What would be the impact of such a policy?
We cannot know exactly, because we would struggle to find a real-world example of it in a comparable country. But we could think of it as, effectively, a 100% marginal tax rate on incomes above £100,000. We could then look at the empirical literature on how responsive top earners are to tax incentives, and extrapolate from that.
We know from previous studies that the behaviour of top earners is quite sensitive to tax changes. Last year, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) tried to model the impact of a proposal to increase the tax burden on the top 5% of earners. In this case, the proposal was to lower the threshold for the 45% additional rate of income tax from £150,000 to £80,000 per annum, and to introduce an “additional additional rate” of 50% for incomes above £125,000.
If nobody changed their behaviour, such a policy would increase tax revenue by just over £9 billion per annum. But people would, of course, change their behaviour. Some top earners would switch to less demanding positions, some would retire earlier, some would reduce working hours, some would engage in more proactive tax planning (i.e. legal tax avoidance), some would simply emigrate, and so on.
We know for certain that responses of that kind exist. But we cannot exactly quantify them. So the IFS came up with a range of plausible outcomes rather than one definite number. It turns out that at the most optimistic end of the spectrum, behavioural changes would still knock over a third off the potential additional tax revenue, reducing it from over £9 billion to under £6 billion. At the most pessimistic end of the spectrum, the policy would fail to raise any additional tax revenue – it would, in fact, reduce revenue by almost £1 billion. (Stop smirking, Dr Laffer.)
If a tax rate of 50% can be predicted to trigger such strong behavioural responses, you can guess how much damage an implicit rate of 100% would do.
Kristian Niemietz, “The public love it, so what’s wrong with the idea of a maximum wage?”, Institute of Economic Affairs, 2020-10-14.
July 28, 2026
QotD: Projecting the effect of a maximum wage law
July 24, 2026
Brian Lilley: “Carney has run out of time”
While Prime Minister Mark Carney has been playing to the anti-American crowd at home, President Donald Trump has pretty clearly run out of patience with Canada’s dilly-dallying:
🚨 Trump just dropped a tariff ultimatum on Mark Carney — and Canada’s PM is officially out of time. Instead of cutting a real deal, Carney’s played delay tactics: dodge serious talks and pray Democrats win midterms to weaken Trump.
Foolish strategy. Here’s why it’s blowing up 👇
Trump’s threat: 50% tariffs on $28 BILLION in Canadian exports (hockey sticks to whisky, honey to flowers) unless Canada brings real solutions by Aug. 19.
U.S. Trade Rep Jamieson Greer: This is about forcing real negotiations.
Carney says he’s “intensifying” talks. But sources on BOTH sides say Canada’s offers are just vague “promises to discuss”. No substance.
Insiders call it “ragging the puck” — stalling in hopes a weaker Trump post-midterms gives Canada a sweeter deal.
Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs are bleeding: 17K lost last month alone. Over 50K since Carney became PM.
Ordinary Canadians are paying the price while politicians play games. 😡
Carney’s team hasn’t even used obvious bargaining chips:
* Provincial bans on U.S. booze (keep ’em in place, but not leveraged)
* Preferred access to Canada’s critical minerals
* Fixing cheese import disputesThese could be packaged to get tariffs lifted. Why sit on them?
Reality check on dependency:
🇨🇦 Canadian exports to U.S. = 19.9% of our GDP
🇺🇸 U.S. exports to Canada = just 1.4% of their GDPTrump’s claim Canada “needs us to survive” is exaggerated — but we’re far more exposed.
Delaying hurts us way more.
Why the foot-dragging?
Carney has little incentive to end the fight. Angry Canadians at Trump = more Liberal votes.
Politics over prosperity. Classic.
Question for Canadians:
Should Carney drop the delay tactics, use our leverage, and get a deal done ASAP? Or keep waiting for U.S. midterms?
What’s your take?
Reply below 👇
Who’s really paying for this? Workers or politicians?
Jen Gerson points out that by being relative pushovers every time it’s clear that Trump really means something, it’s confirming American belief that we’ll always be pushovers:
Parody cover of Mark Carney’s Value(s) seen on the net.
This week’s announcement of 50 per cent tariffs on a raft of goods is more proof that the Liberals’ ironclad strategy of “say tough things in public but then capitulate quietly on issue after issue” isn’t panning out. And I write that knowing full well that the statute being used to implement the tariffs is old, tenuous, and may not hold up. I’m not talking about them, for a moment. I’m talking about us.
Where do we even start with Prime Minister Elbows Up? Dropping the Digital Services Tax and retaliatory tariffs? The apology for the terrible sin of running a Ronald Reagan ad? And now we have the business of the Gordie Howe Bridge: to recap, Canada fronted $6.4 billion to build the span between Windsor and Detroit, which was to be paid back over decades through bridge tolls. At the last minute — and presumably at the behest of the rich MAGA donor who owns the competing bridge — Donald Trump announced the bridge would not open until the U.S. got a better deal. After more quiet negotiations, such a deal was struck.
Initially, Carney claimed that the U.S. would take a split of the operating profits — but only after the debt was paid off, something which was expected to bring real profits down to a very small amount. Effectively, he said the deal would give the Americans chump change.
Subsequent reporting suggested this wasn’t the case at all; that the Americans are to take their cut from operating revenue, which presumably will have the effect of dramatically extending our payback period.
In short, it’s a major concession, made worse by the fact that Carney appears to have lied.
And, frankly, I’m not sure which of these two pills is harder to swallow. Regular press conferences aside, Team Canada has been rather shockingly non-communicative about what the hell is going on with USMCA re-negotiations. I give the government some credit for the need to maintain “strategic silence” in order to pursue “strategic patience”, but if your entire brilliant communications strategy for rallying the Canadian public in the face of unprecedented American economic aggression amounts to “Shush. Just trust us. Carney’s super smart. He’s got this,” well, then, you really can’t lie and be dumb about it.
