Taxes are the price you pay to live in an uncivilized society where you fund by force the worst atrocities and inefficiencies instead of having free choice on how best to contribute to society. The price of not paying them is prison.

Hard disagree. If you are paying property taxes, you don't own your house, you're just renting it. If I want other government services, they should be with a flat fee. Or said services should be privatized. Frankly, most should be privatized. The reason the government services are so crappy is there is no incentive to change them, since they get paid no matter what.

France keeps electing governments that promise order while building the exact machinery that produces chaos. The pattern is old. The 1968 uprising paralyzed Paris because de Gaulle had spent a decade expanding state payrolls, suppressing price signals, and convincing the French that prosperity required a bureaucrat's signature. By 2005, the banlieues around Paris burned for three weeks. Clichy-sous-Bois, Aulnay-sous-Bois, hundreds of torched cars every night. The state had warehoused North African immigrants in subsidized housing blocks, disconnected from labor markets by minimum wage laws priced above their marginal productivity, and handed them welfare checks just generous enough to eliminate the urgency of assimilation. That combination guarantees a poverty trap. Today, with immigration remaining a central tension and pension expenditures consuming 14% of GDP, France runs the same experiment expecting different results. You pay into a system your entire working life and receive benefits calibrated to political survival rather than actuarial reality. Meanwhile, each new transfer payment handed to recent arrivals without reciprocal labor market access breeds exactly the resentment politicians then exploit. Open borders and a welfare state cannot coexist. Either migrants enter a free labor market and compete on merit, building genuine stakes in French civil society, or the state subsidizes parallel communities that have no economic reason to integrate. France consistently chooses the latter, then acts surprised at the friction. Bastiat diagnosed this in 1850. The French state still hasn't read him.

A socialist complaining about the rising cost of living is like an arsonist complaining that his fingers smell of gasoline. And naturally, his proposed solution is more gasoline.

Property taxes are evil. The government is forcing you to continue paying them for something you own -- and will take it away if you DON'T pay them. Something. You. OWN. We have property rights in this country. This is a violation of that.

#MunicipalMafia of courts, cops & low-tier politicians sponsored by the Dem/GOP Duopoly system that refuses to examine more accountable, more Just, non-Rights Abusing methods like by-resident billing for Muni Departments.

Thomas Massie > Donald Trump

Your regular reminder that Russia is on the right side of history with regards to NATO expansion:

Many in the comments are saying: "The French voted for this." Fine. Now ask yourself a better question. Why is it the same story in every Western country at once? France, Germany, Sweden, the UK, Belgium, Canada. Different languages, different histories, different voters. Same outcome. Same open-border policies, sold in the same beautiful packaging: progress, inclusion, integration, "our values." When dozens of peoples who never coordinated end up with the exact same policy, it wasn't the peoples who decided. It was the class that governs all of them. Same schools, same forums, same networks. For decades, they have systematically lied to Europeans about what was happening and what it would cost. They tried it with you too, America. You came close. What saved you was your Constitution, and a handful of people like Elon Musk and the All-In crew who refused to stay quiet when silence would have been easier. But don't celebrate too early. The West is not a country. It's a civilization. Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, and every nation that inherited or built on what came out of them: Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, Israel, and allies like Japan who share its institutions and its fate. If Europe falls, you don't get to watch from across the ocean. You lose half your civilization, your oldest allies, the cradle of everything you believe in. Nobody on either side of the Atlantic has any interest in waking up to an Islamist Europe. So understand that this fight has two levels. There is the national fight. Every people has to win its own battle at home, at the ballot box, in its own institutions, under its own laws. No one can do it for us. You can't vote in France, and we can't vote in Ohio. And there is the civilizational fight. The West is under attack on two fronts at once. From the inside, by a soft communism that hates its own history and wants to dissolve nations into a managed mass. From the outside, by Islamism, which sees our weakness and fills the vacuum. And the two have found each other: Islamo-leftism, where the far left defends the very ideology that would crush it first. The national fights are the battles. The civilizational fight is the war. And here's what the other side exploits: your kindness. Western civilization produced something rare in human history: a moral instinct to extend compassion to strangers. To the refugee, the outsider, the weakest. It's one of the most beautiful things we ever built. The globalist class turned it into a weapon against us. Gad Saad has a name for this: suicidal empathy. Empathy that no longer asks who it protects and who pays the price. Empathy that cares more about how it looks than about what it causes. Empathy so detached from reason that it ends up sacrificing your own people, the girl attacked on her way home, the worker priced out of his neighborhood, the town that no longer recognizes itself, just to signal virtue toward strangers. And every time you object, they don't answer your argument. They question your heart. "Where is your compassion?" That's the trap. They know a decent people will hesitate before being called cruel. They've been running that play for thirty years. Now add the money. A few left-wing billionaires understood long ago that you don't need to win elections if you can shape the institutions around them. The Gates Foundation became one of the largest funders of the World Health Organization. George Soros's Open Society Foundations have spent billions funding NGOs, advocacy groups and legal networks, with Europe as a major focus. Unelected, unaccountable, and extremely well organized. And it's not only private money. Brussels funds NGOs with taxpayers' money, and those same NGOs then lobby Brussels for the policies it already wanted. A closed loop. Citizens pay for it. Nobody ever asked them. This is the supranational machine: Brussels, the galaxy of NGOs orbiting it, the foundations feeding them, and the political class moving freely between all three. It answers to no voter in any country. It does enormous damage. And it can't be voted out, because no one ever voted it in. And if you want to know where its center of gravity is, look at Washington. The Democratic Party is its political headquarters. Not because every Democrat is a globalist, but because that's where the whole network converges: the big foundations, the NGO galaxy, the international organizations, the legacy media, the platforms. Same donors, same people rotating from one to the other, same worldview. Brussels is the branch office. Covid showed it in real time. Within weeks, almost the entire Western world adopted the same playbook. Same measures, same messaging, same "trust the science." Anthony Fauci became the face of the official line far beyond America's borders. The Gates Foundation, co-founder of the global vaccine alliances and one of the WHO's largest funders, sat at the center of global health policy. And anyone who questioned the line was branded a spreader of misinformation. The lab-leak hypothesis was a "conspiracy theory" right up until it became a respectable one. And in 2024, Mark Zuckerberg admitted in writing that senior Biden administration officials had repeatedly pressured Meta in 2021 to censor Covid content, including humor and satire. Government, foundations, international organizations, platforms. All moving in the same direction, at the same time, and no voter ever consulted. That's the machine. Covid was the moment it stopped hiding. That machine is what has to be taken apart. Defund the NGOs living off public money. Bring decisions back to elected national parliaments. Make every foundation that shapes public policy as transparent as a political party. Compassion is a Western virtue. Letting it be used against us is not. So let's not fall into the trap. The trap is Western nations turning on each other. Americans mocking Europeans, Europeans sneering at Americans, each country telling itself "they deserve what's happening to them, they voted for it." I'm pro-border. I'm pro-nation. I believe every people has the right to decide who enters its home and to defend its own culture. That will never change. But what we face today is not one nation attacking another. It's an attack on the civilization all our nations belong to. And a civilization under attack cannot afford to let its members watch each other burn. When you see France on fire, don't say "they chose this." Understand how it happened. Understand who did it. And understand that the same people are working on you. The West has to stand together against this, fully, without ambiguity, and its peoples have to understand each other. National pride and civilizational solidarity are not opposites. They are the same fight at two scales. A Frenchman voting to take back his borders and an American voting on November 3rd are on the same front, in the same war, for the same civilization. We lose it separately, or we win it together.

My suspicion is that most socialists wouldn't be nearly so eager to declare housing a right if they were personally responsible for financing, building, and maintaining homes for someone else's benefit. Notice how conveniently their priorities become universal rights the moment someone else is expected to pay for them. The question they consistently avoid is simple: How does your desire for something give you a rightful claim to someone else's property, money, or labor? Declaring something a right doesn't magically produce it. It merely disguises the obligation you're imposing on someone else.

Whenever a state has wanted a herding people settled and obedient, it has left the people alone and gone for the animals. 1600: Elizabeth's army in Ulster cannot catch the Irish, who live on their cattle and move with them. So it kills the cattle. The famine does the rest. 1870s: the United States cannot hold the Plains nations while there are bison. Thirty million are shot in a decade. By 1889 there are under a thousand. An army colonel says it out loud: every buffalo dead is an Indian gone. 1880s: the survivors are issued flour, sugar and lard on a reservation, and a ration card. 1930: Stalin collectivises the Kazakh herds. Nine in ten animals are gone inside three years. A million and a half Kazakhs die and the rest are put on farms. 1933: Washington decides the Navajo have too many sheep. Agents shoot half of them, in front of the families who own them. 1950: Israel passes the Black Goat Law. The Bedouin's goats are banned from most of the land the Bedouin graze. 1950s: Canadian police shoot the sled dogs of the Inuit, settlement by settlement. No dogs, no hunting. No hunting, no leaving town. 2003: China bans grazing across the Tibetan and Mongolian grasslands and moves the nomads into concrete rows. 2022: Tanzania seizes Maasai cattle by the thousand to clear land for a game reserve. A people with a herd has its own food, its own wealth and its own legs. There is nothing to cut off. Take the animals and they will queue for flour, on the day they are told, at the place they are told. 2023: a government paper in Ireland models the removal of 200,000 cows. For the climate. The reason given changes every century. The first step never has.

