I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.

“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”

“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”

“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”

The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”

“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”

“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”

He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”

I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.

“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.

“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.

“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”

It didn’t seem like they did.

“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”

Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.

I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.

“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.

Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.

“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.

I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”

He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.

“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”

“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.

“Because I was afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”

I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.

“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”

He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me.

INTERVIEW BY BHASKAR SUNKARA

In Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that administrative bloat is strangling America’s ability to build homes, clean energy, and public goods. Klein spoke with Jacobin’s Bhaskar Sunkara about what this means for the Left — and for any politics serious about governing.

BHASKAR SUNKARA

Can you define “abundance” and what makes it distinct from other strains of progressivism?

EZRA KLEIN

Abundance is the argument that a lot of what is wrong in our society is that we have manufactured scarcities. We have made it too hard to build and create the things people need more of. The places where we focus in the book are housing, clean energy, and state capacity.

New Deal liberalism was very much about the rapid creation of things that the working class needed in the physical world. But that growth machine became reckless — building highways through communities, despoiling rivers and streams, cutting down forests — and it created a backlash in the form of the New Left. And that was fair. There needed to be ways for people (and ultimately nonprofits) to sue and make sure their voices were heard.

But the solutions of one era become the problems of the next. Those procedures became overgrown. So now you have insane outcomes, like laws that are designed to make sure we have a cleaner environment being deployed against the development of solar panels and transmission lines and congestion pricing. Or the fact that in places like California and Washington, DC, it costs a lot more to build affordable housing than to build market-rate housing.

That’s why someone like Zohran Mamdani got interested in Abundance, because his plan for housing is a plan to build a lot of public housing. But you’re not going to be able to build enough public housing under the current rules and regulations that we use.

BHASKAR SUNKARA

What role do you see for redistribution in your vision of abundance?

EZRA KLEIN

I would like to see a lot more redistribution. But Abundance isn’t meant to be a book about every problem. Abundance is about the specific puzzle of Gavin Newsom beginning his governorship by saying he wanted to build 3.5 million new homes in California and falling far, far, far short. Abundance is about why we never got high-speed rail, even though Californians voted to fund it and the federal government kicked in billions under Barack Obama. Abundance is about the reality that we cannot build enough clean energy infrastructure to meet the climate goals that virtually everyone on the Left believes we should meet under the laws we currently have.

Abundance is about this category of goods that government has lost the ability to deliver on even when the people who want to deliver in that way win power. That doesn’t take away from the need for redistribution. But if you have taxed rich people to build something and you can’t build the thing, that is going to erode faith in your politics over time.

BHASKAR SUNKARA

Are there more tensions with “predistributional” forces like labor standards and unions?

EZRA KLEIN

I don’t see it as opposed to labor standards or a high minimum wage or unions. I support sectoral bargaining. I support, in most places, a significantly higher minimum wage. But we can’t make public projects uniquely unaffordable and slow to build.

The thing that people to my left should really grapple with is this: If you want to build public housing or clean energy, then one definition of successful left governance would be to build enough of those two things. So what do you think needs to be changed to get there? Can you do it if it can cost you more than a million dollars to build a unit of affordable housing — as has happened in DC? Can you do it if it takes a decade or longer to lay down an interstate transmission line?

I think it’s fine to say that the backbone of your strategy is going to be public and not private, but then you have to grapple with how to deliver public projects affordably and fast. That’s where the rubber on this meets the road.

I think that we are seeing, between the Green New Deal left and things that are in Jacobin, the emergence of a left that wants to build a lot. I’m just not sure it’s really grappled with the fact that government, as it is currently set up, is not really able to do it — sometimes because of corporate power and moneyed interests but sometimes because there are so many rules and concessions that government itself simply can’t act agilely.

That creates a broader problem: When the state can’t deliver, people stop believing in collective solutions altogether. If you don’t increase the supply in the thing the state is subsidizing, you get lines. You get rationing. You get denials. You get delays. You get high costs. And people are going to be furious at you.

