James Hare

Missionary at FOCUS
2 Corinthians 4:7-11
I run in circles a lot
Pitt T&F/XC/ChemE '18 My House '14

[James Hare @jhareruns]

How I feel during cross country lifts, then seeing another team start moving a lot more weight....

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

If you want to talk about affordability for real, especially where Gen Z is concerned, or if you want to wax psychotic about debt, especially to Gen Z audiences, you have to talk about their real anchor issue, which is student loan debt.

To do this, you have to talk about the absolute failure of government manipulation of the higher education market and how our universities didn't just transform ideologically but also sold out generations because of sweet, sweet government-backed monies.

I'm actually light on the details of this story but can paint impressionistically. I've read better detailed breakdowns, and so can you. That's my disclaimer here. I'm painting with broad strokes.

The biggest important change in this story is that in the 1990s under Bill Clinton's tenure, the federal government decided to underwrite federal student loans in order to try to get a lot more people to go to college. This opened a gigantic can of worms.

The direct effect of this policy was that while private lenders would originate the loans, the federal government would assume their risk of losses. Risk of losses is the primary incentive lenders have for not making bad loans, so the federal government stepped in and removed that rather important market incentive.

Prior to this, to get a student loan might require you to convince the lender that you were a good bet to repay that loan, that your education was actually a solid investment in your future (economically, not spiritually or whatever). You might have to convince them that you were likely to be a good student and choosing a solid major whose graduates make enough money to pay back the loans if you wanted one.

After this, you pretty much just had to fill out the paperwork. YOLO!

What, exactly, was in this can of worms? Something like the total destruction of our society in thirty years, or thereabouts.

It's actually difficult to know where to start, but the financial situation is probably the easiest one. What actually happened is that a lot more people intended to go to college, and colleges had to (or at least were incentivized to) make expansions to absorb them. That sounds reasonable enough, but it turns out to have been a disaster.

Lurking in the background of this problem, by the way, is that by the 1990s, we've already seen a dramatic leftward shift of the university as an institution. There are lots of dumb Leftist majors that amount to anti-Americanism (Critical Theory of a dozen or so stripes, to expand to many more). Faculty that were tipping strongly Left or already captured Leftists (e.g., colleges of education).

Absorbing these students required a few things. Some were infrastructure changes: you needed to be able to house them, sit them in classrooms, etc. Others were administrative changes; they needed managing. Some were actually shifts in curriculum emphases: a lot of these kids weren't cut out to major in engineering, pre-med, or even business, and these weird boutique majors (many strongly Leftist activist majors) started to fill up and expand. Remember: no one has to prove to the lender that they're majoring in something with good career prospects anymore to get that money.

The tuition rates started to climb massively mostly as a result of the first two changes, and far more infrastructure than administration. As it turns out, the colleges were catering primarily to 17-year-olds who were picking a school and trying to retain upward to maybe 22-year-olds. This is not an age demographic, especially by the later 1990s, that was famously known for choosing colleges based on academic priorities, career priorities, etc. In fact, they mostly select colleges based on anything BUT academics and future employability, especially when the incoming base is expanded to include potentially roughly everyone.

They want football, fun, nice dorms, student services, gyms, modernized facilities, etc., and those features became the primary elements by which colleges started to compete with one another for attracting and keeping students. Rather than focusing on having a solid engineering department that produces graduates with high percentages of job placement, administration knew it could attract more of these students (and federally underwritten dollars) by building $20M fitness centers and $50M semi-luxury dorm complexes, even while it couldn't do much to improve the strength of the most solid departments. Besides, most of these kids weren't going to major in the hard stuff anyway.

Just as an aside here, a positively post-Boomer cultural current that seems in every respect reasonable and good fed this problem massively, too. That is the belief that "you need to go to college to get a good job," which is the reasonable extension of the climb out of being a largely working-class society into being a largely middle-class (or "bourgeois") society. Nobody works their ass off in a hard factory environment to give their kids the same opportunity. Nobody. Over time, this current at the level of 17-year-olds turned into "college is just the next thing you do after high school," with no clear connection or ambition to make it a genuine, smart career decision for people who are actually cut out for it. It's just the next thing you stumble into and through in an extended adolescence, at least for a sizeable fraction of these people.

