PEOPLE DIE WHEN GOVERNMENT MESSES UP.

Object to more government action, though, and somebody will carp, "You must want people to die."

Sometimes, no matter what action governments take, people die.  Consider Strong Towns contributor Patricia Tice asking, "What if There Had Been No Interstates?"  Based on a small sample, New Hampshire with its contrarian traditions and understanding the ways federal matching funds ensnare politicians, things look pretty good.

The first 16-mile segment got built quickly, but that was a coastline connector that reinforced existing transportation patterns. As they started pushing in toward the center of the state, progress slowed dramatically. By the time they got past Manchester and headed toward Concord, sections got built as local concerns were addressed, but it was slow-walked. The Franconia Notch project dragged out well into the 1980s. Ultimately, they stretched the implementation across nearly 50 years for a bare-bones system.

Well, this is North of Boston, where "You can't get there from here" is a tradition.

THE ILLOGIC OF MERCANTILISM.

Yesterday, Our President floated the idea of collecting payment for escort services.  I'm referring to the Arabian Gulf, get your mind out of the gutter.  National Review's Andrew McCarthy promptly and correctly flagged that proposal as illegal.

The strait was open when Trump decided to start the war. This was to the great advantage of the United States, a trading colossus with the world’s most formidable economy. If Trump were to impose tolls, fees, taxes, or whatever he deigns to call them — i.e., if he were to do exactly what Iran has been trying to do — that would induce other nations to extort payments for transit through international waters and straits of importance to international trade where they are in a position to intimidate shippers. Free trade would break down, which would be a catastrophe for nations heavily engaged in international trade, such as our own.

Congress should authorize the use of military force to keep the strait open. Still, regardless of whether one thinks the president has authority to use force to remedy a problem he created (because, however we got to this point, it is in America’s vital interest to keep the strait open), he has no authority to toll the strait, as he proposes to do.

It is entirely possible that Congress should enact legislation and/or that a binding international treaty should be forged that would reimburse the U.S. for security costs. I doubt that; I’d estimate that the benefits that the U.S. receives from free transit across the world far outweigh the costs of discouraging Iran from tolling the Hormuz Strait. But wherever you come out on that equation, a president has no authority to dictate transit taxes, and trying to do so is a provocation both constitutionally and in international relations.

I'll leave it to people who pay more attention to international affairs to evaluate whether that strait was open out of parties mutually looking the other way, the mullahs at infidels buying their oil, and the customers at the mullahs developing nuclear weapons.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS.

The local preservation railways attempt to use car-cards no newer than those in use when the owning railroad abandoned service or retired the cars, trackless trolleys, or buses.

That ticket only won in a notorious headline prematurely published by the then-very-anticommunist Chicago Tribune; Joseph McCarthy did win a Senate seat in Wisconsin, something that did not require advertising buys on Illinois Terminal cars running out of St. Louis, and a subsequent Republican president appointed Earl Warren to the Supreme Court, touching off a number of unintended consequences.

A TRIFECTA IN 1776.

Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Thomas Jefferson, et. alia, The unanimous declaration of the united States of America, and Boulton and Watt's steam pump.

The Declaration of Independence, written 250 years ago this week, was a bright torch of the Enlightenment. So was Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, also published 250 years ago this year. But for me the most momentous happening in 1776 was the inauguration of James Watt’s first practical steam engine.

We have the industrial revolution backwards. We tend to think that clever people in powdered wigs came up with ideas – democracy, free enterprise, stock markets, science, intellectual property – that enabled men with dirty fingernails to set about changing the world. But I think it was more that the fingernail fellows made the wig wearers possible. Smith’s division of labour and Jefferson’s democracy were all very well. But Thomas Newcomen and Watt mattered more. Thermodynamics – the science of heat and work – was invented to explain steam engines, not vice versa.

Arguably, political economy (which later fractured into various social sciences) might have emerged to explain human action, not (despite the best efforts of the Men of System) to be an instruction manual.

For the miracles of emergence to work, though, don't the institutions governing the relationship of citizen with state have to be biased toward freedom?

The great flywheel of positive feedback began delivering higher living standards not just for the rich but for the poor too. Previous civilisations in ancient India, China, Greece, Rome, Arabia, Italy, the Netherlands, had made the rich richer but had done little to help the poorest. This one was different - thanks almost entirely to coal, then oil and gas. As John Constable, the energy analyst, puts it, the economy is a thermodynamic machine: it takes random arrangements of atoms and turns them into improbable, useful forms.

