Liberal societies have celebrated their openness. Public records, hearings, and archives are available to anyone who wishes to look, but few can access them. Information may be legally public, but practically unavailable due to the high costs of accessing and analyzing that information. The high cost deterred transparency as interlocutors could, in principle, read everything, but not efficiently. Records were open, but few could extract the signal from the noise.

Democratization of Knowledge

Large language models (LLMs) offset that old imbalance by dramatically lowering the cost of search, interpretation, and cross-referencing. In short, LLMs turn openness into accessibility. Following Ronald Coase’s insight that information and coordination are costly, firms exist when it is cheaper to organize internally than to transact through the market. The same principle applies to information environments: LLMs reduce the cost of searching, translating, acquiring, and otherwise transforming text. Keyword search and reading scale linearly with volume, but LLMs shift the slope by vastly reducing the marginal cost of reviewing another million words. The practical effect is that what was previously hidden by abundance becomes accessible.

The most important shift is not technological, but conceptual: LLMs will turn accessibility into usability across domains like governance, business, and science. To illustrate the point:

• Public oversight: The public sector generates enormous quantities of text, much of which remains effectively unread. A suitable machine prompt can reveal recurring justifications for sole-source contracts, identify departments that repeatedly miss reporting deadlines, or trace changes in budget priorities over time. The shift is from anecdotal oversight with citizens and journalists focusing on isolated cases, to oversight where statistical anomalies become visible at once. The costs of public scrutiny fall dramatically.
  
• Legal-regulatory: Administrative law is a paradigmatic case of information overload. Rulemakings, consent decrees, settlement agreements, and comment dockets are all public but scattered across incompatible systems. LLMs can flag upcoming sunset clauses or overlapping mandates that create regulatory conflict. For legal practitioners, this automation reduces the cost of compliance; for scholars and watchdogs, it exposes patterns of regulatory drift or capture that were previously almost invisible.
  
• Scientific and policy translation: Scientific and policy domains generate vast textual ecosystems — preprints, guidance documents, technical reports — filled with overlapping claims. LLMs can rapidly extract key propositions, map networks of agreement and dissent, and link findings to underlying evidence. Instead of reading thousands of pages, policymakers and researchers can query a summary of consensus and controversy, reducing the cost of accessing expert discourse without eliminating the need for it.
  

Friedrich Hayek observed that knowledge in society is frequently dispersed and tacit. Prices coordinate diverse sets of knowledge by summarizing information that no individual fully possesses. LLMs perform a similar coordination task for text. They compress the distributed linguistic record of human activity into digestible, context-specific summaries (of greater or lesser levels of objectivity). The wealthy have always been able to afford to hire lawyers, researchers, and consultants, but those without such means faced much higher coordination costs. LLMs make “good-enough” expertise available to anyone with a smartphone, lowering the effective cost of participation in markets and civic life. This structural shift in access to knowledge makes information more available to those who are less well-off.

How Accessibility Redefines Power

Unfortunately, though, these same properties that empower individuals can weaken collective safeguards. Liberal democracies have long relied on informational clutter as a de facto security feature, but with the rise of LLMs, adversaries are better able to exploit public data. They always could, but now they can do it easily and orders of magnitude faster. Automated summarization and cross-linking make the full corpus of open information vastly more accessible to anyone with access to LLMs. What was once an advantage — transparency coupled with scale — can become a liability. Accessibility and transparency cut both ways.

Coase’s framework predicts institutional reorganization when transaction costs fall, and we are already seeing that. Apple’s decision to outsource generative AI instead of engineering its own reflects a classic make-versus-buy calculation to reduce internal coordination costs. Similar adjustments will occur in universities, law firms, and agencies. The appropriate response, then, is adaptation to those reduced costs.

Safeguards for an Accessible Society

As such, liberal societies can no longer rely on the sheer abundance of data to protect against misuse or distortion, because LLMs undercut that defense. Valuable information that was either buried in plain sight or incredibly costly to find and acquire is more visible and accessible. This transformation will expose previously hidden inefficiencies and opportunities for accountability, but it will also expose strategic vulnerabilities. Our mission must be to ensure that gains in knowledge accessibility do not come at the expense of political stability or individual privacy.

LLMs represent a turning point in the political economy of information by reducing the costs of finding, understanding, and connecting the text in the same way the printing press reduced the cost of reproducing it. The result is more usable information. Whether this technological shift will strengthen or weaken liberal societies depends on institutional adaptation. If liberal societies remain too open, without taking appropriate steps, the advantages of accessibility will be offset by new forms of exploitation. If, however, liberal institutions evolve to embed verification and resilience, LLMs will extend rather than erode the project of Enlightenment liberalism.

