🇺🇲🌵ArizonaKayte

On that note, there is one silver lining in Tuesday's wreckage. The anointing of JD Vance is over. For a year the party treated the 2028 nomination as a crown to be handed down, and the heir apparent now owns a share of a midterm drubbing. Good. The whole concept of an heir belongs to monarchy, not to a republic. So the field is open, and every candidate should be judged the only proper way, one by one, against a fixed standard. Does he treat your rights as absolutes or as bargaining chips. Does he defend capitalism or apologize for it. Does he ground freedom in reason or hand it over to faith and tradition. Does he understand that the government's one job is protecting individuals from force, abroad as well as at home. Here is my ranking by that standard. One note up front. Rand Paul has the best economics of any sitting politician and would be my top pick by a mile, except that he opposes finishing off the Iranian regime that has been killing Americans for 47 years. If by some miracle that regime falls before the election and takes the issue off the table, move him straight to number one. 1. DeSantis. The strongest governing record in the field. Surpluses, no income tax, universal school choice, and he defied the lockdown consensus when it took real independence to do it. But he used state power to punish Disney for its speech, which shows he does not fully understand the principle of individual rights. 2. Haley. The clearest on Iran and Israel, and the only one who told voters to their faces that entitlements must be reformed. But she has no philosophical core, and her proposal to strip anonymity from social media users was an attack on speech she only walked back under fire. 3. Rubio. Serious about Iran, serious about Israel, and his anti-communism is real. But his own economic doctrine is named common good capitalism, which is still collectivism. He would defend us from the mullahs while managing the economy like a European. 4. Paul. Voted against the tariffs, the deficits, and his own party's spending, and says out loud that a tariff is a tax on Americans. The most consistent rights defender in the Senate. But a man who treats a regime that murders Americans as someone else's problem has failed the first test of government. 5. Youngkin. A real business career, competent, inoffensive. A mixed economy manager who has never stated a principle that would cost him anything. 6. Ramaswamy. The best capitalist vocabulary in the party, but the grammar is nationalist, the grounding is religious, and the loyalty to Trump is total. 7. Cruz. Can argue the Constitution better than anyone listed, but grounds rights in scripture rather than reason, and went from vote your conscience to total servility in four years. His principles are for sale. 8. Vance. The others are mixed cases. Vance is a consistent case of the wrong philosophy. He said a million cheap toasters are not worth one manufacturing job, praised Biden's FTC chair, champions tariffs and industrial policy, and runs with intellectuals who openly reject the individualism of the founding. He does not fail the capitalist standard. He repudiates it on purpose. His fall is the one unambiguously good result of Tuesday night. Not one of them passes the full test. But an open contest in which men must argue for their ideas beats a coronation every time. The coronation just lost. Let the arguing begin.

Get the government out. Completely out. That includes the FDA and the American Medical Association. Phase out Medicaid and Medicare and let insurers produce any products they choose and individuals purchase any they choose. It is called capitalism, and it is what built the greatest healthcare system in the world in the first place. Antibiotics, anesthesia, insulin, the polio vaccine, open heart surgery. Every one of them arrived as a miracle only the rich could reach, and within a generation a working man could afford it. That is what capitalism does with every product it is left alone to make. The price falls toward the cost of production and the thing that once saved only the wealthy ends up on a pharmacy shelf. What you are calling for profit healthcare has not existed here since 1965. What you are looking at is a mixed economy, and a mixed economy is a system in which the government has no principles and therefore no limits. Each control produces a problem, and the problem is then offered as proof that the market failed and more control is needed. In 1942 the government froze wages to fight wartime inflation, so employers who needed workers could not offer more pay. They offered health insurance instead, and Washington ruled that the benefit did not count against the freeze and would not be taxed as income. A dollar of coverage was suddenly worth more than a dollar of wages, and within a decade insurance was something you got from your job rather than something you bought. That is why the patient stopped seeing a price. The man receiving the care, the man choosing the plan, and the man paying the bill became three different people, and nobody in that chain has a reason to ask what anything costs. Medicare in 1965 made the government the largest buyer and put it in the business of dictating what care is worth. The FDA holds a monopoly on the right to sell a medicine. The AMA holds a monopoly on who may practice. A 1986 law compels every hospital to treat whoever walks in and shift the bill to you. And now three quarters of insurer revenue is tax money. There is no profit motive left in that structure to blame. There are men responding to the incentives a legislature wrote. Medicine is a product of the human mind. It exists because particular men chose to study, to invent, to build, and to risk their own capital doing it. To call it a right is to claim those men. You can have the medicine men produce when they are free, or you can have the medicine men produce when they are commanded, and the record of the second is the queue. Nobody is asking you to take capitalism on faith. Compare the fields where the government left medicine alone. Lasik and cosmetic surgery got cheaper and better every year while everything the government touched got more expensive and slower. That is what a price does when the buyer is the one paying it. The fix is not a better plan. It is removing the premise that anyone has the right to plan another man's care, or another man's life.

True. Mankind started in anarchy and anarchy is what every society crawled out of, not toward. The whole history of civilization is the history of men trying to get force under objective control, and the anarcho-capitalist proposal is to hand it back to whoever can field the most muscle. Competing defense agencies is just a polite name for competing gangs, and the gang with the biggest arsenal becomes the government anyway, except now without a constitution, without rights, and without anyone to appeal to. Capitalism does not grow out of anarchy. It requires the one thing anarchy cannot provide, a single government restricted to protecting individual rights under objective law. Freedom is not the absence of government. It is government confined to its proper job which is to protect individual rights.