Chris Hart

The impact of AGOA is a sideshow when compared to the damage we ourselves have inflicted on the economy amongst which poor policy choices, governance failures and patronage excesses are the chief culprits.

🚨🇧🇷 TAKE A LOOK AT BRAZIL’S HISTORICAL VOTER TURNOUT! From 2002 to 2018, fewer Brazilians voted in the second round of every presidential election than in the first. The explanation is that some voters simply lost interest after their preferred candidate was eliminated. But in 2022, when Bolsonaro lost to Lula in Biden-style fashion, that pattern reversed: 570,424 MORE people voted in the second round. Odd. And in 2026? An additional 2,960,239 voters! Lula, the phenomenon, did the impossible! RESPECT! 🫡 Now, looking at this election once again. You only need to examine the difference in voter turnout between the first and second rounds and ask yourself: Did everything really happen legitimately? Unfortunately, Brazil’s electronic voting system does not provide a voter-verifiable paper trail that would allow the ballots to be independently recounted by hand. And that is precisely the problem. Alexandre de Moraes REMOVED the paper-based verification mechanism in 2018. You read it right: IN 2018!!! And everything that has happened since 2018? Well, let the numbers speak for themselves.

British pedophile John Maynard Keynes made one genuinely useful observation: in a severe deflationary panic, when businesses freeze and nobody spends, government can sometimes break the paralysis. During 1930 to 1932, as the Federal Reserve actively contracted the money supply and Hoover raised taxes mid-depression, aggregate spending collapsed. Keynes identified that rigid nominal wages meant unemployment rather than wage cuts when demand fell. But he built a catastrophically wrong policy architecture on top of it. The core error was treating consumption as the engine of prosperity. Capital formation drives living standards. Savings fund the machines, the supply chains, the research labs that make your dollar buy more next decade than it does today. Keynes dismissed this with his "paradox of thrift," which reframes savers as economic saboteurs. They fund tomorrow instead. The multiplier is fiction. Government borrows a dollar from the private sector, spends it, and Keynesians count the downstream purchases while ignoring the upstream subtraction. Frederick Bastiat called this the broken window fallacy in 1850, and Keynes simply repeated the error, this time using algebra. His followers made the original sin even worse. By 1971, Richard Nixon had absorbed enough Keynesianism to sever the last gold link entirely, handing central banks the wheel with no road. The 2008 stimulus, the 2020 $6 trillion blowout, the 14.7% CPI spike you absorbed at the grocery store in 2022, all trace directly to the intellectual permission structure Keynes created. He gave politicians a permanent excuse to spend money they don't have and inflate away the debt your savings absorb. One useful observation mangled into a century of monetary wreckage.

South Africa's 30% investor equity regulations represent the same structural tragedy as Zimbabwean gold. They are masterfully designed and highly sophisticated on paper, but in practice, they merely function as an institutional mechanism to funnel private capital into the pockets of the ruling elite and party patronage networks. The cognitive dissonance is glaring. We are told that forcing a 30% localized equity mandate onto international investors transforms societies. Yet, the mathematically baseline reality never adds up. The wealth simply evaporates into the political ether before it ever hits the grassroots. This is the ultimate failure of Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE). If the policy worked exactly as its architects laid it out in the textbooks, South Africa wouldn't be saddled with a catastrophic youth unemployment rate approaching 50% and multi-generational poverty. Instead of creating functional, industrial transformation, South Africa has replicated the failed indigenisation playbooks of its northern neighbors. South Africa has traded actual economic production and real job creation for an elite wealth transfer system, proving once again that paper legislation is no match for systemic political rot.

Lamola is one of the world’s most submissive, effete, weak and unintelligent government ministers. @FaraiMazhindu explains why…

The Ramaphosa administration is choosing a path that lead to the gutter. The South African government is acting like they want to achieve something special, or they're exempt from the consequences of dumb politics. There is nothing in the gutter but a weak currency, a weak passport, a dead banking sector, a stagnant economy, underdevelopment, unemployment, and poor infrastructure. It's easy to say we won't back down, because all it takes is a mouth, but translating that toughness and defiance into reality is far harder. South Africa needs the USA. South Africa needs free markets. South Africa needs a healthy, stable society.