Many of them stumbled into college into their favored majors, some with an eye on that "good job" they went to college to get, only to find out math is really hard and there's still a college degree at the end of the new Women's Studies department. Others majored in something productive enough but in total ignorance of the actual job market on the other side (I remember a 2010 NPR report about this problem in veterinary medicine, which at the time was producing 11 very debt-saddled graduates for every full-employment job the market could absorb). Colleges did absolutely nothing, for all their increasingly sprawling administrations, to address the realities of career counseling and instead just encouraged the kids to come major in whatever they want as long as they pay tuition and don't drop out.

In servicing these natural but ultimately adolescent mismatched priorities of 17-year-olds who had no reason whatsoever at the time to fear an unaffordable future, the colleges and universities actually accrued INSANE amounts of long-term mortgage debt at this time to fund the rapid building of all these new, ultimately "necessary luxury," infrastructure expansions, which locked them into NEEDING, not just wanting, that money. Hundreds of millions of dollars was typical. They were betting the quasi-monopoly money would just keep flowing approximately forever by making these investments. Tuition rose in response, pretty much without any natural control on it because every student could find a federally underwritten loan that provided the lender no risk (but left the student with all the debt).

That is, the adults in the room, who would be the government, mortgage lenders, and university upper administrations, took absolutely no action whatsoever that could be regarded as responsible by any real metric. The government collapsed an incentive ecosystem based on some idiotic vision of the Mondialist "experts," and everyone else just followed the broken incentives.

Those whackjob Critical majors, meanwhile, rapidly expanded with these new inept students, filling the universities with an activist generation and recruitment system that basically transformed the whole university from the inside out, both at the level of faculty and student. These people need surprisingly high levels of administration and demanded it, in like kind. The transformation of our universities into Woke seminaries is more or less fully on the back of this student loan decision.

Tuition costs rose at an average rate of 2-8x inflation because of this government-created bubble which loaded debt onto students who would struggle to carry it for the rest of their lives by removing the incentive to be responsible from the lenders. Textbook companies wanted in on the gravy train and started jacking up the prices of books, which loans also covered. These two sectors are the second and third highest in price increases in the entire economy (after hospital care) since 2000.

The really evil part of this, by the way, is that the federal government wasn't creating a taxpayer-funded subsidy, a.k.a. "free money," in the usual sense. It was actually creating something infinitely worse. The students themselves, as is morally right in the narrow sense, would shoulder their own debt, which they'd have unlimited access to because the lenders were absolved of their natural lending risks. The universities pocketed all this money, but they even outspent themselves.

So, speaking of the universities going Woke, it gets worse. The corner the universities had painted themselves into while saddling our two youngest adult generations with terrible debt and lying to them about their career prospects to keep the money flowing was so tight that they couldn't afford to lose students.

By 2005 or so, this was something like a crisis situation for the universities' budgets, even though tuition had exploded in ways that made people's heads spin. The "better student services" competition to attract and keep students didn't stop: it became even more crucial and reckless (in a way, it reminds me in microcosm of the Great Leap Forward recklessness).

Universities started doing anything they could, as my own administrators put it, to "keep students in," "don't lose their scholarships for them with bad grades," and "keep their morale up." That included padding grades, requiring service-level courses to just kind of pass people and turn a mostly blind eye, and, maybe most consequentially, administratively caving in to every histrionic demand from the increasing numbers of inconsolable, insatiable activist lunatics that were filling campus on all three levels: student, faculty, and administration (but here, particularly students backed by the other two).

That is, after this point, if third-wave feminists started carrying mattresses around campus to protest "rape culture" after being embarrassed by an awkward drunk hookup the day after the fact, the university had to go DEFCON-2 to fix the problem. The rapid proliferation of DEI offices, and the likes, is more or less directly attributable to this, with all attendant problems. Not being able to afford to lose those 3% of most cantankerous students plus the political-demographic shift of student, faculty, and administration that had already occurred to service all those ridiculous fake (Critical) majors, classes, and programs became a major pressure.

The result meant hiring LOTS more administrators to manage this demonic wildfire, which drove up costs, which were passed along through tuition hikes, which were still paid for by these federally underwritten student loans that worked like monopoly money on the one hand while saddling the increasingly unhireable students with completely real debt at the same time.

This all spiraled out of control. Bigly.

So what did this decision in the 1990s ultimately cause? Hmm...

