The Democratic Socialists of America Platform

The Democratic Socialists of America (“DSA”) have won an unprecedented number of Democratic primaries, and their candidates are on the ballot now in many places. Even those Democrats who are not members will follow much of their platform because that is what activists in the Democratic Party want to see done. DSA members may well elect the next Speaker of the House of Representatives, who will be second in line for the presidency.

Among the Democratic Socialists of America who have been nominated for seats in Congress in this year’s midterm elections are:

U.S. Senate Nominations

  • Angie Nixon (Florida): The state representative won a major upset for the Democratic Senate nomination in Florida, marking a notable statewide milestone for a democratic socialist candidate.

U.S. House Nominations

  • Claire Valdez (New York, NY-7): Won the nomination in the district of retiring Rep. Nidia Velázquez.
  • Darializa Avila Chevalier (New York, NY-13): Defeated sitting incumbent and Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat.
  • Brad Lander (New York, NY-10): Won the nomination over incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman (though note he left the DSA following its response to the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks).
  • Melat Kiros (Colorado, CO-1): Unseated long-serving incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in Denver.
  • Chris Rabb (Pennsylvania): Secured the Democratic nomination for a Philadelphia-area House seat.
  • Donavan McKinney (Michigan): Won the nomination in a Detroit-area House district.
  • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York, NY-14): Won renomination in her congressional district (endorsed by her local DSA chapter).

Because of the Democratic Socialists of America’s rise to power, I wanted to know more about what they stood for. I googled their Platform, which is titled “Workers Deserve More,” and I will quote from it below in bold face and respond in ordinary type. Much of what I will quote comes from a section of the Platform that describes “What We Fight For.” Here are just a few key elements of the DSA’s platform.

[1.] Demilitarize police departments … and redirect funding to public services as steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor. Treat drug addiction and mental illness as health issues, not crimes.

There were 14,085 murders in the U.S. last year according to the FBI, 1,119,768 other violent crimes, 168,927 robberies, and 5,245,768 other property crimes. And that was without abolishing the police and prisons. Imagine how many murders, violent crimes, robberies, and property crimes there would be if we abolished the police and the prison system.

Legalizing all drug use, and treating it as a health issue, will cause the use of dangerous drugs to spread rampantly. Lives and families will be destroyed as a result.

The DSA’s obsession with abolishing the police and prisons is a bizarre over-reaction to the abuses of power committed by some police officers. The problem is admittedly a serious one, and I, like most Americans, have been shocked by incidents of police brutality in making arrests, especially of Black men. But the solution to this problem is to eliminate police unions, which protect bad cops from getting fired when they themselves behave unlawfully. Another useful step would be legislation, both federal and state, that would abrogate judicially created immunities from civil suits over police and prosecutorial misconduct.

We do need to reform the police and prisons. We should not abolish them as the Democratic Socialists of America are calling for.

[2.] End ICE detentions and deportations …. Legalize migration, grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status, provide a path to citizenship for all permanent residents, and end visa caps and quotas.

As with police brutality, the solution here is reform, not abolition. ICE has often arrested and deported immigrants in a shockingly brutal way, outraging a sizable number of Americans including me. This has to stop. I would support firing the ICE agents who are committing wrongdoing and then hiring new ICE agents who understand that illegal immigrants are people and that they need to be treated with dignity and respect when they are deported. We should also stop deporting people to third countries, other than the country they are citizens of, unless that country refuses to take them back. I support reforming ICE by legislation if necessary.

But I cannot support the Democratic Socialist of America’s call for actually abolishing ICE. Open borders would flood our country with poor immigrants from Latin America, who would take jobs away from low-income Americans, which would especially hurt Black Americans and Latinos who are legally in the U.S. This would change American culture permanently, threaten the status of English as our national language, and turn the United States into a third-world country. There is a limit to how many immigrants the U.S. can absorb without our national culture changing.

We also should not reward immigrants who came here illegally by giving them citizenship. This is a bad idea, as Americans saw when the Biden Administration opened our borders. First, illegal immigrants jump the queue by crossing the Mexican border to the detriment of people (from Mexico itself and also from India, the Philippines, and other countries) who have waited for decades for permission to come to the United States legally. Second, there is a limit to how many immigrants the U.S. can absorb at once so that our famous U.S. national melting pot will turn them into U.S. citizens. We are perilously close to that maximum number now, even though there are many foreign high-tech workers, engineers, and medical doctors whom I think we should admit.

The solution to criminal misbehavior by ICE agents is to fire and prosecute the agents who behave criminally, which too many have done. Maybe we should even rename ICE as part of an effort to change its culture. But actually abolishing ICE and opening our borders is a gross overreaction to such misbehavior—an overreaction that the American people would quickly come to hate, even more than Americans came to hate the failure to enforce immigration law during the Biden Administration.

[3.] Defund the Department of War. End all foreign wars and close overseas military bases…. End immunity for U.S. war criminals and support the International Criminal Court’s mandate to prosecute war crimes.

Russia has over 2,000 nuclear missiles with multiple warheads aimed at the United States, China has 620 such missiles with a third of them deployed on operational forces, and North Korea has 60 such missiles. If we defund the Department of War, we might all get killed by foreign nuclear attacks or, more likely, be coerced into giving up our precious rights and freedoms. Our NATO allies might be overrun by the Russian dictatorship, and Japan, the Philippines, and Australia might be overrun by the Chinese dictatorship. This would end the global move toward democracy, which the United States started in 1776, and which is our greatest gift to the world.

Most Americans want to live free. They do not want to be Russian or Chinese slaves. Nor do they want to be nuked, or threatened to be nuked, by those countries.

As to prosecuting Americans who have defended this country, or Israelis, before a predominantly Third World International Criminal Court (ICC), that would be the epitome of injustice. I have friends and family members who support the ICC because they want to see murderous despots and drug dealers punished. I would like to see them punished too in American courts, with life tenured judges and the right to trial by jury. Congress could criminalize any global drug-dealing or human rights abuses committed by foreigners, which substantially in the aggregate affect U.S. commerce with foreign nations. Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1 (2005).

The key is to have a just trial before U.S. judges and juries, and not show trials before people drawn from the community of international human rights lawyers, which tends, among other things, to be disproportionately instance anti-Semitic and protective of Islamic terrorists.

[4.] Recognize the rights of the Palestinian people, including the right of return, the right to resist military occupation, and the right to self determination in a free Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital. End all military and economic aid to Israel. Prosecute U.S. and Israeli leaders responsible for the genocide in Gaza.

Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, and it is the only country to recognize the full equality of women and of LGBTQ+ citizens. It is also the only country in the Middle East with broad freedom of expression and freedom of religion. Americans have much more in common with the Israeli democracy than we do with the Palestinians.

