An HSA has two simple parts: a major medical insurance policy with excellent coverage but a high deductible—at least $1,700 for singles and $3,400 for families in 2026—and a tax-advantaged account funded with deductible contributions. That account pays for doctor visits, wellness care, drugs, and other services below the deductible. Because the money belongs to the patient and any unspent balance stays theirs (turning effectively into an IRA at retirement), people spend carefully and demand the best deal. Providers must compete on price and quality. No more guessing what an insurer or Medicare will reimburse. This pairs with the push for hospitals and doctors to post clear prices in advance for procedures like knee replacements.

Yet only about 42.6 million HSAs exist as of mid-2026. Strict restrictions keep the number far lower than it should be: you must enroll in a qualifying high-deductible plan, cannot have other disqualifying coverage, face annual contribution caps, lose the ability to contribute once on Medicare, and risk penalties for non-qualified withdrawals. Many people also avoid them because the rules feel complex and the high deductible looks risky. Congress has layered on needless complexity that makes the system hard to use.

Congress should scrap those contribution limits, eligibility traps, state mismatches, Medicare restrictions, and penalty rules. The core idea remains simple: high-deductible coverage paired with a personal account that patients control. Clean it up so more Americans can use it freely. That is the path to lower medical prices through real competition, not more bureaucracy and government control.

1. Inequality is never a danger. As a society grows wealthier, the most productive and innovative people advance the fastest. That progress lifts everyone behind them. The poor become richer in absolute terms even while the gap widens. Growing inequality under growth is the normal result of freedom and productivity—and it makes everyone better off.

2. A national wealth tax plus inheritance taxes near 100% tax the most productive people. They cut investment, reduce innovation and productivity, and slow growth. Often layered on top of already high income taxes, the combination virtually confiscates earnings—a burden no one should have to bear. Allowing the most productive people to keep their wealth creates far more investment and rising living standards for everyone, including those at the lowest levels, than government seizure and spending ever does. History and basic economics show these taxes harm everyone at every level.

3. It is never fair to take money from people who legally and productively earned it. If you want to take that money and give it to others, you must use an argument other than fairness. Taxing the growth of successful investments chops the legs off capital formation that creates jobs and higher living standards for all.

It is astonishing that an executive at Kirby’s level could hold such economically ignorant views. Property rights and growth, not confiscation, raise living standards. Taking a partisan political stand only makes customers—including me—prefer any other airline when they have a choice. It hardly makes good business sense for United Airlines (or any competent enterprise) to alienate half its customers. As Michael Jordan famously said in connection with his own business: “Even Republicans buy sneakers.”

The Good

• Historic tax reform under the One Big Beautiful Bill that reduced taxes, though it added some unnecessary complexities and self-serving political components.

• Ongoing historic regulatory reform aimed at unleashing markets, including substantially reduced new regulations and eliminating old ones.

• Executive Order 14192 (“Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation”) set a one-in, ten-out rule. Agencies must identify at least ten existing regulations for repeal for every new one.

• Formal notice-and-comment rulemaking has hit record lows. The Federal Register is on pace for fewer than 3,000 final rules in 2026—a level reached only under Trump before.

• Significant rules skew heavily deregulatory: more than twice as many deregulatory as regulatory overall this year, and roughly 4.5-to-1 in the July–September quarter. This is determined federal restraint—the strongest avoidance of new commandments since Reagan.

The Bad

• Heavy-handed tariffs act as taxes on American importers and consumers. They restrain markets, often outside normal rulemaking and without clear new congressional authorization.

• Industrial policy directs capital and favors chosen sectors through subsidies and directives instead of market signals.

• Antitrust activism and price interventions interfere with voluntary exchange.

