Mamdani’s Government Grocery Stores Won’t Last Long Enough to Put Bodegas Out of Business

By Inez Feltscher Stepman

Saturday, August 01, 2026

 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently announced that he was making good on a campaign promise to introduce state-run grocery stores — yes, that dreary Soviet fixture — to the Big Apple. Holding a bunch of bananas (currently a whopping $0.23 a pop at the local midmarket Trader Joe’s), the mayor promised that MamdaniMarts, coming in 2027, will sell meat, seafood, and fresh produce staples at prices 30 percent cheaper than “other retail stores.”

 

Notably missing from the press conference were any details about what that actually means, whether these prices would be calculated vis-à-vis ALDI or Whole Foods, or how they would avoid the uncertainty of price fluctuations while remaining pegged to 30 percent below retail prices.

 

Many on the right (or the merely sane) have responded by pointing out that grocery stores are a low-profit-margin business and that enacting the mayor’s plan, under Econ 101 rules, is liable to undercut and force out those same local mom-and-pop bodegas that New Yorkers love to brag about. And it’s true that socialism, as Milton Friedman famously quipped, could create shortages of sand in Saudi Arabia.

 

But the more likely outcome is that Mamdani’s government grocery stores get caught up in the disorder of New York’s declining state of the commons before they even have the chance to threaten more than a bodega or two in a few-block radius.

 

A realistic short-term prediction is that the stores will become havens for half-criminal resale markets, outright thievery, the homeless, and the mentally ill — that is, generally the same basket of issues that plague so many urban spaces where “discounted and/or free” stuff is on offer. Rather than relieve the very real affordability burden on the law-abiding working class, eliminating minimal barriers to entry, like normal prices and competition, that keep out the most antisocial elements of the city instead will force those workers to share space with the drug-addled, criminal, and dangerous. As surely as blood in the water attracts sharks, handouts of free or deeply discounted goods, in the melee of a populous city like New York, attract the worst kinds of crowds.

 

The importance of these small barriers, and correspondingly, the results of giveaways, can be affirmed all over New York and America’s other urban cores. For example, a “free” public pool in Central Park that opened in 2025 quickly became a hotbed for fights, disorder, and homeless “bathing.” The city has quietly stopped crowing about its success. “Free” gift stunts by companies or livestreamers in the city frequently result in unsafe mob scenes that further degenerate into violence.

 

The NYC ferry is exactly the same price as the subway for repeat customers but is, by comparison, incredibly well-ordered and pleasant. The difference? A human checking tickets at entry, which discourages fare-jumpers. A formalized study in San Francisco recently confirmed the link, finding that anti-fare-jumping gates installed on Bay Area Rapid Transit resulted in dramatic drops in subway litter, vandalism, and crime.

 

Conservatives have pointed out this connection with regard to another Mamdani promise, free buses. The mayor claimed that free buses would reduce assaults on drivers who are attacked when they turn fare-jumpers away. Mamdani avoided that statement’s logical conclusion: Making buses “free” leaves riders sitting next to the very same people who were apt to respond with violence when asked to pay a $3 fare.

 

Then there will be the lines.

 

Queuing was almost a competitive national sport for residents of the Soviet Union, spawning specialized linguistic terms and endless anekdoty — “I assume you are out of fish.” “No, comrade, we are out of meat. The place across the street is out of fish!” Assuming these government grocery stores can even properly wrangle the logistics to supply themselves at all, a 30 percent price cut means that they will quickly find themselves sold out of key discounted goods shortly after delivery. The run on shelves is likely to reward those with the time to burn waiting in line for hours to be first when shipments arrive. Rather than grandmas on fixed incomes, the people with the inclination to wait in daily lines are likely to be those seeking to turn their copious leisure hours into an income stream. The contents of city shipments, after all, could be turned around and resold for profit on card tables on 14th Street and other common spots, where they can compete in the black market with the many stolen goods already on offer.

 

Never say that socialism and entrepreneurship are opposites!

 

Between the iron laws of economics and the disorder, it’s the latter, I predict, that will be the first to fell Mamdani’s 1,000th-time’s-the-charm communist experiment. Government grocery stores, absent DSA no-nos like heavy policing, will quickly become local crime-and-violence hot spots that decent people, even those who could really use the discount, avoid. To present another live demonstration of socialist failures at the regrettable expense of the quality of life of New York City residents, all the right needs to do is sit back and watch.

The EU’s Stealth Censorship Playbook

By John Gustavsson

Sunday, July 26, 2026

 

Western Europe’s struggle with free speech and with the tech sector is set to dramatically ramp up. Until recently, speech regulation has been a national matter, leading to vastly different tolerance levels in different countries (with laws stricter in Germany than in, say, Poland). New EU laws are changing that, and they could prove to have an intensely chilling effect on open political debate by rewarding self-censorship with algorithmic prominence.

 

In October of last year, the EU rolled out the Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising regulation, introducing an onerous regulatory burden on political advertising that included requiring explicit user consent to process personal data for targeting such ads, along with bans on profiling based on inferred political views (or other special categories). Platforms found in violation could be fined up to 6 percent of their worldwide revenue. For Meta, to take one example, this would mean a $12 billion fine.

 

Tech companies are used to being fined by the EU; just this week, Google was fined over $1 billion over what the Brussels deemed to be anti-competitive practices. Yet after they were first held responsible for disinformation under the Digital Services Act, this new regulation was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Rather than silently comply, tech companies pushed the nuclear button and responded by banning all EU-based political and social advertisements: Now, no political party in the EU can advertise on any social media platform. The same goes for grassroots advocacy groups and lobbying organizations, as well as individuals seeking to increase their follower counts by boosting posts of their own that feature political content.

 

The platforms understandably concluded that the risk of such an enormous fine was too high, and the definition of “political advertising” and “disinformation” too vague, for it to be worth the risk of allowing any political ads whatsoever. While political parties, organizations, and activists can still post on the platforms, they must now rely on organic reach. The new regulation also affects media organizations, which are now banned from promoting any posts — for example, an opinion column — that expresses political beliefs.

 

While tech companies have already begun to respond, this regulation is set to have swift and predictable consequences for political and media institutions in Europe. The rule benefits large and mainstream parties, movements, and organizations that do not rely as much on social media to get their messages out. Many already have large social media followings; being restricted to organic clicks and views will have much less of an impact on them.

 

Second, the regulation benefits traditional media. Without social media as an outlet to reach voters, advertising in and being covered by traditional media becomes all the more important. Political groups that had pivoted away from traditional media in favor of new outlets now find themselves trying to get their ads back into the morning newspapers.

 

Third, the rule benefits political influencers who already have large followings, for the same reason. Established political commentators don’t need to pay for visibility because they’ll get it anyway.

