“If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don’t be surprised if you get unemployment.”
–Milton Friedman.
“The essential notion of a capitalist society . . . is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.”
–Milton Friedman.
“Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property. When government–in pursuit of good intentions tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the costs come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player.”
–Milton Friedman.
Today the topic is socialism. Below are articles by former New York Lt. Governor Betsy McCaughey, and former Chief Counsel for the House Judiciary Committee–and a sane Democrat–Julian Epstein. Enjoy!
Don’t laugh off Bernie Sanders’ communist AI-heist attempt — young voters are falling for it
BY: Betsy McCaughey, The New York Post (June 6, 2026).
Far-left politicians want to annihilate property rights — and a large share of young voters are buying into it.
That’s a red flag: Our school systems have become socialist indoctrination factories.
This week Sen. Bernie Sanders (I.Vt.), a leftist agenda-setter, called on the federal government to confiscate half the value of the nation’s largest artificial intelligence companies.
He’s targeting OpenAI, Anthropic (creator of Claude) and xAI, for starters.
Making his announcement on Facebook and in a New York Times opinion essay, Sanders said he’ll introduce legislation to slap these companies with a 50% “ownership tax” — literally grabbing company stock without paying anything for it, in shocking defiance of the US Constitution.
That’s expropriating private property for government use, an idea straight out of Vladimir Lenin’s or Fidel Castro’s playbook.
His flimsy justification: “Since AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity.”
Sorry, senator — all inventions and breakthroughs are built on the knowledge that’s come before.
The same argument could rationalize demanding half the stock of a biotech company that produces a cancer cure, or a musical composer who writes a hit.
Who would invest or invent if the government could swoop in and take half?
Sanders’ bill is going nowhere while there’s a Republican majority in Congress — but ignore it at your peril.
It’s a warning: Outright confiscation is the left’s latest scheme to remedy inequality and pay for ever-expanding public benefits.
Sanders lifted the idea from two law professors, Jeremy Bearer-Friend of the George Washington University School of Law and Sarah Polcz of the University of California at Davis School of Law.
Lawyers, can you believe it?
You’d think they’d recall that the US Constitution’s “takings clause” — Bill of Rights, Amendment Five — bars the government from grabbing property without “just compensation.”
Ivory-tower universities tend to reward faculty for their imaginative proposals, and Polcz and Bearer-Friend have admitted their unconstitutional plan would be challenged in federal court.
Sanders couldn’t care less.
And New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani agrees: He warned us at his inauguration that he’d introduce New Yorkers to the “warmth of collectivism.”
His new Block by Block housing plan proposes seizing apartment buildings from their owners to give them to what he calls “responsible stewards,” including tenants — another outrageous attack on property rights.
Pay attention to how fast Democratic Socialist candidates spouting collectivism are making headway.
This week’s primaries produced outright wins or runoff advancements for more than a dozen Democratic Socialists-backed candidates in five states.
Who likes these ideas? Young voters.
Members of Generation Z in particular have a rose-colored view of socialism, communism and collectivism.
According to a recent Heartland Institute/Rasmussen Reports poll, nearly 60% of likely voters age 18 to 24 want a Democratic Socialist in the White House in 2028.
Mandani captured 78% of under-30 voters in November, per an ABC News exit poll.
The Democratic Socialists of America, once the haven of radical retirees reliving their 1960s glory days, is now powered by the young: DSA saw its membership’s average age plunge from 68 to 33 in the last decade.
Blame the leftist indoctrination in K-12 schools and in universities for this socialist and communist enthusiasm.
A staggering 62% of voters age 18 to 29 hold a favorable view of socialism, and 34% favor communism.
That’s what they’re being taught.
CoolKid Facts, a popular education website aimed mainly at elementary-age students, teaches kids that communists believe “the state should provide every citizen with their basic needs . . . and no one is above anyone else.”
Sounds utopian.
No mention of the brutalities, starvation and mass murders committed in the name of communism by Lenin or Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot, Castro or Che Guevara.
In New York state social studies classes, communism and socialism are presented as two economic systems that make things more equal and fair — again without discussing the atrocities that go hand in hand with property confiscation.
Some states are wisely pushing back.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a new law last year requiring his state’s public schools to teach “the brutal realities of life under communism.”
Texas has passed a similar law.
That’s one way to counter heavy-handed teachers’ union indoctrination.
While they’re at it, these states should also teach students about the Takings Clause, and explain to them why property rights are the engine of economic growth.
Confiscating capital is the fastest way to kill an economy, as history has proven again and again.
