James McArthur

For a free American republic powered by laissez-faire capitalism, the only socio-economic system that respects individual rights. Student of Objectivism.

[John Aziz @aziz0nomics]

The Gulf States were attacked over and over by Iran during this war, by the way.

Making them invest in Iran's reconstruction is absolutely violent blackmail.

You are rewarding terrorism, JD Vance. You support terrorism.

[James McArthur @D0LLARSIGNZ]

@DrNeilStone Vance is nothing but a political chameleon.

[Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump]

The deal with Iran will go down as one of the most incompetent ever made. The U.S. lost on virtually every point. We just don't win anymore!

[Noa Tishby @noatishby]

⚠️ WARNING: Three of America's most senior national security officials, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, have reportedly expressed serious doubt that Tehran is negotiating in good faith, citing intelligence that Iran's intentions don't align with its commitments.

[Bryan Caplan @bryan_caplan]

If you violently object to anything I say, please remain my friend anyway.

I value your friendship and hope to change your mind one day.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

The communist pitch:

"Give up your freedom so the government can control your life, earnings, property, and choices."

Then, after handing that power away:

"Trust us, we'll use that authority to give you freedom."

It's the political equivalent of handcuffing someone and promising it will make them more independent.

[The Rational Animal 🤔 @theobjectivist]

I appreciate the direct response, Congressman @RoKhanna. You've raised a real question, so let me answer it seriously.

You're partly right, and I'll grant it fully: the Founders who established a government to protect individual rights performed an achievement no inventor can match, because they built the precondition for every other achievement. Jefferson and the framers created the framework of liberty. Lincoln preserved it and extended its promise to those wrongly denied it. On that we agree. The statesman who secures freedom is a hero of the highest order.

But notice the distinction that matters. Those men are great precisely to the degree they protected liberty, not to the degree they exercised power. The Founders' greatness was in handing power back. Lincoln's was in ending a violation of rights, slavery, the gravest in our history.

That is why FDR doesn't belong with them. He did the opposite. He expanded the state at the expense of the freedom the Founders secured: seizing gold under threat of prison, attempting to pack the Court, building the apparatus that treats your earnings as the government's to allocate. He used power; he didn't restrain it.

And here is the deeper point. You frame it as Rockefeller and Musk versus the statesmen, as if they compete. They don't. The statesman's whole purpose is to protect the conditions, namely individual rights, in which the producer can create.

The Founders, along with Locke and Aristotle, built the house. Musk, Rockefeller, Bezos, and Vanderbilt are examples of what free men do inside it.

If you fully understood the principle of individual rights, you would be fighting against men and women like Warren, AOC, Sanders, and the rest of these collectivist statists in both parties, instead of advocating ideas that deprive individuals of the very rights you claim to honor.

[James McArthur @D0LLARSIGNZ]

@cboyack It's referred to as "progressive oversight".

[Mina Sam @MinaRahgozaran]

@mikepompeo Precisely!

[Ben DiFrancesco @BenDiFrancesco]

Elon Musk is now worth $1.3 Trillion dollars and he's using it to build a sustainable economy in space. What a waste. If that money was given to the government instead, we could build 4.5 miles of high speed rail 20 years from now.

[James McArthur @D0LLARSIGNZ]

@Mylovanov Someday soon...

[Robert Spencer @jihadwatchRS]

Yes, he did.

[Handre @Handre]

They told you Obamacare would discipline the insurance giants. Force them to compete. Drive down premiums through the magic of an online marketplace with a clean government website.

Then you watched the website crash in October 2013, and you watched UnitedHealth, Aetna, and Anthem post record profits while your deductible climbed past $6,000.

Here is what the exchanges actually built. The law forced you to buy a product under penalty of the individual mandate, then handed the insurers a fountain of taxpayer cash to make the product look affordable. Premium tax credits flowed straight to the carriers, not to you. In 2017 the federal government paid roughly $42 billion in subsidies, and that money landed in corporate accounts. The cost-sharing reduction payments did the same thing. The risk corridor program promised to backstop insurer losses outright, which is to say it socialized the downside while the executives kept the upside. Guaranteed customers. Guaranteed revenue. A captive market created by statute. Any cartel in history would have killed for terms like that.

Free market economists have a plain name for this arrangement: rent-seeking. When a firm earns its money by extracting subsidies through political channels instead of by serving customers who choose freely, it stops being a business and becomes a tax farmer. The insurers lobbied for the mandate because they understood the arithmetic better than the voters did. America's Health Insurance Plans spent millions backing the bill, then acted shocked when premiums on the individual market more than doubled between 2013 and 2017 in many states. They were not the victims of the law. They wrote the parts that mattered.

Strip away the subsidy and the whole structure collapses, because the prices were never real prices. A real price emerges when a buyer who can walk away meets a seller who can lose the sale. The exchange killed both conditions. You could not walk away without a penalty, and the seller could not lose because Washington covered the gap. This is not a market. The people who keep calling it one are counting on you not noticing who cashes the check.

