Matter and energy do not obey political declarations. Someone must cut the timber, raise the walls, grow the grain, and haul the water. If a person is declared to have a right to those things without producing or exchanging for them, then another person must be compelled to supply them. There is no third option.
In the whole of human history, no one had a right to food or shelter. It is a parental imperative until self-sufficiency if they care about their offspring enough to do it. If they don’t, it does not create an obligation that someone else must.
The only statement on this subject that has carried real authority across centuries is older and clearer: “By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread.”
What respected authority later reversed that and declared a right to survival by edict, while leaving no instructions for how the food and shelter are actually to appear? On what basis is the available shelter redistributed? Political cronies? Bureaucratic preference? A grievance hierarchy? It’s always done under threat of brute force.
Biased media allows stupid ideas to thrive by removing intellectual rigor if those ideas support the preferred narrative. But when the statists take over, media becomes state property. Why don’t they ask where those lines are drawn? Who exactly gets looted? Who gets to distribute it? On what basis? And what are the rights of the producers? The bigger the government gets, the slower the economy grows.
Where are the editorial boards of our billion-dollar media empires? Do they really want the seizure of their own wealth and work?
When the Mayflower arrived, food and shelter did not magically appear. Around half the congregation died before the next boat came. The East India Company was a state-sanctioned cartel for wealth extraction. The founders eventually decided the price of supporting the entitled in England, who did not trade on a consensual basis, was too high. Larry the Liquidator in Other People’s Money said it best: You can change the rules, but you can’t change the game. The communists are always out there, waiting in the bushes. The good news is that when they take over, the first thing they do is shoot all the lawyers. If the communists take over here, I expect it will be the tort lawyers first. When was the last day you didn’t see or hear an ad for a tort lawyer? Other than our government, that is the most wealth-extracting industry in America. It is a tax on everything we do. It is redistribution from many to the few based on one target: deep pockets.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is suggesting that, given the levers of power, they can do the impossible. They get rich, but they’re better people, so it’s OK. It sounds perfect: endless vacation, no responsibility, everyone gets a house, food, disposable income, a two-car garage, a choice of a Cadillac SUV or Subaru Outback, and a Coexist bumper sticker.
If you can explain how the science works, I’m in.
When the Affordable Care Act was legislated, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said, “We have to pass it to find out what’s in it.” The press lapped it up like a bunch of starving children and defended it like a rabid Chihuahua.
I ALREADY FLEW MAMDANI’S SOCIALIST AIRLINE. AMERICA DOESN’T NEED A SEQUEL
Obamacare drove doctors into early retirement with rules and reporting requirements. HMOs (heavy Democratic donors) made billions, then became assassination targets of the same leftists. We had to import foreign doctors to fill the gaps. The system took 14 years of taxation to cover 10 years of budget projections, and the costs have only skyrocketed. Service is worse, and the doctors and nurses doing the work got shafted.
The problem with a dunce-tolerant society is the proliferation of dumber dunces. And when Sanders gets his way, when they seize your house and give it to someone else, will they at least have the courtesy to put up a plaque with a stolen house acknowledgment?
Michael Breeden is a retired Air Force chief master sergeant with 29 years of service as a combat controller in special operations. He writes on sovereignty, culture, and institutional accountability.