The Second Monopoly

Foreword

by Gord Magill

author of End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers

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And so begins the 1981 song ‘Red Barchetta’ by Canadian progressive rock band Rush, a musical prophecy influenced by a dystopian short story once published in the vaunted car guy magazine ‘Road and Track’, way back in 1973. The song describes a young man escaping the confines of what some dissidents today call the ‘Bug Hive’ of urbanity, and re-connecting with the spirit of life itself through operation of a well preserved though forbidden motor car, a ‘Red Barchetta’ of the title. The authorities are not amused, and the song continues with the protagonist speeding along to evade capture.

‘Red Barchetta’ may have seemed pessimistic to the average person in 1981, where the dictates brought about by the massive expansion of the regulatory state in 1970 were still somewhat nascent, and had yet to metastasize on the body politic to the cancerous and deadly levels they have grown to in 2026. Cars and trucks were still somewhat inexpensive, easy to work on, and modifiable in ways accessible to the average enthusiast of the time; they did not require software updates, nor were drivers emasculated by digital intermediations of their operation. Many of those enthusiasts were teenagers who, unlike today, obtained their drivers licenses as soon as possible, and were not caught under the spell of the digital realm via ubiquitous Satanic Rectangles, whose implicit communications reek of compliance and conformity. Other versions of those rectangles now dominate all new vehicles, and the programming within them makes the cars into very expensive and difficult to maintain surveillance iPads on wheels.

The profound and notable resonance of ‘Red Barchetta’ in 2026, along with other works of dystopian forecasting such as 1984 by George Orwell, naturally elicit the question of ‘How did we get here?’, and, ‘What can we do about it?’ Though ‘Red Barchetta’ may speak to a perceived rebellious or contrarian inclination, it resonates because the ‘Motor Law’ described in the song is not just about motors, but about nearly every facet of modern life now hobbled by the friction of technological interruption which produces nothing of value and interfere with nearly every human activity and interaction while also capturing highly detailed bits of information about your life to be fed into a voracious surveillance panopticon. The song also resonates because working class people in the west are being kneecapped by massive cost of living increases that are a consequence of so many of these ‘Motor Laws’ brought to us by Safetyism and Climate Alarmism, a pair of wholly manufactured ideologies which have now been weaponized for profit by corporate America, and are backed by a regulatory state which this book argues has interfered in a long lost constitutional bargain.

In “The Second Monopoly - The Patent Expired. The Exclusion Didn’t — and It Doubled the Cost of American Living.” Roleigh Martin brings a number of very specific answers to ‘How did we get here?’ and likewise proposes a Constitutional Challenge that includes many legitimate plaintiff categories in ‘What can WE do about it?’

Martin approached me to write this foreword for him not only because of our overlapping projects as writers trying to solve problems, but because I’m a member of one of the plaintiff categories Martin describes in the book, truckers, and the trucking industry has certainly been at the very shitty end of the government regulation stick. Anecdotes from my own book, “End Of The Road - Inside The War on Truckers” might serve as a small view of millions of examples of truckers being economically harmed by the ratcheting regulatory state, and also encapsulates how a return to the original understanding of the Patent Clause can help truckers avoid that stick, and all of the financial burdens whipped on to us by its very shitty end.

I tell about how a couple of dozen brand new trucks equipped with the latest in mandated emission control technology were sent to run on Canada’s Ice Roads during the 2009 Winter Road season. Those units failed miserably, constantly breaking down, stalling out and becoming immobilized, thus greatly endangering the frozen lakes over which fuel and other supplies are hauled to remote diamond mines. The engineering solution was to make them run at higher RPMs and thus burn far more fuel than normal, losing any gains made by the new emission control systems. The older 1993 Peterbilt I was driving that season had none of these problems, and burned 30-40% less fuel than those newer trucks, a substantial cost differential that can break an owner-operator. I also discuss how 75% of the business at a Freightliner service center near where I live now is dedicated to solving emission control system problems, as well as how a logging truck I operated had sat for six months due to the complexity of the bugs within the computer system which controlled these wicked and costly emissions systems.