• The government now takes equity stakes—or equivalent interests such as golden shares, warrants, or profit participations—in private firms. These are horrible government actions for two major reasons. First, it is a socialist, government-controlled policy. When governments own things, they make decisions based on their own internal political motives and not what the free market would do. Second, having government involved in private companies makes their competitors less able to compete on an even playing field, knowing that the government could use its power to interfere, making it much less likely that those competitors would make significant new investments in their industry.
  The Cato Institute (Cato) tracker by Tad DeHaven and Chad Smitson shows 34 such arrangements as of the latest September announcements—nearly triple the start-of-year total. Two more deals landed in September alone. Examples include the U.S. Steel golden share giving federal veto power over major decisions, conversion of CHIPS Act funding into a roughly 10 percent stake in Intel, and Defense Department Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment or Economic Defense Unit equity investments in firms such as Elmet Group and Hertha Metals. These turn government into a partner or partial owner.

• Agitation for more government giveaways, including the nonsense $5,000 dividend to every adult U.S. citizen that Trump proposed. This would be incredibly inflationary, has no source of funding other than adding to the already catastrophic $2 trillion annual deficit, and is pure political folly.

Markets thrive on clear rules that protect property and leave people free to trade. Mixing genuine deregulation with tariffs, industrial favoritism, and government ownership produces no coherent principle—only the familiar political stew of solid gains and self-inflicted wounds.

Trump announced late Friday that the United States will buy up to 4.8 million tons of Russian diesel. That starts with 300,000 tons right away, 500,000 in November, and one million more soon after. The rest depends on Russia’s refineries. The U.S. Treasury lifted some sanctions through April 7 so the fuel can ship. Trump claimed this will slash diesel prices. That claim is false. The full 36 million barrels equal less than two days of global diesel use. Market analysts and economists across the board call the volumes a drop in the bucket that will do almost nothing to lower prices. The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air estimates the deal will earn Russian oil companies about $4.5 billion. Russia plans to raise defense spending 27 percent to more than $202 billion in 2027. This is a major transfer of cash to the Kremlin for virtually no benefit to American drivers or the U.S. economy.

Trump blamed Ukraine for diesel shortages caused by strikes on Russian refineries and threatened to cut intelligence sharing if the attacks continue. This is irrationally one-sided. Russia and its partners have hit energy targets in the Middle East, yet the pressure lands only on Kyiv. Russian glide bombs killed at least 20 people, including three children, in Zaporizhzhia. Earlier strikes killed 22, including five children, in Pryluky and 33 in Kramatorsk.

Last month Trump signed Lindsey Graham’s bill for new sanctions on buyers of Russian oil. That step was meant to starve Russia of money for its war on Ukraine. Now Trump himself is buying the diesel, undercutting the sanctions he just signed into law. The contradiction is breathtaking. He appears to have no idea what he is doing.

This moronic deal funds Putin’s war machine and leaves Ukraine to absorb the bombs. You cannot run a presidency by issuing actions that cancel each other out. The result is no coherent policy, and the energy sector cannot plan when no one can predict the next move from the White House.

In a June 25 letter to Baden-Württemberg Prime Minister Cem Özdemir, Whitmer used the fact that Mercedes-Benz still maintains an R&D presence in Michigan to claim the right to lecture the German government. She demanded that German officials force Mercedes to drop its opposition to UAW organizing at the company’s Alabama plant—where workers had already rejected the union in 2024. The National Labor Relations Board, an agency long known for its strong pro-union bias, reviewed the UAW’s complaints of intimidation and unlawful terminations and closed the case, finding no merit. That tells you how baseless the charges were from the start. Yet Whitmer’s letter treats those rejected allegations as proven fact. She solemnly warns of “worker intimidation, interfering with union organizing efforts, and unlawful terminations” and insists Mercedes must “uphold the standards it has committed to” and “comply fully with United States labor law.” These are distortions and lies. Mercedes denied any wrongdoing, and the pro-union NLRB itself confirmed there was none. What Whitmer really wants is for Mercedes to unionize all of its US operations to the detriment of its US profitability and competitiveness.

