The Surrender of Fort Fillmore

Perhaps the first thing you should know about this little-known Civil War episode is that the geography is the villain of the story—or, at least, a co-conspirator.  People love to imagine Civil War battles as neat little arrows on a tidy map.  Down here in the Mesilla Valley, the map itself has been wandering around like a drunken steer.  The mountains behave; the river does not.

And then there’s the border.  When Fort Fillmore’s drama unfolds in July 1861, the “southern New Mexico” you know today is still the new wing of the house—added via the Gadsden Purchase in 1853–1854, which means the international boundary everyone takes for granted had been settled, locally, for only about seven years.  That short timeline helps explain why some old maps look a bit… aspirational.

In 1848, the little community that became Mesilla was established west of the Rio Grande (and along El Camino Real).  But the Rio Grande is famous for behaving like a living thing—shifting, braiding, cutting new channels during big floods, and (at times) flipping what people think of as the “east bank” and “west bank.”  One technical summary of the 1860s flooding notes the river cut a new course that left Mesilla on the river’s east bank, and other local histories point out yet another course change later that helped produce the river’s present-day position.

That’s why old descriptions can sound like they’re contradicting one another when they’re actually describing different decades of a restless river.

Now, about Fort Fillmore, itself: if you’re picturing towering stockade walls and a gate you could drive a stagecoach through—nope.  Fort Fillmore was a typical southern New Mexico “fort”: a cluster of adobe buildings, arranged around a central space, with one side open toward the Rio Grande.  A visitor in the 1850s even described it as “large and pleasant,” with comfortable adobe quarters.

Fort Fillmore was established in 1851, across the Rio Grande from La Mesilla to protect travel and traffic through a corridor that connected settlements, trails, and commerce, and that also drew Apache raids and other violence common to the era.

So, keep that mental image in mind: Fort Fillmore was not a compact stone castle, but crude adobe structures in open desert country that was surrounded by nothing but tumbleweeds—hardly an ideal place to absorb a determined attack, especially from mounted men who could choose their angles of attack.  This was a fort that you could demolish with a good garden hose much less a howitzer.

This may sound like the punchline to a bad joke, but it’s mostly a story about risk management.

Fort Fillmore was not built near the river, but on sand hills above it—a choice that made sense if you feared floods and wanted slightly higher, drier ground.  The problem is that a river that shifts can turn “near” into “not near” with alarming speed.  One widely repeated summary notes that after the Rio Grande changed course, the fort ended up being about a mile from the river and had to be supplied by water wagons, which, in turn, made it harder to defend in a crisis.

In other words: it wasn’t built where there was no water so much as it was built where water was close enough—until it wasn’t.

When the Civil War begins, the U.S. Army in the far Southwest is thinly spread, and everything is held together with small detachments, long supply lines, and optimism.  In July 1861, Confederate forces from Texas under Lt.  Col.  John R.  Baylor move into the Mesilla area.  Baylor’s men are mounted, aggressive, and comfortable in desert campaigning.

At Fort Fillmore, the Union commander is Major Isaac Lynde, with several companies of infantry regulars and attached elements—enough to look respectable on paper, but not enough to feel secure when you’re staring at mounted opponents, on a jittery frontier, and insecure in the knowledge that your supply lines have been cut and that the rest of the nation’s attention is a thousand miles away.

Lynde marches out toward Mesilla, where Baylor’s men are positioned.  The confrontation becomes what you might call a “confidence test,” and Lynde does not pass it, despite having more soldiers than the Confederate force.  After a short fight kills three union soldiers, Lynde falls back to Fort Fillmore.  This small battle is known as the First Battle of Mesilla.  (There was a second battle about a year later, but it was so small that no one is sure exactly when it happened.)

This is the hinge point: once he returns to the post, Lynde has a decision.  He can try to defend his mud fort or abandon it and try to save his command by moving north towards another Union fort.  It was not much of a choice, so Lynde orders the soldiers to prepare to abandon the fort.

Now here’s where the story gets a little hazy.  As part of the preparation to leave, Lynde orders that all of the fort’s stores that couldn’t be evacuated are to be destroyed.  Whether the fort had a large stock of medicinal brandy or the Sutler’s store was oversupplied with whiskey is a mystery.  What is known is that many of the soldiers decide that the best way to destroy the liquor is to run it through their systems.  Many of the soldiers choose to fill their canteens with whiskey. 

Perhaps they were worried about snake bite?  As W. C. Fields said, “Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snake bite.  Always carry a snake in case of thirst.”

Lynde wants an orderly retreat, leaving the Mesilla area and heading east into the Organ Mountains and the only source of reliable water nearby—the springs in the San Augustin Pass, about 20 miles distant.  From there, they could move north towards Fort Union. 

That was the plan.  In practice, it turns into a slow-motion collapse.  Men fall out, heat punishes them, the column straggles, and the mounted Confederates enjoy the luxury of mounted pursuit while the infantry fights the desert as much as any enemy.  Southern New Mexico in July is as hot as a pawn shop pistol.  The heat is stifling even in the shade and there ain’t no shade.  In the middle of a New Mexico summer, I’ve seen trees chase dogs in hope of relief.

Baylor splits his forces, sending half through a narrow mountain pass that now bears his name.  While his men are mounted, Lynde’s troops are on foot, struggling in the heat and are beginning to suffer from the effects of their canteens.

By the time Baylor closes in near the San Augustin Pass/San Augustin Springs area, Lynde’s command is demoralized and scattered enough that the surrender becomes, in Lynde’s mind, the least-bad way to avoid slaughter.  He surrenders without a climactic last stand. 

