Quotulatiousness

August 26, 2026

Regulating away small company benefits in the EU

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Environment, Europe, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Cláudia Ascensão Nunes discusses yet another example of regulatory capture, as new European Union regulations will choke off business opportunities for small companies to the benefit of big companies and multinationals who can absorb the costs of the new environmental regulations:

Today, the European Commission estimates that the Single Market has increased the European Union’s GDP by 3–4% and created 3.6 million jobs since its creation. A study by Bertelsmann Stiftung estimated that integration increases European citizens’ incomes by an average of about €840 ($974) per person per year.

Yet the benefits created by this integration, and the freedom that made these benefits possible, began to come under threat on August 12, 2026, quietly and through an apparently harmless packaging regulation.

The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) will force sellers, both European and foreign, to comply with a complex set of rules that may be manageable for large brands but suffocating for small businesses.

The most problematic requirement is that sellers shipping packaged products to an EU country where they are not established must appoint a local authorized representative. That representative will act on behalf of the seller before that country’s recycling authorities. The representative must register the company in the national Extended Producer Responsibility, or EPR, system, file annual reports on the packaging the company places on that market, and charge a service fee of between €200 ($232) and €500 ($580).

The process of appointing a representative in one country is both bureaucratic and expensive. Doing so across several countries can become impractical for small sellers, who lack the scale to spread these fixed costs across a large volume of sales, especially since the PPWR does not provide a volume-based exemption.

Several businesses are already announcing the suspension of shipments to other EU countries or disabling shipping options to the EU altogether. The German company Copiaro, for example, suspended shipments to other EU member states while continuing to ship to European markets such as Switzerland, Norway, and the United Kingdom, which are outside the EU’s regulatory framework.

We are therefore returning to something resembling the old national markets, with barriers to entry.

The entire model of cross-border trade for small businesses risks being undermined in the name of environmental protection. Yet if larger companies, which produce far more packaging waste, are the ones best able to absorb these costs, we are facing a contradiction. Packaging regulations can shield large sellers from competition by smaller businesses, creating a more closed and concentrated market.

Europe may become greener by becoming poorer. European entrepreneurship is being strangled, and small business owners are paying the price.

August 16, 2026

How Not to Be A Nazi – Death of Democracy 28 – Epilogue

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 15 Aug 2026

Nazi Germany destroyed democracy in weeks, launched a war that killed tens of millions, and carried racial persecution to industrialized mass murder. But after 1945, Germans and Europeans faced another question: how could they prevent it from ever happening again?

In this final, independently viewable epilogue to Death of Democracy, Spartacus examines how West Germany transformed the lessons of dictatorship and war into the Grundgesetz — a constitutional system built around human dignity, enforceable rights, federalism, judicial independence, social stability, and a democracy empowered to defend itself.

We trace how the Federal Republic combined lessons from Weimar, the United States, Britain, Austria, France, and other democratic traditions; how Konrad Adenauer’s generation tied Germany to a new European order; and how the same determination to restrain power and prevent another continental war eventually shaped the European Union and the Lisbon Treaty.

Finally, we ask how well those democratic fortifications are holding in 2026 — and return one last time to the diarists, victims, witnesses, supporters, and resisters whose voices guided us through Germany’s descent into dictatorship.

From the comments:

@spartacus-olsson
12 hours ago

Thank you for joining me on this adventure. I hope it has been eye-opening. If you watched to the very end, you will know that I’m soon launching a World War 2 Trivia board game – I’ve been super punny and named it World War IIrivia (2rivia with Roman numerals).

After so many years of studying this and sharing it in the darkest possible way, I felt it was time to look at the whole affair in a way that’s fun, social, and still educational. So a couple of months ago I came up with something. It turned out to be one of those moments when the work seems like extra fun. Before I knew it, I was spending my sleepless nights on the idea, sketching rules in Word, writing questions into lists in Excel, designing the game in Photoshop, testing gameplay against myself, and redesigning. And then there it was — an actual game. It’s a game for both novices and experts, with some unexpected twists and turns. If you’re interested in this period of history and enjoy a night of board games, this is for you. Stay tuned for more updates about the launch.

Once again, many, many thanks to all of you for watching. Thank you to Iryna, Astrid, Anna, and Clara for your great work on the series. Thank you to the TimeGhost Army members for enabling me to do this. With that, as Mr. Murrow would put it:

Good Night and Good Luck,
Your Spartacus

August 7, 2026

Brexit plus ten

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Mark Nayler looks at the state of Britain ten years after the historic vote to leave the European Union. He notes that there appears to be a bit of buyer’s remorse among those who voted to leave the EU, although I would note that the political leadership, both Conservative and Labour, almost all did their level best to sabotage any positive results (although the “Boriswave” of immigrants would have swamped even a substantial economic boom all by itself).

