Steven Haskett

Free speech, free markets, free people.

[Handre @Handre]

Rome handed out free grain to 40,000 citizens in 73 BC. By 46 BC, Julius Caesar found 320,000 people lining up for their monthly ration. That eight-fold expansion happened in under three decades, and it shows you how welfare states actually grow.

No Roman senator stood up and announced a plan to addict a third of the city to government bread. It happened incrementally, through political competition. Each magistrate who wanted votes expanded eligibility. Each expansion normalized the next one. The citizen who once considered the dole shameful eventually expected it, then demanded it, then organized politically to protect it.

This is the core mechanism free market thinkers have identified across every era: once you create a transfer program, you create a constituency for that program. Recipients vote. Administrators build careers. Grain merchants who supply the state develop a stake in keeping the contracts flowing. The political economy locks in.

Caesar, to his credit, actually cut the rolls back to 150,000 through verification audits. It was one of his more economically coherent moves, though the Senate still murdered him. His successors quietly let the numbers climb again.

What did the dole require? Massive grain imports from Sicily, Sardinia, and Egypt, organized through state logistics at state expense, funded by taxation and conquest. When the conquest revenue dried up, the obligation remained. Rome had written a check against future military success, and future military success eventually failed to arrive.

The lesson is not complicated. Distribute a benefit and you distribute dependency. Distribute dependency and you distribute political power to whoever controls the distribution. The grain dole didn't weaken Rome overnight, but it made every subsequent reform politically impossible.

[Steven Haskett @StevenHaskett]

@LoewyLawFirm How do you go broke? Slowly, then all at once.

[Steven Haskett @StevenHaskett]

Simplified: “It’s hard to clearly explain how complicated homelessness is and how the systems help. Local and national programs struggle to make the numbers easy for people to understand. The City will keep working to show where money goes, what it achieves, and the good work of its partners. People feel more confident when they see fewer neighbors living on the streets.”
Translation: We have no way of knowing, but we’d like you to think we’re doing something good. If only you would stop noticing the obvious.

[Steven Haskett @StevenHaskett]

@ArrestedAustin The poor persons hot dog bun!

[Steven Haskett @StevenHaskett]

Even before construction I called it the world’s most expensive homeless shelter. Libraries are great places to hang out. Internet access, and even more so for readers. Air conditioned, clean restrooms.

[ATX Crazy Train 🇺🇲 @AustinCrazyTrn]

@data_atx @Savsays @ATXVideos COA has really messed up our libraries with the homeless. We don't need social workers to take care of them in the libraries, we need security to remove them. Deliver to a social worker offsite if they can help.

[Steven Haskett @StevenHaskett]

Programs like @AngelFlightSC, which relies on private pilots donating their time and aircraft to get rural patients to treatment centers relies on the public-use airport network. There's nothing else like it in the world.

[Steven Haskett @StevenHaskett]

The US has more than 5200 public-use airports. This is unique in the world, the next closest is Canada with 379. Mexico, ranked 14th, has 77.

[Steven Haskett @StevenHaskett]

If you add in private airstrips (ranches, etc.) the number rises to more than 19,000.

[Steven Haskett @StevenHaskett]

@elonmusk Room for a runway?

[Bill Aleshire @AleshireLaw]

To @TravisCoJudge @KirkPWatson
I invite you to share this with your colleagues:

In the next week or so, social service agencies have arranged to have folks testify at your meetings and flood you with emails and phone calls lobbying you to give them more tax money in your upcoming budgets. The City has decided to exempt these organizations from your vendor anti-lobbying rules and they even used their nonprofit organization public funds to directly contribute campaign contributions to passage of Prop Q last Fall.

These are people who, for many years, have leveraged public funds to build political influence affecting elections to the county commissioners court and city council elections. So, they help elect city/county politicians, so those politicians would give them more tax money.

Be mindful that when they present the heart-tugging sad-sack stories of their inability to afford what they want, when you increase taxes, you are forcefully taking away money from those households and small businesses of money they earned to block them from using that money for what they want.

Austin has become a giant welfare state. Social service agencies here get a bigger share of their funding from city/county money, by far than comparable agencies in other Texas cities,e.,g., Houston. Anytime someone looks closely at whether the Travis/Austin social service funding is producing valuable and efficient and effective results, we see that is not the case.

