Old Scottish joke:

An old man at a bar is complaining. “You see that bridge there? I built it with my own hands! But do they call me ‘MacGregor The Bridge-Builder’? No! And I raised five beautiful children! But do they call me ‘MacGregor The Child-Raiser’? No! But, you fuck one sheep . . .”

Has MacGregor been treated unfairly?

This was my complaint in The Beauty Of Settled Science. Psychology laid bare the secrets of the brain - it performs computations through a neural network communicating via electrical impulses intermediated by neurotransmitters crossing synaptic gaps - but do they call it Psychology The Brain-Secret-Revealer? Its concepts have turned into the categories that ordinary people use to interpret the world - extraverts, ingroups, the unconscious, IQ, Pavlovian conditioning - but do they call it Psychology The Useful Concept Creator? But you do one (thousand) bad social priming studies!

I had the same complaint in In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism. Nobody has the slightest interest in the first-order effects of effective altruism - the hundreds of thousands of lives saved - but you buy one castle! Even capitalism is a sort of MacGregor - the average kid these days seems to think of it as centrally about Mark Zuckerberg stealing your data, rather than about whether you have electricity at all, or whether you die from cholera at age three because your country is too poor to afford health care. Someone or something spends years, decades, or centuries doing amazing work, winning victory after victory, and it all fades into noise, leaving the topic to be identified entirely with last week’s tawdry scandal.

On a more personal level, this is the essence of cancel culture. You judge someone by their single worst and most embarrassing action. At its worst, the victim gets fired, but that part is hardly necessary. For a while, the culture enforced conformity just by making sure that the slightest deviation would become 100% of your reputation. Write 100 great blog posts on technical topics, 100 orthodox liberal blog posts, and one blog post expressing where you disagreed with feminism, and for the rest of your life the media would introduce you as “So-and-so, known for his anti-feminist blogging…” Everyone knew this would happen, and it was more than enough to produce chilling effects even without the immediate job loss.

One time we invited Richard Hanania to a prediction market conference. There were five or six news articles about it, and I can’t remember whether any of them mentioned the word “prediction”. As far as our reputation was concerned, it had become the Richard Hanania Conference For Richard Hananias. You invent an amazing new form of forecasting, incubate multibillion dollar startups, accidentally get thousands of people addicted to sports gambling - but you invite one conservative! If you allow this sort of thing, you can discredit any individual, field, or movement. Nobody is perfect enough to survive having every good thing they’ve ever done swept to one side while people hyperfocus on a single indiscretion. In this sense, the dynamic that MacGregor points out is antithetical to human freedom.

On the other hand, I do this all the time and don’t feel bad about it. For example, I assume Anthony Weiner had a rich and diverse career full of many highs, lows, accomplishments, and defeats. He even spent twelve years in Congress - for all I know, he saved taxpayers billions of dollars, or created new social programs to help the neediest among us, or cut red tape to unleash some new form of economic dynamism. Maybe he burnt himself out over years, spending late nights hunched over his desk trying to get the text of some bill exactly right, stressed to the point of ulceration about the possibility of failing in his duty to the American people. I have no idea. All I know about him is that he kept sending pictures of his penis to women who were not his wife, and that one of these times, it had an indirect but significant effect on the 2016 presidential election. Am I being a bad and unfair person for not caring too much about the rest of his Congressional career, let alone whether he is a good husband or a good father or a dutiful son or loves volleyball or collects stamps or otherwise has a multifaceted life?

If I were to force myself to regard Anthony Weiner as a complex individual - maybe go over his Wikipedia page and carefully read every section except Scandals - it would feel like exactly that: forcing myself. Even after doing this (I tried it as an experiment) I’m still unable to think of him in any terms besides “generic Congressman who did various generic Congressman things and then had some extremely nominative deterministic sex scandals”. Apparently he fought hard for health care for 9-11 first responders, good job Representative Weiner, too bad I am going to forget about that literally the moment I stop typing this sentence. Trying to temper judgment this way feels like violence against my brain’s attention heads, the sort of thing that would turn me into an opinionless zombie.

