In January of 2026, just like every January since 1986, a basketball Brigadoon will rise on Duke’s campus. This village, locally known as “Krzyzewskiville,” exists for just a few short weeks every year, and then disappears. But while it lives, it is a beehive of activity, with surprisingly specific and aggressively enforced rules. K-Ville is not just a place, but a student-organized system of governance with its own rules, enforcement, and dispute resolution mechanisms. Elinor Ostrom herself couldn’t have come up with a better example of an emergent institution to create and enforce property rights to a common pool resource.

K-Ville was created as an orderly way to ration access to “free” student basketball tickets to “The UNC Game.” This Manichean struggle of “good” (Duke) versus the “living embodiment of evil on earth” (UNC) is the hottest ticket on campus most years. (The game is always scheduled for late February or early March, and so the January tradition works backward from the game date.) The StubHub price of the non-student tickets is a good measure of the value of what is being given away: buying tickets costs at least $2,000, and can cost $5,000 each or more, depending on the teams’ records and the quality of the seats.

Of course, the student seats are directly courtside, so what economists call the “shadow price” — the cost of the ticket if it could be sold — is at least several thousand dollars. Yet Duke gives these tickets to students on a first-come, first-served basis, for free. Why?

Duke (though nominally a “non-profit”) makes every effort to maximize revenue. Students are required to buy the meal plan, and to pay for a dorm room, at least for the first three years. So why would Duke turn generous and pass up well over two million dollars in revenue — 1,200 student seats in the prime “Student Section” (Section 17), at $2,000 each, conservatively — just to give the seats away?

The answer is interesting. But to get to the answer, we’ll need to review some history.

Origins

Duke basketball tickets are free to enrolled students with current, valid IDs who line up. But the number of seats is limited, so the line can get long. In 1986, a Duke senior and fourteen friends extended the usual “line up overnight” ritual by showing up two nights in advance.

According to The Duke Chronicle:

‘It was common for people to line up hours before a game,’ said Kimberly Reed, Trinity ’86, who was one of the first tenters. ‘We were playing quarters one night at Mirecourt and joking about how early we were going to line up for the ’86 [University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill] game. Finally, someone said, ‘Why don’t we just pitch a tent?’ After a few rounds of quarters, it began to sound like a good idea.’

Reed and about 15 of her friends, many of whom were members of the Air Force ROTC, rented a tent from U-Haul and set up camp in front of Cameron in March 1986.

‘We were going to ask permission…, but then we just decided to ask forgiveness later,’ she said. The adventurous fans set up four tents in front of Cameron on Thursday for the Saturday game against UNC, and word began to spread around campus. By Friday, other tents began to pop up.

‘Someone took a cardboard box and wrote Krzyzewskiville on it,’ Reed said. And so the tent city was named.

The timing was no accident: Between 1986 and 1994, Duke made seven Final Fours in nine years. More students wanted tickets than there were tickets available, by quite a bit, at least at a zero price. Of course, Duke could have charged for tickets, or used a lottery, but queuing was already the custom, and it stuck. But after 1986 the swelling demand to see the UNC game meant that kids had to line up for days, and (before long) weeks.

January in North Carolina’s Piedmont is not polar, but daytime highs average in the 40°s F, nighttime lows can dip well below freezing, and it rains a lot. Still, Cameron Indoor Stadium — roughly 9,300 seats, with about 2,500 reserved for students overall (with most of those in the more uncool, sedate Sections 18, and 19 not the most desirable Section 17) — was small enough to create a predictable, iterated problem that had to be solved every year: far more students wanted seats in Section 17 than were available. Early attempts at informal queuing were chaotic. Students camped without rules, disputes broke out about order, and many felt that the system rewarded only those who were willing to engage in opportunism or outright disruption.

In response, students themselves worked out, through trial and error each year, a more orderly process. They still lined up, but they formalized their place in line and rules of minimum occupancy, all overseen by “Line Monitors.”  A tent by itself doesn’t hold your place in line;  “tent checks” are performed randomly by Line Monitors. You get one “miss,” but if a student misses a Tent Check twice, they are out. Alternatively, if a tent as a whole has too few occupants present then that tent is removed and its fans disqualified. Students can also be disqualified for “excessive” drinking or obvious drunkenness (passing out, vomiting), but this rule has been enforced selectively.

By the 1990s, the system included tiers of participation — black tenting, blue tenting, and white tenting — each corresponding to different levels of commitment and different rewards in line order.  It’s worth looking at the details.

Inside the Queuing System Itself

At its heart, K-Ville is a queuing system built around time and commitment rather than money. Groups of students (twelve per tent, at the start) register to camp out in K-Ville, with place in line determined by performance on a written test, as described below. Once tent order is determined, each tent unit must maintain a certain number of occupants, twenty-four hours a day. Line monitors, drawn from the student body in a “hyper-competitive” process designed by students themselves, enforce compliance by conducting random checks, sometimes in the middle of the night. DSG has legislated an explicit constitution for K-Ville, a set of rules that make the process (mostly) clear.  

• Black tenting, the most rigorous, begins in early January and requires nearly continuous presence until the day before the game.
• Blue tenting begins later, with somewhat less stringent occupancy requirements.
• White tenting, beginning still later, requires the least commitment but comes with correspondingly lower priority in line.

