Why Freedom Works @WhyFreedomWorks

The majority of government regulations, if eliminated, would not be missed by the vast majority of Americans. Except that, over time, their lives and businesses would be easier to run, and the cost of living would be lower.

“caveat emptor”—buyer beware. In a free market a buyer has a choice to walk away. When the government controls it, there is no such choice.

Government interference through inflation (creating money to finance debt), regulations, subsidies, and cronyism undermine markets and make the people poorer. Set our economy free and the standard of living rises for everyone.

@Penniaa5 @Nbennett_ai Only temporarily as they will have to compete with other companies doing the same.

Capitalism should’ve been called socialism—it’s based on social cooperation with equal respect for individual rights/self-determination and harmonized by a free market. So-called socialism is just rearranged feudalism with a different coercive hierarchy.

The morality of capitalism doesn’t rest on its superior results. Its results rest on its superior morality.

There is nothing as permanent as a temporary government program. Example 001: The income tax arrived in 1913 with a promise: temporary, modest, and aimed only at the very rich. The top rate sat at 7 percent on incomes above $500,000 (roughly $15 million today). Congress sold it as a surgical instrument to tax the rich. It became a chainsaw aimed at the middle class. Within five years, wartime spending pushed the top rate to 77 percent. The "temporary" emergency became the permanent architecture of American fiscal life. Politicians discovered something intoxicating: taxing income is far easier than taxing visible property, because the government intercepts your earnings before you ever touch them. Withholding, introduced in 1943, perfected this sleight of hand. You never possessed the money, so you never felt its full absence. Today the federal government collects $2.5 trillion annually through individual income taxes. The code runs to over 70,000 pages. Compliance costs Americans approximately $400 billion per year in accounting fees and lost productivity, producing nothing, building nothing, feeding no one. Every dollar seized through taxation is a dollar diverted from capital formation, from investment decisions made by people with actual skin in the game, toward decisions made by politicians managing election cycles. Mises identified the calculation problem: the state has no price signals to guide spending, so it wastes on a structural scale no private actor could sustain.

The ideal is individual liberty protected by a small, limited constitutional government so we can all live in a free, prosperous society.

under socialism everyone lives in poverty except political elites. Under capitalism, no one has to. It’s a product of your own decisions. What blocks success are all socialist institutions, such as central banks, regulations, and welfare programs that trap people in mediocrity.

Without Self-Interest There Is No Basis For Individual Rights substack.com/home/post/p-18…

While John Maynard Keynes was busy blaming capitalism for the Great Depression, Friedrich Hayek published Prices and Production in 1931 and explained exactly what the Federal Reserve had actually done to cause it. Central banks expand credit, artificially lowering interest rates below their natural market level. Entrepreneurs, reading cheap credit as a signal that real savings exist, pour capital into long-term projects: factories, infrastructure, heavy production. They borrow at 3% and build accordingly. The Fed manufactured that 3% from thin air between 1921 and 1928. No corresponding pool of genuine savings backed it. Hayek called this the boom phase. Malinvestment compounds quietly while the party runs. Then reality arrives. The credit expansion cannot continue indefinitely without hyperinflation, so the central bank tightens. Interest rates climb toward their real level. Suddenly those long-term capital projects that penciled out at 3% are bleeding money. Entrepreneurs liquidate. Unemployment spikes. The structure of production snaps back violently toward what actual consumer preferences and genuine savings could support. This is the bust. The depression is the cure, not the disease. Keynes looked at that same wreckage in 1936 and prescribed more government spending, more credit, more of the exact poison that caused the seizure. Every dollar of "stimulus" the Roosevelt administration injected after 1933 delayed the necessary liquidation and extended the Depression by years. The unemployment rate still sat at 17.2% in 1939, a full decade in. Hayek handed policymakers the correct diagnosis. They hired a different doctor because his prescription required them to do less, spend less, and control less.

@sfliberty Keynesianism is just watered down Marxism. And like Marxism it denies their nature of reality, its failure at any given point should not be a surprise.

Socialism isn’t a good idea that doesn’t work. It’s a horrible idea, and that’s why it doesn’t work.

Profit is the greatest social good. It communicates the most beneficial use of resources, maximizing benefit. Getting rid of profit and loss is like getting rid of pain and pleasure receptors. You won’t know when you’re being damaged or helped. The economy becomes a sociopath.

Profits are the driving force of the market economy. The greater the profits, the better the needs of the consumers are supplied...He who serves the public best, makes the highest profits. --Ludwig von Mises

The interests of a government employee can never match the beneficial stewardship of someone who owns something. Economists call this the "tragedy of the commons." I call it the rental car rule.

With another election season at hand, don't let short term thinking inform your vote. Let proper principles. 4heavenonearth.substack.com/p/on-the-islan…

Cost isn't measured only in price. Socialized medicine has extraordinary costs paid with by the life of the patient--care delays and a lack of innovation are extremely high costs to pay to pretend you "have coverage" while actually having no care.

Prices and Profits are essential to efficient allocation of resources. In a free market, they let "the right stuff show up in the right place at the right time." increasing amounts of socialism undermine this mechanism. Why you end up with shortages, high prices, and poverty.