Quotulatiousness

September 21, 2026

Price controls work … but not the way they’re intended to

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, History, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Politicians love to intervene in markets, trying to impose their preferred solution to “problems” like high prices. But markets don’t work the way politicians think they do:

Price ceilings don’t manage markets, they destroy them. In 1946 the US meat market collapsed because of it.

The Office of Price Administration set beef ceiling prices during World War II. Ranchers and meatpackers adapted: some held cattle rather than sell at a loss, others shifted product to black markets, and slaughter volumes dropped. The OPA briefly lifted controls in mid-1946 under pressure. Beef flooded back into stores almost immediately.

Then Congress, drowning in constituent complaints about inflation, reimposed ceilings in August 1946. Slaughter collapsed within weeks. By October 1946, beef virtually disappeared from American grocery store shelves. You could walk into a butcher shop in Chicago or New York and find nothing. Scarcity was manufactured entirely by Washington bureaucrats setting prices below what producers needed to cover costs.

Mises explained the mechanism precisely: a price ceiling creates a shortage, which produces political pressure for rationing and further controls, spiraling into comprehensive economic disorganization. The OPA ran that experiment in real time on the American food supply.

President Truman ended meat controls on November 9, 1946. Beef returned within days. The supply existed the entire time. Ranchers and packers simply refused to sell at confiscatory prices, and they were correct to refuse. Coercive price suppression causes economic destruction, and 1946 proved it at the grocery counter.

September 18, 2026

“The destruction of the European Civil War traumatized us”

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, Europe, History, Media, Politics, USA, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On Substack Notes, John Carter points out the vast chasm between the capabilities of western nations and their timid aspirations for the future:

LeMO Erster Weltkrieg – Kriegsverlauf – Frühjahrsoffensive 1918
Photo from dhm.de

Western civilization is terrified of itself. The destructive power of our militaries is unparalleled in history. We can devastate continents in minutes. We can annihilate entire populations. We can reduce cities to rubble.

But we don’t.

The same is true of our industrial capability. We can erase mountains, redirect rivers, carve tunnels deep into bedrock, reshape entire landscapes as we please.

But we don’t.

The destruction of the European Civil War traumatized us. Meanwhile, the unintended consequences of unrestricted development — air pollution, water pollution, soil erosion, habitat destruction, even the sheer rampant ugliness of so much of postwar industry — has left us leery of just doing things.

In the postwar era we began binding ourselves ever more tightly with laws. International law to restrict the use of military force; environmental laws, labour laws, indigenous rights laws, and so on to govern the use of our industrial capacity. We did this for good reason. No one wants nuclear war, or even a repeat of World War Two. No one wants another Three Mile Island, another Chernobyl. With great power comes great responsibility, and no civilization has ever been more powerful.

But the result has been to paralyze us.

Our militaries watch helplessly as supplicants invade us with begging bowls held up as their battle standards, prohibited from shooting the unarmed boats by governments bound by international treaties to respect the human rights of anyone who claims to be seeking asylum. Meanwhile we find that it is almost impossible to build anything. High-speed rail, bridges, highways, housing — all of it is slowed to an imperceptible crawl by a regulatory overburden designed to do precisely that. Gulliver held down by Lilliputian strings of his own design, his flesh swarming with hungry ants.

The emerging political coalition of the right is largely comprised of those factions who have grown impatient with this artificial paralysis of the will. Why shouldn’t we use our military to assert ourselves abroad, and defend our borders at home? Why shouldn’t we turn loose the incredible power of modern, heavily automated, high-tech industry to build wonders on a scale never before known? Why shouldn’t we conquer space? Why shouldn’t we use biomedical science to make ourselves beautiful, brilliant, healthy and fit? Why shouldn’t we allow ourselves to be powerful? Why shouldn’t we allow ourselves to be strong? We shouldn’t we reach for greatness?

The opposition consists of all those factions who are horrified by this, terrified of the strength of Western civilization, intent on slowing it, stopping its engine, dismantling the machine, and salting the biocultural soil from which it grew. Third worldists, climatists, AI safetyists, pacifists, open-borders activists, misinformation censors, DEI ideologues, international human rights NGOs, all of these cooperate to throw sand in the gears, to sabotage the West, to subordinate it and ultimately to destroy it.

September 10, 2026

Skynet Industries: “At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus …”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

So … are we now okay with panicking over the threat of artificial intelligence?

The events of the last 24 hours are stunning. And not in a good way. Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of tech, and it’s unfolding right now.

Here’s a start. Maybe you’ve already heard about the guy who resigned from OpenAI. He warned that the technology could kill everybody before the end of the decade.

