Random Thoughts by Mark Milliorn

Whatever Floats Your Goat

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0600

This has been an unusually interesting week for new discoveries, particularly discoveries of things that have spent several thousand years waiting for someone to notice them. In Egypt, two colossal statues have turned up, one depicting Ramses II and the other statue…. Well, that was probably Ramses too, but we’re not certain. Ramses seems to have regarded any empty patch of Egypt as in desperate need of another statues of himself.

In Iraq’s Shanidar Cave, a newly studied Neanderthal skeleton offers a less flattering family portrait. A hole in the shoulder blade was probably the result of a wooden spear. An earlier, severe facial injury had been survived, suggesting assistance from companions. Two serious injuries indicate either warfare or some seriously clumsy hunters. Either way, our distant relatives apparently understood nursing long before anyone invented health insurance.

Meanwhile, recent finds at a Roman fort near Frenni Fawr in Wales lend credence to an old story about the emperor Magnus Maximus camping nearby. The fort was identified in 2024 and the latest discoveries include late fourth-century coins. This does not prove the emperor slept there, but it gives the local legend something better than a tourist brochure.

Across the pond, the Amelia Earhart searchers have (once again) persuaded Purdue and its supporters to financially back another tropical expedition. Having spent years in academia, I admire anyone who can get a university to help finance what looks suspiciously like a South Pacific vacation. At the present rate of progress, the searchers should soon discover Chicago.

The discovery that really caught my attention, however, involves a much older missing conveyance: a small merchant vessel sank off Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. It went down roughly 4,500 years ago, during the age when Egypt was building its great pyramids. While pharaohs were arranging permanent accommodations, somebody else was trying to deliver groceries.

Near Kekova Island, a team led by Hakan Öniz of Akdeniz University has investigated a scatter of pottery about a hundred feet underwater. The site was documented in 2024, jars were recovered in 2024 and 2025, and more extensive excavation began this year. Comparison of the pottery with examples from other sites suggests a date around 2700–2400 BCE.

That potentially makes this the oldest known seagoing shipwreck, although archaeological championships are best awarded in pencil. The date rests on pottery comparisons, and further study may refine it. Even without a gold medal, the wreck is extraordinary.

Do not picture a majestic galley, much less a miniature cruise ship. Researchers estimate a vessel perhaps thirty feet long, a working boat carrying ceramic containers and the people responsible for getting them somewhere profitable. No wooden hull survives to tell us its precise construction. Its appearance must therefore remain a reconstruction, not a photograph conveniently misplaced by the Bronze Age harbor authority.

More than thirty storage jars survive, some broken, others remarkably intact. These amphorae have handles and flat bases. Three stone anchors were also found nearby, although the preliminary report cautions that their connection with this particular wreck remains uncertain. A busy coast can accumulate the maritime equivalent of several generations’ garage contents.

Some jars still contain visible residues. Karin Sowada, the Macquarie University archaeologist helping study the finds, describes material substantial enough to be seen, rather than merely detected by laboratory equipment. Oil, wine, and tree resins are possibilities. Reuse complicates matters: a container’s last contents need not have been its first. Apparently, saving a perfectly good jar predates the invention of the kitchen cupboard.

But my favorite object is a peculiar vessel bearing nine marks and two holes. Researchers suggest that it might have been a churn used to produce dairy products. That possibility opens a delightful window onto life aboard: perhaps these sailors carried goats.

Not sculpted goats. Not goats painted on pottery. Actual goats, with the kind of opinions that only goats can have.

We must distinguish an attractive interpretation from an established passenger list. A possible churn does not prove that live animals traveled aboard, and nobody has produced a Bronze Age manifest reading “thirty jars, four sailors, two goats, one increasingly irritated captain.” The vessel could have served some other purpose. Nevertheless, onboard dairying is among the possibilities the research team is considering.

Consider the practical appeal. Fresh milk does not tolerate a long Mediterranean voyage particularly well without refrigeration. A living animal, however, carries tomorrow’s milk inside itself. Turn some of that milk into a suitable cheese, and you have another way of managing provisions. The arrangement would require water, fodder, space, and someone willing to perform farm chores on a moving deck.

It would also require cleaning up after the refrigeration system.

Imagine, purely as reconstruction, the morning routine. Check the weather. Check the cargo lashings. Check whether the goat has eaten a cargo lashing. Milk the goat while the boat rolls. Explain to the captain why breakfast is now in the bilge. Ancient seafaring becomes considerably less romantic when somebody has to hold the bucket.

This is why the little vessel interests me more than yet another enormous royal head. Kings generally leave ample evidence of what they wanted us to think about them. A possible butter churn tells us what a nameless sailor may have needed before lunch.

The trading network is equally revealing. Think of the eastern Mediterranean as connected shores, not isolated civilizations neatly boxed into separate textbook chapters. Inland producers supplied coastal communities; ports connected those communities to other ports; ships moved goods between them. Cargo could change hands repeatedly before reaching its eventual consumer.

The university reports that clay analysis points to workshops in the Jordan Valley. That concerns where the containers were manufactured, not necessarily where every substance inside them originated. From the Levantine coast—roughly the eastern Mediterranean shores of modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and the Palestinian territories—merchants could carry goods north toward southern Anatolia or southwest toward Egypt.

Following Anatolia’s southern coast westward would bring a vessel into the waters around Kekova. Connections could continue toward the Aegean, including Crete and northwestern Anatolia, where Troy stood. Similar pottery found in those regions, and around Giza, Saqqara, and Abusir in Egypt, helps archaeologists trace the wider circulation of containers and commodities.

Egypt provides a useful example. Sowada points to Byblos, in modern Lebanon, as a port through which Egyptian trade operated. Imported materials included cedar, resins, and metals. Silver reaching Egypt around 2600 BCE has even been traced to mines near Athens. That does not put Egyptian sailors in every harbor; intermediaries could connect distant markets. International commerce was already considerably older than international baggage fees.

That does not mean this boat called at every place on the map. Troy and Crete are proposed destinations, not addresses recovered from a shipping label. Nor must every jar have traveled directly from its maker to its final owner. Picture overlapping routes, coastal stops, and exchanges between merchants, rather than a regularly scheduled Bronze Age Mediterranean Express.

Still, the implications are considerable. A shipment required potters, agricultural producers, people to move goods to the coast, sailors to transport them, and customers expecting delivery. The pyramids command our attention because they remain magnificently visible. The quieter economic world around them is harder to see, particularly when its evidence lies beneath a hundred feet of water.

We do not know what sank this boat, or what happened to its crew. The surviving jars cannot answer every question. But they bring us close to people whose ambitions were probably more immediate than immortality: deliver the cargo, collect payment, find supper, get home.

And, if the dairy interpretation proves correct, feed and milk the goat. History has room for that, too.

The Emperor’s Public Relations Department

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0600

This week, my students seemed particularly interested in a painting of Napoleon standing in his study. This was encouraging. There are days when I suspect that the most compelling visual aid in a university classroom is the clock above the door.

The painting, by Jacques-Louis David, deserves a little attention. The clock reads 4:13, the candle is nearly exhausted, and Napoleon looks as though he has been working all night. Large numbers of papers suggest the labor of government. Here is the emperor, sacrificing sleep for France—a message that probably went over better than a painting of France sacrificing its sons for the emperor.

Naturally, this is a carefully constructed image, rather than a candid snapshot of Napoleon caught answering his email. David was selling an idea. Once students begin looking further for that idea, the furniture becomes evidence, the clothes become arguments, and an apparently innocent clock turns into a government press release.

David was exceptionally good at this. Across his career, he painted royal commissions, revolutionary martyrs, and imperial magnificence. Governments changed (sometimes with considerable assistance from a guillotine), but there remained a steady demand for someone who could make the people in charge look as though they belonged there.

Before we accuse modern politicians of inventing image management, we might spend a little time with four of David’s paintings. Although the technology has improved, the customers would recognize one another immediately.

Start with three Roman brothers who are enthusiastically volunteering for something their relatives plainly wish they would reconsider.

In Oath of the Horatii, the brothers swear to defend Rome against its rival, Alba Longa. Their father holds up their swords. Hands reach forward, legs brace against the floor, and everyone on the masculine side of the painting appears to have been assembled with a carpenter’s square.

The women, meanwhile, collapse into curves. They understand the complications. The families on the opposing sides are connected through marriage and betrothal, which means that whoever wins, somebody at home will be burying someone she loves. Military glory has once again neglected to consult the people expected to clean up afterward.

Look at the architecture. Three arches divide the picture into the brothers, their father, and the grieving family. The setting is severe, orderly, and conspicuously short of decorative clutter. Nobody has put a porcelain shepherdess on a side table. This is a room designed for Duty, with no comfortable chair for Second Thoughts.

The men offer themselves to the state. The women show us the bill.

We can read the painting as a celebration of patriotic sacrifice, but David has made the cost impossible to miss. A good classroom question is whether the women weaken the patriotic message or make the sacrifice seem more noble. Students generally discover that looking at a painting is easier than settling the argument it starts.

There is another trick here: David gives us the moment before the violence, when everyone can still look splendidly principled. While an oath is clean, the consequences are messier. Governments have always preferred recruiting posters to casualty reports, and the distance between those two documents is a fair portion of military history.

Then comes the useful complication: this was a royal commission. Louis XVI’s government helped sponsor the stern civic morality that later viewers could associate with revolution. The monarchy was perfectly willing to encourage virtue, apparently assuming that virtue would remain respectful of the monarchy.

That assumption required revision.

By 1793, David was deeply involved in revolutionary politics. Jean-Paul Marat, a radical journalist and David’s political ally, had been murdered in his bath by Charlotte Corday. David gave the Revolution an indelible image of its fallen champion.

He also gave Marat a substantial improvement in public relations.

Marat suffered from a painful skin condition, which helps explain the bath. David’s painted Marat, however, has remarkably clear skin and an expression of peaceful exhaustion. This is not the face of an inflammatory journalist whose political writing helped feed the Revolution’s appetite for violence. This man looks as though he has died trying to finish a thank-you note.

His arm hangs downward and his head falls to one side. The white cloth, the exposed body, and the wound recall Christian images of the suffering and the dead Christ. The resemblance does not require every viewer to identify a particular religious painting. European Catholics had spent centuries learning what a sacred death looked like. David could draw on that visual education while changing the name of the martyr.

The pen remains in Marat’s hand. Corday’s knife lies on the floor. One man writes; someone else kills. That is a remarkably efficient argument, particularly if you leave out what the man had been writing.

Corday herself is absent. Her letter is present, helping tell the story of access gained through an appeal to Marat’s sympathy. The rough wooden box suggests simplicity, while David’s dedication gives it something of the character of a memorial stone.

Almost everything directs us toward compassion. Almost nothing invites us to examine Marat’s politics.

This is what makes the painting so effective and so useful to teach. David has not merely shown us a dead man. He has arranged the evidence so that we feel we already know the man’s moral character.

A political obituary can leave things out. This one leaves them out beautifully.

Eventually, France acquired Napoleon, who offered David an entirely different opportunity to improve reality.

In Napoleon Crossing the Alps, the future emperor sits on a magnificent rearing horse. His cloak billows, his hand points forward, and his expression suggests that crossing a mountain range is a minor inconvenience between breakfast and destiny.

The horse appears excited. Napoleon does not. That contrast matters. Here is a man capable of controlling tremendous energy without losing his cool. The animal provides the horsepower, but the rider supplies the judgment. You are supposed to imagine that he can manage France the same way…no matter what.

Below him, soldiers struggle with the actual work of moving an army through the mountains. They are small. Napoleon is enormous. Any organization that has ever produced an annual report will understand this arrangement.

Then look at the rocks. David places Bonaparte’s name alongside Hannibal and Charlemagne, two earlier commanders who had crossed the Alps. This is a recommendation letter written by history, itself, with David helpfully supplying the signatures.

There is, of course, a small problem.

Napoleon actually made the crossing on a mule.

A mule was sensible transportation for a difficult mountain path. Sensible transportation, however, is a poor foundation for an equestrian monument. Nobody looks at a mule and immediately thinks, “There goes the next Caesar!” Instead, the they wonder whether he remembered the blankets.

The original painting was commissioned by the king of Spain. Napoleon’s heroic image already had an international market. David supplied a conqueror who could dominate a wall long before French armies arrived to complicate Spanish enthusiasm.

The mule got him across the mountain but it was the horse that got him into our heads.

Once Napoleon became emperor, mere heroism needed accessories.

David’s enormous coronation painting supplies them: gold, robes, clergy, dignitaries, and enough ceremonial fabric to suggest that the Revolution had principally been a dispute over who got to wear the velvet at the costume party.

Despite the familiar title, Napoleon is shown crowning Joséphine. He is the person conferring status. The pope is present, but Napoleon occupies the active center of the ceremony. Religion supplies solemnity without monopolizing the action.

The laurel crown invokes Rome. The golden bees on the imperial robes reach back to the Merovingian origins of French monarchy. The cathedral supplies Christianity. Napoleon’s regime was young, but its wardrobe had an impressive ancestry.

And there, prominently seated, is his mother.

She did not attend.

David included her anyway. An absent mother might suggest family disagreement, and family disagreement was not part of the approved imperial composition. Paint offered a convenient solution. Most of us have to settle for explaining why somebody missed the wedding; Napoleon could (and did) have the absence corrected.

The whole gathering makes a new dynasty appear established. You can almost forget that a few years earlier, France had been busy dismantling hereditary privilege, one head at a time. Now there are new relatives to elevate, new titles to distribute, and new portraits to order. Apparently, abolishing an aristocracy does not eliminate the demand for one. It just creates vacancies.

None of this makes David a bad painter. Quite the reverse: if the work were clumsy, we could dismiss it without much effort. His skill is precisely why the argument deserves our attention.

This is why I enjoy using David in class—his paintings give students something concrete to interrogate. Who gets the light? Who holds the weapon? Who is larger than everyone else? Who has disappeared and who has been added?

Those questions work surprisingly well on contemporary political photographs, too. We still have flags, carefully selected audiences, rolled-up sleeves, and politicians photographed working late. We simply require less drying time.

David understood that people remember a convincing image long after they forget the qualifications. Two centuries later, we still picture Napoleon on that horse.

Somewhere, a mule is entitled to a correction.

The Apartment That Moved Parliament

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 3 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0600

María del Carmen Abascal wanted to remain in her apartment. At 87, after more than seven decades in the same Madrid home, she probably thought she had demonstrated sufficient interest in the neighborhood.

Known as Maricarmen, she occupied an apartment in the Ibiza neighborhood of Madrid’s Retiro district. Cadena SER described it as 90 square meters—about 970 square feet, a reasonably substantial apartment in a desirable part of a major European capital—not a broom closet with a picturesque view of the plumbing.

Her family’s lease dated to 1956. It had passed from her father to her mother and then to her. Unfortunately, a family’s attachment to a home and the legal life expectancy of its lease are different things. The courts concluded that her protected right to inherit the tenancy had ended years earlier, with subsequent occupation continuing through tacit renewals.

The new owner, Urbagestión, wanted a new arrangement. Maricarmen reported a proposed monthly payment of €1,650. Her existing payment was roughly €440–€480, although the company said much of that covered community expenses, heating, and water, with the real base rent of only €204. Her pension was about €1,450. You don’t have to be a math wizard to see this poses something of a problem. You cannot spend €1,650 out of €1,450 unless you are a national government.

Before issuing the landlord a black cape and a mustache suitable for twirling, however, consider the other side of the ledger.

At September’s advertised rental levels, apartments in her neighborhood averaged about €26.10 per square meter monthly. Apply that to the reported 90 square meters, and the result is approximately €2,350. The broader Retiro district averaged €24, producing a figure of €2,160. On that basis, the proposed €1,650 was about a quarter to a third below the local benchmarks. These are rough comparisons, not an appraisal: condition, amenities, and the disputed floor area matter.

Nevertheless, “more than she could afford” and “more than the apartment was worth” are not interchangeable statements.

The company’s stated position was that it had offered a substantial discount from market rent after obtaining a favorable legal ruling. It also said it owned this apartment, rather than the entire building—a distinction somewhat trampled in the rush to describe the villain.

Why raise the rent? To obtain a larger return from the property. That is the financial explanation. I have not seen accounts proving that maintenance, taxes, or financing made precisely €1,650 necessary. But an owner does not have to be approaching bankruptcy to notice that an asset could earn considerably more.

Conversely, purchasing an occupied apartment is not the same as discovering an elderly tenant unexpectedly growing behind the refrigerator. The occupancy was part of the investment.

There were legitimate interests on both sides, which made the situation poorly suited to a political meme that would fit a bumper sticker.

On September 23, Maricarmen was evicted. The sight of an elderly woman being removed from her longtime home supplied the housing crisis with something statistics rarely provide: a sympathetic face. Thousands demonstrated, and protesters established an encampment in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol. The demands soon extended beyond one apartment to stronger protections for tenants generally.

What the protestors probably don’t know is that under Spanish law, Maricarmen’s historic lease agreement, with a monthly rent set at a decades old low rate, expired eight years ago. During that time, instead of finding a cheaper neighborhood to live in, her lawyers used every possible delaying tactic since, legally, the rent was frozen at the last agreed upon rate until the court case was finally settled. When the case was finally seen in court, Maricarmen was promptly ordered to leave the building or pay the higher rate. She chose to remain until the police, armed with a court order, evicted her.

Eventually, negotiations produced an agreement allowing her to return under an eight-year lease, with her payment limited to 30 percent of her net income. Municipal intermediaries helped arrange it. The compromise protected her home without requiring everyone to agree about the entire Spanish housing market before handing back the keys.

The national government, however, had a larger set of keys in mind.

On September 29, it adopted emergency housing decrees that included protection against certain evictions of vulnerable households without alternative accommodation through the end of 2030, compensation for affected landlords, and extraordinary lease extensions. This was not a universal prohibition on evictions, although “qualified suspension subject to eligibility requirements” makes a disappointing protest chant.

The underlying housing problem certainly deserved attention.

Spain is often imagined as the place where northern Europeans go to enjoy sunshine, drink good wine, and spend less money. The sunshine and supply of wine remains relatively dependable. The housing bargain requires closer examination.

Spanish housing costs are not uniformly higher than those elsewhere in Europe. Eurostat’s 2023 comparison placed Spain near the EU average, well below Ireland and Denmark. But international price comparisons do not pay local wages into local bank accounts. A rent that looks attractive to someone arriving with a foreign pension can look appalling to someone earning a Spanish salary.

The Bank of Spain has specifically identified the heavy housing burden borne by renters. National averages blend their experience with that of established homeowners, including people who paid off their mortgages years ago. Averaging those groups together is rather like calculating the swimming ability of passengers and lifeboats.

Nor is this simply a matter of greedy landlords discovering greed last Tuesday.

The Bank of Spain estimated that new household formation exceeded completed new homes by roughly 400,000–450,000 during 2022–2024. That does not mean all those households were homeless. It does mean that substantially more households were competing for accommodation than new construction was providing.

A substantial and growing share of these new households—especially immigrants and young people—enter the rental market rather than buying. In contrast, only about 90,000–100,000 new homes are completed annually, and the number of purpose-built rental (Build-to-Rent) apartments is far smaller, typically in the low tens of thousands at most.

This creates an annual shortfall of around 130,000–160,000 housing units overall, with an even tighter gap in the rental segment. The cumulative deficit since the early 2020s is estimated at roughly 750,000 homes and could exceed one million by 2028 if construction does not accelerate sharply. The imbalance is concentrated in high-demand areas such as Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and the Mediterranean coast, and it continues to push up rents while shrinking the stock of available long-term rental apartments.

The European Commission points to obstacles including construction labor shortages, development delays, and insufficient development-ready land. Spain also has a small social rental sector: roughly 1.5–1.7 percent of households, compared with about 6–7 percent across the EU. Meanwhile, Spanish home prices rose 12.7 percent in 2025 and will likely continue to rise sharply. There is plenty of demand and a decidedly inadequate supply of affordable alternatives.

Into this situation comes rent control, carrying a clipboard and promising to magically improve the arithmetic.

Spain limits certain annual rent increases and permits additional restrictions on new leases in officially designated high-pressure areas. These are not identical rules imposed on every apartment throughout the country. The distinction matters, although it does require politicians to use more than six words.

Rent controls can help the tenant who already has a covered apartment. The difficulty is for the person still looking for one.

If a regulation reduces the expected return from offering a rental, some owners may sell, pursue another permitted use, or decide that becoming a landlord is an ambition best left unrealized. Developers considering rental housing make similar calculations. The strength of that effect depends on the rules, exemptions, costs, and other incentives; it is not proof that every rent restriction stops every construction project.

Still, the government ordering a lower price does not magically create more apartments. Building apartments is the result of a business decision and if the government eliminates the chance of profits, that decision is never going to be positive.

Catalonia’s figures show moderation in registered rents under its controls. Preliminary research also suggests a reduction in new tenancy agreements, although the researcher acknowledges limitations. Both outcomes can occur together: better terms for some tenants and fewer opportunities for others.

A sensible policy must therefore answer two questions: how to keep vulnerable people housed today and how to provide enough homes tomorrow. Answering the first by ignoring the second is how a temporary emergency acquires commemorative anniversaries.

Meanwhile, Maricarmen had her agreement, the demonstrators had forced national attention, and the government had announced a ban on evictions until 2030.

There was just one remaining, niggling detail.

Today, on October 2, the Spanish Parliament rejected the eviction bans. Several small political parties banded together and supplied the opposition necessary to defeat the eviction bar. Among the objections was the argument that the measures would further discourage rental supply.

The promised protection through 2030 had failed its parliamentary vote three days after its announcement.

Maricarmen’s eight-year agreement suddenly looked considerably more durable than the government’s solution.

Maricarmen has a lease. It was the government policy that had a short-term rental.

This is a victory for one elderly woman in Madrid. Her landlord, Urbagestión obviously figured out that the bad publicity was more expensive that the loss of a single apartment’s rent. In the long run, Urbagestión is a winner, too.

But across Spain, the companies that build rental units have carefully watched all of this and have concluded that the cost of construction has just gone up again.

The Cobra Effect

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0600

How to Get More Cobras: A Practical Guide to Government Incentives

Some years ago, the British government in India supposedly discovered that Delhi had too many cobras. This was a reasonable conclusion. One cobra in the pantry is probably too many, particularly if you are reaching behind the flour sack in search of the baking powder.

The British decided to solve the problem with the one tool governments have always trusted: other people’s money. They announced that anyone delivering a dead cobra would receive a cash bounty.

At first, the plan worked splendidly. Dead cobras arrived by the basketful. Some official in Delhi undoubtedly prepared a lengthy report in triplicate announcing that the Cobra Reduction Initiative had exceeded expectations and recommending that everyone involved receive a promotion.

Then the locals began breeding cobras.

This was not the outcome the British had intended, but it was the outcome they had purchased. The government was paying for dead cobras, and the most efficient way to obtain dead cobras was no longer wandering around in the weeds hoping to meet one. It was raising them at home.

Eventually, the authorities discovered the cobra farms and canceled the bounty. The breeders, now stuck with cages full of poisonous merchandise for which there was no longer a government market, released the snakes. Delhi supposedly ended up with more cobras than it had before.

This is known as the cobra effect: an economic policy designed to solve a problem creates an incentive that makes the problem worse.

It is a wonderful story. It may not be true. But we shouldn’t let that bother us too much—a hell of a lot of the things we believe aren’t real. We can take solace in the fact that the principle described is all too real.

The British really did pay bounties for cobras, but historians have found no solid contemporary evidence of a great Delhi cobra-breeding industry. An 1887 inquiry by the Bombay Natural History Society concluded that breeding large numbers of cobras in captivity for bounties was highly improbable. The elaborate tale about the cobra farms and the mass release of snakes appears to have grown in the retelling.

That is unfortunate because economics seldom supplies us with a story containing bureaucrats, poisonous snakes, entrepreneurial villagers, and a conclusion suitable for printing on a coffee mug.

Fortunately, the French stepped in with rats.

