Links - 25th September 2026 (2 - Socialism)

Does anyone else feel like "working-class culture" is just coded masculinity? : r/Socialism_101 - "I consider myself a democratic socialist and care deeply about workers' rights, unions, universal healthcare, and improving material conditions for everyone.  That said... I get incredibly uncomfortable around a lot of blue-collar workers.  I was recently at a family gathering where several of my cousins, who work in construction and trucking, were talking loudly about football, trucks, hunting, and making jokes that probably wouldn't fly in progressive spaces. They weren't even talking to me, but I felt on edge the entire time.  Maybe it's because so many trades are dominated by conservative men, but I just associate that whole culture with aggression. The yelling, the swearing, the macho posturing. It honestly intimidates me.  People always say "the working class is the backbone of society," but if I'm being honest, I have a much easier time connecting with baristas, nonprofit workers, graduate students, and people in creative fields than I do with mechanics or roofers.  I know this probably sounds elitist, and I feel guilty because I believe in class solidarity. But every time someone says we need to spend more time organizing among tradespeople, my first reaction is that I'd rather not.  Does anyone else struggle with this? How do you reconcile believing in socialism while feeling deeply uncomfortable around the kinds of people socialism is supposedly for?"
Time to replace the hammer and sickle with a keyboard and pen

Joshua Reed Eakle 🗽 on X - "Marxism is so depleted it's insane. No ambition, no new answers, no adjustments. Just 1917 forever. A Bolshevik infinity. We must imagine Sisyphus seizing the means of production."

Ken Gardner on X - "One of Ayn Rand's very best observations, which has aged like fine wine:  "Socialism is not a movement of the people. It is a movement of the intellectuals, originated, led and controlled by the intellectuals, carried by them out of their stuffy ivory towers into those bloody fields of practice where they unite with their allies and executors: the thugs.""
sg on X - "Neither Marx nor Engels came from the working class, and certainly weren’t serfs or peasants."
Ken Gardner on X - "And we are seeing it today. DSA is basically young college-educated radicals, many of whom haven't done an honest day's work in their entire lives. <Many of them seem unemployable, tbh.>"

‏ً on X - "Genuinely, I DO NOT like the concept of capitalism. I don’t want to work my job every day. I want to make art. I want to be in my garden. I want to feel something."
Hon. Vickie Paladino on X - "Spoiler Alert: Socialism does NOT mean you don’t have to work.  I have no idea how these idiotic children got the idea that socialism equals never having to work.  Capitalism didn’t invent the concept of a job or a boss or bills or responsibilities. It just found a better way to organize them.   But rest assured, socialist countries have still have all of the above. You don’t just get to decide to be an artist or dancer or whatever.   It’s actually insane that any of this needs to be explained."

Meme - "Communists when they get assigned to Alaskan coal mines instead of teaching lesbian dance theory from a free luxury condo"

Meme - "r/communism101
How is labor properly incentivized in higher-stage communism
How did Marx think society will function in the higher stage of communism when private property and classes are abolished, theres no wage labor and commodity production or even money to compensate. What incentivizes me to become a pilot instead of a street cleaner, my love for planes or humanity? How can there without wage labor be a difference in outcomes for a pilot vs cleaner"
"People that will actually live in a communist society will neither think nor behave like you, much like you do not think or behave like people living in a feudal society."
This is why gulags and re-education camps are such features of Communism

Tankie of the Lake | Facebook - "Liberal believe that the Soviet invasions of Poland and Finland are "gotcha's" because they genuinely believe that the only acceptable response to fascism is to do nothing.  The Nazis where conquering Poland, the Soviets stopped them from taking all of it. Finland was an axis power, and they only finally removed the swastika from their Air Force insignias in the 21st century.  Liberals demand that existing socialists states must be blameless saints while they built a system that handed the nuclear codes to a dementia riddled fascist pedophile."
Left wingers are making stuff up again as they always do. Of course the tankies in the comments are pretending the MR pact was exactly the same as the Munich agreement (as if Stalin wasn't caught by surprise by the German invasion)

History Betrayed - "The Soviet-Finnish Winter War (1939–1940) is often portrayed in Western history as a simple story of Soviet aggression against a small democratic nation. But the actual situation was rooted in the strategic reality facing the USSR before World War II fully erupted. The Finnish border sat dangerously close to Leningrad, one of the Soviet Union’s largest industrial and population centers. As Nazi Germany expanded across Europe and collective security collapsed, Soviet leadership viewed the existing border as militarily indefensible. The USSR initially sought territorial exchanges and buffer zones through negotiation, offering Finland land elsewhere in exchange for moving the border farther from Leningrad. Finland rejected the proposals, fearing Soviet domination. War followed. Early Soviet offensives were disastrous, with Finnish forces using terrain, winter conditions, and mobile tactics to inflict massive losses on the Red Army. But once Soviet command reorganized and concentrated overwhelming artillery and manpower, the balance shifted decisively. Finland eventually signed peace, ceding territory but preserving its independence. When Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, Finland later joined the war against the Soviets alongside the Germans, reinforcing Soviet fears that the northern approach to Leningrad was a major strategic vulnerability. The war demonstrated both the weaknesses of the early Red Army and the brutal security calculations shaping Europe on the eve of the largest war in human history. #worldwar2 #ww2 #winterwar #history #historyfacts"
Is there any communist aggression tankies won't justify? Whitewashing communist crimes is indeed a betrayal of history

Diego Angulo on X - (Translated from Spanish): "As a former sympathizer of the Left, today I want to show you 10 questions that leftists always dodge because they don't know what to answer:
1. Why does no one risk their life to escape to a socialist country, but rather the other way around?
2. If Socialism is so superior to Capitalism, why does it need violence instead of simply convincing people?
3. If the market is so irrational, why does the State need market prices to make decisions?
4. If the worker creates all the wealth, why does productivity change so much based on the available capital and technology, and not so much based on the hours worked?
5. If the end of Capitalism is approaching, why does it survive all crises and give the impression that it strengthens over time?
6. If the entrepreneur contributes nothing, why has it never been enough to simply gather workers to create companies?
7. If you distrust entrepreneurs, why do you trust politicians so much?
8. If the State must correct all the market's failures, who corrects the State's failures?
9. If business profit is undeserved, why would a public servant's salary be fully justified?
10. If Capitalism is exploitation, why do people participate in it and want to participate even when they have other alternatives?"

Axios on X - "GOP reboots the Red Scare as young Democrats embrace socialism"
Greg Lukianoff on X - "Disappointed to see this using the “conservative pounce” formulation.  I’m Gen X. All of us, including liberals like me, were there when we watched a nation filled with brilliant people put its best minds to making socialism work. It was an unparalleled disaster — not just economically, but environmentally, and certainly from a human rights perspective as well.  The fact that we now have people on both the right and the left who think Lenin was on to something, or that “real socialism has never been tried,” is mind-blowing. It represents a massive generational failure of our K–PhD system. They didn’t learn the history, philosophy, or economics that would have prevented them from falling for the same midwittery that too many of our grandparents fell for.  Sure, it sounds nice. Utopia always does. But it was a colossal disaster that we must not repeat.  So no, Axios. The news isn’t that the GOP is sounding the alarm. It’s that more genuine liberals aren’t."

Madeline Pendleton on X - "Deciding which non-capitalist ideology you like is the easy part, fun even. Unlearning all the capitalist propaganda you were fed about the world is the hard part bc it means admitting you were wrong about everything. A lot of people do the first but not the second."
Cathy Young 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 on X - "This dingbat reminds me of the time my mom (then 5-6 years out of the USSR & teaching music at an American university) started telling a colleague about her & her family's experiences with Soviet medicine and he told her she was channeling American propaganda 🤣🤣🤣"

Students For Liberty | Facebook - "Angela Davis Made Political Imprisonment Her Life's Work.
She edited If They Come in the Morning in 1971 while facing capital charges. She wrote Are Prisons Obsolete? She co-founded Critical Resistance in 1997. She built the modern language of prison abolition in the United States, and she built it on a principle that sounded absolute: no human being should be caged for their beliefs. Before she was an abolitionist writer, Davis was a UCLA philosophy professor and a Communist Party USA member. In August 1970, guns registered in her name were used in a California courthouse raid that killed a judge and three others. She fled, made the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, and spent sixteen months in jail on charges of kidnapping, conspiracy, and murder. During that time, "Free Angela" committees were organized across the Soviet bloc. East German schoolchildren sent her postcards by the hundreds of thousands. Moscow made her a global cause. In June 1972, a jury acquitted her on every count.
The Principle Was Supposed to Be Universal.
She walked out of jail owing a debt to a global movement that had made political imprisonment its cause. The claim she carried forward was supposed to apply to every regime that kept a dissenter in a cell. A prisoner in California and a prisoner in Prague were the same category of injustice, whatever flag flew over the courthouse.
In August 1972, a Letter Arrived from Prague.
Jiří Pelikán, former director of Czechoslovak Television and a lifelong communist, wrote to Davis in the pages of the New York Review of Books. Soviet tanks had crushed the Prague Spring four years earlier. His own party comrades were now in Ruzyně prison for the crime of defending socialism with a human face.
He Named the Prisoners One by One.
Milan Hübl, historian. Jaroslav Šabata, psychologist. Karel Kyncl and Jiří Hochman, journalists. Most had been jailed by other communists. Pelikán asked Davis to visit Ruzyně, to speak for men imprisoned for the same reason she had been. He ended the letter: "I assure you, Angela, that not only I but many other people are waiting for a reply."
No Reply Ever Came.
There is no evidence Davis read the letter, and none that she answered it. The champion of political prisoners had received a plea from a communist reformer jailed by communists, and she chose silence. Silence in her case was itself a position.
The Pattern Kept Repeating.
In 1975, Solzhenitsyn told the AFL-CIO labor federation in New York that when Czechs had appealed to Davis, she answered that the prisoners "deserve what they get." In 1991, Alan Dershowitz described giving Davis's office a list of Soviet Jewish refuseniks jailed for wanting to leave the USSR. Her office replied, by his account, that these were opponents of socialism who belonged behind bars.
Meanwhile She Accepted the Honors of the Jailers.
In 1979 Davis flew to Moscow to accept the Lenin Peace Prize from the government that ran the Gulag. In East Germany she was celebrated by Walter Ulbricht, embraced by Erich Honecker, granted an honorary doctorate at the University of Leipzig. Rudolf Bahro, the East German dissident socialist rotting in a Stasi cell, never received a single public word from her.
The Abolitionist Would Not Abolish the Gulag.
A prison abolitionist who selects her prisoners is no longer abolishing prisons. She is redistributing them. The cages Davis wanted torn down were the cages built by regimes she opposed. The cages built by regimes she admired were beneath her attention, and the prisoners inside them were beneath her advocacy. A principle that applies only to your enemies and never to your allies is not a principle. It is a weapon. The men in Ruzyně, the refuseniks in Soviet cells and labor camps, and the dissident socialists in Honecker's Germany paid the price for the difference."

Mildly Interesting Stuff That You Might Like | Facebook - "In 1936, George Orwell traveled to Spain to fight fascists, but the people who nearly killed him were his own communist allies. At the time, Orwell identified strongly with the radical left and had joined the POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification), an anti-Stalinist socialist militia in Barcelona. He believed he was stepping into a utopian workers' revolution where class structures had been abolished and true equality was taking root. His romantic ideals were violently shattered—not just by the fascist forces of Francisco Franco, but by his own nominal allies. In May 1937, Soviet-backed communists systematically turned on their leftist counterparts in Spain. Orwell witnessed firsthand the brutal suppression, manufactured propaganda, and purges directed by Moscow against the very people who were supposed to be fighting on the same side. He barely escaped Spain with his life, fleeing across the border while many of his comrades were imprisoned or executed by Soviet secret police. Before his time in Spain, Orwell was largely sympathetic to the communist experiment in Russia, viewing it as a flawed but perhaps necessary step toward a more equitable society. After surviving the betrayal in Catalonia, his perspective completely inverted. He recognized that totalitarianism, regardless of whether it draped itself in fascist or communist rhetoric, relied on the destruction of objective truth and the absolute suppression of individual liberty. This firsthand brush with ideological betrayal fundamentally transformed Orwell's worldview. He documented his disillusionment in his memoir Homage to Catalonia, and the experience shifted his focus toward a targeted crusade against authoritarianism. The direct exposure to Soviet tactics in Spain directly inspired his masterworks, Animal Farm and 1984. Without his firsthand experience in the trenches of Catalonia, the modern vocabulary for describing oppressive governments might never have been written."

Is anyone else completely disillusioned by the actual “proletariat”? : r/CapitalismVSocialism - "I need to vent, because I’m honestly vibrating with anxiety and frustration right now.  So, I identify as a socialist. I read theory, I support unions, and I genuinely believe in dismantling capitalist structures. But lately, I am finding it harder and harder to advocate for the actual members of the working class, because, let’s be honest, so many of them are completely steeped in toxic masculinity and reactionary, anti-progressive attitudes.  I was at the local café down the street from my apartment this morning, trying to get some grading/reading done before logging into my remote job. It was raining, so I had my umbrella. I also happen to carry a canvas tote bag from my university's literature department.  Two construction workers in high-vis vests came in. They were incredibly loud, taking up way too much physical space, and completely ignoring the unspoken social contract of quiet morning spaces. I was already feeling a bit overstimulated.  As they walked past my table, one of them looked at my tote bag, then at my umbrella, and said, entirely unprovoked, “Hey buddy, careful with that umbrella, don’t want it getting caught on your purse."  His buddy chuckled and they just walked on to get their coffees.  It was a "joke," I guess. "Playful" teasing. But it felt so deeply coded in gender policing and fragile heteronormativity. I just froze. I didn't say anything because, frankly, they were twice my size and I didn't want to escalate a situation with people who clearly don't understand basic boundaries. I just stared at my laptop and felt my face get hot.  Here’s the thing that gets me: I spend my free time fighting for their healthcare. I vote for policies that would literally give them better wages and safer working conditions. Yet, if I tried to explain the concept of intersectionality or gender-neutral language to them, they’d probably just laugh in my face or call me a slur.  How are we supposed to build solidarity with people who actively despise our values? I’m starting to feel like the actual proletariat has zero interest in progress. They don't want a socialist utopia; they just want to eat meat, drive giant trucks, and make fun of people who read books.  I’m just so tired of being the only one trying. Anyone else struggle with this?"

Meme - ""Holodomor wasn't violent because it was faceless bureaucrats and 7 degrees of separation" -Arya Winningson"
Arya Winningson: "yeah I would not describ that as violence. All infliction of suffering or pain is not violence. Violence is a specific type, a subset"
Words the left disapproves of are violence. Violence the left approves of isn't violence.

Meme - "Socialists say I should stop confusing socialism with communism. I say they should I stop confusing my money with their money."

Meme - Project Liberal @ProjectLiberal: "Leftists will call everything but this a genocide."
"Life expectancy. The period life expectancy at birth, in a given year.
China's "Great Leap Forward!" Also known as "Really bad weather!" *4 year drop in world life expectancy*"
DSA Watch: "Hasan Piker: Mao Zedong is one of the great leaders of this world"
It's only genocide when it pushes the left wing agenda

lily on X - ""Stalin would've killed you" If the party decides that is the right action ill gladly take the bullet"
Yuri Bezmenov's Ghost on X - "Here, a demoralized person's loyalty shifts entirely to ideology, embracing party decisions over personal values or self preservation. They've been conditioned through long-term subversion to accept even death for the cause, viewing it as a noble, ultimate act of devotion."

Jack on X - "They killed Charlie Kirk because he was their biggest threat. They could never beat him in a debate. Here is a resurfaced clip of him exposing Hasan Piker for not actually wanting socialism and living in a complete act….
KIRK: "Why don't you give 95% of your money away and go live on a commune?”
PIKER: "Do you really think that's how it works?”
KIRK: "Why not? Go live what you preach. I live what I preach. I am a free market capitalist. I employ people. I took a risk. I have my own startup business. Every single day, I practice what I preach."
"He wants other people to contribute to what he considers to be a good idea. What he considers will make the world a better place."
"You have the freedom to go live as a socialist. Go do it, Hassan. What's stopping you?"
An absolute mic drop moment."

Meme - The Modern Marxist: "The USSR was a democracy. China is a democracy. Cuba is a democracy. The US is NOT a democracy. If you disagree with this, I implore you to actually look into the political systems of these countries"
The fourth positionist: "North Korea is also a democracy."
The Modern Marxist: "Agreed"

/his/ - Rejoice, our favorite /his/ comic is going to Chin - History & Humanities - 4chan - "Acktually, while in theory communism is supposedly to attract the the poor workers, in reality their target audience dont give a fuck and the people most attracted to it are spoiled children of upper middle class families or psychopathic thugs and criminals, both of whom didnt work much in their lives.
All the communist leaders who successfully take over countries are failsons of the upper class:
>Karl Marx
Dad was an upper middle class lawyer, mom was from a wealthy merchant/future industrialist family, his family owned many vineyards and lived in spacious 10 bedroom home.
>Lenin
Dad was a noveau riche nobleman. Had a privileged upbringing in a huge house with servants and attended elite schools before flunking out
>Mao Zedong
Dad was prosperous merchant, owning 20 acres of land (huge by Chinese standard), the richest guy in his village. Was able to send Mao to good schools and support him throughout his studies which he eventually dropped out
>Che Guevara
Born to upper-class parents, dad is a well-to-do architect and businessman, mom is from a rich landowning family. Big houses in multiple provinces, went to good schools, took holidays all over Latin America.
>Fidel Castro
Son of a prosperous sugar plantation owner in Cuba with hundreds of servants and workers. Went to the best schools
>Ho Chi Minh
Son of a land-owning Confucian bureaucrat. Went to the best French colonial school before dropping out
>Pol Pot
Son of aristocratic landowning family with ties to the Cambodian monarchy. Went good local schools and went to France for college"

Meme - "Marx is an idiot."
"Have you read Marx?"
"No" -> "Goes to show"
"I've read the Manifesto" -> "Well, that's just a pamphlet"
"I've read Das Kapital" -> "You have to study Marx for years before understanding him."
"I've read his letters" -> "You need to separate the author from his works."

Meme - Stalin: "THERE IS NO I IN TEAM. BUT THERE IS A U IN GULAG"

The DSA Platform vs. Mao's Original Platform: A Side-by-Side Reading Plus Guangxi: A Case Study

Insurrection Barbie on X

The DSA Platform vs. Mao's Original Platform: A Side-by-Side Reading Plus Guangxi: A Case Study

The DSA's 2025-2026 program was ratified this year. Its authoritative text is public at platform.dsausa.org. Mao Zedong's founding platform — the Common Program of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference — was adopted on September 29, 1949, and served as the constitution of the People's Republic of China until 1954. Below is a side-by-side comparison of the two:

Both frame politics as a war between "the working class" and "the capitalist class." The DSA platform says: "We stand against the capitalist class and the politicians that serve their interests" (DSA Program). Mao's platform: China's revolution unites the working class and peasants against "imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism" (Wikipedia / Common Program).

Both demand a new rewritten constitution. DSA: "Our goal is to put workers in charge of the government through a new democratic constitution" (DSA Program). Mao's Common Program itself was the new constitution, replacing the pluralist 1946 Constitution of the Republic of China.

Both call for a single unicameral legislature. DSA: "proportional representation in a single federal legislature" — meaning the abolition of the U.S. Senate (DSA Program). Mao's Common Program established the National People's Congress as "the highest body of state power" — unicameral by design (Wikipedia / Common Program).

Both eliminate independent judicial review. DSA: "Limit the Court's power of judicial review which it uses to effectively create and abolish laws outside the legislative process" (DSA Program). Mao's Common Program subordinated all courts to "democratic centralism" (Wikipedia / Common Program).

Both nationalize the "commanding heights." DSA: "the largest corporations are put under public ownership and democratic control" and "public ownership over major transportation and energy infrastructure and natural resources" (DSA Program). Mao's Common Program: "development of production through socialist relations of production," with the state prioritizing "the state-owned economy" while tolerating small private enterprises in a "mixed economy" transitional phase (Wikipedia / Common Program).

Both defend America's geopolitical adversaries against sanctions. DSA: "End economic sanctions that impact the sovereignty of countries whose governments act independently of the United States, such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran" (DSA Program). Mao's Common Program based its foreign policy on "respect for mutual sovereignty" — the identical rhetorical formula he used to justify supporting Kim Il-sung's invasion of South Korea and every anti-Western regime that followed (Wikipedia / Common Program).

Both demand reduced U.S. military capability. DSA: "Greatly reduce the U.S. military budget, close overseas bases, and bring troops home" (DSA Program). Mao dissolved the Nationalist army and reoriented Chinese military doctrine around anti-imperial "self-reliance."

Both weaponize "fascism" as an expandable enemy label. DSA: "Only a party that fights for working people can win the battle against fascism" (DSA Program). Mao's Common Program aimed to eliminate "feudal, compradorial, and fascist ideologies" — a category eventually used to justify killing 240,000 shopkeepers in the 1952 Five Antis Campaign (Wikipedia / Common Program).

Those are just the highlights.

Here is the objection I will get from from the lovers of the common good utopia on the left: "That's ridiculous. The DSA is not Mao. It's Scandinavian social democracy. You're being hysterical."

Every Marxist-Leninist party that has ever taken power on a moderate platform has purged its coalition partners and begun killing within a decade. Every single one. There are no exceptions.

The Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, in coalition with King Sihanouk and moderate Cambodian nationalists. Within 72 hours they had forcibly evacuated the entire two-million-person population of Phnom Penh at gunpoint into the countryside. Currency was abolished the same week. Wearing eyeglasses became evidence of being an intellectual, punishable by death (Britannica / Khmer Rouge). Within four years they had murdered 1.7 to 2.2 million of their own people out of a population of 8 million which was the highest percentage of a nation's own population killed by its own government in modern history (Museum of Communist Terror, Wikipedia / Killing Fields).

Fidel Castro told Herbert Matthews of the New York Times in 1957, on the record: "I have said clearly and definitely that we are not communists." His 26th of July Movement's public platform was the restoration of the 1940 Cuban Constitution, free elections within 18 months, and freedom of the press. He seized Havana on January 1, 1959. Eleven days later the first mass firing squads began operating at La Cabaña fortress, and they were personally supervised by Che Guevara. The free elections promised in 18 months were never held. (Britannica / History Will Absolve Me, Cuba Archive).

Lenin's Bolsheviks ran on "Peace, Land, Bread" and in the November 1917 election for that Assembly the freest election in Russian history the Bolsheviks came in second, with 24% of the vote. When the Assembly convened on January 5, 1918, Lenin let them meet for 13 hours and then dissolved it at gunpoint. It never reconvened. The Red Terror was announced September 5, 1918, just ten months after the coup. By 1923, five million peasants, the same peasants that were promised "bread" were dead from the Russian Famine which was largely caused by forced grain requisitions from the Bolsheviks who had promised them land (Britannica / Russian Revolution).

Hugo Chávez told voters in 1998: "We are not going to expropriate. We are not communists." He then won 56% of the vote and within eight years his government had shut down the country's largest independent television station, packed the Supreme Court, and rewritten the constitution. Within fifteen he had expropriated 1,168 companies. By 2018 the country had 130,000% hyperinflation. By 2024 GDP had collapsed 78% and eight million Venezuelans — a quarter of the population — fled the country (Funds Society, SECO 2025 report).

Daniel Ortega returned to power in Nicaragua in 2006 as a reformed democrat who had accepted pluralism. In 2018 he killed at least 355 protesters (BBC). By 2023 he had stripped 222 political opponents of their Nicaraguan citizenship and deported them to the United States, including priests and former revolutionary comrades. In 2023 he sentenced Bishop Rolando Álvarez — a Catholic bishop — to 26 years in prison (Human Rights Watch). Catholic convents were shut down; the Missionaries of Charity were expelled; the Jesuit University of Central America was confiscated by the government.

Mao's own timeline is the most instructive of all. The Common Program was adopted October 1, 1949. Land Reform executions began within one year and killed up to five million landlords by 1953. By 1957, when Mao invited intellectuals to critique the Party in the "Hundred Flowers Campaign," half a million to 1.3 million people were arrested and sent to labor camps (Britannica / Anti-Rightist Campaign). By 1962 the Great Leap Forward famine killed 30 to 45 million people. By 1968, in Guangxi, the Party was organizing cannibalism.

They all started as moderates.

The Great Leap Forward alone killed more human beings in four years than every American war in the history of the United States combined, times thirty. The Great Leap was caused by a room full of central planners in Beijing who believed they could out-think markets, farmers, and physics. So they ordered peasants to melt down their cooking pots and farm tools into backyard steel furnaces which made 99% of the resulting steel unusable (MME Revise source booklet). Then they ordered the extermination of sparrows because sparrows ate grain. One billion sparrows were killed by citizens banging pots until the birds dropped dead from exhaustion. Without sparrows, locusts exploded and a 2025 NBER study calculated that the sparrow extermination alone caused approximately 2 million deaths (NBER).

Mao's own words to his own staff, on the record were: "50 million may have to die … you can't blame me when people die" (Hudson Institute).

Strangely, the American college graduate has never heard of the Great Leap Forward and instead has been told that the Cultural Revolution was about "excesses" rather than mass genocide. The university they attend assigned them The Communist Manifesto but never assigned The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press). See that's the book that documents the 94 million deaths attributable to communist regimes in the 20th century. All of whom by the way started as noncommunist moderate socialists. The Black Book of Communism is one of the most heavily peer-reviewed works of political history published in the last thirty years. It is also, unavailable in the modern American university curriculum.

In case the facts presented above are not enough, let's review what happened on June 18, 1968, in the Chinese province of Guangxi. In a 1983 internal investigation of the Chinese Communist Party itself, and further documented in Donald Sutton's academic study The Ritual and Culture of Cannibalism in Wuxuan, Guangxi, archives told one of the most horrifying stories I had ever read.

Wu Shufang was a teacher who taught geography and she spent the spring of 1968 as the target of a series of "struggle sessions" — the Cultural Revolution's signature ritual, in which she was dragged to a stage, forced to wear a dunce cap listing her crimes, made to kneel, and beaten while a crowd shouted denunciations. Her crime was that she came from an educated family and belonged to the "stinking ninth category" of class enemies.

In the end her students beat her to death on the morning of June 18.

Then the student leaders forced four of her fellow teachers to carry her body to the river and they forced one of the teachers — a colleague, who had shared a classroom with her — to slice her open so they could remove her heart and her liver. The remains were carried back to school and then seventy or eighty students ate her flesh in the school kitchen (Sutton, Time magazine, 1993).

Another group of students, in a smaller ceremony, cooked additional parts of her body in an earthenware pot in the private lodging of the vice head of the county Revolutionary Committee. Four of the students actually ate the meal in his presence.

A third group of students barbecued her flesh on a walkway outside classrooms 31 and 32 (Sutton).

This happened at a public high school in the middle of the afternoon. It happened while the "moderate" institutions of Chinese socialism — the neighborhood committees, the workplace units, the student associations, the local party branches — were all operating exactly as designed.

Wu Shufang was one of at least 421 named human beings eaten in Guangxi Province in the summer of 1968 (Wikipedia / Guangxi Massacre). Song Yongyi's archival work documents cannibalism in 27 of Guangxi's 40 counties — two-thirds of the province (Radio Free Asia interview with Song Yongyi).

Here are some of the others:

Zhang Boxun, primary-school teacher, Huangmao Street, same day, June 18, 1968. Denounced as a rebel-faction sympathizer. Tried to jump into a river to escape a struggle session. Caught. A militiaman named Guo Lixiang cut out his heart and liver with a five-inch knife. His flesh was cooked in an earthenware pot at the local government's Foodstuffs Depot. Over 80% of the unit's members ate the meat — some under duress (Sutton).

Two children, ages 11 and 14, Pubei County. Their father was beaten to death for belonging to the "fifth category" of class enemies. The local officials said, according to the primary-source record: "It is important to eradicate such people." The children were killed and eaten (RFA / Song Yongyi).

Liu Xiulan, 17 years old, daughter of a landowner. Gang-raped by nine people, who then cut open her belly and ate her liver and breasts. Her entire family was wiped out (RFA / Song Yongyi).

Gan Dazuo, Datuan village. Castrated and disemboweled while still alive by his own clansmen. His last recorded words: "Wait 'til I'm dead, then cut" (Sutton).

Chen Guorong, May 14, 1968. Ambushed by an 11-man militia. Killed with a large knife. His liver was cut out and shared among 20 participants as a night meal (Time magazine).

Five people in Shangsi County, October 1968. Militia leader "cut open the bellies of five people, ripped out their livers, cooked them and sat down together to eat them. The next day, they killed four more people and ripped out their livers, which they shared with the other people on the production brigade, who all got to taste a mouthful each, to symbolize the dictatorship of the proletariat" (RFA / Song Yongyi).

Every one of these deaths was carried out by "the revolutionary masses" against people the local Communist Party had labeled "class enemies," in a province with no famine (Bitter Winter). This was not desperation. There was food. This was cannibalism as political ritual.

The 1983 official CCP investigation of Wuxuan County alone found:

56 victims had their hearts and livers cut out.

18 victims were consumed completely — "down to the soles of their feet."

13 victims had their genitals eaten.

7 victims were cut up while still alive.

In Binyang County, every family was required to send a member to the eating hole to eat human flesh (Sutton). In one Wuxuan work unit, two young girls whose political standpoint was suspect were forced to eat the flesh to prove they were on the right side (Sutton).

"Cannibalism enabled the ringleaders in these obscene acts to distribute the blame among fellow participants and thereby protect themselves" (Sutton).

The eating was administered as a loyalty test and refusing to eat people meant you would be the next target. What starts as "the largest corporations are put under public ownership and democratic control" ends, in every historical instance, with the population being compelled to participate in mass murder so that nobody can safely testify against the party. That is the endgame of every ideology that believes there is no legitimate safeguard between the individual and the state — no independent institutions, no protected property, no countervailing courts, no free press, no sovereign local jurisdiction, no owner of anything the state cannot take. In that arrangement, the party runs out of external enemies within a decade, and the machinery it built to destroy them starts destroying the party's own founders, the party's own coalition partners, and finally the party's own supporters.

Of the estimated hundreds of thousands killed in Guangxi and the 421+ documented cannibalizations:

15 people were prosecuted for cannibalism, with sentences up to 14 years.

91 Party members were expelled — none was severely punished.

The provincial party boss who orchestrated the entire campaign, Wei Guoqing, was never punished. He rose to the CCP Politburo, served as Director of the People's Liberation Army's General Political Department, and died peacefully in 1989. On October 24, 2024, Xi Jinping's government reburied Wei Guoqing's ashes with full military honors at Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery — the CCP equivalent of Arlington (Radio Free Asia, 2024).

The current Chinese Communist Party the same party the DSA idolizes buried the man who supervised the cannibalism of 421 human beings, with full military honors, less than two years ago.

In 1981, 43% of the world's most extremely poor people lived in China. Mao had been dead five years and his planned economy had killed 65 million people, produced brittle backyard steel, starved the countryside, cannibalized the schools, and left the population as poor per capita as sub-Saharan Africa.

Then, in 1978, Deng Xiaoping restored private property in the countryside, deregulated prices, welcomed foreign capital, and allowed markets to reallocate labor and goods.

By 2020, China's share of world extreme poverty was less than 1%.

Roughly 800 million human beings were lifted out of extreme poverty (World Bank Poverty and Inequality Update, Fall 2025, Aeon on the World Bank's own data).

Every socialist experiment in history has produced starvation, tyranny, mass killing, and emigration. Every mixed-market economy in history has produced feast, freedom, and immigration. There are zero counterexamples. Not one. Ask a DSA member for the socialist country they would move to.

Links - 24th September 2026 (1 - Left Wing Economics)

Do the Rich Get All the Gains from Economic Growth? - "Adjusted for inflation, the US economy has more than doubled in real terms since 1975.  How much of that growth has gone to the average person? According to many economists, the answer is none or close to none... these depressing conclusions rely on studies and data that are incomplete or flawed. They understate economic growth for the poor and the middle class because they use measures of prices that mis-measure inflation. Some studies leave out important components of compensation such as fringe benefits which have become increasingly important in recent years. And some studies include the elderly which lowers measured progress because the elderly are an increasing share of the population and they are less likely to be working full-time if at all... Many of the most pessimistic studies about the fate of the American middle class ignore the changes in the American family since the 1970s and the effects have had on the way we measure changes in household income... the biggest problem with the pessimistic studies is that they rarely follow the same people to see how they do over time. Instead, they rely on a snapshot at two points in time. So for example, researchers look at the median income of the middle quintile in 1975 and compare that to the median income of the median quintile in 2014, say. When they find little or no change, they conclude that the average American is making no progress.  But the people in the snapshots are not the same people. You can’t use two snapshots to conclude that only the rich have made progress. It’s possible that everyone from the earlier snapshot has actually gotten richer and then been replaced by different people whose incomes will also rise. This is especially true when there is immigration. If new immigrants are disproportionately less skilled than Americans already here, measured incomes can fall even when those who are already here have steadily improving economic prospects. And when marriage rates are falling and people are increasingly living on their own, household income can fall while every individual is doing better. Estimate of economic progress based on household income are distorted by these effects.  What the snapshots show is that the rich today are richer than the rich of yesterday. If the rich people are the same people as yesterday, then one’s class determines one’s fate. But if they are not the same people, the snapshots tell you that the dispersion of income has increased. That may or may not bother you, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a distinct group called “the rich” who are capturing all the gains while the rest of us tread water. How important are these issues? One way to find out is to follow the same people over time.  When you follow the same people over time, you get a very different story from the standard one.  When you follow the same people over time, the largest gains over time often go to the poorest workers; the richest workers often make no progress.  The most dramatic claims by the pessimists that no one is making progress other than the rich are wrong. A study by Leonard Lopoo and Thomas DeLeire for the Pew Charitable Trusts uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and compares the family incomes of children to the income of their parents... 93% of the children in the poorest households — those in the bottom 20% — surpassed their parents. Only 70% of those raised in the top quintile exceeded their parent’s income... Julia Isaacs’s study for the Pew Charitable Trusts looking at the late 1960’s up to 2002 finds that children raised in the poorest families made the largest gains as adults relative to children born into richer families. The children from the poorest families ended up twice as well-off as their parents when they became adults. The children from the poorest families had the largest absolute gains as well. Children raised in the top quintile did no better or worse than their parents once those children became adults... Moving forward in the time of the analysis, Gerald Auten, Geoffrey Gee, and Nicholas Turner of the Office of Tax Analysis in the Treasury Department used tax returns to see how rich and poor did between 1987 and 2007. They find the same encouraging pattern: poorer people had the largest percentage gains in income over time... The median income of the people in the top 20% in 1987 ended up 5% lower twenty years later. The people in the middle 20% ended up with median income that was 27% higher. And if you started in the bottom 20%, your income doubled. If you were in the top 1% in 1987, 20 years later, median income was 29% lower... Splinter’s numbers don’t control for age. Presumably the lowest quintile workers in 1980 are going to be younger so perhaps the growth we see is just normal raises as workers gain experience. So I asked Yonatan Berman who has been working with the same data to do a similar calculation but restricting the sample to workers who start out 25–30 in 1980... All groups, and not just the richest, gain over their lifetime. The poorest workers make the largest percentage gains. The two lowest quintiles see their incomes more than double over their working life. The absolute gains for the three lowest quintiles are $18,800, $22,300, and $23,800. While the rich have larger absolute gains, the variance is much larger.  Finally, this is labor income. It does not include any measures of fringe benefits, benefits that became larger part of compensation over this period. No government transfers. No capital gains. And I would argue that the national income deflator imperfectly controls for improved quality of the goods we consume. This biases it upward meaning real growth is understated for all groups. Going in the other direction — these numbers are for workers — people who had earnings at both the beginning and the end of the period, so this probably overstates the increase in labor income of people at the bottom. The American economy isn’t just helping the richest Americans. Prosperity is being enjoyed widely... This does not mean that everything is fine in the American economy. There are special privileges reserved for the rich that help them reduce their risk of downward mobility — financial bailouts are the most egregious example. There are too many barriers like occupational licensing and the minimum wage that handicap the disadvantaged desperately trying to succeed in the workplace. And the American public school system is an utter failure for too many children who need to acquire the skills needed for the 21st century. But the glass is at least half-full... the proportion of households with two earners has actually decreased since 1980. (See Table H-12 here from the Census Bureau.) That’s because while more married couples are households where both spouses are working, the marriage rate has fallen." ‏ً on X - "The absolute funniest part of capitalist ideology is that they someone managed to convince everyone that "freedom" meant like...the freedom to choose between 63 kinds of shampoo, and not like...the freedom to quit a job you hate without losing your health insurance."
Canada has single payer healthcare but left wingers there are just as miserable, because left wingers are always miserable

Polymarket on X - "BREAKING: Florida becomes the first state to block welfare cash from being spent on tattoos, theme park tickets, video games, vapes, & other non-essential purchases."
Paul on X - "Welfare can be used on Tattoos, Theme park tickets, Video games, vapes, and other luxry goods?"
Left wingers just accused this of being fake news and people believing it of being stupid

No meta-analytical effect of economic inequality on well-being or mental health

End Wokeness on X - "Here's the cabin that Dolly Parton grew up in with 11 siblings. No electricity or water. Dolly died worth $650+ million, after $500 million donated to charity! This is America."
Clearly, she oppressed lots of people by getting rich and it's good that she died

Krystal Ball on X - "There is very simple math behind the need to tax billionaires. Billionaire wealth is increasing at an accelerating rate vastly outpacing the overall rise in GDP. This means that their wealth is not growing because the whole pie is growing. Their wealth is growing at your expense and the trend is accelerating. If you are not a billionaire and you and your children want to own things, this is your fight."
Crime In NYC on X - "If “the whole pie” remained at a constant size while their share grew, then your “very simple math” would make sense."
Left wing zero sum thinking again. They think they are poor because other people are rich.

Meme - Josh Howerton: "When Christians use the word "generosity" they mean "generosity with your own money." When progressives use the word "generosity" they mean "voting for the government to forcibly redistribute other people's money.""
sasseite @RespectableCon: "Presented without comment."
"Charitable giving by county in 2013. Percent of income given to charity *high in Christian/left wing areas, low in secular/right wing areas*"

The Kobeissi Letter on X - "BREAKING: Nike stock, $NKE, collapses to its lowest level since September 2014, now down -78% from its all time high seen in 2021. The stock has now officially erased over -$200 billion in market cap since its record high."
Lauren Chen on X - "EBT is reworked so that people need to spend their own money to get junk food, and now Nike's stock is collapsing. lol. lmao, even"

Meme - "WHY IS IT OKAY FOR BEYONCE TO MAKE $60 MILLION... _BUT NOT OKAY FOR A CEO WITH 3,000 EMPLOYEES TO MAKE $5 MILLION?"

Meme - Richard Hanania: "Businesses are fleeing blue states to go to red states. Biggest losers in terms of corporate headquarters are SF, LA, NYC, Chicago and SD. Biggest winners: Dallas, Austin, Houston, Phoenix, and Nashville. Capitalism just works better than statism. Why can't people admit it?"
"Southern hospitality. Net change in number of company headquarters from relocations, 2020-25"

Meme - Basil @LinkofSunshine: "NYC ran an experiment: a separate minimum wage for construction workers on buildings above 99 units ($72.50 an hour) As a result, almost all construction has been scaled back to 99 units, and we've built significantly less housing"
"Filings for new buildings by number of units"
Clear proof that the solution is to not have any exemptions and to pay all construction workers on buildings "fairly", and that the housing shortage is due to greedy capitalists and we need to seize houses to end it

Meme -
qasimrashid: "A reminder that it is always the right time to tax billionaires out of existence and protect working people, our democracy, and our future humanity"
qasimrashid: "NASA used our tax dollars to successfully complete a historic trip around the moon. Bezos skipped out on paying taxes and built his Blue Origin New Glenn rocket to explode on a launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Tax billionaires out of existence."
"Me when I have no idea how rockets work and know nothing about the history of NASA SLS or Orion."
When left wingers are very clear that when they say "tax the rich" or "tax billionaires", they are spiteful and mean to tax them until they are no longer rich or tax them until they are no longer billionaires. The primary motivation for left wing taxation policy is not to raise money but to punish the rich and successful (at any rate, those more rich and successful than them).
Blue Origin New Glenn's explosion didn't kill anyone. The Challenger disaster killed 7 people and Columbia killed another 7. This is proof that the US needs to confiscate Jeff Bezos's wealth to fund NASA

Stephen Moore on X - "Americans now pay more in taxes than they spend on food, clothing, and shelter combined. Think about that. Government has become so big and bloated that taxes cost more than life's basic necessities. Every American taxpayer should be outraged."
Of course, left wingers demand even higher taxes, because they think only the "rich" will pay them

Robert Schultz on X - "people will be like “but if we raise taxes on billionaires then the billionaires will just leave!” and it’s like, oh really, you’re saying we’d either gain more money in tax revenue or lose the weirdest people with the worst vibes? sounds like a win-win"
involuntary sentient on X - "The weirdest people with the worst vibes who are also the ones stealing all our money. So like...the cause of the problem will leave. Oh no."
Left wingers just hate rich people. Good luck paying for social spending when all the rich people leave
Left wingers think they are poor because other people are rich. Weird how when there were fewer billionaires, people were poorer

Handre on X - "$17 billion for 3.4 miles of subway tunnel. That works out to roughly $5 billion per mile, making the Second Avenue Subway the most expensive transit construction project in human history, per mile, by a significant margin. Madrid built its entire metro expansion in the early 2000s at under $100 million per mile. You are not misreading those numbers.  The Metropolitan Transportation Authority spent 86 years planning Phase 1 (the stretch from 96th Street to 63rd Street, opened in January 2017) before finally breaking ground in 2007. Decades of studies, committees, environmental reviews, and public hearings. Nobody personally paid for those delays. Nobody got fired. No executive absorbed the cost of a decade's worth of inflation, redesigns, and contractor overruns. When you insulate decision-makers from financial consequences, you get exactly this: paralysis followed by extravagance.  Free market economists have a term for what drives this: the calculation problem. Without real prices generated by voluntary exchange, planners cannot rationally allocate resources. The MTA doesn't discover the most efficient tunnel route through competition. It negotiates with unions whose contracts prohibit obvious efficiencies, hires consultants paid by the hour with zero incentive to finish, and answers to politicians who measure success in ribbon-cutting photos rather than cost per passenger mile.   The deeper issue is who pays. New York State taxpayers, federal taxpayers, and future riders through fare revenue all absorb the tab. The people who made the decisions that produced $5 billion-per-mile costs face no personal liability. A private developer whose budget overruns sees his equity evaporate. He has skin in the game. The MTA's leadership has a salary and a pension.  Phase 2 (96th Street to 125th Street, 1.5 miles) carries a projected price tag above $7.7 billion and has just broken ground. The political class will tell you this is what world-class infrastructure costs. What they won't tell you is that Tokyo, a city with arguably the most sophisticated rail network on earth, builds subway lines at roughly $250 million per mile, using private operators who survive only if they perform."
This doesn't explain why Anglo countries are prone to this sort of cost inflation

Austin Padgett (LudwigNeverMises) on X - "The money you save using cheaper labor in China is three times less than what it costs to ship the stuff all the way back here. The reason it is impossible to build in the US is we made it illegal. And so the industrial ecosystems developed in China. Avg labor cost as a percent of manufacturing revenue
China- 11%
US-14%
Difference- 3%
 Trans pacific shipping as a percent of manufacturing revenue- 10%  10 percent is over three times more than 3 percent.   So if it costs three times more to ship stuff halfway across the world than we make in labor savings why are we manufacturing so much in China?  The idea that we lost our production to foreign slave labor has elements of truth in the rare cases which prove to be exceptions to the rule.   But generally it is a pernicious leftist myth that distracts people from the real causes of our failure and creates a sense of fatalism that prevents us from solving the problem.   Interior China didn’t out compete coastal China even though the labor cost is lower. The whole point is skilled labor, the technology to maximize labor efficiency and the synergy of industrial hubs.   100 people picking rice in a field can’t compete with a tractor.   We can make stuff in America and we can make it not only cheaper, but also BETTER than anything the world has ever seen.   We’ve done it before, we can do it again. In fact we’ve already started."

Mark Grote | Facebook - "If you care about affordability, you must look at what is happening to Seattle. For years, state leadership has used liberal loving "tax the rich" policies as a low-risk political tactic, replacing a culture of achievement (the few) with one of resentment (the many). The results are now undeniable:
A "Zombie" Downtown: High-tech hubs and corporate job creators have been chased off by aggressive corporate, employee, and wealth taxes, leaving behind a skyline of vacant offices. Seattle now has the highest vacancy rate in the country.
The Hidden Cost: Because the tax base has eroded, the burden is shifting directly onto local homeowners even before now. Our personal King County property taxes are up 77% since we built our house in 2010 - and that before these recent headlines, painting a foreboding future for taxpayers.
A Shrinking Pie: Rather than focusing on growing the economy to expand opportunity for everyone, lawmakers have used these policies to alienate the very engines of growth that fund our state services. Their hubris never looks at the results of these terrible policies. It's just one bad idea that leads to another.
We are now trapped in a viscous cycle where service dependent low income earners flood the market while business flight shrinks the tax base, forcing the government to squeeze residents to make up the shortfall. Unless we shift away from a strategy of envy or "soak the rich" to one that attracts upward job creators, your taxes—and your cost of living—will continue to spiral upward, not only driving away job creators and tax revenue, but driving all of us away as well."

Meme - Freyja Katra, Girl IRL Cat URL @FreyjaErlings: "A thing they don't tell you about the "push a button for a million dollars but someone you don't know dies" hypothetical is that literally every billionaire is effectively pressing that button as much as they can all the time because that's how exploitation works"
Left wingers have a zero sum view of the world and think that for someone else to be rich, others must be poor

Is Met Gala sponsor Jeff Bezos evil just because he's rich? - "Our politics have been analogized to Veep. A more apt comparison some days is that we are living in a cartoon. Every good cartoon needs a supervillain or three. Our supervillains created millions of jobs, made goods cheaper and far easier to obtain, and revolutionized access to information, among other terrible, terrible things.   I am referring to billionaires. Reasonable people will debate, and disagree on, the best way to sketch out the tax code. Protestations to "tax the rich" have long been central to progressive politics. But last week's Met Gala was a reminder that there is something else undergirding those calls: what seems like legitimate hatred or, at a minimum, disgust. Why?...  The common theme here is that Bezos et al. are, in effect, not just subject to an unfair tax rate. It is that they are evil. He is not paying his "fair share," he is throwing people out onto the streets, he and others must have abused the law... it's also important to interrogate the basic idea that someone is evil because he is rich, which has become common wisdom in certain circles. There are certainly wealthy people who are rotten. Making a product that others want, though, does not make someone a bad egg. Amazon, founded by Bezos, allows people to get items much quicker and often for considerably less money. As of December of last year, the company employed 1.58 million people. He is our cartoon villain?   There are other examples. Sergey Brin and Larry Page gave the world near-unfettered access to information with Google. Maybe it's even how you found this article. (Thanks.) Steve Jobs effectively put computers in our pockets, facilitating more intimate communication and connection with friends and loved ones near and far. Elon Musk, for all of his controversy, helped pioneer the modern electric vehicle and is investing in technology to help people with neural issues regain function. Why is this never a part of the story?  This ire is not constrained to the yearly Met Gala. Perhaps nothing captures it better than a video New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani filmed last month, standing on the street, sneering while he informed constituents that "today, we're taxing the rich." The proposal: a pied-á-terre tax on luxury units whose owners do not live full-time in the city. Why sneering? Because Mamdani was outside of one such unit. He pointed upward at the penthouse and named and shamed its owner, Ken Griffin. Perhaps there is a conversation to be had about an additional tax on high-end, part-time residences. A government leader expressing such revulsion for a constituent is another thing entirely. One of the two men has a lot of audacity, and it is not the private citizen.   Griffin, after all, is a major contributor to the New York economy, though he has reportedly begun scaling back in response to the video. He is also a major philanthropist, having given away billions of dollars. Bezos, meanwhile, recently gave a $100 million donation to a charity funding early childhood education in New York. Will Bernie Sanders add that to his list of Bezos expenditures?"
Left wingers hate success, after all.

Rock Chartrand on X - "The buyer is just as "greedy" for wanting lower prices as the seller is for wanting higher ones. The employee is just as "greedy" for wanting higher wages as the employer is for wanting lower labor costs.   The free market channels these competing interests into voluntary exchange instead of coercion, and the resulting price is whatever both parties find acceptable. Neither side gets everything it wants, but both walk away believing they're better off than before, or no change takes place."
Turd Ferguson on X - ""Greed" is a term always applied to other people's wants, and never to our own."

Possum Reviews on X - "Remember how pissed Democrats got when the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron rule in 2024? That was the rule that enabled government agencies to make up their own interpretations of ambiguous regulations. This effectively gave them the power to fine people for made-up violations whenever they felt like it. Naturally, they would enforce their own rules selectively and arbitrarily.  Of course they couldn't do that on paper, but in real life, not everyone had the resources to sue the government when the EPA or FDA hit them with a bogus violation and fined them for something that was perfectly legal a week prior. This resulted in veterans being denied benefits they previously qualified for, made criminals of the owners of legal firearms, and the EPA used an absurd definition of "navigable waters" to justify fining farmers for filling in puddles.  When fines for trumped-up violations were imposed, they could force someone to pay money to a third party, including politically-aligned NGOs. In other words, when the Democrats controlled the government, they used this power to essentially bully political enemies out of their money and give it to themselves.  This isn't a conspiracy theory or even a secret. The Obama administration considered it a legitimate method of fundraising for Democrat-aligned organizations (and therefore themselves) without going through Congress. The Trump administration tried to stop it during his first term, but then Biden started it up again under the pretense of "environmental justice".  But then the Supreme Court overturned Chevron in 2024, and now the Democrats are broke. I don't think that's a coincidence."

Meme - "1. WE FORCE YOU TO PAY FOR ROADS, SCHOOLS, AND HEALTHCARE..
Man in tie: "It's for the common good!" *roads schools healthcare*
2. THEN WE TELL YOU THAT YOU DIDN'T BUILD ANYTHING BECAUSE YOU USED IT.
Man in tie: "You didn't build any of this. You just benefited from it."
3. SOMEHOW THE PEOPLE WHO PAID THE MOST ARE TOLD THEY OWE EVEN MORE TO THE PEOPLE WHO PAID THE LEAST.
Man in tie: "You successful people owe them even more!"
4. AND IF YOU OPPOSE BEING FORCED TO PAY FOR THEM BUT USE WHAT YOU ALREADY PAID FOR, WE CALL YOU A HYPOCRITE.
Normal man: "I oppose being forced to pay, but I'll use what I already paid for."
Man in tie: "HYPOCRITE!"
"Our philosophy: guilt the producers. Glorify the takers."
"A MARVELOUS SYSTEM-ONE THAT ALWAYS FINDS GUILT IN THE TAXPAYER AND VIRTUE IN THE TAX COLLECTOR.""
Left wingers are never grateful to the rich people who keep the gravy train going, because they feel entitled to all their property in perpetuity, and think if they keep any of it for themselves, that's "theft" and "subsidies for the rich"

Meme - "U.S. STATES GAINING vs LOSING NET INCOME (AGI) FROM MIGRATION
BASED ON IRS DATA FOR TAX YEARS 2022-2023 Shows the net amount of Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) that moved into or out of each state due to interstate migration.
STATES GAINING (NET INCOME INFLOW)
Florida +$21B
Texas +$6B
South Carolina +$4B
North Carolina +$4B
Tennessee +$3B
Arizona +$3B
Nevada +$2B
Idaho +$988M
Georgia +$746M
Colorado +$715M
Alabama +$540M
Maine +$502M
Montana +$500M
Utah +$477M
Arkansas +$447M
STATES LOSING (NET INCOME OUTFLOW)
California -$12B
New York -$10B
Illinois -$6B
Massachusetts -$4B
New Jersey -$3B
Pennsylvania -$2B
Ohio -$2B
Minnesota -$1B
Michigan -$956M
Virginia -$912M
Louisiana -$799M
Oregon -$476M
Connecticut -$460M
Kansas -$361M
Indiana -$326M
This measures the net amount of Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) that moved into or out of each state-not total wealth or assets.
Source: IRS SOI Tax Stats Migration Data (2022-2023) I Analysis: Realtor.com"
I wonder what common thread links most of these

Costs of public transit projects are out of control, experts say

Time to blame "capitalism" and for more regulation! European countries are autocracies, which is why they can build public transport for cheaper.

Costs of public transit projects are out of control, experts say

"On the surface, high-tech methods employed to build the latest extension of Montreal’s métro system seem revolutionary.

A tunnel-boring machine that stands three storeys, or 12 metres high, rotates at a rate of five turns per minute to dig roughly 15 metres of métro tunnels per day, while pouring concrete behind it to seal it all up. Such technology makes it relatively easy to put together major subway expansion projects, as the tunnel machine will dig four kilometres of tunnel in roughly 18 months.

But when you dig deep to examine the length and cost of modern projects, they appear to fall far short of the era of the métro’s inception in the 1960s, which was planned and executed in a span of less than six years and even came in under its original budget.

When it opened in 1966, Montreal’s métro was considered an engineering marvel, because of its design achievements, but also due to its low price tag and the speed with which the original network was built. It cost $213 million to build 26 kilometres and 26 stations. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $2.1 billion in today’s dollars or $80 million per kilometre. 

Consider that the current 5.5-kilometre expansion of the Blue Line is expected to cost at least $7.6 billion for five stations. That amounts to an eye-popping $1.4 billion per kilometre — among the most expensive in the world. It’s also expected to take six years to complete the project.

So does it really cost 18 times more to build a métro today than it did back in the 1960s?...

It wasn’t so long ago that métro extensions were affordable. In 2007, the project to extend the Orange Line three stations to Laval was a relative bargain at $745 million for 5.2 kilometres. Adjusted for inflation, it amounts to $1.1 billion for the project in today’s dollars, or $211 million per kilometre — one sixth of the cost of the Blue Line extension.

Matti Siemiatycki, a University of Toronto professor and the director of infrastructure at the School of Cities, said Canada has the distinction of being the country with among the most expensive infrastructure projects, and it spells trouble for the future, as costs continue to balloon, while the causes of this increase are not clear.

“The costs are through the roof for transit projects,” Siemiatycki said. “It’s out of control, and worse, it’s out of line with what our peers are doing. And this is troubling for all sorts of reasons.”

Montreal isn’t alone, he said. The cost of Toronto’s 15.6 kilometre Ontario Line is expected to reach close to $27 billion, which is just over $1.7 billion per kilometre.

Siemiatycki speculates that some of the regulations attached to project construction are to blame. Another issue is the amount of subcontracting that is done in major projects, as there are more companies involved and each takes a profit margin on the work.

“We also lose control of the project, the more companies that are involved,” he said.

Métro historian Benoît Clairoux said people have to remember that the construction standards are far different today than they were in the 1960s. Among the major changes is the attention now paid to worker safety...

Entire neighbourhoods were also demolished for major projects back in that era, and there was little care taken for relocating those who became homeless as a result.

Ahmed El-Geneidy, the director of the school of Transportation Research At McGill, said that is the price of living in a democracy today, as opposed to an autocracy...

Siemiatycki agreed that it was easier to build projects of all sorts back in the 1960s — because there were far fewer rules about how construction companies could conduct their business.

“This was the era when you could just ram projects through, partly because of the safety issues, but also because you could just brush away the opposition to the projects,” Siemiatycki said.

Speaking for the current Blue Line extension project, David Chartier explained that there are also more environmental norms to respect, more studies that need to be done before a project, and more public consultation that has to be done.

“We have proven that the costs of the project are in line with the (worldwide average),” Chartier said. “I think we’re even a little more competitive.” 

Murtaza Haider, a professor and the Executive Director of the Cities Institute of the University of Alberta, doesn’t buy that argument. He called on politicians in provincial and federal circles to figure out why infrastructure seems to be more expensive to build in Canada compared to most other countries.

“The current situation is that we have lost control of how we build public infrastructure,” Haider said. “Cost discipline has gone out the window; it’s scandalous.

“It is a crisis.”

He added that the public seems less concerned when transit projects go over budget, because most agree that public transit serves the greater good and leads to economic benefits. He called on authorities to pay more attention to financial discipline.

“The mindset is that we need more transit, and at any cost, it’s good,” he said. “So if I’m a builder, I can increase my proft margins, because there is no one trying to get money for dollars. This shouldn’t be acceptable.”

El-Geneidy added that there also fewer companies around these days that can build such projects, so the ones that exist have greater power to dictate the price.

Siemiatycki agrees there is something fundamentally wrong with the way projects are planned, conceived and built that drives up their cost unreasonably.

He called on authorities to go back to Square 1 and examine all the steps involved in planing and building projects."

Links - 21st September 2026 (1 - Left Wing Economics: UK)

Labour’s economic vandalism is turning all my friends into unemployed socialists - "The tragic irony of all this is that, despite their purgatory, Britain’s young have an appetite for their own destruction. I have personal experience of this too. One Left-leaning young lawyer I know told me that, despite the ruinous tax bill coming her way, she “wouldn’t know what to do with the money anyway”. And when the young do rebel, it’s in an even more ruinous direction. A YouGov poll of 18-24 year-olds from the start of the month had the Greens on 43 per cent.  The declining prospects of Britain’s youth are real, and, despite its absurdity, the message from the radical Left that it is all the fault of “the rich” is cutting through. Today’s young revolutionaries might talk about overturning the system, but they are effectively calling for more of the same. Higher taxes, more diversity and more immigration. They don’t just want things to get worse; they want them to get worse faster."

A perverse new plan to ration water - "Britain should never have a scarcity of water. This is a temperate island, which over the course of a year gets a surfeit of rain. The fact that swathes of the country have been condemned to hosepipe bans is indicative of a failure to invest in the infrastructure that would allow enough water to be supplied to the places that need it.  The last major reservoir opened in the 1990s, with attempts to build new ones held up by the planning system. Millions of litres of water are lost every day through leaky pipes. Instead of powering ahead with desalination plants in areas that could benefit from them, Britain has managed to open just one, in East London. Even that has effectively been mothballed... Rather than imposing rationing by the backdoor, the Government should be liberalising planning laws, rolling out new reservoirs and desalination plants, and scrapping net zero targets so they can be powered by cheap and plentiful energy.  The country’s water crisis is entirely of its own making. The aim of policy should be abundance, not a state-manufactured drought."

Labour accused of making workers poorer by banning last-minute shifts - "Labour has been accused of making workers poorer by banning last-minute changes to work shifts.  The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), which speaks on behalf of 5.5 million firms, said forcing companies to give at least seven days’ notice of work rota changes would lead to chronic staff shortages across the economy.  Ministers are preparing to introduce new rules governing zero-hours and low-hours contracts under the Employment Rights Act championed by Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister. Under the plan, employers would have to provide reasonable notice of shifts, changes or cancellations and to offer compensation when shifts are cancelled at short notice.  A government consultation has proposed at least a week’s notice for shift changes – with unions pushing for even longer notice... Labour has already admitted its plan could cost companies up to £3bn a year to implement because of increased bureaucracy and fines for last-minute cancellations."

