By David Stockman at Brownstone dot org.

We recently chanced to importune our Fed Chairman at a cocktail party in NYC. Our message to Jay Powell was that there are multiple reasons to stop cutting interest rates, but in light of the current government shutdown, one of the most compelling arguments is that the Fed's cheap money policies have essentially destroyed any semblance of fiscal discipline in America.

Specifically, we reminded him that real rates on the ballooning Federal debt have been essentially zero or negative for most of the time since the so-called Great Financial Crisis. In turn, this means that the current generation of elected politicians in Washington has been drastically misled - euthanized as it were - as to the true cost of massive and chronic budget deficits.

Here is the inflation-adjusted yield on Uncle Sam's benchmark security, the workhorse 10-year Treasury Note. In fact, the inflation-adjusted yield has averaged -0.30% during the entirety of the span from 2011 thru 2025 to date. Even now it stands at only +1.0%.

So, we suggested to Powell that the Fed is falsely telling the elected politicians that the swelling total of government debt is cost-free. Of course, Chairman Powell did not blink, saying that as it may, "We focus only on what's best for the economy."

Again today, therefore, what's putatively best for the economy according to Jay Powell and his merry band of money-printers is yet another 25-basis point rate cut, with a hint of more to come. That is to say, the Fed appears on track to push the real interest rate back below the zero bound because there is no evidence at all that the running inflation rate has dropped below 3.00%, and, as we have previously noted, it seems to be actually accelerating since April.

In that regard, we offer our trusty 16% trimmed mean CPI. For the last year the annualized rate of monthly change has been oscillating in the +2% to +4% range, and now the slower moving Y/Y rate has turned higher as well, posting at 3.2% in September. Needless to say, how more of this stiff level of inflation is good for the Main Street economy the Fed chairman didn't say - even as self-evidently his continued rate-cutting is signalling the spenders of Washington and the unhinged speculators in the canyons of Wall Street to keep on keeping on.

Then again, were the Fed to keep trucking along the path of the graph's blue line for the next decade, the purchasing power of a dollar earned or saved today would be just 72 cents at the end. How that would incentivize the classic ingredients of supply-side vigor - savings, investment, risk-taking, work effort, and business enterprise - he didn't say, either. And for an obvious reason: Read today's post-meeting statement or any of the cloned variations for the last multitude of months and years and you will find no reference to the supply side or Say's Law, at all.

To the contrary, the Fed is all about Keynesian demand management, as if the US economy were the equivalent of some giant bathtub: Its job is to flush it full to the rim with "aggregate demand" by continuously falsifying interest rates whenever there is a hint of deficient spending.

But, of course, that whole proposition is rooted in the nonsense published by Professor J.M. Keynes during the wholly different circumstances of the 1930s.

Even then, the 1930s did not repeal Say's Law or repudiate in any way its axiom that supply generates its own demand. The 1930s Great Depression, in fact, was just the morning-after liquidation of the massive buildup of debt and excess export capacity that had materialized during the Great War and during the 1920s foreign bond bubble. In turn, both the war economy boom and the 1920s export boom were owing to the unsustainable credit expansion that had been fueled by the exuberant pace of money-printing at the nation's newborn central bank.

In any event, the first graph above is the smoking gun. During the 1985 to 2000 period, the inflation-adjusted ...

By Trish Dennis at Brownstone dot org.

In 2020, the world I thought I knew fell away. Nothing in my life prepared me for what unfolded from March 2020 onwards. It was a rupture that left me reeling, stunned, and disoriented. I felt reborn into a world I barely recognised, one where governments and trusted institutions turned on their own people.

I had always believed that, for the most part, the medical profession and public health agencies acted in good faith. But over the course of the pandemic years, that belief and trust were eroded as I saw malign patterns and policies emerge, policies that stripped patients of autonomy and dignity, and even in many cases, their lives. And these policies were not just misguided but deliberately systemic.

