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From "Man's Rights," The Objectivist Newsletter, December, 1963; reprinted in The Virtue of Selfishness, Ch. 12.
John Galt's Plumber, Capitalist retweeted
"The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls."
– Joseph Schumpeter
Today, the process Schumpeter describes is rapidly unfolding in the diamond industry.
humanprogress.org/from-silk-…
Because right now rents are higher than they should be - and would be - in a free economy, rather than one regulated nearly to death by its various governments (causing supply/demand issues) so you'll need to make belt-tightening adjustments to your lifestyle until people start voting for less government control of things and for more freedom.
Also, rents can't keep rising unless lots of people can afford to keep bidding up the prices, so ironically, it's the 21st-century prosperity of many millions in the middle-class, who have moved into upper classes, that make rents very high in very high demand areas.
John Galt's Plumber, Capitalist retweeted
From the 1989 edition of the 20th century's most influential and best-selling textbook in economics.
The timing of its publication was darkly perfect:
The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
The reality inside the century's most-famous experiment in socialism: "Decades of a centrally planned, inefficient economy led to chronic shortages of consumer goods, long lines, and a massive drop in living standards." (Claude AI)
Many wry comments possible about blinkered/wishful thinking of some academics and their outsized influence on the young.
John Galt's Plumber, Capitalist retweeted
Les pionniers juifs, dès la fin du XIXᵉ siècle, ont acheté des terres légalement, souvent marécageuses, désertiques et abandonnées, qu’ils ont réussi à faire revivre.
Des écrivains comme Mark Twain, visitant la région en 1867, décrivent une terre vide, désertique, misérable, où l’on ne croise presque personne. Mark Twain visite la région lors de son voyage en Orient qu'il raconte dans "Le Voyage des Innocents". Il décrit un territoire en grande partie sous-peuplé, rural, pauvre et négligé sous l'administration ottomane, marqué par des villes en déclin, comme Jérusalem ou Nazareth, et des campagnes particulièrement clairsemées.
La région, à l'époque, fait partie intégrante de l'Empire ottoman et est généralement désignée sous le nom de Sud de la Syrie dans l'administration ottomane.
Ce sont les Juifs, dans leur propre patrie historique, qui l’ont rendue féconde. Ils ont asséché, planté, construit, cultivé. Ils ont créé des emplois, attiré de la vie, de l’espoir, et… de la main-d’œuvre. Les registres britanniques l’attestent : l’immigration arabe vers la Palestine a explosé en parallèle de l’essor sioniste. Des familles sont venues d’Égypte, de Syrie, du Liban, de Transjordanie , attirées par les perspectives de travail et la prospérité naissante.
Ce n’est donc pas l’arrivée des juifs qui a chassé les Arabes, mais l’arrivée des Juifs qui a fait venir les Arabes. Le mensonge selon lequel la terre d’Israël appartenait aux Palestiniens, et que les Juifs auraient volée est devenu le socle de toute la propagande antisémite moderne et que l'Europe a eu la faiblesse d'accréditer.
Merci à @PNerval pour son partage particulièrement intéressant.
John Galt's Plumber, Capitalist retweeted
2 takeaways from the elections.
1. Americans care a lot about affordability.
2. Power can shift very quickly.
This strengthens the case for passing BAAJA now. It's the #1 way to promote affordability, and it protects everyone's freedom-to-build regardless of who's in power.
John Galt's Plumber, Capitalist retweeted
Historically, improvements in working conditions—such as labor standards, limits on working hours, and minimum wages—have often been pioneered by employers and their employees, and only later mandated by governments.
Government officials also often take credit for outcomes that markets already produced.
Remote work is the latest example.
humanprogress.org/evolving-m…
John Galt's Plumber, Capitalist retweeted
Exactly!
When I grew up in Communist China, I was surrounded by completely brainwashed people, including myself.
Now in the US, I’m surrounded by people even more brainwashed than the communists I grew up with in China.
Communism thrives on a dumbed-down population. And the dumbing down is systematically carried out through schools, the media, and Hollywood!
John Galt's Plumber, Capitalist retweeted
This is getting desperate.
A corporation can offer you a product, a service, or a job. You can refuse, choose a competitor, or become one yourself.
