John Brynjolfsson

Bernie Sanders says the top 1% owns more than the bottom 93%, that fewer than a thousand billionaires got $2.2 trillion richer last year, and that it's "obscene." It's the most seductive and most wrong economic argument of our time. Let me explain why. First, wealth distribution follows a power law. Always. Everywhere. Books, music, startups, followers on X, goals in soccer. A small minority captures most of the value. That's not a bug of capitalism. It's the mathematical signature of every system where value gets created. So the only question that matters isn't "how big is the rich's slice?" It's "is the cake growing, and is the slice of the poorest growing with it?" And the answer is yes. In 1990, more than one human in three lived in extreme poverty. Today it's about one in ten. During exactly the period when billionaires multiplied. Bernie shows you the slice. He never shows you the cake. Second thing he won't tell you: past a certain level, wealth stops being consumption. It becomes capital allocation. Elon Musk isn't sleeping on a pile of cash. He owns stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, xAI. Jeff Bezos owns Amazon stock. That "$2.2 trillion" isn't sitting in a checking account. It's factories, rockets, data centers, millions of jobs. Nobody can eat $100 billion. You can only decide where to invest it. Once you understand that, the whole debate changes. The real question becomes: who allocates capital better? The people who built Amazon, SpaceX and Nvidia? Or politicians? A 5% wealth tax isn't "taking money from the rich." It's taking investment decisions away from people who proved they can create value and handing them to people who proved the opposite. Because the fundamental difference between an entrepreneur and a politician is consequences. The entrepreneur invests his own money. If he allocates badly, he loses everything. The market corrects him brutally, no appeal. That's why most startups die: the system kills bad decisions. The politician invests other people's money. If he allocates badly, nothing happens. Worse, he gets a bigger budget to "fix the problem." Milton Friedman put it better than anyone. There are four ways to spend money. Your money on yourself: you care about price and quality. Your money on others: you care about price. Others' money on yourself: you care about quality. Others' money on others: you care about nothing. Government is the fourth box. By design. Perfect example: California high-speed rail. Approved in 2008 for about $33 billion. Current estimated cost: over $100 billion. Passengers carried: zero. No entrepreneur would have survived that. The politicians who pushed it built careers on it. And when allocation has no consequences, it eventually finds a buyer. A politician who controls billions without accountability becomes the most profitable target in the world for anyone who wants to steer that money. The irony is that the left that rails against billionaires is itself funded by billionaires. George Soros is one of the biggest Democratic donors in history. The Gates Foundation shapes public health policy across the planet. Politicians don't fight billionaires. They pick their own. The ones who fund the state over the ones who compete with it. So if we actually want fewer poor people, we have to stop judging ideas by their intentions and start judging them by their results. And the results are brutally clear. China, 1978: Deng Xiaoping opens the economy to markets. More than 800 million people escape extreme poverty. The largest retreat of misery in human history. Not through redistribution. Through the freedom to build. India, 1991: liberalization. Same movie. South Korea and North Korea: same people, same language, same starting point in 1953. One became one of the most advanced economies on earth. The other has famines. Poland and Ukraine: comparable living standards in 1990. Today the average Pole is more than three times richer than the average Ukrainian. Argentina: a year and a half of liberalization, and the poverty rate falls from over 50% to around 30%. No country in history escaped poverty by punishing the people who build. Every single one did it by letting them build. And if you want to see what Bernie's program looks like in real life, you don't have to imagine it. It exists. It's called France. We've been running it for 45 years. Mass nationalizations in 1981. Two years later, Socialist president Mitterrand has to reverse course into austerity. Retirement at 60. The 35-hour workweek. A wealth tax for 35 years. Hundreds of wealthy households left every year for Belgium, Switzerland, London, taking their capital, their companies and their future taxes with them. Macron finally scrapped it in 2018. Hollande's 75% tax: raised a few hundred million, drove talent out, abandoned after two years. One of the highest tax burdens in the OECD. Public spending around 57% of GDP, a record in the developed world. Last balanced budget: 1974. Public debt: over €3.4 trillion. Mass unemployment for four decades. If taxing the rich and growing the state made people prosperous, France would be the richest country on the planet. It isn't. GDP per capita in France is barely more than half of America's. It's lower than Mississippi, the poorest state in the US. Not a single global tech giant. Our best engineers build Silicon Valley instead. I've been going back and forth between Paris and San Francisco for years. I see it every week. And California is about to replay the movie. Prop 40, on the ballot November 3rd, would take 5% of billionaires' net worth. Even Gavin Newsom, a Democratic governor, opposes it. The state's own nonpartisan budget analyst warns that income tax revenue could drop every year if the wealthy leave. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel have reportedly already started moving their assets out. You don't fight poverty by shrinking the top. You fight it by growing the cake. Bernie wants a society where nobody has too much. I want a society where nobody has too little. The first has been tried everywhere and produces equality in stagnation. The second lifted a billion people out of misery. Choose.

