Daniel J Morris 🇮🇱

My dear American friends, in my last post I showed you a number that should terrify you: 70% of Millennials say they're pro-socialist. Today I want to show you why. Not with emotion. With pure logic. Step by step, A plus B, until the conclusion is impossible to escape. Adults, this one is for you. Read it, then explain it to the young people in your life. Start with Peter Thiel. Years ago he summed up our era in one line: we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters. His thesis is that since the early 1970s, the world of bits has kept racing forward while the world of atoms has stalled. Computers, phones, software, the internet: incredible progress. Housing, energy, transportation, medicine, education: stuck. We build almost nothing physical faster or cheaper than our grandparents did. Why would progress stop in some places and not others? Same country, same people, same capitalism. The only thing that differs is how much the state is involved. Here is the proof. Step one: look at prices. Since 2000, in America, the price of TVs has fallen by more than 90%. Software, phones, toys, clothing: cheaper and better every year. Over the same period, college tuition, hospital services, childcare and housing have more than doubled. Step two: look at which is which. The goods getting cheaper are the ones where companies compete freely and the state mostly stays out. The goods exploding in price are the ones where the state regulates the most, subsidizes the most, or controls who is allowed to sell. Step three: look at what young people complain about. They don't complain about TVs. They complain about rent, student debt and healthcare. Exactly the three sectors the state controls the most. That's not a coincidence. That's a pattern. Let's go one by one. Housing. In many American cities, most residential land is zoned for single-family homes only. Building an apartment building can take years of permits, hearings, environmental reviews and lawsuits from neighbors. When you make it nearly illegal to build, supply can't keep up, and prices go up. The young don't have a capitalism problem. They have a permission problem. Education. Washington hands out loans without asking whether the degree is worth it, so universities raise prices because they can. The money doesn't go to better teaching. It goes to layers of administrators that have grown faster than the faculty. And the accreditation system makes it extremely hard for a new, cheaper school to compete. The incumbents are protected. The students pay. Healthcare. In many states, if you want to open a new hospital or even buy a new MRI machine, you need a "certificate of need," permission from a board where your future competitors often have a say. The number of residency slots that train new doctors is effectively capped by Medicare funding. Getting a new drug approved costs billions. Every rule adds a layer. Every layer adds a cost. Every cost lands on the patient. Energy. America built dozens of nuclear reactors in the 1970s. Since then, only a handful, years late and billions over budget. Not because physics changed. Because the rulebook did. Now step four, the most important one. Who benefits from all these layers? Not the young. Not the poor. The incumbents. The big hospital systems, the big universities, the big developers, the big pharma companies, the big unions. Every complex regulation is a wall that only the giants can afford to climb. So they lobby for more of it. They fund the politicians who write it. They hire the regulators when they leave office. That's not capitalism. That's cronyism. Capitalism is a newcomer allowed to compete. Cronyism is an incumbent paying the state to stop him. Step five: so what do young people see? They see prices going up, a system rigged for insiders, and no way to build anything for themselves. Their anger is legitimate. Their diagnosis is wrong. They look at the result of the state's capture and call it capitalism. Step six: and what cure are they offered? Socialism. Which means giving the state even more power over housing, education, healthcare, energy. Giving the keys of the house to the exact institution that locked them out of it. Follow the logic to the end. If regulation creates cronyism, then total regulation creates total cronyism. If a little state control makes things expensive, total state control makes them scarce. That's not theory. The Soviet Union had a ruling class with its own shops, cars and dachas while ordinary people stood in line for bread. Stalin's collectivization caused a famine that killed millions in Ukraine. Mao's Great Leap Forward caused a famine that killed tens of millions. Venezuela went from one of the richest countries in Latin America to a nation where millions fled. Every time the state got all the keys, the insiders ate and the people starved. So here's the conclusion, and there's no escaping it: Where entrepreneurs are free to compete, prices fall and life gets better. Where the state controls, prices rise and insiders get rich. Young people are suffering in the sectors the state controls. Socialism means handing the state everything. So socialism gives you more of the very thing that's hurting you. The enemy is not capitalism. The enemy is a state captured by insiders, blocking the builders who would solve your problems. Adults, this is your job now. Don't tell the young they're stupid. Don't tell them their anger is fake. Tell them they're right to be angry, and show them where to aim it. Ask them: what got cheaper in your lifetime, and what got more expensive? Who controls each one? Let them do the math themselves. The real counter-revolution isn't against the young. It's with them. Free the builders. Let people build homes, open schools, open clinics, build reactors. Give the next generation a stake in the system, and they'll defend it with their lives. I come from your future. We gave the state the keys. Don't make the same mistake.