[T]he revolution eagerly anticipated by Marx never materialized — at least, not where it was supposed to, in the advanced industrial countries. The great bouleversements of 1830 and 1848 were the results of short-run spikes in food prices and financial crises more than of social polarization. As agricultural productivity improved in Europe, as industrial employment increased, and as the amplitude of the business cycle diminished, the risk of revolution declined. Instead of coalescing into an impoverished mass, the proletariat subdivided into “labor aristocracies” with skills and a Lumpenproletariat with vices. The former favored strikes and collective bargaining over revolution and thereby secured higher real wages. The latter favored gin. The respectable working class had its trade unions and working men’s clubs. The ruffians had the music hall and street fights.
The prescriptions of The Communist Manifesto were in any case singularly unappealing to the industrial workers they were aimed at. Marx and Engels called for the abolition of private property; the abolition of inheritance; the centralization of credit and communications; the state ownership of all factories and instruments of production; the creation of “industrial armies for agriculture”; the abolition of the distinction between town and country; the abolition of the family; “community of women” (wife-swapping); and the abolition of all nationalities. By contrast, mid-nineteenth-century liberals wanted constitutional government, the freedoms of speech, press, and assembly, wider political representation through electoral reform, free trade, and, where it was lacking, national self-determination (“home rule”). In the half-century after the upheaval of 1848 they got a great many of these things — enough, at any rate, to make the desperate remedies of Marx and Engels seem de trop. In 1850 only France, Greece, and Switzerland had franchises in which more than a fifth of the population got to vote. By 1900 ten European countries did and Britain and Sweden were not far below that threshold. Broader representation led to legislation that benefited lower-income groups. Free trade in Britain meant cheap bread, and cheap bread plus rising nominal wages thanks to union pressure meant a significant gain in real terms for workers. Building laborers’ day wages in London doubled in real terms between 1848 and 1913. Broader representation also led to more progressive taxation. Britain led the way in 1842 when Sir Robert Peel introduced a peacetime income tax; by 1913 the standard rate was 14 pence in the pound. Prior to 1842 nearly all British tax revenue had come from the indirect taxation of consumption via customs and excise duties, regressive taxes that take a proportionately smaller amount of your income the richer you are. By 1913 a third of revenue was coming from direct taxes on the relatively rich. In 1842 the central government had spent virtually nothing on education and the arts and sciences. In 1913 those items accounted for 10 percent of expenditures. By that time, Britain had followed Germany in introducing a state pension for the elderly.
Marx and Engels were wrong on two scores, then. First, their iron law of wages did not exist. Wealth did indeed become highly concentrated under capitalism, and it stayed that way into the second quarter of the twentieth century, but income differentials began to narrow as real wages rose and taxation became less regressive. Capitalists understood what Marx missed: that workers were also consumers. It therefore made no sense to try to grind their wages down to subsistence levels. On the contrary, as the case of the United States was making increasingly clear, there was no bigger potential market for capitalist enterprises than their own employees. Far from condemning the masses to immiseration, the mechanization of textile production created growing employment opportunities for Western workers — albeit at the expense of Indian spinners and weavers — and the decline in the prices of cotton and other goods meant that Western workers could buy more with their weekly wages. The impact is best captured by the exploding differential between Western and non-Western wages and living standards in this period. Even within the West the gap between the industrialized vanguard and the rural laggards widened dramatically. In early seventeenth-century London, an unskilled worker’s real wages were not so different from what his counterpart earned in Milan. From the 1750s until the 1850s, however, Londoners pulled far ahead. At the peak of the great divergence within Europe, London real wages were six times those in Milan. With the industrialization of northern Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century, the gap began to close, so that by the eve of the First World War it was closer to a ratio of 3:1. German and Dutch workers also benefited from industrialization, though even in 1913 they still lagged behind their English counterparts.
Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.
September 8, 2026
QotD: Why the revolution envisioned by Marx didn’t happen
September 7, 2026
An “exit tax”? What next, internal passports?
A few months back, there was a brief online reaction to the Liberal Party idea of imposing a ridiculously high “exit tax” on young Canadians taking jobs in other countries — and by “other countries” they really only meant the United States. I dismissed it at the time as just someone letting their Liberal freak flag fly … but:
Jesus Christ. These boomer leaflibs, man.
It doesn’t occur to him to ask why highly trained Canadian engineers would rather work in the US. Actually no, he tacitly admits this: they get paid more. Why is that? Why can’t they get paid well in Canada, putting their skills to work here, developing innovative, world-leading technologies right at home in Canada?
The answer is obvious. Because there is no opportunity in Canada. It’s all but impossible to develop high tech industry here. The regulations are too thick, and all the available investment capital gets sucked up into real estate development.
Maybe Canada should try and fix that, so that Canada is actually an attractive country for talented young Canadians?
But nah fuck those kids, we should just charge them a half million dollar exit tax so if they can’t pay that they can just let their dreams die and get a job at BMO.
Oh and at the same time we should flood Canada with “world leading talent” (from Calcutta), in order to make it that much more impossible for Canadian engineers to find employment in their fields at home.
September 1, 2026
“Under Communism, everyone has a job”
Sandy Petersen responds to the “Under Communism, everyone has a job” claim that has been circulating recently thanks to the rising popularity of useful idiots:
“Under Communism, everyone has a job”. This is absolutely true.
