… last week we noted how the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West did not destroy the Roman cultural sphere so much as accelerate its transformation (albeit into a collection of fragmented fusion cultures which were part “Roman” mixed with other things), it did bring an end to the Roman state in the west (but not the east) and an end to Roman governance. But here too, we have to be careful in defining what that governance meant, because the Roman Empire of August, 378 AD was not the Roman Empire of August, 14 AD. This is a point that is going to come up again and again because how one views the decline of the fifth and sixth centuries depends in part on what the benchmark is: are we comparing it to the empire of Hadrian (r. 117-138) or the empire of Valentinian (r. 364-375)? Because most students are generally more familiar with the former (because it tends to be get focused on in teaching), there is a tendency to compare 476 directly with Rome under the Nervan-Antonines (96-192) without taking into account the events of the third and early fourth century.
Roman rule as effectively codified under the first emperor, Augustus (r. 31BC – 14AD) was relatively limited and indirect, not because the Romans believed in something called “limited government” but because the aims of the Roman state were very limited (secure territory, collect taxes) and the administrative apparatus for doing those things was also very limited. The whole of the central Roman bureaucracy in the first century probably consisted of just a few hundred senatorial and equestrian officials (supported, of course, by the army and also several thousand enslaved workers employed either by the state directly or in the households of those officials) – this for an empire of around 50 million people. Instead, day to day affairs in the provinces – public works, the administration of justice, the regulation of local markets, etc. – were handled by local governments, typically centered in cities (we’ll come back to them in a moment). Where there were no cities, the Romans tended to make new ones for this purpose. Roman officials could then interact with the city elites (they preferred oligarchic city governments because they were easier to control) and so avoid having to interact directly with the populace in a more granular way unless there was a crisis.
By contrast, the Roman governance system that emerges during the reigns of Diocletian (r. 284-305) and Constantine (r. 306-337) was centralized and direct. The process of centralizing governance had been going on for some time, really since the beginning of the empire, albeit slowly. The Constitutio Antoniniana (212), which extended Roman citizenship to all free persons in the empire, in turn had the effect of wiping out all of the local law codes and instead extending Roman law to cover everyone and so doubtless accelerated the process.
During the Crisis of the Third Century (235-284) this trend accelerates substantially; the sources for this period are relatively poor, making it hard to see this process clearly. Nevertheless, the chaotic security situation led Roman generals and usurpers to make much greater demands of whatever local communities were in their reach, while at the same time once in power, emperors sought to draw a clearer distinction between their power and that of their subordinates in an effort to “coup proof” their regimes. That new form of Roman rule was both completed and then codified by Diocletian (r. 284-305): the emperor was set visually apart, ruling from palaces in special regalia and wearing crowns, while at the same time the provinces were reorganized into smaller units that could be ruled much more directly.
Diocletian intervened in the daily life of the empire in a way that emperors before largely had not. When his plan to reform the Roman currency failed, sparking hyper-inflation (whoops!), Diocletian responded with his Edict on Maximum Prices, an effort to fix the prices of many goods empire wide. Now previous emperors were not averse to price fixing, mind you, but such efforts had almost always been restricted to staple goods (mostly wheat) in Rome itself or in Italy (typically in response to food shortages). Diocletian attempted to enforce religious unity by persecuting Christians; his successors by the end of the century would be attempting to enforce religious unity by persecuting non-Christians. Whereas before taxes had been assessed on communities, Diocletian planned a tax system based on assessments of individual landholders based on a regular census; when actually performing a regular census proved difficult, Constantine responded by mandating that coloni – the tenant farmers and sharecroppers of the empire – must stay on the land they had been farming so that their landlords would be able to pay the taxes, casually abrogating a traditional freedom of Roman citizens for millions of farmers out of administrative convenience. Of course all of this centralized direction demanded bureaucrats and the bureaucracy during this period swelled to probably around 35,000 officials (compared to the few hundred under Augustus!).
All of this matters here because it is this kind of government – centralized, bureaucratic, religiously framed and interventionist, which the new rulers of the fifth century break-away kingdoms will attempt to emulate. They will mostly fail, leading to a precipitous decline in state capacity. This process worked differently in different areas: in Britain, the Roman government largely withered away from neglect and was effectively gone before the arrival of the Saxons and Angles, a point made quite well by Robin Flemming in the first chapter of Britain after Rome (2010), while in Spain, Gaul, Italy and even to an extent North Africa, the new “barbarian” rulers attempted to maintain Roman systems of rule.
This is thus an odd point where the “change and continuity” and “decline and fall” camps can both be right at the same time. There is continuity here, as new kings mostly established regimes that used the visual language, court procedure and to a degree legal and bureaucratic frameworks of Late Roman imperial rule. On the other hand, those new kingdoms fairly clearly lacked the resources, even with respect to their smaller territories, to engage in the kind of state activity that the Late Roman state had, for instance, towards the end of the fourth century. Instead, central administration largely failed in the West, with the countryside gradually becoming subject to local rural magnates (who might then be attached to the king) rather than civic or central government.
The problem rulers faced was two-fold: first that the Late Roman system, in contrast to its earlier form, demanded a large, literate bureaucracy, but the economic decline of the fifth century (which we’ll get to next time) came with a marked decline in literacy, which in turn meant that the supply of literate elites to staff those positions was itself shrinking (while at the same time secular rulers found themselves competing with the institutional Church for those very same literate elites). Second – and we’ll deal with this in more depth in just a moment – Roman rule had worked through cities, but all over the Roman Empire (but most especially in the West), cities were in decline and the population was both shrinking and ruralizing.