In the run-up to the UK’s referendum on EU membership in June 2016, extravagant claims were made by both the Remain and Leave campaigns. Leaving the EU, the so-called Remainers warned, would propel the UK into recession and mass unemployment. Brexiteers, as they were dubbed, countered with promises of enhanced sovereignty, tighter borders, and liberation from Brussels’s stifling bureaucracy. The latter won the Brexit vote (as it came to be known) by 52% to 48%. But just over a decade on from that historic decision — and six and a half years since the UK officially left the bloc — it’s less clear whether they also won the argument.

This is in large part because of geopolitical turmoil since the vote. Throughout the last decade, there has been a global pandemic, Russia has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine (which, in turn, caused an energy crisis across Europe), and Donald Trump has waged a series of tariff wars across the world. The difficulty of disentangling the effects of these events on the UK economy from those caused by Brexit is formidable. One analyst has even said that “we will never know precisely what the impacts of Brexit were”.

Overall, however, the sweeping transformations predicted by both Brexiteers and Remainers — positive in the former case, negative in the latter — have not occurred. The actual changes have been less dramatic, more gradual, and more mixed than either side forecast. One also has to factor in the UK’s lack of a stable leadership since the vote: when Labor’s Andy Burnham took over from Keir Starmer on July 20, he became the UK’s 7th prime minister in 10 years. This, perhaps, has so far prevented the theoretical autonomy now possessed by the UK from being fully realized. According to a poll conducted in June, 57% of Britons now believe that it was a mistake to leave the EU — meaning there are a lot of dissatisfied Brexiteers out there.

Remainers forecast economic ruin for the UK if it chose to leave the EU. According to the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, “A vote to leave would represent an immediate and profound shock to our economy [and] that shock would push our economy into a recession”. A recession failed to materialize, although the pound suffered its biggest-ever one-day drop on June 24, 2016, the day after the vote, falling 10% against the dollar and 7% against the euro (it still hasn’t returned to its pre-Brexit values against either currency, although Trump’s tariff wars and the pandemic are also factors here). That said, researchers broadly agree that Britain’s economy has contracted due to Brexit. According to a 2025 paper for the US National Bureau of Economic Research, UK GDP per capita is 6–8% lower than it would have been had the UK remained in the EU. Investment is down by 12–13%, employment by 3–4%, and productivity has been reduced by about 4%, according to its authors.

Immigration was a major theme of the Leave campaign. The UK Independence Party’s widely criticized poster showed a large group of Syrian refugees at the Croatia–Slovenia border in 2015, next to a massive slogan reading “Breaking Point” — and, underneath it, in smaller letters, “The EU has failed us all”. The center-right party was playing to concerns about a surge in migration over the decade and a half preceding the referendum, triggered by EU enlargements in 2004,when ten new countries joined, and in 2007. In 2000, migration to the UK from other EU countries stood at 6,000, but by 2015 it had risen to 330,000. In 2015 and 2016 alone, more than a million migrants arrived in Britain. According to a poll conducted on the day of the referendum, 33% of Leave voters said the main reason for their decision was a belief that leaving the EU “offered the best chance for the UK to regain control over immigration and its own borders”. It seems the poster had done its job.

The composition of Britain’s migrant population has changed radically since Brexit, with an increase in non-EU migration more than compensating for the reduction in arrivals from the EU. But immigration has not decreased. In fact, the UK has witnessed record levels of immigration over the last decade. In the year ending March 2023, just over three years after Britain’s withdrawal from the bloc, net migration peaked at 944,000.

August 5, 2026

Power corrupts, but unaccountable power attracts bureaucrats

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

We used to joke around election time that no matter who you voted for, the government always got in. Gallows humour, because it’s quite literally true. Enough people can get angry about the government in power and vote out the politicians … but the politicians aren’t the one implementing the policies that get people upset. The permanent bureaucracy barely notices when the government changes because the government rarely manages to get anything done that the civil service doesn’t want to do. It’s actually worse in Europe, because the politicians are even more mere figureheads than they are in the Anglosphere:

Christine Lagarde and Ursula von der Leyen

Nobody grows up dreaming of a career shuffling directives around Brussels.

Those jobs always fill with the same type of person: people drawn to power for its own sake, the ones who crave authority without ever answering for it. Bureaucracy doesn’t attract the best. It selects for the worst, then shields them when they inevitably screw up.