On game day, students are admitted in the order and then color of their tents, until the available seats are exhausted. While all the seats in the student section are “good seats,” only the Black Tent denizens will be able to get in the front rows at the center of the court, which are the most desirable seats. This creates a clear correspondence between cost and reward: the more time students are willing to spend in line, the better their seats, fostering a meritocracy of endurance. Again, tickets could be auctioned, but the goal is not to select based on wealth, but on a fierce zealotry for the team. By using time as the currency rather than money, Duke students reinforce the principle that participation in fandom requires actual fanaticism.

The Problem of Fairness

Fairness is central to the design of K-Ville, and the rules are published. Line Monitors ensure compliance, though of course there are some complaints of excessive zeal in enforcement (few Duke students use “fascist” as a political description, but it is a common description of Line Monitors). The tier system allows for self-selection: those who are most dedicated (or most willing to endure discomfort) can camp longest, while others can choose a lighter commitment and still secure some chance of entry. The result is a system perceived as legitimate because it balances effort, transparency, and equal opportunity.

What makes K-Ville interesting is its emergent, student-governed nature: a community facing a scarcity problem managed to develop rules, enforcement mechanisms, and sanctions, all without any plan or formal intention. But there is one formal, designed or “laid on” rule: Place in line among Black Tent residents is determined by an examination. This innovation is quite interesting for two reasons.

First, queuing is economically inefficient. Students “pay” for seats with time and discomfort, which could otherwise be devoted to study, work, or leisure. An auction would be efficient, but such a system privileges the ability to pay over devotion. K-Ville’s governors wanted to limit the inefficiency of an open-ended “rent-seeking” contest, while preserving queuing’s signal about depth of fan loyalty.

Second, many organizations have independently stumbled across the value of initiation and elite membership rights. Creating difficulty of acquisition, even if that difficulty is artificial, can enhance the value of the thing acquired, especially if possession of that thing is highly public.

In light of these two influences, DSG has formally limited the amount of time that someone can wait in line, reducing the inefficiency implied by the first principle. And it has created an initiation right that sorts applicants by informed fanaticism, and by depth of knowledge. They use a lengthy and challenging examination: the Duke Basketball “Black Tenting Entry Test”.

The test differs each year, but it generically tests for whether the student/applicants can write down (from memory!) the names, position, and hometown of the Duke players. They also have to name the opponents played in all the Duke games so far that season, the scores of those games, and Duke’s overall won-lost record. Then the test moves to aggressively specific and truly “trivial” questions. Just one example, from the actual 2023 test:

Which team did Duke play against in a “secret scrimmage” before the season began? In what city did they play? What was the final score? (2 pts each; 6 pts total).

The answers (I had to look it up) were University of Houston, in Houston, and Duke lost 61-50.

These questions are not circulated in advance; they are not multiple choice, and there is no partial credit. The cutoff in recent years has been a score of 75 out of 100 possible points, meaning that at least two thirds of the applicants fail, and are not allowed a Black Tent.  There are only 70 Black Tents allowed, and each tent has 12 occupants, though some of those may be disqualified even if the tent itself makes it through to the end. K-Ville starts with 100 tents total, and 12 students in each tent. 

That’s 1,200 people who start the “tenting” experience each year, though by the end 300 or more of those folks may have been disqualified or moved to “Flex” or “Waitlist” tents with no guarantee of being seated.

K-Ville as an Emergent Order

F.A. Hayek would have called K-Ville an “emergent order.” Rules are not imposed from the outside; they evolve as individuals interact over time. Participants in a process learn from past successes and failures, and generate working rules that are known, followed, and enforced by participants themselves.

As Elinor Ostrom pointed out, “Working rules are the set of rules to which participants would make reference if asked to explain and justify their actions.” That’s interesting, because it means that the rules evolve from practice and trial and error, but then are written down after newcomers ask for an explanation.

The problem facing Duke students had three aspects: First, more people wanted tickets (after 1986, at least) than could get seats. Queuing for multiple days was chaotic, and there were incidents that led to frustration.

Second, the tribal experience of showing commitment by face-painting, elaborate coordinated chants and signs, and other rituals was collectively more enjoyable if all the participants are “real fans.” This “public good” aspect was intuitively understood by the students, even those who could never have defined a public good in technical economic terms. Using price or auctions would not have resulted in the same fan sorting.

Third, the first two considerations tended to lead to very inefficient “rent-seeking” contests, where it would be necessary to wait in line for more and more time, making the chances of unpleasantness, line-jumping, and perhaps even violence even greater. So some lottery or contest was necessary to limit the dead-weight losses of queueing (since auctions were off the table).

The solution the students have devised involves explicit and publicly recognized, an enforceable property right to “place in line,” based on tent number. But the extent of rent-seeking to obtain initial tent number is limited by having an “entry test,” an objective measure that is at least correlated with knowledge of the history and folkways of Duke basketball. 

There are other benefits, as well. “Tenting” is a rite of passage for Duke students; many do it at least once, just for the experience. There is folk wisdom (though I could find no definitive source) that students who “tent” at least once are more likely later to attend reunions for alumni, and to make large donations to the Duke Endowment or other campus causes. As a whole, then, it is clear why Duke “gives students tickets for free” rather than by auction, even though an auction would generate immediate revenue.  The shared identity of “Cameron Crazies”, both while enrolled and later, is an important part of a Duke student’s identity, and their commitment as alumni.

