This week’s Bork Report doesn’t touch on the consequences of the midterm elections. I wrote it yesterday, before the news. But fear not! My analysis is coming.

In the meantime, if you can tear yourself away from the news, here’s this week’s offering for paid subscribers!

Something odd is happening in the world’s welfare states. Governments that have spent generations promising to care for their citizens are now issuing a blunt instruction: you’re on your own.

Not forever. Just for the first three days, or seven or ten, depending on which government is talking.

Sweden wants every household able to meet its basic needs for at least a week without help. Norway raised its recommendation from three days to a week. Germany asks households to keep ten days of food and water. The European Commission wants Europeans to be able to last at least 72 hours on their own.

The welfare state, it seems, has discovered rugged individualism, just in time for the apocalypse.

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Coca-Cola is trouncing Pepsi. Its market share is more than twice that of its longtime rival, and now Kentucky Fried Chicken is dumping Pepsi after a forty-year relationship. Somewhere in Washington, an ambitious antitrust lawyer must be wondering whether Coke has monopolized fried chicken.

After all, in some antitrust circles, winning is practically a confession of guilt.

Pepsi once advertised itself as “The Choice of a New Generation.” Evidently, the Colonel has decided it’s time for a new generation of soft drinks, too. And Coke, which once promised to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, has persuaded KFC to change its tune.

Behind the advertising nostalgia is a serious lesson about competition and the consumer welfare standard. The purpose of competition is not to guarantee that everybody wins. It is to make companies compete for the privilege of serving consumers. Market share is the result of that contest, not a prize the government is supposed to distribute.

As Phil Wahba reports in Fortune, the cola wars haven’t been particularly close lately.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Pepsi and Coke were nearly neck and neck. Pepsi challenged Americans to blind taste tests, enlisted Michael Jackson to sell its brand to a new generation, and gave Cindy Crawford a starring role in one of the most memorable commercials of the 1990s. Coke countered with “It’s the Real Thing,” “Have a Coke and a Smile,” and that unforgettable hillside chorus singing about harmony.

Today, Coca-Cola commands 18.5 percent of the American carbonated soft-drink market, compared with Pepsi’s 8.1 percent. Even Dr Pepper has passed Pepsi. Whatever happened to the Pepsi Generation?

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Elizabeth Warren and the Globalization of the Whole Enchilada

Senator Elizabeth Warren is in a pickle. And she’s determined to make sure the rest of us are, too.

The Massachusetts senator has discovered a new threat to American democracy: the proposed merger of McCormick & Company and Unilever’s food business. The transaction would bring Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Cholula hot sauce, Frank’s RedHot, Knorr soups, and McCormick spices under one corporate roof. Warren fears that the combination could raise grocery prices, reduce competition, and concentrate too much power in the hands of Big Condiment.

In other words, she is worried that the deal will globalize the whole enchilada.

The senator is apparently convinced that something sinister is cooking. Imagine a world in which the same corporation controls your mayonnaise and your hot sauce. First, they come for your potato salad. Then they come for your tacos. Before you know it, the invisible hand of the marketplace is wearing an oven mitt.

Warren wants regulators to put the merger on ice before consumers find themselves between a rock and a hard taco.

But her argument doesn’t cut the mustard.

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Robert E. Hall of Stanford and the Hoover Institution has won the 2026 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, sharing it with Michael Woodford of Columbia. The committee honored the two for rebuilding macroeconomic models on a microeconomic foundation, grounded in how households and firms actually behave, and for giving governments and central banks better tools for managing booms and busts.

That is the work that won the prize. But anyone who lived through the tax fights of the 1980s knows Hall for something else. In December 1981, he and his Hoover colleague Alvin Rabushka proposed in the Wall Street Journal that the federal income tax be replaced with a single low rate. Their plan, developed in their book The Flat Tax, set that rate at 19 percent. It exempted a generous family allowance so that low-income households paid little or nothing, and it taxed every dollar of income once and only once. Individuals and businesses could file on a form the size of a postcard.

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