Here’s what else was true.
1) You were ASSIGNED your job AND the region for that job by the state (i.e., a bureaucrat). You were required to stay in your job at least 3 years.
2) After 3 years, if you wanted to switch jobs, you needed the approval of both your labor board AND your employer. If you switched too often (for example: every 3 years), there were legal penalties, up to imprisonment.
3) Promotions were based on party membership, loyalty, and sucking up. I’ve talked to a lot of former Soviet citizens, and zero of them thought merit was of use. Also many nice jobs were only for party members.
4) Wages were pretty even across the board. A factory worker, engineer, and factory manager had similar salaries, so it was indeed egalitarian, but didn’t have a lot of incentive. The higher-rank workers did get perks to make up for it. They might get a vacation dacha on the Black Sea. Or a “company” car with a chauffeur. That sort of thing. The higher-ups had better stuff.
5) You needed a passport to travel inside your own country. You couldn’t just move to Leningrad and look for work. Or even go on vacation without permission.
6) You had a union. It was state-controlled. You could not go on strike. If you criticized your factory manager, you would be arrested. Yay unions.
If you look at the above, they are an evil capitalist’s wet dream. Think of a movie with a foul imaginary super-corporation so beloved of science fiction movies — they would support every one of those initiatives.
Because that’s what the Soviet Union was — the biggest, most evil corporation that ever existed.
August 30, 2026
The short-term impact of widespread LLM usage
I haven’t used any of the latest tranche of LLM agents, although I’m assured by those who do use them that they’re significant improvements over the previous iterations, so I don’t really have an opinion about the state of the “AI Revolution”, but Freddie deBoer has a rare non-catastrophist yet also non-utopian take:
My LLM skepticism is really pretty simple: immense practical consequences have been predicted for them, essentially none of those consequences have come true or can be proven to be imminent, and because reality has a powerful status quo bias it’s not sensible to simply assume that they’re coming. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and no one has produced such evidence. My position is not a complicated one to understand and shouldn’t be controversial. I’m acting with no more skepticism towards AI claims than I regularly demonstrate towards claims about religion or astrology or New Age woowoo.
And, crucially, I’m not the one who has set the comically over-the-top expectations here; the AI maximalists and their enablers in the media have. Sundar Pichai, who as the CEO of Google is one of the ten most consequential figures in the business world, said that LLMs were a bigger deal than the discovery of fire or electricity. AI maximalists frequently insist that the LLM era is equivalent to or more important than the Industrial Revolution. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropoic, went on a podcast from The New York Times (the stentorian, buttoned-down New York Times) and talked about a future where AI colonizes Mars of its own volition. Reports out of Silicon Valley hold that many tech workers sincerely believe that they’re a few years from owning their own asteroid mines and will be so wealthy they essentially step outside of the human experience when it comes to material desire. (If you look, you can find concerning stories on Reddit and similar places of techies spending down all of their saving and taking out large loans, on the theory that in the next few years they will become trillionaires thanks to LLMs.) Scott Alexander seems increasingly unwilling even to countenance the possibility that “AI” is not all its cracked up to be. None of this is serious, let alone convincing. I keep using the example of indoor plumbing to establish a baseline of what actual civilization-altering technological change looks like because that’s what civilization is built on. Videos where AI Chuck Norris beats up AI Vladimir Putin are not on that level.
None of this means that I believe what I am frequently accused of believing, that LLMs have literally no consequences. I don’t think that. I think that the winners of the current AI war will end up with important enterprise software that meaningfully changes how administrative and clerical tasks are completed in the average American workplace. The winners of all of this will make a lot of revenue off of this technology. Certain tasks are going to be presumed to be automated from now on. You’ll ask computers to do things in natural language that you used to do with clicks and commands. And, as we’re already seeing, human culture is going to become even lonelier, less authentic, more crass, less creative, more artificial, and less fulfilling than before. Those are consequences. They’re just, you know, consequences in a fundamentally mundane and boring world. But, yeah. Somebody’s going to make a lot of money on this stuff — conventionally a lot, I mean, not these absurd hundreds of trillionaire dreams, but a lot of money.
The trouble is that, clearly, none of this is enough, precisely because of those outsized expectations. The problems with “LLMs are going to prove to be highly consequential and remunerative enterprise software in a more-or-less unchanged economy and world” are multiple:
- The amount of money and time and energy and attention and manpower that’s been invested in LLMs is so massive that nothing resembling an ordinary economic return can ever pay it off; with AI now essentially propping up the entire American economy, this is a dire circumstance even though specific firms will survive and eventually thrive.
- You can’t cure cancer because cancer is not one disease and also it evolves under natural selection pressures and sometimes when we reduce rates of one cancer rates of other cancers rise etc etc etc; interstellar travel is a fantasy thanks to basic rules of physics and physiology, not because we’re not smart enough; asteroid mines make absolutely zero sense in basic economic terms; you can’t upload your consciousness because consciousness is not software but embedded into the very cells of our bodies that inevitably die; we already experienced radical life extension thanks to immense reductions in infant mortality and smoking cessation, the add-another-25-years-to-the-average-lifespan stuff is just a slow unglamorous chipping away; limitless cheap energy is being kept from us by thermodynamics, not how advanced our microprocessors are; on and on, the things we’re demanding failing to materialize because they’re not sensible things to demand.