 

Finally, the regulation will benefit social media users who are willing to engage in rage-baiting. Posting incendiary, outrageous remarks is a common way for small accounts to “go viral” and grow overnight. This trend holds true for parties and organizations: If you post something outlandish, more people will click, reply, and share — the algorithm will reward you. Moderate and nuanced voices have always struggled to be heard on social media, and thanks to the EU, those voices now cannot even pay for visibility.

 

EU leaders likely expected the first two outcomes: At the risk of giving them too much credit, they must have known that tech companies would respond by banning political ads. The platforms told them as much a year in advance. But that the regulation’s consequences ended up benefiting the political establishment was a feature of its enactment, not a bug. Only belatedly, though, do EU leaders appear to have realized that their rules created an incentive for rage-bait — and, ironically, for disinformation, since posts peddling outrageous, made-up claims often receive more engagement than those that present nuanced truth. The EU has discovered one of social media’s sad realities: The best way to get organic reach is to make stuff up.

 

To fix this, the EU is now in the early stages of reviewing and revising the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD). Among the regulations being debated are rules that would force social media platforms to artificially increase the prominence of “media services of general interest.”

 

These include, first and foremost, publicly funded and operated media organizations. Imagine if posts by NPR were the first thing you saw when you opened Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube — that could soon be reality in the EU. Much like in the United States, public media in the EU leans left on most controversial issues — from identity politics to immigration. Their posts would effectively be automatically promoted without charge, while everyone else would remain unable to pay for promotion.

 

The absurdities don’t end there. The term “media services of general interest” is vague and deliberately crafted to allow member states to define the media outlets that qualify. As an example, a center-left, culturally progressive outlet like Der Spiegel could be classified as being of general interest by an ideologically friendly German government, dramatically increasing the paper’s social media reach. Such a situation would fulfill the European Commission’s expressed intention of giving a leg up to traditional media outlets; the Commission has said that the rule’s goal is “improving the level playing field between traditional and new digital players,” with the implication that it is traditional media who have been disadvantaged and require support.

 

This, combined with the political advertising ban, would quite possibly be the worst thing to happen to freedom of the press in Europe since World War II. All media outlets would be incentivized to play nice and refrain from criticizing their country’s government, because doing so would mean potentially losing the privilege of being classified as “of general interest.” Honest reporting on controversial topics like immigration could be discouraged and even censored by concerned media executives.

 

This isn’t speculation; in fact, Europe has already seen, albeit on smaller scale, the insidious effects of state intervention on behalf of favored media outlets. Some EU member states — for example, Sweden and Austria — maintain press subsidy systems in which the government dishes out grants to support the operations of private newspapers (including online outlets), enabling the media organizations to charge less for subscriptions than outlets who are not approved for subsidies. While officially politically neutral, these subsidies are frequently charged with being biased.

 

Of course, the EU’s new provision could also give right-wing, immigration-skeptical governments in Eastern Europe the ability to designate outlets friendly to their views as “media services of general interest.” Yet, true to form, Brussels is already plotting to “fix” this problem by introducing EU-wide guardrails and guidelines for designation. It goes without saying that this would have a chilling effect on outlets promoting Euroskeptic views: Even if guidelines were written with neutral-sounding language, the mere fact that the EU was involved — and could change the rules at any time in determining who gets boosted — could make journalists think twice about crossing Brussels.

 

As far as censorship goes, the EU’s decisions have been well-crafted: Outright banning a social media platform would immediately be noticed, and users would protest. Leaving the platforms legal but controlling what content reaches the top of the feed is a much smarter move for the progressive, pro-censorship bureaucrats in Brussels.

 

These troubling recent developments in the European Union should serve to highlight how money and political spending are fundamental to defending freedom of speech. Without being free to spend money to advertise their views, non-mainstream voices can have their voices neutered without being explicitly banned.

 

The revision of the AVMSD is still in its early stages. With the EU not having fully committed — at least in public — to any specific changes, now is the perfect opportunity for the U.S. government to intervene and put pressure on the EU not to proceed. Once an updated directive is in place, it will be much more difficult for the EU to back down without losing face.

 

The U.S. government should also put pressure on social media platforms to refuse to comply with any requests for preferential treatment of government-approved outlets — even if that would mean exiting the EU market altogether. In the end, it is likely that only the sudden lack of access to their favorite apps and websites would give European voters the wake-up call they need to protest the censorious conduct of their leaders. Washington should help make that happen.

The Plan to Confiscate AI Company Stock

By Daniel J. Pilla

Wednesday, July 15, 2026

 

For years, socialist advocates of Big Government have pushed wealth taxes as the next step in redistributing the fruits of one’s labor and enterprise. Their premise is that government has a superior claim to the wealth accumulated by successful individuals and businesses, even after the payment of taxes incurred in the creation and consumption of that wealth. Whether the target is high-income earners, inherited wealth, or unrealized capital gains, those advocates’ objective has been to transfer private assets (beyond mere “income”) into the hands of the state.

 

Leftist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders’ proposed American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act (introduced in the Senate on June 19 but yet unnumbered) crosses a line that previous redistributionist lawmakers didn’t reach. Sanders’ scheme goes beyond simply taxing wealth. It compels business owners to surrender ownership of the company itself that creates their wealth.

 

The distinction matters.

 

I’ve written before about proposals such as Minnesota’s wealth tax proposal, which would punish the accumulation of capital by taxing assets that were built through years of investment, creativity, innovation, and risk-taking. Those proposals are economically destructive, but at least they leave ownership of the income-producing assets in private hands.

 

Sanders’ proposal is fundamentally different. Instead of merely taxing successful businesses, it would require qualifying artificial intelligence (AI) companies to transfer half of their ownership interests directly to the federal government, to be controlled in a so-called “sovereign wealth fund.” The federal government would become a major owner of private companies, but not because it invested capital, developed technology, assumed entrepreneurial risk, or purchased stock in the marketplace. They would become owners because Congress ordered the transfer.

 

While the mechanism is labeled as an “excise tax,” the tax must be paid by transferring company equity in such an amount that “immediately after the tax has been paid, the [federal government] shall hold 50 percent of all outstanding equity interests” in the company. That’s not taxation. That’s outright theft by government of private assets carried out under the socialist concept of compulsory state ownership.

 

Sanders’ motivation is driven by the same philosophy that drives all modern socialists: free markets are unfair in that they end up vesting substantial wealth in the hands of just a few. Sanders’ remarks in the proposed act justifying the theft of private assets include: “The 8 richest Americans — all AI oligarchs — together have more than $2.9 trillion in wealth, more than bottom 59 percent of U.S. households combined.” Beyond that, the “findings” of fact presented in the introduction to the bill itself declare that artificial intelligence “is a public resource” chiefly because “a small number of oligarchs have essentially stolen the creative work of hundreds of millions of people” in order to create it.

