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Consequential Actions Podcast: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Jeff Kellick
Our overall goal is to help ourselves and the audience understand the rationale behind the actions of our collective past in order to learn from and address (effectively) the consequences of our present, and of our future. Help others understand what preceded us in various disciplines of study so that we will not waste our efforts reinventing what is already working, or by repeating and perpetuating our faults; but rather to refine the successes and correct the failures. We should learn from others, in their own words, to understand their motivations and determine their effectiveness over time. We live in a time of accountability and merit. Empathize with, and encourage, those who make mistakes and learn from them. Critique those who repeat the failures of the past, or aim to manipulate outcomes and obfuscate intentions. jeffkellick.substack.com
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- 2 days ago1h 23m
Everyone Quotes Montesquieu Almost Nobody Reads Past the First Page
Montesquieu and the Separation of Powers: The Spirit of the Laws Explained.In 1748 a retired criminal magistrate from the wine country south of Bordeaux published two volumes and thirty-one books in Geneva, without his name on the title page. Within three years the Church had placed it on the Index. Within forty, Americans on both sides of the ratification fight were quoting it at each other, because neither side could make its case without it.This episode goes into the sixth chapter of the eleventh book — the most quoted passage of political writing produced in the eighteenth century, and among the least accurately remembered. Read to the halfway mark it says what everyone thinks it says: three powers, three sets of hands, keep them apart. Read past that point and Montesquieu dismantles both prohibitions. He does not want a permanent judiciary at all. He wants occasional tribunals of ordinary men, assembled for the business and dissolved when it is done, judging as the mouth that pronounces the words of the law. Then he calls the power of judging “in some measure next to nothing” and drops it out of the analysis entirely. Whatever that describes, it is not England, which in 1748 had a permanent salaried bench and a court of last resort sitting inside the House of Lords — a fact he knew and recorded privately.We follow the argument through the parts that actually traveled: the sorting of governments by nature and by principle, the passions that move each one, the small-republic doctrine the Anti-Federalists used as their first objection, and the confederate republic in the ninth book that Hamilton used to answer them. Madison concedes the maxim completely in Federalist 47, names Montesquieu “the oracle who is always consulted,” and then proves from the British constitution itself that pure separation was never the doctrine. We also take the reckoning honestly: the climate theory of books fourteen through seventeen, the concession on slavery in the fifteenth, the private notebooks in which he called the English no longer worthy of their liberty, and the fact that those notes were not printed until 1818 — long after the Convention had used the published version.And the hardest part, which the Liberty Test puts to you directly: dividing a government restrains who exercises authority. It does not restrain how much authority there is. The anti-tyranny argument and the limited-government argument are two different arguments, and a tradition that treats the first as though it delivered the second has not noticed the gap.Did it leave people more free, or more governed?⏱️ CHAPTERS0:00:00 The 1721 Sensation and The Persian Letters0:03:26 Episode Intro: Montesquieu and the Architecture of Liberty0:05:25 Montesquieu’s Early Life and the French Parlement0:10:27 Judicial Torture, The Parisian Letters, and The Study of Rome0:13:13 The Spirit of the Laws: Publication and Church Backlash0:14:25 The Method: Adapting Laws to the People and Climate0:18:27 The Scottish Connection: Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith0:23:27 Sorting Governments: Republics, Monarchies, and Despotism0:30:33 Montesquieu in England: Observing the Constitution0:33:13 Defining Political Liberty as a Tranquility of Mind0:34:55 The Three Powers and the “Invisible” Judiciary0:42:16 Distribution of Powers vs. Separation of Powers0:46:35 James Madison, Federalist 47, and Parchment Barriers0:52:24 The Anti-Federalists, Small Republics, and the Confederate Republic0:56:45 The Most Cited Secular Author of the American Founding0:58:11 Building a Portable Model: Stripping the Corruption1:02:39 Climate Theory and Montesquieu’s Contradictions on Slavery1:06:29 The Skeptic’s Case: Elitism and the Intermediate Ranks1:09:51 The Gap in the Doctrine: Limiting the Scope of Government1:15:26 The Liberty Test: Applying the Mechanism Today1:20:24 Conclusion, Follow Information, and