- It’s impossible that all of the major players in this field (OpenAI and Anthropic but also Meta and Google and Nvidia and Oracle and Caterpillar and Modine Manufacturing and Constellation Energy …) survive the next decade; some of them are going to fail, and they’re going to cause an immense amount of collateral damage on the way down.
- Some very informed people will tell you that the future is not LLMs but SLMs, small language models you run locally on your own computer, which would have potentially devastating downstream effects for chip manufacturers, model developers, construction firms, energy companies, etc.
- We have absolutely no idea about where the next big growth field might be if it isn’t this, and this period of permanently irrational stock market growth (which has underwritten all economic optimism) is dependent, more than anything, on that one organizing story.
- The emotional investment in AI is even less likely to pay off than the financial investment; a huge number of people, including a lot of people who spend their lives being too cool for this sort of thing, have staked their emotional health on the idea that the mundane world is imminently going to end, but the mundane world never ends and we will all spend the rest of our days downloading apps to pay for parking a single time and emptying the diaper pail and trying to figure out how to avoid the third round of small talk with the same coworker in a day.
Honestly, I think Google’s recent shakeup tells us a lot about where LLMs are going. Google, for a thousand reasons, is the “frontier” company most likely to make a ton of money off of AI in the next decade — and also, they’ve slipped far down the rankings in terms of the best model and they don’t appear to care very much. Google’s Gemini was briefly seen as the class of the field, but in the past year or more they’ve consistently underperformed OpenAI and Anthropic’s best models. (To say nothing of the rapidly-ascending Chinese competitors, which is a whole other thing.) Google’s top AI guys, Demis Hassabis and Jeff Dean, have both moved on from active development of Gemini because they’re more interested in moonshot AI; the implicit concession is that Google doesn’t think that Gemini can ever be “AGI”, that utterly vague, non-falsifiable construct so many people are now chasing. Instead, Google seems to understand that its vast preexisting base of users allows the company to make a mint without any absurd sci-fi premises: when you ask an AI agent to do your grocery shopping, you’ll probably do it through Google in one way or another, and they can take a few cents off of each of those interactions to the tune of billions. It’s not glamorous and it doesn’t allow you to pretend that you’re going to live forever. But pragmatism of that kind is the soil in which modern day fortunes grow. Moonshot Google is long dead, and for a reason.
August 23, 2026
It is indeed a great curse to get everything you wished for
I have no idea how authentic these are, but even if they were dreamed up in the 1940s by a chain-smoking ad guy trying to sell pre-printed matchbooks to Chinese restaurants, they have a distinct ring of truth to them:
- May you live in interesting times
- May you be recognized by powerful people
- May you get what you wish for
John C. Wright suggests that the third curse adequately explains why womens’ organizations are always so angry:
Photo from John C. Wright
Here is a comment from Twitter from a writer with the persican but cutting name of Peachy Keenan:
Why are so many women sooo angry? They won. They got everything they wanted.
Men have never been doing this badly, and women have never been doing this well.
They make more, they have the majority of jobs, they are the majority of college graduates, (UCLA undergrad is 60% female), they make more money, have much lower rates of suicide, addiction, and alcoholism, and live longer.
They won: they took over all men-only spaces, they took over the Boy Scouts, they ended men’s bathrooms, they can fly fighter planes and be in combat.
Marriage is optional, divorce is no-fault, they win 99% of the custody battles, they can control fertility at will, and they can’t get drafted. We are all living in the female future they promised.
So many women are so angry precisely because they won.
Women are naturally submissive and self sacrificial, loving and supportive. Feminine.
The lone wolf quality of being one’s own man is lonely, self supportive, selfish and domineering. Masculine.
But the sole reward for being a lone wolf, a pioneer, a masterless man, is the promise that one day, after proving yourself, you will win the love of wife and child, and she will turn your cave or hut into a home. The reward of being an independent man, a lonely man, a rebel who plays by his own rules, is finding a wife who will love, honor, and obey.
Woman obviously cannot have that reward. Women are attracted to rebels, bad boys, wolves, winners. They do not want to be them.
Women do not want to win wives.
Woman naturally want to turn huts into homes, and make their man happy. They do not want to live in the hut, run in the rat race, fight in the war.
Women do not want to crush their enemies and drive their enemies before them and hear the lamentation of their women. That is Conan.
Women, by and large, far prefer character assassination, whisper campaigns, false friendships, as the means to undermine enemies: alive but humiliated, and forced to recant and apologize.
A womanly way to win a debate is not through facts and logic, obeying the rules of debate. That is the behavior of a sportsman, a knight in a joust. A womanly way to win a debate is by humiliating the opponent into silence, by threat, by backstabbing. Cancel culture is the perfect tool for the feminine approach.
Women as well as men would rather live in a world run by men. Men aspire to run a world with rules, with honor, with chivalry, where confrontations are direct, juries rule on evidence rather than feelings or group-loyalty, innocence is rewarded and virtue punished. Women, and womanly men, aspire to run a world as a welfare state, a nanny state, where good intentions matter more than good results, and you never get a change to confront the accuser nor answer the whispered accusations. No arguments, no debate, no discussion is allowed, because that would produce conflict, disharmony, and someone might get his feelings hurt.