President Bill Clinton at the end of his second term proposed a two-state solution for Palestine, which is obviously what is needed, and Israel agreed but the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s then-President Yasser Arafat declined to endorse it. In the 59 years since Israel won the 1967 six-day war, it has not annexed the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians should accept this land as their homeland, and some Israeli settlements in the West Bank should be removed. Jerusalem should be a shared capital city for Israel and Palestine.

It is the Palestinians, not the Israelis, who have been blocking a two-state solution. U.S. policy should be to insist on such a solution (though we should also all hope that Benjamin Netanyahu, who is a demagogue intent on staying in power, loses the October Israeli elections).

The Palestinians have chosen as their leaders a criminal, terrorist group—Hamas—which murders innocent Israeli people. Why should the U.S. side with a terrorist group against the Middle East’s only constitutional democracy?

[5.] Replace the two-party system with a multi-party democracy. Expand the House of Representatives, implement proportional representation and ranked choice voting in elections, and abolish the Senate.

There are a lot of quite radical reforms packed into this platform plank, and I will address them one at a time starting with the most fundamental ones.

The Democratic Socialists of America propose to abolish the Senate, which is a cornerstone of our 237-year-old Constitution. The Senate has more power than the House of Representatives because it has the power to confirm, or not, executive branch and judicial nominees and the power to ratify, or not, treaties. The Senate’s filibuster rule requires a vote of 60 out of 100 senators to pass almost all legislation.

Most neutral observers of politics in Washington, D.C. over my lifetime have concluded that the Senate is much more functional than the House of Representative in part because it has many fewer Members, in part because Senators serve a long six-year term, and in part because only one-third of its membership turns over every two years, unlike the House of Representatives. The Democratic Socialists of America would throw all that out the window, along with the benefits of having a bicameral legislature thus wrecking institutions that are now working very well.

I consider the Senate, as it is currently constituted, along with bicameralism, to be the most important parts of the U.S. constitutional system because together they slow down lawmaking and change, which reduces the risk factor in investment, vastly increases American wealth and income, and augments liberty. The long-term certainty created by the Senate, bicameralism, and the presidential veto explains, in my opinion, why U.S. GDP per capita is $94,430, while the GDP per capita of the European Union is only $51,030, and the GDP per capita of China is only $14,870, according to International Monetary Fund estimates.

The Senate and the whole system of checks and balances and federalism makes the U.S much wealthier than even the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. All that extra wealth could be used to fund a better health care system, but the DSA would cause us not to earn that wealth in the first place by hugely increasing the risk factor in investment.

The biggest objection that most advocates of Senate-reform point to is the unfairness of California having 2 votes in the Senate when it has 39.3 million people while Wyoming has 2 votes in the Senate even though it has 588,750 people. This is a problem, but it is not as big a problem as most Americans think it is.

First, the ten states with the lowest populations are, in order, Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island, Montana, Maine, and New Hampshire. Of these low-population states, four are left-wing (and thus in the same political camp as California) and have two Democratic senators: Vermont, Delaware, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. A fifth state, Maine is liberal and has one Independent who votes as a Democrat as Senator and the very liberal Republican Susan Collins who has often voted against President Trump’s agenda and who publicly stated that she would not vote for Donald Trump in both the presidential elections of 2016 and 2024.

More importantly, in the last 40 years, control of the House, which is apportioned by population, and the Senate, which isn’t, have largely gone hand in hand, so the 2-Senator rule doesn’t seem to systematically favor either party. In particular, during 1987-2026 the same party controlled both chambers almost all the time, though in 8 years (2001-03, 2011-15, and 2023-25) the Democrats controlled the Senate while Republicans controlled the House, and in 2 years (2019-21) the Republicans controlled the Senate and the Democrats controlled the House.  Given these facts, it’s pretty hard to see how Democratics are hurt by the rule that each state can have only two senators.

My friend and co-teacher Akhil Amar doubts whether Vermont’s Democratic Senators, if one counts Bernie Sanders as a Democrat, as I do, represent the concerns of California Democrats. He proposes drawing 100 senatorial districts across state boundary lines, which are equal in population. But this would produce huge gerrymandering problems, as happens with U.S. House seats, and it would wreck American federalism. It would also require scrapping the Constitution, which forbids amendments that would deprive each state of its equal representation in the Senate.

What about getting rid of the filibuster? Would not that at least be a good Democratic Socialists of America idea? Not so fast. The first time there was a Republican President, Senate, and House, all of the Democrats’ changes would be swept away, just as Democrats would sweep away the Republicans’ changes when there was a Democratic President, Senate, and House. That would just create more instability, rather than more democracy.  The DSA should be more careful about what it wishes for.

I am opposed to abolition of the Senate, with its current rules of procedure, for all these reasons.

What about replacing our two-party system with proportional representation in the House of Representatives? Proportional representation and a multi-party system is a terrible idea, as is ranked choice voting, which is just a form of proportional representation. Proportional representation has, for instance, led in Israel to extremist groups dominating the government. The Democratic Socialists of America are an extremist group so it comes as no surprise that they would favor proportional representation. In Brazil, proportional representation has so weakened the legislature that the President dominates that country’s democracy. The same thing would happen in the United States.

* * *

Now consider the Platform on “Workers Deserve More,” which is where the DSA post starts. It describes a Leninist-Maoist world in which student loan debt and mortgages have been cancelled; all private housing has been nationalized; private grocery markets and family farms have been nationalized; energy companies have been nationalized; airlines, buses, trains and automobile factories and maybe even cars have been nationalized (though the platform is vague about private car ownership). Lest the reader think I exaggerate, consider what the Democratic Socialists of America are promising:

[6.] “You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.”

What must happen to create a world without debts or mortgages? Presumably, all student loan debts and mortgage debts would be cancelled, thus penalizing those who have paid off their student loan debt and their mortgages to benefit those who are deadbeats and who have borrowed extravagantly while not paying society back. What is so just about that kind of world? Education, health care, housing, food, energy, medicine, and transportation all cost money to provide. If everyone has a “right” to these things then presumably the government will have to provide them.

The only way the government could do this is by nationalizing all education, health care, housing, food production and distribution, energy production and distribution, and automobile companies. That would mean an immense increase in taxes to pay for all these things.

The government could not afford to pay just compensation for all these nationalized items, so presumably they would be stolen unconstitutionally from the people who have earned them in a revolutionary grab of power and of wealth. The Democratic Socialists of America are proposing something like the Communist Revolutions of 1917 in Marxist-Leninist Russia and of 1949 in Maoist China.