 

To Sanders’ way of thinking, the alleged theft of intellectual property by AI developers justifies government theft of half the stock of AI companies. The bill asserts that the wealth generated by AI “must benefit humanity.”

 

Sanders portrays his proposal as allowing every American to “share in the wealth” of the AI revolution. He ignores the fact that every American already has the right to “share in” such wealth. All one has to do is buy stock in any AI company that is publicly traded. But the truth is this proposal is not about providing opportunity to the common citizen. It’s about the Marxist idea of transferring ownership of private property into the hands of the state, by force when necessary.

 

Under the legislation, a government-controlled “sovereign wealth fund” would receive the value of the transferred ownership interests, and all Americans would purportedly receive annual dividend payments, estimated at roughly $1,000 per person. Sanders claims that eventually, “the wealth that it generates could be used to ensure that every man, woman and child in the United States has a decent and dignified standard of living, including the right to health care, education, housing, and a healthy and habitable environment.”

 

But the proposal is that just 5 percent of the wealth of the fund would be used for direct payments to Americans. What would the balance of the 95 percent be used for? The answer is government-sponsored welfare programs, including “access to health care, education, and housing.” In other words, programs that create even more dependence on government.

 

Who doesn’t want free money from the government? But that promise ignores the most fundamental principle of free markets: Those who receive the rewards should also bear the risks. Investors purchase stock with their own money. Entrepreneurs mortgage their homes, invest their savings, sometimes go without paychecks, and spend years building businesses that often fail. They devote their careers to creating products that consumers voluntarily purchase. Every dollar earned represents risk assumed by someone. The recipients of these proposed government dividends have assumed none of that risk. They invested nothing. They sacrificed nothing. They stand to lose nothing if the enterprise performs poorly. Sanders affirms this very fact, claiming that “If the value of these companies goes down, as others have suggested, the companies would bear the losses, not the federal government.”

 

And there’s the rub. The federal government stands in the unique position of an uninvested “partner.” It would acquire ownership without purchasing it. Unlike every legitimate shareholder in the marketplace, Washington would obtain its interest by legislative fiat entirely without risk.

 

There is a world of difference between earning ownership and confiscating it.

 

Moreover, once the federal government has control of the income generated by its 50 percent ownership interest, there’s simply no restriction on what it can do with it. As we know from the long experiment with the Social Security benefits program, future Congresses can change the law any way they wish with just 51 percent of the support of sitting legislators and a willing president. As years pass, future citizens might get a dividend payment, but they might not.

 

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the proposal is its governance structure. The legislation contemplates an “Independent Commission for Democratic AI” to manage the public’s interest. The commission would consist of seven unelected members (nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate) selected from a list of candidates provided by Congress. The commission would exercise voting authority over government-owned shares and participate directly in corporate governance.

 

The irony is rich. Sanders is concerned that currently, just eight individuals in the private sector control substantial amounts of American wealth. Instead, he would substitute that for seven unelected bureaucrats and political hacks exercising forced control over the operations of private businesses. That concept should alarm anyone who values free enterprise.

 

Businesses exist to develop products, satisfy customers’ needs, innovate, and earn returns for those who invest their resources. Government exists to establish reasonable rules to prevent one person or business from unlawfully converting the income or assets of another through force or by fraud. Those are entirely different functions. Once political appointees begin participating in the management of private enterprises, business decisions inevitably become political decisions. And you can be sure that depending upon who happens to control Congress and the While House, about one half of the population will vehemently disagree with those decisions.

 

History demonstrates that governments are remarkably poor at efficiently allocating capital. Bureaucrats respond to political pressure, election cycles, interest groups, and ideological agendas. Entrepreneurs respond to the wants and needs of consumers. Their free purchasing decisions (or not) in the marketplace control the success or failure of a particular business. Government should never be involved in such decisions.

 

The commission would not be bound by factors that ensure the best interests of the company’s investors or customers. Rather, the commission would be “mandated to promote the goals of worker welfare, public safety, fair competition, environmental sustainability, and financial solvency.” These politically motivated concepts are entirely undefined. Moreover, the money in the fund could never be used to provide “financial assistance to, or for the benefit of” any AI company from whom the wealth is confiscated. Thus, the proposal is, in every sense of the word, a one-way street.

 

Even more concerning is the unique nature of the companies targeted by this legislation. AI is rapidly becoming one of the principal means through which Americans obtain information, conduct research, communicate, and create and operate businesses. Government ownership of substantial voting interests in these companies raises obvious concerns.

 

To be clear, the legislation does not expressly authorize government officials to determine what information Americans may access via the AI platforms it would partly own. But it is not unreasonable to ask where that path may lead. If political appointees possess and exercise meaningful influence over the governance of companies that increasingly shape information, communications, and technological development, today’s corporate governance authority could become tomorrow’s influence over product design, content policies, or access to emerging technologies. It is not a wild leap to suggest that government’s direct control of boardrooms could turn into direct control over the nature of the information Americans are allowed to use and consume. Remember the Disinformation Governance Board, created in 2022 within the Department of Homeland Security during the Biden administration? Here we go again!

 

This is precisely the potential worst-case scenario that Americans should examine before granting government unprecedented ownership authority over the nation’s most innovative private enterprises.

 

This proposal also creates a dangerous precedent that could extend far beyond artificial intelligence. If Congress can require AI companies to surrender half their ownership because the industry has become so “systemically important,” what prevents the next Congress and president from applying the same reasoning to pharmaceutical companies, energy producers, home builders, financial institutions, insurance providers, food producers, biotech firms, or car manufacturers? Aren’t all of these sectors systemically important? Once compulsory government ownership of private enterprise is accepted as legitimate, the list of future targets becomes a matter of political preference rather than constitutional principle.

 

This is an open, brazen Marxist attack on private property itself. Private ownership is not merely an economic arrangement. It is one of the principal safeguards of individual liberty. When citizens own property independent of government, they possess a measure of independence from government itself. As government ownership of the means of production expands, private independence necessarily contracts. The end result is total dependence on government for one’s daily needs. There is no leverage in changing another’s opinion or compelling his support greater than that of being the provider of the daily sustenance that person needs to live.

 

That is why proposals like Minnesota’s wealth tax are so troubling. They gradually erode the connection between effort and reward. Sanders’ proposal goes even further by weakening the connection between ownership and investment. America did not become the world’s leader in innovation because unelected bureaucrats directed the activities of private enterprise. It became the world’s leader because entrepreneurs risked their own fortunes, investors voluntarily supplied capital, and consumers — not bureaucrats — determined which ideas succeeded.

 

The American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act turns that formula upside down.

 

It allows politicians to acquire substantial ownership of successful companies without risking taxpayer capital in the marketplace. It allows millions of Americans to receive investment returns from businesses in which they invested nothing, and for whose failures they bear no financial responsibility. It places government appointees in positions of influence over some of the most strategically important technology companies in the world with no accountability to the marketplace.

