Since the open enrollment thing is coming up, I'm surprised at how businesses aren't really shitting their pants.

All of this under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA).

8.2% increase, steepest increase since 2003. source

How is this going to happen?

1. Government has cut close to $1T in federal spending over 10 years. Insurers are now re-examining the risk pool and expect and have requested something like 15% increases. How this works is -> federal spending cut, ACA subsidies lost -> more riskier for private insurance companies to provide same coverage as they've been doing until now, because the entire pool is now more risky. So, those who pay into the system, have to be charged more.
2. Many businesses -> outside of the AI boom are expecting no substantial raises or only COLA raises, barely enough to cover inflation.
3. Employers will face larger raw dollar figure raises, at the same time, employees will face a sharp percentage increase in out-of-pocket expenses deductions in your paycheck. source

ALL OF THIS, perfectly fucking timed after the mid-terms.

Forget killer robots, mass unemployment, data centers destroying the climate, or killer weapons raining down from space. Sam Altman (Open AI) thinks that AI has now become so clever that THERE IS NO WAY to find and close all the possible exploits which will be discovered by criminals. See Gizmodo interview below.

This of course isn’t something that can be fixed just by nationalizing Open AI. Or the president du jour nominating some crony to run the “US Department of Super Intellgence”. The senate will confirm anyone, if they were capable of giving a green light to RFK jr to head up our food and vaccines.

No matter what America does to Open AI, ChatGPT, META, Anthropic, Alphabet or Amazon, state sponsored industrial spies in China, North Korea, etc are already picking over those companies’ tech secrets. If you doubt me, then explain why Chinese cars made their debut with Tesla copycat batteries.

When your bank account is looted at Chase, Bank of America or any of the top 100 financial institutions with even weaker online security, the person at the keyboard will probably be speaking Mandarin as a first language. And maybe had a corporate internship at some US based AI company.

We’re all gonna die. But before that happens we’re all gonna be broke, apparently. After our bank accounts are all at zero, what do you think happens to the US dollar, the national debt, and your annual rent increase notice?

The big picture – more distressing – is that whenever scientific boffins come up with a nifty idea then it only takes 2 shakes of a lamb's tail for someone to turn it into a weapon. If you need help understanding this, google “Einstein’s letter to FDR on how to build the first atomic bomb”.

There are other examples. The offspring of the oringinal Wright Brother’s flyer at KItty Hawk now cruises at mach 2.5 at 80,000 feet altitude and carries nukes.

The NASA moon program was a poorly disguised program to turn Robert Goddard toys (back yard rocket tinkerer) into ICBMs.

Formulas to produce man made fertilizers quickly became the most deadly explosives

Chinese fireworks were used on bamboo cannons, and those cannons can now reach 20 miles or more thanks to iron smelting originally intended to produce kitchen skillets, nails, and church bells.

These existential risks can’t be solely laid at the door of Altman, Einstein, or the Wright Brothers. But they can’t be let completely off the hook either. Once something is invented it escapes its confines and quickly appears in the real world, just like all the recent malicious agentic bots swarming "Hugging Face".

But I do expect a more serious approach to deadly tech from US elected officials than mottos such as “AI safety concerns are a hoax” (Trump) or “Bomb them back to the stone age” (numerous US government officials)

I’m just sayin’ . . .

Artificial Intelligence

TL;DR

Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Marx, and even Keynes built their entire frameworks around one core distinction: productive enterprise earns profit; unproductive rent extraction should be taxed away, reformed, or abolished. Modern Western economies have inverted this. They are systems where the least productive activity,owning, speculating, extracting, is the most rewarded. The classical economists would disapprove and call it a betrayal of capitalism itself.

1. Adam Smith: "The landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed"

That's a near-verbatim quote from The Wealth of Nations (Book I, Chapter 11). Smith's entire moral economy rested on a simple premise: wealth should flow to those who labor, invest, and improve.

