The market for official truth

National Review reports a scheme that would have struck any serious student of political economy as immediately alarming: Truth Social, the platform associated with the current American president, is charging users a fee for the privilege of receiving news about official government actions earlier than those who decline to pay. Let us be precise about what this is. It is not a subscription to analysis, to commentary, or to the considered opinion of any private mind. It is a toll booth placed on the road between a government and its governed.

The instinct to treat this as merely a legal or constitutional question — and no doubt it raises First Amendment and administrative-law questions that are well above my technical competence — misses the deeper economic injury. Markets function, insofar as they function well, on the assumption that relevant public information is available to participants at roughly the same moment. When price-sensitive announcements — tariff decisions, regulatory changes, executive orders — reach some traders minutes or hours before others, you have not merely an unfairness. You have a systematic transfer of wealth from the uninformed to the informed, engineered by the very authority whose neutrality the market requires.

I wrote, in another context entirely, of the animal spirits that drive investment — the confidence, the expectation, the narrative that determines whether private capital advances or retreats. Those spirits are fed, above all, by the belief that the rules of the game are stable and known in common. A government that monetises the timing of its own announcements does not merely offend against equity; it poisons the well of confidence on which any investment decision ultimately rests. Why commit capital to a long-horizon project when the regulatory ground may shift, and you will be among the last to learn of it?

One might argue — and the argument deserves a hearing — that this is simply a media organisation charging for a product, as newspapers have always done. The distinction, however, is not subtle. A newspaper charges for its own editorial labour: the gathering, the judgment, the prose. What is described here, if National Review's account is accurate, is charging for the government's own communications — for the output of the executive branch, which is funded by and accountable to all citizens equally. The newspaper sells its work. This sells yours back to you, at a premium, on a delay.

The economic consequences of political settlements, as I have always insisted, are never fully visible to those who construct them in the heat of the moment. The negotiators of Versailles did not reckon with the demand they were destroying; those who normalise tiered access to public information will not reckon, until it is too late, with the credibility they are selling off. Credibility — of institutions, of data, of official communications — is not an abstraction. It is the substrate on which every interest rate, every investment decision, every employment contract is written. Erode it for a subscription fee and you will find, in time, that the fee collected was very much smaller than the price eventually paid.

The remedy, as ever, is simpler to state than to build: public information produced by public authority must be released publicly, simultaneously, and without charge. This is not a radical demand. It is the minimum condition for a market economy to function honestly and for a democracy to deliberate on equal terms. Any legislature that takes its duties seriously — and I recognise that is itself a matter of inference rather than recollection — should move to codify exactly that principle before the practice becomes too profitable to dislodge.