Everyone claims to want people fed, housed, educated, and treated with dignity. That's the easiest moral position imaginable, requiring neither thought nor effort. The sincerity of that commitment is revealed by whether you're willing to examine what actually achieves those outcomes, what undermines them, and at whose expense. By the socialist standard, even forced labor can be justified in pursuit of these goals, and even policies producing the opposite results can be defended as virtuous. Virtue signaling earns applause for good intentions. Genuine concern demands understanding, evidence, and results. Far too many seem content with the applause.

Apparently, seeing an NBA game in person is the latest human right. Bernie never explains why someone else's wealth creates an entitlement to their property or services. A billionaire owning a basketball team isn't an injustice. Forcing others to subsidize your entertainment would be.

Or, in other words, American capitalism is already heavily compromised by socialistic policies: redistribution, subsidies, bailouts, government intervention, and political favoritism. Capitalism doesn't grant the rich the authority to exploit anyone. It protects everyone's right to produce, trade, compete, and refuse consent. The moment government starts granting privileges to some at the expense of others, you're departing from capitalism, not practicing it.

He blames capitalism for high taxes, government debt, and government-imposed restrictions on economic opportunity, then praises a system in which the state exercises even greater control over the economy. Capitalism means private property, voluntary exchange, and freedom from state economic control. None of the problems he listed requires capitalism. Every one of them is compatible with socialism. And China's economic growth accelerated after it introduced market reforms, not because it abolished them.

This from the same political camp that routinely blames the top 1% for society’s problems and proposes taxing them as the solution. Obsessing over a tiny percentage of the population is only ridiculous when someone else does it.

I hate the way the word democracy is used today, often by both the left and the right. “The people voted for this. Who are you to oppose them?” I'm someone who believes in inalienable individual rights, which cannot legitimately be voted away, regardless of how many people support violating them. And what's wild is that both sides suddenly rediscover individual rights when opposing the other side's attempts at majority rule. I'd imagine both would agree that 51% of the population voting to enslave the other 49% wouldn't make slavery legitimate. Yet somehow that principle disappears when the majority votes to violate rights they personally don't care about. It's pragmatism over principle. Rights when convenient, democracy when expedient. At best, it's a system in which you sanction kneecapping others today, knowing they'll have every incentive to kneecap you tomorrow. A revolving door of mutually sanctioned violations.

Capitalism and private property are effectively abolished when the state assumes ultimate control over their use and disposal. It's literally removing the private from private property and replacing capitalism, which requires freedom of production and exchange, with an economy managed by government permission. You don't have to confiscate the deed to abolish meaningful ownership. If the state dictates what you may produce, how you may trade, and what you may do with your property, you're an owner in name only. The question isn't whether the Nazis formally abolished private property. It's how much control private owners actually retained.

Alex Epstein on Climate Alarmism, Trump’s Energy Policies, ESG, and the Fight Over Data Centers @AlexEpstein @JohnStossel youtu.be/Lc00HwPT8Gs?si=I7kp…

What's more dangerous is a government that considers its role to be appeasing demands rather than protecting individual rights. The political influence of billionaires becomes a problem precisely when government has the authority to dispense favors, subsidies, contracts, and regulatory privileges. The solution isn't to give that same government even more power over private wealth. It's to remove its authority to grant those favors in the first place. The danger isn't wealth itself. It's political power being used to violate rights, regardless of who's demanding it.

Noah seems to think calling people liars and idiots constitutes an argument. It doesn't. Here's an actual argument explaining Hazlitt's point. Marxism treats profit as evidence of exploitation, even when wealth is created through voluntary exchange and mutual benefit. It attributes the capitalist's success to the appropriation of workers' labor while denying that entrepreneurial judgment, investment, innovation, and risk-taking can create enormous value. It also treats economic inequality as evidence of injustice without first establishing that anyone's rights were violated. The result is a worldview in which another person's success becomes grounds for suspicion, while failure becomes grounds for demanding someone else's wealth. Hazlitt was criticizing that inversion of responsibility and achievement. You can dispute his characterization of Marxism, Noah, but calling him a liar doesn't refute a single point he made. It merely saves you the trouble of trying.

I often hear socialists argue, “I pay taxes, therefore I'm owed more.” Conveniently overlooked is how much they actually contribute, how much is already spent on their behalf, and whether they're already receiving more than they pay. Their complaint is essentially that they shouldn't have to sacrifice their livelihood for others, while simultaneously demanding that others be forced to sacrifice theirs for them. Socialists want freedom from sacrifice for themselves and compulsory sacrifice from everyone else, then have the audacity to insist they aren't demanding free stuff. Of course it isn't free. That's precisely why they need someone else to pay for it.

