March 9, 2026

Now, on to the news…

In a recent column for the Wall Street Journal, Roland Fryer, economist and John A. Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, argued that America’s approach to combatting drug use is misguided. Banning addictive substances, he claimed, barely affects demand and paradoxically makes dealers richer. Instead, America should legalize drugs and tax them to fund treatment.

City Journal senior editor Charles Fain Lehman sees it differently. Lehman argues that merely banning drugs, even without intense enforcement, suppresses consumption, while legalization leads to more drug use—and more drug-related harms. Read the rest of Lehman’s response here.

In 2025, the New York City Council passed several laws mandating tipping prompts on delivery apps like Instacart and DoorDash. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has vowed to enforce these new regulations vigorously.

This may be a well-intentioned effort to help gig workers, but it will backfire, argues Jarrett Dieterle. “These latest rules will increase consumers’ tipping fatigue and likely raise food-delivery costs.”

Dieterle cites research showing that American consumers are increasingly weary of aggressive tipping prompts and are turning away from businesses that use them.

“When New York City and Seattle raised their minimum wages for app-based delivery drivers, food-delivery costs spiked and orders plummeted,” he writes. “Higher tips will likely have a similar effect.”

Read more here.

Both self-interest and altruism are powerful drivers of public opinion in the immigration debate. A new book adds a crucial insight about how these values come into play.

“Even when people’s views about migration are shaped by altruism—which they are, to some extent—it’s generally because people care about how immigration affects their fellow countrymen, not how it affects foreigners,” writes Robert VerBruggen, reviewing Alexander Kustov’s In Our Interest: How Democracies Can Make Immigration Popular.

Kustov’s work suggests a simple takeaway for politicians looking to craft a popular immigration policy: focus on highly skilled or educated immigrants—or on immigrants who are “demonstrably beneficial” to the economy.

“People in developed countries aren’t eager to admit countless immigrants just because those newcomers will personally benefit,” writes VerBruggen. “They want a policy that serves their own nations’ interests.”

“Confiscating 5% of billionaires’ invested capital every year would, over time, hurt the entire economy, thereby hurting everyone.

Billionaires’ wealth is almost entirely invested capital. Invested capital is what powers an economy.

Too many people seem to think extremely wealthy people keep all of their wealth, except for what’s in mansions, yachts, or cars, in a money bin in a sub-basement of their mansion—like Scrooge McDuck.”

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RonRonDoRon, commenting on Bernie Sanders’s wealth tax proposal

Photo credits: Anadolu/Getty Images