We have seen in countless cases how a feminized world works: if a mother strangles her children to death, the female world defends her. If a notorious academic fraud is awarded a position far beyond his competence to serve, and commits suicide rather than face the shame of exposure, the female world defends him. Cowardly assassins shooting bankers or public speakers, third-world rape gangs, cross-dressers in woman’s sports or prisons, Mohammedan child-molesters, spotted owls, endangered whales, or anything or anyone who is or who can be shoehorned into being a victim, a sad sack, a crybaby … the female world leads the otherwise healthy and normal maternal instinct to comfort crying babies into comforting any and every monster and madness imaginable, and female fear of social disapproval does not allow her, even in her own mind, to question her master.
August 14, 2026
AI’s coming, everyone panic!
At the Foundation for Economic Education, Mani Basharzad suggests we do the exact opposite of my chosen headline in regard to the inevitable collapse of civilization rise of artificial intelligence:
In recent weeks, a letter on AI titled “We Must Act Now” has made headlines. Its list of signatories brought together an unlikely coalition of intellectuals, from Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman to Alex Tabarrok, Tyler Cowen, and Niall Ferguson.
The signatories agree on three key propositions. First, they argue that “AI may become radically more powerful over the next decade”. Second, they argue that it could “transform the economy on a scale larger than the Industrial Revolution, but over a much shorter period, bringing both large-scale job displacement and significant improvements in living standards”. Third, they argue that “economists, policymakers, and technology leaders must act now to create the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to ensure AI benefits society”.
These propositions have created an unusual consensus among economists and policymakers. They also reflect a broader public anxiety about AI and its impact on people’s livelihoods. Yet, as Stanford economist John Cochrane remarked in response to the letter, “You see AI everywhere, except in productivity and labor statistics”. That is the first problem with the argument: those are the two places where the letter’s predictions should already be showing up.
The letter makes extraordinary claims, and as the famous saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Yet the evidence offered is remarkably thin. The language is dramatic — “large-scale job displacement”, “larger than the Industrial Revolution”, and “major gains in living standards” — but every prediction is qualified by one word: could. There is still little evidence that AI has fundamentally reshaped employment or productivity.
Take the labor market as an example. A widely cited survey claimed that employers plan to reduce graduate hiring because of AI. But the study was forecasting the future, not describing present reality. It found that “four in ten employers believe entry-level roles could disappear within the next five years”. Once again, the evidence rests on expectations and fears rather than observed outcomes.
Now compare that with what is actually happening. Economist Valentin Boboc has argued that entry-level jobs are growing fastest at firms that are aggressively adopting AI. If AI were already eliminating these positions, we would expect to see the opposite.
Consider youth unemployment. Which developed country currently faces one of the most severe youth employment crises? The answer is not a country overwhelmed by AI, but the United Kingdom. More than 1 million people aged 16–24 are classified as NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training), at an estimated annual cost of £125 billion ($169 billion) to the economy.
I’m somewhat ambivalent about the “Something must be done! This is something! Therefore we must do it!” reaction to the rise of widely available LLM agents. If all the claims for AI’s disruptive abilities are true, then change is going to happen whether we want it to or not. I’ve had little direct contact with the various agents, having used Grok a couple of times to generate graphics to accompany blog posts, but I’m told by others that they get lots of benefit from using their preferred AI for all sorts of things.
July 28, 2026
QotD: Projecting the effect of a maximum wage law
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 18, 2026
Jevons and Baumol, and why they matter now
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Matt Ridley talks about the ideas of William Stanley Jevons and William Jack Baumol, whose ideas have become far more important over the last few decades:
English mystery novelist Agatha Christie (1890-1976) at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam on 17 September, 1964.
Photo by Joop van Bilsen for Anefo via Wikimedia Commons.
Agatha Christie once remarked that she had never expected to grow rich enough to own a car or poor enough not to have servants.
The reason this strikes us as bizarre today boils down to two names that you hear invoked a lot in the tech industry: Jevons and Baumol. One is shorthand for the expansion of products or professions with rising efficiency, the other for the shrinkage of products or professions with stagnant efficiency.
There’s a pleasing chronological symmetry between these twin ideas: William Stanley Jevons coined the Jevons paradox in 1865; William Jack Baumol described Baumol’s cost disease exactly a century later in 1965.
… For every industry that experiences efficiency gains, there’s another that does not. And this latter industry inevitably becomes less affordable. Baumol’s first example was string quartets: violinists are no more productive but you have to pay them more to prevent them running off to become software engineers. The productive industries drive up the labour costs in the rest of the economy.
Marc Andreessen jokes that if a hole appears in the wall of your house in California these days it is probably cheaper to glue a flat-screen television over it than hire a builder to repair it: a Jevons-deflated cost beats a Baumol-inflated one.
The big question of our age is can AI drag Baumol-shaded industries back into the sunlight of Jevons? Can it make things like healthcare, education, or government switch from rising costs to falling costs?
I fear not in the case of government because of a bureaucratic version of the Jevons and Baumol effects. As Cyril Northcote Parkinson put it in an article in the Economist in 1955: “Politicians and taxpayers have assumed (with occasional phases of doubt) that a rising total in the number of civil servants must reflect a growing volume of work to be done. Cynics, in questioning this belief, have imagined that the multiplication of officials must have left some of them idle or all of them able to work for shorter hours. But this is a matter in which faith and doubt seem equally misplaced.”
