British-American expat, author, political economist of the free market variety. Former classicist. Economic Freedom at @ceidotorg. Commanders and SAFC fan.
Washington, DC
Joined July 2008
- Tweets34.4K
- Following4.5K
- Followers4.9K
- Likes123K
Pinned Tweet
My new book, The Socialist Temptation, is out today! Get your copy at Amazon or all fine booksellers.
amazon.com/Socialist-Temptat…
This misses the part in which they propose getting government rules to fix things in their favor. Otherwise spot on.
The transition from a nomocratic to a teleocratic state comes with serious costs.
Le pacte social est mort. Voici pourquoi, point par point.
1. Le fait
La préfecture de police de Paris invite officiellement les commerçants à recourir à des agents privés avant les prochaines manifestations.
Traduction claire : l’État reconnaît qu’il n’est plus en mesure d’assurer la protection des personnes et des biens.
2. Ce que c’était censé être
Le pacte social repose sur un échange simple :
Les citoyens acceptent de payer impôts, charges et taxes.
En contrepartie, l’État assure le monopole de la force légitime, maintient l’ordre et protège les personnes et les biens.
C’est sa mission régalienne première. Tout le reste (santé, éducation, aides, etc.) vient après.
3. Ce qui vient de se passer
L’État vient de dire, par la voix de sa préfecture : « Prenez des privés, sécurisez vos vitrines, on ne peut plus le faire seuls. »
Ce n’est plus une défaillance ponctuelle. C’est un aveu institutionnel.
La protection de base est externalisée. Les citoyens et les commerçants paient déjà l’impôt et doivent maintenant payer une deuxième fois pour ce que l’État était censé garantir.
4. Les conséquences logiques
• Si la contrepartie principale disparaît, le consentement à l’impôt perd sa justification.
• On ne peut pas continuer à prélever comme si le pacte tenait encore, tout en avouant qu’on ne remplit plus la mission fondatrice.
• La dette, les dépenses, les discours sur « l’effort collectif » deviennent secondaires dès lors que la sécurité de base n’est plus assurée par celui qui prélève.
5. La responsabilité
Ce n’est pas un accident. C’est le résultat de décennies de renoncements successifs : incapacité à rétablir l’ordre, zones où l’État a déjà reculé, priorité donnée à autre chose qu’à la mission régalienne.
Macron et les gouvernements qui se sont succédé ont laissé cette situation s’installer jusqu’au point où la préfecture elle-même officialise le repli.
Le pacte social n’est pas « en difficulté ».
Il est définitivement mort, pas parce qu’on le proclame mais parce que l’État vient de le reconnaître lui-même en demandant aux citoyens de se protéger à sa place.
La question n’est plus « comment rétablir le calme ».
Elle est : pourquoi continuer à consentir pleinement à l’impôt quand celui qui le prélève a renoncé à la mission pour laquelle on le paie en premier ?
Protection d’abord.Impôt ensuite.
Le reste n’est que littérature.
À bon entendeur.
Iain Murray retweeted
🚨NEW: The Online Safety Act has been a failure, according to a new report from Ofcom.
Ofcom have found "no significant change" in children encountering harmful content since the law came into effect last July. This is despite the signifigant threats to free speech and privacy.
I'm sure @tedfrank will be delighted to know that cy pres is being discussed in England.
It's not necessary to understand the complex law around cy-pres. Not even going to pretend I understand all it's nuances. Of which there are many.
But please, understand the difference between a permanent endowment and income, and try to understand the prudence required of a trustee
And also *please* get your head around the fact that the Corporation of London is both a public and private entity at the same time (confusing, I know) but happily and much more simply, Bridge House Estates is a purely private entity.
(which incidentally means if you want to do this all by legislation, it would be hybrid. And the Corporation will petition against you, and it is the singular more experienced entity in Britain when it comes to private legislation procedure.... So, umm, good luck!)
Something something hobgoblins something.
NEW: Families are being urged by the government to stockpile three days worth of food and water to survive a national emergency.
Ministers have also told the public to keep a battery-powered torch, sleeping bags, cash and a wind-up radio in the house.
thesun.co.uk/news/40777851/b…
Iain Murray retweeted
Higher quality, less expensive TVs killed thousands of 20th century TV repairman jobs. It was an excellent trade! And we should allow consumers to make an unlimited number of future such trades going forward.
