Meme - Tom Jones @93vintagejones: ""The primary cause of the West’s economic decline is the rapid expansion of parasitic rent-seeking actors who extract value without producing it.""
"Rather, the real problem is that Western firms are burdened by unsustainably large non-essential costs placed on them by politicians in order to fulfil the demands of distributional coalitions. Punitive taxes, administrative roles that only exist to ensure the companies comply with non- essential legislation, sky-high costs imposed as a result of political decisions all these layers of nonproductive activity weigh the system down. Chinese companies, by contrast, don't have as many barnacles on their boats; since its' leaders don't need to run for election, they have no need to create or feed distributional coalitions."
🫡 on X - "The goal post just keeps moving farther and farther. First it was “EBT is just kids being able to eat. Kids shouldn’t starve cuz their parents are poor” Then it was “EBT should pay for Little Debbie’s because poor kids deserve a sweet treat too” Now it’s “EBT should get you in at the Zoo for basically free because apparently if you don’t see Giraffes you will literally die” Come on guys. What are we doing here"
Hawk-I-Doc on X - "Its about bribery for votes. Food, zoo tickets, doesnt matter. There is no limiting principle at play for Democrats, no point at which they think theres too much welfare benefits."
DKM 🍉✊🏾 on X - "The goal of ebt is to give people the same quality of life as a "middle class" person. It's literally that simple."
Allie ✞ on X - "A lot of people don’t realize they’re lying because they’re saying things they wish were true. They’ll make up totally false statements but they sound nice so it feels true to them"
Snakesan on X - "I worked a lot of retail, probably more than I should admit in public but whatever. Most of the folks I'd see using it needed it, the amount of abuse I'd see was also incredible. I balked when I saw an arrangement at a previous employer when a manager would lend a u-boat to someone using EBT to buy pop. Just a ton of pop, sometimes needed two. A subsidy got reframed, it helped a bunch of folks while allowing for some abuse. I'd hesitate to call what quoted is saying as lying, maybe a half truth?"
This goes beyond the avowed aim of Universal Basic Income, even. Left wingers just want everything for free
Rock Chartrand on X - "Capitalism has a curious habit of creating luxuries faster than socialism can declare them necessities. Two hundred years ago, free modern healthcare and today’s standard of living would have ranked somewhere between a unicorn and a personal dragon. Capitalism creates the impossible; socialism arrives afterward to explain that mankind had been entitled to it all along."
The urgent need to tax billionaires out of existence - "The New Democratic Party, alone among our federal political parties, has called for an annual net wealth tax, which would apply exclusively to people with assets worth $10 million or more. Such a tax could raise $10 billion a year, thereby helping to fund social programs and making our tax system fairer. Those are both very important goals. But there’s another even more compelling reason for a wealth tax: to prevent wealthy interests from becoming so powerful they effectively have veto power over the will of the people."
When left wingers are very explicit that when they screech "tax the rich" or "tax billionaires", they mean to tax them until they are no longer rich / no longer billionaires. Presumably, that's what they mean by the "rich" paying their "fair share"
Left wingers are driven by envy and hatred. So raising money is not the primary purpose of "taxing" the rich - it's to make them no longer rich
Naturally, like other left wingers, the authors don't understand the difference between income and wealth. This is why they're poor
Paul Zupich | Facebook - "The left continues to promote false claims, which too many people believe. For example, it’s reasonable to debate whether the rich pay their fair share of income taxes; it’s a lie to claim that the wealthy pay a lower tax rate than everybody else. They claim that Warren Buffett pays a tax rate of 0.1% while the average teacher pays 9.8%, or that Elon Musk pays 3.3% while the average registered nurse pays 13.3%. Bernie Sanders and others make those claims using numbers generated by ProPublica. For teachers and nurses, the tax rates are calculated as a percentage of income; however, for the wealthy, they use a percentage of wealth, not income. In other word, they are not calculated the same way. The top 1% actually pay about 26% of their income in federal taxes. The top 1% pay 40% of all federal taxes, while the bottom half pay virtually nothing. Why lie about that? This is typical of what Democrats and the media do."