Last month, I was contacted by Teresa Cichewicz. As a regular reader of Brownstone Institute, Teresa had come across some of my articles, and she invited me to join her and her co-founder, Gail Seiler, on the podcast to discuss their work and to compare notes with me on the similarities and differences in the approach taken by the UK and Ireland during the pandemic. It was a deeply engaging conversation that left me feeling heartened and inspired.

This arose from Teresa and Gail's determination to confront the systemic failures that claimed so many lives during the pandemic. The organisation's stated mission is to document and expose the ethical and procedural breaches that occurred under government-mandated protocols, to support witnesses in sharing their experiences, and to pursue meaningful accountability and reform. By compiling detailed medical records, sworn testimonies, and survivor accounts, the aim is to create a factual record that can challenge official narratives and guide future policy change. Teresa and Gail have worked on this with quiet determination, grounded in the belief that truth and justice belong together, and that remembering and bearing witness is the first step toward repair.

The work of the Project began not in boardrooms or laboratories, but in hospital corridors and grief-stricken living rooms, speaking with families desperate to make sense of the suffering they had witnessed. From that personal crucible, the project emerges as both testimony and indictment, clearly and painfully illustrating that what unfolded in those years was not a series of tragic mistakes but a pattern of institutional betrayal demanding exposure.

Teresa's personal story speaks to the human cost of these failures. Her father, Robert Anthony Michanowicz, entered a Pennsylvania hospital in 2021 needing only oxygen support, but was rapidly placed on the Covid protocol without informed consent. Staff isolated him from family, discouraged communication, and ignored repeated requests for alternative treatments such as ivermectin. He was instead given Remdesivir and later morphine, despite warnings about his kidney condition. He became dehydrated, confused, and increasingly weak while nurses failed to provide even basic care. Within days, his organs failed, and he died alone. Teresa and her family maintain that rigid adherence to federal protocols replaced medical judgment and basic compassion, a cruelty disguised as care.

Only days later, Teresa witnessed another tragedy within her own community. Jessica Halgren, a young mother of six, twenty-eight weeks pregnant with her seventh child, fell ill with Covid-19 that quickly developed into pneumonia. When her oxygen levels dropped to 85, she went to the emergency department, terrified for her baby's safety. Jessica's husband, Matt, was turned away at the door as she was transferred by ambulance to another hospital. For several days, Jessica communicated with her family only by text. Doctors then informed Matt that they needed to perform an emergency caesarean to save the baby.

On December 4, the hospital said Jessica had to be ventilated, which she resisted, telling her husband, "If they vent me, I won't make it out." Sedated and restrained, J...

By David Gortler, Pharm. D at Brownstone dot org.

On Oct. 10, Trump's physician, Dr. Sean P. Barbabella, announced that after conducting a battery of tests, he found that our president "remains in exceptional health" and that he had received "immunizations, including annual influenza and updated Covid-19 booster vaccinations." It's likely the president received a Pfizer mRNA shot.

Listening to the Experts

Trump - perhaps the busiest man on the planet - can't be expected to do a deep dive on the epidemiology, safety, and efficacy of these shots. Like most patients, he had no choice but to trust the experts.

Doing so makes sense when the experts are trustworthy and follow what the data tells them. Unfortunately, when it comes to public health, and to the Covid-19 mandates in particular, trust in federal health agencies and health care professionals has been shattered beyond recognition.

So much of what people think they know about America's recent drug and mRNA approvals just isn't so. As a result, I wonder if the President of the United States received a full disclosure of the available data so he could weigh the risks versus the benefits of mRNA Covid shots.

To exercise truly informed consent, he would have needed to know (at a minimum) the following:

It's October 2025. Deadly variants of Covid are long extinct and extremely unlikely to emerge without human engineering. This has been the case since the emergence of the Omicron variant in late 2021, according to a landmark meta-analysis published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases.

The president, according to his physician, "remains in exceptional health."

