Nessimmersion retweeted
The diamond industry runs a private court system, and it works better than anything a state has built in centuries.
The New York Diamond Dealers Club, founded in 1931 on West 47th Street, handles disputes through binding arbitration between members. No lawyers required. No docket delays stretching three years. Traders submit evidence, appointed arbitrators (themselves experienced dealers) render judgment, and the loser pays within days. The entire process costs a fraction of civil litigation.
This functions because the industry enforces its own judgments through reputation. Expulsion from the club destroys your business. Every dealer on 47th Street talks to every other dealer. You defect on an arbitration ruling, and you cannot buy or sell in New York, Antwerp, or Tel Aviv. The social cost of cheating exceeds any short-term gain a bad actor calculates.
What the state calls "the rule of law" relies on police, bailiffs, and coercive enforcement. The diamond market relies on something cheaper and more effective: the knowledge that your word is your bond, because your bond is your livelihood.
Contracts without government enforcement, dispute resolution without judges and restitution without prisons. The whole apparatus the political class insists you cannot live without runs quietly inside a midtown Manhattan building.
Free market thinkers have pointed at exactly this kind of spontaneous order for generations. Statists usually respond with an awkward silence followed by a change of subject.
Nessimmersion retweeted
The intellectual case for socialism ended in 1920.
Somehow, more than 100 years and 100 million lives later, these terrible ideas still persist in our society.
As a species, humans are not as smart as we sometimes make ourselves out to be.
Ludwig von Mises sat down in 1920 and published a paper that ended the intellectual case for socialism, even if the socialists took another seven decades to notice.
The argument was precise. Mises showed that without private ownership of the means of production, there are no real prices for capital goods. Without prices, you cannot calculate profit and loss. Without profit and loss, economic planners have no way of knowing whether they are creating value or destroying it. They are flying blind, spending real resources with no feedback mechanism telling them whether the factory, the railway, or the grain depot was worth building. Every allocation becomes a guess dressed up as a decree.
This, he called the Socialist Calculation Problem, and nobody answered it. Oskar Lange tried in 1936, proposing that socialist planners could simulate prices by trial and error. Mises read this and was unimpressed (charitably put). Lange assumed you could reproduce the function of market prices without the institution that generates them: private property, genuine exchange, real skin in the game. You cannot fake the signal and expect accurate information.
The Soviet Union spent seventy years proving Mises right. Chronic shortages, misallocated steel, surplus winter boots in Georgia in July, famine engineered by committees convinced they understood grain supply better than the price system. The USSR collapsed in 1991 under the weight of precisely the inefficiencies Mises predicted in Vienna in 1920.
You are watching this play out again today, every time a government sets energy prices, rent ceilings, or pharmaceutical price caps, and then expresses shock at the resulting shortages. The calculation problem did not expire with the Soviet Union. Bureaucrats who override price signals recreate the same blindness Mises identified. Mises told you exactly what would happen.
Nessimmersion retweeted
The UK government has, since April, spent no less than £61 billion - that’s £61,000,000,000 - on debt interest payments.
That’s equivalent to our entire annual defence budget - on just half a year’s worth of debt service costs, not paying back a penny of our national debt.
For £61bn you could build 40 state-of-the-art hospitals.
Or employ 100,000 nurses for a decade
Or fund free-at-the-point-of-use social care, across the entire UK, for three years.
Watch this short “When The Facts Change” video for more on the UK’s soaring debt interest bill - the biggest national scandal our mainstream media continues to ignore.
Nessimmersion retweeted
John Cowperthwaite did more for human prosperity than any development economist drawing a government salary ever managed, and he did it by refusing to do almost anything at all.
As Hong Kong's Financial Secretary from 1961 to 1971, Cowperthwaite ran one of the most radically free economies the modern world has ever seen. He kept taxes flat and low (the top income tax rate sat at 15%), ran consistent budget surpluses, abolished import tariffs, and blocked nearly every subsidy request that crossed his desk. When British civil servants demanded economic statistics to justify intervention, he refused to collect them. Not out of laziness. He genuinely believed that giving planners numbers gave them excuses.
The results? In 1960, Hong Kong's per capita income stood at roughly 28% of Britain's. By 1997, Hong Kong had surpassed Britain. That trajectory happened without natural resources, without foreign aid, and without a single five-year plan drafted by well-intentioned economists from Oxford. Hong Kong had a harbor, people willing to work, and a bureaucrat with enough intellectual discipline to keep the state out of their way.
