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If you’re an intellectual and believe certain things about the use of military force in foreign policy and about unregulated markets in economics, and both of them lead to big disasters, you ought to rethink some of those assumptions By @fukuyamafrancis https://t.co/f6FiqJMALV #ForeignPolicy #MilitaryForce #Economics #Thetweetdoesnotmentionanyspecificcountries #sotherearenocountrycodestoreturn.

“Socialism Was Good in Theory” That sentence assumes the theory was never seriously challenged. It was. Long before the Soviet Union existed, before Lenin seized power, and before socialism had been tested on a national scale, major thinkers were already attacking its foundations—from very different directions. Five of them stand out. Tocqueville: Equality Can Become Servitude In 1848, Alexis de Tocqueville drew a sharp distinction between democracy and socialism. Both spoke about equality. But Tocqueville believed they pursued it in fundamentally different ways. Democracy, in his view, sought equality while preserving individual freedom. Socialism risked achieving equality by expanding the power of the state over the individual. His warning was essentially this: equality is not automatically liberty. A society can pursue equality so aggressively that it begins sacrificing the independence that makes political freedom meaningful. Bastiat: Follow Where Redistribution Leads Two years later, Frédéric Bastiat attacked socialism from a different direction. His question was deceptively simple: What happens when the state acquires the authority to take from some people and give to others in the name of justice? Bastiat called this “legal plunder.” His concern was not merely that redistribution might be expensive. It was that once government becomes the instrument through which competing groups obtain benefits from one another, politics can turn into a permanent struggle over who controls the machinery of redistribution. The problem, therefore, wasn’t simply how much the state redistributed. It was the principle that made redistribution legitimate in the first place. (bastiat.org⁠) Nietzsche: Equality Can Become Resentment Nietzsche approached socialism neither as an economist nor as a constitutional theorist. He attacked its psychology. He saw modern egalitarian movements as part of a much older moral impulse: resentment toward exceptional individuals and suspicion of strength, ambition and hierarchy. For Nietzsche, the danger was not simply that everyone might become economically equal. It was that a culture could begin treating excellence itself as something morally suspect. The goal would cease to be lifting people upward. It would become bringing the exceptional downward. Böhm-Bawerk: Challenge the Economics Then came Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. In 1896, he turned his attention specifically toward Marx’s economic system. His criticism was not primarily moral or political. It was technical. Böhm-Bawerk argued that Marx’s theory of value did not adequately explain how the labor values developed in Capital could be reconciled with the actual prices Marx subsequently needed to explain. In other words, he attacked socialism where it claimed to possess a scientific economic foundation. The argument became one of the central criticisms of Marxian economics and helped launch a debate that would continue for generations. Mises: The Calculation Problem Then, in 1920, Ludwig von Mises attacked an even more fundamental question: Even if socialism is morally desirable, how would a socialist economy actually know what to produce? A functioning economy has millions of competing uses for scarce resources. Build a bridge or a hospital? Use steel here or there? Produce more machinery or more consumer goods? Under private ownership and markets, prices for capital goods provide information about relative scarcity and opportunity costs. Mises argued that abolishing private ownership of the means of production also removes the genuine market prices necessary for rational economic calculation. The problem wasn’t simply that socialist planners might make bad decisions. It was that the system deprived them of the very economic signals required to systematically compare those decisions. (Mises Institute⁠) And that was the sequence. Tocqueville challenged the political premise. Bastiat challenged the moral and legal mechanism of redistribution. Nietzsche challenged the psychology behind egalitarianism. Böhm-Bawerk challenged Marx’s economic theory. Mises challenged the possibility of rational central economic calculation. Five different thinkers. Five different objections. And all of them came before the Soviet Union had demonstrated what large-scale socialist government would actually look like. So “socialism was good in theory, but bad in practice” is not an argument. It is a historical claim that requires you to explain why these theoretical objections were wrong. The interesting question isn’t whether socialism had critics. It did. The interesting question is whether socialism ever adequately answered them” - ChatGPT

Open Source code and the stewardship around it have different economics. That distinction helps show what a project might charge for, what it must budget for, and how it could fund stewardship without making the code less open. https://t.co/0yBIQZRu0H #OpenSource #Stewardship #Economics #Thetweetdoesnotmentionanyspecificcountries #sotherearenocountrycodestoreturn.