Since 1997, the British public sector has seen zero increase in productivity. That is to say, the average civil servant generates about the same output today as he did three decades ago.
Think about this for a second. Thirty years ago fax machines were high-tech, the internet was in its infancy, emails were new, Wi-Fi was scarce, mobile phones were voice-only. How is it remotely possible to be no more productive today than then?
We know the answer. Each email is now copied to a dozen people, each report is pasted and copied till it is twice as long, each Zoom call has five times as many attendees, each mobile call is followed up by three times as many WhatsApp messages – and each day at the desk is interrupted by a training session on transgender anticolonial sustainability. That’s a sort of Jevons-Baumol effect: a Jevol?
June 13, 2026
The intellectual dangers of “nostalgia economics”
Mani Basharzad explains that although resurgent socialist beliefs are a bad sign, there’s actually a worse danger to modern economies that isn’t a coherent ideology but all the more potent because of it:
Custom image by FEE
If someone asked me what the most dangerous economic ideology is, many would expect an Austrian to give a typical answer: Marxism, socialism, or Modern Monetary Theory. Yet I believe there is another way of thinking that is even more pervasive. It is not a coherent body of ideas like those ideologies. Rather, it is a sentiment so widespread and socially accepted that it threatens not merely economic freedom, but our very understanding of progress itself. I call it “nostalgia economics”.
Recently, the singer Sting suggested that the rise of toxic masculinity is partly the result of the “loss of manual jobs”, claiming that because many men no longer use their hands and physical strength in their daily work, unhealthy masculine traits are on the rise. Like many commentators on the political left, he also blamed Margaret Thatcher for Britain’s economic transformation. “Britain’s wealth was created in the coalfields and the steel towns and the mill towns and the shipyards”, Sting said. “All of those skill sets were thrown on the scrapheap … for Thatcher’s dream of a service economy.”
This is nostalgia economics in action. A global celebrity whose music can be streamed instantly on another continent, who earns income through digital platforms, and whose career depends on modern communications and services, criticizes the very service economy that makes his success possible.
A person in thrall to nostalgia economics will take the blessings of progress for granted while romanticizing a past that never truly existed. Imagine living in the world of Charles Dickens: you would not have had access to a typewriter for much of your life, if at all, since it was only commercialized in the late 19th century. More importantly, you would not have had access to electricity. The conveniences we now consider basic would have been unimaginable luxuries.
The economic historian Norman Stone illustrated the extraordinary pace of modern progress through the experience of the novelist Henry James:
In 1895 the novelist Henry James acquired electric lighting; in 1896 he rode a bicycle; in 1897 he wrote on a typewriter; in 1898 he saw a cinematograph. Within very few years, he could have had a Freudian analysis, travelled in an aircraft, understood the principles of the jet-engine or even of space-travel.
Had Sting been alive in 1890, a world tour would have looked very different. A journey from London to New York would have taken more than a week rather than a few hours. International audiences, instant communication, and global entertainment markets would have been beyond imagination.
The glorification of manual labor is one of the most overrated ideas in modern political discourse. This tendency is not confined to the left. Ambitions to revive manufacturing employment through government policy often draw on the same nostalgic impulse. But what exactly are we trying to return to?
Perhaps literature offers a more honest answer than politics. Oscar Wilde observed that “all unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour” involved unpleasant conditions. He went even further, commenting that “there is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading”.
The reality of industrial labor was far harsher than many modern observers imagine. In Britain, workplace fatalities have fallen dramatically over the last century: fatal injuries to employees dropped from around 4,400 a year early in the 20th century to around 200 a year by the end of the century. Coal mining, one of the occupations most frequently romanticized today and the first industry Sting evoked, exposed workers to constant danger and disease. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (“black lung”) claimed well over a thousand lives annually. What would a laborer enduring dangerous conditions, long hours, and chronic health risks have given for an air-conditioned office job?
One thing Sting did identify is that men generally do need more physical activity in their lives both for general physical health but also for mental health.
June 8, 2026
Milton Friedman – accessory to Grand Theft Taxation
I’ve only read a small part of Milton Friedman’s work, but I have great respect for him and think that overall, he was a very strong proponent for smaller, less intrusive government. But there’s one terrible thing that he was instrumental in implementing that almost outweighs everything else:
Milton Friedman’s greatest regret.
The federal government discovered the perfect crime in 1943: make employers collect taxes before workers ever see their paychecks. You think you earn $60,000 per year, but you actually earn $75,000 and hand over $15,000 to politicians without ever touching it. The psychological difference is enormous.
Before payroll withholding, Americans wrote quarterly checks directly to the Treasury. Picture yourself sitting at your kitchen table, writing a $3,750 check to the IRS every three months. The pain was immediate and visceral. Politicians faced constant pressure to justify every dollar because citizens felt the extraction in real time.
Withholding transforms this concrete loss into an abstract accounting entry. Your employer becomes an unpaid tax collector, and you never experience the actual cost of government. Worse, most people celebrate their tax refunds as government generosity rather than recognizing them as interest-free loans they provided to politicians. The Treasury collects your money throughout the year, spends it immediately, then returns your own cash and receives gratitude.
