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Max Saltin retweeted
The Seven Cures
We have gone through the seven sins and watched each one grow from a private weakness into a public system. But the cures are as old as the sins, and our ancestors knew them all.
A civilization is made of what it rewards and punishes. Reward the sins, and they become systems. Reward the cures, and they become a civilization.
Against envy, admiration. Both begin the same way: by looking up at someone who has done better. Envy says: tear him down. Admiration says: show me how. One turns the feeling into destruction, the other into work. And few people envy when everyone around is doing great things.
Against pride, humility. Humility is not thinking you are small. It is knowing the world is bigger than your plan. The proud man designs a society for everyone; the humble man lets everyone design his own life. And Madison put it most simply, noting that if men were angels, no government would be necessary – so power must be divided, and ambition made to check ambition. The cure for pride is not a humble ruler. It is a system that does not need one.
Against wrath, patience. Wrath wants the punishment now, before the facts. Patience waits for them. Scaled up, patience has a name: the rule of law – evidence first, verdict last, or not at all. Every mob, from the guillotine to the hashtag, is wrath that refused to wait.
Against sloth, diligence – not overwork, but care: doing your own work, and finishing it. The surest cure is ownership. Give a man something of his own – a house, a field, a business – and he will take care of it. Take everything from him, and he will care about nothing. When someone tells you that you will own nothing and be happy, he is selling you sloth.
Against greed, generosity. Greed wants to take; generosity wants to give – and you can only give what is yours. Generosity with other people's money is not a virtue. It is greed wearing a halo. The state does not give. It moves money, and keeps a share for the moving. Many of the West's proudest hospitals, universities and cathedrals began as real gifts.
Against gluttony, temperance. Gluttony lives at the expense of later and others. Temperance leaves something on the table – for tomorrow, for the children. At the scale of a state, gluttony is called debt, and temperance a balanced budget. An old proverb says that a society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit. Temperance is love for those who come after us.
Against lust, faithfulness. Lust takes and leaves. Faithfulness stays – and builds a home. Lust is sterile. A home is where children grow up. A civilization that cures lust gets the one thing lust never gives: grandchildren.
Put the seven together, and the pattern is plain. Every sin consumes; every cure builds. You could argue it is all just a matter of time preference – how much you value today over tomorrow. Every sin wants it now. Every cure can wait – for later, and for those who come after us.
Aristocracy is a matter of time preference. Not blood, not money: the habit of thinking in generations. A politician thinks until the next election; an aristocrat, until his grandchildren. That is why a state that lives from election to election eats the future. And you need no title for it – any family that thinks in generations is founding a dynasty.
And notice how each sin became respectable: it changed its name. Envy calls itself social justice. Pride calls itself expertise. Wrath calls itself the people's anger. Sloth calls itself a right. Greed calls itself generosity – with your money. Gluttony calls itself body positivity. Lust calls itself liberation. No sin becomes a system under its own name. It needs the Lie.
So one cure comes before the other seven: call things by their names. The cures need only the truth – and someone brave enough to say it first.
The Seven Deadly Sins – at the Scale of a Civilization.
More than fourteen centuries ago, Christian monks drew up a list of seven sins. Not laws – a map of the human heart. Envy. Pride. Wrath. Sloth. Greed. Gluttony. Lust. It is still pretty much the most accurate psychology anyone has written.
The monks were looking at one soul at a time. Look at whole systems instead, and you find the same seven. A vice that stays private ruins one life. Scaled up, it becomes an institution: a tax, a ministry, an ideology, a budget line.
People will always have vices. The question is who pays for them.
Adam Smith noticed that we owe our dinner not to the butcher’s kindness but to his self-interest. A free market does not abolish greed – it puts it to work: you get rich only by serving others, and you go bankrupt if you don’t. The vice pays its own bill. Bad systems let the vice send its bill to someone else – the taxpayer, the next generation, the innocent.
A good civilization does not abolish sin. It sends the bill to the sinner.
So here is what comes next, one sin at a time:
1. Envy – the engine of socialism. If I can’t have it, nobody should.
2. Pride – the planner’s conceit, from Plato’s philosopher-king to the Brussels directive.
3. Wrath – vengeance without trial, from the guillotine to cancel culture.
4. Sloth – comfort as a political program, from bread and circuses to the empty cradle.
5. Greed – the one everybody expects us to defend. We won’t: crony capitalism, the bailout, private profit and public loss.