He made this announcement just 20 hours ago:

Is this really true? Maybe Coxon is just a disgruntled employee. We need to find out what other insiders think.

As if in answer to this question, another AI scientist — Evan Hubinger at Anthropic — quickly moved to endorse Coxon’s concerns.

[…]

The AI fanboys are trying to defuse this situation. But their responses fall apart at the slightest touch. Consider the smear that this is just a PR campaign. Really? Others are hinting it could be a Chinese plot. Yeah, sure …

But the biggest lie is the claim that these people don’t know what they are talking about. The reality is that they understand this subject better than anybody.

What’s happening here is obvious — eight different people building this technology are afraid of what they’re seeing. But they don’t have the power individually to stop the insanity.

If this isn’t a call to action, I don’t know what is. Trillions of dollars are getting pumped into a runaway technology, and the public already hates it intensely. Now the people making it happen are warning it just might kill everybody.

This demands a response from the highest circles of power and authority. If that doesn’t happen, we will live to regret this inaction. And that’s the best case scenario. The worst is that there won’t be anyone left to regret a thing.

Update: Jim Treacher, of all people, casts a bit of doubt on the “AI’s gonna kill us all!” concerns:

And that moment from Terminator 2: Robotic Boogaloo is what everybody thinks about when they get scared of A.I. I know this because it’s what I think about when I get scared of A.I.

What happens when Skynet becomes self-aware in real life?

What happens when all these software agents that we keep welcoming into our daily lives decide they know how to run things better than we do? How much control can we give up to them before they attack us?

Is it already too late? Is there any going back? Is all hope lost? Are we doomed?

Etc., etc.

[…]

So according to this guy, A.I. professionals see it like the Manhattan Project or the moonshot. We gotta get there first, before our enemies do. That part sounds plausible.

But who is this guy? I’ve never heard of Jacob Coxon. Nobody has. He opened this Twitter account earlier this year, and that was his very first post. Now he’s all over the place. Everybody’s talking about this.

It feels like astroturf.

If you don’t know what that propaganda technique is, it’s just what it sounds like: astroturf. At first glance, it looks real. Grassroots. But it’s fake. And that might be what’s happening here.

A guy named Parker Thayer, who works for the Capital Research Center, writes:

And then he lists stuff about this that seems … hinky. I think the kids say sus. It’s sus.

For example, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about this kid’s claim 20 minutes before he posted it. Before, not after.

The first Twitter accounts to promote that post were from nonprofit groups opposing A.I.

And now, all these Democrats are screaming about it. Bernie Sanders wants to smash all the machines. Old Man Shakes Fist at Cloud. [BERNIE VOICE] “Gotta stop the computers! They’re gonna kill us all!”

Does that mean all this is fake? I don’t know. It doesn’t make me trust any of it. It makes me skeptical.

The tragedy of the commons at sea

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Europe, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

When a valuable commodity isn’t directly owned by anyone, the incentives are for everyone to grab as much of the commodity as they can. Nobody will preserve it, because they wouldn’t get the benefit from it: it would be shared among all the other users. Fishing grounds outside coastal waters are valuable commodities that nobody owns:

Nobody owns the ocean floor off the Georges Bank, and so between 1960 and 1994 the New England cod population collapsed by roughly 70 percent while every fishing fleet on the Atlantic raced to pull up fish before a competitor did. This race is the entirely predictable consequence of absent ownership.

Garrett Hardin formalized the problem in 1968, but the mechanism is older than economics itself. When no individual owns a resource, no individual bears the full cost of depleting it. The cost gets distributed across everyone; the benefit goes straight to whoever acts first. You extract as much as you physically can before the next boat arrives. So does the next boat. The resource disappears, and everyone stands around pointing fingers at greed. The actual culprit is the property rights regime, or rather the absence of one.

State managers offer themselves as the solution: quotas, licensing boards, regulatory agencies. The Atlantic fisheries commission issued exactly these instruments. The cod is still not back. Bureaucrats lack the price signals, local knowledge, and personal stakes that make stewardship rational. A regulator who mismanages a fishery keeps his salary; an owner who does the same loses his capital.

Private ownership forces the owner to think in time. Iceland extended exclusive fishing rights to its own coastal fishermen in 1975, drove foreign trawlers out, and now holds one of the best-managed cod stocks in the North Atlantic. Property rights did what Brussels-style quota spreadsheets could not: they tied the fisherman’s future income to the health of the stock today.

Common ownership produces a sprint to zero.