This is the core of the hypocrisy. The UAW’s grip on Michigan has been so damaging that manufacturers have been leaving for years; the state has lost 36,200 manufacturing jobs since Whitmer repealed right-to-work in 2023 and now suffers the nation’s fourth-highest unemployment rate. With only the remaining R&D foothold left, she is trying to use it as leverage to unionize Mercedes operations in Alabama. The obvious hope is that if the UAW can lock down plants everywhere, Michigan will stop hemorrhaging the manufacturing business it already drove away. She even dangles Michigan’s “incredible resources”—taxpayer subsidies and political favors—as the implied reward if Mercedes plays along. Alabama Governor Kay Ivey is right: her workers will not fall for the UAW’s tricks the way Michigan has. When a governor traffics in lies to strip free workers of choice and free companies of their rights, the result is always fewer jobs and less prosperity.

Governors are elected to protect their own citizens’ prosperity, not to act as unpaid lobbyists for a private union that seeks to strip other states of the competitive advantages Michigan foolishly discarded. Property rights and voluntary association are not optional; when politicians traffic in lies and treat them as bargaining chips, the result is always fewer jobs, higher costs, and less freedom.

Eisner’s defense of this lunatic policy is a master class in isolating real problems and then blowing the analysis because she is an economic moron of the precise type that props up Mamdani.

Here are the key claims Eisner advanced:

• The difference between a zero-percent freeze and a two-percent increase is “just not that big a deal,” even over four years.

• A Moody’s report showed that at most six percent of landlords would face serious risk of default under a multi-year freeze, so the finances of the stabilized stock are basically “okay” and “not as bad as the landlord groups like to say they are.”

• The freeze is a practical, non-radical tool that delivers immediate relief to rent-burdened tenants.

Each of these claims collapses under the slightest contact with economic reality. Start with the “not that big a deal” dismissal of a two-percent increase. Operating costs—insurance, property taxes, water and sewer, labor, and mandated code upgrades—keep rising every year. Freezing revenue while costs climb is not a minor adjustment; it is a forced reduction in the owner’s ability to maintain the building. By dictating prices through government force, it also abuses the free market and makes it impossible for investors and homebuilders to plan or construct any new housing. Pretending the gap is trivial is the kind of arithmetic only an academic who never has to meet a payroll or a mortgage can offer.

Next, the Moody’s six-percent figure. Six percent is one out of every sixteen landlords facing serious default risk. That is not a rounding error; these are precisely the investors the city needs to maintain its housing stock, and forcing them into default will economically devastate them while driving their units into disrepair. Worse, the number captures only those headed for outright default. It ignores the far larger group of owners who are already failing to earn any return and are forced to pour their own capital into the property simply to keep the lights on and the elevators running. Declaring the finances “okay” while ignoring both the defaulting owners and the quietly subsidizing ones is not analysis. It is propaganda designed to justify transferring the cost of political affordability onto private property owners, most of which were caused by the policies of Mamdani and his progressive predecessors.

Finally, the claim that the freeze is merely practical short-term relief. What kind of blind partisan talks only about how nice this would be for tenants while completely ignoring the enormous damage it does to landlords and the housing stock at the same time? Price controls do not create housing; they destroy the incentive to maintain and expand it. When half the rental stock is locked at zero while costs rise, owners defer maintenance, leave units vacant, and exit the market. The result is fewer livable apartments, not more affordable ones.

Eisner’s entire defense is the predictable output of someone who treats private property as a public utility available for political extraction. Mamdani pushes the policy; Eisner supplies the economic nonsense that tries to make it sound respectable. Both are wrong, and both are dangerous to the housing stock New York actually needs.

Speaking to Jewish Democrats, she declared they have “a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival,” and must sacrifice “the comfort, safety, and security and even the very future of our own people” so Democrats can advance climate policy, renewable energy, and the rest of the progressive agenda. As if that weren’t enough, she claims this is what Queen Esther did.

