Jay B

[Mises Caucus @LPMisesCaucus]

Hey remember "I'll be surprised if the Iranian regime is still standing in a month"?

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

The trick is to define “capitalism” as whatever happens in America, regardless of what policy caused it. Government spending, subsidies, welfare, price controls, monetary manipulation, protectionism—doesn’t matter. If it happens under an economy they’ve labeled capitalist, capitalism gets the blame.

Then communism is afforded the opposite luxury: whenever communist policy produces disaster, suddenly that wasn’t real communism.

Capitalism is judged by every policy imposed against its principles; communism is absolved of every outcome produced in its name. Convenient little accounting system.

[Oliver Darko @oliver_drk]

If you really read all The Witcher books (I have my doubts), then you shouldn't be surprised or mad that Ciri is the protagonist in part 4. In fact Ciri, not Geralt, is the actual main character in the book series. Everything centers around her.

[Robert P. Murphy @BobMurphyEcon]

listening to these comedians talk economic policy is like following an economist who cracks jokes on twitter

[reaction.gif @TheReactionGif]

Can we pass a law that says that Government is never allowed to say "free" and instead they must always say "tax-payer funded"?

[tenkaiyayes @tenkaiyayes]

@biggieU_U Pragmata is the GotY for me.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

“Nothing has changed except the illusion of freedom.”

Right. Except the modern worker can quit, change employers, negotiate pay, start a business, own property, invest, save, inherit wealth, move across the country, choose where to live, choose what to eat, choose whom to marry, refuse to work for someone, sue an employer, vote, speak publicly, travel, retire, and keep the fruits of his labor after taxes.

And apparently food, water and shelter are the only things modern wages buy. Never mind cars, electricity, refrigerators, air conditioning, heating, washing machines, plumbing, hot showers, smartphones, computers, internet, televisions, streaming entertainment, restaurants, air travel, vacations, medicines, antibiotics, anesthesia, dentistry, eyeglasses, supermarkets overflowing with food from around the world, clothing that would once have been luxuries, university education, hobbies, gaming consoles, home appliances, furniture, insurance, retirement savings, and investment accounts.

A slave couldn't choose his employer. He was property. He couldn't quit, negotiate his compensation, keep what he produced, freely relocate, accumulate property for himself, or tell his owner to go to hell.

The fact that free people still have to produce before they can consume isn't slavery. It's reality.

Apparently freedom was supposed to mean that somebody else becomes the slave who works all day providing your food, water and shelter for free.

[Count Dankula @CountDankulaTV]

It's because being falsely accused of being a slut doesn't get you 15 years in prison.

[DL Cummings (LibertyDad) @libertydadpod]

"Massie has failed to solve problems for 14 years!"

Sounds damning until midwits realize that means EIGHT different Congresses (112th - 119th) ignored, blocked, and obstructed Massie's many amendments and legislation to address fraud and overspending.

Not the own you think.

[Being Libertarian @beinlibertarian]

Young people shifting to embrace socialism is the fault of Republicans claiming that we are a free market capitalist country when nothing could be further from the truth.

[2ndGenNewMexican @2ndGenNewMxcn]

@MarcoFoster_ @Shanemgillis @joerogan Socialists, if you believe in socialist medicine, bully for you, but it is not free. Stop fucking using that word, retards.

[Blue Collar Dad @BlueCollarDad73]

@MarcoFoster_ @Shanemgillis @joerogan Hey Shane, this is for you when you use the word free.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

This is what happens when you either lie about capitalism or never bother learning what it means.

Mass surveillance, censorship, police power, restrictions on protest and political corruption are exercises of state power, yet somehow every abuse of government becomes “capitalism” simply because it happened in a country socialists dislike.

Then comes the punchline: their solution to excessive state power is to give the state more power over property, production and individual choice.

And apparently none of these abuses count against socialism when they occur under governments openly declaring themselves socialist.

That isn't an argument. It's a definition rigged so capitalism inherits every failure and socialism is never responsible for anything.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

If you had trusted the settled science of the day, here is how it would have gone.

1890s: you dose the baby with Bayer's new cough syrup, the non-addictive alternative to morphine, marketed for children. It was heroin. They named it after the German for heroic.

1900s: you rub calomel teething powder on your infant's gums. It is a mercury compound, and it leaves a generation with pink disease. Swollen, peeling hands and feet, screaming for months, and some of them died.

1910s: you cook in Crisco, launched by a soap and candle company, because cottonseed oil is modern and lard is what your mother used. The process that made it solid produced trans fat, banned outright a century later.

1920s: you drink Radithor, certified radioactive water, on prescription. Eben Byers took fourteen hundred bottles for his vitality. His jaw was removed in pieces and he was buried in a lead coffin.

1930s: a chemist dissolves a new sulfa drug in diethylene glycol, which is antifreeze. It kills 107 people, mostly children, and only then does America give the FDA power to demand safety testing.

1940s: your doctor lights a Camel in the surgery. More doctors smoke them than any other brand, and the advert runs in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which sold him the page.

1950s: DDT is sprayed over your kitchen, your garden and your children at school. The man who found its insecticidal properties has already been given a Nobel Prize.

1960s: your wife takes thalidomide for morning sickness because it is remarkably safe. More than ten thousand children are born with missing and shortened limbs.

1970s: the country puts down the butter and picks up the margarine, on the instruction of the American Heart Association. The fat everybody switched to was banned in 2015 as unsafe at any level.

1980s: the fat comes out of everything and sugar goes back in to make it edible. Obesity begins a climb it has never come off.

1990s: your father is prescribed OxyContin, because fewer than one per cent get addicted. The company later pleads guilty to criminal misbranding, and the overdose count runs into hundreds of thousands.

2000s: you take Vioxx for your knee. It is pulled in 2004, and the FDA's own safety officer estimates tens of thousands of excess heart attacks.

Not one of those was fringe. Every one had a professional body, a literature and a man in a white coat standing behind it.

Nobody who followed that advice was stupid. They were obedient, to the most qualified people available.

Settled is a word about money. It means the questions stopped being funded, so they stopped being asked.

So which of today's instructions will your grandchildren read out in disbelief.

The oil washed in hexane and built into every cell you own. The statin that blocks the pathway making your hormones, to prevent one heart attack per hundred people. The injection where a third of the loss is muscle. The infant formula built out of vegetable oil.

All settled. None of it funded to be otherwise.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

Let’s be honest, you’re paying $4/gallon for Israel.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

What this attempted sleight of hand evades is that “everyone deserves to live” doesn’t answer who must provide the means. If you refuse to earn your own living, you’re demanding to live off someone who did, and depriving them of part of what they earned to finance you.

It turns failure into entitlement and achievement into debt:

“I produced less, therefore someone who produced more owes me.”

It’s resentment trying to acquire a moral vocabulary.