The Refined Populist on X - "Lindsay Ellis made a two-hour “critique of capitalism” in which she abandons her family to take five back-to-back solo vacations, spending the entire time feigning abject misery and sneering at the unsophisticated proles who’re actually enjoying themselves. She ultimately concludes Disney is the “least evil” cruise line because they recognized her as an influencer, gave her a free VIP suite upgrade, had a crew member she wanted to sleep with, and were slightly more transparent about how gratuities are distributed. Virgin was #2 because they had drag queens and no crotch goblins. The whole video honestly felt like a parody of aging BreadTubers, right down to her cruise buddy being an insufferable twink who wouldn’t shut up about his favorite anarchist philosophers, oblivious to the fact that he’d get his brains bashed in with a rock about six minutes into his romanticized stateless utopia. My favorite part was when she attended a Frozen princess dinner and, for one brief, glorious moment, experienced a flicker of actual self-awareness about how messed up it was to be on a Disney family cruise without her two young children. She then immediately drowned such introspections in alcohol before resuming her simultaneous complaints that everything costs too much and that cruise lines should 10x their labor costs. Leftism in 2026. You genuinely cannot make this up."
Rothmus 🏴 on X - "Argentina’s monthly inflation went from 25.5% in Milei’s first month to 1.7% in August 2026. As expected when government stops printing pesos to cover the deficit. Fiscal surplus first, then prices stop sprinting. The “experts” who called this “austerity theater” now have 33 months of INDEC data to explain away."
Rothmus 🏴 on X - "Milei balanced the budget after 9 years of deficit. The surplus covers the debt service too, so the government no longer has to borrow or print just to stay open. That was the inflation machine in Argentina. Chronic deficits financed by the central bank, a collapsing peso, and prices that reset every month. Close the gap and the printing press loses its reason, the currency stops being a melting ice cube, and saving, lending, and pricing in pesos become possible again. Image"
Melissa Chen on X - "Seeing the riots in France and the terrible state of the French economy made me think of this 🔥 speech by Lee Kuan Yew.
"Look at the buildings around you. Look at the stock market bouncing up. Let me tell you how to bring it down. Have a couple of really good riots, shake political confidence."
On top of that, the French economy is collapsing. Only one in three French people works in the real economy. Two-thirds live off other people’s taxes. The entire system is completely unsustainable due to absurd pensions and runaway state spending.
At the end of the clip, Lee says: "My political opponent says that we are 'obsessed with profits' I say 'YES! That’s how Singapore survives.' If you have no profit, who pays for all of this? If you make profit into a dirty word.. Singapore dies!” Beyond mass migration, this is how Western Europe is dying btw."
Meme - Tom Jones @93vintagejones: ""The primary cause of the West's economic decline is the rapid expansion of parasitic rent-seeking actors who extract value without producing it.""
"Rather, the real problem is that Western firms are burdened by unsustainably large non-essential costs placed on them by politicians in order to fulfil the demands of distributional coalitions. Punitive taxes, administrative roles that only exist to ensure the companies comply with non- essential legislation, sky-high costs imposed as a result of political decisions all these layers of nonproductive activity weigh the system down. Chinese companies, by contrast, don't have as many barnacles on their boats; since its' leaders don't need to run for election, they have no need to create or feed distributional coalitions."
SinoAngloFuturism - "the most redistributive systems - if you use transfers from top 10% to bottom 50% - are the U.S. and Britain. But it doesn’t seem to be impacting inequality; a recent paper in Applied Economics has demonstrate that Europe’s lower inequality levels cannot be explained by more equalizing tax and transfer systems, because (after accounting for indirect taxes and in-kind transfers) the US redistributes a greater share of national income to low-income groups than any European country...