If I were to sum up the mindset of New Yorkers who elected Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City, it would be We want something for nothing, and we want the rich to pay for it. Instead, they will get nothing for something, and they will pay for it with a degraded quality of life. 

Mamdani’s victory was paved with ingratitude for the blessings New Yorkers receive daily. The mindset demanding “something for nothing” from society is not just a political phenomenon, but a profound lapse in economic understanding and moral character.

Frédéric Bastiat, in his Economic Sophisms, brilliantly exposed what many don’t understand. He wrote, “On entering Paris, which I had come to visit, I said to myself: Here are a million of human beings, who would all die in a short time if provisions of every kind ceased to flow towards this great metropolis.”  

Bastiat explains that our “imagination” can’t even encompass “the vast multiplicity of commodities” that must enter daily to stop Parisians from starving. “And yet,” Bastiat pointed out, “all sleep at this moment, and their peaceful slumbers are not disturbed for a single instant by the prospect of such a frightful catastrophe.”

That was written in 1845; today, the complexity of the economy to keep Parisians (and New Yorkers) alive and well has increased exponentially. Yet, if there were a Gallup survey tracking the gratitude of New Yorkers from 1847 to today, I would bet that gratitude has declined. 

In Economic Harmonies, Bastiat wrote of a person of modest circumstances, “It is impossible not to be struck by the disproportion, truly incommensurable, that exists between the satisfactions this man derives from society and the satisfactions that he could provide for himself if he were reduced to his own resources.”

Given that fact of life, is ingratitude a sign of an ignorant and arrogant mind? After all, as Bastiat added, “I make bold to say that in one day he consumes more things than he could produce himself in ten centuries.”

Insightfully, Bastiat added that this gift of riches from others doesn’t come at the expense of anyone else: “What makes the phenomenon stranger still is that the same thing holds true for all other men. Every one of the members of society has consumed a million times more than he could have produced; yet no one has robbed anyone else.” 

In short, the win-lose mindset that some employ to justify their ingratitude is nonsensical. Of course, it is not only New Yorkers who exhibit this illiberal, ungrateful mindset. I call this the win-lose mindset illiberal because it is incompatible with the win-win mindset necessary for a free society to flourish.

Ingratitude is not a new issue for humanity. In his Letters on Ethics #81, the Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote, “You complain that you have encountered someone who was ungrateful. If this is the first time, then you yourself should be grateful either to fortune or to your own efforts.”

Expressing gratitude is self-rewarding. Seneca taught, “We should make every effort to show all the gratitude we can.” Not because we will be rewarded in kind, but “every virtue is its own reward. For one doesn’t practice the virtues in order to receive a prize: the reward for right action is having acted rightly.”

Having cultivated a grateful mindset, Seneca assured, “You have gained something wonderful… the best possible state of mind…a thankful heart.”  

Suppose you are not grateful at this moment. Seneca’s words will pour a bucket of ice water on your ingratitude: “No one can be in his own good graces if he is not grateful to others. Do you think I am saying that the ingrate will eventually be miserable? I am not granting him any delay: he is miserable right now.”

If that warning doesn’t sink in, Seneca pointedly instructed, “We should avoid ingratitude not for the sake of others but for our own sake. Only the smallest and lightest portion of one’s wickedness overflows onto others; the worst of it — the thickest part, as it were — remains in the vessel to choke the possessor.”

If we are being “choked” by our ingratitude, wouldn’t it be wise to do something about it?  

In his book On Benefits, Seneca explained why we are ungrateful: “It is either an excessive regard for oneself — the deeply ingrained human failing of being impressed by oneself and one’s accomplishments — or greed or envy.”

“Everyone is generous when judging himself,” Seneca observed, “which is why each person thinks that he has earned all that he has…and that his real value is not appreciated by others.”

“Greed,” Seneca explains, “will not allow anyone to be grateful. Nothing that is given is ever enough to satisfy undisciplined hopes; the more that comes to us, the more we want.” 

Envy, Seneca explains, “is a more violent and relentless” emotion. Envy, “unsettles us by making comparisons” and “never makes the case for someone else but always puts its own interests ahead of everyone else’s.” We fixate “our attention [on] the good fortune of people who are ahead of us.”

Seneca believed, “There are many kinds of ungrateful people, just as there are many kinds of thieves and murderers.” To be clear, not all New Yorkers are ingrates, and not all ingrates reside in New York. Everywhere, there are people who deny receiving the benefit of those who provide goods and services on their behalf. Seneca taught that the “most ungrateful of all is the person who forgets that he received it.”

How could we deny or forget the benefits of modern life? Seneca explained, “We are constantly preoccupied with novel desires; we do not consider what we have but only what we are trying to get.”