Capital flows toward secure property rights and reliable rules, and flees the moment politicians start allocating it. Every industry Beijing picked as a "priority sector" during those same decades burned through subsidies and produced junk. Hong Kong's industries emerged organically, serving real demand, building real wealth.
You benefit from this history whether you know it or not, because Hong Kong's success gave the world a controlled experiment that still embarrasses every advocate of managed development. The control group thrived. The planned economies didn't.
Cowperthwaite retired to St Andrews, received a knighthood, and gave almost no interviews. That restraint was entirely in character.
Nessimmersion retweeted
75 BREXIT BENEFITS
You've all been lied to. Lied through omission, on all the great things the UK has achieved since and because of Brexit.
Its time to fix that. My book has 75 tangible and demonstrable benefits of leaving, most of which you will not know anything about at all.
Nessimmersion retweeted
🚨 Auditors find £73m of “irregular” payments at DEFRA.
That comes directly from the National Audit Office.
That is more than £200,000 of taxpayers’ money every single day.
And the problem is getting worse:
❌ Two years ago: £30.6m
❌ Last year: £58.1m
❌ Now: almost £74m
It has more than doubled in just two years totalling £160m!
Meanwhile, the Government is preparing to put our taxes up again at the next Budget because apparently there still isn’t enough money.
We are paying more tax than ever, and the auditors keep raising concerns about the accounts.
It’s time we all start asking:
Where is our money actually going?
Nessimmersion retweeted
Parkinson’s Law – Why the State Bureaucracy Grows When the Work Shrinks
In 1955, a British naval historian wrote a joke for The Economist. Seventy years later, it remains one of the most accurate descriptions of the modern state ever written. Everyone knows the slogan: work expands to fill the time available. Almost no one knows the mechanism underneath it. That mechanism explains Europe.
1. The evidence. Between 1914 and 1928, the Royal Navy lost two thirds of its largest warships. Over the same years the Admiralty – the office that ran the ships – grew by three quarters. There were fewer ships and more men behind desks. Then there was the Colonial Office, which kept growing while the colonies left one by one. It was hiring while the empire was shrinking.
2. The first mechanism. An official who feels overworked has three choices. He can resign, he can share the work with a colleague, or he can ask for two subordinates. He never chooses the colleague, because a colleague is a rival. Two subordinates are a rank. So one tired man becomes three. Then each of the two subordinates feels tired.
3. The second mechanism. Seven people now do what one did, and they keep each other busy with drafts, approvals, and comments on the approvals. Everyone works hard, and nothing is produced. You have been in this meeting. You have been copied on this email. You have watched three people sign the form that one person filled in.
4. The law of triviality. Parkinson noticed that a committee will approve a nuclear reactor in minutes, because nobody understands it. The same committee will debate the bicycle shed for an hour, because everybody does. Bureaucracy does not avoid the important question by accident. It avoids it by design – the small question carries no risk, and on the big one, someone’s name goes on the decision.
5. The ratchet. A business that fails closes. A department that fails gets a bigger budget, because the problem is now bigger. Failure is the bureaucracy’s best argument for itself. This is why the state never shrinks on its own: every problem it does not solve becomes a new office for solving it.
6. The civilizational lesson. Burnham described the managers taking over. Parkinson showed how they breed. Put the two together and you get Brussels. You get France, where the state spends more than half of everything the country produces and still cannot fix a hospital. This is not because the people inside are wicked. It is because the machine works exactly as Parkinson said it would.
7. The vindication. Parkinson was dismissed as a humorist. Then Milei cut Argentina’s ministries in half – and the country did not collapse. It barely noticed, except on the bill. The lesson is simple: you cannot reform a bureaucracy by asking it what to cut. It will always propose to cut the ships – and hire someone to manage the cut.
Nessimmersion retweeted
See this from me, among much else capx.co/knee-jerk-nationalis…
Nessimmersion retweeted
The greatest political bait and switch of the last decade was the ability of the left to describe policy aimed at approaching a balanced budget as ‘austerity’.
So much so that Theresa May announced the ‘end of austerity’ in 2017 to appease Jeremy Corbyn. Buying in to Labour’s rhetoric hook line and sinker.
Consequently, Britain abandoned fiscal discipline, first slowly and then very quickly. Now we’ve seen the consequences of that in terms of interest rates, gilt yields, inflation, and the value of the currency.
Nessimmersion retweeted
The World Economic Forum.
Every January, roughly 2,800 executives, finance ministers, and central bankers fly private jets into Davos, Switzerland, to discuss how you should use less fossil fuel, practice sustainability, and pursue "equitable growth".
