Handre

The ideal size of any governent is always smaller than it is now. I give you daily examples why.

[Handre @Handre]

https://t.co/1ijgCINfNo

[Handre @Handre]

@ryderse69 The effects of monetary inflation runs deep.

[Handre @Handre]

The Federal Reserve creates $4 trillion in new money, yet your grocery bill barely budges while Nvidia stock doubles in six months. Welcome to the most insidious form of inflation: when newly printed dollars bypass consumer prices and flow directly into financial assets.

You won't see this wealth transfer reflected in the Consumer Price Index. The CPI measures bread and gasoline, not Bitcoin and Berkshire Hathaway. Meanwhile, the Fed's money printing operation sends fresh liquidity straight to primary dealers, who park those dollars in stocks, bonds, and real estate. Asset owners get richer. Wage earners watch their purchasing power erode in real terms, even as official inflation statistics claim everything is fine.

This creates a vicious feedback loop that sound money advocates have warned about for decades. Cheap credit inflates asset bubbles, which the Fed then feels compelled to support with even more money printing. Each cycle makes the wealth gap wider. The Tesla shareholder benefits from artificially suppressed interest rates. The school teacher saving in a checking account gets destroyed by financial repression.

The establishment calls this "quantitative easing" and pretends it's different from old-fashioned money printing. Expanding the money supply faster than real economic growth means that new money has to go somewhere. Since 2008, it has systematically flowed into assets that wealthy people own rather than goods that working people buy.

Your 401(k) might look healthy, but you're watching monetary debasement in real time. The stock market is booming because dollars are dramatically less scarce, not because companies are dramatically more productive.

If you can, buy stocks, bitcoin, property, or gold. This makes you a beneficiary of this phenominon, not a victim.

[Handre @Handre]

Today on Hard Money, Hard Truths, I am joined by @TedJButler from @SoundMoneyRpt for a discussion about... sound money! Set your reminders!

[Roxom TV @RoxomTV]

TODAY: Hard Money, Hard Truths with @Handre

A Roxom Spaces focused on Bitcoin, macro, markets and the ideas shaping the future of hard money.

2:30 PM ET. Don’t miss it.

[Handre @Handre]

@mcgillmd921 The Nr.1 most under-appreciated Roman, of course...

[Handre @Handre]

South Africa's ANC government spent R787 billion on "stimulus" packages between 2019 and 2023, promising to revive growth and fix the country's crumbling infrastructure. The electricity grid collapsed anyway. GDP growth averaged 0.7% annually during this period while load-shedding reached record highs of 12 hours per day in 2023.

You cannot spend your way out of structural problems. South Africa's electricity crisis stems from decades of government interference. The government nationalized electricity generation through Eskom, banned private power producers for years, and appointed politically connected managers who couldn't keep the lights on. When reality hit, their solution was predictable: throw more taxpayer money at the mess they created.

Every rand the state borrows and spends gets pulled from the private sector, where entrepreneurs might have allocated it toward actual productive uses. Instead of allowing private companies to build power plants and compete for customers, the ANC doubled down on central planning. They funded more Eskom bailouts, more "green energy" subsidies, more infrastructure projects managed by the same bureaucrats who broke everything in the first place.

The stimulus spending created jobs, alright: more government positions for ANC cadres, while productive businesses shut down from power outages. Manufacturing dropped 12% in 2022 alone. Mining companies started building their own generators rather than relying on the national grid you pay for through taxes.

Capital flows toward its most valued uses when politicians stay out of the way. When they don't, it flows toward political cronies instead.

[Handre @Handre]

@joonu75 @grok, can you give us a summary of how property rights worked in the Soviet Union?

[Handre @Handre]

One of the most devastating indictments of socialism sits buried in Soviet agricultural statistics: private plots representing just 3% of farmland consistently produced 25-30% of the USSR's total food output. Private ownership generated output that collective ownership could not match, even at vastly smaller scale.

Picture this absurdity. A collective farm worker tends 1,000 acres of state wheat with the enthusiasm of someone filling out tax forms. The same worker then rushes home to lavish attention on his quarter-acre private vegetable patch, working until sunset to coax maximum yield from every square foot. The difference in productivity per acre often reached 10:1 ratios. Sometimes higher.

On collective farms, additional effort generated zero additional reward for the individual worker. Your extra sweat benefited the collective (meaning nobody in particular) while you bore the full cost of that effort. Workers rationally allocated their energy toward their private plots where they captured 100% of marginal returns.

Soviet planners grasped the embarrassing implications and repeatedly restricted private plot sizes and banned certain crops, fearing that obvious productivity comparisons would undermine ideological credibility. The restrictions backfired spectacularly. Every limitation on private plots worsened food shortages and strengthened black market prices.

You can dress up collective ownership in whatever intellectual framework you prefer. You can invoke solidarity, social justice, or the greater good. But you cannot escape the fundamental reality that human beings respond to incentives, and collective ownership systematically destroys the connection between individual effort and individual reward.

