The average American today lives better than John D. Rockefeller did in 1926. That is not an exaggeration. It is a fact. Rockefeller could not fly across the country in five hours. You can for $200. He could not video call his family from another continent. You do it for free. He had no antibiotics, no MRI, no air conditioning in July. He could not carry every book ever written in his pocket. You are reading this on a device that does all of that and more. Americans throw away 30-40% of their food. Not because they are wasteful, but because food is so abundant that waste is affordable. Your car has climate control, navigation, and safety systems that did not exist at any price a century ago. Your home has heating, cooling, refrigeration, and entertainment that emperors could not have imagined. None of this was voted into existence. None of it was redistributed from the rich. It was created by free minds operating in what remains of a free market. Every comfort you enjoy today is the product of a man who thought, invented, produced, and traded voluntarily. This is what the remnants of capitalism still deliver, even while it is being dismantled. Imagine what a fully free society could build.

This is another example of why @brithume is my favorite news anchor. The administration's envoy calls Putin a humanitarian, and Hume calls him what he is, a war criminal, on Fox's own air. No other host there will challenge Trump like that.

What he means is that only men like himself via government force should be able to do any of these. AI is a tool. It fires nobody and denies nobody. A decision maker does those things, and the only question is who that decision maker is and whether you can walk away from him. An insurer that denies your claim can be fired, sued, or left for a competitor. Under his Medicare for All, the government is the only payer allowed by law. When it denies your care, there is no second door, no appeal to a rival, no exit. He is not proposing to protect you from a denial. He is proposing to decide who issues it, and his answer is the one institution you can never leave. The tool does not worry him. Your independence from him does.

Faith is the one commodity Washington holds in surplus. Congress takes it on faith that a $40 trillion debt pays itself. You take it on faith that the debt has nothing to do with federal health programs, the largest item in the budget at $1.8 trillion a year. You take it on faith that Medicare for All needs no price tag, that a billion dollars sits idle in a vault, and that a 7 percent annual tax on capital leaves the capital standing. Faith is belief without evidence. Reason is the faculty that identifies the facts and accepts them whether they flatter your platform or not. The trustees publish the facts every June. The Medicare Hospital Insurance trust fund runs short in 2033 and the law cuts payments 11 percent automatically. The Social Security Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund runs short in 2032 and the law cuts benefits 22 percent automatically. Prayer does not move either date. Washington has all the faith it can hold. What it lacks is reason, and you are campaigning to bring more of the first.

"I want to see people not die" is the argument of every appeaser in history, and it deserves the answer history gave it. World War II killed roughly 70 to 85 million people. Over 400,000 of them were Americans. By Hannity's logic, the moral course in 1941 would have been surrender. Let Hitler keep Europe. Let Japan keep the Pacific. People would stop dying. The war should have been settled long ago. The American Revolution killed roughly 25,000 Americans. About 6,800 fell in battle. Out of a population of 2.5 million, that is one percent of the country, the equivalent of over 3 million Americans today. By Hannity's logic, Washington should have settled long ago. The colonists were outgunned, outspent, and losing men they could not replace. Accept the Crown's terms, stop the dying, take the deal. Had they followed that advice, there is no United States. There is no Constitution. There is no free nation for Hannity to broadcast from. Every liberty he exercises tonight exists because men at Valley Forge rejected the argument he is making. Observe what this argument demands and of whom. It asks nothing of the aggressor. Russia can end every death tomorrow by going home. Instead the demand lands on the victim. Stop defending yourself, your resistance is the problem. That is not a plea for peace. That is a plea for the aggressor's victory delivered in humanitarian language. A man who counts corpses without asking who initiated the killing has dropped the one fact that gives the count moral meaning. 32,000 soldiers lost in a month is Putin's doing. He started this war. He continues it. He can stop it at any hour he chooses. Blaming Ukraine for those deaths is like blaming the man who fights fires for the smoke. If "people not dying" is the standard, there is only one way to stop it. Make aggression fatal to the aggressor. This kind of intellectual corruption is the reason that Hannity's own network puts Trump's approval at 36%, with 64% disapproving and why Trump is about to hand the country back to the Democrats.

Anyone who believes this is even possible has lost his grip on reality or learned math from Bernie, AOC or Ro Khanna. Run the numbers. $1,000 a week from one company = $52,000 a year per person Times 3 to 5 companies = $156,000 to $260,000 a year per person Times 262 million American adults = $41 to $68 trillion a year US GDP is about $31 trillion. All federal revenue is about $5.5 trillion. Total after-tax profit of every corporation in America is under $4 trillion. One week of checks from one company, $262 billion, is around ten times OpenAI's annual revenue. The plan requires a handful of firms to pay out more than every dollar produced in the country, every year, forever. That's the simple math problem. The deeper one is that money isn't wealth. A check is a claim on goods somebody produced. If nobody works, the check buys whatever the machines make, and prices rise until the checks are worth exactly what backs them, which is nothing. Printing claims on production that doesn't exist is how you get Weimar, not leisure. Walsh is right that it's a dystopia. He's wrong about who'd be writing the checks. No company can. Only a government with a printing press would try.

