i came to the conclusion that this story is so awful that we have no way to punish it. to commit to an appropriate measure of justice is beyond our willingness to do it.

The fixed pie fallacy is false. Wealth isn’t static, it’s CREATED through innovation and voluntary trade. Musk’s companies generate NEW value people choose to buy (better cars, cheaper launches, global internet). This expands total output, jobs, and options instead of taking from a fixed pool. Wealth creation is positive-sum. The pie grows. You can explain it to leftists but you can’t make them understand it, especially when their incentive is not to.

“one-time redistributions are two orders of magnitude smaller in helping the poor than the 2,900 percent Enrichment from greater productivity since 1800.” deirdremccloskey.org/docs/pd…

Congratulations @ElonMusk. Thanks to SpaceX's IPO, he's the first Trillionaire. He didn't TAKE money from anyone. He CREATED wealth. He launched satellites that connect even the poorest, most remote parts of the world. Our world needs more MAKERS like Musk; fewer TAKERS like:

If you want to understand the modern left, you need to understand three men. One redefined freedom. One redefined history. One redefined power. Together, they created the intellectual foundations of much of modern progressive politics. Jean-Jacques Rousseau laid the foundation in the 18th century. He argued that man is born good and free but is corrupted by society – especially by private property. This idea that civilization itself is the source of inequality and oppression became the emotional core of leftist thought. Rousseau replaced the individual with the “general will” and portrayed traditional institutions as chains that must be broken. Karl Marx took Rousseau’s romantic critique and turned it into a supposedly scientific system. He argued that private property and class relations were not just morally wrong but historically doomed. Marx shifted the focus from abstract human nature to the economic base, claiming that history moved through class struggle toward a final, inevitable revolution. His ideas justified the seizure of power and the total reconstruction of society in the name of progress. By the 20th century, however, it was clear that the Western working class was not going to revolt. Antonio Gramsci provided the next crucial development. He argued that capitalism maintained power not primarily through economics, but through cultural hegemony – the dominance of “bourgeois ideas” in education, media, religion and civil society. Gramsci concluded that revolutionaries must first capture the institutions of culture before they could seize political and economic power. This strategic shift moved the left’s focus from factory workers to universities, schools, media and the family. Together, these three thinkers created the intellectual architecture of modern leftism: Rousseau supplied the moral grievance against civilization, Marx supplied the revolutionary method and historical justification, and Gramsci supplied the long-term cultural strategy. The result is a movement that no longer primarily fights over wages and factories, but over language, education, identity, and the moral legitimacy of Western society itself.

The famous screen grab where Hayek flips off social justice warriors as he explains to them why their crazy religion makes no sense at all.

Why does The Economist hate wealth taxes?

East Germany turned human misery into foreign exchange at $96,000 per head. Socialism requires capitalism to survive. Between 1963 and 1989, the German Democratic Republic sold 33,755 political prisoners to West Germany for hard currency. The going rate started at 40,000 Deutsche Marks per prisoner in the early years and climbed to 95,847 marks by the end. You can find the invoices in the Stasi archives today. Line items included "one dissident journalist" and "three church activists." The East German state needed every Deutschmark it could get because its command economy couldn't produce goods anyone wanted to buy. A government so desperate for foreign currency created a production line of human trafficking with bureaucratic precision. The Stasi arrested dissidents, processed the paperwork, and shipped them west like any other export commodity. Church groups and West German officials negotiated bulk discounts. The whole operation generated $3.4 billion over three decades. A socialist paradise that claimed to represent the workers had to sell its own citizens to the capitalist enemy to keep the lights on. East Germany couldn't manufacture anything that the world market valued except the bodies of people trying to escape socialism. Every transaction proved that their entire economic system was a fraud that survived only by parasitically extracting value from the very capitalism it claimed to oppose. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, but you still hear academics praise central planning and command economies today. They never mention that East Germany's most successful export program involved selling human beings by the pound to fund their workers' paradise.

There is a fundamentally different relationship to wealth (and those who own it) between those who make it, those who take it, and those who have it handed to them.