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

Tommy Robinson has just walked out of court with a victory that is already being called one of the most explosive free-speech moments in Britain.

The terrorism-related case against him — linked to his refusal to hand over his phone PIN to UK police — was thrown out after the judge ruled the stop unlawful and reportedly said Robinson had been targeted because of his political views.

This was not just about a phone. This was about power, politics, journalism, and whether the state can treat someone like a national security threat simply because it dislikes what they say.

Robinson says he refused to unlock his phone to protect journalistic sources. The state treated it as a terrorism matter. The court, according to Robinson’s reaction, saw something far more disturbing: political targeting.

Then came the detail that made the story explode worldwide: **Elon Musk reportedly helped finance Robinson’s legal defense**, stepping in where others stayed silent and turning the case into a global battle over free expression. Robinson thanked Musk publicly, asking why it had taken an American businessman to fight for justice in Britain.

“First of all, thank you, Elon Musk,” Robinson said, before adding that he was targeted because of his political beliefs and that counterterrorism police were allegedly used to get access to his phone as a journalist.

For supporters, this ruling is a brutal warning to the establishment: if terrorism powers can be used against controversial speech today, who will be next tomorrow? Critics will still call Robinson divisive, but this case has forced a bigger question onto the table — do rights only apply to people the government likes?

[James McArthur @D0LLARSIGNZ]

@MorEdge_Insight @VP This much promotion for a "deal" that hasn't yet been made public tells you all you need to know about Trump's sellout, and the fact that Rubio has disappeared virtually proves it.

[euronews @euronews]

"Trump got played like a violin."

Trump's former national security adviser @AmbJohnBolton blasts the US president, saying he was "manoeuvred" and "desperate" to get a deal with Iran: "It's very bad for the US. Iran got what they want."

On #EuropeToday:

[The Rational Animal 🤔 @theobjectivist]

@NouveaT53568 makes the same error as most so I'll answer this for anyone else who's interested.

I see the difference. It is real but not essential, and that distinction matters.

You're right that Obama's deal was never enforced and Iran cheated freely. And you're right that Trump did real military damage where Obama did nothing. Grant both fully.

But ask what that damage was for. You don't spend a "chance of a lifetime," a regime on its knees, its military and infrastructure shattered, in order to sign a 60-day framework that reopens its oil, hands it sanctions waivers, and defers the entire nuclear question to talks later. You finish it. The destruction was the leverage to end the threat permanently, and he is trading it away at the moment of maximum advantage.

So the difference between the two deals shrinks to this: Obama empowered a healthy regime, Trump is rescuing a broken one. In both cases the enemy survives to rebuild. And it will rebuild, fast, with Chinese and Russian help, the moment Trump is gone. The morally exhausted culture we live in will do nothing to stop it. Maybe the Israelis will.

Which brings you to the only question that matters, the one no one defending this will answer honestly: why do we need a deal at all? You don't negotiate with an enemy you've already beaten. You dictate terms, or you finish him. A deal here doesn't secure the victory. It forfeits it.

[Handre @Handre]

The Berlin Wall was built to trap East German citizens inside their supposed workers' paradise, not to keep enemies out. East German authorities erected it in 1961 because their system had already failed: when you need barbed wire and machine guns to prevent people from leaving, you've admitted as much.

By 1961, over 2.7 million East Germans had fled to the West through Berlin. The exodus included doctors, engineers, skilled workers, and intellectuals. Brain drain doesn't begin to capture the hemorrhaging. The East German economy was collapsing as productive people voted with their feet against socialism. Walter Ulbricht's government faced a choice: reform the system or build a prison. They chose the prison.

You can see the same pattern everywhere socialism takes hold. Cuba builds rafts. North Koreans risk execution to cross the DMZ. Venezuelans walk thousands of miles to escape Maduro's paradise. The pattern never changes because the economics never change. When the state controls production, innovation dies. When bureaucrats set prices, shortages multiply. When politicians promise equality, they deliver poverty equally.

The Wall stood for 28 years as the perfect symbol of socialism in practice. Guards shot 140 people trying to escape between 1961 and 1989. Each death proved the same point: people will risk everything to escape centralized planning. They will climb walls, dig tunnels, and hide in car trunks to reach free markets.

Ludwig von Mises warned in 1922 that socialist calculation was impossible without market prices. Every socialist experiment since has required walls, gulags, or killing fields to function. The Berlin Wall was just socialism being honest about what it really takes to make paradise work.

[Phil Magness @PhilWMagness]

Fun fact: for many years Florida State University operated a radical Marxist student group called the Center for Participant Education.

It was university-subsidized and given office space on campus...which they promptly decorated with Stalin posters.

[Anti Kommunistic @antikommunistic]

I don’t post against communism because it’s unpopular as an ideology.

I post against communism because history matters.