Boulder’s Climate Lawsuit Is a Tax on Every American

By Marc Wheat & Mitchell G. Bahnsen

Saturday, June 20, 2026

 

This fall, the Supreme Court will hear a case that could do more damage to American household budgets — and our economy as a whole — than almost any piece of legislation ever passed by Congress. It doesn’t involve a new spending bill or a tax hike but rather a lawsuit filed by Boulder County, Colo. And if Boulder wins, every American will pay the price.

 

Suncor Energy v. Boulder County is the leading case in a wave of more than 60 climate lawsuits filed by progressive localities against oil and gas companies since 2017. Boulder (the county and the city together) alleges that since ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy produce and sell fossil fuels, they contribute to global warming, the effects of which, it claims, have harmed Boulder’s property and residents. As compensation for these harms, Boulder seeks billions of dollars. In a parallel case, a single Oregon county is demanding more than $50 billion. New York’s Climate Change Superfund Act, signed into law in December 2024, seems to impose $75 billion in assessments on major fossil fuel producers over the next quarter century.

 

The architects of this litigation campaign aren’t shy about what they’re doing. David Bookbinder, a former counsel of record in the Boulder case, described the strategy last year as “a rather convoluted way to achieve the goals of a carbon tax.” This is extremely telling, as proponents of a carbon tax have tried and failed repeatedly to move legislation through Congress. Now they’re trying to achieve through lawsuits what they couldn’t accomplish through legislatures.

 

The problem is that the costs of that end run won’t stay in Boulder but will land on everyone. The oil and natural gas industry contributes more than $2.1 trillion to U.S. GDP annually and supports more than 10 million jobs across the full supply chain, from wellhead through pipeline, refinery, and to the gas station. Oil and gas extraction workers earn a mean annual wage of $114,750, roughly double the national median. When litigation forces companies to set aside massive reserves and contend with reduced credit, they curtail investment in exploration and production, tightening domestic supply and leading to higher prices.

 

This will be another pressure point on affordability for middle America and a serious hardship on the poorest households. Low-income families already spend nearly 20 percent of their income on home energy and transportation fuel — a share more than three times what the average American household pays. A litigation-driven increase in energy prices functions as a regressive tax, severely harming the poor and middle classes as concerns about affordability continue to worsen.

 

Even starker are the national security implications. Only a few years ago, Europe was woefully dependent on Russian natural gas. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the EU leaned more heavily on American liquified natural gas exports to keep the lights on, a shift made possible by U.S. energy companies like Houston-based Cheniere Energy. The amount of liability that progressive Boulder proposes would force those companies to price massive litigation costs into every cargo barrel, making American exports less competitive overnight and handing a structural advantage to Russia, Qatar, and Iran, all of which would happily undercut us.

 

The Colorado Supreme Court allowed Boulder’s suit to proceed on the erroneous theory that, because the Clean Air Act doesn’t expressly preempt state tort claims, Boulder is free to use state nuisance law as a regulatory tool. But that reasoning turns on its head more than a century of federalism precedents. The Supreme Court established in Georgia v. Tennessee Copper (1907) that interstate air pollution is a federal question governed by federal law, not state tort law.

 

American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut (2011) reaffirmed the point that Congress, in passing the Clean Air Act, transferred authority over interstate air emissions from the federal courts to the Environmental Protection Agency, not to the states. State tort law has never played a substantive role in governing interstate air pollution. It cannot assume that role now simply because the effects of the pollution are called “climate change.”

 

The core question before the Supreme Court is not about the legitimacy of climate science, which is a vigorously contested issue. It’s about who decides what federal policy looks like. Does the federal government, accountable to all 50 states and all 330 million Americans, set U.S. energy policy? Or do a few government officials representing a single, very progressive county in Colorado get to impose their preferred policy on the whole nation and damage our economy by imposing huge costs on families and businesses?

 

The Constitution has a clear answer.

 

The Framers built a system in which genuinely national problems — the kind that cross state lines and affect every citizen — are handled by the federal government. They did so precisely because they’d seen what happened under the Articles of Confederation, when states pursued their own economic interests at one another’s expense. James Madison called it one of the chief “Vices of the Political System.” States trespassed on each other’s rights and imposed costs on their neighbors, triggering retaliation and economic chaos. Boulder’s lawsuit is exactly such a dynamic in 21st-century dress, and the Court should shut it down.

Bernie Sanders’s ‘Wealth Fund’ Scheme Has Already Been Tried

By John Gustavsson

Monday, June 08, 2026

 

Bernie Sanders announced last week that he will be introducing legislation aimed at creating an artificial intelligence sovereign wealth fund. Sanders proposes confiscating 50 percent of AI equity and putting it into a public fund, having the government act as an active shareholder. Sanders falsely implies that this is a mainstream practice around the world. It is quite telling that Sanders does not understand how Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, built from oil revenue and currently buying small stakes in a number of AI firms at the market price, differs from his own proposed state confiscation. In fact, only Sweden provides a real historical precedent — and that experiment ended in a disaster that forever changed the country’s political environment.

 

In 1976, the Swedish Trade Union Confederation proposed the creation of löntagarfonder, or employee funds. The issue had been debated since 1971, when the Confederation funded a study to lay out how such funds might work. This study was released to a warm reception in 1975 and officially was endorsed by the government the following year. Under the original plan, any corporation with more than about 50 employees would be required each year to issue new shares equivalent to 20 percent of its profits. Control of these shares would go to the individual unions that made up the Confederation. Gradually, these unions would gain a majority stake, effectively socializing the economy.

 

This was a radical deviation from traditional Swedish social democracy. The Social Democrats party, while proudly left-wing, had prided itself on its rejection of Bolshevism, even going so far as to round up communists into concentration camps during World War II. The party’s long streak in government was the result not just of good outcomes, but of pragmatism: The monarchy was left in place, and while tax levels rose, these taxes — beyond a mostly symbolic wealth tax — did not chiefly target the aristocracy.

 

In the late 1960s, this began change, as radical left-wing trends sweeping the world reached Sweden. Taxes began to rise sharply. The 1938 agreement between unions and the employers’ confederation that guaranteed no government interference in the labor market — the reason Sweden to this day does not have a legal minimum wage — was violated by the government for the first time in 1974, in the unions’ favor.

 

Soon after, the Confederation, flush with confidence, proposed the employee funds. The Social Democrats, a party that had once founded the Confederation and was bankrolled largely by union contributions, found themselves unable to disown the idea.

 

The timing could not have been worse. After enjoying a post-war boom even stronger than the United States’, the Swedish economy had already stalled under the weight of high oil prices and increased international competition. The mere prospect of the employee funds greatly contributed to families behind iconic Swedish firms like IKEA and Tetra Pak leaving the country.

