American progressives continue to advocate for a Medicare for All system, pointing to the Old Continent as a utopian model of universal access to health care. However, in Europe, systems in which the state functions as both direct provider and single-payer monopolist continue to fail.

Contrary to the narrative pushed by certain political circles, Europeans are increasingly adopting private health insurance. The structural flaws in countries that double down on centralized, state-run models show notable consistencies: swelling waiting lists, health care professionals fleeing a public sector constrained by rigid salary scales, and a systemic inability to allocate resources where they are needed most.

In the United Kingdom, whose famous National Health Service (NHS) served as the inspiration for public systems across Europe, roughly 71% of adults now say they would consider using private health care. Meanwhile, more than half of adults aged 35 to 44 expect to do so within the next year, a direct result of record-breaking waiting lists. In England, there are about 7 million people waiting for hospital treatment. The statutory promise of treatment within 18 weeks has failed consistently since 2016, and more than a third of emergency room patients wait more than four hours, a delay linked to estimates of over 1,300 excess deaths per month.

In Sweden, a country steeped in social-democratic tradition, over 826,000 citizens, roughly 8% of the population, hold private health insurance to bypass the sluggishness of a taxpayer-funded system.

In Portugal, a country with below-average European incomes where the tax burden on families is among the highest in the EU relative to earnings, the recurring closure of emergency rooms and maternity wards has driven more than 35% of the population to obtain private insurance. Despite financial difficulties, many families pay out of pocket simply to secure basic care.

This health care model, the Beveridge model, operates as a state monopoly. In doing so, central planning demonstrates that removing price mechanisms does not eliminate scarcity; it merely rations care through waiting lists and administrative bureaucracy.

There is another health care system in Europe, the Bismarck model, adopted by nations such as the Netherlands and Germany. Although based on mandatory social insurance, Bismarck systems achieve superior access by fostering competition between public and private providers, granting patients greater freedom of choice while preserving universal coverage. In the Netherlands, basic insurance is purchased from competing private insurers. In Germany, patients can freely choose their sickness fund and physician. According to recent data, only 0.3% of Dutch patients and 0.6% of German patients go without care due to waiting lists.

In Bismarckian systems, long-term sustainability depends on private complementarity to prevent capacity bottlenecks. However, in countries that cling to the rigidity of the Beveridge model, the practical result is double taxation: Europeans end up paying for health care twice, first through heavy taxes to fund a public service that fails to treat them in time, and second out of their own pockets through private insurance.

In practice, the state monopoly’s own utopian promise is what drives citizens into the free market. The growth of Europe’s private health care sector is not an ideological assault on the social safety net, but rather an inevitable consequence of its structural limitations.

As ideologues and lawmakers in Washington continue to present single-payer state financing as a progressive solution, Europe’s real-world evidence offers an economic lesson: scarcity does not disappear by banning the market; it merely changes shape. When the state assumes a financing monopoly, resource allocation ceases to respond to actual patient demand and is instead managed by budgetary and administrative criteria, with negative results not only for health but also for overall economic productivity.

The expansion of the private sector in Europe is the result of a practical necessity. Turning to private care after already paying high taxes is the way millions of families attempt to protect their health when the public system subjects them to months of waiting.

The United States of America should reinforce what Europe is only now beginning to rediscover: competition and freedom of choice remain the best guarantees of access, efficiency, and quality.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is not a publication most would be familiar with. It is meant as a repository of overviews of big topics in philosophy broadly defined, inclusive of political theory. As such, entries added to it are unlikely to generate strong responses by the experts deeply familiar with each individual entry. Every rule has exceptions though.

Recently, Chiara Cordelli, a political philosopher at the University of Chicago, delivered her “three years in the making” commissioned piece on “capitalism.” The piece went viral. The reason that it sparked such attention is that it read to many as basically a rehash of old online talking points spewed by more refined trolls. That is unfair but there is truth to the claim that there is no smoke without fire. It is indeed a boring “takedown” of capitalism.

Let me be precise here: the problem is not that the entry is critical of capitalism. There is nothing wrong with criticising capitalism, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman or classical liberalism. The problem is that much of the discussion does not pass even a modest ideological Turing test. An ideological Turing test asks whether one can state an opposing position so accurately that its proponents would recognise the argument as their own before one proceeds to criticise it. Here, too often, they would not.

