Peter's Blog

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

Governments consistently believe they can outlaw the law of supply and demand, and Ontario’s price caps on World Cup resale tickets are only the latest example. The predictable result is not fairer prices but a black market, proving once again that intervention does not eliminate scarcity, it just pushes the exchange underground. The following article […]

Austrian economist Murray Rothbard famously described government as a large and successful criminal gang, arguing that it relies on coercion and violence to achieve its ends. The Microsoft antitrust case of the late 1990s illustrates this concept, as the government used its power to target a successful private company for alleged anticompetitive practices. By threatening […]

As wealth inequality continues to rise, many are quick to blame billionaires for society’s ills. However, focusing on individual wealthy people obscures the underlying institutional factors that shape economic outcomes. Rather than vilifying the rich, we should examine how government policies and central bank interventions create perverse incentives that concentrate wealth and distort markets. The […]