As German forces launched what would become their final major offensive on the Western Front in March 1918, President Woodrow Wilson’s Food Administrator, Herbert Hoover, identified what he called “one of the most vital problems confronting the nation”: a shortage of sugar. Demand had surged. Soldiers needed sugar in their rations, while producers and civilians relied on it to preserve and can food for the war effort. At the same time, supply had collapsed due to Europe’s engulfment in war, the disruption of Cuban cane fields during the 1917 Chambelona War, and German U-boats threatening Atlantic shipping.

What followed became one of the clearest examples in American history of price controls spiraling into creeping interventionism — and a textbook demonstration of why such schemes fail, even when administered by capable and patriotic officials pursuing a common wartime goal.

Hoover was commissioned as Food Administrator of the United States on August 10, 1917. A successful mining engineer and humanitarian, he seemed the ideal public servant for such an important task. He wasted little time, setting out to “assure to the American consumer a fair and just price” of sugar. Blaming rising prices on speculators rather than on underlying economic conditions, he ordered the suspension of trading in sugar futures on August 16 until “further notice.” And, by the end of the month, he had pressured American beet sugar producers “to limit the price of their product” with an expected savings of $30 million within the next year.

But replacing the flow of information and the structure of incentives supplied by the price system was far more difficult than Hoover, a graduate of Stanford University, imagined. Hoover’s attempts to adjust the system to unexpected changes in economic conditions were frustrated by the sugar industry’s attempt to divert the program to their own benefit. Hoover ultimately created a tripartite bureaucratic apparatus: the Sugar Division of the Food Administration, the International Sugar Committee, and the Sugar Distributing Committee. He set prices by signing agreements with producers and refiners under the threat of revocation of their license if they charged “excessive” prices.

But artificially low prices did exactly what economics textbooks predict: they encouraged consumption while discouraging production. Pre-war per-capita consumption stood at roughly 85 pounds annually, much of it in candy, soft drinks, condensed milk, canned goods, ice cream, and ketchup. Even at the beginning of the program, administrators acknowledged the predictable difficulties of holding prices low by urging consumers to limit consumption in the face of increased demand and decreased supply. By mid-October, a sugar famine was already causing sugar-using factories to shut down, and Hoover was forced to order cuts in candy production. The low price of sugar discouraged retailers from stocking it, especially given that it would not cover the increasing costs of transporting it from refineries. 

Under Hoover’s informal price ceilings, demand stayed high while beet growers watched competing crops become more profitable. As economist Joshua Bernhardt (1919) noted, mounting production costs and unregulated prices for other foods made sugar beets progressively less attractive. In desperation, Hoover tried to enlist schoolchildren and boys’ and girls’ clubs in sugar production, offering families an allotment of sugar in exchange for planting an acre of sugar beets. Pledge cards, circulars, and monetary incentives were deployed with patriotic fervor.

Hoover also formed local commissions to investigate spiraling production costs, producing thousands of pages of testimony from planters, nearly all of whom recommended higher prices. Testimonies from over 100 planters in California alone filled nine thick volumes (Bernhardt 1919). Planters rejected a flat price because it gave an advantage to low-cost producers, especially foreigners. Cuba could deliver sugar for about 5.5 cents per pound, while domestic beet sugar planters required nine cents and Louisiana cane sugar planters needed ten. Hoover’s political solution to these competing special interest groups was to buy cheap foreign sugar, along with domestic output purchased at higher prices, and then resell it to American refiners at an average price.

Price controls on sugar gradually expanded the scope of intervention. Transportation priorities, refinery allocations, export quotas, and distribution zones were imposed. Louisiana sugar failed to reach New England refineries because regulated prices made it more profitable for Louisiana mills to sell lower-grade sugars directly to confectioners than to ship to Atlantic refiners. Centrally prioritizing sugar allocation without market prices led to accusations of misallocation. While households went without sugar for canning and baking, Hoover argued in Senate testimony that the candy industry employed 250,000 Americans and that further diversion of sugar would put them “entirely out of work.” Yet, as Blakey (1918) notes, the knowledge problem cuts the other way: candy might have deserved a higher priority “in view of the national campaign for prohibition,” given its potential as a substitute for alcohol.

The Food Administration proudly claimed it had saved consumers millions. Yet as Roy Blakey (1918) observed, gratitude evaporated when sugar simply sporadically disappeared from tables in regionalized shortages. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s mocking refrain captured the public mood: “What comfort is there in a low price when no sugar can be obtained?” Searches for “Sugar Famine” on Newspapers.com yield over 20,000 matches during the years 1917-1920, the years Hoover’s sugar programs were operative, yet only 284 in 1916 and 370 in 1920.