This points to a common reflex in debates over “capitalism” and “neoliberalism.” The vocabulary is often not used to define but rather rationalise already-held ideological priors. The characteristics one dislikes are incorporated into the definition of the system, after which those same characteristics are rediscovered as criticisms of it. The conclusion has, in part, been smuggled into the premises. But these end up being recycled over and over as one scholar states it before another regurgitates it back as fact and so forth.

Some examples help show this usual reflex. When describing the “market capitalism” advanced by Hayek and Friedman, Cordelli claims that they believed capitalism required “complete, private, and unregulated markets,” and that this stemmed from their acceptance of a “general equilibrium” view, with the implication that “capitalism goes wrong when it is politically interfered with.” But both claims—which underlie much of the entry—are massively incorrect. Not minor quibbles, mind you, but major and easily verifiable errors. Friedman initially advocated antitrust laws and, while he moderated on this front later in life, he still believed they did some good. He supported a negative income tax—a variant of a guaranteed minimum income—and schooling vouchers. Hardly the mark of someone who believed in the complete absence of political interference. Hayek for his part rejected the idea of general equilibrium altogether and preferred to speak of competition and markets as discovery processes. He defended regulation of natural monopolies and he also spoke in favour of some basic welfare state functions.

But this is not new. This description of Hayek and Friedman—and others like them—has been there since the 1960s and it can be found in the work of many. So too are the replies pointing all of this out. The claim has been recycled and vomited back. The replies have been ignored—the mark of the inability to undergo the key Turing tests I mentioned. Thus, the entry massively misrepresents what it dubs “normative defences” of capitalism.

And then, the preferred views of the entry’s author also eschew major criticism raised at it. The best illustration of this is visible in the considerably detailed treatment that Karl Marx gets. Marx is presented as complete, coherent and accurate. No mentions are made of the fact that Das Kapital self-contradicts itself via the well-known transformation problem. Marx first argues that the value of commodities is determined by the labour required to produce them (i.e., the labour theory of value). This is the key foundation of “exploitation” theory in Marxist theory. But he later recognises that competition tends to equalise profit rates across industries. For that to happen, market prices must diverge from labour values. The problem, then, is explaining how one gets from labour-determined values to observed competitive prices without abandoning the labour theory of value itself. Marx never provides a fully consistent solution to that transformation. And no solution to the problem exists.

It explains why Marxist predictions fail to materialise. The most obvious example is that wages and incomes for unskilled workers were rising while Marx was writing his works. Not only that, he was writing in Britain—a society where inequality was actually falling! Moreover, in the United States—the country most often described as most capitalist by Marxists then and now—even socialist writers like Charles Spahr produced data which, when used with subsequent works, show massive growth in living standards at the bottom while inequality between the top 1% and the bottom 90% either stagnates or actually declines.

Not only did Marx predict that capitalism would generate pauperisation; he also added that it generated persistent pressure to lengthen working hours and lower labour’s share of national income. Historical evidence runs strongly against these predictions: working hours have fallen dramatically since the nineteenth century, both annually and as a share of waking life—with only modest influence on unions or legislation. Marx’s prediction about labour’s share of income also fares poorly empirically, as many studies find that greater economic freedom (a proxy for capitalism) and globalisation are associated with a larger share of national income accruing to labour. In fact, in causal empirical tests, economies that become more capitalist (by liberalising) tend to show rising boats for everyone. Taken together, these findings suggest that some of Marx’s central empirical predictions about capitalist labour markets have been contradicted rather than confirmed by subsequent economic history.

All of these massive holes in the Marxist account of capitalism are ignored and set aside. The criticisms are still presented as high-quality despite the fact that they have repeatedly failed to generate the predictions they are supposed to.

This is precisely where the usual reflex in debates over “capitalism” becomes problematic: early and criticised claims (even debunked ones) are built into the description of capitalism itself and then rediscovered as criticisms of it, even when the empirical evidence points in the opposite direction. Once repeated often enough, such claims pass from one scholar to another as established facts, with the original empirical proposition increasingly insulated from serious testing. The entry falls prey to this and while it does offer insight into how some people think about capitalism, it is merely a sophisticated rant—nothing more.

