least discussed consequences of major foreign policy actions is how they temporarily reorganize the internal balance of democratic institutions.

War and crisis compress deliberation. When events move quickly and threats appear immediate, the normal processes of legislative oversight, public debate, and bureaucratic review begin to look like obstacles rather than safeguards. Executives gain discretion. Dissent becomes risky. Intelligence assessments acquire outsized influence. And constitutional checks that function adequately during peacetime erode under the pressure of perceived emergency.

This is not unique to any particular administration or political system. It is a recurring pattern in how democracies respond to external threats. The urgency that justifies action also justifies bypassing the institutional friction designed to prevent hasty decisions.

The current situation illustrates the dynamic clearly:

• Congressional authorization for the strike, if it occurred at all, happened through expedited processes that minimized deliberative debate

• Intelligence assessments that justified the operation remain classified, preventing external evaluation of their quality or completeness

• Dissenting views within the bureaucracy, if they existed, were either overruled or never reached public discussion

• Media coverage focused overwhelmingly on operational success rather than strategic rationale, partly because operational details were immediately visible while strategic outcomes remain speculative

None of these features indicate malice or conspiracy. They reflect how institutions behave under conditions of perceived crisis. But they create conditions where mistakes become harder to prevent and easier to entrench.

The deeper problem is that foreign crises tend to be self-reinforcing. Once military action begins, any call for restraint or reconsideration gets reframed as undermining national security during a critical moment. This rhetorical move is extraordinarily powerful in democratic politics. It transforms substantive disagreement over strategy into questions about loyalty, resolve, and willingness to support the nation under threat.

The result is a temporary reorganization of constitutional balance. Executives expand discretion. Legislatures defer. Courts avoid interference in matters classified as national security. And civil society actors who raise concerns find themselves marginalized as unserious or unpatriotic.

This reorganization is usually temporary. As the immediate crisis recedes, normal institutional checks reassert themselves. But the decisions made during the period of compressed deliberation remain in place, shaping the strategic environment that future administrations must navigate.

Democracies rarely abandon guardrails permanently. Instead, crises normalize temporary exceptions that gradually redefine what counts as ordinary executive authority.

This creates a ratchet effect. Each crisis expands executive discretion slightly. Some of that expansion persists even after the crisis ends. Over time, the normal baseline of executive power in foreign affairs drifts toward greater autonomy and reduced oversight.

The Iran strike will likely follow this pattern. In six months, public attention will have shifted to other issues. In two years, the operation will be a settled fact, debated only among specialists. In five years, the consequences will be unfolding in ways that bear little resemblance to current expectations. And the institutional precedent—that executives can authorize strikes on foreign leaders with minimal deliberation during perceived crises—will be absorbed into the background assumptions of American foreign policy.

This is how democracies gradually lose their capacity for restraint. Not through dramatic ruptures, but through accumulated precedents established during moments when restraint appeared too risky to tolerate. Foreign policy shocks do not merely reshape external environments; they temporarily reorganize the temporal structure of democratic decision-making itself.

Conclusion: The Time Problem in Democratic Judgment

The killing of Ali Khamenei will be evaluated many times, by many actors, using many different standards. Immediate assessments focus on operational success: the target was eliminated, allied coordination functioned effectively, and initial retaliation remained limited. Future assessments will focus on strategic outcomes: whether the strike enhanced regional stability, how Iranian succession unfolded, and whether long-term U.S. interests were advanced or compromised.

These assessments will occur on different timelines and reach different conclusions. That divergence is not a failure of analysis. It is the predictable result of evaluating decisions whose consequences unfold slowly using political systems designed to respond quickly.

The central difficulty is not deciding under uncertainty—that is unavoidable in foreign policy. The difficulty is evaluating decisions whose consequences will only become visible long after the decision-makers are gone.

This temporal gap creates recurring problems for democratic accountability:

• Leaders face incentives to pursue actions that generate immediate political benefits while deferring costs to future administrations

• Voters must judge decisions based on incomplete information and provisional outcomes that may later be reversed

• Institutional checks designed to prevent hasty action erode precisely when they matter most

• Success narratives form before outcomes can be observed, creating anchoring effects that distort later evaluation

None of these problems can be fully solved. The mismatch between crisis-time decision-making and historical-time evaluation is structural. But democracies can improve how they manage this mismatch by:

1. Resisting the demand for immediate judgment. Foreign policy decisions should be evaluated provisionally in the short term and revisited as evidence accumulates. Early declarations of success should be treated skeptically, not because officials are dishonest but because outcomes have not yet materialized.

2. Strengthening institutional checks during crises. The moments when executive discretion feels most necessary are precisely when oversight matters most. Democracies that bypass deliberation during emergencies store up problems for later.

3. Distinguishing acceleration from prevention. Not every intervention prevents disaster. Some merely reshape transitions already underway. That distinction should inform both decision-making and evaluation.

4. Acknowledging irreversibility honestly. Once major actions are taken, political systems face pressure to vindicate them. Acknowledging uncertainty after irreversible decisions does not undermine support—it creates space for course corrections when early assumptions prove incorrect.

The Iran strike raises a question that extends far beyond Iran: how should political systems evaluate decisions whose consequences will unfold across timelines longer than electoral cycles, longer than individual careers, and longer than public attention spans?

That question has no clean answer. But asking it is the first step toward building foreign policy institutions capable of learning from experience rather than repeating mistakes dressed up as necessity.

Democracies cannot avoid acting under uncertainty. Nor can they postpone judgment indefinitely. But the temptation to render immediate verdicts on irreversible decisions remains one of the greatest sources of foreign policy error. The killing of Ali Khamenei will eventually be understood not through the clarity of the moment that produced it, but through the slow accumulation of consequences no participant could fully control.

The enduring question is therefore not whether leaders acted decisively, but whether democratic societies possess the patience to judge decisiveness only when history, rather than crisis, has rendered its verdict.

This essay is part of an ongoing series on temporal accountability in democratic governance.

Open Venmo and scroll the feed. It feels like you’ve picked up someone else’s itemized diary: rent splits, taco reimbursements, the occasional passive-aggressive 🙃. The dollar amounts are hidden, but the relationships are not.

The instinctive reaction is simple: why is any of this public?

Venmo’s says payments are “fun to share.” The more interesting answer is institutional.

Money Used To Mind Its Business

For most of modern banking, transactions were not supposed to become anyone’s content stream. Privacy wasn’t a boutique preference; it was part of the architecture. Banks sat between you and the world, clearing payments and absorbing the informational risk that came with knowing who paid whom.

That arrangement wasn’t sentimental. It was functional. Markets depend on the ability to transact without turning relationships and crises into public signals. Settlement stayed settlement because confidentiality lowered the social cost of exchange.

Venmo’s Problem: No One Trusts the Empty Room

Venmo was born without any of that inherited trust. No charter. No marble lobby. Just a scrappy app that only worked if enough of your friends were willing to route money through a social network owned by PayPal.

That’s a coordination problem, not a UX problem. A payment app is useless if the people you transact with don’t use it. Early on, any given person has almost no information:

· Will my friends actually adopt this?

· Is there real activity here, or am I walking into a ghost town?

· Will this thing still be around in two years?

Venmo’s problem wasn’t moving money. It was manufacturing confidence.

Traditional finance solves that with regulation, deposit insurance, and longevity as a repeated signal of reliability. Venmo had none of that. It needed another way to manufacture confidence.

So it reached for something platforms understand better than banks: visibility.

Visibility as a Substitute for Trust

Venmo’s public feed took what used to be a private confirmation — “the payment went through” — and turned it into a social signal: “look, people like you are using this all the time.”

· Each public payment is a little proof-of-life for the network.

· Each scrolling session is free marketing.

· Each “oh, she’s on Venmo too” interaction lowers adoption friction.

Venmo describes itself as a social network; people open the app to see what others are up to. Beneath that framing is an institutional shift: reputation is replaced by observable participation.

The innovation wasn’t faster money. It was visible money.

Defaults as Quiet Governance

Venmo emphasizes that users can adjust their privacy settings. Formally, that’s true. Economically, the power lies in the default.

Public-by-default means doing nothing produces visibility. Changing that requires attention, navigation, and effort. Behavioral economics has been clear for years: most people accept the default.

The older banking model embedded privacy in the structure itself. The platform model hands users a toggle and lets path dependence do the rest.

That shift — from “we’ll protect this” to “we’ll label the toggle” — is a small but telling change in how governance operates.

The Institutional Trade: Who Carries the Privacy Risk?

Once you see the trust problem, the rest of the design choice comes into focus. Venmo flips the old allocation of responsibility:

In the banking model, you don’t need to curate your financial exposure. The default architecture does it for you. In the platform model, the app hands you the controls — then quietly sets them to “broadcast,” and lets path dependence do the rest.

The FTC’s complaint against Venmo in 2018 was telling: regulators didn’t say “you can’t have a social feed,” they said you misled users about what was visible and buried key information behind confusing settings. The settlement forced better disclosures, not a return to privacy-by-default.