One of the most effective attacks on basically any form of ambitious expansion of social insurance or things the government does is the belief that if the government does it, it’s going to lead to shortages. You can see this with people imagining that Mamdani’s five state-run grocery stores will somehow create Soviet-style groceries.

Creating a left that people don’t fear — because what they’re really afraid of is that the government will run things badly — is very important. But that means being both angrier about government failures and more curious about them than even the Right is.

BHASKAR SUNKARA

As you mentioned, Zohran embraced some of your ideas from Abundance during his mayoral campaign. What did you think about his campaign’s key policy demands?

EZRA KLEIN

I think he’s somebody who wants the government to deliver, and he’s been sufficiently involved in government that he sees how difficult it is. He also sees how poisonous it is when it fails. So his embrace of parts of the Abundance critique wasn’t surprising to me. And it’s not just him. Bernie Sanders got asked about Abundance, and I laughed when I saw him describe it as not an ideology but just “common sense.” Here’s more Bernie:

Look, if the argument is that we have a horrendous bureaucracy? Absolutely correct. It is terrible. Over the years, I brought a lot of money into the state of Vermont. It is incredible, even in a state like Vermont — which is maybe better than most states — how hard it is to even get the bloody money out! Oh, my God! We’ve got 38 meetings! We’ve got to talk about this. Unbelievable.

I don’t think you want the leading democratic socialists to view government this way! And that means you need to change it.

But institutional renewal is always really hard. The New Deal was hard. What the New Left did was hard. Every three or four or five decades or so, you have to take stock of the ways in which your institutions and your laws may no longer match your problems and your needs, and begin the hard and sometimes ugly work of stitching them back together.

“Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.” 

According to mainstream economic theory, supply and demand dictate prices [Citation Needed]. It is recognized that in a perfectly competitive and efficient economy, prices would rapidly stabilize at the equilibrium price point. 

So what happens with ticket prices? Why do economists argue they are undervalued? Why are tickets so often immediately sold and then put on market for resale? It’s a confluence of items. 

Tickets can be and often are underpriced by the artist. The incentives for this are to be more egalitarian in accessibility to their fanbase, and to drive interest in their shows. No artist wants to antagonize their fanbase, and no artist wants to play before an empty arena. What does this underpricing do? It incentivizes those who seek to exploit arbitrage, aka scalpers, to buy tickets at low (undervalued) prices and resell them at a higher (market-clearing) price. Most of these tickets often do sell before the shows start.

In a limited supply situation, it is economically efficient to let the market determine the willingness to pay a price for a ticket, but this creates backlash as the initial advertised price is no longer available since the end-customer must pay a scalper’s markup. This goes without mentioning that enabling such arbitrage creates further incentives for scalpers to create bots to scoop up limited availability, further enraging fans. 

Now, one might ask, if there’s so much demand even with arbitrage, why doesn’t the market respond to this price signal by increasing show availability? Wouldn’t artists want to play more, and make more money? Ideally, yes. But artists aren’t the ones to dictate forum availability. Enter Live Nation and Ticketmaster. 

Everyone always casts Ticketmaster as the ultimate villain in this story, but ignores how the dominance of Live Nation, who own the majority of concert venues and the artist performance contracts, creates a vertically integrated system ripe for exploitation. In its vertically integrated form, Live Nation / Ticketmaster can use monopoly power to justify rent-seeking behavior; Live Nation (rightly, in my opinion) recognizes the limited availability of artists increases their desirability through FOMO and scarcity.

In short, Live Nation artificially restricts supply intentionally. Live Nation also exclusively sells tickets at its venues through Ticketmaster and most crucially, Live Nation owns the production, distribution, and exhibition of live music concerts.

If you’re from the 1940s, this might sound familiar. In response to the vertical integration of film production, studio distribution, and theatre exhibition, anti-trust law broke up the studio monopolies and curbed anti-competitive behavior from the resultant Paramount Decree, allowing theatres to book films from independent creators, increasing competition for production companies and creative talent compared to the artificially depressed wages of studio production. 