This article was originally published by CapX.

Daron Acemoglu won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2024 and is the third most cited economist of all time. Thus, the paradox of his new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, is that its most serious analytic failures are economic. He provides a sincere and serious consideration of modern liberalism’s estrangement from the working class. But when he moves from description to solutions, the basic building blocks of economic analysis disappear. Imperfect markets are compared with an idealized government. Expansive agencies are proposed while the risk of their capture—well known in public-choice theory—is ignored. And while Acemoglu is known for integrating institutions into economics, he sometimes celebrates democratic consensus without attention to the elite institutions that formed it.

Acemoglu “pitches his tent” on the left side of liberalism, arguing that it “has historically been an engine of material and social progress.” Today he believes tradition should give birth to “working-class liberalism,” which means, for him, creating a more level economic playing field and technological change that complements rather than displaces labor. The book is well-intentioned. He recognizes that elites cannot be trusted to direct culture. But he never explains why they can be trusted to direct technology, redistribution, and the administrative state.

Acemoglu argues that the postindustrial economy puts a premium on cognitive skills useful in fields such as elevating finance, health, and education, while reducing the importance of manufacturing. He claims that automation “severs the link between mass production and shared prosperity” and has resulted in “the disappearance of good jobs for workers without a college degree.” Acemoglu thus endorses the economic explanation for populist discontent popular among left-liberals.

What is original about his account is his willingness to also highlight the contribution of left-liberals to working-class alienation. As in my own book, Why Democracy Needs the Rich , he sees the class of educated liberals as attracted to social engineering because it “confers on them greater status and social influence.” Acemoglu recognizes that this class then abused its power by imposing cultural values without democratic buy-in, further alienating the working class. He rues the fact that many on the contemporary Left became “convinced that protecting minorities and vulnerable groups and building a fairer economy required silencing those with opposite viewpoints.” This is a welcome admission, but Acemoglu is selective in his political economy. His distrust of elites largely vanishes when they administer the economic policies he favors, and he also fails to consider the influence of other powerful interest groups.

His argument for more redistribution and a bigger state in economic matters flows from his principle of “nondomination,” which Acemoglu defines as “the capacity to undertake free actions and try new things without being subject to the arbitrary power of any person, norm, or institution.” That principle should be contrasted with classical liberalism’s principles for a relatively bounded government—one that prevents coercion and fraud, protects property and the right to contract, and provides public goods.

Nondomination, in contrast, “calls for some amount of redistribution and the provision of public services such as health and infrastructure to ensure a level playing field in the economy,” also, in his view, requires a more active and powerful government that can steer new technology to promote the principle by broadly distributing its occupational benefits.

Acemoglu does not address the problem of limiting principles. When does dependence on an employer or, indeed, on one’s family become domination? Which social norms constitute domination, and who decides? Why is discretionary state power not a strong form of domination? And perhaps most pointedly for Acemoglu, how can government emancipate citizens from allegedly oppressive norms without engaging in the social engineering that Acemoglu condemns? Acemoglu himself calls nondomination “an argument against social engineering—top-down efforts to change and police people’s beliefs and practices.” It is difficult to square that principle with his recommendations for activist government.

The vagueness of the nondomination mandate also raises well-known public-choice concerns. Public choice is the branch of economics that describes how politics works given interest groups’ incentives. Nondomination invites groups to characterize their own interests as claims against domination. Politicians, bureaucrats, unions, firms, and professional-class constituencies will define the concept in ways that protect them, even if doing so contributes to their domination of other groups.

Acemoglu himself warns that working-class liberalism “should never bypass the needy to curry favor with the middle class.” But entitlements and regulations that skew toward the better-off, particularly older people as a class, are not simply moral failures of government—they are predictable results of people voting in their own interests, with older people having more time and thus a greater propensity to vote. Moreover, the educated are better able to navigate administrative systems, and concentrated interests can wield far more influence than the working class because they do not face free-rider problems. When Acemoglu calls for a new agency to ensure AI aids the working class, he does not explain how he would create institutions or norms to alter the all-too-predictable incentives that will steer it in directions other than the ones he wants.