Dead-on accurate. VFW & American Legion Halls nationwide ought be livestreaming the execution, cheering upon justice delivered, and memorializing his victims.

Your average thief at least understands that what he's taking belongs to someone else. The socialist insists he's entitled to it. The thief steals what already exists. The socialist demands the power to redistribute it indefinitely, undermining the incentives to produce more. The thief generally wants your money. The socialist wants political authority over how you earn, spend, invest, and keep it. The thief knows his victim hasn't consented. The socialist calls that lack of consent democracy. The thief doesn't usually demand gratitude. The socialist expects applause for his compassion. And when the damage is done, the thief may disappear. The socialist returns demanding more money, more power, and another opportunity to make things worse. At least the common thief rarely has the audacity to call his victims greedy.

Socialism is a machine for consuming capital while pretending to create it. Every socialist program starts the same way: a politician identifies something people want, promises to deliver it without a visible price tag, and taxes or prints the money to fund it. Venezuela had this down to an art form by 2015. Price controls on food, nationalized oil revenues redistributed as subsidies, Maduro declaring the supermarket shelves would stay full. By 2017, Venezuelans lost an average of 11 kilograms of body weight from hunger. The machine ate the capital, then ate the people. Prices carry information. When a government fixes the price of bread below market, bakers stop baking. When it taxes productive capital to fund consumption, the capital stock shrinks. Ludwig von Mises called this the calculation problem: without genuine price signals, central planners are flying blind, allocating resources based on political pressure rather than actual scarcity. Chronic shortage sits underneath their rhetoric of abundance. Rent is higher because zoning boards and rent stabilization laws choked off housing supply in cities like San Francisco for decades. Your healthcare costs more because Medicare and Medicaid inflate demand while regulatory capture insulates hospitals from competition. Specific politicians passed specific laws that produced specific shortages, then campaigned for re-election by blaming the market. Voting for a slightly less interventionist candidate while holding your savings in dollars is rearranging furniture on a sinking ship. Hard assets held outside the banking system, particularly bitcoin, gold, property, and stocks, remove your stored labor from the reach of the printing press. This is a basic act of self-preservation in a system designed to extract your productivity under the guise of compassion. Stop waiting for permission to opt out.

Mike Huckabee committed Treason on behalf of Israel. It’s not a big mainstream story because the Media is also treasonous on behalf of Israel. It’s not being treated as treason by our government because we are fully occupied by traitors. That’s how bad it is.

Money translates into political power because government has the authority to grant favors, subsidies, monopolies, bailouts, and regulatory privileges. The more politicians can redistribute wealth and interfere with markets, the more valuable it becomes to buy their influence. Socialism takes this corruption to its logical extreme by placing economic power directly in political hands. If you want money out of politics, start by taking away the political power to decide who gets whose money.

Two of the most persistent misconceptions about socialism are that it favors the poor and that it favors the working class. Socialism favors the political class, which decides who receives favors and who pays for them. That may mean subsidizing the poor, rewarding the rich, or protecting politically favored businesses in the name of prosperity. Capitalism rewards productive work by allowing individuals to own what they produce and exchange it voluntarily. Socialism subordinates that work to political objectives, using producers and their earnings to fulfill promises politicians make to others.

Economics studies how people make choices, respond to incentives, produce, exchange, and cooperate. Every one of those activities ultimately involves individuals. Collectives don't think, choose, produce, or suffer independently of the people composing them. You can study institutions and entire economies without pretending they possess minds of their own. Dismissing individualism without offering an argument is a rather efficient way of announcing that your contempt exceeds your understanding.

Jig is up

Everyone claims to want people fed, housed, educated, and treated with dignity. That's the easiest moral position imaginable, requiring neither thought nor effort. The sincerity of that commitment is revealed by whether you're willing to examine what actually achieves those outcomes, what undermines them, and at whose expense. By the socialist standard, even forced labor can be justified in pursuit of these goals, and even policies producing the opposite results can be defended as virtuous. Virtue signaling earns applause for good intentions. Genuine concern demands understanding, evidence, and results. Far too many seem content with the applause.