That is the institutional pivot in miniature: from “we’ll protect this” to “we’ll label the toggle.”

The Externalities Are Boringly Predictable

None of this requires a sinister plot, and you don’t need to invoke “surveillance capitalism” to see the consequences. If you publicly expose a large social graph of who pays whom, three things follow almost automatically:

· You make it easier to infer relationships and routines — roommates, partners, coworkers, habits.^[3]

· You create a trail that can be cheaply mined by anyone from scammers to hobbyist bots.

· You create a tempting subpoena target for law enforcement and regulators.

Mozilla flagged the “public by default” model and noted that, at one point, “everyone on the Internet” could see your payments unless you changed the settings. Researchers have used Venmo data to map social and consumption networks at scale. Scams piggyback on the visibility of who frequently sends money to whom. None of that is a bug in the code. It’s the structural byproduct of a feed that treats economic behavior as social content.

Again: this is not the dystopian novel version of privacy loss. It’s the boring, incremental version — the kind that’s harder to dramatize and easier to live with until, in hindsight, it becomes the default for an entire generation.

The Upside Is Real — That’s Why It Won

If this were just a clumsy privacy failure, it wouldn’t have lasted. It worked.

Public feeds helped Venmo explode to tens of millions of users and hundreds of millions in revenue, riding network effects that traditional banks can only envy. It made splitting dinner painless, normalized P2P repayments, and, for many people, made “send me a check” sound like a joke.

From a coordination perspective, the trade-off is straightforward:

· Lower transaction friction and faster adoption.

· Higher exposure and more inference risk.

Most users never explicitly agreed to that exchange in a fully reflective sense. They just showed up, found their friends already there, and adapted. Path dependence did the rest, and visibility accelerated adoption in a way regulatory reputation never could have.

That’s why the “why is this public?” question is so revealing. By the time you ask it, the equilibrium the feature was designed to create is already there. Your confusion is a lagging indicator.

Visibility as the New Trust Technology

The banking world built trust by keeping your financial life out of sight and backing that promise with regulation and institutional capital. Venmo and similar platforms build trust by making your participation easy to see — to yourself, your friends, and, by default, more people than you probably realize.

In that sense, the public feed isn’t just a quirky social extra bolted onto a payment app. It’s the core of a different governance model for money:

· Trust shifts from institutional opacity to social observability.

· Privacy shifts from being an embedded property of the system to a user-level chore.

Venmo’s real innovation wasn’t giving us one more way to move dollars around. It was teaching us, very quietly, to treat our economic lives the way we treat everything else on a platform: as something meant to be seen.

What the Published Piece Could Not Do

The Independent Institute article had to compress a multi-layered institutional story into a short policy essay: a general audience, limited space, and a statutory focus left little room to spell out the underlying mechanism design in detail. In particular, the piece sketched but did not fully formalize how emergency statutes like IEEPA, balance-of-payments tools like Section 122, and judicial review interact over time to shape executive incentives in trade policy.

Policy essays also tend to treat doctrinal questions—does IEEPA authorize tariffs, how far can Section 122 go—as discrete legal puzzles rather than as parts of an evolving system where actors respond to delayed feedback and shifting constraints. This note treats the same episode as a live example of temporally distributed accountability: how costs, corrections, and incentives are dispersed across time rather than resolved at a single decision point.

Mechanism Walkthrough

At the center of the tariff episode is a familiar executive incentive: presidents face strong pressure to “act” on economic grievances quickly, especially when trade policy can be framed as defending domestic workers or punishing foreign adversaries. Emergency and quasi-emergency statutes—IEEPA for national emergencies, Section 122 for balance-of-payments concerns—offer a comparatively low-friction channel to act unilaterally, especially when ordinary tariff legislation would require building and sustaining a congressional coalition.

Once this channel is available, the mechanism begins:

· Executive incentive → emergency statute use. When ordinary lawmaking is costly and slow, emergency or delegated authorities become the margin of adjustment for ambitious tariff initiatives. Recent uses of IEEPA and Section 122 illustrate how emergency statutes can be stretched to support trade measures that resemble general tax policy rather than crisis response.

· Emergency statute use → diffuse cost distribution. Tariffs impose concentrated costs on specific importers and exporters but diffuse, often opaque costs on consumers and downstream firms through higher prices and supply-chain disruptions. Because these costs are spread out and partially hidden in complex price and quantity adjustments, they are politically easier to sustain in the short run than an explicit tax increase passed by Congress.

· Diffuse cost distribution → delayed judicial correction. Litigation requires identifiable plaintiffs who can show standing, assemble a legal strategy, and bear the time and expense of challenging the policy. In the tariff episode, importers, states, and public-interest groups had to coordinate challenges across multiple theories—statutory interpretation of IEEPA and Section 122, nondelegation and major questions arguments, and separation-of-powers claims about Congress’s taxing authority.

· Delayed judicial correction → political accountability lag. By the time a case like Learning Resources v. Trump reaches the Supreme Court and results in a ruling that IEEPA tariffs are unconstitutional, the policy has already generated real economic and distributional effects. Voters observe the judicial correction as a discrete “event,” but the underlying costs and incentives that produced the tariffs were generated years earlier, under different political conditions and media narratives.

This sequence—executive incentive, emergency-channel activation, diffuse costs, delayed judicial review, and lagged political response—is what “temporally distributed accountability” looks like in a concrete legal setting. The Constitution’s allocation of tariff and taxing power to Congress remains formally intact, but the timing of when that allocation actually binds behavior is mediated by statutory design, litigation dynamics, and the political economy of diffuse versus concentrated costs.

Figure 1 summarizes the timing structure.

Why Courts Appear “Late”

From a news-cycle perspective, courts often look like they are “late” to the party: by the time the Supreme Court limits presidential tariff powers or rejects an expansive reading of IEEPA, the tariffs have already bitten. But as an institutional matter, courts are designed as lagged correction mechanisms: they do not initiate policy, they respond to disputes, and they rely on affected parties to bring justiciable cases.

That lag is not necessarily a failure; it is a feature of a system that separates initiation, implementation, and review across different bodies with different time horizons. Executives operate on election and news cycles; legislators on legislative calendars and coalition dynamics; courts on dockets, briefing schedules, and precedential constraints, with each step introducing delay but also additional information about a policy’s real-world effects.

In the tariff episode, the Court’s eventual conclusion that IEEPA tariffs exceeded statutory authority and encroached on Congress’s power to impose duties is best understood as a delayed reassertion of an existing constitutional allocation, not the creation of a new one. From a temporally distributed accountability perspective, the key question is not “Why did the Court take so long?” but “How did the statutory and political environment allow the executive to exploit that time window?”

This is exactly the kind of timing structure that Fairness Over Time-style analyses emphasize: outcomes are evaluated at one moment, but the path that produced them spans multiple periods, with different actors and constraints at each step. The tariff case provides a policy-domain counterpart to the way fairness metrics in algorithms can misalign with the longer-run dynamics of incentives, feedback, and institutional learning.

Research Note / Forward Link

The tariff episode illustrates how institutional systems repeatedly correct policy expansions only after their fiscal, distributive, and constitutional costs become visible enough to crystallize into litigation and judicial review. In the interim, executives can bank political credit for “toughness” on trade, even as the underlying measures are structurally fragile once subjected to full statutory and constitutional scrutiny.

The argument developed here did not originate as an abstract theoretical exercise. It emerged from attempting to understand why institutional corrections to policy expansion so often appear delayed or reactive, even when underlying constraints remain unchanged. The recent tariff litigation provided a particularly clear illustration of this recurring temporal pattern.

A more formal treatment of these dynamics, treating emergency authorities and judicial review as components of a temporally distributed accountability system, appears in ongoing work on time, institutions, and fairness in public policy. For readers interested in the broader framework, a draft of that project is available here: Fairness Over Time / temporally distributed accountability preprint.

It turns out that when you bargain away your liberalism for a chance at quick libertarian victories, you don’t get either for very long.

Now Peru has given us something different: Hernando de Soto.

Not a meme‑ready icon, not a YouTube ranter with a chainsaw, but an institutional reformer whose life’s work has been about giving the poor legal personhood and enforceable property rights. That doesn’t make him a messiah; it does make him a far less morally compromised “bandwagon” than the one so many allies just finished riding into a ditch.

Hope in institutions, not in heroes

The first thing to say about de Soto is that he doesn’t rescue the case for putting faith in politicians.
If anything, he’s a reminder of why we shouldn’t: even “our” guy can lose elections—as he did in Peru’s fragmented 2021 presidential race—or be sidelined by coalitions and state‑capacity limits.

The proper object of liberal hope has never been a singular leader, but a framework: rules over rulers, institutions over instincts, constraints over charisma. De Soto’s career has been about that framework—about bringing the poor into the law through the formalization of property and business rights developed in The Mystery of Capital, so they are no longer entirely dependent on the goodwill of mayors, party bosses, or police commanders.

If he succeeds, it won’t be because he is especially pure of heart.

It will be because he managed to convert an intellectual project about “dead capital” into registries, titles, and predictable enforcement that will still be there when he is gone.

