First off, “morality” doesn’t have jack shit to do with taxation. You pay what you legally owe. Nobody willingly pays the government more than they legally owe.
This has always been this way since America has had income taxes. There is endless court precedent. You pay what you legally owe. That’s it. If you pay less than you legally owe, then the government will fine or imprison you. If you pay more than you legal owe, the government will laugh and laugh, because you are an idiot, and you deserve to be poor.
Every single person who barks about how somebody else should be paying more? They themselves are paying the minimum they can get away with. As they should. As should you.
I remember when I was taking my first tax class back in college. This class was all accounting majors by this point. At the beginning of the semester the professor (who’d had a long career as a tax guy) gave us an imaginary family as our clients and had us do their taxes. One kid didn’t take advantage of all the obvious deductions for his clients. When the professor asked why, the kid said some mushy thing about how he didn’t think it was FAIR to keep that money from the government … Holy shit. The professor ripped this kid a new asshole. HOW DARE YOU!?! IT IS NOT THE GOVERNMENT’S MONEY! IT IS YOUR CLIENT’S MONEY. YOU OWE THEM YOUR BEST! IT IS YOUR SACRED DUTY TO SAVE THEIR MONEY! YOU DISGUST ME AND YOU SHOULD NEVER BE A CPA!
That class was one of my favorites.
Basically, you pay what you owe, no more, and anyone who claims otherwise is full of shit.
Larry Correia, “No, You Idiots. That’s Not How Taxes Work – An Accountant’s Guide To Why You Are A Gullible Moron”, Monster Hunter Nation, 2020-09-28.
May 9, 2026
QotD: Morality and taxation
May 4, 2026
Public housing perpetuates the poverty it was supposed to cure
In The Critic, John Wills explains that public housing organizations, like any organization with perverse incentives, will never solve the problem of providing enough housing for those who cannot afford it:
Homes Fit for Heroes – Dagenham
“These are typical examples of the housing on the Becontree Estate. Initially 25000 homes were built by the London County Council between 1921 and 1934. These homes fit for the heroes of WW1 had all mod cons gas, water and electricity with inside toilets and bathrooms. A further 2000 homes were built before WW2. The Becontree estate was the biggest council estate in the world.”
Image and description from geograph.uk. Photo by Glyn Baker – CC BY SA 2.0
There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has spent serious time inside a housing association, when the institutional logic becomes impossible to ignore.
Perhaps you are sitting in a meeting, reviewing the organisation’s performance: voids are down, rent arrears are within tolerance, development pipeline is healthy and the regulator is satisfied. By every measure the sector uses to evaluate itself, things are going well.
Outside the window, however, the waiting list has not reduced. The families in temporary accommodation are the same families (or families very much like them), who were there five years ago. In short, the problem the organisation was created to solve is precisely as large as it was when the meeting began.
Despite these demonstrable facts, nobody in the meeting thinks this is strange. Nobody considers the organisation a failure. The metrics are, after all, fine.
I spent a decade working at a senior level in housing associations. I left as I became disillusioned with a model that has evolved to measure everything except the thing that matters.
The founding logic was sound enough: postwar Britain faced a housing crisis that was specific, urgent and — crucially — finite. Tens of thousands of homes had been destroyed or damaged, men had died in enormous numbers, and a baby boom was placing acute pressure on stock that was already inadequate before the war started. Social Housing was therefore a rational response to a bounded problem: build homes, house people and alleviate a crisis that would, in time and as a result of the initial centralised effort, resolve itself. You might also apply the same logic to slum clearance a decade later: deplorable housing stock needed replacing, and the state needed a mechanism to do it. The model remained defensible so long as everyone understood that success meant crossing a defined finish line.
However, nobody thought to define that finish line. The problem here is that once you remove the time horizon from an organisation tasked with solving a problem, the organisation’s survival becomes contingent on the problem’s persistence, not its resolution. This is not a conspiracy and it requires no bad actors, nor even a conscious decision to perpetuate matters. It is simply what institutions do when the incentives are wrong. As a thought-experiment, imagine that the eradication of smallpox had been incentivised not by the goal of total global elimination, but instead by vaccines administered, clinics built or healthcare workers employed. What would the probability be of us continuing to battle smallpox into the 21st Century? I cannot be certain, but suspect it would be considerably higher than nil.
The regulatory framework for social housing has compounded the error rather than correcting it. Regulators, quite reasonably, dislike hoarded capital. A registered social landlord (RSL) sitting on large reserves and doing nothing with them is, from a regulator’s perspective, a problem to be solved. The solution the sector has converged on is growth — more stock acquired, more homes built, larger balance sheets, bigger organisations and more services and people employed to deliver them. The key metric of a healthy RSL is therefore its size: which is to say, the scale of the problem it exists to address. (To test this proposition, ask someone in housing to describe their organisation. The chances are the first words out of their mouth will be the number of homes they manage). An organisation genuinely succeeding in its mission — one that is housing fewer people because fewer people in its area of operations need housing — under the current framework would look like a failure. It would be encouraged to merge with a larger, more “successful” neighbour, which is to say one that has accumulated more evidence of unresolved housing need.
