Eric J Holmes

Avid follower of the markets, economics, history, and nature. Did I mention history!

[Dr. Maalouf ‏ @realMaalouf]

During the Iranian Revolution, leftist students, communists, and Muslims were all united in overthrowing the Shah.

The leftists celebrated when Khomeini returned in 1979. They thought they had defeated capitalism and imperialism. It didn’t last long.

Over 30,000 leftists who helped the Islamic regime consolidate power were soon executed. That is where the term “useful idiot” comes from.

They served their purpose and were no longer needed. Muslims had always despised their progressive ideals and couldn’t wait to get rid of them.

One of the women celebrating in the picture was killed, the other fled the country for her life.

It’s bizarre that almost 50 years later, Western leftists are making the exact same mistake and allying with Muslims. They will have the same fate.

[Alex Epstein @AlexEpstein]

We should not concede the narrative that data centers are causing rising electricity prices. The real cause is anti-fossil-fuel policies and bad permitting policies.

The admin has reversed some anti-fossil-fuel policies. Now it needs to cut a major permitting reform deal—soon!

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

Because they don't want to pay more tax. They want to virtue signal and force other people to pay more tax.

[Creative Deduction @CreativeDeduct]

In 1920, Ludwig von Mises delivered one of the most powerful intellectual blows against socialism in history.

In his essay Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, Mises demonstrated how rational economic calculation is impossible under socialism.

The argument is devastatingly simple. In a free market, prices emerge from the voluntary interactions of millions of individuals. These prices reflect real scarcities, subjective valuations, and trade-offs. They serve as indispensable signals that tell producers what to make, in what quantities, and how to allocate resources efficiently.

Under socialism, where the state owns the means of production, there are no genuine market prices - only arbitrary administrative decisions. Central planners, no matter how intelligent or well-intentioned, lack the information they need to allocate resources rationally. They cannot know the relative value of different goods, the opportunity costs involved, or whether they are using capital efficiently.

Mises was not claiming that socialist planners are necessarily stupid. He was saying the problem is structural and insurmountable. Even the most powerful supercomputers could not solve it, because the necessary knowledge is dispersed, local and constantly changing - generated only through real market exchange.

This insight proved prophetic. Every serious attempt at central planning - the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Venezuela - eventually collapsed into chronic shortages, waste and economic failure. Mises showed that socialism doesn’t just fail in practice. It fails in theory.

The Economic Calculation Problem remains one of the strongest arguments ever made for capitalism and private property. Without them, rational economic action cannot exist. Mises gave the world a clear, logical reason why collectivism is doomed.

Few ideas in economics have aged as well.

[The Free Press @TheFP]

New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has accused Israel’s leader of genocide and the maiming of children and has called on the federal government to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he sets foot in NYC.

@DouglasKMurray writes on Mamdani’s “disinterest in the truth.”

Read his full piece: https://t.co/hOWIwOroCv

[Handre @Handre]

Joseph Stalin murdered more human beings than almost anyone in recorded history, and he did it with a clipboard and a five-year plan.

Let me give you the numbers, because the numbers matter. The Holodomor, the man-made famine in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, killed somewhere around 4 million people. Stalin engineered it. He confiscated the grain, sealed the borders so starving peasants couldn't leave, and let them die in the snow while the state exported wheat abroad.

He collectivized agriculture, meaning he seized private farms and forced peasants onto giant state operations. The productive farmers, the ones who owned a cow or two and actually knew how to grow things, he branded "kulaks" and shipped to Siberia or shot. He destroyed his best producers on purpose.

Then came the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. Stalin's secret police executed roughly 700,000 people in about two years. Not battlefield deaths. Confessions extracted in basements, quotas handed down for how many "enemies" each region should find.

Quotas. For arrests. Somebody in Moscow decided your town owed the state 200 traitors, and the local officers went and found 200, guilty or not.

The whole thing rests on a simple lie: that a handful of men in a Kremlin office know how to run millions of lives better than those millions running their own. Stalin believed that lie hard enough to build a machine of corpses around it.

Property rights aren't some dusty legal technicality. They're the thing standing between you and a bureaucrat deciding your grain belongs to the collective and your life doesn't matter.

Stalin proved that 20 million dead is just a statistic to a central planner.

[Rob Henderson @robkhenderson]

Elite opinions change fashion faster than elite wardrobes.

When you express a luxury belief, you are communicating your level of education, your income, and your sociopolitical sympathies. It is an expression of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called cultural capital.

You are trying to separate yourself from the commoners, from the masses. You want to signal that you are better than them, so you express the beliefs fashionable among your class.

The question, then, is: What is the fashionable luxury belief of the moment?

Perhaps the most intuitive recent example is the Defund the Police movement in the United States. Survey data indicated that high-income Americans were the most supportive of defunding the police, while low-income Americans were the least supportive. White Democrats favored the idea more than black and Hispanic Democrats.

But that belief is now déclassé. It is passé. That was several years ago. Bring up “Defund the Police” with some of the people who championed it six years ago, and they become shy or embarrassed. They say, “Oh, we never really meant that.”

So what is the new luxury belief?

I have been speaking with psychologists and mental health professionals who tell me that some experts increasingly want to destigmatize suicide. Destigmatization is an ongoing project among cultural elites. Anything we once stigmatized as harmful must now be destigmatized, normalized, or reframed in more morally neutral terms.

I do not think they have gone so far as to describe suicide as good. But some appear to be moving toward treating it as a choice that should not be judged.

