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The Austrian School
Joined November 2023
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Der "POINT OF NO RETURN" in der Lehre von Von Mises:
"Ein Staat wird in an dem Punkt beinahe unreformierbar, an dem die Mehrheit der Bevölkerung finanziell oder strukturell vom Staat abhängig ist (Staatsangestellte, Beamte, Subventions- oder Förderungsempfänger, Bezieher von Transferleistungen etc.) Sobald die Gruppe derjenigen, die netto vom Staat profitiert oder alimentiert wird, größer ist als die Gruppe, bei der dies nicht der Fall ist, blockiert das System Reformen, da die Mehrheit aus Eigeninteresse für den Erhalt oder Ausbau staatlicher Leistungen stimmt."
Das ist genau die shice, die wir haben.
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This is getting serious, and what's really interesting is that the US Treasury has stopped saying or doing anything about it. They tried intervening at 4.6% & it backfired, so it seems now they're just going to ignore it & hope it goes away.
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a common question I get asked is
in a stateless society, what happens to the seas and oceans?
who protects marine life?
the answer lies within the rothbardian criticicism of modern day ‘water socialism’
to solve the tragedy of the commons that plagues public waters
we need to implement full private property rights established through the lockean homesteading principle
ocean space is claimed not through paper decrees, but by mixing labor with the sea
high-traffic shipping lanes and coastlines become private commercial infrastructure maintained through user tolls
while uncultivated open ocean remains unowned (res nullius) until transformed
under this system, market forces will align human self-interest with ecological preservation
private aquatic owners will naturally defend their territory against pollution
carefully manage their stock levels
and invest in conservation to protect the long-term capital value of their property
therein lies the methodology to protect our beloved bodies of water
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Carlson is entirely consistent: he wants Palestinians in Palestine & westerners in their own counties. You want Palestinians in Palestine but want western countries open to everyone & you resort to substance-free Zioscolding & name-calling to try to scare people away from the entirely common sensical position that westerners deserve their own countries. Zioscolding doesn't work for Zionists anymore and it doesn't work for you either.
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President @nayibbukele discovers The Imprisoned-Criminal Fallacy, the corollary of The Broken-Window Fallacy, on which all of Keynesian nonsense rests.
The Keynesian scammers of the fiat cartel told him that eliminating crime would reduce GDP. Yet in reality, it raised GDP.
This is because crime is destructive rather than productive. Crime doesn't create economic goods; it just takes them from those who created them and gives them to those who commit crimes. Locking up criminals does not reduce production, but for Keynesian fiat scammers, it seems to reduce spending because criminals are no longer spending while locked in prison, and the Keynesian scammers only care about spending because they do not understand the concept of production.
In the real world, spending is not actually reduced, because the productive victims of crime now get to keep their money and spend it themselves. The criminal goes to jail, and the tomato seller he extorted gets to keep his money and spend it on things he likes. Not only is spending not reduced, but production actually increases when the criminals are locked up, as President Bukele points out. Locking up criminals shifts society's incentives away from crime and toward production. It becomes much harder to earn from crime, so you have to turn into a productive human and do something useful for others.
Equivalently, Keynesian scammers think broken windows are 'good for the economy' because they lead to increased spending: when a window is broken, the window owner needs to spend money getting it fixed, and that makes the window maker richer, causing him to spend more himself, with a multiplier effect that ripples prosperity throughout society. This is hilariously stupid because without breaking the window, the window owner would spend the window repair money on another thing, and he would have the window and the other thing! And an equivalent chain of spending would ensue. But the vandal who broke the window would have to spend their time doing something productive instead of being a Keynesian vandal.
It is no wonder that Keynesian economics leads to pro-criminal conclusions; the entire ideology was invented by a despicable child-raping criminal, and it has been used to justify the two greatest crimes in human history: fiat central banking and the many wars it finances.
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Nobody warns you. That's the sick part.
Nobody sits you down and says, hey, if you spend one weekend actually reading about money, you will lose the ability to enjoy anything for the rest of your life.
Your brother-in-law just mentions it at a barbecue. That's how it starts. Some guy holding a hot dog says "you should look into Bitcoin" and you laugh at him.
You laugh AT him.
You make the tulip joke. You feel superior for eleven more days.
Then it's 2:47 in the morning and you're on your fourth Saylor podcast and your wife thinks you're having an affair.
And in a way, you are.
You're cheating on your entire worldview.
ou came in to debunk it. That's the trap. Everyone comes in to debunk it. You wanted to find the flaw, dunk on your brother-in-law, and go back to your Vanguard target date fund like a respectable adult.
Instead you found out what happened in 1971 and now you can't make eye contact with your 401k.
Because here's what actually happens.
Bitcoin is cool and all, but you REALLY learn about the dollar. Bitcoin is fine, Bitcoin is twenty-one million and a schedule, you understand it in an afternoon. The dollar takes months, because every time you think you've hit the bottom of that thing there's a trapdoor.
