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Handre
13.6K posts
Handre
@Handre
The ideal size of any government is always smaller than it is now. We will wipe the terrible ideas of socialism and collectivism from the face of the earth.
The Cape Katılım Kasım 2019
4.9K Takip Edilen38.3K Takipçiler
You can't make this shit up. This is what the left will do to white people if left unchecked.
They create racist laws and quotas that exclude whites from competing in national tournaments.
Then, when white people create their own tournament for themselves to compete in, they call it out as racist🤣
Insane.
Kallie Kriel@kalliekriel
Unfortunately, News24 once again insults Afrikaners by portraying our culture and cultural events as racist relics of apartheid. Cultural events are entirely normal. In South Africa, there are literally hundreds of cultural gatherings and events held within the country’s various cultural communities. These include, among others, the Zulu Reed Dance, initiation schools, festivals in traditional communities, the Jewish Maccabi sports weeks, Ramadan football tournaments and the Bokkieweek. None of these events is labelled as “black only”. In contrast, those who disrespect the dignity of Afrikaners, such as News24, continue to falsely reduce our culture to the evil concept of white only racism. @afriforum is proud to support cultural gatherings in the spirit of the constitutional principle of unity in diversity. We do so through cooperation agreements with traditional communities, as well as through AfriForum's sponsorship of the Mark Fish Foundation's football clinics in traditional communities and the Bokkieweek. News24 is also blatantly lying by labelling the Afrikaans song Die Lied van Jong Suid-Afrika as “the apartheid anthem”. This confirms that News24 does not hesitate to spread falsehoods in order to advance its anti-Afrikaner agenda. The Bokkieweek also creates a new opportunity for inclusion for young Afrikaners who have been excluded from SARU and other school tournaments due to stringent racial quotas in provincial school sport tournaments that are preoccupied with racial classification. AfriForum does not organise Bokkieweek. However, for the record, here are my answers to News24 when I was approached for comment: Dear Prega, Thank you for your questions. I am happy to respond as follows: In South Africa, there are literally hundreds of cultural gatherings and events held within the country's various cultural communities. These include amongst others the Zulu Reed Dance, initiation schools, other festivals in traditional communities, the Jewish Maccabi sports weeks, Ramadan football tournaments and the Bokkieweek. None of these events is ever labelled as "black only". In contrast, Afrikaner culture is insulted and disregarded by those that falsely reduces it to racist or "whites only" events. AfriForum is proud to support cultural gatherings in the spirit of the constitutional principle of unity in diversity. We do so through cooperation agreements with traditional communities, as well as through AfriForum's sponsorship of the Mark Fish Foundation's football clinics in traditional communities and the Bokkieweek. I also find it offensive that songs which have, over many decades, become part of Afrikaner culture are reduced by some to being apartheid songs and relics. Afrikaners, like all other communities in the country, have the right to practise and celebrate their culture through cultural events. For this reason, AfriForum and I will continue to promote cultural diversity in this way. The use of regional names for areas that do not correspond with current provincial boundaries is not an unusual phenomenon. The Bokkieweek also creates a new opportunity for inclusion for young Afrikaners who have been excluded from SARU and other school tournaments due to stringent racial quotas in provincial school sport tournaments that are preoccupied with racial classification. Kind regards, Kallie Kriel CEO: AfriForum
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Rome fed 200,000 families free grain by 46 BC, and it called this generosity. Julius Caesar inherited a dole of 320,000 recipients and trimmed it, not out of principle but because the treasury was bleeding. This was the annona, the grain distribution that started as emergency relief under the Gracchi in 123 BC and hardened into a permanent entitlement. Once free grain became a right, no politician could touch it and keep his head.
You already know how this works, because you watch the same play run today. A subsidy arrives as mercy. It stays as an expectation. Then it becomes the thing men vote for instead of working for.
The Roman citizen once farmed his own land, served in his own legion, and expected nothing from the state but courts and roads. By the time Trajan was staging 123 days of games in AD 107, slaughtering 11,000 animals and pairing 10,000 gladiators for the crowd, that citizen had become a spectator. He no longer fought Rome's wars: hired auxiliaries and Germanic mercenaries did. He no longer fed himself: Egypt and North Africa did, shipped in on the public account. He no longer chose his rulers in any meaningful sense: he cheered them in the Colosseum and collected his ration.