6. Gluttony – debt. Eating the future.
7. Lust – pleasure cut off from its consequences, and from children.
And then the cures: the four old virtues – prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude – and the institutions that make them stick.
The monks thought sin was a matter for the confessional. They were half right. It is also a matter for the budget.
Show me a country’s budget, and I will tell you which sins it subsidizes.
First up: Envy.
Envy – the Engine of Socialism.
A genie appears to a peasant: "I’ll grant you one wish." The peasant thinks for a long time. His neighbor has a goat. "Kill the neighbor’s goat."
That is envy. Not wanting what someone else has – that’s ambition, and it built most of the world. Envy is wanting him not to have it. Even if you gain nothing. Even if you lose.
Every other sin at least promises pleasure. Envy promises only that someone else will have less. And it is the one sin nobody ever confesses – because it never calls itself envy. It calls itself fairness. Justice. Equality.
Socialism is envy at scale: not lifting the bottom, but cutting the top. Thatcher caught it in one sentence in Parliament: her opponents would rather the poor were poorer, provided the rich were less rich.
In experiments, people will pay out of their own pocket to destroy money belonging to others. Whole countries do the same: the tax that raises little but drives away the people it targets, the school that abolishes the advanced class because not everyone can take it, the rule written to bring down whoever got ahead.
In Soviet villages, a kulak – a "rich" peasant – was often a man with two cows. Liquidating the kulaks did not give anyone a cow. It gave everyone the famine.
That is envy’s bill. Envy aims it at the successful. But the successful leave, or stop trying – and the bill comes back to everyone. Kill the goat and you get no milk. Neither does anyone else.
The Greeks knew there were two kinds of rivalry. Hesiod wrote that the potter competes with the potter, the craftsman with the craftsman – and that this strife is good, because it makes everyone work harder. The other kind only destroys.
A free society does not abolish envy. It converts it: you may have what your neighbor has – by doing what he did. Socialism converts it the other way, into policy, so that nobody has the goat.
The cure is old and simple: gratitude for what you have, and the ambition to build what you don’t.
Next: Pride.
Max Saltin retweeted
Most women are single because they want to get paid for being in a relationship.
Let's be honest.
A lot of women today aren't single because there aren't any good men left.
They're single because they've turned relationships into business deals.
Love stopped being about connection and became about compensation.
It's no longer "let's build together." It's now "what can I get from him?"
Many modern women want all the benefits of a wife without actually being one.
They expect you to provide, protect, spend, and sponsor their lifestyle while giving there bare minimum in return.
They want emotional support, constant attention, and financial investment.
But when it's time to bring peace, loyalty, or real partnership?
They disappear.
Here's the truth:
A relationship built on money instead of meaning will always collapse.
When the money slows down, the "love" disappears.
When the gifts stop, the affection fades.
When he stops paying, she stops caring.
That's not love.
That's a transaction.
The sad part?
A lot of women who call men "stingy" are just mad they can't monetize a man's emotions anymore.
Real men don't invest in women who only show up for the benefits.
They invest in women who bring peace, respect, and genuine effort not entitlement.
Ladies, a man is not an ATM.
You can't demand loyalty from someone you only value for what he can give you.
Love isn't about who spends the most.
It's about who stays when life gets hard.
To the men reading this:
Stop letting women guilt-trip you into thinking love is measured by how much you spend.
It's not your job to finance a woman's lifestyle just because you care.
It's your job to protect your peace and invest in someone who values you beyond your wallet.
The irony is the same women calling men cheap are the ones who never bring anything real to the table.
They chase luxury love but forget that real love can't be bought... it's built.
Most women today are single not because good men don't exist, but because good men are tired of paying for love that isn't real.
Max Saltin retweeted
Christine Lagarde is leaving the ECB. Even her exit is planned: leave before the 2027 French election so her successor gets picked before voters have a say.
Let's use the moment to ask the real question: what is this job even for?
One person, in a tower in Frankfurt, sets the price of money for 350 million Europeans. The single most important price in the economy, the one every other price depends on, decided by a committee. We call it "monetary policy." If we did the same thing with the price of bread, we'd call it Gosplan.
That's Europe's real problem. It's a central planning project, and like every communist project, it rests on one belief: that the economy is a machine you can steer with levers, rates, regulations and directives, as long as you have enough technocrats and enough models. Macroeconomics as practiced in Brussels and Frankfurt is that illusion dressed up as science.
