Meme - Kelly C. Hitchcock: "After watching the Prager U. video called "The War on Work" I got curious. The total cost to the Union of the Civil War was $6.2 billion. (In 2015 dollars, that's $96.8 billion.) In the Prager video, the speaker said we paid $960 billion in 2012. In short, we spend almost exactly ten times as much to eliminate poverty every year as the ENTIRE Civil War cost the Union real dollars. Ihave been debating a black friend and his friends recently, so I will use black people in the following example. According to blackdemographics.com, 42.6 million Americans identify themselves as "black only'. Divide $960 billion by that, and it comes to $22,535 for every black man, woman and child in America. A one time gift would pay for college for every black kid under 18, and it would pay the rent and groceries for every unemployed black adult for a year, enough time to get off drugs, go back to school or find some kind of job. And that's just how much we spent in one year. Poverty, Inc. is big business, and that is why NO ONE helping the poor ever wants them to go away."
This doesn't address what would happen when, a short while after giving them the money, they are poor again. Of course, it would be entertaining seeing the new cope
Detroit's Belle Isle pitched as tax-free Freedom City for revival - "America’s once-iconic industrial hub is primed for an economic comeback as major metropolitan areas continue to bleed residents to lower-tax states, a prominent Michigan developer told Fox News Digital. Rodney Lockwood, Board Chairman of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, warned that high-tax cities like New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are facing serious structural trouble. "I think we have to look at both sides: what is not working, and then what will work," Lockwood said. "Right now, socialists are on the march, and Zohran Mamdani in New York is perhaps the best example of that. They're winning races, and their answer is always the same: more taxes and more free stuff." Lockwood’s comments come as progressive-led cities nationwide—including New York, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles—struggle with taxpayer flight driven by high state and local taxes, lingering crime concerns, and an astronomical cost of living. A new study by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTUF), released April 7, 2026, confirmed that taxpayers are fleeing high-tax environments for more fiscally friendly states. While Texas and Florida remain the top targets, states like North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee are also seeing record gains. Notably, the NTUF "Migration in Minutes" metric found that Texas surpassed Florida in 2022 as the state gaining a new taxpayer most frequently — one every 4 minutes and 40 seconds... Lockwood is championing a proposal to transform Detroit’s Belle Isle into a self-governing "Freedom City" aimed at setting a new blueprint for urban revival nationwide... Under Lockwood’s proposal, private investors would purchase or lease the island from Detroit to build a mixed-use residential, retail, and commercial district. The goal is to generate massive economic activity and private-sector jobs for a city recovering from decades of population loss. Lockwood pointed to recent polling by Michigan pollster Steve Mitchell indicating strong interest in bold economic solutions, with 68% of likely Detroit voters and 51% of voters statewide approving the concept of special economic freedom zones. Detroit's economic trajectory highlights the stark reality of post-war urban decline, Lockwood noted. "We're trying to restore it back to being the world-class city it once was," Lockwood said. "Back in 1950, it was the world's richest city. Today, it ranks among the poorest in the United States. We've gone from 1.85 million people down to around 600,000." Lockwood believes the island represents a vastly underutilized asset ideal for conversion into a tax-friendly special economic zone designed to draw global capital. His vision projects a permanent population of 50,000 residents across 20,000 households—all built without relying on taxpayer dollars."
Weird. Left wingers keep insisting that rich people will never leave
David Burke ๐บ๐ธ on X - "What was the richest city in the world in 1950? Detroit. Today it has highest poverty rate in the U.S. among cities with a population of 500,000+. Why? Democrat mayors like @NYCMayor taxed the rich to pay for utopian social programs. And guess what? Rich people left Detroit"
Massachusetts Loses Billions in Income After Millionaire Tax - "Residents exiting Massachusetts took a net of $4.2 billion in adjusted gross income with them in 2023, one of the largest totals in the country, after a tax on millionaires took effect. The amount was an 8% year-over-year increase, according to Internal Revenue Service data, even as the total number of taxpayers leaving the state slowed. This was the first year that residents were subject to a 4% surtax on incomes over $1 million after voters approved the levy in 2022 to fund schools and transportation. Several Democrat-led states have since approved or are considering similar taxes on top earners, partly as a way to make up for federal funding cuts enacted under President Donald Trump and also to pay for more ambitious agendas."
