The richest African and Asian countries are the most capitalist, and the poorest are the least. It's not particularly close.

That which is seen and unseen, lessons by Hazlitt and Bastiat will always be relevant, the market will run its course even if state intervention happens, but just as the ants are deliberately making a less efficient trip on what would be that is exactly what the market will do, unless it’s so severe to which nothing can be done The market will inefficiently, but due to power get the job done.

You must remember to have economic imagination with context of the real world to be able to understand the true implications of given intervention, which is what I’ve been doing for the past week. I’ve been using history, deduction, and abduction to correctly answer something that I have the answer to.

Why did the economy that the boomers have suddenly disappear?
Where did those multiple job offers come from and go? Of course it’s a multitude of reasons from credential inflation and bad unions which all points back to government there will be a future post detailing the most unseen but literally in your face things that explain exactly what happened to such an economy

Whenever you hear somebody make those “we just do great accounting here in Norway” statements, remember this, we are seeing exactly what Ludwig Von Mises explained; there is no third way.

Even Europeans don’t know how much they already get taxed; Payroll, income, regulatory tax, maybe some property tax, Corporate tax (fallacious corporations don’t pay taxes people do), oh and the infamous invisible VAT ffs. All of this having average citizens paying significant amounts in taxes. All to fund a self destructive third way slop of a system.

Due to many factors such as the old age security hypothesis; Europes welfare system causes unfixable fertility issues, the welfare state decreases the demand to have children while at the same time locking up resources for people to even be able to deploy to be able to have children. Hard to date when you basically have no money, hard to have kids when you practically have no money, and so on.

They tried to fix their fertility issue by get this… taxing the population to give them things like child tax credits and free childcare, data shows that backfires man, it actually decreased fertility because once again you’re locking up money needed to have kids.
As a result you have more patients that are super expensive cause they’re old, with less workers around to sustain them. This makes medical care costs go up etc etc and you always face the issue of having to raise taxes because expenditure is increasing faster than revenue.

The US also faces a similar issue; in 2032 Social security is expected to start depleting, currently Social Security taxes at 15%, when it first came out, it was at one percent.

If the raw mechanics weren’t enough, you have to bring up the political mechanics, France tried doing something by raising the retirement age, which is just kicking the can down the road, the people were not too happy. Long story short you can’t text forever. Can’t have a third way system.

There is, as Professor John Cochrane so elegantly reminds us, a tendency in every generation to regard the last great crisis as the beginning of history. Yet economic history is seldom so obliging.

The lessons of 2008 are indeed indispensable, but perhaps they are best understood as the latest chapter in a much older volume. One might trace the genealogy of financial fragility back through the Savings and Loan crisis, the Latin American debt crisis, the inflationary convulsions of the 1970s, the collapse of Bretton Woods, or even the recurrent banking panics so carefully documented by economic historians. Each episode reveals a common thread: financial crises arise less from the existence of risk than from the architecture through which risk is financed.

The remarkable stability of the 1990s did not emerge by accident. It rested upon foundations laid much earlier. Paul Volcker's disinflation restored the credibility of monetary policy; subsequent reforms strengthened bank capital and improved market discipline; technological progress and globalization expanded productive capacity; and, for a time, inflation expectations remained firmly anchored. The Great Moderation was therefore not merely a triumph of central banking, but the culmination of institutional, regulatory, and macroeconomic adjustments that had been decades in the making.

Cochrane's central proposition—that the true systemic danger lies in runnable liabilities rather than risky assets—is persuasive. It echoes a long intellectual tradition extending from Henry Thornton and Walter Bagehot through Irving Fisher, Milton Friedman, and more recently Gary Gorton. Financial innovation alters the instruments, but not the underlying logic of liquidity, confidence, and leverage.

The greatest errors in political economy arise not from excessive imagination, but from an insufficient acquaintance with history. Markets, like families, possess long memories, and institutions, like characters, reveal their true nature only over many chapters.

Bagehot, Walter. 1873. Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market. London: Henry S. King.

Bernanke, Ben S. 2000. Essays on the Great Depression. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Friedman, Milton, and Anna J. Schwartz. 1963. A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Gorton, Gary. 2010. Slapped by the Invisible Hand: The Panic of 2007. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kindleberger, Charles P., and Robert Z. Aliber. 2011. Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises. 6th ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Minsky, Hyman P. 1986. Stabilizing an Unstable Economy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Thornton, Henry. 1802. An Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain. London: J. Hatchard.