Kville has risen again. Black tenting started January 18; blue tenting starts January 28. The tents are full, and anticipation is growing. 

The annual gathering of global elites in Davos, Switzerland, is well underway. Past meetings have not been without their share of controversy and dissension. But this year’s forum may devolve into chaos. Last week, at a dinner of many current and former heads of state as well as top CEOs, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick delivered scathing criticism of European economic and social policy. His remarks were so impolitic that high-profile figures, such as European Central Bank president Christine Laguarde, walked out in protest and the host of the dinner, none other than Larry Fink of Blackrock, ended the dinner before dessert.

Then Trump spoke on Wednesday. And while he assured the Europeans that he would not take Greenland by force, he continued to insist that the US would acquire it. The rest of his speech focused on tariffs and his various “economic achievements.” On tariffs, at least, Trump has been remarkably consistent. He loves them. They are the perfect policy: negotiating tool, revenue generator, a bone to toss to workers and domestic firms, a lever of power, and a leveler of economic fairness.

Lutnick and Trump are not your ordinary Davos attendees. They refuse to play nice or kowtow to globalist sentiment. They are not on the net-zero green energy bandwagon. They believe in national power. They emphasize building and growing rather than regulating. In short, they are anathema to the Davos orthodoxy. So why are they there?

Perhaps they hope to extend US influence. Afterall, why destroy Davos when you can take it over? When you think about it, Lutnick and Trump are part of the global elite – wealthy businessmen looking to cut a deal and line their pockets. This is their crowd and their kind of machine. If they can turn the event to their own purposes, they will certainly try.

A more likely story, though, is that they came to Davos intending to cut the Europeans down to size. They certainly don’t respect the Europeans. And not entirely without reason. What should they respect? Their woke ideology? Their oppressive regulatory regime? Their underwhelming economic growth? Their military prowess? In the President and the Secretary’s eyes, the Europeans warrant little praise and much blame. 

Then again, the European elite have brought this upon themselves. They began the Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) crusade several decades ago. They have aspired, often successfully, to be the puppet masters of the global economy. They have foisted costly, sometimes disastrous, net-zero and clean energy goals. They have also pushed identity politics on the rest of the world through Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives and requirements. 

People in western democracies have become restless under the administrative boot of these Davos elites. They are unhappy about uncontrolled immigration and the swift demographic changes in their cities. They don’t want to be censored by politically correct regulators. They don’t want to pay higher prices for food, energy, and transportation. They live in a maze of red tape; and every year is worse than the one before. 

As a result, right-wing political parties across Europe have been surging. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni has been the right-of-center Prime Minister for over three years. In France, the right-of-center National Rally party won the largest share of the popular vote in 2024. In Germany, the far-right AfD party won just over 20 percent of the national vote.

And across the Atlantic, this reactionary populism re-elected Trump and his team. The Davos chickens have returned home to roost. Despite their shortcomings, Trump and Lutnick are delivering the discontents’ message loud and clear to the global elite: “We don’t like you. We don’t want you. We don’t need you. As a matter of fact, just leave us alone. And we are not asking.”

Based on the reaction of the past few days, we can assume that the message has been received. But now what? Will the Davos elite simply sail (or fly on their private jets) into the sunset? It’s safe to say that they won’t give up that easily. There is too much at stake – billions and billions of dollars.

Walking away means admitting that their multi-decade project to reshape the global economy has failed. This would mean that hundreds of billions of dollars were wasted on solar panels and wind turbines. It would mean that hundreds of millions of people have been made to pay higher electricity and gas prices, and to accept lower rates of economic growth in pursuit of an elitist pipe dream. As the commander in A Few Good Men might say to them, “You can’t handle the truth!”

But besides the pain of acknowledging failure, there is a far more prosaic reason why the Davos elites will not abandon their global puppet strings. They benefit too much from the current global elite agenda. They have built multi-billion-dollar companies around carbon credits and the net-zero agenda. They lead an extensive NGO network whose existence depends on climate alarmism and social engineering. And they have built careers and political coalitions around the ideas and priorities Trump and Lutnick recently blasted.

It’s especially fitting that Larry Fink – the interim co-chair of WEF and one of the chief architects of the global elitist agenda – should see things spiral into chaos at the private dinner he hosted. As perhaps the most prominent “Davos Man,” this message was for him. Although BlackRock has improved in recent years (under extreme pressure from anti-ESG organizations), it was one of the key architects of spreading ESG and DEI throughout corporate America by voting the proxies of the shares it holds for investors.

Davos may not quite be finished, but it’s hard to imagine it ever regaining the reputation or status it once had. Nor can it go back to business as usual after such a public and vocal rebuke. The net-zero ESG agenda has been weighed and found wanting. Decentralized competitive capitalism remains the best avenue to improving human flourishing. 

But were the global elites to accept that, Davos would truly be finished.

The senators elected in fall 2026 won’t be able to avoid dealing with Social Security. The program is projected to hit a financial cliff before the end of 2032, forcing Congress to consider benefit reductions, higher taxes, or more borrowing.

The looming deadline exposes a deeper problem than arithmetic: Congress has spent decades selling Social Security as something it isn’t. Public misunderstanding of the program’s true nature is one of the biggest obstacles to reform. 