Why de Soto feels different from Milei

The contrast with Javier Milei is not just about manners or ideology; it’s about structure.

· Milei is a theorist of shock and a practitioner of exception: sweeping deregulation and fiscal adjustment bundled into omnibus laws and emergency decrees, backed by a willingness to criminalize protest and restrict civic space.

· De Soto is a theorist of incorporation: documenting informal assets and claims, drafting hundreds of pieces of legislation to formalize property and business rights, and setting up agencies to register immovable property and enterprises.

Both talk about markets.

Only one is primarily trying to thicken the rule‑of‑law substrate under which markets can operate without a permanent state of exception.

That’s why de Soto is such a tempting “I told you so” moment for those of us who warned against libertarianism‑by‑strongman.

If we had been more patient, we could have had our Latin American liberal narrative centered on a property‑rights reformer instead of trying to explain away baton‑charges on protesters and presidential attempts to rule by decree.

How to hope without worship

So what does it look like to place hope rightly here?

· Cheer the institutional agenda, not the man.
The victory worth celebrating in Peru is not “de Soto in the palace,” but any concrete expansion of legal personhood, formal titles, and due process for people who previously lived entirely at the mercy of informal mafias and arbitrary bureaucrats.

· Watch the constraints, not the speeches.
If de Soto or any successor starts leaning on emergency powers, sidelining courts, or militarizing public order, they should lose liberal support just as fast as Milei should have.

· Treat this as an experiment, not a prophecy.
Classical liberals should be brutally honest: the de Soto agenda may fail or be watered down, as critics of his property‑rights program have long argued in other countries. The difference is that if it fails, it will fail within a framework we can still defend on principle.

A better bandwagon

There is a very human urge among intellectuals to have “a country” and “a leader” we can point to and say: that’s us; that’s our project made flesh.

The Milei episode showed how quickly that urge can lead smart people into excusing open illiberalism as a mere means to market ends.

De Soto offers a chance to re‑stage the conversation on healthier terrain.
Here is someone whose central promise is not to smash the system on our behalf, but to make the system legible, general, and fair enough that the poor can finally stand as legal equals. That’s still risky; it’s still politics. But it doesn’t require us to pretend that concentrated power is secretly freedom.

Hope for de Soto, then—but hope in the specific, limited sense liberals should always practice.

Hope that a serious institutional reformer might win enough battles to leave behind sturdier property rights, clearer personhood, and a little less room for the next strongman to play God.

Modern democracies face a strange and increasingly visible dilemma. Citizens increasingly demand institutions that respond faster when problems arise, yet the mechanisms that allow institutions to learn often depend on resisting immediate pressure. What looks like institutional failure may sometimes be the uncomfortable process of correction itself. Efforts to force faster responsiveness, however understandable, can unintentionally weaken the very constraints that make learning possible.

When Institutions Appear Unable to Learn

Public frustration with institutions is not irrational. Citizens often experience problems that seem to persist despite expert management, procedural safeguards, and repeated promises of reform. When outcomes fail to improve — or improve too slowly to be visible — it is reasonable to conclude that institutions have become insulated from accountability. Demands for faster responsiveness emerge not from hostility to democracy, but from a growing belief that correction itself has stalled.

In an environment of epistemic fragmentation, even genuine attempts at learning become difficult to recognize. Signals about reform are filtered through polarized media, partisan narratives, and uneven expertise, so citizens struggle to distinguish between failure, delay, and slow-moving correction. Under those conditions, skepticism about institutional learning is not simply cynicism; it is an understandable response to an opaque and noisy information environment.

The Temptation to Loosen Constraints

Yet pressure for faster correction can produce an unintended consequence. Institutions designed to learn over time typically rely on constraints that slow decision-making: independence from immediate political pressure, procedural safeguards, and rules that limit discretionary action. When public confidence weakens, these constraints increasingly appear not as protections but as obstacles. Efforts to restore accountability therefore often begin by loosening the very limits that allow institutions to evaluate outcomes, absorb feedback, and adjust course responsibly.

This does not imply that insulated institutions perform well by default, nor that independence guarantees sound policy; only that the capacity for correction depends on preserving conditions under which error can be recognized over time.

This pattern is visible in debates over central banks, courts, and regulatory agencies, where proposals for “democratization” frequently involve narrowing terms, weakening independence, or tightening electoral control. The underlying impulse is understandable: if institutions are not learning, bring them closer to immediate public pressure. But in doing so, societies risk dismantling the buffers that separate short-term moods from long-horizon evaluation.

How Learning Capacity Degrades

As constraints weaken, institutional decisions become more directly responsive to short-term pressures. Feedback grows noisier, policy horizons shorten, and outcomes become harder to evaluate before new demands for change arise. Adaptive learning begins to degrade. Opportunistic actors find systems easier to influence, while genuine correction becomes more difficult to distinguish from political reaction. What began as an effort to restore responsiveness can gradually erode the conditions that make institutional learning possible.

Research on populism and institutional capture suggests that when voters become impatient and institutions are weakly constrained, leaders face stronger incentives to seize control of the very bodies meant to oversee them. In such environments, capture is not an aberration but a predictable response to loosened guardrails. Over time, institutions shift from processing information to protecting incumbents, further degrading their capacity to learn.

A Self-Reinforcing Perception Loop

The result is a self-reinforcing dynamic. Citizens interpret persistent problems as evidence that institutions cannot correct course, prompting demands for greater immediacy and responsiveness. Yet as stabilizing constraints weaken, institutions lose the capacity to evaluate policy over time, making successful correction less likely. Performance deteriorates in ways that confirm the original perception of failure. Institutional distrust, initially rooted in understandable frustration, becomes progressively self-validating.

In this loop, populist pressure and institutional underperformance are not opposing forces but co-producers of decay. Leaders respond to distrust by weakening constraints; weakened constraints make capture easier; capture further undermines trust. Each side can accurately point to real dysfunction while contributing, often unintentionally, to its escalation.

The Liberal Tension: Responsiveness vs. Learning

Liberal institutions therefore operate under a persistent tension. To remain democratically legitimate, they must ultimately respond to public concerns. Yet to remain capable of learning, they must sometimes resist immediate demands long enough to evaluate outcomes and incorporate feedback over time. Constraints that slow decision-making — independence, procedure, and limited discretion — are not obstacles to accountability but conditions that make meaningful accountability possible. When this distinction becomes difficult to recognize, restraint begins to resemble betrayal.

Comparative work on democratic resilience shows that democracies survive not by avoiding shocks, but by maintaining institutions that can absorb and learn from them. Where horizontal constraints and rule-of-law protections are strong, electoral responsiveness and long-horizon learning reinforce each other; where these constraints are weak, the same electoral pressures can accelerate instability.

When Disagreement Becomes About Possibility

Much contemporary political conflict may therefore reflect not simply disagreement over policy, but disagreement over whether institutions remain capable of correction at all. When citizens lose confidence that systems can learn, pressures naturally arise to bypass constraint in favor of immediacy. Yet adaptive institutions rarely improve through acceleration alone. Their capacity to correct mistakes depends on preserving the very structures that make evaluation, revision, and delayed accountability possible.

This helps explain why debates over courts, central banks, public health agencies, and universities often feel existential rather than merely technical. For some, constraints signal captured, self-protective elites; for others, the same constraints represent fragile preconditions for any hope of impartial learning. Both interpretations contain elements of truth, yet they point toward radically different responses.

The Fragility of Learning Societies

Liberal societies do not fail simply because institutions make mistakes. Error is inevitable in complex systems. They fail when citizens and institutions alike lose confidence that mistakes can still be recognized and corrected over time. The challenge facing modern democracies may therefore be less about choosing the right policies than about preserving the conditions under which learning remains possible.

When constraint is mistaken for indifference and delay for dysfunction, societies risk dismantling the very mechanisms that allow them to correct their own course. Liberal institutions may endure only if we retain the ability to distinguish between failure itself and the difficult process of adaptation.

Angela McArdle likes to style herself a libertarian polemicist. But the story of her tenure atop the Libertarian National Committee (LNC) is less about polemics than about institutional incentives — a live demonstration of mechanism failure: adverse selection in leadership, moral hazard in candidate support, and a principal–agent breakdown between party leadership and the people it was supposed to represent.

This isn’t gossip, and it isn’t about personality. It’s an institutional autopsy. The interesting question isn’t who was right — it’s what the rules made almost inevitable.

From liberal party to factional vehicle

Start with the coalition that brought the current leadership to power. The Libertarian Party Mises Caucus openly embraces a paleolibertarian, fusionist orientation — more socially conservative, more comfortable with right-populist politics, and explicitly interested in working alongside Republicans rather than simply opposing them.

By 2022, the caucus had consolidated control of the LNC, displacing the party’s older classical-liberal and pragmatic wings. Several state affiliates responded with splits or disaffiliations, a conflict sketched in coverage of LP factional politics and critiques such as “Of Mices and Mises.”

