Bernie Sanders says the top 1% owns more than the bottom 93%, that fewer than a thousand billionaires got $2.2 trillion richer last year, and that it's "obscene." It's the most seductive and most wrong economic argument of our time. Let me explain why. First, wealth distribution follows a power law. Always. Everywhere. Books, music, startups, followers on X, goals in soccer. A small minority captures most of the value. That's not a bug of capitalism. It's the mathematical signature of every system where value gets created. So the only question that matters isn't "how big is the rich's slice?" It's "is the cake growing, and is the slice of the poorest growing with it?" And the answer is yes. In 1990, more than one human in three lived in extreme poverty. Today it's about one in ten. During exactly the period when billionaires multiplied. Bernie shows you the slice. He never shows you the cake. Second thing he won't tell you: past a certain level, wealth stops being consumption. It becomes capital allocation. Elon Musk isn't sleeping on a pile of cash. He owns stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, xAI. Jeff Bezos owns Amazon stock. That "$2.2 trillion" isn't sitting in a checking account. It's factories, rockets, data centers, millions of jobs. Nobody can eat $100 billion. You can only decide where to invest it. Once you understand that, the whole debate changes. The real question becomes: who allocates capital better? The people who built Amazon, SpaceX and Nvidia? Or politicians? A 5% wealth tax isn't "taking money from the rich." It's taking investment decisions away from people who proved they can create value and handing them to people who proved the opposite. Because the fundamental difference between an entrepreneur and a politician is consequences. The entrepreneur invests his own money. If he allocates badly, he loses everything. The market corrects him brutally, no appeal. That's why most startups die: the system kills bad decisions. The politician invests other people's money. If he allocates badly, nothing happens. Worse, he gets a bigger budget to "fix the problem." Milton Friedman put it better than anyone. There are four ways to spend money. Your money on yourself: you care about price and quality. Your money on others: you care about price. Others' money on yourself: you care about quality. Others' money on others: you care about nothing. Government is the fourth box. By design. Perfect example: California high-speed rail. Approved in 2008 for about $33 billion. Current estimated cost: over $100 billion. Passengers carried: zero. No entrepreneur would have survived that. The politicians who pushed it built careers on it. And when allocation has no consequences, it eventually finds a buyer. A politician who controls billions without accountability becomes the most profitable target in the world for anyone who wants to steer that money. The irony is that the left that rails against billionaires is itself funded by billionaires. George Soros is one of the biggest Democratic donors in history. The Gates Foundation shapes public health policy across the planet. Politicians don't fight billionaires. They pick their own. The ones who fund the state over the ones who compete with it. So if we actually want fewer poor people, we have to stop judging ideas by their intentions and start judging them by their results. And the results are brutally clear. China, 1978: Deng Xiaoping opens the economy to markets. More than 800 million people escape extreme poverty. The largest retreat of misery in human history. Not through redistribution. Through the freedom to build. India, 1991: liberalization. Same movie. South Korea and North Korea: same people, same language, same starting point in 1953. One became one of the most advanced economies on earth. The other has famines. Poland and Ukraine: comparable living standards in 1990. Today the average Pole is more than three times richer than the average Ukrainian. Argentina: a year and a half of liberalization, and the poverty rate falls from over 50% to around 30%. No country in history escaped poverty by punishing the people who build. Every single one did it by letting them build. And if you want to see what Bernie's program looks like in real life, you don't have to imagine it. It exists. It's called France. We've been running it for 45 years. Mass nationalizations in 1981. Two years later, Socialist president Mitterrand has to reverse course into austerity. Retirement at 60. The 35-hour workweek. A wealth tax for 35 years. Hundreds of wealthy households left every year for Belgium, Switzerland, London, taking their capital, their companies and their future taxes with them. Macron finally scrapped it in 2018. Hollande's 75% tax: raised a few hundred million, drove talent out, abandoned after two years. One of the highest tax burdens in the OECD. Public spending around 57% of GDP, a record in the developed world. Last balanced budget: 1974. Public debt: over €3.4 trillion. Mass unemployment for four decades. If taxing the rich and growing the state made people prosperous, France would be the richest country on the planet. It isn't. GDP per capita in France is barely more than half of America's. It's lower than Mississippi, the poorest state in the US. Not a single global tech giant. Our best engineers build Silicon Valley instead. I've been going back and forth between Paris and San Francisco for years. I see it every week. And California is about to replay the movie. Prop 40, on the ballot November 3rd, would take 5% of billionaires' net worth. Even Gavin Newsom, a Democratic governor, opposes it. The state's own nonpartisan budget analyst warns that income tax revenue could drop every year if the wealthy leave. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel have reportedly already started moving their assets out. You don't fight poverty by shrinking the top. You fight it by growing the cake. Bernie wants a society where nobody has too much. I want a society where nobody has too little. The first has been tried everywhere and produces equality in stagnation. The second lifted a billion people out of misery. Choose.