Many Americans think Social Security works like a retirement account. In Cato polling conducted in August, about one in four said they believed they had a personal account within the system. That misconception didn’t arise by accident. Politicians routinely describe payroll taxes as “contributions,” speak of a “trust fund” as if it held real savings, and defend benefits as “earned.”

Social Security is not a savings program. It is a pay-as-you-go transfer system. Today’s workers’ payroll taxes fund today’s retirees’ benefits. There is no individual account accumulating a balance over time. Payroll taxes are taxes, neither deposits nor savings.

Its early history makes that clear. The first Social Security check went to Ida Fuller of Vermont, who would go on to collect nearly half a million in today’s dollars. That is about 1,000 times what she had paid in taxes. Fuller did nothing wrong; the system was built that way. From the start, Social Security transferred resources across generations and among workers with different earnings.

This distinction matters because it changes how Americans evaluate the program—and the choices ahead. When Social Security is framed as a retirement account, any benefit reduction sounds like unfair confiscation. 

And when payroll taxes are described as “contributions,” it invites a contradiction: Americans are told that Social Security delivers earned benefits, yet are also encouraged to view the payroll tax cap as an inequity and calls to raise it as a matter of high earners paying “their fair share.” 

When it’s understood as what it is—government-provided income insurance for old age—the trade-offs become clearer. Lifting the payroll tax cap becomes a decision to raise taxes on higher earners to fund redistribution. Higher payroll taxes across the board mean lower take-home pay for workers and weaker economic growth for all of us. Slower benefit growth results in less government spending that subsidizes lifestyle choices among retirees who are, on average, wealthier than the workers financing the system.

Americans, meanwhile, are clearer-eyed about the trade-offs than Congress gives them credit for—especially when presented with real numbers. In an October Cato survey, most respondents initially supported raising payroll taxes “as much as necessary” to shore up Social Security. But support collapsed once the question was framed in dollars. Most Americans are unwilling to pay what would be required to fix Social Security through higher payroll taxes alone.

The same survey shows widespread frustration with how Congress has handled Social Security. Sixty-two percent of respondents believe lawmakers have mostly broken their promises to workers, and 71 percent support creating a commission of independent, nonpartisan experts with authority to address the program’s funding shortfalls.

Americans don’t trust Congress with Social Security, and for good reason: they’ve been sold a comforting fiction for decades.

Honesty would also clarify what reform should look like. If Social Security is fundamentally a redistribution program meant to prevent poverty in old age, then Congress should stop pretending it is a contribution-based retirement account and design it accordingly. The most straightforward approach is a flat benefit: a uniform, anti-poverty payment for eligible seniors, phased in gradually for younger cohorts. It would protect those who need help while reducing subsidies to those who don’t.

This idea is gaining traction. Nearly half (48 percent) of Americans in the Cato survey support replacing Social Security with a flat-benefit system that raises benefits for lower earners and reduces them for higher earners. Support is strongest among younger workers who would be the ones to bear the brunt of the benefit change and who also stand to gain the most from limiting the program’s rising payroll tax burden.

Analysts across the policy spectrum have begun moving in the same direction. 

Proposals by scholars of the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the Progressive Policy Institute differ in their approach but converge on a common insight: once you abandon the fiction that Social Security is a personal savings plan, a flatter, more transparent benefit structure makes sense.

A flat benefit would not eliminate difficult choices. Lawmakers would still have to decide how generous the benefit should be, how to finance it, and how to manage the transition fairly. But it would make it possible to protect vulnerable seniors from indiscriminate cuts by reducing spending on more affluent retirees instead. It would also make Social Security’s purpose and costs explicit: payroll taxes are taxes, and benefits are welfare spending. Congress will not be able to dodge Social Security’s fiscal reality much longer. It also shouldn’t dodge the truth.

If Congress wants to restore trust and stabilize the program, the first step is simple: stop pretending Social Security is something it never was.

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is expected to leave its interest rate target unchanged at 3.5 to 3.75 percent at this week’s January meeting. After a series of rate cuts in the second half of last year, and a continued push for further easing, a pause may feel anticlimactic. But the leading monetary policy rules suggest another cut would be a mistake.

The latest Monetary Rules Report from AIER’s Sound Money Project shows that the Fed’s current policy rate now sits below the range suggested by several well-known rules. Most of the rules point to an appropriate policy rate somewhere between 3.85 and 4.25 percent, depending on how one weighs inflation, employment, and overall spending in the economy. In that context, additional rate cuts would go beyond what current economic conditions justify.

Why Stop Here?

Chair Jerome Powell has described the Fed’s recent rate cuts as “risk-management” moves — steps taken to guard against the possibility that a cooling labor market could tip into something worse. That framing made sense last year, when unemployment was drifting upward and the outlook for growth was more uncertain.

Since then, the economic picture has changed. Despite a continued slowdown in job creation, the unemployment rate in December was only slightly higher than in the first half of the year. More importantly, real GDP grew much faster than expected in the third quarter of 2025, as total spending in the economy rebounded sharply. At the same time, inflation remains above the Fed’s two-percent target, and progress toward that goal has been uneven.

The risks that motivated rate cuts last year have not disappeared, but they no longer justify continued risk-management through easier monetary policy.