The institutional question was never whether factions would fight — that’s normal politics. The real question was whether liberal governance mechanisms would constrain leadership behavior once power changed hands. What follows traces how that mechanism evolved: selection, incentives, and institutional drift. The answer, increasingly, appears to have been no.

The RFK Jr. fundraising arrangement as adverse selection

The joint fundraising deal with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should be taught in a public-choice seminar.

In 2024 the LNC entered a fundraising structure that allowed donors to write unusually large checks routed through Libertarian Party infrastructure and then distributed to Kennedy-aligned entities. Kennedy was never the Libertarian nominee — he sought the nomination and lost — yet the committee reportedly raised roughly $5 million, most of which flowed toward Kennedy’s campaign and affiliates, with only a smaller share remaining within Libertarian structures.

Reporting from outlets including the Boston Globe, alongside analyses such as “Where We Are on RFK Money” at Third Party Watch, fueled internal criticism that the arrangement functioned less like a partnership and more like a conduit. Additional reporting and party investigations described payments to entities connected to leadership figures and their networks.

The institutional point is straightforward. Party rules assumed leadership would internalize party objectives and treat conflict-of-interest boundaries as real constraints. Instead, the mechanism selected for a leadership type comfortable using party infrastructure as a bridge between donors and outside projects.

In mechanism-design language: screening failed.

Moral hazard once power is secured

If adverse selection explains how leadership arrived, moral hazard explains what came next.

After Chase Oliver secured the Libertarian presidential nomination, leadership messaging often framed his candidacy less as the party’s centerpiece and more as a potential spoiler dynamic — an approach criticized by state affiliates and internal voices who argued it undermined unified support for the nominee.

At the same time, leadership pursued highly public outreach toward Donald Trump, including inviting him to address the Libertarian convention, even as the party’s own candidate struggled with institutional support and ballot-access challenges. Litigation filed by LNC secretary Caryn Ann Harlos and related internal disputes alleged failures in core responsibilities, including nominee certification and organizational neutrality.

This is textbook moral hazard. Once in office, leadership had the ability to quietly reallocate effort and signaling toward outside coalition goals while rank-and-file members — the nominal principals — lacked real-time information or enforcement power.

Principal–agent collapse

Put together, the pattern resembles a classic principal–agent breakdown.

In theory, Libertarian Party members and delegates serve as principals; leadership acts as their agent. In a healthy liberal institution, rules and transparency are designed to keep those incentives aligned.

But during this period, internal litigation and public complaints alleged resource misallocation, conflicting loyalties, and procedural maneuvers that appeared to prioritize factional or external interests over the party’s own nominee. In several instances, internal accountability mechanisms seemed to reverse direction — disciplining those attempting to reassert institutional alignment rather than the actors accused of undermining it.

Once the agent begins disciplining the principals, the mechanism is no longer functioning.

Paleolibertarian polemic vs. liberal institutionalism

The deeper issue here isn’t personality. It’s philosophy.

Paleolibertarian politics tends to merge libertarian rhetoric with culturally conservative, populist-right coalition building. Classical liberalism, by contrast, treats institutions themselves — rules, fiduciary duties, procedural neutrality — as intrinsic to a free order.

From that perspective, the central problem isn’t disagreement over policy. It’s what happens when institutional constraints are treated as negotiable tools rather than binding commitments.

The rhetoric may remain libertarian. The revealed incentives tell another story.

A broader pattern in minor parties

And this isn’t unique to the Libertarian Party.

Minor parties live in a perpetual tension between being ideological movements, ballot-access vehicles, and fundraising infrastructures. Those overlapping roles create predictable vulnerabilities. Without strong constraints, coalition entrepreneurs can repurpose institutions toward outside goals while preserving branding continuity.

What looks like ideological evolution is often just mechanism drift.

Lessons for liberals and minor parties

The lesson isn’t “choose better people.” Institutions cannot rely on moral luck.

Joint fundraising agreements with outside candidates should face strict transparency requirements and real member oversight. Financial relationships involving officers or close associates should trigger automatic disclosure and recusal. Mechanisms must be designed on the assumption that incentives will diverge — because eventually, they do.

More fundamentally, liberal institutions survive only when participants treat rules as constraints rather than suggestions. A party that views its nominee as optional, its bylaws as elastic, and its donor network as a bargaining chip with outside movements risks becoming something other than what it claims to be.

If there is a polemic worth writing here, it isn’t about personalities. It’s about mechanism design — and how quickly a nominally liberal institution can be repurposed once the guardrails stop working.

A crisis in search of evidence

Every election cycle, Americans are told that undocumented immigrants are voting in large numbers and that this hidden wave of “illegal ballots” threatens the legitimacy of our democracy. The rhetoric is familiar: warnings about “non‑citizens on the rolls,” allegations that elections are being “stolen,” demands for ever‑stricter identification rules. The strongest conservative effort to document election fraud unintentionally shows that undocumented voting is not an electoral threat but a statistical mirage.

If those stories were true at scale, the data would already show it. Prosecutions would stack up, audits would routinely uncover large numbers of ineligible voters, and the institutions most invested in documenting fraud would have overflowing files. Instead, when you look at the record carefully, you see something very different: a gigantic election system in which non‑citizen voting of any kind is extremely rare, and confirmed cases involving undocumented immigrants are almost nonexistent.

One of the clearest windows into this reality comes from an unlikely source: the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has spent years arguing that U.S. elections are vulnerable to fraud and pushing for tighter restrictions. This essay views the non-citizen voting debate as a form of institutional equilibrium, in which incentives drive behavior and the stories surrounding that behavior.

Not a study—and not a ceiling

Defenders of the fraud narrative respond in two ways. First, they emphasize (correctly) that Heritage’s database is not comprehensive: it records only those cases that were detected, formally handled, and then captured by staff. Second, they argue that the database therefore shows only the “bottom floor” of fraud, not the ceiling.

From a purely statistical perspective, that is right: you cannot treat Heritage’s tally as the upper bound on all non‑citizen voting. Detection is imperfect; some cases are never prosecuted; local reporters miss stories. There will always be incidents that never make it into any database.

But if you think in terms of incentives and behavior, the database is still incredibly informative. It is the product of a long‑running, highly motivated search by an institution that wants to find fraud. If there were truly a large amount of undocumented voting happening, this is exactly the kind of effort that should be able to document it.

Instead, what we see in Heritage’s own numbers is a pattern consistent with a very different world: one where non‑citizen and undocumented voting do occur, but at microscopic rates relative to the scale of American elections.

A game of incentives, not just rules

This is less a story about individual bad actors than about institutions responding rationally to asymmetric incentives. Why would the true rate be so low? The simplest answer is that the incentives point that way.

For a non‑citizen—especially an undocumented immigrant—the potential benefit of voting illegally is minuscule. One ballot among millions only infinitesimally changes the chance that a preferred candidate wins. The potential cost, however, is enormous: detection can mean fines, felony charges, loss of lawful status, and deportation. For most non‑citizens, risking deportation for a single ballot is not an abstract calculation; it is a frightening gamble.

At the same time, the institutional environment is not as porous as casual rhetoric suggests. Over the past two decades, states have added voter‑ID requirements, cross‑checks with citizenship databases, and more frequent audits. Even where those systems are imperfect, they raise the probability of detection enough that the expected cost of a fraudulent vote for a non‑citizen swamps the expected benefit.

On the enforcement side, officials face the opposite incentives. The marginal benefit of detecting one more fraudulent vote in terms of actual election outcomes is essentially zero; the odds that any single illegal ballot changes a result are tiny. But the political payoff from uncovering and publicizing even a handful of cases is large. Elected officials and advocacy groups can point to those cases to push legislation, mobilize donors, and energize base voters.

Put together, that mix of incentives leads to exactly the pattern we see:

Non‑citizens almost never attempt to vote illegally because the risk‑reward ratio is wildly unfavorable.

Politicians and advocacy organizations over‑invest in searching for and amplifying the rare cases they can find, because those cases are rhetorically valuable even when they are numerically insignificant.

Heritage’s database is the natural output of that environment: a small collection of highly salient stories, repeatedly cited as proof of a crisis, even though taken together they amount to a rounding error in the denominator of all ballots cast.

Institutional design for the world we actually have

None of this implies that election rules don’t matter or that we should ignore fraud. The state has a legitimate interest in keeping non‑citizens from voting in federal and most state elections, and sensible safeguards—clear eligibility rules, basic identity checks, and routine audits—are appropriate.

The real policy question is margin management. When the best available evidence, including from groups ideologically committed to finding fraud, shows that proven non‑citizen and undocumented voting are extraordinarily rare, what kinds of interventions are justified?

One approach is to treat even a tiny number of non‑citizen votes as justification for sweeping new requirements: documentary proof of citizenship to register, aggressive voter‑roll purges based on flawed databases, or national ID mandates. Those measures may marginally reduce an already microscopic risk, but they also raise the cost of participation for lawful voters and increase the risk of erroneous disenfranchisement.

