Bill B retweeted
James O’Keefe on the Felony Charges for Exposing Fraud in Minnesota:
This is not political. It is fundamental. It is about whether citizens still have the right to question their government. This is now a landmark First Amendment case, and every American’s right to speak truth to power has been put on the line.
Weaponized lawfare does not work against me. It has always backfired on the people who come after me. Most people find criminal charges and lawsuits stressful; the process becomes a form of punishment. But I love this process because it gives me the opportunity to expose injustice at the highest levels. My foundation will be indemnifying members of the Justice League, including @camhigby for their lawful reporting.
I’m calling on all Americans, and especially all journalists, to stand united on a message to the prosecutors in Minnesota: the politics of fear will not prevail in the United States of America.
Bill B retweeted
🚨 BOOM
“Georgia owes President Donald Trump an Apology” — Ballots were Tabulated Twice & Counted Twice and we now Know it was NOT Done Accidentally
Joseph Rossi:
“You can’t leave Walmart without showing a receipt, but for some reason you can count 20,000 votes without showing a receipt….
The [Ballot] duplication process was due to Intentional Human Intervention. I’m not a lawyer, but when I ran this by a few of them, they told me this is the phrase… Human Intervention is the predicate for Election fraud..”
In addition to the 3,900+ ballots that were scanned and counted, they said we scanned 3,900 ballots, but we’re not sure if they were counted twice.
—— that is a lie!
• GA State Election Board is discussing these issues, SEB2023-025, this morning
• Fulton county has been found to be in violation on multiple occasions
—— 17,852 votes counted with no ballot images
—— 20,713 original votes from tabulators out of thin air
—— 3,930 duplicates counted and inserted via intentional human intervention.
Remember.. Trump “lost” GA by 12,670 votes
Bill B retweeted
“Georgia has a clear choice on Nov. 3. One candidate has already been tested by a crime crisis and answered with failure after failure.
The other has spent a lifetime proving that where you start doesn't determine where you finish, and he has a plan to make every Georgia neighborhood safer.”
foxnews.com/opinion/gianno-c…
Bill B retweeted
@universityofga as a UGA alumni (and with 2 sons who also have their bachelor's and master's degrees from UGA, I find it abhorrent that you have leftist activists on your staff. We need a count of how many liberal professors you have on staff vs. conservative.
Bill B retweeted
🚨 EXCLUSIVE: European Parliament money helped fund a CLOSED-DOOR meeting on resistance to Trump and MAGA ahead of America’s midterms.
The keynote speaker? A University of Georgia professor who had publicly argued that Democratic victories could “make Trump a much weaker president for the rest of his second term.”
The June 3 meeting examined where Democratic Party, activist and NGO resistance was working—and how European progressives could learn from it and strengthen transatlantic cooperation.
The agenda spells it out:
“CLOSED DOOR ROUNDTABLE.”
“financial support of the European Parliament.”
European Parliament Vice-President Katarina Barley convened it. The Foundation for European Progressive Studies and Germany’s Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung organized it.
Professor Cas Mudde delivered the keynote, according to the organizers’ recap.
Bill B retweeted
MN Secretary of State Steve Simon on charging me with a felony.
Mr. Simon, every time someone has sued or tried to arrest me, it has backfired. Because of 1st amendment fundamentals.
The process will not be my punishment.
I wiIl have fun with the process, exposing injustice.
Bill B retweeted
When Keisha was mayor, Atlanta’s inflation outpaced every other major city in America.
It’s no wonder someone like Gavin Newsom is all-in for her – she’d govern just like him.
Bill B retweeted
In Japan, protecting children is the absolute baseline of a civilized society. If a government agency handed a child to a predator, the entire leadership would step down in total disgrace.
What happened under the Biden-Harris administration doesn't even seem real.
You don't need conspiracy theories—the DOJ and HHS already confirmed the receipts:
- Sept 2023: Biden's HHS released a 14-year-old girl to a man falsely claiming to be her brother. He sexually assaulted her (convicted in court).
- Aug 2023: HHS released a 15-year-old girl to another fake "brother" with zero DNA or fingerprint verification. He is charged with raping and impregnating her.
- July 2024: HHS handed a 17-year-old boy to someone with unverified documents. Three months later, the boy was found dead in the backseat of a car.