My question for these mental health experts is this: Would you destigmatize suicide for your own son or daughter if they began expressing thoughts of self-harm? Would you say, “That is your choice. It is perfectly valid. Living is no better than not living. Do whatever feels right”?

Or, when it comes to their own families and their own children, would they say, “This is very serious. We need to protect you and get you help”?

Perhaps their private response would be urgent and morally unambiguous, while their public position would remain softer: that suicide is a behavior like any other, that it must be discussed without judgment, and that we should not shame people who make that decision.

[Daniel Lacalle @dlacalle_IA]

If young people understood that most of today’s social and economic problems come from statism and government interventionism, not from capitalism, they would never see socialism as a "solution."

A statist capitalist country has important problems.
A socialist country manufactures misery and repression.
The solution is not more, but less government.
The end.

[Alex Epstein @AlexEpstein]

"Rich person" services that poor people can access now thanks to AI:

- Custom tutor
- Job training
- Legal advice
- Tax advice
- Financial planning
- Psychological counseling
- Concierge doctor
- Career coach
- Executive assistant
- Test prep

Oh and it's all vanishingly cheap.

[The Free Press @TheFP]

Noah Rothman’s new book argues that left-wing political violence isn’t new, isn’t random, and isn’t being honestly reckoned with. https://t.co/I7G81njyPI

[Handre @Handre]

Envy needs an ideology, and socialism has always been happy to provide one. Mises wrote a whole book about this in 1956, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, and the diagnosis holds up: people who resent the outcomes of voluntary exchange will always search for a doctrine that transforms their resentment into virtue. The woke left found theirs.

Notice what wokeism and socialism share at the root. Both start from the premise that unequal outcomes prove injustice. You earned more than your neighbor? Exploitation. One group outperforms another in median income? Systemic oppression. Neither doctrine ever asks whether people made different choices, took different risks, or produced different value for others. Asking that question would ruin everything, because the entire project depends on assigning blame rather than understanding prices, profit, and loss.

Once you accept that unequal outcomes equal injustice, you need a corrector. Someone powerful. Someone with the authority to override contracts, seize property, and redistribute according to a moral hierarchy the planners themselves define. That job description has exactly one applicant: the state. This is why the woke activist and the socialist always arrive at the same policy desk, demanding rent control in New York, wealth taxes in Sacramento, hiring quotas in every HR department from Seattle to Brussels.

Marcuse and the Frankfurt School figured out decades ago that the Western worker refused to play his assigned role as revolutionary. He got rich instead. Capitalism handed him a car, a house, and air conditioning, and he stopped listening to men promising utopia through expropriation. The revolutionaries needed a new client base. Class became identity, but the machinery stayed identical: oppressor and oppressed, guilt and grievance, revolution and rule.

The love affair with socialism, then, follows logically. Wokeism supplies the moral demand for coercion; socialism supplies the economic apparatus of coercion. Neither can survive in a world of private property and voluntary exchange, because in that world you rise by serving customers, not by capturing committees. Venezuela ran this experiment from 1999 onward. The grocery shelves reported the results.

[Vivek Sen @Vivek4real_]

PALANTIR CTO:

“FOR $10 BILLION, ELON MUSK PUT 300 ROCKETS IN ORBIT.”

“FOR $11 BILLION, THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA HAS BUILT 1,600 FEET OF ELEVATED RAIL...

WITH NO RAIL.”

[Juanita Broaddrick @atensnut]

Correct 💯

[Nuclear Hazelnut 👷🏻‍♀️ @NuclearHazelnut]

Every day is a good day to love nuclear energy ⚛️

[Steve Hanke @steve_hanke]

Last night, following France's win over Morocco in the World Cup, VIOLENT RIOTS took place in Paris.

FOR OVER 10 YEARS, PARIS HAS BEEN PLAGUED BY LEFTIST MAYORS = NO PROTECTION OF PROPERTY.

[Alex Epstein @AlexEpstein]

The richest people in this country have access to huge amounts of intelligence: custom medical advisors, custom tutors, custom assistants.

Data centers are making this accessible to the average American.

My full appearance on @FoxBusiness on the moral case for data centers:

[Rob Henderson @robkhenderson]

My latest for @CityJournal:

"For Americans under 30...desired family size was about 1.7 children. For those with the most supportive friends, it was 2.8. That is a full extra child, associated with nothing more than having trusted friends who show up." https://t.co/JRnlDbXBSr

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

Academia concentrates intellectuals because it’s a low accountability bubble where bad ideas like socialism thrive.

According to Thomas Sowell, intellectuals produce ideas judged only by peers.
An engineer’s collapsed building ruins him and a businessman’s flop means bankruptcy.
But if an intellectual’s grand social scheme fails disastrously, he pays no price for being wrong, thanks to tenure and echo chambers.

And according to Ludwig von Mises, capitalism rewards those who serve consumers.
Many intellectuals resent this.
Their ambitions are frustrated, so they retreat to academia/government to denounce the “system” that didn’t crown them, subsidized by the markets they hate.

They excel at abstractions and peer validation, not reality tests.

And the result is a self-selecting club where sounding smart to colleagues takes precedence over delivering results that work for real people.

Because the real world is harsher, and a lot more honest.

[Bjorn Lomborg @BjornLomborg]

EU: Lowest use of air conditioning

Highest rate of heat deaths

With US-level AC, it could save about 26,000 lives a year

Europe is rich and has, by latitude, fewer hot days than most inhabited regions

Its aversion to air conditioning is entirely because of an energy-degrowth ideology

https://t.co/6cFme3jeMr

You can see all the references in my Twitter thread:
https://t.co/4VBxE7J43W