Richard Hanania on X - "Sweden is choosing capitalism. Social spending as percentage of GDP is now 24%, lower than most of Northern Europe. Sweden has surpassed the US in billionaires per capita. School choice is universal, one in ten teens goes to a school operated by a company listed on the Stockholm stock exchange. Taxes have been cut three years in a row. Sweden has seen "more than 500 initial public offerings over the 10 years through 2024, more than Germany, France, the Netherlands and Spain combined" Nearly half of primary healthcare clinics are now privately owned. The result? Same as always. Sweden is projected to grow 2% a year through 2030, which is the same as the US and double France and Germany. How many times does this have to keep happening across the world? How many times does free market capitalism have to prove itself superior to socialism before the world accepts the truth?"
Meme - Chris Freiman @cafreiman: "Most people rejected His message."
*Modified Chick tract* "The oft-ramp out of extreme poverty is, ugh, commerce, it's entrepreneurial capitalism."
"Shut up!"
"They hated Bono because He told them the truth."
The American Tribune on X - "This is an important point to remember about race communism and its proponents. They don't really care about inequality or whatever. South Africa is more unequal today than before apartheid ended. What they care about is weaponizing socialist economic policy against "oppressors", by which they invariably mean normal white people. Anyone who isn't a deranged leftist or member of the Bioleninist coalition has his economic head (and sometimes literal head) on the chopping block. But the point of that isn't to make the poor better off, etc. Instead, it is to inflict economic pain on the "oppressors" for the crime of existing, particularly the crime of rising above the average Bioleninist coalition member. If you have an attractive spouse, comfortable paycheck, nice house, etc., they despise you for it because they are spiteful mutants with nothing better in their future than forever being a spiteful mutant. Hence the policies that make little sense from any reasonable calculus; they are designed to cause pain, not to make anyone better off"
Oilfield Rando on X - "Weird how “eat the rich”‘doesn’t apply to university administrators and “non profit” officers making $300,000-$2 million a year."
Wokal Distance on X - "Bernie Sanders used to say "tax millionaires and billionaires," but then he made a million dollars and now its just "tax billionaires." What this taught me was that in practice "eat the rich" means "eat whoever makes more then what I currently happen to be making right now.""
nic carter on X - "rich is a state of mind and it is entirely determined by the left. a blue collar HVAC guy that owns his own small business and makes $600k is "rich". a hollywood actor who is worth $45m is "speaking truth to power" when they criticize billionaires. a fraudster who steals $20m from medicaid with a fake autism clinic or hospice is "a constituent""
Andrew on X - "Stacey Abrams pays herself a profitable 1 mill a year for her career “non-profit” work 🤔"
Seneca Scott on X - "EAT THE RICH.....but not Tom Steyer. Also not George Soros. Please also excuse Neville Roy Singham and Reid Hoffman, they won't taste good anyway. Laurene Powell Jobs also has a hall pass, and ditto Dustin Moskovitz. James Simons is excused as well, and pretty please don't forget Haim Saban and Quinn Delaney. But yes, eat the rich."
Jeremy Carl on X - "I just despise the language the left uses to excuse it's anti-social behavior. There is no such thing as a "rent strike." You're just a deadbeat who doesn't want to pay what you owe according to the contract you signed."
Brandi Kruse on X - "INSANE. Seattle's Socialist Mayor responds to exodus of wealth from Washington state by saying "BYE" ... then laughing. We're doomed."
aviel on X - "Ok, I’ve finally processed how I experienced this, and it’s a big deal. I grew up hearing stories from my father and grandfather about the Soviet Union, but this was the first time I truly understood them, like the difference between hearing stories about having a child and actually holding your own newborn. Like an ancestral alarm. It’s devastating. Everything in me is screaming to divest from the region that I’ve poured my adult life into to survive. The feeling of loss is immeasurable, and the casual “bye” just makes it worse. The damage from the lack of empathy here will create a cycle of attacks that take decades to undo and will bloody the hands of everyone around me, there are no sidelines in my line of work. This also isn’t about taxes, the cost of reorienting my life is infinitely greater. It’s now primal and existential."
