Emilio Martinez

“It’s Love”-ly ain’t it!? Another acapella of lush harmony arrangements from a criminally underrated band, King’s X! @kingsx #KingsX #ItsLove #FaithHopeLove #rock #progrock #sing #harmonies #acapella #vocals #Lewitt #LCT440Pure

A fulfilled life requires both “yes” and “no.”

The Lumas are ready for launch! Don't miss The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, in theaters April 1.

If you actually don’t want billionaires to get richer, the answer isn’t punishment. It’s competition and capitalism. That’s the difference between protecting existing billionaires and creating new ones. The latter breaks dominance, expands opportunity, and is the only process that ever lifts the poor. But that isn’t the goal here. The goal isn’t upward mobility. It’s resentment. Not to raise anyone up, but to tear someone down. If you want fewer powerful incumbents, you need freer markets. If you want scapegoats, you tweet about billionaires.

If capitalism is to survive, the right to become a billionaire must be defended. That doesn’t mean every billionaire is virtuous, or that every path to vast wealth is legitimate. Wealth gained through fraud, force, or political favoritism is not capitalism. What must be defended is the principle that there is no moral ceiling on success earned through voluntary exchange. People must be free to become billionaires, trillionaires, or more, so long as they do so without violating rights and without state coercion. The moment society accepts the idea that there is “too much” wealth, it has accepted that politicians may decide how much of your effort, value, and life you are allowed to keep. That is the leash. And once granted, it is never used sparingly or confined to its original target. Today the sanction is aimed at billionaires. Tomorrow it will be aimed at everyone. To the extent this principle is compromised, politicians gain moral permission to tighten control over all individuals, not just the most successful, because they do so with public approval. If people are not free to rise without arbitrary limits, they are not free at all.

A slave is owned. A slave is coerced. A slave cannot quit. A slave’s labor and body are property. A wage earner chooses an employer, negotiates terms, can quit, can refuse, can switch jobs, can start a business, can save, can walk away. That isn’t slavery. It’s trade. Calling voluntary work “slavery” isn’t just wrong. It’s a moral obscenity that trivializes chains, whips, rape, auctions, and lifelong captivity. And notice the inversion. The people who scream “wage slavery” are the ones demanding real coercion. Taxes by force. Labor mandates. Price controls. Confiscation. Punishment for refusal. They empty the word “slave” of meaning so they can justify creating actual masters. If someone can quit without being hunted down, beaten, or killed, they’re free.

You do not debate people who advocate murder as policy. You identify them as morally bankrupt and remove their credibility. Every ideology that starts with “some people deserve to die for the greater good” ends the same way: mass graves, censorship, purges, and eventually eating its own. Libertarianism doesn’t fail because violent psychopaths exist. It exists because they do. And when someone tells you who they are this plainly, the correct move is not outrage, not fear, and not engagement on their terms. It’s clarity. This is what happens when collectivism runs out of arguments and drops the mask.

It sounds compassionate until you ask the obvious question: by whom? Food, shelter, electricity, and healthcare don’t exist by wishing. They require labor, production, expertise, and time. Declaring them “guaranteed regardless of income” doesn’t make them free. It just shifts the burden onto others by force. That isn’t a right. A right restricts coercion. It doesn’t conscript producers. What’s being demanded here isn’t freedom from harm, but an entitlement to other people’s work. A claim on someone else’s life, absent their consent. It’s moralizing parasitism. You don’t create justice by turning producers into servants and calling it care.

Libertarianism isn’t anarchism and it isn’t leftism. It’s a system of individual rights, property, and voluntary exchange enforced by a limited government. If defending rights “upsets” people who deny property, contracts, or retaliation against force. That’s their filter working.

North Korea is a hereditary totalitarian prison state. No free speech. No free movement. No independent courts. No internet. (Except for cronies and the political elites and even thats controlled) Collective punishment, for not one but 3 generations Labor camps State worship enforced at gunpoint. Equating that with liberal democracies isn’t critique. It’s erasure. It tells every person who escaped, starved, or watched family members disappear that their suffering was just propaganda for someone else’s politics. Even North Korea’s own regime doesn’t make claims this stupid. They don’t pretend their police are benevolent community servants. They rule through fear and don’t apologize for it. It takes Western communists to invent fairy tales the dictatorship itself wouldn’t endorse. Why do they do it? Because admitting the truth would collapse their worldview. If North Korea is actually evil, then communism isn’t just “misapplied.” It’s exposed. So reality has to be rewritten. This isn’t solidarity with oppressed people. It’s using them as stage props while lying about the conditions they’re trying to escape. Every time someone posts this garbage, they don’t punch up at power. They punch down at victims and call it radicalism.

Everything Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argued was already being dismantled before they were dead. Their predictions failed, their economics collapsed, and every real attempt to apply their ideas produced repression, shortages, and mass death. The only reason Marxism survives today is because modern American communists are historically illiterate and insulated from consequences. They romanticize a system so disastrous that the people actually living under it risk prison, torture, or death to escape.

What’s left of capitalism today is under attack—from politicians, intellectuals, the media. If we want to uphold liberty in the marketplace, we need to defend it on moral grounds. Discover Ayn Rand’s moral case for capitalism: hubs.ly/Q03R9J4w0

Made with @grok

This is real question posed to Ayn Rand on the Donahue show. She didn't laugh but went on to explain that it is impossible to establish a monopoly in a free market, that all monopolies have been established with the help of government. But today, we can have a laugh, because today no one even knows these companies that everyone thought were unstoppable 50 years ago.