Rahman auliya @Rahmandzelbuzz

In 1960, newly independent African leaders had a choice: capitalism or socialism. Almost all of them picked socialism. A Ghanaian economist named George Ayittey spent forty years documenting what happened next. His findings are in print, and almost nobody outside Africa wants to hear them. 🧵

Bizarrely, socialism is still popular among young people. They should listen to those who lived it! “You don't really know you have it good until you have it bad,” says @charlesNKorea. He escaped North Korea, twice. He tells me his story and the importance of freedom:

Money printing has never created a single unit of wealth, and the persistence of poverty across the globe is the proof. Wealth is goods and services: bread on the shelf, steel in the warehouse, code that runs, machines that produce. When the Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet from $900 billion in 2008 to $8.9 trillion by 2022, it produced none of those things. It produced digits. Those digits do not feed a man in Caracas or build a factory in Lagos. They bid up the price of assets already owned by the people closest to the spigot, which is why the wealthiest decile in America saw its net worth balloon while wage earners watched rent and groceries outrun their paychecks. You must understand the mechanism. New money enters the economy at specific points: the Treasury, the primary dealers, the banks. The man who receives it first spends it at old prices. The man who receives it last, the pensioner, the wage laborer, the saver in a poor country holding a collapsing currency, spends it at new prices. This is the Cantillon effect, named for Richard Cantillon, who described it around 1730. Inflation is a transfer from the late receivers to the early receivers. It moves wealth. It does not make it. Look at the countries drowning in poverty and you will find central banks running the printing press hardest. Zimbabwe printed a 100-trillion-dollar note in 2008. Argentina has debased the peso so relentlessly that inflation crossed 200 percent in 2023, and its people store value in physical dollars stuffed into mattresses. Venezuela destroyed the bolivar so completely that vendors weighed banknotes rather than count them. Easy money did not lift these populations. It looted their savings, shortened their time horizons, and taught entire generations to consume today because tomorrow's currency buys nothing. Hard money does the opposite. When the unit of account holds its value, a man can save, defer consumption, and fund the capital accumulation that actually raises living standards. Debasement punishes the saver and rewards the debtor and the speculator. A society that cannot save cannot build. If printing money created wealth, Zimbabwe would be the richest nation on earth.

Ludwig von Mises, Hayek’s early mentor, wrote one of the most brutal takedowns of socialism ever: “The champions of socialism ... call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau.”

"Marx is one of the greatest thinkers to ever live." Hmmm...wrong. The most poisonous thinker to ever live. Rulers using his thoughts to rule killed tens of millions of people and condemned billions to lesser lives of ruinous poverty. When communism spread across Russia in 1917, Russia had a population and economy comparable to that of the US. Today, their population is less than half ours, their economy is 1/10 our economy and their stock market is 1/140th of ours. For 65 years, Democrats waxed poetic about the superiority of the Russian economy; now they can't run away fast enough.

Jackson Hinkle 🇺🇸 @jacksonhinkle

2 weeks ago

Marx is easily one of the greatest thinkers to ever live.

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Magical thinking. If you forced Elon Musk to sell a bunch of stock, the price would tumble & his companies—which employ many people—would suffer. Multiple European countries LOST revenue as a result of wealth taxes (and scrapped them as a result). Please join us in reality.

Elizabeth Warren @SenWarren

2 weeks ago

If Elon Musk paid my ultra-millionaire wealth tax, we could pay for child care for all three and four year olds in America.

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Thomas Sowell NAILS IT. “ Much of the appeal of socialism comes from the fact that it allows people to feel morally superior without having to bear the costs of their policies. It’s easy to advocate ‘sharing’ when someone else pays the price.” Pure truth. Socialism is a scam for virtue signalers who never foot the bill.