Preview for Episode 15📚 Companion reading — Article 14, “The Spirit of Laws: Montesquieu and the Architecture of Liberty.” Goes deeper on the Notes on England, the venality of judicial office, the fifth chapter of the fifteenth book, and Lutz’s citation counts, with full endnotes: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-spirit-of-laws-montesquieu-and-the-architecture-of-liberty📖 Read it yourself, free — The Spirit of Laws in the 1777 London edition, the eighteenth-century English text the founding generation was working from, in the public domain at the Online Library of Liberty: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/montesquieu-complete-works-4-vols-1777Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 14 of 22. Next Saturday, Episode 15, “The Fork in the Road”: two more Frenchmen writing in the same decad
- 5 days ago1h 5m
Socialist Calculation Debate Explained: Menger, Mises, Hayek and "I, Pencil" in 2026
Nobody Knows How to Make a Pencil. So What Is a Price Actually Telling You?In December 1958, Leonard Read published an essay in the voice of a pencil, and its claim still holds. Not one person in the pencil’s global supply chain knows how to make one, and the pencil gets made anyway. Something tells each of those people what to do, and much of what reaches them is a number. This episode asks what that number is.Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient to direct the industry of a nation. A century and a half later, other men turned that sentence into a formal argument. Carl Menger argued in 1871 that value sits in the person valuing, not in the object. Ludwig von Mises argued in 1920 that without private ownership of producer goods there are no exchange ratios for them, and so no way to weigh one use of a ton of steel against another. F. A. Hayek recast the problem as dispersed knowledge. We trace that line through Rothbard, Bastiat, Hazlitt and Read, and we are candid that the tradition itself does not agree on whether Mises and Hayek were making the same argument.Then we test it against five fights in the United States this year. The first is algorithmic rent-setting and the RealPage litigation, where the Justice Department reached a consent settlement with no finding of liability. The second is the roughly one-third of federal contract dollars awarded without full and open competition. The third is occupational licensing and the Supreme Court’s 2015 dental board case. The fourth is certificate-of-need laws that give incumbent hospitals a formal route to object to a new competitor. The fifth is the September proposals from leading AI firms to pace the frontier, and the antitrust objection that followed within a day.The Honest Reckoning takes on libertarians who treat “I, Pencil” as a proof and who defend statutory privileges as market outcomes. The Skeptic’s Case gives the market socialists Lange and Lerner their due, along with the argument that computation has changed the terms and the objection that neither Smith nor Ferguson would have signed any of this. The Liberty Test sets up a scale running from the pencil to the strict socialist case. It then asks three things of any arrangement where a number is set: who has a choice, what narrowed it, and whether walking away still does anything.Recorded Sunday, September 13, 2026. The RealPage matters and the AI pacing debate were both moving at the time of recording.Did this leave us more free, or more governed?⏱️ CHAPTERS0:00:00 - The Mystery of “I, Pencil”0:05:47 - Podcast Introduction0:06:54 - Adam Smith’s Pin Factory0:11:10 - Carl Menger & Subjective Value0:17:18 - RealPage & Rental Antitrust Lawsuits0:20:47 - Mises & The Socialist Calculation Debate0:26:11 - Federal Contracts & Thin Competition0:29:24 - AI Cartels & Smith’s Warning0:33:26 - Occupational Licensing & Healthcare0:38:38 - Intellectual Genealogy of Austrian Economics0:45:23 - Critiques & Modern Objections0:56:44 - The Liberty Test & Episode Conclusion📚 Companion article, “The System of Natural Liberty — The Scottish Enlightenment, Part II: Smith and Ferguson.” It covers Smith’s sentence on innumerable delusions, his warning about merchants seeking a wide market and narrow competition, and the part of the conspiracy passage that usually gets cut: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-system-of-natural-liberty-the-scottish-enlightenment-part-ii-smith-and-ferguson🎓 I, Pencil My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/read-i-pencil-my-family-tree-as-told-to-leonard-e-read-dec-1958🎓 The Law by Frédéric Bastiat — five top lessons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goHMDXfm7vcConsequential Actions Podcast · Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 · Episode 13B, “The Price of Everything.” Thursday, Greg Deal joins us to stay with the other Adam, Adam Ferguson, and his warning about a commercial people who hire their fighting done. Saturday, Episode 14: “The Spirit of Laws.”#austrianeconomics #adamsmith #ludwigvonmises #hayek #ipencil #socialistcalculation #occupationallicensing #certificateofneed #libertarian #selfevident This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeffkellick.substack.com
