Joshua Machiavello

Old School Baptist, CPA, constitutional conservative, and free market guy.

[Joshua Machiavello @JDMach]

@DadePhelan Dade would rather elect a socialist than a personal/political nemesis? Pathetic.

[Matt Schaefer @RepMattSchaefer]

Talarico will piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining.

He’s a dangerous liar.

[Konni Burton @KonniBurton]

Beautiful. I hate that these people had to feel the effects to understand that tariffs are higher taxes paid by Americans. So many people in this administration & beyond are just straight up lying to Americans about what they are. And people believed them unfortunately.

[Konni Burton @KonniBurton]

I've been pushing back and will continue to until this garbage stops. I just wish elected R's would speak out against this. It's an absolute disgrace that they haven't.

[Erick Erickson @EWErickson]

Joe Biden surrounded himself with people who embraced modern monetary theory, a heterodox academic fad that taught you could write as many blank checks as you liked without the consequence of inflation. Larry Summers, Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, warned Democrats not to go down that road. Conservative economists warned Democrats not to go down that road. Biden listened instead to the modern monetary theorists and their loud defenders online, ultimately signing a $1.9 trillion spending bill on top of everything else, and gave the country inflation that peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022. Democrats paid for it at the ballot box.

Unfortunately, President Trump has made a similar mistake. He has surrounded himself with men who staked out heterodox views on the economy decades ago and now treat his administration as a laboratory. Peter Navarro has spent his career pushing trade theories that nearly the entire economics profession rejects, and he once propped up his own books by quoting an expert named Ron Vara, who turned out to be Peter Navarro.

Outside the White House, Oren Cass, a lawyer and former management consultant with no formal training in economics, founded a think tank, gave himself the title of chief economist, and has become the most prominent defender of the tariffs on the right. Around them is a chorus of loud social media defenders who insist tariffs are a tax on foreigners.

The MMT crowd promised that massive spending would not cause inflation. It did. The tariff crowd promised that tariffs would not raise prices or hurt wages. They did both. We no longer have to argue about it as a matter of theory. We have the data. The tariffs raised prices and held down wages.

The administration now refuses to change course. That is arrogance. It is also bad politics. The tariff regime has turned into a favor generator, with exemptions going to whoever hires the right lobbyist. Voters now rank corruption as a top concern for the first time in a generation. Republicans are heading into a midterm with voters angry about prices, angry about corruption, and trusting Democrats more than Republicans on the economy. Much of that is self-inflicted, and the tariffs are the biggest self-inflicted wound of all.

https://t.co/GHztwD67oC

[Mark R. Levin @marklevinshow]

When you dismiss or abandon Smith, Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Sowell, Williams, (James) Buchanan, Ricardo, Bastiat, Hazlitt, Stigler, Becker, et al, then you have difficulty defining socialism. 

You also have difficulty understanding commerce, wealth creation, capital, prosperity, the civil society, individual liberty, property rights, and much more.  These great men, and so many others, going back 40 years and much before, demeaned as "the old guard" by the Woke Right know-nothings, knew a helluva lot.  The world did not begin today -- that's Marxism and apparently Woke Rightism.

[Joshua Machiavello @JDMach]

@DonaldJTrumpJr @tedcruz @realDonaldTrump Terrible deal

[Joshua Machiavello @JDMach]

@CaryCheshireTX The Baptists enthusiastically supported the Revolution. However, they certainly were not at the top of the political hierarchy in that moment. Nigh impossible to win much more than local elections where concentrated pockets of Baptists might exist.

[𝗝𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗺𝘆 𝗗. 𝗞𝗶𝘁𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗻 @JeramyKitchen]

Creating capitalists doesn’t require the state to seed and manage investment accounts for every newborn. Families become investors when they’re allowed to keep more of what they earn, not when government creates a permanent wealth program in the constitution.

Encouraging financial literacy is good. Expanding government into universal wealth management is not.

[Charles C. W. Cooke @charlescwcooke]

Why would I want to “stick together” with those guys? They don’t believe what I believe. They don’t say what I think. Their worldview is not mine. And, insofar as they are connected to institutions of which I generally approve, they damage them.

[Joshua Machiavello @JDMach]

@staginglight @MattWalshBlog Exactly!

[Joshua Machiavello @JDMach]

@FoxNews @realDonaldTrump Why are some of my supposedly “conservative” friends bragging about massive tax revenues imposed on their fellow Americans?

[Megan Basham @megbasham]

A very smart lawyer friend sent me some thoughts on what David French wrote here, and I thought them worth sharing:

“When Christians say, ‘hey, we don't want to be discriminated against in the marketplace of ideas,’ we're not saying that people can't disagree with us. We’re saying the law should not prevent us from speaking. We want freedom to share our point of view without the law or the state discriminating against us.

“When we are criticizing the Gaineses for their TV show, including normalizing homosexual behavior, we're not saying that the LAW should go after them. What we are saying is that we don't like it. And we encourage other people not to watch the show anymore.

“So French is comparing apples and oranges. It's a typical David French move. He just takes these cheap shots that really don't hold water.”

[Joshua Machiavello @JDMach]

@Michellebbz @RepMattSchaefer Exactly. Shame on Ken Paxton for not only betraying his wife, but all of us who backed him all these years. I’m soooo disappointed in him.

[Matt Schaefer @RepMattSchaefer]

M.A.G.A.

Make Adultery Gross Again

#txlege

[Joshua Machiavello @JDMach]

@SarahisCensored @AngelaPaxtonTX …Ken Paxton screwed up the election, not his wife. If he was an honorable man, a person of integrity, kept his vows before God, etc., then he would’ve probably cruised to victory. This is Ken’s fault, not Angela’s.

[Joshua Machiavello @JDMach]

@asteadfastfaith @AngelaPaxtonTX Ken Paxton did this to himself. Don’t twist this around to blame the victim. He’s perhaps the most conservative TXAG we’ve ever had, but he’s proven himself to be a very dishonorable man.

[Matt Schaefer @RepMattSchaefer]

Ken Paxton is morally unfit to hold office. He cannot be the next U.S. Senator from Texas.
#txlege

[Joshua Machiavello @JDMach]

@VanceGinn @RepMattSchaefer Matt Schaefer for US Senate!

[Chris Freiman @cafreiman]

Capitalism has, in fact, dramatically reduced work hours