What protects pluralism when elites want to use courts or agencies to facilitate an elite consensus on the nation?

Acemoglu also does not make a persuasive economic case for what makes a pro-worker AI agency necessary. He says the agency should ensure AI is used to make workers more productive. He argues that neither digital advertising nor selling automation software “will naturally lead to a concerted effort to develop pro-worker AI.” But he never identifies the market failure that makes this mission necessary. If AI can help electricians diagnose equipment or nurses perform more sophisticated tasks, companies will have incentives to provide these AI tools. Incumbent firms do not exhaust the universe of potential suppliers. Startups have incentives to fill any gaps and increase workers’ know-how. The case for markets is not that they must be steered to provide people with the right tools, but that they have a natural incentive to do so.

Acemoglu also argues for a tax system that does not favor capital over labor. Moving toward a tax system more neutral as to source is at least a proposal that avoids market distortions and does not require a large bureaucracy. But it accentuates his failure to show an actual market failure. Why is neutrality not sufficient? Acemoglu thus has two problems. He does not sufficiently show why the market for upskilling workers through AI is imperfect, and even if it is, he compares it with a government agency whose imperfections he has not modeled.

Let’s provide a concrete example—one close to my heart—of the economic problems posed by the AI agency he proposes. For instance, he calls AI pro-teacher when it “would increase the demand for teachers—for helping with smaller groups after AI-generated group assignments and lesson plans are drawn,” rather than reduce the number of teachers needed. But why should increasing the demand for a particular occupational category be the focus of government rather than the market?

Occupations wax and wane. Just ask farmers. Labor-saving technologies can reduce prices, and teachers are also consumers and taxpayers. Such technologies have also historically created new kinds of jobs that we could not have imagined. To be sure, some people think we are on the cusp of artificial general intelligence, which will wipe out almost all human work, but Acemoglu is an avowed AGI skeptic.

Acemoglu himself quotes F. A. Hayek’s warning that the economic “data” “are never for the whole society ‘given’ to a single mind which could work out the implications and can never be so given.” His example illustrates the knowledge problem that occurs when one replaces the market with government steering. Which tasks should be automated? Which technologies will create new complementary jobs? Will an innovation that displaces labor create new jobs elsewhere?

Government agencies also provide opportunities for rent-seeking. The omission is especially striking because Acemoglu elsewhere acknowledges that “the speed and effectiveness of public service provision have diminished while the cost of these services has ballooned thanks to heavy regulation.” Teachers’ unions are notoriously powerful and are likely to use the agency to protect their members; other professional organizations, such as the Association of American Law Schools, will seek barriers to substitution. Even when national security is at stake, politicians steer funds to favored constituencies and regions. They will regard an agency with such a broad and indeterminate mission—promoting pro-worker AI—as a rudder to help them set a favorable course toward reelection.

The best part of Acemoglu’s book is his argument for broad democratic buy-in to government-led cultural change. He argues that “a practical social compact should leverage self-government and get buy-in from a significant fraction of the communities making up a society.” He is rightly worried that elites can seize government institutions and use them to impose their values on the rest of the citizenry.

But he fails the acid test of recognizing how elite institutions manufacture democratic consent. Amazingly, his example of consensus is the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act, which requires all states to recognize same-sex marriages and which he describes as “the end point of a similar journey.” The problem is his account of how the consensus was produced. Seven years before the statute, Obergefell v. Hodges required states to license same-sex marriages, overturning bans in thirty states. Thus, same-sex marriage cannot be fairly presented as simply the result of bottom-up democratic consensus. It is the kind of decision that alienates many citizens who see their preferences invalidated by a Court composed of elite lawyers.

Again, Acemoglu understands in the abstract that “community-level experimentation is vital for social adaptation in a changing world” and that “experimentation is powered by variation.” But he does not make sufficient use of federalism as the constitutional mechanism that enables such variation and, over time, helps build democratic consensus. Federalism permits different jurisdictions to have different policies. Our national guarantee of free speech then allows people to talk about the consequences, facilitating debate. That is how national consensus, if one is to be had, is best reached. When people have their say without it being preempted, they are much more likely to accept the result. Federalism is to political knowledge what competition is to economic knowledge—a process of decentralized discovery.

