In the spring of 1933, American farmers pleaded for help from their newly elected president, Franklin Roosevelt. Hog prices were at record lows, and the farmers wanted the government to do something.

Not one to let a crisis go to waste, FDR took action. Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace was tasked with arranging the slaughter of millions of pigs in an effort to raise hog prices. Farmers who participated in the federal government’s hog program — later dubbed by economists “the porcine slaughter of the innocents” — were compensated. Their animals were turned into “inedible meat and bone meal,” courtesy of US taxpayers, even as hunger in America hit record highs. 

A country destroying its own food during a depression might sound like economic madness, and it is — but we are once again watching governments ramp up policies that pay farmers to destroy food.

It’s no secret that European vineyards have been disappearing for years. The trend is starkest in Pyrénées-Orientales in southern France: that region “lost nearly half its vines” between 2000 and 2020, The Economist recently reported. Limited access to water and rising energy costs played a role. But vineyards have vanished with increasing speed in recent years, thanks to government policies. 

In 2024, the French government revived a familiar tactic: paying farmers to rip out their vines. Under this national program, farmers can receive roughly €4,000 (about $4,600) for every hectare they remove. If lawmakers aimed to see the country produce less wine and hasten the disappearance of vineyards, that’s what they got.

France typically produces well over 40 million hectoliters of wine annually, but in 2025 it produced just 36 million, according to the French Ministry of Agriculture. Meanwhile, growers in the Languedoc-Roussillon region saw a surge in vines removed last year — roughly 15,000 hectares, an area approaching the size of Washington, D.C., according to The Economist.

Many might assume climate concerns drove France’s policy, but the primary reason resembles the catalyst for FDR’s “porcine slaughter of the innocents”: oversupply.

Global trends show fewer people drinking alcohol, especially Gen Z. Wine has taken a particularly hard hit, even in France, where red wine consumption recently reached an all-time low. French lawmakers say their policy is designed to “rescue” the wine industry from what the ministry described as excessive output.

To the average person, paying vineyard owners to destroy their vines likely looks crazy — but in Europe, it’s business as usual.

For years, the European Union has attempted to micromanage wine production through various incentives, including direct payments to farmers to remove vines. A European Parliament report found that the EU’s 2008 wine reform set an aggressive target: removal of 175,000 hectares with commitments to not replant. (Actual removal totaled 160,550 hectares.)

Now it appears Brussels is intent on ramping up its policy. The EU’s most recent Wine Package will, among other measures, make it easier for countries to make direct payments to farmers to destroy their vines.

“…new rules on State aid would allow Member States to use national financing not only for distillation of surplus wine,” the package reads, “but also for green harvesting (the total destruction or removal of grapes while still in their immature stage) and grubbing up (complete elimination of all vine stocks) of vineyards.”

There’s a certain irony in the policy. 

For decades, the EU subsidized wine production, resulting in surplusses critics dubbed “wine lakes.” Now Brussels wants to ratchet up efforts to rip out vines — to curb the very surplus that bureaucrats helped create.

There’s a senselessness to Europe’s approach that matches New Deal efforts to alleviate poverty by destroying millions of pigs. At least some New Dealers eventually learned their interventionist policies were failing.

“We are spending more money than we have ever spent before and it does not work,” United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. admitted to Congress in 1939. “I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job, I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises.”

Morgenthau learned the hard way that trying to engineer a market economy from Washington — through spending, controls, and heavy-handed intervention — produced results far different from those promised. 

We can only hope lawmakers in Europe eventually learn the same lesson. 

Markets aren’t perfect, but they aggregate information from millions of buyers and sellers far better than bureaucrats, who can’t seem to decide whether to subsidize vineyards to boost production or destroy them to raise prices.

These contradictions will do long-term harm to vineyards. That’s a shame. A world with less wine is a less happy world.

Fusionism, a new book by Stephanie Slade, a Senior Editor at Reason, attempts to make sense of the seemingly incoherent New Right. Although Slade proposes a renewal of fusionism as a remedy to conservatism’s drift and the challenges facing a divided Republic, the book’s greatest strength lies in its analysis of the trends to date. 