Look at the results. Stagnant growth, industry leaving, purchasing power melting, savers wiped out by inflation, overindebted states propped up by the printing press, social anger, insecurity. This isn't a string of accidents. It's what happens when you replace millions of free decisions with a handful of central ones.
Milton Friedman said it 50 years ago: inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. It doesn't fall from the sky, it comes out of central banks. He distrusted central bankers so much that he proposed replacing them with a computer that would grow the money supply at a fixed rate, no discretion, no "steering."
I'd go further. Creating money out of nothing distorts every price at once. Prices are the information that lets an economy function. Falsifying them is lying to everyone at the same time. It should be banned.
And the good news is this system is about to become obsolete. What Elon is building, AI, robots, energy, payments, is an economy of abundance where productivity pushes prices down faster than any committee can manipulate them. When the cost of production collapses, the power of those who control money collapses with it.
Lagarde is leaving. The next one should be the last.
I have just informed my colleagues that I will step down as @ECB President on 7 February 2027.
It has been a source of great pride to serve this institution.
I thank all of those who have supported me on this journey over the past seven years.
Max Saltin retweeted
Be serious about what you do. But never take yourself seriously.
In mid-May, I posted about wokeism. Over 100 million views. Picked up by a ton of media outlets. And right after, Elon Musk and Javier Milei followed me.
I'm not telling you this to flex. I'm telling you because it made me look at these two much more closely. And the more I watch them, the more convinced I am that they embody exactly what entrepreneurs will have to become.
First, they don't take status seriously.
Elon posts memes at 2am between rocket launches. Milei campaigned with a chainsaw. You can find that ridiculous. I find it deeply healthy.
Because I'm so done with guys who, after a bit of business success, give themselves an air of importance that Elon doesn't have 1% of. The grave tone. The persona. The distance. As if a fundraise or an exit turned them into sages.
Second, they're driven purely by infinite-sum games.
A finite-sum game is a fixed-size pie: whatever you win, someone else loses. An infinite-sum game is one where the goal is to grow the pie and keep playing.
And here's what I've come to understand: in finite-sum ecosystems, people almost always end up behaving badly. Not because they're bad people. Because the structure of the game pushes them there. When the pie doesn't grow, the only way to move forward is to take someone else's slice. Office politics, rent-seeking, backstabbing, envy.
This is exactly what Peter Thiel understood when he wrote "Competition is for losers."
It's not a VC punchline. It's a thesis about human nature. Thiel had René Girard as a mentor at Stanford, and Girard spent his life showing one thing: we desire what others desire. Mimetic desire. And when everyone wants the same thing in a limited space, rivalry turns destructive. Competitors become so obsessed with each other that they forget what they were supposed to build.
Thiel's lesson: don't fight over the same pie as everyone else. Create a pie that didn't exist.
And I believe that in the age of abundance that's coming, with AI, energy, robotics, this is precisely what will redefine capitalism. We're moving from a capitalism of capture to a capitalism of creation. Those who play finite games will tear each other apart over crumbs. Those who play infinite games will build what comes next.
Elon doesn't take market share, he creates markets. Milei is trying to do the same thing at the scale of a country: pull Argentina out of a logic where people fight to divide up scarcity, and put it back into a game where wealth gets created.
I deeply admire them both.
And I think these two qualities are connected.
Not taking yourself seriously isn't just a nice personality trait. It's a competitive advantage. It's what lets you keep learning.
Because the day you start taking yourself seriously, you have a persona to protect. And when you have a persona to protect, you're afraid of being wrong, afraid of looking stupid, afraid of asking the naive question. You stop listening. And you stop learning.
Status is a finite game: there's only one spot at the top, and everyone's fighting for it.
Learning is an infinite game.
Be serious about what you do. Never take yourself seriously.
Max Saltin retweeted
How do we know we live under socialism in Europe?
Because they lie – socialism can’t stand reality.
And because they are taking us to war – socialism needs war to hide its contradictions.
Hitler’s socialism wasn’t just an internal economic policy – it was the cause of the war.
Socialism was at the origin of the war. Not as a coincidence. As a necessity. The socialist economic model generates contradictions it cannot resolve internally – the calculation problem, the misallocation, the stagnation, the mounting failure. War is the exit. It provides the external enemy that explains the internal failure. It justifies the total mobilization the system always wanted. It consumes the surplus population the economy cannot employ. It redirects the resentment outward.