"Responsibility demands hard choices" We published this memo 9 months ago and, while Canada is making progress, we must not rest. Worth another read. Canada is in a crisis. Growth is weak. Productivity is stalled. Our ability to decide, build, and deliver has eroded, while the world around us is accelerating and fragmenting. In this environment, delay is not neutral. It is a liability that leaves us poorly positioned as a nation. This was the stark message that Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered to Canadians almost a year ago, when he swore in his first Cabinet after taking over the leadership of the Liberals from Justin Trudeau. To respond to this crisis, he promised Canadians “We’re focused on action.” This memo reflects a growing concern among entrepreneurs, builders, and operators. Across all levels of government, in our corporations, and as citizens, Canada has not yet shifted enough from a peacetime mindset to an urgent, results-driven posture. We are not moving fast enough or with the intensity needed to meet the moment. The Prime Minister acknowledged this reality in his recent address in Davos. The speech shared an uncomfortable truth: the world is changing faster, becoming more volatile, and less forgiving of hesitation. The statement that Canada must “take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be” was both accurate and necessary. The same clarity must be applied to Canada’s domestic reality. We recommend three immediate shifts We recommend three immediate shifts to every level of government, to corporations that invest and build here, and to Canadians who benefit from a stronger economy: First, focus relentlessly on domestic execution. 2026 must be the year we deliver. Canada’s sovereignty is secured through economic strength. To build this strength, we must deliver energy infrastructure, housing, transportation corridors, competitive tax structures, policy reform, digital systems, and industrial capacity with a sense of urgency not seen in decades. Delivery requires execution – the discipline of turning intentions into concrete actions and results. This means making decisions, not consulting about making decisions. It means signing committed contracts, not MOUs. It means approvals that lead to shovels in the ground, not endless studies. Second, change our norms and expectations. Sovereignty is not preserved by managing decline more politely than others. Attack the “culture of consultation”. Reset expectations so that decisions are made in days and weeks, not months or years. End government programs that don’t achieve results. Remove EDI requirements that slow down progress. Expedite dismissals for underperforming government executives. Expect and demand more from every Canadian. Be honest with Canadians about the hard choices required and the tradeoffs involved. Stop using “Canada just works this way” as an excuse. Leverage the full power of government to get things done. Accept that not everyone will be happy with this – the bigger risk is that we get left behind as we try to build a much more competitive economy. Third, bring builders into the room. As Canada approaches critical trade negotiations and economic decisions, governments must engage directly with the businesses that operate across borders and supply chains. We’ve done this before - through initiatives like theCDL Rapid Screening Consortium in 2020 - and can do it again. Policy is strongest when it reflects commercial reality and we should find ways to ensure it’s not developed in isolation. The World Won’t Wait We do not live in a world where time is abundant, where transitions are gentle, or where every risk can be fully mapped before action is taken. Competitor economies are executing at speed.  In a national productivity crisis driven by rules and regulations that create uncertainty and timelines that discourage capital investment, it’s fair to ask whether our systems are designed to deliver outcomes or preserve comfort. As the Prime Minister has said: “This is not a transition. This is a rupture.” History shows that Canada can do hard things when it faces danger. In World War II, during the fiscal crisis of the 1990s, and during the onset of COVID-19, our governments got serious. They did not seek to make everyone happy; they sought to survive and succeed. They acted at “crisis speed.” In those moments, Canada removed the signs from its windows and stopped pretending that rituals, slogans and procedural compliance were enough. The country acted on reality, not reassurance. We are in a moment when Canadians know what’s at stake. We applaud the efforts this federal government has made so far to do things like remove federal barriers to internal trade, fast track major projects, and streamline applications for R&D tax credits. But we must do more. Much more. And much faster. It’s amazing that we haven’t yet made our corporate and capital gains tax structures more competitive, accelerated project approval timelines and cut red tape across the board, or deployed private sector experts to support government. Steering Canada through this moment is an enormously difficult task – we understand that. The current federal government has now been in place for nearly a year. With Parliament back in session, this is an excellent moment to shift decisively from peacetime habits to a wartime posture. That does not mean abandoning values. It means aligning systems with urgency. Builders face these choices constantly. When conditions change, adaptation is not optional. Decisions are made that upset stakeholders. Action is taken before consensus is complete. This is because responsibility demands hard choices. Government is no different. Neither are corporations, institutions, or citizens. In a rupture, everyone adjusts or everyone pays the cost. The path forward is demanding and clear: accept the world as it is, and create the conditions for Canada to build.

I’m Polish. If France is your future, I come from the end of that road. France shows you the slow version. We lived the full one – the version where the state doesn’t just take care of everything. It owns everything. In Poland it arrived with Soviet bayonets. In America it would arrive by vote – slower, softer, with better slogans. But the destination is the same, and so is the mechanism. It starts with prices. When the state decides what things should cost, prices stop telling the truth. A price is a message: this is scarce, this is wanted, make more of this. Abolish the message, and the whole economy goes deaf. So the shelves emptied – first of meat, then of almost everything. Every Pole knew the joke. A man walks into a shop: "No meat?" The clerk: "No, sir. Here is no fish. No meat is across the street." We queued for everything. People wrote their place in line on their palms and kept lists through the night. You waited years for a small car, and often more than a decade for an apartment. Not because Poles were lazy. Because nobody in the system had any reason to produce what we needed. At work, we had another joke: we pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us. And the promise of equality? It produced the most unequal system of all. The party elite had their own shops – Poles called them the shops behind the yellow curtains. Those with dollars shopped in special stores. Everyone else got the queue. Then the system needed informers, because nobody believed in it anymore. Our neighbors were recruited to report on us. You never knew who was listening – the colleague, the friend, sometimes family. So we learned to live a double life: one language in public, another at home. Those who spoke up got the wolf ticket: no job, no promotion, sometimes no university place for their children. Nobody needed to send them to prison. They just couldn’t live. The newspapers reported record harvests while the shelves stood empty. Everyone knew. Nobody said it. That is what a society looks like when the lie becomes the system. In 1950 we were about as rich as Spain. By 1989, Spain was twice as rich. That is what forty years of "fairness" cost us. Today in America, the method is softer. Your neighbor won’t inform on you to the secret police. Someone will report your post, and you’ll be cancelled – no job, no account, no platform. Different tools, same machine. We got out. Ten million of us joined Solidarity, and in 1989 a system that looked eternal collapsed. Since then, Poland has become one of the great success stories of Europe – because people were finally free to build. But we still carry it. More than thirty years later, you can see it in the careful answers, the closed faces - the system leaves faster than the fear does. It takes generations to get out of it fully once you fall into that trap. Nobody votes for the queue. Nobody votes for the informer. They come with the promise. Trust me, you don’t want to go down that road.

