Stephen Pollard retweeted
Open borders plus a welfare state is a combination that destroys a society, and it happens quicker than you think.
Milton Friedman said it plainly in 1999: you can have open immigration or a welfare state, but not both. A welfare state prices services below market cost, which creates excess demand. When you then remove the residency filter that rationed access to those below-cost services, demand explodes while the tax base funding the system cannot keep pace. Sweden discovered this after 2015, when it admitted roughly 163,000 asylum seekers in a single year. Within three years, Swedish municipalities were cutting elder care and school budgets to absorb the fiscal pressure.
The trap works like this. Welfare benefits function as a price signal in reverse: they advertise subsidized consumption. Free movement toward subsidized consumption is a purchasing rush at a store where someone else pays the bill. That someone is you.
Property rights sit at the center of any workable immigration framework. Private property owners historically managed migration organically: employers sponsored workers, communities vouched for newcomers, individuals bore direct costs. The state socialized those costs across taxpayers, severed the accountability link, and produced what you see today in France, Germany, and the UK, where parallel welfare dependency has calcified across generations in specific postal codes.
Decentralized, contract-based immigration tied to productive employment creates no such dynamic. Work visas with no welfare eligibility for a fixed period, say ten years, let labor markets clear without loading the fiscal commons. That approach respects both the immigrant's agency and your wallet. The current arrangement respects neither.
Stephen Pollard retweeted
There exists a better way to govern, but your local despot isn't willing to give up his turn at the trough to make it happen.
Decentralization is an institutional technology for producing better governance, and history proves it.
Switzerland offers the clearest running experiment. The Swiss canton system, which predates the 1848 federal constitution by centuries, gave each canton genuine fiscal and legal autonomy. Cantons compete. Appenzell Innerrhoden ran its affairs differently from Zurich, and both had to live with the consequences of their own choices. Tax policy, spending, local regulation: all accountable to populations small enough to hold officials personally responsible. When a canton governor failed, residents noticed immediately. Exit was real and cheap. Cross the border, pay lower taxes, keep your capital. That threat disciplines governments in a way that no constitutional clause ever manages.
Pre-unification Germany made the same point, often uncomfortably for German nationalists. The patchwork of hundreds of principalities, free cities, and minor kingdoms that made up the Holy Roman Empire and later the German Confederation produced fierce jurisdictional competition. Hamburg grew wealthy as a free city because it kept commercial law light and bureaucratic interference minimal. Frankfurt became the financial center of continental Europe for the same reason. Bismarck's 1871 unification consolidated power upward and, within a generation, Berlin was micromanaging what Hamburg had run perfectly well on its own.
Smaller jurisdictions cannot hide fiscal failure behind monetary expansion or transfers from distant taxpayers. A canton that overspends runs visibly short. A German principality that harassed merchants watched them relocate. The feedback loop is tight and fast. Large centralized states break that loop. Washington, Brussels, and Berlin all collect taxes from populations too dispersed and too diverse to coordinate effective pushback. The spending continues, and the bureaucracy expands, insulated from consequence.
You end up paying the price of centralization every time a uniform federal regulation destroys a local arrangement that worked. The canton system worked because Appenzell could not impose its preferences on Zurich.
Brussels hasn't learned that lesson yet, and Europeans are paying the tuition.
Stephen Pollard retweeted
The government taxes you when you earn money, taxes you when you spend it, taxes you when you invest it, and then taxes your children when you die. The federal estate tax currently kicks in at 40% on estates above $13.61 million, a threshold the Biden administration repeatedly tried to lower. Washington frames this as targeting dynastic wealth. It actually targets a lifetime of accumulated savings, already taxed multiple times over.
Property rights mean nothing if the state can confiscate your accumulated capital the moment your heart stops. Murray Rothbard put private property at the foundation of liberty for exactly this reason: ownership that evaporates at death is not ownership. It is a revocable license the state issues and reclaims at will.
Consider a family farm in Iowa worth $15 million on paper, generating $200,000 a year in real income. The heirs owe $540,000 in federal estate taxes within nine months of death. They did not get $540,000. They got a farm. So they sell it, usually to a corporate agricultural buyer, which is a funny outcome for a tax rhetorically aimed at breaking up concentrated wealth.
