Monday, July 13, 2026

California and the Eleven Dwarfs Take on the Paramount-Warner Bros Merger

In Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith foresees that capitalist industrialists could collude with government at the expense of labor. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that keeping laborers to a subsistence wage is necessary for capitalists to have enough wealth accumulated to invest in culture. Rather than being immoral, exploitation is simply part of life and thus the resulting economic inequality cannot be removed at its source. Low wages may simply be a feature of how labor supply typically relates to business demand for workers, whereas highly educated professionals are not so numerous and can demand higher compensation. Meanwhile, what about consumers as capitalist industrialists continue to accumulate capital in part by being able to pay large workforces subsistence wages and engage in mergers and acquisitions, such that competitive markets are turned into oligopolies and even, as in the case of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in the 1870s, monopolies capable of extracting “monopoly rents”? In the U.S., the Sherman and Clayton Acts in the early 1900s were oriented to safeguarding competitive markets from being undermined by business titans, but enforcing those federal laws would seem to fly in the face of collusion between capitalists and their respective governments. As a case in point, the U.S. Justice Department gave the green light to Paramount’s take-over of Warner Brothers/Discovery even as President Trump had a financial interest in the deal going through. In the American federal system, the state governments could act as a check, and on July 13, 2026, the announcement came that California plus eleven other states, led by their respective attorneys general, filed a lawsuit challenging the merger on the basis that it would violate Section 7 of the Clayton Act. American consumers had reason to be thankful that they were still in a federal republic of republics, even though the growth of power at the federal level had nearly eclipsed the federalism, at least as it was originally intended—as enabling checks by the feds on the states and vice versa.

The Clayton Act “holds that mergers that may substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly are illegal.”[1] In seeking to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery for $111 billion, Paramount’s mega-merger was raising concerns before closure that “combining two major Hollywood studios would hurt the industry while giving too much power” to Paramount’s CEO, David Ellison, in the film and television industries.[2] Hence California Attorney General Rob Bonta “led a group of 12 attorneys general in filing a lawsuit challenging the merger, claiming it would ‘lead to higher prices, lower quality, and less content for film and television, harming movie theaters, basic cable distributors, and ultimately audiences on every sofa and movie theater seat in the U.S.’”[3] In other words, all that typically goes with a competitive market becoming first an oligopoly, with just a few suppliers each with substantial market-share and thus market-power with which to become price-setters rather than takers, and then possibly even a monopoly in which consumers have only one choice of supplier and thus must pay whatever that supply decides. Because Paramount had completed an $8 billion merger with Skydance Media in 2025, the addition of Warner Bros. Discovery would give rise to tremendous market-power, hence occasioning an oligopolistic industry-structure. 

It is because the U.S. Justice Department announced on July 10, 2026 that even incorporating Warner Bros. Discovery would not harm competition and could even “strengthen competition across the media and entertainment industry, including in streaming video, traditional television and theatrical film distribution” that California and eleven other states jumped into action on the following Monday.[4] That a supplier with such massive market-power would actually make the industry more competitive is hard to believe, for, as Adam Smith lays out in his classic text on competitive markets, each supplier must be small enough relative to the entire market that no one supplier could set prices, but instead would have to take whatever prices are set by supply and demand, mechanistically in the market rather than by the intention of a dominant CEO.

Fortunately, under the U.S. federal system, “state attorneys general retain independent authority under antitrust laws, and the DOJ’s decision [would] not prevent additional legal challenges” to the proposed merger.[5] The personal financial interests of high officials in the U.S. Government, whether in the White House or Congress, could be checked, in effect, by the governmental sovereignty retained by the states, for in U.S. federalism, like E.U. federalism, governmental sovereignty has been divided between the federal and state levels, such that each would have an autonomous basis upon which to challenge over-reaches by governmental institutions on the other level. Put crassly, wealthy capitalists seeking a mega-merger would be best advised in both the E.U. and U.S. to pay off enough key federal and state officials so no one on either level would be motivated to institute a judicial contest. Other things equal, a federal system means that corruption by business of government costs more.

Federalism itself can thus be seen as serving a public purpose for the good of the whole. Were governmental sovereignty to reside exclusively only at one level—federal or state—as in a consolidated government and a confederation, respectively, it would be easier for powerful CEOs of large corporations to be able to engineer mega-mergers at the expense of market competition. In 2026, it was thus in the interest of American and European consumers to balance their respective federal systems, with more governmental autonomy going to the American states at the expense of the federal government, and more governmental authority going to the E.U. at the expense of the member-states. Perhaps as a result, more industries could be remade into competitive markets from being too oligopolistic and even de facto monopolies. 

To be effective, anti-trust laws must be enforced even if business executives and boards don’t exactly like the idea and would rather buy off governments at the expense of labor, consumers, and even the economic systems themselves, for there is a certain beauty to forces of supply and demand finding equilibria without any one participant (or few participants) being a price-setter as well as a policy-setter for an industry as a whole. The sheer frustration that typically goes with calling a company’s customer “service” phone-bank cries out for the existence of competition, and thus consumer choice. When that choice has to do with entertainment, and thus with which stories get told and with how much creativity and variety is possible, having a number of struggling suppliers (i.e., different gate-keepers) rather than just a few centralized powers is arguably crucial.


1. Brian Flood, “Paramount Advisors Push for California Exit as State Sues to Block Warner Bros Discovery Merger: Report,” FoxBusiness.com, July 13, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.

Saturday, July 4, 2026

The Declaration of Independence at 250

Ahead of the 250th anniversary of the signing of a Declaration of Independence by representatives, or delegates, from thirteen British colonies in North American, a rare copy was discovered at the British government’s archives. Besides the obvious irony, how the copy had come into the possession of the British is a reminder of just how much the rebelling colonists risked by taking on the mighty British Empire. Although the task of actually achieving political independence must have seemed formidable, the political elites on both sides “of the pond” (i.e., the Atlantic Ocean) had already grasped the inherent instability in there being an empire within an empire, for an empire as a political category or type consists of kingdom-level polities rather than empires. The British Empire had run aground in terms of the logic, and the American Revolution can be interpreted as a working-out of the illogic.