The “Democratic” Socialists of America are not really calling for democratic, constitutional change. They are calling for unconstitutional, revolutionary change on a massive scale. History teaches that when revolutionary changes take place like those that would be necessary to implement the DSA’s platform, freedom of expression and freedom of religion get abandoned; privacy and freedom in general disappear. And Enemies of the People get rapidly imprisoned in what soon becomes a totalitarian state with massive bloodshed and violence taking place.

But let’s imagine unrealistically that the “Democratic” Socialists of America could peacefully bring about their unconstitutional redistribution of wealth from those who have worked hard to those who do not work hard. What would it be like to live in a world where there are no private universities or schools, and they are all “common … utilities”? Everything would become conformist. There would be no debate or discussion of ideas. Schools would teach only what the government wants them to teach. Research, experimentation, and technological progress would stop.

Look at the countries today that have gone down this road like Russia, North Korea, and Cuba and ask yourselves what cutting edge technologies and innovations those societies have produced compared to the United States? Even China, the most successful socialist dictatorship, has a plunging birthrate, widespread alienation of all its young people, and crippling debt. (Indeed, to the extent it can boast considerable economic success, it comes from its retreating from socialism and developing a massive, fundamentally capitalist, private sector.) Can anyone reading this op-ed realistically imagine themselves wanting to move from the United States to China, Russia, North Korea, or Cuba?

What would it be like to live in a country where the government ran all the hospitals, and all the doctors worked for the government? Look at the national health services in the United Kingdom Canada, Sweden, or Norway where you must notoriously wait for many months to get health care. Look at the scandal-ridden Veterans Hospitals in the United States, run by the federal government, where the quality of medical care is far below what it is in private and public university hospitals in the very same country. Today, in the United States, anyone who needs cutting edge emergency medical care can walk into a university privately run hospital’s emergency room, demand healthcare, and they will get that healthcare without regard to whether they have health insurance or can afford to pay for it. All that would be lost under the Democratic Socialists of America’s vision of health care as a public good.

What would it be like to owe no rent and own no home or apartment? No one would have any incentive to maintain, repaint, or repair such a home or apartment, so it would quickly start to rot and fall apart. I went to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1990 and 1991, and I saw how dilapidated the housing stock had become without private ownership of apartments and houses. Go to Cuba or North Korea today and you can see the same dismal thing.

How about a government right to food and to public grocery stores? I went to the fanciest grocery store in Moscow, right off Red Square, in 1991, and all the shelves were bare. The only thing for sale was one jar with an obviously rotten pickle. Admittedly, Soviet grocery stores had canned goods for sale, but they were abysmal by U.S. standards. Meanwhile, there was a four-hour-long line outside the one privately owned McDonalds in Moscow to buy a Big Mac. 98% of the farmland in Russia then was government owned. The 2% that was still privately owned produced one fourth of all the food in Russia. (See Hedrick Smith, The Russians (1976).) When the government owns land and grocery stores people starve. Just ask the North Koreans who have been reduced to eating grass during some famines.

What do members of the Democratic Socialists of America have to say about Second Amendment gun ownership rights? They hate them and want to abolish them. Anyone who wants to own a gun, even just for hunting, is a threat in the eyes of many members of the Democratic Socialists of America.

* * *

That, readers, is the heart of the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America. The DSA advocates policies that have been tried over the last 100 years in countless communist and socialist countries and that have always failed. This has been true in the Soviet Union, its former Eastern European allies, China, Cuba, and North Korea.

Indeed, two countries—Germany and Korea—with the same ethnic makeup, histories, and cultures were divided in the 20th Century into a communist half and a free market half, and in both cases the communist halves failed abysmally while the free-market halves thrived. Likewise, Taiwan thrived where the People’s Republic of China remained extremely poor until it moved towards partial capitalism—and even now, per capita income in Taiwan is three times that in mainland China. Even when some of the DSA’s proposed policies have been tried by capitalist but welfare-state countries, such as the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden, and Norway, they have failed as well.

The Democratic Socialists of America are simply ignorant when it comes to the policy results of the last century. Voters shouldn’t trust ignorant politicians who fail to denounce such awful and dangerous ideas.

The post The Democratic Socialists of America Platform appeared first on Reason Magazine.

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The Gas Station Gets Its Gas: NANO’s Laser Enrichment Partner Takes Delivery Of Its First Uranium

The Gas Station Gets Its Gas: NANO’s Laser Enrichment Partner Takes Delivery Of Its First Uranium

Last week NANO Nuclear bought the license to handle the back end of the fuel cycle. This week, the front end showed up in a cylinder.

On Thursday morning, LIS Technologies (LIST), the privately held laser enrichment company in which NANO Nuclear (NNE) is a shareholder and strategic partner, announced that it has accepted its first shipment of uranium hexafluoride (UF6) at its Demonstration Test Loop facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on the footprint of the former K-25 gaseous diffusion plant, a cornerstone of the Manhattan Project. In other words, uranium is back at K-25, only this time it’s going in front of a laser.

It’s a milestone that matters well beyond a private startup’s press release, because, as we explained in “NANO Nuclear Buys The One Thing You Can’t Speed Up: A Fuel-Cycle License” last week, NANO is quietly assembling something no other microreactor developer has: an end-to-end domestic fuel chain, from enrichment to deconversion to fabrication to transport to reactor. Today, the enrichment link went from slideware to “licensed material on site.”

What Actually Happened

The UF6 will feed LIST’s CRISLA-4G process (Chemical Reaction by Isotope Selective Laser Activation), a patented technique that uses infrared lasers to selectively excite molecules of the desired uranium isotope so they can be separated from the rest. LIST says the shipment lets it begin proof-of-concept testing, process optimization, materials qualification, UF6 systems commissioning and integrated loop testing.

COO Lloyd Jollay noted the shipment arrived “in just under a year” after LIST received its Radioactive Material License from the State of Tennessee (Dec 23, 2025), and added a detail that says a lot about the state of the US fuel supply chain: the shipment required developing a new process with LIST’s supplier, because the quantity was smaller than what the industry normally moves. When the system has to invent a procedure just to ship less uranium, you know it was built for a handful of giant customers and nobody else.

President and co-founder Christo Liebenberg laid out the next step:

“Over the past 2 years, LIST has worked to engineer and integrate all of its proprietary laser enrichment hardware. This UF₆ feedstock will enable us to optimize our laser enrichment process in the coming months and mature the technology to a Technology Readiness Level 5 on the nine-level scale used by the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Energy to assess technology maturity.”