Hayek named this in The Road to Serfdom. His chapter “Why the Worst Get on Top” spelled out the logic. Unchecked power appeals most to the people least troubled by wielding it.

Mises found the engine underneath. In a market, a bad decision shows up as a loss, and losses remove you. Bureaucratic management faces no such test. Fail to fix a problem and you keep your job, then collect a bigger budget and a larger staff to keep failing with. The incentive runs backwards: waste earns you more, and the machine grows on its own.

Look at the European Union. Ursula von der Leyen presides over the Commission, the body that proposes almost all EU law. No European voter ever put her there. Heads of state handed her the post in a 2019 backroom deal and waved her through parliament. Christine Lagarde runs the European Central Bank, setting monetary policy for more than 340 million people and steering the value of the money in their pockets. She faced no voters for the job either.

You can throw out your national government every few years, but nothing above it moves, the apparatus stays. The unelected keep their offices, their pensions, their power, untouched by the only check ordinary people have.

This is the design, not a flaw in it. The people with the most control over your money and your future are the ones you are not allowed to fire.

August 3, 2026

The Ceuta invasion as a tipping point

Filed under: Africa, Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On Substack, el gato malo suggests that the “refugee” invastion of Ceuta is a “bridge too far” for the EU:

peruvian strongman oscar benavides famously said “for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law”.

once, such a thing might have provided a succinct summation of the practice of privilege in its literal sense of “private law”. there were laws for the aristocrats and others for the commoners and still others for non-citizens and slaves.

such ideas date back to time out of mind before stone was placed upon stone in giza and stood as absolute expectation and norm in most of the world until quite recently (and pertain in many parts of the world even today). the idea that “all people should be equal under the law” was a radical alteration to social order, a repudiation of the divine right of kings and aristocrats and their monopolies on property and on violence. the literal idea that land could be owned by a commoner was an astonishing upheaval of established orders. it was also the freeing move that allowed for the west to rise and flourish and prosper, unlocking its vast human potential. one might think that people would be happy about this and cherish and protect this most foundational idea that serves as cornerstone to civilizations of liberty and plenty.

lol.

you must be new here.

[…]

spain looks to be in real danger of falling as a nation. they created a mass amnesty for illegal immigrants from places that do not believe in spain but only in tribe and who do not believe in rights but only in who may dominate whom. if one seeks to be a wrecker, it’s a brilliant incentive. pardon a million and give them access to your social safety networks and welfare payments which fund a lifestyle far in excess of where they came from (and the right to vote for more) and the next wave is already packing its bags to come. spread enough jam and you can attract infinity ants.

the US was well on its way to running this playbook (and likely has ~40 million illegals to show for it) before it was stopped. the astonishing bit was how easy it was to shut this off. you just cut off the incentives. no more free stuff, no more amnesty, no more “path to stay”, and no more “catch and release until our overwhelmed court system can have a hearing years from now”. it’s really that simple.

due process becomes rounding you up and sending you home, not giving you a nice place to live for the 3 years until your case is heard.

and it ALL comes down to prosecutors, courts, and agencies. immigration law became irrelevant not because the law changed but because enforcement did. the spectacle of american judges sneaking illegals out of courthouses to avoid their apprehension by ICE was really pretty astonishing. so too were the massive levels of entitlement fraud, literal government funded flights to needed voting districts, and the astonishing refusal to arrest or hold accountable any among them because “marginalized”. europe is worse.

the NGO bond villian insidious complex has been running the table on the west for 20 years.

and they are moving into overdrive now before the populist right forces they are giving reflexive rise to can take control.

[…]

the media is, predictably, either ignoring this or pretending it’s a humanitarian crisis of families and babies. it’s not. this is damn near all men.

and they are not behaving well.

some are claiming that many of these are criminals freed by morocco and bused to the border as a deliberate act. (this same tactic was used by central and south american regimes to dump their gangs in the US.) images of robbery, rape, and of murder are cropping up.

just what a town of 80k is supposed to do with 80k invaders and how they might be fed or sheltered or controlled remains an open question.

meanwhile, EU commission president ursula von doom has moved to action.

“we have sent a bureaucrat to monitor the situation. if this continues, they will tell people to ‘stop’. if that fails, they will say ‘stop’ again, perhaps in a firmer voice.”

to call this air and nonsense would be charitable. it’s an admission of helplessness. the EC relied upon a soft power it no longer possesses because it now faces people who believe only in hard power which the EC never had.

bluff called.

it’s over.

the EC was fine to govern the sort of citizens who yell at tourists for crossing an empty street against the light. it is wholly unsuited for this and like many an ill fated magician’s apprentice before them, they have now summoned that which they have no hope of controling and will eat them alive.

but here’s the part i really loved: “the images from ceuta are unacceptable”.

talk about saying the quiet part out loud. not the events. not the crisis. the images. even now, for her it’s all perception. you want to understand why they want to mandate ID to use the internet/social media and why they so desperately demand the right to censor it (once more using courts and agencies to enforce their whim)? this is why.

