The prime fact of human nature which the wise statesman must take into account is that men will exert themselves for their own benefit, or for that of their families, regarded as an extension of themselves, as they will exert themselves for no one else; and, in particular, men are not prepared to work for the state or for any other collectivity as they will work for themselves or for their families … If it is made impossible for him to advance himself or his family by his exertions, the average man will cease to exert himself. No motive comparable in its effects … has yet been known in the history of the human race … Because socialism expects the average man to exert himself for the state as he would for himself, … the socialist is doomed to disappointment when he comes to put his ideas into practice.
Ivor Thomas, The Socialist Tragedy, 1951.
May 1, 2026
April 30, 2026
China’s weaker-than-it-seems strategic position
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR expands on a post by Tom Kratman about the strategic weakness of the current Chinese government:
Tom didn’t explain his second assertion, but it’s important so I’m going to do it.
China is in the worst strategic position of any great power in history because it is critically dependent on resources it has to import, and it doesn’t have control of the sea lanes over which it imports them.
China is neither food nor energy self-sufficient. It needs to import pork from the United States, grain from Africa, coal from Australia, and oil from the Middle East to keep its population fed and its factories running.
Naval blockades at about three critical chokepoints (Hormuz, Malacca, Sunda) would cripple the Chinese economy within months, possibly within weeks. China does not have the blue-water navy required to contrast control of those chokepoints. The moment any first-rate naval power or even a second-rate like India decides China needs to be stopped, it’s pretty much game over.
As a completely separate issue thanks to the one-child policy, Chinese population probably peaked in 2006 and has been declining ever since. Every year in the foreseeable future they will have fewer military-age males than they do now. Most of those males are only sons; their deaths would wipe out entire family lines, giving the Chinese people an extremely low tolerance for war casualties.
Then there’s the glass jaw. The Three Gorges Dam. Which is already in some peril even without a war — you can compare photographs over time and see that it’s sagging. If anyone gets annoyed enough to pop that dam thing with a bunker-buster or a pony nuke, the resulting floods will kill millions and wipe out the strip of central China that is by far the country’s most industrially and agriculturally productive region.
The Chinese haven’t fought a war since 1971. They lost. Against Vietnam. The institutional knowledge that could potentially fit their army for doing anything more ambitious than suppressing regional warlordism does not exist.
I could go on. But I think I’ve made Tom’s statements sufficiently understandable already.
The position of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in Hubei Province, showing the major cities downstream of the dam.
Image by Rolfmueller via Wikimedia Commons.
And Tom Kratman responds:
Almost perfect; you missed four tricks.
1. People, when we talk about blockading China, imagine that we’re talking about a civilized stop and search. Uh, uh; we will designate a no go zone and sink without further warning anything that enters it.
2. Our blockade will be distant, well out of range of those Oh-they’re-just-too-terrible-for-words (but never tested) DF-21s. [Wiki] (You did sort of address this, but not in so many words.)
3. We can blow the levees on the Yellow River, too, to kill many millions more and destroy still more industry (it flows above ground).
4. China not only doesn’t have the navy to contest with us, it can never have that navy. Why not? Because there’s only so much wealth to go around; China is surrounded on all sides by enemies with anywhere from decent to quite good armies, any or all of which might take a stab (pun intended) at carving China up like a turkey. They must put a lot more money and effort and manpower into stymying those than they can ever put into meeting us and Japan.
QotD: The terrible economics of (most) recycling efforts
Even those calculations underestimate the cost of recycling because they include only the direct outlays, chiefly the $686 per ton that the city spends to collect recyclables. But what about all the valuable time that New Yorkers spend sorting and rinsing their trash and delivering it to the recycling bin? For a New York Times Magazine article in 1996, I hired a Columbia University student to keep track of how much time he spent recycling cans and bottles and how much material he gathered in a week. Using those figures (eight minutes to gather four pounds), I calculated that if the city paid New Yorkers a typical janitor’s wage for their recycling labors, their labor would cost $792 per ton of recyclables — over $100 per ton more than what the city pays its sanitation workers to collect it.
As the economics of recycling worsened, cities in America and Europe found that the only viable markets for their recyclables were in poor countries, chiefly in China and other Asian nations, where processing recyclables was still profitable, thanks to lower wages and lower standards for worker safety and environmental quality. But as those countries have gotten wealthier, they’ve become reluctant to accept foreign trash. As bales of unwanted recyclables pile up in warehouses, towns have had to start sending them to landfills, and dozens of American municipalities have finally had the sense to cancel their recycling programs.