What the Rules Say

Monetary policy rules provide a consistent way to translate economic conditions into interest-rate guidance, helping policymakers avoid overreacting to the latest headline or political mood.

Rules based on inflation and unemployment — often referred to as Taylor Rules — suggest that the policy rate should be closer to 4 percent. This prescription is based on a few key factors. First, inflation remains stuck persistently above the Fed’s two-percent target. When inflation is above target, the Taylor Rule calls for higher interest rates to slow demand and reduce upward pressure on prices. Second, the unemployment rate remains close to levels typically associated with maximum employment. When the labor market is near maximum employment, the Taylor Rule suggests there is little need for lower interest rates to boost economic activity. Third, strong growth and productivity have led to an increase in estimates of the “natural” rate of interest — the interest rate that is expected to prevail when the economy is at full strength and inflation is stable. When the natural rate rises, the Taylor rule calls for a similar increase in the prescribed policy rate.

Rules that focus on overall spending in the economy — often described as nominal GDP (or NGDP) targeting rules — call for an even higher policy rate. Total spending by households, businesses, and governments grew briskly in the third quarter of last year — over 8 percent on an annualized basis — signaling that monetary conditions are not especially tight. When spending accelerates that quickly, cutting rates further risks adding fuel to demand at a time when inflation has not yet been fully contained.

What This Means for Monetary Policy

Coming out of the pandemic, monetary policy swung sharply — first, staying too loose as inflation surged, then tightening aggressively to regain control. Episodes like these highlight the danger of letting policy stray from the data. Rule-based benchmarks help guard against that risk by keeping policy anchored to observable economic conditions.

Right now, those benchmarks are sending a clear signal: there is no urgency to do more. If anything, they indicate that the next interest rate move — if there is one at all — should be up rather than down. While a reversal at this meeting is unlikely, the Fed’s internal debate should be about whether to regret the last 25-basis-point cut, not whether to cut even further.

That does not mean the Fed should ignore downside risks. Weak job growth, consumer spending increasingly driven by high-income households, and open questions about how long the AI investment boom will last are all legitimate concerns that should be monitored. At the same time, new jobless claims are near historical lows, growth forecasts are strongly positive, and the stock market is at record highs. Ultimately, monetary policy should not be driven by headlines in either direction. The Fed’s mandate is to promote maximum employment and stable prices. If unemployment rises, inflation falls convincingly toward target, or growth slows, the case for continued easing would strengthen. Absent those developments, further rate cuts are difficult to justify.

Looking Ahead

In the years immediately following the pandemic, monetary policy drifted away from the guidance offered by the leading monetary rules. Over the past year, the Federal Reserve has largely worked its way back toward those benchmarks, bringing the stance of policy closer to what prevailing economic conditions would suggest. That course correction has helped restore some measure of predictability and discipline to monetary policy.

The challenge at the start of 2026 is to maintain that discipline. Markets increasingly expect further rate cuts and there is political pressure to deliver on those expectations. But the greater risk now is repeating a familiar mistake: allowing policy to once again drift away from the signals embedded in the data. Absent clear signs of economic weakness, further easing risks undoing the discipline that has brought policy back on track.

Late last year, YouTube announced plans to reinstate accounts that had been banned at the behest of the Biden Administration for posting alleged COVID-19 misinformation. The announcement likely came as a relief to groups like the Children’s Health Defense Fund, a group associated with Robert Kennedy Jr.; and to Senator Ron Johnson; both of whom were punished by the social media giant for posting videos that ran contrary to the Biden administration’s official policy on the COVID-19 vaccine and on COVID-19 treatments.

This is a good move. But we should remember, it wasn’t just YouTube that decided to punish speech disapproved by the prior administration. 

A report by the United States House of Representatives’ Committee on the Judiciary and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government contains damning evidence that the Biden Administration leaned on social media companies to censor anti-vaccine content during the COVID-19 pandemic. The report details how Facebook, Amazon, and YouTube all shadowbanned or removed content that was critical of the administration’s official stance on the vaccines, the origin of the virus, and more.

The administration’s actions were reckless, and endangered more than just our societal freedom of speech.

For one thing, while it might be tempting to think that the Biden Administration only censored crackpots and conspiracy theorists, the truth is far worse. The report details how the Biden administration leaned on Facebook to censor the “lab leak” theory of COVID-19’s origins, a theory that’s now seen as highly plausible. It similarly asked Facebook to censor “negative information on or opinions about the vaccine,” and internal emails from Facebook report that ““The Surgeon General wants us to remove true information about side effects.”

Prominent scientists who opposed the administration’s position on lockdowns, including Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (current head of the National Institutes of Health) were blacklisted by social media platforms. At the administration’s behest, videos featuring Bhattacharya were removed from YouTube.

All of this did immense damage to our truth-seeking apparatus, during a time when finding the truth could not have been more important. When Facebook dragged its feet on censoring certain content, President Biden publicly accused them of “killing people.” But the same accusation could be made against the Biden Administration itself: by censoring scientific debate during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, the administration virtually guaranteed that its response would be worse than if prominent critics were allowed to voice their concerns.