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 10, 2026

Clarkson’s Farm (and seven subsidiary businesses)

Filed under: Britain, Business, Environment, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

While I don’t watch much TV outside the NFL season, I was certainly aware of Jeremy Clarkson’s post-Top Gear/post-The Grand Tour TV show, I only started actually watching it earlier this week. And that was only because of a glowing review from The Critical Drinker. I’ve been missing a really good show, but I’ve got four-and-a-half seasons to catch up on — I’m not a binge watcher, so that’s not going to happen immediately. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Sama Hoole points out just how tenuous a farming business can be in England nowadays and how many other businesses Clarkson has started on his farm to try to make it profitable:

Jeremy Clarkson of Clarkson’s Farm.

Jeremy Clarkson runs at least eight businesses off a thousand acres in Oxfordshire. Seven of them make money.

Count them. A farm shop. A pub. A lager brand. A bestselling book every autumn. A streaming series. A merchandise range. And now an app, built by Lisa Hogan, connecting the public to farms.

Then the eighth. Growing food.

Year one, working the ground flat out: £144. By year six, a £5,000 loss where £37,000 had been projected. This summer, two hundred of those acres grew nothing at all, because putting wheat in them was a guaranteed loss before the drill left the shed.

Every enterprise on that farm turns a profit except the farming.

The lager tells you why, and the chain of cause is on the record. Government subsidies were falling, so in 2021 he decided to brew beer from his own barley. That is the entire origin of Hawkstone. A decision taken in Whitehall turned an arable farmer into a brewer, and the beer worked.

Nothing about the grain changed. Barley sold as barley goes at whatever the buyer offers that morning. Barley in a bottle goes at the price the man who grew it decides.

That one difference is the whole business.

The pub is the same move in bricks. A derelict barn nobody had wanted since 2013, bought for reportedly under a million, now with a queue. On the menu a sausage from his own pigs costs 74p against 18p for the imported version, and he absorbs that gap on every plate. The farm shop, meanwhile, is legally barred from selling food produced more than sixteen miles away, and still cannot keep up with demand.

Now look at what the farming has behind it that yours does not. One of the best land agents in England. A farm manager who has worked that ground since he was a teenager. An agronomist. A production company covering the costs. A queue down the lane. A name that sells anything it is printed on.

It loses money anyway.

And this is the ordinary arrangement, not an eccentric one. Defra’s own figures say 72 percent of farms in England now take income from something that is not farming, and diversification accounts for 31 percent of total farm income. The government’s own Batters Review found nearly a third of British farms were loss-making outright in 2024.

Diddly Squat is simply the loudest version. The shop subsidises the field. The pub subsidises the field. The television subsidises the field.

A thousand acres of English farmland, and the one thing it cannot do is pay for itself by producing food.

July 31, 2026

Nobody “designed” capitalism

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Education, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

One of Karl Marx’s cleverer notions was to come up with a label for the economic system that had slowly emerged from the feudal period in Europe. It wasn’t ever the result of some overarching plan or campaign, it was just the easiest way for producers and consumers to connect without coercion or force. It had no real name until its declared enemy named it:

Capitalism did not begin in a boardroom. Voluntary exchange, repeated across generations, built the fairs, the credit networks, the double-entry books that Luca Pacioli codified in 1494. Nobody planned this. That’s the whole point.

The story you learned in school runs backwards. You were taught that greedy factory owners exploited children until noble legislators rescued them in 1833. What actually happened: the Industrial Revolution dragged English living standards up so fast that population doubled between 1750 and 1850 because people stopped dying. Wages rose. Life expectancy rose. The factory that horrifies the modern reader was an upgrade from a life of starving on a tenant farm at the mercy of the harvest. Children worked because their families were poor, and the factory made those families less poor. The reformers arrived after the market had already done the heavy lifting, then took credit for the sunrise.

Real capitalism needs sound money, and here is where the tragedy sharpens. Between 1815 and 1914, under a classical gold standard, prices in Britain fell gently while output exploded. You could save a coin and expect it to buy more later. That world died in stages: 1914, when governments suspended gold to print [money for] war; 1933, when Roosevelt confiscated citizens’ gold at $20.67 an ounce then revalued it to $35; 1971, when Nixon closed the window entirely and handed us the pure fiat regime you live under now.

What followed was corporatism wearing capitalism’s coat. When the Federal Reserve can conjure trillions and hand them to the banks and firms closest to the spigot, you no longer have a market allocating capital. You have a cartel allocating privilege. The 2008 bailouts were a monetary system doing exactly what a monetary system built on the printing press does.

When someone blames “unfettered capitalism” for the mess around you, ask them to point to the fetters.

The answer is to let go. Less regulation, no central bank, less tax, less government. Not more!

A few days ago, Severian point out:

Title page of Das Kapital in the first German edition of Volume 1.
Wikimedia Commons.