The capital your grandfather spent forty years building represents deferred consumption, resources he chose not to spend. Taxing that capital destroys it. This process doesn't redistribute purchasing power; it rather converts productive assets into government expenditure, removing them from capital markets where they would have funded jobs, equipment, and future production.
Calling this anything other than state-sanctioned inheritance confiscation requires genuine ideological commitment to the fiction that the state has a prior claim on what you built.
Stephen Pollard retweeted
Sir John Cowperthwaite ran Hong Kong's finances from 1961 to 1971 and treated regulation like a tax on discovery. Nobody in government can know which business will work, so he refused to pick, plan, or protect.
Whitehall sent officials to Hong Kong to push for economic statistics, and he sent them home. When Milton Friedman asked in 1963 why he collected so little data, Cowperthwaite answered: "If I let them compute those statistics, they'll want to use them for planning." Numbers give planners a reason to act, and every plan arrives as a rule that tells entrepreneurs what they may not try. Asked what poor countries should do to grow, he said they should abolish the office of national statistics.
He rebuffed tariffs, opposed corporate subsidies, and refused London's push to raise taxes. When a legislator proposed that the government back promising industries, he asked how the government could possibly know which ones those were.
The results arrived without a plan. During his decade as Financial Secretary, real wages rose 50% and the share of residents in acute poverty fell from 50% to 15%. When he took the job, the average Hong Kong resident earned about a quarter of what a Briton earned. By the early 1990s, Hong Kongers out-earned Britons. Britain, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, planned its economy with ministries full of statisticians and fell behind a rock with no resources except a harbor.
Every regulation assumes a regulator who knows which experiments to allow. That regulator does not exist, so each gate he builds blocks the ideas nobody in the room could have predicted. Hong Kong's most valuable policy was the absence of a gatekeeper.
As far as civil servants go, this guy is the GOAT.
Stephen Pollard retweeted
Before the welfare state existed, working-class Americans built their own safety nets, and those nets caught people.
Fraternal mutual aid societies like the Odd Fellows, the Sons of Italy, and hundreds of smaller ethnic lodges ran insurance programs throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. By 1920, roughly one in three adult American males belonged to one. Members paid modest dues, typically $1 to $2 monthly in 1900 dollars, and received sickness benefits, death payments, and access to lodge doctors who charged $1 to $2 per year per family. The Foresters of America covered 900,000 members by 1908. These institutions ran on mutual contracts between people who knew each other; it wasn't charity.
Accountability created alignment of incentives. Lodge members had every incentive to verify that sick claims were genuine, because fraudulent payouts drained their own pool. Government bureaucrats face no such incentive. Someone else bears the cost of fraud in their system.
The lodge doctor system collapsed because the American Medical Association lobbied state legislatures throughout the 1910s and 1920s to ban contract medicine. Doctors working for lodges earned less than AMA members preferred. The state obliged, eliminated the competition, and left citizens with the fee-for-service monopoly that still strips your paycheck today.
Voluntary cooperation built welfare that worked. Politicians dismantled it.
Stephen Pollard retweeted
Before Carl Menger published his Principles of Economics in 1871, mainstream economic thought was a muddle of half-truths, moral philosophy dressed as science, and a value theory so broken it could not explain why water costs less than diamonds.
The classical school, anchored by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, gave the world the labor theory of value. Price, they believed, derived from the labor embedded in production. Ricardo built elaborate theoretical structures on this foundation. Karl Marx then took the same foundation and built a guillotine with it. The logic was internally consistent and empirically catastrophic.
Classical economists could not explain prices consumers actually paid. A painting by Raphael required fewer labor hours than a competently built brick wall, yet sold for vastly more. They patched this with awkward exceptions and caveats, which is what economists do when the theory contradicts reality but they refuse to abandon the theory(As Keynesians still do today).
John Stuart Mill represents the peak of this confusion. His 1848 Principles of Political Economy ran through five editions and taught a generation of British policymakers that price emerged from supply and production costs, with demand treated as almost an afterthought.