The free grain and the free games purchased compliance, not compassion. A man dependent on the state for his dinner and his entertainment does not organize resistance to that state, and every emperor from Augustus onward understood the arithmetic. Panem et circenses was a bribe paid in exchange for civic surrender, and the mob accepted the terms gladly.
Here is the mechanism the welfare enthusiast never grasps. Virtue is not a feeling. It is a practice, and practices atrophy when the incentive to perform them disappears. Take away a man's need to provide, defend, and decide, and you domesticate him rather than liberate him. Rome spent four centuries proving it, then handed the ruins to Odoacer in AD 476 without much of a fight, because the men who might have fought had long since learned to wait for the grain ship instead.
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The best Roman emperor debased the currency the least. That is the only ruler you should measure.
Augustus minted the denarius at roughly 95 percent silver and kept it there. Prices stayed stable for decades. Trade flowed across the Mediterranean because a merchant in Alexandria trusted the coin a merchant in Gaul handed him. Sound money built that empire, not the legions.
Now meet the villain: state debasement, the ancient version of the printing press.
Nero started the rot in 64 AD. He clipped the denarius to about 90 percent silver and shaved its weight. He needed to pay for his fire-ravaged Rome and his own excess, so he stole purchasing power from every Roman who held a coin. Classic inflation. You do not vote on it. You just wake up poorer.
By the time you reach Caracalla in 215 AD, the silver content sits near 50 percent. He also invented the antoninianus, a coin marked as two denarii that carried the silver of one and a half. Fraud stamped in metal.
Then comes the worst of them: the stretch running through Gallienus around 265 AD, when the "silver" denarius held maybe 5 percent silver and looked like a bronze slug dipped in a shine. Prices exploded. The empire's economy fractured into barter.
Diocletian answered in 301 AD with the Edict on Maximum Prices. He blamed merchants for the inflation he and his predecessors caused, then set price ceilings on over a thousand goods with death as the penalty. Sellers pulled their goods. Shortages spread. He created the disaster and then punished the people trying to survive it.
You know this pattern. Every central bank repeats it: debase, deny, then criminalize the response.
So rank your emperors by the coin, not the conquests. Augustus kept his hands off the silver. Gallienus and Diocletian robbed the whole empire and called it governance.
The metal never lies about the man.
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Rome did not fall in a day. It bloated, taxed, and inflated its way into the grave over three centuries, and you can watch it happen if you follow the money.
Start with Augustus. The early Principate ran on a light touch: modest taxes, a silver denarius that actually contained silver (about 95 percent under Augustus), and a merchant class that moved grain, wine, and olive oil across the Mediterranean without asking a bureaucrat's permission. Trade flourished because the state mostly stayed out of the warehouse.
Then the emperors discovered spending. Armies to pay. Grain doles to hand out in the capital. Games to keep the mob distracted (the dole and the circus were the world's first stimulus package, and they worked exactly as well as ours). By Nero's reign in 64 AD the treasury was short, so Nero did what desperate governments always do. He clipped the coin. The denarius lost silver, and it kept losing it. By the time of Gallienus around 260 AD, the "silver" coin was a copper token with a wash of silver on the surface, roughly 5 percent. Prices exploded. Wheat that cost a few denarii under Augustus cost thousands.
Diocletian arrived in 284 AD and diagnosed the disease as greedy merchants. His Edict on Maximum Prices in 301 fixed the price of everything from a pint of beer to a lion, with death for anyone who charged more. Goods vanished from the market overnight. You cannot repeal supply and demand by decree, though every ruler tries.
He also froze men into their professions. A baker's son baked. A farmer stayed tied to his land, the seed of serfdom planted by a tax code that needed bodies fixed in place to squeeze.
The free market that built Roman prosperity died under the weight of the state that fed on it. The barbarians only knocked over a corpse.
You have seen this movie. You are living the sequel.
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In 212 AD, the Emperor Caracalla issued the Constitutio Antoniniana and granted Roman citizenship to nearly every free man in the empire. Historians dress this up as a milestone of inclusion, a grand humanitarian gesture. Cassius Dio, who lived through it, was less sentimental. He told you the real reason plainly: Caracalla wanted the revenue.
Follow the money. Roman citizens paid inheritance tax, the vicesima hereditatium, at five percent, and tax on freeing slaves. Provincials who lacked citizenship largely escaped these levies. So Caracalla did the arithmetic. Convert millions of subjects into citizens overnight, and suddenly the whole population owes the estate tax. He then doubled the rate to ten percent for good measure. Inclusion was the marketing. Extraction was the product.