Having been a young teenager when America celebrated its bicentennial, I was less than taken with marking the passage of just fifty more years in 2026. Similarly, anyone who remembers New Year’s 2000, which marked a change of year, decade, century, and millennium (!) would be hard-pressed to get excited about departing from 2025 to begin 2026, for example. Even so, the number 250, half of 500, catches the eye. Even though 250 years is but a blink in the expanse of human history, let alone human existence (1.8 million years!), the passage of even just 250 years can come with a significant loss, and even misconstruing, of a historical event as it was perceived in its time by participants and onlookers.

The long odds in 13 “former” colonies taking on the armed forces of the British Empire could scarcely be grasped on July 4, 2026. How the rare copy of the document fell into the hands of the British provides us with a glimpse of the actual risks. The document, which is “one of the rarest forms of the Declaration we know about,” “was seized by the Royal Navy after the capture of the privateer ship Dalton on Christmas Eve in 1776.”[1] The capture came after seven hours of pursuit by the Royal Navy ship HMS Raisonable off the coast of Portugal. Over a hundred men were subsequently taken prisoner and stayed in prison in Britain under very harsh conditions, including food deprivation, for years until freed in a prisoner-exchange. It not for nothing that Benjamin Franklin remarked at the signing of the Declaration, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” He knew what they were up against, and what could befall them at the hands of the British. He also knew why urging the delegates of the then-former colonies to stick together in the conduct of the war, which would doubtlessly long unless easily snuffed out by the empire’s forces, for the colonies were declaring their respective independences concurrently, rather than creating one new nation. This point had by 2026 been largely lost to history.

The heading of the document consists of the following: “In Congress, July 4, 1776, DECLARATION by the REPRESENTATIVES of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in GENERAL CONGRESS Assembled.” Parsing this heading, the word Congress then meant an international political meeting (or “summit” in modern political parlance), rather than a country’s legislative body. The self-declared independent polities were called states generically because their respective forms of government (e.g., kingdom, republic) had yet to be decided by their already-existing legislatures. The words, United States of America, referred to the states being united rather than to a country with its own government and comprising states. In fact, prior to independence, the title United Colonies had been used on both sides of the ocean, albeit with a baleful connotation on the British side. Not only did the United Colonies not refer to anything formal politically, but also both the colonial and the British elites, according to the Massachusetts-born historian George Bancroft, viewed the United Colonies as empire-scale, and thus an empire at least in expanse within an empire, which was believed to be an inherently unstable arrangement because the empire within the empire would almost certainly eventually break free. Some people even ascribed the label empire to New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the South, such that the United Colonies consisted of three empires—yet another unstable arrangement.[2] Accordingly, Franklin urged the delegates from the independent new states to hang together; it was not only because United action would be necessary to defeat the British Empire. In 1776, no one thought of the title, United States, as referring to a country, so the latter misconstruing of the heading as referring to the United States as a country having begun then is inaccurate. On July 4, 1776, what would become that country with a federal system of dual sovereignty could only be anticipated, and thus understood as being formed by sovereign countries.

That 13 countries began on July 4, 1776, even though only years later recognized as such by the British, rather than a country called the United States of America, has implications for comparative politics generally and comparative federalism in particular. Just as sovereign countries under the Articles of Confederation joined the U.S. in 1789, so too sovereign countries began and have joined the E.U. since its founding on 1 November, 1993. Unlike international organizations, such as the European Coal and Steel Community and the Economic Community, the E.U. is federal characterized principally by governmental sovereignty being held both by the states and the Union itself. Just as the U.S. States are members of the U.S. institutionally at the federal level in the U.S. Senate, the E.U. states have direct federal involvement in the Council of Ministers, which like the U.S. Senate, is legislative, and in the European Council, which can be likened to the U.S. Senate when it is in executive session and to the National Governors Association, which does not have formal power. However, by glancing over at the European Council, it can be understood that the governors assembled could play a formal role at the federal level in the setting of priorities for that Union. Such insights are potentially of great advantage in doing comparative federalism in line with historical contexts rather than from contemporary reformulations of the past.

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

Independent U.S. Regulatory Agencies: Undermining the Chief Executive

On June 29, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal president has the authority to terminate the employment of heads of independent federal agencies at will, rather than only for cause. The latter requirement (i.e., due cause) would still hold for the Federal Reserve, which raises the question of whether a central bank should be distinguished from regulatory agencies. The value in buffering monetary policy from political pressure is why the Federal Reserve is not part of the executive, legislative, or judicial branches of the U.S. government, but is instead an independent central bank within that government. As a consequence, monetary policy does not require approval from either the U.S. president or the Congress. Hence, the “for cause” requirement for removing someone from the Fed’s board of governors cannot be disagreement with the person’s preferences or decisions regarding monetary policy. As for independent regulatory agencies in the executive branch, their independence undermines the unitary executive as well as the president’s role in implementing existing law.

As with virtually any institutional arrangement in government, drawbacks are paired with benefits. In the case of the Federal Reserve, the main drawback lies in the difficulty in coordinating fiscal and monetary policy because Congress and the White House decide fiscal policy while monetary policy is decided by the Federal Reserve, which is buffered from pressure from all three branches of the federal government. So a fiscal policy could be in place to stimulate the economy even though high interest rates slow down economic growth. In the 1970s, for example, the term “stagflation” was coined because high inflation existed along with economic stagnation. During that decade, fighting inflation by monetary policy would have run counter in its economic effects to stimulating the economy by fiscal policy. Typically, inflation and stagnation alternate rather than occur at the same time. Paul Volker, as chairman of the Federal Reserve in the early 1980s, used monetary policy to reduce inflation even though the high interest rates exacerbated economic stagflation and, without sufficient fiscal stimulation to counter the higher interest rates, quickly produced a recession in President Reagan’s first years in office. So there is value economically in coordinating monetary and fiscal policy, and buffering the Federal Reserve from pressure from Congress and the White House (as well as not allowing a Federal Reserve chairperson to dominate those two branches) comes with a price. An iconic line from a European in the film, The Godfather, Part III, is relevant: “All our ships must sail in the same direction.” Separating monetary and fiscal policy institutionally comes with a cost in that ships could be going in opposite directions, producing chaos.