The chapter of ‘End of The Road’ these anecdotes are relayed from is called ‘Punishment by Castration’, and a great many of the examples in Roleigh’s book follow the same pattern - a new mandate is brought to bear on some piece of equipment, be it a truck, a tractor, a water heater for your house, or anything else that requires energy to operate - which is the Castration. The purchase cost of that piece of equipment goes up, often quite substantially, as does the cost of maintaining the fragile systems imposed upon them to meet the dictates of ‘those who worship the sky’ - which are the Punishments. These mandates are part of what Roleigh calls a ‘regulatory ratchet’ which turns in only one direction. This ratchet combines with and enforces a mandated ‘wall’ that legally blocks anyone from building the older and cheaper versions of any of this equipment, which is where we run into the Patent Clause, and what Roleigh describes as a ‘broken bargain’ between what the Constitution grants us in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, and the forgotten part of that clause, ‘limited times’. The patents for a 3406B Caterpillar engine expired in the 90s and the patent on every component to a 1993 Peterbilt expired in 2013. Under the ‘limited times’ part of the patent clause, on which Roleigh goes into great and granular detail in this book, anyone should be able to remanufacture that Caterpillar engine and the 93 Peterbilt. You can’t use those trademarked brand names, but the designs for those technologies passed into the commons for anyone to build on their own a long time ago, but the regulators stand between you and your constitutional right to build and sell that patent expired equipment, and make a few miles without a selective catalytic reduction system and its Pig Piss Diesel Exhaust Fluid ruining your motor. Multiply these regular breakdowns across millions of pieces of equipment in America, and the costs to the trucking industry (as well as farming, construction, and various others) reach unknown and untold billions in downtime and extra costs that come out of the pockets of hardworking truckers, and the wider economy. That 93 Peterbilt would also be exempt from the Fourth Amendment breaking ‘Eye of Sauron’ forced on truckers via the Electronic Logging Device mandate, an anti-human and emasculating system of surveillance which essentially tells a trucker when he may shit or when he may eat. An anti-American, anti-worker, and totalitarian abomination if there ever was one.

Not only truckers, but any other consumer in America who is sick and tired of the cost of new vehicles and their maintenance, along with these vehicles being turned into data harvesting machines for the surveillance state, would benefit from the ‘limited times’ aspect of the patent bargain being returned to them. And if you don’t believe me or Roleigh Martin, none other than Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, made the case for me in an interview given to the Detroit Free Press in June of 2026.

“But you don’t want people repairing their own vehicles?”

Farley’s reply: “No, that’s, that’s fine, not for warranty work, though. These are very complicated cars, and we don’t think that’s safe, for many of the repairs on our vehicles, someone at home like myself could never do it. I have no problem working on a ’73 Bronco, but to work on a brand-new Bronco? I need all sorts of specialty tools. That’s something that, um, you know, we would put people’s lives at risk.”

Farley may not have meant to give away the game here, but he did, and it is worth noting that even CEOs understand the joy, utility, and economic advantage in working on your own equipment. I wonder if the irony is lost on Farley, as Henry Ford very explicitly made his cars accessible to the working man through their reasonable price and ease of maintenance. What a shame Farley has besmirched the legacy of Ford as he works hand in hand with the government to take these price and ease of maintenance advantages away from you, protected as Ford is by the ‘regulatory wall’ described by Martin in this book.