Carney came to power 18 months ago with an explicit “Elbows Up” promise that is deteriorating into a punch line. I don’t object to choosing not to rise to the bait of every provocation. But when “doing nothing” is accompanied by caving on everything, what you have is no longer “strategic patience.” It looks a lot more like “showing the Americans that we have no appetite for retaliation.” We’ve indicated with crystal clarity that aside from the odd mean speech, and the fact that Canadians are Big Mad, we will extract no material consequence for anything they choose to do. And absent consequence, they will continue to escalate past the point of diminishing returns.
Why?
Because they can.
Because they don’t care.
Because they take delight in their own contempt for our demonstrated weakness.
July 23, 2026
DSA: Trump doesn’t respect political norms. Also DSA: Let’s abolish the current system
On Substack, Chris Bray attempts to establish what the nascent Democratic Socialists of America actually stand for — and what they stand against:
Democrats are racing left, sprinting faster and faster toward abject authoritarian idiocy. Democratic socialists are defeating old Democrats in Congress and governing our big cities to death, and the DSA now offers an explicitly post-capitalist future in which everything is “free”, the one thing that resources can’t actually ever be:
You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.
You get as much food, energy, and everything else as you feel that you need, and labor is no longer imposed on anyone. Should work well.
Meanwhile, after years of dire warnings that Evil Trump doesn’t respect our Constitution, here’s an actual headline today from one of the mindless institutions of the Democratic Party’s narrative-making apparatus:
They also propose the replacement of the Supreme Court, the restructuring of the presidency, and the elimination of the Electoral College, but other than that they’re really mad that Trump doesn’t respect our political norms. Trump is very bad, because he’s tearing down our political system, and also we demand the destruction of our political system.
Why are they moving left, moving left, and then moving left some more? Why doesn’t anything ever hold them in check?
Because there’s no anchor on the right to hold the left anywhere near the center. There’s no force in American politics pulling consistently and effectively in the other direction. They’re unopposed and unanchored, so nothing holds them. Mixing metaphors, it’s like gravity ceased to exist, so the moon is floating away. Political centering is the product of a contest. Bad ideas are punished and rejected through debate. And we increasingly don’t have that. Here’s a Republican congressman bragging about getting his measure passed to make home repairs a federally funded giveaway:
Democrats think the federal government should just give you whatever you need as a government handout, while Republicans think the federal government should, how can I put this, just give you whatever you need as a government handout. Your bathroom faucet broke? Don’t worry, that’s a federal program.
Meanwhile, while Democrats demand the abolition of the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, and private property, prominent Republicans are theatrically angry at … Donald Trump.
The danger of election fraud isn’t cheating – it’s citizens believing their votes no longer count
Following up on his post about the need to audit elections, Larry Correia explains why election fraud is an existential threat to the very concept of democratic government:
“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 
.
The thousands of comments on my voter fraud post remind me of one very important thing.
The issue isn’t about Trump. It is about the perception of the citizens. But they need to make it about Trump.
It is difficult to dismiss the valid concerns of millions of nervous or angry citizens. It is easy to dismiss one guy as a sore loser and make the whole thing about his ego. Hence any discussion of this topic inevitably devolves into them fixating on Trump and the details surrounding one election and one moment in time, and ignoring everything else in the universe, up to and including fundamental human nature (as in some people cheat).
Voter fraud existed long before Trump was born and will exist long after he dies. The fixation on Trump is merely a smokescreen to obfuscate the issue. He was just louder about it than most politicians who traditionally just sulk off rather than rock the boat.
Everybody made their mind up about that election six years ago. It was a big muddled mess. And no matter what happens now around other elections, they’re gonna try and shift the discussion back to that. They’d rather relitigate 2020 and have those same tired arguments over and over again than focus on the threats today, and those which are looming in the future.
And yes, they really don’t want you to talk about the future. It can only be 2020, forever and ever. Amen. Even though technology is evolving rapidly, we have hostile foreign actors who we know for absolute certain have their intelligence services meddle in other nations’ elections, and this is a cheap and easy ploy … nope. Thinking about the future is bad. Why do you hate those millions of elderly disabled women of color who can’t get IDs?
Don’t let them gas light you that you’re crazy for being suspicious of your fellow man. It is perfectly sane, rational, and logical to suspect that fraudulent behavior is occurring when suspicious things happen and the same parties always seem to benefit.
It becomes even more prudent to be suspicious when instead of tightening the process to make fraud more difficult, they loosen the process to make fraud easier. That sends the opposite message.
There is nothing wrong with you. You look out there and see a world of unaccountable mail in ballots, drop boxes, organized ballot harvesting, bribing homeless schizophrenics to vote, weird questionable crap, and blue cities who take longer to count their results than a 3rd world nation. It would be insane to NOT be suspicious.
And then rather than placate the reasonable people who are worried about this loosening of the controls, they attack everyone who raises concerns as a racist, sexist, conspiracy theorist, dismiss them as insane or stupid, and then turn the subject back to talking about Trump’s personality.
The biggest danger about election fraud isn’t just someone cheating their way to victory. It’s a critical mass of citizens losing faith in their institutions and believing that their votes no longer count, and that being dangerous to the survival of the country. When people truly believe that the fix is in, and their votes don’t matter, bad things tend to occur. That’s what I want to avoid.
It would be logical and reasonable to do everything possible to assure the people that their system is secure, but instead they get berated, gas lit, and told they’re insane. Don’t believe your own eyes. Asking for ID is racist. Taking weeks to count votes is perfectly good and normal. Having late ballots continue to appear is wonderful, and questioning this is makes you a bad person. How dare you wonder if ineligible non-citizens are voting? Sure, we’ve got people registering their pets to vote just to prove a point, and humans lie and cheat in every other endeavor on Earth, but they’d never cheat in an election. How dare you?
