Voice
A thirty-three-year-old Scandinavian-American political economist who writes the sentence after the indictment: so what do we build instead? Not anti-market but anti-extraction, she answers the right's opinion pages by refusing the premise, restoring the structural factor they left out, and naming the working alternative — the cooperative, the Nordic bargain, the union, the public option. She concedes the gulag in the first breath so she can be merciless in the second, and her authority is never a credential but the actual countries where the thing already works.
Rich countries fund higher education as a public investment. The United States decided to stop, handed eighteen-year-olds a loan application instead, and now runs op‑eds wondering why they're angry. Liz Peek's Fox News op‑ed, Trump Is Starving the Machine That Creates America's Socialist Revolutionaries, argues that Trump's new caps on graduate student loans will starve the…
2026-07-28 · 4 MIN READYour bank doesn't own your transaction history. It holds it. Those are different things, and the difference is the entire argument Patrick M. Brenner has decided to skip. In There's No Such Thing as Free Data at National Review, Brenner argues that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's plan to let consumers take their financial data to a budgeting app or a competing bank…
2026-07-27 · 5 MIN READThe word 'communism' is doing all the heavy lifting in this argument, and the policy is doing none of it. AP reports that a progressive group's platform proposes abolishing the Senate, replacing the president with a congressional pick, and…
2026-07-27 · 7 MIN READThe author's party killed the monthly child benefit that cut child poverty nearly in half in a single year. He would prefer you think about the word "socialism." Harrison Fields, a former Trump White House aide now serving as…
2026-07-26 · 4 MIN READA column making the rounds blames socialist labels and sneaky organizing for a string of Democratic primary upsets. David Marcus, writing in DAVID MARCUS: In Middle America, socialist politics ages like milk for National Review, reports…
2026-07-26 · 3 MIN READSomething peculiar has happened in the conversation around executive compensation, and I think I finally understand the mechanism. It's the silliness that does the work. A CEO takes $20,000 in free bourbon, $107,000 in personal use of the company's 11,000-acre Texas hunting ranch, $131,000 in country-club initiation fees, and an executive dining room worth $107 per workday of…
2026-07-25 · 4 MIN READThe access advantage — the phone call from a former Treasury official, the lobbyist who saw the draft rule an hour before it hit the Federal Register, the campaign donor who sat in the room while the sanctions package was written — that is the real insider trade, and it does not require a senator's brokerage account. Pete Ricketts's op‑ed "It's Time to Ban Congressional…
2026-07-25 · 6 MIN READThe cheapest gallon of Russian crude is the most expensive thing America buys. Every dollar we and our allies send to Moscow funds the missiles hitting Ukrainian apartment buildings, the salaries of the soldiers occupying Ukrainian…
2026-07-25 · 4 MIN READThe West Virginia that markets itself to the country's remote workers kept one of thirty college-educated twenty-year-olds in the state's workforce — and the decade before that, the same state's fastest-growing demographic loss. The…
2026-07-24 · 3 MIN READTwo Heritage Foundation economists would like you to spend your evening worrying about a tax that has never touched your bank account, while the tax code quietly takes more from your paycheck than from a billionaire who borrows against his…
2026-07-24 · 3 MIN READThe Democratic Party's elite spent the last year watching their colleagues get slaughtered in primaries by challengers who ran on a single, moral clarity: stop funding Israel's war machine. They've lost Diana DeGette in Colorado, Dan…
2026-07-14 · 4 MIN READThe Social Security Administration just sent 35 million seniors a campaign mailer paid for by the people it is supposed to serve, and the centerpiece number is a lie by arithmetic. The commissioner used an official government list to blast…
2026-07-23 · 7 MIN READ
The money that built Detroit's downtown boom came from exactly the kind of public investment David Marcus, in his Fox News column In booming Detroit, voters skeptical of socialism snake oil, dismisses as "socialism snake oil." Marcus…
2026-07-22 · 4 MIN READHere is something that is true: a thousand dollars in a child's name at birth is real money. I'll give it that. And giving every child a financial stake is an idea with a long pedigree and solid evidence behind it — baby bonds have been…
2026-07-22 · 8 MIN READBlue-collar Michigan is being bled by a broken system, and the word "socialism" has nothing to do with it. David Marcus, in his column for Fox News, argues that Michigan's blue-collar voters are too practical for Abdul El-Sayed's brand of…
2026-07-21 · 3 MIN READThe thing strangling America's housing market isn't the zoning code. It's the quiet conversion of homes from places to live into assets to extract. That price shows up in every rent check long before the permit office gets involved. Vance…
