Five Foolish Ideas from Economically Challenged Legislators

Every now and then a legislator comes up with an idea so pure, so compassionate, so utterly detached from reality that you almost have to admire it.  Not because it will work.  Good Lord, no.  But because it takes a special kind of mind to look at a grocery store, an apartment building, or a checkout lane and think, “You know what this needs?  A mandate from someone who has never had to make payroll.”

There is a particular type of modern politician who believes that prices, wages, rent, inventory, staffing, food waste, and profit margins are not economic facts.  They are moral failures.  If groceries cost too much, command them to cost less.  If food is thrown away, order it donated.  If rent is high, cap it.  If self-checkout annoys someone, regulate the scanner.  If billionaires have money, announce that you will take it and then act surprised when they begin browsing real estate in Florida.

This is economics by bumper sticker.  And, as usual, the bumper sticker fits neatly on the car because the actual explanation would require a trailer.

Let us consider five recent ideas from the economically challenged wing of the legislature.

1.  The Ten Percent Self-Checkout Discount

Some genius in New York has proposed that grocery stores should be required to give customers a ten percent discount for using self-checkout.  The theory seems to be that if you scan your own groceries, you are now an unpaid employee and deserve compensation.

This has the surface appeal of one of those arguments made by a sophomore who has just discovered injustice, marijuana, and sex in the same semester.  “Why should I scan my own soup and not get paid?”

The problem is that grocery stores do not have ten percent profit margins.  They do not have a secret room in the back where they roll around in canned-bean money.  Grocery retail is a low-margin business.  A ten percent mandatory discount is not a reward for the customer.  It is an instruction to sell the food at a loss.

So what would happen?  Exactly what any adult would expect.  Stores would raise prices, remove self-checkout machines, restrict their use, reduce staffing elsewhere, and build the cost into everything on the shelf.  The legislator imagines a shopper saving money.  The grocer sighs and makes more cuts to customer service while demanding more productivity from a shrinking labor force.

This is the recurring problem with economically challenged politicians: they think the first move is the whole game.  They pass the law, everyone claps, and the curtain falls.  In the real world, people respond.  Businesses respond.  The board changes after every move.

If you make self-checkout a guaranteed loss, you do not get cheaper groceries.  You get fewer self-checkout lanes, higher prices, and another small lesson in why arithmetic should be required before holding office.

2.  Mandatory Staffing Ratios for Self-Checkout

Not content with misunderstanding self-checkout once, some places are also considering rules that would require one employee for every few self-checkout machines, along with item limits and other helpful little instructions from the Ministry of Retail Wisdom.

Now, I will freely admit that self-checkout can be irritating.  There are few things in modern life more insulting than being accused by a machine of stealing bananas while a clerk with a magic key has to come pardon you.  The machine says “unexpected item in bagging area” with the moral certainty of Cotton Mather spotting a witch.

But stores already know this.  They know when customers hate the machines.  They know when theft is too high.  They know when one employee can monitor six kiosks and when three kiosks are too many.  These decisions depend on the store, the neighborhood, the product mix, the technology, the time of day, and the customers.

The legislature knows none of this.

A government-mandated staffing ratio is not consumer protection.  It is anti-automation policy with a little smiley-face sticker on it.  If lawmakers want to preserve cashier jobs, they should say so.  But then they should also admit the tradeoff: longer lines, higher labor costs, higher prices, and fewer stores willing to operate in marginal areas.

This is the old habit of pretending that the cost will be paid by “business,” as if business was a large anonymous creature living in a cave.  But the cost gets paid by everyone.  Customers pay it in prices.  Workers pay it in fewer hours elsewhere.  Stores pay it by closing locations or not opening new ones.

The law does not repeal cost.  It merely disguises the invoice.

3.  Paper Copies of Digital Coupons

Then we have the proposal that if a store offers a digital coupon, it must also provide a paper version of the same discount.

I have some sympathy for the complaint.  Digital coupons are often obnoxious.  You walk into a store and see that butter is $3.49, only to discover that this price is available only if you have downloaded the app, created an account, confirmed your email, remembered your password, sacrificed a goat, and allowed the store to track your movements until the Second Coming.

For older customers especially, that is a real problem.  A grocery discount should not require a technology support call from a grandson.

But turning every digital coupon into a mandatory paper coupon is how government turns an annoyance into a department.  Now the store has to print, stock, track, honor, explain, police, and audit the paper coupons.  Employees have to deal with fraud, confusion, arguments, expired coupons, missing coupons, duplicate coupons, and customers who saw the sign but did not bring the paper.

And the predictable result?  Fewer coupons.  There is no way to lower prices by raising costs.

The legislator thinks he has made the discount more accessible.  The store thinks, “Fine, we will offer fewer discounts.” Once again, the law assumes behavior will not change after the mandate.  Once again, this assumption has the life expectancy of a snow cone in Las Cruces.

A sensible rule would be simple: if a store advertises a digital price in the aisle, let the cashier apply it for customers who ask.  Done.  Problem mostly solved.  No paper-coupon bureaucracy.  No compliance circus.

But sensible rules lack the grandeur of a bill-signing ceremony.

4.  Mandatory Donation of Near-Date Food

This is the one that really sounds wonderful, right up until you think about it for twelve seconds.

Grocery stores throw away food.  Poor people need food.  Therefore, require grocery stores to donate food that is near its sell-by date instead of tossing it out.

At first glance, this sounds like kindness.  At second glance, it sounds like kindness written by someone who has never ordered lettuce.

The great mistake is the idea that “the food already exists.” Yes, it exists the first day.  But after the law is in place, the grocer is not making decisions about yesterday’s food.  He is making decisions about tomorrow’s order.

Before the mandate, the manager might order 100 units, expecting to sell 85 at full price, mark down 10, and lose 5.  That is not ideal, but it is part of the abundance customers demand.  We want full shelves.  We want ripe produce.  We want bread available at 6 p.m., not just a sign saying, “We sold the mathematically correct amount at 3:14.”

After the mandate, those last five units are not merely possible waste.  They are a compliance problem.  They must be sorted, stored, refrigerated, documented, separated, perhaps logged, maybe inspected, and coordinated with a charity that may or may not arrive on time with refrigerated transport.

