Summary: When President Nixon imposed wage and price controls in 1971, it created chaos. Gas shortages, rationing, and angry customers became daily realities, teaching one young gas station attendant how disastrous top-down economic planning can be. A decade later, when markets were finally freed, supply returned and abundance followed. The lesson endures: politicians create scarcity, but entrepreneurs and free markets create plenty.

Shortly after I turned 15, President Richard M. Nixon managed to make my life miserable. On Sunday August 15, 1971, against the advice of his economic counselors, and in total repudiation of his party’s campaign platform, he announced on national TV that he was suspending the gold standard, imposing a 10 percent tariff surcharge, and imposing wage and price controls.

At the time, I didn’t know a thing about macroeconomics. What I did know was how to make customers happy at my dad’s gas station: Fill their tanks fast, wash their windows, and send them off with a smile.

Nixon’s decision not only shook the foundations of global finance—it trickled all the way down to a teenager pumping gas on Main Street, teaching me firsthand how government policy can reach into everyday life. Nixon’s policies caused a decade of artificial shortages and almost destroyed my father’s business. As Robert Bleiberg, editor of Barron’s, noted at the time, “Price controls, as their advocates have claimed all along, do work like magic. They can make things disappear in the twinkling of an eye.” For me, Nixon’s policies meant no more happy customers, which translated to no more tips.

Like many gas station owners at the time, my dad decided to attempt rationing his limited allotment of fuel by restricting sales to only five gallons per customer. After waiting in line for sometimes more than an hour, most customers were furious to be told that they could only buy five gallons of gas. They took their anger out on their lowly attendant, not on the perpetrator of the calamity living in the White House.

The president, along with the politicians and corporate leaders who cheered for price controls, never had to face the fury of my customers. They could make sweeping decisions from behind their podiums and boardroom tables without ever paying the price for being wrong. As Thomas Sowell once put it, “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

Price controls tied the hands of domestic producers while leaving foreign suppliers, such as OPEC, untouched. The result was the opposite of what policymakers had intended. Instead of fueling independence, the policies throttled domestic supply and handed foreign oil giants the keys to America’s energy future.

In 1981, just eight days after taking office, President Ronald Reagan swept away the federal price and allocation controls on domestic oil and refined products. Overnight, my decade of gas-line misery came to an end. Prices did rise—but for the first time in years, people could fill their tanks without rationing, limits, or fear of empty pumps. I learned a key lesson: Politicians create scarcities, entrepreneurs create abundances.

When oil prices surged in the early 2000s, entrepreneurs and markets responded with a wave of innovation. Breakthroughs such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing unlocked vast new oil reserves, unleashing a surge of supply. America’s unique system of private ownership of subsurface mineral rights—rather than government control—supercharged this revolution by giving landowners a direct stake in production. The results were astonishing: The United States, whose oil industry was once thought to be in irreversible decline, has become a net exporter of petroleum products.

Since 1950 the average time price for a gallon of gasoline has been around six minutes for blue-collar workers. We’re actually around five minutes today. The United States has some of the lowest gasoline time prices on the planet.

Yes, we’ve had periods where the price has spiked, typically due to political turmoil, but time and again, innovation and markets have responded by creating greater abundance. Julian Simon predicted such would be the case, as long as politicians and bureaucrats don’t impose “solutions” that have counter-productive consequences.

Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974, to avoid impeachment for his crime of covering up the Watergate break-in. But to me, his darker crime wasn’t in a hotel—it was in every gas station in America. His Soviet-style controls left behind a nation of frustrated, unhappy customers and pump attendants who bore the real cost of his misguided policies.

Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.

“Uber Eats will soon be making some meal deliveries with drones.

Uber Technologies said Thursday that it’s partnering with drone company Flytrex Inc. The companies expect to begin deliveries in test markets by the end of this year. Uber didn’t say where those markets will be, but Flytrex is already operating in Texas and North Carolina.

It’s the latest partnership in the fast-growing drone delivery space. Flytrex, which is based in Tel Aviv, Israel, also makes deliveries for Uber Eats’ rival DoorDash.