Does this remind you of anything?
The evidence is not subtle. The NSDAP program of 1920 reads like a standard socialist manifesto. The economic reality confirmed it – price controls, industrial planning, state allocation of raw materials, entrepreneurs reduced to government functionaries. Private property in name only. Mises called it Zwangswirtschaft – coercive economy. Hayek dedicated a chapter of The Road to Serfdom to the socialist roots of Nazism. Both writing from observation, not retrospect.
After 1945 the Soviet victors imposed their version and attached the capitalist label to every rival. Western textbooks followed. The lie became the curriculum.
The real divide has never been left versus right. It is collective control versus individual freedom. Once you place National Socialism correctly within the family of collectivisms, the political spectrum becomes legible – and the war becomes explicable.
When the system fails — and it always fails — it needs an enemy. The bigger the failure, the bigger the enemy required.
Imagine being Poland. Squeezed between two socialist systems, both searching for their enemy.
We were it.
Max Saltin retweeted
The financial media runs on a protection racket, and you are the mark.
Peter Schiff has been predicting hyperinflation and dollar collapse every single year since 2009. Seventeen years. The dollar is still the world's reserve currency. Schiff still sells gold funds and books interviews on CNBC. Nobody fires the guy. Nobody even interrupts him.
This persists because bad forecasters carry no skin in the game. A surgeon who botches operations loses patients, then loses his license. A market pundit who botches calls loses nothing. He collects his appearance fee, pivots to "the collapse is coming, just delayed," and books his next podcast. Confidence is rewarded over accuracy.
Media platforms compound this by optimizing for engagement, not truth. A loud, dramatic prediction of imminent catastrophe generates clicks. A sober probability-weighted assessment of capital allocation generates yawns. Networks select for the wrong trait aggressively and repeatedly.
There is also what Nassim Taleb ironically calls the "no skin in the game" problem. When a commentator manages no real capital, faces no audit trail, and bears no fiduciary duty to anyone watching, accountability simply has nowhere to land. Ironically because he is one of the worst offenders in the space.
Sadly, audiences do not track prediction records. You watch a pundit in October 2026 and form impressions based on his current confidence, not his track record since 2019. He exploits your memory gap completely.
Demand a track record with dates. Every call, every outcome. Forecasters who survive that scrutiny deserve your attention. The rest are selling you certainty because certainty sells.
Here are people with excellent and honest track records to follow:
@LukeGromen @RonStoeferle @saifedean @LynAldenContact @ThomasEWoods @porterstansb @LawrenceLepard @TaviCosta @NickHudsonCT @CorySwan @SantiagoAuFund @MacleodFinance @profstonge
Who would you add? And who are your worst offenders?
Max Saltin retweeted
We haven't had real money since 1971.
What we've had instead is a giant pyramid scheme where those closest to the money printer get richer while everyone else works harder just to keep up.
And somehow, people still call this a functioning monetary system.
Max Saltin retweeted
Ce n’est pas tant la droite qui m’a convaincu, mais surtout la gauche qui m’a fait basculer...
Je viens d'une famille ouvrière, donc historiquement de gauche. J'ai grandi dans un milieu où être de gauche était une évidence.
Et pourtant, à la base, je n'étais absolument pas politisé.
Les histoires de gauche, de droite, d'extrême gauche ou d'extrême droite, pour moi, c'était surtout du vent.
Je n'ai jamais ressenti le besoin d'appartenir à un camp, de défendre un parti ou de me reconnaître dans une idéologie.
Je suis de base un électron libre.
Mais avec le temps, l'expérience, le recul et la maturité, ma vision du monde a évolué.
Et je suis convaincu que nous sommes très nombreux dans ce cas. Certains d'entre vous, ont dû aussi passer par là...
Ce ne sont pas les discours de droite qui m'ont fait évoluer. C'est le comportement exécrable de la gauche.
Son arrogance. Son mépris. Sa violence. Son intolérance. Cette manie insupportable de distribuer des leçons de morale tout en étant incapable de supporter la moindre contradiction.
Cette obsession de vouloir imposer sa vision du monde, de coller des étiquettes, de salir des réputations et de désigner des ennemis dès que quelqu'un ose sortir du cadre idéologique autorisé.