Democrat HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra presided over this broken vetting system while thousands of trafficking complaints piled up in a backlog.
That was never "compassion." It was catastrophic negligence paid for by taxpayers.
How does Xavier Becerra have the nerve to run for Governor of California after presiding over this?
Joe Rogan is horrified as Steve Hilton reveals where the 330,000 migrant kids Biden lost actually ended up.
ROGAN: “Holy f*ck!”
HILTON: “The way Bobby puts it is that Becerra turned HHS into the largest child trafficking operation in history.”
A caseworker told Hilton they were ordered to ignore obviously fake IDs and get the kids out the door as fast as possible.
Their directive was “Speed over safety.” If something happens to the kids, so be it.
One girl was put on a plane, handed off to three strange men, and forced to work 20 hours a day.
ROGAN: “Oh my God, it’s shocking. That’s so evil.”
The kids were given a hotline to call if they were in danger. The problem was getting anyone to answer.
HILTON: “There were 65,000 unanswered calls to the hotline.”
And the people who flagged it? “FIRED.”
ROGAN: “It doesn’t even seem like it could be real.”
When Bobby Kennedy Jr. previously described what happened to these kids, he called it a “huge, huge tragedy.”
KENNEDY: “One guy pretended to be the parent of 42 children. We have no idea what happened to those kids.”
“There was about 60 kids who were sent to one address. When we looked at that address, it was a container, a steel container in the middle of a parking lot.”
“A lot of them were sent to work at slaughterhouses and picking fruits in the fields. They were slaves.”
“It’s a huge, huge tragedy. My agency [under Biden] was the single biggest child trafficker in the world.”
And now Xavier Becerra, the man who presided over all of it, wants to be governor of California.
Steve Hilton is running against him.
Bill B retweeted
Our second product is called Blindsight and it will, as the name suggests, enable even those who are completely blind or have never seen to see.
It is ready from an engineering standpoint. Just waiting on regulatory approval.
Bill B retweeted
🚨 THE FBI'S DIRTY SECRETS ARE OUT — 700 PAGES UNREDACTED 🚨
The Crossfire Hurricane files have just been released…
And it’s WORSE than anyone imagined.
One name keeps appearing over and over:
💥 Stefan Halper
The “informant” paid to SPY on Donald Trump.
Paid by WHO?
→ THE FBI.
→ YOUR tax dollars.
→ For DECADES.
This wasn’t about “Russia.”
This wasn’t about “collusion.”
This was about:
→ Political espionage.
→ Character assassination.
→ Taking down Trump by any means necessary.
Remember General Mike Flynn?
Halper was the one who spread the lie:
🗣️ “Flynn left a conference alone with Russian women.”
Fake.
Fabricated.
DEBUNKED by the FBI themselves.
But the damage was done.
Flynn’s life — destroyed.
Trump’s campaign — spied on.
And the Deep State walked away untouched.
📢 WHAT THIS MEANS:
⚠️ The FBI didn’t “investigate” Trump.
🚨 THE FBI TARGETED TRUMP.
They paid informants.
They planted lies.
They weaponized the intelligence community against a sitting U.S. President.
The swamp isn’t just real.
IT’S DOCUMENTED.
And now — 700 pages PROVE IT.
The Russia Hoax wasn’t just a scam.
🚨 IT WAS TREASON.
Time for the truth.
Time for accountability.
Time for justice.
Bill B retweeted
This shameless lady got caught and is a fraud. Alaska, don’t just defeat her but crush her electorally in such large numbers you’ll make clear to all the Democrat Party ambulance-chasing lawyers, sleazy consultants, and scumbag politicians that there’s a big price to pay for trying to scam the voters — we, the people.
Mary Peltola keeps denying, tries the old standard reaction to her ballot-stacking scandal: "This is just another distraction, it's another diversion...This is all stuff to sell newspapers." realclearpolitics.com/video/…
Bill B retweeted
Lust – Pleasure Without Consequence.
Lust is not desire. Desire, turned into love and commitment, is what builds families. Without it, none of us would be here.
Lust is pleasure cut off from love.
Lust is pleasure cut off from commitment: the body present, the person absent.
Lust is pleasure cut off from consequences – above all from the oldest consequence of all: a child.
Lust consumes people the way gluttony consumes food: quickly, and without memory.
Lust is never full. It needs the next one – the next face, the next screen, the next swipe.