“for my friends, speech, for my enemies censorship and gulag”.

what they are doing cannot survive these images.

On Substack Notes, GenX Anecdotes reacts to the progressives’ response to the Ceuta situation:

I often wonder about the open borders, “migrants welcome” people and I can’t square it.

I am traditionally a left leaning person from a mixed background who has travelled extensively.

To the current progressive mind this ought to make me automatically cheering on the levels of mass migration we are living with.

But it’s the opposite.

The well travelled “anywhere” cosmopolitans should surely be the most aware of cultural differences and that it’s precisely the concept that nations are “particular” and unique from one another, that makes travelling such a fascinating and sometimes challenging thing to do.

[…]

Travelling gave me a fresh and new appreciation of little things (that actually turned out to be important things) about Britain that I had taken for granted before.

The fact that these muppets think that any form of patriotism or nationalism leads to Hitler is absolutely moronic.

And of course they celebrate it everywhere else. It’s just us who are the baddies for wanting to hold onto our traditions, customs and culture.

Why are we uniquely expected to live by different rules? Surely that in itself is kind of exceptionalist?

A progressive travelling in India wouldn’t think twice about a Mumbai taxi driver having an Indian flag hanging on his rearview mirror.

Or a Thai guesthouse having a shrine to the Thai royal family.

When you travel, people are proud of their countries and towns. They want to show you around. They tell you their country is the best proudly.

Of course, I will be here all day pointing out progressive double standards.

But this one is a biggy!

Update, 4 August: 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.

August 1, 2026

The invasion of Ceuta

Filed under: Africa, Europe, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

In the last 48 hours vast numbers of people have learned that Spain still has territory on the African continent, as Morocco enables thousands of young men to cross into the Spanish city of Ceuta. The Spanish government has, to time of writing, refused to declare a state of emergency or to send military forces to assist the municipal authorities in Ceuta. In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill thinks this heralds the end of globalism:

Can we say “invasion” now? What other word is there for the rough intrusion of tens of thousands of young men into the sovereign territory of a foreign nation? Surely not even the sappiest leftist in his tattered keffiyeh and “Refugees Welcome” t-shirt would describe the thuggish gatecrashing of an independent nation as “asylum seeking”? That might be the one and only upside to the extraordinary events in Ceuta yesterday: the death, at last, of euphemism. The impossibility of any longer dressing up the West’s suicidal abandonment of its borders as “kindness”.

The scenes from the Spanish enclave at the tip of North Africa are staggering. An estimated 49,000 people, mostly Moroccans, mostly men, gleefully intruded upon the territory of the Spanish kingdom. That’s around the same number of people who illegally sail to Britain in a year. They scaled border gates and overwhelmed those charged with protecting Spanish lands. Viral clips show men punching the air as they swarm the enclave, clearly thrilled with their incursion into a sovereign state. Even the Spanish press is feeling the death of euphemism. “Ceuta, invaded”, says the front page of ABC, a newspaper of record, alongside an image of thousands of men streaming along Ceuta’s beach.

The mass storming of Ceuta has focused the minds even of Spain’s fatally apathetic ruling class. All of Ceuta’s parties, both right and left, have called on Madrid to send in the army to reinforce the border with Morocco. Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez promised an “immediate response“. Yet even if the Spanish manage to tame this searing crisis of sovereign rule – and that’s a big “if” – the lessons of it should reverberate not only across Spain but all of Europe. For the fall of Ceuta exposes the lethal strain in globalism. It speaks – screams in fact – to the chaotic trashing of sovereignty, democracy and our very way of life that globalism and its gold-collared acolytes have brought about.

The storming of Ceuta shatters the falsehoods of the left. For years, “progressives” gaslit the public, insisting that the men illegally crossing our borders are “vulnerable people” who are “seeking asylum”. Like Big Brother, they expected us to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears and accept that these swaggering blokes from Eritrea or Afghanistan are the wretched of the Earth requiring our love and care and four-star hotels. Ceuta dismantles that lie. The whole world can see there are virtually no women and children in those mobs. The whole world knows Morocco is not ravaged by war or hunger. From now on, every utterance of the phrase “asylum seeker” should invoke noisy, angry scepticism.

