AFG, Esq. @agrange

@EliLebowicz Not to his knowledge.

Capitalism has a win condition. Socialism does not. Here's why, explained so simply a 10-year-old could get it. It starts with a book written in 1944 by an Austrian economist named Friedrich Hayek: The Road to Serfdom. Imagine a classroom of 30 kids. One day the teacher says: "From now on, I decide what everyone eats for lunch, which games you play at recess, and who sits next to whom. It's fairer that way." First problem: the teacher doesn't know what you like. You hate carrots. Your friend is allergic to peanuts. Lucas wants to play football, Emma wants to draw. 30 kids, 30 different wishes. Nobody can know all of that, not even the smartest teacher on Earth. Hayek called this the knowledge problem. The information needed to run an economy is scattered across millions of heads, and it can't be gathered in one office. Second problem: the kids start fighting. "Why does he get the window seat?" "Why football again?" Before, everyone just chose for themselves. Now every choice is a fight, because every choice is made for everyone. Third problem: the class can't agree on a plan, so someone says "we need one person in charge who just decides." This is Hayek's key insight. Planning doesn't fail because planners are evil. A plan needs everyone to agree on the same goals, and free people never agree on everything. So the plan needs force to work. Fourth problem, and it's the scariest one: who wants that job? The kind kid doesn't want it, because the kind kid doesn't want to force 29 people to eat carrots. The job attracts the one who likes giving orders and doesn't mind punishing those who disobey. Hayek wrote a whole chapter on this, called "Why the Worst Get on Top." It doesn't happen by accident. It happens by selection. Here's the trap. When the person who controls your lunch also controls your job, your home, your shop and your newspaper, they control your whole life. You can't say no, because there's nowhere else to go. Controlling the economy doesn't mean controlling one part of life. It means controlling the means to every goal you have. That's the road to serfdom. Nobody votes for a dictator. People vote for "someone should fix this," then for "give them more power to fix it," and one day they wake up with no one left to say no to. The USSR, Maoist China, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela. These are different countries with different cultures and languages, and the story has the same ending every time. When a script produces the same ending every time, it isn't bad luck. It's the script. Now capitalism. Back to the classroom. Instead of one teacher deciding everything, every kid can trade. You give me your carrots, I give you my apple, and we both walk away happier. Nobody needs to know what everyone wants, because prices do that job. A price is a message telling millions of strangers what's scarce and what's wanted, with no one in charge. That's the win condition. In capitalism, you get rich by making something other people freely choose to buy, so your success depends on serving others. In a planned system, you get ahead by pleasing whoever holds power. One rewards usefulness. The other rewards obedience. And this isn't theory. Two centuries ago, almost every human being was extremely poor. In 1990, about 38% of humanity still lived in extreme poverty. Today it's under 10%. More than a billion people escaped it in a single generation. It happened when China, India, Vietnam and South Korea opened up to markets, trade and private enterprise. The largest reduction in poverty in human history came from letting people trade. So why do so many people hate capitalism? Because what they hate usually isn't capitalism. They hate the bank that got bailed out with their taxes while they lost their house. They hate the giant company that writes the regulations so no startup can compete with it. They hate rent they can't afford because building new homes has been made nearly impossible. They hate the lobbyist who gets a subsidy while the small business owner drowns in paperwork. Look closely at each one, and you'll find a state handing out privileges. A bailout is not the market. The market would have let the bank fail. A regulation written by incumbents is not competition. It's protection from competition. None of this is capitalism. It's cronyism, which is what happens when businesses stop competing for customers and start competing for politicians. People see the symptom and blame the wrong cause. They say "capitalism failed" and ask for more state. That gives more power to the same people who created the problem, and it puts us right back on Hayek's road. The answer to bad capitalism isn't less freedom. It's less privilege. That means fewer bailouts, fewer protected incumbents, fewer permits, and more people allowed to build, compete and trade. Capitalism has a win condition: make things people want. Socialism has an end condition: someone has to be in charge. And history keeps showing us who ends up in that chair.

The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole

3 days ago

Capitalism has a win condition. Socialism does not.

