The following are empirical measures of trust/social cohesion in a sampling of different countries.

Countries cluster into stable institutional-trust equilibria observable through compliance behavior, enforcement intensity, and institutional design assumptions. The U.S. now clusters with medium-low trust systems rather than high-trust Northern European or East Asian ones.

The data used for the TC metric are from IMF and OECD tax-gap studies.as well as Piketty, Saez, Zucman for administrative tax data.
The data used for the IE metric are derived from World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators and the EU Justice Scoreboard.
The data used for the RC metric are derived from Large-N lost-wallet experiments, fare-evasion and honor-system studies, Fare-evasion and honor-system studies and bureaucratic self-reporting accuracy studies.
The data used for the CE metric are derived from World Bank Doing Business, comparative commercial-law studies, and firm-level contracting behavior.
The JD metric is the least empirical. It is derived from documentation burden, audit frequency, means testing intensity, and fraud-prevention cost ratios. Short version: the Nordic and Japanese systems assume honesty; the U. S. and Italian systems assume evasion.

When institutional trust is measured via revealed compliance behavior, enforcement efficiency, and system design assumptions rather than opinion surveys, the United States clusters with medium-low trust countries such as Italy, well below Germany, the Nordics, and Japan, and well above Greece or Brazil.

Denmark doesn’t just have generous welfare policies. It has a high-trust equilibrium that makes them administratively cheap and fraud-resistant.

We don’t need to speculate about whether Americans would abuse a large, fast-moving welfare state. We just ran that experiment during COVID. Fraud did not occur at the margins; it occurred at industrial scale.

Carine Hajjar devotes her Washington Post column today to an attempt to set the record straight for young Americans about the situation in Venezuela:

One of my first memories of celebrating New Year’s was in Caracas, Venezuela, on a family visit. That trip is a flicker of scenes, as most early memories are. A packed church, a grove of fruit trees, a busy city with mountains in the background, impossible-looking birds with rainbow feathers.

The Venezuela I perceived was one of abundance, even without knowing I was standing on top of the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Oil production at that time was well over 2.5 million barrels a day, and poverty was falling as the popular president Hugo Chávez distributed profits from the nationalized energy industry to the poor.

The short version is that the political-economic model initiated under Chávez, heavily reliant on oil revenues, lacking institutional checks and balances, and prone to rent-seeking, proved unsustainable and collapsed into economic and political crises that have left Venezuela among the most impoverished nations in the region.

Here’s what happened in Venezuela:

• Hugo Chavez was elected freely by Venezuelans in the hope that he would redistribute Venezuela’s oil wealth from oil companies and rich Venezuelans to the poor.
• He did for a while.
• He also redistributed Venezuela’s oil wealth lavishly to himself, his family, and his cronies.
• Elections became less free and fair over time, with democratic backsliding intensifying under Maduro, contributing to international responses including sanctions.
• Institutional design failures and policy choices by Venezuelan leaders were the primary drivers of the collapse and Venezuelans chose that.

Economic sanctions were imposed in response to institutional collapse, corruption, and democratic backsliding in Venezuela not the origin of those phenomena.

The decisive mistake young Americans make is treating U.S. sanctions as a primary cause of Venezuela’s collapse. In reality, sanctions were a response to a regime that had already dismantled democratic institutions, hollowed out its oil sector through patronage and corruption, and converted elections into managed authoritarianism. The system Chávez created did not merely fail because of bad leaders; it reliably selected for them. Once institutional constraints were removed, elite capture and economic collapse were not aberrations. They were the predictable equilibrium.

Sadly, I don’t think her target audience will pay much attention.

No system that concentrates power, eliminates feedback, and rewards loyalty over competence can be saved by good intentions or external excuses. That is true whether that system is run by Nicolás Maduro, Hugo Chavez, Joe Biden, or Donald Trump.

I think that only Venezuelans can solve Venezuela’s problems. Whether they’re ready to do that I don’t know. The bad guys are still in charge and I doubt they will relinquish power peacefully. The Trump Administration’s “running things” probably won’t help, either.