The dilemma Hoover faced was classic: he needed “capable and informed representatives” who inevitably had skin in the game, or “uninformed ones who were disinterested.” Neither produced efficiency. Instead, the plan spawned a clerical army, including state-level certificate systems classifying industrial sugar use into five categories (A through E), population-based allocations, and transportation zones, which required a system of prioritization as well, designed to match supply to “equitable” demand. As Frank Rutter (1902) earlier recognized about attempts to regulate the sugar industry, any regulation would pit the concentrated interest of producers against the dispersed costs faced by consumers, “Opposed to these demands [of the sugar industry] there is only the diffused interest of the consuming public, with no detailed knowledge concerning trade conditions or the inner workings of the tariff, and without organization….”

The sugar episode was not an isolated wartime curiosity. It was a microcosm of the broader logic of Ludwig von Mises’ interventionism. Regulate the price of one commodity and you must regulate its inputs, its substitutes, its transport, and its distribution. “From the few instances cited,” Blakey wrote, “as well as from one’s daily observation, it is easy to see that the regulation of the price of one thing involves the regulation of the prices of all constituent factors and competing commodities, which in the last analysis means the regulation of wages, as well as the regulation of the prices, the supply and the distribution of everything else.”

Today’s policymakers would do well to revisit this forgotten chapter before reaching for price controls, “equitable allocation” schemes, or industrial policy boards. Price ceilings create shortages, which in turn necessitate rationing. Rationing requires bureaucracy, which opens the door to lobbying and favoritism. The consumer — the very citizens Hoover was commissioned to serve — ultimately pays in empty shelves and higher overall costs.

Herbert Hoover was a brilliant engineer and a sincere public servant. He believed he could “stabilize” markets through expert administration. The sugar famine suggested otherwise. Markets are not problems to be solved by committees; they are discovery processes that coordinate millions of decisions without central direction. When governments try to override that process, even with the best of intentions and the full powers of wartime emergency, the result is not order but the very chaos they sought to prevent.

For years now, a persistent narrative has circulated in American political discourse: China is quietly buying up vast swaths of US farmland, threatening food security, undermining sovereignty, and gradually gaining strategic control over America’s agricultural base.

It is an emotionally resonant story, one that combines geopolitical rivalry, declining trust in institutions, and anxieties about national decline. Yet like many claims that gain traction through repetition, its empirical foundations are weak.

The short version: Chinese ownership of US farmland exists, but the scale is dramatically smaller than commonly portrayed, the economic implications are muted, and any genuinely important concerns are narrower, more specific, and less sensational than the public narrative machine alleges.

We begin with the numbers. Chinese-linked investors own somewhere between roughly 250,000 acres of US agricultural land, depending on the year and reporting method used. That may sound substantial in isolation, but context matters. The United States contains roughly 880 to 900 million acres of farmland. Chinese ownership therefore amounts to approximately 0.02 percent of total US agricultural land: a rounding error in macroeconomic terms. Even within the category of all foreign-held US farmland, China represents well under one percent. Put differently, the claim that China is “buying up American farmland” is not supported by the available data.

Indeed, the broader story of foreign ownership looks very different from the one often implied in political debates. Foreign entities collectively own approximately 43 to 46 million acres of US agricultural land, or roughly three to four percent of the national total. Yet the overwhelming majority of this ownership comes not from geopolitical adversaries, but from long-standing allies and trading partners. Canada alone owns roughly one-third of foreign-owned US farmland: 13 to 15 million acres, or forty to sixty times more than China. The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and other European countries collectively account for millions more acres. If acreage alone constituted an economic threat, political attention would look very different.

Moreover, much of what is classified as “foreign-owned agricultural land” is not traditional cropland at all. Large portions consist of timberland, renewable energy projects, grazing areas, or institutional investment holdings. Particularly in states such as Texas, foreign-held acreage is often tied to wind or solar developments rather than farming. In many cases, land ownership reflects pension funds, long-term asset diversification, or industrial activity rather than strategic attempts to influence agricultural production. This distinction matters because public imagination tends to conjure images of foreign governments quietly accumulating Midwestern cropland, when the reality is often corporate ownership structures tied to energy, forestry, or vertically integrated agribusiness.

The Chinese component of this story is especially concentrated. More than eighty percent of Chinese-linked agricultural holdings are associated with only a handful of entities, the most notable being the 2013 acquisition of Smithfield Foods. That transaction alone brought approximately 146,000 acres under Chinese ownership. Yet even here, the political symbolism tends to outweigh the underlying economics. Smithfield remains a US-based producer, operating largely through American supply chains, workers, facilities, and domestic production. Although its ownership structure changed amid heated opposition from interest groups, the firm did not suddenly transform into an instrument of foreign agricultural control. The firm primarily produces for US consumers and functions within American regulatory and legal institutions.

