Links - 15th November 2026 (University Majors)

Why Are Recent College Graduates Underemployed? - "• About 48 percent of employed U.S. college graduates are in jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) suggests requires less than a four-year college education. Eleven percent of employed college graduates are in occupations requiring more than a high-school diploma but less than a bachelor’s, and 37 percent are in occupations requiring no more than a high-school diploma;
• The proportion of overeducated workers in occupations appears to have grown substantially; in 1970, fewer than one percent of taxi drivers and two percent of firefighters had college degrees, while now more than 15 percent do in both jobs
• About five million college graduates are in jobs the BLS says require less than a high-school education;
• Comparing average college and high-school earnings is highly misleading as a guide for vocational success, given high college-dropout rates and the fact that overproduction of college graduates lowers recent graduate earnings relative to those graduating earlier...
• Not all majors are equal: Engineering and economics graduates, for example, typically earn almost double what social work and education graduates receive by mid-career...
The claim that “college is worth it” because there are high economic returns asso- ciated with possession of a college degree often ignores the role other factors play in determining employment and wages... Frederic Pryor and David Schaffer, in their book, Who’s Not Working and Why, observed that the solution to the apparent paradox of rising underemployment of college graduates coupled with an increasing educational payoff through the mid-1990s is that “economic returns to cognitive skills, independent of education, have increased... the college-related component of our human capital stock is a distinct minority of the total, and that learning by doing is particularly underrated in the contribution it makes to raising the productivity of American workers. That fact mainly explains why experienced 50-year-old workers make vastly more on average than workers half that age with precisely the same level of educational attainment... public policy actions taken in this country several decades ago severely limit the ability of employers to learn much about their potential employees. In particular, the Griggs v. Duke Power decision by the U.S. Supreme Court and subsequent related court cases or legislative action have made employers extremely cautious about using testing as a means of measuring potential competence. Bryan O’Keefe and the senior author have argued this court decision and related legislation was a factor in the rising college/high-school earnings differential after the mid-1970s... From the employer’s perspective, the best thing about relying on diplomas to help narrow the pool of job applicants is that the potential employee bears the bulk of the search-related costs—he or she pays for the college training... Proponents of “college for all” fail to mention, in general, that the signaling value of a bachelor’s degree declines as a larger proportion of the population achieves it... That plausibly explains the “arms race” with regards to college admissions... For a large portion of the college-going population, attendance is only partly motivated by human capital investment criteria, namely a desire to ultimately obtain a good job and a ticket to a relatively affluent middle class (or better) life. Those students go to college also to have fun—to meet new friends, to use top-of- the-line exercise machines to relax, to party, to get drunk, and have sex... Some of the socialization dimensions of college do have a broader “educational” purpose... From a public policy perspective, however, the socialization dimension of college raises questions: Why should taxpayers in general, many of whom are relatively poor, subsidize the partying and “fun” of kids from mostly moderately affluent families?... While people will become increasingly aware that a bachelor’s degree is no longer a very assured ticket to success, more and more people will try to get a competitive edge in the labor market by obtain- ing master’s or even doctoral degrees to demonstrate competence. We jokingly predict that colleges will offer a master’s degree in Janitorial Studies within a decade or two and anyone seeking employment as a janitor will discover no one will hire unless proof of possession of such a degree is presented... Credential inflation is pervasive. And, as Hernstein and Murray noted nearly two decades ago, one by-product of this phenomenon is a dumbing down of the college curriculum; as they put it “credentialism… is part of the problem, not the solution.”... Can we afford to expend $100,000 or more in resources giving kids a college degree, only to see them take taxi driver jobs for which the college education added hardly a scintilla of employment skill? Can we afford to lose the labor services of 18-to-22 year olds going to college for little employment advantages, persons who could start driving a taxi or working as a bank teller at 18 instead of 22? In an era where the worker-to-dependent ratio is rapidly falling, the underemployed college graduate is an expensive luxury we can ill afford as a nation... as Paul Barton observes, despite the handwringing in the past about an emerging shortage of highly educated workers in the U.S., “since 1995, productivity has accelerated, with no demonstrable improvement in workforce skills or acceleration in job requirements during the period.”... All of this calls into question the wisdom of the “college for all” movement... As the number of years of education of work- ers rises in virtually all non-professional and technical jobs, is the reason ultimately that really it takes, say, 14 or 15 years of schooling to offer the same learning that previously was accomplished in 12 years? Is the deterioration in the quality of our primary and secondary education a contributing factor in the credential inflation obvious at the postsecondary level? That suggests there may be two major economic issues facing higher education. First, it is too costly, too inefficient, too shielded from the useful market forces of “creative destruction.” Second, because of massive overinvestment reflecting indifference to labor-market realities, we are vastly wasting scarce resources, both public and private... public policies such as massive federal loan subsidies often distort outcomes and prevent a stable and econom- ically effective equilibrium position from being reached. As someone once joked, “when we see light at the end of the tunnel, the government adds more tunnel.”... Economists for generations have long accepted the law of diminishing returns—when one adds more and more resources, at some point the marginal contribution to output falls. The law applies to education as to almost everything in life"
Clearly, education makes society better so the government needs to push everyone to go to college and pay for it, and the resentment of college graduates in jobs which don't need degrees is good, because they will push the left wing agenda