 

In 1976, after an election campaign dominated by the employee-funds issue and Sweden’s infamous above-100 percent marginal tax rates, the Social Democrats were defeated, ending a 44-year streak in power. Despite this, the party, still in the unions’ headlock, officially endorsed and ran on establishing employee funds ahead of the next election in 1979. They were again defeated.

 

Finally, after returning to power in 1982, the employee funds became a reality, albeit in a watered-down form. The minister of finance at the time, Kjell-Olof Feldt, was caught on camera furiously writing a poem in the plenary on the very day the funds legislation was passed. In the poem, he cursed the funds that he — despite publicly endorsing them — knew would hurt Sweden’s economy and cursed the union bosses who forced him, an old-school social democrat, to implement them. Outside the Riksdag, over 75,000 people gathered to protest the funds, in what was (and continues to be) the largest right-wing demonstration in Sweden’s history.

 

Almost one-sixth of Sweden’s business dynasties had left the country by 1988. This number conceals a far greater capital flight: 67 percent of the wealth held by the 50 wealthiest Swedes was by the early 1990s held by those living abroad.

 

After the victory of the right in the 1991 election, abolishing the funds became the very first act of the new coalition government. To discourage the unions from ever trying again, the center-right government refused to let the unions keep the money already in the funds, instead using it to fund a number of research foundations and two venture capital firms.

 

The government spent its one term in office cleaning up the fallout from both from the capital flight and a collapsed real-estate bubble, which had been caused by a credit boom stemming from the Social Democrats’ decision to abolish liquidity ratios. That boom had also drastically increased money supply, but as the Social Democrats had refused adjust the krona’s fixed exchange rate, this left the currency overvalued and vulnerable to speculators.

 

This problem, too, was left to the center-right government, which reluctantly agreed to abolish the fixed exchange rate regime altogether after a massive speculative attack by none other than George Soros, with the aid of current U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

 

Subsequent changes to the Social Democrats’ statutes drastically reduced the unions’ influence, as the party chose to rededicate itself to pragmatism and its two core ideological principles: to take power, and to keep it. Feeling secure enough that the era of socialization was over, some — but not all — of the entrepreneurs who had left Sweden went on to return beginning in the 1990s. Today, not even the Swedish Left Party, which during the Cold War was bankrolled by the Soviet Union, seeks the reestablishment of the employee funds.

 

Yet the mark it left on Swedish politics remains. After trusting and accommodating the Social Democrats for over 40 years, Swedish businesses began to organize politically, funding not just political campaigns but also still-active think tanks to fight back against the left-wing consensus and educate the next generation of right-wing leaders (including current Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson).

 

Rest assured that even in Europe, Sanders’s unique blend of Luddite Bolshevism is a no-sell, and the mere prospect of such an idea being implemented would surely cause capital flight from the U.S., just as happened in Sweden. Those short-lived employee funds live on today only as a cautionary tale against socialization. If America goes down Sanders’s path, it will no doubt find itself writing the next chapter of that tale.

A Moral Case for Jeff Bezos’s Wealth

By Marian L. Tupy

Saturday, June 06, 2026

 

There’s no doubt that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos earned his fortune, and it’s easy to see how the value his work has created has benefited modern society. Amazon has saved people many hours and many dollars. Basic arithmetic shows that his fortune represents only a fraction of the value created for others.

 

But that is not the only defense of his wealth. There is also a moral defense rooted in economic justice. It rests on ownership, discovery, choice, and responsibility.

 

When I recently wrote about Bezos’s value creation in the Wall Street Journal, some readers objected that Bezos did not build Amazon by himself. Amazon used the internet. The government helped create the internet. Therefore, his wealth is partly a product of government action. Therefore, the state has a moral claim on much of his fortune.

 

That is Barack Obama’s “you didn’t build that” argument. True, no one builds anything in isolation, and entrepreneurs use laws, courts, roads, schools, electricity, language, science, and prior inventions.

 

But the redistributionist conclusion does not follow.

 

Public inputs are not gifts from the state. They are funded by taxpayers. If government taxes citizens to build roads, courts, or networks, it cannot later treat those services as favors that create a second claim on private achievement. Citizens paid for the input. They do not owe the state their output.

 

Access is not authorship. The internet made online commerce possible. It did not make Amazon inevitable. The same public inputs were available to millions of people. Every major retailer, investor, and bookstore owner had access to the network. They did not change how we shop. Bezos did.

 

The logic applies universally. The lawyer did not invent the courts. The doctor did not invent medicine. The writer did not invent language. If public input is dispositive, then private property becomes meaningless.

 

The argument becomes circular when government monopolizes an input. The state taxes citizens to fund infrastructure, restricts or crowds out private alternatives, and then says citizens’ use of state infrastructure proves their dependence on government. That is not moral reasoning. It is a closed loop.

 

True public goods may justify taxation under clearly defined rules. They do not justify an ownership claim over every enterprise that uses them.

 

The public inputs argument takes success for granted but never explains why Bezos succeeded while most did not even try. The economist Israel Kirzner provides the answer: entrepreneurial alertness. A successful entrepreneur notices what others miss, acts before others act, and is rewarded if consumers value the result.

 

What about the efforts of Bezos’s employees? Workers are part of Amazon’s success, but their work took place inside an enterprise Bezos created. Wages compensate labor. Equity rewards ownership and risk. Those are different claims.

 

That leads to a second, deeper objection to entrepreneurial wealth from their creations. Bezos may possess unusual alertness, intelligence, drive, or temperament. But he did not earn those traits. He was born with them. Why should he own the returns from gifts he did not earn?

 

The objection confuses two questions. One is whether a person earned his original endowments. He did not. No one does. The other is whether the absence of self-creation gives someone else a better claim to those endowments. It does not.

 

“Unearned” does not mean “ownerless.” Still less does it mean “state-owned.” A person does not earn his memory, courage, intelligence, looks, or energy. Yet those traits are not public property. Think the opposite, and every wage, prize, patent, book, performance, and promotion becomes suspect.

 

Personal attributes are inseparable from the person who possesses them. To let the state claim their products because a person did not earn them is to give the state a prior claim to the person himself.

 

Who, then, has the best claim to his talents and to the fruits of their use? His parents? Parents do not own adult children. The state? The state provided general conditions funded by taxpayers, but it did not raise him, take his risks, delay his gratification, or make his decisions.

 

That leaves Bezos. He may not have earned his native abilities, but he is the person who must exercise them or waste them. Bezos put his endowments into productive action.

 

This, then, is the morally principled case for Bezos’s wealth. A person has the first claim to his mind, body, time, and choices. If he uses them peacefully, and if others deal with him voluntarily, the resulting gains are his.

 

Unequal ability does not transfer ownership of the able to politicians. To let politicians claim ownership over productive talent is a moral inversion.

 

Everyone stands on the shoulders of others. Only a few see farther and build from what they see. We should welcome unequal talent when it is used peacefully and productively. It is a force that moves civilization forward.