The Great Hanoi Rat Enterprise

In 1902, the French colonial government in Hanoi became alarmed about the city’s rat population. Rats carried plague, crawled through the new sewer system, and generally behaved like rats. The French therefore offered a bounty for every rat killed.

Officials did not want thousands of dead rats piled on their desks, which was understandable. They required people to turn in only the rat’s tail as proof of death.

Somewhere in Hanoi, a fellow looked at a rat, looked at a pair of shears, and founded an industry.

Soon, French officials began noticing healthy rats running through the city sans tails. The rat catchers had realized that killing a rat eliminated a productive asset. Cutting off its tail, collecting the bounty, and releasing it allowed the animal to breed more rats, each equipped at birth with another government check attached to its rear end.

There were also reports of rats being brought into Hanoi and of people deliberately raising them. The French had wanted fewer rats. They had accidentally established a municipal rat-farming program.

Unlike the Delhi cobra story, the Hanoi rat hunt is well-documented. So, if strict historical accuracy concerns you, call it the rat effect. Unfortunately, that sounds less like an economic principle and more like a discussion about Congress.

People Respond to Incentives, Not Speeches

The cobra effect rests upon one of the simplest principles in economics: people respond to incentives.

They do not necessarily respond to what officials intended, what the regulation’s preamble says, or what was written on the PowerPoint slide at the committee meeting. They respond to what gets them paid, promoted, fined, fired, or left alone.

The government wanted fewer cobras, but it paid for carcasses. The French wanted fewer rats, but they paid for tails. In both cases, officials confused the thing they could count with the result they actually wanted.

This happens regularly because the real objective is usually difficult to measure.

A school wants educated students, but education is hard to measure, so it rewards test scores. Teachers naturally spend more time teaching what appears on the test. In extreme cases, weak students are encouraged to stay home on examination day, or someone quietly improves their answer sheets afterward. The scores rise, the superintendent holds a press conference, and the children remain about as educated as they were on Monday.

A bank wants profitable, satisfied customers, but customer satisfaction is hard to enter on a spreadsheet. The bank therefore rewards employees for opening accounts. Wells Fargo employees, crushed beneath aggressive sales quotas, opened millions of accounts customers had not requested. Management asked for more accounts and received more accounts. The fact that many were fraudulent was apparently an unnecessary detail omitted from the quarterly report.

Hospitals want patients treated promptly, but that is complicated. Administrators therefore measure waiting times. At some Veterans Affairs facilities, employees manipulated appointment dates and scheduling records so the official waiting times looked shorter. The veteran was still sitting at home waiting for an appointment, but the computer was feeling much better.

This is the great comfort of modern administration. If reality refuses to improve, there is usually a number somewhere that can be adjusted.

That is the essence of the cobra effect. It is not an argument that government action, regulation, or incentives never work. It is an argument that good intentions are not a substitute for understanding how people will respond.

When a Fine Becomes a Fee

The cobra effect does not always require fraud. Sometimes perfectly respectable people make the situation worse simply by behaving rationally.

Economists once studied Israeli day-care centers where some parents habitually arrived late to collect their children. The centers introduced a fine, expecting parents to become more punctual.

Late pickups increased.

Before the fine, parents who arrived late felt guilty because they were inconveniencing the staff. After the fine, they no longer viewed lateness as inconsiderate. It had become a service available for purchase.

“I am not keeping the teacher late,” the parent could reason. “I am buying twenty minutes of additional childcare.”

The fine did not forbid the behavior. It established a market price.

Even after the fine was removed, lateness remained elevated. The old social obligation had been destroyed. Once you convert shame into a financial transaction, it can be difficult to get the shame back.

This is worth remembering whenever someone proposes a small fine for objectionable behavior. If the fine is lower than the value of committing the offense, it may function as a license.

A wealthy man does not necessarily see a $25 parking ticket as punishment. He may see it as valet parking provided by the city.

Mexico City Solves Pollution by Selling More Cars

Mexico City once attempted to reduce air pollution by prohibiting cars from operating one weekday according to the last digit of their license plates.

The theory was that people would use public transportation, share rides, or remain home contemplating the environmental damage caused by their selfishness.

Many families bought a second car with a different license number.

Since poorer families could not afford a shiny new second automobile, they often purchased an older, dirtier one. The policy intended to reduce driving encouraged additional automobile ownership. Studies found no convincing improvement in air quality.

This is what happens when policymakers assume that human beings will stand quietly where they have been placed. Human beings instead go around the rule, under it, through it, or down to a used-car lot.

The regulation applied to a particular license plate. It did not apply to the trip the driver still wanted to make.

Carbon Credits With a Tail Attached

The same problem has appeared in environmental policy.

HFC-23 is an extraordinarily powerful greenhouse gas produced as a byproduct of manufacturing another chemical. Carbon-credit programs paid factories to destroy HFC-23 rather than release it into the atmosphere.

Destroying the gas was beneficial. The difficulty was that the credits could become extremely valuable. A factory might earn more from destroying the waste than from selling the original product.

At that point, producing the chemical created more waste, and more waste created more credits. A program intended to eliminate a pollutant risked making pollutant production profitable.

This is the cobra effect wearing a laboratory coat.

Whenever the government pays people to dispose of something, it ought to ask whether somebody will begin manufacturing it. If Washington offered $100 for every broken toaster, the country would soon contain forty-seven new toaster factories, all producing defective appliances with patriotic efficiency.

The Difference Between a Target and a Goal

Economists often connect the cobra effect with Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

A measurement can tell us something useful until people have a reason to manipulate it.

The number of arrests may once have indicated police activity. Attach promotions to arrest totals, and officers may concentrate on easy, minor arrests rather than serious crimes.

The number of academic publications may once have suggested scholarly productivity. Make careers depend upon publication, and professors divide one useful article into six smaller ones, establish journals nobody reads, and produce research proving that additional research is urgently needed.

The number has not become false. It has become useless.

This does not require wicked people. Ordinary people adjust to the rules placed before them. If you reward quantity, they produce quantity. If you reward speed, they sacrifice quality. If you punish reported mistakes, they stop reporting mistakes.

Then management announces that errors have fallen to zero.

How Not to Breed Cobras

Avoiding the cobra effect requires asking a question rarely heard at government meetings: How could a reasonably clever scoundrel take advantage of this?

Better yet, invite several reasonably clever scoundrels into the planning meeting. They aren’t hard to find, every organization already employs a few. They know where the weaknesses are.

Policymakers should measure genuine outcomes rather than convenient activities. They should examine what happens outside the measured category. They should conduct small trials before launching enormous programs. They should use independent audits, limit rewards, and plan what happens when the program ends.

Most importantly, they should stop assuming that citizens, employees, businesses, teachers, doctors, and rat catchers will respond as obedient figures in an economic diagram.

They will respond to the actual incentives.

The cobra effect is not an argument that government should never act, that regulations never work, or that every public employee is hiding a cage of snakes behind his desk. Markets create perverse incentives too, as Wells Fargo demonstrated with considerable enthusiasm.

It is an argument for humility.

Good intentions are pleasant things. They look handsome in speeches, fit comfortably into campaign literature, and require no particular knowledge of economics. But good intentions do not repeal human behavior.

Before adopting any bounty, subsidy, quota, fine, or performance target, we should ask what intelligent people will do when they pursue it literally and selfishly. Can they collect the reward without solving the problem? Can they hide the problem, rename it, move it somewhere else, or manufacture more of it?

If so, the policy may not eliminate the cobras. It may merely teach people how to raise them for profit.

John Singer Sargent Goes to War

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0600

From Madame X to Mustard Gas

John Singer Sargent made his fortune painting people who possessed titles, country houses, substantial bank accounts, and enough wall space to hang a portrait the size of a garage door. If you were an Anglo-American aristocrat and wanted your descendants to believe that you had better posture, finer clothes, and more character than you actually possessed, Sargent was your man.

He painted Madame X, the Wyndham sisters, the daughters of Edward Darley Boit, and a considerable portion of the English-speaking upper crust. He could make silk shimmer, jewelry sparkle, and could make an otherwise ordinary duke look as though he had been entrusted with the future of Western civilization. Sometimes all this required was a good suit, dramatic lighting, and a very large canvas.

Yet late in his career, this painter of wealth and refinement produced one of the most haunting images of the First World War. Instead of duchesses in satin, he painted British soldiers in muddy uniforms. Instead of confident faces, he showed eyes covered with bandages. Instead of portraying people who owned half of Yorkshire, he painted men who could not see well enough to walk without placing a hand on the shoulder of the man ahead of them.

The painting was Gassed, and it remains one of the most powerful pictures of modern war ever made.

Sargent was American, at least technically. He had been born in Florence, in 1856, to American parents, and he grew up wandering around Europe. Sargent trained in Paris and eventually settled in London. He spoke several languages and lived the sort of international existence that makes filling out the nationality box on government forms needlessly complicated. By the beginning of the twentieth century, he was probably the most successful society portraitist in the English-speaking world.

Around 1907, however, he tried to escape the portrait business. Painting the affluent had made him wealthy, but it had also required him to spend decades listening politely while rich people explained how they wished to be painted. He increasingly preferred landscapes, watercolors, and his enormous mural projects for the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts. He never entirely abandoned portraiture, but he tried to replace lengthy oil commissions with quicker charcoal drawings. Even a genius eventually discovers the advantages of getting the customer out of the studio before lunch.

The First World War made his retreat into pleasant watercolor landscapes rather difficult.

The conflict struck Sargent’s family directly. His niece Rose-Marie Ormond had married the French art historian Robert André-Michel, who was killed while serving in the French Army in 1914. Rose-Marie then worked as a nurse caring for blinded soldiers. On Good Friday, March 29, 1918, she attended services at the Church of Saint-Gervais in Paris. A shell fired by the German Paris Gun struck the church, collapsing part of the roof and killing her, along with scores of other worshippers.

Thus, by 1918, the war was not merely something Sargent read about in the newspaper. It had reached into his own family, as the war had reached into nearly every family in Europe.

That May, the British War Memorials Committee, working under the Ministry of Information, asked Sargent to produce a monumental painting for a proposed Hall of Remembrance. The government envisioned a grand national collection filled with enormous works commemorating the war. It was an ambitious project (which is another way of saying that a government committee had conceived something expensive without being entirely certain where it would go or how it would be paid for).

The proposed painting was to be about twenty feet wide and show British and American troops cooperating in the war. Sargent was a logical choice. He was an American who had lived for decades in Britain, and he was already famous on both sides of the Atlantic. Prime Minister David Lloyd George personally urged him to accept, telling him that he would be performing “a work of great and lasting service to the nation.”

This was a little more persuasive than the usual request to paint somebody’s wife beside a decorative column, so Sargent agreed.

In July 1918, at the age of sixty-two, he crossed to France with Henry Tonks, a painter, physician, and former surgeon. They spent time with the Guards Division near Arras and later visited American forces near Ypres. Sargent began looking for his great scene of Anglo-American cooperation.

Unfortunately, modern warfare refused to pose for him.

Traditional battle paintings required massed soldiers, charging cavalry, fluttering flags, heroic commanders, and preferably someone pointing dramatically toward the enemy. The Western Front provided concealed machine guns, scattered artillery positions, men hiding in holes, and long stretches of apparently empty landscape. The closer one approached the fighting, the fewer people one could actually see. Anyone who stood around in a picturesque group was likely to attract artillery fire, which generally discourages picturesque posing.

Sargent complained that the Ministry wanted an epic, but the front would not supply the necessary crowds. British and American troops were not conveniently assembling together on hilltops so that a visiting artist could arrange them into a twenty-foot composition. General Pershing also resisted placing American soldiers under permanent British command, apparently without considering how much this inconvenienced Sargent.

The painter nevertheless produced a remarkable group of watercolors and sketches: ruined streets, damaged buildings, soldiers bathing, troops resting, crashed aircraft, and the devastated landscape around Arras. What he still lacked was the single great subject that could support a canvas of the enormous size demanded by the committee.

He found it on August 21, 1918.

Sargent and Tonks learned that large numbers of gas casualties were arriving at a corps dressing station at Le Bac-du-Sud, on the road between Arras and Doullens. When they reached the station, they saw hundreds of British soldiers suffering from mustard-gas exposure. The men arrived in small processions, their eyes covered with lint and bandages. Because they could not see, each placed a hand on the shoulder of the man ahead while an orderly led them toward treatment.

They sat or collapsed on the grass while still more casualties arrived.

It was a beautiful evening. The sun was setting.

The combination was almost unbearable: golden light, green grass, exhausted men, and a weapon designed to burn the eyes, skin, and lungs. Sargent began sketching immediately.

Mustard gas had first appeared on the Western Front in 1917. Despite the name, it had nothing to do with mustard, hot dogs, or anything else likely to improve a picnic. It was a persistent chemical agent that could remain on the ground, clothing, and equipment. Symptoms might not appear immediately. Then came blistered skin, damaged lungs, vomiting, and temporary or permanent blindness. It did not have to kill a man to remove him from battle. It could also contaminate the soldiers who carried him and overwhelm the medical system responsible for treating him.

The scene at Le Bac-du-Sud gave Sargent his subject. The committee allowed him to abandon the original plan for a cheerful Anglo-American tableau, which was fortunate because nothing says bureaucratic desperation quite like trying to turn an international command dispute into decorative art.

Back in his Fulham studio, Sargent spent the winter of 1918–1919 transforming his sketches into Gassed. The finished canvas measures a little over seven and a half feet high and twenty feet wide. It is not so much a painting as a section of wall with an opinion.

Across its center, a procession of nearly life-size soldiers moves from left to right along a duckboard path. Their eyes are bandaged. Each man reaches for the shoulder or equipment of the soldier ahead. One raises his foot d awkwardly, unable to see where the board lies beneath him. Orderlies guide the procession while other casualties sit, sprawl, or retch on the ground.

The arrangement resembles a classical frieze or a religious procession. It also recalls Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Parable of the Blind, although Sargent’s soldiers are not foolish men tumbling into a ditch. They are capable men rendered helpless by an invisible weapon. Their dependence upon one another is both practical and symbolic. Let go of the man ahead, and you are lost.

Then, in the background, Sargent painted a football match.

Apparently, the British Army could stage a football game within sight of the Apocalypse, provided someone produced a ball.

The game is not a joke, however. It is one of the picture’s most disturbing details. In the foreground, blinded men stumble toward medical treatment. In the distance, other soldiers continue playing. War does not stop and arrange itself into a single emotion. Agony, boredom, recreation, death, paperwork, tea, and football can all occur within the same field of vision.

For decades, viewers also interpreted the painting’s yellow-green cast as Sargent’s deliberate attempt to suggest poison hanging in the air. That was a reasonable interpretation, but it turned out to be partly wrong. During a major restoration completed in 2023, conservators removed thick, yellowed varnish applied during the 1970s. Beneath it they discovered a brighter palette of pinks, mauves, and greens. The poisonous haze owed rather more to old varnish than to Sargent. The 1970s had managed to make the First World War even browner than it already was.

Sargent completed Gassed in March 1919. It appeared at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition and was voted the picture of the year. Winston Churchill praised its “brilliant genius and painful significance.” Other viewers considered it too heroic, too sentimental, or too patriotic. Virginia Woolf, who was not easily impressed by large patriotic gestures (or possibly tended to be unimpressed by anything that attracted an enthusiastic crowd), disliked it.

The Hall of Remembrance for which the painting had been commissioned was never built. The project disappeared into the familiar postwar mixture of financial trouble, changed plans, and administrative rearrangement. This may have been the first time—but it was certainly not the last—that a government commissioned the contents before deciding whether it could afford the building.

The painting eventually was placed in the Imperial War Museum, where it became one of the museum’s best-known works.

Sargent later painted General Officers of World War I, completed in 1922, which presents twenty-two senior British and Imperial commanders standing together in solemn formality. They look rather like the faculty of a very expensive military college, assembling for a meeting at which everyone believes he should be department chairman.

The contrast with Gassed could hardly be greater. One painting gives us famous men, polished boots, decorations, rank, and authority. The other gives us anonymous soldiers who cannot see. One shows those who directed the war. The other shows what the war did to the men who fought it.

Yet Gassed is not a simple attack upon generals, governments, or war. Sargent was not producing an anti-war manifesto and he did not turn the casualties into grotesque symbols. He gave them dignity, but he did not make them triumphant. Their courage consists largely of continuing to place one foot in front of the other.

That restraint is part of the painting’s strength.

Sargent remained what he had always been: a painter of observed people, physical presence, atmosphere, fabric, light, and gesture. He used the traditional language of monumental figure painting because it was the language he knew.

The surprise is how well that language accommodated something so thoroughly modern and horrible.

Sargent had spent much of his career painting privilege. He understood how clothing, posture, setting, and scale could give importance to a human figure. In Gassed, he applied those same abilities to ordinary soldiers whose names we do not know. He gave them the scale once reserved for monarchs, aristocrats, and conquering heroes.

But these men have conquered nothing. They cannot even see the next step.

John Singer Sargent died in 1925. The Hall of Remembrance vanished before it was built, the generals in his later portrait passed into history, and the drawing rooms that made him famous became museum exhibits and tourist attractions. Gassed survived them all and today it is a central part of the Great War exhibit of the Imperial War Museum.

Its power comes from the collision between beauty and horror. The sunset is beautiful. The arrangement of figures is beautiful. The handling of light is beautiful. What is happening to the men is not.

That tension keeps the painting from becoming mere propaganda or being merely an illustration of suffering. It records a moment when civilization’s crowning achievements—chemistry, industry, organization, transportation, medicine, and art—were met on the same patch of ground. Some of those talents had been used to blind the soldiers. Others were being used to lead them to safety. Sargent used his to make certain that we would still see them after they could no longer see for themselves.

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:02:43 -0600

Oh, Shenandoah: Why Doesn’t the Navy Have One Today?

The United States Navy has a perfectly good ship’s name that is just gathering dust.

Shenandoah is musical, historic, unmistakably American, and considerably easier to pronounce than Antietam. It summons up a river, a valley, blue mountains, Jimmy Stewart, a national park, a famous folk song, and several million tourists trapped behind recreational vehicles on Skyline Drive. It has also been carried by four vessels commissioned as USS Shenandoah—one of which did not even float—and by the Confederate commerce raider CSS Shenandoah.

The Navy itself sometimes describes the most recent Shenandoah as the fifth naval vessel to bear the name because it includes the Confederate ship in the lineage. Strict bookkeeping therefore gives us four USS Shenandoahs, plus one CSS Shenandoah. Evidently, the Navy regards its Confederate cousin as part of the family, although presumably, she is seated at a separate table during reunions.

The first USS Shenandoah was a wooden screw sloop launched at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in December 1862 and commissioned in June 1863. A “screw sloop” sounds like either an obscure sailor’s knot or something the Navy might court-martial you for attempting. In fact, she was a steam-powered warship that also carried sails, displaced about 1,375 tons, and mounted some very serious guns.

During the Civil War, she joined the blockade off Wilmington, North Carolina, chasing ships trying to carry supplies into the Confederacy and carry cotton out of it. In 1864 and 1865, she participated in the attacks on Fort Fisher, the formidable installation guarding the entrance to Wilmington. Federal sailors and Marines from Shenandoah went ashore during the successful second assault, armed with cutlasses and revolvers and apparently unaware that Hollywood had not yet been invented to film them.

The first Shenandoah remained useful long after the war. She served in South America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. She visited ports in Japan and China, surveyed unfamiliar harbors, searched unsuccessfully for possible survivors of the American merchant schooner General Sherman in Korea, and protected American interests during disturbances in Panama. After several cycles of commissioning, decommissioning, and being brought back because the Navy had once again discovered that it needed ships, she was finally sold in 1887. Her career had lasted nearly a quarter-century, which is quite respectable for a wooden vessel built while Abraham Lincoln was still explaining to generals that he wanted them to fight.

Then there was the troublesome relative: CSS Shenandoah. Despite the name, this ship never actually sailed anywhere close to Virginia—she never sailed within sight of the American mainland. And sadly, the USS Shenandoah never fought the CSS Shenandoah.

She began life in Britain as the merchant vessel Sea King. Confederate agents acquired her in 1864 and converted her into a commerce raider under Commander James Iredell Waddell. Her job was not to engage the much larger United States Navy. Her job was to find American merchant ships in distant waters and ruin their owners’ day.

She was remarkably good at it.

CSS Shenandoah sailed around the world and captured, burned, or bonded 38 American merchant vessels, most of them whalers. She took nearly 1,000 prisoners without suffering a combat death among her own crew. In June 1865, while operating in the Bering Sea, she attacked the American whaling fleet and fired what is generally described as the last shot of the Civil War.

There was one slight problem: the Civil War had already ended.

Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox in April. Joseph Johnston had surrendered later that month. Jefferson Davis had been captured in May. The Confederacy was rapidly becoming a historical research topic, but Waddell was still burning Yankee whalers near Alaska because news traveled slowly before radio, satellite communications, and sailors checking their telephones every eleven seconds.

When Waddell finally received reliable confirmation that the Confederacy had collapsed, he disarmed the ship and sailed roughly 9,000 miles around Cape Horn to Liverpool. On November 6, 1865—almost seven months after Appomattox—CSS Shenandoah surrendered to British authorities. The Confederate flag was lowered for the final time. This gave Shenandoah the distinction of being both one of the Confederacy’s most successful ships and the military unit that most seriously needed a newspaper subscription.

The next USS Shenandoah was not a ship at all. It was ZR-1, the Navy’s first American-built rigid airship.

Commissioned in 1923, the silver giant was 680 feet long—more than twice the length of a football field. It was the first rigid airship to fly using helium rather than highly flammable hydrogen. This was an improvement because helium does not explode, although being inside a 680-foot aluminum framework during a thunderstorm remained a lifestyle choice.

The airship was intended to scout ahead of the fleet, locating enemy ships far beyond the horizon. It also served as an enormous flying advertisement for naval aviation. In 1924, it completed the first crossing of North America by an airship, attracting crowds wherever it appeared. People looked up and saw the future.

The future looked like a tremendous silver cucumber.

On September 3, 1925, USS Shenandoah encountered a violent storm over Ohio. Powerful updrafts carried it beyond its structural limits, and the airship broke into several sections. Fourteen crewmen died, including its commander, Zachary Lansdowne, while 29 survived by riding portions of the wreckage to the ground. The disaster helped expose the dangers of using fragile rigid airships in severe weather, although it took the losses of the Akron and Macon before the Navy was finally convinced that the risks outweighed the benefits of rigid-frame airships.

The name returned during World War II. USS Shenandoah (AD-26) was a destroyer tender: essentially a floating repair shop, warehouse, machine plant, hospital, supply depot, and hardware store. Destroyers could tie up alongside her and receive repairs without returning to a major naval base. She carried the men, tools, spare parts, and mysterious Navy paperwork necessary to keep fighting ships at sea.

Commissioned on August 13, 1945, AD-26 arrived just as World War II was ending. That was unfortunate timing if one wanted battle stars, but excellent timing if one wanted to avoid being sunk. She spent much of her 35-year career supporting the Atlantic Fleet and made numerous deployments to the Mediterranean. In 1964, her crew helped rescue everyone aboard the Dutch freighter Doris after the ship broke loose during a storm at Naples. The tender was finally decommissioned in 1980.

Three years later came USS Shenandoah (AD-44), another destroyer tender and the largest member of the family. At 642 feet and more than 20,000 tons, she carried roughly 1,500 officers and sailors. She supported destroyers, cruisers, and frigates wherever the Navy needed a mobile repair facility. She served until 1996 and was eventually scrapped in 2012.

That means the Navy has gone 30 years without a Shenandoah. It’s time the Navy rectified this mistake. I guess I should be slightly mollified by the presence of another Shenandoah.

Outside of the US Navy, civilians have continued using the name. The most extravagant example is Shenandoah of Sark, a magnificent 178-foot, three-masted schooner built near Staten Island in 1902. She has survived two world wars and now accommodates about ten guests in the comfort expected by people who use “summer” as a verb. One charter company advertises her for approximately €110,000 to €125,000 per week, while another lists a price exceeding $150,000.

