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Handre
12.6K posts
Handre
@Handre
The economy isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed. Just not for you. They call it monetary policy; we call it what it is: legalized theft.
The Cape Katılım Kasım 2019
4.8K Takip Edilen30.3K Takipçiler
the draft regulations are far bigger than crypto, they are a direct attack on the gold community too
Property Rights Defense Group@PRDG_ZA
🧵 THREAD: South Africa's Draft Capital Flow Management Regulations 2026 (CFMR) aren't just coming for crypto. If you hold gold, silver, or precious metals — your self-custody rights are in the crosshairs. Read this. ⚡✅
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@stephen_hinton I just spent the whole weekend digging a hole in my backyard and filling it up again. How much was my labor worth?
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@Handre You sure you got that right? That the price of anything reflects how much labour is put into it? That is a new interpretation for me.
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Carl Menger destroyed the labor theory of value in 1871 with a single insight: humans value goods based on their marginal utility, not the labor embedded in them. The same year, William Stanley Jevons in England and Léon Walras in France independently arrived at similar conclusions about marginal utility. Three economists, three countries, one revolutionary idea that shattered Marx's entire framework.
Menger's "Principles of Economics" went further than his contemporaries by building economics from individual human action rather than mathematical abstractions. While Jevons and Walras constructed elegant equations, Menger asked the fundamental question: why does anyone value anything at all? His answer traced value back to human needs and the decreasing satisfaction each additional unit provides. The tenth glass of water matters less than the first when you're dying of thirst.
The timing wasn't coincidental. By 1871, classical economics had painted itself into a corner with the labor theory of value. If labor determines value, why do diamonds cost more than water? Why do identical goods sell for different prices? Value exists only in the mind of the acting individual. No intrinsic value, no objective measurement, just human preferences ranking scarce goods according to their ability to satisfy wants.
Menger's approach created the foundation for the entire Austrian school tradition that followed. Böhm-Bawerk used marginal utility to explain interest rates. Mises extended it to money and the business cycle. Rothbard applied it to ethics and political theory. Every free market economist since 1871 stands on Menger's shoulders.
The establishment still teaches economics as if Menger never existed, preferring mathematical models to human action, aggregate demand curves to individual choice, and central planning to market processes.
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Student loan forgiveness transfers wealth from plumbers and electricians to lawyers and consultants. The median borrower with graduate debt owes $65,000 but earns $75,000+ annually (often much more). Meanwhile, the median household income sits at $70,000. You're literally asking families who couldn't afford college to subsidize those who could.
Biden's $400 billion handout in 2022 proved this perfectly. A Harvard MBA with $180k in debt gets relief while the guy who installs her kitchen cabinets pays for it through inflation and higher taxes. The plumber probably makes less than she will in her first year at McKinsey, yet his tax dollars reduce her monthly payments.
Even worse: forgiveness incentivizes universities to jack up prices further. Why wouldn't they? Students borrow freely when they expect bailouts, and schools capture that easy money through higher tuition. (We've seen this movie before with housing and easy credit.) The real winners aren't struggling graduates but bloated administrations and their army of diversity coordinators earning six figures.
The perverse morality here stuns me. We reward poor financial decisions by educated elites while punishing working families who made responsible choices or sacrificed college dreams for economic reality.
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Pakistan's rupee has lost 85% of its value against the dollar since 1990. The IMF keeps calling this progress.
The International Monetary Fund has approved Pakistan's 24th bailout package since 1958. Twenty-four separate "rescue" programs in 65 years. Each time, the IMF arrives with the same prescription: devalue your currency, raise taxes, cut spending, liberalize imports. Each time, Pakistan gets poorer and the rupee gets weaker.
Free market economists call this the IMF trap. The Fund lends dollars to governments that cannot pay their debts, then demands policy changes that make repayment even less likely. Currency devaluation makes imports more expensive, driving up inflation and making ordinary Pakistanis poorer. Higher taxes crush domestic businesses. Import liberalization floods the country with foreign goods that local producers cannot compete with.
The real winners are the politically connected importers who get cheap access to dollars, and the Western exporters who gain market access. Pakistan's middle class watches their savings evaporate while the government celebrates each new IMF agreement as economic reform.
The rupee traded at 9.9 per dollar in 1990. Today it trades above 280. Pakistani families need 28 times more rupees to buy the same goods from abroad. This represents systematic monetary destruction disguised as economic stabilization.
Pakistan's government could end this cycle tomorrow by refusing new IMF loans and fixing the rupee to gold or adopting the dollar entirely. But that would require giving up the ability to print money to fund government spending. The IMF trap keeps both the Pakistani government and the Fund in business while ordinary Pakistanis pay the price.
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He has it wrong. The reason no one is having children is because they cant afford it. They cant even afford moving out of their parents houses, nevermind having children.
This is because of money printing is causing inflation.
Blaming dating apps for population decline😂 That is like blaming a piece of straw for starting a forest fire.
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but of course @handre would have it that we should just let technology rip …
Steve Skojec@SteveSkojec
He’s dead on.
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The South African government published draft regulations that would criminalize self-custody of Bitcoin. Border agents could demand your private keys. Treasury could force you to sell your Bitcoin back to rand. All holdings must be declared within 30 days. This happened by ministerial decree without a parliamentary vote.
Murray Rothbard described the state as nothing more than a gang of thieves writ large, legitimized through the mythology of democratic consent. South Africa's National Treasury demonstrates this perfectly. They are using a 93-year-old law from 1933 to regulate technology that didn't exist until 2009, overriding court rulings that said crypto assets fall outside exchange controls. The rand has lost 90% of its value in thirty years, and now they want to trap you inside their sinking currency.