I was just discussing that someone needs to to start . - $1 buy out + earnout - Cut all marketing & sales expenses - Engineering/product to "lights on" only - Increase prices for new customers - Team in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Costa Rica

Instead of “tax the rich,” the ambition should be “make more people rich.” Government funds public services largely by taxing the value people and businesses create. If we want more money for social programs, we need more value being created. Empower builders to build. Make it easier to start businesses, invest, create jobs, and grow the economy. And if someone gets wealthy doing that, let them. If they’re creating jobs and real economic growth, their success is creating opportunity for others and expanding the tax base that funds the services we all rely on. A more prosperous society needs more people building prosperity.

I think the “tax the rich” framing sends the wrong message about success. It risks making wealth seem like something to resent and take from, rather than something more people should have the opportunity to build. Becoming wealthy doesn’t inherently mean taking from someone else. Wealth can be created. It’s not zero sum. People who build businesses, invest, and take risks can create jobs, opportunity, and a larger tax base. We should want more people doing that. Especially our youth. Build something useful, solve a problem, improve how something works, and you can create value for yourself and others. A more prosperous BC needs more people creating opportunity, and a government that makes it easier to do so.

Canada’s publicly funded research programs should focus on merit as the sole criteria. Identity politics has destroyed a lot of the academic culture we used to pride ourselves on as a nation. Just ask many academics who are afraid to speak out. We spend $4.5 billion a year on the tri-agency research programs, including $311M a year on the Canada Research Chairs program alone. Time for a change.

@DHH is 🎯. Recycling plastic is a scam on all of us by the industry. The fastest way to wake everyone up from this hallucination is to ban plastic recycling. For first timers to this topic, start here:

A reminder that every time government offers you something for “free” or artificially lowers the price of something with a real underlying cost, someone still has to pay for it. That money has to come from somewhere, whether through taxes, borrowing, or cuts elsewhere. Much of our income tax revenue comes from our highest earners, many of whom are business owners, entrepreneurs, and professionals. But when government continually asks more of these people while delivering less in return, it risks driving them away and discouraging others from coming here. Think of it like farming. You can’t continually harvest without planting new seeds. Eventually, there’s nothing left to harvest. Government should be focused on growing the economic pie, not simply figuring out how to take a bigger slice. We need policies that encourage investment, productivity, entrepreneurship, and growth. You cannot tax your way to prosperity if your policies are simultaneously undermining the people and businesses creating it. Unfortunately, the BC NDP seems far more focused on harvesting than planting.

Most domestic recycling efforts are empirically retarded, counterproductive, and require you don't value your time. Their real function is to fill the God-shaped hole, sized for penance, prayer, and sacrifice, in people's souls.

David Eby’s latest harebrained idea is to issue zero-interest loans to businesses in British Columbia. 💸 He’s basically turning taxpayers into lenders — competing with commercial banks. 🏦 Two ✌️ problems: First, the province doesn’t have the money. It has to go to the bond market, borrow that money at 4.5%, and then turn around and lend it out at 0.0%. 🤯 That’s a negative-carry loan book. On $500 million, that’s $135 million in interest costs alone, over six years. 💰🔥 Then there’s default risk. Banks are professional lenders. They understand the number-one rule: lend money to people who will pay you back. Government lending has a very different track record. COVID loans had default rates exceeding 7% — 20x higher than what commercial banks typically experience. 📉 That same default rate would put another $35 million of taxpayers’ money in the furnace. 🔥 Add it together, and taxpayers are looking at a cost of $170 million — before administration costs. 🧾 Borrow at 4.5%. Lend at 0%. And taxpayers take the credit risk. 🎲 I guess David Eby is our banker now. 🏦 What could possibly go wrong? 🤷‍♂️

Entrepreneurial Canadians move to America and build massive companies: Elon Musk — $3.9T Chris Olah, Anthropic co-founder — $965B Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder — $852B David Cheriton, Arista co-founder — $272B Garrett Camp, Uber co-founder — $140B Michelle Zatlyn, Cloudflare co-founder — $128B Stewart Butterfield, Slack co-founder — $28B Ivan Zhao, Notion founder — $11B Apoorva Mehta, Instacart founder — $10B