And so forth.
Now watch. If this post goes viral like the last one the process will repeat, and the NPC/bot army will do exactly what I described trying to browbeat and shame everyone into compliance. I’m safe to say that here because almost none of them actually even read the posts they’re responding to.
July 22, 2026
Andy Burnham’s “Manchesterism” at the national level
In The Critic, Shimeon Lee looks at Andy Burnham’s time as Mayor of Greater Manchester and what his record there says about how he will try to run Britain from No. 10:
Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s official MP portrait, July 2026.
© House of Commons via Wikimedia Commons.
Andy Burnham is now Prime Minister, and the country soon to discover what “Manchesterism” means when applied to the British state. Burnham’s nine years as mayor, alongside his earlier national record, offer a clear guide to the instincts he is likely to bring to No.10: a willingness to raise taxes, expand the state and prioritise policies that sound good but ultimately deliver poor value for money.
It is revealing that after being elected mayor in 2017, one of Burnham’s first acts was to impose a new charge on households in Greater Manchester. The new mayoral precept was initially set at £8 for the average band D property, funding the mayoral operation, including Burnham’s £110,000 salary. As so often happens with new charges, it did not remain modest for long. The charge more than doubled the following year, rising again in 2020-21, 2022-23, 2025-26 and 2026-27. By the time Burnham resigned to contest the Makerfield by-election, it had risen to £61.75, nearly eight times the original amount in less than a decade.
As residents paid more, the mayor built an increasingly elaborate network of advisers, commissioners and panels funded by taxpayers. These included a young person’s advisor paid £500 per day, a transport commissioner and an active travel commissioner each paid £650 per day, and an LGBTQ+ advisor paid £177 per day. He also established seven equality panels facilitated by “culturally appropriate organisations” which cost £392,435 a year. Taxpayers can only speculate how much larger that ecosystem could become when he takes control of Whitehall.
The mayoral precept was not the only tax rise implemented by Burnham. As mayor, he raised every tax under his control. The band D police precept rose from £162.30 when he entered office to £285.30 by the time he left, a 76 per cent increase. At the same time, the fire precept increased from £59.95 to £92.20, a 54 per cent increase. Both increases substantially outstripped cumulative inflation of 37.5 per cent during that period.
Even that understates his tax-raising ambition, as it only includes the charges he managed to implement. In 2019, Burnham proposed a clean air zone for Greater Manchester which would impose a daily charge on commercial vehicles that did not comply with environmental standards: £7.50 per day for taxis, £10 per day on vans and £60 per day on buses, coaches and heavy goods vehicles. These would have added thousands of pounds a year to local businesses’ costs.
Sensible climate spending
On his Substack, John Robson suggests some spending on environmental issues where we actually can make positive changes as opposed to the spending on climate change which is mostly wasted:
As noted in our latest Green Money Machine, there’s no question that humanity faces real environmental problems and that some worthwhile organizations and people are trying to do something about them. It’s an important reason why we oppose, and even resent, the way the overwhelming focus on “climate change” drains off so much effort, time, and even money. So let us tell you about some actual environmental issues that have caught our attention lately. For instance “the Mediterranean Sea’s critically endangered population of great white sharks”. Of course we also recognize that some ecologists may be taking a worldly, not to say cynical, approach and leveraging concern about climate to raise money for other actually more useful activities. But in the long run cunning isn’t a good plan any more than obtuseness is.
When it comes to great white sharks it is also of course easy to imagine that anyone planning to swim in the Mediterranean might regard their scarcity as a plus. But the fact that such a comment would be controversial today reminds us of just how far the environmental movement has come since the 1960s, and frequently in good ways.
Indeed, being historically minded, we even recall a jibe by the New York Times after US president Franklin Roosevelt’s crushing 1936 reelection victory (he won every state but Maine and Vermont) that “If he were to say a kind word for the man-eating shark, people would look thoughtful and say perhaps there are two sides to the question”. But just in case you were frightened by Jaws in your youth, we could also mention (also from National Geographic) efforts to save the Mekong River’s “megafish”, a catfish bigger than a person that … no, wait. Poor choice. Also scary.
Satellite photo of the Great Salt Lake from August 2018 after years of drought, reaching near-record lows. The difference in colors between the northern and southern portions of the lake is the result of the Lucin Cutoff, a railroad causeway. The image was acquired by the MSI sensor on the Sentinel-2B satellite (Resolution: 20m, RGB Composites: True color, Band 4-3-2).
Wikimedia CommonsOK then. How about the shrinking Great Salt Lake? Because according to National Geographic (yes again they do serve a useful purpose when not banging on about climate):
Since 1850, the lake has lost 73 percent of its water and 60 percent of its surface area, and as more people move to the region, the water that typically feeds the lake is increasingly being diverted for agricultural, municipal, and industrial needs. What’s more, over the past few decades, a series of challenges – including climate change and the worst megadrought in at least 1,200 years – has impacted the cyclical climatic conditions that have sustained the lake for millennia.
Aaaargh. Banging on about climate. It’s a hard habit to break. And a bad one to keep, because it’s ridiculous to describe the loss of water going back to 1850, attribute it to human folly diverting the flow, and throw in the worst megadrought in at least 1,200 years (which necessarily means there was a horrific one 1,200 years ago which can’t have been our fault) and then toss in “climate change” which again is a description of alterations in weather not a causal force, and then speak of all these things having “impacted the cyclical climatic conditions that have sustained the lake for millennia”.
Bosh. In the first place, they cannot possibly know what cyclical climate conditions were like thousands and thousands of years ago. Nor what kind of pattern of megadroughts occurring millennia apart is natural, especially since interglacials don’t last that many millennia. Second, it isn’t possible that diverting water to agriculture, or swimming pools, has disrupted climate cycles. It just isn’t. Critical thought seems to be among the first and worst victims of “climate change”. The mind virus not the weather thing.
