Gonna Miss the Old Boy

My daughter’s dog passed away. This is him at our cabin this summer. He was “hiding” from the thunderstorms. His name was Jay and he didn’t like thundershowers or fireworks. He had an aversion to Mexican Independence Day in Chicago. It wasn’t because he had a dislike of Mexicans. Nope, he loved them and their food very much. Fireworks and gunfire were not his thing.

Very soon after my daughter acquired Jay from the shelter, we drove from Chicago to Grand Marais. First big car trip for Jay since being trucked up from Tennessee to a shelter in Chicago. We didn’t know what to expect.

Jay turned out to be a GREAT car dog. So great, he made many, many trips from Chicago to Grand Marais with us.

He was basically a very sweet dog. Smart dog. Loyal. He was my daughter Gen’s shadow. He longed only to be in her presence from the day she picked him up at the shelter. But he could be neurotic. Especially if you tried to leave your residence without him.

He would bark continuously. A high-pitched bark. Sometimes ear piercing.

Jay loved a boat ride. In the evening, he would run down to the dock to wait for you to go on the boat. He enjoyed fishing. Especially the reeling in. One time, he knocked me so hard my glasses fell out of my pocket into the depths of the lake. I can still see them flying out and sinking.

He was our dog’s best friend. They were inseparable when they were together. At our lake place, this was his favorite spot. He could keep an eye on both grills. He could keep an eye on both doors and the other cabin, along with both docks. Primarily, he could keep an eye on the road and parking lot, jumping up to bark and alert us when there was any intruder.

Jay was always trying to “help” me cook. Several times, he would raid the bread if it was left on the counter. One time, I had separated fat from making bolognese into a container on the counter. We left three dogs alone in the cabin. When we came back, it was gone. We knew from “evidence” the next day who the culprit was.

We will miss the Jay.

A Beef With Beef

And Pork And Chicken

The global warming cult’s war on beef is gaining momentum. How do we know? Look at this chart. Global warming, people hate cows. They fart. They take up the grassland to range on. They fatten on grain grown for them.

We should all be eating lentils, ha. Cattle actually put carbon in the soil. Their hoof action is good for the soil. The key is regenerative farming. Joel Salatin is outspoken on this topic. He runs cattle through a pasture. Then chickens. Then hogs. He is farming soil, not protein.

Going to simplify some stuff in this post, but you will get the general idea.

This is live cattle futures since 2021.

Feeder cattle futures look similar.

Shutting down the economy and all the restrictions placed on businesses by state governors created havoc in the cattle industry. It also did similarly in hogs and poultry. Here is a hog chart. It is quite a bit more volatile than cattle, which reflects the differences between the two products.

General inflation caused by massive increases in government spending also caused prices to rise. Prices rose for just about everything besides meat.

The prices in the beef market are telling us something. It’s a one-way street, higher, and it isn’t because America has suddenly embraced eating only beef.

There is a general operational chain to growing animal protein. Born, grow, fatten, slaughter, ship to market. For cattle, it takes about 30 months to rebuild the herd. Hogs and poultry are far less than that, which is why they are more volatile.

There are plenty of other factors impacting the cattle market than a simple “got to birth a lot of calves”. Currently, screwworm is south of the border in Mexico. Screwworm is spread by flies. Those flies were eradicated, but broke through a barrier in Panama and haven’t stopped. It hasn’t gotten to America yet, but yesterday I saw a report that said they found it 70 miles south of Arizona. It was also discovered on a person from El Salvador in MARYLAND. That’s frightening and another great argument for strong borders and no illegal immigration.

If a cow gets screwworm, you have to destroy the cow. It’s a total loss.

A neophyte might say that supply is constrained, so price has to go higher. That’s some of what is going on in the cattle market, but there is a lot more to it.

Hog and Poultry markets can vertically integrate. This means Tyson or Smithfield can come up with a formula and guarantee a price to farmers per head of livestock. They can control production and mandate parts of that production, so everything is standardized. A standard-sized hog/bird makes slaughter a lot more efficient and faster.

Cattle are not like that. Vertical integration is illegal.

Hence, ranchers raise cattle. They sell them to the feedlot. Feedlot fattens them. They sell them to the slaughterhouse, which sells to consumer-facing butcher shops and grocery stores.