- 1 weeks ago1h 32m
Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson: The Wealth of Nations, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, and the Militia Question
Adam Smith Made the Case for the Free Market. Then, in the Same Book, He Wrote the Strongest Objection to It.Two men were born in Scotland in 1723, a county apart. They joined the same Edinburgh club, kept the same friends, and worked from the same premise about what commercial life does to a people. They never agreed about the remedy, and the disagreement is more specific and more difficult than it is usually made to sound.This episode opens by taking a famous story apart. Every account of Adam Ferguson tells you that at Fontenoy in May 1745 the young chaplain of a Highland regiment was found in the front rank with a drawn broadsword, was threatened with the loss of his commission, told his colonel what he thought of the commission, and marched off with the men. Walter Scott told it. The eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica printed it as established fact in 1911. A Victorian painter put it on the wall of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1897. The regiment’s own museum now says it could not have happened, because Ferguson had not yet left Scotland. The scholarship goes further and doubts he was present at all. What is left without the broadsword is a better story anyway: a minister who never finished his divinity training, who got the post because he spoke Gaelic, and who spent nine years attached to Highland soldiers in the immediate aftermath of a rising, at a time when the clothes those soldiers wore lawfully in uniform were criminal for every other man and boy in Scotland on pain of transportation.The Smith half runs from the salt pans and nail-makers of Kirkcaldy to the Glasgow chair he called the happiest years of his life, and then to the argument itself. What the mercantile system actually was and why he gave a whole book to dismantling it. The system of natural liberty passage read in full, including the eleven words that get dropped and the reason he gives for discharging the sovereign — which is an objection about capacity, not about rights, and which arrives a hundred and fifty years before the twentieth century made that argument famous under another name. The butcher and the brewer and the baker, and why that passage is about persuasion rather than selfishness. The invisible hand, which appears three times in everything Smith published, once in an essay describing pagan superstition, and which became the famous line only when a tradition needed a slogan. And the writing about merchants and guilds, which is as harsh as anything produced on the left since.Then the turn. The book opens with the pin factory, eighteen operations, ten men, forty-eight thousand pins. Several hundred pages later Smith goes back and writes down what that life does to the man living it — that he becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become, and that he is equally incapable of defending his own country. Nobody made him put that in. Adam Ferguson had printed a related warning nine years earlier and drawn the opposite conclusion: that some things divide without loss and some do not, that shoes are one kind and citizenship is the other, and that a nation which contracts out its own defense has dismembered the human character. Smith answered that a militia cannot match professionals, that only a standing army preserves a civilized nation — and then said the half almost nobody quotes, that the martial spirit of the people is worth preserving anyway and deserves the serious attention of government.The hour closes with an honest reckoning neither man survives cleanly. Ferguson wrote an anonymous pamphlet against the American case, printed at government expense, and then crossed the Atlantic as secretary to a peace commission sent to end the war on British terms. Smith spent his last twelve years as a commissioner of customs, inside the establishment his own fourth book had attacked, having first gone through his wardrobe, found almost nothing in it whose import was legal, and burned it. Then three objections, all built from the primary text, including the strongest thing anybody says against reading these men the way this series reads them.Did this leave us more free, or more governed?⏱️ CHAPTERS0:00:00 - The Legend of Fontenoy and Adam Ferguson0:02:41 - Two Men, One Premise: Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith0:03:57 - Podcast Introduction and Previous Episode Recap0:05:31 - The Select Society, The Militia Club, and Scotland’s Grievance0:12:59 - Kirkcaldy and the Early World of Adam Smith0:17:24 - Academic Postings: Hume, Hutcheson, and Smith0:19:34 - The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Impartial Spectator0:27:21 - Attacking the Mercantile System in The Wealth of Nations0:31:28 - The System of Natural Liberty and the Duties of the Sovereign0:37:32 - Deconstructing the True Meaning of the “Invisible Hand”0:41:32 - Smith’s Warning About Merchants, Monopolies, and Guilds0:44:29 - The Pin Factory and The Hidden Costs of Divided Labor0:48:44