Wing, a drone company owned by Google parent Alphabet, works with DoorDash and Walmart. Zipline, a drone company based in South San Francisco, works with Walmart and Panera Bread and also makes deliveries for hospitals. Amazon also making deliveries with its own Prime Air drones.”

From Associated Press.

Summary: Some influential voices today romanticize feudalism, but the reality of feudalism was misery for nearly everyone. Life under that system meant hunger, disease, violence, and lives cut brutally short. By contrast, modern societies have lifted billions out of poverty and extended life far beyond what kings and queens once knew. Progress comes from freedom, innovation, and hard work, not a return to the rule of lords and monarchs.

On a recent podcast, Tucker Carlson praised feudalism as “so much better than what we have now” because a ruler is “vested in the prosperity of the people he rules.” This romantic view of medieval hierarchy ignores a brutal reality: For most people, feudalism meant grinding poverty, disease, and early death.

As Gale L. Pooley and I found in our 2022 book Superabundance, society in preindustrial Europe was bifurcated between a small minority of the very rich and the vast majority of the very poor. One 17^th-century observer estimated that the French population consisted of “10 percent rich, 50 percent very poor, 30 percent who were nearly beggars, and 10 percent who were actually beggars.” In 16^th-century Spain, the Italian historian Francesco Guicciardini wrote, “except for a few Grandees of the Kingdom who live with great sumptuousness … others live in great poverty.”

An account from 18^th-century Naples recorded beggars finding “nocturnal asylum in a few caves, stables or ruined houses” where “they are to be seen there lying like filthy animals, with no distinction of age or sex.” Children fared the worst. Paris, according to the French author Louis-Sébastien Mercier, had “7,000 to 8,000 abandoned children out of some 30,000 births around 1780.” These children were then taken—three at a time—to the poor house, with carriers often finding at least “one of them dead” upon arrival.

People were constantly hungry, and starvation was only ever a few bad harvests away. In 1800, even France, one of the world’s richest countries, had an average food supply of only 1,846 calories per person per day. In other words, the majority of the population was undernourished. (Given that the average person needs about 2,000 calories a day.) That, in the words of the Italian historian Carlo Cipolla, gave rise to “serious forms of avitaminosis,” or medical conditions resulting from vitamin deficiencies. There was also, he noted, a prevalence of intestinal worms, which is “a slow, disgusting, and debilitating disease that caused a vast amount of human misery and ill health.”

Sanitation was a nightmare. As the English historian Lawrence Stone wrote in his book The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, “city ditches, now often filled with stagnant water, were commonly used as latrines; butchers killed animals in their shops and threw the offal of the carcasses into the streets; dead animals were left to decay and fester where they lay.” London had “poor holes” or “large, deep, open pits in which were laid the bodies of the poor, side by side, row by row.” The stench was overwhelming, for “great quantities of human excrement were cast into the streets.”

The French historian Fernand Braudel found that in 15^th-century England, “80 percent of private expenditure was on food, with 20 percent spent on bread alone.” An account of 16^th-century life in rural Lombardy noted that peasants lived on wheat alone: Their “expenses for clothing and other needs are practically non-existent.” Per Cipolla, “One of the main preoccupations of hospital administration was to ensure that the clothes of the deceased should not be usurped but should be given to lawful inheritors. During epidemics of plague, the town authorities had to struggle to confiscate the clothes of the dead and to burn them: people waited for others to die so as to take over their clothes.”

Prior to mechanized agriculture, there were no food surpluses to sustain idle hands, not even those of children. And working conditions were brutal. A 16^th-century ordinance in Lombardy found that supervisors in rice fields “bring together a large number of children and adolescents, against whom they practice barbarous cruelties … [They] do not provide these poor creatures with the necessary food and make them labor as slaves by beating them and treating them more harshly than galley slaves, so that many of the children die miserably in the farms and neighboring fields.”