[Handre @Handre]

@heavypulp @elonmusk Wait like 6 months, the talking scenes aren't quite there yet. They are really close, though. Excellent work.

[Handre @Handre]

The Bolivian Revolution of 1952 handed us a perfect laboratory for socialism's destructive power. The Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario seized the tin mines that generated 80% of Bolivia's export revenue and systematically destroyd them over twelve years.

Before nationalization, private mining companies like Patiño Mines employed 60,000 workers and produced 35,000 tons of tin annually. The MNR promised worker control and economic justice. Production collapsed to 16,000 tons by 1964 while employment bloated to 75,000. This is the predictable disaster that free market economists would have warned about.

The newly created COMIBOL (Bolivian Mining Corporation) eliminated profit incentives overnight. Mine managers became political appointees who knew nothing about extraction. Workers received guaranteed wages regardless of output, so productivity plummeted 40% within three years. The state couldn't fire anyone (votes matter more than efficiency), so they kept hiring. Mines that once generated foreign currency became permanent fiscal drains requiring subsidies that consumed 30% of government revenue.

You can observe the exact mechanism of destruction: remove private property rights, eliminate price signals, replace entrepreneurial decision-making with bureaucratic committees. The tin was still in the ground. The workers still had hands. But without market incentives coordinating production, the entire system collapsed into organized chaos.

By 1964, Bolivia went from South America's largest tin producer to an international beggar importing food while sitting on mineral wealth. The MNR redistributed poverty with revolutionary efficiency.

[Handre @Handre]

Oh, now we are talking about which is more profitable according to Google? Why didn't you tell me that's what you were talking about from the start? I fully agree with you! You can sell homegrown organic vegetables at farmers' markets for a huge markup. I have many friends who do it, and I often buy such food items myself!

But I don't understand what this has to do with Soviet crop failure?

[Handre @Handre]

@brivael What do your views for these two weeks look like?

[Handre @Handre]

@tpwusername Actually, I know quite a lot about farming. What you posted here is complete horse shit. Industrial-scale farming produces orders of magnitude more than gardeners.

[Handre @Handre]

For three millennia, Mesopotamian civilizations conducted commerce using barley as their primary monetary standard, establishing the longest-running commodity money system in recorded history. From approximately 3000 BCE to the rise of silver coinage around 650 BCE, barley functioned as the unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value across the fertile crescent. The Code of Hammurabi (1750 BCE) codified interest rates, wages, and fines in barley measures, while temple records from Kanesh document complex lending arrangements denominated in barley bushels.

This monetary system emerged through voluntary adoption. Barley possessed the essential properties of sound money: divisibility into standardized measures, durability for storage across seasons, widespread acceptability due to universal demand for food, and relative scarcity that prevented arbitrary inflation. Mesopotamian merchants developed sophisticated banking practices around barley reserves, with temples serving as depositories that issued clay tablets representing specific quantities of stored grain. These tablets circulated as money substitutes, creating an early fractional reserve banking system.

The barley standard imposed natural limits on monetary expansion that modern fiat currencies lack. Kings could not simply decree additional barley into existence; the money supply expanded only through increased agricultural productivity or territorial conquest. When Babylon's rulers attempted to manipulate weights and measures, markets responded by discounting debased barley certificates. Money evolved organically toward commodities with intrinsic value across three thousand years of sustained use.

Archaeological evidence from Nuzi and Nippur reveals that this decentralized monetary order facilitated extensive trade networks spanning from Anatolia to the Persian Gulf without requiring central banking institutions or exchange rate management. Markets determined barley's purchasing power through the interaction of supply and demand, creating price signals that allocated resources efficiently across the ancient world's first complex commercial economy.

[Handre @Handre]

@sandstrom_64498 It does, it's the only thing that creates prosperity. Private property rights have been shown in theory and in practise as a fundamental requirement for a prosperous society. In fact, it’s a prerequisite.

[Handre @Handre]

The Holodomor proves what free market economists have been saying for a century: when you kill price signals, you kill people. Soviet central planners deliberately starved 5 to 7 million Ukrainians and other Soviet citizens in 1932-33, all while exporting grain to maintain their political image abroad.

Stalin's regime had already collectivized agriculture, destroying the kulaks who actually knew how to farm efficiently. Without private property rights or market prices to coordinate production, Soviet agriculture collapsed into chronic shortages. The party then doubled down and seized whatever grain remained from starving peasants.

You can see the pure evil of central planning in the details. While Ukrainians ate bark and grass, Stalin exported 1.7 million tons of grain in 1933 alone. His officials knew exactly what they were doing: they confiscated seed grain needed for the next harvest and posted guards around collective farms to prevent anyone from leaving to find food elsewhere.

The Soviet state created artificial scarcity through price controls, production quotas, and the systematic elimination of private farming. When reality conflicted with their economic plan, they chose to let millions die rather than admit that markets work and socialism kills.

Yet you still hear people today defending "democratic socialism" or claiming central planning just needs better implementation. Every single time someone argues for price controls or government management of food distribution, they're advocating for the same mechanism that murdered those 7 million souls.