Klaus Schwab founded the Forum in 1971, and for 55 years it has perfected a singular trick: dressing up cartelization as collaboration. When BlackRock's Larry Fink sits across from Christine Lagarde and three heads of state, the outcome is never deregulation. It is always managed markets, stakeholder capitalism, and what the Forum itself calls "public-private partnership," which is the polite term for incumbent firms writing the rules their competitors must follow.
The 2030 Agenda the Forum relentlessly pushes centralizes energy allocation, monetary policy, and food production under supranational bodies that nobody elected and nobody can remove. Prices no longer signal actual scarcity; they rather reflect political priorities. Farmers in the Netherlands lost land to nitrogen regulations lobbied into existence by parties with no skin in Dutch agriculture. You absorbed that cost through food prices, quietly, with no vote cast.
The Forum redistributes access to governments, and access to governments is worth more than genuine productivity when regulations make genuine productivity nearly illegal. Regulatory capture operating at a global scale.
Hayek identified the fatal conceit in 1988: the belief that a committee of sufficiently credentialed people can allocate resources better than dispersed price signals. Davos proves him right annually, producing white papers while the people funding those flights, through taxes and inflation, get poorer.
Nessimmersion retweeted
I put this together on the case against "sewage dumping has increased". It's just the basics from my threads on this and some other sources and is for those that won't read through the thread.
Nessimmersion retweeted
China beats us by having less regulation. Imagine that, the Lanyards are even worse than a sodding Communist Party. adamsmith.org/blog/the-costs…
Nessimmersion retweeted
News from the Joined Up Government Front. New law bans you from renting out a house for 12 months. New law says the council can steal your house if it's empty for 6 months. Well done, eh? adamsmith.org/blog/this-all-…
Nessimmersion retweeted
People will argue (in English) on a platform invented by an Englishman (the Web - Tim Berners-Lee) using technology that traces its roots to the Industrial Revolution (which began in England) that the English are nothing more than a mongrel race with nothing of which to be proud.
Nessimmersion retweeted
The freest economy in American history produced the greatest explosion of living standards the world had ever witnessed, and the people who benefited most were the poor.
Between 1870 and 1900, real GDP per capita roughly doubled. Steel output went from 77,000 tons in 1870 to over 11 million tons by 1900. Kerosene dropped so cheap that even working-class families could light their homes at night. Carnegie drove down steel prices while paying wages that rose faster than inflation. The market did that. No regulator in Washington achieved this.
Federal spending in 1870 sat at roughly 3.7% of GDP. Congress had no income tax until 1913. The regulatory state was microscopic. Capital formation exploded precisely because entrepreneurs kept what they built.
But there is a villian here: the progressive revision of this history. Academics frame the Gilded Age as a catastrophe of exploitation, demanding the state as savior. The numbers destroy that story. Real wages for unskilled labor rose 50% between 1860 and 1890. Infant mortality fell. Life expectancy climbed.
What about technology? Could some important things have been invented during that time? Only AC power, the lightbulb, the telephone, the camera, the automobile, the airplane... nothing really important.
Property rights worked. Contract enforcement worked. Sound money, anchored to gold, kept capital allocation honest and prevented governments from inflating savings into dust.
The progressives arrived after 1900 and systematically dismantled each pillar: the income tax in 1913, the Federal Reserve in 1913, regulatory agencies multiplying through the 1920s. Growth slowed. Then the Fed contracted the money supply and Congress passed Smoot-Hawley, and you got 1929. The state caused that collapse and later blamed it on the free market.
Nessimmersion retweeted
The time to decentralize is upon us!
Decentralization is the only political structure that actually disciplines government, and Switzerland's canton system proves it with 700 years of evidence.
Twenty-six cantons compete for residents and businesses. Appenzell Innerrhoden runs differently from Zurich, which runs differently from Geneva. When Basel raises taxes past the tolerance of its engineers and entrepreneurs, those people move to Zug, which has kept its corporate tax rate under 12%. Basel loses the revenue. The lesson writes itself.
Centralization is the villain. Every time a federal authority absorbs a decision that cantons once made, you lose the price signal. You lose the experiment. You lose the exit option. Brussels crushes this mechanism across the EU, which is why French farmers and German industrialists both scream at the same unresponsive bureaucracy with nowhere to go.
Competition between governments constrains Leviathan the way competition between businesses constrains monopoly pricing. Strip away that competition and governments do exactly what monopolists always do: extract maximum value from captive subjects while delivering minimum service.
The canton system works because it keeps power close to the people funding it and gives those people somewhere else to go.
Take power and responsibility out of the hands of bureaucrats thousands of kilometers away. Localize it to within manageable sections, and watch your area flourish.