Hayek-Club Weimar on X - "Niemand hat den "Kapitalismus" erfunden. Kapitalismus ist das, was freie Menschen von Natur aus tun - Waren und Dienstleistungen zu ihrem eigenen Vorteil tauschen." ("Nobody invented "capitalism." Capitalism is what free people naturally do—exchange goods and services to their own advantage.")
Anish Moonka on X - "There's a clay tablet with the founding charter of a 12-partner company on it. Twelve merchants pooled 33 pounds of gold to start the firm. The contract has the partner names, the starting capital, the profit split, and the penalty for cashing out early. The tablet is nearly 4,000 years old. It was found at a site called Kanesh, in central Turkey. Archaeologists have dug up 23,500 of these clay records there, most of them business documents: receipts, loan contracts, shipping orders, lawsuits. The houses they were stored in eventually burned. The fire baked the clay solid and preserved every record. The merchants came from Assur, in modern-day Iraq. They loaded donkeys with tin and cloth and walked them 1,000 kilometers across mountain passes to Kanesh, roughly the distance from New York to Atlanta. Each donkey carried about 180 pounds and the trip took two to three months. They came home with silver and gold. The company ran for twelve years under a merchant named Amur Ishtar. A third of the profits went back to the investors. Pull your share out early and the firm gave you four kilos of silver per kilo of gold, half the normal rate. Locked-up money was meant to stay locked up. That one company was just a tiny piece. The tablets show a complete economy with partners suing each other in commercial court, husbands writing home about prices, and wives writing back complaining the husband had been gone too long. A woman named Ahatum quietly lent silver to four different men over nine years. People bought up other people's loan documents and used them as collateral for new loans, the same thing Wall Street does today with mortgage-backed securities. One merchant got caught smuggling tin in his underwear to dodge a 10% import tax. In 2019, four economists from Harvard, Sciences Po, Chicago, and Virginia ran the tablet numbers through a gravity model, the math economists use today to predict how much two countries will trade based on size and distance. The Bronze Age numbers matched modern trade numbers almost exactly. Trade fell off with distance at nearly the same rate it does between countries today. The paper ran in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. There was no economic theory yet. The idea didn't even have a name. The word "capitalism" wouldn't be coined for another 3,800 years, and Adam Smith was 3,700 years away from writing a sentence about markets. Just a guy named Pushu-ken writing a clay tablet to his business partner about a shipment of cloth, and a woman in Assur recording who owed her how much silver. Capitalism was already there, doing its full job, almost four thousand years before anyone wrote down a theory of how it worked."
Richard Hanania on X - "Why listening to Ezra and Derek reflecting on abundance made me pessimistic. They want a movement that builds things. But in their coalition is a huge faction that hates business, the people who build things! It's a wild contradiction."
wanye on X - "This is of course completely true. Whatever Centrist Libs say about building things, the Democratic Party and the left more generally is the party of not building things. They are skeptical of business. They are skeptical of tech. They are skeptical of landlords and new apartment buildings. They are skeptical of markets, skeptical of investing, skeptical of finance. I don’t even understand what these abundance people are doing. Like, just become a republican, bro. You’re natural Republicans. You’re all educated, 40-something white guys. You’re Republicans. Like, there’s already a word for people who believe the things you believe. It’s, “republican.”"
Robert Reich on X - "A history of the top marginal tax rates on the wealthiest Americans:
1940: 81%
1950: 84%
1960: 91%
1970: 72%
1980: 70%
1990: 28%
2000: 40%
2010: 35%
For 50 years, corporate backed politicians in Congress have slashed taxes to line the pockets of their wealthy donors."
paleoneoliberal on X - "Reich is intentionally deceiving as always. He's a socialist, and the only thing socialists can do is lie and obfuscate. The top marginal tax rates in the '50s are irrelevant because they applied to incomes above thresholds that were so high and were accompanied by so many loopholes, deductions, and exceptions that almost nobody was actually paying them. The effective tax rate on the wealthiest taxpayers didn't change that much, and they now pay a higher share of taxes. "The rich" are paying the majority of taxes in the US, and tax revenue as a share of GDP has been relatively stable, but the thing that makes a big difference is the huge increase in government spending, mostly due to welfare entitlements and healthcare."