At its broadest, “system” means something like “the appearance of rule-governed behavior”, and so yeah, “capitalism” is a “system” in that sense. The “law” of Supply and Demand is a “rule”, if you like, and we can start piling on the ACK-shullies from there. But it’s not particularly useful trying to analyze why and how it happens; the only thing we need to proceed is to acknowledge that it does.

“It” being “reification“, which you’ll recall means “treating an abstraction as if it were a real object”. Synonyms (per Wiki) include “concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness”, and while I personally dig “hypostatization” — it’s got that groovy Gnostic ring to it — “reification” is easier to type; plus it was very successfully repurposed by Marx and we might need that later, so “reification” it is. Calling “the natural human tendency to exchange stuff for other stuff, each party pursuing what he perceives to be his own advantage” Capitalism is a reification. It’s useful rhetorical shorthand …

… but it carries with it a tendency to mistake the map for the territory, you dig? Instead of confining yourself to “the natural human tendency to exchange stuff for other stuff, each party pursuing what he perceives to be his own advantage”, you inevitably start talking about the “rules” or “laws” of Capitalism. And from there, it’s just a short leap to our course title: the morality of Capitalism.

Because that’s what rules are for, no? To keep things fair — or equal, if you prefer. If we want to find out who’s better at tennis, let’s say, we set up a bunch of rules, to eliminate from the outcome every “inequality” but skill (and dumb luck). Both players have to agree on the scoring. Tennis, therefore, really is a system, strictly speaking. It really is a game, in the mathematical and linguistic senses.

Tennis is not a reification. When we talk about tennis, we are talking about the rules of the game, or the outcome of an individual match. That’s it.

But watch what happens when we start talking about the “rules” of Capitalism. The very word “rule” (or “law”) unavoidably contains the notion of fairness. The rule determining “out of bounds” in tennis is explicitly designed to make the game fair, because that’s what game rules are for — to make the players equal in every respect but skill. You couldn’t know who is the better tennis player if the rules were arbitrary; “out of bounds” has to be clearly defined, and universally applicable.

If you start talking about the “rules” of Capitalism, then, you might not think about “fairness”, but you can’t help but feel it.

Which the contrast with Communism makes worse. Because of course “Capitalism” and “Communism” are “dialectically constructed”. I don’t like throwing Marxist jargon around, but it’s useful in this case. Because Communism is a system, or a game, or whatever word you prefer. Communism does have rules, and they are explicitly designed — like the rules of all games — to ensure equality.

(And they do, comrades, they really do. As P.J. O’Rourke pointed out back when he was funny, Communism is as fair as it gets. We’re all equally broke, starving, and dead, but goddamn it, we’re equal).

I’m sure I don’t have to tell this crowd what a bad idea it is to let your enemies define things for you, but that’s what “Capitalism” does. Karl Marx his own self invented that term. Pick your famous “Capitalist” thinker — Adam Smith, David Ricardo, whoever. They didn’t call themselves “Capitalists”; they called themselves political economists. They weren’t devising rules for a game; they were describing phenomena they observed. It was only after Marx slapped the “Capitalism” tag on the natural human tendency to exchange stuff for other stuff, each party pursuing what he perceives to be his own advantage, that we started seeing “Capitalists”.

July 22, 2026

Why progressives are always so eager for more gun control

Filed under: Law, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

ESR discusses a recently posted chart about firearm homicide rates:

I’m not certain this chart is true, but looking at it shook something loose in my head. I think it explains why ordinary liberals are so obsessive about gun control despite the fact that it’s both bad policy and a persistent election-time loser.

This isn’t a trivial question. I understand why Communists are obsessive about gun control; the last thing they want is a population capable of armed resistance to tyranny. What I have never figured out is why Communists have been so successful at selling gun control to their dupes as an urgent moral necessity.

This chart could be exaggerated, but the figures are at least possible. In the United States, murder and other forms of criminal violence are heavily, heavily concentrated among Blacks. Usually with other Blacks as their victims.

And that’s a problem for your typical normie liberal, because not being “racist” against Blacks is the core of their moral and political identity.

What I now understand — forgive me because I probably should have noticed this sooner — is that gun-control advocacy is a sort of reaction formation. When you’re not an evil Communist, it’s something you do frantically to avert your eyes from unbearable reality.

The truth: outside of a relatively small cohort at the right-hand end of the Black IQ distribution, the people liberals want to treat as sacred victims deserving of infinite indulgence are savages that even intelligent Blacks fear and despise.

That’s the message in the left hand column, there.

IQ denialism, blank-slatism, “poverty causes crime” — these are all defensive formations. They cluster with gun-control advocacy as ways of avoiding the horrible, intolerable truth.

Which makes me wonder: what happens when the strain becomes too great and the protective illusion snaps?