Larry Trefz | Facebook - "We've become a society that loves the benefits of progress but increasingly resists the things that make progress possible. We want AI, but not data centers. We want clean energy, but not transmission lines. We want affordable housing, but not new neighborhoods. We want safer communities, but fight the companies building the technology our first responders use. We want economic growth, but oppose the businesses creating the jobs. It's as if we've convinced ourselves that all of these things just... happen. Take what's happening with Axon in Scottsdale. Whether you've ever thought about the company or not, you've almost certainly benefited from what it builds. If you've ever watched body camera footage after a critical incident, seen a TASER save a life by preventing the use of deadly force, or expected police to have better tools, evidence, and accountability, you've benefited from the work being done there. It's one of Arizona's biggest technology success stories, founded here, grown here, employing thousands here. Yet when Axon wanted to expand its headquarters in the city where it was born, the conversation wasn't really about innovation or jobs. It became years of resistance, political fights, lawsuits, referendums, and arguments over why it shouldn't happen. Now zoom out. The exact same story is playing out across the country with data centers. Everyone wants faster AI. Everyone wants better healthcare powered by AI, smarter education, more productive businesses, better scientific discoveries, and more capable assistants in their pockets. Almost nobody wants a data center built near them. Communities object because of the power demands. Or the water use. Or the traffic. Or the appearance. Or the noise. Some of those concerns are absolutely legitimate and deserve serious attention. Good planning matters. But here's the question almost nobody asks. If every community says no... where, exactly, do we expect these things to be built? Because AI doesn't exist in some magical cloud. The cloud is a warehouse full of computers. It's substations. Transformers. Fiber optic cable. Cooling systems. Concrete. Steel. Gigawatts of electricity. It's physical infrastructure, and physical infrastructure has to exist somewhere. While we're debating whether we should build it, China has largely made a different decision. They've decided that computing infrastructure is strategic. So they build it. Not because every citizen loves having a data center nearby. Not because there are never tradeoffs. But because they've concluded that if you want to lead in the industries of the future, you can't spend a decade arguing over whether the future should be built at all. The irony is that America still has enormous advantages. We lead in AI research. We build the world's most advanced chips. We have extraordinary entrepreneurs, engineers, universities, and capital markets. Our biggest obstacle isn't that we've stopped inventing. It's that we've become remarkably good at stopping ourselves from building. Every project has opponents. Every development has a petition. Every power line has a lawsuit. Every housing project has a neighborhood coalition. Every data center has organized resistance. Every corporate expansion is portrayed as something to fear before it's evaluated for what it could create. Individually, each objection can sound reasonable. Collectively, they become paralysis. History isn't kind to civilizations that lose the ability to build. America became an economic superpower because previous generations built railroads, dams, highways, airports, electrical grids, semiconductor fabs, research campuses, and the internet itself. None of those projects would have survived if the default answer had been, "Not here." That's the part I think we're missing. This isn't really about Axon. It isn't really about data centers. It isn't even really about AI. It's about whether we've developed a culture of blind resistance where opposing something has become easier than imagining what becomes possible if we actually build it. Innovation doesn't disappear because people stop wanting it. It disappears because someone else is willing to build what we refuse to."
How to Get Filthy Rich with Gary Stevenson, Channel 4 review: an economist who’s out of his depth - "Gary Stevenson is the working-class former City trader who became a millionaire at 25 then quit to campaign against economic inequality. He spreads the gospel with revolutionary zeal via YouTube, where he has 1.62 million subscribers and the slogan: “Other economists make predictions, but my ones are actually right.” Hmm. Did he predict that this documentary, How to Get Filthy Rich With Gary Stevenson (Channel 4), would make him look so embarrassingly out of his depth?... Stevenson became increasingly testy and, instead of countering with an intelligent argument, was reduced to saying: “Poverty has got worse – do you care about that?” Sure, said Neidle, “but the fact I worry about it doesn’t mean I can seize on any initiative with a nice name and refuse to think about the consequences”. Ouch."
