Handre

Karl Marx spent his life explaining an economy he never once participated in. He wrote *Das Kapital* in the reading room of the British Museum, subsisting on handouts from Friedrich Engels, whose family owned the very factories Marx despised. But that irony is the least of his problems. Start with the labor theory of value, the rotten foundation holding the whole structure up. Marx claimed a good's value comes from the socially necessary labor time poured into it. Sounds tidy. It collapses on contact with reality. You can spend forty hours hand-carving a mud pie and it remains worthless. Value lives in the mind of the buyer, not the sweat of the maker. Carl Menger settled this in 1871 with the theory of marginal utility. Value is subjective. A bottle of water sells for pennies in Vienna and for a fortune in the Sahara, and the labor inside it never changed. Once subjective value stands, Marx's "surplus value" story falls with it. He insisted the capitalist steals the gap between what labor produces and what labor gets paid. But the worker gets paid today for output the entrepreneur sells months later, at a price nobody can guarantee. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk named this correctly: the capitalist advances wages now and shoulders the risk of loss. Time preference explains the wage gap. That is not theft. That is a service, and workers line up for it because they prefer a paycheck Friday over a gamble that pays off next year. Then there is calculation. In 1920 Ludwig von Mises demolished the socialist project in a single stroke: without private ownership of capital goods, you have no market prices for them, and without prices you cannot calculate whether building tractors or grain silos wastes resources. The planner flies blind. The Soviets proved it for seventy years, producing shoes nobody could wear and steel nobody needed while people queued for bread. Twenty million dead in the process, give or take a census. Marx predicted capitalism would immiserate the worker until revolution. Instead the worker got refrigerators, antibiotics, and a smartphone with more computing power than NASA had in 1969. His theory failed the exam. Every single question.

@Michel_Jabbour 🤣 insane

@Handre I went to the Lebanese DMV equivalent to register the second-hand car I bought. I paid 13% of what I paid for the whole car, just so that the state recognizes the car is officially mine. It is disgusting. Not counting the mess and waste of time.

Sometimes I wonder why I hate the state. Could it be because they are forcibly taking 75% of my income and giving almost nothing in return? Maybe it’s because on top of that they are debasing our currency, thereby making everyone poorer? Or could it be the humiliation rituals they put me through by forcing me to stand in lines for 6 hours+ at Home Affairs and the traffic department? How do people look at this and go: We need more of that?

@antonliubich I like

@Handre The Impossible Promise: 245 Failures of the State

What do you think of “Licensed to Fail - 245 Examples of Government Overreach” as a title?

@MAKS_Diogenes This is the kind of content I was missing in my feed.

lets go anons

Quantitative easing is counterfeiting with a graduate degree. Strip away the acronym and you find something a Roman emperor would recognize instantly. The Federal Reserve creates dollars out of nothing, buys government bonds and mortgage-backed securities from the primary dealers, and credits their reserve accounts with money that did not exist a keystroke earlier. That is the whole trick. Ben Bernanke launched the first round in November 2008, buying $600 billion in assets. By 2014 the Fed's balance sheet had swollen past $4.5 trillion. During the 2020 panic it blew past $8.9 trillion. Nobody mined anything. Nobody saved anything. They printed. Call it what it is: monetary debasement. The Fed prefers "asset purchase programs" because "printing money to fund the state" tests poorly with focus groups. You were told this was emergency medicine. Temporary. Bernanke sat before Congress and promised the balance sheet would normalize. It never did. Every attempt to shrink it, the 2018 "quantitative tightening" experiment, ended the moment markets threw a tantrum. The addict does not taper. The addict finds a new dealer. Here is what the debasement actually does. New money enters through Wall Street first. The banks, the bondholders, the asset owners get the fresh dollars while prices remain at yesterday's level. They buy stocks, real estate, whatever they please, at old prices. By the time those dollars reach the nurse in Toledo or the electrician in Phoenix, prices have already climbed. Richard Cantillon described this effect around 1730. The people closest to the money spigot win. The people furthest away pay. This is the mechanism. QE inflated the everything bubble: the S&P 500 tripling from its 2009 low, home prices doubling, zombie corporations rolling over debt they could never service at honest interest rates. Now they need a fresh label. When the next crisis hits and the Fed cranks the machine again, expect "balance sheet expansion," or "liquidity support facilities," or some antiseptic phrase engineered so you never picture a printing press. Perhaps they will bundle it with a central bank digital dollar and call it modernization. The name changes. The theft does not. You hold the currency. They control the supply. Learn what money actually is before they redefine that too, and while you are at it, buy some Bitcoin or gold.