Geographically, Chinese-linked holdings are concentrated in a relatively small number of states, including Texas, North Carolina, Missouri, Utah, and Florida, with smaller holdings scattered elsewhere. Even in these states, however, Chinese ownership typically represents far less than one percent of total agricultural acreage. There is little evidence that such ownership materially influences agricultural output, commodity pricing, food availability, or broader land markets. The United States remains one of the largest and most productive agricultural exporters in the world. No plausible reading of the data suggests Chinese land ownership threatens American food security in any meaningful sense.

Still, dismissing the matter entirely would be a mistake. There are concerns, but they are much narrower than fearmongers tend to imply. The first involves proximity to sensitive military or strategic sites. Several proposed or completed Chinese-linked land purchases have raised scrutiny because of their location near military installations or critical infrastructure. A frequently cited example involved land near Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, where national security objections ultimately helped block development plans. In these cases, acreage is less important than geography. A few hundred strategically placed acres may matter more than tens of thousands of remote ones.

Second, there are reasonable questions regarding ownership transparency. Land can be acquired through subsidiaries, partnerships, shell corporations, or joint ventures that obscure beneficial ownership. This creates legitimate challenges for regulators attempting to distinguish between normal commercial investment and potentially sensitive acquisitions. Yet here too, the appropriate response is targeted transparency and review mechanisms, not broad exaggerations about foreign domination of American agriculture.

Third is the issue of reciprocity, though its significance is open to debate. The United States remains one of the world’s most desirable destinations for investment precisely because of our stable institutions, relatively open markets, and strong protections for private property. Other countries, including China, operate under far more restrictive legal and ownership systems, particularly with respect to land. Yet it is not immediately obvious that differing rules necessarily constitute a problem. A country that attracts global capital because investors trust its institutions occupies a different position than one in which investment is constrained by legal uncertainty or state control. The relevant policy question, then, is not merely whether reciprocal access exists in a formal sense, but whether particular forms of foreign investment create identifiable national-security or strategic risks that outweigh the broader benefits of openness. 

If one argues that Chinese purchases of agricultural land should be prohibited categorically, the logic quickly expands to foreign direct investment as a category. Should foreign firms be barred from investing in American factories, warehouses, logistics networks, commercial real estate, or manufacturing facilities? Should allied pension funds be prohibited from owning timberland? Should energy investments be restricted simply because ownership is foreign? Such questions illustrate why precision matters. Nearly $6 trillion of cumulative foreign investment underpins swaths of the American economy. The policy issue is not foreign investment per se, but how to distinguish productive capital inflows from genuinely sensitive national security risks.

The conclusion is far from dramatic, which may explain why it struggles to compete politically. Chinese ownership of US farmland is tiny, highly concentrated, and irrelevant to both America’s agricultural production and food security. The broader narrative of sweeping foreign control is substantially overstated relative to the facts and data. National security concerns can exist in specific cases, especially near sensitive infrastructure, and reciprocity deserves thoughtful debate. But neither concern justifies abandoning proportionality or confusing a handful of narrow issues for a sweeping economic threat that does not exist.

Almost 250 years ago, a group of revolutionaries published a document declaring their independence from the world’s largest empire. The Declaration of Independence clearly articulated a set of principles that had been developing for centuries — namely, that people are born free and possess an inherent right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Seven years later, after a long and arduous war, they realized their dream, and the United States of America began its grand experiment: a nation governed by its citizens rather than a monarch or dictator, with liberty placed firmly at its center. Contemporary defenders of liberalism are the progeny of that generation. We are the revolutionaries carrying this dream forward.

Today, many on both the Right and the Left — national conservatives and so-called progressives alike — seek to undermine the American experiment. They claim it has failed the middle class, minorities, women, and other groups. They argue that their ideas — tariffs, class warfare, and greater state control over the economy — will make us safer, restore jobs, and reduce poverty. But these ideas are old, and when nations have relied on them in the past, they have faltered.

Take trade. Peter Navarro and others in and around the Trump administration believe America needs to pull back from international commerce. They advocate high tariffs on imports to restrict Americans’ access to foreign goods, raise revenue, and boost domestic manufacturing. This is not new thinking. It is very old thinking.

From 1815 to 1846, the United Kingdom had a series of policies, known as the Corn Laws, that in effect imposed a 28 percent tariff on imported grains. These laws benefited landowners at the expense of workers and consumers who paid 9 percent more for food, leaving less money for clothing, shelter, and everything else. These laws made the United Kingdom poorer, not richer.

In 1434, the Chinese Emperor Xuande issued the Edict of Haijin. It suspended official ocean-going voyages, effectively isolating China from much of the outside world. Privately owned ocean-going vessels were destroyed, and the empire’s naval fleet was allowed to decay. For much of the next 350 years, China remained largely inward-looking and self-sufficient — an outcome that might please many Republicans these days. Some purported justifications for China’s isolationist swing were to end piracy and to put pressure on Japan, which was a large importer of Chinese goods. 