The Republican Party, for all its faults, was supposed to understand (instinctively, if not always intellectually) limited government, rule of law, and the basics of economics. From its elected leaders, though, we have gotten tariffs, increased public debt, dodgy respect for habeas corpus in immigration enforcement, and the Saturday Night Live tragicomedy of DOGE (a virtue-signaling, clumsy, and cruel flash in the pan destined to die on the vine when it removed entitlements from the chopping block). The coalition that constitutes the New Right has abandoned conservatism, and instead sells its own form of populist interventionism. 

Slade starts by painting a rather glum sketch of the contemporary scene. Within the convoluted and heterogeneous mess she labels “the Dissident Right,” she identifies three major strains: 

1. the predominant national conservatives, who are eager to use the coercive power of the modern administrative state to advance (allegedly) conservative causes and push for national primacy;
2. the theocons, who dream of “immanentizing the eschaton” by creating a state theocracy to impose (their understanding of) a transcendent moral order;
3. the neoreactionaries, the Pajama-Boy Nitzscheans who have been given legitimacy to spew their blend of vitriol and conspiracy.

The NatCons have turned their back on the basics of markets and skepticism about administrative power (how sad in this 250^th anniversary year of The Wealth of Nations!). The theocons would repoliticize salvation after three centuries of religious tolerance within Christendom. And, beneath all that, the country’s baser instincts toward power and suppression are flourishing within the neoreactionary right. On the other side, the interventionist excesses of American socialism, with DEI, cancel culture, and continued growth of the administrative-welfare state, are equally horrifying. To paraphrase Richard Nixon, we are all interventionists now.

The titular Fusionism is shorthand for the collaboration of old-school conservatives and libertarians that held in America from 1945 to 1989, or thereabouts. Members of that alliance disagreed on details, but shared a horror for the rise of collectivism, the welfare-administrative state, and the existential threat of communism. 

Slade’s personal history of the movement is a rich and readable complement to some of the deeper treatments of the ideas (notably George Carey’s magisterial compendium, Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate, and my own work with Nathan Schlueter of Hillsdale College, Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives? The Foundations of the Libertarian-Conservative Debate). Slade’s arguments are clean and incisive, and the prose is a pleasure to read, even if Slade occasionally indulges in the journalist’s déformation professionnelle of descriptive wordiness.

Slade points to several explanations for the rise of the Dissident Right: the failed gamble of China’s accession to the WTO without subsequent human rights improvements, the post-2007 bank bailouts, the costly debacle of attempted nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, immigration, those left behind by globalization, and the authoritarianism of DEI. 

These are all plausible. But I suspect that Slade is a bit too kind: the American administrative-welfare state is the real villain in this story. First, because it caused most of the problems that have energized the Dissident Right (crowding out of civil society, a culture of dependence, and erosion of the family). Second, because income inequality in the US is associated with cronyism replacing genuine economic activity — a problem exacerbated by the gutting of K–12 and college education standards by educrats, along with the rise of regressive regulation, including job licensing. Third, because the Dissident Right doesn’t see the irony: its proposed use of the state is exactly what generated the outcomes it decries.

In just half a century, the US shifted from teaching Latin and calculus in high school to teaching basic English and algebra in college. It took a mere generation for discourse to collapse from Ronald Reagan’s gentlemanly and beautiful oratory to Donald Trump’s boorish grade-school-level word salad. What happened, in discourse and substance, between 1989 and 2016? Slade points to the populist conservative Pat Buchanan, but we could also mention Dick Cheney; the vice president was more refined, but also a lot more effective at pushing the power of the unitary executive and expanding the administrative state. There have always been “proto-Dissident Right” voices in America, Slade argues, but they were once kept in check by a loose coalition of libertarians, decent folk, fusionist conservatives, and the communist threat. The pre-1968 Dixiecrat segregationists, the Evangelical Christian Right under Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Dick Cheney and the more radical neocons under George W. Bush were always there. But there was always accountability, restraint, and public decency. 

