Statism – government control of the economy and people’s lives – is on the rise and freedom in decline, as developments around the world show. In Canada, the federal government directs infrastructure projects, including oil and gas pipelines, foreign trade, housing development, and AI, among other things. It has also established a sovereign wealth fund that gives the state an increased stake in capital markets and as financier of government-favored projects. In the United States, the federal government is using tariffs and ownership stakes in companies to direct the economy. Similar observations can be made in the EU, Asia, and elsewhere.

       Governments assume that through their votes, voters sign away their individual rights – their freedom – and let the government decide what is best of them. Elitist government leaders presume that they are naturally equipped to make better decisions than people trading in free markets and are therefore justified limiting their freedom, based on the leaders’ political philosophy of collectivism. Collectivism, according to Ayn Rand, “ … is based on a view of man as a congenital incompetent, a helpless mindless creature who must be fooled and ruled by a special elite with some unspecified claim to superior wisdom and a lust for power.”

       Often, governments use some perceived threat as a justification for increasing their control. As Ayn Rand observed, “In order to justify it, the statists have to rouse people to a hysterical fear of some malevolent enemy who threatens them with constant, unpredictable dangers.” In the recent past, those malevolent enemies have been capitalists whose profit-seeking industrial activity has allegedly caused a “climate emergency,” the pandemic-causing corona virus leaked from a Chinese research lab, and now, President Trump and his unpredictable tariffs disrupting international trade.

      Why do government leaders succumb to the hubris that they know what’s best for everyone? These are some plausible reasons:

• They are true believers in collectivism and have therefore adopted statism as their political ideology.
• They evade the importance of freedom to human flourishing and the government’s role in protecting it because that contradicts their philosophy of collectivism and statism.
• Like everyone else, they have a psychological need for self-esteem but instead of gaining it from their own productive efforts, they seek if from power over others  that inflates their view of their own abilities.

      On the other side of rising statism is its acceptance by those who repeatedly vote statist governments into power. Such voters share their political leaders’ ideology and want to be taken care of and looked after by the government. They want the state to ensure equal shares for all in the common pie that it has baked with their tax money.

      To challenge statism and “the government knows best” thinking, we need to point out statism’s flaws and identify an alternative.

      The problem with statism is that by attempting to direct and control the economy, the government diminishes human flourishing – which, ironically, it claims to protect by arguably meeting basic economic needs and ensuring equity for all. In Canada, despite the government’s efforts to direct the economy through industrial policies, the sovereign wealth fund, and taxation, growth is stagnant, capital is fleeing the country, productivity is sluggish, inflation is persistent, and almost a third of Canadians lives paycheck to paycheck. In the U.S., where greater freedom still exists, these problems have been largely avoided.

      But human flourishing does not mean bare economic survival and equal struggle for all. The condition of flourishing is that people are able to depend on their basic tool of survival, reason. They must be free to think, engage in any productive activity, and trade with others of their choosing, to survive and enjoy life. Thinking, producing, and trading requires freedom to choose one’s work, to keep the proceedings from it and to prosper accordingly.

      By limiting or abolishing that freedom – through confiscation of property and “redistributing” it to others, trough taxation, welfare programs, and foreign aid,  or through restricting trade through regulations – a statist government undermines individuals’ freedom to pursue their values and thereby their flourishing.

     The alternative to statism is a free society where the government plays a limited but crucial role and  flourishing can be maximized.

      Instead of controlling the economy and restricting individual choices, the government in such a society protects freedom by upholding individual rights to life, liberty, and property. Because those rights can only be violated by force, whether physical coercion or fraud, the government upholds them by deterring and punishing those who initiate force. This is the government’s only legitimate role and limits its functions to policing to protect citizens against common criminals, maintaining the military against foreign invaders, and operating the law courts to protect contracts and help resolve disputes.

     In a free society, there is no role for the government in the economic and social realms. It doesn’t collect taxes and fund industrial or social policies, hand out subsidies, or bail out businesses. It leaves the citizens free to live, produce and trade, as long as they respect the freedom of others to do the same, which makes flourishing possible for all.

      The gap between today’s statism and a free society is wide, but if we want to maximize human flourishing, we must strive to narrow it. One way to begin is to challenge those who hold the “the government knows best” premise by simply asking them “why?”.

Photo by William Zhao on Unsplash

I have a new article up at The UnPopulist, continuing my work for them on charting Donald Trump’s abuses of executive power.

This time, I focus on an effort to deprive universities of tax-exempt non-profit status on vague and arbitrary grounds.

