Libertarian, #bitcoin, consciousness.
Wellington City, New Zealand
Joined September 2014
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Richard Collings retweeted
Healthcare will never be free. Someone always pays, and government control doesn't eliminate costs. It adds bureaucracy, waste, and political favoritism.
As for wages, try improving your skills, productivity, and bargaining power instead of demanding politicians decree your labor more valuable.
Historically, revolutionaries rebelled against state power.
Your idea of revolution is giving the state more power over everyone's lives and demanding it confiscate their earnings to provide for you.
You're not rebelling against authority. You're begging to lick its boots.
Richard Collings retweeted
Capitalism didn't create your need to work to survive. Nature did.
An employer doesn't impose that necessity upon you. He offers you an opportunity to satisfy it through voluntary exchange.
Socialism doesn't eliminate the necessity of work. It merely transfers authority over production to politicians or the collective.
Under capitalism, you're free to change employers, negotiate wages, work for yourself, or establish a cooperative. None guarantees success, but the freedom exists.
And here's where your moral superiority becomes particularly ridiculous.
You condemn people for offering employment on terms others are free to reject, yet consider yourself morally entitled to dictate how they must use their property, run their businesses, and compensate others.
You call voluntary agreements exploitation while presenting coercion as compassion.
Your objection isn't that people are being forced to serve others. It's that they aren't being forced to serve others on your terms.
And somehow, you've convinced yourself that makes you the moral one.
After reading the replies to my original post, I've learned that some libertarians have a much bigger problem than their understanding of economics. Their complete lack of empathy is fucking astonishing.
I suggested that paying half your income in rent because the alternative is sleeping in a freezing car isn't exactly a wonderful example of economic freedom. The responses were an extraordinary collection of lectures about voluntary exchange, personal responsibility, property rights, and why homelessness is apparently just another consumer preference.
Here are the five most common arguments.
1. It's voluntary because nobody is forcing you.
Apparently, choosing between unaffordable rent and sleeping in your car is the expression of liberty. Sure, nobody is holding a gun to your head. But someone with $500 in the bank doesn't have the same bargaining power as someone with $10 million in property. A decision made under financial desperation is still a decision. That doesn't mean the person has meaningful economic freedom. If your definition of liberty includes celebrating someone's choice to freeze in their car, perhaps your philosophy needs some fucking work.
2. Just move, get roommates, buy a house, or sleep in your car.
This was my favorite. One person suggested getting a gym membership so you could sleep in your car and still shower. Others recommended second jobs, roommates, or simply buying a house. Fucking brilliant. But what happens when millions of households simultaneously move somewhere cheaper? Demand increases, and those locations become less affordable unless housing supply expands. What works for one individual doesn't necessarily work for everyone. It's called the fallacy of composition. An entire housing crisis cannot be solved by giving millions of people individual financial advice. Yet apparently, sleeping in a Toyota Corolla now constitutes a comprehensive economic policy.
3. Government regulations and central banks caused expensive housing.
This was actually a reasonable argument, at least initially. Restrictive zoning and excessive development regulations absolutely can contribute to expensive housing. But blaming government for every undesirable market outcome is just ideological laziness. Housing prices also depend on incomes, credit conditions, construction costs, land values, population growth, speculation, and investment expectations. Developers build when they expect sufficient profits, not simply because people need somewhere to live. Removing bad regulations can improve housing supply. It doesn't magically eliminate every other economic problem. An economy is an interconnected system, not a fucking supply-and-demand diagram.
4. The landlord provides a mutually beneficial service.
Several people argued that rental transactions must benefit both parties because otherwise they wouldn't happen. Yes, someone facing homelessness might prefer paying half their income in rent to sleeping outside. Congratulations. You've established that people prefer shelter to freezing. But that doesn't prove the housing market is competitive, affordable, or producing desirable outcomes. People routinely accept terrible arrangements because their alternatives are worse. Individual rationality doesn't guarantee desirable outcomes for society. The existence of a transaction isn't proof that the economic system is working particularly well.