Labour’s growth fantasy is dying under the weight of its own promises - "Private sector pay is rising by its lowest rate for six years, yet those working for the state are still seeing healthy growth in their wage packets. Office for National Statistics data show that for the three months to June, annualised wage inflation in the private sector stood at 2.8pc, while it was 6.1pc for those in the public sector.  Such a differential is unsustainable. Public wages must be paid for either through taxation or government borrowing – and both are at unprecedented levels. Our national debt will soon breach £3tn and taxes are at their highest since the aftermath of the Second World War... Labour wants to be nice, or at least be seen to be the nice party... for many in Labour, it is a matter of equality... The public sector is much more heavily unionised than the private... abour continues to rely on unions for their funding and its members as its foot soldiers. A strike on Labour support from the unions would make winning an election all but impossible for the party. They would not have the money nor the local intelligence to campaign.  With mergers and the decline of traditional industry, Labour is relying on a shrinking band of unions to keep it in business – only 11 affiliates remain. Although the teaching unions are not affiliated, the overall tinge of these remaining unions is increasingly public sector, overwhelmingly so for Unison, the largest with 1.3 million members. Is Labour really in a position to say no to their demands?  The combination of these three factors make it all but impossible for Labour to get public sector pay under control. All they have left is the hope that somehow the private sphere can be squeezed just a little harder. But this won’t remain the case indefinitely; a breaking point will come. It may even be soon."

Spend more on foreign aid, Labour MPs tell Burnham

Andy Burnham doesn’t know where growth comes from - "Andy Burnham has an idea. By shifting a team of civil servants dedicated to the issue of economic growth from the Treasury to Manchester he will spark what he calls “growth in every postcode”. How very Burnham, and how very Labour. It reveals a bizarre mentality which seems to hold that businesses only get formed, and only grow, because there are public officials helping them along.  The sad reality is that the Government is standing in the way of the private sector, not aiding it. It has treated business people as if they exist simply to have their pockets picked... He has promoted the concept of “Manchesterism”, which, inasmuch as it means anything, seems to mean co-operation between the private sector and local authorities... The term Manchesterism is, after all, not original. It was coined in the 1880s to refer to the mixture of free trade and laissez-faire capitalism which had made the city so successful. It was embodied in the values of industrialists like Richard Cobden, one of Manchester’s first aldermen, who combined an interest in social reform with a belief that it was ultimately free enterprise which drove the improvement in living standards. Burnham, by contrast, has scorned “neoliberalism” as an experiment which has failed. Cobden would have been horrified.  Manchester may be a very different place now than it was 200 years ago, but the rules of capitalism have not changed. If you want economic growth you have to let entrepreneurs get on with it, taking risks and investing capital. They do not need Burnham, the Greater Manchester Authority or even the Government’s new growth unit trying to tell them how to do it."

The chart that proves it’s Labour killing employment - "In total, the number of payrolled jobs fell by 13,000 in July, following another 13,000 fall in June. A net total of 94,000 jobs have been lost over the last year, and 188,000 over the last two years. The number of vacancies fell yet again, down by another six thousand. The chart below is striking, and a damning indictment of Labour... Add it all up, and the conclusion is clear. Britain’s labour market has started to slow dramatically. It has not yet collapsed, but it is getting close to the point where it will.  It is not hard to figure out why. The slow-motion car crash of the former chancellor Rachel Reeves’s decision to hike the rate of National Insurance paid by employers is still playing itself out. No one fires people on the day the tax on jobs goes up.  Instead, they wait for them to leave and don’t replace them (it’s a lot easier than risking an expensive tribunal). The living wage has been pushed way ahead of the rate of inflation, and certainly way ahead of output, so it is now above the point where it is worth hiring people. Angela Rayner’s extra employment rights for workers may be well-meant, but as they start to bite they have also made employing someone far riskier, especially for the small businesses that account for the bulk of job creation.  Soaring rates, green levies, and the highest energy prices in the developed world have also forced many businesses to close, with the staff laid off at the same time. All of this combined means the labour market is starting to break. It is only going to get worse over the next few months. The ban on zero-hours contracts will trigger another round of job losses, as some employers can’t afford to offer full-time positions instead, while rising inflation, and yet more tax rises in the Budget, will crush demand and confidence. As vacancies fall, and fewer people have jobs, they have less money to spend, and that makes it even tougher for the businesses that remain open. Britain has had plenty of economic problems for at least two decades. But at least it used to generate lots of jobs, even if they were not always well paid enough, or in high-growth industries.  Under Labour, that is no longer true. Andy Burnham’s new government doesn’t appear to have a clue what to do about it."

Why Britain Is Shedding Millionaires - WSJ - "Compared to 2024, Britain has 35,000 fewer residents with an individual net worth of £1 million or more—the fewest since 2008 and a 7% decline in two years, according to a tally by the Adam Smith Institute, a free-market think tank in London. Blame a hostile tax climate and sluggish British economic growth... Britain’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has declined to rule out a wealth tax, and a newspaper poll this month found 66% of respondents supported one. Leftist economists Gabriel Zucman and Ben Tippet have been promoting a wealth tax of at least 2% on Britain’s most affluent and claim it would raise more than £10 billion a year. One problem: Britain’s rich can afford to move abroad, and many already have. Switzerland, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Cyprus and Malta have been “falling over themselves to attract the wealthy,” says Douglas McWilliams, founder of the London-based Centre for Economics and Business Research, which does economic forecasting.Some 27,300 people with a net worth of $1 million or more have moved away from the United Kingdom in 2024 and 2025, according to New World Wealth, a wealth intelligence firm based in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Adam Smith Institute also finds that Britain is creating fewer home-grown millionaires. The report cites lower household savings, the inflation-based erosion of pension values, a lack of economic confidence that’s reducing property values and “a culture which is hostile to wealth-creators,” among other factors. High taxes and burdensome British regulations discourage entrepreneurship. Class-based envy and resentment are in the political saddle these days in the U.K., as they are in much of Europe and the U.S. The Adam Smith Institute says the top 1% of earners already pay 29.1% of British income taxes. A British government report released last month predicts “major sources of pressure on public finances over the next 50 years” as social spending consumes an ever-growing share of GDP. Squeeze the rich hard enough, and they’ll flee, leaving those far less affluent to pick up the tab."
Weird. Left wingers keep insisting that rich people will never leave>/i>

Labour is destroying one of its greatest achievements - "It was under Blair that new rigour in academic subjects was pursued and when the first tentative attempts to reduce the control local councils had over schools was attempted via the creation of new foundation schools. This latter initiative was the brainchild of Andrew Adonis and was strongly opposed by the teaching establishment, including the trade unions and the Left of the Labour Party, which felt that if education was anything it had to be corporate... In one of her few public statements since taking up her post, Powell suggested that the system she inherited was guilty of “hoarding excellence”, and that her mission was “to spread it into the lives of every young person in the country”. An admirable ambition, of course, with which no parent, teacher or politician of any party would disagree.   But “hoarding”? Where are these “hoards” of academic excellence and why have they not been distributed to the masses before now? Powell seems to believe that there is a finite amount of academic excellence and, like wealth, it must be fairly shared with others. And naturally, it’s those middle-class children and their parents who have been most guilty of piling it in heaps in the spare bedroom or conservatory... Her commitment to “spreading [excellence] into the lives of every young person in the country” sounded an awful lot like the lowest common denominator education policies that the Left has often fallen for in the past, a crude and vain attempt to engineer “equitable” rather than fair examination outcomes across the spectrum of academic ability. A fair and reasonable education and examination system does not create equality of outcomes for every pupil taking an exam; a fair and reasonable system recognises each child according to their ability and willingness to put in the work, as well as the competence of their teachers and own social background.  Many of these factors are beyond the legislative or funding powers of the Department for Education, a fact that must infuriate politicians who believe that every aspect of a pupil’s life must be regulated and monitored by the state, that “fairness” as well as “excellence” are commodities to be distributed at a minister’s behest.  Some pupils are just more academically gifted than others and will get better exam results than some of their peers and, therefore, will have better career prospects. This is not an injustice, it is a simple fact of life. The government’s job is to make sure that pupils’ own social backgrounds and material wealth are removed, as far as possible, from the factors that influence exam grades. This is what Blair and then Gove recognised in their own attempts to roll back some of the more damaging but fashionable “child-centred” learning imposed on the curriculum in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s"
With education as it is with money, left wingers believe in the fixed pie fallacy. But it makes even less sense when applied to education

Eco-rules behind years-long delay to delivery of 10,000 prison places - "The delivery of more than 10,000 new prison places has been delayed because of hold-ups over badgers, water weeds and legal challenges... The opening of three new mega-prisons, which were meant to be in service by now, has been put back until 2031 after environmental and planning disputes.  The prisons will provide a combined 5,000 extra spaces, official figures show.  Meanwhile, the Government plans to release the same number of criminals early over a period of 10 months from October to free up places in overcrowded prisons. Government data also show that a further 5,500 places in jails would have been created if not for delays in constructing additional housing blocks, refurbishing existing prisons and the use of temporary accommodation. The overall capacity of the prison system has increased by just 26 places since Labour came to power two years ago, government figures show... Ministers previously blamed the presence of badgers, which are a protected species, for halting building work on the jails.  Under nature laws, badgers can only be evicted from their setts between July and November, which restricts when construction work can take place... the Tories pledged to solve the prisons crisis by leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to deport all foreign inmates in British jails... The Government’s legal battles to push through new capacity and construct the three delayed jails were triggered after councillors refused to grant planning permission, meaning ministers had to launch a lengthy process to overturn the decisions.  At the Lancashire site, which sits alongside HMP Garth and HMP Wymott, residents waged a four-year legal battle that was finally dismissed last June. By then, the 1,700-place jail was meant to be near completion.  At a second site near Grendon, in Buckinghamshire, planning delays meant officials had only progressed as far as launching a public consultation by last June.  Buckinghamshire council then made changes to the planning permission for the 1,500-space jail in October over concerns about its effect on great crested newts."
Time to blame "capitalism"
Badgers are classified as of "Least Concern", but that doesn't stop greenies

The Left is cheering a purge of London’s ordinary homeowners - "many on the Left, including sitting MPs, are happy to mock ordinary families squeezed out of London who they claim should simply live somewhere else if they can’t afford it. Heaven forbid anyone makes the same claim about social housing tenants... If you have the temerity to build a new shopping centre or apartment block in London, you’re accused of gentrification, social cleansing and pricing out residents. But for some reason, it’s acceptable to talk with appalling casualness, and even glee, about squeezing the put-upon middle classes out of their neighbourhoods... Many things in life are unfair. Residents of London and the South East may pay a smaller share of their property value in council tax, but they are also the only net fiscal contributors to British public finances. In other words, if you’re a taxpayer in the South East, you’re already subsidising other regions to the tune of hundreds of billions. If fewer people are able to live and work in the most productive part of the country, if fewer people pay tax, and if even those who can afford the cash simply sell up to avoid paying up, where will all the money upon which other regions rely come from? And what kind of place will London and the South East be if only footballers, bankers and benefits claimants get to live there? Too often we treat dependency as a form of heroic virtue, and modest financial success and contribution as a form of unearned privilege. It should scarcely need to be said, but the lives, communities and homes of those who own property in London and the South East are not worth any less than social housing tenants, or those living in poorer regions."

