Quote of the Day
On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders.
And I asked myself a question I can’t shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap.
I don’t think it’s stupidity. I think it’s a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece.
A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable.
Look at economist Mark Perry’s famous chart, the one people call “the chart of the century.” It tracks US prices since 2000.
At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation.
At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product.
Look at what separates the two groups. It isn’t technology. It isn’t complexity. It’s one variable: how much the state is involved.
At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper.
B. The mechanism: why it’s systematic.
When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient.
In France it’s even more vicious, because the price doesn’t disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can’t afford to live in the city where they work.
The market didn’t fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in.
C. Suffering demands a culprit.
A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can’t find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don’t deny it for a second.
But human beings can’t stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat.
And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world?
D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain.
Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem.
Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit?
No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. “The rich.” The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time.
E. One lens, a thousand causes.
And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That’s why the trap is always the same: it’s not the cause that draws them in, it’s the way of thinking that was installed in them.
F. The perfect inversion.
Here’s the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second.
It’s like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene.
G. The ballot box confirms it.
In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it’s been tried. The cure that worsens the disease.
In France, it’s the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to “manage” the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state.
H. The way out.
These young people aren’t stupid. They’re right to be angry. They’re just aiming at the wrong target.
The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They’ll stop protesting against those who create. They’ll start protesting against those who capture.
That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.
Brivael Le Pogam @brivael
Posted on X October 17, 2026
The emphasis is mine.
It is probably an important point to bring out up front that the author lives in Paris France and claims he is a freedom fighter.
I asked Claude, Copilot, Gemini, and Grok the same question, “Is this claimed observation true?” There was strong consensus that the data points were generally true, but the causal claims were not as well supported. From Claude:
The top items are labor-intensive, local services, where productivity grows slowly. The bottom items are tradeable manufactured goods and software, which are subject to global competition and fast technological change. That difference alone could explain much of the gap. This is my own general-knowledge point, not something I searched for.
Grok explains Baumol’s cost disease best and its application here:
The claim that “how much the state is involved” is the single decisive variable is an oversimplification. The pattern is real and government policy is a major factor in several of these sectors, but it is not the whole story:
- Baumol’s cost disease is a primary structural driver. Labor-intensive services with low productivity growth (healthcare, education, childcare) become relatively more expensive as wages rise with high-productivity sectors (manufacturing, tech). A string quartet still needs the same number of musicians; a nurse or teacher’s output per hour does not scale like semiconductor production. This divergence occurs even without subsidies or heavy regulation.
- Manufactured/tradable goods benefit from technological progress and global competition. Services are harder to automate or offshore.
Grok also has the best conclusion:
The mechanism (“state subsidizes demand without freeing supply → prices rise”) is standard economics and holds in many cases. The extension to education systems teaching an “oppressor vs. oppressed” lens, scapegoating capitalism/markets while ignoring state failures, and voting patterns (young urban voters favoring more state intervention) is interpretive and political. It is a coherent hypothesis with supporting observations, but not a fully proven causal chain from the price chart alone. The Palestinian-flag anecdote is personal and not generalizable as data.
Bottom line: The price divergence is true and well-documented. State involvement (subsidies + supply restrictions) is a significant contributor in education, housing, and healthcare, alongside Baumol effects, technology, and trade. Treating “state involvement” as the sole or primary variable overstates the case, but dismissing it as irrelevant would also be wrong. The broader political diagnosis is opinion.
I think the proposed solution is somewhat correct:
H. The way out.
These young people aren’t stupid. They’re right to be angry. They’re just aiming at the wrong target.
The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They’ll stop protesting against those who create. They’ll start protesting against those who capture.
That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.
There will always be people pushing and believing the scam. It will never be over. It part because there is always leverage in claiming the state can and should fix injustices. Many things claimed to be injustices brought about by good/bad luck.
Other claimed injustices are due to differences in culture. A culture of hard work and observing the rights of others is going to result in that culture having greater wealth than a culture of laziness and theft. Yet, the socialist mindset of laziness and theft, even when “legally” implemented via the state, is going to result in much lower wealth. But getting “free stuff” is extremely appealing even if it is a false promise.
Hence, despite socialism being one of the most tested and failed political systems of all time will always have an appeal to those unwilling and/or unable to be productive members of society. But pointing out state operated and regulated services is more of a proven problem than a proven solution can make a difference.
Yes, the Marxist oppressor/oppressed worldview has been pushed consistently in K-12 public education for a long time, under many different names and guises.
That is why the left took over the education-industrial complex, to instill a worldview. It’s far more important to them than any specific piece of content in a lesson-plan. Programming that deep is hard to break. That’s why it’s so important to be heavily involved in your own children’s raising, more than the school system, more than the screen or algorithm.
People are lazy, it’s easy to appeal to their ego and promise them free stuff and tell them they are a victim. It’s a self-destructive way of thinking, but it makes people feel good about themselves even as they suffer and make things worse.