Richard Hanania on X - "Every generation of leftists seems to just hate whatever new thing most represents capitalism and is making life better. Then they forget and move on to the next one. First they obsessed over Walmart. Its crime was a wider range of goods and lower prices. Then Amazon was the issue, because it also gave low prices but also brought unimagined variety and convenience. One click order to get anything in the world overnight, sane people would've been singing its praises, but they specifically targeted them. Now it's data centers, the main engine of economic growth. Populist rightoids are joining them. Good thing about the American system is that it's too deadlocked and too subject to special interest influence to wipe out whatever is new. So data centers will make life better, and then they'll hate the next thing."
Corie Whalen on X - "This is why I wish leftists would stop calling themselves progressive. They’re the segment of society most vehemently opposed to progress of virtually all kinds."
steve phenson on X - "Notice the direction - downwards. Anything poweful new and important is attacked. Leftism is best understood as a civilizational death cult. They actually want to 'lose'. Hence importing their own replacements etc."
BowTiedMara on X - "A surreal scene unfolds with an anti-Milei leftist on television.
Mariana Brey (journalist): You've been saying for months that Milei's government would collapse. And the more time passes, the more positive the government's image becomes.
Guillermo Moreno (leftist, barred from public office for life): You don't know anything about economics, okay? Sit down! Close your mouth! Shut up and stop talking, you donkey! I told you, shut your mouth!
Mariana Brey (journalist): No, I'm not going to shut up! Don't talk to me like that! Don't be disrespectful and let me do my job!(C5N / Cristina5Nestor)"
Stelios Panagiotou on X - "Argentinian leftists have lost it because Milei is forcing them to look in the mirror and realise that their ideology has harmed Argentina immeasurably. Milei has completely mogged them."
paleoneoliberal on X - "But it took Argentina a century of humiliation to get a president who isn't some kind of socialist. At the beginning of the 20th century, Argentina was among the wealthiest nations in the world (at some points its GDP per capita reached almost 90% of that of the USA), but despite avoiding direct involvement in both World Wars, within less than a century its GDPpc had plummeted to less than 30% of the US level, accompanied by several episodes of hyperinflation."
Meme - "Ezra Declined
MIKE SOLANA Editor in chief
In the great tradition of Ezra Klein - who spent a year arguing for "abundance" only to vote for Zohran Mamdani, a dogmatic socialist hell bent on dismantling New York City's engine of prosperity - CNN's Fareed Zakaria published an essay in the Washington Post last Friday targeting the urban Democratic Party's propensity for promising new entitlements it can't afford while failing at the absolute basics of governance. Well, sir, welcome to the far right (or at least until your inevitable pivot back to communism). Sadly, as you'll soon find now that you're actually paying attention, every city in America is a one-party state run by the Democrats, and for as long as Democrats rely on government workers to win elections, their priority can only ever be increasing the number of government workers and giving them tons of shit. It's easy to hate the mayor, but do you have the courage to hate the teacher's union? From the Pirate Wires Daily newsletter"
Yonan on X - "Dave Ramsey says 89% of millionaires did not inherit it, they used a 401K and paid off house "We did the largest study of millionaires ever done in North America, 89% were first generation, meaning they did not inherit their money" “The two things that got them there were simply putting money in their 401K and buying a house and paying it off… home ownership is a key part of the first 1M to 10M in net worth”"
Clearly, the system is rigged and capitalism has failed
Handre on X - "College tuition has exploded 1,200% since 1980 while wages rose just 213%. In 1963, a student could work a minimum-wage summer job and pay for a full year at the average public university. Today, that same job covers roughly one month of tuition. The culprit isn't corporate greed or underfunding. It's government intervention distorting every price signal in higher education. Federal student loans created artificial demand that universities exploited ruthlessly. When government guarantees endless credit to teenagers with zero income or assets, colleges face no market constraint on pricing. Why charge $3,000 per year when students can borrow $30,000? The money flows regardless of educational quality or job prospects. Universities responded predictably: they jacked up prices and hired armies of administrators to capture this guaranteed revenue stream. Easy credit always inflates asset prices, whether houses in 2005 or degrees today. Free market economists warned this would happen, just as they predicted the housing bubble. When you subsidize demand without increasing supply, prices skyrocket. Colleges simply absorbed every dollar of increased lending capacity into higher tuition, fancy dorms, and bloated bureaucracies. The 1950s model worked because students paid real prices with real money; either their own or their parents'. This created immediate feedback between cost and value. If Harvard charged too much, students went elsewhere. Today, that price mechanism is completely severed. Students don't feel the true cost until years later when loan payments hit, and by then universities already pocketed the cash. Every additional dollar of federal aid generates roughly 60 cents of tuition increases. The government created this monster, feeds it annually through increased lending limits, then acts shocked when colleges behave exactly like the rent-seeking cartels they've become."