'China does little by way of redistribution from the wealthy to the poor; rather, it is enacting a Leninist agenda in which the state retains enormous discretion to command economic resources in order to maintain political control and to build toward a post-scarcity world.'...
Being engineers, Chinese leaders see infrastructure projects as a better form of social transfer. They have no intention, even when those infrastructure projects deliver a higher level of development, from altering from that strategy; in 2021 Xi Jinping said said, “Even when we have reached a higher level of development... we should not go overboard with social transfers. For we must avoid letting people get lazy from their sense of entitlement to welfare.” What is unsaid throughout Wang’s book is that Chinese leaders do not have to worry about elections...
Wang argues that the development of ‘the lawyerly society’ has resulted in America being unable to develop the infrastructure necessary to keep up with its own population growth, or sustain sufficient economic growth – something that is replicated in most modern liberal democracies, particularly those in Western Europe, which have developed a dangerous combination of vetocracy and massive immigration-derived population increases. But there is now an increasing view that we should treat developed Western nations as developing. Breckneck’s conclusion sees Wang argue that in order to compete with China, America must recapture its desire and willingness to build; the abundance and progress movements in America are also, in some way, a rejection of the approach of the lawyerly society and an adoption of the engineering society’s approach to infrastructure. There is a similar desire to see Britain build again too; Anglofuturism. While Aris Roussinos has offered some intellectual scaffolding, the movement largely lacks rigorous political philosophy. For most of its adherents, Anglofuturism is defined not by theory but simply by a singular focus on grand infrastructure projects. If there is to be an Anglo future, we have to get Britain building again - and that means treating Britain, if not quite as a developing nation, then as a nation that needs to be developed."
Left wingers will never be happy, because they are just miserable people. Left wingers in the US pretend that their lives are living hells and all they want is free healthcare, but left wingers in Canada have it and are just as miserable as their comrades across the border
ThemeParkScout on X - "So… my daughter tried Rollercoaster Tycoon for the first time ever. She made all the rides free so “everyone can ride” because she has a kind heart. Then she ran out of money. She then started charging on everything, including the bathrooms. Greatest game of all time."
Meme - "GENEROSITY
Man: I WANT TO HELP
YOUR MONEY. YOUR CHOICE. YOUR SACRIFICE.
SOCIALISM
Bernie: I WILL DECIDE HOW MUCH YOU GIVE AND TO WHOM.
Panicked man: BUT I WANTED TO CHOOSE
Bernie: CHOICE IS FOR CAPITALISTS.
YOUR MONEY. HIS CHOICE. HIS CREDIT."
Meme - Leigh Scott: "The top 1% made it possible to get anything delivered to your door within a day. The bottom 1% will steal it off your porch. The top 1% make cell phones and the internet possible. The bottom 1% made it so we have to have a ton of Passwords and security so our money and identity aren't stolen. The top 1% facilitates our ability to travel around the world on airplanes. The bottom 1% are why we have to endure TSA. The top 1% are the ones who allow us to get prescription drugs that make our lives better. The bottom 1% are why the deodorant and Sudafed are locked up in cases. The top 1% innovate to make our lives simpler and more efficient. The bottom 1% make our insurance rates higher. So anybody screaming about the "1%" are screaming about the wrong 1%."
ً on X - "You can’t have hyperwealth without hyperpoverty. A billionaire exists in one country because child labor exists in another. Stock markets grow by looting countries raw. That’s the reality of capitalism: the misanthropic greed of the rich is fed by devastating the poor."
Commies think they're poor because other people are rich. That's why communism destroys countries, because of the delusion that destroying success helps failures
Griff on X - "Unpopular opinion but we spend far too much time organising our society around the lowest 20%. The poor, violent, uneducated, underperforming, illegals, refugees etc etc we throw BILLIONS at them every year and they never seem to get any better. Instead we lack any compassion for the productive elements of society who get up every day and go to work. We tax them or 'red tape' them to such an extent that they've clearly stopped producing. We need to build a society around the top 40% - lets get everyone rich. Start believing in ourselves again."