July 13, 2026

Teddy Roosevelt versus the “Robber Barons” of the Gilded Age

Filed under: Business, Government, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the Coolidge Review, Burton W. Folsom, Jr. outlines the way President Teddy Roosevelt and his Progressives tried to rein in the wealthy industrialists who had helped create the Gilded Age:

Theodore Roosevelt looks on with glee as his commerce secretary puts the screws to trusts.
(Puck magazine, Alamy Stock Photo, via The Coolidge Review)

The early twentieth century marked the height of the progressive movement, which sought to check the power of free markets and business. To understand what progressives did in the early 1900s, we need to understand what happened in the late 1800s, the period often called the Gilded Age.

After the Civil War, the United States experienced spectacular economic growth. The industries leading the way included railroads, oil, and steel. This expansion made the United States a global economic power. The profits of those businesses enriched the wealthiest — and the average American. That’s in part because bigger, more efficient businesses can offer cheaper prices. Between 1870 and 1880, for example, railroad freight prices fell by half. By 1890, they had fallen by half again. And by 1900, they had been cut nearly in half once more.

Similar advances occurred in many other industries. In the Gilded Age the United States saw perhaps the greatest burst of invention and economic development any country has ever experienced.

[…]

Progressives relied on three tools to restrain business.

The first was the Sherman Antitrust Act. Passed in 1890, this law was used sparingly for a decade. Government enforcement proved difficult in part because the act’s language was vague: the Sherman Act outlawed any contract or “combination” in “restraint of trade or commerce”. In 1895 the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted the law narrowly. In a case involving a sugar-refining business, the Court held that the Sherman Act did not apply to manufacturing. Theodore Roosevelt later wrote in his autobiography that the ruling produced “governmental impotence”.

But soon after entering the White House in 1901, Roosevelt seized on the Sherman Act to engage in “trust busting”. He directed the Justice Department to dissolve the Northern Securities Company, a railroad holding company that Hill had created. This time, the Supreme Court upheld the government’s intervention. Referring to the 1895 ruling, Roosevelt crowed, “This decision I caused to be annulled by the court that had rendered it”, giving the federal government the power “to deal effectively with the trusts”. Roosevelt’s Justice Department soon targeted Standard Oil, which was eventually broken into thirty-four separate companies.

The second tool progressives used against business was the Interstate Commerce Commission. Although railroad rates had declined dramatically for decades, progressives objected to the way those rates were structured. Railroads tended to give the largest discounts to customers that transported the most goods. The railroads still profited from these volume discounts, and smaller customers still paid much lower rates than they had earlier. But progressives argued that it was unjust for smaller shippers to pay higher rates than larger businesses.

In his 1905 annual message to Congress, President Roosevelt demanded legislation to put “a complete stop to rebates in every shape and form”. The 1906 Hepburn Act accomplished that goal. The law was expanded to give the Interstate Commerce Commission the power to inspect railroads’ financial records, eliminate targeted rebates, and set “just and reasonable” rates. In other words, the federal government now had significant pricing power over railroads, America’s largest business sector.

The progressives’ third tool was the federal income tax. In 1909 Congress approved the resolution for a constitutional amendment to establish an income tax. The Sixteenth Amendment took effect in 1913, after three-quarters of the states had ratified it. That was the year Coolidge was elected president of the Massachusetts State Senate.

From the beginning, the tax system was progressive, imposing higher rates on larger incomes. In 1913 most Americans paid no federal income taxes, while the top marginal rate — for income exceeding the equivalent of $16 million in 2026 dollars — was only 7 percent. But within five years, tax rates had soared, with the top bracket paying 77 percent.

July 2, 2026

Reining in the administrative state – Humphrey’s Executor overruled by the Supreme Court

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, History, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

One of the two US Supreme Court rulings this week that sparked controversy was the court’s decision to overrule a 1935 precedent that enabled the growth of the administrative state:

Panorama of the west facade of United States Supreme Court Building at dusk in Washington, D.C., 10 October, 2011.
Photo by Joe Ravi via Wikimedia Commons.

The Supreme Court this week restored an old-fashioned constitutional idea: if a principal federal officer exercises executive power, the president must be able to remove him. The justices’ 6–3 ruling in Trump v. Slaughter, which struck down a law prohibiting the president from firing members of the FTC except for cause, is the logical endpoint of a 15-year series of cases that have steadily chipped away at Humphrey’s Executor, the 1935 decision that blessed for-cause removal protections for the heads of so-called independent agencies.

The Court didn’t mince words. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “Humphrey‘s framework, in short, has not withstood the test of time”. Then came the sentence that will launch a thousand administrative-law articles: “If anything more is left of Humphrey‘s, we overrule it”. The New Deal compromise that invented quasi-legislative agencies has finally met Article II of the U.S. Constitution.

