Anton Liubich

⚙️ Economist |
✝️ Christian | Conservative | Pro-capitalism |
📚 Author of Real Economics & Money |
💲 19 years in Private Equity |

[Anton Liubich @antonliubich]

Most economics education is useless for real life. It teaches models, not judgment. Curves, not crises.

In March 2022, weeks after hostilities in Ukraine began, I walked into a Dubai mall and saw long lines of Russians cycling through bank cards at ATMs — many no longer working.

Old joke: two men meet a bear. One stops to put on running shoes.
“You think you can outrun the bear?”
“I don’t need to outrun the bear. I just need to outrun you.”

Those people in the mall couldn’t control the bear.

[Anton Liubich @antonliubich]

@rxhit05 Come back to agriculture

[Anton Liubich @antonliubich]

@pameelaposada 💯

A right you can’t afford to use isn’t a right.

[Anton Liubich @antonliubich]

@EduardHabsburg Congratulations!

[Anton Liubich @antonliubich]

@enjojoyy I met him once, in person. In Moscow, more than ten years ago, in Michael Calvey’s office. Both are prominent entrepreneurs and visionaries. Calvey’s fate, too, turned out to be deeply troubled.

[Anton Liubich @antonliubich]

@Handre Miracles are happening, my boy 🤣

[Anton Liubich @antonliubich]

🇮🇸 Capitalism = private profit + private loss

🇮🇪 Capitalism ≠ private profit + public loss

[Handre @Handre]

Two small island economies blew up in 2008. Iceland and Ireland. Their names differ by one letter, and their handling of the crisis differed by everything that matters.

Iceland's three big banks, Kaupthing, Landsbanki, and Glitnir, had grown assets to roughly ten times the country's GDP by 2008. Pure credit-fueled madness. When the music stopped, the Icelandic government did the unthinkable: it let them fail. Bondholders ate the losses. The state refused to socialize private bank debt onto 320,000 citizens who never signed up for it. Capital controls went up, the króna collapsed, and the politicians actually prosecuted bankers. Twenty-six of them went to prison. Sigurður Einarsson and Hreiðar Már Sigurðsson, the men who ran Kaupthing, served real sentences.

Ireland took the opposite road. In September 2008, the Irish government issued a blanket guarantee covering the liabilities of its major banks, including Anglo Irish Bank, a property-lending casino that should have been allowed to die in peace. The taxpayer absorbed the bill. By the time the rescue ended, Ireland had poured around 64 billion euros into its banks, roughly 40 percent of GDP. The state took on private gambling debts, then went to the Troika in 2010 hat in hand for an 85 billion euro bailout, and accepted years of austerity to pay for losses it had no business owning.

Both economies recovered. Both eventually grew again. The difference is who paid and who learned. Iceland made creditors and reckless bankers bear the consequences of their own decisions, which is the entire point of capitalism: profit and loss, not profit and bailout. Ireland protected the people who made the bad bets and handed the invoice to schoolteachers and shopkeepers.

You will hear economists call Ireland's GDP rebound a triumph (much of that "growth" is multinational accounting fiction, Leprechaun economics, but that's another lesson). What they skip is the moral architecture. When you guarantee bank liabilities, you abolish the discipline that makes markets work. You tell every banker in the country that downside is optional.

Iceland jailed its bankers. Ireland reimbursed theirs.

[Anton Liubich @antonliubich]

@ASag34213043 It seems like very close!👍🏻

[Anton Liubich @antonliubich]

I live in Dubai.
Drop your city. One word. How far this actually reaches?

[Anton Liubich @antonliubich]

Fair deal.

Most interesting, this idea is fully compliant with the economic nature of power that I explain in my book Real Economics:

those who hold power take their share of the pie and refrain from doing harm.

[Rick Rule @RealRickRule]

double their pay, but prohibit them from coming to work, at all. Much cheaper solution

[Anton Liubich @antonliubich]

@RealRickRule Fair deal

[Anton Liubich @antonliubich]

A brilliant text for understanding the intellectual roots of Communism–Leftism–Wokeism. Still, I have to draw your attention to one word used here inappropriately: the West.