Another approach—the one more consistent with both the data and the incentive story—is to tighten where errors actually occur, without building policy on imagined waves of undocumented voters. The American Immigration Council’s analysis points out that many of the non‑citizen voting cases in Heritage’s database originated in government error: officials wrongly encouraged non‑citizens to register or failed to check documentation properly. Better training for front‑line staff, clear communication about eligibility, and modest investments in record‑keeping do more to prevent these rare mistakes than sweeping new barriers aimed at a crisis that isn’t there.

In a constitutional political‑economy sense, that matters. The power to regulate elections and determine who counts as a legitimate voter is one of the most dangerous tools a state wields. It should be exercised with restraint, grounded in evidence rather than fear. When the evidence—especially the evidence painstakingly collected by those most eager to prove a problem—shows that a particular form of fraud is almost nonexistent, the burden of proof shifts to the would‑be restrictors.

The real lesson of Heritage’s numbers

The Heritage Foundation set out to build a flagship resource documenting election fraud in the United States. In some ways, it succeeded: the database is detailed, searchable, and politically influential.

Yet when you read it with a clear eye and a calculator, it ends up telling a very different story from the one its sponsors intended. Across decades of elections and more than a billion ballots, Heritage’s own data show only dozens of non‑citizen voting cases, including a bare handful involving undocumented immigrants. Other audits and investigations in key states reinforce the same conclusion: non‑citizen voting happens, but at rates so low that they cannot plausibly explain electoral outcomes.

For readers who care about how institutions behave under pressure, that pattern is not a reason for complacency. It is a reason for clarity. The system we have built—imperfect, decentralized, and often messy—has produced an equilibrium in which undocumented voting is the exception, not the rule. More broadly, this is what institutional equilibrium looks like when rare events generate high political returns—narratives persist even when the underlying rates remain negligible.

That should shape how we design the next round of rules. It should temper the calls for ever‑harsher restrictions that fall hardest on lawful voters.

I’m curious whether readers see incentive or institutional dynamics that point elsewhere; frameworks like this are strongest when tested against what others actually observe.

We are arguing more — and understanding each other less. Something strange has happened to public language over the last decade. Words that once felt stable now feel provisional. Definitions shift mid-conversation. People speak past each other with confidence, convinced they are using the same vocabulary when they plainly are not.

It would be easy to dismiss this as ordinary linguistic evolution. Language changes; it always has. New generations stretch old words, academics refine terms for analytical precision, and political movements try to name experiences that previously lacked clear vocabulary. None of that is new, and none of it is inherently alarming.

What feels different, however, is the speed — and the incentives. Definitions now seem to change on the timescale of headlines. Terms are reconfigured not slowly through shared usage, but rapidly through conflict. In highly polarized environments, redefining a concept often becomes cheaper than persuading people about it.

This matters because language is not merely expressive. It is infrastructure. Shared definitions function much like legal standards or accounting rules: they lower the cost of coordination. Contracts become possible because people broadly agree what words mean. Scientific claims can be debated because terms remain stable long enough for evidence to accumulate. Institutions operate because citizens and officials at least partially inhabit the same linguistic world.

When that infrastructure begins to wobble, the immediate effect is not philosophical confusion. It is rising transaction costs. Arguments linger longer because participants are debating vocabularies rather than claims. Policy conversations stall because entire debates collapse into fights over terminology. Trust declines, not necessarily because people are more dishonest, but because the shared frame of reference that makes disagreement productive becomes harder to find.

This is why the current moment feels less like ordinary partisanship and more like a descent into Babel. The problem is not that people disagree. The problem is that the underlying conditions for disagreement — shared meanings, shared procedures, and shared expectations about language — are becoming less stable.

And that raises a question that is more institutional than linguistic: how do societies continue to coordinate when words themselves are contested terrain?

Language as Infrastructure

We rarely think of language as infrastructure because, when it works, it disappears into the background. Like roads or power grids, its success lies in being unremarkable. People coordinate, transact, argue, and govern without constantly renegotiating the meaning of basic terms.

Economists sometimes describe certain goods as “coordination devices” — shared frameworks that reduce friction among actors who do not fully trust one another. Language plays a similar role. It allows strangers to sign contracts, citizens to interpret laws, and researchers to build cumulatively on one another’s work. The point is not that everyone agrees; the point is that disagreement occurs within a shared semantic architecture.

When that architecture is stable, disagreement can be productive. People can argue about evidence, outcomes, or values while assuming that key terms remain fixed enough for the conversation to progress. A policy debate, for example, might be fierce, but it still relies on participants roughly agreeing what counts as “risk,” “harm,” or “cost,” even if they weigh those things differently.

The moment definitions become unstable, however, the character of disagreement changes. Arguments shift from the empirical to the semantic. Participants start contesting what words are allowed to mean before they can even discuss what should be done. Coordination slows. Trust erodes. The conversation begins to feel less like debate and more like parallel monologues sharing the same air.

This is not simply a matter of annoyance or rhetorical style. There are real institutional consequences. Laws become harder to interpret consistently when their social meaning shifts rapidly. Policy becomes harder to evaluate when core concepts are constantly reframed. Academic conversations become brittle when key terms carry different moral or ideological weight depending on the audience.

In short, shared meaning functions as a public good. Everyone benefits from it, but no single actor bears responsibility for maintaining it. And like many public goods, it becomes fragile when incentives encourage short-term gains over long-term stability. The system drifts.

Definitional Drift — and Definitional Turpitude

Not all changes in meaning are the same. Language evolves constantly, and most of the time that evolution is healthy. New realities demand new vocabulary. Scholars refine concepts for precision. Communities adapt words to fit changing social experience. None of this is especially controversial.

But there is a difference between gradual evolution and something more strategic.

For lack of a better phrase — and because the phrase makes me laugh — I think of the latter as definitional turpitude. By this I mean the deliberate or semi-deliberate reshaping of established terms to serve immediate rhetorical or political goals, often without acknowledging that the definition itself is being renegotiated.

The distinction matters. Organic drift is slow and collective; definitional turpitude is fast and instrumental. Linguists have long described this as an “invisible hand” process in language change — emergent rather than centrally directed. One emerges from shared usage over time. The other treats language as a tactical resource.

In highly polarized environments, the incentives are obvious. Persuasion is hard. Redefinition is easier. If a term can be expanded, narrowed, or morally recharged, entire debates can be reframed without changing any underlying facts. The conversation shifts before anyone notices the ground has moved. So people redefine.

This is not merely a problem among activists or media personalities. Academic and intellectual spaces are susceptible for structural reasons. Novel framings are rewarded. Boundary-redrawing signals originality. The temptation to redefine concepts — sometimes quietly, sometimes openly — can become part of the incentive structure itself.

None of this requires bad faith. Most participants genuinely believe they are clarifying rather than reshaping. But the cumulative effect can still be destabilizing. When too many terms become contested simultaneously, conversation stops being about evidence and starts being about vocabulary. Participants disagree not only about conclusions, but about the meaning of the words used to reach them.

The result is a subtle but important shift: language ceases to be shared infrastructure and becomes a battleground in its own right. Any linguist worth reading will point out that semantic drift is normal — and they’re right. But institutional coordination runs on slower clocks than cultural change, and that mismatch is where trouble begins.

Why Hyperpartisan Systems Reward It

If definitional turpitude is becoming more common, the explanation is less moral than structural. Systems tend to produce the behaviors they reward, and highly polarized environments reward rhetorical efficiency more than slow persuasion.

In stable political or intellectual environments, convincing someone usually requires argument: evidence, reasoning, and a shared conceptual framework. But in hyperpartisan settings, those shared frameworks weaken. Audiences are already segmented. Trust across groups is low. The odds of persuading opponents decline sharply.

Under those conditions, changing the terms of debate can be more efficient than winning the debate itself.

Redefining a concept shifts the battlefield. It alters which arguments sound reasonable and which positions appear legitimate before any substantive claims are evaluated. From a purely strategic standpoint, this is often the cheaper move. Persuasion asks you to change minds; definitional shifts ask only that you change the frame.

Academic and intellectual ecosystems are not immune to this logic — if anything, they amplify it. Novelty is rewarded. Reframing an issue can be more publishable than refining an old argument. New terminology signals intellectual ambition and moral seriousness. Over time, even well-intentioned scholars can find themselves pulled toward conceptual innovation whether or not it improves clarity.

Again, none of this requires conspiracy or bad faith. The incentives do the work quietly. Individuals respond rationally to professional and political environments that prize reframing over continuity.

The cumulative effect, however, is cumulative instability. Each small shift may appear harmless on its own. Taken together, they raise the cost of communication across groups. People begin to suspect that words mean different things depending on who is speaking — and they are often right.

This is how public discourse drifts toward Babel: not through sudden collapse, but through a series of individually rational choices that collectively erode semantic stability.

The Coordination Cost

When shared definitions weaken, the immediate effect is not cultural decay or intellectual apocalypse. It is friction.

Coordination depends on predictable interpretation. Contracts rely on agreed meanings. Laws depend on relatively stable concepts. Scientific inquiry requires terms that hold still long enough for evidence to accumulate. Even ordinary political disagreement assumes that participants are arguing about the same object.

