Ian Welsh – The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 31, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025

Company headed by Trump-pardoned Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy wins $106 million federal prison contract

[Guardian, Drop Site Daily: May 28, 2026]

LEO Technologies, a Texas-based AI company founded and led by Elliott Broidy—a Republican fundraiser pardoned by President Donald Trump on his last day in office in 2021, days before Broidy was to be sentenced for secretly lobbying the Trump administration on behalf of Chinese and Malaysian interests—won a $106 million contract from the Bureau of Prisons to translate, transcribe, and monitor prison phone calls using artificial intelligence last month, the Guardian reported. The contract marks LEO’s first with the federal government. Broidy, who has twice pleaded guilty to separate criminal offenses.

The White House Intervened to Get a $620 Million Deal for a Company Tied to Donald Trump Jr.

Robert Faturechi, May 28, 2026 [propublica.org]

Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump Are Running a $1.2 Billion Felony Fraud Scheme that is Fully Prosecutable in New York.

Christopher Armitage, May 24, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]

Other crypto founders are serving eight, twelve, and twenty-five years in prison for the same conduct. The only thing that separates the Trump sons from those men is their last name.

How Trump Created a Slush Fund for His Allies – The President may have committed the rare offense that turns Republican lawmakers against him.

Ruth Marcus, May 24, 2026 [The New Yorker]

Trump’s Jan. 6 slush fund is right from Hitler’s playbook! This is not a coincidence

Dean Obeidallah, May 25, 2026

It was about a year after Jan. 6 that I first raised red flags in both articles and on my SiriusXM radio show that Donald Trump would be increasingly defending and even praising the Jan. 6 terrorists. That was way before Trump was calling them “patriots,” pardoned them or recently erased their crimes from the DOJ website and created his $1.8 billion terrorist slush fund to reward them.

The reason I raised that concern is not because I’m some type of political version of Nostradamus. Rather it’s because I have read a great deal about the history of fascist leaders and spoken to many experts.

That history was telling us that Trump would not reject the J6 terrorists but instead embrace, celebrate and honor those who helped him wage his failed coup. After all, it’s exactly what Adolph Hitler did after his 1923 failed coup known as the “Beer Hall Putsch.”….

Here’s the Real Reason Pam Bondi is Returning to the Trump Regime

Dean Obeidallah, May 28, 2026

On Wednesday, we learned that fired Attorney General Pam Bondi was returning to work for the Trump regime. However, this time no longer as the corrupt administration’s top attorney but as a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) that will focus on Artificial Intelligence….

But why would Bondi—who has no experience in the AI area—be appointed to this board by Trump and get a hero’s welcome?! Well former prosecutor Glenn Kirschner has a theory—and it’s one that resonates with me.

Glenn’s view it’s likely two reasons. First, “This is probably a wonderful opportunity to grift Should someone be interested in doing just that,” Kirschner commented.

And second—and this is the big one—”Pam Bondi knows where all the Epstein bodies are buried and Trump wants to keep her close.” Ding! Ding! Ding! That sounds like a winner. This is especially true given Bondi will testify Friday, May 29 before the House Oversight committee. (Obviously, the timing of the new gig is not a coincidence!)

And as I have written about in the past, Bondi served as Florida’s Attorney General from 2011 to 2019 at the very time Epstein was operating his massive child rape and women sex trafficking ring in that very state. Yet Bondi NEVER investigated Epstein despite there being more one thousand victims. That was clearly a decision by her in an effort to protect Trump and other powerful men….

We also discussed Trump DOJ’s latest actions to cover up the Jan. 6 crimes. This comes in the form of Acting AG Todd Blanche deleting a massive number of Jan. 6 related files from the DOJ website about the people charged and convicted of crimes—including those who brutally beat up police officers like Michael Fanone.

Some of the records Blanche deleted–as NPR reported— include:

Daniel Rodriguez, who pleaded guilty to driving an electroshock device into the neck of former Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department officer Michael Fanone, and who was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison.