That is only the base rate. Food, drinks, fuel, port charges, taxes, and tips may be additional. At those prices, I would expect the crew not only to raise the sails but also to address me as Admiral, fire a seventeen-gun salute whenever I came on deck, and pretend to laugh at all my jokes.

Since most of us are unlikely to find that much spare money in our sock drawer, that brings us back to my original question: So why is there no USS Shenandoah today?

The Navy has plenty of ships named for politicians, admirals, states, cities, battles, Native American peoples, and abstract concepts. Some deserve the honor. Some undoubtedly resulted from a committee meeting that went on much too long. But Shenandoah has everything a naval name should possess. It is dignified without being pompous. It is rooted in American geography. It has accumulated a remarkable history involving the Civil War, Arctic whalers, Korea, Japan, rigid airships, destroyer tenders, and a schooner affordable only to people who regard a Gulfstream jet as carry-on luggage.

Surely the name deserves another assignment. A submarine would be appropriate: quiet, formidable, and moving beneath the water as smoothly as the song. A new repair ship would honor the two tenders. Even a future airship would complete the circle, although perhaps we should keep that one away from Ohio thunderstorms.

After four USS vessels, one Confederate raider, and more than a century of extraordinary adventures, the name should not end in a scrapyard—or belong exclusively to a yacht that costs more for one week than most Americans paid for their first house.

“Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you.”

Preferably painted gray, flying the Stars and Stripes, and paid for by somebody else.

The Seven Deadly Sins of a Bad Mexican Restaurant

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 5 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Let me begin with an important distinction: “Mexican food” comes in two varieties. There is the food of Mexico, which is one of the world’s great cuisines, and then, there is what too many American “Mexican” restaurants serve, which is the same six ingredients rearranged into forty-seven allegedly different entrées, each of which, someone will inevitably claim, has a name that is Spanish slang for a penis.

Let us also make one thing completely clear: if you do not serve beer, you are not really a Mexican restaurant. As everyone who lives on the border knows, “La comida mexicana sin cerveza es como el sexo sin besos.” For the gringos out there, that translates as, “Would you bring more tortilla chips?”

The indispensable ingredients are ground beef, chopped lettuce, chopped tomatoes, refried beans, a soggy tortilla, and a little melted cheese that is apparently descended from dried Elmer’s glue. These materials are moved around the plate in different configurations and given different Spanish names, rather like rearranging the furniture and claiming you have built a new house. Occasionally, there is also a green slime pretending to be guacamole, even though it contains only one avocado per gallon.

Put the beef inside a folded tortilla, and it is a taco. Roll it inside the tortilla, and it is a burrito. Roll it tightly and fry it, and it is a taquito. Cover it with sauce, and it becomes an enchilada. Fold the tortilla over and flatten it, and you have a quesadilla. Deep-fry the burrito, and it becomes a chimichanga. Leave the tortilla open and pile everything on top, and it is a tostada. Break the tortilla into a pile of pieces, scatter the ingredients over the top, and you have nachos.

The menu may occupy twelve laminated pages, but the kitchen requires approximately one shelf.

This is the first sin of the bad Mexican restaurant: the illusion of choice. The waiter gives you ten minutes to study the menu as though you were examining the wine list at Versailles. In reality, you are deciding whether you want your ground beef wrapped, folded, rolled, fried, buried, or dropped from a modest height onto a tortilla chip.

The second sin is structural failure. The taco arrives crisp, upright, and confident. You pick it up, take one bite, and it immediately disintegrates along the bottom seam. Ground beef falls into your lap. Lettuce scatters across the table. A tomato cube rolls under the saltshaker. The shell splits into three pieces, each sharp enough to require a tetanus shot.

The burrito has the opposite problem. It possesses the tensile strength of a fire hose. The tortilla is thick, damp, and elastic, and it has been wrapped so tightly around its contents that opening it may violate federal regulations governing pressurized vessels. When finally punctured, it releases a beige substance that may once have been beans.

The third sin is cheese abuse. Cheese should have flavor, texture, and some identifiable connection to an animal. Bad Mexican-restaurant cheese is a yellow industrial sealant. It arrives molten but begins hardening when immediately upon contact with oxygen. Within thirty seconds, it has formed a protective coating over the enchilada. Within two minutes, it can be peeled off in a single sheet. Within five minutes, it could be used to repair drywall.

The restaurant calls it queso. Elmer’s would call it product development.

The fourth sin is the combination plate, although “combination” suggests greater variety than actually exists. The waiter sets down a dangerously hot platter containing two enchiladas, one taco, one burrito, beans, rice, lettuce, tomatoes, and enough melted cheese to immobilize the entire arrangement.

“Careful,” he says. “The plate is hot.”

The plate is always hot. Nobody knows why. The food is tepid, but the ceramic has recently reentered Earth’s atmosphere. You must sit with your hands in your lap while everything congeals, because touching the plate would remove your fingerprints…from your fingers!

The rice is orange, dry, and abundant. A note to the chef: food coloring does not count as a flavor ingredient. The refried beans are the color and consistency of wet cement. The rice is deposited in a perfectly rounded mound, while the beans spread across the plate in a dirty puddle. Somewhere in the kitchen, there must be a man whose entire career consists of constructing rice domes. He is probably the restaurant’s most highly trained employee.

The fifth sin is the salsa deception. The waiter brings two bowls.

“This one is mild,” he explains, “and this one is hot.”

The mild salsa is chopped tomatoes floating in pink water. The hot salsa is also chopped tomatoes floating in pink water, but someone has waved a jalapeño over it. Both are served with tortilla chips possessing two remarkable characteristics: they are simultaneously stale and greasy.

Nevertheless, you eat three baskets of them while waiting for dinner, thereby consuming the caloric equivalent of a replacement meal. When your entrée arrives, you announce that you are already full and then proceed to eat it anyway, because surrendering before the cheese solidifies would be cowardice.

The sixth sin is compulsory festivity. A Mexican restaurant cannot merely feed you, it must persuade you that you are attending a fiesta. The walls are painted in colors normally visible only from orbit. Sombreros hang from the ceiling. A ceramic burro stands near the cash register. The chairs look as though they were decorated by a man who was paid according to the number of colors he used.

Suddenly…Somewhere…a trumpet starts playing “La Cucaracha.”

Why is a Mexican restaurant the only place where it is considered festive to sing a song about a cockroach? Nobody enters an Italian restaurant expecting the staff to sing about silverfish. At a French restaurant, the inevitable accordion player rarely performs a jaunty number about bedbugs. Yet in a Mexican restaurant, a jaunty song about a crippled cockroach is apparently essential to the atmosphere.

And then we reach the seventh and gravest sin: the mariachis.

I realize that I am supposed to insert a diplomatic qualification here. I am expected to say that I admire authentic mariachi music when it is performed well, at the proper time, by skilled musicians.

Nope. I don’t. I hate mariachis.

Before anyone accuses me of cultural insensitivity, I should present my credentials. I live on the Mexican border. I have traveled extensively throughout Mexico and Central America. I regularly teach the history of the region. I even possess a degree in Latin American Studies. I have spent a substantial portion of my life studying, visiting, discussing, defending, and explaining Latin America.

But cultural appreciation is not a suicide pact. You cannot be required to like everything produced by a civilization merely because you admire much of it. The Italians produced Michelangelo, Dante, and the Renaissance, but that does not obligate us to admire Mussolini driving a Fiat. Mexico gave the world extraordinary art, architecture, literature, history, and food. It also gave us overweight men in embroidered trousers firing trumpets directly into the human nervous system.

Restaurant mariachis do not perform at a distance ordinarily associated with musical entertainment. They surround your table. The trumpeter stands eighteen inches from your left ear. The guitarist is close enough to perform minor surgery. Conversation becomes impossible unless conducted through written notes, semaphore, or artillery signals.

The musicians proceed from table to table, leaving stunned diners and overturned water glasses in their wake. Everyone smiles because no one wants to be identified as the gringo who does not appreciate the culture. Meanwhile, fillings loosen, hearing aids squeal, and elderly patrons attempt to remember whether Medicare covers trumpet-related injuries.

Tom Lehrer understood the problem. In his song “In Old Mexico,” he observed that the mariachis “would not shut up till they were paid.”

I once tested this theory. An especially off-key group was circulating through a restaurant, destroying conversation one table at a time. When they approached me, I offered them twenty dollars to go outside and play in the parking lot. Everyone within earshot pretended to be insulted while privately hoping the musicians would accept the offer.

This created a brief ethical crisis. They had presumably never before been paid specifically to increase their distance from an audience. Nevertheless, capitalism prevailed. They accepted the money and departed.

It was the best twenty dollars I ever spent on music I did not hear.

And yet, despite all seven sins, we return.

We return for the chips. We return for the cold beer. We return for the margaritas (which contain enough fluorescent syrup to illuminate the table). We return because the portions are enormous, because the prices are usually reasonable, and because even a mediocre enchilada buried beneath industrial cheese possesses a certain comforting appeal.

Most of all, we return because there are at least forty-seven things on the menu.

Admittedly, they are all made from the same six familiar, comfortable ingredients. But tonight I may be adventurous.

I may have mine folded.

Rudyard Kipling and the Great War

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Rudyard Kipling was more than just the man who wrote The Jungle Book, although I confess that whenever I hear his name, the first thing that trots through my brain is “the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River.” That phrase has been lodged in my head since childhood and apparently cannot be evicted, even for nonpayment of rent.

Kipling was one of the most famous writers alive when Europe went to war in 1914. He had written about soldiers, sailors, empire, India, England, and most every other subject a properly mustached Englishman might discuss after dinner. He had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. People listened when he spoke, which is a dangerous condition for any writer.

Like most Europeans, Kipling was confused about the causes of the First World War. That is all right: we are still confused about them. Historians have spent more than a century sorting through alliances, nationalism, imperial rivalries, mobilization schedules, and Serbian conspirators. We can explain the war with great confidence for about fifteen minutes, after which somebody asks one sensible question and the whole contraption starts leaking oil.

What makes the Great War especially troublesome is that, for the Europeans who entered it, this was not a simple war between good and evil. It was not even clearly a war between “them” and “us.” The kings and emperors were cousins. The ruling classes vacationed in one another’s countries, read one another’s books, and married one another’s daughters. Then, in August 1914, they put on different uniforms and commenced killing one another by the trainload.

Kipling did not hesitate. He believed that Germany had to be defeated and his poetry sounded like a trumpet. In “For All We Have and Are,” published in 1914, he warned that civilization itself was at stake. “The Hun is at the gate,” he declared. There was no room for ambiguity or for a fellow who wanted to study the railway schedules one more time. Britain must fight.

This was not simply Kipling waving a flag from a comfortable chair. He wrote propaganda, visited military units, and urged young men to serve. He had spent much of his career praising the ordinary British soldier while pointing out that respectable civilians treated him like a stray dog in peacetime but discovered his virtues whenever shooting started. Understanding hypocrisy, unfortunately, does not make a man immune to it—or to enthusiasm.

Then the war reached into his own house.

Kipling’s only son, John, wanted to serve. John was young, short, and so nearsighted that the Army could have hidden the German Army across the examination room and he might not have spotted it. The Royal Navy rejected him. The Army rejected him. These were not unreasonable decisions. A battlefield is a poor place for an officer who cannot clearly see the men he is supposed to lead.

But John wanted a uniform and his father wanted him to have one. Kipling used his friendship with Lord Roberts, the celebrated old field marshal and colonel of the Irish Guards, to help John obtain a commission. It is tempting to tell this as a domineering father’s shoving an unwilling boy toward the guns. That is too easy. John was eager to serve. Father and son had been raised on duty, honor, empire, and sacrifice. They both believed the same sermon.

John Kipling became an officer in the Irish Guards at the age of sixteen. In September 1915, not long after his eighteenth birthday, he went into action at the Battle of Loos. Loos was Britain’s largest offensive of the war up to that time and it was an early demonstration of the military principle that, when a bad plan fails, headquarters may improve it by sending in more men.

On September 27, John led his platoon through shellfire and machine-gun fire. Witnesses later gave confused accounts, as witnesses to battles often do. He may have been wounded in the face and was seen stumbling or falling. Then he disappeared into the smoke, mud, and wreckage. He never came home.

On his first day at the front, John went into his first attack carrying an officer’s revolver, not—as legend sometimes has it—merely a swagger stick. By the time the Battle of Loos sputtered to its miserable conclusion, roughly 16,000 British and Empire soldiers were dead and more than 50,000 had become casualties. John Kipling had lasted less than one day.

Rudyard and Carrie Kipling refused to abandon hope that John had been wounded or captured. They followed every rumor, questioned survivors, and searched for any scrap of information that might tell them what had happened to their son. None ever brought him home nor was John’s grave identified during either parent’s lifetime. Kipling later supplied the Imperial War Graves Commission with the inscription “Known unto God” for the graves of unidentified soldiers. For him, the words were horribly personal: they described his own boy as well as any of the nameless dead.

After John’s death, Kipling did not suddenly become a pacifist. This is important, because history is seldom courteous enough to arrange itself into a clean moral lesson. Kipling continued to believe that Germany had to be defeated. He did not decide the war was unnecessary simply because it had become personally unbearable. But the trumpet in his poetry acquired a crack.

The change can be heard in “My Boy Jack,” with its repeated plea for any kind of “news of my boy Jack?” The poem originally accompanied Kipling’s writing about the naval Battle of Jutland and the death of a young sailor, Jack Cornell; “Jack” was not simply a private nickname for John. Still, no grieving father could write those lines without pouring something of himself into them. The answer comes back with the sea: not this tide, nor any tide. Patriotic consolation remains, but consolation is not comfort.

By the end of the war, Kipling’s verse had become harder, colder, and far less impressed by speeches. In “The Children,” he wrote of the young: “They believed us and perished for it.” In his Epitaphs of the War, he compressed the judgment of an entire generation into two lines:

If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

Those lines are sometimes treated as Kipling’s confession that he had been wrong about everything. That is too simple. He may have been condemning the political leaders who failed to prepare Britain for war, the propagandists who disguised its cost, the older men who handed noble phrases to younger men, or himself. The power of the lines lies in the fact that all those answers can sit together on the same mourners’ bench.

Kipling spent the postwar years helping the Imperial War Graves Commission decide how the dead should be remembered. He chose words for cemeteries and memorials, including “Their Name Liveth for Evermore” and “Known unto God.” The great public poet of empire became one of the writers of its grief. He could help ensure that John and the other dead did not vanish into French soil and government statistics.

And there is the lesson we keep forgetting: Wars begin with maps, flags, speeches, and confident men explaining why the enemy has left us no choice. The young hear, “honor, destiny, security, and duty”. Some of it may be true. Then the troop trains leave—and the meaning of the words changes.

The men who start a war usually believe they understand what they are doing. The fathers who encourage their sons usually believe they are teaching courage. The sons who go usually believe they will return. Everybody may be sincere, and yet, the graveyards fill just the same.

Kipling’s journey from “The Hun is at the gate” to “because our fathers lied” does not prove that patriotism is foolish or that every war is avoidable. It proves something less comfortable: righteous certainty is cheapest before the casualty lists arrive. A nation may have to fight… but before it sends its children, it owes them the truth—about the cause, the cost, the mistakes, and the odds of coming home.

That is a debt old men have been refinancing—using the blood of young men as collateral—for a very long time.

James Bascom Milliorn’s Remarkably Bad Wa

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

The name James recurs frequently in my family. It was my father’s name. I have numerous cousins named James. It is the middle name of my first son, and I also had a great-uncle named James. At family reunions, yelling “James!” probably produced roughly the same result as yelling “Waiter!” in a crowded restaurant.

I never gave much thought to where the name came from. Families routinely recycle names, particularly good, sturdy names that are difficult to misspell. “James” is especially convenient because it works equally well for a farmer, preacher, bank president, outlaw, or man being questioned by the authorities. It accommodates almost any career path.

Truthfully, I have never been terribly interested in genealogy. I always assumed my father’s ancestors were a long line of modest farmers. “Modest,” in this case, is the diplomatic term for poor. They farmed land that was apparently capable of producing rocks, dust, grasshoppers, and predictable disappointment.

I was vaguely aware that my grandfather Fred had farmed in Texas, packed his family into a covered wagon, moved to Arkansas, briefly examined the opportunities available there, then loaded everyone back into the same wagon, and returned to the poor farm in West Texas.

I have seen that Texas farm and I can only conclude that all of Arkansas must have been on fire.

For most of my life, that seemed to be sufficient family history. We had farmers. They were poor. They owned wagons. At some point, somebody demonstrated questionable judgment regarding Arkansas. I saw no urgent need to investigate further.

Recently, however, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to find out whether any of my Southern ancestors had owned slaves. I was fairly certain they had not, principally because slave ownership required money, property, and economic resources that the Milliorns seem to have successfully avoided for generations.

The search produced one uncomfortable discovery: an uncle of one of my direct ancestors had owned one enslaved sixteen-year-old at the beginning of the Civil War. The census recorded the boy’s age, sex, and race, but not his name. The white people were named. The enslaved boy was treated as property and was entered on a separate schedule.

There is nothing amusing about that. Even one enslaved person is one too many, and the fact that his name was not recorded is a grim reminder of how completely the system attempted to erase individual lives.

Having established that at least my direct ancestors were apparently too poor to own anyone, I thought the investigation was finished, but then, I discovered James Bascom Milliorn.

James was born near Byhalia, in Marshall County, Mississippi, on January 14, 1844. He was the son of George B. Milliron and Frances Doddridge. The surname appears in records as Milliron, Milliorn, Millard, and occasionally, in whatever combination of letters a clerk could produce before lunch. Genealogy is considerably easier when your ancestors have names that census takers can spell consistently. My ancestors apparently regarded standardized spelling as an infringement on personal liberty.

When the Civil War began, James was seventeen. On March 10, 1862, shortly after turning eighteen, he enlisted as a private in Company E of the 34th Mississippi Infantry. Company E was known as the “Coldwater Rebels,” which sounds less like a military organization than a high-school football team with an unusually aggressive booster club.

The enlistment and unit are documented in the surviving 34th Mississippi Infantry roster. The regiment was organized at Holly Springs and fought in the Western Theater. It participated in the Battle of Perryville in Kentucky, the campaigns in Middle Tennessee, and the Battle of Chickamauga.

James evidently did not enjoy a comfortable war.

His Arkansas Confederate pension application states that he was shot in the left knee and suffered a fractured skull due to a second gun shot. Unfortunately, the information available does not clearly establish where or when this happened. Civil War soldiers were not issued convenient medical summaries, and Confederate record keeping deteriorated as the Confederacy ran short of paper, clerks, transportation, food, shoes, soldiers, and eventually, Confederacy.

Being shot in both the head and the knee would ordinarily qualify as the low point of a military career, but in James’s case, it may merely have been the opening act.

Testimony submitted with his pension application states that James was involved in an elevator accident while being held as a prisoner in a five-story hotel in Nashville. The elevator supposedly collapsed, dropping him several stories.

On first reading that account, I was skeptical. Elevators existed during the Civil War, but a five-story elevator accident involving Confederate prisoners sounded a little too elaborate. It had all the necessary ingredients for a story that had improved with age: a war, a prison, a hotel, an elevator, and a very long fall.

Surprisingly, the central event really happened.

The building was the unfinished Maxwell House Hotel in Nashville. Construction had stopped when the war began. After Union forces occupied Nashville, the building was used as a barracks, a hospital, and a prison. During the war, it was known as Zollicoffer Barracks.

In case you are wondering, Felix Kirk Zollicoffer was a recently deceased Confederate general and former Tennessee newspaper editor who had gone for a ride on a foggy morning and mistook the Union lines as Confederates. The general was rather quickly killed.

On September 29, 1863, approximately 600 Confederate prisoners were crammed into the top floor of the brick building. Many had recently been captured at Chickamauga. When the prisoners assembled to go downstairs for breakfast, part of the temporary staircase and flooring collapsed. More than 100 men plunged through several floors in a mass of soldiers, beams, boards, and debris.

Contemporary reports disagreed about the number killed. The first newspaper reports said that only a few died immediately, while later accounts claimed that dozens died at the scene or later from their injuries. A survivor insisted that the prisoners fell all the way to the bottom floor rather than merely to the third floor.

After the war, the building served as the site where Nathan Bedford Forrest was inducted into the Ku Klux Klan. Finally finished as a hotel, seven presidents, as well as Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, stayed there, and the coffee served at the famous hotel served as the start of the Maxwell House Coffee brand. Guests of the hotel claimed it was haunted by a ghost of one of the soldiers who perished in the collapse of the floors.

The important point is that this was not a family legend invented around a fireplace several generations later. The elevator account appears in testimony given in support of James’s pension application. Someone was formally explaining to the State of Arkansas why James was old, disabled, poor, and deserving of assistance. According to the application, during the collapse of the flooring, his “arms were mashed up.”

The testimony called it an elevator accident. Contemporary descriptions call it the collapse of temporary stairs and flooring near the stairwell. It is possible that the word “elevator” referred to an open shaft, hoist, or unfinished part of the building. It is also possible that, several decades after being dropped through a hotel, James did not feel obligated to supply the Arkansas pension board with an architectural diagram.

The distinction probably seemed unimportant to him. Whether the elevator fell, the floor collapsed, or the stairway gave way, gravity performed its assigned duty.

A casualty list published years later includes a “J. B. Millard” of Company E, 34th Tennessee. That appears likely to be another bureaucratically mangled reference to J. B. Milliorn of Company E, 34th Mississippi. The initials, company, regiment number, pension testimony, and circumstances all fit. Only the surname and state are wrong, which by Civil War record-keeping standards may qualify as unusually accurate.

There are no surviving details on how long it took Pvt. Milliorn to recover, but eventually, he was moved north to the Illinois Rock Island Prison Barracks on an island in the Mississippi River. While this was not the worst of the Civil War POW camps, it was far from a picnic for the more than 12,000 captured Confederate soldiers kept there. About one in eight prisoners died during their confinement, most of whom died from disease. The camp was cold and overcrowded, so the prisoners easily succumbed to smallpox, dysentery and scurvy.

In her book, Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell puts Ashley Wilkes in the Rock Island Prison Barracks. When Wilkes staggers back to Tara, he wearily describes the camp as the Andersonville of the North. It’s a good, well-written scene, but it is far from accurate as Andersonville had twice the death rate. Still, the almost two years James spent there must have been hell.

After serving for over 1100 days (with a little over half of them as a prisoner of war) James survived the war, as well as two gunshot wounds, his captivity, and the collapse inside the Maxwell House. He then returned to the much slower but apparently unprofitable occupation of farming.

His pension application offers an unusually blunt summary of his economic achievements. It reported that the total value of his property was less than $100. After a lifetime of farming, raising a family, and surviving events that should have killed him several times, James had accumulated property worth less than the price of a modest modern television.

The State of Arkansas approved an annual pension of $25.

That was not $25 a month. It was $25 a year.

In exchange for being shot twice, captured, imprisoned, dropped through several floors of a hotel, and remaining poor long enough to prove financial need, James received slightly more than two dollars a month. Government generosity apparently had not yet been invented.

Still, $25 was not completely insignificant at the time. It could purchase food and other necessities, but it was hardly a comfortable retirement. The pension system was designed as minimal relief for elderly or disabled Confederate veterans who could demonstrate both military service and poverty. James evidently met every requirement with room to spare.

After the war, he married Frances Evelyn Boggan and fathered a large family. Their children included Guy, Lillian, Elmo, Fred, Ray, and others. Fred, born in 1877, became my grandfather and helped carry the James name into later generations. My father was James H. Milliorn, and my brother and I gave one of their sons the name.

Thankfully, my great-grandfather’s pension was raised in later years. It appears to be his only means of support during the last decades of his life.

James Bascom eventually settled in Arkansas and lived until July 3, 1933, dying at age eighty-nine. He had been born before the Mexican War, survived the Civil War, lived through Reconstruction, and remained alive long enough to witness automobiles, airplanes, radio, the First World War, and the Great Depression.