Daniel Priestley on X - "Well this is awkward … @garyseconomics central claim is that billionaires hoard wealth and plunge people into poverty. The data does not support this claim. Between 2010 and 2025 the number of US billionaires rose from 400 to 900. At the same time the rate of people living in poverty declined from 15% to 11%. In the UK the number of billionaires rose from 74 to a peak of 177 and is now in decline. During that time the percentage of people living in poverty was stable at 21-22%. It’s as if, a growing economy lifts people out of poverty and a stagnant one doesn’t. Billionaires clearly do not create poverty. They do however pay a lot in taxes. Driving them out is stupid and based on envy not data.
BONUS FUN FACT: The number of people who describe themselves as “socialists” in the UK is 1 in 5 and in the USA it’s 1 in 12… almost perfectly aligned to the poverty rate in each country."
Richard Hanania on X - "People say government is incompetent but how can that be the case when it’s normal for 99%+ of government employees to get high marks in their reviews?"
Maybe this is why left wingers love government so much and want it to keep expanding. They love mediocrity (e.g. they claim you don't need the best person for the job - just someone good enough) and are mediocre and don't want to be fired
๐๐๐๐ ๐ฏ on X - "Young democrats being +22 on “Free market economy” and -31 on “Capitalism” is both funny and bleak"
Time to mock right wingers/conservatives for being ignorant and poorly educated
Mary Julia Koch on X - "America’s democratic socialists are obsessed with the Nordic model. The problem? These countries aren’t socialist."
Democratic Socialists Don’t Understand the Nordic Model - WSJ - "Nordic countries aren’t socialist. Their economies are highly competitive free markets, built on private ownership and global trade. Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden consistently rank among the top 15 countries with the most economic and personal freedom. And Scandinavians aren’t simply sitting around snatching up government benefits. The labor force participation rate is higher in Nordic countries than in the U.S. “Bernie is too much of a socialist for Scandinavia that he probably could not get elected in any of the Scandinavian countries,” Sen. Rand Paul recently said in an interview with John Stossel. The former prime minister of Denmark, Lars Lรธkke Rasmussen, even had to issue a clarification in 2015 directed at American politicians: “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.” Scandinavian countries offer more expansive public services than the U.S. But those benefits are paid for with steep and broad taxation that reaches to relatively low income levels. The U.S. has a much more progressive tax system. While the Nordics see capitalism as an engine of wealth creation, the DSA calls for dismantling capitalism itself. Its vision of a standard 32-hour workweek goes further than Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, where the norm hovers around 37 hours a week... every welfare state has its limits. In recent years, Nordic countries have started contracting out many of their expensive social services like healthcare and schools to private providers as aging populations strain public budgets. Their economic growth can be largely attributed to manufacturing prowess, high rates of employment and a culture of entrepreneurship fueled by access to global markets and deep capital pools (though many startups come to the U.S. Bay Area to scale). And while the U.S. experimented with Scandinavian-style policies in the mid-20th century, the deregulation of the Reagan revolution and the entrepreneurship surge of the 1990s allowed growth to take off. The U.S. economy is now one-third greater than the European Union’s. If today’s socialist sympathizers are searching for honest inspiration, they might instead look to Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea or Soviet Russia. Somehow that pitch never makes it into the stump speech."
John Papola on X - "The nordics are broadly free market, rule of law societies with slightly larger welfare states paid for by VAT taxes and high marginal rates that start close to median income. The reason these communists claim to obsess about the Nordic model while promoting a set of policies that are the opposite is because they're thieving scumbag liars. Is that fair? Shouldn't we assume good intentions as an ethic of civil discourse? No. Not when you're advocating coercion as a political leader. Well-intended Ignorance is not an acceptable answer. You chose to enter public office. You've been making these claims for years (in Bernie's case for decades). Motivated ignorance is lying. Lying to steal other people's stuff and accumulate power for yourself is thieving scumbag behavior."
Rock Chartrand on X - ""Living wage" is an emotionally loaded term. It implies that anyone unwilling or unable to pay the demanded amount is condemning people to death. In reality, it's simply a demand that low-productivity jobs pay more than the market currently values them at, with the costs shifted onto employers, consumers, and the unemployed who get priced out entirely."
jay plemons on X - "Nick Shirley uncovers an adult day care in Flushing, Queens with 7,000 phantom members.
Nick: “This public document says you have 7,899 members.”