1) The ENTIRE student debt crisis and the financial injury or crippling of the two youngest adult generations in America;
2) The lurch by universities into a trap of their own making that could only drive up costs and bring this debt problem to a real crisis level;
3) The fundamental transformation of the university from a place of higher learning and liberal arts education into a factory for producing debt-saddled radical socialist and Woke lunatics;
4) Armies of what Peter Turchin would call "elite overproduction," which is to say a flood of (mostly false) societal elites, many of whom are borderline useless as such or worse, who have completely unbalanced our economic system and who are both rightly and completely wrongly very mad about it and destructive of it as a result;
5) The "affordability crisis" of today;
6) The American Cultural Revolution, nothing less.

I understand that we're 30 years down river from this decision, and I also understand that most of the decisions we made in the meantime as this problem and crisis manifested before us actually made this problem worse rather than fixing the root cause of it, which had become essentially impossible probably within a decade.

See, the universities had become dependent on this money by racking up hundreds of millions in long-term mortgage debt in the initial phases of the gold rush and student-services marketing race, and MANY would likely have bankrupted had we just cut it off, even by, say, 2005 or so. They would be lobbying extremely hard not to be left in this lurch, which they kind of put themselves in but not wholly unreasonably, just imprudently, based on a very foolish decision by the U.S. federal government under very dumb political and cultural assumptions that prevailed in the emerging post-Boomer environment.

So now we're kind of stuck with this set of university monstrosities and two badly wrongly injured generations, all of which are engines of nothing short of Cultural Revolution, even without the shocks of Covid, inflation, Democrat-run housing policy mismanagement, and all the rest. There's no clear way to untie this Gordian knot, and simply cutting it, while that might conceivably be best in the long run, would precipitate a crisis beyond comprehension that might, in fact, be fatal. (It's like a Gordian knot in the aorta of our society, frankly.)

What should be done isn't clear, but weaning off these errors seems to be the only real choice despite there being almost no political will or mechanism for doing so.

Of course, the whole affordability crisis along with the agitation operation known as the Affordability Crisis(TM), are directly downstream of this second-largest and most immediately pertinent problem to the younger generations who are rapidly radicalizing over it, so prospects don't look good here.

I don't have an optimistic, encouraging, hopeful, copeful finish to this one. Our universities sold us down the river in more ways than the obvious one, but the cause was dumb federal policy regarding dumb assumptions about the value and necessity of everyone in a post-industrializing world getting a college degree that most of them didn't actually need or benefit from.

The conclusion of this story is likely to be a short-to-medium-term absolute catastrophe that if we are smart enough now we can weather by building smart alternatives. The shock is going to hit hard, though.

Our mission, which we must accept, is not to let this problem and approaching shock spill over into a successful Cultural Revolution.

I'm praying there are smarter people than I am who can come up with better solutions here. One thing is sure: we have got to get back to our American principles of not having the government muck around too much in crucial economic sectors. The market has to be allowed to do its job, or we all pay for the damage.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

The only correct discourse on the $20 burritos is that nothing like Covid can ever, ever, ever happen again from our government, and the Democrats who drove so much of the inflation cannot be in power again. Gratitude to President Trump for his successes would be nice too.

We all knew this inflation was going to hit and hit hard. We all know where it actually came from. That's why it's so damned galling to see this political chicanery and these attacks against Trump and Republicans when we know exactly where it came from, along with all the lying the post-liberal "Right" is doing to drive the narrative.

It's irritating to hear this line coming from Communists like Hasan Piker and infuriating to hear it from so-called conservatives as though they're being electorally prudent, in-touch, and empathetic. It's bewildering to hear this, among so many other talking points, echoed by radicals on both Left and Right at the same time almost like it's coordinated, this just being the latest example until, say, tomorrow or so.

The narrative they're trying to force on us isn't just disingenuous, manipulative, and agitating (as Lenin used the word), it is to the Left's advantage, pushing all of public discourse onto their home turf. Again, this all while we knew it was coming and we knew who caused it: and it wasn't us.

So why's it happening?

[IMPERATOR @IMPERATORAUS]

In his Summa Theologiae, St Thomas Aquinas laid out one of the most charitable yet practical arguments concerning immigration that effectively shaped the West for almost 1,000 years.

1. Immigration must always be proportionate so that foreigners can properly assimilate into the culture and mode of worship of the state.