In layman's terms: if the president were to catch Covid again (he has had Covid at least once), it would be mild. He could easily treat it with very safe drugs such as ivermectin and/or hydroxychloroquine that he correctly advocated for, and stockpiled, along with dozens of other repurposed, inexpensive treatments for Covid, proven to be safe and effective as the peer-reviewed literature has clearly outlined: Here are two of my favorites both of which I've written about extensively:

Covid viruses mutate too quickly to be stopped by any mass-produced "vaccine." Manufacturers knew from the start that with Covid's high rate of mutation, mRNA shots would have to be produced and administered at least once a month, lest they become irrelevant due to mutations. Researchers from the Universities of Bath and Edinburgh found back in 2021 that Covid mutates as quickly as every two weeks. That means Trump's monovalent injection that he was injected with in 2025, which was developed in late 2024 and early 2025, is likely obsolete.

Even if they were given as a monthly booster, these shots don't do what a "vaccine" is supposed to do; they have not been shown to prevent spread or transmission of Covid-19.

Unlike vaccines which are designed to provide total immunity, Covid injections have been shown to produce antibodies, but do not provide complete immunity from Covid. In other words, one would still catch Covid, just not the one particular strain of Covid you are being injected with.

There's no reputable evidence to show that mRNA Covid shots minimize serious disease and may have caused harm; by the end of 2022, the majority of Covid-19 deaths were in vaccinated/boosted individuals.

The Risks of mRNA Covid Shots

So much for the benefits. What about the risks?

In the FDA VAERS database, there are over one million adverse event reports from Covid mRNA shots in the United States alone, which include tens of thousands of reports of: deaths, permanent disability, ER visits, and severe allergic reactions. Even worse: The VAERS surveillance database has been chastised by multiple government and FDA officials to only represent low, single-digit percentages of the actual number of adverse effects that actually occur.

Per Liz Willner's (famous?) Open VAERS website:

Pharma companies misled us in 2020-21 when they claimed that the...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

The year was 2001 and the dot-com bust was in the rearview mirror. New ideas were in circulation among young and visionary entrepreneurs. Sure, pets.com failed and so many others but that was a temporary boom-bust.

The Internet will change everything eventually, we were told. Technology, decentralization, crowd sourcing, and digital spontaneity will create an information landscape without gatekeepers. Everything will have to adapt. The experts of the old world will be replaced by a people's revolution. Whereas legacy elites waved credentials, a new class of revolutionaries will raise armies of servers and digits to move the center of civilization to the cloud.

Wikipedia was a headline feature, an experiment in crowd sourcing knowledge in a way that was decentralized, able to scale in ways the old model was not, and drawing from the knowledge and passions of people the world over. The platform seemed to embody the principle of freedom itself. Everyone has a voice. The truth will emerge from the seeming chaos of competing points of view.

At long last, the anti-authoritarian outlook would be tested on a medium that had intrigued scholars since the ancient world: books containing all knowledge. Reading through Aristotle's vast corpus, you find this passion and drive at work. He wanted to document everything he could about the world around him. Centuries later following the fall of Rome, St. Isidor, archbishop of Seville, embarked upon a similar path. With the help of countless scribes, he spent his life writing Etymologiae, a massive treatise on all that was known, compiled from 615-630AD.

As publishing with movable type took hold in the 15th and 16th centuries, the first similar work appeared in 1630: Johann Heinrich Alsted's Encyclopaedia Septem Tomis Distincta. When by the late 19th century, book publishing and distribution was democratized by markets and technology, and middle-class households could obtain real libraries, the encyclopedia set became a huge commercial success. Many companies were involved in making and selling them.

After the Second World War, it became common for every household to have a set on the shelf, or several. They provided endless fascination for everyone, a reference tool for learning for all ages. One of the more salient memories of my own childhood was opening them randomly and reading as much as I could, on pretty much any imaginable topic. I spent countless hours with these magical books.