President Trump is tapping into real ills and soul sicknesses in American society and the American economy; but he is doing so in an ugly way that appeals to the lowest common denominator. Even FDR, Huey Long, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, for all their interventionist instincts and actions and their loose interpretations of the Constitution, operated under a veneer of respectability, and showed some shame when they got caught with their pants down.

Slade proposes a renaissance of fusionism as an antidote to the Dissident Right, in a bid to save both the Republic and the Spirit of ‘76. She reminds us that political analysis will require new language. In a similar spirit, I have long argued that the left-right taxonomy once made sense — in post-1789 France, where the left represented the Jacobin radicals like Robespierre, the centrists were today’s classical liberals, and the right favored a return of the monarchy. But the Dissident Right is a misnomer. This modern movement Slade names does not align with the American conservative tradition, and is thus not clearly of “the Right.” Even if it seeks nativist or religious or other allegedly conservative goals, it does so by promoting an increasingly intrusive and muscular central government.

How little we have progressed since 1944, when F.A. Hayek dedicated The Road to Serfdom to “the socialists of all parties.” 

Today’s classical liberals are, indeed, alone in a two-front war. The paternalistic Left and the Dissident Right both aggressively push for social and economic control. Liberty, limited government, and free markets have few defenders. Fusionism is an appealing alliance, as Slade proposes it. But who will be the fusionist warriors for individual liberty? Where are the moderates to defend private property? Where have all the pro-business, small-government, free-trade conservatives gone? We can hope that there is a Nockian Remnant out there, biding its time while the dissident storm passes. In the meantime, the libertarian wing of fusionism stands alone, as core agreements have largely been abandoned by those who still call themselves conservatives, but now need hyphenations to distinguish conservatism from their preferred flavor of interventionism.

Markets almost never function better when participants know less rather than more. Yet that is where the growing campaign against Federal Reserve forward guidance ultimately leads.

Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh has argued that the Fed should speak less, publish fewer clues about its future intentions, and move away from many of the communication tools developed over the last three decades. As he told the Senate Banking Committee, “Unlike many of my colleagues past and present, I don’t believe in forward guidance. I don’t believe that I should be previewing for you what a future decision will be.”

The argument sounds sensible enough. Central bankers are often wrong. Forecasts are revised. Policymakers become attached to projections that events quickly render obsolete. Markets sometimes spend more time parsing Federal Reserve speeches than studying the economy itself.

Yet this entire line of reasoning overlooks a basic fact: information does not disappear when it is withheld. Warsh is correct that markets can become overly focused on Federal Reserve communications. But reducing official communication does not eliminate that focus. It merely redirects it. Investors who once scrutinized public statements will instead scrutinize private signals, informal conversations, and perceived access to policymakers. The demand for policy information remains unchanged. Only the transparency of its distribution changes.

The debate over Federal Reserve communication is not really about forward guidance. It is about information.

For most of its history, the Federal Reserve operated behind a veil of deliberate ambiguity. Prior to 1994, it did not routinely announce changes in its target interest rate. Most investors and economists were expected to infer policy changes from open-market operations and subtle shifts in Federal Reserve behavior. Entire industries emerged around deciphering these signals.

This was often described as market discipline. In practice, it frequently rewarded access over analysis. The winners were not necessarily those who best understood inflation, employment, productivity, or growth. They were often those who best understood the habits of central bankers, the mechanics of Federal Reserve operations, and the informal channels through which information traveled.

The move toward transparency occurred because policymakers gradually concluded that this was a poor way to run a modern monetary system. The Fed began announcing rate changes directly. It released more information about its reasoning. Minutes became more detailed. Press conferences became routine. Economic projections became public. Research generally found that markets became better at anticipating policy actions as communication improved and policy surprises diminished.

The intellectual foundation for much of this shift was laid by economists such as Marvin Goodfriend and David Dotsey. In a series of influential papers during the 1980s, Goodfriend challenged what he called the Federal Reserve’s “monetary mystique”—the longstanding belief that secrecy enhanced monetary policy. Dotsey likewise examined the economics of secrecy and concluded that while opacity might reduce some short-run market volatility, it also increased uncertainty by making policy harder to anticipate. Together, their work helped shift the debate from whether central banks should communicate to how they should communicate. Their central insight was straightforward: information not disclosed to the public does not disappear. It simply becomes more valuable to those who possess it, creating incentives for investors to seek privileged access rather than rely on superior economic analysis.