You should recognize the maneuver, because states never stop running it. A government facing a spending problem never cuts spending elsewhere, it finds new revenue sources. It widens the net.
Caracalla needed the money for a specific reason. He had murdered his brother Geta, purged Geta's supporters, and then bought the army's loyalty with a massive pay raise. Soldiers cost silver. The denarius he minted kept losing weight and fineness, so debasement alone could not close the gap. He reached for the tax base instead.
The result over the following decades was predictable. Broader taxation, heavier coin debasement, and a citizenship that meant progressively less as more people held it. By the mid third century the currency had collapsed and the empire nearly followed.
Watch what happens when a ruler hands you a title you never requested. The paper says citizen. The ledger says taxpayer. Caracalla saw the difference clearly and counted on the people not to.
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Picture a baker in Rome around 100 BC. He joins a collegium of fellow bakers, pays his dues, shares recipes, buys grain in bulk, and settles disputes with his peers over a cup of wine. Nobody forced him. He walked in because it paid to, and he could walk out the same way. That is a voluntary association, and it worked precisely because it was voluntary.
Then the state arrived.
By the reign of Trajan, and hardening under Diocletian and Constantine, the collegia stopped being clubs and became conscription lists. The emperors discovered something every ruler eventually discovers: a private guild is an inconvenient thing to tax and command, but a licensed monopoly is a beautiful thing to milk. So they licensed them. The pistores (the bakers) received legal privileges, guaranteed grain supplies, even exemptions from certain public duties. Generous, no?
The price came due fast. Membership turned hereditary. Your father baked bread for the annona, so you would bake bread for the annona, and your son after you. The collegium became a caste. Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices in 301 AD then fixed what you could charge, which meant you produced at a loss or you didn't produce at all. Bakers fled their ovens. Shippers abandoned their vessels. The emperors responded by chaining men to their trades by law.
Watch the mechanism, because it repeats across every century. The state grants a privilege. The privilege comes with a leash. The leash tightens until the "beneficiary" is a serf holding a charter.
Free market thinkers have a name for the exchange the emperors offered: protection from competition in return for obedience. The baker who once set his own prices and hired whom he pleased now answered to a prefect. His guild, born to serve him, now served Rome.
The bread got worse.
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Vale's 1997 privatization stands as one of the clearest real-world experiments in what happens when you remove a state bureaucracy from control of a productive asset and hand ownership to people who bear actual profit and loss.
Before privatization, the Brazilian government ran Vale as a patronage machine. Political appointments filled management positions, capital allocation followed electoral logic rather than geological or market logic, and the company's iron ore reserves in the Carajás region, the largest high-grade deposits on earth, sat underexploited because no state bureaucrat faced personal consequences for leaving billions in the ground. The government sold its controlling stake for approximately 3.3 billion USD in 1997, a figure critics called a giveaway. Within a decade, Vale's market capitalization exceeded 170 billion USD.
Wealth creation emerged from the difference in incentive structures. Private owners have a radically different time preference than state managers. A government official discounts the future heavily because his tenure is short and his upside is capped. A private shareholder with transferable equity has every incentive to invest in long-duration capital projects, precisely the kind iron ore extraction demands, because future cash flows increase present asset value. Vale spent aggressively on rail infrastructure, port capacity at Ponta da Madeira, and fleet expansion, investments that require decades to pay off. State management avoids exactly this category of commitment.
Sound money connects directly here. Capital-intensive industries like mining require long-term planning horizons, and long planning horizons require a stable unit of account. Brazil's history of monetary debasement, from cruzeiro to cruzado to cruzeiro real before the 1994 Plano Real, destroyed the calculation environment that rational capital deployment demands. Privatization without monetary reform produces incomplete results. Vale thrived partly because privatization coincided with a period of relative monetary stabilization, giving investors the price signals they needed to commit multi-decade capital.
The state had already robbed Brazilians by suppressing Vale's productive potential for decades through bureaucratic management. The 170-billion-dollar market cap that emerged after private ownership took hold represents wealth that political control had been actively preventing from existing.
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J'ai côtoyé des milliardaires de la tech, des politiques de haut vol, des dirigeants dans des domaines très différents.
La plus grande déception n'est pas celle qu'on croit.