Some proponents of censorship argue that the more important an issue is, the more justification there is for censorship. This makes a superficial kind of sense: after all, nobody wants hucksters selling snake oil to take advantage of sick people by claiming that they’re curing cancer. But more often, the inverse is true: the higher the stakes of a given issue, the more essential it is that experts on all sides be allowed to voice their concerns freely. By preventing this robust scientific debate, the Biden administration ensured that the policies it implemented (including lockdowns and vaccine mandates) were worse than if prominent critics had been given a seat at the table.

The Biden Administration’s actions also took a sledgehammer to institutional trust in America, which has fallen to concerning levels. The decline of institutional trust worries critics across the political spectrum, from progressives concerned that our society is becoming anti-science to conservatives like Yuval Levin, for a simple reason: our society works better when we trust our institutions and when, in turn, they show themselves to be trustworthy.

By politicizing the scientific debate about the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden Administration did profound damage to institutional trust. A study by Pew finds that in April 2020, 87 percent of Americans “had confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests.” By late 2023, that number had fallen to 73 percent. By summer of 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had only a 33 percent approval rating among Republicans. Many on the left chalk this trend up to Republicans being anti-science, but the House Judiciary report tells a different story: many on the right lost trust in an institution that they justifiably saw as having been shamelessly politicized.

Trust in news has plummeted as well. In 2019, 18 percent of Americans had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of faith in television news. By 2024, that number had fallen to 12 percent. In 2019, 23 percent of respondents had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of faith in newspapers; by 2024, that number was just 18 percent. There are multiple reasons for this decline in trust, but it’s hard to see evidence of the administration jawboning companies into censoring so-called “misinformation” on COVID-19 and not conclude that many Americans are simply tired of feeling lied to by the news.

The other problem created by the administration has to do with what economist Robert Higgs calls the “ratchet effect.” Here’s how Michael Matulef describes the phenomenon:

The ratchet effect theory, as popularized by Robert Higgs in his book Crisis and Leviathan, refers to the tendency of governments to respond to crises by implementing new policies, regulations, and laws that significantly enhance their powers. These measures are typically presented as temporary solutions to address specific problems. However, in history, these measures often outlast their intended purpose and become a permanent part of the legal landscape.

One danger of the Biden Administration’s actions is that they can become precedents for future administrations to further erode free speech protections in future crises. The Biden administration inured people to having their freedom of speech censored in the name of public health, which makes it that much more likely that we’ll be equally willing to shrug off future abuses. When it comes to free speech, we the people can feel like the proverbial frog sitting in a pot of increasingly hot water, and it should concern all of us whenever an administration decides to increase the temperature by a few degrees.

When we’re discussing freedom of speech, First Amendment defenders can be strident about the principles involved; as more than one First Amendment absolutist has argued, even if there were no practical benefit to free speech beyond letting people speak freely, it would still be worth defending. 

That’s true, but we shouldn’t let ourselves forget that the First Amendment is also a profoundly practical tool for building a good society. When governments censor their people, they do profound damage to the truth-seeking apparatus and risk people’s lives and livelihoods with poorly-thought-out policies. They damage the institutional trust that keeps society functioning. No matter what we think of the arguments made by lockdown resistors and COVID-19 vaccine skeptics, we should be appalled that our government tried to censor them.

David Beito argues that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a self-serving politician who cared very little for the civil liberties of Americans. In FDR: A New Political Life, Beito challenges historians who explain away Roosevelt’s horrid record on civil rights as politically strategic (in the case of black Americans) or as an exception (in the case of Japanese internment).

Instead, Beito contends that FDR’s glib view of civil liberties was core to his worldview. Additionally, Beito emphasizes that Roosevelt’s economic policies were ineffective and at times counterproductive, and that his reliance on top-down solutions to the Great Depression violated the economic liberties of Americans. In short, FDR was the worst president on individual liberty since Woodrow Wilson, and he might have been even worse.

Beito begins by recounting Roosevelt’s actions as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Wilson. FDR “gave unquestioning support” to Wilson’s attack on free speech and expression during the conflict and demonstrated no “strong ideological commitments to the Bill of Rights.” During the notorious white violence against black Americans during the “Red Summer” of 1919, Roosevelt did nothing as white sailors attacked black streetcar passengers. The violence spread to 26 cities and when the NAACP demanded that the sailors and marines be arrested, FDR and the rest of the Wilson administration initially did nothing. Writing to a Harvard classmate, FDR joked, “With your experience in handling Africans in Arkansas, I think you had better come here and take charge of the police force.” 

In addition to his lack of a response to the racial violence of 1919, Roosevelt also played an active role in the Newport Sex Scandal. There were reports that there were “perverts” at the Newport Naval base and Ervin Arnold, a chief petty officer, began an investigation using entrapment as a tool to root out homosexual activity. Lacking funds, Arnold’s violation of the sailors’ dignity and civil liberties might have ended, but Roosevelt “almost single-handedly saved the investigation” by pushing his superiors to create Section A (nicknamed the Newport Sex Squad) to continue looking into the matter.

Roosevelt believed that “homosexuality was immoral and he would expend every effort to ferret out offenders.” Section A used “heavy-handed tactics” that “soon backfired” and led to “public backlash.” FDR ultimately had to testify and defend the methods of the investigation. On the stand, he “denied any knowledge that his investigators had engaged in same-sex acts to obtain evidence.” To which the judge skeptically inquired, “How did you think evidence of unnatural crimes could be obtained?” Humiliated, Roosevelt responded simply, “I didn’t think.” 