I don’t see it ending well. 40 trillion in debt. 2 trillion in yearly deficits. A Republican administration taking partial ownership of the means of production. The expansion of the welfare state by both parties and the refusal to address this crisis decade after decade.

This is what happens when men like Ro Khanna promise a generation of young people that everything will be free, and then reality catches up. The looters' money runs dry, there is nothing left to confiscate, and the youth demand more, exactly as they were taught. Khanna is condoning their actions right now. Khanna is a despicable morally corrupt man who is now trying to cash in on this tragedy to push his twisted political agenda. Look at what he is praising. In France, 24 schools burned or ransacked, 6,100 arrests, hundreds injured, headteachers attacked. In Tirana, students set fires and stormed the Education Ministry. Even France's prime minister said burning down a high school does not improve it. Khanna calls it young people telling their governments they want a future. And notice the schools. France spends more public money on education than almost any nation on earth, and the buildings are still crumbling. The welfare state did not fail these students for lack of funding. It failed because it was the welfare state. He blames wealth in the hands of a few. The few did not torch the schools. The students did, after a lifetime of hearing their needs were a claim on everyone else. "America's Next New Deal" is the same promise. Khanna wants the French result here.

Bernie Sanders just accused a man of wanting children dead because he declined to hand over his property. That is the sentence of a man who has run out of arguments and reached for the only tool left, which is the charge of murder against anyone who tells him no. So turn the question around. When Bernie is not working to seize what the producers built, what is he doing? He is adding to a $40 trillion debt. He is defending a retirement system that hits insolvency in 2032 with an automatic 22 percent cut. He is working to end the last scrap of choice left in medicine, which eighty years of federal mandates and employer lock-in already stripped down to almost nothing. He is demanding a halt on the data centers and the energy that modern medicine runs on. Then notice what Sergey Brin did with his life. He built the thing Bernie used to look up his net worth, which half the planet now uses for free. Every dollar he holds came from someone choosing his product. Every dollar Bernie directs comes from someone who had no choice. One of these men has fed the world. The other has spent 45 years admiring the countries where the lines form outside the bread stores, and calling the men who stock the shelves obscene. The real question is why these men don't learn to defend themselves.

Trump spitting truth bombs. Let's test that claim against the facts instead of cheering it. Russia violated Trump's own ceasefire within hours by bombing a power plant in Kharkiv. Not mentioned in his post. Russia's refining capacity is down nearly half because Ukraine hit the revenue funding the invasion of their country. His post recasts that as Zelensky attacking American farmers. Russia selling off distressed diesel it can no longer refine gets described as generosity to the world. And a duly passed sanctions law becomes something he can sign any time he wants, which means law enforced by whim which is what dictatos do. Read the post again and notice what's missing. Not one critical word about Russia. The invader who started the war, bombs civilians, and breaks every agreement receives zero blame. Every attack lands on the man defending his country. That is not truth. That is a man rearranging facts to fit the deal he wants, and an audience applauding because their guy said it. Hero worship is not analysis. Integrating facts by principle means asking who initiated force, who keeps breaking agreements, and who profits from every concession. Answer those three questions and the post falls apart. On the election claim, Ukraine's constitution bars elections under martial law and has since long before Zelensky. Martial law exists because Russia invaded. The dictator label belongs to the man staging sham referendums at gunpoint, not the elected leader of the country he invaded.

Both parties are marching this country toward collectivism, and neither can stop, because both accept the moral code that drives it. A nation that accepts a moral code that holds self-sacrifice as its highest virtue can only end by sacrificing the individual to the state. Look at the record. • 1935 Social Security, FDR (Democrat) • 1937 Public housing, FDR (Democrat) • 1946 National School Lunch Program, Truman (Democrat) • 1956 Disability Insurance, Eisenhower (Republican) • 1964 Food Stamps, LBJ (Democrat) • 1965 Medicare and Medicaid, LBJ (Democrat) • 1965 Head Start, LBJ (Democrat) • 1972 SSI, WIC and Pell Grants, Nixon (Republican) • 1974 Section 8 housing, Ford (Republican) • 1975 Earned Income Tax Credit, Ford (Republican) • 1981 LIHEAP energy aid, Reagan (Republican) • 1997 CHIP, Clinton (Democrat) • 2003 Medicare Part D, George W. Bush (Republican) • 2010 Obamacare, Obama (Democrat) • 2025 Trump Accounts, $1,000 for babies born 2025 to 2028, Trump (Republican) • 2025 to 2026 Federal ownership stakes in Intel, MP Materials, Lithium Americas, Westinghouse, L3Harris, USA Rare Earth and a golden share in U.S. Steel, Trump (Republican) Democrats expand the welfare state. Republicans promise to shrink it, then add programs of their own. Now a Republican president buys shares of private companies with taxpayer money, which puts the means of production partly in the hands of the state. None of these programs has been repealed. Each one rests on the same premise, that your earnings belong to the state to redistribute as it sees fit. A party that accepts that premise has no ground left to oppose socialism, only to argue about its speed. And the march continues. On the table now: • Universal child care, Warren and AOC (Democrat) • MediKids, government health coverage for every American under 26, Andy Kim (Democrat) • Medicare for All (Democrat) • $2,000 tariff dividend checks, Trump (Republican) • Tariff rebate checks, Hawley's American Worker Rebate Act (Republican) • More federal stakes in private companies, Trump (Republican)