[Handre @Handre]

@LawrenceLepard @theswansjr So close to the right side, though.

[Handre @Handre]

Brain rot, cooked, vibe coding, based, unc.

Language develops without committees, central planners, or linguistic authorities mandating proper usage, yet it achieves breathtaking complexity that surpasses any designed system you can imagine.

Consider English. Nobody decreed that "very" would intensify adjectives or that "ing" would mark continuous action. No linguistic Federal Reserve sets rates for new vocabulary. The word "cool" migrated from temperature to approval without a single government directive. Shakespearean English evolved into modern English through millions of individual speakers making marginal adjustments to their communication patterns.

Each speaker acts as an entrepreneur in the marketplace of meaning. You adopt new words when they serve your communicative needs better than existing alternatives. You drop archaic terms when they fail to convey your intended message. The teenager who first used "ghosting" to describe sudden communication cessation succeeded because this term filled a genuine lexical gap. Market forces rewarded precision.

Language demonstrates spontaneous order in its purest form. Complex grammatical structures emerge without conscious design. The subjunctive mood exists because speakers found conditional statements useful, not because grammarians invented conditional logic. Syntax follows patterns that mirror how humans actually process information, refined through countless conversational transactions.

The parallels to market economics become obvious once you notice them. Successful words spread like profitable business models. Regional dialects compete like firms serving local markets. Standard languages function as currencies: widely accepted mediums of exchange that facilitate broader communication networks.

French offers a perfect counterexample. The Académie française has spent centuries trying to centrally plan French vocabulary, rejecting English loanwords and mandating approved terminology. French speakers ignore these edicts daily. They say "weekend" instead of the officially sanctioned "fin de semaine." They use "parking" rather than "stationnement." Market forces triumph over bureaucratic preferences.

Language evolution operates through the same mechanisms that drive economic progress: individual action, voluntary exchange, and competitive selection. Bad words disappear. Good words proliferate. Nobody votes on which metaphors survive or which grammatical innovations deserve adoption. Usage patterns that reflect genuine human preferences regulate the process.

You participate in this process every time you speak. Your word choices shape the evolutionary trajectory of human language itself.

[Handre @Handre]

@RealKeithWeiner Easy peasy. Both are unfair, and neither should exist. Capital gains tax in itself should be abolished.

[Handre @Handre]

The Chicken Tax of 1963 is one of America's most absurd exercises in economic protectionism, disguised as retaliation but functioning as pure corporate welfare for Detroit's Big Three automakers.

You probably think this story begins with chickens. It doesn't. It begins with Volkswagen Beetles flooding American driveways in the late 1950s, terrifying Ford and General Motors executives who watched their market share evaporate to superior German engineering sold at lower prices. American consumers had discovered something revolutionary: foreign manufacturers could build better vehicles for less money.

The chicken angle emerged when West Germany and France imposed tariffs on American poultry exports in 1961. President Johnson's administration, pressured heavily by United Auto Workers lobbyists and Detroit executives, saw an opening. In 1963, they slapped a 25% tariff on imported pickup trucks and commercial vans, ostensibly as retaliation for European chicken tariffs.

The chicken dispute resolved itself within a few years. The truck tariffs remained permanent.

You live with the consequences today, sixty years later. Walk into any Toyota dealership and try to buy a Japanese-built pickup truck. You can't. The Chicken Tax killed that possibility before you were born. Toyota builds the Tacoma in Texas and Mexico to avoid the tariff. Nissan builds the Frontier in Mississippi. Honda doesn't even attempt to compete in the full-size pickup market.

Ford's F-150 has dominated American truck sales for decades, not through superior innovation but through government protection from Japanese and European competition. Detroit convinced politicians to shield them from the creative destruction that would have forced them to improve their products or lose customers to better alternatives.

The numbers tell the story. In 1963, import trucks held roughly 4% of the American market. Today, after sixty years of protection, domestic manufacturers still control about 80% of pickup sales. Tariffs predictably protect inefficient producers within industries at the expense of consumers and efficient competitors. Every American who bought an overpriced, lower-quality domestic truck since 1963 paid this hidden tax.

Free market economists understood this outcome from day one. Tariffs don't protect industries; they protect inefficient producers within industries at the expense of consumers and efficient competitors.

The policy persists because concentrated benefits flow to visible constituencies while dispersed costs remain invisible to consumers. Ford executives know exactly how much the Chicken Tax increases their profits. You never calculated how much extra you paid for your last truck because foreign alternatives were banned before you could compare them.

Consider the irony. American consumers, given free choice, preferred foreign vehicles that offered better value. The government responded by eliminating that choice to protect domestic companies from their own mediocrity. This violated every principle of market economics while enriching politically connected corporations.

Sixty years later, you still can't buy the truck you actually want at the price foreign manufacturers would charge. The Chicken Tax remains, chickens forgotten, protecting Ford's profits while denying you Toyota's quality.