Good intentions. They’re great for road paving, but how much do they count for in things that really matter, like helping the less fortunate?

We have things like charity in this country, which exists to help people. But we also have businesses in this country — like Walmart — that exist to make a profit off of people — including poor people.

But which is helping people more?

Now, Americans are pretty generous. We gave $592 billion to charity last year. That’s on top of all those stupid taxes taken from us.

But what was the benefit from that? And it’s not like every charity even checks if things work. For every dollar that bought a can of food for the hungry, there’s a dollar that bought a gala, a brochure, a consultant, and a warm, fuzzy feeling. That’s because people give money based on intentions, not results. Charity is not like a business where if you fail at your goal, you go out of business. In fact, if you really fail to help and things get even worse, you can use how bad things are to raise even more money.

Still, let’s look at what are some of the best charities in the U.S. for helping the poor. Take Feeding America, the biggest charity in the country by revenue. And it’s good at its job: a network of more than 200 food banks and 60,000 pantries, soup kitchens, and shelters that handed out 5.7 billion meals last year to some 46 million people. Because it runs on donated and rescued food instead of buying it retail, it squeezes every dollar donated to it — by its own math, a buck becomes at least ten meals.

That’s the ceiling. Feeding the American poor done about as well as it’s ever been done — and it runs on about $5 billion a year, most of that not even cash but the value of donated food.

Now, let’s look at Walmart. It’s the largest private employer in the country. It puts 2.1 million people to work. The average hourly associate makes north of eighteen dollars an hour. Also, about three out of four of its salaried store managers — people now clearing six figures — started out hourly, pushing carts and stocking shelves. It’s not just a job, but for a lot of people it’s a ladder with the bottom rung low enough for anyone to reach it.

Then there’s the other thing Walmart does, the thing it’s actually famous for: Figuring out how to make everything super cheap.

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Elon Musk is likely to be the world’s first trillionaire — probably later this year. And so many people are thinking, “Oh, the things I would do with a trillion dollars,” and it’s quite obvious those people aren’t rich, because it’s absurd to think that being a trillionaire means you have a trillion dollars.

What has done the most damage to people’s understanding of capitalism? Is the work of Marx? The lectures of Thomas Piketty? Bernie Sanders rallies?

No, I’d say the greatest damage was done by the cartoon DuckTales. It gave us the idea that when someone is very wealthy, he puts all his money in a giant money bin and swims in it.

Of course, any actual capitalist would be appalled at the idea of that much money just sitting in a building doing nothing. The whole point of capitalism is that money is never supposed to just sit there. If you’re not actively spending money on a ham sandwich or something, in the least it should be in a bank account where the bank can give it to other people to invest while you’re not using it. Even better, it can be invested in new businesses through stocks. Or — and this is the way many become billionaires — your wealth is in your own brilliant innovative business that is continuing to grow.

And this, of course, is how Elon Musk is a billionaire: He’s created multiple businesses — Tesla, SpaceX — that he owns. When SpaceX goes public, he’s expected to pass the mark of one trillion in wealth. And people hear this and think, “Here’s all the things he could do with that money.” Except that there isn’t any money.

Let’s understand what Musk’s wealth means: He owns a large part of the companies he made. Those companies then become valued so highly based on stock trading. And what exactly does that mean?

I once heard (maybe it was from Michael Munger on EconTalk) that stocks are like a way for profits to time-travel. Money is being raised for businesses now through the purchase of shares based on what profits they think a company will have in the future. When you hear of Elon Musk’s wealth, this is what he has: shares of his own company being valued based on what people think the profits will be far in the future.

So when people talk about spending that money, that money is not here. It’s far in the future. So when you talk of a wealth tax based on his shares in a company, you’re taxing money that doesn’t even exist yet — it’s money far in the future. The value of his companies is still pure speculation, and you’re making suggestions on spending and taxing speculation.

So even if Elon Musk was valued at a trillionaire, he in no way could ever have an actual trillion dollars to spend. To try and get that, he would have to sell the shares in his own businesses, and if he did that, the value of those shares would immediately plunge! A big reason they are worth so much and people speculate on such high profits for Tesla and SpaceX is that Elon Musk is very invested in the success of those companies. If he started selling his shares and was no longer invested as highly in those companies, they would be worth much much less. He would only end up with a small fraction of that trillion dollars — because again, that money only exists in the hearts and minds of the investors. If it exists at all, it’s profits that will be earned a decade from now.