5. You aren't entitled to someone else's property or labor.
And naturally, someone had to start screaming about communism. Apparently, suggesting that people shouldn't have to sleep in freezing cars is now revolutionary Marxism. I support private property, competitive markets, and private enterprise. But supporting capitalism doesn't require celebrating every outcome it produces. Property rights don't automatically guarantee affordable housing, economic efficiency, or an equitable distribution of resources. You can defend private property without treating human suffering as an acceptable demonstration of economic liberty.
Now, here's what genuinely disturbed me.
I expected arguments about economics. What I didn't expect was how enthusiastically some people recommended homelessness. Sleep in your car. Get a gym membership. Work three jobs. Move away. Stop complaining. These weren't hypothetical responses. People actually suggested these things. Imagine seeing someone struggling to afford shelter and immediately explaining why they should be grateful to their landlord. What kind of fucking worldview produces that reaction?
Markets are supposed to serve human beings. Human beings aren't supposed to suffer simply to validate someone's economic philosophy. I'm a supporter of free markets, but I don't believe that requires abandoning basic human empathy. The irony is that people who constantly preach individual liberty seem perfectly comfortable dismissing the economic circumstances that restrict it.
If your response to someone facing homelessness is to congratulate them on having the freedom to sleep in their fucking car, perhaps you've spent too much time defending capitalism and not enough time interacting with actual human beings.
Richard Collings retweeted
Actions speak louder than words.
Hitler opposed Marxism, not state control of the economy. He abolished independent unions, suppressed economic freedom, subordinated private property to state dictates, and imposed central planning in pursuit of nationalist goals.
That he wanted to exterminate rival socialists doesn't make him a capitalist any more than Stalin's persecution of Trotskyists made Stalin an advocate of free enterprise.
Nazism and Marxism were competing forms of collectivist authoritarianism, not opposites on the fundamental question of individual liberty.
The relevant distinction isn't which collectivists hated which other collectivists. It's whether individuals are free or subordinate to the state.
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Volume I, Chapter IV (“Munich”):
“The problem of how the future of the German nation can be secured is the problem of how Marxism can be exterminated.”
Let’s be clear: Elon Musk absolutely knows the history. He knows Hitler’s stated goal was to destroy Marxism. Pointing to “Socialist” in the party’s name to call Hitler far-left isn’t a mistake. It’s a calculated lie designed to gaslight gullible people who believe every word he says.
Richard Collings retweeted
.@BernieSanders , it is a time to celebrate. @elonmusk has created enormous value for society by building @SpaceX, driving down the cost of rocket launches and creating a global satellite communication network that has brought high speed, low-cost internet and communication access to hundreds of millions and eventually billions of people along with critical advantages for our military and our nation’s defense.
SpaceX and its technologies will cause an acceleration in the growth of wages and wealth creation globally, including in some of the poorest communities in the U.S. and around the world.
Access to low-cost, high speed communications everywhere will allow children around the world to be educated, families to build businesses, and life-saving medical knowledge and care to be available everywhere.
SpaceX will materially bring down the cost of compute, advancing AI and humanity.
Meanwhile, 4,000 SpaceX employees yesterday became millionaires, including hourly wage employees who you claim you are trying to help.
The Elon Musks of the world drive growth, global GDP, and provide access to goods and services at lower cost that would otherwise not exist.
Elon’s nominal trillionaire status is due to his ownership of SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, the Boring Company and his other initiatives that have brought new technologies that improve our everyday lives.
Elon is not sitting on a trillion dollar pile of cash, jewelry and gold. He is using his controlling stakes in his companies to advance mankind. Elon’s companies don’t pay dividends. They reinvest all of their capital to accelerate innovation and value creation.
Elon is working 24/7 for all of us. He deserves respect and appreciation, not smears.
Bernie, your socialism would never allow a SpaceX to be built. Socialism has only proven to impoverish mankind and lead to death and destruction.
We need to create the conditions for more SpaceXs to be built, not attack the great entrepreneurs who are helping to advance our country.
Richard Collings retweeted
Unpopular opinion:
The debate between MAGA and the left is increasingly a debate over who should be the central planner, not whether central planning is legitimate.
Trump is many things, but a laissez faire, hands off leader isn't one of them.
The argument is drifting from freedom versus control to competing brands of control.