Leaving aside the aspiring senator’s positively Bolshevik-Jacobin sentiments, we actually want more trillionaires who will create more wealth, opportunities, and jobs for millions of people than essentially any political leader. @elonmusk

The Austrian business cycle starts with central banks artificially lowering interest rates below their natural market level. This floods the economy with cheap credit, distorting the crucial price signals that coordinate production across time. Entrepreneurs suddenly see long-term projects as profitable when they're actually maladaptive. The market didn't generate these savings, the printing press did. You get the boom. Construction companies launch massive developments, tech startups burn through venture capital, and everyone feels wealthy (for a while). The problem? Real resources haven't increased. The central bank created money, not actual capital goods or skilled workers or raw materials. The bust arrives when reality reasserts itself. Interest rates rise, credit tightens, and those seemingly profitable ventures reveal themselves as wealth destroyers. The 2008 housing bubble followed this script perfectly. Greenspan held rates at 1% for years, developers built houses nobody could actually afford, then Bernanke had to choose between hyperinflation or letting the malinvestments liquidate. We know which path he chose... and here we are again.

Well, here's some math. Starlink is a profitable business with about $11 billion of sales and $3 billion of free cash flow. It might be worth $75 billion at a frisky multiple of 25X free cash flow. The balance----the space launch business and the AI/data centers in space fantasy----has $7 billion of sales and NEGATIVE -$17 billion of free cash flow. So why is it worth anything, unless you are pricing a dream peddled by sell-side hucksters?! In short, after trading up to $2 trillion based on $75 billion of tangible Starlink value, where's the remaining $1.925 trillion of it? This isn't just the classical mania of the crowds. This is sui generis--- mass insanity in a casino that has been giving a lobotomy by three decades of money-printing madness at the Fed and its fellow-traveling central banks around the planet.

Why do democrats hate success ? Musk puts rockets into space, WiFi into homes and EV’s on the road. In 2021 alone Musk paid $11,000,000,000 (Billion) in taxes. And he paid a tax rate of 40.4% ($6.9 billion) on a $16.9 billion Tesla stock sale. The problem isn’t how much Musk earns. The problem is how much government spends!! Socialists LIE! It’s what socialists do to create division to consolidate power. 🚫 Socialism

Ronald Coase's "Adam Smith's View of Man" (1976) offers an important corrective to reductive readings of Smith's ideas. He clarifies that Smith never reduced human motivation to self-interest alone. Sympathy for others and our relationship with the impartial spectator both influence our behavior. However, these elements reinforce rather than contradict the case for markets. As Coase puts it: "The market is not simply an ingenious mechanism, fueled by self-interest, for securing the co-operation of individuals in the production of goods and services. In most circumstances it is the only way in which this could be done. [...] if one is willing to accept Smith’s view of man as containing, if not the whole truth, at least a large part of it, realisation that his thought has a much broader foundation than is commonly assumed makes his argument for economic freedom more powerful and his conclusions more persuasive." To read more about "Adam Smith's view of Man," click the link below. econjwatch.org/articles/adam…

Property rights aren't some abstract legal concept. They're the operating system for human cooperation. When you can't secure the fruits of your labor, you stop producing beyond survival. Why build a better mousetrap when the village chief's nephew can just take it? Look at North Korea versus South Korea. Same people, same culture, different property regimes. The South protects what you create and earn. The North... doesn't. Result: $31,000 per capita GDP versus $1,300. That's not a rounding error. Every prosperous society in history built itself on this foundation. The Romans codified property law and conquered the Mediterranean (then abandoned it and collapsed). England secured property rights in 1688 and launched the Industrial Revolution. China started protecting private property in 1978 and lifted 800 million people out of poverty. The pattern never breaks because the incentives never change.

Progressives say the income gap between rich and poor is one of America's biggest problems. But it's not true, says economist Don Boudreaux: “Look at the data ... that gap is due to a statistical illusion." More on that and other economic myths here:

If Ayn Rand had invented @PikettyWIL, critics would have said she created an unbelievably ridiculous supervillain, writes @veroderugy at @reason. But his idiotic plan for global economic controls isn't fiction, alas... reason.com/2026/06/11/the-ec…

“I recommend that anyone interested in a detailed account of the New Deal and recovery purchase a copy of False Dawn. You will not be disappointed.” A nice recent review: thedailyeconomy.org/article/…