In 2021, the head of the UN World Food Programme said $6 billion from Elon Musk could solve world hunger. Elon replied: publish the plan, right here, publicly, and I'll sell Tesla stock on the spot. The plan came out. And when you read it, it wasn't a plan to solve hunger. It was one year of food for 42 million people. A twelve-month subscription. And the year after? Start over. A few months later, Elon summed up his view: if you care about the reality of goodness rather than the perception of it, philanthropy is extremely difficult. "Reality of goodness over perception of goodness." That line stuck with me for weeks. Does philanthropy actually work? Gates-style philanthropy is first and foremost institutional capture. Foundations funding NGOs, funding governments, funding programs, producing reports, producing photos. Everyone's happy, and the aid machine keeps itself alive. Sixty years and hundreds of billions later, much of Africa is still dependent on aid. Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo laid it out in Dead Aid: aid breeds dependency, feeds corruption, and short-circuits the only mechanism that has ever lifted a country out of poverty. So what actually works? It's been tested. In Kenya, Berkeley researchers working with GiveDirectly randomly selected villages and gave every poor household about $1,000 in cash. No program. No training. No conditions. Just cash. The result: people bought metal roofs, livestock, started small businesses. Barely any inflation. And every dollar injected generated around $2.50 of economic activity locally, including for neighbors who received nothing. Why? Because you didn't give them charity. You gave them capital. You primed the pump. And that's where everything hinges: ownership. Hernando de Soto showed that the world's poor hold trillions of dollars in assets, but without recognized property titles, it's dead capital. You can't borrow against it, pass it on, or grow it. Where property rights are respected, the system starts running. Where they aren't, no amount of aid will ever be enough. Now reread Elon's post. "Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many." That's not a meal. That's not a handout. That's a property title. A piece of the company building the infrastructure of a multiplanetary civilization, owned directly by millions of kids. A kid who gets a handout depends on the state. A kid who owns a share of SpaceX owns a piece of the future. He learns what an asset is, he has a stake in the economy working, and one day he'll vote as an owner, not as a client of the state. Gates buys perception. Musk distributes ownership. The reality of goodness versus its perception. And it's absolutely brilliant.

You've probably seen the video. A young Frenchwoman in Paris, in tears, begging looters to stop. "Why are you doing this? That's not what we stand for." Some accounts are mocking her. "She voted for it." I won't. Because what you see on her face is not stupidity. It's a disease that has infected the entire West, and it has a name: suicidal empathy. The term comes from Gad Saad, an evolutionary behavioral scientist at Concordia University in Montreal. A man who fled the Lebanese civil war as a child, and who knows what it looks like when a society falls apart. His new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, is the follow-up to The Parasitic Mind. Here is the thesis, and why it concerns every one of us. Empathy is one of the best things about us. It evolved for a reason: to care for our children, our kin, our tribe. It was calibrated for a world where the people you felt for were the people around you, and where empathy always came paired with its counterweight: the instinct to protect your own and to recognize a threat. Suicidal empathy is what happens when that mechanism misfires. When it fires at the wrong targets, in the wrong amounts, with no brake. When we feel more for the criminal than for his victim. More for the stranger who breaks the rules than for the citizen who follows them. More for how compassionate we look than for what our compassion actually produces. Where does it come from? Four layers. First, biology. Empathy is a spotlight, as the psychologist Paul Bloom put it. It lights up the one face in front of you and leaves everything else in the dark. The crying migrant on the boat is visible. The thousands of future victims of a broken system are statistics. A spotlight is a terrible tool for running a country. Second, our own civilization. The West is the civilization that put the victim at the center of its morality. Christianity taught us to care for the stranger, the poor, the weak. It was one of the greatest moral revolutions in history. But cut off from its other half, justice, responsibility, the duty to protect your own, it turns into something else. Third, ideology. In The Parasitic Mind, Saad described idea pathogens, ideas that hijack our reasoning. Suicidal empathy is the emotional counterpart: an ideology that hijacks our compassion. It sorts the world into oppressors and victims, then demands unlimited empathy for whoever ranks as the victim, whatever they do. Fourth, status. In the age of social media, empathy has become a display. Posting "refugees welcome" costs nothing and earns applause. The bill goes to someone else: the working class, the suburbs, the women walking home at night. The results are everywhere. Criminals treated as victims of society. Sexual assaults by migrants met with lenient sentences. Self-defense branded as aggression. Borders treated as cruelty. Saad's conclusion is simple: a society dies when it would rather display infinite tolerance than use its survival instinct. Now the part I'll add myself, and that few people dare to say. On average, women score higher than men on measures of empathy. It's one of the most consistent findings in psychology, across cultures, and it makes perfect evolutionary sense: for most of human history, the survival of children depended on it. It's a strength. But it means an ideology that weaponizes empathy will hit women harder. And the data shows it: in country after country, young women have moved sharply to the left of young men, especially on immigration. This is where men have a responsibility. Not to mock. Not to lecture. Not to say "she deserved it." Empathy has always needed a counterweight, and that counterweight was the protective instinct: the one that draws lines, says no, and stands between the threat and the people it loves. Men abandoned that role. They were told it was toxic, and many believed it. So they stayed silent at the dinner table, at work, with their partners, sisters, daughters and friends. That has to end. Men have to have this conversation, honestly and with respect: compassion that cannot say no is not compassion. It's surrender. And the first to pay for it are women. Many women already understand this better than anyone. Some of the bravest voices in this fight are women, precisely because they are the first to feel the danger in the street. A civilization rests on a balance: compassion and strength, openness and borders, mercy and justice. When one side swallows the other, the foundations crack. What we are watching in Europe is what happens when empathy has no counterweight left. Look at that young woman again. She isn't the enemy. She's what this ideology made of a generation that was told kindness would be enough. Our job is to make sure she's the last generation that has to learn it this way.