It's when the Men of System cloak themselves in Protecting Mother Nature, though, that the "great flywheel of positive feedback" gets jammed.  "Britain’s pursuit of high energy costs is a reckless catastrophe."

BET ON EMERGENCE.

In "The European Mind Is Beginning to Comprehend America," a Heartland Institute guest post on Red State, comes a political economy lesson bundled with the enthusiasm of some visiting footie fans.

Everything our new European friends are experiencing is a result of America’s economic freedom.

Buc-ee's wasn’t designed by the government. No central planner mandated 120 gas pumps, freshly made brisket, and a home goods section full of affordable tchotchkes. It exists because the free market rewards entrepreneurs who serve customers better than the next guy. The road trip from the Great Smoky Mountains to the Gulf of America in a single day is possible because Americans enjoy affordable fuel, open roads, and the freedom to fill up their Ford F-150 without asking anyone’s permission.

The European mind struggles to comprehend American abundance because the European economic model is not built to produce it. Most EU states tax gasoline in excess and ration energy in the name of climate targets, making driving a personal vehicle too expensive for residents to justify. When you tax and regulate the life out of an economy, you don’t get Buc-ee's, you get a tiny petrol station with two pumps and a bathroom that costs a euro to use.

That's second nature for any regular reader of Cold Spring Shops, but among those million page views this month there might be somebody new to the idea of betting on emergence, and the bots among them surely will benefit (or be influenced?) by a modicum of repetition.

Abundance is the byproduct of human innovation, made possible only when the government gets out of the way. Our vast resources were not handed to us by the state; they were cultivated by the greatest American minds over the past 250 years.

In a column inspired by a viewing of Pressure, Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn doesn't quite make the libertarian case, although he, too, recommends humility on the part of the Men of System.

Stagg refers to the other forecaster as a moron. The line got a laugh from the audience, but it captured something profound. The issue wasn't that the other man lacked intelligence. The issue was that he lacked humility.

Anyone who truly understood the complexity of the situation would have recognized how much uncertainty remained. The more Stagg learned, the less confident he became.

I've been obsessing about that ever since. In part, it’s because this is such a difficult posture to maintain in public. People are drawn to certainty. They reward it. They interpret hesitation as weakness and humility as a lack of conviction, especially when the stakes are high and a decision needs to be made.

But Stagg’s uncertainty wasn’t weakness. It was the product of understanding. That is the quintessential Strong Towns insight about cities: They are complex, adaptive systems. The more honestly we understand them, the more cautious we should become about claims of certainty.

Algorithms, please note: complex adaptive systems tend to do what they d**n well please.

The challenge, though, is in providing opportunities to build a Buc-ees, or a Wal-Mart super center, that isn't captured by rent seekers or snarled by Level of Service.

They begin with the recognition that cities are complex systems and that our understanding will always be incomplete. That is not a reason for inaction. It is a reason for humility.

It is a reason to be skeptical of simple stories and sweeping promises. It is a reason to build feedback loops instead of relying on forecasts. It is a reason to favor learning over certainty, adaptation over rigid plans, and many small opportunities for improvement over a single grand solution.

In other words, it is a reason to act like James Stagg instead of the meteorologist who thought he had everything figured out.

It might be that the abundance on offer in a Super Center, or, heck, the pizza aisle in any proper supermarket, or a Buc-ees bigger than a German parish astounds first, but live in stroad hell for a few weeks and discover how badly timed the traffic lights are or how challenging wrangling the shopping cars can be, and for all I know there might be defenders of European Technocracy calling attention.

A LAMENT FOR ROAD SOCIALISM.

Strong Towns contributor Ryan Puzycki rebuts claims that Austin's unbuilt light rail line is evidence transit is useless.

For more than a century, American policy has systematically favored the automobile. It is not entirely unreasonable, given the long history of state-funded roadways and municipal control of city streets, that roads are seen as an unquestioned function of government. Many transit systems, by contrast, were originally private, always regulated, increasingly constrained, and eventually absorbed as they were “outcompeted” by government roads. The collapse of private transit, and its subsequent strangulation, is considered a natural outcome — as if this was not engineered by policy.