Meanwhile, Say's Law told economists that production creates its own demand. This carried a grain of truth and a mountain of overconfidence. Nobody had yet placed the individual decision-maker, weighing one marginal unit against the next, at the center of economic analysis until Carl Menger came along.
Shockingly, 150 years later, serious people in serious positions still refuse to believe subjective value theory and the theory of marginal utility. They still think and act as if value is derived from labor.
Stephen Pollard retweeted
“El pueblo no está obligado a obedecer cuando los gobernantes infringen las normas”.
- John Locke -
Stephen Pollard retweeted
The word tolerance has been weaponized against you. The weapon was forged in 1965. You should know who forged it and why.
Before there was the French Theory — before Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze made deconstruction elegant and exportable — there was the Frankfurt School. And the Frankfurt School was worse, because it was deliberate. Foucault played with ideas he never expected to have consequences. Herbert Marcuse knew exactly what he was building.
These were not fringe academics. The Institute for Social Research relocated from Frankfurt to Columbia University in 1934 when Hitler came to power. Funded, positioned, and deliberate, they spent the next decades producing the theoretical infrastructure for the dismantling of the civilization that had given them refuge. This is not ingratitude – it is the logic of the project. It was universal – it applied to every Western civilization equally.
Marcuse — godfather of the New Left — published Repressive Tolerance in 1965. The most influential political document most people have never read. Its argument: tolerating wrong ideas is itself oppression. True tolerance requires the suppression of intolerant ideas. Tolerating everything is repressive. Suppressing the wrong things is liberating. The argument is circular by design – it puts the conclusion inside the premise and dares you to find the exit.
The practical implication was stated explicitly: withdrawal of tolerance from movements that are regressive, from speech that reinforces existing hierarchies. The left decides which movements are regressive. Everyone else is silenced – not despite tolerance but in its name. The most sophisticated justification for censorship ever produced, dressed in the vocabulary of liberation.
The French Theory picked up the tools and made them elegant. Foucault made the Frankfurt critique of power literary. Derrida made the critique of meaning philosophical. Deleuze made the critique of identity aesthetic. What had been a political program became a cultural sensibility – which is why it spread further and faster than the original. You can argue with a political program. A cultural sensibility is in the air you breathe.
The generation that read Marcuse went on to run the universities, the media, the foundations, the NGOs, the content moderation departments, and the EU regulatory apparatus. They did not implement his argument cynically – they implemented it sincerely, because they had been taught it as philosophy.
This is why cancel culture does not feel like censorship to the people practicing it. The journalist who demands a speaker be deplatformed genuinely believes she is defending free speech. The HR department that fires the employee for the wrong opinion genuinely believes it is creating an inclusive environment. They have been taught that this is what tolerance means. Marcuse taught them.
Musk has been fighting Marcuse’s argument for four years probably even without knowing Marcuse’s name. Every content moderation policy, every advertiser boycott, every regulatory assault – these are Repressive Tolerance, institutionalized. The DSA is Repressive Tolerance with a legal budget. The fact-checking organization is Repressive Tolerance.
The good news: the argument fails on contact with a free platform – because the suppression becomes visible, the mechanism becomes nameable, and a named mechanism loses half its power. This is why the Counter-Reformation moves so fast against X. Not because X is dangerous. Because X is where Repressive Tolerance gets named.
You are reading this now – which is precisely what Repressive Tolerance was designed to prevent.
Je veux présenter mes excuses, au nom des Français, pour avoir enfanté la French Theory (qui a enfanté la pire des merdes idéologiques : le wokisme).
Nous avons donné au monde Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. Et puis, dans les ruines intellectuelles de l'après-68, nous avons donné Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Trois hommes brillants qui ont fabriqué, dans l'élégance de notre langue, l'arme idéologique qui paralyse aujourd'hui l'Occident.
