Tycod retweeted
“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” - Milton Friedman
If your understanding of the world never progressed beyond 'Saturday Morning Cartoon' lessons....
...you might be a communist.
Tycod retweeted
Anne Arundel County, Maryland, explicitly gives undocumented households priority for taxpayer-funded housing assistance covering rent, utility bills, security deposits and moving costs.
The county’s published rules identify priority households as including:
“those with undocumented or mixed immigration/citizenship status.”
That language appears directly on the county government’s application page. Other priority categories include homelessness, eviction proceedings and disconnected utilities.
The Community Schools Rental Assistance Program can pay for:
• Overdue rent.
• Electricity, gas, water and internet bills.
• Security deposits and first month’s rent.
• Moving expenses.
• Certain late fees and eviction-related court fees.
Maryland’s official FAQ says proof of citizenship is not required. Eligible households can receive repeat assistance, including up to three months of future rent or utilities at a time, with an overall maximum of 15 months.
Governor Wes Moore’s office says the statewide program’s FY2027 budget increased from $5 million to $11 MILLION.
Tycod retweeted
🚨 $12.8 MILLION IN PRINCE GEORGE’S TAXPAYER FUNDS WENT TO NONPROFIT TIED TO COUNCIL CHAIR’S FRIEND — NOW AN AUDIT IS COMING
PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY, MD — County Council Chair Krystal Oriadha is defending millions in taxpayer-funded grants directed to the Edward Charles Foundation, a California nonprofit serving as fiscal sponsor for Community on the Frontline, operated by her close friend Janna Parker.
Oriadha maintains the funding was handled properly. County officials are now demanding a financial accounting.
▪️ $12.8 MILLION UNDER SCRUTINY: County Executive Aisha Braveboy says approximately $12.8 million went to the foundation between fiscal years 2024 and 2026.
▪️ FRIENDSHIP QUESTIONS: Parker has been described by Oriadha as her best friend. Oriadha says Parker’s nonprofit experience, not their personal relationship, justified her confidence in the organization.
▪️ $7.6 MILLION RETURNED: The foundation returned the requested funds October 22. Officials are seeking an accounting and recovery of remaining county money.
▪️ AUDIT STILL PENDING: An independent financial review is expected to examine expenditures, grant procedures and whether promised community services were delivered.
▪️ AUDITOR VOTE DELAYED: A scheduled October 26 council vote on auditor nominee Marcel Emerson was pulled from the agenda without an immediately disclosed explanation.
Oriadha denies wrongdoing and says programs included food distribution and children’s services. Those claims remain subject to examination.
The unresolved issue is not simply whether money was returned, but how the grants were approved and spent.
Why was an organization led by a council chair’s close friend selected for millions in public funding? Will taxpayers receive a complete, independently verified accounting of every dollar?
Tycod retweeted
“The people who run our private enterprises have the same incentive as the people who are involved in our government enterprises. In all cases the incentive is the same: to promote their own interest.”
— Milton Friedman
Tycod retweeted
Destroying farmland and forests to save the environment is wild.
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger is proposing 277,000 acres of solar panels to produce home grown “clean” energy.
That’s the size of Fairfax County, Arlington County, and the City of Alexandria combined.
Ninety percent of the solar panels would be placed on farmland and forests.
Millions of trees would be clear-cut.
State Senator Glen Sturtevant says solar is unreliable and he once again called for a statewide data center moratorium.
The governor’s energy report says data centers are driving 90% of new energy demand.
Tycod retweeted
“Freedom has promoted prosperity and provided the wealth that can then be wasted in the welfare state. The welfare state is a luxury expenditure, made possible only by the efficiency generated by a free market system.”
— Milton Friedman
Tycod retweeted
I was incredibly concerned with the debt.
Now I get it.
It’s never going down.
The budget will never get balanced.
Both parties don’t care and if they say they do they are lying.
Fighting about taxes is silly.
We can’t tax our way out of it.
There isn’t enough tax revenue to be extracted.
We are going to print our way out of it.
5% real inflation forever.
What’s 40 trillion in debt if we inflate the gdp to 100 trillion?
It’s the only choice.
Both sides want to keep spending.
My thesis the next 30 years:
The dollar will be worth less tomorrow than today.
The government will promise anything and spend everything.
Plan accordingly.
Tycod 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.