Every part of that is wrong. Abusing Jews is not a special license; it is bad for everyone. When a major party treats Jewish safety as negotiable, the world becomes more dangerous for anyone who values civilized norms. Jews do not owe the rest of the world their own abuse so preferred domestic policies can advance. Nessel’s demand that Jews accept antisemitism as the price of “saving humanity” is itself a moral failure.

What compounds the offense is her claim of biblical authority. That claim is factually false. Esther never sacrificed Jewish survival for some greater good. She risked her own life specifically to save the Jews of Persia from annihilation—and defending Jewish survival proved consistent with what was best for the wider world. Nessel inverted the story completely. By acknowledging her party’s antisemitic harms and then instructing Jews to endure them for progressive priorities, while falsely wrapping the demand in Esther’s name, her remarks cross into affirmative antisemitism.

Nessel is a standard bearer of a party traditionally supported overwhelmingly by Jewish majorities who are now experiencing the worst kind of cognitive dissonance. How long with they remain faithful to their betrayers?

A dividend is a distribution of actual earned profits. Trump either does not grasp this elementary distinction or does not care. His argument that the $5,000 payments would be covered by the tariffs is incorrect. His tariffs are horrific for the economy, a terrible way of generating tax revenue, and incapable of generating any meaningful amount of revenue. Even in fiscal year 2025, when collections peaked, customs duties totaled only about $195 billion—while the proposed $5,000 payments to adults would cost roughly $1.3 trillion.

The amount raised has not even made a dent in the existing federal deficit and would only make up a small fraction of the cost of the $5,000 payments. Most of these tariffs have been declared illegal and will have to be refunded anyway. The government is bleeding red ink by the trillions—roughly $2 trillion a year in annual deficits. There are no profits to distribute. You do not return capital to shareholders when the company is insolvent and drowning in debt; you service the obligations. Trump’s failure to understand this basic reality is not a minor oversight—it is the kind of fundamental ignorance that turns fiscal policy into a carnival act.

Dressing up deficit-financed transfers as “dividends” from nonexistent profits does not make them sounder. It only highlights how little regard is shown for honest accounting or the crushing debt already loaded onto future taxpayers. Responsible governance demands paying down obligations, not inventing new ways to spend money that does not exist.

I assume even Trump understands that ejecting reporters simply because he dislikes their opinions is indefensible and would draw little support even from his strongest backers. Framing the ban as a response to fiction and deliberate lies is a different matter; that claim could attract reasonable people, and I would support it if the evidence were clear and specific. Yet he has offered none.

The ball is in his court. Produce the actual instances of lies and fabricated reporting or this episode stands as nothing more than another thin-skinned performance by a president who treats disagreement as personal injury.

The Supreme Court just allowed the project to continue. The media trumpets that the justices greenlit the whole enterprise, as if they blessed its legality. Nonsense. Read the opinion: the majority refused to rule on the merits and instead tossed the case because neither the National Trust nor Alison Hoagland, the architectural historian and historic preservationist it relied upon for evidence, had standing. The dissent, including Chief Justice Roberts, made it plain that the project is likely unlawful. So here we sit, watching an unauthorized multimillion-dollar monument to executive whim rise because of a legal technicality.

This is government by technicality at its most absurd. A president tears down part of the people’s house and pours concrete without the power of the purse, and the courts allow it to proceed solely because the challenger lacked standing to bring the suit. This illustrates a severe problem. When the president flouts the law, Congress could always push back. But Congress is so divided that that’s not going to happen.

The Constitution was written by our founders under the assumption that the three branches would stay in their lanes and that presidents would act with honor and integrity. They never anticipated a president who, as a matter of routine, oversteps his legal bounds, and they provided no mechanism to stop illegal acts other than impeachment, which was reserved for the most egregious situations. A system must be allowed to evolve that can hold the president accountable when he blatantly violates the law. It’s not clear how to do this, but such a system needs to be developed.

Once Trump’s illegality is clear, since he acted without authorization, he personally—not the United States government or the taxpayers—should be required to reimburse the full cost of restoring the site to its prior condition. That personal responsibility is important; it might prevent him from going off half-cocked in the future if he knew he would be held accountable for blatantly violating the law.

