Yes, You Entitled Brats, You May Have to Move to Succeed

Ben Shapiro always has a lot of people gunning for him, even outside of the Left. The anti-Semitic fringe nuts despise him because he’s arguably the most influential Jewish political commentator in America, but even if he weren’t Jewish, he’s still one of the most prominent people on the Right. When you’re on top, there are always a lot of people who want to pull you down because of envy or because they somehow think it gets them one step closer to your slot.

Because of all of this, things Shapiro has said in the past get semi-regularly brought up in coordinated campaigns against him. In and of itself, this isn’t all that exceptional. When Rush Limbaugh was more of a shock jock in the seventies, he once told a black guy to “take that bone out of your nose and call me back.” That was still getting brought up THREE DECADES LATER.

However, one of these clips people are claiming to be outraged by is surprising because it’s such obvious, common sense, it’s hard to understand why anyone would disagree with it, yet it’s spawning waves of dumb outrage. Let’s go to the clip:

8 million plus views on that? Usually, it’s the Left that gets infuriated when people say something this obvious, but some of these people are on the Right and fringe Right. Let’s give a sample of the sort of loopy responses this has generated:

First of all, as a starting point, it’s worth noting that my father traveled all over the country in his job, one of my brothers lived all over America (and in Japan) because he was a career Air Force guy, and I personally moved from Charlotte, NC, to Alexandria, VA, because it had a much better job market. Along similar lines. After doing some research, I found that Ben Shapiro has done the same thing. He took the Daily Wire from LA to Florida because it made more sense for them to be in the Sunshine State.

It would be nice to say that we’re exceptional people because we were willing to do this, but the truth is, it’s just part of the basics you need to be willing to do to succeed in life. If you want to go as far as you can in tech, you’re probably going to want to move to San Francisco or Austin. If you want to get a job in Hollywood, you’re probably going to need to go to LA. Seattle strikes me as one of the worst cities in America, but Microsoft, Boeing, and Starbucks have lots of high-paying jobs there. On the other hand, Detroit’s population has dropped 60% since the 1950s, small towns that have been slowly dying since a factory left are common, and Rhyolite, Nevada, used to have 5,000 residents, and now it has none. Nothing stays mired in time. Everything changes.

It’s also worth noting that Ben Shapiro is specifically talking about New York. Well, I am one of the rare conservatives who actually LIKES MANHATTAN. I have SERIOUSLY CONSIDERED moving there. Am I going to do it? No. Why not? Well, aside from the fact that the city is ultra-liberal and they just elected a Ugandan Karl Marx as mayor, the cost-of-living Democrats have engineered in that city is way too high. As an example, I asked ChatGPT to compare making 100k in NYC vs. making 100k in Myrtle Beach, SC (which is where I currently live).

You tell me where you’d rather spend your money:

It’s hard to even know what the sane, logical response is to these complaints about what Shapiro said because there just aren’t any. It’s all toddlers screaming, “The world isn’t fair!”

That’s right, it’s not.

We live in a world of scarcity, and as Thomas Sowell noted:

As we just saw in the NYC mayor’s race, it’s very easy to say, “Everything should be cheaper! Everything should be more affordable!” The problem is that the sort of people who make those promises tend to be on the Left, and the only effective way to do those things is to move toward a free market approach.

For example, want to make rent cheaper in NYC? Get rid of rent control, slash housing regulations, put protections in place for landlords, and give tax breaks to people building new homes. It will take a little while, but guess what? Housing costs will come down significantly. That still doesn’t mean housing will be “cheap,” because a lot of people want to live in NYC. The more people who are willing to bid up the price of something, the more likely it is to be sold at a premium.

Still, let’s not get away from the original question. Why can’t you live in any city or state in America you want to live in?

Of course, you can. The thing is, if you want to work in a factory town after the factory shuts down or at Burger King in Manhattan, you’re going to have a tough time economically and would do better somewhere else.

If there has been any economic opportunity at all, it has always been like this. Yes, serfs doing subsistence agriculture might work the same plot of land for generations, but the California gold rush and the Oregon trail happened because people wanted better lives for their families and were willing to move to pursue economic opportunity.

You don’t want to do that? Cool, because you don’t have to do it. The only two things you have to do are die and pay taxes. But, NYC just isn’t as affordable as rural Oklahoma or Alabama and it probably never will be. If you want to whine that it’s not fair and you shouldn’t have to choose between maximizing your economic success and always living exactly where you want to live, too bad. That’s how it is, and nobody can change it, no matter what they promise you.

Maybe you prefer one area but could live a better lifestyle somewhere else. That doesn’t mean you’re dealing with anything the rest of humanity hasn’t struggled with since we lived in tribes and had to pursue herds of animals from one place to another. Stop complaining and start making choices about what you value most and then live with your choices.

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