- 1 weeks ago1h 8m
David Evans of Sentiero Ventures on Artificial Intelligence, Lyapunov Time, and the Knowledge Problem | Self-Evident Week 12
I Asked an AI Investor Whether a Machine Could Set Every Rent in New York. He Said It Absolutely Could.This is the Thursday interview closing week 12 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776. Sunday’s article and Saturday’s history followed a group of Scots to an argument that sounds wrong the first time you hear it — that the most sophisticated arrangements human beings possess were not designed by anybody. Tuesday ran that claim against a rent board, a municipal grocery store, and a federal investment portfolio. This hour puts it to somebody who builds the machine that is supposed to answer it.David Evans is the founder and managing partner of Sentiero Ventures, an early-stage venture fund outside Dallas that invests in business software where artificial intelligence is the core of the product rather than a feature bolted onto it. Before the fund he was an operator. He has been writing software since the early 1990s, built and sold a national digital signage network, and founded EasySeat, an online ticket resale business that reached the Inc. 500 and sold in 2015. He teaches graduate courses on innovation and entrepreneurship at the University of Texas at Dallas. He and Jeff met as seventeen-year-olds sharing a dorm room in Baltimore in August 1995.The question put to him was direct. Could a system read every rent-stabilized building file in New York and produce a number the board could not produce? He said it absolutely could — and then he scoped it, and the scope turned out to be the whole answer. It could read every unit, every tenant, every price and every alternative in the city at once, at a fixed point. What it cannot do is carry that forward, because every decision every person makes compounds against every other one until the thing diverges past recovery. He has a name for that horizon, borrowed from mathematics rather than economics, and he ran into it twenty years ago building ticket prices, where he spent years assuming it was a data problem before concluding there was no data to find, because the events had not happened yet.The conversation also covers why large language models are not on the road to general intelligence, what a dog and a bell reveal about the difference between having the words and having the world, data poisoning as an attack on the record itself, why the arithmetic of federal equity stakes stops working past a certain size, and the moment an aggregator becomes a market maker and the number on the screen stops being a price.The closing monologue does not let the argument off easily. It builds the strongest version of the challenge, grants it everything it asks for, and then runs the week’s test on it anyway.Recorded 6 September 2026. Several matters discussed here are live and may have moved since: the Rent Guidelines Board litigation was argued on 2 September with the decision reserved, and the Senate version of the fiscal year 2027 defense authorization had not been taken up on the floor after cloture on the motion to proceed failed in July.Did this leave us more free, or more governed?⏱️ CHAPTERS00:00 - Introduction to the Episode 01:15 - Guest Introduction 05:11 - Interview Commences 05:47 - Machine Learning in Ticketing 09:09 - The Business Value of AI 13:10 - AI and the Job Market 17:27 - The Scottish Enlightenment and LLMs 23:43 - Data Poisoning and Future Content 29:08 - Technocracy and Government Intervention 32:19 - Can AI Replace Human Planners? 40:11 - The Scale Problem of Government Investing 44:31 - The Solow Paradox and Productivity 47:59 - Market Disruption and Autonomous Trucking 53:35 - Innovation vs. Regulation 57:03 - Post-Interview Reflection 01:02:44 - More Free or More Governed?📚 The companion article for this week, covering Hutcheson, Hume, the Aikenhead execution, the Union vote, Hume’s rejections at Edinburgh and Glasgow, and Francis Alison’s line from Donegal to Chester County:https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-scottish-alternative-the-scottish-enlightenment-part-i-foundations🔗 Sentiero Ventures: https://sentiero.vcConsequential Actions publishes four times a week. Sunday article, Saturday history, Tuesday application, Thursday conversation. Next week the Scots continue with the system of natural liberty — Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, and the argument Smith is famous for is not the argument he thought he was making.#selfevident #consequentialactions #davidevans #artificialintelligence #knowledgeproblem #hayek #davidhume #scottishenlightenment #venturecapital #libertarian This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeffkellick.substack