In short, ingratitude stems from a fundamental distortion of perception: the ungrateful person either overestimates their own merit, focuses constantly on unfulfilled desires, compares themselves jealously to others who received more, or becomes so absorbed in pursuing new objects of desire that they forget past benefits entirely. Each cognitive cause reflects a failure to perceive and appreciate what one has actually received.

Because we’re busy keeping score of what we think we are owed, we ignore what is in plain sight. We ignore the win-win ties that bind us all and upon which our survival depends. Mamdani’s world is one where the ungrateful take from others and still complain that they want more. If it sounds like a world governed by “democratic socialists” is unsustainable, it is.  

If we choose to be a sulking, mentally small, ungrateful ego, then our capacity to create meaning in our lives will correspondingly diminish.

Seneca gave us this guideline for living: “It is impossible for anyone to feel envy and gratitude at the same time; envy is what gloomy complainers feel, but gratitude is accompanied by joy.” Seneca encouraged those who cultivate gratitude to be “stubbornly optimistic” that the ungrateful will have a change of heart. Without that optimism, Seneca warned, “human endeavor would cease.”

In her excellent podcast, The Great Antidote, Juliette Sellgren often asks her guests to name one thing that they once believed to be true but no longer do. It’s a good question. Intelligent people are people who learn, and it’s practically impossible to learn without at least occasionally discovering that something that you once were quite confident is true is likely to be false.

Having now reached the age of 67, I would be embarrassed to look back on my career only to discover that I’ve changed my mind about nothing over these many years. Fortunately for me, I have indeed changed my mind about several substantive matters.

For example, I once believed, like Milton Friedman, that among the most effective tools for reining in excessive government growth is to “starve the beast” – that is, to keep tax revenues as low as possible. Starved of tax revenues, big government would have no choice but to shrink into smaller government, one that can survive on appropriately small sums of revenue.

I no longer believe that this theory of “starving the beast” is correct. It’s now obvious to me that as long as the government can finance its current expenditures with borrowed funds, a policy of refusing to allow taxes to be raised in order to meet expenditures doesn’t starve the beast; that policy engorges the beast.

The reason the government is engorged when tax revenues are kept below expenditures is that, as a result of this policy, much of current government spending is paid for by future taxpayers-citizens. The debt that the government issues to fund current expenditures comes due in the future, when many of today’s taxpayers-citizens will either be in lower tax brackets or their graves. The burden of repaying this debt falls on many people who aren’t even born when the debt-financed expenditures are made. The bottom line is that deficit financing allows today’s taxpayers-citizens to get goodies from the government and then shove the bill for these goodies onto tomorrow’s taxpayers-citizens.

Because deficit financing allows today’s taxpayers-citizens to spend other people’s money – and because no person spends other people’s money as carefully as that person spends his or her own money – the demand for government ‘services’ today is higher than it would be if today’s taxpayers-citizens were obliged to pay for all the government they demand. Just as, say, people in New York and California will demand more government services if those services will be paid for largely by people in Florida and Texas, people in 2026 will demand more government services if those services will be paid for largely by people in 2056.

Unsurprisingly, there is empirical evidence showing that attempts to starve the beast result in increased government spending.

The beast of big government is far more likely to be starved, or at least kept on a leaner diet, by a strict budgetary rule that requires that all current expenditures be funded with current revenues – revenues gotten either from current taxes, from cuts in government spending on particular programs, or from sales of public lands or other government-owned assets. Were taxpayers-citizens obliged to pay today for what they consume through government action today, they’d be much more likely to resist increases in government spending.

For anyone who prefers to keep government small and limited, this case for a balanced-budget rule is very strong even if we could be 100-percent assured that no amount of deficit financing would ever lead to a fiscal crisis, or lead even to higher rates of interest. Yet in fact no such assurance is possible even in the best of all possible circumstances, and less so when today’s taxpayers-citizens can live at the partial expense of tomorrow’s taxpayers-citizens. If Sam can easily borrow from Sarah and then shift onto Tom the obligation to repay the debt, Sam will – you can bet on it – spend and borrow beyond his means to repay.

The resulting waste of resources from Sam’s excessive spending will necessarily make the economy of which Sam is a part grow less than it otherwise would, and perhaps even to shrink. And so when Tom, years later, enters the ranks of taxpayers-citizens, there’s a real prospect that his ability to service the debt that Sam, years earlier, imposed on him will be compromised. If Tom, too, has access to deficit spending through government, he, like Sam, will deal with his fiscal burden by passing it on to as-yet-unborn Nancy and her generation.