Stop Pushing College for All - "Support for socialism and for figures like Mamdani primarily comes from young people who feel priced out of the American dream—owning a home, securing a stable job, and starting a family. Many first confront the gap between expectation and reality when they enter college and take on substantial debt, a stark contrast with the youthful freedom that older Americans often associate with their own college years... Many flawed policy ideas gain traction because of misconceptions about both college prices and student debt. In recent years, the net cost of college has fallen modestly but remains far too high, compared with previous decades. The average cost of an undergraduate education has more than doubled since 1985—and yes, those numbers are inflation-adjusted.  Explanations abound. Higher-education leaders often cite state disinvestment, but they overstate how much lost state funding can account for higher prices. My analysis of 26 public universities between 1980 and 2018, for example, found that tuition revenue growth was three times the reduction in state funding—meaning that the loss of state support is insufficient to explain the surge in tuition. Another popular explanation is administrative bloat...  if anything, administrative spending is more likely a consequence of higher tuition than a cause of it. Colleges hire more administrators because increased tuition revenue gives them the means to do so. And even if they trimmed unnecessary administrative roles, most institutions would have little incentive to lower tuition now that they know the market will bear current prices.   That brings us to the Bennett Hypothesis, named after Ronald Reagan’s second education secretary, William Bennett, who argued that federal subsidies incentivize colleges to raise prices. Early research in the 1990s and 2000s showed mixed results, but later work has found stronger evidence for the theory. A 2017 New York Federal Reserve study suggested that for every dollar a college received in student loans and Pell grants, it increased tuition by 58 cents and 38 cents, respectively.  Identifying the causes of tuition growth matters because it shapes the policy response. If a major factor is federal subsidies, then reforming them should be a priority. Understanding what drives up costs can help explain why student debt has swelled and how it affects some borrowers more than others.   Today, student debt has hit $1.65 trillion, held by 43 million borrowers. The median borrower owes $20,000–$25,000. The median debt is lower than the average debt because 8.4 percent of borrowers who attend graduate school owe more than $100,000. It takes borrowers 20 years, on average, to repay their debts.  A common misconception is that borrowers with six-figure debts struggle the most. The data suggest the opposite. Those with the highest balances often attend medical school, law school, or other professional programs, and they have the lowest default risk. By contrast, borrowers with smaller debt are likelier to struggle with repayments. They often attend for-profit or open-access public colleges and drop out, failing to reap the vocational benefits that a college degree can provide.   This distinction—who struggles and why—is crucial. The case for debt forgiveness rests on the claim that it would help many struggling young people, and it has been a staple of the Democratic platform for years. But broad-based debt forgiveness is regressive, benefiting the relatively well-off far more than those truly in need.  Loan forgiveness lost momentum after the Supreme Court blocked the Biden administration’s mass cancellation plan in 2023. Supporters have since shifted to reducing and eliminating interest rates on federal loans, which even some Republicans have entertained. But slashing interest rates is simply another form of debt forgiveness. Lending is costly for any institution, including the government, so lowering rates means that Washington can’t recoup its full lending costs in real terms, even when students pay back the full loan amount. And the same regressivity problem applies: borrowers with the largest loan balances benefit the most from interest-rate reductions, and they’re also the borrowers most likely to have high incomes.   It also matters that the borrowers most prone to struggle don’t attend the elite institutions. Elite universities have plenty of problems, but the economic benefits they offer their working- and middle-class students are not among them. Attacking elite endowments doesn’t address affordability at the broader set of universities where most students enroll, and it doesn’t help the schools whose students struggle most with repayment.  Most young voters are not drowning in unmanageable six-figure debt, despite the impression sometimes created by media and activist groups. Their concern—well-founded—is that college has become an increasingly expensive pathway to success... The deeper problem in higher education, often overlooked, is that too many people who aren’t ready for college attend anyway. Universities are admitting students who struggle with middle-school math. The dropout data underscore this point: students often describe leaving school in financial terms because that is the pressure they feel most immediately, but the strongest predictors of dropping out are inadequate academic preparation and poor early college performance. If the system draws unprepared students into expensive programs that they are unlikely to complete, then policies focused solely on easing repayment or subsidizing access will not address the root problem...   Democrats and Republicans tend to make the same strategic error: they focus on reducing student debt rather than the price of college...   It’s worth remembering that many college degrees provide positive returns on investment. Students run into trouble when they enroll in schools or programs that don’t. That’s why federal funds should be disbursed more strategically. Banks don’t lend to people they doubt can repay a loan; similarly, federal student loans should take into account whether a student is likely to succeed in college-level work, using indicators such as academic records, standardized test scores, and the program a student intends to pursue. Students should be encouraged to enter in-demand fields, but academic readiness matters, too... Tightening loan eligibility at the margins would likely reduce the college-going population, easing demand and putting downward pressure on prices. Paired with stronger workforce-training and credential programs, such a system could help steer students into the pathways best suited to their abilities and goals.  Messaging matters, too. Young voters should hear a clear distinction: price is a public-policy responsibility, but debt is your responsibility... Families should look first at colleges that meet 100 percent of demonstrated financial need. In-state public universities are usually far cheaper than out-of-state alternatives. And many students can begin at community colleges, which often provide more individualized academic support than four-year schools. These are only a few examples, but the broader point stands: students have more practical, affordable pathways than they sometimes realize."
So much for left wingers blaming the loss of state subsidies for high college tuition

‘Financially Hobbled for Life’: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off - WSJ - "Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000. Yet two years after earning their master’s degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year. The Columbia program offers the most extreme example of how elite universities in recent years have awarded thousands of master’s degrees that don’t provide graduates enough early career earnings to begin paying down their federal student loans, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Education Department data... Taxpayers will be on the hook for whatever is left unpaid. Lured by the aura of degrees from top-flight institutions, many master’s students at universities across the U.S. took on debt beyond what their pay would support, the Journal analysis of federal data on borrowers found. At Columbia, such students graduated from programs including history, social work and architecture... Undergraduate students for years have faced ballooning loan balances. But now it is graduate students who are accruing the most onerous debt loads. Unlike undergraduate loans, the federal Grad Plus loan program has no fixed limit on how much grad students can borrow—money that can be used for tuition, fees and living expenses... Highly selective universities have benefited from free-flowing federal loan money, and with demand for spots far exceeding supply, the schools have been able to raise tuition largely unchecked. The power of legacy branding lets prestigious universities say, in effect, that their degrees are worth whatever they charge... Columbia grad students who borrowed money typically held loans that exceeded annual earnings two years after graduation in 14 of the school’s 32 master’s degree programs tracked by the Education Department, the Journal found. In about a dozen Columbia master’s programs, the majority of recent graduates weren’t repaying the principal on their loans or took forbearance, according to data released for the first time this year... Debt counselors recommend students not borrow more than they will earn right out of school. Yet about 38% of master’s programs at top-tier private universities in the U.S. failed that test, according to the Journal’s analysis of salary data for graduates from the 2015 and 2016 classes, the latest available. At for-profit schools, a common target of regulators for high student debt and poor job prospects, 30% failed to meet the debt counselors’ advice... At least 43% of the people who recently took out loans for master’s degrees at elite private universities hadn’t paid down any of their original debt or were behind on payments roughly two years after graduation, the available data show. Universities, which receive their tuition up front, have an economic incentive to expand graduate degree programs and face no consequences if students can’t afford to pay the federal loans after they leave. “They’re not really held accountable for the myth they’re selling to students,” said Ozan Jaquette, an associate professor of higher education at the University of California, Los Angeles’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. His doctoral dissertation was on the growth of master’s programs. “We should not be giving federal-aid dollars to these programs that systematically saddle students with high debt,” he said... “We were told by the establishment our whole lives this was the way to jump social classes,” he said of an Ivy League education. Instead, he said he feels such goals as marriage, children and owning a home are out of reach. During a car ride last year with three friends from the film program, Mr. Black said, they calculated they collectively owed $1.5 million in loans to the federal government. “Financially hobbled for life,” he said. “That’s the joke.”... Although the school created an emergency fund for international students, Americans “were just told to go and take more loans,” said Paul Carpenter, a 2018 film MFA graduate who joined the petition. Columbia said it also offset some student fees... “There’s a virtual army of young people, most of whom may be naive about the financial obligations they’re undertaking,” said James Bundy, dean at Yale University’s drama school, which in June announced it would eliminate tuition. “I think there are some schools with debt loads that are indefensible.”... The university said recent increases in grad-student aid weren’t reflected in the federal data the Journal analyzed. For example, the School of Social Work increased the number of full-tuition awards for new master’s students to 12 from two a few years ago. The fall 2020 entering class had around 560 students."
Clearly the solution is for the taxpayer to pay for everything including a stipend because education always benefits society and only philistines who hate education would disagree, and ban for-profit schools, because profit is evil

