Burly. Surly. Thick-skinned. An uncensored podcast by a libertarian awakened from a conservative coma - politics, pop culture, and whatever else is on my mind.
San Antonio, TX
Joined May 2011
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Raging Rhino retweeted
In free nations, we investigate crimes to see who is guilty of them.
In communist tyrannies, they investigate men to see what they can be punished for.
Raging Rhino retweeted
You absolute midwit. Congrats on repeating the Wikipedia "Nazis were far-right, end of story" summary you absorbed between TikToks.
Yes, the Nazis crushed independent unions, jailed and murdered communists and social democrats, and Hitler liquidated the Strasserite "left" wing of his own party in the Night of the Long Knives. That part is not in dispute. They were not Marxist class-struggle socialists. They hated Bolshevism as a Jewish plot and treated international socialism as the main enemy. Fine.
What your middle-school history class skipped is that they still ran a National *Socialist* state: private property existed only as long as it served the Führer’s racial and war goals, wages and prices were controlled, industry was cartelized under state direction, profit was subordinated to the party, and the economy was planned for autarky and rearmament. That is not free-market capitalism, liberal conservatism, or classical right-wing economics. It is the same family of state-directed, anti-liberal, collectivist economics practiced by every other fascist and "national socialist" regime. The name was not a prank; the 25-point program and the early rhetoric were full of anti-capitalist planks precisely because they were competing with the actual socialists for working-class support.
Your North Korea comparison is the usual gotcha and it is only half-clever. Yes, names can lie. But the NSDAP did not merely call itself socialist while secretly running a Rothschild hedge fund. They nationalized, directed, rationed, and regimented. The difference from Soviet socialism was mainly that the Nazis kept the owners as managers under party orders instead of shooting them all and installing commissars. Both systems produced shortages, secret police, and mass graves; one just had better uniforms and Wagner.
Elon pointing out the obvious—that "National Socialist" is not an ironic branding exercise and that the regime was economically left of any classical liberal or conservative—does not make him a moron. It makes him less obedient to the post-1945 academic consensus that insists every totalitarian who isn’t a full Marxist must be filed under "far-right" so the left never has to share the body count. Money didn’t buy him a brain; it just bought him a platform where he doesn’t have to pretend your selective reading of 1930s Germany is the complete picture.
Keep yelling "far-right fascists" while ignoring the actual economic policies and the party’s own name. It is the historical equivalent of covering your ears and shouting.
Raging Rhino retweeted
Every one of us started out as a mental communist.
A very small child believes that wishing makes it so. The world revolves around him. Food appears, toys appear, someone else pays for everything. When reality says no, he cries: "It's not fair!" And when something breaks, it's someone else's fault.
Normally, children figure out around four that it isn't so. The mental communist doesn't.
The rest of us learn it from reality. The stove is hot. The toy breaks. The friend leaves. Wishes don't move the world; work does. Freud called it the passage from the pleasure principle to the reality principle. It is called growing up.
The mental communist never made that passage. He is fifty years old, and still four.
Why? Because he was protected from reality for too long. A comfortable home, endless studies, a job in an institution where being wrong costs nothing, and a state that plays the parent. Peter Pan was the boy who wouldn't grow up. Today Neverland has a campus, a newsroom and a ministry.
And so the fantasies became delusions.
A child's fantasy is soft. It gives way when reality pushes. A delusion is hard. It survives every piece of evidence – that is what makes it a delusion.
You recognize the grown child easily. The tantrum when reality says no – today we call it outrage. Rights without duties. Someone else always pays – only the parent has become the state. Every failure is someone else's fault: he started it. And the imaginary friend – "humanity," "the people," "history" – who always agrees with him.
Here is the danger. A child's fantasy is guarded by his parents. A grown man's delusion is guarded by power – and paid for by everyone else.
What grows people up is what it always was: consequences, work, responsibility for someone other than yourself. And nothing ends a fantasy faster than your own baby crying at three in the morning.
A civilization is built by adults. It cannot be run from Neverland.
Mental Communism – How to Recognize It.
You don't need a party card to be a communist anymore. You don't even need to have read Marx. Mental communism is not an ideology. It is a way of thinking – and you meet it every day: in the office, in the newsroom, at the dinner table, in the ministry.
Here is how to recognize it.
1. Words before things. Rename a problem and it's solved. Insecurity becomes "a feeling of insecurity." Rioters become "youths." Censorship becomes "fighting disinformation."