At some point, this effort of current generations to live at the expense of future generations will raise the national debt to a level that’s unsustainable. Creditors will notice this risk and begin demanding higher interest rates – which only further increases the fiscal burden on current taxpayers-citizens. This fiscal rot stands a good chance of suddenly snowballing, prompting the government to resort to a policy of high inflation or even to repudiation of its debt.

Deficit doves will protest. They’ll say that as long as creditors are willing to lend, no problem is afoot because creditors’ self-interest prevents them from lending money to any entity that they believe is unlikely to repay. The trouble with this point is its factual record. History has no shortage of fiscal crises featuring governments suddenly unable to service their debts.

Again, however, even if a magnanimous supernatural entity promised that no ratio of government debt to GDP would ever trigger a fiscal crisis, the case for requiring that current tax revenues match current government spending would remain strong because such a requirement would serve as a powerful check against excessive growth of government.

Washington never misses a chance to promise “fairness” while tightening its grip on the financial system. For more than a decade, regulators and central bankers have stretched their authority far beyond the original intent of the law, distorting markets, punishing savers, and concentrating economic power in the hands of bureaucrats. 

The latest example is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Section 1033 rule, which marks a new front in Washington’s quiet campaign to nationalize financial data under the guise of “consumer empowerment.”

Section 1033 was intended to help consumers access their financial information. In practice, the Biden-era CFPB twisted it into a sweeping mandate that forces banks, credit unions, and fintech companies to share customer data with third parties, regardless of cost, security, or consent. Regulators call this “data portability.” But it’s really data coercion, forced transfer of private information directed by the government. 

By compelling institutions to open their systems to outside actors, the CFPB is creating massive cybersecurity risks and legal uncertainty. Once that data leaves a secure bank environment, who’s responsible if it’s hacked or sold? The agency doesn’t say, because it doesn’t have to. It operates as a mostly unaccountable branch of government funded by the Federal Reserve.

This new rule fits a pattern that stretches across administrations of both parties. 

The Federal Reserve has spent years manipulating the economy through its own version of central planning. Its balance sheet exploded from about $4 trillion before the COVID lockdowns to nearly $9 trillion at the peak, and even after years of “tightening,” it still sits around $6.6 trillion, roughly 20 percent of US GDP. That extraordinary expansion, coupled with record federal deficits, monetized Washington’s overspending and triggered the inflation surge Americans are still feeling today. 

The Fed’s interventions distorted credit markets, inflated asset prices, and fueled the illusion that easy money could substitute for productivity. The result has been slower growth, declining real wages, and a public that no longer trusts the dollar — or the institutions that manage it.

At the same time, agencies such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have extended open-ended guarantees to ever-larger deposits up to $250,000, signaling to financial institutions that risk doesn’t really matter because taxpayers will always clean up the mess. The more Washington insulates these institutions from market discipline, the more reckless behavior it encourages. That’s not consumer protection; that’s moral hazard on a national scale.

The CFPB’s Section 1033 rule compounds that problem by politicizing access to financial data. It hands Washington the ability to dictate not only how money moves but also how information about money moves. 

Once regulators can decide which companies may access data and on what terms, they effectively control the competitive landscape of American finance. This is industrial policy in digital disguise. And it’s already spilling into state politics, where legislators are introducing new caps on credit card interest rates, limits on interchange fees, and other well-intentioned but destructive interventions. Each of these measures increases costs for consumers, reduces credit access for the poor, and consolidates power among the largest incumbents who can afford the compliance burden. If this sounds like central planning, that’s because it is. 

A handful of bureaucrats now wield more influence over the financial system than the millions of Americans who depend on it. The Fed’s technocrats decide the cost of money. The CFPB dictates how data may flow. The FDIC guarantees risks that private firms should bear. And Congress keeps spending as if none of it matters, driving the national debt above $37 trillion and pushing annual interest payments past $1.1 trillion — a sum larger than the defense budget. These are not isolated mistakes. They are symptoms of a government that has grown far beyond its competence.

The path forward begins with humility and a return to first principles. The Fed should stop acting as an unelected economic czar and start shrinking its balance sheet toward historical norms, or possibly back to six percent of GDP, where it was before the Great Financial Crisis. Congress should reassert its oversight role and restore a rules-based monetary framework that ties money growth to economic fundamentals, not political convenience. The CFPB should be dismantled or at least stripped of its unilateral authority, with legitimate fraud enforcement consolidated under accountable agencies. Most importantly, Washington must end its obsession with managing markets and start trusting them again.

America’s prosperity was built on sound money, competition, and personal responsibility — not on bureaucratic control. If we want a financial system that works for everyone, we must end the centralization of both money and data. Section 1033 isn’t just another bad rule; it’s a warning sign of how far we’ve drifted from a truly free economy. The stakes are simple: either Americans control their financial future, or Washington does. It’s time to choose the former.

