ProLiberty

ProLiberty advocates free thought, free action, and free exchange.

[Handre @Handre]

Milton Friedman's greatest regret.

The federal government discovered the perfect crime in 1943: make employers collect taxes before workers ever see their paychecks. You think you earn $60,000 per year, but you actually earn $75,000 and hand over $15,000 to politicians without ever touching it. The psychological difference is enormous.

Before payroll withholding, Americans wrote quarterly checks directly to the Treasury. Picture yourself sitting at your kitchen table, writing a $3,750 check to the IRS every three months. The pain was immediate and visceral. Politicians faced constant pressure to justify every dollar because citizens felt the extraction in real time.

Withholding transforms this concrete loss into an abstract accounting entry. Your employer becomes an unpaid tax collector, and you never experience the actual cost of government. Worse, most people celebrate their tax refunds as government generosity rather than recognizing them as interest-free loans they provided to politicians. The Treasury collects your money throughout the year, spends it immediately, then returns your own cash and receives gratitude.

This system enables the explosion in government spending you witness today. Defense contractors billing $640 for toilet seats, agricultural subsidies for corn syrup, and congressional salaries for 535 people who rarely show up to work. When taxation feels painless, voters stop demanding accountability for how their money gets spent.

Milton Friedman helped design withholding as a wartime emergency measure and later called it his greatest regret. Free market economists recognized that the psychological pain of direct taxation creates political pressure for fiscal restraint. The temporary always becomes permanent in government hands, and the emergency justification disappears while the extraction mechanism remains forever.

[Robert W Malone, MD @RWMaloneMD]

Federal prosecutors just charged an NIH virologist with smuggling biological materials into the United States.

His name is Vincent Munster. He's not a minor scientist. He runs the Virus Ecology Section at one of the government's premier BSL-4 labs.

This is bigger than a customs charge. Thread 🧵

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

US foreign aid spending is like watering the neighbor’s yard while your house is on fire. 🔥

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

Socialism says: "You owe me."
Capitalism says: "What can I offer you in exchange?"
It's hard to find a clearer distinction between a zero sum mindset and one based on mutual benefit.

[Liam McCollum @MLiamMcCollum]

Donald Trump may have made a huge mistake by not appointing Thomas Massie as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, as was floated after the 2024 election.

Trump had the opportunity to sideline Massie in some department and ignore his priorities, as he's done with RFK Jr. and did with Tulsi, or he could have even fired him, as he did with Elon. But he decided to make a martyr out of him instead.

Every single person who was a part of the coalition that got Donald Trump elected and then subsequently joined the admin will struggle to gain trust with the same voters and podcast circuit they gained in 2024.

Thomas Massie, on the other hand, has stayed consistent and on principle the entire time. He kept his integrity, and he was willing to keep on telling the truth about the Epstein files, foreign aid, and AIPAC, even if it meant he would lose his own seat.

I can't think of a single person who has it teed up better for 2028, and his opposition did it to themselves.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Prices are critical information without an economy cannot function

[Connor Boyack 📚 @cboyack]

The case against state power isn't necessarily that the wrong people hold it. It's that no one should hold that much of it, including the people you agree with.

[Connor Boyack 📚 @cboyack]

Capitalism made the poor rich enough to be called middle class.
Socialism makes the middle class poor enough to be called equal.

[Saifedean Ammous @saifedean]

Fun fact of the day:

If you don't think inflation has been the biggest problem in the world over the last century, you have been miseducated by people who get paid by inflation.

[Adam Livingston @AdamBLiv]

You start reading weird books.

You buy “The Bitcoin Standard” and then “The Fiat Standard” and then you accidentally end up reading Murray Rothbard, and then somehow you’re reading Mises, and then it’s 11:47 PM on a Tuesday and you’re 340 pages into “Human Action” and you’re highlighting passages about praxeology and your wife comes downstairs and asks if you’re coming to bed and you say “in a minute” but you don’t come to bed for two hours because you have just discovered that everything you were taught about economics in college was wrong, all of it, every single sentence, and now you can’t go back, you can never go back, you have been orange-pilled in a way that goes deeper than money, you have been epistemologically orange-pilled, you now believe that John Maynard Keynes was a charlatan and the gold standard was actually fine and the income tax is theft and you can never say any of this out loud at a dinner party ever again.

[Nick shirley @nickshirleyy]

CBS News said there was no evidence of fraud.

The NYT said the Somali community was being targeted

CNN said there was "little evidence."

Tim Walz said it was “white supremacy” to expose fraud

Today: $90M busted and 15 charged.

IT WAS ALL FRAUD AND THEY KNEW.

[Handre @Handre]

NASA spent $23 billion developing the Space Launch System. SpaceX built Falcon Heavy for $500 million. Same payload capacity to orbit.

You watch bureaucrats optimize for Congressional districts, not rockets. Every SLS component gets manufactured in a different state (pure political math). SpaceX optimizes for physics and cost per kilogram. When politicians control capital allocation, the result is jobs programs disguised as space exploration.

Private capital forces brutal efficiency. Lose money on rockets? You're done. NASA loses money? Congress writes another check. Musk had three chances to get Falcon 1 working before bankruptcy. Government contractors get cost-plus deals that reward failure.

[Duopoly Destroyer @realnikohouse]

Thomas Massie introduced legislation to force AIPAC to register as a foreign agent.

And AIPAC got rid of him.

Sorta proving his point there, huh?

[Connor Boyack 📚 @cboyack]

"Affordable housing" programs make housing less affordable.
"Affordable healthcare" programs make healthcare less affordable.
Notice the pattern…

[Anti NWO 🇺🇸🇮🇹🇺🇸 @Anti__NWO]

Thomas Massie has the highest lifetime career score on the Freedom Index...
A 99!
The Freedom Index measures voting records against the Constitution...
And the GOP did everything to get rid of him..

Really think about that..

[Thomas Massie for Congress @MassieforKY]

I lost the election but we started a revolution. Keep the flame of LIBERTY burning my friends! I will continue to put People and Principles before Party. America First! 🇺🇸

[Connor Boyack 📚 @cboyack]

Politicians are the last people who will ever free you.

They are the product of the culture, not the cause of it.

Stop begging the symptom to cure the disease.

[Seamus (FreedomToons) @seamus_coughlin]

I invest 1 dollar. Inflation happens. Now everything that once cost 1 dollar costs 2 dollars. So my stock is now worth 2 dollars.

I sell the stock. The government says I profited 1 dollar. They tax me on it.

But I didn't profit. I broke even while they destroyed the dollar.

[Jack Hunter @jackhunter74]

Thomas Massie is exactly the kind of citizen-leader the Founders envisioned.

The man who beat him is purely a creature of foreign interests, exactly what George Washington warned about in his farewell address.

Happy 250th.

[Connor Boyack 📚 @cboyack]

Every dollar the government spends "helping" the poor passes through a payroll of people who are not poor and who have no incentive to ever let them stop being poor.