John Tierney, “Let’s Hold On to the Throwaway Society”, City Journal, 2020-09-13.
Update, 1 May: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
April 28, 2026
QotD: The cultural history of the Tidewater and Deep South regions of the United States
This may not seem like a huge difference — does it really matter if you’re growing wheat or tobacco, if you’re farming someone else’s land? — but it had profound implications for what happened after the indenture. In theory, the formerly-indentured should have taken on the role of either the English tenant farmer (think Emma‘s Robert Martin) or yeoman/freeholder (a small-time landowner but not of the scale or social class to be a “gentleman”). In practice, though the colony was a plantation economy exporting a cash crop: there was very little local manufacturing, since it was so easy for a ship from London or Bristol to sail right up to some great landowner’s dock on the river and unload whatever he might have ordered. Independent small-scale farmers simply couldn’t compete for tobacco export with their larger neighbors, and especially not if they also had to pay rent. But luckily for them, they had something no Englishman had had for centuries: empty land nearby. Or, you know, sort of empty. (Several of the rebellions in early Virginia were fought over the colonial government’s refusal to drive the Indians off the land former servants wanted to settle.) They could just leave.
The obvious solution for the Tidewater elites — the clear way for gentlemen to maintain an aristocratic lifestyle without a peasantry tied to the land — was African slaves. And here’s the important difference between Tidewater and it neighboring nation, the Deep South: Tidewater turned to slavery in the hopes of perpetuating their social structures, while the Deep South was envisioned from the first as a slave society.
The Deep South had been founded in the 1670s by Barbados sugar planters who ran out of room on their tiny island and were now exporting their particularly brutal combination of slave gangs and sugarcane to the coastal lowlands around Charleston Harbor. (Like the Tidewater gentry, the Barbadians had originally experimented with indentured servants from Britain, but they were worked to death so rapidly that the authorities objected.) The planter class quickly became phenomenally wealthy — by the American Revolution, per capita wealth in the Deep South was four times that of Tidewater and six times either New York or Philadelphia, and the money was much more concentrated than anywhere else in the colonies — but unlike the manorial idyll of Tidewater, with its genteel pursuits and colonial capitals all but abandoned when the legislature was out of session, the Deep South planters spent as much time as possible in the city.
Charles Town (later Charleston), South Carolina, modeled on the capital of Barbados, was filled with theaters, taverns, brothels, cockfighting rings, private clubs, and shops stocked with goods imported from London. Life in the city was a constant churn of social engagements, signalling, and status competition: in 1773, a pseudonymous correspondent wrote in the South Carolina Gazette that “if we observe the Behavior of the polite Part of this Country, we shall see, that their whole Lives are one continued Race; in which everyone is endeavouring to distance all behind him, and to overtake or pass by, all before him; everyone is flying from his Inferiors in Pursuit of his Superiors, who fly from him with equal Alacrity …” The planters of the Deep South had no interest in being lords of their estates, which were managed by overseers, or indeed in their land or the people who worked it. Certainly there existed poor whites in the colonies of the Deep South, but they never entered into the conversation: where Tidewater imagined agricultural labor performed by the English “salt of the earth” but had to fall back on slaves, the Deep South always planned on slaves.
This may not seem like an important difference, especially if you’re a slave,1 but it matters a great deal for national character. Culture, after all, lives as much in a people’s values and ideals as in their daily routines: a culture that praises loyalty to clan and family will behave very differently from one that lauds fair dealing with strangers. And the Deep Southern ideal, the nation’s vision of how life ought to be, was more or less Periclean Athens: a tremendous efflorescence of wealth, art, and personal distinction for the great and the good, with no consideration whatsoever for the slaves and metics who made up the bulk of the population. A good life meant leisure and luxury, wealth and freedom, the full exploration of personal capacity for the few and who cares about the many. The Tidewater ideal, on the other hand, was basically the Shire: bucolic, rural, politically dominated by a cousinage of great families who shared a profound sense of noblesse oblige and populated by a virtuous, hardworking yeomanry who knew their place but were worthy of their betters’ respect.