On Sunday, October 26, Argentine President Javier Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza, won big in the country’s legislative elections. In the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, it won 50.4 percent of the available seats on a plurality — 40.7 percent — of the vote. In the upper house, the Senate, it won thirteen of 27 available seats for a net gain of six.    

Many doubted such an outcome a month ago when, according to Polymarket, the party’s odds of winning most seats fell to a low of 52.5 percent, down from 89.5 percent on August 19. Argentina was, then, in the grip of one of its perennial economic crises, with the peso falling and bond yields rising. The fate of Milei’s bid to right the country’s economy by balancing the budget with deep spending cuts — which, as Noah Smith noted in July, had eliminated the budget deficit and brought inflation down from a monthly rate of 25 percent to 2.4 percent — hung in the balance.  

The proximate cause of Argentina’s latest economic crisis occurred on September 7, when, with Milei’s sister embroiled in a corruption scandal, Alianza La Libertad Avanza suffered a heavy electoral defeat at the hands of the center-left Fuerza Patria. “Markets panicked,” The Economist reported, “worried that this signaled the end of popular support for his reforms, and the potential return of spendthrift Peronists. A sharp peso sell-off began, while investors ditched Argentine bonds.” 

While Argentina is not alone in feeling the fiscal pain of rising bond yields, few countries nowadays worry very much about their exchange rates. But Argentina is different.   

The Necessity and Peril of Foreign Currency Borrowing  

The ultimate cause of Argentina’s crisis is its long history of fiscal and monetary mismanagement. It has defaulted on its international sovereign debt nine times, three of those in the past two decades, and suffered repeated bouts of high inflation. As a result, nobody will lend pesos to its government at a remotely affordable interest rate because they either might not get repaid at all (a hard default) or be repaid in currency which is worth much less than when they loaned it (a soft default).   

So, to borrow the pesos it needs to finance its operations, the Argentine government first borrows dollars which it then exchanges for those pesos. But a government which borrows dollars must be able to repay dollars. So how does a government which borrows in a currency it doesn’t issue — which isn’t a “monetary sovereign” — get that currency? It has two sources. 

Taxation is the first. The Argentine government could impose taxes on its population payable in dollars, but that merely transfers the problem of getting those dollars in the first place from the government to the taxpayers. To do so, those taxpayers would need to sell more to the United States (or anyone else who is willing to transact with them in dollars) than they buy from it. In short, Argentina would have to run a current-account surplus, something it has done only rarely in recent years.   

Borrowing is the second. Here, however, the Argentine government is effectively buying dollars with pesos, and this is why the exchange rate — the peso price of dollars — matters. In April, 1,000 pesos bought you 93 cents; on September 21, it bought you just 68 cents. Milei’s government needed more pesos to buy the same amount of dollars, and this, as The Economist noted, raised the familiar specter of money printing and inflation, with the consequent flight from pesos and peso denominated debt, like Argentine government bonds, and the resulting fall in the currency and rise in bond yields.  

The Folly of Fixed Exchange Rates  

To protect themselves from such a situation, the Argentine government has tried to fix the exchange rate, but there are limits to this.   

If the peso rises against the dollar, the Argentine central bank, as the issuer of pesos, can print them in unlimited quantity, using them to buy dollars, pushing the relative price of pesos down and the relative price of dollars up.  

It is a very different situation when the peso is falling against the dollar. Then, the Argentine central bank must push the price of the dollar down relative to pesos by selling dollars for pesos, pushing the relative price of those pesos up. But the Argentine central bank only has access to a certain number of dollars so there are limits to how far it can pursue this policy. This is the great asymmetry at the heart of currency pegs like Argentina’s; as the British discovered in 1992, it is easy to weaken a relatively strong currency, but not to strengthen a relatively weak one.   

In the run-up to the election, Argentina blew through its dollar reserves attempting to defend the peso’s peg. When it ran out of ammo, President Trump stepped in. However helpful, depending on the president is not a macroeconomic strategy for the long term.  

The Prospects for Argentina    

Milei aims to get Argentina’s borrowing under control so that it is less vulnerable to swings in the exchange rate. The country’s electorate gave him a vote of confidence this Sunday. Unlike voters in other countries, they might have felt a level of economic pain which has led them to acknowledge the need for Milei’s medicine.   

With this mandate, work remains to be done. “The main problem is that Argentina has a large welfare state given the size and level of development of its economy, and a highly distorted tax and transfer system that funds it,” political economist Jean-Paul Faguet told Newsweek in September. “It only manages to remain stable during good times; a bad international economy or specific international shocks throw it out of kilter and into crisis.” Sunday’s election was a positive shock, with the peso and bond prices rising and yields falling on the news. But as long as Argentina’s structural problems persist, the economy – and the country – will remain vulnerable. Its welfare state must, like that in France, for example, be brought into proportion with the economy’s ability to support it and that will mean further cuts. With Milei up for reelection in 2027, much work remains for him to do.     