Capital gains tax is theft, committed twice against the same dollar. You earn income. The government takes its cut immediately, in the US its between 22% and 37% depending on your bracket. What remains is yours, after-tax money, already processed through Washington's collection machine. You choose not to spend it. You save it, invest it, buy assets with it. The discipline required to delay consumption is precisely the behavior that funds capital formation across the economy. Then the asset grows. You sell it. The government appears again, demanding 20% (plus the 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax for higher earners) on the nominal gain, which often includes pure inflation adjustments that represent no real increase in purchasing power whatsoever. The IRS treats your patience as a second taxable event. The original dollar was already taxed. The "gain" frequently reflects nothing more than the dollar losing value while you held the asset. Murray Rothbard identified this pattern: the state punishes capital accumulation. Consider a simple case. You invest $50,000 of after-tax earnings in 2016 into an S&P 500 index fund. By 2026, it's worth $115,000. Inflation consumed a meaningful slice of that $65,000 gain. You pay capital gains tax on the full nominal figure regardless. Capital gains taxation suppresses investment, shrinks the capital pool available for productive enterprise, and forces entrepreneurs to seek financing from a shallower pond. Fewer productive investments get made. Workers carry that cost through lower wages and fewer opportunities. The state expands, while you suffer.

Or he could just say that calling for the killing of people is wrong and declare farm murders a priority crime and not lose AGOA access. It’s really not hard to avoid destroying the country but he just can’t bring his communist self to do that.

Seventy million people died in World War II, and the U.S. government spent the next seventy years claiming the war cured the Great Depression. This is one of the most successful lies in modern economic history. GDP rose sharply between 1941 and 1945. Unemployment nearly vanished. The textbooks call this recovery. What they omit is that GDP figures counted government military spending as production. Building a Sherman tank that explodes in France raises GDP. It does not raise your living standard. Henry Hazlitt identified the real test of any economic policy: the unseen. Full employment in munitions plants is visible. The butter, the cars, the housing, the civilian goods that never existed because capital and labor went to ordnance instead: these are invisible. Rationing, price controls, and conscription masked the underlying misery. Workers had paychecks they could not spend on anything real. That is suppressed consumption at gunpoint, not prosperity. The Depression itself sprang from Federal Reserve credit expansion in the 1920s, then Hoover's refusal to let prices clear, then Roosevelt's systematic war on investment through the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and punishing tax rates that reached 94 cents on the dollar by 1944. War didn't remove those structural errors, but buried them under emergency powers. The genuine postwar recovery came in 1946 and 1947, when Truman (reluctantly, under pressure) slashed federal spending by +-40 percent. Prices adjusted. Veterans rejoined a labor market that could actually absorb them. Capital reallocated toward things people voluntarily chose to buy. Economists who predicted postwar collapse were wrong, because the state briefly stepped back and let markets function.

