James Hafner

69% of Americans support my bill to give the public a 50% ownership stake in AI companies. The American people understand that AI must work for ALL of us, and not just make a handful of Big Tech billionaires even richer.

Libertarians have been at each other's throats for decades. Picture a Manhattan apartment, late 1950s, thick with cigarette smoke. Two of liberty's fiercest minds circle each other before the inevitable break. Murray Rothbard admired Ayn Rand's novels. He wrote her a letter in 1957 praising Atlas Shrugged as the greatest achievement of the century. For a brief stretch he attended gatherings of her inner circle, the group that would later call itself the Collective. Rothbard brought his own students. He hoped for an alliance between the anarcho-capitalist wing he was building and the atheist-objectivist salon Rand presided over. It curdled fast. Rand demanded philosophical conformity. You accepted the whole system, from metaphysics to aesthetics to her theory of emotions, or you were treated as a suspect. Nathaniel Branden ran the inquisitions. Rothbard, a devout economist trained under Ludwig von Mises and quite happy staying Jewish and married, refused to submit his wife Joey to deconversion sessions aimed at curing her Christianity. He also noticed the movement behaving like a cult, complete with loyalty tests and excommunications. So he did what any scholar with a wicked sense of humor would do. He wrote a play. Mozart Was a Red, composed around 1961, is a one-act satire skewering the Randian scene. The central figure is Carson Sand, a thinly veiled Rand, who presides over a circle of worshipful disciples in an apartment. The character Keith Hackley wanders in, gets systematically converted, and ends up parroting the master's every opinion, including the decree that Mozart is objectively worthless music (Rand actually held strong, idiosyncratic aesthetic verdicts). The disciples applaud each of Sand's pronouncements. Independent thought evaporates on contact. Rothbard's target was the intellectual tyranny of a movement that preached individualism while enforcing groupthink, not Rand's economics, which overlapped with his own free market convictions. Rand's people accused Rothbard of plagiarizing her ideas in his dissertation work. The charge went nowhere. The two never reconciled. You can judge the merits yourself. Rand built a philosophy that turned thousands toward capitalism and reason. Rothbard built the modern case for stateless markets and hard money, and he skewered anyone, including allies, who mistook a personality for a principle. Both defended liberty. Neither could stand the other's church. The smoke cleared, but the feud outlived them both.

Under capitalisms everyone benefits enormously from the wealth of the capitalists. That wealth is invested in the production of all of the goods and services that people buy. When someone buys an automobile, for example, he benefits from all of the capitalists’ wealth that is invested in the production of automobiles, and not only automobiles but also in steel mills and iron mines, all the wealth that is directly or indirectly necessary to the production of automobiles. This includes oil fields and power plants. Under capitalism, the self-interest of everyone lies with everyone being as rich as possible, because their wealth will contribute to more and better goods being available in the market. Everyone’s self-interest is served by the existence of billionaires.

Listen to North Korean defector Yeonmi Park explain how her grandparents were promised much of what Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America are promising today: - Free healthcare - Free housing - Free education - A government that will take care of everyone In return, they surrendered their freedom. Tyranny rarely arrives looking cruel. It arrives smiling, speaking softly and promising compassion. Liberals, I beg of you, don’t listen to conservatives if you don’t want to. Listen to the North Korean defector. It will not be different this time. This is how it begins.

Climate change is not just heat waves. It’s drought. Forest fires. And extreme weather disturbances. We can create millions of jobs transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels. Let’s take on the greed of the fossil fuel industry.