UK Prime Minister on X - "Jonathan Reynolds has been appointed Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade."
Andrew Griffith MP on X - "When he was Business Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds presided over:
- 330 pages of new employment red tape
- Record insolvencies
- Higher taxes on business
- A crisis of youth unemployment
- 100,000 jobs lost
Do we really need a sequel?"

Retailers hit back at Healey over supermarket ‘price-gouging’ claims - "Business groups have hit back at Andy Burnham’s Chancellor after Labour renewed its attack on supermarkets ahead of the Budget.  Retailers said John Healey was wrong to point the finger at businesses after he vowed to combat “price-gouging” and monitor signs of shoppers being ripped off.  Grocers said they were already delivering the most affordable food in Western Europe, while also claiming that tax rises under Labour were to blame for a recent uptick in prices... Andrew Griffith, the shadow business and trade secretary, said: “Time and again, we see this Government lashing out at others for their own mistakes.  “Retailing is brutally competitive and prices are going up because of Labour’s tax hikes, employment red tape and energy costs. As John Healey explores his new residence, he needs to look a bit closer to home to lower the cost of living... British supermarkets are famously low-margin on both groceries and petrol.  The CMA found in 2023 that the average operating margin was just 1.8pc and had fallen in recent years. It has climbed since then, although most supermarkets reported a fall in profit margins in the last year.  It said earlier this year that supermarkets were the cheapest place to buy petrol."

Nationalisation of the railways is already off track - "“I accept that over the last year, performance at South Western Railway has not been up to scratch… we will leave no stone unturned in making sure that constituents have a better travel experience in future,” Heidi Alexander, the Transport Secretary, pledged in Parliament last month.  She was responding to a question by Will Forster, the Liberal Democrat MP for Woking, about why services on the recently nationalised South Western Railway were enduring “horrendous delays and cancellations”. Nationalisation, Mr Forster asserted, “has not gone to plan”.  Though these are early days for state-run trains, the signs are not good.  Labour’s much-vaunted Great British Railways is still to be legally constituted as the Railways Bill makes its way through Parliament – 80 years since Clement Attlee created British Railways, later known as British Rail.  Labour is again ending private-sector involvement in running most passenger trains and creating the third biggest public-sector employer in Britain, after the NHS and the Armed Forces. Rail will now have to compete again in public-sector spending rounds against nurses, police and soldiers for money. Last year, taxpayers had to put £21.6bn into rail whilst ticket sales raised £11.5bn. John Major’s privatisation of the railways in the early 1990s endured early challenges, but the benefits to passengers and social mobility were undeniable. While splitting track and train was a clear mistake, extracting civil servants from running loss-making and subsidy-drunk train services brought significant benefits. It delivered a significant increase in capital investment, a new focus on innovation, better trains, better safety and gave passengers what they wanted – rather than what British Rail thought they deserved. It also delivered early passenger train choice.  Until Covid, privatisation brought a clear focus on rail ridership that had been missing under nationalisation. British Rail oversaw the long-term decline in passenger numbers from around one billion in 1950 down to 750 million in 1992, whereas privatisation reversed this 40-year decline, growing ridership to an impressive 1.7 billion in 2019. The new plan to nationalise train services contains no passenger growth target or cost control safeguards. Instead, Great British Railways risks enduring Whitehall micromanagement, high subsidy, ageing trains and political interference. A tale all too familiar when looking back at the old British Rail board begging ministers for more taxpayer support to run more loss-making trains. So how independent will the Fat Controller at Great British Railways really be once a panicking Transport Secretary starts pulling levers to stem losses?  If passenger numbers and their growth are no longer to be the key driver of success, then the omens are not good. If a primary ambition is to increase reliability, then this risks being code for a reduction in services. It is, in effect, disguising failure by state-run Network Rail and Great British Railways."
Clearly, this is the fault of counter-revolutionary saboteurs, who must be hunted out and hanged!

Will Solfiac on X - "Nesta's plan to cut energy bills, being considered by Andy Burnham's team, involves the genius move of using taxpayer money to pay off £2.7 billion of debt for people who haven't paid their electricity bills."
max tempers on X - "“Since the costs of bad debt are already socialised across all bill payers, we should pay it off with HMT money [socialised across all taxpayers].” Such a craven, cynical strategy to trick people into thinking their bills are lower because they aren't willing to bring costs down"

Count Binface is no laughing matter. He embodies why Britain is in such a mess - "There is a line in Count Binface’s manifesto that encapsulates why Britain is in such a mess. “I’ll cut your taxes,” pledges the Clacton by-election candidate, “and raise everyone else’s.”  So says every party, if not quite so baldly. Politicians baulk at hiking the taxes that people feel directly. Instead, they raise the taxes at one remove – the taxes that voters imagine fall on others.  A business no more pays corporation tax than your TV set pays the licence fee, but politicians pander to the section of the electorate which mulishly refuses to understand that all taxes are paid by human beings.  I wish I could write that Binface was cleverly satirising the populism of the mainstream parties. In fact, like so many BBC comedians, he recycles received pieties as if they were hilarious insights. He promises to cap the price of “Wigan kebabs”, and to “restore the price of a 99 Flake to 99p”. That is pretty much what Zack Polanski says about food prices. Indeed, when it comes to energy bills, it is what all the parties say, which helps explain why Britain is getting poorer... Binface, formerly Lord Buckethead, is more like a licensed jester for the broadcasting establishment. He came to prominence as one of the menagerie of figures who arose in opposition to the Brexit referendum in 2016, alongside EU Supergirl, the top-hatted Steve Bray and the otherwise sensible Victoria Bateman, who insisted on wandering around naked in protest. Binface is a comedian only in the sense that, say, Nish Kumar is a comedian. His career has largely been as a BBC comedy writer... Only unscrupulous politicians pretend that price rises are caused by “corporate greed” rather than by excessive regulation, taxation and money-printing. In the same way, raising taxes that people imagine are paid by someone else is wildly popular. Voters oppose raising basic-rate income tax (by 65 per cent to 22), National Insurance (also 65 to 22) and VAT (73 to 14). But they support an “exit tax” for people leaving the UK (by 60 per cent to 21), a “mansion tax” for £2m homes (69 to 20) and a wealth tax on assets of more than £10m (75 to 12).  In practice, all these taxes would cause a precipitate drop in state revenue, and for the most obvious of reasons. Wealthy people wouldn’t meekly hold their wallets open. They would move – they are moving – to friendlier jurisdictions, leaving the rest of us to pick up their share of the bill. That is why, in reality, we all end up paying for wealth taxes... A recent set of polls commissioned by the Prosperity Institute found that people wanted to spend even more on the budgets that are already the biggest and fastest-growing, notably healthcare and social security.  Shown a pie-chart of where government spending actually goes, focus-group participants protested that they couldn’t find the foreign-aid budget, and were incredulous when informed that it amounted to less than 1 per cent of total spending.  Why have we, as a country, drifted so far from reality? Partly because we prefer sweet falsehoods to bitter truths, and partly because the lockdown convinced us that there really was a magic money tree. But partly, too, because our politicians are like weak parents bullied by demanding teenagers. They shy away from telling us what needs to happen.  Sir Keir Starmer was elected two years ago promising sensible, technocratic government and no new taxes beyond the three identified in the Labour manifesto: school fees, energy levies and changes in the non-dom rules. He could have delivered on that promise, but it would have meant cutting welfare and denying some of the more extreme public-sector pay demands. Instead, he caved in... What, though, of more difficult reforms, such as ending the state monopoly in healthcare, abolishing the various EU-derived and ecological rules that inhibit building and – if scrapping the triple lock really is impossible (Burnham has indicated that he will not touch it) – raising the state pension age?  I’m afraid the early signs are discouraging. The hints of what a Burnham government might do focus on small changes that will make things slightly worse.  He wants more state control of utilities, which will mean greater expense and less efficiency. Ditto his plans for protectionism in key sectors which, behind the manly-sounding headline of “national resilience”, will make the protected industries less productive. He seems to be eyeing even higher taxes, possibly on capital gains... the anger will not abate, and our politics will get wilder until someone is prepared to tell us that we must live within our means."

Council have sent me an enforcement notice to take down my air conditioning within 28 days. In the middle of a heatwave. 🙃 : r/LegalAdviceUK - "Background is I bought an ex council house in 2022.  In 2025 I fitted an AC unit after a hot summer.  Neighbours are both still council houses. After they found out I had AC this year they went to the council and asked for it. Housing assoiciation refused their request and they came over to me asking how I got mine.  I explained I owned my own home and paid to get it installed myself. This caused a bit of bitterness and jealousy from one of them who reported me to the council, "Why can he do it when we can't?"  What I didnt realise is that you need planning permission to install an AC unit in England.  The council have served me an enforcement notice telling me to get rid of my AC within 28 days.  Is there a way I can challenge this? I spent thousands getting my AC installed. Or can I be granted planning permission reteoactively?  I dont want to lose it in the middle of a heatwave!!!"

Peter Hague on X - "When you lived in the USSR the government tormented you, ostensibly, in service of a grand plan to produce communist utopia. In Britain you’re tormented by the state basically because they enjoy doing it. There is no grand plan, no civilisational purpose. It’s just pettiness for its own sake"
The communist utopia in the UK now is Net Zero