This is the inevitable consequence of placing faith in politicians and then granting them unaccountable sanction. Once political power becomes the solution to every problem, the only remaining question is who gets to wield it. The debate shifts from limiting power to capturing it.
Richard Collings retweeted
If the goal is equality of outcome without equality of effort, productivity, or value creation, the result isn't equality. It's shared decline.
The more a system rewards people regardless of contribution, the less incentive there is to produce. The more it penalizes those who create value, the less value gets created.
Eventually everyone becomes poorer together, as productive people are burdened with supporting an ever growing number of people encouraged not to produce. You cannot consume what nobody creates.
Richard Collings retweeted
The Laffer Curve exposes one of the biggest flaws in “tax the rich” politics: past a certain point, high taxes stop generating productive activity and start generating avoidance behavior instead.
The wealthy usually have the most ability to adapt by restructuring income, moving capital, raising prices, automating, reducing hiring, or passing costs onto employees and consumers.
So the rich often suffer slightly, not at all, or even profit through reduced competition, while workers and consumers absorb the damage through lower wages, higher prices, fewer opportunities, and slower growth.
Richard Collings retweeted
If socialists actually understood what socialism was, many would probably still support it anyway because the appeal was never excellence, production, or earning. It was resentment, dependency, and the desire to morally justify taking from those they envy.
At least then the mask would come off. They could stop pretending socialism is about compassion, workers, or justice and admit it’s fundamentally hostility toward unequal outcomes created through voluntary exchange.
Richard Collings retweeted
This accidentally exposes the opposite of what he wants to prove.
If billionaires become wealthy by persuading millions of people to voluntarily buy music, shoes, books, phones, or services, then wealth is tied to value creation, not extraction. Calling every unequal outcome “exploitation” just empties the word of meaning.
Michael Jordan didn’t get rich by forcing people to buy sneakers. JK Rowling didn’t become wealthy by putting a gun to children’s heads and demanding they read Harry Potter. People traded willingly because they valued what was offered more than the money they gave up.
And his “tollbooth” argument destroys itself because the largest actual tollbooth in society is the state. Billionaires can only profit if people keep choosing them. Governments extract wealth whether you consent or not.
What he really hates isn’t exploitation. It’s that in capitalism wealth can be earned without political permission, and that consumers, not central planners, decide who succeeds.
And the snowflake label is pure projection, you're pretending that its an unbearable injustice that you can't sustain your life through shameless ever increasing theft.
Richard Collings retweeted
Capitalism is the only system that bans physical coercive force from all social relationships, allowing individuals to freely and voluntarily act according to the judgment of their own minds, in pursuit of their own happiness.
Capitalism is not only the most productive system, it's the only just system - the only one that treats men as they ought to be treated: as sovereign, thinking individuals who have a right to chart their own course in life, owing no unchosen obligations to anyone.
Richard Collings retweeted
The free market involves thousands of companies, millions of individuals making billions of decisions on employing resources to mutual benefit. It takes a special kind of arrogance for socialists to look at this economic miracle and think 'I'm cleverer than that, I can do better'
Richard Collings retweeted
The Fascism Lie
One of the most successful political tricks of the last century was convincing people that fascism was a “right wing” system.
It wasn’t.
Fascism was built on the same core belief as other authoritarian systems: the state comes before the individual.
Under fascism the government controlled industry, controlled labour, dictated production and subordinated private business to the goals of the state. Property technically existed, but only so long as it served the regime.
That is not free markets.
That is not capitalism.
That is not individual liberty.
Benito Mussolini himself started as a socialist, edited a socialist newspaper and openly described fascism as a system where the state would organise and direct the economy.
In other words, the individual and the market were never in charge. The state was.
The real divide in politics has never been “left vs right”.
The real divide is much simpler:
Do you believe the individual should control their life and economic activity, or do you believe the state should?
Every system that places the state above the individual eventually ends the same way.
Less freedom.
Less prosperity.
More power concentrated in the hands of a few.
Free societies do the opposite.
They limit government power, protect property rights and allow individuals to build, trade and create freely.
And history shows very clearly which system actually produces prosperity.