The Federal Reserve is a central bank, and therefore it is not an independent regulatory agency in the executive branch. The very notion of an independent regulatory agency is problematic constitutionally because if such an agency is free of a president’s control and yet still within the executive branch, then separation of powers prohibits direct control by Congress or the judiciary. The Court “held that presidents have free rein to fire agency heads at will, despite federal laws that require a cause for such dismissals” and a 1935 Supreme Court case known as Humphrey’s Executor that held that presidents could not fire heads of federal agencies without cause.[1] That precedent, which the Court overruled, is problematic because assuming a regulatory head does nothing for cause, the person would be free to make regulatory policy at will even if the chief executive officer of the government, the president, disagrees. Because the federal presidency is an office elected by electors of the member-state held to the popular votes in the respective states whereas the head of a regulatory agency is appointed, regulatory agencies being independent of the president incurs a democracy deficit. In other words, the head of an independent agency has too much power given the amount of accountability that is available if termination of employment for cause is not an option due to good behavior.

Furthermore, carving out independent turfs within the executive branch denies the unitary nature of that branch that is implied by the president’s title as chief executive officer. Because the presidency is an elected office, heads of independent regulatory agencies within the executive branch who resist presidential pressure obstruct the “will of the people” from being implemented. Ideally, besides presiding as a neutral figure-head representing the United States of America, the presidency is tasked with implementing law, including defense. Hence it is Congress that has the constitutional power to declare war, for example, and the president is obliged to implement that declaration as the commander in chief. The role of implementing is hardly glamorous, and it has tended to be given insufficient time and energy by presidents who have been more interested in influencing the enactment of law, which is the task of the legislative branch, even though the veto is a negative power and thus designed to be a check on Congressional abuses of power rather than a mandate to legislate in a positive sense.

Ironically, the very existence of independent regulatory agencies with directors free from presidential pressure has freed up presidents from their implementing role, and thus enabled them to spend more time and energy on legislating new law rather than implementing existing law.  Unlike formulating new law, implementing existing law, including declarations of war, is consistent with the neutrality that a figurehead needs to be credible and thus to represent the United States as a whole. That such neutrality politically has been disregarded is evinced when American citizens state that a sitting president “is not my president.” The baleful warnings of expansive presidential power made by Arthur Schlesinger in his seminal 1973 book, The Imperial Presidency, would be less of a concern were presidents willing to constrain themselves to focus on being a figure-head uniquely credible enough to represent the United States as a whole rather than just one political party, and implement existing law by running the executive branch (including the defense department), rather than usurp Congress’s legislative prerogative as per the separation of powers. The Court’s 2026 decision allowing presidents to fire heads of previously independent regulatory agencies in the executive branch is a step in the direction of presidents attending more to functioning as the chief executive of the U.S. federal government when not called upon to preside.  


Monday, June 29, 2026

Italy Thwarts E.U. Lawmakers Inspecting an Off-Shore Migrant Centre

On 17 June, 2026, the E.U. formally adopted a federal law, the Return Regulation, that allows states to set up “return hubs” outside of the E.U. for the returning of migrants back to their respective countries. On 29 June, 2026, elected representative in the Greens/EFA party in the E.U.’s parliament “were prevented from carrying out a full inspection of the Italian-run migrant detention centre in Gjadër, northwest Albania—a facility at the center of one of [the E.U.’s] most debated offshore migration experiments.”[1] Even though Albanian police patrolled the perimeter of the facility, that it was Italian-run means that state employees, rather than the foreign police, who were thwarting federal lawmakers in their inspection of the facility even though a federal law rendered the facility legal under federal law. Such obstructionist behavior does not bode well for the E.U.’s federal system, wherein both the federal and state legislative bodies are legitimate.

Rep. Tineke Strik, of the Greens/EFA party, said at the time of the visit, “Today’s visit was very disappointing and disgraceful. The staff really created a lot of obstacles for us.”[2] By “staff,” she likely was referring to the Italians running the facility rather than to the Albanian police outside, for police are never referred to as staff. Also, Albania’s Interior Ministry had “previously stated that the Gjadër centre operates as Italian territory, with Albanian police responsible solely for perimeter security.”[3] So managers from the E.U. state of Italy were the problem from the perspective of the federal delegation. Rep. Strik went on to explain, “We didn’t get any data, they didn’t answer any questions, and we were not allowed to really go into the cells and see what the situation is like.”[4] That a check on the Italian staff by federal officials was needed is evident from Rep. Strik’s finding: “For the people we did manage to speak to here, it’s clear they have problems asking for asylum, and many of them don’t see any way out of a failed system.”[5] Had the elected representatives in the Parliament known on 17 June that the system was “failed,” the proposed legislation likely would have been defeated. After the visit on 29 June, it is likely that a significant number of the representatives who had voted yes were suffering “buyer’s remorse.” So, the visit and inspection served a legitimate and thus valid purpose, and the obstruction that the lawmakers encountered from the Italian staff was inappropriate.

That the visit was stymied by state employees is significant from the standpoint of the E.U.’s federal system as a whole, for one of the chief benefits of federalism is that the federal level can act as a check on abuses of power at the state level, and vice versa. Checks can and should work in both directions for liberty to be protected from tyranny, which can occur at both levels in a federal system, and for the legitimacy of both levels. In fact, that the states rather than E.U. citizens are represented in the European Council (and U.S. states are represented in the U.S. Senate, which is founded on principles of international rather than national law) gives the state level a direct check on federal encroachments on the prerogatives of the several states. That E.U. law (excluding directives, which reply on implementation by the state governments) can have direct effect anywhere on E.U. territory, including inside the Italian detention centre in Albania, acts as a check on the power of states, for they are only semi-sovereign in the E.U. Even qualified-majority voting in the European Council and the Council of Ministers can be viewed as a check on a willful governor (e.g., Viktor Orbán) of a state, whereas the principle of unanimity blocks such a check and thus should be eliminated from the E.U.’s basic legal framework.

