(John Hinderaker)

Jack Smith was the hyper-partisan special counsel appointed by Joe Biden who tried, at the federal level, to get Donald Trump thrown into prison, thus ending his political career. His efforts supplemented those of the notorious Fani Willis in Georgia and Alvin Bragg in New York, who represented the Democratic Party at the state level. Scott, seeing Smith’s photos, memorably dubbed him “Krazee-Eyez Killa,” after the look-alike Curb Your Enthusiasm rapper. Killa sat for a deposition conducted by the House Judiciary Committee on December 17.

Other aspects of the deposition have given rise to minor news stories, but I want to concentrate on just one point: Smith’s determination to send Trump to prison for his actions relating to the January 6 protest in Washington. I don’t think Trump covered himself in glory that day, but what did he do that was a crime? He said that he thought the election had been stolen. So what?

Q But the President’s statements that he believed the election was rife with
fraud, those certainly are statements that are protected by the First Amendment, correct?

A Absolutely not. If they are made to target a lawful government function and they are made with knowing falsity, no, they are not. That was my point about fraud not being protected by the First Amendment.

Q I mean, there is a long list of disputed elections, I mean, the election of 1800,
1960, year 2000, where candidates believed they were wronged by the — you know, because they lost. And there’s a long history of candidates speaking out about they believe there’s been fraud, there’s been other problems with the integrity of the election process. And I think you would agree that those types of statements are sort of at the core of the First Amendment rights of a Presidential candidate, right?

Of course they are. Election integrity is a critically important issue on which all are allowed to speak freely. Watch what Smith does next:

A There is no historical analog for what President Trump did in this case. As we said in the indictment, he was free to say that he thought he won the election. He was even free to say falsely that he won the election.

But what he was not free to do was violate Federal law and use knowing — knowingly false statements about election fraud to target a lawful government function. That he was not allowed to do. And that differentiates this case from any past history.

Smith refers here to the counting of electoral ballots that was going on in the Capitol on January 6. There is a federal crime of interfering with lawful processes, but Trump never told his supporters, or anyone else, to obstruct the electoral vote counting. On the contrary, he told them to demonstrate peacefully and patriotically.

More, from later in the deposition:

Q So did you develop evidence that President Trump, you know, was responsible for the violence at the Capitol on January 6th?

A So our view of the evidence was that he caused it and that he exploited it and that it was foreseeable to him.

Not a crime, obviously.

Q But you don’t have any evidence that he instructed people to crash the Capitol, do you?

A As I said, our evidence is that he in the weeks leading up to January 6th created a level of distrust. He used that level of distrust to get people to believe fraud claims that weren’t true. He made false statements to State legislatures, to his supporters in all sorts of contexts and was aware in the days leading up to January 6th that his supporters were angry when he invited them and then he directed them to the Capitol.

True or not, none of this is even arguably a crime.

Now, once they were at the Capitol and once the attack on the Capitol happened, he refused to stop it.

“Refusing to stop it,” assuming that is correct, is not a crime.

He instead issued a tweet that without question in my mind endangered the life of his own Vice President. And when the violence was going on, he had to be pushed repeatedly by his staff members to do anything to quell it.

And then even afterwards he directed co-conspirators to make calls to Members of Congress, people who had were his political allies, to further delay the proceedings.

Nothing itemized here is even close to being a criminal act. Trump had a legal theory according to which the vice president had discretion to decide which slate of electors to approve in a disputed state. It was a weak legal theory, to be sure. But was it as weak as, for example, the theory the Supreme Court accepted in Roe v. Wade? No. In any event, advancing a weak legal argument is obviously not a crime.

What follows is softball questioning by the Democrats:

Q And during our hour, we talked a lot about the knowledge that Mr. Trump had, one, that he had lost the 2020 election; two, that what he was saying to the American public was false about the 2020 election.

I think Trump sincerely believed, and still believes, that he won the 2020 election. Smith’s evidence that he knew he was lying is that some Republicans told him he was wrong.

