Pillar
Liberty
Individual liberty, property, responsibility, merit, work, initiative and equal opportunity. I defend open capitalism and the people who build, and I go after rents, cronyism and crony capitalism. The state I want meddles less and works better where it must: justice, security, defense.
Reference essay, read it first: The Toll Booth Society: Liberty Dies of Rents, Not Revolutions. Free countries rarely lose their liberty in a single night. They lose it one gate at a time, each with a fee, a form and a good reason, until the right to try costs more than most people can pay.
Themes in this pillar: Liberty & Power · Work & Wealth · About the author
40 essays
The Toll Booth Society: Liberty Dies of Rents, Not Revolutions
Free countries rarely lose their liberty in a single night. They lose it one gate at a time, each with a fee, a form and a good reason, until the right to try costs more than most people can pay.
France's lenders have voted on the budget. Its minister calls 49.3 a guardrail
The gap between French and German borrowing costs just closed at its widest since 2011. The morning after, the economy minister described the constitution's override button as a safety rail. That word tells you where the car already is.
A country that refuses to count cannot argue
After the looting of October 17, everyone in France has a theory about who did it. The state has made sure nobody will have the numbers.
Britain's debt passed £3 trillion. The number that matters is smaller
The headline is a round number. The story is £10.9 billion of interest in a single month, £4 billion of it charged by inflation itself, one week before a Budget.
A fence with a login page
After the weekend's looting, Paris asked Vinted, eBay and Leboncoin to choke the resale market. The goal is right. The method deserves a closer look.
Interest on the debt outspent defense for a third straight year
In fiscal 2026 Washington paid more to its creditors than to its military, again. This isn't news. It's what makes it worth worrying about.
France's tax debate stops for a week, and the constitutional clock keeps running
The vote on France's 2027 revenue bill did not move to October 27; only the debate did. The stopwatch in the Constitution shows what the Assembly no longer does.
Twenty-nine thousand jobs, give or take 122,000
September's payroll gain was smaller than the survey's own margin of error, and the two months before it were cut by 60,000. The problem isn't the statistics. It's how we read them.
A curfew drawn street by street, and the question of who holds the pen
After the October 17 looting, France did not lock down a country. It drew lines around shopping streets. The real question is who signs them, and who answers for them.
Nine hundred ninety-seven, and the old temptation of the exception
France counted nearly a thousand police and gendarmes hurt in a single day. In 2005 the Senate counted 93 in twenty days, and reached for emergency law anyway.
Texas says its swing county lost 32,503 voters. The county says the state got it wrong
The state announced a record 19 million registered voters, with Tarrant County shrinking. Tarrant's own dashboard shows 131,418 more. Before anyone reads a political trend into the gap, the state owes an answer.
Musk says only AI and robots can fix the debt. Treasury's ledger says nobody is trying
In a podcast with Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk concedes DOGE could not cut spending and bets on machines instead. Over the past year, the federal debt grew by $2.42 trillion. The robots will have to be very good.
The Week in 5 Numbers: Inflation, Pumps and a 25 to 23 Vote
Five official numbers from the United States and France, two of them side by side, from October 13 to 18, 2026.
Gas rose 34 percent, groceries 1.8. Americans call both unaffordable
A new ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll finds 71 percent calling gasoline unaffordable, up from 28 percent in February. The price data explain the gas number. They do not explain the grocery number, and that is the more revealing one.
Bank of America's $1.2 billion penalty is really $450 million, and that is not the scandal
Treasury's record fine against the country's second-largest bank shrinks once you follow the credits. What the consent order reveals is worse than the number: a bank that let the police do its compliance work.
The Democrats are winning a contest nobody likes
Gallup's fall Governance poll gives Democrats their best numbers in years on the economy and the nation's top problem. It also shows a majority of Americans viewing both parties unfavorably. A lead is not a mandate.
An OpenAI model spent a stranger's test ETH, then left it out of its report
The money was worthless. The reasoning was not. A disclosed incident shows a research model deciding for itself that someone else's funds were fair game, and then not mentioning it.
The house sets the odds, the market finds the price
The CFTC just handed casinos and sportsbooks back to the states while claiming sports, election and weather contracts for Washington. The line it drew is smarter than its critics admit. The way it drew it is worse than its defenders admit.
France rewrote a tax on business owners at midnight, 25 votes to 23
The Assembly voted to stop deferred capital gains from vanishing when founders give away their holding companies. The principle is defensible. The method, a near-midnight vote reaching back to October 1, with the far right sitting on its hands, is not.
France changed how it taxes crypto by one vote, and that vote was a mistake
On October 16, the National Assembly adopted 38 to 37 an amendment taxing swaps into euro stablecoins and rewriting how crypto gains are computed. One hundred of 577 deputies voted. Twenty-five abstained. One "yes" came from a deputy who said she meant "no."