Ce n'est pas le cynisme. Ce n'est pas la corruption. C'est l'inconscience.
Dans l'immense majorité des cas, ces gens n'ont aucune idée des effets de leurs actions. Personne ne se lève le matin en se disant "je travaille pour un système qui produit de l'immigration de masse, donc de l'insécurité". Personne ne fait le lien. Personne ne remonte la chaîne causale.
Pourquoi ? Parce qu'ils manquent de culture historique. De culture économique. Ils optimisent leur carrière, leur statut, leur prochaine étape, sans jamais voir le système dans lequel ils s'inscrivent.
Ils ne sont pas maléfiques. Ils sont perdus.
Les vrais cyniques existent, j'en ai croisé. Mais ils sont rares. La banalité du mal, ce n'est pas des méchants qui complotent. C'est des gens intelligents, ambitieux, et profondément inconscients, qui exécutent sans comprendre.
C'est bien plus effrayant qu'un complot. Un complot, ça se combat. L'inconscience de masse, elle, se reproduit toute seule.
Français
Did X change the gif search engine? It sucks now. Can't find anything good, all the old standby favorites are gone or buried deep.
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Social Security is a Ponzi scheme with one feature Bernie Madoff never had: the federal government will send armed men to your home if you refuse to participate.
Every working American pays 12.4% of wages into a system that holds zero assets on their behalf. The Social Security Trust Fund owns Treasury IOUs, meaning the government owes money to itself. When you pay in today, Congress spends that money immediately on current retirees and general expenditures. Your "account" is a political promise, enforced by statute, backed by nothing except the Treasury's capacity to tax future workers. Charles Ponzi ran the same structure in 1920 and went to federal prison for it. The difference is purely jurisdictional.
Free market economists succintly explained how this unravels. A pay-as-you-go system requires an expanding base of workers to fund a growing pool of retirees. In 1950, 16 workers supported each Social Security beneficiary. By 2024, that ratio sat at 2.7 workers per beneficiary, and the Social Security Administration's own actuaries project the combined trust funds reach insolvency by 2033. At that point, the law mandates automatic benefit cuts of roughly 21%. The math is not ambiguous. The program has been consuming its own structural foundation for decades.
You were never given a choice. No opt-out exists. Attempt to withhold your payroll tax and the IRS assesses penalties, levies your bank account, and ultimately prosecutes you. The moral weight of that coercion tends to disappear beneath softer language about "contributions" and "entitlements," but the underlying mechanism is identical to any other government extraction: comply or face force. Calling the payroll tax a contribution is calling a mugging a voluntary wealth transfer.
The cruelest part is what the coercion actually costs you. A 25-year-old earning $60,000 today who redirected their 12.4% payroll tax into a simple index fund over a 40-year career would retire with approximately $1.4 million in real assets, not a political promise subject to congressional revision every budget cycle. Instead, Congress gets the capital, allocates it to current political priorities, and hands you a benefit formula that the same Congress retains the legal authority to cut at any time. The Supreme Court confirmed in Fleming v. Nestor (1960) that you hold no contractual right to Social Security benefits whatsoever.
They built a mandatory retirement system where you own nothing, control nothing, and are protected by nothing except the goodwill of the people spending your money.
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Socialism has a body count, and it keeps meticulous records of everything except the graves.
The Soviet Union starved roughly 5 million people in the Holodomor of 1932-33 while exporting grain to prove the collective farm worked. Mao's Great Leap Forward killed between 30 and 45 million between 1958 and 1962, mostly by ordering peasants to smelt their cooking pots into useless pig iron. Cambodia under Pol Pot emptied its cities in 1975 and murdered a quarter of the population with hoes to save bullets. North Korea runs a hereditary monarchy that dresses in Marxist costume and let 3 million citizens starve in the 1990s while the Kim family bought cognac by the case.
Venezuela sat on the largest proven oil reserves on Earth and still engineered inflation of 1,000,000 percent by 2018, leaving surgeons scavenging dumpsters and toddlers dying of measles that vaccines had erased decades earlier. Zimbabwe seized productive farms in 2000 to correct historical grievance and turned the breadbasket of Africa into a nation printing 100-trillion-dollar notes worth nothing. Cuba froze its economy in 1959 and now displays 1958 Chevrolets not as nostalgia but as the only cars anyone can keep running. East Germany built a wall in 1961, then shot the people who tried to leave the workers' paradise, which tells you everything about who the paradise served.