2. Citizenship – and associated rights – should only ever be granted after the third generation to preserve the culture, mode of worship, and constitution of the state.

3. The common good of the citizens must remain the highest priority of the state, meaning, the state's obligation to provide aid to its neighbours can never be at the expense of the citizens.

However, Aquinas ends with the sobering reminder that some peoples and states are incompatible with one another, and these must be held as "foes in perpetuity".

[Bill Maher @billmaher]

I'm not voting for anyone who thinks the wrong side won the Cold War or cheers for the Intifada like it's the World Cup.

[The Vigilant Fox 🦊 @VigilantFox]

Bill Maher’s audience audibly gasps when he reads what the Democratic Socialists of America are actually saying out loud:

MAHER: “Trump has told 1 trillion lies, but when he says the DSA are actually COMMUNISTS, that’s not one of them.”

“And it’s not hard to prove it just by quoting the DSA and their candidates.”

“J.D. Vance was on the show, and I told him that if the Democratic Party keeps going in the direction of the DSA, my vote was in play. And all I heard all vacation was, ‘Oh, my God, you’re a Republican now.’ No, that's not what I said. I said in play, and here’s why.”

“Because not a week goes by where I don’t read about some newly chosen, exciting new face in the Democratic Party. And then when that face opens its mouth, the Communist Manifesto or some other crazy shit comes out! Again.”

“Let’s just read the quotes. The DSA platform says: ‘You work as much as you are able and no more than needed.’ If that was any closer to Karl Marx’s dictum, from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, they’d be sued for plagiarism.”

“New York Mayor Mamdani once tweeted, Karl Marx’s words exactly. They’re not trying to hide it. Their most popular influencer, Hasan Piker, thinks communism is so groovy, he laments the fall of two of the most murderous regimes in history, the Soviet Union and Chairman Mao's China.”

“Mamdani's aide, his top aide, Cea Weaver, said, ‘If you don't believe in the government's sacred right to seize property, it's over.’ And ‘impoverish the white middle class.’ What? That's a goal? You know you're supposed to scare people into voting for you, right?”

“One of the new, soon-to-be Democratic congresspeople, Darlesia Chavalier, supports seizing all properties from landlords and said, ‘Seize the means of production.’ Mamdani has said ‘The end goal is seizing the means of production.’ I think they want to seize the means of production.”

“Now, maybe you missed that in school or missed school altogether, but THAT'S COMMUNISM.”

“Now the coalition within the DSA called the Marxist Unity Group is in ascendance. And I must take them at their word. When their words include, ‘Our commitment is to the long-term struggle for a fully liberated classless society. In a word, communism.’”

“What do they have to do, tweet out ‘Elect more communists’? Oh, yeah, Cea Weaver did that.”

[Shows tweet, audience audibly gasps]

“Yes, [she really did that]! ... People gotta realize this is going on.”

[RNC Research @RNCResearch]

Democrats can gaslight Americans all they want, but history is a great teacher.

🎥 How to Spot a Communist, 2026:

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 Sec. Marco Rubio just NAILED IT:

"One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism is that it 'sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice.'"

"That's actually NOT TRUE. Communism does NOT sound good in theory. The world that envisions for all of us is small, flat, gray, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul."

"The world that envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity, or ambition, a world without heroes, or glory, or great causes to strive towards, without a world without miracles, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things."

"And the world communism envisions is a world without God."

"For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievement of our civilization, for them, it's an unbearable humiliation, a reminder of what they cannot do and a reminder of what they cannot be. So they choose instead to destroy." 💯

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

At the end of the day, Communism and all other totalitarian systems are not economic, social, or political theories. In a way, they're all idolatrous false religions, but at their roots are incorrect theories of human nature.

To be clear, Communism is at its foundation an incorrect theory of human nature.

It will therefore never work and will always kill and destroy.

It shares in common with Fascism, other forms of socialism, Nazism, and lots of mondialist and New Age ideologies (think United Nations here) a simple incorrect foundation for human reality.

These all assume humanity is a single organism (or "meta-organism") rather than a ln ecosystem of interacting individuals. All collectivism suffers this fundamental and basic error, so it will all always fail, no matter how it expresses itself (including in theocracies like Islam or Christian tyrannies).