That’s good, because the Federal Trade Commission isn’t a debating society. It, along with its alphabet-agency brethren, writes rules with the force of law, investigates private parties, adjudicates violations, and sues in federal court on behalf of the United States. Whatever labels Congress attached to that body in the Progressive Era, the FTC — like the FCC, SEC, NLRB, and so on — today exercises executive power. And the Constitution vests “the executive power” in one president, not in commissioners serving staggered terms, answerable to no one whom voters can fire.

This ruling isn’t a gift to Donald Trump or his successors. It’s a restoration of constitutional accountability. Congress can create executive-branch agencies and specify what they may do, but it cannot create a fourth branch of government and then pretend its officers are independent of the only person the Constitution makes responsible for executing federal law.

Roberts put the point crisply at the end of Slaughter: “Subordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him”. That’s a unitary, not an imperial, presidency, and it’s a hallmark of republican government. The president remains constrained by statutes, appropriations, courts, Congress, elections, and the Constitution itself. If the people dislike how the FTC enforces the law, they should be able to blame — and replace — the president, not chase a goulash of insulated mandarins.

Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurrence adds the important next step. Killing Humphrey’s Executor doesn’t cure every constitutional disease in the administrative state. It simply reallocates the power Congress poured into independent agencies. As Gorsuch warned, “the fourth branch’s powers still exist; they have just been reassigned to the President”. If agencies possess vast legislative and judicial authority, the answer isn’t to hide those powers from presidential control, but to restore legislative powers to Congress. Make Congress great again!

June 26, 2026

No “capital formation”, please: we’re Canadian

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison identifies one of the biggest reasons the Canadian economy is falling ever further behind other industrialized nations:

AI-generated image from L. Wayne Mathison

Canada does not have a talent shortage.

It has a capital formation shortage.

In Q1 2026, Canada managed one growth-stage VC deal. One. Worth $1M.

That is lemonade-stand money in a global tech race.

The U.S. pulled in $267.2B in VC investment. Capital is not confused. It goes where risk is rewarded, scale is possible, and success is not treated like a moral offence.

Carney and the Liberals keep talking about “building the economy” while presiding over a country where founders raise seed money here, then scale somewhere else.

That is the real brain drain.

Not just doctors. Not just engineers. Builders. Founders. Investors. People who can turn ideas into payrolls.

They look at Canada and see taxes, red tape, weak productivity, political favouritism, and a government more interested in managing decline than getting out of the way.

Carney was sold as the adult in the room. OK. Then explain this: why is Canada producing press releases while the Americans are producing companies?

Because capital can smell fear.

And right now, Canada smells like a country that punishes ambition, subsidizes failure, and calls it fairness.

June 25, 2026

Credit card fee cap: a great idea, with the best of intentions … what possibly could go wrong?

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Nobody likes credit card fees — except the banks that issue credit cards — so politicians figure that they can please the voters at no cost and mandate limits to the fees that credit card companies can charge. But who is going to suffer for this “at no cost” bit of rule-making?

“Credit Cards” by Sean MacEntee is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Two years ago, Illinois passed crowd-pleasing restrictions on credit card interchange fees, which are better known as “swipe fees”. The ban on charging fees on processing payments for tips and taxes has now been delayed twice by skeptical federal judges and lawmakers worried that they’ve crafted a financial mess. These interventions may be saving the state from itself, as a new report points out that the law threatens to hurt consumers, small retailers, and local financial institutions.

Delayed Ban on Fees for Processing Taxes and Tips

Passed as part of a 2024 revenue bill, the Interchange Fee Prohibition Act (IFPA) defines “interchange fee” as “a fee established, charged, or received by a payment card network for the purpose of compensating the issuer for its involvement in an electronic payment transaction”. It adds: “An issuer, a payment card network, an acquirer bank, or a processor may not receive or charge a merchant any interchange fee on the tax amount or gratuity of an electronic payment transaction if the merchant informs the acquirer bank or its designee of the tax or gratuity amount as part of the authorization or settlement process for the electronic payment transaction”.

“Although merchants have long advocated for this change, banking and payment industry representatives argue that it imposes an undue hardship by forcing them to process certain components of transactions without compensation,” attorneys Thomas V. Panoff and Maxwell Earp-Thomas noted for the National Law Review at the time. They also commented that the law could force Illinois payments to be processed differently than those originating in the rest of the country and the world beyond.

The situation is now being fought in court and in public between advocates who argue the fees are hidden costs and opponents who say they’re an industry-standard means to cover the cost of business.