When definitions become unstable, that predictability declines. Actors must spend more time clarifying what they mean before they can even address whether a claim is true. Arguments stall at the level of vocabulary. Debates that should be empirical become semantic. Trust erodes, not necessarily because people are dishonest, but because the shared frame that makes disagreement intelligible becomes harder to locate.

The effect resembles an increase in transaction costs. Each exchange requires more interpretive labor. Each institutional decision carries greater risk of being reinterpreted under a shifting conceptual lens. Courts must work harder to stabilize statutory meaning. Policymakers must specify terms more exhaustively. Scholars must append caveats that would have been unnecessary a decade earlier.

None of this is dramatic in isolation. But it accumulates.

In low-trust environments, actors begin to assume that definitions are contingent on audience. That suspicion changes behavior. People hedge. They over-specify. They retreat into narrower communities where meanings feel more secure. Cross-domain communication — between academia and journalism, between law and politics, between communities that once shared partial vocabularies — becomes more fragile.

This is the point at which Babel ceases to be metaphorical. The problem is not that people disagree. It is that disagreement no longer reliably operates within a shared semantic structure. And when that structure weakens, institutional coordination becomes more expensive and more brittle.

The irony is that many of the individuals participating in definitional shifts are acting rationally within their immediate environment. But the aggregate outcome resembles a classic public-goods problem: short-term rhetorical advantage contributes to long-term semantic instability.

How Societies Actually Survive Babel

The good news is that societies have encountered versions of this problem before. Periods of intense polarization or rapid social change almost always involve semantic conflict. Words become contested because institutions, values, and identities are themselves in motion.

And yet societies rarely collapse into permanent incomprehension. Instead, they develop mechanisms that restore enough shared meaning for coordination to continue.

The first mechanism is institutional definition. Courts, regulatory bodies, professional organizations, and scientific communities stabilize vocabulary by giving terms operational meaning within specific contexts. Legal definitions, for example, do not require universal agreement; they require consistency for the purpose of governance. The same is true for professional standards and technical disciplines. These institutions act as anchors when everyday language becomes fluid.

The second mechanism is domain separation. Different communities develop partially distinct vocabularies suited to their own purposes. Scientific language does not need to mirror journalistic language, and policy language does not need to track activist discourse perfectly. What matters is that participants understand when they are crossing domains and adjust accordingly. Societies survive not by forcing a single universal lexicon, but by maintaining boundaries that preserve internal clarity.

Third, procedural trust often substitutes for semantic consensus. When people stop agreeing on meanings, they can still agree on methods. Peer review, precedent, transparent standards of evidence, and institutional process allow disagreement to persist without dissolving into chaos. In effect, procedures become the shared language when words themselves are contested.

Finally, societies rely on translators — individuals who can move between vocabularies and explain one domain to another. These figures rarely command universal agreement, but they reduce misunderstanding by making implicit assumptions visible. The role is less glamorous than it sounds; translation often involves clarifying what people think they already understand.

Together, these mechanisms do not restore perfect consensus. They do something more modest and more realistic: they maintain partial stability. Enough shared meaning exists in enough domains that coordination remains possible even amid deep disagreement.

That is the real lesson of Babel. Societies do not survive by eliminating difference. They survive by building structures that allow difference to coexist with cooperation.

The Real Risk

The risk, then, is not disagreement. Democracies are built to withstand disagreement. Intellectual life depends on it.

The risk is simultaneous erosion.

If institutional anchors weaken, domain boundaries blur, procedural trust collapses, and translators lose credibility all at once, the stabilizing mechanisms begin to fail together. At that point, semantic conflict no longer feels temporary or localized. It begins to feel systemic.

When courts are distrusted, legal definitions no longer reassure. When scientific procedures are politicized, methodological consensus no longer stabilizes debate. When journalism collapses into activism or activism masquerades as scholarship, domain separation falters. When translators are treated as traitors by every side, cross-domain communication deteriorates.

Under those conditions, rising coordination costs are not merely inconvenient. They become corrosive. Policy gridlock deepens. Institutional legitimacy declines. People retreat into narrower interpretive communities where meanings feel safe but increasingly insular.

That is what makes hyperpartisan Babel unsettling. It is not that words change. Words have always changed. It is that too many stabilizing mechanisms are under strain at once.

Babel Is Survivable

And yet — Babel is survivable.

Societies do not require unanimity to function. They require enough stable definitions in enough places to allow cooperation to continue. Shared language does not need to be universal; it needs to be sufficiently predictable within key institutional domains.

Language will continue to evolve. Academics will continue to refine and sometimes over-refine. Political actors will continue to reframe. None of that is likely to stop.

But if institutions take seriously their role as semantic anchors — if courts clarify rather than drift, if professional communities guard technical precision, if procedural standards remain visible and consistent — the coordination problem becomes manageable.

The goal is not to freeze language in amber. It is to prevent short-term rhetorical incentives from overwhelming long-term semantic stability.

Babel, in other words, is not primarily a linguistic crisis. It is a coordination challenge.

And coordination challenges are not solved by louder argument. They are solved by rebuilding the structures that make argument productive in the first place. Coordination returns — unevenly, but enough. That work is slower than outrage. But it is the only work that lasts.

Tariffs are almost always sold as a way to have it all. Politicians promise to protect domestic industries and jobs, keep foreign rivals in check, and still deliver low prices and rising prosperity at home. Recent debates in the United States, with claims that “foreigners pay our tariffs,” fit this pattern neatly. I’ve called this narrative out before in “Tariff Truths,” where I walked through how both Trump and Biden have leaned on duties while downplaying who actually pays for them.

But trade policy, like any other policy that touches scarcity, obeys constraints. In practice, governments face a tariff trilemma. They cannot simultaneously deliver, at high levels, all three of the following:

• Durable protection for politically favored domestic industries.

• Low prices and broad consumer prosperity.

• An open, rules‑based trading system that sustains long‑run productivity growth.

They can choose any two corners of this triangle, but the third will give way. The rhetoric around tariffs usually denies this, which is why the costs so often show up in places voters are not looking.

A free lunch that isn’t

The modern protectionist pitch goes something like this:

• Foreign producers are “cheating” or benefiting from unfair advantages.

• Imposing tariffs will level the playing field and bring back domestic jobs.

• The burden will mostly fall on foreign exporters or their governments, not on American consumers.

That is the story behind claims that new tariffs on imports are a painless way to raise revenue or discipline trade partners. It suggests that the United States can achieve strong protection for targeted industries and still enjoy low prices and stable growth, because someone else will foot the bill. Recent empirical work finds the opposite: Americans—importers and consumers—are bearing almost the entire cost of recent U.S. tariffs.

Experience—and basic economics—tell a different story. Tariffs are taxes on imports, and taxes on imports raise the domestic prices of those goods and the things made from them. They also invite retaliation, uncertainty, and lobbying for special treatment, all of which erode the openness and predictability of the trading system.

The trilemma framework simply makes this more visible: to the extent tariffs succeed in protecting favored sectors, they do so by sacrificing either consumer welfare or the health of the broader trade regime.

Who really pays?

The first place the trilemma shows up is in incidence. When tariffs are imposed on intermediate goods—steel, aluminum, semiconductors, or inputs to consumer products—domestic firms that rely on those imports see their costs go up. They respond by raising prices, cutting back production, or both. Consumers pay more for cars, appliances, and electronics. Exporters whose products use imported components become less competitive abroad.

Recent analysis of U.S. tariff rounds finds that domestic consumers and downstream firms have borne much of the burden. Even where tariffs increase output or employment in the protected sector, they do so by diluting real incomes elsewhere. Economists such as Donald Boudreaux have spent years pointing out that the real economic case against tariffs is not that they always cause recessions, but that they quietly make most people poorer to privilege a few.

This is the first edge of the trilemma:

• You can protect a domestic industry with tariffs, and you can pretend that foreign firms will pay the bill.

• In reality, if you hold protection high and try to keep the trade system broadly open, the adjustment will come through higher prices and reduced purchasing power at home.

You can keep the protection and avoid being honest about who pays, but you cannot avoid the payment.

Protection versus openness

The second edge of the trilemma concerns the trade regime itself. A relatively open, rules‑based system—with lower barriers, clear commitments, and predictable dispute resolution—creates the conditions for investment, specialization, and long‑run productivity growth. Firms build supply chains and export markets because they expect the rules of the game to be reasonably stable.

When governments start treating tariffs as a first resort, especially when they claim those tariffs are costless, they inject uncertainty into those expectations. Each protected sector becomes a precedent for another. Trading partners respond with retaliation, creative circumvention, and their own special protections.

From the trilemma perspective:

• If you want strong, durable protection for a wide range of industries, and you also want to reassure voters that prices will stay low, you will sacrifice openness and predictability.

• The trading system becomes more politicized and brittle, as each country carves out exceptions for its own favored constituencies.