Did that world actually exist? Of course not, neither here or in its English model,2 any more than the Puritans’ commonwealth in Massachusetts Bay was a new Zion inhabited by saints. But a culture’s picture of how life ought to be determines its reaction to changing circumstance, and Tidewater pictured an enlightened rural gentry ruling benevolently over lower orders who nevertheless mattered. In contrast to the aggressively middle class northern nations, the fiercely independent Appalachians, and the elite-centric Deep South, Tidewater imagined itself as an aristocracy. And it was the only one among the American nations.
Tidewater had a disproportionate influence on the early United States, contributing far more than its fair share of early statesmen and generals as well as a healthy dose of the philosophical underpinnings for many of our founding documents. Unfortunately for the lowland Virginia gentlemen, however, they were hemmed in to the west by the hill people of Greater Appalachia: when the other nations began to expand deeper into the continent after 1789, Tidewater was stuck in its starting position. Soon the nation that had been “the South” on the national stage was dwarfed by Greater Appalachia (more than doubled between 1789 and 1840) and especially by the Deep South (ten times larger). When the young United States began to polarize over the issues of slavery, Tidewater — by then a minority in Maryland, Delaware, North Carolina, and even Virginia3 — had to retreat to the political protection of the Deep South and began to lose its cultural distinctiveness. It never really emerged again as its own ideological force.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: American Nations, by Colin Woodard”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-02-19.
- Though it actually mattered a great deal to slaves, who were imported to the Deep South in great waves only to be worked to death; the enslaved population of Tidewater, by contrast, increased steadily over the entire antebellum period.
- Though I will point out that Akenfield suggests the total immiseration of the tenant farmers in the early 20th century has something to do with the land being owned by rich farmers and implies that the local gentry are more generous employers.
- West Virginia’s eventual secession back to the Union would put Tidewater back in the majority there.
April 27, 2026
QotD: The false economy of reducing plastic packaging for food products
“Look at the plastic, the Styrofoam or cardboard underneath,” she told the class. “Do you need this much wrapping when you buy things?”
“Noooo,” the fifth-graders replied.
It was all so obvious to them, the fifth-graders as well as their lecturer. She was barely out of college, but she thought that she knew more about selling produce than supermarket executives and packaging engineers who had spent their careers studying this question. She was sure that plastic wrap and Styrofoam were wasteful and harmful to the environment because she had never seriously considered the alternative or wondered why those products were introduced.
To merchants and shoppers in the late 1920s, there was nothing wasteful about the revolutionary packaging material introduced by DuPont. Cellophane seemed miraculous because it was not only moisture-proof but also transparent. “EYE IT before you BUY IT,” DuPont advertised, and shoppers welcomed this new feature enabling them to judge the quality of produce and meat before they paid up. Cellophane kept things fresh much longer, an advantage advertised to everyone from homemakers to soldiers. During World War II, a DuPont ad showed a German soldier looking on enviously as American prisoners of war opened packages of cigarettes from home that were wrapped in cellophane: “The prisoners who have better cigarettes than their guards.”
Soviet citizens in the 1980s were similarly envious of Westerners’ new plastic grocery bags, which sold for $5 apiece on the black market in Moscow. The bags were coveted partly as a status symbol (a hard-to-get imported product) and partly because they were so light and compact. In a shortage-plagued economy, Muscovites never knew when a scarce item would suddenly become available in a nearby store, so they wanted to have an empty bag with them, just in case.
American merchants and shoppers switched from paper to plastic packaging because it reduced waste. Plastic was cheaper because it required fewer resources to manufacture. It required less energy to transport because it was lighter. Plastic took up less space in landfills than paper, and it further reduced the volume of household trash because it preserved food longer. The typical household in Mexico City, for example, generated more garbage than an American household because it bought fewer packaged products and ended up discarding more food that had spoiled.
But activists eager to find some reason to oppose disposable products have ignored these advantages. They blame America’s throwaway society for polluting the oceans with plastic, though virtually all that pollution comes from either fishing vessels or from developing countries with primitive waste-management systems — mostly the Asian countries that were importing plastic recyclables from America. Instead of castigating American consumers, environmentalists should blame themselves for creating the recycling programs that sent plastic to countries where it was allowed to leak into rivers. The best way to protect marine life is to throw used plastic into the trash, not the recycling bin, so that it goes straight to a well-lined local landfill instead of ending up in the ocean.