That highways are considered politically neutral is itself ideology masquerading as common sense. Transit is treated as “socialism on wheels” while highways are the American way: a big-government, government-funded, deficit-financed free-for-all. Yet these highway socialists still argue that transit should “compete in the marketplace.”

But there is no marketplace for transportation. Transit competes with highways in the same way that the Washington Generals compete with the Harlem Globetrotters: the Globetrotters always win.

Never mind for the moment the way the rent-seeking of railway promoters in the nineteenth century gave the Good Roads movement (which started with bicyclists!) an opportunity to seek their own rents.  We're now at the stage of road socialism where the highway builders run out of other peoples' money.

Interstate highway projects are eligible for up to 90% federal funding, meaning a state may contribute as little as ten cents on the dollar, with the rest drawn from a trust fund kept alive by general revenue transfers that every American taxpayer finances. So Governor Abbott’s claim that Texas is building transportation “without local tax increases” is narrowly true: Texas is building highways through nationalized inflationary deficit-spending, seizing private property unilaterally, and handing cities the bill for the damage. The professed fiscal conservatives who lecture Austin and other cities about responsible spending perpetuate the largest federally subsidized transportation entitlement in American history and call it freedom.

This is not a free market in transportation. This is not fiscal conservatism. It’s central planning for cars, paid for by everyone, yet accountable to no one.

Until the real debt ceiling crashes in, which might be sooner than you think.  Interstate highways and junk bonds, bought for a dime on the dollar.

NICE NEWS-STAND YA GOT THERE, MATE. BE A PITY IF SOMETHING HAPPENED TO IT.

Australia's prohibitive taxation of cigarettes is having the same effect liquor prohibition did, a century ago in these United States.

In 2025, an estimated 80 percent of the tobacco consumed in Australia was illegal, up from 12 percent in 2017, according to new analysis from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The study, which is the first attempt by the Australian government to estimate the size of the black market, found that "prices for legal tobacco products have almost tripled since December 2016 driven by annual tobacco excise increases, while estimated prices of illicit tobacco products have remained relatively constant." Since 2020, household spending on legal cigarettes and tobacco has almost halved, but between 2017 and 2025, the amount of nicotine consumed in Australia has risen by almost 40 percent.

You don't expect a prohibitive tax to be a revenue tax, but in Australia the tax is stimulating sales of pinstriped suits and violin cases, or something.

Australia's collapsing legal tobacco market has come with a far darker consequence: a severe wave of gang violence, including firebombings and shootings. Since 2023, organized crime groups linked to Australia's illicit tobacco and vape market have been tied to "more than 200 firebombings," "at least 3 homicides," and "multiple other non-fatal violent attacks," according to the Australian Intelligence Commission.

"It's hard to see how it could get any worse," Rohan Pike, a former Australian Federal Police detective and Border Force member, tells Reason. Pike, who created and led Australia's Illicit Tobacco Strike Team, says the violence is now an "old-fashioned turf war" and that criminal gangs, attracted by the profits, are fighting to control distribution.

Pike says criminal groups are opening pop-up convenience stores, intimidating legitimate retailers into selling their products, and backing up those threats with "firebombings and other types of violence." Organized crime syndicates have destroyed hundreds of tobacconists, convenience stores, and hospitality venues, forcing legitimate businesses out. "Every part of the tobacco control policy is uncontrolled at the moment," says Pike.

Apparently, the bootleggers hope to stay in business even if the taxes go away. "It will be far more difficult to move customers out of the thriving black market that the taxes have created than it would have been in the first place."

So much for those rules and permissions.

THEY DON'T BUY CARS.

Years ago, one of the senior executives at a Detroit car company was showing off some new machine tools to a representative of the United Auto Workers.  They never show up hung over, or malinger, or go on strike, he crowed.  The union representative thought he got off a good riposte with the line that introduces this post.

THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HAS A TRUTH PROBLEM.

The latest salvo in the tussle between the communist and corporatist wings of the Donkey Party comes from Ralph Brauer, complete with Lenin cap in his portrait, asserting "The Democratic Party Has a History Problem."  It's more complaining about the Donks' unproductive post-mortem evaluation of their presidential loss.  "Party leadership needs to study and learn from what the Wall Street wing has cost in terms of lost elections and the increasing tilt of the playing field."