2. Intentions before results. A policy is good because it means well and sounds good. That it failed is a detail – usually someone else's fault.
3. Humanity before people. He loves humanity. He can't stand his neighbor.
4. The model before reality. When the world doesn't fit the theory, the world must change. A new law, a new program, a bigger budget.
5. An enemy for every failure. The plan never fails. It is sabotaged – by the rich, the speculators, the "far right," the weather.
6. Appearances before reality. Poses before acts: the flag in the profile picture, the slogan at dinner, the open letter signed with a hundred others. Then nothing.
7. Rights for me, rules for you. Free speech for his side, "hate speech" for yours. Private schools for his children, public ones for yours.
8. He never pays. Being wrong costs him nothing – he moves on to the next cause, the next post, the next promotion.
9. Consensus instead of evidence. "Experts agree." "Studies show." "Everyone knows." Ask which study, and you become the problem.
10. No exit. Ask him what would prove him wrong. Silence – or outrage.
Poles recognize it instantly. We lived inside it for forty-five years: the meetings where everyone knew and nobody said, the newspapers reporting record harvests, the slogans on the walls. The regime only partly fell. The habit stayed. And in the West, it never even needed a regime.
What unites all ten? One thing. For the mental communist, reality doesn't exist – only his wishes, his words, his poses, and the power to impose them. Every sign is the same gesture: putting something in reality's place. Words instead of things. Intentions instead of results. A model instead of the world. An enemy instead of a mistake. A pose instead of an act. Consensus instead of evidence. That is also why he never pays and never admits he was wrong: you cannot be wrong about a world you don't believe exists.
Like children living in their fantasies. Children believing that wishing makes it so – except these children have power.
The good news: a habit of mind can be broken. It starts with one sentence, said out loud: the world doesn't work like that.
Raging Rhino retweeted
I hate the way the word democracy is used today, often by both the left and the right.
“The people voted for this. Who are you to oppose them?”
I'm someone who believes in inalienable individual rights, which cannot legitimately be voted away, regardless of how many people support violating them.
And what's wild is that both sides suddenly rediscover individual rights when opposing the other side's attempts at majority rule.
I'd imagine both would agree that 51% of the population voting to enslave the other 49% wouldn't make slavery legitimate.
Yet somehow that principle disappears when the majority votes to violate rights they personally don't care about.
It's pragmatism over principle. Rights when convenient, democracy when expedient.
At best, it's a system in which you sanction kneecapping others today, knowing they'll have every incentive to kneecap you tomorrow.
A revolving door of mutually sanctioned violations.
Raging Rhino retweeted
Capitalism has a win condition. Socialism does not.
Here's why, explained so simply a 10-year-old could get it. It starts with a book written in 1944 by an Austrian economist named Friedrich Hayek: The Road to Serfdom.
Imagine a classroom of 30 kids. One day the teacher says: "From now on, I decide what everyone eats for lunch, which games you play at recess, and who sits next to whom. It's fairer that way."
First problem: the teacher doesn't know what you like. You hate carrots. Your friend is allergic to peanuts. Lucas wants to play football, Emma wants to draw. 30 kids, 30 different wishes. Nobody can know all of that, not even the smartest teacher on Earth. Hayek called this the knowledge problem. The information needed to run an economy is scattered across millions of heads, and it can't be gathered in one office.
Second problem: the kids start fighting. "Why does he get the window seat?" "Why football again?" Before, everyone just chose for themselves. Now every choice is a fight, because every choice is made for everyone.
Third problem: the class can't agree on a plan, so someone says "we need one person in charge who just decides." This is Hayek's key insight. Planning doesn't fail because planners are evil. A plan needs everyone to agree on the same goals, and free people never agree on everything. So the plan needs force to work.
Fourth problem, and it's the scariest one: who wants that job? The kind kid doesn't want it, because the kind kid doesn't want to force 29 people to eat carrots. The job attracts the one who likes giving orders and doesn't mind punishing those who disobey. Hayek wrote a whole chapter on this, called "Why the Worst Get on Top." It doesn't happen by accident. It happens by selection.
Here's the trap. When the person who controls your lunch also controls your job, your home, your shop and your newspaper, they control your whole life. You can't say no, because there's nowhere else to go. Controlling the economy doesn't mean controlling one part of life. It means controlling the means to every goal you have.
That's the road to serfdom. Nobody votes for a dictator. People vote for "someone should fix this," then for "give them more power to fix it," and one day they wake up with no one left to say no to.
