Aj retweeted
First, ban nuclear.
Second, ban domestic natural gas.
Third, massively increase taxes and regulated costs.
Fourth, blame data centers for high prices and limited energy supply.
Repeat.
Aj retweeted
Lula has made all Brazilians poorer in one day. Brazil’s currency plunged most since 1999 after Lula’s election victory
Lula promises to reduce the deficit spending more and increasing taxes... which is how his deficit went out of control.
Fascinating.
Aj retweeted
Socialism, communism, and fascism are three flavors of the same poison: the state directing resources that individuals would allocate far more efficiently through voluntary exchange.
Socialism nationalizes production gradually. The Venezuelan government seized PDVSA's operations fully by 2007, and by 2019 oil output had collapsed from 3.2 million to under 800,000 barrels daily. Central planners lack the price signals that tell producers what to make, when, and in what quantity. Without market prices, rational economic calculation becomes impossible.
Communism simply accelerates this endpoint. Mao's Great Leap Forward collectivized Chinese agriculture between 1958 and 1962, killing an estimated 45 million people through famine. Total state ownership produces total state failure. Eliminating incentives entirely produces mass death.
Fascism is socialism with better marketing. Private ownership remains nominally intact, but the state dictates production targets, prices, and personnel. Mussolini's corporatism in 1930s Italy preserved company nameplates while gutting economic independence. The owner keeps the liability; the bureaucrat keeps the decisions.
Free market thinkers draw one clear line: voluntary exchange versus coercion. Every system above sits firmly on the coercion side, differing only in their preferred speed of descent.
Aj retweeted
France keeps electing governments that promise order while building the exact machinery that produces chaos.
The pattern is old. The 1968 uprising paralyzed Paris because de Gaulle had spent a decade expanding state payrolls, suppressing price signals, and convincing the French that prosperity required a bureaucrat's signature.
By 2005, the banlieues around Paris burned for three weeks. Clichy-sous-Bois, Aulnay-sous-Bois, hundreds of torched cars every night. The state had warehoused North African immigrants in subsidized housing blocks, disconnected from labor markets by minimum wage laws priced above their marginal productivity, and handed them welfare checks just generous enough to eliminate the urgency of assimilation.
That combination guarantees a poverty trap.
Today, with immigration remaining a central tension and pension expenditures consuming 14% of GDP, France runs the same experiment expecting different results.
You pay into a system your entire working life and receive benefits calibrated to political survival rather than actuarial reality. Meanwhile, each new transfer payment handed to recent arrivals without reciprocal labor market access breeds exactly the resentment politicians then exploit.
Open borders and a welfare state cannot coexist. Either migrants enter a free labor market and compete on merit, building genuine stakes in French civil society, or the state subsidizes parallel communities that have no economic reason to integrate. France consistently chooses the latter, then acts surprised at the friction.
Bastiat diagnosed this in 1850. The French state still hasn't read him.
Aj retweeted
France's collapse is the direct consequence of following Piketty and Zucman's recommendations of massive government, huge spending, high taxes and uncontrolled migration.
Now they give lessons.
Aj retweeted
You notice anything?
Look at what separates the two groups.
It isn't technology.
It isn't complexity.
It's one variable: how much the state is involved.
At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply.
At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper.
Aj retweeted
Today I'm going to explain why socialism can never work, even if you're 8 years old.
Not with statistics. Not with the body count, even though it runs into the tens of millions. With a school playground and a bag of marbles.
By the end, you'll understand what Mises, Hayek and the whole Austrian School proved more than a hundred years ago, and what the Soviet Union then spent seventy years confirming.
Picture a schoolyard. Thirty kids. Marbles.
There are clay marbles, glass marbles, agates, big shooters, and a few cat's eyes that everybody fights over.
Nobody ever decided what a shooter is worth. And yet every kid knows: a shooter is worth about five glass marbles. An agate, three. A clay marble, almost nothing.
Who set those prices? Nobody. They appeared on their own, through trading. Every trade is a kid saying: "I want that thing more than what I've got in my hand." Thousands of little trades like that end up creating a "marble exchange rate" that everyone knows, even though nobody ever wrote it down anywhere.
And that rate is alive. A new kid shows up in September and he's crazy about agates? The price of agates goes up. The other kids notice, and that night they dig through their drawers at home to bring more in. Nobody asked them to. The price told them.