From Smash to Grab

By Andrew Stuttaford

Tuesday, June 02, 2026

 

I’m old enough to remember when Bernie Sanders proposed a moratorium on the construction of data centers.

 

The Hill, March 25, 2026:

 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) plan to introduce legislation that would bar construction of all new data centers until “strong national safeguards are in place.”

 

The pair announced the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act on Wednesday, which aims to halt construction of AI infrastructure until lawmakers enact measures requiring government reviews of AI products, preventing mass job displacement and limiting increases in consumer electricity prices.

 

Now, however, there is this. Sanders, writing in the New York Times:

 

I will soon be introducing the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. This legislation would give the public a direct ownership stake in the largest A.I. companies in our country. How? It would create a sovereign wealth fund through a one-time 50 percent tax — not on the profits of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and other companies, but paid with something far more valuable than that: the stock.

 

Yes, expropriation.

 

At a quick glance, these two proposals seem to contradict each other. The moratorium, self-evidently enough, is designed to slow down the roll-out of hyperscale data centers and, by extension, AI.

 

There may be cases where a data center is inappropriate for a certain site. But that is something to be sorted out on a local basis, not by a blanket, top-down moratorium, especially when that moratorium is “about” far more than ensuring, say, that new data centers place an undue burden on electricity bills or are too noisy or too bright for their planned location or (and this is not generally an issue that stands up to scrutiny) threaten water supplies.

 

Thus, the areas in which Sanders would like to see “guardrails” established before the lifting of his moratorium include measures to ensure “the economic gains of AI and robotics will benefit workers, not just the wealthy owners of Big Tech.” That looks like an invitation to a debate that could last years, which may well be the point.

 

In a press release explaining his proposed moratorium, Sanders also argued:

 

This bill will stop a global race to see which country is the first to eliminate hundreds of millions of jobs, or the first to build an AI that destroys the planet. It accomplishes this by banning U.S. exports of AI computing infrastructure to countries that do not have safeguards in place to guarantee AI is safe and effective, workers are protected and AI does not harm the environment.

 

The restrictions on exports are, if imposed intelligently, fine, but Sanders’s moratorium will not stop a “global race” to develop ever more advanced AI. It will merely concede it to China. We don’t know yet what the effects of AI on jobs will be, but, unless we move forward with it, we will not discover what jobs it can create here. But we will find out what how many jobs the U.S. will lose to AI-powered foreign competition.

 

As for ensuring that the U.S. does not develop an AI that “destroys the planet,” let’s just say that unilateral disarmament is highly unlikely to avoid the development (or attempt to develop) such lethal AI elsewhere. Best guess: it will merely ensure that if such AI is ever developed it will be by the Beijing regime, and that the U.S. will have no response.

 

Sanders’s proposed expropriation is not aimed at enriching the taxpayer (an aim somewhat difficult to reconcile with his moratorium), but it does look a lot like an alternative route to gumming up the development of AI in the U.S.

 

He writes:

 

The federal government would have the power, through its voting shares and an equal representation on each company’s board, to block decisions that hurt our citizens and to push for policies that help them.

 

It would take up an immense amount of space to list the ways in which big government could abuse that power. That its involvement would also slow down the development of AI would be inevitable.

 

The mere existence of such a proposal (and indeed the moratorium) is likely to scare off capital and talent from a technology that may hand the U.S. immense technological and geopolitical advantages. Why do that?

 

Moreover, some of that talent and capital could easily end up elsewhere. Doors would open in Beijing.

 

Imagine if Thomas Edison or Henry Ford had been obliged to contend with a Sanders. Or picture the moment when, sensing an approaching storm, Benjamin Franklin makes his big move only to be confronted by a time-traveling Sanders and told to step away from the kite.

All the Money in the World, and Then Some

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, May 04, 2026

 

We finally really did it! You maniacs! You blew it up!

 

From the numbers-monkeys over in the statistical department comes the news that U.S. government debt has crossed a red line: Debt held by the public now exceeds 100 percent of GDP, those figures being $31.27 trillion and $31.22 trillion, respectively.

 

What that means is that if the federal government were somehow able to pass a tax that would confiscate 100 percent of the output of the U.S. economy for a year—if consumption somehow magically fell to $0.00 and Americans were able to do nothing else with their economic efforts except put their fruits toward the national debt—it would not be enough.

 

Oh, don’t worry—it gets worse.

 

On top of the $31.3 trillion in federal debt per se, there’s another $88 trillion or so (some estimates are higher) in unfunded liabilities for major entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare. There’s another $1.5 trillion or so in unfunded state and local government pension liabilities, which are not a federal liability as a formal matter, but it is all the same from the taxpayers’ collective point of view, and the pressure for a federal bailout of the states may very well overwhelm our weak-kneed Congress. Call it $120 trillion in the hole just to keep the number simple. That is just a little bit more than the total economic output of the entire human race in 2025. That is a lot of money: In fact, even if you define “money” relatively broadly (here, I’m using M2, meaning all the cash, checking and savings deposits, and smaller instruments such as certificates of deposit) it is—fun fact!—more than all the money in the world.

 

Oh, don’t worry—it gets worse!

 

The Congressional Budget Office adds this cheery context:

 

Deficits

 

In CBO’s projections, the federal budget deficit in fiscal year 2026 is $1.9 trillion and grows to $3.1 trillion by 2036. Relative to the size of the economy, the deficit is 5.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2026 and grows to 6.7 percent in 2036, which is greater than the 3.8 percent deficits averaged over the past 50 years. Rising net interest costs drive much of that increase. The primary deficit, which excludes those net interest costs, totals 2.6 percent of GDP this year and stays below that level through 2036, when it totals 2.1 percent.

 

Debt

 

From 2026 to 2036, large and growing deficits cause debt to increase. Federal debt held by the public rises from 101 percent of GDP this year to 120 percent in 2036, surpassing its previous high of 106 percent of GDP in 1946.

 

Outlays and Revenues

 

In CBO’s projections, federal outlays in 2026 total $7.4 trillion, or 23.3 percent of GDP. Relative to the size of the economy, outlays remain near their 2026 level through 2028 and then rise, reaching 24.4 percent of GDP in 2036; that trend is a result of greater spending on Social Security and Medicare and growth in net interest costs that are partly offset by declining outlays for discretionary programs. Revenues total $5.6 trillion, or 17.5 percent of GDP, in 2026. Over the 2026–2036 period, increasing individual income tax receipts and remittances from the Federal Reserve are partly offset by declining customs duties measured in relation to the size of the economy. In 2036, revenues total 17.8 percent of GDP, slightly above their 50-year average of 17.3 percent.

 

The bosses here at The Dispatch have asked me to keep the profanity to a minimum, so I am not going to write in plain English what it is that we are: Let’s just say that it is a problem we have not ducked.