Baylor plays this well.  He pressures, pursues, and presents Lynde with the sense that resistance will only mean pointless casualties.  Lynde yields.  Baylor has captured a Union force in spectacular fashion, and the Confederacy suddenly has a foothold in the region strong enough for Baylor to proclaim a Confederate “Arizona” government soon after, with Mesilla as its capital. 

Lynde’s surrender detonates his career.  He is disgraced, and the Army moves harshly against him.  A War Department order drops him from the rolls “for cowardice,” effective the date of the surrender. 

Baylor rides his victory into power.  His proclamation and early Confederate control in the region make him briefly prominent.  But Baylor’s story also curdles.  He is removed from authority later after issuing an infamous order calling for the extermination of the Apache people—an act so extreme that even Confederate leadership moved against him. 

Today, Fort Fillmore is not only forgotten, but it has almost completely vanished. Where the fort once stood is a large pecan orchard where the grounds have been expertly leveled to conserve the precious irrigation water.  All that is left is the fort cemetery, located about half a mile southeast.

We need some way to commemorate this battle.  Since commemorative runs and walks are the national hobby now, let’s do what any responsible civilization would do: every July, we should stage an annual Fort Fillmore Whiskey Run.

Participants will begin with the traditional gesture—all water bottles will be confiscated and replaced with a pint of whiskey—then participants will set off to recreate Lynde’s finest hour: twenty miles of ambitious decision-making through the desert and march up into the Organ Mountains.  Finishers will be rewarded with access to the springs, which is a lovely touch of historical authenticity, except for the small complication that the springs inconveniently dried up around 1950.  Still, details, details.  History is built on them and is then immediately trampled by them.

A Look Back at the Bush Plan

Every few years, someone drags Social Security out onto the national stage, shines a harsh spotlight on it, and announces—usually with the calm confidence of a man explaining compound interest to a golden retriever—that what the program really needs is a makeover involving Wall Street.

In the mid-2000s, President Bush floated the idea of “personal accounts,” and the discussion quickly collapsed into a familiar shouting match:

• Republicans heard, “You can own your retirement!”
• Democrats heard, “They’re going to turn Grandma’s check into a day-trading app!”

The partisan rhetoric doomed the proposed plan before it had any chance to be seriously studied or modeled.  In the last two decades there has been no serious discussion about changing the Social Security system even though we all know it has serious problems.

It is roughly 17 years since the Bush Plan would have been in effect, so let’s do something unfashionable: let’s assume everyone remains calm, lower the volume, and walk through what the proposal actually meant, what it would have meant financially, and what it might mean for the average retiree today if the diverted money had been invested in a plain-vanilla S&P 500 index fund.

This is a blog, not a dissertation, so I’m going to keep the math honest, but not joyless.  So, what was the plan?

The popular memory is that Bush wanted to “privatize half” of Social Security.  The most concrete version of the plan that got widely modeled wasn’t “half.”  It was more like: “You may divert a small slice.”

In the most widely analyzed design, the personal account would be funded by diverting up to 4% of the payroll tax, subject to a dollar cap that started at around $1,000 a year and rose over time.  In other words, it was a limited diversion and not a full-blown transfer of the whole program into your Fidelity login.

That detail matters, because it means the personal account was never going to grow into a yacht for the “average” worker… More like a modest financial dinghy—possibly a very nice dinghy—depending on the ocean.

This is an important detail: Your Social Security check goes down if you opt in.  That’s the part that gets lost in the political bumper-sticker version.  If you divert payroll taxes into a personal account, your traditional Social Security benefit gets reduced.  Not because the government is being mean, but because you didn’t pay those taxes into the system, so you don’t get paid as if you did.

The personal account in our model is that all the funds diverted go into an S&P Index Fund that grows or declines with the stock market.  At your retirement, your personal account pays you something too, and your total retirement income becomes:

    (Smaller Social Security check) + (Personal account payment) = Total

So, yes, your Social Security check would be smaller.  The question is whether the personal account would make up the difference, and then some.

Now, the big hypothetical: What if the personal account was invested in an S&P 500 index fund?

The scenario we’re using

• We’re looking at a new retiree in 2026 (turning 65 and retiring around now) who earned an average income each year.
• They opted into the personal account in 2009 and contributed the maximum allowed each year under the capped design.
• The money was invested in a low-cost S&P 500 index fund, with a small annual fee assumption (think “boring and responsible,” not “crypto enthusiast at 2:00 a.m.”).

What happens to the monthly Social Security check?

Under this scenario, the offset would reduce the retiree’s monthly Social Security check by about:

• $276 to $284 per month (in today’s dollars)

So, if someone says, “Privatization would raise your Social Security check,” the polite reply is: No.  It lowers the check, and then adds a second check.

What does the personal account pay per month?

Under the same scenario, the personal account would generate about:

• $530 to $593 per month (in today’s dollars)

This is where the stock market does its dramatic entrance, wearing sequins.

Net result: total monthly retirement income.  Put the two together:

• Social Security check goes down: –$276 to –$284
•  Personal account adds income: +$530 to +$593
•  Net change: +$255 to +$309 per month

So, in this specific “average new retiree in 2026” scenario, the retiree’s total monthly income would likely be higher than under current law—by a few hundred dollars a month.  And remember, this is what would happen if we diverted only a small portion of the funds into the private sector.

That’s real money.  It’s not a second home in Aspen, but it’s also not “nothing.”

