Andrew Zuckerman

A wannabe dilettante with too much education, too few degrees, and not enough time in the day for it all.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

It seems like a good time to remind you that if you're a young person who turned against Israel in the last five years, you were the successful target of a coordinated influence operation meant to turn you into a useful idiot for Islamo-Leftist causes.

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

This is long but incredibly worth reading.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Aristotle wrote the operating system Western civilization ran on for two thousand years – and quietly abandoned in the twentieth century, around the same time all the catastrophes we have been describing began.

1. His central question is not “what are your rights?” It is “what are you for?”
Eudaimonia — flourishing, not happiness — is the answer: the full realization of what a human being can become. The moment a civilization stops asking this question and starts asking only about rights, equality, and safety, it has already chosen administration over life.

2. Virtue is not a rule you follow. It is a habit you form – through practice, through the right environment, through a community that models and rewards excellence. This is why negative selection is so catastrophic in Aristotelian terms: it doesn’t just promote the wrong people. It corrupts the very mechanism by which virtue is transmitted across generations.

3. Man is a political animal – not in the sense that man should be governed, but that man is constituted by his community. You cannot flourish alone. But the corollary is equally precise: the polis exists for man’s flourishing, not the other way around. The moment the state becomes the end and the citizen becomes the means, you have not just bad government – you have the inversion of the natural order.

4. Aristotle catalogued the corruptions of every form of government: monarchy becomes tyranny, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, polity becomes mob rule. The pattern in every case is identical – the rulers stop ruling for the common good and start ruling for themselves. This is not a modern insight. It is the oldest political observation in the Western tradition. Every system contains the seed of its own corruption. The question is always: who is it for?

5. Phronesis — practical wisdom — the ability to judge particular situations correctly, without a rulebook. The bureaucratic state destroys phronesis systematically, replacing judgment with procedure, wisdom with compliance, the experienced man with the certified one. This is Aristotle’s explanation for why the credentialed class produces so many wrong decisions with such complete confidence.

6. He identified the middle class as the foundation of the stable republic – the ballast that prevents the ship from capsizing toward oligarchy above or mob rule below. Not as a sociological observation. As a structural necessity. Destroy the middle class and you have not just inequality – you have the preconditions for every tyranny he ever described.

7. The West replaced Aristotle with procedure, utility, and rights. It gained a framework for managing conflict but lost the vocabulary for saying what a good life is. The system can optimize for GDP, equality of outcome, measured safety – but it cannot tell you what you are for. Aristotle could. Every civilization that forgot that question discovered, eventually, that someone else was happy to answer it for them.

[The Rational Animal 🤔 @theobjectivist]

I put the general framework below, and I'm glad to go into far more granular detail on any phase, the actual statutory repeals, the transition math, the sequencing. That part is solvable. Smart people have drafted versions of it for decades.

But here's the real obstacle, and it isn't economic. It's moral. None of this gets enacted in a culture that believes your neighbor's need is a claim on your life. As long as altruism is the accepted moral standard, that self-sacrifice is the good and self-interest is the sin, every free-market reform will be felt as cruelty, no matter how well it works. People will look at a policy that makes care cheaper and more abundant for everyone and still reject it, because it doesn't route through sacrifice, and sacrifice is what they've been taught virtue requires.

That's why Bernie wins the emotional argument even when he loses the factual one. He's speaking the language the culture already accepts: that need is a right, that the producer owes the needy, and that the compassionate thing is to make people provide, by force if necessary. He doesn't have to prove his plan works. He only has to invoke the moral code everyone already holds.

So the mechanics are the easy half. The hard half, the necessary half, is challenging the morality underneath. Making the case that a man's life belongs to him. That producing wealth is a virtue, not a debt. That leaving people free is not abandonment, and that the freest societies have always been the ones that lifted the poor the most, precisely because they unleashed production instead of rationing sacrifice.

You don't win this by out-detailing Bernie on policy. You win it by contesting the premise he's counting on you to concede: that caring for people means seizing from them. Until the moral argument is made and won, the policy argument can't land, because people will always choose the plan that lets them feel virtuous over the plan that actually works.

Fix the morality, and the mechanics follow. Skip it, and the best plan on earth dies on the floor.