That is not free.  It takes labor.  It takes space.  It takes management.  It takes training.  It creates risk.  It creates overhead.

So next week the manager orders 92.

The legislator sees less food in the dumpster and declares victory.  What he does not see is the food that was never ordered.  The produce that was never stocked.  The bread that was never baked.  The farmer who got a smaller order.  The distributor who handled less volume.  The customer who came late and found empty shelves.  The poor shopper who used to buy markdown meat and now finds there is none.  Everyone loses because of the loss of economy of scale.

This is the difference between physical surplus and economic surplus.  The food is physically there today.  But the legal obligation changes the cost of having surplus tomorrow.  And when you raise the cost of surplus, you get less surplus.

That may sound good until you realize that grocery abundance depends on tolerating some waste.  A perfectly efficient grocery store is one where the last apple is sold to the last customer just before closing.  It is also a store that exists only in the imagination of someone who has never met customers.

The better policy is obvious: make donation easy, voluntary, safe, and legally protected.  Encourage it.  Provide tax incentives if necessary.  Standardize date labels so people stop throwing away food that is still perfectly edible.  Help charities build cold-storage capacity.

But do not turn every unsold tomato into a legal obligation.  Once the government starts punishing inventory risk, the market responds by taking fewer risks.  That means fewer tomatoes and fewer choices in the store.

5.  Rent Control, Wealth Taxes, and the General War on Incentives

For the fifth foolish idea, I am going to cheat and include an entire category: laws based on the belief that incentives are optional.

Rent control is the classic example.  Rents are high, so government limits rent increases.  The current tenant benefits, at least for a while.  The politician takes a bow.  The newspaper runs a photo of grateful renters.

Then landlords stop building.  Maintenance declines.  Units disappear into other uses.  New renters get locked out.  The people already inside the system are protected; everyone outside gets to press his nose against the glass.

Rent control is not housing policy.  It is musical chairs with nicer slogans.

Then there are wealth taxes.  These usually begin with the discovery that billionaires have a lot of money, followed by the belief that they will remain politely seated while the state rummages through their pockets.

But billionaires are not fence posts.  They can move.  Their assets can move.  Their lawyers can move even faster.  Announce a “one-time” wealth tax and every affected person hears the words “first installment.” If the state says, “We will tax you because you were here on January 1,” the obvious lesson is: do not be here on January 1.

Politicians imagine the money sitting still.  Money does not sit still.  Capital has legs, wings, attorneys, accountants, and a deep personal relationship with Delaware.

The same error appears in all these ideas.  Legislators look at the current arrangement and assume it will remain unchanged after they impose new costs.  Grocers will order the same amount.  Stores will offer the same coupons.  Landlords will build the same apartments.  Billionaires will stay put.  Customers will pay less.  Workers will earn more.  Farmers will sell the same produce.  Everyone will behave exactly as before, except in the one narrow way the law commands.

That is not policy.  That is a snow globe.

Shake it, admire the flakes, and ignore the fact that nobody inside is real.

The recurring question in economics is not, “Wouldn’t it be nice?” Of course it would be nice.  It would be nice if groceries were cheaper, rent were lower, food were never wasted, checkout lines moved faster, and billionaires mailed checks to the treasury out of civic affection.

The real question is: and then what?

And then the grocer orders less.
And then the store raises prices.
And then the landlord stops building.
And then the billionaire moves.
And then the discount disappears.
And then the checkout line gets longer.
And then the farmer plants less.

And then everyone wonders why the compassionate law produced such uncompassionate results.

The economically challenged legislator never gets to “and then what?” He stops at the press release.

The rest of us live in the “and then.”

The Fort Worth Nude Scandal of 1959

The scandal occurred when I was six years old and I remember my mother and father talking about it.  Either my memories were incorrect or my mother’s version of the story was different from what really happened. In any case it turns out that what I thought happened was a country mile from reality.  I’ve done some research and here is the real story. 

I suppose we have to start, as many Texas stories must, with two cowboys named Goodnight and Loving. 

The Goodnight-Loving Trail sounds less like a cattle route than a firm of frontier attorneys specializing in unpaid whiskey bills, but Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving managed to turn it into one of the great Texas enterprises: pushing longhorns north and west through country so dry the trees chased dogs and selling beef to soldiers, miners, and anyone else who was willing to pay cash for something that could walk to dinner under its own power.

Their story had everything Texas requires for legend—cattle, dust, danger, Comanches, bad water, worse judgment, and men with beards who considered sleeping indoors a sign of moral decline.  Loving died after being wounded on the trail, Goodnight kept his promise to bring the body home, and the whole thing became the sort of story Texans admire because it proves that if a man is stubborn enough, he can turn dehydration, bankruptcy, and poor road planning into glorious heritage.

The story of Goodnight and Loving, and their work with their friend John Chisum, became the foundation for dozens of movies, countless books, and, more or less, the beating heart of Lonesome Dove.  Texans have been dining out on the story ever since.

By the 1890s, the grandson of Oliver Loving had opened Ellison Furniture Store in downtown Fort Worth.  It became a profitable business and, by the 1950s, occupied an eight-story building at the corner of Seventh and Throckmorton.  I remember being in that store…Dimly, but I remember it.  There was a different kind of furniture on every floor and there was an art gallery (which seemed to me at the time like something adults had invented so children would learn patience).

By the time I went into the store, it was run by Bob Ellison, the great-great-grandson of Oliver Loving.   I think the cowboy heritage had petered out by the time Bob was born; he had a degree in philosophy and had spent extensive time touring art museums in Europe.  It was his wife’s suggestion that he turn the first floor of the furniture store into an art gallery.

In 1959, artist Ben Johnson submitted a painting called The Song to the Fort Worth Art Association.  It was an abstract, colorful depiction of a nude woman.  The Art Association rejected it on the grounds that it was vulgar.  This pissed off Bob Ellison, who was unimpressed by the cultural judgment of the local fig-leaf brigade, so he displayed the painting in a street-facing window of his furniture store as a protest for artistic freedom.

Perhaps there was a little cowboy left in Bob after all.