Clearly the solution is to make college free i.e. taxpayer paid so colleges can jack up prices even more but students don't see the cost so they don't mind
Given that the vast majority of US colleges are non-profit, left wingers can't blame the pursuit of profits, so they need some other cope, like blaming government "underfunding"
Opinion | Generous student loan programs make college more expensive - The Washington Post - "In 1987, William Bennett, then President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education, penned what might have been the most famous op-ed in education history. Pointing to the steady upward march of tuition after federal aid increased in the late 1970s, he declared, “Federal student aid policies do not cause college price inflation, but there is little doubt that they help make it possible.” Bennett was not the first to suggest that government subsidies for tuition might worsen the problem they were intended to solve. But he was the first secretary of education to do so in the New York Times, so this idea came to be known as “the Bennett hypothesis.” You will be unsurprised to learn that his idea became very popular on the right — but less so on the left, which tends to chant “correlation is not causation” whenever the topic comes up... Over the years, many studies have found suspiciously Bennett-like effects on tuition — in one case, as much as 60 cents of every dollar borrowed were diverted into tuition hikes. Other research has found small effects or none, including a pair of papers from education scholar Robert Kelchen at the University of Tennessee showing that expanded graduate student loan programs had little influence on the cost of professional school. For proponents of expansive student loan programs — or federal aid more generally — Kelchen’s work is particularly encouraging, because he studied those effectively unlimited Grad Plus loans. If raising loan limits to infinity doesn’t produce Bennett-like effects, then it’s hard to see what could. Alas, another team of researchers has now come along with a healthy dose of discouragement. Kelchen had looked at the listed tuition prices of business, law and medical schools whose students previously had access to a substantial private loan market. (Between 1999 and 2001, I borrowed more than twice the federal loan limits to get an MBA at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.) Economists Sandra E. Black, Lesley J. Turner and Jeffrey T. Denning looked at the same Grad Plus changes but studied a broader array of graduate programs, using Texas data that let them see which students and programs had been constrained by the earlier loan caps — students who had borrowed right up to the limit, and programs that had a high percentage of such students. They found that after the caps were lifted, those constrained students borrowed more and constrained programs raised their tuition faster. Of course, no policy is perfect. An earlier study of undergraduate borrowing by some of the same researchers who analyzed the Texas grad school data found that while increasing student loan limits raises student indebtedness, it also “improves degree completion, later life earnings, and student loan repayment.” One could argue that this is worth higher indebtedness and even some tuition inflation, especially if it boosts access for underrepresented groups. Unfortunately, the researchers’ study of graduate schools isn’t so encouraging. Increasing loan limits didn’t improve graduation rates or the percentage of Black and Hispanic students attending. And they found little evidence of improvement in earnings or employment. On net, uncapping the loans left students worse off... nearly half of all new federal loans disbursed in 2021 to 2022 went to graduate students, and more than half of the student loan debt outstanding is held by households with graduate degrees. When you hear about someone with an eye-popping, six-figure debt burden, you’ll almost always find that person went to graduate school. Now it seems that in an attempt to help those people gain valuable human capital, the government might have “helped” them take a significant amount of unnecessary debt. Republicans are right that this program needs reform; unfortunately, for a lot of students, it will come too late."