As I write this, a mother somewhere in Detroit just swiped her EBT card at a grocery store, trying to buy food for her children. She was denied, forcing her to leave the food at the cashier as her kids looked on, hungry and wondering why they’re not able to carry the food out of the store tonight. She and 42 million other Americans are facing this dilemma because Congress hasn’t passed a budget. While politicians point fingers at one another, families are starting to wonder how they’ll put food on the table. Despite all the doomsayers, something amazing is happening that offers lessons for countries around the world: people are solving the problem without the federal government.

Several states announced that they would dip into their budgets to partially fund food assistance programs. But more tellingly are the local and private responses to this. H-E-B, a Texas-based grocery store, pledged $5 million to Texas food banks and $1 million for Meals on Wheels. DoorDash announced that it would deliver one million free meals and that they were going to waive delivery and service fees for 300,000 grocery orders. Communities, churches, and local charities, not to mention small businesses across the country are collecting increased donations and filling the gap left behind by Congress. All of this without federal authorization, oversight, or influence.

This isn’t the first time people in local communities have stepped up in this way. In 2023, when Congress ended pandemic-era SNAP allotments, several pundits cried disaster. Food banks across the nation reported “increased demand” in the months following the cuts. And while there were some initial challenges, the American people once again rose to the occasion. Private charities donated some 5.3 billion meals that year, in exactly the same way that Americans are doing right now. The Archdiocese of St. Louis mobilized over 100 parishes within 48 hours. No hearings required.

This raises an interesting question: if communities and people can do something, why are we charging the federal government with doing it, and what net effect has the federal government’s involvement had?

Whenever governments get involved in distributing benefits, it creates concentrated benefits for some and dispersed costs for taxpayers. With food assistance programs, there are two groups of beneficiaries. The most obvious beneficiary is the people who receive food assistance. But the less obvious beneficiary is none other than the well-connected members of the food industry. 

As it turns out, there is a tremendous scope for cronyism in determining eligibility, benefit amounts, and purchase restrictions. Using the US’s food assistance program as our example, consider the fact that you can buy cold chicken, but not hot, ready-to-eat chicken. Kellogg’s Corn Flakes? Those are fine. Store-brand corn flakes made with the same ingredients? Maybe not. Nutrition science doesn’t explain this. Lobbying does. 

As another example, WIC, a federal program designed to further assist Women, Infants, and Children, leaves it to states to determine which products are eligible. Michigan lists 9,890 items, down to brand and package sizes. You can buy two-percent milk, but only if it’s from certain brands and only one quart at a time. Want a gallon of milk instead to save yourself (and the taxpayer) money? Sorry, Lansing bureaucrats know better. 

Imagine the lobbying effort that went into securing a product’s placement on this list and similar lists in the other 49 states. Then realize that there are multiple levels of bureaucracy that must be navigated before a tax dollar reaches the recipients of these programs, all of which are staffed by people who do not work for free. The efficiency gains alone of cutting out the government are simply staggering.

According to some estimates, food pantries provide one meal for every nine that SNAP and other food assistance programs provide. But when these programs fail, those pantries, thanks to community involvement, almost instantly scale up, despite cries from the commentariat that “philanthropy can’t fill the gap.” Critics will argue that charity cannot replace the $8 billion per month the US spends on SNAP alone. They’re right about the scale but wrong about the implications.

The irony here is that the same government, which claims the sole ability to prevent hunger, criminalizes feeding the homeless without permits in over 70 cities and requires food banks to navigate FDA regulations designed more for commercial enterprises. Philanthropy plus federalism plus free markets equals results. Not perfect results, of course, but far more effective results done much more efficiently than Washington’s one-size-fits-none approach. This is because people know and understand their neighbors’ actual needs, not just their demographic categories.

The question isn’t whether we can feed hungry families without federal oversight. We’re doing it right now, and history shows this isn’t an isolated incident. The question is why we pretend that only Washington can solve problems that communities solved long before the Department of Agriculture existed.

American capital markets — stock exchanges, bond markets, over-the-counter markets for securities and derivatives of all types — are often praised as paragons of free-market dynamism. But beneath that reputation lies a market structure shaped less by entrepreneurial forces than by layers of regulatory design. While market structure may seem like an abstract or technical topic, it directly affects the prices we all pay and receive — for gas at the pump, groceries at the store, or the stocks and bonds in our 401(k)s — because it determines how trades in capital goods are executed and how prices are discovered. The National Market System (NMS) that ties together various stock exchanges and electronic trading venues is not a spontaneous product of competitive, entrepreneurial forces, but rather — and quite ironically — an elaborate bureaucratic construct born of sustained government intervention.