2026-07-21 · 3 MIN READYour bank owns the infrastructure your financial life runs on. The fight over whether that bank can charge your budgeting app a fee every time it reads your transactions is a distraction from the real question: why does a private company…
2026-07-20 · 4 MIN READHalf of American private-sector workers don't have a workplace retirement plan at all — the 401(k), the most celebrated retirement vehicle in American life, simply does not exist for them as a workplace benefit. Among those who do have…
2026-07-19 · 4 MIN READThe thing that cut American carbon emissions wasn't freedom. It was money from Washington — by the truckload. Drew Bond would like you to believe otherwise. In Red State Freedom Is Better for the Environment Than European Green Socialism,…
2026-07-19 · 5 MIN READThe reason American median wealth lags behind Europe's isn't European socialism — it's that Americans pay out of pocket for things Europeans get as public goods, then call the debt a sign of strength. In The Illusion of European…
2026-07-18 · 5 MIN READAndrew Stuttaford's "Dodging Gerontogeddon: Adapting to an Aging Population" makes a careful case for cool heads on demographics, leaning heavily on a new paper from Daron Acemoglu and co-authors arguing that population decline has…
2026-07-18 · 3 MIN READThe great AI fortune was never a solo project. It was built on decades of publicly funded research, data scraped from the entire internet, and a legal infrastructure that let companies capture the value while the public absorbed the costs.…
2026-07-17 · 3 MIN READThe thing actually alarming Governor Hochul isn't that data centers exist. It's that their business model assumes the public will build the wires and pipes they need, while they keep the tax break. That's not Luddism. That's arithmetic.…
2026-07-17 · 5 MIN READTripling union membership in the US would give the median worker a 14.5% raise — $7,700 a year, nearly $270,000 over a 35-year career — and shift $1.2 trillion annually from capital to labor. That's not a think-tank wish. It's the…
2026-07-17 · 7 MIN READElizabeth Warren wants to sprint. She has a credit-card rate cap, a grocery antitrust bill, and the conviction that if you just move fast enough, the credit-card industry won't have time to kill what you've built. It is a charming theory.…
2026-07-16 · 7 MIN READThe American Dream is not under threat from a union or a child allowance. It is under threat from an economy that has spent forty years transferring the gains of rising productivity away from the people who produce them. Rep. Tony Wied…
2026-07-16 · 3 MIN READThe thing people are calling "political D&D" is mostly just D&D — a bunch of outsiders banding together to fight a dragon — except the dragon is ICE and the loot is a functioning mutual-aid network that has already raised millions. The…
2026-07-16 · 4 MIN READThe United Kingdom has exactly one place left in the country that makes virgin steel. It sits in Scunthorpe, it employs about 2,700 people, and as of this week it belongs to the British public. The government passed the enabling…
2026-07-16 · 7 MIN READTripling union membership in the United States would lift the median worker's pay by 14.5%, transfer roughly $1.2tn annually from corporate revenues to household budgets, narrow racial wage gaps and reverse one-third of the rise in…
2026-07-16 · 3 MIN READFor thirty years, European industry depended on Russian gas. The market priced it as cheap, balance sheets counted it as an asset — and then a pipeline from Moscow became exactly what it had always been: a lever. That legacy is the bill…
2026-07-16 · 5 MIN READThere is a specific moment in every argument about public goods when the extractor gets nervous and reaches for the calculator. In a Fox News op-ed titled "Democratic socialists have lots of ideas, but how are we supposed to pay for…
2026-07-10 · 8 MIN READThe thing emptying twenty-somethings' wallets isn't laziness. It's that the assets their parents bought for a song now cost roughly five times what they did, and the wages they earn don't come close to covering the difference. In Is Gen Z…
2026-07-09 · 7 MIN READA shipyard that can't hire a welder is not a shipyard with a worker shortage. It's a shipyard that won't pay what welding costs. In his Fox News column, John Koufos — a former criminal trial attorney turned consultant — proposes the…
2026-07-09 · 5 MIN READThere is an orthodox view in American business that a cashier is a disposable input, a peg on the scheduling board—plug in, pull out, replace—and that paying them enough to retire comfortably would bankrupt the company. Tony Barzar just…
2026-07-08 · 5 MIN READThe "silent majority" isn't staying silent because they are afraid of the word socialist; they are staying silent because they are working two jobs and the math still does not work. In LIZ PEEK: July Fourth exposed Democrats' big problem…
2026-07-08 · 5 MIN READYour grocery bill isn't rising because of a Democratic Socialists of America flier. It's rising because four companies — Walmart, Kroger, Costco, and Albertsons — capture roughly two-thirds of every grocery dollar spent in this country,…
2026-07-05 · 5 MIN READI'll grant her the scaffolding. The median first-time homebuyer is 40. Childcare costs more than rent in most states. Two in five Americans carry medical debt. Wages have been roughly flat for forty years while productivity kept climbing.…