So, here’s my point: Regardless of any heartfelt sincere desire to spend county or city taxes charitably because you feel a moral obligation to do so, remember This: There is No moral purpose to forcefully taking taxes away from people to waste it. Even if it helps you get re-elected. And if that’s why you are doing it, damn you to Hell.

[Steven Haskett @StevenHaskett]

No lies detected.
This has been clear to me my entire adult life. Is it possible it’s news to anybody?

[Nick Freitas @NickJFreitas]

"Why do prices keep going up?"

I'd be happy to explain why prices keep going up...Inflationary monetary policy.

"Why do we have inflationary monetary policy?"

Well, there are a lot of reasons, but the primary one is that politicians really like to spend money, because it's an easy way to buy votes. The problem is politicians don't make money, so they have to get it through one of 3 primary ways...

1. They can tax...which is how they get most of it, but there is a point where taxation has diminishing returns because taxing someone too much leads to a lack of productivity or avoidance strategies.

2. They can borrow...which is one of their favorites because it allows them to kick the can down the road when it comes to actually paying for things; the problem is that at some point the government's credit isn't very good, and people don't want to voluntarily loan them money anymore.

3. They can print it...which is what we have been doing for a long time now. It's especially damaging because when the government prints a bunch of money to spend, it doesn't immediately cause all the prices to go up, so when the government spends the money, they are getting close to the full value of the dollar at the time that it is spent...it is only after the new paper dollars have started to circulate without a corresponding increase in supply that more dollars are competing over the same amount of goods and services and thus the prices go up, because the value of each dollar has gone down through money printing ie. "inflationary monetary policy."

Eventually the inflation gets so bad that they have to stop printing and spending, but that only decreases inflation; it doesn't end it, so prices don't go down to where they were; they simply stop increasing at the previous rate.

"Well, why don't they fix it?"

Because it would cause the economy to significantly, albeit temporarily, tank, and then whatever party was not in charge would blame the party that was in charge, and the citizens suffering the most from inflationary monetary policy would punish the party that stopped the inflationary monetary policy.

"So what's the answer?"

Well...the American people could start getting a lot more educated and concerned about the dangers of fiat currency combined with an ever-expanding welfare state and economic central planning, or the system can keep going until it reaches a critical mass, collapses, and we go through a lot more pain than would have otherwise been required...

[Steven Haskett @StevenHaskett]

@libsoftiktok @CentralWashU @AAGDhillon I really like Nick’s geology lectures and videos. Sure hate to see him fall into this trap.

[Steven Haskett @StevenHaskett]

@LoewyLawFirm @HEB Free T-shirts!

[Steven Haskett @StevenHaskett]

@Thenutward @AkkadSecretary No. It’s a good place to earn money, especially if you’re the type that can live well within your means.

[Steven Haskett @StevenHaskett]

Never forget

[KanekoaTheGreat @KanekoaTheGreat]

🚨Fauci’s own diary just dropped.

Feb 1, 2020. The secret call that produced "Proximal Origin."

12 scientists on the line.

Only 2 thought the virus was natural.

The other 10 — per Fauci's own notes — "felt that deliberate insertion was possible."

They flagged Shi Zhengli's gain-of-function work on coronaviruses in Wuhan by name.

8 days later, Fauci went on Newt Gingrich's podcast:

"I've heard these conspiracy theories. And like all conspiracy theories, Newt, they're just conspiracy theories."

Then Facebook and Twitter banned you for saying the same thing his own scientists were telling him privately.

[Steven Haskett @StevenHaskett]

@DutchRojas Until we have a single payer/single provider system, and achieve healthcare utopia. It’s just never been done right.

[Steven Haskett @StevenHaskett]

@DutchRojas Notice who is not at the negotiating table.

[Steven Haskett @StevenHaskett]

@JesseKellyDC IOW, about the rate of inflation due to deficit spending. Unfortunately, spending more than you bring in is the biggest area of bipartisan agreement.

[Steven Haskett @StevenHaskett]

@RogerSeheult It’s time to catch up with…Mexico?