Unfortunately for China, the policy backfired. By the time it re-engaged with the West through contact with England in the late 1700s and early 1800s, it had fallen significantly behind in both technological and military development. England easily defeated China in the Opium Wars, kickstarting China’s “century of humiliation.”

Protectionism is an old idea with periods of widespread support across the globe. The newer idea, the innovative idea, is realizing that international trade brings benefits to all involved. Supporters of freer trade are the true radicals in the best sense of the word. They are the ones pushing a counterintuitive idea that makes people better off.

Class warfare is another old idea that is back in vogue. Progressives make their living denouncing billionaires and big business. Republicans used to largely avoid such rhetoric, but now folks on the Right are okay with higher taxes on corporations, “Big Tech,” and the wealthy. 

The novel idea is not going after the rich just because they are successful. That has been done in countries all over the globe. The communists in Cuba do it, the socialists in Venezuela do it, and the European progressives do it, too. The revolutionary idea is allowing people to keep the fruits of their labor. Successful entrepreneurs in America have a lot of money because they have created a lot of value for society. Their wealth is a just reward for the value they have created. 

Paying taxes to support essential government programs is one way we help the least fortunate among us. But levying punitive taxes on the rich reflects a more primitive impulse, appealing to base instincts of envy and resentment. The real innovation was overcoming those instincts to build a system that respects individuals, encourages success, and protects private property. American capitalism, born of our Revolution, has largely achieved this, and we continue the work of the Founders when we defend it.

State-owned enterprises are also making a comeback. After World War II, the United Kingdom nationalized dozens of industries as part of the post-war consensus. This consensus, promoted by progressive intellectual heavyweights such as John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge, argued for a mixed economy with significant government involvement in industry. Coal, telecommunications, railways, canals, steel, and shipbuilding were just a few of the industries the UK government took over. Nationalization was supposed to generate full employment, and along with a robust welfare state, prevent the type of conditions experienced by Europeans and Americans alike during the depression of the 1930s.

The reality was different. As John Moore, former UK Financial Secretary to the Treasury, discussed in a Harvard Business Review article, nationalized industries had low returns on capital, high costs, bad labor relations, and were generally unable to satisfy consumers. According to Moore, by 1979, government-controlled industries were costing taxpayers £3 billion per year, or nearly $24 billion in current US dollars. The United Kingdom’s economic woes in the 1970s gave former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher the opening she needed to privatize these industries. Her actions improved the industries previously crushed by government mismanagement and boosted the larger economy.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. There will be no shortage of celebrations, but as we commemorate the occasion, we should remember what exactly we are celebrating: a group of radical thinkers who demanded liberty, not paternalism; trade, not protectionism; and a government that protected rights rather than one that determined them. America has not always lived up to those ideals, but our pursuit of them has enabled us to extend freedom to more people than any other nation in history. The result, though imperfect, has been extraordinary prosperity.

Today’s defenders of liberalism are the true revolutionaries, and we must do our part to advance the ideals of the American founding.

A new study of federal court filings suggests that artificial intelligence may be transforming one of the oldest — and most expensive — services in American society: representation in court. 

The paper, now circulating for comments before publication, reports a nationwide surge in civil lawsuits filed by people acting pro se (as their own attorneys). The researchers conclude that many of these filings were researched, drafted, or otherwise heavily assisted by large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT and Claude. 

The study examined millions of federal court docket entries across multiple years and dozens of categories of litigation. Using large databases of filings, linguistic analysis, statistical comparisons with pre-ChatGPT baselines, and software to detect AI-generated language patterns, the researchers conclude that the rise of generative AI coincides with a major increase in pro se litigation in federal courts. 

That increase is substantial. Federal civil filings surged after the public release of advanced LLMs. The overwhelming majority of the increase came from pro se plaintiffs. The authors report:

In the post-[AI] period, we find that the AI detection rate rises consistently, from near zero at the end of 2022 to 18 percent by early 2026, tracking the trajectory of LLM capability gains and diffusion of LLM adoption rather than any single event. By early 2026, roughly one in five complaint filings contains text that the detector classifies as AI-generated [emphasis added]. 

The right to represent oneself in federal court dates to the founding era and was codified by the First Congress in the Judiciary Act of 1789. In practice, however, the right often existed more in theory than reality. The Sixth Amendment and subsequent rulings assured a right to an attorney for those accused of a criminal offense, but no such protection exists in civil or administrative courts. Federal litigation is intimidating, technical, document-heavy, and expensive. Filing fees may be affordable, but legal representation often is not. 

For generations, many Americans who believed they had been cheated, harassed, wrongly terminated, denied compensation, defamed, discriminated against, or otherwise mistreated under the law reached the same reluctant conclusion: it simply was not worth paying a lawyer and risking unpredictable legal costs to pursue a civil case. Artificial intelligence abruptly alters that calculation. 