That decline in state capacity is visible in a number of different contexts. Bryan Ward-Perkins (Rome and the End of Civilization (2005), 148ff) notes for instance a sharp decline in the size of Churches, which for Christian rulers (both the post-Constantine emperors and the new “barbarian” kings) were major state building projects meant to display either royal or local noble wealth and power; Church size really only reaches Late Roman equivalent in the west (an important caveat here, to be sure) in the ninth century. In this kind of context it is hard to say that Visigothic or Merovingian rulers are actually just doing a different form of rulership because they’re fairly clearly not – they just don’t have the resources to throw at expensive building projects, even when you adjust for their smaller realms.
Nor is it merely building projects. Under Constantine, the Romans had maintained a professional army of around 400,000 troops. Much of the success of the Roman Empire had been its ability to provide “public peace” within its borders (at least by the relatively low standards of the ancient world). While the third century had seen quite a lot of civil war and the in the fourth century the Roman frontiers were cracking, for much of the empire the legions continued to do their job: war remained something that happened far away. This was a substantial change from the pre-Roman norm where war was a regular occurrence basically everywhere.
The kingdoms that emerged from the collapse of Roman rule proved incapable of either maintaining a meaningful professional army or provisioning much of that public peace (though of course the Roman state in the west had also proved incapable of doing this during the fifth century). Instead those kingdoms increasingly relied on armies led by (frequently mounted) warrior-aristocrats, composed of a general levy of the landholding population. We’ve actually discussed some of the later forms of this system – the Anglo-Saxon fyrd and the Carolingian levy system – already; those systems are useful reference points because they’re quite a bit better attested in our evidence and reflect many of the general principles of how we suppose earlier armies to have been organized.
The shift to a militia army isn’t necessarily a step backwards – the army of the Middle Roman Republic had also been a landholder’s militia – except that in this case it also marked a substantial decrease in scale. Major Merovingian armies – like the one that fought at Tours in 732 – tended to be around 10,000-20,000 men (mostly amateurs), compared to Late Roman field armies frequently around 40,000 professional soldiers or the astounding mobilizations of the Roman Republic (putting around 225,000 – that is not a typo – citizen-soldiers in the field in 214BC, for instance). Compared to the armies of the Hellenistic Period (323-31BC) or the Roman Empire, the ability of the post-Roman kingdoms to mobilize force was surprisingly limited and the armies they fielded also declined noticeably in sophistication, especially when it came to siege warfare (which of course also required highly trained, often literate engineers and experts).
That said, it cannot be argued that the decline of “public peace” had merely begun in the fifth century. One useful barometer of the civilian sense of security is the construction of city walls well within the empire: for the first two centuries, many Roman cities were left unwalled. But fresh wall construction within the Empire in places like Northern Spain or Southern France begins in earnest in the third century (presumably in response to the Crisis) and then intensifies through the fifth century, suggesting that rather than a sudden collapse of security, there had been a steady but significant decline (though again this would thus place the nadir of security somewhere in the early Middle Ages), partially abated in the fourth century but then resumed with a vengeance in the fifth.
Consequently the political story in the West is one of an effort to maintain some of the institutions of Roman governance which largely fails, leading to the progressive fragmentation and localization of power. Precisely because the late Roman system was so top-heavy and centralized, the collapse of central Roman rule mortally wounded it and left the successor states of Rome with much more limited resources and administration to try to achieve their aims.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-01-28.
June 5, 2025
QotD: Political institutions of the late western Roman Empire
May 25, 2025
Comparing Japan’s supply management system to the Canadian version
Colby Cosh considers the fate of a Japanese government minister who accidentally told the truth about a subject near and dear to Japanese consumers’ hearts (well, stomachs, actually):
“Japanese Girls at Work in the Rice Fields – Grand Old Fuji-Yama in the Distance, Japan” by Boston Public Library is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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I’m sure some of you saw Wednesday’s NP headline for an Associated Press wire story: “Japan’s agriculture minister resigns after saying he ‘never had to buy rice’” AP’s Mari Yamaguchi explained this international-news nugget. A cabinet minister in a shaky minority government made a flippant comment indicating that he was light-years out of touch with ordinary people facing high grocery costs in a developed country.
Taku Eto’s political survival thus became impossible within a matter of hours, and his prime minister hastily swapped a congenial young star into the agriculture portfolio. Japan is a constitutional monarchy with a system of parliamentary government more or less like ours, so there’s nothing incomprehensible about any of this to a Canadian …
… but, of course, one almost couldn’t help flashing back to our recent election campaign, wherein the prime minister had half-boasted to a Radio-Canada reporter that he doesn’t buy his own groceries and has no earthly idea how the stuff in his fridge gets there. It struck me at the time that this was a classic mistake for an electoral neophyte like Mark Carney. Fans of the legendary American columnist Michael Kinsley will surely think of it as a “Kinsley gaffe”, i.e., an obviously true statement that is nevertheless bound to get a politician in trouble.
[…]
Eto was talking about rice because the prices for it in Japan have gone through the roof, the clouds and the stratosphere. And rice plays a role in the Japanese culture and diet for which there is no analogue in omnivorous Canada. For precisely that reason, rice is supply-managed there in much the same way our dairy, eggs and poultry are — i.e., through confiscatory tariffs on foreign products, along with a mafia of politically powerful producer cooperatives who operate under supply quotas.