Grass-fed beef does not go to the feedlot. However, grass-fed cows take a lot longer to fatten, and there is always a sticky ownership problem. Ranchers want inventory turn so they can redeploy cash into a new herd. Slaughterhouses don’t want to own cattle until they are ready to slaughter. Grass-fed beef can create a mismatch in traditional cattle markets.

During Covid, the price of beef tanked. Restaurant demand was 0. There were bottlenecks at the slaughterhouses. Post-COVID, as you can see from the above charts, the price of beef is skyrocketing. The size of the US cattle herd is at a low not seen in 60 years or so. What happened was all the ranchers sent all their beef to market. Remember, 30 months to rebuild the herd.

But not all the ranchers stayed in the market. Some decided to go out of business and do something else.

I could do a huge blog post, except this tweet from a rancher sums it up well. It’s the government regulation that is causing a lot of the rise in price.

1. The American cattle herd #s are way down….we can’t snap our fingers and increase the #s. It takes time…30 months.

2. Cattle ranchers are aging out with no replacements at the ranch. FYI: We are seriously looking at the “Halter system” to spread our limited resources to handle more cattle. The Halter collars and antenna initial investment is expensive.

3. Rural land prices are skyrocketing making it impossible to economically graze cattle on pricy acreage.

4. Direct to consumer sales takes time, energy and money…..that the “over stretched” aging rancher just does not possess or is too old & tired to pursue.

5. On-site processing is clunky….we are talking ones and twos to get processed at best at the small ranch operation…and the discarded remains & blood are an issue if done at the ranch (mad cow and prion issues).

Also….where to store the meat…..there is not enough cold storage facilities available near most ranches to accommodate the inventory.

6. Transportation - speaking from experience….renting “one” freezer truck & trailer is a logical nightmare to transport the processed meat.

#1 is self-explanatory. There is a life cycle issue. Insemination, gestation, calving, and growing all take time.

#2, No replacements. Agriculture is a TOUGH business. It’s not just cattle, but if you look at the wine industry, the children are not taking over their family operations. Dairy industry operations are consolidating. They are doing something else. It’s harder to raise cattle than it is hogs or poultry because hogs and poultry can be done in a confined space. Cattle need room. There is also the expense of equipment. It’s not like the television show Yellowstone. Ranchers are high-tech, and they also use helicopters, drones, and other high-tech ways to monitor herds. A simple search yields results like this.

#3, The population movement from city to rural areas is causing land prices to escalate. Another factor is that there are people fleeing blue states for red states. A lot of the red states have the grazing land. In addition, conglomerates are buying up land and holding it as an asset. Land is a hedge against inflation.

#4. You cannot snap your fingers and go direct to consumer. You have to set up for it. There are orders of operations involved. You cannot just slap up a website and be open for business. In addition, federal or state regulations might prohibit the sale direct to consumer. Representative Thomas Massie has a cattle herd on his property in Kentucky and cannot sell beef to his neighbor. Going direct might, in fact, be a younger person’s game. Economic studies over time say it takes 30 years for big innovation to take hold and blossom in an economy. Much of the reason is that it just takes the older generation to die off.

#5 It is next to impossible to build a slaughterhouse. Federal and state regulations make it very expensive. In addition, slaughterhouses tend to have a lot of injuries in them. It’s tough, dangerous work. We haven’t developed robots that can automate slaughter. Mobile abattoirs are a solution, but very hard to scale and make economically. As the poster says, killing ones and twos is not profitable, and what do you do with the offal?

#6 Cold Storage. It’s a gigantic business. I didn’t know how big a business it truly was until an MBA student I was mentoring was telling me about it. Lineage, a Michigan-based logistics company specializing in cold storage, developed a REIT that went public last year. Again, expensive and highly regulated. You think data center electricity is expensive, try cold storage. They eat energy! We can’t cut ice on the Great Lakes to keep them cold, they need electricity. This is another reason to embrace nuclear power and get building ASAP.

#7 Transportation. You have to get the livestock from the range to the slaughterhouse. Diesel has gone up in price. When I travelled across the country last week, it was just under $4 per gallon. Once the livestock is slaughtered and cut up, it has to be transported in refrigerated trucks. There aren’t enough trucks to transport the beef, so transportation costs are through the roof.