In other words, a world of widespread, permanent protectionism is not a world of robust, rules‑based trade. It is a world of chronic skirmishes, “temporary” tariffs that never quite go away, and a gradual erosion of the institutional framework that supported postwar prosperity.

Prices, prosperity, and saying no

There is, however, one corner of the triangle that is compatible with openness and broad prosperity: keeping trade relatively free and accepting that not every industry can be sheltered forever.

Choosing low prices and an open, rules‑based system means accepting more competition and more visible change. Some industries will shrink or relocate; others will grow. Workers and capital will move toward more productive uses. The gains are spread across many people and many sectors, which is why they are less politically salient than the concentrated losses in a declining industry —a textbook case of concentrated benefits and diffused costs.

This is the least comfortable position for politicians who want to promise specific job counts or targeted protection. It requires saying, in effect:

• We can help workers adjust,

• We can encourage growth and innovation,

• But we cannot guarantee that today’s pattern of production will be frozen in place without making everyone poorer.

That is a hard sell in the short run. It is also the only configuration of the triangle that does not rely on wishful thinking.

Choosing corners honestly

The tariff trilemma does not tell us what to value; it tells us that values are in tension. I develop a related “fairness trilemma” in a different context—algorithmic governance—in my working paper, “The Fairness Trilemma: An Impossibility Theorem for Algorithmic Governance,” which formalizes this “pick any two” structure in a more general way.​ Protection for specific industries, low prices for consumers, and a stable, open trade regime are all good things. The point is simply that they cannot all be maximized at once.

A more honest trade debate would start by asking:

• Which two corners are we choosing in this case?

• How large are the costs at the third corner, and who bears them?

• Are there better ways to help workers than taxing their consumption and risking a trade war?

For free‑traders, this framing has an advantage. It shifts the conversation away from abstract claims that “trade is always good” for everyone, and toward a concrete question: if we use tariffs to privilege some producers, which consumers and future opportunities are we willing to sacrifice, and are we prepared to say so explicitly?

The alternative is the status quo: protectionist promises that pretend costs do not exist and then allow them to surface later as higher prices, slower growth, and a more fragile global order.

There is no tariff that can repeal scarcity. There is only a choice about where scarcity bites. The tariff trilemma is a reminder that if we want open markets and broad prosperity, we cannot also demand permanent shelter for every politically favored industry.

In a recent piece for The Bulwark, William Kristol celebrates the citizens of Minneapolis as exemplars of democratic resistance, arguing that “the people are leading” while elected Democrats timidly follow. His narrative frames civic action—protests outside hotels housing ICE agents, community surveillance networks tracking federal vehicles, physical confrontations with enforcement officers—as democratic leadership that Congress should emulate by defunding Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It’s a stirring call to action, and Kristol deserves credit for taking seriously both the Minneapolis community’s sustained resistance and the urgent need for democratic accountability in immigration enforcement.

But as an economist who studies institutional design and mechanism design, I find myself troubled by a different question: What does it mean when ordinary citizens must organize neighborhood watch networks, compile license plate databases, and physically interpose themselves between federal agents and their neighbors? Kristol sees democratic vitality. I see institutional failure.

The Minneapolis resistance isn’t leading us toward better policy. It’s a symptom of a system so fundamentally broken that it forces citizens into impossible choices between complicity and extralegal resistance. And the solution isn’t simply to defund ICE, as Kristol proposes—it’s to rebuild immigration enforcement from the ground up with proper institutional constraints, transparent processes, and accountability mechanisms that make such desperate resistance unnecessary.

The Mechanism Design Perspective

Mechanism design—the branch of economics concerned with designing rules and institutions that produce desired outcomes—offers a useful lens for understanding what’s gone wrong in Minneapolis. A well-designed enforcement mechanism should create incentive-compatible outcomes where following the rules produces better results than breaking them, both for enforcers and those subject to enforcement.

The current ICE operations in Minneapolis spectacularly fail this test. According to multiple reports, federal agents have been stopping vehicles without probable cause, detaining U.S. citizens, operating with masked faces that prevent identification, and conducting what residents describe as “zone enforcement” rather than targeted operations. Two U.S. citizens—Renée Good and Alex Pretti—were fatally shot by federal agents in January 2026, deaths that remain under investigation with the Trump administration actively obstructing cooperation with state investigators.

This isn’t enforcement. It’s extractive institutional design—a system optimized for removing people rather than sorting legitimate cases from illegitimate ones, for maximizing arrests rather than maximizing justice. The incentives are all wrong: agents are rewarded for numbers, not accuracy; for compliance, not legitimacy; for speed, not due process.

When institutions create these perverse incentives, rational actors respond predictably. Federal agents mask their faces because they fear accountability. Community members track license plates because official oversight has failed. Residents physically block vehicles because legal remedies are too slow or nonexistent. Each side escalates because the institutional structure offers no better path.

Kristol is right that this situation is intolerable. But his proposed solution—Democratic senators refusing to fund ICE—misdiagnosses the disease. The problem isn’t funding levels. It’s that we’ve built an enforcement apparatus with virtually no meaningful constraints on its operation.

The Institutional Vacuum

Here’s what’s missing from current immigration enforcement:

Transparent targeting criteria. ICE operations in Minneapolis have been described as zone enforcement rather than targeted enforcement of specific removal orders. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s explanation—”If we are executing an operation focused on a target, there may be individuals surrounding that individual whose identities we may need to validate”—is institution-free reasoning. Under this logic, any neighborhood becomes a valid enforcement zone, any person a potential target requiring “validation.”

Compare this to criminal law enforcement, where police need probable cause for stops and warrants for searches. These aren’t arbitrary restrictions—they’re institutional constraints that create accountability and limit abuse. Immigration enforcement operates in a parallel legal universe where such constraints barely exist.

Meaningful judicial oversight. The civil immigration enforcement system has always operated with less judicial scrutiny than criminal enforcement, justified by the legal distinction between removal and punishment. But the Minneapolis operations reveal how inadequate this framework has become. Federal agents are making split-second decisions about detention and identity verification—decisions that can lead to wrongful arrest of U.S. citizens—with no prior judicial authorization and minimal ex post review.

Senate Democrats have proposed requiring judicial warrants for immigration arrests, which Republicans dismiss as unworkable. But this objection reveals the problem: we’ve built an enforcement system that can’t function under the constitutional constraints we accept for every other form of law enforcement. That should terrify us.

Officer identification and accountability. Multiple reports describe ICE agents operating with masked faces, making it impossible for citizens to identify officers who may have violated their rights. This is Soviet-style enforcement—anonymous state power accountable to no one.

Senate Democrats have proposed limits on masking by federal agents. This shouldn’t be controversial. If you’re exercising state authority to detain, arrest, or use force against citizens and non-citizens alike, you should be identifiable. The fact that ICE agents resist this basic accountability mechanism tells us everything about the incentive structure they operate within.

Separation of immigration status from general law enforcement. The Obama administration attempted to shift resources toward the border and away from interior enforcement, recognizing that interior operations are far more disruptive to established communities. The Trump administration has reversed this entirely, creating an environment where any interaction with government—taking children to school, driving to medical appointments, appearing at court hearings—risks detention and removal.

This creates impossible tradeoffs for mixed-status families and entire communities. Do you call the police when you witness a crime, knowing you might encounter ICE? Do you take your child to the emergency room, risking detention on the way? These aren’t hypothetical questions in Minneapolis right now—they’re daily calculations that undermine trust in all government institutions, not just immigration enforcement.

Why Defunding Alone Won’t Work

Kristol’s solution is to deny new funding for ICE and Border Patrol, forcing drawdown of the massive five-year appropriation Republicans provided last year. There’s a certain satisfying logic to this: if an agency is operating lawlessly, stop funding it. But as an institutional reform strategy, it’s deeply inadequate.

First, the appropriation is already in place. As Kristol acknowledges, Republicans gave ICE $75 billion through 2029 in last year’s reconciliation bill. The Trump administration is using these resources to lease facilities, contract detention services, and build enforcement capacity that will persist long after the current political moment passes. Refusing additional funding may send a message, but it won’t stop current operations.

Second, funding restrictions without institutional reform simply create new perverse incentives. An underfunded enforcement agency doesn’t become more careful and discriminating—it becomes more brutal and efficient. When resources are scarce, corners get cut, oversight diminishes, and the pressure to produce results intensifies. We’ve seen this pattern repeatedly in criminal justice contexts: budget cuts lead to higher bail amounts, more plea bargaining, fewer public defenders, worse outcomes for defendants. There’s no reason to expect different results in immigration enforcement.

Third, and most fundamentally, defunding doesn’t address the underlying institutional vacuum. Even if Democrats somehow succeeded in zeroing out ICE’s budget—a political fantasy given current congressional arithmetic—what then? Do we simply have no immigration enforcement? Do we rebuild ICE under a different name? Do we shift responsibilities to other agencies that may be even less constrained?

The immigration enforcement debate has become trapped in a false binary: either robust enforcement without constraints (the Trump position) or no enforcement at all (increasingly the progressive position). Both options are institution-free thinking. We need enforcement that operates under rule of law, with transparent criteria, meaningful oversight, and genuine accountability. That requires building institutions, not just defunding agencies.