To be sure, perhaps the E.U.’s Commission would have been more appropriate than legislators in the Parliament in inspecting the Italian facility, for the Commission is the Union’s executive branch, which sees that federal laws, directives, and regulations are implemented whether by federal agencies or state governments. In contrast, lawmakers—legislators—are forward oriented in terms of creating new law. Had a delegation from the Commission have gone and been stymied, the Commission could have recommended to the bicameral Parliament and European Council that the Return Law be amended in some way that would better protect the human rights of the migrants and require state employees to allow inspections with full disclosure of information to federal officials visiting such facilities “off-shore.” Furthermore, it would be rather unwise for candidate states such as Albania, hosting such facilities to block E.U. officials from entering the facilities run by E.U. states. Fortunately, Albania kept clear of such obstructionism, and the blame can be put squarely on the E.U. state of Italy.

Interestingly, just hours before writing this essay, I showed my book on the E.U. and U.S. federal systems, entitled Essays on Two Federal Empires, whose cover-picture depicts the star-studded flags of the E.U. and U.S. (the stars on both represent states), to a young college student newly arrived in California from Italy. She visibly bristled as if in abject denial when she looked intensely at the picture on the cover. I wonder whether the staff at the Italian facility in Albania presumed that E.U. lawmakers had no right to inspect an Italian facility even though Italy was at the time a semi-sovereign state in the E.U.’s federal system. It was obvious to me that the young woman would barely speak to me after seeing my book’s cover, so obdurate was her state of ideological denial that she may even have presumed that the arrogance was mine. Political socialization, which bears on equivalences, evidently starts early.


1. Rebecca Rommen, “EU Lawmakers Say They Were Blocked from Fully Inspecting Italy’s Migrant Detention Centre in Albania,” Euronews.com, 29 June, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.

Sunday, June 28, 2026

E.U. Emergency Assistance to Venezuela: Coordinating Federalism

Whereas when the U.S. responds to natural disasters abroad, the resources of all 50 states are combined in a federal-level response, the E.U.’s Civil Protection Mechanism limits the federal level to coordination and instead relies on the states to deploy resources, including personal. I contend that the European arrangement is more in keeping with federalism than is the federal-only arrangement of the Americans. Moreover, involvement at both federal and state levels reflects and facilitates one of the benefits of federalism, wherein each level has the strength to act as a check on the other. Programs in which the federal level coordinates and the state governments deploy can help keep a federal system from lapsing into a “one-size-fits-all” consolidated rather than federal system. The U.S. could stand to take a lesson in this respect.

Severely impacted by earthquakes of 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude and with more than 50,000 people still missing, Venezuela welcomed the first E.U. emergency responders on 27 June, 2026. Deploying “rescue teams and other emergency assistance to Venezuela,” the European Commission relied initially on eight states who actually did the deploying, with the Commission only coordinating for a united response.[1] In other words, the eight states “mobilized for deployment through the E.U. civil protection mechanism.”[2] Separately, the E.U. “also activated its Copernicus satellite service to ‘emergency mapping mode,’ which provides free of charge data in cases of natural and man-made disasters around the world.”[3] The E.U. thus acted on its own with regard to one program while being limited to activating and coordinating state-level deployments in another program. In other words, it was not a federal-only show.

To be sure, direct involvement of state governments abroad could potentially destabilize federal foreign policy and even undercut it, as was the case when Viktor Orbán of the E.U. state of Hungary visited Russian President Putin in Moscow as the Van Der Leyen administration was attempting to pressure Putin into pulling his troops and weapons out of Ukraine. It can be asked, therefore, whether the government officials in Caracas would feel obliged to the E.U. or to any of the state governments as a result of the emergency assistance. If the latter, then limiting the Commission to merely coordinating, rather than sending its own personnel and resources, could be risky in terms of the E.U. being able to negotiate with foreign governments in regard to federal foreign policy.

Assuming the risk is nugatory, then the benefits of the federal-level institution merely activating and then coordinating to the federal system itself could be realized without much of a drawback. The federal level in a federal system wherein governmental sovereignty is divided between the two levels (i.e., not a confederation, in which the states are fully sovereign) is in an excellent position to coordinate, including taking the decision to activate a program, and the state-level governments are well suited to deploying personnel and resources, and the benefit to those states in terms of federalism lies in taking part rather than remaining on the sidelines while federal agencies act and thus gain power that could, if aggregated over time, result in an unbalanced federal system in which power at the federal level enables it to dominate the state governments such that the latter could no longer act as a check on the power wielded at the federal level.

When the E.U. activated its two programs to help Venezuela with the Commission restrained to coordinating state-level deployments, the U.S. was about to celebrate 250 years since thirteen British colonies in North America declared themselves to be sovereign countries. Those countries did not even ratify a treaty that established a confederation of continued national sovereignties under the Articles of Confederation until 1781, and then to delegate some of their respective governmental sovereignties until eight years after the commencement of the Articles. By late June, 2026, however, when the Commission activated its two programs for the benefit of Venezuelans by relying on state-level deployments in one of the programs, the American federal system of dual sovereignty had gone severely off-track due to too much of an imbalance of power between the Union and the states. The consolidation of power by the U.S. at the expense of that of the state governments impaired the ability of the latter to act as a check on abuses of power at the federal level. It is in precisely this respect that the Commission’s coordinating role is so important, lest the E.U. follow its American cousin towards a lopsided federalism, for balance is a key feature of this system of public governance.


1. Lucy Davalou, “Europe Send Search and Rescue Personnel to Venezuela in Response to Massive Quakes,” Euronews.com, 27 June, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

Tuesday, June 16, 2026

The European Parliament: Rejecting the Council’s Proposed Budget

On 16 June, 2026, the European Parliament rejected the European Council’s proposed budget for the E.U. not only because of the proposal’s €32.8 billion budget-cut, which would reduce the six-year 2028-2034 federal budget even below that which the Commission had proposed, but also because the Council had refused to address the issue of federal-sources of revenue, which was made increasingly salient by the increasing need of funds at the federal level. In seeking to keep the federal institutions dependent on money supplied by the states, the Council, which like the U.S. Senate represents states, can be viewed exploiting a conflict of interest at the expense of the ability of the E.U. to operate even within its given mandates. Put another way, the requirement that the Parliament pass any proposed budget can be viewed as a check on the state-centric Council’s proclivity to put the interest of the parts above the whole—the individual states above the Union.