Encyclopedias drew from the best experts but always with gatekeepers to decide what was and was not credible information. The top editorial position at World Book, Britannica, or Funk & Wagnalls was a powerful place to be professionally. He could decide what was and was not true, who was and was not an expert, what people did and did not need to know.

When Murray Rothbard had finished his graduate studies at Columbia University and before he had a teaching position, he was looking for ways to bring in income. As a trained economic historian, he attempted to send in three entries to an encyclopedia company. The essays were promptly rejected simply because his take was different from the mainstream consensus, never mind that what he wrote was true.

This is the problem with gatekeepers. So long as printing remained the main means by which knowledge was preserved and distributed, they would be necessary.

The founding of Wikipedia in 2001 was about a vision to change that. The initial reaction was widespread and justifiable incredulity. It could never work for anyone to be able to change anything, so they said. It's not possible simply to wipe away the gatekeepers and for truth to emerge. For years, this perception dominated, as teachers and experts of all sorts spoke of Wikipedia only with disdain.

But gradually, something interesting began to happen. It actually seemed to be working. The entries became ever more voluminous and detailed. The rules of the road became mor...

By David Bell at Brownstone dot org.

The Evil of Aimlessness

I once worked in communities supported mainly through a form of Universal Basic Income (UBI). Most money was received from the government for no (or token) work, or from mining royalties, where others worked digging on the communities' lands. There were walls black and heaving with cockroaches while children slept with dogs on stained mattresses below, and babies covered head to toe in pustular scabies while the mother complained about a sore back. This was not universal, but not uncommon. Other communities that stood out as strong and healthy had people working hard for a living - particularly in roles that reflected their culture - a very different economy.

Men who once worked hard to support families lose the reason to do so when it makes no real difference; when the basics of life and leisure are equally available to those who work for them, and those who do nothing. It is not a political issue, just a human behavioral and psychological one. Removing the need to work and the dignity that striving and succeeding, especially before one's family, leads to inaction, loss of interest in the world, a loss of role (i.e., a loss of dignity), and depression. This is dampened by alcohol or drugs. Wives and children suffer by being beaten up by drunk, frustrated, and drugged men. Having two frequently drunk parents ensures children are malnourished and aimless.

This is not theoretical - it is seen all over the world where people of one culture are overrun by those of another, and confined to subservience, economic and societal irrelevance, and handouts. Some people and communities break out of it, usually by finding ways to grow their local economy and achieve some form of self-governance and self-reliance. Breaking out is not common and requires an opportunity, the possibility, to do so.

Our Brave New Technocratic World

The road much of the 'developed' world is currently on is towards UBI, but without that potential for escape. We use this term 'developed' in a technological sense - not a human sense - as it denotes technology rather than awareness. UBI will be introduced as a panacea, as artificial intelligence (AI) will replace a lot of jobs. The use of AI is increasing because it can accumulate wealth more reliably than employees. Amazon's plans to replace humans with robots will not only mean a few hundred thousand human jobs gone at Amazon, but lots more high-street shops boarded up and their employees and owners gone. This is why Amazon is moving to AI and robotics - to increase profit for the few percent who are its beneficiaries by putting competitors out of business. AI may be overplayed or not, but what Amazon is doing will be widely repeated.

The people out of work, by and large, will be city and town dwellers who must obtain their food from shops (or Amazon). They will need to be given money or food vouchers to do this. Governments will provide these because they cannot afford responsibility for abject poverty on a mass scale, and many in government also mean well. People will increasingly rent their housing from Blackstone or a similar corporate entity rather than own it, further increasing their dependence. For a while, some people will play online games or draw pictures and grow token lettuces on their balconies, but knowing this is just window dressing on life. Then they will go the way of the communities in the first paragraph, taking families and communities with them.