If you read Canadian news, you can recite the effects of this, whether or not you’re capable of finding Japan on a map of Japan. Their supply-management system is, like ours, a major headache for counterparties in trade negotiations. Their farmers, like Canada’s, are dwindling in number and aging out of the business. They are sometimes paid to destroy crops. Farm costs for machinery and supplies are subject to inflation. And sometimes the system for domestic demand forecasting blows a tire.
It’s a constant high-wire act for Japanese governments, who still have official responsibility for the national rice supply under wartime statute. If store-shelf prices get too high, and consumers start to make trouble, the cabinet must consider loosening tariff barriers and releasing rice from the national strategic reserve. The LDP ministry has done both these things in the face of hallucinatory prices, and so the farmers are now just as ticked off as the buying public.
May 20, 2025
Gen Z is blaming Capitalism for the sins of Cronyism
Lika Kobeshavidze at the Foundation for Economic Education explains why angry Gen Z’ers are blaming capitalism but should instead be blaming crony capitalism for the economic plight they find themselves in:
Image Credit: Custom image by FEE
Across college campuses, on TikTok feeds, and in everyday conversations, a familiar narrative is gaining steam: capitalism is broken.
Rising rents and stagnant wages fuel the claim among some young people that free markets have failed an entire generation. According to a 2024 poll by the Institute of Economic Affairs, more than 60% of young Britons now view socialism favorably. In the United States, the trend is similar, with Generation Z increasingly skeptical of capitalism’s promises.
But much of this idealism is rooted in distance — many of the young people romanticizing socialism have never lived through the economic dysfunction or political repression it often brings. For those who experienced Soviet shortages, Venezuelan collapse, or East Germany’s surveillance, the word socialism doesn’t suggest fairness or opportunity — it suggests fear, failure, and control. There’s a reason so many fled those systems to come to freer countries. What sounds utopian in theory has too often turned dystopian in practice.
But blaming capitalism misses the mark. The real culprit is cronyism, the unholy alliance between big government and big business that twists markets, blocks competition, and rewards political connections over genuine innovation.
[…]
Cronyism is not limited to one country or one political party. Across the United States and Europe, the symptoms are the same.
In the US, Canada, and the UK, the dream of homeownership slips further away for young people. Sky-high housing prices are blamed on “market failure”, but the real cause lies in layers of government-imposed barriers: restrictive zoning laws, burdensome permitting requirements, and endless bureaucratic delays. Big developers who can afford to navigate or influence the system survive. Everyone else gets locked out.
In Europe, the pattern repeats. France’s labor laws, designed to protect workers, instead stifle opportunity. Hiring becomes risky and expensive, especially for young people. Large corporations, with the resources to manage compliance costs, consolidate their dominance. Small firms and startups never get off the ground.
There’s also a persistent myth that big business fears government intervention. In reality, the largest corporations often embrace it, because it keeps them on top. Tech giants like Facebook and Google now lobby for more regulation, knowing that complex new rules will strangle smaller competitors who can’t afford fleets of compliance officers. Green energy subsidies, meant to combat climate change, often end up showering billions on well-connected firms while locking out emerging innovators.
Cronyism doesn’t reward the best ideas. It rewards the best lobbyists.
QotD: The autohagiography of the NHS
I grew up, for example, in the inculcated belief that the National Health Service was, according to the slogan of the time, “the envy of the world”. Millions of people believed this, and indeed it was an assertion heard for many years whenever the subject of health care came up. The slogan was last wheeled out in any force in 2008 for the 60th anniversary of its founding.
Oddly enough, it never occurred to the people who repeated the slogan to examine the basis of the claim. Who, exactly, were the people doing the envying — not just one or two of them, but en masse? It is no doubt true that immigrants from very poor countries were pleased enough to receive care under the NHS, comparing it with what they would have received at home. But is it really much of an achievement for a developed country to have health care better than that offered in Somalia or Bangladesh?
A war of anecdotes, while always gratifying to the human mind, is not the way to decide important questions such as the superiority or inferiority of a system of health care.
It never occurred to those who repeated the “envy” slogan to look to comparable countries across the Channel or North Sea to see whether, in fact, those countries had anything to envy. In fact, between 1948 and 1975, even Spain under Franco performed better in the matter of improving the health of the population than did Britain. In most respects, in fact, Britain lagged or limped behind other countries, always in the rear and struggling to catch up.
What eventually struck me, then, was the willingness of so many people to repeat and believe a slogan without any compulsion whatever to do so, and without the slightest inclination to examine its truth — indeed without any awareness of the need for such an examination. There was no oppressive force to prevent or deter them from intellectual inquiry, but they preferred the comfort the slogan offered to the effort and possible discomfort of finding the truth. The NHS, or rather the idea of the NHS, played the role of teddy bear to a population with many anxieties.
True enough, many individuals may have experienced deficiencies in the service — long waiting times, offhand or disagreeable interactions with the bureaucracy, etc. But like Russian peasants of old who believed that the Tsar knew nothing of the oppression which they suffered, and would have put an end to it if he had known, the British continued to believe that the National Health Service had been born with original virtue and that the defects they experienced were exceptions. Repeated scandals of gross neglect or sub-standard treatment were shrugged off in the same way. And in a certain dog-in-the-manger way, the British were inclined to believe that if the NHS was unpleasant to negotiate, at least (being more or less a monopoly) it was equally unpleasant for everyone. Fairness and justice were equated with equal misery. Anyway, being ill is always unpleasant, so what did anyone expect?