I first encountered these ideas as a doctoral student in economics during the stock-market crash of October 1987. The Federal Reserve of that era was hardly known for openness. Yet when markets were spiraling downward, Alan Greenspan did not choose silence. He issued a brief statement affirming that the Federal Reserve stood ready to provide liquidity to support the financial system.

The statement contained no projections and no dot plots. It simply told markets what they needed to know. The Federal Reserve would act if necessary. One of the most successful acts of forward guidance in Federal Reserve history occurred before economists had even given it a name.

Less than a decade later, I found myself advising central banks and monetary authorities in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Jordan. In each case, the consequences of opacity were impossible to miss. When official information was scarce, markets did not become more efficient. They became more political. Economic analysis mattered less. Access mattered more. Businesses devoted less effort to understanding economic conditions and more effort to discovering what government officials were privately thinking. In weak institutional environments, information itself became a form of currency.

The same dynamic applies to monetary policy.

Suppose the Federal Reserve substantially reduces forward guidance. Will investors stop trying to forecast interest rates? Will banks stop hiring economists? Will hedge funds stop searching for clues about future policy? Of course not.

The demand for information about monetary policy will remain exactly where it is today. Only the supply of public information will decline.

The likely result is not a renewed focus on economic fundamentals. It is a return to a world in which access carries a premium. Investors will spend more time interpreting private signals, cultivating relationships, and searching for clues about policymakers’ intentions. The advantage shifts away from those who are best at analyzing economic data and toward those who are best positioned to obtain information that others cannot.

Supporters of a quieter Federal Reserve are correct that not every speech is useful and not every projection deserves publication. Some communication tools may indeed have gone too far. But the solution to excessive communication is better communication, not deliberate opacity.

Markets are remarkably capable of evaluating information. Investors already distinguish between sound analysis and empty rhetoric. Some Federal Reserve speeches move markets because investors regard them as credible. Others are ignored because investors do not. The real question is whether those judgments should be made using public information or private information.

Markets work best when investors compete on analysis rather than access. The real cost of Federal Reserve silence is not uncertainty. It is privilege.

In a 2024 ruling that shook DC to its foundations, the Supreme Court upheld the Seventh Amendment in SEC v. Jarkesy (2024), affirming the right to an impartial jury trial. Until Jarkesy, the Securities and Exchange Commission had been deciding and applying its own civil penalties for securities fraud. When the time came, though, to reaffirm this right for a different agency, the Supreme Court blinked.

Must other agencies honor the Seventh Amendment in such cases too? And what about agencies who stack shadow administrative courts against Americans, operating as the enforcer, judge, and jury?

AT&T sought to answer these questions when defending itself against a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) charge of violating Sec. 222 of the Telecommunications Act, allegedly mishandling customers’ cellular data. The FCC enforced these monetary penalties against private entities entirely in-house and without the right to a jury trial. AT&T begrudgingly paid the $57 million forfeiture, but sought to overturn the enforcement action in federal court. 

The Fifth Circuit Court sympathized with AT&T.

The Commission [FCC] cites no authority supporting the proposition that the constitutional guarantee of a jury trial is honored by a trial occurring after an agency has already found the facts, interpreted the law, adjudged guilt, and levied punishment.

In other words, administrative agencies cannot simply sideline Constitutional protections.

Unfortunately, the US Supreme Court did not share the Fifth Circuit’s concerns. The justices ruled 8-1 to protect the FCC’s civil penalty regime, claiming that the FCC’s forfeiture orders were not judicially enforceable, and AT&T should have refused to pay if it wished to force a jury trial. Despite the same absence of constitutional protection as the SEC’s fraud cases, the FCC was judged to have upheld the right to a jury trial — even though none was actually available. 

AT&T faced two equally undesirable outcomes after receiving a Notice of Apparent Liability of Forfeiture (NAL), a formal warning of noncompliance under the Comms Act.