Nearly 2 in 5 of American college graduates regret their majors - The Washington Post - "The regretters include a healthy population of liberal arts majors... nearly half of humanities and arts majors have studier’s remorse as of 2021. Engineering majors have the fewest regrets: Just 24 percent wish they’d chosen something different... As a rule, those who studied STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — are much more likely to believe they made the right choice, while those in social sciences or vocational courses second-guess themselves. There doesn’t seem to be much relationship between loans, gender, race or school selectivity and your regrets. Though, as you may have guessed, our analysis of Fed data shows that the higher your income is today, the less you regret the major you chose back in college. Regrets have remained relatively steady since 2016, the earliest year for which we have consistent data. The most notable exception, education, went from below-average regrets before the pandemic to above-average regrets in 2021. Life sciences, on the other hand, have seen a steady and substantial decline in regret... Regardless of major, half of those who went to private, for-profit schools regret their decision, perhaps because students at for-profit schools are much more likely to struggle to repay their student debt. Similar regrets plague only 21 percent of those who went to public colleges and universities and 30 percent of those who attended private nonprofits. A substantial majority of vocational and technical students (60 percent) wish they’d gone for more schooling, while less than 40 percent of law, life science and engineering students believe the same. The burgeoning regret among humanities and arts majors may help explain why humanities graduates are a dying breed.  “There’s a pretty significant change underway,” historian and digital humanist Ben Schmidt said. “The numbers have dropped by 50 percent, and there’s no sign that they’re going to rebound.”  By 2021, disciplines such as history, English and religion graduated less than half as many students as they did in their early 2000s heyday, relative to the overall size of the graduating student body... the Great Recession sparked the beginning of a downward spiral in humanities such as history, art, philosophy, English and foreign languages... In the decade since our national pivot to STEM, the number of people graduating with computer science degrees has doubled. Every STEM field notched significant gains. Nursing, exercise science, medicine, environment, engineering, and math and statistics are all up by at least 50 percent. Among the humanities, only two increased: cultural, ethnic and gender studies, and linguistics... Over their lifetime, a typical history or journalism major can expect to earn about $3.4 million, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data from 2014 to 2018 by economist Douglas Webber, who is now with the Federal Reserve. A typical economics, biological sciences or chemistry major can expect to make $4.6 million over that same time, adjusted for inflation.  But those typical earnings hide that who you are matters just as much as what you study. Many of the highest-earning humanities majors earn more than the lowest-earning STEM majors, Webber’s research shows. For example, the top quarter of history majors earn $4.2 million over their career. That puts them above the bottom quarter of earners from even the highest-paying majors, such chemical and aerospace engineering. Humanities specialists argue that these majors open up higher-earning opportunities later in life because they don’t lock students into a narrow programming language, certification or career path. The critical thinking taught in humanities courses allows students to adapt to jobs that may not have existed when they enrolled in college.  “Having training to ask hard questions is pretty significant, and that applies across all kinds of different career situations,” said Quinn Dombrowski, an academic technology specialist at Stanford University... “When we work with undergraduates on digital humanities projects,” Dombrowski said, “it’s often easier to take a humanities undergrad and teach them just enough coding to do what they need to do rather than taking some of the CS majors who can do the coding in their sleep but don’t really think about the questions in the nuanced ways that we need them to.”... But Dombrowski said she understands undergraduates’ desire to walk into a highly paid tech career immediately out of college rather than roll the dice on a humanities degree and trust that opportunities will arise.  “It’s fine to tell people that this sets them up for brighter prospects in the longer term for their career,” Dombrowski said. “But students — especially [those] who’ve taken on substantial student debt — have immediate needs for paying rent and then paying those loans back.”"

German Authorities' Impotence in the Face of Migrant Violence

Time for more mass migration to overwhelm European states even more

The German state fails to protect its citizens

"Every terrorist attack and every victim is tragic. In Germany especially, attacks seem time and again to be the result of a chain of unfortunate “circumstances.” If authority X had acted sooner and listened more carefully to official Y, and if judge Q had made a better decision, this tragedy could have been prevented. But these are far from unfortunate incidents.

Does the following sound familiar? The suspect was known to the authorities, moved in Islamist circles, and had been in juvenile detention or under the care of support services until just a few weeks earlier. Places such as Aschaffenburg, Solingen, Mannheim and Magdeburg, which otherwise few Europeans would ever have heard of, are now etched into our collective memory as targets of Islamist terrorism.

These are not unfortunate incidents, but the direct consequences of an overwhelmed system. Far more tragic than the life Abdul Ballout took a week ago, is the fact that German authorities once again failed in numerous ways, yet the failing system remains in place. The impotence of the German state to protect its citizens is the true scandal...

With every new case of “known to the police,” European states lose more of their authority. On top of that, after the attack, German police were not allowed to share images of the terrorist on social media because of data protection rules. Once again, the rights of terrorists and murderers are protected at the expense of the safety of the overwhelming majority of citizens. The very idea that a Muslim whose family members are involved with ISIS can be brought back on the ‘right path’ through a deradicalisation programme, reflects a naive belief in the idea of a manageable society that can only be found in Western Europe. 

When will Western European authorities abandon the illusion that they can make people who hate our societies and everything we stand for love us? Our endless desire for “connection” with those who do not want to be connected to us is fatal. The man tasked with Ballout’s deradicalisation is also the chairman of an NGO that spread Islamic propaganda and made young girls pose wearing headscarves. His Violence Prevention Network received €70 million in subsidies between 2014 and 2024. 

More important than the institutional failure in this particular case is the fact that German authorities have been overwhelmed for years. According to Berlin’s ‘intelligence service’ (Verfassungsschutz), around 900 “violent Islamist extremists” currently live in Berlin, and that number is rising. The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) knows of 28,600 people considered “potentially Islamist.” Police consider around 420 of them to be dangerous. Many are still walking free. But thankfully, the Brandenburg Gate was lit up on Sunday with the words Berlin, City of Freedom, the day after someone’s freedom and right to life had been taken away. Against the backdrop of these bleak facts and statistics, such hollow symbolism increasingly looks like a sign of weakness.

Foreign nationals who should have left Germany years ago are often involved in such attacks. But here too, the state is overwhelmed. At the end of 2024, more than 220.000 people who had been ordered to leave Germany were still living there illegally. And that is only a small part of the total number of illegal migrants. In 2025, Germany deported just 23.000 of them. Nearly 180.000 were given a ‘toleration permit’. At the end of 2024, there were even 72.500 people in Germany who should have left at least six years (!) earlier. And in October 2025, according to BILD, there were 934.553 foreigners in Germany whose asylum applications had been rejected. 

Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s promised Rückführungsoffensive to increase deportations remained just a promise. In the first half of this year, Germany deported only 9663 people, fewer than during the same period a year earlier. Who enters Germany, who remains in Germany, and who should have left long ago: the German state often doesn’t even know. A state that knows that tens of thousands of people are living within its borders, including thousands who pose a security risk, yet cannot monitor or deport them, is itself part of the problem. The fact that the German state has been unable for years to perform one of its most basic functions - deciding who lives within its territory - partly explains why the AfD is polling as the largest party at 28%. 

The weakness of the German state was symbolised further by the endless, meaningless statements from politicians such as ‘there is no place for this in our societies’. Starting with Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner (CDU), who tweeted: “It is an attack on our free and open society (...) Berlin is the city of freedom and today our freedom has been attacked in the most horrific way. My thoughts are with the victims, their families and friends.” 

I cannot stand this hollow rhetoric anymore. The problem is that there clearly ís place in our societies for people who want to destroy them, while our societies are becoming less open and less free as a result of policies pursued for years by parties such as the CDU. So stop sending tweets and clean up the mess you created. No one gives a damn who your thoughts are with. Especially because the biggest attack on Germany’s free and open society came from Angela Merkel’s (CDU) Wir schaffen das policy. As a result, tens of thousands of people now live in Germany who hate Germany.

The same CDU tweeted that it would “defend the freedom of our society.” Those words have lost all meaning log ago. The current CDU Chancellor, and Europe’s biggest political idiot, Friedrich Merz, went so far in his speech the day after the attack as to describe intolerance, exclusion, discrimination, offensive language and “stupid jokes” as “part of the violence experienced by the queer community.” Islam and migration were not mentioned once. Merz’s remarks might almost be funny if the situation were not so tragic and people were not dying because of political and state incompetence.

On the left side of parliament, things are even sadder. Green Party MP Katrin Göring-Eckardt tweeted “You will not get our hate.” Das stimmt! Instead, people who hate our European societies receive billions of euros in welfare, citizenship, suspended and juvenile sentences, and lenient judges. Why should terrorists who hate us, our societies and everything we stand for not deserve our hatred? Towards them, hatred is the only logical and healthy response for a liberal democracy that wants to defend its values.