Which is why it’s so stupid when people are like, “Think of all you could buy with Elon’s wealth,” because it does not actually exist. And that’s also why wealth tax is so stupid and insidious — you’re taxing speculation that changes daily, not anything real.

So that’s why Elon Musk is a billionaire and probably will soon be a trillionaire — because he’s made businesses that people believe will make huge profits in the future. But it’s not because he has money. A bunch of coins sitting in a vault is not real wealth — wealth is the future. And Elon Musk is seen as the wealthiest man in the world because he’s believed to have the best grip on that future.

The scientifically minded often have a lot of problems with the description of creation in Genesis — the order, the timeline, the dividing of animals into whether they flew, walked, or swam instead of orders or genuses — but I’d say it was never meant as a science textbook. Yet, there are some strong truths in it that led to science. Genesis describes not a world of spirits, but of things God created. The sun and the moon aren’t gods, they’re just more objects God added to this universe. They aren’t described more than as “lights,” but it’s clear you shouldn’t bow down to them.

And it’s having this faith God made a physical, ordered universe that allows science. There is no blasphemy in probing the world — God made it and gave it to us. And we know God is not capricious, so the rules we derive from His creations should be solid and meaningful.

Of course, sometimes the science conflicted with what at the time was religious belief, as when scientific discoveries showed the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around. This was certainly trouble for a time, but eventually it was decided there was nothing in the Bible that really said one way or another on who revolved around whom (it was just assumed the earth was the center of importance, but nothing God said was explicit about revolutions). Now it’s no longer considered a religious issue.

But a big split from science — one that is still ongoing — is about evolution. It’s easy to see how this was a big deal. For most of human history, atheism was actually really hard. There were so many strange unexplained things one could see from the lightning to the stars at night. Slowly, we peeled back most of those mysteries, but the hardest one to come up with a naturalistic explanation for had to be life itself. It was unthinkable for there to be some unguided process that could come up with all the many varied lifeforms we have on the planet.

And then someone theorized one. Now, this was a big boon for atheists — even more so than finding out the Earth is not the center of the universe. Now one of the biggest mysteries has a scientific solution, and many of them went, “See? You don’t need God. Animals just evolve from each other instead of being created.”

Now, there are two ways for a Christian to attack this statement — one good and one bad. And unfortunately, many settled on the bad method: Which is to implicitly accept the premise of it (“evolution disproves God”) and then attack the science.

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So a bunch of people are always whining about billionaires.

“Billionaires shouldn’t exist!” these people shout, but I wonder why in the world people even care about billionaires. No billionaire has ever done anything to me. I don’t even know any. If it weren’t for all the whining about them, I wouldn’t even know they were around.

But you know who does cause problems that directly affect me? It’s the billionaire’s dark opposite: the poor person.

Poor people suck. They commit crime. They ruin neighborhoods. They smell weird. And not only all that, they cost us a ton of money. 60% of the federal budget now goes to entitlements, and that’s mainly to pay for poor people1 — whom I don’t even like!

So, poor people are terrible and the government is constantly taking money out of my pocket to keep these terrible people around? What?! So why is anyone worrying about billionaires — people who pay a lot of those taxes but also give us cool things like being able to order anything to my door overnight and magic space rockets?

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Ever seen a little kid at an arcade?1 They’ll stand in front of a game cabinet with no credits in it and move the controls, thinking they’re actually playing the game. It’s the illusion of control, and it’s an innate part of us to fool ourselves into thinking we’re in control.

At least that one is harmless, but we also understand how a video game works and why what the child is doing has no effect, and also understand how to actually control the video game. Where intelligent adults run into trouble is when what they’re trying to control is a complex system. Like the human brain.

For a long while, the way to handle problems with the brain was a lobotomy. Now, this did have an actual effect on the human brain — it wasn’t just the illusion of control. But it still wasn’t real control because it was poking holes in something so complex that none of the doctors understood it. In the end, it just did more damage than good.