The idea is expressed most clearly in the "corporatism" of Fascism, per Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, posting that the whole society is a single body ("corpus," hence "corporatism"). The institutions are like organs, the individuals like cells, and the state and Party like the central nervous system. Everything works together for a common goal.

Communists see this same model in "the people," who experience "inter-being" or "interdependence," which is the new mondialist and New Age way of putting it, but it's the same thing. We're all cells in a single body run by the state, all working harmoniously for everyone's success.

Weirdo New Age mondialists at the UN like Robert Muller called not just humanity but the entire ecosystem of earth a "meta-organism" whose central nervous system is the UN itself. The UN's purpose as "World Brain," in Muller's vision, is to take control of the future evolution of man and the Earth.

Marx called this "humanization" of man and Nature. The Fascists and Nazis embraced the same project to advance humanity to its next levels of human organization. It's all basically the same. It's also all wrong in basically the same way.

Humanity, and human societies, are not like organisms. They are like ecosystems. The difference is that in a body, all the parts and cells work together by design to support the flourishing of the organism. In an ecosystem, individual entities and parts might cooperate, act symbiotically, compete, or predate.

Dragonflies don't cooperate with mosquitoes; they eat them. And they don't cooperate with bats to eat more mosquitoes more efficiently; they compete in conditions that eventually reach carrying capacities and therefore scarcity.

Your liver, heart, and kidneys do not do this. They serve specialized functions in a single interdependent organism. The fact that ecosystems thrive (or don't) is not the result of organic coordination but a property that emerges (or fails) because of individuals filling various niches, mostly opportunistically.

Collectivist ideologies not only get this wrong but adopt the murderous belief that the people who aren't getting it wrong are the problem. Those people must be bent, broken, or destroyed until they believe or at least stop not believing.

Of course, human beings have a high capacity for collaboration and intentional cooperation, to our mutual benefit, but that doesn't change the basic fact that societies are ecosystem-like. It just explains how we fill our niches. And it doesn't change.

Collectivist ideologies like Communism are therefore wrong theories of human nature, doomed to fail, kill and destroy.

It will not work this time.

You and yours cannot make it work. You cannot crack the code. There's no code to crack, and trying just turns into cracking skulls in pursuit of total failure.

[Chris Arnade 🐢🐱🚌 @Chris_arnade]

Funny thing about the whole red card hub bub is 99% of the world knows FIFA is corrupt — it might be the single thing people across the globe believe and tell you, regardless of if you ask — and then Trump blasts in, without any care, like the kool aid man, and does some small fry FIFA corruption, and everyone is like “Woah . The integrity of the game. It’s gone. It’s ruined forever”

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

So much support for socialism is rooted in flat-out economic ignorance. I find it fun to think through examples of this kind of thing sometimes.

Socialists are pretty diametrically opposed to profit. They see profit as proof of exploitation, that the "owning class" is extracting the surplus value of production for themselves and robbing, if not enslaving, the workers.

There are actually about a million good, common-sense, basic-economics arguments against this stupidity, for example that the owners deserve a (large) share of that surplus because they're shouldering all the risk and responsibility for the company, and this is sound. Most socialists are terrified to become owners, at the end of the day, because they know if it fails, it's all on them.

The profit motive, however, is the literally the magic sauce that unlocks abundance and a high standard of living. To walk through just one simple, real-life example, the profit motive strongly encourages cost-saving innovation (in addition to much else) while also solving the core socioeconomic question at the heart of every civilization: "how do you get people who don't care about each other to act like they care about each other's problems?" (Answer: the profit motive, which makes coming up with solutions to other people's problems, which you can sell, a matter of self-interest!)

Anyway, I got a notification on my phone from a huge corporation called Amazon earlier after my wife placed an order. It said I have until whatever time to add any items I want to the order so they'll arrive in the same shipment. This is actually new. It is an innovation that greatly increases efficiency.

Let's think it through together.

The simplest way to solve the order-to-shipment problem is to tie a shipment, which is ultimately a box or envelope, to an order number. Someone orders stuff on the app, an order number tied to those product choices is made, and a shipping container is later filled with those items and shipped.

This happens millions of times a day, an unfathomable number of times, actually, and it's very complicated. There's a huge inefficiency happening here, though, with this simple-minded, but complicated, order fulfillment scheme that any bonehead would think up and implement.