But wait: does that mean the plan “solves” Social Security?  No, and this is where the policy conversation gets slippery.  The trust fund problem doesn’t vanish; it shape-shifts.

Social Security’s financing challenge is largely a question of cash flow: payroll taxes come in, benefits go out, and demographics are doing what demographics always do—namely, refusing to ask permission as they run roughshod over your plans.

If you divert payroll taxes into personal accounts, the trust funds receive less money up front.  But retirees still need to be paid their benefits during the transition.  That creates transition costs.  In normal-person terms, it means:

The government either:

• borrows,
•  raises other taxes,
•  cuts benefits,
•  or it does some mixture of all three,

to keep sending checks while part of the payroll tax stream is being rerouted.  The original Bush plan was to divert funds from the general fund into Social Security to match what was being diverted.  If this wasn’t done, the Social Security trust fund would be in worse financial shape than it currently is.  If Congress fails to divert funds, the trust fund, already in terrible financial shape, gets worse.

Could the long-term picture improve if the offset is structured a certain way, participation is limited, benefit growth is changed, or additional financing is added?  Yes.  But personal accounts by themselves are not a magic wand that makes arithmetic stop being arithmetic.

The inheritance question: What could the average retiree leave to heirs?

Here’s where personal accounts do something traditional Social Security generally does not: they can create a pile of money with your name on it.  Under the present system, if a retiree dies after receiving benefits for only one month, his family receives a one-time death benefit of $255.  The rest of the money the retiree paid into the system vanishes.

Under the same scenario, the personal account at retirement would be about:

• $95,000 to $106,000 (in today’s dollars)

Since this money is in a private account, the total funds would be available to the retiree’s family upon the death of the retiree if the retiree opted to only receive the interest off the fund and not spend the principle.

In other words, personal accounts introduce a new freedom: you can choose a higher monthly income now, or a larger bequest later.  Social Security, as designed, is much more “lifetime insurance” than “inheritable asset.”

So, was the Bush plan a good idea?

The honest blog answer is: it depends on what you’re optimizing for, and how lucky you get.

Potential upside:

• A strong market period could boost total retirement income for average retirees.
•  Personal accounts can create inheritable wealth, especially for people who die earlier, or who don’t spend down the account.
•  People like owning things with their name on them.  This is not a trivial political fact.

Potential downside:

• Market risk becomes retirement risk.  If the market does badly during your contribution years, or right before retirement, your “private” portion shrinks, but the offset doesn’t sympathetically shrink at the same pace.
•  The transition financing is real, and it can increase federal borrowing pressures in the years it matters most politically (which is to say, all years ending in a number).

The takeaway, in plain English.  If an average new retiree in 2026 had been allowed to divert the maximum under the capped design, and that money had tracked an S&P 500 index fund through the 2009–2025 market run, then:

• Their Social Security check would likely be about $280/month smaller,
•  Their personal account would likely add about $560/month,
•  Their total monthly income would likely be about $255–$309/month higher, and
•  They might have something like $95,000 to $106,000 in “surplus” account value that could be preserved for heirs, if they didn’t spend it.

That’s the sunny version, because the stock market in that period was, frankly, in a good mood.  The darker version is the one nobody can calculate cleanly ahead of time: what happens when the market is not in a good mood, but you are still trying to pay rent.

And that, right there, is why this debate never dies: it’s a tug-of-war between the appeal of ownership, the comfort of insurance, and the unavoidable fact that the future is going to do whatever it wants, regardless of our spreadsheets.

With Foot Firmly in Mouth

There is more than one kind of history. 

One is the kind where armies march, treaties are signed, and professors write books with subtitles like A Reconsideration of the Strategic Context.  Another kind is where someone opens their mouth, a word wobbles slightly to the left, and the whole world decides that a head of state has just confessed to being a pastry.

Let’s begin with the most famous baked good in the history of diplomacy, .a story every reader has heard whether they wanted to or not.

In 1963, President John F.  Kennedy stood in West Berlin and delivered one of the great Cold War soundbites: “Ich bin ein Berliner.” The line was meant as solidarity: I am a Berliner, i.e., I am one of you, i.e., your cause is my cause.

Then, somewhere along the way, English speakers turned it into: “I am a jelly donut.”

This is one of those stories that refuses to die because it is perfectly shaped to satisfy a certain human need: the need to see the mighty humbled by a small linguistic banana peel.  Presidents, after all, should not be permitted to stride through history like marble statues.  We prefer them with a bit of powdered sugar on the lapel and their foot, if not in their mouth, at least in a bucket.

The problem is that this joke is largely an urban legend.  In Berlin, the pastry you and I might call a “Berliner” is commonly called something else, and, more importantly, Kennedy’s phrasing is defensible in context.  In other words, it worked as intended for the people listening, which is the whole point of communication, and also the whole reason this story is annoying.

But the legend persists because it highlights something true: language is treacherous, even when it’s not technically wrong.  The ear wants what the ear wants, and the public loves a translation that produces an accidental confession of being a donut.

And once you realize that, you start noticing how often world events hang on the fragile thread of words.

Now and then, the translation isn’t a charming myth.  Sometimes it is real, and sometimes it is magnificent in its wrongness.

In 1977, President Jimmy Carter visited Poland, and his remarks were translated into Polish in a way that turned perfectly normal diplomatic sentiments into something… spicier.  Accounts vary in the exact phrasing, but the gist is that the President meant to say that he liked the Poles, but the translation said that he had a more intimate yearning for the Polish people that no president should ever express in public, at least not without a slow jazz soundtrack and a licensing agreement.  Perhaps the verbal slip would not have been so funny if Carter hadn’t just the year before during an interview with Playboy Magazine hadn’t admitted that he had “lust in his heart.”