Which brings us to another complex thing like the brain that people are always trying to control: the economy.

The economy is basically the world’s biggest supercomputer — but more complex than a supercomputer. It’s like a brain itself. The economy has billions of people, every day, deciding what to buy, what to sell, where to work, what something is worth to them. All of that creates information — incredibly detailed information about what people want and what things actually cost to provide. And each economic transaction is like a neuron reacting to this info.

And wow does this work. The billions fed unlike at any time in human history — the wealth and tech we all have. And it chugs away with no one at the top controlling it all.

Which a lot of people see as a problem.

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There is a lot of anxiety about our AI future, but there is optimism, too. I know Elon Musk is planning on a future of abundance — where basically everyone is rich — and it is a possibility.

I mean, we have AI that is approaching being able to do any job that involves sitting in front of a computer. And right now many companies are working on robots that, combined with that AI, will in the not-too-distant future be able to do even jobs that require physical work. We’re rapidly approaching a future where, if any work needs to be done, you don’t hire someone — you simply build a worker.

Now, some are seeing this as some apocalypse between the haves and the have-nots, where a few will control all the capital and have no need for anyone else. Poor people can’t even be underpaid servants because robots will still be cheaper and easier to maintain.

The other, happier possibility is basically we’ll all be rich. Since the robots can work tirelessly and produce as much of anything as we want, we’ll basically all be rich and live in abundance. There will not be haves and have-nots because we’ll have so much of everything that money will be basically meaningless — it will be like a Star Trek future with no money.

Let’s focus on this future as it’s more fun to talk about. It sounds pretty great — we’ll all be like those people in Downton Abbey who don’t actually have jobs but just a bunch of people who work for them.

But how mechanically would an abundance future work? It would seem money would have no point when we can just make things, but I don’t see how we can organize without it because the point of money is not just buying things but conveying information.

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Do you want to feel old? Well, if you’re one of those few who have been with me since the IMAO blogging days, my oldest daughter is fifteen years old.

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We didn’t worry a lot about Muslims before 9/11. There were terrorist attacks, for sure, but there was no civilization-level threat here. These guys seemed like primitives who could barely put together a bomb, and our previous worry was the Soviets with world-ending nukes pointed at us. Muslims were a nuisance of places none of us wanted to visit, but not a particular concern at home.

After 9/11… things got a little weird. The average person was more worried about Muslims, but suddenly, we’re acknowledging Ramadan and President Bush is telling us, “Islam means peace” — which seemed very doubtful from our limited knowledge of it. But it seemed a popular notion that we just had to embrace Muslims and they would integrate and become a part of the West, and there would be peace. A big part of the Iraq invasion was the idea that if we just brought democracy to the Middle East, then the people there would be more like us.

It does not seem to have worked out that way.

So the question, one I don’t think we as a Western society have sufficiently grappled with, is “How much is Islam the problem?” Are we dealing with cultural problems that can eventually be overcome, or are there simply beliefs inherent to Islam that are incompatible with Western values like human rights and equality?

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I did not fight the revolutions that created a free country.

I did not endure the wars that kept this country free.

I did not build the legal system that protects basic rights and settles disputes peacefully.

I did not build the industries that gave this country its prosperity.

I did not write the Constitution that protects my rights.

I did not lay the asphalt for the roads I travel.

I did not purify the water that flows from my tap.

I did not build the supply chains that put food in stores year-round.

I did not discover the electricity that lights my home.

I did not design the engines, materials, and safety systems that make travel by ground and air routine.

I did not find the cure for the diseases that killed my ancestors.

I did not invent the computer, the microchip, or the decades of engineering behind modern electronics.

I did not code the software that connects me to the world.

We spend so much time asking what we deserve, but we have so much we did not earn and do not deserve.

The real question is: What can we contribute to honor all we were given?

But it’s become popular on the right, these days. There is so much whining about how everything used to be great but now it sucks and it’s because of nebulous others. Then there are the pathetic losers saying the Jews are somehow doing things to make them losers.

I’m sick of it. So here is a great truth. A chart to always remember. It is the heart of conservatism.