Chatbots Enter the Courtroom

A plaintiff can now ask ChatGPT to explain filing requirements, organize facts, summarize precedents, draft motions, prepare responses, and generate properly formatted legal documents at little or no cost. What once required thousands of dollars and weeks of expert legal work can be meaningfully attempted at home in an evening. (For what it’s worth, ChatGPT scored a 297 out of 400 on the Uniform Bar Exam, easily exceeding the passing score in nearly all US jurisdictions. Some 10 percent of US law school graduates never pass the exam.) 

The jump in AI-assisted filings occurred across a wide range of legal categories, from real estate disputes and employment law to slander and libel claims, insurance matters, disability cases, and immigration proceedings. Of particular note, perhaps, is the rapid growth in filings related to detention and deportation, where detainees increasingly appear to be using AI tools to navigate the federal legal system without attorneys. Amid accelerating (often erratic) immigration enforcement, habeas corpus lawsuits have increased 8,400 percent. In other words, a market-generated AI technology may be broadening de facto access to constitutional protections for the groups least able to defend themselves within the legal system. From that perspective, this looks like an impressive democratization of access to justice. 

For decades, reformers have argued that lower-income Americans effectively lack equal access to civil courts because professional legal services (“legal cognition”) are too expensive. Lawyers cost money because legal work requires highly trained cognitive labor: research, drafting, procedural knowledge, formatting, and endless paperwork. Legal aid programs and pro bono services help some people, but many are turned away because the basic economics remained unchanged. 

Now, LLMs have dramatically reduced the cost of producing all that legal text and navigating legal procedure. The result may be a profound expansion of practical access to civil litigation in American history. 

The Risks of AI Litigation

US courts evolved under the assumption that legal services would remain “scarce” and therefore expensive. That scarcity acted as a filtering mechanism. Lawyers didn’t merely draft documents. They discouraged weak claims, translated emotional grievances into legally actionable arguments, imposed professional discipline, and absorbed enormous procedural burdens before cases reached judges. 

AI removes much of that friction. 

The legal profession, for now, is deeply divided over the impact of what they call “robo-litigation” on the future of American justice. Some lawyers and judges see a coming wave of frivolous filings, fabricated citations, and procedural chaos. Others, including many organizations devoted to expanding access to legal services, see something closer to a breakthrough. 

The American Bar Association recently conceded that generative AI could provide “affordable legal guidance” to people unable to hire attorneys but warned about inaccurate advice, ethical problems, and the unauthorized practice of law. Courts increasingly caution litigants that they remain fully responsible for errors generated by AI systems, including fabricated legal citations and imaginary precedents. Several lawyers already have been sanctioned after submitting briefs containing nonexistent cases hallucinated by AI tools. 

Legal aid organizations are more enthusiastic than alarmed. The ABA’s own Center for Innovation has described AI as a potentially transformative tool for improving access to justice. The Thomson Reuters Institute recently called AI a “generational opportunity” to narrow the justice gap (unmet civil legal needs of Americans) by helping underserved populations navigate legal systems that historically have been too expensive and complex for ordinary citizens. One survey discussed by the Legal Services Corporation found that legal aid organizations are adopting AI tools at roughly twice the rate of the broader legal profession. 

In short, the groups most directly confronted with unmet legal demand seem naturally eager to use AI. For legal aid attorneys and reform advocates, the advantages are obvious. A tenant facing eviction, a migrant contesting detention, a worker challenging dismissal, or a disabled claimant denied benefits suddenly can obtain procedural guidance, draft filings, organize evidence, and prepare legal arguments at little or no cost. What elite lawyers may view as a destabilizing automation can look different to people who previously had no practical access to legal representation at all. 

Will Automation Overwhelm the System?

Critics reply that lowering the cost of legal access is also lowering the cost of producing legal “noise.” Federal judges complain of growing quantities of AI-assisted filings containing procedural errors, invented authorities, and poorly grounded legal arguments. Even accurate filings, however, increase pressure on courts that already struggle with overloaded dockets and limited judicial capacity. In many ways, the system’s stability relies on most people not exercising their rights. “Justice delayed” is one of the most politically sensitive measures of a court system. 

And unlike private firms, the federal judiciary cannot rapidly gear up in response to surging demand. Adding more judges requires congressional action. Court procedures are governed by law, precedent, and elaborate procedural rules designed for consistency and due process — explicitly not for rapid adaptation. 

In this sense, the federal courts may be confronting a classic problem identified decades ago by the economist Ludwig von Mises in Bureaucracy. Market institutions can respond dynamically to technological innovation because they are guided broadly by profit, loss, and competitive adaptation. Bureaucratic institutions operating under law necessarily move more cautiously because their authority depends upon rules, procedure, and limited discretion. 