Now the general framework.

You're right that specifics matter, so here's the honest answer to the subsidy question first, then the path out.

Understand how people got on subsidies: the ACA didn't rescue people from unaffordable care, it made care unaffordable, then sold the subsidy as the cure for its own disease. Look at the young. A healthy 30-year-old's cheapest plan jumped 260% from 2013 to 2014. In 44 of 51 states, the lowest-priced plans rose triple digits.

The cause: the 3:1 age-rating rule forbids charging the oldest more than three times the youngest, when real costs differ five to one. That gap gets loaded onto the young by law. Then the shell game: the subsidy rises dollar-for-dollar with the inflated premium, so the taxpayer eats a price the ACA manufactured. And those enhanced subsidies just expired end of 2025, exposing the true cost. That's the crisis Bernie points at, the predictable fruit of the intervention itself.

The path out, phased, lowering cost before removing any crutch:

Repeal the mandates and the age- and community-rating price controls. Let insurers price by real risk.
Let insurers sell across state lines and offer any plan buyers want, catastrophic, high-deductible, short-term. Let an 18-year-old buy cheap coverage sized to his needs.

Break supply chokeholds: repeal Certificate of Need laws, end residency caps, loosen licensing, speed FDA approval and accept drugs cleared abroad. More supply, lower prices.

End the tax distortion tying insurance to jobs, uncap HSAs. When patients see prices, providers compete, as in Lasik and cosmetic surgery, the fields government barely touches, where prices fall.

On current recipients: don't cut anyone off day one. Keep subsidies during transition. As prices fall, a $600 plan becomes $150, and the subsidy shrinks on its own, dissolving beneath people onto real affordable coverage. Lower cost first, let the subsidy fade.

Every crisis Bernie names traces to a government intervention. The cure isn't a bigger patch. It's removing the blade.

[Andrew Zuckerman @zurtleman2000]

@farman4x X = 16

[Andrew Zuckerman @zurtleman2000]

@Mistyrose_iQ A= 4

[Andrew Zuckerman @zurtleman2000]

@BhattiLaib9960 Her life.

[Andrew Zuckerman @zurtleman2000]

@Seraphinaf5 71

[Andrew Zuckerman @zurtleman2000]

@Bennieeexyz Reminds me of the Married With Children episode where Buck Bundt (the dog) gets a credit card.😂

[Andrew Zuckerman @zurtleman2000]

@iluminatibot Social security.

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

If you don't already know what critical theory is, I recommend you do some independent research and figure it out.

Because, right now, literally every manmade problem in the USA is a function of critical theory.

Defeating critical theory is the most important task for American survival.

[Patrick Byrne @PatrickByrne]

Excellent short essay. Don’t skip it. Immediate follow.

[Andrew Zuckerman @zurtleman2000]

@ggreenwald Are you suggesting they liked him before this?

[Andrew Zuckerman @zurtleman2000]

@KyleKulinski This is only true if you are a complete asshole who is so utterly impossible to deal with that every last person you have ever known absolutely refuses to help you or have anything to do with you…or if you are mentally ill.

[Andrew Zuckerman @zurtleman2000]

@ramit Agreed. Javier Milei ended rent control in Buenos Aires and practically overnight supply tripled while rents dropped nearly 40%. Price controls are the kiss of death, no matter how smart the people who advocate for them believe themselves to be.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

CONFESSION: A grown Japanese man SOBBED at YOUR fireworks last night.

That man was me. Zero shame.

Because every July 4th, my heart flies back to March 11.
Your sailors—YOUR sons and daughters—
standing on deck INSIDE the radiation zone,
wrapping blankets around shivering strangers.

We were those strangers.
NOW WE ARE FAMILY.

Cry with me, America. It's your 250th birthday. 🎆😭🇺🇸

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

🇺🇸🇺🇸 Hell yeah!! 🇺🇸🇺🇸

[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).

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

The communist always must destroy your history. History is what attaches you to something. Memories make a home. The communist attacks your history to unmoor you from your home, so you won’t fight him when he demolishes it and renovates it in his image.

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

The communist doesn’t think to increase the quality of the grid. The communist demands that you decrease the quality of your life.

They make you ration the things that every other American gets to enjoy. Every single time.