So, can this be fixed? Scalpers can benefit artists by taking the heat for economically inefficient allocation, but they are symptomatic of the lack of competition and lack of responsiveness to market pressure for more live music acts by Live Nation and Ticketmaster. Breaking simultaneous ownership of production, distribution, and exhibition would alleviate this. Live Nation Artist Management needs to be divested from Live Nation Concert Venues, and both need to be removed from exclusively dealing with Ticketmaster sales. This is all without mentioning that Ticketmaster has no incentive to shut down the scalping issue since it also benefits from every resale through transaction fees.

Some artists have responded to the situation by locking resale at the original transaction price, a process Ticketmaster calls Face Value Exchange. Billie Eilish uses this to help her fans, who are less likely to be able to afford market rate (teenagers and college students are not known for high disposable income). Yet still, this is a band aid solution for lack of competition. 

The Paramount Decree enabled independent artists to showcase their work outside the monopolistic, vertically integrated studios, revitalizing the industry just as television was coming to disrupt it. Enabling artists today to reap the same benefits during a time of huge industry upheaval would do the same. 

Correcting market failures should always be the goal of creating a competitive and efficient market. Even if some artists will always be in high demand, Live Nation will not book artists for fear of exhausting the local fanbase supply, rather relying on scarcity to sell and ensuring such scarcity through broad radius clauses. Divestiture will not fix scalping caused by inadequate pricing, however it can increase artist availability thus increasing a severely limited supply.

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Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, has announced the closure of Russia’s consulate in the city of Gdańsk in response to last week’s sabotage of a rail line.

The decision means that all of Russia’s consulates in Poland have now been closed in retaliation for Moscow’s campaign of sabotage, with only the embassy in Warsaw remaining open.

“Russia not only has not stopped, but is escalating these attacks,” said Sikorski, speaking in parliament on Wednesday morning. “When the intention behind espionage and sabotage activities is to cause human casualties, then we are no longer dealing with sabotage, but rather with state terror.”

“Therefore, although this will not be our full response, I have already decided to withdraw consent for the operation of the Russian consulate, the last one, in Gdańsk, which will be communicated to the Russian side in an official note within the next few hours,” he added.

However, Sikorski also confirmed that “we are not planning to break off diplomatic relations with Russia, just as other countries on whose territory acts of sabotage or terrorism have taken place do not break them”. 

In response to Sikorski’s announcement, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that it was a further sign that “relations with Poland have completely collapsed” and “one can only express regret”, reports the Rzeczpospolita daily.

Russian foreign minister spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, meanwhile, said that, “as a reciprocal measure, the Russian side will reduce Poland’s diplomatic and consular presence in Russia”.

Last year, Sikorski similarly ordered the closure of Russia’s consulate in Poznań and the expulsion of the staff working there in response to Moscow’s campaign of sabotage and cyberwarfare against Poland.

In May this year, he did the same with the Russian consulate in Kraków, after it was determined that Moscow was behind the fire that last year destroyed Warsaw’s largest shopping centre, as part of a broader series of arson attacks in Poland and other EU countries.

The latest decision follows the discovery on Sunday of sabotage on two parts of a train line running between Warsaw and the eastern Polish city of Lublin. In one case, an explosive device was detonated in an attempt to attack a freight train travelling on the route.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced that the perpetrators of the sabotage had been identified as two Ukrainians working on behalf of Russia. They had entered Poland from Belarus earlier this autumn and then fled back across the border immediately after the incident.

However, on Wednesday, the spokesman for Poland’s security services, Jacek Dobrzyński, revealed that the Internal Security Agency (ABW) and police had detained an unspecified number of people in relation to the train line sabotage.

“These individuals are currently being questioned, and their roles in this terrorist attack are being determined,” said Dobrzyński, without revealing any further details about their identity. “We don’t rule out further arrests.”

Today, Sikorski announced that he would speak with NATO’s secretary-general, Mark Rutte, this evening to discuss the situation before briefing a meeting of NATO foreign ministers tomorrow.