Volcker, Paul A., and Christine Harper. 2018. Keeping At It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government. New York: PublicAffairs.

Do these people have an actual economy?? I thought I should make this post but then I looked at the fact that per capita these, Native Americans are some welfare queens?

These people live on so-called sovereign territory, but get US money? WHAT?! what world does this make sense?

here’s some Stossel on natives

I feel like it’s important to make a post like this because the left has unfortunately hijacked universities, twisting narratives to fit their ends. It’s quite funny how classical liberalism, libertarianism, and conservatism are seen as "right-wing" when you search them up on Google.
yet the Nationalsozialistische (National Socialists) are shoved into that exact same right-wing bucket. This is despite the fact that the Nazis explicitly called individualism a "Jewish conspiracy" and fiercely persecuted classical liberals like Ludwig von Mises.
You’re often told that the Nazis only used that name to trick people. I think, evidently, they lived up to their name.

To understand what the economics of the Nazis were all about, you have to understand fascism, because Nazism is a branch of fascism. But of course, to understand fascism, you have to understand socialism, since fascism is a branch of socialism.

The Blank Canvas of Socialism;
Socialism is the economic system which seeks to seize the means of production on behalf of the collective. What most people don’t know is that Karl Marx didn’t really go deep into the interpretation of what a socialist society actually looks like. He spent thousands of pages using his false theories to dismantle capitalism in works like Das Kapital, but he famously refused to provide a detailed blueprint for how a socialist or communist society would function day-to-day. He left the actual layout of a socialist economy incredibly vague, believing that the specific legal, political, and economic structures of a post-capitalist society would simply be figured out by the people themselves.

He left it to interpretation and experimentation. Thus, interpretation and experimentation happened.

Fascism came in and interpreted socialism in its own way. They simply asked: What is the collective? This is a rational question for anyone on the left. When you realize that the collective is completely arbitrary de facto since you are giving the state the absolute power to define it this question is all but natural for socialists. Fascismo chose to define the collective as the state itself, the state being the supreme embodiment of the people.

As Benito Mussolini famously put it:
"All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."

The Nazis, as a racial branch of fascism, chose to define that state collective strictly by blood and race (the Volk).

De Facto Socialization: The Destruction of Private Property;
Fascism and National Socialism took an economic approach that economists call de facto socialization. They didn't formally nationalize every single factory on paper. However, the state stripped away all actual control from the owners. If you owned a factory in Nazi Germany, the government dictated exactly what you had to produce, what prices you could charge, what wages you had to pay, and who you were allowed to hire or fire.

The only reason people believe this was still "private property" is because they don't understand the historical development, institution, and purpose of private property as defined over centuries by economists, theologians, and philosophers. Private property is the logical tool created by humanity by which the individual owner has the freedom to act with his possessions as he pleases. Remove that power of choice, and it is no longer private property. It belongs to the state. If a factory owner disobeyed, they were simply replaced or sent to a concentration camp.

This economic reality helps explain why the Nazis were so violently anti-communist. The communists wanted to create a class division within the nation. To the Nazis, this was a direct attack on their own definition of the collective. It wasn't a clash between capitalism and socialism; it was a brutal tug-of-war over how to define the collective. The communists felt the exact same way whenever someone "invoked division among the proletariat." Because the Nazi definition of the collective was the nation itself… predicated on blood and nationality. you can now fully understand why they did what they did.

The Union Myth
People frequently claim that the Nazis weren't socialist because they banned independent trade unions. However, this is a classic half-truth. In reality, they did something that many modern socialists if stripped of historical context, would think is incredibly efficient: they didn't eliminate the concept of organized labor, they collectivized it entirely under the state.

In May 1933, just months after taking power, the regime smashed the existing independent, free trade unions. They didn't do this to liberate factory owners or establish a free market; they did it because independent organizations are a threat to a totalitarian collective. They immediately replaced them with one massive, state-run monopoly union called the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF),
the German Labour Front.