The USSR, Maoist China, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela. These are different countries with different cultures and languages, and the story has the same ending every time. When a script produces the same ending every time, it isn't bad luck. It's the script.
Now capitalism. Back to the classroom. Instead of one teacher deciding everything, every kid can trade. You give me your carrots, I give you my apple, and we both walk away happier. Nobody needs to know what everyone wants, because prices do that job. A price is a message telling millions of strangers what's scarce and what's wanted, with no one in charge.
That's the win condition. In capitalism, you get rich by making something other people freely choose to buy, so your success depends on serving others. In a planned system, you get ahead by pleasing whoever holds power. One rewards usefulness. The other rewards obedience.
And this isn't theory. Two centuries ago, almost every human being was extremely poor. In 1990, about 38% of humanity still lived in extreme poverty. Today it's under 10%. More than a billion people escaped it in a single generation. It happened when China, India, Vietnam and South Korea opened up to markets, trade and private enterprise. The largest reduction in poverty in human history came from letting people trade.
So why do so many people hate capitalism?
Because what they hate usually isn't capitalism.
They hate the bank that got bailed out with their taxes while they lost their house. They hate the giant company that writes the regulations so no startup can compete with it. They hate rent they can't afford because building new homes has been made nearly impossible. They hate the lobbyist who gets a subsidy while the small business owner drowns in paperwork.
Look closely at each one, and you'll find a state handing out privileges. A bailout is not the market. The market would have let the bank fail. A regulation written by incumbents is not competition. It's protection from competition. None of this is capitalism. It's cronyism, which is what happens when businesses stop competing for customers and start competing for politicians.
People see the symptom and blame the wrong cause. They say "capitalism failed" and ask for more state. That gives more power to the same people who created the problem, and it puts us right back on Hayek's road.
The answer to bad capitalism isn't less freedom. It's less privilege. That means fewer bailouts, fewer protected incumbents, fewer permits, and more people allowed to build, compete and trade.
Capitalism has a win condition: make things people want. Socialism has an end condition: someone has to be in charge. And history keeps showing us who ends up in that chair.
Raging Rhino retweeted
Capitalism has no authority to execute, imprison, or starve people into submission. Governments do.
Someone dying because another person didn't sacrifice their labor or property to keep them alive doesn't make that person a killer.
But when socialist and communist governments abolish private property, seize the means of production, suppress independent enterprise, dictate what may be produced and distributed, and punish those who resist, they deprive individuals of the freedom to provide for themselves.
There's a fundamental moral difference between refusing to provide for someone and using state power to prevent them from providing for themselves.
And an even greater difference when that coercion contributes to mass starvation.
Raging Rhino retweeted
Sounds like a golden opportunity to start a worker-owned cooperative and undercut those greedy corporations.
Pay workers more, charge customers less, and put the billionaires out of business.
If greed is all that's keeping prices high, what's stopping you?
Thank goodness capitalism gives socialists the freedom to put their theories to the test.
Raging Rhino retweeted
Or you could go build $1 trillion in wealth and solve the problems you’re talking about.
It’s funny how you’re so opinionated on what should be done with OTHER PEOPLE’s wealth.
Build your own wealth. You should shut up and get to work.
Things Elon Musk could do with $1Tn dollars:
- End world hunger
- Solve climate change
- Provide schooling for every child
- Reduce housing crisis
What Elon Musk does:
- Build a stupid car-toy with no practícal use, just to impress a bunch of idiots.
Tesla Roadster should be the last straw. #EatTheRich
Raging Rhino retweeted
J'ai vu une Tesla décoller. Et j'ai entendu beaucoup de bêtises.
« Ça ne sert à rien. » « Gadget de milliardaire. » « Qui a besoin d'une voiture qui vole ? »
Personne. Et c'est exactement pour ça que c'est important.
En 1978, Brabham a aligné en Formule 1 une voiture équipée d'un ventilateur géant à l'arrière. Il aspirait l'air sous le châssis et plaquait la voiture au sol. Elle a gagné sa première course avec une avance insolente. Elle a été interdite immédiatement.
Quarante-huit ans plus tard, on y revient. Un système de succion qui colle la voiture à la route et lui permet de passer sous la seconde au 0 à 100.
Personne n'a « besoin » de faire le 0 à 100 en moins d'une seconde. Comme personne n'a besoin d'une Formule 1. Et pourtant : les freins carbone de votre berline, l'hybridation de votre moteur, l'aérodynamique de votre SUV, les palettes au volant — tout ça vient de voitures de course que personne n'utilisera jamais pour aller au travail.
