Mike Roach

To my American friends. A message before you vote in November. In the coming weeks, you're going to see a flood of hate aimed at Elon Musk. Propaganda, lies, outrage on every screen. Before you believe any of it, let me tell you what happens to a country that doesn't have one. I'm writing to you from France. You probably still picture it as cafés, cathedrals and long lunches. Let me tell you what it looks like from the inside. 57% of our GDP flows through the state. More than half of everything we produce, every hour worked, every euro earned, passes through the hands of a bureaucrat before it reaches anyone else. And here's what it bought us: schools set on fire. Police officers overwhelmed in the streets. Neighborhoods where the state has quietly stopped showing up. Young people who've stopped believing they'll ever own a home. The country that built the Concorde and the TGV now struggles to keep its hospitals running. Nobody voted for this. It happened one "fair" policy at a time. I know many of you are young. You look at your rent, your student debt, the house you'll never afford, and you think: capitalism is rigged. The value should be shared better. Socialism sounds like justice. I get it. I'm the grandson of a farmer from Brittany. Nothing was handed to me. I understand the anger. But here's what nobody tells you. Socialism never stays a promise of fairness. It becomes a machine. More rules, more agencies, more people whose job is to manage other people's work. And every machine like that ends the same way: more corruption, less efficiency, less freedom. Every time. Ask yourself why everything costs so much. Why college costs a fortune. Why houses are out of reach. Follow the money and you find the same thing again and again: permits, zoning boards, administrators, rules written by people who will never build anything. The problem isn't capitalism. It's capture. And this time the stakes are bigger than taxes. We're entering the age of superintelligence. The most powerful technology in human history is being built right now, mostly in your country. The question of the next decade is simple: who controls it? Free people building freely, or a state that decides what you're allowed to build, say, compute and think? Hand a bureaucracy the keys to superintelligence and you don't get a fairer world. You get 1984 with GPUs. Now look south. El Salvador was one of the most dangerous countries on earth a few years ago. Bukele took on the gangs, and today the overwhelming majority of his people stand behind him. Ask yourself why. Argentina had decades of Peronism and inflation spiraling out of control. Milei showed up with a chainsaw, cut the state, and inflation collapsed. Poverty is falling. They called him crazy. The numbers don't. And across the continent, one country after another is turning right and going after the cartels instead of negotiating with them. The pattern is the same everywhere: shrink the machine, and people start breathing again. In Europe, we don't have the luck of a living Leonardo da Vinci building rockets, cars and AI in our backyard. You do. So when the attacks come, ask yourself who's attacking him, and why, before you choose who gets your vote. I'm not writing this as a partisan. I'm writing as someone watching his own country live through the terminal phase of exactly what's being sold to you as hope. You still have a choice that we in France are losing. Don't trade it for a slogan. History is watching. Don't make our mistake.