In one route, AT&T could have avoided paying the $57 million penalty, forcing the FCC to refer the matter to the Department of Justice for debt recovery. Only after the debt is assessed can AT&T finally pursue a trial de novo (a completely new trial) with jury access.  

Or AT&T could have paid the fine in full and then challenged the forfeiture action by appealing to a nearby circuit court. But this path sees the company forfeit access to a jury trial. 

A company can issue a written statement in opposition to the NAL, asking the five FCC commissioners to vote to uphold or deny the penalty. This preordained process undermines any semblance of fairness, as the commission dominates every possible outcome. Only the FCC commissioners can greenlight enforcement actions in the first place, so the targeted firm’s recourse is only to those very people who authorized the action under appeal.

In the FCC’s domain, AT&T lost its case before it even began. As Justice Clarence Thomas pointed out, AT&T should have received access to a federal jury before being forced to pay a costly fine. “In this process, which was completely in-house, the Commission acted as prosecutor, jury, and judge,” according to the Fifth Circuit’s AT&T decision. 

One alternative mechanism exists: the Commission may decide to host an internal hearing to adjudicate the forfeiture order. A hand-picked FCC administrative law judge (ALJ) may be assigned to hear the dispute, but the choice to appoint one is left to the commissioners’ discretion. The FCC dominates the entire process.

This ALJ-led route has become more unlikely over time, given the commissioners’ preference to adjudicate fines on their own terms. The FCC reserves more control over the enforcement process when its five commissioners vote to uphold a NAL rather than provide the opposing party with an administrative hearing. The FCC imposed the fine, rejected AT&T’s written opposition, and demanded immediate payment — without due process. 

Only a handful of agencies enjoy similar privileges. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and formerly the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) can all reroute cases away from their ALJs to be managed entirely by the agency leadership. This diminishes the original purpose of ALJs as the first line of review in proceedings.

The CFPB Director, until recently, reviewed all dispositive motions prior to the ALJ’s consideration, even though that same office also exercised final authority over all ALJ decisions. Thankfully, Acting CFPB Director Russ Vought rescinded this uncanny ability to control every aspect of a case, ensuring that dispositive motions were reviewed by an ALJ first.  

The NLRB’s rules allow the Board to intercept and revise ALJs’ draft opinions before an initial decision — which parties can challenge — is issued. The NLRB Board exercises full influence over the ALJ’s decision and will later review challenges to that same decision.

At the SEC, commissioners have increasingly bypassed ALJ adjudication: a rise in SEC commissioner opinions since 2020 corresponds with a precipitous decline in ALJ cases. SEC commissioners increasingly choose to decide disputes absent an ALJ, as seen with the recent Ameritrust Corporation case. 

Even if the FCC had held a traditional hearing on the fine, AT&T would face a near impossible challenge before an ALJ. In the unlikely event that AT&T managed to win against the agency in-house, FCC attorneys would simply appeal the matter before the full commission. Why wouldn’t those commissioners affirm the very enforcement action they approved in the first place? The SEC commissioners enjoy an identical process when affirming their own Division of Enforcement’s actions. 

As the above shows, agencies like the FCC can bend the trajectory of enforcement disputes as they deem fit. In such arrangements, businesses are stripped of their procedural due process rights. Telecom firms like AT&T deserve the right to adjudicate civil penalties before a real court of law, not before an agency court with enormous conflicts of interest.  

The FCC’s forfeiture orders closely resemble the SEC’s fraud penalties in the Jarkesy decision. The Seventh Amendment’s guarantee of a jury should have overridden the FCC commissioner’s adjudicatory scheme, just like it did to the SEC.  

The FCC cannot withhold access to a jury until after it has already determined the facts, levied a penalty, and rendered one’s guilt. Regardless of the binding nature of the order, AT&T deserved to be heard by an impartial jury before the FCC commissioners demanded payment.

“No one denies the Commission’s authority to enforce laws requiring telecommunications companies like AT&T to protect sensitive customer data,” read the Fifth Circuit’s decision in AT&T v. FCC. “But the Commission must do so consistent with our Constitution’s guarantees of an Article III [judicial] decisionmaker and a jury trial.” 

