You told people to boycott restaurants in favor of illegal street vendors. Your regulations and taxes are crushing small business.
You're a 36 year career politician with no clue how hard you've made it to actually run a small business in California, you ridiculous charlatan.
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Thank you to @LAGovJeffLandry and the great people of Louisiana for all of their support as we work together on this audacious project → https://t.co/zGKVOGSxfW
A student stands up in a Stanford lecture hall in 1979 and calls poverty a market failure. He is calm, he is prepared, and he has just handed the man on stage the exact opening he wanted.
What happens next was clipped, titled, and watched 700 thousand times. Almost nobody has seen the hour it came out of.
The exchange is worth studying with the sound off. The student is arguing a position. The professor is doing something else entirely, and he does it before answering anything.
He does not dispute the facts. He accepts them, then asks 1 question about a word the student used without defining it, and the whole argument reorganises around that word.
That move is the transferable part, and it has nothing to do with economics. Find the moment he decides which word to isolate, because everything after that is already decided.
@GavinNewsom That’s fine. Just follow these simple rules:
From the ruling:
-Turn over a list of every voter getting a ballot
-Put unique serialized barcodes on both the outgoing and return envelopes
If a state refuses, USPS will not deliver those ballots.
47% of government spending is on some form of welfare. Only 8% is on defense.
Reducing welfare spending is profoundly difficult politically...but it must be done or we will go the way of Rome.
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.