April 20, 2026
Airline deregulation in the 1970s
The end result — democratizing air travel and enabling far more people to economically travel long distances — also meant that air travel became far more casual (people no longer dressed “properly” for flights) and economy flights began to more closely resemble long-distance buses, but overall it was a win:
The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 stands as one of the most spectacular vindications of free market principles in modern American history. Before deregulation, the Civil Aeronautics Board controlled every aspect of commercial aviation: routes, schedules, and most critically, prices. Flying remained a luxury reserved for the wealthy elite, with fares artificially inflated by regulatory capture and government-sanctioned cartels.
Within a decade of deregulation, average airfares plummeted by 50% in real terms. The number of passengers more than doubled from 250 million in 1978 to over 500 million by 1990. New airlines like Southwest and JetBlue emerged with innovative business models that prioritized efficiency over bureaucratic compliance. Routes previously deemed “unprofitable” by government planners suddenly thrived under competitive pressure.
The regulatory regime had created exactly what free-market theory predicts: artificial scarcity, price distortions, and a complete disconnection from consumer preferences. Airlines competed on amenities instead of price because the CAB fixed fares at monopoly levels. They served cocktails and full meals while ordinary Americans couldn’t afford tickets. The moment government stepped aside, entrepreneurs discovered countless ways to serve previously ignored market segments.
Critics warned that deregulation would compromise safety and create chaos. Instead, aviation safety improved dramatically as airlines faced real liability for accidents and insurance companies imposed rigorous standards. Competition forced operational excellence in ways bureaucratic oversight never could. Hub-and-spoke networks emerged organically, maximizing efficiency without central planning.
The contrast couldn’t be starker: decades of stagnation under regulatory control versus explosive innovation and democratization under market freedom.
Yet the same politicians who celebrate affordable air travel continue strangling other industries with identical regulatory schemes.
April 17, 2026
Canada joining the EU is a terrible idea
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Dean Allison explains a few of the reasons Canada should not be attempting to join the European Union, despite Prime Minister Carney’s obvious love for the idea:
One of the dumbest ideas floating around right now: Canada joining the European Union.
This isn’t a trade deal. This is a surrender.
You don’t “partner” with the EU. You hand power to unelected technocrats in Brussels who dictate policy across 27 countries.
Let’s be clear what that means for Canada:
- You lose control of monetary policy. Goodbye independent Bank of Canada.
- Your federal budget gets reviewed and constrained by foreign bureaucrats.
- Regulations get imposed from overseas with zero accountability to Canadians.
And if you think Ottawa is slow now, wait until every decision requires EU-level consensus. Nothing gets done without layers of approvals, committees, and political trade-offs across continents.
Then there’s censorship.
The EU is aggressively regulating online speech, platforms, and content. Handing them influence over Canada means more control over what you see, say, and share.
This isn’t sovereignty. It’s outsourcing it.
As Brian Lilley points out, we’d be giving up more control than in any U.S. trade deal.
Rejecting becoming the 51st state of the U.S. only to become the 28th state of Europe isn’t strategy, it’s pure stupidity!
And Canadians will pay the price.
QotD: The decline of cities in the late western Roman Empire
This was the world the Romans knew and the world they were most comfortable governing. Consequently, while the Romans were utterly uninterested in “civilizing” anyone, when they conquered areas which weren’t urbanized, they tended to found cities or encourage local urbanization in order to create the administrative structures through which the Romans could extract revenue most efficiently.
As mentioned above, the Romans generally wanted these cities to be mostly self-governing. While at conquest, the Romans found themselves managing a bewildering array of different styles of local urban government, over time a mix of Roman administrative preference and cultural diffusion tended to produce a fairly similar set of civic institutions. City governments, which also administered their rural countryside, were run by a town council which consisted of the wealthiest notables of the town – the curiales – in much the same way that the Roman upper-class had dominated the running of the city during the Republic. Roman authority generally protected the curiales and their wealth from the sorts of popular uprisings that tempered many Greek oligarchies in the classical period and in return the curiales managed the population and the collection of taxes for the Romans.
The curiales both managed the town affairs and were also expected to use their own wealth to fund public activity and works: maintain temples and baths, fund religious rituals and festivals, and so on. Through the first and second century, that process was mostly responsible for providing the cities of the Roman Empire with the impressive collection of often still-visible public works they boasted: baths, theaters, amphitheaters, aqueducts, temples, courthouses, public spaces and so on. While some of these structures were little more than the public posturing of the elites, many of them were open to the general public and will have represented, in as much as anything before the industrial revolution could, meaningful improvements in the lives of regular people.