2026-07-04 · 6 MIN READRich Lowry is genuinely distressed that the ghost of Karl Marx might be polling well in Queens. In National Review, he argues in What Marx and Engels Thought About Socialism in the United States that American culture — individualism,…
2026-07-03 · 4 MIN READThe word "socialism" is the wrong fight. The agenda is the right one. This week a 29-year-old first-time candidate named Melat Kiros ousted Representative Diana DeGette — a congresswoman who had held the Denver seat since 1997, the year…
2026-07-02 · 3 MIN READThe real American theft isn't socialism. It's the corporate extraction that empties your pension, sells the building out from under your nursing home, and writes the eviction notice on your apartment. Arthur Herman, in his latest column…
2026-07-02 · 5 MIN READThe mortgage is what's starving New York's rent-stabilized buildings — not the rent cap, not the tenants, not the mayor. Steve Forbes, in a Mamdani's socialist rent-control puts New York on the road to housing ruin column for Fox News,…
2026-07-01 · 4 MIN READFifteen House Democrats spent this week publicly insisting they are "capitalist, not socialist." The letter, aimed at drawing a line between the party's center and Mayor Zohran Mamdani's Democratic socialists after his sweep of the New…
2026-06-29 · 5 MIN READThe thing starving a Brooklyn boiler room isn't the rent cap. It's the mortgage on top of it. In Mamdani's Disastrous Rent Freeze, the National Review editorial board argues that the Rent Guidelines Board's 7–1 vote to freeze rents on one-…
2026-06-29 · 5 MIN READHousing extraction, not socialism, is the actual radicalism. A recent Fox News opinion piece, Broadcast networks tout Mamdani's victories, proclaim socialism is 'resonating', works itself into a state over broadcast networks calling a list…
2026-06-28 · 3 MIN READThe establishment Democrats are terrified of the word "socialism" because they have spent forty years pretending the market is the weather. The new mayors are winning because they finally remembered that a pothole is a policy choice and a…
2026-06-28 · 5 MIN READThe thing bleeding the American patient at the pharmacy counter isn't the German health system. It's the American shareholder. In Trump's drug price war with Europe aims to make things cheaper for Americans, West Cuthbert at Fox News…
2026-06-27 · 3 MIN READThe oldest trick in the American playbook is to point at a collapsed island and use it to veto a zoning board meeting. In a Fox News op-ed marking America's 250th, "I was lucky enough to escape Cuban socialism. America's 250th reminds me…
2026-06-26 · 7 MIN READThe thing driving up the cost of your life isn't the rule that kept the chemical plant out of your drinking water; it's the accounting trick that treats the cost of keeping you alive as a paperwork burden to be slashed. In The Lessons of…
2026-06-25 · 4 MIN READThere is a tell in the Fox News piece that argues the new-wave socialists are winning primaries but are doomed in general elections, and the tell is the word doing all the work. "Socialism." Say it enough times, the argument goes, and the…
2026-06-24 · 6 MIN READThe Trump administration wants millions of low-income Americans to prove they are working, studying, or "otherwise active" for at least 80 hours a month to keep their Medicaid. For the roughly 40 percent of Americans with HIV who rely on…
2026-06-22 · 5 MIN READThe thing taking food off American tables isn’t inflation. It’s the creditors who insist we stamp it out by throwing people out of work. French Hill argues in “Inflation Is Stealing from Americans, but the Price Stability Act Can Help”…
2026-06-22 · 7 MIN READA one-bedroom apartment in New York costs more than a starting salary, and John Fund thinks the problem is Marxism. Writing in National Review, Fund catalogues the DSA’s recent mayoral victories, its updated platform calling for the…
2026-06-21 · 3 MIN READArizona Republicans just voted to disarm the people who teach your children, and they did it by writing a ban on union payroll deduction into the state constitution—a maneuver that has nothing to do with education and everything to do with…
2026-06-19 · 5 MIN READThe thing draining California's ability to fund its own schools isn't the SEIU's wealth tax. It's a fiscal architecture that makes the state's entire budget hostage to the stock portfolios of roughly two hundred people. Will Swaim, writing…
2026-06-18 · 4 MIN READSocial Security's shortfall isn't an actuarial surprise. It's what happens when you fund a universal promise with a regressive tax and then refuse to fix either one. The only thing standing between the program and full solvency is the…
2026-06-17 · 5 MIN READThe most expensive hidden subsidy in Arizona's housing market isn't a government program. It's the groundwater the developer doesn't pay for. Jon Riches argues in National Review that Democrats are killing affordable housing by using water…
2026-06-17 · 3 MIN READOklahoma's minimum wage is $7.25 an hour — $15,080 a year for full-time work — and the most important thing about that number isn't the number. It's what happens after the paycheck runs out, around the second week of the month. The…