Earlier this month, the Treasury Department and the IRS proposed a rule that would revoke tax-exempt status from private schools—everything from elementary schools to universities—that offer “targeted support to Black or other minority students.” This isn’t just a ban on explicit racial preferences or quotas. It’s a ban on any help offered specifically to minority students, down to minority student clubs and mentoring programs, which the administration apparently considers an offense against that most victimized minority in America: white men.

Aside from the nefarious goal of this rule change, we should be concerned about how the administration is using the IRS to impose it. The politicization of the IRS’s nonprofit rules has implications that go far beyond college admission policies. It is a way to gain direct presidential control over civil society.

A word on the substance of this particular policy. The Trump administration is trying to use the language of civil rights, talking about eliminating special favors, but doing so in a way that is actually designed to roll back the advances of the civil rights movement and the end of Jim Crow.

Let’s put it this way. I grew up still seeing ads for the United Negro College Fund, with its famous motto, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” The fund aimed at providing scholarships for talented young black people who otherwise could not afford to go to college. Is this a special favor for black students? Yes, but one that was based on merit, recognizing the disadvantages they faced from poverty and from the lack of educational opportunities and helping them overcome that.

But under Trump’s rules, this would be targeted by the IRS as an illegitimate purpose. Follow the link about how the Trump administration pressured universities into disavowing a mentoring program for black Ph.D. students because this is “discriminatory.” Here’s what that looks like in practice:

MIT, like many of the schools cited in the investigation, had paid The PhD Project “a nominal fee” to participate in the group’s university fairs or conferences, allowing MIT to send representatives to answer questions about attending their school, spokesperson Kimberly Allen said.

MIT informed the government in April 2025 it had ended its participation in such conferences.

I don’t know about you, but telling MIT it can’t even engage in recruitment of black students doesn’t sound like anti-discrimination. It sounds like a return to discrimination. And that’s a lot clearer when you realize that this administration is chock full of explicit racists. (This is something I’ve covered in the past, but I’ve been storing away even more examples, which I’ll be sharing soon.)

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But that’s not the focus of this article. I focus on the arbitrary way the Trump administration is reshaping its rules for tax-exempt nonprofits. While they’re imposing new restrictions on universities, they’re loosening restrictions on churches by allowing religious organizations—but not other tax-exempt nonprofits—to engage in political activity and endorse candidates. I sum up the administration’s policy this way: “Starve the universities, feed the churches. Exploit a politicized IRS to discourage activity you deem politically unwelcome in institutions you regard as hostile, while you open the floodgates of money and influence for institutions you regard as friendly.”

I point out how vague statutes and undefined powers in the law made this possible, but then I point to a more ominous factor.

Today’s authoritarian right has revived and adopted the ideas of the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt. The central idea of Schmitt’s theory is that no legal doctrine can really be based on universal and neutral liberal principles. Instead, he insisted, the only basic distinction in politics is between friend and enemy. The fundamental political imperative is to reward one’s friends and punish one’s enemies.

Here we see that doctrine put into practice in the nitty-gritty of IRS tax rules.

Read the whole thing.

The UnPopulist

Trump Is Reshaping IRS Rules to Defund Minority Programs and Empower Churches

The Trump administration’s civil rights agenda is becoming clearer. Earlier this month, the Treasury Department and the IRS proposed a rule that would revoke tax-exempt status from private schools—everything from elementary schools to universities—that offer “targeted support to Black or other minority students.” This isn’t just a ban on exp…

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2 hours ago · 12 likes · 1 comment · Robert Tracinski

And please do follow those links, especially Andy Craig’s article, which lists some of the contemporary American right-wing endorsements of Schmitt. It’s one of those things that sounds so cartoonishly evil you can’t believe it’s really happening—but then the vice-president name-drops a Nazi theorist.

But you don’t need a theorist to engage in the age-old political impulse to rig the system in favor of your gang, which is the rule of our politics right now, until we demand something better.

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Written and directed by Curry Barker
Starring Cooper Tomlinson and Inde Navarette
Distributed by Focus Features (United States)
Running time: 109 minutes
Rated R for strong bloody violence, grisly images, sexual content, pervasive language, and brief graphic nudity.

Obsession (2025) follows Bear Bailey (Michael Johnston), an introverted, hopeless romantic who faces severe anxiety trying to confess his love to his good friend, Nikki Freeman (Inde Navarette).

In the opening shots, the cold palette and absence of characters close to Bear emphasize his unhappiness in his isolation. Characters in the background are blurry but still perceptible, suggesting that human connection is constantly in the back of Bear’s mind but always out of reach. This loneliness is underscored when his cat, Sandy, dies; she had been the only other occupant of the one-bedroom home he inherited from his grandmother.