This is not merely funny: in-on  it is instructive.  Translation is not a word-for-word substitution game.  It is real-time cognitive gymnastics performed in front of an audience, with the added delight that the audience will only notice you exist when you fail.

Interpreters are like football referees: if you’re talking about them, something has gone wrong.  And this brings us to the first great law of international communication: The more important the moment, the more it depends on the least glamorous person in the room.  Which is a comforting thought—unless, of course, you are the least glamorous person in the room.

If Carter’s Polish mishap was the diplomatic equivalent of slipping on a banana peel, Nikita Khrushchev’s most famous line was more like slipping on a banana peel while enthusiastically waving a lit road flare.

In 1956, less than a year after the Soviet Union had crushed the Hungarian Revolution—at a moment when the Cold War was running particularly hot—Khrushchev managed to assure the West that history itself would be doing the burying.

“We will bury you” landed in Western ears like a threat engraved on a missile.  It sounded very much as if the Soviets were advancing with a gun in one hand and a shovel in the other and saw no reason to be subtle about either.

But Russian idiom does not always map neatly onto English panic.  Many have argued that a more accurate sense was something closer to: we will outlast you, or we will live to see you buried, or history will bury your system.  It’s still not exactly a Hallmark card, but it’s a different species of menace—more ideological boasting than literal burial arrangements.

Here’s the point: idioms are loaded weapons.  In your own language, they’re harmless because everyone knows the safety is on.  In another language, they can go off in the translator’s hands and put a hole through the wall.

So, if you’re ever tempted to spice up a diplomatic message with a colorful figure of speech, remember: what’s clever in one tongue can become nuclear in another.

Some translation stories are funny, some are scary, and some are both, depending on how much you enjoy contemplating the fragility of civilization.

In late July 1945, the Allied Powers issued the Potsdam Declaration, citing the generous terms for Japan to surrender and end World War II.  In Japan, many of the top leaders, including Emperor Hirohito, were inclined to accept the terms subject to a few clarifications, but the response included the work mokusatsu,  黙殺; lit. "killing with silence". 

While exactly what the Japanese meant will be argued forever, it is possible that Japan meant to imply “acceptance without comment.”  There is no doubt however how that the United States interpreted it as “rejection by ignoring.”  The mokusatsu episode is often incorrectly retold as though Japan insulted the United States and the United States responded with atomic weapons. 

The United States did not decide to use the atomic bomb because of the Japanese response, instead they saw no reason to stop the already in motion plan to use the nuclear weapons.  By late July 1945, the machinery of war was no longer waiting to be offended—it was waiting for a surrender.

Still, it is a sobering reminder that ambiguity is not neutral.  When you are speaking to someone armed, nervous, and already halfway convinced you mean the worst, an ambiguous word is a match tossed near gasoline.

In everyday life, ambiguity is charming.  It makes poetry possible.  In geopolitics, ambiguity can become a Rorschach test that the other side fills in with their nightmares.

At this point you may be thinking: why does the jelly donut story outlive the truth? Why does “we will bury you” echo louder than the nuance? Why do we cherish linguistic bloopers?

Because these stories serve three human cravings:

1.They make the powerful relatable.  A president who can accidentally call himself a pastry becomes, briefly, the kind of person who also once walked into the wrong restroom.

2.They offer the comfort of comedy.  History is terrifying.  We like our terror with a punchline, preferably one involving baked goods.

3.They warn us without preaching.  “Be careful with language” is boring advice.  “A mistranslation can make you a donut in front of the world” is advice you’ll remember.

And there’s another reason, too: these stories highlight the old truth that language is not a transparent window.  It’s a stained-glass mosaic of culture, habit, and assumption.  You can see through it, but the colors distort everything.

If you take anything from these tales, let it be gratitude for the people who stand between leaders and international chaos.

A skilled interpreter is not “fluent.” They are a professional mind-reader who processes meaning, tone, and intent, while also anticipating how a phrase will land in the other culture.  They are constantly choosing between “literal” and “faithful,” knowing that those are often enemies.

Sometimes the faithful translation sounds less dramatic than the literal one, and the press will punish you for it.  Sometimes the literal translation is accurate in words but disastrous in meaning, and history will punish you for that, too.

In other words, it’s a job where the only way to win is to disappear.

Which brings us, at last, to the king who could not disappear if he tried, because he was, allegedly, a rabbit.

In 1806, Napoleon installed his brother Louis as King of Holland.  Louis, apparently attempting to be charming, tried to address the Dutch in their own language.  The Dutch word for king is koning.  The word for rabbit is konijn.  Those words are close enough that, in the mouth of a nervous foreign monarch, one can hop into the place of the other.

Thus the famous anecdote: instead of saying something like “I am your king,” Louis effectively announced: “I am your rabbit.”

Whether he said it exactly that way, or whether the story grew in the retelling, is part of its charm.  These lines often do grow, because people love them and repeat them, and repetition turns a wink into a brass plaque.

But the underlying truth is timeless: learning a language is an act of humility, and humility is not a natural posture for emperors, kings, and presidents.  When they attempt it anyway, the universe occasionally rewards the effort with a joke that lasts two centuries.

And honestly? Of all the things a ruler might accidentally confess to being, a rabbit is not the worst. 