Des méthodes profondément autoritaires et fascistes.
Ils parlent au nom du peuple, mais méprisent ce même peuple dès qu'il refuse de penser comme eux.
Ce sont des imposteurs.
Je ne me suis jamais réveillé un matin en me disant que j'avais envie d'être d'extrême droite.
Ce sont eux qui m'ont classé de ce côté du prisme politique.
Ce sont eux qui ont décidé que certaines de mes opinions, certaines de mes interrogations ou certaines de mes critiques suffisaient à me ranger dans cette catégorie.
Je n'ai pas choisi cette étiquette. Ils me l'ont collée.
Alors ainsi soit-il.
Vous avez réveillé quelque chose en moi : une profonde colère face à l'injustice et une envie viscérale de remettre les choses à leur place.
Parce que s'il y a bien deux choses que je ne supporte pas, ce sont l'injustice et l'autorité illégitime.
Je déteste ceux qui s'arrogent le droit de décider ce que les autres doivent penser, dire ou croire. Ceux qui prétendent détenir la vérité et s'autorisent, au nom de leur prétendue supériorité morale, à faire taire tous ceux qui les contredisent.
Ce n'est même plus une question de gauche ou de droite. C'est une question de liberté, de dignité et de refus de la soumission.
Et plus ils chercheront à nous imposer leur vision du monde, plus ils renforceront notre détermination à leur résister.
Ils ne cherchent pas à comprendre ce que vous pensez. Ils décident à votre place de ce que vous êtes.
Et quand les gens finissent par se détourner d'eux, ils ne se remettent jamais en question.
Ils les traitent de fascistes, de racistes, d'extrémistes.
Ils ne comprennent toujours pas que leurs méthodes radicalisent les gens contre eux et c'est tant mieux !
Et je pense que beaucoup de Français ont vécu la même expérience que moi...
Tout le monde est en train d'ouvrir les jeux ces derniers temps sur cette gauche dangereuse.
Vous êtes juste imbuvables et plus grand monde ne peut vous saquer.
Max Saltin retweeted
Fiat money is a government permission slip to slowly steal from you, and every central bank on earth runs one.
Here is how the mechanism works. Governments spend beyond what taxation can cover. Rather than default honestly, they instruct their central bank to create new currency units, purchase government debt, and inject the proceeds into the financial system. As of late 2026, the Federal Reserve held $7 trillion in assets, most of it acquired through this process. The new dollars dilute every dollar you already hold. Your purchasing power falls. Nobody ever announces the heist.
Mises called this the "crack-up boom," the terminal phase where currency creation accelerates until the public loses confidence entirely. Germany 1923. Zimbabwe 2008. Venezuela throughout the 2010s. Each collapse followed the same script: politicians facing fiscal pressure chose the printing press over honest accounting. They always do.
This also causes another problem: Prices carry information, specifically the relative scarcity of goods and the preferences of millions of people acting voluntarily. When a central bank manipulates the money supply, it corrupts that signal. Entrepreneurs invest based on distorted interest rates, build factories the real economy cannot support, hire workers for projects that only pencil out at artificially cheap credit. Then the correction comes, and you watch your portfolio, your job, your neighborhood absorb the damage that Washington's balance sheet avoided.
Sound money, whether gold or a hard-capped digital currency, removes this lever from political hands. Governments hate this removal because it strips them of the power to inflate.
Max Saltin retweeted
Falls ihr es noch nie gehört habt: Lernt, was der Cantillon-Effekt bedeutet.
Neues Geld landet nicht gleichmäßig bei allen. Wer es zuerst bekommt (Staat, Banken, Großkonzerne), kauft Dinge, bevor die Preise steigen. Wer es zuletzt bekommt (Arbeitnehmer, Sparer), zahlt schon die höheren Preise.
Deshalb:
– steigen Immobilien und Aktien schneller als Löhne
– wird Wohneigentum für viele unbezahlbar
– profitiert, wer Vermögen besitzt, und verliert, wer nur Einkommen hat
– geht die Schere zwischen Arm und Reich immer weiter auf
– fühlt sich das Leben an wie ein Hamsterrad, in dem man trotz Arbeit nicht vorankommt
Je mehr Geld ins System kommt, desto unfairer wird es verteilt. Das Problem ist nicht der Kapitalismus, sondern unser Geldsystem.