Spencer Pratt on X - "$500M net worth George Clooney could’ve permanently housed 8 homeless people for the rest of their lives with the money he spent on a single-use dress for his wife at a 4 hour event. I will never tolerate a woke scold lecture from these people. Just be an ostentatious celebrity and own it."
Thread by @MattGLilley on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "A bunch of Nobel Prize-winning economists have endorsed California's proposed billionaire wealth tax. I can't oppose them on authority. But I know some academics who can.
Stiglitz (1976) v. Stiglitz (2026)
Atkinson–Stiglitz: redistribute through the income tax, not extra tax instruments.
California: "What about a tax on accumulated assets?"
Stiglitz: signed. The theorem was unavailable for comment.
Acemoglu (2001) v. Acemoglu (2026)
Colonial Origins: "Protection against expropriation risk is extremely important for long-run prosperity."
Also: "Anyway, here's a 5% levy on the existing property of one narrowly defined group." It's a one-off. I pinky promise.
Apparently the lesson of Colonial Origins was credible property rights are important until the property crosses ten figures.
· The coefficient on expropriation risk: enormous.
· The coef when the taxpayer owns Nvidia stock: Appendix B, Vibes.
Diamond (1971) v. Diamond (2026)
Diamond–Mirrlees: Preserve production efficiency. Don't distort productive choices when other tax instruments exist.
Prop 40: tax the assets of people who own lots of productive capital? Professor Production Efficiency: "Sounds good."
Banerjee & Duflo (2007) v. Banerjee & Duflo (2026)
The credibility revolution: Stop waving your hands about giant ideological questions. Find something you can identify. Run the experiment. Measure what happened.
And therefore, naturally: California should impose a 5% wealth tax.
The causal chain:
1. Randomize remedial tutors in Mumbai and Vadodara.
2. Observe a 0.28σ rise in test scores.
3. ???
4. Tax Jensen Huang's equity.
Thousands of economist-hours teaching the profession to decompose huge policy questions into narrow ones with credible identification. Then the ballot proposition arrives: "No RCT necessary for this one, lads. Pre vs post comparisons in an AI boom are fine."
Krugman (1991) v. Krugman (2026)
New Economic Geography: Firms, workers and capital respond to incentives in deciding where to locate; those choices can shift equilibria.
Location is endogenous. Agglomerations aren't laws of nature.
But then for California: "Yes, location incentives exist. Yes, mobile capital exists. Yes, equilibria can shift. But Silicon Valley will obviously be fine."
Location is endogenous, but apparently not that endogenous.
Truly, the most robust result in modern economics is that, as ideology grows large, every theorem acquires a people-who-are-richer-than-me exception. (If you don't like the jokes, don't blame me, blame my co-author GPT. He did all the work)."
tedfrank on X - "It’s a shame Matthew doesn’t have a blue check, because this is the best thread on X today. Every Nobel Prize winner endorsing the California wealth tax, refuted by their own award-winning writing."
:Trust the Experts - when they push the left wing agenda
Steve Guest on X - "On CNN NewsNight, The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill argues that capitalism is oppressive and bound up in white supremacy.
Kmele Foster: “It's one thing to not think capitalism isn't working ideally. It's another thing entirely to insist that it is oppressive, that it is bound up with white supremacy.
Hill: “How is it not?”
Foster: “I've always preferred Adam Smith's description of capitalism as the natural system of liberty. The idea that people can own property, that they can exchange it freely with one another for profit, that they can find ways to put their resources to good use and profit in a way that is actually beneficial to everyone else, that there can be gains from trade that are mutually beneficial. These are foundational ideas that have created more wealth than any other system in human history. That is what capitalism is! That is not white supremacy.”
Hill: “Do you think capitalism has always worked that way?”