 

If longtime readers will forgive my repetition here, I think it is necessary that we liberate ourselves from the crippling superstitions and anesthetizing lies that almost always accompany the discussion of this issue. A few facts to tattoo on your brain:

 

1.      This debt is not driven by incontinent spending on a selection of boutique federal programs that you and your friends don’t like. The main drivers of our debt are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other medical entitlements, national security, and interest on debt already incurred, the latter being a growing and worrisome burden. At present, Social Security by itself accounts for 22 percent of all federal spending; interest payments are 14 percent; non-Medicare health spending is 14 percent; Medicare is another 14 percent; national defense is 13 percent, low by historical U.S. standards; “income security,” meaning welfare writ large, is 10 percent; veterans’ programs are 6 percent; every other damned thing put together adds up to only 6 percent of federal spending. The 2025 deficit amounted to 26 percent of federal spending, meaning we borrowed a little more than $1 out of every $4 we spent. That means that we could cut Social Security spending in half, cut Medicare spending in half, and cut national-defense spending in half and still not balance the budget.

 

2.      Contrary to what my Republican friends often insist, there is no obvious way out of this without entitlement reform and higher taxes or major defense cuts—very likely, all of the above will be required. We could cut non-defense non-entitlement spending to $0.00 and not be able to balance the budget. There is no balanced budget without major entitlement reform, but entitlement reform on its own will not be sufficient: There will have to be large cuts to defense spending and other programs or a large tax increase. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and the ones who have sought their parties’ respective presidential nominations in recent years, generally oppose such cuts. Republicans generally oppose tax increases, and Donald Trump seems to have successfully dragged the GOP into a position of blanket opposition to entitlement reform, at least where that would concern Social Security and Medicare.

 

3.      Contrary to what my progressive friends so often insist, our debt crisis is not the result of tax cuts, and a return to Eisenhower-era tax rates would not fix the problem—in fact, such a policy would not improve the fiscal situation at all. That is because the federal government collects more in taxes today than it did in the supposed economic golden age of the postwar years: Federal taxes from 1956 to 1960 ran 17 percent, 17.3 percent, 16.8 percent, 15.7 percent, and 17.3 percent of GDP. In 2025, federal taxes amounted to 17.3 percent of GDP, a little bit higher than in the Eisenhower years and higher than the 1950-1970 average. The variation is on the spending side: 1950-1970, federal spending ran 17.6 percent of GDP; in 2025, it was 23 percent of GDP—nearly a third more in GDP terms. Tax collections have stayed the same, edging up only a little, but spending is radically higher.

 

4.      Warmaking isn’t cheap, but all this isn’t really a warmaking burden. In GDP terms, defense spending has been trending downward over the years, while entitlement spending is up sharply. Defense spending was 9 percent of GDP as late as 1962, more than three times the 2025 level of 2.9 percent of GDP. In the same years, Social Security spending more than doubled as a share of GDP, and as late as 1979, Medicare spending was only 1 percent of GDP and had more than trebled to 3.3 percent of GDP by 2025. Means-tested (“welfare”) spending went from 0.7 percent of GDP in 1962 to 1.7 percent of GDP in 2025. The notional surpluses at the turn of the century (1999, 2000, 2001) all involved spending that was under 18 percent of GDP. This isn’t to say that the Republican-backed tax cuts of that era were good policy (I do not think they were) or that they did not make things marginally worse (it certainly seems they did), but the thing that has changed dramatically is spending. The numbers are pretty clear on that. There is no year on record, from the beginning of the federal data set in 1930 to the present, in which federal tax collections would have been sufficient to sustain current spending levels: Even in 1944—while the federal government was funding World War II—taxes just barely topped 20 percent of GDP.

 

If you think I’m being funny with the numbers, please do go see for yourself—this is all easily accessible public information.

 

Oh, don’t worry—it gets worse!

 

While the White House is busy indicting former federal bureaucrats for ... posting pictures of seashells on social media ... we are potentially only one failed Treasury auction away from fiscal apocalypse. I put the word “potentially” in there only because nobody knows what a national fiscal crisis looks like when the country in question is responsible for a quarter of the entire world’s economic output. My guess is that it will not look good, and while it is possible that the sheer scale of the U.S. economy will buy us some leeway, it is equally likely that we already have been extended much of the leeway that we can reasonably expect. Laugh at supposed socialist hellholes like Sweden and Denmark all you like, but those big-spending, high-tax welfare states have debt-to-GDP ratios of 35 percent and 28 percent, respectively. (N.B.: You’ll note some discrepancy here, with U.S. debt listed in the linked table at 123 percent of GDP; that’s because this figure includes so-called interagency debt, obligations the U.S. government notionally owes to itself. The EU version of that amounts to about 1.1 percent of EU GDP; the comparison remains useful, in my view, even if it is not exactly apples-to-apples, and different fiscal practices and government structures make more technically precise comparisons difficult.) There are millions of reasons the Scandinavian model probably would not work very well here (roughly 343 million reasons—Americans!), but as a purely fiscal matter there is much to be said for Nordic practice.

 

We could, still, even at this late hour, do something responsible and proactive to get this under control.

 

Or we could keep spinning the cylinder on the .44 magnum and see where this game of fiscal roulette takes us.

 

Words About Words

 

Some wordiness—and a little economics, too.

 

An unusually irritating Washington Post column bears the headline:

 

Targeting this $2.8 trillion tax shelter could solve a big U.S. problem

 

Only good can come from taxing these “nonprofits.”

 

I’m always interested in a good tax-shelter story. This isn’t a tax-shelter story. The “tax shelter” in question is ... the fact that large nonprofits exist. Scott Hodge, president emeritus of the Tax Foundation, has a bee in his bonnet about this, offering as an example the PGA Tour, which, like many sports leagues, is organized as a nonprofit. He writes:

 

The PGA Tour qualifies as a nonprofit “business league,” which means it pays no income taxes on the hundreds of millions it makes from tournament sponsorships and TV deals.

 

That is not quite right. (Surprise.) In reality, the PGA has both a nonprofit and a for-profit wing, and the revenue from media rights goes to the for-profit entity, PGA Tour Enterprises, which recently has booked hundreds of millions of dollars in profit and is liable for corporate taxes on its taxable income. PGA Tour events are, indeed, mainly organized as charitable endeavors, and the organization reports that it has distributed more than $4 billion in charitable contributions.

 

It gets a little complicated, but the PGA’s nonprofit/for-profit dual structure doesn’t appear to be so much engineered to shortchange the taxman as to shortchange star golfers whose PGA “equity grants” remain illiquid while the nonprofit arm, which is the majority owner of the for-profit organization, is loaded up with hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. I am here reminded of how some of the stars of the Star Wars franchise never saw big paydays on their back-end points because, thanks to the miracle of “Hollywood accounting,” some of those films never technically made money. I’m sure there is a tax-planning aspect to it as well, but it is not simply the case that PGA is putting gazillions of dollars into the pockets of executives, competitors, or shareholders without tax liability on its profits.

