Chris Mifflin

Teacher, sometime Speech & Debate Coach, Here. libertarian, freedom first, atheist.

[Claire Lehmann @clairlemon]

Help me understand why capital should be taxed at the same rate as labour (@JEChalmers's goal).

If you are a worker, you will never earn a negative salary.

If you invest capital, you can (and often will) lose it all.

How are these two scenarios remotely the same?

[Kostas Moros @MorosKostas]

A common tactic of antigun academics is abusing the ignorance of their audience.

Reading this, you'd think some huge change was made to the status quo. In reality, the vampire rule has never been in effect anywhere (besides for about 6 days in CA) ever. 3 other circuit courts struck it down.

And of course, people with carry permits almost never commit crime anyway, as we have proven and Hawaii, CA, and NJ all failed to rebut in three different courts.

But they know their target audience doesn't know any of that.

[Students For Liberty @sfliberty]

In 1960, newly independent African leaders had a choice: capitalism or socialism.

Almost all of them picked socialism.

A Ghanaian economist named George Ayittey spent forty years documenting what happened next.

His findings are in print, and almost nobody outside Africa wants to hear them. 🧵

[Mises Media @mises_media]

The Fed is politically rewarded for inflating assets, because asset owners vote more, donate more, and have more political influence. Working families are punished by the same policy. The K-shaped economy is the incentive structure working as designed. @RyanMcMaken

[Bjorn Lomborg @BjornLomborg]

Guardian: "heat kills more people in Europe than almost any other issue you worry about"

But that's because the Guardian doesn't tell you about the things to really worry about, like cold death

https://t.co/3z0fO6ubyR

[Kostas Moros @MorosKostas]

So to be clear, in the last few years we've had a giant expansion in carry rights AND a boom in suppressor sales - both of which gun control groups claimed would EACH cause crime to spike - and instead we have record lows in homicide.

They have no credibility. If we had an honest media, they'd cite this evidence and ask every gun control org spokesperson in every interview why they are always wrong in their predictions.

[Ilya Somin @IlyaSomin]

Fair market value compensation for takings is often too little, not too much. That makes today's Supreme Court decision allowing below-market compensation in tax foreclosure cases even more indefensible: https://t.co/bCevVtji1L

[Daniel Priestley @DanielPriestley]

Karl Marx wrote the communist manifesto 7 years before the creation of Limited Liability Companies.

Before then, if you wanted to set up a business you have to be seriously rich because anything the business did could impact your entire net worth. If your business got sued, you could lose your entire estate. Only the very rich had businesses and they ran their businesses like every decision could be financially catastrophic.

Then in 1855, the Limited Liabilities Companies Act was passed into British Law and the game changed.

Suddenly anyone could set up a business, raise investment and trade. There was separation between ownership and control.

This wasn’t lost on Karl Marx either. He wrote good things about this change. He was even a company director at one point.

Essentially, it means that under capitalism you can be a socialist if you want to.

A socialist can set up a company, give shares to all the workers, put workers on the board, pay executives the same as everyone else and if there’s any profit remaining they can freely donate it to the government.

There is absolutely nothing stopping any socialist from living according to these values under a capitalist system.

Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world and most of the employees own shares. Many are millionaires. In the UK, John Lewis and Waitrose are owned by their workers and are much loved successful businesses. Capitalism has no problem with workers owning the means of production.

Under capitalism, anyone with an idea can set up a company, pitch to investors and launch it. Starting with nothing, they can be a millionaire (on paper) within a month.

Socialists can lead by example; the fact that they almost never do this tells you a lot about socialists and human nature.

The same is not true under socialism. It is not possible for a capitalist to live according to their values. Under socialism, if I believe in small government, self-sufficiency, low regulations I must leave the country - if it’s even possible to do so. It’s not enough for a socialist to live their values, they need everyone to do it too.

[Charles Murray @charlesmurray]

My daughter's friend in grad school, upon being asked by a member of her dissertation committee why she didn't include a Marxist perspective. "I grew up in the Soviet Union. I don't practice recreational Marxism."

[John Stossel @JohnStossel]

Today is the 21st anniversary of Kelo, one of this century's WORST Supreme Court rulings.