That is an extraordinary span for a man whose military experience included being shot, captured, and dropped through several floors of a hotel before the hotel had even opened.

I began this investigation expecting to confirm that my ancestors were poor farmers. That part was easy. They were. James’s declaration that he owned less than $100 in property provides something approaching official certification.

Instead, I also found an unnamed enslaved boy who deserves to be remembered as a person rather than a line on a property schedule. I found a Mississippi teenager who joined a war, suffered a serious wound, became a prisoner, survived one of Nashville’s strangest wartime disasters, and lived another seventy years.

I also found the probable source of all those Jameses scattered through the family tree.

The name was not merely recycled because nobody could think of anything better. It may have been passed down because James Bascom Milliorn proved extraordinarily difficult to kill.

Considering his war—and the size of his pension—that seems reason enough.

The Great Cat Migration

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Did 5,000 Siberian Cats really save Western Civilization? (Spoiler Alert: Nope.) The story goes something like this:

During the Siege of Leningrad, virtually every cat in the city disappeared. Some starved, some froze to death, and some were eaten by people who had reached the unfortunate stage of starvation at which Fluffy with gravy begins to sound less appalling than it normally would.

With the cats gone, millions of rats poured into the city. They marched through the streets in vast gray armies, attacked food warehouses, gnawed through electrical wires, overran the Hermitage Museum, and prepared to eat their way through several centuries of European art. Rembrandt Tartare.

Then, following the breaking of the siege, the Soviet government launched the Great Cat Migration. Five thousand specially selected Siberian cats were collected in Tyumen, Omsk, Irkutsk, and other distant cities. They were placed aboard a special train and transported thousands of miles to Leningrad.

When the train arrived, the doors were opened, the cats charged into battle, the rats were annihilated and Western civilization was saved. The cats were installed in the Hermitage, where their descendants continue guarding the Rembrandts, Leonardos, and assorted imperial furniture to this day.

It is a wonderful story. Unfortunately, it may contain almost as much fiction as the average congressional budget proposal.

The actual story begins in 1745, when Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, issued a genuine imperial decree ordering that 30 of the finest and largest mouse-catching tomcats be obtained from Kazan and delivered to the imperial court.

Kazan cats were reputed to be particularly formidable mousers. Apparently, eighteenth-century Russia had already developed regional cat rankings, although ESPN had not yet begun televising the playoffs.

The decree specified that the cats should be large, good at catching mice, properly fed during the journey—and castrated.

That last qualification becomes important whenever someone claims that the cats currently living at the Hermitage are direct descendants of Elizabeth’s original Kazan cats. Unless eighteenth-century Russian veterinarians were remarkably incompetent, those 30 tomcats did not leave descendants.

Nor, strictly speaking, did Elizabeth introduce cats to the “Hermitage Museum.” The present Winter Palace was not begun until 1754, and Catherine the Great did not establish the art collection that became the Hermitage until 1764. Elizabeth brought cats to the imperial court. The later palace and museum inherited the tradition.

Over the following centuries, cats were kept in the Winter Palace to control mice and rats in its kitchens, storerooms, corridors, and cellars. As the palace accumulated paintings, furniture, tapestries, books, and other objects upon which rodents might dine, the cats became unofficial guardians of the imperial collections.

They were not art critics, but they were certainly more useful than most art critics.

Cats, Rats, and the Siege of Leningrad

The Siege of Leningrad began in September 1941 and lasted until January 1944. It was one of the most appalling episodes of the Second World War. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died, most from starvation, cold, and disease.

During the Siege of Leningrad, virtually every cat in the city disappeared. Some starved, some froze to death, and some were eaten. There was nothing historically unusual about people eating rodents—British sailors, for example, ate shipboard rats known as “millers,” apparently because the animals emerged from the flour stores looking as though they had been working the night shift in a bakery. Cats, however, were household pets, and eating the family cat required a rather more desperate adjustment in culinary standards. By the winter of 1941–42, many Leningraders had reached precisely that point.

The disappearance of the cats contributed to a serious rodent problem. Rats threatened what little food remained and damaged buildings, wiring, archives, and stored materials. The Hermitage was not immune, although most of its greatest treasures had already been evacuated to Sverdlovsk before conditions became completely disastrous.

Popular accounts often say that every cat in Leningrad died during the siege. That is probably an exaggeration. Contemporary records mention individual cats appearing in the city by early 1943, and several families later claimed that their pets survived.

The most famous was Maxim, whose owners reportedly protected him throughout the siege, occasionally locking him in a room to prevent a hungry relative from turning him into dinner. Maxim may indeed have survived the entire siege. Calling him “the only cat in Leningrad to survive,” however, would require a citywide feline census conducted under conditions in which the government had more pressing administrative concerns.

What can be said with confidence is that cats became extremely rare and extremely valuable. By 1943, a kitten could cost several times the price of a loaf of bread. Once people no longer needed to consider cats as food, they again wanted them as pets and rat catchers.

Enter the Meowing Division

This is where history begins turning into folklore.

According to one version, after Soviet forces opened a land corridor into Leningrad in January 1943, city authorities ordered four railway cars filled with gray or “smoky” cats from the Yaroslavl region. These cats supposedly arrived while the siege was still underway and immediately began exterminating rats.

According to another version, the great shipment occurred after the siege ended in January 1944. This time, approximately 5,000 cats were collected across Siberia, with Tyumen serving as a major collection point. Residents donated household pets, officials rounded up strays, and a special train carried the animals to Leningrad.

Some accounts combine both stories: first came the Yaroslavl cats, followed by the larger Siberian feline reserve.

The details vary considerably. Depending upon the person telling the story, there were two railway cars, four railway cars, or an entire train. There were 500 cats, 1,000 cats, or 5,000 cats. They arrived in 1943, 1944, or 1945. They came from Yaroslavl, Tyumen, Omsk, Irkutsk, or all of the above.

This is generally not a sign that historians have uncovered an unusually rich collection of corroborating evidence.

In 2020, researchers at St. Petersburg State University reported that they had searched government records, wartime diaries, letters, and memoirs without finding confirmation of the famous trainload of cats. They concluded that the mass migration story was probably a postwar legend representing a return to normal life—a time when cats could once again be pets and useful companions rather than emergency food.

That does not mean no cats were brought into Leningrad. They almost certainly were. Returning evacuees carried pets with them. People bought, traded, and transported cats. Officials probably encouraged their introduction, and some organized shipments may have occurred.

But the image of exactly 5,000 specially recruited Siberian commandos boarding the Feline Express and reporting for duty at the Hermitage remains unverified.

The recovery of Leningrad’s cat population was probably gradual and untidy. Cats arrived from many places, reproduced, wandered into buildings, and were adopted by residents. Traps, poison, sanitation programs, and ordinary pest-control work also helped reduce the rat population.

In other words, history did what history generally does: it unfolded through thousands of small, poorly documented actions. Posterity then improved it by adding a special train.

Today, approximately 50 cats currently live beneath the Hermitage. The number fluctuates because cats occasionally wander in, are rescued by employees, or are surrendered to the museum. Others are adopted by carefully screened families.

The cats have names, identification documents, veterinary records, vaccinations, bowls, beds, and medical care. They live primarily in the cellars, service areas, and courtyards. They are not normally permitted to stroll through the galleries, critique the Dutch masters, or sharpen their claws on a Louis XVI chair.

Their modern pest-control value is largely preventive. The smell and presence of cats discourage rodents from entering the area. The cats themselves are reportedly well-fed and not always enthusiastic hunters. One was once photographed peacefully watching a rat drink from its bowl, suggesting that feline work ethic has deteriorated since the heroic days of 1944.

The museum nevertheless treats them as honorary employees and public-relations ambassadors. They have a veterinarian, caretakers, sponsors, an adoption program, an annual Hermitage Cat Day, and even an official spokeswoman.

Whether any are descended from the cats brought into Leningrad after the siege is impossible to establish. Museum representatives say that a few descendants of the Yaroslavl cats remain, but there is no published pedigree or genetic study proving it. The modern colony has absorbed stray cats and rescued animals for decades, and its members are routinely sterilized.

They are not a special breed. They are ordinary mixed-breed cats with an unusually impressive business address.

A few wildly popular—and equally inaccurate—stories about the Hermitage cats deserve to be tossed out with the cat litter.

Peter the Great brought the first Hermitage cat, Vasily, from Holland. Perhaps. It is an old and charming tradition, but there is no contemporary documentation proving it. Other versions say Peter obtained Vasily in Russia from a Dutch merchant. Apparently, even the legendary cat’s travel documents have been misplaced.

The present cats descend from Elizabeth’s original Kazan cats. No. Elizabeth ordered castrated tomcats. Their dynasty was over before it began.

Five thousand pedigree Siberian cats arrived aboard one special train. There is no documentary confirmation. Furthermore, “Siberian cats” may simply mean cats collected in Siberia, not 5,000 registered members of the modern Siberian breed traveling with certificates and matching luggage.

Every cat receives a government salary. They receive food, housing, and veterinary care. They do not receive rubles, pension contributions, paid vacation, or compensatory time for working nights. Perhaps they should start a union.

A wealthy Frenchman left the cats an enormous fortune. This one is partially true, which makes it ideal for the Internet. A French admirer did include the Hermitage cats in his will. Headlines breathlessly announced that the cats had inherited a “fortune,” conjuring images of 50 newly wealthy felines lounging aboard yachts, manipulating offshore accounts, and refusing to associate with common alley cats.

The actual inheritance was approximately €3,000. Divided among 50 cats, that comes to roughly €60 apiece—enough for each cat to purchase a respectable quantity of food, but probably not enough to establish a hereditary European banking family.

Still, €3,000 is €3,000. It may not have made the Hermitage cats rich, but it did place them in a small and exclusive category: cats who have inherited more money than most cats and performed more useful government service than many humans.

Elon Musk and the Long Range Foundation

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 8 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

In Robert Heinlein’s 1956 novel, Time for the Stars, mankind’s most important scientific work is financed by an organization called the Long Range Foundation. The Foundation invests in research so speculative, expensive, and slow that governments, corporations, and sensible people want nothing to do with it.

Naturally, the projects keep succeeding. A sustained and diversified portfolio of research usually pays off in the long run, even though most individual research projects do not.

Weather control and other improbable ventures make enormous amounts of money, so the Foundation invests in even more improbable ventures. Eventually, it becomes fabulously wealthy and can afford to finance interstellar spaceships, telepathy experiments, and anything else that strikes its directors as potentially useful to humanity. It is the ultimate virtuous circle: invest vast sums of money on unlikely research, accidentally make a fortune, and use the fortune to investigate something even crazier.

This was science fiction when Heinlein wrote it. Today, we call it the Elon Musk business plan.

Musk made his first serious money from Zip2 and, then, a much larger fortune from PayPal. He could have purchased several islands, a respectable collection of yachts, and enough politicians to start his own congressional caucus. Instead, he put much of his fortune into electric automobiles and rockets.

At the time, neither investment looked particularly sensible.

Electric cars were slow, unattractive little vehicles with limited range. They were marketed chiefly to people who believed smugness should be classified as an alternative fuel. Rockets, meanwhile, were built by governments and gigantic defense contractors. Starting a private rocket company sounded approximately as reasonable as announcing that you intended to build your own aircraft carrier in the backyard.

Musk did both.

SpaceX was founded in 2002 with the modest objective of reducing launch costs, making rockets reusable, colonizing Mars, and saving the human race. Most new businesses begin with more manageable goals, such as surviving until Friday.

The first three Falcon 1 launches failed. Spectacularly. SpaceX was running out of money, and Musk was simultaneously trying to keep Tesla alive. Had the fourth launch failed, SpaceX probably would have collapsed. It succeeded.

SpaceX subsequently developed the Falcon 9, Dragon spacecraft, and reusable booster systems. Landing an orbital-class rocket vertically had long been considered technically possible but economically doubtful. SpaceX turned it into something approaching routine. Boosters now return to Earth and land upright on platforms at sea, looking like something Heinlein would have rejected as a little too theatrical.

SpaceX also created Starlink, which required launching thousands of satellites before the system could produce anything resembling an adequate return. A conventional company would have balked at the cost. A government program would have required years of hearings concerning orbital debris, rural broadband, environmental impact statements, minority contracting requirements, and whether the satellites were being launched from a politically equitable selection of congressional districts.

Musk ignored all of the problems and just launched them.

Tesla followed a similar path. Musk did not create the original company, although he became its largest early investor and eventually its dominant executive. Tesla began with the Roadster, proved that an electric car did not have to resemble a golf cart with doors, and then gambled heavily on the Model S.

The company came close to failure more than once. It nevertheless built factories, developed battery systems, established a charging network, and forced nearly every major automobile manufacturer to take electric vehicles seriously. One need not believe that every Tesla is perfect—or that every prediction from Musk arrives on schedule—to recognize that he changed the automobile industry.

Then there is Neuralink.

Neuralink is attempting to produce a practical interface between the human brain and computers. Its current experimental implants have allowed people with severe paralysis to control computer cursors and other devices through thought. The company is also developing Blindsight, an implant intended to create visual perception by stimulating the visual cortex directly.

Musk has suggested that Blindsight could eventually allow blind people to see and might someday provide vision extending into ultraviolet or infrared wavelengths. For the moment, that portion remains a promise rather than an accomplishment. Musk’s predictions are frequently delivered according to a calendar that has only a casual relationship with the one hanging on everyone else’s wall.

Still, the research is real. It requires neuroscientists, surgeons, engineers, custom electronics, experimental robots, regulatory approval, years of testing, and an astonishing amount of money. There is no guarantee of success. There may not even be a clearly defined path to success. That is precisely why ordinary investors are reluctant to finance it.

There are, of course, caveats.

Private capital did not accomplish all this by itself. SpaceX received hundreds of millions of dollars in NASA development payments and later billions in government contracts. NASA provided knowledge, facilities, technical standards, and—most importantly—a dependable customer.

Tesla received a $465 million Department of Energy loan that helped finance the Model S and its Fremont manufacturing plant. Tesla repaid the loan early, but the government assumed a risk that private lenders were unwilling to accept. Electric-vehicle tax credits also helped create a market.

Neuralink stands on decades of neuroscience and brain-computer-interface research conducted at universities, hospitals, and government laboratories, much of it financed by taxpayers.

Musk did not invent rocketry, electric motors, lithium-ion batteries, satellites, or brain implants. What his companies have done exceptionally well is combine existing scientific knowledge, take it out of the laboratory, and force it through the long, expensive, humiliating process of becoming a useful product.

Nor does a large fortune automatically produce technological miracles. Jeff Bezos has invested billions in Blue Origin without matching the accomplishments of SpaceX. Musk’s Boring Company has yet to transform transportation, and the Hyperloop appears to have been placed in the same imaginary warehouse where we keep flying cars and household nuclear reactors.

Money is necessary, but it is not sufficient. It must be accompanied by technical judgment, disciplined management, persistence, and a willingness to look foolish for a very long time. Musk exhibits a remarkable tolerance for failure, steadfastly continuing to financially support projects long after a board of directors would have cut their losses and pulled the plug.

Government certainly can conduct great research. The Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, the internet, GPS, jet engines, nuclear power, and much of modern medicine demonstrate that beyond dispute. Government is particularly good at financing basic science because the benefits are widely dispersed and may not appear for decades.

The difficulty is not that government lacks money. The difficulty is that government lacks patience under public observation.

Imagine a federal rocket program exploding three vehicles in succession. The first explosion would produce an investigation. The second would produce televised hearings. After the third, members of Congress would demand resignations, refunds, criminal prosecutions, and perhaps a constitutional amendment prohibiting rockets.

No administrator would be rewarded for saying, “Yes, we destroyed $100 million today, but we learned a great deal.”

A private investor can call that research. A newspaper calls it a scandal.

Government programs must survive elections, annual appropriations, changes of administration, hostile committees, inspectors general, environmental lawsuits, and the evening news. A project that will require fifteen years of failure before producing a breakthrough must be defended repeatedly to people whose next election is never more than two years away.

Public pressure demands visible results, predictable schedules, and an explanation for every failure. Genuine experimental research offers none of those things. It advances through wrong turns, broken equipment, embarrassing mistakes, and discoveries that were not included in the original PowerPoint presentation.

A large pool of private capital provides something more important than money: insulation. It gives researchers time to fail without having the project canceled by a congressional committee or converted into a campaign issue. It allows one generation of profits to finance the next generation of speculation.

The ideal system is, therefore, neither government nor private enterprise. Government should finance basic research, absorb risks that society as a whole must bear, establish reasonable regulations, and become the first customer for valuable new technology. Private capital should perform the frantic experimentation, integration, manufacturing, and cost reduction that government manages poorly. There are some projects that are only feasible if large pools of capital are in the hands of relatively few people.

Heinlein understood the essential point. The Long Range Foundation succeeded because it possessed enough money to ignore short-range thinking.

Musk has not created Heinlein’s Foundation and he certainly has not succeeded at everything he has attempted. But he has demonstrated that civilization occasionally benefits from having an enormously wealthy eccentric willing to spend a fortune on ideas that respectable people consider ridiculous.

Some of those ideas remain ridiculous.

A few become the future.

The King Who Hated Tobacco—Right Up Until He Taxed It

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 1 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

You could call it royal hypocrisy. You could call it cognitive dissonance. You could even call it moral inconsistency—assuming, of course, that someone who claimed a divine right to rule over everyone else was expected to have morals in the first place. Personally, I'll settle for economic opportunism on a truly royal scale, courtesy of King James I of England.

But before we get to James and his famous hatred of tobacco, we need to back up a few thousand years.

Actually...more than 12,000 years.

Long before Europeans had ever heard of tobacco, Native peoples in South America were cultivating and using it. The plant probably originated somewhere in the Andes or nearby western South America before spreading throughout the Americas. It was smoked, chewed, snuffed, and used in religious ceremonies from the Amazon to what is now Canada. Contrary to popular belief, the earliest smokers probably weren't rolling cigars. They were more likely smoking loose tobacco in primitive pipes or as wrapped leaves, while true cigars seem to have been developed much later, in the Caribbean.

Like every successful vice in history, tobacco traveled well. Whether it spread because people enjoyed it, because they believed it had medicinal value, or because nicotine is one of the world's more persuasive chemicals is anyone's guess. Archaeologists have found evidence that people were using wild tobacco in what is now Utah roughly 12,000 years ago. That does not mean they were farming it, however. Deliberate cultivation probably began somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 years ago, making tobacco one of the oldest domesticated plants in the New World.

The first Europeans to encounter tobacco arrived with Christopher Columbus in 1492. While exploring Cuba, two members of his expedition reported that the local Taíno people carried "firebrands and bundles of leaves" that they lit and inhaled. The Europeans had just witnessed the world's first recorded cigar smokers. Columbus himself wasn't particularly impressed, but one of his sailors, Rodrigo de Jerez, apparently acquired the habit and may have become the first European smoker.

The Taíno also gave Europe the word tobacco—or at least something close to it. Historians still argue over whether the original word referred to the plant itself or to the Y-shaped tube used to inhale its smoke. Either way, within little more than a century the strange New World weed would conquer Europe far more effectively than any Spanish conquistador ever could.

By the late 1500s, tobacco had become the latest must-have import for Europe's upper crust. Spanish and Portuguese sailors carried it home first, and before long it had reached England. Contrary to popular legend, Sir Walter Raleigh did not introduce tobacco to England. English sailors and explorers had already encountered it and members of the ill-fated Roanoke Colony returned home smoking it. Raleigh's real contribution was far more powerful: he made it fashionable. As he was one of Queen Elizabeth I's favorite courtiers, anything Raleigh did instantly became more interesting. If Sir Walter had shown up wearing a lobster on his head, half the nobility would have been shopping for crustaceans by week's end.

We are certain that Raleigh demonstrated his new fad at court, but whether the Virgin Queen ever sampled the weed is not recorded, but I like to think she got to enjoy at least one good vice.

Then, in 1603, Queen Elizabeth died and was succeeded by James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England. James took one look at the growing number of Englishmen puffing away on clay pipes and reacted much the way a modern health crusader reacts to a teenager with a vape.

In 1604, he published his famous pamphlet, A Counterblaste to Tobacco. It wasn't merely a criticism of smoking—it was a full-throated literary assault. James described tobacco as:

"A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs..."

That is one of history's more memorable one-sentence product reviews, even if the King neglected to put it on Yelp. (That’s quite a contrast to the positive advertising by tobacco sellers some 360 years later—and those guys knew about the scientific evidence that backed up the claims made by the king!)

Given such strong feelings, you might expect James to outlaw tobacco entirely.

He didn't.

Instead, in that very same year, he imposed what amounted to one of the biggest "sin taxes" in English history. The import duty on tobacco jumped from 2 pence per pound to 6 shillings and 10 pence per pound. Since there are twelve pence in a shilling, that meant the tax soared from 2 pence to 82 pence per pound—a staggering forty-one-fold increase.

Apparently, tobacco was so vile, so disgusting, so offensive to God and man...that the Crown simply couldn't afford to let anyone stop buying it.

The plan worked—sort of. The higher tax generated revenue, but it also generated smugglers, who quickly discovered that avoiding an eighty-two-penny tax could be a profitable line of work. Eventually the government moderated the duty, not because James had softened his opinion of tobacco, but because confiscating contraband is considerably less profitable than collecting taxes on legal imports.

The irony only deepened over time. England's American colony at Jamestown was struggling to survive until John Rolfe began growing a sweeter variety of tobacco that English smokers actually wanted to buy. Suddenly, the "loathsome" weed became the economic engine that kept Virginia alive. Before long, English ships were carrying ever-larger cargoes of tobacco across the Atlantic, customs officials were collecting ever-larger duties, and the Crown was becoming increasingly dependent on revenue from the very product its king had condemned as an abomination.

Walk into an English tavern in about 1700 and you'd likely be handed two things: a mug of ale and a long-stemmed white clay pipe. The pipe wasn't yours, mind you—it belonged to the tavern, just like the tankard and (probably) the cat sleeping by the fireplace. You smoked it, handed it back, and the innkeeper tossed it into the hottest part of the fire. Before long it was hot enough to burn away every trace of tobacco—and quite possibly every germ within a hundred yards. Centuries before anyone had heard of bacteria, publicans had accidentally invented a remarkably effective sterilization process.

The pipes themselves were so inexpensive that they were practically the disposable coffee cups of the seventeenth century. Most cost only a fraction of a day's wages, and if one broke, nobody shed a tear. Archaeologists have since repaid the favor by digging up millions of broken stems and using them to date old settlements with surprising accuracy. It seems the humble tavern pipe, designed to be smoked, broken, and forgotten, has become one of history's most talkative little artifacts.

History has a wicked sense of humor. Governments often discover that the fastest way to embrace a vice is to figure out how to tax it. James I may have sincerely hated tobacco, but he also loved revenue. Faced with choosing between his principles and his treasury, the treasury won by forty-one to one.

A New Presidential Coin?

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:12:58 -0600

It is almost impossible for me to tell a story without going to the very beginning. When I taught the freshman course of Western Civilization, I started with Australopithecus and worked my way forward. So, today we really have to begin with the Civil War.

The Civil War was, like all wars, far more costly than expected. Congress responded in predictable fashion: it raised taxes, which is pretty much a reflex action, since the typical congressman will want to raise taxes if he sneezes. Then, still short of funds, Congress borrowed money and when this also failed to raise enough money, Congress authorized the printing of currency that was not backed by anything but the faith that the government would eventually exchange the paper currency for gold or silver. Within a very short time, it took $285 of currency to buy $100 in gold.

Economists have a simple description for when any government has two types of official currency. Called Gresham’s Law, it simply states, “Bad money chases out good.” This means that, if the government has issued two types of money, people will hoard the “good” money—defined as the money they trust—so that only the “bad” money will be left in circulation. This is exactly what happened during the Civil War: as unbacked paper currency was introduced, people hoarded silver and gold.