Although the proposed federal budget by the Council represented a political compromise between states that wanted “substantial cuts” and other states that “asked for an increase of the budget for agriculture and regional funds,” enough of the Parliament’s representatives elected by E.U. citizens, rather than appointed by state governments, deemed the Council’s proposal as insufficient.[1] Those representatives were oriented to adequately funding extant federal programs rather than doing the bidding even of their own states. This translates into an orientation to the common good that is implied in collection action (i.e., the whole) rather than to the interests of parts. Because the €2 trillion proposal by the Commission had already been rejected as insufficient by the Parliament, the Council’s even lower figure can be interpreted as perplexing unless the states were making a statement that any federal branch is apt to overstate the E.U.’s funding needs so the Parliament’s rejection of the Commission’s proposal could and should be ignored.

Consistent with the alleged proclivity of federal governmental institutions to over-state the E.U.’s needed funding was the refusal of the Council “to touch the issue of the budgetary correction mechanisms known as rebates, revenues coming from taxes at the E.U. level, known as own resources, and the principle of making the budget conditional on the rule of law.”[2] Refusing to increase the E.U.’s own access to revenue independent of funds contributed (and thus controlled by) the state governments was essentially a decision to maintain power over the federal institutions and thus render the Union subservient to the states. At the time, MEP Carla Tavares told the press, “We need to make progress on own resources. . . . It is difficult to achieve a strong and renewed budget with cuts and without new own resources.”[3] In other words, the common good as funded federally would be diminished by the refusal of the state-centric Council to even consider new sources of own resources at the federal level. The distinctly state-level interest in maintaining (inordinate) power in the federal system was operating at the expense of the whole. The self-interested decision of the states in the Council to refuse to make budget-outlays conditional on rule-of-law being upheld in a given state also evinces an institutional (or structural) conflict of interest because using the budget so state governments do not disassemble rule-of-law provisions is in the interest of the whole (i.e., the European Union). One state government being able to backslide could easily domino across state-lines, and as all of the delegates at the U.S. federal Convention thought in 1787, allowing dictators at the state level would be incompatible with a democratic Union. So, the refusal of the Council to address the matter of conditionality can be viewed as putting the Union at risk. Fortunately, the members of Parliament were foremost oriented to the good of the Union rather than to protecting state prerogatives even at the expense of the Union.

One of the benefits of federalism is that the federal and state levels can act as checks on each other so as to preserve liberty against the threat of tyranny. The Parliament’s role in being a check on the use of the Council by the state governments to put the interests of the state government officials and their respective governments above the interests of the whole is thus vital in safeguarding the E.U.’s federal system and thus the E.U. itself. Moreover, putting the interests of parts above the whole of which they are parts is never a good idea, for the interests of a whole are not identical to the aggregate of the interests of the parts; the whole is more than the sum of its parts.


1. Eleonora Vasques, “EU Parliament Rejects Member States’ First Draft of Long-Term Budget,” Euronews.com, 16 June, 2026.
2. Ibid, italics added for emphasis.
3. Ibid.

Monday, June 1, 2026

The E.U.’s Immigration “ICE”: The Pros and Cons of State Implementation

On 1 June, 2026, the E.U.’s two legislative chambers agreed informally on text for a law called Return Regulation, which is oriented to facilitating the return of illegal aliens to their respective countries. Both The European Council, the “upper chamber,” and the European Parliament, the “lower” legislative “chamber” (roughly corresponding to the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, respectively) worked in what in American parlance is called a Congressional reconciliation or conference committee to agree to text enabling state police to enter the domiciles of illegal immigrants and state governments to set up detention centers outside of the European Union. That the federal law relegates implementation to the states illustrates just how different E.U. federalism differs from U.S. federalism even though both systems are “modern” rather than confederal in that governmental sovereignty in both unions is split between the federal and state levels. Even though the E.U. after thirty years was like the U.S. after its first thirty years in that most of that sovereignty was at the state level, the use of state governments to implement a federal law differentiates the European federal system from the American one. Both advantages and disadvantages go with leaving implementation largely up to the states.

Imagine if the American Congress had passed a law leaving it up to the state governments to exercise “ICE” enforcement powers to rid the Union of illegal immigrants. In U.S. President Trump’s second term in office, Florida would jump at the chance, whereas states such as Massachusetts, Illinois, and California would refuse to implement the federal law. It would not be difficult to surmise how illegal aliens would work around such a patchwork, at least those with enough money to move to a more preferential state. As a result, the federal rationale—that of eliminating illegal immigrants from U.S. soil—would be compromised. However, the differing political-ideological centers-of-gravity in the several states would get more breathing room, and in empire-scale political unions such as the U.S. and E.U., one legislative size does not fit all. When one is imposed, internal pressure builds up that could eventually blow such a union apart.

Even in the E.U., in which the new law reflected “a broader political shift . . . sometimes backed by the far right . . . pushing for a tougher approach to migration,” states could be said to differ as to the political significance of the far right.[1] Some state governments may for example not find much internal political support for a state law that enables police to search a “place of residence or other relevant premises” of illegal migrants, especially as some NGOs (non-governmental organizations) compared “to the notorious raids conducted by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).”[2] It is not as if the two federal legislative chambers passed the federal law under the assumption that it would be strenuously implemented by every state. “The provision is vague on purpose, to allow a broad interpretation in the different member states. It opens the doors to home raids and also raids in the premises of associations helping migrants and healthcare facilities,” Eleonora Celoria with Asgi, a state-level association of legal experts said at the time of the law’s passage.[3] Celoria’s depiction of the implications highlight just how politically and ethically controversial the law is, and this, I submit, is precisely why the provision is vague on purpose. States could be anticipated to differ on how the law should be implemented “on the ground.” Even though the maximum legal detention period for illegal immigrants waiting to be expatriated back to their respective countries is “extended from six months to two years, with a possible six-month extension and an unlimited duration for persons considered as posing a security risk,” clearly not every state legislature would go with the maximus. The comment made by MEP Mélissa Camara (of the European Parliament) that the legislative text serves “a xenophobic ideology” may resonate more in some states than in others.[4] Hence, the E.U.’s federal system could be said to be healthier than its U.S. counterpart at the time (2026) because the E.U states were legislatively given more breathing room in which to tailor the federal law according to their respective political cultures.