[…]

Overall, Illinois lawmakers’ attempt to please the crowd by mandating lower costs looks poised to create a mess that could leave the state’s consumers, small banks, and retailers with higher costs and fewer choices if financial institutions leave to avoid headaches.

“To protect the integrity of the checkout experience and avoid driving financial providers from the Illinois market, the IFPA must be either repealed or overturned”, concludes Swedberg.

Credit card fees are undoubtedly burdensome for consumers and retailers. Ultimately the best way to avoid them is the traditional way: Use cash.

June 18, 2026

Unexpected increase in legal gun ownership in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The federal government has been doing everything it can to curtail Canadians’ access to firearms since 2015, most recently imposing bans on literally thousands of different gun models and almost completely restricting purchase, sale, or transfer of legal handguns. Under these circumstances, you’d expect that interest in legal gun ownership would be on a pretty steep decline. But that’s emphatically not the case:

Here is something the government does not talk about.

Canada’s handgun freeze took effect on October 21, 2022. Since that date, very few people who have exemptions have been able to buy, sell, gift, or inherit a handgun. The market for new restricted handguns is effectively closed.

So you might expect the number of Canadians holding a Restricted PAL (the licence required to own handguns and other restricted firearms) to be flat or declining. Why bother completing the restricted component of the Canadian Firearm Safety Course if you can’t use it to buy a handgun?

The data says otherwise.

According to the RCMP Commissioner of Firearms Reports, the number of RPAL holders has grown every year since the freeze:

2022: 716,348
2023: 752,002 (up 5.0%)
2024: 775,266 (up 3.1%)
2025: 794,768 (up 2.5%)

That is a net gain of 78,420 restricted firearm licence holders in three years, a 10.9% increase, all during a period when the primary reason most people get the restricted designation on their PAL (to buy a handgun) was legislated away.

Canadians are still taking the safety course, submitting to the background checks, and getting licensed. The freeze did not stop the demand for restricted licences. It just stopped the legal market from serving the people who hold them.

Source: RCMP Commissioner of Firearms Reports, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025.

June 17, 2026

Why California’s high speed train system will probably never be finished

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

This is an older post from March, but nothing in it has significantly changed … the legal and regulatory structure of Californian governance will ensure that what work gets done on the high speed rail infrastructure will only be done at the slowest speed yet at the highest possible costs:

The California high-speed rail authority, literally owns thousands of parcels of land that are in various stages continued litigation, tenant improvements, eviction, and constant maintenance.

For example, there are many homes and apartment complexes in the plant path that have been purchased years ahead of construction. Removing those tenants is a slow and expensive process. (let’s ignore the extra stress on housing that all of these destroyed properties are causing)

In some cases, these are low rent apartments with a lengthy eviction process. During that process, the state of California is the landlord and has to maintain the property codes the same as any other landlord. This means repairs, adding smoke detectors, fixing roofs, vegetation management, landscaping, paying off tenants to leave early, boarding up Windows, constant trash cleanups, towing vehicles etc.

But the High Speed Rail Authority doesn’t just have to maintain these properties at normal cost. Every single bit of that work has to be done at California prevailing wage rates. The work can only be done through qualified contractors that have passed through a long series of idiotic mazes to qualify to perform the work.

An average rate per hour (charge rate) for a worker to perform any service on these properties is approximately $200 an hour for labor only. The cost go up for specialized work, like electricians, plumbers, or machine operators.

Properties that are literally worthless are being maintained at huge expense just so the next round of homeless transients can break into the property and cause more damage. For reasons I can’t explain, the process to finally demo and remove the structures takes years.

I’m only mentioning the tip of the iceberg regarding my firsthand knowledge.

Completely separate from those outlandish costs are the inflation caused by the construction. The prevailing word on the street is that nothing is getting done. The truth is that a lot is getting done and none of it efficiently.

The amount of concrete being poured daily and monthly to build gigantic overpasses for both the rail and roadways is not understood. In these work areas, every concrete mixing company is fully scheduled out and cannot offer building materials for other basic services such as building a house often times for weeks when the average lead time for many of these services used to be one day. And that’s just the schedule, never mind the huge cost increases from straining the supply chain and labor pool.

The amount of concrete and steel that has gone into the structures so far is massive.

Dozens and dozens of new water wells have been dug just for dust control. Thousands upon thousands of acres of highly productive tree fruits and nuts have been torn up and shredded.

Utility scale solar fields have been uprooted and sometimes relocated at extravagant costs.

Every type of business you can imagine has gone through either a closure, relocation, or a long-term tenant agreement with the rail authority. In some cases, it’s just a buyout where the business closes its doors forever. The owners get something all of the workers get nothing.

Don’t get me started on how thick the layers of bureaucracy are for these minute tasks that occur on all of these properties.

