Why Reality Keeps Crashing Into America’s Economic Debate

It’s time to say a bunch of stuff that’s going to get me in trouble in the too-online sphere right now; people on the Left who live in mansions, who hate capitalism, and also people on the Woke Right, the New Left, who also live in mansions, who also hate capitalism but like to pretend that they like capitalism.

Here we go.

I’m going to defend private property and free markets and basic common sense, because these are the things that allow you to succeed economically in life. It is good to make more money by providing people with better goods and services. It is good to be fiscally responsible. It is good to make smart decisions about your money.

Most Americans know all that stuff.

But a lot of Americans are being lied to these days. They’re being told a bunch of garbage that makes their lives actively worse. And increasingly — particularly if they are young and too online — Americans believe those things.

The Left and the Woke Right are going to get angry when I say you shouldn’t spend too much money eating at a restaurant if you’re unable to pay your rent. They’ll say that I’m saying that because I don’t care about people.

(You see, it’s better to be poorer and also keep eating at Wolfgang’s Steakhouse.)

They will get angry when I say that Amazon makes your life better and cheaper. They’ll say it’s better to yell at Amazon, try to shut down their business, and tax them more because “Jeff Bezos is bald and rich and has a yacht!” or something similar. They’ll get angry when I say that billionaires aren’t inherently bad because they’re billionaires, and that instead, genuinely immoral people are bad and moral people are good. Tax returns have nothing at all to do with any of that.

The billionaires are typically billionaires, not because they are stealing from the poor — spoiler alert: the poor don’t have much money to take — but because they make a lot of people’s lives better. They make goods and services for cheaper.

So get ready. Here comes the blowback. It comes every time I talk about this stuff.

Remember that time I said young people who couldn’t afford to live in New York City might think about moving if policies don’t change because it’s more productive to search outside of New York City and find some success than to sit there in your expensive apartment with your two roommates and pizza?

People got super-duper mad.

Remember that time I said that Social Security needs to kick in later in life — especially for people who are currently 40 and under — because people are now living 20 years longer, and then Social Security kicks in, which is really expensive and is bankrupting the country? And also that when you hit retirement age, sure, you can retire, especially if you’re working a backbreaking job, but you should continue to do productive things in your community because it’s good for you on both a mental and spiritual level?

People got super-mad again.

Well, here’s the thing. I don’t really give a crap about how people feel about reality. And here is the reality: the only way your life gets more affordable is 1: You make more money; 2: Your expenses get lower, and 3: Products and services get more plentiful and better and cheaper.

All of these rely on free markets and common sense.

When Americans don’t feel good about the economy in general, they tend to think that things are “unfair.” “Unfair” is just a substitute for “I don’t feel good about things.”

This is human nature. It applies to us. It applies to our children. Whenever something happens that my kids don’t like, it’s unfair, right? They deserved something, and it didn’t happen.

It’s possible for two things to be true: The economy is not doing what it should be doing right now, and there are problems in the economy; regulatory problems, subsidy problems, market distortions, etc.

But generally speaking, the economic system in this country is mostly fair.

It is fair because you have property rights in this country. You have the equal rule of law in this country, as opposed to the vast majority of other countries around the Earth and in all of human history.

Politicians love lying to you. It is their favorite thing to do because the way that you win votes is by appealing to the lizard part of the brain, the part that says, “A bad thing happened and it’s unfair. It’s the system,” as opposed to, “A bad thing happened. Life is full of bad things.”

How do you solve poverty? The answer for most politicians is to yell at rich people and pretend the rich people got rich by causing poverty, which is untrue.

Poverty is the natural state of all mankind; for all of human history, everyone was poor. The question is not why there are poor people and rich people; the question is why even the poor people in the United States are, by any historical marker, very, very rich. That is the real question.

We now live in a world where, if you give basic financial advice, like “Move elsewhere if you can’t get a job in your area,” if you say things that reflect reality, people get mad, especially if there is a group of people telling them they don’t need to live in the world of reality.

Is Jeff Bezos the bad guy? Amazon directly employs 1.6 million people globally. People who use Amazon to sell products account for another 2 million jobs. Elon Musk’s global workforce consists of 150,000 people. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has 70,000 employees.

The notion that you kill private property and modern finance and somehow the economy gets better is absolute stupidity. But it is part and parcel of a lie that is being sold to you; that if only you had more power to centralize government, if you gave more power to Bernie Sanders or Tucker Carlson or people who want control over the economy, they would bring you back to some placid, agrarian past in which you can fish in the evening and write poetry in the morning.

It’s just trash. It’s stupid, and it does not comport with reality.

And as I’ve been saying for decades: in the end, reality always wins.