Employee: “No, we don’t have 7,000 members.”
Nick: “So you’re overbilling then? You’re getting paid $1,600 per patient — that’s how you got $12.9 million in 2024.”
Employee: “Please leave.”
American taxpayer dollars at work."
Left wingers want unlimited social spending, because that's unlimited funds to leech off
Labor Is The Party of the Bureaucrat, Not The Worker - "For most of this country's political history, the major fault line has been between labour and capital—between workers and the bosses who employ them. That's the fault line that shaped the union movement, and the party that grew out of it. The Australian Labor Party. But that fault line isn’t as clear anymore. I believe that the major political conflict we have isn’t between workers and bosses. And it isn't between the public versus private sector either. The real fault line is between those whose work lifts productivity and those whose work puts a drag on it. Those who lift productivity include the surgeon, the teacher, the tradie, and the founder: anyone whose work makes someone else more likely to produce. One doesn’t even have to be in paid work to be productive. Stay at home mums are some of the most productive people in our society, raising the future human capital of the nation. On the other side of the fault line sits work that exists to administer, monitor, or process the people who are actually doing the producing, often with no clear link back to any outcome at all. Every organisation carries some of that second kind of work. But it’s in government that it's growing the fastest, and where it has the least accountability. Because government is the only part of the economy that gets to write its own cheque and send someone else the bill... The Labor Party has gone from being a party of the worker to being the party of the bureaucrat. The same party that purports to defend workers has overseen the highest amount of tax revenue generated from labour in Australia's history. The government collected $349 billion in personal income tax last financial year... Since 2022, the APS has grown by 26 per cent. The cost of running it has blown out by 42 per cent—to $114.6 billion, or roughly $8,200 for every taxpayer in this country, every year. Budget papers show that figure being revised up by a further $19.6 billion over the next four years—on its own, enough to wipe out any savings from cutting the NDIS. Government spending overall now sits at 28 per cent of GDP—the highest it's been in my lifetime. But here's what I find most telling: of all the things this budget reformed, the government's own spending wasn't one of them. There was no plan to shrink the size of government, no serious attempt to ask why the APS needs to keep growing so fast. Every other part of the economy was asked to adjust. The one part of the economy that gets to write its own cheque was not. A few weeks ago, the Secretary of the Treasury, Jenny Wilkinson, gave the post-Budget address to the Australian Business Economists. It's worth paying attention to what she chose to talk about, because it tells you something about how this budget was actually built. Her speech was thorough, and serious, and almost entirely about one thing: who has more wealth, and who should have less. Page after page of analysis on lifetime income distribution, effective tax rates by income bracket, who benefits from negative gearing and trusts and by how much. All of it very carefully modelled. But all of the modelling was based on the assumption that wealth just naturally manifests itself. The Treasury Secretary did not model how these tax changes might affect the decision to start a business at all, to take the risk, to build the very thing that gets redistributed in the first place. When she did address the risk question directly, her answer was that the research didn’t support the idea that capital gains tax impacts risk-taking, beyond compensating for inflation. She mentioned one citation, and moved on. The Treasury, by its own admission elsewhere, hasn't modelled the productivity impact of these reforms at all. You can build a very rigorous case for redistribution. It's a different exercise entirely to build a case for growth, and that is what Treasury has not done. Australia is already a hard place to take risks, and it's getting harder. The OECD's latest survey found that Australia has gone from being one of the five easiest countries in the OECD to start a business in the late 1990s, to below the OECD average today. The rate of creation of new companies has been falling since the mid-2000s, and its slowing down. And the conversations I've had, particularly with young people online, about the proposed changes have told me something else: there's very little understanding in this country of why entrepreneurship matters, or what risk actually does... What we don't see is the risk not taken. The research not pursued. The film not made. The business not started. The children that are never born. When people don't take risks, we can't know what future we've missed out on. Those losses are invisible—which is exactly why they're so easy for the government to ignore them. You can't put a line item in a Budget for the company that never existed... I've noticed, in the past few weeks, a resurgence of something pernicious that can sometimes characterise this country: tall poppy syndrome. I've seen ordinary Australians, who own a modest amount of shares, likened to robber barons. I've seen small business owners described as being "subsidised" by the current tax settings. This is an inversion of the truth. Everyday Australians investing in shares are doing the right thing, and should be rewarded for it, not punished for their thrift. People who take the risk to start a business are not subsidised by our tax settings—they pay income tax, company tax, payroll tax, and GST. When a capital gain finally occurs, it's on money that has already been taxed. This is no subsidy in the equation. We should also remember something this country seems to have forgotten: in a free market, a business only succeeds when it gives customers something better, or cheaper, than the alternative. The value captured by the business owner is only ever a small fraction of the value created for everyone else. The future is built by the saver who buys shares instead of another holiday. The tradie who decides to start a business and hire apprentices. The founder who pays himself $80,000 a year, the surgeon, the teacher, the parent who took the risk of bringing a child into the world. Long live every Australian still willing to build something nobody asked them to build. They are not the burden this country needs to manage. They are the only thing that has ever paid for everything else."