The Ceuta crisis also confirms that the moral cowardice of the modern state is like a red rag to hostile actors. It is undeniable that Pedro Sánchez’s lunatic granting of asylum to illegal immigrants emboldened these Moroccan men to pour into soft-touch Spain. In January this year, Sánchez bypassed parliament and issued a royal decree to regularise virtually all “undocumented migrants” on Spanish territory. Almost 1.2million illegal arrivals applied for this regularised status that would grant them the right to reside in Spain, to work there and to enjoy unfettered access to healthcare and education.

The cope is strong in progressive commentators:

July 16, 2026

“Only fans – Europe’s approach to air conditioning”

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Europe, Government, Health, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

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.

July 14, 2026

The problem is the state

Filed under: Europe, France, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

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 12, 2026

This used to be active sabotage … now it’s standard EU practice

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ten years back, I posted an excerpt from a WW2 American espionage manual showing workers in occupied Europe how to bureaucratically sabotage their organizations to harm Nazi Germany’s war efforts. At the time I joked that it also sounded like a lot of company meetings in the modern world. Brivael Le Pogam uses the same set of guidelines to illustrate just how much the EU has embraced these sabotage methods as their standard operating practices:

Link goes to full text at Wikisource

🚨 The OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) describes how to paralyze an organization without explosives.

The European Union seems to have taken it as its official instruction manual. Here are the disturbing similarities:

1. “Insist on everything going through official channels.”
✅ 27 states, 24 official languages, 3 seats, thousands of committees and agencies. Even a directive on lightbulbs goes through 7 levels of validation.

2. “Hold meetings. Speak at length with anecdotes.”
✅ 45-minute speeches in the European Parliament on minor topics. Strasbourg and Brussels locals applaud politely.

3. “Refer everything to committees. Make them as large as possible (never fewer than 5 people).”
✅ The trilogue, COREPER, working groups, expert committees … A simple decision turns into a 3-to-7-year obstacle course.

4. “Bring up unrelated matters repeatedly.”
✅ Talking agriculture? Let’s add the Green Deal, LGBT rights, Palestine, and the carbon border tax. Nothing is ever straightforward.

5. “Haggle over the precise wording of communications.”
✅ Months of negotiation over a semicolon in a 400-page regulation. The word “should” vs. “must” can stall everything.

6. “Reopen decisions that have already been made.”
✅ Directive adopted? We reopen it 2 years later for “revision”, “strengthening”, or “adaptation to the geopolitical context”.

7. “Advocate caution and deliberation. Avoid all haste.”
✅ “We need more time to study the impact”, “let’s consult stakeholders more”, “better safe than sorry”. Result: nothing moves quickly.

8. “Question the legitimacy of every decision.”
✅ “Is this really within the EU’s competence?” (even when it’s already in the treaties). Subsidiarity invoked when convenient, forgotten when not.

The EU doesn’t need Russian or Chinese saboteurs. It has turned itself into a machine for slowing down Europe, exactly as the manual recommended to weaken the enemy.

The funniest part? All of this is done legally, democratically, and with the best intentions.

Automatically translated from the original French by X.

July 10, 2026

EU “Chat Control” passes through parliamentary chicanery

Filed under: Europe, Government, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

As mentioned yesterday, the EU introduced “Chat Control” which allows the authorities to examine any and all private communications by EU residents “to protect the children”. As eugyppius reports, it got through and was passed into EU-wide law on Thursday:

If anybody cares, what actually happened is that an extension of the European Union’s mass surveillance regulation known as Chat Control 1.0 failed to make it out of the European Parliament twice in March. Unable to summon a clear parliamentary majority, advocates (mostly in the centre-right European People’s Party [EPP]) turned to the European Council, which adopted the failed Chat Control 1.0 renewal on 2 July. The Council’s position hardens automatically into law unless the European Parliament can summon an absolute majority to stop it. To forestall any such majority from forming, the EPP on Tuesday moved with member state backing for urgent procedure, angling to force their scheme through in the last days before the summer holiday, after many MEP’s had already left. The parliament narrowly approved the urgent procedure, and in consequence there were not enough votes to stop Chat Control 1.0 when it came for a vote today. Hours ago, a majority of 314 MEPs voted to stop Chat Control against the wishes of the Council, while a minority of 276 voted to let it happen. Because 314 is less than the absolute majority of 361, Chat Control 1.0 passed even though most MEPs present didn’t want it to.

It was a sleazy vote, not least because it’s far from clear this procedural manoeuvre was even appropriate in this case. Also, electronic surveillance is bad, but if we are honest with ourselves this battle was already lost.