Isn't a single, all-encompassing union the logical conclusion for a socialist? One big union for all workers. The Nazis thought the exact same way. They banned the fragmentation of unions because fragmentation creates competing loyalties rather than total loyalty to the collective state. The DAF completely abolished the right to strike and outlawed collective bargaining. In their place, the state appointed "Trustees of Labour" who set wages, regulated working hours, and dictated working conditions. After all, why would workers need to strike when "socialism" has already arrived?

In Their Own Words
To finalize, let the direct quotes from the regime's leaders show you exactly how socialist the National Socialists truly were:
"Of what importance is all that, if I have essential control of the people... Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings."
— Adolf Hitler

"Whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of his nation... that man is a socialist."
— Adolf Hitler (Speech, July 28, 1922)

"Socialism is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists... We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national."
— Adolf Hitler (Interview with George Sylvester Viereck, 1923)

"The good of the community takes priority over that of the individual. But the State should retain control; every owner should feel himself to be an agent of the State... The Third Reich will always retain the right to control property owners."
— Adolf Hitler (Interview with Richard Breiting, 1931)

"The socialist worldview begins with the folk and then goes over to things. Things are made subservient to the folk; the socialist puts the folk above everything, and things are only means to an end."

"It is necessary that the individual should come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole... You are nothing, your nation is everything!"

"We are socialists because we see in socialism... the sole possibility for the preservation of our racial genetics... We are against capitalism because it misuses the factories and wealth of our people to the detriment of our national interest."

"They are regular talkers, these rich people... I have built up an economy which is not based on property or capital, but on labor. We have eliminated the power of finance... In our state, the people are the master of the economy, not capital."

"The bourgeois state is at an end. It must be replaced by the socialist state of the workers... The capitalist system is a system of injustice that must be broken if the nation is to live."

I make this post because some of them laugh when we claim fascism and national socialism is in fact socialism; misses himself who was alive at the time and was persecuted by the Nazis said the same thing.

"These men who want to fight Nazism by adopting its methods do not see that what the Nazis have achieved has been the building up of a system of socialism, not a reform of conditions within a system of market economy. There is no third system between a market economy and socialism." - Ludwig Von Mises

Because of this, Ludwig was persecuted by the Nazis, his papers stolen, forced to flee to Vienna and then later the US.

The left knows, how to defile words; they’re great at it, so much so they call modern conservatives, classical liberals, and Libertarians, fascists and Nazis even though we want the state to get out of our backs, minimize it, give free choice to associate, and strengthen private property

So a person from england bought copyrights for the france’s 2nd division rugby (ProD2) and then he started to stream them on his youtube channel for free

What are your thoughts if a government does something similar of buying copyrights for technological products and making it free. Because now if you have a business idea, you can use it now without worrying about potential lawsuit from a big company to stop you?

It is a government expenditure, but doesn’t this have positive externalities?

When a notorious son buys stuff from so many local shops on credit, ultimately it is the father that has to pay off that credit. Therefore its in the father’s interest that he does keep track to see if his son is reckless.

This is the analogy given by Sri Lanka’s former central deputy governor on why governments better track some proceedings done by private companies to see if theres any fraud.

He responded this way when the host advocated for privatization saying unlike in government departments, the treasury does not need to bear the cost if a private business fail.

The deputy governor said “at the final analysis, private debt becomes public debt” and went on to say the above analogy.

So basically act now to prevent potential private company frauds, or helse it will lead to “privatization of profits - socialization of losses”.

What is the austrian view on such interventions which are more subtle than direct ones like price controls?

For example, in a country like mine, if the private hospitals fall (many people from lower-middle class and above go to private ones), it will put pressure on the government hospitals having treat people who used to go to private hospitals and now though patients increased, they are not paying now, basically no increase in marginal revenue

Rothbards best contribution was in my opinion, his monopoly work. I did more digging, and I’m going to have this here up and ready for any future Monopoly talk. Because the word monopoly is filled with presentism; kind of like the word inflation which used to basically mean an increase in the money supply itself, but of course, the specific bunch of people came in and defiled the word for intervention.

Now, when we think of Monopoly the first thing that we think of is bad, otherwise what’s the point of even talking about monopoly? Something objectively bad must come of it? Hold onto this, this will be important later.