Nowhere is this irony more visible than in Regulation NMS (Reg NMS), adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2005. At the time, the SEC claimed it was modernizing fragmented exchanges into a coherent, investor-friendly system. At the heart of Reg NMS lies Rule 611, the Order Protection Rule, which prohibits trade-throughs — i.e., executing orders at worse prices than those displayed elsewhere. This rule, intended to guarantee the “best price,” also had countless unintended consequences: it spawned an explosion of trading venues, fragmented liquidity, and a hyper-focus on speed and order type engineering.

At the time, two SEC commissioners (Paul Atkins and Cynthia Glassman) dissented from the final rule. Their warning was clear: rather than promoting competition, Reg NMS would ossify it — enshrining one model of execution, suppressing innovation, and ultimately reducing market choice. “Far from enhancing competition,” they wrote, “Regulation NMS will have anticompetitive effects.” 

Two decades later, with the SEC now revisiting the rule amid mounting criticism of complexity and gaming, their dissent looks increasingly prescient.

The background to Reg NMS’s adoption is equally revealing. In 2005, fears of a “duopoly” gripped the industry as the New York Stock Exchange merged with the Arca ECN and Nasdaq acquired Instinet. In both cases, two central stock markets bought electronic trading venues that deeply entrenched them in US securities trading. Smaller players like the Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PHLX) scrambled to remain relevant, striking deals with Citadel and Merrill Lynch to form a so-called “tripoly.” This turf war among exchanges wasn’t a natural market realignment — it was driven by the regulatory architecture. If the best quote must be accessed and honored by law, why maintain multiple venues displaying it? The answer became clear: only those who could afford the technological and legal arms race would survive.

Over the following years, dozens of new exchanges and dark pools emerged — not because of entrepreneurial freedom, but because Reg NMS made it profitable to exploit its mechanics. Algorithmic firms like Tradebot launched BATS to capitalize on the guaranteed protection of displayed quotes. Matching engines were designed to game the rules rather than serve human investors and traders. The market became increasingly fragmented: as of 2023, trades in US equities were routed through at least 16 exchanges and over 30 dark pools, with orders often pinging across venues in microseconds to comply with regulatory obligations rather than optimize execution quality.

This complexity wasn’t accidental — it was built. As former SEC Commissioner Daniel Gallagher has noted, today’s market structure is “the product of extraordinary regulatory change,” not spontaneous order. The SEC effectively codified not only how trades must be priced and routed, but also how exchanges must behave, who can compete, and which kinds of data must be purchased. The bastion of capitalism is a product of collectivist planning.

The SEC argues that Reg NMS lowered trading costs and democratized access. That’s partly true. But it did so by standardizing a particular model of trading and empowering firms that could comply with, or arbitrage, the rules. The losers weren’t just inefficient brokers or legacy exchanges — they were also individuals and firms who now face hidden complexity, reduced transparency, and rising market data costs.

As the SEC revisits Rule 611 in its September 2025 roundtable, the real question isn’t about passing judgment on Regulation NMS — it’s about deciding the future path of our markets. Do we allow competitive forces to reshape market structure and move away from the innovation-stifling, one-size-fits-all regime that now governs price formation? Or do we continue to bear the hidden but very real costs of central planning in the most critical arenas of American economic life? Regulation NMS continues to earn praise from the same regulatory bodies that imposed it, but its legacy is a market architecture engineered in Washington, not discovered through market processes.

In an interview last month, Citadel founder and CEO Ken Griffin revealed how excited he is about the charter school options in Miami, citing them as a reason he’s so excited his company now calls the city home. 

The finance giant, based in Chicago for years, officially moved its headquarters to Miami in 2022. Its employee migration out of Chicago is ongoing, but as of 2025, most of its employees have made the exodus to South Florida.

One of the reasons Griffin cited for the move was the low quality of life in Chicago for his family and his employees — including Illinois’ struggling schools. As he explained in the interview: “There are some 50 schools in the state of Illinois where not a single child is at grade level.” And those districts are just the very worst of the bad performers.

Of course, there are myriad reasons why Florida is appealing to Ken Griffin as a headquarters for Citadel. Florida’s lack of a state income tax makes it a financially strategic decision. Miami’s crime rate is a small fraction of Chicago’s, making it a safer place for his employees to raise families: “There are more murders in Chicago on a bad weekend than there are in Miami in a year.”