Can you help now bring us full circle on how you analyzed the First Amendment claims with the knowledge of the fraud that Mr. Trump was putting out to the American public in 2020 and 2021?

A Sure. From a legal perspective, this is really quite clear. I think all of us want to make sure people’s First Amendment rights are not abridged in a way that they shouldn’t be. I think I certainly feel that way. I’m sure everybody in this room feels that way.

But there is a very clear carve-out for fraud in our case law. The Supreme Court — I think there’s — one case is the Stevens case, talks about that, and there are others. And so when you’re committing a fraud, meaning you’re not just saying something that’s untrue, you’re saying it knowing it’s untrue or with reckless disregard for the truth, that’s not protected by the First Amendment.

That is completely untrue. If you defame someone with knowledge that what you are saying is untrue, it is actionable. But it is not a crime. In any event, defamation law has no application here. Politicians say things all the time with reckless disregard for the truth. Kamala Harris? Chuck Schumer? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Nancy Pelosi? Send them all to prison! Or rather, let’s not.

People commit crimes all the time using words. And when someone commits a
fraud, an investment fraud, or someone commits an affinity fraud, where you try to gain someone’s trust, get them to trust you as a general matter, and then you rip them off, you defraud them, that’s all words, but it’s not protected by the First Amendment.

Of course that is true. It is a point I have made many times. “Speech” within the meaning of the First Amendment does not mean all talking or writing. My favorite illustration is the gangster who says, “Shoot him, Bugsy,” and Bugsy shoots him. The gangster does not have a First Amendment defense because all he did was talk.

Fraud pretty much always involves communication, either written or oral. But that does not mean that fraud is insulated from prosecution. If you say, “Our records show that this company had a net income of $400 million last year, so you should buy it,” and in fact the company lost money and the records are fake, you are guilty of fraud and are likely to go to prison. You don’t have a First Amendment defense because all you did was talk.

Smith obviously understands this, but he pretends not to:

And in a lot of ways this case was an affinity fraud. The President had people who he had built up — who had built up trust in him, including people in his own party, and he preyed on that. Some people wouldn’t do it. Others would. We’re lucky that enough wouldn’t that the election was upheld.

This is pitiful. Trump saying he thought that he actually won the 2020 election was not “affinity fraud” because some of his supporters might believe it. It was political speech that is entitled to the core protection of the First Amendment.

In fact, Trump may very well have been right. As I argued here, there were several million ballots counted for Joe Biden in 2020 that were almost certainly illegal, the result of voter fraud.

The debate over election integrity is one that desperately needs to take place. Jack Smith’s effort to shut down that debate by imprisoning President Trump because he said the unsayable–our election processes are inadequate, and are highly susceptible to fraud–was disgraceful. Smith should be relegated to America’s Hall of Shame, along with Fani Willis and Alvin Bragg.

Elon Musk recently put forth a bold vision: that within two decades, AI will automate virtually all productive activity, work will be optional, and money will lose meaning. Coming from Musk, such pronouncements carry gravitas. And noticeably, the expressed vision unsurprisingly dovetails neatly with Musk’s admittedly exciting entrepreneurial visions. 

Yet variants of those claims have circulated for years, usually without reference to economic theory, institutional constraints, or political risk. Rigorously examining those assertions is essential to decouple technological optimism from the practical realities that will shape the next two decades.

Will Work Be Optional in 20 Years?

In economic terms, “work optionality” requires three simultaneous conditions: (1) per-capita output high enough that the median person can maintain a high standard of living without paid labor, (2) widespread, reliable distribution mechanisms, and (3) institutional stability that ensures income security over time. None of those conditions are close to existing.

Even if AI substitutes for large swaths of labor, historically new automation has reallocated work rather than completely eliminating it. New goods, new services, and new forms of status competition appear as old ones disappear. Moreover, without explicit redistribution mechanisms — which no major nation has implemented — the owners of AI capital capture the lion’s share of gains. That, if anything, requires the median individual to work more, not less.