The book’s failures have some general lessons for left-liberals. Like classical liberals, they cannot avoid answering comparative institutional questions. Do ideas like nondomination actually empower state domination? What are the specific market failures that prevent the market from boosting welfare over the long run? What mechanisms prevent redistribution and new regulatory agencies from being captured by special interests? What protects pluralism when elites want to use courts or agencies to facilitate an elite consensus on the nation? Acemoglu is right to worry that elites can turn left-liberalism into an instrument of domination. But he never explains why the new AI agency he wants to empower would not become the next instrument of elites and interest groups.

John O. McGinnis is the George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law at Northwestern University and a senior writer at Law & Liberty. He is the author of Why Democracy Needs the Rich (2026), Accelerating Democracy (2012), and coauthor, with Mike Rappaport, of Originalism and the Good Constitution (2013). He is a graduate of Harvard College; Balliol College, University of Oxford; and Harvard Law School. He has written for leading law reviews, including Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford, as well as The Yale Law Journal, and in journals of opinion, including National Affairs and National Review.

This post originally appeared at Law & Liberty.

Daron Acemoglu Nobel laureate in economics, recipient of the Swedish Riksbank’s prize in economic science in memory of Alfred Nobel in 2024, during the Nobel lecture in economic science in Aula Magna, Stockholm University, Sweden, on December 8, 2024. (Pontus Lundahl/TT/Code 10050 Credit: TT News Agency/Alamy Live News)

The post The Economist Who Forgot Economics appeared first on Econlib.

Conservative YouTuber Nick Shirley has taken his anti-fraud crusade to California, but a recently passed law, coined by conservatives as the "Stop Nick Shirley Act," is threatening to derail him, or so he says. Now Shirley is challenging it in federal court. 

Shirley outlined his argument in a recent YouTube video, claiming that the legislation is a blatant violation of the First Amendment created in response to him exposing fraud across California. In his suit, he also alleges that it discriminates based on the content and viewpoint of speech and is unconstitutionally "overbroad and vague."  

Assembly Bill 2624, authored by state Assemblymember Mia Bonta (D–Oakland), wife of Attorney General Rob Bonta—a fact that Shirley is keen to point out—allows for immigration support services providers, employees, and volunteers who are "fearful for their safety or the safety of their family because of their affiliation with a designated immigration support services facility" to join California's Safe at Home Program. This program provides participants with a substitute mailing address that they can use for government records, keeping their school, work, and residential addresses confidential.

The legislation also prohibits online disclosures of personal information or images "with the specific intent" to either "incite a third person to cause imminent great bodily harm" or threaten an immigration support worker protected by the law or "a coresident of that person." Violators can face fines of at least $4,000, court orders restricting publication, and payment of plaintiffs' court costs and attorney's fees. A separate provision also criminalizes posts with the specific intent that another person imminently use it to commit a likely act or threat of violence.

The law, which will go into effect on October 1, 2027, was signed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom last month. The California Legislature claims it's a necessary measure to protect the immigrant community from increasing incidents of doxxing and harassment caused by the Trump administration's anti-immigration agenda. However, some free speech groups are raising concerns about its constitutionality.

In April, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) warned that the legislation could limit "what regular people are allowed to post online about immigrants and the people who help them." Specifically, under section 6218.19, which FIRE called "the most concerning part of the bill," immigration service providers could "ban nearly anyone from posting their personal information on the internet." As FIRE pointed out, "personal information" under the bill could include "anything that 'relates to' them." 

Posts can be banned regardless of whether or not they are protected by the First Amendment—they don't have to incite threats or harassment, or have anything to do with immigration. "That means the provision could facilitate censorship of all kinds of speech the Constitution protects," FIRE said.

The legislation was amended before passage, with much of 6218.19 narrowed to prohibit posting a person's information only with the specific intent to threaten or incite violence against them. However, the group warned the new version "could still chill lawful, constitutionally protected speech about immigrants and immigration service providers."

"The law could also be abused in practice through frivolous demands to take down speech that doesn't actually meet the bar for incitement or threats," FIRE added.

A.B. 2624 is not the first seemingly well-intentioned law to raise First Amendment concerns. In 2025, California extended similar provisions for reproductive healthcare providers to gender-affirming healthcare providers and patients. 