This instantly caused a furor in Fort Worth, a city that was deep in the center of the Bible Belt.  Fort Worth had its own movie censorship board tasked with making certain that Hollywood didn’t undermine the morality of the frontier metropolis.  The city had churches over a century old, one of which was the First Baptist Church, which was the largest church in the United States and the home of Frank Norris, the nationally-known, fire-breathing fundamentalist preacher famous for leading the fight against “that hell-born, Bible-destroying, deity-of-Christ-denying, German rationalism known as evolution." 

Naturally, the Fort Worth Ministers Association stepped forward.  This was a group deeply committed to making certain that no one in the city accidentally had any fun without proper supervision.  They began a concerted effort to have the painting removed on the grounds that it was vulgar, obscene, and a threat to the morals of a cowtown that had built much of its early reputation on whiskey, whorehouses, and gun fights. 

Letters to the editor described The Song as obscene graffiti or etchings suitable for an outhouse.  Of course, the publicity did what publicity always does.  Citizens of Fort Worth flocked to see the painting for themselves.  Some viewed it from across the street, presumably so that if moral contamination occurred, it would have to travel through traffic.  Many were outraged and some even returned several times to see if they were still outraged.  Vehicle traffic on Seventh Street slowed to a crawl.

There is no spectacle quite like a city insisting it does not want to look at something while lining up for a better view.

At this point, you probably want to know what this scandalous painting looked like.  Unfortunately, the current whereabouts of The Song are unknown.  As far as I can determine, only two black-and-white photographs remain, both showing the artist, Ben Johnson, and two women standing in front of the painting.  Sadly, the photographs do not show the colorful, pre-abstract painting to its best advantage.

However, there is another Johnson painting that was included in the show at the Ellison Furniture Store.  This painting, known simply as Nude (1957), gives us an excellent idea of what the missing painting looked like.

By today’s standards, the painting is so innocent, the public debate so trivial, and the Art Association’s refusal to show it so silly, that the whole episode makes the guardians of public virtue look like the sort of sanctimonious buffoons who wander through museums at night gluing fig leaves on statues.

Evidently, Bob Ellison thought so, too.  He moved to New York City, where he continued to collect art.  A few years later, he sold the Ellison Furniture Company.  When he died, part of his collection was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Not surprisingly, Ellison did not leave his collection to the art museums of Fort Worth.  One suspects he had decided that if Fort Worth did not want to see a painting in 1959, there was no need to trouble the city with the burden of seeing the good ones later.

We may never know what happened to The Song.  It might be hanging quietly in someone’s house, or rolled up in an attic, or misidentified in storage, or gone forever.  But if you would like to see Johnson’s Nude, you can travel to New York City and walk down Broadway to the Schoelkopf Gallery, where it has been on display.

You should no hold your breath waiting for it to be shown in Fort Worth.

Rent Freeze Today, Housing Shortage Tomorrow

Zohran Mamdani promised to freeze the rent, and, to his credit or blame, depending on which end of the lease you occupy, he has now delivered the essential part of that promise.  Mayor Mamdani did so, not by standing on the steps of City Hall and personally ordering every landlord in New York to reach for the smelling salts, but through the New York City Rent Guidelines Board, which voted to freeze rent increases on roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments.  Since Mamdani appointed six of the ten members of the board, it amounts to the same thing.

That distinction matters: he did not freeze every apartment in New York.  He did not freeze luxury towers, market-rate brownstones, or the rent on a closet in Brooklyn now advertised as “cozy, sun-adjacent, artist-friendly space.”  What he froze were the allowable increases on the already rent-stabilized apartments—the giant middle category of New York housing that is neither free-market nor old-fashioned rent-control.  These are the units where tenants already have strong renewal rights and landlords are already limited in what they may charge.

Still, as campaign promises go, this one was not merely symbolic.  The board approved a zero percent increase on both one-year and two-year leases.  That is the important part.  Prior rent freezes usually gave tenants relief for one year.  This unprecedented move extends the logic to two-year renewals as well.  Mamdani promised tenants that their rent would not go up.  For covered tenants choosing a renewal lease beginning under this order, that is now essentially true.

The immediate political benefit is obvious.  If you are a tenant in a rent-stabilized apartment and your rent was about to rise, this feels like someone finally threw you a rope.  New York rents are absurd.  Working people are squeezed.  Families are doubled up, priced out, or forced to spend the grocery budget on the privilege of living near a subway stop that smells faintly of hot brake dust and despair.  A rent freeze is simple, understandable to the uneducated, and immediately popular with the people who receive it.

But economics has a nasty habit of showing up after the applause ends.

Start with tenant behavior.  If both the one-year and two-year lease options carry a zero percent increase, what rational tenant planning to stay in the apartment would choose only one year? The two-year lease becomes the obvious choice.  It is not greed.  It is arithmetic.  Why lock in one year of protection when you can lock in two? If the Rent Guidelines Board comes back next year and allows an increase, the tenant who chose one year is exposed.  The tenant who chose two years is protected.

That means a large share of tenants will likely pick the two-year lease.  The landlord will not merely lose one year of increases, he may lose two.  Meanwhile, the building does not get a rate freeze from the insurance company.  It does not get a tax freeze from the city.  (And Mayor Mamdani is proposing to raise property taxes by 9.5%). The plumber does not say, “Never mind, this one is for the revolution.”  The boiler company does not repair the heat out of solidarity.  Labor, insurance, taxes, utilities, repairs, debt service, compliance costs — all of these keep moving.

This is where the romance of rent control collides with the plumbing.

A building is not a moral abstraction—it is a physical object with a roof, pipes, wiring, elevators, boilers, bricks, locks, stairs, fire systems, trash areas, and tenants who quite reasonably expect all of those to work.  If rent is frozen while costs rise, the owner has fewer dollars available for maintenance.  Large landlords may be able to absorb that for a while.  Some may even deserve little sympathy.  But New York also has small building owners, older buildings, marginal properties, and landlords already struggling with post-2019 rules that limited how much renovation cost can be recovered through future rent.