Max Saltin retweeted
Recently I was talking with a friend about universal geniuses. And something struck me.
Florence, 1480–1510. Same city, same moment: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Botticelli, Pico della Mirandola. Raphael right behind them. They walked the same streets.
Europe, 1600–1700. Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Huygens, Newton, Leibniz. In two generations, we got calculus, modern mechanics, probability theory, and the scientific method.
Athens, 470–320 BC. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Phidias, Thucydides. One century, one city, and the foundations of Western thought were laid.
Europe, 1890–1930. Poincaré, Hilbert, Einstein, Marie Curie, Tesla, Planck, Bohr, then von Neumann.
Always the same pattern. In every great era, the West had 15 to 20 minds of this caliber alive at the same time. People who could touch everything and push the frontier of several fields at once.
Today we have one. Just one. Elon Musk.
And Elon is an anomaly.
Not in the sense that he shouldn't exist. In the sense that the world we built is designed so that someone like him never emerges. Statistically, he shouldn't be here.
Because what forged Elon was an absolutely insane move.
October 2002. eBay buys PayPal. Elon walks away with roughly $180M. Anyone else buys an island and never works another day.
He puts $100M into SpaceX, $70M into Tesla, $10M into SolarCity. Almost everything. On rockets and electric cars, two industries no sane person wanted to touch.
2006–2008. The first three Falcon 1 launches fail. Tesla is burning cash, the financial crisis hits, investors run. He has enough left for one last launch. Just one. He borrows money from friends to pay his rent.
September 28, 2008. The fourth launch reaches orbit.
December 23, 2008. NASA awards SpaceX a $1.6B contract.
December 24, 2008. The Tesla round closes at the last possible hour. A few more days and everything collapses.
That's what a genius is. Not just IQ. The ability to put everything on the table when the entire world tells you it's impossible, and be right.
Now the real question: why do we only have one?
Because a genius needs three things. The freedom to try. The right to get massively rich if it works. The right to fail without being destroyed.
And that's exactly what the collectivist left and the technocrats have torn down across the West for the past 50 years.
They turned success into suspicion. Making a lot of money became a moral failing. Taking risks became irresponsible. Rising above the crowd became an insult to equality.
They stacked up norms, committees, permits, regulations written in Brussels by people who have never built anything in their lives. In Europe, Elon would never have been allowed to blow up three rockets. He'd have been stopped at the first form.
They want to tax capital before it even exists, cap fortunes, redistribute what others created by risking everything.
They replaced excellence with conformity. Our schools produce docile people, not dangerous ones. And a genius, by definition, is someone who disrupts. Their entire system is built to neutralize the people who disrupt.
The result: where we should have 15 to 20 universal geniuses alive at the same time, we have one.
Just one.
And you want to put him in prison.
You summon him before judges, you raid his offices, you insult him morning, noon and night, you dream of breaking up his companies. The man who lands rockets vertically and wants to take humanity to Mars.
You're disgusting.
History won't remember your names. It remembers Galileo, not the inquisitors who tried to silence him.
Max Saltin retweeted
Top Women's Podcast Promotes Divorce Because "There's Always Something Better" zerohedge.com/political/top-…
Max Saltin retweeted
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.
Max Saltin retweeted
I don't know how many people realize that if Elon Musk pulls off what he's building, it will be the biggest social reset in human history.
To understand why, you need to understand a concept almost nobody really gets: rent.
Yesterday I was talking about it with someone. I told them something simple: the moment a rent sets in, whatever kind it is, it gets paid for. Not necessarily in dollars. It gets paid for in stagnation.
So what is a rent?
A rent is income that doesn't come from the value you create, but from the position you hold. You don't win because you're better. You win because nobody is allowed to come and beat you.
The mechanism is almost always the same. A company succeeds. Then, instead of continuing to innovate, it goes for regulatory capture: licenses, standards, quotas, approvals, lobbying. It turns its lead into a wall. And behind that wall, new entrants can't get in.
But they're the ones who innovate. They're the ones who drive prices down, raise quality, create new wealth. When you block them, nothing dramatic happens. Nothing happens at all. Prices stop falling. Quality stalls. The pie stops growing. And when the pie stops growing, the only way to get richer is to take someone else's slice.
This is the point almost nobody sees: what people blame on "capitalism" (frozen inequality, a broken social ladder, the feeling that the game is rigged from the start) are the effects of that stagnation. The symptoms of rent. Not of capitalism. Capitalism is competition. Rent is its negation.