(It’s the same with people who make one nasty barb on Twitter. No matter what else they accomplish, they will always and forever be “that one guy who called my friend an ignorant buffoon that one time”. I feel bad about it, I try to regard them as a complex individual who may do good work, but I can’t do.)

I still find the problem of how to be scrupulously fair to MacGregor one of the thorniest social-norm-related questions, and have no good solution. I hope he accepts the title of this post as partial compensation.

According to a new report from Advancing American Freedom’s Plymouth Institute for Free Enterprise, tariff lobbying revenues reached $9.9 million for the second quarter of 2026, a 690 percent increase over the same quarter in 2024 and a 956 percent increase over 2016 (pre-Trump) levels. The number of registered tariff lobbying disclosures has jumped 230 percent in just two years. At least 22 contracts listed “tariffs” as their sole lobbying issue.

The surge is not surprising. When the federal government arrogates to itself the power to decide who receives carve-outs and exceptions, it transforms a free and open market into a system of cronyism and influence currying. The tariff schedule becomes a menu of favors, and the favor-seeking industry grows accordingly. Gordon Tullock famously documented this phenomenon, later named rent-seeking. Private resources that could fund payrolls, invest in equipment, or lower prices are instead diverted toward securing benefits from the government.

These lobbying contracts specifically target the administration’s tariff programs. They include at least 15 references to Section 232 tariffs, 13 to Section 301 tariffs, and 4 to the IEEPA tariffs that the Supreme Court struck down in February. In Learning Resources v. Trump (2026), the Court held 6–3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the president to impose tariffs, reaffirming Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. The power to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” belongs to Congress, yet the administration has simply reached for other statutory shelves. On July 20, it announced new Section 338 tariffs on Canadian cars, alcohol, dairy, cement, and, in an almost comical fashion, hockey sticks. 

During the Liberation Day IEEPA tariff regime, the economy shed roughly 5,000 jobs per month. Since those tariffs were struck down, it has added 137,000 jobs per month. AAF’s analysis attributes a monthly cost of 75,000 to 80,000 jobs to the Liberation Day tariffs. These tariffs did not “make America rich again,” as President Trump anticipated, but instead created instability in the labor market while contributing to ever-higher prices for American families.  

The deeper distortion is the one defenders of free markets should care most about. Tariffs are regressive twice over. The first regression is familiar: import taxes fall hardest on families and small businesses, who pay the full duty at the register. The second is subtler and more corrosive. Large corporations can afford to advocate on K Street, while the little guy cannot. When exemptions are available to connected players with lobbyists and unavailable to those without, trade policy becomes a system of patronage, of government by the highest bidder. This is what Adam Smith himself referred to as the “wretched spirit of monopoly,” or what is now politely called regulatory capture or corporate welfare.  

Defenders of the tariff program will argue that the lobbying boom is merely a transitional cost — the friction of a necessary realignment. But the friction is the program. A discretionary tariff regime cannot function any other way. The 690 percent increase in lobbying revenue is not a bug in the system Washington has built; it is an example of the incentives working exactly as expected. As James Madison warned in Federalist No. 62: 

Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue, or in any way affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace its consequences; a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow-citizens.

Over the twentieth century, Congress steadily delegated portions of its constitutional tariff authority to the executive through statutes such as Section 338 (1930), Section 232 (1962), and Sections 122 and 301 (1974). Each abdication of responsibility has become a lever for executive improvisation and a profit center for the influence industry. The Supreme Court’s IEEPA ruling closed one door, but the administration, in typical fashion, walked through four others within days. Until Congress reclaims the taxing power the Framers assigned it, the carve-out economy will keep growing, because the incentive to seek favors grows with the discretion to grant them.

Free enterprise does not mean the absence of rules. It means rules that apply equally to everyone. A trade regime in which prosperity depends on proximity to power is closer to pre-industrial mercantilism than to the dynamic and meritocratic ideal that has characterized America. While big business pays K Street for carve-outs, families and small businesses pay the full tariff tax. The Framers gave the taxing power to Congress precisely so that prosperity would never depend on proximity to power; it is past time Congress took it back.