Start with a monopoly. Now add a genuinely free market. How does that monopoly keep overcharging when competitors are free and eagerto steal its customers with lower prices or better products? Usually, it doesn’t. So how does it protect itself? Get government favors, erect regulatory barriers, restrict competitors, or outlaw them altogether. And once you’ve done that, you haven’t demonstrated the failure of the free market. You’ve demonstrated why the monopoly needed protection from it. Simple stuff.

That’s a legitimate problem with government, but anarchism doesn’t solve it, it relocates it. Abolish the monopoly on retaliatory force and you get competing armed agencies with competing laws and judgments about whose force is justified. Who restrains them? Government can exceed its legitimate function. The answer is to constitutionally restrict it to protecting individual rights, not replace one restrained monopoly with a market of competing force.

“Retaliatory” changes the nature of it completely. A murderer using force against his victim and police using force to arrest the murderer are not morally or legally equivalent merely because both involve force. The entire question is when force is legitimate. Calling that distinction “fantastic” doesn't eliminate it, it just avoids arguing against it. Who enforces the boundary? Objective law, courts and due process. Now answer my question: when your competing agencies disagree about that boundary, who has final jurisdiction?

Private charity has what government redistribution lacks: choice creates accountability. If a charity wastes money, subsidizes failure, or doesn't help, donors can stop funding it and support something better. Government takes the money first, politicians pick the recipients, and failure often becomes justification for a larger budget, subsidizing problems instead of solving them. And people would have far greater capacity for charity if government weren't already consuming so much of what they earn. Charity spends your money helping someone you choose. Redistribution spends your money helping someone politicians choose, then sends you the bill and demands more when it doesn't work.

“You think the people of this country exist to provide you with position. I think your position exists to provide those people with freedom. And I go to make sure that they have it.”

Detroit’s public schools have already increased spending per student enormously, roughly 60% in nominal terms in just a few years, and somehow the sales pitch is still that the problem is insufficient funding. At some point, “give us another $1.7 billion” stops being a solution and starts being an admission that spending more has become the substitute for explaining why existing spending hasn’t produced acceptable results.

What gets overlooked when socialists complain about high prices and unaffordability is how often the policies they previously championed helped create the problem, and how often their proposed “solutions” would make it worse. At some point, you can stop taking economic advice from people whose cure keeps producing more of the disease. Ignore the lesson, and expect the struggle to get harder.

Communists and their useful idiots: always Party over people. Defend North Korea. Cheer China. Then look at Uyghurs subjected to arbitrary detention, forced labour, pervasive surveillance, and suppression of religious and cultural life and insist they aren’t oppressed. The UN itself found abuses in Xinjiang may constitute crimes against humanity. Apparently oppression isn’t the problem. It’s only oppression when the wrong political tribe does it.

The “void” disappears once you stop calling it a monopoly on violence. The argument is for a monopoly on the legal use of retaliatory force under objective law. Anarchy doesn’t abolish government; it creates competing governments with competing laws and guns. When two enforcement agencies disagree and neither recognizes a final legal authority, congratulations: you’ve turned justice into a market of force.

Communism is at its worst for the communists who aren’t favored by the political class. If you’re outside that class and still advocating for communism, you’re volunteering to surrender your freedom to people you merely hope will favor you once they have the power not to.

If you actually care about Palestinians, condemning and removing Hamas from power should be step one, not an uncomfortable footnote. Hamas deliberately targeted Israeli civilians, has brutalized Palestinians who challenge its rule, and has repeatedly pursued a war Palestinians themselves pay catastrophically for. And that exposes the glaring omission in Cenk’s argument: intent versus capacity matters. You cannot treat Palestinian deaths as automatic proof of Israeli genocidal intent while treating Hamas’s intentions and deliberate attacks on civilians as irrelevant. Palestinians deserve better than being reduced to human shields for Hamas politically as well as militarily. Condemning Hamas isn’t abandoning Palestinians. It’s refusing to pretend their oppressors are their protectors.