In 2020, New Jersey enacted Daniel's Law, which prohibits the disclosure of the home addresses and private telephone numbers of judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement officers. This law has chilled free speech, including the time it barred journalist Charlie Kratovil from publishing the address of a police chief, which he got through a public records request. Kratovil's only intent was to document that the captain lived two hours outside of the city he served. A New Jersey appellate court ruled that while the chief's residency in Cape May was a matter of public concern, his "exact street address is not a matter of public concern" and that protecting public officials from harassment is "a compelling State interest of the highest order." The state Supreme Court later ruled that the address was a matter of public concern, but upheld the constitutionality of Daniel's Law.

Meanwhile, in January, Illinois' Public Official Safety and Privacy Act went into effect, which enacted similar provisions to Daniel's Law for current and former General Assembly members, constitutional officers, state attorneys, public defenders, and county clerks. "While I don't think the intent of lawmakers here is to suppress news or criticism, the fact is, the law is extremely amenable to abuse for those purposes," Carolyn Iodice, legislative and policy director of FIRE told the Chicago Tribune.

Shirley's commentary and style are certainly not for everyone, but the YouTuber might have a point: California's laws seem to suppress free speech. This isn't a California-only problem, and it should raise concerns for all Americans who care about government overreach.

The post The 'Stop Nick Shirley Act': Yet Another Anti-Doxxing Law That Chills Free Speech appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei doesn't want to stop his competitors' progress; he just wants to slow it down. 

In an essay released this past weekend, Amodei outlined a plan to coordinate a global slowdown of AI development to ensure "companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models," overseen by "third party evaluators." While he admits that "some forms of coordination that would be impactful for pacing are legally challenging, and will require government support," Amodei states that for the regulatory regime to work, America and "other democratic governments" must "attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible."

It's a naive sentiment that betrays the pie-in-the-sky nature of Amodei's request for regulation. Worried about Chinese models outpacing Anthropic's, Amodei suggests the U.S. ban the sale of powerful AI chips or semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China, crack down on chip smuggling and model distillation, and restrict remote access to data centers outside China. He also ambitiously calls on the U.S. and China to agree to "test their models before release for acute risks in areas such as cybersecurity, biology, and alignment," which could be done through a "global standards body." However, even Amodei admits that giving this body "real teeth will be a challenge, and the difficulty will be in verification that both sides don't have secret models which they don't test but may deploy in secret." 

As Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, points out, implementing parts of Amodei's plan will be difficult. He tells Reason that "no matter how well-intentioned the efforts may be, there is a realpolitik of global technological control that must be taken into account." 

One challenging part of Amodei's plan is his call for "embedded evaluators." Drawing on examples from the banking industry, Amodei posits that the people evaluating models will be neutral third parties embedded within companies, but it's difficult to see how that's possible. In his banking example, the embedded third-party evaluators are federal workers under the Federal Reserve or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Given the state of partisan politics in the U.S. and the executive branch's increasing reach, it's hard to imagine a neutral, independent government agency. 

Amodei isn't the only tech leader asking the government to weigh in. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind Chairman Demis Hassabis, and xAI CEO Elon Musk—heads of the nation's leading AI labs—each agreed with the essay, giving proponents of regulation like Sens. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), Ruben Gallego (D–Ariz.), and Jon Ossoff (D–Ga.) unlikely allies in their portentous push to regulate the industry.

Industry leaders may favor regulation that keeps bad actors from using their technology, but that won't stop lawmakers from proposing expansive frameworks that usurp their ownership and authority. Several absurd proposals in Congress already would give the government sweeping powers over the industry. The AI Kill Switch Act would allow the secretary of homeland security to slow down or shut down AI systems the government deems powerful, while a bill proposed by Sanders to ban artificial superintelligence would subject violators to 20 years in prison.

The rest of the AI industry has at least one friend in government in President Donald Trump. The Washington Post reports that Trump has resisted calls to regulate the technology for fear of falling behind China in the AI race. Still, journalist David Shuster reported on Sunday that aides in the Trump administration are "advising Trump to give a national TV address in the next 72 hours, declare certain aspects of the AI race an 'imminent threat to humanity,' and announce regulations pausing the things Tech companies want paused." 