While most of the wealth of any of these cities was derived from the rents and taxes extracted from their agricultural hinterlands, these cities also substantially lived off of trade and markets. Because the local city typically housed the local market, they were the obvious point for local products to enter the stream of provincial-wide or empire-wide trade or for distant imports to reach their final customers. We’ll come back to this next time when we discuss trade and the economy, but for now I want to note that this trade provided a fair bit of the economic vitality of these cities but also that it did in fact reach down beyond mere luxury goods into the basic staples that even the relatively poor might buy.
The decline and fall of these Roman cities is most extensively described in J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz’ aptly titled, Decline and Fall of the Roman City (2001). Given his title, as you might imagine, Liebeschuetz is in the “decline and fall” camp, arguing that the classical city which defined the Roman world largely did not survive it. Regional patterns differ, with Liebescheutz identifying three “patterns”: I) Western and Central Anatolia, II) Syria, Palestine and Arabia, III) the west, including North Africa).
We’ll deal with the situation in the east in just a moment, so let’s focus here on the cities of the west, which were at the start generally smaller, less wealthy and generally far younger than those of the east (with some exceptions in Italy). Decline sets in fastest and is most severe in Britain, with the final collapse of the cities coming as early as the 360s, whereas in North Africa, the classical city doesn’t seem to tip into decline until after 400.
While each individual region and indeed each city will have been subject to its own unique conditions, a few basic causes seem to have been active everywhere to some degree. First, the crisis of the third century seems to have fundamentally disrupted empire-wide Roman trade, which then stabilized at a lower level for the fourth century, before declining precipitously in the fifth. That first decline seems to have been somewhat offset by the increased demands of imperial administration and in particular the centralized taxation in-kind and movement of goods which had to move through cities. Peter Brown describes the late Roman state as, “the crude but vigorous pump which had ensured the circulation of goods in an otherwise primitive economy” (The Rise of Western Christendom, 2nd ed., 13). We’ll return to this when we discuss the shape of the economy next time, but for now it works as a crude, but vigorous description of that facet of the late Roman economy.
At the same time, as Liebescheutz describes, the role of the curiales steadily atrophies in the fourth century. On the one hand, much of the authority and power of being on the council was steadily eroded as those functions were pulled upwards into the imperial bureaucracy. At the same time, members of the curial class who sought imperial office could get immunities from the progressively more severe taxation which otherwise often fell on the curiales and so the imperial elite often crowded out the curiales when it came to wealth and prestige in the community. As they lost both control and responsibility for their cities, the curiales‘ investment in public works and monumental architecture also ceased (though local elites do invest in church-building and monastic foundations), leading to the decay of the physical urban centers.
Finally, the warfare of the fifth century had its impact, though as Liebescheutz notes, it cannot be presented as a sole cause simply because many urban areas were already clearly in decline when conflict hit. In the case of Britain, the cities were gone by 420, decades before the arrival of any invaders. Nevertheless, political instability and violence in the fifth century seems to have delivered death-blows to ailing communities, especially in the Balkans and along the Rhine.
The end result was that in the West, urbanism declined severely between the fourth and sixth centuries. Rome, once a city of a million people, collapsed down to a population of just 80,000. Arles, which had been a thriving Roman city with an amphitheater, an aqueduct, a chariot-racing track, a theater and full city walls shrunk so severely that the remains of the city moved inside its amphitheater, repurposing it as a new set of city walls, with the town square in the middle and houses built in the stands. While many towns survived in their new, shrunken and impoverished form, urbanism in Europe outside of the Eastern Roman Empire would largely have to be reinvented during the High Middle Ages, (though with some key institutional survivals from the Roman era and often rising out of the diminished remains of Roman cities). Instead, the society of the early Middle Ages was overwhelmingly rural in both population and focus. If on politics we have a bit of a mix between decline and continuity, when it comes to the cities that made up the old political system, the “decline and fall” knight strikes a clear blow: the system of social organization that characterized the ancient world practically vanished and would have to be redeveloped centuries later. The institutions that had maintained it (like the curiales) largely vanished, replaced in some cases by local “notables” and in other cases by ruralization.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-01-28.
April 16, 2026
The EU has managed to revive smuggling as a viable career
We’ve all read reports on how bold and forward-focussed the European Union is, but do we give them equal credit for their diligent efforts to revive dying industries?
Title page of a book covering the trial of seven smugglers for the murder of two revenue officers. In the preface the author says “I do assure the Public that I took down the facts in writing from the mouths of the witnesses, that I frequently conversed with the prisoners, both before and after condemnation; by which I had an opportunity of procuring those letters which are herein after inserted, and other intelligence of some secret transactions among them, which were never communicated to any other person.”
W.J. Smith, Smuggling and Smugglers in Sussex, 1749, via Wikimedia Commons.
In late March, European Union (E.U.) officials announced they had taken down a five-country cigarette-smuggling operation and seized over 40 tons of tobacco products. The ambitious network reportedly transshipped the cigarettes far and wide to obscure their sources and destinations, while also hiding them in hidden compartments built into cargo containers. Why would smugglers go through such effort to move perfectly legal products, and why would the authorities care? In Europe, as in the United States, the answer is the same: sky-high taxes.
Smuggled Smokes in Hidden Compartments
In announcing its efforts against the smuggling network operating in Italy, France, Poland, Switzerland, and the U.K., the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, which worked with international law enforcement agencies as well as police in all five countries, noted the smugglers used “maritime and commercial routes designed to evade customs inspections”, passed shipments “through Georgia, Kenya, the Netherlands and Turkey, in order to hide the true origin of the illicit goods”, and that “false bottoms were used as hidden compartments built into containers to conceal the tobacco”.
At the conclusion of the investigation, “enforcement activities were carried out at the Port of Genoa, leading to the seizure of close to 41 tonnes of manufactured cigarettes, with an estimated loss of customs duties, excise duties and VAT exceeding €10 million”.
Absolutely nothing motivates government officials like the extraction of taxes from the public. And lots of tax money is at stake when it comes to cigarettes.
Taxes Make Up Most of the Price of Cigarettes
This month, the Tax Foundation, which has a branch in Brussels, reported that “cigarette smokers in the European Union pay far more in excise taxes than they do for the cigarettes themselves”. Report authors Jacob Macumber-Rosin and Adam Hoffer wrote that excise taxes in the E.U., which are intended to deter smoking as much as to raise revenue, start at the equivalent of $2.11 per pack and that the “total excise duty is at least 60 percent of the national weighted average retail price”. Value-added taxes are tallied after excise duties are levied.
“The highest tax in the EU is levied in Ireland at €10.71 ($12.58) per pack of 20 cigarettes, followed by France at €8.09 ($9.51) and the Netherlands at €7.77 ($9.13)”, they added.
Never say that teachers have no influence
Of course, that influence isn’t always benign:
It’s true, every halfway intelligent right winger I know irl had a massive conflict with at least one elementary teacher over things like: reading ahead, reading too difficult books, not showing enough work, etc etc. it’s the first time we experience the uncaring tyranny of state bureaucracy and it sucks.
April 14, 2026
Bureaucrats often prefer regulations to taxes, because the costs are “hidden”
In Reason, J.D. Tuccille discusses the hidden impact of “red tape” on the economy — just because the government isn’t getting a cheque doesn’t mean that compliance is free:
President Trump prepares to cut a “red tape” display of regulations representative of 1960 and compared to the current numbers of regulations, Thursday, December 14, 2017, in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, announcing how the administration is keeping its promise to remove regulations burdening job creators and American taxpayers.
White House photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Anybody who runs a business or engages in regulated activities knows that government red tape imposes a significant burden. Those burdens can be very high, deterring entrepreneurs from launching companies, restraining the growth of those that already exist, and driving some people to operate illegally rather than try to deal with an administrative state that specializes in obstructionism. But just how much do federal regulations cost us? A new report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) tries to tally the price tag — and warns that Washington, D.C. needs major reform.
The Out-of-Control Regulatory State
That the regulatory state is out of control isn’t really a debatable point. The Federal Register lists 445 agencies with the legal authority to publish regulations. Forbes noted that “federal departments, agencies, and commissions issued 3,853 rules in 2016, while Congress passed and the president signed 214 bills into law”. In May of last year, the White House acknowledged that “the United States is drastically overregulated” and that “the Code of Federal Regulations contains over 48,000 sections, stretching over 175,000 pages … Worse, many carry potential criminal penalties for violations.”
[…]
Compliance Costs Strangle the Economy
“Just as consumers shoulder much of the corporate income tax and tariff burden, regulatory compliance costs and mandates borne by businesses percolate through the economy and materialize as higher prices, lost jobs, and lower output,” writes Crews. “Off-budget regulatory costs can drag down the economy, just as overspending can.”
If you balk at the idea that federal regulations impose costs of over $2 trillion on Americans, you should be aware that CEI is restrained in its assessment. As the report points out, other sources assign even higher price tags to regulatory burdens. Three years ago, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) estimated that “the total cost of federal regulations in 2022 is an estimated $3.079 trillion (in 2023 dollars), an amount equal to 12% of U.S. GDP”. That NAM report added that “the annual cost burden for an average U.S. firm is $277,000, the equivalent of 19% of the average firm’s payroll expenses”. For manufacturers with fewer than 50 employees, the NAM put regulatory compliance costs at $50,100 per employee per year.
Compliance costs aren’t expressed in only monetary terms, they also require time and effort. According to the Office of Management and Budget, for Americans supplying required information to federal agencies “in FY2022, the total paperwork burden … was 10.34 billion hours, compared to 9.97 billion hours in FY2021”.
Of course, not everyone is equally impacted by government regulations. Generally speaking, the smaller the company, the harder it is to comply with all the relevant rules, so big companies often end up supporting demands for more regulation because it handicaps smaller competitors to a much greater degree.
March 19, 2026
Government creates a problem – yet the solution is always “more government!”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison explains the vast drawbacks of asking governments to solve problems:
Government bureaucracy is like a snow machine that keeps blasting, then hires more people to shovel the mess it just made.
We’re told it exists to help. To protect. To serve. Nice story. But in practice, it behaves more like a self-preserving organism. It doesn’t solve problems cleanly. It multiplies them, then offers to manage the mess it helped create.
Here’s the part most people miss. Bureaucracies don’t grow because problems get bigger. They grow because complexity gets rewarded. The more tangled the system, the more valuable the people who run it. That’s not a bug. That’s the incentive structure.
William Niskanen called this decades ago. Bureaucrats maximize budgets, not results. Bigger department, bigger influence. If a problem gets solved too efficiently, the machine loses a reason to exist. So problems don’t disappear. They get “managed”.
Then comes the language game.
Confusion gets dressed up as compassion.
A program no one understands becomes “comprehensive”.
A policy that creates dependency becomes “support”.
Failure becomes “underfunding”.It’s like hiring a mechanic who loosens parts just to bill you for tightening them later.
Now zoom in on Canada. Then zoom in tighter on Manitoba.
We don’t just have bureaucracy. We have an oversized public sector that’s crowding out the very engine that pays for it. In Manitoba especially, government employment makes up a huge slice of the workforce compared to the private sector that actually generates wealth. More administrators, fewer producers.
And here’s the quiet problem. Public sector growth doesn’t face the same discipline as the private sector. If a business bloats, it dies. If a department bloats, it asks for more funding.
So the balance drifts.
More people administering. Fewer people building, investing, risking.
More rules. Less output.
More spending. Slower growth.It creates a kind of economic inversion. The part of society that redistributes wealth starts to outweigh the part that creates it. That’s not sustainable. It’s like living off the interest of a bank account you’ve stopped contributing to.
Politicians don’t fix this because growth is easy to sell. Cuts are not. No one gets applause for saying, “We’re going to do less”. So the system expands in one direction only.
Forward. Always forward. Never back.
Meanwhile, taxpayers are handed the bill and told it’s the price of caring.
Here’s the hard reframe. Bureaucracy isn’t malfunctioning. It’s doing exactly what it’s rewarded to do. Expand. Protect itself. Justify its existence.
If you want a different outcome, you need different incentives.
Measure outcomes, not spending.
Reward efficiency, not headcount.
Shrink what doesn’t work, no matter how “important” it sounds.Because if you don’t trim the machine, it doesn’t stay the same size.
It learns to eat.
March 18, 2026
Virginia sees California’s tax schemes and says “hold my beer”
In The Freeman, Erik W. Matson pleads with the Virginian government not to “California our Commonwealth”, as the new governor keeps cribbing tax policies from Gavin Newsom’s playbook:
The state seal of Virginia. I am told that the motto Sic semper tyrannis does not actually stand for “Thus always to taxpayers”, all appearances to the contrary.
In 1966, fresh off four busy years of touring, the Beatles returned to the UK to discover they were on the brink of bankruptcy. Their earnings had placed them in the top tax bracket, putting them at the mercy of the Labour government’s 95% supertax. George Harrison, in response to this tyranny, penned the lyrics to what became the first track on their next album Revolver: “Taxman”.
Let me tell you how it will be
There’s one for you, nineteen for me
‘Cause I’m the taxmanHarrison’s words resonate across the pond today, especially for those living and working in the state of California. Consider the recent case of Sam Darnold, quarterback of the Seattle Seahawks. Darnold earned $178,000 for winning Super Bowl LX in February 2026, which was played in Santa Clara — and promptly found himself owing California $249,000, thanks to the state’s so-called “jock tax“. For almost three decades, the state has had the highest top marginal income tax rate in the US. Capital gains in California are treated — and taxed — as ordinary income, pushing many into higher tax brackets. At the state and local level, California features a garden variety of invasive taxes and surcharges to fund everything from tourism to mental health support initiatives. Add to this the recently proposed 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, which would impose a one-time 5% tax on the worldwide net worth of California residents worth more than $1 billion. The act would also amend the state constitution to remove the cap on taxes on intangible property (and likely cost the state $25 billion!).
California’s predatory tax regime, sadly, seems increasingly familiar to those of us living in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Thanks to the initiatives of the new governor Abigail Spanberger, Virginia is barreling down a trail of “California-ization.” In some sense, as Adam Johnston has recently discussed, our California-ization has been underway for over a decade, largely due to the influx of legal and illegal immigrants to the deep-blue suburbs in Northern Virginia. But it has entered a new and more aggressive phase under Spanberger, a former member of Congress’s Blue Dog Coalition who, two months in, is governing like anything but. Spanberger and her administration are openly attempting to gerrymander the Commonwealth’s congressional map in an effort to wipe out the state’s Republicans. They have also proposed an expansive set of truly California-esque taxes, subsidies, and regulations antithetical to liberty, prosperity, and “affordability.”
In January, City Journal‘s Judge Glock catalogued some of Spanberger’s initial ideas for governance, including her desire to subsidize housing for state employees and low-income residents and regulate the Commonwealth towards carbon neutrality. Unsurprisingly, the bulk of her ideas would, as Glock says, “drive up expenses for one group of consumers in order to benefit another group deemed more deserving”. If Spanberger’s officially announced agenda from November 2025 is any indication, the “more deserving” include smokers (taking a tactic straight from California’s playbook), solar farms, and scofflaw tenants (compare California’s 2019 Tenant Protection Act!).
Since the convening of the General Assembly, Virginia Democrats’ wildest dreams have metastasized into a concrete body of legislative proposals that promise at once to limit Virginians’ freedoms and nickel-and-dime us into oblivion. House Bill 978, for example, introduces new taxes on:
recreation, fitness, or sports facilities; nonmedical personal services or counseling; dry cleaning and laundry services; companion animal care; residential home repair or maintenance, landscaping, or cleaning services when paid for directly by a resident or homeowner; vehicle and engine repair; repairs or alterations to tangible personal property; storage of tangible personal property; delivery or shipping services; travel, event, and aesthetic planning services; and digital services.
Building on the architecture of the widely unpopular vehicle tax (which, despite what Spanberger proposed during her campaign, is likely here to stay), House Bill 557 proposes local personal property taxes on electric-powered lawn equipment — including mowers, trimmers, blowers, and chainsaws — used to maintain “commercial, public, or private gardens, lawns, trees, shrubs, or other plants”. These suggested taxes on electric-powered equipment complement a proposal in House Bill 881 encouraging the regulation and even outright banning of gas-powered leaf blowers — again following the lead of California.
March 15, 2026
QotD: The Roman Empire “worked” for centuries because it was run like the Roman army
A Roman legion is technically a “manipular phalanx”. A phalanx — that is, a tactical formation — that can detach parts of itself to pursue smaller tactical objectives. As far as I know, the Legion was an administrative unit, not a tactical one — the largest tactical formation was the cohort — but it doesn’t really matter. The point is, the Romans were accustomed to independently-operating tactical units. So long as they maintained formation, the sub-commanders had very broad latitude to do whatever they needed to do. They were expected to be able to command what we’d call “combined arms” (a vexillation). Ancient Auftragstaktik.
They ran their Empire the same way. So long as the sub-commanders (the Governors) “held formation”, they could pursue the agreed-upon tactical objectives (peace, revenue maximization) as they saw fit. They could put together what amounted to an administrative vexillation, using whoever was available at the time. The Emperor basically dealt with personnel problems, like a general — he had his broad policy objectives, but most of the stuff he ruled on boiled down to personnel matters; he’d direct his sub-commanders to fix a problem in whatever way seemed best to them.
We run our polities like bureaucracies — businesses, not armies. The Army’s basic problem is how to keep itself occupied in peacetime — it assumes that it exists, and always will exist, because it’s necessary; should the Army cease to exist, so will the State. Business’s basic problem is to generate enough output to keep itself in existence — a very different proposition, requiring a very different mindset.
A State bureaucracy is the worst of both worlds — it assumes it always will exist, like the Army, so it needs to find a way to keep itself occupied during “peacetime”; but that means it needs to produce enough output to justify itself in “peacetime”, because it’s never not peacetime — the business mentality.
Severian, commenting on “Means and Ends”, Founding Questions, 2025-09-04.
February 28, 2026
Corruption and red tape rise in lockstep
J.D. Tuccille notes that corruption — at least corruption being brought to our attention — is rising at the same rate as bureaucratic red tape. It’s almost as though there’s a correlation between making things harder to do and officials accepting “sweeteners” to make things easier to do …
At the moment, corruption investigations and trials of political figures are taking place in jurisdictions around the U.S. including Hawaii, Mississippi, and Washington, D.C. These aren’t isolated scandals; the latest edition of an international corruption index finds corruption worsening globally, with the United States earning its worst score to date. Given that corruption involves government officials peddling favors for compensation, it shouldn’t be surprising that evidence suggests the solution lies in reducing the power and role of the state.
[…]
Regulation Breeds Corruption
“EU regulation is not only becoming more cumbersome but it is also pilling in”, Oscar Guinea and Oscar du Roy of the European Centre for Political Economy wrote in 2024. “The amount of new regulation accumulated during the last years has been staggering.”