Government UBI will happen - it already does to some extent, but the future will see it on a far, far larger scale. It will not be cash handouts but digital currency. This will be a tightly controlled version, as in a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), because the government will claim responsibility for controlling the money it dispenses. CBDC is essentially food vouchers, and intended to be. Your UBI will be yours as long as you use it for what the government allows, within the time...

By Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone dot org.

The Indian-origin parable of the six blind men describing an elephant spread to many cultures and civilisations centuries ago and is therefore a widely-known story. Upon first encountering an elephant, the men who had heard about but not actually come across it, each person projects from the particular part of the animal he explored by touch to offer a generalised description of the whole beast.

The one who felt the side said the animal was like a wall; another touched the tusk and said it was like a spear; the third took hold of the trunk and insisted it was like a snake; the fourth grasped a leg and concluded it was clearly most like a tree; the fifth, a tall man, felt the ear and said it was like a fan; and the sixth grabbed the tail and said the elephant resembled a rope.

The point of the parable is that specialists can similarly see in their area of expertise in granular detail yet be blind to the big picture. In previous articles, I have highlighted parallels between the 2003 Iraq war, nuclear disarmament, climate catastrophism, and Covid interventions (lockdowns, mask recommendations, and vaccine mandates).

All three are conveniently brought together in the book Our Enemy, the Government: How Covid Enabled the Expansion and Abuse of State Power (2023). As an aside, readers might note that the left-right ideological divide breaks down as an explanation for my opposition to the four sets of official policies.

Instead, in all four cases, my stance supports pockets of opposition and resistance to the consensus in the policy elite.

The two dots I'd like to connect in this article are the seemingly discrete reform agendas of the United Nations and the World Health Organisation (WHO). In his address on 23 September 2025 to the annual gathering of world leaders for the opening of the UN General Assembly, President Donald Trump offered an exceptionally blunt assessment of the manifold failures of the organisation, including with regard to its primary purpose of ensuring international peace and security. The wide-ranging address was notable for one important omission.

Not once did Trump mention the Security Council, the organisation's most important organ with the legal authority to make decisions, up to and including going to war, that binds all countries. Yet, its congenital impotence and accelerating obsolescence and irrelevance are arguably the primary explanation for the UN's failure to reach its potential on preventing and ending wars that Trump complained about.

They are also centrally relevant to the discussion of a more powerful WHO or a replacement international health organisation. In the current architecture of global governance, the UN Security Council is both the ultimate and the only international entity with enforcement authority over sovereign states.

Furthermore, its authority extends to states that are not UN members, are not members of the Security Council when the decision to authorise enforcement by means of diplomatic, economic, and/or military sanctions is made, or are a member but vote against the authorising resolution. Except, of course, if the negative vote is cast by one of the five permanent members (P5), with the power of veto.

Cases can be decided by the World Court and the International Criminal Court (ICC) on the legal obligations and liabilities of sovereign states. But if they reject the judicial decisions and defy the courts, the only recourse to enforce them is the Security Council acting under chapter 7 of the UN Charter. Nor is the ambit of the veto power limited to actions by one of the P5. Any one of them can veto enforcement action to protect an ally or a client state.

Without Enforceable Compliance, International Law Is a Fiction

One of the early and sustained criticisms of the WHO in mismanaging the Covid pandemic was failure to hold China accountable for non-cooperation with the inquiry into the origins of the virus, in particular if it might...

By Russ Gonnering at Brownstone dot org.

Donald Berwick, one of the giants in the field of Medical Quality Improvement, is often credited with popularizing the phrase, "Every system is perfectly designed for the results it gets." I am indebted to Anna Reich for exploring the history of this saying. As it turns out, as usual, the history is a bit more "complex" and is a distillation of the ideas of multiple people.

This truism should not really be a surprise, though. Those of us who have raised children, or even a dog, understand that incentives matter, and incentives must be built into the system. What really IS surprising is that the "experts" in whom so much of our lives are entrusted, especially in healthcare, have such a poor understanding of this fact.