Sanders’ AI-theft scheme is just the beginning.
The best defense — the only defense — is an educated electorate.
Considering the misguided attitudes of many Gen Z voters, there’s no time to waste.
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Graham Platner and ‘New Wave left’ detest Western exceptionalism
BY: Julian Epstein, The New York Post (June 7, 2026).
How many scandals can beset a major party Senate candidate before the party jettisons him or her? How extreme can such a candidate become before he or she is dumped?
If you’re part of the Democrat party apparatus in Maine, the answer seems to be that nothing is too extreme. Nothing is too scandalous.
By this point, everyone has heard the sordid stories of Graham Platner. The allegations that he twisted an ex’s arm and yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument (he has denied this). The admittance of sexting women shortly after getting married. The mocking of Purple Heart recipients. Calling army soldiers fat, lazy trash, and seemingly wishing their death. Slandering rural Americans as racist and stupid, and blacks, because they “don’t tip.” The porta-john masturbation cringe musings and much more.
Candidate Platner writes off all these personal misgivings as trivial foibles and says it’s his politics that count. The mindless groupthink Democrats fall right into line. “Maybe we focus on the issues facing the American people,” squirmed his patron saint, Sen. Bernie Sanders.
But the real obscenity of Graham Platner is not his personal misdeeds. Rather, it’s his politics.
He has openly embraced communism, which slaughtered 100 million people in the 20th century while oppressing and impoverishing many more. He sported a tattoo like the ones worn by Hitler’s SS at death camps that killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.
Sleepwalking Democrats have leveled charges of fascism so habitually, in such zombie-like fashion, that they don’t even recognize real Nazism when in their midst.
In short, Platner is part of the New Wave left, making common cause with extremists, socialists, and Islamists. It sports an empty form of political narcissism, the con job of a Robin Hood movement pretending to rescue us from fake oppression scenarios. This so it can moralize its way into office on a platform of failed ideas that build nothing other than race and class resentments and government dependency. The substance of civilizational failure.
This new left seems to detest Western exceptionalism — an exceptionalism that has enriched and liberated billions of people, more than any civilization ever. Even our poorest today are wealthier than over 90% of the rest of the world.
Graham Platner would have been dismissed as unacceptable in the Democratic Party just a decade ago. So what does his embrace tell us about modern-day Democrats and where they are headed?
This tells us that the party has a weak bench. It’s no secret that working-class voters — the core base for Democrats since the New Deal — are abandoning Democrats, as are many other groups. Seven in 10 voters think the party is too extreme and out of touch.
To rebuild, the party could go back to the center or lunge to the socialist left. Led by its activist class, it’s choosing the latter.
But very few on the socialist left have ever built a business, or anything else for that matter. AOC was a bartender before her election to Congress in 2018.
Bernie Sanders is a career politician, suckling on the taxpayer teat nearly all his career. To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, the far left knows nothing about creating prosperity; its leaders just think that it somehow exists and that the only interesting question is how to redistribute it.
This means the New Wave Democrat movement doesn’t really know much about building through discovery, innovation, and growth — the hard stuff that grows the economic pie and secures our future. Many on the left are like nepo-babies, knowing only how to take from government payrolls, government-funded NGOs, and George Soros-like ideological philanthropy.
First, this is why the new breed Democratic bench will be a thinner one, attracting novices, activists, and extremists like the terrorist-linked Adam Hamawy, who won the Democratic nomination in New Jersey with the backing of Democratic socialists in Congress. This toxicity will deter more serious candidates.
Second, the Platner conundrum also tells us this New Wave Democrat is myopic. Democrats across the country will be badgered all fall with questions about supporting the Nazi-tattooed, Hamas-supporting, self-described communist. When they try to dodge, as Sen. Chris Murphy clumsily did last Sunday, they will be seen as weak, cowardly, and out of touch by normie voters.
Third, Platner conveys that Democrats are situational, insincere moralists, whose collective heads exploded at every one of Trump’s transgressions but who stared at their shoelaces when it came to one of their own.
Finally, the Platner phenomenon tells us of the cowardice of the party’s moderates. When I worked years ago at the House Judiciary Committee alongside Senator Schumer, then a proud centrist, he would always talk about the importance of saying “no” to the hard left. Who would have thought that years later he would be so intimidated by online activists that he would coddle a candidate cheering the genocidal Hamas today.
Ultimately, it is this cowardice of party leaders who know better that is leading to the party’s decadent decline.
GFK
Observations From The Fifth Estate 