The editors of the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have reacted to the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by a Border Patrol agent:

Washington Post

It’s essential that federal immigration officers don’t think they can act with impunity, because that will only encourage more fatal encounters. An independent probe of this shooting is an important step. On Saturday night, a federal judge ordered DHS not to destroy evidence related to Pretti’s killing in response to a lawsuit filed by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D).

Democrats will prevail if they focus on a narrow set of reasonable demands. The president will gain the upper hand if the left clamors for abolishing ICE. They already tried that during Trump’s first term, and it backfired. At the same time, that agency needs to be bound by laws, oversight and accountability. Most of all, U.S. citizens need to be secure in exercising their First and Second Amendment rights without worrying they’ll get gunned down.

Most Americans want a secure border, and they think violent criminals should be deported. That’s a large part of why Trump returned to the White House. The overreach of the past year, however, could consume his presidency and lead to more tragedy. If Trump won’t change course on his own, can Republicans in Congress save him from himself?

Wall Street Journal

Pretti made a tragic mistake by interfering with ICE agents, but that warranted arrest, not a death sentence. The agents may say they felt threatened, but it’s worth noting the comments over the weekend by police around the country who say that this isn’t how they conduct law enforcement.

Either many ICE agents aren’t properly trained, or they are so on edge as they face opposition in the streets that they are on a hair trigger. Either way, this calls for rethinking how ICE conducts itself, especially in Minneapolis as tensions build.

I materially agree with both of those statements with a few provisos.

The context of the killings in Minneapolis includes:

The initiating policy signal

Candidate Biden literally urged those seeking to enter the United States to “surge to the border”. They did. That signal functioned as an invitation in practice.

This was not metaphorical language. In every domain where the word “surge” is used whether logistics, medicine, military operations it denotes a deliberate increase in volume designed to stress a system’s capacity. The predictable result was a mass inflow that overwhelmed border processing and shifted the enforcement problem into the interior of the country.

Statements by mayors

The mayors of Portland, Minneapolis, and Chicago, all “sanctuary” cities, have made the following statements:

Portland, September 2025

Enforcement of civil immigration laws by militarized forces has no legitimate role in our community, no support from local elected leaders, and little public support

and

Local and state law enforcement must remain the jurisdiction of local law enforcement authorities…

Minneapolis, January 7, 2026

We are demanding that ICE leave the city and state immediately.

and

We stand by our immigrant and refugee communities — know that you have our full support

Chicago

…we remain opposed to militarized immigration enforcement that runs afoul of the Constitution in our city.

If you think that the key word in the statements above is “militarized”, please provide evidence that the mayors support federal enforcement actions within their jurisdictions so long as they are not militarized. I have searched and found no such statements. They do not oppose tactics; they oppose jurisdiction.

Note that a) the federal government’s role in the enforcement of immigration laws has been fully litigated and is unchallenged; b) all three mayors reject it. The mayors’ position is functionally indistinguishable from nullification: the claim that federal law is valid everywhere except where local officials disapprove of it.

While I recognize that neither the mayors nor the editors have any legal responsibility to do so, I think that under the circumstances they have an ethical responsibility to propose a workable method for enforcing immigration law within those jurisdictions without deploying federal law enforcement agents within them. Otherwise, their position is not reform but abdication.

Like many Americans I am deeply saddened by the latest fatal shooting of a man in Minneapolis by a federal law enforcement officer. I thought I’d arrange my thoughts into some of the things I do and don’t believe about it.

I do believe that the shooting is a tragedy and an avoidable one.

The killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti in Minneapolis by a U.S. Border Patrol agent on January 24, 2026 has shocked the community and drawn widespread protest. Hundreds of people have taken to the streets to mourn and to demand transparency and accountability.

I don’t believe that ICE officers are adequately trained, recruited, or supervised.

The larger pattern of federal immigration enforcement actions in Minnesota including multiple recent shootings raises serious questions about preparation, oversight, and the deployment of personnel in complex urban environments

I do believe that peaceful protest is legitimate.

People have the right to assemble and express grief, concern, and dissent, and thousands have done so in Minneapolis and across the country following this shooting and earlier ones.

I don’t believe that obstruction of justice is legitimate in a peaceful protest.

Peaceful protest carries moral and constitutional weight; physical interference with lawful operations does not. Respect for law is consistent with and enhances the legitimacy of peaceful dissent.