Western academia is a giant, supra-national safe space for Leftist ideologues. Within its hallowed halls, Leftists can spend their lives in a kind of fantastic alternate reality, confident that no one around them will be so gauche as to confront them with facts. For this reason, academia doesn’t just attract Leftists, it attracts the most neurotic, emotionally fragile, and intellectually conforming Leftists. This is the reason why Leftist academics react with such outrage and horror when they find that somehow, in spite of all their precautions, a conservative has slipped into their midst and is asking questions. It is not just their ideology that is threatened, it is their tenuous grip on sanity.

The older I get, the less interested I am in political promises and the more interested I am in political results. History is the ultimate fact-checker. Follow for more historical analysis and discussion. 🇺🇸📚

When Bernie Sanders says he is a socialist, this is what he means: "This is the man who, in 1985, praised the Sandinistas and once said breadlines were a good thing. His exact reasoning: in poor countries the rich get the food and the poor starve, so breadlines mean rationing is at least spreading the misery around. Read that again. He looked at people queuing for hours to receive a government allotment of bread and saw fairness, not failure."

Handre @Handre

2 weeks ago

Bernie Sanders honeymooned in the Soviet Union in 1988. Yaroslavl, to be exact, a year before the Berlin Wall fell and the whole rotten edifice collapsed under the weight of its own central planning. This is the man who, in 1985, praised the Sandinistas and once said breadlines

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Rothbard showed in “America’s Great Depression” that FDR did not end the Great Depression. He prolonged it. Hoover started the interventionist experiment by propping up wages and prices. FDR expanded it with industrial cartels, paying farmers to destroy crops while people went hungry, union favoritism that raised labor costs, and tax hikes that doubled as a share of the economy. Unemployment never fell below 14 percent during the 1930s. The median annual rate from 1934 to 1940 was 17.2 percent. Of the ten years with unemployment over 10 percent, eight occurred under FDR. New Deal wage policies alone added roughly eight percentage points to unemployment by 1940. Net private investment turned negative for the decade. Markets could not adjust or liquidate bad investments. The result was a lost decade until war mobilization. Second worst president after Woodrow Wilson.

Connor Boyack 📚 @cboyack

3 weeks ago

Schools typically teach that the New Deal saved America. They don't teach that it extended the Great Depression by several years and that even FDR's own Treasury Secretary admitted it had failed. (The omission is not accidental…)

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"Studied history" doesn't explain why professors are all left-wing. Langbert's survey of 5,000+ professors found Communications and Anthropology at 100% registered Democrat.... literally ZERO conservative faculty. - Religion 98.6% - English 98% - Sociology 97.8% Even Engineering, the most "balanced" field, was 61.5%. History teachers aren't left-wing, the entire academic apparatus is. BUT THIS ISN'T BECAUSE THEY'RE SMARTER. It's because they are more ruthless. Marcuse's "repressive tolerance" was put into full force in the mid to late 20th century. Leftists believed themselves to have moral license to treat right-wing thought itself as harm rather than disagreement. This led to a hostile environment against anyone Conservative. Then factor in administration and affirmative action policies that favour left-wing leaning groups (blacks, women, gays, etc etc). This created two-way pressure: push out conservative faculty and students, while simultaneously stacking the deck of newcomers with leftists. Andrew Lobaczewski called this "negative selection." Opposing viewpoints don't get hired, given tenure, and self-select out. Moderates leave. Then all that's left is... the left. History doesn't teach you to be left-wing. Rather, the institutions were captured at the administrative level, restructured who gets through the gate, and now launder a monoculture with heavy ideological biases as "the expert consensus."

Victor Davis Hanson: California's Doom Loop California is losing between 300,000 and 500,000 middle-class taxpayers every year while government spending and dependency continue to grow. Victor Davis Hanson explains why taxpayers are leaving and says the state has entered what he calls a "doom loop." Full episode: youtu.be/dFVOZqLQDqY @VDHanson

Communism does not kick down the door wearing a Soviet uniform. It knocks politely and says, “Hi, I’m democratic socialism, and I’m here to make life affordable.” Now look at the trend. Mamdani in NYC. Katie Wilson in Seattle. And L.A. may be next with Nithya Raman trying to take the city even further left. Then come the rent freezes, price controls, wage mandates, wealth taxes, government-run markets, and endless promises that the same people who broke the city can centrally plan it back to health. It is always sold as compassion. But it runs on coercion. People need incentive. Builders need reward. Risk-takers need upside. Workers need a path upward. Society flourishes when people are free to create, own, compete, fail, and succeed. Communism is an evil lie because it pretends human nature can be repealed by committee. Resist it while it still smiles.