When the law becomes a game of who has standing rather than whether the action is legal, the rule of law itself is the casualty. Property rights and limited government demand better than this: no official, not even a president, gets to build on the public’s dime and the public’s land without clear authority.

First, there is simply no way to prove a direct causal line from any individual company’s production of oil or gas to specific “damages” in New York or anywhere else. We still cannot reliably separate man-made emissions from the natural warming that has been underway for centuries. Assigning precise liability percentages based on estimated global emissions since 2000 is pure political accounting, not science or law.

Second—and this is the show-stopper—are these states seriously claiming that fossil-fuel companies should not exist and that we should stop using oil and gas? Of course not. They know full well that without these fuels the modern economy collapses. Yet they still demand the companies pay massive penalties for producing the very energy the states cannot live without. That is having it both ways: demanding the product while treating its lawful production as a tort. It is economic illiteracy dressed up as moral virtue, and it turns every such lawsuit into an exercise in extortion rather than justice. Even if such a scheme were accepted, since everyone will still demand fossil fuels, the penalties and the accompanying legal fees would simply be built into the price of oil and gasoline, making energy far more expensive for no actual benefit.

Property rights and basic causation still matter. Until plaintiffs can show direct, measurable harm from a specific actor—and stop pretending they can ban the product while relying on it—these climate damage suits remain non-starters.

This is textbook socialism and economic illiteracy. When the government owns a piece of a private business, it distorts every incentive: capital is no longer allocated by profit-and-loss signals but by political favoritism and bureaucratic priorities. Efficient private operators will rationally pull back rather than risk competing with an entity that can lean on taxpayers, preferential regulations, and state power. Property rights get shredded, risk is socialized, and the result is slower growth, higher costs, and crony deals instead of genuine wealth creation. We’ve seen this movie before—every time government “partners” with private firms it crowds out the very companies that make the best, most disciplined investments. For example, after the government took an interest in US Steel, promising to be a passive investor, it immediately prevented the company from closing an inefficient steel plant for fear of the politics of the workers losing their jobs.

The principle is simple and non-negotiable: the U.S. government has no business owning private enterprises. Markets work when private owners bear the full consequences of their decisions. Anything less is theft of opportunity and a direct assault on the economic freedom that built this country.

There are only three things Congress can do to make Social Security viable for the long term, and realistically, some combination of all three will be necessary.

First, raise the retirement age. Americans are living longer, and a retirement system designed around earlier life expectancies cannot simply pretend that nothing has changed.

Second, determine what level of benefits the country can actually afford, including addressing the way annual increases are calculated. Benefit levels were raised for political reasons over the years to levels far in excess of what people’s contributions should have entitled them to. It is presently politically untenable to actually cut those existing benefit levels. What can be done is to address the way annual increases are calculated. Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment is based on the CPI-W, which is an index that reflects annual increases greater than the rate of inflation. There is no justification for deliberately providing increases greater than inflation at the expense of younger workers who must finance the system.

Third, raise taxes. That means asking workers and employers to contribute more to a system that already consumes an enormous share of federal resources. None of these choices is pleasant. But pretending there is some fourth option called “do nothing” is simply dishonest.

The problem Congress is trying to outsource is the very tough decision of to what extent and in what proportions those three approaches will be used to fix the system. There are no magic tricks here. The basic choices are a higher retirement age, slower growth in benefits, and higher taxes, or some combination of all three. The Journal reports that one bipartisan proposal would create a commission whose recommendations could receive expedited consideration if they produced a plan extending solvency for 75 years. Fine. But who appoints the commission? Who decides what assumptions it uses? Who determines whether retirement age goes from 67 to 68, 70 or something more substantial? How much higher do payroll taxes go? How much do future benefits grow? These aren’t technical footnotes. They are the entire debate. Congress knows perfectly well that every serious solution will require somebody to give something up. Democrats generally don’t want benefit reductions or a higher retirement age; Republicans have historically resisted tax increases but currently lack a unified position. The Journal notes that even the conservative position has fractured, with Republicans having “no unified position” on Social Security. A commission doesn’t solve that political cowardice. It merely gives Congress somebody else to blame when the recommendations arrive.