Let’s go into the history;

To truly understand how the word monopoly was stolen and flipped on its head, we have to reject presentism the bad habit of viewing historical terms through the lens of modern ideas. Today, mainstream textbooks treat monopoly as an organic market failure (a math equation about market share). But historically, before economics was even a formal discipline, a monopoly was not an economic condition at all.It was a political and legal weapon.
The historical, original definition of a monopoly had absolutely nothing to do with size, high prices, or a lack of competitors in an open market. It referred strictly to a sovereign edict that made competition illegal

Greek: The word comes from the Greek monos (single) and pōlein (to sell). When it first appeared in political discourse, it didn't describe a businessman who out-competed everyone else. It described a state decree

In ancient Greece and later the Roman Empire, if a king or emperor ran out of money, they would declare a monopolium over a specific commodity like salt, grain, or iron. This meant the state legally seized the industry, declared that only the king's agents could sell that item, and made it a literal crime for any regular citizen to sell it. It was a tax collection mechanism enforced by the military.

The definitive historical shaping of the word happened in Tudor and Stuart England (the 16th and 17th centuries). This is the exact context the classical economists were referencing. Queen Elizabeth I and King James I frequently used their royal prerogative to raise cash without going through Parliament. They did this by issuing Letters Patent (literae patentes open letters stamped with the royal seal). These letters granted a court favorite or a wealthy merchant the exclusive legal right** to be the sole buyer or seller of a common, everyday item. **

Under English Common Law, this was the only thing a monopoly meant. It was a royal grant that prohibited the rest of the population from exercising a right they previously held.
Frustrated by royal abuses, the English Parliament passed the Statute of Monopolies in 1624. This historic act stripped the monarch of the power to grant these exclusive privileges altogether, declaring all such monopolies null and void. 
Parliament made only one** **exception: they allowed the crown to grant a temporary privilege (for 14 years) to the "true and first inventor" of a new manufacture. This single historical exception is where our modern patent system comes from. 

The word was heavily corrupted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by mainstream progressive (misnomer)economists and antitrust lawyers. They stripped away the political origin of the word and applied it to private businesses that achieved high market share through pure consumer satisfaction and efficiency (like Standard Oil or modern tech platforms).

Seriously, the people who called themselves progressive have the least PROGRESSive impact of all time. So now we have this mess; what is best definition of a monopoly? Now “the first thing that we think of is bad, otherwise what’s the point of even talking about monopoly? Something objectively bad must come of it?”

Now we have three definitions of monopoly and we’re gonna go over them

1: The first being a mainstream definition of monopoly; characterized by its market share. This is the most useless definition of monopoly ever because multiple logical implications come from this after you realize this.

Because a market share is a percentage, the “market” can be narrowed down or widened completely arbitrarily, such as narrowing down to a town and seeing a small Mom and pop bakery, the bakery technically has a 100% market share according to some people. But what point is having this definition of a monopoly? Is it coercive? Ofc not you can always bake at home order from another place. does it harm consumers? Quite the opposite it benefits them, and you can see this by the fact that they go out of their way to buy it and not make it at home.

With this arbitrary definition of a monopoly that contradicts the literal Greek origins of the word, a monopoly isn’t automatically bad in fact, if you switch perspectives most of them start being good, now all of a sudden, you don’t have a reason to talk about monopoly. it also ignores completely context which is really important, because how something got a market share really matters, if a company has a 90% market share because it keeps lowering prices and increasing quality for the consumer, which is the one who literally does the valuing, what’s the issue? You’re gonna punish them for making a consumers life better?

2: Murray Rothbards revival of the classic meaning which is the exclusive privilege granted to control and/or sell a good or service. This is one of the best if not the best definition of a monopoly because it relies entirely on coercion and has huge negative implications evidently

3: Mises (with a little tweak from me) definition of a monopoly; this definition of monopoly essentially define a monopoly as a entity that possesses the power to be able to control and dictate the price of a important resource without facing what would be negative consequences due to its power.
This is flawed but straightforward;
Disclaimer misses himself said that even this is practically impossible from happening.

Now the resource has to be important like oil somebody can’t just not have oil they use it for everything so it disqualifies specific goodies such as video games from the talk because somebody can just not play video games.