And lust is lonely. Many encounters, no real bonds.
Now scale it up.
It began as a promise: pleasure without consequence. Then sex was separated from marriage, marriage from children, and children from the future.
Scaled up, it created a whole hook-up culture, gay and straight alike. An entire environment of weak relationships – nights without mornings, encounters without names, no tomorrow. Completely sterile: no bonds, no children, nothing to pass on.
Industries grew around it. Arousal sold by the minute. Intimacy turned into an app market where a few get all the attention and many end up alone – more connected than any generation in history, and lonelier than any.
And the bill arrives later, as it always does: lonely old age, empty cradles, a state trying to replace families that were never formed.
Against all this stands one of civilization’s oldest inventions: marriage. It takes the strongest force in human nature and channels it into building – a home, children, a future. Some historians credit the West’s insistence on one spouse with taming the rivalry between men and turning it toward work and family instead.
A healthy civilization does not abolish desire. It converts it: into love, into commitment, into children. Hook-up culture converts it the other way – into consumption, with no one to pass anything on to.
The cure is old and simple: love that commits.
Desire builds families. Lust builds nothing.
Next: The Cures.
The Seven Deadly Sins – at the Scale of a Civilization.
More than fourteen centuries ago, Christian monks drew up a list of seven sins. Not laws – a map of the human heart. Envy. Pride. Wrath. Sloth. Greed. Gluttony. Lust. It is still pretty much the most accurate psychology anyone has written.
The monks were looking at one soul at a time. Look at whole systems instead, and you find the same seven. A vice that stays private ruins one life. Scaled up, it becomes an institution: a tax, a ministry, an ideology, a budget line.
People will always have vices. The question is who pays for them.
Adam Smith noticed that we owe our dinner not to the butcher’s kindness but to his self-interest. A free market does not abolish greed – it puts it to work: you get rich only by serving others, and you go bankrupt if you don’t. The vice pays its own bill. Bad systems let the vice send its bill to someone else – the taxpayer, the next generation, the innocent.
A good civilization does not abolish sin. It sends the bill to the sinner.
So here is what comes next, one sin at a time:
1. Envy – the engine of socialism. If I can’t have it, nobody should.
2. Pride – the planner’s conceit, from Plato’s philosopher-king to the Brussels directive.
3. Wrath – vengeance without trial, from the guillotine to cancel culture.
4. Sloth – comfort as a political program, from bread and circuses to the empty cradle.
5. Greed – the one everybody expects us to defend. We won’t: crony capitalism, the bailout, private profit and public loss.
6. Gluttony – debt. Eating the future.
7. Lust – pleasure cut off from its consequences, and from children.
And then the cures: the four old virtues – prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude – and the institutions that make them stick.
The monks thought sin was a matter for the confessional. They were half right. It is also a matter for the budget.
Show me a country’s budget, and I will tell you which sins it subsidizes.
First up: Envy.
Envy – the Engine of Socialism.
A genie appears to a peasant: "I’ll grant you one wish." The peasant thinks for a long time. His neighbor has a goat. "Kill the neighbor’s goat."
That is envy. Not wanting what someone else has – that’s ambition, and it built most of the world. Envy is wanting him not to have it. Even if you gain nothing. Even if you lose.
Every other sin at least promises pleasure. Envy promises only that someone else will have less. And it is the one sin nobody ever confesses – because it never calls itself envy. It calls itself fairness. Justice. Equality.
Socialism is envy at scale: not lifting the bottom, but cutting the top. Thatcher caught it in one sentence in Parliament: her opponents would rather the poor were poorer, provided the rich were less rich.
In experiments, people will pay out of their own pocket to destroy money belonging to others. Whole countries do the same: the tax that raises little but drives away the people it targets, the school that abolishes the advanced class because not everyone can take it, the rule written to bring down whoever got ahead.
In Soviet villages, a kulak – a "rich" peasant – was often a man with two cows. Liquidating the kulaks did not give anyone a cow. It gave everyone the famine.
That is envy’s bill. Envy aims it at the successful. But the successful leave, or stop trying – and the bill comes back to everyone. Kill the goat and you get no milk. Neither does anyone else.
The Greeks knew there were two kinds of rivalry. Hesiod wrote that the potter competes with the potter, the craftsman with the craftsman – and that this strife is good, because it makes everyone work harder. The other kind only destroys.