The Evolution of Modern Leftism Left-wing and woke ideology often presents itself through noble ideas: compassion, justice, equality, and progress. But progress toward what? That question is rarely asked. To understand modern leftism, we must look back nearly 200 years. Ideas evolve like viruses: when society develops resistance to one form, academics modify it until it becomes more contagious, destructive, and difficult to recognize. Hegel proposed the dialectic: opposing ideas—a thesis and antithesis—collide to produce a synthesis. Marx applied this framework to economics through dialectical materialism. He viewed history as a struggle between the “haves” and “have-nots” and predicted that workers would overthrow capitalism and create a communist utopia. When Marx’s vision failed, Lenin reworked it. He argued that workers needed to be led by an elite revolutionary class. This produced the idea of perpetual revolution: after one oppressor is defeated, the next ruling class becomes the new enemy. The struggle never ends. The Frankfurt School later adapted Marxism for the West. It argued that capitalism’s material success had made workers less receptive to revolution, so the focus shifted to culture, education, media, religion, and the arts. The goal became a gradual “long march through the institutions.” Postmodernists expanded the theory further, arguing that power exists everywhere—not only between rich and poor, but also between men and women, racial groups, heterosexual and homosexual people, and colonizers and the colonized. The personal became political. Intersectionality then presented oppression as a matrix in which every identity adds another layer of victimhood and moral authority. At one extreme is the idealized figure of a poor, disabled, rural, transgender lesbian woman from a developing country. At the other is the supposed ultimate oppressor: a wealthy, educated, able-bodied, straight, white, cisgender, Christian, Western man living in a city. Modern progressivism, in this view, is essentially neo-Marxism in drag.

Today, at the behest of President Donald Trump, the United States Department of the Treasury is launching Operation Economic Outcast, an unprecedented campaign aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies, announced Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, stating that the goal is (translated)

OPERATION ECONOMIC OUTCAST — MAKE IRAN’S OIL EXPORTS ZERO I strongly welcome the United States Treasury’s launch of Operation Economic Outcast. Its objective is right: sever every economic lifeline sustaining Tehran’s tyrannical regime. Iranian oil deliveries to China have https://t.co/bkesVv13fD #EconomicSanctions #Iran #OilExports #IR #US #CN

Bessent just published an article in the FT. It reads like an economic suicide note. I think the US is legit about to blow its brains out by imposing secondary sanctions on China as the USD global system unwinds. 🇺🇸🤪🔫 https://t.co/iPG1KpcYrw #Economics #Sanctions #USChinaRelations #US #CN

What if Charles Dickens could also be read as an economist? In Hard Times, wages, employer power, education, debt, inequality and collective action are not abstract concepts — they shape the lives of the characters. Literature can reveal how economic systems feel from the inside, and how microeconomic forces influence everyday choices, opportunities and power. #CharlesDickens #HardTimes #Victorianliterature #Microeconomics #books #reading #ReaderPsychology #CriticalThinking #EconomicsAndLiterature #ReadingMotivation #English #0004= #ArthurWren

What if Charles Dickens could also be read as an economist? In Hard Times, wages, employer power, education, debt, inequality and collective action are not abstract concepts — they shape the lives of the characters. Literature can reveal how economic systems feel from the inside. #ReaderPsychology #CriticalThinking #EconomicsAndLiterature #CloseReading #English #CharlesDickens #HardTimes #Microeconomics #literatureandeconomics #Victorianliterature #0003= #ArthurWren

The billionaire class is organised. It’s time we did too — before it’s too late. 📚 Order ANTI-FASCIST ECONOMICS today. Out in October: https://t.co/18xcwqkNWD #AntiFascistEconomics #BillionaireClass #Organize #Nospecificcountrycodesarementionedinthetweet.

The people have spoken. They want price controls. This is a vote of no confidence against market fundamentalism. For a deep dive into the politics of prices stay tuned for Anti-fascist Economics out 10/20. https://t.co/HNfBF8xzOo #PriceControls #MarketFundamentalism #AntiFascistEconomics #Nocountrycodesfound.

In California, it’s the people versus the billionaires: Silicon Valley is throwing everything it’s got at fighting a wealth tax. It shows why oligarchy is fundamentally incompatible with democracy as I argue in Anti-fascist Economics. Just look at who’s lining up to oppose #WealthTax #Oligarchy #Democracy #US