Iain Murray retweeted
Who could have possibly predicted this outcome?
Or, is it simply the unstated objective of the national conservatives.
There is an alternative: leave the private sphere of action -- including commerce -- to the private sector. That is what freedom conservatism is about. It is also common sense. #freecon
semafor.com/article/10/21/20…
Iain Murray retweeted
Of course, of course: "Trump turned the government into an investor. Democrats have shopping plans, too." semafor.com/article/10/21/20…
"We’re through the looking glass"
"The sky’s the limit"
"The Trump administration has opened up Pandora’s box"
Iain Murray retweeted
Can someone tell me how Moore is wrong?
What’s the difference between owning chip companies or critical mineral companies and, say, owning grocery stores?
Memo to the Trump administration: Stop buying companies.
A government $40 trillion in debt should be SELLING assets, not buying ownership stakes in 36 companies.
We thought government control of the means of production was what we were fighting against.
Iain Murray retweeted
Rory Kinnear's prime minister in Netflix's The Diplomat has resigned midway through the fourth series because Britain having the same leader for four years was deemed too unrealistic.
🔗: telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10…
Iain Murray retweeted
“The nineteenth-century liberal regarded an extension of freedom as the most effective way to promote welfare and equality; the twentieth-century liberal regards welfare and equality as either prerequisites of or alternatives to freedom.”
— Milton Friedman
Looks like the days of any archaeology in Scotland are numbered...
🚨 EXCLUSIVE: Glasgow's Kelvingrove Museum has removed Egyptian mummies from display because there was no 'informed consent from the deceased individual'👇
mol.im/a/16227743
#Exclusive #Scotland #Glasgow #Museums #EgyptianMummies #Woke @MailOnlineScot
Iain Murray retweeted
Today, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay a staggering $25 billion.
While most coverage has characterized it as a privacy case, the claims are fundamentally about speech, and 3 of the 5 categories of alleged misrepresentations have absolutely nothing to do with data privacy.
Instead, they are focused on “hateful, violent, and divisive content,” “misinformation,” and “equal application of Facebook’s policies.” Fraud is not protected by the First Amendment, but these are incredibly vague concepts without clear legal definitions that encompass a wide array of constitutionally protected speech. A jury was asked to interpret these terms and evaluate the accuracy of Facebook’s high-level statements about how it tries to moderate content against them.
To decide whether a statement like "we don't allow hate speech" was false, jurors had to apply their own understanding of terms that have no legal definition. Even more, they had to decide whether Facebook applied its policies equally. These are very amorphous concepts that mean something different to everyone, making it incredibly difficult to prove falsity, a necessary element in any fraud case.
Facebook was found to have committed 43,899,725 violations.
43,899,725.
How? The state multiplied the 26 statements Facebook made about its moderation practices by the number of users who may have potentially read them.
Many of these statements were not advertising. They were executives speaking publicly about how Facebook handles some of the most contested content moderation questions of the last decade.
The decision in this case would give government officials an incredibly powerful tool to go after content moderation decisions they don't like. Every state has a consumer protection law like New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act and every major platform publishes rules about what content it removes and how it enforces them. All a state has to do is point to an alleged discrepancy between a platform’s stated policy and its content moderation decision.
If it is not overturned, this case will have a massive chilling effect on what platforms say about their content moderation practices. The safest course of action for any platform now is to say as little as possible about how it moderates content to as few people as possible.
Ultimately, platforms will be less willing to share information with users and users will know less about the platforms they use.
Breaking News: Meta must pay $25 billion, one of the largest penalties levied against the tech giant, for deceiving users about data privacy. nyti.ms/4yvv5yZ
As someone once said, "Dance with the one who brung you." That goes as much for game design as for politics.
Iain Murray retweeted
1/2 @ISMurray is vice president for strategy and senior fellow at @CEIdotorg. He is also one of the founders of the @FreeConTalk project.
In a recent article for The Daily Economy, Murray wrote that America won’t outcompete China by restricting imports on robots. “It will win by becoming the best place in the world to build and deploy them.”