A government can legally prohibit competition, compel your participation, confiscate your property, and imprison you for refusing.
And your brilliant observation is that corporations might somehow do the exact same thing?
Sure. Once you give them the powers of government.
Congratulations. You've discovered why those powers are dangerous.
All. Of. This.
What Socialism Is.
Socialism is not a real model to be applied in the world – it is a contradictory rhetoric used to gain power over people, by manipulating those who are easiest to manipulate.
It is anti-life, because it contradicts reality. Its contradictions stay harmless only as long as it stays on paper. Try to implement it, and they come due.
It postulates equality – and produces the most unequal societies of all: the nomenklatura in its special shops, everyone else in the queue.
It says it frees the workers – and in 1980, ten million Polish workers had to rise up against the workers' state.
It postulates abundance – and gets rid of the people who produce it. Venezuela, sitting on the largest oil reserves in the world, watched its people lose an average of eleven kilos in a single year.
It says the state will wither away – and builds the biggest state in history.
It postulates peace – and needs an enemy for every failure.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Needs, of course, especially of the immoral, are unlimited. Ability is punished.
Someone has to resolve these contradictions. In socialism, that someone is the police, by force. When the theory says one thing and reality another, it is never the theory that gets arrested.
That is why it is anti-life. Life works by getting reality right: every living thing survives because it reads the world correctly. Socialism switches off the instruments – prices that say what is scarce, profits and losses that say what works, free speech that says what is wrong. A society that can no longer see where it is going ends up where socialist societies always end up: first the queue, then the famine and the camp.
And yet it keeps coming back. Why? Because socialism is not an economic theory that failed. It is a technique of power that works. The economics always fails. The rhetoric never does – on those easiest to manipulate, and for those who rise by manipulating them.
Socialism has never delivered what it says. It has always delivered what it is for: power.
John Galt's Plumber, Capitalist retweeted
Matt Walsh calls this the most honest assessment he has read. You should all read it. And then maybe you will see what honesty requires and that both of these men refuse to do it.
Start with Vance's method. A team of data analysts obsessing over electorate composition, pollsters asked to explain the loss after it happens, a survey handed to defecting voters asking what would bring them back. This is the technique of a pragmatist. A man of principle could not care less about polls. He cares about ideas and whether they are right or wrong, and he would rather lose every election in his lifetime doing the right thing than win a single one doing the wrong thing. He holds a standard, measures his actions against it, and knows before the returns come in whether he governed by it. Victory means nothing to him if the price is his principles, because a victory won by abandoning what is right is a defeat in everything that matters. That is not what is happening here. These men are asking the crowd what it feels because they have no idea what is true, then adjusting their convictions to match the answer. Ayn Rand named this method decades ago. When men abandon reason as their guide, the opinion survey becomes their substitute for thought.
Observe what the assessment leaves out entirely. Not one word about tariffs, a tax on Americans that the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional and the administration reimposed under a different statute, running through two years of roughly 6% cumulative inflation. Not one word about roughly 30 government equity stakes in private companies, which is socialism practiced by the party that claims to oppose it. Not one word about a brand new universal entitlement, two trillion dollar deficits, or a 40 trillion dollar debt. "Focus on cost of living" appears as a polling answer with no causal analysis attached, because the causal analysis indicts their own record. The most honest assessment somehow misses every policy the voters threw them out over.
Then Vance's 4 conclusions which are out of context slogans which are meaningless as such. The reason we lost is the war. Half true and twisted. Hitting the regime that has waged war on us for 47 years was right and four decades overdue. What voters watched afterward was the goal line surrender, a so called deal championed by the appeaser Vance, who stood at Lake Lucerne praising the framework as the foundation for a final agreement while it waived Iran's oil sanctions and released $12 billion in frozen assets to a regime left standing, with our forces still taking fire in the strait. The failure is not that we fought. The failure is that we paid the enemy and called it peace while they still shoot at us to this day. And buried at answer four is the actual agenda, change our relationship to Israel. This disgusting faction of the Republican party that cannot define socialism while its administration practices it has one firm conviction, pushing away the only free nation in the region, our one reliable ally against the theocracy we are trying to buy off, just as Obama did. At least Obama dropped the pallets of cash for all to see.