Soaring beef prices expose a broken system. While the Local Farmers Feeding our Communities Act (H.R.4782) throws $200M/year at state agencies to buy local meats, Section 2(b)(4) still funnels distribution through bureaucratic nonprofits instead of empowering direct farm-to-consumer sales. Farmers face drought-driven feed costs & packer monopolies, yet D.C.'s answer is more middlemen. Real solution? Slaughter USDA red tape, deregulate on-site processing, and let markets bypass the gatekeepers. Until then, taxpayers fund layers of waste while ranchers bleed. The real cost of legislative half-measures is paid by families at the checkout and ranchers on the brink.

There is no easy pain-free fix to this problem. Five companies control the slaughter of almost all the animals. They don’t just control it in the US, but internationally. If regulatory change is afoot, you can bet dollars to donuts those companies will lobby aggressively against it.

Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, should focus on this problem and come up with a free-market solution. Deregulation is key, of course. However, you have to make sure the ones you are cutting are just extraneous red tape and not material to safety. It can be tricky. But, for sure, we have to deregulate.

Here is an easy one. End COOL labeling regulation. It does nothing. It was controversial when it was enacted under the Obama Administration. It’s proven to be useless.

The marginal costs tied to COOL must go somewhere – and consumers were forced to carry some of the burden. USDA’s own commissioned research pegs the cost (in terms of lost producer and consumer surplus) at $20 billion in today’s dollars.

Again, deregulation and intense competition are the answers. How we get to a competitive market is going to be arduous. But it has to be done because it will benefit the American consumer. You want to make America great again? Make America compete again. To incentivize intense competition, deregulate.

Meat is not any different than banking, insurance, health insurance, or any other heavily regulated industry when it comes to monopsonistic concentration of power and the ability for innovators to enter the market and compete.

Is $100,000 The Right Price?

Trump And The Government Think So

Yesterday, Trump raised the price of an HB-1 visa to $100,000. My clickbait question is the wrong question. Trump shouldn’t be setting the price of the H-1 visa. The free market should.

Immigration is such a politicized issue. Chuck Schumer recently said he wants a path to citizenship for all the illegal immigrants in the US. I remember when I was lectured by the left that “replacement theory” wasn’t real and just a conspiracy theory against illegal aliens. One of Trump’s most popular campaign themes was to end illegal immigration, and he’s done that. The border is closed, and we are sending illegal immigrants back. Democratic socialists and other hack Democratic politicians are engaging in show pony tactics at ICE locations across the country. This is another 20% issue they are defending, and frankly, there is no honor in it.

You have to give Trump credit. He is the first politician to take on illegal immigration and immigration in a meaningful way in a century.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I advocate for the Gary Becker method to cure the US and virtually every other country’s immigration problem.

For those who might be new to the blog, some background. Gary Becker was a Nobel Prize-winning economist from the University of Chicago. What he did was take economic concepts and apply them to places where economics had not been used before to understand them. His first groundbreaking study was on the economics of discrimination. What’s the cost of discrimination? There is a larger cost to policies like Jim Crow beyond the obvious human toll. He uncovered it.

When I went to the University of Chicago to get an MBA, one of the first lectures I ever heard was from Professor Kevin Murphy. Murphy encouraged us to forget what we knew about economics and discover it again. In his talk, he said that economics is everywhere.

Why?

As Thomas Sowell accurately says, economics is the study of scarcity, not money. It’s about trade-offs and opportunity costs. On his blog, I recall Becker saying that the death penalty was a trade-off. He said research had shown that executing a murderer stopped roughly twenty other murders.

Murphy went deeper. He asked the class how many people were married. He said, “There is a marriage market. There is a supply of people, and a demand to get married. Everyone has a price that they will transact.” People chuckled that economics could enter into a very human and emotional decision about love and a mate, but Murphy went on to prove that it is true.

What’s that got to do with HB-1 visas, Trump, Becker, and immigration?

My friend Vishal Verma sponsored a “Brown Bag Lunch”. You could bring a lunch and listen to a professor from U of C present a theory they had been working on. It was a chance to learn. It was a chance for the professor to present their theory to a live audience, get a reaction, and receive questions. The lunch helped the professor work on their theory. The very first lunch was Gary Becker presenting his theory on how to fix immigration.

When he presented it, a hush and then a negative fervor went through the room. Many of the students were international. They were outraged that the US, or any country, would charge a price for immigration. It was unfair.

Becker counters many objections here.