His infatuation with Nikki seems sweet on the surface. But during his speech to his best friend, Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), in which he practices what he will say to her as he confesses his feelings, it’s clear that he loves what Nikki provides for him rather than Nikki herself.

Pretending to talk to Nikki, he says, “You were the only person who was nice to me when I moved here.” This suggests that Bear has experienced social ostracization and exclusion before, and this line explains in part his intense nervousness and anxiety about talking to Nikki, who is supposed to be his friend. It also suggests that Bear views himself as an outsider. Instead of this being a singular experience that he has grown or learned from, it is now a facet of his personality, and he views Nikki’s acceptance of him as an outsider as a reason to believe that they could be happy together romantically.

After a phone call with Nikki during which she complains about losing her crystal necklace, he goes to a crystal shop to buy her another. This will be his in; by replacing something she cherished, he will be able to say the thing he cannot with words—that he loves and cares for her.

But when he gets to the crystal shop, he is instead enchanted by a small children’s toy called the One Wish Willow, which grants the user one wish if he breaks the stick in half. It is unclear why Bear decides to pick this toy over the necklace. It has no significance for Nikki other than that it would be a present from her friend Bear. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the intimacy of replacing a necklace was too explicit a confession for Bear, so he went for a less obvious option in case Nikki said no. This choice reveals something about Bear’s character: He abandons his logic for his emotion. His fear of rejection is understandable, but he makes an incomprehensible choice. Giving Nikki the necklace would surely communicate his feelings better than giving her the One Wish Willow, which says absolutely nothing on its face. He has more of a chance of being rejected by giving her the One Wish Willow because it is not personal to Nikki and therefore does not convey the message that he understands her and cares for her.

This abandonment of logic for the sake of emotional security is a consistent feature of this story, which not only diverts Bear away from a path of clarity and reason but is also the driving mechanism through which Nikki is subjected to torture.

After several excruciating tries to draw Nikki away from their friends for a personal talk at trivia night, Bear settles for driving her home. In the car, their conversation suggests closeness but is stilted by silences that should be filled with Bear’s confessions. Instead, he keeps quiet, pushing himself to talk but always doing so to change the topic, much to his own frustration.

After Nikki eventually gets out of the car and walks toward her door, Bear realizes that he forgot to give her the One Wish Willow. Knowing that even if he had, he wouldn’t have said what he really feels, he instead breaks the stick and says the words to himself, “I wish Nikki Freeman loved me more than anyone else in the world.”

What follows is completely unexpected. The wish has a horrific effect on Nikki’s life. Her body is taken over by an extremely violent and obsessive entity. She lies that her dad has cancer to invoke sympathy from Bear, so he stays with her all the time. She digs up his dead cat and makes a shrine to her on Bear’s kitchen floor to show her devotion to him. She brutally kills her best friend, with whom she suspects Bear is having an affair, by smashing her face into her steering wheel. The real Nikki is buried in her own body, and we see fleeting glimpses of her when she suddenly recoils from Bear’s touch, screaming in agony and disorientation.

As audience members, we must admit that Bear had no way to know that his wish would cause this. For the first quarter of the film, he suspects that his wish has worked, but he resists accepting that because of the impossibility. But we get periodic glimpses that the real Nikki is trapped inside her own mind—and Bear sees them. Even if he could not accept that his wish had worked, Nikki’s actions are in line with someone experiencing a psychotic break. After digging up the cat, Nikki makes Bear lunch for work. When he bites into the strange, discolored meat, he realizes that she has cut up his cat and fed it to him. A picture of the two of them is taped to the inside of the lunchbox lid; Bear is circled with the words “you,” and Nikki is circled with the words “not me.” So why does he spend so much of the film trying to find ways to contain this new Nikki so they could have the relationship he has always dreamed of?

We can sympathize with Bear for rejecting a conclusion that seems inconceivable. His entire worldview must change to accept that Nikki’s body has been hijacked due to his wish. Previously, he believed that he lived in a world governed by reason, but he now knows that he lives in a world where dark magic can affect the lives of innocent, unassuming citizens. This is also hard to accept because it means that Nikki is powerless to stop it. Bear has forced Nikki into a state of waking torture in which she has become a prisoner inside her own body with absolutely no hope of breaking out.

In a state of intense bewilderment, Bear goes back to the crystal shop for answers, where he is told, rather candidly, that the only way to free Nikki from this agony is to kill himself. If he dies, the wish will die with him, and Nikki will be free; otherwise, Nikki will live like this forever, in an endless state of powerless servitude.