Beito uses FDR’s time in the Wilson administration to demonstrate that his indifference to the plight of black Americans and his support for mass internment of Japanese Americans were not aberrations but rather the fulfillment of Roosevelt’s worldview. He did not care about American civil liberties. The Senate Committee of Naval Affairs issued a stunning rebuke of FDR following its investigation of the Newport scandal. It asserted that Roosevelt’s office had violated “the moral code of the American citizen, and the rights of every American boy who enlisted in the Navy to fight for his country.” Further, it found FDR “morally responsible” for entrapment and the other “immoral acts” and came to the conclusion that he “must have known” the methods that were being used by the investigation. 

Beito also demonstrates how Roosevelt came of age and was influenced by an intellectual climate that was sympathetic to central planning and social control. His later penchant for top-down economic solutions was a product of “the spread of progressive ideas all around him.” Drawing on the work of historian Daniel T. Rodgers, Beito explains that much of this progressivism was coming from Germany where Bismarck’s emphasis on “paternalism and military-style efficiency” had captured the imaginations of American students who studied abroad. They brought back with them “German-inspired policies” such as “compulsory insurance, public housing, and zoning.” For his part, Roosevelt praised Germany because it had moved “beyond the liberty of the individual to do as he pleased with his own property and found it was necessary to check this liberty for the benefit of the freedom of the whole people.” Far from being the pragmatist that most historians cast Roosevelt as, Beito argues that he bathed in progressive waters and concluded early in his political career that American society needed to be “centered on cooperation rather than excessive competition.” 

Beito shows that FDR harbored racist views of both Jews and Japanese Americans and infers that these contributed to the president’s poor treatment of both groups. The story of Japanese internment is well documented, and Roosevelt is beginning to get the blame that he deserves for that gross violation of justice. Beito’s discussion of FDR’s treatment of potential Jewish refugees, however, is newer and demonstrates a further dimension of his bigotry. As Nazi atrocities against German Jews began to surface in the mid-1930s, Roosevelt did nothing to help them migrate to the United States. Following Kristallnacht, his State Department rejected the United Kingdom’s willingness “to donate the unused capacity of its quota so the US could admit sixty thousand more German Jews.”

Further, FDR rejected calls from Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins “to admit the maximum combined quota for the next three years (82,000 in all).” Most tragically, when the German liner, the SS St. Louis, arrived off the coast of Florida carrying over 900 Jewish refugees, the administration not only did not admit them, the Coast Guard ensured that none of the refugees would be able to swim to freedom. Even after evidence of mass genocide in Europe reached Roosevelt, “the administration’s stance toward refugees showed no sign of shifting.” Beito concludes that “while FDR and his advisors certainly viewed the Nazis as international gangsters, the plight of the Jews was never a priority.” 

For those focused on FDR’s economic policy, Beito agrees that the New Deal was ineffective and even counterproductive for bringing about economic recovery. He condemns the National Recovery Administration, the Federal Housing Administration, the Wagner Act, and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration for harming black Americans. Beito argues that Roosevelt created massive amounts of uncertainty that prevented economic recovery and did so by embracing a corporatism that emulated fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Even in areas where FDR is sometimes praised, such as his emphasis in encouraging more international trade, Beito demonstrates how progress sometimes came in spite of the president rather than because of him. In fact, Beito details how Roosevelt undermined the efforts of Cordell Hull to expand trade and reduce tariffs. 

Finally, Beito challenges the narrative that FDR was a great wartime leader. In contrast, he depicts Roosevelt as prolonging the war with his insistence on “unconditional surrender.” Beito argues that the rigidity of these terms led the Nazis and the Japanese to fight on when they might have laid down their arms. He concludes that “after the US entered the war, the president’s rigid stand for unconditional surrender worsened the destructive nature of the conflict.”

In making his case against FDR, Beito marshals evidence from his numerous publications, including his previous book The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights. The result is a magnificently researched narrative that also serves as an introduction to numerous topics that Beito has long studied, including mutual aid societies, self-help organizations, the tax revolt of the 1920s, and more.

In a sense, FDR: A New Political Life feels like the crescendo of all the work that came before it. The book is a damning portrayal of America’s thirty-second president.

Beito ultimately concludes that “FDR was a failed president primarily because he repeatedly put his considerable abilities at the service of far less laudable goals, including a ruthless preoccupation with personal and political advancement, self-defeating economic policies, and the erection of a vast and unaccountable centralized federal bureaucracy.” This short biography is worth the read, even for those who are well acquainted with Roosevelt’s shortcomings. Beito has produced the most accessible and comprehensive critical account of FDR to date. 

Many of the worst policies have bipartisan support.  

On January 9, President Trump announced on Truth Social that he was “calling for a one year cap on credit card interest rates of 10 percent” starting January 20. 

When asked what the consequences would be if credit card companies didn’t comply, the president replied: “Then they are in violation of the law. Very severe things.” There is, in fact, no such law, but there are moves to change that. 

Q: On the credit card rate cap, what if the credit card companies don’t respond?

Trump: Then they are in violation of the law. Very severe things.