Unfortunately, this also caused a scarcity of silver and gold coins. Silver quarters, dimes, and half-dimes quickly became scarce. (They were called half-dimes since the “nickel”—a coin made of 75% copper and 25% nickel—was not introduced until after the Civil War.). This made regular commercial transactions difficult. A single dollar at that time had the purchasing power of over $40 in today’s economy. You can imagine the difficulty in trying to buy a pack of gum if the smallest bill in circulation today were a $50 bill.

Congress formally authorized the use of postage stamps for government payments in July 1862, but once again, Gresham’s Law kicked in and soon there was a severe shortage of postage stamps.

To solve this problem, Congress turned—once again—to the printing press, and soon issued fractional notes worth 3, 5, 10, 25, and 50 cents each. The government ultimately issued about $369 million in fractional notes between 1862 and 1876.

In 1864, Congress authorized a new printing of 5-cent notes and requested that instead of putting the image of Washington or Jefferson on the note, they honor Clark of the famous Meriwether Lewis and William Clark expedition. The order was sent to the National Currency Bureau, the predecessor of today’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing. And here is where the wicket gets sticky. The superintendent of the bureau was Spencer M. Clark, who promptly saw a golden opportunity—so he produced the new fractional notes with his image instead of that of the famous explorer. Technically, he had done as ordered.

Maybe he thought no one would recognize him and notice the difference.

Congress was furious. Representative Martin Thayer of Pennsylvania argued that Treasury officials were abusing their authority to select currency portraits. On April 7, 1866, Congress enacted language providing that,

“No portrait or likeness of any living person hereafter engraved shall be placed” on federal bonds, securities, notes, or fractional currency.

Clark was not the first living official placed on currency—Salmon P. Chase, Francis Spinner, and William Fessenden had also appeared—but Clark’s audacity was the last straw. Congress soon discontinued paper notes worth less than ten cents, and the new five-cent nickel replaced Clark’s paper five-cent bill.

Clark surprisingly kept his position until 1868. His little act of bureaucratic vanity, however, created a rule that supposedly governed American money from that point forward: if you wanted your portrait on U.S. currency, you ordinarily had to kick the bucket first.

Well, no… Reread that law; it does not actually prohibit living people from appearing on coins. Its wording covered federal “bonds, securities, notes, fractional or postal currency”—in other words, paper obligations.

In 1926, to commemorate the 150^th anniversary of American independence, Congress authorized a commemorative 50-cent coin portraying George Washington and then president Calvin Coolidge on the obverse and the Liberty Bell on the reverse. Congress authorized up to one million half dollars, which the exposition commission bought at face value and resold for a dollar each.

As a fundraiser, it was a colossal flop—the public wasn’t interested in buying a half-dollar coin for twice the face value, and over 85% of the coins were returned to the mint and melted down. If you can find an uncirculated coin today, it’s worth about a hundred dollars.

Having been burned, Congress wanted to keep the nation’s coinage from becoming political advertising. Allowing a sitting president to place his own portrait on government money smacks of kings, emperors, and assorted dictators who have traditionally regarded national mints as their personal publicity departments. Restricting presidential coins to the dead keeps the currency historical and nonpartisan—or at least ensures that its subject is no longer running for office.

So Congress required presidents in the Presidential $1 Coin Program to have been dead for at least two years, providing a cooling-off period before the Mint begins polishing anyone’s reputation. The idea was to honor presidents only after history had begun assessing them, rather than letting current popularity, party control, or presidential vanity determine whose face appeared in Americans’ pockets.

So, it might surprise you to learn that President Trump’s image is going to be on the new $1 coin. He found a couple of loopholes.

Trump is not being added to the Presidential $1 Coin series created in 2005. His coin is a separate, one-year issue authorized by the Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020 to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary in 2026. Therefore, the Presidential-series requirement that its subjects be dead for two years does not apply.

The anniversary law prohibits portraits of living people on the reverse of its coins—but neglects to prohibit them on the obverse. Treasury is exploiting that distinction: Trump’s portrait is on the front, while the Presidential Seal appears on the back. Treasury says that makes it legal (although critics contend it violates the law’s obvious intent). The Mint has begun production, with collector rolls and bags expected in late fall 2026.

And yes—there will be lawsuits. And lawyers will mention Clark and Coolidge and the difference between obverse and reverse sides. You have been warned.

JumpStart: How to Tax the Golden Goose, Then Wonder Why It Moved Across the Lake

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0600

There is a certain type of city government that looks at a successful private economy the way my cat looks at unattended fried chicken. It does not think, “How did this get here?” It thinks, “How much of this can I eat before anyone notices?”

Seattle’s JumpStart payroll tax is a fine example of the genre.

JumpStart was sold as a progressive tax on big corporations with highly-paid employees. It passed in 2020 and targeted large employers with big Seattle payrolls and workers earning above high compensation thresholds. The theory was simple: Seattle had rich companies, rich workers, and not enough money for housing, homelessness, climate programs, and various other progressive civic ornaments. Therefore, Seattle would tax the payroll of the successful firms and use the money to do good things.

This is the sort of idea that sounds marvelous in a city council chamber, where money arrives as “revenue,” not as something previously owned by someone else.

Katie Wilson, now Seattle’s mayor, was not some innocent passerby, who wandered into this mess carrying a sandwich board. Her own campaign material says she played a “key role in designing and passing” the JumpStart payroll expense tax. Seattle Magazine likewise described her as having played an instrumental role in designing and passing it. So this is not a case of Mayor Wilson inheriting an alien machine from a previous civilization and wondering what all the smoke is about. She helped build the machine.

At first, the machine produced money…Lots of it. JumpStart generated hundreds of millions of dollars, which allowed supporters to declare victory. This is the standard first act in a tax drama. Politicians pass a tax, money comes in, and everyone applauds as if they have discovered fire.

The second act begins when the people being taxed notice and in Seattle, they did notice. More importantly, they noticed Bellevue.

Bellevue sits just across the city line—incorporated, convenient, and waiting. As Seattle began taxing employers through JumpStart, some of those employers discovered that moving just beyond Seattle’s reach was not exactly a moonshot. In less than six years since JumpStart was implemented, Bellevue’s city population has grown by only about 2,300 people, but the community has added more than 10,000 jobs and roughly 4,000,000 square feet of office space. In other words, the people did not necessarily move, but the payrolls sure as hell did.

Seattle’s problem is that its tax was aimed at exactly the people and companies most able to leave. A small restaurant owner cannot move his lunch counter to Bellevue without actually moving his life. Amazon, Microsoft contractors, tech teams, consultants, software divisions, and professional-service firms are another matter. Their workers do not need to be chained to a particular block of downtown Seattle. They need laptops, managers, conference rooms, fiber optic cables, and nearby coffee. Bellevue has all of those, plus the added virtue of not being Seattle.

Bellevue is not Mars: it is just across Lake Washington. If Seattle makes it more expensive to employ highly-paid workers inside Seattle, a rational company does not need to issue a dramatic press release titled, “Goodbye, Ungrateful City.” It simply lets leases expire, shifts teams, places new hires elsewhere, and tells the HR department to update the office map…which appears to be exactly the pattern. Amazon is still in Seattle, but its Seattle headcount has fallen from its peak, while its Bellevue headcount has risen. Broader reporting has described Bellevue as a major tech alternative to Seattle, with companies are citing taxes, downtown conditions, and quality-of-life issues as part of the attraction.

Meanwhile, downtown Seattle’s office market has looked less like a triumphant progressive revenue laboratory and more like a partially abandoned corporate aquarium. Axios reported that downtown Seattle’s central business district vacancy reached 30%, with availability at 34%. The Wall Street Journal, summarizing the Bellevue boom, described prime Seattle office vacancy at 34.6%, the highest for a large city in the nation.

An analysis backed by Downtown Seattle Association says downtown Seattle lost roughly 30,000 jobs and that taxable office-building value fell dramatically, while Bellevue gained jobs and saw commercial values rise. Since that is an advocacy-backed report, we should not treat it as holy scripture chiseled onto stone tablets. But the general direction is not hard to believe. Tax mobile jobs and some of the mobile jobs move.

Let us put numbers on this.

If Seattle loses 30,000 jobs, and we assume an average compensation of only $100,000, that is:

30,000 × $100,000 = $3 billion in annual payroll.

If these are high-end tech and professional jobs, the real number could easily be much higher. Even at the conservative figure, that is $3 billion a year in wages no longer circulating downtown in the same way. That means fewer lunches, fewer coffee runs, fewer dry-cleaning tickets, fewer happy hours, fewer parking receipts, fewer office leases, fewer business-service contracts, fewer transit trips, and fewer reasons for the next company to locate there.

The office-value loss is even more dramatic. If downtown office values fall by $10 billion, that is not just a sad day for landlords wearing expensive shoes. It is a destruction of taxable wealth, collateral value, construction incentive, investment appetite, and long-term urban confidence. Property-tax systems can disguise the loss for a while by shifting burdens and adjusting rates, but they cannot make dead office value rise from the grave by passing a resolution.

Then comes the truly comic part. JumpStart was originally sold as dedicated money for housing, homelessness, climate, and equitable development. But once the city got used to the money, it started using it to plug ordinary budget holes. Axios reported that Seattle redirected $287 million in 2025 and $223 million in 2026 from JumpStart’s intended uses into general-fund needs.

Let us add that:

$287 million + $223 million = $510 million.

That is more than half a billion dollars shifted into the general city budget because the city needed the money elsewhere. In plain English: the tax that was supposed to fund special progressive priorities not only became a crutch for ordinary city spending but also created larger deficits.

And the hole is not gone.

Recent projections show Seattle facing deficits of $175 million in 2027, $164 million in 2028, and $149 million in 2029.

Add those together:

$175 million + $164 million + $149 million = $488 million.

So Seattle has already shifted about $510 million of JumpStart money into general revenue for 2025 and 2026 and is looking at another $488 million in projected deficits from 2027 through 2029.

That gives us:

$510 million + $488 million = $998 million.

Call it a one-billion-dollar problem, give or take the usual municipal rounding error, which in Seattle seems to be measured in endangered coffee shops.

This is the great irony. JumpStart was supposed to be a way to make big business pay for Seattle’s ambitions. Instead, Seattle has become dependent on the tax while the new tax erodes the tax base, making income less dependable. And this will only get worse every year.

The city may have gotten the first check, but it seems to have lost the account.

The defenders of JumpStart can still point to money raised, which is true, but it is also something any robber can do. The question is not whether the city raised money, but it is whether the city’s new tax is chasing off other revenue. If the tax helped encourage highly-paid jobs, office demand, business investment, and future growth to migrate across the lake, then Seattle did not harvest wealth. It harvested and ate their seed corn.

That is the part progressive tax designers so often miss. Capital is not a statue, jobs are not fence posts, and payrolls are not geological formations: they all move and adapt. Worse yet, they flee quietly—often without leaving a forwarding address.

JumpStart may have been a success in the narrowest possible bookkeeping sense: it produced revenue. But since the price is a weaker downtown, emptier offices, fewer high-value jobs, lower property values, and a city budget still staring at nearly half a billion dollars in future deficits, then perhaps the name was more honest than intended.

The program actually did “jump-start” something.

It’s just apparently not Seattle.

Five Foolish Ideas from Economically Challenged Legislators

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Every now and then a legislator comes up with an idea so pure, so compassionate, so utterly detached from reality that you almost have to admire it. Not because it will work. Good Lord, no. But because it takes a special kind of mind to look at a grocery store, an apartment building, or a checkout lane and think, “You know what this needs? A mandate from someone who has never had to make payroll.”

There is a particular type of modern politician who believes that prices, wages, rent, inventory, staffing, food waste, and profit margins are not economic facts. They are moral failures. If groceries cost too much, command them to cost less. If food is thrown away, order it donated. If rent is high, cap it. If self-checkout annoys someone, regulate the scanner. If billionaires have money, announce that you will take it and then act surprised when they begin browsing real estate in Florida.

This is economics by bumper sticker. And, as usual, the bumper sticker fits neatly on the car because the actual explanation would require a trailer.

Let us consider five recent ideas from the economically challenged wing of the legislature.

1. The Ten Percent Self-Checkout Discount

Some genius in New York has proposed that grocery stores should be required to give customers a ten percent discount for using self-checkout. The theory seems to be that if you scan your own groceries, you are now an unpaid employee and deserve compensation.

This has the surface appeal of one of those arguments made by a sophomore who has just discovered injustice, marijuana, and sex in the same semester. “Why should I scan my own soup and not get paid?”

The problem is that grocery stores do not have ten percent profit margins. They do not have a secret room in the back where they roll around in canned-bean money. Grocery retail is a low-margin business. A ten percent mandatory discount is not a reward for the customer. It is an instruction to sell the food at a loss.

So what would happen? Exactly what any adult would expect. Stores would raise prices, remove self-checkout machines, restrict their use, reduce staffing elsewhere, and build the cost into everything on the shelf. The legislator imagines a shopper saving money. The grocer sighs and makes more cuts to customer service while demanding more productivity from a shrinking labor force.

This is the recurring problem with economically challenged politicians: they think the first move is the whole game. They pass the law, everyone claps, and the curtain falls. In the real world, people respond. Businesses respond. The board changes after every move.

If you make self-checkout a guaranteed loss, you do not get cheaper groceries. You get fewer self-checkout lanes, higher prices, and another small lesson in why arithmetic should be required before holding office.

2. Mandatory Staffing Ratios for Self-Checkout

Not content with misunderstanding self-checkout once, some places are also considering rules that would require one employee for every few self-checkout machines, along with item limits and other helpful little instructions from the Ministry of Retail Wisdom.

Now, I will freely admit that self-checkout can be irritating. There are few things in modern life more insulting than being accused by a machine of stealing bananas while a clerk with a magic key has to come pardon you. The machine says “unexpected item in bagging area” with the moral certainty of Cotton Mather spotting a witch.

But stores already know this. They know when customers hate the machines. They know when theft is too high. They know when one employee can monitor six kiosks and when three kiosks are too many. These decisions depend on the store, the neighborhood, the product mix, the technology, the time of day, and the customers.

The legislature knows none of this.

A government-mandated staffing ratio is not consumer protection. It is anti-automation policy with a little smiley-face sticker on it. If lawmakers want to preserve cashier jobs, they should say so. But then they should also admit the tradeoff: longer lines, higher labor costs, higher prices, and fewer stores willing to operate in marginal areas.

This is the old habit of pretending that the cost will be paid by “business,” as if business was a large anonymous creature living in a cave. But the cost gets paid by everyone. Customers pay it in prices. Workers pay it in fewer hours elsewhere. Stores pay it by closing locations or not opening new ones.

The law does not repeal cost. It merely disguises the invoice.

3. Paper Copies of Digital Coupons

Then we have the proposal that if a store offers a digital coupon, it must also provide a paper version of the same discount.

I have some sympathy for the complaint. Digital coupons are often obnoxious. You walk into a store and see that butter is $3.49, only to discover that this price is available only if you have downloaded the app, created an account, confirmed your email, remembered your password, sacrificed a goat, and allowed the store to track your movements until the Second Coming.

For older customers especially, that is a real problem. A grocery discount should not require a technology support call from a grandson.

But turning every digital coupon into a mandatory paper coupon is how government turns an annoyance into a department. Now the store has to print, stock, track, honor, explain, police, and audit the paper coupons. Employees have to deal with fraud, confusion, arguments, expired coupons, missing coupons, duplicate coupons, and customers who saw the sign but did not bring the paper.

And the predictable result? Fewer coupons. There is no way to lower prices by raising costs.

The legislator thinks he has made the discount more accessible. The store thinks, “Fine, we will offer fewer discounts.” Once again, the law assumes behavior will not change after the mandate. Once again, this assumption has the life expectancy of a snow cone in Las Cruces.

A sensible rule would be simple: if a store advertises a digital price in the aisle, let the cashier apply it for customers who ask. Done. Problem mostly solved. No paper-coupon bureaucracy. No compliance circus.

But sensible rules lack the grandeur of a bill-signing ceremony.

4. Mandatory Donation of Near-Date Food

This is the one that really sounds wonderful, right up until you think about it for twelve seconds.

Grocery stores throw away food. Poor people need food. Therefore, require grocery stores to donate food that is near its sell-by date instead of tossing it out.

At first glance, this sounds like kindness. At second glance, it sounds like kindness written by someone who has never ordered lettuce.

The great mistake is the idea that “the food already exists.” Yes, it exists the first day. But after the law is in place, the grocer is not making decisions about yesterday’s food. He is making decisions about tomorrow’s order.

Before the mandate, the manager might order 100 units, expecting to sell 85 at full price, mark down 10, and lose 5. That is not ideal, but it is part of the abundance customers demand. We want full shelves. We want ripe produce. We want bread available at 6 p.m., not just a sign saying, “We sold the mathematically correct amount at 3:14.”

After the mandate, those last five units are not merely possible waste. They are a compliance problem. They must be sorted, stored, refrigerated, documented, separated, perhaps logged, maybe inspected, and coordinated with a charity that may or may not arrive on time with refrigerated transport.

That is not free. It takes labor. It takes space. It takes management. It takes training. It creates risk. It creates overhead.

So next week the manager orders 92.

The legislator sees less food in the dumpster and declares victory. What he does not see is the food that was never ordered. The produce that was never stocked. The bread that was never baked. The farmer who got a smaller order. The distributor who handled less volume. The customer who came late and found empty shelves. The poor shopper who used to buy markdown meat and now finds there is none. Everyone loses because of the loss of economy of scale.

This is the difference between physical surplus and economic surplus. The food is physically there today. But the legal obligation changes the cost of having surplus tomorrow. And when you raise the cost of surplus, you get less surplus.

That may sound good until you realize that grocery abundance depends on tolerating some waste. A perfectly efficient grocery store is one where the last apple is sold to the last customer just before closing. It is also a store that exists only in the imagination of someone who has never met customers.

The better policy is obvious: make donation easy, voluntary, safe, and legally protected. Encourage it. Provide tax incentives if necessary. Standardize date labels so people stop throwing away food that is still perfectly edible. Help charities build cold-storage capacity.

But do not turn every unsold tomato into a legal obligation. Once the government starts punishing inventory risk, the market responds by taking fewer risks. That means fewer tomatoes and fewer choices in the store.

5. Rent Control, Wealth Taxes, and the General War on Incentives

For the fifth foolish idea, I am going to cheat and include an entire category: laws based on the belief that incentives are optional.

Rent control is the classic example. Rents are high, so government limits rent increases. The current tenant benefits, at least for a while. The politician takes a bow. The newspaper runs a photo of grateful renters.

Then landlords stop building. Maintenance declines. Units disappear into other uses. New renters get locked out. The people already inside the system are protected; everyone outside gets to press his nose against the glass.

Rent control is not housing policy. It is musical chairs with nicer slogans.

Then there are wealth taxes. These usually begin with the discovery that billionaires have a lot of money, followed by the belief that they will remain politely seated while the state rummages through their pockets.

But billionaires are not fence posts. They can move. Their assets can move. Their lawyers can move even faster. Announce a “one-time” wealth tax and every affected person hears the words “first installment.” If the state says, “We will tax you because you were here on January 1,” the obvious lesson is: do not be here on January 1.

Politicians imagine the money sitting still. Money does not sit still. Capital has legs, wings, attorneys, accountants, and a deep personal relationship with Delaware.

The same error appears in all these ideas. Legislators look at the current arrangement and assume it will remain unchanged after they impose new costs. Grocers will order the same amount. Stores will offer the same coupons. Landlords will build the same apartments. Billionaires will stay put. Customers will pay less. Workers will earn more. Farmers will sell the same produce. Everyone will behave exactly as before, except in the one narrow way the law commands.

That is not policy. That is a snow globe.

Shake it, admire the flakes, and ignore the fact that nobody inside is real.

The recurring question in economics is not, “Wouldn’t it be nice?” Of course it would be nice. It would be nice if groceries were cheaper, rent were lower, food were never wasted, checkout lines moved faster, and billionaires mailed checks to the treasury out of civic affection.

The real question is: and then what?

And then the grocer orders less.
And then the store raises prices.
And then the landlord stops building.
And then the billionaire moves.
And then the discount disappears.
And then the checkout line gets longer.
And then the farmer plants less.

And then everyone wonders why the compassionate law produced such uncompassionate results.

The economically challenged legislator never gets to “and then what?” He stops at the press release.

The rest of us live in the “and then.”

The Fort Worth Nude Scandal of 1959

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 4 Jul 2026 00:01:00 -0600

The scandal occurred when I was six years old and I remember my mother and father talking about it. Either my memories were incorrect or my mother’s version of the story was different from what really happened. In any case it turns out that what I thought happened was a country mile from reality. I’ve done some research and here is the real story.

I suppose we have to start, as many Texas stories must, with two cowboys named Goodnight and Loving.

The Goodnight-Loving Trail sounds less like a cattle route than a firm of frontier attorneys specializing in unpaid whiskey bills, but Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving managed to turn it into one of the great Texas enterprises: pushing longhorns north and west through country so dry the trees chased dogs and selling beef to soldiers, miners, and anyone else who was willing to pay cash for something that could walk to dinner under its own power.

Their story had everything Texas requires for legend—cattle, dust, danger, Comanches, bad water, worse judgment, and men with beards who considered sleeping indoors a sign of moral decline. Loving died after being wounded on the trail, Goodnight kept his promise to bring the body home, and the whole thing became the sort of story Texans admire because it proves that if a man is stubborn enough, he can turn dehydration, bankruptcy, and poor road planning into glorious heritage.

The story of Goodnight and Loving, and their work with their friend John Chisum, became the foundation for dozens of movies, countless books, and, more or less, the beating heart of Lonesome Dove. Texans have been dining out on the story ever since.

By the 1890s, the grandson of Oliver Loving had opened Ellison Furniture Store in downtown Fort Worth. It became a profitable business and, by the 1950s, occupied an eight-story building at the corner of Seventh and Throckmorton. I remember being in that store…Dimly, but I remember it. There was a different kind of furniture on every floor and there was an art gallery (which seemed to me at the time like something adults had invented so children would learn patience).

By the time I went into the store, it was run by Bob Ellison, the great-great-grandson of Oliver Loving. I think the cowboy heritage had petered out by the time Bob was born; he had a degree in philosophy and had spent extensive time touring art museums in Europe. It was his wife’s suggestion that he turn the first floor of the furniture store into an art gallery.

In 1959, artist Ben Johnson submitted a painting called The Song to the Fort Worth Art Association. It was an abstract, colorful depiction of a nude woman. The Art Association rejected it on the grounds that it was vulgar. This pissed off Bob Ellison, who was unimpressed by the cultural judgment of the local fig-leaf brigade, so he displayed the painting in a street-facing window of his furniture store as a protest for artistic freedom.

Perhaps there was a little cowboy left in Bob after all.

This instantly caused a furor in Fort Worth, a city that was deep in the center of the Bible Belt. Fort Worth had its own movie censorship board tasked with making certain that Hollywood didn’t undermine the morality of the frontier metropolis. The city had churches over a century old, one of which was the First Baptist Church, which was the largest church in the United States and the home of Frank Norris, the nationally-known, fire-breathing fundamentalist preacher famous for leading the fight against “that hell-born, Bible-destroying, deity-of-Christ-denying, German rationalism known as evolution."

Naturally, the Fort Worth Ministers Association stepped forward. This was a group deeply committed to making certain that no one in the city accidentally had any fun without proper supervision. They began a concerted effort to have the painting removed on the grounds that it was vulgar, obscene, and a threat to the morals of a cowtown that had built much of its early reputation on whiskey, whorehouses, and gun fights.

Letters to the editor described The Song as obscene graffiti or etchings suitable for an outhouse. Of course, the publicity did what publicity always does. Citizens of Fort Worth flocked to see the painting for themselves. Some viewed it from across the street, presumably so that if moral contamination occurred, it would have to travel through traffic. Many were outraged and some even returned several times to see if they were still outraged. Vehicle traffic on Seventh Street slowed to a crawl.