And instead of campaigning to ban plastic grocery bags, green activists should be promoting their environmental advantages. Banning them results in higher carbon emissions because the substitutes are thicker and heavier, requiring more materials and energy to manufacture and transport, and these paper bags and tote bags typically aren’t reused often enough to offset their initial carbon footprint. Greens may feel virtuous lugging groceries home in a paper or tote bag, but the shoppers choosing plastic are actually doing more to combat global warming and reduce consumption of natural resources.
John Tierney, “Let’s Hold On to the Throwaway Society”, City Journal, 2020-09-13.
April 26, 2026
South Korea’s switch from an exporting heavyweight to a cultural juggernaut
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte looks at the importance of a South Korean government report to changing the structure of the South Korean economy and making the country far more visible culturally on the world stage:
South Korea, in the latter half of the twentieth century, was building its economy almost entirely by exporting manufactured goods, everything from home electronics to ships to automobiles. That changed, as the story goes, when the country’s Presidential Advisory Board on Science and Technology released a report on digital technology in May 1994. It noted that a single Hollywood film, Jurassic Park, with its computer-generated dinosaurs, generated the same amount of foreign sales as 1.5 million Hyundai cars. The darling of Korean industry, Hyundai was exporting 640,000 cars a year in 1994. So one film was worth more than two years of heavy industrial production requiring enormous plant, equipment, capital investment.
The report stunned Koreans — “literally sent shock waves across the country”, writes Doobo Shim, a Seoul-based professor of media and communication. At the time, culture and entertainment were viewed as ephemeral and unlikely to contribute to Korea’s core mission of “improving the material conditions of the people”. The country decided it needed to change its game in order to thrive in the twenty-first century economy.
It wasn’t a straight line from the Presidential Advisory Report to Parasite, Squid Game, BTS, Blackpink, and Han Kang’s Nobel prize, but it’s straighter than you might think. Seoul is now a top-five world cultural center, and arguably top two if we’re talking pop culture and anything that appeals to under-thirties. How it happened tells us a great deal about Canada’s relative failure to develop home-grown cultural and entertainment industries.
The Presidential Advisory Board report alone did not alter Korea’s strategy. The country was starting from way behind. First came democratic reforms and media deregulation. That birthed new commercial TV channels and a variety of independent publications. Now with an independent (from government) domestic media sector, Korea tried to protect it by limiting the amount of foreign cultural product in its market. That didn’t work. In 1993, 90 of the top 100 video rentals in the country were from Hollywood; only five were domestic. Sound familiar, Canada?
Protection wasn’t going to work, anyway. Another factor at play was the Uruguay Round, an international accord negotiated between 1986-1994 that decisively liberalized the global economy, forcing all 123 signatory countries to open their markets for a vast range of goods and services, including communications services and entertainment product. It was clear to Korea that efforts to protect heritage and culture by shutting out the world had no future. It needed to upgrade its efforts in the cultural sphere if it wanted to avoid being swamped by content from multinational companies, and not just American ones. Satellite television services out of Japan and Hong Kong were already making inroads in Korea.
Another thing: Korea had noticed that Japan, its nearest rival in the home electronics sector, was making investments in content. Sony had bought Columbia pictures and CBS records. It was the nineties, the age of synergy, or vertical integration. Companies making devices — video players, portable music players — also wanted to own what played on them. Korean firms such as Samsung and Daewoo, makers of TVs and VCRs, felt a need to be vertically integrated, too.
So the Presidential Advisory Report landed on fertile ground. Korean businesses felt an imperative to pay attention to content. The Korean government felt itself under siege from foreign cultural and entertainment product. “Gone are the days”, said one expert interviewed in the newspaper Dong-A Ilbo, “when the government could appeal to the people to watch only Korean programs out of patriotism”.
All that notwithstanding, the report mostly resonated because it presented culture as an opportunity. It asked Koreans to recognize the potential of arts and entertainment to improve the material conditions of the people. Instead of resisting the emerging global marketplace, the power of multinational corporations and platforms, and the free movement of talent, it needed to master this new system, compete commercially, and take Korean culture to the world.
