Igor

This is true everywhere in the West. Palmer Luckey just launched BlueChip with Qualcomm, a laptop designed and assembled in the United States. The "analysts" told us an American computer would cost $100,000. Luckey says it'll cost about 20% more than a high-end PC. The gap between those two numbers is the size of the lie. In France, we know this song by heart. Taxis. In 2008, a government commission proposed opening up taxi licenses. Strikes, highways blocked, and the government backed down within days. A Paris taxi license would eventually resell for over €200,000. Scarcity created by the state turned into private wealth. It took Uber to break it, and in 2014 the government passed a law to try to lock it all back down. Telecom. In 2005, Orange, SFR and Bouygues were fined €534M for colluding on market share. In 2012, a newcomer called Free launched unlimited plans at €19.99. Prices collapsed. Nobody went bankrupt. We had just been paying a cartel. Pharmacies. A legal monopoly down to the last box of over-the-counter Tylenol. France's largest supermarket chain has been fighting for over fifteen years for the right to sell it. Still no. Notaries. Decades of de facto caps on the number of practices. When reform finally opened new offices, they took to the streets. Driving schools. A startup called Ornikar shows up with a cheaper license path, and the industry drags it into court. And at the EU level, GDPR and the AI Act: rules that only a company with 200 lawyers can comply with. Exactly the moat incumbents dream of. The pattern is always the same. Manufacture scarcity through law, call it protection, and tell everyone there's no other way. What AI is doing right now is exposing the scam run by what I call the pseudo-communist entrepreneurs. People who preach free markets and live off administered rents. Central planning, privatized. The perfect embodiment is Bill Gates. In 2005, he called people who wanted to loosen intellectual property rules "modern-day communists." The irony is total. In the 90s, Microsoft charged PC makers a license fee on every machine they shipped, whether Windows was installed on it or not. The Justice Department had to ban the practice in 1994. Then came the US antitrust ruling for monopoly abuse, then a €497M fine from Brussels in 2004. The real central planner was him. This whole economy rests on one thing: production costs were high and opaque, so they could charge you for the license, the toll, the stamp. AI is crushing that cost. Code is heading toward zero. Entry-level legal, accounting and medical expertise is heading toward zero. And when producing something costs almost nothing, a rent can no longer be defended by economics, only by law. That's when everyone sees the machinery naked. It's going to blow up. And it's going to create insane abundance. Thank you Palmer Luckey for yesterday. Two days ago I wrote a thread about geniuses. I think Palmer Luckey has the potential to join Elon Musk in that category within a few years. Oculus at 19, Anduril closing in on $100B, and now he's going after the very idea that the West has forgotten how to build things. You see maybe one trajectory like this per generation.