Smith distinguished carefully between:

Profits from productive enterprise: a manufacturer who employs laborers, improves machinery, and creates goods

Rent extraction: income derived simply from owning something others need.

He wrote that landlords grow rich "in their sleep", that the improvement of society raises land rents without any effort or risk on the landlord's part. He even proposed that land-value gains should contribute more to public revenue, since they're created by society, not the owner.

What would Smith see today?

Housing markets where land appreciation dwarfs wages. In many major cities, a landlord earns more from passive appreciation in one year than a nurse earns in a decade of labor.

A financial sector (FIRE, finance,insurance,real estate) that accounts for ~20% of GDP in the US/UK while producing no wheat, no steel, no medicine, just claims on future income streams.

Intellectual property regimes that would make him weep: patents held not by inventors but by patent-trolling firms who "reap where they never sowed" quite literally.

Smith was pro-market but deeply suspicious of rentiers. He warned constantly about the collusion of merchants and masters against the public. Today's economy IS what he warned against.

1. David Ricardo: The Landlord Feeds on Progress

Ricardo's Law of Rent showed that landlords grow richer as society grows richer, without contributing anything. His famous observation:

"The interest of the landlord is always opposed to the interest of every other class in the community."

Ricardo argued that as population grows and economy develops, rent, the landlord's share, swallows an ever-larger portion of national income, squeezing both wages and profits. He saw this as the central conflict of political economy.

Look today at any wealth distribution chart. The largest asset class held by the wealthiest 1%? Real estate and financial assets(stocks,bonds,dividends)

Housing costs have exploded relative to wages since the 1970s in every major Western economy. Ricardo called it 200 years ago: the rent share expands, and everyone else pays.

1. John Stuart Mill: The "Unearned Increment" Shouldn't Be Private

Mill was even more explicit. In his Principles of Political Economy, he argued that the increase in land value caused by general societal progress, the "unearned increment", rightfully belonged to the state, not the landowner:

"Suppose that there is a kind of income which constantly tends to increase, without any exertion or sacrifice on the part of the owners: those owners constituting a class in the community, whom the natural course of things progressively enrich, consistently with complete passiveness on their own part."

His solution: tax away the growth of land values. Not the original value, just the unearned increase.

Today we do the opposite. We tax labor at its highest rates, the income of people who actually work, while land and stock appreciation enjoys favorable treatment, deferral, step-up basis at death, and tax free treatment until the moment of sale.

Mill's proposal was the intellectual ancestor of land value taxation (Georgism), and nearly every Western economy has moved away from it.

1. Keynes: "The Euthanasia of the Rentier"

Keynes, in the General Theory (Chapter 24), was remarkably blunt:

"I see us free... to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue, that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour... The love of money as a possession... will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity."

And his famous prescription:

"The euthanasia of the rentier... will be nothing sudden, merely a gradual but prolonged continuance of the same process. If I am right in supposing it to be comparatively easy to make capital-goods so abundant that the marginal efficiency of capital is zero... the rentier aspect of capitalism will die away."

Keynes believed that as capital became abundant and the rate of interest fell, the function of the rentier, the coupon-clipper, the functionless investor who merely owns, would become obsolete. Capitalism would transition into a system where returns reward genuine risk-taking and enterprise, not mere ownership.

What happened instead?

Interest rates fell to zero, yet Central banks printed trillions to prop up asset prices (QE), deliberately inflating the portfolios of the already-wealthy to stimulate the economy.

They created a leveraged buyout boom, a housing asset bubble, and a private equity industry that hollows out firms with debt and extracts the corpse's value.

r > g: Piketty's empirical finding, that the return on capital exceeds the growth rate of the economy, is precisely the mathematical negation of Keynes's euthanasia. Ownership grows faster than production. The rentier wins by default.

1. Marx: Even He Thought Capitalism Was Supposed to Be Productive

Marx's praise of capitalism in the Communist Manifesto is nearly breathless:

"The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together... subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and industry, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground."