- 1 weeks ago57 min
NYC Municipal Grocery Stores, the Rent Freeze, and Federal Equity Stakes: Hume's Knowledge Problem in 2026
A City Promised Groceries 30% Below Retail. Somebody Still Has to Decide 30% Below What.In July, New York City published a request for proposals asking qualified grocers to bid on operating one or more of five publicly funded, privately operated stores. The winning operator handles merchandising, sourcing, and a city-branded private label. A core basket sells at thirty percent below retail, reset once a month. The information session was August 5. Proposals are due at four o’clock on October 16. And the document identifies market data and observable evidence as possible inputs without fixing a benchmark or a formula, which means the number exists so far as a promise rather than as a method. That is not a gotcha about drafting. It is that somebody eventually has to sit down and decide what a typical retail price is in a city of eight and a half million people and more than a thousand grocery stores, and then decide it again a month later.This is the contemporary application episode for Week 12 of Self-Evident, and it takes Saturday’s Scottish argument into the ordinary business of getting and spending. Not whether a government that sets out to direct that business means well. Whether it can know what it would have to know.Three cases, in ascending order of how hard they are to correct. The Rent Guidelines Board voted seven to one on June 25 under Order 58 to set adjustments at zero percent for both one-year and two-year renewal leases beginning October 1, covering roughly a million rent-stabilized apartments. The board is not a mob; it is a technical body that publishes seven separate research documents, one of which produced commensurate adjustment figures running from 3.4 to 8.5 percent. It voted zero anyway, and there is no binding rule anywhere telling it which metric controls. One number has to cover a building in Brooklyn where every unit is stabilized and the boiler is forty years old and the building two blocks away with four stabilized units and a new roof, and it has to be chosen in an evening for a year that has not happened yet.Then the municipal grocery record, which is genuinely mixed and gets reported honestly here rather than as a talking point. St. Paul, Kansas, a town of about six hundred, has kept a city-owned supermarket running since 2013 and turned a small profit. Anybody who wants to say these always fail has to go through St. Paul first. But Erie, fifteen miles away, is the case that matters, because Erie did everything a careful town is supposed to do. It surveyed residents by mail and warned them the shortfall might land on their utility bills. It sent its clerk to St. Paul in 2019 to ask the people who had made it work. It ran the store for about three and a half years, leased it to a professional operator who runs rural groceries across two states, and the doors closed anyway. The diligence was real and it never answered the only question that mattered, which was whether that store on that street with those competitors would cover its own costs. The residents answered it instead, one trip at a time.And then the level where none of that applies. As of the end of July, the most complete public accounting of what the federal government owns counted $27.7 billion across thirty-nine announced deals involving direct ownership, and it is maintained by a think tank rather than by the government that owns the positions. Federal budget rules were built for grants and loans; they record an equity purchase as money out the door with very little machinery for recording what comes back. There is no consolidated, publicly marked-to-market ledger of the portfolio, no published portfolio-wide exit framework, and no rule for writing one that does not create the problem it was meant to prevent — a mechanical exit rule destroys value, a discretionary one invites the interference the rule existed to stop. A Senate committee has reported a bill with an entire subtitle on equity investments, and that subtitle is mostly oversight and deserves credit for being so, but it covers one Defense Department office while the largest position in the story sits at Commerce. Cloture on the motion to proceed failed fifty to forty-six on July 14 and the bill has not been taken up since.The episode does not let the libertarian side off. It concedes that we are better at explaining why a store will fail than at explaining why Hunts Point looks the way it does after decades of zoning, licensing, and tax treatment that we wrote well about and never campaigned on. It concedes that certainty about outcomes is one of the things the knowledge argument denies to everybody in the room, including the person making it. It concedes the national security objection wins its own domain outright. And it draws the distinction the whole hour turns on: ending a practice and directing an economy require different knowledge. To end a practice you have to know it is wrong. You do not have to know