Contra AOC, you don't have to be a billionaire to be a leech - "Barack Obama's "you didn't build that" comment during the 2012 election, part of a larger argument that successful entrepreneurs ultimately derived their wealth from public investments, was widely considered a gaffe at the time. In retrospect, the former president sounds downright capitalist. A decade and a half of leftward drift in the Democratic Party has given us the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), who argues that not only did you not build that, but if you're rich enough, you actually stole it. The New York congresswoman went viral yesterday for comments she made on comedian Ilana Glazer's podcast describing any billionaire's wealth as inherently unearned... The notion that someone has profited off of others' misery simply by being a billionaire is silly. Philosopher Robert Nozick debunked this idea with his Wilt Chamberlain thought experiment. To summarize, if you redistributed all wealth equally, Chamberlain would quickly end up having way more money than everyone else because a huge number of people would be willing to buy a ticket to see the basketball player live. Nozick's point was that even from a starting point of complete economic equality, some people's superior skills will enable them to make more money than others and that's fine. The people who voluntarily pay to see Chamberlain are better off for the experience, even if the money they spent on tickets recreates vast wealth inequality. People have offered the more contemporary example of Taylor Swift as a rebuttal to AOC's comments, but the point is the same: You can indeed become a billionaire by doing something obviously uncontroversial and non-exploitative like selling concert tickets. Indeed, the source of Swift's wealth is not so different from AOC's interlocutor. Glazer is a successful actor and comedian who's become, even by contemporary American standards, rich and famous by selling performances that people want to see. The fact that she hasn't obtained the stratospheric levels of wealth that Swift has doesn't obviously make one the oppressor and the other the oppressed. It does reek of envy and petty status competition. There is of course a case that Taylor Swift's fortune is partially derived from ill-gotten gains. While many consider her to be a talented performer, and she's certainly a skilled businesswoman, her wealth depends in part on copyright protections of her music that many libertarians would consider a form of unjust, state-granted privilege. The point is that it's not the amount of money Swift has earned, but her means of acquiring it that determines whether her fortune is deserved. The primary question to ask is whether one earned their money conducting voluntary exchanges in a free market, or through some state transfer or grant of privilege. To be sure, in our modern, mixed economy, there's plenty of state transfers going around. Contra AOC, there are makers and moochers on every rung of the income ladder. The billionaire who lowers consumer prices by creating an online retail giant and distribution network hasn't inherently exploited anyone. The middle-income tenant living in a rent-stabilized unit in New York is benefiting from an inherently parasitic relationship created by regulation... AOC complains of the "myth" we've created of the productive billionaire to justify wealth inequality. The far more pervasive myth seems to be the one the congresswoman retails in: that government taxation and state-granted privileges can't be coercive exploitation because you didn't earn that money anyway. Sheldon Richman ends his essay on libertarian class theory with a call to "raise the class-consciousness of all honest, productive people. That is, the industrious must be shown that they are daily victims of the ruling political class." AOC wants to obfuscate the fact that she is a member of the ruling class with her own rags-to-Congress story. Don't buy it. Stand in solidarity with the billionaires she'd like to see the state grind into dust."
Left wingers think all property belongs to the state after all
Swann Marcus on X - "Every left-wing poll be like “Would you vote for socialists if we could give you everything you’ve ever wanted with no cost?” socialism +63 “What if it cost you literally anything?” Death to commies +794"
