Peter's Blog

How Regulation Creates the Illusion of Competition

Politicians consistently defend business regulation as a shield for consumers, but the airline, healthcare, and banking industries show how these rules actually protect incumbent firms from real competition. The result is a state-enforced cartel that limits market entry, keeps service quality at the regulatory floor rather than pushing it higher, and leaves consumers footing the […]

The Dangerous Politics of Techno-Asset Inflation

Monetary inflation and technological revolution have combined to produce dangerous asset bubbles throughout history, from the precious-metal inflows and printing press of the Northern Renaissance to today’s digital-era boom in equities and speculative assets. The technology-driven productivity gains mask rising prices in goods markets, giving central banks cover to keep interest rates artificially low, fuel […]

The Federal Reserve’s Independence Is an Illusion

The Fed’s supposed independence from the Treasury has always been more rhetoric than reality, and recent friction between Treasury Secretary Bessent and the Fed over currency intervention shows how that rhetoric bends whenever cooperation is convenient. The claimed separation lets both institutions share credit when policy succeeds and deflect blame onto each other when it […]

The Regulatory State’s Hidden Agenda

Regulation is routinely sold to the public as consumer protection, but its actual effect is to shield incumbent firms from competition by controlling who may enter a market and how they may operate. The airline industry illustrates this dynamic well, where a state-organized cartel produces the illusion of competing brands while regulatory minimums quietly become […]

When Progress Becomes Anti-Progress

Modern institutions have embraced the belief that more data, more regulation, and more centralized coordination will always produce better outcomes, but that assumption is increasingly running into its own limits. As bureaucracies drown in information they cannot meaningfully interpret, the very mechanisms built to improve performance begin producing the opposite result, a phenomenon that undermines […]

Trump’s New Era of Political Capitalism

The Trump administration has taken equity stakes in roughly 30 American companies, effectively turning the Commerce Department into a political venture capitalist rather than a neutral overseer of markets. Critics across the political spectrum warn that this arrangement distorts capital allocation by signaling government backing for favored firms, pulling investment away from businesses that succeed […]

Why We Keep Falling for War

Wars are consistently sold to the public on false or misleading pretexts, and the true beneficiaries are rarely the citizens asked to fight and pay for them but the politicians, financiers, and military-industrial interests who profit regardless of outcome. Statist ideology and nationalism condition people to accept these sacrifices, obscuring the reality that the state’s […]

Why Socialism Prioritizes Control Over Prosperity

Socialists rarely abandon their ideology no matter how badly socialist economies perform, and that persistence makes sense once the goal is understood as the establishment of state control rather than genuine prosperity. Even the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ongoing crisis in Venezuela have failed to move true believers, who simply argue that […]

The Democratic Socialist Roots of California’s Housing Crisis

California’s housing shortage did not emerge from free markets failing, but from decades of policy that let neighborhood groups and environmental regulators substitute their preferences for property owners’ rights to build. Discretionary permitting, CEQA lawsuits, and a no-growth ideology born from the 1960s effectively socialized private property, and sky-high home prices in cities like San […]

Price Stability, Economic Instability: The Fed’s Contradiction

The Fed insists that a stable price level is the mark of a healthy economy, but stability in the headline number tells us nothing about the money supply distortions happening underneath it. Chasing a two percent target still requires manipulating interest rates and credit creation, and it is precisely that manipulation, not the price index, […]