Il faut comprendre ce qu'ils ont fait. Foucault a enseigné que la vérité n'existe pas, qu'il n'y a que des rapports de pouvoir déguisés en savoir. Que la science, la raison, la justice, l'institution médicale, l'école, la prison, la sexualité, tout n'est qu'une mise en scène de la domination. Derrida a enseigné que les textes n'ont pas de sens stable, que tout signifiant glisse, que toute lecture est une trahison, que l'auteur est mort et que le lecteur règne. Deleuze a enseigné qu'il fallait préférer le rhizome à l'arbre, le nomade au sédentaire, le désir à la loi, le devenir à l'être, la différence à l'identité.
Pris isolément, ce sont des thèses discutables. Combinées, exportées, vulgarisées, elles forment un système. Et ce système est un poison.
Car voici ce qui s'est passé. Ces textes, illisibles en France, ont traversé l'Atlantique. Les départements de Yale, de Berkeley, de Columbia les ont absorbés dans les années 80. Ils y ont trouvé un terreau qui n'existait pas chez nous : le puritanisme américain, sa culpabilité raciale, son obsession identitaire. La French Theory s'est mariée à ce substrat, et l'enfant de ce mariage s'appelle le wokisme.
Judith Butler lit Foucault et invente le genre performatif. Edward Said lit Foucault et invente le post-colonialisme académique. Kimberlé Crenshaw hérite du cadre et invente l'intersectionnalité. À chaque étape, la matrice est française : il n'y a pas de vérité, il n'y a que du pouvoir, donc toute hiérarchie est suspecte, toute institution est oppressive, toute norme est violence, toute identité est construite donc négociable, toute majorité est coupable.
Voilà comment trois philosophes parisiens, qui n'ont probablement jamais imaginé leurs conséquences pratiques, ont fourni le logiciel d'exploitation à une génération entière d'activistes, de bureaucrates universitaires, de DRH, de journalistes, de législateurs. Voilà comment on a obtenu une civilisation qui ne sait plus dire si une femme est une femme, si sa propre histoire mérite d'être défendue, si le mérite existe, si la vérité se distingue de l'opinion.
C'est de la merde pour une raison simple, et il faut la dire calmement. Une civilisation se tient debout sur trois piliers : la croyance qu'il existe une vérité accessible à la raison, la croyance qu'il existe un bien distinct du mal, la croyance qu'il existe un héritage à transmettre. La French Theory a entrepris de dynamiter les trois. Pas par méchanceté. Par jeu intellectuel, par fascination du soupçon, par haine de la bourgeoisie qui les avait nourris. Mais le résultat est là. Une génération entière a appris à déconstruire et n'a jamais appris à construire. Une génération entière sait soupçonner et ne sait plus admirer. Une génération entière voit le pouvoir partout et la beauté nulle part.
Je m'excuse parce que nous, Français, avons une responsabilité particulière. C'est notre langue, nos universités, nos éditeurs, notre prestige qui ont donné à ce nihilisme son emballage chic. Sans la légitimité de la Sorbonne et de Vincennes, ces idées n'auraient jamais traversé l'océan. Nous avons exporté le doute comme d'autres exportent des armes.
Ce qui se construit maintenant, en silicon valley, dans les labos d'IA, dans les startups, dans les ateliers, dans tous les lieux où des gens fabriquent encore des choses au lieu de les déconstruire, c'est la réponse. Une civilisation se reconstruit par les bâtisseurs, pas par les commentateurs. Par ceux qui croient que la vérité existe et qu'elle vaut qu'on s'y consacre. Par ceux qui assument une hiérarchie du beau, du vrai, du bon, et qui n'ont pas honte de la transmettre.
Alors pardon. Et au travail.
Stephen Pollard retweeted
The word "capitalism" was not coined by its champions. Marx popularized it in the 1860s as a term of abuse, a label designed to make voluntary exchange sound like a conspiracy of the owning class against everyone else. You inherited that framing without realizing it, and so did most economists who use the word casually today.
Before Marx, the thing we now call capitalism had no single name because it needed no special defense. It was simply commerce, trade, production, the ordinary activity of human beings pursuing their interests through cooperation and exchange. Adam Smith in 1776 wrote about "the system of natural liberty," not capitalism. Turgot, writing in France a year earlier, described markets as the spontaneous outcome of individual property rights. Neither man felt compelled to brand the system because no one had yet launched a coordinated ideological attack requiring a rebuttal.
