The idea of a “pink tax,” that women commonly pay more for equivalent goods, has sparked public debate and inspired various policy proposals. This concept gained prominence after the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs released its 2015 report From Cradle to Cane: The Cost of Being a Female Consumer, describing many examples of women’s products costing more than nearly identical men’s products. While the report documented many cases of women paying more than men for similar products, the causes of these differences are more complicated than the notion of a straightforward tax. Understanding how prices emerge in a market economy offers another way to interpret these disparities. 

The NYC study offers several examples intended to highlight real-world price differences for women’s products. Early in the study, the authors acknowledge that some price disparities are justifiable but claim that “these higher prices are ‘mostly unavoidable for women.’” 

Some cases raise as many questions as they answer. One example in the report compares two Radio Flyer scooters sold on Target’s website: a standard red version priced at $24.99 and a ‘pink sparkle’ version priced at $49.99. The report treats this difference as an unavoidable burden on women or parents of girls, yet consumers remain free to purchase either product. Paying for the higher-priced pink version reflects a preference for a particular product design, rather than an unavoidable tax. 

Even the study’s own data suggest a more nuanced picture. Women’s products were priced higher 42 percent of the time, men’s products were higher 18 percent of the time, and prices were equal in the remaining 40 percent. Such findings are more complicated than the notion of a uniform tax imposed on women. 

Critics might push back against the scooter example as an outlier. The strongest version of the pink-tax argument isn’t really about isolated items like a single scooter. Rather, critics point to broader patterns across categories where comparison is harder to avoid, such as dry cleaning that charges more for women’s shirts, or personal-care products like razors marketed to women at a premium. In these cases, critics argue, “choice” is a weaker defense, since substitutes aren’t always available and the men’s and women’s products do not appear, at first glance, to differ in production costs.

This is a fair challenge, but it still doesn’t establish gendered pricing as the cause. Dry cleaners often cite genuine cost differences; women’s shirts frequently require hand processing or different cleaning methods altogether due to design and fabric. Personal care markups may reflect smaller batch sizes, different formulations, or packaging costs rather than gender per se. However, even if production costs are identical, a price difference alone does not establish bias any more than airlines charging more for aisle seats constitutes discrimination against passengers who prefer extra legroom. 

Economists associated with the Austrian school, beginning with Carl Menger and later developed by Friedrich Hayek and others, emphasized that value is subjective rather than inherent in goods themselves. As Peter Boettke, Don Lavoie, and Virgil Storr observe, subjectivism lies at the center of the Austrian tradition and directs attention toward the meanings and preferences individuals attach to goods and services. Earlier theories, such as the labor theory of value, suggested that value derives from production inputs, but experience shows otherwise. A hand-turned chair requiring many hours of labor may still garner no buyers, while a designer handbag costing relatively little to produce may sell for thousands. 

More than a century before the Austrian school emerged, Adam Smith observed the famous water-diamond paradox. Water is essential to life, yet it is generally inexpensive because it is abundant. Diamonds, though far less necessary, command high prices because they are scarce and highly valued by consumers. 

These examples show why price differences between men’s and women’s products are not necessarily discriminatory. Prices emerge from consumer preferences, perceived value, and supply and demand. If pink items are valued more highly, companies rationally price them higher. Even identical production costs can result in different prices if a segment of consumers is willing to pay more for one variant. Conversely, if people do not value a product as highly, they will pay less. 

Price differences should not automatically be interpreted as evidence of bias. More commonly, they are signals, the accumulated result of millions of individual preferences and purchasing decisions made across countless transactions. No single firm sets these prices arbitrarily. Prices emerge from the interaction of producers and consumers responding to the information available to them. 

The pink tax framing, while an entry into an interesting discussion, is misleading. A tax is imposed from above and remains just as it was legislated. Unlike a traditional “tax,” no one is forced to pay markup for women’s items. Prices respond, however imperfectly, to what consumers actually value. If prices are to change, the most direct mechanism is not legislation, but the accumulated force of consumer choices over time. Prices are not obstacles imposed on consumer preferences, but reflections of them. 