Evil recognizes no political borders. Yesterday it acted through the hands of the East. Today it can move to the West.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

What the West Still Doesn’t Get It:

Communism’s True Core: The Systemic Lie

Most people in the West think they understand communism. They picture bread lines, gulags, failed five-year plans, and the collapsed Soviet Union. They treat it as a discredited economic theory – an experiment that proved that abolishing private property doesn’t work. Case closed, history moved on.

This misunderstanding may be the most dangerous intellectual failure of our time.

Communism was never primarily an economic system. Economics was the surface. Beneath it lay something far more insidious: a total, systemic, institutionalized commitment to lying. Not occasional dishonesty. Not spin or propaganda in the ordinary sense. Something deeper – a civilizational war against truth itself, waged through every institution, every classroom, every newspaper, every conversation, until reality itself became negotiable and the lie became the air people breathed.

The Words We’re Missing

The Polish language, forged by decades of living under this system, produced words for this phenomenon that English simply cannot match:

Zakłamanie [zah-kwah-MAH-nyeh] – a state of total, pervasive, socially embedded falsehood, a condition in which an entire society is saturated with lies so thoroughly that truth becomes almost inaccessible.
Obłuda [ob-woo-dah] – a deep, performative hypocrisy, the gap between what is proclaimed and what is actually practiced, the mask worn so long it begins to feel like a face.

These are not words for individual liars. They describe a system – a mode of social organization built on organized mendacity, where the lie is not the exception but the foundation. English has no single word for either concept, and that linguistic gap is not a coincidence. It reflects a gap in experience. Cultures that did not live under communism lack the vocabulary because they lack the wound.

And because they lack the vocabulary, they struggle to recognize the thing when it reappears in new clothing.

The Continuity: Communism, Leftism, Wokeism

What we call wokeism today, or the broader radical left, is not a new phenomenon. It is the same operating system running on updated hardware. The specifics have changed – instead of the proletariat, we have marginalized identity groups; instead of bourgeois class enemies, we have racists and transphobes; instead of socialist realism, we have DEI statements. But the deep structure is the same.

That deep structure is this: truth is not discovered, it is assigned. Reality is not something to be understood honestly but something to be narrated strategically. Language is not a tool for communication but a weapon of power. And anyone who resists the approved narrative is not simply wrong – they are dangerous, and must be silenced, shamed, or destroyed.

This is zakłamanie in its modern form. This is obłuda wearing a human rights badge.

The same movement that insists men can become women will insist, with equal fervor, that questioning this is an act of violence. The same institutions that claim to champion free inquiry systematically suppress dissent. The same people who invoke tolerance as their highest value are among the most intolerant forces in public life. The contradiction is not accidental – it is structural. It is the system working as designed.

Why the West Still Doesn’t Get It

People who grew up in freedom tend to assume, at some level, that bad actors know they are lying. That somewhere behind the ideological performance, there is a cynical operator who privately acknowledges reality. This assumption is wrong, and it is why Westerners consistently underestimate what they are dealing with.

The totalitarian lie, at its mature stage, is not cynical. It is believed. Or rather, it creates a condition in which the distinction between belief and performance collapses entirely. People learn to say things they do not believe so fluently, and for so long, that they lose access to what they actually think.

1/2

[Anton Liubich @antonliubich]

And it hands society one more person whose opinion just got heavy.

“I wish everyone well” is free.
Under the weight of real responsibility, it hardens into judgment — the kind that doesn’t evaporate into the air, but lands on the world and leaves a mark.

[Anton Liubich @antonliubich]

Four guys. One #AI startup. ~$2.7 billion each.

They met at #MIT, built a coding tool called #Cursor, and last week SpaceX bought it for $60 billion. The same #IPO turned 4,400 #SpaceX employees into millionaires — engineers, welders, cafeteria workers.

What does that kind of money actually buy? Not what you think.

[Anton Liubich @antonliubich]

This is what separates a billion from a participation trophy.

A plaque says “thank you.”
A billion says “go ahead — change something.”

One makes noise. The other moves the world.

[Anton Liubich @antonliubich]

@TTrimoreau To create vision.

To be able to check up the result.

[Anton Liubich @antonliubich]

@AlessiaBaumgar Excellent choice 👌🏻 Congratulations!

[Anton Liubich @antonliubich]

@mysteriouskat Emirati 🇦🇪.