Translation: the hardware is built, the uranium is in the building, and the next few months are about proving the laser separates isotopes the way the patents say it does. TRL 5 means component validation in a relevant environment. It is not a commercial plant (that’s TRL 9), and LIST’s own fine print says it can only make realistic economic predictions after a Phase 2 pilot plant. But every enrichment technology that has ever worked had to pass through exactly this stage, and most of the would-be US enrichers are still well short of it.

The Bigger Plan: “LIST Island” And Project F.U.E.L.

The test loop is the appetizer: Executive Chairman and CEO Jay Yu (who is also NANO’s founder) tied today’s shipment to LIST’s flagship commercial site on the 206-acre “LIST Island” in the heart of the K-25 zone, the base for what the company calls Project F.U.E.L.

The numbers behind it are not small. In January, LIST announced plans to invest $1.38 billion in a commercial-scale laser enrichment plant in Oak Ridge, after buying the former Duct Island for $8 million and closing a 240% oversubscribed $17 million round that took total capital raised to roughly $64 million. Groundbreaking is targeted for 2026, subject to licensing and permitting, with initial commercial operations targeted before 2030, which, not coincidentally, is right when Goldman expects the uranium supply deficit to bite (more below).

For context on how fast things are moving: LIST’s seed round in August 2024 raised $11.88 million. NANO wrote a $2 million check into it. Two years later, the company has a state license, a site, a nine-figure plant plan and its first uranium. That is not how the nuclear industry usually measures time.

Why NANO Shareholders Should Care

NANO doesn’t own LIST outright, but the two are joined at the hip: they are related parties through common ownership and shared officers and directors, and under their November 2024 collaboration agreement, LIST is NANO’s preferred supplier of enriched UF6. More interesting is the economic structure the two laid out at the time: the parties intend that LIST will provide NANO with enriched UF6 at no cost, to be fabricated and sold to customers, with LIST compensated through a profit-sharing arrangement still to be agreed.

And here’s the part the market seems to keep missing. Under that same agreement, NANO’s job was to build the “supportive capabilities” on either side of LIST’s enrichment: deconversion and fuel fabrication. Which is exactly what NANO went out and bought last week, when it paid $13.5 million for the NRC-licensed Radnostix deconversion site near Hobbs, NM.

Put the two announcements side by side and the plan comes into focus:

  • Enrichment: LIST’s CRISLA-4G laser process, now running on real UF6 in Oak Ridge (today), with Enveniam as lead integrator for the commercial plant (Sep 5).
  • Deconversion and fluorine recovery: the 40-year NRC license in Lea County, NM, acquired last week.
  • Fuel supply and fabrication: the HALEU Energy Fuel subsidiary.
  • Transport: Secured Transportation Services, the $13M acquisition that made NANO revenue-generating overnight.
  • Reactors: KRONOS at UIUC, where the NRC has begun its technical review of the construction permit, plus ZEUS and the space-focused LOKI.

Here is the map we drew last week. As of this morning, the enrichment box at the top has something in it:

Regular readers will recall that NANO’s own pitch put the logic best back in May: “what good is a fancy new car if there’s no gas stations to fill it?” Last week NANO bought a licensed place to handle the exhaust. Today the gas station got its first delivery of gas.

Why Enrichment Is The Choke Point

None of this would matter if fuel were easy. It isn’t. As DOE Deputy Secretary James Danly put it recently, “If we are going to have this nuclear renaissance, we are not going to be able to do it without fuel.” The US has exactly one commercial enrichment plant (Urenco’s Eunice facility, 30 miles from NANO’s new New Mexico site), the Russian import ban waivers expire in January 2028, and SWU prices are sitting at all-time highs.

Goldman’s clean energy strategist Brian Lee made the same point in his note on the $120 billion US-Korea reactor package last week, warning that the eight new large reactors are “likely to further exacerbate the anticipated uranium supply deficit in the 2030 time frame” (full note available to pro subs). That’s eight gigawatt-scale reactors’ worth of new enrichment demand landing on a Western supply chain that is already short before a single SMR is switched on.

Goldman’s own uranium supply/demand math shows exactly where the trigger point sits: after raising its demand forecast to account for SMRs (while leaving production unchanged), the bank’s U3O8 demand line breaks above supply in 2026-27 and never looks back, with the gap blowing out after 2030 as mine supply peaks and then rolls over. By the mid-2040s demand is roughly triple supply.

Which is also why Washington is throwing money at the problem. In January, DOE handed out $900 million each to Centrus’ American Centrifuge Operating, General Matter and Orano, plus $28 million to Global Laser Enrichment. LIST, despite being one of the six companies selected for DOE’s LEU Enrichment Acquisition Program in December 2024, got nothing in that round. Getting real UF6 into a real laser loop is the most direct way to change that the next time the checkbook opens.

What Could Go Wrong

  • Lasers have a history. The US already spent billions on laser enrichment once: the government’s AVLIS program was shelved in 1999 when USEC pulled the plug. GE-Hitachi’s SILEX-based Global Laser Enrichment has been at it for over a decade and still isn’t commercial. CRISLA is a different (molecular, lower-power) approach, but “laser enrichment is around the corner” has been said before.
  • TRL 5 is the middle, not the end. The Phase 2 pilot plant, NRC licensing for a commercial facility and the $1.38 billion financing all still lie ahead, and LIST is pre-revenue.
  • Related-party optics. Common ownership and shared directors between NANO and LIST will invite scrutiny of the eventual profit-sharing terms. The 2024 deal was approved by NANO’s independent directors, but the market will want to see the final economics.

Bottom Line

Jay Yu summed up LIST’s goal this morning as becoming “a world leader in cost-effective and energy-efficient enrichment.” That’s still a promise. But a week ago NANO’s enrichment link was a license and a test loop with no uranium in it. Today it has feedstock, and NANO has a licensed site waiting at the other end of the chain.

We have argued for years that modular, behind-the-meter reactors are the only real long-term answer to AI’s insatiable power demand, and that whoever controls the fuel will collect the rent long after the reactor startups finish raising money. NANO, it seems, read the same memo: while most of its peers are still waiting in line for fuel, NANO is building the line. With the stock still trading like a single-reactor story, we suspect the market will figure that out (later rather than sooner, as usual).

The next test: LIST’s optimization results over the “coming months” and whether it hits TRL 5. We’ll be watching.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 10/08/2026 – 10:55

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Explosions Rock Riyadh’s International Airport Amid Houthi Attack, Travelers Evacuate

Explosions Rock Riyadh’s International Airport Amid Houthi Attack, Travelers Evacuate

King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh has come under Houthi attack once again on Thursday, and may have suffered a hit, as eyewitnesses have told Reuters of smoke rising from an aircraft at the major travel hub in the Saudi capital. Some new, unverified shocking images emerging…

Witnesses were also cited in The Associates Press as having heard “several explosions” – after which an urgent evacuation notice was given.