Free Trade

Trade is in the news again, with just today, several politicians—including our president—saying that the US needs tariffs to restrict trade.  It is relatively easy to conclude that trade is evil, but nothing could be further from the truth.

In a perfect world, every country would embrace free trade, resulting in a happier and more prosperous world.  And in a perfect world, I would be out putting on my private 36-hole golf course—not writing this blog.  Since the world isn’t perfect and several nations are imposing strict tariffs on imported American goods, our president may be correct: perhaps we do need to adjust our tariffs, if only to encourage other countries to return to a policy of free trade.

We need to teach college students the principles of free trade for the same reason universities make students take freshman orientation: because a shocking number of intelligent people can still be trusted to do something spectacularly counterproductive if no one explains the basics to them.  It is only through ignorance that someone would voluntarily accept the collective warmth of huddled masses.  

Free trade is simply the scandalous idea that consenting adults should be allowed to swap what they have for what they want, without a parade of gatekeepers, forms, committees, and a policy memo citing “stakeholders.”  It turns “this is useless to me” into “this might be perfect for you,” and it turns “you have what I want” into “let’s negotiate,” instead of “let’s regulate each other into mutual disappointment.”  

Voluntary exchange scales beautifully, bureaucratic micromanagement does not, and the fastest way to make everyone worse off is to appoint the most self-righteous person in the seminar as the Director of Fairness and let them decide who deserves the snacks.

If you teach school, there’s a simple, low-effort way to show students why free trade keeps getting invited back into the conversation, even after everyone swears they’re done with it.  It takes about ten minutes, requires no permission slips, and will cost you roughly thirty dollars, which is also known as “two-thirds of a teacher’s weekly budget for joy.”

Step one: go to the nearest dollar store and buy thirty random items.  Candy, a puzzle book, a wine glass, a bag of potato chips, and a tiny flashlight that will stop working the moment it feels unappreciated.  The details do not matter.  (In fact, the more chaotic the assortment, the better.)  You want a table that looks like a garage sale held during a mild panic.

Hand out the items so that every student gets one.  Tell them they may inspect their items, but not open them, consume them, or break them.  (In other words, you are running the most realistic economy imaginable.) They may, however, show them off to classmates, which will immediately create envy, disappointment, and the first great moral lesson of the day.

Now have everyone hold up one to five fingers to show how satisfied they are, with one meaning “this is basically trash” and five meaning “this fulfills my wildest dreams and I would like to name it.”  Mentally add up the scores.  In most classrooms, the total will land somewhere around 40 to 50, because fate has distributed the wine glass to the kid who wants gummy worms, and the gummy worms to the kid who wanted literally anything else.

Round two: announce they may trade, but only with the student sitting next to them.  Give it a minute.  Then have them rate their happiness again.  The total will usually climb into the 60–80 range.  It turns out that when you loosen restrictions a little, people can undo a little of the universe’s bad decision-making.

Round three: remove the training wheels.  Tell them they may make their final trade with any willing student in the room.  Two minutes of frantic swapping later, do the finger-rating one more time.  Typically, the total jumps to 100+, and the classroom briefly resembles a commodities exchange, minus the suits and with more arguing over sour candy.

Then you deliver the punchline: no new items entered the room.  Nobody manufactured anything.  Nobody discovered a gold mine behind the whiteboard.  And yet, the class’s total “wealth”—measured as “how much people value what they have”—went up.  Why? Because trade helps stuff move from the people who don’t want it to the people who do.  And the fewer the restrictions, the easier that happens.

In other words: trade creates wealth—not by making more things, but by getting the same things into better hands.

Trade does more than shuffle stuff around until everyone is happier with what they’re holding. It also does something quietly civilizing: it teaches respect for private property.

Start with the classroom experiment.  Thirty random dollar-store items get scattered among thirty students, and the universe instantly proves it has a sense of humor.  Somebody gets a puzzle book and wants candy.  Somebody gets candy and wants anything that would not melt in their backpack.  At first, the room is full of low-grade disappointment, plus that one student who is absurdly thrilled to receive a tiny panda plush, because the world is unfair in both directions.

Now, here’s the key point: the moment you announce that trading is allowed, the entire tone changes.  Students stop talking like pirates and start talking like shopkeepers.  They ask, “What do you want for that?” instead of, “Hand it over.”  They begin to persuade.  They bargain.  They look for mutual advantage.  They also discover very quickly that the whole game collapses if people don’t treat possession as legitimate.

Because trade only works if your item is actually yours.

In the first round, students are told they can examine the item, show it off, and complain loudly about it, but they cannot open it, eat it, or break it.  That restriction is not there to ruin anyone’s fun.  It is there because private property is not just the right to hold something; it is the responsibility not to destroy what you might later exchange.  A candy bar is a tradable asset until you bite it… After that, it is just evidence.

Then come the trades.  Watch what students do when they want something.  They don’t snatch it, they negotiate for it.  They offer something in return, and—this part is crucial—they accept “no” as a valid answer.  Not always happily, but they accept it.  They start to understand that consent is not a decorative extra—it is the foundation.

Private property sounds lofty until you realize it’s the only barrier between “exchange” and “chaos.”  If anyone can take what they like, there is no reason to offer a better deal, no reason to keep promises, and no reason to plan.  Everyone’s effort goes into guarding, hiding, and grabbing.  In other words, the classroom turns from an economy into a feeding frenzy.

Trade is a practical lesson in boundaries because it teaches that ownership matters, not because the object is sacred, but because respecting ownership is what makes cooperation possible.  When people can say, “This is mine,” and have it mean something, they can also say, “Let’s make a deal,” and have that mean something, too.