Such violence pervaded daily life. Medieval homicide rates reached 150 murders per 100,000 people in 14^th-century Florence. In 15^th-century England, it hovered around 24 per 100,000. (In 2020, the Italian homicide rate was 0.48 per 100,000. It was 0.95 per 100,000 in England and Wales in 2024.) People resolved their disputes through physical violence because no effective legal system existed. The serfs—serfdom in Russia was abolished only in 1861—lived as property, bound to land they could never own, subject to masters who viewed them as assets rather than humans. And between 1500 and the first quarter of the 17^th century, Europe’s great powers were at war nearly 100 percent of the time.

Carlson’s nostalgia for feudalism is not unique on the MAGA right. The influential American blogger Curtis Yarvin, for example, attributes to monarchs such as France’s Louis XIV decisive and long-term leadership that modern democracies apparently lack. But less frequently mentioned is how, for example, that same Louis ruined his country during the War of the Spanish Succession. As Winston Churchill wrote in Marlborough: His Life and Times,

After more than sixty years of his reign, more than thirty years of which had been consumed in European war, the Great King saw his people face to face with actual famine. Their sufferings were extreme. In Paris the death-rate doubled. Even before Christmas the market-women had marched to Versailles to proclaim their misery. In the countryside the peasantry subsisted on herbs or roots or flocked in despair into the famishing towns. Brigandage was widespread. Bands of starving men, women, and children roamed about in desperation. Châteaux and convents were attacked; the market-place of Amiens was pillaged; credit failed. From every province and from every class rose the cry for bread and peace.

The Great Enrichment, a phrase coined by my Cato Institute colleague Deirdre McCloskey, of the past 200 years or so lifted billions from the misery that defined human existence for millennia. It was driven by market economies and limits on the rulers’ arbitrary power, not feudal hierarchy.

There are many plausible reasons for Carlson’s (and Yarvin’s) openness to giving pre-modern institutions such as feudalism and absolute monarchy a second look. One is a lack of appreciation for the reality of the daily existence of ordinary people whose lives, in the immortal words of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, were “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Another is their apparent conviction that the United States is, in the words of President Donald Trump, “a failed nation.” Except that we are nothing of the sort. The United States has plenty of problems, but the lives of ordinary Americans in 2025 are incomparably better than those of the kings and queens of the past. Our standard of living is, in fact, the envy of the world, which is the most parsimonious explanation for millions of people trying to get here.

Solving the problems that remain and will arise in the future will depend on careful evaluation of evidence, historical experience, reason, and hard work. Catastrophism does not help, for it rejects human agency by declaring that the future is already decided. Hunkering down under a protective shield of feudal hierarchy or placing our trust in a modern incarnation of Louis XIV is no guarantee of success. We tried it before, and the results were disastrous.

This article originally appeared in The Dispatch on August 26, 2025.

Summary: IKEA has transformed how we furnish our homes, making stylish essentials far more accessible than in the past. Furnishing a home once demanded long hours of work, but today it takes only a fraction of the time. IKEA’s innovations have steadily reduced the effort needed to turn paychecks into furniture. The result is a world where comfort and style arrive faster and more abundantly than ever.

IKEA was started in 1943 by 17-year-old Ingvar Kamprad and has been the world’s largest furniture retailer since 2008. The brand name is an acronym of Kamprad’s initials; Elmtaryd, the family farm where he was born; and the nearby village of Agunnaryd. There are 483 IKEA stores operating in 63 countries with 2024 sales of $52.87 billion. The IKEA website contains about 12,000 products. The world’s largest IKEA store is located in Pasay, Metro Manila, Philippines. Much of IKEA’s furniture is designed to be assembled by the customer. The company claims that this helps reduce costs and use of packaging by not shipping air.

IKEA has been a leading innovator in making furniture abundant. We looked at four of its products that have remained essentially unchanged since 1985. In most cases, their retail prices are actually lower today than 40 years ago. But the bigger story is in time prices. Back in 1985, blue-collar workers earned $8.73 per hour. Today, they earn about $31.34.

Adjusting for wages, the time prices of these products have dropped by an average of 77.2 percent. Put differently, the time price to furnish one room in 1985 will furnish 4.4 rooms today.

Tip of the Hat: Jeremy Horpendahl

Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.