The Houthis in Yemen have been going after airports as well as Aramco oil facilities. In two separate attacks on Tuesday and Wednesday, the kingdom’s Abha International Airport and King Khalid International Airport were targeted by Houthi missiles.

The AP details of the Thursday flight stoppage in Riyadh as follows:

King Khalid International Airport “closed again,” the Flightradar24 monitor said Thursday afternoon on X not long after the blasts. “Last landing 80+ minutes ago. Last take off 90+ minutes ago.”

Fire and ambulance crews deployed and smoke was visible, the witness said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

The witness said outgoing flights were halted and passengers were instructed to leave checked-in luggage behind and evacuate. It was not immediately clear how many flights were disrupted.

The prior 72 hours has seen three civilians killed and 36 injured in Houthi-claimed attacks across Saudi Arabia. “An Egyptian and an Algerian national were killed at Abha airport, and a Sudanese national was killed at the airport in Riyadh, the agency said, with 36 people wounded in the attacks,” Middle East Eye details.

 

On Thursday, Saudi-led coalition spokesman Turki al-Maliki said his forces intercepted and destroyed a pair of Houthi ballistic missiles on Riyadh and towards Khamis Mushait.

As for the latest airport attack, which has reportedly shut down the international hub, the Houthis are claiming responsibility and say there was a direct hit and damage, while Saudi authorities have remained silent in the initial hours.

All of this, plus last evening’s headlines that President Trump is mulling a new bombing raid on Iran possibly before the November midterm elections, has pushed oil prices higher throughout the Thursday morning hours…

Over in Yemen, fighting has intensified in the Taiz region and in rural areas. Al Jazeera details:

Fighting is raging in al-Shamayatayn, al-Maafer and the southern and western countryside of Taiz governorate.

The Houthis are pushing into rural areas that have not seen conflict for years, aiming to open a supply route because their lines towards al-Kadaha and al-Waziiya, which link Aden, Lahij and Taiz, are nearly cut off by advancing government forces.

Those forces are moving towards al-Waziiya and the Kahboub Mountains overlooking Bab al-Mandeb.

Government forces expected a dangerous escalation over the next 48 hours after the defense minister said Houthi-held areas will be recaptured soon. Government forces reported more than 2,000 operations, including attacks, supply line cuts, repelled attacks and territory retaken.

The three deaths reported by the Saudis on Wednesday are the first civilian deaths reported in the kingdom since the conflict with the Houthis was renewed several weeks ago.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is likely going to press allies harder to join the counteroffensive against the Houthis in Yemen, after Pakistan and Turkey have announced defense assistance based on the Mecca Defense Pact.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 10/08/2026 – 10:40

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/lrqoPkW Tyler Durden

Consumers May Be Eligible For Up To $280 In Equifax Credit Reporting Settlement

Consumers May Be Eligible For Up To $280 In Equifax Credit Reporting Settlement

Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times,

Millions of consumers whose credit information was inaccurately reported by Equifax because of a coding error may be eligible for compensation from a proposed $100 million class-action settlement.

Equifax Inc. corporate offices in Atlanta on Sept. 8, 2017. Tami Chappell/Reuters

The settlement covers U.S. consumers for whom Equifax reported a credit score or credit attribute to a third party between March 17, 2022, and April 8, 2022, that differed from what would have been reported without the coding issue, according to the court-approved settlement website.

Consumers who received an email or mailed notice are considered settlement class members based on Equifax’s records.

To receive money, eligible consumers must submit a valid claim by Dec. 28. Claims can be filed online through the settlement website or submitted by mail.

It is currently estimated that each claimant could receive between $95 and $280. The actual amount will depend on how much money remains after court-approved attorneys’ fees, litigation expenses, administrative costs, and other expenses are deducted, as well as the number of valid claims filed.

Attorneys representing the class have said that the settlement could cover roughly 4 million people nationwide.

Those who object to the settlement’s terms or wish to exclude themselves from it must do so by Nov. 27.

The settlement has received preliminary approval from a federal judge but is not yet final. A final approval hearing is scheduled for Jan. 22, 2027.

The settlement would resolve nearly four years of litigation stemming from a coding problem in one of Equifax’s computer systems in the spring of 2022.

According to the complaint, Equifax allegedly provided inaccurate scores on consumers applying for auto loans, mortgages, and credit cards to a range of banks and other lenders.

The scores were sometimes off by 20 points or more in either direction, the plaintiffs said, potentially affecting the interest rates consumers were offered or whether their applications were approved.

The plaintiffs alleged that Equifax violated the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, which requires credit-reporting agencies to follow reasonable procedures to ensure the maximum possible accuracy of the information they provide.

Equifax has denied wrongdoing and has not admitted that it violated the law.

In August 2022, the company acknowledged that it had identified a coding issue in a system used to calculate certain elements, or attributes, of credit scores. Equifax stated at the time that fewer than 300,000 consumers experienced a score change of 25 points or more.

“While the score may have shifted, a score shift does not necessarily mean that a consumer’s credit decision was negatively impacted,” the company stated at that time.

The episode was a major setback for Equifax, which was also the target of a massive data breach in 2017 that exposed the personal information of nearly 150 million Americans.

Federal prosecutors later charged four members of China’s military with hacking Equifax and stealing sensitive personal data, including names, Social Security numbers, and birth dates.

In the aftermath of the 2017 data breach, Equifax agreed to pay at least $575 million to settle investigations and claims stemming from the breach. Under that settlement, consumers were offered free credit monitoring or the option to seek a cash payment, initially advertised at up to $125.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 10/08/2026 – 10:20

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/EgyYznh Tyler Durden

Iran Expands Tanker Assaults Beyond Narrow Confines Of Hormuz In Rare Escalation

Iran Expands Tanker Assaults Beyond Narrow Confines Of Hormuz In Rare Escalation

Iran has significantly widened its maritime operations by shifting attacks beyond the narrow confines of the Strait of Hormuz into the broader waters of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Over a recent 24-hour window, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) may have struck two commercial ships outside traditional chokepoints, including a vessel off Qatar, as well as a Very Large Crude Carrier near the United Arab Emirates. The latter instance has less confirmation at this point.

This escalation indicates a tactical shift, given the IRGC is no longer waiting for vessels to explicitly violate its designated maritime enforcement corridors. Instead, any ship suspected of trying to bypass Iranian blockades now faces active targeting across the entire regional waterway. This at least is what Tehran is likely seeking to demonstrate to Washington and its Gulf allies, and comes after record numbers of vessels have been making it through so far this month under US naval watch and protocol.