The astute reader may be waiting for “the other shoe to drop,” meaning: what’s the catch? According to E.U. figures, “only 29% of migrants with no legal right to remain” in the E.U “leave the EU.”[5] Illegals were a big problem facing the Union, and leaving enforcement up to whether a given state government favors the proposed legislative text risks creating a legal loophole wherein illegal migrants could simply move to another state where enforcement is lax or utterly lacking. The intentional vagueness in the legislative text makes even no enforcement possible. In California at the time, I was surprised to see a sign outside a popular pizza restaurant indicating that the workers reserved the right to refuse service and entry to ICE police, as if enforcement of U.S. immigration law were up to restaurant workers. Were such law up to the government of California, given the high proportion of registered Democrats over Republicans, it is a safe bet that no enforcement could be passed by the California Senate and Assembly. Contrast this with states such as Oklahoma, Alabama, and Florida! I would even venture to posit that the ideological distance on the issue of illegal immigration between those three states and California is more than existed at the time between E.U. states on the same issue: how, or even whether, illegal immigration should be expunged.

Perhaps my thesis can be generalized to say that giving states in an empire-scale union enough breathing room is inversely related to efficacy at the federal, or Union level. Federalism is a messy business in part because judgment is requisite; there are few easy answers in how to navigate the common good (of the political union) while seeing to it that the states have enough breathing room so their respective residents do not feel suffocated by a one-size-fits-all federal mentality. In other words, modern federalism, whose signature attribute is dual sovereignty, can be said to involve a balancing act. As of 2026, it could be said that the E.U. was doing a better job at that than was the U.S., but at what cost in terms of the interests of the European Union as a whole, which is not a mere aggregate of state interests? This is a dynamic unique to the empire-level, so it does not pertain to E.U. states that have adopted federal systems of their own. No large U.S. states are themselves federal, though in a nod to the Europeans such a prospect is worth entertaining. Even so, the heterogeneity across an empire of 27 or 50 republics dwarfs that which exists even within a large E.U. or U.S. state. This is yet another reason why the E.U. and U.S. should be compared and contrasted, rather than treating a large state in one union as equivalent to the other union. In other words, the U.S. is not a France with a large back yard that stretches across a continent and beyond. Within such an expanse of land, views on immigration can be expected to vary markedly from state to state.


1. Vincenzo Genovese, “EU Greenlights Controversial Return Hubs in ‘Strictest-Ever’ New Migration Law,” Euronews.com, 1 June 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.

Sunday, May 31, 2026

Texas School Policies Violently Enforced: Police in Schools

An organizational policy, whether in an educational, religious, or business organization, is not law. Accordingly, “police tactics” are inappropriately used on people who violate policies. The proliferation of off-duty police officers in retail in more than one of the U.S. states (and perhaps in the E.U. as well), complete with lethal weapons, renders the distinction between policy and law especially relevant and even pressing. To be sure, trespassing is indeed a crime, even though some municipal police departments in Florida have refused to recognize it as such, as, for example, when a property owner illegally enters a rented apartment, but in a store, absent a decision by a manager to have a person removed from the premises, store “police” cannot legally act violently against the public as long as no crime is being committed—even if a store policy is being violated.

Since the killings at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas in 2022, school districts in Texas “spent billions of dollars to station police officers” in every school.”[1] Crucially, the intent was “to protect students from similar tragedies.”[2] It is therefore more than unfortunate that school administrations, including local school boards, have allowed even elementary-school aged children to be subjected “to heavy-handed police tactics for behavior that once would have landed them only in the principal’s office.”[3] A principal is the head of a school. “Children in elementary school, including one as young as 6, were handcuffed. Teenagers were arrested, charged with crimes and even jailed. In the most extreme cases, they would up in hospitals, bruised or concussed, after being body-slammed or shocked by Tasers, which [were at the time] prohibited in [Texas] juvenile detention facilities but allowed in public schools.”[4] Under those circumstances, parents could hardly be blamed for yanking their kids out of public schools, preferring private schools, religious or secular, instead. In one public school, a student caught with a vape at school was “smashed into a wall” by an “officer,” another kneed a student in the face for fighting with a classmate, and still another animal (i.e., “officer”) slammed a student “into a metal cart” intentionally.[5] Admittedly, the student kneed and the one slammed were in the midst of physically fighting with other students, so some physicality was justified in order to break up the respective fights; it is the excessive violence that calls into question to motives of the police in the school hallways. For instance, the intent to severely harm out of sheer anger and even the intent to instill a sense of guilt in the respective students can both be subjected to harsh critique.

In his text, On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that punishment originally arose in ancient (and prehistoric) times so the punisher could feel pleasure from inflicting pain in another person, rather than to instill a sense of moral responsibility or deter bad behavior in the future. Nietzsche argues that this original intent, or purpose, was still in force among European parents in his own adult lifetime in the mid-to-late 1800s (before he went mad in 1890).  Kneeing a student in the face and slamming a student into a metal cart are so extreme that it can indeed be wondered whether the culprits (i.e., the “officers”) were not at least partially motivated by such pleasure. Nietzsche goes on to point out that if political, economic or any other kind of elite are getting away with the exact behavior that is subject to punishment if done by other people, no sense of guilt arises from such dogmatic inflictions of pain otherwise known as punishments. Nietzsche argues that if a criminal “sees exactly the same kind of actions practiced in the service of justice and approved of and practiced with a good conscience: spying, deception, bribery, setting traps, the whole cunning and underhand art of police and prosecution, plus robbery, violence, defamation, imprisonment, torture, murder, practiced as a matter of principle and without even emotion to excuse them, . . . all of them therefore actions which his judges in no way condemn and repudiate as such, but only when they are applied and directed to certain particular ends” then no sense of guilt will arise when those actions are punished.[6] The violence of the police in the schools in Texas de facto nullifies any intended message sent by that violence qua “punishment” that violence is wrong. In fact, it might even be that the students in physical fights at school may grow up to be hired by cities as police! As such, those kids, as police “officers,” could be expected to be unnecessarily violent precisely because the use of violence in school beyond the authority of the police stationed there nullified any “lesson” that violence is wrong and therefore violent people should feel guilty, for presumably none of the police in the schools felt ashamed of themselves, and punishment inflicted on them would not have had such an effect if those police could in turn remember violence having been orchestrated by their bosses and even the impunity that those officials received from political or judicial officers of government.