This is why Republicans and Democrats keep winning in alternating cycles while freedom loving Americans lose a little more freedom each time. Both parties govern by the same premises, spending, controls, entitlements, state stakes in industry. Neither offers an alternative, so voters punish whoever stands closest to the wreckage while the wreckage keeps growing.
The pollsters then measure the anger and recommend sharper messaging, and Walsh pronounces the measurement honest.
Honesty is the refusal to fake reality. An assessment that evades tariffs, socialism, and a bought off theocracy while blaming the one thing done partly right is not honest. It is a crowd reading performed by men who long ago stopped checking their premises against anything but each other.
i/o called it.
Man, is this ever true.
In 2024, people were sick of a de facto open border, the lying behind the propping up of a doddering memory-unit president, the assorted mental illnesses of the wokes, and a bunch of other stuff.
Trump was rewarded with increased support from Hispanics and younger voters, and the presidency. And so an opportunity for the MAGA GOP to prove itself was there for the taking.
Things went downhill quickly. Tariffs, J6 pardons, threats to annex Canada and Greenland and the Panama Canal, DOGE chaos, renaming bodies of water, incompetent and corrupt officials, putting Trump's likeness on passports and buildings, the cartoonish machismo in the administration's meme game, and, of course, a war and gas prices few Americans support — the list of offences is long and barely believable.
At the top of that list should be the president's non-stop lying — first, there were relatively small lies, but a few months into his term the instantly refutable whoppers began, sometimes issued several times a day, because Trump, unlike the script-driven Biden, has no problem improvising in front of the cameras and large crowds. A narcissist loves the sound of his own voice.
And let's not forget the parade of unlikable candidates MAGA has offered up in these midterms, putting itself in position to lose races the GOP almost never loses.
If the GOP gets trounced today, it's richly deserved.
How to lose an election:
Overpromise, underdeliver, and manage to be an enormous arsehole the whole time.
John Galt's Plumber, Capitalist retweeted
Cette vidéo détruit 80 ans de propagande.
1941. Le Grand Mufti de Jérusalem rencontre Hitler et s’allie à l’Allemagne nazie.
L’État d’Israël ? Il n’existe pas encore.
Les « territoires occupés » ? Pas davantage.
Mais l’antisémitisme, lui, était déjà bien là.
Alors non : la haine des Juifs n’a pas commencé en 1948.
John Galt's Plumber, Capitalist retweeted
The belief that AI can achieve comparable results to free markets, let alone surpass them, reflects a misplaced confidence in computation and a misunderstanding of the price system.
humanprogress.org/ai-cant-re…
Any atrocity can be committed in the name of this or that "common good," even if it cannot be imagined or defined.
Villainous.
Russian ultranationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin, often called “Putin’s brain,” addresses Ukrainians:
“We love you, we respect you. And even if we are forced to kill you, we do it by shooting our own brothers and sisters in the heart, in the face, in the head. It’s very difficult, but we are doing it for some very important purpose… This goal exceeds all our formally declared objectives. We do this in the name of salvation, in the name of transformation.”
Before the welfare state existed, working-class Americans built their own safety nets, and those nets caught people.
Fraternal mutual aid societies like the Odd Fellows, the Sons of Italy, and hundreds of smaller ethnic lodges ran insurance programs throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. By 1920, roughly one in three adult American males belonged to one. Members paid modest dues, typically $1 to $2 monthly in 1900 dollars, and received sickness benefits, death payments, and access to lodge doctors who charged $1 to $2 per year per family. The Foresters of America covered 900,000 members by 1908. These institutions ran on mutual contracts between people who knew each other; it wasn't charity.
Accountability created alignment of incentives. Lodge members had every incentive to verify that sick claims were genuine, because fraudulent payouts drained their own pool. Government bureaucrats face no such incentive. Someone else bears the cost of fraud in their system.
The lodge doctor system collapsed because the American Medical Association lobbied state legislatures throughout the 1910s and 1920s to ban contract medicine. Doctors working for lodges earned less than AMA members preferred. The state obliged, eliminated the competition, and left citizens with the fee-for-service monopoly that still strips your paycheck today.
Voluntary cooperation built welfare that worked. Politicians dismantled it.




