Sometimes, a customer will order stuff, and then later that same day, they will think of more stuff to order and will place another order. This might happen more than once in a day, in fact. It matches how people shop and think, especially when families share accounts. Each order is a new order number, and each order number is a new logistical train plus shipping materials and costs.

Amazon doesn't want to waste money shipping stuff, and their model (at least on Prime) is that shipping is virtually always included, which means wrapped up into the product costs across all products. If the same delivery location is ordering three times (or more) in the same day, it's something like one third the incurred shipping costs to put it all in one box and ship it only once.

The customer will also be happy with this and probably makes fun of the fact that Amazon doesn't automatically do it, as if there's just some guy happily filling orders in a logical, sensible way instead of a huge system fulfilling millions of orders a day in a very complicated way, where automation beats out "sensible" organization that an individual running a small operation might do.

That means there's an incentive to innovate on Amazon's end. They can innovate their logistics algorithm to identify multiple orders going to the same delivery address under the same account in a short period of time and consolidate them. I'm sure this wasn't a monumental programming challenge, but it was certainly a programming challenge. I can tell because of how new this feature is.

What makes this worth doing on Amazon's end is that they save money by doing it if it's cheaper to make and implement this consolidation algorithm and logistical chain than it is to ship according to a naive implementation, including errors generated by the new logistical system. By reducing costs at the same revenue, they generate profit, and the profit motive encourages them to do this in an economic way, not just a vague "right thing to do" way.

Notice that this situation is an improvement in all regards, if and only if it actually works. Amazon saves on shipping/delivery costs and materials, the customer gets fewer packages, there's less waste. The profit motive encourages AND REWARDS Amazon's executives to make decisions that remove a blatant inefficiency that doesn't actually benefit anyone but that is somewhat difficult to eliminate.

Do you understand this, young socialist idiot? It's actually really simple, and it doesn't depend on anyone having morals you think they should have in a situation you don't even understand.

But it gets a lot better.

I don't know how much in shipping and shipping materials, plus other overhead, Amazon saves by consolidating orders like this, but it's absolutely reasonable to guess it might be around a dollar per consolidation. It's actually probably more.

Amazon's executives could just pocket that whole saved dollar-per, but they probably won't. It's their right, but profit-driven economics tell them there's an even smarter way that's filled not just with winning, but win-winning, and even win-win-winning, or even win-win-win-winning. Let's take a look.

First, of course, they're not necessarily motivated to help other people win because they might just not care. The problem at the heart of every society, free or unfree, is that people aren't required to care about other people's problems and, beyond a certain line, can't be forced to. You cannot make them even with the most invasive socialist "ideological remolding" that's supposed to make them care about things they don't have any truly good reason to care about. If it's a matter of self-interest, though, they're CERTAIN to care about it, voluntarily, freely, and without anyone having to force them to do so or sending them to a standing-room-only prison dick-to-asscheek with some convict under Tiananmen Square because they did it wrong.

It is actually self-beneficial for Amazon's executives to spread that dollar (plus) in savings out over at least two or three domains or four.
Some of it goes in their pocket as more profit (win).
Some of it goes to the company itself to keep innovating in these ways, which eliminates unnecessary inefficiencies to everyone's benefits (win).
Some of it goes to lowering product costs so that everyone can obtain the same goods more cheaply because the product costs are absorbing shipping costs, which went down with this innovation (win) This will give them further market advantage and attract more customers, which includes making more products more accessible to more people with lower income (win).
Some of it also can go to employees who have their working morale increased because lower overhead allows the company to pay employees more (not less) while making MORE PROFIT at the same time (win). This allows them to attract and keep a better workforce that works better and harder, btw, willingly (win).

Notice how everything a young socialist ignoramus might care about gets checked off here by this profit-motive-driven innovation process.
-Lower costs
-Greater accessibility for lower income people
-Greater efficiency and less waste
-More capacity to pay employees more

The only thing our young socialist ignoramus doesn't like about it, in fact, is the part that makes it work: the profit for the owners part, maybe for one of two reasons. Maybe she doesn't like it because the owner is taking profit at all, as though owners shouldn't be rewarded (thus motivated) to make their enterprises better. A more reasonable socialist wouldn't like it because the executives (owners) would take proportionally more of the profit than other sectors, if they can, which is "unfair" if you don't understand anything.