This system enables the explosion in government spending you witness today. Defense contractors billing $640 for toilet seats, agricultural subsidies for corn syrup, and congressional salaries for 535 people who rarely show up to work. When taxation feels painless, voters stop demanding accountability for how their money gets spent.
Milton Friedman helped design withholding as a wartime emergency measure and later called it his greatest regret. Free market economists recognized that the psychological pain of direct taxation creates political pressure for fiscal restraint. The temporary always becomes permanent in government hands, and the emergency justification disappears while the extraction mechanism remains forever.
Libertarian economist Murray Rothbard was far more scathing about Friedman:
June 5, 2026
The Canadian economy, RIP
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, James E. Thorne writes an obituary for the Canadian economy:
For the record.
In Canada, It Matters How the Economy Dies.
The Canadian economy is dead. It just didn’t die with a crash big enough to satisfy the models. No Lehman moment, no Covid-style cliff, just two negative quarters of GDP, years of falling output per person, negative productivity, and a private sector slowly strangled by rates and regulation while the establishment insists the patient is “resting”.
On the facts, this isn’t ambiguous. Real GDP has contracted for two consecutive quarters on an annualized basis. Labour productivity has been flat or negative since 2021. Real GDP per capita is below its pre-pandemic level. Ontario has logged its worst non-pandemic quarterly job losses since the mid-1970s. The only consistent growth is in government payrolls and compliance, not in private enterprise and investment. If that isn’t recessionary, the word is meaningless.
And yes Macklem threatens rate hikes through all of this insanity.
Yet Canada’s official guardians insist nothing fundamental has broken. The C.D. Howe recession-dating committee says the downturn is not “pronounced, persistent, and pervasive” enough. The central bank warns against overreacting to “technical” weakness. Bay Street talks about “soft landings” and “resilience”. In some quarters, the answer to this slow-motion collapse is not relief, but further rate hikes. Ignore the body on the table, we are told, the vital signs aren’t quite bad enough yet to fill out the certificate.
Their rulebook was built for heart attacks, not cancers. It excels at spotting sudden collapses in aggregate GDP and jobs. It barely registers slow organ failure: a few tenths off real GDP per capita each year, productivity edging down, ugly quarters for private-sector employment and capex offset by public hiring. None of that triggers the old alarms until the damage is permanent.
Meanwhile, Canada has been busy throwing away the advantages that once justified its prosperity. Energy and resource projects are stalled or strangled. Business investment per worker trails peers. A country rich in capital, talent, and geography behaves as if it can live forever off inherited endowments while making it harder to build anything new. That is not “resilience”. It is delusion.
Canada’s economic establishment needs to wake up.
Two negative quarters of GDP, negative productivity, falling GDP per person, historic job losses in the core province, a suffocated private sector and calls for more tightening on top, are not signs of an economy “cooling toward trend”. They are signs of an economy that has already crossed the line from stagnation into decay.
The Canadian economy is dead in the way that matters: as an engine of rising living standards and a place where private capital is rewarded for building the future. It just didn’t die loudly enough for the old definitions. The real question now is not what we call it, but how long our institutions will keep pretending the corpse is “resilient”.
As the propagandists of the mainstream media do everything they can to deflect any hint of blame from their Liberal paymasters, we can still see that things are getting worse, not better:
The federal Liberals are getting fantastic return on their investment … giving our money to the presstitutes of the legacy media in return for kid-glove treatment of the government and attack-dog tactics against the opposition:
Why Do 50% Still Support Carney? My long-winded response.
That is a question we need to take seriously.
Leger’s latest federal polling has the Liberals at 50% support among decided voters, their highest level in that firm’s tracking since the Liberals first formed government in 2015. Abacus also found the political environment still favourable for Carney and the Liberal government. So this is not imaginary. This is not just CBC fairy dust sprinkled over Ottawa. The support is real. The harder question is whether it is rational.
My answer is simple: many Canadians are not voting for results. They are voting for the illusion of relief.
Even though Carney was in the economic background since 2020 he appeared to arrive after the Trudeau years like a man in a clean suit walking into a room after the dog crapped on the floor. Trump threatened 51st State. Carney looked calm. Unlike Trudeau. He spoke in complete sentences. He had the central banker aura. For exhausted voters, that was enough. They did not examine the wiring. They just saw someone who did not seem to be setting the curtains on fire.
Carney’s appeal is not built mainly on performance. It is built on contrast. Compared with Trudeau’s theatre-kid government of slogans, selfies, and moral lectures, Carney looks serious. But “serious” is not the same as right. A surgeon can look serious while operating on the wrong leg.
Canada’s economy is now weak enough that Carney himself has had to acknowledge ugly economic data. Reuters reported him addressing Canada’s technical recession and warning that some data will be “uneven” “ah ah ah” as the government pushes through policy changes. The Wall Street Journal reported GDP weakness, including two consecutive quarterly contractions, while Carney framed the pain as part of a broader economic rebuild.
That is where the sales pitch gets slippery.
When the economy weakens under Conservatives, it is called failure. When it weakens under Liberals, it becomes “transition”, “restructuring”, or “long-term transformation”. Same corpse, nicer label on the toe tag.
The deeper problem is that Canadians were never really asked whether they wanted Carney’s ideology. They were sold competence, not doctrine. They were sold expertise, not a governing philosophy that puts the state, regulators, climate finance, and elite managerial planning at the centre of national life.