Keep that in mind. That's the whole story.
Now a new teacher arrives. She's kind. She means well. And she finds it deeply unfair that Kevin has 200 marbles while Lily has 3.
So she collects every marble in the playground and announces: "From now on, I manage the marbles. I'll distribute them fairly, for the good of everyone."
On paper, it's beautiful. Watch what happens.
First problem: she doesn't know who wants what.
Lily loves blue marbles. Tom doesn't care about marbles at all, he just wants to play soccer. Emma has collected cat's eyes since kindergarten. None of this is written down anywhere. It lives in the heads of thirty kids, and often the kids themselves only discover it at the moment someone offers them a trade.
So the teacher distributes "fairly." And everyone ends up with marbles they don't want.
Second problem: nobody knows what anything is worth anymore.
Before, the exchange rate would have told her that cat's eyes were rare and precious. Now that trading is banned, there is no rate. She's blind. How many agates should she order for next year? How many shooters? No idea. She guesses. She guesses wrong. Next year there are crates of clay marbles nobody wants and not a single cat's eye.
Third problem: nobody makes an effort anymore.
Why bring marbles from home if they end up in the big common bag? Why take care of them if they're not really yours? After a month, there are fewer marbles in the playground than on day one.
Fourth problem, the most important one: the kids start trading again. In secret. Behind the gym.
Because Lily still wants her blue marbles, and Tom would happily hand his over for half a cookie. Trading is natural. You can ban it, but you can't stop people from wanting things.
So the teacher has to choose. Either she lets it happen and her system collapses. Or she starts watching. She searches pockets. She hands out punishments. She appoints "monitors" whose job is to report anyone caught trading.
She hasn't turned evil. She simply has no choice anymore. The plan cannot survive without coercion.
And guess who ends up with the nicest marbles? Not Lily. Not Emma. The monitors. The kids who are close to the teacher.
That's it. You now understand socialism.
Now replace the playground with a country. The thirty kids with hundreds of millions of people. The marbles with millions of different products: steel, wheat, bolts, medicine, size 10 shoes. And the teacher with a planning bureau in Moscow.
That is exactly what the Soviet Union was. The bureau was called Gosplan.
What I just told you isn't a hunch. It's a handful of the strongest arguments in the history of economic thought.
Carl Menger, 1871, founder of the Austrian School: value isn't in the object. It's in the head of the person who wants it. A shooter has no "objective" value. It's worth whatever a kid is willing to give up to get it. Sounds obvious, but it undercuts the foundation of Marxism, which claims value comes from the amount of labor that went into something. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, another Austrian, took Marx apart on exactly this point back in 1896.
Ludwig von Mises, 1920: that's the second problem, calculation. In an essay called "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," he shows that if the state owns all the means of production, there's no market for factories, machines or raw materials. So no prices for them. So no way to know whether it's smarter to put that steel into railroads, tractors or bridges. Without prices, the planner isn't evil. He's blind. Mises wrote this just three years after the Russian Revolution.
Friedrich Hayek, 1945: that's the first problem, knowledge. In "The Use of Knowledge in Society," he explains that the information that runs an economy doesn't exist in any one place. It's scattered across millions of heads: the baker who knows his oven runs cold, the farmer who can feel the rain coming, the truck driver who knows the shortcut. No bureau can collect all of that.
His example is brilliant. A source of tin dries up somewhere in the world. The price of tin rises. And everywhere, millions of people start using less tin, without knowing why, without anyone explaining anything to them. The price carried the information to the entire planet. Hayek compares the price system to a telecommunications system. The price is the marble exchange rate.
Hayek again, 1944, "The Road to Serfdom": that's the fourth problem, coercion. A central plan requires the plans of millions of people to be subordinated to a single one. And since people don't go along willingly, they have to be forced. One chapter of the book is titled "Why the Worst Get on Top": in a system where power decides everything, the people who love power most end up winning. The playground monitors.
Which is exactly what Solzhenitsyn said: socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. It's not an accident along the way. It's mechanical. It's not that bad people took over a good system. It's that the system needs force to hold together.
The Soviets themselves joked about it. An old joke goes like this: a nail factory is given a quota in number of nails, so it produces millions of tiny, useless nails. Gosplan switches the quota to weight, and the factory produces a single one-ton nail. It's a joke, but it's also the calculation problem summed up in two sentences.