Thomas Webster, who was convicted by a jury of assaulting law enforcement with a metal flagpole, tackling a police officer to the ground and trying to remove the officer’s gas mask. Webster was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Peter Schwartz, who was convicted by a jury of assaulting police officers with pepper spray and throwing a metal chair at law enforcement. Schwartz was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

And DOJ is bragging about this erasure of records saying in a statement they are “proud” to strip the “DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.” The goal in deleting these records is not just part of the effort to rewrite Jan. 6. It’s also to make it more difficult for the media and public to uncover the crimes committed by Trump’s followers—especially since he is on the verge of giving them a huge pay day with his $1.8 billion terrorist slush fund….

How the War on Terror Created the Age of Trump (W/ Matt Kennard)

Chris Hedges, May 27, 2026

Matt Kennard shows in his new book that the bipartisan War on Terror laid the groundwork for the Trump presidency and the rise of fascism — now, with extremists empowered, we face the consequences.

Trump’s $250 Greenback Is a Gift to the Criminal Class

Timothy Noah, May 28, 2026 [The New Republic]

National Park Entrance Fees Are Funding Trump’s D.C. Projects

[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 05-29-2026]

Strategic Political Economy

GRAPH: Not All Oil Is the Same (types of oil)

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 05-26-2026]

The Mystery Gasoline Surcharge: How Oil Incumbents Are Trying to Maintain Fossil Fuel Dominance

Matt Stoller, May 29, 2026 [BIG]

Among American elites, there appears to be an aggressive embrace of new technologies, whether crypto, generative artificial intelligence, or automated systems in war. But there is an important exception. If you deploy energy systems at scale that compete with fossil fuels, you will be ignored. The reason is both the narrative power of oil companies, and the Trump administration’s view that fossil fuel infrastructure is a deep source of American strength.

What’s interesting about this dynamic is that clean tech systems – batteries, solar panels, electric vehicles – are having real impacts, far more measurable than crypto or AI. Here is a chart of annualized gasoline sales in California, which has dropped by 2.5 billion gallons a year since 2019, despite more cars on the road. And California is leading the way in America; a quarter of new cars there are electric….

[TW: I have not yet come across a book that, imho, adequately explains the proper principles of political economy for a republic. I have been pondering these principles since it became clear around 2009-2010 that President Obama and the Democratic Party leadership had no intention of imposing accountability and justice on the financial predators who had created the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Among the principles of political economy of civic republicanism I have identified are

[1. Scientific and technology progress are fundamental and essential to a republic’s economic health (note I do not use the term “economic growth” here).

[2. Because private enterprise, in reality, is mostly risk averse and therefore unwilling to invest in breakthrough science and unproven technology, one major responsibility of the national government is to encourage and support scientific endeavors and the development of new technologies — including outright funding. First Secretary of the Treasury was explicit about this in hid December 1791 Report to Congress on the Subject of Manufactures, which carefully and thoroughly refuted the “free enterprise” and “free trade” nostrums of British empire factotum Adam Smith. Point number 2 is reflected repeatedly in the history of how nations actually industrialized, including

USA’s deliberate seeding of new armory machine tool technology into the rest of the economy in the early 1800s (which created the bases for modern industrial mass production);
the massive land giveaways that supported the development of nationwide rail networks in the mid-1800s;
outright national funding of the telegraph and infant electricidal industry;
agricultural research and development, including fighting pests and diseases, and identification and support of new crop breeds;
outright government funding of the road and highway network that made possible the widespread use of automotive technology;
early funding and continued support for aviation and aerospace technology;
the development of transistors, integrated circuits, computers and the internet.

[To use Marxist phraseology, it is the political superstructure — the government — that most often creates and determines new means of production — the exact opposite of the disastrously erroneous Marxist view of reality.