The result is predictable.  Necessary repairs get delayed.  Cosmetic repairs disappear.  Marginal buildings become more marginal.  An owner who would have renovated a vacant apartment may decide not to bother.  A unit that needs $50,000 in work but can only legally rent for an amount that will never repay the investment, is not an affordable apartment.  It is a stranded asset with a broken stove.

That brings us to the problem of “ghost apartments.” New York already has over 57,000 vacant rent-stabilized units.  These are units that are sitting empty because owners say the rent laws make renovation uneconomic.  In plain English, they are apartments that exist on paper, languish behind locked doors, and do absolutely nothing for the people who need housing.

A city with a housing shortage cannot afford ghost apartments.  It cannot afford tens of thousands of legal apartments standing empty while politicians give speeches about affordability.  Every empty unit is a small confession that the policy system has failed.  The tenant does not get the apartment.  The landlord does not get rent.  The city does not get a functioning housing unit.  Everyone loses—except perhaps the lawyer explaining why nothing can be done until the next hearing.

New York has already run this experiment, and the results in the 1960s and 1970s should make everyone a little less smug about today’s rent-freeze promises.  Wartime rent control began as an emergency measure in the 1940s, but by the postwar decades the emergency had somehow become a permanent feature of city life, like rats in the alleys or a subway performer with a guitar.  The theory was simple: keep rents low and tenants safe.  The reality was less charming.  In older buildings, especially in poorer neighborhoods, rents were held below the level needed to cover taxes, repairs, heat, insurance, plumbing, roofs, and the thousand other indignities suffered by buildings that have the nerve to age.  Landlords responded exactly as arithmetic said they would: they delayed repairs, cut maintenance, walked away from marginal properties, or let buildings deteriorate until abandonment became the business plan.  By the late 1960s, New York’s vacancy rate had collapsed to crisis levels, and through the 1960s and 1970s entire neighborhoods saw disinvestment, abandonment, arson, and decay.  Rent control did not cause all of that by itself—crime, poverty, population loss, bad city finances, and urban collapse all had supporting roles—but strict rent control helped turn ordinary housing into a financial trap.  Eventually, the city’s own housing authority begged to end rent control.

The real solution to high rents is not mysterious.  New York needs more housing.  Not slogans about housing.  Not hearings about housing.  Not a blue-ribbon commission to study whether people prefer sleeping indoors.  Actual housing.  More apartments.  More density.  Faster approvals.  Lower construction barriers.  A system in which building rental housing is treated as a public necessity rather than a suspicious activity requiring seven consultants, fourteen signatures, and a goat sacrifice before the zoning board.

A city cannot simultaneously tell private capital, “Please build and maintain rental housing,” and “By the way, your future income may be politically frozen whenever rents become unpopular.”  Developers and lenders are not sentimental creatures—they are experts who price risk.  If New York becomes a place where the return on rental housing is increasingly controlled by politics, fewer people will build rental housing unless the city pays them, subsidizes them, gives them tax breaks, gives them land, or forces them through zoning mandates.

That may be Mamdani’s actual preference: more publicly-driven housing, more subsidized housing, more city-guided construction.  Fine.  Then the question becomes whether the city can actually build at that scale, at that speed, and at a cost that does not turn every affordable apartment into a marble monument to bureaucratic process.  Promising 200,000 units is easy.  Delivering them in New York is where campaign poetry goes to die.

A comparison with Buenos Aires is useful because Argentina recently tried the opposite experiment.  Argentina’s earlier rental law had heavily regulated lease terms and rent adjustments.  When President Javier Milei repealed those controls, the Buenos Aires rental market changed rapidly.  Landlords who had withheld units put them back on the market.  Rental listings rose sharply.  Real rents fell or stabilized after inflation, at least in the first period after repeal.  Landlords are now competing for tenants by offering lower rents or improved amenities.

This is a lesson worth noticing.  When the rules made renting unattractive, supply disappeared.  When the rules were loosened, supply came back.

New York is choosing the opposite, protecting current tenants by squeezing future returns.  In the short run, that works for the people lucky enough to have a covered apartment.  In the long run, it risks creating fewer available apartments, worse maintenance, more ghost units, and even higher pressure on the uncontrolled market.

That is the oldest problem with rent control.  It is wonderful if you are inside the lifeboat.  It is less wonderful if you are swimming beside it.

Mamdani delivered what he promised.  That should be acknowledged, but delivering a promise is not the same thing as solving a problem.  Freezing rent may help today’s tenant sign a two-year lease, but does not fix the boiler, finance the renovation, lure the builder, or bring the ghost apartment back to life.

The first step to achieving affordable housing is to have housing.  That sounds almost too simple to say, which may be why politicians avoid saying it.  New York does not need a better way to ration scarcity.  It needs less scarcity.

The Social Security Mattress Fund

Back in 2005, George W.  Bush suggested that maybe, just maybe, Social Security ought to let some money should be invested in the market.  Naturally, Washington reacted as if he had proposed funding retirement by making seniors fight raccoons for loose change behind the Cracker Barrel.  We were told this was dangerous.  Reckless.  Radical.  Possibly the end of civilization, or at least the end of the entitlement system as a sacred government-operated mattress stuffed with IOUs.

The idea was simple enough: instead of putting every Social Security dollar into the federal government’s own weird bookkeeping system, take some portion of the incoming payroll-tax money and invest it in the productive American economy.  Not in tulip bulbs.  Not in Uncle Louie’s alpaca ranch.  Not in a cryptocurrency named RetireCoin bearing a cartoon eagle wearing sunglasses.  Just something boring, broad, and dull enough to make a Vanguard brochure seem like a Tom Clancy novel: an S&P 500 index fund, the darkest blue of blue chip investments.

Now suppose we had taken half of new Social Security payroll-tax receipts beginning around 2005 and invested that half in a broad S&P 500 index fund.  The other half would still have gone into the regular Social Security system to help pay current benefits.  This was not a proposal to stop paying Grandma.  Grandma would still get her check.  She might even get it while glaring at CNBC and demanding to know why Pfizer was down three-eighths.

Under a rough model, investing half of the incoming payroll-tax money from 2005 through 2025 in the S&P 500 would have produced a gross investment account of roughly $38 trillion.  That is not a typo.  It is not $38 billion, which is the kind of number Congress loses in a sofa cushion while looking for a defense contractor.  It is $38 Trillion, with a T.