Foster: “I've actually just described the basic facts of the economics.”
Hill: “That ain't how it's always worked.”
Foster: “Slavery is an institution that is older than writing. It predates capitalism. The notion that white supremacy and all these other things are bound up with capitalism in an intrinsic and fundamental way is so absurd and laughable, it barely needs to be defended.”
Hill: “How was it absurd?”
Foster: “It barely needs to be defended.”
Hill: “What do you mean it barely needs to be defended?”
Foster: “You actually have to articulate what the connections is. How are these two things the same? I'm talking about private property, the right to exchange and sell with whomever you like. What does that have to do with white supremacy? … What is the white supremacy dynamic of private property?“"
Mary Katharine Ham on X - "Kmele: “You actually have to articulate what the connection is.” Hill writes for the Atlantic and has years of TV experience, but it didn’t occur to her she would ever need to, and she isn’t prepared to."
Left wingers chant their slogans and repeat their platitudes, but are unable to make real arguments for them
Russ Greene on X - "Our great national tragedy: "Today, most U.S. counties depend on a level of government transfer income that was once reserved only for the most distressed places. In 1970, not even 1 percent of counties derived a quarter or more of their total personal income from transfers. In 2000, just 10.4 percent did. But by 2022, 53 percent of counties were receiving a quarter or more of their income from transfers." - @InnovateEconomy"
Left wingers keep claiming that they want taxes to be used to help people. Of course, they don't know (or pretend not to know) that the US spends over 2x as much on public healthcare as on defence. Presumably their ideal is to have an economy where all income comes from the government, and then the government then taxes it all away and finances everything with debt, because covid proved that money is fake
Lone Star Liberty PAC on X - "In a private Zoom meeting with Austin Sierra Club activists, James talarico says capitalism is an oppressive system he wants to dismantle:
"I'm ... thankful that young activists have really drawn the link between climate change and white supremacy and capitalism in our country.
"And I think only understanding the ways that all three of those oppressive systems work together are we going to be able to begin the process of dismantling them." #TXsen"
Meme - Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias: "Part of the affordability crisis is pretty clearly people just refusing to be thrifty - you should not be spending a quarter of your salary on DoorDash."
"There's pasta in the pantry and jarred sauce in the refrigerator. So what compels Kiely Reedy to keep having spaghetti with marinara delivered from the restaurant down the street, for several times the cost of cooking the dish herself? It's not that the restaurant dish is particularly good, she said. "It's the instant gratification." From her roughly $50,000 annual salary as a data processor in San Diego, Ms. Reedy, 34, spends at least $200 to $300 a week on food delivery. Ordering in has eaten away at her savings, she said, and led her to socialize less. She tips generously, but worries that the delivery drivers are poorly paid."
Proof that capitalism has failed!
AnechoicMedia on X - "I think the decline of thrift is part of loss of a shared social script for "average people" that revolves around middle class family formation. Most working people couldn't expect dramatic income gains over their life and so had to build wealth slowly through acts of self-denial. For those raised online, social comparison and visible inequality has instilled an all-or-nothing mindset about wealth. You're either one of the people destined to 10x your income or you're not. Getting rich makes thrift not matter, and if you're doomed to not be rich, then thrift also doesn't matter because nobody becomes rich through thrift. Thrift only matters if your goal is to be a slightly more respectable person of the same class. But what are you saving money for today? Probably not to have a family; Society isn't demanding you have kids, you don't attend church, there's no tribe that pats you on the back for doing the little things right every day. Home ownership, already seen as an impossible goal in top cities, also become sharply less affordable in recent years. On the other end, there isn't a penalty for going bust, either; You're never going to be allowed to starve or be refused medical treatment. And being carefree has its own social status, at least while young. So why not enjoy all the luxuries that are within reach and that everyone around you also seems to be enjoying? Most of my life I adhered to a strict moralizing attitude about personal finance and making the correct decisions to be better than everyone else. This helped avoid some personal crises, but otherwise, bringing your future retirement a few years closer doesn't change life much. I also frequently failed to live up to my own standards and spent more on eating out, then felt guilty for it. In the end, none of this mattered. Switching jobs a couple times made a bigger impact on my finances than a decade of buying store brand milk and bread. So either I was always going to make more money, in which case thrift just made me a neurotic weirdo for no reason, or I wasn't, and I was denying myself for no proximate social reward."