What then can we expect as to how the kids in the schools were affected by the police brutality? According to Nietzsche, “Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance.”[7] None of those can be favorable to being open to learning, so the activity of the police inside the schools beyond stopping mass shootings is contrary and thus detrimental to the mission of a school, which is to educate by imparting knowledge from teacher to student. Incidentally, it can’t be that the teachers feel comfortable being in the schools in which police are body-slamming students for carrying vaping equipment (perhaps a student is having trouble quitting smoking cigarettes, in which case vaping should be encouraged when the student feels very tempted to smoke). The result of such violent over-reaches on kids in Texas can be expected to include no longer feeling safe in their respective school hallways—not just because mass-killings have occurred in American schools, but also, and perhaps even more so, because the police installed in hallways have over-reached so from their purpose being to guard and protect students from external physical threats.

That school principals and even school boards have either given their consent or ignored the over-reaches renders those officials culpable as well. Prudent parents who love their children would be justified in voting to replace entire boards, which in turn would presumably be disposed to fire school principals who would rather than their respective students beaten up by police even for vaping than have teachers send students to the principal’s office. Police have no business enforcing school policies because policy is not law, and human beings with the means of greater power over other humans are too inclined to use it.

As Lord Acton famously wrote in 1887, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” For an organization’s management to place police rather than unarmed security guards in a position of enforcing policies is to inappropriately tempt abuses of power that cannot be said to come rightly under authority. For power sans authority can be understood to be in line with Hobbes’ description of the state of nature prior to any social contract historically. As another saying goes, give a human being an inch and a mile will be taken. Or, give someone a few centimeters and a kilometer will be taken. Take your pick, but don’t over-reach even though doing so seems to be hardwired into the human psyche, which, after all, can be said to be human, all too human. Such an innate proclivity should not be tempted whether in a managerial decision or in institutional arrangements that allow for the exploitation of an institutional or personal conflict of interest.


1. Claire Amari, Kristian Hernandez, and Asher Lehrer-Small, “At Texas Schools, Pepper Spray and Tasers,” The New York Times, May 30, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), Second Essay, sec. 14, p. 518.
7. Ibid, p. 517.

Thursday, May 28, 2026

California and Florida: Different Political Cultures in the U.S.

As evinced by Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney likening a planned referendum on whether Alberta should vote to separate from the rest of Canada to “Brexit,” in which Britain seceded from the E.U., as if the UK in the European Union were equivalent to Alberta in Canada, political category mistakes can run rampant without being detected as such. Referring to the referendum in the province, Carney said, “That is a very dangerous bluff.” He was “pointing to the turmoil that followed the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union.”[1] The implied false equivalence of Canada and the E.U., as if the former too had been formed out of countries, is as incorrect as that which Carney was more directly assuming between Alberta and Britain. A region of a country, even if the latter has a federal system, is not equivalent to a country that joins a political union such as the E.U. and U.S. That Britain was once the host kingdom in the British Empire, and thus equivalent to other members of the empire, including Ireland and Virginia, does not mean that the UK as a state in the E.U. was equivalent to the latter, or to other political unions consisting of early-modern-scale countries.

Even before they became independent countries, the thirteen British colonies that would rebel were considered to be an empire within the British empire, and such an incongruity was correctly believed to render the latter unstable[2]. Empires consist of (early-modern) kingdom-scale polities, rather than of empires. The distinction between a kingdom and empire was well established, as in Althusius’s 1603 book, Political Digest, on federalism. It would not surprise Althusius at all that the countries that became members of the U.S. would continue to have their own political cultures rather than be fully homogenized at the empire-level.  The ideological conviction that the 50 states are somehow very similar culturally, as if linguistics were the exclusive basis of cultural differences, and thus that the U.S. is equivalent to an E.U. state, is empirically false (as are most ideological biases).

On May 27, 2026, the head of government of California vowed “to tax any payouts that California residents receive from a $1.776 billion ‘anti-weaponization’ fund that Donald Trump secured in a settlement with his own [U.S.] Justice Department.”[3] Newsom said, “Anyone from California that receives any of those funds, we want to tax 100 percent of those proceeds.” A similar proposal had been made in New York by NY Senator Mike Gianaris. It would be a grave mistake to assume that such a bill were also being entertained by the Florida legislature, and the reason goes beyond partisanship between the two major American political parties.

That Newsom would make public his proposal means that he believed that the political center of gravity in California favored going after not just corruption generally, but also efforts to reward people who had rioted at the federal Capitol building as the states’ respective votes for U.S. president were being counted in 2020. State populations differed appreciably on the ideology behind Trump’s “MAGA” populist movement. That movement had a much lower percentage of believers in say California and Massachusetts, than in Florida and Oklahoma. Alaska and Hawaii provide yet another stark contrast on how pervasive support for MAGA was as of 2026.

The sheer ideological difference between the centers of political gravity of those two republics resonates with the theoretical claim that the heterogeneity between kingdom-level polities in an empire is not just a matter of degree, but, rather, a leap, from the cultural differences that exist within any one of those polities. This is why federalism, which intentionally includes governmental means of managing inter-state cultural diversity, originated with empires rather than kingdoms, and is better suited to empires even though some early-modern-scale kingdom-level polities have federal systems (e.g., Germany, Switzerland, Belgium). The cultural differences between E.U. states is a leap rather than just a degree more than such differences within Germany and even Belgium within which different languages are spoken (in Flanders and Wallonia, respectively). The practical need to take account of cultural differences is greater in E.U. governance than at the state level, and thus federalism is more valuable—more fitting—at the E.U.-state interface than within a given state.