Here he presents it in an hour-long lecture. If you have not watched it, you can skip up to the part where he presents the theory. It’s dry. Becker was a bit dry. He wasn’t as showy as Milton Friedman. But it is a radical and very elegant solution to our problem.

Instead of arguing about who can come from where, demonizing groups, or anything like that, the argument becomes about price. The market sets the price.

Here is a link to a shorter piece on the Becker idea. Edward Lazear is also credited. Lazear has also passed away, sadly.

Singapore is a small country in Southeast Asia. You can purchase citizenship there. The government sets the price. Becker’s concept, in the main, isn’t out of the realm. The US and other countries have had programs where there was some token cost to immigrate on some specified terms. The HB-1 visa is one example, but there are others.

Trump arbitrarily picked a price. Why not $50,000? Why not $500,000? Why is $100,000 the perfect price? We don’t know because there are no market forces deriving it. It’s simply a centralized government entity saying what the price should be. It doesn’t even matter if the price is close to what the actual price might be. Since the market didn’t set it, we have no confidence that the price is right.

Trump setting the price at $100,000 doesn’t go far enough because it doesn’t let the market work. Becker initially postulated a price of $50,000 but even he would say there was little rigor around the price but you had to start somewhere. Let’s assume that the price was correct and adjust it for inflation. The new price would be $83,000. Trump is in the ballpark, especially when you look at the arguments below.

Free markets work when you have interested buyers and sellers bidding and offering against each other to transact for their benefit at a price. Those buyers and sellers want to maximize their utility. Buyers want to get whatever they want at the cheapest price. Sellers want to sell at the highest price.

This is NOT the case with immigration and HB-1 visas. Both buyers and sellers want to transact at the lowest price.

There are true societal benefits to immigration that come with true costs. More people demand services, both public and private. It’s beyond this blog post to speculate on the entire scope of benefit and strain, and what will happen, but you can imagine it. In cities where illegal immigration is high, school systems and public health systems are overwhelmed. There is a tangible cost to taxpayers for that and for the deficit spending many governments have gone to in order to house, feed, and clothe illegals.

Becker argued for a binding price floor. Here is how a price floor works graphically. We have price floors in many commodity goods already in America, so this is not foreign.

For a price floor to work, it must be set slightly above the market equilibrium price.

For instance, if the minimum wage in a particular state is $12, and a company would like to pay their employees $14 per hour, this is not an issue—this is not a binding price floor. Conversely, if a company would like to pay employees $10, this will not work, because that amount is lower than the price floor—in this case, it is a binding price floor.

In other words, if you start at a price of, say, $50, and then keep lowering the price, which price do you hit first? If you arrive at the price floor price first, that means it is binding. And if you arrive at the equilibrium price first, this means the price floor is not binding.

The other factor driving the marketplace for immigration is the number of green cards and HB-1 visas that are available. That creates some scarcity. Scarcity creates incentives for buyers and sellers to bid/offer above the floor.

If every country adopted Becker’s idea, there would be a competitive market for immigration among countries. The UK and the US would compete in the open market for immigrants. Immigrants would be empowered with choice, which would help derive a better market-driven price. That concept is not dissimilar from US states having different laws and tax schemes.

Competition for immigration is going to force a country to create a desirable place for people to emigrate to. There is not a lot of demand to immigrate to China or North Korea for obvious reasons. No one is knocking down the door to immigrate to Russia.

Another layer of incentives in the market is who pays? Who should pay the price? The immigrant? The employer?

The answer is we don’t care. All we care about is that the price they pay is market-driven at or above the binding price floor. Critics will say we are encouraging “slavery”. An employer could pay 100% of the price, and the immigrant would be tied to that employer with no recourse. If an employer pays for education, aren’t employees similarly tied?

Suppose ABC Company pays for an immigrant to come to the US. They pay $125,000. Assume the terms of the payment mean the immigrant has to work for the ABC company for 5 years. Again, we don’t care about those terms because the immigrant will negotiate them with the company privately. We assume that the immigrant is a pretty smart and valuable employee if the company is willing to pay that kind of cost to get them. There is nothing predatory about it. The immigrant could stay in their home country or perhaps emigrate to another country.

The immigrant comes and works for ABC.

They are working and hear about a better opportunity with the XYZ company. What happens? Are they precluded from going to work for XYZ because of their prior contract with ABC? No.