- 2 weeks ago1h 25m
Hutcheson, Hume, and the Scottish Enlightenment: Undesigned Order Before It Had a Name
The Country That Made David Hume Refused to Hire HimIn the spring of 1745 a man of thirty-four sat down in Edinburgh to defend himself anonymously against charges of atheism and skepticism, because a chair had come open at the university in his own city and he wanted it. It did not work. The clergy organized, the town council gave the post to William Cleghorn, and six years later Glasgow refused him too. David Hume, the philosopher most students of the subject would name the most important ever to write in English, never held a teaching post in his life — and the university system that turned him away was the single most important reason his country was able to produce him.Episode 12 of Self-Evident opens Arc Four and the Scottish arc. It begins with the conditions: a kingdom that lost Darien and then argued itself into a union it did not agree about, a Kirk that put a schoolmaster in nearly every lowland parish because Presbyterian doctrine required ordinary people to read Scripture themselves, and that in the same generation urged the vigorous execution of the law against a twenty-year-old student named Thomas Aikenhead, hanged for blasphemy in January 1697 a short walk from where Hume would be born fourteen years later. Five universities against England’s two, open to men Oxford and Cambridge would not admit. An old town compressed onto a single ridge, where a judge and a printer and a professor drank in the same tavern because there was no other tavern.Then the arguments. Francis Hutcheson lecturing in English rather than Latin from 1730, telling a room of fourteen-year-olds — one of them newly arrived from Kirkcaldy — that moral approval arrives before the reasoning does, and being charged by the Presbytery of Glasgow in 1738 for teaching that a person may know good and evil prior to knowing God. Hutcheson holding that every human being is born free, that no conquest confers a right to enslave, that a slave is not property and the children of slaves are born free, and that colonial subjects oppressed by their rulers may justly overthrow them — an argument reprinted in America and carried to a Pennsylvania schoolroom by Francis Alison, whose pupils included three men who would sign the Declaration.And then Hume, who took apart the case this series has spent four articles building. He denied that reason founds moral judgment. He denied that justice is a natural virtue. He took the original contract apart with more care than his reputation credits, and then wrote the sentence almost nobody quotes: that consent is the best and most sacred foundation of government where it has place. What he built to replace the contract is the reason he belongs here. Two men pulling the oars of a boat coordinate without a promise. Languages are established gradually by convention without any founding assembly. Gold and silver become the measures of exchange because each person accepts them expecting the next person will. Each of those is more intricate than anything a committee ever built, and not one of them had a designer.The episode does not leave that comfortable. It dates Hume’s footnote on race precisely, walks the revision history through 1768 and 1770 and the posthumous edition of 1777, and reports honestly that whether Beattie’s public demolition of it caused the revision is a live scholarly dispute rather than a settled fact. It puts the conservative objection at full strength — that a doctrine about the wisdom of unplanned institutions tells against every reformer, including the Americans of 1776. And in the Liberty Test it turns the knowledge argument against something the host wants, and concedes what the argument cannot do: it can warn you about the limits of what a planner knows, and it cannot by itself tell you to end an inherited injustice. Something else had to do that work.The question this program keeps asking: did this leave us more free, or more governed?⏱️ CHAPTERS00:00 The Strange Case of David Hume03:29 Episode 12 Introduction05:16 Condition One: Scotland’s History and the Union of 170712:52 Condition Two: The Kirk of Scotland16:35 Condition Three: Scottish Universities and Club Culture19:28 Francis Hutcheson and the Moral Sense31:27 David Hume’s Treatise and Academic Exile37:30 Hume’s Critique of the Original Contract42:54 Artificial Virtues and Undesigned Order53:09 The Epistemic Claim: Scottish vs. French Enlightenment59:02 The Reckoning: Hume’s Racism and Glasgow’s Slave Economy01:07:04 Objection One: Hume as a Problem for Natural Rights01:11:00 Objection Two: The Conservative Objection01:14:44 Objection Three: Universal Language vs. Particular Freedom01:17:25 The Liberty Test01:22:51 Conclusion and Episode 13 Preview📚 COMPANION ARTICLEArticle 12 of 22, “The Scottish Alternative — The Scottish Enlightenment, Part I: Foundations,” with full endnotes, the Ferguson epigraph, the Union vote and the Equivalent, the Aikenhead chronology, the