The cycle of hard men -> good times ->soft men -> hard times will continue.
Very similar to the cycle of good times > fall away from God > bad times > find God again in the Old Testament. It’s unlikely we can change it.
Much of what Rolf says is spot on.
It may be possible to partially rectify our situation by returning voting to a more limited group who hopefully have a better grasp of reality, including Baumol’s cost disease theory and other economic principles. Almost any logical restriction of the franchise would be helpful. Raise the voting and draft age to 21. Require passing a basic aptitude test before voting; Include US history, civics, economics, mathematics and science at a high school graduate level circa 1950. Perhaps only having honorably discharged veterans vote would be more egalitarian? How about returning to our post Colonial roots and having the property tax roll BE the authorized voter roll?
Pick one or a combination of two or more. Our Republic would be much better off for everyone except the current class of politician-grifters.
“The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them”
Huh?
It’s news to me that “the state” runs any of those things. Healthcare prices have gone through the roof not because “the state” is meddling in supply or demand, but because of the health insurance industry, which provides no value whatsoever and exists only as a parasite in the system. But yay! Capitalism!
As for tuition, where’s the state there? Last I checked the issue with tuition was that schools have realized they can hire shit tons of administrators, pay them well, and meanwhile get rid of the tenure system and just pay a bunch of adjuncts poverty wages. Yay! Capitalism!
As for “the rent” being too high, that’s too complex for a pithy comeback, other than to say that generalizing about it being a function of government interference is inaccurate at best.
“They’ll stop protesting against those who create. They’ll start protesting against those who capture.”
Except we’re mixing those two groups together by simply referring to capitalism and socialism generally. Plenty of capitalists are rentiers who create no value whatsoever. And plenty of socialists (in the Nordic sense not the Russian sense) create value (anybody here on a GLP-1? Socialists made that.).
Protests against the current implementation of capitalism in the west aren’t succumbing to “the greatest intellectual scam of our time,” they’re addressing obvious flaws in the system. If you believe capitalism as currently practiced, particularly in the U.S., is operating without *significant* flaws I have some beachfront property to sell you….
“Healthcare prices have gone through the roof not because “the state” is meddling in supply or demand”
Yes, the state **absolutely and obviously** meddles in supply and demand. Extensively. Publicly. Openly. Proudly.
For only the most recent of examples, see “Obamacare”.
And that’s without getting into the history of how we got where we are, which is almost completely because of government action (**especially** the near-monopoly of a few large insurance companies).
Seriously, this is a dumb claim, *even for you*.
“As for tuition, where’s the state there?”
ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE subsidies, both directly in terms of “grants” and such, and indirectly by enabling MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH more borrowing for people to give more money to the schools.
This one isn’t much better than the previous claim. Also below even your abysmal average.
“As for “the rent” being too high, that’s too complex for a pithy comeback, other than to say that generalizing about it being a function of government interference is inaccurate at best.”
It is a bit more complicated, yes. But it’s also very, very clear if you bother to check what policies are in place where and what happens to the rent prices. “Rent control” produces the highest rent, for instance, but *multiple* reasons, but the most obvious and direct reason is that it guts the will to construct new housing, as there will be no profit in it. To use your phrase from earlier, that’s “meddling with supply”.
“And plenty of socialists (in the Nordic sense not the Russian sense)”
Ah, so by “socialist” you also mean “capitalist”. That’s making a hash of things.
With the exception of socialized medicine (which is indeed a significant exception), the Nordic countries are arguably *more* capitalist than the US. Ask them – many of them get offended at being called socialist, and with good reason.
If that’s your only example of “good socialism”, then you don’t have any good examples at all.
“If you believe capitalism as currently practiced, particularly in the U.S…”
You mean, “several large steps towards socialism”? Yeah, it’s bad. We should stop doing that. That covers most (and the worst) of the “flaws” that you are talking about, which I completely agree exist.
Oh, sure, there will always be at least some flaws because we’ll always have people, and there will always be scammers and con men, etc, and *every system yet devised by man* has “rentiers who create no value”, very much including every form of socialism yet tried.
But those are small potatoes compared to what we are talking about here.
“the state **absolutely and obviously** meddles in supply and demand”
I didn’t say otherwise. What I said was that state meddling isn’t the *reason* for the increase in prices. Nothing about Obamacare creates upward price pressure. What *does* create price pressure is the demand for profitability in insurance companies, who seek to lower consumption while still taking in the same premiums, for example.
“this is a dumb claim, *even for you*.”
If it’s so obviously stupid why are you bothering to argue with it? You think Joe’s readers are too stupid to see my obviously bad arguments? And throwing in the “even for you” insult at the end doesn’t bolster your position.
“ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE subsidies”
According to Gemini and Claude those subsidies constitute about 15% of college tuition nationwide. That’s not massive, that’s not even “big.”