Of course, that gross number is not the same as saying Social Security would have had $38 trillion sitting in the vault, stacked neatly between the Ark of the Covenant and Jimmy Hoffa.  Social Security still had to pay benefits during those years.  People retired.  Checks went out.  Medical alert bracelets were purchased.  Grandchildren were slipped twenty-dollar bills and told not to tell their parents.  If we subtract the continuing cost of paying benefits from the fantasy version where all of this was magically self-contained, the more realistic rough net figure comes down to something like $16.5 trillion to $17 trillion.

That is still an astonishing number.  The actual Social Security trust fund was about $2.6 trillion at the end of 2025.  So instead of limping along with a fund that Washington keeps warning will be exhausted in the foreseeable future, we might have had a net fund in the neighborhood of $16.6 trillion.  That is a difference of about $14 trillion.  Fourteen trillion dollars is not walking-around money.  That is not “rounding error.” That is not the amount the federal government spends because someone in a subcommittee discovered there are still three counties in America without a federally funded interpretive dance center.

And here is where it gets really irritating.

This period was not exactly a golden escalator ride to prosperity.  Anyone who says, “Well sure, the stock market did well, but only because everything went perfectly,” should be required to sit quietly in a room and watch financial news from 2008 on a loop until they apologize to the nearest index fund.  Since 2005, we have had the housing collapse, the financial crisis, the Great Recession, the COVID crash, inflation panic, interest-rate panic, recession panic, bank panic, election panic, European panic, China panic, debt-ceiling panic, and the recurring American tradition of yelling “This is unsustainable!” while continuing to sustain it with borrowed money.

The S&P still won. 

That does not mean stocks always go up.  They do not.  Sometimes they fall down the stairs, burst through the screen door, and land in the shrubbery.  But over long periods, owning pieces of profitable companies has historically done better than lending money to the federal government so it can write itself a note promising to repay itself later.  The Social Security trust fund is not exactly Scrooge McDuck’s money bin.  It is mostly a pile of special Treasury securities, which is Washington’s way of saying, “We spent the money, but we left ourselves a very formal Post-it note.”

Now, for the truly nervous, let us run a deliberately ridiculous stress test.  Suppose the invested half of payroll taxes had not earned the actual S&P returns.  Suppose it had lost 10% every single year.

Not one bad year.  Not one crash.  Not a recession.  Not 2008.  I mean losing 10% per year, every year, for twenty-one years.  That is not an investment model.  That is a financial horror movie.  That is the stock market being managed by rabid squirrels with margin accounts.  That is a mutual fund whose prospectus simply says, “Abandon hope, all ye who enroll.”

Even then, if half of annual payroll-tax contributions had been set aside each year from 2005 through 2025 and the balance had shrunk by 10% annually, the side fund would still have ended up around $3.95 trillion.  Compared with the actual trust fund reserve of about $2.56 trillion, even that disaster scenario would be ahead by roughly $1.4 trillion.

That number requires an important explanation, because otherwise someone from Washington will run into the room waving a blue-ribbon commission report and wheezing into a microphone.  The $3.95 trillion figure is the value of the side investment fund under the absurd “loses 10% every year” assumption.  It assumes benefits are still being paid through the regular Social Security cash-flow system.  If you charged all benefits against that side fund alone, then of course it would not work.  But that was never the point.  The point is that setting aside part of incoming money creates a growing asset pool, even under comically terrible assumptions.  Under real-world market returns from 2005 through 2025, that asset pool would have been gigantic.

And no, this does not mean we should turn Social Security into a day-trading app.  Nobody needs Grandma checking candlestick charts between “Wheel of Fortune” and the evening news.  The point is not speculation.  The point is ownership.  A broad index fund is not betting on one company.  It is buying a slice of American productivity.  It is owning part of the companies that make the phones, build the stores, drill the oil, run the railroads, process the payments, sell the groceries, manufacture the drugs, ship the packages, write the software, and generally keep the country functioning while Congress holds hearings about why nothing functions.

A system like this would also have changed the psychology of Social Security.  Instead of workers seeing payroll taxes vanish into the federal fog, they would know that at least some part of the money was being invested in real assets.  Not promises.  Not slogans.  Not “the full faith and credit” of people who cannot pass a budget without theatrical hostage negotiations.  Real ownership in real companies.

Imagine what that much sustained investment in the American economy could have meant.  Not every dollar would have gone directly into a new factory or a new job, because index funds mostly buy shares that already exist.  But long-term investment strengthens markets.  It lowers the cost of capital.  It supports expansion.  It helps companies grow, hire, modernize, research, build, and compete.  It also gives ordinary workers a direct stake in the growth of the country.  The people paying into Social Security would not just be funding benefits for today’s retirees.  They would be building a national nest egg tied to the success of American enterprise.

Instead, we chose the mattress.

Every year, payroll taxes come in.  Benefits go out.  The surplus, when there is one, gets lent to the federal government.  The federal government spends it.  The trust fund receives a Treasury security.  Everyone in Washington puts on a serious face and says the system is “invested.” Technically, that is true.  It is invested in the same sense that giving your brother-in-law $500 and receiving a napkin that says “I owe you big-time” is fixed-income investing.

The obvious reply is that it is too late now.  We missed the chance.  The 2005 train left the station.  The conductor retired, the station was renamed after a senator, and the tracks are now part of a federal high-speed rail study that will be completed in 2147.

But it is not too late.

We do not have to fix the entire system in one heroic act.  Washington loves heroic acts because they create press conferences, commemorative pens, and bipartisan photographs in which everyone looks as if they just smelled smoke.  But Social Security could begin modestly.  Set aside a small percentage of annual payroll-tax receipts into a true national investment fund.  Make it broad.  Make it boring.  Make it automatic.  Make it legally protected from congressional raids, which means putting it behind more locks than Fort Knox, NORAD, and a teenager’s phone.

Start with 1%.  Or 2%.  Or 5%.  The exact number matters less than the principle: stop treating every incoming dollar as if it must be spent immediately or loaned to the same government that is already broke.  Begin building an actual asset base.  Let compounding do what compounding does.  It will not solve every problem overnight.  It would not make actuarial deficits disappear like a magician’s assistant but it would move the system in the right direction.