A free society does not abolish envy. It converts it: you may have what your neighbor has – by doing what he did. Socialism converts it the other way, into policy, so that nobody has the goat.
The cure is old and simple: gratitude for what you have, and the ambition to build what you don’t.
Next: Pride.
Bill B retweeted
Greed – Private Profit, Public Loss.
This is the one everybody expects us to defend. We won’t.
Greed is not wanting more. Wanting more built the world – the farmer who wants a better harvest, the inventor who wants a better machine, the mother who wants a better life for her children. That is ambition.
Greed is wanting more without giving more. Taking without making.
Greed is the shortcut. Why build a better product when you can buy a better law?
Greed loves the dark: the closed meeting, the amendment slipped in at midnight, the subsidy buried on page eight hundred of a bill nobody read.
Greed is never full. Midas got his wish: everything he touched turned to gold – his bread, his wine. He starved surrounded by treasure.
Now look at what each system does with it.
A free market puts greed on a leash. Adam Smith saw it: we owe our dinner not to the butcher’s kindness but to his self-interest. You can get as rich as you like – but only by giving people something they want more than their money. And if you get it wrong, you go bankrupt. The greedy pay their own bill.
The state can cut the leash. The subsidy lets you get rich without serving anyone. The regulation written by the biggest player locks out the smaller ones. And the bailout completes the picture: in 2008, the banks kept the profits of the boom and handed the losses to the taxpayer – bonuses included. Private profit, public loss.
Then there is the quietest machine of all: the printing press. New money does not arrive everywhere at once. It reaches those closest to the printer first – the state, the banks, the owners of assets – who spend it before prices rise. By the time it reaches the worker’s wage, prices have already moved. An economist named it nearly three centuries ago: the Cantillon Effect. A silent transfer from those far from the printer to those close to it.
And socialism, which promised to abolish greed? It gave greed a party card. The nomenklatura had its own shops, its own villas, its own hospitals. The greediest class in history was the one that ran the abolition of greed.
A free society does not abolish greed. It converts it: get rich by serving, at your own risk. Crony capitalism converts it the other way: keep the profit, send the loss to someone else.
A market without bankruptcy is not a market. It is greed with a state guarantee.
The cure is old and simple: give before you take. And pay for your own mistakes.
Next: Gluttony.
The Seven Deadly Sins – at the Scale of a Civilization.
More than fourteen centuries ago, Christian monks drew up a list of seven sins. Not laws – a map of the human heart. Envy. Pride. Wrath. Sloth. Greed. Gluttony. Lust. It is still pretty much the most accurate psychology anyone has written.
The monks were looking at one soul at a time. Look at whole systems instead, and you find the same seven. A vice that stays private ruins one life. Scaled up, it becomes an institution: a tax, a ministry, an ideology, a budget line.
People will always have vices. The question is who pays for them.
Adam Smith noticed that we owe our dinner not to the butcher’s kindness but to his self-interest. A free market does not abolish greed – it puts it to work: you get rich only by serving others, and you go bankrupt if you don’t. The vice pays its own bill. Bad systems let the vice send its bill to someone else – the taxpayer, the next generation, the innocent.
A good civilization does not abolish sin. It sends the bill to the sinner.
So here is what comes next, one sin at a time:
1. Envy – the engine of socialism. If I can’t have it, nobody should.
2. Pride – the planner’s conceit, from Plato’s philosopher-king to the Brussels directive.
3. Wrath – vengeance without trial, from the guillotine to cancel culture.
4. Sloth – comfort as a political program, from bread and circuses to the empty cradle.
5. Greed – the one everybody expects us to defend. We won’t: crony capitalism, the bailout, private profit and public loss.
6. Gluttony – debt. Eating the future.
7. Lust – pleasure cut off from its consequences, and from children.
And then the cures: the four old virtues – prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude – and the institutions that make them stick.
The monks thought sin was a matter for the confessional. They were half right. It is also a matter for the budget.
Show me a country’s budget, and I will tell you which sins it subsidizes.
First up: Envy.
Envy – the Engine of Socialism.
A genie appears to a peasant: "I’ll grant you one wish." The peasant thinks for a long time. His neighbor has a goat. "Kill the neighbor’s goat."