There is no spectacle quite like a city insisting it does not want to look at something while lining up for a better view.

At this point, you probably want to know what this scandalous painting looked like. Unfortunately, the current whereabouts of The Song are unknown. As far as I can determine, only two black-and-white photographs remain, both showing the artist, Ben Johnson, and two women standing in front of the painting. Sadly, the photographs do not show the colorful, pre-abstract painting to its best advantage.

However, there is another Johnson painting that was included in the show at the Ellison Furniture Store. This painting, known simply as Nude (1957), gives us an excellent idea of what the missing painting looked like.

By today’s standards, the painting is so innocent, the public debate so trivial, and the Art Association’s refusal to show it so silly, that the whole episode makes the guardians of public virtue look like the sort of sanctimonious buffoons who wander through museums at night gluing fig leaves on statues.

Evidently, Bob Ellison thought so, too. He moved to New York City, where he continued to collect art. A few years later, he sold the Ellison Furniture Company. When he died, part of his collection was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not surprisingly, Ellison did not leave his collection to the art museums of Fort Worth. One suspects he had decided that if Fort Worth did not want to see a painting in 1959, there was no need to trouble the city with the burden of seeing the good ones later.

We may never know what happened to The Song. It might be hanging quietly in someone’s house, or rolled up in an attic, or misidentified in storage, or gone forever. But if you would like to see Johnson’s Nude, you can travel to New York City and walk down Broadway to the Schoelkopf Gallery, where it has been on display.

You should no hold your breath waiting for it to be shown in Fort Worth.

Rent Freeze Today, Housing Shortage Tomorrow

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:01:00 -0600

Zohran Mamdani promised to freeze the rent, and, to his credit or blame, depending on which end of the lease you occupy, he has now delivered the essential part of that promise. Mayor Mamdani did so, not by standing on the steps of City Hall and personally ordering every landlord in New York to reach for the smelling salts, but through the New York City Rent Guidelines Board, which voted to freeze rent increases on roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments. Since Mamdani appointed six of the ten members of the board, it amounts to the same thing.

That distinction matters: he did not freeze every apartment in New York. He did not freeze luxury towers, market-rate brownstones, or the rent on a closet in Brooklyn now advertised as “cozy, sun-adjacent, artist-friendly space.” What he froze were the allowable increases on the already rent-stabilized apartments—the giant middle category of New York housing that is neither free-market nor old-fashioned rent-control. These are the units where tenants already have strong renewal rights and landlords are already limited in what they may charge.

Still, as campaign promises go, this one was not merely symbolic. The board approved a zero percent increase on both one-year and two-year leases. That is the important part. Prior rent freezes usually gave tenants relief for one year. This unprecedented move extends the logic to two-year renewals as well. Mamdani promised tenants that their rent would not go up. For covered tenants choosing a renewal lease beginning under this order, that is now essentially true.

The immediate political benefit is obvious. If you are a tenant in a rent-stabilized apartment and your rent was about to rise, this feels like someone finally threw you a rope. New York rents are absurd. Working people are squeezed. Families are doubled up, priced out, or forced to spend the grocery budget on the privilege of living near a subway stop that smells faintly of hot brake dust and despair. A rent freeze is simple, understandable to the uneducated, and immediately popular with the people who receive it.

But economics has a nasty habit of showing up after the applause ends.

Start with tenant behavior. If both the one-year and two-year lease options carry a zero percent increase, what rational tenant planning to stay in the apartment would choose only one year? The two-year lease becomes the obvious choice. It is not greed. It is arithmetic. Why lock in one year of protection when you can lock in two? If the Rent Guidelines Board comes back next year and allows an increase, the tenant who chose one year is exposed. The tenant who chose two years is protected.

That means a large share of tenants will likely pick the two-year lease. The landlord will not merely lose one year of increases, he may lose two. Meanwhile, the building does not get a rate freeze from the insurance company. It does not get a tax freeze from the city. (And Mayor Mamdani is proposing to raise property taxes by 9.5%). The plumber does not say, “Never mind, this one is for the revolution.” The boiler company does not repair the heat out of solidarity. Labor, insurance, taxes, utilities, repairs, debt service, compliance costs — all of these keep moving.

This is where the romance of rent control collides with the plumbing.

A building is not a moral abstraction—it is a physical object with a roof, pipes, wiring, elevators, boilers, bricks, locks, stairs, fire systems, trash areas, and tenants who quite reasonably expect all of those to work. If rent is frozen while costs rise, the owner has fewer dollars available for maintenance. Large landlords may be able to absorb that for a while. Some may even deserve little sympathy. But New York also has small building owners, older buildings, marginal properties, and landlords already struggling with post-2019 rules that limited how much renovation cost can be recovered through future rent.

The result is predictable. Necessary repairs get delayed. Cosmetic repairs disappear. Marginal buildings become more marginal. An owner who would have renovated a vacant apartment may decide not to bother. A unit that needs $50,000 in work but can only legally rent for an amount that will never repay the investment, is not an affordable apartment. It is a stranded asset with a broken stove.

That brings us to the problem of “ghost apartments.” New York already has over 57,000 vacant rent-stabilized units. These are units that are sitting empty because owners say the rent laws make renovation uneconomic. In plain English, they are apartments that exist on paper, languish behind locked doors, and do absolutely nothing for the people who need housing.

A city with a housing shortage cannot afford ghost apartments. It cannot afford tens of thousands of legal apartments standing empty while politicians give speeches about affordability. Every empty unit is a small confession that the policy system has failed. The tenant does not get the apartment. The landlord does not get rent. The city does not get a functioning housing unit. Everyone loses—except perhaps the lawyer explaining why nothing can be done until the next hearing.

New York has already run this experiment, and the results in the 1960s and 1970s should make everyone a little less smug about today’s rent-freeze promises. Wartime rent control began as an emergency measure in the 1940s, but by the postwar decades the emergency had somehow become a permanent feature of city life, like rats in the alleys or a subway performer with a guitar. The theory was simple: keep rents low and tenants safe. The reality was less charming. In older buildings, especially in poorer neighborhoods, rents were held below the level needed to cover taxes, repairs, heat, insurance, plumbing, roofs, and the thousand other indignities suffered by buildings that have the nerve to age. Landlords responded exactly as arithmetic said they would: they delayed repairs, cut maintenance, walked away from marginal properties, or let buildings deteriorate until abandonment became the business plan. By the late 1960s, New York’s vacancy rate had collapsed to crisis levels, and through the 1960s and 1970s entire neighborhoods saw disinvestment, abandonment, arson, and decay. Rent control did not cause all of that by itself—crime, poverty, population loss, bad city finances, and urban collapse all had supporting roles—but strict rent control helped turn ordinary housing into a financial trap. Eventually, the city’s own housing authority begged to end rent control.

The real solution to high rents is not mysterious. New York needs more housing. Not slogans about housing. Not hearings about housing. Not a blue-ribbon commission to study whether people prefer sleeping indoors. Actual housing. More apartments. More density. Faster approvals. Lower construction barriers. A system in which building rental housing is treated as a public necessity rather than a suspicious activity requiring seven consultants, fourteen signatures, and a goat sacrifice before the zoning board.

A city cannot simultaneously tell private capital, “Please build and maintain rental housing,” and “By the way, your future income may be politically frozen whenever rents become unpopular.” Developers and lenders are not sentimental creatures—they are experts who price risk. If New York becomes a place where the return on rental housing is increasingly controlled by politics, fewer people will build rental housing unless the city pays them, subsidizes them, gives them tax breaks, gives them land, or forces them through zoning mandates.

That may be Mamdani’s actual preference: more publicly-driven housing, more subsidized housing, more city-guided construction. Fine. Then the question becomes whether the city can actually build at that scale, at that speed, and at a cost that does not turn every affordable apartment into a marble monument to bureaucratic process. Promising 200,000 units is easy. Delivering them in New York is where campaign poetry goes to die.

A comparison with Buenos Aires is useful because Argentina recently tried the opposite experiment. Argentina’s earlier rental law had heavily regulated lease terms and rent adjustments. When President Javier Milei repealed those controls, the Buenos Aires rental market changed rapidly. Landlords who had withheld units put them back on the market. Rental listings rose sharply. Real rents fell or stabilized after inflation, at least in the first period after repeal. Landlords are now competing for tenants by offering lower rents or improved amenities.

This is a lesson worth noticing. When the rules made renting unattractive, supply disappeared. When the rules were loosened, supply came back.

New York is choosing the opposite, protecting current tenants by squeezing future returns. In the short run, that works for the people lucky enough to have a covered apartment. In the long run, it risks creating fewer available apartments, worse maintenance, more ghost units, and even higher pressure on the uncontrolled market.

That is the oldest problem with rent control. It is wonderful if you are inside the lifeboat. It is less wonderful if you are swimming beside it.

Mamdani delivered what he promised. That should be acknowledged, but delivering a promise is not the same thing as solving a problem. Freezing rent may help today’s tenant sign a two-year lease, but does not fix the boiler, finance the renovation, lure the builder, or bring the ghost apartment back to life.

The first step to achieving affordable housing is to have housing. That sounds almost too simple to say, which may be why politicians avoid saying it. New York does not need a better way to ration scarcity. It needs less scarcity.

The Social Security Mattress Fund

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Back in 2005, George W. Bush suggested that maybe, just maybe, Social Security ought to let some money should be invested in the market. Naturally, Washington reacted as if he had proposed funding retirement by making seniors fight raccoons for loose change behind the Cracker Barrel. We were told this was dangerous. Reckless. Radical. Possibly the end of civilization, or at least the end of the entitlement system as a sacred government-operated mattress stuffed with IOUs.

The idea was simple enough: instead of putting every Social Security dollar into the federal government’s own weird bookkeeping system, take some portion of the incoming payroll-tax money and invest it in the productive American economy. Not in tulip bulbs. Not in Uncle Louie’s alpaca ranch. Not in a cryptocurrency named RetireCoin bearing a cartoon eagle wearing sunglasses. Just something boring, broad, and dull enough to make a Vanguard brochure seem like a Tom Clancy novel: an S&P 500 index fund, the darkest blue of blue chip investments.

Now suppose we had taken half of new Social Security payroll-tax receipts beginning around 2005 and invested that half in a broad S&P 500 index fund. The other half would still have gone into the regular Social Security system to help pay current benefits. This was not a proposal to stop paying Grandma. Grandma would still get her check. She might even get it while glaring at CNBC and demanding to know why Pfizer was down three-eighths.

Under a rough model, investing half of the incoming payroll-tax money from 2005 through 2025 in the S&P 500 would have produced a gross investment account of roughly $38 trillion. That is not a typo. It is not $38 billion, which is the kind of number Congress loses in a sofa cushion while looking for a defense contractor. It is $38 Trillion, with a T.

Of course, that gross number is not the same as saying Social Security would have had $38 trillion sitting in the vault, stacked neatly between the Ark of the Covenant and Jimmy Hoffa. Social Security still had to pay benefits during those years. People retired. Checks went out. Medical alert bracelets were purchased. Grandchildren were slipped twenty-dollar bills and told not to tell their parents. If we subtract the continuing cost of paying benefits from the fantasy version where all of this was magically self-contained, the more realistic rough net figure comes down to something like $16.5 trillion to $17 trillion.

That is still an astonishing number. The actual Social Security trust fund was about $2.6 trillion at the end of 2025. So instead of limping along with a fund that Washington keeps warning will be exhausted in the foreseeable future, we might have had a net fund in the neighborhood of $16.6 trillion. That is a difference of about $14 trillion. Fourteen trillion dollars is not walking-around money. That is not “rounding error.” That is not the amount the federal government spends because someone in a subcommittee discovered there are still three counties in America without a federally funded interpretive dance center.

And here is where it gets really irritating.

This period was not exactly a golden escalator ride to prosperity. Anyone who says, “Well sure, the stock market did well, but only because everything went perfectly,” should be required to sit quietly in a room and watch financial news from 2008 on a loop until they apologize to the nearest index fund. Since 2005, we have had the housing collapse, the financial crisis, the Great Recession, the COVID crash, inflation panic, interest-rate panic, recession panic, bank panic, election panic, European panic, China panic, debt-ceiling panic, and the recurring American tradition of yelling “This is unsustainable!” while continuing to sustain it with borrowed money.

The S&P still won.

That does not mean stocks always go up. They do not. Sometimes they fall down the stairs, burst through the screen door, and land in the shrubbery. But over long periods, owning pieces of profitable companies has historically done better than lending money to the federal government so it can write itself a note promising to repay itself later. The Social Security trust fund is not exactly Scrooge McDuck’s money bin. It is mostly a pile of special Treasury securities, which is Washington’s way of saying, “We spent the money, but we left ourselves a very formal Post-it note.”

Now, for the truly nervous, let us run a deliberately ridiculous stress test. Suppose the invested half of payroll taxes had not earned the actual S&P returns. Suppose it had lost 10% every single year.

Not one bad year. Not one crash. Not a recession. Not 2008. I mean losing 10% per year, every year, for twenty-one years. That is not an investment model. That is a financial horror movie. That is the stock market being managed by rabid squirrels with margin accounts. That is a mutual fund whose prospectus simply says, “Abandon hope, all ye who enroll.”

Even then, if half of annual payroll-tax contributions had been set aside each year from 2005 through 2025 and the balance had shrunk by 10% annually, the side fund would still have ended up around $3.95 trillion. Compared with the actual trust fund reserve of about $2.56 trillion, even that disaster scenario would be ahead by roughly $1.4 trillion.

That number requires an important explanation, because otherwise someone from Washington will run into the room waving a blue-ribbon commission report and wheezing into a microphone. The $3.95 trillion figure is the value of the side investment fund under the absurd “loses 10% every year” assumption. It assumes benefits are still being paid through the regular Social Security cash-flow system. If you charged all benefits against that side fund alone, then of course it would not work. But that was never the point. The point is that setting aside part of incoming money creates a growing asset pool, even under comically terrible assumptions. Under real-world market returns from 2005 through 2025, that asset pool would have been gigantic.

And no, this does not mean we should turn Social Security into a day-trading app. Nobody needs Grandma checking candlestick charts between “Wheel of Fortune” and the evening news. The point is not speculation. The point is ownership. A broad index fund is not betting on one company. It is buying a slice of American productivity. It is owning part of the companies that make the phones, build the stores, drill the oil, run the railroads, process the payments, sell the groceries, manufacture the drugs, ship the packages, write the software, and generally keep the country functioning while Congress holds hearings about why nothing functions.

A system like this would also have changed the psychology of Social Security. Instead of workers seeing payroll taxes vanish into the federal fog, they would know that at least some part of the money was being invested in real assets. Not promises. Not slogans. Not “the full faith and credit” of people who cannot pass a budget without theatrical hostage negotiations. Real ownership in real companies.

Imagine what that much sustained investment in the American economy could have meant. Not every dollar would have gone directly into a new factory or a new job, because index funds mostly buy shares that already exist. But long-term investment strengthens markets. It lowers the cost of capital. It supports expansion. It helps companies grow, hire, modernize, research, build, and compete. It also gives ordinary workers a direct stake in the growth of the country. The people paying into Social Security would not just be funding benefits for today’s retirees. They would be building a national nest egg tied to the success of American enterprise.

Instead, we chose the mattress.

Every year, payroll taxes come in. Benefits go out. The surplus, when there is one, gets lent to the federal government. The federal government spends it. The trust fund receives a Treasury security. Everyone in Washington puts on a serious face and says the system is “invested.” Technically, that is true. It is invested in the same sense that giving your brother-in-law $500 and receiving a napkin that says “I owe you big-time” is fixed-income investing.

The obvious reply is that it is too late now. We missed the chance. The 2005 train left the station. The conductor retired, the station was renamed after a senator, and the tracks are now part of a federal high-speed rail study that will be completed in 2147.

But it is not too late.

We do not have to fix the entire system in one heroic act. Washington loves heroic acts because they create press conferences, commemorative pens, and bipartisan photographs in which everyone looks as if they just smelled smoke. But Social Security could begin modestly. Set aside a small percentage of annual payroll-tax receipts into a true national investment fund. Make it broad. Make it boring. Make it automatic. Make it legally protected from congressional raids, which means putting it behind more locks than Fort Knox, NORAD, and a teenager’s phone.

Start with 1%. Or 2%. Or 5%. The exact number matters less than the principle: stop treating every incoming dollar as if it must be spent immediately or loaned to the same government that is already broke. Begin building an actual asset base. Let compounding do what compounding does. It will not solve every problem overnight. It would not make actuarial deficits disappear like a magician’s assistant but it would move the system in the right direction.

The best time to have begun was twenty years ago. The second-best time is now. The worst time is always “after the next election,” which in Washington means approximately never.

Social Security does not need a casino. It sure as hell does not need any more immoral politicians promising the elderly the economic impossible. It needs a savings account with ambition. It needs a portion of its annual inflow tied to the productive economy instead of buried in the federal mattress. We had a chance in 2005 and ran away from it screaming. Fine. We are older now. Presumably wiser. Certainly more indebted.

Maybe it is time to stop pretending the mattress is a retirement plan.

Cruel and Unusual

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0600

What no one argues is that four people were killed in Tommy Zeigler’s family furniture store in Winter Garden, Florida, on Christmas Eve. That much is not in dispute. The dead were Zeigler’s wife, Eunice; her parents, Perry and Virginia Edwards; and a customer named Charlie Mays. Zeigler himself was also shot and badly wounded, which is either evidence that he was a surviving victim of a robbery gone catastrophically wrong, or evidence that he was a very determined murderer willing to shoot himself in the abdomen to sell the story.

This is not a cheerful Christmas story. Somewhere Norman Rockwell just put down his paintbrush and poured himself bourbon.

The State of Florida’s theory was that Zeigler planned the whole thing. According to prosecutors, he killed his wife for a large life-insurance payout, then killed her parents and Charlie Mays as part of an elaborate cover-up. Mays, in the state’s version, was not an innocent customer who wandered into the wrong furniture store at the wrong time—he was the convenient corpse Zeigler needed in order to make the murders look like a robbery or shootout.

Zeigler has always maintained the opposite. He says he walked into violence already in progress, fought for his life, and barely survived. His lawyers have repeatedly argued that physical evidence, blood evidence, and DNA evidence do not support the prosecution’s version of events. Prosecutors, with equal enthusiasm, have insisted that the case was proved and the jury agreed.

A Florida jury convicted Zeigler. He was convicted of first-degree murder in the deaths of Eunice Zeigler and Charlie Mays, and second-degree murder in the deaths of Perry and Virginia Edwards. The jury recommended life imprisonment for the death-eligible counts. The judge overrode that recommendation and imposed death sentences anyway, because Florida law at the time allowed judges to do that sort of thing. It is always comforting when the justice system finds a way to make “recommended by the jury” mean “thank you for your suggestion, please enjoy a complimentary mint on the way out.”

The case then moved into the strange afterlife of capital punishment, where nothing is ever really finished. Zeigler’s original trial concluded, but the litigation continued. His death sentence was vacated and then reimposed by a different judge. There have been appeals, post-conviction motions, DNA fights, evidentiary hearings, death warrants, stays, more motions, more hearings, and enough paperwork to mulch a small national forest.

This is where the phrase “cruel and unusual” begins to chew through the bars of Tommy’s cell on death row. You see, Tommy Ziegler was convicted in 1976, he has been waiting to be executed for 50 years.

The Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Any civilized person should be willing to admit that the deliberate killing of a prisoner by the state at least wanders into the neighborhood of that prohibition, even if the Supreme Court has decided, for now, that capital punishment is not automatically unconstitutional. “For now” is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. Constitutional law is permanent in the same way wallpaper is permanent. It stays right where it is until enough people decide it has become hideous.

There are endless debates about the death penalty, and I understand both sides, which is inconvenient because it prevents the clean pleasures of yelling. I dislike the idea of the state executing people. I especially dislike the idea of the state executing people after the state has repeatedly demonstrated that it can lose evidence, botch trials, rely on junk science, believe jailhouse informants, and occasionally confuse “beyond a reasonable doubt” with “close enough for government work.”

On the other hand, I can think of crimes so monstrous that life in prison feels inadequate. There are people who have done things so evil that the soul reaches for punishment before the brain can call a committee meeting. For someone like Osama bin Laden, even my better angels admit the executioner should browse the power-tool aisle at Lowe’s in search of a method of fulfilling the court’s sentence.

So, I am not writing this as someone who thinks the death penalty is always morally impossible. I am writing as someone who thinks it is far too easy to support the death penalty in theory and far too hard to defend it in practice.

Because in practice, it is a mess. A slow, expensive, contradictory, lawyer-fed mess.

And it is expensive. That is the part that always surprises people. Many assume execution must be cheaper than keeping someone in prison for life. After all, food costs money. Guards cost money. Medical care costs money. Prisons are not free, no matter how many politicians speak as if we built them out of surplus righteousness and unpaid interns.

But the execution itself is not the expensive part. The syringe, the chemicals, the gurney, and the last meal are not what bankrupts the state. The money disappears decades earlier, in the capital trial process. A death-penalty case is not just a murder trial. It becomes a media circus that lingers for years.

The lawyers have to be more specialized. Jury selection takes longer. Experts are hired. Motions breed in the file cabinet like rabbits. If there is a conviction, there is often a separate penalty phase, which is essentially a second trial to decide whether the defendant will live or die. Then come the automatic appeals, state post-conviction proceedings, federal habeas petitions, challenges to evidence, challenges to lawyers, challenges to the method of execution, and occasionally litigation over whether the state’s preferred chemical cocktail is medicine, punishment, or a very grim chemistry fair project. All of this clogs up the court calendar and costs some very real taxpayer money.

And there should be safeguards. That is the maddening part. The cost is not simply waste. Much of it is the price of trying not to kill the wrong person. A mistaken prison sentence is terrible, but at least there is some possibility of correction. A mistaken execution cannot be fixed with an apology, a check, and a plaque reading, “Oops.”

Study after study has found that death cases cost more than life-without-parole cases. Maryland found that a death sentence cost millions more than a comparable non-death case. California’s death-penalty system has been estimated to cost billions more than a system where life without parole is the maximum penalty. North Carolina researchers reached similar conclusions. Kansas found that death cases devour more court time than ordinary murder cases, which is a little like discovering that a hippopotamus takes up more room in the bathtub than a duck.

So no, the death penalty is not the budget-conscious option…it is not discount justice. It is premium-priced vengeance, financed one hearing at a time with the taxpayers footing the bill.

If we lived in some imaginary country where the sheriff arrested a murderer on Monday, the judge sentenced him on Tuesday, and the executioner handled matters on Wednesday before lunch, then yes, execution would probably be cheaper. But that is not the United States. We have constitutional protections, appellate review, evidentiary rules, procedural safeguards, and a national memory full of wrongful convictions. We also have judges, lawyers, prosecutors, clerks, experts, transcripts, motions, remands, re-hearings, and a legal vocabulary apparently designed by people paid by the syllable.

The real question, then, is not whether execution is cheaper. The real answer is that it usually is not. The real question then becomes whether the state should spend extra money to achieve death rather than permanent imprisonment.

Some people will say “yes” because they believe certain crimes deserve the ultimate punishment regardless of cost. That is a moral argument and it may be right or wrong, but at least it is honest. What is not honest is pretending the death penalty saves money. It does not. In fact, it is the most expensive way to prove that the state is very, very angry.

Which brings me to a possible compromise (though I admit compromises on the death penalty have all the natural grace of a committee-designed camel). What if the death penalty were reserved exclusively for the worst of the worst: serial killers and mass murderers? Not every murderer. Not every horrible case. Not every crime that makes the evening news unbearable. Only those who kill multiple people in a single mass-murder event, or those who murder repeatedly over time.

This would not end the moral argument, it would not satisfy abolitionists, and it would not satisfy those who think every aggravated murder deserves death, but it would narrow the system dramatically. America’s death rows include roughly two thousand people. If capital punishment were restricted to serial killers and mass murderers, the number of eligible prisoners would shrink to a small minority (probably only a few hundred at most). Most capital murders are horrifying, but they are not Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, the Oklahoma City bombing, or a school massacre.