Alexis de Tocqueville was born on July 29, 1805. Two hundred and twenty-one years later, he has become a man whom every political tribe seeks to claim as its own. The most ardent suitors at the moment are the post-liberals. Patrick Deneen and the national conservatives have made Tocqueville something close to a patron saint, finding in his portrait of democratic America an early glimpse of liberalism’s fatal contradiction. Liberal societies, they argue, dissolve the moral and communal supports on which they depend, until nothing is left but isolated individuals standing alone before an enormous state. The remedy, they say, is to recover virtue, religion, and community, and to enlist a government willing to form its citizens toward the common good.

The first half of this story is hard to argue with. Tocqueville indeed believed that a free society draws on reserves of virtue it does not itself create. And he believed that a people interested in nothing beyond its own comfort would eventually lose the capacity to govern itself. He sometimes put the point more strongly still. “Despotism may govern without faith,” he wrote, “but liberty cannot.” 

But the post-liberals have Tocqueville exactly backwards on the question that actually divides us, which is not whether free societies need virtue but where a free society is supposed to get it.

A careful reading of Tocqueville reveals that the cure he prescribed is very nearly the opposite of the one they are selling.

What Tocqueville Granted 

Tocqueville thought that religion was indispensable to American freedom. One of its most important roles, he believed, was to serve as a public institution that gave democratic citizens fixed points in a world of flux. Tocqueville believed that the mores of a people — their habits, beliefs, and settled ways of living — mattered more to the survival of free government than its written laws.

“There is no country in the world,” he wrote, “in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality.”

Notice, though, that there are two different claims tangled together here. One is that a free people need virtue. This is the sound core of the post-liberal worry. A liberalism that pictures the free individual as requiring no formation, no restraint, and no inherited traditions is living on borrowed capital, and eventually the loan comes due.

The other claim is that freedom requires not merely virtue but religious faith. This claim is far more contestable, especially in our secular age. Nevertheless, we can grant it without handing the argument to the post-liberals. That’s because the real debate is not about ends but about means.

In a free society, what is it that actually cultivates virtue and sustains faith? It turns out that Tocqueville had an answer to this question. But it is far from anything on the post-liberal agenda.

Where Virtue Comes From 

In America, Tocqueville found a wide variety of institutions aimed at improving the character of the people. Crucially, however, the vast majority of these institutions belonged to society rather than the state. The thing that struck Tocqueville most forcibly was the sheer density of voluntary association.

“Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England,” he wrote, “in the United States you will be sure to find an association.”

Americans banded together to build schools, churches, hospitals, and a thousand other things a Frenchman would have waited for the state to provide. These associations were a kind of practical school where people developed customs of cooperation, responsibility, and self-command. Virtue, for the American, grows out of habit, and habit out of free action repeated until it becomes second nature.

The same was true of self-government. Tocqueville called the New England township the place where Americans learned to be free.

“Town-meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science,” he wrote; “they bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it.”

The citizen who managed the affairs of his own town acquired the habits a free people cannot do without, and acquired them in the only way such habits can be acquired: by exercise.

And then there is religion, where his argument is sharpest and least convenient for the people now quoting him. American religion was powerful, Tocqueville thought, precisely because it kept its distance from political power.

“Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society,” he wrote, “but it must nevertheless be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country.”

He had seen what happened in Europe when churches climbed into bed with regimes, and he stated the lesson clearly: “The Church cannot share the temporal power of the State without being the object of a portion of that animosity which the latter excites.”

Tying a faith to the state only weakens it, binding its fortunes to a government that will someday fall and to all the resentments that government gathers on its way down.

The pattern here is clear. Every one of these institutions is local, participatory, and independent of central power. Each does its work from below, through free people acting for themselves. For Tocqueville, neither virtue nor faith is the kind of thing that can be handed down from above.

The Cure That Is the Disease 

Tocqueville would have been alarmed, then, by the post-liberal agenda, or at least by its most ambitious version. A post-liberal who wanted only to defend the family, the church, and the school against the forces dissolving them would find Tocqueville a friend, not a critic. The alarm comes with the further step of enlisting the central state in the work of moral formation.

Using the power of the state to make citizens good would, on his account, only deepen the very isolation and passivity of democracy that it promises to heal.

His most famous prophecy was of a new kind of despotism, gentler than the old and thus much harder to resist. He imagined “an immense and tutelary power” rising over a nation of busy private individuals and taking the whole business of living off their hands. The power would be “absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild.” It would labor willingly for their happiness, but would insist on being “the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness,” and would keep them, he said, in “perpetual childhood.”

Tocqueville’s target was a state that frees its people from the burden of an adult responsible life, one that takes the trouble of living off their hands and leaves them little to do but enjoy themselves. This comforting paternalism is, of course, not what the post-liberals are after. But in making the state the arbiter of virtue, they produce the same infantilizing effect in the domain that matters most. The post-liberal state relieves its citizens of the hardest and most personal labor there is: the labor of working out for themselves how to live.

That labor is precisely the mechanism through which character develops. Virtue is the fruit of habit, and the habits a free people most need ripen only where they are practiced. Law can restrain vice and shore up the institutions in which such practices happen. What it cannot do is practice for us. A government that commands its citizens into goodness gets the outward act, but the active virtue Tocqueville admired has to be grown, and it grows only where people govern themselves.

To be clear, this is not an argument against coercion as such. Tocqueville was no libertarian, and the townships he praised as schools of virtue were, after all, institutions of coercive government. But the authority of the townships was local, plural, and answerable. It was an authority that citizens could influence through voice and, if necessary, escape through exit.

What Tocqueville feared was not government but administrative centralization — the drawing of every local and private concern into the central state. Let a centralized power “penetrate into the privacy of individual interests,” he wrote, and “freedom would soon be banished.”

The post-liberal virtue-state is that penetration carried to the soul: the formation of souls lodged in the central state, the one task he thought had to stay dispersed, handed to the institution he trusted least to hold it.

In the end, Tocqueville cared less about who held power than about how much of it had pooled in one place.

“There is,” he wrote, “and I cannot repeat it too often, there is in this matter for profound reflection for those who look on freedom as a holy thing, and who hate not only the despot, but despotism.” 

When he felt the hand of power lie heavy on him, he said, he cared little to know whose hand it was, and was no readier to bow because it was “held out to me by the arms of a million of men.” He might have added that it makes little difference whether such a power reaches for our property or for our souls.

Classical liberals have always feared concentrated power in the first of those domains, and met it with competition and dispersion rather than gentler masters. The post-liberal virtue-state asks us to make an exception in the second. But a government strong enough to make us virtuous is a government strong enough to make us anything it likes. That alone is reason to keep the making of virtue where Tocqueville found it: in the hands of free people, governing and improving themselves.

Mediterranean chaparral goes up in flames and once again we’re told it’s all about climate change producing excessive summer heat:

French flee for their lives as ‘apocalyptic’ wildfires ravage homes

And:

As thousands of people are forced to flee their homes amid devastating wildfires in France, Spain and Scotland, the climate emergency seems closer to people’s lives than ever.

Despite this, governments around the world are seemingly rolling back their efforts to end the fossil fuel pollution that is driving the climate emergency.

Well, obviously, no one wants a good crisis to go to waste. But as we’ve noted before, a number of times, this is not correct. The cause of these fires is not summer heat nor is it our failure to abjure capitalism.

We are stout believers in something terribly unfashionable these days. We must identify the cause of a problem before there is any hope of being able to cure said problem.

These Mediterranean ecologies are built to burn. That’s just a part of their lifecycle. That they do burn should therefore not be a surprise to anyone. Summer temperatures make little to no difference. For such ecologies are not - even a bit, let alone notably - more flammable at 45 oC than 35 oC. The entire cycle is winter rains produce plant growth. When those rains stop, in spring, so does the growth and after seeding everything dies back. This thus produces the fireload which is ready to go up by June and July. This is just what the ecology does.

How much winter rain there is determines how much fireload there is to go up. Last winter was very wet thus there’s lots of fireload. So, more fires, bigger fires, over wider areas. And yes, you can indeed match off wet winters with fiery summers and vice versa, dry with non-fiery.

To the extent that climate change is driving these fires it is whatever the effects global heating has on winter rains that matters.

The other influence is that vast expanses of these Latin countries are emptying out. What were, until very recently, peasant smallholdings are being abandoned. The young have moved into the cities and the old have withered by their vines. People simply will not try to live on an acre of scrub and a few goats. Therefore the fireloads are not being cleared. Attempts at rewilding - attempts which do not reintroduce large numbers of herbivores - compound this.

We’re afraid that’s it. We’ve an ecology built to burn. We’ve stopped grazing and clearing large parts of it - for good reason, we’ve all got too rich to be peasants any more. Hot summers are not the cause of these fires even as wet winters might well be making them worse.

As we insist, it’s necessary to identify the cause(s) of a problem before attempting to solve it. As it’s not summer heat causing this one then reducing summer heat isn’t going to solve it.

Insisting that people don’t abandon - or even rewild - land and thereby refuse to clear the brush might work. But that would be an unfashionable solution, wouldn’t it?

Tim Worstall

What is the essential difference between someone conveying information and someone conveying propaganda? It’s not that the former is presenting something true while the latter, something false. No, the difference is that the propagandist has no concern for the truth. He does not care whether there are facts that contradict his position. He holds his views, not because they rest on facts and on logic, but simply because he desires them to be true. Like the fervent religionist whose beliefs are impervious to rational argument, the propagandist’s assertions, too, are not derived by reason.

What then are we to make of the accusations about widespread election fraud and cover-ups offered by President Trump in his July 16^th speech to the nation? Are we to take seriously a professed concern over election integrity when it comes from the man who encouraged a mob to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in order to undo the results of a presidential election? Can we believe that the man who pardoned all the people convicted of violent action during that riot actually wants to prevent interference in the election process? Can his warnings about alleged election tampering have any credibility when he tenaciously evades the overwhelming evidence, including dozens of court findings, that he lost the 2020 election?

When Trump declares that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets—when Trump declares that the hundreds of thousands of deported immigrants are guilty of serious crimes—when he declares that the tariffs he has imposed on us are being paid for by foreign exporters—when, in other words, he makes claims that are easily shown to be baseless—he is engaged in the equivalent of propagandizing. His aim is not to present the truth, but to offer a rational façade for his irrational beliefs.

If someone says to you “7 times 3 equals 21,” you can judge that statement as true. Which means that it is a successful effort at cognition, a successful attempt to grasp reality. But if you hear those same words being uttered by a parrot, you cannot judge them as either true or false. The squawking of a parrot is outside the realm of cognition. The parrot is not trying to name a truth. It is just emitting sounds.

The same applies to Trump’s statements about election fraud. He does not care whether his assertions are actually true. So one’s initial response should not be to grant his arbitrary claims a cognitive status, any more than one would to the parrot’s squawkings. Rather, one should ask: What is Trump’s purpose?

And clearly his goal is to pave the way for his own intervention in future elections. His goal is to make the public receptive to his future claims of fraud and to his efforts to nullify voting results. He failed to reverse the 2020 vote. He will doubtless try to do better the next time. He has publicly stated that his big regret is having failed to send National Guard troops to seize voting machines after his loss in the 2020 election. Will he order them to do so for this year’s midterm, or 2028’s presidential, election? Will he authorize his armed ICE agents to oversee voting sites by claiming that illegal immigrants are casting ballots? Will he unleash the many Jan. 6 goons he pardoned, and instruct them to “ensure” honest elections?

What we need to fear is not the secret machinations of “deep state” conspirators who want to skew the vote, but the open attempts by our own head of government to overturn results he does not like.

Nate Anderson , reporting for Ars Technica under the headline “A Missing Underscore Sent Innocent Man to Prison for 18 Months”:

Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name “fus__ro_dah” (two underscores after “fus”), but they accidentally requested records for the username “fus_ro_dah” (one underscore after “fus”). This one-character difference led them not to the perpetrator but to a Canadian man named Brandon Klayme. [...]

Despite finding no evidence of the crime on his digital devices, Canadian police arrested Klayme in 2020 on child sex abuse charges. He was convicted after a trial in 2023 and sentenced in 2024 to 18 months in prison. He served the full term.

Even after release, Klayme continued to fight his conviction. In the process of preparing his appeal, the username mistake that led to all these years of disruption was finally discovered. On Thursday, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal overturned Klayme’s conviction, writing: “Mr. Klayme is factually innocent of the offences. He should never have been charged, let alone convicted.”

Via Paul Kafasis, who asks:

While I understand how the mistake led to this poor guy becoming a suspect, I really can’t fathom how he was convicted. What the hell happened during that trial?

Contra Ars’s headline, it wasn’t the missing underscore that sent Klayme to prison for 18 months.