But the education quality available to Citadel employees — and available to the surrounding community, which is a leading indicator on the quality of said community in years to come — is important enough to Griffin to be worth mentioning.

This is just another example of the second- and third-order effects of bad education policy. It’s basic cause and effect: if a school district delivers a poor quality education, residents with means will move to a better district. If schools in an entire region deliver a poor quality education, families, and indeed companies, will start moving out of the area altogether.

We’ve known for years that people move locally for schools. There’s a reason Zillow listings tout good school districts as a core part of their marketing. More recently, it has become clear that people take education policy into consideration when moving across longer distances too. 

Jenny Clark, founder of Love Your School and proponent of Arizona’s school choice movement, says she regularly talks to parents who relocate to her state for its school choice options. Arizona’s school choice vouchers are particularly appealing to parents with special needs children (like Clark, who first used Arizona’s ESA vouchers to support her dyslexic son’s reading education). In many places, it’s hard to get support for students who don’t perfectly fit the conventional classroom mold; ESA vouchers allow parents to take matters into their own hands and find the very best resources without their local district as a gatekeeper.

Arizona was the first state to pass universal school choice (in 2022), so it’s had longer to accumulate data and monitor policy effects on its migration and economy. Other states have since followed suit, and while it’s too early to have clear data, the early indicators are clear: parents are paying attention, and they’re factoring school choice options as they decide where they want to live.

As Griffin revealed, corporations are paying attention, too.

In the interview, Griffin — who recently offloaded his downtown Chicago penthouses for a 44-percent loss as he cut ties with the city – voiced his excitement over what’s happening in Florida’s education market.

I was with the governor of the state of Florida a couple weeks ago, we welcomed the Success Academies to South Florida. They’re going to open several schools in the Miami area. There are hundreds of thousands of kids in the state of Florida who are in charter schools.

That number is likely to rise quickly once Success Academy opens its doors.

Success Academy is one of the shining lights of recent education innovation. A charter school network originally based out of Brooklyn (but quickly expanding into the rest of New York City, and now to new states), Success Academy was founded in 2006 by Eva Moskowitz, a former teacher and New York City Council member who was deeply troubled by the state of New York’s public schools.

Her first location, the Harlem Success Academy, quickly eliminated the achievement gap on standardized tests between its low-income students and those in the city’s top-performing public schools, attracting national attention. That performance trend has held even as the charter network has expanded to its current 57 locations.

Success Academy focuses on holding students to high standards, surrounding them in a culture of excellence, maintaining firm discipline, and delivering a strong academic curriculum. It has offered a world-class education to thousands of kids who would’ve otherwise been stuck in failing public classrooms. And now, its program is expanding to Miami.

This Success Academy announcement is just the latest in a long string of education moves happening in Florida. The state passed universal school choice in March of 2023, and since then, the state has seen an explosion of innovation. As one of the states with the least bureaucratic red tape for new schools, it has become a hotbed for innovation and entrepreneurship.

The state has seen myriad microschools and independent programs launch. It’s also become an incubator for networks working to expand on a national scale.

Primer, a network of K-8 microschools headquartered in San Francisco, based its early schools in South Florida because the state was so friendly to startup programs. Similar to Success Academy, Primer’s goal is to reach underprivileged kids who otherwise wouldn’t have high-quality options. Primer opens schools in areas it calls “school deserts” and brings choice into communities that only have a low-performing public school and no other private options.

Primer is quickly expanding, opening locations in other school choice states like Arizona, Alabama, and Texas. But for the time being, Florida remains its center of gravity, because Florida has been such a favorable state to work with.

Griffin voiced his excitement about the school choice culture in Florida.

Eva Moskowitz was blown away by one thing – everybody, everybody extended her the warmest of welcomes. We want her in Miami. We want our children to have the future that Success Academy will prepare them for…I mean, these will be kids that will go on from every socioeconomic background to have great careers and great lives because they had a great K-12 education.

This enthusiasm — from families, entrepreneurs, and perhaps most surprisingly corporations — is something politicians and lawmakers should be paying attention to. People are demonstrating that they’re willing to immigrate to good educational regions and emigrate from bad ones. Companies are considering education culture when choosing cities in which to open offices.

Parents want the best for their kids. Corporations want to move to strategic locations to attract top talent. And even with all the politics and bureaucracy as we have, states are, in a sense, competing in a market to attract residents and businesses, especially wealthy ones. 

School choice policy will always be most exciting because of the possibilities it opens up for children. Nothing will ever compare to the shifts in life trajectory made possible by access to better schools, for kids who wouldn’t have had choice otherwise. But school choice policy is also an important thing to watch as an indicator of what states may be on the up and up, and which ones may be on the decline if they don’t stay competitive.