Let's do a "root cause analysis" of why the "experts" seem to have gotten so many things wrong when it comes to health and healthcare. If we follow the questioning deeper, we will eventually get to the answer that the "experts" do not really understand how the health/healthcare system works. They don't understand this because they lack the knowledge allowing them to separate what is "merely complicated" from what is "truly complex." They don't comprehend it, because their education was lacking in this area. I know…I was one of those "experts" at a point in my career. I described my own epiphany in this Brownstone essay as well as multiple Substack posts.

In addition to my clinical career in Oculofacial Reconstructive Surgery, I had a "shadow career" and headed the Quality Improvement Program at a large tertiary-care medical center. We applied the methods of statistical quality control to healthcare, and we had some amazing success. But we had dismal failures as well, and that was puzzling. It was only when I read this article by David Snowden and Mary Boone that I realized what was missing.

Stop what you are doing and follow the hyperlink to the article so you understand the basis of this essay. If you can't do that, follow this to a 3-minute YouTube video that will explain the difference between merely complicated and truly complex.

It became clear to me that when we applied the statistical quality control approach to problems that were merely complicated, we were very successful. However, when we tried the same with those problems that were truly complex, we failed miserably. We needed a different toolset for those, and we needed to recognize emergent order where the elements of the problem worked together in ways difficult or even impossible to know ahead of time. Changing one element would disrupt the flow and produce other, unforeseen adaptive changes in the problem.

In a Complex Adaptive System, "the whole really is more than the sum of the parts." Efforts to conform the system to what we thought should work (when in reality it didn't work at all) led down the road to ultimate failure. We would only know "the answer" when we solved the problem! This of course is anathema to one schooled for years in the scientific method.

With truly complex or wicked problems described by Rittel and Webber, we can't realistically formulate the One hypothesis and test it with a huge fail-safe effort. We need to formulate multiple safe-fail hypotheses as a failure, and the constructive response to it is essential to arrive at the optimum answer to the problem.

This series of "constructively changing course" is the basis of the concept Peter Sims described in Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries. This embrace of failure is completely counterintuitive to those in the health professions so accustomed to success. To avoid catastrophic failure, one must learn to recognize and expect small failures and profit from them. That is the only way to achieve the optimum result.

The predictability horizon from the emergent order in a Complex Adaptive System is very short. One must make changes on the fly, putting resources into what is working, then stop and adapt when...

By Rev. John F. Naugle at Brownstone dot org.

On May 8 the pastor and I gathered in the living room of our rectory to await the announcement of a new pope. After what seemed like forever, the cardinal protodeacon announced the words we had been waiting for:

Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum; habemus papam: Eminentissimum ac Reverendissimum Dominum, Dominum Robertum Franciscum, Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem Prevost, qui sibi nomen imposuit Leonem Decimum Quartum.

My reaction was twofold. First, I had no clue who Cardinal Prevost was. I was, however, excited that the new Pope was named Leo, for it was the words of his predecessor Pope Leo XIII that I used to argue against lockdowns in April of 2020:

"The preservation of life is the bounden duty of one and all, and to be wanting therein is a crime. It necessarily follows that each one has a natural right to procure what is required in order to live, and the poor can procure that in no other way than by what they can earn through their work" (Rerum Novarum 44).

Under the guise of executive powers reserved for short-term disasters such as hurricanes, leaders across the West have done the previously unthinkable: they have FORBIDDEN entire segments of the population from working. Using a nonsensical distinction between essential and non-essential (as if providing for one's family is ever non-essential) our entire workforce has been divided into three groups: 1.) The upper class with jobs that can be performed in their pajamas at home, 2.) Laborers lucky enough to still be able to go to work, and 3.) Those intentionally rendered unemployed.

Just two days later, Pope Leo XIV referenced the encyclical Rerum Novarum is his address to the College of Cardinals:

Sensing myself called to continue in this same path, I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.

