Bill Weisberg

Whatever

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

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 They are the places where the market has already been replaced by the state.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.

[Bill Weisberg @BillWeisberg]

Hello. Going to try posting my random thoughts on sports, business, books, current events. Wish me luck.

[Mike P @mikepat711]

Both political parties are constantly online trying to convince you that some insane crisis wild shit is going on, and you’ve gotta vote for them to stop it. But you go outside and it’s just people being mostly nice to each other and working on their own shit and doesn’t look anything like any of the crazy shit either side wants you to believe is going down everywhere.

The only way to do politics is look at policy bulletpoints and vote for whichever you want. Listening to any of them campaign is almost totally worthless.

[Marc Randolph @marcrandolph]

Building Netflix taught me that your first idea is rarely your best idea.

We started mailing DVDs, not streaming movies.

Stay married to the problem you’re solving, not the solution you THINK will solve it.

[NO CONTEXT HUMANS @HumansNoContext]

He drinks redbull in his sleep

[Arjun Khemani @arjunkhemani]

.@naval: Marxism, besides denying human incentives, also has a problem where it just assumes that everything is finite and we're all just dividing up the same small set of things.

Well, the cavemen didn't have color TVs, computers, cars, antibiotics, or medicine. They were not sitting around dividing up the same few things.

The knowledge grows, and we create more. It also tends to assume that we can freeze frame at some point in society and say, 'Well, we have enough different kinds of sneakers, enough different kinds of housing, we just need to allocate it better.' And that is not how anything works.

@DavidDeutschOxf has a great definition of wealth, which he says is the set of physical transformations that we can affect.

So, when you think about it that way, you realize that knowledge is not just stored capital in the classic Marxist sense (capital vs. labor), but it's also knowledge on what to do with that capital.

The cavemen or Palaeolithic ancestors had access to all the same resources we did. They were living on the same Earth, and by the modern environmentalist arguments, they had a better Earth—they had more to do things with.

But yet, they couldn't do anything. They were not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. Why? Because of knowledge.

Life is not a zero-sum game, it's a positive-sum game. But we are hardwired to think it's a zero-sum game because, for millions or billions of years, there was no such thing as wealth. There was no such thing as persistent knowledge creation in the environment.

What you had was a small amount of resources being divided up, and most of the games were status games—'Which monkey outranks which other monkey?' And that decides which monkey gets to eat first. We played that game for a billion years.

Now, we come onto a recent game where, actually, we can all eat, and the big problem is obesity. It's no longer starvation. The big problem is boredom. It's not actually work. There's enough work.

So, in this environment, switching your evolved mindset from a zero-sum game to a positive-sum game where we can all win, if we create knowledge together and use the resources that we have to create more resources and more wealth, that's the game we all need to be playing now.

[Richard Barry @irishchink]

MUST WATCH 👇

Mike Benz is the GOAT of uncovering corruption 🔥🔥🔥

[Bill Weisberg @BillWeisberg]

@AndrewPerpetua Ł mm in nmłl l only

[Piers Morgan @piersmorgan]

This clip from an old CNN interview I did with President Clinton is worth watching again in the context of why President Trump believes he can trust Putin when it comes to personal assurances, and why he may be reluctant to attack him in public:

[Bill Weisberg @BillWeisberg]

@TheStormRedux @howardlutnick Good stuff.

[TheStormHasArrived @TheStormRedux]

Do yourself a favor and bookmark this. When you have 15 minutes, watch this interview Commerce Secretary @howardlutnick.

He is a genius businessman. He brilliantly explains exactly how President Trump is going to make America greater than ever before.

The Golden Age is near 🇺🇸

[Nature is Amazing ☘️ @AMAZlNGNATURE]

This is why I pay for the internet

[Bari Weiss @bariweiss]

"Is Donald Trump a “dictator”? Did the events of January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C., constitute an “insurgency”?

Is Joe Biden “sharp as a tack”?

Is the science of climate change “settled”?

Are Javier Milei of Argentina, Marine Le Pen of France, and the AfD party in Germany “far right”?

Is the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis a “conspiracy theory”? Was the persistence of the virus a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”? Does Anthony Fauci “represent science”?

Does Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, “promote hatred”? Do “fact-checkers” check facts?

Let’s ask a question about these questions: Why on Earth were we placed in a position of having to answer them?

In an open society, perspectives on reality confront one another in forceful competition. Each may contain some particle of truth—or at least some useful information.

So even the flat-earthers are allowed their say. Even the Bigfoot-seekers appear on the Discovery Channel. Somewhere among the nonsense, there may be something worth hearing.

Because we don’t precisely know where or when, the conversation is never over.

A vast diversity of perspectives should be promoted within an open society. It’s the intellectual equivalent of hybrid vigor.

If we all think alike, a single fatal error, being shared by all, could destroy the world.

These precepts are not original. They have long been part of the American DNA. The default, for us, has always been debate.

When certain subjects, like slavery, were made taboo and removed from the possibility of discussion, towering figures arose and terrible conflicts were fought to restore the balance.

However, the past four years have seen a sustained effort to overturn the principles of the open society. The just-departed administration, of which Biden was the decrepit figurehead, tried to impose, by threat or mandate, a version of reality that brooked no discussion.

Supported by its allies in the media, the academy, and the bureaucracy, the administration became, in its own eyes, the guardian of truth."

[Dr Jordan B Peterson @jordanbpeterson]

A new round of polling shows that Americans in fact agree on a shocking amount of topics -- everything from the environment to immigration and more. @GreggHurwitz walks us through some stunning polls showing that people aren’t as polarized as we’re constantly led to believe. Watch below.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

https://t.co/nshV5KJ7sI