This is the endpoint of altruism as public policy. When sacrifice is the standard, demand is infinite, production is punished, and the money runs out. France isn't an outlier. It's a preview. Our debt is $40 trillion and both parties are expanding it. The streets of Paris are what "not paying attention" costs. France this weekend: 550,000 in the streets, 1,000 arrests, and the city hall of Limoges burned to the ground. The protesters' demand? More government spending, from a government that already consumes 57% of the economy, carries debt at 119% of GDP, and is being lectured by the IMF to get its house in order. France built the welfare state its students were raised to expect. The schools are crumbling anyway. The cost of living climbs anyway. So the young, taught from birth that the state owes them a living, conclude the state hasn't taken enough. They are burning buildings to demand more of what bankrupted them. Many on X, including JD Vance, are framing this as an immigration riot. That is the easy scapegoat, the same one used in the United States. Blaming a group of people spares everyone from examining the system. A France with zero immigrants and 57% government spending still goes broke, just more quietly. Blaming the newcomers lets Europe's right defend the welfare state while fighting over who collects from it, which is why Le Pen leads the polls while promising to protect the pensions. The politicians debating the budget this week share the protesters' premise, every one of them. Not one will say the welfare state failed because it had to fail, that you cannot consume more than you produce forever. Melenchon is riding the riots. Lecornu is offering 3,000 more teachers to a mob demanding the impossible.

Let's call Ro Khanna what he is. A thief in a suit, condemning the men who earned their wealth for trying to keep his hands off it. His morality is corrupt, but it is the morality most men have been taught to accept. The time is now for men to start questioning that morality. Start with his claim. Prop 42 does not ban billionaires from ever facing a tax. They still pay income tax, capital gains tax, property tax on real estate, and every tax already on the books. What it bans is a new tax on simply owning what you have, and any tax that reaches back to punish you for where you lived before it passed. That protects your 401(k) as much as any billionaire's. And "I am with the unions"? He is with SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, the union that sponsored Prop 40, whose members work in the healthcare system the money would fund. He is with his accomplices, standing beside the people who also want to rob these men. Notice the premise underneath. He assumes the state has a claim on what you own simply because you own it. It has none. What a man earns is his by right, above all the men who created it from nothing, and defending it is self-defense. Their work gave us the phones, the search engines, the electric cars, the rockets, the medicines, and millions of jobs. We all benefit enormously. But that benefit is not what makes their wealth theirs. Their right to it comes from having produced it, not from what it does for the rest of us. If Khanna wants to improve the lives of ordinary men, he can get the hell out of the way and out of the pockets of the men producing the values we all depend on.

There's no difference in principle, and that is the flaw in Musk's prediction. If the robots' output is taken and distributed by government, it is welfare at scale, whoever signs the press release. Musk is one of the great producers of our age. Flying cars, reusable rockets that land themselves, Starlink putting the internet everywhere on earth, Neuralink letting paralyzed men move cursors with their minds, and the factories behind all of it prove what his mind can do. But being a great producer doesn't mean he has identified what makes production possible: property rights and trade. The honest version of superabundance is what capitalism already delivers: the poor living like the rich of a generation ago, with smartphones, air conditioning, and cars kings couldn't buy a century back. Freedom keeps compounding that. Wealth you earn is abundance. Wealth taken from the man who produced it is welfare, no matter how futuristic the packaging. Musk is Hank Rearden in real life, a man who pours himself into metal and machines, carries half the culture's hopes on his output, and concedes moral ground to the people who denounce him. That is why Objectivists like him, and why we argue with him. Rearden's redemption came when he learned he deserved a philosophy equal to his work. What Musk needs is Objectivism, a Galt-like figure to teach him why he is such a great producer and that the same principles he uses in the factory apply to life outside it. He is a good man with bad ideas. Unfortunately, to lean on a metaphor from The Matrix, Morpheus warned that past a certain age a mind has trouble letting go of what it believes. But Musk is a special kind of mind, and if anyone can take the red pill at 55, it's the man who taught rockets to land. Probably won't happen, but I am an eternal optimist.

Here is a radical idea @SenSanders. Learn to think. You are standing on $40 trillion in debt, built by the morality you sell, and you point at the men who produce everything you use to sustain and enjoy your life, including the phone you posted this on, as the threat to humanity. It was $5.7 trillion in 2000. Two trillion more piles on every year. A child born tomorrow arrives owing roughly $300,000 per household, contracted by men he will never meet, for benefits consumed before he drew his first breath. That is replacing the human race, and not with robots. With debtors. No producer can touch your life without your consent. Your Congress mortgaged lives that do not yet exist. Wake up, Americans. The threat is not the men building your future. It is the men who already spent it.

Exactly right. And observe the choice required to hold Saladino's view. He types it on a phone, posts it to a satellite network, and will see a doctor if the river makes him sick. He chooses not to connect what he enjoys to what produced it. That choice is called evasion.