But the larger point remains: If society insists on keeping the death penalty, it should at least stop pretending that every death-eligible case is equally clear, equally monstrous, and equally worth the cost. Reserve it for the rare category of crimes where the evidence is overwhelming, the public scrutiny is intense, and the scale of the crime is beyond ordinary murder. For everyone else, life in prison without parole is not mercy. It is a concrete box with meals, boredom, old age, and no exit.

If this rule had been in use for the last half century, we would have reduced the number of people sitting on death row in this country from roughly two thousand to about three hundred. Not only would we have taken a significant step to unclogging the our country’s court dockets, we would have saved the taxpayers about $4 billion.

That may not satisfy the hunger for vengeance, but it would have been cheaper, cleaner, and less likely to leave us fifty years later, staring at an old man on death row and wondering whether punishment has become less a sentence than a national nervous breakdown.

The death penalty, as practiced, is not swift, it is not cheap, it is not simple, and, after half a century, it is hard to call it justice without feeling the word wobble in your mouth. Can anyone really argue that Florida’s executing an eighty-year-old man now confined to a wheelchair after he has endured half a century on death row serves the cause of justice?

At some point, the state should either carry out the sentence quickly, constitutionally, and correctly, or admit that it cannot. Because a system that takes fifty years to decide whether to kill a man is not projecting moral certainty. It is pacing the floor in a black robe, mumbling to itself, and billing the taxpayers by the hour.

The Roman Seal Box

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 6 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0600

There is a scene in one of my favorite movies, Roxanne, where Steve Martin’s character sits down to write a letter. But he does not merely grab the nearest ballpoint pen from the coffee mug, rip a page out of a legal pad, and start scribbling. No, this is a man who understands civilization. He opens a desk drawer and begins searching for the perfect stationery. Then he selects the perfect pen. He is not just writing a letter. He is preparing a small act of theater.

How wonderful!

Compare that with a modern text message.

“u up?”

There it is: the collapse of Western civilization in three characters and a question mark.

I still like letters. I like to write them. I assume I would like to receive them, although, at this point, that is mostly theoretical. I have heard rumors that people once received personal letters in the mail, but that may be one of those apocryphal stories, like rain following the plow, or a city council’s lowering taxes.

There was a time when the mail was exciting. You opened the mailbox and found something besides bills, campaign flyers, and a postcard from your dentist featuring a cartoon molar water-skiing. There might be a letter. A real letter. From a real person. Written by hand. Folded carefully. Slipped into an envelope. Addressed by someone who knew where you lived and, more importantly, thought about you long enough to find a stamp. There is a little magic in a letter that has touched both the hand of the writer and the hand of the reader, carrying across the miles not just words, but evidence of affection.

Now the mailbox is mostly a metal spam folder with hinges, a temporary repository for grocery store advertisements and assorted junk mail.

But I still like the ritual of writing letters. Occasionally, I like to go whole hog and I get out nice stationery—not “printer paper from the bottom drawer” nice, but actual stationery—but paper that suggests I might own a smoking jacket, a globe, and opinions about port wine. Then I choose an old fountain pen (preferably one temperamental enough to remind me that convenience is the enemy of character). A fountain pen does not simply write…It negotiates. It makes demands: “Hold me correctly!” “Use decent paper!” “Do not rush!” “Do not press down like you are filling out a loan application!” “Write legibly!”

Then, when the letter is finished, I sometimes close it with a wax seal.

Now, we are getting somewhere.

A wax seal turns a letter into an event. Without a wax seal, an envelope says, “Here is some correspondence.” With a wax seal, it says, “This may contain news of inheritance, betrothal, or troop movements.” It gives even a note about lunch the dignity of a royal decree.

The process itself is ridiculous in the best possible way. You light a little flame, melt sealing wax, drip it onto the flap, and press a seal into it. For one brief shining moment, you are not a person sitting at a desk in the age of password resets and software updates, you are a Venetian doge, a Tudor minister, or a minor nobleman with troubling peasants and a cousin in exile.

Of course, the modern postal system does not fully share my enthusiasm. A wax seal can be torn off, smashed, smeared, or otherwise brutalized by sorting machines that treat envelopes the way airport baggage handlers treat guitars. The U.S. Postal Service, which can deliver a birthday card across the continent for the price of a candy bar, is still not really designed for my eighteenth-century correspondence cosplay.

But I have an answer…Or at least I have the beginning of an answer, which is more or less the same thing in blog form.

I need a Roman seal box.

Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

In the Roman world, important documents were sometimes sealed using little containers called seal boxes. The document, often written on a wax tablet or on folded material, would be tied shut with string. The string would pass through or around the box. Wax would be placed inside the box, and then a signet ring or seal would be pressed into the wax. The box protected the wax seal from damage, while the seal protected the message from tampering.

That is the kind of sensible over-engineering I admire.

The Roman seal box was usually small, often made of bronze, and sometimes decorated. It had a base and a lid. The cords holding the document closed ran through slots or holes. Once the wax was sealed inside, you could tell whether anyone had opened the document because the cord would have to be cut or the seal broken. In other words, it was ancient two-factor authentication, except instead of a six-digit code texted to your phone, it involved string, wax, metalwork, and suspicion.

The steps are simple enough. First, write your letter. This is already where most modern people drop out, because writing more than two sentences without autocorrect or emojis now counts as a survival skill. Second, fold the letter. Third, wrap it with string or ribbon. Fourth, pass the string through the seal box and tie it up. Fifth, drip wax into the box, press your seal into it, and close the lid. Sixth, send the letter to someone who either will be delighted or will be deeply concerned about your mental state.

I want one.

Not an original Roman seal box, of course. That would belong in a museum, or at least in the hands of someone who knows the difference between “patina” and “I dropped it in the driveway.” I want a cheap modern version. Something made for the eccentric letter writer. Something you could buy in a set with sealing wax, cotton cord, and a little brass seal engraved with a cat, a family initial, or the words “You Have Been Formally Notified.”

Why does no one make these?

We live in an age when you can buy a plastic banana slicer, a Bluetooth toaster, and a phone case shaped like a waffle, yet I cannot easily buy a Roman-style seal box for mailing personal letters. This seems like a failure of capitalism. We have 47 kinds of toothpaste, but no affordable device for making my correspondence look like it was intercepted on the Appian Way.

Perhaps the answer is 3D printing. Surely someone with a 3D printer, a small Etsy shop, and a willingness to indulge harmless weirdos could produce these things. Make them in bronze-colored resin. Make them in faux ivory. Make a starter kit. Call it “The Cicero.” Offer premium editions called “The Cleopatra,” “The Hadrian,” and “The Maiden Aunt Who Still Writes Thank-You Notes.”

There is a market here. It may be a tiny market, but it is a market. There are people who buy fountain pens. There are people who collect sealing wax. There are people who still know what blotting paper is. There are people who own more than one inkwell and are not currently appearing in a period drama. These people need tools. They need encouragement. They need enablers.

Which gives me an idea.

The Post Office is forever lamenting the loss of business. Nobody writes letters anymore, they say. Mail volume is down. The system is under strain. Packages are keeping things alive, but the personal letter has been shoved into history alongside calling cards, hat pins, and people who knew how to fold a road map.

Fine. Then revive the art of letter writing.

Do not merely sell stamps with flowers and lighthouses. Launch a campaign. “Write Someone a Real Letter Month.” Put up posters. Show a grandmother receiving a handwritten note and not one more email beginning, “We value your privacy.” Show a child opening an envelope and realizing that paper can contain affection. Show a man choosing a fountain pen as if the fate of the Republic depends on it.

And then offer a discount for personal mail sealed with wax.

The Post Office could create a special “hand-cancelled personal correspondence” rate. Bring in a letter with a wax seal, and instead of feeding it to the sorting machines like a chicken into a combine, a postal clerk gently hand-cancels it while classical music plays. For an additional fee, the clerk could nod gravely and say, “Very good, sir. We shall see that it reaches Albany.”

And if the letter has a Roman box seal, the Post Office doesn’t charge anything, it will be their way of reinvigorating the lost art of writing letters.

This might not solve the Post Office’s financial problems, but neither has anything else, so why not try charm?

They could sell the supplies right there. Stamps, stationery, envelopes, sealing wax, inexpensive fountain pens, and officially approved Roman-style seal boxes. Put them next to the passport forms and the padded envelopes. Sell a “First Letter Kit” for children, a “Love Letter Kit” for romantics, and a “Complaint Letter Kit” for retirees with excellent handwriting and unfinished business.

There could even be classes. “How to Write a Letter Without It Sounding Like a Hostage Note.” “Fountain Pens: Friend or Ink-Filled Menace?” “Wax Seals for Beginners.” “Advanced Grievance Correspondence.” I would attend that last one just for the refreshments.

Because a letter is not just communication—it is evidence of time spent, time dedicated. It says, “I sat down. I thought about you. I chose words. I made marks on paper. I folded this object and sent it into the world.” A text says, “I was standing in line at the pharmacy and my thumb slipped.”

There is room for both, of course. Text messages are useful. Emails are efficient. Phone calls still exist for people who enjoy panic. But letters occupy a different place. They are slower, quieter, and more deliberate. They do not demand an immediate answer. They do not buzz in your pocket. They wait.

That may be why they feel almost luxurious now. Not expensive luxurious, necessarily, but human luxurious. The luxury of attention. The luxury of paper. The luxury of ink drying before the next sentence. The luxury of sending something that cannot be deleted by accident, buried under newsletters, or answered with a thumbs-up emoji.

So, I will keep writing letters, even if I am mostly writing into the void. I will keep using fountain pens that occasionally blob ink like wounded squid. I will keep melting wax and pressing seals. And someday, when I find or make the right little Roman seal box, I will tie up a letter, seal it properly, and send it off through the modern postal system like a message from a saner, slower, more ceremonious world.

And if the recipient opens the mailbox, sees that mysterious little sealed object, and thinks, “Good heavens, what is this?” then the letter will already have done half its work.

The New Mexico Film Miracle, Now Showing at Taxpayer Expense

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 -0600

New Mexico politicians dearly love the film industry, and why wouldn’t they? It gives them everything politics likes best: celebrities, ribbon cuttings, press releases, big numbers, and a chance to stand in front of a camera while pretending the camera showed up entirely on its own. If a governor or legislator can point to a soundstage, a catered lunch, a movie star hiding behind sunglasses, and a rented van full of assistant auxiliary vice-producers, then, by golly, economic development has arrived!

Or so we are told.

The official story is that New Mexico’s film subsidy is working. Hollywood comes here, spends money, hires people, uses our landscapes, and occasionally blows up a fake gas station somewhere outside Albuquerque. In return, the state writes a very large check, calls it a tax credit, and assures the public that this is how prosperity is made. The whole thing is presented as if the state has discovered a magic well: drop taxpayer money in one end, and out come jobs, glamour, and—maybe—a Netflix series with better lighting than plot.

But before we start polishing the Oscar and naming a new state highway after some producer from Burbank, it might be worth asking the rude question: are New Mexico taxpayers actually making money on this deal?

The answer appears to be no. Not “maybe no.” Not “no, but only if you use mean arithmetic.” More like plain, old “NO”—the kind your banker gives you when you ask whether buying a bass boat counts as retirement planning.

The film industry creates activity. Nobody seriously denies that: when a production comes to town, people rent hotel rooms, they eat meals, and they hire drivers, security guards, extras, caterers, construction workers, set dressers, location scouts, and folks whose job titles sound like they were invented during a lunch break. Trucks move around. People wear radios and look busy. A local restaurant might sell 200 breakfast burritos before sunrise. Money changes hands. That is all real.

But activity is not the same thing as profit. A fellow can set fire to his barn and create a lot of activity. Firefighters arrive, insurance adjusters appear, lumber gets ordered, contractors get hired, and everybody in the county has something to talk about at the local diner. That does not mean burning down barns is a sound rural-development strategy.

The state’s sales pitch often relies on big “economic impact” numbers. Those numbers count money moving around. What they do not necessarily show is whether the state treasury gets back what it spent. That is the difference between a business’s making money and a carnival’s coming through town. A carnival produces traffic, noise, corndog sales, and temporary employment. But if the town must pay the carnival to show up, pay for the cleanup, and then brag that the cotton-candy stand had a good weekend, somebody ought to check the books.

New Mexico’s film credit is not just a polite tax break. It is fully refundable, which is a fancy way of saying that if the credit is larger than the production company’s tax bill, the state will hand over cash. That money does not fall from the sky—it comes from New Mexico people who paid taxes, including people who will never be invited to a wrap party, who will never meet a star, and who will never get residuals when the show streams in Belgium.

That is where the whole thing starts to smell less like economic development and more like political theater.

The politicians tax a waitress in Roswell, a mechanic in Farmington, a retiree in Las Cruces, and a small-business owner in Deming, then they send part of that money to a studio. Then, when the studio hires a temporary crew in Albuquerque, the politicians hold a press conference to announce that they have created jobs. This is a little like stealing a man’s cow, selling him a glass of milk, and then asking him to applaud your dairy program.

And what kind of jobs are we buying? Some are good jobs. To be fair, New Mexico does have a few skilled film workers: grips, electricians, carpenters, camera people, wardrobe people, set builders, production accountants, and other craftspeople who know their trades. Those jobs can be skilled, respectable, and well-paid…when the work is steady.

But that little phrase—when the work is steady—is where the mule bogs down in the arroyo.

Film work is project work: the production arrives, spends money, hires people, shoots, wraps, and leaves. It is not the same as a factory that opens, runs year-round, trains workers, buys supplies, expands, and puts down roots. It is more like a cattle drive: there may be dust, payroll, and excitement, but when it passes through, the herd is gone.

The state’s own accounting shows that New Mexico is not making its money back from the film subsidy. According to the Legislative Finance Committee, the film production tax credit returned only about 6 cents in state tax revenue for every $1.00 spent in FY25 — meaning state government recovered roughly six percent of what it paid out, while losing the other ninety-four cents from the treasury. That does not mean no one made money; hotels, caterers, drivers, extras, crew members, and vendors certainly did. But it does mean the state’s “return on investment” argument depends on counting economic activity, not actual money returning to the state budget. In plain English, New Mexico is paying Hollywood a dollar, getting back about six cents in tax revenue, and calling the noise in between prosperity.

If you could make a state rich by using tax money to hire citizens…. You could fly by pulling on your bootstraps.

The state also loves to talk about local jobs. Fine. But headcounts can be slippery. When someone says most workers are local, are we talking about total people, total hours, or total payroll? A local extra who works two days and earns pocket money counts as a job. So does a driver. So does a hotel clerk indirectly serving the production. Meanwhile, the larger checks may go to stars, directors, producers, editors, specialists, and imported crew, all of whom show up temporarily, spend some time under our painfully blue sky, and then go home to wherever people say “the industry” without irony.

If the state counts every local extra and driver as proof of transformation, then we need to be careful. A movie set can create the same kind of service jobs that a big wedding, a rodeo, or a convention creates. That does not mean the economy has been reborn. It means visitors came to town and spent money, partly because we paid them to.

Then there is the grand dream of building a permanent cluster of film-related businesses. This is the part where the consultants get misty-eyed. We are told that, if New Mexico just keeps subsidizing Hollywood long enough, the industry will take root here. Studios will expand. Workers will train. Vendors will appear. The ecosystem will mature. One day, presumably, we will all wake up, and New Mexico will be the new Hollywood, only with better enchiladas and fewer agents named Brent. (Yeah—and the Rio Grande will have water running in it 24/7/365!)

Maybe…but film production is famously mobile. It goes where the money is and it’s a target-rich environment. Georgia offers money, Louisiana offers money, Oklahoma offers money, Canada offers money, and the next state governor who wants to hide economic failure will offer money, too. (In fact, only 38 states are subsidizing film production!). If New Mexico builds a film industry that survives only as long as New Mexico keeps writing checks, then we have not built an industry. We have built a hostage situation.

Take, for example, the case of the Sylvester Stallone’s television series, Tulsa King. The first season was filmed in Oklahoma because the state offered sizable subsidies. The next three seasons were filmed in Georgia because Georgia offered a bigger subsidy. You don’t have to be a particularly sharp viewer to notice that “Tulsa” no longer looks like Tulsa. (The Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts reports that the state recovers only 10% of the money they spend to attract the movie industry.)

Even workforce training has a leak in the bucket. Suppose we do train New Mexicans into real film professionals. Good. Then what? A trained film worker can take those skills anywhere and when work inevitably slows down here, that person will head to Georgia, California, Texas, Oklahoma, or Canada. The state will end up subsidizing productions to train workers who become valuable enough to leave. And if they stay, then taxpayers must keep subsidizing Hollywood to make sure they have work.

That is not an industry. That is Hollywood renting New Mexico’s checkbook.

New Mexico is not merely helping local grips, drivers, caterers, and extras get work—it is also helping pay the checks of people who were never New Mexicans and may never intend to become New Mexicans. Under the film-credit system, the state can subsidize wages for certain nonresident crew, and the larger partner arrangements can reach into payments for nonresident actors, directors, producers, writers, and editors. In plain English, that means a director flies in from Los Angeles, a star arrives with an entourage, specialized crew members come for a few weeks or months, the production wraps, and then they go home — while New Mexico taxpayers help underwrite their paychecks. The state counts that as local economic activity because the work happened here, but much of the paycheck will leave on the same plane as the people who earned it.

Under New Mexico’s film-subsidy program, a movie star can roll into the state in a million-dollar bus, sleep in it, eat in it, shoot her scenes, cash her check, and drive away — while New Mexico taxpayers help underwrite the paycheck. That is the magic of film incentives: even when the glamour leaves town, the bill stays behind.

The underlying question is simple: would the money do more economic good if left in the pockets of New Mexicans?

State government assumes that if it collects money from citizens and redistributes it to a politically favored industry, the resulting activity is proof of wisdom. But maybe the citizens would have spent that money better. Maybe they would have fixed trucks, bought appliances, paid medical bills, expanded small businesses, hired local help, repaired roofs, replaced water heaters, or just bought groceries without wincing. That spending would also create jobs, only without needing a government office to issue a press release about it.

There is an old country test for this sort of thing: if the deal is so good, why does it need my money?

If New Mexico’s scenery, light, culture, climate, and talent pool are enough to make this a natural film center, then Hollywood should come here because it makes sense. If Hollywood comes only because we pay it, then we are not selling New Mexico. We are discounting it—bribing them to come.

That does not mean film production is bad. Let them come. Let them shoot Westerns, crime dramas, science fiction, prestige miniseries, and whatever else requires a lonely road, a suspicious sheriff, or a desert sunrise. Sell them hotel rooms. Rent them warehouses. Feed them green chile. Hire local workers. Charge fair prices. Welcome them warmly.

But stop pretending that writing checks to Hollywood is the same thing as building prosperity.

New Mexico has real needs: water, roads, crime, schools, courts, healthcare, broadband, housing, and a private economy strong enough that young people do not have to leave to make a living. Against that list, subsidizing a wealthy entertainment industry starts to look less like vision and more like vanity.

The film subsidy creates smoke. Sometimes it creates a pretty flame, too. But after the crew leaves, the trailers roll out, the rented furniture is returned, and the last assistant director boards a plane, New Mexico is left with the bill and a politician pointing at the smoke as proof there was a fire.

Cecil B. DeMille supposedly said that young Hollywood actresses were called starlets because the word piglets was already taken. In a similar vein, we call an elected moron in the state house a politician because the word thief was already taken.

New Mexico, An Art Colony Built Around a Gas Station

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 -0600

On and off for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been talking about cities getting dangerously close to plunging into an economic death spiral, primarily New York City because I find the likelihood of a young socialist like Mayor Mamdani fixing the city’s financial problems about as likely as a spavined hearse horse winning the Kentucky Derby.

An economic death spiral is what happens when a town gets to circling the drain like a tired dog before a nap: businesses pull out, workers move off, tax money dries up, the roads go to washboard, the schools start selling raffle tickets for copy paper, and the only folks still optimistic are the chamber of commerce, three realtors, and a man at the diner who insists a new truck stop is going to turn everything around just as soon as somebody fixes the exit ramp. As tax income dries up, the city government inevitably tries to raise revenue by raising taxes, thus lighting the bundle of rags tied to the tail of the last fleeing business.

But, it is not only cities that can enter that downward spiral, but whole states can also do it as well, and my state, New Mexico, would be a classic example—if not for one saving economic factor that is an industry that our state government absolutely hates.

There is an old joke that New Mexico is a poor state with excellent scenery. Like many old jokes, it survives because it is uncomfortably close to true.

If one were brutally honest—and honesty is rarely encouraged in economic development brochures—it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, if not for the oil and gas industry, New Mexico would be firmly planted in an economic death spiral somewhere between “rust belt cautionary tale” and “forgotten Soviet republic.”

This is not entirely New Mexico’s fault. Geography dealt the state a strange hand: It is large, sparsely populated, dry, mountainous, and far from the great population centers of the country. Unlike Texas, California, or Florida, nobody accidentally passes through New Mexico and decides to move there because the freeway exits looked lively.

What New Mexico does possess is beauty, culture, laboratories, military bases, chile, and an astonishing number of turquoise shops. Unfortunately, none of those things generates the kind of tax revenue required to keep an entire state government fed, paved, pensioned, and air-conditioned.

Enter oil.

Oil in New Mexico is less an industry than a life-support system with pump jacks.

The southeastern part of the state—in the Permian Basin region—produces staggering amounts of wealth compared to the rest of the state economy. One could argue that Hobbs and Carlsbad are effectively subsidizing Santa Fe’s ability to debate bicycle lanes, climate justice, and whether chile should be capitalized in official state documents.

Without petroleum revenue, New Mexico would face a deeply uncomfortable reckoning. State government spending would have to shrink dramatically or taxes would have to rise to levels usually associated with medieval tribute systems.

This creates one of the great political ironies of modern America: New Mexico is culturally and politically suspicious of the very industry preventing its becoming economically indistinguishable from rural West Virginia with better sunsets.

The state’s public rhetoric often treats oil companies the way Victorian families treated embarrassing relatives: tolerated because they pay the bills, but never mentioned in polite company. A recent governor of New Mexico declared that it should be the primary goal of the nation to reduce the dependency on petroleum by 50%. Cut New Mexico petroleum income by 50% and the state will be desperate for a recipe for sand soup.

Meanwhile, every time oil prices rise, state government revenues suddenly bloom like desert wildflowers after a thunderstorm. Budget surpluses appear. Legislative wish lists expand. New programs emerge. Everyone becomes an economic genius for six months.

Then oil prices wobble and panic quietly spreads through Santa Fe like a norovirus outbreak on a cruise ship.

The deeper issue is that New Mexico has never quite solved the puzzle of creating a broad, diversified private-sector economy.

There are islands of success:

Los Alamos,
Sandia,
defense contracting,
tourism,
healthcare,
and, a trickle of retirement migration,

But these sectors do not combine into a roaring engine of population growth and entrepreneurial dynamism. They create pockets of prosperity floating in a much larger sea of government dependency, low labor participation, and economic fragility.

One sees this in the demographics.

Young educated people leave in such large numbers that they may well be the state’s largest export. Many rural communities steadily age, so that entire small towns seem to survive on a mixture of federal transfers, retirees, and determination. Outside of Albuquerque and a few select corridors, economic momentum can feel thin.

And yet, oddly enough, New Mexico narrowly avoids outright collapse.

Why?

Again: oil.

Oil revenue functions like an enormous invisible subsidy that holds together a state economy otherwise struggling to generate sufficient taxable activity on its own.