Last weekend, I drove from Massachusetts to Washington, DC. Somewhere along those 450 miles, my license plate was almost certainly photographed, time-stamped, and logged into a private database maybe ten, or even a hundred times. I honestly can’t tell you how many I passed, and that’s the problem. 

Flock Safety, the (nominally private) company behind most of the cameras, operates in more than 2,000 cities. No warrant, no suspicion, and no notice was required to record my trip. I did nothing wrong. I was tracked anyway. 

This is not a speed camera or a red-light camera. When Atlantic City expanded its license plate readers, the department put fixed cameras on every entrance and exit to the city so that every vehicle coming in or out gets scanned. Parking lots, expressways, and intersections have become de facto police stops. Networked across thousands of towns, those individual snapshots stop being individual occasions. They become a record of your life, a “literal and intimate roadmap of private life” — where you work, where you shop, which doctor you see; whether you attend worship or a protest or a firing range. As one respondent in the research put it, wholesale surveillance “is not simply a more efficient way for the police to do what they’ve always done. It’s a new police power.” 

Now, do the cameras help solve crimes? Sometimes. But the evidence here is a lot weaker than the sales pitch. That same Atlantic City expansion, one of the only rigorous evaluations we have, found that blanketing the city’s entrances did not reduce violent crime. There were some reductions in shootings and car thefts, and the technology mostly sat siloed in a few investigative units.

A 2025 review by some of the biggest names in evidence-based policing concluded that after decades of research, we still cannot establish whether license plate readers are cost-effective at all, because the effect depends entirely on how a department implements them. So, taxpayers are compelled by city councils to pay a recurring subscription for a system whose returns are unproven — but whose violations are constant.

Accountability normally disciplines surveillance. Private companies that misuse our data lose our trust and our patronage; they can be sued and fined. Government data collection is disciplined by the Constitution: warrants, courts, elections. Flock is a hybrid that slips both checks, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous. The people being watched are not the customers. Drivers cannot opt out of being scanned, and the police department or city council decides whether you’ll be a user. And there is no constitutional discipline because a private company does the collecting, so the government gets the data without the Fourth Amendment process to constrain it. Legal scholars have a name for the government buying its way around the warrant requirement: data laundering. 

No regulatory discipline is waiting to fill the gap, either. Adoption of this technology has completely outpaced the rules. Researchers who interviewed police leadership and Flock representatives found no standardization, no independent audits, and policies being worked out long after the cameras were already tracking citizens. The agencies themselves admit they are running on “best practices” because there is no law. An ACLU lawsuit revealed that ICE was using a private license plate database containing billions of scans to target people for deportation — after a similar project by the Department of Homeland Security was scuttled as clearly unconstitutional.

Police are quick to say Flock cameras make investigations easier, and some citizens say they have nothing to hide and have done nothing wrong, but the definition of “wrong” can be changed. Freedom is not just being left alone today. Living under someone’s arbitrary power to track you whenever they choose is itself the harm, even before the power is abused (which it absolutely is, everywhere, every day). Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, designed for prisoners, is now pointed at everyone. People who know they are being watched start policing themselves; they surrender autonomy. They think twice about the gun store, the clinic, the protest, the mosque. Surveillance itself is a blow to freedom. 

The constitutional debate continues. Courts have so far said a license plate in public carries no reasonable expectation of privacy, and for one officer seeing one plate once, fine. But that logic was built for the world before the nationwide mass surveillance network, and endless, near-free logging of data. A permanent, searchable record of every trip you take is a difference in kind, not in degree. The Supreme Court already recognized in Carpenter that tracking the whole of a person’s movements is a search, and generally requires a specific warrant. In Chatrie, SCOTUS recently ruled that accessing cell phone location history is a search. A camera grid that can collect and reconstruct geographic location for every driver, without reasonable suspicion or probable cause, violates individuals’ reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment. Collecting mass data is not an exception to the rule. It is a direct violation. 

Every query of a Flock database should require a judicial warrant. Independent audits should be a condition of any contract, and contracts that won’t meet those terms should be voided. A free society can live with some unsolved crimes. It cannot live with an unaccountable, permanent, searchable registry of constitutionally private and protected activities.