Communism is what happens when losers get tired of competing with winners. The solution isn't to become less of a loser. It's to declare winning unfair, success exploitative, achievement oppressive, and productivity suspicious. Every loser gets a committee. Every loser gets a grievance. Every loser gets a claim on someone else's earnings. The only thing the loser never gets is responsibility. Which is why communism reliably produces more losers.

If Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire makes you angry, wait until you hear about the organization that collected over $100 trillion from Americans, borrowed another $40 trillion, can’t pass an audit, and still acts like it’s broke. One guy built rockets. The other guys built debt. Guess which one everyone is mad at.

Me: I don't want the government controlling my life and taking my earnings. Socialist: BOOTLICKER! Whose boots am I licking? My own? The entire accusation only makes sense if they assume someone must be controlled by someone. The idea that a person might simply want to run their own life never occurs to them.

The problem isn't that politicians can trade stocks. The problem is that they can vote on regulations, subsidies, contracts, taxes, tariffs, investigations, and spending bills that affect stock prices before trading them.

Socialists spend half their time claiming the rich contribute nothing and the other half demanding that society can't function without taking more from them.

Wanting food, water, housing, and healthcare isn't what gets you called lazy. Wanting other people forced to provide them is.

The answer is both. NASA set the goal and funded it. Private companies designed, built, tested, manufactured, and supplied most of what made it possible. More importantly, it was an America focused on growth, industry, engineering, and technological achievement. Not an America obsessed with degrowth, redistribution, and treating success as a social problem. The lesson of Apollo isn't that government can do everything. It's that a wealthy, productive, technologically ambitious society can accomplish extraordinary things.

That's not eliminating poverty. It's funding it for a year. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Create the conditions for millions of people to become productive, innovate, invest, trade, and create wealth, and you reduce poverty generation after generation. Redistribution consumes wealth. Wealth creation produces it. The real question isn't how long you can keep redistributing someone else's success. It's how many future successes you prevent in the process. That's the difference between solving poverty and kicking the can down the road.

Redistribution can only move existing resources around, minus the cut taken by a government bureaucracy that consumes resources itself. Wealth creation increases the amount of resources that exist in the first place. One expands prosperity. The other reallocates it after administrative costs, political favoritism, waste, and inefficiency. The irony is that governments are often rewarded for failing to solve problems. A solved problem loses funding. An unsolved problem justifies a bigger budget. That's why wealth creation tends to make problems disappear, while politics tends to make them permanent.

Then we've found the disagreement. I believe creating value and acquiring wealth through voluntary trade justifies keeping it. You believe the more successful a person becomes, the less entitled they are to the results of their success. The issue isn't whether wealth was earned. The issue is that you view ability as an obligation and success as a debt. By that standard, ability creates obligation and inability creates exemption. The more capable, productive, and successful you are, the more responsibility you have. The less capable, productive, and successful you are, the less responsibility you have. Success becomes a debt. Failure becomes a discount. That's quite an incentive structure.

The tragedy isn't that socialists ignore the unseen. It's that they often prefer it. They would rather have no billionaire, no Tesla, no SpaceX, and no fortune to resent than allow the process that created them. To them, the company that never exists is preferable to the company that succeeds "too much." The free market says, "Wealth won't exist if we confiscate it." Socialism often answers, "Good."

The most compelling objection to economic inequality (as opposed to poverty) is that it enables political inequality. However: (1) We lack strong evidence that money does in fact buy elections (2) People are entitled to use their property to promote political outcomes (e.g., you’re within your rights to put a sign for your favorite candidate in your yard) (3) The most effective way to prevent people from buying political influence is to disincentivize it by reducing the redistributive and regulatory power of the state

Some socialist politicians are fools. The smarter ones are worse. They know the claims are nonsense. They just think their supporters don't.

I know how Elon Musk became a trillionaire, but I don't know how Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Nancy Pelosi became millionaires.

By the socialist standard, jobs are for suckers. Welfare is for paying your bills. Work is just what the productive class does so the political class has something to redistribute.

The fact that Americans don't want certain jobs isn't evidence of capitalist failure. It's often evidence of capitalist success. When people have better options, they take them. The question isn't why Americans don't want those jobs. The question is why workers in poorer countries often do. The answer is usually that those jobs pay more than the alternatives available to them.

Communism is class fascism. Fascism divides people by nation or race. Communism divides people by class. Both justify subordinating the individual to a collective and both require political control over the lives and property of others.

The world without communists is just everyone else keeping more of what they earn, paying lower political costs, enjoying more freedom, and spending less time being lectured about why success is a social problem.

Socialists don't hate what they portray the rich as being. They dream of being what they portray the rich as being. That's why the complaint is never that wealth grants power, influence, luxury, or control. The complaint is that someone else has it.