The best time to have begun  was twenty years ago.  The second-best time is now.  The worst time is always “after the next election,” which in Washington means approximately never.

Social Security does not need a casino.  It sure as hell does not need any more immoral politicians promising the elderly the economic impossible.  It needs a savings account with ambition.  It needs a portion of its annual inflow tied to the productive economy instead of buried in the federal mattress.  We had a chance in 2005 and ran away from it screaming.  Fine.  We are older now.  Presumably wiser.  Certainly more indebted.

Maybe it is time to stop pretending the mattress is a retirement plan.

Cruel and Unusual

What no one argues is that four people were killed in Tommy Zeigler’s family furniture store in Winter Garden, Florida, on Christmas Eve.  That much is not in dispute.  The dead were Zeigler’s wife, Eunice; her parents, Perry and Virginia Edwards; and a customer named Charlie Mays.  Zeigler himself was also shot and badly wounded, which is either evidence that he was a surviving victim of a robbery gone catastrophically wrong, or evidence that he was a very determined murderer willing to shoot himself in the abdomen to sell the story.

This is not a cheerful Christmas story.  Somewhere Norman Rockwell just put down his paintbrush and poured himself bourbon.

The State of Florida’s theory was that Zeigler planned the whole thing.  According to prosecutors, he killed his wife for a large life-insurance payout, then killed her parents and Charlie Mays as part of an elaborate cover-up.  Mays, in the state’s version, was not an innocent customer who wandered into the wrong furniture store at the wrong time—he was the convenient corpse Zeigler needed in order to make the murders look like a robbery or shootout.

Zeigler has always maintained the opposite.  He says he walked into violence already in progress, fought for his life, and barely survived.  His lawyers have repeatedly argued that physical evidence, blood evidence, and DNA evidence do not support the prosecution’s version of events.  Prosecutors, with equal enthusiasm, have insisted that the case was proved and the jury agreed.

A Florida jury convicted Zeigler.  He was convicted of first-degree murder in the deaths of Eunice Zeigler and Charlie Mays, and second-degree murder in the deaths of Perry and Virginia Edwards.  The jury recommended life imprisonment for the death-eligible counts.  The judge overrode that recommendation and imposed death sentences anyway, because Florida law at the time allowed judges to do that sort of thing.  It is always comforting when the justice system finds a way to make “recommended by the jury” mean “thank you for your suggestion, please enjoy a complimentary mint on the way out.”

The case then moved into the strange afterlife of capital punishment, where nothing is ever really finished.  Zeigler’s original trial concluded, but the litigation continued.  His death sentence was vacated and then reimposed by a different judge.  There have been appeals, post-conviction motions, DNA fights, evidentiary hearings, death warrants, stays, more motions, more hearings, and enough paperwork to mulch a small national forest. 

This is where the phrase “cruel and unusual” begins to chew through the bars of Tommy’s cell on death row.  You see, Tommy Ziegler was convicted in 1976, he has been waiting to be executed for 50 years.

The Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.  Any civilized person should be willing to admit that the deliberate killing of a prisoner by the state at least wanders into the neighborhood of that prohibition, even if the Supreme Court has decided, for now, that capital punishment is not automatically unconstitutional.  “For now” is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.  Constitutional law is permanent in the same way wallpaper is permanent.  It stays right where it is until enough people decide it has become hideous.

There are endless debates about the death penalty, and I understand both sides, which is inconvenient because it prevents the clean pleasures of yelling.  I dislike the idea of the state executing people.  I especially dislike the idea of the state executing people after the state has repeatedly demonstrated that it can lose evidence, botch trials, rely on junk science, believe jailhouse informants, and occasionally confuse “beyond a reasonable doubt” with “close enough for government work.”

On the other hand, I can think of crimes so monstrous that life in prison feels inadequate.  There are people who have done things so evil that the soul reaches for punishment before the brain can call a committee meeting.  For someone like Osama bin Laden, even my better angels admit the executioner should browse the power-tool aisle at Lowe’s in search of a method of fulfilling the court’s sentence. 

So, I am not writing this as someone who thinks the death penalty is always morally impossible.  I am writing as someone who thinks it is far too easy to support the death penalty in theory and far too hard to defend it in practice.

Because in practice, it is a mess.  A slow, expensive, contradictory, lawyer-fed mess.

And it is expensive.  That is the part that always surprises people.  Many assume execution must be cheaper than keeping someone in prison for life.  After all, food costs money.  Guards cost money.  Medical care costs money.  Prisons are not free, no matter how many politicians speak as if we built them out of surplus righteousness and unpaid interns.

But the execution itself is not the expensive part.  The syringe, the chemicals, the gurney, and the last meal are not what bankrupts the state.  The money disappears decades earlier, in the capital trial process.  A death-penalty case is not just a murder trial.  It becomes a media circus that lingers for years.

The lawyers have to be more specialized.  Jury selection takes longer.  Experts are hired.  Motions breed in the file cabinet like rabbits.  If there is a conviction, there is often a separate penalty phase, which is essentially a second trial to decide whether the defendant will live or die.  Then come the automatic appeals, state post-conviction proceedings, federal habeas petitions, challenges to evidence, challenges to lawyers, challenges to the method of execution, and occasionally litigation over whether the state’s preferred chemical cocktail is medicine, punishment, or a very grim chemistry fair project.  All of this clogs up the court calendar and costs some very real taxpayer money.

And there should be safeguards.  That is the maddening part.  The cost is not simply waste.  Much of it is the price of trying not to kill the wrong person.  A mistaken prison sentence is terrible, but at least there is some possibility of correction.  A mistaken execution cannot be fixed with an apology, a check, and a plaque reading, “Oops.”

Study after study has found that death cases cost more than life-without-parole cases.  Maryland found that a death sentence cost millions more than a comparable non-death case.  California’s death-penalty system has been estimated to cost billions more than a system where life without parole is the maximum penalty.  North Carolina researchers reached similar conclusions.  Kansas found that death cases devour more court time than ordinary murder cases, which is a little like discovering that a hippopotamus takes up more room in the bathtub than a duck.