Correlation is not causation when it threatens the left wing agenda
Josh Barro on X - "As I said at Welcomefest last year, when you look at what's standing in the way of Abundance in New York, you'll often find a union forcing the government to spend more money to provide less public service"
Kyle Smith on X - "As long as Dems are the party of unions, bureaucrats and environmentalists, they can never be the party of abundance"
Creative Deduction on X - "In the early 1980s New Zealand was a textbook socialist failure: one of the most regulated economies on earth, with exploding public debt, double-digit inflation, rising unemployment and a slide from 6th to 19th richest per capita in the OECD. Then came the libertarian revolution known as Rogernomics. In 1984 Finance Minister Roger Douglas and the Fourth Labour Government slashed farm and industry subsidies overnight, scrapped tariffs and import quotas, floated the NZ dollar, deregulated finance and banking, abolished wage and price controls, and cut the top tax rate from 66% to 33%. The next step was privatisation: Telecom NZ, Air New Zealand, energy firms, ports, forests and banks were sold to private owners. Short-term pain was real, but the results were spectacular. Inflation was crushed. Productivity in privatised firms soared: Telecom NZ transformed from creaky monopoly into an innovator with collapsing prices and exploding services. Air New Zealand went from chronic losses to profitable global airline. Real consumer prices fell, investment boomed and public debt was slashed. By the late 1990s New Zealand was running surpluses, enjoying a long growth boom and climbing the global economic freedom rankings. Rogernomics proved what free-market advocates keep saying: government is a terrible steward of resources. Restore private property rights, kill political meddling and let markets and incentives work. Free people and free markets deliver the growth and prosperity the state never could. Freedom works. New Zealand proved it."
Hard times lead to right wing policies, right wing policies create good times, good times lead to left wing policies, left wing policies create hard times
Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 on X - "In New Zealand leftists tried to introduce pay equity claims before the courts arguing that female community NGO workers should be paid the exact same as male detectives, male engineers and male air traffic controllers. The government was forced to introduce emergency legislation drafted in secrecy and pass the emergency legislation in under 24 hours with no public consultation in order to end the deluge of insane pay equity claims that threatened to bankrupt the state"
Taren Feist on X - "After Washington passed a millionaire tax, people did exactly what they’re supposed to do — they organized and filed a referendum to overturn it. And the courts basically said: not so fast — that’s unconstitutional! If a tax is considered essential to funding government, voters may not get a say at all. But here in Oregon, we saw the opposite play out: People organized, gathered signatures, and forced a referendum on a major tax package. Lawmakers couldn’t stop it — so they changed the election instead. Different approach. Same underlying tension: What happens when voters push back on taxes lawmakers already passed? Washington’s answer looks like: you don’t get a vote Oregon’s answer looked like: you get a vote… just under government conditions Either way, it raises a bigger question: How much power do voters actually have when it comes to taxes? Apparently in Washington — ZERO."
It's only oligarchy for elites to do what voters don't want when it threatens the left wing agenda
Keith Emerson Kruse | Facebook - "I invested at least 20k in unpaid labor and thousands of dollars on living expenses trying to rehab a failing "ecovillage" last year. There was trash everywhere, a horrible rat infestation, and many trees in the 30 year old food forest dead and dying when I arrived. Also there was no functioning sanitation system on the property. I made it my responsibility to clean up and properly compost around 150 gallons (30 five gallon buckets) of human waste. Hundreds of pounds of hazardous waste in the form of rat droppings mixed with cholla cactus had to be removed from the tiny homes and outbuildings. The signs of neglect and decay were everywhere. I did all the worst, most disgusting jobs that had to be done to save the community from its death spiral by myself. Looking back, its kind of funny just how stereotypical it all was. Every ridiculous and cringy thing you'd expect to happen on a burnt out "hippy commune" came alive in this place. The pseudo shamanism, the creepy polyamorous "goddess worshipper", the right wing conspiracy nuts, the temporarily embarrassed trustifarian, the toxic positive "love and light"... An enormous amount of effort had gone into the infrastructure and the food forest at one time but it had become little more than a crash pad for shiftless wingnuts over the years. The disfunctional, abusive, and/or predatory behavior of several of the community members was normalized and protected. I was made a pariah over time by my willingness to confront and correct glaringly obvious problems. My "captain save-a-hoe" attitude towards the community and in my own personal life was careless and costly. And my commitment to the far out dream of living in a thriving ecovillage food forest blinded me to the harsh reality of what the place actually was."