Back to the U.S., on the very day on which Newsom announced his proposal to tax all of the proceeds of Trump’s “slush fund” to his base that had sought to interfere with the role of Congress in counting the ballots of electors from the States for in the federal presidential election, Ron DeSantis, the head of Florida’s government, announced his proposed tax cut that would vastly increase the exemption from $50,000 to $250,000 on property taxes in Florida. Ben Albritton, the president of the Florida Senate, said, “I can’t think of a more meaningful way to celebrate America’s 250 [year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence than] the passage of $250,000 in tax relief for every Florida homeowner.”[4] Both men were betting that any drop in school budgets from the drop in tax revenue would be less important to most voters than paying less in property taxes. Here again, a distinct political ideology was in play—one that would get considerably less broadcast air-time in California where proportionally more voters believed in a more expansive role of government and thus for government spending by which public goods could be provided even if taxes are high. To be sure, the ideological divide between favoring tax-cuts versus government spending on public goods is an old one; my point is that the peoples in the American states differed, at least as of 2026, significantly on which side should be valued more. In fact, the European states may have differed much less in this respect even though different languages were spoken! So much for the false claim that cultural differences depend on linguistic differences! Belgium and the Netherlands were much more alike on this axis of political ideology that were California and Florida. Moreover, the differences within a given state, whether of the E.U. or U.S., were a leap down from the differences between the states.

Therefore, Alberta leaving Canada (or the southern region known as Egypt leaving Illinois—which has been attempted five times in Illinois history) is not like Britain seceding from the Union. Even though Canada’s regions admittedly may differ culturally, an empire consists of many polities and thus the diversity between the polities in an empire is greater than in Canada. Put another way, Canada would come into the U.S. as states just as every other country that has become a member of the U.S. has (and territories that became states are legally assumed to have been sovereign countries). Neither Texas nor Hawaii merged with the existing U.S., so neither would Canada merge with the United States. Neither would Canada come in as just one state, but this is not to say that each province would translate into a state; even if each one would, Canada still could not be classified as an empire (unlike the E.U. and U.S., both of which have many country-level republics).  


1. Mike Blanchfield and Sue Allan, “Carney Warms Alberta Not to Pull a “Brexit,” Politico, May 25, 2026.
2. Skip Worden, British Colonies Forge an American Empire.
3.Tyler Katzenberger and Nick Reisman, “Newsom Vows 100 Percent Tax on DOJ ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ Payouts,” Politico, May 27, 2026.
4.. Gary Fineout, “In One of His Final Acts, DeSantis Calls For Vote on Sweeping Florida Property Tax Cut,” Politico, May 27, 2026.

Wednesday, May 13, 2026

Regulatory Capture and the Public Interest: The FDA

The head of the Food and Drug Administration, Marty Makary, “resigned” in May, 2026 even though the decision had been made by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy “and then the White House signed off on it.”[1] Although Makary had been annoyance to drug-company executives, and to that extent his removal was due to pressure on President Trump by the CEOs, his “resignation” supports the theory of regulatory capture, wherein the regulated companies control the very regulatory agencies (and regulators therein) that regulate those companies, this case shows that it is possible for an industry’s interests to be aligned with the public (health) interest. Does the alignment regarding getting rid of a particular regulator lessen the unethical quality of the broader conflict of interest between business and government?

Without a doubt, the regulated industry was unhappy with Makery and his deputy, Vinay Prasad. For example, “(v)aping executives told Trump that Makary was blocking approval of their products, including new flavored e-cigarettes seen as crucial to the industry’s survival.”[2] Additionally, Prasad was “pushed out of the agency twice in less than a year for running afoul of specialty drugmakers and groups for patients with rare diseases.”[3] He had “rejection letters or requests to run additional studies” sent to more than six drug companies on drugs for rare or hard-to-treat diseases that had previously been approved by the FDA.[4] I do not have enough information to be able to assess whether his actions were in the public interest, as it is possible that the FDA’s previous approvals had been flawed. I have more confidence in concluding that he operated against the public’s healthy in going after an established coronavirus-vaccine maker. He had “repeatedly overruled vaccine staffers to restrict eligibility for new coronavirus shots.”[5] He even refused to “even consider Moderna’s mRNA shot for flu.” Moderna “called for intervention by the White House.”[6] In an internal memo, Prasad had claimed without evidence “that the FDA had linked COVID-19 shots to the deaths of 10 children.”[7] It seems that he was going more off an ideology than science.

It seems likely that the drug-company executives red-flagged the ideological distortion as it would decrease the companies’ future sales. The only ideology that rules in corporate boardrooms is that of the profit-motive, so any competing ideology coming out of a regulatory agency would be easily flagged. In such a case, the company-specific economic interests would be aligned with the public interest because the government-sourced ideology would be partial, hence partisan, and thus not in line with a bigger picture such as can reflect the public interest. In short, any pressure that the executives could bring on President Trump to remove Makary and his deputy would be in the public interest even though it would be a case of regulated companies getting rid of government officials who regulate those companies.

In general, regulatory capture of a government agency by a company or industry that the agency regulates is unethical because it destroys the power-relationship that is required for government regulation to exist. Another way of looking at the ethical problem is by realizing that a company, and even an industry, look out for their own particular (economic) interests, whereas the public interest is a whole. To put a part before or ahead of the whole of which the part is a part is essentially to have the tail lead the dog—a part leading a whole.

Because it cannot be supposed that a part’s interests are identical to that of the whole of which the part is a part, even cases in which the two are in sync cannot justify permitting the part to call the shots for the whole—to direct the whole. Put another way, it would still be unethical for a regulated company or industry to wield such power as could dominate a government in a republic because companies are private property rather than elected bodies. That specific cases such as Makary and Prasad justify the drug industry pressuring Kennedy and Trump does not mean that either official would be justified in being directed by that industry more generally. The problem is that corporate political-campaign donations can be so large that big pharma can have the political pressure to direct even a U.S. president. Going forward, company executives could try to justify such power by pointing to their “public” role in having shelved an ideology harmful to the public health that was pushed by Makary and Prasad. It is important to keep in mind, however, that regulatory capture is nonetheless unethical and contrary to democratic principles of public governance of private property, including companies.


1. Matthew Perrone and Seung Min Kim, “Trump FDA Chief Is Leaving After Angering Pharma CEOs, Vaping Lobbyists and Anti-Abortion Groups,” APnews.com, May 12, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.

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