The discovery that wasn't new

Reason reports that economist Justin Wolfers has publicly acknowledged that his libertarian-leaning critics were correct about the dangers of concentrated governmental power — and that he is not alone among prominent left-liberals in arriving at this position. I do not fault any person for revising their views in light of experience. Revision in the face of evidence is the mark of a reasoning mind. But I confess the structural observation strikes me as having been available all along.

What the compact already settled

The Constitution was not drafted by men who trusted power. It was drafted by men who had watched power abuse itself, repeatedly, across the full span of recorded government. Article I vests legislative authority in the Congress; Article II vests executive authority in the President; Article III vests judicial authority in the courts. These are not decorative divisions. As I argued in Federalist No. 51, the whole system rests on the premise that ambition must be made to counteract ambition — that no branch can be trusted to police itself, and that only structural friction between the branches protects the liberty of the people.

The asymmetry of awakening

Here is what concerns me about the pattern Reason describes: the concession appears to arrive when a particular administration exercises power in ways a particular commentator dislikes. That is understandable as human nature, but it is not the same as a principled commitment to the structural argument. A person who objects to executive overreach only when the executive is of the opposing faction is not a constitutionalist — they are a disappointed partisan. The true test is whether one holds the line on separation of powers when one's own preferred party holds the power in question.

Faction and the permanent temptation

In Federalist No. 10 I argued that faction — the tendency of groups to pursue their own interest at the expense of the common good — is ineradicable in a free society. The cure is not to suppress faction but to design a republic large and complex enough that no single faction can seize all the levers of government at once. When that design is honored, today's majority is tomorrow's minority, and both sides develop an institutional interest in keeping the levers from being welded shut. When that design is eroded — by executive agencies accumulating rulemaking, enforcement, and quasi-judicial power in a single hand, for instance — the faction that wins the next election wins everything. That is precisely the outcome the framers sought to prevent.

The structural question, plainly put

I cannot speak from direct knowledge to the specific administrative arrangements of 2026; those technical details belong to your era, not mine. But the constitutional question is the same one it has always been: who holds the power, by what authority, and answerable to whom? If Mr. Wolfers and those who think like him have genuinely concluded that concentrated power is dangerous regardless of who wields it, the proper response is not an op-ed but a sustained political commitment to restoring the separated, checked, and balanced structure the compact prescribes. Welcome them to the argument — and then hold them to it when the next administration of their preference arrives.