I do believe in enforcing the law.

In a constitutional republic, the rule of law is essential to public order and civil liberties. Law enforcement should be exercised consistently, fairly, and with due regard for rights and safety.

I don’t believe in “sanctuary” states and cities.

Sanctuary states and cities are not merely symbolic gestures; they function as a form of de facto nullification of federal authority in an area where federal supremacy is explicit, and historically such arrangements have proven legally corrosive and socially destabilizing.

I do believe that defense attorneys will emphasize the presence of a firearm as heightening the perception of threat by reasonable law enforcement officers.

Federal officials have asserted that Pretti was armed and that a Border Patrol agent fired in self-defense after officers perceived a threat, and legal arguments in future proceedings will almost certainly focus on how an armed individual would have appeared to reasonable officers in a tense, split-second encounter.

I do believe that law enforcement officers have a right to defend themselves and aren’t obligated to take the first hit or shot to do so.

Under U.S. use-of-force doctrine, officers may use lethal force if they reasonably believe there is an imminent threat of serious harm. That is the legal standard, even if people disagree about how it should be applied in practice.

I don’t believe that any amount of analysis, amateur or professional, of videos of the shooting will determine whether the shooting was justified or not.

Videos can provide critical context, but they cannot fully capture what an officer perceived or the totality of circumstances at the moment of force. Multiple angles and interpretations exist, and available footage has been interpreted differently by local officials, federal authorities, and independent observers.

I do believe that the standard that will be applied in any foreseeable case against the shooter will be whether in that moment he perceived a deadly threat.

This aligns with established constitutional law, under which the central question in use-of-force cases is whether the officer’s belief in imminent danger was reasonable under the circumstances, not whether the victim in hindsight was morally innocent.

I do believe that is up to the courts to decide and until that is decided the officer who fired the fatal shots should be suspended from duty.

Due process requires an impartial investigation and adjudication. A judge has already issued orders to preserve evidence, and state and federal authorities are contesting access and investigative roles.

I do believe that holders of executive office (mayors, governors, and presidents) carry a special obligation to preserve public order and to temper rhetoric that might elevate tensions.

Public statements by local and state executives in this case, as well as by the president, have at times framed protests and federal enforcement in highly charged terms that risk escalating conflict rather than calming it. While vigorous critique is part of democratic discourse, leaders responsible for public safety should weigh carefully how their words will be heard in the streets and on the ground.

The general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security has published a Wall Street Journal op-ed with some interesting observations. I think this is the key passage because it hinges on the claim that “reasonableness” under the Fourth Amendment can substitute for judicial oversight in the specific context of immigration enforcement, a claim that is doing a great deal of work in justifying administrative entry into private residences:

Under federal immigration law, officers may issue an administrative warrant, which means that the probable-cause finding is made by an executive-branch officer rather than a judicial officer. This is consistent with broad judicial recognition that illegal aliens aren’t entitled to the same Fourth Amendment protections as U.S. citizens. It is also consistent with the Supreme Court’s admonition that the touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is whether the search or seizure is “reasonable,” not whether it is supported by a judicial warrant. In Abel v. U.S. (1960), the justices recognized that there is “overwhelming historical legislative recognition of the propriety of administrative arrest for deportable aliens.”

While administrative warrants may satisfy the Fourth Amendment for any arrest of an illegal alien, ICE currently uses these warrants to enter an illegal alien’s residence only when the alien has received a final order of removal from an immigration judge. That means the alien has already seen a judge, presented his case, received due process, and been ordered removed from the country. Aliens in this context are fugitives from justice, and the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over Minnesota, has expressly recognized that administrative warrants may be used to enter a residence to capture a fugitive.

His primary complaint and apparent reason for the op-ed is:

Although the law is clear, deep-state actors in the federal government have for decades told ICE officers that they may not enter a fugitive alien’s home even with a final order of removal and administrative warrant. Because Congress hasn’t created a mechanism to obtain a judicial warrant, this meant that under previous presidential administrations, ICE would sit outside the homes of fugitive aliens waiting for them to come outside before arresting them. Illegal aliens quickly identified this loophole. Some would openly taunt ICE officers by waving through the window or passing notes under the door.