Message à Marine Le Pen. Il y a de fortes chances que ce soit toi qui sois élue en 2027. Alors je vais te parler franchement, parce que ceux qui t'entourent ne le feront peut-être pas. Je sais que ton ton gauchiste sur l'économie est sans doute électoraliste. Je comprends le calcul. Mais je te préviens : si tu continues à faire de l'étatisme, tu ne soigneras pas la France. Tu vas continuer à nourrir le cancer qui a été inoculé à ce pays dans les années 80. Avec un autre drapeau, un autre discours, une autre couleur sur l'affiche. Mais le même cancer. Parce que le problème de la France n'est pas seulement qui entre sur son territoire. C'est ce que l'État est devenu. Une machine qui prélève tout, qui contrôle tout, qui promet tout, et qui ne livre plus rien. Une machine qui punit celui qui travaille et protège celui qui s'en dispense. Une machine qui a remplacé l'ambition par le formulaire, le risque par la subvention et le mérite par le réseau. Tu peux régler l'immigration demain matin. Si tu laisses cette machine intacte, la France ne survivra pas à cinq ans de plus de gauchisme, même rebaptisé patriotisme. Un pays qui ne produit plus, qui n'innove plus, qui ne récompense plus l'effort, est un pays qui meurt. Lentement d'abord. Puis d'un coup. Ce qu'il faut faire est simple à dire et très dur à faire. Arrêter l'étatisme. Réduire au maximum le poids de l'État. Lui rendre ses fonctions régaliennes, la sécurité, la justice, l'armée, les frontières, et le retirer de tout le reste. Libérer ceux qui créent, qui embauchent, qui prennent des risques. Cesser de traiter chaque entrepreneur comme un suspect et chaque fonctionnaire comme un intouchable. Remettre la méritocratie à tous les étages. À l'école, dans l'administration, dans les entreprises publiques, au gouvernement. Partout. Et ça commence par toi. Par les gens que tu choisis. Bien t'entourer, ce n'est pas t'entourer de gens loyaux. Ce n'est pas t'entourer de gens sympas. Ce n'est pas t'entourer de ceux qui ont le bon réseau, qui étaient là depuis le début, ou qui te disent ce que tu as envie d'entendre. C'est t'entourer de gens compétents. De gens qui ont prouvé leurs compétences, sur le terrain, par des résultats, pas par des titres ou des fidélités. L'intelligence et la compétence doivent toujours passer avant l'affection. Toujours. Un pays ne se redresse pas avec des amis. Il se redresse avec les meilleurs. C'est exactement là que tous tes prédécesseurs ont échoué. Ils ont confondu fidélité et valeur. Ils ont rempli les ministères de courtisans. Et la France a payé la facture de leurs dîners en ville. Si tu veux être celle qui a sauvé ce pays, et pas une parenthèse de plus dans son déclin, tu n'as pas le droit de reproduire ça. Des millions de Français vont te confier leur espoir. Beaucoup d'entre eux sont ceux qui travaillent, qui créent, qui construisent, et qui sont à bout. Ne les trahis pas avec un étatisme de plus. La France n'a pas besoin d'un nouveau maître. Elle a besoin qu'on la laisse enfin respirer.