The compassion of voting away someone else's livelihood. They're awfully generous when someone else is paying the bill. Wanting people to have healthcare and affordable housing is one thing. Claiming the authority to force others to provide them is quite another. Compassion is what you voluntarily give, not what you vote to confiscate from someone else.

Socialists seem to envision some Garden of Eden where everyone lives in harmony, everyone's needs are met, and nobody has to struggle to survive. What they fail to appreciate is that nature doesn't cooperate with their fantasies. Without human ingenuity, production, and civilization, they wouldn't be living peacefully alongside the animals. They'd be figuring out how to avoid being eaten by them. Nature doesn't provide prosperity, comfort, or security on demand. Human beings have to create them.

Imagine taking your car to a mechanic who, instead of fixing it, makes it worse, then demands more money to repair the damage he caused. Any rational person would fire that mechanic and likely consider him a criminal. Yet when government does the equivalent, people demand that it receive more money and responsibility. Perhaps the problem is that people apply entirely different standards of accountability. Businesses must satisfy customers or risk losing them. Politicians learn that failure can be rewarded with bigger budgets and greater authority. And the people rewarding that failure wonder why nothing improves.

If your goal is tax revenue, you should be cheering for trillionaires, not trying to turn billionaires into millionaires or abolish inequality altogether. Yet the same people demanding more services funded by wealth creation also demand policies that discourage the very creation of that wealth. Over and over, they demonstrate that they'd rather crush the top than lift the bottom. Of course, we'd all be better off simply leaving people free to produce and trade instead of obsessing over how much wealth someone else has accumulated.

So basically, the argument comes down to claiming that stealing and using human beings as productive chattel is justified because the people you want to rob have something worth stealing. If this is the view of the left, then it loses all credibility when speaking of fairness, morality, or rights.

It's increasingly a fading principle on the right, but it's fundamentally at odds with communism. The whole premise is sacrificing the able to the needy, regardless of what either produces. You cannot simultaneously argue that workers deserve the fruits of their labor and that others are entitled to those fruits merely by existing as human rights. One principle rewards production. The other makes production an obligation to others.

Notice how, when confronted with socialism's inherent coercion, socialists often resort to whataboutism: “Capitalism is coercive too!” They implicitly acknowledge coercion is objectionable, then reveal they don't understand the difference between coercion and voluntary exchange. Capitalism protects your right to refuse. Socialism claims the authority to override it.

Communism is winning? Then why do communist regimes repeatedly resort to markets, private enterprise, and foreign investment to generate wealth? China and Vietnam embraced market reforms. Cuba struggles with chronic shortages. North Korea remains an economic disaster. And bailouts aren't capitalism rescuing itself. They're government interventions protecting failure from the consequences of competition. Under capitalism, failing businesses are allowed to fail, freeing resources and opportunities for better competitors to replace them. Communism doesn't merely protect failing enterprises. It establishes them by government decree, without requiring consumers' voluntary patronage, shields them from competition, and keeps them operating regardless of whether they produce anything people actually want. What you condemn as capitalism's failure is precisely the kind of political control over production that capitalism rejects. And the ultimate irony? Socialism depends on capitalism to produce the wealth it promises to redistribute. If history is in motion, communists might explain why their supposed victories keep requiring retreats from their own principles.

Everything you've listed is compatible with socialism and a betrayal of capitalism. Even socialists call subsidies and bailouts "socialism for the rich," conveniently forgetting that vastly greater sums are spent on social programs benefiting ordinary people. Apparently, government redistribution is capitalism when the rich benefit and socialism when the poor benefit. The principle hasn't changed. Only the recipient. And the greater irony is that socialism depends on the wealth capitalism creates to finance its redistribution. It cannot redistribute wealth that hasn't first been produced.

Profit is profoundly human. It represents the creation of value that other people willingly pay for. It rewards those who discover better ways to satisfy human needs, improve lives, and create opportunities. Capitalism recognizes human beings as individuals with rights, free to produce, trade, cooperate, and pursue their own happiness. Communism subordinates the individual to the collective, replaces voluntary exchange with political command, and treats human productivity as something society is entitled to confiscate. One recognizes human beings as ends in themselves. The other demands they become instruments of someone else's needs. And you have the audacity to call capitalism inhumane?