On se demande où on a « foiré » en France. La réponse est assez simple, le point de bascule c’est 1981. Pas 2002, pas 2017, pas Macron. 1981. L’arrivée de Mitterrand. Le moment où la France a décidé, en toute lucidité, de se tirer une balle dans le pied en se convainquant que c’était du progrès social. Avant 1981, la France était encore un pays qui produisait, qui exportait, qui avait une industrie, des entreprises qui osaient investir et des gens qui croyaient encore vaguement au travail. Après 1981, on a nationalisé à tour de bras, on a augmenté les impôts comme si l’argent des autres était une ressource infinie, on est passé aux 39 heures, on a baissé l’âge de la retraite, et on a expliqué aux Français que la richesse se créait en redistribuant celle des autres. Résultat ? Capital qui fuit, franc dévalué, inflation, et le fameux « tournant de la rigueur » de 1983 qui n’a jamais vraiment corrigé le cap idéologique de fond. Depuis, on a perfectionné le modèle : État toujours plus gros, charges toujours plus lourdes, culture du droit acquis plutôt que du mérite, école qui a progressivement abandonné l’exigence au nom de l’égalité des chances, et une immigration de plus en plus déconnectée de toute logique d’intégration réelle. On a remplacé « travailler et produire » par « revendiquer et bloquer ». Et aujourd’hui, on s’étonne que la France soit devenue le pays des 35 heures, des grèves perpétuelles, de la dette à 110 %, du chômage des jeunes endémique et d’une classe moyenne qui se fait asphyxier. Le plus beau, c’est la mauvaise foi. Quarante-cinq ans plus tard, on continue de dire que « ce n’est pas la gauche », que « c’est le néolibéralisme », que « c’est l’Europe », que « c’est la mondialisation ». Non. C’est le moment précis où une majorité de Français a choisi de croire qu’on pouvait vivre durablement au-dessus de ses moyens en faisant payer les autres, et que ça s’appellerait « justice sociale ». 1981 n’a pas tout cassé en un jour. Mais c’est là qu’on a choisi le chemin. Et depuis, on court de plus en plus vite au bord du précipice en se demandant pourquoi on n’arrive plus.🤔🤭

Guess which country has race based BEE laws?

My dear American friends, yesterday I showed you an email. Today I want to show you what comes after, because history has already written this chapter many times, and every time in blood. Every Marxist revolution goes after the same first target. Not the army, and not the rich. It goes after the people who think. Lenin understood it early. In 1922 he put Russia's leading philosophers, scientists and writers on ships and expelled them. Many of those who stayed were shot or sent to the camps. In 1940, in the forest of Katyn, Stalin's secret police executed around 22,000 Polish prisoners: officers, but also doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers and priests. A nation's educated class was killed one by one, each with a bullet in the back of the head. Mao perfected the method. In 1956 he launched the Hundred Flowers campaign. "Let a hundred flowers bloom." He invited China's intellectuals to speak freely and to criticize the Party. They believed him, and they spoke. A year later the trap closed. The Anti-Rightist Campaign branded more than half a million people as enemies. Professors, writers, engineers and doctors lost their careers and their families, and many were sent to labor camps they never left. Mao was proud of it. In 1958 he compared himself to the First Emperor of China, who was infamous for burying 460 scholars alive. Mao boasted that the Communists had buried 46,000. His masterpiece came in 1966, with the Cultural Revolution. This time he didn't need the police. He used children. Schools were closed and students became Red Guards. Their teachers were dragged onto stages for "struggle sessions." Their heads were shaved, placards were hung around their necks, and they were forced to kneel while crowds beat and spat on them. In August 1966 Lao She, one of the greatest writers in modern Chinese literature, was beaten by Red Guards. The next day he was found drowned in a lake in Beijing. That same month, at a girls' school in Beijing, students beat their vice principal Bian Zhongyun to death. Then the revolution entered the home. Children learned a slogan: "Father and mother are dear, but not as dear as Chairman Mao." Sons denounced fathers and daughters denounced mothers. Zhang Hongbing was 16 when he reported his own mother, and she was executed. A child turning on his parents was celebrated as the highest form of virtue. Once the Red Guards had done the dirty work, Mao discarded them too. From 1968 on, around 17 million young people were sent to the countryside to "learn from the peasants." A whole generation lost its education, its youth and often its sanity. The revolution devours its own children, every single time. Cambodia, 1975. The Khmer Rouge emptied the cities in days. Glasses, soft hands, speaking French: any of these could mark you as an intellectual, and being an intellectual could get you killed. In four years roughly a quarter of the population was dead. Look at the pattern, because it never changes. First, convince the young that the world is rotten and the old are guilty. Second, silence or destroy the people who could contradict the story. Third, break the family so that the only loyalty left is to the cause. Fourth, give the young power. Fifth, when they've finished the dirty work, throw them away. I am not telling you America is China in 1966. I'm telling you the first steps look familiar. Careers are destroyed over a single opinion. Professors sign ideological pledges just to get hired. Children are taught to see their parents as bigots and their country's history as nothing but a list of crimes. Political violence is excused online, and sometimes even celebrated. Every year it gets a little more radical, and every year the people who warn about it are called alarmists. This is not a left versus right debate. Reasonable people can disagree about tax rates, healthcare or trade, and that's politics. What I'm describing is something else. It's an ideology that has killed tens of millions of people in the last century, and it always starts by promising justice to the young. We should call it what it is: evil. You fight evil by refusing to become it. Teach real history. Defend free speech, especially for the people you disagree with. Protect the teachers and parents who refuse to bow. Above all, give young people something to own, build and defend, so that no one can sell them the fire. I come from a continent that has already lived this story. Please don't let your children write the next chapter.