Nobody knocked on doors saying, “Would you like a prime minister who believes markets should be bent around elite-defined social and environmental values?” No. They said, “He is smart. He ran banks. He knows Trump. He will steady things.”
That is not a mandate. That is a branding exercise.
And this is why the Conservative attack has to get sharper. Not louder. Sharper.
Calling voters stupid is a dead end. Many Carney supporters are not stupid. They are terrified of Trump. They are tired. They are anxious. They are looking at housing, debt, food prices, crime, productivity, health care, and a country that feels smaller than it used to, and they want someone who looks like an adult. Carney gives them the visual. He gives them the voice. He gives them the vibe.
But vibes do not build houses. Vibes do not raise productivity. Vibes do not lower debt. Vibes do not attract investment. Vibes do not make young Canadians believe they have a future.
The Carney government’s strongest weapon is not success. It is emotional permission. It lets Liberal voters tell themselves they have moved on from Trudeau without admitting the Liberal machine remains fundamentally intact. Same operating system, cleaner looking wallpaper.
That is why 50% still support him.
They are not endorsing the results. They are postponing the verdict.
Canada does not need a better-spoken manager of decline. It needs a government willing to reverse the policies that caused the decline in the first place.
Because a tight ship headed toward the rocks is still headed toward the rocks.
June 2, 2026
Applying for a job in 2026
This is exactly the kind of experience I was having before I retired: painfully extended online application process, complete with re-entering pretty much everything in my resumé in their preferred format (but without the impromptu video pitch, thank goodness) followed almost instantly by rejection. In the vast majority of cases, no human being was ever even aware of my application:
“Help Wanted” by dreamsjung is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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I spent 4 hours yesterday updating my resume to apply for a mid-level PM role.
The listing said they wanted someone with 10 years of experience in a software that was invented 4 years ago.
I clicked apply and was immediately redirected to a third-party portal that asked me to upload my resume, which I did.
Then it asked me to manually type in every single detail of the resume I had just uploaded.
Why did I upload it if I have to type it again?
Is the uploaded PDF just a ceremonial offering to the HR gods?
I spent 40 minutes breaking down my career history into tiny mandatory text boxes.
The portal required me to list a start and end date for every job, but the calendar widget wouldn’t let me type the year.
I had to click the back arrow month by month to get to 2002.
My wrist started cramping somewhere around 2018.
Then it asked for my high school GPA.
I’m 44 years old.
I don’t even remember the name of my high school mascot, let alone my proficiency in AP European History.
After the history lesson, came the behavioral assessment.
It presented me with 75 statements and asked me to rate them from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”
One statement was “I prefer to work alone but also thrive in team environments.”
That is a paradox.
I’m being asked to evaluate a philosophical contradiction by a recruiting algorithm.
I just clicked “neutral” for everything out of spite.
The final step was a mandatory video cover letter.
I had to record a one-minute pitch explaining why my core values align with a B2B SaaS company that sells inventory management software.
My core value is being able to afford groceries and paying my internet bill on time.
I put on a dress shirt over my sweatpants, stared into my webcam, and lied for 60 seconds.
I said I’ve always been profoundly passionate about supply chain optimization.
Nobody is passionate about supply chain optimization.
I clicked submit and immediately received an automated rejection email.
The timestamp said it was sent zero seconds after I applied.
I was evaluated and deemed unworthy by a line of code at the speed of light.
Next time I’m just going to wrap my resume around a brick and throw it through their office window.
May 29, 2026
Progressives, suddenly – “We’ve gotta protect our phony baloney jobs!”
Apologies to Mel Brooks for hijacking that line from Blazing Saddles. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, signs of panic from the media and media-adjacent progressive ranks as they realize Silicon Valley is an existential threat to their media monopoly:
Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound
One aside on the Blair conversation
I’m absolutely gobsmacked at the level of hostility to “tech bros” and the belief that we can just insulate ourselves from AI and technology
Like listening to weavers on the spinning Jenny or Hanson cab drivers on the advent of the motor car
Look this isn’t complicated.
The left hates you because they’re (correctly) worried AI is going to replace the “work” they do for their comfortable professional-managerial class sinecures, while at the same time they are (correctly) concerned that AI generated video will completely neutralize the remaining cultural influence they wield via their control of entertainment media.
The right (correctly) views you with suspicion and contempt because you already replaced white men with H1Bindians, which hurt us economically, and also enshittified the Internet, which was further enshittified due to your perfidious collaboration with leftists during the peak of the Great Awokening’s censorship and deplatforming push.
Despite your years of service to them, the left wants to immolate your headless corpses on funeral pyres built from your burning data centres, merely because you MIGHT be a threat to them in the near future.
Despite your record of pusillanimity, the right — some of us — are willing to work with you. That is a godsend for you, because we are literally your only defence right now.
But we have conditions, and those conditions are not negotiable.
