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Handre
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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 Edilen30.2K Takipçiler
@Handre Rescinded.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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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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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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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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Blockbuster had 9,000 stores and 84,000 employees in 2004. Netflix had 2.6 million subscribers paying $20/month to get DVDs in the mail. Wall Street analysts called Netflix a "niche player" while Blockbuster executives dismissed streaming as irrelevant (classic corporate myopia).
You voted with your dollars. You wanted convenience over late fees, selection over geographic limitations, recommendation algorithms over teenage clerks who hadn't watched half the movies they were shelving. Blockbuster fought consumer preferences instead of adapting to them.
Free market economists understand this perfectly: entrepreneurs who serve consumer wants get rewarded, those who ignore them get eliminated. No bailouts, no "too big to fail" nonsense. Just pure economic democracy in action. By 2010, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy while Netflix hit 20 million subscribers and launched internationally.
The market doesn't care about your legacy or your real estate footprint. It cares about value creation. Netflix created value. Blockbuster extracted rents from artificial scarcity.
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Government regulation creates the perfect storm for medical cascades that destroy patients while enriching pharmaceutical companies and medical bureaucrats.
The FDA's approval process costs drug companies $2.6 billion per medication, creating massive barriers to entry that protect incumbent pharmaceutical giants from competition. Only companies with deep pockets can navigate the regulatory maze, while innovative treatments from smaller firms die in regulatory purgatory. This government-created oligopoly gives Big Pharma pricing power and removes competitive pressure to actually heal patients rather than manage symptoms indefinitely.
Medicare and insurance reimbursement systems reward procedure volume over patient outcomes. Doctors get paid more for prescribing five drugs than for curing the underlying problem with one. The statin cascade generates five separate billing codes, five separate prescriptions, five separate follow-up appointments. Each step increases revenue for doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies while the patient deteriorates. Government payment systems literally incentivize making patients sicker.
Medical licensing boards prevent nurses, pharmacists, and other practitioners from competing with doctors in areas where they have superior training. A pharmacist understands drug interactions better than most MDs, but regulations prevent them from adjusting prescriptions or recommending alternatives. This artificial scarcity drives up costs and reduces the quality of care patients receive.
Free markets reward businesses that solve problems permanently. Government-regulated healthcare rewards businesses that create recurring revenue streams from chronic management. The patient taking five drugs for life generates $50,000 annually in pharmaceutical revenue. The patient cured with proper nutrition and lifestyle changes generates zero. The regulated system optimizes for the first outcome.
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The income tax started at 1 percent in 1913, sold to Americans as a modest levy on only the wealthiest citizens. The Sixteenth Amendment passed with assurances that rates would remain low and the burden light.
Watch the cascade unfold. By 1917, the top rate hit 67 percent to fund World War I. Politicians promised reductions after the war ended. Instead, they discovered the intoxicating revenue stream of mass taxation. The "temporary" wartime rates became the new baseline.
The 1920s brought modest cuts, then the Depression triggered another explosion. FDR pushed the top rate to 79 percent in 1936, then 94 percent during World War II. Each crisis provided the perfect excuse for expansion. Each expansion became permanent. The tax code grew from 14 pages in 1913 to over 70,000 pages today.
The real genius lies in withholding, introduced in 1943 as another "temporary" wartime measure. No more writing painful lump-sum checks to the government. Instead, they take your money before you even see it. Compliance becomes automatic. Resistance becomes impossible. Most Americans celebrate their annual "refund" without recognizing they gave the government an interest-free loan all year.
The psychological manipulation runs deeper still. Tax preparation transforms citizens into supplicants, begging for deductions and credits the government graciously allows. Complexity creates dependence on experts who profit from the maze. The IRS employs more agents than the FBI and CIA combined.
Started with 1 percent on the rich. Ended with a surveillance apparatus that monitors every transaction, confiscates wealth before you earn it, and conditions entire populations to accept theft as civic duty.
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Your town starts with a simple 2% property tax to fund basic services.
Year 3: Revenue shortfall hits. Infrastructure "desperately needs" upgrades. Property tax jumps to 3.5%. City council promises this covers everything.
Year 5: School district claims crisis funding needs. Separate education tax appears; just 1.5% for the children, they say. Your total tax load now sits at 5%.
Year 8: Environmental impact assessments become mandatory for all development. New environmental compliance tax of 0.8% gets tacked on. Plus a transportation improvement fee of 1.2% because the roads can't handle the delayed projects.
Year 12: Housing affordability crisis emerges (funny how that works). City creates affordable housing trust fund requiring another 1% tax. Storm water management fees add 0.5%. Total burden now exceeds 8.5%.
Year 15: Local businesses start fleeing to neighboring counties. Commercial tax base shrinks. Residential property owners must make up the difference. Rates jump across all categories. Your effective rate hits 11%.
The city's books show every tax paying for its designated purpose. The infrastructure still crumbles. Schools still claim poverty. Housing costs skyrocketed beyond what any middle-class family can afford.
You started with one modest tax for basic municipal services. A complex web of overlapping levies now funds an army of bureaucrats managing the crisis created by the previous army of bureaucrats.
Each department gets its budget. Each program gets its funding. Each tax collector gets their cut.
The services you actually wanted remain broken, just more expensive.
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Marx lived off Engels like a parasite for decades, dodging creditors while preaching about worker exploitation. The man who claimed capitalists steal surplus value mooched, borrowed, and defaulted constantly.
His economic theories crumble under basic scrutiny. Labor theory of value? Marginal utility destroyed that nonsense by 1871. Central planning? Every attempt created mass starvation and tyranny. Marx never worked in business, never understood markets, and prices form through mechanisms he never grasped.
The prophet of the proletariat was just another broke intellectual living off others while spinning fantasies about economics he never bothered to study properly.
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Handre retweetledi
Milton Friedman: “I am not a conservative. I’ve never been a conservative. Hayek was not a conservative.”
“We are liberals in the true meaning of that term: concerned with freedom. We are not liberals in the current distorted sense—those liberal with other people’s money.”
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