750,000 GHOSTS | FROM OUR GENERATION #73

Accurate history is cheap tuition. Learning from other people’s experience costs far less than repeating their mistakes, but only if the record is right. The popular story says FDR ended the Depression. The data says the war did, and that top marginal rates jumping from 25% to 94% helped trigger a second downturn in 1937 and 1938.

Germany’s AfD is now the most popular party in recent regional elections, while Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party keeps sliding. Government spending runs 57% of GDP in France, 50% in Germany, 45% in Britain, and 34% in the United States, about four points above its historical norm. Britain has 410 registered parties, France 30, Germany seven. Centrist parties build coalitions with the left, so more parties means less change, even when voters ask for it.

Candidates who hide their agenda have no mandate to carry it out. Nebraska has no Democrat on the Senate ballot, and independent Dan Osborne is now answering for a recorded private rant. A mandate only covers what you promised.

A poll of fewer than a thousand Democrats asked how they would like Trump to leave office. About 90% favored impeachment, 77% the 25th Amendment, and roughly two thirds a military coup. The pollster was not named on air. The hatred runs far deeper than policy disagreement.

The Vance fraud task force says it is removing 750,000 Obamacare enrollees who never existed, signed up by brokers who collected commissions and insurers who collected subsidies, with no claims ever filed. One California defendant allegedly took $118 million through sham vendors. California added 205,708 social assistance establishments between early 2020 and early 2026. Most coverage describes 750,000 people losing coverage, not 750,000 names that were never real people.

New court filings show AI companies knew what they were doing. A Microsoft document called model training an astounding theft, and OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT called the products an existential threat to publishers. AI answers skip the click, so the sites that did the work get no traffic and no revenue. The same companies warning of doom want regulation that boxes out competitors.

Lawsuit costs end up in prices. States sued the tobacco companies, lawyers took a third, and smokers paid through higher prices. Insurance works the same way, and Obamacare’s 80% payout rule rewards insurers for inflating the base. Big companies absorb the overhead. Small ones can’t.

Trump pulled White House press credentials from CNN, MS Now, and Politico. In 2021, CNN floated the same move against Fox News under Biden. Somebody has to decide who fits in the briefing room, and the risk is handing that power to a president of either party.
Nicole Hannah-Jones regrets leaving her daughter in a government-run school but still sides with the unions on choice for everyone else. Twenty-one states, almost all Democrat-run, declined the federal scholarship tax credit, and Indiana is advertising in Illinois to collect the donations instead. Milwaukee’s government-run schools rank fourth worst in the country.

Marx’s labor theory of value misses what capital does. A worker with a $10,000 mower does in ten minutes what took three hours, so he can earn more and the owner can still profit. The Manifesto landed in 1848 because the Industrial Revolution had finally given Marx something to attack. As the old line about his mother goes, she wished Karl had made more capital instead of just writing about it.

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