The immigrant could negotiate with XYZ to pay off ABC and then take the new job. ABC and XYZ would negotiate. Again, everyone is bargaining in their self-interest, so the market works. No government regulation needed.

Of course, immigrants would be subject to background checks. No one wants to unknowingly bring in terrorists. People who truly are at risk in their own countries and need asylum would be an exception as well.

In the linked piece above, they added this wrinkle. What about low-skilled workers? With HB-1 visas, we think about highly skilled workers.

But what about low-skilled workers? Our economy needs these kinds of workers too, but it is unlikely that a would-be low-skilled immigrant would ever pay $50,000 for citizenship. After all, that fee is many times greater than the earning advantage the immigrant would reasonably expect from coming to the U.S. in the first place. The Becker/Lazear plan is mindful of this too. It proposes allowing immigrants to enter the country on a temporary basis by paying an annual fee rather than purchasing outright citizenship at the high cost. A guest worker program could fit into this temporary migrant category, allowing low-skill immigrants who do not have the means (or desire) to pay $50,000 for citizenship to still enter the country and work. This would be good for immigrants, and good for the U.S. economy.

Where does the payment for immigration go? It goes to the US Treasury. It will pay down debt.

Creating a market for immigration will also not strain local public services. Data shows that HB-1 visa immigrants do not access welfare or other government transfer payments. Many of them send money home, which helps their family raise their standard of living in their home country. Creating a marketplace is not only a net positive for the United States and its treasury but also for the world.

Illegal immigration and open borders stink. You cannot have open borders and a welfare state.

You must give Trump credit for being on the right track by setting a high price to get an HB-1 visa. But, he needs to carry the ball over the goal line and just blow the entire idea of traditional immigration up. Embrace the free market and structure it so it works.

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Jimmy Kimmel Was A Victim of Capitalism, NOT Censorship

Facts Matter

Jimmy Kimmel thought he’d become the “free speech martyr”. What an incredibly stupid person. He exemplified his intellect. The beauty of free market capitalism is that it often is transparent, so everyone can see!

I wrote about the differences between capitalism and totalitarianism here.

Let’s lay out the facts of this case.

1. Charlie Kirk was murdered in cold blood by a transperson, or at a minimum, a person in love with a transperson. It might have been a murder carried out by a group of people. We don’t know yet. It’s possible they were influenced or active in ANTIFA. ANTIFA has been a terrorist organization, and now it is official.

2. An old man distracted everyone at the scene. He made it so the shooter could get away more easily. That old man turns out to be a crank from the far left wing who agitated before. It also turns out he possesses kiddie porn photos on his computer. It’s not the grandkids in the bath. Was he part of the conspiracy? We don’t know, but you might assume he was given the other facts we know about the case.

3. Jimmy Kimmel went on his late-night program and said Kirk was shot by a MAGA person. It was an obvious lie. The facts above were basically known by anyone who could read.

4. The ABC airwaves are government-owned spectrum. Because the spectrum is owned by the government and ABC leases it, they have to comply with standards. The government has control over property rights. As we know, in a capitalistic system, property rights with a clear objective legal system are key. They allow for negotiation to happen.

5. The cable system is different. Cable is owned by the operators. It’s private, not public spectrum. Hence, it doesn’t have to follow the same rules as networks on the public spectrum.

6. Kimmel wasn’t cancelled like others for his past actions.

This is when capitalism takes over. It’s also a perfect illustration of how we all have rights given to us by our Creator, but we aren’t free from the consequences of exercising those rights.

I also want to highlight the difference between cancel culture and what happened to Kimmel.

Cancel culture digs up old stuff. It finds a fragment of a statement. It finds an old photo. It manufactures that finding and applies the rules for radicals of the hard left wing. The person is isolated and fired. The cancelers try to rally the culture to make it so that the person is never able to even work again.

Remember, Megyn Kelly was cancelled. Dave Chappelle. Tucker Carlson. Perhaps you might recall Chuckie Schumer telling Fox to fire Tucker. Rush Limbaugh was consistently under attack.

There are plenty of others. PLENTY. So many, I can’t name them all. There are also plenty of others whom we don’t know about. Fired from their jobs. They weren’t famous. They weren’t powerful. They had to take it.