See that? If things aren’t going well for you, where is most of the blame?

Now, I can hear some whining. “But no, people are mean to me!” “Everyone is really racist against me!” “Things were cheaper; everything is harder now!”

And I can tell you the best answer to all of that: Shut up and stop whining.

In some extreme cases, that “outside forces” sliver is marginally bigger. But it’s always just a sliver. Because under your choices are infinite things you can do — and that infinite is just growing bigger. Everyone these days is whining how tough they have it with a glowing box in their pocket that connects them to all the world’s knowledge. We have so many more choices and things we can do than our ancestors, yet everyone focuses and whines about that sliver.

Your life is because of your choices. If things suck now, you don’t have to wait for huge changes to society or government — you can just make different choices. Starting today. If things suck, it’s because of you. Embrace the empowerment of knowing you’re the problem, because you control you.

And that is the essence of conservatism.

As you may have noticed, a loud, dumb group has emerged online that constantly brings up the Jews about everything. For someone who has gone through his entire life never worrying about the Jews, it’s all rather bizarre.

So how do people end up like this?

I kind of get it for all the primitive, backward people in the Middle East. They have this entire land dedicated to nothing but Islam — it should be a paradise instead of a joke. What are they supposed to do? Blame their own culture? No, their problems have to be that 0.3% of the Middle East that isn’t an Islamic dictatorship — the part that’s actually successful in modern industry. They see Israel’s whole existence as an insult to them (instead of a demonstration of how you can be successful in the Middle East if you just change your ways).

But what motivates people in America? We’re rich and successful and don’t need to make up some group to blame problems on. And yet we have these commentators like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, making almost everything they talk about be about the Jews or Israel. Why? Are they being paid big money by Islamists like Qatar? Or are they genuinely having a mental break and lost all ability to discern morals and reason?

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“America First” (in recent usages) started I think as a slogan in MAGA and then as a response to MAGA who think Trump is too nice the Jews. And now Matt Walsh has introduced “America Only,” and I’ve seen some of the fringery politicians jump on it. I guess the idea there is America First wasn’t America-focused enough, so now not only do we need to put America first, we can’t even think about other countries.

It’s all pretty dumb.

I mean, yeah, there are some people who don’t put America’s concerns first (*cough* Democrats *cough*), but America First was mainly in response to people who do put America first, but think that it’s in the best interest to get involved with other countries. So America First is an attempt not to debate that but to shut it down by trying to control the language.

A very leftist tactic (which is why you see it favored by the woke right).

And America Only is just a dumb fart of a slogan. It immediately gets a lot of negative reaction because people are like, “Are you saying we can’t even help another country even if it would save millions of lives?” And then they explain that no, they don’t mean America can never help another country — they just mean America First… but even more! Thus, it’s a lot like the “defund the police!” slogan in that gives normal people a visceral negative reaction and then proponents have to spend all their time explaining that the slogan doesn’t mean what everyone thinks it means, i.e., it’s a great slogan if you want attention as a podcast host, but it sucks as politics.

So, it’s all rather stupid — America First and America Only — so I will instead suggest a better third way: America should be Superman.

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There are a lot of principles our nation is built upon. Freedom. Equality. General Awesomeness.

And at some point, sexual lusts got added in there.

I guess that probably happened in the 60s with the sexual revolution. Sexual lusts and the fulfillment of them started to be celebrated. And the whole LGBTQ movement arose out of this. If you’re going to celebrate sexual lusts, what happens if you have different ones than the norm? Don’t those need to be honored, too?

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I’d say one of the most important aspects of conservatism is understanding the right of and the importance of defense. If you won’t defend what we have, what is the point in building up civilization and prosperity? How can the common man live in peace if the people in charge won’t protect him from savagery?

Another very important aspect of conservatism is that you are responsible for your choices, and it’s better that you suffer the consequences for them than anyone else. If you choose to be a thief, it’s good that you suffer the consequence of prison, rather than others who suffer from having their property stolen. If you don’t like those consequences, you can always make better choices.

And thus we come to Israel. A lot of people scream at Israel and say it’s bad. A lot of other people say everyone else is bad. Where you come down on this shows whether you are a conservative or not because of those two previous principles.