Now, Elon Musk.
He said that by 2036, money won't matter anymore. Most people read it as science fiction. I read it as an implicit critique of our entire monetary system.
His reasoning: AI and robots will produce more than we can possibly consume. So prices will collapse. Deflation, not inflation.
And this is where it gets interesting. For decades, the role of central banks has been to stabilize prices. In practice: to stop them from falling. Yet in an economy that innovates, the natural direction of prices is down. Look at what a computer cost thirty years ago.
Preventing prices from falling was the worst thing we could have done. Because it created an entire generation of rentiers. People who got rich not by creating something, but by owning something at the right time. An apartment. A plot of land. An asset shielded from falling prices by money printing and by rules that choke supply.
In a world not captured by the state, house prices would be extremely low.
And who would stay rich? The people who keep creating value. The ones whose wealth comes from the valuation of their company, because their company keeps innovating. Wealth you have to re-earn every single year.
That's where Elon's line really makes sense. In a world of deflationary abundance, human life would look like a video game. Or a game of chess.
If you're good and you start at the bottom, you can rise very, very fast. In a few years.
If you're bad and you inherit the inertia of a position you don't know how to maintain, against people who keep innovating, you fall very, very fast too.
No more rent. No more entitlement. Just your ability to create value, put back on the line every day.
It would be the greatest equalizer in human history.
Not equality of outcomes imposed from above. Equality of the playing field, imposed by abundance.
I think Elon Musk is reinventing the rules of capitalism. Or rather, bringing them back to their original form: the Austrian school. Real capitalism. Value creation as the only legitimate source of wealth.
And at the end of the road, something neither rent nor redistribution has ever achieved: the end of poverty on a global scale.
Max Saltin retweeted
Did you know that The Lord of the Rings was about communism?
(Maybe when you come from Poland, every evil looks like communism to you…:)
1. The Ring is not a weapon. It is the totalitarian temptation itself – the promise that this time, the right person wielding absolute power will finally produce the good outcome. Even heroes in the book are tempted by this argument. Gandalf refuses it, Aragorn refuses it, but it is the most seductive argument in politics. It is always wrong.
2. The Shire is where the story begins and where it must return. Hobbits grow their own food, smoke their own pipe-weed, own their gardens, and nobody tells them what a second breakfast should look like. This is not naivety – it is civilization at its most honest. Which is precisely why the system cannot leave it alone.
3. The Eye sees everything – not because it is omnipotent, but because enough servants are watching on its behalf. The Nazgûl are the secret police: former kings, once free and powerful, who accepted rings of power and became hollow enforcers. They did not fall suddenly. Each one made a reasonable accommodation, then another, until nothing remained inside the armor. The surveillance state does not need cameras everywhere. It needs people who have already sold themselves, and have nothing left to lose by selling others.
4. Saruman is the most sinister villain in the book – the brilliant intellectual who studied power so long and so closely that he decided he might as well have some. The collaborator. The man who convinced himself that managing the evil was smarter than opposing it, and ended up running a small franchise of it in the Shire.
5. The Shire gets collectivized. This is the chapter Western readers most want to skip – because it means that ignoring the darkness while it was distant did not protect the things that were close and dear. It came home anyway, wearing the face of bureaucratic administration: no private gardens, no excess, enforced sharing, small men with clipboards and new rules. Sharkey — the defeated Saruman — cannot create anything anymore. He can only administrate, regulate, and ruin. This is what the system looks like when it has already lost everywhere else.
6. Gollum is what the system produces when it finds someone useful. He serves the Ring completely, calls it his precious, and has long since forgotten what he was before it. He is not evil – he is consumed. The system doesn’t need to destroy you. It just needs you to need it more than you need yourself.
7. The Ring must be destroyed, not used. Not reformed, not redirected, not wielded by a better person for better ends. This is Tolkien’s most radical political statement: some instruments of total power cannot be turned to good purposes. They must be unmade. Every generation has to rediscover this, because the argument for just one more ring, in the right hands, for the right reasons, never stops sounding reasonable to some people…
The Brave New World made simple:
1. The World State’s motto is Community, Identity, Stability. These words are lies. There is no community – only interchangeable units. No identity – it is assigned before birth and conditioned before thought. Stability is the only honest word, because stability is the only actual goal, and everything else was sacrificed to achieve it.