There is nothing as permanent as a temporary government program. Example 001: The income tax arrived in 1913 with a promise: temporary, modest, and aimed only at the very rich. The top rate sat at 7 percent on incomes above $500,000 (roughly $15 million today). Congress sold it as a surgical instrument to tax the rich. It became a chainsaw aimed at the middle class. Within five years, wartime spending pushed the top rate to 77 percent. The "temporary" emergency became the permanent architecture of American fiscal life. Politicians discovered something intoxicating: taxing income is far easier than taxing visible property, because the government intercepts your earnings before you ever touch them. Withholding, introduced in 1943, perfected this sleight of hand. You never possessed the money, so you never felt its full absence. Today the federal government collects $2.5 trillion annually through individual income taxes. The code runs to over 70,000 pages. Compliance costs Americans approximately $400 billion per year in accounting fees and lost productivity, producing nothing, building nothing, feeding no one. Every dollar seized through taxation is a dollar diverted from capital formation, from investment decisions made by people with actual skin in the game, toward decisions made by politicians managing election cycles. Mises identified the calculation problem: the state has no price signals to guide spending, so it wastes on a structural scale no private actor could sustain.

South Africa’s economic underperformance is not an accident of history - it is largely the result of the choices we continue to make. We talk endlessly about creating an enabling environment for business and investment, both local and international. Yet too often the actions do not match the rhetoric. Red tape, inconsistent policy, and slow decision-making continue to choke investment across almost every sector of the economy. Investors - and our own entrepreneurs - do not wait forever. Capital is mobile. Talent is mobile. Opportunity is mobile. If we are serious about growth, jobs and shared prosperity, our leaders across government, business and civil society must become more self-critical. We cannot keep blaming external factors while avoiding the hard internal work: simplifying regulation, speeding up approvals, creating policy certainty, and treating business as a genuine partner rather than a problem to be managed. The solutions are known. Many countries have done the hard work of cutting bureaucracy and prioritising execution. We can too - but only if we are honest enough to confront where we are falling short and disciplined enough to change. What are we prepared to do differently, starting now? #SouthAfrica #EconomicGrowth #Leadership #Investment #RedTape #Accountability

I'm South African. I also want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. To warn you. I come from even further into the future. South Africa used to be a first-world country. We had the best infrastructure and hospitals in the world, and we were developing our own nuclear capability. Today, there is literally shit running in the streets; people in our capital, Johannesburg, haven't had running water for months and more than 40 000 rape cases are reported every year. For most South Africans, there is no such thing as healthcare. You go and stand in a queue for days, then go home. This is what happens when you hand your country to economically illiterate progressive fools with catchy slogans. Don't do it.