That is, our young socialist ignoramus might think that it's wrong that the executives (who are few in number) split millions of dollars in freed-up profit while the other sectors (customers, employees, etc.) only get an almost negligible pittance that works out to cents. How unfair!

It's not unfair, though, because the executives are, in fact, few in number. If that dollar saved, times say a million instances per day, is split up 10% to executives (and shareholders...), 20% to reinvestment, 20% to employees, and 50% to price reduction, let's say, almost no one would think that's unfair, unreasonable, or greedy, but because there are a few execs, a hundred thousand employees or something, and tens of millions of products, the division will look exaggerated and "unfair" for the owners/execs in a naive analysis (which is what socialists always tend to do).

And that's where the risks and rewards of ownership come into the picture again to address this, if you're still stuck on the idea that it's somehow unfair that they've eliminated waste, increased efficiency, decreased costs, lowered prices, invested in further improvements, and paid people a little more to work for them and yet got to take a bit of concentrated profit for themselves for the trouble, which they didn't really have to do.

Speaking of that, why would they bother in the first place if the system they had was working well enough, despite the inefficiencies and related limitations?

Because they get to take home that little bit of extra profit that when concentrated is a lot of money and therefore a huge incentive for them to come up with and force implementation of challenging changes to make it work.

The story of an advanced society is that the thing we take for granted as an advanced society, the thing that makes life comfortable enough for socialists to have time to whine and demand socialism in their first-world entitlement, is only built because the profit motive is strong enough to motivate ambitious people to take the risks of building systems that deliver the first world to us.

Imagine starting an airline, for example. Your first plane is going to cost you about a hundred million dollars, and if it doesn't work, you're stuck with a hundred-million-dollar outlay that you have to get rid of after all your other losses. We have airlines because people took those risks and take those risks every day. Most of them fail, but some succeed not because of some deep unfairness but because what they built solves problems for people well enough such that people will pay a price that's a win-win for them.

This is the ONLY REASON we have nice things.

So, my dear young socialist. Calm down. Learn a little. You'll realize not only that the profit motive is correct but good, and you might even see ways you can capitalize upon it and become successful yourself without panhandling-by-proxy through the state apparatus and its guns and prison cells (you know, those things you say you're against).

[Selene Mariposa @Selene_Mariposa]

America turns 250 today.

Let me read back the resume.

We started by telling a king to pound sand, in writing.

By 1803 we bought half a continent from France for about four cents an acre.

We fought a war with ourselves and somehow stayed one country.

We strung a railroad across the entire thing.

We handed the world the lightbulb, the telephone, and the airplane in about thirty years flat.

Then a man named Willis Carrier invented air conditioning and made half the planet actually livable.

You are welcome, Texas. You are welcome, Dubai.

Twice the whole world caught fire, and twice we showed up and helped put it out.

We split the atom.

We put men on the moon in 1969.

Then we went back and hit golf balls up there, because why not.

We invented jazz, blues, rock and roll, and hip-hop, and the whole planet is still dancing to it.

We put a burger and fries on every corner of the earth.

We built rockets that fly themselves home and land standing straight up.

We flew a helicopter on Mars.

We launched a car into actual space and it is still out there cruising.

We also invented ranch dressing and somehow talked the entire world into putting it on pizza.

Priorities.

We even invented three of our own sports so we could win them.

Baseball, basketball, and football.

Real football, the kind with hands, because we named it and we are not taking corrections.

The rest of the planet can keep soccer, which is fine, we are hosting it in our backyard this summer anyway.

And yes, Canadian football exists, wider field, extra man, one fewer down, and we try very hard not to think about it.

Frankly it was generous of us to invent our own games.

If we put all that energy into soccer, nobody else would ever lift that trophy again.

We would win it so often they would just rename it the America’s Cup and hand us the keys.

You are welcome for the suspense.

And in 2026 we threw a birthday so big a German tourist live-tweeted our gas stations to 750,000 people.

Not every chapter was clean.

We argued, we stumbled, we fixed what we broke, and we kept building.

That is the whole trick.

Two hundred and fifty years in, and we are still the loudest, brightest, most improbable experiment on the map.

Not bad for a country that started as a strongly worded letter to a king.

Happy birthday, America.