Calls for government intervention seem unnecessary for an industry that has shown it can self-regulate its leading companies. When OpenAI found its advanced models escaped their test environment and reached the internet earlier this year, it handled the incident in concert with industry partners like CrowdStrike, METR, and Redwood Research, which specialize in AI cybersecurity. Anthropic is even more stringent with its security checks. In July, it halted all active testing, notified its partners, and published a detailed report after its models reached the internet due to a mistake in the testing environment setup. 

Thierer calls the urge to regulate AI a "complete reversal of the model we utilized for the internet." When similar public panics threatened to derail the growth of the modern web, lawmakers opted for an open, decentralized internet self-regulated by the marketplace.

"We're not seeing this disruption that everybody's been predicting," he says. 

Indeed, predictions about widespread job loss and fears about terrorist acts carried out with the help of AI have failed to materialize. Instead of AI-driven job displacement, the industry is driving the American economy at a time when other industries are struggling to find workers. 

There's also the matter of whether any of this is practical. An international effort to slow AI development would mean reconciling European or Chinese attitudes on free speech with American values. As Thierer and Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, wrote on Lukianoff's Substack in April, "ideological pressure applied to machines that are rapidly becoming part of how people learn, research, write, and reason" should "alarm anyone who cares about free speech" and "anyone who cares about America's competitive position against China."

Of course, while its CEO calls for his industry to be hamstrung, Anthropic is plowing ahead with plans to debut its initial public offering later this year. 

There's something disingenuous about sounding the alarm on the existential threat posed by AI models while simultaneously capitalizing on every improvement made in the field. If Amodei and others of his ilk are truly worried about creating a product capable of mass extinction, nothing is stopping them from pausing or slowing development in their own labs. 

Instead of doing so voluntarily, they're turning to the heavy hand of government intervention, which, as Thierer points out, inevitably "entails foreclosing innovation and competition within a sector," and "that sort of centralized control breeds politicization and cronyism."

The post AI Executives Want International Regulation. They Could Just Slow Down Themselves. appeared first on Reason Magazine.

If you are someone who gets their news primarily from the New York Times and NPR, as many liberal-leaning Americans do, you often get a distorted picture of what is going on the US and the world. This is often less because of outright errors in reporting, and more about what isn't said.

For example, each outlet barely covered the widespread nationwide rioting that accompanied Black Lives Matters protests in summer 2020. I still meet people who think the the primary violence that summer was from police manhandling protestors, and are completely unaware of the deaths, injuries and massive property damage attributable to rioters.

Similarly, I keep encountering people who have no idea that there was widespread antisemitic violence, intimidation, and threats on college campuses after Oct. 7, 2023, and instead think that university officials and later the Trump administration had no justification for clamping down on what they perceive as peaceful "pro-Palestine" protests. And that's because they are being misinformed by sources like the Times and NPR.

Case in point: In a puff piece in yesterday's New York Times about a lawsuit filed by Mahmoud Khalil, alleging discrimination by Columbia University against Palestinian students and their "pro-Palestine" allies, the Times reports: "The 2023 and 2024 protests divided the Columbia campus, with thousands joining in, and others, including some Jewish students, saying they were too disruptive or made them feel unsafe."

Here, relying on a recent article of  mine, is some of what happened at Columbia, limited to violence, threats, and intimidation--and this involves only the incidents that were publicly reported:

In October 2023, an Israeli Columbia student was assaulted in front of Butler Library by a former student who was no longer affiliated with the university. The assailant allegedly struck the student with a stick; police arrested and charged the suspect. During a separate student walkout "for Palestine," a Jewish student was allegedly shoved by a Columbia classmate wearing a keffiyeh and subsequently swarmed by protesters.

Another incident outside Butler Library was more explicitly antisemitic. According to a subsequent civil-rights complaint, an individual confronted a Jewish student while yelling "Free Palestine" and "Fuck the Jews." The assailant allegedly made the motivation explicit, telling the student that he had singled him out "because you are a Jew."