I have been a victim of it twice. One I cannot talk about. One I can. The Biden SEC targeted me because I wrote a blog post about the Let’s Go Brandon meme token. They found a sympathetic lawyer to file a civil suit as well. That lawyer didn’t do his research. It cost me a pretty penny in legal fees to get out from under it, and there was no recourse.

Spare me the martyrdom, Kimmel, you lowlife.

ABC executives said yesterday that the FCC DID NOT PRESSURE THEM TO FIRE KIMMEL. DID NOT.

You know who did? The capitalistic system. The affiliates that own the stations went to ABC and said they wouldn’t carry the show anymore.

Here is another fact. Kimmel’s ratings were so bad that cat memes on X do better. He wasn’t funny. He sucked. The free market was showing up. No one watched. In television, when no one watches, you can’t get a lot of advertising revenue. No ad revenue, no TV show.

Hence, Jimmy got fired. Happens.

Here is a conspiracy theory for you:

ABC execs had already spoken to Kimmel about his shitty ratings. He knew he was on the chopping block, and he saw Colbert get fired. Colbert’s ratings were better than Kimmel’s by quite a bit. Colbert’s show was losing $40MM per year.

Kimmel knew he had to do something. But he knew he was tapped out. He had nothing to bring to the table anymore for his show. Hence, his out was to force a firing and become a free speech martyr by doing it.

He lied about Charlie Kirk’s murder.

Only feeble-minded people believe that he is a martyr. They aren’t looking at data and facts.

Now what happens? In a capitalistic society, Jimmy gets a chance to start over. He could do a podcast. If he is good, he will get a following. If he gets a following, advertisers and he can make some money. If not, it fails again and tries something else.

After getting cancelled, Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson started podcasts and are largely successful by all accounts.

Don Lemon was a total disaster on CNN. He got fired, not cancelled. He started a podcast. No one listens because he isn’t entertaining. He brings nothing to the table.

Kimmel can try to start his own gig. Take some risk. Enjoy the benefits if he’s successful, and if he is not, fail and learn. Try again.

Capitalism beats socialism every single time.

So GFY Jimmy Kimmel. Stop lying. Grow up and see if you have a pair.

The Messiness of Capitalism is a Strength, and Weakness

There Is No Order

Younger people in America are chagrined with “capitalism”. Many are looking to socialism because it is dressed up in words that make it sound great. The US Federal government has destabilized our capitalistic society with many of the policies it has instilled, going back to the New Deal.

Policies before the New Deal could be damaging to capitalism, but could also be repealed. The New Deal ushered in the unelected bureaucrat and credentialed experts. The New Deal birthed the NGO movement. Instead of looking to ourselves to solve problems and innovate, society looked to the government.

The Great Depression was a massive shock and upheaval to societies across the world, not just the US. As Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz uncovered in their research, the cause of the Great Depression wasn’t “capitalism”; it was government. Not only was the gold standard a problem, but the Federal Reserve was the problem.

Today, people point to the Smoot-Hawley tariffs. That’s because they want to fight Trump on tariffs. The Smoot-Hawley Act did have an effect, but not nearly the same effect as being on the gold standard or the inaction by the US Federal Reserve Bank.

Here is an old video of Uncle Miltie describing how the gold standard destabilized world markets.

In 1972, we went off the gold standard, and the free market began to set the relative values of currency. Today, people pine for the old gold standard because they think is was more “stable,” but as you can see from the video, it’s not.

The free market can absorb shocks and twists and turns far better than a precious metal.

But the free market is very messy. It can’t be predicted with any regularity. Totalitarian, centrally planned-type systems are very orderly and predictable.

What’s the price?

If you ask the free market, it doesn’t know. Someone has to decide what they are willing to pay, and someone has to decide what they are willing to sell something for.

If you ask the centrally planned totalitarian market, you know the price. But, because that price is decided on by a central planner, the price might not reflect the actual supply and demand in the market. Shortages and surpluses happen.

We see that with rent control, which is a very popular program among the socialists and Marxists running our cities in the US today. “Free college” is another program the socialists love. “Free health care” is another. Of course, if something is free, we know what happens.

• It’s not very valuable or desirable, so no one wants it, and there is a surplus.

• It’s a hook to get you to pay for something else

• Shortages happen, and you can’t actually get the “free” stuff

When it’s free and desirable, only the powerful or wealthy can access it.