The courts now face precisely that asymmetry. The market has produced a revolutionary technology capable of dramatically lowering the cost of legal cognition. But the judicial system must respond through new legislation, revised procedures, modified administrative rules, and constitutional safeguards. Recently, for example, courts ruled that attorney-client privilege doesn’t apply to chatbots, even if the user is relying on them for legal counsel.

From Disruption to Democratization

Not so long ago, headlines about AI and law focused on whether ChatGPT could pass the bar exam and whether AI would threaten the jobs of junior associates drafting legal briefs. 

Across profession after profession, AI is reducing the cost of cognitive labor once performed only by highly trained people. Journalism, accounting, customer service, education, finance, medicine, and software development — to name a few — all are confronting versions of the same disruption. Institutions built around expensive expertise suddenly face technologies capable of reproducing portions of that expertise at near-zero marginal cost. That we knew.

But few considered the more consequential finding that millions of ordinary citizens suddenly possess tools capable of helping them navigate the legal system. The relationship between ordinary Americans and the legal system is changing fundamentally. The constitutional right to represent oneself existed long before AI. What AI may now be doing is operationalizing that right on a mass scale for the first time in American history. 

As a seventeen-year-old high school student in Trier, Germany, Karl Marx wrote a religious essay to fulfill a graduation requirement. Titled “The Union of the Faithful with Christ,” it explained the human need for the divine as an “unsatisfied longing for truth and light.” A loving relationship with God not only filled that longing but also brought virtue as a benefit.

“Then every repulsive aspect is submerged,” Marx continued, “everything earthly suppressed, everything crude extinguished, and virtue is more enlightened as it becomes milder and more humane.”

Although the essay feels somewhat more analytical than heartfelt, along with Marx’s other work, it was easily good enough to graduate. He finished eighth in a class of 32, ready for college.

Parents naturally fret when children leave home. What if they fall in with a bad crowd or adopt destructive ideas? Pity Marx’s parents, Heinrich and Henriette; young Karl was an edge case of this. Within two years of his family turning out at 4 a.m. to see him off to university aboard a river steamer, Marx was living a life notably short on virtue, mildness, or humanity. In fact, a tsunami of egotism and wrath toward God had consumed him. Those who have had their own battles with self-absorption and anger can relate.

Between 1835 and 1841, Marx studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin, during which time he was jailed for drunkenness and disturbing the peace, was accused of carrying weapons, and reportedly fought a duel.

His parents, who were financing this mischief, worried, with Heinrich carrying on a correspondence with Karl that degenerated into conflict. Believing his son’s heart was “enlivened and governed by a spirit that is not given to all men,” in 1837, he frankly asked Karl whether that spirit was “of a heavenly or a Faustian nature.”

“Do you think,” he wrote, “that you will ever be capable of feeling a truly human, a domestic happiness?”

Karl wrote back a long, solipsistic reply which signaled that a momentous battle inside him had been decided. He described an illness that seemed to be partly physical and partly spiritual. It had led him out of Berlin into the countryside to recuperate. For several days he was unable to think at all.

“I ran like a madman around the garden beside the dirty waters of the Spree,” Karl wrote.

Literary Ambition and Swallowing Fury

In 1838, the very next year, Heinrich died. He was 61. Karl didn’t attend the funeral. Any substantive relationship with his family ended at that point. 

What brought on Karl’s remarkable college transformation? Perhaps a Marxist would say he was overcome by rational objectivity. But as the biographer Werner Blumenberg notes, in the end Marx was less an objective scientist than (quoting Marx’s friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels) “a revolutionary politician.” His intellectual work was designed to serve political ends. Beneath the claims of objective rationality lay a tortured, artistic soul. 

Marx’s first college ambitions, in fact, had been literary. At Bonn, he was active in a poetry group. Today his verse serves as a window into the emotional storm that drove him. 

In “Invocation of One in Despair” (1836-37), Marx describes wanting to avenge himself on  a god whom he claimed had “snatched from me my all.” In “The Pale Maiden” (1837) he quotes the titular character as saying “Thus Heaven I’ve forfeited, I know it full well. My soul, once true to God, Is chosen for Hell.” And the later poem “The Fiddler” (1841) reads like a bizarro version of the Charlie Daniels’ song “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” Marx describes a violin player turning against God, who had lent him his art: “Till heart’s bewitched, till senses reel, With Satan I have struck my deal. He chalks the signs, beats time for me, I play the death march fast and free.” 

In 1837, when an editor rejected his poems for publication, Marx had written his father that he “swallowed it with fury.” That was when his primary ambitions pivoted to philosophy and history. Exhaustion from this intense study seems to be what led to the illness that drove him out of Berlin to run like a madman beside the river.  

It also arguably drove the work that would make Marx famous. 