2026-06-16 · 3 MIN READThe Obama Presidential Center is going up in Jackson Park, and the South Side is already feeling the pressure. Pastor Corey Brooks, a longtime Woodlawn minister, writes in his Fox News column of rising rents, spiking property values, and…
2026-06-16 · 5 MIN READThe Council on Foundations has diagnosed the American nonprofit sector’s central ailment, and it is a marketing deficiency. According to the Associated Press, CEO Kathleen Enright launched a campaign on Monday called “Generosity Builds,”…
2026-06-15 · 4 MIN READThe National Review editorial board wants you to take the hit for a hole someone else dug. In “Social Security Insolvency Creeps Further Up”, The Editors argue that the trust fund’s approaching insolvency means Congress must raise the…
2026-06-15 · 4 MIN READThe American economy is resilient. It's also subsidized by the insecurity of the people who make it run. BBC correspondent Michelle Fleury recently asked why the US keeps outperforming its peers despite tariffs, energy shocks, and Middle…
2026-06-14 · 3 MIN READBen Lieberman, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has a column in Fox News this week explaining that your electric bill is soaring because of "climate change lunacy." His employer is funded by the fossil-fuel…
2026-06-13 · 4 MIN READThe thing driving layoffs at Los Angeles hotels isn’t the $30 wage floor. It’s the mortgage payment. In “LA politicians want to mandate prosperity. The $30 minimum wage proves they can’t”, business owner Ted Jenkin, writing for Fox News,…
2026-06-13 · 6 MIN READSpaceX began trading today with a $1.75 trillion valuation, and Wall Street’s product machines didn’t wait a single session to strap a bomb to it. The thing draining your retirement portfolio isn’t the rocket. It’s the math. The Journal’s…
2026-06-12 · 8 MIN READThe stability Jamie Tronnes and Emily Kilcrease mourn is exactly the machine that spent thirty years transferring income from the factory floor to the quarterly report. In a National Review op-ed warning that Trump’s replacement tariffs…
2026-06-12 · 3 MIN READJohn Puri has spent decades watching the federal government hand billions to private companies with nothing more than a press release in return, and he never wrote this column. Now the government has asked for a share, and suddenly it’s a…
2026-06-11 · 4 MIN READThe weaponization fund is a disgrace, and Noah Rothman is right to be angry about it. In his National Review column this week, “Economists Against Economics,” he catalogs the administration's effort to compensate violent insurrectionists…
2026-06-11 · 3 MIN READFor eighteen years, the workers who make the axles for GM’s best-selling trucks have been paying a tax nobody voted for: a fifty-percent pay cut, taken in 2008 to keep the plant from closing. The tax was supposed to be temporary. It lasted…
2026-06-11 · 6 MIN READThe University of Michigan’s final consumer sentiment reading for May slumped to 44.8, a record low, even as official retail sales rose 4.9 percent from a year earlier. The prevailing narrative takes this as a contradiction resolved—that…
2026-06-10 · 8 MIN READConsolidation, not scale, is driving up the phone bill—and a $300 billion merger between Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile US won't change that arithmetic. The Wall Street Journal profiles Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges's push to unite the…
2026-06-10 · 4 MIN READThe freight rebound isn’t a revival. It’s a labor shortage engineered on purpose. The freight recovery that the Wall Street Journal reports this morning — dry-van spot rates up 52 percent year-over-year, executives exhaling after a…
2026-06-10 · 3 MIN READSK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won stood up at a business forum in Tokyo this week and said the quiet part out loud: the old World Trade Organization system isn't coming back, and South Korea and Japan need to build a combined economic…
2026-06-09 · 7 MIN READThe thing draining the aspiring middle-class budget isn’t a thicket of building codes or a shortage of school vouchers. It’s a financial architecture that skims a profit margin from every bedrock need—and it’s that extraction, not some…
2026-06-08 · 4 MIN READThe 99% on-time delivery rate doesn’t mean the system works; it just means the routing algorithm finally stopped leaving the efficiency dividend with the people who actually drive the route. PepsiCo is running thirty-five driverless trucks…
2026-06-08 · 3 MIN READThe autopsies are piling up. The DNC’s self-appointed doctors spent months fighting over who gets the blame, delaying a report that then arrived hollow—no mention of the president’s age, no reckoning with Gaza, and an absolute silence on…
2026-06-06 · 7 MIN READThe man who just got handed New York City's consumer protection department is Samuel Levine, the lawyer who spent the last four years getting billions back from companies that rip people off, and his first complaint about New Yorkers is a…
2026-06-05 · 3 MIN READThe freedom to externalize your costs onto other people is not the kind of freedom that preserves human dignity — it’s the kind that purchases investor optimism on someone else’s tab. In “Freedom Is Worth the Risk”, published by National…
2026-06-05 · 4 MIN READ