[3. Unfortunately, though it is government support which creates new industries, new companies and huge private fortunes, the human faults of avarice, lust for power, pride end up transforming these new industries, new companies and new private fortunes into opponents of further change to the means of production. When this inevitably occurs, Marxist analysis of how the means of production determines the political superstructure tends to reflect reality with more fidelity than other forms of economic analysis.

[4. Therefore, a republic must always take steps and impose measures to limit the accumulation of wealth, the translation of wealth into political power, and misuse of the political system by concentrations of wealth and the morbidly rich. The argument that every billionaire is a policy failure must be fleshed out by developing this framework of civic republican political economy. Much of the history of neoclassical and Austrian economic thinking is a series of case studies in how concentrations of wealth and the morbidly rich used academia to develop schools of political economy which justified selfish behavior and concentrations of wealth, and in effect suppress and bury a decent exploration and consideration of civic republican political economy.

[5. Civic republican political economy therefore demands making moral judgements about what is good and bad for the preservation and development of human existence. Preserving the use of fossil fuels endangers human life istelf and is therefore bad. Remember that two of the basic principles of civic republicanism are justice, and the General Welfare. Gambling, prediction markets, crypto, and artificial intelligence should all be rigorously subjected to moral judging. Markets cannot and will not do this. The essence of the evil of neoliberal and neoclassical economics is that they use mathematical certainty as a facade to evade moral judgement.

[Though it omits any consideration of government’s role in supporting the early development of the petroleum industry, Stoller’s article is an excellent case study of how an industry, once mature, becomes a force for oligarchy and against republican governance. – TW]

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On May 30, 2026

17 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Closer to the End of Credit Cycle Phase Two

By Sean Paul Kelley

On May 29, 2026

8 Comments

~by Sean Paul Kelley

For the first time in this Credit Cycle more money is leaving private credit than is going in.

In Q1 2026, $7 billion left non-publicly traded BDCs (business development companies, ie. private credit shops) while they only raised about $5 billion. Total redemption requests from investors to private credit shops topped $15 billion.

Okay class, a little math. If $7 billion was cashed out, only $5 billion was raised then $8 billion of redemption demands were denied investors. That means investors were denied 53% of their redemption requests. (One might call that a run on the bank.)

Systemic Deterioration

We’re talking about the entire private credit industry, here. Not just a bad loan or failing borrower. It’s becoming systemic.

“If there were no war,” as Herr Tarman at Deutschbank said, “in the Persian Gulf this would be dominating the news cycle.”

What makes this very, very bad is when more money leaves the private credit system, sales are forced.

These are not voluntary sales or trades. They are forced, essentially they are margin calls, except, as Bloomberg pointed out, some sales sell for .98¢ on the $1, others sell for .90¢, but one forced sale went real bad for the private credit firm. They got .65¢ on the $1.

That’s a 35% loss. I can recover from a 15% loss but losing 35%? Nope. That’s a busted investment I’m never getting my principal back on. This activity has a name, one rarely uttered on Wall Street, as it is the market equivalent of screaming, “Voldemort,” on the floor of the NYSE.

This is what we in the business call “Accelerating Downside Price Discovery.” (Honestly, last time this happened was in 2008 and I got giddy. I love seeing fools lose boatloads of money. The schadenfreude works like an aphrodisiac on me!)

Accelerating downside price discovery creates a vicious downward cycle in credit markets and later in equity markets. Assets devalue. Private credit shops announce bankruptcy. Lots of people lose jobs.

Then equities decline, soon the investment (Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs) and commercial (JPM Morgan Chase, BoA and Wells Fargo) banks crater. In February 2009 I bought an enormous amount of Bank of America at $6 a share. A month later it was trading at $3.50-ish. I was biting my fingernails for sure. But, ten years later I sold it for almost $30 a share. But for ten years the stock traded sideways. So did the equity markets. The Fed’s QE–quantitative easing–made money virtually free and no one paid a price for the sub-prime fiasco.