The far-left Die Linke went even further: “We must not look away and we must not generalise. We must name hatred without suspecting entire communities.” That means: we generalise and suspect people when it suits us, but deny reality when it does not, because upholding our worldview matters more than the security of our citizens.

I do not generalise, meaning by drawing conclusions from one or a few cases. But anyone who refuses to draw conclusions from statistics about nationalities, population groups and thousands of cases is not merely blind, they simply do not want to see. For the willingly blind: Germany and Western Europe have a problem with migrant violence, especially from Islamic countries. In Germany, Syrians are overrepresented in violent crime by 800% compared with the average German. Afghans are overrepresented by almost 900%. According to an analysis by the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, foreign nationals make up almost 45% of the total prison population in Germany...

Germany deported Afghans without a criminal record for the first time. There was exactly one. The other thirty had in fact been convicted...

The deportation of this scum seemed to left-wing protesters like the perfect opportunity to protest against deportations, under the slogans “refugees welcome” and “protect people, not borders.” What the fuck is there to protest? I would rather not share my continent with Afghan rapists, murderers and child abusers, nor with the naïve people who undermine the security of the state and its people by protesting against their deportation. Speaking of “protect people,” what do they think borders are for? And what do they think deporting criminals is meant to achieve?

Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt was forced to defend his “U-turn” - the decision to also deport Afghans without criminal records - to media outlets such as Die Zeit: weren’t only criminals supposed to be sent back??? The fact that this is even a debate shows how deep the rot is. People who have been ordered to leave must leave. It does not get more ‘rule of law’ than that.

Between 2015 and 2026, the number of Afghans in Germany increased by 244%, from 131.454 to 451.644. At least 15.343 of them are required to leave the country. According to BILD, as of October there were as many as 153.550 Afghans who had to leave Germany because their asylum applications had been rejected. They join more than 1.3 million people of Syrian background living in Germany, of whom at least 11.000 have been ordered to leave the country. In the first quarter of 2026, Germany deported exactly three of them.

When will Western European states finally carry out their most basic sovereign duty? When will Western Europe choose the security and rights of our own citizens over the alleged rights of those who hate us and our societies? When will Western European countries finally turn away from people who have turned their backs on our societies?

The authority of the state is based on the social contract between the government and its citizens, an implicit agreement. Citizens accept the power of the government because it protects them, among other things. When more and more citizens increasingly feel that the state fails to provide them with security, this not only undermines that contract, but also the authority of the state. That a state like Germany continues down this deadly path and undermines itself, thát is what truly poses a danger to the state."

 

  

Links - 14th November 2026 (2 - Left Wing Economics [including France])

Simon Betschinger on X (Translated) - "France spends 57% of its economic output through the state, while Switzerland spends only 32%. Despite this, Swiss households have a purchasing-power-adjusted median income that is around 26% higher. Employment rates are higher, students perform better in PISA tests, and people are more satisfied with their lives. Particularly noteworthy: In France, only 22% of people trust their national government, while in Switzerland it is 62%. The comparison shows: A good society does not arise from the state collecting and distributing as much money as possible."

The chaos in France is a ‘warning signal’ for Australia’s public spending and rising costs - "France’s finances are buckling under its generous welfare state.  France’s high public debt, stagnant economy and universal social security benefits have created a “binary” situation, Hartigan said, where citizens’ demands for better services and cost-of-living help are clashing with the country’s increasingly dire fiscal position.  France has not balanced its budget since 1974. Meanwhile, total public debt as a share of the economy has swelled to nearly 120%, according to the International Monetary Fund. Australia’s total government debt pile looks benign in comparison at 53%. But a decade ago our debt was 40% of GDP, and a decade before that it was just under 10%.  Hartigan said France’s lacklustre economy had compounded its fiscal problems, underlining how Australia needed to work hard to boost productivity. “If you think about trajectories, they [France’s challenges] give us an idea of where we could potentially be if we continue down this path,” Hartigan said.  “It’s a warning signal.” Bob Breunig, the director of the ANU’s Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, said there was a growing gap between what voters believed the government should be able to do, and what politicians were able to deliver.  “One thing that is happening everywhere is this narrative that the government should be able to solve all your problems, and that narrative has probably been pushed further in Europe than it has here. It’s failing in both places but it’s pointier there than here,” Breunig said. The evidence of this growing demand for government intervention is that French public spending now accounts for 58% of the economy, the IMF data shows. In contrast, Australia’s total public spending is equivalent to 40% of our national output – the highest in data stretching back to 1990, outside the pandemic, and at similar levels to the United States and the United Kingdom.  “All these protesters are asking the government to help them out, but the government has maxxed out the credit card,” Breunig said, adding France’s debt was “reaching levels that are unmanageable”. “The federal government here can still borrow and has a lot of flexibility, and the French just have no money.”  President Emmanuel Macron’s decade in power has been marked with failed attempts to rein in spending.  “There’s a real sense that people don’t know what to do,” Breunig said.  The bond market reflects growing alarm with France’s fiscal trajectory.  France typically has to pay a higher interest rate on its 10-year debt than fiscally prudent Germany, and the gap between the two rates is a measure of financial markets’ confidence in France’s fiscal position.  That gap is now at its widest since the European debt crisis in 2011."
Left wingers are obsessed with "sustainability" but don't care about fiscal sustainability, because they think money is fake. The fact that they think France is a model to follow speaks to their nihilism

Henrik Dahl on X - "French-language X is awash with images like this one. People to the right of centre are making fun of the spokesperson La France Insoumise chose to appear on La Grande Confrontation.  I can see the funny side. A spokesperson for a left-wing party who, down to the smallest detail, signals “academic elite” and “inherited privilege”.  But I would actually like to take Ms Whittaker seriously. Because she represents one of Europe’s greatest political paradoxes.  The two French parties that, according to the polls, are on course to reach the decisive second round of next year’s presidential election, in May, are both running on platforms that amount to the greatest theft from the young in history.  The older generation wants a very low retirement age. It wants very generous benefits. It wants an extensive welfare state. And it does not want to pay for any of it itself. So the older generation borrows the money. The debt now stands at roughly 120 per cent of France’s GDP.  One day, that will stop working. Then the money will have to be repaid. And who will have to repay it? Ms Whittaker’s generation.  If Ms Whittaker wanted a secure and comfortable life in middle and old age, she would vote for a fiscally responsible party such as Les Républicains.  If she votes for Rassemblement National or La France Insoumise, there are many things Ms Whittaker cannot be sure of. But one thing is absolutely certain: these two parties will leave her and her generation with a gigantic bill for decades of overspending.  Who will pay France’s enormous debt? Ms Whittaker’s generation. Who will have to carry on working far longer than their grandparents did? Ms Whittaker’s generation. And who will suffer when the French welfare state becomes much smaller than it is today? That’s right: Ms Whittaker and her generation.  They are the ones who will face poorer healthcare and poorer care for the elderly. Because the leaders of the party she supports have economic plans that extend no further than their own generation.  That makes Ms Whittaker a perfect illustration of a concept developed by the great French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu: méconnaissance.  For Bourdieu, méconnaissance meant systematically misrecognising the social world and the relations of power that shape it - including one’s own position within it.  Think of the middle manager who believes he belongs to society’s elite, yet fails to see that he is treated and paid only marginally better than the workers on the shop floor. Or the impoverished farmer who imagines himself a business magnate because he employs a couple of people who are even worse off. That sort of profound misunderstanding of one’s place in society.  It is hard to imagine anyone of Ms Whittaker’s age displaying a greater degree of méconnaissance than she does. And I have not even touched on the méconnaissance of a woman who believes that still more immigration will give her a safer future."

