Why Is Capitalism Better Than Communism?

A comparison between the merits of capitalism and free enterprise and those of communism is ongoing in America and has grown more persistent after Zohran Mamdani, a self-identified socialist, was elected to lead New York City as its next mayor. Paul Atkins, Chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) spoke on this topic at the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday morning. Jarrett Stepman reported on the speech – “Revitalizing American Markets” – in his article published at The Daily Signal. 

[Paraphrasing Atkins,] As America turns 250 years old, it’s important to remember that freedom, not top-down communism, created our prosperity….

“In seven months, [the American] story will reach a rare milestone when our Republic marks its 250^th year,” he said, noting that the creation of the U.S. was a special moment because the Founding Father’s stood for the idea that rights were “neither permissions to be earned nor privileges to be revoked.”

The attitudes of the Founders were shaped in part by what came before them in the Old World and the New World, Atkins said. The SEC chairman said that before the U.S. was a nation, it was an “investment.”

“The first English settlements in this hemisphere were financed through joint-stock enterprises that allowed people to pool together and share in the risk and the reward of a very uncertain venture,” he said.

He said that New York, once named “New Amsterdam,” also began as an investment project, foreshadowing its future as the major center of global finance.

Atkins noted that a long English legacy of restrained government power, the preservation of property rights, and predictable rules rather than “royal whim” allowed for market and human flourishing. The Founding Fathers inherited that worldview, he said, then “forged a more perfect union.”

The SEC chairman pointed to Alexander Hamilton … as a man who understood that “markets, structured properly, can unleash the might of American dynamism as no monarch or government ministry possibly could.”

It was the commercial nature of the American people, Atkins sad, quoting Hamilton in Federalist 11, that so greatly defines the country and creates an “inexhaustible mine of national wealth.”

Atkins said freedom and dynamism produced remarkable prosperity for the American people. In the 20^th century, other regimes tried to create a top-down model of growth, he said, but these proved disastrous in comparison to the free system of the United States.

“The Soviet and communist system of central planning, coercion, mass murder, seizing private property, and suppressing private enterprise, for example, collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions,” Atkins said. “While the American approach empowered its citizens to innovate, to invest, and to build wealth within predictable and enforceable frameworks.

The message from this larger set of historical examples is clear, Atkins said.

“Across this long sweep of innovation, a pattern emerges with clarity: The great leaps of American life were always produced by a willingness to tolerate and accept risks within a system that rewards those who take those risks,” he said. “Our prosperity is no accident of history – nor is our primacy assured in the future. The 20^th century was a triumph of economic freedom over doctrines that sought to constrain it.”

Atkins warned that “principles do not preserve themselves.” He said that freedom is not a “relic” that we inherit, but a responsibility we must assume. In recent years, “our regulatory frameworks have veered from the founding ideals that helped the United States to once stand without peer as the world’s destination for public companies,” the SEC chairman said….

“One of my priorities as chairman is to reform the SEC’s disclosure rules with two goals in mind,” he said. “First, the SEC must root its disclosure requirement in the concept of financial materiality. Second, these requirements must scale with a company’s size and maturity.”

With these changes, Atkins said he could set the SEC on a better path to fulfilling its original mission as a benign steward of financial markets.

“So as America’s 250^th anniversary approaches, the question before us is not whether our entrepreneurs have the capacity to reinvigorate our capital markets, but whether we, as regulators, have the will,” he concluded. “In this new day at the SEC, and under President [Donald] Trump’s leadership, I am pleased to report that we do.”

What Should Be Done with All the Immigrants, Both Legal and Illegal?

According to a new report authored by Ryan Thorpe and Christopher F. Rufo and published at City Journal, Democrats in Minnesota oversaw millions of taxpayer dollars in fraud. The authors reported that much of the fraud was allegedly perpetrated by members of the Somali community in Minnesota, which is “sizeable.” 

Minnesota is drowning in fraud. Billions in taxpayer dollars have been stolen during the administration of Governor Tim Walz alone. Democratic state officials, overseeing one of the most generous welfare regimes in the country, are asleep at the switch. And the media, duty-bound by progressive pieties, refuse to connect the dots.

In many cases, the fraud has allegedly been perpetrated by members of Minnesota’s sizeable Somali community. Federal counterterrorism sources confirm that millions of dollars in stolen funds have been sent back to Somalia, where they ultimately landed in the hands of the terror group Al-Shabaab. As one confidential source put it: “The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.”