- 2 weeks ago1h 20m
James Ostrowski on the 1689 Arms Clause, the NY SAFE Act Reversal, and Government Takes 80%
I Asked a Forty-Year Appellate Lawyer What a Court Is For. He Said It Is a Bureaucracy.This is the Thursday conversation that closes week 11 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776. Saturday traced the Glorious Revolution and the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Tuesday set a written bill of rights against an unwritten one. Both stopped short of the arms clause, because that argument belongs to somebody who has carried a written liberty into a courtroom and asked a judge to honor it.James Ostrowski is a trial and appellate lawyer in Buffalo, New York, in his forty-second year of practice. He took a philosophy degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a law degree from Brooklyn Law School, and he sat in Murray Rothbard’s private seminar on the history of economic thought in New York City. He served as vice chairman of the law reform committee of the New York County Lawyers Association and as chair of the human rights committee of the Erie County Bar Association, and his Cato Institute study “Thinking about Drug Legalization” appeared in May 1989, before the issue was on the national map. He is the author of thirteen books. In April 2019 he won the reversal of the first conviction ever prosecuted under the New York SAFE Act, and in May 2026 he stood for chair of the Libertarian Party, led the first ballot, and lost on the third.I asked him what the purpose of a court is, and he did not give the answer a constitutional series usually gets. Courts are a bureaucracy, he said. They act in their own interest and they are deeply ideological. Judges are politicians, and appointed judges are frequently more political than elected ones and less transparent about it, because when a handful of people put a judge on a bench nobody outside that handful can see the constituency being served. He has spent four decades in appellate courts and he describes himself as a cynic about them. That is a cold thing to hear at the end of a week spent admiring a constitutional settlement, and it is the most useful thing anyone said on this show all week.He earned the right to say it. In 2013, days after the SAFE Act passed, Benjamin Wassell sold two of his own rifles to an undercover investigator and was convicted of criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree and criminal sale of a firearm in the third degree, the first conviction ever prosecuted under the statute. Jim took the appeal, wrote a fifty-page brief raising every Second Amendment argument he had, and won unanimously in April 2019 on a jurisdictional point buried at the front of it: the Attorney General had no authority to bring the case. The indictment was dismissed. His client walked.Then I handed him the arms clause of 1689 cold and asked him to read it as a brief, and put the second question the men of that year never asked. Which of your clients’ liberties survive only because Albany has not gotten around to them yet? He did not reach for a gun case. He reached for compulsory government schooling, and then for the drug war, and made the point that both sit almost entirely at the state and local level, where the money and the enforcement and the prisons actually are. Decentralization is worth having and it does not end the fight, because a state can oppress and a town can oppress, and the only real advantage of the town is that you can leave it. We close on his new book, Government Takes 80%, which compares the cost of government in 1900 against 2026 and works to put a dollar figure on the costs that never appear on a bill.Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 traces the intellectual origins of American liberty from ancient Greece to the Bill of Rights, across twenty-two weeks. Each week runs a written article on Sunday, the history on Saturday, its contemporary application on Tuesday, and where we can, a conversation on Thursday to close it out.Every episode of this show asks the same question of whatever it examines: did this leave us more free, or more governed?⏱️ CHAPTERS00:00 - Introduction to the English Bill of Rights00:38 - Episode Overview03:08 - Guest Background05:59 - Origins of a Legal Career12:20 - Early Drug Policy Advocacy20:19 - The Reality of the Courts24:23 - Defeating the NY SAFE Act30:38 - Challenging Gun Licensing33:58 - Analyzing the 1689 Arms Clause44:23 - Liberty at the State Level49:54 - The Ratchet Effect of Government Growth58:43 - Libertarianism’s Historical Contributions01:04:26 - Government Takes 80%01:12:17 - Closing Reflections01:19:08 - Preview of Next Week📚 Companion article — Week 11, on the Glorious Revolution, the thirteen claims of right, Godden v. Hales and the packed bench, and what the settleme
- 2 weeks ago1h 2m
A Tax Expired at Midnight. Another Took Its Place in the Same Minute.