Congress should stop commissioning studies about problems it already understands and start legislating. Elected representatives—not an unelected panel—should decide when Americans retire, what they can reasonably be expected to receive, and how much they should pay. That’s called governing.

Since they have absolutely no case that the wealthy are not paying their fair share, they scramble for all kinds of irrational excuses to justify making them pay still more. One way they do that is by demanding taxes on the paper appreciation of assets—unrealized gains—before a single dollar of cash hits anyone’s bank account. That is pure economic nonsense. It is the equivalent of demanding income tax on next month’s paycheck before the employer has paid you, or forcing retirees to hand over taxes on the paper value of their 401(k)s every year whether or not they withdraw a cent. Unrealized gains are not income; they can vanish overnight, create crushing liquidity problems, force asset sales, and require the IRS to value everything from private businesses to illiquid real estate—an administrative nightmare.

European countries have tried similar wealth taxes and have utterly failed—to the point that the taxes have been almost uniformly eliminated. Governments watched people and capital flee their countries to avoid the levies, revenues never hit the promised targets because of that flight and the sheer complications (and outright evasion) of trying to implement the schemes, and the experiments collapsed. No rational tax system treats phantom wealth as taxable income; doing so is simply a Hail Mary grab for revenue to paper over reckless new spending. Cut the spending instead and more capital stays in private hands—capital that gets invested in businesses, creates jobs, and raises wages. Seize it through unrealized-gains taxation and you shrink the very economy that pays everyone’s salaries.

Property rights and economic reality are not optional. You do not owe the government a cut of money you have not yet received, and pretending otherwise is just an attempt to distract from the real problem: politicians who refuse to control their own spending addiction.

On top of that, Social Security and Medicare are heading for bankruptcy around 2032. As we get closer, the only political solution will be to throw more money at the entitlement programs, which would otherwise go bankrupt without additional funds—meaning even more debt. Anything Bessent does to tweak the market is pure insanity—like facing a flood and trying to bail it out with a thimble. It’s throwing good money after bad.

This is textbook symptom-chasing while the disease runs rampant. It’s posturing. It’s the appearance of doing something while doing exactly the wrong thing. Until the deficits and the entitlement train wreck are confronted, every buyback and market gimmick is just expensive theater that makes the eventual reckoning worse for every taxpayer.

The Inflation Reduction Act’s Medicare Part D redesign capped seniors’ annual out-of-pocket drug spending shifted more liability onto plans and taxpayers and overhauled the benefit structure. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) originally scored those drug provisions as a modest cost or even a net saver—claiming roughly $129 billion in deficit reduction. Reality arrived with a vengeance. CBO has since jacked its Part D projections by roughly $600–700 billion over the coming decade. Per-beneficiary spending is racing past $4,000, plan bids have soared, and the promised “savings” have evaporated into higher taxpayer subsidies. No forecasting error, this is the standard operating procedure for growing the welfare state.

In private industry, if a project comes in far over the approved budget, management does not simply shrug and keep spending. The overruns force a hard stop: redesign the program, cut elsewhere, or get new authorization. Congress should impose the same discipline. When official scores understate the true cost of an entitlement expansion, the law should not automatically continue at the higher price. It must be redesigned or re-budgeted. Knowing that ballooning costs will trigger automatic accountability—and that popular benefits could be curtailed—would make the people who write and score these bills far more careful. Temporary premium subsidies layered on top merely delayed the reckoning and hid the damage from voters.

Entitlements sold on fantasy numbers are theft dressed up as policy. The only way to demand realistic accounting is to make the overruns blow back on the very people who produced the bad numbers in the first place.

