East Germany turned human misery into foreign exchange at $96,000 per head. Socialism requires capitalism to survive. Between 1963 and 1989, the German Democratic Republic sold 33,755 political prisoners to West Germany for hard currency. The going rate started at 40,000 Deutsche Marks per prisoner in the early years and climbed to 95,847 marks by the end. You can find the invoices in the Stasi archives today. Line items included "one dissident journalist" and "three church activists." The East German state needed every Deutschmark it could get because its command economy couldn't produce goods anyone wanted to buy. A government so desperate for foreign currency created a production line of human trafficking with bureaucratic precision. The Stasi arrested dissidents, processed the paperwork, and shipped them west like any other export commodity. Church groups and West German officials negotiated bulk discounts. The whole operation generated $3.4 billion over three decades. A socialist paradise that claimed to represent the workers had to sell its own citizens to the capitalist enemy to keep the lights on. East Germany couldn't manufacture anything that the world market valued except the bodies of people trying to escape socialism. Every transaction proved that their entire economic system was a fraud that survived only by parasitically extracting value from the very capitalism it claimed to oppose. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, but you still hear academics praise central planning and command economies today. They never mention that East Germany's most successful export program involved selling human beings by the pound to fund their workers' paradise.

BREAKING: Arizona House passed a resolution banning taxpayer funding of teachers unions. The vote was 31–22. It passed the Senate 16–13. It now goes to the ballot.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but… The poorest Americans today enjoy a standard of living that the richest people on earth couldn’t buy a century ago. Why? Free-market capitalism is the only system in history to lift entire societies out of mass poverty.

Why does Senator Hawley of Missouri hate workers so much. He takes money from the union bosses and now wants to force more workers to pay union dues. That is what left wing democrats for a living. Why Missouri? The New York post exposes much: nypost.com/2026/06/12/opinio…

Bribing the voters with wealth seized from innovative companies might be popular - if government-run companies were capable of turning a profit, which they usually aren’t. More likely this would be a one-time looting, and would destroy most of these developers in the process.

New tariff polling: Only 10 percent of U.S. adults say tariffs on foreign goods should be increased compared to 47 percent who say they should be decreased.

Congress is considering imposing a new national car tax at a time when 64 percent of U.S. adults say the price of owning a car is getting more expensive, compared to just 2 percent saying car prices have come down.

“Incredibly, there is a debate over how and when to allow broadband providers permission to retire old copper phone lines. This is like having to get permission to replace dial-up phones with today’s handhelds.” - @SteveForbesCEO in @washexaminer washingtonexaminer.com/op-ed…

Milton Friedman's greatest regret. The federal government discovered the perfect crime in 1943: make employers collect taxes before workers ever see their paychecks. You think you earn $60,000 per year, but you actually earn $75,000 and hand over $15,000 to politicians without ever touching it. The psychological difference is enormous. Before payroll withholding, Americans wrote quarterly checks directly to the Treasury. Picture yourself sitting at your kitchen table, writing a $3,750 check to the IRS every three months. The pain was immediate and visceral. Politicians faced constant pressure to justify every dollar because citizens felt the extraction in real time. Withholding transforms this concrete loss into an abstract accounting entry. Your employer becomes an unpaid tax collector, and you never experience the actual cost of government. Worse, most people celebrate their tax refunds as government generosity rather than recognizing them as interest-free loans they provided to politicians. The Treasury collects your money throughout the year, spends it immediately, then returns your own cash and receives gratitude. This system enables the explosion in government spending you witness today. Defense contractors billing $640 for toilet seats, agricultural subsidies for corn syrup, and congressional salaries for 535 people who rarely show up to work. When taxation feels painless, voters stop demanding accountability for how their money gets spent. Milton Friedman helped design withholding as a wartime emergency measure and later called it his greatest regret. Free market economists recognized that the psychological pain of direct taxation creates political pressure for fiscal restraint. The temporary always becomes permanent in government hands, and the emergency justification disappears while the extraction mechanism remains forever.

The average American family pays roughly $4,200 a year because of lawsuit abuse. That's money coming out of family budgets through higher insurance costs and higher prices. Lauren Zelt of @pactconsumers explains why on the latest episode of Leave Us Alone with @GroverNorquist.

Most people understand that higher taxes raise costs. Fewer realize lawsuit abuse does too. Higher insurance premiums. Higher home insurance costs. Higher prices. @GroverNorquist talks with Lauren Zelt of @pactconsumers and @RyanPatrickTX of @lawsuitreform on the latest Leave Us Alone Podcast: youtu.be/J3S-NI3HY6o

The European Union is looting American Companies to raise money independent of the European nations and people. The European Union is stealing from Americans to build a "self-funding" powerbase so they don't have to care what the people of France, Germany, Italy etc want or do not want.

Lawsuit Abuse Costs Your Family $4,200 Every Year youtu.be/J3S-NI3HY6o?si=_R2t… via @YouTube

The blue states of Californias and Colorado also decided that “free” health care was too expensive. danieljmitchell.wordpress.co…

Another thing NH doesn't tax (and every other New England state does)? Personal Property - imagine having to pay taxes not just on your real estate, but the stuff in your house (or business) too. Consider this when folks from those state say our property taxes are too high.

Could we not try out socialism on a small state. One that would not be such a loss if socialism turned out the way it did in Germany and Russia and Cuba and Albania. Vermont might volunteer. Or Hawaii?

Alas, these lessons must be taught repeatedly: youtu.be/wPTTTuq1Opw

Collectivism begins with promises of equality and ends with coercion.

Mencken is going out on a limb there with the caveat “almost always” Always is the safer way to bet