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WARNING: You will lose IQ points if you watch this. These are the economically illiterate rubes who Mamdani has hoodwinked and are pushing socialism. "I'm a Dior bag socialist" and she says there's enough wealth in this country where nobody should have to live in poverty, but it's being hoarded by 10 guys. The combined wealth of the 10 richest guys in America is $3 trillion...now keep in mind, kids, they don't have that in cash. That's the combined value of all their businesses. If you were to seize 100% of all their assets, you'd have to compel the sale of all of their stock and their entire businesses. You wouldn't eve be able to get the full $3T because the forced sale of their stock and businesses would crash the entire market and you would only get pennies on the dollar. Not only that, by seizing the means of production, you've now decimated businesses that employ 2 million people...these are taxpayers. Those businesses generate wealth and tax revenue, every year, in perpetuity...if you wipe them out, you collapse the entire economy and all the tax revenue required to fund all your social services. But even in this imaginary Mamdani world, if you were to somehow seize $3T, that might sound like a lot, but that would only fund government for 5 months. That's it. Then it's gone forever, and all the annual wealth and revenue that their businesses create would be gone, causing a cascading collapse of tax revenue that would make the entire government go belly up. Even if you were to distribute that $3T as direct cash payments to every American, you know how much that would give you? $8,900. That's it. 4 months rent, at the expense of wiping out the entire American economy. When I tell you these communists are stupid...I mean, they are dangerously stupid. They are truly like children; they fundamentally lack any understanding of how things work, so they can LARP as adults in this fantasyland of free everything. And listen to what she says at the end...it perfectly sums up everything wrong with these socialists: "I'm not a political scientist, so if that's wrong, I don't care" I can't stand these people. They are going to destroy our civilization.

There are no “Pro Palestine” people. They’re all just anti-Israel. If they gave a shit about the people of Gaza they’d be calling for the immediate surrender of Hamas and the demilitarization of the territory.

@EliLebowicz

300,000 Jews call Chicago home. Since Mayor Brandon Johnson took office, antisemitic hate crimes in the city have jumped 58%. His response? He called Jewish requests for added security “segregation politics.” He appointed people with records of Holocaust inversion and sympathy for Hamas. 🧵

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The anti-Israel social media operation, mapped: Qatar, Iran, Turkey, Russia, China, and Palestinian advocacy networks are the 6 hubs. 233 entities spanning state-backed media, foreign agents, activist groups, campaigns, and digital publishers. At least 86 documented connections

S.B.S @Wallface

6 days ago

Israel's social media operation, mapped: 6 contractors, 13 websites they are tied to, 38 groups and tools the Diaspora Ministry lists for supporters, 5 AI chatbots citing the sites. 105 organizations and sites. Here is the whole web.

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@Tesla

@brivael

@brivael

I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you. I come from your future. In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream. Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them. The promise was protection. The result is stagnation. The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe. I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has. Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France? Trust me. You don’t want to be France.

Brivael Le Pogam @brivael

a week ago

Je n'ai jamais été aussi optimiste. Pas malgré le chaos actuel, mais grâce à lui. Je vais vous expliquer pourquoi l'empire du mensonge construit par la gauche depuis cinquante ans va s'effondrer, et pourquoi ce n'est pas une opinion mais une question de physique. Tout commence

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Not so anti-fragile now, huh?

Brivael Le Pogam @brivael

a week ago

Je n'ai jamais été aussi optimiste. Pas malgré le chaos actuel, mais grâce à lui. Je vais vous expliquer pourquoi l'empire du mensonge construit par la gauche depuis cinquante ans va s'effondrer, et pourquoi ce n'est pas une opinion mais une question de physique. Tout commence

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A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life. At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday." He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy. Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system. He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting. He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way." The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.

@naval 👇

AFG, Esq. @agrange

2 weeks ago

Well, thanks for NOTHING, Captalism:

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@libsoftiktok 👇

AFG, Esq. @agrange

2 weeks ago

Well, thanks for NOTHING, Captalism:

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@Gallup 👇

AFG, Esq. @agrange

2 weeks ago

Well, thanks for NOTHING, Captalism:

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@thatsKAIZEN 👇

AFG, Esq. @agrange

2 weeks ago

Well, thanks for NOTHING, Captalism:

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@chamath 👇

AFG, Esq. @agrange

2 weeks ago

Well, thanks for NOTHING, Captalism:

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@elianayjohnson @FreeBeacon 👇

AFG, Esq. @agrange

2 weeks ago

Well, thanks for NOTHING, Captalism:

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Well, thanks for NOTHING, Captalism: