Rock Chartrand

I spend most of my time on X trying to save socialists from themselves.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

Everyone claims to want people fed, housed, educated, and treated with dignity. That's the easiest moral position imaginable, requiring neither thought nor effort.

The sincerity of that commitment is revealed by whether you're willing to examine what actually achieves those outcomes, what undermines them, and at whose expense.

By the socialist standard, even forced labor can be justified in pursuit of these goals, and even policies producing the opposite results can be defended as virtuous.

Virtue signaling earns applause for good intentions. Genuine concern demands understanding, evidence, and results. Far too many seem content with the applause.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

There's some truth to the claim that Ayn Rand's villains aren't realistic today.

But that's mostly because she gave them more intelligence, subtlety, and shame than their modern counterparts possess.

Rand portrayed villains who rationalized coercion as compassion, envy as justice, and the sacrifice of productive individuals as a moral obligation.

Today, they openly demand these things, applaud one another for doing so, and congratulate themselves on their moral superiority.

What Rand dramatized as a warning has become ordinary political rhetoric.

Her villains weren't unrealistic because they were too evil. If anything, she underestimated how shamelessly their philosophy could be embraced.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

Compound interest isn't a contradiction of capitalism. It's mathematics, and apparently mathematics becomes oppression when it exposes the consequences of your decisions.

Debt doesn't inevitably grow exponentially. That's what happens when interest accumulates faster than you repay it.

Someone lends you money they could have spent or invested elsewhere, assumes the risk of never seeing it again, and expects compensation.

You voluntarily borrow it, agree to the terms, enjoy the benefits, and then declare yourself a victim when you're expected to honor your obligations.

And lending doesn't prevent productive investment. It's one of the principal means by which productive investment becomes possible.

But apparently, being too stupid to think long-term, too shameless to accept responsibility, and too dishonorable to honor your agreements is a structural failure of capitalism.

And your solution? Force someone else to suffer and sacrifice for your decisions.

You want the benefits of borrowing without the obligations of repayment, while condemning the very people who made borrowing possible.

No one owes you anything for your poor decisions.

The parasitism isn't in lending money at interest. It's in demanding that others sacrifice their property to relieve you of obligations you voluntarily assumed.

[Liger @EdbieLigerSmith]

The “miracle” of compounding interest.

This is possibly the most fundamental contradiction in modern capitalism. Debt grows exponentially while income does not.

Therefore, how are people supposed to pay off their debts?

Modern economists simply ignore this, and grifter financial advisors like Caleb Hammer & Dave Ramsey individualize the debt problem by claiming it’s the result of personal lifestyle decisions.

In reality, the problem is entirely structural. The richest people in our society make money by loaning money at interest. Then they use the money they receive in loan payments to issue even more loans.

This steadily grows the debt burden which acts as economic overhead draining societal wealth and ensuring that it isn’t invested in anything productive. What’s accumulated is not real tangible capital, as occurred during the Industrial Revolution, but fictitious capital in the form of paper or digital money.

A more backwards and parasitic economy than this could scarcely be imagined.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

Compound interest isn't a contradiction of capitalism. It's mathematics, and apparently mathematics becomes oppression when it exposes the consequences of your decisions.

Debt doesn't inevitably grow exponentially. That's what happens when interest accumulates faster than you repay it.

Someone lends you money they could have spent or invested elsewhere, assumes the risk of never seeing it again, and expects compensation.

You voluntarily borrow it, agree to the terms, enjoy the benefits, and then declare yourself a victim when you're expected to honor your obligations.

And lending doesn't prevent productive investment. It's one of the principal means by which productive investment becomes possible.

But apparently, being too stupid to think long-term, too shameless to accept responsibility, and too dishonorable to honor your agreements is a structural failure of capitalism.

And your solution? Force someone else to suffer and sacrifice for your decisions.

You want the benefits of borrowing without the obligations of repayment, while condemning the very people who made borrowing possible.

No one owes you anything for your poor decisions.

The parasitism isn't in lending money at interest. It's in demanding that others sacrifice their property to relieve you of obligations you voluntarily assumed.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

@mcsquared34 At least you've figured out that it's a luxury which is better than pretending it's a right

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

@BigWhale777777 @JamesTate121 The politicians you're simping for will fuck you though

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

“Greed is not good,” says the man who has spent his entire political career obsessing over other people’s money and demanding more of it.

The billionaires he condemns generally accumulated their wealth by supplying what people voluntarily demanded. Bernie demands their wealth through government coercion, promising solutions that routinely make life more expensive.

Apparently, earning money by satisfying people's wants is greed, while confiscating it to satisfy political ambitions is compassion.

Ideas so good that your consent, your choices, and your freedom to refuse need not even be considered.

In a just world, Bernie would be ridiculed into silence by the sheer embarrassment of his own hypocrisy.

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Bernie Sanders: “Greed is not good. Love and compassion is good. Empathy is good. Billionaires who have more money than they can spend in a thousand lifetimes say I need more and more and more and I don’t care what happens to ordinary people. We have got to take that on full steam ahead”

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

“Greed is not good,” says the man who has spent his entire political career obsessing over other people’s money and demanding more of it.

The billionaires he condemns generally accumulated their wealth by supplying what people voluntarily demanded. Bernie demands their wealth through government coercion, promising solutions that routinely make life more expensive.

Apparently, earning money by satisfying people's wants is greed, while confiscating it to satisfy political ambitions is compassion.

Ideas so good that your consent, your choices, and your freedom to refuse need not even be considered.

In a just world, Bernie would be ridiculed into silence by the sheer embarrassment of his own hypocrisy.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

The difference is that you weren't enslaved, and nobody alive today enslaved you.

A stolen watch has an identifiable owner and a thief. You want to replace individual guilt with inherited guilt and individual rights with racial entitlement.

You're not seeking justice. You're seeking to profit from ancestral victimhood by making innocent people pay for crimes they never committed.

That's racism masquerading as justice.

[Dawn Butler ✊🏾💙 @DawnButlerBrent]

A stolen watch doesn’t become yours just because you pass it down to your children. So why apply a different rule to stolen labour, wealth and land? Reparations are about inherited benefit and inherited loss. Time doesn’t erase injustice.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

The difference is that you weren't enslaved, and nobody alive today enslaved you.

A stolen watch has an identifiable owner and a thief. You want to replace individual guilt with inherited guilt and individual rights with racial entitlement.

You're not seeking justice. You're seeking to profit from ancestral victimhood by making innocent people pay for crimes they never committed.

That's racism masquerading as justice.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

@InfraHaz Communism at best replaces one parasite with another

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

If food weren't grown for profit, most of it would never be produced in the first place. People would largely grow food for themselves and their families.

Profit is precisely what incentivizes people to produce food for complete strangers.

What communists are actually demanding is that someone else grow, harvest, process, and deliver their food without expecting anything in return.

They don't object to exploitation. They object to having to compensate the people whose labor keeps them alive.

Their ideal farmer isn't an entrepreneur. He's a slave whose only reward is another list of demands and sacrifices.

What could go wrong?

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

If food weren't grown for profit, most of it would never be produced in the first place. People would largely grow food for themselves and their families.

Profit is precisely what incentivizes people to produce food for complete strangers.

What communists are actually demanding is that someone else grow, harvest, process, and deliver their food without expecting anything in return.

They don't object to exploitation. They object to having to compensate the people whose labor keeps them alive.

Their ideal farmer isn't an entrepreneur. He's a slave whose only reward is another list of demands and sacrifices.

What could go wrong?

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

If you're complaining that your problems are caused by someone else getting a tax cut, you're effectively admitting that you believe you're entitled to their money.

You're not objecting to being robbed. You're objecting to someone else being robbed less because you expect to live off the proceeds.

That's not fighting exploitation. That's demanding to be subsidized by the people you accuse of exploiting you.

And the irony of calling those people parasites seems entirely lost on you.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

Americans can't even get healthcare with all the cuts to funding going to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

There are large swaths of people who seek to exploit others' emotions, ignorance, and tribal allegiances to advance agendas that ultimately harm the very people supporting them.

That's all the more reason to embrace reason, independent thought, genuine education, and inconvenient truths, even when they're uncomfortable.

And by education, I mean learning how to think, not being taught what to think. Much of public education today deserves scrutiny on precisely that distinction.

Reason isn't merely a tool for understanding the world. It's your best defense against those who would manipulate you into participating in your own destruction.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

What Bernie conveniently ignores is that human beings survive extreme climates largely because of affordable, reliable energy, overwhelmingly supplied by fossil fuels.

Air conditioning, heating, modern agriculture, transportation, and infrastructure save countless lives.

Yet Bernie champions policies that would restrict the very energy sources that make these protections possible.

The goal of climate catastrophists increasingly seems less about making the planet livable for human beings than protecting the planet from human beings.

The irony is that Bernie himself has lived nearly 85 years in a civilization made possible in no small part by the fossil fuels he now demonizes.

Human flourishing should be the standard, not an untouched planet purchased at humanity's expense.

[Sen. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders]

Climate change killed 32,000+ people in Europe this summer.

Trump believes this crisis is a "hoax." Republicans in Congress are following their "Great Leader.”

NO to Trump’s fossil fuel agenda. YES to creating millions of jobs by moving our energy system away from fossil fuels.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

What Bernie conveniently ignores is that human beings survive extreme climates largely because of affordable, reliable energy, overwhelmingly supplied by fossil fuels.

Air conditioning, heating, modern agriculture, transportation, and infrastructure save countless lives.

Yet Bernie champions policies that would restrict the very energy sources that make these protections possible.

The goal of climate catastrophists increasingly seems less about making the planet livable for human beings than protecting the planet from human beings.

The irony is that Bernie himself has lived nearly 85 years in a civilization made possible in no small part by the fossil fuels he now demonizes.

Human flourishing should be the standard, not an untouched planet purchased at humanity's expense.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

Capitalism is the only economic system founded on the recognition of individual rights, including the right to life.

What socialists seem to oppose isn't working to live. It's having to work to live while demanding that others be forced to work so they can live.

Or perhaps they imagine abolishing capitalism will somehow abolish reality itself, ushering in a magical world where consumption no longer requires production.

Someone must produce what you consume. Capitalism allows them to do so voluntarily. Socialism claims the authority to compel them.

The difference isn't whether people must work. It's whether they own their lives and labor.

[Russell @ATLCWorker]

I have to agree with her

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

Capitalism is the only economic system founded on the recognition of individual rights, including the right to life.

What socialists seem to oppose isn't working to live. It's having to work to live while demanding that others be forced to work so they can live.

Or perhaps they imagine abolishing capitalism will somehow abolish reality itself, ushering in a magical world where consumption no longer requires production.

Someone must produce what you consume. Capitalism allows them to do so voluntarily. Socialism claims the authority to compel them.

The difference isn't whether people must work. It's whether they own their lives and labor.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

The irony is that communists still imagine themselves leading a workers' revolution when their ideology demands that workers surrender control over their labor, their property, and ultimately their lives to the state.

They call capitalists the class enemy while demanding a political ruling class with powers no capitalist could ever legitimately exercise.

They aren't fighting to liberate workers from masters. They're fighting over who gets to be the master.

[Rainer Shea ☭ @rainer_shea]

France is a prelude to the next wave of workers revolutions, where the class enemy’s present offensive will backfire.