Chat Control 1.0 was first instated in 2021 as a temporary exemption to the ePrivacy Directive of the EU, allowing messaging services and online platforms to scan chats and other electronic communications for child sexual abuse material. The exemption expired in April, but various platforms have continued their surveillance with no legal basis in the intervening months. Now their formal permission to scan our private communications has been restored and extended through April 2028. We are, in other words, merely returning to the prior regime.

Chat Control 1.0 is a temporary stopgap while the European Parliament, the Commission and the Council try to negotiate their Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, or Chat Control 2.0. As envisioned by the Commission, this permanent law would not merely allow platforms to scan private communications for child sex abuse material, but require them to do so; require additional AI-assisted automated scanning not only for known child pornography but also for such vaguely defined activities as “grooming”; and extend scanning to end-to-end encrypted services like Signal via mandatory monitoring on the client side. This insane proposal has been watered down over the years, in large part because of parliamentary opposition, but it’s coming in some form. We’re getting Chat Control 2.0 before Chat Control 1.0 expires, and Chat Control 2.0 will be at least somewhat worse.

The EU’s stratégie “antiracisme”

Filed under: Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The media has been pushing the narrative of a huge rising tide of racism and white supremacy, even as those ideas had been steadily losing influence and popularity. European and western governments generally have been doing their part to keep racism alive by importing as many unassimilable young men of military age and setting them loose upon the native population. Something’s got to give:

It has been proven. The narrative of systemic racism and “white supremacy” was completely fabricated by the media and activists since 2010. It’s undeniable.

Ask yourself this: have you ever come across, among your friends, your family, or your colleagues, someone who calls themselves a white supremacist and wants to “restore the purity of the white race”?

No. It doesn’t exist. It might have been a marginal fantasy in the past. Today, it’s a media construct to justify division and ideology.

The post I made that Elon Musk reposted yesterday proves it perfectly.

This European strategy isn’t going to “fight racism”. It’s going to create the perfect breeding ground for grooming gangs to spread everywhere in Europe, including France.

Reminder: in the UK, thousands of underage girls were raped, drugged, and sexually exploited by networks (often Pakistani) in Rotherham, Rochdale, and elsewhere. The cops, social services, and elected officials let the most horrific abuses slide for years … because they were afraid of being labeled racists. They chose to sacrifice young girls rather than “stigmatize” a community.

This is exactly the mechanism that Brussels is now rolling out across the board:

– Denial of anti-white racism
– Definition of “structural racism” without perpetrators or intent (so everyone is suspect by default)
– 3.6 billion euros in public money to anti-racist NGOs
– Training for civil servants to detect “racial bias” everywhere

Result: police officers and agents paralyzed by the fear of being called racists. They’ll hesitate even more to act in certain neighborhoods or against certain groups.

In France, this ideology has already been carried by associations like Touche pas à mon pote and others of the same ilk. Instead of promoting integration and unity, they’ve created division by exploiting minorities for political ends.

Antiracism as it’s practiced today is racism. It divides people by skin color, protects real problems, and criminalizes those who dare to name the facts.

What needs to be done: stop dividing. Stop multiplying associations that exploit minorities to sow discord. Go back to true equality: judge actions, not origins. Protect victims without ideological taboos.

If this strategy passes, we won’t have “small” problems.

We’ll have grooming gangs on steroids across all of Europe.

That’s the price of this madness.

Auto-translated from the original French by X.

July 9, 2026

They call it “Chat Control”

Filed under: Europe, Government, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Brivael Le Pogam talks about what the EU is calling “Chat Control”:

We need to talk about Chat Control, because it’s all happening this week and almost no one understands what it’s about.

In plain terms: the EU wants to authorize the scanning of your private messages. Your WhatsApp conversations, your emails, your DMs. Not those of a suspect. Those of everyone, all the time, by default.

The pretext is airtight, and that’s the trap: “protecting children”. No one can be against that. That’s exactly why it’s the perfect tool. They’ll never get you to swallow mass surveillance in the name of mass surveillance. They’ll get you to swallow it in the name of children, terrorism, disinformation. Always some cause you won’t dare challenge.

Understand the two-step mechanism well.

Today it’s the “soft” version: platforms have the right to scan, on a voluntary basis, unencrypted messages. Harmless on the surface. It’s the foot in the door.

Then comes the real version, the one under negotiation: mandatory scanning, including of your encrypted messages, analyzed directly on your phone before they’re even sent. Over 500 cryptographers have signed a letter saying it’s technically unfeasible without creating security vulnerabilities that any hacker or hostile state could exploit. You’re breaking encryption for everyone, including the criminals you claim to be targeting.

And the worst part isn’t even that.