The Gospel of Marx

Marxist philosophy is a reimagined New Testament, with Marx in the role of Christ. After all, Jesus had first spoken of a kingdom in which the last would be first, and vice versa. Marxism even has its own perverted eschatology, with violent socialist revolutions paving the way to a utopian state of communism that supposedly marks the end of history.

Creating this system of thought came at a cost. Marx’s drive and intellect could have secured a much more comfortable life for his family, who lived in profound poverty. Four of his children died before reaching adolescence. His wife, Jenny, who had been raised in wealth, had to beg a neighbor for money just to bury one of them. Marx himself died in 1883 at age 64, with eleven people attending his funeral — many of his growing number of disciples, one imagines, were too busy promoting his work to the world.

Jesus said you could know a tree by its fruits, and those of Marx did not fully ripen until the twentieth century. At one point, over a third of humanity lived under Marxist governments. Utopias they were not.

Fortunately, today the ratio has declined to less than one-twentieth, if you exclude China, which remains nominally socialist but with a significantly different economic model.

Instead of rewriting the Gospels, Marx’s life might have been better spent trying to live them out, cultivating something he had written about in his high school essay: “…a heart full of love for humankind, open to everything noble, everything great, not out of ambition but for the sake of Christ.”

At seventeen, Karl knew the words of a better way to live, even if he had not yet learned the tune. The dreams of youth are sometimes lost with tragic results.

Many discussions of the ongoing decline in fertility end up treading on the grounds of “family policy” when discussing remedies (or, if one believes there are too many people on Earth, incentives) to fertility decline. Commonly debated items include subsidized childcare, income tax credits, housing reform, divorce laws, welfare policy, and the possible trade-offs of “quantity” and “quality” when investing in children. What is rarely, if ever, included is the role of monetary policy.

Fertility decisions are primarily based on lifelong considerations. Because monetary policy mostly affects the short-run, even large unexpected monetary expansions or contractions are unlikely to matter much for such long-run fertility decisions. In extreme cases, an unexpected monetary expansion can cause a real wealth reduction that affects timing. If extreme enough, the delay may push older possible parents out of their prime years for having children. In other extreme cases (think hyperinflation) we can expect some effects. But both examples are extreme cases.

Available estimates of the role of monetary policy on fertility in non-extreme cases show something, but it is a small something (although not negligible). Thus, the role of monetary policy seems properly sidelined in countries like the United States.

A recent book by Jeffrey Degner* argues that these results understate the true damage. In Inflation and the Family, Degner argues that monetary institutions (which could include state-issued monies as well as competitively issued ones under a free banking regime) end up shaping people’s time preferences. Our habits (greater indebtedness, increased inequality, and greater moral hazard) are influenced by the economic environment. “Time preferences” refers to how people value present consumption relative to future consumption or, more broadly, how willing they are to defer gratification. Related habits include the age at first marriage, the number of children, and the spacing between children, among other factors. Ultimately, he argues that political control of the money supply gives politicians incentives to overissue money, fueling an “inflation culture” which depresses fertility.

There is much to say about such an argument. Economists, in general, are reluctant to argue in terms of “preference changes.” One of the fathers of family economics, Nobel laureate Gary Becker, famously argued that we should take preferences as given and never invoke preference changes to explain social or economic change. Not because such changes never occur, but because it is a facile argument. “Preference change” can be used to explain too much, and it’s difficult to falsify. 

Being somewhat of a Becker devotee, I tend to admonish my students the same Becker did. At the same time, there is always a little voice in my head that makes me somewhat reluctant to say that preference changes should never be used. After all, dictatorial regimes invest significant resources in propaganda precisely to reshape people’s preferences so that they acquiesce. So it cannot be fundamentally wrong to argue about preference changes, but we should set the standard required to make a convincing case extremely high.

Degner’s case has parts that respect Becker’s admonition but also parts that violate it in order to take the more difficult road. In the parts where the admonition is respected, the case is fully convincing. In the parts where it is not, Degner does not quite make that case, but he does make a convincing case that the issue deserves more attention.

For example, with respect to instances of following Becker’s admonition, Degner points out that we measure inflation for the poor very poorly, which likely explains why we understate the damages of inflation. The consumer price index (CPI), when one looks at how it is constructed, tends to resemble the inflation experience of households in the top income quartile of the population. Attempts to create “group-specific” inflation measures generally find higher rates of inflation at the bottom than at the top of the distribution. Degner argues that this is due in part to how money enters the economy — loose monetary policy actually fuels inequality. Since inequality has been shown to have some connection to fertility, monetary policy may affect fertility through its contributions to inequality. This well-anchored claim indicates the “usual” assessments understate the role and importance of monetary policy.

Straying from Becker’s advice about positing shifting preferences, Degner invokes the idea of an “inflation culture.” In this framework, monetary policy does not merely influence prices; it also shapes the incentives and behavioral responses (like indebtedness, low savings rates) that arise under an inflationary monetary regime and ultimately influence household decisions, including family formation. The intriguing link merits further investigation, and in Degner’s treatment it largely serves as an invitation for future research rather than as a fully developed empirical demonstration.