What Actual Institutional Reform Would Look Like

If we took mechanism design seriously, immigration enforcement reform would focus on creating incentive structures that reward accuracy, legitimacy, and due process rather than simply maximizing removals. Here are some concrete components:

Warrant requirements for non-border enforcement. Civil libertarians have long advocated for extending Fourth Amendment protections to immigration enforcement. The standard objection—that requiring warrants would make enforcement too slow—reveals how broken our current system is. Criminal law enforcement functions with warrant requirements. Civil regulatory enforcement functions with warrant requirements. Immigration enforcement can too, if we design the system properly.

Requiring judicial warrants for immigration arrests away from the border would create several beneficial effects. Judges would review targeting criteria, forcing ICE to articulate specific reasons for detention. The warrant process would create a paper trail for accountability. Officers would need to present evidence before detention rather than simply detaining first and sorting later. Most importantly, it would prevent the zone enforcement model that’s terrorizing Minneapolis, where agents stop anyone who “looks suspicious” and validate identities ex post.

Mandatory body cameras and officer identification. If you exercise state authority to detain or arrest, you should be identifiable and your actions should be recorded. This is standard in urban policing—imperfect but essential for accountability. Immigration enforcement should operate under at least the same constraints.

The resistance to body cameras reveals how far immigration enforcement has drifted from democratic norms. ICE argues that camera footage could endanger officers or reveal enforcement tactics. But police departments have managed these concerns through reasonable policies about footage review and release. ICE can too, unless the real objection is to accountability itself.

Separation of immigration enforcement from routine policing. One of the most corrosive effects of aggressive interior enforcement is the breakdown of trust between immigrant communities and local police. When any traffic stop might lead to ICE detention, entire communities become invisible to law enforcement. Crime goes unreported, witnesses disappear, victims don’t seek help.

The solution is clear institutional boundaries: local police should not be enforcing immigration law, and immigration enforcement should not be piggybacking on routine policing. This requires affirmatively prohibiting information sharing between local police and ICE (beyond serious criminal convictions), restricting ICE access to state databases, and creating clear protocols that prevent mission creep. Several jurisdictions have attempted these reforms with mixed success—but that’s because federal funding and policies actively undermine them.

Genuine oversight mechanisms with teeth. Immigration enforcement currently operates with minimal oversight. Congress holds occasional hearings. Inspectors general write reports that agencies ignore. Courts review removal orders, but only after detention and often after removal.

Effective oversight requires real-time monitoring with authority to halt operations. This could take several forms: civilian review boards with subpoena power, judicial magistrates who must approve major operations before they proceed, mandatory reporting requirements with automatic budget consequences for violations, independent ombudsmen with authority to investigate complaints and impose sanctions.

The key is creating accountability structures where those exercising enforcement authority face meaningful consequences for abuse. Right now, ICE agents who detain U.S. citizens face essentially no professional consequences. Agents who use excessive force aren’t disciplined. Supervisors who approve lawless operations aren’t sanctioned. We’ve created an incentive structure where abuse is costless—so we get abuse.

Narrowed enforcement priorities with mandatory sequencing. Not all immigration violations are equal. Someone who entered unlawfully twenty years ago, built a life, raised U.S. citizen children, and committed no serious crimes presents fundamentally different equities than someone who entered last month with an extensive criminal history.

A well-designed enforcement system would build these distinctions into formal priorities with mandatory sequencing. Serious criminal convictions first. Recent unlawful entries next. Long-term residents with U.S. citizen family members last, if at all. ICE nominally has such priorities, but they’re honored more in the breach—the Minneapolis operations have targeted anyone and everyone, often catching more U.S. citizens and green card holders than removable non-citizens.

Making these priorities mandatory and enforceable—with budget consequences for deviating from the sequence—would force ICE to make difficult tradeoffs and articulate its reasoning. It would also create clear metrics for evaluation: Are you focusing resources on high-priority cases? Are you distinguishing between categories? Are you respecting the sequencing?

The Public Choice Problem

There’s a deeper issue that Kristol’s analysis glosses over: immigration enforcement operates in a political economy where concentrated benefits and diffuse costs create pathological incentives.

The benefits of aggressive enforcement are concentrated and visible: politicians can claim they’re being “tough on immigration,” industry groups get increased appropriations for detention facilities and enforcement technology, law enforcement agencies expand their authority and budgets. The costs—family separation, community disruption, erosion of civil liberties, wrongful detention of citizens—are diffuse and often hidden, borne by populations with limited political power.

This is classic public choice theory: policies that impose concentrated costs on politically weak groups and provide concentrated benefits to politically strong groups tend to persist regardless of their aggregate social welfare effects. It’s why we get ever-increasing enforcement appropriations even as evidence accumulates that aggressive interior enforcement produces minimal benefits while imposing enormous costs on mixed-status families, local governments, and community institutions.

The Minneapolis resistance is attempting to rebalance this equation by making the costs of enforcement visible and imposing direct costs on enforcement agencies—but this is an unstable equilibrium. Eventually either enforcement will be scaled back (unlikely given current political incentives) or resistance will be criminalized and suppressed (already happening, with 158 arrests for impeding federal officers according to recent reports).

Breaking this cycle requires changing the underlying political economy. That means creating institutional constraints that operate automatically rather than depending on political will, building in accountability mechanisms that can’t be easily evaded, and most importantly, giving communities subject to enforcement a genuine voice in how it operates.

What Democrats Should Actually Be Demanding

If I were advising Senate Democrats on the DHS funding fight—and to be clear, no one is asking—here’s what I’d recommend they demand as conditions for any continuing resolution:

1. Mandatory judicial warrants for all interior arrests, with narrow exceptions for hot pursuit and border zones (defined as within 100 miles of international borders or ports of entry, not the current expansive definition).

2. Complete prohibition on masked enforcement, with mandatory visible badge numbers and body cameras for all agents engaged in arrests or detention.

3. Automatic exclusion of evidence and dismissal of removal proceedings for violations of these requirements, making the procedural protections meaningful rather than advisory.

4. Independent oversight board with real-time access to operations, subpoena authority, and power to halt operations that violate procedures—analogous to civilian police review boards but with stronger teeth.

5. Mandatory enforcement sequencing with severe criminal convictions first, recent entries second, long-term residents with family ties last or never, with budget clawbacks for deviations.

6. Absolute prohibition on information sharing between ICE and local police except for final criminal convictions for serious offenses, with severe penalties for violations.

7. Affirmative requirement that all enforcement operations minimize disruption to schools, medical facilities, and houses of worship, with bright-line rules about what’s prohibited.

8. Complete transparency in detention contracts and facility operations, with mandatory public reporting of all significant expenditures and all serious incidents.

These demands would fundamentally constrain ICE’s operations—which is precisely the point. An enforcement agency that can’t operate within these constraints shouldn’t exist. If ICE can’t function with warrant requirements, judicial oversight, officer accountability, and transparent priorities, that’s an argument for abolishing ICE, not for accepting lawless enforcement.

But notice: these demands don’t eliminate enforcement. They channel it through institutional structures that create accountability and protect rights. They make enforcement better—more targeted, more legitimate, more consistent with constitutional norms. A system designed around these constraints might actually do what we claim to want immigration enforcement to do: remove genuinely dangerous individuals while respecting the rights and dignity of everyone else.

Beyond Minneapolis: The Institutional Question

The broader question is whether we can have immigration enforcement that operates under rule of law in a democratic society. The Minneapolis experience suggests we currently can’t—or won’t.

But the failure is a choice, not an inevitability. We’ve designed immigration enforcement to operate outside normal constitutional constraints, with minimal oversight, weak accountability, and incentive structures that reward abuse. Then we act surprised when agents abuse their authority, communities resist, and the entire system descends into chaos.

Kristol is right to elevate the Minneapolis resistance as morally serious. These are citizens putting their bodies on the line to protect their neighbors from lawless government action. That’s civic virtue, and it deserves respect.

But we shouldn’t romanticize resistance as a substitute for functional institutions. The fact that ordinary citizens must organize neighborhood surveillance networks and physically block federal vehicles isn’t a sign of democratic vitality—it’s a sign that our enforcement institutions have failed so completely that extralegal resistance has become the only available check on power.

The solution is neither Kristol’s proposal to defund ICE nor the Trump administration’s commitment to enforcement without constraints. The solution is to build immigration enforcement institutions that actually work: institutions with transparent criteria, genuine oversight, meaningful accountability, and respect for constitutional limits. Institutions where following the rules produces better outcomes than breaking them, for everyone involved.

This is harder than defunding. It requires sustained legislative effort, difficult tradeoffs, and political courage to defend unpopular constraints on popular enforcement. But it’s the only path toward an immigration enforcement system that both works and deserves to work—one that doesn’t require citizens to choose between complicity and resistance.

The people of Minneapolis aren’t leading. They’re screaming. The question is whether anyone in Washington is willing to build the institutions that would make their desperate resistance unnecessary.