Notice a pattern? Central planners cannot calculate what prices communicate. They compensate for that blindness with barbed wire. The intellectuals who designed these systems never suffered under them. Walter Ulbricht did not queue for bread. Nicolás Maduro does not eat from the trash. The state promises to abolish scarcity and delivers only the scarcity of freedom.
Every one of these regimes began with a moral claim: that men with guns could allocate resources more justly than free people trading voluntarily. Every one ended by pointing those guns at the citizens it swore to liberate. The coercion was the design working perfectly.
You were told these were accidents. They were the design.
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Someone give this guy a Nobel. They figured out how to eliminate all crime by simply legalizing it. How has no one ever thought of this before?
Democrats Deliver@DemzDeliver
🚨 Robberies are now down 31% in California since Gavin Newsom took office.
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Cadre deployment is the operating system of the ANC, and it works exactly as designed.
In 1997, the ANC formalized what it called "cadre deployment," a policy of placing loyal party members into every position of consequence: state-owned enterprises, municipalities, the judiciary, procurement offices. The stated goal was to control "the levers of power." Read that phrase again. They told you, in writing, that the point was not to run water treatment plants or keep the lights on. The point was control. Competence was never the criterion. Loyalty was.
You can watch the result at Eskom. The utility that once produced some of the cheapest electricity on earth now subjects 60 million people to rolling blackouts, some lasting ten hours a day. Between 2007 and 2023, the ANC cycled through more than a dozen CEOs, many of them deployed cadres with no engineering background and a remarkable talent for signing contracts with connected suppliers. André de Ruyter, who actually tried to fight the theft, testified that roughly one billion rand per month was being looted from the utility. He was poisoned with cyanide for his trouble. Transnet collapsed the same way. So did South African Airways, which burned through more than 30 billion rand in bailouts before anyone admitted the obvious.
The state does not create wealth. It seizes and redistributes it. Every rand a deployed cadre "earns" is a rand extracted at gunpoint from a taxpayer or a consumer who had no choice. When you staff a coercive monopoly with people chosen for loyalty rather than skill, you have not corrupted a good institution, you are simply running it honestly, according to its true nature.
The private firm that hires an incompetent nephew loses money and dies. It faces the profit-and-loss test every single day. A state enterprise faces no such test. It bills you whether it delivers electricity or darkness, and it jails you if you refuse to pay.
Cadre deployment revealed what a state is.
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Angola sits on some of the richest oil reserves in sub-Saharan Africa, pumping over 1.1 million barrels per day at its peak, and managed to keep the majority of its population in grinding poverty for decades. This is a policy outcome, not an accident.
The MPLA took power in 1975 and immediately began doing what Marxist-Leninist governments do: nationalizing industry, collectivizing agriculture, and funneling resource wealth into the state apparatus rather than allowing it to circulate through voluntary exchange. Sonangol, the state oil company created in 1976, became the regime's personal treasury. By the 2000s, with oil prices surging, Angola was posting GDP growth above 15% annually. The average Angolan saw almost none of it. Isabel dos Santos, daughter of longtime president José Eduardo dos Santos, accumulated a personal fortune estimated at $2.2 billion while overseeing state enterprises. Socialism operates exactly as designed: concentrate control, and the controllers enrich themselves.
The coercion is the point. When you strip away the revolutionary language and the five-year plans, the state is an institution that extracts wealth from some people by threatening violence against others. Angola's ruling class did not stumble into predation; they organized around it deliberately, and the MPLA's ideological scaffolding gave them moral cover to call it liberation.
Free market economists have explained the resource curse clearly enough: oil wealth flows to whoever controls the state, and that control becomes worth fighting over, so you get civil war (27 years of it, ending in 2002), institutional decay, and zero incentive to build the legal and economic infrastructure that actually produces broad prosperity. Diversification never happens. Manufacturing never develops. Farming collapses after collectivization destroys price signals and private incentive simultaneously.
Angola began modest liberalization after 2002, and private sector activity did grow. But the MPLA never surrendered structural control over the commanding heights of the economy. The lesson the regime drew from the Soviet collapse was not that central planning fails: it was that you need better PR and a sovereign wealth fund to quiet foreign critics. Current poverty rates above 40% are the tuition fee ordinary Angolans pay for that lesson.
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