Theodore Dalrymple, “Worshipping the NHS”, New English Review, 2020-05-07.
May 3, 2025
QotD: When the Cursus Honorum failed, so did the Roman Republic
The Old Republic was full of men like Caesar, because people are what they are; there are always potential Caesars running around. But the names of the Old Republic’s Caesars don’t appear in the history books, because back then they still maintained the distinction between process and outcome. If there’s a conflict between them, process must yield, and so even though a potential Caesar did a competent job as quaestor and was ready to stand for curule aedile, he’d be taken aside by an old man (“senate” comes from senex, “old man”) for a stern talking-to … or more than a stern talking-to, if it came to that.
By Julius Caesar‘s day, though, process had completely eclipsed outcome. Again, the “real” Caesar is much debated by historians, but what’s not in dispute is his naked ambition. Everybody knew what Caesar was about, right from the get-go. But since there was no way to stop his climb up the cursus honorum spelled out in the Policies and Procedures Manual, nobody did.
Indeed, by Caesar’s time, the rot was so deep that most (I’d argue all, but I’m not a Classicist) of the offices on the CH were eyewash, just lines on a CV. The curule aediles weren’t managing the grain supply; they had battalions of freedmen running that. They were still putting on games, of course, but they weren’t personally putting them on; again, battalions of clever freedmen did that. The only thing the aedile did for “his” games was pay for them … on credit, and only in order to take the next step up the ladder.
And the rot was, of course, recursive. Caesar at least had clarity: He wanted to be quaestor so he could be aedile; to be aedile so he could be praetor; to be praetor so he could be governor; to be governor so he could be general; to be general so he could be … well, whatever, that’s part of the great debate surrounding Caesar, but it doesn’t matter for our purposes. For us, what matters is that everyone else was doing the same thing, and because all the real work was being done by those battalions of clever freedmen, the quality of Republican leadership dropped off dramatically. How can a praetor-in-name-only accurately judge the competence of an aedile-in-name-only? Yeah, he technically held the office for a year, but he left it as ignorant of its duties as when he entered.
Severian, “Cursus Honorum”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-27.
[NR: Links to the Roman Glossary added.]
May 1, 2025
When “looming dystopia” is the preferable scenario
Elizabeth Nickson on just how badly the great and the powerful have managed to screw up so badly that instead of opening for Anthrax at the Hollywood Bowl, “Looming Dystopia” might actually be one of the better possible futures we face:
I asked Grok to show me Looming Dystopia opening for Anthrax. This is the “in Gothic style” version.
I am a person of faith, of Christ, not a very good one, but one who has been devoted for a long time. I’m not saying I didn’t spend twenty years in the great big glittering world, where I indulged every whim, lived among the powerful, beautiful, God- hostiles, adopted their habits of speech and dress, went to every small exquisite museum, the play of the moment, the art openings, the restaurants and parties, became a sophisticate able to live within that world as handmaiden or companion. I mean, for almost ten of those years, I had a husband who never, not once, came home without a present. But even that came of prayer, of a desire fulfilled a wish granted, of prayer, as in “You want this? Ok then, you will sicken, but here it is”.
That world – the enrichment of culture that came out of the 80’s and 90’s – determines today. That life is the model and goal for many and in fact, now the design, the plan laid out by those who plan the future of the world. Humans shunted deliberately into city life, then enhanced via surgery and chip. Indulgence, consumption, fighting for preference, ambition. Cultural creatives, unmarried, oddly-sexed, politically left would determine the future, their gifts the siren call of the arts, fashion, grand bohemia, Hollywood, eat, drink and travel merrily. The end goal of life: your individuality, your woundedness, your self care, the full expression of your specific gifts. If you are lucky you too can be Lady GaGa or BlackPink and have stadiums roar when you appear. Other humans? The state will take care of them, do not worry. Maybe they will die off. Like dinosaurs.
The central banks have gamed this going forward, making the insane assumption that this social movement was permanent. Did they depend on feminism and drugs to stop the next step, ie, young people leaving the city to build families? Even if they did, they thought they could stop it. Why? Because fascist greens like John Kerry, told them that rural regions must be left to “recover”.
Therefore they gutted the suburbs of financing, because “poor land use”, and “too much car required”, which is preposterous in the Americas with all this land. What else does a young family want but trees and parks, and lawns and a neighborhood of friends, not riven with whores, crackheads and murderous migrants?
The ‘08 crash was predicated on Thatcher’s fiscal success in selling people their council houses in the 80’s. Wonderful! thought Bill Clinton’s team, let’s lead marginal Americans into housing, and lo, we still haven’t paid the freight for that insane idea. I had a paralegal friend in Florida who was foreclosing on $500,000 loans to actual crackhead whores. Clinton’s people, lost in their greed and benevolence, forgot that the British council estate dweller was homogenous, placed, as in deep roots in the area, and stable. In the U.S and Canada, idiot banks lent to just about any joker who turned up with a plausible story. Then the speculators invaded, everyone cashed out merrily, then ka-boom. And pioneering walking away with $100 million from government “service” was Jimmy Johnson, Head of Fannie Mae.
I mean, it’s stupid. The western world’s current bankruptcy (and it’s severe) was caused by Central Bank clowns. Those ridiculous, repellent, hideously expensive COP #8,789 conferences had two outcomes: banks would be compelled to lend to green, require green, require climate mitigation, and jump through DEI, ESG hoops, and governments would chunk up green regs. And prosperity would bloom! Not only that, they surreptitiously, across the world, funded actual companies that poisoned the air, water and land. And when I say “they funded”, I mean the taxpayer did. A lot of our money went into insane outfits like this:
And just like Malcom Gladwell’s tipping point – it took ten years – boom, economic activity came to a screeching halt, except for the wreckage of green energy enterprises everywhere, government debt and re-financing. For instance, the Obama-created outfit, the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility, that consists of three solar concentrating thermal power plants in California burned through $1 billion before it collapsed in February. It is one of thousands across the west, all subsidized by the taxpayer. Unwittingly. The press is so embarrassed, they don’t report the trillions lost to green energy projects.
Again, the central bankers own this.
Central bankers have become a metastatic cancer on the economy. By definition, they are late adopters on the marketing curve. By the time they notice something and make their plans upon it, it’s over and something new is growing. Today, the mega-cities everywhere are emptying of everyone over 30 with an income, even or rather especially in China, where the young have just said … nope, a pox on your Commie plans. Chinese, European, British, American, everyone is trickling back to the towns of which their ancestral memories sing, where they can root, where they can live smaller, without environmental toxicity, the rank depravity of the super-culture, the ruinous stupidity of green. The great cities are now super-dangerous for women, and that is spreading as the autocrats in power force violent young men into towns. Last week a young woman in Vancouver fought off a migrant who tried to kill her three times in Stanley Park. My modest, Christian, pioneer family who built the early city along with their community of 10,000 and neglible government, made that park in the early 1900’s; my great grandmother was the first woman to ride a bike in bloomers through that park. It was so safe for 100 years you could let kids play in it after dark, calling them home with a whistle. It is one of the world’s great urban parks, more astonishing than Central Park. This is an outright tragedy. And it is unnoticed, unreported, except on TikTok.
April 28, 2025
Unintended consequences of vehicle mileage regulation
On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, Sheel Mohnot explains the amazing unintended consequences of another “great idea with the best possible intentions”:
Ever wonder why sedans disappeared and every car is huge now?
“Thanks, Obama!”
His administration changed fuel economy standards in a way that had the perverse impact of making cars even bigger.
Here are all the vehicles for sale by the 3 largest US automakers. 62 vehicles, 4 sedans (6%). 20 years ago this chart would have been ~50% sedans!
What happened?
Obama administration changed auto fuel efficiency rules to tie fuel economy targets to vehicle size.
Under the new system:
-The bigger the car’s footprint, the easier the MPG target was.
-Light trucks (including SUVs and crossovers) had far lower requirements than passenger cars.
-Crossovers were quietly reclassified as “trucks,” giving them a huge regulatory advantage.Instead of building lighter, more efficient cars, automakers simply made everything bigger, and made more trucks and SUVs.
Notice that cars that used to be sedans are now crossovers? They do this so it counts as a light truck – they raise ground clearance, square off the rear for cargo capacity, and meet off-road approach minimums so they get qualified as a light truck. Think Subaru Legacy > Subaru Outback.
As you can see in the chart, it’s a LOT easier to meet MPG requirements if your vehicle is classified that way.
So cars got LARGER to meet fuel efficiency goals. The new Honda Civic is 20 inches longer and 4 inches wider than it used to be, about the same size as an old Accord. By making the Civic larger, Honda slightly shifted it into a more favorable regulatory category.
… and smaller cars disappeared. The Honda Fit was a great little car, but would have had to hit 67 MPG in 2026, which would be nearly impossible … so instead, Honda stopped selling them.
So, the only way to make small vehicles now is to make them EV’s (Chevy Bolt).
The Slate truck that is all the rage now is only possible because it’s an EV … otherwise its footprint would have demanded an overly onerous MPG target.
So in short – Obama era CAFE standards had the opposite of the desired impact: sedans died, vehicles ballooned in size, and America’s streets turned into an SUV parking lot.
All thanks to a policy that accidentally incentivized bloat instead of efficiency.
Don’t get me started on “cash for clunkers!”
April 17, 2025
Canadian labelling regulations save us from “too many vitamins”
In the National Post, Jesse Kline points out that Canadian food label regulations have become so nit-picky that they prevent safe and accurately labelled foods from Australia, Britain, and other countries from being sold here:
Marmite from the UK and Vegemite from Australia, two of the products at risk of Canadian over-regulatory twitches.
Shortly after winning the Liberal leadership, Mark Carney travelled to Paris and London to shore up our trading relationship with our European allies.
Yet it is noteworthy that Canada is one of only two countries that has not yet ratified the United Kingdom’s accession into the CPTPP, meaning that we don’t enjoy the benefits of free trade with the country with whom we share a system of government and a King. Meanwhile, France is one of a handful of countries that has yet to ratify the free-trade agreement between Canada and the EU.
If we can’t even agree to implement trade deals that have already been negotiated and agreed upon with countries that have such deep historical ties to Canada, what hope do we have of improving trade with our other partners around the world?
Part of the problem is that Canada refuses to follow the example of countries like Australia and New Zealand, which successfully phased out their own systems of supply management years ago with great success.
As a result, supply management has proven to be a sticking point in virtually every trade negotiation we’ve entered into, and is a constant source of tension even among countries we have free-trade deals with.
But we have also fallen into the trap, along with our European friends, of over-regulation. Modern bureaucratic states impose so many restrictions on commercial enterprises, it often becomes uneconomic to market their products in other countries.
Canada, for example, imposes stringent labelling requirements to ensure product information is available in both English and French, and that nutritional information conforms to our very specific requirements.
None of this is necessary, especially in an age in which we can hold a phone up to a box of French crackers to see what it says. But the problem extends far beyond language or disagreements over the recommended daily intake of fibre.
As the CBC reported on Monday, Leighton Walters, an expat from Down Under who owns several Australian-themed coffee shops in the Greater Toronto Area, was told earlier this year by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) that he was no longer allowed to sell the roughly $8,000 worth of Vegemite he had imported because it contains … too many vitamins.
Under current regulations, only a select list of products are allowed to contain added vitamins. Vitamin B-rich spreads like Vegemite and its British equivalent Marmite are not among them because … well, just because.
A similar situation arose a decade ago when reports that the government had ordered Marmite and the Scottish drink Irn-Bru to be taken off the shelves of a British supermarket in Saskatoon caused outrage on both sides of the pond.
The CFIA later clarified that only versions of those products formulated specifically to meet Canadian requirements — i.e., those that don’t contain added vitamins or a specific type of food colouring — are allowed to be sold in this country. Because heaven forbid we trust that other advanced Commonwealth nations would have reasonable enough food safety standards.
We have quite literally regulated ourselves into a corner. We can’t even import spreads like Marmite and Vegemite — which have been staples of British and Australian diets for decades — not because they’re unhealthy or unsafe, but because they don’t conform to our nit-picky regulations.
April 13, 2025
QotD: The 15-minute city
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Wizard and the Prophet, by Charles C. Mann”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-01-22.
April 11, 2025
Critical Trade Theory
A discussion at the amusingly named Handwaving Freakoutery on the ongoing wave of tariff activity under the Trump II administration, characterizing them as “woke” tariffs:
The great argument playing out in the media right now about the relative value and ethical implications of reciprocal tariffs is not relevant. It is not relevant because these tariffs are not reciprocal tariffs in any measurable way. They aren’t reciprocal, they aren’t sensible, and the justification for them is Woke in every sense of the word. Let’s take a close look at what we might call Critical Trade Theory, back our way into an understanding of what a woke tariff is and how this is definitely that, and close with a quick word about how political realignments portend doom for the left even though the right is really screwing this up. Then we’ll all buy mop handle futures.
Awokening
The Great Awokening of the prior decade was founded in part on the False Cause Fallacy. Our major institutions for the better part of the last ten years were operated by wokerists, who used an Intersectional Matrix of Culturally Encouraged Race and Gender Prejudice to counteract what they viewed as hidden unmeasurable forces such as “systemic racism”. They couldn’t point to the systemic racism, but they knew it must be there because of the imbalance in socioeconomic metrics, and they denied any other possible explanation for the imbalance. Once the False Cause was in place, the devout wokerist was forced to fight the hidden prejudice with overt reverse prejudice, because they couldn’t conceive any other cause.
For example, if black folks have a hard time getting into Harvard or UNC, it must be because society is systemically racist against black people, and no other reason, therefore we should redirect admission slots from Asians who earned them to blacks who didn’t, for race balancing.
Harvard did exactly that, for exactly that reason, and admitted it, and it was sent to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court banned it, and then Harvard kept doing it and is still doing it using different words.
Some of our other institutions are still running this wokery program, although the Trump Administration purged much of it from the halls of federal power this year under their DEI ban, and many other institutions used Trump as cover to independently purge it from theirs. But this same smooth-brained thinking wiggled its way right into Trump’s tariff plan last week, through an equation that looks fancy but is something my middle school son could figure out.
[…]
The media thinks these woke tariffs are going to bomb the economy back to the stone age, but when I make the abhorrent choice to read the graphs myself it looks more like January 2024. A 20% tariff on Chinese goods is rough. Adding 34% more to it is rougher. But a 54% tariff on Chinese goods is nothing compared to Shenzhen closing its entire manufacturing sector down because they found a germ, and probably not significantly worse than the Fed turning off the free money spigot in 2022.
These tariffs are going to do goofy shit to the economy. I don’t like the goofy shit they’re likely to do. I think that trade balancing through tariffs is an idea so stupid that only Rust Belt union workers could come up with it, which is why they probably did come up with it, and also probably why Trump won the election by flipping the Rust Belt.
QotD: Teaching in modern universities
In two sentences, Leys has pinned, like a butterfly to an entomologist’s board, the bureaucratic sickness that has overtaken our institutions of higher learning (and not only those institutions). There is no madness more difficult to treat than that which believes itself sane, and there is no irrationality greater than that which believes itself perfect. It is no surprise that Leys retired early from his university chair because the university no longer bore any resemblance to what it had once been and misled students and the rest of society into believing it still was. A community of scholars had become an organization of foremen on a production line.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Rare and Common Sense”, First Things, 2017-11.
April 7, 2025
QotD: The new Neolithic agrarian villages allowed for the development of the parasitic state
And just as this way of life — [Against the Grain author James C.] Scott calls it the “Neolithic agro-complex”, but it’s really just another bundle of social and physical technologies — inadvertently created niches for the weeds that thrive in recently-tilled fields1 and the fleas that live on our commensal vermin, it also created a niche for the state. The Neolithic village’s unprecedented concentration of manpower, arable land, and especially grain made the state possible. Not that the state was necessary, mind you — the southern Mesopotamian alluvium had thousands of years of sedentary agriculturalists living in close proximity to one another before there was anything resembling a state — but Scott writes that there was “no such thing as a state that did not rest on an alluvial, grain-farming population”. This was true in the Fertile Crescent, it was true along the Nile, it was true in the Indus Valley, and it was true in the loess soils of “Yellow” China.2 And Scott argues that it’s all down to grain, because he sees taxation at the core of state-making and grain is uniquely well-suited to being taxed.
Unlike cassava, potatoes, and other tubers, grain is visible: you can’t hide a wheatfield from the taxman. Unlike chickpeas, lentils, and other legumes, grain all ripens at once: you can’t pick some of it early and hide or eat it before the taxman shows up. Moreover, unhusked grain stores particularly well, can be divided almost infinitely for accounting purposes (half a cup of wheat is a stable and reliable store of value, while a quarter of a potato will rot), and has a high enough value per unit volume that it’s economically worthwhile to transport it long distances. All this means that sedentary grain farmers become taxable in a way that hunter-gatherers, nomadic pastoralists, swiddeners, and other “nongrain peoples” are not, because you know exactly where to find them and exactly when they can be expected to have anything worth taking. And then, of course, you’ll want to build some walls to protect your valuable grain-growing subjects from other people taking their grain (and also, perhaps, to keep them from running for the hills), and you’ll want systems of measurement and record-keeping so you know how much you can expect to get from each of them, and pretty soon, hey presto! you have something that looks an awful lot like civilization.
The thing is, though, that Scott doesn’t think this is an improvement. It certainly wasn’t an improvement for the new state’s subjects, who were now forced into backbreaking labor to produce a grain surplus in excess of their own needs (and prevented from leaving their work), and it wasn’t an improvement for the non-state (or, later, other-state) peoples who were constantly being conquered and relocated into the state’s core territory as new domesticated subjects to be worked just like its domesticated animals. In fact, he goes so far as to suggest that our archaeological records of “collapse” — the abandonment and/or destruction of the monumental state center, usually accompanied by the disappearance of elites, literacy, large-scale trade, and specialist craft production — in fact often represent an increase in general human well-being: everyone but the court elite was better off outside the state. “Collapse”, he argues, is simply “the disaggregation of a complex, fragile, and typically oppressive state into smaller, decentralized fragments”. Now, this may well have been true of the southern Mesopotamian alluvium in 3000 BC, where every statelet was surrounded by non-state, non-grain peoples hunting and fishing and planting and herding, but it’s certainly not true of a sufficiently “domesticated” people. Were the oppida Celts, with their riverine trading networks, better off than their heavily urbanized Romano-British descendants? Well, the Romano-Britons had running water and heated floors and nice pottery to eat off of and Falernian wine to drink, but there’s certainly a case to be made that these don’t make up for lost freedoms. But compare them with the notably shorter and notably fewer involuntarily-rusticated inhabitants of sub-Roman Britain a few hundred years later and even if you don’t think running water is worth much (you’re wrong), you have to concede that the population nosedive itself suggests that there is real human suffering involved in the “collapse” of a sufficiently widespread civilization.3
But even this is begging the question. We can argue about the relative well-being of ordinary people in various sorts of political situations, and it’s a legitimately interesting topic, both in what data we should look at — hunter-gatherers really do work dramatically less than agriculturalists4 — and in debating its meaning.5 And Scott’s final chapter, “The Golden Age of the Barbarians”, makes a pretty convincing case that they were materially better off than their state counterparts, especially once the states really got going and the barbarians could trade with or raid them to get the best of both worlds! But however we come down on all these issues, we’re still assuming that the well-being of ordinary people — their freedom from labor and oppression, their physical good health — is the primary measure of a social order. And obviously it ain’t nothing — salus populi suprema lex and so forth — but man does not live by
breada mosaic of non-grain foodstuffs alone. There are a lot of important things that don’t show up in your skeleton! We like civilization not because it produces storehouses full of grain and clay tablets full of tax records, but because it produces art and literature and philosophy and all the other products of our immortal longings. And, sure, this was largely enabled by taxes, corvée labor, conscription, and various forms of slavery, but on the other hand we have the epic of Gilgamesh.6 And obviously you don’t get art without civilization, which is to say the state. Right?Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: Against the Grain, by James C. Scott”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-21.
1. Oats apparently began as one of them!
2. It was probably also true in Mesoamerica and the Andes, where maize was the grain in question, but Scott doesn’t get into that.
3. No, the population drop cannot be explained by all the romanes eunt domus.
4. That famous “twenty hours a week” number you may have heard is bunk, but it’s really only about forty, and that includes all the housekeeping, food preparation, and so forth that we do outside our forty-hour workweeks.
5. For example, does a thatched roof in place of ceramic tiles represent #decline, or is it a sensible adaptation to more local economy? Or take pottery, which is Bryan Ward-Perkins’s favorite example in his excellent case that no really, Rome actually did fall: a switch in the archaeological record from high-quality imported ceramics to rough earthenwares made from shoddy local clays is definitely a sign of societal simplification, but it isn’t prima facie obvious that a person who uses the product of an essentially industrial, standardized process is “better off” than someone who makes their own friable, chaff-tempered dishes.
6. Or food rent and, uh, all of Anglo-Saxon literature, whatever.
March 26, 2025
Rich country foreign aid – threat or menace?
John H. Cochrane on the benefits and harms that aid from rich countries has done to the poor recipient nations around the world:
At half the dinners I go to, someone says, well, yes, a lot of the USAID money was mis-spent, but what about the poor starving children in Africa? If you are in that situation, this is the article for you.