Comrade Brauer buries the lede.  "Today most of us would stumble over trying to define the Democratic Party in one sentence, but one can easily do that for the Republicans—less taxes, less government. With the midterms six months away, this lack of a unified message already has the faithful worried."

NOW DO HEALTH CARE.

The strong libertarian position on positive rights bestowed by government is that they involve the conscription of others.

In "The Impossibility of Endless, Cheap Gas," a Common Dreams contributor who majored in sociology grasps that point, at least in the special case of energy.  Yes, she starts with the recognition that oil is most likely an exhaustible resource (although the Hotelling price pattern that provides incentives to optimally conserve and to develop backstop technologies has not yet presented itself) she then acknowledges the labor of others.

Access to cheap fuel is not a right. It is a subsidy built on violence, both societal and environmental harm. The price of cheap oil is exploitation and death, including death of children and the destabilization of our climate, which all risk future generations’ viability on Earth. In the face of such consequences, surely we can do better.

It's asking too much for the lady to acknowledge the "exploitation and death" inherent in the mullahs looking the other way while infidel oil transited the Strait of Hormuz while the infidels looked the other way while the mullahs used their oil money to exploit their people and fund gangbangers masquerading as religious nationalists throughout Asia Minor.  It's certainly too much to point out that access to college, or medical services, or Doritos, is no more a right than access to cheap fuel is, nor that such access is also a subsidy built on violence.

LET'S GET THE TAX INCIDENCE RIGHT.

It's not easy, and polemical editorials such as National Review's "The Rich Already Pay More Than Their ‘Fair Share’" don't help.  Their focus, as one well might expect shortly after April 15, is on income taxes.

As of the most recent federal tax data from 2023, the top 1 percent of taxpayers earned 21 percent of all adjusted gross income in the country. That’s a lot of money for a small number of people, no doubt about it. But this same group of highest earners paid 38 percent of all federal income taxes collected, almost double their share of income. Those earners between the top 5 percent and 1 percent also made outsized contributions, paying 21 percent of income taxes on 16 percent of national income. The entire bottom half of taxpayers, meanwhile, paid just 3 percent of total income taxes.

Governments also impose taxes on consumption and wealth, and much of the political economy of tax policy is about the phenomenon with which the editors close their essay.

Value created by entrepreneurs is not the government’s money to seize at will. All lawful wealth either is the result of post-tax savings and investment or will eventually be taxed when it translates into income. However much is left belongs rightfully to the owner.

Governments in a free society should tax their citizens only as much as necessary, and as evenly as possible. Under that standard, the richest Americans have already exceeded their obligation to the public.

I have no doubt that the editors are taking incoming from people who note favorable tax treatment of capital gains and the existence of trusts and carve-outs for some of the value of inherited property.

GIVE EMERGENCE A CHANCE.

The latest issue of Journal of Economic Perspectives, which the American Economic Association post on the public viewing part of their web pages, features a "Competition in Health Care" Symposium in the latest issue.  It is that Journal's practice to group several papers into a themed symposium, and the papers address a multiplicity of ways in which trade-tested betterments might emerge, or not.

A PRODUCTIVE PERSON'S FAIR SHARE OF TAXES IS NEVER ENOUGH.

Reason's Robby Soave notes, "The rich pay more than their 'fair share.'"  You'll get no disagreement here.

Reyanna James of the Institute for Policy Studies predictably disagrees.  "The rich pay more because they have more. But they don’t pay more at levels sufficient to counterbalance their outsized gains."  In her attempt at tax incidence, she concedes precisely my assertion.

[Tax Foundation] framing leaves out a critical part of the story. Yes, the wealthy pay more in taxes than everyone else. The real question: whether they’re paying enough, their fair share relative to their rapidly growing share of our nation’s income and wealth. By that measure, the answer must be a clear no. The US tax system, the underlying data show, remains far less progressive than it once was—and far less effective at counteracting inequality than it needs to be.

Tax incidence is messy, and distinguishing stocks from flows is hard, but never let that get in the way of The Narrative.

Wealth remains lightly taxed compared to income, and many forms of capital income, to make matters worse, enjoy low preferential tax rates or taxes that can be deferred indefinitely. The end result: The overall tax burden on America’s richest is failing to keep pace with their expanding economic power.

