Start with a monopoly. Now add a genuinely free market. How does that monopoly keep overcharging when competitors are free and eagerto steal its customers with lower prices or better products? Usually, it doesn’t. So how does it protect itself? Get government favors, erect regulatory barriers, restrict competitors, or outlaw them altogether. And once you’ve done that, you haven’t demonstrated the failure of the free market. You’ve demonstrated why the monopoly needed protection from it. Simple stuff.

Even if Bernie’s premise is right that AI should be used to better people’s lives, his political track record hardly makes the case for letting Bernie anywhere near the controls. “Improve humanity” is a rather ambitious assignment for politicians who’ve spent decades promising to improve ordinary lives and still campaign on how miserable those lives supposedly are.

If a cop takes a bribe, we recognize two guilty parties: the person buying special treatment and the official selling it. Politics performs a remarkable moral magic trick: write the privilege into law, and suddenly the official who grants it is treated as though he were the victim. The politician isn’t a helpless bystander being “bribed” by lobbying. Politicians make the rules, control the favors, and decide which privileges are available for purchase. And once government has the power to reward the politically connected, refusing to lobby can simply mean standing still while your competitors lobby for rules that disadvantage you. If you want to eliminate the market for political favors, eliminate the favors—not merely complain about who comes asking for them.

In an Islamic theocratic revolution or a communist one, the sympathizer who sanctions the revolution may eventually discover that he was useful mainly until the revolution succeeded. He expected the new order to provide for him; the new regime expects submission, obedience, and productive service to its goals. The revolutionary imagines himself among the beneficiaries. The regime may see him as another subject to command. Once his support is no longer needed, enthusiasm is worth considerably less than obedience.

The government doesn’t produce the things it promises you. It acquires them from people who do, then redistributes them. Calling dependence on the compulsory transfer of someone else’s production a “dignified life” turns dignity on its head. Dignity is producing, earning, trading, and accepting voluntary help, not acquiring what you want by forcing someone else to provide it.

If “existing without spending money” means other people must build, maintain, heat, clean, and staff a place for you at no cost, you haven’t abolished the price, you’ve merely demanded that someone else pay it. Take that principle far enough and “free” becomes a euphemism for a claim on someone else’s property and labor. In others words it equates to an argument for slavery.

The gaslighting is the assertion. The objection isn’t that California has 250 billionaire farmers, it’s that the economic consequences don’t stop with whoever gets the tax bill. Ro can dispute those consequences, but pretending they don’t exist dodges the argument. When punishing the rich becomes the objective, harming everyone else becomes acceptable collateral damage, and government gets another excuse to demand more money for problems it created and still hasn’t solved.

Everyone, rich, middle-class, and poor has been paying increasingly more for generations. Yet instead of delivering the promised affordability, government has produced ever-larger spending, debt, and recurring complaints that life is unaffordable. It’s bad enough to keep prescribing the same medicine after the patient gets worse. To insist the cure is simply twice the dose borders on indefensible ignorance drifting toward malevolence. Intentional or not, in practice the argument begins to look less like helping the poor than punishing the rich, even when the resulting costs fall on everyone else, especially including the very poor whose suffering supposedly justified the policy in the first place.

It annoys me how political words accumulate so many contradictory meanings that using one can sabotage your message before you’ve even made it. Libertarian: like Milton Friedman—markets, individual liberty and limited government? Or the people who reflexively blame America for everything while romanticizing practically any regime that opposes it? Liberal: like John Locke, Adam Smith or the classical liberal tradition of individual rights, private property and free exchange? Or people advocating extensive state control while borrowing the language of liberty and rights? Capitalism: laissez-faire—private property, voluntary exchange, profit and loss? Or bailouts, subsidies, political favoritism, protectionism and bureaucrats picking winners and losers? Eventually the label communicates less than the definition. You say one word; the listener supplies an entire philosophy you may not hold. Sometimes it’s clearer to skip the label and state the principle: individual rights, private property, voluntary exchange, and a government restrained from managing peaceful people’s lives.

And how did that alliance work out for the left in Iran? Iranian communists and other leftists saw Islamists as useful revolutionary allies against a common enemy. Once the Islamic Republic consolidated power, many of those allies discovered that being useful to a revolution and being welcome after it are two very different things.