While trade creates wealth, it also creates something harder to measure and—arguably—:more important: the habit of respecting other people’s rights, because it turns out that a peaceful “swap” is a lot more profitable than a messy “take.”

Respect for private property is not just a domestic virtue:  scaled up, it is one of the quiet foundations of peace among nations.

When a country treats property rights as legitimate—contracts honored, assets not arbitrarily seized, rules applied predictably—it becomes a safer place for foreigners to buy, sell, invest, and cooperate.  That, in turn, predictability lowers the temptation to use political pressure, covert coercion, or military force to “secure” resources that could be obtained through normal commerce.  In plain terms: if you can reliably purchase what you need, you are less likely to try to take it.

Property rights also strengthen diplomacy because they make agreements credible.  Treaties, trade deals, and cross-border projects are all just contracts with flags on them.  If a government has a reputation for confiscation, default, or expropriation, other states treat promises as temporary and hedge accordingly—often by building exclusionary alliances, by stockpiling weapons, and by preparing for confrontation.

Finally, respect for property supports trade, and trade creates mutual stakes.  When businesses, workers, and consumers in two countries find mutual benefit from ongoing exchange, leaders pay a higher political price for conflict that disrupts it.

Nations that can trust boundaries—territorial and economic—find fewer reasons to test them violently and find a whole lot of good reasons to respect them.

The Problem With Affordable Housing

Perhaps it is a sign of my age, but it increasingly seems to me like it’s always campaign season.  The Republicans, having won the coin toss back in 2024, have elected to defend in 2026 while the Democrats will go on offense.  While it is still months away, the Democrats’ apparent strategy for the next election is to defund ICE (since defunding the police worked so well in 2024) and to blame Trump for a bad economy.

The economy is actually pretty good, but accuracy doesn’t matter in election rhetoric and facts never matter as much as the appearance of things, so Trump is trying to make it look like he is working to make things “more affordable.”  One of the common complaints is that housing is more expensive, particularly entry level homes for first-time buyers, so the President is adopting an oft-heard solution:  forbid large investment entities from buying homes to derive income from rental property.  

Every housing debate eventually arrives at the same emotionally satisfying villain: a financial institution, who’s wearing a dark suit and has a darker soul, (and—if we are being honest—sporting a monocle it does not need).  (Most Americans learned their basic economics from playing Monopoly, which is a substantial improvement since our parents learned theirs from watching Frank Capra movies.)

The theory goes like this: “Big money” is buying homes, turning them into rentals, and therefore driving prices into the stratosphere. So, if we just ban financial institutions (or hedge funds, or private equity, or “people who use spreadsheets”) from purchasing houses, the market will calm down, prices will fall, and a grateful public will frolic through affordable subdivisions like it is 1997 again.

It is a great story with clear heroes, transparent villains, and the kind of moral clarity you only get from a plot that skips the boring parts like math, incentives, and supply and demand.  The problem is that this solution—while political catnip—mostly aims at reducing demand, when the durable, boring, unglamorous lever that actually lowers prices is usually increasing supply.

Let’s unpack that, with only mild sarcasm and minimal property damage.  First, the housing market is not a morality play.  Housing prices are largely a function of something that economists use to ruin parties: supply and demand.

• When demand rises (more people, higher incomes, low interest rates, migration, smaller household sizes), prices go up.
• When supply cannot respond (zoning, permitting delays, labor shortages, infrastructure limits, neighborhood resistance, financing constraints), prices go up more.

Notice something critical: the “can respond” part is doing a lot of work there.  If a city or region has strong demand and a system that makes new housing painfully slow, expensive, or legally impossible to build, prices climb whether the buyer is a schoolteacher, a dentist, or a corporation headquartered in Delaware with a logo that looks like a spreadsheet cell.

So, yes, investors can matter at the margin, especially in certain neighborhoods, during certain periods, or in certain housing types.  But the bigger, long-run story in most high-cost markets (think every city in California) is that we are not building enough homes, relative to the number of people who want to live in those places.

You can chase villains all day.  If the market is short a large number of units, it will behave like a market short a large number of units: it will bid up the existing ones.  And it doesn’t matter who is doing the bidding

What happens if you ban financial institutions?  Let’s say government passes a law tomorrow: “No financial institutions may buy single-family homes.”  The crowd cheers, a bald eagle sheds a tear, and—for two minutes—Bernie Sanders smiles.  Then the market reacts, because markets are like that.

Demand doesn’t vanish; it just reroutes.  If a certain pool of buyers is blocked, the demand will shift into:

• Smaller investors (LLCs, “mom-and-pop” landlords, partnerships, family offices),
• Buyer proxies (entities structured to skirt definitions),
• Out-of-state individuals, or
• Owner-occupants who were already competing.

You have not eliminated the underlying demand for housing as an asset.  You have mainly changed who is allowed to participate, and how they will structure their participation.  If the fundamental problem is “too many people chasing too few homes,” rearranging the list of permitted chasers is not a structural fix.

Some policies reduce rental supply (and raise rents).  If investors buy homes and rent them out, and you clamp down hard, you can end up with fewer rental options—particularly in places where single-family rentals are a meaningful part of the rental stock.  Result: renters compete harder for fewer rentals.  Rents rise. Then what happens?

• Renters with resources decide to buy.
• That pushes demand back into the ownership market.
• Prices do not obediently collapse: they reallocate pain.