So no, the death penalty is not the budget-conscious option…it is not discount justice.  It is premium-priced vengeance, financed one hearing at a time with the taxpayers footing the bill.

If we lived in some imaginary country where the sheriff arrested a murderer on Monday, the judge sentenced him on Tuesday, and the executioner handled matters on Wednesday before lunch, then yes, execution would probably be cheaper.  But that is not the United States.  We have constitutional protections, appellate review, evidentiary rules, procedural safeguards, and a national memory full of wrongful convictions.  We also have judges, lawyers, prosecutors, clerks, experts, transcripts, motions, remands, re-hearings, and a legal vocabulary apparently designed by people paid by the syllable.

The real question, then, is not whether execution is cheaper.  The real answer is that it usually is not.  The real question then becomes whether the state should spend extra money to achieve death rather than permanent imprisonment.

Some people will say “yes” because they believe certain crimes deserve the ultimate punishment regardless of cost.  That is a moral argument and it may be right or wrong, but at least it is honest.  What is not honest is pretending the death penalty saves money.  It does not.  In fact, it is the most expensive way to prove that the state is very, very angry.

Which brings me to a possible compromise (though I admit compromises on the death penalty have all the natural grace of a committee-designed camel).  What if the death penalty were reserved exclusively for the worst of the worst: serial killers and mass murderers?  Not every murderer.  Not every horrible case.  Not every crime that makes the evening news unbearable.  Only those who kill multiple people in a single mass-murder event, or those who murder repeatedly over time.

This would not end the moral argument, it would not satisfy abolitionists, and it would not satisfy those who think every aggravated murder deserves death, but it would narrow the system dramatically.  America’s death rows include roughly two thousand people.  If capital punishment were restricted to serial killers and mass murderers, the number of eligible prisoners would shrink to a small minority (probably only a few hundred at most).  Most capital murders are horrifying, but they are not Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, the Oklahoma City bombing, or a school massacre.

But the larger point remains:  If society insists on keeping the death penalty, it should at least stop pretending that every death-eligible case is equally clear, equally monstrous, and equally worth the cost.  Reserve it for the rare category of crimes where the evidence is overwhelming, the public scrutiny is intense, and the scale of the crime is beyond ordinary murder.  For everyone else, life in prison without parole is not mercy.  It is a concrete box with meals, boredom, old age, and no exit.

If this rule had been in use for the last half century, we would have reduced the number of people sitting on death row in this country from roughly two thousand to about three hundred.  Not only would we have taken a significant step to unclogging the our country’s court dockets, we would have saved the taxpayers about $4 billion.

That may not satisfy the hunger for vengeance, but it would have been cheaper, cleaner, and less likely to leave us fifty years later, staring at an old man on death row and wondering whether punishment has become less a sentence than a national nervous breakdown.

The death penalty, as practiced, is not swift, it is not cheap, it is not simple, and, after half a century, it is hard to call it justice without feeling the word wobble in your mouth.  Can anyone really argue that Florida’s executing an eighty-year-old man now confined to a wheelchair after he has endured half a century on death row serves the cause of justice?

At some point, the state should either carry out the sentence quickly, constitutionally, and correctly, or admit that it cannot.  Because a system that takes fifty years to decide whether to kill a man is not projecting moral certainty.  It is pacing the floor in a black robe, mumbling to itself, and billing the taxpayers by the hour.

The Roman Seal Box

There is a scene in one of my favorite movies, Roxanne, where Steve Martin’s character sits down to write a letter.  But he does not merely grab the nearest ballpoint pen from the coffee mug, rip a page out of a legal pad, and start scribbling.  No, this is a man who understands civilization.  He opens a desk drawer and begins searching for the perfect stationery.  Then he selects the perfect pen.  He is not just writing a letter.  He is preparing a small act of theater.

How wonderful!

Compare that with a modern text message.

“u up?”

There it is: the collapse of Western civilization in three characters and a question mark.

I still like letters.  I like to write them.  I assume I would like to receive them, although, at this point, that is mostly theoretical.  I have heard rumors that people once received personal letters in the mail, but that may be one of those apocryphal stories, like rain following the plow, or a city council’s lowering taxes.

There was a time when the mail was exciting.  You opened the mailbox and found something besides bills, campaign flyers, and a postcard from your dentist featuring a cartoon molar water-skiing.  There might be a letter.  A real letter.  From a real person.  Written by hand.  Folded carefully.  Slipped into an envelope.  Addressed by someone who knew where you lived and, more importantly, thought about you long enough to find a stamp.  There is a little magic in a letter that has touched both the hand of the writer and the hand of the reader, carrying across the miles not just words, but evidence of affection.

Now the mailbox is mostly a metal spam folder with hinges, a temporary repository for grocery store advertisements and assorted junk mail.

But I still like the ritual of writing letters.  Occasionally, I like to go whole hog and I get out nice stationery—not “printer paper from the bottom drawer” nice, but actual stationery—but paper that suggests I might own a smoking jacket, a globe, and opinions about port wine.  Then I choose an old fountain pen (preferably one temperamental enough to remind me that convenience is the enemy of character).  A fountain pen does not simply write…It negotiates.  It makes demands: “Hold me correctly!”  “Use decent paper!”  “Do not rush!”  “Do not press down like you are filling out a loan application!”  “Write legibly!”

Then, when the letter is finished, I sometimes close it with a wax seal.

Now, we are getting somewhere.

A wax seal turns a letter into an event.  Without a wax seal, an envelope says, “Here is some correspondence.” With a wax seal, it says, “This may contain news of inheritance, betrothal, or troop movements.” It gives even a note about lunch the dignity of a royal decree.

The process itself is ridiculous in the best possible way.  You light a little flame, melt sealing wax, drip it onto the flap, and press a seal into it.  For one brief shining moment, you are not a person sitting at a desk in the age of password resets and software updates, you are a Venetian doge, a Tudor minister, or a minor nobleman with troubling peasants and a cousin in exile.