Totalitarians and central planners love to instill chaos. They like to make people suffer. Why? Because amidst all the chaos and suffering, they can bring order to a chaotic world. They can do it quickly.

People who are hurting want the suffering to stop. They will latch onto the totalitarian because the totalitarian can make it stop quickly. The totalitarian takes power and immediately finds a boogeyman to blame the chaos on. They get rid of the boogeyman. But, things don’t actually get better for the normal person who initially latched onto the totalitarian’s promises.

The central planners need and find a new boogeyman.

Suppose Hitler had been successful and murdered all the Jews in Europe? Do you think he would have stopped? No. Look at what Castro did in Cuba. Stalin murdered millions in the USSR. Mao and the current communist party in China have murdered millions. North Korea has murdered millions. They need the boogeyman and find them.

There is little to no private property. Central planners decide. There is no rule of law. Central planners decide or judges rule on the emotion of the day. One day you can be leading your life in a socialist system, the next day you can be imprisoned.

There is no real trust in a centrally planned system. People don’t trust each other and sometimes spy on each other. The East German Stasi were just like the Karen’s from Covid.

Totalitarianism has an endpoint. It isn’t self-perpetuating. It can only sustain itself through violence and walls.

Capitalism is not like that. It’s messy. It can’t be controlled. Capitalism takes a long time to find an answer, and sometimes never finds a final answer. However, the answers it finds are more democratic and far-reaching than any totalitarian system. People say capitalism is not “fair”, but what’s fair?

Fairness is all subjective. It’s not objective. Capitalism is objective.

Capitalism doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you look like, or who you know. It’s merit-based. Solve a problem in an innovative way, and you can earn a lot of money.

Capitalism is flexible. It can sustain a shock and come back. A field gets burned to the ground, and capitalism replants it, tends it, and it becomes green again. Capitalism sometimes burns its own field! That’s called creative destruction. Creative destruction is a core component of capitalism. Central planners hate creative destruction because it is disorder, and it burns down structures that they have built to build walls and maintain power.

Another core tenet of capitalism is private property rights. When you have private property, the owners of that property can decide what to do with it. They can bargain with other owners, and the market will decide the best use of it.

Capitalism relies on a predictable, repeatable rule of law. Judges don’t rule indiscriminately. The rules of the game are clear. Violate them, and there are consequences.

Capitalism feeds on itself. Success breeds more success. There will always be people in a capitalistic society at the bottom. They will have less.

But their lives will be 100 times better than any totalitarian system. In addition, they can always change their lot in life without any permission from an overruling authority.

I think capitalism is much maligned in the US academic system. Certainly, the Teacher’s Unions don’t promote it and will denigrate it. No surprise because their incentive is for central planning and more bureaucracy.

Their thrust to dismantle capitalism has bred a legion of young people who are turning away from it. They are turning away because they don’t understand it. They don’t know how to participate in it. They have been told it is unfair, and they don’t know what to do about it.

Growing up, I never thought Americans could elect and embrace a communist. But here we are. It makes me sad. The New Deal and the bastardization of what freedom actually means by FDR and his administration have led us to this point.

Charlie Kirk was a strident voice that flew in the face of all that. He was educating his generation and waking them up. He was a voice in the wilderness. That is another reason his murder is so sad.

The other sadness is what’s going to happen now. It’s already happening. Walter Kirn laid it out on X. Here is a link to a longer blog post he wrote that helps explain his tweet.

Here's how this will play out, here's the meta-script, and please don't laugh it off. How this all started is not how it will end. A story that began with a clear traditional moral shape, an innocent victim, a vile perpetrator, will be transformed using secondary characters, new revelations, and other dramatic elements into its very opposite -- a story of forbidden love, persecution by religious bigots, a poignantly rebellious heartfelt protest against a World that Doesn't Understand. There will then be a total split, far deeper than mere "politics," between the segments of the public that were captivated by two incommensurate tragedies.

The US State Department funded the organization that murdered Charlie Kirk.

Freedom from Fear, Freedom of Religion, Freedom from Want, Freedom of Speech…. Two of those are not objective and cannot be sustained.

FDR is revered and remembered as a great president. I do not concur. A lot of the problems and unfairness we see in America today can be traced back to FDR and Woodrow Wilson.

We need to embrace the Capitalist Pig in America. Do not butcher and disembowel it.