My post about France went viral. Thousands of likes. Many Americans told me: "Democrats aren't socialists. America will never be France." I want to answer that seriously, step by step. Start with a simple observation. Look at what has gotten cheaper in America over the last 25 years: TVs, phones, software, clothes, toys. Now look at what has exploded: college tuition, healthcare, childcare, housing. What separates the two lists? The first lives in competitive markets. The second is exactly where government is most involved: subsidies, mandates, licensing, zoning, regulation. College. Washington lends students almost unlimited money. Universities know the money will always come, so they raise tuition and hire more administrators. The student pays the bill for twenty years. More government money, higher prices. Housing. Why can't a nurse buy a home in the city where she works? Not because of capitalism. Because of zoning laws, permits, environmental reviews, years of procedure to build a single building. The most expensive places to live in America are the places where it's hardest to build. When building is nearly illegal, prices explode. Healthcare. The patient almost never sees the price. A third party pays, regulations limit who can compete, and costs climb year after year with no one able to say no. So here is the trap. The problems you suffer from are not the failure of free markets. They are the places where the market has already been replaced by the state. And the solution you're being offered is more of the same. That's the Trojan horse. It always works the same way. A real problem. A generous-sounding promise. A program that makes things worse. Then the failure of that program becomes the argument for the next one. People who lived under communism in Poland learned to recognize the lie and the mask the lie wears. The lie never presents itself as a lie. It presents itself as compassion. In France we are at the end of that road. Debt we can never repay. Young people who can't afford a home. Our best people leaving. And every few years our cities burn. Nobody voted for this. They voted for one more generous promise, fifty years in a row. If you're a Republican, share this with the Democrat in your life. Not to win an argument. To start a conversation. If you're a Democrat, I'm not asking you to switch teams. I'm asking you to look at the pattern. Wherever the state took over, life became unaffordable. Don't fix the failures of government with more government. Stay American. Ask for less state, not more.

This post reminds me of a conversation I had last week with a friend. He told me he was on the left. Proudly. Fine by me. So I dug a little. I asked him: "Have you ever seriously looked into economics? Because anyone who studies it in good faith, without intellectual dishonesty, will have a hard time staying on a Marxist line." His answer stopped me cold: "My entire social circle is on the left. If I'm not on the left, I'll be excluded." Not "I read the arguments and they convinced me." Not "the data supports it." "I'll lose my friends." That's the whole problem in one sentence. His politics aren't a conclusion. They're a membership card. And that's exactly what our schools stopped teaching. Too busy passing down an ideology instead of a method, they skipped the one skill that makes every other skill worth something: critical thinking. The ability to put your own beliefs on trial. To follow an argument where it leads, even when it costs you socially. Being on the left isn't the problem. You can be left, right or center and still be intellectually honest. The problem is never testing your views. Staying in pure emotion. Choosing belonging over truth. When that becomes the norm at scale, you get a sick society. One that would rather collectively accept decline than individually admit it might be wrong. A society that can't question itself can't fix itself. Teach kids how to think. Not what to think.