I've been pondering the phrase "rerum novarum" a lot in recent days, which literally means "new things." At the recent Brownstone Polyface Farm event, I was having a dinner conversation with Bret Weinstein where he mentioned the urgent need to address the problem of new things such as artificial intelligence. I responded that "new things" in Latin has an extremely negative connotation, and that these words, when translated into English in Leo XIII's encyclical, are rendered as "revolutionary change."

This prompted me to go back and reread the opening paragraph of the 1891 encyclical:

That the spirit of revolutionary change, which has long been disturbing the nations of the world, should have passed beyond the sphere of politics and made its influence felt in the cognate sphere of practical economics is not surprising. The elements of the conflict now raging are unmistakable, in the vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the marvelous discoveries of science; in the changed relations between masters and workmen; in the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses; in the increased self-reliance and closer mutual combination of the working classes; as also, finally, in the prevailing moral degeneracy. The momentous gravity of the state of things now obtaining fills every mind with painful apprehension; wise men are discussing it; practical men are proposing schemes; popular meetings, legislatures, and rulers of nations are all busied with it - actually there is no question which has taken a deeper hold on the public mind.

I was astounded by how these words, written over 130 years ago, sound as if they could have been written today, especially after the...

By Roger Bate at Brownstone dot org.

A walk through a dozen convenience stores in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, says a lot about how US nicotine policy actually works. Only about one in eight nicotine-pouch products for sale is legal. The rest are unauthorized - but they're not all the same. Some are brightly branded, with uncertain ingredients, not approved by any Western regulator, and clearly aimed at impulse buyers. Others - like Sweden's NOAT - are the opposite: muted, well-made, adult-oriented, and already approved for sale in Europe.

Yet in the United States, NOAT has been told to stop selling. In September 2025, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued the company a warning letter for offering nicotine pouches without marketing authorization. That might make sense if the products were dangerous, but they appear to be among the safest on the market: mild flavors, low nicotine levels, and recyclable paper packaging. In Europe, regulators consider them acceptable. In America, they're banned. The decision looks, at best, strange - and possibly arbitrary.

What the Market Shows

My October 2025 audit was straightforward. I visited twelve stores and recorded every distinct pouch product visible for sale at the counter. If the item matched one of the twenty ZYN products that the FDA authorized in January, it was counted as legal. Everything else was counted as illegal.

Two of the stores told me they had recently received FDA letters and had already removed most illegal stock. The other ten stores were still dominated by unauthorized products - more than 93 percent of what was on display. Across all twelve locations, about 12 percent of products were legal ZYN, and about 88 percent were not.

The illegal share wasn't uniform. Many of the unauthorized products were clearly high-nicotine imports with flashy names like Loop, Velo, and Zimo. These products may be fine, but some are probably high in contaminants, and a few often with very high nicotine levels. Others were subdued, plainly meant for adult users. NOAT was a good example of that second group: simple packaging, oat-based filler, restrained flavoring, and branding that makes no effort to look "cool." It's the kind of product any regulator serious about harm reduction would welcome.

Enforcement Works

To the FDA's credit, enforcement does make a difference. The two stores that received official letters quickly pulled their illegal stock. That mirrors the agency's broader efforts this year: new import alerts to detain unauthorized tobacco products at the border (see also Import Alert 98-06), and hundreds of warning letters to retailers, importers, and distributors.

But effective enforcement can't solve a supply problem. The list of legal nicotine-pouch products is still extremely short - only a narrow range of ZYN items. Adults who want more variety, or stores that want to meet that demand, inevitably turn to gray-market suppliers. The more limited the legal catalog, the more the illegal market thrives.

Why the NOAT Decision Appears Bizarre

The FDA's own actions make the situation hard to explain. In January 2025, it authorized twenty ZYN products after finding that they contained far fewer harmful chemicals than cigarettes and could help adult smokers switch. That was progress. But nine months later, the FDA has approved nothing else - while sending a warning letter to NOAT, arguably the least youth-oriented pouch line in the world.