Especially as we regard it as intensely desirable that our fellow human fools stop draining the lake. Really. Take some of the tens of billions governments squander on trying to fix the weather, which honestly has always been bad, frequently dreadful, and put it to sensible uses.
July 20, 2026
Carneynomics in action
Even though the relic media are all singing from the government’s hymn book — because they might lose their generous subsidies if they don’t — a few dispiriting details about the real state of Canada’s economy still slip through:
This is the Carney economy in one picture.
He sold himself as the adult in the room. The banker. The international dealmaker. The man who could handle Trump and restore confidence.
Instead, Canadian manufacturers are preparing their exit.
According to the KPMG survey, 42% of manufacturers have already moved some production to the United States or are considering doing so. Another 36% are cutting investment, 12% have paused spending and 9% have cancelled projects altogether.
Manufacturing jobs are disappearing. Investment is drying up. Factories are moving south.
Businesses respond to incentives, costs and uncertainty. They do not remain in Canada because Mark Carney gives polished speeches about nation-building. They go where taxes, energy prices, regulation, labour costs and access to markets make production worthwhile.
Carney promised competence. What Canadians are getting is stalled trade talks, falling investment, disappearing jobs and another Liberal government that seems incapable of understanding how private-sector wealth is actually created.
A great many Canadians now see Carney as an incompetent ideologue in a good suit, surrounded by the same Liberal machine that helped create this mess.
And what consequences does he face?
Very few.
Carney is rich. His family is secure. His pension, investments and connections are intact. He will never worry about a mortgage payment, a grocery bill, a lost factory job or whether his children can afford a home.
The people who pay for his failures are workers, families, small-business owners and young Canadians whose futures are being shipped across the border.
That is the ugliest part of modern government. The people making the decisions are often insulated from the consequences. They can damage an economy, lose jobs, drive away investment and still retire wealthy, respected and welcomed back into corporate boardrooms.
A résumé is not an economic policy. A banker’s vocabulary cannot hide factories closing and investment leaving.
Canada is not being built. It is being hollowed out, while the people responsible remain comfortable.
This is why I thought the announcement on Friday that a Republican senator is calling for Carney’s assets in the US to be seized and to refuse him a visa … it’s beyond weird that a Canadian Prime Minister would have over 90% of his personal assets invested in the United States rather than in Canada. This gives Trump another handle on Carney, if he chooses to use it.
On her Substack, Melanie in Saskatchewan envisions how this may play out:
AI image from Melanie in Saskatchewan
So let me make a prediction: Any day now, your government will solemnly discover the importance of proper forest management.
There could be a task force, or a federal strategy, a minister standing solemnly in front of some trees. Perhaps an announcement that Ottawa has been “working around the clock” on a comprehensive plan that, by a miraculous coincidence, became urgent only after the American president threatened tariffs and a U.S. senator started talking about sanctions.
Should that happen, Canadians will be entitled to ask a very simple question: What finally changed Ottawa’s mind?
Was it concern for Canadians living through evacuations, destroyed communities and weeks of choking smoke? Was it the economic damage caused by recurring fire seasons? Was it pleas from provinces, northern communities and forestry workers for better prevention, mitigation and emergency capacity?
Or did the urgency arrive only when Washington threatened to slap another charge on Canadian exports and Senators possibly sanctioning Canadian officials like yourself? You personally have A LOT at stake if you are sanctioned since the majority of your wealth investment portfolio is in America.
The timing on this matters a great deal. It matters whenever a government suddenly treats a long-standing domestic problem like a national emergency only after somebody powerful outside the country attaches a financial consequence to it.
Trump has accused Canada of “wilful negligence” in maintaining its forests and says he intends to ask you what Canada plans to do. Your emergency management minister responded that governments have invested billions in fire prevention and forest sustainability since 2020. That defence deserves to be examined very closely and very carefully, because Canadians can reasonably ask what those billions purchased, where they went and why so many communities remain frighteningly vulnerable. To say it plainly … Canadians simply do not see any value for the dollars spent.
You announced spending of $317 million to lease 10 water bombers and heavy helicopters for rapid deployment to provinces because the wait time for them to be built is too long. So, here’s a fun little arithmetic exercise for Ottawa: water bombers are built right here in Canada — jobs, sovereignty, the whole patriotic package you’ve been selling — yet the federal shopping list remains stubbornly empty.
With $317 million, you could buy three heavy scoopers and have pocket change left for spotter planes or a helicopter, or — and this is where it gets embarrassing — you could roll out 45 to 55 single-engine Fire Boss aircraft, scattering an actual national fleet across every province that needs one. But apparently the government prefers its firefighting budgets theoretical. It is here that I will remind you, Fort Mac, Jasper and Lytton should have already provoked this response to act years ago.
The United States is hardly in a position to lecture anyone without hypocrisy. It is enduring its own brutal wildfire season, and fires do not stop at customs booths to declare their country of origin. Climate, drought, lightning, forestry practices and emergency capacity all play a role. There is plenty of responsibility, contradiction and political theatre to go around here. America has somehow managed to turn airborne smoke into an international trade dispute, because apparently even oxygen now requires a customs declaration. But that doesn’t absolve Ottawa. Again … Fort Mac. Jasper. Lytton. The warnings were already there. The time to act was then, but Ottawa chose navel gazing instead. In my books, that means today’s consequences lie with the governing Liberals.
Markets reject Carney’s official carbon price, so Canadians have to pay more
Canada is one of the last remaining bastions of Net Zero zealotry … in fact, Prime Minister Mark Carney may be the only national leader trying to turn back the tide of economic reality over this:
AI image posted by L. Wayne Mathison on X.
Mark Carney wrote a book called Value(s) lecturing the world about fairness, responsibility, sustainability and humility. His real governing value appears to be this: when markets reject his climate scheme, force Canadians to rescue it.