This time will be different. No one understands what private credit does, except buy up empty houses and make the housing crisis worse.

Petroleum And Economywide Demand Destruction

Another consequence: This credit cycle is ending and oil futures are flashing a clear deflationary spiral. This is why I keep pointing out the long end of the WTI Oil futures price contracts going out a year. Here is why oil matters:

In Mid-August US petroleum reserves (non SPR) will fall to 390 million barrels. Today that number is 440mln barrels.

For refineries, pipelines, storage tanks, and terminals to function the system needs a minimum of 380mln barrels in reserve. If reserves fall below that level getting petrol from point A to B is like pushing a string, instead of pumping a viscous liquid.

Let’s do some simple math. We export 5mln barrels a week, plus or minus a million. The US uses 120million barrels a week. Subtract our exports over the next ten weeks. That’s 5×10=50 mln barrels pulled out of the reserve. Subtract 50 mln barrels from present reservers (non SPR) gets us within the margin of error at 390mln barrels. At this rate US petroleum and gasoline reserves will be at crisis levels in mid-August.

And herein lies the big rub, the dilemma of dilemmas, caught between Scylla and Charybdis: how can the Fed backstop a credit crisis with easy credit (because only easy credit solves a credit crisis) when its fighting phantom inflation with high rates, ie. tight credit? It cannot do both. Picture clearing up now?

I’ve been explaining the imminent unraveling of this credit crisis here at Ian’s for at least two months now. Today we’re closer to the end of Phase Two of the Credit Cycle now than we are to its start. When Phase Two unravels fully, that’s when the AI bubble goes pop.

When will that be?

Sooner than we want, but not as quickly as we fear.

“Cowboy up,” folks, as we say down here in Texas, “you’re going to need a raincoat.”

In Defence of Le Mot Juste

By Sean Paul Kelley

On May 28, 2026

15 Comments

~by Sean Paul Kelley

My mother and I got into it yesterday about writing.

Now, I adore my mother: she’s fantastic; most of the time.

Yesterday, however, she took issue with my word usage.

Preface: Mom is Catholic. Went to Catholic high school and university. She knows her St. Thomas Aquinas, Grotius, Pascal, and a good smattering of just war theory. She’s good coming heavy with the ethics when I screw up, Buddhist or not. When she aims, she doesn’t miss.

12 lbs of joy and discovery

So in an email yesterday we were discussing Catholic and Buddhist ethics. Mom wanted to know specifically how Buddhists view the Three Soures of Catholic Morality. I resisted a flashback to Sister Agnes and the 12 inch wood ruler with which she routinely slapped my hand. Transgression, unknown. She was a sadist but I learned my Latin declensions perfectly, especially for pain: dolor, masculine, Third declension”

Dolor, doloris, dolori, dolorem, dolore, dolor

But I digress. . .

“In Catholicism,” my Mom wrote, “for an action to be morally good the object, the intent and the circumstance must all be morally sound or the action is corrupted.”

“Interesting that there are three sources in Catholicism, because in Buddhism ethics are rooted in the Noble Eightfold Path through three main components: right speech, right action, right livelihood,” I replied. “However, to achieve merit and harmony in Buddhism one is not required to act in a supererogatory manner, whereas some Catholic actions imply it.”

She laid into me in the next email. “See, you’re grandstanding–she meant grandiloquent, a vice I am very guilty of–with your words again,” she said. “What does that even mean? It sounds like something out of the Kama Sutra!”

“First, the Kama Sutra is Hindu. Second, what did I say?” I replied.

“You’re a word snob. Supererogatory is what you wrote. What does that even mean?”

“Mom, it’s actually a Catholic concept,” I replied. “It’s something that is morally good, but not required to be done; it is to go above and beyond what is morally or ethically required.”

“Why didn’t you just say that?” She said.