Bernie Sanders says the top 1% owns more than the bottom 93%, that fewer than a thousand billionaires got $2.2 trillion richer last year, and that it's "obscene." It's the most seductive and most wrong economic argument of our time. Let me explain why. First, wealth distribution follows a power law. Always. Everywhere. Books, music, startups, followers on X, goals in soccer. A small minority captures most of the value. That's not a bug of capitalism. It's the mathematical signature of every system where value gets created. So the only question that matters isn't "how big is the rich's slice?" It's "is the cake growing, and is the slice of the poorest growing with it?" And the answer is yes. In 1990, more than one human in three lived in extreme poverty. Today it's about one in ten. During exactly the period when billionaires multiplied. Bernie shows you the slice. He never shows you the cake. Second thing he won't tell you: past a certain level, wealth stops being consumption. It becomes capital allocation. Elon Musk isn't sleeping on a pile of cash. He owns stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, xAI. Jeff Bezos owns Amazon stock. That "$2.2 trillion" isn't sitting in a checking account. It's factories, rockets, data centers, millions of jobs. Nobody can eat $100 billion. You can only decide where to invest it. Once you understand that, the whole debate changes. The real question becomes: who allocates capital better? The people who built Amazon, SpaceX and Nvidia? Or politicians? A 5% wealth tax isn't "taking money from the rich." It's taking investment decisions away from people who proved they can create value and handing them to people who proved the opposite. Because the fundamental difference between an entrepreneur and a politician is consequences. The entrepreneur invests his own money. If he allocates badly, he loses everything. The market corrects him brutally, no appeal. That's why most startups die: the system kills bad decisions. The politician invests other people's money. If he allocates badly, nothing happens. Worse, he gets a bigger budget to "fix the problem." Milton Friedman put it better than anyone. There are four ways to spend money. Your money on yourself: you care about price and quality. Your money on others: you care about price. Others' money on yourself: you care about quality. Others' money on others: you care about nothing. Government is the fourth box. By design. Perfect example: California high-speed rail. Approved in 2008 for about $33 billion. Current estimated cost: over $100 billion. Passengers carried: zero. No entrepreneur would have survived that. The politicians who pushed it built careers on it. And when allocation has no consequences, it eventually finds a buyer. A politician who controls billions without accountability becomes the most profitable target in the world for anyone who wants to steer that money. The irony is that the left that rails against billionaires is itself funded by billionaires. George Soros is one of the biggest Democratic donors in history. The Gates Foundation shapes public health policy across the planet. Politicians don't fight billionaires. They pick their own. The ones who fund the state over the ones who compete with it. So if we actually want fewer poor people, we have to stop judging ideas by their intentions and start judging them by their results. And the results are brutally clear. China, 1978: Deng Xiaoping opens the economy to markets. More than 800 million people escape extreme poverty. The largest retreat of misery in human history. Not through redistribution. Through the freedom to build. India, 1991: liberalization. Same movie. South Korea and North Korea: same people, same language, same starting point in 1953. One became one of the most advanced economies on earth. The other has famines. Poland and Ukraine: comparable living standards in 1990. Today the average Pole is more than three times richer than the average Ukrainian. Argentina: a year and a half of liberalization, and the poverty rate falls from over 50% to around 30%. No country in history escaped poverty by punishing the people who build. Every single one did it by letting them build. And if you want to see what Bernie's program looks like in real life, you don't have to imagine it. It exists. It's called France. We've been running it for 45 years. Mass nationalizations in 1981. Two years later, Socialist president Mitterrand has to reverse course into austerity. Retirement at 60. The 35-hour workweek. A wealth tax for 35 years. Hundreds of wealthy households left every year for Belgium, Switzerland, London, taking their capital, their companies and their future taxes with them. Macron finally scrapped it in 2018. Hollande's 75% tax: raised a few hundred million, drove talent out, abandoned after two years. One of the highest tax burdens in the OECD. Public spending around 57% of GDP, a record in the developed world. Last balanced budget: 1974. Public debt: over €3.4 trillion. Mass unemployment for four decades. If taxing the rich and growing the state made people prosperous, France would be the richest country on the planet. It isn't. GDP per capita in France is barely more than half of America's. It's lower than Mississippi, the poorest state in the US. Not a single global tech giant. Our best engineers build Silicon Valley instead. I've been going back and forth between Paris and San Francisco for years. I see it every week. And California is about to replay the movie. Prop 40, on the ballot November 3rd, would take 5% of billionaires' net worth. Even Gavin Newsom, a Democratic governor, opposes it. The state's own nonpartisan budget analyst warns that income tax revenue could drop every year if the wealthy leave. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel have reportedly already started moving their assets out. You don't fight poverty by shrinking the top. You fight it by growing the cake. Bernie wants a society where nobody has too much. I want a society where nobody has too little. The first has been tried everywhere and produces equality in stagnation. The second lifted a billion people out of misery. Choose.