Indeed, Degner highlights earlier efforts at making the “inflation culture” argument – including one by Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy — as well as potential avenues to connect economics with biology, psychology and sociology to explain preference formation. But in this, Degner only hints at future research, and in fact omits some obvious empirical arguments in his favor.  

Take, for example, the habits of people in former Soviet bloc countries, notably in East Germany. Despite now having lived under a liberal democracy with relatively stable monetary policy and open markets — and for many having grown up in that environment — East Germans still exhibit a much stronger aversion to inflation than people in West Germany. This is despite a literature showing that, before Soviet division, there were few socio-economic discontinuities at the border between what later became East and West Germany.

That last criticism notwithstanding, Inflation and the Family makes for a worthy addition to one’s library. What it does well is genuinely valuable, and even where it is less fully developed, the book provides a useful starting point for future inquiry. All in all, it is a valuable contribution.

*This review was commissioned and completed before Jeffery Degner joined the AIER staff.

As the Iran campaign grinds into its third month, with unpredictable reactions and uncontrollable consequences pushing the conflict toward open‑ended escalation — a prolonged war — the contrast with January’s swift capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro could not be starker. 

Yet the two interventions are by the same military and the same commander-in-chief. What explains the difference?

The contrast between the two campaigns points to a deeper issue. War has long been understood as having uncertain outcomes. As Carl von Clausewitz observed, any war unfolds in a “fog” where much remains unknown and therefore cannot be controlled. Yet military campaigns are still planned as rational and deliberate undertakings, utilizing strategies and tactics to manage or overcome this uncertainty and bring about the intended outcome: victory on the battlefield.

Friedrich Hayek offers a fundamental and revealing critique of the planning mindset that permeates the military and its campaigns. His work on knowledge in society as not given to a single mind, but dispersed across individuals, puts the very framework of top-down planning in question. War, as the coercive imposition of one centralized rule over another, suffers from this limitation.

Although Hayek developed this insight in the context of markets, it applies equally to war. Military campaigns seek to impose a single will, yet their success depends on navigating and overcoming the dispersed knowledge embedded in the societies they confront — and therefore the varied and unpredictable responses on the battlefield and beyond. Because the goal is to overtake and establish control over the enemy, war becomes a central planning problem.

Hayek’s insight is that much of what matters is knowledge of the “particular circumstances of time and place.” This knowledge is largely tacit, what Michael Polanyi described as knowing more than we can tell. Because it is practical and experience-based, it cannot be centralized or fully communicated.

The reason the knowledge gap is not merely a complication but a fundamental barrier lies in the nature of feedback. Hayek observed that markets correct poor planning through price signals, which generate decentralized, immediate responses that reveal planners’ errors.

War lacks an equivalent mechanism. As James Scott argued, by the time the knowledge gap becomes apparent, the intervention has already altered the society in which it is embedded. New, irreversible facts are created on the ground. In Iran, each month of campaigning generates reactions that no prior intelligence service could have anticipated, and each reaction reshapes the terrain for what comes next. The planner is initially ignorant, lacking the full knowledge necessary to make rational decisions, and it is the very act of planning that exacerbates this ignorance.

Even taking uncertainty into account does not solve it. Donald Rumsfeld’s distinction between “known and unknown unknowns” acknowledges uncertainty, but does not dispel it. However, Hayek’s point explains that the issue is not simply that some data are missing, but rather that the necessary knowledge found in the cultural, historical, and social spheres is not of the kind that can be compiled, centralized, or incorporated into a plan.

The swift resolution of the Venezuelan conflict and Iran’s prolonged involvement illustrate this well. Maduro represented a center of concentrated power — one man in a specific and well-defined position — and his removal required knowledge that intelligence could approximate. Iran, by contrast, is different: the task is broader and less well defined. Success hinges not only on military might, but also on the responses of a society deeply rooted in distinct cultural, historical, and religious dynamics. Although there is opposition to the regime, would it rise in support of a foreign intervention, remain passive and silent, or even side with the state in resisting it? Even the most sophisticated intelligence cannot reliably predict such outcomes, because the relevant knowledge is dispersed among millions of individuals.

The danger is not that war is irrational, but that it is treated as if it can be made rational and predictable. This illusion not only justifies action without sufficient knowledge but also underlies the belief that societies can be reconstructed from the top down after conflict. War is not only a matter of military might and technology, but also of human response.

Hayek’s insight thus invites skepticism toward the idea of rational war. Outcomes depend on dispersed and tacit knowledge that no planner can fully access or control. War is therefore not only uncertain, as Clausewitz argued, but constrained by deeper epistemological limits.

Planning cannot overcome this limitation. As President Eisenhower put it, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”