Of course, the modern postal system does not fully share my enthusiasm.  A wax seal can be torn off, smashed, smeared, or otherwise brutalized by sorting machines that treat envelopes the way airport baggage handlers treat guitars.  The U.S.  Postal Service, which can deliver a birthday card across the continent for the price of a candy bar, is still not really designed for my eighteenth-century correspondence cosplay.

But I have an answer…Or at least I have the beginning of an answer, which is more or less the same thing in blog form.

I need a Roman seal box.

Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

In the Roman world, important documents were sometimes sealed using little containers called seal boxes.  The document, often written on a wax tablet or on folded material, would be tied shut with string.  The string would pass through or around the box.  Wax would be placed inside the box, and then a signet ring or seal would be pressed into the wax.  The box protected the wax seal from damage, while the seal protected the message from tampering.

That is the kind of sensible over-engineering I admire.

The Roman seal box was usually small, often made of bronze, and sometimes decorated.  It had a base and a lid.  The cords holding the document closed ran through slots or holes.  Once the wax was sealed inside, you could tell whether anyone had opened the document because the cord would have to be cut or the seal broken.  In other words, it was ancient two-factor authentication, except instead of a six-digit code texted to your phone, it involved string, wax, metalwork, and suspicion.

The steps are simple enough.  First, write your letter.  This is already where most modern people drop out, because writing more than two sentences without autocorrect or emojis now counts as a survival skill.  Second, fold the letter.  Third, wrap it with string or ribbon.  Fourth, pass the string through the seal box and tie it up.  Fifth, drip wax into the box, press your seal into it, and close the lid.  Sixth, send the letter to someone who either will be delighted or will be deeply concerned about your mental state.

I want one.

Not an original Roman seal box, of course.  That would belong in a museum, or at least in the hands of someone who knows the difference between “patina” and “I dropped it in the driveway.” I want a cheap modern version.  Something made for the eccentric letter writer.  Something you could buy in a set with sealing wax, cotton cord, and a little brass seal engraved with a cat, a family initial, or the words “You Have Been Formally Notified.”

Why does no one make these?

We live in an age when you can buy a plastic banana slicer, a Bluetooth toaster, and a phone case shaped like a waffle, yet I cannot easily buy a Roman-style seal box for mailing personal letters.  This seems like a failure of capitalism.  We have 47 kinds of toothpaste, but no affordable device for making my correspondence look like it was intercepted on the Appian Way.

Perhaps the answer is 3D printing.  Surely someone with a 3D printer, a small Etsy shop, and a willingness to indulge harmless weirdos could produce these things.  Make them in bronze-colored resin.  Make them in faux ivory.  Make a starter kit.  Call it “The Cicero.” Offer premium editions called “The Cleopatra,” “The Hadrian,” and “The Maiden Aunt Who Still Writes Thank-You Notes.”

There is a market here.  It may be a tiny market, but it is a market.  There are people who buy fountain pens.  There are people who collect sealing wax.  There are people who still know what blotting paper is.  There are people who own more than one inkwell and are not currently appearing in a period drama.  These people need tools.  They need encouragement.  They need enablers.

Which gives me an idea.

The Post Office is forever lamenting the loss of business.  Nobody writes letters anymore, they say.  Mail volume is down.  The system is under strain.  Packages are keeping things alive, but the personal letter has been shoved into history alongside calling cards, hat pins, and people who knew how to fold a road map.

Fine.  Then revive the art of letter writing.

Do not merely sell stamps with flowers and lighthouses.  Launch a campaign.  “Write Someone a Real Letter Month.” Put up posters.  Show a grandmother receiving a handwritten note and not one more email beginning, “We value your privacy.” Show a child opening an envelope and realizing that paper can contain affection.  Show a man choosing a fountain pen as if the fate of the Republic depends on it.

And then offer a discount for personal mail sealed with wax. 

The Post Office could create a special “hand-cancelled personal correspondence” rate.  Bring in a letter with a wax seal, and instead of feeding it to the sorting machines like a chicken into a combine, a postal clerk gently hand-cancels it while classical music plays.  For an additional fee, the clerk could nod gravely and say, “Very good, sir.  We shall see that it reaches Albany.”

And if the letter has a Roman box seal, the Post Office doesn’t charge anything, it will be their way of reinvigorating the lost art of writing letters.

This might not solve the Post Office’s financial problems, but neither has anything else, so why not try charm?

They could sell the supplies right there.  Stamps, stationery, envelopes, sealing wax, inexpensive fountain pens, and officially approved Roman-style seal boxes.  Put them next to the passport forms and the padded envelopes.  Sell a “First Letter Kit” for children, a “Love Letter Kit” for romantics, and a “Complaint Letter Kit” for retirees with excellent handwriting and unfinished business.

There could even be classes.  “How to Write a Letter Without It Sounding Like a Hostage Note.” “Fountain Pens: Friend or Ink-Filled Menace?” “Wax Seals for Beginners.” “Advanced Grievance Correspondence.”  I would attend that last one just for the refreshments.

Because a letter is not just communication—it is evidence of time spent, time dedicated.  It says, “I sat down.  I thought about you.  I chose words.  I made marks on paper.  I folded this object and sent it into the world.” A text says, “I was standing in line at the pharmacy and my thumb slipped.”

There is room for both, of course.  Text messages are useful.  Emails are efficient.  Phone calls still exist for people who enjoy panic.  But letters occupy a different place.  They are slower, quieter, and more deliberate.  They do not demand an immediate answer.  They do not buzz in your pocket.  They wait.

That may be why they feel almost luxurious now.  Not expensive luxurious, necessarily, but human luxurious.  The luxury of attention.  The luxury of paper.  The luxury of ink drying before the next sentence.  The luxury of sending something that cannot be deleted by accident, buried under newsletters, or answered with a thumbs-up emoji.

So, I will keep writing letters, even if I am mostly writing into the void.  I will keep using fountain pens that occasionally blob ink like wounded squid.  I will keep melting wax and pressing seals.  And someday, when I find or make the right little Roman seal box, I will tie up a letter, seal it properly, and send it off through the modern postal system like a message from a saner, slower, more ceremonious world.

And if the recipient opens the mailbox, sees that mysterious little sealed object, and thinks, “Good heavens, what is this?” then the letter will already have done half its work.