Lee Kuan Yew proved that a nation's destiny is engineered, not inherited. In 1965, when Singapore was unceremoniously booted out of Malaysia, the international consensus predicted absolute state failure. He inherited a swampy, impoverished island with a population of just two million people living in squalor. It had zero natural resources, no agricultural land, no military defense, and lacked even enough basic drinking water to sustain human life. If Lee Kuan Yew had operated on the standard of modern populist politics, he would have spent the next thirty years weeping on international stages, blamed historical external factors, and begged neighboring countries for permanent welfare handouts. He didn't. He went to work. While post-colonial leaders across Africa and Asia turned inward to launch economically illiterate isolationist experiments, Lee championed hyper-globalization. He realized that if you have no domestic market, your only asset is human capital. He cleared the malarial swamps of Jurong, instituted strict pro-market property rights, lowered taxes, and laid down red carpets for Western multinationals like Texas Instruments and Hewlett Packard before the supporting infrastructure even existed. His domestic masterclass was built on structural logic, not ideological fantasies. He gave his anti-corruption units actual teeth, starting with his own cabinet. If a politician stole public funds, they didn't get a promotion or a diplomatic posting, they went straight to prison. Zero tolerance meant global investors knew their capital was safer in Singapore than in London or New York. He transformed subjects into stakeholders through the Central Provident Fund and the Housing Development Board. By aggressively shifting 75% of the population out of slums into state-of-the-art public housing, he gave ordinary citizens a physical, equity-based ownership stake in the country's survival. He instituted mandatory bilingualism and made English the main national language to plug his workforce directly into the global grid. He hired elite technocrats based on raw competence, completely ignoring ethnic divisions. Teachers were paid corporate-level salaries because he understood that a first-world economy cannot be built by an uneducated majority. In a single compressed generation, GDP per capita skyrocketed from under $500 to overtaking the United States and the United Kingdom. The structural lesson of Singapore is a devastating indictment of Africa's current leadership. It proves that poverty is not a permanent geographical curse; it is a choice made by incompetent elites who prefer primitive capital accumulation over national engineering.

I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you. I come from your future. In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream. Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them. The promise was protection. The result is stagnation. The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe. I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has. Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France? Trust me. You don’t want to be France.

Dos ejemplos claros de países que tomaron caminos distintos. Cuba era una de las economías más prósperas de América Latina antes de la revolución de 1959. Tenía un ingreso por habitante relativamente elevado para la región y una economía vinculada al comercio internacional. La revolución prometió un futuro de prosperidad e igualdad, pero el camino elegido fue concentrar el poder, restringir las libertades individuales, perseguir a la disidencia y someter gran parte de la economía al control estatal. Con el tiempo, la falta de libertad económica, los controles, la ineficiencia y la dependencia de la ayuda externa contribuyeron a un sistema incapaz de generar prosperidad sostenida. Hoy, los cubanos padecen una profunda crisis económica, escasez y falta de oportunidades. La historia de Cuba demuestra que las promesas de un gobierno no garantizan el bienestar de la población cuando se destruyen las instituciones que permiten producir, emprender y prosperar. Ahora miremos a Singapur. Cuando se independizó en 1965, era un territorio con escasos recursos naturales, pobreza, desempleo y enormes desafíos para sobrevivir como nación independiente. Sin embargo, en lugar de aislarse del comercio mundial, apostó por atraer inversiones, desarrollar su industria, fortalecer la educación, construir instituciones sólidas y convertirse en un centro internacional de comercio y negocios. En pocas décadas pasó de ser una economía de ingresos modestos a convertirse en uno de los países más ricos del planeta. La gran lección es que la riqueza no aparece por decreto ni la pobreza desaparece porque un gobierno prometa igualdad. Se necesita un marco institucional que permita trabajar, ahorrar, invertir, emprender e intercambiar libremente. Cuba siguió el camino de la planificación centralizada y la concentración del poder; Singapur construyó una economía abierta al mundo y aprovechó el comercio y la inversión para desarrollarse.

A poor South African living in a tin shack hates the white man infinitely more than they hate the black politicians systematically looting the state wealth. A white commercial farmer is the exact reason South Africa still has cheap, accessible food compared to the catastrophic food inflation across the rest of the continent. They maintain the supply chains, handle the massive risk, and produce at a scale that keeps the nation fed. Yet, the emotional programming completely overrides the economic reality. This is exactly how identity politics is designed to work, and it is working perfectly well in South Africa. If you can keep the man in the shack fixated on historical grievances and racial scapegoats, he will happily ignore the black politician driving past his dirt road in a brand-new luxury convoy bought with stolen public funds. The illusion of the struggle is preserved, the cartels remain protected, and the poorest citizens continue to starve on a diet of empty slogans.