Stop the “Free Lunch” Lunatics Before They Starve You

 

Price controls don't work. They create 9-dollar meat and 50-cent wages. Nationalization equals bread lines. Zohran Mamdani, Mélenchon, Polanski, Lewis will eat your future. Scream louder.

Let me cut the crap. You’ve seen the faces. Zohran Mamdani. Zack Polanski. Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Avi Lewis. They stand there with their soft voices and hard opinions, telling you that the reason your wallet is thin is because some billionaire in a glass tower is sitting on a mountain of cash like a dragon. They tell you the world is a fixed pie. One big pizza. If the rich guy has eight slices, you get two. So their big brain solution? Grab a knife, stab the rich guy’s hand, and redistribute those slices. Price controls. Wealth taxes. Nationalize the pizza shop. Pay for everything by shaking down the one percent until their pockets turn inside out. That sounds like justice if you failed third grade math. But I live in the real world, and let me tell you: that is pure, unadulterated insanity. These people aren’t revolutionaries. They are restaurant critics who have never boiled water. And if we don’t stop them, you won’t be living in a worker’s paradise. You’ll be living in a thirty-minute line for a stale loaf of bread while the government tells you to smile.

The truth is so simple it hurts my teeth to repeat it. Wealth is not a fixed pie. You don’t get rich by cutting slices thinner. You get rich by baking more pizzas. You grow the damn thing. Innovation, investment, entrepreneurship—that’s the oven. These socialists want to smash the oven and hand out the crumbs. You want a history lesson? Fine. Let’s talk about Venezuela. Those guys ran the exact playbook Mélenchon dreams about at night. Price controls on food. Nationalize everything that moves. Did hunger disappear? No. By 2019, the stunning statistic hit—74.9 percent of Venezuelans were surviving on government ration boxes. Not groceries. Rations. You know what happens when you freeze the price of milk? The dairy farmer looks at his cow, does the math, and says, “Why bother?” The cow stops producing, the shelves go empty, and suddenly a pound of meat costs 9 dollars while the monthly minimum wage is the equivalent of 0.50 cents. 0.50 cents! You can’t buy a gum ball with that. That’s not socialism. That’s a slow-motion suicide.

Take Zohran Mamdani. He’s running around New York screaming for a rent freeze. Sounds like a hero until you think for four seconds. You freeze rent, the landlord can’t fix the boiler. You freeze rent, the developer takes his money and builds condos in Miami instead. You end up with moldy walls, broken radiators, and a waiting list for a closet that smells like wet dog. That’s the “affordable” future they want. You can’t freeze your way to abundance. You freeze your way to a slum with better slogans.

And Mélenchon? Oh, this guy is a poet of bad ideas. He wants a 90 percent tax on high earners. He wants to chase French expats across the ocean and tax them even after they flee. What happens when you announce that? Let me paint you a picture. The rich don’t stand around applauding. They leave. They take their yachts, their lawyers, and their payrolls to London or Singapore. You scare the billionaire out of the zip code, you scare the jobs away too. You can’t spend a billionaire’s wealth if the billionaire is sipping espresso in Switzerland, laughing at you.

The Fixed Pie Fallacy is a con job. It’s told by people who have never signed a paycheck, only cashed a government one. They hate the greedy industrialists. But let’s talk about those so-called “greedy villains” for a second. Take Carnegie. That steel tycoon didn’t steal a fixed pie. He built a bigger oven. Between 1870 and 1900, he drove the price of steel down so hard that skyscrapers and bridges became cheap enough for everybody. That wasn’t theft. That was magic. He turned rocks into rails. Or take Rockefeller. When he squeezed the oil business, the price of kerosene dropped by 80 percent. Eighty percent! That meant a factory worker could afford light after dark. That’s not evil. That’s a gift wrapped in greed. His competition made the whole country richer, not poorer. I know life is hard.

I know rent hurts and the boss is a jerk. But the answer isn’t to hand the thermostat to Zohran Mamdani. The answer is to let the builders build, the makers make, and the risk-takers risk. You want lower costs? You don’t wave a magic wand called “price control.” You build a better mousetrap. You compete. You hustle.

So no, I won’t applaud the pie-slicers. I won’t stand in the rain and cheer while they nationalize the bakeries and turn them into DMVs. If these clowns get their way, the only thing we’ll collectively own is a giant, steaming pile of nothing. Wake up, New Yorkers. Wake up, America! Growth hates a straitjacket. And poverty loves a good price freeze. Don’t let the lunatics run the kitchen.

 

For readers interested in a separate line of thought, the titles in my “Brief Book Series” are available on Google Play. Read them here on Google Play or in Barnes & Noble bookstore: Brief Book Series.