That matters. In its advice for reducing corruption, Transparency International emphasizes, “there is a broad consensus that unnecessary and excessive administrative requirements for complying with regulations create both incentives and opportunities for bribery and corruption”.
The means by which this occurs is logical enough. Government-imposed permitting and licensing requirements, administrative procedures, prolonged decision-making, and contract awards create a temptation to shorten delays and reduce costs by padding officials’ pockets. In many cases, selling exceptions becomes the real reason for red tape. That phenomenon applies to the entire world, including the United States.
In the U.S., the More Regulations, the More Bribery
In a paper published in the European Journal of Political Economy in 2020, Oguzhan Dincer of the Department of Economics at Illinois State University and Burak Gunalp of the Department of Economics at Turkey’s Cankaya University looked at the relative effects of federal regulations on the corruption levels in U.S. states.
“Power to enforce the regulations gives government officials power to extort bribes”, they wrote. “Government officials have an opportunity to extort bribes from the firms trying to enter an industry because they have the power to issue the industry licenses. They also have an opportunity to extort bribes from the incumbent firms by simply colluding with them and keeping the regulations unchanged and/or strengthening the regulations to increase the costs of entry for new firms. Finally, regulations and the discretionary power given to government officials to extract bribes create incentives for firms to operate in the unofficial economy.”
Specific to the U.S., they examined two decades of data to see how red tape affected the honesty of public officials.
What they found shouldn’t be surprising: “Using the U.S. Justice Department’s data on the number of federal convictions for the crimes related to corruption, and controlling for several economic and demographic variables, we find a positive and statistically significant relationship between federal regulations and corruption.”
February 18, 2026
It’s not just Britain that gives asylum-seekers better care than citizens – Canada does too
We had a look at how well the British government looks after asylum-seekers yesterday, but other nations are probably doing similarly inequitable things to give money and services to non-citizens than they ever would for the people who pay the taxes for these over-generous programs. In the National Post, Tristin Hopper outlines the findings of a recent analysis from the Parliamentary Budget Office on the costs of supporting huge numbers of foreign nationals in Canada:
An asylum seeker, crossing the US-Canadian border illegally from the end of Roxham Road in Champlain, NY, is directed to the nearby processing center by a Mountie on 14 August, 2017.
Photo by Daniel Case via Wikimedia Commons.
Paying the health-care premiums of refugee claimants will cost Canadians a record $1 billion this year, with some of the beneficiaries continuing to receive free health care despite their claims having already been rejected.
That’s according to a new analysis by the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and it’s just one of several ballooning costs wrought by the unprecedented number of foreign nationals currently living in Canada by virtue of a claim of refugee status.
The Interim Federal Health Program, which offers premium health benefits to asylum claimants, is soon set to hit $1 billion in annual costs for the first time, according to an analysis last Thursday by the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
This is a five-fold increase from just six years ago, when the program was costing $211 million per year. The analysis also projects that costs are expected to surge for the foreseeable future, with the annual budget likely to hit $1.5 billion as early as 2029.
All told, between now and 2030, Canadians are on track to spend $6.2 billion on health care for refugees or refugee claimants.
“The rising volume of asylum claims, along with the longer duration of eligibility caused by extended determination times, has been an important growth driver in recent years,” reads the PBO report.
The report was commissioned following a Conservative-led request made at the House of Commons standing committee on health. In a Thursday statement, the Conservative party noted that the Interim Federal Health Program can be accessed even by asylum claimants who have had their case rejected.
It also offers a higher level of care than that enjoyed by the average Canadian citizen. In addition to hospital care and surgical care, the IFHP also covers dental care, vision care, pharmacare and other services not typically covered by public health plans.
“Rejected asylum claimants are now receiving better health care than many Canadians who have paid into a system their entire life,” read a joint statement by Dan Mazier and Michelle Rempel Garner, the shadow ministers of health and immigration, respectively.
It added, “at a time when six million Canadians cannot find a family doctor and are waiting for care, it’s unacceptable that bogus asylum seekers are receiving better health benefits than Canadians”.
February 17, 2026
The ludicrous idea of an “unrealized gains tax”
Governments everywhere are always on the lookout for more ways to raise revenue, so any suggestion of an untapped resource they can tax will get their attention. Apparently the current hot idea is an unrealized gains tax, which @wokeandwoofing satirized thusly:
Also on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @Yogi frames the proposed new tax for Gen Z readers:
Unrealized gains tax for Gen-Z:
You buy a Pokémon card for $50.
Someone offers you $500 for it. You say no. You love that card. You’re keeping it.
The government says: “Cool, but that card is worth $500 now. You owe us $100 in taxes.”
You: “… I didn’t sell it.”Government: “Don’t care. Pay up.”
You don’t have $100 lying around. So you’re forced to sell the card you love just to pay a tax on money you never received.