“Blowback” can explain consequences. It doesn’t magically establish guilt. Terrorists having grievances against American policy doesn’t prove America caused their terrorism any more than a criminal having grievances against his victim makes the victim responsible for his crime. And Hasan’s choice between “kill everyone” and “leave them alone” is a convenient fiction. There’s a rather important third option: distinguish aggression from retaliation, judge each intervention on its merits, and hold the people who deliberately murder civilians responsible for deliberately murdering civilians. Understanding why someone attacks you is useful. Turning their stated grievance into your confession is something else entirely.

Ironically, this works pretty well as a description of socialism: eventually the property is controlled by one institution, prices stop conveying scarcity, shortages make goods unobtainable, and the guy ruining everyone’s fun isn’t some capitalist with a top hat, it’s the state. Monopoly even gives you a choice about whether to buy the property.

The difference between a lobbyist and a socialist is that the lobbyist wants government favors and pays for the influence. The socialist wants government favors, calls them “human rights,” and demands that the people represented by the lobbyists pay for them. If you want money out of politics get politics out of money.

If corporations have “bought the government,” they should ask for a refund. Politicians across the spectrum routinely campaign by threatening to tax, regulate, break up, investigate, punish, or otherwise control them. The revealing part of this argument is that corporate “power” suddenly becomes intolerable precisely when corporations use resources to defend their interests against people demanding political power over them. You’re free to attack them, organize against them, demand their money and lobby government to control them, but if they spend their own money arguing back, that’s the threat to democracy. Apparently free speech is sacred right up until your intended political sacrifice hires a microphone.

White supremacy is unequivocally evil. Its ideology and advocates must be condemned without qualification. Many of the same people, when it’s terrorism: “Context matters. It’s nuanced. You have to understand their circumstances. And I won’t be bullied into condemning anyone.” Apparently moral certainty is absolute, until the wrong extremists require it.

So make trespassing legal? People seem confused by the “private” part of private property, and the “freedom” part of free speech. Free speech includes Macklemore’s freedom to speak. It also includes Kraft’s freedom to say no, refuse association, and decline to provide his property as Macklemore’s platform. Compelling someone to host speech they reject doesn’t protect free expression. It violates theirs.

Why aren’t you revolting? Probably because the minimum-wage job you describe as unbearable oppression is already too much work. The French Revolution involved people risking their lives against entrenched legal privilege. Your revolution involves seeing someone else’s paycheck, declaring yourself entitled to more, and waiting for the government to collect it for you. Less storm the Bastille, more someone else should do this for me.

Socialists often confuse trade with redistribution, claiming wealth has been “redistributed upward.” But trade is voluntary: both sides choose it because each values what they receive more than what they give up. Even socialists vote with their wallets when spending their own money. Meanwhile, governments actually redistribute trillions through taxation, borrowing, subsidies, and entitlements, while accumulating enormous debt and leaving many of the problems those programs promised to solve unresolved. Yet the conclusion is always the same: more redistribution. When voluntary exchange produces outcomes they dislike, they blame capitalism. When compulsory redistribution disappoints, they demand more of it.

Capitalism is the legal protection of your right to freely pursue your own happiness by any means that doesn’t violate another individual’s equal right to do the same. Socialism reverses the principle: it turns another person’s life, labor, and property into an entitlement to be pursued through political force. Capitalism says: pursue what makes you happy, but earn it. Socialism says: if someone else has what you want, acquire political power and make them surrender it. One protects the pursuit of happiness. The other mistakes redistribution for its achievement.

Your advantage becomes what it always was: your mind. AI can give everyone access to similar tools. It cannot equalize judgment, curiosity, creativity, ambition, discipline, knowledge, or the ability to recognize a good idea and execute it. Giving everyone a calculator didn’t make everyone equally good at mathematics. Giving everyone a camera didn’t make everyone a great photographer. Equal access to a tool does not produce equal ability to use it.