Now, this isn’t talking about what funding or material support (weapons) Israel should get, which I find to be a completely separate issue with lots of arguments for and against of varying quality. This is about whether, when people accuse Israel of genocide, you say, “Shut up, stupid.” Or when the U.N. tries to pass a resolution against Israel for the 80 millionth time, whether we vote against.

Because if you’re not on the side of Israel, then I don’t see how you’re a conservative.

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Trump is an abrasive loudmouth, but voters love him for that.

Or, Trump has won despite being an abrasive loudmouth because the status quo was so bad.

No one is really sure, but we kind of have to figure it out as we have a little over three more years of Trump, but then no more Trump (despite all the Trump 2028 signs). And it’s become clear that only Trump is Trump — we’ve seen lots of other people, left and right, try the abrasive loudmouth routine but can’t quite ride it to electoral success. So instead of Trump being a new type of politics, he was always going to be a bridge from the old status quo to… well, that’s the question.

Now, you all know, I’ve never been a big Trump fan. I didn’t vote in 2016 or 2020 because I really didn’t care for any of the options. After Democrats tried to get us to a new, terrible status quo with Biden, I did vote for Trump in 2024. And, he’s been about as good and bad as I expected. I mean, the tariffs stuff is worse (if Bernie Sanders were trying to control the economy through new taxes he thought of every day and imposed on us without Congress, I’d be calling for a military coup), but mostly Trump has been… Trump. And I’ve come to accept Trump is like a force of nature that there is not much point raging against. He has no clear ideology, but he at least likes America… which makes him better than a lot of other options.

But Trump really does have no real ideology other than his brashness, which just doesn’t work for anyone else. So when Trump is gone, Trumpism is most likely over as well. That’s a big void, so what will fill it?

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So Trump has demolished the East Wing of the White House.

Now, I didn’t even know there was an East Wing of the White House. I guess I should have inferred it, though, since I knew it had a West Wing.

But people are outraged. They act like he’s just demolishing the White House for funsies. But I guess Trump is building a bigger ballroom. But people have very particular opinions on exactly how big the White House ballroom should be even though that’s something they never mentioned once in their entire lives until now.

Come on, man. We can’t do this.

I mean, we already did four years of screaming about everything Trump did during his first term, and we have over three years left of this one. You’d think people would learn a lesson by now, and that lesson is not, “Scream constantly about absolutely everything Trump does.”

Right now, yelling about Trump is background noise. Nothing can possibly stand out. And the thing is, Trump does some bad stuff — like the tariff nonsense — but the thing is, since there is no discernment, absolutely everything gets lumped in with “more screaming about Trump.”

It’s like that old tale about crying wolf — and there is a wolf that comes around every so often. But when you yell, “Wolf!” multiple times every day, it’s the same as not yelling “Wolf!” at all because people just have to tune it out. They have no way of knowing when there actually is a wolf.

Now, I don’t really want to help the Democrats (I like their people a lot less than Trump), but they won’t listen to me anyway. Still, here is my advice: Pick one thing to get outraged about Trump a month. I know, he probably does more than one outrageous thing a month, but the problem is it’s all noise now. You want to get noticed. And the only way for noise to get noticed is if there is also silence. Think about it: Weeks of nothing said about Trump and then suddenly, “Hey! Look at this terrible thing Trump is doing!” People might be interested now. So there is an absolutely impossible thing for you to try.

Me, I’m going to talk about other things.

I’ve seen a lot of debate about what to with the alt-right/groyper people.

Matt Walsh has decried all discernment, saying we need to only focus on the left.

Now, this is in reaction to the text from the Young Republicans (who I guess are actually in their 30s?) getting their texts leaked, and to be honest, I have not paid much attention to that, as they don’t seem particularly important or pivotal people. Most people instead seemed to interpret this as talking about the people who have more influence on the right but have terrible views, such as Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and all those alt-right Nazi-lite people talking about how Israel is the real problem in the world and Churchill was the true villain of WWII.

Matt Walsh never clarified who exactly he was talking about uniting with, though, and what exactly he plans to achieve by uniting with those people, so we are left to speculate.