(There is no such law. A president vomiting ideas on social media doesn’t make them law.)
pic.twitter.com/vMCWjP5hEE

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) January 12, 2026

A bill was introduced in the Senate last April by Sen. Bernie Sanders which “temporarily caps credit card interest rates at 10 percent.” On January 13, Rep. Maxine Waters threw her support behind President Trump’s proposal: “Let’s do it,” she said during a House Financial Services Committee hearing, “Let’s cap interest rates.”  

Let’s not.  

Prices are Not the Problem 

All price controls are based on the idea that the price is the problem to be solved. It is not. It is merely the symptom of some underlying issue in supply and demand for whatever good, service, or asset is under discussion. This is the same for minimum wages – which are price floors – or caps on credit card fees, which are price ceilings, just like rent controls.  

An interest rate is a price like any other. Specifically, it is the rental price of capital, and it is set by the supply of and demand for capital: where demand is high relative to supply, the price will be high, and where it is low, the price will be low, ceteris paribus.  

If a market interest rate is high, reflecting high demand for capital relative to the supply of it, setting a legal maximum rate below it will neither expand the supply of nor reduce the demand for credit. Quite the opposite. If demand was high relative to supply at a rate of, say, 10 percent, it is only likely to increase if a legal maximum of 5 percent is introduced. On the other side, those supplying credit at 10 percent are likely to supply less of it at 5 percent.

Price controls, whether they are caps on credit card interest rates, rent controls, or minimum wages, only exacerbate the problems they are intended to solve because they treat the symptoms rather than the causes. 

The Consequences of Credit Card Price Controls  

If we know what a cap on credit card interest rates wouldn’t do, do we know what it would do? 

A cap on credit card interest rates would, like any price ceiling, increase demand and reduce supply. It would prevent people who have to pay above the legal maximum rate to access credit from doing so.

Interest rates differ from most other prices — of shoes or haircuts — in that different people pay different amounts for the same thing: a $10,000 loan. One borrower might pay 8 percent interest, while another pays 14 percent or 20 percent, even though all receive the same $10,000 upfront.

These differences reflect, among other things, the riskiness of the loan. Someone with a good credit history or a decent amount of collateral will pay less to borrow a given amount over a given period than someone without these. The consequences of an interest rate cap will, then, be different for different people.

Someone whose credit history or collateral means that it makes sense to lend to them at a rate of, say, four percent, will still be able to borrow if the legal cap is set above that, at, say, 10 percent. But someone without this credit history or collateral and who it only makes sense to lend to at a rate of, say, 15 percent, will be excluded from the market for credit. These folks will not get access to cheaper credit by legislative fiat; they just won’t get access to credit at all. 

If credit will dry up for riskier borrowers, it doesn’t follow that their demand for it will: they may still need it to meet unexpected costs, for example. And, frozen out of legitimate credit markets, they may turn to illegitimate ones. As economist Paul Samuelson wrote in 1989, interest rate caps “result in drying up legitimate funds to the poor who need it most and will send them into the hands of the illegal loan sharks.” It is precisely the lower-income borrowers these caps are intended to help who will be hit hardest by them.   

The only alternative is that the cost of providing credit to these borrowers is recouped elsewhere through higher fees. As Iain Murray notes, this will be “either to merchants who will pass on their higher fees to consumers…or to the consumers in the cost of card fees. If consumers have to pay more in fees, that will almost certainly price some people out of the market.” 

Once again, it is precisely the lower-income borrowers this measure is intended to help who will be hit hardest by it.   

Several studies of similar state policies support this. “One study looked at the effect of the 36 percent interest rate cap in Illinois and found, as economic theory predicts, that both the availability of small-dollar loans and the status of consumers’ financial well-being had decreased in the two years after the enactment of the restriction,” Nicholas Anthony writes. “Most notably, the number of loans that were issued to the financially vulnerable fell by 44 percent in the six months after the rate cap was enacted.” 

Another study in South Dakota found that the enactment of a 36 percent interest rate cap drove payday lenders out of business. A study by the Mercatus Center found that “Arkansas’s binding 17 percent interest rate cap imposes a substantial cost on the state’s residents, who drive to neighboring states to take out small-dollar installment loans.” Another study found, similarly, that “many small loans made to residents of border counties in North Carolina actually originate in South Carolina” as residents of the former travel to the latter to circumvent their home state’s interest rate cap. Indeed, in Georgia and North Carolina, where payday loans have been banned since 2004 and 2005 respectively, researchers found that “Compared with households in states where payday lending is permitted, households in Georgia have bounced more checks, complained more to the Federal Trade Commission about lenders and debt collectors, and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection at a higher rate. North Carolina households have fared about the same.”    

The Real Problems  

This is not to deny that there are problems.  

As Thomas Savidge noted in December 2024, “A recent survey of Americans shows that the average household’s credit card balance is $9,706, just $1,416 below the record high in 2008. In addition, 40 percent of households now rely on credit cards to pay bills.” With a 40-year high spike in inflation only slightly behind us, this isn’t surprising.  

But the problems, in that case, are supply side ones of energy and housing, for example, which force prices up with excessive taxes, fees, and regulations, or of lax monetary policy. Once again, credit card interest rate caps are treating the symptom, not the problem.   On the campaign trail, candidate Trump blasted Kamala Harris’ “Soviet-style” plans for price controls. He was right then, and is, like Bernie Sanders and Maxine Waters, wrong now.