Peter's Blog

Labor Day’s History of Violence

Every first Monday in September, Americans get a three-day weekend. Barbecues fire up, stores run sales, and politicians give speeches about “the dignity of work.” Labor Day is sold as a straightforward tribute to the American worker. But, as with most official retellings of historical turning points, the real history of Labor Day is a […]

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 […]

Follow the Risk

Tracing the distribution of risk is an important method that is helpful for understanding the trade-offs of any government action. Almost every government action reduces risk for some group and repackages the risk and forces another group to bear it. The government often serves as a hedge against risk, but it is important to understand […]

US Patent System Helps China Catch Up

Although patent law is supported by many different factions as necessary to incentivize innovation, they are actually slowing down the rate of American innovation and damaging our competitiveness with China. It is right for companies to profit from the ideas that they came up with, but the cost of government-created monopoly makes our current patent […]

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 […]

The Singularity and Externalities

The unique dangers of artificial intelligence are often used to argue that development should be taken out of the hands of profit-driven private actors. The government is presented as a force for good that can develop AI responsibly for the common good. While this line of reasoning can soothe the minds of well-meaning citizens, it […]

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 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 Controls Can’t Make World Cup Tickets Affordable

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 […]