My Weekly Reading for June 15, 2025

First, to all the fathers out there, Happy Fathers’ Day.

by Gina Heeb, AnnaMaria Andriotis, and Josh Dawsey, Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2025 (electronic edition)

Excerpt:

A move to launch crypto-based payments by Walmart or Amazon that bypasses the traditional payments system would send shivers through the nation’s banks and card-network giants.

With vast networks of customers and employees, troves of data and far lighter regulations, retail and technology companies have long been viewed as particular threats to banks, including regional and community lenders.

DRH note: Knowing my free-market proclivities, you might be able to guess what my favorite adjective is in the second paragraph above.

Tobacco excise has passed a ‘tipping point’ and is fuelling black market, economists warn

by Patrick Commins, The Guardian, June 10, 2025.

Excerpts:

Economists say regular increases to the tobacco excise have stopped working to further lower smoking rates and are instead encouraging a soaring cigarette black market.

Instead, they suggest either a freeze or a cut to the excise rate while Australia cracks down on illicit tobacco. However, a public health advocate warned policymakers not to be “conned” into a radical tax cut.

And:

Over the past decade, the excise rate per cigarette has tripled from 46c to $1.40. The excise now accounts for $28 of the average $40 price for a packet of 20 cigarettes.

For some time a rising tax was associated with the twin benefits of falling smoking rates and rising revenue, but after peaking at $16.3bn in 2019-20, federal excise receipts have plunged.

The March budget forecasts tobacco excise receipts will be just $7.4bn in this financial year – the lowest since 2012-13 – and will continue to fall to $6.7bn by the end of the decade.

Rather than a sudden collapse in smoking rates, experts point to an explosion in the availability of black market tobacco in recent years.

An equivalent of 605.8m cigarettes in illegal tobacco was seized at the border in 2019-20, according to government figures. By 2022-23, border seizures had reached the equivalent of 2.6bn cigarettes before easing to 2.2bn in 2023-24.

DRH comment: I vaguely remember when the Canadian government imposed a stiff tax of about $5 per pack in the 1990s. That would translate to over $10 per pack in today’s dollars. Growing up in Canada, I was used to thinking of Canadians as particularly law-abiding. (I’m not sure it was true, but that’s how I thought of my fellow Canadians.) But then we started hearing about boats crossing the St. Lawrence laden with cigarettes from lower-price United States.

Trad Wives and Tallow Fries: How the Wellness Wars Flipped Health and Food Politics Upside Down

by Elizabeth Nolan Brown, Reason, July 2025.

Excerpts:

“I don’t want to be told how many calories are in my Big Mac meal or my quarter pounder meal. I don’t want the government telling me that I can’t put salt on my food,” Sean Hannity declared on Fox News in 2010. “I like junk food. I like McDonald’s. I like Wendy’s. I like Burger King. I love Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

This was a common sentiment for conservatives of the era, a time when many on the right viewed attempts to promote health as left-wing and therefore suspect. Some of this Republican pushback was rooted in righteous opposition to intrusions on the free market and consumer choice,as when Democrats attempted to impose sin taxes on sodas or limit the size of sugary drinks stores could sell. But too often, it seemed more like oppositional defiance disorder.

And:

“The age of Big Gulp conservatism is over,” says Breitbart writer John Carney. “Now we’re into the protein- and blueberry-maxxing age.” And Carney—who jokingly calls yogurt with pomegranate seeds and blueberries his “neofascist breakfast“—thinks this is great. “I’d rather be on the side that’s healthy,” he says.

This isn’t just a story about MAGA going health nut; a lot of health nuts went MAGA too, partly as a rejection of the Democratic Party’s centralized public health dogmas, especially during the pandemic. The story of how we got here involves fertility fears and lentil wars, dietary science and social justice, losing our religion and gaining Obamacare. Perhaps most of all it involves COVID-19.

DRH comment: When RFK, Jr. was chosen as the secretary of HHS, I told a friend who was surprisingly uncritical of Kennedy, “Be prepared for the nanny state on steroids.”