The Fed just... prints it? And they gave how much to the banks in 2008? And the banks did WHAT with it?
And the guy who ran that got a MEDAL? You're up at 4am reading about the Cantillon effect like it's your kid's toxicology report.
Then comes the phase where you're insufferable.
Everyone goes through it, nobody admits it. You ruin Thanksgiving. You genuinely ruin it. Your aunt says turkey prices are crazy this year and you see your opening like a lion seeing a wounded gazelle.
Forty-five minutes later you're drawing the M2 money supply on a napkin and your mother is crying and your uncle is saying "it's not backed by anything" for the ninth time while his pension is backed by the promises of a government that's thirty-seven trillion in debt.
He's worried about YOUR risk profile.
He has unit bias so bad he'd rather own a whole Shiba Inu coin than a fraction of the hardest asset ever created, because his brain, poisoned by seventy years of fiat, thinks "whole thing cheap" beats "piece of thing good."
And the prices. God, the prices. You can't turn it off.
You're in the grocery store repricing eggs in sats. The eggs are getting cheaper in sats. Everything is getting cheaper in sats except your will to explain that to anyone.
You look at a house and you don't see a house, you see the number of Bitcoin it costs, and that number falling forever, and you realize the housing crisis is a measuring stick crisis, and you say this out loud at a dinner party, once, and now you're not invited to dinner parties.
Then the anger burns off and something worse arrives.
Clarity. You realize nobody is coming to fix this.
The people in charge KNOW. That's the part that breaks you. They're not stupid, they're incentivized.
The debt can't be paid, only inflated, and every serious person in a suit on television knows it, and their plan is to be dead before the invoice arrives.
So you buy. Coinbase, first time, hands shaking like you're doing something illegal, and the fee annoys you, and that annoyance is the last normal financial emotion you will ever feel.
You set up the DCA. You learn what a hardware wallet is. You write twelve words on steel like a doomsday prepper, because that's what you are now, except your bunker is math.
And then the loneliness. Nobody tells you about the loneliness. You've seen it. You can't unsee it.
And you're surrounded by people you love who are working forty years to fill a bathtub with the drain open, and when you point at the drain they get mad at YOU.
So you stop pointing. You just stack quietly, in the dark, waiting for the day one of them comes to you, at a barbecue, holding a hot dog, and says the words.
"Hey... you were into Bitcoin, right?"
And you smile. Because it's their turn in the barrel.
Welcome. Nobody warned me either.
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Listening to the greats, Hans-Hermann Hoppe and @NSKinsella, at the Rothbard at 100 conference in Porto.
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It's good to see the @nytimes acknowledge, however begrudgingly, that the most extreme climate projections of the past decade were wrong.
Next step: Acknowledge that we're in a climate renaissance thanks to affordable, reliable, and abundant fossil fuel energy!
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But who will build the roads... in France?
While French politicians debate infrastructure spending, private highways consistently outperform their state-managed counterparts in every metric that matters. The contrast hits you immediately: smooth private motorways carry you swiftly from Paris to Lyon, then dump you onto crumbling state asphalt where orange cones and half-finished repairs create endless bottlenecks.
Private highway operators like Vinci Autoroutes maintain 8,000 kilometers of French motorways through direct user fees. No political interference. No budget committees deciding whether pothole repair can wait another fiscal year. When your revenue depends entirely on drivers choosing your roads, maintenance becomes urgent business rather than a bureaucratic afterthought.
State highways rely on tax funding filtered through layers of political calculation. Politicians prefer ribbon cuttings for new projects over unglamorous repair work. Bureaucrats face no immediate consequences when roads deteriorate because drivers have no alternative. The incentive structure guarantees inferior outcomes.
Private operators face immediate market discipline. Poor road conditions mean drivers seek alternate routes, killing revenue instantly. Customer complaints reach decision makers within hours, not election cycles. Quality maintenance protects profit margins while political highways drain budgets regardless of performance.
The French model proves what free market economists have argued for decades: property rights and profit motives solve coordination problems that democratic processes cannot. When you own something, you maintain it. When everyone owns something, no one does. Private road quality reflects ownership and accountability. Public road deterioration reflects diffused responsibility and political time horizons.
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Time preference is the control knob of your destiny.
The hardness of your money is the control knob of your time preference.
Inflation destroys human civilization, as we see all around us, because it forces people to have a high time preference.
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Time Preference retweeted
Gary, good to see you finally talking seriously about asset inflation, the real enemy of the voters. This is what is creating the deep wealth divide and this is what is hollowing out the country.
Truth is, we both benefit from it. We both sit on the winning side of a system of asset inflation as we both hold assets (I’m assuming you do because you’re rich init).
But your argument collapses here:
1. Blame the billionaires
2. Tax wealth harder bro
You can’t just conclude that every crisis since 2008 is blame the billionaires, unless:
1. You have no idea what you are talking about
2. Or you do, but you’re playing politics for someone else’s agenda
3. Or you’re just a commie and the shoe fits
All those people paying for your Patreon and watching your YouTube can’t be expected to know these things work, so let’s honest, yeah?