Marx's packaged a moral indictment inside a noun. Once you accept the word "capitalism," you implicitly accept that the profit motive, private ownership, and voluntary contract form a distinct ideological "ism" with deliberate architects and beneficiaries. The state enters the picture as the purported neutral corrector of capitalism's excesses. This framing is backwards. The state is not a referee. The state is an institution that sustains itself through compulsory taxation and the monopoly on legal violence. Every intervention it enacts transfers wealth from producers to political beneficiaries. That transfer is the original problem the market solves around.
Free market thinkers from Ludwig von Mises to Henry Hazlitt spent decades fighting on terrain the enemy chose. Mises preferred "the market economy" precisely because it described a process rather than a power structure. Hazlitt wrote in plain declarative sentences to strip the ideology back out of the subject. The word "capitalism" smuggles in the assumption that without deliberate institutional design, voluntary exchange produces exploitation. We tacitly accept that assumption every time we use the word uncritically.
Words shape arguments before arguments even begin. The socialist tradition understood that in 1867. Most of its critics still haven't caught up.
Stephen Pollard retweeted
British rail services are often held up as an example of how privatisation doesn’t work. In fact, it proves the exact opposite: the parts of the railway that were genuinely exposed to market incentives have performed much better than the parts that remained under detailed government control.
British rail provides something as rare as an independent variable experiment in economics: in the early 1990s, two comparable sectors exited full state ownership but followed very different models.
The "privatisation" of the British passenger rail industry was never actual privatisation. It was a transfer of legal ownership, but not of control or of full economic interest, to the private sector. Private Train Operating Companies (TOCs) were awarded heavily regulated, fixed-term franchises which gave them monopolies over their specific routes. The state continued to dictate operations and investment obligations, assume revenue risks, specify timetables and set fares, while private entities extracted strictly regulated profits.
Contrast that with the rail freight sector, which was structured to be an open and competitive private market with operators taking full financial risk. Freight operates under pure open access model where any licensed private company can buy track space from the infrastructure provider and compete on any route. This lack of franchise protection has paved the way for many new private entrants over the decades.
Unlike the much criticized passenger rail sector, the privatisation of rail freight has been an unmitigated success. It spurred massive private capital investment in rolling stock and reversed a decades-long decline in freight volumes. Costs have dropped as productivity has improved significantly, with rail freight now carrying 70% more goods but with 30% fewer train paths than under state control.
The British rail sector tells a story of private success versus the mess of the hybrid passenger model that never was actual privatisation, but government granted monopolies to heavily regulated and subsidised franchises. Actual privatisation means not only transfer of ownership, but of control and full financial risk to the private sector. The British rail freight sector shows what can actually be achieved by proper exposure to the dynamic forces of free market incentives.
Stephen Pollard retweeted
Who benefits when new money is created? And who pays the price?
New money doesn’t enter the economy by dropping into people’s pockets. Instead, it is created to be spent on specific goods and services. And this matters. This was the key insight discovered by Richard Cantillon in the 18th century. We now know this as the Cantillon Effect.
When new money is spent by the government, it flows first to those who sell the government assets, goods or services. Military contractors, health care providers, transport networks, and consultants are often first in line. These are the first to experience rising demand, and they hike their prices. Now, with more cash to spend, they start demanding more from other sectors. It spreads, like rings in water, and as it gets further from the source, the effect on demand and prices ebbs out. Those furthest from the source can only watch as prices rise.
One sector has recently benefited more than any other: the banks. When central banks engage in Quantitative Easing, they buy up government bonds from the commercial banking sector. Flush with new cash, the banks buy other assets at today’s price, confident that the increase in demand from all that new money will sustain higher prices in the future. We end up with bubbles in stock markets, real estate and credit, while the banks book large profits.