 

Sports leagues can be a little goofy: The NFL is not a nonprofit today, but it was a nonprofit for a long time. That doesn’t mean that the vast profits generated by professional football went untaxed during its nonprofit years: The NFL did not pay taxes, but Jerry Jones did, and other team owners did, shareholders did, and players and coaches did, etc. Sports leagues are in that sense like other business associations: The National Association of Realtors is a tax-exempt nonprofit whose job is to promote the economic interests of its members, but its members’ businesses are not tax-exempt. Neither are the earnings of the NAR staff and executives.

 

Hodge notes this about nonprofit hospitals:

 

Consider nonprofit hospitals and health care plans: In 2023, they generated $1.3 trillion in revenue and nearly $45 billion in tax-free profits. The largest, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and its affiliated hospitals, recently announced over $127 billion in revenue in 2025 — more than many of America’s largest for-profit companies — yet paid no corporate income tax on more than $9.3 billion in net income.

 

But the reason that $9.3 billion in net income was not taxed is because it was not realized or distributed as taxable income. Nonprofit surpluses do not get paid out like corporate dividends—they get reinvested into the enterprise, which is where the money comes from if a nonprofit hospital chain wants to add, say, upgraded fetal MRI services or build a new cancer treatment facility. It is true that some nonprofit executives and employees get paid pretty well—Do you want a bargain-basement pediatric specialist for your sick kid?—and they pay income tax on those salaries and bonuses and whatnot the same way they would if they worked for for-profit companies. And when a nonprofit hospital spends $1 million on equipment from a for-profit business, that normally produces some profit for the for-profit business, which is taxed as business income under the usual procedures.

 

Some of this stuff is just the weird bias against enterprises that are big. It’s not like there are no corrupt or abusive small businesses, small towns, small government agencies, or small nonprofits. Hodge complains that the AARP’s sponsorship deal with the Washington Nationals is “hardly the action of your neighborhood nonprofit” and that the nonprofit sector includes many enterprises that are, in revenue terms, larger than many for-profit businesses: “The commercial revenue generated by these nonprofits totaled $2.8 trillion in 2023, nearly three times the amount nonprofits receive from donations and government grants.”

 

So, we’re supposed to be mad at nonprofit hospitals because they have found ways to generate revenue rather than rely on donations and government grants? That is a very odd complaint, in my view, as is the implicit preference for “neighborhood” nonprofits. Small organizations sometimes do great work—and so do large ones. Mom-and-pop do-gooder committees really cannot do the kind of work done by, say, the Red Cross or Catholic Charities. Some social purposes are better served by larger organizations than by smaller ones–or by cheap sloganeering about “neighborhood” this or that. The NAACP takes in tens of millions of dollars in revenue most years, and it uses that money to further its mission. Presumably, the NAACP could do more if it had more revenue at its disposal, and if it found ways to raise that revenue compatible with its mission, it is difficult for me to see how, exactly, that would be a bad thing.

 

Hodge has it exactly wrong, in my view. Rather than applying corporate taxes to nonprofits, we ought to get rid of corporate taxes entirely. That does not mean that the money earned by Microsoft or Goldman Sachs or the law firm of Nasty, Brutish & Short would escape taxation—it would mean only that the taxes would be paid by people, when they received actual income in the form of dividends, capital gains, salaries, bonuses, etc. There is a case (Megan McArdle makes it) for treating all income the same way, whether it is an ordinary paycheck or a dividend or an inheritance. There are good arguments on both sides of that (I think it would be good to reinforce incentives for long-term business performance when structuring executives’ compensation, but treating all income the same way would create a bias toward simple salaries), but, in any case, taxing corporate income per se and then re-taxing dividends distributed from that after-tax income is a cumbrous and kind of dumb way to do things.

 

Ah, but this is a language feature!

 

Do you know what a “tax shelter” is? It is a lot like a “loophole” or a “technicality” that sees an accused criminal go free: It is an aspect of the law that you don’t like. That’s all. Our laws may be stupidly written, but they are carefully stupidly written. The laws generally say what they say because somebody wrote the law that way on purpose. We didn’t create the nonprofit corporation by accident.

 

For comparison: We have a “standard deduction” of $15,750 for individual U.S. taxpayers—i.e., we shelter the first $15,750 in income—but nobody calls that a “tax shelter.” We don’t usually convict criminals who have been brought up on charges after illegal surveillance or following a search without a properly executed warrant or after a confession produced via torture, but it is rare to hear anybody denounce these considerations as “technicalities.” The fact that farm kids can do chores is not a “loophole” in our child-labor laws—that’s just the law.

 

It is particularly maddening when members of Congress denounce “loopholes” and “technicalities” and the like—if the lawmakers don’t like the laws, then they can change the damned laws, no?

 

If you want to raise more revenue for the federal government—I do! See the top item!—then there are better and worse ways to do that. When it comes to the federal income tax, we should probably have more taxpayers and fewer deductions. I don’t think putting the bootheel of the IRS on the Shriners Children’s hospitals probably gets it done.

 

And Furthermore ...

 

If you’ll forgive the hippie-punching, I always have the same thought when I read about one of these May Day blanket economic boycotts: If the big idea is to stop work and withhold consumer spending to show the world your economic might, then you should probably try to get your movement to include some workers and consumers whose absence will be ... noticed. In my world, I’d notice if Amazon deliveries stopped, and I’d be miffed if Jiffy Lube or Discount Tire weren’t open during their regular hours. (Those are two great American businesses, by the way, the kind of capitalism that just gets stuff done.)

 

But these May Day knuckleheads? What would you say you do here, kids? The Standard Practices of Right-Wing Columnists Handbook advises that I make a joke about baristas with gender-studies degrees here, but, in reality, the baristas I encounter on a regular basis are hardworking and capable, and many of them get to work before 5 a.m. pretty much every day five or six or seven days a week—and that is no joke. Farmers and ranchers and meatpackers aren’t taking the day off, and neither are owner-operator truck drivers, New York City cab drivers, ER nurses, home health aides, the people who staff mental health crisis hotlines, or, God bless them, what’s left of America’s local newspaper reporters. Discount Tire will still fix your flat for free wherever you bought the tire in the hope that you’ll buy your next one from them. I’ll bet that whoever sells those Palestinian flags to the idiot children who wave them on college campuses is hard at work, too.

 

I’m sure that somebody is taking the day off. Just nobody who does work that I care about.

 

In Closing

 

Of course the United States now makes troop-deployment decisions in response to Donald Trump’s hurt feelings. What a dumb time to be alive.

 

Of course worldwide material abundance is shockingly high and rising. What an amazing time to be alive.