That is envy. Not wanting what someone else has – that’s ambition, and it built most of the world. Envy is wanting him not to have it. Even if you gain nothing. Even if you lose.
Every other sin at least promises pleasure. Envy promises only that someone else will have less. And it is the one sin nobody ever confesses – because it never calls itself envy. It calls itself fairness. Justice. Equality.
Socialism is envy at scale: not lifting the bottom, but cutting the top. Thatcher caught it in one sentence in Parliament: her opponents would rather the poor were poorer, provided the rich were less rich.
In experiments, people will pay out of their own pocket to destroy money belonging to others. Whole countries do the same: the tax that raises little but drives away the people it targets, the school that abolishes the advanced class because not everyone can take it, the rule written to bring down whoever got ahead.
In Soviet villages, a kulak – a "rich" peasant – was often a man with two cows. Liquidating the kulaks did not give anyone a cow. It gave everyone the famine.
That is envy’s bill. Envy aims it at the successful. But the successful leave, or stop trying – and the bill comes back to everyone. Kill the goat and you get no milk. Neither does anyone else.
The Greeks knew there were two kinds of rivalry. Hesiod wrote that the potter competes with the potter, the craftsman with the craftsman – and that this strife is good, because it makes everyone work harder. The other kind only destroys.
A free society does not abolish envy. It converts it: you may have what your neighbor has – by doing what he did. Socialism converts it the other way, into policy, so that nobody has the goat.
The cure is old and simple: gratitude for what you have, and the ambition to build what you don’t.
Next: Pride.
Bill B retweeted
Envy – the Engine of Socialism.
Envy is not wanting what your neighbor has. That would be desire – and desire built most of the world.
Envy is wanting him not to have it.
Envy is the pain you feel at someone else’s good. Not your loss – his gain.
Envy is Schadenfreude: the small, warm, shameful joy when the neighbor’s business fails, when the brilliant colleague stumbles, when the one who rose too high comes down.
Envy is close. Nobody envies a king. We envy the cousin, the classmate, the colleague at the next desk – the one who started where we started and went further. Aristotle saw it: we envy those nearest to us.
Envy is admiration that refused to become effort. It looks at excellence and, instead of climbing toward it, decides to pull it down.
Envy is a mirror nobody can bear. His success asks a question: if he could, why didn’t I? There is only one way to silence it – make him guilty. He must have cheated. He must have stolen. Every theory of exploitation begins here.
Envy is the only sin nobody confesses. It never calls itself envy. It calls itself fairness, justice, equality. It goes to the barricades in the costume of virtue.
And envy is never satisfied. Tocqueville saw the trap: when everyone is nearly equal, the smallest difference becomes unbearable. Level everything, and the last remaining difference burns brighter than all the old ones did. Equality never cures envy. It feeds it.
That is why envy is strongest where the stakes are smallest. In academia, professors fight viciously for the tiniest, most insignificant advantages – the old joke says the politics are so bitter precisely because the stakes are so low. And in socialism, where everyone had almost nothing, a slightly bigger flat was enough to make a neighbor write a denunciation.
Few people envy when everyone around them is doing great things. When everyone is climbing, nobody has time to pull anyone down.
Now scale it up. Envy is the cheapest fuel in politics. Promise to take from the few and give to the many, and the crowd forgives you everything. It costs the politician nothing – the bill goes to the successful. Then the successful leave, or stop trying, and the bill comes back to everyone. In Soviet villages, a "rich" peasant was often a man with two cows. Liquidating them gave nobody a cow. It gave everybody the famine.
The Greeks knew there were two kinds of rivalry. One makes the potter work harder because the other potter is good. The other burns down the other potter’s workshop.
A free society does not abolish envy. It converts it: you may have what your neighbor has – by doing what he did. Socialism converts it the other way – into policy.
The cure is old and simple: gratitude for what you have, and the ambition to build what you don’t.
The Seven Deadly Sins – at the Scale of a Civilization.
More than fourteen centuries ago, Christian monks drew up a list of seven sins. Not laws – a map of the human heart. Envy. Pride. Wrath. Sloth. Greed. Gluttony. Lust. It is still pretty much the most accurate psychology anyone has written.
The monks were looking at one soul at a time. Look at whole systems instead, and you find the same seven. A vice that stays private ruins one life. Scaled up, it becomes an institution: a tax, a ministry, an ideology, a budget line.
People will always have vices. The question is who pays for them.
Adam Smith noticed that we owe our dinner not to the butcher’s kindness but to his self-interest. A free market does not abolish greed – it puts it to work: you get rich only by serving others, and you go bankrupt if you don’t. The vice pays its own bill. Bad systems let the vice send its bill to someone else – the taxpayer, the next generation, the innocent.
A good civilization does not abolish sin. It sends the bill to the sinner.
So here is what comes next, one sin at a time:
1. Envy – the engine of socialism. If I can’t have it, nobody should.
2. Pride – the planner’s conceit, from Plato’s philosopher-king to the Brussels directive.
3. Wrath – vengeance without trial, from the guillotine to cancel culture.
4. Sloth – comfort as a political program, from bread and circuses to the empty cradle.
5. Greed – the one everybody expects us to defend. We won’t: crony capitalism, the bailout, private profit and public loss.
6. Gluttony – debt. Eating the future.
7. Lust – pleasure cut off from its consequences, and from children.
And then the cures: the four old virtues – prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude – and the institutions that make them stick.
The monks thought sin was a matter for the confessional. They were half right. It is also a matter for the budget.
Show me a country’s budget, and I will tell you which sins it subsidizes.
First up: Envy.
Envy – the Engine of Socialism.
A genie appears to a peasant: "I’ll grant you one wish." The peasant thinks for a long time. His neighbor has a goat. "Kill the neighbor’s goat."
That is envy. Not wanting what someone else has – that’s ambition, and it built most of the world. Envy is wanting him not to have it. Even if you gain nothing. Even if you lose.
Every other sin at least promises pleasure. Envy promises only that someone else will have less. And it is the one sin nobody ever confesses – because it never calls itself envy. It calls itself fairness. Justice. Equality.
Socialism is envy at scale: not lifting the bottom, but cutting the top. Thatcher caught it in one sentence in Parliament: her opponents would rather the poor were poorer, provided the rich were less rich.
In experiments, people will pay out of their own pocket to destroy money belonging to others. Whole countries do the same: the tax that raises little but drives away the people it targets, the school that abolishes the advanced class because not everyone can take it, the rule written to bring down whoever got ahead.
In Soviet villages, a kulak – a "rich" peasant – was often a man with two cows. Liquidating the kulaks did not give anyone a cow. It gave everyone the famine.
That is envy’s bill. Envy aims it at the successful. But the successful leave, or stop trying – and the bill comes back to everyone. Kill the goat and you get no milk. Neither does anyone else.
The Greeks knew there were two kinds of rivalry. Hesiod wrote that the potter competes with the potter, the craftsman with the craftsman – and that this strife is good, because it makes everyone work harder. The other kind only destroys.
A free society does not abolish envy. It converts it: you may have what your neighbor has – by doing what he did. Socialism converts it the other way, into policy, so that nobody has the goat.
The cure is old and simple: gratitude for what you have, and the ambition to build what you don’t.
Next: Pride.
Bill B retweeted
Pride – The Engineers of Human Souls.
Pride is not the craftsman’s satisfaction in good work. That kind of pride built cathedrals.
Pride is the certainty that you know better than other people how they should live.
Pride is looking at a society and seeing a machine – with yourself as the engineer.
Pride is impatience with reality. Reality is slow, messy, full of people who want different things. So pride replaces it with a plan.
Pride "loves" humanity and despises people. Humanity never argues back.
Pride is blind in one specific way: it cannot see what it does not know. Hayek called it the fatal conceit – the belief that a few clever people can know what millions know, each about his own work, his own family, his own street.
Pride wears the mask of compassion. "For your own good" – the most dangerous words in politics. C.S. Lewis warned that the worst tyranny is the one exercised sincerely for the good of its victims – because its enforcers sleep with a clear conscience.
Pride never admits a mistake. A failed plan was sabotaged, betrayed, underfunded – never wrong. So the next plan is bigger.
And pride never lives in its own design. The architect of the housing estate lives in the old town. The reformer of the school sends his children somewhere else. The planner never pays for his plan.
Now scale it up. Plato’s ideal city abolished the family among its rulers and told the people a useful lie. The French revolutionaries redesigned even the clock – ten hours a day; it lasted barely a year and a half. Trotsky promised that under socialism the average man would rise to the level of Aristotle, Goethe or Marx; what came out was a man queuing for bread and informing on his neighbor. Le Corbusier wanted to raze the heart of Paris for identical towers; his ideas shaped the grim estates on the edge of every European city – designed for a new man, inhabited by real ones. Today the same pride works in committees, redesigning language, the family and what children must learn about themselves. Quieter than a revolution. The same certainty.
The West’s best tradition starts from the opposite place. Socrates: the wisest man knows that he does not know. Chesterton: never take down a fence until you know why it was put up. Society is not a machine. It is a living thing – grown, not built. The statesman should be a gardener, not an engineer.
A free society does not abolish pride. It converts it: be as proud as you like of what you build – your house, your company, your family – and let reality judge it. The planner is proud of what he designs for everyone else, and never has to live in it.
The cure is the oldest one: know what you don’t know. And let people live their own lives.
The Seven Deadly Sins – at the Scale of a Civilization.
More than fourteen centuries ago, Christian monks drew up a list of seven sins. Not laws – a map of the human heart. Envy. Pride. Wrath. Sloth. Greed. Gluttony. Lust. It is still pretty much the most accurate psychology anyone has written.
The monks were looking at one soul at a time. Look at whole systems instead, and you find the same seven. A vice that stays private ruins one life. Scaled up, it becomes an institution: a tax, a ministry, an ideology, a budget line.
People will always have vices. The question is who pays for them.
Adam Smith noticed that we owe our dinner not to the butcher’s kindness but to his self-interest. A free market does not abolish greed – it puts it to work: you get rich only by serving others, and you go bankrupt if you don’t. The vice pays its own bill. Bad systems let the vice send its bill to someone else – the taxpayer, the next generation, the innocent.
A good civilization does not abolish sin. It sends the bill to the sinner.
So here is what comes next, one sin at a time:
1. Envy – the engine of socialism. If I can’t have it, nobody should.
2. Pride – the planner’s conceit, from Plato’s philosopher-king to the Brussels directive.
3. Wrath – vengeance without trial, from the guillotine to cancel culture.
4. Sloth – comfort as a political program, from bread and circuses to the empty cradle.
5. Greed – the one everybody expects us to defend. We won’t: crony capitalism, the bailout, private profit and public loss.
6. Gluttony – debt. Eating the future.
7. Lust – pleasure cut off from its consequences, and from children.
And then the cures: the four old virtues – prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude – and the institutions that make them stick.
The monks thought sin was a matter for the confessional. They were half right. It is also a matter for the budget.
Show me a country’s budget, and I will tell you which sins it subsidizes.
First up: Envy.
Envy – the Engine of Socialism.
A genie appears to a peasant: "I’ll grant you one wish." The peasant thinks for a long time. His neighbor has a goat. "Kill the neighbor’s goat."
That is envy. Not wanting what someone else has – that’s ambition, and it built most of the world. Envy is wanting him not to have it. Even if you gain nothing. Even if you lose.
Every other sin at least promises pleasure. Envy promises only that someone else will have less. And it is the one sin nobody ever confesses – because it never calls itself envy. It calls itself fairness. Justice. Equality.
Socialism is envy at scale: not lifting the bottom, but cutting the top. Thatcher caught it in one sentence in Parliament: her opponents would rather the poor were poorer, provided the rich were less rich.
In experiments, people will pay out of their own pocket to destroy money belonging to others. Whole countries do the same: the tax that raises little but drives away the people it targets, the school that abolishes the advanced class because not everyone can take it, the rule written to bring down whoever got ahead.
In Soviet villages, a kulak – a "rich" peasant – was often a man with two cows. Liquidating the kulaks did not give anyone a cow. It gave everyone the famine.
That is envy’s bill. Envy aims it at the successful. But the successful leave, or stop trying – and the bill comes back to everyone. Kill the goat and you get no milk. Neither does anyone else.
The Greeks knew there were two kinds of rivalry. Hesiod wrote that the potter competes with the potter, the craftsman with the craftsman – and that this strife is good, because it makes everyone work harder. The other kind only destroys.
A free society does not abolish envy. It converts it: you may have what your neighbor has – by doing what he did. Socialism converts it the other way, into policy, so that nobody has the goat.
The cure is old and simple: gratitude for what you have, and the ambition to build what you don’t.
Next: Pride.