Greg Scheckenbach

What's obscene is pretending that insufficient taxation is the problem when decades of government spending have demonstrated how spectacularly politicians can waste other people's money while failing to solve the problems they promised to fix. Bernie's solution is always more money, more power, and less accountability. At what point does government failure become an argument against giving it more?

The obsession with whether Hitler belonged to the left or right misses the far more important point. Both fascism and communism subordinate the individual to the state. Both reject individual rights whenever those rights interfere with their collective objectives. Left and right have become little more than the colors of competing team jerseys, with remarkably little consistency in principle. Both tribes routinely adopt, abandon, or exchange each other's policies whenever politically convenient. The left has embraced racial discrimination in the name of equity, while the right has embraced class discrimination through protectionism, industrial favoritism, and economic nationalism. And both have practiced the other's preferred forms of discrimination. The fundamental political distinction isn't left versus right. It's individual liberty versus collective coercion. Whether you're being sacrificed to the nation, the race, the class, or the collective, the violation of your rights remains the same. Changing the justification doesn't change the injustice.

There's some truth to the claim that Ayn Rand's villains aren't realistic today. But that's mostly because she gave them more intelligence, subtlety, and shame than their modern counterparts possess. Rand portrayed villains who rationalized coercion as compassion, envy as justice, and the sacrifice of productive individuals as a moral obligation. Today, they openly demand these things, applaud one another for doing so, and congratulate themselves on their moral superiority. What Rand dramatized as a warning has become ordinary political rhetoric. Her villains weren't unrealistic because they were too evil. If anything, she underestimated how shamelessly their philosophy could be embraced.

Communism, at best, solves poverty by making it the norm. It doesn't lift people out of poverty; it knocks down those who have risen above it. Capitalism creates wealth by rewarding production, innovation, and the satisfaction of human demands. Communism redistributes existing wealth while undermining the incentives to produce more. The capitalist ambition is to make prosperity increasingly accessible. The communist ambition is to abolish the differences, even if everyone ends up poorer. It's considerably easier to make everyone equally poor than equally prosperous.

Capitalism creates and expands wealth. Some individuals accumulate more than others, but their success doesn't require everyone else to become poorer. Wealth is not a fixed pie to be divided. Capitalism makes the pie bigger, allowing even those with a smaller share to become substantially wealthier. Concentration of wealth alone tells us nothing about whether others are becoming poorer, whether that wealth was earned, or whether anyone's rights were violated.

The more time I spend on X, the more convinced I become that America's gravest national crisis may be the failure of its public education system. The sheer inability to reason, distinguish facts from opinions, recognize contradictions, or understand basic economics is staggering. And the most alarming part is how confidently so many people demonstrate it.

This is political grifting designed to exploit zero-sum thinking, economic ignorance, envy, and resentment. The existence of wealth doesn't cause poverty, and someone else's success doesn't explain your hardship. The rich aren't your slaves, nor are they responsible for providing for you. Politicians who pretend otherwise are exploiting your resentment to justify giving themselves more power over everyone else's property.

If millionaires and billionaires didn't exist, socialists would have a much harder time virtue signaling. After all, their supposed virtue so often consists of volunteering someone else's wealth for sacrifice. It's remarkably easy to be generous when you're spending money you never earned.

Everyone claims to want people fed, housed, educated, and treated with dignity. That's the easiest moral position imaginable, requiring neither thought nor effort. The sincerity of that commitment is revealed by whether you're willing to examine what actually achieves those outcomes, what undermines them, and at whose expense. By the socialist standard, even forced labor can be justified in pursuit of these goals, and even policies producing the opposite results can be defended as virtuous. Virtue signaling earns applause for good intentions. Genuine concern demands understanding, evidence, and results. Far too many seem content with the applause.

Capitalism creates wealth where none existed. Socialism waits for the wealth to appear, declares its distribution unjust, and demands political control over what capitalism created. Its list of “necessities” keeps growing precisely because capitalism keeps giving it new things to take for granted.