The real danger isn’t that Brussels technocrats will be watching you tomorrow. They’re probably too spineless for that. The danger is that they’re building the infrastructure. Once scanning everyone’s messages becomes normal, legal, operational — the track is laid. And on that track will roll everything that comes next. The day a crisis brings ruthless people to power, they won’t have to invent anything. The machine will already be there, ready to go.

No surveillance infrastructure has ever stayed limited to its original purpose. None. It’s a law of administrative nature: a tool built for X always ends up serving Y.

What makes this text dangerous isn’t what it does today. It’s what it makes possible forever.

The decisive vote is Thursday. The last lock.

Auto-translated from the original French by X.

The good folks at Windscribe weigh in:

The EU is not a democracy.

They’re closer to a guy who keeps pressuring a girl to sleep with him despite her saying no.

5 times now.

But he won’t stop.

We’re at the stage where he’s giving her alcohol and making her drunk so she struggles to say no.

Over the last 3 years, Chat Control and similar scanning measures have been defeated or blocked 5 times.

The citizens of the EU and members of EU Parliament have made it abundantly clear — they don’t want Chat Control.

This latest attempt by the EU is the slimiest one yet. Revive dead legislation that was already defeated, flip the passing criteria so that majority don’t need to SUPPORT it, majority need to DEFEAT it, and as the cherry on top, hold that vote on the very last day before Parliament members go on summer break so that many don’t show up. Oh and if they don’t show up, it counts as a vote to pass Chat Control.

You can dress it up in as many legal technicalities and loopholes as you want, what the EU is doing here is fundamentally undemocratic.

No means no.

And if you ever saw a guy pressuring a girl into sleeping with him with disgusting tactics after she said no THIS many times, you would consider him to be a rapist.

So congrats to the EU on adopting rapist strategies to your governance.

June 25, 2026

Why Britain voted for Brexit

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Pat Condell explains some of the reasons British voters chose Brexit over staying in the EU back in 2016:

Why did we vote for Brexit ten years ago? Because we understood that the core purpose of the European Union is to destroy the independent countries of Europe by opening the borders and transforming a diverse continent of sovereign nations into a single homogenous political bloc governed by a committee of unelected bureaucrats, as a model for the planned global dictatorship.

Obviously, you’re not going to get many votes for that if you just lay it out for people, so you start with something innocuous like trade.

You say “Let’s harmonise our trade arrangements and everything will run more smoothly.”

And people say “Yes, that sounds like a good idea.”

Then you say “While we’re at it, let’s give this small group of people the power to organise all this from one place, and everything will run more smoothly.”

“Well, I suppose that makes sense. We want things to run smoothly.”

Then it’s “Actually, let’s give these people the power to make our laws and override our parliament and justice system, and everything will run much more smoothly.”

“Hold on a second, I don’t know about that …”

“You fascist. You racist. You xenophobe. You bigot. You pig ignorant little Englander. You vermin. You scum.”

Although that attitude certainly helped to tip the balance, the most important reason we voted for Brexit is that politicians had no right to sign away the governance of the UK to a foreign entity, but that is what they did, while pretending it was about trade. They lied to us, and they tried to cheat us out of our country.

That is why we voted for Brexit, and it’s why we’re now being punished for our disobedience by traitors who refuse to secure the border and who are allowing our country to be flooded with millions of unwanted and incompatible immigrants and illegally invaded and occupied by an army of dangerous military age men in whose presence no woman or child is safe.

Forced mass immigration from hostile and barbarous cultures is punishment for Brexit. Our country is being purposely destroyed for not voting the way we were told.

June 23, 2026

They don’t do “democracy” in Europe for any important issue: the voters might get it wrong

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, France, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

It used to be a joke that voting never matters because the voters can’t be trusted with that kind of power. Over time, the joke stopped being at all funny, because that’s exactly what has happened in most western countries at the national level, but most blatantly in the European Union, where voters can express their will in a clear majority, yet see exactly the opposite policies implemented by Brussels:

EU delenda est

2005: the day they decided your “no” didn’t count

May 29, 2005. The French vote. Referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty.

Result: 54.68% NO.

Turnout: 69%.

Not a vote of abstainers, not a misunderstanding.

A people speaking out, massively, with full awareness.

Three years later, the same text — or nearly so — came into force. Without asking their opinion again.

Here’s how.

The context.

The Constitutional Treaty was the great federal leap: a text that gave the EU the attributes of a state. A flag, an anthem, a “constitution”, a foreign minister, supremacy written in black and white. Chirac, full of confidence, calls the French to the polls. The “yes” campaign mobilizes everything: the state, the major parties, the media, big business, the institutional unions.

