![\"\"](\"https:\/\/dw-wp-production.imgix.net\/2025\/10\/ben-banner.avif\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThey will get angry when I say that Amazon makes your life better and cheaper. They\u2019ll say it\u2019s better to yell at Amazon, try to shut down their business, and tax them more because \u201cJeff Bezos is bald and rich and has a yacht!\u201d or something similar. They\u2019ll get angry when I say that billionaires aren\u2019t inherently bad because they\u2019re 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.<\/span><\/p>\nThe billionaires are typically billionaires, not because they are stealing from the poor \u2014 spoiler alert: the poor don\u2019t have much money to take \u2014 but because they make a lot of people\u2019s lives better. They make goods and services for cheaper.<\/span><\/p>\nSo get ready. Here comes the blowback. It comes every time I talk about this stuff.<\/span><\/p>\nRemember that time I said young people who couldn\u2019t afford to live in New York City might think about moving if policies don\u2019t change because it\u2019s 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?<\/span><\/p>\nPeople got super-duper mad.<\/span><\/p>\nRemember that time I said that Social Security needs to kick in later in life \u2014 especially for people who are currently 40 and under \u2014 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\u2019re working a backbreaking job, but you should continue to do productive things in your community because it\u2019s good for you on both a mental and spiritual level?<\/span><\/p>\nPeople got super-mad again.<\/span><\/p>\nWell, here\u2019s the thing. I don\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\nAll of these rely on free markets and common sense.<\/span><\/p>\nWhen Americans don\u2019t feel good about the economy in general, they tend to think that things are \u201cunfair.\u201d \u201cUnfair\u201d is just a substitute for \u201cI don\u2019t feel good about things.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nThis is human nature. It applies to us. It applies to our children. Whenever something happens that my kids don\u2019t like, it\u2019s unfair, right? They deserved something, and it didn\u2019t happen.<\/span><\/p>\nIt\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\nBut generally speaking, the economic system in this country is mostly fair.<\/span><\/p>\nIt 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.<\/span><\/p>\nPoliticians 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, \u201cA bad thing happened and it\u2019s unfair. It\u2019s the system,\u201d as opposed to, \u201cA bad thing happened. Life is full of bad things.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nHow 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.<\/span><\/p>\nPoverty 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.<\/span><\/p>\nWe now live in a world where, if you give basic financial advice, like \u201cMove elsewhere if you can\u2019t get a job in your area,\u201d if you say things that reflect reality, people get mad, especially if there is a group of people telling them they don\u2019t need to live in the world of reality.<\/span><\/p>\nIs 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\u2019s global workforce consists of 150,000 people. Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s Meta has 70,000 employees.<\/span><\/p>\nThe 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.<\/span><\/p>\nIt\u2019s just trash. It\u2019s stupid, and it does not comport with reality.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd as I\u2019ve been saying for decades: in the end, reality always wins.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s time to say a bunch of stuff that\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24566,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-current-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}