Musk’s claim requires the total (or near-total) automation of the entire global capital stock, universally broad redistribution of payment streams or wealth, and stable political institutions, all within twenty years. Even considering $38 trillion of US public debt, setting aside lumpiness of capital flows, uneven innovation in various places around the world, differing views on the sanctity of labor and countless other potential obstacles, that is an extraordinary compression of time, capital formation, and global diffusion.

When Musk says that “work will be optional,” no different than choosing to grow vegetables in one’s backyard for fun, he is insinuating a world where production is fully automated and money scarcely matters. But such a future requires astronomically more than clever automation. It demands the near-total overhaul of the global capital stock, new mechanisms for distributing income in the absence of labor markets, and political systems stable enough to address a world where everyone receives sustenance without working. Considering $38 Trillion in US public debt, wildly uneven innovation and development across nations and continents, and deep cultural disagreements about the value and role of work, fitting that transformation into a twenty-year window would require an inconceivable compression of capital formation and institutional evolution. 

Will Money “Lose Meaning?”

For money to lose meaning, scarcity must disappear. But scarcity is not abolished by robots, however intelligent they are or however cheaply they make goods. Scarcity arises because:

• Consumer preferences differ.
  
• Time matters (now vs later).
  
• Land, location, status, political influence, and other constraints make some goods unavoidably rivalrous.

As individuals become wealthier, their consumption tends to shift from goods toward services. Even in a world with ultra-cheap production methods, services — and in particular positional and experiential goods — would dominate utility at high income levels. Access to desirable neighborhoods, exclusive schools, bespoke clubs, rare experiences, or political influence cannot be automated into abundance. Prices will continue to ration those services, and money, even if it changes form, remains the social mechanism that expresses relative value.

What could disappear is wage labor as the primary mechanism for accessing consumption. But that would not constitute an “end of money;” it would instead signify a shift in the income structure of society. One characterized by more capital income, more redistribution, perhaps more universal transfers. A world where “money loses meaning” is one where the economy violates the core assumptions of microeconomics, macroeconomics, and game theory. Artificial intelligence does not do that.

What Actually Matters: Capital, Diffusion, and Institutions

Musk’s vision treats AI as a profound, exogenous leap. Economic systems change, however, only through capital deepening, technological diffusion, and institutional adaptation.

At the very least, replacing the existing global capital stock with AI-augmented systems is a many-decade project. Upgrading energy grids, fitting logistics networks to the speed of AI, remaking industrial processes and transportation fleets, and all the other necessary upgrades of the global industrial base will take orders of magnitude longer than updating software. They require planning, investment, and training for complementary human skills. Each is additionally likely to be a target of hefty regulation, slowing that update process all the more. 

Second, technology diffuses unevenly. Historically, the highest-productivity technologies take decades to spread across countries, sectors, and classes. Under any realistic model of diffusion, any optionality where work is considered will arrive at vastly different times for different nations and the internal strata of their societies.

If that weren’t enough to cast doubt on the idea of work’s future irrelevance, prevailing institutions condition everything. Whether AI abundance produces universal prosperity or vast inequality depends entirely on property rights, competition policy, the rule of law, and stable governance. None of those variables can be automated by graphics processing units (GPUs). AI is indeed likely to be transformative, but productivity shocks are not destiny. 

Institutions, formal and informal, ultimately determine whether a society captures, mismanages, or squanders technological abundance.

AI vs. War, Famine, Pandemic, or Totalitarianism

The argument that rapid AI progress will reduce geopolitical danger is beyond economics; it may simply be a category error. Military conflict, agricultural collapse, disease, or authoritarian risk are not functions of the density of automation or its calculative capacity; they are functions of incentives, history, institutional weakness, and human failings.

If anything, AI may foster volatility: consider the long shadow likely to be cast by autonomous weapons, algorithmic political decision-making, and cyber vulnerabilities. Asymmetries in access to the most advanced AI at any given moment could increase international insecurity, not reduce it. Rapid automation may escalate resource competition, foster nationalist resentment, and shift paranoid regimes into overdrive.