It gave absurdly broad power to government.

Politicians can take your land if it MAY produce more tax dollars in the hands of someone else!

People fought back, and yet:

[Students For Liberty @sfliberty]

Every socialist system in history, when built with enough consistency, eventually needed walls, internal passports, or exit visas to keep its own citizens from leaving.

If your political project requires allocating people, you will eventually need to keep them from leaving. 🧵

[Carl @HistoryBoomer]

People can argue capitalism sucks, but claims that indigenous peoples lived more prosperous, peaceful lives are nonsense.

The Cherokee were warriors who kept captives as slaves. Pre-industrial and stateless societies were far poorer and more violent than ours.

Ethnographic and anthropological studies suggest that in small-scale and non-state societies, 5-20% of deaths came from violence. In America, that number is less than 1%.

This chipper ninny sells the popular leftist idea that it's Western society that causes harm, when the reality is that, with our flaws, human society is far better off today than it was in the past.

[Alex Epstein @AlexEpstein]

Some regions of the US have negative wholesale prices for electricity for a significant portion of the year.

This means that sources of electricity are *paying the grid* in order to produce electricity for it.

How is this possible?

Because these regions have built a ton of intermittent, unreliable solar and wind to collect subsidies.

[Handre @Handre]

Alan Greenspan died today, and the man who spent two decades inflating bubbles will be eulogized as a maestro. Fitting, because he understood exactly what he was doing.

In 1966 a younger Greenspan wrote an essay called "Gold and Economic Freedom." He laid out the case with precision. The gold standard protected savers from confiscation by inflation. Welfare statists hated gold because it stood in the way of their deficits. He wrote that the abandonment of gold made deficit spending a "scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth." He was right. He knew it. Then he took the job running the printing press.

From August 1987 to January 2006 Greenspan sat atop the Federal Reserve and did the opposite of everything that essay defended. After the 1987 crash he flooded the banks with liquidity and taught a generation of traders that the central bank would catch them every time they fell. They named the reflex after him: the Greenspan put. He cut the federal funds rate to 1 percent by June 2003 and held it there, and you watched housing prices detach from any sane relationship to income. Mortgage credit gushed. He went on television in February 2004 and suggested Americans consider adjustable-rate mortgages, roughly eighteen months before he started hiking rates into those very borrowers. The man who warned in 1966 about the hidden confiscation of wealth engineered the largest credit distortion in postwar history.

Then came the apology that wasn't one. In October 2008, sitting before Congress as the wreckage smoked, Greenspan confessed he had found "a flaw" in his model of how the world worked. He was "shocked" that lenders had not policed themselves. You don't get to spend twenty years pricing risk at zero and then act surprised when men respond to the incentives you built. Any committee of economists cannot set the price of money better than a market can.

Greenspan knew the answer at 40 and spent the next half century pretending he'd forgotten it. The savers he warned about in 1966 paid for that performance.

[Gene Epstein @GeneSohoForum]

For both India & China, which together account for 1/3rd of world population, the Average Annual Rate of Economic Growth has been noticeably HIGHER in the 45 years since 1980 than in the 35 years from 1945-1980, with a key driver market-oriented reforms instituted by both.

[Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright]

It is impossible to escape the impression that major English-language news outlets (NYT, WaPo, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, NPR, Guardian, and BBC) and science news outlets (Science, Nature, and Stat) prefer that the public be misinformed--or at minimum uninformed--about COVID origins.

[TakingHayekSeriously @FriedrichHayek]

"If the socialists admitted that the issue of whether their moral aims can be achieved is a scientific question, they would have to admit that their science is antiquated, and that in academic circles it occupies the position of astrology."

-- Friedrich Hayek, edited

[Andrew G. Biggs @biggsag]

Were seniors disproportionately poor in 1935? Definitely.

Are they disproportionately poor today? Definitely not.

It's foolish to think those changes in facts shouldn't inform Social Security reform. Just plain foolish. /2

[tedfrank @tedfrank]

Data centers create jobs, are already taxed and reduce taxes for others, reduce electricity bills, and don’t use that much water. As a public policy issue, it’s a real IQ litmus test; this sort of demagoguery should be disqualifying. https://t.co/WHe4cFJQ4v