OLIGAHCHY | FROM OUR GENERATION #60

Every dollar spent on government is a dollar somebody else had to earn. That math never changes, no matter how large the economy gets. On a ten-person island, adding one government worker forces the remaining nine to work 11% longer to cover the same output. Add a retiree and the burden climbs again. Scale that to a $7 trillion federal budget and the math is the same, just harder to see.

Bernie Sanders now leads the Democratic Party by the only metric that matters: candidates seek his endorsement more than any other Democrat's. His position has not moved in 40 years. More government, single-payer healthcare, higher taxes, universal programs. He calls the healthcare system broken while having done more than any single politician to build the system he now criticizes. He points to Canada as a model, omitting that wealthy Canadians fly to the U.S. for surgery because wait times make their own system unusable for anything urgent. He calls Great Britain single-payer when it actually runs a two-tier system where anyone who can afford private care opts out of the government version.

The word oligarch gets thrown around without definition. Sanders uses it to attack billionaires, but oligarchy is a political concept: power over others enforced by the state. Mark Zuckerberg cannot compel anyone to use Facebook. The CEO of Exxon cannot set the price of oil. A U.S. Senator can vote to force 330 million people to buy health insurance, destroy an industry, or restructure an economy. If oligarch means anything, it applies to the people who write the laws, not the people who build the products.

Russia's economy is smaller than Italy's. It exports oil and raw materials. It has never produced a globally competitive manufactured product, not a car, not an appliance, nothing. That is what happens when a system does not allow producers to become more efficient over time. The absence of property rights and competitive markets guarantees stagnation regardless of natural resources.

Graham Platner is running for the Maine Senate seat against Susan Collins with a Nazi prison guard tattoo he wore for 18 years, sexting allegations from over a dozen women, six accusations of physical abuse, and a biography built on an oyster farm that sells primarily to his mother's restaurant. Democrats are standing behind him because they need 51 seats. The New York Times ran a hit piece, likely to pressure him out before the July 12 ballot deadline so the party can appoint a replacement who never ran a primary. In Alaska, Democrats recruited a man with the same name as the Republican incumbent to run as a fake Republican under ranked-choice voting.

Scott Pelley was fired from 60 Minutes after publicly confronting his new boss at an all-hands meeting, calling him unwelcome and unqualified. He framed it as a stand for journalistic integrity. The more likely story: his producer asked him to include information that would balance a story, he refused, and called the additional sourcing "unverified" because he never bothered to verify it. Rachel Maddow publicly invited him to MSNBC, which is the last thing a journalist claiming to be balanced wants to hear.

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