“A society that puts equality before freedom ends up with neither.”

Seems there is a misunderstanding between what a house guest is and what a customer is.

I’ve never paid cash to be a house guest. I’ve taken the host’s family out to dinner, brought them a bottle of wine, or offered to pay for the house cleaner that month.

When paying cash for services as a customer, I’ve never done any of the above. I’ve never helped wash dishes at a restaurant or ran a load of wash at a hotel.

Happy Pythagorean Theorem Day!

10/24/26

10² + 24² = 26²

This is the last one we’ll experience in our lifetime.

Spanberger is restoring voter rights to dead felons. Jay Jones wants DOJ election monitors kept out of the polls. Louise Lucas just got indicted for running a drug racketeering ring.

This is Virginia Democrat leadership. 12 days. Vote like it matters. 🇺🇸

Disaster for pre-IPO founders in California.

Uncommon view (maybe?): Citadel said 90% of AI spend was from 1% of companies, mostly venture backed startups. When many of them fail, as startups do, capacity will open up.

This

Immigration policy must be driven by the present, not the past, and business leaders are too terrified of the left AND the right to acknowledge this.

Recent H1B discourse revolves around a longstanding immigration sleight-of-hand. H1B proponents point to exceptional people who came here decades ago as if they represent the current state of the program in the same way that advocates for low-skill/illegal immigration point to very favorable immigrant crime/welfare/education/etc statistics that do, in truth, have them beating native-born Americans on many fronts.

It is all a sham. The world that created those statistics, people, and businesses no longer exists. Brilliant but desperate Vietnamese fathers who fled communism have nothing in common with young men from Honduras, and the crime rates/economic acccomplishments/integration of the former should not be used to justify mass migration of the latter.

Nor should the accomplishments of people who managed to get an H1B visa in the 90s (when the program was capped to just 65,000 visas) be used to justify staffing agencies and tech companies using the program to replace American jobs for less money. The obvious abuse going on is politically suicidal and something that even the most ardent supporters of the visa should want to crack down on, no immigration program can possibly survive the obvious and widely known reality of what is going on. I am a longtime outspoken advocate for stealing the best people from other countries to make our own better, runaway abuse of existing programs robs the government of the worker trust required to do so.

Lots of people in the tech space know this. Even the dumb people are smart enough to see it. Nobody actually believes these are all incredible people with unique talents performing jobs no American can. Everyone knows the guy in Cubicle Bay 7 doing mediocre but functional web design for half the salary of his American peers is no savant and doesn't meet the statutory requirements for his H-1B visa.

Unfortunately, most people with power or profile are terrified that any public statement or acknowledgement will get them attacked by the right (You guys have been screwing over American workers for years with visa abuse, you damn hypocrite!) or the left (You are racist, sexist, misogynist, and sucking up to this fascist administration!). Or, more likely, both. I know too many tech execs in particular who feel trapped, like the only winning move is to stay silent.

JD is blowing the whole thing wide open by putting facts and stats front and center that nobody wants to engage with. Critics will talk about anything and everything else but these damning facts and this obvious truth, that H1B visas serve neither their original purpose, legal purpose, invented purpose, or the American people.

lol

Beautiful

Now on America.gov: report fraud against government programs in just a few steps and, if eligible, receive a reward up to $30K

Capitalism has a win condition. Socialism does not.

Here's why, explained so simply a 10-year-old could get it. It starts with a book written in 1944 by an Austrian economist named Friedrich Hayek: The Road to Serfdom.

Imagine a classroom of 30 kids. One day the teacher says: "From now on, I decide what everyone eats for lunch, which games you play at recess, and who sits next to whom. It's fairer that way."

First problem: the teacher doesn't know what you like. You hate carrots. Your friend is allergic to peanuts. Lucas wants to play football, Emma wants to draw. 30 kids, 30 different wishes. Nobody can know all of that, not even the smartest teacher on Earth. Hayek called this the knowledge problem. The information needed to run an economy is scattered across millions of heads, and it can't be gathered in one office.

Second problem: the kids start fighting. "Why does he get the window seat?" "Why football again?" Before, everyone just chose for themselves. Now every choice is a fight, because every choice is made for everyone.

Third problem: the class can't agree on a plan, so someone says "we need one person in charge who just decides." This is Hayek's key insight. Planning doesn't fail because planners are evil. A plan needs everyone to agree on the same goals, and free people never agree on everything. So the plan needs force to work.

Fourth problem, and it's the scariest one: who wants that job? The kind kid doesn't want it, because the kind kid doesn't want to force 29 people to eat carrots. The job attracts the one who likes giving orders and doesn't mind punishing those who disobey. Hayek wrote a whole chapter on this, called "Why the Worst Get on Top." It doesn't happen by accident. It happens by selection.

Here's the trap. When the person who controls your lunch also controls your job, your home, your shop and your newspaper, they control your whole life. You can't say no, because there's nowhere else to go. Controlling the economy doesn't mean controlling one part of life. It means controlling the means to every goal you have.

That's the road to serfdom. Nobody votes for a dictator. People vote for "someone should fix this," then for "give them more power to fix it," and one day they wake up with no one left to say no to.

The USSR, Maoist China, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela. These are different countries with different cultures and languages, and the story has the same ending every time. When a script produces the same ending every time, it isn't bad luck. It's the script.