Jarrett Stepman at The Daily Signal noted that the report by Thorpe and Rufo “set off a firestorm” as it brought the “outrageous scandal” into a “national conversation.” After quoting the above paragraph about Minnesota drowning in debt, Stepman explained as follows. 

The piece highlighted truly titanic fraud schemes involving various state welfare programs, including “Feeding Our Future,” a program that received hundreds of millions of dollars annually and was ultimately “being used to fund lavish lifestyles, purchase luxury vehicles, and buy real estate in the United States, Turkey, and Kenya.” …

Rufo was accused of being anti-immigrant and racist. Many on social media accused him of exaggerating the problem. But then The New York Times published a follow-up basically confirming that Minnesota’s social services were essentially eviscerated by Somali fraudsters under Walz’s watch.

There was a very important line in this piece provided by Ahmed Samatar, a professor at Macalester College. Samatar said, according to the Times, that “Somali refugees who came to the United States after their country’s civil war were raised in a culture in which stealing from the country’s dysfunctional and corrupt government was widespread.”

This sort of gets to the heart of why immigration policies have been so out of whack and destructive in Western countries for a generation, producing the current justified backlash.

It should be no surprise that in concentrated Somali communities, like the ones that exist in Minnesota, similar scams have taken place. One doesn’t need to be wholly against immigration to understand that. After all, Thomas Jefferson warned in his famed “Notes on the State of Virginia” about taking in too many people from “absolute monarchies” who will bring with them “the principles of the governments they leave imbibed in their early youth.”

“These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children,” Jefferson wrote. “In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us in legislation. Our laws and institutions must therefore be guarded with jealous attention; and in order to preserve them, we must incorporate our immigrants into the body of our people.”

He recommended essentially slowing our roll bringing in people form such places. That’s prudence, not nativism.

Former President Joe Biden was either senile or complicit, and Democrat governors – particularly Walz -- are either complicit or stupid in the way that they encouraged and orchestrated illegal immigration into the United States. All Americans should be grateful for President Donald Trump’s plan for the United States to permanently pause all immigration from Third World countries and discontinue all federal benefits and subsidies for noncitizens.

Trump encouraged all illegal immigrants to self-deport themselves back to their home countries and said that the United States would consider denaturalizing migrants who are not a “net asset” to the United States. Since he must act within constitutional law, Trump may not be able to accomplish all that he desires, but just stopping the influx of migrants into the United States should be helpful. 

  

Who Is Steve Lipscomb?

My VIP for this week is Steve Lipscomb – son, father, husband, Marine, man of faith, coal miner, and hero. Early in November, disaster struck when “Lipscomb and his crew encountered an unknown pocket of water when a ‘sudden and substantial’ flood sent millions of gallons into the Rolling Thunder Mine” [Kanawha County, West Virginia]. Lipscomb became a hero when he made sure that every member of his crew evacuated safely even though rising water in the shaft made it impossible for him – the last man -- to get out. 

After five days of round-the-clock, hazardous search efforts, a two-man crew found Lipscomb’s body in the mine at 7:37 a.m. Nov. 13.

Gov. Patric Morrisey (R-W.V.) announced his death outside the Rolling Thunder Mine. “This is really a very sad day in West Virginia,” Morrisey said. Lipscomb was the fifth coal miner to die this year in West Virginia….

Lipscomb’s tragic death marked the 29^th fatality in the mining industry this year, according to Coal Zoom, a mining trade organization with the Mine Safety and Health Administration, which details mining fatalities, nearly half of which are due to equipment failures. By state, West Virginia has the most mining fatalities this year at five.

Morrisey issued all flags flown at half-staff, not just for Lipscomb but for all five of the West Virginia coal miners who lost their lives on the job in 2025: Steven Fields, Billy Stalker, Eric Bartram, Joey Mitchell and Lipscomb.

Mitchell died last week in the Mettiki Mine in Grant County, marking the second mining fatality in November….

The history of coal in West Virginia dates back to the 1800s. Government and family records indicate that settlers of what was then Virginia (West Virginia seceded during the Civil War and became its own state) resided in a region rich in abundant reserves of bituminous coal. In fact, of the state’s 55 counties, only two do not have coal seams. It wasn’t until the railroads arrived that coal, previously used only for heat and fuel, became the backbone of a booming commercial industry in the 1880s….