The 2008 crisis was a debt-fuelled financial system on crack, backstopped by governments and central banks.
I’m deeply suspicious of the role asset managers play, but you have to acknowledge the role that politicians play. If we keep electing half wits we will keep having problems.
Central banks pushed interest rates to zero, because their goal is to maintain power, juicing the system helps this. Any economist knows that the economy has cycles and rather than allowing them to play out, they have paid off credit cards with new credit cards. Great for you and I, shit for most people.
Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon (thanks Milton), and the rich will always take advantage of this. But this is also the choice of the state.
What do you expect people to do with this cheap money, they’ll of course buy cheap assets. Everyone should.
That isn’t simply rich people being greedy, it’s the entirely predictable mathematical outcome of a monetary system designed around perpetual expansion of debt and currency.
You know this though. You do right? Please tell me you know this.
If the Green’s were ever to win power, they will face the same fiscal challenges - especially with all their spend promises, these will get more challenging if they think they can solve this through higher taxes and crushing business.
So guess what, they’ll have to inflate the money supply too. Argentina, Venezuela, how many examples do we need for how this plays out?
You correctly identify the symptom:
asset prices detached from ordinary living standards. Cool. High five.
Your weakness is moralising the cause. Emotion is good for clicks but we should strip away emotion and deal with facts.
Can we please agree that the problem is deeper than inequality.
The problem is a system where governments create the problem because their common goal is power, power means promising things they can’t afford - the resulting debasement extracts wealth upwards and the poor and middle class absorb the losses through purchasing power and wage stagnation.
Tax wealth harder sounds good when you have created the enemy, and even if you do (they’ll leave), even if they don’t leave (they will), if the underlying monetary architecture remains broken, all you’re doing is redistributing claims inside a structurally inflationary system. Hello socialism. Hello universal misery.
You cannot tax your way out of monetary dysfunction. No credible economist thinks this. And MMT is garbage.
We have so many problems that need fixing which can create long-term prosperity:
- Fix the energy crisis
- Fix the productivity crisis
- Fix the housing supply crisis
- Fix the regulation crisis
- Fix the demographic crisis
- Fix the thick politician crisis
You could confiscate half the wealth in Britain tomorrow and we would still not build enough homes, produce enough energy or generate enough productivity growth. I know these aren’t simple slogans, facts are hard.
We have a debt-saturated fiat system fused with an overgrown state that increasingly protects asset holders while hollowing out productive society.
Blaming the rich is cheap politics.
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Murray Rothbard demolished every economic justification for government intervention in his 1970 masterpiece "Power and Market," and the state's apologists still haven't recovered from the intellectual beatdown. Rothbard took apart price controls, antitrust laws, regulation, taxation, and public goods theory with surgical precision, showing how each intervention creates more problems than it solves while transferring wealth from producers to political parasites.
Take minimum wage laws. Politicians claim they help workers, but Rothbard showed how artificial wage floors create unemployment by pricing low-skilled workers out of jobs entirely. You force employers to pay $15/hour for $10/hour productivity, and guess what happens? The worker gets zero dollars instead of ten. Meanwhile, politicians get votes from unions whose higher-skilled members face less competition.
Rothbard exposed the public goods fallacy that still dominates economics textbooks today. Governments monopolize roads, schools, and defense to create dependency and justify their existence, not because markets fail to supply them. Private roads existed throughout American history. Private schools outperform government schools. Private security protects property better than police (who have no legal duty to protect you, according to the Supreme Court).
The most devastating insight: every government intervention creates a constituency that benefits from the intervention, making reversal politically difficult even when the policy fails spectacularly. Tariffs create protected industries that lobby for more protection. Welfare creates bureaucracies that demand bigger budgets. Regulations create compliance costs that large corporations can handle but small competitors cannot.
Government intervention expands state power while enriching connected elites at your expense.
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Some of us understand the labor theory of value just perfectly. It is statists in the form of Marxists like @BladeoftheS , who don't understand reality, reason, morality, individual rights, or basic economics.
Profit is not stolen labor. It is the return on judgment, risk, and capital that made the work possible in the first place. The man who identified the opportunity, raised the funds, organized the enterprise, and bore the loss if it failed didn't "do no work." He did the work that made all other work possible.
Marx's error is epistemological before it is economic. He treats physical labor as the source of value while ignoring the mind that directs it. A ditch dug in the wrong place has negative value. Labor without thought is not productivity. It is motion.
"Split it among the workers" assumes the enterprise creates itself, the market appears by magic, and risk carries no cost.
It doesn't. Someone paid for that. Someone gambled on it. That someone is owed his return.
Without that someone you wouldn't be able to post this gibberish.
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"In the long run we're all dead" only makes sense if you think children are worthless sex dolls.
Keynesianism is a way to figuratively screw children's future, invented by a man who literally screwed them for entertainment.
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I updated my article to reflect this insight and have credited to you. Thanks
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