The outcome is bad for legal sellers and public health. ZYN is legal; a handful of clearly risky, high-nicotine imports continue to circulate; and a mild, adult-market brand that meets European safety and labeling rules is banned. Officially, NOAT's problem is procedural - it lacks a marketing order. But in practical terms, the FDA is punishing the very design choices it claims to value: simplicity, low appeal to minors, and clean ingredients.

This approach also ignores the differences in actual risk. Studies consistently show that nic...

By Randall Bock at Brownstone dot org.

Washington is locked in another shutdown standoff over two Democrat demands Republicans will not accept: continued Affordable Care Act subsidies and (separately but related) federal healthcare benefits for illegal immigrants. Those fights are real, but they miss the larger cost driver. ACA subsidies alone amount to only about half of what the nation would save if we returned to pre-1990 levels of mental health insurance coverage.

What changed wasn't compassion; it was policy. Mental health parity, passed in 1996 as the Mental Health Parity Act (MHPA), and expanded in 2008 as the (ponderously politically prosaic) Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA), compels insurers to cover mental and substance-use disorders as they do heart disease or diabetes.

But pause on that word, parity. We never needed a law to force hospitals to treat heart attacks, strokes, brain bleeds, broken bones, or pneumonia. Those are acute, visible, life-threatening conditions. No insurer needs moral guidance to approve care for someone bloody or beaten on the pavement. PARITY became reality with (first academia's, then government's) redefining struggle as disease; deciding that anxiety, ADHD, addiction, or vague "mood disorders" must be treated (and reimbursed) like myocardial infarction.

Even acknowledging addiction can ruin lives, the way Washington chooses to "fix" things rarely resembles careful repair, but rather a combination of how Mr. Bean might "fix" an item: heavy-handedly, and misapplied - and a gambler might "fix" a race, so the right insiders walk away with the winnings. Government itself has no profit motive, but its operatives do: through campaign donations, consulting contracts, kickbacks, and bureaucratic expansion.

"Parity" sounds humane. In practice, it has medicalized ordinary hardship, incentivized lifelong dependency, and built an industry that never has to cure anything. Who wouldn't want schizophrenia treated seriously? But the mandate sprawled far beyond severe illness. ADHD, anxiety, autism, addiction - once handled by family, faith, or personal resilience (hand-in-hand with mental health institutions, and more severe social stigmas and legal codes) - became permanent billable conditions.

Proportional with youth, it may be harder to imagine now, but before parity and the therapy economy, Americans endured grief, fear, war, and uncertainty without a medical file to climb into. Families were intact. Churches were full. Children more often grew up with both parents. There was silence and stoicism- but also resilience. We did not treat every sadness or quirk as a lifetime disorder requiring weekly appointments.

The result: an estimated $250 billion in added annual costs over 1990 baselines. The ACA didn't create this; it entrenched it behind federal transfers. We now have a system too expensive to sustain and too sacred to reform - "affordable" only by branding.

The Diagnosis Boom

Parity turned ordinary struggles into billable codes. Consider a familiar pattern: a worried mother, a restless child, a school evaluation - and suddenly ADHD, amphetamines, therapy sessions, an IEP, maybe SSI checks. Relief, but also dependency - paid by taxpayers at every level.

Autism followed the same path, as delineated in "Unraveling Autism's Surge." Diagnoses in California climbed from a few hundred in the 1980s to over 200,000 today - quadrupling since 2011. This isn't just "awareness." Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), schools receive an extra $13,000 per child with an autism label on top of baseline spending. National special-education costs hit $39 billion in 2020. SSI payments for autism rose 154% between 2004 and 2014.

Addiction was recast, too. In my "Methadone Maintenance Ignited America's Opioid Crisis," I describe the methadone model: medicalize, stabilize, monetize. Addiction became a chronic illness, not a detour; "reco...