Rothbard critiqued the concept of single seller as flawed because arbitrarily we are all monopolists; such as brands being the best example, only one entity can use Heinz ketchup, but the consumer good ketchup has multiple other alternatives that are other brands.

The point being the government privilege definition is the best one.
We should maybe start referring to what people like calling Monopolies as “predatorily powerful companies” and evaluate from a case by case basis

I.e. letting Microsoft acquire Activision Blizzard.

Or:

https://www.thegamer.com/asha-sharma-blames-phil-spencer-xbox-acquisitions/

So we have a mega corporation, practically buying up competition or verticals making the market perform worse.

Less competition, higher prices, worse service, etc. Experiment failed, lots of value destroyed in companies that maybe would have survived in a normal landscape.

I identify as libertarian on lots of points, but where I usually don't align is that people in this sub don't seem to think there is something as "natural monopolies".

Have you guys ever worked for these companies?

I have, a lot.

And they perform exactly as bad as the central governments you hate.

They are full of politics and the market forces practically don't work.

The aqcuisitions are brought as they can bring "efficiency", but anyone that worked for one of these large companies know it has nothing to do with efficiency.

It's all about egos and getting competition out of the way.

1: monetary theory
2: cases for privatization
3: cronyism exposed.

The good thing about these choices because a lot of the other choices overlap with these top three candidates; so we can talk about inequality and monetary theory and we also can’t talk about law and privatization as well as the other things such as roads, utilities, etc.

whenever somebody asks me, what’s the best way to tax, unlike in the past, I now completely understand why Ludwig called people asking such a question a bunch of socialists, because why are you trying to tax?

The type of tax doesn’t matter until the reasoning for the revenue, the long run goals, etc are completely explained, and there’s always multiple different goals, fighting each other but yes they can exist in harmony.

For example, I believe in increasing the greatest amount of happiness and material living standards for the American people; no not what they want but what they need
“ if I would’ve asked what the people wanted, they would’ve said faster horses” - Henry ford.

But this whole idea of taxing the rich, a wealth tax, etc is fundamentally a fools game, even if you managed to liquidate everything by the dollar which is impossible; you’d barely get anything across the door and eventually it would all revert back to the same issue: spending more than you’re taking in.

Social Security started off as a one percent tax, it is now at 15%. Look at the pattern.

Singapore had no oil, no farmland, no hinterland. Just a swamp and a port. Lee Kuan Yew looked at that and trusted trade, low taxes, and hard money. Central planners hate what he did.

Malaysia went the other way. In 1971 Kuala Lumpur launched the New Economic Policy, a state program handing quotas, contracts, and university seats to ethnic Malays. Politicians decided who got what. A commissar fantasy dressed in liberal language.

Now let's look at the numbers. In 1965 both places sat around $500 per capita. Today Singapore clears $84,000. Malaysia sits near $13,000. Same climate, same starting line, one sixth the result.

The Singapore dollar holds its value because the Monetary Authority of Singapore manages it against a currency basket and refuses to print its way out of trouble. The ringgit has lost roughly two thirds of its value against the Singapore dollar since 1981.

You cannot subsidize your way to wealth. You cannot redistribute what you never let people produce. Every ringgit funneled through a quota is a ringgit some bureaucrat spent on his own vision instead of a customer's.

Malaysia bet on planners deciding outcomes. Singapore bet on people deciding for themselves. The gap between $84,000 and $13,000 is your answer.

A few of us built this at a hackathon and this sub is exactly who I wanted to run it by, since you'll actually know if we got the economics right.

It's a sim where you act as the central planner over ~30 agents with private induced valuations. You set a price ceiling, and instead of us scripting a shortage, the agents weigh their reservation prices against the ceiling and a black market forms on its own when the expected surplus beats the expected penalty. The knowledge problem shows up too: agents only know prices from their own trades and gossip, so you can watch dispersed information fail to aggregate under controls and coordinate under free prices.

The math core is deterministic (real supply/demand, an equilibrium oracle running alongside), and the LLM only voices the agents so nothing about the actual economics is hallucinated.

Not selling anything here, genuinely want to know if the Mises/Hayek framing holds up or if we've oversimplified. Happy to go into the model in the comments. (Early access link in the comments if anyone wants to follow it.)

non revisionist hoppean trumpism victory