Now, first off, I have to point out that a central premise of that statement isn’t true. Anyone who observes the far left at all notices they spend more time attacking people who are center-left (a mirror image of the far right, who seem much more concerned with Ben Shapiro than AOC). And this trying to unite with these people did nothing but hurt Democrats electorally. Kamala, to try to appease these nutjobs, made a number of ridiculous statements (especially on trans issues) that came back to haunt her in the presidential election.

So, unity with nutjobs is not a win. Still, Matt Walsh insists that we shouldn’t focus on calling out bad actors on the right and instead focus on the enemy, the left. But even if you were to embrace that idea uncritically, you still have to answer this question:

How do you tell a right-winger from a left-winger?

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I’ve had a number of interests in my life. At a very early age, I wanted to be a cartoonist and make comic strips like my favorite comic strip, Garfield. But I also got into computers at an early age — a Commodore 64 was an amazing thing, and I was able to actually go in the computer room in 1st grade instead of recess. Eventually, my parents got a computer — a Tandy, if anyone remembers what that is — and I started to fiddle in BASIC.

Though I still wanted to write and create movies or TV shows or anything with stories or comedy, when it came time to think of a career, computers were the obvious choice. I got a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon — but while I was there, I wrote humorous editorials for the school newspaper.

Still, I got a nice engineering job after college (I graduated in 2001), and while I had some ambition to write a novel, I didn’t do much writing anymore.

And then 9/11 happened.

Now, there is a lot that changed with 9/11, but the important one to my story is the warbloggers — people who started blogging in the need to do something after 9/11. And I saw it was decently easy to start a blog and get an audience, so I thought I’d give it a go. My focus was politics, but I was in my early 20s at the time and didn’t feel I had any wisdom to hand out, so I decided to instead write silly and stupid stuff.

I had some success blogging and built up an audience and got other writing opportunities, such as columns and books, but this was all on the side while working as a software engineer for the vast majority of my income. Writing was never more than a few extra dollars here and there, if that.

Then I got this opportunity to work for Emergent Order, which was hiring me full-time for my creative ability. I got to do some work I couldn’t believe — like work on a web series where I got to write scripts and be involved in casting. It was quite a change of pace from being an engineer.

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One man. One vote.

It’s an important principle, but if you’ve ever voted, you have to realize it’s more symbolic than practical. While technically your vote had some effect, whether you individually had gone to vote or stayed home wouldn’t have changed the outcome. Voting is a bit like steering a giant cargo vessel by tons of people outside throwing pebbles at it. I guess together you all have an effect, but individually you matter only imperceptibly.

And then, what do you get from this process? If the guy you voted for won, I guess you get to celebrate a little (though, again, you really didn’t have much effect on the matter). If your guy lost, then, well, you only get bad things, I guess (not that any politician usually leads to great things).

It’s the best system we have, though.

Except for one other one.

There is, in fact, this other voting system we use, but instead of just once every other year or so, it’s one we use pretty much every day. And instead of you casting your tiny vote and hoping years from now it leads to something that benefits you, you get benefits from this vote every time you use it. This voting system is so great, absolutely everyone wants as many votes as they can get.

This vote is called the “dollar.”

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Whenever there is a horrific shooting, the left pops their heads up for a few seconds, shake their fists, and talk as if there is some magic law that could be passed that could stop such things. They then soon settle down, as it never even gets traction anymore. If you look at gun laws, it has been over four decades of the left just plain losing on the issue, and yet they never try anything new other than maybe some different word choices (it’s not gun control, it’s now “gun safety”… no, wait, “gun reform”). They seem thoroughly demoralized on the issue and barely go through the motions anymore.

Good.

But there are still, of course, gun homicides, and it would be nice to do something about them. The problem is, the only gun laws they propose are really stupid things like, “Let’s ban assault rifles!” that all seem symbolic and are made just to annoy legal gun owners while having only negligible effects on criminals.

But if we are to tackle gun crime — the everyday variety and even mass shootings — what are we to do? I think first, we need to all accept a realistic attitude about guns, and that starts with everyone acknowledging two reality checks.

Here is the first one:

You can’t keep criminals from having access to guns.

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