Melissa Chen on X - "I think what's happening in the Western Europe is that fiscal discipline has gone out the window in much the same way parental discipline has (in fact, it might be related).  The fact that strikes are too often the natural response to budgetary restraint tells me that a large part of the French electorate is living in denial of the basic constraints of public finance. This is like denying the law of gravity. Markets obviously have taken notice.  It's the same when parents stop demanding discipline and enforcing boundaries - children grow to become less able to handle delayed gratification or the consequences of their choices.   Societies that lose the habit of fiscal restraint follow a similar path. Spending becomes an entitlement. Deficits are treated as temporary or someone else’s problem. The hard arithmetic of interest payments and primary balances is dismissed as austerity.   The bond market is sending signals saying "stop." What scares the market is something other than the burning cars. It is what they symbolize - that there is so little understanding of the need for fiscal consolidation.  In April, there is a presidential election. Mélenchon wants the central bank to cancel debt, and Marine Le Pen wants to lower the retirement age. The market might be starting to fear the election more than the debt itself.   In 1981, François Mitterrand promised a break with capitalism. Capital responded by breaking with France, and two years later he was forced to change course. Back then, France could devalue. Today, the country has the euro.   And be careful about counting on the European Central Bank (ECB) to come to the rescue as it did during the euro crisis. Back then, inflation was too low, and the ECB could print money without compromising its target. Today, inflation is too high.  As the sick man of Europe, France should consider the Chinese concept of chi ku (吃苦) - eating bitterness. It is the idea of willingly enduring hardship, delayed gratification, in the belief that perseverance builds strength and later reward.   China’s rapid industrialization and infrastructure build-out were not painless; they involved massive savings, hard trade-offs, and a cultural willingness to accept hardships and restraints for future gains.  Admiring Chinese growth while rejecting the discipline that made it possible is incoherent. Without a willingness to eat some bitterness on the fiscal front, French admiration for China’s results remains hollow, and the bond market will continue to impose its own, less voluntary version of discipline."

César A. Hidalgo on X - "Why are French university students lining up for lunch at 11am when the cafeteria opens at noon?  I took this picture on my way to work this morning because it is a good lesson in “shadow prices.”  In May, France extended €1 university meals to all students. Previously, those not eligible for assistance paid €3.30.  The result was not cheaper meals, but shortages.    Demand surged, and students now queue an hour or more in advance to secure their lunch. What they used to pay with money, they now pay with time.  And this is a lesson in shadow prices. It tells us that students are willing to sacrifice an additional hour to save €2.30, so they are implicitly valuing their time at €2.30 an hour or less.  That's awful. 11 am is one of the best times to study. You are alert, but not yet tired. Even if a fraction of them studied at this time, there could be more value than the one saved by the “cheaper” meal.  While the government did provide €50 million in additional funding for 2026, for a system serving more than 3 million higher-education students (about 8 cents per student per day), the problem illustrates something deeper about France.  Don't get me wrong. I love living here, and I work hard every day to contribute to this country. But too many French institutions operate as though people's time were free.  It is a system where enormous resources flow through the state, and simple transactions are replaced by forms, permissions, and waiting. People grow accustomed to this dependency, sometimes even demanding more of it.  The implicit message of the system is that your time is cheap, your initiative is unwelcome, and your ability to decide for yourself is something to be managed.  It is a sad situation because I genuinely believe France can be one of the best places in the world to live.  But people are tired. And I'm not talking about those who looted sporting goods stores and vandalized public buildings over the weekend. I'm talking about the butchers, bakers, and produce sellers I meet every week at the market. The small antique dealers who worry that a mob could destroy the little capital they have. I talked to many of them yesterday. They are scared and they know there is nothing for them to do other than hide.  A country that values its people should value their time.  Vive la France!"

Brivael Le Pogam on X - "Mélenchon a présenté le schéma qui doit sauver la France. Je l'ai regardé de près. C'est une machine à mouvement perpétuel, et l'histoire a déjà testé cette machine plusieurs fois. Je vais vous montrer comment ça finit à chaque fois.  Regardez les chiffres sur son écran. À gauche, 250 milliards de dépenses par an. À droite, 267 milliards de recettes. Autrement dit, chaque euro dépensé par l'État reviendrait tout seul, avec 7 % de bonus. Si c'était vrai, aucun pays au monde n'aurait de dette. Il suffirait de dépenser plus pour s'enrichir.  D'abord, ce qu'il oublie sur l'économie. La richesse ne naît pas de la dépense. Elle naît de la production : quelqu'un fabrique quelque chose que quelqu'un d'autre veut acheter, à un prix qui couvre ses coûts. L'argent n'est qu'un ticket qui donne droit à une part de cette production. Distribuer plus de tickets sans produire plus ne crée rien, ça fait juste monter les prix.  Son « cercle vertueux » suppose que l'argent distribué est dépensé en France, chez des entreprises françaises, qui embauchent en France. En réalité, une grosse partie part en importations : téléphones, voitures, vêtements, énergie. L'argent sort du cercle. Le déficit commercial explose, la dette aussi.  Et la France ne part pas de zéro. Dépenses publiques parmi les plus élevées du monde développé, plus de 3 300 milliards de dette, des taux d'intérêt qui coûtent déjà des dizaines de milliards par an. Ajouter 250 milliards par an, c'est demander aux marchés de prêter encore plus à un pays qui annonce qu'il ne compte pas rembourser par la croissance réelle.  On a déjà vu ce film en France. 1981 : Mitterrand lance une relance massive, nationalisations, embauches publiques, hausse des minima. Résultat : inflation à deux chiffres, trois dévaluations du franc en dix-huit mois, et en 1983 le tournant de la rigueur. Deux ans pour revenir en arrière. Et à l'époque, on avait encore notre propre monnaie pour amortir le choc.  Le Chili d'Allende, 1970-1973 : hausse des salaires, nationalisations, contrôle des prix. En trois ans, l'inflation dépasse les 500 %, les rayons se vident, les files d'attente deviennent la norme.  Le Venezuela, le modèle que Mélenchon a ouvertement salué à la mort de Chávez en 2013. Le pays avec les plus grandes réserves de pétrole du monde. Redistribution massive, contrôle des prix, expropriations. Résultat : hyperinflation à des dizaines de milliers de pour cent, pénuries de nourriture et de médicaments, et plus de sept millions de Vénézuéliens partis. Un quart de la population.  Voilà la mécanique, toujours la même. Les dépenses explosent, les prix montent. Le gouvernement accuse les « spéculateurs » et bloque les prix. Les producteurs arrêtent de produire à perte. Les rayons se vident. On rationne. On contrôle les entreprises, puis les mouvements de capitaux, puis les gens qui veulent partir. Et ceux qui protestent deviennent des ennemis du peuple.  Poussée jusqu'au bout, cette logique a produit les pires catastrophes du XXe siècle. La collectivisation soviétique et la famine en Ukraine : des millions de morts. Le Grand Bond en avant de Mao : des dizaines de millions de morts de faim. Le Cambodge des Khmers rouges : près d'un quart de la population. Personne n'a commencé par un massacre. Tout le monde a commencé par un schéma au tableau qui promettait que l'État pouvait remplacer la production par la volonté.  Je ne dis pas que Mélenchon veut ça. Je dis qu'il connaît cette histoire mieux que quiconque, et qu'il présente quand même un schéma où l'argent se multiplie tout seul. Soit il n'y croit pas, et il ment aux plus fragiles. Soit il y croit, et c'est encore plus inquiétant.  La seule chose qui a jamais sorti un peuple de la pauvreté, c'est produire plus et mieux. Pas dépenser plus. Les pays qui l'ont compris se sont enrichis. Ceux qui ont cru au cercle vertueux ont fini par fermer leurs frontières pour empêcher leurs citoyens de fuir."