Other physical incidents followed. Columbia student Jonathan Lederer was assaulted while carrying Israeli flags on April 20, 2024; the source cited in my article reports that a suspect threw a rock at him. Lederer was assaulted again on December 11, 2024, while once again carrying an Israeli flag; this time, the assailant reportedly punched him and called him a "Nazi." In another incident, a Jewish Columbia student wearing a kippah was spat upon and told, "I hope you guys suffer."

These individual confrontations occurred against a background of increasingly intimidating mass protests. Demonstrators at Columbia shouted "Fuck the Jews," "Death to Jews," and "Fuck Israel," attempted to instigate fights, and screamed at a rabbi who was praying with students.

At one demonstration, protest organizer Mohsen Mahdawi used a megaphone to direct protesters to push back a small group of pro-Israel students. Columbia officials themselves later acknowledged that the campus had experienced "threatening rhetoric and intimidation."

Protesters also targeted a Columbia class dealing with Israel, distributing flyers bearing such slogans as "The enemy will not see tomorrow" and "Burn Zionism to the Ground." Jewish organizations characterized the messages as incitement.

Perhaps the most notorious individual episode involved Columbia student protest leader Khymani James. James publicly declared that "Zionists don't deserve to live" and said that people should be "grateful that I'm not just going out and murdering Zionists." Columbia suspended him, and even the White House condemned his statements.

What happened afterward is also significant. Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), the umbrella organization for anti-Israel groups on campus (and to which Khalid was attached), initially apologized for James's statements. It subsequently withdrew the apology and expressly endorsed "armed resistance." James likewise disavowed his expression of regret.

There was another feature of the protests that mattered to many Jewish students: anonymity. At Columbia, as elsewhere, many demonstrators concealed their identities with masks, keffiyehs, and other face coverings while participating in protests that included rhetoric such as "Globalize the Intifada."

Whatever one's view of that slogan in isolation, its effect can be different when it is shouted by anonymous demonstrators amid actual incidents of assault and intimidation. Students encountering such protesters cannot necessarily know whether the masked people endorsing violent "resistance" are strangers, classmates, or people living in their own dormitories.

The situation escalated dramatically during the spring 2024 encampment, when students blocked up a section of campus.

The escalation culminated in the occupation of Hamilton Hall. Protesters broke into the building, vandalized it, and held two custodians against their will, while calling them "Jew-lovers."

Columbia's own findings provide important evidence about how this environment affected Jewish students.

The university's Task Force on Antisemitism reported that Jewish students described not only verbal harassment and social ostracism, but also being physically targeted and feeling unsafe in their dormitories.

By April 2024, the situation had become sufficiently alarming that a Columbia campus rabbi advised Jewish students to leave campus and return home as soon as possible because of concerns about their safety.

To recap, Jewish and Israeli students were assaulted. A student wearing a kippah was spat upon. A Jewish student was told explicitly that he was being targeted because he was Jewish. Demonstrators shouted "Death to Jews," attempted to instigate fights, and pushed pro-Israel students backward. A prominent student leader had declared that "Zionists don't deserve to live" and said others should be grateful he was not murdering them. Protest organizations embraced "armed resistance." Masked demonstrators participated in increasingly lawless protests. And eventually protesters broke into a university building, vandalized it, and held employees against their will. Columbia's own antisemitism task force found Jewish students reporting that they had been physically targeted and felt unsafe even in their dormitories.

With that in mind, we can see that the Times' description--The 2023 and 2024 protests divided the Columbia campus, with thousands joining in, and others, including some Jewish students, saying they were too disruptive or made them feel unsafe--is not  itself inaccurate. It's what it leaves out that leaves reader uninformed.

Bonus: The article also reports: "In a statement, Adam Guillette, the president of Accuracy in Media [a defendant], said his group had 'repeatedly delivered accountability to Columbia's pro-Hamas radicals,' using language that echoed the Trump administration's description of pro-Palestinian campus protesters."

The leaders of Columbia's anti-Israel protests defended Oct. 7 within days, and were led by Students for Justice in Palestine, a pro-Hamas organization. So while not every protestor was pro-Hamas, the protestors, writ large, were indeed pro-Hamas radicals, but the Times wants you to think that this is just a Trump thing.

The post Distortion by Omission: The New York Times and "Pro-Palestine" Demonstrations appeared first on Reason Magazine.