Consider the impact of AI on already totalitarian regimes: thusly augmented, oppressive states become more capable, not more benign. Surveillance, social-credit systems, censorship, predictive crackdowns, and digital repression scale boundlessly with AI. North Korea, Cuba, and scores of other unfree nations will not suddenly liberalize because machines capture data and deliver higher productivity. Existential political risks are not reduced by AI abundance; they may, on the other hand, be amplified by it.

Must We ‘Get There Faster to Avoid Suffering?’

The view that a faster transition is better is nothing but an assumption. It may reflect a candid attempt at regulatory relief or direct government subsidies. In welfare-economic terms, though, the transition to an AI-dominated economy may be more painful than life at the destination itself. Rapid automation can produce unemployment, wealth concentration, social unrest, and political extremism. On top of that, the groups most harmed by the transition have extremely high marginal utility of consumption, which means that transitional losses will weigh heavily upon them.

Optimal diffusion may require gradual adoption precisely because societies need time to adjust: retraining, workplace changes, safety mechanisms, new institutional frameworks, and so on. A reckless sprint to automation might generate more conflict, not less. An adaptive, organic trajectory is far more aligned with empirical economic behavior and political stability. 

But that trajectory cannot be centrally planned. When governments attempt to dictate the timing of transformative technological rollouts — as some are already preparing for or attempting to — they almost always set the pace either too fast — triggering backlash and disruption — or too slow, stifling innovation and growth. Competitive market processes, though imperfect, tend to reveal a more measured rate of adoption than bureaucratically-imposed timelines.

A High-Tech Future, Without The Fiction

AI will significantly reshape the global economy. Productivity may rise sharply in certain sectors, returns on certain forms and mixes of capital may spike, labor markets will inevitably reorganize, and while some degree of both structural and frictional unemployment may result, new industries will emerge. But none of this implies an end of work, scarcity, money, or political acrimony. Across the past century, figures from Keynes to Jeremy Rifkin, Martin Ford, and Erik Brynjolfsson have predicted that technological progress, especially automation and artificial intelligence, ultimately make large portions of human labor unnecessary. Similar post-work visions appear in futurist/science fiction and political writing, from Marshall Brain’s Manna to post-scarcity theorists and Silicon Valley leaders like Ray Kurzweil, all of whom see automation pushing societies to rethink income, purpose, and the role of work itself.

AI is likely to magnify prosperity, but it will also magnify risks, and it cannot fundamentally change human nature. A better description of what AI will create is leverage in the economic, political, and military realms. What nations choose to do with that leverage will determine the future. Technology cannot, and does not, erase incentives, undermine money, or invalidate scarcity. It only changes the terrain on which human beings pursue them.

Oslo’s Deichman Bjørvika differs from downtown libraries in America by its near-total absence of homelessness.

If Smith were truly committed to transparency, he would respond to Sen. Grassley’s request for information concerning the special counsel’s investigation.

The day after the United Kingdom's general election last year, newly appointed Labour Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Wes Streeting proclaimed that Britain's socialized health care system was "broken."

Streeting's statement, while certainly correct, would have been political suicide just a few years ago. Criticism of the National Health Service (NHS) has long been seen as heretical. As in other religions, heretics were judged not on the merit of their criticism, but on the mere fact that they dared challenge received wisdom. As former Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson put it in 1992, "The National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion."

During the COVID-19 lockdowns, we were encouraged to stand outside our homes and "clap for the NHS" every Thursday. Some overly excited clappers even decided that wasn't quite enough to show their adoration for our health care system, and so out came the pots, pans, spoons, and other kitchen utensils.

Criticism of the NHS has remained extremely taboo. When I suggested in 2023 that the NHS was perhaps not the best health care system in the world, the left-wing tabloid paper The Mirror ran two stories about my "shocking" views. I even received death threats.