Peter Slagter on X (Translated) - "The pitch from the @VVD  (@QueenyRaj ) to lure billion-dollar companies to the Netherlands:  "Come here, and we can tax you and dictate exactly what you can and can't do with AI!"  Utterly absurd. No deepfake. We're being governed by clowns."
Blume Industries CEO Balding 大老板 on X - "This is getting roundly mocked but I think it seriously represents a real divide in mentality between Europe and the US."

After warning about fascism, the Left proposes seizing private corporations - "The endless cries of creeping fascism from the Left have become exhausting, particularly when progressives keep reminding us that their problem isn't authoritarianism itself, but who gets to wield the authority.  The most recent example? Robert Reich, the former secretary of labor under Bill Clinton - a man who routinely warns about fascism - advocating for the government to seize control of private companies. Reich wants a Democrat-controlled government to cut off Elon Musk's government contracts and prepare to nationalize SpaceX and Starlink if they regain power. In the spirit of Marx himself, Reich wants the state to take ownership of Musk's lucrative companies.  The thinly-veiled democratic socialist also proposes a one-time 5% wealth tax on billionaires. The solution to all our societal ills is to apparently empower wealthy Washington politicians to go shopping in someone else's wallet. The nationalization proposal reveals something important about the political left's approach to power.  Musk's companies are undeniably influential. His government contracts deserve scrutiny, just as those awarded to any major defense contractor do. Reasonable people can debate whether the government relies too heavily on private companies for critical infrastructure, whether contracts are structured properly, and how to ensure accountability.  But nationalization is a different proposition entirely. It's not simply regulating a company or enforcing the terms of a contract. It's transferring ownership from private hands to the government because officials (or, in this case, a prominent progressive intellectual) don't trust the person running it.  We're supposed to believe that concentrating even more power in the hands of government is the solution to the dangers of concentrated power?  The irony is difficult to miss. We're constantly told that wealthy individuals exerting influence over public affairs constitute a threat to democracy. Yet Reich's proposed remedy would give the government ownership and control over companies whose technology has enormous implications for communications, space exploration, and national security. Apparently, concentrated power is dangerous when Elon Musk holds it but potentially liberating when Washington does?  Not every regulation is socialism. But government ownership of private enterprise is a distinctly collectivist answer to the problem Reich identifies, and it deserves to be recognized as such.  There's also a basic question of consistency here. If the government can seize or nationalize a company because its owner has become too powerful or politically objectionable, what principle limits that power? Who decides when a private citizen has crossed the line, and what prevents a future administration from applying the same logic to businesses it dislikes?  These are precisely the questions one would expect from people concerned about authoritarianism.  Instead, we get years of dire warnings about rising fascism on the Right, followed by proposals on the left to put private enterprise under government control. The rhetoric can't shroud the underlying temptation: concentrate power in the hands of people convinced they can be trusted with it. Before lecturing the country about the dangers of authoritarianism, the Left should explain why its preferred solution involves giving the government more power."
Technically, Communism isn't Fascism

Michael Deacon: Today’s Left-wing radicals are nothing but whacking great toffs - "Why exactly is it that so many of today’s rich kids are becoming socialists, instead of socialites?  In my view, the answer is linked to an awkward truth at the heart of Left-wing politics. We often call it “the politics of envy”. And that’s true. But it’s not, as widely assumed, the envy the poor feel for the rich. It’s the envy the rich feel for the even richer.  In other words, this is the politics of people who are privileged – but not quite as privileged as they feel they should be. So they yearn, with furious vengeance, to tear down the people who are even more privileged than they are. Or, as the American author Rob Henderson has put it, the real battle is not between the “haves” and the “have-nots”. It’s between the “haves” and the “have-mores”. Still, let’s not kid ourselves that this is a wholly new phenomenon. Consider the case of the original rebellious rich kid: Karl Marx.  In 1837, when Marx was 19, his father – a successful lawyer who owned a number of vineyards – sent him a letter, deploring the way that “weaklings” choose to “quarrel with the world because they do not possess, without labour or trouble, well-furnished palaces with vast sums of money and elegant carriages”. Such “embitterment disgusts me”, Marx Sr told his teenage son – “and you are the last person from whom I would expect it. What grounds can you have for it? Has not everything smiled on you ever since your cradle?”  A pertinent question for today’s pampered young radicals. Although I don’t suppose they’ll answer it."
"Every communist leader you can think of was a downwardly mobile loser from the elite class. Not surprisingly, the people most in favor of communism today come from the “high-education, low-income” crowd."

World Health Care Systems 'In Crisis' - "A MAJOR study conducted in 23 countries shows a majority of people -- in many cases a large majority -- believe their nation's health care system is "in a state of crisis". But although half (52%) the British public think this, larger majorities in 19 other countries believe their own health care systems are 'in crisis'.  These include France, where 58% of people feel their nation's health care system is in crisis, USA (65%), Germany (78%) and Poland (the highest at 93%). The average across all 23 countries shows 65% feel their nation's health care systems are in crisis, and 31% feel they are in 'good shape'.   But the study reveals that money is not necessarily thought to be the answer to health care problems. In most countries the public blame inefficient management rather than insufficient funding. In Britain, half (49%) blame management compared with 37% who blame funding problems."
Clearly, it's "capitalism" that's to blame and evil conservatives are underfunding healthcare
The USA actually had an average level of satisfaction with the government's handling of health care and above average assessment of its healthcare system, but that won't stop left wingers continuing to bash it and claim it's the worst in the developed world

hamsters on X - "Leftists be like: “They're using the guy beheading your brother in the street to distract you from your real enemy: Jeff Bezos delivering medicine to your front door overnight.”"

Toronto Allan Gardens food volunteers fined $600 - "In a statement to the Star, the city confirmed the fines were for multiple violations, including holding an event of more than 25 people without a permit, driving a vehicle off a roadway without a permit and putting up a tent without a permit.   The city added that its initial goal was to “work with the organizers to help them continue their operations while meeting the requirements that apply to all organized events in city parks.”  It went on, “after those efforts did not result in the required permit being obtained, bylaw enforcement officers attended the site. Officers first provided education and sought voluntary compliance before charges were issued.”  But Bal disputes this, saying they did try to work with the bylaw officers. She said they had a permit when they first started the operation 17 years ago and had forgotten to renew it.  She said the bylaw officers could have given them more leeway. “At least say, ‘OK, we’ll give you a week or whatever to get your stuff together then we’ll come back,’” she said.  A volunteer with the food bank that operates opposite them in the park was also fined. Like Bal and Khosa’s hot food service, the food bank has operated in the park for a number of years.   Stefanos Lialias, who has volunteered with the food bank for more than a year, said his group also tried to work with the officers.  “I said, ‘Look, can we just have a meeting about this?’” He said the officer had no interest in working with them. “There was no accommodation at all. They said, ‘Nope, we’ve got to give you a ticket.’”"