April 24, 2026
Britain’s Green Party … not your weird cousin’s old Green Party
The Green Party have been more of a punchline than a party for decades in British politics, but the Green Party of today shares only a name with its earlier incarnations (the old UK party is now split into three separate Green Parties for England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland). Now, it’s become a significant threat to the Labour Party thanks to its unlikely fusion of socialist and green policies with strong support from Britain’s growing Muslim community:
The Green Party is a growing force in British politics. In February, they gained the Parliamentary constituency of Gorton and Denton in a by-election — a supposedly “safe” seat for the Labour Party. Local elections in May see them set to make big gains — perhaps sweeping to power in several town halls in London, perhaps including Camden, where Sir Keir Starmer is one of the local MPs. Opinion polls often show them roughly level with Labour and the Conservatives.
This is quite a change from previous decades when they were indulged as eccentrics on the political fringe. The Green Party (or the Ecology Party, as it was earlier named) were the sandal-wearing, muesli-munching environmentalists who wanted to go back to nature. They opposed economic growth — but their supporters tended to be affluent enough that they could afford to do so. Its leader was the aristocrat Sir Jonathon Porritt.
They were the breed George Orwell was thinking of when he wrote: “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England”.
Great fun. But there was a darker side to the quackery then and now. A totalitarian mentality which, as Orwell also vividly described, proves horrific when it prevails.
Increasingly, the Green Party has shifted its focus away from the environment. In the few towns and cities where it has gained power locally, such as in Bristol and Brighton, it has proved ineffective at practical work in this respect. Typical behaviour would be to pass a motion declaring a “climate emergency” but then perform lamentably when it comes to recycling or tree planting or any of the relevant matters they have the power to deal with.
There was always a distortion in its supposed concern for sustainability in that it was really an excuse to denounce capitalism. The Property and Environment Research Center, a US think tank which champions free-market environmentalism, has shown a more enlightened approach. Their work has included a comparison of privately-owned and state-owned forests. Another applies property rights to marine assets. But the role of property rights as a means of good stewardship of our planet is dismissed by the Green Party out of hand.
In any case, much of the campaigning by the Green Party now is on non-green issues. Its leadership talks a lot about foreign policy and a broader economic pitch focusing on class war rhetoric and an extreme programme of state control. Taxing the rich is always seen as the panacea, despite the reality that many entrepreneurs are already fleeing the United Kingdom due to its hostile fiscal environment.
Its Manifesto for the last election two years ago proposed a Wealth Tax, a pensions tax, and a big increase in Capital Gains Tax. A £90 billion carbon tax would have closed down much of British industry, which was probably the idea.
April 19, 2026
How to Tank the Economy for War – Death of Democracy 12 – Q4 1935
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 18 Apr 2026Nazi Germany in late 1935 was becoming more ruthless, more militarized, and more dangerous. In this episode, Spartacus Olsson reports from Berlin on the final months of 1935, when Hitler’s regime tightened its grip through food shortages, propaganda, rearmament, and the continued implementation of the Nuremberg Laws. As ordinary Germans faced rising prices, scarce meat and butter, and mounting pressure to sacrifice for the Reich, the Nazi state pushed its “guns before butter” economy even further. We examine the “fat gap”, Winter Relief, Eintopfsonntag, and the growing burden placed on German families while resources were diverted to war preparation.
At the same time, the First Supplementary Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law gave the regime a bureaucratic definition of who counted as a Jew, accelerating exclusion, dismissal, and persecution. Courts, police, and the Gestapo increasingly enforced the racist order, while Goebbels’ propaganda machine worked to normalize hardship, suppress criticism, and intensify antisemitism.
Against the backdrop of Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia and the paralysis of the League of Nations, Hitler found new room to maneuver internationally while consolidating dictatorship at home. This episode explores how the Third Reich turned scarcity into discipline, prejudice into law, and national pride into obedience — bringing Germany one step closer to catastrophe.
Never Forget.
AI’s missing economic impact
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Rational Aussie explains at least part of why the expected economic benefits of widespread adoption of artificial intelligence agents are … missing:
It’s funny how AI has made white collar work 10x faster already but there’s been basically no economic impact from it.
The reason is quite simple:
1. Most white collar work is bullshit, so speeding it up by 10x still equals a pile of bullshit at the end
2. Most white collar employees are using AI to do all their work for the week in 4 hours instead of 40, whilst telling their manager the deadline is still 40 hours away
We have been living in a fake economy for the better part of two decades. It is all a fugazi.
People who do real jobs in the real world get paid comparatively crap, and people who do fake jobs in the fiat Ponzi world get paid just enough fiat currency to pretend they are important. None of it amounts to anything productive nor valuable for the world though.