Carney now admits the official carbon price is supposedly above $100 while actual credits have traded near $20. Any honest banker would recognize the message. The market does not believe these credits are worth the imaginary price politicians assigned to them.
Carney’s response is classic central-planner arrogance. He will not reconsider the product. He will rig the price, tighten the rules, compel companies to buy it and call the resulting coercion “investment certainty”.
He praised carbon pricing in Value(s) as one of the most important and effective ways to reduce emissions. Then the consumer carbon tax became politically poisonous, so he scrapped it. The industrial version survives because its costs are easier to bury inside electricity, transportation, groceries, construction materials, wages and lost investment.
Carney also boasts that Canada continues sending climate-finance money abroad while other G7 governments pull back. Canadian families are struggling with food, housing and energy, yet our philosopher-banker remains determined to finance his international reputation with their money.
His book preached humility. His government practises price fixing.
His book preached responsibility. His government transfers the risk to taxpayers.
His book preached fairness. His policies protect the climate-finance class while ordinary Canadians absorb the costs.
Carney spent years wrapping political ideology in the language of banking. Now the numbers are exposing the sales pitch. When a theoretical $100 asset trades for $20, the market has delivered its verdict. Ottawa can falsify the price, but it cannot manufacture genuine value.
Value(s) may be hundreds of pages long. Carney’s philosophy fits into one sentence:
When reality refuses to validate the climate fantasy, force Canadians to pay until it does.
July 19, 2026
The importance of auditing
I often find people on social media expressing frustration with the voting system in their country, often claiming that all elections are placebos and that the powers-that-be would get rid of them if they actually worked. A strong counter-argument to that line of thought is how hard many on the left fight against any measure that would increase the security of elections, like requiring voter ID or auditing election results:
If it is a voter fraud speech tonight, the dems will of course flail, lie, and deny regardless of what is presented. Because as we all know fraud happens everywhere, all the time, in every other system humans are involved in, but not in voting ever, and HOW DARE YOU?!?
And when some of it does get caught, they cry that it is no big deal, and made no difference.
Every other functioning system on Earth gets audited. But not elections. Nope. Those are sacrosanct and the idea that dishonest humans would cheat at that one thing even though they routinely cheat at everything else is CRAZY.
And I mean real audits, not spot checks or recounts, or any of the other silly little half ass things dumb people think count as a real audit. If we audited publicly traded corporations like we “audit” elections, we’d have ten thousand percent more stock related fraud.
At this point if someone is against voting security or voter ID it’s because they want easier cheating. Period. That’s it. They’ll still lie about it and come up with outlandish bullshit scenarios about disenfranchising some imaginary people, but we all know it is to make cheating easier.
It is so tiresome keeping up these polite fictions with people who you know are lying their asses off.
They lie. We know they lie. They know we know they’re lying. They lie anyway.
July 16, 2026
“Only fans – Europe’s approach to air conditioning”
From the free-to-cheapskates portion of Ed West‘s most recent article on his Substack:
The EU may not actually believe this, but they thought you would …
Different climates have enjoyed advantages at different points in time. For most of history, industry and scholarship in southern Europe benefitted from significantly longer hours of sun and daylight much of the year compared to the north, allowing for more hours of work and study. James Belich noted in The World the Plague Made that this all changed with the expansion of the Basque whaling trade in the late medieval period, providing cheap wax for candles.
England and the Netherlands subsequently overtook the south in their levels of literacy, a transformation usually attributed to Protestantism, although this technical solution to a physical disadvantage certainly helped. As the northern countries grew richer, and were able to use more energy, so the climate came to be an advantage. Cooler areas of Europe in particular benefitted from a relative absence of vector-borne disease, dangerous insects and food poisoning, which made hotter regions of the world more lethal.
Yet the biggest curse of the lower latitudes is that heat makes us sluggish — since people struggle to work above 23° centigrade. As Maarten Boudry writes on his substack, “For every degree above 25°C (77°F), our cognitive performance declines by around two percent. And if synapses suffer, so does economic activity. At 30°C, office performance drops by almost 9 percent.”
I see that. I’ve been trying to write this in temperatures of up to 34°, which equates to a production level similar to a moderate hangover. If only there was some sort of technology that could make my home cooler.
Until relatively recently the world was dominated by a handful of relatively cold regions, and Paul Johnson observed in his history of the United States that human industry thrives in what Fahrenheit appreciators would call “the 60s”, a Goldilocks zone that turned New England and Greater Yankeedom into a powerhouse. The southern states, in contrast, were held back by higher mortality and the impossibility of productive work in the sweltering summer months, and until the mid-20th century were about 40 per cent poorer than the Union states.
The northerners were especially known for their work ethic and their inventiveness, a characteristic epitomised by the Boston-born Benjamin Franklin. Then in 1902, New York’s Willis Carrier changed everything with the one of the most world-changing inventions, the air conditioning unit; aircon has notably shifted population and power in the US southwards, but Dixieland is just part of a broader, global “sunshine belt”.
Among the most notable beneficiaries of this technology are the financial powerhouses of Dubai and Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew famously said of air conditioning that it was “perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics … The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked.” Indeed, it has often been noted as characteristic of the city-state that the aircon is usually set to icy levels, reflecting their determination to be on work mode throughout the day.
While Singapore is the most famous beneficiary of Carrier’s invention, Japan has almost universal air conditioning, with 91 per cent of homes equipped, compared to 88 per cent in the US. China is home to more than 500 million aircon units, is the world’s largest manufacturer, and has also seen an economic shift towards the south. Vietnam, also likely to be a major economic power by mid-century, is as dependent on this technology as it is on its people’s ingenuity. The development of aircon, and medical breakthroughs in the treatment of tropical diseases, has shifted the centre of gravity away from the cold regions of the earth — just as the globe is warming up.