The film has presented us with an unwinnable ultimatum, which can reasonably evoke sympathy from the audience. Only one solution exists, which requires the biggest loss any human being can suffer. However, it is made clear through the consistent presentations of Nikki’s agony that this is a necessary action. In the final scenes, as Bear debates whether to overdose on pills to end his torment, the film is faster paced, manic, evoking the feeling that Bear is running out of time before something even worse happens, and we cannot help but hope for his death to prevent it. His life taken to save Nikki’s is not a sacrifice, because a life in which he has wreaked such havoc on an undeserving Nikki is not a life worth living. Forcing someone into servitude is a catastrophic violation of individual rights, and morally it must be met with forfeiture of the criminal’s own rights, even if the full effects were unintended. What removes or diminishes our sympathy for Bear is how long it takes him to recognize the fact that he has done something wrong and therefore, should be punished. Even if Bear didn’t know what his wish would entail when he first made it, his decision to accept someone else’s enslavement as long as it serves his desires is evil.

One of the most basic virtues we can exercise is choosing to think rationally and to evaluate the world around us. Therefore, wilfully inducing inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment is a source of evil. Bear spends much of the film ignoring that which he knows is true: Nikki is behaving significantly out of character in a way that puts her life and the lives of others in danger. He lies to his friends and himself, trying to convince them that Nikki is fine, that they love each other so she seems different. When no one believes him, he regurgitates her lie about her dad dying to explain her drastic change, even though he knows it is untrue and makes no sense considering their distant relationship. He isolates her further by telling Ian that nothing is wrong with her, even when Ian identifies her behavior as beyond abnormal and suggests that Bear might be taking advantage of her in her time of crisis.

In the dead of night, the real Nikki manages to break through to talk to Bear, saying that the entity inside of her is sleeping. She begs Bear to kill her, emphasizing that this experience is agonizing and terrifying. Instead of empathizing with her and recognizing his own mistakes, he demands to know what’s so bad about being with him that she would rather be dead. She tries to reply that she has never been with him, but he cuts her off by storming out of the room.

Although Bear, to some degree, is a victim of circumstance, his callousness and complete disregard for Nikki’s experience is truly evil. He had no way to know that his wish would induce such a horrific experience for everyone involved. But when he identified his wish as directly responsible, he should have taken the necessary steps to remedy it. He should not have continued to puppet her around, treating her more like an object than a person. One of the most horrifying and graphic scenes is when he has sex with her; the camera zooms in on her blank expression, absent and disassociated from her own body, as Nikki makes placid sounds of enjoyment.

Even if it is unintended, subjecting someone to involuntary servitude is one of the most heinous acts a person can commit, and there is properly a legal requirement to take away some of the criminal’s own rights in response. But Bear being arrested and thrown in prison would not have freed Nikki. The only way Bear could free Nikki was to take his own life or to take hers. But taking hers would have been immoral to the highest degree because she did nothing wrong.

We can feel sympathy for Bear that he is left without options, but logic and reality demand recognition. His decision to ignore Nikki’s predicament is evil; by doing so, Bear willingly ignores his ability to think by pretending he doesn’t understand the circumstances, which only serves to prolong Nikki’s servitude to him.

Bear’s death is a catharsis for the audience. The audience and Bear are the only ones who know that Nikki is trapped inside of her own body because of the wish. We see Nikki, charismatic and confident before Bear subjects her to this torture. Then we see her in the final scene, screaming yet paralyzed by shock, and we know Bear had to die—anything else would not have delivered the retribution Nikki deserved. Obsession horrifically shows the evils of this action, dealt with justly through the ending.

We can feel sorry for Bear that he had to take his own life while recognizing it is the only thing a sane person could do—because he’d doomed Nikki to a fate worse than death.

We are pleased to announce that “Stranger Danger: How Bart Ehrman’s Latest Unmasks the History of Altruism,” Ben Bayer’s review of Bart Ehrman’s Love Thy Stranger, has been published as the cover story of the October/November 2026 issue of Free Inquiry. You can read the opening paragraph below and the full essay at Free Inquiry.

Anyone today who cites the Bible to make moral objections to homosexuality or premarital sex becomes an easy target for a certain critical question: Why follow those passages but not the Old Testament rules permitting the sale of one’s children into slavery and condemning the act of touching pigskin?

Read the full article at Free Inquiry.

CANA — New research has suggested that the famous miracle of the water turned into wine at the wedding at Cana may have been undone soon thereafter, as Jesus witnessed guests doing the Electric Slide.

GLOUCESTERSHIRE — A group of Muslim men released by authorities earlier this week were back in custody today after police received reports that the men had shared a meme online.