Why did the French and American revolutions, inspired by similar ideals, end up having such different outcomes? In The Constitution of Liberty, Friedrich Hayek, contrasts two competing traditions of liberalism: the Anglo-American tradition of evolved liberty and the French tradition of rationalist constructivism. He argues that while the US placed constitutional limits on state power, the French revolutionaries, influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, argued that sovereignty resided solely in the people. To them, liberty meant participating in democracy, and no limits should be set on what government could be asked to do. Indeed, any institutional constraint could be viewed as treason. The revolutionaries therefore drafted a positive constitution, empowering the state to enact the “will of the people.” By contrast, the American Founding Fathers saw democracy primarily as a means to the peaceful transition of power. The preservation of liberty depended not on the changing will of the majority, but on a so-called negative constitutional order that limited what any majority could ask the government to do. Hayek argues that the strongest justification for freedom is acknowledging the fundamental limitations of individual human knowledge. If human reason was supreme, government could indeed design society in accordance with the will of the people. But because individual human knowledge is incomplete, society must rely on a spontaneous order of individuals acting on their unique, localized knowledge, protected from arbitrary changes to the rules of the game by a constitution. While Hayek expressed deep admiration for the spirit of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights, he was critical of the subsequent watering down of the principles through the addition and interpretation of clauses such as the Commerce and Welfare Clauses. A constitution, he argued, should be strictly negative, meant only to shackle the state and protect individual spheres of freedom.

Modern economics built elaborate mathematical models of how markets work. Israel Kirzner spent six decades pointing out the same problem with every one of them: the agent that actually makes markets work does not appear in any of them. 🧵

Zero-sum economics is a fallacy. Someone else’s success doesn’t take away from your success. It actually makes you more likely to succeed yourself.

🚨 WOW! JD Vance says it PERFECTLY VANCE: "I was a critic of Trump in 2015 and 2016. Now I'm the VP of the US in the Trump admin." JOY BEHAR: "Yeah, what happened?" VANCE: "Well, Joy, a little HUMILITY. When you make predictions and those predictions turn out to be false, you got to ask yourself, well, what made me wrong about that? What did I not understand or not appreciate?" "For example, I said that Donald Trump's economic policies would not lead to wage growth. They did in the first term. That was actually a major, major thing!" 🔥 "I said that we couldn't bring back any of those factory jobs because I kind of had given into this idea that those jobs were disappearing, but actually Donald Trump, you saw a manufacturing boom during that administration!" "So there's a certain point where you say, you know, I made predictions about this. I ended up being wrong. And in politics and anything, I think it's important to just say, you know what, I got some things wrong and I was wrong about him." Boom!

"Here is the theory: 'It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole ... that above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual . . . By this we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men.' These statements were made in our century by the leader of a major Western nation. His countrymen regarded his viewpoint as uncontroversial. His political program implemented it faithfully. The statements were made by Adolf Hitler. He was explaining the moral philosophy of Nazism." Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), 14.

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"The left won, and they don't even appreciate it. The world's first trillionaire has done more to solve environmental problems than everyone else on Earth combined." @gavinsbaker: "This is a 'Bond villain' who's decarbonizing the world (last time I checked, people on the left like the environment), connecting people, schools, and hospitals in low-income countries to the internet at very low cost, and helping blind people see and interact with the world today. That's a villain?" "And there are so many parts to the $SPCX story. All of the blue-collar workers who've gotten super wealthy. If you're opposed to data centers on Earth, because of the environment? Well, SpaceX is your solution."