Source: UKMTO

The first of these incidents, which was widely reported overnight and is now being given greater confirmation Thursday, occurred 51 nautical miles north of Madinat ash Shamal, Qatar. The vessel was struck multiple times, in what appears an effort to specifically to kill crew members. An unknown amount of casualties has been reported:

It said there were multiple casualties as a result of the attack. The extent of the casualties is unknown, however, in previous UKMTO warnings the word “casualties” has been used to describe seafarer deaths rather than injuries.

The Guardian details further of the unusual location of the attack:

The vessel was in the Gulf, about 500km (300 miles) west of the strait of Hormuz, when it reported being struck “by multiple projectiles”, the UK Maritime Trade Operations said on Wednesday. The UK authority did not specify the origin of the ship.

Wednesday’s attack comes as strikes on tankers sailing through the strait of Hormuz hit their ⁠highest weekly level since the Iran war began, according to maritime security firms, as oil prices climbed above $100 per barrel.

Oil Price writes, “A tanker has been struck by multiple projectiles north of Qatar’s tip in the first such attack deep within the Persian Gulf in nearly a month.” Not only have drone and missile attacks on vessels picked up over the last nearly two weeks, but casualties as well.

“In the ‌week to 5 October, there were at least 12 attacks ‌on oil, liquefied natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas tankers around the strait, according to data from three security sources,” continues The Guardian. “On Tuesday, India’s ​foreign ministry said 12 crew members were injured after an attack on a Panama-flagged oil tanker passing through the strait of Hormuz.”

The second of these events, off UAE, has been less confirmed. Newsquawk notes:

Oil tanker assembly site reportedly explodes near UAE, Mizan reports; “Ocean sources reported the detection of a fire in the Gulf of Oman, approximately 30 nautical miles east of Fujairah”

And via DropSite News:

Maritime and satellite open source channels have been observing a fire, with potential US military assets circling the area, at the below location:

If this second attack is confirmed, it marks a serious escalation in terms of Iran’s efforts to extend its own blockade and ‘answer’ to so many ships getting through under the US Navy’s protocol.

More Latest Regional Developments

via Newsquawk

  • The White House has asked the Pentagon to develop strike options against Iranian targets that could be exercised ahead of the midterms, according to two administration officials. The planning underscores just how much the president wants to reduce gas prices and demonstrate progress in the conflict before the vote. The Atlantic
  • The US military has been ordered to be ready for possible Iran strikes as President Trump weighs the timing, with the Pentagon said to have instructed CENTCOM several days ago to conclude preparations for resuming major combat operations in Iran; any campaign is expected to be a joint US-Israeli one including large bombing of Iranian energy, infrastructure and nuclear targets. Axios
  • US President Trump stated that he doesn’t think an Iran deal is something he wants to do. It was separately reported that Trump said the Iranians are ready to offer us anything to stop what’s happening, even though an agreement with them is not the option he truly wants, while Trump was also reported to say that Witkoff is now working on reaching an agreement with Iran and is making very good progress, according to Al Jazeera.
  • The US military has been ordered to be ready for possible Iran strikes as President Trump weighs the timing, with the Pentagon said to have instructed US CENTCOM several days ago to conclude preparations for resuming major combat operations in Iran, according to Axios. The directive didn’t include a specific date for launching strikes and President Trump hasn’t made any final decisions, although US and Israeli sources said it could happen before the US midterm election. Furthermore, it was stated that if major combat operations resume, they are likely to be a joint US and Israeli campaign and expected to include large bombing of Iranian energy, infrastructure and nuclear targets.
  • US President Trump and his national security team have discussed possibly resuming large-scale US military operations in Iran in the coming weeks, including the option of launching strikes before the midterm elections next month, according to NBC.
  • The US is stepping up preparations and has completed operational plans in case President Trump orders strikes against Iran, i24 News reported citing sources. The report added that forces at Fort Bragg are ready to deploy to any theatre within 18 hours.
  • Iran’s working assumption is that there will be a US attack, according to Jerusalem Post’s Stein, citing two regional diplomats, while the debate in Tehran is if they should attack first.
  • US CENTCOM rejected IRGC claims that the Strait of Hormuz is closed and that Iran has full control over it, while it stated that traffic is flowing through the strait carrying commercial goods and energy supplies, including 20mln bbls of crude.
  •  Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Baghaei said Iran’s considerations and conditions for ending the war on all fronts and restoring security to the Persian Gulf region and the Strait have been clearly and firmly explained, and the necessary response to US proposals will be provided through mediators. He also stated that Iran will continue its efforts to strengthen trust and interaction between regional countries, while he stated that Tehran has spared no effort, in consultation with Oman as another coastal state, to restore security to the Strait of Hormuz, and the two sides had agreed on the geographical coordinates for safe transit routes and on how the agreement will be presented internationally, while the agreement between Iran and Oman on the safe routes of Hormuz will soon be reflected in international references.
  • Iranian intelligence services are reportedly targeting the US Ramstein and Spangdahlem air bases in Germany, WiWo reported. The report added that Iranian intelligence services are reportedly also targeting other US bases in Europe and planning complex attacks, with the UK also said to be a potential target.
  • Pakistan’s Army Chief said they are working to reduce the differences between the US and Iran, according to Nour News.
  • Reports of explosions heard and fires visible in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, according to Sabereen News. Satellite images also showed smoke rising from the Abqaiq oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, and a fire at both Abqaiq facilities and Tanjib gas plant.
  • Oil tanker assembly site reportedly exploded near UAE, Mizan reported; “Ocean sources reported the detection of a fire in the Gulf of Oman, approximately 30 nautical miles east of Fujairah.”
  •  Yemen’s Houthis said they attacked King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh with a ballistic missile and stated Saudi airspace will be a target of operations except over Mecca and Medina.
  • Syria officially denied reports of sending troops to Yemen, with its presidential media advisor stating the reports are lies with no truth, and affirmed that Syria stands with Saudi Arabia’s security.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 10/08/2026 – 09:45

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/tR8d3DK Tyler Durden

Price Controls Don’t Work. So Why Do So Many Democrats and Republicans Love Them?


U.S. Capitol building in the background and a pair of scissors cutting a dollar | Tupungato/Thyrymn/Dreamstime/Midjourney/Fatima Ruiz.

Most Americans apparently agree on at least one thing. Unfortunately, it’s something dangerous: price controls.

A new Wall Street Journal poll finds remarkable bipartisan support for government limits on prices, with 93 percent of Democrats and 83 percent of Republicans supporting capping prescription drug prices. Nearly four in five voters support capping credit card interest rates at 10 percent. And large majorities favor capping child care charges for working families.