Meme - Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand: "Everyone claims to want people fed, housed, educated, and treated with dignity. That's the easiest moral position imaginable, requiring neither thought nor effort.  The sincerity of that commitment is revealed by whether you're willing to examine what actually achieves those outcomes, what undermines them, and at whose expense.  By the socialist standard, even forced labor can be justified in pursuit of these goals, and even policies producing the opposite results can be defended as virtuous.  Virtue signaling earns applause for good intentions. Genuine concern demands understanding, evidence, and results. Far too many seem content with the applause."
"I WILL ALWAYS SUPPORT THE SiDE THAT WANTS PEOPLE FED, HOUSED, EDUCATED, AND TREATED WITH DIGNITY."

Meme - Earth: "Breathe or suffocate. Find shelter or freeze. Grow or trade for food, or have no food."
Earth: "I'm reality."
Upset left winger: "Evil capitalism!"

Chris on X - "Democrats went from promising to “end welfare as we know it” to complaining that more people aren’t on welfare in just 30 years. Big reason why I can never even think about voting for a Democrat these days."

Handre on X - "The welfare cliff does not trap poor families by accident.   Congress engineered a benefits system where earning one additional dollar can trigger simultaneous cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, housing vouchers, and childcare subsidies, collapsing your effective income by $5 or more. The government built a cage, and somehow we call it a safety net.  Take a single mother in Houston. She earns $22,000 annually and qualifies for $35,000 in combined federal and state benefits. She gets a raise to $25,000. That $3,000 in new wages costs her $18,000 in benefits. Her employer rewarded her productivity; the state punished her for it. No rational actor climbs that wall.  This is price control, but applied to human ambition. Every welfare threshold functions as a marginal tax rate that would make a Scandinavian bureaucrat jealous, often exceeding 80 or even 100 percent on the next dollar earned. This disincentive is the system's core mechanism.  Dependency concentrates political power. Families tethered to benefit rolls vote to protect those rolls, and the politicians who administer the programs vote to expand them. The cliff self-perpetuates. Free market economists have traced this perverse incentive structure for decades, but the administrative state expands regardless, because a bureaucracy that manages poverty also survives by it.  Genuine exit from poverty requires accumulating capital, building skills, and taking calculated risks. The welfare cliff taxes all three."
Mike Lee on X - "Federal welfare programs are highly effective—as a means of growing government And as a means of locking the poor into poverty"

GRANDPA’s FREE ADVICE on X - "25 years of one-party Democrat control in Oregon is a masterclass in how leftist rule destroys a state’s ability to govern. This is the same state whose governor leads a system that no longer requires students to prove proficiency in reading, math, or English to graduate high school
2001–03 budget: $34 billion
• 32% education
• 25% social programs
• 12% infrastructure
• 12% administration
• 6% public safety
• 13% everything else
2025–27 budget: $140 billion (over 4× higher)
• 18% education
• 45% social programs
• 7.5% infrastructure
• 14% administration
• 5% public safety
• 10.5% everything else
 Social programs went from $8.5 billion (25%) to $62.7 billion (45%) — 7 times more, nearly half the entire budget on handouts.  “Healthier Oregon” spends $1.3 billion giving free medical care to illegal migrants.  $724 million went to “homeless services” in 2024 — $60,412 per homeless person — while the homeless population rose. Walk Portland’s streets and see where that money actually went.  Oregon schools sank to the bottom of the country in reading and math. Democrats’ solution? Pass a law eliminating proficiency requirements to graduate, extend it again, then brag about higher graduation rates. They’re not lifting people out of poverty or fixing education.   They’re building a permanent dependency empire with themselves in charge. Their ads say it plainly: “Vote for us or Republicans will take away your benefits!”  Governor Kotek can’t blame Trump. Democrats have controlled Oregon the entire time — even as the federal government flipped party control five times.  This is what one-party Democrat rule delivers. #Oregon #DemocratFailure #Accountability"

Steve · Millionaire Habits on X - "If you think all Billionaires exploit people by underpaying them, now is your chance to start your own business and pay everyone at least $100/hour. Show us how it’s done. Be the example."

Meme - François Valentin @Valen10Francois: "It's funny to me that leftists internationally fantasize about China when inequality there is higher than even in the United States.  In fact China's tax and transfer system has virtually no redistributive effect"
"Figure 2: Income Inequality before and after Redistribution. China's tax structure has virtually no redistributive capacity - only the personal income tax has a progressive rate structure, but less than 10% of the income earners pay any income tax."

Michael A. Arouet on X - "This is eye-opening. Europe’s share of global tech R&D has collapsed from 23% in 2005 to just 8% today, while the US has climbed to 62% and China has risen from near zero to 15%. South Korea now outspends Germany, France, the UK, and Italy combined in tech R&D. Yep, you read that right.  This is the predictable result of policy choices that systematically favor control and redistribution over growth. Layered regulation, data rules, AI restrictions, labor rigidities, and precautionary frameworks, raises the cost and slows the pace of turning ideas into products, forcing companies to spend scarce resources on compliance rather than experimentation. High taxation and expansive redistributive systems extract capital that would otherwise fund private R&D and risk-taking, while shrinking the after-tax reward for building something new and scaling it. The broader left-leaning mindset that prioritizes equality of outcome over dynamism treats entrepreneurial success as something to be managed, taxed, or shared rather than unleashed and rewarded.  Places that protect the returns to innovation and keep barriers low continue to pull ahead, attracting talent and capital that Europe increasingly loses. Europe’s relative decline is the cumulative outcome of treating dynamism as a problem to be regulated rather than the engine of prosperity. Without a shift toward lighter rules, lower burdens on enterprise, and greater tolerance for unequal outcomes from unequal effort, the gap will keep widening, and Europe will become an open-air museum for wealthy Americans and Asians."
StanFirewings on X - "There is also DEI plan I need to have in place while applying to EU research grants."
Institute for Empirical Study Of Economic Thought on X - "And it's not just tech. Total R&D spend, % of GDP (World Bank, 2023): Israel 6.4, Korea 4.9, US 3.5, China 2.6, EU 2.3. The EU set itself a 3% target for 2010. Thirteen years past the deadline it was still at 2.3%, behind China. Regulate first, innovate never."
Joey Freshwater on X - "the Great Feminization of Europe. who needs growth when you have equity"
Time for more regulation

How USAID Built a Global Color Revolution Infrastructure With NGOs

This is why left wingers are so upset about USAID

DataRepublican (small r) on X

"How USAID Built a Global Color Revolution Infrastructure With NGOs...

The right points to USAID grants for transgender operas in Colombia and DEI workshops in Serbia and asks why American taxpayers were funding them. The left points to children who depended on foreign aid claims millions of deaths.

 

But both miss the purpose of true USAID.

 

USAID was one of Washington's primary instruments for regime change abroad. Beneath the humanitarian programs, the cultural initiatives, and the development projects sat a much larger objective: managing regime change and color revolutions across the globe.

 

Which raises an obvious question:

 

What does a transgender opera in Colombia have to do with regime change?...

 

1. Media. Independent outlets. Journalism training, equipment, institutional funding so a newsroom can survive without depending on the local government or corporations for revenue. The function is to ensure that there is an “independent” outlet ready to broadcast Western narratives. You need a megaphone before you propagate a message.

 

2. Legal infrastructure. Lawyers, legal aid clinics, rule-of-law programs, judicial reform advocacy. The function is to build a class of professionals who know how to challenge a government through its own legal system — and who have the institutional backing to survive doing it. And, yes, build a judiciary that shares the values of liberal Western democracy.

 

3. Election monitoring. Observer training, voter roll modernization, parallel vote tabulation (PVT). PVT is the critical technology: an “independent” count run alongside the official one. Without PVT data, people claiming a stolen election are sore losers. With Western-backed election monitoring, they're defenders of liberal democracy.

