LeBoulanger

I've been saying it for months: we're heading toward a new 1989. Not the fall of the Berlin Wall this time. The fall of the globalist project, and its fundamentally collectivist vision of humanity. Remember the video Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum published in 2016, the "predictions for 2030." Prediction number one: "You'll own nothing. And you'll be happy." You'll own nothing, rent everything, and smile about it. They presented it as a desirable future. Marx summed up communism in a single sentence: the abolition of private property. The WEF just rewrote it with a delivery drone. Their problem is that two forces are now tearing this project apart. The first is AI. For the first time in history, a single individual can own a lever of production that used to require an army of employees, a bank, and a state. AI doesn't centralize capital. It hands it to the people who build. That is the exact opposite of "you'll own nothing." The second is reality. Exploding debt, collapsing public services despite record taxes, rising insecurity, schools that no longer teach anything. You can lie about reality for decades. You can't stop it from arriving. So here's what they're going to do now. First, activate their networks. Soros's foundations, starting with Open Society, have spent years pouring money into NGOs, activist collectives, and "anti-repression" groups that form the ideological and logistical breeding ground of the crowds we're seeing today from Paris to Montreal. When the argument no longer works, all that's left is chaos. Second, manipulate the youth. This is how communists have always taken power. Mao, speaking to Chinese students in 1957: "The world is yours. You young people are like the sun at eight or nine in the morning." Nine years later, he unleashed the Red Guards: high schoolers and university students who humiliated their teachers, denounced their parents, and burned books. And once they were no longer useful, he shipped some 17 million of them off to the countryside to be "re-educated." Youth is always the fuel of the revolution. Never its beneficiary. Third, the globalist elites will do everything they can to keep the chaos going. Because a country in chaos demands more state, more control, more surveillance, more "governance." Chaos isn't a bug in their project. It's how it runs. But either way, their project has only two possible endings. Neither one goes their way. Ending one: political Islam. They think they can use it as an ally against the West, against the nation, against the family. They forgot Iran. In 1979, the Iranian left, led by the communists of the Tudeh Party, marched hand in hand with Khomeini to overthrow the Shah. Four years later, the party was banned, its leaders in prison, many of them executed. Islamism never lets itself be used by Marxism. It devours it. Your Marxist project will end up eaten by the very people you thought you were manipulating. Ending two: economic collapse. Because let's say it plainly: the elites running this project are, on the whole, economically illiterate. Brilliant at storytelling, hopeless at incentives. Ludwig von Mises proved it back in 1920: without private property there are no prices, without prices there is no economic calculation, and without economic calculation there is only waste and shortage. Hayek drove the point home: no central planner can aggregate the dispersed knowledge of billions of people. Global collectivism can't work. Not because it's been badly implemented. Because it is structurally impossible. The USSR learned that in 1989. They're about to learn it now. The wall is already shifting.

On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders. And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap. I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece. A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable. Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000. At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation. At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product. Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved. At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper. B. The mechanism: why it's systematic. When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient. In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work. The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in. C. Suffering demands a culprit. A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second. But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat. And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world? D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain. Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem. Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit? No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time. E. One lens, a thousand causes. And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them. F. The perfect inversion. Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second. It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene. G. The ballot box confirms it. In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease. In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state. H. The way out. These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target. The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture. That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.

My post about France went viral. Thousands of likes. Many Americans told me: "Democrats aren't socialists. America will never be France." I want to answer that seriously, step by step. Start with a simple observation. Look at what has gotten cheaper in America over the last 25 years: TVs, phones, software, clothes, toys. Now look at what has exploded: college tuition, healthcare, childcare, housing. What separates the two lists? The first lives in competitive markets. The second is exactly where government is most involved: subsidies, mandates, licensing, zoning, regulation. College. Washington lends students almost unlimited money. Universities know the money will always come, so they raise tuition and hire more administrators. The student pays the bill for twenty years. More government money, higher prices. Housing. Why can't a nurse buy a home in the city where she works? Not because of capitalism. Because of zoning laws, permits, environmental reviews, years of procedure to build a single building. The most expensive places to live in America are the places where it's hardest to build. When building is nearly illegal, prices explode. Healthcare. The patient almost never sees the price. A third party pays, regulations limit who can compete, and costs climb year after year with no one able to say no. So here is the trap. The problems you suffer from are not the failure of free markets. They are the places where the market has already been replaced by the state. And the solution you're being offered is more of the same. That's the Trojan horse. It always works the same way. A real problem. A generous-sounding promise. A program that makes things worse. Then the failure of that program becomes the argument for the next one. People who lived under communism in Poland learned to recognize the lie and the mask the lie wears. The lie never presents itself as a lie. It presents itself as compassion. In France we are at the end of that road. Debt we can never repay. Young people who can't afford a home. Our best people leaving. And every few years our cities burn. Nobody voted for this. They voted for one more generous promise, fifty years in a row. If you're a Republican, share this with the Democrat in your life. Not to win an argument. To start a conversation. If you're a Democrat, I'm not asking you to switch teams. I'm asking you to look at the pattern. Wherever the state took over, life became unaffordable. Don't fix the failures of government with more government. Stay American. Ask for less state, not more.