Making money on a shortage is just the opposite of losing money during an oversupply. It is simply supply and demand working. Profits that accrue when prices are high attract more production, which increases supply, removes the shortage, and brings prices down. This is just the reverse of what happens when prices are low, as they have been for long stretches in the oil and gas industry. When prices are low, people don’t explore for new supply; the supply contracts, and demand ultimately forces prices up, which then encourages new investment. His remarks amount to advocating price controls that would block the market from reducing high prices—Economics 101 that he flunks completely. He then claimed “I’m a big free enterprise guy, nobody bigger,” making the entire performance even more ludicrous, because a genuine free-enterprise advocate would have recognized the laughability of everything he had just said. Instead of focusing on real problems where presidential leadership could actually matter, he wastes energy demonizing companies that are simply responding to market signals. That makes Trump look uneducated, narcissistic, and frankly cringeworthy in the process.

Oil companies do not set world prices; supply and demand do. High prices signal scarcity, which induces more exploration and production—exactly the mechanism that eventually increases supply and brings prices back down. Blaming firms for earning profits under those conditions, or trying to strong-arm them into artificial price cuts, interferes with the very process that addresses shortages. This is Economics 101, and interfering with it only prolongs the pain by discouraging the investment needed to expand supply.

Free markets work when participants are free to respond to incentives, not when politicians treat profits as a crime and property rights as optional. Trump’s assault on oil companies for doing precisely what the market demands is economically illiterate theater that undermines the principles that keep the economy humming.

When the man who controls regulations, contracts, tariffs, and enforcement personally monitors the donor list and offers special access in return, the line between legitimate fundraising and outright extortion vanishes. Corporations are rational actors. They will write the checks to protect their property and operations, just as they would under any protection racket. The result is pure cronyism: capital flows not to its highest economic use but to whoever holds political power. Shareholders’ money is diverted, markets are distorted, and the principle of equal treatment under the law is discarded. History shows that once government starts extracting tribute this way, the demands only grow and the economy pays the price in inefficiency and lost trust.

This is not out of character for someone who insists on having his name on currency, on the Kennedy Center, and a $1.78 billion slush fund. But property rights and free markets cannot survive when the presidency becomes a toll booth. Voluntary donations are one thing; pressure from the commander-in-chief is another. This practice must end.

Let’s call this what it is—cronyism at its ugliest. GM and the UAW want to hamstring a rival building cars in non-union Southern plants while they bleed market share and demand taxpayer bailouts and EV mandates to survive. The bill also layers on restrictions targeting Chinese-supplied software and battery components with even lower ownership thresholds. Yet it conveniently carves out exemptions and waivers for the politically connected. For example, Volvo was given an exemption while Polestar was not, even though they have the same Chinese majority owners. In addition, there is a process for manufacturers to appeal the ban for which cronyism and favoritism will clearly motivate any decisions.

It has drawn 32 co-sponsors, including 25 Republicans. As the Wall Street Journal noted, even Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz questioned why Republicans are so eager to harm jobs in GOP-led states just to carry water for a union that funnels nearly all its political money to Democrats.

Republicans who back this rent-seeking should explain themselves to the Alabama and South Carolina workers whose jobs they’re volunteering to sacrifice. It’s not surprising that RINOs like Bernie Moreno, Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton would be on board, but it’s disappointing that right-thinking senators like Marsha Blackburn, Pete Ricketts, Shelley Moore Capito, Ted Budd, Tim Sheehy, Joni Ernst, Jon Husted, Rick Scott, Cindy Hyde-Smith, and John Cornyn would be on board.

This is exactly how the Beltway corrupts free-market principles: wrap protectionism in an anti-China flag, hand regulators arbitrary power to pick winners, and watch American workers and consumers pay the price through higher costs, fewer choices, and lost investment. National security deserves serious tools like CFIUS review based on actual control—not equity thresholds designed to settle union scores. Economic reality doesn’t care about election-year posturing. Property rights, open competition, and limited government do.