But you’re assuming the change is an improvement. If the occasional libertarian win comes packaged with more numerous and larger losses of liberty overall, then the net direction is still backward. So the plant analogy actually cuts the other way: you’re congratulating it for finding one patch of sunlight while repeatedly carrying it farther into the dark. That unintentionally makes the libertarian argument, not the Republican one.

Socialists will complain that capitalism supposedly requires endless economic growth, then demand endless growth in government entitlement, financed by confiscating an ever-growing share of what capitalism produces. Apparently endless growth is unsustainable when people create more, but indispensable when government promises to consume more.

Antitrust laws are presented as a means of protecting competition, yet in practice they can punish the very outcome competition is supposed to produce: someone competing exceptionally well. Once market dominance itself becomes grounds for intervention, bureaucrats are no longer merely protecting competition; they gain the power to hinder whoever is winning and determine who gets a better opportunity to gain ground in their place. Apply that standard to a footrace. Everyone begins under the same rules, but one runner pulls far ahead. The officials declare his lead “anti-competitive.” They put weights on his ankles, shorten the course for those behind him, perhaps force him to surrender some of his advantages, and call the resulting closer race “fairer.” If he slows down, the intervention worked. If he keeps winning, apparently he needs heavier weights. Yet the important questions were never how far ahead is he? They were: Did he cheat? Did he prevent anyone else from entering or competing? And was his dominance actually detrimental to the spectators? Competition means protecting everyone’s freedom to enter the race and compete. It does not mean handicapping the fastest runner until the officials approve of the standings.

One of the main reasons people conclude capitalism has failed is that they judge capitalism by what governments and societies call it rather than by what it actually is. That becomes obvious when they describe the supposed failures of capitalism and proceed to list subsidies, bailouts, regulatory barriers, political favoritism, protectionism, and government-created privileges which are features that involve political intervention in markets rather than laissez-faire capitalism.

Peak economic illiteracy: blaming capitalism for the ability to “close the door behind you,” as though a free market gives businesses the legal power to stop competitors from entering. If the door is actually closed, ask who has the power to close it, licenses, regulatory barriers, subsidies, exclusive privileges, or other state restrictions. And of course socialists will nod along, because nothing gets scrutinized less carefully than an argument that sounds like it’s flattering their worldview.

I trust science precisely because I don't have to trust scientists. Show the method. Show the data. Repeat the experiment. Try to prove them wrong. That's the whole point.

Everyone, including socialists: “The government is incompetent, wasteful, and makes everything more expensive.” Now just socialists: “Precisely. Now give it more money, more power, and more things to manage. Eventually we’ll get lucky.”

Someone can support the death penalty precisely because he values the lives of the innocent victims whose deliberate murder warranted considering it. Equating the murderer with his victim under the single banner of “life” erases the moral distinction the punishment is based on.

The U.S. has 989 billionaires. And 23.8 million millionaires. (That’s more than 24,000x the number of billionaires.)

That question is about redefining rights. A baby needs care, but that doesn’t create a right to someone else’s labor. Needs don’t override rights. What you’re arguing is that because someone is vulnerable, others can be compelled to provide for them. It's an obligation imposed on someone else. Once you accept that premise, there’s no limiting principle. It doesn’t stop at babies, it expands to anyone with a claim of need. Rights protect you from coercion. They don’t entitle you to the output of another person’s time, effort, or life. A child being cared for is a moral responsibility taken on by parents or chosen by others. Turning that into a “right” means turning someone else into a means to an end.

People who declare food, housing, education, healthcare, and whatever else politicians add to the list to be “human rights” usually imagine this means they personally get more of them. What they rarely consider is what their principle actually means when universalized. If everyone has a right to goods and services regardless of ability to pay, someone else must be obligated to provide or finance them. And if that principle is genuinely global, affluent North Americans and Europeans don't gain new entitlements, they acquire enormous obligations to billions of poorer people. The comfortable advocate imagining a larger share for himself may discover that, by his own standard, he is among those expected to surrender resources so others can receive theirs. The slogan sounds considerably different once you're the one holding the bill.