Fitsum

[Students For Liberty @sfliberty]

In 1825, a rich Welsh industrialist bought an entire American town to prove that socialism could work.

He had the money, the buildings, the theory, and hundreds of eager followers waiting to move in.

Two years later, it was over. 🧵

[William Wolfe 🇺🇸 @WilliamWolfe]

THOMAS JEFFERSON: "A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation.

To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means."

[John Anderson AC @JohnAndersonAC]

In this historical clip, @douglaswils explains how modern education has taught students to hold contempt towards their own tradition.

[Edward Feser @FeserEdward]

Readers looking for modern exposition, defense, and application of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics should get hold of these two volumes by David Oderberg.

[Magatte Wade @magattew]

It's that simple.

[Edward Feser @FeserEdward]

If you're looking for a modern exposition, defense, and application of traditional natural law theory, you can't do better than these two volumes by David Oderberg. The second is devoted to issues related to life and death (abortion, euthanasia, war, capital punishment, animals).

[Handre @Handre]

Marx built his entire economic system on the labor theory of value, and the labor theory of value is wrong. He claimed that the value of a good equals the socially necessary labor time embedded in it. This collapses the moment you ask why a bottle of water sells for ten dollars in the Mojave and fifty cents in Vienna. The labor is identical. The price is not.

Carl Menger settled this in 1871 with his "Principles of Economics." Value is subjective. It arises from the ranking each acting person assigns to units of a good at the margin, not from hours sweated in production. A diamond commands a high price because the marginal unit satisfies an urgent want, while water, abundant, satisfies a trivial one. Marx never answered Menger because he could not. The "Capital" volumes he left unfinished circle the transformation problem endlessly: he could not reconcile labor values with the actual prices markets generate, and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk demolished the attempt in 1896 in "Karl Marx and the Close of His System."

Then there is the matter of capital itself. The capitalist advances present money against an uncertain future return, absorbing the risk the worker avoids by demanding payment now instead of after the product sells eighteen months later. That premium on present goods over future goods is interest, and it reflects time preference, not theft. Böhm-Bawerk named this in 1884. Marx had no theory of interest because he had no theory of time.

You see the same blindness in his monetary thinking. Marx assumed value was an objective substance you could measure and centrally administer, which is precisely the fantasy that justifies a central authority printing the money supply. Hard money like gold or Bitcoin imposes discipline because no planner sets its quantity by decree. Easy money is the Marxist instinct dressed in a suit: someone in a committee decides what your labor is worth and dilutes it at will.

Every socialist calculation since 1917 has crashed into the wall Ludwig von Mises identified in 1920. Without market prices, you cannot allocate capital, because you cannot calculate. Marx never priced anything. He counted hours and called it science.

[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. 🧵

[Nationalist @euronationalizt]

Nothing built today comes close to this

[Camus @newstart_2024]

“I will do good no matter what. No matter what happens to me. I will do good.”

Jordan Peterson:

“No matter how much undeserved suffering comes my way… undeserved and unjust, in spite of my innocence… I will not lose faith and I will do good.”

Absolute rejection of the victim mindset.

“Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.” - Job 13:15

[Milton Friedman Quotes @MiltonFriedmanW]

“What ultimately happens when you aim for equality is that A and B decide what C should do for D, except that they take a bit of commission off on the way.”

— Milton Friedman

[The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship @ARC_Conference]

“Strong societies are sustained not only by constitutions and markets, but by trust, by responsibility, by mutual respect and by solidarity.”

Former Vice President of Nigeria @ProfOsinbajo at ARC 2026 today.

[The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship @ARC_Conference]

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's son, Ignat, this morning read from his father's seminal 1978 Harvard Address.

Extract in full here:

It is almost universally recognized that the West shows all the world the way to successful economic development, even though in past years it has been sharply offset by chaotic inflation. However, many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. They despise it or accuse it of no longer being up to the level of maturity attained by mankind. And this causes many to sway toward socialism, which is a false and dangerous current.

I hope that no one present will suspect me of expressing my partial criticism of the Western system in order to suggest socialism as an alternative. No; with the experience of a country where socialism has been realized, I shall certainly not speak for such an alternative… socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a levelling of mankind into death…

But should I be asked, instead, whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep suffering, people in our country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive.
… if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant points. … after the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.

There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen. Indeed, sometimes the warnings are quite explicit and concrete. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc.

…

How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present debility? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing steadily in accordance with its proclaimed social intentions, hand in hand with a dazzling progress in technology. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.

This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very foundation of thought in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the Age of Enlightenment. It became the basis for political and social doctrine and could be called rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the centre of all.

… this humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any higher meaning.

Thus gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today. Mere freedom per se does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and even adds a number of new ones.

And yet in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding one thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were eroded everywhere in the West; a total emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming ever more materialistic. The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer.

In the past decades, the legalistic selfishness of the Western approach to the world has reached its peak and the world has found itself in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century.

... I am referring [here] to the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness.

It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West.

…

Today it would be retrogressive to hold on to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Such social dogmatism leaves us helpless before the trials of our times.

We cannot avoid reassessing the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion above all? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our integral spiritual life?

If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era. This ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but—upward.

[Zeritu Kebede @KebedeZeritu]

እውነት ትቅደም!

[Tim Kotzman @TimKotzman]

Bitcoin needs good marketing.

[Ethiopian Reporter @EthioReporter]

የሥልጣኔያችን የመጨረሻ ግብ ምን ሊሆን ይችላል?

🔗 ተጨማሪ ያንብቡ: https://t.co/qO4v3bFd4L

[Wasson Watch Co. @WassonWatch]

Problems with our society in a nutshell.

[Daniel Priestley @DanielPriestley]

@Heccles94 Under capitalism you’re free to practice socialism. You can set up a company, give shares to all your workers, pay high wages for workers and low wages for the executives. You can volunteer your additional profits to government. The fact you don’t do it says a lot.

[Saifedean Ammous @saifedean]

@Emptins_Instnct It's amazing, but not unique. Every single field of knowledge has its despicable criminal frauds like Keynes, Freud, Ancel Keys, and its forgotten heroes like Mises, Szasz, and Yudkin. The twentieth century was the century of the fraud.

[Dr Jordan B Peterson @jordanbpeterson]

Love is the desire for someone else’s good, even at your own expense.