When the central bank creates new money to finance a government deficit, it creates winners and losers. The first winner is government itself: by the stroke of a key in the central bank, there’s more money to spend. Next in line are the usual suspects: banks, defence contractors, construction companies, care providers. Most of us lose. As Cantillon pointed out 300 years ago, for us, the result is just inflation.
Stephen Pollard retweeted
Hitler’s socialism wasn’t just an internal economic policy – it was the cause of the war.
Socialism was at the origin of the war. Not as a coincidence. As a necessity. The socialist economic model generates contradictions it cannot resolve internally – the calculation problem, the misallocation, the stagnation, the mounting failure. War is the exit. It provides the external enemy that explains the internal failure. It justifies the total mobilization the system always wanted. It consumes the surplus population the economy cannot employ. It redirects the resentment outward.
Does this remind you of anything?
The evidence is not subtle. The NSDAP program of 1920 reads like a standard socialist manifesto. The economic reality confirmed it – price controls, industrial planning, state allocation of raw materials, entrepreneurs reduced to government functionaries. Private property in name only. Mises called it Zwangswirtschaft – coercive economy. Hayek dedicated a chapter of The Road to Serfdom to the socialist roots of Nazism. Both writing from observation, not retrospect.
After 1945 the Soviet victors imposed their version and attached the capitalist label to every rival. Western textbooks followed. The lie became the curriculum.
The real divide has never been left versus right. It is collective control versus individual freedom. Once you place National Socialism correctly within the family of collectivisms, the political spectrum becomes legible – and the war becomes explicable.
When the system fails — and it always fails — it needs an enemy. The bigger the failure, the bigger the enemy required.
Imagine being Poland. Squeezed between two socialist systems, both searching for their enemy.
We were it.
Oui, j’en ai lu.
Et justement, les livres des années 30 (et ceux écrits par des gens qui vivaient ça) disent exactement le contraire de la doxa d’après-guerre.
Le programme de 1920 du NSDAP (points 11 à 17) n’est pas une glose moderne : abolition des revenus non liés au travail, nationalisation des trusts, participation aux bénéfices des grandes entreprises, réforme agraire avec expropriation, lutte contre le « capitalisme financier ». Les nazis le répétaient sans complexe. Hitler lui-même, dans ses discours et conversations privées, parlait de socialisme national et se situait dans la rupture avec le libéralisme économique.
L’économie réelle sous le régime ? Contrôle des prix et des salaires (Preisstopp 1936), planification industrielle via le Plan de quatre ans, cartels obligatoires, allocation autoritaire des matières premières, entrepreneurs transformés en *Betriebsführer* qui exécutent les directives de l’État. Propriété privée nominale, pouvoir réel de l’État. Mises l’a décrit en temps réel comme une forme de socialisme (Zwangswirtschaft). Hayek, dans *La Route de la servitude* (1944), y a consacré un chapitre entier : les racines socialistes du nazisme.
Avant 1935, le camp marxiste lui-même ne rangeait pas le national-socialisme à « droite ». Il le traitait comme un concurrent socialiste dévoyé. La théorie du « social-fascisme » (Staline/Zinoviev 1924, poussée jusqu’en 1933) assimilait social-démocratie et fascisme. C’est Dimitrov, au VIIe Congrès de l’Internationale communiste en août 1935, qui impose la définition qui va devenir canonique : « dictature terroriste des éléments les plus réactionnaires du capital financier ». Opération de branding pure. Il fallait monopoliser le mot socialisme et coller l’étiquette capitaliste à tout rival.
Après 1945, les vainqueurs soviétiques ont imposé leur version. Les manuels occidentaux ont suivi. Et on a oublié que Mussolini venait du socialisme, que les Strasser et une partie importante du NSDAP se revendiquaient explicitement de la gauche anti-capitaliste, et que l’anticapitalisme racial n’est pas le contraire du collectivisme, c’est une variante.
Le point factuel n’est donc pas faux. Il est même banal pour quiconque lit les sources primaires des années 20-30 au lieu des récits post-45.
Le vrai clivage n’a jamais été « droite vs gauche » au sens scolaire. C’est contrôle collectif vs liberté individuelle. Une fois qu’on replace le national-socialisme dans la famille des collectivismes, le spectre redevient clair.
Stephen Pollard retweeted
In 1930, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset published The Revolt of the Masses, a book that still feels uncomfortably prophetic. His central target was not the poor or the working class, but a new kind of human being he called the “mass man”.
The mass man, Ortega argued, is defined by attitude rather than income. He is the ordinary person who is perfectly satisfied with himself, demands nothing higher of his own character or intellect, and yet insists that his mediocrity be treated as a right. He does not defer to excellence, competence, or higher standards. He regards them with suspicion or resentment. What previous ages saw as the privilege of the few - political influence, cultural authority, the right to shape society - the mass man now claims as his due, without any corresponding effort to rise above the average.
Ortega believed this type of person had been produced by the very success of modern civilisation. Rising living standards, mass education, and liberal institutions had given ordinary people unprecedented power and comfort. But they had not produced a corresponding sense of responsibility or humility before higher achievements. The result was a revolt: the mass man refused to accept the authority of superior knowledge, culture, or character. He demanded that everything be brought down to his level.
The danger, Ortega warned, was that a civilisation cannot survive if its central actors no longer respect the standards that made it possible. When the average begins to dominate without aspiring to anything beyond itself, excellence is undermined, institutions decay, and politics becomes an expression of resentment rather than responsibility.
Ortega’s diagnosis remains unsettling because it is not a complaint about poverty or exclusion. It is a warning about self-satisfied mediocrity armed with power.
Stephen Pollard retweeted
More money in circulation always raises prices. This is basic causal logic, and the historical record confirms it every time governments ignore it.
The quantity theory of money tells you that when the supply of money increases faster than the supply of goods and services, each unit of money buys less. MV = PQ, if you want the textbook shorthand. Hold velocity and output roughly constant, and doubling M doubles P. The Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet from roughly $900 billion in 2008 to $9 trillion by 2022. You watched grocery bills, rent, and energy costs surge to their highest levels in forty years. Jerome Powell and the Fed's open market committee printed the money; American households paid the price.
Keynesians will tell you the relationship is "complicated." They'll point to the decade after 2008 when the Fed expanded money supply aggressively yet consumer price inflation stayed relatively subdued. What actually happened: the newly created money pooled inside bank reserves and inflated asset prices instead of flowing into consumer goods. Housing valuations in cities like San Francisco and Austin went parabolic. Stock indices hit record highs year after year. The inflation was real. You just needed to own assets to feel it as a gain rather than a loss. The worker with no portfolio got neither the asset appreciation nor a cost-of-living adjustment to match.
Sound money advocates have stressed for over a century that monetary expansion is never neutral. Ludwig von Mises laid this out in 1912 in "The Theory of Money and Credit": new money doesn't land in every wallet simultaneously in equal proportion. It enters the economy at specific points, through government spending, bank lending, bond purchases, enriching early recipients before prices adjust, and systematically impoverishing those who receive the new money last. This is the Cantillon effect, named after Richard Cantillon who described it in the 1730s. Bankers and government contractors gain. Wage earners on fixed salaries lose.
Governments create money because it lets them spend without the political cost of visible taxation. Inflation is the hidden tax, and it runs works seamlessly because most people never connect the cause to the effect. You see the higher price tag, but you never blame it on the people who created new money out of thin air.
Stephen Pollard retweeted
$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.
Stephen Pollard retweeted
Switzerland has 26 cantons, each with its own constitution, tax rates, and laws, and the result is one of the wealthiest, most stable countries on earth. That is not a coincidence.
You want to understand why Swiss GDP per capita sits around $92,000 while the EU average hovers near $37,000? Start here. Cantons compete for residents and businesses the same way firms compete for customers. Zug kept its corporate tax rate at roughly 11.9%, attracted commodity traders and crypto firms, and watched its population and tax revenues grow. Cantons that taxed aggressively lost mobile capital and productive citizens to neighbors with lighter burdens. This is Tiebout competition working in real life, not a textbook diagram.