An entire generation doing fake email jobs, slide decks and excel sheets for corporations who ultimately produce nothing.
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 13, 2026
Young Canadians don’t have the resources to “buy their way out”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter points out the screamingly obvious fact that it’s insane to propose imprisoning young Canadians in a dying economy if they can’t scrape up half a million dollars to escape:
First, young Canadians don’t have shit. They definitely don’t have half a mil to pay the boomers in extortion fees so that they can leave the country.
Second, how are they planning to enforce this? Charge $500k for a passport? What stops the US from just offering amnesty? Ottawa can’t tell Washington what visas it can and cannot offer.
Third, and what makes this malicious boomerfap especially piquant, young Canadian professionals don’t leave because they especially want to. Wanderlust aside, most would prefer to remain close to family and friends.
They leave because they don’t have a choice. The Canadian state is set up to restrict opportunity to the point of nonexistence. Canada is a country that strangles ambition in the crib. As the old joke goes, if Musk had stayed in Canada he’d be a mid-level financial manager at CIBC (with any possibility of further promotion eliminated by the all-of-society DEI imperative).
Canada invests an absurd amount into educating its youth. It then refuses to allow them to use their training. So they leave. The University of Waterloo is one of the best engineering schools on the planet; virtually all of its graduates end up in the Bay area. Because the alternative is sitting on their hands or trying to get a job in the Ministry.
It would be a mistake to see Canadian investment in education as intended for the benefit of Canadian youth, by the way. Like everything else in Canada’s political economy, this is a subsidy to a Liberal Party client group, in this case the academics and administrators staffing the universities. The primary purpose of the universities is providing sinecures to liberals; the secondary purpose is indoctrination of the youth with liberalism; the third, to launder liberal ideas through intellectual channels. Whether the kids learn anything, or whether they can use whatever useful knowledge they acquire to (lol) better themselves or (lmao) “build the country”, is not a priority.
If it were not for the Laurentian Elite running the country into the ground, if young Canadians were not sabotaged at every step of their lives, then there would be no brain drain problem.
But as usual, boomerlibs would rather punish the youth to try and fix the problems the boomerlibs caused.
If you haven’t been paying attention to the progressive hellscape that Canada is becoming, here’s the wife of the Prime Minister boasting to the Liberal convention in Ottawa about how wonderful things are in Soviet Canuckistan:
It would make perfect sense for new grads to look for greener pastures, wouldn’t it? Which is why the Liberals want to force them to stay here, of course.
QotD: Cognitive Bias
Why do we have cognitive biases? They seem like a colossal failure of the evolution of the human brain. But the more we learn about them, the better we understand their purposes. One is that they save us time and effort — the frugal reasoning argument. Suppose we go into the supermarket to buy cereal. You carefully read all the boxes, figuring out whether the All-Bran or the Just Right gives you the best nutritional balance and value in dollars per kilogram or pound. I grab a box because I like the colour or because it has a sponsorship deal with my football team. You make the more rational choice, but I spend much less of my life in the cereal aisle at the supermarket and more doing other things. It’s easy to see how the same logic gets applied to, for example, voting. Assuming that the consequences of voting the “wrong” way don’t cause me to lose as much time and effort as I would have given up to carefully select the right candidate, I come out ahead in the end.
And then there’s the prospect that cognitive biases could simply be side-effects of useful and valuable short-cuts our brains have developed. Our tendency to see patterns in randomness leads to the spread of conspiracy theories. Our ability to generalise from a few points of information leads to prejudice. The knee-jerk reactions to danger which kept our ancestors from being eaten by sabre-tooth tigers can also lead to irrational decisions in the face of more abstract threats like crime, terrorism, natural disasters, or stock-market crashes. And finally, shared beliefs, even incorrect beliefs, might promote group cohesion. Our brains are imperfect at reasoning, but they may be so for good reason.
Adam Wakeling, “George Orwell and the Struggle against Inevitable Bias”, Quillette, 2020-08-08.
April 10, 2026
QotD: William Cobbett
Cobbett was a scrapper on the same majestic scale as our Henry V and our Horatio, except he dished it out to Vested Interest rather than Jean-Pierre Foreigner. He is the faded star of the British Awkward Squad (Capt. Jon. Swift; Vice Capt. Geo. Orwell) and he needs a boost. He needs a blue plaque on every place he ever visited. In his long life — he was born in 1763 and died in 1835 — Cobbett was a farmer, Tory, soldier, Radical, MP, agony uncle (his books include Advice to Young Men), and the founder of Hansard.