This article is about about the centerpiece of aid: “development” aid, designed to boost economic growth, not about the politicized “nonprofits” that USAID was supporting and their bloated staffs, funneling aid money to political advocacy and employment, promoting American self-loathing around the world, and so forth.
Development spending accounts for almost three-quarters of all aid.
And the enterprise is a colossal failure.
The capital of Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries, runs on aid. A city built in the 1970s by the World Bank, Lilongwe’s straight streets are filled with charities, development agencies and government offices. Informal villages house cooks and cleaners for foreign officials; the entrance to each is marked with the flag of its national sponsor.
The money is small compared to advanced country GDP, but huge compared to poor country government resources […]
The results of such spending are no better in Malawi than in the US — even if it’s free to the recipient. Add the preference of aid advocates for “sustainable” or “appropriate” and “green” technology, including these days hostility to GMO foods, and social or environmental wrappers, “climate justice” and so on, indeed even the hostility to capitalism, “consumerism” and growth itself and it’s not a surprise this is a rathole. (Again, it’s cheap from our perspective. The problem is that it’s wholly ineffective. If money really could jump start growth, that would be great.)
One of the central conundrums of aid is that it can destroy local industry. Sending food, for example, seems like a no-brainer of mercy. And in a war, crop failure, or other catastrophe it is. But sending food on a regular basis bankrupts local farmers.
Central idea 1: Imagine just how happy the US might be if China decided in its mercy to tax Chinese citizens, buy crops at overvalued prices (which incidentally pleases Chinese farmers), and send bags of rice to the US for free, marked “gift of the CCP”, thereby bankrupting US rice farmers. Or if it decided to send us really cheap electric vehicles to help us speed towards net zero, thereby undermining our own state-supported EV business. Well, you know exactly how our government feels about this sort of thing! And this is exactly what aid does.
Now, a good free market economist welcomes subsidized imports, and a push to leave agriculture and move to export-oriented manufacturing or other higher value industries. But Malawi doesn’t have other higher value industries, and exporting anything to the advanced economies is getting harder and harder. Extending the old proverb, send a man a fish a day forever, and he forgets how to fish.
The article opened my eyes (some more) to the delicate intertwining of economics and politics. We really don’t live in a free market world in the US (note our executives rushing to change ideology and please the new team in Washington), and even less so in poor countries.
Western aid officials often want to prevent local politicians, who control crucial industries, from profiting as a result of their projects, meaning they select obscure sectors for tax breaks, credit and subsidies. With few investors willing to stump up capital, and little interest from local politicians, the businesses duly flop.
Here is a conundrum for you. Without 10% off the top for the big guy, businesses will flounder.
March 21, 2025
Apparently the US Constitution elevates the judiciary over the other branches of government
Chris Bray on recent innovative judicial activism to constrain the evil machinations of the Bad Orange Man:
It won’t be news to anyone that the federal judiciary has decided Donald Trump has no authority as President of the United States but to serve and protect the status quo, absolutely without deviation. Change is unconstitutional. Policy is unconstitutional. But even by that standard, today has been very special.
Without digging into all the details about everything, skim your way through a single judicial decision to begin to see what’s happening: the decision from District Court Judge Ana Reyes, ordering the Department of Defense to allow the continued service of transgender military personnel. You can click here to read it, or open the PDF file below.
This is not a judicial decision. I mean, it is a judicial decision, but it doesn’t represent judicial culture or a judicial outlook. At all. It’s a bitchy schoolgirl essay about being fair and not being mean, with healthy doses of platitudinous foot stompery. Screenshot, bottom of page one and top of page two:
“Today, however, our military is stronger and our Nation is safer for the millions of such blanks (and all other persons) who serve.” Because she says so, is why. The old bigoted American military was very weak. I don’t remember: Did the old dumb bigots ever even win any wars or anything?
[…]
Our military is much stronger now than it was when gay and transgender service wasn’t warmly encouraged, the end. (Stomps foot.) It’s a TikTok video formatted to look like a, you know, a judge thing. You can even agree with the judge and see that she hasn’t made an argument. “Today, however, our military is stronger.” Like when we beat the Taliban, or all the other wars we’ve won lately. This is the declarative reality in which a thing becomes true because you type it.
Now, watch this. Watch Judge Ana Reyes roll right over herself without noticing that she’s doing it. You don’t have to read past page two to see this.
On page one, she characterizes the reasoning — the premise the administration advanced to forbid military service by transgender personnel: “Service by transgender persons is ‘inconsistent’ with this mission because they lack the ‘requisite warrior ethos’ to achieve ‘military excellence’.” That’s it, those mean monsters! That’s their whole reason! They said trans people can’t serve because of, I don’t know, some stupid ethos thing. What does that even mean?
Star Trek: Jobs, Money, and Replicators
Feral Historian
Published 14 Jun 2024So the Federation doesn’t use money and magic walls give you anything you ask for. What kind of economy are we really looking at here, and is some approximation of this possible without first having those replicators?
First we have to talk about what money is, what a job is (vs just being employed) and a little historical detour into modern efforts at Universal Basic Income. All of which lead to a very hypothetical look at how we might be able to build a rough approximation of a Star Trek economy in the near-term future.
This is all analysis and thought-experiment. I’m not necessarily endorsing any of these ideas, just bouncing things around for consideration.
00:00 Intro
01:00 Qualitatively Distinct Model
02:27 The Triple Revolution
05:00 Jobs ≠ Employment
06:32 Universal Basic Income
11:35 Federation Credit
13:45 Impacts of Currency
15:16 Can We Really Do This?
(more…)