The Journal describes these policies as “populist.” That’s fair, although populism means something more specific than just being supported by the people (or the consumer). Political scientists generally define populism as a political approach that pits ordinary people against an elite group that’s seen as serving its own interests. Populism can therefore come from the left or the right, which helps explain today’s strange alliances.

Democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and GOP Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Miss.) agree on a 10 percent credit card interest rate cap. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) can champion limits on child care costs while President Donald Trump creates a government website directing consumers toward discounted prescription drugs. Different political tribes are embracing the idea that if something costs more than most people think it should cost, the government should make it less expensive.

But if the idea is to advocate for ordinary people against powerful interests, an irony lurks.

First, few people are as powerful or more self-interested than those in government. As Ronald Reagan famously observed, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” It’s not just because the government has the power to coerce—to take resources as glibly as it hands them out. It’s that government officials have an incentive to promise voters things for free, and those promises are impossible to fulfill. Reagan knew how easily government intervention and bureaucracy can complicate economic issues and hurt those it set out to help.

The price controls that so many Americans now clamor for are perhaps the best example. Behind their support is an assumption that prices are just the product of the desires of powerful and heartless sellers. The reality is quite different.

Prices are the manifestations of countless decisions by buyers and sellers, each acting on individual knowledge no one else has. No buyer’s budget and needs, and no seller’s costs and offerings, are identical. Only a free market can account for this and decide whether a price sticks. Creating laws to cap prices doesn’t make scarcity go away. It just shows up as empty shelves instead of a market-determined price.

Consider credit cards. A 10 percent interest rate cap sounds lovely. Many Americans pay twice that. Why not simply tell banks that’s the limit? Because an interest rate isn’t an arbitrary number. It is the price of credit that reflects funding costs, administrative expenses, and, not least, expected default risks.

Congress can cap the rate, but it can’t cap the risk. When the price a lender can charge falls below what the risk costs, lending stops. Lenders turn down applicants, cut credit limits, and close accounts. The borrowers the cap was supposed to protect still need the money. They end up at the payday lender or the pawn shop instead. In other words, interest rate caps hurt the economically vulnerable people they are supposed to help.

The same problem is even more stark with child care. The service is expensive because caring for small children requires a lot of labor and demand is high, especially when governments subsidize it through vouchers and tax credits. Meanwhile, state and local authorities restrict child care supply through staff-to-child ratios, credential mandates, zoning bans on home-based providers, costly building codes, and more. No wonder prices are so high.

Capping those prices won’t help. If providers cannot cover their expenses at the mandated price, some will reduce capacity. Others will close. The parents lucky enough to secure a remaining slot might pay less. Others will find no available care. The government cannot decree the additional workers and facilities necessary to fill the gap it created.

Prescription drugs are more complicated, but the basic tradeoff remains. Reducing drug prices can benefit patients today, at least on the surface. However, developing new drugs is extraordinarily expensive and risky. Expected future revenues help determine how much companies invest in research. Thus, capping prices eventually reduces the number of new drugs that reach the market. Over time, fewer lives are saved.

That example also illustrates why price controls are such seductive politics. Their benefits are highly and immediately visible, while their costs are often harder to spot.

Politicians can legislate lower prices; they cannot legislate away scarcity, other costs, or risks. If populism really means standing up for ordinary people, then its policies should be judged not by popularity but by how they affect ordinary people. And for the average American, price controls hurt.

COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

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Can a Chatbot Prompt Be a Punishable Threat?

From Straight Arrow News (Devin Pavlou):

One morning in late September, Carli Heller opened up an artificial intelligence chatbot and began venting. She took aim at the Lee County Sheriff’s Office in Florida, saying she was “going to shoot up the sheriff’s right the f— now,” she wrote to the phone app, according to a probable cause statement. Heller continued venting a day later, writing that it was “100% LAST CHANCE” and that she “GOT A NEW F—— GUN TODAY.”

Anthropic’s safety features triggered and sent the chats to its human review team to analyze. The team believed there was a big enough risk to escalate the risk to the FBI, which then notified the sheriff’s office. Authorities arrested Heller on Sept. 30, charging her with making a written or electronic threat of a mass shooting or act of terrorism, a felony under Florida law to which she pleaded not guilty.

Heller admitted writing the messages but denied any intent to carry them out, the report says. She pleaded not guilty.

I doubt that this is a punishable threat, at least under the Florida law, Fla. Stats. § 836.10, unless there is evidence that the woman subjectively realized at the time that the message would be communicated to a human being who would perceive it as a threat. T.R.W. v. State (Fla. App. 2023) makes clear that “To prove the commission of a violation of section 836.10, the trier of fact must find that the defendant transmitted a communication for the purpose of issuing a threat, or with knowledge that the communication will be viewed as a threat.” Simply typing a prompt into a chatbot, expecting it to be viewed only by the software, wouldn’t qualify.

The more recent Supreme Court decision in Counterman v. Colorado (2023) says that a state may criminalize a statement if the defendant is reckless about the possibility of its being viewed as a threat, and not just if the defendant had the purpose of issuing a threat or knew that the statement would be viewed as a threat. Recklessness is defined as “consciously disregard[ing] a substantial [and unjustifiable] risk” that a human would see the statement and perceive it as threatening. Florida courts thus may allow punishment for reckless threats, without violating the First Amendment—though they could also stick with T.R.W. and require purpose or knowledge. See, e.g., C.R. v. Burke (Fla. App. 2026) (following T.R.W.‘s purpose/knowledge requirement, three years after Counterman was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court).

But in any event, it seems unlikely that the woman was consciously thinking “This might get read by a human, who might feel threatened, but I don’t care; I’ll just type it in.”  Rather, it seems much likelier that she was just assuming, as most of us do when using a chatbot, that we’re talking solely to the machine and that our input will never reach a human.  And if that’s so, then her statement just isn’t a threat punishable under section 836.10.

And of course a prosecution would have to prove the woman’s mental state beyond a reasonable doubt. So even if a jury thinks the woman might have been aware of the risk that this would be read by a human, that’s not enough: It would have to be convinced that there’s no reasonable possibility that she just assumed the text would go only to the chatbot. Such a finding of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt by the jury strikes me as quite unlikely, unless the accused had made some statement saying that she was hoping the statement would reach a human or at least knew that was going to happen (or maybe that she knew it was fairly likely).

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My Review of Ted Cruz’s Biography of Justice Thomas

Civitas Outlook published my review of Senator Ted Cruz’s biography about Justice Clarence Thomas. The introduction sketches why I think so highly of Cruz’s book, and why I think not-so-highly of other Supreme Court books.