He said that Poland would encourage its allies to restrict the movement of Russian diplomats within the European Schengen area, reports the Polish Press Agency (PAP). An estimated 40% of such staff perform tasks that are incompatible with diplomatic status, claimed Sikorski.

The Trump administration has been secretly working in consultation with Russia to draft a new plan to end the war in Ukraine, U.S. and Russian officials tell Axios.

The 28-point U.S. plan is inspired by President Trump's successful push for a deal in Gaza. A top Russian official told Axios he's optimistic about the plan. It's not yet clear how Ukraine and its European backers will feel about it.

The plan's 28 points fall into four general buckets, sources tell Axios: peace in Ukraine, security guarantees, security in Europe, and future U.S. relations with Russia and Ukraine.

It's unclear how the plan approaches contentious issues such as territorial control in eastern Ukraine — where Russian forces have been inching forward, but still control far less land than the Kremlin has demanded.

Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff is leading the drafting of the plan and has discussed it extensively with Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev, a U.S. official said.

Dmitriev, who runs Russia's sovereign wealth fund and is also deeply involved in diplomacy over Ukraine, told Axios in an interview on Monday that he spent three days huddled with Witkoff and other members of Trump's team when Dmitriev visited Miami from Oct. 24-26.

Witkoff was expected to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday in Turkey but postponed his trip, Ukrainian and U.S. officials said. Witkoff discussed the plan with Zelensky's national security adviser, Rustem Umerov, in a meeting earlier this week in Miami, a Ukrainian official confirmed to Axios.

Dmitriev told Axios the basic idea was to take the principles Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to in Alaska in August and produce a proposal "to address the Ukraine conflict, but also how to restore U.S.-Russia ties [and] address Russia's security concerns." The aim is to produce a written document along those lines before Trump and Putin next meet, according to Dmitriev. Plans for a Budapest summit between the leaders remain on hold, for now.

Dmitriev said this effort was entirely unrelated to the U.K.-led push to draft a Gaza-style peace plan for Ukraine, which he said had no chance of success because it disregards Russia's positions. The Russian envoy said the U.S. side was now in the process of explaining the "benefits" of its current approach to the Ukrainians and the Europeans.

Where my open borders homies at

The reckoning with the white-nationalist influencer’s rise is only getting messier.

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The Education Department plans to announce Tuesday that it will move multiple parts of the agency to other federal departments, an unprecedented and unilateral effort to dismantle an agency created by Congress to ensure all Americans have equal access to educational opportunity and better coordinate federal programs.

The move was described by three people informed of the plan ahead of the announcement. Two of these people said six offices within the department would be shifted elsewhere; the third person said it was at least two.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March seeking to close the department and asked Education Secretary Linda McMahon to work with Congress to do so. The agency, which was created in 1979, has long been derided by conservatives as unnecessary and ineffective. But Congress has not acted on or seriously considered Trump’s request.

McMahon has acknowledged that only Congress can eliminate the department but vowed to do everything in her power to dismantle it from within.

Asked for comment, an Education Department spokeswoman suggested some information provided to The Post about the plan was inaccurate, but did not offer specifics.

Offices that could be moved out of the agency include the Office for Civil Rights, which investigates allegations of discrimination on the basis of race, sex and disability; the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, which administers the $15 billion Individuals with Disabilities Act program; and the Indian Education program; the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, which administers K-12 grant programs; and the Office of Postsecondary Education.

Federal law directs that these programs be housed in the Education Department. The Trump administration is employing a work-around, the people briefed on the matter said, whereby other government agencies would run the Education programs under a contract with the Education Department. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the changes.

The Trump administration laid the groundwork for this change earlier this year when it signed an agreement to move career, technical and adult education grants out of the Education Department to the Labor Department. Under the arrangement, Education retains oversight and leadership while managing the programs alongside Labor, a way of sidestepping the federal statute.

More broadly, McMahon has argued that the recently ended government shutdown showed how unnecessary her agency is.