May 27, 2026
Tim Hortons now pretends they’re going to stop abusing the TFW program, maybe
There are few Canadian companies who’ve done more to trash their own reputation than Tim Hortons over the last decade or so. What used to be everyone’s coffee chain of choice, through breathtaking abuse of the Temporary Foreign Worker scheme and other shady employment practices, has now become one of the most detested companies in the land. Everyone I’ve talked to seems to have their own Tim Hortons anecdotes, and none of them are complimentary to the firm or its largely non-Canadian workforce. Last week, Dunkin’ Donuts announced that they would be re-entering the Canadian market and suddenly Tim Hortons claims they’ll be hiring a whole bunch of Canadian workers to staff their restaurants:
If you believe yesterday’s announcement that Tim Hortons plans to dial back its use (and clear abuse) of the Temporary Foreign Worker Programme (TFWP) to hire “10,000 people locally” out of the goodness of its heart, I have a below-sea-level basement apartment to sell you in Richmond, B.C.’s peat-based Delta soil.
Let’s start with the obvious: If those 10,000 positions suddenly exist now, they never should have been outsourced to begin with. And yet, Tim Hortons spent the better part of a decade lobbying the Canadian federal government to increase and maintain workforce percentage caps that directly impacted thousands of positions, and influenced the entirety of the Canadian labour market.
Rather than ever lobbying for a specific number of individuals (because, again, they didn’t have an actual need when the market was showing a perpetual 20+ percent youth unemployment rate), Tim Hortons and its parent company, Restaurant Brands International Inc., instead lobbied to manipulate the overall percentage (or cap) of TFWs allowed per restaurant. During supposed “pandemic-era shortages”, they successfully massaged wilful dupes in government to increase that cap, allowing up to 30 percent of a restaurant’s workforce to consist of TFWs.
When the federal government finally cut the cap back down to 10 percent to curb immigration numbers, Tim Hortons heavily lobbied through 2024 and late 2025 to raise the limit back to 20 percent or 30 percent. Up until yesterday, they argued that rural and remote franchises continued to face severe labour shortages.
What they actually face is competition from Dunkin’ Donuts, with the popular American coffee chain set to break ground on its first Canadian locations in 2026, under a plan to aggressively expand to 600-700 locations nationwide.
If one were to charitably take Tim’s sudden shift in labour strategy at face value, this framing of yesterday’s announcement from the Globe and Mail might be enough to let bygones be bygones.
Tim Hortons was one of the biggest proponents of the TFWP, a controversial immigration stream that expanded in popularity during the pandemic and came to symbolise some of the failings of the Trudeau-era immigration strategy.
Restaurant Brands International Inc., Tim Hortons’ parent company, is also pledging to stop lobbying the federal government to expand the TFWP, citing the high youth unemployment rate.
But the devil, they say, is in the details; in this instance, in the lack thereof. That “10,000 people locally” includes foreign students, and TFWs already in the country, with both groups still on active and expired permits in the millions.
And that’s just the start: graduates on Post-Graduation Work Permits (PGWP), and individuals under the International Mobility Program (IMP) do not require a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA). Meaning a single restaurant could be staffed almost 100% by temporary visa holders, but if those employees are international students or PGWP holders, Tim’s corporate metrics classify them as “local hires”, not TFWs.
That also means Tim’s supposed “cap” on TFWs was never an inherently honest number.
Corporate cynicism is nothing new, but Tim Hortons’ hiring practices have effectively replaced tens of thousands of part time jobs for Canadian teens with full- and part-time jobs for foreign students, temporary foreign workers, asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, visa-overstayers, and any other kind of cheap and exploitable employee who can be depended upon to meekly accept whatever working conditions are on offer with minimal chance of anyone appealing to health inspectors or federal regulators. Very convenient for Tim Hortons and their franchisees. Not very Canadian, but very convenient.
Update: Perhaps another reason that Tim Hortons is backing away from the TFW designation is that the government has given them an even easier way to hire foreign workers:
Mark Carney is lying to you.
In the first 90 days of 2026, Canada issued 292,855 work permits, smashing the full-year target of 220k–230k.
247,895 under IMP (International Mobility Program)
44,960 under TFWP
Why employers love the IMP:
It’s a much cheaper, faster, and easier alternative to the TFWP.
Key Financial & Practical Benefits of IMP (vs TFWP):
No LMIA required → Saves $770+ per worker (no $1,000 LMIA fee)
No mandatory job advertising to Canadians
Much faster processing (weeks vs months)
Lower compliance costs — only $230 employer fee
Fewer obligations around housing, wages, and recruitmentMore flexible permits for workers (easier to retain staff)
This is exactly why companies like Tim Hortons and many in hospitality/retail have shifted heavily to IMP workers. It’s faster, cheaper, and bypasses most of the strict labour market tests required under the TFWP.
That would seem to explain Tim Hortons’ sudden change of heart rather more than the risk of increased competition by a revived Dunkin’ Donuts expansion.
QotD: “Bring your whole self to work”
Organisations and institutions are formalised teams. Due to past ruthless selection — see the Neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck — the male expression of Homo sapien genes is much better at teams than is the female expression of the same. This does turn out to matter.
We have spent centuries, millennia, dealing with the bad traits of men in power. We better start wrestling seriously and quickly with the bad traits of women in power, or we could end up with a cascading collapse of complex systems (see the LA fires for an example). We are already seeing some serious institutional degradation.
But if we remain stuck in “if you criticise men, it’s feminism; if you criticise women, it’s misogyny”, we have a potentially terminal problem.
Lorenzo Warby, Substack Notes, 2026-02-21.