“Why use eleven words when one gets the job done?”

And then I mouthed off to her, like a dumb-ass.

“How hard is it to use a dictionary app on your iPhone?”

“If you weren’t an adult I’d beat you, right now.”

“I know, Mom, but still. I’m a logophile, a verbivore. I can’t help myself.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“I love you too.”

Gustave Flaubert believed in the perfect word in the perfect place.

So do I.

Western AI Investors Are the Dumbest Money In The World

By Ian Welsh

On May 27, 2026

33 Comments

Regular readers will know that ever since Deepseek came out, with token costs of three to five percent of US models, and open source which you can run on your own servers, I’ve been saying that China would win the AI war.

Here’s another data point:

I Went From $3,000/Month on Claude to $5/Week on DeepSeek

And honestly? 80% of my work is identical.

For the past two months, I was burning $3-5K monthly on Claude Code. Every idea from design to development to testing – full end-to-end automation, even simulating users to test my products and provide feedback. Extremely token-intensive.

But Claude’s caching sucked, making it insanely expensive. Then I discovered DeepSeek V4.

The numbers: • Claude: $5 input, $25 output per million tokens •

DeepSeek: $0.28 input, <$1 output (with their current discount) • DeepSeek cached: $0.0002 – literally less than a penny The caching optimization is game-changing.

Once DeepSeek has seen content, it basically stops charging tokens. My result: $5/week vs $1,000/week for the same workload.

The Chinese have been optimizing for efficiency. Frontier models are a little better, at each generation, but the Chinese aren’t sitting still on quality either. What will happen is convergence: where all the models are about equally good. Until then, the Chinese models may be 3 months to 6 months behind, but that’s all and when they have the advantage of being, not just 95% cheaper as before but over 99% cheaper, and when they’re open source, so the vendor can’t just increase prices or restrict usage without users having any ability to run the model themselves, well, only an absolute moron would plan on using Anthropic/Claude or Open-AI.

The West is building vast numbers of data centers, far more than the Chinese, because nothing is optimized for efficiency. Our models use far more electricity, far more GPUs, and far more water. Additionally the Chinese are working hard on real-world AI uses: robotic AI, in other words, so that their AI can be used for actual production, and pushing on humanoid robots so they can take care of their old people, do household work and so on: Chinese AI is optimized to do shit work so you can read and write and paint, while Western AI is optimized to do creative work so you can shovel manure, do your own laundry and clean toilets.

I simply cannot fathom; I literally spent 5 minutes repeating to myself, “how can they be so fucking stupid?” what American tech leaders and the people throwing money at American AI companies are thinking. They lose money with every single query. Starbucks just got rid of their inventory AI because it couldn’t tell the difference between oath milk and cow milk even after months of trying to make it work. The only large use-case for American AI is programming and even there quality questions are rife.

But even if it winds up being as great as they say, they’re still going to lose, because it’s not going to be enough better than Chinese AI (if it’s better at all in a few years, which I doubt) to make up a 95 to 99% cost difference plus the safety that open source provides.

We are ruled by morons. Our rich people, whom we celebrate as brilliant, are idiots and fools. The moment Deepseek came out, the response should have been to figure out how it was so much more efficient and add that to American AI. No one even considered it, they just threw hundreds of billions of dollars more money at doing the same thing they were doing before.

You can’t look at American AI, as anyone who uses is, and not realize it’s massively subsidized and that at some point they’re going to have to charge the actual, real cost. As with everything else, the plan is to destroy alternatives, then once they’re damaged beyond repair (like Taxis and “rise sharing”, raise prices.”

But this won’t work with AI because the Chinese aren’t playing along and it’s software that can be run on any server, if you have access, and, again, Chinese models are mostly Open Source and way, way cheaper.

I’m shaking my head as I write this. This is the greatest mis-allocation of resources I’ve seen in my entire life. It makes the housing bubble (out of which we at least got some homes) look brilliant and wise.

