Should We Fear Santa?
Some Holiday Satire
The holidays are always a fun time, especially now that I have children and get to see the magic all over again through their eyes. But should we actually fear Santa as a force for economic destruction?
Back in 2014, Austin Middleton and I wrote this piece for FEE. It was pure satire and I remember Austin and I laughing the entire time we were writing it. Some snippets:
[Santa’s] unfair business advantage has forced companies in the United States to kick off the holiday shopping season the day after Thanksgiving with a ritual known as “Black Friday.” In an attempt to capture what little of the market they can before Santa and his band of thieves dump toys, electronics, and other consumer goods on the world economy, some stores advertise sales as great as 50 percent off suggested retail price. This business practice is clearly unsustainable.
Further, the working conditions of Claus’s cadre of elf labor are unknown. We do, however, know from NASA and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency’s geothermal imaging of the North Pole that no significant thermal activity exists. This means that elves lack basic necessities like lighting and heat; it also means that their work must be done by hand. Forced to endure six months of night, the elves’ working conditions fail every reasonable standard set by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The United States has historically led the charge of correcting these practices elsewhere, which has had the demonstrable effect of improving people’s lives worldwide. Yet, Mr. President, you and Congress refuse to act in this situation, leaving elves perpetually impoverished.
The fun part of this article is in the links we included (which hopefully still work!), where we linked to works by others demonstrating the exact opposite of what we claimed.
A few days ago, Dominic Pino published this satire at the Washington Post
Millions of American children are looking forward to Santa Claus’s visit and his sleigh full of presents. Timeless tradition? Harmless fun?
Not anymore. The United States has adopted a new philosophy about foreign trade under President Donald Trump, and jolly old St. Nick is desensitizing American kids to the dangers of trade deficits.
American children have been trained not merely to accept but to celebrate the dumping of foreign goods, directly from Claus’s bottomless sack into their homes, without any government efforts to level the playing field for American producers. Fun as it may be, the Santa Claus tradition damages our national solidarity in the struggle for fair trading relationships. The gleeful acceptance of low-priced imports is only one of many symptoms of the failed neoliberal mindset wrecking this great nation.
Claus should commit to moving some of his toy production to the U.S. That way, every request from a child sitting on his lap at the mall would help create good-paying jobs in the Rust Belt. The white-bearded interloper also uses a foreign-domiciled vessel to make deliveries in the U.S. when he jumps from house to house. Efficient as it may be, Kris Kringle’s sleigh and reindeer operation denies jobs to the hardworking American truck drivers, train engineers and union dockworkers who would transport the gifts instead.
And yesterday, I had a similar piece published on The Daily Economy.
Santa does not produce his own merchandise, but rather creates facsimiles of products readily available on shelves of stores around the country. This is intellectual property theft at its finest, which by some estimates costs the US up to $600 billion annually. Is it possible that all of those “elves on the shelves” are really spies, seeking to steal trade secrets through corporate espionage? After all, they apparently return to the North Pole every evening to “report to Santa.” Just what is in those reports? Has anyone seen them?
The reality is that the American people understand full well that Santa is no “economic terrorist.” While we may bemoan having to clean up the mess of wrapping paper, find ourselves unprepared for the sheer number of toys that need (but do not include) batteries, and perhaps find frustration that after a late night, we have to get up absurdly early, we still see Christmas Day not as a sign of us being taken advantage of, but as a day of celebration and good cheer.
Also. I’d just like to say thank you to all the people who shared my post on 4.3% Q3 GDP. Normally, I get somewhere around 100 views on my posts, which is fine, but as of this writing that one already has well over 2,100 views and was shared on Cafe Hayek this morning.
That in particular is super flattering as I’ve been reading Cafe Hayek daily for almost 20 years now and reading Don and Russ was what made me want to go to GMU for grad school in the first place.
I’ve only done a few “real” posts on here, mostly using it as a repository of talking points and links that I use in other writings. But starting in 2026, I want to use it for more, especially for things that don’t fit the mold for other outlets. Perhaps a weekly roundup of all the economic releases from e.g. the BEA/BLS/etc. or other, quick reaction type pieces where I can show the math that outlets such as the WSJ would never publish.