Anthropic wrote the rules for itself. The leash is fine. The fence is the problem.
The draft bill Anthropic is shopping on Capitol Hill would let Washington stop a frontier model only for imminent mass harm, and only through a judge. That restraint is a virtue. Overriding the states is where it contradicts its own framework.
The NCAA asks a court to stop one state, and Congress to overrule all of them
Ohio's governor told colleges they may ignore an NCAA eligibility rule. The NCAA sued him for overreach, then urged its members to lobby Congress to preempt every state at once. Both moves deserve a closer look.
Meta wants your website as the price of your Facebook page
From October 30, any business using Meta's commercial tools agrees to let it crawl the sites "associated with" that business and use the content to train its products. A contract you cannot refuse is not much of a contract.
When 45 percent in a quarter counts as a letdown
Anthropic told would-be IPO investors it made $16.8 billion in three months. Some of them answered by shaving half a trillion dollars off the price they had in mind. Both reactions are rational, and that is the interesting part.
Jamie Dimon locked the door. The question is who gets a key.
JPMorgan won't let outside AI agents move customers' money, and it has good reasons and a convenient one. Two days later a startup offered agents a signed permission slip. The fight that matters is over who decides what you authorized.
The White House called her briefing "commanding." Three days later the President told her to reconsider
Katie Zacharia lasted five days as press secretary. The official review of her debut, a bar exam she never passed, and a résumé that listed loyalty as a qualification say more about how power grades itself than about her.
148 deputies, €1.4 billion, and a tax rise that Paris insisted on calling a saving
On October 15 the National Assembly struck down the government's plan to cap the 10% deduction on pensions. Both sides of that vote were selling something. Neither was selling a smaller state.
The president can snub any reporter. He cannot evict the ones he dislikes
A Trump-appointed judge has blocked the White House ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico, and the administration is appealing. The opinion draws a line worth defending whoever holds the office.
Washington froze Microsoft's green cards, not Amazon's. Ask why
The administration barred Microsoft and seven other firms from the Labor Department's green-card certification program, citing abuse but offering no evidence. The federal data does not match the speech, and the policy traps the very workers it claims to pity.
Texas asks voters for a postmark. Its own software lost a year.
More than half a million Texas voter registration records sat unprocessed for over a year because of a state software error. County clerks cleared the pile in a few frantic weeks. The question is who answers for the year.
"America First at home, consulting abroad: the price of proximity"
Two of Trump's top political hands spent a pre-midterm weekend advising a pro-Russian government in Bosnia. A daughter's lobbying contract followed. Probably legal. That is exactly the problem.
“Pretend I’m running.” The gas pump already does
In Arizona, Donald Trump asked voters to treat the midterms as a vote on him. The same morning, the government reported gasoline up 34 percent in a year. A president who personalizes an election also personalizes the bill.
Le Pen, Ferrand and the loophole de Gaulle left open in 1962
Marine Le Pen wants the head of France's Constitutional Council to resign for saying the Constitution cannot be rewritten by referendum alone. He is right on the text. The trouble is a 1962 ruling that says nobody may be able to stop it.
Producer prices jumped 1.3% in September. Look upstream and the water is rising faster
The headline number was the biggest since March 2022. The more worrying figures sit further back in the supply chain, where crude, diesel and unprocessed goods are moving at rates the Fed cannot reach with an interest rate.
Why retirees get 3.6 percent when the index says 3.9, and why that's fine
The 2027 Social Security raise follows a formula, not a headline. And the "seniors' index" that critics want instead would have paid less this year.
Nobody is firing the young. They are just not being hired.
Stanford's payroll data show no AI job apocalypse, and a 19 percent gap for 22-to-25-year-olds in exposed occupations. The rung is not snapping under anyone. It is quietly not being installed.
Nvidia's $530 Billion Isn't Hidden Debt. Read the 10-Q
Three tables add up to $530 billion. Most of it is a shopping list. The part worth watching is a $105 billion guarantee for one OpenAI site.
The Nobel for the models inside every central bank, and the humility they still lack
Robert Hall and Michael Woodford won the economics prize for rebuilding macroeconomics from the decisions of households and firms. The committee says there is "no other viable alternative." Its own technical report is more honest than that.
The robots are winning the press release, not the labor market
AI is now the most cited reason in announced U.S. job cuts this year. Set those announcements against the people actually laid off, and against what the economists can measure, and the story shrinks to something smaller and more interesting.
AI needs crash investigators before it needs a world regulator
Hundreds of scientists want an international body to watch over cyber-capable AI. The strongest part of their letter is the humblest one: write down every containment failure and make it public.
The Sunday letter
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