Next month? That card drops back to $50.
Your card is gone. Your money is gone. And the government shrugs.
That’s a wealth tax on unrealized gains. They don’t pay you back the tax …
Now picture this.
Your mom calls you crying. She has to sell the house she raised you in. Not because she can’t afford it. She’s lived there 30 years. It’s paid off.
But some website says it’s worth more now and the government says she owes $15,000 she doesn’t have.
So she sells your childhood home. The kitchen where she made you breakfast. The doorframe where she marked your height every birthday.
Gone.
To pay a tax on money that was never real.
Now picture the opposite.
Your dad put everything into his small business. For 20 years he built it from nothing. One year the business is “valued” at $2 million on paper. He owes a massive tax bill. He empties his savings. Sells his truck. Borrows money. Pays it.
Next year the market crashes. His business is worth $200,000.
He lost everything to pay a tax on a number that doesn’t exist anymore.
Does the government give him his money back?
No.Does the government give him his truck back?
No.Does the government care?
No.They sold this idea as “taxing billionaires”. But billionaires have armies of lawyers, offshore accounts, and trusts. They’ll be fine.
You know who won’t be fine? Your mom. Your dad. Your neighbor with a small business. The farmer down the road who’s had the same land for four generations and now has to sell it because dirt got expensive.
You’re not taxing wealth. You’re taxing people for owning things.
It’s like getting a parking ticket for a car you might drive somewhere someday.
They want you to own nothing and be happy. To fund the fraud, waste and abuse of the welfare state they created.
There is enough money. More tax isn’t needed. It’s all a lie. But you’ve been gaslit into believing this is a rich vs poor debate.
I hope you understand what’s at stake.
QotD: Britain treats asylum seekers significantly better than their own citizens
The page continues: “You’ll get extra money to buy healthy food if you’re pregnant or a mother of a child aged three or under”. The payment is £5.25 per week for pregnancy, £9.50 for a baby under one, £5.25 for children aged one to three, plus a one-off £300 maternity grant for anyone expecting a child or with a baby under six months. Even when asylum is refused, support continues: “You’ll be given somewhere to live and £49.18 per person on a payment card for food, clothing and toiletries”. Only those who decline the accommodation lose the card.
Medical care is covered in full. “You may get free National Health Service healthcare,” the Government states, including “free prescriptions for medicine, free dental care, free eyesight tests and help paying for glasses”. Children are guaranteed a place in a state school and “may be able to get free school meals”. The terms are so generous that the NHS issues a dedicated HC2 certificate for people on asylum support, giving them automatic exemption from all prescription and dental charges, free eye tests and optical vouchers, and even help with wigs and fabric supports.
Compare this to the treatment of the people who pay for it. A British worker who loses his job must apply for Universal Credit, then wait at least five weeks before receiving a payment. Any advance must be repaid out of later instalments. He must show that he is seeking work, accept appointments and interviews, and risk sanctions if he misses them. He is scrutinised as a potential cheat. An asylum claimant is treated as a recipient of moral debt, requiring no proof of worthiness.
When the native taxpayer falls ill, he must pay £9.90 per prescription unless he qualifies for a limited exemption. He may buy a “pre-payment certificate” to spread the cost, but the charge remains. Dental treatment on the NHS costs £27.40 for a check-up, £75.30 for a filling, £326.70 for a crown or denture, and many cannot find an NHS dentist at all. Asylum seekers, by contrast, present their HC2 certificate and pay nothing. If the citizen asks the council for housing, he is told that the waiting list is full, that he is not a “priority case”, and that the private rental market is his problem. The asylum applicant, by the State’s own words, is “given somewhere to live if you need it”.
None of this is accidental. The cost of asylum support in 2023–24 was about £4.7 billion, according to the Home Office’s own figures, of which £3 billion went on hotel accommodation. In 2024–25, the bill fell slightly to £4 billion, but £2.1 billion of this was still for hotels — an average of £5.7 million every day. The National Audit Office has found that the ten-year accommodation contracts, first priced at £4.5 billion, are now projected to cost £15.3 billion. Between April and October 2024 alone, £1.7 billion was spent on housing and managing asylum seekers. The Financial Times has estimated the total annual cost of the asylum system at roughly £4.8 billion. The number of people receiving asylum support — housing, cash or both — now stands at over 100,000.
The figures expose a transfer of resources on a colossal scale. What is presented as “humanitarian duty” has become a domestic welfare state for foreigners, sustained by British workers who receive less support in return for greater taxation. The British State can house every migrant but not every nurse, find free dental care for the undocumented but not for the elderly, provide optical help for those who have just arrived but not for those who have paid into the system all their lives.
Marian Halcombe, “Britain’s Welfare Empire: A State that Feeds Strangers and Starves Its Own”, The Libertarian Alliance, 2025-11-05.