Morons. Our leaders are morons. And this isn’t even a case of “well they’ll do well out of it and they don’t care about anyone else”, it’s a case of “they’re going to lose hundreds of billions of dollars.”

One more bailout. Maybe. This is the last time.

And the West is DONE.

Because we aren’t even ruled competent evil people. We’re ruled by utter idiots.

(I wanted to write that they’re the dumbest money in world history, but, alas, that still goes to the Dutch tulip bubble. Though, again, at least they did get a lot of beautiful flowers out of it, which is more than we’re going to get.)

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Don’t Believe Weekend “Peace Deal” Leaks

By Ian Welsh

On May 26, 2026

22 Comments

So, this weekend there was a leak of a possible peace deal. Iran got most of what it wanted in this hypothetical deal. Israel said “we won’t obey any truce in Lebanon” and, well, that’s probably the end of it, though we’ll see.

I considered writing about it over the weekend, but so far every peace deal floated over a weekend has meant a manipulation of markets, some insider making bank by exactly timing it, and no peace deal.

The bottom line here is that if Iran is serious about a peace deal including Lebanon and Hezbollah, it can only happen if Trump is willing and able to discipline Israel. Doing so is in one sense easy: just stop sending them weapons and parts. They can’t go more than two weeks without US re-supply. (This is why Netanyahu has been saying Israel wants to be independent of the US.)

For whatever reason Trump won’t do this. It could be political fear due to the power of the lobby. It could be they have pictures of him raping kids. It could be, as a correspondent just argued, that in fact Trump is impotent and they can prove that and his ego can’t take it.

Whatever the reason is, it obviously exists.

Iran would like a deal, but it’s in no particular rush because the pain ramps up every week the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, and despite what various idiots say, the US is not immune to that pain.

Iran won the war. They want a peace deal that reflects that. They aren’t willing to give in peace what the US can’t win by arms.

As for the US, I think we’re looking at an opposition between American politicians fear of Israel and its lobby and their terror of what will happen in the mid-term elections. The Joker in the deck is the how many of them are subject to blackmail, because pictures of them raping teenagers trumps losing election.

Deleted AIPAC tweet

But be clear that the pain has only begun. It’s going to be even worse overseas. If Europe and large parts of Asia, including Australia, don’t start rationing soon, they’re not going to have enough energy to get thru next winter. That’s the sort of incompetence that leads to governments falling.

If the US was run by sane competent non-blackmailed people who cared about America, and not just their own class, Trump would be impeached, Israel would be reined in, and a peace deal would be cut. The US has lost, and the fallout from signing a peace deal which admits this is less than letting the Strait remain closed.

If this or another similar deal does pass soon, then it will be because Iran has cut Hezbollah loose and left them on their own, whatever they say. But trying to help Hezbollah isn’t just about doing the “right thing”, Hezbollah is an important proxy for Iran and they want to keep it around and not have to support it in a multi-year war against Israel.

And, again, their negotiating hand gets stronger every day. Sure, they’re suffering from the US blockade, but not as much as the US (and almost everyone else) is from theirs.

The only country which could compel Iran to make peace is China, and since they are run by competent people who think ahead, they’re one of the few nations that can handle the Strait being closed. Not, perhaps, forever, but certainly much longer than the US can.

Meanwhile America keeping the Strait closed (which is how it is perceived by many) is doing vast damage to America’s subject states. That too will have consequences: they may publicly blame Iran, but behind the scenes they know this was a US war of choice, that the US lost, and that the US doesn’t care what is happening to them as a consequence of not cutting a peace deal.

Losing wars has consequences. Failing to admit you lost a war has even worse consequences. The US has yet to figure this out.

Freedom To, Freedom From & Capitalism (Freedom Series #3)

By Ian Welsh

On May 25, 2026

16 Comments

This is the third in the series:

1) Freedom Under Capitalism

2) Freedom Under Representative Democracy

Scholars often divide freedom into two types: negative and positive. Negative freedom is “freedom from”. From arbitrary search and self incrimination, for example. Freedom from is primarily about what other people, including the government, cannot do to you.

Positive freedom is the ability to do things: free speech and freedom to follow any religion are two of the positive freedoms enshrined in American Constitutional law (though freedom of expression is much violated in the practice, as opposed to principle.)

The preamble of the Declaration of Independence says that everyone has the inalienable right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Obviously, again, these principle are more theoretical than practical, given how busily the American government kills people. (Nothing is said in the preamble about these rights being only for Americans, indeed they are supposed to be for everyone.) And then there’s how many people America locks up, which isn’t exactly liberty.

No rights, positive or negative, to do or to be free of, are actually ordained by the Creator, nor are any of them inalienable. All of them exist exactly and only to the extent that one has the power to enforce them. The English Magna Carta, which gave nobles the right of jury trial was forced by the Barons on the King, not granted by the King out of some beneficience. Later expansions of the right to jury trial were won by Republican and Parliamentary powers, and indeed, right now the British government is removing the right to jury trial for most offenses, in part so that opposition to genocide can be quelled without juries refusing to convict, as they have done.

Israel’s lobby in Britain is more powerful than those who believe in jury trial. And power is all that matters when it comes to freedom and rights.

This is why the actual left is always concerned about restricting concentrations of power and wealth and why most modern liberals are fools, believing that rights can exist with concentrated. Older liberals were not so foolish, FDR knew, and so did Justice Brandeis:

“You can have a great concentration of wealth or you can have democracy. You can’t have both.”

You can have the form of democracy, as the US does. But not the reality.

But there is another type of freedom to. We touched on it when we discussed freedom under capitalism, but let’s revisit it.

Elon Musk has far more freedom to than anyone reading this post. So does Mark Zuckerberg. They have vast wealth, and money is, at its heart, the ability to tell other people what to do and to command the results of their labor. If either man wants to do something, they can get a thousand people to do it for them. If they want almost anything they can buy it. They never have to work for anyone else, and other than (sometimes, but not most of the time) obeying the law, there are few practical limits on what they can do.

Compared to them, or to top political leaders like Trump or Putin or Xi or even Starmer, you and I have no freedom to do things. We obey our lords and masters.

This is especially true under capitalism, because capitalism is a system in which the means of production are controlled by a very few people. Under feudalism or for hunter-gatherers, this was not the case. You had land. You had animals. You could take care of yourself. This isn’t to say such people free in all ways, just that they had a freedom we have mostly lost. Work for the lord for 60 days, give him his cut, and the rest of their time was theirs to do with as they saw fit.

To create capitalism required removing their land and animals and rights from them. In exchange, over time, they received other rights.

But as long as we must work for others, and do what they say, we are not and cannot be free in the sense of having “freedom to do”. Most our life is spent doing what others insist on.

To be free means an end to capitalism and a system where we can, hopefully as individuals, but more likely as small groups, provide most of our own needs and where we do not have to spend most of our time accepting orders from bosses.

This is one of the essential points of this series of essays and we’re working towards looking at what such a society would be like both in principle and in practice. But the bottom line is that if you must spend almost all your days working for someone else, you are not free. And if you cannot create, if you cannot do, you are not free, no matter how much “freedom from” you have—and in the West, we have less and less of that freedom from each year, with the rise of surveillance, the constant assaults on free speech, association, and due process. Almost every Western nation, it seems, is restricting due process and allowing people to be destroyed by administrative order, as for example when the Canadian truckers and opponents of genocide were de-banked and/or sanctioned, making it impossible for them to pay rent or even buy food.

We have very little real freedom. We find that out when we do something the government disapproves of, like saying “please don’t help Israel mass murder children, torture and rape.” We find that out when we realize that we spend 8 or more hours a day obeying a pin-headed boss, and that if we don’t, we’ll wind up homeless and starve.

Neither represenative democracy nor capitalism has worked, and while China is more generous now that most of the West and better run, they have not solved these problems either. Perhaps they will. Perhaps they’ll make that transition to true communism, the withering of the state, and the control of the means of production by the proletariat.

Maybe. But I doubt it. Not without a clear picture of what such freedom would look like. And that’s the real question, and the real problem.

So that’s what we’ll tackle.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 24, 2026

By Tony Wikrent

On May 24, 2026

4 Comments

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 24, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

Americans are leaving the U.S. in record numbers and spending hundreds to learn how to do it

Jennifer Liu, May 17 2026 [CNBC, via DailyKos]

…A record number of Americans are leaving the U.S.: The country saw a net negative migration of between 10,000 and 295,000 people in 2025, according to research from The Brookings Institution. The widest estimated range was among people who left voluntarily, with Brookings estimating that between 210,000 to 405,000 people did so last year.

It’s the first time in at least 50 years that more people moved out of the country than moved in. Restrictive immigration policies and deportation efforts play a role, according to Brookings. Some U.S. citizens are emigrating for school, work, raising a family, retirement and everything in between.

Expatsi, a company that offers relocation tours for Americans, is becoming a sought-after resource for some….

The company, launched in 2022, held its second annual Move Abroad Con in San Diego on May 9 and 10. Some 600 Americans from around the country attended, double the number of people at the inaugural event held in May 2025, Expatsi co-founder Jen Barnett tells CNBC Make It.

A majority, 89%, said they want to leave the U.S. for political reasons, according to a sampling of 218 of the weekend’s attendees, per Barnett. Others say they hope to move for adventure and growth (73%), as well as to save money (57%). Roughly two-thirds of respondents hope to move within two years, they have an average monthly budget of $3,856 to work with, and hopeful movers are split among 44% individuals, 39% couples and 17% families with kids….

LinkedIn Is Doing What Bluesky Was Supposed to Do

[Popular by Design, via The Big Picture, May 20, 2026]

Rebuilding a public square on the platform you least expect. For a brief moment about a year ago, it really did look like Bluesky might work. Researchers and left-of-center intellectuals were flooding in, swapping starter packs, reassembling what felt like a nostalgic reunion of old Twitter. Then everyone arrived, and the center could not hold. A sharp argument that the post-Twitter intellectual conversation didn’t move to Bluesky or Threads — it quietly migrated to LinkedIn, of all places. Uncomfortable for everyone involved, but not wrong….

The people on LinkedIn are the people we should be trying to reach: policymakers, congressional staffers, civil servants, industry analysts, foundation program officers, and journalists at general-interest outlets. A 2025 Avoq survey of DC policy insiders found that 81 percent of Democrats, 84 percent of Republicans, and 78 percent of MAGA-aligned respondents use LinkedIn. Good representative data on LinkedIn compared to other platforms is notoriously hard to find, but this looks like a bipartisan footprint no other platform comes close to matching….

Discussion that actually moves understanding. The clearest evidence I have for all of this is my own cross-posting experience. I have often shared the same piece, including the more controversial ones, simultaneously on Bluesky, X, and LinkedIn, and the pattern has been remarkably consistent. On Bluesky, the reaction is usually either silence or a small pile-on when the piece challenges prevailing consensus, and substantive engagement is rare. On X, responses are a mix of real engagement and the usual ratio of slop, bad-faith screenshotting, and reply guys.

On LinkedIn, the pushback I get is both the most civil and the most productive: named professionals who actually work on the topic, often from perspectives I don’t share, who write multi-paragraph responses that engage with the argument rather than perform outrage about it. This holds even for pieces and takes I expected to trigger the most hostility, because people disagreeing under their own name with their employer looking over their shoulder have strong incentives to be reasonable.