@MAKS_Diogenes LFG

My feed is all bitcoiners now Maybe this was the bottom signal we’ve been waiting for Up only now

Does this mean follow-trains are back?

@JethroToro 🤣🤣🤣

GM mutuals ☀️ Long time, no see for many of you

@elndito Thank you!

@Handre I’m happy to share your content. Your work is excellent and I look forward to your book.

I am looking for someone to work with who can help me create and self-publish a book consisting of the most interesting posts from this account. You will be working for a profit share. Dm’s are open.

@lonniev Thank you Lonnie!

@Handre As soon as you have it posted on Amazon, I will add it to my recommended readings at stablecoin.myshopify.com/collections/bo… If you need pro bono prerelease reading reviewers, DM me, please.

@____sth____ I like it!

@Handre Licensed to Fail - Tales of Debauchery

@JPRaubenheimer You would not be buying the book then?

@Handre Honestly - I’d be interested but also think I’d only need to read 4-5 examples to get the point. (Which may be incorrect on my part - but just my immediate knee jerk response).

@Crypto_Briefing 🤮

@Handre x.com/Crypto_Briefin…

The European Central Bank wants to issue you money it can switch off. That is the digital euro in one sentence, and no amount of Frankfurt press-release gloss changes it. Christine Lagarde and the ECB have spent since October 2023 preparing a central bank digital currency. A digital euro held directly at the central bank. A holding cap floated around 3,000 euros per person, so your commercial bank does not collapse when depositors flee. Programmable, traceable, issued and controlled by the same institution that printed 4.6 trillion euros of new base money during the pandemic years. Consider what that cap tells you. A currency so attractive that regulators must legally forbid you from holding too much of it🤣. They are nailing the windows shut before the fire drill. You already have digital euros. They sit in your bank account. The real difference is control. Cash is anonymous, final, and yours. A CBDC settles on the central bank's ledger, which means every transaction becomes visible to the issuer, and every rule the issuer dreams up becomes enforceable at the point of spending. Negative interest rates that actually bite. Expiry dates on stimulus. Restrictions on what you buy, where, and when. Sound money advocates have warned about this for decades, and the technology now makes it trivial. The public has noticed. The ECB's own 2022 consultation drew responses dominated by privacy fears. A 2023 Bundesbank survey found most Germans uninterested in the thing. Brussels keeps building anyway, because the digital euro was never a response to demand. It answers the wave of private stablecoins and the quiet exit into bitcoin, both of which threaten the monopoly. Free market thinkers understand money as a good chosen by users, not decreed by committees. When people prefer dollars, gold, or a digital asset with a fixed supply of 21 million, the state does not compete. It legislates. You do not need permission to hold value. The digital euro exists to remind you that Frankfurt disagrees.

1. Yes, it is. 2. There is no such thing as intrinsic value, the concept is only viable when comparing stocks, where “intrinsic value” would mean something like “underlying assets with resale value”. In economic terms nothing has value onto its own, anything is only as valuable as someone is willing to pay for it.

@Handre Handre, is Bitcoin different from other cryptocurrencies? If so, does it have intrinsic value?