Now you're going to tell me: "Sure, but it's 2026. We have AI. A supercomputer can do the teacher's job."
That's the fashionable argument, and it misses the point entirely. The problem was never computing power. The problem is that the information doesn't exist before the trade. Lily herself didn't know how much she cared about blue marbles until someone offered to swap. Preferences change every day. People lie to the planner to get more. And above all, no algorithm can plan for what hasn't been invented yet. Gosplan would never have ordered the iPhone.
And no, Sweden and Denmark are not counterexamples. They're market economies, with private property, free prices and companies that go bankrupt, plus a big welfare state on top. You can debate the right level of taxes. But that's not the socialism Mises and Hayek were talking about: the state owning and planning production.
So, for the 8-year-old, here's the summary.
Nobody knows better than you what you want. Prices are how millions of people talk to each other without ever meeting. Get rid of prices and everyone goes deaf and blind. And when people refuse to follow the plan, there's only one option left: force them.
And for the 80-year-old grandpa who remembers the Berlin Wall, I don't even need to explain. He saw both sides.
Socialism doesn't fail because it was badly implemented. It fails because it asks one brain to do the work of millions of brains. And when it fails, all it has left is force.
Aj retweeted
For decades, European politicians said that high taxes, big government, and immigration were essential to preserve the welfare state and the pension system.
Now, all they delivered was stagnation, more debt, social discontent, inflationism, and an unsustainable pension system.
Aj retweeted
Without capitalism most people would be peasant farmers.
This isn’t hyperbole. The median human experience outside of capitalism is peasant farming.
Whenever we experiment with alternative economic systems we start trending back to the mean - more poverty and less affluence.
So many people accuse me of being greedy because I champion capitalism but until I see evidence otherwise it’s the best safeguard we have against the brutal realities of being a naked ape on a rugged planet.
Aj retweeted
Marc Andreessen reveals why housing, health care, and education keep getting more expensive while everything else gets cheaper
"There's basically three components to the American dream. A house near great job opportunities, great health care for you and your family, and sending your kids to good schools"
"If you disaggregate the economy over the last 25 years, everything that technology touches basically collapses in price. Television sets, computer games, anything with electronics in it. But if you chart housing, education, and health care, the prices of those things are skyrocketing"
"The government restricts supply, zoning laws and university certifications. And then the government responds to the political pressure caused by the rising prices by subsidizing demand. And of course, if you subsidize demand and a fixed supply, you get skyrocketing prices"
Ireland could do with some of this thinking.
It’s called direct democracy. We mustn’t trust politicians. That simple
On 2 December 2001, Swiss voters approved the constitutional debt brake with 85% voting in favour. It entered into force in 2003. The mechanism is enshrined in Article 126 of the Federal Constitution.
Importantly, it is not a debt ceiling in the American sense. It does not establish an absolute maximum stock of government debt. Rather, it imposes a binding expenditure rule designed to prevent structural deficits. And it works.
Repeat our model. Friendly advice
Aj retweeted
France followed all of Krugman's recommendations: Big government spending, high taxes, migration. Now...
Nobel winner Krugman says France may have become 'too big to save' and 'unsustainable fiscal path'.
cnb.cx/4hDK84t
Aj retweeted
Socialism is impossible. Read that again.
Here is why:
1. Ludwig von Mises and the Calculation Problem; then 2. Friedrich Hayek and the Knowledge Problem.
They are distinct, and it's important to understand the difference.
Mises fired first. In his 1920 paper "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," he drove a stake through the heart of central planning by showing that rational economic calculation is impossible without private ownership of the means of production. Prices are not arbitrary numbers. They are signals generated by actual bids and offers between property owners who face real profit and loss. Strip away private property, and you strip away the bidding process. Strip away the bidding process, and prices become bureaucratic guesses. A Soviet planner deciding how much steel to allocate between rail construction and tractor manufacturing has no genuine price for steel because no one is buying or selling it freely. He is flying blind. The problem is structural, not administrative. Hire smarter planners, give them faster computers; it changes nothing. The information cannot exist without the market process that generates it.
Communists read this and realized Mises was right. They found a roundabout way to keep going. They would simply use prices from Western capitalist countries.