And yet, in just a few years, the Overton window appears to have shifted. The idea that the NHS isn't the world's best health care system is becoming more and more politically acceptable. Recent polling by YouGov suggests that more Brits now believe the NHS provides worse health care than other European countries, with the percentage increasing from 16 percent in 2019 to about 27 percent in 2025. The British Social Attitudes survey shows that, in 2024, just one in five adults (21 percent) were "very" or "quite" satisfied with the way the NHS runs. This is a steep decline of 39 percentage points since 2019, and marks the lowest level of satisfaction recorded since the survey began in 1983.

Perhaps the various high-profile stories of shockingly poor NHS treatment have driven some of this change. Nowhere is this more striking than in the Lucy Letby case.

Letby, a 35-year-old NHS nurse, was convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others at the Countess of Chester Hospital from June 2015 through June 2016. Her prosecution was subject to countless debates, with many people claiming she was actually innocent. Leading the media defence of Letby was journalist Peter Hitchens, who claims the babies were not murdered but died because they were "already very ill and received inadequate treatment."

How can we not tell the difference between serial baby murder and normal NHS care?

The idea that the NHS used to be the best system in the world but has only recently begun to fail remains common. When London Theatre reviewed Nye, a play about the birth of the National Health Service, the critic found it "bittersweet watching [Aneurin "Nye"] Bevan's fight to bring the NHS into being at a time when years of cuts have left it crumbling, and when its heyday can already be looked back on as something of a fever dream."

But the NHS is far from the best health care system in the world, and has never been the best. The most popular explanation for its shortcomings, echoed in that Nye review, is that the NHS is struggling because it is now underfunded. Yet public spending on the NHS has increased in real terms by an average of 3.7 percent since the 1950s. Health care represented 43.1 percent of total government spending on goods and services in 2024, an increase from 31.6 percent in 1997.

Government health care spending is so high in the U.K. that it has become the source of amusing ridicule. An account on X called Days of NHS Spending puts into context just how much the health service costs British taxpayers. For example, "the NHS spends Russia's entire military budget once every 150 days." If the NHS itself were a military, it would have the third-highest budget in the world, surpassed only by the U.S. and China.

The idea that the NHS is "underfunded" is simply untrue. But the only solution most politicians ever offer for our health care woes is to spend more money.
By almost every available measure, the NHS performs poorly in comparison to other systems. Take avoidable treatable deaths: In 2019, the U.K. had an avoidable mortality rate of 71 per 100,000 people. This is the lowest it has ever been, down from 84 in 2010 and 120 in 2001, yet it's still the second-highest avoidable mortality rate in Western Europe.

Even the 2023 Commonwealth Fund Survey, probably the international ranking that is most positive toward the NHS, ranks the U.K. ninth out of 11 in "health care outcomes."

Four-hour waits at emergency rooms and month-long delays to see a general practitioner have become part of life. Wait times have fluctuated over the years. According to the British Medical Association, the total number of people on NHS wait lists fell until 2010, then steadily increased until 2019. But even at that 2010 low point, British wait times were about twice as long as Dutch wait times for the same procedure. The Commonwealth Fund study found that the U.K. had among the longest wait times to see a specialist. Only 37 percent of people who needed specialist care in the past two years got an appointment within a month. Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the U.S. performed better, with 46 percent to 64 percent seen within a month. Only Canada reported a lower percentage than the U.K.
The NHS was founded on the promise that health care would be universally accessible and free at the point of use. But with wait lists this long and routine care difficult to obtain, is it really "universally accessible"? And when the tax burden is at its highest level since World War II, does it really matter if you aren't paying at use?

Not only is dissatisfaction with the NHS rising, but the public is slowly waking up to the fact that there could be better systems out there. The fact that the health secretary is now willing to call the NHS "broken" reflects this shift. Now, possibly for the first time in British history, Social Health Insurance (SHI) systems are becoming part of the mainstream debate. The BBC ran an article comparing the NHS to Germany's health care system, saying that the "jury is very much out on whether copying a different country's health system is really the way forward." Politico ran a piece titled "Is it time for the U.K. to (whisper it) ditch the NHS?"