And the French say no. For reasons the elite refused to hear: fear of social dumping (the infamous “Polish plumber”, the Bolkestein directive), a sense of a machine slipping out of their control, rejection of a project decided from on high and ratified by acclamation. Five days later, the Dutch say no in turn. 61%.

The treaty is dead. Officially, it’s called a “period of reflection”. In reality, it’s time to find a workaround.

The workaround has a name: Nicolas Sarkozy.

2007 campaign. Sarkozy proposes a “simplified treaty”. And above all, he lays out the adoption method: it will be the parliamentary route. No referendum. Parliament will vote in place of the people.

That’s his promise. He is elected.

And he keeps it against the people who had already decided.

The sleight of hand: the Lisbon Treaty.

Signed in December 2007.

They remove the symbols that scared people: no more “constitution”, no flag in the text, no “minister”.

They keep the essentials: permanent presidency of the Council, extension of qualified majority voting, retreat from unanimity, the Union’s legal personality, European diplomatic service. The institutional substance of the rejected text, repackaged.

The most cynical part is that they admitted it. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the architect of the Constitution, wrote it himself: the tools are the same, we’ve simply changed their order in the box. The stated goal: make the text unreadable so no government would be forced to submit it to a referendum. Technique replacing the popular verdict.

February 2008. Versailles.

Congress convenes to amend the French Constitution and allow ratification. Then Parliament ratifies Lisbon. The government left, which had campaigned for “no”, abstains and lets it pass. The French, they are never consulted again.

The “no” of 2005 has just been converted to “yes” by procedure.

And for those who might doubt the method: Ireland, for its part, was constitutionally required to vote. It says no in June 2008. They make it revote in 2009 until they get the right result. Vote until you get it right.

And that’s where it all connects.

This isn’t a procedural anecdote. It’s the founding act of a legitimacy problem that France has never settled.

Because the question of 2005 is exactly the one today. When Brussels signs 96 billion in development aid, when the NDICI directs billions to foreign “civil societies”, when the Global Gateway promises 300 billion the real question is never “should we do it?”.

It’s: who decided, and with what legitimacy?

The answer, we’ve known it since 2005: an administration that believes the people, when they answer wrong, must be circumvented, not heard. Hayek called it the fatal conceit.

The idea that a center knows better than the peoples what is good for them including against their explicit vote.

The French never accepted Lisbon. They were never asked.

And a structure built by going over the head of a lost referendum doesn’t carry a democratic deficit: it carries a birth defect.

The American Constitution starts with “We the People”.

Ours, the European version, started with a people who said no and an apparatus that decided it didn’t count.

Auto-translated by X from Brivael Le Pogam’s original French post.

May 28, 2026

“Van Langenhove is not charged with spreading false information. He is charged with presenting facts in a way that incites hatred”

Filed under: Europe, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This is the natural end result of “hate speech” laws, as a court in Belgium clearly states in the finding quoted here:

These two paragraphs of my verdict are crucial for everyone to read and understand.

“Even if all of the statements made by Van Langenhove are based on scientific evidence and statistics, it makes no difference to the criminal intent. Van Langenhove is not charged with spreading false information. He is charged with presenting facts in a way that incites hatred against persons on the grounds of one or more of the protected criteria in the Anti-Racism Law.” 1⃣

“For Van Langenhove to have committed a crime, it is not necessary for him to have incited concrete acts of hate or violence. It suffices that others are incited to take on a general attitude of intolerance or disapproval regarding a group protected under the criteria of the Anti-Racism Law.” 2⃣

This means you can go to jail for “inciting hatred” even if your statements were 100% factual (see 1⃣) and even if you did NOT incite concrete acts of hate (see 2⃣).

The benchmark of “inciting hatred” , a crime punishable by prison, is thus “saying something that has the potential of inciting someone to have a general attitude of disapproval regarding a protected group“. This means literally any criticism of mass migration is now a punishable offence. If you cite a statistic, and someone could potentially think less of a protected group (like migrants) because of it, you can be jailed.

The craziest part is that there is no defence possible against this. I brought the scientific studies that I cited to court, but the judge didn’t care 1⃣. I also proved that the hundreds of students present at the lecture included students of all different political affiliations, and everyone was able to voice their opinion or ask questions. The lecture went very calmly, so obviously nobody was incited to hatred. But this too did not matter 2⃣, because if the judge says he believes there is the possibility that someone COULD be incited to “a general attitude of disapproval“, this is enough for the judge to send me to jail, even without any evidence.

I’m telling you this to warn you that by the time these hate speech laws have come into place, it’s already too late. You will NEVER be able to beat these laws in court. You have to stop them before they are implemented. Let my fate be your warning.

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