Hanson

Not Financial Advice | Opinions Are My Own | Mega Pint Of 🍺

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment – the real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire

The French Enlightenment and the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment happened simultaneously, in the same century, reading the same books, arguing about the same questions. They reached completely opposite conclusions. One produced the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. The other produced the guillotine. This is the most important civilizational fork in modern history.

1. The French Enlightenment begins with the assumption that human beings can be improved by reason – that if you strip away the corrupting institutions of Church, tradition, and inherited authority, the natural goodness underneath will organize itself into a just society. This sounds like progress. It is a fantasy with a body count. Every attempt to implement it has required, at some point, a Committee of Public Safety to handle the people who turned out not to be naturally good enough.

2. The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment begins with the opposite assumption: human beings are what they are, not what they could be if properly enlightened. Hume grounds morality in human nature as it actually operates – sympathy, habit, sentiment, the slow accumulation of social trust. Smith shows that self-interest, properly channeled, produces collective benefit without a planner. Neither man is building a utopia. Both are building with the actual material available.

3. Burke is the direct refutation, written in real time. He published Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 – before the Terror, predicting it precisely – because he understood that institutions are not obstacles to human flourishing, they are its precondition. They contain accumulated wisdom — the knowledge of the dead — that cannot be recovered once destroyed. Pull society apart to improve it and you don’t get the General Will. You get Robespierre.

4. The American founders read Burke, Hume, Smith, and Montesquieu – the Frenchman who looked at England and understood what France was missing. They built a system that takes human nature as given — self-interested, power-hungry, tribal — and constructs institutions to contain those tendencies rather than assume they disappear once the right people are in charge. Checks and balances are not a design flaw. They are what you build when you don’t believe in philosopher-kings.

5. 1776 versus 1789. Same Enlightenment, same century, same vocabulary of liberty and reason. One produces a constitutional republic that has survived two and a half centuries of stress, civil war, and upheaval. The other produces, in sequence: the Terror, Napoleon, 1848, the Commune, and eventually — via Marx, who was a Frenchman in spirit if not in birth — the entire catastrophe of the twentieth century. The difference was not intelligence or intention. It was the starting assumption about human nature. Get that wrong and everything that follows is wrong with it.

6. The guillotine is not the Revolution’s failure. It is its logical conclusion. If man is naturally good and the system is corrupt, then whoever seizes the system in the name of natural goodness is licensed to do anything. The General Will cannot be wrong. Those who resist it are not opponents – they are enemies of nature itself.

7. The real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire was never a better French philosopher. It was a different civilizational tradition – one that builds with human beings as they are; that treats inherited institutions as repositories of wisdom rather than obstacles to progress; that distributes power rather than concentrating it in whoever currently claims to know the General Will. That tradition was built in Edinburgh, London, and Philadelphia. It is currently under sustained assault — from exactly the same ideas, in exactly the same form, with exactly the same confidence — that Burke watched demolish France in 1789. He was right then. He is right now.

[Hanson @hansonwong]

@benjitaylor @elonmusk @X @XMoney May I please have access? Thank you.

[Hanson @hansonwong]

@benjitaylor @elonmusk When can I get access? Thanks!!!

[Hanson @hansonwong]

@WallStreetApes @grok what is the typical margin profile of a restaurant business? provide gross margin, operating costs, labor costs, net profit margin.

[Hanson @hansonwong]

@bcoleintn @buitengebieden @PAMsLOvE is that how we got dogs?

[Hanson @hansonwong]

https://t.co/Kvcrs9lmGn

[End Wokeness @EndWokeness]

IT BEGINS…

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveils plan to "transfer ownership" from landlords to "the community"

[Hanson @hansonwong]

NYC and Seattle will shine the light.

[Hanson @hansonwong]

https://t.co/SWKtC8hMoD

[The Husky @Mr_Husky1]

Jeff Bezos Responds to Seattle Officials After Leaving For Miami Over Wealth Tax Seattle’s political elite may have just received the most devastating financial reality check in modern city history after Jeff Bezos quietly confirmed that Washington’s aggressive new tax structure played a major role in his decision to flee to Florida, a move that reportedly saved the Amazon founder close to $1 billion while leaving Seattle staring at a collapsing revenue model built around billionaires who can leave faster than lawmakers can pass another tax bill. What makes the situation even more humiliating for city leaders is that Bezos did not scream, threaten, or launch some dramatic billionaire rebellion against Mayor Katie Wilson after she publicly laughed, waved “bye,” and dismissed concerns about wealthy residents leaving the city. Instead, he simply ran the numbers, changed his address to Miami, sold billions in Amazon stock, and calmly pointed out that the tax revenue Washington expected from him no longer exists because he no longer lives there. “Apparently, telling the richest man connected to your city that he’s irrelevant works slightly worse when he takes half your projected tax model with him.” As Starbucks founder Howard Schultz escapes to a $44 million Florida penthouse, Amazon shifts workers out of Seattle, downtown vacancy rates explode, and lawmakers double down on even higher millionaire taxes despite a near 50% drop in capital gains revenue within a single year, critics are now warning that Seattle may have become the most terrifying live experiment in America showing what happens when ideological politics collides headfirst with economic math and the people funding the system quietly walk away.
“Seattle’s $1B mistake revealed 👇”

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

They should actually teach this in biz school

[Bravos Research @bravosresearch]

Some investors argue that widespread awareness of the yield curve inversion will limit its impact

Here’s why it won’t happen

A thread 🧵

[Hanson @hansonwong]

https://t.co/a51xaNhnIy

[Aleksandr Volodarsky @volodarik]

Since 2011 Peter Thiel has been giving out $100K to college students to drop out and start a company.

Forbes wrote, "Thiel Fellows will create lesser successful companies than degree holders."

10 yrs later, they've founded some of the most breakthrough companies of the decade:

[Dalai Lama @DalaiLama]

As soon as I wake every morning, I remind myself that all human beings are the same as me—we all want to be happy. I resolve to use my life to ensure that other beings are happy. It’s compassion that brings about peace of mind, not anger and hatred.

[Sam McRoberts @Sams_Antics]

When I first saw Fight Club as a kid, all I saw was a movie about a tool and a rebel, with a mind bending twist. The deep philosophy went right over my head 🤦🏻‍♂️

So, in case you’ve missed it, here you go, an epic thread on the Philosophy of Fight Club 🤜🤛

[Hanson @hansonwong]

"the party's gotten great and the Fed's not removing the punchbowl until they've seen...conclusive evidence that everyone's going to get plastered,"

https://t.co/gYaCv8jizB