“MUCH more borrowing for people to give more money to the schools”
On that one you win the point: The “bennett hypothesis” says the availability of federally backed loans inflates prices, typically by $.60 for every $1 loaned. Though the flip side to that is without the loans, many colleges would close, and we’d be left with a super-elitist system where only the very rich could afford to attend, as we did a couple hundred years ago. I view broad access to education as critical to a functioning society, so would rather we deal with the problem in the context of over supply of students/money than undersupply.
“rent control” That’s limited to a few large cities. Most cities don’t have it. At best they have zoning laws that restrict certain kinds of development, but there’s a long way between zoning and controlling rent prices.
“the Nordic countries are arguably *more* capitalist than the US”
No True Scotsman applies here.
“the “flaws” that you are talking about, which I completely agree exist.”
Well, that’s something.
“I didn’t say otherwise”
OK, my bad – I politely assumed you didn’t make an EVEN DUMBER argument.
“What *does* create price pressure is the demand for profitability in insurance companies, who seek to lower consumption while still taking in the same premiums, for example.”
That is “every single business ever”. Literally. They all want “more money in, less money out”. All of them.
They CANNOT do what you are ascribing to them. What CAN do it is government action to prevent competition.
You can certainly claim that they lobby the government to do that for them… but that does not mean it’s not the government actually doing it.
“And throwing in the “even for you” insult at the end doesn’t bolster your position.”
It’s a useful means of comparison. I think many of your arguments are dumb, something I have not been shy about. When you make one that is significantly worse than your usual, it is noteworthy.
“Though the flip side to that is without the loans, many colleges would close, and we’d be left with a super-elitist system where only the very rich could afford to attend, as we did a couple hundred years ago.”
I also agree that education is a good thing, but A) what many of those high-priced schools are providing is indoctrination with MAYBE a side of education (just as their actual customer, *the government*, wants), B) 4-year education is a luxury that doesn’t help nearly as much as more specific forms of education (though it _can_ still be a good thing), and C) government funding like that is far more recent than 200 hundred years ago, and MANY colleges and universities predate it. Your claim is baloney, as shown by that history.
Just like private schools for grade school education have a much better average results for a MUCH lower average cost (as they cannot feed at the trough of government), so actually private schools that aren’t de facto government funded could much better on MUCH MUCH less (and again, judging by actual history of said institutions, *actually did so*).
“According to Gemini and Claude those subsidies constitute about 15% of college tuition nationwide.”
Ah yes, only 1/7th of the massively inflated tuition. Yep, not massive or anything. Seriously, that’s what you have?
If I offered you a 15% pay increase, but I first offered to also increase your base pay by more than 50% (because a large majority of the money used to pay for college is borrowed – see your own “bennett hypothesis” for what that has done to the price of college, and realize that that 60 cents on the dollar has also compounded for 2+ generations now), would that qualify as “massive” yet?
See, I used “and” to include both of those things, and they compound.
“No True Scotsman applies here.”
Not all bad examples trigger No True Scotsman. Words have meaning, even theoretical words like “socialist” and “capitalist” that only apply imprecisely to the real world.
Yours was just a very bad example, and I gave specific reasons why that was so.
““rent control” That’s limited to a few large cities. Most cities don’t have it”
Yes, and I rather specifically said, “for instance”. That’s just a single very obvious place where governments meddle, with very obvious results.
Zoning, for instance (there’s that phrase again), is definitely a form of “meddling”. Some reasonable zoning produces good benefits for relatively mild pricing affects.
MANY areas of the country do not engage in “reasonable” zoning, and the costs that incurs are large.
Additional examples abound.
Deliberate, large-scale prevention of the construction of additional housing when the population is increasing (especially when government then deliberately brings in 10s of millions of additional people in a short period of time) is government action causing higher rent prices.
This is easy to check by comparing areas where rent has NOT dramatically increased with those where it has. Not every single bit is government action, of course, but MUCH is, and it’s very easy to see by comparing the government policies between those areas.
I have found AI useful for medical detective work and mechanical things but problematic for anything remotely close to politics. You may have noted that Anthropic has turned their election analysis over to Democracy Works which is a leftist NGO. I sometimes argue with AI for amusement. Recently, given the French follies, I decided to bone up on the Paris Commune. I asked what was Marx’s opinion. Reasonable answer. Same for Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky. Then I asked about the Cultural Marxists. Answer was they doesn’t exist and are a right wing conspiracy theory. So Gramsci is fiction? I did get them to acknowledge his existence and inventor of the thing that does not exist and the opinion of orthodox Marxists that he was a heretic because of his embrace of identity rather than class. I think what AI was trying to do here was to protect The Groups (as Ruy Teixeira would say) that are often identified as cultural Marxists. Some of them happily accept the label.
Just the state being involved in education, and especially the corrupted partisan involvement we have now, guarantees nothing good for the future. Pretty much every major social ill disappears with a moral and well educated population. And bias towards the American Constitution in that regard certainly helps.