New Mexico’s state government is not merely “helped” by oil and gas; it is structurally dependent on it. Using the cautious state-budget framing, roughly one-third of recurring general-fund revenue comes from oil and natural gas, while a broader accounting that includes severance taxes, royalties, gross-receipts taxes, corporate taxes, worker income taxes, permanent-fund distributions, and related economic activity can push the oil-and-gas share into the 40%-50% range of general-fund support. The direct money alone is enormous — billions from severance taxes, rents, and royalties — but the real dependency is larger because the industry also supports high-wage jobs, contractors, local purchases, and investment funds that feed the state treasury. In practical terms, New Mexico can talk like an energy-transition state, but its schools, roads, agencies, reserves, and recurring spending are still heavily financed by the petroleum economy.

Imagine a household where one cousin works offshore rigs in the Gulf and sends home checks large enough to support twelve other relatives who spend most of their time discussing sustainable gardening and beadwork. That, in simplified form, is New Mexico’s fiscal structure.

The state’s defenders will object that New Mexico has recently experienced pockets of economic growth. This is true: Intel has reinvested in Rio Rancho and Albuquerque has seen some revitalization, so there are real success stories.

But remove the petroleum sector from the ledger and the picture changes very quickly.

Worker participation remains weak compared to many states and private-sector depth is limited. Many counties remain heavily dependent on government employment. The state consistently struggles to retain college graduates. Crime concerns in Albuquerque continue to hurt perceptions. Educational rankings remain stubbornly poor despite decades of reform efforts and spending increases.

And while businesses are fleeing California and New York for the Southwest, almost none of them come to New Mexico because of our state personal income tax, our generally anti-business climate, and the state’s strong union laws. If we draw a line across the United States, going along the northern boundary of New Mexico stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, only two states below this line are not right-to-work states: California and New Mexico. These two are also the only states below that line whose industrial bases are declining.

On paper, New Mexico has quite a few advantages: several large state universities, low land cost, and a low cost of living. Even with those resources, economic activity stops at the state border, as can be seen by this satellite photo of the Texas/New Mexico border at night.

The result is a state that often feels suspended between two futures.

One future imagines New Mexico transforming into a southwestern Colorado: affluent, outdoorsy, technologically sophisticated, culturally rich, and attractive to remote workers and retirees.

The other future looks more like a slow demographic fade: stagnant population, shrinking economic dynamism, rising dependency ratios, and a permanent reliance on federal and petroleum revenue to sustain living standards.

At present, oil is keeping the second future at bay, which creates a curious emotional atmosphere in the state.

New Mexico simultaneously behaves like:

a frontier state,
a federal dependency,
an arts colony,
a retirement haven,
and an energy exporter.

These identities do not always coexist gracefully.

The state wants the tax revenue from petroleum without fully embracing the culture that produces it. It wants environmental prestige while depending heavily on extractive industry revenue. It wants Scandinavian-style social programs with an economy that’s closer to rural Arizona plus uranium ghosts.

These contradictions could continue for quite some time. Governments are perfectly capable of living with contradictions, especially when oil is above $70 a barrel.

But long term, New Mexico faces uncomfortable strategic questions:

What happens if the petroleum industry contracts substantially before the state develops a replacement economic engine? What happens if the petroleum availability expands and the industry begins shutting down wells in states where governments tax production the most?

These questions lurk behind almost every optimistic press release about film studios, green energy corridors, aerospace hubs, startup incubators, and artisanal lavender festivals.

Because, despite all the brochures featuring happy hikers and attractive people drinking craft beer beside adobe walls, New Mexico’s modern fiscal reality remains astonishingly simple:

The oil patch is paying the electric bill…

And deep down, almost everyone in Santa Fe knows that and hates it.

The Ghost Ship, the Wrong Submarine, and the USS Stewart That Wouldn’t Stay Sunk

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 16 May 2026 00:01:00 -0600

When I lived on Galveston Island, I frequently toured the USS Cavalla (SS-244), a World War II submarine on display at Seawolf Park. This produces one of those small historical misunderstandings that only a tourist attraction can create. Because the submarine is in Seawolf Park, many visitors naturally leave with the impression that they have toured the USS Seawolf. This is impossible, unless the Navy has developed a very aggressive museum-restoration program involving recovery from the bottom of the Pacific, because USS Seawolf (SS-197) was lost in 1944, most likely to friendly fire. The Galveston Naval Museum identifies the submarine on display as the Cavalla, and the destroyer escort beside her as USS Stewart (DE-238).

The friendly-fire part of the Seawolf story is one of those grim little naval footnotes that make history feel less like a marble monument and more like a dimly lit office with too many filing cabinets. The evidence indicates that Seawolf was probably sunk by the destroyer escort USS Richard M. Rowell after failing to respond properly during a tense anti-submarine search. The Navy did not exactly put “We may have sunk our own submarine” on a recruiting poster, but the friendly-fire explanation was part of postwar accounting rather than a secret locked away until the age of the internet. The Naval History and Heritage Command say the evidence suggests friendly fire was the most likely cause.

Still, I was not there primarily to solve the Seawolf confusion. I was there to tour the Cavalla, the submarine that sank the Japanese aircraft carrier Shōkaku, a veteran of the Pearl Harbor attack. That is a pretty good résumé. Most museum ships can say they served their country, the Cavalla can say she helped send one of the Pearl Harbor carriers to the bottom. That gives the tour a certain edge. You are not just ducking through hatches and trying not to bang your head; you are walking through a machine that once changed the balance sheet of the Pacific War.

But I always ended the visit by touring the ship tied up beside her: the USS Stewart (DE-238), an Edsall-class destroyer escort. Destroyer escorts were not glamorous in the way battleships and carriers were glamorous. They did not get much help from Hollywood. They were the practical shoes of naval warfare: sturdy, necessary, and unlikely to be featured in a recruiting poster unless all the battleships were busy. The Galveston Naval Museum says Stewart is one of only two remaining destroyer escorts in the United States, and the only surviving Edsall-class destroyer escort.

Reading up on Stewart, I discovered that there were actually three U.S. Navy ships named USS Stewart, all named for Rear Admiral Charles Stewart, who commanded the USS Constitution during the War of 1812. This is where the story stops being merely interesting and starts behaving like it was written by a screenwriter who had been told, “Make it weirder, but keep the ships real.”

The first USS Stewart (DD-13) was one of the Navy’s earliest destroyers, a Bainbridge-class vessel from the dawn of the destroyer age. She was small, narrow, fast for her time, and armed with the kind of optimism that early destroyers required. In World War I, she escorted convoys off France, and even attacked the German submarine U-108 in 1918. The Naval History and Heritage Command photo caption notes that Stewart’s funnel carried a star signifying that she had sunk or disabled a German submarine, though later evidence showed U-108 survived.

The second USS Stewart (DD-224) had the truly fabulous career, by which I mean a career that included almost every indignity short of being converted into a floating seafood restaurant. She was a Clemson-class “four-stacker,” commissioned in 1920, and by World War II she was already an elderly antique destroyer in the Asiatic Fleet. In peacetime, she had done the usual imperial-era chores: showing the flag, visiting China, rescuing people after the Kanto earthquake, patrolling rivers, and reminding everyone that the United States Navy could appear in your harbor whether or not you had invited it. In 1938, Stewart even helped search for the missing Pan Am Hawaii Clipper, which vanished between Guam and Manila. According to one timeline, Stewart left Manila on July 30 to search for the missing flying boat and was ordered to abandon the search on August 6.

The Hawaii Clipper mystery deserves its own shelf in the library of prewar weirdness. The aircraft disappeared with fifteen people aboard, and no confirmed wreckage was ever found. One rumor held that passenger Wah Sun Choy, also known as Watson Choy, was carrying millions in gold certificates intended for Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalists. That led to theories that Japanese agents hijacked or destroyed the plane, something Japan vigorously denies, but we shouldn’t let that get in the way of a good story.

Then came World War II, and Stewart’s life became genuinely strange. In February 1942, during the desperate defense of the Dutch East Indies, Stewart was damaged in battle and made it to Surabaya, Java, for repairs. There, in one of those moments that makes a sailor consider changing careers, she slipped off the blocks in a floating dry-dock and bent her propeller shafts. With Japanese forces closing in, the Americans destroyed the ship with demolition charges, scuttled the dry-dock, and left her for dead. The Navy struck her from the list in March 1942.That should have been the end of it.

It was not the end of it.

After nearly a year underwater, the Japanese raised her, repaired her, and commissioned her as Patrol Boat No. 102. This is where Stewart became the “Ghost Ship of the Pacific.” Allied pilots began reporting the extremely awkward sight of what looked like an old American four-stack destroyer operating deep behind enemy lines.

One can imagine the debriefing. “You saw what?” “An American destroyer.” “Where?” “In Japanese waters.” “Have you been sleeping?” “No.” “Would you like to start?” The Naval History and Heritage Command says multiple Allied pilots reported seeing the ship behind enemy lines after the Japanese commissioned her as Patrol Boat No. 102.

At war’s end, American occupation forces found the battered former Stewart afloat near Japan. In a ceremony that was either touching, bizarre, or both, the U.S. Navy recommissioned her in October 1945 as DD-224. Her crew nicknamed her RAMP-224, borrowing the language used for Recovered Allied Military Personnel, as if the ship herself had been a prisoner of war. This is sentimental, absurd, and somehow exactly right. Ships are just steel until sailors start talking about them; after that, they become characters.

The Navy brought Stewart back to San Francisco, but there was no real future for an old four-stacker that had served both sides, been sunk, raised, captured, recovered, and insulted by every ocean she met. On May 24, 1946, she was used as a target ship and sunk off the California coast. Even then, she did not go quietly. Reports say she absorbed rockets, machine-gun fire, and naval gunfire for more than two hours before finally going down. Some ships are sunk, Stewart had to be persuaded.

For decades, that was the end of the story. Then, in August 2024, undersea searchers found the wreck of USS Stewart (DD-224) in the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary off northern California. She lies in about 3,500 feet of water, largely intact and nearly upright. The National WWII Museum says the discovery was made by a team including Ocean Infinity, the Air/Sea Heritage Foundation, SEARCH, NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, and the Naval History and Heritage Command.

So there she rests: an American destroyer, a Japanese patrol boat, an American destroyer again, and finally a ghost on the seafloor. If one is willing to be mischievous, she may be the closest wreck of a Japanese warship — sort of — to San Francisco. Legally, historically, and emotionally, that statement requires several footnotes and possibly a naval lawyer. But as a punchline, it is irresistible.

The next time someone visits Seawolf Park and says they toured the Seawolf, let them down gently. They toured Cavalla, which sank Shōkaku, and Stewart, whose predecessor had one of the strangest careers in naval history. That is not a disappointment. That is an upgrade. After all, any ship can have a service record. Very few can say they served two navies, died twice, came home, and still managed to become a ghost story.

New York and the Search for the Last Taxpayer

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 9 May 2026 00:01:00 -0600

There is an old joke that New York City could tax oxygen if only the air could be properly assessed and invoiced. Given recent political trends, I fully expect a future press conference announcing the “Progressive Atmospheric Equity Contribution Fee,” payable quarterly by anyone breathing south of Yonkers.

This raises a serious question hidden beneath the humor: At what point does New York’s increasingly enthusiastic effort to tax the rich begin to resemble a man trying to drain a sinking boat by drilling new holes in the bottom?

To hear some people tell it, the rich are already fleeing New York in biblical caravans. Hedge fund managers are supposedly racing across the Florida border in armored Bentleys while investment bankers rappel out of Midtown office towers carrying sacks of untaxed capital gains. Somewhere in Palm Beach, according to this narrative, there is now a gated community populated entirely by former Upper East Side residents wearing linen suits and complaining about how hard it is to find decent bagels.

The truth, as always, is less cinematic and more interesting.

There is, in fact, real evidence that wealthy people have been leaving New York City. New York’s own tax data show that millionaire out-migration increased sharply during and after COVID, with relocation rates rising well above historic norms. Some of the ultrarich, especially those earning tens of millions annually, clearly decided that sunshine, lower taxes, and fewer regulations sounded preferable to paying both New York State and New York City income taxes while carefully navigating feces-laden sidewalks on the way to dinner.

And honestly, from a purely mathematical standpoint, one can understand their concern. New York State already imposes one of the highest income tax burdens in the country. Add New York City’s local income tax on top, then pile on property taxes, corporate taxes, sales taxes, mansion taxes, congestion pricing, assorted fees, and Mayor Mamdani’s threat of a pied-à-terre tax, and eventually even a billionaire may begin quietly Googling “residency requirements in Florida.”

Florida, meanwhile, waits down the shore like a giant tax-free aircraft carrier.

No state income tax. Warm weather. Palm trees. Private airports. And an endless supply of real estate agents whispering, “Sir, your taxes alone could pay for this waterfront estate.” New York tax officials admit almost 1,700 millionaires moved their tax address out of New York in just 2024. New York hasn’t released the data for 2025 or 2026, but I doubt that many moved back.

Not surprisingly, Miami and Palm Beach have become popular landing zones for finance executives and wealthy retirees. Texas has benefited too. Wealth migration toward lower-tax states is real enough that entire industries now exist to help wealthy individuals establish legal residency elsewhere while keeping one tasteful Gucci loafer still planted in Manhattan.

But before we declare New York a post-apocalyptic wasteland populated only by rats and deranged graduate students, it is worth noting that the “everyone is fleeing” story is also wildly exaggerated. New York is not in the red-light danger zone, but it is in the warning orange zone. The NYC Comptroller says the city is already operating with a structural deficit, meaning spending is already running ahead of recurring revenue, and the budget relies on optimistic revenue projections, reserve drawdowns, unspecified savings, and reduced fiscal flexibility. The state comptroller also warned that the city’s budget reduced contingency reserves, including the general reserve, down to the $100 million statutory minimum.

New York remains one of the most economically powerful cities on earth. It still dominates finance, media, publishing, fashion, advertising, law, and international business. People continue to move there because it offers opportunities unavailable almost anywhere else. The city still attracts massive tourism, investment, and foreign capital. And despite all the horror stories, the overall tax base has not collapsed. Official projections still show growing tax revenue in coming years, although that may be offset by predictions of even faster growing expenditures.

This is because wealthy people are often less mobile than politicians and cable news hosts imagine. Moving is not just a tax decision—it involves business networks, schools, family ties, social status, office locations, cultural institutions, and personal identity. A hedge fund manager may enjoy saving millions on taxes in Miami, but he may also discover that his entire professional ecosystem still functions in Manhattan.

In other words, it turns out that civilization is annoyingly sticky. But, with each arrival of a new millionaire or business in a Southern state, a small part of that missing social infrastructure is re-established, making it easier for the next hedge fund manager to set up shop.

Still, New York faces a genuine long-term risk, and it is not necessarily the dramatic overnight collapse people imagine. The real danger is something slower and far more bureaucratic: a gradual erosion of the tax base combined with increasingly optimistic government spending.

This is where economics stops being exciting and becomes terrifying.

Suppose Mamdani inevitably announces yet another new “tax the rich” proposal that is anticipated to raise $500 million annually. Headlines celebrate. Advocacy groups cheer. Editorial boards declare that fairness has finally arrived.

Then reality intervenes.

More wealthy residents leave. Others restructure income. Investments are delayed. Real estate transactions slow. Businesses expand elsewhere. Capital gains are realized in different states. Accountants suddenly become the most powerful people in America.

Instead of raising $500 million, the tax brings in $300 million. Unfortunately, by this point the government has already spent the imaginary $500 million three times over and created six new agencies to administer it.

Now there is a budget gap.

The response, naturally, is to propose another tax, and triggering even more capital flight.

This is how cities wander into fiscal quicksand. Not through a dramatic catastrophe, but through an endless cycle of optimistic revenue forecasts colliding with human behavior. This is how Detroit, St. Louis, and Philadelphia triggered rapid economic decline.

The core problem for New York is concentration. A tiny percentage of taxpayers provide an enormous share of tax revenue. Millionaires account for a massive portion of New York’s income tax collections. This means the city’s financial health increasingly depends on the continued willingness of a relatively small number of highly mobile people to remain exactly where they are and continue earning exactly as much money as before.

That is not a stable long-term strategy. It resembles balancing the city budget atop a stack of champagne glasses.

And yet, the political incentives always favor more taxation because the immediate math looks irresistible. If one billionaire pays millions annually in taxes, then taxing him a little more appears painless. Multiply that across thousands of wealthy taxpayers and politicians see visions of balanced budgets dancing in their heads.

The trouble is that economists are forced to deal with the horrifying reality that human beings react to incentives.

Raise cigarette taxes and fewer people smoke. Raise gasoline prices and people drive less. Raise taxes on capital and wealth, and eventually some capital and wealth relocate.

This should not be controversial, but somehow every generation of politicians acts shocked when it happens.

The final irony is that if New York ever truly succeeded in driving out large numbers of wealthy taxpayers, the burden would not vanish into thin air. It would simply shift downward onto the remaining middle class, homeowners, renters, and businesses. By the time officials realized the rich did not produce the projected tax revenue after all, the spending commitments would already exist.

And then a new politician would arise with a fresh PowerPoint presentation explaining why one more tax increase will finally solve everything forever.

At which point the last remaining taxpayer in Manhattan will quietly board a flight to Miami carrying nothing but a laptop, a residency affidavit, and a deep appreciation for palm trees.

The Mystery of the Lost Mysteries

milliorn@nmsu.edu (Mark Milliorn) — Sat, 2 May 2026 00:01:00 -0600

I have always loved mysteries, probably because I worked my way through the entire Hardy Boys series in the second grade. I was hooked early by secret panels, hidden staircases, stolen jewels, mysterious strangers, coded messages, and the absolute certainty that two boys with flashlights could outwit every adult in town.

Eventually, I moved on to Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Lawrence Block, John D. MacDonald, and a host of other great mystery writers. The best of them understood something important: a mystery is not just a crime story. It is a puzzle, a game, a contest between the writer and the reader. The writer lays out the clues, hides the truth in plain sight, and then dares the reader to arrive at the solution first.

Good mystery books are still being written, and it is not hard to find one. If you are looking for your next mystery, I would recommend subscribing to the newsletter from The Mysterious Bookstore, the “World’s Oldest and Greatest Mystery Fiction Specialty Store,” run by Otto Penzler. You can find them here.

What I cannot find, or at least cannot find very often, is a good mystery movie or television mystery. There are plenty of television shows and movies that call themselves mysteries, but most of them are not mysteries at all. They are police procedurals, character dramas, revenge stories, thrillers, or episodes of “watch the star solve the case while everyone else stands around looking suspicious.” They may have a corpse, a detective, a lab report, and a confession, but that does not make them mysteries.

They all seem to fail in the same ways.

First, they frequently are not actually mysteries. In the opening act, we often see who commits the murder. We watch the killer creep into the room, pull the trigger, push the victim off the balcony, or poison the wine. Then the rest of the episode consists of the detective slowly discovering what the audience already knows. That can be suspenseful, but it is not a mystery. It is a waiting game.

There is nothing wrong with that form, exactly. Columbo made an art of it. The pleasure of Columbo was not guessing who did it. The pleasure was watching Peter Falk’s rumpled, shambling, apparently harmless detective worry the murderer to death with “just one more thing.” But Columbo worked because it knew what it was. It was not pretending to be a whodunit. It was a how-will-he-catch-him.

Too many modern television mysteries give us the murderer early and then still expect us to pretend we are solving something. We are not. We are just watching the hero catch up.

Second, in the vast majority of television mysteries, the murderer is the highest-paid guest star. This may be the single greatest weakness of television mystery writing. The casting department destroys the plot before the first commercial break.

If a familiar actor shows up in the first ten minutes, has no obvious reason to be there, and then disappears into the background, you can safely arrest him immediately. Television cannot resist this pattern. The famous guest actor is never just the victim’s lawyer, the dead man’s neighbor, or the slightly rude restaurant owner. He is there because the show paid for him, and, by heaven, they are going to get their money’s worth in the final scene.

This is especially true when the actor is just famous enough to be recognizable, but not famous enough to be above doing one episode of a network crime drama. The moment he appears, the mystery is over. You do not need fingerprints, blood spatter, or motive. You need only ask, “Which guest star has the strongest IMDb page?”

Third, the suspect list is usually too small. A real mystery needs room to breathe. It needs several people who could plausibly have committed the crime, several motives that overlap, and several clues that point in different directions. In a good mystery novel, almost everyone has something to hide, even if only one person is hiding murder.

Television usually gives us three suspects, and one of them is obviously innocent because he cried too much in the interrogation room. One is too obvious, one is too sympathetic, and one is the guest star. That is not a mystery. That is a seating chart.

The problem is partly time. A television episode has perhaps forty-two minutes after commercials. In that time, it has to introduce the crime, interview witnesses, include a lab scene, give the regular characters something to do, provide a red herring, solve the case, and leave time for a final emotional conversation in a dimly lit office. There is not much room for real detection.

Fourth, the structure gives the game away. Television mysteries are often built on a rigid rhythm. The first suspect is wrong. The second suspect is also wrong. The third suspect seems impossible, then suddenly becomes obvious after a late-breaking clue. Someone lies. Someone else says, “I should have told you this earlier.” The detective sees something tiny, stares thoughtfully into the middle distance, and suddenly knows everything.

Once you know the rhythm, you are not solving the crime so much as reading the clock. At minute twelve, the angry spouse did not do it. At minute twenty-four, the business partner did not do it. At minute thirty-five, the sweet old friend says something odd, and there it is. Cue the confession.

The formula is so familiar that it drains the story of tension. We know the first explanation is wrong because it came too early. We know the second explanation is wrong because there are still eighteen minutes left. We know the killer will be revealed at the exact moment the episode needs to start wrapping up.

Fifth, the detective often knows more than the audience. This is a fatal flaw. A fair mystery lets the audience reason alongside the detective. We should see the important clues, even if we do not understand them at first. When the solution is revealed, we should be able to say, “Of course. I should have seen it.”

Too many television mysteries cheat. The detective notices something the camera did not show us clearly. Or a lab result appears at the last minute. Or the hero remembers a detail from an earlier conversation that was not emphasized enough for any sane viewer to retain. Then, in the final scene, the detective explains everything as if the solution had been obvious all along.

That is not mystery writing. That is withholding evidence.

Agatha Christie, at her best, played fair. Rex Stout played fair. Ellery Queen practically invited the reader to stop before the final chapter and solve the case. Television usually does the opposite. It hides the usable clue, then congratulates itself for revealing it.

Sixth, character drama replaces detection. Many television mysteries are less interested in the murder than in the detective’s personal problems. The detective has a divorce, trauma, a drinking problem, a dead partner, a troubled daughter, a dying father, a corrupt boss, or all of the above. The murder becomes a coat rack on which to hang the regular character’s weekly emotional burden.

Again, there is nothing wrong with character drama. We like detectives with personality. Sherlock Holmes had cocaine, a violin, and a tendency to be insufferable. Nero Wolfe had orchids, beer, and an unwillingness to leave the house. Travis McGee had a houseboat and a deeply complicated view of paradise. But the mystery still mattered. The character did not replace the puzzle.

On television, the crime often exists only to illuminate the detective’s feelings. A murdered teenager reminds the detective of her own daughter. A dead soldier reminds the detective of his time in the service. A poisoned husband reminds the detective of his failed marriage. By the end, the killer is almost an afterthought. The real climax is the hero staring out a window, having learned something about grief.

Finally, the solution must be simple enough for one episode. A good mystery needs misdirection, motive, opportunity, timing, character, and surprise. It needs the solution to be unexpected, but inevitable. That is hard to do in a novel. It is much harder to do in forty-two minutes with a B-plot and recurring cast obligations.

So television reduces the mystery to something simple. He lied about where he was. She wanted the inheritance. The brother was jealous. The business partner was stealing. The victim knew a secret. The killer made one mistake, and the detective spotted it.

That may be enough for a crime show, but it is not enough for a real mystery. A real mystery should make the audience lean forward, not merely wait for the reveal. It should give us the pleasure of suspicion, deduction, failure, and sudden recognition. It should make us think we might solve it, then punish us for being overconfident.

Television rarely does that anymore. It gives us crimes, detectives, corpses, and confessions, but not mysteries. The machinery is there. The puzzle is missing.

And that is why, when I want a mystery, I usually go back to books. The corpse may be imaginary, but at least the game is real.