I have a question for Hollywood. You wore the keffiyeh on the red carpet, signed boycott pledges, gave speeches at award shows and used your platforms to tell the rest of us what justice looks like. Macklemore. Susan Sarandon. Mark Ruffalo. Javier Bardem. Emma Stone. Joaquin Phoenix. Olivia Colman. Tilda Swinton. Riz Ahmed. Andrew Garfield. Ayo Edebiri. Bella Hadid. Hannah Einbinder. Melissa Barrera. Cynthia Nixon. Now the UN itself has documented what is happening in the camps in Gaza. Girls handed over for food. Rape victims pushed into marrying the man who attacked them. A father gave away his 14-year-old daughter for two bags of flour. Forced marriages more than doubled in a single quarter. No Israeli soldier arranged those weddings. Fathers did. Uncles, brothers-in-law, clan elders and camp leaders did. And a Hamas regime lets it happen. The same regime shot one of its own commanders, Mahmoud Ishtiwi, after holding him for a year. Hamas announced he had been executed for "moral turpitude," its term for homosexuality. Hamas documents later found in a tunnel in Gaza describe what happened and show that Hamas kept torturing members it believed were gay. Every summer the same regime gathers tens of thousands of children and teenagers in camps. There they learn to take weapons apart and put them back together, and they practice kidnapping Israeli soldiers. In earlier years they were trained to stab and stone police officers, while instructors celebrated the dead as martyrs. Much of the training takes place in schoolyards and classrooms, where children should be learning to read. On Hamas's own TV channel, little kids in military uniforms are interviewed about the fight. A child in Gaza learns early that the greatest thing it can achieve is to die. You march for women's rights and for gay people's right to live freely. You talk about every child's right to a childhood. In Gaza you stand shoulder to shoulder with the people crushing all of it. As long as they fight Israel, you look the other way. Can you really not see the double standard? Or are you just playing dumb to get attention at any cost? You call Israel genocidal. No court has ruled that it is, and the death tolls behind the accusation come from Hamas's own health ministry. You cheer for "the resistance." But in Gaza the resistance has a name, and the name is Hamas. You just won't say it out loud. Look at the leaders the Palestinians have been given. The Grand Mufti who sat down with Hitler. Arafat, who hijacked planes and funneled hundreds of millions into accounts he controlled. Abbas, elected for four years and still in power more than twenty years later. And then Hamas, whose leaders lived in luxury in Qatar while sending their own people to die. You defend a people and close your eyes to the tyrants who have kept it down for a hundred years. Where are your posts now? Where is the speech from the stage? Macklemore, you wrote an entire song for Gaza. Where is the verse about a 14-year-old girl sold for flour? The girls of Gaza only mattered as long as they fit your story. The moment reality stopped fitting, you went quiet. You were never fighting for them, only for yourselves and your own reputation. A reputation that will soon be put to shame. Because the truth always wins, and it takes down those who stayed silent when it mattered. Now sit down and shut up.

Americans are struggling to pay for groceries and gas while Elon Musk becomes a TRILLIONAIRE. When the federal government is for sale, the rich get richer and everyone else gets shafted. The system is rigged.