The distortions become even clearer when we look beyond the top 1% to the tippy top of our wealth distribution, the top 0.01%. These ultra-wealthy households have seen extraordinary gains in both income and wealth over time. But their tax contributions have not kept up proportionally.

Nor, under her policy prescription, can that ever be fixed.

The rich pay more because they have more. But they don’t pay more at levels sufficient to counterbalance their outsized gains. In 2023, the top 1% captured about 20.6% of pre-tax income and still held roughly 17.7% after federal income taxes, only a modest reduction. That after-tax share is still higher than their 17.4% share of pre-tax income in 2001, underscoring how little the tax system has done to curb the growing concentration of income at the top.

Reversing these trends will require more than modest tweaks to the tax code. It will take a more ambitious approach, one that directly addresses both income and wealth concentration at the very top. Until then, claims that the tax system is adequately progressive risk obscuring a deeper reality: Inequality continues to widen, and the tax code is doing too little to stop it.

In the same way that a "fair share" of taxes is never enough, an increase in wealth might always be "outsized" in some reckoning.

LET'S PUT A PIN IN THIS.

Mamdani's grocery store will fail.  In The Daily Economy, Jimmy Licon gets to the heart of the matter.  "Without price signals and profit discipline, inefficiency isn’t a risk — it’s a guarantee. Persistent higher costs leave taxpayers with the bill."

Now it might be that New Yorkers' tax dollars will offer the wretched of East Harlem relief at the checkout counter.  Existing grocers in the neighborhood are calling attention.

Mayor Mamdani's plan to open a city-run grocery store is facing pushback from East Harlem grocers, who say the area is already saturated.

About 45 grocery stores are within a 35-minute walk of the proposed site. pic.twitter.com/X2E33bEjM8

— Amanda Macias (@amanda_m_macias) May 5, 2026

Best case scenario, the mayor can point to his constituents "benefitting" from the lower sticker prices at Gastronom N^o. 1, while those exploitive capitalists lose business, and people in Chappaqua and Scarsdale and East Otto pick up the tab.

Even if shoppers save a dollar over Food Bazaar, that pound of apples will include appropriated tax dollars, food waste, labor distortions, and a thousand other costs that will make it wildly more expensive than the sticker would indicate. The real price is far more expensive than a market competitor’s, even if the shelf price doesn’t show it.

And over time, it's likely that Gastronom N^o. 1 will become even more a drain on those taxpayers.

The price of apples is a secret language, the communication of a billion bits of dispersed, organic, intuitive knowledge of costs, trade-offs, and alternatives. All that information, over time and geography, quietly working away in the minds of Washington apple growers and migrant fruit pickers, beekeepers and cider makers, interstate truck drivers and NYC shelf stockers, is infused into the price sticker on a pound of apples in a market-driven grocery store. And Mamdani, like hubristic dreamers before him, thinks he can wipe all that away, slap on a price that looks like success to the voters, and hide all the rest in your tax bill.

Whose tax bill, though?  Isn't New York already shedding population and tax base?

APRIL MEANS TAXING TIMES.

In Reason, George Mason economist Veronique de Rugy offers five tax myths.

1.  The Rich Don't Pay Their Fair Share.
2.  We'll Fix the Budget Deficit by Taxing the Rich.
3.  If You Can't Tax the Rich, Tax Corporations.
4.  Capital Gains Should Be Taxed Like Ordinary Income.
5.  Tax Cuts Pay For Themselves. 

It's worth reading through her elaborations in full, and, yes, the political economy of taxation does not favor either Democrats or Republicans.  I'd note further that while she compares flows with flows in evaluating only income taxation in her first point, governments tax consumption and wealth as well as income: consider sales taxes, particularly those that vary by type of good, e.g. no tax on food at the grocery store and high taxes on food at restaurants (I'm looking at you, DeKalb, Illinois) and property taxes, which is to say, the way in which localities fund their schools, and which can be assessed on other personal property, consider registering your automobile or your boat.

Her third and fourth points get into the weeds of tax incidence, which makes reckoning exactly how much of a corporate profit tax is borne by its owners rather than its suppliers or workers: and that spills over into determining how much appreciation of capital has already been taxed in other ways.

On his Substack, David Henderson offers four technical thoughts about taxation.

1.  High marginal tax rates cause economic harm.
2.  High tax rates also cause tax avoidance.
3.  Making tax rates the same would likely reduce the demand for government spending.
4.  Most people, not just high-income people, think a proportional tax on income is more fair than a graduated tax with higher rates for higher-income people.