They are doing this because of what economists call the Impossible Trinity. Any government can only maintain two of three things: stable exchange rates, free capital movement, or independent monetary policy. South Africa chose capital controls plus monetary independence, sacrificing your freedom to move money. Bitcoin breaks that equation. When you can custody your own wealth outside their system, their capital controls become meaningless.
Eleven million South Africans remain unbanked. For them, self-custodied Bitcoin is their bank. The same government claiming to care about financial inclusion just moved to criminalize the only viable savings technology these people can access. Bastiat would recognize the paradox: what is seen is "investor protection," what is unseen is the destruction of the only escape route from monetary theft.
The comment window closes May 16th. They are betting you won't notice until it's too late.
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If Government schemes, rules, regulations, and laws were the solutions to our problems, then, given the superabundant multiplicity of such schemes, rules, regulations and laws, the only problem we should have would be discover some problem that hadn’t yet been solved.
Handre@Handre
Government is not the answer to your problem, is the problem.
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@Handre Rescinded. But spelling apart, your mini essays are en pointe and much enjoyed.
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Walter Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for systematically lying about the Ukrainian famine while 7 million people starved to death under Stalin's forced collectivization. The New York Times correspondent knew exactly what he was doing when he filed reports describing "shortages" and "food difficulties" instead of the mass starvation unfolding before his eyes.
Duranty's articles praised Soviet agricultural policy even as entire villages disappeared. He wrote glowing accounts of collective farms while peasants ate bark and grass. When other journalists reported the truth about the Holodomor, Duranty dismissed their accounts as "malignant propaganda" and assured American readers that Stalin's five-year plan was working brilliantly. The Times promoted his coverage on the front page throughout 1932.
Duranty lived in Moscow, traveled through Ukraine, and witnessed the consequences of central planning firsthand. He chose to cover for Stalin because he believed the Soviet experiment represented humanity's future. Like many Western intellectuals of his era, he convinced himself that millions of deaths were acceptable collateral damage for building socialism. The Pulitzer committee rewarded him for this moral bankruptcy.
The Holodomor perfectly illustrates what happens when states control food production and distribution. Stalin confiscated grain to feed cities and export abroad while rural Ukraine descended into cannibalism. Free market economists had predicted exactly this outcome when central planners replaced price signals with bureaucratic decree.
The Times has never recinded Duranty's Pulitzer Prize.
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@Jessethefree That is the least of the problems with Marxism or Marxists.
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I have a real question. If Marxism is so great, why do Marxists need to use manipulative tactics? What’s with the word games and double speak?
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Before 1978, the Civil Aeronautics Board treated airlines like public utilities. You needed government permission to fly routes, government approval for fares, government blessing to exist. Flying cost what a car costs today (adjusted for inflation) and only executives and the wealthy could afford it.
Carter signed airline deregulation in October 1978. Fares dropped 50% within five years. Routes exploded from regulated monopolies to competitive networks. Southwest Airlines went from a Texas regional carrier to reshaping how Americans travel.
The bureaucrats said deregulation would create chaos, unsafe conditions, stranded passengers. Instead you got $99 flights to Vegas and retirees visiting grandchildren across the country. Free markets delivered luxury-turned-commodity faster than any government program moved the needle on "accessibility."
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@NanHayworth I'm shocked by the general population's lack of resistance to this, worldwide.
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Progressive taxation is State-sanctioned theft.
Inheritance taxation is both State-sanctioned theft and a ghoulish obscenity.
Government has NO inherent right to attach its citizens' earnings or wealth.
REPEAL THE 16th AMENDMENT.
Handre@Handre
The real enemy? Progressive taxation. One intervention creates problems that demand five more interventions, each generating revenue for the system. Start with a 15% top rate "just on the wealthy." Within decades, you get bracket creep pushing middle-class earners into those top rates. Politicians respond by creating new deductions and credits to "help families." Tax code balloons from 400 pages to 75,000 pages. Compliance costs hit $400 billion annually in the US alone. Small businesses hire accountants instead of workers. Entrepreneurs relocate to Singapore or Dubai. Each complication spawns three new bureaucracies. The Alternative Minimum Tax arrives to catch "tax avoiders" (translation: people following the law). Then comes the Earned Income Tax Credit to help low earners crushed by payroll taxes. Estate tax planning creates entire industries. Corporate inversions trigger anti-inversion rules that trigger new loopholes that trigger more rules. Sweden tried this experiment in the 1970s and 80s. Top rates hit 87%. Astrid Lindgren (Pippi Longstocking author) paid 102% marginal rates. IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad fled to Switzerland. Tennis star Björn Borg moved to Monaco. Tax revenues as percentage of GDP actually fell. Sweden eventually slashed rates and simplified the system. The original promise was to soak the rich. The result: middle class paying 40%+ effective rates while billionaires hire armies of lawyers to pay 15%. Each new "fix" creates ten new distortions, ten new lobbying opportunities, ten new ways for connected insiders to game the system. Modern taxation, working as designed.
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Socialists took over and are “redistributing” wealth from the productive to the parasite class.
Wall Street Mav@WallStreetMav
South Africa used to be way ahead of other African countries and strongly above the average for emerging economies. But something happened the past 20 years, they are falling behind … now they have electricity blackouts, public infrastructure is falling apart. What changed?
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