Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 13.9% (118 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 0%
• Availability Heuristic - 5.8% (49 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 12.2% (104 hits)
• Hindsight Bias - 3.6% (31 hits)
• Overconfidence Bias - 0.9% (8 hits)
• Framing Effect - 2.6% (22 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 0%
• Status Quo Bias - 3.2% (27 hits)
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 11.8% (100 hits)
• Pessimism Bias - 3.4% (29 hits)

Article text

America 250: Our Great Challenge

I wonder if Mayor Mamdani and his aides and staffers realize that his July 2, 2026 speech tells us everything we need to know about the clueless bubble he and his DSA friends inhabit.

He rails against division:

> At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another.

Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest.

Then he spends the rest of his speech stirring up division: us against them, like a true student of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.

> We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world -- one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more…

> We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands… and we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few.

No, Mr.

Mayor.

You and your lefty aides and staffers are Klue Less.

Our great national wealth did not come from starving little children or the calloused hands of manual workers.

It came from ordinary guys -- Benjamin Franklin, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, Jobs, Musk -- who invented stuff and made it work.

No question, the manual workers helped.

But without the inventors: bupkis.

There’s a great piece by James Vaughn in Compact that tells us how it all came about, this rise of bourgeois freedom and ordinary guys.

> By the later eighteenth century, the New World was everywhere demanding that the Old Regime of the West make way for it… For all the differences between [the various] movements, they shared common aims: that modern, bourgeois freedom should be given full scope to develop on its own terms, and that the state should be the servant of society, not its master.

I think Vaughn illustrates the contrast between the woke DSAs and the rebellious MAGAs perfectly.

The question for DSA Humpty Dumptys is: “which is to be master -- that’s all.”

To the MAGAs, life is to be lived by each of us on our own terms, and the DSA movement “should be the servant of society, not its master.”

The whole point of the left, from activists to rich kids to mind-numbed bureaucrats to tenure-encrusted professors, is that the middle class, the bourgeoisie, should be regulated, controlled, hemmed in, forced to bend the knee to the hegemonic educated class.

That’s all.

Guess what!

Mamdani is the problem, not the solution.

Our problem is that the culture of bourgeois freedom of 250 years ago has been throttled by the rise to power of the educated Humpty Dumpty class.

And the culture of the educated class is remarkably similar to the culture in Europe in the late 18th century.

Here is James Vaughn describing Europe back then:

> In Western Europe, where servile labor had come to an end in the late Middle Ages, a social and political order based on hereditary privileges and caste distinctions still prevailed.

Because?

Vaughn quotes Charles Loyseau, a French jurist writing in 1610:

> Because we cannot live together in equality of condition, it is necessary that some command and others obey.

Those who command have several orders, ranks, or degrees.

Sovereign lords command all within their state, addressing their commands to the great; the great to the middling, the middling to the small, and the small to the people.

It’s funny, isn’t it?

Our DSA pals insist on equality of condition, to be obtained by the command of the hierarchical orders of the administrative state diligently administering equality of condition from their bureaucratic palaces -- like NGO princes.

Let’s revise Vaughn’s description of 18th-century Europe to fit 21st-century America.

> [I]n the [US], where [slavery] had come to an end in the [Civil War], a social and political order based on [institutional] privileges and [credentialed] distinctions [now] prevailed.

In the Civil War, the industrial North got impatient with the feudal South and decided to teach those plantation lords a lesson, with a resulting butcher’s bill of over 700,000 lives.

Our challenge is to quietly dissolve the power of the current regime and its credentials and cultural hegemony, and reassert the civilized city economy and culture of 1776 without running up a butcher’s bill.

As James Vaughn writes,

> [T]he freedom of all made possible the greater freedom of each, and the freedom of each contributed to the greater freedom of all… In this society, human beings have no masters and set the course of their own existence (life and liberty); they are not prescribed the ends for which they live, but rather determine them in the midst of living (the pursuit of happiness).

As Associate Justice Clarence Thomas has written, it’s all about the difference between a citizen and a subject.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com.

Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.