Mitch Wagner

Political capitalism is the capitalism you get when the cheapest, most reliable way to improve your rate of profit is to invest in the political process, to get favorable regulation, pork barrel government contracts, and cash bailouts. As Ganz puts it, "capitalists have gone from profit-seekers to rent-seekers," or, as Brenner and Riley write,... See more

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out the summer before I was a senior in high school, which meant when I watched it I was very much oh, here’s a role model . Not for the skipping of school precisely; I went to a boarding school and lived in a dorm, skipping days was a rather more complicated affair than it would have been in a public school. But the... See more

Ferris breaks the fourth wall more and better than anyone before or since, yes, even better than Deadpool, I said what I said

John Varley died two days ago on December 10, 2025. A great many will mourn him as a science fiction writer whose work they enjoyed. But this misses his moment .

In the mid-1970s, Varley exploded into science fiction like a phoenix. His "Eight Worlds" stories were set in a future where hyper-powerful aliens have killed everyone on Earth as a threat... See more

It's true that technology can give rise to novel regulatory challenges, but it's also true that claiming that a technology is so novel that existing regulation can't resolve its problems is just a way of buying time to commit more crimes before the regulators finally realize that your flashy new technology is just a boring old scam.

The ascendancy of political capitalism tracks with the decline in antitrust enforcement, the rise of monopolies, a series of massive bailouts, and, under Trump, naked kleptocracy. In the US, "raw political power is the main source of return on capital."

Look, I'm not trying to say that new technologies never raise gnarly new legal questions, but what I am saying is that a lot of the time, the "new legal challenges" raised by technology are somewhere between 95-100% bullshit, ginned up by none-too-bright tech bros and their investors, and then swallowed by regulators and lawmakers who are either so... See more