Learning Resources v. Trump, Section 122, and the 1689 Bill of Rights: How the Taxing Power Left CongressAt one minute past midnight on July 24, 2026, a tax on most of what Americans buy from abroad stopped existing. No bill passed either chamber. No president signed anything. The authority simply reached the end of a sentence written into a statute in 1974 and expired. In the same minute a different tax took its place, at roughly the same rate, on roughly the same goods, paid by the same importers at the same ports. What changed was the statutory citation in the corner of the form, and one thing no announcement mentioned: the old tax had a deadline that put the question back to Congress, and the new one has a deadline that puts the question to a federal agency and to the industries that benefit from it.Five months earlier the Supreme Court had told the President he could not impose those tariffs. Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump came down six to three on February 20, 2026, written by the Chief Justice, resting on Article I and on Chief Justice Marshall’s proposition in Gibbons v. Ogden that a tariff is a branch of the taxing power. The President obeyed. Customs and Border Protection has since reported roughly $128.6 billion in potential and certified refunds accepted for processing. That compliance is the most important fact in this episode, and it is stated first, because a government that gives money back when a court tells it to is doing something most governments in most centuries would not have done.Then, within hours, came Proclamation 11012 under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a ten percent surcharge with a hard statutory ceiling of fifteen percent and a hard limit of 150 days. That clock ran out on July 24. And in the same minute, a Section 301 action covering sixty economies took effect. Section 301 has no rate ceiling, and its continuation is decided not by Congress but by a written request from a benefiting domestic industry followed by an agency review. Across a Supreme Court defeat, a substitute authority, a statutory expiration and a replacement, Congress took no recorded vote.Saturday’s episode covered the settlement of 1688 and 1689 that stripped the Crown of the power to tax alone and keep an army alone. Today we read the whole of the money clause, including the three words almost nobody quotes, and follow it forward through a forty trillion dollar national debt, a permanent appropriation for interest that no Congress votes on, a central bank Congress designed and insulated on purpose, and an operation in the long end of the bond market that begins next week. The claim is not that the Constitution failed. February proved the improvement on 1689 is real. July proved it is not sufficient.One question governs everything we do on this program. Did this leave Americans more free, or more governed?⏱️ CHAPTERS00:00 - The Midnight Tariff Expiration and Replacement 01:06 - The Supreme Court Ruling on Presidential Tariff Authority 02:37 - Episode Introduction: Self-Evident, Week 11, Part B 04:44 - The English Bill of Rights of 1689 and the Money Clause 07:44 - The Mutiny Act of 1689 and Parliament's Renewal Clock 11:11 - Analysis of Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump and IEEPA 15:03 - Proclamation 11012 and Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 17:46 - Section 301 Investigations and the Beneficiary-Driven Renewal Clock 21:50 - Section 232 and the Lack of Congressional Votes 24:46 - The Congressional Trade Powers Reform Act and Trade Review Act of 2025 28:12 - Crossing the $40 Trillion National Debt Threshold 31:18 - Inflation as a Wealth Transfer and the Federal Reserve's Statutory Authority 36:27 - Treasury Buyback Operations and Liquidity Support 41:18 - Article I, Section 8: The Two-Year Limitation on Army Appropriations 46:16 - Evaluating the Non-Delegation Doctrine and Judicial Remedies 50:30 - Defending the Necessity of Speed in Statutory Delegation 55:13 - The Liberty Test: Are Americans More Free or More Governed? 01:00:17 - Preview for Thursday: Jim Ostrowski on the Arms Clause 01:00:53 - Outro and Consequential Actions Subscription Details📚 Read the companion article: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/1688-triumph-and-warning-the-glorious-revolution-and-its-limitsCovers the fourth declaratory clause in full, the 1689 revenue settlement and the four-year customs grant, the first Mutiny Act and its seven-month life, Learning Resources v. Trump and the three-justice major questions plurality, Section 122 and Section 307, and the two bills now sitting in the Senate Finance Committee.#selfevident #consequentialactions #billofrights #tariffs #section301 #learningresources #nationaldebt #federalreserve #separationofpowers #libertarian This is a public episode. If you wou
About Consequential Actions Podcast
Our overall goal is to help ourselves and the audience understand the rationale behind the actions of our collective past in order to learn from and address (effectively) the consequences of our present, and of our future. Help others understand what preceded us in various disciplines of study so that we will not waste our efforts reinventing what is already working, or by repeating and perpetuating our faults; but rather to refine the successes and correct the failures. We should learn from others, in their own words, to understand their motivations and determine their effectiveness over time. We live in a time of accountability and merit. Empathize with, and encourage, those who make mistakes and learn from them. Critique those who repeat the failures of the past, or aim to manipulate outcomes and obfuscate intentions. jeffkellick.substack.com
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