No serious country would tolerate this clear aberration of its laws or allow its national security to be jeopardized and mocked in this manner. Congress never intended the immigration laws to operate this way and the Fourth Amendment doesn’t require it.

I think that the central argument of many of the critics of the ongoing ICE operations is lack of due process. But “due process” is not a singular, uniform requirement of judicial warrants or individualized hearings; it varies across legal domains. His claim, in effect, is that in this context due process consists of the prior deportation order itself.

ICE agents should be better-trained and more merciful in carrying out even legitimate enforcement operations; that doesn’t negate the legitimacy of enforcing our laws. Assessing the ultimate legality of these claims is for the courts, but the argument is worth examining on its own terms because it illustrates how much executive power now rests on administrative interpretations of “reasonableness” rather than on explicit judicial authorization.

In today’s Washington Post the editors provide their opinions of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). To be clear I’m not a DOGE fan; I think the effort was misguided. Here’s a snippet of the editorial:

Remember DOGE? The good idea to find government efficiency and reduce spending was so poorly executed that it undermined the case for scaling back the size of government. Yet a little-noticed bit of news out of the Justice Department in recent days suggests that some in the organization were not just incompetent but malicious.

What follows is a compact illustration of two logical fallacies. I won’t fisk the whole thing but the two fallacies in the piece are what are called “hasty generalization” and “intentional fallacy”.

Here’s a key passage:

For a group that was meant to root out waste, DOGE officials were shockingly unfocused on their main goal. One person was apparently more interested in relitigating election results than making government more efficient.

That passage illustrates both of those fallacies. One or two individuals behaved badly; those individuals are representative of DOGE; therefore DOGE was incompetent and/or malicious.

I think that striving for government efficiency should be ordinary, unremarkable, and ongoing. Quotidian. Not done with fanfare by a core group of “experts” parachuted in for the purpose. Unfortunately, that is a repeated practice for the Trump Administration. See the president and members of his cabinet’s speeches at Davos for the most recent example.

Sadly, bureaucracies by their structure and sociology are resistant to such efforts and they would be impossible within our present governmental and legal structure. They would need to have incentives to do their work, e.g. their compensation would need to be based on efficiencies gained, and my reading of the civil service code suggests that would be illegal.

However, I am a fan of solid editorial writing and this isn’t it.

I have found the performance of the WaPo’s editorial board puzzling lately. This editorial reads less like institutional analysis and more like partisan polemic, which is increasingly characteristic of WaPo’s editorial tone.

I agree that ICE’s enforcement practices have been too harsh. What I’m still missing is something I consider morally obligatory for those actively protesting ICE in the streets of our cities—a concrete proposal for how we can enforce present immigration law in the context of “sancturary” states and cities.

Failing that it seems to me that Occam’s Razor suggests that they want open borders.

Open borders are unworkable and would be harmful to poor citizens and taxpayers alike.

I wanted to underwrite the editors’ of the Wall Street Journal’s hope that the Supreme Court will strike down the president’s ability to impose permanent tariffs at will:

The world is waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the legality of President Trump’s “emergency” tariffs, and Mr. Trump’s weekend tariff spree against European allies underscores again why his abuse of his authority needs to be reined in.

Mr. Trump unleashed a new tariff volley against several European countries (see nearby) to coerce Denmark to sell or cede Greenland to the U.S. He cited no legal authority for doing so. He simply said he is imposing the tariffs.

Though he didn’t say this, presumably he is doing so under what he has claimed is his power in an “emergency” under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. But what emergency? Greenland isn’t under threat of invasion, and Denmark has said the U.S. can have more or less free run of the island for defense purposes.

But Mr. Trump wants ownership of the island on his legacy resume, so he is likely to say that control of Greenland is an emergency even if it isn’t in any normal understanding of the term. The only observable emergency is the threat to the NATO alliance that Mr. Trump’s demands and tariffs are creating.

The episode puts in sharp relief how open-ended Mr. Trump’s claim of tariff emergency authority is. He can declare an emergency on his own, he can decide which countries and goods he can hit with the border taxes, and at what rate. This means he can use tariffs essentially whenever he wants for whatever reason he wants. Congress gave him no such expansive power under IEEPA or any other statute.

