JCC

My post about France went viral. Thousands of likes. Many Americans told me: "Democrats aren't socialists. America will never be France." I want to answer that seriously, step by step. Start with a simple observation. Look at what has gotten cheaper in America over the last 25 years: TVs, phones, software, clothes, toys. Now look at what has exploded: college tuition, healthcare, childcare, housing. What separates the two lists? The first lives in competitive markets. The second is exactly where government is most involved: subsidies, mandates, licensing, zoning, regulation. College. Washington lends students almost unlimited money. Universities know the money will always come, so they raise tuition and hire more administrators. The student pays the bill for twenty years. More government money, higher prices. Housing. Why can't a nurse buy a home in the city where she works? Not because of capitalism. Because of zoning laws, permits, environmental reviews, years of procedure to build a single building. The most expensive places to live in America are the places where it's hardest to build. When building is nearly illegal, prices explode. Healthcare. The patient almost never sees the price. A third party pays, regulations limit who can compete, and costs climb year after year with no one able to say no. So here is the trap. The problems you suffer from are not the failure of free markets. They are the places where the market has already been replaced by the state. And the solution you're being offered is more of the same. That's the Trojan horse. It always works the same way. A real problem. A generous-sounding promise. A program that makes things worse. Then the failure of that program becomes the argument for the next one. People who lived under communism in Poland learned to recognize the lie and the mask the lie wears. The lie never presents itself as a lie. It presents itself as compassion. In France we are at the end of that road. Debt we can never repay. Young people who can't afford a home. Our best people leaving. And every few years our cities burn. Nobody voted for this. They voted for one more generous promise, fifty years in a row. If you're a Republican, share this with the Democrat in your life. Not to win an argument. To start a conversation. If you're a Democrat, I'm not asking you to switch teams. I'm asking you to look at the pattern. Wherever the state took over, life became unaffordable. Don't fix the failures of government with more government. Stay American. Ask for less state, not more.

A lot of uneducated people fall into this capitalism vs public trap. So let me explain why the "public" side of this debate comes down to one thing: it doesn't work. And it's not because the State is evil. It's because the State is made of people. Same people as everywhere else. Same incentives, same laziness, same temptations. The only difference is whose money they're spending. Milton Friedman nailed it. There are four ways to spend money. Your money on yourself: you watch the price and the quality. Your money on someone else: you watch the price, less the quality. Someone else's money on yourself: you stop caring about the price. Someone else's money on someone else: you care about neither. Every public budget on earth lives in that fourth box. Now let me explain it like you're 8. Picture a schoolyard. 100 kids, Pokémon cards handed out at random. Nobody plans anything. Kids trade, collectors sort, good players accumulate. Very quickly every card ends up with the kid who values it most. Then the teacher walks in, decides it's unfair, confiscates everything and redistributes it herself. Problem: she has no idea who wants what. She can't. Nobody can. Trades stop, good players quit, and somehow the kids sitting closest to her desk end up with all the rare cards. That last part is the one everyone forgets. When money flows from a central desk instead of voluntary trade, the winners are the people who know the desk best. Lobbyists, connected contractors, consultants billing 10x. California high-speed rail: budget tripled, still no train. That's not a bug, it's what happens every single time someone spends money that isn't theirs, on people they'll never meet, with zero consequences if they fail. And here's the irony in your take. The capitalists who love public infrastructure the most are the cronies who win the contracts. That's not the free market. That's the exact opposite of it. The free market is the only system where bad allocators lose their money and good allocators get more to allocate. Profit is the signal. Losses are the correction. The State has neither. A failing company goes bankrupt. A failing ministry gets a bigger budget next year. So if you actually care about the common good, you should want more free market, not less. Freedom means the freedom to build, to trade, to keep what you create. It does not mean the freedom to hand other people's money to people who've proven they don't know how to invest it. The question was never capitalism vs public. It's who allocates the next dollar best. 200 years of data, same answer every time.