The inefficiency is far beyond your wildest dreams. In many cases, this is not related to fraud in any way it’s just absolute ignorance, red tape, and failed leadership.

June 11, 2026

Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As promised/threatened, the Liberal government introduced a new bill to address ongoing concerns about “online harms”: Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act. The ever-informative Michael Geist provides an overview:

The government tabled Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, earlier today, marking its third attempt at online harms legislation after the failed 2021 consultation and Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act that died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued ahead of the 2025 election. As I wrote on the day Bill C-63 was introduced, that bill was effectively three bills in one: a defensible set of platform regulation provisions built around a duty to act responsibly and a clear list of identifiable harms, contentious Criminal Code and Canada Human Rights Act reforms, and a powerful new Digital Safety Commission with considerable regulatory discretion. My view at the time was that the contentious provisions should be removed and addressed separately, since they were certain to dominate the debate at the expense of what really mattered, namely the platform regulation piece. That is precisely how it played out as the speech provisions undermined the bill for months, and by the time the government conceded and agreed to split the bill, time ran out.

Bill C-34 suggests the government absorbed only part of the lesson. The Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions are gone, but in their place the government has thrown in everything else: the original Online Harms Act platform duties, an under-16 social media ban backed by mandated age verification, Bill S-209’s pornography age verification requirements, a new AI chatbot regulatory regime, and sweeping powers for a Digital Safety Commission that will write the rules, enforce them, and decide which platforms escape the ban restriction. It is an everything-all-at-once approach in which nearly every key component, including which services face the restriction, how age gets verified, which AI systems are covered, and what standards govern exemptions, is left to regulations that do not yet exist.

I’ve been working on this piece since before the bill was introduced with the expectation that many provisions from the prior proposal would resurface. This post is long, but seeks to provide a very initial review of key elements in the bill. For those looking for the key takeaways, there are five. First, the platform regulation elements with a duty to act responsibly once again offers a good starting point for working through regulation. Second, the inclusion of a social media ban for those under 16 is bad policy that will take considerable time to implement and raises serious privacy concerns that will affect tens of millions of Canadians. Third, the AI chatbot regulations are consistent with emerging standards, but the uncertainty of who it covers is not. Fourth, the government is creating a bureaucracy comparable to the CRTC in the Digital Safety Commission as it will wield serious power and be tasked with fleshing out much of the detail of how the law will work. Fifth, the uncertainty of this bill has the hallmarks of a government wanting to do something quickly, but the “trust us” approach likely means years of implementation work and potential court challenges.

The Foundation: A Duty to Act Responsibly

The aspect that attracted the broadest support in Bill C-63, namely the platform regulation rules, survived largely intact. The bill features the same seven categories of harmful content (intimate content communicated without consent, content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, content that induces a child to harm themselves, content used to bully a child, content that foments hatred, content that incites violence, and terrorism or violent extremism content) and revives the duty to act responsibly that requires platforms to assess and mitigate the risk of exposure to that content. There is also a duty to make certain categories of content inaccessible within 24 hours backed by a complaint path to the new Digital Safety Commission, and a duty to be transparent through public digital safety plans, record-keeping, and researcher access to data. These measures target how platforms actually operate and provide a credible starting point.

[…]

The Social Media Ban for Under 16’s

The headline measure, widely reported as a “temporary” ban on social media for those under 16, leaves many questions unanswered since the application of the ban, age verification methods, and exemption rules are all left to future regulation. The word “temporary” appears nowhere in the bill. […]

The AI Chatbot Regime: Mainstream Duties, Unbounded Definition

The government wisely took the duty path rather than the ban path on AI chatbots, an approach I argued last month would be even worse than the social media ban. There is no chatbot ban and no under-16 account restriction for chatbot services. Instead, the bill creates duties that track the emerging international mainstream found in California’s SB 243 and New York’s AI companion law. […]

The Commission: More Power, Fewer Limits, Smaller Penalties

The third concern is the one the government never resolved the first time. My day-one assessment of Bill C-63 flagged the Digital Safety Commission’s regulatory power as a serious concern. The answer two years later is an even more powerful Commission with more undefined limits. Bill C-63’s three-pronged approach of the Commission, a Digital Safety Office, and a Digital Safety Ombudsperson has been consolidated into a single Digital Safety Commission of Canada that develops the regulations and guidance, assesses compliance, manages complaints, conducts audits, issues compliance orders, levies administrative monetary penalties, and decides the exemption applications that determine which platforms escape the under-16 restriction. Once again, the amount of uncertainty is the real story since the design features at the heart of the duty to protect children are simply those “set out in the regulations”, and the user thresholds that determine which services are covered at all are to be determined.

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