Top Tweets for #FREEMARKETS

Africa won’t earn the world’s respect by looking bigger on a map. We will earn it by building things people around the world want to use. “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” (H/T Steve Martin) That requires free markets where African entrepreneurs can try their ideas, build companies and sell to the world without being crushed by overregulation. That’s what I mean by “criticize by creating.” Build something so useful that people don’t need a speech about why Africa matters.

WSJ: A Princeton PhD in chemical engineering applied to 2,300 jobs, ranging from postdoctoral fellowships to corporate science jobs and software engineering positions. He still hasn’t found a job. 34% of Americans surveyed by Gallup in August said it was a good time to find a quality job. Meanwhile, Congress is fixated on finding a way to pass a bill that staples green cards to any international student who earns a PhD in the United States. We should start by asking why our own graduates can’t find jobs before importing more workers.

Let's drop the polite academic euphemisms. Communism is a murderous, bankrupt, totalitarian ideology that has failed everywhere it has ever been tried, leaving a legacy of blood, starvation, and chains. If you want freedom, you protect the free market and private property. If you want tyranny, you embrace the collective. Which side are you on?

The most dangerous person in history is an intellectual with zero real-world experience who believes they are smart enough to engineer human society from a desk. They don't understand supply chains, price signals, or human drive, yet they demand absolute veto power over your life. Hubris kills millions.

Tell people you work for an NGO and they assume you’re helping the poor.  Say you own a business and they assume you’re just making money. But look at how NGOs work in real life. Take Dakar, in my home country of Senegal, where foreign aid workers have expensive apartments, new SUVs and household staff, all funded by donor countries’ taxpayers.  They even receive “hardship pay.” With donor money behind them, these NGOs offer salaries that local businesses cannot match. Talented Africans who could be starting companies or helping local businesses grow end up working in the aid industry instead. An entrepreneur in a competitive market has to care about what people need. You have to understand their problems and offer something that actually helps them. If you disappoint your customers, they can go to someone else. Helping people through a business is doing good. Your customers get something they need, and you get paid for providing it. The profit gives you a reason to keep improving what you offer and reach more people. Better jobs and rising incomes are how people escape poverty at scale.  We need far more respect for the entrepreneurs who make that possible, and far less willingness to assume an NGO is doing good just because it calls itself one.