“It is a major part of the administration’s policy to ‘reshore’ American manufacturing to bring back jobs,” he explained, “and a tenet of the National Conservatism movement that America needs blue-collar jobs that pay a good wage. Yet both of these propositions rest on the idea that manufacturing needs to be labor-intensive.”
What neither officials in Washington nor NatCon influencers seem to understand is that the best chance for reshoring manufacturing capacity is to seek more automation of industrial processes, not less.
“That means more robots, but the administration has recently moved to restrict the import of robots, specifically humanoid robots from China,” Murray wrote. “The more hostile the administration is to automation, the more it will drive manufacturing back offshore.”
“Restricting access to robot hardware cannot be the answer. The sensible response is to make America the best place to invent, improve, and deploy robots in new and remarkable ways.” #FreeCon
Iain Murray retweeted
Ofcom Concedes Defeat in the 4chan Case
prestonbyrne.com/2026/10/20/…
Iain Murray retweeted
this California wealth tax thing is just incredible.
so in October 2025, a California healthcare union proposed a "one time" 5% tax on any billionaire's wealth. the ballot measure will be voted on next month. In early December 2025, California announced that it would be a retroactive tax if passed, applying to anyone with CA residency as of Jan 1, 2026. The objective is to pay for Medi-Cal, California's incredibly dysfunctional healthcare system. (which also functions as a glorified welfare apparatus, but that's a discussion for another time).
polls reveal that the CA electorate is split around 50/50 on the tax, but prediction markets only give Prop 40 a ~23% chance of passing (there are competing measures on the ballet that would nullify it).
there are 200 billionaires in CA, worth collectively somewhere between $2.3 and $2.6 trillion. 5% of that is around $100b, accounting for a small amount of attrition. proponents of the tax forecasted a significant windfall, assuming only a 10% departure rate.
supporters thought they were being clever with the retroactive concept. no billionares would leave CA in the few short months between the tax being proposed and the residency cutoff date, without the tax even having passed yet, right?
well as it turns out, they did.
a new paper [1] from two academics at Stanford called "The Net Present Value of the California Billionaire Tax Act", argues that not only did more billionaires leave due to the proposed tax than its proponents expected, but that the value of the tax, if it does pass, is actually negative.
proponents of the tax only assumed 10% avoidance, that is, only 10% of the taxable base of targeted billionaires would leave CA within the very short Oct-Dec 2025 window. Jaros and Rauh, the Stanford academics, find that a lower bound of 28.6% of the taxable base managed to leave.
just based on known departures, those departures total $577b in net worth, or $28.8b in potential tax lost. this of course does not capture everyone (many left without announcing their departure), so the authors normalize to departure rates estimated from other wealth tax events, and apply other discounts for litigation, arriving arrive at a figure of only $28-$36b in forecasted tax revenues.
but this isn't all! all of the income taxes paid by the departed billionaires are also forsaken. the authors estimate that CA billionaires pay $3.3- 5.8b in annual income taxes. they assume a midpoint of $2b lost in annual collections from departed billionaires. the net present value of that lost income stream is -$68.9 billion.
so when you add it all up you get:
+ $30b one-time tax windfall (estimated)
- $69b in present value of lost future income taxes
= - 38.9b overall net present value of the tax
of course, this analysis is highly estimate driven. the authors simulate the parameters 100k times and find a negative NPV of the implemented tax 85 percent of the time.
and if the tax doesn't pass, which it's not looking like it will, California still ended up losing at least $577b in departed net worth, and they have permanently poisoned the well with entrepreneurs who will now worry about future wealth taxes.
[1]: nber.org/system/files/workin…
Iain Murray retweeted
WAKE UP BABES NEW TARIFF LAWSUIT JUST DROPPED
libertyjusticecenter.org/cas…
Iain Murray retweeted
This is the future the UK wants for the entire Internet: only a handful of companies, ones that obey British censorship rules, may be permitted to survive.
The Online Safety Act has made hosting community forums so laborious that they're closing shop.
Hundreds of forums have shuttered due to piling paperwork and liability risks.
Ordinary speech from ordinary people, gone.
Read our report ⤵️
bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/campa…