Three general types of books about the Supreme Court exist. First, most books are based entirely on publicly known information. These books, often written by academics, rely primarily on the author’s opinion and analysis. Second, some books provide inside information about the Court that largely comes from anonymous sources. These books, usually authored by journalists, are intriguing but are impossible to verify because unnamed sources have unknown biases. Third, few books deftly blend public and private information, most of which is directly attributed to named sources. With these tomes, readers learn directly from the principals, and there is no speculation about anonymous sources. This final category, usually an authorized biography, is the rarest and most useful because few authors have earned such trust at the Court.

Senator Ted Cruz’s new biography about Justice Clarence Thomas, Going Further, is a must-read contribution to this third genre of Supreme Court books. Indeed, Cruz is uniquely qualified to write this book because he has observed the third branch from three perspectives over three decades: as a law clerk to Chief Justice Rehnquist, as a Supreme Court litigator in public and private practice, and as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Most importantly, Cruz has earned the trust of Clarence Thomas. If “somebody else was asking,” Thomas said, “I would say no. But if it’s you writing, I’m glad to do it.” In late 2025, Cruz visited the Thomas chambers six times over six months, compiling nine hours of on-the-record interviews. Justice Thomas did not speak “on background” like other Justices trying to improve their reputation. Thomas was an open book.

Often, when I read a book about the Supreme Court, there is little new material. Indeed, you can safely skip most books in the first category unless you find the author’s perspective agreeable. And when I read a book in the second category, I am usually titillated, but left to wonder, “How accurate is this information?” But I could not put Cruz’s book down, because virtually every attribution is backed up by one of his sit-downs with the Justice. Moreover, as Cruz acknowledges, “some of what Justice Thomas said surprises me.” Ditto. I hope that the full or partial transcripts of those interviews might be published in the future.

The conclusion, I think, sums up who Justice Thomas is:

Since President Trump’s re-election, some conservatives have called on Justice Thomas, as well as Justice Alito, to retire. These entreaties fell on deaf ears. As Justice Thomas has said many times, he doesn’t care what people write about him. But a resignation would go against everything Thomas stands for. As Thomas told Cruz, “If you collapse at the end of this, you’ve lived a noble life.”

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Adler v. Kochan on Suncor Energy v. Boulder County

On Wednesday I recorded an episode of the “Blessings of Liberty” podcast, hosted by Jeffrey Rosen, on Suncor Energy v. Boulder County. I was joined in the discussion by my friend Donald Kochan, Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Law & Economics Center at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.

As one might anticipate, we have different views on the proper outcome in the Suncor case. I think our exchange helped elucidate what is at issue in the case, but you can judge for yourself below.

For more on Suncor, here are (some of) my posts on the subject (with more to come):

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Price Controls Don’t Work. So Why Do So Many Democrats and Republicans Love Them?


U.S. Capitol building in the background and a pair of scissors cutting a dollar | Tupungato/Thyrymn/Dreamstime/Midjourney/Fatima Ruiz.

Most Americans apparently agree on at least one thing. Unfortunately, it’s something dangerous: price controls.

A new Wall Street Journal poll finds remarkable bipartisan support for government limits on prices, with 93 percent of Democrats and 83 percent of Republicans supporting capping prescription drug prices. Nearly four in five voters support capping credit card interest rates at 10 percent. And large majorities favor capping child care charges for working families.

The Journal describes these policies as “populist.” That’s fair, although populism means something more specific than just being supported by the people (or the consumer). Political scientists generally define populism as a political approach that pits ordinary people against an elite group that’s seen as serving its own interests. Populism can therefore come from the left or the right, which helps explain today’s strange alliances.

Democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and GOP Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Miss.) agree on a 10 percent credit card interest rate cap. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) can champion limits on child care costs while President Donald Trump creates a government website directing consumers toward discounted prescription drugs. Different political tribes are embracing the idea that if something costs more than most people think it should cost, the government should make it less expensive.

But if the idea is to advocate for ordinary people against powerful interests, an irony lurks.

First, few people are as powerful or more self-interested than those in government. As Ronald Reagan famously observed, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” It’s not just because the government has the power to coerce—to take resources as glibly as it hands them out. It’s that government officials have an incentive to promise voters things for free, and those promises are impossible to fulfill. Reagan knew how easily government intervention and bureaucracy can complicate economic issues and hurt those it set out to help.

The price controls that so many Americans now clamor for are perhaps the best example. Behind their support is an assumption that prices are just the product of the desires of powerful and heartless sellers. The reality is quite different.

Prices are the manifestations of countless decisions by buyers and sellers, each acting on individual knowledge no one else has. No buyer’s budget and needs, and no seller’s costs and offerings, are identical. Only a free market can account for this and decide whether a price sticks. Creating laws to cap prices doesn’t make scarcity go away. It just shows up as empty shelves instead of a market-determined price.

Consider credit cards. A 10 percent interest rate cap sounds lovely. Many Americans pay twice that. Why not simply tell banks that’s the limit? Because an interest rate isn’t an arbitrary number. It is the price of credit that reflects funding costs, administrative expenses, and, not least, expected default risks.

Congress can cap the rate, but it can’t cap the risk. When the price a lender can charge falls below what the risk costs, lending stops. Lenders turn down applicants, cut credit limits, and close accounts. The borrowers the cap was supposed to protect still need the money. They end up at the payday lender or the pawn shop instead. In other words, interest rate caps hurt the economically vulnerable people they are supposed to help.

The same problem is even more stark with child care. The service is expensive because caring for small children requires a lot of labor and demand is high, especially when governments subsidize it through vouchers and tax credits. Meanwhile, state and local authorities restrict child care supply through staff-to-child ratios, credential mandates, zoning bans on home-based providers, costly building codes, and more. No wonder prices are so high.

Capping those prices won’t help. If providers cannot cover their expenses at the mandated price, some will reduce capacity. Others will close. The parents lucky enough to secure a remaining slot might pay less. Others will find no available care. The government cannot decree the additional workers and facilities necessary to fill the gap it created.

Prescription drugs are more complicated, but the basic tradeoff remains. Reducing drug prices can benefit patients today, at least on the surface. However, developing new drugs is extraordinarily expensive and risky. Expected future revenues help determine how much companies invest in research. Thus, capping prices eventually reduces the number of new drugs that reach the market. Over time, fewer lives are saved.

That example also illustrates why price controls are such seductive politics. Their benefits are highly and immediately visible, while their costs are often harder to spot.

Politicians can legislate lower prices; they cannot legislate away scarcity, other costs, or risks. If populism really means standing up for ordinary people, then its policies should be judged not by popularity but by how they affect ordinary people. And for the average American, price controls hurt.

COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

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