His obituary in The Times, after categorising him as a “self-taught peasant”, declared Cobbett “by far the most voluminous writer that has ever lived for centuries”. The funniest, too: when some town council somewhere banned his anti-Malthusian play Surplus Population, he riposted with a drama entitled Bastards in High Places.
Above all, though, Cobbett was the champion of the rural poor, the village labourer and the small farmer. He was their one true tribune. He spoke at The King’s Head in 1820 because country folk were suffering a triple wham from agricultural depression, enclosure and the rise of agri-business. Or, to precis, “Hodge” (his name for the generic farm worker) was low-waged or unwaged and deprived of the bits of land he had once enjoyed under commoner’s rights.
Cobbett railed against “The Thing” (the capitalist, manufactory system) and the centrifugal, corrupting force of smoky London (“The Wen”, in Cobbettian). But he was no bloviator: he was a farm boy, and hence entirely empirical and properly pragmatic. He spent a decade travelling around the English sticks to discover the true state of affairs. His descriptions of his horseback journeys were published in 1830 as Rural Rides, the first sociological study of the English countryside.
No dry-as-dust tome by the way, the Rides: it brims with pinned-to-the-specimen-board descriptions of people and places, nature, wit. Cobbett knew beauty and, the proper Englishman that he was, he loved horses:
The finest sight in England is a stage coach ready to start. A great sheep or cattle fair is a beautiful sight; but in the stage coach you see more of what man is capable of performing. The vehicle itself, the harness, all so complete and so neatly arranged; so strong and clean and good. The beautiful horses, impatient to be off. The inside full and the outside covered, in every part with men, women, children, boxes, bags, bundles. The coachman taking his reins in hand and his whip in the other, gives a signal with his foot, and away go, at the rate of seven miles an hour.
One of these coaches coming in, after a long journey is a sight not less interesting. The horses are now all sweat and foam, the reek from their bodies ascending like a cloud. The whole equipage is covered perhaps with dust and dirt. But still, on it comes as steady as the hands on a clock.
Speaking at The King’s Head coaching inn in Monmouth must have been the dream gig for Cobbett the horseman.
John Lewis-Stempel, “Why Britain needs a peasants’ revolt”, UnHerd, 2020-08-06.
April 7, 2026
Alberta is the only province moving in the right direction
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Martyupnorth responds to Tristin Hopper’s post about Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once, which he published a year ago:
Here is a one-line summary of each of Tristin’s 8 points:
Housing crisis: Canada pioneered turning entire cities into over-leveraged real estate bubbles, driving home ownership out of reach for ordinary people because prices detached from wages.
Crime and justice: Soft-on-crime policies, catch-and-release bail, and activist courts created a revolving door for repeat offenders, leaving our streets unsafe.
Harm reduction & drugs: “Safe supply” and decriminalization experiments escalated addiction and public drug use, worsening overdoses, tent cities, and societal harm instead of reducing it.
Euthanasia (MAiD): Canada rapidly expanded medical assistance in dying into one of the world’s most aggressive programs, with soaring death numbers and cases pushing it as a tratement for poverty and disability.
Healthcare system: Despite high spending, Canada’s “free” system ranks near the bottom in performance among developed nations, with deadly wait times and dysfunction.
Transgender policies: Canada went further than most countries with permissive rules on youth transitions, pronouns, biological males in female spaces, and related ideology in schools and institutions.
Identity politics and “anti-racism”: Canada outdid even the U.S. in embracing divisive oppressed frameworks, including declaring itself guilty of an ongoing “genocide” against Indigenous people with little accountability.
Censorship and speech laws: Expansive hate speech rules, online content takedowns, and bills like the Online Harms Act pushed Canada toward Orwellian restrictions, chilling expression and drawing international warnings.
Canada took progressive ideas further and faster than peers, almost always with cascading negative consequences, turning a once-stable nation into a totally dysfunctional one.
He’s right in saying that Danielle Smith is the only one finally acknowledging that things aren’t working, and is trying to reverse some of these pad idea.
It’s still not enough to save Alberta, we need to divorce ourselves from the rest of Canada and their bad ideas.