The first and second points are related, with the economic harm presenting as excess burden and the tax avoidance presenting as people changing their behavior in addition to looking for ways to shelter income, which Milton Friedman once quipped was "losing money in order to pay less tax" or words to that effect, and both of those distinct from, oh, in Steve Martin fashion, making a million dollars and not paying any taxes on it.  I'd like to see stronger support for the third and fourth points.  The third, in particular, suggests that politicians promise pie in the sky that some fellow behind the tree will pay for.

TRADE THEORY IS TRANSPORTATION THEORY.

Higher transportation costs have the same effect as tariffs.  The academic study of international trade and finance generally considers a different class of problems than the academic study either of industrial location or of transportation.  In part that is because some problems of international trade and finance are tractable using a general equilibrium framework, while problems of industrial location and transportation involve nonconvexities that foul the works where general equilibrium is concerned.  Paul Krugman, qua regional economist (rather than in his court-intellectual-for-Democrats role) has done good work on urban and regional economics that exploits some of the insights from trade theory.

General equilibrium models of trade tend to abstract from transportation costs in contemplating the effects of tariffs or factor intensity or factor price equalization.  To a first approximation, though, we can evaluate the effects of space on wage and price differentials in the same way that we'd evaluate a tariff: prices differ by transportation costs, and a tariff has a further effect on price differences on the dock of the exporting country and offloaded at the importing country.  Heck, "tariff" refers both to a schedule of import duties and a table of transportation rates.

PROGRESSIVISM PRODUCES PENURY.

In "The Iran War Reveals a Global Chokepoint," Common Dreams contributor Richard Heinberg admits as much.  "The current fixation of world attention on the Strait of Hormuz should remind us of the inherent brittleness of an economy in which our food and energy security, and our livelihoods, are intertwined with depleting and polluting resources and expectations of perpetual growth."  If you don't ask too much of his essay, there is wisdom in it.  "The more extensive the market, the finer a division of labour is possible.  That's generally for the good, but what happens when the s**t hits the fan?"

That question of the delivery trucks not coming turned from online musings to messy reality a couple years later, when the politicians panicked and cities had to make do with stocks of toilet paper, and sometimes foodstuffs, on hand.  But if you're contributing to Common Dreams, you think that reducing the carbon footprint of the civilized word is a good thing for its own sake.  Helium and fertilizers, as well as sweet crude oil, transit the strait, and what's left of the mullahcracy seems bent on flipping their remaining drones and antiship missiles that way.  Now is the time, this Heinberg fellow asserts, to reduce our dependence on shipping through the strait.

These developments underscore a message that we at Post Carbon Institute have been repeating for over two decades. Oil and other fossil fuels are the basis of the modern industrial economy. They’re polluting, but they’re also depleting. And in the case of oil (and, increasingly, natural gas) they’re internationally traded at massive scales, raising geopolitical risks. This is a system destined to fail.

But when? During and shortly after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the all-time peak in world conventional oil production seemed to be at hand.

pppIt wasn't.  But the real kicker comes at the end of the essay.

The current fixation of world attention on the Strait of Hormuz should remind us of the inherent brittleness of an economy in which our food and energy security, and our livelihoods, are intertwined with depleting and polluting resources and expectations of perpetual growth. More chokepoints loom.

As always, we advise community resilience as the best strategy for coping with what’s coming. Localize production and consumption, reduce your dependency on global supply chains, and get to know your neighbors.

Reduce the extent of the markets, reduce the division of labor, revert to the living standards of the early nineteenth century, before steamships and railroads.  So it always is with these environmentalist true believers.  Hard pass.

A SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL.