A policy that makes you feel like you punished the right people can still land the bill on the wrong people.

You will probably make new housing harder to build.  Here is the unromantic truth: a lot of housing gets built because someone can finance it, aggregate it, manage it, and operate it at scale. Some institutional money goes into:

• Build-to-rent communities,
• Large multifamily housing, and
• Infill projects that require patient capital and tolerance for bureaucratic misery (building within a city where infrastructure already exists, on a vacant lot, for example).

If you write broad laws that scare away capital—or make compliance a legal minefield—you can reduce construction activity.  And reducing construction is an odd strategy for lowering prices in a shortage.

This is the key point: Supply is the pressure valve.  Break the valve, and you do not get lower pressure. You get a louder bang.

Demand suppression is the “diet soda” of housing policy.  Demand-reduction policies feel satisfying because they look like action, and they create the impression that prices are high because of a particular group’s behavior.  Every politician loves a quick solution that fits on a bumper sticker and is a little too complicated for the voter to realize that it doesn’t actually work.

But the demand side is an economic hydra:

• You cut off one head (institutions), and another head pops up (smaller investors).
• You restrict another head (investors overall), and demand returns through household formation, migration, interest rates, and income changes.

In high-demand places, demand is not a tap you can casually turn off—it is a fire hose.

Even if you could suppress demand meaningfully, you run into another awkward truth: people need places to live.  Housing demand is not purely optional consumption.  You can defer buying, but you cannot defer shelter forever.  Which is why, over time, the more reliable approach is to make it easier to build enough homes so that competition among buyers and renters cools down naturally.

Supply is the boring answer that actually works.  If you want prices to fall—or at least stop sprinting away from wages—you generally need more of the thing that is expensive.  In housing, that means more units, of more types, in more places, at more price points. 

No politician is ever going to admit that in a campaign speech.  It’s not glamorous and there is no single, obvious villain to defeat.  You boost supply by lowering barriers—those obstacles that are usually in place because of another misguided government policy. 

If you really want to solve the problem of housing, somewhere in the following list are the actions you need to implement.

Legalize more housing where people want to live.  A lot of cities reserve vast areas for only one housing type: detached single-family.  That is a policy choice, not a law of nature.  Allowing more “missing middle” housing—duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, courtyard apartments—can add supply without needing to build skyscrapers.

Speed up permitting and stop making lengthy construction time overly expensive.  Delays are not just annoying, they are a heavy construction cost, and costs show up in prices.  If it takes two years to get approvals, only certain projects pencil out, and only certain developers can survive the wait.  Streamlining approvals is not a giveaway to developers—it is a way to reduce the waste, risk, and financing costs that are ultimately baked into what buyers and renters pay.

Reduce parking mandates and other silent cost adders.  Mandating excessive amounts of parking can function like a tax on housing (especially in infill areas, where land is expensive).  If you require every unit to bring its own slab of asphalt, do not be shocked when the unit costs more.

Build infrastructure that unlocks buildable land.  Housing capacity is often constrained by water, sewer, roads, schools, and transit.  If you want more homes, you need the pipes and public services to support them.

Encourage accessory dwelling units (ADUs).  These are usually a second smaller home on the same lot, sometimes called a mother-in-law’s house or a casita.  ADUs are not a silver bullet, but they are a real bullet, and those are rare in policy.  They can add incremental supply in established neighborhoods, and they can create gentler options for multigenerational living.

“But investors are buying everything!”  Investors are easy to blame because they are visible, and because “BlackRock” sounds more ominous and easier to blame than “the zoning board meeting that ran until 11:00 p.m.”  But even if investor activity is inflating prices at the margins, the reason it can do so is usually that supply is tight enough that extra competition moves prices quickly.

In a well-supplied market, investors do not have magical price powers.  If they overpay, they lose money.  If rents cannot support the purchase price, the model breaks, and they stop buying.  Tight supply is the condition that turns marginal buyers into major price movers.

So, if you fix supply, you do not have to win a wrestling match against every possible category of buyer.  You just let the market do what markets do when there is enough product: create competition that lowers the price.

If you want a campaign slogan that actually lines up with the economics of the problem, try this: “Build more homes, faster.”

It is not as emotionally satisfying as “ban the villains,” but it has the advantage of being aimed at the lever that actually changes the outcome.  Banning financial institutions is, at best, a narrow tool that might modestly affect specific neighborhoods under specific conditions, and, at worst, a policy that shifts demand around, raises rents, or discourages construction.

Meanwhile, increasing supply is the grown-up move: slow, procedural, unsexy, and far more likely to work.  The housing market does not care how righteous you feel.  It cares how many units exist.  And until we build enough of them, the monocle-wearing villain is going to keep showing up in the script—because we wrote the shortage into the plot ourselves.

Let's Talk Carrots

There is a great story from World War II that tells how the British were able to shoot down German aircraft because of a secret weapon: carrots.

When the Nazis began heavily bombing London in September 1940, the British ordered a blackout at night and began fighting back by sending up fighters to intercept the Nazi bombers before they could reach the English Channel.  “Cat’s Eyes” Cunningham was the first British pilot to shoot down an enemy bomber at night, going on to rack up twenty confirmed kills, all but one of which were downed in the dark.  Naturally, the public wanted to know how.

The Ministry of Information eagerly responded that the reason the RAF pilots were so successful was from the Vitamin A they received from eating carrots.  Almost immediately, the Ministry of Food began using carrots to promote victory gardens to supplement the meager amount of rationed food available.  A bespectacled Dr. Carrot told children it was their patriotic duty to weed those gardens.

