Quote of the Day
The average American today lives better than John D. Rockefeller did in 1926. That is not an exaggeration. It is a fact.
Rockefeller could not fly across the country in five hours. You can for $200. He could not video call his family from another continent. You do it for free. He had no antibiotics, no MRI, no air conditioning in July. He could not carry every book ever written in his pocket. You are reading this on a device that does all of that and more.
Americans throw away 30-40% of their food. Not because they are wasteful, but because food is so abundant that waste is affordable. Your car has climate control, navigation, and safety systems that did not exist at any price a century ago. Your home has heating, cooling, refrigeration, and entertainment that emperors could not have imagined.
None of this was voted into existence. None of it was redistributed from the rich. It was created by free minds operating in what remains of a free market. Every comfort you enjoy today is the product of a man who thought, invented, produced, and traded voluntarily.
This is what the remnants of capitalism still deliver, even while it is being dismantled. Imagine what a fully free society could build.
The Rational Animal 🤔 @theobjectivist
Posted on X, April 3, 2026
I have nothing to add.
We live better than J.P. Morgan 100 years ago. Calvin Coolidge’s son died of an infected blister on his foot that could be cured today with hardly a thought for how deadly it could be. I have read of comparisons of western lives today with those of the Pharaohs’ in the time of the Pyramids. Compared to him, the lowest among us live as gods.
Indeed, what could we accomplish without the metaphorical buckets on our feet and heads of regulations intended only to provide inspection jobs for those incapable of imagining improvements on their own.
Just as East Asian mothers tell their children, “We are Asians, not Bsians”,
the last two centuries tell us we are Americans, not American’ts.
And yet, in spite of all that, the average couple has a very hard time being able to afford a house and kids. The luxuries are cheap, the basics are expensive.
Certainly, but the key question is why this is so. Go back to “fully free” and “remnants of capitalism”.
Why? inflation. Debt-based money and economy. Outsourcing. Mass immigration. Too much government spending and regulation at all levels. Outsourcing jobs. The shift from women “getting” to work regular jobs to most couples NEEDING both to work because increasing the labor force size tends to decrease wages via supply / demand shifts. Significant private-investment money buying up residential properties (homes, townhomes, apartments) and restricting supply in order to squeeze up rents. Free markets can easily turn into oligopolies and unofficial cartels with WAY too much influence.
Good comments all!
As Windy and Rolf say. Just imagine what we could do. Or what could be done without the parasitic megalomaniacs trying to monopolize everything.
Or the moronic ignorance of the “bought and paid for results” of the science community.
The thing we really need to bring home is that most all these improvement were accomplished in spite of the rich and powerful’s control.
These days they have such a lock on everything, We have seen very little if any improvement in a long time.
Sure, we got every book in the world at our fingertips. But the incentive and desire to know what’s in them has been destroyed.
Fred Reed talked about the opportunity of being a poor minority in Baltimore.
He pointed out that you could take a short bus ride everyday into the greatest libraries and museums in this country.
What is before us will be impossible without the desire and will to know and build.
Good news though! There is a “spirit of truth” that has been bestowed on all that would seek it out,
Direct from the guy that invented and made the future possible.
Through his son Jesus Christ, whom we celebrate his raising from the grave this day.
Happy Easter all! He is risen!
“All things are possible to him that believe.”
“Knock and the door shall open, seek and you will find.”
Medical advances, for example, JFK’s son Patrick, born in 1963, only lived a few hours.
The medical profession did not have the tools to help the newborn son of arguably the most powerful man in the world, but a relatively few years later, treatment of this condition would be considered routine, with survival expected.
The flip side of that is expensive patent treatments are pursued because they are lucrative, while cheap and effective cures are not. Light therapy, IV vit C, ivermectin / feben, and many more are great cures for a number of things that are cheap and with few side-effects, but are ignored because $$$.
See my post from a little while back here: https://www.thestarscameback.com/2025/11/30/medical-naxalt/ for more thoughts.
My younger brother died of the same thing a few years earlier
About a decade later a friend had a premie that was quite a bit less mature. He lived.
My step-daughter went into pre-term labor at 23 weeks. “cervical insufficiency”. She received a helicopter ride from our rural MN town – down to Minneapolis, one of the best NICUs in the country.
They were able to hold off the pregnancy for just a little longer, while providing steroids that allowed the baby to develop further. My granddaughter was born at 25 weeks, and is now 9 years old. Happy & Healthy, after spending an additional 6 months in that NICU.
— I have made mostly this same argument to people who “long for the good old days”.
By every conceivable metric – Today, is the best time to be alive.
And there is no shortage of morons who would HAPPILY take ALL OF THIS away…
Rockefeller funded much of the professionalism of medicine as well as a lot of research.
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Would Elon have been able to achieve what he did without corporations being persons?
Personhood for corporations is perhaps the greatest canard in modern economic history, and we’d be better off without it.
“Personhood for corporations is perhaps the greatest canard in modern economic history, and we’d be better off without it.”
It is not entirely one-sided – there are a few societal benefits to that arrangement.
But those benefits are utterly swamped by the costs and abuses of said arrangement. Most of those benefits could also be implemented in other ways without being TOO difficult or costly (not talking about money).
Speaking of freedom (and surveillance and security failures), who trusts all those cameras put out there for “our protections?”
https://x.com/jenniferzeng97/status/2040941190518886580
There is so much rich irony and scary ideas here it would take days to unpack it.
A surveillance state is an unfree state.