Voltaire figured out in the 18th century what the European Central Bank pretends not to know in 2026: paper money always returns to its intrinsic value, which is zero. He watched John Law do it. In 1716 Law convinced the French regent to back the Banque Générale with royal authority, then flooded France with paper livres tied to shares in the Mississippi Company. For a few glorious months everyone in Paris felt rich. By 1720 the whole thing collapsed, wiping out savers, and Law fled the country he had bankrupted. Voltaire, who lived through it, remarked that paper money eventually reverts to its actual worth. He was not theorizing, he was reporting. Now the ECB wants you to hold a digital euro. Frankfurt is finalizing the design of a central bank digital currency, complete with holding limits, offline functionality, and reassurances that it will "complement" cash rather than replace it. Read that carefully. A monetary authority promises not to abolish cash, while it has already drafted the memo to abolish cash. The pitch is convenience. A digital euro gives the ECB a direct ledger of your balance and the technical ability to set holding caps, apply negative interest at the individual level, and program what your money does. Christine Lagarde's institution has already run the euro at negative rates. It printed roughly 5 trillion euros in asset purchases since 2015. The monetary base ballooned and your purchasing power did not improve. Ask any German who remembers what a coffee cost in 2019. Law believed that increasing the money supply increased wealth. Every central banker since has believed the same thing while insisting they are more sophisticated about it. They have better software. Money is not wealth. Money is a claim on wealth. Multiply the claims without multiplying the goods and each claim buys less. A digital euro changes the plumbing, not the arithmetic. It lets the state issue and track claims faster, which means it debases faster. You have three centuries of evidence. Assignats, continentals, Reichsmarks, Zimbabwean trillion-dollar notes. The technology improves. The result never does. Voltaire knew. Now so do you now.

We're rolling out a small tweak to boost visibility of your posts to your mutuals (people who you follow back). We noticed this data was missing from the algo and it made your friends appear less in your replies. This resulted in the reply section feeling more like a battleground with people you don't recognize. This should also help clusters form around interests more easily, which many people have asked for.

@Libfyter @ScottCahil23870 I mean he kind of has a point, and I agree with him that people being unaware of what money is and how it works is a problem, but attacking me for pointing out the problems with fiat is kind of weird🤷🤣

@ScottCahil23870 @Handre Good grief! What drugs was "monetary expert" @ScottCahil23870 on when he wrote this? Maybe it was written by a bot running amok.

When the price of bread doubles in Buenos Aires, the Argentine on the street blames the greedy baker, the hoarding supermarket, the last three presidents. The baker blames the wholesaler. The government blames "global conditions." Everyone points somewhere except at the printing press, which sits humming in two capitals at once: Buenos Aires and Washington. Here is the arithmetic no central bank wants you to do. The dollar is the reserve currency of the planet. Oil, copper, wheat, and semiconductors clear in it. So when the Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet from roughly $900 billion in 2008 to nearly $9 trillion by 2022, it did not just inflate American prices. It exported inflation to every country that pegs, holds, or trades in dollars. Egypt imports wheat priced in dollars. Nigeria imports fuel priced in dollars. When those dollars lose purchasing power, Cairo and Lagos feel it before Kansas does. That is the floor. Every other currency inflates at least as fast as the dollar, because the dollar is the yardstick. Then comes the surcharge. Country risk. This is where the local political class earns its reputation. Argentina printed pesos to fund deficits it refused to cut, and the peso lost over 90 percent of its dollar value across the last decade. Turkey's Erdogan ordered interest rates down while inflation ran past 80 percent in 2022, because he decided, against three centuries of monetary evidence, that high rates cause inflation. Venezuela simply ran the presses until the bolivar became wallpaper. Your local inflation equals dollar inflation plus your government's own additional sins. Chile and Switzerland keep the surcharge low. Argentina and Zimbabwe stack it to the sky. You can test this yourself. Price your groceries in dollars, then in gold. The dollar number climbs steadily. The gold number barely moves across decades, because gold has no central bank and no election to win. The lesson for the free market thinker is old and unglamorous. Fiat money is a political instrument, and every politician who touches it takes his cut. The dollar sets the baseline theft. Your finance minister decides how much to add. Blame the baker if it comforts you.

@TheDudeWisdom Dude, to tell you the truth, no. I will see it eventually, but not in theatre, man.

So the Dude wants to know - Given the casting decisions in the Odyssey, do you still intend to go see it?

@Monkeyiobe When I publish the book featuring the posts from this account, we should make a special edition featuring your comments🤣

Cash doesn't know what you bought or how much. The digital euro will... every transaction, on the Gorilla's ledger, with a €3,000 ceiling on what you're allowed to hold. They've already run the euro at negative rates before, so "no negative interest for now" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Voltaire didn't theorize about this... he watched it happen and wrote it down. The technology keeps improving. The ending stays the same. 🍌