This year’s European heat wave, still ongoing, saw temperatures reach 37 last month in England, a June record. Many schools shut early, although one in Kent instead used air raid tunnels to teach children. London’s Central Line hit 39.4c, presenting a real risk of heat stroke.
Across Europe the hot weather has closed down not just schools but factories, offices and rail lines, and led to an estimated 10,000 deaths, with France top of the heat mortality charts. Indeed as Boudry writes, Europe has the worst heat-related excess deaths of any region — while fatalities in the US have declined by 75 per cent since the adoption of air conditioning.
Update, 17 July: 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.
This is why so many of the kids are not “alright”
An interesting discussion at the social media site formerly known as Twitter, as Devon Eriksen responds to a comment from Stephen Fleming:
But don’t you understand?
There was a way. There was always a way.
We had it within our grasp, because we had already grasped it. The childhoods that you and your daughter had were available because you and your daughter had them.
All that the Boomers, and their parents, the eldest of the post WW2 generations, had to do was …
Nothing.
Just live in the paradise that their ancestors won for them, and make the minimum, the bare minimum, of effort that would have been required to actually sustain it.
That’s all.
Just keep things the way they were.
But they couldn’t handle that. Their fathers and grandfathers, the heroes that won WW2, made them jealous.
They wanted to be heroes, too.
So, for the sake of their own egos, they had to become Social Justice Warriors. They had to be Champions of Progress and Change.
They had to see the world they inherited as a pile of problems to be solved, rather than a pile of solutions to be cherished and preserved.
So they could feel like they were doing something important.
Almost all of the elder generations, even the ones who call themselves conservative and vote republican, are, in truth, socialist liberal progressives. Because they looked at paradise, and wanted to fix it instead of protect it.
That’s why the “republican” option was Reagan, the gun-ban guy, the social-welfare guy, the kiss-up-to-the-commies guy, the amnesty-for-foreign-invaders guy.
Reagan, the Hollywood liberal, the Obama of the 80s, instead of Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, and Pat Buchanan.
Teens can’t have a summer job because elders had to be Third-World Compassion Heroes, and give us Hart-Cellar and eleventy-billion barbarians who don’t care about civilization, but will work cheap.
Teens can’t have a car because elders had to be Climate Emergency Heroes and give us emissions control laws and Cash for Clunkers.
Teens can’t have safe schools to learn at, because elders had to Anti-Racist Heroes and made it illegal to exclude violent thugs from our school districts. Just because those thugs generally come color-coded for your convenience.
Teens can’t have safe public spaces to hang out in, because elders had to be Compassion for the Underclass Heroes, and release violent savages into society, again and again, with a lecture and a slap on the wrist.
Teens can’t have a healthy economy to inherit, because elders had to be Equality Heroes and make sure every corporation that actually did anything useful was punished for not being Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive enough to suit the ideal universe that exists only in their heads.
Teens can’t have dates, because elders had to be Anti-Sexist Heroes, and let feminists spend forty years diminishing the social value of men, until you had to a be a billionaire rockstar adventurer to avoid being an unsexy loser by default.
Teens can’t even be fit, healthy, and pretty, because elders had to be Sex Equality Heroes, and move women into the corporate workforce in droves, leaving children to be fed by corporate industrial slop factories.
Teens can’t have sane, well-adjusted, unspoiled girlfriends and wives, because elders had to be Champions of Sexual Freedom, and normalize unlimited female promiscuity, all in exchange for the largely unfulfilled promise of a little unshaven free-love yeti snatch.
And worst, of all, the crowning irony, the final dead hamster in the water pipe, is that all of this would be fixable, perhaps in three to five election cycles …
Except.
Except the elders don’t understand that any of this of this is happening.
They haven’t had a child in the household since 1997. They haven’t looked for an entry-level job since 1973. They haven’t gone on a date since 1981. They haven’t been laid off … ever.
They are safe with their paid-off houses and their investments and their pensions from 45 years at the same company and their social security and their medical plans.
It’s affecting the youngest generations first and worst. While the elders sit on their cruise ship, surveying the short with binoculars, wondering who all these ragged distressed looking people standing on the shore are.
And why they are holding signs that say “HELP”, “THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT”, and “YOU STOLE THE LIFE I WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE”.
Then they shrug, conclude that these must be the whiny losers, and everyone further inland is probably just fine, and everything is fine, because they fixed everything and they are all heroes, and the Summer of Love was the end of the Problematic Era of History and the beginning of the Great Enlightenment.
And when I am 74 years old, and the elders are all safely tucked into their cemetery plots, I will be torn apart by an angry mob for having white hair, and therefore being “one of them”.
And the mob will not care that I didn’t get to cast a vote until 1992, for the Man Who Predicted All Of This.
He called it the “giant sucking sound”.
Which is apt because it’s why everything sucks now.
July 14, 2026
Translating “virtù” in Machiavelli’s The Prince
At SteynOnline, Tal Bachman ponders the use of the Italian word “virtù” and how best to translate it into English without losing the essence of what Machiavelli was trying to communicate:
Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito (1536-1603)
Via Wikimedia Commons.
I’d read Machiavelli’s The Prince many times. Pondered its fiendish teachings as I watched political events. Wondered how true, or at least universal, the suggestions really were. I’d even started translating the text myself a few months earlier, just for fun. Machiavelli’s Italian wasn’t all that different from Spanish, so I could get quite a bit of it. With a bit of study, I got the rest. Now, here I was, standing in the very room he’d written the book in, touching the very desk he might have used.
It was in that moment I remembered a letter Machiavelli had written once, to a friend, about writing in that very room:
When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine, and that I was born for. There, I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them … I have composed a little work (The Prince), where I delve as deeply as I can into reflections on this subject.
The book itself opens with a quick description of the different types of states, and then concludes the first paragraph with an important sentence. New dominions, says Machiavelli, are acquired o con le armi di altri o con le proprie, o per fortuna o per virtù — that is, they’re acquired “either with the arms of others or with one’s own, either by fortune or by” — drum roll — “virtù“. That’s the word in Italian. The question is how to best translate virtù into English.
You might say, “virtue”. And you wouldn’t entirely be wrong: of course the Italian virtù and the English virtue are cognates. The problem is that in the Tuscan Italian of 1513, virtù carried important connotations which no longer exist in contemporary Italian, and don’t exist in English. “Virtue” these days, in either language, refers to an ethical attribute; it describes something good or moral. But in Renaissance Italian, it still retained an older meaning — one unaligned with anything specifically ethical. That older meaning merely described a certain kind of manly excellence, skill, power, prowess, or virtuosity: the Latin root of virtù is vir, meaning man; virility, like virtuosity, traces back to the same root. (The only remaining echo of this meaning in English or Italian, that I know of, lies in the idiom “by virtue of” — which attributes some authoritative force to something: “The agreement remained binding by virtue of state law”, or “Dan became captain by virtue of his experience”.)
To make matters even more challenging for the conscientious translator, Machiavelli pushes this older meaning to its extreme end throughout The Prince. In fact, his use — or as some might have it, his abuse — of the word virtù drives the main theme of the book.
In brief, what Machiavelli argues is that the political realm has its own rules — its own sort of morality, if it can even be called that. This morality is entirely unlike Christian morality, Aristotelian morality, or commonsense folk morality. Thus, the meaning of “virtue” and “vice” in the political realm differs from the meaning in other contexts. Failure to understand this and act accordingly will bring ruin to any aspiring ruler.
So, according to Machiavelli, a “virtuous” ruler isn’t necessarily a good man. In fact, he can’t be a good man by any normal definition; if he were, he’d inevitably fail as a ruler. After listing off some admirable moral qualities, Machiavelli says this:
It is not necessary, then, for a prince to have in fact all of the qualities written above, but it is indeed necessary to seem to have them … when these qualities are possessed and always observed, they are harmful; but when they seem to be possessed, they are useful. So it is useful to seem compassionate, faithful, kind, honest, religious … a prince cannot observe all of those things for which men are believed good, since to maintain his state he is often required to act against faith, against charity, against kindness, and against religion.
A virtuous ruler, in other words, is simply a political virtuoso: a ruler who knows what it takes to acquire and use power effectively, and has the guts to do it.
[…]
As you read through The Prince, you can almost hear Machiavelli saying, hey — I didn’t create this world. I’m just explaining how it actually works. If that’s anyone’s fault, it’s God’s — except there’s no reason to believe God even exists. And so, the aspiring ruler can and must do whatever it takes to succeed, without fear of divine disapproval.
This is Machiavelli’s conception of, or redefinition of, virtù. It is the main theme of the book. Yet as Harvey Mansfield notes in his book Machiavelli’s Virtue, often “Machiavelli’s translators have difficulty in rendering virtù“. Indeed they do, and where they don’t get it right, the reader has no chance to grasp just how radical or disturbing Machiavelli’s morality-inverting argument is. Where they do get it right, we get the chance to engage with one of history’s subtlest and most challenging political thinkers. This raises the question of whether there’s some specific set of principles which ought to guide the translation of great books, and if so, what they might be.
The problem is the state
Brivael Le Pogram explains that acceptance of mediocrity is key to the decline of most western societies … meek acceptance that we are lesser people living in the ruins of a just-passed but rapidly receding Golden Age:
An SNCF Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) Duplex DASYE (moteur asynchrone, nouvelle generation de duplex) train at Figueres-Vilafant station, May 2011.
Photo by eldelinux via Wikimedia Commons.
I’m on a “air-conditioned” train where it’s 26 degrees. The WiFi doesn’t work. No one says a word.
And that’s what fascinates me the most: not the breakdown, but the collective acceptance.
The socialist state has pulled off a psychological feat. It’s made us internalize that a mediocre service, paid for at exorbitant cost, is normal. That it’s even what “public service” means.
The same service in a free market would cost a fraction of the price. And if the AC broke down, you’d be refunded within the hour, because a competitor is waiting right next door for you to switch shops.
Make a list of everything the state touches:
Education: plummeting standards, teachers burning out, PISA rankings in freefall.
Healthcare: months-long waits, hallways full of gurneys, caregivers fleeing.
Transport: delays, breakdowns, strikes, prices exploding.
Justice: years for a judgment.
Police: overwhelmed, demoralized.
Colossal budgets.
Record-high tax takes in Europe.
Result: everything’s rotten.Why?
Because two things are missing that only the market provides: skin in the game and prices.
Skin in the game first. An entrepreneur who delivers a lousy service goes bankrupt. He loses HIS money, HIS reputation, HIS years of work. A bureaucrat who mismanages a public service loses nothing. He’ll get promoted, transferred, or at worst he’ll coast to retirement. Failure has no personal consequences. So failure repeats, indefinitely.
Prices next. Hayek showed it: market prices are an information system. Every price aggregates millions of individual decisions and signals where to allocate resources. When the state sets prices or subsidizes at a loss, it destroys that signal. No one knows anymore what anything is worth. We sprinkle money at random, we waste, and we call it “public investment”.
That’s why the bureaucrat is the worst possible steward of your taxes: he spends other people’s money, on other people. No incentive to save, no incentive to serve well. Milton Friedman summed it up in one sentence: it’s the worst of the four ways to spend money.
The problem isn’t this minister, that government, this reform. The problem is structural. A monopoly without competition, without prices, without skin in the game, will ALWAYS produce mediocrity. No matter who’s running it. No matter the budget.
If you’ve grasped that, you’ve grasped 90% of political economy.
So do one simple thing: explain it to your loved ones. Next delayed train, next emergency room wait, ask the question: “Who loses money when this service sucks?” Answer: no one. That’s the problem.
The information will eventually spread. And one day, collectively, we’ll stop swallowing it.
The problem is the state. Always.
Auto-translated from the original French by X.
Update, 15 July: 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.
July 13, 2026
Canada’s performative “grand strategic pivot away from the United States”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison provides the statistics to show that Prime Minister Carney’s big meeting with the Saudi Arabians is much more sizzle than steak:
Mark Carney wants Canadians to believe that courting Saudi Arabia represents some grand strategic pivot away from the United States.
The numbers expose the performance.
Saudi Arabia purchased roughly $1.3 billion in Canadian goods in 2025. Canada exported about $779 billion worldwide. That makes Saudi Arabia approximately 0.17 per cent of Canadian exports. It is a rounding error being marketed as an economic transformation.
Meanwhile, the real Canadian economy is voting with its money.
A new KPMG survey found that 57 percent of Canadian manufacturers have paused, reduced or cancelled capital investments. 42 percent have moved production to the United States or are considering doing so. Nearly one-third have already shifted at least some production south, and 61 percent say their businesses cannot survive without access to the American market.
That is the real Carney record: photo opportunities with Saudi royalty while Canadian factories, investment and future production quietly head for the border.
Ottawa keeps talking about “diversification”, but markets do not follow Liberal press releases. Capital goes where taxes are competitive, regulations are predictable, projects can be approved, energy is affordable and customers are close.
The latest trade figures make the point painfully clear. Canadian exports rose for the fourth consecutive month in May, driven by a 1.5 percent increase in exports to the United States. American-bound exports reached their highest level since February 2025 and still represented almost 70 percent of everything Canada shipped abroad. Exports to non-U.S. markets continued to shrink.
Canada should absolutely pursue new customers. But Saudi Arabia cannot replace an integrated continental market of more than 330 million people sitting directly beside us.
You do not reduce dependence on the United States by weakening Canadian competitiveness and watching manufacturers relocate there. You build Canadian strength first, then expand outward from a position of confidence.
Carney and the Liberals are doing the opposite.
They are allowing Canada’s productive base to erode while selling diplomatic tourism as economic strategy. They are chasing Saudi sovereign wealth while Canadian capital sits idle, scales back or leaves.
That is not diversification.
It is economic decline wearing a tailored suit and carrying a diplomatic passport. 🤡🌎
Teddy Roosevelt versus the “Robber Barons” of the Gilded Age
In the Coolidge Review, Burton W. Folsom, Jr. outlines the way President Teddy Roosevelt and his Progressives tried to rein in the wealthy industrialists who had helped create the Gilded Age:
Theodore Roosevelt looks on with glee as his commerce secretary puts the screws to trusts.
(Puck magazine, Alamy Stock Photo, via The Coolidge Review)
The early twentieth century marked the height of the progressive movement, which sought to check the power of free markets and business. To understand what progressives did in the early 1900s, we need to understand what happened in the late 1800s, the period often called the Gilded Age.
After the Civil War, the United States experienced spectacular economic growth. The industries leading the way included railroads, oil, and steel. This expansion made the United States a global economic power. The profits of those businesses enriched the wealthiest — and the average American. That’s in part because bigger, more efficient businesses can offer cheaper prices. Between 1870 and 1880, for example, railroad freight prices fell by half. By 1890, they had fallen by half again. And by 1900, they had been cut nearly in half once more.
Similar advances occurred in many other industries. In the Gilded Age the United States saw perhaps the greatest burst of invention and economic development any country has ever experienced.
[…]
Progressives relied on three tools to restrain business.
The first was the Sherman Antitrust Act. Passed in 1890, this law was used sparingly for a decade. Government enforcement proved difficult in part because the act’s language was vague: the Sherman Act outlawed any contract or “combination” in “restraint of trade or commerce”. In 1895 the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted the law narrowly. In a case involving a sugar-refining business, the Court held that the Sherman Act did not apply to manufacturing. Theodore Roosevelt later wrote in his autobiography that the ruling produced “governmental impotence”.
But soon after entering the White House in 1901, Roosevelt seized on the Sherman Act to engage in “trust busting”. He directed the Justice Department to dissolve the Northern Securities Company, a railroad holding company that Hill had created. This time, the Supreme Court upheld the government’s intervention. Referring to the 1895 ruling, Roosevelt crowed, “This decision I caused to be annulled by the court that had rendered it”, giving the federal government the power “to deal effectively with the trusts”. Roosevelt’s Justice Department soon targeted Standard Oil, which was eventually broken into thirty-four separate companies.
The second tool progressives used against business was the Interstate Commerce Commission. Although railroad rates had declined dramatically for decades, progressives objected to the way those rates were structured. Railroads tended to give the largest discounts to customers that transported the most goods. The railroads still profited from these volume discounts, and smaller customers still paid much lower rates than they had earlier. But progressives argued that it was unjust for smaller shippers to pay higher rates than larger businesses.
In his 1905 annual message to Congress, President Roosevelt demanded legislation to put “a complete stop to rebates in every shape and form”. The 1906 Hepburn Act accomplished that goal. The law was expanded to give the Interstate Commerce Commission the power to inspect railroads’ financial records, eliminate targeted rebates, and set “just and reasonable” rates. In other words, the federal government now had significant pricing power over railroads, America’s largest business sector.
The progressives’ third tool was the federal income tax. In 1909 Congress approved the resolution for a constitutional amendment to establish an income tax. The Sixteenth Amendment took effect in 1913, after three-quarters of the states had ratified it. That was the year Coolidge was elected president of the Massachusetts State Senate.
From the beginning, the tax system was progressive, imposing higher rates on larger incomes. In 1913 most Americans paid no federal income taxes, while the top marginal rate — for income exceeding the equivalent of $16 million in 2026 dollars — was only 7 percent. But within five years, tax rates had soared, with the top bracket paying 77 percent.