 

4. Activist training. Civic engagement workshops, youth leadership programs, community organizing. The grant descriptions say "civic engagement" and "leadership development." The skills being transferred:

• How to organize a protest
• How to sustain a protest
• How to train others to do the same
• How to communicate with media
• “Nonviolent” discipline under pressure and training.

The result is a trained cadre of people who know how to convert public anger into sustained political pressure across multiple election cycles.

 

5. Governance data. Procurement monitoring, FOIA programs, budget transparency initiatives, anti-corruption databases. These organizations generate the raw material that the media reports on, the lawyers cite in court, and the election monitors reference in their findings. Without this layer, the other four operate on anecdote. With it, they operate on evidence.

 

None of these looks like regime change in isolation. A journalism training program is a journalism training program. The system becomes visible only when you fund all five in the same country for a decade and the people running them all know each other because you trained them at the same conferences, connected them through the same fellowship programs, and funded them through the same grant pipelines.

What the Completed System Looks Like: Georgia

Georgia is the country where the full pipeline played out in public, so Georgia is where you can trace it.

Starting in the mid-1990s, American and European money built all five capabilities inside Georgian civil society. USAID and the Eurasia Foundation funded Rustavi 2, an independent broadcaster that became the opposition's primary media outlet by 2003. The Liberty Institute, founded in 1996, drafted Georgia's freedom of speech legislation and ran anti-corruption campaigns. ISFED, founded in 1995 with USAID and NED money, trained 3,000 election observers and ran parallel vote tabulation across ten Georgian elections. NED spent $3 million on Otpor in Serbia, whose trainers then came to Georgia — funded by Open Society, facilitated by Liberty Institute — and trained a student group called Kmara. Same playbook, same clenched-fist logo, different country. And organizations like IDFI monitored government procurement, generating the data everybody else used.

 

Open Society's own Georgia staff described the scale in a video: "We have been out there, helping every startup in Georgia, almost every organization that came to us with new ideas... There were 16,000 projects supported by the foundation."

 

Read that again. Sixteen thousand projects in a country of 3.7 million people.

 

In November 2003, all five fired at once. ISFED's parallel vote count proved the parliamentary election was fraudulent. Rustavi 2 broadcast the evidence. Kmara filled the streets. Liberty Institute provided the organizational backbone. Three weeks later, President Shevardnadze resigned in the Rose Revolution.

 

The activation was emergent. Every node in the network activated and performed its designed function simultaneously.

 

After the revolution, Liberty Institute members entered the Georgian government: Bokeria to the National Security Council, Subari as Public Defender, Targamadze to the Defense and Security Committee, Vardzelashvili as Deputy Justice Minister, Zhvania to Foreign Intelligence, and Minashvili as Foreign Affairs Committee Chair. The organizations didn't just support a transition. They staffed it.

 

USASpending.gov shows over a billion in USAID awards to Georgia from 2008 to 2025. The contract descriptions spell it out: CEPPS received $26 million for "Georgia Elections and Political Processes Activity."East-West Management Institute got $21 million for "build and innovate upon PAST USAID investments in the rule of law." That one is the pipeline describing itself — build on what we already built.

 

Twenty years later, the Georgian government proposed a law requiring NGOs to disclose their foreign funding. The same network activated: foreign-funded NGOs sustained protests across multiple waves, hundreds of thousands in the streets. Former U.S. Ambassador Ian Kelly explained the dependency on camera: "The civil society is the absolute beating heart of Georgian democracy... it relies quite a bit on EU and U.S. funding."

 

The Georgian government's response was blunt: foreign-funded NGOs organized the 2003 color revolution, and the same infrastructure activated again when the government tried to make them disclose who was paying.

 

If this is starting to sound familiar, good. It should.

Now Look at the United States

The same five capabilities exist domestically. The language softens — "election observation" becomes "election protection," "civil society training" becomes "civic engagement," "independent media" becomes "local civic journalism" — but the functional categories are identical. The funding source shifts from USAID to private foundations. The scale is larger.

 

1. Media. The Knight Foundation gave $25 million to the American Journalism Project, which it

described as a "first-of-its-kind venture philanthropy organization focused on growing and sustaining independent, nonpartisan, local civic news." AJP has distributed millions in smaller grants. MacArthur

gave Howard University $5 million for a "Center for Journalism and Democracy."

2. Legal infrastructure. The Brennan Center for Justice — mission statement: "nonpartisan law and policy institute that seeks to improve the American systems of democracy and justice." The Hopewell Fund, an Arabella Advisors fiscal sponsor, hosts Democracy Docket — Marc Elias's election litigation operation — as one of its many fiscally sponsored projects. The domestic legal infrastructure shapes the legal environment from the outside through litigation, judicial training, and model legislation that state legislatures adopt.

 

3. Election monitoring. The Voter Registration Project runs $40+ million per year on private donations. Its grantee, State Voices, coordinates over 700 organizations in 24 states, providing "cutting-edge organizing technology and experimentation access." The Foundation to Promote Open Society gave the Hopewell Fund $10 million in 2023 for a "Nonpartisan Free Election Fund." The Election Trust Initiative launched with $25 million from Hewlett, Peterson, and Klarman foundations — and files no independent public returns because its finances are buried inside Pew's 990. Domestically, 700 coordinated organizations across 24 states provide poll monitoring, voter verification, and legal rapid response. 

 

4. Activist training. The Alliance for Youth Organizing runs programs on over 200 college campuses. Its 990 describes "local, integrated civic engagement programs that help train and develop new leaders, register and mobilize young voters, and educate young people about key issues in their communities. Our program engages with young people year-round and over multiple cycles, building habits that translate into lifelong civic engagement." Open Society Action Fund spends tens of millions on domestic civic engagement grants. The capability is identical as Georgia: a trained cadre who know how to organize, mobilize, and sustain political pressure across multiple election cycles.

 

5. Governance data. Open Society Action Fund's 2023 IRS 990 lists its domestic program areas: "DEMOCRACY DEFENSE, VOTING RIGHTS, ELECTION INTEGRITY, CENSUS, REDISTRICTING, ECONOMIC SECURITY... COMBATTING MIS- AND DISINFORMATION, TECHNOLOGY AND CIVIL RIGHTS... GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY AND TRANSPARENCY." Domestic program expense: $173 million.

 

Those are NED's foreign democracy categories — democracy defense, election integrity, government accountability and transparency, combatting disinformation — applied domestically, word for word.

The Recognition

Seven right-wing candidates won in Latin America after the funding stopped. The infrastructure that had been cultivated for decades began to weaken because its primary source of capital disappeared. The newspapers survived only if they could find new donors. The NGOs shrank.

 

That is what people misunderstand when they argue about whether USAID funded transgender operas, journalism workshops, anti-corruption databases, youth leadership programs, or election observers.

 

Those were never the point.

 

The point was the network.

A grant to a newspaper is not a newspaper. A grant to an activist group is not an activist group. A grant to an election-monitoring organization is not an election-monitoring organization. Fund enough of them for long enough, connect them to one another, train their leaders together, give them shared sources of funding, shared language, shared objectives, and eventually they become a political operating system.

 

At that stage, individual grants no longer matter. The system reproduces itself.

Georgia shows what the completed architecture looks like. The organizations did not merely criticize the government. They generated information, trained activists, shaped public opinion, challenged institutions, mobilized voters, and ultimately supplied personnel for the government that followed.

 

The architecture was the product.

 

And once you recognize the architecture, you start seeing it everywhere.

 

Even in the United States.

 

Especially in the United States.

 

That is why we see a major nationwide protest every month as long as President Trump is in office."