2. Mustapha Mond, the Controller, has read Shakespeare. He has read the Bible. He has read everything that was ever great or true or painful about being human – and he locked it in a safe and runs the system anyway. He is not a true believer. He is the man who knows exactly what he buried and considers it a reasonable trade. He is the fattest pig, with better manners and a longer bookshelf.
3. The conditioning doesn’t break you. It makes you enjoy your cage. This is the upgrade from every previous tyranny – you don’t need guards if the prisoner has been engineered, from conception, to find the cell comfortable. Soma — the drug that makes obedience pleasant — is just the maintenance dose. The real work was done before anyone was born.
4. “Everyone belongs to everyone else” – the most totalitarian sentence ever dressed as liberation. It does not mean you are free to love everyone. It means you are forbidden to love anyone in particular. Depth, loyalty, grief, true love — all the things that make a person irreplaceable to another person — are the first things the system removes, because they are the first things that would make you resist it.
5. The man born outside the system — the Savage — asks for the right to be unhappy. To be cold, dirty, afraid, and alive in the full sense. Mond grants him, graciously, that the right exists – and explains, patiently, why no one wants it anymore. This is presented as a debate. It is not a debate. It is a man explaining to a relic why relics are no longer made.
6. Bernard Marx, Helmholtz Watson, the Savage – all three feel that something is missing. None of them can fully name it. This is precise: the system doesn’t suppress the hunger, it removes the vocabulary for it. You cannot demand what you cannot describe. You cannot mourn what you have been engineered not to know you lost.
7. Huxley’s message: Orwell feared they would ban the books. Huxley feared no one would want to read them. The boot on the face is easy to recognize and resist. The silly entertainment — the soma tablet, the orgy-porgy, the centrifugal bumble-puppy — these are harder, because they feel like enough, and by the time they don’t, you no longer have the words for what’s missing. The most complete tyranny is the one that makes abolishing itself unthinkable. Not forbidden. Unthinkable.
"You will own nothing and be happy"
Max Saltin retweeted
The media is lying to you about Elon Musk.
In this video, I explain why it’s a miracle to have someone at that level fighting the system, when he could have just made a deal with it.
I don't think you realize how lucky we are to have an Elon Musk at this level, actually fighting this thing.
Because let's be clear about the sides.
On one side, the people. The vast majority. Common sense, hard work, family, and one simple wish: to live in peace.
On the other, an illegitimate elite. Mostly globalist, which at its core is a communist project: managing humanity from the top, like a system. And since that project doesn't work (it has never worked anywhere), they survive in only one way: lies.
To hold on, this elite built systems of coercion and corruption. Ukraine is one of them. They've also captured and corrupted a huge share of the institutions that were supposed to protect us.
Take Bill Gates. On this line for years. It's no accident he ended up at the heart of Covid policy. Just ask yourself: why is a software billionaire talking directly to Fauci before the vaccine rollout even starts, as if he were part of the operation?
These people see humanity as a herd to be administered. But they're terrible at economics. They don't understand their model can't work. So instead of saying "we were wrong, let's change," they lie. They double down. And that's exactly what makes them dangerous.
Honestly, this system was almost impossible to break.
And then, by the most improbable of chances, there's one man. The richest man in the world. Who chose the side of the people against these illegitimate, mostly left-wing elites. And who's throwing all his power into this fight.
The system is dying. And he's the one pushing.
Think for two seconds. If Elon wanted to enslave humanity, he could have done it long ago. All he had to do was make a deal with the globalists. He'd have everything he wants, right now.
He did the opposite.
That should tell you whose side he's on.
Max Saltin retweeted
And somehow the solution is to concentrate even more power in the hands of fewer people—politicians who wield far greater authority, face far less direct accountability, and don't even require your consent to impose their dictates?
A billionaire can offer you a product, a job, or a service. You can refuse.
A politician can impose laws, confiscate your property, restrict your choices, and imprison you for disobedience.
Yet somehow it's the billionaire's power you find terrifying.
Perhaps the problem isn't concentrated power. It's that you want it concentrated in the hands of people willing to use it against those you resent.
Max Saltin retweeted
It's been months that I keep saying Hitler was far left. Every time, thousands of clowns show up in my replies to give me history lessons.
So I made a video to answer all these low IQ takes at once.
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