Now capitalism. Back to the classroom. Instead of one teacher deciding everything, every kid can trade. You give me your carrots, I give you my apple, and we both walk away happier. Nobody needs to know what everyone wants, because prices do that job. A price is a message telling millions of strangers what's scarce and what's wanted, with no one in charge.

That's the win condition. In capitalism, you get rich by making something other people freely choose to buy, so your success depends on serving others. In a planned system, you get ahead by pleasing whoever holds power. One rewards usefulness. The other rewards obedience.

And this isn't theory. Two centuries ago, almost every human being was extremely poor. In 1990, about 38% of humanity still lived in extreme poverty. Today it's under 10%. More than a billion people escaped it in a single generation. It happened when China, India, Vietnam and South Korea opened up to markets, trade and private enterprise. The largest reduction in poverty in human history came from letting people trade.

So why do so many people hate capitalism?

Because what they hate usually isn't capitalism.

They hate the bank that got bailed out with their taxes while they lost their house. They hate the giant company that writes the regulations so no startup can compete with it. They hate rent they can't afford because building new homes has been made nearly impossible. They hate the lobbyist who gets a subsidy while the small business owner drowns in paperwork.

Look closely at each one, and you'll find a state handing out privileges. A bailout is not the market. The market would have let the bank fail. A regulation written by incumbents is not competition. It's protection from competition. None of this is capitalism. It's cronyism, which is what happens when businesses stop competing for customers and start competing for politicians.

People see the symptom and blame the wrong cause. They say "capitalism failed" and ask for more state. That gives more power to the same people who created the problem, and it puts us right back on Hayek's road.

The answer to bad capitalism isn't less freedom. It's less privilege. That means fewer bailouts, fewer protected incumbents, fewer permits, and more people allowed to build, compete and trade.

Capitalism has a win condition: make things people want. Socialism has an end condition: someone has to be in charge. And history keeps showing us who ends up in that chair.

We’ve got 5 years or so of social security left? How about expanding to all Americans under 60? 😀

Thank you, @elonmusk, for investing in the next generation. More than $8 billion has already been deposited into children’s accounts, and this extraordinary donation will push that total even higher.

As @TrumpAccounts continues to grow we look forward to more philanthropists joining the movement and helping children across America jumpstart their financial future.

For more information, please visit TrumpAccounts.gov and download the Trump Accounts app to claim your child’s account today. 🇺🇸

This. Inviting kids to share in productivity and wealth generation WITHOUT a bureaucratic middleman. This is what is so brilliant about Trump accounts. Increase the benefits of the private sector; withhold power from the politbureau. Thank you Elon, Michael, Gwynne, Brad, and so many more producers!

The Paradoxical Commandments

@AnthropicAI I recommend giving the shares directly to the public

On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders.

And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. thy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap.

I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece.

A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable.

Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000.

At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation.

At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product.

Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved.

At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper.

B. The mechanism: why it's systematic.

When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient.

In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work.

The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in.

C. Suffering demands a culprit.

A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second.

But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat.

And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world?

D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain.

Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem.

Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit?

No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time.

E. One lens, a thousand causes.

And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them.

F. The perfect inversion.

Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second.

It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene.

G. The ballot box confirms it.

In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease.

In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state.

H. The way out.

These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target.

The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture.

That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.

Premise:

Incentives drive all human behavior.

The corollary:

How to destroy a country:

A vast social security and support system that serves as a magnet for those who would rather not work.

An open immigration policy that does not screen immigrants to determine their ability and willingness to provide for themselves and their families.

An open immigration policy that does not screen for political and/or religious ideologies that are a threat to the country.

Economic incentives large enough to incentivize immigrants on the state dole to have large numbers of children, but insufficient for educated and economically productive mothers to be able to quit to raise a family.

The declining fertility of the most educated and productive women due to their delay to begin a family as a result of their desire and/or need to advance their careers, among other reasons, to live a life they deem consistent with their educational achievements and/or to repay their student debts.

Amnesty programs that give citizenship and voting power to illegal immigrants without consideration of their economic productivity or their threat to the country due to their religious or political ideologies.

The changing demographics and increased population due to the above factors.

The state responding to protests by increasing social support.

The continued failure to punish and hold accountable violent and looting rioters.

Government managed by a massive and growing unelected bureaucracy.

Government fraud, waste, and abuse contributed to ballooning budgets.

Anti-business legislation that makes it difficult for businesses to compete in a global marketplace being disrupted by AI, including restrictions on firing even poorly performing employees.

Overly burdensome, globally uncompetitive, corporate taxation.

Continuous increases in personal taxes to raise funds to provide for the rapidly growing welfare state.

The substantial majority of the tax burden levied on a small percentage of the population.

A growing percentage of the electorate paying no taxes and receiving welfare.

The introduction or threat of a wealth tax including the taxation of unrealized gains, i.e., taxes on paper wealth.

The flight of the most productive business builders and highest taxpayers to lower tax countries with lesser security concerns.

A growing percentage of the electorate voting for candidates that support increased welfare and laws favorable to, and/or that match the cultural and ideological needs and desires of a growing unproductive immigrant population.

The rapid rise in anti-semitism and inadequate efforts to address this hatred.

Increased borrowing by the state to fund the growing social burden.

Higher sovereign interest rates due to all of the above.

The resulting need to reduce expenditures to make the math work.

Increasingly violent protests that make life less livable for the productive and law abiding citizens leading to their accelerated departure.

And so on…

Some people would say this is a better feature than flying 😂