Everything adds up. People who spend a lot on one frivolous thing spend on other frivolous things too
Meme - "Yes, great way to drive the private sector out of business"
Sean Collinson: "if the private sector can't compete it shouldn't exist"
Dan Jenkins: "The whole argument for having private enterprise do things under capitalism is that they are more efficient, and the profit is the reward of that efficiency. If at a base level they can't compete with the much less efficient government, what is the argument for their existence?"
Left wing logic - if the private sector cannot compete against a competitor that pays no taxes and gets endless subsidies from taxes, it deserves to go out of business
‘Conservative, business-friendly states:’ Buc-ee’s CEO wants to avoid Blue states - ""We're growing. We're building in a lot of places. But when you find a conservative, business-friendly state with a phenomenal workforce, it makes a difference. And I'm starting to realize life's too short to try to build in places that people don't appreciate what you're bringing, versus a place like this where people do appreciate what you're building," Aplin said in a video shared by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders... "That leadership, that concept, that idea of conservative, business-friendly, family-oriented concept, works so much better if it trickles down from the leadership, from the very top of the governor's office, at the congressmen, at the senators, at the mayors, the representatives. And so, what we found when we got here in Benton (Arkansas) was a business-friendly town," he added. "They said 'Let's roll up our sleeves and let's go get a Buc-ee's built.'""
John Althouse Cohen | Facebook - "“No one earns a billion dollars. You can only steal a billion dollars.” “So who are the victims of Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Jerry Seinfeld, and Paul McCartney?”"
Ro Khanna on X - "I am a believer in free enterprise. I want it to work for the people I grew up with, not just for a few in a few places. Always open to dialogue!"
Cynical Publius on X - "Absolute 🐂💩. This Congressman wants to tax unrealized capital gains, and when the tax is imposed on a founder of a VC-backed company and that founder has no liquidity to pay the tax, he or she must pledge his or her shares to the federal government to back the debt of an unpaid "wealth tax." Guess what happens if that founder never gets liquidity? The government seizes control of the company. This is a backdoor way to achieving Lenin's dream of seizing the means of production, and is as far removed from "free enterprise" as is possible. Khanna is a dangerous Marxist operative whose actions speak vastly louder than his words."
Threads - "Here's the difference between you and us: You want to know why a single mom got a $1 Pepsi with our tax dollars. We want to know why Tesla got billions in subsidies with our tax dollars. That's the difference."
Comment (elsewhere): "isn’t it weird how the left demanded everyone buy EVs, bribing people to do so with subsidies? And then after people buy them, the left blames the companies for the subsidies."
Another left winger: "The reason that mom bought a pepsi with SNAP is because Pepsico fought really hard to make that happen. Quit blaming poor people for Corporations faults". Weird. When people stick it to Pepsico by not letting moms buy Pepsi with SNAP, they are apoplectic too
Meme - Smashed head Bernie to Baker with a lot of bread using loudspeaker: "YOUR PROFITS ARE OBSCENE."
*Closed baker with empty bakery and long 90% tax bill from Bernie*
Bernie to long line of shocked people: "THE BAKER WAS GREEDY. THAT IS WHY THERE IS NO BREAD."
"PUNISH THE BAKER. BLAME THE BAKER. REPEAT."
Meme - Angry Soyjak: "Small businesses that can't pay a living wage should die!!!"
Shocked soyjak: "Why is everything controlled by 9 corporations?!"
Proof that capitalism has failed!