Tariff apologists will say the Greenland tariffs show the uses of border taxes for foreign policy, but the taxing power is Congress’s under the Constitution unless expressly delegated to the President.

U.S. trade rep Jamieson Greer said Monday that if the Supreme Court overturns Mr. Trump’s tariffs, the President will quickly rely on other tariff authorities. But those delegations are more limited on what goods, for what reason, and for how long they can be imposed. They don’t allow tariffs for any emergency that Mr. Trump conjures for whatever political purposes he desires.

Like Joe Biden’s abuse of the spending power on student-loan forgiveness without Congressional assent, Mr. Trump’s abuse of the taxing power cries out for a Supreme Court correction.

Imposing tariffs is the responsibility of the Congress not the president.

However, I suspect my views on what Congress should do is markedly different from those of the editors. I suspect their views are the conventional neoliberal ones: unconditional free trade, asymmetrical tolerance of industrial policy abroad, reliance on theory assuming immobile labor and capital.. The distinctive problem we have is that if we are following neoliberal principles and none of our trading partners are it places us at a distinct disadvantage. They can manage their tariffs, quotas, and internal incentives to offset any comparative advantages we might have and those are becoming increasingly narrow as capital and even populations become more portable.

What the Congress should do is to provide incentives for our trading partners to reduce their own tariffs, quotas, and internal incentives against our exports. The word for that is “reciprocity”. It is not lost on me that theory says that the country with the fewest tariffs, quotas, and internal incentives benefits the most. Unfortunately we cannot remain a global power without industries of our own and, at least in some cases, that implies that we must impose tariffs, quotas, and internal incentives of our own. Those industries include the entire supply chain for the manufacturing of ships and aircraft, semiconductors, and others.

In some cases tariffs should be temporary bargaining tools; in others, particularly where national capacity is at stake, they must be structural even if uneconomical.

Even if tariffs are sometimes necessary, that necessity makes Congressional control more important, not less.

I don’t know whether Gerald Baker’s counter-history of the Greenland War in his Wall Street Journal column is tongue-in-cheek or not. Here’s a sample:

It wasn’t much of a battle, to be sure. President Trump, fresh off his swift and effective intervention in early January to topple and bring to trial in the U.S. Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his wife (who were later pardoned by President JD Vance and now run a chain of retail cocaine stores based in Palm Beach, Fla.), doubled down on his “Donroe corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.

He insisted that the U.S. needed to annex Greenland for its own security and that of the wider Western Hemisphere and initially sought to pressure Denmark, the Arctic island’s sovereign authority, to sell it. Deploying his favorite diplomatic tool, import tariffs, Mr. Trump—not unreasonably—expected the Europeans to cave, as they typically did when confronted with the reality that decades of dependency and complacency had left them powerless in the face of strength.

But the Danes, a proud people whose soldiers had fought and died alongside Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, refused. When Mr. Trump ordered U.S. forces to seize the island, Denmark enlisted a handful of nations to help with the resistance—a coalition of the willing, but not very able.

It was never a contest. In addition to Danish and Greenlandic forces armed for winter warfare, the allies included a shipload of British Royal Navy admirals; a Canadian armored detachment handpicked in compliance with the nation’s strict commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion; a German fleet of battery-powered armored fighting vehicles that had to be abandoned when the only charging stations in Nuuk, the territory’s capital, broke down; and a Dutch infantry battalion that was forced to withdraw because of a shortage of ammunition, and discovered that shouting “bang-bang,” as they had been trained, was of little effect in battle.

Humiliated, the Europeans and Canadians retreated but regrouped, committed to do whatever they could to retaliate. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formally dissolved in late 2026. Europe expelled American troops. Deprived of its forward operating bases there, from which vital missions had been conducted across the world over the last 75 years, the U.S. tried to strike deals with Arab governments for bases in those countries. But domestic popular hostility to American military deployment, and continuing tensions over the U.S. alliance with Israel, meant there was to be no Middle Eastern replacement for Ramstein or Lakenheath.

That should give you the general idea. I’m not sure whether he’s harder on the U. S. or our putative European allies.

It’s certainly food for thought.