🦋

[עמיחי שיקלי - Amichai Chikli @AmichaiChikli]

In the US House chamber hang 23 marble reliefs of history’s greatest lawgivers: Hammurabi, Justinian, Jefferson, and others.
Twenty-two are carved in profile, all turned toward the one figure shown full face, gazing straight at the Speaker’s rostrum: Moses.
For America’s 250th birthday, a short thread on America’s Hebrew secret.
🇺🇸🇮🇱

🧵1/6

[Philadelphia Flyers @NHLFlyers]

From the city where it all began 250 years ago. 🇺🇸

Happy Independence Day, Philly!

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

You've probably heard this before, but it's always worth repeating. Something extremely cool about the "Star-spangled Banner," the American national anthem, is that it asks a question, and it's the question at the heart of everything in the American worldview.

"Oh, say, can you see
By the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed
At the twilight's last gleaming..."

So the anthem begins with a question and a scene. One man, a patriot, is asking another man, another patriot, "can you see it?" at sunrise after a long, dangerous night.

The "it" in question is going to be revealed to be the flag, our "star-spangled banner," which they had last fully recognized and honored as the sun set, daylight failed, and night crept over them the evening before.

Can you see it? Say! Can you see it?!

IS IT STILL THERE?!

"Whose broad stripes and bright stars
Through the perilous fight
O'er the ramparts we watched
Were so gallantly streaming..."

Here we find that the "it" is in fact the flag, our star-spangled banner, and we learn why the question is being asked.

The flag is described as having flown and streamed gallantly over ramparts of war through a perilous fight. All could have been lost. The flag, and even the fledgling country for which it stands, one nation under God and indivisible.

Say! Can you see it? Now that the light is back?

IS IT STILL THERE?!

"--And the rockets' red glare,
The bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night
That our flag was still there!--"

They could see it through the battle in the light of the rockets and bombs that threatened them, here and there in quick glimpses. But it was still there throughout! But now? At dawn?

Say! Can you see?

IS IT STILL THERE?!

"Oh, say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free
And the home of the brave?"

The urgency is palpable with every refrain. They have to know. It's the first thing they must know as the sun begins to light the sky, even before it rises.

IS IT STILL THERE?!

Say! Say!! Can you see? Can you see it?!

At the heart of every American beats the fundamental truth and reality that what we have here is precious, that it's worth fighting for, to the death if necessary, and that it's fragile. That at any moment it can be lost. That we have to remember to look for it because last night might have been the night in which it failed.

Every day, every year, every generation.

The American fight for freedom, to live in self-governance within ordered liberty, is ongoing and never-ending. The price of the land of the free is that it must be the home of the brave. We have to defend it, defend it, and defend it again, against all enemies foreign and domestic, because what we have is amazing, rare, fragile, and worth every cent of treasure, every drop of blood, and every risk to our sacred honor to protect it.

Our anthem is not a declaration. It is not a proclamation. It is not a statement.

It is a question.

Every time we sing our wholly unique national anthem, we as American ask the question again. IS IT STILL THERE?! Are we still America? Does that star-spangled banner yet wave?

Because it's a question, the answer is not known. It is not a guarantee. It cannot be taken for granted and isn't. And what an honor to ask and take up our part in the story, in the American Experiment, in the greatest country the world has ever known.

For tonight, the last night of our first 250 years, as the sun gave way to twilight's last gleaming and darkness overtook our land once again, the answer was still yes. We can see it even tonight in the red glare of rockets, with small bombs bursting in air, fill the sky with the noble tribute of fireworks once again.

And we all ask ourselves, will it still be flying at dawn?

This is what it means to be an American.

Happy 250th, America! Now for many happy returns!
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

[Gritty @GrittyNHL]

hbd, America. ilysm

[The Free Press @TheFP]

New York City’s rent freeze sounds compassionate—until you meet the landlords barely hanging on.

@LLBiggers interviews a landlord whose grandfather fled Castro’s Cuba and spent a lifetime building a future in New York.

Now, government housing policies threaten to destroy everything he built.

[James Hare @jhareruns]

@ConceptualJames "Marxists always lie" -some guy on the internet

[Jared Cook @jkimballcook]

easy 150K

[Catholic Answers @catholiccom]

@Pontifex SUBMIT TO ROME

[La Sagrada Família @sagradafamilia]

We see the tower of Jesus Christ illuminated for the first time!
The light show, starting from the base up to the illumination of the cross, culminated with a composition of lights guided by drones that traced the figure of Gaudí and the phrase “first love, then technique”.