The federal government in Bern handles defense, monetary policy, and some foreign affairs. Everything else defaults downward. Cantons set income taxes. Communes set property levies. Citizens in Appenzell Innerrhoden voted on local laws by a show of hands in the Landsgemeinde, an open-air assembly, until 1990 for most matters. The feedback loop between decision-makers and the people paying for those decisions stays tight. That tightness disciplines spending in ways no central auditor ever will.
Free market thinkers have stressed this for generations: political units must be small enough that exit is credible. When the cost of leaving a bad jurisdiction drops, politicians face real consequences for bad policy. Switzerland kept that cost low by design. A business or family in Basel-Stadt dissatisfied with cantonal policy drives forty minutes to Baselland. No visa. No language barrier. No bureaucratic labyrinth. Just a move.
The EU spent decades building the opposite architecture, consolidating regulatory power in Brussels and eliminating the jurisdictional diversity that forces governments to stay honest. Switzerland refused to join. Its per-capita wealth, its low public debt, and its functional civil society arrived because the Swiss preserved the one institutional feature every centralized state destroys first: the credible right to leave.
Stephen Pollard retweeted
War destroys wealth; it doesn't create it! This has been common sense to everyone throughout history, except the most delusional Keynesian apologists of the past 70 years.
A boy shatters a shopkeeper's window. The crowd consoles the owner: think of the glazier who now earns six francs, who spends them at the baker, and so on down the line. Prosperity from vandalism. Bastiat's point was about what you do not see. The shopkeeper would have spent those six francs on new shoes. Now he spends them on glass he already had. The glazier gains, the cobbler loses, and society is down one window. Net wealth destroyed.
War is that window multiplied by ten million.
World War II supposedly "ended the Depression." You have heard this in classrooms. GDP rose because the state counted tanks and bombers as output. A Sherman tank feeds no one. A B-17 does not house a family. The state was measuring spending, not wealth, and the two are not the same thing. Rationed meat, price controls, sixteen million men pulled out of productive labor and shipped overseas to be shot at. Robert Higgs demolished the "wartime prosperity" myth in his 1992 paper in the Journal of Economic History. Real prosperity arrived after 1945, when Washington slashed spending by roughly 60 percent and the planners predicted a return to depression. The opposite happened.
Every factory rebuilt in Dresden or Hiroshima is a factory that existed before someone flattened it. The labor and capital that rebuild it could have built something new instead. You do not get richer replacing what you had. You run to stand still.
Destruction is destruction. But they call it stimulus.
Stephen Pollard retweeted
Capitalism did not begin in a boardroom. Voluntary exchange, repeated across generations, built the fairs, the credit networks, the double-entry books that Luca Pacioli codified in 1494. Nobody planned this. That's the whole point.
The story you learned in school runs backwards. You were taught that greedy factory owners exploited children until noble legislators rescued them in 1833. What actually happened: the Industrial Revolution dragged English living standards up so fast that population doubled between 1750 and 1850 because people stopped dying. Wages rose. Life expectancy rose. The factory that horrifies the modern reader was an upgrade from a life of starving on a tenant farm at the mercy of the harvest. Children worked because their families were poor, and the factory made those families less poor. The reformers arrived after the market had already done the heavy lifting, then took credit for the sunrise.
Real capitalism needs sound money, and here is where the tragedy sharpens. Between 1815 and 1914, under a classical gold standard, prices in Britain fell gently while output exploded. You could save a coin and expect it to buy more later. That world died in stages: 1914, when governments suspended gold to print war; 1933, when Roosevelt confiscated citizens' gold at $20.67 an ounce then revalued it to $35; 1971, when Nixon closed the window entirely and handed us the pure fiat regime you live under now.
What followed was corporatism wearing capitalism's coat. When the Federal Reserve can conjure trillions and hand them to the banks and firms closest to the spigot, you no longer have a market allocating capital. You have a cartel allocating privilege. The 2008 bailouts were a monetary system doing exactly what a monetary system built on the printing press does.
When someone blames "unfettered capitalism" for the mess around you, ask them to point to the fetters.
The answer is to let go. Less regulation, no central bank, less tax, less government. Not more!