Richard Collings retweeted
Bitcoin is not a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi requires a central operator promising returns and paying early investors with funds from later ones. Bitcoin has no issuer, no promoter, and no guaranteed return—just an open, decentralized monetary network driven by code and market demand.
Richard Collings retweeted
Strength does not come from diversity. Strength comes from strong people.
A strong country is built by people who take responsibility for their own lives.
People who save.
People who produce more than they consume.
People who build, innovate, and create real value in the world.
These are the traits that create prosperity and resilience.
Race has nothing to do with it.
The obsession with diversity for its own sake reduces people down to categories and labels. Ironically, that mindset is far closer to racism than the idea of judging people by their character, their work, and what they contribute.
If we want a strong country we should focus on encouraging strength.
Discipline.
Productivity.
Innovation.
Responsibility.
Strength is strength.
Richard Collings retweeted
Libertarianism, simply explained
A libertarian believes in maximum individual freedom and minimum government control.
The core idea is simple. You own your life. You own your choices. You own the consequences.
Government exists to protect basic rights like life, liberty and property, not to control how you live, what you buy, what you say, or how you choose to run your business.
A libertarian world view says free people making voluntary choices in a free market create better outcomes than politicians trying to engineer society from the top down.
It means personal responsibility instead of government dependency.
Freedom of speech even when you disagree.
Low taxes.
Small government.
Strong property rights.
And the belief that if you are not harming anyone else, the government should leave you alone.
It does not mean no rules at all. It means rules that protect freedom rather than restrict it.
At its core, libertarianism is simply this. Adults should be free to live their lives without interference, and success or failure should come from their own decisions, not political control.
Richard Collings retweeted
If you want to stretch the word “slavery” until it means “I have to work to live,” then nature is the slave master.
Reality requires production before consumption.
When you argue that people should be able to consume without producing, you are arguing that someone else must produce without full claim to what they earn.
You aren't against slavery, you just want to be the master.
Richard Collings retweeted
It’s absurd that one man sets interest rates for a “free” country.
End the Fed.
Richard Collings retweeted
Socialists invent and then condemn the idea of “late-stage capitalism” without ever defining what actually changed.
When pressed, what they describe isn’t capitalism at all. It’s cronyism, corporatism, regulatory capture, and oligarchy.
Those aren’t features of capitalism. They’re features of state power picking winners and losers.
Notice the contradiction: they often don’t mind what they call “early-stage capitalism” because it’s competitive, decentralized, innovative, and raises living standards. What they hate is what happens after heavy regulation, subsidies, bailouts, licensing cartels, and political favoritism take over.
In other words, they hate capitalism after it’s been partially socialized.
Then comes the fatal error: instead of removing the state distortions that caused the corruption, they demand more of them. More control, more planning, more power concentrated in the same institutions that already broke the system.
So they end up fighting capitalism for the sins of socialism, while imagining that doubling down on the cause will somehow produce a utopia, when really it just produces stagnation, resentment, and endless complaints from everyone, including the socialists themselves.
Richard Collings retweeted
Career Update: After almost four memorable years, I moved on from Apple last week, closing an unforgettable chapter of my professional journey.
I’m sincerely grateful for the opportunities to work on so many amazing projects and products across the company. Though many of them are not public yet (wait for the surprise!), I feel greatly honored to experience, learn and grow from IC to tech lead, from engineering to research, from larger engineering teams to early product incubation and prototyping. Each role has offered me invaluable unique lessons. Above all, my deepest gratitude goes to my colleagues, mentors and friends who made this journey truly unparalleled and meaningful. I’ll miss you all.
New Chapter: I’m joining Tesla Optimus AI team to work on humanoid robots.
Humanoids are the ultimate dream of our generation. With the recent breakthrough of LLMs and Physical AI, this dream is finally within reach and it’s on us to make it come true. Tesla has the right combination of software, hardware and AI talents to make it happen - I was totally blown away by the scale and sophistication of the Optimus lab and deep dedication of people when I got to visit the office. My first week was already so much fun and exciting: flat team structure, spontaneous deep technical discussions, direct communications across levels, hardcore building and crazy ideas with super fast iterations. You can feel the energy to change the world here. I really like it so far.