During the war years, when sugar was rationed to eight ounces per adult per week, folks got creative, and they got creative fast. Carrot pudding, carrot cake, carrot marmalade, and even carrot flan leaned on plain old root-vegetable sweetness to do the job the sugar bowl couldn’t.  And if that still didn’t scratch the itch, you could always pour yourself a glass of carrolade—a juice made from rutabagas and carrots and proof that when dessert is a morale issue, people will find a way (even if it involves drinking something that sounds like it ought to be used to clean a basement drain).

For the record, carrots won’t turn you into a human lighthouse. The whole “eat carrots and you’ll see in the dark” thing was less Grandma’s folk wisdom and more wartime storytelling: carrots do contain beta-carotene, which your body can use to make vitamin A, and vitamin A is important for normal vision, especially if you’re deficient.  But if you’re already eating like a reasonably functional mammal, adding extra carotene doesn’t bolt on night-vision goggles—it just gives you a respectable carrot crunch and, in super-sufficient quantities, it will bless you with the sort of orange complexion that makes people ask if you’re over doing the spray-on tan.

There is no doubt that carrots are good for you, but Cat’s Eyes Johnson didn’t rely on vegetables to shoot down those planes:  his interceptor had a new secret weapon—radar.  In 1940, the British began putting Airborne Interception (AI) radar into night fighters.  The early radar gave the crews a crude “blip” for a target’s range and rough direction; controllers on the ground would then “talk the fighter in”, using Ground Controlled Interception (GCI) until he was within two or three miles, at which point the onboard radar would guide the pilot close enough to finally see the bomber in the dark and make the attack.  These early radar sets were primitive, fussy, and absolutely game-changing for night defense during the Blitz.

The carefully crafted stories about carrots’ benefits unquestionably fooled British civilians, and the idea that carrots were good for the eyes absolutely became one of those bits of nonsense that everyone knows is true.  But it certainly did not fool the Germans, who were already experimenting with their own radar sets.  After all, the Germans could certainly see those massive radar antennas that were erected along the Cliffs of Dover.  Apocryphal stories of the Germans suddenly feeding their pilots more carrots should be filed in the same open-top cylindrical filing cabinet where we keep Bigfoot sightings and UFO reports.

For me, the most interesting part of the story is asking why the Ministry of Information thought fooling its own citizens was necessary in the first place.  All the Allies and all the Axis countries knew the truth, so why couldn’t the citizens be trusted with the truth? 

There’s yet another carrot story, and it’s a whole lot more fun than wartime marmalade.  If you’ve ever wondered how Bugs Bunny wound up leaning on a carrot like it was a cigarette, and tossing out “What’s up, Doc?” like he’s got an appointment with your optometrist, the trail runs straight through a 1934 movie called, It Happened One Night.

That film was a cultural crowbar.  It didn’t just entertain—it rearranged furniture.  It helped define the screwball-comedy genre, it shocked the Academy by sweeping the five major Oscars, and it generated more “everybody knows” trivia than a barroom on movie night.

The most famous example is Clark Gable undressing and revealing he’s not wearing an undershirt: a moment that’s been credited—sometimes a little too confidently—with sending undershirt sales into a nosedive.  The basic story is widely repeated, but the dramatic “75% drop” figure is closer to legend than to something you can audit with receipts, which is, honestly, the most Hollywood thing imaginable.

Then there’s the bus trip.  The movie put Gable and Claudette Colbert on a Greyhound and later writers have credited the film with giving intercity bus travel a real bump in popularity: romance, comedy, and the open road, all for the price of a ticket and a seatmate who sings?  That’s certainly remotely possible but it’s also patently unprovable.

Now, here’s where the carrots hop back onto the stage. A fast-talking character named Oscar Shapely keeps calling Gable’s character “Doc,” Gable mentions an imaginary tough guy named “Bugs Dooley” to rattle him, and there’s a scene where Gable munches a carrot while talking rapidly—a bit of business that Warner Bros. animators later admitted was the inspiration for Bugs Bunny.

But, just to keep the record straight: the line “What’s up, Doc?” itself wasn’t cribbed from Capra’s script.  It was written for Bugs in 1940 (A Wild Hare), and Tex Avery, the director, later said it was just a common Texas-style greeting—“doc” meaning something like “pal” or “dude.”  So, yes, Bugs borrowed the carrot-chewing swagger from Clark Gable, but the catchphrase came right out of Texas, not from a Hollywood soundstage.

Now, here’s the punchline to this whole Bugs Bunny business: a cartoon rabbit leaning on a carrot like it’s a cigar is basically where half the English-speaking world learned “rabbit nutrition”—and it’s about as reliable as learning automotive repair from Wile E. Coyote.  Real rabbits don’t naturally live on sugary root vegetables and carrots are best treated like dessert—small, occasional, and not the main event.   A steady diet of carrots will actually kill a rabbit.  If you want to feed a rabbit something “carrot-ish” on the regular, the top green part is the better bet: carrot tops are a leafy green that fits the “salad” side of a rabbit diet, while the orange part belongs in the once-in-a-blue moon treat category. 

Any good dietitian will tell you that you are safer taking dietary advice from Popeye than from Bugs.

Okay, that’s enough!  Next week I’ll explain how the S.S. Minnow was a Wheeler Express Cruiser with a top cruising speed of only 12 knots, so Gilligan and the rest of the castaways were never more than 41 miles from Oahu.  Geez, it’s like you can’t believe Hollywood at all