The mere suggestion that marketized health care systems could provide better outcomes is no longer heresy. As is the case in every market, competition and choice allow for the most efficient allocation of resources. These systems empower patients with the ability and freedom to choose.

The Netherlands, for example, transitioned from a socialized system to a competitive, market-based, private SHI system. Sweden has started to allow private companies to set up medical practices. Most of Europe has some form of competitive market in health care, and spends much more on capital and long-term investment than the U.K.

The Australian example is particularly interesting. In 2019, Australian health care spending as a percentage of gross domestic product was 9.3 percent, just a few points below the U.K. Despite similar levels of spending, Australian health care outcomes outperform Britain's. Ovarian, lung, pancreatic, liver, stomach, and colorectal cancer survival rates are all higher in Australia than in the U.K., by as much as 10 percent in some cases. Australia's pancreatic cancer survival rate is nearly 75 percent higher than the U.K's.

Competition and choice drive innovation, efficiency, and responsiveness. When providers must compete for patients, they have incentives to improve quality, reduce wait times, and invest in cutting-edge treatments. Choice empowers patients rather than forcing us into a monopoly system where our only option is to wait and hope.

Americans who offer rose-tinted visions of universal health care systems would be wise to look at what happens when you actually implement one. The U.S. system is far from perfect and is far less market-driven than most people think. But the NHS is certainly not an alternative to be envied.

The post Britons Are Beginning To Admit It: Their Beloved National Health Service Is Broken appeared first on Reason.com.

It is impossible to pinpoint an exact place or moment when capitalism began. Capitalism is a process, not a discrete historical event with a beginning and an end, and it did not drop fully formed into a particular location. Even today, no society is organised along fully capitalist lines, and some have argued that a fully capitalist world is a theoretical impossibility. Efforts to isolate one patch of soil as capitalism’s place of origin—Florence, Barbados, Amsterdam, Baghdad, the southern English countryside, or Manchester, for example—have all proved insufficient. That is because the capitalist revolution had always been a process that drew energy from myriad sources. The first springs fed into rivulets that over time became meandering and ever more powerful streams. As these streams moved through time and space, they encountered a world often hostile to their further development—rivulets dried out; brooks met sandbanks and evaporated; and even the mightiest streams encountered mountain ranges that stopped their flow and forced them to take on new contours. Shape-shifting through the centuries, and against all odds, this novel logic of economic life—one that centred less on markets as such and more on the growth of capital, that is, money and goods dedicated to the production of more money and thus more capital—gained power.

Given capitalism’s winding course, one reasonable place to start is with the first capitalists—merchants—who played a critical role in propelling capital’s revolutionary recasting of economic life on Earth and personified its logic. While we do not know precisely when and where merchants of this particular bent emerged first, there surely was an unusually vibrant and early community of traders who, in the twelfth century, plied their business in the port of Aden, a port that became, according to its most important historian, Roxani Margariti, the heart of Indian Ocean trade. Capitalism did not “break out” in Aden in 1150, but the city was one among a number of notable places that linked together to form the stream that became the river and ultimately the flood.

Its merchants sent ships to distant ports across dangerous oceans, brought the riches of Asia, Africa, Arabia and Europe back to their storage sheds, then distributed them to the far reaches of the known world, buying low and selling dear, providing shipping services, exchanging currencies, offering credit and sometimes financing and even organising the production of agricultural commodities and manufactured goods.

Linking the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (and beyond) by sea and land, Aden was a world city constructed by people whose mundane activities, majestic in their sheer scale, included assembling cargoes, inspecting wares, haggling over prices, supervising the construction of ships, observing remote markets, gathering information and, not least, raising capital. As unlikely as it may seem, these banal activities, performed intensively, showed qualitatively new, emergent abilities—early, scattered sparks of the revolution to come.

This is an edited extract from Sven Beckert’s new book Capitalism: A Global History, published by Penguin.

This article originally appeared at CapX.