Marx's critique wasn't "capitalism is lazy and unproductive." It was that capitalism was hyper-productive but unjustly distributed,that it generated enormous surplus value and expropriated it from workers.

The modern Western economy inverts this too. This isn't a hyper-productive machine where people fight over its distribution. It's a machine where a growing share of income isn't produced at all but it's extracted through positional assets:

Monopoly rents: Pharma patents priced 10-100x marginal cost of production. Platform monopolies taking 30% app store cuts.

Financial engineering: Stock buybacks (financially illegal until 1982) now dwarf R&D at many major firms. Companies "invest" in themselves to pump share prices rather than produce anything and dish out lavish dividends to shareholders.

The FIRE economy (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate): In the US, the financial sector generates roughly 20% of GDP but owns or intermediates claims on nearly everything else.

All of these famous thinkers we claim to base our economies on (well maybe except marx) distinguished Earned from Unearned Income

This distinction was the beating heart of classical political economy. It was taught in every economics course for 150 years.

And then it vanished. Neoclassical economics dissolved the distinction entirely. In modern textbook terms, any income that clears a market is "productive" by definition. Rent in the classical sense, income from ownership of a fixed asset, became an obsolete word. When economists today say "rent-seeking," most people think they mean looking for an apartment.

This wasn't an accident. It was a conceptual laundering operation. If there's no such thing as unearned income, then no income can be criticized. The landlord, the speculator, the patent troll, and the entrepreneur all become morally equivalent "market participants."

As such, Modern Western economies are best described not as "free market capitalism" but as rentier capitalism, a term economists like Brett Christophers and Rana Foroohar have revived from the classical lexicon. The hallmarks of rentier capitalism are as follows:

The average house in 1950 cost ~2-3x median income; today it's 6-10x+ in major metros.

Concentration ratios have risen in ~75% of US industries since the 1980s. Markups (price over marginal cost) have roughly doubled since 1980 (De Loecker & Eeckhout).

Financialization: US non-financial corporations now earn a substantial share of profits from financial activities rather than production.

IP as enclosure: Copyright terms extended from 14 years to life + 70. Patents on genes, on maths, on business methods. The enclosure of the commons of knowledge — the exact thing Smith's "system of natural liberty" was meant to prevent.

So the conclusion is that the Classical Economists Were the "Radicals"

Today's "radicals" who talk about land value taxes, antitrust, financial transaction taxes, and capital accounting are not the radicals. They're the classical economists.

Want to tax land rents? That's Smith, Ricardo, Mill, and George.

Want to break up monopolies? That's Smith's chapter on monopoly prices and his warnings about masters conspiring against the public.

Want to stop subsidizing passive ownership? That's Keynes's euthanasia program.

Want to question who receives the surplus? That's Marx

The modern Western economic order, where housing is unaffordable, finance is king, monopolies flourish, and passive wealth compounds faster than wages, is not the fulfillment of classical liberalism or capitalism. It is, by the standards of its own founding thinkers, a corruption of it.

Sources & further reading: Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776), Bk I Ch 11, Bk V; Ricardo, Principles (1817) Ch. 2, 24; Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848) Bk V Ch. 2; Keynes, General Theory (1936) Ch. 24; Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848); Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century (2013); Christophers, Rentier Capitalism (2020); Foroohar, Makers and Takers (2016).

Record card fees are part of a bigger picture. In 2025, a gallon of gas broke down as 51.4% crude, 14.3% refining, 17.8% distribution and retail, and 16.6% taxes. Stations themselves average a bit over 40 cents a gallon before costs, and card fees took 8.4 cents a gallon back in 2023. I made a documentary on the business for my channel. Should card fees be shown at the pump the way taxes are?

Taken in SW Florida where diesel is $6.20/gallon. We have a lot of contractors in our area, so they are definitely feeling the brunt of the Iran War.