Then Hayek hit them with his 1945 essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society." His target was subtly different. Hayek accepted that prices aggregate information. His contribution was to identify what kind of information markets process: local, dispersed, tacit knowledge that no central authority can collect. A warehouse manager in Düsseldorf knows that his particular supplier is three weeks behind schedule. A farmer in Kansas knows the soil conditions on his specific plot after last month's frost. A textile merchant in Lyon knows which dyes his buyers currently prefer. None of this knowledge is written down anywhere. Much of it the people holding it cannot fully articulate. It lives in habits, relationships, and on-the-ground experience accumulated over years. No survey, no commissar's report, no algorithm extracts it reliably. You cannot copy it from one country to another.
Mises showed that central planners lack the mechanism to generate rational prices. Hayek showed that even if planners somehow had prices, they still could not possess the ground-level knowledge those prices encode. Mises's problem kills socialist calculation at the structural level. Hayek's problem kills it at the epistemological level. The two arguments are complementary, stacked on top of each other like floors of a building.
The Soviet Union ran this entire experiment in full. Central planners in Moscow set over 20 million prices by the late Soviet period. Shortages and surpluses coexisted everywhere. Bread rotted in one city while another city's bread lines stretched around the block. Planners were not uniquely corrupt or stupid. They were operating inside an institutional structure that made rational allocation geometrically impossible, exactly as Mises predicted in 1920 and exactly as Hayek's epistemology explained in 1945.
Every government price control, every production quota, every centralized allocation scheme you live under today repeats this mistake at a smaller scale. The mechanism fails whether the commodity is steel, housing, or healthcare. The scale changes; the logic does not.
Aj retweeted
Suppose that once a week, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to £100.
If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay £1.
The sixth would pay £3.
The seventh would pay £7.
The eighth would pay £12.
The ninth would pay £18.
And the tenth man (the richest) would pay £59.
So, that’s what they decided to do.
The ten men drank in the bar every week and seemed quite happy with the arrangement until, one day, the owner caused them a little problem.
“Since you are all such good customers,” he said, “I’m going to reduce the cost of your weekly beer by £20.”
Drinks for the ten men would now cost just £80.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes.
So the first four men were unaffected.
They would still drink for free but what about the other six men?
The paying customers? How could they divide the £20 windfall so that everyone would get his fair share?
They realized that £20 divided by six is £3.33, but if they subtracted that from everybody’s share then not only would the first four men still be drinking for free but the fifth and sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.
So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fairer to reduce each man’s bill by a higher percentage.
They decided to follow the principle of the tax system they had been using and he proceeded to work out the amounts he suggested that each should now pay.
And so, the fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (a 100% saving).
The sixth man now paid £2 instead of £3 (a 33% saving).
The seventh man now paid £5 instead of £7 (a 28% saving).
The eighth man now paid £9 instead of £12 (a 25% saving).
The ninth man now paid £14 instead of £18 (a 22% saving).
And the tenth man now paid £49 instead of £59 (a 16% saving).
Each of the last six was better off than before with the first four continuing to drink for free.
But, once outside the bar, the men began to compare their savings. “I only got £1 out of the £20 saving,” declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man, “but he got £10!“
“Yeah, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth man. “I only saved a £1 too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more benefit than me!”
“That’s true!” shouted the seventh man. “Why should he get £10 back, when I only got £2? The wealthy get all the breaks!”
“Wait a minute,” yelled the first four men in unison, “we didn’t get anything at all. This new tax system exploits the poor!”
The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.
The next week the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had their beers without him.
But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important – they didn’t have enough money between all of them to pay for even half of the bill!
And that’s how it works.
Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy and they just might not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas, where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.
For those who understand, no explanation is needed.
For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.
Aj retweeted
Spain is not an economic miracle. It is a statistical mirage.
The truth about the Spanish economy with Sanchez.
Via @diegodelacruz
@juandemariana_
juandemariana.org/wp-content…
Aj retweeted
Iran’s economic collapse is accelerating:
Inflation: 89.9%
Oil-export revenues: Zero.
Rial: above 2.7 million per US dollar. Down more than 50% in one year
GDP: −10.1%
This is what happens when a regime destroys its productive capacity, finances terrorism, isolates itself from neighbor countries and trade partners attacking them, and finances chronic imbalances through monetary debasement.
There is no “resistance economy” when the regime only resists executing and repressing its own citizens.
#Iran #Economy #Inflation #Oil #CurrencyCrisis