La Formule 1 ne sert à rien. Pourtant elle sert à tout.
En 1973, quand la France a lancé Ariane, l'Europe sortait de onze échecs consécutifs du programme Europa. La presse parlait d'argent jeté dans l'espace. Vingt ans plus tard, Ariane détenait la moitié du marché mondial des lancements commerciaux, et chaque satellite de télévision, de météo ou de GPS que vous utilisez a bénéficié de cette obstination.
Le progrès a toujours la même tête au début : un truc inutile, cher, ridicule, construit par des gens qu'on prend pour des fous.
Ce que j'ai vu à Dallas, ce n'est pas une voiture volante. C'est un châssis, une gestion de l'énergie et une maîtrise des flux d'air que l'industrie automobile mettra dix ans à digérer.
Les applications viendront : sécurité, freinage, stabilité, consommation. Elles finiront dans des voitures ordinaires conduites par des gens qui expliqueront, en 2036, que tout ça était évident.
La question n'est jamais « à quoi ça sert ».
La question est : qui ose encore construire des choses qui ne servent à rien ?
Il y a cinquante ans, c'était nous. La fusée, le TGV, le Concorde, le Minitel.
L'Europe construisait des choses absurdes et magnifiques.
Aujourd'hui, on commente depuis le siège arrière car nous sommes hors course.
Merci @elonmusk de nous faire rêver
Raging Rhino retweeted
Congratulations. You've discovered how everyone can retire at 50 by giving them approximately $2,420.
According to Forbes, the world's 3,428 billionaires possess a combined $20.1 trillion. Confiscate every penny, divide it among 8.3 billion people, and that's your one-time payout. And that's assuming you could liquidate everything without destroying its value.
For this magnificent achievement, you'd violate property rights, undermine investment, disrupt production, and slaughter the golden goose that generated the wealth in the first place.
And here's the part you haven't considered: that golden goose may take generations to reproduce, assuming anyone would even attempt it under a regime that confiscates the rewards.
The communist mentality resembles a cancer: consume the wealth of the host, demand more as the host weakens, and continue until there's nothing left to consume.
You've traded generations of potential prosperity for a few weeks of spending money, destroyed the incentives to rebuild, and called it liberation.
All because you confused possessing wealth with stealing it, and consuming wealth with creating it.
Raging Rhino retweeted
We say goodbye to our dear friend, Oscar-winning actress Eva Marie Saint.
One of the last surviving stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, we are grateful for her contributions to cinema and the time she spent with us over the years.
Our thoughts are with her loved ones.
Raging Rhino retweeted
Calling invested wealth “hoarding” turns production into a moral crime and confiscation into compassion. Wealth invested in businesses, technology, housing, and production isn’t sitting in a vault depriving someone of dinner, it is creating value and employment.
More fundamentally, another person’s hunger does not give him ownership of your wealth or labor. Once need becomes an enforceable claim on another person’s work, compassion becomes servitude and slavery by the hungry, with need as the title deed.
The welfare state compounds this by treating need as sufficient proof of entitlement, barely distinguishing misfortune from repeated irresponsibility while forcing strangers to pay either way. Voluntary charity can: help the unfortunate, demand accountability, and refuse to subsidize destructive behavior. The civilized goal is to help people escape poverty, not make poverty a permanent claim on those who have escaped it.
Raging Rhino retweeted
Poverty is humanity’s starting condition; wealth has to be created. And one reliable way to perpetuate poverty is to treat the people creating wealth as prey, and to punish investment, confiscate its rewards, and then wonder why there is less investment, production and abundance.
An attitude built around crushing and plundering the rich doesn’t feed the poor. Push it far enough and it leaves everyone fighting over scarcer, more expensive goods while congratulating themselves that at least nobody got too rich producing them.
Raging Rhino retweeted
Paying taxes doesn’t mean you paid for everything you demand from government. The trick is to say, “I pay taxes, therefore I’m owed all of this,” while refusing to compare what you actually paid with the cost of what you expect to receive.
If you pay $10 into a system and demand $20 back, the missing $10 didn’t materialize because you called the first $10 “taxes.” Someone else has to pay the difference.
“I pay taxes” establishes that you contributed something. It does not establish that everyone else owes you whatever amount you decide you deserve.
Raging Rhino retweeted
God speed Pete Byrne, lead singer of Naked Eyes.
Who else remembers this song being everywhere? And yes, a banger.