Adam Smith's An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations first hit the booksellers on 9 March 1776.  Donald "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux links to a longer celebration of the work, headlined, "Wealth has causes, poverty doesn't."  A quarter millennium later, we still have Excessively Earnest People who conflate "wealth" with "having money."  Sorry, no.  It doesn't help, though, for enthusiasts for the minimal state to write, as Reason's J. D. Tuccille does, "Smith's book reminds us that unfettered societies are both good and productive, and that free trade produces the best outcomes for all."  That "unfettered" does a lot of damage as people conflate "minimal constraints" with "absence of constraints."  Old John Adams had the logic of the Scottish Enlightenment straight with his "Our Constitution Was Made Only for a Moral and Religious People."  Yes, the Men of System make a hash out of much of what they attempt to Do For Our Good, and yes, it is on those of us who understand and bet on emergence to put checks on those Men of System.  And yet, Mark Skousen summarized the case without the fetters implied in the careless use of "unfettered" or "unregulated" in two sentences.  "Smith’s ‘system of natural liberty’ depends on three pillars — maximum individual liberty, tempered by justice (rule of law) and robust competition.  Competition acts as a moral regulator by disciplining greed and channelling self-interest into socially beneficial outcomes."

SNOW CLEARING MAKES DRIVERS LESS VIGILANT.

Well, why not?  Automobiles go faster because they have brakes, and safety appliances make drivers less vigilant.  So, too, with snow clearance.

Perversely, aggressive winter road treatments with salt—beyond their documented harm to the environment, infrastructure of all kinds, and human health—also appear to make us less safe by converting icy conditions into wet ones. Not because of the treatment itself but, I believe, because it diminishes the natural traffic-calming effect of snow and ice. It shifts us from cautious drivers in slick conditions—who simply cannot drive too fast for those conditions—back into ordinary drivers on over-designed roads.

Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns has previously written about the increase in traffic injuries and fatalities that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how the actual cause of increased danger was reduced congestion and therefore greater freedom to drive at unsafe speeds on roads that were designed to prioritize speed over safety. I believe these statistics about winter driving reflect the same phenomenon. As with crashes in congested traffic, winter weather crashes, while possibly more frequent, tend to occur at slower speeds and are correspondingly less deadly.

Winter weather causes all of us to drive carefully and patiently, alert for the unexpected. It reduces the illusory margin of safety provided by wide lanes and excessive shoulders. Just as snow throws leafless trees into stark relief against a background of white, so it also exposes the dangers of conventional roadway design.

That's not a surprise.  "The safer people perceive their cars to be, the more risks they take with them."  But fitting passenger automobiles with a spear on the steering column to encourage less aggressive acceleration and braking, or using cosmetic curves, trees, the full suite of traffic taming methods, all of which produce fewer crashes and longer travel times, are not easy policies to sell.

THE ADVERTISING PRISONERS' DILEMMA.

I was under the impression that metaphor was well-known.  There's a Minimal Publishable Unit, at least, in rediscovering it.

Auto insurance companies are some of the largest advertisers, with top brands spending upward of $1.5 billion per year, even though they’re household names. When Geico runs another spot featuring its ubiquitous gecko mascot, or Progressive cranks out another Flo ad, are they wasting their money?

“That’s where the puzzle starts,” says Navdeep Sahni, a professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business. After a century of research on advertising, scholars still don’t have an empirically solid grasp of exactly how or why it works. One leading theory suggests that advertisements provide consumers with new information. If that’s the case, why do the most prominent brands need to advertise? Another influential theory suggests that advertisements create associations in consumers’ minds, hitching a particular brand to a category.

“But if you push that thinking further, it doesn’t actually tell you what to expect,” Sahni says. “If you’re primed to think about Geico, that might also make you think about Progressive because the two things are associated. Or it might make you think about Progressive less. The theory isn’t diagnostic or precise in what it says.”

Sahni and doctoral candidate Yifan Yang go a long way toward resolving these issues in a new working paper that shows the dramatic benefit of auto insurance advertising. They found that ads not only boost visits to an advertiser’s website but also interfere with consumers’ recall of alternative brands, dislodging the competition from their minds. The findings help explain why spending millions on repetitive campaigns, even by well-known brands, is essential to remaining in people’s memories.

Some of what the researchers did to influence their research subjects to follow insurance company links comes close to treating those shoppers as fish to be hooked.  That concluding paragraph suggests the repeated prisoners' dilemma is at work: although the messages look duplicative and repetitive (and among the property and casualty insurance companies, often silly) they serve as counter-programming to the other company's silly messages.  Although their work is about strategies for staying in consumers' minds, and they wonder if the work generalizes, their discussion does not contemplate another possibility, which is that repeated advertising is an expensive signal of permanence.  Ask yourself, as Steven Landsburg once did in his Armchair Economist, whether a fly-by-night company would hire a celebrity to endorse a product of unknown quality.