The CNBC report tells us that Trump Media and Technology Group's paid data service went live on August 1st, selling clients faster access to Truth Social posts from President Donald Trump. The product is information — or rather, speed of information — and the seller is an entity whose principal asset is the voice of the sitting head of government. I have no recollection of anything so precisely constructed, but the principle it raises is one I addressed at some length in my own time.

In The Wealth of Nations I argued that monopoly is the great enemy of the consumer. A monopoly need not be granted by royal charter; it is sufficient that one party controls a resource others cannot replicate, and then sets a toll on access to it. The president's public statements move financial markets, direct public attention, and shape the expectations of merchants and workmen across the economy. If faster access to those statements is sold as a private service, then the purchaser — the well-capitalised trader, the institutional client — gains an advantage over every ordinary citizen who reads the same post seconds later. The toll is invisible, but it is real.

The deeper trouble is one of institutional design. Markets work honestly when all participants receive material information at roughly the same moment, so that price adjusts to reality rather than to the accident of who paid for a faster wire. Financial regulators in the present day have, as I understand it by inference rather than recollection, built rules around exactly this principle — prohibiting selective disclosure of corporate information to favoured investors. The question now is whether those rules reach a private company selling access to a public officer's communications. That is a question of institutional framework, and it is the most important question here.

I am sometimes invoked by people who take the phrase 'invisible hand' to mean that any transaction freely entered is therefore just. That reading does me a disservice. I wrote that the individual, pursuing his own interest, is sometimes led to promote the public interest — and I was careful with the word 'sometimes.' The condition was a competitive market within a framework of law and honest dealing. A market in which one seller controls access to the sovereign's words, and prices that access to the highest bidder, is not that market. It is closer to what I called the 'mean rapacity' of merchants who contrive to widen their own privilege at the expense of the public.

The moral foundation of commerce is sympathy — the capacity to stand, imaginatively, in another's position. The workman who cannot afford a subscription, the small investor who reads the post three seconds too late, the citizen whose government speech is now a commodity: their position deserves to be imagined. The institutional question that follows is plain. What body — regulatory, legislative, or judicial — has the authority and the will to ensure that the public communications of a public officer remain, in their material effects, genuinely public? Until that question is answered with the force of law, the toll stands, and the consumer of democracy pays it whether he knows it or not.