Regulatory walls are not the only culprit Martin takes to task as he walks us through the breaking of this guarantee between the Constitution and the American people. There are numerous court cases cited throughout in painstaking detail showing how the ‘limited times’ provision was purposely buried or ignored, and various groups of ‘Bootleggers and Baptists’ formed coalitions of convenience to create regulatory capture that screwed everyone out of their rights to patent expired equipment. This was partially done in order to satisfy the nebulous quasi-religious moral yearnings of various advocacy groups - most of whom today practice the new secular orthodoxy of progressivism, which is often at odds with the material needs of most people. These advocacy groups, often leftists in political orientation, have found themselves in very cozy relationships with the pimps of technology who are busy hemming us all into an inescapable surveillance panopticon. Martin also shows us how remanufacturing patent expired equipment works in the rest of the world, and how the savings benefits accrue to those countries’ citizens. Why not revitalize American manufacturing with a new Golden Age of building patent expired equipment that people actually want and can afford? Many critics of NeoLuddites like me say that no one would purchase such older model equipment, but it’s not even legal to make it, much less legal for me or any other consumer to purchase brand new. How can these critics make such a claim when the consumer is prevented from making such a choice? Why not let the market make that call instead of the regulatory state?

Martin is not just here to accurately and precisely lay out how American society is being hosed with cost of living increases intimately related to the results of this breaking of the patent clause; he also shows us a novel approach to launching a Supreme Court challenge. Though I am personally not a fan of AI content anything, Martin has acted as a maestro in directing high end AI engines, specifically built for case law and legal research, to support any potential challenger to the regulatory wall that stands between the citizens and their rights to expired patents. With the Loper Bright vs Raimondo Supreme Court case in 2024 bringing us an end to the Chevron Deference doctrine, Martin believes now is the time to reforge the bargain promised to us, and this book is a very thorough examination of that broken promise and provides us a roadmap to repair it, which includes detailed breakdowns for a number of plaintiff categories, and letter templates for interested and passionate patriots to take action.

Martin talks about the ‘ratcheting’ effect of the regulatory state, and the anti-backsliding measures that our wicked regulators have built into their dictates. I believe there is a related ‘ratchet’ placed into our minds by our corporate-government-media ecosystem, and that is the heavily implied inevitability of ‘the future.’ Yes, there is a future, but who are they to dictate to us what it looks like, or that it may not be imbued with what worked in the past? Do we have the capacity to imagine something better for ourselves? Perhaps a near term future where American truckers aren’t going broke because of the multiple pressures they experience across the board, over and above the looming imposition of autonomous trucks, because they can buy a cheaply remanufactured patent expired rig that worked just fine when it was originally built? The farmers who don’t lose their shirts because they have to pay ten times the cost of what a tractor or combine harvester costs in other countries? Lost beauty returned to our roads, as consumers are allowed to purchase re-manufactured cars from the 1960s or 70s, when the car companies primary design calculation was not compliance with the moralizing dictates of climate alarmism, which render todays cars into a beige lozenge shaped sameness, devoid of any human level aesthetic considerations whatsoever? What investments in the future are not being made because we are barred from the financial savings of purchasing cheaper and proven equipment? Do you remember when going for a drive was a respite from the constant desire for your attention, one of the last places an American could have some peace and quiet? Wouldn’t you like to not have a screen staring you in the face while taking in your birthright of the American road trip? What of a return to a Golden Age of manufacturing in America when a right guaranteed to us by the Founders is restored? The future looks very bright without a wall blocking out the sunshine.

At a time when the public is growing increasingly skeptical of the excesses of the surveillance state, the loss of their savings and economic standing to ever increasing inflation and growing costs of living, and farmers are having public fights to obtain the ‘right to repair’ their own equipment, Roleigh Martin’s book, which is really a challenge to the status quo and an instruction manual on how to change it, couldn’t be more timely. There are futures available to us by honoring the bargains of the past, and from the cost savings realized when the parasites of regulatory capture are burned from the body politic by the rising Phoenix of the Constitution. In the hands of the right group of dedicated patriots, this book could be the beginning of a consumer rights revolution, and a necessary escape valve out of our growing technocratic imperium.

Are you willing to elude the eyes and go outside the wire?